Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that Canada’s old relationship with the United States, “based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over”.

Speaking to reporters in Ottawa after a cabinet meeting, Carney said Canadians must “fundamentally reimagine our economy” in the face of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

He said Canada would respond with retaliatory tariffs that will have “maximum impact” on the US.

Trump announced on Wednesday he would target imported vehicles and vehicle parts with a 25% tax, stating: “This is permanent.”

Carney, the Liberal Party leader, called the original Canada-US Automotive Products Agreement signed in 1965 the most important deal in his lifetime.

“That’s finished with these tariffs,” he said in French.

He continued that Canada can sustain an auto industry with the US tariffs provided the government and business community work to “reimagine” and “retool” the industry.

Canada needs to build an economy Canadians can control, he said, and that would include rethinking it’s trade relationship with other partners.

It remains to be seen whether Canadians can have a strong trading relationship with the United States going forward, he added.

Carney has switched his campaign plans ahead of next month’s general election to confront the latest import duties.

The US has already partially imposed a blanket 25% tariff on Canadian goods, along with a 25% duty on all aluminium and steel imports. Canada has so far retaliated with about C$60bn ($42bn; £32bn) of tariffs on US goods.

The new car tariffs will come into effect on 2 April, with charges on businesses importing vehicles starting the next day, the White House said. Taxes on parts are set to start in May or later.

Early on Thursday morning, Trump warned Canada and the EU against joining forces versus the US in the trade war.

“If the European Union works with Canada in order to do economic harm to the USA, large scale Tariffs, far larger than currently planned, will be placed on them both,” he posted on his Truth Social platform.

Carney met his ministers in Ottawa on Thursday morning to “discuss trade options”. He had originally been scheduled to campaign in Quebec.

He said during his press conference that President Trump had reached out to him last night to schedule a call, and that it would take place in the “next day or two”.

If it takes place, this would be the first call between the pair.

Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservatives, the main opposition party, called the tariffs “unjustified and unprovoked”.

The NDP, a left-wing party that previously helped prop up the minority Liberal government of ex-PM Justin Trudeau, also switched its campaign plans on Thursday.

Jagmeet Singh, the NDP leader, spent the day meeting union leaders and car workers in Windsor, Ontario, an auto manufacturing hub across from Detroit, Michigan.

He said the US tariffs are a “betrayal” against a close ally, saying that “Donald Trump has started an illegal trade war with Canada” for “absolutely no reason”.

He said any auto company that moves their operations out of Canada because of the tariffs should be blocked from selling cars in the country.

Canadians go to the polls on 28 April.

The US imported about eight million cars last year – accounting for about $240bn in trade and roughly half of overall sales.

Earlier this month, after he became Liberal leader and before he was sworn in as prime minister, Carney gave a victory speech in which he lambasted the US president.

“A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” he said, while assailing his main rival, Poilievre.

Mexico is the top supplier of cars to the US, followed by South Korea, Japan, Canada and Germany.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, in a news conference on Thursday morning, declined to comment directly on the new auto tariffs.

She vowed her government would “always defend Mexico”, and fight to maintain job creation and protect Mexican companies affected by import taxes.

She said Mexico would provide an “integral response” to the Trump administration’s tariffs on 3 April, the day after many are due to come into effect.

Sheinbaum has repeatedly noted that many US car companies have operations in both Mexico and Canada, which are bound by a North American free trade agreement that Trump himself negotiated during his first term in the White House.

“Of course, there shouldn’t be tariffs,” she said on Thursday. “That’s the essence of the free trade agreement.”

The number of children in poverty in the UK has reached its highest level since comparative records began in 2002.

In the year to April 2024, there were 4.45 million children living in a household of relative low income after housing costs are deducted – the government’s own standard measure for poverty.

The figure, released by the Department for Work and Pensions, is an increase of 100,000 children from the previous year – and equates to 31% of children in the UK.

The figure has risen sharply since 2021 and the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) predicts 4.8 million children will be in poverty by the end of this Parliament in 2029-30.

It is calling for the government to scrap the two-child benefit limit in its upcoming child poverty strategy, and to pause the recent proposals for wider benefit cuts.

The two-child cap prevents parents from claiming universal credit or child tax credit for a third child, with a few exemptions.

The relative poverty definition – which is measured both before and after housing costs – refers to people living in households with income below 60% of the country’s median average figure.

Separately, the Scottish government has missed its legal targets for reducing child poverty for 2023-24.

“The latest data is a stark reminder of the scale of deprivation among families, with close to a third of children in Britain now living in poverty,” said Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation think tank.

“This is before any additional impact from new benefit cuts and a weak living standards outlook, which are set to reduce incomes across the poorest half of working-age households by £500 over the next five years.”

Speaking in the House of Commons on Thursday, work and pensions minister Sir Stephen Timms said the figures “show just what a huge challenge” the “very high level of child poverty that’s left by the previous government” is for Labour.

He added: “We’re going to be addressing that”.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed a shake-up to the benefits system on Wednesday. This includes halving incapacity benefits for new claimants, and tighter criteria around the Personal Independence Payment for those with long term physical or mental health conditions.

An extra 250,000 people, including 50,000 children, will be pushed into relative poverty by these changes, according to the government’s own impact assessment.

In the three years to 2024, the highest child poverty rates after housing costs were in the West Midlands and London, although London’s levels were among the lowest if housing was not factored in.

One in five families who had one child were living in poverty, compared with 44% of those who had three children or more.

The Resolution Foundation echoed calls for the government to scrap the two-child benefit limit and wants the government to extend free school meal entitlement to all families on Universal Credit.

When Labour took power in the summer of 2024, after the period covered by the figures, the prime minister announced the creation of a child poverty task force, promising to leave “no stone unturned” in tackling the root causes of the issue.

The cross-government child poverty strategy is due to be published in spring 2025.

“No-one should be living in poverty, and we know that the best route out of poverty for struggling families is well paid, secure work, a Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said.

“That is why we are reforming our broken welfare system so it helps people into good jobs, boosting living standards and putting money in people’s pockets,” they added.

When Cyclone Alfred barrelled over Australia’s east coast earlier this month, it also blew the government’s election plans off course.

Hoping to capitalise on some rare good news on interest rates, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was on the cusp of announcing an April polling date. Instead he had to pivot and focus on responding to the natural disaster. It was, one Labor Minister told me, a decision taken from him by “an act of God”.

You might say that’s been a theme of his government: big plans often derailed by unpleasant surprises – trying global economic conditions and a cost-of-living crisis which is battering many countries, foreign wars and tricky geopolitics, rising national divisions, and now giant storms.

Albanese, who leads the Labor Party, wants a second term to reset.

Standing in his way on 3 May is Peter Dutton – a conservative who leads the Liberal Party, the dominant member of the so-called Coalition with the National Party of Australia – who just two years ago polling indicated was deeply unpopular.

But the race between them is now so tight and the rise of independents or minor parties such that many are expecting a hung parliament.

So how has it unravelled for Prime Minister Albanese?

His victory in May 2022 was seen as a fresh start after nine years of conservative rule.

Climate action was big on the agenda, as was addressing the cost-of-living and restoring stability to the country’s leadership.

But the legacy he eyed for his government was on Indigenous affairs. He opened his victory speech reiterating a pledge to hold a historic referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, an advisory body that would inform the government on issues that affect First Nations people.

Albanese spent most of 2023 campaigning for a “Yes” vote. This was the moment, he hoped, that First Nations people would get constitutional recognition – finally catching up with other former British colonies – and that Australia would begin mending what many see as a very broken relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

But the proposal was decisively rejected, leaving many Indigenous people feeling disappointed and betrayed. Albanese was also left licking his wounds after a damaging campaign.

Some critics blamed confusion and misinformation for why about 60% of Australians voted “No”. But while Albanese was campaigning for the “Yes” vote, opposition leader Peter Dutton campaigned for “No”, attacking Albanese for spending money on the referendum while a cost-of-living crisis intensified.

“[Dutton] not only won on the referendum, but also he won on positioning Labor as the government that’s not completely focused on the issues that matter to Australia,” says Kos Samaras, political consultant and a former Labor strategist.

During Albanese’s tenure, interest rates have been put up 12 times (and cut once, in February), inflation soared post-pandemic, the country’s housing crisis deepened, and Australians increasingly felt stretched.

Though the prime minister would lay the blame for many of those issues at the previous coalition government’s feet, voters want to know who is best placed to deal with all of them now.

In Anthony Albanese’s victory speech in 2022, he said Australia was “the greatest country on earth”. Australian voters though are increasingly questioning whether that’s still true – and perhaps more importantly, whether politicians from traditional parties are the ones able to fix it.

So though many are disillusioned with Labor, this won’t necessarily translate as a vote for Dutton’s Coalition at the ballot box.

Support for minor parties and independents reached record levels at the previous election, and similar is expected this time around. If neither party reaches the magic number of 76 seats in the House of Representatives, which poll after poll paints as unlikely, independent candidates could be the kingmakers of any future government.

If that happens, Australia would be another page in a story unfolding all over the world – disenfranchised voters seeking more radical solutions and voting for change. In many places this is a real threat to democracy as people stop trusting the system.

But while Australia faces the same challenges as other parts of the world, a few quirks in its electoral system have thus far guarded against more radical swings that we’ve seen in other countries, like the US, France and Germany.

Experts all agree that mandatory voting is a key factor in Australia’s political stability. In the 2022 elections, just under 90% of the population voted – much, much higher than the average OECD turnout of 69%. The fine for not voting in a federal election is a mere A$20 but there’s a sense of duty here to go out and vote.

What that means is politicians don’t have to mobilise their bases – turnout is a given, it’s just about pushing your narrative. Where voting is optional, there’s a tendency for special interest groups to become overly influential as those who are less engaged decide not to cast a ballot. Plus, if everyone, no matter their politics, education or their wealth, goes to vote, it tends to pull the result towards a more representative centre.

“[Australia’s] elections are decided in the middle,” says the country’s chief election analyst Antony Green. “That means getting your message through those people who aren’t paying much attention.”

The other big stabiliser for Australia, say experts, is preferential voting – where voters effectively number their candidates in order of who they want to win. It’s why in recent years the Greens have emerged on the left and One Nation on the right but still, Labor and the Coalition dominate. Experts say preferential voting tempers the effects of polarisation and forces the two major parties to appeal to people who aren’t necessarily voting for them first in order to receive their next preferences, which also helps moderate policy.

While the campaign will focus on problems close to home, the candidates would be foolish to ignore the global political headwinds.

During last year’s presidential election, few analysts I spoke to seemed to think a Trump White House would massively impact Australia, this comparatively small and distant democracy.

But five months feels like a lifetime in today’s politics. Not a day goes by without Donald Trump making the headlines and Australians are tuning in to watch.

With Trump’s obvious disregard for longstanding alliances as well as constant talk of tariffs and trade wars, all this plays a part in Australians’ fears about their place in the world – and importantly, the future of what is arguably its most important diplomatic and military relationship.

Peter Dutton argues he’d be much better than Albanese at dealing with Trump. But there are doubts that anyone really knows how to handle this new administration – politicians of all stripes around the globe are feeling their way with how best to manage their relationship with the US.

With Albanese firing the starting gun today, Australians have just over a month of intense campaigning to help them determine who they want to lead them through the next three years.

While Labor’s handling of the ex-cyclone Alfred has improved its chances – the Prime Minister’s approval ratings have risen to their highest level in 18 months – polling in recent months has pointed towards a Dutton administration.

It’s still incredibly close, and the Albanese government faces the unenviable prospect of being the first which fails to win a second term since 1931.

I remember 1974 well. With inflation on the rise, the government had been locked in battle with trade unions over worker pay. The government appeared paralysed: stand up to the miners and strikes could shut down the power system, but give in and pay them more money and inflation would rocket.

And then the global oil crisis came out of nowhere. It threw economies, including Britain’s, into chaos. The government introduced a three-day week. Power cuts were common – we would be plunged into darkness without warning. And seemingly, the government just expected us to deal with it.

This was also the year I began presenting the BBC’s current affairs programme Panorama. We spent a lot of time debating these issues. People came on with all kinds of different ideas of what to do.

There were even suggestions that what the country really needed to take back control from the unions was a military takeover – a coup.

There was another idea out there too. It was proposed by the Conservative politician Keith Joseph and was entirely radical – so removed from the mainstream, in fact, that during filming of Panorama, Joseph turned to the production team and asked exasperatedly if they understood what he meant.

That idea was the free market.

This meant Britain departing from the post World War Two consensus that government should control the economy and that instead if you left the markets alone, they would deliver the country greater prosperity and security.

If, in 2025, the idea sounds anything but radical, that’s exactly the point.

What we saw in the UK in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher’s government was just how quickly the free market transitioned from a radical idea into the new reality. Then before long it became what many assumed was the system that would last forever.

US President Donald Trump is a billionaire businessman who has clearly done well financially out of capitalism. But suddenly, thanks in part to him, the free market system finds itself under assault like never before.

It might yet weather the storm. However others are asking if the free market system is fatally flawed and doomed to failure?

So much of what Thatcher did in the wake of her 1983 general election victory seems so obvious now. We take it for granted that private companies play a pivotal role in providing our water, electricity, gas, railways, ports and freight.

But at the time few believed it possible to do what she had done – it seemed like a fantasy world, completely detached from how things had been done post war.

I was six when the war ended. There was rationing – coupons that allowed you to buy meat or clothes, or of course, sweets. But out of these hard times and on the heels of victory, a new vision of society was emerging in Britain.

With Clement Attlee’s landslide election victory in July 1945, for the first time in Britain’s political history a majority cast their votes for a party ostensibly dedicated to socialism.

But more than that, a new consensus on how the country should run emerged, with those leading the Labour and Conservative parties singing from a broadly similar sheet.

“We have built our defences against want and sickness, and we’re proud of it,” was uttered not by a Labour prime minister but by Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister from 1957 to 1963. This had been how things were done.

However not everyone bought into the consensus. Antony Fisher, who was a chicken farmer, was exasperated by what he saw as the meddling of the Egg Marketing Board. He set up the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank, inspired Keith Joseph and he in turn got Thatcher’s ear.

That the current assault on the free market is coming, in part, from a Republican US president seems all the more ironic given how popular Thatcher’s reforms were with the American right.

Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan shared a similar world view, and Trump has spoken of his admiration for the two, albeit with the caveat that he didn’t agree with some of Reagan’s trade policies.

Thatcher was convinced that the country would be much better off if gas and water and electricity were taken out of the hands of the state. And sold on the open market. The free market. Just like buying a loaf of bread.

The Thatcher government’s big idea was that they weren’t just going to sell the shares in state owned utilities to big businesses or investors. They were going to offer them to the British people.

In December 1984 shares in British Telecom (BT) went on sale. The next morning, the numbers were staggering: more than two million Britons were now BT shareholders.

And Thatcher began to realise that selling off these companies wasn’t just about breaking the shackles of government control. It could be something bigger – turning every person in Britain into a capitalist and in doing so making capitalism popular.

In Britain, by the end of the 1980s, the scale of transformation was staggering. The sum of £60bn was raised by selling off state run companies. Up to 15 million Britons were now shareholders.

Britain was embracing the free market. This wasn’t just an economic shift. It was a cultural revolution. A redefinition of Britain’s relationship with money, with government, and with itself.

And if Thatcher’s privatisation had given ordinary people the chance to buy shares, her reforms to Britain’s financial services sector in 1986, known as the Big Bang, gave ordinary people the chance to sell them too, to get a job in the previously closed world of the City.

There were many on the left for whom the principle alone of these reforms was something to object to. The assault on the free market from some on the right is not about the principles of the reforms, but the consequences.

At the core of Thatcher’s thinking was a belief that free market capitalism could work only if many people had a direct stake in it. And with share ownership of previously state run utilities, many people did. But before long, alarm bells were starting to be rung. And their chime has only gotten louder.

James Goldsmith was a businessman who had made a fortune by buying struggling companies cheaply, reshaping them to maximise efficiency and then selling them at a profit. The 1980s reforms were like manna from heaven for him.

But then he seemed to change his mind about things. In 1994 he told a committee of US senators that its premise contained a fatal flaw – that the system demanded maximum profit but to achieve maximum profit that meant severing the umbilical link with many of your own electorate.

“You get to a system whereby so as to get the best corporate profits, you have to leave your own country. You have to say to your own sales force ‘Goodbye, we can’t use you anymore – you’re too expensive’.

“You’ve got unions. You want holidays. You want protection. So we’re going offshore.”

Goldsmith was predicting that companies would take their business wherever they would make the most money. If you are a CEO answerable to shareholders that’s literally your job description. And the result, he said, would be job losses in the West, with communities collapsing.

And to make things worse, he argued that Britain had ceded sovereignty to the likes of the European Union and the World Trade Organization, with Britain binding itself to an economic system run by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, only adding to the sense of alienation felt in collapsing communities. And with global markets dictating policy. If an industry wasn’t profitable, it was left to die.

Today, the UK may be a global leader in science and financial services but is that of much consolation to communities where we once made things that are now made offshore?

Based on what I often heard in my many years touring the country presenting Question Time, I’m not sure it is.

Goldsmith would end up trying to go into politics. His Referendum Party was trounced in the 1997 general election but he had planted a seed. He had argued that the global free market path that Britain and the rest of the world was going down was dangerous. That it would spread division around the world.

Fast-forward nearly 20 years to 2016 and his warning came to pass. Britain voted to leave the European Union and the verdict could not be clearer: the Leave vote was highest in those left-behind communities, driven by those who felt globalisation was not working for them.

The dream of a nation of shareholders has soured too.

In 1989 Thames Water was privatised. We were promised lower bills, better infrastructure, less red tape and investment in a system fraying at the edges. It was investment that the global capitalist system was supposedly best placed to provide.

What followed was something else entirely. Debt ballooned and dividends flowed to shareholders. The company extracted profit while pipes leaked and sewage poured into rivers. And our bills now pay for interest on that debt – it feels like we’ve come a long way from Thatcher’s nation of shareholders.

Back in 1994, James Goldsmith had posited that the problem with the free market dream was that it didn’t protect the home base.

Now, there is someone else much more powerful who takes that view.

President Trump’s methods are so erratic that with him it’s hard to tell what is going on. His readiness to slap hugely consequential tariffs on countries that are both traditional foes and supposed friends at times defies easy explanation.

But what we can say is that he is trying to return to ideas that preceded the free market. He is trying to make America strong through protectionism, making it harder for anyone to simply sell anywhere.

There is an argument that if you take the long view then perhaps the free market period is the outlier. Britain itself had a long, long period of protectionism before it embraced free trade.

Tariffs are nothing new in world economic history and in a sense Trump is just trying to return the US to how things were, albeit in quite a chaotic way.

The reign of the free market is facing its biggest ever challenge. But that challenge is coming not from supporters of socialism who ideologically back a big role for the state. Instead, the challenge is coming from Trump, a man who is broadly speaking of the right and has no qualms with capitalism allowing people to become very rich.

That the challenge is coming from within is what makes it so potent.

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Ukrainians in the UK are losing out on job opportunities and homes because of uncertainty over how long they will be allowed to stay in the country.

They were initially given the right to live and work in the UK for three years and can apply for an 18-month extension 28 days before their original visa expires. The government said this provided “certainty and security”.

But some Ukrainians have told the BBC that employers are reluctant to hire them or landlords will not rent to them because their visa is due to expire.

One survey of 1,133 Ukrainians in Britain suggested 41% had lost a new job opportunity because of visa uncertainty, while 26% said their tenancy was not renewed.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham also found 22% of respondents said a job contract was not renewed, while 24% said they could not sign a new tenancy.

Arrivals spiked after the Homes for Ukraine scheme, which allows people in the UK to host those fleeing the war, was launched on 14 March 2022.

At the peak in May that year, more than 10,000 Ukrainians a week came, with a total of 300,000 offered sanctuary to date, according to the Home Office.

People were initially given the right to stay for three years, meaning the bulk of visas are due to expire in the coming months. The Ukraine Permission Extension Scheme opened on 18 February.

The government says Ukrainians retain their existing rights to live and work in the UK while a decision is being made on whether to extend their visa, which can take up to eight weeks.

However, charities say in practice some Ukrainians who are in the process of extending their visa or only have a few months left are struggling to find jobs or rental properties.

Mila, who lives in Atherstone, Warwickshire, with her 14-year-old daughter, is waiting for her visa extension to be approved.

The family must leave their flat by 25 April as it is being sold by the landlord.

She had planned to move to a flat closer to her job at a salon in Nuneaton but the agent told her she could not sign a six-month tenancy because her visa is due to expire on 12 April.

Mila said she had tried a number of different agents without success because of her visa status.

She told the BBC she was worried about the prospect of being left without anywhere to live, adding: “I can’t sleep at night.”

Tatiana – not her real name – struggled to find a new job after her contract as a lab technician ended, despite being highly qualified.

Over a six-month period she says she was refused for around six jobs because her visa was due to expire in July, with prospective employers citing uncertainty over whether her right to work in the UK would be extended.

One company asked her to apply for a visa extension immediately, but she was unable to because of rules stating applications can only be made 28 days before the original visa expires.

Tatiana, who has two sons aged 11 and 16, told the BBC the situation left her suffering from anxiety, for which she was prescribed medication by her GP.

Although she has now secured a new job, Tatiana still feels worried about her future.

“It’s incredibly frustrating to feel trapped in this cycle,” she said.

“[My employer] would love to offer a longer-term position, but the visa situation prevents it.

“We are all in a tough position, and I wish we had at least some certainty about the future.”

Olena – not her real name – arrived in the UK with her daughter, who is now 15, in April 2022 and their visas have recently expired.

She applied for an extension more than three weeks before the expiry date but they are still waiting for this to be approved.

Olena is a housekeeper at a hotel but her employer initially told her she could not work after her visa expires and would have to take annual leave.

She also receives universal credit as she can only work limited hours due to health problems. With her visa due to expire, her caseworkers wrote to her warning her benefits could be stopped, causing her further anxiety.

Rights to claim benefits remain while a visa decision is pending, according to government guidance.

Olena was only able to persuade her employer she could continue to work with help from the charity Settled, which also helped her to provide the necessary information to ensure her benefit payments continued.

Others told the BBC they had been informed by universities they would have to pay international fees as their visa was due to expire before the course began.

This is despite government guidance stating that those on visa schemes for Ukrainians should be treated as “home” students, who are eligible for financial support and domestic fees.

Settled said it had also seen an increasing number of technical issues which had left Ukrainians unable to prove their visa status or progress their applications for an extension.

It said an automatic visa extension would avoid these issues.

Simone Schehtman, who runs the Birmingham for Ukraine support group, said currently most visa extensions were being approved within a couple of weeks but there was concern that in the coming months the volume of applications could overwhelm the system.

“We’ve got about 100,000 Ukrainians about to submit their [extension application],” said Ms Schehtman. “It’s a complete disaster.”

A government spokesperson said: “We are fully committed to supporting Ukraine in its fight against Putin’s illegal war, while also providing a safe and secure haven for those fleeing the conflict.”

The spokesperson added that the visa extension scheme allowed “a continuation of rights to work, live and study as well as access to healthcare and welfare support in the UK”.

In Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic circle, President Vladimir Putin vowed to “strengthen Russia’s global leadership in the Arctic”, while warning that “geopolitical competition in the region” was intensifying.

The first example he gave was Donald Trump’s idea to acquire Greenland.

But from the Kremlin leader there was no criticism of his US counterpart.

And that’s telling, as the White House and the Kremlin try to rebuild relations.

“In short, America’s plans in relation to Greenland are serious,” President Putin said in an address to Russia’s Arctic Forum in Murmansk.

“These plans have deep historical roots. And it’s clear that the US will continue to systematically pursue its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Аrctic.

“As for Greenland this is a matter for two specific countries. It has nothing to do with us.”

So said the president who had launched a full-scale invasion of a sovereign neighbouring country and claims to have annexed whole swathes of Ukraine.

When Joe Biden was in the White House, Moscow and Washington were vocal in their criticism of one another.

How things have changed.

Today Russia is promoting the idea of economic cooperation with the United States in an Arctic region packed with natural resources.

“We are open to considering different investment opportunities that we can do jointly with the US, in certain sectors approved by the Russian government,” says Kirill Dmitriev, President Putin’s envoy for foreign investment and economic cooperation.

Mr Dmitriev, who is also chief executive of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, has already been in talks with US officials.

“We are open for investment cooperation in the Arctic. That could be in logistics, or other areas beneficial to Russia and to the US,” Mr Dmitriev adds.

“But before deals can be done the war in Ukraine needs to end,” I suggest.

“Many people in the West accuse Russia of dragging its feet, showing no compromise or concessions, and just laying down conditions.”

“I am focused on economics and investments, so I don’t comment on political issues,” Mr Dmitriev responds.

“The only thing I can say is we have a very good dialogue, and I think it’s very important that the US is trying to understand Russia’s position.”

Moscow seems confident that it can woo Washington with promises of lucrative deals in the Arctic and across Russia.

That confidence is understandable considering how senior US officials have been repeating Kremlin talking points about the war in Ukraine and about Europe.

In a recent interview with former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff appeared to accept the results of Moscow-organised referenda that were held in Ukrainian territories seized and occupied by Russia.

These votes that have not been recognised by the international community.

In the words of one recent Russian newspaper headline: “US and Russian officials are now talking the same language.”

Are the Russian authorities at all surprised by the sea change in America’s Russia policy?

“[In America] there are two parties that compete with one another,” says Nikolai Patrushev, former head of Russia’s FSB domestic security service.

Mr Patrushev, who is now an aide to President Putin, is one of the most powerful figures in Russia.

While on the side lines of the Arctic Forum he tells me: “When the Democrats were in power, they took one view. The Republicans have another.

“It doesn’t mean that they agree with Russia’s standpoint. Only that they have their own, which they promote, and we can cooperate with them.”

I ask Mr Patrushev: “Do you have a sense that a new world order is being forged?”.

“We used to have a system where two powers dominated in the world. Then it was just one. Now we’re building a multi-polar world. But with its own peculiarities,” says Mr Patrushev.

In the centre of Murmansk, a giant inflatable whale has taken over one of the city’s squares.

Attached to wires, it’s bobbing over a sea of silver balloons designed to look like waves. The balloons are dancing in the wind beneath the blow-up beast.

It’s a giant installation. But then Russia has enormous ambitions, both for the Arctic and for the country’s relations with America.

The whale is attracting a great deal of interest with lots of families posing for photos.

It’s an opportunity to ask Russians whether they support the idea of economic cooperation with America in the Arctic and whether they’re surprised when Washington appears to take Moscow’s side?

Elina isn’t.

“Russia is strong,” she says. “You should always back the strong ones and go along with them.”

“We need to develop the Arctic,” Olga tells me. “Cooperation with ‘friendly countries’ is a good thing.”

“And do you see America as a ‘friendly country’?” I ask.

“You know what? I can’t decide.” replies Olga.

Meanwhile presidential envoy Mr Dmitriev is singing the praises of one particular American – Elon Musk – and counting on cooperation.

“We believe Elon Musk is a great visionary, a great leader and a very successful person,” Mr Dmitriev tells me. “Russia has a lot to offer for a mission to Mars because we have some nuclear technologies which can be applicable.

“There are some video conferences we believe will be upcoming with, let’s say, the Musk team.”