It was early in the evening of 21 February that it became impossible to ignore that Vladimir Putin was planning something truly terrible for Ukraine.
Up to that moment, exactly six months ago, many voices were urging calm in the face of increasingly insistent American and British warnings of a full-scale invasion. The French and German governments, Russian officials and even Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy suggested Putin’s troop buildup was a bluff, and the warnings from Washington were over-egged.
