We Value Human Lives, Not Parades – Address by the President

28 April 2025 – 22:13

I wish you health, fellow Ukrainians!

Briefly about today. In the Cherkasy region, work is currently underway to restore gas supply. Following a Shahed drone strike, there has been damage to infrastructure – critical infrastructure – and it is ordinary civilian infrastructure. Once again, Russia has struck a target that is not about war, but about people. Moreover, this attack came against the backdrop of global demands for Russia to end this war and establish a ceasefire. That is, each new day brings another clear proof that pressure must be exerted on Russia – and it must be strong enough – to force them in Moscow to end this war, a war that only Russia needs. We in Ukraine never wanted a single second of this war – and we have always said that we are ready to work as swiftly as possible with all partners who can help establish peace and guarantee security. Back on March 11, we responded positively to the American proposal for a full ceasefire. We made our own proposal to Russia – bilaterally – to halt strikes at least on civilian targets, at the very least. We also proposed making the Easter ceasefire full and extending it for thirty days. Russia has consistently rejected everything and continues to manipulate the world, trying to deceive the United States. Now, yet again, another attempt at manipulation: for some reason, everyone is supposed to wait until May 8 before ceasing fire – just to provide Putin with silence for his parade. We value human lives, not parades. That’s why we believe – and the world believes – that there is no reason to wait until May 8. The ceasefire should not be just for a few days, only to return to killing afterward. It must be immediate, full, and unconditional – for at least 30 days to ensure it is secure and guaranteed. This is the foundation that could lead to real diplomacy. We reaffirm this proposal. The American proposal also remains on the table. Russia knows exactly what it needs to do and how to respond: to genuinely cease fire. And we believe that global pressure – pressure from the United States of America – can push Russia toward precisely the kind of response that is needed.

Today, I held a meeting with our diplomats – we are preparing meetings and negotiations with our partners, and Ukraine will take part in the summits that are essential for our country. The priority is clear – air defense, security for our people, support for Ukraine, and support for diplomacy – so that Russia loses the ability to prolong the war.

Today, our government officials – Ukraine’s representatives in the negotiations with the United States on the economic partnership agreement – also delivered their reports. The document has become significantly stronger – equitable – and can be beneficial for both of our nations, for Ukraine and for America. I would like to thank our teams first of all.

I spoke several times today with Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi – about the frontline situation and our operations. I want to thank all our warriors for their resilience. And today, I especially want to highlight Pokrovsk – we are holding our positions – as well as the Kursk and Belgorod directions, where we continue to operate on enemy territory. I am grateful to each of our units for the result in destroying the occupier. Strength at the front gives strength to diplomacy.

Glory to Ukraine!

Georgia:

#GeorgiaProtests
Day 152

📷 Giorgi Burjanadze

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— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 2:43 PM

Our little rituals ✊🏻 Day 152!

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— Marika Mikiashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 (@marikamikiashvili.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 2:30 PM

“If I am not in prison, I will do everything for European integration and for the freedom of speech and expression. If that is considered a crime, then perhaps I should indeed be punished” – Amaglobeli stated at court.

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— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM

GYLA has filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of Mzia Amaglobeli, founder of Batumelebi&Netgazeti.
The case challenges Amaghlobeli’s unlawful detention and other rights violations, citing breaches of six fundamental rights under the European Convention on Human Rights

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— Batumelebi&Netgazeti (@netgazeti.org) April 28, 2025 at 4:11 AM

#Mzia entering the court ✊

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— Lena Schilling (@lenaats.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 5:18 AM

Friend and Colleague of #Mzia, Tamar of @netgazeti.org, summarising what happened today in court.

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— Lena Schilling (@lenaats.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 11:14 AM

On Apr.28, Judge Nino Sakhelashvili rejected the defense’s request to replace Mzia Amaglobeli’s pre-trial detention – imposed on Jan.14 – with a less severe measure such as house arrest or an electronic bracelet.
Citing an increased risk of reoffending, the judge ordered that Mzia remain in custody

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— Batumelebi&Netgazeti (@netgazeti.org) April 28, 2025 at 3:39 PM

take action for #mzia now:

actionnetwork.org/forms/freedo…

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— Lena Schilling (@lenaats.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 6:07 AM

A father and a son have been shot dead in Gori.

A frequent occurrence in a rapidly Russifying Georgia.

Meanwhile, protesters discuss new methods & it seems like a new breath is near once again – after a period of some collective creeping in of depression, which is natural too.

— Marika Mikiashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 (@marikamikiashvili.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 5:26 AM

Spain, Portugal, and France:

Never seen anything like the power outage hitting Spain/Portugal right now. Regions of Spain, Portugal, France hit. Mayor of Madrid tells residents to stay home if they can. Traffic lights out. ATMs, too. Airports dark. “The interruption was due to a problem in the European electricity grid”

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— Kim Zetter (@kimzetter.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 9:53 AM

From The NY Times:

A major power outage hit Spain and Portugal on Monday afternoon, abruptly shutting down daily activities, halting trains and subways, cutting off traffic lights, closing stores and canceling or delaying some flights.

Hours after the power shut off around 12:30 p.m. Central European time, stranding tens of millions of people across the Iberian Peninsula, officials remained at a loss as to the cause, though several denied any foul play.

“At this point, there are no indications of any cyberattack,” António Costa, the president of the European Council, wrote on X after communicating with the leaders of Spain and Portugal, who both assembled emergency meetings. “Grid operators in both countries are working on finding the cause and on restoring the electricity supply.”

By Monday evening, with the help of electricity funneled from Morocco and France, parts of northern and southern Spain had flickered back to life and Spain’s national power company, Red Eléctrica, said power was being progressively restored across the country. Later Monday night, the president, Pedro Sánchez, said, “Practically 50 percent of the electricity supply has been restored.”

In Portugal, the electricity and gas supplier, REN, announced power had been reconnected to two important substations near Lisbon and that residents in Greater Porto should be back online shortly.

The outage briefly affected France. RTE, the French electrical grid operator, said in a statement that some households in the Basque region had lost electricity but that “all power has since been restored.”

Still, others remained in the dark.

The reaction across the region ranged from frantic stockpiling to confused bewilderment to calmly hunkering down and making do with old-fashioned electricity-free ways of living.

More at the link.

Right now I’ve seen no reporting as to the cause, so we wait and watch.

Ukraine has offered assistance to European countries that experienced massive power outages.

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 11:05 AM

The US:

European & Ukrainian officials fear Donald Trump is on the brink of walking away from peace negotiations with Kyiv and Moscow, using minor progress in talks as an “excuse to walk away”, people briefed on the discussions told me, @christopherjm.ft.com & @maxseddon.bsky.social

on.ft.com/4jWc1TC

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— Henry Foy (@henryjfoy.ft.com) April 28, 2025 at 1:33 PM

From The Financial Times:

European and Ukrainian officials fear Donald Trump is on the brink of walking away from peace negotiations with Kyiv and Moscow, potentially using minor progress in talks as an “excuse” to say his job is done, according to people briefed on the discussions.

The US president was elected on a promise to end the war in “24 hours”, but his overtures to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and attempts to strong-arm the Ukrainian leadership have failed to win backing for his initial proposal of a 30-day ceasefire, let alone a lasting truce.

Following talks with the US side in recent days, European and Ukrainian officials are convinced Trump is ready to seize any kind of breakthrough this week, which marks his first 100 days in office — even if it falls short of a long-term solution, four officials told the Financial Times.

One European official said Trump was “setting up a situation where he gives himself excuses to walk away and leave it to Ukraine and us [Europe] to fix”.

Putin’s unwillingness to agree to key US and Ukrainian demands such as maintaining a postwar Ukrainian military force, and the complexity of the conflict has made Trump re-evaluate his commitment to a peace deal, they added.

Marco Rubio, US secretary of state, on Sunday called this a “critical” week for talks and signalled that Washington is unwilling to be dragged into an extended negotiation.

The Russian president on Monday offered a three-day ceasefire over the holiday of May 8-10 when Russia celebrates the Soviet victory in the second world war — but he has failed to keep his previous pledges to pause hostilities over Easter and on Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

On Monday, Russia further hardened its conditions with foreign minister Sergei Lavrov saying that Moscow considered “international recognition” of its annexation of five Ukrainian regions to be an “imperative” for any deal.

All these developments led some European capitals to rethink their efforts to “keep [Trump] engaged”, the first official said, and instead to “do the right thing and rather not what Trump wants”.

Kyiv has quietly begun preparing to go it alone in anticipation of a US pullout, by increasing domestic arms production and intensifying talks with European allies about future assistance.

It was unclear if the US would stop intelligence and military support to Ukraine — as Trump did temporarily in March — in the event of the White House stepping back from the diplomatic efforts, the officials said.

“There are serious apprehensions in Ukraine that Trump might walk away from ceasefire negotiations,” Oleksandr Merezhko, an MP in Zelenskyy’s ruling party and head of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told the FT.

“The worst thing that can happen in the US-Ukraine relations is when Trump will lose any interest in Ukraine,” he said, which he added “might be perceived by Putin as a tacit permission from the US to escalate the war”.

More at the link.

Frankly, if the EU, its member states, the non-US NATO members, and non-European allies and partners will fill the intelligence gap that might result, as well as the logistics gap, I’m not sure having Trump and his team walking away would be worse than accepting a bad agreement. It’s one thing to negotiate an accept the best alternative agreement, but that’s not what Putin and Russia are pushing for. And the US team seems to be negotiating with Russia for a US-Russia reset where resolving Russia’s genocidal re-invasion of Ukraine is just a complication.

Especially as this is what Putin and Russia have in mind once they’ve finished with Ukraine:

Russia is preparing for a military conflict with NATO after the war in Ukraine ends, according to The Wall Street Journal.

www.wsj.com/world/russia…

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 12:00 PM

From The Wall Street Journal:

HELSINKI—With President Trump and many other world leaders preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, some Europeans are growing alarmed about what the Russian army has been doing much more quietly along other stretches of its border with Europe.

Some 100 miles east of its border with Finland, in the Russian city of Petrozavodsk, military engineers are expanding army bases where the Kremlin plans to create a new army headquarters to oversee tens of thousands of troops over the next several years.

Those soldiers, many now serving on the front lines in Ukraine, are intended to be the backbone of a Russian military preparing to face off with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, according to Western military and intelligence officials. The Kremlin is expanding military recruitment, bolstering weapons production and upgrading railroad lines in border areas.

Finland, which was forced to surrender territory to the Soviet Union in 1940, has spent decades trying to avoid confrontation with Moscow. Now, having joined NATO after the Ukraine invasion, it is fortifying its border with electronic defenses and barbed wire fencing.

Trump, who has been pressuring Ukraine to accept a cease-fire deal while trying to rebuild U.S. ties with the Kremlin, has said worries that Russia has any ambitions beyond Ukraine are overblown. Asked in February about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s warning that Russia could wage war on NATO if the U.S. reduces support for the alliance, Trump said: “I don’t agree with that, not even a little bit.”Back to Ukraine.

Military experts inside Russia, though, characterize the activity along the Finnish border as part of the Kremlin’s preparation for potential conflict with NATO.

“When the troops are back [from Ukraine], they will be looking over the border at a country they consider an adversary,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based defense think tank. “The logic of the last decade shows we’re expecting some conflict with NATO.”

Russian officials have sent mixed signals. At a defense ministry meeting late last year, Russia’s Defense Minister Andrey Belousov said Russia’s military must be ready for a conflict with NATO. At the same gathering, President Vladimir Putin said the West was alarming its own population by suggesting that Russia was ready to attack, and that current tensions were NATO’s doing.

As Russia prepares to increase its military presence along NATO’s eastern flank, Putin has ordered the military to expand its ranks to as many as 1.5 million troops, up from around one million before the Ukraine invasion.

Russia has increased military spending to more than 6% of GDP this year, from 3.6% before the war. By comparison, the U.S. spent 3.4% of its GDP on its military last year, and EU countries, on average, spent 2.1%.

For centuries, Russia’s military made it one of Europe’s great powers. It routed both Napoleon and Hitler after each dared invade Russian territory. The Soviet Union’s entry into World War II changed the direction of the conflict and set the stage for the Cold War era that followed.

Putin has drawn on that military legacy to justify the war in Ukraine and Russia’s efforts to claw back influence in Europe, where former allies such as Ukraine have drifted toward the West. Russia appears to be betting that a military expansion along NATO borders will force the West to re-engage with a stronger Moscow.

“Russia and Europe will need to restart dialogue with a clear understanding of one another’s capabilities, an understanding of the fact that we’re enemies,” said Vasily Kashin, director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics.

To concentrate its forces to the West, last year the Kremlin changed the way it organizes its forces inside the country, creating new districts tied to the defense of its biggest cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In the Moscow military district, Russia has been integrating the road and rail routes used by its military with those in neighboring Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally and a staging ground for the initial invasion of Ukraine.

Most of the manpower expansion will take place in the Leningrad district, which faces Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Smaller brigades will nearly triple in size to become divisions of 10,000 around troops, according to Western military and intelligence officials.

“No matter how they may try to innovate on a tactical or operational level, for the Russians, size matters,” said Maj. Gen. Sami Nurmi, Finland’s deputy chief of staff responsible for strategy. “It always comes down to numbers.”

Russia is planning to build new barracks and training grounds and to upgrade arsenals and railroad lines to accommodate the swelling troop numbers in and around Petrozavodsk.

In December, Russian state television showed some 100 Russian soldiers marching through the city’s center to celebrate the restoration of a Soviet-era railroad brigade tasked with laying the new rails. “You are the first ones, the first unit being revived,” Andrei Artyomov, commissar for the broader Karelian region, told the assembled troops.

The new infrastructure being built includes storage units and troops housing, said Emil Kastehelmi of the Finland-based Black Bird Group, which analyzes satellite images of Russian military sites. New rail is being laid along the borders with Finland and Norway, and south of St. Petersburg to the Estonian border. Existing lines that cross the region are being expanded.

Finland is watching to see where those new lines might go.

More at the link.

Just to close the loop on this, all of what Russia is doing is setting the conditions to at least threaten, if not actually invade different European states despite them being NATO members. Imagine how much more effective this will be if Russia also winds up controlling Crimea, and as a result, the Black sea, as well as Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk Oblasts. And, of course, he also wants to try to push into and take Odesa Oblast as that creates a land corridor all the way to the breakaway statelet of Transnistria. At the start of Russia’s genocidal re-invasion of Ukraine, Putin, his key staffers, his surrogates, and Russian propagandists were referring to this corridor as Novorossiya or New Russia.

The Russian newspapers say the Kremlin should keep stringing Trump along for as long as it can, aiming to wring out more concessions that will leave Ukraine a defenseless, semi-vassal state.

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— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 3:00 AM

Here’s the full video:

That “major reconstruction of the Ukrainian political system” is part of what the Russians mean by denazification.

Back to Ukraine:

What do Ukrainians think about trading Crimea for Trump’s “ceasefire”.

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 11:00 AM

Kharkiv:

Last day, russian forces shelled an agricultural enterprise in the Kharkiv district. Dozens of cattle were killed, and several dozen more animals were injured.

Why? Just why???

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 5:47 AM

The Kursk cross border offensive:

Russia has officially released footage showing North Korean soldiers fighting on Russia’s side.

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— 🦋Special Kherson Cat🐈🇺🇦 (@specialkhersoncat.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 5:07 AM

Russian occupied Luhansk Oblast:

Clearing of a village in the Luhansk region by fighters of the 2nd Company, 1st Assault Battalion, 3rd Separate Assault Brigade.
t.me/c/1377735387…

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 1:44 PM

Rostov Oblast, Russia:

Did you miss burning russian oil depots as much as I did?

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 2:50 PM

Bryansk Oblast, Russia:

Russian Bryansk had a fun night 👀🔥

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 4:57 AM

From The Kyiv Independent:

Editor’s note: The story is being updated.

An overnight drone strike targeted a key Russian electronics plant in the city of Bryansk, Russian Telegram channels and a Ukrainian official claimed on April 28.

Bryansk Oblast Governor Alexander Bogomaz claimed that Ukrainian forces launched a “massive attack” against the region, with Russian air defenses allegedly intercepting and destroying 102 drones.

“Unidentified” drones targeted the Kremniy-El plant, a major facility specializing in microelectronics for Russia’s military-industrial complex, said Andrii Kovalenko, an official at Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

Russian Telegram channels supported this assertion, which was not confirmed by local authorities.

The plant produces components for missile systems such as the Topol-M, Bulava, and Iskander, as well as for radars, electronic warfare systems, drones, and the onboard electronics of military aircraft, according to Russian open sources.

Images and videos posted on Telegram showed fires burning in parts of the city overnight, with residents reporting flashes in the sky.

Local media reported at least 10 to 15 explosions in Bryansk, with damage to civilian infrastructure, vehicles, and residential buildings. Bogomaz claimed that one civilian was killed and another injured in the attacks.

The Ukrainian forces have not yet commented on the attack. The Kyiv Independent could not verify the claims.

Bryansk lies around 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of the Russia-Ukraine border. Ukrainian forces have repeatedly targeted Russian military and industrial facilities in the rear to undermine Moscow’s ability to wage its all-out war.

Krasnodar Oblast, Russia:

Russian Telegram channels report a large fire in the area of Novorossiysk, Krasnodar region of Russia.

Local news reported a “diesel fuel tank fire in industrial area”. Judging by the size of the fire, the tank was not small.

No comments from local authorities yet.

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— Anton Gerashchenko (@antongerashchenko.bsky.social) April 28, 2025 at 3:55 PM

That’s enough for tonight.

Your daily Patron!

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@patron__dsns

Приніс тут вам понеділковий лизь! Заряджений натхненням і гарним настроєм 🤭👅 #песпатрон

♬ sonido original – Lore.

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Open thread!