Owen Matthews

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have very different negotiating styles. Trump lines up his offer in advance, browbeating all the parties on his own side into compliance before slapping his bottom line on the table. Putin, by contrast, is a haggler. He loads his proposals with superstructure intended to be jettisoned in the course of getting to yes. Or to put it another way, what Putin says he wants and what he realistically expects to get are two different things. On the face of it, Russia’s first response to US proposals for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine contain several major deal-breakers that the Ukrainians could never swallow.

The main achievement of the US-Ukrainian talks in Jeddah was to produce a ceasefire document that Russia might actually want to sign. A long list of Ukrainian red lines – such as a partial ceasefire in the air and sea only, and security guarantees before any ceasefire was implemented – were swept aside. What’s on the table is essentially an unconditional ceasefire on all fronts, initially limited to thirty days. Putin now needs to decide whether it’s in Russia’s interests to accept.

Make no mistake: whatever higher moral authority they may have invoked in their defence, Soviet and Russian spies have never been good or honourable people. Kim Philby, the suave Martini-sipping traitor sent dozens of brave anti-Communist volunteers to their deaths. Konon Molody – alias Gordon Lonsdale, Canadian vending machine salesman and kingpin of the Portland Spy Ring – did not balk at blackmailing and threatening his hapless sub-agents into doing the KGB’s dirty work. But as the sordid revelations about the latest crop of Russian spies convicted yesterday in the Old Bailey’s Courtroom Seven reveal, the major difference between Moscow’s agents of yore and those of today is how lowbrow, how pathetic, how amateurish Russian intelligence operations appear to have become.

Will the real Volodymyr Zelensky please stand up? On Sunday, Ukraine’s president defiantly stated that ‘the final deal about ending the war is very, very far … nobody’s even started all those steps yet.’ But just three days later, Zelensky’s office issued a statement saying more or less the opposite. ‘None of us wants an endless war,’ read his official communiqué. ‘Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer … we are ready to work fast to end the war.’ So is Kyiv’s plan a quick ceasefire or a fight till victory? Zelensky’s mixed messages have left his allies confused and provided his enemies with political ammunition.

Days after the disastrous White House showdown between Volodymir Zelensky and Donald Trump, Sir Keir Starmer has done an undoubtedly impressive job in quickly rallying western leaders to Kyiv’s cause. The ‘Europe Plus’ partnership suggested by Starmer will be a ‘coalition of the willing’ to protect Ukraine that includes major non-European players such as Canada and, crucially, Turkey.  But make no mistake over the nature of Europe Plus’s new role. It is not, as some more excitable commentators have called it, a ‘mini-Nato.’ Europe is not taking over responsibility for its own security. A new European world order is not being built before our eyes.

Seldom in modern times has the fate of a whole nation been so dependent on a single meeting and on a single relationship. When Volodymyr Zelensky entered the Oval Office on Friday he had one job: to repair a deep and catastrophic rift between him and Donald Trump, who the previous week had called the Ukrainian president a ‘dictator’. Zelensky held the future of US support for his country’s defence against Russia in his hands.  But instead of a reconciliation, the meeting turned into an epochal diplomatic train wreck. So disastrous was the exchange that by the end Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington Oksana Markarova was holding her head in her hands.

US President Donald Trump has announced that Ukraine is ready to sign a deal that gives US investors a share in the country’s mineral riches. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, who two days ago vowed not to sign any deal that his countrymen would be paying for ‘for ten generations’ is due in Washington on Friday to sign a revised accord. The US’s most controversial demand – that Washington keep $500 billion in revenue from exploiting Ukraine’s resources as payback for military aid – has reportedly been removed from the final text.  While the final details of the deal remain undecided, one thing is certain: the scale of Ukraine’s mineral wealth and its actual value on world markets have been spectacularly overstated by both the US and Ukraine.

Three years ago today, Russian tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border in a massive surprise attack. Russian unit commanders and soldiers were told to prepare for a three-day campaign – and indeed by the end of the day parachute units were fighting for control of the vital Hostomel military airport just a few miles from the centre of Kyiv. But over a thousand days later, many of the fundamentals of war and politics have been changed forever.  For one, Europe found its conscience. In the run-up to the full-scale Russian invasion, some European countries – including Britain – were training Ukrainian infantry units in scattered partisan warfare and supplying man-portable anti tank weapons such as NLAWs and Javelins.

Is there any truth to Donald Trump’s extraordinary and, to many, highly offensive comments apparently blaming Volodymir Zelensky for starting the war? Speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said he was ‘disappointed’ that the Ukrainian leader complained about being left out of talks between the US and Russia in Riyad and claimed that Zelensky ‘could have made a deal’ to avert war. A ‘half baked’ negotiator could have secured a settlement years ago ‘without the loss of much land,’ claimed Trump. Trump is factually wrong – but not for the reason most commentators have assumed. Zelensky could indeed have averted the war back in October 2019, and came very close to doing so.

Sir Keir Starmer’s proposal to put British troops on the ground as part of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine is a principled and politically bold move. But the sad reality is that Britain is in no position to act as Ukraine's peacekeeper. Starmer is playing with an empty deck and singing from obsolete songbook.  Starmer has few options left other than gesture politics Starmer’s offer to put British troops on the ground is, in practical military terms, a very small promise. As former British Army chief Lord Dannatt pointed out last night, the UK’s armed forces are ‘so run down’ that we could not lead any future peacekeeping mission in Ukraine.

In a move likely to mark the beginning of the end of the Ukraine war, Donald Trump today announced that he had begun talks with Vladimir Putin. Trump has already held a ‘lengthy and highly productive phone call’ with Putin, he announced in a post on Truth Social, adding that they agreed to ‘have our respective teams start negotiations immediately’. The Biden administration promised repeatedly that no peace deal would be negotiated over the heads of the Ukrainians. But that was always, frankly, a lie. Trump at least has sufficient respect for Ukraine to be honest that the endgame of the war was always going to be decided in Washington, not in Kyiv.

The Trump administration’s takedown of federal spending has begun in earnest with the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an independent government agency that has been funding healthcare, pro-democracy and civil society programmes around the world since 1961. ‘We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,’ Elon Musk boasted on X, describing the agency as ‘a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.

The Kremlin’s involvement in Syria’s civil war was always, first and foremost, about posing as a great multi-regional power rather than actually being one. Vladimir Putin’s deployment of a single squadron of warplanes to Hmemim airbase in Syria in 2015 brought a gun to a knife-fight. The Assad regime had been fighting insurgents with poison gas and infamous ‘barrel bombs’ rolled out of helicopters. Russian Su-24 and Su-35 fighter-bombers and Kamov helicopter gunships were quickly able to turn the tide against the growing rebellion and undoubtedly saved Bashir al-Assad’s regime.