In the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, in the territory of the Donetsk province still under the control of Kiev, a bloody land battle is being fought, probably decisive for the evolution of the war of attrition between Ukraine and Russia. Slowly but persistently, Russian troops are advancing along the entire front, especially in this area of Donbass, with the aim of completing control of this basin, whose sovereignty Putin claims as a preliminary condition for any negotiations for a ceasefire. Having failed the diplomatic theater organized by Donald Trump, first with the August meeting in Alaska and then with the cancellation of the summit that should have been held in Budapest, the Russian president is preparing to expand his territorial advantage.
Therefore, as international attention waned, Russia intensified its offensive. Daily life in eastern Ukraine is constant drone bombardment, now joined by aerial shells that travel up to 200 kilometers before hitting and destroying homes at midnight. The average is between 200 and 300 impacts per month. Hundreds of attacks on train convoys and stations forced the cutting of a railway communication artery with Donbass, after the death of a thousand company employees. Last August, the UN estimated the deaths of around 13,800 Ukrainian civilians and the wounding of more than 35,000. An American estimate puts the total number of deaths and injuries among soldiers on both sides at half a million. Other estimates place them at one million. The front is littered with tens of thousands of countless corpses.
Europe cannot trust the solution of Trump’s negotiation strategy, which proved disastrous from day one. Guided by affinity with Putin and antipathy towards Zelenskyj and the European Union, he has always entrusted the initiative to Moscow and practiced a false equidistance that punishes allies, marginalizes them from negotiations and rewards those who should be their enemies, transformed into a privileged interlocutor. If it took nine months to get the Kremlin to sit at the negotiating table with instruments of economic pressure, such as the ban on the purchase of gas and oil, it took just a few days to demonstrate its incoherence, when it exempted Hungary from this obligation, due to simple ideological affinity with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian exemption is a gift to Putin.
It is yet another demonstration that Washington is not trustworthy. Added to the denial of the Tomahawk missiles is Ukraine’s need to defend itself from the increasingly intense air offensive with which Moscow intends to destroy its energy infrastructure and demoralize the population. The inconsistency of the US president led him, while refusing to engage more decisively in Ukraine, to irresponsibly inflame international opinion with his intention to carry out nuclear detonation tests. As expected, Putin immediately entered the auction, announcing that there will be no shortage of Russian tests if there are American ones.
Demonstrations of nuclear weapons, even if merely verbal, only exploit those who use them to gain advantage in conventional warfare, as in Putin’s case in Ukraine, where he unleashes doomsday rhetoric to inhibit allied military aid to Ukraine. Raising the nuclear threat only benefits Putin. Amid the distraction, death and misery continue to spread across Ukraine. Both countries are preparing for a war that will last years. If it is removed from the international spotlight and the pressure on Russia is reduced, Europe runs the risk that its citizens will end up normalizing a large-scale war on the continent that could, if told at low intensity, continue without end.
