Lviv, Ukraine: There are mobile apps to measure progress in the peace talks on Ukraine – and they are lighting up with warning signs.
The apps tell people across the country when their city or region is likely to feel the blast of a missile strike or a drone attack, giving them time to seek safety in a bomb shelter.
The warning system is essential to saving lives and is based on the work of civil defence agencies tracking Russian missiles and drones through the air. It is like a weather forecast for impending terror, available on an iPhone screen.
And for all the talk about a pathway to peace, the data displays an escalating war.
Yaroslav Kolodiy felt the impact on November 19 when Russian missiles slammed into two apartment buildings in his home city of Ternopil, in western Ukraine.
One of his friends, a mechanic, went to sleep that night as usual and died in the flames. His wife and children survived, badly injured. The attack was one of the worst of the war, killing at least 37 people, including seven children, and wounding more than 120 others.
Kolodiy, safe in his house, heard the explosions and felt the destruction. “You feel this freezing behind your chest,” he tells me. “It is a feeling like you are not in normal life. In the air, there is death.”
Black smoke and burning oil surrounded the buildings the next day, he says, and spread a physical as well as a psychological sickness over the city. One theory is that the missiles used infrared countermeasures to evade air defences.
Kolodiy is a patriot: his company, Koza Dereza, makes clothes with traditional designs, and his charity, Wheels of Victory, transports toughened 4WD vehicles to the front to help soldiers in battle. He worries that people do not really understand what is happening in Ukraine. He feels the Russian onslaught is destroying the world he knew.
The records show that Russia is blasting Ukraine with a devastating intensity at the very time US President Donald Trump says a peace deal is close. Trump’s personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, is expected in Moscow on Tuesday (early on Wednesday, AEDT) to encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to end the war.
There is no sign, however, that Putin will accept peace unless it comes with a capitulation from Ukraine. The tally shows a surge in strikes this year and new peaks in recent weeks, including 476 drones and 48 missiles in a single night on November 19, when Ternopil was struck.
Russia launched 464 drones and 22 missiles on November 25. It attacked power systems around Kyiv on Saturday, leaving 600,000 without power for much of that day.
In the latest attack, a Russian missile killed four people and wounded 40 others when a ballistic missile struck a civilian target in Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine. Most attacks are at night, but this one was on Monday morning.
One study of the missile strikes, by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, shows a dramatic escalation in the second half of this year.
Another study, reported by The Kyiv Independent based on work by Dragon Capital, found that Russia launched 359 missiles and more than 8000 drones in October and November. It said Ukrainian forces intercepted 80 per cent of drones but only 27 per cent of missiles.
Ukraine’s former foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, says the attacks are part of a pattern that shows Putin is under insufficient pressure to sign a peace deal.
“The sequence of contrasting events captured the grim essence of the outgoing year,” he writes in The Guardian about the latest attacks.
“By day, diplomatic battles are fought: hopeful statements are issued from Washington, London, Brussels and Kyiv. Immense energy is expended on containing Donald Trump’s initiatives. By night, Putin brutally reminds the world that, for him, war remains the primary tool for achieving ‘peace’.”
Kuleba concludes that genuine peace will only come when there is a more forceful response from America and Europe to deter Russia.
“Putin is convinced that time is on his side – that Ukraine and its partners are approaching exhaustion,” he writes. “His motivation to sign a deal that does not give him the maximum possible gain is close to zero.”
Putin’s own words show Kuleba is right. The Russian leader last week said that Russia was ready to keep on fighting “until the last Ukrainian dies”. Then, on Sunday, he expressed confidence in seizing the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk. “Russian forces are advancing in practically all directions,” he said.
Calculating that Europe and America will not do enough to stop him, Putin increases his attacks while Trump and his aides try to negotiate a peace.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is trying to gain more support while Trump sends Witkoff to see Putin, given the risk that the White House will expect Ukraine to sacrifice its long-term security to secure a ceasefire.
Zelensky met French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday in Paris (early on Tuesday, AEDT), and the two men joined a call with leaders from Britain, Germany, Poland, Italy, Norway, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands. The talks included NATO and the European Union.
The next step for the Ukrainian leader is an official visit to Ireland on Tuesday with his wife, Olena, including an address to the nation’s parliament, the Oireachtas.
European leaders are showing their support for Ukraine. Even so, their words are not enough to deter Putin, who feels he is on a historic mission to reclaim the Russian empire.
Ukrainians see a weak peace deal as an invitation to Putin to wage war again later. And they see the missile and drone strikes as proof that Putin does not really want peace at all.
“The Russians are dangerous,” says Kolodiy in Ternopil. “They are saying that they are for peace, but they are killing. If somebody wants to understand the condition of the world, just talk to somebody who has survived in Ukraine.”
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