Vladimir Putin says more than 600,000 Russian soldiers are in Ukraine, almost twice the number he started the war with. His “freeloading” adversary will soon run out of Western support. And in a sign of his growing confidence at his traditional end-of-year press conference, he insists that Ukraine’s forces have “failed everywhere” in their counter-offensive. But as the snow starts to fill trenches at the end of a second year of fighting he initially expected to be over in days, is he right?