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  • Putin and Zelensky play for time

    Putin and Zelensky play for time
    2025/07/24
    Another round of direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine took place in Istanbul on July 23. This was the third meeting between the two sides since face-to-face meetings resumed in May.The previous two rounds yielded very few concrete results, apart from agreements on prisoner exchanges and the return of the bodies of soldiers killed in action. They did, however, demonstrate two things. First, both sides remain very far apart on what they would consider acceptable terms for a ceasefire, let alone a peace agreement. And, second, neither side is prepared to walk away from the negotiations, fearing to incur the wrath of Donald Trump, the US president.Consequently, expectations for the third round were very low, and the negotiators did not disappoint in delivering almost nothing after their shortest meeting yet, which lasted just forty minutes. They agreed on another exchange of prisoners and on setting up three working groups on political, military, and humanitarian issues to engage online rather than in face-to-face meetings. A fourth round of negotiations has not been ruled out, but it is unlikely to involve the two countries’ presidents, given that their negotiating positions still offer little hope of a deal ready to be signed at a leaders’ summit. As if further evidence was needed that these talks are mostly performative exercises devoid of any sincere effort to bring the fighting to an end, within hours of the meeting in Istanbul ending, Russia and Ukraine launched fresh air attacks against each other’s Black Sea shores.While all this appears to mirror the patterns of the previous two rounds of talks, this third round, however, took place in a different context than the earlier two meetings. On July 14, Trump set a deadline of fifty days for the fighting to stop. If this deadline passes without a ceasefire agreement, he will consider imposing hefty secondary sanctions on Russia’s remaining trade partners, in an effort to starve Moscow’s war economy of crucial foreign income. To date, the Kremlin has been able to sell heavily discounted oil and gas to willing buyers like India and China, both of whom are also critical to sustaining Russia’s war effort by supplying explosives and engines for Russia’s drone fleet.The first ten days of this 50-day ultimatum have now passed. While the talks in Istanbul might be seen as a sign that Kyiv and Moscow are taking Trump seriously, the lack of tangible results suggests otherwise. There is no indication that either Russia or Ukraine have moved from their maximalist demands. Russia keeps insisting on the recognition of its illegal occupation in Ukraine, on future limits to Ukraine’s military strength, and on a permanent blocking of the country’s accession to Nato. Ukraine meanwhile asks for its territorial integrity to be restored and its sovereignty, including its ability to determine its alliance arrangements, to be respected.Nor do developments on and around the battlefields in Ukraine offer any signs that Moscow or Kyiv are ready even for a ceasefire. Russia keeps making incremental gains along the 1000 km of frontlines in Ukraine. And the Kremlin keeps pounding Ukrainian cities, including the capital Kyiv, with nightly air attacks at unprecedented scales of hundreds of drones and missiles that have repeatedly overwhelmed Ukraine’s already stretched air defence systems.Yet, Ukraine has been buoyed by the promise of more US arms deliveries — paid for by other Nato allies — and the continuing commitments by its international partners to support the country, including at the recent Nato summit in The Hague and the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome. Add to that Trump’s apparent pivot away from Putin and his recently more constructive relationship with Zelensky, and it becomes clear why Kyiv, like Moscow, thinks that time is on its side.Both may be proven wrong. Zelensky’s latest efforts to consolidate his power — a large-scale cabinet reshuffle and a decree to curb the independence of two of Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies — have caused alarm among EU officials in Brussels. More importantly, they have also triggered rare public protests against the government in Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities, including Dnipro, Lviv, and Odesa. The protests may not get enough traction to pose a real danger to the government, but they indicate that support for Zelensky is not unconditional, something that the Ukrainian president appeared to acknowledge when he announced plans to submit an additional bill to parliament protecting the independence of the embattled anti-corruption agencies. And crucially, what is widely seen as a power grab by the president’s inner circle also has the potential of undermining public morale at a critical time in the war.All of this also feeds into a Russian narrative of Zelensky as an illegitimate leader of his country who Russia cannot negotiate with. But it would be a mistake to assume that Russia...
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    7 分
  • Ukraine Recovery Conference 2025 emphasises challenges and costs of rebuilding the country

    Ukraine Recovery Conference 2025 emphasises challenges and costs of rebuilding the country
    2025/07/14
    Clearly angered by the intensification of Russia’s air campaign against Ukraine, Donald Trump has pivoted from the suspension of US military assistance to Ukraine to promising its resumption. Russia’s strikes on major cities killed more civilians in June than have died in any single previous month, according to UN figures. Over the past two weeks, the US president has made several disparaging comments about his relationship with Vladimir Putin, including on July 13 that the Russian president “talks nice and then he bombs everybody in the evening”.Not only will the US resume the delivery of long-promised Patriot air defence missiles, but Trump is now also reported to be considering a whole new plan to arm Ukraine, including with offensive capabilities. Additionally, he has talked about imposing new sanctions on Putin’s regime and putting 100% tariffs on any countries buying Russian oil unless there is a deal within the next 50 days.This is the general background against which the eighth Ukraine Recovery Conference took place in Rome on July 10 and 11. The event, attended by many western leaders and senior business executives, serves as an important reminder that the war against Ukraine will be decided on the battlefield, but that peace will only be won as the result of rebuilding Ukraine’s economy and society.Ending the war anytime soon and on terms favourable to Kyiv will require an enormous effort by Ukrainians and their European allies. The country’s recovery afterwards will be no less challenging.According to the World Bank’s latest assessment, as of the end of 2024, Ukraine’s recovery needs over the next decade stood at $524 billion.With every month that the war continues, these needs are increasing as the damage grows that Russia’s aggression causes, including to housing, transport, and energy infrastructure – the three hardest-hit sectors which account for around 60% of all damage, according to the World Bank.At the same time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provided a relatively positive assessment of Ukraine’s overall economic situation at the end of June, with economic growth forecast at between two and three percent for 2025 and likely to grow to over 4 percent in 2026 and 2027. However, the IMF also cautioned that this trajectory, and the country’s macroeconomic stability more generally, will remain heavily dependent on external support. This is especially the case as the IMF also projected a potential gap in Ukraine’s budget for next year of up to $19 billion.The cumulative pledge of over €10 billion at the Ukraine recovery conference, therefore, is both encouraging and sobering at the same time. It is encouraging in the sense that Ukraine’s international partners remain committed to the country’s social and economic needs, not merely its ability to resist Russia on the battlefield. Of particular note in this context is the EU’s announcement of a new €2.3 billion support package, consisting of €1.8 billion of loan guarantees and €580 million of grants. This constitutes more than one-quarter of the EU's €9.3 billion commitment in the Ukraine Investment Framework.And yet, it is also sobering that even these eye-watering sums of public money are still only a fraction of Ukraine’s needs. Even if the EU manages to mobilise its overall target of €40 billion for Ukraine’s recovery, by attracting additional contributions from other donors and the private sector, this will constitute less than 8 percent of Ukraine’s recovery needs as of the end of last year. As the war continues and more of the diminishing public funding is directed towards defence expenditure by Kyiv’s western partners, this gap is likely to grow over time.And money is not the only problem for Ukraine recovery efforts. Rebuilding the country is not simply about undoing the damage done to infrastructure and economic performance. The social impact of Russia’s aggression is similarly hard to over-estimate. Ukraine has been deeply traumatised as a society since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.Generally reliable casualty counts — some 12,000 civilians and 43,000 troops killed since February 2022 — still likely underestimate the number of people who died as a direct consequence of the Russian aggression, each of whom will have left behind family members struggling to cope with their loss. In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of war veterans.Already during the period between Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the launch of the full-scale invasion eight years later, there were nearly half a million veterans. By the end of 2024, this number had more than doubled to around 1 million. Most of them have complex social, economic, medical, and psychological needs that will have to be considered as part of a society-wide recovery effort.According to data from the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), there are also some 7 million ...
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    8 分
  • Despite superficial consensus at the Nato summit, the US has abandoned Ukraine

    Despite superficial consensus at the Nato summit, the US has abandoned Ukraine
    2025/07/07
    Recent news from Ukraine has generally been bad. Since the end of May, ever larger Russian air strikes have been documented against Ukrainian cities with devastating consequences for civilians, including in the country’s capital, Kyiv. Amid small and costly but steady gains along the almost 1,000 km long frontline, Russia reportedly took full control of the Ukrainian region of Luhansk, part of which it had already occupied before the beginning of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. And according to Dutch and German intelligence reports, some of Russia’s gains on the battlefield are enabled by the widespread use of chemical weapons.It was therefore something of a relief that Nato’s summit in The Hague did not upset the proverbial apple cart. Nato allies issued a short joint declaration on June 25 in which Russia was clearly named as a “long-term threat … to Euro-Atlantic security” and in which they restated “their enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine”. While the summit declaration made no mention of future Nato membership for Ukraine, the fact that US president Donald Trump agreed to these two statements was widely seen as a success.Yet, within a week of the summit, Washington paused the delivery of critical weapons to Ukraine, including Patriot air defence missiles and long-range precision-strike rockets. The move was ostensibly in response to depleting US stockpiles. But it contradicted the Pentagon’s own analysis, which suggested that the shipment – authorised by former US president Joe Biden last year under a presidential drawdown authority – posed no risk to US ammunition supplies.This was bad news for Ukraine. The halt in supplies weakens Kyiv’s ability to protect its large population centres and critical infrastructure against intensifying Russian airstrikes. It also puts limits on Ukraine’s ability to target Russian supply lines and logistics hubs behind the frontlines that have been enabling ground advances. Despite protests from Ukraine and an offer from Germany to buy Patriot missiles from the US for Ukraine, Trump has been in no rush to reverse the decision by the Pentagon.Another phone call with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on July 3, failed to change Trump’s mind, even though he acknowledged his disappointment with the clear lack of willingness by the Kremlin to stop the fighting. What’s more, within hours of the call between the two presidents, Moscow launched the largest drone attack of the war against Kyiv.A day later Trump spoke with Zelensky. And while the call between them was apparently productive, neither side gave any indication that US weapons shipments to Ukraine would resume quickly.Trump previously paused arms shipments and intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March, 2025 after his acrimonious encounter with Zelensky in the Oval Office. But the US president reversed course after whatever concessions he had been after were forthcoming – whether that was an agreement by Ukraine to an unconditional ceasefire or a deal on the country’s minerals.It is not clear with the current disruption whether Trump is after yet more concessions from Ukraine. The timing of this latest disruption is ominous, however, coming after what had appeared to be a constructive Nato summit with a unified stance on Russia’s war of aggression. And it preceded Trump’s call with Putin. This could have been read as a signal that Trump was still keen to accommodate at least some of the Russian president’s demands in exchange for the necessary concessions from the Kremlin to agree, finally, the ceasefire that Trump had once envisaged he could achieve in 24 hours.If this is indeed the case, the fact that Trump continues to misread the Russian position is deeply worrying. The Kremlin has clearly drawn its red lines on what it is after in any peace deal with Ukraine. These demands – virtually unchanged since the beginning of the war – include a lifting of sanctions against Russia and no Nato membership for Ukraine, while also insisting that Kyiv must accept limits on its future military forces and recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea and four regions on the Ukrainian mainland. These demands will not change as a result of US concessions to Russia but only through pressure on Putin. And Trump has so far been unwilling to apply such pressure in a concrete and meaningful way beyond the occasional hints to the press or on social media.It is equally clear that Russia’s maximalist demands are unacceptable to Ukraine and its European allies. With little doubt that the US can any longer be relied upon to back the European and Ukrainian position, Kyiv and the old continent need to accelerate their own defence efforts.A European coalition of the willing to do just that is slowly taking shape. It straddles the once rigid boundaries of EU and Nato membership and non-membership, involving countries such as Moldova, Norway and ...
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    7 分
  • Nato's summit in The Hague is a critical test for the transatlantic alliance

    Nato's summit in The Hague is a critical test for the transatlantic alliance
    2025/06/24
    When Nato leaders meet for their annual summit in The Hague on Wednesday, June 25, all eyes will be on Donald Trump. Not only is the 47th president of the United States less committed to the alliance than any of his predecessors in Nato’s 76-year history. But he has also joined Israel’s war with Iran, threatened regime change, and then brokered a ceasefire between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Closer to Nato’s borders, he seems long have given up his efforts to end the war in Ukraine.Leaders of Nato’s 32 member states should therefore have a packed agenda. Although there are several meetings and a dinner planned for June 24, the actual summit – which has tended usually to stretch out over several days – has been reduced to a single session and a single agenda item. All of this has been done to accommodate the US president. A single session reduces the risk of Trump walking away from the summit early, as he did at the G7 leaders meeting in Kananaskis, Canada, on June 16.The single item remaining on the agenda is Nato members’ new commitment to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. This is meant to placate Trump who demanded such an increase even before his inauguration in January 2025. The US president, like many of his predecessors, has also frequently complained, and not without justification, that European members of the alliance invest too little in their defence and are over-reliant on the US. A draft summit declaration confirming the new spending target has now been approved.Even accounting for Trump’s notorious unpredictability, this should ensure that Nato will survive the Hague summit intact. What is less clear is whether Nato’s members can rise to the unprecedented challenges that the alliance is facing. These challenges look different from each of the 32 capitals, but for 31 of them, the continued survival of the alliance as an effective security provider is an existential question. Put simply, they need the US, while the US doesn’t necessarily need to be part of the alliance.Symptomatic for this dependence is the capability deficit that Canada and European member states have compared to the US, which was thrown into stark relief by Washington’s airstrikes against Iran over the weekend. This is not simply a question of increasing manpower and equipping troops to fight. European states also lack most of the so-called critical enablers required to prevail in a potential war with Russia, including intelligence capabilities, command and control structures, and heavy-lift aircraft to quickly move troops and equipment. All of these have traditionally been provided by US forces, and they will take significant time and resources to build up should the US pull back from Europe.For now, Russia is tied down in Ukraine, which will buy time. And the 5%-commitment, even if not all member states will get there quickly or at all, is likely to go some way to mobilise the necessary resources for beefing up Europe’s defences. But time and resources are not limitless. And it is not yet clear what the American commitment to Europe will be in the future and when and how it will be reduced.Nor is it completely obvious what kind of war Europe should prepare for. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is both a very traditional war of attrition and a very modern technological showdown. A future confrontation with the Kremlin is initially likely to take the form of a grey-zone conflict, a state of affairs between war and peace in which acts of aggression happen but are difficult to attribute unambiguously and to respond to proportionately.This has arguably already started with Russian attacks on critical infrastructure across Europe. But as the example of Ukraine illustrates, grey-zone conflicts have the potential to escalate to conventional war. In February 2022, Russia saw an opportunity to pull Ukraine back into its sphere of influence by brute force after and launched a full-scale invasion, hoping to capture Kyiv in a matter of a few days. This turned out to be a gross misjudgement on the Kremlin’s part. And three years on from that, and partly as a consequence of it, the possibility of a nuclear confrontation can no longer be ruled out either — if frequent Russian threats to this effect are to be believed.Key members of the alliance are unequivocal in their assessment of Russia as an existential threat to Europe. This is evident from the UK’s strategic defence review and a new strategy paper for the German armed forces. Yet, it is not a view unanimously shared. Trump’s pro-Putin leanings date back to their now infamous meeting in Helsinki when he sided with the Russian president against his own intelligence services. In Europe, long-term Putin supporters Victor Orban and Robert Fico, the prime ministers of EU and Nato members Hungary and Slovakia, have just announced that they will not support additional EU sanctions against Russia.Hungary and Slovakia are hardly defence ...
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    7 分
  • Amid an escalating air and ground war, talks between Russia and Ukraine yield no progress

    Amid an escalating air and ground war, talks between Russia and Ukraine yield no progress
    2025/06/04
    News of the spectacular “spiderweb” mass drone attack on Russian air bases on June 1 will have been uppermost in the minds of delegates who assembled the following day for another round of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul.The attack appears to have been a triumph of Ukrainian intelligence and planning that destroyed or damaged billions of pounds’ worth of Russian aircraft stationed at bases across the country, including at locations as far away as Siberia.Ukraine’s drone strikes, much like Russia’s intensifying air campaign, hardly signal either side’s sincere commitment to negotiations. As it turned out, little of any consequence was agreed at the brief meeting between negotiators, beyond a prisoner swap, confirming yet again that neither a ceasefire nor a peace agreement are likely anytime soon.As with the similarly inconclusive meeting between the two sides on May 16, the lack of progress is unsurprising. However, the broader context of developments on the battlefield and beyond offers important clues about the trajectory of the war in the coming months.At their earlier meeting in Istanbul in May, Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to draft and exchange detailed proposals for a settlement. The Ukrainian proposal reiterated the long-standing position of Kyiv and its western allies that concessions on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country are unacceptable.In other words, a Russian-imposed neutrality ruling out NATO membership and limiting the size of Ukraine’s armed forces as well as any international recognition of Moscow’s illegal land-grabs since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 are non-starters for Ukraine. While the Ukrainian proposal accepts a ceasefire along the frontline, it considers this only as “the starting point for negotiations” and demands that “territory issues are discussed only after a full and unconditional ceasefire.”In substance, this is very similar to Zelensky’s peace plan of late 2022 which failed to get broader traction outside the capitals of Ukraine’s western allies.The Russian proposals are also mostly old news. Moscow’s terms were only handed to Ukrainian negotiators at their meeting in Istanbul on Monday. Given what the Kremlin is reported to be asking for, this is unlikely to have made any difference to the possibility of meaningful discussions between the sides: the full recognition of Russian territorial claims since 2014, Ukrainian neutrality, and the stringent conditions set out for even a temporary ceasefire are hardly in any way more serious negotiation positions from Ukraine’s perspective than Kyiv’s proposals are likely to be to Moscow. In fact, what the Kremlin put on the table in Istanbul is more akin to surrender terms.Ukraine is in no mood or need to surrender. The wave of drone attacks targeted several airbases deep inside Russia on June 1, including some hosting parts of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. But this, like previous drone strikes against Moscow in June 2023, is more of a symbolic morale booster than signalling a sustainable Ukrainian capability that could prove critical in evening out some of the advantages that Russia has over Ukraine in terms of material mass and manpower.Closer to the frontlines inside Ukraine, Kyiv’s forces also struck the power grid inside the Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. This may have an impact on any Russian plans for an offensive to capture more of these two southern Ukrainian regions that Russia has claimed since sham referendums in September 2022 but still does not fully control. But much like the drone strikes deep into Russia, it is, at best, an operation that entrenches, rather than breaks the current stalemate.There is no doubt that Ukraine remains under severe military pressure from Russia along most of the more than 1,000km-long frontline. The country is also still very vulnerable to Russian air attacks. However, while Russia might continue to make incremental gains on the battlefield, a game-changing Russian offensive or a collapse of Ukrainian defences does not appear to be on the cards.Kyiv’s position will potentially also be strengthened by a new bill in the US senate that threatens the imposition of 500% tariffs on any countries that buy Russian resources. This would primarily affect India and China, the largest consumers of Russian oil and gas and could cut Russia off from critical revenues and imports — if New Delhi and Beijing decide that trade with the US is more important to them than cheap imports from Russia.Yet, US president Donald Trump, to date has been indecisive when it comes to putting any real, rather than just rhetorical pressure on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. It is, therefore, not clear whether the proposed senate bill will have the desired effect any time soon or at all.By contrast, European support for Ukraine has, if anything, increased over the past months. It still falls ...
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    7 分
  • Berlin steps up to replace Washington as guarantor of European security

    Berlin steps up to replace Washington as guarantor of European security
    2025/05/29
    Two statements from world leaders this week bear closer examination. On May 27, US president Donald Trump took to his TruthSocial social media channel to proclaim that if it wasn’t for him, “lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia”. The following day the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, announced that his country would assist Ukraine in developing long-range missiles to deploy against targets inside Russia. Both statements are quite extraordinary.Even by Trump’s own standards, the public declaration by a sitting US president that he is protecting the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is unprecedented. Putin is an indicted war criminal who has been waging a war of aggression against Ukraine for more than three years after having illegally annexed Crimea over a decade ago. There can now be no doubt left that the US has become an unreliable ally for Ukraine and its European partners.This is the context in which Merz’s announcement of increasing defence cooperation with Ukraine becomes significant. While Trump continues to chase an impossible deal with Putin – even after threatening to abandon his mediation efforts less than ten days ago – Germany has doubled down on Ukraine’s defence.Not only that, but as the EU’s largest and Nato’s second-largest economy, Germany is now also aiming to turn its Bundeswehr into the “strongest conventional army in Europe”. Its most senior military officer, Carsten Breuer, has published plans for a rapid and wide-ranging expansion of defence capabilities.Germany is finally beginning to pull its weight in European defence and security policy. This is absolutely critical to the credibility of the EU in the face of the threat from Russia. Berlin has the financial muscle and the technological and industrial potential to make Europe more of a peer to the US when it comes to defence spending and burden sharing. This will be important to salvage what remains of Nato in light of a highly probable American down-scaling — if not complete abandonment — of its past security commitments to the alliance.After decades of failing to develop either a grand strategy to deal with Russia or the hard power capabilities that need to underpin it, achieving either will take some time. But it is important to acknowledge that some critical first steps have been taken by the new German government.For Germany, and much of the rest of Europe, the investment in more defence capabilities does not simply require producing more ammunition or procuring more advanced defence systems. These are important — but what is also needed is a significant investment in developing manpower. This means either finding more volunteers or reintroducing conscription, which is now no longer a taboo in Germany.Deploying a whole new brigade to Lithuania is an important signal to Nato allies about Germany’s commitment to the alliance. It is also a clear signal to Russia that Germany finally is putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to containing the threat from Russia, which has grown significantly since the beginning of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.The three years of Russia’s war against its neighbour have also highlighted the threat that Russia poses beyond Ukraine’s borders. The war against Ukraine has exposed European vulnerabilities and its dependence on the United States. And it has taught military planners important lessons about what a likely future confrontation with Russia would look like. This is why Germany’s military planners have identified air defence systems, precision strike capabilities, drones, and electronic and cyber warfare assets as procurement priorities.Beyond Germany, the signs have been that Europe more broadly is beginning to learn to stand on its own feet when it comes to its security. For the continent, the challenge is threefold. It needs to beef up its defence spending in light of the ongoing war against Ukraine and Russian threats to expand it further. Europe also needs to come to terms with the dismantling of the transatlantic alliance by Trump. And, finally, there is a growing populist surge that threatens the very foundations of European democracy and has the potential to undermine European security and defence efforts. This has been given extra fuel by the alignment of Trump’s America-first Maga movement with Putin’s Russia.These are enduring challenges with no quick fixes. The first test of this apparent new-found European mettle will be the war in Ukraine. Giving Ukraine permission to use long-range missiles against targets in Russia is not a new development. Such a move was first taken by the then US president, Joe Biden, in November 2024 when he authorised Ukraine to launch limited strikes into Russia using US-made long-range missiles, followed by similar authorisations from London and Paris at the time, but not Berlin.Now, as then, how effective this will be depends not ...
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    7 分
  • For the sake of a reset with Russia, Trump has abandoned efforts to mediate peace in Ukraine

    For the sake of a reset with Russia, Trump has abandoned efforts to mediate peace in Ukraine
    2025/05/20
    After a phone call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on May 19, US president Donald Trump took to social media to declare that Russia and Ukraine will “immediately start negotiations” towards a ceasefire and an end to the war. He did, however, add that the conditions for peace “will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be”.With the Vatican, according to Trump, "very interested in hosting the negotiations" and European leaders duly informed, it seems clear that the United States, and Trump personally, have effectively abandoned their stalled mediation efforts to end the war against Ukraine.It was always a possibility that Trump could walk away from the war, despite previous claims he could end it in 24 hours. This only became more likely on May 16, when the first face-to-face negotiations between Ukraine and Russia for more than three years predictably ended without a ceasefire agreement.When Trump announced shortly afterwards on his social media platform that he would be speaking to his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts by phone a few days later, he effectively mounted the beginning of a rearguard action. This was further underlined when US vice president JD Vance shortly before the Trump-Putin call explicitly told reporters that the US could end its shuttle diplomacy.The meagre outcomes of the talks between Russia and Ukraine — as well as between Trump and Putin — are not surprising. Russia is clearly not ready for any concessions yet and keeps insisting that Ukraine accept its maximalist demands of territorial concessions and future neutrality.Putin simultaneously continues to slow-walk any negotiations. After his call with Trump, he reportedly said that "Russia will offer and is ready to work with Ukraine on a memorandum on a possible future peace agreement", including "a possible ceasefire for a certain period of time, should relevant agreements be reached."The lack of urgency on Russia's part to end the fighting, and, in fact, the Kremlin's ability and willingness to continue the war, was underlined by the largest drone attack against Ukraine so far in the war on the day before the Trump-Putin call. Nor has there been any let-up in the fighting since. And the fact that Putin spoke to Trump while visiting a music school in the southern Russian city of Sochi further suggests that a ceasefire in Ukraine is not that high on the Russian leader's priority list.A large part of the Kremlin's calculation seems to be the desire to strike a grand bargain with the White House on a broader reset of relations — and to signal clearly that this is more important than the war in Ukraine and might even happen without the fighting there ending.This also still appears to drive thinking in Washington, with Trump foreshadowing an improvement in bilateral relations by describing "tone and spirit of the conversation" with Putin as "excellent". Following the two-hour conversation with his Russian counterpart, Trump also seemed excited about the prospects of "largescale trade" with Russia.Trump is on record as saying that there would be no progress towards peace in Ukraine until he and Putin would get together. Such direct interaction between the American and Russian presidents may well be critical to any progress in relations between the two countries. However, it is worth bearing in mind that very little movement towards a ceasefire in Ukraine, let alone a peace agreement, occurred after the previous phone call between the two presidents on February 12.Part of this lack of progress has been Trump's reluctance to date to put any real pressure on Putin. And despite agreement in Brussels and preparations in Washington for an escalation in sanctions against Russia, it is unlikely that Trump will change his approach. If anything, the outcome of this latest Trump-Putin call is an indication that Trump is prioritising the improvement of bilateral relations with Russia over peace in Ukraine.In this context, the sequence in which the calls occurred is also telling. Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had a short call before the former spoke with Putin. Zelensky said he told Trump not to make decisions about Ukraine “without us”.But rather than presenting Putin with a clear ultimatum to accept the existing ceasefire proposal, Trump apparently discussed future bilateral relations with Putin at great length during their call — before informing Zelensky and key European allies that the war in Ukraine is now solely their problem to solve.This has certainly raised justifiable fears in Kyiv and other European capitals again that, for the sake of a reset with Russia, the US might yet completely abandon its allies across the Atlantic.However, if a reset with Russia at any cost really is Trump's strategy, it is bound to fail. As much as Putin seems willing to continue with his aggression against Ukraine, Zelensky is as unwilling to surrender. Where Putin can rely on China's continuing...
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    7 分
  • Territorial concessions, and who makes them, are central to any Ukraine peace deal — and to Russia’s long-term agenda

    Territorial concessions, and who makes them, are central to any Ukraine peace deal — and to Russia’s long-term agenda
    2025/05/15
    When the Ukrainian and Russian delegations meet in Istanbul later today (May 15), territory — and who controls it — will be high on their agenda.The meeting, when it happens, will have come about after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, offered to start direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv at a press conference on May 11. Donald Trump, the American president and want-to-be peacemaker, pushed Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian counterpart, to accept this offer in a social media post, saying that "Ukraine should agree to this, IMMEDIATELY."And the Ukrainian president, still buoyed by a meeting with the British, French, German, and Polish leaders that called for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire, agreed shortly afterwards.In the build-up to the possible resumption of direct negotiations, there was some hope that all three presidents — Putin, Zelensky, and Trump — would meet, but this has now apparently been ruled out, indicating that no breakthrough towards an actual peace deal is expected. This is hardly surprising, given that Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiating positions still lie far apart. Russia has made it clear that it wants to focus on the so-called Istanbul communique of March 2022 and a subsequent draft agreement negotiated but never adopted by the two sides in April 2022.The 2022 negotiations were mostly about Ukrainian neutrality and security guarantees, and they deliberately excluded the status of Crimea by relegating its resolution to separate negotiations with a 10-15 year timeframe.When Russia additionally mentions what it calls “the current situation on the ground”, this is thinly-disguised code for territorial questions that have become more contentious over the past three years as a result of Russian gains on the battlefield and the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions in September 2022 (in addition to Crimea, which Russia annexed also illegally in 2014).Russia's position, as articulated most recently by the country's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, is that "the international recognition of Crimea, Sevastopol, the DPR, the LPR, the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions as part of Russia is ... imperative."This is clearly a non-starter for Ukraine, as repeatedly stated by Zelensky, even though there might be some flexibility on accepting that some parts of sovereign Ukrainian territory are under temporary Russian control, as suggested by Trump's Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, and Kyiv's mayor, Vitali Klitschko.The territories that Russia currently occupies — and claims — in Ukraine have varying strategic, economic, and symbolic value for Moscow and Kyiv. The areas with the greatest strategic value include Crimea and the territories on the shores of the Sea of Azov, which provide Russia with a land corridor to Crimea.The international recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, as apparently suggested under the terms of an agreement hashed out by Putin and Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff, could expand Russia's de jure control of the Black Sea, which could then be used by the Kremlin as a launchpad for renewed attacks on Ukraine. Such extended maritime control would also threaten NATO's eastern flank in Romania and Bulgaria. Any permanent recognition of Russia's de-facto control of these territories is, therefore, unacceptable for Ukraine and its European partners.Compared with Crimea and the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions along the Sea of Azov, the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk are of lower strategic value. However, there is a certain economic value in all four regions on Ukraine's mainland.This includes, in the long term, the mineral resources on which the US and Ukraine concluded a separate deal on April 30. While there is considerable doubt over how good a deal this is, the resource potential of the Russian-occupied territories is substantial, including Europe's largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia. In addition, the four occupied regions boast a substantial labour force among their estimated population of between 4.5 million and 5.5 million people who will be critical to Ukraine's post-war reconstruction.Beyond the strategic and economic value of the illegally occupied territories, the symbolism that both sides attach to their control is the most significant obstacle to any deal, given how irreconcilable Moscow's and Kyiv's positions are. For both sides, control of these territories, or loss thereof, is what defines victory or defeat in the war.Putin may be able to claim that even partial territorial gains in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 short of full control of all four regions are a victory for Russia. But even for him any compromise that would see Russia give up territory that it has conquered — often at exceptionally high cost — would be a risky gamble for the stability of his regime.For Ukraine, anything less than the complete restoration of the country's territorial integrity in its 1991 borders would imply ...
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