Aug. 10, 2025, 1:39 p.m. ETVice President JD Vance said the Trump administration no longer wished to fund Ukraine’s defense of the Russian invasion.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAs President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia gets ready to meet with President Trump on Friday in Alaska, Vice President JD Vance said on Sunday that the U.S. is working to set up a meeting that also includes President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.Mr. Vance said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that he did not think it would be a good idea for Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky to meet before Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Putin on Friday. But he suggested the three leaders could meet and that the U.S. wants to schedule such a meeting.“One of the most important logjams is that Vladimir Putin said that he would never sit down with Zelensky, the head of Ukraine, and the president has now got that to change,” he said.Mr. Vance said the White House is working on “scheduling and things like that around when these three leaders could sit down and discuss an end to this conflict.”On Sunday morning, Mr. Zelensky posted on social media that “Russia is doing everything to prolong hostilities, refuses to stop the killings despite announced deadlines, and is trying to bargain for better positions on the ground for future strikes. Such destructive behavior by Russia must be stopped.”He added, “Ukraine is ready to work as productively as possible with all partners for the sake of real peace. Matters concerning Ukraine must be decided with Ukraine’s participation.”Mr. Trump plans to meet with Mr. Putin in Alaska without the Ukrainians there, barring any last-minute invitation. Mr. Trump has suggested “land swaps” could be part of a peace deal between the two countries, but Kyiv has firmly rejected giving over Ukrainian land to the Russian invaders without any security guarantees or arms for Ukraine.Appearing on ABC, Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, portrayed the meeting Friday as a pivotal test to see whether Mr. Putin is sincere about peace.Mr. Rutte said Mr. Trump “clearly is putting pressure on Putin. Next Friday will be important, because it will be about testing Putin, how serious he is on bringing this terrible war to an end.”Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany told the German broadcaster ARD that he would call Mr. Trump on Sunday to discuss the war in Ukraine.Mr. Merz said it was unacceptable that any talks about a resolution to the fighting, including possible territorial concessions, be held “over the heads of the Europeans, over the heads of the Ukrainians.”Matthew Whitaker, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, said on CNN he believed it’s possible Mr. Zelensky could still attend Friday’s meeting in Alaska.“Obviously, the decision is going to be made by President Trump,” he said. “He agreed to meet with President Putin in Alaska on Friday, and if he thinks that that is the best scenario to invite Zelensky, then he’ll do that.”“There’s time to make that decision,” Mr. Whitaker said. “No decision’s been made.”Mr. Vance also declared on Sunday that the United States was “done” with funding Ukraine’s defense of the Russian invasion.Long a skeptic of funding weaponry for Ukraine, Mr. Vance said the Trump administration no longer wished to fund the defense, but was fine with Ukraine’s buying American weapons from U.S. companies.“America, we’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,” Mr. Vance said. “We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing. We want to stop the killing. But Americans, I think, are sick of continuing to send their money, their tax dollars, to this particular conflict.”He continued: “But if the Europeans want to step up and actually buy the weapons from American producers, we’re OK with that. But we’re not going to fund it ourselves anymore.”In July, the Trump administration and NATO reached a deal to supply patriot air defense systems, missiles and ammunition, among other American-made weapons to Ukraine. Under the deal, NATO allies would buy the weapons to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian attacks.Aug. 10, 2025, 11:20 a.m. ETChancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany told the German broadcaster ARD in an interview that he would call President Trump on Sunday to discuss the war in Ukraine. Merz also said he assumed that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine would be involved in the meeting Trump plans to hold this week in Alaska with President Vladimir Putin of Russia to press for an end to the war. While Zelensky hasn’t been invited to the meeting, Merz said it was unacceptable that any talks about a resolution to the fighting, including possible territorial concessions, be held “over the heads of the Europeans, over the heads of the Ukrainians.”Aug. 10, 2025, 10:49 a.m. ETVance says the Trump administration no longer wants to finance Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion, but is fine with Ukraine buying American weapons from U.S. companies.“We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing,” he said on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News. “We want to stop the killing. But Americans, I think, are sick of continuing to send their money, their tax dollars, to this particular conflict. But if the Europeans want to step up and actually buy the weapons from American producers, we’re OK with that. But we’re not going to fund it ourselves anymore.”Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesAug. 10, 2025, 10:46 a.m. ETVice President JD Vance, on Fox News, repeated his call for retribution against perceived enemies of the Trump administration. Speaking on the show “Sunday Morning Futures,” he said, “I absolutely want to see indictments” of those who investigated Russia’s influence campaign in the 2016 presidential election.Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has released documents showing that Obama administration officials wanted to complete a review of Russian influence in the 2016 election before they left office, and put pressure on the intelligence agencies to work quickly. Trump has alleged without evidence that those documents point to a conspiracy against him. Gabbard has not produced evidence of criminal behavior.Aug. 10, 2025, 10:10 a.m. ETSen. Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, has been a vocal critic of gerrymandering, describing the practice as unfair and undemocratic. But as Texas Republicans seek to redraw the state’s maps ahead of the 2026 midterms, Sanders was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash whether Democratic governors “should try to push back and do the same thing.”He replied: “What should Democrats do? Sit back and say, ’Oh, gee?’ So Democrats have got to fight back. I think it’s pathetic, but I think that’s what they’ve got to do.”Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York TimesAug. 10, 2025, 9:19 a.m. ETPresident Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has not been invited to Friday’s meeting in Alaska between President Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. But Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, said on CNN that “I certainly think it’s possible” that Zelensky could attend. “Obviously, the decision is going to be made by President Trump,” Whitaker said. He added: “There’s time to make that decision. No decision’s been made.”Aug. 10, 2025, 5:47 a.m. ETA town in the Donetsk region of Ukraine in June. The Trump administration has been pushing for an end to the war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York TimesUkraine and its European allies sought on Sunday to present a united front ahead of a meeting this week between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that risks sidelining Kyiv in future peace talks.“The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine,” read a statement released early Sunday by seven European leaders, including President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany.President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was quick to endorse their statement, writing hours later on social media that he was “grateful to everyone who stands with Ukraine and our people today for the sake of peace in Ukraine, which is defending the vital security interests of our European nations.”The coordinated statements came after Mr. Zelensky engaged on Saturday in a series of calls with European leaders. That same day, two senior Ukrainian officials and their European counterparts met with top American officials outside London to try to gauge Moscow’s negotiating position and to press Ukraine’s case ahead of the Trump-Putin summit on Friday in Alaska.President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, center, last month with European leaders at a conference. Ukraine and its European allies have sought to present a united front ahead of a meeting between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Credit...Mauro Scrobogna/LaPresse, via Associated PressThe calls and the meeting near London made clear that Kyiv was once again trying to rally its European allies as Washington pushes to independently negotiate an end to the war with Russia, raising concerns that the Trump administration will make concessions to Moscow that Kyiv cannot accept. Ukraine is also determined not to let Russia set the terms and structure of future peace talks.In their statement, the European leaders said that “meaningful negotiations can only take place” after a cease-fire or a reduction in hostilities has been put in effect — a position long held by Ukraine but one that Russia has consistently rejected.The European leaders also said that they “remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force” and that the current front line “should be the starting point of negotiations.” That language amounted to an implicit rejection of Mr. Trump’s recent suggestion that a cease-fire deal could include some “swapping of territories.”Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said she would convene an emergency meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers on Monday to discuss next steps.“Any deal between the U.S. and Russia must have Ukraine and the E.U. included, for it is a matter of Ukraine’s and the whole of Europe’s security,” she told the Agence France-Presse news agency on Sunday.NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, also threw his support behind Ukraine on Sunday, saying that Russia would have to “acknowledge that Ukraine decides on its own future, that Ukraine has to be a sovereign nation, deciding on its own geopolitical future.”Friday’s summit in Alaska “will be about testing Putin, how serious he is on bringing this terrible war to an end,” Mr. Rutte said on ABC News.The Trump-Putin summit was announced after Steve Witkoff, the U.S. president’s envoy, met with the Russian leader last week in Moscow. After the meeting, Mr. Trump briefed European leaders and described a proposal by Mr. Putin that two senior European officials said involved giving Russia the entire Donbas region of Ukraine, an area his forces do not entirely control.Mr. Zelensky warned on Saturday that he would not accept any deal requiring Ukraine to hand over territory that Russia does not currently occupy.“Any decisions made against us, any decisions made without Ukraine, are at the same time decisions against peace,” Mr. Zelensky said. “They will bring nothing. These are dead decisions; they will never work.”Aug. 10, 2025, 4:37 a.m. ETTammy Bruce speaks during a briefing at the State Department, in April.Credit...Rod Lamkey/Associated PressPresident Trump said on Saturday that he was nominating Tammy Bruce, a spokeswoman for the State Department, as the next deputy representative of the United States to the United Nations.Mr. Trump said on Truth Social that Ms. Bruce had done a “fantastic job” in her State Department role and that she would “represent our Country brilliantly at the United Nations.”Ms. Bruce has served as the State Department’s spokeswoman since January and has conducted regular press briefings on U.S. foreign policy. She has defended the Trump administration’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza, as well as its decisions to withdraw from UNESCO, the U.N. cultural agency, and to freeze nearly all U.S. foreign aid funded by the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department.“I’m blessed that in the next few weeks my commitment to advancing America First leadership and values continues on the global stage in this new post,” Ms. Bruce said on X after the announcement.Ms. Bruce was a political commentator and a contributor to Fox News for more than 20 years before joining the Trump administration. She had been a longtime organizer for the Democratic Party before breaking away to “expose and help defeat the leftist agenda,” according to her website. She has written several books criticizing the American left.Her nomination for the role, which requires Senate confirmation, comes weeks after the confirmation hearing of Michael Waltz, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, to serve as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Waltz in May after Mr. Waltz stepped down from the national security role, where he faced intense scrutiny earlier this year for a group chat on Signal in which senior officials discussed sensitive details of a military operation in Yemen. His nomination is still awaiting Senate confirmation.Aug. 9, 2025, 2:51 p.m. ETChristina JewettChristina Jewett covers the Food and Drug Administration.Dr. Vinay Prasad left the F.D.A. in late July after being targeted by Laura Loomer and others over medication-related decisions and critical comments he had made about President Trump.Credit...U.S. Food and Drug Administration, via Associated PressDr. Vinay Prasad, who led the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccines and gene therapy division before resigning under pressure two weeks ago, is returning to the agency, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesman confirmed Saturday.Dr. Prasad left the F.D.A. in late July after being targeted by the right-wing activist Laura Loomer and others who criticized his decisions regarding certain medications and pointed out critical comments he had made about President Trump before joining the administration.A series of editorials published in the weeks leading up to Dr. Prasad’s resignation also appeared to have contributed to the pressure on him. Those editorials found fault with his decisions to deny drug approvals and to demand a pause on a medication linked to several patient deaths.Dr. Prasad’s return was an unusual instance of a federal official being allowed to rejoin the administration after being targeted by Ms. Loomer for being insufficiently loyal to the president. She has repeatedly demonstrated her influence over federal personnel decisions.His rehiring also suggests that the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, remain influential enough in the Trump administration to employ someone who had previously expressed disdain for Mr. Trump and his followers.“At the F.D.A.’s request, Dr. Vinay Prasad is resuming leadership of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research,” Andrew Nixon, a health department spokesman, said in a statement.In a post on X Saturday, Ms. Loomer called Dr. Prasad’s return “another egregious personnel decision,” describing him as a “Marxist.” She also pledged to ramp up her campaign against other health officials she deemed “rabid Trump haters.”Before the resignation, Mr. Kennedy and Dr. Makary had defended Dr. Prasad against the mounting attacks, even as those seeking to have him fired lobbied the White House directly with their concerns, people familiar with the conversations said.Dr. Makary called him an “impeccable scientist,” and Mr. Kennedy told an associate he wanted Dr. Prasad at the F.D.A. in part because of his approach to vaccines, according to people familiar with the conversation. Dr. Prasad had played a key role in the decision in May to limit the use of the Covid vaccine to people over 65 and to those with medical conditions that put them at high risk for severe illness.Their advocacy fell short, though, and Dr. Prasad issued his resignation on July 29. Dr. Prasad’s long-running penchant for sharp criticism of the federal health bureaucracy, often peppered with expletives, led to intense speculation about the reasons for his ouster.It was a surprise to many in medical circles when Dr. Makary said at an event with Mr. Kennedy earlier this week that he was seeking to bring Dr. Prasad back to the F.D.A.Before entering government, Dr. Prasad was an oncologist and epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, where he was active on Substack, YouTube and other social media sites, often excoriating public health officials for their approaches to the pandemic and what he viewed as poor decisions by the F.D.A.After joining the agency, he attracted attention for declining to approve several drugs, including one meant to treat advanced skin cancer and another meant to treat heart conditions for patients with a rare muscle disorder. Dr. Prasad had long called on the F.D.A. to take a stronger stance against drugs with a high price tag and uncertain benefits for patients.He has taken a similar position on vaccines, saying they need more careful examination before authorization and heightened scrutiny after.In the weeks before his ouster, Dr. Prasad also called on the company Sarepta Therapeutics to stop shipping its gene therapy drugs after the deaths of two teenagers and a 51-year-old man were deemed related to the medication. The company initially refused but later conceded. Since then, the company has resumed shipments of the medication for younger patients.Aug. 8, 2025, 7:12 p.m. ETHarvard University and the White House are discussing a deal to end their legal battles. But Friday’s moves suggested that the relationship remained contentious.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York TimesThe White House stepped up pressure against Harvard Friday, adding a new investigation into the university’s patents and renewing a host of claims that the university is unfit to host international students.The two sides have been working to resolve their differences in recent weeks, but a court motion filed by the government on Friday in a dispute over international students suggested there is still deep acrimony. The motion accuses Harvard of failure to control crime, and claims that Harvard’s leadership has “shown itself to be incapable of properly hosting, monitoring, disciplining, and reporting on its foreign students.”On the same day, Commerce Secretary Howard W. Lutnick sent a letter to Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, claiming that the university had not lived up to its obligations surrounding federally funded patents, which are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the letter, the agency will begin a comprehensive review of Harvard’s compliance with federal law.The additional pressures on Harvard come during a week when the government had also taken significant steps to bring other schools into line with its agenda. President Trump issued a directive that would require colleges and universities to submit reams of new data on students to check whether they are complying with a Supreme Court decision that ended race-based affirmative action. The White House also intensified its campaign against the University of California, Los Angeles, which it stripped of hundreds of millions in research funds over a list of issues.In the court case involving Harvard, the Justice Department was asking a judge to throw out one of two pending lawsuits filed by Harvard against the administration, this one involving the right of the nation’s oldest university’s right to host international students.Earlier in the year, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, moved to end Harvard’s right to host the students. Harvard sued. When Judge Allison Burroughs of federal court in Boston temporarily blocked the administration action, the White House countered in June by issuing a proclamation blocking international students that invoked a different provision of law.Judge Burroughs, who has expressed skepticism of the Trump administration’s crusade against Harvard from the bench and also in written orders, also blocked that effort, issuing a preliminary injunction.On Friday, the government moved to dismiss the lawsuit entirely. (The government’s motion on Friday applied only to the case involving international students. It has no effect on the university’s lawsuit against the administration about research funding cuts, a case that focuses heavily on constitutional and procedural concerns.)The government’s effort could have disrupted the lives of about 5,000 international students attending Harvard last spring, another 2,000 recent graduates, as well as a new cohort of students who plan to arrive this fall.“Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” the lawsuit said. The university has accused the government of retaliating against it for its refusal to bend to the White House’s efforts to control the university’s “governance, curriculum and the ideology of faculty and students.”In its filing Friday, the administration denied that contention. Instead, it listed a number of accusations it has made in previous filings and statements about the school, including that violent crime has increased on campus.Harvard pointed to reporting showing its campus has very low-crime overall. The university’s student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, has reported that the campus police responded to nearly twice as many crimes on campus in 2023 as in 2021, mostly over reports of stolen electric bikes and scooters.There was no evidence that international students were involved in the crimes.In a statement, Harvard said the motion on Friday “has no impact on Harvard’s ability to enroll international students and scholars.”“The university will continue to defend its rights — and the rights of its students and scholars,” the statement added.In a separate move on Friday, the administration added to its pressure campaign against Harvard when the Commerce Department said it would investigate whether the university was complying with federal laws and regulations around intellectual property that emerge from government-backed research.The investigation is expected to examine whether Harvard complied with myriad requirements related to how the university procures and maintains patents for its ideas and research.In his letter to Dr. Garber, Mr. Lutnick said that his department “places immense value on the groundbreaking scientific and technological advancements from the government’s partnerships with institutions like Harvard.” But, Mr. Lutnick warned, Harvard was also required to follow rules designed to maximize “the benefits to the American public.”Mr. Lutnick did not include any evidence showing that Harvard, whose researchers generally secure scores of patents each year, had violated the law, but he said that the Commerce Department thought that the university had “failed to live up to its obligations to the American taxpayer.”Patents can be extraordinarily lucrative for research universities, with their collective values climbing far into the millions of dollars. But if a university does not follow an array of regulatory requirements, the government can essentially dilute or strip a school of its financial stake.Mr. Lutnick said the government was “initiating” that process. His department asked Harvard to provide a range of records to the government by Sept. 5.In a statement on Friday, Harvard blasted the Commerce Department’s letter as “unprecedented” and “yet another retaliatory effort targeting Harvard for defending its rights and freedom.”“Technologies and patents developed at Harvard are lifesaving and industry-redefining,” the university said, adding that it was “fully committed” to complying with federal law.Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.