From the editor
Vladimir Putin has expressed his reluctance to agree even a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, and appeared in military fatigues while visiting Kursk Oblast with Valery Gerasimov to celebrate the recapture of Sudzha by Russian forces. The latest developments considerably undermine Donald Trump’s efforts to quickly end the war, which have mainly consisted of putting extreme pressure on Ukraine. Russian troops advanced in Kursk Oblast through an underground gas pipeline, with some reportedly suffocating en route.
Vladimir Putin wore military fatigues during a visit to Kursk Oblast with Valery Gerasimov
“Right now, we have all heard from Russia Putin’s highly predictable and manipulative words in response to the idea of a ceasefire on the front lines - at this moment he is, in fact, preparing to reject it,” Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday. “Of course, Putin is afraid to tell President Trump directly that he wants to continue this war and keep killing Ukrainians. That’s why in Moscow they are surrounding the ceasefire idea with such preconditions that it either fails or gets dragged out for as long as possible.” He called for more sanctions to be applied to force Russia to end the war.
“All the people who on the territory of Kursk Oblast are committing crimes against the civilian population, resisting our armed forces, law-enforcement bodies and security services, according to the laws of the Russian Federation are terrorists,” Putin said during his visit, emphasising that this means that Ukrainian POWs are terrorists and will be prosecuted, although they should be treated “humanely”. At the same time Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said five more Ukrainian POWs had apparently been executed by Russian troops on video.
A visit to Moscow yesterday by Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff yielded very little. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said that Witkoff met Putin and it was agreed that the Russian and US presidents should have a conversation at some point, but meanwhile Russia was looking forward to attracting more foreign investors. Trump made his usual bizarre comments on foreign policy yesterday during a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, reiterating his desire to annex Greenland and Canada, and saying: “We’ve been discussing with Ukraine land. Pieces of land that would be kept and lost, and all the other elements of a final agreement. There’s a power plant involved, you know, a very big power plant involved, who’s going to get the power plant?... Phase one is the ceasefire.”
Ukraine has been making its own efforts to bring Russia to the table with drone attacks on Moscow Oblast and several other Russian regions in the past couple of days. Russia has continued attacking Ukrainian civilians all week, killing 11 people and injuring another 47 in a strike on Dobropillya, Donetsk Oblast, killing three and injuring seven in a drone attack on Kharkiv, and killing a 54-year-old man by dropping explosives on his vehicle in Kherson – all on Friday night and Saturday morning. On Tuesday night Russia struck a Barbados-flagged cargo ship carrying wheat in the port of Odesa with a ballistic missile, killing four Syrians. On Wednesday morning a 47-year-old woman was killed in a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih and nine other people were injured. Also on Wednesday two people were killed and eight others injured in a Russian strike on Kostiantynivka, Donetsk Oblast.
Trump lashed out at Joe Biden in a social media post this morning, writing: “Crooked Joe Biden got us into a real ‘mess’ with Russia (and EVERYTHING ELSE!), but I’m going to get us out. Millions of people are needlessly dead, never to be seen again… and there will be many more to follow if we don’t get the Cease Fire and Final Agreement with Russia completed and signed. There would have been NO WAR if I were President. It just, 100%, would not have happened.” The one person Trump has not blamed for the war is Putin, and no one should hold their breath waiting for him to do so.
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Finnish and German courts sentence Russians for war-related murders
A court in Finland has sentenced Russian citizen Yan Petrovsky, also known as Voislav Torden, to life in prison for war crimes committed in 2014 in eastern Ukraine, where his neo-Nazi Rusich paramilitary group killed an injured soldier. Petrovsky was found guilty of the killing of the soldier, the mutilation of another one, and the taking and publishing of degrading images of dead soldiers. The court dismissed a charge that the Rusich unit killed 22 Ukrainian soldiers in an ambush in which the Russians pretended to be Ukrainian, finding it unproven. Petrovsky was arrested in Finland at Ukraine’s request in 2023 while trying to travel to France under a false identity. Finland’s supreme court blocked his extradition to Ukraine.
Meanwhile a court in Munich sentenced a 58-year-old Russian man to life in prison for the murder of two Ukrainian servicemen aged 36 and 23 who were being treated for war injuries in Murnau, Bavaria in April last year. The unnamed man had lived in Germany since the early 1990s and was described as a Russian nationalist who supported the invasion of Ukraine. He stabbed the two Ukrainians after getting into an argument with them in a bar that he felt “violated his national pride”. “Now, in a sober state, I deeply regret what happened,” he told the court.
Ukrainian POWs and suspected recruiting office arsonist sentenced
A military court has sentenced two Ukrainian POWs, Oleksandr Melnik and Oleksiy Pokatilov to 16 years in a maximum-security prison for “terrorism” for their part in the invasion of Kursk Oblast. They were accused of entering the region in September last year with a column of Ukrainian military vehicles and opening fire on Russian troops and civilians. They were captured on October 1. The court’s websites states that sentences have been passed in 30 other similar cases.
A court in Petrozavodsk has sentenced local resident Petr Romanyuk, 36, to 15 years in a maximum-security prison for “terrorism” for allegedly setting fire to a military recruiting office in Suoyarvi in May last year. Someone threw two Molotov cocktails at the building at night and ran away. Romanyuk’s lawyer argued that the arsonist couldn’t be identified and their gender couldn’t even be established, and that the accused was arrested only because he was born in Ukraine.