This year, the atmosphere is very different. Three months into its counter-offensive, Ukraine has made
only modest progress along the all-important southern axis in the Zaporizhia region, where it is trying to sever Vladimir Putin’s “land bridge” from Russia to Crimea. The question of how long that will take, or whether it will succeed, weighs on the minds of Western leaders. They still talk the good talk, pledging that they will stand with Ukraine “as long as it takes”. But Mr Zelensky, a former television actor with an acute sense of his audience, has detected a change of mood among some of his partners. “I have this intuition, reading, hearing and seeing their eyes [when they say] ‘we’ll be always with you,’” he says, speaking in English (a language in which he is increasingly fluent). “But I see that he or she is not here, not with us.”