Is an outright Russian military victory in Ukraine possible?

A US estimate released earlier this week suggests as many as 7,000 Russian soldiers have already died in the fighting, a tally partly confirmed by the growing number of death notices of uniformed young men appearing in Russian media. Its forces are estimated by western governments to have lost 10% of their armour.

Chaotic logistics led to a vast, stalled 40-mile convoy outside Kyiv and fighting vehicles stuck in the early spring mud. But it took less than a week for the Russians to change tack.

That was signalled by a cruise missile strike on the government building in the heart of Kharkiv, and has since been played out brutally in Mariupol, once a city of 450,000 people, where the past week has seen Russia bomb a maternity hospital and on Wednesday, a theatre where desperate people had been taking refuge below ground.

The first Russian forces arrived at the towns just north-west of Kyiv on the first day of the invasion, but since then they have become bogged down, failing to progress from Irpin and Bucha just outside the capital. Progress has also been stymied on the east side of the city, and western officials are beginning to question if Russia wants to fight its way through.