Also, China rewrites Hong Kong’s history textbooks and a Trumpian candidate emerges in Colombia.
We’re covering European leaders’ vows to back the Ukrainian war effort and a Trumpian presidential candidate in Colombia. The leaders of France, Italy, Germany and Romania met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Thursday in Kyiv, where they expressed support for making Ukraine a candidate for E.U. membership and said they would continue to back Ukraine’s military efforts, despite suggestions to the contrary. President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, who had been criticized in recent days over the perception that they were seeking to pressure Zelensky into peace talks with Russia, emphasized that their support was genuine: “We are and we will remain by your side in the long run to defend your sovereignty, your territorial integrity and your freedom,” Macron said. “This is our goal, we have no other and we will achieve it.”
All four leaders expressed support for Ukraine’s E.U. candidacy, Macron said. Scholz added that “Ukraine belongs to the European family.”
The European leaders also visited Irpin, a Kyiv suburb where investigators are looking into reports of Russian atrocities during the war. Russia dismissed their trip as empty symbolism. Dmitri Medvedev, the former Russian president, derisively called the leaders “European connoisseurs of frogs, liverwurst and pasta.”
Hesitation: Ukrainian officials are wary of pressure to negotiate an end to the war with Russia because of the 2014 and 2015 Minsk accords, in which the Ukrainians offered concessions in exchange for Russian cease-fires, which never held. Trapped: With all of the bridges connecting the twin Ukrainian cities of Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk destroyed and fighting still raging, thousands of civilians have been left trapped inside one of the deadliest battles of the war so far. Schoolchildren around the world have long been taught that Hong Kong was a British colony. But students in Hong Kong will soon be told a different lesson: It wasn’t. A new narrative pushed by Beijing — which rejects how the British saw their relationship to the city — will be explicitly taught to Hong Kong high school students through at least four new textbooks that will be rolled out in the fall.
