The collapse of “peace talks” between Russia and Ukraine in Geneva is a moment to be celebrated. But Europe’s politicians may need a stiff drink to fortify them for what is to come after Volodymyr Zelensky described what America deal-brokers were doing as “unfair”.
The entire process has been a mafia-style shakedown of Ukraine and her allies by the US and Russia, who have weaponised lies about the whole bloody process – from the causes of the war to the prescriptions for ending it.
In Pavlohrad, the Big Lie for internal refugees from Russia’s “meat grinder” operations in the east is that he sent forces to rescue them from Ukrainian nationalists. That he sent Russian soldiers to save Russian speakers from oblivion under Kyiv.
Nikolai Klymenko, 56, sits wheezing on the edge of a bed in the government-run relief coordination centre in the city, an hour’s drive from the front lines.
A former soldier in the Soviet army, he fought in Kandahar, Jalalabad and elsewhere during Moscow’s efforts to prop up a communist regime in Kabul in the 1980s. He says he was decorated for bravery and blown up by a booby-trap in Kandahar and has the scars to prove it.
“I had a hole in my head you could put your finger in,” he says of his service to the Kremlin.
Nikolai speaks Russian as a mother tongue. He fled Moscow’s invaders from Dobropilla in the summer, then found himself in Druzhkivka, south of Kramatorsk, as Russian missiles and drones expanded their attacks on civilians.
“I ended up begging for cigarettes outside the hospital. So I came here,” he says.
The nearby relief centre, Lilia Zemliana, a refugee from Donetsk province, which Putin has already illegally annexed even though about a third of it isn’t in Russian hands.
Since the centre opened in 2024, two years after Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, 44,000 people have come through its doors. They’re helped with food, documents, psychological support and accommodation locally or deep into the west of the country.
Almost all of them would have been Russian speakers – the people Putin said he was trying to save.
Oleh Nemchenko, a miner from Dobropillia, is not among the refugees. His body is in a hole in the ground near the coal mining pit head. He and his wife, Iryna, hung on as Russian forces bombarded the town.
“I was lighting a fire in our stove and he went out for a cigarette. I don’t know what happened next and cannot remember. The next thing I found myself outside looking at his dead body in the street,” she says, rolling her eyes when asked about Putin coming to the rescue of Ukraine’s Russian speakers.
Donald Trump has often repeated the Putin claim that Ukraine would not have suffered an invasion if it had not looked to join Nato. But Russia invaded in 2014 – Ukraine has formally pursued Nato membership only since 2019 and as a result of Moscow’s invasion.
