Trump on rampage at Nato summit: what does it mean for Ukraine? – The Latest
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This is The Guardian.
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Trump is still really crucial to this idea of how do you end the war?
What is the context and purpose of the NATO summit in Ankara?
Is there a way to put pressure on Putin?
We've settled a lot of wars and this one is the one that I thought maybe would be the easiest. But Putin's a difficult character and this guy's a difficult character.
There's a kind of strange paradox in the way Trump looks at allies. That kind of tension is perhaps going to come out more and more if Trump continues with this quite rogue foreign policy.
From The Guardian's Today In Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Hoth. A two-day summit began yesterday in Ankara in Turkey, the main event happening today with a big focus on Ukraine. Sean Walker, you are our Central and East Europe correspondent. You're based in Warsaw. You've just returned from Ukraine. I wonder if we can start there before we look at the summit itself and why the stakes are so high. I mean, there's some reporting in our paper that things are the worst they've been in some time.
How severe have recent Russian missile and drone strikes been on Kyiv?
Well, I think certainly for residents of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, things are the worst that they've been for a while in terms of those incoming long range missile and drone strikes that we see from Russia. There was a long time in the war where, you know, obviously everything was going on at the front. But if you lived in the center of Kyiv, you'd more or less feel that Ukrainian air defense would take care of you. As Ukraine's getting shorter and shorter on air defense, that equation has changed. Russia is kind of really, really pushing because the front lines are kind of more or less static. So the war has taken to the skies. Ukraine is sending its long range drones towards Russia and Russia is smashing up Ukrainian cities.
So it was really quite brutal in Kiev last week. Thousands of people in the metro were Lots of people who haven't been concerned up to now, very, really quite concerned in the capital.
You've also written about how crucial drone warfare has become in terms of some successes from the Ukrainian side against Russia. And that is something that Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, is really pushing for as he attends this two day summit in Ankara, isn't it?
Well, yeah, that's right. I mean, Ukraine has achieved some really remarkable attacks on Russia, particularly on the oil infrastructure. I mean, just this week, Ukrainian drones hit a refinery in Omsk, which is further away from Kyiv than London is. It's way, way, way into Russia. So that's kind of causing a bit of disquiet in Russia, causing, you know, stress and anger over lack of petrol. And I think the hope in Kiev is that by really putting that economic pressure on Russia and bringing the war to Russia, that it kind of pushes Moscow into getting serious about talks, which we haven't really seen yet.
Yeah, and obviously crucial to all of this is the ever unreliable Donald Trump who landed in Ankara yesterday with a vast delegation of 1,400 people. I was quite interested in the detail that some of that number are there to collect his toilet waste and take it off site so it can't be analysed for intelligence on the state of his health, which is protocol that I didn't know about and definitely a job that I do not ever want to have. And what how would you describe the state of relations between Zelensky and Trump at the moment? Because it is an ever fluctuating one, but he will be hoping, won't he, to have support from NATO allies on this drone deal in particular?
Yeah, I was also surprised by that detail. And it's something we used to write about with Vladimir Putin. There's a guy who literally carries a suitcase around that kind of follows Putin on his trips.
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