It’s tempting to conclude, therefore, that negotiations have been pointless from the beginning. There may indeed be “no bargaining” with Putin in the sense that there is no deal he could accept that would also have been acceptable to Ukraine’s government and its people, and no deal with NATO that he was going to trust. But that doesn’t mean that negotiations were pointless. Quite the contrary.

Why, if Putin wanted war, did he go through the charade of making demands and appearing to negotiate? Because while he is an authoritarian, he still needs popular support, and he needs to construct that popular support from observable facts, however distorted. Even so, support for his current moves appears far more tepid than his seizure of Crimea in 2014, which enjoyed enthusiastic popular backing in Russia.

The same is true of the West. Fine distinctions such as President Biden’s between a “limited incursion” — which is what has happened so far — and a full-scale invasion matter greatly in achieving popular and international support for a more confrontational policy, even if that confrontation is limited to something far short of war (as I sincerely hope it is). They also matter greatly for communicating with Putin himself. The last thing we want to do is assist him in building his case before his own people, and thereby make it easier for him to opt for maximum violence.