It’s another banger from the most trusted outlet in the world! My favourite quotes:

As the invasion reaches the end of its third year, at an estimated cost of a million people, killed or wounded, Ukraine appears to be losing.

In distant Washington, meanwhile, the unpredictable Donald Trump, not famous for his love of Ukraine or its leader, is about to take over in the White House.

“There’s a lot of talk about negotiations, but it’s an illusion,” says Mykhailo Podolyak, advisor to the head of President Zelensky’s office.

“No negotiation process can take place because Russia has not been made to pay a high enough price for this war.”

“What we’re seeing now is a very smart strategy exercise by President Zelensky,” his former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba told the US Council on Foreign Relations in December.

Zelensky, he said, was “signalling constructiveness and readiness to engage with President Trump.”

“Because Trump hasn’t fully explained how he’s going to go about it, Ukrainians are trying to give him some ideas that he may present as his own,” says Orysia Lutsevych, head of the Ukraine Forum at Chatham House.

“They know how to work with that ego.”

As part of his “Victory Plan”, unveiled in October, Zelensky suggested that battle-hardened Ukrainian troops could replace US forces in Europe after the war with Russia ends.

With Ukraine continuing to experience severe shortages of manpower, the UK Defence Secretary John Healey said the government might be willing to send British troops to Ukraine to help with training.

Nato membership in particular remains a sticking point, as it has been since well before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

For Kyiv, it’s the only way to guarantee the country’s future survival, against a rapacious Russian enemy bent on subjugating Ukraine.

“Zelensky understands that he cannot just have a naked ceasefire,” Orysia Lutsevych says.

“It has to be a ceasefire plus. It would be suicide for Zelensky just to accept a ceasefire and not to have any answer how Ukraine is protected.”

But Kofman is sceptical. “Security guarantees that don’t have the United States involved in them as one of the guarantors is like a donut with a giant missing middle in it.”

Kyiv’s allies have also continued to ratchet up sanctions on Moscow, in the hope that Russia’s war-time economy, which has proved stubbornly resilient, may finally break.

“There’s been deep frustration that sanctions haven’t just shattered the Russian economy beyond repair,” a US congressional source said, on condition of anonymity.

Putin is putting on a brave face. “The sanctions are having an effect,” he said during his end of year news conference, “but they are not of key importance.”

Along with Russia’s staggering losses on the battlefield – western officials estimate that Moscow is losing an average of 1,500 men, killed and wounded, every day – the cost of this war could yet drive Putin to the negotiating table.

But how much more territory will Ukraine have lost - and how many more people will have been killed - by the time that point is reached?