AS Roma

Samuel Dahl, 21, har hamnat i frysboxen i AS Roma. På egen begäran flyttades han ner till klubbens primavera-lag för att få speltid. För Expressen berättar han om den tuffa starten i Italien och hur han tycker Djurgården bör göra med Kim Bergstrand och Thomas Lagerlöf.

Elfsborg tar emot storklubben AS Roma i Europa League i kväll. Då passade supportrar på att störa motståndet med fyrverkerier utanför hotellet under natten. ”Det irriterade säkert spelarna och tränaren”, skriver Corriere dello Sport.

Alma Selerud, 24, är klar för BK Häcken. Efter ett och ett halvt år i italienska AS Roma är hon nu klar för återkomst till damallsvenskan. – Det känns jättebra, det ska bli otroligt kul, säger hon till Häckens hemsida.

Samuel Dahl, 21, är klar för AS Roma. Djurgården säljer enligt Expressens uppgifter stjärnan för 52 miljoner kronor efter ett succéartat år i klubben. – Jag är sjukt glad och min tid i Djurgården har varit helt oförglömlig, säger han till Djurgårdens hemsida.

Djurgårdens IF säljer Samuel Dahl till AS Roma. Enligt uppgifter till Expressen är klubbarna överens om en prislapp på drygt 52 miljoner kronor som i dagarna flyger till Rom för läkarundersökningar. Affärens totala värde kan stiga till totala 70 miljoner kronor, ifall alla bonusar slår in i framtiden. – Jag kan bekräfta att vi är i slutskedet av en övergång, säger Bosse Andersson.

Samuel Dahl är nära en flytt till AS Roma, avslöjar italienska Tuttomercatoweb. Vänsterbacken i Djurgården kan kosta klubben cirka 40 miljoner kronor. – Vi har ingen ambition att förhandla om en övergång med Dahl, det har vi sagt tidigare. Inte i dagsläget, säger sportchefen Bosse Andersson.

Sven-Göran ”Svennis” Eriksson är sjuk. – Alla förstår ju att jag har en sjukdom som inte är bra. Alla gissar att det är cancer och det är det, berättar han själv i Söndagsintervjun i P1. 75-årige Sven-Göran Eriksson säger att han har ungefär ett år kvar att leva – kanske mindre. – Men man får lura hjärnan, säger han. – Se det positiva i saker och ting, gräv inte ner dig för motgång, för det här är den största motgången givetvis, men gör något bra av det. Förbundskapten för England Sven-Göran ”Svennis” Eriksson är född i värmländska Sunne 1948. Han har en lång karriär som fotbollstränare bakom sig. ”Svennis” har bland annat lett IKF Göteborg till seger i UEFA-cupen 1982. Därefter tränade han flera stora europeiska klubbar, däribland AS Roma och Manchester City. Han har också varit förbundskapten för England, Mexiko och Filippinerna.

Även om Mark Zuckerberg och Elon Musk inte genomför sitt utlovade slagsmål, så råder det en högst verklig strid mellan techmiljardärernas företag. Zuckerbergs Meta har lanserat Twitterrivalen Threads nu i veckan. Det sker samtidigt som Musks första månader som chef för Twitter har varit minst sagt stormiga, med stora nedskärningar och sjunkande annonsintäkter. Threads har fördelen att redan ha en stor användarbas genom Instagram och goda chanser till riktad annonsering. Dessutom kan Meta få värdefull språkdata för sina AI-projekt, skriver The Economist. With Threads, a copycat app, Meta hopes to capitalise on Twitter’s travails. By The Economist July 4th 2023 In one corner is Mark Zuckerberg: 39 years old, five foot seven inches and, if his selfies are to be believed, a wizard at jiu-jitsu. In the other corner stands Elon Musk: 13 years older, six inches taller and considerably heavier, with a special move known as the walrus (“I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing”). The two billionaires have agreed to a cage fight, with Mr Musk saying on June 29th that it might take place at the Roman Colosseum. The bout may never happen. Neither the Italian government nor Mr Musk’s mother seems keen. But the new-media moguls are simultaneously limbering up for a more consequential fight. On July 6th Meta, Mr Zuckerberg’s firm, will add a new app to its suite of social-media platforms. Threads, a new text-based network, bears a remarkable resemblance to Twitter, the app that Mr Musk bought last October for $44bn. The rumble in Rome may be all talk. But an almighty social-media smackdown is about to begin. Mr Musk’s eight months in charge of Twitter have been bruising for many parties. About 80% of the nearly 8,000 employees he inherited have been laid off, to cut costs. Amid a glitchy service, users have started to drift away, believes eMarketer, a research company (see chart). The introduction on July 1st of a paywall, limiting the number of tweets that can be seen by those who do not cough up $8 a month, may repel more. Advertisers have fled in even greater numbers: Twitter’s ad revenue this year will be 28% lower than last, forecasts eMarketer. All this has hurt investors. In May Fidelity, a financial-services firm, estimated that the company had lost about two-thirds of its value since Mr Musk agreed to buy it. From this chaos, the clearest winner has been Mr Zuckerberg. By 2021 his business had become synonymous with privacy invasion, misinformation and bile—so much so that he changed its name from Facebook to Meta. He then irked investors by using his all-powerful position at the firm to pour billions into the metaverse, an unproven passion project that still looks years away from making money. On July 4th two years ago he attracted ridicule after posting a video of himself vaingloriously surfing a hydrofoil while holding an American flag. It was hard to find anyone in Silicon Valley more polarising. Now it is not so difficult. Mr Musk’s erratic management of Twitter makes Mr Zuckerberg’s stewardship of Meta look like a model of good governance. And although Twitter’s new freewheeling approach to content moderation has delighted some conservatives—including Ron DeSantis, who launched his presidential bid in a glitch-filled live audio session on the app, and Tucker Carlson, who started broadcasting on Twitter in June after parting ways with Fox News—liberals find it increasingly hard to stomach. Mr Musk remains more popular than Mr Zuckerberg among Americans (who also fancy him to win the cage match), according to polls from YouGov. But as the controversies at Twitter have rumbled on, and as politicians have turned their fire on another social app, the Chinese-owned TikTok, Mr Zuckerberg’s approval rating has quietly risen to its highest level in over three years. Meta now sees an opportunity for another, commercial victory. Various startups have tried to capitalise on Twitter’s travails, with little success. Mastodon, a decentralised social network with a single employee, said that by November it had added more than 2m members since the Twitter deal closed. But people found it fiddly and by last month it had 61% fewer users than at its November peak, estimates Sensor Tower, another data company. Truth Social, Donald Trump’s conservative social network, has failed to gain traction, especially since Mr Musk steered Twitter rightwards. The latest pretender, Bluesky, faces the same struggle to achieve critical mass. Meta’s effort, Threads, has a better chance. For one thing, cloning rivals is what Meta does best. In 2016, as Snapchat’s disappearing posts known as “stories” became popular, Mr Zuckerberg unveiled Instagram Stories, an eerily similar product which helped to keep Instagram on top. Last year, as TikTok’s short videos became a threat, Meta rolled out Reels, a near-identical video format that lives within Instagram and Facebook. It too has been a hit: in April Mr Zuckerberg said Reels had helped to increase the time spent on Instagram by nearly a quarter. Threads also has a head start in achieving scale. Unlike Reels, it will be an app in its own right. But it will let those with an Instagram account use their existing login details and follow all the same people with a single click. Some 87% of Twitter users already use Instagram, according to DataReportal, a research firm, so most now have a near-frictionless alternative to Twitter. Will they bother to switch? For some, it may be enough simply to have a network that is “sanely run”, as Meta’s chief product officer put it recently. Others will need a shove. By announcing a paywall just days before Threads’ launch, Mr Musk may have provided one. Twitter’s business is tiny by Meta’s standards, with barely an eighth as many users as Facebook, the world’s largest social network. In 2021, the last year before Mr Musk took it private, Twitter’s revenue was $5.1bn, against Meta’s $116bn. And with those meagre earnings come big problems. Few platforms attract as many angry oddballs as Twitter. In recent years Meta has shied away from promoting news, which brings political controversy and seems not to delight users; in Canada it has said it will stop showing news altogether, in response to a law that would force it to pay publishers. News is a big part of what Twitter does. There are two reasons why Mr Zuckerberg may think Threads is nevertheless worth the headache. One is advertising. Twitter has never made much money out of its users because it knows little about them. Between half and two-thirds of those who read tweets are not even logged in, estimates Simon Kemp of DataReportal. Many registered users are “lurkers”, who view others’ feeds but seldom engage. Meta, by contrast, already knows a lot about its users from its other apps, so can hit them with well-targeted ads in Threads from day one. And the brand-focused advertising that works best on Twitter would complement the direct-response ads that Facebook and Instagram specialise in. Threads “feels very complementary” to Meta’s current portfolio, says Mark Shmulik of Bernstein, a broker. Meta’s other possible motive relates to large language models, which ingest text from the internet to produce human-like responses in artificial-intelligence (AI) apps like Chatgpt. This technology places a premium on big troves of text. Online forums such as Reddit are scrambling to monetise the billions of words that they hold. Mr Musk has said that Twitter’s new paywall is a response to “EXTREME levels of data scraping” by AI firms. In setting up a text-based network to complement the more visual feeds of Facebook and Instagram, Meta will have its own source of rich language data. “Threads has been conceived as much more than an advertising platform,” believes Mr Kemp. “Zuck is playing the AI content-feeding game.” Whether Meta licensed such data to others or used it in its own AI projects, it would be a new growth story to tell investors while they wait for the metaverse to materialise. Threads faces formidable challenges. Launching a new social network is notoriously hard. Even with its 3.8bn existing users Meta has had its share of failures: Facebook Dating remains unloved and the company’s gaming and shopping initiatives have yet to take off. But as Twitter bleeds users and advertisers, and as Mr Musk’s management continues on its eccentric path, the opportunity is becoming bigger. Regardless of which billionaire prevails in the cage, Mr Zuckerberg may come away with the spoils. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

Trots flera segrar på senare tid så kan den populistiska högern inte sluta deppa. Det skriver The Atlantics Helen Lewis i ett långt reportage från den brittiska konservativa rörelsens stora konferens som nyss hölls i London. Lewis, som innan hon började på The Atlantic var redaktör vid den brittiska liberala tidskriften The New Statesman, tycker sig se en rad av talare som mest klagar på ”att något gått fel” – istället för att göra något åt det. Till slut, skriver hon, stod poängen med mötet klart: ”Det här var inte ett politiskt möte utan en gruppterapi-session.” Despite all of its victories, the populist right can’t stop moping. By Helen Lewis May 18, 2023 As I arrived for the first day of the National Conservatism Conference in London, a protester outside shouted directions to me: “Up the stairs—turn far right.” That description, unsurprisingly, would have offended many of the speakers gathered this week at the Emmanuel Centre, a 10-minute walk from Big Ben. One of them, the journalist Melanie Phillips, published an article after the conference’s first day headlined: “National Conservatism is not a fascist plot.” Good to have that cleared up. Instead, according to the conference’s organizers, it is about a form of conservatism “inextricably tied to the idea of the nation … an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.” NatCon draws an international group of nationalists (I know) who have also organized events in the United States—Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been a speaker—as well as in Brussels and Rome. Their favored politicians include Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and their politics are socially conservative, anti-immigration, authoritarian, and heavily invested in an idealized version of “the West.” The most reliable applause line in London was to imply that the left has parted company with reality over gender, as in this quip by Home Secretary Suella Braverman: “100 percent of women do not have a penis.” (Hearty applause.) The conference takes place at a piquant moment for Britain. The Conservative Party has been in power here since 2010, and seven years ago, the populist right surprised itself by winning the referendum on membership of the European Union. Brexit should have been a moment of great victory for members of this faction, but their mellow was harshed by years of chaotic stasis amid negotiations over the exit deal. From 2010 to 2016, the Tories had a single leader, David Cameron; since Brexit, they have cycled through four. The conventional wisdom is that the party will lose the next election—not on cultural grounds, but on economic ones. Inflation is high, public services are faltering, the young are locked out of buying houses, energy prices are eye-watering, and wage growth has been sluggish since the 2008 financial crisis. One response to this challenge might be a conference focused on discussing how to promote economic growth, how to build houses in the face of NIMBY opposition, and how much immigration is acceptable to keep the price of goods and services low. Instead, NatCon was a safe space for people who had won a true populist triumph, in the shape of Brexit—and yet still felt like losers. “Why are so many people in Britain today so utterly disillusioned and despondent at the state of the country?” asked Matthew Goodwin, a politics professor at the University of Kent, in a typically doomy speech. “Why do so many of us walk around with a palpable sense that something has gone fundamentally wrong, as though we are trapped in a car with the doors locked being driven to some nightmarish destination?” Goodwin then segued into 10 minutes of pure populist beat poetry, shifting from the “glaring cultural problem” caused by immigration, through his parents’ divorce teaching him the value of marriage, and on to the assertion that “our schools have become a Wild West” because they teach children that there are 72 genders. As I wrote in my notebook, riffing on Molly Ivins: This probably sounded better in the original Hungarian. The first day of the conference was dominated by one subject: babies. In the opening session, Miriam Cates, a Conservative member of Parliament, identified low birth rates as the biggest problem facing the West, attributing the phenomenon both to concrete policy challenges and a liberal individualism that she deemed “completely powerless to resist a cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls.” Over the next two days, speakers offered a lot of this sort of thing—what George W. Bush might have described as “some weird shit.” Cates’s fellow Tory Danny Kruger devoted part of his speech to condemning a “new religion” of “Marxism and narcissism and paganism.” The historian David Starkey claimed that critical race theorists “do not care about Black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture.” I began to keep score of how many speakers asserted that Britain had been through a cultural revolution, the evidence for which was that students are quite left-wing and annoying. Over and over, this was attributed to “indoctrination.” Cates was followed by Yoram Hazony, the Israeli philosopher widely credited with coining the term national conservatism. (He has done his bit to avert babygeddon by having nine children.) Now, carping sorts might say that any phrase beginning with national and ending with -ism carries unfortunate echoes of the 1930s, and in branding terms should therefore be avoided as a political slogan, along with, say, “We make the trains run on time” or “Work makes you free.” Silence, peon: At NatCon’s invite-only dinner, the British commentator Douglas Murray had a different take. Nationalism is unfairly maligned; the real problem was those rascally Teutons taking everything too far as usual. “I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century,” he said in a clip released by the official NatCon Twitter feed. Undeterred by outside criticism, Hazony played the hits, attacking “woke neo-Marxism” and ending with an exhortation that we should all have more children and become more religious. He was in happy company because the next speaker was Jacob Rees-Mogg (six children, the last of whom is named Sixtus). Rees-Mogg, a devout Catholic, started playing a caricature of an English toff in early life and has not stopped yet. His speech took in Saint Thomas Aquinas, Charlemagne, the Treaty of Westphalia, habeas corpus, Edward the Confessor, and occasional snatches of Latin. “Are DeSantis speeches like this?” texted a friend on the other side of the hall. “Slightly less about Aquinas and the French monarchy,” I replied. “Slightly more about Disney.” This was history as an aesthetic rather than an academic discipline or even a private passion. When Rees-Mogg tried to write a serious book on history, The Victorians, it was almost universally panned, even by fellow anti-woke writers. Still, posing as a pop historian worked for Boris Johnson—whose references were always the most obvious ones you could imagine, such as Shakespeare and Winston Churchill—so I suppose there’s a market for it. The highlight of Rees-Mogg’s speech came when he attacked his own Conservative Party for insisting before the recent local elections that voters needed to present identification at polling stations. Widespread electoral fraud is simply not an issue in Britain, and so this felt like an extra hurdle imposed on the type of people (students, poor people, racial minorities) who might otherwise vote for Labour. Not so, offered Rees-Mogg in his aristocratic drawl. “Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections,” he said. “We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters, and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.” For a moment I warmed to Rees-Mogg; it was awfully decent of him to confess to an antidemocratic plot so early in the proceedings. At lunchtime, I was greeted by a colleague in the subterranean press room. “Hello,” he boomed. “I just popped out to father some children.” Looking at the program, I noticed that one panel had two men named Sebastian and no women. The audience in the hall was perhaps four-fifths male. Both of these awkward facts underlined a problem with all these paeans to natalism: Most women don’t want to hear them. In countries where women have access to education and the job market, the birth rate falls. In Britain, the demographic that could solve the baby drought, those under 45, is struggling to buy houses after decades of soaring prices, and also declining to vote for right-wing parties. What does national conservatism have to offer these people? They can’t put a crib in a makeshift shelter built from remaindered copies of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians. In one of the best speeches of the conference—because it was daringly tethered to empirical reality—the Substack author Ed West observed that “the world’s most effective form of contraception is the London housing market.” Returning to the hall, we all took our seats early for the afternoon’s main event, the biggest draw of the conference: Suella Braverman. The home secretary is the darling of the Conservative ultra-right, and their best hope of winning the party leadership if Prime Minister Rishi Sunak loses the next election. Her speech was interrupted by a protest against the government’s migration policy—Braverman wants to deport some of those seeking asylum in Britain to Rwanda, which will process their claims instead. (The policy has been framed as a response to high numbers of migrants trying to get to Britain in small boats across the English Channel.) First, one protester was dragged out shouting, “We welcome you, unless you come in a boat, unless you are brown.” The audience settled down, Braverman prepared to restart her speech, and then another protester stood up. I hoped this would last for some time, as it would undoubtedly be more interesting than the speech. Sadly, that was not to be. “Anyone else?” Braverman offered, brightly. Her speech came in two halves. The first was devoted to an immigrant success story: Her Indian father was displaced from Kenya in the 1960s, around the same time that her mother traveled from Mauritius to Scotland to work as a nurse. This hardworking, loving couple raised a child who would go on to be home secretary, and wasn’t it a real tribute to Britain that it recognized and rewarded her brilliance? The second half of the speech was devoted to explaining why other immigrants should be kept out. In fairness, her speech galloped around some other issues: grooming gangs that sexually exploit children, Britain’s role in abolishing slavery, women’s aforementioned lack of penises, the left’s perfidy in decolonizing the curriculum and tearing down statues. “White people do not exist in a special state of sin or guilt,” said Braverman. “Ha, that’s what she thinks,” I whispered to the person sitting next to me. “Some of us were raised Catholic.” And then came one perfect line to encapsulate the difference between national conservatism and the other, more milquetoast, strains. “Conservatism,” said Braverman, “is order or it is nothing.” After Braverman’s speech, people began to drift away, a migratory herd of navy blazers heading for the exits. I hung around for J. D. Vance, the senator from Ohio who once said Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler” before trying to pretend he didn’t mean that in a bad way. Vance is too much of a big shot to travel to London for a conference, and so he Zoomed in from what looked like an empty house. I found this intensely distracting: Was he a Zen monk? Had he just moved in? Had he just broken in? Vance quickly identified a reason national conservatism might struggle to prosper in Britain: This country has a large and successful party of the center-right that the public has repeatedly voted into office. If you want lower taxes, you don’t have to sign up for hard-core natalism too. “You only really have two viable political movements that can contest each other and govern the country,” Vance told the crowd. “And you have on the one side, a political movement that’s dedicated to open borders, that’s sort of ashamed of traditional British culture, and I think is very much of the view that people who live outside major metropolitan areas are to be scorned and looked down on.” Get ready for it: “And then, of course, on the other side you have the Labour Party.” The delegates loved it. This was a crowd primed to agree that mainstream Tories were traitors to the conservative cause, and that Sunak—a Brexiteer, a religiously observant Hindu, a hard-liner against drugs—was a wet liberal in disguise. Anger and dismay at the ruling Conservative Party was a repeated theme of the conference, and it squared the obvious contradiction of right-wingers complaining about their marginalization in a country that has been governed by the right for 13 years. “You know, as I do, that the solution is to be found in conservatism,” the Conservative member of Parliament John Hayes said. “But not in the desiccated, hollowed-out, sugar-free conservatism deemed to be just about acceptable by our liberal masters.” This movement cannot ever admit that it has won, because that would involve taking responsibility. Far better to dwell forever in the arcadia of the culture war, a perpetual-motion machine of grievance. Speaking of which, by the second day I realized that none of the many socially conservative speakers had mentioned homosexuality, which would have been a staple of a similar conference in 1990, or even in 2000. Sorry, gay men, your time as the biggest threat to Western civilization is over; childless women like me are the problem now. Abortion was also absent because it is a settled issue in Britain. Even the punch lines about transgender issues were curiously muted; instead of bloodcurdling Republican invocations of “child mutilation,” we mostly got weary eye rolls about the disputed existence of biological sex. That tonal difference between the U.S. and Britain was striking, and I think indicative of the two countries’ relative appetites for nationalism. Above all else, British people are suspicious of enthusiasm. This has proved a great defense against fanatics. (In the 1930s, P. G. Wodehouse caricatured Oswald Mosley’s fascists as the “Black Shorts,” while Nancy Mitford wrote an entire novel mocking her sisters’ eager embrace of Hitler.) Too many of the NatCon speakers came off like someone who would harangue you at a party about their pet cause, oblivious to your glazed eyes. Watching Matthew Goodwin work himself into a lather about the fall of civilization made me want to give him a cup of tea and a reassuring biscuit. And Britons like children, sure. But nine? Who likes children that much? To me, the two wittiest and most self-deprecating speakers, Tim Stanley and Ed West, were also the most intellectually interesting; the former criticized the “regrettable miserablism in Conservatism.” Stanley had earlier silenced the hall by asking what John 10:11 said. The answer is “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,” according to the King James Version. But a roomful of people suffused with love for “Judeo-Christian values” turned out to be hazy on their Bible verses. Eventually, the point of the meeting became clear. This wasn’t a political conference so much as a group-therapy session. Here were people who were obviously, startlingly correct about the evils of the modern world, and yet they weren’t being listened to. There must be some mistake. In that context, the endless, conspiratorial references to the “elite” began to make sense. The elite is not NatCon chair Christopher DeMuth, who attended Harvard before serving in the Nixon and Reagan administrations. It is not the conference’s British organizer, James Orr, a divinity professor at Cambridge University. It is not Douglas Murray or Father Marcus Walker, who said the prayer before the conference’s private dinner, though both were at Oxford University at the same time I was. It is not Danny Kruger, who told delegates that conservatives had to fight the “intelligentsia, the globalized elite, whose loyalties are to everyone and no one,” and who went to the same boarding school as Prince William. It is not Charlemagne, either, even if he was a literal emperor. The elite is students. The elite is the “woke mind virus.” The elite is a great shadowy Them composed of anyone an inch closer to the political center than the national conservatives are. The elite is whoever is stopping you from getting whatever you want without having to make any compromises. Throughout the conference, delegates kept returning to one question: Can national conservatism succeed in Britain? The answer has to be no. Just look at Brexit, that great populist triumph now dismissed even by its proponents as an unfulfilled dream, a mere shadow of what they were promised. Whatever happens next, I confidently predict we will discover that true national conservatism has never been tried. © 2023 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Samtidigt som USA och andra nationer i väst ser till att rusta Ukraina militärt och ger fullt moraliskt stöd är tonen en helt annan från andra delar av världen. Såväl Kina som Brasilien och Sydafrika har på olika sätt framhållit att de vill se ett slut på kriget och försökt få Ukraina till förhandlingsbordet, skriver Washington Posts utrikesanalytiker Ishaan Tharoor. Han konstaterar att flera av de som vill medla själva har intresse av att det inte slutar med en total förlust för Ryssland. Och Ukrainas respons har än så länge varit tydlig: De som vill medla borde se till att vara på rätt sida av historien. (Svensk översättning av Omni). While the United States and other Western countries vowed to arm Ukraine to the hilt, countries elsewhere pushed for a cessation in hostilities and a negotiated peace. By Ishaan Tharoor 19 May, 2023 The leaders summit of Group of Seven nations in Japan taking place at the end of this week has one issue at the top of its agenda: Ukraine. President Biden and his allies in this small, chummy club of industrialized powers are united in their desire to support Kyiv’s plans to wrest back control of major stretches of its territory lost to Russia’s invasion. Before the summit, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did a quick spin through Rome, Berlin, Paris and London — the capitals of Europe’s G-7 members — to gin up support and further commitments in military aid, including fighter jets. Deliberations in the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where the summit is being hosted, will involve discussion of ways to raise the pressure on Russia. Zelensky is expected to virtually beam into the proceedings. But tough questions loom. Even within the G-7 — arguably, the most close-knit major bloc on the world scene — there are differing views over how far support for Ukraine can go, or to what extent Russia must be defeated. Concerns surround the looming Ukrainian counteroffensive. While Western diplomats and their Ukrainian counterparts speak confidently in public of major territorial gains on the horizon, we know that U.S. officials are more skeptical about what Ukraine can accomplish along its long front with Russia. Some reports suggest the United States has even forecast an indefinite war of attrition that could one day resemble the frozen conflict splitting the Korean Peninsula. And so, even as the like-minded allies of the G-7 puzzle over the way forward, other global actors are trying to find their own solutions. Almost since the start of Russia’s full-fledged invasion in February 2022, there has been a gap between the ways in which the conflict is perceived in Europe and North America and in large parts of the rest of the world, where solidarity with Ukraine is a bit more sparse. A narrative tension set in: While the United States and other Western countries vowed to arm Ukraine to the hilt, countries elsewhere pushed for a cessation in hostilities and a negotiated peace. A flurry of diplomatic initiatives have been put forward in recent months. On Wednesday, Chinese envoy Li Hui, Beijing’s special representative for Eurasian affairs, was in Kyiv, holding talks with a series of high-level Ukrainian officials during a two-day trip before continuing his mission to a handful of other European capitals. His visit was preceded earlier this month by Celso Amorim, special adviser on international affairs to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who touted a nonaligned “peace club” to mediate a truce between Russia and Ukraine. Lula also triggered Washington’s ire by accusing the West of helping to fuel the conflict with its shipments of weapons. Skeptics believe such efforts are half-baked and play into Russia’s hands. But numerous world statesmen still want to give it ago. On Thursday, Vatican sources confirmed that Pope Francis was keen to dispatch his own envoys to Moscow and Kyiv. Earlier in the week, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the formation of a delegation of leaders from six African countries — including his counterparts from Zambia, Senegal, Republic of Congo, Uganda and Egypt — to meet separately with Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin in a bid “to find a peaceful resolution to the devastating conflict.” Four of these countries abstained from a U.N. vote last year that condemned the Russian invasion, while South Africa has been accused by U.S. officials of proving weapons and ammunition to Russia via a cargo ship that secretly docked at a naval base near Cape Town last December. Ramaphosa’s government has denied the allegations; it maintains a neutral stance on Ukraine, though has deep links to the Kremlin, in part because of years of Soviet support for South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. Ukrainian officials are categorical in how they view such overtures, at present, warning that Russia was not a genuine interlocutor and that Putin could be trusted. “One cannot make a mediation with Putin,” Zelensky said on Italian television last weekend, after meeting the pope. “He just knows how to kill. It is not a question of the Vatican, Latin America or China.” China’s initiative is arguably the most substantive, given Beijing’s significant leverage over Moscow. But analysts see its proposals as essentially working to preserve a Russian advantage and undermine Ukraine. “A total Russian defeat does not serve Chinese interest, especially if it leads to Putin’s demise,” Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told CNBC. “Russia is an increasingly important partner for [Chinese President] Xi Jinping. There is no other country that can help weaken U.S. leadership in the world and revise the international order.” Unsurprisingly, it seems Li’s efforts in Kyiv bore little fruit. On Wednesday, a statement from Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry relayed Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba’s discussions with the Chinese envoy, saying that he “emphasized that Ukraine does not accept any proposals that would involve the loss of its territories or the freezing of the conflict” — two elements of China’s publicized peace plan. On queue, Russian missiles fell on the Ukrainian capital. Ukrainian officials are at pains to stress that such a stance does not mean they don’t want peace. “Our main goal is to resolve the war,” Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova told me via Zoom on Wednesday. “We are the most interested party when it comes to peace.” But she added that the terms of any truce between Ukraine and Russia “would not and should not be an appeasement of the aggressor.” That means a withdrawal of Russian forces from all of the Ukrainian territory they occupy before a political settlement. Dzhaparova pointed to outsize Russian influence in many countries in the so-called global South. She visited India last month, where she observed a “deficit of information” about Ukraine, given both its geographical remove from South Asia as well as the imprint of “Soviet epoch thinking” that persuaded many of her Indian interlocutors that Ukraine and Russia were ultimately part of the same political or national entity. “I had to really put some effort to explain that we’re not one nation, that this is exactly why we have this war, which is an existential war,” she said, explaining how Putin could not countenance a Ukraine that sees itself as part of the West and as a “European nation.” Dzhaparova’s message to the countries seeking to mediate the conflict was stark: They should “be on the right side of history,” she said, and “not support evil and not be part of this evil.” © 2023 The Washington Post. Sign up for the Today's Worldview newsletter here.