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.