First the good news. The US is talking to Russia. Then the bad. Vladimir Putin has been phoned not by the current US president, but by a known admirer and sceptic of the US’s support for Ukraine, the president-elect, Donald Trump (the Kremlin has since denied the call took place). Could these two facts offer a path to peace?
Two years ago, Putin made a terrible mistake. He thought he could invade Ukraine and topple its leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He failed utterly. Ukraine’s forces pushed him back to the supposedly pro-Russian territory of his 2014 invasion. At talks in Istanbul months after this failure, Putin’s representatives might have settled for a ceasefire and the acceptance of some western security guarantee for Kyiv. The talks broke down with the west encouraging Ukraine to fight on. In what amounted to a proxy war on Moscow, the west attacked Russia and its people with the severest sanctions ever seen, while donating to Ukraine huge sums of aid.
