'Trump may want to end the Ukraine war quickly – but that is bad news for Zelensky'

Detailed summary

OPINION: America's hapless peace envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are really go-betweens from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin, quietly doing deals with Moscow on behalf of Donald Trump

There's a whiff of corruption and foul dealing hanging over these US-mediated so-called peace talks between Moscow and Ukraine. They centre upon behind-the-scenes horse-trading over the Donbas, Ukraine’s eastern region which borders Russia and is the industrial heartland.

US President Donald Trump, who has insisted he wants to see the conflict end as quickly as possible, has consistently blamed Zelensky for not doing more to end the war, for standing in the way of peace whilst avoiding the same for Putin the actual aggressor.

This is such an extreme twisting of the truth, a flip-flopping of actuality that even for a Trump it is too incredible to even make sense of. To short-sighted Trump it would be expedient for Zelensky to just give up the Donbas, drawing a line across occupied territory.

But to Ukraine it would be giving up territory populated pre-war by roughly 58% ethnic Ukrainians and 38% ethnic Russians, who lived in Ukraine. Ukraine has always said it will not give up an inch of territory, not even Crimea which Russia has occupied since its illegal invasion back in 2014 - as is its right since it was invaded.

Many have fled the fighting so it is hard to know exactly who is still there but we have to judge it on what was happening before Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion.

Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency had spent preceding years campaigning to gradually take over the region, feeding loyalists with weaponry and propaganda. Small statelets were created by pro-Russian forces in preparation for what was to become, the full-scale invasion in 2022.

Putin paints his war as one of emancipation, freeing Russians and those who want to be Russian from persecution in Ukraine. He has made unsubstantiated claims of Ukraine performing some kind of genocide against pro-Russians in the region.

The Donbas is Ukraine’s historical, cultural and industrial heartland, serving it and elsewhere with a huge coal and steel enterprise.

And crucially Russia is not winning this war…

Opening of the article, excerpted from Daily Mirror. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.