Trump Talks, Medvedev Threatens, Ukraine Bleeds

Trump’s bravado met Medvedev’s threat of World War III. This isn’t diplomacy, it’s performance. And in Ukraine, theatre kills. Sarcasm doesn’t bury the dead.

LVIV, Ukraine — The smell of dust and diesel hangs in the air like an accusation. It is the scent of a nation not merely at war, but abandoned in war. The bells of Lviv's Latin Cathedral toll without ceremony, their melancholy barely noticed now, even by the faithful. This is not a city under siege in the traditional sense. It is a city held hostage by promises that were never meant to be fulfilled¹. And at the epicentre of this betrayal is a theatre of diplomacy playing to an audience that long ago stopped believing.

Donald J. Trump, the forty-seventh President of the United States, returned to office in January 2025 promising, in his typical register of braggadocio, to end the war between Russia and Ukraine in twenty-four hours. "Before I even arrive at the Oval Office," he said on the campaign trail, "it'll be over." When challenged on these claims later, he shrugged them off as sarcasm. But in Ukraine, sarcasm does not staunch blood. Irony does not bring back the dead.

The farcical …