Kyiv, which I recently visited for a week under the auspices of the Transatlantic Dialogue Center, is a bustling city that is almost indistinguishable from its European counterparts. It boasts everything from packed restaurants to several LP stores to a bespoke tailoring house. The resilience of the locals in the face of frequent nighttime drone and missile attacks is as inspiring as it is remarkable.

That resilience helps to explain why a few weeks from now—January 12, to be precise—Russia will have fought longer in Ukraine than it did in World War II. Another way of putting it is that in four years, under Stalin’s leadership, Russia marched to Berlin. By contrast, Russian president Vladimir Putin has yet to conquer the Donbas. In living up to the former Soviet dictator’s legacy, his principal accomplishment appears to have been to put a statue of Stalin in Moscow’s Taganskaya metro.

So is Putin ready to reach a peace deal that might offer a respite from the fighting? If his fighting words on Wednesday were anything to go by, the answer is a flat no. Rather than extending an olive branch, Putin assailed European leaders during an annual meeting with his military advisers. “Everyone thought that in a short amount of time they could destroy Russia,” Putin said. “And the European swine immediately joined the work of the previous American administration in the hope of profiting from the collapse of our........

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