Senior officers, veterans, politicians and ordinary soldiers have lashed out at Donald Trump’s plans to meet Vladimir Putin in peace talks that exclude Ukraine.
Ukrainian rap star Oleksandr Yarmak, who is also head of research and development in the country’s new unmanned aerial vehicle force, told The Independent: “Regardless of the plans of Trump and the murderous Putin, we will defend our country.
“If Russia is not punished for its bloody deeds, this world has no future.”
He spoke after the US president’s announcement that he hoped to open talks with the Russian leader, possibly in Saudi Arabia, next week. Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has already laid out the parameters for the US which directly reflects the Kremlin’s longstanding position.
Notably, he said Ukraine cannot join Nato and that Kyiv must give up on demands that Russia withdraw from all of the territory it has captured in the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine since 2014.
Yarmak, a former front-line drone pilot and commander with many years of service on the battlefield, said in a text: “If the world does not show its maturity, there are still many Ukrainians, including me, who are ready to bring at least a little justice to this world.
“We will not end the struggle until evil is punished! Otherwise, there is no point in living in such a disgusting world!”
His rap songs have become national war chants and blend contemporary wartime experiences with traditional poetry and history.
Ukrainians are drawing parallels with the late 1930s when efforts made to appease Hitler did nothing to prevent the Second World War.
Volodymyr Omelyan, a major in a homeland defence regiment who was badly wounded by a Russian airstrike in eastern Ukraine last year and was the minister for infrastructure under former president Petro Poroshenko, also condemned Trump’s approach.
“His approach to please the beast is wrong and will lead to big problems.”
Referring to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler after meeting him in Munich in 1938 he warned: ”Munich ’38 was just the beginning, not the end. Russia and China will use this situation to take Europe. Only if the UK, France and Germany will take the lead over the continent, we can survive”.
Oleksii Yakovlenko deals with the results of Putin’s invasion every day. Until last year he was the former director of the Kramatorsk Hospital, where the corridors are often slick with the blood of wounded and dying Ukrainian soldiers.
Now commanding a frontline medical unit on the eastern front, he sent a message to The Independent that said “Munich 2.0”.
In Sumy close to the border with Russia and on the roiling eastern front near Pokrovsk, frontline soldiers told The Independent that, although they were exhausted and depressed by three years of intense fighting, they were seeing signs that Russia’s campaign was also waning.
The Kremlin’s forces have recently claimed to have made a small territorial gain in the east with the capture of a small village – but the costs to Moscow’s troops have been huge.
“We’re not seeing operational successes of the Russians. They’re buying small pieces of land with mass casualties and we are also seeing that they are less able to send tanks, armoured vehicles, even planes into battle. That means this is the time for us to get more weapons and drive them back,” said the commander of a specialist battalion operating in the east.
Ukraine has sought to improve its hand in future negotiations by expanding the area it currently holds in the Russian Kursk region in a recent wave of attacks.
European Nato members have insisted that there can be no talks about Ukraine, or Europe’s security, without the presence of both Ukraine and Europe in negotiations.
One former member of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government said that he hoped Trump’s decision was an early move in a more complex process.
“I think it’s a first call. I hope this is a classic exercise to massage the ego of the Kremlin’s dictator. The idea is to allow him to keep face – to look tough.”
But he warned that Putin “will counter that and he is good at exploiting weakness. The Kremlin could humiliate the president of the USA.”
