Ukraine’s European and American allies seemed close to agreeing for once.
On Saturday, they all seemed signed up to the idea of applying pressure on Vladimir Putin to accept an unconditional ceasefire.
Read more: Ukraine ‘ready to meet’ Russia after Putin calls for peace talks
Then came his response. The master of divide and rule may have succeeded in driving a wedge between them again.
Putin is clearly playing for time. He believes the war in Ukraine is going his way.
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Peace is not in his interests, especially if it means thousands of Russian troops returning home, stirring up discontent with tales of life on the frontline.
So he met the allies’ ceasefire gambit with a swerve, proposing direct negotiations instead in Istanbul.
Ukrainians read that offer as both offensive and evasive.
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Istanbul is where ill-fated Russian-Ukrainian negotiations came unstuck at the start of the war.
Russia has since tried to spin a false narrative. A peace deal was imminent, they claim, when Boris Johnson intervened and told the Ukrainians to keep on fighting.
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Those lies have infuriated Ukrainians ever since.
If Putin was offering talks in good faith, he would not have suggested Istanbul, they say. It was the diplomatic equivalent of a one-fingered salute.
But they have little choice but to see where this diplomacy leads.
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European allies do not have the political will to give Ukraine the means to win this war, despite their enormous economic might, ten times that of Russia’s. And in the hands of Donald Trump, the US seems closer to the Kremlin than to Kyiv.
Mr Trump has seemed willing to give Putin the benefit of the doubt at every turn so far, and most likely will do so again, lured by the Russian offer of negotiations.
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If he is distracted from the allied effort to force Putin to finally agree to a ceasefire, the Russian leader will have been successful in derailing a serious proposal to end the killing for 30 days and give peace a chance.
