Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure, despite Vladimir Putin’s pledge on a call with Donald Trump yesterday to avoid such targets. The Russian president is doing exactly what everyone said he would, says Tim Ross in Politico: “slow-walking” the ceasefire talks so that he can strengthen his position on the battlefield. North Korea has become the world’s third-largest bitcoin holder, after its hackers carried out the largest theft in history on a cryptocurrency exchange last month. The regime’s most prolific hacking group, Lazarus, has a stash worth at least £886m, behind only Britain (£3.9bn) and the US (£12.7bn), both of which accrued their hauls from criminal asset seizures. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth last night after being stuck on the International Space Station for nine months. The pair splashed down off the coast of Florida, says The New York Times, where a pod of dolphins provided a “playful terrestrial welcoming party”.

The only deal Putin will accept

When Vladimir Putin came to power 25 years ago, says Roderic Lyne, former British ambassador to Russia, on Substack, he initially sought to align Moscow with the West. He met Tony Blair five times in his first year in office, had “countless intimate chats” in German with Gerhard Schröder, and helped Western forces in Afghanistan. In 2003, he enticed 40 heads of state to a 300th birthday party for St Petersburg and became the first Russian leader since 1874 to be honoured with a state visit to the UK. Putin’s hope was that if he kept Western leaders sweet, they would tacitly grant him “suzerainty” over Russia’s neighbours and turn a blind eye to what he did back home. “He was to be disappointed.”

Western leaders backed the anti-Russian victors of the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. They criticised Putin’s 2004 election win as “blatantly undemocratic”. Realising that his cultivation of Blair and co hadn’t given him a “free pass”, Putin turned against the West. Yet his main objective didn’t change: he wanted to secure Russia’s “sphere of influence”, with Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia the “highest priorities”. He invaded Georgia in 2008 to block its gravitation towards Europe; he has used force to prop up Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus; and he has been at war with Ukraine for 11 years. That’s the context for these ceasefire talks, and whatever comes next. In Putin’s world view, Ukraine can never join the “Western camp”. So the only deal he’ll accept – or honour – is one that gives him de facto control over Kyiv. It really is as simple as that.

🇨🇳🥒 Putin’s successors may come to regret the precedent he has set for “unilateral border revision”. China’s list of “unreturned” territories includes a chunk of the Russian Far East much larger than Ukraine, which was taken by the Tsar from the Qing dynasty in three “unequal treaties” of the 19th century. Chinese maps have recently started printing the historic name for Vladivostok: “Sea Cucumber Village”.