Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky holds a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on August 27.Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters
Russia launched one of its largest airstrikes on Ukraine on Monday, using more than 200 missiles and drones to damage and destroy the country’s energy infrastructure. Targets hit included a hydroelectric dam near Kyiv, raising fears of deadly flooding if the dam breaks. Ukrainian authorities said at least eight civilians were killed and 20 people were injured. At least one missile hit a residential building, they said.
It was a typically callous attack by Russia, one of countless similar atrocities since President Vladimir Putin began his illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine two and a half years ago.
It highlighted the absurdity of a war that can only be resolved through diplomatic negotiations, and the compromises that such talks would entail, involving a dictator who negotiates only in bad faith.
Two weeks ago, after Ukraine launched an unexpected attack on Russian soil in the Kursk region – the first foreign incursion into the country since World War II – Mr Putin ruled out the possibility of peace talks.
“What kind of negotiations can we talk about with people who indiscriminately attack civilians and civilian infrastructure or try to create threats to nuclear power plants,” Putin said. “What can we even talk about with them?”
Putin’s troops have murdered, tortured and raped civilians. They have kidnapped Ukrainian children. They have attacked homes and schools and razed entire cities to the ground with 600-kilogram bombs. At the beginning of the war, they attacked a nuclear power plant and took it hostage.
And now the Russian president says that his delicate sensibilities have been so hurt by Ukraine’s counterattack that he cannot even think about discussing an end to the war. It’s enough to make you tear your hair out.
But before doing so, it is worth remembering that diplomacy always takes place away from the spotlight of public power, and that Mr Putin has long been looking for a way out of a war that is not going according to his plans.
That is why it is now more important than ever that Ukraine’s allies maintain and even increase their financial and military support for the beleaguered country. The next few months could be a critical phase in the war.
In fact, Russia and Ukraine began peace talks just weeks after Putin’s troops crossed the border in February 2022. But those talks failed after Putin realized that neither Ukraine nor the West would allow him to invade a sovereign country with impunity – and that the conditions he demanded would not be so easy to achieve.
The United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada and other allies have provided billions of dollars in aid and weapons to Ukraine and imposed financial, travel and technology sanctions on Russian officials and companies.
While the sanctions have not brought Russia to its knees, they hurt. Lifting the sanctions imposed by the West after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 was one of Putin’s very first demands at the 2022 peace talks – and the sanctions have only gotten worse.
The number of Russian casualties is also rising. Estimates vary, but the number of Russian soldiers killed this year may have exceeded 100,000, according to some sources. Russia has also lost part of the Ukrainian territory it captured in 2022. And now it has Ukrainian troops on its own soil.
Currently, the two sides are locked in a stalemate, with each side trying to gain an advantage at the negotiating table: Russia by concentrating its resources on the bloody ground fighting in the eastern provinces; Ukraine by invading the Kursk region and bombing Russian war infrastructure across the border.
If Russia prevails, in exchange for an end to the war, it would be able to force Ukraine to give up some of its eastern territories, recognize Crimea as Russian territory and limit the size of its armed forces in the future, among other concessions.
Such a capitulation would be unacceptable to Ukraine’s allies. But the clock is ticking. A victory for Donald Trump in the US elections in November could cut off vital American aid to Ukraine. Now is the moment when Ukraine’s allies must give Ukraine the money and weapons it needs to keep making Putin pay for his aggression and to bring his diplomats to the negotiating table on terms that serve everyone’s interests but his own.
