Vladimir Putin’s marathon press conference on 19 December, an annual year-end event, offered no evidence that Russia may abandon the goals the president set for his “special military operation” against Ukraine in February 2022: conquering Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. True to form, Putin seemed unperturbed that nearly four years into the war his army had managed to fully occupy only Luhansk, despite having already taken control of more than a third of that region, as well as Donetsk, by 2015.

Putin’s unyielding stance shouldn’t be a surprise. Soon after the invasion, Russia’s State Duma adopted legislation incorporating these four Ukrainian regions into Russia – and this month the foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and the deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, reiterated Putin’s territorial claims.

Russia’s inflexibility clashes with Donald Trump’s desperate efforts to achieve a political settlement by Christmas. To meet his self-imposed deadline, Trump even tried to pressure Volodymyr Zelenskyy into surrendering the parts of Donetsk that Ukraine still holds. Though Zelenskyy refused, he was willing to end Ukraine’s years-long quest for Nato membership and adopt neutrality, in exchange for solid western security guarantees.

Zelenskyy’s shift won’t mollify Putin. Russia’s longstanding – and understandable – anxiety about Nato’s expansion predates him. But Putin’s 2022 war stems from something deeper, because there’s no evidence that Ukraine was any closer to formal membership in the alliance on the eve of Russia’s 2022 invasion than it had been in 2008, when,

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