Patrick Mercer

There’s a temptation when discussing Ukraine to over complicate things, to bandy unfamiliar Slavic names about and to assume that everyone follows the battle maps as minutely as you do.

It’s been an absolute maelstrom of meetings, proposals and counter proposing Ukraine over the past couple of weeks. Some of those ideas have been made in good faith and others not, but it does look as though there’s a chink of light, just a spluttering flash of hope that we might be approaching the end of this bloody war.