The Ukraine crisis, now in its twelfth month, is caught in a prolonged winter of war rather than one of frozen hostility or attempted peace. Two developments in December 2022 underscored this reality. First, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the US, where he set a high bar for an end to the conflict in an impassioned address to the US Congress: “just peace is no compromises as to the sovereignty, freedom, and territorial integrity of my country, the payback for all the damages inflicted by Russian aggression.” [1] The visit signalled an attempt to escalate the conflict with added weaponry and firmer western support. To many Americans, Zelenskyy’s assertion that “Ukraine holds its lines and will never surrender” [2] evoked an inflection point from the Second World War, when UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited Washington in 1941 to draw the US into a European war.
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