He may not be the one to sit down with Vladimir Putin, but Keith Kellogg, President Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, summed up the horror of Sunday’s ballistic missile strikes on Sumy succinctly.
“Today’s Palm Sunday attack by Russian forces on civilian targets in Sumy crosses any line of decency,” he said.
“As a former military leader, I understand targeting and this is wrong.”
Ukraine war latest: At least 34 people killed
Vladimir Putin gave up on decency long before he started this war.
What he seems to be risking by attacks of this scale is Donald Trump‘s patience.
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He does not seem to mind if strikes like this make a mockery of US attempts to bring the two warring parties to the table.
He does not seem to care if he alienates his US counterpart, who has been strangely predisposed to fawn over him to date.
Perhaps he is raising the stakes as high as he can to illustrate his strength of hand: Strikes on civilians damage Ukrainian morale – even if they are hardly battlefield wins – and on the battlefield, he is pushing ahead and does not want to stop.
Perhaps he knows that if he keeps up his military momentum, President Trump will tire of a conflict he realises he cannot solve and let the matter slip while staying true to his MAGA-economic priorities by letting funds for Ukraine dry up.
Perhaps he thinks President Trump is so keen on a rapprochement with Russia, on the big Putin-Trump bilateral, that the details, the civilian deaths along the way, will all be by-the-by when that long-sought photo-op finally happens.
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Whatever it is, President Putin seems to be in no rush to get things settled.
His spokesman told a Russian state reporter on Sunday that talks were under way at several levels but that “of course, it is impossible to expect any instant results”.
Withdrawing his troops would get instant results. But that is not what Vladimir Putin wants.
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His war economy is working for him, and he has the attention of the one country he considers a worthy adversary, the United States.
In the meantime, this attack reinforces why President Zelenskyy’s plea for air defence systems is his top priority. And why a ceasefire cannot come soon enough.
