Last week, Vladimir Putin responded with characteristic disdain to an open letter from Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling for face-to-face talks. Declining to mention Ukraine’s president by name at an economic forum in St Petersburg, he said that he saw “no point” in a meeting and insisted that all Russia’s war aims, including the annexation of the entirety of the eastern Donbas region, were on course to be met.
Mr Putin is “in blood stepped in so far” that agreeing to a ceasefire while those messianic goals remain unachieved may seem more politically dangerous than continuing a war which has cost an estimated 500,000 Russian lives. But as a concerted Ukrainian drone attack on St Petersburg the next day vividly illustrated, his confident assertions are increasingly belied by facts on the ground and in the air.
