So what will make President Putin come out of this disastrous war looking good in the eyes of Russia"s majority? Firstly, an assurance, perhaps even to be written into Ukraine"s constitution, that it has no intention of joining Nato in the foreseeable future. President Zelensky has already prepared the way for this, by asking Nato for something it couldn"t agree to (establishing a no-fly-zone over Ukraine), then criticising the alliance for letting him down on this, and finally musing out loud that he wasn"t sure that if Nato behaved like this, it was actually worth joining. As clever and wise political positioning goes, it doesn"t get much better than this. Nato gets the blame, which it can easily cope with, and Ukraine gets the freedom to act as it wants.