It will take more than a change of tone from the US president for Ukraine to win the war

Who can keep up? In a single social media post, Donald Trump declared that Kyiv's under-pressure military could, in fact, "WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form". On the plus side, from Ukraine's perspective, the comments do suggest the US president has definitively abandoned his effort to persuade it to give up Donetsk province for a loose promise of ceasefire talks from Moscow - which was briefly the outcome of his Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin in August.

- Dan Sabbagh

The change in Trump's tone is worth something to Kyiv. But if the US president were to be serious about a Ukrainian battlefield victory, it would require not just further economic sanctions but far greater provision of American weapons and probably direct military intervention on the part of the west as well.

Russia has been forced to retreat only during two periods since its full-scale invasion began in February 2022: in the spring of that year, when it was overextended around Kyiv; and again in autumn 2022, when it faced a similar problem in Kherson and when defences were thinly held in the Kharkiv region before the Kremlin launched a mobilisation drive.