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Suddenly the ball is in Russia’s court. The flow of US intelligence and military aid to Ukraine is to resume – and the Kremlin is being asked to agree to a 30-day ceasefire that Kyiv has already told the Americans it will sign up to.
It is a dizzying turnaround from the Oval Office row between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump and the apparent abandonment of the White House’s strategy to simply pressurise Ukraine into agreeing to a peace deal. Now, for the first time, Russia is being asked to make a commitment, though it is unclear what will follow if it does sign up.
Announcing the peace proposal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said that he hoped Russia would accept a peace agreement “so we can get to the second phase of this, which is real negotiations”.
That may leave plenty of room for interpretation. Russia has also been pushing for a ceasefire, though the Kremlin had wanted that to be followed by elections in Ukraine, before any full negotiation about territory and Kyiv’s future security.
Ukraine, meanwhile, will want strong security guarantees to avoid a resumption of the war, involving European peacekeepers on the ground, which Russia has so far said it is against. An open question, perhaps, is whether peacekeepers could enter Ukraine during a ceasefire period, but this is speculative.
Until Tuesday’s discussions between US and Ukrainian delegations bore fruit, the battlefield dynamics did not appear to favour a ceasefire. Ukraine’s decision to launch a drone attack into Russia on Monday night was a clear demonstration that its military capacity had not yet been significantly dented by the pause in supply of US military intelligence. It was also an aggressive effort to put pressure on Moscow to agree a peace.
Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine had attacked with 337 drones, 91 of which were aimed at Moscow and the surrounding region. Three people were reported to have been killed, all four of the Russian capital’s airports had to be closed, and local air defences were not entirely effective in repelling the assault.
A handful of residential buildings were visibly damaged, though not too seriously. Moscow’s regional governor said that two people had been killed at a car park near a meat processing plant in Domodedovo, 5 miles from an airport. Fragments of a drone hit the ground, setting fire to cars shortly after 5am, Andrei Vorobyov wrote on his Telegram channel. Later, it was reported that a third man had died.
Striking at civilian targets is never attractive, though the images were not dissimilar to those of Ukrainian cities hit nightly by Russian bombing over the past three years. Russia has also been increasing the scale of its drone attacks recently – on Monday it launched 126 Shahed drones, as well as other, decoy drones, into Ukraine, alongside a ballistic missile.
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Fighting on the frontline has favoured Russia for some time, but not dramatically or decisively so. On Thursday last week, a day after the US confirmed its decision to halt the flow of intelligence, Russia launched an effort, with the help of North Korean troops, to recapture the remainder of the Kursk area held by Ukraine.
That has forced the defenders back by between 4 and 8 miles (6.5km and 13km) and into the outskirts of Sudhza, a village that Ukraine has occupied since August. But its success may well be a function of a concerted attack, rather than a beginnings of a rout caused by the temporary absence of targeting data. That means Russian progress in the Kursk sector, for example, is very likely to continue if no ceasefire is agreed.
Nevertheless, the diplomatic momentum is suddenly with Ukraine, though with the mercurial Donald Trump involved, it is unclear for how long. Around $1bn (£772m) of US military aid is now potentially unblocked, while key functions for totemic weapons such as F-16s are presumably being restored – and the Kremlin’s immediate hopes of grinding down Kyiv on the frontline are set back.
