Steve Witkoff is wrong to see peace in Putin’s eyes

Kyiv

‘It doesn’t surprise me that they’re abolishing the Ministry of Education,’ my old friend Dima told me. ‘Judging by what Steve Witkoff said on the Fox channel, neither history nor geography are taught in America.’ Team Trump’s energetic but purposefully misdirected attempts to push the negotiation processes forward have left Ukrainians in shock. Each day reveals new depths in the Oval Office’s inadequacy and we can only shrug when we hear things like ‘Putin is not a bad guy’ or ‘I feel that he wants peace’. President Volodymyr Zelensky said something similar after his election in 2019, when he promised to negotiate a peace deal with Vladimir Putin within 12 months or resign. Neither peace nor his resignation materialised. A full-scale war began and after three years of fierce fighting, it is no longer Zelensky but Witkoff who sees peace in Putin’s eyes. Putin’s eyes are very small and you would have to look very close to see anything in them, but Ukrainians have long stopped trying to fathom the Russian dictator.

With each day of the ‘peace talks’, the Kremlin shells Ukrainian cities more and more intensively, using new tactics involving large and heavy ‘Geranium’ drones which fly at an altitude of about 6,500 feet. It is almost impossible to shoot them down when they are that high in the sky. As a result, we have seen a sharp increase in the number of victims and extent of destruction caused by each attack. Another ‘new thing’ is how, during a raid, a large number of drones head for one target. Recently, more than a dozen drones made a night attack on Khmelnitsky; then it was Odessa’s turn, and a few nights ago Kyiv was targeted. My family, like many Kyivites, spent that night in the hallway listening to drone explosions and air defence cannonades.