“Russia looses against Ukrain-DERK SAUER"





" 'Ukrain Drones Russia from the Planet'”

The clumsy Russian system has no answer to Ukrainian brains and bravado

Derk Sauer writes a weekly column about Russia for Het Parool

May 16, 2025

“Am I disappointed? Why? He (Putin) was going to come, but he thought I wasn’t coming. He wouldn’t go if I wasn’t there and I believe nothing will happen until we see each other.”

With this gibberish, Trump tried to save himself from yet another debacle. Because how simple the cards were at the beginning of the week. Zelensky, Trump and the EU jointly called for a thirty-day ceasefire as a start for negotiations.

Putin tried to circumvent the ceasefire by proposing direct negotiations with Ukraine and the US, suggesting he was open to a possible historic meeting – Trump, Putin and Zelensky in Turkey.

Trump – already in the Middle East – and Zelensky agreed. But Putin scuttled the plan Wednesday night – a few hours before the deadline – and sent a second-tier delegation to Istanbul.

If ever there was a reason for a tough American response, it is now. But no. As diplomats and negotiators wander around Istanbul in confusion, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that a Putin-Trump summit is now the only way out.

And that is exactly what Putin wants. Only with Trump. Preferably in private – like in Helsinki in 2018, when Putin completely won him over. “Putin did not think for a second about sitting down with Zelensky,” Moscow Times colleague Pyotr Kozlov quoted his Kremlin sources as saying. “We have been saying, including in our propaganda, that Zelensky is an illegitimate president for years. That means that Putin can only make a peace deal with a new Ukrainian leader,” a senior Russian diplomat said. “Russian diplomacy still follows the same protocols as in Soviet times, with all major negotiations thoroughly prepared in advance. Therefore, there is no room for spontaneous negotiations or flexible ideas.”

Putin completely won over Trump during negotiations in Helsinki in 2018. Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images In the chaos, there are still several bright spots for Ukraine. At least there has been less bombing in recent days. As long as there is talk, Putin will be reluctant to launch new attacks. And it is becoming increasingly difficult for Trump to put all the blame on Zelensky – as much as he likes to do so.

Even Trump's loyal Republican senators are starting to stir. In Europe, the new German Chancellor Merz is taking more of a lead. But by far the most important thing: the offensive declared by the Russians with so much fanfare has gone up in smoke. According to the latest analyses of the authoritative ISW institute, the Russian army is barely making any progress. In the past sixteen months, the Russians have conquered an area a quarter larger than our province of Gelderland at the cost of four hundred thousand dead and wounded soldiers.

Just imagine the carnage.

Ukraine's success is not due to American arms support, but mainly to home-made drones. In a short time, Ukraine has become the world power in the field of drones. Every month, various factories and workshops in Ukraine now produce two hundred thousand drones. And they are extremely effective. About eighty percent of all Russian injuries are the result of drone attacks.

Ukrainian drone operators near the front. ANP/EPA Instead of building trenches, as Ukraine did at the beginning of the war, a much more effective technological variant has now been devised, 'the drone wall'. According to military analysts, a fifteen-kilometre kill zone has been created across almost the entire front, where advancing Russian tanks and troops are hunted down and eliminated with drones.

The Russian response is to advance with small, mobile units – often on motorcycles and quads – but they too are prey to the drones. Tech+speed=victory, Defense Minister Rustem Umyerov summarized the Ukrainian strategy.

And that seems to work very well. An important advantage is of course that considerably fewer Ukrainian soldiers are killed. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the first fully robotized Ukrainian attack on a Russian bunker near Kharkiv. No soldiers were involved. Robot-controlled all-terrain vehicles mounted with machine guns and rocket launchers drove towards their target – supported from the air by drones – and managed to blow up the enemy bunker.

Ukraine now has, mainly due to its own ingenuity and innovation, the most modern army in the world. And it is already training British and Danish soldiers how to deal with drones. For this reason alone, NATO should embrace Ukraine.

The sluggish Russian system has no answer. It doesn’t help that Russia’s best engineers have fled the country en masse. With playful ease, Ukrainian drones are making Russian airspace unsafe and forcing airports to close. And with incredible precision, dozens of oil refineries and critical power plants have been shut down.

Putin has nuclear weapons and an endless supply of mostly unmotivated soldiers. The Ukrainians have the brains and the bravado. That could make Zelensky – with just a little more support from Europe – a lot more independent of Trump’s whims.

Derk Sauer is publisher of The Moscow Times and columnist for Het Parool.

He is also the founder of the Russian newspaper Vedomosti and former publisher of RBK Gazeta.





Questa mattina mi sono alzato
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao
questa mattina mi sono alzato
e ho trovato l'invasor.


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this morning I woke up
and I found the invader.

  
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