Pope Francis’s health has shown a “slight improvement” but he remains in a critical condition, the Vatican has said.

The Pope, 88, has been at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital since 14 February and is being treated for double pneumonia and chronic bronchitis.

In a statement on Monday evening, the Vatican said: “The clinical conditions of the Holy Father, in their critical state, show a slight improvement.

“Even today there were no episodes of asthmatic respiratory crises; some laboratory tests improved.

“Monitoring of mild renal failure is not a cause for concern. Oxygen therapy continues, although with slightly reduced flow and oxygen percentage

“The doctors, considering the complexity of the clinical picture, are prudently not releasing the prognosis yet. In the morning he received the Eucharist, while in the afternoon he resumed work activity.

“In the evening he called the Parish Priest of the Parish of Gaza to express his paternal closeness. Pope Francis thanks all the people of God who have gathered in these days to pray for his health.”

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In a strictly military sense, the war in Ukraine is not going so badly for Kyiv. 

Russian territorial gains on the ground have slowed to a crawl since last November for which they are losing, on average, some 1,500 men every day.

They have almost – but still not quite – taken Toretsk. And after months of being on the verge of overwhelming the other key strategic towns of Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk, Russian forces still remain outside them.

Russia’s massive air bombing campaign against the Ukrainian power grid, its critical infrastructure and civilian targets has not brought Kyiv to its knees, though this has been far and away the toughest winter of Russia’s air offensive against Ukraine.

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And in the Black Sea, Ukraine has chased the Russian navy away from its western waters and thus kept its vital shipping routes open from the Odesa ports to the Mediterranean and the Danube Basin. This is a strategic battle Ukraine has unquestionably won.

But with so much material help from Iran, North Korea and China, Russia is obviously prepared to carry on the war, even though on current trends, its own economy will be pretty shaky by the end of this year.

If Western powers, particularly the United States, continued with their previous levels of support, then Ukraine could carry on as well, if it were minded to keep fighting, even with its more limited pool of manpower.

But the battlefield doesn’t matter much any more. The political ground has dramatically shifted under Kyiv and its principal backers in Europe.

The US seems to have suddenly reversed its position under President Trump, and it is driving Ukraine into a very rapid, so-called ‘peace deal’. Serious negotiations have not yet begun, but top US decision-makers seem to want to give Moscow more than it could ever have dreamed of when its “special military operation” in Ukraine went so spectacularly wrong three years ago.

Moscow now feels it has a very good chance of keeping all its military gains, getting even parts of the Ukrainian regions it hasn’t yet conquered, getting some relief from sanctions, US investment in its economy and re-entry into the G7, which would go back to being a G8.

It will also be making demands on what Kyiv will and will not be allowed to do and what NATO should do to “reassure” Moscow that it won’t have to invade anyone else in an act of self-defence.

Most of all, the US is holding out the tantalizing prospect to Russia that NATO’s “transatlantic dimension” may be militarily finished under the Trump administration. That implies that if the Europeans end up fighting Russia in the future, the US will stand aside.

That prospect is the greatest free gift Washington could ever give Moscow.

Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, even Gorbachev and Yeltsin, fervently wished for it but never even got close. Putin may feel it is now within his grasp, whatever happens next in Ukraine.

In her desperate search for answers over her son Valentin’s death, Elena even turned to Vladimir Putin.

She wrote to the Russian president demanding an explanation as to why an 18-year-old conscript was involved in combat.

Throughout the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin promised that conscripts wouldn’t be sent to war. But in Valentin’s case, the war came to him.

He had been deployed to the Kursk region as part of his military service and stationed on the border.

But it was there that Ukrainian forces launched their cross-border incursion in August and one month after it began, Valentin was killed after receiving a shrapnel wound to the head.

“It should be specially trained people there, not children,” Elena says.

“They were taken from home, from a mother’s nest, and brought to some unknown place, where there is shooting.

“What kind of warrior is he? He’s not a warrior.”

Like other fallen soldiers, Russia views Valentin as a hero, but that’s no comfort to Elena. All she has are questions, which she wasn’t afraid to put to Mr Putin directly.

“The most important question was: ‘What were our children doing there?’ But I didn’t get any response,” she says.

“At that moment I just wanted to take the whole world and turn it upside down.

“Whoever says they are obligated for military service, what do they owe? What did my son take from the Motherland to pay a debt with his life?”

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Valentin was a few weeks short of his 19th birthday when he died, and nearly a year into his military service. Elena didn’t want him to sign on so soon – head boy at school, he could have deferred conscription until after further study – but she says he was excited to serve and insisted.

Pictures of him in his parade uniform are everywhere in her apartment in Rybinsk, a town 160 miles northeast of Moscow. His blue beret is perched on a shelf. And Elena still hopes that one day he’ll walk through the door.

“I still wait for him to come back home, even though I saw his body. I still can’t believe it,” she says, tears running down her face.

“Sometimes I sit and think who my grandchildren could have been. It’s impossible to live like this. It’s not life.”

Russia doesn’t publish its casualty figures but the UK estimates that more than 750,000 Russian troops have either been killed or wounded in the three years since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion began.

Valentin is buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Rybinsk – a 20-minute bus ride for Elena. There are dozens and dozens of military graves there, each one marked with flags. The grave next to Valentin is for a serviceman killed on the same day as him.

It’s rare for anyone to speak openly in Russia about the war because criticising it can land you in prison. But Elena is determined to prevent other mothers from suffering the same experience.

“I want only one thing – for all children to come home,” she said.

“I want them to hear us and give us back our children in the same state we gave them, not cold.”