Former Ukraine PM Yatsenyuk: If we get a ceasefire, Ukrainians will cast ballots and elect the president. But that’s not on the radar right now.
Russians are playing this game, believing they can embroil Ukraine in domestic infight. The Ukrainian president is legitimate. 1/
Yatsenyuk: I do not see any intention on the side of Putin to cut any kind of peace deal with Ukraine. These so-called talks are a sham, with the idea to drag its feet and to outlast us. 2/
Yatsenyuk: There is no other scenario rather than to fight and to prevail. Putin's goal is to take over an entire Ukraine and annihilate Ukraine as a sovereign and independent nation. Putin is never straight. Putin is a professional KGB liar. 3X
Sullivan: The Chinese leadership says the East is rising, the West is declining. They believe the US is in decline and that democracy can’t succeed in XXI century.
Xi thinks China holds the high cards and America has vulnerabilities. There is real confidence from Beijing. 1/
Sullivan on Iran: If you got a deal, you put the nuclear program in a box, you get verification, and you’re not constantly lining up to take out enriched material or centrifuges or missiles.
I hope Trump would look seriously at the diplomatic option, but it’s likely there’ll be strikes. 2/
Sullivan on Venezuela: This is not a long-term sustainable strategy, but it has worked for a few weeks.
We asked for one big thing, let American oil companies exploit Venezuela’s oil resources. The question is whether there will be a democratic transition or just the status quo. 3X
2025 is the first year of the war in which Russian army losses exceeded recruitment. 418,000 killed or wounded vs 406,000 mobilized.
Ukraine continues to resist Russia’s main offensives — Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi for Le Monde. 1/
Syrskyi says Russia planned a large-scale 2025 offensive to seize all of Donbas, parts of Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson, and create a buffer zone in Kharkiv and Sumy regions — but “it failed.” 2/
He credits two cross-border Ukrainian offensives in Belgorod (March–April) and Kursk (May–June) for forcing Russia to redeploy forces, preventing the planned spring offensive. 3/
Four Russian FPV drones hunted down a married couple as they tried to flee occupation near Sumy.
The man pulled his wounded wife on a sledge across no man’s land. A second strike tore her apart. A fourth killed him as he knelt beside her – The Times. 1/
The couple, Valentyna and Valerii Klochkov, had hidden in their cellar for six weeks after Russian troops captured their village before Christmas.
Hunger and cold forced them out. Their bodies still lie in the snow — no one can retrieve them under drone fire. 2/
In Kyiv, Oksana says anxiety pushes her to take tranquillisers, yet she keeps the dose low.
“I want to feel this. I don’t want to go through it as a vegetable,” she says, while her sister’s body lies unrecovered in the snow in Sumy region. 3/
An IT mistake exposed a $90bn Russian oil network funding the war in Ukraine.
FT traced 48 traders using one private email server to mask Rosneft crude after US sanctions in Oct. 2025. It is the largest sanctions-evasion scheme uncovered so far and may trigger new sanctions. 1/
FT identified 442 web domains whose public registrations show they all use the same private email server, .
It matched those domains with Russian and Indian customs filings linking the network to more than $90bn in oil exports. 2/mx.phoenixtrading.ltd
In November 2024, more than 80% of Rosneft’s ship-borne oil exports moved through the apparent network. Customs records show many of the companies are active for around six months before being replaced. 3/
“I left my Manhattan apartment for Ukraine’s front lines. Now I’m fighting drones.”
Viktoriia Honcharuk quit her dream job at Morgan Stanley in 2022 to become a combat medic. She evacuated up to 100 wounded soldiers a week from one of the war’s deadliest fronts, The Times. 1/
Viktoriia left Ukraine at 15 on a U.S. scholarship.
She studied at Minerva University in California, sent out 80 job applications, interned at Citibank and landed a role at Morgan Stanley in New York.
On Feb 24, 2022, she woke up to Russia’s invasion. 2/
Her parents joined Ukraine’s Territorial Army. At first she sent money and gear.
“I thought I was helping. But I couldn’t look myself in the mirror”, she says. In September 2022 she returned home and decided to stay on the ground. 3/