I guess I would say that I draw optimism from the stories of resilience that we hear from Ukrainians all the time.
This is a war, and I remember my Ukrainian counterpart at the OSCE, in the days immediately following the full-scale invasion in 2022, saying, “Jocelyn, one of the things that are so terrifying right now is that everybody is just assuming that Ukraine is going to fall.”
He believed, and it is quite a remarkable thing—considering the assumptions that I think one would draw based on the relative size of the militaries, etc.—that the Ukrainians are still going. That's where I draw my optimism from. I don't have a ton of optimism about President Putin, but I do think that we all need to be determined in exerting whatever pressure we can to bring him to the negotiating table and bring an end to the war.