If Putin pulls his troops back, he will come away with significant gains. State media have shown Western leaders dancing to his tune: Macron being lectured across a cartoonishly long table, Liz Truss being insulted and patronised by her opposite number, NATO members squabbling with Germany over whether they could route aid to Ukraine across its territory.

For Russians to criticise any aspect of Putin’s regime during such a crisis – the palaces and Western hidey-holes owned by officials on modest state salaries, the murder of journalists, the imprisonment of human rights activists – feels almost like treachery.

All that, in its grisly way, makes sense. So why the war talk in Washington, London and Ottawa? Could it be that our leaders, too, have Freakonomics motives? Just as Putin can walk away claiming victory simply because Ukraine has not joined NATO, so they can claim victory simply because war was averted. “We and our allies have managed to prevent Russia from any further escalation,” crowed Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba yesterday.