The knotty prelude to the US-Israeli military action against Iran, and the eventual launch of full-scale attacks has shifted the focus of international media towards the Persian Gulf and the Middle East and made the already monotone news flow from Ukraine even less noticeable.
There has been, of course, no halt to military action in Ukraine. Moreover, as the war in the Middle East was heating up, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that Russia had no target date for ending the war – meaning no plans to stop until it had achieved its strategic goals. This message was primarily aimed at US President Donald Trump, who regularly fuels expectations of imminent peace in Ukraine, especially among his supporters in the US.
In Ukraine, although the worst of the winter may be over, the war goes on, and, according to General Oleksandr Sirsky, Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, over the past two weeks, Ukrainian troops liberated more territory in southern Ukraine than Russia captured during the same period in the east. Currently, over 400 square kilometers (154 square miles) of previously occupied Ukrainian land have been liberated.
This doesn’t mean that Ukraine has launched a counteroffensive or that the war has reached a turning point. It only indicates that the Ukrainian army remains combat-ready and able to conduct surprise maneuvers and operations.
This positive news, coming as negotiations stall, allows Ukrainians to maintain morale and faith in the idea that Russia will not be able to advance further toward major Ukrainian cities located close to the front line: Zaporizhzhia, Nikopol, and Kharkiv.
While the destruction of Tehran’s arsenal can be welcomed by Ukraine, the war in the Middle East also disrupts Russo-Ukrainian negotiations scheduled to take place in Abu-Dhabi and provides something of a smoke screen for Trump’s lack of success in ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Interestingly, according to sources on the US Axios news website, last week, during a half-hour conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump spoke of the need to end the war with Russia – that is, to negotiate a peace agreement – within a month.
While the details of Trump’s demands are not publicly known, the US administration has certainly been working to prepare the ground for decisive shifts in Ukraine’s approach at the negotiation table, as shown by the arrival of the American television channel NEWSMAX in Ukraine.
The channel is owned by Christopher Ruddy, a friend and unofficial adviser to Donald Trump and Mar-O-Lago golf club member, and describes itself as “Top news headlines, videos, and commentary … covering politics, the White House, Congress, and Hollywood.”
Content for NEWSMAX Ukraine will be produced in Kyiv, where it will have a fully-fledged newsroom and a large team of professional journalists and producers. The channel will primarily serve a Ukrainian audience, but will also produce news for international and American audiences. News materials in Russian will also be produced and broadcast from Kyiv.
Lyudmyla Nemyria, a well-known Ukrainian journalist, producer, and documentary filmmaker, who is originally from the Donbas region, has become the channel’s general producer. She is also the wife of Ukrainian politician Hryhoriy Nemyria, a member of parliament and deputy head of the Batkivshchyna political party.
The Batkivshchyna party leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, has stepped up her political activities over the past two years. While discounted by many Ukrainians because of her alleged involvement in commercial and political corruption in the 1990s and early 2000s, Tymoshenko still has a following, and it was she who was chosen to attend the presentation of the news channel in Kyiv.
In her short welcome address, Tymoshenko said she hoped the channel would strengthen democracy and freedom of speech in Ukraine. Julie Davis, US Chargé d’Affaires, expressed the same hope at the news channel’s launch.
Interestingly, NEWSMAX has been broadcasting from Belgrade to the Balkans since 2024, and in February of this year, NEWSMAX Balkans announced the launch of NEWSMAX Poland. Initially, it will be an online news service, and later a fully-fledged Polish-language television channel.
It can be assumed that the aim of all this expansion is to maximize right-wing political influence in Eastern Europe, and especially in Ukraine, rather than to develop a commercial news business. This is evidenced by the fact that, inside the US, NEWSMAX ended 2025 with losses of $97 million.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.