A prisoner exchange and a three-day partial ceasefire at the weekend were the only visible signs of a potential Russia-Ukraine peace process. Talks between Russia and the US, which have excluded Kyiv, are to all intents and purposes dead, with Donald Trump heavily preoccupied with Iran and China.
Moscow’s triumphal Victory Day military celebrations were conspicuously muted, an acknowledgment of the direct threat to the capital posed by Ukrainian drones.
On the battlefield Russia’s small advances in Donbass have all but ground to a halt, despite Vladimir Putin’s claims to an easily persuaded Trump. No easy victory is visible, and the latter’s weekend description of what he said was “hopefully” the “beginning of the end of a very long, deadly and hard-fought war” appeared as delusional as his regular announcements of the end of the conflict with Iran.
As Lara Marlowe’s recent reports for The Irish Times have shown, Ukraine’s rapid development of its drone capacity – it now produces most of the drones it uses – has led to increasing battlefield superiority against Russian infantry. With an estimated 325,000 Russian dead so far in the four-year war, six times US fatalities in Vietnam, there is growing confidence in Kyiv that perhaps it can survive and thrive independently of the unreliable support of its US ally.
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President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been increasingly willing to rebuke the US president who only a year ago humiliated him into silence. He bluntly attacked Trump’s easing of oil sanctions on Russia to mitigate the effects of the Persian Gulf blockade. “Every dollar paid for Russian oil is money for the war,” he said. “Russia played the Americans again, played the president of the United States.”
Kyiv has also been angered by Trump and his vice-president JD Vance’s insistence on territorial concessions. Last month Vance bemoaned Ukraine’s “haggling at this point over a few square kilometres of territory”.
Zelenskiy has been making overtures to an increasingly willing EU to step in as mediator. Speaking at an event on Thursday in Florence, European Council president António Costa said he believed there was “potential” for the EU to negotiate with Putin if US-led talks stalled further.
The EU has replaced the US as the largest funder of Ukraine’s war effort, considerably assisted by the ousting of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who had blocked a €90 billion loan.
Reports suggest, however, that there is no consensus among the union’s 27 leaders as to who should be appointed to speak for it, when such an effort should be made and what the offer to Putin would be. It is time for Europe’s diplomacy to come of age.
