US is pausing military aid to Ukraine – White House
The United States is pausing military aid to Ukraine, days after US President Donald Trump clashed with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, a White House official confirmed with Reuters on Monday.
The official said the US is pausing and reviewing aid to ensure it is contributing to a solution, Reuters reports.
The pause will last until Trump determines the country’s leaders demonstrate a good-faith commitment to peace, according to Bloomberg and Fox News reports.
“This is not permanent termination of aid, it’s a pause,” Fox News quoted a Trump administration official as saying.
Bloomberg reported that all US military equipment not currently in Ukraine would be paused, including weapons in transit on aircraft and ships or waiting in transit areas in Poland.
It added that Trump ordered Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to execute the pause.
The reports come hours after Trump told reporters at the White House that he had not discussed suspending military aid to Ukraine, but added that Zelenskyy “should be more appreciative” of Washington’s support.
Nearly three years into the war, Washington has committed billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine.
Key events
Vance says US economic interest in Ukraine would serve as security guarantee
More now on JD Vance’s comments in that pre-recorded Fox News interview.
Vance told Fox News on Monday that giving Washington an economic interest in the future of Ukraine will serve as a security guarantee for the country that Russia invaded in February 2022.
“If you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine,” Vance said in the interview.
“That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years,” he added.
“That’s called diplomacy, we used to have respect for that in Washington DC,” Vance says without irony.
Vance is making the case that the best way to guarantee security for Ukraine is to ensure America gains economically and has a long-term interest in the country, ie by signing a minerals deal.
Vance says that Putin has said he is willing to talk peace.
“When the Ukrainians came to Washington on Friday, it was meant to be ceremonial,” Vance says.
“We couldn’t even get the Ukrainians to a place where they could talk about peaceful settlement,” Vance says.
Vance makes the case that the only way to have a conversation about a settlement with Putin is to have a relationship with him.
“Nobody is suggesting that you give the Nobel Peace Prize to Putin,” he says.
He says that Biden called Putin “every name in the book”.
He says that Trump says that the door is open to Zelenskyy as long as he is willing to “seriously talk peace”.
“What is the actual plan here. You can’t just fund the war forever. The American people won’t stand for that,” Vance says.
This interview was recorded prior to the episode, it is unclear whether Vance is speaking knowing that the US would have paused aid by the time it aired.
He repeats, “We don’t want to fund the war indefinitely.”
Fox’s Hannity airs interview with JD Vance
Fox host Sean Hannity’s interview with JD Vance is starting now.
Vance says Trump “tried to bend over backwards to “be nice” to Zelenskyy before what became an extraordinarily combative press conference in the Oval Office on Friday.
He says that Zelenskyy showed a “lack of respect” and a sense of entitlement.
HHS previously warned employees that responses to Doge’s request may “be read by malign foreign actors.” The department sent two versions of its email on Monday, the second of which removed that reference.
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents HHS workers, told members in an email seen by Reuters that they must comply with the agency’s choice to proceed with the “ill-advised exercise”. The union was not immediately available for comment.
Employees were told in HHS’s email to follow supervisor guidance on how to reply and respond in a way that would not identify grants, grantees, contracts or contractors, nor information that would identify the precise nature of scientific experiments, research or reviews.
“I feel I will spend the whole day writing these five bullets in a way that does not contain sensitive information while also providing information that my job is important. I don’t know if this can be called efficiency,” an FDA source who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal told Reuters.
Employees on leave, out of office due to work schedules, or who have signed a deferred resignation agreement are not required to respond, according to the email.
HHS employees told to comply with Doge request for information on accomplishments
More now on the US Department of Health and Human Services telling employees on Monday they could apply for early retirement over the next 10 days.
The message said they should respond to a request for information on their accomplishments of the past week, according to emails seen by Reuters.
The HHS told employees in an email that it received authorization on Monday from the US Office of Personnel Management to offer early retirement under the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority, which impacts agencies “that are undergoing substantial restructuring, reshaping, downsizing, transfer of function or reorganization.”
An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Employees were directed to OMP’s website, which says eligible employees must be at least 50 years old with 20 years of federal service, or any age with 25 years of service, among other requirements. The offer is valid until 14 March at 5pm EST, the email said.
Last week, the administration sent out a second round of emails asking employees to share five bullet points on their accomplishments of the past week.
Employees at HHS, which includes the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), had previously been told that they did not have to respond to Doge’s emails and there would be “no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond.” Multiple other US agencies had also told employees not to respond immediately to Doge’s demand, including the FBI and state department.
But in a Monday email seen by Reuters, HHS told employees to respond to DOGE’s email by midnight without revealing sensitive information, including the names of drugs and devices they are working on.
US vice-president JD Vance will be appearing on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show in 10 minutes’ time. We will bring you any important developments from that interview.
Lois Beckett
Beneath a recent Los Angeles Times opinion piece about the dangers of artificial intelligence, there is now an AI-generated response about how AI will make storytelling more democratic.
“Some in the film world have met the arrival of generative AI tools with open arms. We and others see it as something deeply troubling on the horizon,” the co-directors of the Archival Producers Alliance, Rachel Antell, Stephanie Jenkins and Jennifer Petrucelli, wrote on 1 March.
Published over the Academy Awards weekend, their comment piece focused on the specific dangers of AI-generated footage within documentary film, and the possibility that unregulated use of AI could shatter viewers’ “faith in the veracity of visuals”.
On Monday, the Los Angeles Times’s just-debuted AI tool, “Insight”, labeled this argument as politically “center-left” and provided four “different views on the topic” underneath.
