The long overnight train journey from Warsaw to Kyiv ran like clockwork, as it has throughout the war, and the hours flew by chatting to my fellow passengers.

They included a top child psychiatrist, who shook his head in bafflement at Russia’s cruelties as he told me hideous stories of kids left traumatised by horror. There were Korean defence contractors, executives from a Japanese firm that recycles rubble into new building materials, and a young Chinese man leaving his own land for the first time to study in a nation he admired due to its fight for freedom. He despised his own dictatorship, had no fear of bombs, and his story seemed a powerful symbol of the global significance of Ukraine’s struggle against repression.

Yet these days, the narrative about this grim war is as gloomy as m

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