Grégory Herpe What Witkoff and Kushner Came to Seek Peace, if one can call it that, has had a rather unlikely face in recent months. Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate developer turned Trump envoy for the Middle East and then for Ukraine. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. The two men have supplanted Keith Kellogg—the official special envoy for Ukraine, a retired general and a man who has worked on the file from the start—to the point that Kellogg ended up resigning after discovering he had been sidelined without ever being told so directly. You can’t make this up. ...

Jacques de Larosière The political and ethnic situation in Ukraine is, to say the least, complex. In the western part of the country, Ukrainian-speaking inhabitants constitute a clear majority. It was this population that drove the anti-corruption and anti-Russian demonstrations on the Maidan square in Kyiv, where far-right movements — and, on the margins, neo-Nazi groups — ultimately prevailed in overthrowing President Yanukovych, who had been democratically elected. While Yanukovych was certainly favourable to collaboration with Moscow, he was by no means its vassal. ...

Grégory Herpe On the night of May 23-24, 2026, I watched the sky over Kyiv. The sirens had sounded shortly after midnight. I was in my hotel room working on the photos I had taken during the day, and I stepped out onto the terrace – the instinct not to miss what the walls of an apartment would have hidden. The sky seemed pierced by the luminous trails of falling missiles, glowing like flashes of fire. Then the dull detonations in the distance, the closer explosions whose blast you felt in your ribcage before you even truly heard them. As if waves of pressure were passing right through us. The anti-aircraft batteries chattering in bursts. Then the drones – small, fast points, humming discreetly, before the total conflagration of the sky, of the city. ...