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Greetings from a gloriously sunny and warm Kyiv, quite a turnaround given it was snowing just a week ago.
As ever, the news has not stopped so let’s get right into it.
The Ceasefire
It’s almost as if Donald Trump isn’t actually that good at making deals. Shortly before taking office, the incoming administration made a big deal of the belief they could bring peace to Ukraine in 100 days, revised slightly up from the original target of 24 hours.
As I write this, we are 89 days into those 100, and a genuine peace deal is still a long way off.
So what is the US going to do about it? Nothing. Trump is simply going to wash his hands of the whole thing.
“If for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say: ‘you’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people’, and we’re just going to take a pass. But hopefully we won’t have to do that,” Trump said on April 18.
What’s really remarkable about this isn’t the disconnect between no deal, and Trump’s self-professed image as the king of deal makers, but the fact that he hasn’t even put in the minimal amount of effort required to reach one.
OK, that’s not entirely accurate — he put a little effort in, but it was completely misdirected.
I said this last time, but it’s worth reiterating — on March 11, Ukraine agreed to a full, 30-day ceasefire. Russia refused.
A peace deal was there for the taking — all it required was just a little bit of effort to apply some pressure on the Russians.
All along, Trump has had multiple options to do this — increase sanctions on the Kremlin, impose secondary tarriffs on countries buying Russian oil, or increase military aid to Ukraine.
He used none of these. Russia even escaped his “Liberation Day” tariffs. That’s right — Trump has applied more economic pressure on almost every other country in the world since taking office than he has on Russia.
And now that his absolutely toothless approach to reaching a peace deal is looking like a dud, he appears to be blaming both Moscow and Kyiv equally.
Again, Ukraine already agreed to a full, 30-day ceasefire. On April 17, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya said a full ceasefire in Ukraine is “unrealistic”.
There’s only one side not playing ball and the frustration here in Ukraine has you screaming “how can you not see what’s going on?” every time Trump or one of his minions opens their mouth.
You could argue that that Trump administration is compromised, the US President is a Russian asset, or that the White House has fallen victim to Russian propaganda.
But look a bit wider — Trump has failed to stop the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, and this week his officials will begin negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran that’s almost certainly going to look a lot like the one he tore up when he was last president.
He’s just stunningly, and devastatingly incompetent and has surrounded himself with people of the same caliber.
The Minerals Deal
Unlike the ceasefire, there does actually appear to be some progress on this front. This week will see a new round of negotiations between the US and Ukraine following the signing of a memorandum on April 17.
Although not all the details have been made public and officials on both sides say there are still a lot of things to iron out, the latest version has gone from a document designed to permanently indenture Ukraine to the US and strip it of all its resources, to one that pays back all the aid Washington has given Kyiv and generates funds for both.
It’s still an abomination — the Biden administration gave that money to Ukraine for the defence of the very values that the US has stood for for centuries.
But now with an amoral president in charge who is steadily demolishing everything that made America a beacon of democracy, it’s just all about the cold hard cash.
Lessons From Lithuania
To see what a country looks like when it actually still stands for something and recognises the threat Russia poses to the way of life we’ve all taken for granted for decades, have a glance at Lithuania.
A hot topic of conversation in the Baltic nation is “what are you going to do if Russia invades?”
And this isn’t just casual table talk — people are genuinely preparing. The Kyiv Independent spoke to people there who told us there was “total panic” as the now infamous Oval Office showdown between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky unfolded.
“Everybody was thinking that NATO is kind of gone,” one person said.
Given the country’s proximity to Russia, its long and painful history of Russian aggression, and the dramatic changes in geopolitical realities, people are preparing grab bags, planning escape routes, and training for war.
The Lithuanian government is also taking the threat seriously — they already issue booklets with information on what to do if the worst happens, and in the latest move, announced it is to fortify a section of the Suwałki Gap, a strip of land connecting Belarus with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and widely seen as one of the most likely targets for a future Russian attack on Europe.
And it’s not just Lithuania — the other Baltic states and Poland are all taking similar steps.
Possible Attacks
Not that they abided by it anyway, but the Kremlin on Friday said a 30-day truce on attacks on energy infrastructure had expired.
This has obviously raised fears in Kyiv and across Ukraine that Russia’s mass missile and drone attacks could intensify even further in the coming days, a worrying prospect given attacks like the one in Sumy last week was one of the deadliest of the entire war.
One of the dubious joys of our advanced technological age is you can follow the activities of Russian bomber aircraft via various monitoring channels on Telegram.
Currently, there are four Tu-95 bombers fully loaded with cruise missiles at Russian airbases used to launch attacks against Ukraine which isn’t a lot but things can change very quickly.
“We know what Russia is preparing for. Now, ahead of Easter, and after it, new Russian attacks are possible”, Zelensky said earlier this week.
Adding to the tension, Russia’s last ballistic missile attack on Kyiv appears to have been quite successful which raises questions about just how much ammunition Ukraine has for its air defences.
Germany’s Taurus Missiles
But let’s end on a positive note — Vladimir Putin‘s very precious and very symbolic Crimea Bridge might soon be in for a bit of a rough time.
Germany has — finally — said its long-range Taurus missiles could be on their way to Ukraine.
Much to the frustration of Ukrainians, outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz repeatedly blocked the delivery of Taurus missiles because he was scared of Russia’s repeatedly hollow threats about escalation.
His successor, Friedrich Merz, is doing the sensible thing and ignoring Moscow.
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“If things continue as they are, if, for example, the most important land connection between Russia and Crimea is destroyed, or if something happens on Crimea itself, where most of the Russian military logistics are located, then that would be an opportunity to bring Ukraine strategically back into the picture finally,” he said earlier this week.
Like clockwork, after it was announced Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the move would lead to “inevitable escalation” — just days after murdering 35 civilians in Sumy with ballistic missiles packed with cluster munitions.