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A man has been found guilty of the rape and murder of an Irish woman backpacking in India.

Danielle McLaughlin, 28, from County Donegal, was found dead in a field in the western state of Goa in March 2017.

A post-mortem examination found brain damage and strangulation as the cause of death.

Vikat Bhagat was found guilty at the District and Sessions Court in south Goa, India, on Friday and could face life imprisonment, but prosecutors have asked for the death penalty.

His defence team appealed for leniency.

He will be sentenced next Monday.

In a statement afterwards, Danielle’s mother Andrea Brannigan and her sister Joleen McLaughlin Brannigan, said justice “has finally been achieved”.

“There was no other suspect or gang involved in Danielle’s death and Bhagat was solely responsible for cruelly ending her beautiful life,” they said.

The family said they have “endured what has been effectively” an eight-year murder trial with many delays and problems.

The “quest for truth” has been “very tiring” and family said they “are glad it is over”.

“We are content now with the judicial confirmation in public of what we already sadly knew,” they added.

The family said “in memory of Danielle”, they had stayed “patient and respectful of the Indian legal system”.

“We are glad to have visited the area where Danielle spent her last days on this earth, painful and difficult as that was,” the statement continued.

“We now hope that not only that Danielle can rest in peace but that we, as a family, can have some peace and comfort knowing that the person who brutally raped and murdered our precious Danielle has been convicted.”

A statement was also posted on behalf of the family on the Trust for Danielle McLaughlin Facebook page, saying they never got to see the woman Danielle would have become.

“Because of Vikat she will forever be 28,” the statement said.

“We will never see her smile or hear her laugh and we appreciate all that they have done for our campaign fighting for this outcome.

“She was so much more than a daughter, sister and best friend. She lit up every room she entered and touch the lives of all who met her.”

Rape victims cannot usually be named under Indian law. Their identities are often hidden in a bid to protect them from being shunned in society.

In this case, Danielle McLaughlin’s family have spoken to the media to raise awareness of her case.

Ms McLaughlin, who grew up in Buncrana, had travelled to India in February 2017.

She was there for two weeks before she was murdered..

The Liverpool John Moores University student had been staying in a beach hut with an Australian friend.

The pair had been celebrating Holi, a Hindu festival, in a nearby village.

She left the village at night and her body was found the next day by a local farmer in an isolated spot.

On Friday morning, Tánaiste (Irish Deputy Prime Minister) Simon Harris paid tribute to Ms McLaughlin’s family, in particular her mother “for her determination and resilience in the face of unimaginable tragedy”.

“While nothing can ease the pain of their loss, I hope that this verdict represents some closure for the family,” he said.

“May Danielle rest in peace.”

Ms McLaughlin, who had dual Irish and British citizenship, travelled to India using a British passport.

In 2018, the then Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar met and apologised to her family after a misunderstanding about her citizenship.

Her body was brought home to Donegal with the help of the Kevin Bell Repatriation Trust.

She is buried in her hometown of Buncrana in the Republic of Ireland.

“I have no plans for the future at all,” says Oleksandr Bezhan, standing next to an empty, frozen paddock where he used to work as a fisherman on the bank of the Dnipro river in southern Ukraine. “If I wake up in the morning, that’s already pretty good.”

Malokaterynivka sits just 15km (9 miles) north of the front line in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.

If US President Donald Trump succeeds in halting the war, Malokaterynivka is hoping to end up on the right side of that front line.

I last visited this area in 2023, when Ukraine launched a much-anticipated counter-offensive.

At the time, Ukrainians dared to dream of winning this war. They had, after all, won the battle of Kyiv and liberated swathes of territory elsewhere.

But 18 months on, thunder-like artillery exchanges reflect the failure of that operation, and Russia’s dominance.

The front line here is broadly in the same place – but the broad expanse of river has gone.

When the Russian-occupied Kakhovka dam downstream was destroyed, this became a vast, uninterrupted expanse of scrubland.

The barren surroundings reflect the frozen limbo in which Ukraine finds itself. The White House wants to end the war, but it’s not as simple as blowing a full-time whistle.

“If the front line becomes a border, it would be scary… fighting could break out at any moment,” explains Oleksandr.

The exposed riverbed separates our location from Russian-occupied territory. Distant sunlight bounces off the metallic Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, in Moscow’s grip since 2022.

Ukraine and the US both want peace, but that is where the consensus seems to end.

Washington’s vision of it, along with battlefield realities, means Russia will probably keep hold of the Ukrainian land it’s seized.

Ukraine wants meaningful security guarantees that would prevent invading forces from pushing across the river.

Instead, Trump has denied Kyiv’s dream of joining the Nato alliance as he focuses on Russia.

Having watched and reported on Ukraine’s fight for more than three years, it is an especially tough hand for the country to receive.

There are feelings of betrayal. Commentators criticise either Ukrainian President Zelensky or the new foreign policy of its biggest ally.

“The border wouldn’t depend on us,” says Oleksandr. “It probably won’t work out, but Seoul is 30km from North Korea, and they somehow live and prosper.”

Malokaterynivka’s challenge of finding a new purpose lies at the heart of Ukraine’s future.

And while politicians talk about talks, Ukrainians continue to fight and die.

Villagers gather for the funeral of a local soldier, also named Oleksandr. Half of the graves in the cemetery are freshly dug.

The ceremony cannot last more than 25 minutes because of the threat of artillery. Mourners flinch and duck for cover when his comrades fire off a gun salute.

“I don’t have hope for a ceasefire,” says his widow Natalya, who nevertheless wants to be proved wrong.

“They just keep sending more and more of our boys to the front. If only they could find some way to end it.”

Alongside the river is a disused rail line surrounded by barbed wire.

“It’s to stop Russian agents from sabotaging the track,” explains Lyudmyla Volyk, who has lived in Malokaterynivka her whole life.

Trains used to run all the way to Crimea in the south.

“We hope that one day it will be restored,” says the 65-year-old, optimistically. “And that one day we’ll go to our Crimea.”

The peninsula’s 11 years of Russian occupation makes it hard to imagine.

President Zelensky insists he won’t sign any agreement which doesn’t include Ukraine, so does Lyudmyla trust him to get a deal which protects her?

“We want to believe,” she replies after a deep breath.

If Trump does bring peace to Ukraine, it would be welcomed in many quarters.

The prospect of uninterrupted nights, sirens falling silent and soldiers returning home is yearned for.

But as things stand, any relief would quickly be swamped by the unanswered questions of how a ceasefire would hold and who would enforce it.

Kyiv will see this absence of detail as something still to play for. The problem for Ukraine, is that so will Russia.

Additional reporting by Svitlana Libet, Toby Luckhurst and Hanna Chornous

A year into their relationship, Jess and Nate got engaged next to the sea. “It was a golden, sandy beach – empty and secluded,” says Jess, 26. “It was just us two there, so it was really intimate.”

Except that the couple were actually hundreds of miles apart – and they were role-playing their engagement in the video game World of Warcraft.

Nate, 27, was living just outside London – and Jess was in Wales. After meeting briefly at an esports event in Germany in March 2023, the pair developed a long-distance relationship, playing the game together “from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to bed”, says Nate.

The couple still play the game daily, even though they’ve been living together in Manchester since March 2024. And they know other couples who have found their partners through video games: “It’s a different way of meeting someone,” says Jess. “You both have such a strong mutual love for something already, it’s easier to fall in love.”

Nate agrees. “I was able to build a lot more of a connection with people I meet in gaming than I ever was able to in a dating app.”

Nate and Jess are not alone. According to some experts, people of their generation are moving away from dating apps and finding love on platforms that were not specifically designed for romance.

And hanging out somewhere online that’s instead focused on a shared interest or hobby could allow people to find a partner in a lower-stakes, less pressurised setting than marketing themselves to a gallery of strangers. For some digital-native Gen Zs, it seems, simply doing the things they enjoy can be an alternative to the tyranny of the swipe.

Since it first appeared with the launch of match.com 30 years ago, online dating has fundamentally altered our relationships. Around 10% of heterosexual people and 24% of LGBT people have met their long-term partner online, according to Pew Research Center.

But evidence suggests that young people are switching off dating apps, with the UK’s top 10 seeing a fall of nearly 16%, according to a report published by Ofcom in November 2024. Tinder lost 594,000 users, while Hinge dropped by 131,000, Bumble by 368,000 and Grindr by 11,000, the report said (a Grindr spokesperson said they were “not familiar with this study’s source data” and that their UK users “continue to rise year over year”).

According to a 2023 Axios study of US college students and other Gen Zers, 79% said they were forgoing regular dating app usage. And in its 2024 Online Nation report, Ofcom said: “Some analysts speculate that for younger people, particularly Gen Z, the novelty of dating apps is wearing off.” In a January 2024 letter to shareholders, Match Group Inc – which owns Tinder and Hinge – acknowledged younger people were seeking “a lower pressure, more authentic way to find connections”.

“The idea of using a shared interest to meet someone isn’t new, but it’s been reinvented in this particular moment in time – it signals a desire of Gen Z,” says Carolina Bandinelli, an associate professor at Warwick University whose research focuses on the digital technologies of romance.

According to Danait Tesfay, 26, a marketing assistant from London, younger people are looking for alternatives to dating apps, “whether that be gaming or running clubs or extra-curricular clubs, where people are able to meet other like-minded people and eventually foster a romantic connection”.

At the same time that membership of some dating apps appears to be in decline, platforms based around common interests are attracting more users. For instance, the fitness app Strava now has 135m users – and its monthly active users grew by 20% last year, according to the company. Other so-called “affinity-based” sites have seen similar growth: Letterboxd, where film fans can share reviews, says its community grew by 50% last year.

And just as in the pre-internet age, when couples might have met at a sports club or the cinema, now singletons are able to find each other in their online equivalents.

“People have always bonded over shared interests, but it’s been given a digital spin with these online communities,” says Luke Brunning, co-director of the Centre for Love, Sex, and Relationships (CLSR) at the University of Leeds.

“It’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between behaviour that’s on a dating app and dating behaviour on another platform.”

Hobby apps are taking on some features of social media, too: in 2023, Strava introduced a messaging feature letting users chat directly. One twenty-something from London explains that her friends use it as a way to flirt with people they fancy, initially by liking a running route they’ve posted on the platform. Strava says its data shows that one in five of its active Gen Z members has been on a date with someone they met through fitness clubs.

“[Online] fitness communities are becoming big places to find partners,” says Nichi Hodgson, the author of The Curious History of Dating. She says a friend of hers met his partner that way, and they’re now living together.

The same appears to apply to Letterboxd, too. With users including Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, it’s a popular platform for younger people – two-thirds of members in a survey of 5,000 were under 34.

The company says it’s aware of several couples meeting through the app, including one who bonded over a shared love of David Fincher’s opinion-dividing 2020 drama Mank. “It could be that seeing other people’s film tastes reveals an interesting aspect of themselves,” says Letterboxd co-founder Matthew Buchanan.

So what might be driving this? While dating apps initially appeared to offer “the illusion of choice”, and a transparent, efficient way to meet partners, the reality for many has often proven to be different. The Pew Research Center found that 46% of dating-app users said their experiences were overall very or somewhat negative.

The recent decline in user numbers might also be a response to the way some apps are structured – in particular, the swipe feature for selecting potential partners, launched by Tinder in 2013 and widely copied.

Its creator, Jonathan Badeen, was partly inspired by studying the 1940s experiments of psychologist BF Skinner, who conditioned hungry pigeons to believe that food delivered randomly into a tray was prompted by their movements.

Eventually, the swipe mechanism faced a backlash. “Ten years ago, people were enthusiastic and would talk quite openly about what apps they were on,” says Ms Hodgson. “Now the Tinder model is dead with many young people – they don’t want to swipe any more.”

According to Mr Brunning, the gameifying interface of many dating apps is a turn-off. “Intimacy is made simple for you, it’s made fun in the short term, but the more you play, the more you feel kind of icky.”

The pandemic may have had an impact, too, says Prof Brian Heaphy at the University of Manchester, who has studied dating-app use in and after the lockdowns: “During Covid, dating apps themselves became more like social media – because people couldn’t meet up, they were looking for different things.”

Although that didn’t last after the pandemic, it “gave people a sense that it could be different from just swiping and getting no responses – all the negatives of dating-app culture,” says Prof Heaphy.

And in that context, the fact that video games or online communities like Strava or Letterboxd aren’t designed for dating can be appealing. By attracting users for a broader range of reasons, there’s less pressure on each interaction.

“Those apps aren’t offering a commercialised form of romance, so they can seem more authentic,” says Prof Heaphy.

It’s a type of connection free from the burden of expectation. A different couple who met on World of Warcraft – and go by the names Wochi and PurplePixel – weren’t looking for love. “I definitely didn’t go into an online game trying to find a partner,” says Wochi.

But although initially in opposing teams, or guilds, their characters started a conversation. “We spent all night talking until the early hours of the morning, and by the end of the night, I’d actually left my guild and joined his guild,” says PurplePixel. Within three years, Wochi had quit his job and moved to the UK from Italy to be with her.

According to Ms Hodgson, “While some dating apps can bring out the worst behaviours, these other online spaces can do the opposite, because people are sharing something they enjoy.”

Because of these structural elements, she doesn’t think the recent decline in numbers is temporary. “It’s going to keep happening until dating apps figure out how to put the human aspect back.”

The dating apps aren’t giving up without a fight, however. Hinge is still “setting up a date every two seconds”, according to a spokesperson; Tinder says a relationship starts every three seconds on its platform and that almost 60% of its users are aged 18-30. In fact, the apps appear to be embracing the shift to shared-interest platforms, launching niche alternatives including ones based around fitness, veganism, dog-ownership or even facial hair.

They’re also evolving to encourage different kinds of interaction. On Breeze, users who agree to be set up on a date aren’t allowed to message each other before they meet; and Jigsaw hides people’s faces, only removing pieces to reveal the full photo after a certain amount of interaction.

It means that it’s premature to proclaim the death of the dating app, believes Prof Heaphy. “There’s now such a diversity of dating apps that the numbers for the biggest ones aren’t the key indicator,” he says. “It might actually be a similar number to before, in terms of overall membership.”

And there’s a downside to people going to more general-interest apps looking for love – people might not want to be hit on when they just want to talk about books. Dating apps, at least, are clear about what their purpose is.

In an increasingly online world, the solution to improving relationships might not simply be to go offline. Instead, apps that can offer an experience which more closely mirrors the best of IRL interactions, while tapping into the possibilities of digital ones, might also show a way forward.

With the imminent integration of AI into dating apps, we are “right on the cusp of something new”, says Mr Brunning. “It’s interesting to see if we’ll end up with specific apps just for dating, or will we end up with something a bit more fluid?”

He points to platforms in China that are more multi-purpose. “People use them for chat, for community, and conduct business on them – they can also be dating platforms, but they’re often not exclusively for that.”

In the meantime, the interactions possible in less mediated communities like World of Warcraft could offer more of a chance to connect than conversations initiated by a swipe.

Jess and Nate’s in-game engagement on the beach might not have been real, but the couple are hoping to change that soon. “It’s a matter of when, really. There are a few things we need to tick off the checklist, and then she’ll be getting her ring,” says Nate. And there’ll still be a gaming element.

“You can role-play getting married,” says Jess. “So it could be funny to get all our friends together at some point in the World of Warcraft cathedral, and we could have a marriage ceremony.”

Additional reporting by Florence Freeman

Top image credit: Getty

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Three men have been convicted by a German court of trying to blackmail the family of ex-Formula 1 champion Michael Schumacher.

Yilmaz T, 53, was jailed for three years for threatening to upload 900 personal photos, almost 600 videos and confidential medical records to the dark web unless the Schumacher family paid €15m (£12m).

His 30-year-old son was given a six-month suspended sentence for aiding and abetting extortion. A former security guard at Schumacher’s home, who denied any involvement, received a two-year suspended sentence.

Schumacher has not been seen in public since a 2013 ski accident which resulted in serious brain injuries. His family have kept his medical condition private.

The father and son had admitted most of the charges and Yilmaz T, a nightclub bouncer in Constance in southern Germany, told the court that what he had done was “very, very disgusting”.

“I realised that on the second day in prison. I will answer for it.”

In his confession he said he had received two hard drives from the security guard, Markus F, who was accused of passing the sensitive files for a “five figure sum”.

One hard drive is believed never to have been recovered.

The judge blamed the security guard for allowing the blackmail attempt to start. The Schumacher family’s lawyer said they would challenge his suspended sentence.

Markus F had been working for the family 18 months before Schumacher’s ski accident.

According to the defence, Schumacher’s wife Corinna had asked him to digitise the family’s private photos. They argued that the material went missing after his contract was terminated.

The court heard that the father and son had emailed the Schumacher family samples of the stolen files.

Recordings of phone calls made to the Schumacher family were also played in court.

In one of these conversations, Yilmaz T told the family that rather than trying to blackmail them, he was offering to act as a broker in returning the files and identifying their source in what he called a “clean deal”.

The family alerted local authorities in Switzerland who tracked the source of the threat to Germany and the three men were arrested in June 2024.

The Schumachers’ lawyer, Thilo Damm, said the sentences were too lenient for what was the “ultimate betrayal” and they planned to appeal.

“We do not agree with everything the court said. You can rest assured that we will exhaust all legal possibilities at our disposal,” he said.

He also voiced concern that a hard drive remained missing despite multiple searches of the defendants’ properties.

“We don’t know where the missing hard drive is,” Mr Damm said, “I don’t have a crystal ball but there is the possibility of another threat through the backdoor.”

Parents of four young female Israeli hostages freed from Hamas captivity in Gaza have told the BBC about how their daughters were abused, including being starved, intimidated and threatened by armed men, and forced to cook and clean.

They recounted how the hostages were held in underground tunnels and buildings, witnessed physical abuse and were made to participate in Hamas propaganda videos, including, in one case, by faking her own death.

They said the women found strength through sharing stories, drawing and keeping a diary.

None of the women have given interviews to the media since their release, and their parents say the full details of what they endured are still emerging. There are also things they can’t speak about due to fears it could put the hostages still in Gaza at risk.

Three of the four women whose parents spoke to the BBC were female soldiers kidnapped by Hamas from the Nahal Oz army base near Gaza on 7 October 2023.

The hostages’ access to food and their treatment by male guards varied over the 15 months they were held, their parents said. They were moved between locations, rarely seeing sunlight.

“It was very different between the places that she went – it could be a good tunnel, it could be a very bad tunnel. It could be a good house or a bad house,” said the father of Agam Berger, 20, a soldier who had been at Nahal Oz.

Some of the places had good food, some had “very bad food… they just tried to survive,” Shlomi Berger said.

“They [and their captors] had to run away from one place to another because they are in a war zone there. It was very dangerous to be there,” said Orly Gilboa, whose daughter Daniella was also kidnapped from the base.

When Daniella watched the release of three male hostages last week – who came out thin and emaciated – she told her mother: “If I had been released two months ago I would have probably looked like them.”

“She got thinner, she lost a lot of her weight through the captivity. But in the last two months they were given a lot of food to gain weight,” Ms Gilboa says.

Other parents have also reported significant weight loss. Meirav Leshem Gonen’s daughter was taken by Hamas from the Nova music festival.

Romi, 24, was released in the first week of the ceasefire in January – she had lost “20% of her body weight”, says her mother.

Ms Gilboa says the hardest thing she endured was seeing a video that suggested her daughter had been killed. Her captors poured powder on her so she looked like she was covered in plaster, as if she was killed in an Israeli military strike.

“I think everyone who saw it believed it, but I just kept telling myself that it can’t be,” she told the BBC.

The war was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, when gunmen killed about 1,200 people and took another 251 hostage.

More than 48,230 people have been killed in Gaza since, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. About two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed or damaged, estimates the UN.

So far, 16 Israeli and five Thai hostages have been exchanged for more than 600 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel under the ceasefire deal that began on 19 January.

Mr Berger says his daughter, Agam, was threatened by her captors and witnessed physical abuse while in captivity.

“Sometimes they tortured other female hostages in front of her eyes,” he says, referring specifically to an assault on Amit Soussana, a former hostage who was released in November 2023.

Mr Berger says his daughter told him how they were constantly watched over by armed men, “playing all the time with their guns and their hand grenades”.

He says the male captors treated the women with “big disrespect”, including forcing them to clean and prepare food.

“That was really bothering her. She’s a girl that if she has something to say, she’ll say it. She’s not shy. And sometimes she told them what she was thinking about them and their behaviour,” he says.

He adds that in a small act of resistance, Agam had refused to perform any jobs on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest. The men detaining her accepted this.

They were also not allowed to speak loudly.

“When Agam came [back to Israel] she wanted to speak all the time… After a day, she had no voice because she’d spoken so much,” Mr Berger says.

Yoni Levy, whose daughter Naama, 20, was also taken from the army base, says she was sometimes held in locations where there was a TV or radio playing.

Once, Naama saw her father talking on TV. “It gave her a lot of hope and optimism… that nobody would forget her, and we’ll do whatever is needed to take her out of this hell.”

He says for Naama, the Hamas attack on the army base was “was much more traumatic than the captivity itself”.

“It may change but at this stage we think that this is the most tragic day that she’s talked about,” Mr Levy says.

Footage of Naama that day shows her and other female soldiers in bloodstained clothing surrounded by armed men in a room at the base before being forced into a vehicle and taken to Gaza.

The three female soldiers whose parents spoke to the BBC are among five from an all-women unarmed military unit at Nahal Oz freed in the first round of the ceasefire.

Members of the unit, known in Hebrew as Tatzpitaniyot, are tasked with observing the Gaza border and looking for signs of anything suspicious. Survivors and relatives of some of those killed that day say that they had been warning for months that Hamas had been preparing for an attack.

A few days before the 7 October attack, Daniella had been at home on a break from service. She had told her mother then: “Mummy, when I go back to the army, there’s going to be a war.”

“I didn’t think it was going to be such a war and of course that my daughter would be taken hostage,” Ms Gilboa says.

Ms Gilboa and the families of the two other observers who spoke to the BBC say they are joining calls for an inquiry into what happened.

They say their daughters remain concerned about the conditions of those still in Gaza and have called for the ceasefire to continue.

Meanwhile, Ms Leshem Gonen says she is still learning what happened to her daughter Romi.

She was shot at the Nova music festival and her mother says she was not properly treated, leaving her with “an open wound where she could see the bone”.

“This is something we can know and that she speaks about. The other things, I think it will take time.”

Ms Leshem Gonen says Romi described her release in the first week of the truce as “intimidating” and “frightening”. She was surrounded by gunmen and crowds. But the moment of their reunion was “so powerful”.

The parents also described how their daughters had found ways to get through each day in captivity – through drawing, making notes or sharing stories with each other.

“They wrote as much as they could, every day – what was happening, where were they moving, who were the guards and things like that,” says Mr Berger.

While in captivity, the young women had dreamt about the things they wanted to do when they got home: getting a haircut and eating sushi.

Daniella had drawn a butterfly with the word “freedom” while in captivity – she now has that tattooed on her arm.

They are adapting to life back in Israel, and their families say they are taking the recovery step by step.

The moment of reunion with his daughter Naama is still a blur, says Mr Levy, but he remembers the emotion.

“The feeling was that… I will take care of you now, and everything’s going to be OK. Daddy’s here. That’s all. And then everything was quiet.”

Additional reporting by Naomi Scherbel-Ball

Ukraine will not agree to any peace deal proposed by the US and Russia without its involvement, President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned, after Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin pledged to begin talks to end the war.

“We cannot accept it, as an independent country,” Zelensky said.

The US president had talked of a “good possibility” of ending the war after he and Putin spoke by phone. It was not “practical” for Ukraine to join Nato, Trump said, and “unlikely” it could return to its pre-invasion borders.

He has now suggested that Russian respresentatives will meet Americans on Friday in Munich, which is hosting a security conference.

“Russia is going to be there with our people,” Trump said. “Ukraine is also invited, by the way. Not sure exactly who’s going to be there from any country but high-level people from Russia, from Ukraine and from the United States.

“I’d love to have them [the Russians] back. I think it was a mistake to throw them out. Look, it’s not a question of liking Russia or not liking Russia.”

Russia, which is not taking part in the annual forum, did not immediately comment on Trump’s claim.

Zelensky adviser Dmytro Lytvyn told reporters that “talks with Russians in Munich” were “not expected”.

Zelensky is to meet Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, in the German city on Friday.

The Ukrainian leader, who also had an individual call with Trump on Wednesday, said his country could not accept “any agreements [made] without us”.

“Europeans needed to be at the negotiating table too,” he said, and he told Trump his priority was “security guarantees”, something he did not see without US support.

Elsewhere, he said that Nato membership for Ukraine would be the “most cost-effective” option for its partners, without giving details.

“I also warned world leaders against trusting Putin’s claims of readiness to end the war,” he added.

Ukraine’s European allies also rejected any move towards a forced settlement on Kyiv:

• UK Defence Secretary John Healey said there could be “no negotiation about Ukraine without Ukraine, and Ukraine’s voice must be at the heart of any talks”

• German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rejected a “dictated peace” and his defence minister said it was “regrettable” Washington was already making “concessions” to the Kremlin.

• EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas accused Washington of “appeasement” towards Russia. “We shouldn’t take anything off the table before the negotiations have even started because it plays to Russia’s court and it is what they want,” she said.

Trump, who made the first publicly acknowledged White House call with Putin since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, said he would meet Putin in Saudi Arabia. without giving details.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday in the Oval Office, he said Putin wanted the war to end and he expected a ceasefire soon.

When asked if Ukraine was an equal member in the peace process, he said: “They have to make peace.”

His Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told a press conference at a Nato summit on Thursday that peace negotiations would be “had with both” Putin and Zelensky” and he described Trump as the “perfect dealmaker”.

Hegseth, who on Wednesday said it was “unrealistic” to expect Ukraine to return to pre-2014 border and downplayed the prospect of Ukraine joining Nato, appeared to row back on his remarks, saying “everything was on the table” and the conversations were being led by the president.

The defence secretary also suggested financial aid to Ukraine during negotiations could be on the table, as well as US troop numbers in Europe.

Following the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president in 2014, Moscow annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and backed pro-Russian separatists in bloody fighting in eastern Ukraine.

The conflict burst into all-out war nearly three years ago.

Moscow’s attempts to take control of the capital Kyiv were thwarted, but Russian forces have taken around a fifth of Ukraine’s territory in the east and south, and have carried out air strikes across the country.

Ukraine has retaliated with artillery and drone strikes, as well as a ground offensive against Russia’s western Kursk region.

America is under new management. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is joining a growing list of US allies who are finding that the world according to Donald Trump is a colder, more uncertain and potentially more dangerous place for them.

It must have been bad enough for Zelensky to hear Trump’s abrupt announcement that he had welcomed Russia’s President Vladimir Putin back to international diplomacy with a 90-minute phone call, to be followed by a face-to-face meeting, perhaps in Saudi Arabia.

After Putin, the White House dialled up Zelensky’s number. Speaking to journalists in Ukraine the morning after, Zelensky accepted the fact that Putin received the first call, “although to be honest, it’s not very pleasant”.

What stung Zelensky more was that Trump, who rang him after he spoke to Putin, seemed to regard him, at best, as a junior adjunct to any peace talks. One of Zelensky’s many nightmares must be the prospect of Trump and Putin attempting to settle Ukraine’s future without anyone else in the negotiation.

He told the journalists that Ukraine “will not be able to accept any agreements” made without its involvement.

It was vital, he said, that “everything does not go according to Putin’s plan, in which he wants to do everything to make his negotiations bilateral”.

President Zelensky is heading to the Munich security conference, starting on Friday, where he will attempt to rally Ukraine’s allies. He faces a tough meeting with Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, who was one of the sternest critics of Joe Biden’s aid to Ukraine.

The argument Zelensky will hear from the Americans is that Ukraine is losing and it needs to get real about what happens next. He will argue that Ukraine can win – with the right backing.

The European Union is worried too. After meeting and praising the Ukrainian defence minister Rustem Umerov, the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas posted that Europe must have a central role in any negotiation. “Our priority now must be strengthening Ukraine and providing robust security guarantees,” Kallas said.

Zelensky is painfully aware that while his European allies are sounding much more steadfast than the Americans, the US remains the world’s strongest military power. He told the Guardian last week that “security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees”.

Collectively, European allies have given Ukraine more money than the US. But the Americans have weapons and air defence systems – like the Patriot missile batteries that protect Kyiv – that Europeans simply cannot provide.

Putin will be delighted that he is getting a much easier ride than he had from Biden. The former US president called Putin, among other things, a “pure thug”, a “brutal tyrant” and a “murderous dictator” and cut off contact after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Just to drive home the point that everything had changed, Trump followed up yesterday’s positive assessment of his talk with Putin with an upbeat early morning post on his platform, Truth Social, reflecting on “great talks with Russia and Ukraine yesterday”. There was now a “good possibility of ending that horrible, very bloody war!!!”

Putin is not just back in conversation with the most powerful country in the world. With Trump, he may now see himself as the arbiter of the endgame in the war he started when he broke international law with the all-out invasion of Ukraine almost exactly three years ago.

At the White House, Trump seemed to suggest that the huge numbers of dead and wounded in the Russian military gave some kind of legitimacy to Putin’s demand to keep the land captured and annexed by Russia.

“They took a lot of land and they fought for that land,” Trump said. As for Ukraine, “some of it will come back”.

His defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s remarks at a Nato meeting in Brussels were more direct. He wanted Ukraine to be “sovereign and prosperous”. But “we must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective”.

“Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

Trump is still at the easy end of what could become an impossibly tough diplomatic challenge. Boasting that he has the key to ending the Russo-Ukraine war is one thing. Making that happen is something else.

His declaration before any talks with Russia start that Ukraine will not join Nato nor get back all its occupied land has been widely criticised as a poor start by a man who claims to be the world’s best dealmaker.

The veteran Swedish diplomat and politician Carl Bildt posted an ironic rebuke on X.

“It’s certainly an innovative approach to a negotiation to make very major concessions even before they have started. Not even Chamberlain went that low in 1938. That Munich ended very bad anyhow.”

Bildt posted a photo of Britain’s then prime minister Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich in 1938, waving the notorious and worthless agreement he had made with Adolf Hitler – the price of which was the capitulation and break-up of Czechoslovakia and a faster slide towards a second world war.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin was widely portrayed in the west as the new threat to European peace. Trump’s approach to him is very different.

He will have to try to bridge the gap between Putin and Zelensky’s positions, which are polar opposites.

Zelensky’s declared objective is to regain Ukraine’s lost territory, which amounts to around a fifth of its total land mass. He also wants Ukraine to become a full member of Nato.

Putin insists that any peace deal would require Ukraine to give up the land Russia has captured, as well as areas it has not occupied, including the city of Zaporizhzhia which has a population of more than half a million. Ukraine would also become neutral, demilitarised and would never join Nato.

Ukraine’s demands will not be acceptable to Moscow, and Trump has indicated he doesn’t like them either.

But Russia’s amount to an ultimatum, not a serious peace proposal. Trump, once a developer, likes deals that involve tangible real estate. But Putin wants more than land. He wants Ukraine to go back to the relationship it had with the Kremlin during the days when it was part of the Soviet Union. For that to happen, Ukraine would have to lose its independence and sovereignty.

Biden offered Ukraine enough not to lose, because he took Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons if Nato intervened seriously. Trump must be aware of nuclear danger, but he also believes backing Ukraine indefinitely is a bad deal for the US, and he can do better.

As for the Europeans, he might force them to face up to the gross disparity between their military promises to Ukraine and their military capabilities. Only Poland and the Baltic states are backing their public statements about the threat from Russia with qualitatively increased defence spending.

With Russia grinding forward on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, this is the toughest moment Zelensky will have faced since the dark and desperate first months of the war, when Ukraine fought off Russia’s attack on Kyiv.

It is also a moment of decision for his western allies. They face tough choices that cannot be put off much longer.

US President Trump has announced a deal with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for Delhi to import more US oil and gas to shrink the trade deficit between the two countries.

“They’re going to be purchasing a lot of our oil and gas. They need it. And we have it,” Trump said at a joint news briefing in Washington.

Modi said that “in order to ensure India’s energy security, we will focus on trade in oil and gas”, also pledging to invest more in nuclear energy.

His two-day visit comes as Trump ordered that US trading partners should face reciprocal tariffs – tit-for-tat import taxes to match similar duties already charged by those countries on American exports.

Trump and Modi have developed a personal rapport over the years, despite friction over trade.

“We’ve had a wonderful relationship,” Trump said as he welcomed his visitor in the US capital on Thursday.

He also said the US would increase sales of military hardware to India by millions of dollars, eventually supplying Delhi with F-35 fighter jets.

Immigration was high on the agenda, with Trump expected to ask India to take back thousands of undocumented immigrants. 

Earlier, Modi said he had also discussed space, technology and innovation at a meeting with Trump ally Elon Musk. 

Modi said: “I firmly believe with Trump we will work with twice the speed we did in his first term.”

Shortly before their bilateral, Trump ordered his advisers to calculate broad new tariffs on US trading partners around the globe, warning they could start coming into effect by 1 April.

Trump told reporters that “our allies are worse than our enemies”, when it comes to import taxes.

“We had a very unfair system to us,” the Republican president said before meeting Modi. “Everybody took advantage of the United States.”

The White House also issued a news release that fired a trade shot across the bows of India and other countries.

The document noted that the average US tariff on agricultural goods was 5% for countries to which Washington had granted most favoured nation (MFN) status.

“But India’s average applied MFN tariff is 39%,” the White House fact sheet said.

“India also charges a 100% tariff on US motorcycles, while we only charge a 2.4% tariff on Indian motorcycles.”

On Thursday, Trump acknowledged the risks of his tariff policy, as economists warned such import taxes could drive up consumer prices.

“Prices could go up somewhat, short term, but prices will also go down,” he said in the Oval Office.

But he argued the policy would boost American manufacturing and the country would be “flooded with jobs”.

Trump has already placed an additional 10% tariff on imports from China, citing its production of fentanyl, a deadly opioid that has stoked a US overdose epidemic.

He has also readied tariffs on Canada and Mexico, America’s two largest trading partners, that could take effect in March after being suspended for 30 days.

On Monday, he removed exemptions from his 2018 steel and aluminium tariffs.

Questions have been raised about the accuracy of the chancellor’s online CV, and the use of expenses while working at a bank, in the wake of a BBC News investigation.

Rachel Reeves and two colleagues were the subject of an expenses probe while she was a senior manager at Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) in the late 2000s.

It was also revealed that the chancellor’s online CV exaggerated the length of time she worked at the Bank of England.

Sir Keir Starmer said Reeves has “dealt with any issues that arise” when asked about her CV by a reporter.

The initial stage of the investigation found that a whistleblower’s complaint was substantiated at HBOS, and the three employees appeared to have broken the rules, according to a senior source with direct knowledge of the probe.

We have not been able to establish what the final outcome of the investigation was. Indeed, it may not have concluded.

A spokesman for Reeves said the chancellor had no knowledge of the investigation, always complied with expenses rules and left the bank on good terms.

In a brief interview with a reporter, Sir Keir was asked about Rachel Reeves’s CV.

The prime minister was asked whether he was “comfortable that she exaggerated her relevant experience”.

He said the issues were from “many years ago” but that he and the chancellor “get up every day to… make sure that the economy in our country, which was badly damaged under the last government, is revived and we have growth, and that is felt in the pockets of working people across the country”.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the investigation raised questions for the chancellor.

She posted on X: “Keir Starmer said ‘restoring trust in politics is the great test of our era’. Until she [Reeves] comes clean – not just about her CV but about the circumstances in which she left HBOS, no one will take him seriously.”

Rachel Reeves has frequently cited her time at the Bank of England as part of the reason that voters can trust her with the public finances, and has repeatedly claimed to have spent up to 10 years there.

The chancellor left the financial institution nine months earlier than she stated in her LinkedIn profile. This means she spent five and a half years working at the bank – including nearly a year studying – despite publicly claiming to have spent a decade there.

On the professional networking site LinkedIn, the chancellor’s profile claimed she worked at the Bank of England from September 2000 to December 2006.

However, BBC News has established she had left by March 2006 when she began working for Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) in West Yorkshire.

A spokesman for Reeves confirmed that dates on her LinkedIn were inaccurate and said it was due to an administrative error by the team.

They said the chancellor hadn’t seen it before it was published.

Speaking before the prime minister was interviewed, a Downing Street spokesman said the prime minister had no concerns about Reeves’s conduct.

Asked whether Sir Keir still thought the chancellor had integrity after she updated her career history on LinkedIn, his official spokesman said: “Yes. The Chancellor and the prime minister are working hand in hand to deliver on the priorities, the plan for change, and to deliver the higher growth and the improvements in living standards that the country needs.”

The Number 10 official added that the chancellor had gone through the declaration process, which all members of Cabinet go through, when asked if she disclosed that there had been an investigation into her expenses before she was an MP.

Reeves’s profile was updated on Thursday morning just before the BBC broke the news, to reflect that the chancellor left the Bank of England in March 2006

The rest of the profile was subsequently edited to clarify the dates she worked at HBOS.

A photo taken in March 2006 shows her with other HBOS staff at the Council of Mortgage Lenders annual lunch.

A former HR lead for the bank who helped with Reeves’s relocation also said she could recall her first day and it was in March 2006.

In a 2021 magazine interview, which she subsequently posted on X, she said: “I spent a decade working as an economist at the Bank of England and loved it.”

In a speech to the Labour Party Business Conference in February last year, Reeves said: “I spent the best part of a decade as an economist at the Bank of England.”

She said the same thing in a speech at a CEO summit in July 2022, and in a video posted on her Facebook page in the same month.

The claim was also repeated in a Labour party document last year which stated that she spent “most of the first decade of her career at the Bank of England”.

As she had already started at HBOS by the spring of 2006, her time at the central bank only amounted to five and a half years. This included nearly a year studying for a Masters at the London School of Economics (LSE).

Last year, during previous controversy about Reeves’s CV, the Bank of England confirmed that Reeves had left in 2006 but refused to give the month of her departure saying it was a detailed staff record which they couldn’t provide.

Reeves also stood for election in Bromley in south-east London more than three months after she had taken a job in West Yorkshire.

She stood in a by-election on 29 June 2006 but had taken up a role at HBOS in March that year and received a relocation package to move from London. It is understood she rented a flat in Leeds and kept a flat in London at this time.

The chancellor’s online CV gives incorrect dates for her time at HBOS as well, which her team also acknowledged. It states that she left in December 2009, five months before she was elected to parliament in May 2010.

In fact, we have established, her employment at HBOS finished in mid-May 2009, when she signed a compromise agreement. An invoice for legal advice on the agreement stated that it arose “from a decision by your employer to terminate your employment”.

The bank was undergoing restructuring at the time of Reeves’s departure and a spokesman for the chancellor said she had taken voluntary redundancy.

A compromise agreement, now known as a settlement agreement, is a legal document between an employer and employee which HBOS used when senior managers were made redundant.

Reeves was allowed to continue using a company car for six months, according to her spokesman.

She then spent a year campaigning ahead of the May 2010 general election without seeking further employment.

The MP for Leeds West and Pudsey has previously faced accusations that she has embellished her online CV.

Her LinkedIn profile was changed last year to describe her role at HBOS as “Retail Banking”.

It had previously claimed she worked as an economist at the bank but she instead held a management role in the bank’s Customer Relations department, which dealt with complaints.

In November, several MPs raised the row in the House of Commons while putting questions to Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner.

The prime minister’s spokeswoman also faced questions at that time, with journalists asking if Sir Keir expected members of his Cabinet to tell the truth on their CV.

The spokeswoman said the row related to “the chancellor’s time before she was the chancellor”.

“The prime minister is very clear that what is most important is having a chancellor who is able to balance the books and who is able to be straight with the public and restore the public finances,” she added.

If you have any information on stories you would like to share with the BBC Politics Investigations team, please get in touch at politicsinvestigations@bbc.co.uk

Rachel Reeves has had a difficult start to her ministerial career.

As well as Labour’s new chancellor taking on the challenges of the UK economy, she has faced tricky questions about her past.

They began with scrutiny of her online CV late last year.

On the professional networking site LinkedIn, the Chancellor of the Exchequer claimed to have worked as an economist at Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) immediately before becoming an MP.

One of those who challenged it was a retired former colleague, Kev Gillett.

In a public post on LinkedIn, which he asked followers to share, he wrote: “Back in 2009 Rt Hon Rachel Reeves worked 3 levels below me. Just facts. She was a Complaints Support Manager at LBG/HBOS. Not an Economist. #factcheck.”

In fact it emerged that she had worked in a managerial role within the bank’s complaint handling department and her LinkedIn profile was updated to remove the claim.

Gillett also made another claim about Reeves’s time at the bank from 2006 to 2009, writing that she: “Nearly got sacked due to an expenses scandal where the 3 senior managers were all signing off each others expenses.”

Reeves’s team vigorously denied the allegations.

However, Labour’s imminent victory in last summer’s general election prompted a post on a private Facebook group for former HBOS employees that BBC News has seen asking if anyone remembered Reeves.

One former employee replied: “the expenses dept certainly do!”

Several others made reference to Reeves being investigated over her expenses spending.

BBC News has been seeking the truth behind these suggestions, speaking to more than 20 people, many of whom were former colleagues, and gaining access to receipts, emails and other documents.

We have learnt that there was an expenses investigation into Reeves and two other senior managers.

A detailed six-page whistleblowing complaint and dozens of pages of attached evidence, which we have seen, raised concerns that the three managers were using the bank’s money to “fund a lifestyle” with allegedly inappropriate spending on dinners, events, taxis and gifts, including for each other.

We have not been able to establish what the final outcome of the investigation was. Indeed it may not have concluded.

But the initial part of the investigation, which was conducted by Internal Audit at the request of the bank’s risk department, found that the three managers appeared to have broken the rules and the whistleblower’s allegations were substantiated, according to a senior source with knowledge of the investigation.

A spokesman for Reeves said the Chancellor had no knowledge of the investigation, always complied with expenses rules and left the bank on good terms.

Reeves was in her 20s and trying to become an MP when she took up a job at Halifax Bank of Scotland in West Yorkshire in 2006.

The role required her to move north from London, where she had unsuccessfully stood as Labour’s parliamentary candidate in what had been a safe Conservative seat.

She initially worked in the mortgage department, but in late 2007 moved to become Head of Business Planning in the Customer Relations department, which handled complaints.

Her career at HBOS coincided with what would prove to be a tumultuous time for the bank.

The global financial crisis which began in late summer of 2007 would force the sector to embark on a massive programme of job cuts and cost savings.

In September 2008, HBOS itself came close to collapse, requiring a government-brokered takeover by Lloyds and an emergency bailout which would total £20.5bn of taxpayers’ money.

It was shortly after this near-collapse, by early 2009, that a whistleblower from her department raised concerns about the spending habits of Reeves and two other managers, one of whom was Reeves’s boss.

Before this, in late 2008, a memo was circulated to Reeves and others which called for tighter cost control in the department.

Written by a planning and strategy manager, the document, “Financial Risk Control within Customer Relations”, raised concerns about “spending on travel” and on corporate spending cards, including Motivation cards which were used to reward staff.

It laid out proposals to “improve cost controls” which included monthly discussions with Reeves and another of the senior managers who the whistleblower claimed had mis-used expenses to “give visibility of claims, invoices, Thanks card use and reports”.

Separately, Reeves was emailed in mid-December 2008 about proposals for a presentation setting out how much had been spent on Motivation cards, recognising top performers and on taxi travel, to “focus attention on particular aspects of travel that are costly and perhaps need more consideration”.

Reeves replied to say that she was not sure a “huge analysis” was needed and she wanted to see the papers before they went any further.

The whistleblower’s complaint submitted by early 2009 was a six-page document laying out a range of concerns about an alleged spending culture in the Customer Relations department.

It focused on the behaviour of three individuals: Reeves, Reeves’s boss, and another senior manager in the department. Reeves’s boss, who we are not naming, was responsible for signing off the expenses of the other two managers.

The report and attached receipts and other documents seen by BBC News show Reeves was accused of spending hundreds of pounds on handbags, perfume, earrings and wine for colleagues, including one gift for her boss. Concern was also expressed about her spending on taxis and on a Christmas party. The whistleblower believed the spending to be excessive.

After a call to the whistleblowing hotline, the whistleblower was instructed to hand in a physical copy of their report and supporting evidence, two sources said.

A separate source, who contacted BBC News themselves in the wake of an article on the furore around Reeves’s CV last year, was also aware that someone had blown the whistle on Reeves and another colleague.

The report was passed to the bank’s risk department and, at their request, was taken on by the Internal Audit department.

A source who worked in risk at the bank told us: “Given the nature of the allegations – claiming expenses for things you wouldn’t normally claim expenses for – and the relative seniority of the individuals, the matter was referred for investigation by a team outside of that department.”

The Internal Audit department, which had access to expenses claims and sign-offs, then assessed the complaint and supporting documents, according to two sources.

It found that there was evidence of apparent wrongdoing by the three senior managers including Reeves, a senior source with direct knowledge of the investigation told BBC News.

Internal Audit completed its involvement in the investigation and passed its findings to an investigative part of the Risk department in around April 2009. The normal process would then have been for the managers to be interviewed about the allegations. There would then be an assessment of potential disciplinary action if necessary.

However it does not appear that this next interview stage took place, or that the investigation ever reached a formal conclusion. Reeves insisted she was never interviewed, as did her boss, who said she was “not aware of an expenses probe and my departure was not related to any alleged investigation”. The other senior manager declined to comment.

There is no evidence of which we are aware that the bank’s internal investigation was completed, or that there was ever a concluding finding of any wrongdoing.

Reeves left the bank in May 2009, as did her boss. The other senior manager was on sick leave in May and never returned to work at the bank.

There is no suggestion any of the departures were linked to the investigation or spending issues and a spokesman for Reeves said the Chancellor left the bank on good terms.

They also provided a statement from the lawyer who provided legal advice on the compromise agreement – a voluntary legal document ending an employee’s employment – she signed on her departure.

He said it was a “standard-style agreement adopted by the company when a mutually agreed exit was made during the bank’s restructure”.

“Absolutely no allegations of wrongdoing or misconduct were mentioned by the HBOS HR team during this process,” he said.

What lay behind the whistleblower’s complaint and the grumbles of other colleagues was unhappiness relating to several different areas of spending.

One concern was the use of bank payment cards to pay for Christmas and birthday gifts.

“A culture developed among senior managers in Customer Relations where gifts were given freely to direct reports – both upwards and downwards,” one former colleague of Reeves claimed.

“[They had] a very cavalier attitude regarding the budget in the department.”

Reeves and the other senior managers had both a corporate credit card and another payment card known as a ‘Motivation’ or ‘Thanks’ card.

The Motivation card was intended to be used to reward high-performers for good work.

There was guidance about its use. In February 2008 a memo instructed HBOS employees on the correct use of Motivation cards, which were widely used within the Customer Relations department.

It stated that the cards were to be used to “reward/acknowledge colleagues who have gone the extra mile”.

Suggested gifts included “chocolates, flowers, wine, vouchers or you could simply log on and send a free e-card to say ‘Thanks’ for a job well done”, the memo said.

It warned that managers would be “responsible for all transactions on your card and will be held accountable if spending on your statement cannot be verified”.

Spending in this area was scrutinised because the company incurred tax on it.

The memo doesn’t explicitly prohibit Christmas and birthday gifts.

But 11 former employees told us they had never heard of colleagues being bought birthday gifts with the bank’s money, and believed that doing so was in breach of the rules. Several said any birthday gifts were bought with their own money.

However, one ex-staff member, Jane Wayper, a former HR business partner who was given permission to speak to us by Reeves’s team, claimed that “birthday gifts and Christmas presents could be purchased using Motivation cards” and “staff were encouraged to do so for their teams”.

Reeves bought birthday presents for colleagues with HBOS’s money throughout her time in Customer Relations, receipts show, with purchases including wine and cosmetics. Some were bought using a Motivation card, while others were reimbursed through an expenses claim.

She also spent £152 on a handbag and perfume as a present for her boss using the bank’s money, according to the whistleblower’s report. The present was a joint gift from Reeves and one of the other managers who was later investigated alongside her.

And she bought earrings as a present for her PA, which she claimed back on expenses.

Her PA, Linda Barrowclough, said she had received Christmas and birthday gifts from Reeves but had assumed they were “personal gifts [and] they’d have come out of her own pocket”.

Reeves also used her Motivation card to spend more than £400 on a leaving meal for a colleague, which the whistleblowing complaint claimed was not a permitted use.

The situation around Christmas gifts, which Reeves also bought for her PA and others, was more complicated.

That’s because, according to internal bank guidance we have seen, these could be bought on expenses providing they were small gifts of £25 or less and they were not bought using the Motivation card.

The £25 limit was based on tax advice as anything more substantial would attract tax.

It appeared to her colleagues that Reeves had broken these rules.

But there does appear to have been confusion about the policy. We have also seen emails showing that Reeves was encouraged by her boss to buy more expensive Christmas presents, and to pay for them with her Motivation card.

In late October 2008, Reeves’s manager wrote that “after checking with other departments, it looks like the standard practice of buying Christmas gifts for direct reports using motivation bank will continue this year”, emails seen by the BBC show.

She suggested spending £50 to £75 per person on the presents.

A reminder titled “further clarity” about how to buy Christmas gifts and how much to spend was circulated by another HBOS employee in early December, emails show.

Reeves and the other managers who were later investigated were all among the recipients of this email confirming the rules on Christmas gifts.

While seasonal gifts, such as at Christmas, were allowed, the managers were explicitly told they could not use Motivation cards for these purchases. The cost of these “trivial” gifts was also not allowed to exceed £25, in line with HMRC guidance, the email said.

This is because rewards for performance at work are taxable whereas seasonal gifts such as those given for Christmas, providing they are not too costly, are exempt.

Replying to the email, Reeves wrote that she didn’t understand why the “goal posts are shifting” and said she had already ordered and paid for her presents using “Motivation Bank/Thanks, and I do not intend to cancel them,” claiming this would cost more time and money.

A colleague responsible for finance acknowledged that the message on paying for Christmas gifts hadn’t always been clear but said: “I don’t believe that the goalposts are being moved.”

Receipts show that gifts bought by Reeves at Christmas 2008 included a £49 handbag for her PA, while she herself received £55 worth of wine from her boss.

There was a widespread belief at the bank that there had been an expenses investigation into Reeves and two colleagues.

But Reeves has said that she has no recollection of being investigated or having questions raised over her expenses.

A spokesman for Reeves said she was “proud of the work she did at HBOS” and was not aware of the claims about her expenses until approached by the BBC.

“She was not aware of an investigation nor was she interviewed, and she did not face any disciplinary action on this or any other matters. All expenses were submitted and signed off in the proper way,” she said.

The spokesman also said Reeves left in 2009 “on good terms and received a severance payment, including her full notice pay and bonus”.

“HBOS allowed her to keep a company car for six months after she left and she was given a favourable reference.”

Reeves’s team put forward several former HBOS employees for interview who they said corroborated her account that she had not been investigated.

One said she hadn’t seen evidence of senior managers misusing expenses and the bank had controls to prevent it but she left in February 2008, more than a year before Reeves departed. She also said that she had never heard of giving birthday and Christmas gifts at HBOS’s expense as being part of the bank’s policies.

Another, Jane Wayper, the former HR business partner, said in a statement that she didn’t recognise the accusations against Reeves and “would have been aware of any investigation which concluded there was a case to answer” as she would have been involved in the disciplinary process.

She said there was “extensive oversight of all expenses policies” and claimed that “birthday gifts and Christmas presents could be purchased using Motivation cards”. But this is at odds with a document seen by BBC News and the testimony of 11 sources we have spoken to.

Many of Reeves’ former HBOS colleagues were worried about the consequences of sharing confidential information with BBC News but believe it is in the public interest for what happened, and their concerns about the now-Chancellor’s spending of the bank’s money, to be reported.

But, given their concerns about speaking out publicly, we have agreed not to name them.

A Downing Street spokesman said the prime minister had no concerns about Reeves’s conduct.

Asked whether Sir Keir Starmer still thought the Chancellor had integrity after she updated her career history on LinkedIn, his official spokesman said: “Yes. The Chancellor and the prime minister are working hand in hand to deliver on the priorities, the plan for change, and to deliver the higher growth and the improvements in living standards that the country needs.”

The Number 10 official added that the chancellor had gone through the declaration process, which all members of Cabinet go through, when asked if she disclosed that there had been an investigation into her expenses before she was an MP.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the investigation raised questions for the chancellor.

She posted on X: “Keir Starmer said ‘restoring trust in politics is the great test of our era’. Until she [Reeves] comes clean – not just about her CV but about the circumstances in which she left HBOS, no one will take him seriously.”

The investigation at HBOS was not the last time Reeves would face scrutiny over her expenses.

In 2015, it emerged that she was among 19 MPs who had had their official credit cards suspended by the parliamentary expenses watchdog after failing to show their spending was valid.

Reeves owed more than £4,000 in spending at the time when her card was blocked. She subsequently cleared her debt.

If you have any information on stories you would like to share with the BBC Politics Investigations team, please get in touch at politicsinvestigations@bbc.co.uk

A car has driven into a group of people in the Munich leaving at least 28 people hurt, two of them seriously, German police have said.

The fire service said some of the injured were in a “life-threatening condition”.

The driver was a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, police said. The suspected attacker was arrested at the scene and posed no further risk, they added.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters: “This attacker cannot count on any mercy. He must be punished and he must leave the country.”

Germany is 10 days away from federal elections in which asylum, immigration and security have taken centre-stage in the campaign.

Asylum seekers have been involved in a series of deadly attacks in recent months, and police said there were indications of a “extremist background” in what had happened in Munich.

The drama unfolded during a rally linked to the transport union Verdi at around 10:30 local time (09:30 GMT) on Thursday.

The car was seen approaching police cars at the rally in Dachauer Strasse, a short distance from Munich’s main station, before speeding up and driving into a group of people, police said. Police then shot at the vehicle before detaining the man.

Rescue helicopters were quickly at the scene and Munich’s mayor Dieter Reiter said children were among those injured.

A police spokesman told Bavaria’s public broadcaster BR that officers were checking whether there was a link to the demonstration. The union said it was deeply shocked and sent its thoughts to those who had been injured.

Eyewitnesses told the BBC they saw people running for shelter in shops and residential buildings as the “distressing” scene unfolded.

“It is obviously very unsettling,” said a student who had been studying in a nearby coffee shop. “I can’t concentrate on anything else.”

Bavaria’s Premier Markus Söder called the incident a “suspected attack”.

“Something has to change something in Germany – and quickly,” he said.

For Germans there were immediate reminders of an attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg less than two months ago that killed six people and injured 300 others.

“When you get the news that someone has once again driven a car into a crowd of people, the fact that there are many injured, is a slap in the face,” said Söder.

“We will clarify all the details, but we react cautiously to every attack like this.”

Police said they could not confirm whether anyone else was involved, following unconfirmed reports of a second person in the car.

The suspect was known to police for theft and drug offences, officials said.

The incident happened a day before world leaders including Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Vice President JD Vance were due to arrive at the Munich security conference about 1.5km (1 mile) away.

Police appealed for witnesses to come forward with information and footage of the incident.

Bavaria was hit by an attack only three weeks ago, when a toddler and a man aged 41 were killed in a stabbing at a park in the town of Aschaffenburg.

It soon emerged that the suspected attacker was an Afghan national with suspected jihadist sympathies, and Olaf Scholz had called on authorities at the time to explain why he was still in Germany.

Repeated attacks have propelled the issue of immigration and asylum policy to the forefront of Germany’s 23 February election, with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) running second in the opinion polls.

The party’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, has publicly backed calls for “remigration”, seen as referring to mass deportations of immigrants.

Scholz, whose centre left Social Democrats are trailing behind the AfD, said the government was planning to increase deportations of serious criminals to Afghanistan. Deportations to Kabul began last August.

In a separate development, an Afghan man with suspected Islamist sympathies went on trial at a high-security prison in Stuttgart over a knife attack that killed a policeman and wounded five other people at an anti-Islam rally in Mannheim in May last year.

Months later, three people were murdered by a man armed with a knife in the western city of Solingen. A Syrian who was due to be deported was arrested, and jihadist group Islamic State said it was behind the attack.

Hamas has said it is committed to implementing the Gaza ceasefire deal with Israel and will continue releasing hostages as scheduled, raising hopes that a resumption of the war can be averted.

Following talks in Cairo, the Palestinian armed group said mediators from Egypt and Qatar had confirmed they would “remove obstacles”. Egyptian and Qatari reports also said gaps had been bridged.

An Israeli government spokesman did not comment on the reports but stated that if Hamas did not free three living hostages on Saturday then the ceasefire would end.

Israel’s prime minister made a similar ultimatum on Tuesday after Hamas said it was postponing releases over what it claimed were Israeli violations.

Hamas said these included a failure to allow in the agreed amounts of vital humanitarian aid, including tents and shelters, which Israel denied.

The group’s threat to derail the deal prompted US President Donald Trump to propose Israel cancel the agreement altogether and “let hell break out” unless “all of the hostages” were returned by Saturday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he welcomed Trump’s demand and warned: “If Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday noon [10:00 GMT], the ceasefire will end and the [Israeli military] will resume intense fighting until the final defeat of Hamas.”

However, there were conflicting messages from Israeli officials about whether he was demanding the release of all 76 hostages still in Gaza – in line with Trump’s ultimatum – or just the three due to be freed this weekend.

On Wednesday, an Egyptian security source told the BBC that Egypt and Qatar were “intensifying their diplomatic efforts in an attempt to salvage the ceasefire agreement”, as Hamas’s leader for Gaza, Khalil al-Hayya, arrived in Cairo to hold talks with Egypt’s intelligence chief and other officials.

After concluding the talks on Thursday morning, Hamas put out a statement saying they focused on the need for all terms of the deal to be fulfilled, particularly regarding deliveries of caravans, tents, heavy construction equipment, medical supplies and fuel.

It added that the talks were “positive” and that the mediators had agreed to work to “remove obstacles and close gaps”.

“Accordingly, Hamas reaffirms its commitment to implementing the agreement as signed, including the exchange of prisoners according to the specified timeline.”

At the same time, Egyptian state-run Al Qahera TV reported that Egypt and Qatar had successfully “overcome obstacles” and that Israel and Hamas were committed to fully implementing the ceasefire deal.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera TV also said the negotiations had been successful and that mobile homes and heavy machinery would be allowed into Gaza on Thursday.

However, Israeli media then cited the Israeli prime minister’s office as calling the Al Jazeera report “fake news” and saying there was “no basis” to it.

Omer Dostri, a spokesman for the prime minister, later clarified the denial, writing on X: “There is no entry of caravans or heavy equipment into the Gaza Strip, and there is no co-ordination for this.”

When asked about Hamas’s statement at a later media briefing, another Israeli government spokesman said Israel’s position on the ceasefire agreement was “crystal clear”.

“There is a framework in place for the release of our hostages,” David Mencer said. “That framework makes clear that three live hostages must be released by Hamas terrorists on Saturday.”

“If those three are not released, if Hamas does not return our hostages, by Saturday noon, the ceasefire will end.”

War-weary Palestinians in Gaza said they had been alarmed by the prospect of a return to fighting after 16 months of devastating war.

“When the truce was announced, we felt immense joy. However, with the announcement of a new crisis, fear returned [and] traders began raising commodity prices,” Mouti al-Qedra told BBC Arabic’s Gaza Lifeline programme.

“I pray to God constantly for lasting peace, especially after the martyrdom of 65 members of the al-Qedra family. Now, we are relieved that the crisis has been resolved, hoping no more martyrs will fall.”

The first phase of the ceasefire deal is supposed to last six weeks and see a total of 33 Israeli hostages exchanged for about 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees from Gaza.

So far, 16 living Israeli hostages have been freed since the ceasefire took effect on 19 January. Hamas has also handed over five Thai hostages outside the terms of the deal.

The 17 other Israeli hostages due to be released during the first phase are two children, one woman, five men over the age of 50, and nine men under 50. They are supposed to be handed over in the next three weeks. Both sides have said eight of these hostages are dead, but only one has been named.

Negotiations for the ceasefire’s second phase – which should see the 43 remaining hostages released, a full Israeli withdrawal and a permanent ceasefire – have not yet begun.

The deal has also seen Israeli forces withdraw from densely populated areas of Gaza, hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians return to their homes in the north, and hundreds of aid lorries allowed into the territory each day.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

More than 48,230 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Most of Gaza’s population has also been displaced multiple times, almost 70% of buildings are estimated to be damaged or destroyed, the healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed, and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.

Google Maps has blocked reviews for the Gulf of Mexico, after criticism of its decision to label it “Gulf of America” for users in the US.

The tech giant updated the name of the location on Wednesday after President Donald Trump ordered it to be changed in official government documents.

Clicking on the label for the Gulf in Google Maps now brings up a note saying “posting is currently turned off”.

Google also appears to have deleted some negative reviews left in the wake of its name change.

The company has defended its decision, saying it “regularly puts protections on places during times when we anticipate an uptick of contributions that are off-topic or unrelated to someone’s direct experience with the place.”

It also highlighted a 2023 blog post about how it tackles “policy-violating content”, such as fake reviews, and the when it disables contributions or removes content to prevent abuse of its tools.

Users on social media claim hundreds of one star reviews have been removed, and have accused Google of “censorship.”

The most recent review left for the location result on Google Maps now appears to be from a month ago.

Critics have since taken to posting negative, one star ratings of the Google Maps app itself on Apple’s App Store, with several describing the app and its labels as “factually inaccurate”.

So-called “review-bombing” has become a popular form of online protest against companies or businesses that appear in Google Search or Maps results.

In December, Google removed derogatory reviews of a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania where Luigi Mangione – the 26-year-old since charged with the murder of United Healthcare boss Brian Thompson – had been arrested.

The tactic has also been deployed to manipulate an app’s ratings on mobile marketplaces.

In 2020, people used it to criticise President Trump’s then-proposal to ban TikTok – reportedly leaving hundreds of critical reviews on his re-election campaign app on Apple’s App Store.

It was also used by GameStop traders to hit back at stock-trading apps such as Robinhood that introduced trading restrictions amid the 2021 market upset.

Forbes reported on Thursday that the company had “tacitly admitted” to removing reviews criticising the Gulf location’s renaming on Maps.

The BBC has asked Google to confirm whether it has deleted them.

In a blog post on Monday, Google announced that US users would see “Gulf of America” replace Gulf of Mexico on Maps.

It said this followed a “longstanding policy” of reflecting name changes updated in official US government sources.

The name would remain unchanged in Mexico and the rest of the world would see “Gulf of America” added next to its current name in brackets, Google added.

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum wrote a letter to the company asking them not to rename the Gulf in a letter in late January.

President Sheinbaum reportedly reiterated her concerns on Thursday – suggesting the country could sue Google over the name change.

Meanwhile, Apple has also changed the name for US users of its own Maps app.

Star Trek actor George Takei has encouraged people to “report” the renamed location on Apple Maps in a post to his 1.1m followers on BlueSky.

“Please continue to report,” he wrote above a screenshot of a viral post on X (formerly Twitter) of someone appearing to report the renamed location.

The White House highlighted Apple Maps displaying “Gulf of America” instead of Gulf of Mexico in a X post on Wednesday.

Big tech firms and their chief executives have been accused of trying to “curry favour” with the Trump administration through controversial policy changes.

Meta announced it would ditch US fact-checkers and some global content policies in January, and later joined a slew of firms including Google and Amazon in scaling back diversity recruitment goals.

Arriving at Nato headquarters early on Thursday, Europe’s defence ministers had one common message – that there could be no negotiations about Ukraine without Ukraine and Europe at the table too.

The question is to what extent the US is listening.

After a frenetic 24 hours of US declarations, there is a tangible sense that Europe’s leaders have been caught by surprise; that they now fear being bypassed on any potential Ukraine deal and being deprived of a voice on the future of European security.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spoke of Donald Trump’s call with Vladimir Putin as being “very much out of the blue”, even if the US president had made it clear for months that he was aiming to bring a quick end to the war.

“There can be no negotiation about Ukraine without Ukraine,” said the UK’s John Healey.

“The same is true for Europe,” warned Dutch Defence Secretary Ruben Brekelmans.

“Because of course what is negotiated also has implications for Europe, so we think Europe should also sit at the table.”

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk rammed home the message on X when he posted: “All we need is peace. A just peace. Ukraine, Europe and the United States should work on this together. Together.”

The US is clearly engaging with its Nato allies and Ukraine. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth is spending two days at Nato HQ and Vice-President JD Vance will see Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference.

But Europe’s problem, and specifically the EU’s problem, is that it struggles to speak with one voice and present a united vision.

Ursula von der Leyen, the EU’s most recognisable figurehead, met Hegseth this week but has been barely visible since.

Europe’s leaders have had plenty of time to prepare for Trump’s peace plan. Now they’re left wondering whether the US is listening to them, or even reading their communiques.

The UK joined Poland, France, Germany, Italy and Spain late on Wednesday in agreeing that the security of the European continent was “our common responsibility” and that a just and lasting peace in Ukraine was necessary for transatlantic security too.

Baerbock told German radio that obviously Europe could not replace the US in military support for Ukraine, but a strong Europe was in US interest and it had to be made clear that “the USA needs us too”.

Europe could have claimed more agency instead of waiting for Trump’s initiative, Tyyne Karjalainen, of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, said.

“These statements we’re seeing now…I’m afraid they’re a symbol of weakness not strength,” she added.

So far, there is no obvious space for Europe in Trump’s peace push, and arguably not enough for Kyiv. Until now there had been a general acceptance that there should be no talking to Vladimir Putin without Ukraine.

Trump is planning face-to-face talks with the Russian leader, apparently in Saudi Arabia, but the two men have already prepared the ground with a lengthy phone-call.

The US president’s follow-up chat with Volodymyr Zelensky was far shorter.

Zelensky spoke initially of his belief that “America’s strength is sufficient to pressure Russia and Putin into peace”.

But on a trip to the southern city of Kherson on Thursday he made clear that, as an independent state, Ukraine would not accept either bilateral negotiations or “any agreements reached without us”.

“Putin hopes that by holding talks only with Trump, he will be able to negotiate more favourable terms,” Aleksandra Kozioł, from the Polish Institute of International Affairs, said.

“In doing so, he will also present himself as a leader who talks to another superpower on an equal footing.”

The worry for European leaders is that the US may have already moved some way towards meeting Russia’s war aims – and that it might go further.

Ukraine’s consistent demand has been for a complete withdrawal of Russian troops from its sovereign territory and for Ukrainian control over its state borders.

Judging by remarks from Trump and Hegseth, the US already considers Russia’s 2014 capture of Crimea and eastern areas in the Donbas as a fait accompli and that Ukraine won’t be joining Nato.

Trump added that Ukraine needed fresh elections “at some point”, repeating a Putin fallacy that Zelensky was no longer a legitimate leader, even though Ukraine is under martial law precisely because of Russia’s war.

Hegseth was adamant there had been no betrayal of Kyiv, but German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said it was “regrettable…that the Trump administration has already made public concessions to Putin before negotiations have even begun”.

“It would have been better to talk about Ukraine’s possible Nato membership or the country’s possible loss of territory only at the negotiating table and not to take it off the table beforehand,” he said.

Along with the evident alarm that Putin may already have the upper hand, there was a clear warning from Nato and the EU on Thursday that any agreement had to last.

Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte said it was crucial that any deal should not unravel as had been allowed to happen with Russia in the past.

“It is always important to bear in mind that Russia is the aggressor here and it cannot be rewarded for its aggression,” warned EU Commission spokeswoman Anitta Hipper.

“When it comes to any discussions, any peace deals, it needs to be sustainable. A bad deal will only lead to more war. Just as it did before.”

European governments are already expecting to foot the bill to help rebuild Ukrainian cities, but President Trump may ask for European boots on the ground as well, to provide security guarantees.

Not only do Europeans have a strong argument to be involved in the overall plan, but Poland, the Baltic states and the Nordic countries would be especially wary of an emboldened Russia if it fell apart.

Hegseth stressed on Thursday that standing up against Russia’s “war machine” was an “important European responsibility”, and he reinforced Trump’s demand for 5% of economic output (GDP) to be spent on defence.

Few European governments have managed anything like that, while Russia’s government is already spending almost a third of its annual budget on defence.

Poland aims to spend 4.7% of its GDP on defence this year and Latvia 3.45%, but Germany has only just hit 2% and Spain and Portugal are hoping to reach 2% in 2029.

Luxembourg’s Defence Minister Yuriko Backes acknowledged the US demand but said numbers should not be set arbitrarily.

“What we should be focusing on is our plans and our ambitions that determine our investments not the other way around,” she said.

Additional reporting by Kathy Long in Brussels.