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 negotia