Letter From the Editors
The railway town of Grishino could serve as a historical weathervane of sorts for the political whirlwind unleashed by the Russian Empire’s loss of control in eastern Ukraine. In February 1917, the town was taken over by Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who then tilted toward the Bolsheviks after October but were soon driven out by Hetman Skoropadsky’s German allies. When the Germans had enough and left Skoropadsky twisting in the wind, things got very confusing: Simon Petlyura, local “free Cossacks,” Don Cossacks, Reds, Whites, Greens, Makhnovites, until the Red Army finally occupied the town’s power vacuum in 1919.
In time, Grishino would be renamed after the Red Army to Krasnoarmeisk. The city came up a handful of times in the Current Digest’s coverage of political instability and war in Donetsk Province in 2014-2015, but there was not much news about it after that until last summer, when Krasnoarmeisk started making headlines under yet another name, adopted in 2016: Pokrovsk. Some Russian publications, notably Defense Ministry organ Krasnaya zvezda, continue to use “Krasnoarmeisk.”
Which name will stick? That may depend on this week’s events. First, The New York Post reported that “Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone as he is trying to negotiate with him to end the Ukraine war,” and subsequently refused to reveal any details aside from “I always had a good relationship with Putin,” leading to much speculation.
Novaya gazeta Europe’s Kirill Martynov takes a pessimistic view of the phone call, writing: “The great powers see no need for a Ukrainian representative to be present as they begin carving up the country, ultimately laying the groundwork for a new world order, something that has long been Putin’s ultimate objective.”
Ukrainian journalist Konstantin Skorkin, on the other hand, doesn’t think the grimmest scenarios are any more politically workable than the rosiest. While he says “no one in Kiev still seriously believes” a reconquest of all lost territory is possible, “Ukrainians will never agree to recognize the seized lands as legal Russian territory (including the Crimea) or leave without a fight the provinces that Putin declared from afar were part of Russia.” Skorkin asserts that, like many Western leaders before him, Trump must confront the key issue: “What kind of agreement can be reached with someone who is not prepared to compromise and is used to playing a zero-sum game? As pro-Kremlin political analyst Fyodor Lukyanov recently noted: ‘The West somehow got the idea that it was important for Putin to reach an agreement and put an end to everything. That’s not the case.’ ”
Lukyanov discussed a different matter this week, J.D. Vance’s abrasive speech at the Munich Security Conference. Comparing it to Putin’s 2007 challenge to the West at the same venue, Lukyanov points out that the US, unlike Europe, has moved on from the cold war, and “Trump’s approach is not isolationism but finding other ways of running the ‘empire.’ . . . Vance’s demand to fix European democracy is essentially a call for better governance in a province where local authorities have lost the ability to properly deal with internal issues.”
Even before the speech, the Europeans at the conference were perplexed by the US’s new Ukraine policy. Nikolai Pershin points to one example: As to whether EU representatives would be present at peace talks, Vance said “of course,” Defense Secretary Hegseth said it was “likely,” while peace envoy Keith Kellogg “expressed the opinion that . . . they will not be at the negotiating table.” All this contributed to what Pershin called “the chaos of uncertainty.”
Looking at this chaos, Zelensky and Putin, both history enthusiasts, are surely considering the whirlwind that swept through the Donetsk Basin a century ago. Zelensky cannot afford to lose his foreign support like Skoropadsky, or his authority like Petlyura. If that happens, Putin knows he’ll be able to march in and name the cities as he pleases.