Sparklers may have led to deadly New Year’s Swiss resort bar fire, investigators say
Flowers are laid after a fire broke out overnight at Le Constellation bar on January 01, 2026 in Crans-Montana, Switzerland. (Photo by Harold Cunningham/Getty Images)
(CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland) — Investigators probing the deadly New Year’s Day fire at a Swiss resort bar are looking into the possibility that it started from sparklers that were too close to the ceiling.
Beatrice Pilloud, Valais Attorney General, told reporters Friday that investigators were still conducting interviews and going through evidence from the wreckage at the Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montana but she said that they are “pursuing several hypotheses,” based on the evidence they’ve gathered so far.
“We currently assume that the fire was caused by sparklers attached to champagne bottles that came too close to the ceiling,” she said at a news conference.
“Initial evidence has been secured at the scene,” Pilloud added.
Forty people were killed and 119 people were injured in the blaze, according to authorities who said the fire spread very rapidly.
Investigators are working to identify the deceased victims.
“No mistakes can be permitted. We need to give the correct remains back to the families,” Pierre-Antoine Lengen, the head of the Swiss Judicial Police, told reporters.
Of the injured, 71 were Swiss citizens, 14 were French, 11 were Italian, and others were from Bosnia, Serbia, Portugal and Belgium, according to officials.
The nationalities of the 14 other injured victims were not immediately determined.
Pilloud said that more interviews will be conducted and noted that investigators spoke with the two French managers of the bar.
“For now, there is no penal liability which has been identified,” she said when a reporter asked about any liability.
Investigators are also looking into the building’s safety measures and building regulations, according to Pilloud.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(LONDON and KYIV, Ukraine) — Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared last week to be cautiously optimistic on the U.S. 28-point peace plan to end his invasion of Ukraine, but statements made by his emissaries in the days since then have led some analysts to believe he thinks he can get a better deal.
“I believe that it could also form the basis for a final peace settlement, but this text has not been discussed with us in detail,” Putin told his Security Council on Friday.
Momentum has appeared to be building as U.S., European, Ukrainian and Russian representatives met first in Geneva, Switzerland, and then in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. U.S. President Donald Trump has now said a deal could be “very close” and has ordered his envoy Steve Witkoff to travel to Moscow next week to present the plan to Putin.
But despite the diplomatic flurry and public optimism, many close observers of Russia still doubt Putin is actually ready to take a deal now or sees much need to compromise.
“I see nothing at the moment that would force Putin to recalculate his goals or abandon his core demands,” Tatiana Stoyanova, founder of R.Politik and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center wrote on X.
“He feels more confident than ever about the battlefield situation and is convinced that he can wait until Kyiv finally accepts that it cannot win and must negotiate on Russia’s well-known terms,” Stoyanova said. “If the Americans can help move things in that direction — fine. If not, he knows how to proceed anyway.”
Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who quit in protest after Russia’s 2022 invasion, also told ABC News he thought it “most likely” that this latest round of negotiations will fizzle out with the combatants still far apart on key issues, as has been the case with previous efforts.
The new 19-point plan negotiated with Ukraine this week is highly unlikely to align with Moscow’s goals, Bondarev said. Even the original 28-point plan that Russia helped draw up with Witkoff “wasn’t fully acceptable to Russia in the first place,” he said, pointing to the Kremlin’s apparent hesitance to commit to the initial blueprint.
“Now it’s even less acceptable,” he said. “So, of course, they would not accept it.”
But Bondarev didn’t rule out entirely that Putin might lunge for a deal that contains many of his demands.
“Of course, we can and we should be ready for any surprises from the Kremlin,” he said. “They can still surprise sometimes.”
The original 28-point U.S. proposal that heavily favored Russia was revised down to 19, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials, during the Geneva negotiations.
Some of the most unacceptable points to Kyiv have been removed, according to sources familiar with the discussions, including a cap on Ukraine’s army and a war crimes amnesty. But it is not entirely clear what the new plan includes and the most intractable issues, including Ukraine ceding more unoccupied territory remain.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday again downplayed hopes for a deal, saying it was “too early to say” whether the warring parties are close to an accord. Russia’s deputy foreign minister has since said Moscow will not make any major concessions.
Previous rounds of talks have resoundingly failed. And, while the U.S. has been projecting hope, it’s unclear how serious Russia — which has been eking out battlefield gains — is about making peace.
“Putin does not want an agreement,” John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said at an Atlantic Council event on Tuesday. “The only agreement he wants is diktat — a Ukrainian surrender. Otherwise, he wants to continue fighting.”
“I suspect if Ukraine had accepted those dreadful 28 points, Putin would come back for more,” Herbst said. “He realizes those 28 points reflected great flexibility moving his direction on the part of the United States, and he would say, ‘See what else we can get’.”
Putin’s long march The Kremlin has indicated that the new peace plan was discussed at the summit between Putin and Trump in Alaska in August.
Putin left Alaska with Trump’s endorsement of the “fantastic relationship” between the two presidents, having successfully neutralized Trump’s previous demand he agree an immediate ceasefire and pushing off the threat of more American sanctions, while gaining the prospect of potentially lucrative bilateral economic cooperation.
Despite a nominal commitment to peace talks, as summer turned to fall, Russia only intensified its frontline offensives and expanded its long-range attacks on Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure, according to information released by Russian and Ukrainian forces.
Russian forces have captured some 350 square miles of Ukrainian territory — roughly the same area as the German capital of Berlin — since Trump and Putin sat down together in Alaska, according to data from the Institute for the Study of War think tank.
Putin has for years said that any peace deal in Ukraine must reflect the “new territorial realities” of Russian occupation of large chunks of the country. As Russian troops edge forward, Putin appears to be trying to entrench those territorial realities.
That new territory is a tiny sliver of the roughly 44,600 square miles — nearly 20% — of Ukraine controlled by Russian forces. But despite the slow rate and reportedly high human cost of Russia’s advance, independent military analysts worry it reflects a growing momentum for Moscow.
A high-profile advance around the destroyed Donetsk city of Pokrovsk and an unexpected local breakthrough on Ukraine southern Zaporizhzhia front have further burnished the Kremlin’s propaganda campaign promoting what they claim as an inevitable Russian victory.
Relentless Russian drone and missile strikes continue to kill civilians and wreak havoc on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, particularly the energy grid. Concentrated strikes on power stations and natural gas infrastructure have precipitated rolling blackouts in many parts of the country — including in Kyiv — as winter bites.
Zelenskyy’s government has also been rocked by a corruption scandal that has seen two cabinet ministers removed from their posts and figures close to the president investigated.
Bondarev said he believes Russia is repeating its strategy of delay and obfuscation. Putin is “playing for time,” he said, and “outsmarting” his Western adversaries.
“Putin says we need to remove the root causes of the war,” Bondarev said. “You cannot remove these root causes of the war just by signing some memorandum. You need to work it through. It takes a lot of experts, meetings, coordination — so it may take months. And at the same time, he will be fighting.”
“With each new tiny victory — every new village occupied, every square kilometer occupied — the Russian position will be more and more robust, less and less flexible,” Bondarev said.
Red lines “People’s expectations for how long a process like this will take are wildly exaggerated,” Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told ABC News this week.
“I think even in the best case we are talking about months not weeks,” Charap added.
Still, Charap said, the new push by the Trump administration was positive, noting it had jumpstarted negotiations and for the first time produced a framework document that at least included almost all the core issues of the conflict.
“You have to give them credit, they have certainly shaken up the stasis which had set in,” he said. “There are conversations happening that weren’t happening a week ago.”
Ukrainian lawmakers and analysts told ABC News there remains little hope in Ukraine that Putin can be trusted to abide by the terms of any peace deal. That is why Kyiv’s demands for Western security guarantees, NATO membership and more military aid have been so central to the Ukrainian negotiating position.
Still, Yehor Cherniev — a member of the Ukrainian parliament and the chairman of his country’s delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly — told ABC News that the framework established with the U.S. “is a good signal and it’s good progress in our peace negotiations, because before we were stuck.”
But some “red lines” remain, Cherniev said, “as before, about the concession of our territories or of or our sovereignty.” Ukrainian officials have said they want to leave such thorny topics to a meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy at the White House.
“I have doubts that Russia will agree with this,” Cherniev added.
Oleksandr Merezhko, another member of parliament and the chair of its foreign affairs committee, told ABC News he believes “Putin will reject this peace plan and will reiterate his maximalist demands.”
“He is not interested in peace or ceasefire — he is only interested in our surrender,” Merezhko said. “We should insist not on a ‘peace treaty’ but on a ceasefire agreement.”
Zelenskyy has consistently urged more pressure on Russia twinned with more muscular Western military aid for Kyiv. Trump has often threatened a tougher line on Moscow, but — according to Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland — it is unclear if he is willing to deliver.
“In the end, Trump is going to have to stare down Putin to get his deal in any kind of decent form,” Fried said at an event Tuesday.
But Bondarev said he sees little hope of an imminent change in U.S. strategy, suggesting that any disunity within the administration will only further strengthen Moscow’s hand.
“Western diplomacy has never tried to get the initiative, to first elaborate its own agenda and impose it on Russia,” the former diplomat said. “They only follow what Russia is doing. You can never prevail if you just follow your adversary and let him lead.”
“Trump mentioned that ‘it takes two to tango,'” he added. “But there is someone in every couple who leads and someone who follows.”
(LONDON) — As the alarms sounded at the Louvre Museum on Sunday morning, four suspects took off on two motorbikes, winding their way through central Paris, allegedly carrying with them a haul of “priceless” jewelry once worn by queens and made of sapphire, diamonds and emeralds.
They haven’t yet been found.
About 24 hours after the brazen theft of some of the most recognizable pieces of glittering French heritage, which were taken during daylight hours from the world’s most-visited museum, a manhunt and investigation are in full swing, according to state and law enforcement officials.
“The theft committed at the Louvre is an attack on a heritage that we cherish because it is our history,” President Emmanuel Macron said on social media on Sunday.
He and other French officials vowed that the pieces would be returned and the suspects apprehended.
The museum closed on Sunday morning as police swarmed the area in search of suspects and evidence.
“Following yesterday’s robbery at the Louvre, the museum regrets to inform you that it will remain closed to the public today,” officials said on social media on Monday. “Visitors who have already booked tickets will be refunded.”
7 minutes, in and out, authorities say The suspects arrive in pairs, with two in a truck and two riding motorbikes, authorities said on Sunday. The truck was equipped with a moving ladder, a “mobile freight elevator” of the type city furniture movers sometimes use, Paris police said.
The suspects allegedly parked the truck on a road that runs along the side of the museum, near the Seine, police said.
They were wearing yellow vests, dressed as construction workers might be, police said. They took the time to secure the area near the truck by placing orange construction cones around it, police said.
They then used the ladder to get up to the second floor, climbing onto a thin balcony with a metal railing outside the museum’s Apollo Gallery, where some of the French crown jewels were kept, according to police.
Once they had used an angle grinder to open the window, they clambered through it, police said. Their entrance triggered the alarm, which was still sounding when they left, the museum said in a statement.
“Inside, they then smashed two display cases, ‘Napoleon jewels’ and ‘French crown jewels,’ using the angle grinder and stole numerous pieces of high-value jewelry,” police said.
When they left through the same window about seven minutes later, they had with them nine pieces of jewerly of “inestimable” value, as France’s interior minister described them on Sunday. Other officials, including Rachida Dati, the culture minister, described them to French media as “priceless.”
According to the French Ministry of Culture, among the items stolen was a diadem, or crown, from the collection of Queen Marie-Amelie and Queen Hortense; an emerald necklace and a pair of emerald earrings from the collection of Marie-Louise, Napoleon’s second wife; and a large bow brooch from Empress Eugenie’s bodice.
The Paris Prosecutor’s Office said the perpetrators tried and failed to set fire to the mobile freight elevator they used in the heist before they fled the scene.
A ‘total’ investigation is underway Officials at the museum said in a statement that an investigation had been launched into the “organized theft and criminal conspiracy to commit a crime.”
The Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office, which will oversee the case, tapped a specialized group of detectives, the Brigade for the Suppression of Banditry, which is part of the French National Police, to lead the investigation, according to the Louvre’s statement.
Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, told a local TV station on Sunday that about 60 investigators were working on the case, showing “total determination” to find those responsible.
As of Monday morning, police had not yet said whether they had any leads on the possible identities of the suspects.
Officials said the suspects appeared to have been professionals. Beccuau on Sunday described it as an organized crime, saying officials hadn’t ruled out possible foreign involvement, but also that investigators were treating it as a domestic case at the moment.
“Everything is being done to apprehend the perpetrators of this unacceptable act as quickly as possible,” Laurent Nunez, the interior minister, said on Sunday.
(NEW YORK) — For the first time in his presidency, Donald Trump this week imposed new sanctions on Russia in an attempt to push Vladimir Putin to stop his nearly four-year war in Ukraine.
The sanctions target two of Russia’s largest oil companies and their subsidiaries, a move that analysts say is a significant blow to Putin but unlikely to immediately shift his military aims.
“These are tremendous sanctions. These are very big,” Trump said as he confirmed the levies in an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Wednesday.
When asked why he was taking this action now, after months of threats and delayed punitive action against Moscow, Trump said he “felt it was time.”
Trump’s U-turns on Russia-Ukraine diplomacy
The surprise sanctions announcement came after a dizzying week of diplomacy for Trump, who turned his focus back to the conflict in Eastern Europe after securing a fragile ceasefire agreement in the Middle East.
Trump has shifted between support for Russia and support for Ukraine since returning to office, and has often sent mixed messages on what concessions would need to be made by both sides to reach a peace deal.
“I don’t think there’s an overall strategy. I think there’s an overall goal, which has been pretty consistent, which is to stop the fighting and stop the killing,” said William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama who also served as chargé d’affaires to the country during the first Trump administration.
Trump is now calling for a freeze of the conflict along the current battle lines, a ceasefire proposal that is backed by Ukraine.
One clear trend in Trump’s approach to the war over the past several months, experts said, was a growing frustration with Russia.
“Trump’s rhetoric started to change in the summer when he realized that despite his effort to diplomatically engage with Russia, Putin was not really delivering anything other than smooth talking. Russia, in fact, continued to escalate its attacks on Ukraine,” said Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Amid those tensions, Trump recently said he was considering giving Ukraine access to coveted American-made Tomahawk missiles that would allow Kyiv to strike deeper inside Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Washington to make the case for the military assets last week.
One day before Zelenskyy’s arrival, though, Trump changed his bullish posture after a phone call with Putin. Trump then said he and Putin planned to meet for a second face-to-face meeting.
“Putin has been very skillful in derailing Trump’s intentions to get tough with him. Putin derailed the sanctions when he went to Alaska and he derailed the Tomahawks with a phone call. But it does appear that Trump has figured that out,” said Taylor.
The second Putin summit was called off days after Trump first announced it, as Russia made clear it had no intention to change its goals to erode a sovereign Ukraine. Trump said he canceled the meeting because he didn’t want to have his time “wasted.”
“It seems that was a final blow,” said Snegovaya. “And eventually the administration decided it’s not enough to just use carrots to pressure Putin, you also need sticks. I think [the sanctions are] really long overdue decision but it’s better later than never, and the hope is that it’s just a first step in the overall much needed direction.”
What impact will the sanctions have?
The sanctions hit Open Joint Stock Company Rosneft Oil Company and Lukoil OAO, which are estimated to account for nearly half of all Russian oil production.
The Kremlin waved off the measures, and Putin said they will not “significantly affect our economies.”
Severe sanctions were put in place by the Biden administration and European countries after the start of Russia’s war in 2022, but Russia was largely able to stem the impact on its economy through shadow fleets and other adjustments.
But the economic situation in Russia has worsened in recent months, with declines in oil and fuel export revenues, persistent inflation and lower growth rates.
“These sanctions would be bad news for Putin under any circumstances but at the present moment, they’re more significant than they might otherwise seem,” said Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union.
“The past few years they’ve had pretty good economic growth, and so they might not have had this kind of impact then,” Sestanovich said of the new U.S. sanctions. “But right now, this is just one more headache Putin does not need.”
How much these new sanctions hamper Russia will largely dependent on U.S. enforcement, experts said, especially when it comes to secondary sanctions on countries and companies buying Russian oil.
A fuller picture of the effect of the sanctions will emerge when they go into effect on Nov. 21.
“The devil, as usual, is in details,” said Snegovaya.
What next?
Analysts agree that the sanctions are not a silver bullet, and should be paired with more military support and financial support for Ukraine.
“There’s more that’s needed,” said Taylor, the former ambassador to Ukraine. “More sanctions, more weapons and more consistency.”
The European Union joined the U.S. in enacting tougher sanctions on Russia on Thursday, marking the group’s 19th sanctions package against Moscow. On Friday, the United Kingdom called on European allies to send more long-range missiles to Ukraine during a gathering with Zelenskyy in London.
Zelenskyy, for his part, left Washington last week without Tomahawk missiles but said he believed the issue was not entirely off the table.
In the meantime, Russia’s only ramped up its attacks on Ukraine, including an aerial strike on a kindergarten in the eastern city of Kharkiv.
“I think everybody ought to be ready for the Russians to get significantly more brutal in their attacks on Ukraine,” said Sestanovich.
“You have to have a comprehensive approach to dealing with this problem and to make the Russians see that actually, the situation is only going to get worse for them,” Sestanovich said. “The Putin approach has been a patient one and maybe a somewhat self-deluded one, thinking that the moment will come where they can break the Ukrainian lines or Ukrainian morale will sag or Western unity will erode. What you’ve got to do is have a set of policies that make it hard for Putin to kid himself.”
