The gloomsters have gone quiet. A leading British pundit wrote in October “I hate to say it, but Kyiv won’t last till spring”.
Foreign Affairs proclaimed in February “Ukraine is losing the war”, a line echoed by a Finnish thinktank report in March.
Not any more.
Ukraine’s spectacular attacks on oil and naval installations 1,000km inside Russia humiliated Vladimir Putin at his annual shindig, the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). The message: nobody, nothing and nowhere in Russia is safe, at any time.
These attacks overshadowed what might otherwise have been seen as a diplomatic success, with the SPIEF gaining the attendance of an official US representative, Rodney Mims Cook Jr.
