The US national security adviser Mike Waltz has told Kyiv to reign in its criticism of President Trump, and agree to US demands for a mineral rights deal. Also: Amazon gains control of the James Bond film franchise.
Chapter 1: What are the main highlights of the podcast?
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Janet Jalil and in the early hours of Friday the 21st of February, these are our main stories. The White House National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, tells Ukraine to tone down its criticism of the US and sign a minerals deal being pushed by President Trump. A planned news conference between President Zelensky and a visiting U.S.
envoy is abruptly cancelled as a rift between the two countries deepens. The Mexican army arrests a senior leader of the notorious Sinaloa drugs cartel. Also in this podcast, Amazon takes over creative control of the James Bond franchise after agreeing a deal with the Broccoli family.
They have had their hands on that wheel for a long time, but we are here still talking about Bond 64 years later. And I think they will still be looking over the backseat at who's driving.
We look at what this means for the future of the world's most famous fictional spy and how a wrong turn saw a cycling race descend into chaos.
A day after Donald Trump called the Ukrainian leader a dictator for daring to say that the US president lived in a Russian disinformation space, an aide to Mr Trump has said that Vladimir Zelensky needs to tone down his criticism of the US and sign a deal for mineral rights to pay for American support in Ukraine's war against Russia.
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Chapter 2: Why is the US urging Ukraine to tone down criticism?
Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, told Mr Zelensky to get over his reluctance to sign the deal, which he thought could be worth as much as half a trillion dollars to the US.
President Trump is obviously very frustrated right now with President Zelensky. The fact that he hasn't come to the table, that he hasn't been willing to take this opportunity that we have offered, I think he eventually will get to that point, and I hope so very quickly.
Meanwhile, a U.S. envoy, retired General Keith Kellogg, has been holding talks with Mr. Zelensky in Kiev. He said he'd come to listen. But a planned joint news conference on Thursday afternoon was cancelled at the last minute, the Ukrainians say, at the request of the American side.
However, afterwards, the Ukrainian president described his meeting with the US envoy as productive and called for stronger ties with Washington. In just over a week, President Trump has dramatically upended US foreign policy. Speaking to Vladimir Putin on the phone, allowing high-level face-to-face talks between Russia and the US that excluded Ukraine and Europe,
Chapter 3: What is the status of US-Ukraine relations?
and suggesting that it was Ukraine that started the war. Our international editor, Jeremy Bowen, is in Kiev, and he told me U.S.-Ukrainian relations have plummeted to a new low.
I think the fact that the news conference was cancelled, guesswork on my part, but the indications I'd say are that they had nothing good to say about each other, so best not to say it in public. And also, General Kellogg, the US envoy, would have been asked all sorts of awkward questions about, does he agree that Zelensky, who presumably would have been standing next to him, is a dictator?
as president trump has said as for waltz the national security advisor and one of the criticisms of the american approach has been is that they are treating ukraine potentially like a colony where they can extract its mineral wealth its natural wealth and just walk off with it in a very very one-sided deal and waltz was saying you've got to get that contract signed and tone down the uh
the nasty comments about our leadership, even though the Americans, of course, have license to say, President Trump particularly, about what he wants about the Ukrainians. So I think they are saying, look, it is an unequal relationship. We are stronger than you. And you know what? Bad luck. We're going to do what we want and you better go along with us.
President Zelensky clearly feels he's got nothing to gain by biting his tongue. What do Ukrainians make of the Trump administration lashing out at their president in this way and the way that Vladimir Zelensky is responding to that?
One thing Ukrainians are not short of after three years of war is nationalism. And one thing that Zelensky is good at is defiance. He showed that from the outset three years ago. I mean, you remember he did a video late at night with his chief advisers around him saying, we are all here, we're not leaving. And I think that that will quite likely be the approach he takes to all of this.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin is saying that it would be unacceptable for NATO countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, but many would say, how can you have a peace deal without them?
Well, answer, you can't. I think that it wouldn't work otherwise. There are various formulations being discussed, but the thing about it is if there is going to be some kind of a peace agreement, and it's a misnomer to talk about what's going on really between the Americans and the Russians as peace talks, because while the Americans had been backing Ukraine,
Ukraine, they're not direct belligerents in the war. And you can't really do a deal just by talking to one side. And there now seems to be very little daylight between the things that Trump and his people are saying about the war and the things that Putin and his people have been saying about the war for many years now, since before the full-scale invasion.
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Chapter 4: How might Amazon's acquisition impact the James Bond franchise?
It is. I think it's always important to take any single arrest in its context. Of course, all of these figures, from El Chapo Guzman himself down, are important when they are detained. But the criminal organisation is much bigger and much stronger than any single individual.
I think what is significant is that this shows there's a sort of more concerted effort by the Mexican government to try and focus on the issue of fentanyl trafficking, something that clearly Donald Trump has been pushing for to secure, as he saw it, a greater commitment by the government of Claudia Sheinbaum, the Mexican president, towards strengthening the U.S.
border and having troops focus on fentanyl trafficking and undocumented immigration.
So she'll be hoping that those threatened tariffs won't be imposed. But at the same time, she's also saying that she'll press ahead with legal action against US gun manufacturers because she says a large proportion of the weapons used by criminal groups in Mexico actually come from north of the border from the US.
On the US side, there's the belief that there is no way that US gun manufacturers can be held responsible for the ultimate destination of those guns. But I think what Claudia Sheinbaum is doing is pushing the elements that matter to her in this relationship with Donald Trump in its early days. She's saying, look, this is a two-way street.
You're obviously worried about fentanyl trafficking, so are we. But in return, you have to acknowledge two things. One is that the demand for fentanyl on illegal drugs is in the US. And two, as you mentioned, the guns are coming illegally smuggled from the United States.
Will Grant in Mexico. The authorities in Azerbaijan have ordered the suspension of the BBC's Azeri service, a source of impartial news and information in the country since 1994. It comes a week after the country's oldest independent news agency, Tehran, was also shut down. Rehan Dimitri has the details.
The BBC's Azeri Service and Turan News Agency were the last two independent news sources in the oil-rich country of 10 million people. The BBC Azeri website had up to one million readers per week, providing impartial news in a country where information is tightly controlled.
More than 20 independent Azerbaijani journalists have been jailed since the government intensified its crackdown on independent media in 2023. journalists are often accused of currency smuggling, a charge that human rights groups have described as dubious.
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Chapter 5: Who is the Mexican army's latest arrest in the drug war?
I asked our arts correspondent, Vincent Dowd, if this development had come as a surprise.
It's a massive surprise. If you'd asked any well-informed arts journalist yesterday, oh, what's happening with 007, everyone would have said, oh, well, it's mired in this terrible, painful, slow movement. row between Eon Productions, based in London, who owned the franchise, and Amazon, who are now the distributors. As you say, basic facts, the most recent Bond film was in No Time to Die in 2021.
The next year, the distributors then, MGM, were bought out by Amazon. And that's the origin of the tension there's been since, which has taken a very surprising turn today. And why do we think this is happening now? Partly age. Eon is basically Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who are half siblings. Michael is now 83. Barbara is rather younger, in her mid-60s.
She's reported very recently as having been very unimpressed with execs at Amazon and what they might want to do with the franchise. They sort of... co-own it in a funny sort of way. Well, what might have changed their minds? I think basically they may have been made an offer they can't refuse financially. As I say, Barbara Broccoli is in her 60s.
She said she wants to devote more of her life and her time to working with the arts and working with charities. She's still very active.
So what does this mean now for the Bond films?
Well, it's not that No Time to Die was a financial flop. It's made $775 million worldwide. I suspect, however, that Amazon want to make more of that. Think of what Disney did with the Star Wars franchise since they, in effect, took over from George Lucas, spin-offs, films, all that kind of thing.
In the Amazon era already, you would have been very possibly ignorant of the fact that there was one non-movie spin-off, a game show on Amazon Prime called 007 Road to a Million. Nine pairs of contestants... attempt to win a million pounds by competing in James Bond-inspired challenges around the globe. It sounded pretty dire, it was pretty dire, widely considered deeply forgettable.
And now the big question on many people's lips will be, who will be the next James Bond and when will we see the next film?
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Chapter 6: What challenges are faced by independent media in Azerbaijan?
So it was a shock when, in November, it was announced that on a visit to Algiers, Sansol had been arrested at the airport under state security laws. I am the publisher of the last book of Boulem Sansol. Paris publisher Jean-François Colosimo knows Boilem Sansal well. He describes him as a humane and gentle person and a genuine free thinker.
Above all, he's a man who trusts in human brotherhood. He's a man who trusts in a kind of love for the cosmos, love for the earth, love for history, love for the different people and their cultures. He's a man of peace. So what has angered the Algerian government so much about him? Well, he's a writer of the size of Solzhenitsyn. If you want to compare, there you have to go, Solzhenitsyn.
He says the truth about the official history. He puts it down. For a kind of regime like the one that, unfortunately, the Algerian people have today on their back, truth is unbearable.
Sansal had been getting up the nose of the Algerian government for many years. From semi-exile in France, he wrote about corruption, about what he saw as the carve-up of power between the Algerian military and Islamists, about the threat to France of Islamists.
And in this interview, on a website close to France's hard-right National Rally Party not long before his arrest, he may have overstepped the mark, calling into question aspects of Algeria's official account of its own history. On the internet, the reaction from pro-Algerian influencers in France has been vitriolic, accusing Sansal of being a stooge for Marine Le Pen.
The president of Algeria, Abdelmajid Taboun, gave an interview saying that the whole affair was a concoction intended to mobilize opinion against Algeria. The truth is that Boualem Sansal is caught up in a bigger crisis, which is the recent breakdown in relations between France and Algeria, possibly the worst since Algerian independence 60 years ago. Sansal is a victim and a kind of hostage.
He's never written a word that is seditious or inflammatory, merely described the world around him as he sees it. His lawyer, still waiting for the chance to visit him in prison, is François Zimouret.
He's a free thinker, and as all free thinkers and free minds, his thoughts and beliefs might have shocked or irritated. This is incumbent to freedom of speech, in fact. But at the end of the day, I still don't see how his words could have endangered a state of 45 million inhabitants.
Françoise Zimure, ending that report by Hugh Schofield.
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Chapter 7: Who could be the next James Bond?
This comes on top of cuts in aid funding. Our Cairo correspondent Sally Nabil has been investigating.
Over the past few months, we have more than 24 UN staff arrested, as well as others from local and international aid agencies. They have been behind bars for months. Their whereabouts are unknown. One employee for the World Food Programme died in detention a few days ago. It took us a while to be able to find someone, an aid worker, who agrees to talk to us.
Hannah, who works for a U.S.-funded aid agency, and Hannah is not her real name, she spoke to us on condition of anonymity. And she told us how she had to flee the capital, Sanaa, after the Houthis raided her office.
I didn't realize how shocking it was until I walked into the office and saw my manager sitting in the meeting room, his phone and laptop confiscated and surrounded by security personnel. Outside, two armored vehicles were parked near our building, and a group of masked armed men stood nearby.
What Hana told me during our conversation is that she believes this heavy crackdown on aid workers is meant to spread fear among the public. They just want to make an example of these aid workers who are accused of being potential traitors. So now any person who works for a foreign-funded agency, is very scared.
And Yemen has been a big beneficiary of USAID. That's the world's biggest donor agency, which has now been frozen by the Trump administration. What impact has that had on the many people that were dependent on the aid it gave? Huge.
I mean, according to Human Rights Watch, USAID, it supplies nearly one third of the needs of the Yemeni people. We have talked to families who have been displaced for over a decade and they are living in camps elsewhere. in very miserable conditions.
This one lady called Amal, and again, this is not her real name, she is a mother of nine, and she depends on a monthly food basket that she receives from the World Food Program. And she tells us that These supplies, they run out after two weeks. And I asked her, what if these supplies are to be cut? If assistance is to be stopped, me and my children will die.
It's painful and shameful to go begging. But this is my destiny.
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