The US-UK trade deal warmly suggested by President Donald Trump should help insulate the UK from the direct impact of global trade tensions.

It signals that the White House has accepted the statistical logic that the US and UK have a balanced trade position.

Essentially each country roughly exports the same amount of goods to one another. Indeed, rather helpfully, according to the US numbers it exports more.

There is no general case that the UK is, in the words and logic of the president, “ripping off” or “screwing” the US, as he has suggested of many other countries and the EU.

So a deal to avoid the further trade barriers is very much on the cards.

But this is not the wideranging US-UK free trade agreement to lower almost all existing tariffs, that was the subject of so much debate in the Brexit era.

It is important to remember that the wider deal was never properly prioritised by Trump’s own team, because, as they told me, they never truly believed that the UK would find it in its interest to make the necessary hard break from the EU.

It is difficult to see that the UK government would want to further aggravate farmers, or its own base, by putting US farm imports or NHS pricing on the table.

In addition, on goods trade, the government is already prioritising its “Brexit reset” – a food standards deal, and some customs arrangements to bring down newish trade barriers with the European Union. Tellingly, the top official on that negotiation was in the Oval Office.

The narrower “economic deal”, as it was termed by Sir Keir Starmer, centres around technology and what the UK has referred to as the “further integration of our two countries’ tech sectors”.

Perhaps the best analogy is that the tech expertise held within the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle could become for a booming AI-driven Silicon Valley what London’s financial City became to New York’s Wall Street. The fact that Vice President and big tech ally JD Vance will be leading some of the US negotiation is key here.

This strategy will have consequences. Trump’s team are already railing against digital services taxes.

The UK’s digital services tax was introduced in 2020 and imposes a 2% charge on revenues made by big tech firms running social media, internet search engines or online marketplaces.

While the £700m-£1bn a year it raises in the UK is smallish beer, since the UK and France introduced a hit to big tech’s revenues, many other countries have followed suit.

The White House wants to “stop the contagion”, and that could mean persuading the UK to lower or abolish it. Chancellor Rachel Reeves advocated raising it from 2% to 12% just four years ago.

Likewise the vice president in the Oval Office mentioned US tech firms being unfairly affected by what he called “freedom of speech” issues.

This appears to be a reference to the Online Safety Act. This aims to make social media firms and search engines protect children and adults in the UK from illegal, harmful material, although some have argued it risks stifling free expression online. My understanding is that, right now, movement may be less likely here.

The prize will be integration into the massive investments from the best capitalised tech companies in the world.

Could the UK start to attract back some of the investments lost to Dublin, for example? Would the EU stand back and allow the UK to develop as an offshore hub for US tech companies to service the whole of Europe?

There are two other significant issues. It is not unknown for warm words in the Oval Office to be somewhat contradicted by actions soon after. While sat next to the PM, President Trump described the EU’s levying of VAT as a trade restriction, seemingly unaware that the UK does exactly the same thing.

And even if it avoids direct new tariffs from President Trump, the open UK economy would be affected by any wide-ranging trade war involving most of the G7 and other countries.

That is still on the cards. Not only would that collapse world growth and potentially spike up inflation again, but could upend entirely the workings of the World Trade Organization.

The PM says the UK doesn’t have to choose between the US and other allies, but it may appear like that to them.

The strategy appears to be to become the Switzerland of global economics. Neutrality in a world of trade turmoil, not so much sat on a fence, but tiptoeing along a rather wobbly one.

US President Donald Trump has said he has a “lot of respect” for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, on the eve of their talks at the White House.

Asked by the BBC if he would apologise for recently calling him a “dictator”, he said he could not believe he had said this. He also called Zelensky “very brave”.

Trump was speaking after talks with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer about ending the war between Ukraine and Russia.

He predicted a “very good meeting” with Zelensky on Friday, saying efforts to achieve peace were “moving along pretty rapidly”.

This week’s meetings come after the Trump administration shocked its Western partners by holding the first high-level US talks with Moscow since Russia invaded Ukraine just over three years ago.

America’s new president had appeared to blame Zelensky for the war and chided him for not starting peace talks earlier.

“You’ve been there for three years,” he had said last Tuesday. “You should have ended it… You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

But this Thursday, speaking after meeting Sir Keir, Trump told reporters asking about his forthcoming talks with Zelensky: “I think we’re going to have a very good meeting tomorrow morning. We’re going to get along really well.”

Asked by the BBC’s Chris Mason if he still thought Zelensky was a “dictator”, he replied: “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that.”

Zelensky will be hoping to win some kind of security guarantees for his country that would underpin any peace deal that may be negotiated.

Asked about these on Thursday, Trump only said he was “open to many things” but he wanted to get Russia and Ukraine to agree a deal before deciding what measures might be put in place to enforce it.

On his visit on Friday, Zelensky is expected to sign a deal that will give the US access to Ukraine’s rare earth mineral resources.

Trump suggested that the presence of US mining concerns in Ukraine would act as a deterrent against future Russian attacks on Ukraine.

“It’s a backstop, you could say,” he said on Thursday. “I don’t think anybody’s going to play around if we’re there with a lot of workers and having to do with rare earths and other things which we need for our country.”

The British prime minister had said earlier that the UK was prepared to send troops to Ukraine after the war as part of a peacekeeping force but only if the US, Nato’s leading member, provided a “backstop”.

Asked if the US would aid British peacekeepers if they were attacked by Russia, Trump said: “The British have incredible soldiers, incredible military and they can take care of themselves. But if they need help, I’ll always be with the British, okay?”

Nato’s Article 5 holds that Nato members will come to the defence of an ally which comes under attack.

Praising Trump’s “personal commitment to bring peace” in Ukraine, Sir Keir said the UK was “ready to put boots on the ground and planes in the air to support a deal”.

“We’re focused now on bringing an enduring end to the barbaric war in Ukraine,” he said.

But, he added, it must not be a peace deal “that rewards the aggressor or that gives encouragement to regimes like Iran”.

Asked whether Vladimir Putin was trustworthy, the UK prime minister said his views on the Russian president were well-known.

Asked in turn why he seemed to trust Putin and Sir Keir did not, Trump said: “I know a lot of people that you would say no chance that they would ever deceive you, and they are the worst people in the world.

“I know others that you would guarantee they would deceive you, and you know what, they’re 100% honourable, so you never know what you’re getting.”

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, who had been due to meet US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington before he cancelled the talks “due to scheduling issues”, told BBC News that Putin and Russia did “not want to have peace”.

“For any peace agreement to function, it needs the Europeans as well as Ukrainians on board,” she added.

Stopping off in the Irish Republic on Thursday en route to the US, Zelensky met the Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Micheál Martin at Shannon Airport.

“We discussed the steps to end the war with guaranteed peace for Ukraine and the whole of Europe,” he said later.

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

The conflict burst into all-out war when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people, most of them soldiers, have been killed or injured, and millions of Ukrainian civilians have fled as refugees.

As well as Crimea, Russia now occupies parts of four other regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

The Kremlin warned on Thursday that Russia would make no territorial concessions to Ukraine as part of a peace deal.

“All territories that have become subjects of the Russian Federation… are an integral part of our country, Russia,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “This is an absolutely indisputable fact and a non-negotiable fact.”

Separately, Russian and US officials met in the Turkish city of Istanbul for talks on rebuilding diplomatic ties.

The two nuclear superpowers expelled one another’s embassy staff when Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, was in the White House.

Andrew and Tristan Tate, the controversial British-American social media influencers accused of rape, human trafficking and money laundering, have been freed from travel restrictions in Romania after several high-level White House officials took an interest in their case.

It’s unclear what, if any, role Donald Trump’s administration may have played in their release, but one of Trump’s top envoys met with Romania’s Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu at a security conference in Munich earlier this month.

Andrew Tate rose to fame after appearing on the UK reality show Big Brother, and later making a series of extreme and controversial statements about women and politics on social media.

The pair ran a web cam business and were charged with human trafficking and rape along with two Romanian female suspects in June 2023.

They also face separate, unrelated allegations of rape and human trafficking in the UK, and civil suits in the US and UK. They deny all the allegations, which their US lawyer calls “defamatory and unequivocally false”.

On Thursday the brothers arrived in Florida after previously being banned from leaving Romania while the case against them is pending.

Lawyers for the pair say they will return to Bucharest for court hearings.

When asked about the Tates at the White House on Thursday, President Trump said: “I know nothing about that.”

But the brothers have been the subject of recent high-level discussions between the US and Romania.

Romanian officials say US counterparts brought up the brothers’ case with the Romanian government earlier this month, a story first reported by the Financial Times.

And Trump special envoy Richard Grenell raised the issue again at a security conference in Munich.

Hurezeanu said the Tates were mentioned during that conversation, but denied being pressured to release the pair.

The Tate brothers are Trump supporters and also have ties to his administration.

One of Tate’s lawyers now works as White House liaison to the US justice department.

Paul Ingrassia was part of a team representing the Tate brothers in a defamation lawsuit they filed in Florida against several of their alleged victims.

Ingrassia also acted as Tate’s publicist and says he got the influencer onto a show hosted by Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host.

He has praised Tate in online posts. In one dating from July 2023, he called Tate “an extraordinary human being” who was offering “a dying West some hope for renewal”.

Ingrassia did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

The Tates have also been talked about by several people in Trump’s orbit, including Donald Trump Jr and Elon Musk.

Trump Jr once called Tate’s detention in Romania “absolute insanity”.

Musk reinstated Andrew Tate’s account, which had been banned on X, and suggested, perhaps in jest, that Tate would make a good UK prime minister.

Joseph McBride, a lawyer representing the Tates in a defamation case they have filed against several of their accusers in Florida, said in a statement: “They feel secure in America for several reasons, the primary one being that Donald Trump is the president.”

The statement alleged that the Tates and others are victims of “weaponised legal systems” and “politically motivated prosecutions”.

McBride did not respond to questions about what role, if any, White House officials played in the removal of travel restrictions against the Tate brothers.

Trump and his advisers know the political power of the manosphere – a popular and very online subculture that attracts fans of mixed martial arts fighting, video games, cryptocurrencies and other stereotypically male pursuits.

It’s a sprawling scene that includes men who reject the company of women entirely, a “pick-up artist” scene filled with tips on how to find casual hookups, and plenty of mainstream podcasts and YouTube channels filled with bro-type humour.

The president’s advisers targeted the same audiences during last year’s election campaign, when Trump, JD Vance and others in his orbit went on podcasts and did interviews with new media outlets.

The views of the Tate brothers lie at one of the manosphere’s extreme edges. Andrew Tate himself has made no secret of his self-described misogynist – women-hating – and sexist views.

On podcasts and online clips he talks about how women are property, how men shouldn’t allow girlfriends to go out without them or talk to other men.

In extremely graphic language, he’s described violence against women and talks about how sexual assault victims bear responsibility for rape.

Tate and his brother at the same time sell a glamorous lifestyle of expensive properties, cigars and luxury cars that includes self-improvement messages directed at young men – an image that garnered him a large audience before he was booted off most mainstream social media platforms.

He told the BBC in a 2023 interview: “I preach hard work, discipline. I’m an athlete, I preach anti-drugs, I preach religion, I preach no alcohol, I preach no knife crime. Every single problem with modern society I’m against.”

Like many other extreme influencers, in the face of criticism he often claims his posts are satire or jokes, mocking his detractors as his messages spread further, propelled by online outrage.

The pair’s supporters were thrilled with his release and eager to proclaim their innocence, despite the outstanding charges against them.

Others were less enthusiastic. Four British women who have filed a civil lawsuit against Andrew Tate issued a statement calling on UK authorities to “take action”.

And support for the Tates is far from universal among Trump supporters and American conservatives, many of whom moved to immediately distance themselves from the brothers.

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, where Tates landed on Thursday, said of their activities: “Florida is not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct.”

The state’s attorney general later said he would open a preliminary inquiry into the Tates and said Florida has “zero tolerance for human trafficking and violence against women”.

In the conservative Washington Examiner, podcaster Brady Leonard wrote: “Tate’s obnoxious, misogynistic brand is toxic to everyone besides electorally insignificant corners of social media.”

Matt Lewis, a US conservative political commentator who has been critical of Trump in the past, said advocating on behalf of Tate “fits in with the ethos of the Maga world right now, which is: ‘let’s be tough guys'”.

“But I also think it speaks to a legitimate problem, which we have seen in the last couple decades, a problem with men…where there’s an epidemic of loneliness, a sense the world is passing them by, a sense that modernity has made it harder to be successful as a husband and a father. I think that’s had some real psychic effects,” he said.

“There’s a pretty good contingency of Trump’s supporters who are probably going to welcome this guy and probably even see him as a victim of persecution.”