Speaking to FRANCE 24 from Kyiv, Ukraine's former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said that "President Trump's effort to bring this war to an end has failed". "His approach does not work," he argued, predicting that as long as Trump does not change it, "we will be in the limbo where the Russians will be upset with Trump because he is not putting enough pressure on Ukraine", while Kyiv and Europe will be upset that he is not pressuring Russia enough.
Should Washington simply be sidelined? "No one is going to dare to exclude the United States of America from the process," Kuleba conceded.
'The trust in Russia is zero'
On the battlefield, Kuleba said it was "too early to say we are winning the war, although I firmly believe we are going to win it". Ukraine's strikes on Russian refineries – a "bottleneck" whose targeting has triggered a fuel crisis in Russia – mean that "one of the key points of the social contract that President Putin signed" with Russians "is broken", he said.
In the coming weeks, he predicted, "there will be more news coming from the air battles than from the ground battles".
Asked about possible territorial concessions, Kuleba was categorical: "No political leader in Ukraine will ever sign a document that will read Ukraine is giving away occupied territories to Russia." President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected Vladimir Putin's demand for a withdrawal from the Donetsk region, he noted, because "the trust in Russia is zero".
For Kuleba, the war will end only when Putin recognises "that Ukraine has the right to continue to exist as an independent, sovereign and European nation" – a prospect "currently out of sight".
