WASHINGTON DC – Exactly a fortnight after Donald Trump warmly welcomed Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to Alaska for their summit on Ukraine, the peace initiatives he hoped to kickstart have yet to materialise.

On Thursday, Russia launched one of its most powerful assaults on Kyiv since the war began in February 2022. At least 23 civilians were killed in the drone and missile assault, with explosives raining down on the Ukrainian capital. Among those complexes struck, the European Union’s diplomatic offices and the Kyiv headquarters of the British Council.

Last week, the Russians also destroyed an American-owned electronics manufacturing plant in western Ukraine, suggesting – as an American TV interviewer put it to the Kremlin’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last weekend – that eith

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