Over the course of its war of independence against Russian aggression, Ukraine has defied all odds. In Vladimir Putin’s vision, Russian tanks were meant to enter Kyiv within days, “liberating” the population from their democratically elected president Volodymyr Zelensky, who, in 2019, had based his campaign, among other things, on finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict that Russia had sparked in the Donbas five years earlier. Yet, for all his willingness to negotiate,