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He hasn’t quite shifted from Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight them on the beaches” to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time”, but Volodymyr Zelensky has toned down his war rhetoric.
Since Donald Trump won the US presidential election just over a fortnight ago, the Ukrainian president appears to have quietly dropped his maximalist ambition of defeating Russia on the battlefield.
Perhaps his most startling statement so far was made on Wednesday evening during an interview with Fox News, when he admitted that occupied Crimea, touted as the target of Ukraine’s failed 2023 counter-offensive, cannot be retaken through force.
“We cannot spend dozens of thousands of our people so that they perish for the sake of Crimea coming back,” he said. “We understand that Crimea can be brought back diplomatically.”
This was caveated with a promise not to “legally acknowledge any occupied territory of Ukraine as Russian” but the underlying shift in tone was clear.
This wasn’t his first change of course.
Last week, Mr Zelensky hinted that he knew time was running out on his ambitions to defeat Vladimir Putin because Mr Trump would push him into negotiations.
“It is certain that the war will end sooner with the policies of the team that will now lead the White House,” he said.
Mr Zelensky had previously waved away talk of a peace deal with Russia and vowed he would not give up any Ukrainian territory.
Take his New Year 2022-23 speech when he said: “We fight and will continue to fight. For the sake of the main word: Victory.”
More recently, in a speech to the UN General Assembly in September, Mr Zelensky had said: “War can’t simply fade away. That’s why this war can’t be calmed by talks.”
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It was the same message in October, in a speech in Ukraine’s parliament when he said that Russia “must lose the war” and that he would refuse to “trade any of Ukraine’s territory”.
But the US election changed all that.
Mr Trump has said that he wants a swift end to the war in Ukraine, which means that Mr Zelensky will likely have to make a deal with Putin.
It also means the Ukraine president has effectively lost his strongest ally for continuing the war. His room for manoeuvring has shrunk, dramatically.
John Foreman, the former British defence attaché in Kyiv and Moscow, said that Mr Zelensky was adjusting to a new reality.
“The Ukrainian situation is precarious. This is a new burst of realism following Trump’s win,” he told The Telegraph.
Mr Zelensky also appears to be reflecting the will of most Ukrainians.
In a poll for The Economist, 52 per cent of respondents said that they wanted to negotiate an end to the war. Last year only 27 per cent had said they wanted to negotiate with Russia.
Moscow controls most of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and large chunks of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in the south. It also annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. This is roughly about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s 1991 borders.
Mr Zelensky, a professional comedian who became Ukraine’s president and then wartime leader, had wanted to push Russia out of Ukraine entirely.
Now, instead, he appears ready to settle for less, even if the change in messaging is subtle.
