Europe blindsided by Donald Trump on Ukraine peace talks with Russia

Today’s agenda: Wall Street sells $3bn debt tied to Twitter takeover; ex-DeepMind scientist’s drug discovery venture; China’s record coal plant construction; the “Opec of nickel”; and Cornwall’s mystical far west

Good morning. We start today with news of European officials reeling from being cut out of peace negotiations on Ukraine after Donald Trump said the US and Russia would begin talks “immediately”. Here’s what we know.

Where Europe stands: More than half a dozen senior European officials told the Financial Times they expected Trump to tell them they must pay for Ukrainian reconstruction and deploy troops there to maintain a peace deal in which they would not be involved.

“The Americans don’t see a role for Europe in the big geopolitical questions related to the war. It’s going to be a real test of unity,” said one senior EU official. “Trump sees us as money. And frankly we haven’t been clear on what our seat at the table would look like in exchange for that money.”

Looking ahead: European leaders and ministers are hoping to gain more clarity on Trump’s plans from discussions with US vice-president JD Vance and Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, at the Munich Security Conference which begins tomorrow and will be attended by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He has repeatedly said that a European-only security guarantee would not be credible.

“It’s more than fair to say that nothing can be agreed about European security without Europe,” Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Albares told the FT. “And we don’t think that anything should be decided about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

Read more about Trump’s plan and how it has blindsided European capitals. We also have analyses of the Trump administration’s latest moves:

• Anti-corruption: Trump’s order to pause enforcement of an anti-corruption act will open the doors of America to all manner of bad actors, writes Casey Michel.

• South Africa: The US president’s attacks on the country might actually unite its people, writes David Pilling.

• Trade law: Neither international nor domestic courts on their own will stop Trump’s destructive tariffs, writes Alan Beattie.

For more updates on the new administration, sign up for our White House Watch newsletter. And here’s what else we’re keeping tabs on today:

• Economic data: The European Central Bank releases its latest economic bulletin. Germany reports January inflation figures, while the UK publishes GDP estimates for last year’s fourth quarter.

• Geopolitics: Nato defence ministers meet in Brussels to prepare for a summit in June. Emmanuel Macron hosts a conference in Paris to support “a fair and inclusive political transition” in Syria after Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

• Results: Airbnb, Barclays, Commerzbank, Nestlé, Thyssenkrupp and Unilever are among those reporting. See our Week Ahead newsletter for the full list.

Five more top stories

1. Exclusive: US private equity groups have invested billions of dollars in data centres serving ByteDance, in a dealmaking frenzy now threatened by a US crackdown on Chinese companies’ access to the best chips. Here’s how the TikTok owner could be using the sites to exploit a legal loophole to access high-end Nvidia chips.

2. Exclusive: A majority of Thames Water’s sewage plants did not have enough capacity to treat incoming material last year, according to the company’s own data, leading untreated effluent to spill into rivers and waterways across its network. Read the full report.

3. Wall Street banks are close to selling $3bn worth of loans backing Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, offloading another mammoth portion of a debt deal that has lingered on their balance sheets for more than two years. A further disposal would come a week after bankers successfully sold $5.5bn of debt tied to the takeover.

4. Exclusive: Institutional investors with $1.5tn in funds have told asset managers to step up on climate action or risk being dumped, in a sign of a split in the industry. As many large asset managers back away from public support for corporate action on global warming, asset owners argue that climate change is a long-term financial risk.

5. A former DeepMind scientist has raised $50mn to launch a company to discover new drugs using artificial intelligence. Simon Kohl, who helped build DeepMind’s Nobel Prize-winning protein prediction programme, said AI had the potential to change how drugmakers operate by making biology “programmable”.

• The FT View: No one would wish to see an authoritarian China become dominant in AI, but America’s apparent readiness to dismantle guardrails represents a bold, potentially reckless, bet, writes the FT editorial board.

News in-depth

Rachel Reeves has repeatedly described her commitment to meeting her fiscal rules as “non-negotiable”, but preliminary forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility suggest Reeves is in the red because of weak economic growth and higher than expected debt interest payments. How boxed in is the chancellor by the UK’s fiscal outlook?

We’re also reading and listening to . . . 

Chart of the day

China’s coal plant construction surged last year to the highest level in almost a decade despite the country’s push into renewables. The parallel expansion “risks undermining China’s clean energy transition”, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor wrote in their report.

Take a break from the news . . . 

Tate St Ives has just opened the first major exhibition of surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun, much of whose creative output was inspired by Penwith’s ancient landscapes. Oliver Smith follows her footsteps to Cornwall’s mystical far west.