Ukraine

Kyiv The urge to run from danger is only human. It was palpable when air raid sirens sounded as I left the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, which is close to the front line and under relentless attack nightly from Russian drones. Five MiG-31 aircraft were in the air, Telegram channels with access to reliable intelligence reported. The warplanes can be armed with either the Iskander ballistic missile – which travels at up to 5,400mph – or the Kinzhal hypersonic missile, top speed 7,700mph. So fast there wasn’t enough time to find a shelter. We sat in traffic with bated breath, waiting. A deep boom resonated through the mini-bus and two colleagues of mine began praying. Was it an intercept or an impact – or a Patriot defense battery firing? We still don’t know.

As Moscow and Washington prepare for talks on the latest version of Donald Trump’s peace plan, leaked recordings of a conversation with US envoy Steve Witkoff have thrown a spotlight on to senior diplomat Yuri Ushakov. It seems he, not Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is the prime mover behind Russia’s negotiating position. The stature of Lavrov, once a legend in the diplomatic community, has steadily diminished since 2014, when he wasn’t even consulted before Vladimir Putin decided to annex Crimea. Every year since then, the now-75-year-old minister has petitioned Putin to be allowed to retire; every year this is denied. Instead, Lavrov remains confined to a role of repeating threadbare talking points to audiences who frequently and openly disbelieve him.

It was summer 2022. Ukraine had just taken back Kyiv, people were returning to the city, and the mood was one of euphoria, triumph and success. I was having dinner with a Ukrainian official in a neon-lit seafood restaurant in the center of the city, the curfew nearing. "If this ends like the West Germany or Korea scenario, that would be the best outcome," I said to him. He snapped at me: "You want me to tell my relatives in Kherson that they will never live in Ukraine?" Three years later, and even that unwelcome outcome is now far from what Kyiv is being offered by the Trump administration.

At a time when western commentators are tying themselves in knots trying to parse the ongoing Ukraine peace discussions, the Russian media is suddenly strikingly united in its coverage. There is a common misperception that, like their Soviet forebears, the Russian press simply reproduces some standard party line, day in, day out. In fact, there is often surprising pluralism, with different newspapers having their own interests and angles. However, the Kremlin does impose its will when it comes to especially important or sensitive matters, with editors receiving tyomniki, informal but authoritative guidance from the presidential administration on lines to take and topics to avoid. When the press is speaking in one voice, that voice is Putin’s.

With Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s political authority already under grave assault in the wake of a major corruption scandal, he now faces a new challenge – this time from his erstwhile ally, the United States. A high-level US delegation led by army secretary Daniel Driscoll is meeting Zelensky in Kyiv today to present the latest version of a peace plan aimed at ending the war. The contents of the plan have not been officially revealed and so far it has not been publicly endorsed by Donald Trump. But two things are already clear. One is that there’s nothing new in it. And two, there’s nothing good in it for Zelensky.

Very well then – war. That is the bottom line of Vladimir Putin’s response to Donald Trump’s latest attempts at mediating an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In August, Putin rejected the peace deal that Trump lined up in Alaska. Now, the Kremlin has scuttled the White House’s plan for a summit in Budapest by insisting that Russia’s demands for Ukrainian demilitarization and “de-nazification” remain in force. Clearly, the Russian President still believes that he can win the war on the battlefield – and terrorize Ukraine’s civilians. What is Putin’s plan?

Here we go again. Now that Russian president Vladimir Putin has resumed his bombardment of Ukraine, President Donald Trump is responding by sanctioning the oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil. So much for the vaunted peace push that Trump has been engaging in since he met with Putin in August in Alaska.  The atmosphere has turned distinctly frostier since they held their pow-wow. Budapest was supposed to be a reprise of the brief thaw that took place in August but Trump has got cold feet after the Kremlin indicated that it was in no mood to compromise over the actual boundaries between it and Ukraine.

The identity of the saboteurs who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 was for years the western security establishment’s worst-kept secret. Just two weeks after a series of explosions within the economic zones of Sweden and Denmark crippled three of the four undersea natural-gas pipelines linking Russia to Germany, Scandinavian diplomats in Brussels were already being quietly briefed that the most likely culprits were Ukrainian. By January 2023, a forensic investigation by German police had discovered traces of the explosives on board the charter yacht Andromeda and found that the vessel’s movements aligned exactly with the location of the blasts.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine continued his excellent sartorial adventure at the White House, appearing in an elegantly cut black suit and shirt on Friday as he met with President Donald Trump in the Cabinet Room. But while they may have helped avoid any emanations of wrath from his host, his habiliments did not appear to prompt Trump to approve the dispatch of Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv, a coveted item indeed. “We’d much rather not need Tomahawks,” Trump said. “We’d much rather get the war over. It could mean a big escalation. It could mean a lot of bad things could happen.”  Back to square one, in other words. In August, Trump had claimed that his summit meeting with President Vladimir Putin would lead to a breakthrough. It never happened.