Volodymyr Zelensky has said Donald Trump is “living in a disinformation bubble” after the US president blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia. Following peace talks between Washington and Moscow yesterday, Trump said Zelensky “could have made a deal” years ago, and that the Ukrainian president should call an election. UK inflation rose to a 10-month high of 3% in January. According to the FT, the increase was driven by the hike in private school fees, surging food prices and air fares dropping less than usual. Astronomers have discovered 45,000mph winds barrelling around the equator of a distant planet called Tylos. Boffins say sodium-rich gales – the fastest ever observed around any planet – combine with slower winds of titanium and iron to fill the sky with vivid reds, yellows and purples, like a “sunrise on steroids”.

There’s a reason Germans fear the AfD

JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference – lambasting Europe for supposedly giving up on free speech and other “democratic values” – understandably sparked uproar, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times. But just as outrageous was his decision, with only a week until Germany’s federal election, to meet AfD leader Alice Weidel. There are very real reasons most Germans, including conservatives, find the far-right AfD horrifying. The party launched in 2013 in protest against Germany’s fiscal policies in Europe, then got a big boost through its opposition to Angela Merkel’s highly controversial decision in 2015 to open the floodgates to more than a million Middle Eastern refugees. But the AfD soon took a “much darker turn”.

In 2017, regional party leader Björn Höcke complained about the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, calling it a “monument of shame” and demanding a “180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance”. In 2018, then-party leader Alexander Gauland dismissed Hitler and the Nazis as “just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history”. In 2023, AfD politicians met with other far-right extremists in a Potsdam hotel to discuss a “master plan” for the “remigration” of “migrants” to their countries of ethnic origin, including German citizens. The star of the show was 34-year-old Austrian Martin Sellner, who as a teenager stuck swastikas on a synagogue. This record, and the acute memory of Germany’s 20th century, is why mainstream parties refuse to collaborate with the AfD. There are, as Vance said, examples of European governments going too far in curtailing free speech. Keeping the AfD out of power is not one of them.

🤝🧐 What’s most baffling in all this is that the AfD has made absolutely no secret of its “disdain for America”, says Filipp Piatov in The Wall Street Journal. Despite superficial similarities with the Make America Great Again movement, the “Germany First” crowd – who “fantasise about a rebirth of an ethnically pure German Volk” – consider the US to be their “ideological and most dangerous adversary”. Weidel holds regular meetings at the Chinese embassy in Berlin and recently wrote an op-ed describing Germans as “slaves” of America; Höcke calls the US an “extraneous power” trying to drive a wedge between Germany and its natural ally… Russia.