One week after US President Donald Trump's meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska, the war in Ukraine is no closer to ending.
It has been a week of hype, confusion and, ultimately, disappointment over the direction of the US-led peace initiative.
The main and most immediate takeaway from Alaska was Mr Trump's unexpected decision to drop US demands for a ceasefire, a US-proposed policy supported by Ukraine and Europe, and instead support Russia's demand to go straight to peace talks.
But one other significant point emerged from last weekend's US-Russia summit: an apparent shift by Russia on security guarantees for Ukraine.
We know this because after the meeting US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN that the Russian delegation had agreed to the idea of the US and European countries providing an Article 5-type security guarantee for Ukraine (Article 5 being the clause in the alliance's founding treaty that an attack on one member is an attack on all).
"Game-changing" is how Mr Witkoff described this apparent Russian concession.
During the meeting in Alaska, Mr Putin stuck to his maximalist demands for Ukraine to cede one-fifth of its sovereign territory to Russia, including a brazen demand for Ukraine to withdraw entirely from the part of Donetsk region that it still controls.
However, a Russian concession on Western security guarantees would make a real difference for Ukraine, providing an insurance policy against another Russian invasion in the future.
After the disappointment of Mr Trump's abandonment of the ceasefire policy, European leaders seized the initiative and tried to pin down what those security guarantees would mean in practice, and the level of US commitment.
At his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders in the White House on Monday, Mr Trump gave his clearest statement yet on US involvement in security guarantees for Ukraine when he said that the US would "help" Europe.
"European nations are going to take a lot of the burden. We're going to help them and we're going to make it very secure."
Mr Zelensky hailed Mr Trump’s statement on security guarantees for Ukraine.
And though the US president ruled out sending American ground troops, he offered a better indication on Fox News last Tuesday of the level of help Europe could expect.
"We're willing to help them with things, especially, probably by air," he said.
'No one in Ukraine optimistic about security guarantees'
Though vague, the suggestion of US air support gave weight to European plans for a post-war reassurance force.
"No one in Ukraine is optimistic about security guarantees, really, because we don't know what would happen," Volodymyr Dubovyk, the Director for the Centre of International Studies at Odesa Mechnikov National University, told RTÉ News.
He cautioned that Mr Trump could change his mind on the level of US involvement in providing Western security guarantees to Ukraine.
Putting "some meat back on the bone" about security guarantees is, said Mr Dubovyk, "the main conversation right now".
European leaders and other members of the 'Coalition of the Willing’ began those kinds of discussions on Tuesday. Ireland, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said, was open to contributing a peacekeeping mission in line with the UN Charter.
But Russia’s reported concession on supporting security guarantees for Ukraine turned out not to be the "game-changer" Mr Witkoff touted.
By Wednesday, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was saying that Russia needed to be included in any talks that dealt with security guarantees for Ukraine.
By Thursday, he was saying that Russia must have a veto on Western security guarantees, which would render them useless.
And, Russia again brought up its opposition to the deployment of Western troops in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force.
Somehow, Mr Putin and his delegation had not mentioned these major stipulations during their three-hour discussions with Mr Trump, Mr Witkoff and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Anchorage.
It was a classic case of Kremlin subterfuge: offer something vague that has connotations of a big concession, only to take it all back days later.
Difficult to see what US achieved from Alaska meeting
Frankly, it is difficult to pinpoint what the US achieved from the meeting in Alaska.
Mr Trump conceded to Russia’s opposition to a 'ceasefire-first' approach, which he had said was his priority going into the meeting.
He and his team failed to get concrete details on what kind of security guarantees, if any, Russia would agree to.
Mr Trump also let Russia avoid new US sanctions and the secondary tariffs that he had threatened to impose on countries that buy Russian oil.
And Mr Putin continues to show no willingness to meet Mr Zelensky.
On Monday, Mr Trump said he had begun to make arrangements for a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents.
But the Kremlin saw it differently.
Remarks from Russian officials since Tuesday show that Moscow has no intention of agreeing to a meeting between Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky any time soon.
The closest the Kremlin came to acknowledging Mr Trump’s push for a Putin-Zelensky meeting came on Tuesday when a senior Russian foreign policy advisor said the US and Russian presidents had discussed "the possibility of raising the level of representatives".
That could just as well mean a meeting at the level of foreign ministers.
Perhaps Mr Trump sensed after his 40-minute phone call with Mr Putin late on Monday that the meeting in Alaska had not advanced his peace plan efforts.
There was a possibility, Mr Trump conceded during a phone-in interview with Fox News on Tuesday, that Russia's leader "doesn't want to make a deal."
Sanctions a leverage for Trump
Sanctions were Mr Trump's leverage to cajole Russia into peace talks.
On Friday, after a week of no progress and vague words from the Kremlin, the US president renewed his threat to impose sanctions on Russia if no progress towards a peace deal were made in the next two weeks.
Mr Trump's intentions to stop the war in Ukraine should be commended but he has gone about it the wrong way, failing to use America's economic might to extract real concessions from Russia.
For Ukraine, sanctions are still an important tool to pressure Russia.
"Normally, I would say the weapons are more important than sanctions, but this time, I would say maybe sanctions are even more important than the weapons, because the sanctions can actually hurt Russia," said Mr Dubovyk.
It is clear that Russia has no intention of stopping its war any time soon.
This week its forces continued to launch drones and missiles at Ukrainian cities and towns and its ground offensive continued as normal.
Richard Haass, a former senior US diplomat, this week told Politico that Mr Trump's decision to abandon calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine was a "big tactical error".
"To negotiate a formal peace could take months or years," he said, because "it involves all the most difficult issues that either side wants to bring up".
"It’s most likely to prolong the war and make it difficult, if not impossible, to succeed".
Given that the Kremlin shows no signs of wanting to engage in a leaders summit with Mr Zelensky, the current US-brokered peace initiative looks stuck.
If and when Mr Trump wants to inject some momentum back into the process, he might finally have to get tough with Russia and commit to sanctions.
Otherwise, his goal of being the US president who stopped the war looks unlikely to succeed.
