How Russia’s grinding advance complicates Ukraine peace push

Good morning. Today, I report on the latest from the ground in Russia’s war against Ukraine, and the battle for influence inside Donald Trump’s mind. And the head of the EU’s electricity lobby tells our energy correspondent that rising populism is hurting efforts to better integrate the continent’s power grids.

Moving parts

Russia has claimed that its forces have advanced into Ukraine’s east-central region of Dnipropetrovsk. It would be a symbolic victory at the start of a potentially critical week for the future of the almost 40 months-long war.

Context: Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and after failing in its lightning assault on Kyiv, has fought a gruelling war of attrition in the country’s east. US President Donald Trump vowed to bring the war to a swift conclusion but has struggled to get Kyiv and Moscow to find any form of common ground for a ceasefire. 

The claimed entry of units from Russia’s 90th tank regiment into Dnipropetrovsk, which Ukraine’s armed forces denied last night, would mark the first time Moscow’s land forces have entered the region since the early months of the war, and be another sign of their brutal, incremental advance as peace talks stall.

Both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have sought to convince Trump that the other is the impediment to peace. Putin has continually restated maximalist demands that would heavily undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty and diminish its territory.

Western officials believe the upcoming G7 leaders’ summit in Canada that begins on Sunday could be a potential moment for Trump to take a more decisive position regarding the war, after weeks of him vacillating over US support to Ukraine, even as his patience with Putin seems to be waning.

“With all due respect to President Trump, I think it’s just his personal opinion,” Zelenskyy told ABC News yesterday when asked about Trump’s assertion that Putin wants peace. “Trust me, we understand the Russians much better, the mentality of the Russians, than the Americans understand the Russians. I know for sure Putin doesn’t want to stop the war.”

Last week, low-level negotiations between Ukrainian and Russian officials in Turkey had brokered a bilateral swap of 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action on both sides. 

That agreement was mired by confusion yesterday as Russia claimed it had brought its bodies to the swap site but Ukraine had postponed the initiative, while Kyiv said that the exchange was always planned to take place this week.

Ukraine is also bracing for the outcome of what Putin has vowed will be a large-scale military retaliation for Kyiv’s surprise drone attack earlier this month that destroyed dozens of Russian bombers.

Chart du jour: Dilemma

To reach Nato’s new military spending targets, France would have to double its yearly spending from last year’s levels. But the country’s high national debt threatens to curb its defence ambitions.

Network effect

The rise of populists could thwart many EU policy efforts — including better grid integration, the new president of the EU electricity industry body tells Alice Hancock.

Context: The vast increase in volatile renewable power has added urgency to the need for the EU to update its grids and ensure that electricity flows smoothly between countries. But interconnector projects often stall because of investment challenges and national interests.

Portugal, for example, has been vocal in blaming France for not improving cross-border energy links, after the Iberian peninsula suffered an almost hour-long disconnection from the European grid during the large-scale power cut on April 28.

Markus Rauramo, chief executive of the Finnish energy company Fortum who took over as president of Eurelectric last week, said he feared that the populist agenda was not conducive to better EU co-operation on grids.

“Individualism overall is on the rise, and short-termism. It is a challenging thing to explain to consumers and the industries that an integrated market will create more welfare than small islands where everybody tries to be self-sufficient,” Rauramo said.

While the EU’s grid is in far better nick than the US or China’s, it will still need upgrades worth more than €1.2tn until 2040 in order to cope with the electrical demand expected as part of the bloc’s green transition, the European Commission estimates.

Rauramo said that consumers that currently had lower prices might be connected to areas with higher prices if there was better grid integration, leading to temporary price rises. But on average, prices would go down to the benefit of everyone, and grids would become more resilient.

Explaining this was “the political challenge”, he said. “Issues like energy price get picked up and they will be then used to stir up discussion and emotions.”

What to watch today

1. UN Ocean Conference kicks off in Nice.

2. Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte meets UK premier Sir Keir Starmer in London.

Now read these