It could mark the beginning of the bitter end for Vladimir Putin’s outrageous and horrifying criminal enterprise in Ukraine. A news item appeared on the Reuters website on Monday, an interview given to one of its journalists by Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman. He was said to be setting out Russia’s new conditions for an end to the fighting. It appears that Peskov had been sent forth to fly a kite, signalling to Ukraine and the West that Putin wanted a way out of the corner he had painted himself into. Could Putin have recognised that he was not going to win his war, but needed a cover story?

It could, of course, be a trap. But peace must always be given a chance. Innocent civilians are dying every day, and hundreds of thousands are suffering extreme deprivation and misery. The conditions under which the Kremlin is ready to halt military operations are far from the fantasies that Putin entertained at the outset, which involved the extinction of Ukraine as a sovereign nation and his installation as a tsar-like protector of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, the whole territory of “Ancient Rus”.