What the commentators said

Is Putin facing defeat in Ukraine? Don’t bet against it, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. His troops are suffering huge losses and are short of food, fuel and ammunition. At least 7,000 have died. Ukrainian forces have destroyed 500 Russian armoured vehicles, 32 fighter jets, and 240 tanks – more than in any military action since the Second World War. Five Russian generals have been killed; Putin has sacked eight others. It’s true that Russia has made gains in the south, said Max Boot in The Washington Post. It’s likely that Mariupol will fall and Russia will get its “land bridge” between Crimea and Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. But the situation elsewhere is “dismal”. Russians have been driven out of Mykolaiv, a city of 470,000; and Kyiv and Kharkiv, a largely ethnic Russian city that was expected to fall fast, remain in Ukrainian hands.

Maybe so, said Niall Ferguson in The Mail on Sunday, but Putin won’t stop until he controls enough of Ukraine’s south and east to win concessions that he can then present as a victory. The West is still filling the Kremlin’s coffers by buying $1bn of Russian oil a day. And anyone who saw Putin’s “splenetic” address to a vast crowd in Moscow last week will know that he isn’t thinking rationally. The more desperate he gets, the more drastic the actions he’ll take: Russia has already fired hypersonic missiles that fly at ten times the speed of sound; it could yet unleash chemical weapons. President Biden’s “naivety” in assuring Moscow that Nato won’t intervene “in any circumstances” is extraordinary, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. As long as Putin is confident we won’t strike back, “bloodbath upon atrocious bloodbath beckons”.

Putin must know his objective of bringing all of Ukraine under his sway is now “unattainable”, said William Hague in The Times. But “even in the unlikely scenario” he engages in Turkeybrokered peace talks in good faith, the issues are “formidably” complex. The future status of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk is intensely divisive, as are questions of how Ukraine would be compensated for damage to its cities, for lives lost, and for the millions uprooted from homes. The Ukrainians’ offer of neutrality provides some hope for talks. “But they will need a muscular, self-reliant, ruggedly independent neutrality if they are ever to sleep easily in the future.”