Kyiv Burns Again the Morning After U.S. Envoys Depart Moscow
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Russia resumed strikes on Kyiv within hours of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner boarding their plane home from Moscow — a sequence of events that senior European diplomats described, quietly but clearly, as proof that Washington's shuttle diplomacy lacks the one thing that makes diplomacy effective: a credible cost for non-cooperation. The Kremlin did not wait a decent interval. The message, in the assessment of officials in Berlin and Paris who spoke to reporters, was deliberate.
Moscow's official position following the meetings remained unchanged: Ukraine must cede the four partially occupied regions, NATO membership for Ukraine must be permanently foreclosed, and a ceiling must be imposed on Ukrainian troop levels. European officials characterized these not as negotiating positions with room to maneuver but as structural demands designed to be unacceptable to Kyiv while allowing Russia to maintain the appearance of openness to dialogue.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy nonetheless signaled a willingness to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin directly at the G20 summit in Miami — a remarkable public offer to sit across from the man who ordered the invasion of his country, at a meeting hosted on American soil. Putin offered nothing resembling a reciprocal gesture. His attendance at the Miami summit remains a major open question given his outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
Ukrainian drones struck a chemical plant and a military airfield deep inside Russian territory during the same period, extending a pattern of long-range strike operations that Kyiv has systematically expanded over the past eighteen months. Strikes on chemical infrastructure raise distinct escalation concerns: imagery from those operations is circulating in Russian domestic media, shaping how Putin's own population processes the conflict. Putin separately issued a direct warning that deploying European troops to Ukraine — a step France, the United Kingdom, and several Baltic states have been discussing — would constitute an act of war against Russia.
The BRICS summit opening in New Delhi added a geopolitical backdrop that analysts said is not unrelated to the diplomatic stalemate. Russia is a BRICS member, and the joint declaration emerging from New Delhi — from a bloc that now includes Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Ethiopia, Egypt, and others, representing roughly 45 percent of global population and approximately a third of world GDP by purchasing power parity — amounts to diplomatic cover for Moscow. The declaration's language around alternative payment systems and reserve currency diversification will be read in the Kremlin, analysts noted, as confirmation that the global alignment Russia depends on remains intact despite Western pressure.