War in Ukraine

The Russian-Ukrainian war has been going on for more than three years. The front lines are now essentially frozen, but the conflict seems to be escalating as the warring parties try to acquire more allies and weapons and involve more countries in the conflict. But what will be decisive: arms shipments, sanctions, or perhaps peace talks? How long will the Ukrainians hold out and how long will Russian society tolerate the losses? We will try to answer these questions in our series of articles.

Security guarantees.

This is the topic around which the entire common European foreign policy now revolves, after US President Donald Trump made it clear to EU leaders at Monday's summit that the US would only play an episodic role in preventing another possible Russian invasion, and that the bulk of that work would have to be done by Kiev's European allies.

Security guarantees, of course, would only be of practical use if a Russian-Ukrainian peace treaty were to be signed first. The nightmare scenario in Kiev is that Russia would use the lifting of sanctions and peace to rebuild its military and launch another invasion to finish what it started—that is, to completely annex Ukraine. The guarantees would be designed to ensure, by providing a deterrent, that Putin would not violate the peace agreement and attack again.

While behind the scenes, European leaders, who were ultimately left alone by Trump, sweat over the development of guarantees, Putin launched another massive attack on Ukraine on Wednesday evening with 574 drones and 40 missiles, targeting cities far from the front line - including shooting up an American electronics factory in the Transcarpathian city of Munkacs. Then, by dawn on Friday, the Friendship pipeline, which supplies Hungary with Russian oil, was hit by its third Ukrainian attack in a week, this time at the Russian-Belarusian border, and supplies were again halted.

The necessary first step, making peace, is apparently still far away, and the second step, maintaining peace, is not helped, to put it mildly, by the fact that Trump has become a European insider due to his isolation.