KYIV — With another bitter winter of fighting in the Russia-Ukraine war ahead, diplomatic activity is ramping back up in a fresh attempt to close in on a ceasefire and eventually a final peace accord.

Under renewed pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, Kyiv and Moscow are preparing to send negotiating teams to Abu Dhabi for a three-way meeting with American officials to explore the potential for agreement. The meeting is penciled in for Nov. 10. 

But many questions about the process remain, including whether Europe will have a seat at the table when key decisions are taken — and who should fill it. Based on remarks from key leaders, and conversations with European officials granted anonymity because the talks are sensitive, POLITICO breaks down what’s under discussion for an agreement and what could get in the way.

What will they discuss? 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the agenda for Abu Dhabi should first include initial steps toward de-escalation, such as prisoner swaps and ceasefires on energy infrastructure and for the Black Sea. There should also be a discussion among the technical negotiating teams of what format a future three-way meeting between leaders — Trump, Zelenskyy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin — should take, he told reporters this week.

When it comes to a final deal, one overriding question for Ukraine is what form of security guarantees it will get from Europe and the U.S., or potentially NATO. Zelenskyy won’t want to accept anything he believes could leave Ukraine vulnerable to a future attack from Russia. 

Putin is also likely to raise the need for security guarantees — for Russia — including limiting or potentially reversing NATO’s presence in the neighborhood. 

Then there’s the question of territory. Zelenskyy’s view is that marking out any boundaries, temporarily or permanently, is something that can only be discussed at leader level. “No one else has the authority to do so,” he said Tuesday. 

Zelenskyy said during previous sets of negotiations over the past year, “as a compromise,” that Ukraine had been prepared to discuss the idea of a demilitarized “buffer zone” on both sides of the contact line in the Donbas region.

Similar ideas were proposed for other parts of Ukraine. Zelenskyy said his negotiators discussed these questions again with the Americans in recent weeks. “We are ready to discuss the issue of territories because the Russians keep wanting to discuss it and make it part of the agenda,” he said. But this would need to be at a leader-level meeting. 

Europe has a role 

European leaders are adamant that they must be included in final negotiations, not least because it is they who are are now providing the vast bulk of financial and military support to Ukraine. Trump ended American aid in 2025.

Zelenskyy and U.S. officials accept that European governments will likely need to be involved in discussions about security guarantees — mainly because any peacekeeping forces deployed to Ukraine would be dominated by European troops.

The Coalition of the Willing, a loose alliance of more than 30 countries led by France, the U.K. and Germany, put together detailed proposals in coordination with the U.S. almost a year ago. Ukraine is also interested in exploring bilateral security guarantees with the U.S., a discussion that would not need to involve European officials.

Plans for rebuilding Ukraine and nurturing its economic revival would also have to involve Europe, Zelenskyy said. “We cannot envision such a, so to speak, ‘Marshall Plan’ without Europe.”

But Europe doesn’t know who should speak for it 

Trump’s renewed interest in Ukraine also resurfaced some sore questions for European governments: Who should represent them when it comes to decision time? And should they even be talking to Putin at all? 

With no clarity emerging from Brussels, some leaders have taken matters into their own hands. On Tuesday, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre held a 90-minute call with Putin, urging him to end the war. It went down badly with several European governments, including Denmark, Italy, Sweden and Lithuania. One frustrated diplomat said: “There are too many middle-aged men who want to end up in the history books having solved this war.”

Russia has said the Stubb-Støre call achieved nothing of substance and the war will likely “escalate.” By some accounts, Putin used much of the time on the phone lecturing the Nordic leaders on regional history. 

One problem in identifying a lead negotiator is that the European countries with a stake in the talks are not only in the EU — the U.K. and Norway, for example, are both outside the bloc. Without clarity of leadership, European interests risk being sidelined when the talking gets serious. 

It all comes down to Trump 

One critical unknown factor in the mix is how long Trump’s attention will stay on Ukraine.

After the U.S. and Israel launched a war with Iran in the spring, progress on Ukraine stalled for months, only to return this fall as Trump sought to mitigate the impact of the Middle East conflict. A new escalation in the Iran war risks sidelining the negotiations all over again. 

The U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff held talks with Zelenskyy, Stubb and Støre in Oslo on Oct. 20. Witkoff then went to St. Petersburg to meet Putin the next day. There was supposed to be a follow-up meeting in Brussels this week in preparation for negotiations in Abu Dhabi — but the Americans postponed the talks, apparently due to developments in the Middle East. 

“The meeting in Abu Dhabi now depends on the American side,” Zelenskyy said Tuesday. At a press conference Wednesday, he added: “We very much hope that the escalatory processes in the Middle East — which are currently the subject of so much discussion — will not interfere.”

Putin can wait 

After their Kremlin call, Stubb and Støre apparently told Zelenskyy they felt Putin was serious about the Abu Dhabi opportunity. But in public and private, diplomats and political leaders in Europe are deeply skeptical that Putin is at all serious about an imminent path to peace.

Despite the Kremlin insisting he is on board, European diplomats believe the Russian leader is just playing for time in the hope that Ukraine weakens over a winter of attacks on its energy system, and Europe — perhaps with the far-right Marine Le Pen in charge of France — gets tired of paying for the war and gives up next year. 

That’s why EU officials know they cannot pin their hopes on peace and need to redouble their financial support and military aid for Ukraine, while tightening sanctions on Russia. EU leaders will discuss the issue of securing funds for Ukraine’s war effort at their summit in Brussels scheduled for November 26.

Nicholas Vinocur in Brussels contributed to this report.

LONDON — Andy Burnham became Britain’s prime minister 100 days ago on a pledge to end 40 years of neoliberalism. His first budget announced he wouldn’t do that on the front page.

Wednesday’s 150-page red book was titled “breathing space for today, fresh hope for the future”, a confession, with true British modesty, that it was a stepping stone to bigger pledges downstream.

Burnham’s top finance minister, Chancellor John Healey, unveiled 98 changes, including help for most households’ energy bills, which are due to spike this winter because of Donald Trump’s war with Iran, and a £10 billion defense package to support Ukraine.

Many of the tax tweaks were limited and technical, including an 8% cut to tariffs on soy milk. Healey’s ambition was reined in by surging global oil prices and a political choice by his boss not to blow the doors off yet.

Burnham has reviews on the creaking welfare system, devolving power to the regions and a “10-year plan” all coming before Christmas. Only then can he grind out the numbers for next year’s spending review.

The Labour MP Darren Jones, who served in the Treasury until Burnham arrived in July, called it a “steady-as-she-goes budget” that was to be expected. Many Labour MPs were happy, cheering measures for their area and pointing toward a bigger bang later on. Industry lobby groups could grasp onto something in their area of expertise.

But with U.K. growth struggling, others were less generous. Joe Shalam of the center-right Centre for Social Justice think tank called it the “fudge-it budget.” Tory leader Kemi Badenoch asked: “Is that it?”

Perhaps the trickiest response for Burnham was from Mainstream, the left-wing campaign group that helped propel him to the Labour leadership this year. “Ending 40 years of neoliberalism can only be delivered by radical action,” read a statement by the group’s interim council.

POLITICO looks at five other takeaways from Wednesday’s budget.

1) We’re in the holding pen

The chancellor’s big bazooka was to slap a much-anticipated tax rise on banks — but he surprised many by saying it will last only 15 months. It will raise less than £1 billion in its peak year.

It wasn’t the only temporary measure Healey unveiled on Wednesday. He extended existing cuts to fuel duty, a tax cut on household energy bills and a £2 cap on bus fares, but only until 2027. They will all need to be reviewed again before his next annual budget.

Likewise, some of Healey’s spending plans thin out after a few years, which suggests they may need topping up later. This applies even to the areas closest to Burnham’s heart. Budget documents suggest support to end rough sleeping will total £1.1 billion in the two years from April 2027 but only £270 million in the three years after that.

There were plenty of changes, of course, such as to writing-down allowances, property income taxes and tax on savings. Whitehall will have to find more administration cuts while tax inspectors hunt down another £3.2 billion a year. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a non-partisan economic think tank, called it all a “hodgepodge” of “fiddly measures” that would do little to affect growth.

Many of the more fundamental decisions were kicked down the road. Healey has committed to spending 3.5% of GDP on defense by 2035, but will only spell out how to fund it in a spending review at some point in 2027. Major reforms to the welfare system — spending on which is still rocketing — will only be decided after two reports by the Labour grandees Stephen Timms and Alan Milburn are published in November.

Healey published a “fiscal devolution roadmap” that spelled out a path to handing regional mayors full control of the business rates raised in their areas by the end of the decade, but this has an element of wait-and-see too.

Healey had a narrative for his cautious approach. “I decided on an early budget to give the country a bit of breathing space and to provide stability and direction in the face of speculation,” he told MPs Wednesday. “We’ll continue to map out that direction for Britain through the prime minister’s 10-year plan and the spending review.”

This is not the Burnham who complained Britain was “in hock to the bond markets” last year.

2) Everything is terrible, so blame the White House.

Burnham and Healey can blame Trump — up to a point.

The chancellor said the headwinds that once faced Britain are now “global economic storms,” fueled above all by the U.S. conflict with Iran. “We did not want this war,” Healey told MPs.

Journalists spent Wednesday trawling through the usual gloomy parade of numbers about the U.K. economy produced by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility. Britain’s projected growth in 2027 was cut from 1.6% to 1% (though Treasury officials insisted GDP per person will rise overall by the end of the decade).

Healey chose to leave himself with a smaller fiscal buffer than his predecessor Rachel Reeves, telling MPs he had used it to “absorb the impact of the Iran war.” He also raised net taxes by £7 billion a year, though this was far less than the £26 billion in Reeves’ last budget.

But the situation is so volatile that these numbers, based on market energy prices in mid-August, are probably already out of date. The OBR’s “severe shock scenario” had oil prices peaking at around $115 a barrel in the first half of 2027. They already hit that level this week.

Healey insisted that Britain is doing well in the circumstances; his ministers all point to an International Monetary Fund prediction that the U.K.’s deficit will be the lowest in the G7 by 2029.

Opposition parties, however, paint a picture of a nation where everything is just getting gloomier. The tax take was already on course to rise to a record high; Healey broke that record again on Wednesday. (It is now due to reach 38.6% of GDP.) Britain’s spending on debt interest has almost tripled since 2020.

3) Defense spending is still a big, big headache

Healey resigned as defense secretary under former Prime Minister Keir Starmer in June to protest the lack of military spending — but now faces mounting unanswered questions about his own plans.

Healey did two big new things on defense spending on Wednesday. First, he confirmed an open secret in Westminster: he plans to reach 3% of GDP by 2030 — on a path to NATO’s 3.5% by 2035 — but repeated that the details of how he’ll pay for it will only be spelled out in next year’s spending review.

Secondly and more significantly, he outlined his plan to plug a ​​£1.8 billion-a-year gap in Starmer’s defense investment plan — but provided only scant details. 

The Treasury said it will be paid for by shaving 1% off each Whitehall department’s capital budget in the coming years. However, those departments have not yet worked out what they will cut; that is a problem for another day. These questions will dog Healey for the next year.

At least one person was delighted: Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president said the chancellor “made my day” with a £10 billion package of economic and military support to Kyiv. Part of the package needed special sign-off by ministers because civil servants warned they could not guarantee it would provide value for money.

4) There was something to make Labour MPs happy

Much of what Healey did unveil appeared to be aimed at preserving the “Burnham bounce” in the polls and with his own MPs. 

The chancellor called it a “budget for the working people of Britain” and Treasury analysis says it was redistributive, handing the biggest boost to the poorest households (albeit only raising their incomes by 0.6%).

Central to this was Healey’s closest thing to a “rabbit out of the hat” — a £100-per-household cash payment to people living in homes below a certain value this winter. One Labour MP enthused that the criteria for the payment (which Treasury officials say will capture 88% of the poorest households) was “absolutely brilliant” because it will capture working households and those on benefits at the same time.

There was another £1.5 billion for social and affordable housing, a “covenant” to govern new AI data centers and changes to mileage rates for self-employed workers. Burnham has prided himself on being a grassroots politician; it was a grassroots package.

How much voters will notice is another question. The IFS warned the package of “breathing space” measures was still “relatively small.” It could be swallowed by a rise in annual energy bills in January — predictions of which have recently ranged from £276 to £469.

The OBR warned there has been “virtually no growth” in real household disposable income per person over the last decade or so, and predicted “no real earnings growth in 2027” despite Burnham and Healey’s efforts to help.

5) MPs won’t stop chattering about an election

Burnham only has to call an election by mid-2029 and keeps trying to snuff out talk of going earlier — but every prime minister does this until they don’t.

His MPs were studying the budget Wednesday to work out if it makes an early general election more or less likely. It’s fair to say they couldn’t agree.

On the one hand, this cautious budget of temporary measures might suggest Burnham — who needs his own mandate for more radical changes to the electoral system or Britain’s relationship with the EU — is holding out for the country’s backing.

Others would say a cautious stepping-stone budget is hardly the eye-catching approach you would take if you were about to sell yourself to voters. Growth is set to be slow next year; Burnham needs time to turn the economy round and show he can change things.

Burnham told journalists on Wednesday: “I don’t know how many times I’ve done this now, but yes, I can rule out calling a general election in the next 12 months.” The speculation will continue anyway.

Esther Webber, Emilio Casalicchio, Sam Blewett and Charlie Cooper contributed reporting.

CORRECTION: This article was updated on Oct. 29 to better reflect the Centre for Social Justice’s ideological stance.

LONDON — Liz Truss claims the U.K. would have managed successful missions to Mars within years — if only her 49-day premiership hadn’t been cut short.

The assertion comes in the former British prime minister’s new book “Bank Job,” which was published Monday and claims to explain “how the Bank of England broke the bond market and brought down the government” when her mini-budget in 2022 precipitated market turmoil.

In its closing chapter, the book paints a vivid picture of what Truss believes life in 2040 would be like if her policies had been given a chance to bed in. “Several missions to Mars have now been launched from Britain’s space port,” Truss’ book imagines.

The ex-PM also opts for some more grounded policy dreams.

She envisages a 2040 in which “there are now no European Union laws in Britain,” a “permissive regime for artificial intelligence” is in place, and tumbling energy costs and faster planning timelines have helped make the U.K. a leader in AI.

“Bitcoin received tax treatment consistent with its status as a form of money for commercial purposes,” she imagines. “No central bank digital currency was introduced.”

Since leaving office after a revolt in her own party, Truss has dismissed claims her economic decisions — which included a huge energy bills bailout and tax cuts funded by fresh borrowing — were responsible for crashing the pound.

She has instead pointed the finger at the central bank, the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog, accusing them of working against her. Her new book takes direct aim at the Bank of England, which proposed to sell £80 billion of gilts before the mini-budget, although delayed that sale amid market turmoil.

Truss lost her House of Commons seat at the 2024 general election, and has since been involved in launching the Conservative Political Action Conference in Britain.

LONDON — When Prime Minister Andy Burnham arrived a few minutes late to a meeting with regional mayors on Thursday, his Cabinet ally Angela Rayner had a name for it. She joked they were on “Andy Time.”

The rest of Britain is beginning to learn what that feels like.

Burnham entered 10 Downing Street three months ago promising a “new economic model.” However, the prime minister’s first budget next Wednesday will ask voters to wait a bit longer for it.

John Healey, Burnham’s top finance minister, is expected to announce cuts to business regulation, new steps to move power out of Whitehall and targeted cost-of-living help as energy bills surge due to the wars in Iran and Ukraine.

But while London’s banking sector is resigned to a tax rise, Healey is broadly not expected to completely overhaul tax regimes that many in Burnham’s center-left Labour Party have long seen as unfair. These include business rates, which treat high street shops more harshly than out-of-town delivery warehouses; capital gains tax, which charges less on income from assets than from work; and council tax on homes, which is based on valuations from 1991. 

Healey and his allies are already rolling out a pitch for lower-key changes to tax and spending than his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, insisting budgets are about more than their bottom-line “scorecard.” They point instead to thinning the “sludge” of business bureaucracy and helping “bloody-minded” entrepreneurs.

The reason behind this is about much more than war dragging on the British economy and keeping inflation high. Many radical reforms just aren’t ready yet. 

Next Wednesday will mark just 100 days since Burnham took office, after a whirlwind special election that ended the Greater Manchester mayor’s decade-long absence from parliament.

Burnham’s much-touted “10-year plan” to rewire Britain’s public realm is far from finished; its publication date is edging closer to Christmas. And many granular details of his plan for reform — including higher defense spending, welfare reforms and ownership of the water sector — will only come at a multi-year spending review some time in 2027. Healey is still trying to decide when that will happen.

POLITICO spoke to 22 current and former government officials, MPs and people who speak regularly to Downing Street to map out Burnham and Healey’s strategy, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak frankly. 

Several offered the view that Healey’s budget was designed to act as a stepping stone toward the 10-year plan and spending review, while not spooking the bond markets — which Burnham complained Britain was “in hock to” last year. That is despite Britain inching closer to a general election that the prime minister must call by summer 2029.

“They want it to be a non-event,” one person who speaks regularly to both 10 and 11 Downing Street said of the budget. 

Expectation management

This narrative has already left Healey’s allies bristling.

People are “accusing us of not making decisions and kicking the can down the road when actually this budget is incredibly difficult,” said one government official. This person added: “This is the first budget of this country that will have come to the House of Commons for scrutiny while the war in the Middle East is raging and an illegal invasion of Ukraine continues by Russia. The idea that this is by any means small is quite difficult to stomach.”

A second U.K. government official argued the budget would be “as ambitious as possible within the political context.” But a third government official said they believed the budget would be more “steady as she goes” than finished solutions to Britain’s problems.

Ruth Curtice, a former Treasury official who is now chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, a think tank focused on living standards, added: “In some ways it’s quite surprising to have such a small budget, given we have a new prime minister and chancellor and quite a lot has happened in the world since the last one.”

The opposition Conservative Party is preparing to seize on this “deferral budget” theme. Tory strategists are ready to paint it as a cowardly act from an administration they claim prefers sweeping vision to hard decisions. “Why act tomorrow when you can act today?” said one shadow cabinet minister. “Have some balls!”

Cameron Brown, a former Tory special adviser in the Treasury, was more sympathetic. “There’s no need to crystallize any kind of savings or cuts now,” when the spending review is looming anyway, he argued. Brown predicted a “tight and concise” but “intellectually coherent” package: “[Healey] will have some buffer at the end, a nice little cost of living package, Labour MPs will be happy, he’ll target the bad people — gamblers and banks — and he’ll push things down the road a bit.”

A Labour official voiced concern that a cautious budget could lose the goodwill Burnham has built with the public — as happened to his predecessor Keir Starmer, who promised “change” in his 2024 manifesto.

And Reeves’ former Political Secretary Matt Pound urged “caution” on deferring too many decisions to the 2027 spending review. “The truth is that they could end up putting a monumental amount of pressure on that spending review,” he told POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast in an interview released Friday. “There are already a lot of pressures they will need to fund.”

Hard to get

“Energy” will be the key thread linking Healey’s messages for the budget, a fourth U.K. government official said — from “breathing space” help with bills to building a more resilient infrastructure network. 

There will also be a “fiscal devolution roadmap” on budget day, setting out terms of how regional mayors can get more power and money and drawn up partly by Burnham’s new Manchester outpost, No. 10 North. Legislation to let them impose tourist taxes will be published in the coming weeks. And officials have talked behind the scenes about procurement and boosting Britain’s heavy industries; the budget needs to find almost £5 billion to plug a hole in a defense investment plan unveiled under Starmer.

Targeted cost-of-living measures appear likely to include scrapping “standing charges” on domestic gas bills, which cost the average household just over £100 a year. Burnham said Wednesday that he had asked Healey to look at the issue — though any help could be eclipsed by a predicted £276 rise in domestic bills this January.

The other message will be that the Treasury can do big, consequential things without raising taxes. Healey will make “a political argument that actually there are other types of budgets that you can have,” said the first government official quoted above, “busting through some of that sludge and ripping up a lot of that red tape.” Cash-strapped chancellors have reached for regulatory reform before, with mixed success.

MPs are looking closely at cost-of-living support. One backbencher in an affluent seat said any help had to be significant, because even their well-off constituents were struggling to take the holidays they wanted. Defense, by contrast, barely comes up on the doorstep: “There are hardly any votes in it, but it’s just something we have to do.”

There has been heavy engagement with Labour MPs, whose detachment from No. 10 helped force Starmer out in July. Treasury ministers Torsten Bell and James Murray are among those engaging while Chief Secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds handles tricky negotiations with Cabinet ministers, alongside No. 10 chief of staff James Purnell.

Healey has negotiated with Cabinet ministers and spoken to union leaders, banks and MPs — though not lobbyists. “No one can get to Healey,” said one. “It’s very smart. Let him do his job.”

Markets will look at the “headroom” — a snapshot of the buffer between Healey’s five-year plans and his self-imposed fiscal rules. The fourth official quoted above said Treasury officials have considered having only a small “headroom” buffer compared to the £21.7 billion left by Reeves, as it could be increased in future years. 

Reeves’ former political secretary, Pound, warned against this, telling Westminster Insider: “If the headroom is so low that it’s clear that they can’t clear the defense investment plan, for example, or the wider defense pressures, then I think that that could then start to have a bit of a knock-on effect that would be quite negative.”

However, headroom is merely a snapshot, often out of date by the time it is published. It is likely to be buffeted further by any events in the Middle East arising from the U.S. midterm results on Nov. 3.

And as with all budget briefings, some opposition politicians believe there is an element of expectation management. Conservatives suspect that headroom will come out higher than predicted — which Healey can paint as a victory.

Time is ticking

Then it’ll all be over — and Westminster will immediately start preparing for the next step.

A date was never confirmed for Burnham’s 10-year plan (beyond the latter part of 2026), but some officials believe it has already slipped slightly from the original intention. 

Downing Street and Cabinet Office officials remain determined to publish it in December, though some in Whitehall worry it might be delayed. “Knowing the things on the horizon and how big they are, I genuinely don’t see how you could make space for it,” said one official in another department.

While some Cabinet Office civil servants were first tasked to work on the plan in August, others only joined the team this month as it has grown, according to one person with knowledge of the staffing. Burnham’s ally Louise Haigh, the first secretary of state, is leading three “task forces” ahead of the plan on the cost of living, public control of utilities and the renewal of run-down high streets.

The 10-year plan won’t have all the answers, though. POLITICO reported this week that while it will contain a high-level vision, priorities and principles for the water industry’s future, much of the granular detail of how future ownership models will work is expected in the 2027 spending review. 

One Labour figure who has spoken to the government about the water industry said they believed ministers will choose “different horses for different courses” — an array of ownership models for various firms depending on how stricken they are. A second Labour figure talking to the government said: “You can’t do this in two years.”

The Labour official quoted earlier in this story said they feared the 10-year plan would be a let-down. “These big plans governments are always throwing forward to have a habit of turning out quite thin,” this person said. “At which point we all realize there was never a big plan all along.”

There are other plans to come, including an imminent plan to reform the welfare system by the former Labour Cabinet minister Alan Milburn, and a white paper in December that is due to set out a timetable, legislation and borders for plans to move more power outside Whitehall.

Devolution is one area where Burnham has moved quickly, pleasing many regional mayors. But some officials in the union movement fear that Burnham’s initial focus on devolution risks taking up bandwidth that could have been spent on other issues. A fifth government official added that they were worried all the conversations between different public bodies could crowd out the push for growth. They said: “I sit on Teams calls that are 30 people, all from different arms of the state. Sometimes I think — ‘You do know none of us are making this money?’”

‘Rubber hits the road’

Then there is the 2027 spending review. 

It will set out how the state allocates money across its arms for the next three to five years — turning these plans and the difficult trade-offs they require into reality.

The Treasury has previously confirmed it will set out the entire pathway to lift U.K. defense spending from 2.6% of GDP this year to 3.5% by 2035. It is also likely to address questions about Burnham’s pledge to create a state-funded national service for social care, funded by reducing the rise in the state pension.

There will be months of to-and-fro between Whitehall departments and a Treasury looking for cuts, efficiency savings or both to balance the books.

“The spending review is when the rubber hits the road,” said the fifth government official quoted above. “It’s already beginning. Departments are beginning to work out sacrificial lambs to offer up.”

Three people with knowledge of the conversations said Healey still hasn’t decided when in 2027 he wants to hold the spending review, though it is broadly expected no earlier than the summer. He has been privately musing with allies about the options.

Curtice said Healey’s options are essentially to hold a small fiscal event followed by a spending review next summer, or to hold a spending review with an annual budget simultaneously in fall 2027.

She added: “The big question we’ve posed for this budget — that we’re not necessarily expecting an answer to — is what is the spending total for the spending review that we know needs to come next year? Until we know the answer to that question, we don’t really know whether we can believe the path of tax and borrowing that is set out in the budget.”

Senior Conservatives argue the spending review will be so difficult that Burnham could call a snap election before it is due. He has insisted he will only force it in 2029.

Until then, much of the spending review work will fall to Reynolds. Her predecessor Darren Jones argued the existence of the 10-year plan and spending review meant it would be sensible for next week’s budget to be a little low-octane.

“The prime minister’s been clear that the 10-year plan is going to be the political strategy for the government,” Jones told POLITICO. “So I think it makes sense to do all of your public spending decisions after the publication of the 10-year plan. It would be odd if this October’s budget tried to deal with all the big trade-offs on defense, mayoral budgets, or more ownership of public utilities.

“So I think in many ways, actually the 10-year plan is more interesting this autumn in terms of the political strategy of the government. 

“And then 2027 will be the year in which ministers will have to start thinking about how to implement that strategy operationally, including in public spending decisions.”

Much of that will fall to Burnham himself.

Crowdsourcing

Rayner’s joke about “Andy Time” was not without cause.

Unlike Starmer, Burnham gets into the weeds of an issue even if it derails his schedule. The prime minister chews things over with colleagues so much that some have joked they could just remove his Downing Street desk, said the third government official quoted above. By contrast, Starmer used to retreat to No. 10’s first-floor study to read away from the hubbub.

Burnham’s approach can lead to Downing Street making decisions late in the day. One former No. 10 official said: “A Prime Minister needs to do 80 things in a day and if that goes to 60, then you end up massively behind.”

The flipside is that ministers and officials know what their leader actually wants from them — even if they are left to work out the detail.

“It’s like we’ve woken up from a political coma,” one backbench MP enthused. “I know what the prime minister thinks,” added the third government official quoted above.

Aides used to complain that Starmer, by contrast, tried to be efficient but would end meetings without setting a clear political direction. “Keir was always a stickler for time, even if the issue wasn’t resolved,” as one former colleague put it.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, suggested this week that Burnham was failing to flesh out the detail behind his vision. “Talking about it is not making a decision,” she said of social care reform at prime minister’s questions. Burnham was visibly frustrated—insisting he was making the long-term decisions other politicians duck.

And for the prime minister’s allies and most of his MPs, the vibes remain good. The No. 10 environment is more relaxed and open. Junior ministers, in meetings over bacon sandwiches, feel they can share their views and be heard.

“There’s definitely still a buzz,” said the person who talks regularly to Downing Street, who was quoted earlier in this story. “But you don’t want to spend too much time buzzing while Rome burns. There’s a reality check that I feel is going to come imminently.”

Patrick Baker, Sascha O’Sullivan, Esther Webber and Emilio Casalicchio contributed reporting.

he world is starting to understand that there is no way to fully and lastingly protect itself from President Donald Trump.

The man just can’t let things go — and he’ll get creative to get what he wants.

The latest blowup over Ukraine is emblematic of Trump’s wily persistence, and it suggests a challenging two years lie ahead for the international set even if Democrats gain some power in the midterm elections.

Not that long ago, Trump seemed to have patched up ties with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Kyiv made gains against Russia. Trump signed legislation last month that was championed by his late friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to impose heavy new sanctions and tariffs to punish Russia for its war on Ukraine.

This month, the original Trump — the one who fawns over Russian leader Vladimir Putin and despises Zelenskyy — roared back. He waived many of the legislation’s penalties on Russia, moved to buy Russian diesel and signaled he’s more interested in doing business with Moscow than seeking justice for Kyiv. Ukrainians suspect the U.S. has pressured them by throttling its satellite connections and intelligence-sharing. (The Trump administration disputes much of this.)

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Trump said Monday as he welcomed the idea of an arms control summit with Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that might include talks about Ukraine.

The lesson, foreign officials and others steeped in diplomacy tell me, is that you cannot truly change Trump’s mind or stop his overall trajectory. Even if Trump seems briefly chastened or stages a tactical retreat, he will eventually return in new, often-surprising modes to push his original views and goals. He will try to exhaust you into submission.

Imagine how startling it is to be Ukrainian these days as Trump pressures you to make concessions to Russia by blaming you for a global energy crisis he caused by launching a war on Iran. Or what it’s like for officials across European capitals trying to craft a response, knowing there’s never an end to the process.

“There is no immunity to Donald Trump. He makes a deal in order to make a better deal the next day,” one senior European official mused, having been granted anonymity because the topic involves sensitive diplomacy.

It’s hard to blame world leaders who think they’ve learned to manage Trump only to be bewildered by a sudden left hook on his part. Foreign policy is often driven by hope when you lack good options. And Trumpology is a confounding, but still a relatively new, subfield.

Besides, Trump’s messaging is inconsistent, incoherent and nonstrategic — characteristics that can obscure his single-minded pursuit of his goals. So the global actors dealing with him — whether it’s the Gulf Arab states who shower him with gifts or the Canadians furious over his trade and territorial threats — sometimes think they’ve come to terms with him only to find they’re fighting on a newly configured plane.

A Supreme Court ruling that gutted many of Trump’s tariffs earlier this year was good news in many capitals. But since then, the so-called Tariff Man has moved to impose the import taxes under pretexts not considered by the court, including turning to accusations involving forced labor.

The White House doesn’t dispute Trump’s aggressive tactics.

“There is no greater fighter for America First interests than President Trump — and he is willing to look anyone in the eye to deliver wins on behalf of the United States,” spokesperson Anna Kelly told me in a statement.

The Greenland saga shows the limits of trying to mollify Trump.

In his first term, Trump wanted to buy the frozen island. The idea was shelved amid global laughter, but authorities in Greenland and Denmark made it clear to Trump that they welcomed more U.S. investment in the Danish territory.

In his second term, Trump huffed and puffed about an all-out U.S. takeover of Greenland, only to agree in September to an expanded U.S. military footprint that he could have gotten anyway under existing, decades-old diplomatic accords without all the drama. The whole affair has led to lingering anger in Europe about what Canada’s leader called a “rupture” in the global order — but many European officials hoped that the saga had faded away.

Yet, it’s far from certain that Trump has given up on possessing Greenland. Just days ago, he touted on social media plans to start oil, gas and mineral exploration in “our new and beautiful Greenland.”

The use of “our” is more than a little suggestive.

Defying Trump, too, can get you only so far.

Brazilians effectively told Trump to take a hike when he used tariffs and sanctions to punish the country for charging its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, in a coup attempt.

A few months later, as Bolsonaro was about to start his prison sentence, Trump seemed to admit defeat in his effort to help his political ally. “That’s too bad,” he said in November 2025, with little emotion. (“Brazil Defied Trump and Won,” The New York Times declared.)

But Trump wasn’t done with Brazil. He and his team have pursued efforts to undercut the current Brazilian government while quietly backing Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, in his efforts to win the presidency this year. The runoff election is on Sunday, and it’s tight.

World leaders are doing what they can to make their countries Trump-resistant, if not all-out Trump-proof.

That has meant everything from diversifying their sources of trade and security alliances to joining Trump on ventures that, on the surface at least, can be helpful to them. (Then there are the many countries, especially in Africa, that diplomats privately tell me are happy to be off Trump’s radar.)

My takeaway from watching all of this, though, is that it’s not enough to stay one step ahead of Trump. You have to stay several steps ahead, and you have to be wildly imaginative about the lengths to which Trump and his devoted aides are willing to go to complicate your life.

The second Trump administration is filled with people who have turned to unique, bizarre and clever interpretations of law and reality to push his agenda. It’s not always clear who is behind which move, but it’s hard to imagine Trump isn’t fine with most of what’s happening.

It’s why a teenager is being held in immigration detention for the actions of his grandmother decades ago. It’s why Congress can scream and shout about its spending orders yet Trump ignores it.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said other nations should not hope that the Republican Party will shed Trump’s worldview, including his disdain for allies, once Trump’s out of power.

“I would love for our allies to know that we have consistent common adversaries that we’re going to work together to fight. I just don’t know that you can make that guarantee,” Murphy, a frequent Trump critic, told me. “That’s painful to say, but given the state of the Republican Party right now, it’s true.”

I understand why Ukraine and the European Union are trying to diversify their sources of intelligence and military industrial bases as Trump keeps chasing love from Russia.

Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claims, the reality is that the United States can no longer be trusted for such security assistance.

But it’s not enough to find new intelligence partners or weapons manufacturers. You have to ask bigger questions, like, “What are the untapped streams of intelligence that no one knows are out there? What’s a potential weapon no one has considered? How can I acquire what I need before Trump stops me?”

Governments need to have plans — now — for scenarios that seem completely crazy. Better to be wrong than unprepared.

Still, even if you do all of that … “I don’t think it’s possible to stay two or three steps ahead of Trump,” said Charles Kupchan, a former senior national security official during the Obama administration who apparently enjoys raining on parades.

“He acts on impulse,” argued Kupchan, who has a new book out on the crumbling world order. “We need to try to limit the damage he’s causing and ride him out.”

A Democratic win in November’s midterms — one or both chambers of Congress — is unlikely to do much to rein in Trump’s actions abroad during his final years, current and former U.S. and foreign officials tell me.

He still has the veto and has been willing to ignore congressional demands. There’s also the fact that presidents have significantly more power to act in unilateral ways overseas than they do domestically.

Ukraine, the European Union, the world — all will be dealing with a politically wounded Trump who’s likely to double down on what he feels he must have.

“He’s going to be angrier,” Murphy predicted.

ROME — Former paratrooper General Roberto Vannacci portrays himself on social media as a Roman legionary and charioteer. He has declared he prefers women “without skirts” and posted an AI-generated image of a female junior minister with exaggerated cleavage.

None of these projections of masculinity and anti-woke culture are clumsy gaffes. The insurgent far-right star of Italian politics is making a deliberate play to the so-called manosphere to transform himself from an internet provocateur into a heavyweight political force.

For Italy’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Vannacci now poses a serious problem as she needs to decide whether he is an asset or a liability. With elections expected next spring, his National Future party is polling at about 8%, making him a potentially crucial factor in building a right-wing coalition.

“It is disgusting to think you can manipulate the image of a woman for such deplorable propaganda,” the center-right junior minister in Meloni’s coalition whose image was manipulated, Matilde Siracusano, told POLITICO.  “I don’t think we have ever sunk this low, especially from someone aspiring to be a national political leader.”

Vannacci’s provocations may look like familiar trolling from a politician who has built his reputation on saying the unsayable. But behind them lies a broader political project, tapping into the grievances of young men who feel alienated by feminism and progressive culture.

Emanuele Pozzolo, a National Future parliamentarian who defected from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, believes young men have become increasingly constrained in their relationships with women.

“I think young Western men are very often almost castrated in their instinct for dealing with women,” he said, arguing that even legitimate romantic approaches risk being treated as aggression. 

“The cultural problem is that sometimes everything seems to be harassment, everything abuse, everything violence,” he added, while stressing that genuine abuse must be punished.

Mediterranean patriarchy

Vannacci combines inflammatory online messaging and an alpha-male persona with a political program that promises to restore traditional roles for men and women. National Future even has a name for its preferred social order: “Mediterranean patriarchy.”

Its political program calls for the formation of “strong men” capable of controlling their emotions and passions, protecting women and sacrificing themselves for society. It opposes the recently introduced crime of femicide, condemns feminism, and declares the defense of life “from conception to natural death” and the “natural family” among its non-negotiable values.

The architect of this vision and principal author of the program is Lorenzo Gasperini, a conservative Catholic philosophy teacher from Tuscany, who has opposed vaccines and abortion rights on social media and blamed feminism for violence against women.

The result is a political offering that combines different traditions: conservative Catholic ideas about family and sexuality, older Italian ideas of virility and the much newer online politics of male grievance.

The manifesto seeks to put traditional family values into practice with proposals to pay parents who leave work to raise children, and reward parents of large families with tax exemption and public sector jobs.  

Some proposals echo Benito Mussolini’s fascist-era “Battle for Births,” which offered similar incentives while promoting motherhood as a patriotic duty.

Luca Sforzini, a former Vannacci ideologue who has since broken with him, said the Mediterranean label was a clever piece of marketing.

“It’s like talking about the Mediterranean diet,” he told POLITICO. “You think of Italian food, mozzarella, tomatoes, olive oil.” The result, he said, was to conceal a patriarchal model with men above women behind “bucolic, positive images. It’s monstrous,” he said.

Pozzolo rejected the suggestion that the program advocates for male supremacy.

“It is exactly the opposite,” he said. “When we talk about Mediterranean patriarchy, the main idea is to recover, preserve and pass on the responsibilities of being a man within the family and society.” Men, he argued, had a duty to show women respect, love and protection, while rejecting violence or coercive control.

He defended the “without skirts” remark as “extremely funny” — picking up on a reference to Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani advocating long skirts — and not remotely offensive, comparing Vannacci’s ability to connect with ordinary Italians to Silvio Berlusconi’s. 

At a recent rally in the Umbrian city of Orvieto, Vannacci defended the Mediterranean patriarchy concept as not “oppression and possession” but “duty, fidelity, sacrifice,” and said it was the family model that had allowed “us to prevail over the last 2,000 years.”

Elisa Ercoli, president of the women’s rights organization Differenza Donna, condemned the program as “a return to the supremacy of the white, cisgender alpha male, and the woman as his handmaiden.”

Appealing to alphas

Vannacci, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, became a media sensation in 2023 with the self-published book “The World Upside Down,” a broadside against immigration, feminism and homosexuality. In it, he told gay people: “You are not normal, get over it.”

Lionized by fans as a defender of common sense against progressive politics, he received more than half a million votes as a candidate for the anti-immigration League in the 2024 European elections, before founding National Future in February.

Polling analysis suggests that about 62% of National Future’s prospective voters are male, including strong support among manual workers and the unemployed.

Pozzolo denied National Future was deliberately targeting male voters, insisting the party’s ambition was to reach Italians of all backgrounds who felt unrepresented.

Federica Formato, a lecturer at Brighton University in the U.K., who studies gender and the far right, said Vannacci was “testing the waters” to see whether he can reach a younger male audience, tapping into what she described as the “aggrieved entitlement” of young men.

A career soldier, he has repeatedly portrayed himself through images of physical strength, competition and military prowess. On social media, AI-generated versions proliferate of Vannacci as an ancient Roman in scenes recalling the Ridley Scott epic Gladiator.

For Formato, the Roman imagery projects “virility and hyper-masculinity,” while Vannacci’s army background itself helps construct the image of an “alpha male.”

Humor, memes and deliberate provocation are particularly effective with a younger online audience, Formato said, allowing relatively complex ideological messages to be reduced to instantly comprehensible images. “He is not naive,” she said. “He says things to provoke and get more attention.”

That presents Meloni with a headache. Vannacci’s party is drawing voters from her Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini’s League, while offering a more uncompromising platform on immigration, social issues and foreign policy.

Yet Vannacci has opened the door to an alliance with Meloni if she needs his votes. He has described National Future as a natural partner for the center-right, while insisting that any deal must respect his party’s principles. With Italy’s new electoral law offering a parliamentary majority bonus to coalitions winning at least 42 percent of the vote, those votes could matter.

That presents Meloni with an uncomfortable choice: Keep Vannacci outside the coalition, or bring into her government a movement whose appeal rests partly on the grievances of men who believe feminism has gone too far.

For Formato, Vannacci is exploiting a space in Italian politics that has so far lacked a figure capable of turning those grievances into an organized political constituency.

Vannacci, with his promises to restore traditional masculinity, appears determined to occupy it.

“There is an empty chair,” she said.

LONDON — Kemi Badenoch warned Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham on Tuesday not to repeat the economic mistakes of her former boss Liz Truss in his first budget next Wednesday.

The Tory leader said higher national debt, increased gilt yields and extra government spending are creating a gloomy economic picture — and demanded sharp spending cuts from the ruling Labour government next week.

“The lessons of the mini-budget are: if you don’t balance your budget, if you give away £150 billion in subsidizing people’s energy bills, but you don’t cut spending, then the markets will react,” Badenoch said, citing former Tory leader Truss’ ill-fated mini-budget in 2022, which triggered a sharp sell-off in U.K. government bonds and saw the value of the British pound fall.

Truss — Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, who spent just 49 days in Downing Street — announced Tuesday she is publishing a new book setting out “what really happened” during the mini-budget in 2022, according to a press notice issued by her spokesperson.

“Bank Job: A short book on how the Bank of England broke the bond market and brought down the government” will be published later this month.

The ex-PM has blamed the mini-budget’s consequences on the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog.

Badenoch told a press conference in London she does not believe Labour is paying attention to the consequences of that Conservative budget by failing to reduce spending: “They are the ones who want to repeat the mistakes of four years ago, we are not going to be making that mistake again.”

“We need to live within our means,” she said. “We have to stop borrowing so much, but instead, Labour are taking out more loans to pay the interest on our existing loans.”

Questioned on why the public should trust her judgement on economic competence, Badenoch, who served as Truss’ international trade secretary, told POLITICO: “I am not Liz Truss and I think that the public can tell the difference.”

Badenoch said she only saw the mini-budget when it was presented and collective responsibility “doesn’t mean that you agree with all of the decisions that are made.”

“She needs to take responsibility for it, one way or another,” Badenoch said. “That is her issue.”