This week’s video opens with something rare: silence. For four days now, Odesa and southern Ukraine have gone without sirens, explosions or drones, apparently thanks to the localized ceasefire negotiated around Oleshky. Tomorrow may make five. Nobody is quite sure, because calm like this almost never happens.
But here’s the counterintuitive part. The people I speak to love the quiet, and they fear what comes after it. I explain what Oleshky means, and why so many here are bracing for hellfire once the ceasefire ends.
I also preview tomorrow’s big piece by our South Africa correspondent, Enzokuhle Jojo, who dug into the numbers behind Melania Trump’s push to return children forcibly removed to Russia back to Ukraine.
Then the midterms. My prediction: the House flips, and the Republicans’ Senate margin gets even thinner. Running through it all is a line from Frank Underwood in House of Cards that I keep coming back to: “The nature of promises is that they remain immune to changing circumstances.” Yes, I’m turning to Hollywood for wisdom again and I elaborate in the video.
The nature of promises is that they remain immune to changing circumstances - President Frank Underwood in House of Cards
Finally, a sector rarely discussed as this war grinds into its fifth year: Ukraine’s media. As I said on Sky News, it may be time to evacuate media workers to a safe zone in Europe and proactively establish a Ukrainian media in exile, before we lose more journalists to death, injury, emigration and career changes.
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