It’s advantage Zelensky in Ukraine’s push for peace

Just as Volodymyr Zelensky has so often outmanoeuvred the enemy on the battlefield and in the skies above, so he is doing now in the diplomatic sphere.

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In a surprise “open letter” to his Russian counterpart, President Zelensky has seized the diplomatic initiative with a panache entirely absent among Russia’s plodding attaches (led by Sergey Lavrov, a man for whom the word “lugubrious” might have been invented).

In the letter — in truth, more of a fashionable long essay - Mr Zelensky alternately taunts and challenges his adversary, countering the usual bogus Russian narrative and confronting Vladimir Putin, and indeed the world, with the ugly facts of how badly things are going for the Russian campaign, which has now lasted longer than the Great Patriotic War against the (real) Nazis after 1941.

Mr Zelensky was smart enough to clear his move with the Europeans and, more importantly, the Americans, neatly sidestepping any countermove by the Kremlin to invoke “the spirit of Anchorage” - by reminding the US of last summer's Trump-Putin summit - and persuade Donald Trump to put pressure on the Ukrainians to frame their offer in a manner more palatable to the invaders. Instead, given that the letter advocated the kind of direct talks Mr Trump would like to see, it received enthusiastic endorsement from the White House.