This month marks four years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war has lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war with Nazi Germany - known as the Great Patriotic War - in 1941-45. Repeated rounds of so-called peace talks have brought an end to the war no closer, and nor do they appear likely to, for the simple reason that Russian president Vladimir Putin never backs down - on anything. 

Having launched his Special Military Operation on 24 February 2022 with the aim of overrunning Kyiv and overthrowing his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky within two weeks, Putin has doggedly clung on, claiming success where none existed and sowing confusion to make failure appear as victory.

In all those long, miserable years in Ukraine, the only town of any size and symbolic significance that Russia has won and held since the early weeks of the war is Bakhmut. Its army pounded and obliterated Bakhmut for a year from mid-2022, finally claiming the destroyed city in May 2023. It has been attempting to do the same in Pokrovsk since the autumn of 2024 and has declared victory there on more than on occasion, but Ukrainian troops still cling on to the ruins in parts of the city.

The Kremlin stepped up the ferocity of its battlefield attacks last year in the hope of increasing its territorial gains and bolstering its bargaining power in negotiations with the US. Russia occupied around 1,500 square kilometres over the summer of 2025, more than double the territory it gained in the same three months a year earlier. But that land came at a devastating cost to the Russian population. 

Russian casualties have averaged around 1,000 per day for months, but in December 2025, for the first time, Russian losses on the battlefield exceeded the number of new recruits, according to the Kyiv Independent. Russia added 27,400 contract soldiers, lower than the 33,200 killed or wounded that month. 

There are other indications too, that the tide may be starting to turn against Russia. The number of recruits and casualties from its major cities, including Moscow and St Petersburg, is increasing. Until recently, the authorities avoided mobilising men from metropolitan areas, fearing that their grievances could foment protests and political opposition.

Recruitment focused instead on the distant corners of this huge country, often on men who were not ethnic Russians, whose deaths would go unnoticed by the wider population. They received sign-up bonuses amounting to tens of thousands of dollars, around three times their annual salary, with additional generous payments to their families if they died. For many, the danger money was worth the risk and few dared to complain when their sons didn’t come home.

But with the Russian army starting to run out of manpower, the Kremlin can no longer shelter large segments of the population from mobilisation. The last time it attempted a partial mobilisation, in September 2022, more than a quarter of a million young men fled the country, so that option is off the table.

Putin recently changed the law to allow conscripts to be drafted year-round and reservists to be called up. Although officially these men can serve only within Russia’s borders, chances are many of them will end up in Ukraine. The same goes for large numbers of foreign nationals from Africa, South America and elsewhere, lured to Russia by false promises of work or financial reward.

Including the astronomical cost of bonuses paid to the families of recruits, military spending made up as much as half of Russia’s state budget last year, according Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, far higher than officially declared. It’s difficult to believe that this ratio can be sustainable as pressure on the economy ramps up. 

International sanctions on Russia’s energy sector are turning the screw further, with the Russian newspaper Vedomosti reporting that oil and gas revenues to the federal budget in January were 50% down on a year ago. And India - the biggest importer of Russian oil since 2022 - is expected to slash its purchases further this year under pressure from the US. 

Russia’s sovereign wealth fund has long been used to plug spending gaps, but local media have started reporting that its coffers may be running dry. On top of this, regional government debt is at a 15-year high, and the banking sector is under pressure, with many borrowers struggling to repay loans in both the corporate and retail sectors. Economists believe that the non-military economy is close to recession and even Putin has admitted that economic growth is slowing to around 1%.

So far, Putin has been adept at finding ways and means to continue his war despite an increasingly bleak economic outlook. This year, Trump could be key to whether or not he succeeds. Expect his ‘peace’ negotiations to centre on increasingly desperate pleas for the lifting of sanctions on Russian oil and gas. 

For more on Russia’s economic woes, listen to this episode of Ukraine: the Latest (which includes a fascinating story about pigeons!)

So, the new year started with a bang in Venezuela with US President Donald Trump’s bold mission to unseat Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and bring him to “justice” in New York.

In a previous life, I worked as editor of a business magazine covering Venezuela - a once-prosperous but now failed state, mired in corruption. I’m not qualified to comment on whether Maduro is guilty of heading a drugs trafficking ring and the other crimes of which he’s accused, but he is undoubtedly a deeply unpleasant, amoral and dishonest politician who rigged elections and jailed or exiled his political opponents. 

The description equally fits his longtime ally, Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Notably, Putin did not lift a finger to help Maduro - providing further evidence, if it were needed, that Moscow is no longer a reliable partner on the global stage. Maduro is the second of Putin’s key allies to be deposed in the space of little over a year, after the fall of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who also failed to gain the Kremlin's support in his hour of need. Nor did Putin respond last summer when Iran, another of Russia’s strategic partners, came under attack from Israel, and is highly unlikely to support Teheran as the Islamic regime grapples with domestic protests and US threats.

Of course, Moscow is incapable of offering its allies military support, being mired in its brutal war of attrition in Ukraine. But Russia’s failure to respond is also symptomatic of an important shift in the global world order, in which spheres of influence led by strong (megalomaniac, even) leaders are replacing the post-World War II consensus of rules-based international order. 

Trump has already quipped about the ‘Donroe Doctrine’, his own version of the historical Monroe Doctrine, which established the Western Hemisphere as the US sphere of influence in return for staying out of European affairs. 

According to Fiona Hill, a former Russia advisor to Trump during his first term, the Kremlin had suggested just such a deal back in 2019. She testified in a congressional hearing that in April that year, the Kremlin raised the idea of giving up its influence in Venezuela in return for being allowed to do as it pleased in Ukraine. “You have your Monroe Doctrine. You want us out of your backyard. Well, you know, we have our own version of this. You’re in our backyard in Ukraine,” Hill told the hearing, paraphrasing the Russian officials' proposal.

A shift in the global order towards spheres of influence would mark a sea change in Russia’s foreign policy. Moscow has, for decades, sought to gain influence in Latin America, and Venezuela was its biggest conquest. The two countries have cooperated in dozens of energy and other industrial projects, and Putin and Maduro signed a new strategic partnership as recently as May 2025. 

While, on the face of it, the US action in Venezuela marked a key strategic defeat for Russia, the Kremlin’s response was somewhat muted. This is not entirely surprising. For starters, Moscow might not want to draw attention to the reputational damage suffered by its defence industry, which supplied the air defence systems over Caracas that completely failed to respond to the US threat.

The Russian reaction may also be tinged with embarrassment that the US appeared to have succeeded with such ease in removing an incumbent leader, while Russia’s attempts back in February 2022 to get rid of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky failed so spectacularly. While Maduro stood in the dock in New York, Zelensky’s Ukraine continued to repel Russian advances in a bloody war that has so far lasted almost four years and racked up one and a quarter million Russian casualties. “All of Russia is asking itself why we don’t deal with our enemies in a similar way,” wrote the prominent Russian ultranationalist Aleksandr Dugin.

But most of all, Putin must be rubbing his hands at the idea of a Donroe Doctrine. If Trump focuses more attention on Latin America, his peacemaking attempts in Ukraine and threats to put pressure on Moscow may dwindle away. It’s clear that Putin already thinks he has the upper hand in his dealings with Trump, successfully seeing off a raft of threats, deadlines and negotiations.

“Many amateur (and actual) psychiatrists have diagnosed Trump, but only Putin has successfully handled him as a ‘useful idiot’. Although he has pushed Trump too far on occasion, the man in the Kremlin feels secure in his relationship with the man in the Oval Office,” writes John Bolton, the former US national security advisor and US ambassador to the UN.

Oleksiy Sorokin, deputy chief editor of the Kyiv Independent, puts forward an alternative viewpoint. Washington’s seizure of Maduro shows the Kremlin’s weakness, he believes, exposing Russia as “a regional power overplaying its hand”. Sorokin continues, “Russia doesn’t appear to be in a strong position. Its allies are failing, its adversaries are emboldened, and its army isn’t performing. I think those in the White House are really close to getting it - ‘the Emperor has no clothes’”.

Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash

As the year draws to an end, and the anniversary of Donald Trump’s return to the White House approaches, the war in Ukraine still rages on. For all his grandiose campaign-trail statements of having “the war settled in one day”, the likelihood of any kind of peace agreement by the end of Trump’s first year back in office is vanishingly slim.

It’s hard to imagine that less than two months ago, Trump slapped sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, Russia’s two largest oil companies, as “a result of Russia’s lack of serious commitment to a peace process”, and was close to giving the go-ahead to send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine.

Since then, the tide has turned decisively against Ukraine and its embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelensky. Battered by an ongoing corruption scandal at home, which at the end of November prompted the resignation of his widely detested chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, Zelensky also finds himself once again out of favour with the deeply mercurial Trump. 

The American 28-point peace plan that hit the headlines in late November turned out to be a version of a Russian proposal that had been circulating under the radar for months, and demanded nothing less than Ukraine’s capitulation. Subsequent rounds of diplomacy have revised the proposals and Trump is clearly getting frustrated that Zelensky will not (indeed cannot, according to Ukraine’s constitution) give up land that too many Ukrainians have given their lives to defend. 

It has been more than a decade since Russia first attempted to annex the Donbas and a Russian victory on the battlefield remains firmly out of the question. The Economist recently calculated that at the current rate, it would take until June 2030 for Russia to fully occupy the four regions it claims to have annexed, and more than 100 years to capture the whole of Ukraine. Even though its pace of gains on the battlefield accelerated in recent weeks, the front lines have moved very little in the last three years, and no large city has changed hands.

Moscow now claims to have finally taken Pokrovsk, nearly 18 months after the battle for the key frontline city in Donetsk region began. But Ukrainian soldiers retain a toehold in the north of the once strategic city and have not given it up yet. The battle for Pokrovsk alone has cost Russia around 100,000 casualties, while the number of Russians killed or wounded in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 is approaching a staggering 1.2 million.

But Putin cares nothing for the lives of his people. What Trump still fails to realise is that the Russian dictator has no intention of ending the war unless his maximalist demands are met: Russian control of the entire Donbas region, a ban on Ukraine ever joining Nato, and Ukraine’s “denazification” which, broadly, is Kremlin-speak for returning Kyiv to Moscow’s sphere of influence. For Putin, anything less would mean backing down, and if there’s one thing the last quarter of a century in Russia has taught us, it’s that Putin doesn’t back down. Ever. 

The second thing that history has taught us is that Putin is a wily old fox and knows just how to play the people he wants to influence. Enter Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff - a fellow New York real-estate developer, and son-in-law Jared Kushner. They are both clearly looking at Russia through dollar-tinted spectacles, urging any kind of peace deal that will enable them to get their grubby paws on a share of Russia’s energy and mineral wealth. 

Renowned for being swayed by the last person he held a conversation with, Trump seems to be under Witkoff’s spell. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that at a meeting held ostensibly to talk about Ukraine, Witkoff and Kushner discussed business deals between the US and Russia - including a joint mission to Mars involving Elon Musk’s SpaceX - with Putin’s chief negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, the head of one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds.

Leaked phone calls reported by Bloomberg in late November revealed that Witkoff was coaching Dmitriev and another Putin aide, Yuri Ushakov, in how best to persuade Trump to view things from Russia’s perspective. As the historian Timothy Snyder posted on X, “Witkoff is not buying the Russian narrative, he is selling it”

We all know that Trump loves a deal. With his advisors promoting Russia as a land of opportunity for American investors, and Kremlin-linked businessmen offering potential energy and rare-earth minerals deals to US companies - some with links to Trump’s family, the Ukraine peace process is turning decidedly sordid.


View this article at https://www.lisa-cooper.com/blog 

Photo by Tong Su on Unsplash

​A summer of frantic activity on the diplomatic and geopolitical fronts has come and gone, yielding very little change for the war in Ukraine. The much vaunted Alaska summit with its embarrassing red-carpet treatment for Russian President Vladimir Putin resulted in nothing more than words and gestures, while US President Donald Trump’s repeated deadlines and threats to impose secondary sanctions turned out to be nothing but hot air.

Much has been said about the increased pace of Russian territorial gains on the battlefield over the summer months - about 1,500 square kilometres in June, July and August according to Ukrainian monitoring group Deep State - more than double the territory it gained in the same period a year earlier. 


But Moscow has still failed to win control of any significant towns since the early months of the full-scale war back in 2022, and its gains continue to come at an insanely heavy cost in human lives - an average of more than 1,000 Russian casualties per day. Notably, the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk region has held out for almost a year since Russian forces first approached last October. And Ukrainian troops have managed to stymie or even reverse some of Russia’s territorial advances, particularly in Donetsk region and its cross-border offensive in Sumy region.

Moscow has accompanied its slow gains on the battlefield with a huge increase in lethal aerial attacks on civilian targets away from the front lines. In an obscene irony, each discussion between the US and Russia aimed at ending hostilities was swiftly followed by a colossal attack on Ukraine’s civilian population. The summer saw one grim record broken after another in terms of the number of missiles and drones fired at Ukrainian towns and cities, resulting in the deaths of dozens of civilians. 

Between June and September, Moscow repeatedly stepped up its bombardments, notably launching around 550 drones and missiles at Kyiv on 4 July - America’s symbolic Independence Day - and culminating overnight on 7 September with more than 800 drones and missiles fired across Ukraine including one that hit a government building in Kyiv and another that killed a mother and her newborn child.

But the war is not going all Russia’s way - far from it. The Russian economy is stuttering towards recession under pressure from spiralling military spending and Western sanctions. And despite its limited manpower and resources, Ukraine has honed tactics away from the front lines that seek to gradually strangle Putin’s war machine.

In late 2023, Kyiv began striking Russian energy and logistics infrastructure. For the next year or so, the attacks were sporadic and failed to achieve much lasting impact. But last month, it began a sustained, targeted assault on oil facilities and transport hubs that is threatening serious consequences for Russia. 

In short, its tactics involve flying dozens of drones at the same target to overwhelm Russia’s air defences, daily strikes on oil refineries across the length and breadth of Russia, and repeated attacks on the same facility within a few days or weeks to hamper repair efforts. 

Cunningly, Kyiv is increasingly targeting sophisticated refining units that rely on foreign parts and expertise for maintenance and repairs. With Western sanctions hampering imports of foreign equipment, some of these units may be forced offline for considerable periods of time. And with limited local expertise in repairing such complex engineering, repeated strikes on numerous facilities all across the country are likely to strain Moscow’s ability to bring its refining capacity back on stream.

There are signs that Kyiv’s strategy is beginning to bear fruit. With up to 20% of Russian refining capacity disrupted at one point, Russia's pipeline operator Transneft has reportedly warned that the country may need to curb its crude production because of inadequate storage in its network.

Oil and gas currently accounts for around a quarter of Russia’s budget and a third of its export revenues, so Kyiv’s campaign is clearly aimed at cutting Moscow’s revenue streams to hamper its ability to finance the war - military spending now makes up around a third of Moscow’s budget expenditure. 

As well as disrupting Russian revenues, Kyiv’s approach has a second aim: to curb the enemy’s effectiveness on the battlefield.

Repeated attacks on key energy infrastructure are prompting Moscow to move some of its air defences away from the front lines to help protect its most valuable refining assets. This will give Ukrainian drones a better chance to get through Russian defences in the combat zone to strike front-line targets.

And in addition to targeting oil refineries, Kyiv has also carried out drone strikes on rail logistics critical to Russian military supply lines, as well as energy storage depots, arms warehouses, chemical plants, pipelines and port facilities. Even temporary disruptions at critical hubs can create bottlenecks that prevent fuel and other essential supplies from reaching the front lines. 

Already some regions of Russia, notably the far east and occupied Crimea, are facing fuel shortages, with long queues at petrol stations, and fuel prices have spiked. 

The longer Kyiv maintains its current strategy, especially as it rolls out new, more powerful missiles with long-range capability, the more likely it becomes that fuel supplies to the military will be disrupted. As winter approaches, Moscow may struggle to supply its troops on the front line, impeding its ability to advance. 

And then, maybe, just maybe, Putin will be forced to the negotiating table with some willingness to compromise and take more seriously the West’s attempts to bring his heartbreaking war to an end.

For more a more in depth explanation of Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure from the Kyiv Independent, click here

Photo by Yuriy Vertikov on Unsplash

For many years, I helped organise a literary festival here in Cornwall. Although it involved a lot of hard work, I loved the experience - we had a great team of people and it was a thrill to meet some of my literary heroes. But it could be very stressful at times. Like when storms wrecked the marquee and we had to switch venues at the last minute; or when an author turned up an hour late for their talk; or the projector didn’t work; or one of our featured books became shrouded in controversy in the run-up to the event; or, worst of all, when attendees complained.

Imagine, then, running a literary festival in a war zone. The weather would be the least of your worries when punters literally risked their lives to attend. Such were the obstacles facing the Meridian Czernowitz Literary Festival, held in Zaporizhzhia at the end of June. And yet more than 150 local residents turned up to listen to readings and talks by some of Ukraine’s best known writers. 

The festival was held in a basement in the centre of town - free from the risk of stormy weather, but far more importantly, out of reach of glide bombs and missile strikes. Other than this, the format of author talks and book signings was reassuringly familiar. Just like in Cornwall, the majority of the audience was female, but in Zaporizhzhia this reflects the fact that most men of fighting age are in the military. And I have to admit that from the photos, the audience looks decidedly younger than the predominantly grey-haired brigade that frequents the North Cornwall Book Festival.

Zaporizhzhia, in the southeast of Ukraine, is the capital of one of the regions that Russia claimed to have annexed in a phoney referendum back in the autumn of 2022. It lies just 30 kilometres from the front line and is the target of regular aerial attacks on civilian homes and infrastructure. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, the largest in Europe, is nearby and has been controlled by Russia since 2022, putting the area at repeated risk of nuclear catastrophe.

“In the eyes of the Russians, we are holding a festival of Ukrainian literature on their territories,” Svyatoslav Pomerantsev, president of the literary group Meridian Czernowitz that organised the festival, told the Kyiv Independent. “They bomb us every day, but we still have large literary festivals. It lifts people’s spirits.”

Ukrainian literature has often taken the form of resistance, given Russia’s historical persecution of Ukrainian authors and its repeated attempts to suppress Ukrainian language and culture. With both under threat again since Russia began annexing parts of the country in 2014, Ukraine has undergone something of a cultural renaissance. 

Many of the country’s writers have enlisted in Ukraine’s armed forces or taken up positions to defend their country’s freedom. Tragically, many have lost their lives since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. PEN Ukraine tracks the dozens of cultural figures, including writers, artists and musicians, who have been killed in the war. I have written before about the deaths of the novelist Victoria Amelina and the poet Maksym Kryvtsov. 

Authors at the Meridian Czernowitz Literary Festival in Zaporizhzhia included:

Serhiy Zhadan, one of Ukraine’s best known writers, his non-fiction work Sky above Kharkiv: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Front, an intimate account of resistance and survival in the first four months of the full-scale invasion, was released in English in 2023. Zhadan also writes critically acclaimed fiction and poetry, including the novel Voroshilovgrad - the Soviet name for Luhansk.

Peter Pomerantsev, a Ukrainian-born British journalist and TV producer, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School Of Economics, whose latest book How to win an information war: the propagandist who outwitted Hitler tells the true story of the largely forgotten British WWII propagandist Sefton Delmer.

Yuliia Paievska, a medic who founded the volunteer ambulance corps Taira’s Angels, its name based on her call sign Taira. She was captured and imprisoned by Russian soldiers for three months in 2022 after documenting her work with a body camera during the Siege of Mariupol. Paievska recently published her first poetry collection Nazhyvo (Live).

Yuri Andrukhovych, a long-standing pioneer of Ukrainian language and culture dating back to Soviet times. He co-founded the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group in 1985 that explored the cultural landscape of the Soviet Union’s decline and Ukraine’s move towards independence. His novel The Moscoviad recounts a series of absurd events surrounding a Ukrainian poet in Moscow trying to get back to Kyiv. It was translated into English in 2009.

Yaryna Chonohuz, a poet, military medic and drone pilot in the Ukrainian Marine Corps. Her 2020 publication How the War Circle Bends is a collection of free-verse poetry about trench warfare, written while serving on the front lines in the Donbas.

Artem Checkh first found literary acclaim with his essay collection Absolute Zero, a reflection on his military service in 2015-2016. He later fought on the front line in Bakhmut, one of the most lethal battles of the current war. His latest novel Dress up Game explores psychological transformations in the chaos of war. 

Andriy Lyubka, an author whose latest collection of essays War from the Rear deals with his switch from writer to front-line volunteer. In his satirical debut novel Carbide, a drunken history professor enlists the help of local criminals to dig a tunnel into the EU and smuggle out the entire population of Ukraine. It was published in English translation in 2019.


Read the full article in the Kyiv Independent here

​Across Europe, commemorations took place last week to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. The ceremonies have been solemn yet celebratory, their enduring message: "Never Again". 

As war between two nations rages again across a corner of Europe, Russia and Ukraine marked the anniversary in decidedly different ways.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of remembrance of the tragedies of the last war and commemorated those who fought against the evils of Nazism, while Russia glorified the war with a triumphant parade of its military might. The message of Russia’s war commemoration was not “Never Again”, but “We can do it again”.

I remember being in the southern Russian city of Voronezh for Victory Day back in 1992. It was a beautiful, sunny day, one of the first warm days after a long, bleak winter. The main street was closed to traffic and it felt like the city’s entire population was there, walking slowly towards the war memorial to lay flowers. 

Solemn music played over loudspeakers as veterans paraded in all their military regalia, bedecked with medals, and accompanied by their families. Mothers were dressed up in their Sunday best, keeping tight control of their children: little girls in neat skirts with over-sized bows in their hair, little boys buttoned up with braces and jackets too warm for the weather. 

It was a very serious occasion. There was no sense of jubilation or celebration. The Soviet Union paid an exceedingly heavy price for its victory in the Great Patriotic War, as it is known. An estimated 27 million Soviet citizens died during the war; every family lost a son, a brother, a father, an uncle. Millions were displaced, everyone suffered.

Under President Vladimir Putin, Victory Day has changed. It has become a showcase for Russia’s military glory, all glitz and glamour, pomp and celebration, triumph and exultation. The weaponisation of the allied victory in World War II provides a means for Putin to spread his propaganda, depicting Russia as the liberator, and all who opposed it as Nazis. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 that made allies of the Soviet and German wartime leaders Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, enabling them to carve up Eastern Europe between them, is conveniently forgotten.

Hand-in-hand with Putin’s glorification of the Great Patriotic War is his rehabilitation of Stalin. Long vilified as a cruel, paranoid and ruthless dictator, responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens, the Kremlin is glossing over Stalin’s crimes.

There is no mention in Russia these days of the mass deportations, the purges, the terror and, of course, the Holodomor of 1932-33 when millions of Ukrainians died of hunger in a famine that was deliberate, premeditated and avoidable. 

Last month Putin signed a decree renaming Volgograd’s international airport as “Stalingrad” and on 8 May a monument to Stalin was unveiled in occupied Melitopol, in Zaporizhzhia region. The town was taken by the Russians in March 2022 in the early days of the full-scale invasion.

Also redacted from the Russian version of history is the contribution of the other Soviet republics to the victory over Nazi Germany. More than 6 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army, and Ukrainians paid the greatest price of all - at least 8 million were killed, a staggeringly high proportion of the population of 41 million.

This year, as Putin comes under pressure to end his war in Ukraine, he wanted Victory Day to be better than ever. He sent out invitations to dozens of foreign leaders in an attempt to emphasise  Russia’s standing on the world stage, 27 of whom accepted his invitation. At the parade he was flanked by Chinese president Xi Jinping as they watched more than 100 Chinese soldiers marching on Red Square, cementing the “no limits friendship” between the two countries.

The leaders of Brazil, Venezuela, Serbia and Slovakia, among others, were visible in the crowd. Last year just nine foreign dignitaries turned up - longstanding allies like President Lukashenko of Belarus. In 2022, in the wake of the full-scale invasion there were none at all. Russia is sending a message that its isolation is over and it’s back on the world stage.

In the run-up to the parade, the Kremlin blockaded the centre of Moscow and restricted internet access across the city. These measures were an attempt to prevent Kyiv from embarrassing Putin by marring his Victory Day parade with drone strikes. In the run-up to the event, Ukrainian drones repeatedly targeted the Russian capital, paralysing Moscow’s airspace and closing all the city’s airports. Around 350 flights were delayed, diverted or cancelled over three days. 

Among those affected was Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, whose plane was reportedly forced to divert to the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, because of the threat to Russian airspace. President Zelensky stated that “Ukraine is not responsible for the safety of foreign officials” visiting Moscow for the parade.
​
Moscow’s imposition of a three-day “humanitarian ceasefire” from 8-11 May to coincide with Victory Day was also widely seen as an attempt to deter Ukraine from targeting Moscow during the parade. Both side reported hundreds of breaches of the ceasefire with heavy fighting continuing across multiple regions. As the Kremlin continues to resist the unconditional 30-day ceasefire demanded by the West and counter it with his own proposals, peace feels as distant as ever.

US president Donald Trump’s pledge to end Russia’s war in Ukraine is proving somewhat trickier to fulfil than he had expected. So far two tentative deals have been agreed - sort of - by both sides but neither appears to have actually come into force. 
 
Russia’s Vladimir Putin - wily old fox that he is - is playing a cunning game, offering a semblance of agreement to proposals then adding so many conditions that any accord becomes impossible to implement. While Trump congratulates himself on reaching a deal, he appears not to notice that the Kremlin keeps kicking his ball into the long grass.
 
First there was Ukraine’s 11 March agreement to a full 30-day ceasefire if Russia also accepted the terms. Such was Putin’s obfuscation that some media outlets initially reported that he had agreed, while others said he refused, and the whole idea seems now to have dropped off the discussion agenda.
 
Following the shuttle negotiations in Saudi Arabia earlier this week, both sides undertook to halt attacks on energy infrastructure and on maritime operations in the Black Sea. But interpretations of the agreements differed between the Russian, Ukrainian and US versions in several key elements. 
 
Russia claimed the ban on energy strikes began on 18 March and said it had recalled its warplanes, but then launched fresh attacks before the ink was even dry; it has struck Ukraine’s energy sites on eight separate occasions since. Its commitment to the Black Sea deal is also in doubt after it later imposed conditions relating to the lifting of sanctions on its agricultural exports before agreeing to implement it. 
 
It’s worth noting that both pledges made so far benefit Russia more than Ukraine. Kyiv has achieved notable success over the past year or so in pushing Russia out of the western part of the Black Sea to facilitate its own grain exports, and in targeting Russian oil refineries and military energy facilities in long-range attacks. Even if fully implemented, neither deal would affect the war on the front lines or diminish the relentless Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure.
 
Putin is dragging his feet in the negotiations precisely because he has no desire to settle for peace just yet. What he really wants out of any potential peace deal is territory. The Kremlin is stepping up its efforts to consolidate control over the four Ukrainian regions it partially occupies - which amount to about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. 
 
A decree that Putin signed on 20 March is the latest step in the Russification of the illegally occupied regions. The decree mandates that Ukrainian citizens “illegally” staying in Russia must obtain Russian documents or leave. In other words, Ukrainians who refuse to accept Russian passports and citizenship will be kicked out, or to put it another way, the regions will be ethnically cleansed. 
 
The issue of the occupied Ukrainian territory was something the Russians were keen to discuss with the US delegation in Saudi Arabia this week, as Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and chief Russia negotiator, unwittingly revealed in an interview with the far-right political commentator Tucker Carlson on 21 March.
 
“They’re Russian-speaking…There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of people indicated they want to be under Russian rule,” Witkoff said, parroting Russian disinformation. Displaying a shocking ignorance for someone involved in such high-level negotiations, Witkoff was unable to name the four regions in question, referring to “these so-called four regions - Donbas, Crimea… and there’s two others”. He didn’t even get the first two right: the four regions that Russia illegally annexed in 2022 are Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
 
Witkoff also muddled the concept of Russian-speaking Ukrainians with ethnic Russians, and made the assumption that those who speak Russian would ally themselves with Russia, which is far from the case. Equating Russian speakers with Russians who support the war, and using language as a motivation for the war, is an oft repeated chapter in the Russian playbook. My own Ukrainian relatives are Russian speakers; they most definitely are not Russian sympathisers.
 
The referendums that Witkoff referred to, held in September 2022, were a sham, secured by the Russian military amid widespread voter intimidation - often at gunpoint, and contravened both Ukrainian and Russian law. Freedom of speech and assembly were denied, no procedures were in place to guarantee the safety and confidentiality of voters. Many pro-Ukrainian voters were persecuted, some were even murdered. No independent observers were present and there were no systems to prevent voter fraud.
 
The BBC reported at the time that in some towns, Russian soldiers with guns stood with a ballot box in the main square to collect votes. Elsewhere, they went door to door. "You have to answer verbally, and the soldier marks the answer on the sheet and keeps it,” one woman recounted.
 
Voting was hastily organised in a matter of days and took place only in the parts of the four regions that were under Russian control - those living in areas of the four regions still held by Ukraine did not have a voice. In spite of this, the Kremlin claimed that the referendums gave Moscow the right to annex the four regions in their entirety. At that time, Russia occupied most of Luhansk and Kherson regions, but only around 60% of Donetsk, and in Zaporizhzhia it has never even controlled the state capital. The city of Kherson (capital of the region of the same name) was occupied by the Russians at the start of the full-scale invasion but liberated in November 2022, prompting thousands of residents to take to the streets in celebration.
 
Russia claimed that 99% of voters in Donetsk region were in favour of becoming part of Russia, 98% in Luhansk, 87% in Kherson and 93% in Zaporizhzhia. The results were recognised by only two countries - Russia and North Korea, neither of them known for being a beacon of democracy.
 
“Any annexation of a state's territory by another state resulting from the threat or use of force is a violation of the principles of the UN Charter and international law,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the time. “The so-called referendums cannot be called a genuine expression of the popular will.”
 
Steve Witkoff, it would seem, disagrees.

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Photo by FlyD on Unsplash
 
 

Today marks three years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and in the last two weeks the conflict has suddenly been propelled back to the top of the news agenda and into the public consciousness again.

US president Donald Trump’s love-in with Russia’s Vladimir Putin has upended all previously held expectations about the war’s future and potential peace negotiations. Just as they were three years ago, Ukrainians are staring down the barrel of a gun, feeling the full weight of the existential threat facing their country. Ukrainian sovereignty and its existence as an independent country are once again in serious doubt, as they were in February 2022. Then, a 35-mile-long column of tanks was heading towards Kyiv from the Belarusian border and the Russians were aiming to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky and install a puppet leader as president of Ukraine.

“How do I begin to describe what it feels like here, on the ground? It feels oddly similar to these very days three years ago,” says Olga Rudenko, editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent. “That anxious February of 2022, filled with a buildup to a disaster. We saw it coming closer but didn’t want to believe it would happen – it seemed so insane, impossible to imagine. A military invasion to take over a free country? Impossible. Just as impossible as it is to believe that the leader of the free world will side with the Russian dictator. And yet, it’s happening.”

For three years, Ukrainians have stood up to the Russian aggressors. The resilience and defiance of the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people has shocked and impressed much of the world. Since February 2022, nearly 50,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed on the battlefield, as well as thousands of civilians. Eighty percent of Ukrainians have personal experience of loss, be it a close relative, friend or acquaintance. Ukrainians cannot allow themselves to believe that the carnage of this brutal war is all for nothing.

In the few short weeks since Trump’s inauguration, he has upended the geopolitical principles that have been in place since the end of World War II and in doing so, he appears to have pivoted the US from an ally of Ukraine to a foe.

Many Ukrainians were justifiably frustrated with former president Joe Biden. His regime furnished Ukraine only with sufficient military assistance to prolong the fighting, not enough to win the war. Had Biden been willing to supply more sophisticated weaponry earlier, before the Russians had time to build their formidable lines of defence, he could have saved lives, territory and, probably, money in the long run. But for all that, Ukrainians always knew the US was on their side.

One can only guess at the content of the infamous 90-minute phone call between Trump and Putin, but the Russian president was clearly very persuasive. From that moment on, Trump began parroting Russian propaganda and hurling well-worn Russian insults at Zelensky: calling him a dictator, falsely claiming his approval ratings are at rock bottom, and even insinuating that it was Ukraine that started the war.

It comes as little surprise that the Russian leadership and its state-run media are euphoric, the current state of play goes beyond their wildest dreams. Before negotiations to end the war in Ukraine have even begun, Trump’s team has blithely conceded two of the West’s key leverage points without demanding any concessions in return, stating that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is unrealistic and that Ukraine will never join NATO, not to mention ending Russia’s isolation.

Putin’s three years as an international pariah have come to an abrupt end. He is soon to have a seat at the table with the American president, while US negotiators agreed to reestablish full diplomatic relations and talked about potential joint energy ventures. Trump has even signalled an intention to invite Russia back into the G7.

Numerous historical comparisons with the period before and during the Second World War have already been made by myself and many others. Most obviously, Trump’s appeasement of Putin calls to mind the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which the leaders of Britain, France and Italy signed away part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in an attempt to avert a wider war. Any freezing of the frontlines in Ukraine is likely to set the scene for further Russian incursions down the line.

Then there’s the notion of two nationalist dictators making a deal behind the backs of other world leaders (while Putin is a dictator in every sense of the word, Trump merely acts like one), reminiscent of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 – the ill-fated non-aggression treaty that enabled Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to carve up parts of Eastern Europe unopposed.
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And, of course, the meeting of Russian and American officials in Saudi Arabia to discuss the fate of Ukraine without inviting representatives from Kyiv or the rest of Europe to the table smacks of the 1945 Yalta Conference. Then, the three chief allied leaders – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – met in the Crimean resort town to decide the fate of Germany, carving up the country into zones and deciding the future of the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe. 

This year, Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Today's services of remembrance honour the six million Jews - two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population - murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, as well as millions of others - political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, gays, blacks, those with disabilities.

But no memorial service, no book or film or TV documentary, can adequately commemorate what happened during the Holocaust: the systematic and targeted persecution and killing of Europe's Jews. The humiliation, torture, starvation, and annihilation of an entire people in a world scarred by prejudice. The Holocaust didn't begin with Auschwitz, it began with hate. It began with the separation in people's minds of 'us' and 'them', of stigmatising Jews because they were considered different. Jewish property and businesses were vandalised, Jews suffered public humiliation in the streets and town squares, their children were forced out of their schools, and parents forced out of their homes. Eventually Jews became dehumanised to such a degree that they could be killed like vermin, gassed using a pesticide, Zyklon B.

Eighty years on, we see the same process of stigmatisation. It has become acceptable political discourse to dehumanise migrants. Our politicians exhort, "Stop the Boats!" and "Send them Back!" Minorities are increasingly coming under attack - be they Jews, Muslims, migrants or members of the LGBTQ+ community. Political parties and other organisations espousing far-right views are on the rise across Europe and the Americas. It feels like the lessons we thought we had learned from the Holocaust are being forgotten, and soon there will be no survivors left to remind us.

The words of a plaque on the site of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau are more poignant than ever: "For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity". 

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2018. The tour, conducted by a guide whose great-grandfather had survived the camps, was haunting. Appalling, gruesome, sickening….there are no words that can do justice to the horrors perpetrated there. The visit is something everyone should experience. It records events that should never be allowed to happen again. And yet humanity periodically forgets. Since then, ethnic cleansing has been perpetrated in former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Darfur, in Myanmar. Right now, there are accusations of genocide in Gaza and Ukraine. 

Even more shocking to me than the Nazi concentration camp was the sense of absence in the Polish cities I visited. In Krakow and Warsaw, the pre-war Jewish communities made up around a quarter and a third of the population, respectively – around 60,000 Jews lived in Krakow and 400,000 in Warsaw. In Krakow, the loss is palpable. Several vestiges of the old Jewish quarter remain – synagogues turned into museums; a cemetery where one wall has been built using fragments of gravestones shattered by the Nazi occupiers; shop fronts adorned with the names of their Jewish former owners. Indeed there is something of a revival of Jewish culture and heritage, with concerts of klezmer music, a Jewish festival and the Israeli ‘Hummus and Happiness Bar’, as well as a museum of photographs documenting the area’s Jewish life and loss.

In Warsaw it is the dearth of remnants of the Jewish community that is so chilling. The Germans razed the city to the ground as they fled the approaching Soviet troops. This makes the tiny fragments that remain all the more shocking: a single street that survived the demolition of the ghetto, pockmarked with bullet holes; a narrow fragment of ghetto wall; a synagogue that miraculously survived – one of over 400 that used to exist in the city; metal strips traversing the pavement at intervals, marking where the wall stood from 1940 until the ghetto was liquidated in 1943, when its inhabitants were herded onto cattle trucks and sent to the death camp at Treblinka.
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And, in the sparkling new Jewish museum, exhibits marking hundreds of years of Jewish life in Poland come to an end not during the war, but afterwards, when the remaining few Jewish survivors returned to their villages to be welcomed not with sympathy and understanding, but with rampant anti-Semitism and fresh pogroms. The foundation of the state of Israel provided the escape that the remaining Jews needed, and they fled, en masse, in 1948.