PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron called leaders from key European Union nations and the United Kingdom to his ornate Elysee Palace on Monday for an emergency meeting on how to react to the U.S. diplomatic blitz on Ukraine, which left the once rock-solid partner as a potential political liability.

The first visit by top U.S. officials to Europe has left the impression that the Trump administration was ready to embrace the Kremlin while it cold-shouldered many of its age-old European allies.

Despite belligerent warnings for months ahead of Donald Trump’s reelection as U.S. president, EU leaders publicly ignored the ominous forebodings and somehow hoped Trump would stand side by side with Europe, as it would finally start to act on beefing up its defenses and become less reliant on the firepower of Washington.

But a flurry of speeches by Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during their initial visits to Europe last week questioned both Europe’s security commitments and its fundamental democratic principles. Macron said their stinging rebukes and threats of non-cooperation in the face of military danger felt like a shock to the system.

The tipping point came when Trump decided to upend years of U.S. policy by holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in hopes of ending the Russia-Ukraine war. Then, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia on Saturday all but ruled out the inclusion of other Europeans in any Ukraine peace talks.

Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, called the week “an existential moment. It’s a moment where Europe has to stand up.” It is where Macron hopes to step in with Monday’s meeting. Even if Jean-Noël Barrot, Macron’s foreign minister, sought to play down the significance of the emergency huddle of Europe’s main leaders, the weekend scramble to set up the meeting underscored something much more fundamental.

Ever since World War II, the United States and western European nations have basically walked in lockstep as they confronted the Soviet Union during the Cold War right up to the increasingly aggressive actions of current-day Russia close to its borders. Even if there had long been U.S. complaints about the reluctance of many European NATO nations to step up their defense efforts, they never boiled up to the political surface as they have over the past days.

On Monday, Macron will have afternoon talks with the leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark and the European Union on how to deal with Europe’s security quandary. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will also attend.

French officials said no firm decisions are expected to emerge beyond a show of unity of European leaders.

“There is a wind of unity blowing over Europe, as we perhaps have not felt since the COVID period,” said Barrot, referring to the pandemic in 2020 when the 27 EU nations had to stand side by side to stave off a health catastrophe.

A strong U.S. link, though, will remain essential for the foreseeable future since it will take many years before European nations can ratchet up defense equipment production and integrate it into an effective force.

That U.S. bond also applies to dealing with war in Ukraine, said U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “U.S. support will remain critical and a U.S. security guarantee is essential for a lasting peace, because only the U.S. can deter Putin from attacking again,” Starmer wrote in Monday’s Daily Telegraph.

European nations are bent on boosting Ukraine where they can, and EU nations see eye to eye when it comes to upping defense spending. However, even if there is a general consensus to move beyond the goal of spending 2% of gross domestic product on defense, it is hardly clear how to get to 3%.

Some EU nations are insisting on an agreement on joint borrowing for massive defense projects, while others are insisting it is the task of the nations that lag in spending to get to the 2% threshold first. That issue is also set to be discussed at the meeting.

But some of the EU nations balked at the thought of the restrictive Elysee meeting with only a few chosen leaders while others were left in the cold. For an uncomfortable number of decisions, the EU needs the backing of all 27 nations. It raises the issue of veto power, which Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as a staunch Putin ally, has already threatened to use on plenty of occasions.

Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar said the selective list of invitees was proof that the EU member states are not treated equally. “This is not Europe that commands respect abroad. This is not the Europe that would be a serious partner to the North American ally.”

Casert reported from Brussels. Associated Press writer Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade, Serbia contributed to this report.

MUNICH (AP) — European leaders took steps Sunday to answer assertive U.S. efforts to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, as France announced a meeting of continental leaders and Baltic countries called for new steps to strengthen Kyiv’s hand in any future talks.

The jockeying for position by Europe, Ukraine’s top military and financial backer along with the U.S., comes as the Trump administration has quickly sought to mediate an end to the fighting three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

With Moscow’s forces making some territorial gains in eastern Ukraine in recent months, Finnish President Alexander Stubb on the last day of the Munich Security Conference called for “maximum pressure on Russia” through sanctions and asset freezes in the lead-up to any talks.

He laid out three phases: “pre-negotiation,” ceasefire and long-term peace talks.

“The first phase is the pre-negotiation, and this is a moment when we need to rearm Ukraine and put maximum pressure on Russia, which means sanctions, which means frozen assets, so that Ukraine begins these negotiations from a position of strength,” Stubb said.

French President Emmanuel Macron is rallying European leaders, with his foreign minister announcing an emergency “working meeting” on Ukraine’s next steps after recent U.S. announcements.

Speaking to France-Info on Sunday, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot sought to project a united front: “A wind of unity is blowing over Europe, as we perhaps have not felt since the COVID period.”

Macron had called for “consultations between European leaders on the situation in Ukraine and the security challenges in Europe.”

He will host an informal afternoon meeting Monday with the leaders of Germany, the U.K., Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as European Council President Antonio Costa, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

The discussions could continue in other formats, according to the French statement, with the goal of “bringing together all partners interested in peace and security in Europe.”

News reports said British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk were among those expected in Paris.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s push for a quick way out of Russia’s all-out war in Ukraine stirred concern and uncertainty in Munich.

After a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, Trump said that he and Putin would likely meet soon to negotiate a peace deal over Ukraine. Trump later assured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy he also would have a seat at the table. U.S. officials have indicated that European nations, however, wouldn’t be involved.

“Don’t underestimate Trump as a negotiator. I genuinely believe that Putin is baffled and afraid what might be coming from there,” Stubb said. “Right now, the ball is in our court here in Europe. We need to convince the Americans where’s the value added, and then get back into the table.”

“I think in Europe we need to talk less and do more,” he said later.

President Edgars Rinkēvičs of Latvia, which like Finland borders Russia, agreed that “if we are strong, if we have something to offer … then we are going to be interesting to the United States. If you just continue having those nice conferences, talking and whining, then we are not going to be interesting to our own publics very soon.”

He also noted “a point that probably went unnoticed Friday” in Munich, which was European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s “important announcement” that she would propose a temporary waiver of EU budgetary rules in crisis situations — this time to allow for extra defense spending.

“I can announce that I will propose to activate the ‘escape clause’ for defense investments,” she said. “This will allow member states to substantially increase their defense expenditure. Of course, we will have to do this in a controlled and conditional way.”

The three-day Munich conference was a hub of crisscrossing diplomacy on issues of politics, economics, and defense and security, with top envoys on hand from places as diverse as Syria and Saudi Arabia, and Japan and South Korea, as well as many European leaders.

On Saturday, Zelenskyy called for the creation of an “ armed forces of Europe ” to better stand up to an expansionist Russia that also could threaten the 27-nation EU.

In an interview with U.S. television network NBC that aired on Sunday, Zelenskyy ratcheted up his warnings and said that Ukraine had shared intelligence with partners indicating that Putin was “preparing to train 150,000 people mostly on the territory of Belarus.” He also said that Europe has fewer brigades than Russia.

“The risk that Russia will occupy Europe is 100%,” he said in comments to the “Meet the Press” program recorded Friday.

On Saturday, Zelenskyy told The Associated Press that he had directed his ministers not to sign off on a proposed agreement to give the United States access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, because the document was too focused on U.S. interests.

The proposal was a key part of his talks with U.S. Vice President JD Vance on the sidelines of the Munich event, according to one current and one former senior Ukrainian official familiar with the talks. Zelenskyy’s decision not to sign a deal, at least for now, was described as “shortsighted” by a senior White House official.

Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya told reporters in Munich on Saturday that he has asked U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to exclude Japan from steel and aluminum tariffs as well as from reciprocal tariff measures.

Iwaya, who had a brief chat with the top U.S. diplomat on the sidelines of the conference, said that he also “raised the issue” of automobile tariffs, though he gave no further details. If imposed, the impact of the tariffs on the Japanese auto industry would be huge, experts say.

Associated Press writers Joanna Kozlowska in London, Angela Charlton and Thomas Adamson in Paris, and Jamey Keaten in Lyon, France, contributed to this report.

Extreme temperatures — mostly heat — are projected to kill as many as 2.3 million people in Europe by the end of the century unless countries get better at reducing carbon pollution and adapting to hotter conditions, a new study says.

Currently, cold temperatures kill more people in Europe than heat by large margins.

But a team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine used climate simulations of different scenarios and looked at death rates in 854 cities.

They found as it warms cold deaths lessen slowly, but heat deaths soar rapidly.

With few reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases and little adaptation like air conditioning and cooling centers, Italy, southern Spain and Greece should see massive increases in the rate of heat deaths due to climate change.

On the flip side, much of Scandinavia and the United Kingdom will see fewer temperature-related deaths, mostly due to moderating cold temperatures, the study in Monday’s journal Nature Medicine found.

But even in the most optimistic scenarios — with carbon dioxide emissions from coal, oil and gas cut sharply and massive increases in adaptation — there’s a net increase in temperature-related deaths as the world warms, said study lead author Pierre Masselot, an environmental epidemiologist and statistician.

The drop in cold deaths up north are in places not as populated as places further south, where the heat really kicks in and hurts, Masselot said.

“The Mediterranean is a so-called climate hotspot,” Masselot said. “It’s a region that is warming much quicker than the rest of the world. And Malta is right in the middle of it.”

The study projects Malta’s temperature-related death rate to increase by 269 people for every 100,000 by the end of the century. By contrast, Ireland’s will go down slightly, 15 per 100,000 people.

In general, western Europe being wealthier fares better than eastern Europe, Masselot said.

Several heat waves have killed thousands of people in the last few years in Europe, but one in 2003 is the biggest with about 70,000 deaths.

Big cities with lots of people near the Mediterranean can see the bodies pile up through the rest of the century. The study says in the worst case they studied Barcelona could see nearly a quarter million extra temperature-related deaths, while Rome and Naples get close to 150,000 deaths.

In a scenario with carbon pollution only slightly worse than current trends and no extra adaptation to heat, Masselot’s team found more than 5.8 million excess heat deaths just from climate change, but nearly 3.5 million fewer cold deaths too. The team has a interactive website where cities and different factors can be adjusted.

Masselot’s team was also able to isolate out climate change, removing a major factor of an aging population which made the study even more useful and impressive, said University of Washington public health and climate scientist Kristie Ebi, who wasn’t part of the study.

“This very much lines up with what we would expect,” said Dr. Courtney Howard, a Canadian emergency room physician and vice chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance. She was not part of the study. “When you think about summertime daytime temperatures in places like Rome — they start to get up into the 40s (104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit)…. That’s very heat stress/heat stroke territory for healthy young people and very dangerous for older people, particularly if they don’t have air conditioning.”

Europe having older housing stock and not much air conditioning needs massive amount of adaptation, such as central air, more green space and cooling centers, to lower the projected death rates, Masselot said. North America is less likely to have such a strong trend, he said.

Another factor is the aging of Europe makes its population more vulnerable, Masselot said.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

The last time Belarus staged a presidential election in 2020, authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko was declared the winner with 80% of the vote. That triggered cries of fraud, months of protests and a harsh crackdown with thousands of arrests.

Not wanting to risk such unrest again by those opposing his three decades of iron-fisted rule, Lukashenko advanced the timing of the 2025 election — from the warmth of August to frigid January, when demonstrators are less likely to fill the streets.

With many of his political opponents either jailed or exiled abroad, the 70-year-old Lukashenko is back on the ballot, and when the election concludes on Sunday, he is all but certain to add a seventh term as the only leader most people in post-Soviet Belarus have ever known.

Here’s what to know about Belarus, its election and its relationship with Russia:

Belarus was part of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. The Slavic nation of 9 million people is sandwiched between Russia and Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, the latter three all NATO members. It was overrun by Nazi Germany in World War II.

It’s been closely allied with Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin — himself in power for a quarter century.

Lukashenko, a former state farm director, was first elected in 1994, riding public anger over a catastrophic plunge in living standards after chaotic and painful free-market reforms. He promised to combat corruption.

Throughout his rule, he’s relied on subsidies and political support from Russia, allowing it to use Belarusian territory to invade Ukraine in 2022 and later agreeing to host some of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons.

Lukashenko was dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” early in his tenure, and he has lived up to that nickname, harshly silencing dissent and extending his rule through elections that the West has called neither free nor fair.

An open admirer of the Soviet Union, he has restored Soviet-style controls on the economy, discouraged use of the Belarusian language in favor of Russian, and pushed for abandoning the country’s red-and-white national flag in favor of one similar to what it used as a Soviet republic.

Belarus’ top security agency kept its fearsome Soviet-era name of the KGB, and it’s the only country in Europe to keep the death penalty, with executions carried out with a gunshot to the back of the head.

As he bargained with the Kremlin over the years for more subsidies, Lukashenko periodically tried to appease the West by easing repressions. Such flirtations ended after he unleashed a violent suppression of dissent after the 2020 election.

That election to his sixth term was widely seen at home and abroad as rigged, and it sparked months of massive protests, the largest ever seen in Belarus.

Authorities responded with a sweeping crackdown in which over 65,000 people were arrested, thousands were beaten by police and hundreds of independent media outlets and nongovernmental organizations were closed and outlawed, drawing Western sanctions.

Leading opposition figures have either been imprisoned or fled the country. Human rights activists say Belarus holds about 1,300 political prisoners, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, the founder of the country’s top rights group, Viasna.

Although Lukashenko’s current term doesn’t expire until summer, the election was moved up in what officials said would allow him “to exercise his powers at the initial stage of strategic planning.”

Belarusian political analyst Valery Karbalevich gave a different reason, saying “There won’t be mass protests in freezing January,” he said.

In other maneuvering, Lukashenko has pardoned 250 people described as political prisoners by rights activists.

The pardons, however, come amid heightened repressions aimed at uprooting any remaining signs of dissent. Hundreds have been arrested in raids that targeted relatives and friends of political prisoners. Other arrests include participants in online chats organized by residents of apartment buildings in various cities.

Unlike the 2020 election, Lukashenko faces only token challengers, with other opposition candidates rejected for the ballot by the Central Election Commission. The election began with early voting Tuesday and concludes Sunday.

“The politicians who once dared to challenge Lukashenko are now literally rotting in prison in torture conditions, there has been no contact with them for over a year, and some of them are in very poor health,” said Viasna representative Pavel Sapelka.

Opposition leader-in-exile Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who challenged Lukashenko in the 2020 election and was forced to flee the country afterward, says the latest vote is a farce and urged Belarusians to vote against every candidate. Her husband, activist Siarhei Tsikhanouski, tried to run four years ago but was jailed and remains imprisoned.

In December 2024, Lukashenko and Putin signed a treaty that gave security guarantees to Belarus that included the possible use of Russian nuclear weapons.

The pact followed Moscow’s revision of its nuclear doctrine, which for the first time placed Belarus under the Russian nuclear umbrella amid tensions with the West over the war in Ukraine.

Lukashenko says Belarus is hosting dozens of Russian tactical nuclear weapons. Their deployment extends Russia’s capability to target Ukraine and NATO allies in Europe.

He also said Belarus will prepare to host Russia’s Oreshnik hypersonic missile that was used in Ukraine for the first time in November. Putin said the missiles could be deployed to Belarus in the second half of 2025, remaining under Moscow’s control while Minsk will select the targets.