All that can be said on the Russian side is that they have edged away from regime change in Kyiv, or at least are prepared to see Zelensky stay as president, but they still insist on neutralising Ukraine, so it can join no international organisations, along with recognition of annexed Crimea and the independence of the enclaves in the Donbas.

On the evening of 8 March Zelensky’s office issued his proposals. These were carefully constructed so as to suggest forms of compromise. The first raised the possibility of ‘a collective security agreement with all its neighbours and with the participation of the world’s leading countries’, which will provide guarantees for Russia as well as Ukraine. In principle this has attractions for Putin, because it would render membership of NATO unnecessary and would preclude Ukraine acting as a base for long-range US weapons. On the other hand it would give Ukraine some sort of US-backed security guarantee. It would not however lead to Ukraine’s demilitarization. Ukraine has had these sorts of guarantees before, notably in the 1994 Budapest memorandum, in return for giving up its nuclear arsenal. Moscow explicitly repudiated them, on the grounds that the government in Kyiv was illegitimate, so this raises obvious questions about what sort of guarantees could render this credible.

On Crimea he seems to be looking for a compromise that allows both sides to maintain their positions on where the territory truly belongs while in practice apparently accepting for the moment it stays with Russia. This is realistic. On Donetsk and Luhansk, the two enclaves in the Donbas, his language was more elliptical.