Turkey-Syria earthquake: Where a boy whose name means lion is just one of thousands of victims of the deadly disaster
Sky News has gained rare access to the warzone that is northwest Syria, now also hit by devastating earthquakes.
Children were found dying and others have been left mutilated after a string of delays by the international community to help the last-remaining opposition area.
The Sky team have visited the area twice, most recently spending another 48 hours inside the rebel-held area where an Islamist militant group is in control, and which was hit most badly by the string of earthquakes and multiple aftershocks and tremors over the last two weeks.
We found a string of babies born prematurely to mothers who were caught up in the earthquakes and whose tiny newborns are now only just clinging onto life with little aid and sparse, antiquated equipment.
We also saw children who are the sole survivors in their families but left with catastrophic injuries and others with life-changing amputations whose futures will never be the same.
There are whole towns and villages now living rough, in tents or with relatives and few, if any, belongings to their name.
And most worryingly, there’s a collective burgeoning anger and despair directed against the international community – particularly the United Nations – who they believe delayed getting help to them and sacrificed their children’s lives.
As aid and rescue teams from all over the world poured into Turkey immediately after the earthquake, in Syria they were left to fend for themselves.
It took more than four days for the first trickle of UN relief to arrive in northwestern Syria.
A doctor checks on a baby at the Shams hospital
It was far too late for many, and these small convoys didn’t bring with them any of the heavy lifting equipment or rescue experts that could have made a difference to those still trapped under the rubble.
We saw a small scrap of a boy called Arsalan – which means “lion” in Arabic – struggling with every breath he gulped to stay alive.
The three-year-old was the only one of his family to survive the huge 7.8 magnitude earthquake which struck the region on 6 February.
The civil defence group called the White Helmets struggled to free him and his family for three days.
Arsalan was the only one of his family to survive the earthquake
One by one they pulled out the family – his mother, his six-year-old sister, and his seven-year-old brother.
All had perished under the rubble.
‘We have no ICU’
Then the White Helmets saw the outline of a man’s body – it was Suleiman, his father.
He was crouched forward as though he’d used his body to shield his tiny son against the force of the earthquake and the rubble which enveloped them.
The volunteers slowly pulled his lifeless body out. This was the last brave act of a father who desperately tried to give his little boy the best chance of survival and sacrificed his own life to do so.
Arsalan’s uncle Izzat Humadi is at his bedside
The White Helmets team could see beneath Suleiman’s body, a child’s arm poking out from the grey, stony tomb. As they scraped the rubble away and gently pulled the toddler free, the child opened his eyes, his eyelashes caked in dust, as he was passed along the human chain of rescuers.
“He’s alive, he’s alive,” the cry went up. “Alhamdulillah [thank God].”
It was a miracle anyone from the family had survived after nearly two days of being buried under the rocks and stones of their home, in wintry conditions with no food, water or specialised equipment to help locate and extract them.
The little boy named after a lion was showing enormous survival instincts way beyond his years. Doctors at the Aquabat Hospital on the Turkish border have been working ever since to save him with little specialised equipment and no proper intensive care unit. Not even their own CT scanner.
“We have no ICU,” Dr Sameeh Qaddour told us.
“Our ICU is his uncle and aunt by his bedside all day and night. We can give him some oxygen and painkillers and we’ve performed numerous operations to try to save his legs which are badly affected by crush syndrome.”
The little boy has had a stomach operation too and his bowels are struggling to work. His massive leg wounds are at constant risk of becoming infected and septicaemia setting in.
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Arsalan and Dr Sameeh Qaddour
The doctor is obviously moved by the boy’s spirit to live and how he’s already defied the odds to come this far. “Logically he should not have survived,” he tells the Sky News team.
“But when I see the video (of his rescue), he survived… logically he must not survive! But he survived the first, maybe he’ll survive the next… this is out of (the hands) and logic of medicine.”
The little boy opens his eyes and is responding to his uncle Izzat Humadi who is talking gently to him. “Come on, Arsalan,” he says to his nephew, “Come on, let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”
He’s willing the toddler with all his might to fight death, and cheat it again.
This little boy – and his siblings – were all born into a war which seems to have no end.
They were born into poverty, in an enclave filled with more than four million people who have run away from the fighting and bombing and shelling by the Syrian leader Bashar al Assad.
They’ve known no other life other than one lived in the shadow of war – and now a natural disaster has wiped out the entire family apart from this toddler.
Street art in Jindiris
‘This is all our responsibility’
Dr Qaddour is emotional as he examines Arsalan.
He’s angry at the lack of help for children like Arsalan and tells us: “Are these children responsible for what Assad is doing? Are they responsible for the borders? Or the international community?
“He’s lost everyone. Every single one of his family. He doesn’t know anything about these politics and he doesn’t care about this and I don’t care about this.
“I want this patient to survive – anyway. I have to give him all the chances. Arsalan survived under the rubble but maybe not survive now – but I have to give him all [the chances] that I can. This is all our responsibility.”
Dr Qaddour is emotional as he examines Arsalan
The tragedy suffered by Arsalan and his family is not even unique in northwest Syria where they’ve all endured nearly 12 years of war, of constant terror and homelessness, of rebuilding their lives over and over again, sleeping in fields, sheltering in tents, finding and building new homes, only to do it all over again a few months or years later.
It is a war which has gone on so long, an entire generation has been born into it and is growing up in it.
It is a life filled with armed checkpoints, constant battles between the armed stakeholders and shifting territorial claims and gains.
It’s a life inured in depravation and the repetitive uncertainty of shells and bombs. Those in northwest Syria are probably the only section of the global community which felt a bit of relief at the start of the war in Ukraine.
The consequences for them are that it has distracted the Russian support for Bashar al Assad and resulted in far fewer attacks against them as the Russian leader directs most of his military resources against the Ukrainians.
Yet Assad’s jets still flew over the area on the day of the first earthquakes and while we were inside Idlib following the second set a fortnight later, there were rockets being fired into the countryside in Idlib.
‘Why didn’t the UN help us?’
Even in less troubled times, the fear can never completely disappear for the beleaguered people of Idlib.
“Perhaps we should thank Bashar al Assad more than the United Nations in this crisis,” the admin manager of the Aquabat Hospital, Salahedin Abdulsalam tells us.
“Bashar al Assad taught us how to manage a crisis… by bombing us, killing our families, destroying everything.
“But the United Nations did nothing the first four or five days (of the earthquake) and our people died under the rubble and they just asked for permission from Bashar al Assad to help us.” It’s a constant refrain from those we talk to.
A nurse with babies at the Shams hospital
“Why didn’t the UN help us when we needed it most?” we keep getting asked.
The neonatal ICU in the Shams Hospital in Sarmada, near the Turkish border is packed with babies born into the world dangerously early as well as others struggling from the long-term denigration of medical facilities because of the war and now the earthquakes.
Dr Munzer al Rammah takes us past little cot after little cot.
“He’s suffering from pneumonia, she is too; he has bronchitis; he has severe dehydration. The main reason is the war,” the doctor tells us.
“Many of these families live in tents and suffer from cold and many more are now living in tents because of the earthquakes so it affects an already bad situation.”
A crying baby at the Shams hospital
‘There is no future for these children’
He takes us to another ward where he shows us the babies caught up in the earthquake.
Two are in adjacent transparent incubator cots. Both were born in the hours after the earthquake as terror and trauma forced their mothers into early labour and expelled them from their bodies a whole month early.
They are fragile and now facing the fight of their short lives to keep breathing and survive in horrendous conditions. They each weigh little more than a litre bottle of water.
They’re pitiful little things. I notice the feeding syringe laying next to one of them called Fatima is almost the same size as her.
She flails around as the nurse, who’s also called Fatima, slowly presses the specialised milk they are feeding her, down the feeding tube which is inserted into her nostril and takes the sustenance straight to her stomach.
A premature baby fights to survive
She’s blinking up at her nursing saviour. Eight times a day she’s fed just 30ml of milk to try to keep her alive.
But even if the nurses and doctors succeed in building up their strength so they can leave hospital and return to their families, the majority will return to cold tents where their relatives are struggling to feed themselves and there are few choices.
“We see them return here over and over again with illnesses and nutritional problems,” nurse Fatima Khalid tells us.
“There is no future for these children with no school, no education, no proper hospital and not enough food.”
She, like so many here, blames the outside world for their lack of empathy, lack of care, and lack of action.
“If they’d helped us (to get rid of Assad) we might not be like this now. If we were able to get rid of Assad who bombed us and destroyed us, maybe it would be better – and now we have the earthquakes but still, we are here. We are alive. We resist death.”
In Jindiris, a town near Afrin in Aleppo Province in northern Syria, we find families putting up plastic sheeting to shelter against the cold, while others huddle in tents erected among the rubble and piles of rocks which used to be their homes.
Elderly ladies sit near rubble in Jindiris
Jindiris is among the worst hit by the earthquakes whose impact rippled with devastating effects across the border with Turkey.
We see many children scavenging amongst the debris for scraps they can sell or use. And whole families sifting through stones with their bare hands trying to find their IDs, phones or just memories of their dead.
No time for the luxury of grief
Majdolin Ahmed lost the youngest of her four children – a 10-year-old boy called Nebi. He was pulled out of the rubble after two days by his relatives. No one came to help them and there was an air of resignation from them.
Few ever help them. Here, it’s each man, woman and child for themselves. The families are excessively tight-knit here – because family is important in their culture but also because all they have are each other.
Few but Majdolin and his immediate family will mourn the death of Nebi. Everyone in Jindiris seems to have lost someone, sometimes multiple family members.
A boy picks through the rubble in Jindiris
There is a stunned and despairing air permeating every devastated street and broken building or packed tent. Grieving is a luxury they don’t have time for. Survival is sucking up much of their emotions and their reserves of energy now.
“I’m just trying to find my phone so I can have photos of my son,” Majdolin tells us. Tears are welling up as she recounts what happened. Nebi was her baby, her youngest and none of them could do anything to save him. In the same town, there are remarkable tales of defying death.
‘I begged them to cut my leg off’
Reema is one of those who defied death. She’s 14 years old and was trapped under the rubble for three days, her right leg pinned down by concrete and a steel pin through her right ankle.
She tells us how she scrambled to escape the earthquake as her home shook, but the ceiling came crashing down on her as she raced to get out. When she came to she was trapped, her leg crushed and a dead body beside her. He was the guest of one of her neighbours. She screamed for help and could hear her mother and siblings outside.
Reema walking after having her leg amputated
They ran to get help from cousins and uncles and called the White Helmets and anyone who’d help try to free her. Their plea for help was answered by two medics. Together with the White Helmets and little equipment, they burrowed through the concrete and created a tunnel through eight metres of it to reach her.
They spent hours trying to chisel her out while also trying to placate her and reassure her.
“Don’t leave me, don’t leave me alone,” Reema kept crying to them. “Please just get me out of here.”
In the end, she was begging them to cut her leg off so she could get out. “I told them to please cut my leg,” she tells us from her hospital bed, “I had to get out”.
So one by one the medics took turns to crawl inside the cavity which was big enough for just one person at a time, and first they administered painkillers, then anaesthesia and then the amputation was carried out – beneath the rubble. “I don’t remember anything from that,” Reema tells us, “Because they anaesthetised me”.
We watch as she walks on her one leg using a walker. If she continues to heal, she hopes to get a prosthesis in about a month. “This is God’s decision,” she says with a smile, “Who am I to complain?”
A family puts up a tent after their home was destroyed in the quake
Her family still haven’t told her that her father died in the earthquake. They want her to get stronger before delivering this terrible news. But life is likely to be tremendously hard for Reema living in a war zone with few facilities.
One of the medics who saved her life takes us to her family’s home. The apartment block they used to live in is a mound of uneven broken concrete slabs and rubble. He is the head of the Ambulance Services in Aleppo and his name is Mohammed al Hussein.
“We managed to get to Reema after 20 hours,” he tells us, “It was a really difficult decision to cut her leg. We didn’t want to and did everything to save her. But if we removed the block on top of her, the whole building was going to collapse on her and kill her. So we ended up amputating her leg in the rubble.”
He goes on: “Reema was lucky because we were able to save her. But what of all the other children around here who have not been saved?
“There’ve been so many other ‘earthquakes’ through the years,” he says.
“With bombings and shellings and attacks from Bashar al Assad but no one helped us or our children. And so many have died. No one did anything for us.”
The destruction in Jindiris
Arsalan loses fight he could never hope to win
A few hours after we leave Idlib, we get word from the doctors that their valiant fight to save the little boy named after a lion, has failed.
Arsalan died around the same time of day the earthquake first struck this region, around 4am in the morning, a little over a fortnight later. The miracle they needed to save him eluded them.
Arsalan died two weeks after the quake
A small group of Canadian doctors is in Idlib trying to prioritise what the area needs when there is so much need here. And they are furious at the lack of swift international help.
“I’m very angry, says Dr Anas al Kassem. “I’ve seen all kinds of injuries and all the crush injuries and it could have saved lives. These are children and it (a quicker response) could have saved their lives… and given them a better outcome”.
“The United Nations should be ashamed of their slow response,” he goes on.
Arsalan couldn’t wait for the response from the outside world. And like so many others, despite fighting so hard, despite defying the odds, despite the tremendous battle by the doctors, he lost a fight he probably could never hope to win. The doctors are now wondering how many more will go the same way.
Alex Crawford reports from Idlib in northwest Syria with cameraman Jake Britton and producers Chris Cunningham and Mahmoud Mosa as well as Guldenay Sonumut based in Turkey.
Donald Trump’s plan for ending the war in Ukraine would hand swathes of land to Russia and limit the size of Kyiv’s military, a draft has revealed.
The copy of the proposal that originates from negotiations between Washington and Moscow was obtained by the Associated Press and appears emphatically favourable to Russia.
It closely resembles the list of demands repeatedly stated by the Kremlin since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago.
Points included in the plan are widely seen as untenable for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has rejected Mr Trump‘s previous calls for territorial concessions.
Ukraine war latest – Zelenskyy responds to Trump peace plan
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Pic: Reuters
The draft was reportedly devised by Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff and Kremlin official Kirill Dmitriev.
It says there would be a “decisive coordinated military response” in the event of further Russian incursions onto Ukrainian territory, but does not say what role the United States would play in that response.
A side agreement aims to satisfy Ukrainian security concerns by saying a future “significant, deliberate and sustained armed attack” by Russia would be viewed as “threatening the peace and security of the transatlantic community”.
The agreement – detailed to the AP by an unnamed senior US official – does not obligate the US or European allies to intervene on Ukraine’s behalf, although it says they would “determine the measures necessary to restore security”.
The 28-point plan states Ukraine must cede the entirety of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk to Russia – despite Ukraine still controlling a third of the latter. Kherson and Zaporizhzhia would be frozen along the existing lines of conflict.
Ukraine’s army, currently at roughly 880,000 troops, would be reduced to 600,000.
A serviceman of the 93rd Kholodnyi Yar Separate Mechanised Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Pic: Reuters
Some frozen Russian assets would go toward rebuilding Ukraine, while sanctions on Russia would be lifted and Moscow and Washington would enter in a series of “long-term” economic arrangements.
The document says Ukraine would not be allowed to join NATO, but would be eligible to join the European Union.
It also says elections must be held in Ukraine in 100 days.
Here is the 28-point draft agreement in full:
1. Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed.
2. A comprehensive non-aggression agreement will be concluded between Russia, Ukraine and Europe. All ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled.
3. It is expected that Russia will not invade neighbouring countries and NATO will not expand further.
4. A dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the United States, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation in order to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.
(l-r)Kremlin official Kirill Dmitriev and US special envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg in April. Pic: Kremlin Pool Photo/AP
5. Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees.
6. The size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be limited to 600,000 personnel.
7. Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.
8. NATO agrees not to station troops in Ukraine.
9. European fighter jets will be stationed in Poland.
10. The US guarantee:
– The US will receive compensation for the guarantee;
– If Ukraine invades Russia, it will lose the guarantee;
– If Russia invades Ukraine, in addition to a decisive coordinated military response, all global sanctions will be reinstated, recognition of the new territory and all other benefits of this deal will be revoked;
Ukraine and Europe cannot reject Trump’s plan – they will play for time
“Terrible”, “weird”, “peculiar” and “baffling” – some of the adjectives being levelled by observers at the Donald Trump administration’s peace plan for Ukraine.
The 28-point proposal was cooked up between Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff and Kremlin official Kirill Dmitriev without European and Ukrainian involvement.
It effectively dresses up Russian demands as a peace proposal. Demands first made by Russia at the high watermark of its invasion in 2022, before defeats forced it to retreat from much of Ukraine.
Its proposals are non-starters for Ukrainians.
It would hand over the rest of Donbas, territory they have spent almost four years and lost tens of thousands of men defending.
Analysts estimate at the current rate of advance, it would take Russia four more years to take the land it is proposing simply to give them instead.
It proposes more than halving the size of the Ukrainian military and depriving them of some of their most effective long-range weapons.
And it would bar any foreign forces acting as peacekeepers in Ukraine after any peace deal is done.
The plan comes at an excruciating time for the Ukrainians.
They are being pounded with devastating drone attacks, killing dozens in the last few nights alone.
They are on the verge of losing a key stronghold city, Pokrovsk.
And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is embroiled in the gravest political crisis since the war began, with key officials facing damaging corruption allegations.
The suspicion is Mr Witkoff and Mr Dmitriev conspired together to choose this moment to put even more pressure on the Ukrainian president.
Perversely, though, it may help him.
There has been universal condemnation and outrage in Kyiv at the Witkoff-Dmitriev plan. Rivals have little choice but to rally around the wartime Ukrainian leader as he faces such unreasonable demands.
The genesis of this plan is unclear.
Was it born from Donald Trump’s overinflated belief in his peacemaking abilities? His overrated Gaza ceasefire plan attracted lavish praise from world leaders, but now seems mired in deepening difficulty.
The fear is Mr Trump’s team are finding ways to allow him to walk away from this conflict altogether, blaming Ukrainian intransigence for the failure of his diplomacy.
Mr Trump has already ended financial support for Ukraine, acting as an arms dealer instead, selling weapons to Europe to pass on to the invaded democracy.
If he were to take away military intelligence support too, Ukraine would be blind to the kind of attacks that in recent days have killed scores of civilians.
Europe and Ukraine cannot reject the plan entirely and risk alienating Mr Trump.
They will play for time and hope against all the evidence he can still be persuaded to desert the Kremlin and put pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war, rather than force Ukraine to surrender instead.
– If Ukraine launches a missile at Moscow or St Petersburg without cause, the security guarantee will be deemed invalid.
11. Ukraine is eligible for EU membership and will receive short-term preferential access to the European market while this issue is being considered.
12. A powerful global package of measures to rebuild Ukraine, including but not limited to:
– The creation of a Ukraine Development Fund to invest in fast-growing industries, including technology, data centres, and artificial intelligence.
– The United States will cooperate with Ukraine to jointly rebuild, develop, modernise, and operate Ukraine’s gas infrastructure, including pipelines and storage facilities.
– Joint efforts to rehabilitate war-affected areas for the restoration, reconstruction and modernisation of cities and residential areas.
– Infrastructure development.
– Extraction of minerals and natural resources.
– The World Bank will develop a special financing package to accelerate these efforts.
13. Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy:
– The lifting of sanctions will be discussed and agreed upon in stages and on a case-by-case basis.
– The United States will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.
– Russia will be invited to rejoin the G8.
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Ukraine: US ‘has the power’ to make Russia ‘serious’
14. Frozen funds will be used as follows:
– $100bn (£76bn) in frozen Russian assets will be invested in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine;
– The US will receive 50% of the profits from this venture. Europe will add $100bn (£76bn) to increase the amount of investment available for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Frozen European funds will be unfrozen. The remainder of the frozen Russian funds will be invested in a separate US-Russian investment vehicle that will implement joint projects in specific areas. This fund will be aimed at strengthening relations and increasing common interests to create a strong incentive not to return to conflict.
15. A joint American-Russian working group on security issues will be established to promote and ensure compliance with all provisions of this agreement.
16. Russia will enshrine in law its policy of non-aggression towards Europe and Ukraine.
17. The United States and Russia will agree to extend the validity of treaties on the non-proliferation and control of nuclear weapons, including the START I Treaty.
18. Ukraine agrees to be a non-nuclear state in accordance with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Pic: Reuters
19. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant will be launched under the supervision of the IAEA, and the electricity produced will be distributed equally between Russia and Ukraine – 50:50.
20. Both countries undertake to implement educational programmes in schools and society aimed at promoting understanding and tolerance of different cultures and eliminating racism and prejudice:
– Ukraine will adopt EU rules on religious tolerance and the protection of linguistic minorities.
– Both countries will agree to abolish all discriminatory measures and guarantee the rights of Ukrainian and Russian media and education.
– All Nazi ideology and activities must be rejected and prohibited.
The Donbas
Zaporizhia
21. Territories:
– Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognised as de facto Russian, including by the United States.
– Kherson and Zaporizhzhia will be frozen along the line of contact, which will mean de facto recognition along the line of contact.
– Russia will relinquish other agreed territories it controls outside the five regions.
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– Ukrainian forces will withdraw from the part of Donetsk Oblast that they currently control, and this withdrawal zone will be considered a neutral demilitarised buffer zone, internationally recognised as territory belonging to the Russian Federation. Russian forces will not enter this demilitarised zone.
22. After agreeing on future territorial arrangements, both the Russian Federation and Ukraine undertake not to change these arrangements by force. Any security guarantees will not apply in the event of a breach of this commitment.
The east of Ukraine
23. Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using the Dnieper [Dnipro] River for commercial activities, and agreements will be reached on the free transport of grain across the Black Sea.
24. A humanitarian committee will be established to resolve outstanding issues:
– All remaining prisoners and bodies will be exchanged on an ‘all for all’ basis.
– All civilian detainees and hostages will be returned, including children.
– A family reunification program will be implemented.
– Measures will be taken to alleviate the suffering of the victims of the conflict.
25. Ukraine will hold elections in 100 days.
26. All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.
27. This agreement will be legally binding. Its implementation will be monitored and guaranteed by the Peace Council, headed by President Donald J Trump. Sanctions will be imposed for violations.
28. Once all parties agree to this memorandum, the ceasefire will take effect immediately after both sides retreat to agreed points to begin implementation of the agreement.
World
Ukraine and Europe cannot reject Trump’s plan – they will play for time and hope he can still be persuaded to desert the Kremlin
“Terrible”, “weird”, “peculiar” and “baffling” – some of the adjectives being levelled by observers at the Donald Trump administration’s peace plan for Ukraine.
The 28-point proposal was cooked up between Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff and Kremlin official Kirill Dmitriev without European and Ukrainian involvement.
It effectively dresses up Russian demands as a peace proposal. Demands first made by Russia at the high watermark of its invasion in 2022, before defeats forced it to retreat from much of Ukraine.
Ukraine war latest: Kyiv receives US peace plan
(l-r) Kirill Dmitriev and special envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg in April 2025. Pic: Kremlin Pool Photo/AP
Its proposals are non-starters for Ukrainians.
It would hand over the rest of Donbas, territory they have spent almost four years and lost tens of thousands of men defending.
Analysts estimate at the current rate of advance, it would take Russia four more years to take the land it is proposing simply to give them instead.
It proposes more than halving the size of the Ukrainian military and depriving them of some of their most effective long-range weapons.
And it would bar any foreign forces acting as peacekeepers in Ukraine after any peace deal is done.
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Is Moscow back in Washington’s good books?
The plan comes at an excruciating time for the Ukrainians.
They are being pounded with devastating drone attacks, killing dozens in the last few nights alone.
They are on the verge of losing a key stronghold city, Pokrovsk.
And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is embroiled in the gravest political crisis since the war began, with key officials facing damaging corruption allegations.
Read more from Sky News:
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Ukrainian support for peace plan ‘very much in doubt’
The suspicion is Mr Witkoff and Mr Dmitriev conspired together to choose this moment to put even more pressure on the Ukrainian president.
Perversely, though, it may help him.
There has been universal condemnation and outrage in Kyiv at the Witkoff-Dmitriev plan. Rivals have little choice but to rally around the wartime Ukrainian leader as he faces such unreasonable demands.
The genesis of this plan is unclear.
Was it born from Donald Trump’s overinflated belief in his peacemaking abilities? His overrated Gaza ceasefire plan attracted lavish praise from world leaders, but now seems mired in deepening difficulty.
The fear is Mr Trump’s team are finding ways to allow him to walk away from this conflict altogether, blaming Ukrainian intransigence for the failure of his diplomacy.
Mr Trump has already ended financial support for Ukraine, acting as an arms dealer instead, selling weapons to Europe to pass on to the invaded democracy.
If he were to take away military intelligence support too, Ukraine would be blind to the kind of attacks that in recent days have killed scores of civilians.
Europe and Ukraine cannot reject the plan entirely and risk alienating Mr Trump.
They will play for time and hope against all the evidence he can still be persuaded to desert the Kremlin and put pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war, rather than force Ukraine to surrender instead.
World
South Africa is making history with its first G20 summit, but the continued exclusion of its oldest communities is a symbolic threat
This is the first time the G20 summit is being hosted on African soil.
Heads of state from 15 countries across Europe, Asia and South America are expected to convene in South Africa’s economic capital, Johannesburg, under the banner of “solidarity, equality and sustainability.”
The summit is facing challenges from the Oval Office as US President Donald Trump boycotts the event, where the G20 leadership is meant to be handed over to him by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The US has also warned South Africa against issuing a joint declaration at the end of the summit. The challenges to South Africa’s G20 debut are also domestic.
Trump had a contentious meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office earlier this year. File pic: AP
Nationwide civic disobedience has been planned by women’s rights charities, nationalist groups and trade unions – all using this moment to draw the government’s attention to critical issues it has failed to address around femicide, immigration and high unemployment.
But a key symbolic threat to the credibility of an African G20 summit themed around inclusivity is the continued exclusion and marginalisation of its oldest communities.
“There is a disingenuous thread that runs right through many of these gatherings, and the G20 is no different”, Khoisan Chief Zenzile tells us in front of the First Nations Heritage Centre in Cape Town, “from any of them”.
“I am very concerned that the many marginalised sections of society – youth, indigenous people, are not inside the front and centre of this agenda,” he added.
Khoisan Chief Zenzile says land developments on indigenous land are the ‘most ridiculous notion’
As we speak, the sounds of construction echo around us. We are standing in a curated indigenous garden as South Africa’s Amazon headquarters is being built nearby.
After years of being sidelined by the government in a deal that centres around construction on sacred Khoisan land, Chief Zenzile said he negotiated directly with the developers to build the heritage centre and sanctuary as a trade-off while retaining permanent ownership of the land.
“There are many people who like to fetishise indigenous people who want to relegate us to an anthropoid state, as if that is the only place we can, as if we don’t have the tools to navigate the modern world,” he says when I ask about modern buildings towering over the sacred land.
“That is the most ridiculous notion – that the entire world must progress and we must be relegated to a state over which we have no agency.”
An hour and a half from Cape Town’s centre, Khoi-San communities have seized 2,000 hectares of land that they say historically belongs to them.
Knoflokskraal is a state where they exercise full agency – filling in the infrastructural gaps around water and electricity supply that the provincial government will not offer to residents it categorises as “squatters”.
“We are – exactly today – here for five years now,” Dawid De Wee, president of the Khoi Aboriginal Party, tells us as he gives us a tour of the settlement. “There are more or less around 4,000 of us.
“The calling from our ancestral graves sent us down here, so we had an urge to get our own identity and get back to our roots, and that was the driving motive behind everything we are here now to take back our ancestral grounds.”
‘We are here now to take back our ancestral grounds,’ Dawid De Wee says
Dawid says they have plans to expand to reclaim more swathes of land stolen from them by European settlers in the 1600s across the Cape Colony.
Land reform is a contentious issue in post-Apartheid South Africa, with a white minority still owning a majority of the land.
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Indigenous land is even further down the agenda of reparations, and South Africa’s oldest communities continue to suffer from historic dispossession and marginalisation.
For many Khoi-San leaders, G20 represents the ongoing exclusion from a modern South African state.
They have not been invited to officially participate in events where “solidarity, equality and sustainability,” are being discussed without reference to their age-old knowledge.
Instead, we meet Khoi-San Queen Eloise at a gathering of tribal leaders from around the world on the most southwestern tip of Africa in Cape Point called the World Tribal Alliance.
Khoi-San Queen Eloise tells Sky that the G20 ‘is a politically-based gathering’
“In order for us to heal, Mother Nature and Mother Earth is calling us, calling our kinship, to come together – especially as indigenous people because with indigenous people we are still connected to our lands, to our intellectual property we are connected to who we are,” Queen Eloise tells us.
“G20 is a politically-based gathering – they are coming together to determine the future of people politically.
“The difference is that we will seek what Mother Earth wants from us and not what we want to do with technology or all those things politically, but the depth of where we are supposed to go.”
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