What the Christmas Day bombing of Ukraine tells us about Putin’s aims

Behind the Kremlin’s insistence on fighting to save the Russian ‘soul’ of a western-drifting Ukraine, there are crude practical benefits from seizing the territory where today’s fighting is worst, writes Mark Almond

Ukrainians faced another barrage of Russian rockets and drones on Christmas Day, showing that Vladimir Putin’s war grinds on regardless of the calendar.

You may think – as a born-again Russian Orthodox believer – Putin is saving the season of goodwill for 7 January. Unlike Ukraine (which dropped the old Orthodox calendar and adopted 25 December as its holiday), Putin’s Russia cleaves to old imperial Russian tradition.

But changing the date of Christmas was not so much a theological realignment with the Catholic West, as a geopolitical signal of Kyiv’s determination to integrate with Nato and the EU.

That is, of course, a red rag to Putin.

And behind the Kremlin’s insistence on fighting to save the Russian “soul” of a Western-drifting Ukraine, there are crude practical benefits of seizing the territory where today’s fighting is worst.

Around Pokrovsk, in the Donbas, there are huge lithium deposits. Russia has long used its vast natural resources to subsidise the Kremlin’s geopolitical ambitions. If oil is going the way of net zero, Putin intends to dominate the raw material of EV batteries.

Republican senator Lindsay Graham has assured Americans wobbling about financing Ukraine’s defences that the country has two trillion dollars worth of tomorrow’s energy gold.

Donald Trump’s promise to mediate peace between Kyiv and the Kremlin will be the backdrop to the struggle to control this lithium and rare earths.

The recent spate of territorial demands by Trump in the Americas themselves are too often dismissed as signs of his eccentricity.

Trump’s announcement that he meant to restore William McKinley’s name to America’s highest mountain, now called Denali – “the Great One” – in Alaska, was dismissed here as just a Maga snub to Native Americans’ heritage.

But, though McKinley may be forgotten today, the 25th president is one of Trump’s favourites. He was a great proponent of tariffs as Trump is – but, more than that, he was the first president to make American power go global.

From Cuba and Puerto Rico to the Philippines, people remember the third US president to be assassinated as the architect of American overseas expansion in the war of 1898 which destroyed what was left of Spain’s empire. After his murder, McKinley’s successor, Teddy Roosevelt, who had fought in Cuba, went on in the immortal words of Ronald Reagan to “steal” the Panama Canal “fair and square”.

For us, living in a country where the Suez Crisis is ancient history – and one desperate to finish the retreat from empire by paying the Maldives to take the Chagos Islands off our hands – imagining seizing back the Panama Canal or buying Greenland sounds like satire.

But to Maga Americans, reversing Jimmy Carter’s “sell-out” of the Canal to the Panamanians and taking on Greenland as an ice-cold Puerto Rico with rare earths galore makes perfect sense.

China has been toying with developing an alternative to the Panama Canal through Nicaragua, whose veteran Sandinista regime is in very bad odour with both main US parties.

But at the same time, through a mixture of commercial shipping using the canal (and its supply and engineering companies helping with the infrastructure), Beijing is beginning to play the kind of role which alarms Washington’s devotees of the Monroe Doctrine.

As so often with Trump’s most outlandish ideas and provocative claims, there is more of a consensus behind them stateside than Europeans like to admit.

Trump’s transactional calculus of profit and loss in international affairs is very different from Keir Starmer’s – and the EU’s, too.

Most Europeans are as much at a loss about why anyone might want Greenland as Mao Zedong did 50 years ago, when he asked Henry Kissinger about Greenland’s size and whether it had any resources other than ice and snow (Kissinger thought not.)

Today, Chinese companies are developing the rare earths apparently in abundance there. They may be increasingly accessible as the ice sheets retreat. The Arctic’s shrinking ice cover is also making the dream of a north-west passage trade route across the roof of the world – from Asia’s powerhouses like China and Japan, to Europe – more and more practical.

Putin’s government has been investing both in ice-breakers and ports along Russia’s vast northern coastline to make the route a Russian asset.

The idea of Russia and China dominating the Arctic alarms Washington’s grand strategists. America and her navy have dominated the sea lanes since 1945 and both protected and controlled world trade.

Now, a Sino-Russian alliance threatens to end that monopoly – but also to take control of huge mineral resources under the Arctic and Greenland.

At Christmas, the main activity of America’s northern air force command – Norad – has been monitoring Santa Claus’s sledge. Not any more.

Just as the brutal battles in southeast Ukraine are as much about controlling rare earths, as they are for all the rhetoric about national identity and sovereignty – so the superficially grotesque Trumpian bid for Greenland is about real resources and power.

The mysterious sinking of a Russian cargo ship in the Mediterranean which was transporting cranes and dockyard equipment to the far east may have been part of a shadowy secret war to establish facts on the ground on the Arctic coast.

Ukraine’s secret service recognises that its skill in subverting Putin’s forces but also his allies – like Syria’s Assad – makes the embattled country more valuable to Washington than one that just sits on the defensive at home.

Maybe Trump’s political interests will help bring Putin to the peace table over Ukraine, but they are likely to destabilise the wider world – not least in the Americas themselves.

If Putin’s ambition to make Russia great again in Eastern Europe was a body blow to European complacency, Trump’s apparent determination second time round – to waste no time making America global number one again – could unsettle his European allies, as much as his foreign rivals.