This week Kyiv will celebrate independence day, and mark half a year of fighting, with a display of wrecked Russian tanks on its main street. The Russian president’s hopes of a swift victory have come to nothing. Peace talks have stalled. Where do we go from here?
It was early in the evening of 21 February that it became impossible to ignore that Vladimir Putin was planning something truly terrible for Ukraine.
Up to that moment, exactly six months ago, many voices were urging calm in the face of increasingly insistent American and British warnings of a full-scale invasion. The French and German governments, Russian officials and even Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy suggested Putin’s troop buildup was a bluff, and the warnings from Washington were over-egged.
