Ukraine war: Merz shows that Germany wants to have a say again

The new chancellor, along with his colleagues Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, and Donald Tusk, visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. They occasionally called Donald Trump. But the Kremlin reacted rather negatively to the call for a ceasefire.

At night on the train to Kyiv, the three most powerful Europeans meet in the rolling living room of French President Emmanuel Macron. His saloon car and the other carriages for his delegation arrive directly behind the locomotive. The German section is in the middle of the train, and the British section is at the end. Chancellor Friedrich Merz thus doesn't have to travel far from his car—which was reportedly built in the GDR in the 1980s and is stylistically reminiscent of both Las Vegas and neo-Stalinism—to his French counterpart.