Ten days of hope: Nikolai Mitrokhin* - about what was behind the talks about a truce that led nowhere

Ukrainian soldiers of the Black Raven battalion ride in vehicles along a road covered with mesh to protect equipment from drone attacks.

Photo by IRYNA RYBAKOVA / THE 93RD KHOLODNYI YAR SEPARATE MECHANIZED BRIGADE / AFP

From May 9 to 11, Putin and Zelensky publicly discussed the possibility of a direct meeting for the first time in eight months. But the fuse was not enough; already on May 14, the head of the State Department, Marco Rubio, said that “the momentum of the negotiations has been lost.” The front is moving: over the past month, the Russian army has slowly but advanced in several directions at once - from Kupyansk to Pokrovsk. But in the Zaporozhye region, the Ukrainian Armed Forces, with the help of new drones, began to destroy the logistics of the Russian troops. Nikolai Mitrokhin* - about what happened during the war in Ukraine in the first half of May.

Failed truce

The main topic of negotiations to end the war over the past two weeks has been the issue of a truce for the sake of the May 9 parade in Moscow. A completely ordinary parade in honor of the 81st anniversary of the end of the war in the first ten days of May turned into an international event of the first magnitude: many media suddenly saw in it hope for stopping the war. This says a lot about the world in which journalists themselves and, to some extent, the political class live.

Hopes were built on this. After the first dubious exchange of pleasantries regarding a possible truce (the previous one was concluded just two weeks earlier, on Easter, and turned out to be of little result), Putin unexpectedly turned to Trump for help - so that the truce would be counted according to the Moscow calendar, and not the Kyiv one. Zelensky proposed starting it right from May 6: these conditional four days would allow the Ukrainian Armed Forces to significantly improve the supply of forward units and even openly carry out the necessary defensive work in the near rear. Putin's version was half as long.

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