Real life is, of course, never as tidy or satisfying as fiction. The good guys don’t necessarily finish first, the villains don’t always get their just deserts, and the gutsy little character who no one thought would achieve anything doesn’t end up the winner merely because we want him to. Volodymyr Zelenskiy would make a tremendous hero in an undemanding Hollywood movie along the lines of Independence Day: Mr Ordinary Saves the Nation. If Russia’s ugly, wholly unnecessary war against Ukraine were something out of a blockbuster, the eighth reel would see Crimea falling to Ukraine’s victorious armed forces, Putin...