Trump's Ukraine ceasefire unravels as Putin resumes strikes; UK Budget faces £35bn tax gap

Donald Trump announced a ceasefire on energy infrastructure between Ukraine and Russia on Monday, but the agreement appeared to unravel almost immediately. According to multiple British newspapers, Russian forces continued striking Ukrainian energy targets even as the US President was publicizing the deal—a development that raised sharp questions about whether the arrangement had any substance at all.

The timing and process of the announcement itself became a story. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared to have learned about the ceasefire from Trump's public statement rather than through direct coordination beforehand, according to reporting in The Guardian and The Times. This lack of advance notice suggested the agreement had been negotiated without meaningful input from the country most directly affected by it. The Daily Telegraph's headline captured the skepticism bluntly: "Putin breaks Trump's 'ceasefire'." The paper's editorial went further, arguing that the fundamental problem was that the deal "only exists in the US President's head"—a way of saying the arrangement lacked grounding in any mutual commitment or enforcement mechanism.

Within hours of the announcement, Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure resumed. This was not a minor violation or a misunderstanding; it suggested either that Moscow had never agreed to the ceasefire in any binding sense, or that it had agreed and immediately disregarded it. Either way, the agreement's credibility collapsed before it could be tested.

Behind the scenes, the Trump administration was reportedly using leverage to enforce compliance from Ukraine's side. According to the Financial Times, citing conversations between European officials and their American counterparts over the weekend, the US was threatening to cut off weapons supplies to Ukraine if it continued attacking Russian energy infrastructure. The White House declined to comment on these reports. The asymmetry was notable: the US was threatening to punish Ukraine for strikes on Russian targets, while Russia faced no apparent consequences for violating the ceasefire it had supposedly accepted.

The political reaction in Britain was sharp. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Trump's separate agreement with Putin—which would lift sanctions to allow Russia to supply diesel to American and global markets—"sickening." Johnson went further, suggesting the Royal Navy should intercept Russian fuel ships in the English Channel, a proposal that underscored how controversial the sanctions-lifting arrangement had become among senior British figures.

The ceasefire's collapse had immediate human consequences. Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure threatened civilian access to heating and electricity as winter approached. The targeting of energy systems is a deliberate strategy to degrade living conditions and civilian morale, and the resumption of these strikes meant that Ukrainian cities and towns faced the prospect of prolonged cold without reliable power.

The episode illustrated a broader tension in the diplomatic effort: any ceasefire required buy-in from all parties, enforcement mechanisms, and verification that the agreement was actually being observed. Trump's announcement appeared to lack all three. By Monday morning, it was already clear that whatever had been announced in Washington bore little relationship to what was actually happening on the ground in Ukraine.