Trump and Macron's Ukraine divide, DeepSeek and Germany’s Left
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Today, Donald Trump and France's Emmanuel Macron meet to discuss Ukraine. How Germany's far left got a surge in support. And while the Chinese AI disruptor DeepSeek works to release a new version, we dig into what makes it so successful. It's Tuesday, February 25th.

This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the frontlines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Tara Oaks in Liverpool. And I'm Christopher Waljasper in Chicago.

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U.S. President Donald Trump says he spoke to G7 leaders alongside French President Emmanuel Macron, noting that everyone on the call expressed the goal of seeing Russia's war in Ukraine come to an end. The details on how, of course, are still being hammered out.

Trump says the U.S. is close to finalizing a deal with Ukraine to access its mineral wealth, describing it as a sort of return on investment for military aid already sent. We're in for $350 billion. How we got there, I don't know, but that's a lot of money, a lot of money invested, and we had nothing to show for it.

Our White House reporter, Andrea Shalal, covered the meeting with Macron, which, while friendly, highlighted the growing rift between the U.S. and the E.U.

Macron pushed back politely several times where he sort of corrected the president. They get their money back. In fact, to be frank, we paid. We paid 60 percent. And then there were other instances throughout the press conference where he differentiated his position from that of Trump to make clear that Ukraine's sovereignty has to be respected.

I think it was really notable that in the Oval Office, Trump also declined to call Putin a dictator, saying that he didn't use these words lightly, which was strange because, of course, last week he called Zelensky a dictator.

And Trump keeps talking about this critical mineral deal as payment for what the U.S. has already put into the war in Ukraine. You know, 60% of these rare earths and critical minerals are in areas that are currently held by the Russians. And so the idea was they would enlist the U.S. aid to displace the Russians from these areas and there'd be more to go around. But what came back to them was a proposal that basically said, let's just focus on

focus on those things that you already have and let's not worry about ending the Russian occupation of these other areas. And by the way, you know, it's all retroactive and it's indefinite. So it'll ensure that U.S. companies get a share of the profits of mining and excavating these minerals going forward. To find out more about what critical minerals actually are and why they're so important, check out our latest edition of Econ World podcast. There's a link in the pod description.

Sticking with rare earths, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the U.S. an offer. A deal for joint exploration of Russia's rare earth metals, plus the supply of aluminum. And at the U.N., a stark shift on Ukraine, as the U.S. sides with Russia.

The UN General Assembly has backed a resolution drafted by Ukraine and the EU condemning Russia. The US joined Russia, Belarus and North Korea in voting against it. A second warning shot from Elon Musk. Federal workers had until midnight Monday to comply with a Doge order to detail their accomplishments the previous week. Pushback from some US agencies meant Musk's email went unanswered.

The billionaire now says they've got another chance to respond or risk losing their jobs. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli bulldozers have demolished large areas of the almost empty Jenin refugee camp. Palestinians there fear a Gaza-style clearance as at least 40,000 flee their homes. Apple says it will spend $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.

The plan includes a giant Texas factory for AI servers, as well as 20,000 R&D jobs across the country. As German conservative Friedrich Merz looks to form a coalition, he's ruled out working with the far-right AFD.

But there's another party which has defined expectations and whose door he's also unlikely to be knocking on. Die Linke, or the left, is the successor to East Germany's Communist Party, and they scored 8.8% in Germany's federal election, their best result in years. Riham Al-Khousa is here to explain why.

Many political analysts have said there has been a shift to the right by the traditional leftist party, like the Greens and the SPD, and that created political vacuum for a more clearly defined left and right.

That was filled by the hard left, the left party, Die Linke. Also, the far left party focused its campaign on social justice issues like capping rent, abolishing taxes on food, introducing more social support for low-income families to be funded by the wealthy, and that resonated by many voters. The party is also strong on social media. That also made it

reach more voters. How did they use that? How did that win them votes over the campaign? Yes. So there has been a fiery speech by the leader of the party, Heidi Reiseneck, on TikTok that got over 6 million views. Reiseneck herself is very popular on TikTok. We're talking about 600,000 followers and 16 million likes. That compares, for instance, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He has only 240,000 followers

And followers mass has even half of that. So the party was much more present on TikTok. Also, that enabled it to reach many younger voters. Of course, the AFD was also present on TikTok. For instance, Elis Vidal, the leader of the party, has almost a million followers on TikTok. But she does have less likes than the hard left party leader.

Stocks are dropping and treasury yields are slipping as the US-China tech war ratchets up. Carmel Quimmins is here with more.

A report from Bloomberg that the Trump administration is planning to beef up restrictions on the export of chips to China, particularly chips from AI giant NVIDIA, has spooked investors. It's triggered a sell-off in Chinese technology shares in particular. Gold, on the other hand, is roaring ahead amid all this uncertainty. It set a new record overnight and is tantalizingly close to $3,000 an ounce.

If you're interested in hearing about how high it might go, tune into a recent episode of Reuters Econ World. It's all about the precious metal. You can catch it on the Reuters app or wherever you get your podcasts. And sticking with that US-China tech war, the makers of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI model that triggered a trillion dollar global equity sell-off last month, are rushing to bring a successor to the market.

But even as the quantitative hedge fund company, High Flyer, pushes to innovate further, the creation of DeepSeek is coming into greater focus.

Our correspondent Eduardo Baptista in Beijing has been digging into how the company was able to build this game-changing AI model. High Flyer was very prescient in the way that it started to build huge computing clusters way before the Biden administration started to crack down

on Chinese companies trying to buy a bunch of very advanced US chips and create these very powerful computing clusters that can be used for AI tasks. High Flyer already had one of the biggest clusters in Asia. And so High Flyer's stashing, accumulation of chips

creation of this very impressive computing cluster was fundamental to DeepSeek's success. So what's DeepSeek's relationship with the Chinese government? High Flyer really had to convince regulators to not take any action regarding its huge accumulation of chips.

DeepSeek's success globally is something that a lot of Chinese tech companies that have received government support and government backing have not been able to do. And so I think now the relationship has completely changed. So you can think of it as High Flyer was one of perhaps several quantitative hedge funds that were on the government's radar as firms that had to be monitored carefully, and now it's

the darling of the government. It's the new national champion. And it's getting a lot of endorsements from the central government, which are translating to companies adopting DeepSeek, state-owned enterprises adopting DeepSeek, local governments embracing DeepSeek. And so now DeepSeek really is in the good graces of the government.

How has DeepSeek, as well as the Chinese government, responded to your reporting? So China's Commerce Ministry and its securities regulators did not respond to our request for comment. DeepSeek has been told by government authorities to keep a low profile and to not accept media interviews without government approval.

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And for today's recommended read, crypto trading is booming in India's smaller cities, and many young Indians are dabbling in crypto to supplement their regular incomes. There's a link to the story in the pod description. And for more on any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show.