Lisa Haseldine

Freedom of movement in the EU received another nail in its coffin yesterday after Poland became the latest European country to introduce checks along its shared borders with fellow member states. As of next Monday, Warsaw will start enforcing border controls at crossings shared with Germany and Lithuania.  The Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that he felt compelled to introduce border checks in particular to ‘reduce the uncontrolled flows of migrants across the Polish-German border to a minimum’. The source of Tusk’s angst is the tougher border regime introduced by new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz less than two months ago.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is sounding the alarm. The end of the war in Ukraine, whenever it comes, won't mean the end of Vladimir Putin, he says – nor the Russian threat to the West. Moscow, he says, has never been very good at demobilising restless, traumatised soldiers. ‘There is a 600,000-strong group that took part in the fighting. The question for Putin is: ‘What to do with this group?’. Khodorkovsky fears that he knows the answer. ‘These tensions will naturally arise after two or three years,' he says. ‘And then Putin's way of thinking kicks into gear. And Putin's mentality? He has already relieved such points of tension four times [during his rule] by starting a war. This is his modus operandi.

Not to be outdone by the celebration of VE Day across Western Europe yesterday, Vladimir Putin this morning staged his own ‘biggest ever’ Victory Day celebrations in Moscow. Over the course of Putin’s rule, the annual celebration of 9 May has gradually morphed from a solemn commemoration of the victory over Nazi Germany to being a key ideological cornerstone of his regime. Never one to miss a chance to send a message to Russia’s foreign adversaries, today’s 80th anniversary parade across Red Square – Putin’s 25th – was more a neat showcase of the President’s own militaristic and jingoistic ambitions than a tribute to the country’s past sacrifices. Everything associated with the preparations for today’s event was a degree of magnitude bigger than in previous years.

US special envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Russia this morning to meet with Vladimir Putin, as Donald Trump ploughs ahead with his plan to secure a peace deal in Ukraine by hook or by crook. This is the pair’s fourth meeting in nearly as many months. Putin and Witkoff are expected to discuss Trump’s final proposal for a ceasefire in the conflict, which is believed to include American recognition of Russian control over Crimea, along with all territories occupied by Moscow since February 2022, a ban on Ukraine joining Nato and the lifting of all sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014.

At 4 p.m. UK time today, Russian troops were instructed to temporarily lay down their weapons in Ukraine. The order, issued by Russian president Vladimir Putin to mark the Easter weekend, is nominally in force for 30 hours until midnight on Easter Monday. ‘We are proceeding on the assumption that the Ukrainian side will follow our example,’ he said. All military operations, the President added, would supposedly be halted during that time period. From Putin’s statement it doesn’t look as if this ceasefire was discussed with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, or anyone from his administration, before he announced it. But it appears that for the rest of this weekend – maybe, just maybe – quiet will reign on the battlefields of Ukraine.

With just under a week to go until the supposed Easter deadline, it appears that Donald Trump is no closer to securing a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. The President’s special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff travelled to St Petersburg yesterday for talks on ‘aspects of a Ukraine settlement’ with Vladimir Putin. The fact that neither produced a read-out of the four and a half hour meeting afterwards implies that, yet again, Trump’s representative has come away without having achieved much meaningful progress. While the Americans may have hoped yesterday’s meeting would perhaps bring Putin closer to the negotiating table with Ukraine, the Russians were clearly under no such illusion.

When Vladimir Putin launched his bid to be elected as Russia’s president in 2000, he had already been in the role for a month and a half. His predecessor Boris Yeltsin had stepped down on 31 December 1999, appointing his young prime minister in his place to prevent political opponents from prosecuting him and his associates – on well-founded grounds – for corruption. At the time, less than a decade after the collapse of the USSR, Russia had fair elections, freedom of expression, a thriving press and a growing economy. A quarter of a century on, all of that has gone. Today marks exactly 25 years since Putin was elected President of Russia for the first time.

Vladimir Putin is apparently open to a ceasefire in the war against Ukraine. But is he really? Just like that, the response that America, Ukraine and its Western allies had been waiting for has arrived. Speaking this afternoon in a joint press conference with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, the Russian President commented for the first time on America’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in the conflict. ‘We agree with the proposal to stop military actions,’ he said. The truce, he said, should lead to ‘long-term peace and eliminate the root causes of the crisis’.  As with many statements which turn out to be too good to be true, the Russian President then followed this with a ‘but’: ‘There must be nuances,’ he added.