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Joe Biden has said the US will defend “literally every inch of NATO” in the face of Russian aggression – as Moscow welcomed China having a more active role in “resolving” the Ukraine war.

The US president has met leaders from the Bucharest Nine – a collection of nations in the most eastern parts of the NATO alliance that came together in response to Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

The alliance includes Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

The countries have expressed concerns that Mr Putin could launch military action against them next if he is successful in Ukraine.

Biden warns freedom is at stake in NATO meeting – follow live updates

“You’re the frontlines of our collective defence,” Mr Biden said of the group.

“And you know, better than anyone, what’s at stake in this conflict. Not just for Ukraine, but for the freedom of democracies throughout Europe and around the world.”

He pledged that NATO’s mutual-defence pact is “sacred” and that “we will defend literally every inch of NATO”.

Vladimir Putin greets Chinese Communist Party's foreign policy chief Wang Yi in Moscow. Pic: AP
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Vladimir Putin greets China’s foreign policy chief Wang Yi in Moscow. Pic: AP

China’s top diplomat meets Putin in Russia

Meanwhile, Russia has welcomed Beijing taking a more active role in efforts to “resolve” the war after China’s top diplomat Wang Yi met Vladimir Putin in Russia.

Following the meeting, Mr Putin said he was looking forward to a visit to Moscow by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

No other countries could influence the relationship between China and Russia, he added.

Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Mr Wang’s trip had shown Moscow and Beijing agreed on many issues.

Ms Zakharova praised China’s “balanced approach” towards the war.

“We welcome China’s readiness to play a positive role in resolving the Ukrainian crisis,” Ms Zakharova said.

Mr Wang was quoted in Russian state media as saying China will “firmly adhere to an objective and impartial position and play a constructive role in the political settlement of the crisis”.

China has refused to criticise the invasion of Ukraine while condemning sanctions imposed on Russia.

In return, Russia has supported China amid tensions with the US over Taiwan.

Russia is due to begin military exercises with China in South Africa on Friday and has sent a frigate equipped with new generation hypersonic cruise missiles.

A Russian officer said Moscow would fire artillery, but not the missiles, whose speed makes them difficult to shoot down.

Putin ‘proud’ of those fighting in Ukraine

The top Chinese diplomat’s visit to Russia came as Mr Putin spoke at a huge rally in Moscow.

He said Russia is “proud of those who are fighting in Ukraine to defend the fatherland”, adding that the “whole country” supports them.

Chants of “Russia, Russia, Russia” were heard around him as he spoke.

Some 200,000 people had gathered in Moscow to hear Mr Putin’s address.

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‘There is a fight on our historic borders’

Biden criticises Russia’s move to pause nuclear treaty cooperation

Meanwhile, Mr Biden said Mr Putin had made a “big mistake” in deciding to suspend participation in the last nuclear treaty between the US and Russia.

He made the comment to reporters as he arrived at the presidential palace in Warsaw for a summit of the Bucharest Nine countries.

Moscow has insisted its decision to pull out of the New START treaty does not raise the risk of nuclear war.

The move is expected to have an immediate impact on US visibility into Russian nuclear activities as it allowed each side to conduct up to 18 inspections of strategic nuclear weapons sites each year.

Biden wants to project strength, resolve and unity


Dominic Waghorn - Diplomatic editor

Dominic Waghorn

International Affairs Editor

@DominicWaghorn

Joe Biden is putting diplomatic weight behind all the fine words and imagery of this week.

The White House says he wants to project strength, resolve and unity. After his surprise trip to Kyiv and passionate rallying cry for freedom in this speech in Warsaw, he is meeting allies.

They want reassurance that the US understands their anxieties and stands with them in the face of renewed Russian aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere.

The meeting of the Bucharest Nine countries on NATO’s eastern flank followed Vladimir Putin’s ominous speech in Moscow.

He delivered another perverse view of history, saying NATO started the war, then announced Russia’s suspension from the START nuclear arms treaty in a major blow for nuclear arms reduction efforts.

The move is being seen in western capitals as more nuclear bullying by the Russian president as the war enters another year.

Joe Biden condemned the move as a mistake before meeting his central European allies.

The treaty also imposes a cap on the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the US and Russia can deploy.

Russia has said it is not withdrawing from the pact altogether and would respect the caps on nuclear weapons set under the treaty.

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“I do not believe that the decision to suspend the New START Treaty brings us closer to nuclear war,” deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

Despite the foreign minister’s comments, Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev said the world was “on the verge of a global conflict”.

“If the US wants Russia’s defeat, we have the right to defend ourselves with any weapons, including nuclear,” he wrote.

Speaking of Russia decision to pause its cooperation in the New START treaty, Mr Biden said: “It’s a big mistake.”

The remark, and his promise that the US would protect eastern NATO territory, came a day after he gave a highly-anticipated speech in the gardens of the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

Mr Biden warned that Russian aggression, if unchecked, wouldn’t stop at Ukraine’s borders. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased,” he said. “They must be opposed.”

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‘Putin left with his forces in disarray’

He also met Moldovan President Maia Sandu in Warsaw, who last week claimed Moscow was behind a plot to overthrow her country’s government using external saboteurs.

She spoke out after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country had intercepted plans by Russian secret services to destroy Moldova. Those claims were later confirmed by Moldovan intelligence officials.

Meanwhile, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the right-wing populist leader who argued last week that the European Union is partly to blame for prolonging Russia’s war in Ukraine, skipped the Bucharest Nine meeting with Mr Biden.

President Katalin Novak attended instead.

‘We must break the cycle of Russian aggression’

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who attended the meeting, said: “We don’t know when the war will end, but when it does, we need to ensure that history does not repeat itself.”

Pointing to past Russian actions in Georgia and Ukraine, he said: “We cannot allow Russia to continue to chip away at European security. We must break the cycle of Russian aggression.”

Meanwhile, Kyiv has said there can be no talk of peace with Russian troops in Ukraine.

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Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

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Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.

The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.

The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.

“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”

Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.

Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.

It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.

chart

Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.

They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.

In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.

‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’

Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.

“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”

Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.

By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.

chart

Names were previously added to the list without verification

Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.

The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.

Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.

“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.

Read more:
Analysis: Gaza aid workers’ deaths
What happened to the ceasefire?

A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.

These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.

“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.

“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”

More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.


The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote – and his fickleness is making the problem worse

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Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote - and his fickleness is making the problem worse

Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.

The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.

The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.

Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID

Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.

Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump holds a "Foreign Trade Barriers" document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 2, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
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On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced global tariffs, ratcheting up protectionism. Pic: Reuters

04 April 2025, Hesse, Frankfurt/Main: Stock exchange traders watch their monitors on the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange while the display board with the Dax curve shows falling prices. US President Trump had issued a huge tariff package against trading partners around the world. The European Union and China have already announced countermeasures. Photo by: Arne Dedert/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
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Traders at the Frankfurt stock exchange watched the DAX plummet on Friday. Pic: Picture-alliance/dpa/AP

Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.

More on Donald Trump

He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?

Read more:
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These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.

China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.

Aerial view of a ro-ro terminal for vehicle shipment in Yantai in eastern China's Shandong province, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (Chinatopix Via AP) CHINA OUT
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Vehicles destined for export, like these in Yantai in eastern China, face massive US tariffs. Pic: Chinatopix/AP

Cargo containers line a shipping terminal at the Port of Oakland on Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
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Container ports like Oakland in California might expect activity to fall. Pic: AP

That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.

Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.

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Children among 19 killed in Russian attack on Zelenskyy’s home city

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Children among 19 killed in Russian attack on Zelenskyy's home city

At least 19 people, including nine children, have been killed in a Russian attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, according to Ukrainian officials.

Around 50 people were also wounded in the attack, according to emergency services, and regional governor Serhiy Lysak said more than 30, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital.

Ukraine’s president said Friday’s attack on Kryvyi Rih showed Russia “does not want a ceasefire”.

“The whole world sees it,” said Mr Zelenskyy.

“Every missile, every strike drone proves that Russia only wants war.

“And only on the pressure of the world on Russia, on all efforts to strengthen Ukraine, our air defence, our forces – only on this does it depend when the war will end.”

Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had struck a military gathering – a statement denounced by the Ukrainian military as misinformation.

Mr Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app that 18 people were killed when a missile hit residential areas and sparked fires.

Later on Friday, Russian drones attacked homes and killed one person, Oleksandr Vilkul, the city’s military administrator, said.

Latest updates: President’s home city hit by missile attack

Local authorities said the missile strike damaged about 20 apartment buildings, more than 30 vehicles, an educational building and a restaurant.

They said emergency responders were at the scene and psychologists were helping survivors.

Confirming the “high-precision strike”, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram it targeted “a meeting of unit commanders and Western instructors” in a city restaurant.

“As a result of the strike, enemy losses total up to 85 servicemen and officers of foreign countries, as well as up to 20 vehicles,” the ministry added.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says at least 14 people have died, including six children, following a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih. Pic: Telegram/Zelenskiy
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Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says at least 14 people have died, including six children, following a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih. Pic: Telegram/Zelenskiy
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Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy

US ‘not interested in negotiations about negotiations’

It comes after the US secretary of state issued a veiled threat to Russia as talks about a ceasefire with Ukraine continue.

Speaking in Brussels during a NATO meeting, Marco Rubio said the US was “not interested in… negotiations about negotiations”.

“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace. Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later,” he said.

Read more:
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In March, the US agreed a proposed 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine after talks in Saudi Arabia. Later, Washington negotiated a limited ceasefire about energy infrastructure with Russia.

Since then, the warring countries have accused each other of violating the energy ceasefire.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also in Brussels on Fridaym said Vladimir Putin “continues to obfuscate, continues to drag his feet” on ceasefire talks.

He added that while the Russian president should be accepting a ceasefire, “he continues to bombard Ukraine, its civilian population, its energy supplies”.

“We see you, Vladimir Putin. We know what you are doing,” he said.

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