The talks in Istanbul were given the worst billing imaginable.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, refused at the last minute to turn up, meaning there was no point in Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky staying in Turkey to confront him, and US President Donald Trump had no reason to swing by on his way back from the Middle East.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who did turn up in Istanbul, acknowledged that the Russian delegation was "not at the levels we had hoped it would be at" and downplayed expectations for a breakthrough.
That delegation was led by Vladimir Medinsky, an ultra-conservative former culture minister and close aide to Mr Putin who has been accused of distorting Russian and Ukrainian history to justify the invasion.
He had also led the Russian team that entered talks with Ukrainian officials in the weeks that followed the Kremlin's assault on its neighbour in 2022, again in Istanbul.
Russia had made it clear that they intended to pick up where those talks had left off.
Ukrainian President Zelensky said this made the encounter virtually pointless, both because Mr Medinsky did not have the authority to agree a ceasefire, and because Russia sought in those talks the ultimate end of Ukraine as a sovereign country.
After the two-hour talks in Istanbul, Mr Zelensky spoke with Mr Trump by phone, and huddled with the French, German and UK leaders in Tirana, where he was attending the European Political Community summit.
A Ukrainian source told Reuters that Russia's demands were "detached from reality and go far beyond anything that was previously discussed".
Russia was demanding that Ukraine withdraw from parts of its own territory in order to obtain a ceasefire "and other non-starters and non-constructive conditions".
Ukraine and Russia announced tangible results
Despite that, both sides announced some tangible results.
Ukraine’s defence minister Rustem Umerov, who led the Kyiv delegation, said: "The agenda that has been given to our [team] and our partners was to discuss first the ceasefire, [secondly] the humanitarian track...and third is a potential meeting on the leader's level.
"As a result, we have agreed to exchange 1,000 persons to 1,000 and we're working on other modalities, and our colleagues are in contact, and we'll exchange all the documents."
Earlier, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said a meeting between Mr Putin and Mr Trump was now what was needed in order to advance a peace process.
Whether the talks in Istanbul were surprisingly fruitful or represent a dead end, it is clear both sides are maneuvering for maximum advantage as the war inches towards a potential denouement.
Mr Putin has always wanted to square off the Ukrainian question - and a new security architecture in Europe - directly with the US behind Ukraine’s and the EU’s back, and Donald Trump appeared to grant that wish as soon as he returned to the White House.
"The Russian position is clearly unacceptable, and not for the first time."
His embrace of Russian talking points, even accusing Ukraine of starting the war, was greeted enthusiastically in Moscow, while deeply alarming the Europeans.
However, with Mr Zelensky restoring his personal chemistry with Mr Trump following the Oval Office ambush, and Russia continuing to attack civilian targets, the US president has shown signs of irritation with Mr Putin (although without ever downright accusing him of having sole responsibility for the war).
That gave Europe some confidence that Mr Trump was inching back to the pre-existing transatlantic support for Ukraine.
On 9 May, Keir Starmer, French president Emmanuel Macron, the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Poland’s Donald Tusk were meeting Mr Zelensky in Kyiv and jointly calling on Russia to agree a 30-day unconditional ceasefire or face a massive ramping up of western sanctions.
Mr Putin then threw a curve ball saying Russian and Ukrainian teams should meet in Istanbul yesterday but without agreeing to a ceasefire.
Mr Trump responded that Ukraine should agree to this "immediately", in effect cutting off the Europeans who believed the Trump administration had tacitly agreed to the sanctions/ceasefire gambit.
Mr Zelensky promptly agreed to meet his Russian counterpart in Istanbul, but he, of course, refused to turn up, having produced the initiative in the first place.
At the summit in Tirana, momentum was building for a tougher raft of sanctions to push Mr Putin towards the negotiating table.
Having just agreed a 17th package of sanctions, the EU is ready to begin talks on an 18th package, further hitting Russia’s ability to sell its oil through restrictions on its shadow fleet of tankers and lowering the G7 price cap and ensuring that the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines are not restored any time soon.
Mr Starmer supported the call for tougher sanctions after a side meeting with Mr Zelensky, Mr Macron, Mr Tusk and Mr Merz.
"The Russian position is clearly unacceptable, and not for the first time," he said.
"And so as a result of that meeting with President Zelensky and the discussion with President Trump, we are now closely aligning and coordinating our responses and will continue to do so."
Zelensky holding out for tougher sanctions on Russia
Essentially, therefore, Mr Zelensky is holding out for tougher sanctions and restored transatlantic harmony on Ukraine, while Mr Putin is most likely hoping that Russia’s battlefield momentum (and a Trump summit, given the US president’s tendency to be smitten by the Russian leader) will put Moscow back in an advantageous position.
Can anything be learned from the first Istanbul talks in March and April 2022?
The context is entirely different.
Back then, Russia had launched a full-scale invasion by land, air and sea on 24 February and within days had encircled Kyiv.
Despite being frustrated in its plan to capture the city and decapitate the Ukrainian leadership, Russia still held most of the battlefield cards.
"The Budapest assurances were clearly worthless."
Discreet talks got underway between Russian and Ukrainian officials just four days after the invasion, brokered by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, in a country residence 50 km from the Ukrainian-Belarus border.
Russia’s initial demands amounted to Ukraine’s complete capitulation.
However, as Russia’s battlefield position deteriorated in early March, the Kremlin softened its position.
Ukraine had its own demands: a ceasefire and humanitarian corridors to allow civilians to escape the war.
By the third meeting both sides had exchanged drafts.
Ukraine presses for 'security guarantees'
In March, Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba met his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Turkey: at this point Kyiv started pressing for "security guarantees" in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality.
Following the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, Ukraine had agreed to give up its Soviet era nuclear arsenal, but what it got in return were "security assurances" and a promise by Russia to respect its borders.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, its proxy war in the Donbass the same year, and its full scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine wanted to both survive as a country and ensure Russia never attacked again.
The Budapest assurances were clearly worthless.
Furthermore, NATO had effectively stalled on Ukrainian membership before the war, meaning Ukraine couldn’t rely on the Article 5 collective defence clause.
What Kyiv was pushing for now were multilateral guarantees outside the NATO framework which would see guarantor countries go to Ukraine’s defence if it was attacked.
This would put countries like the US, France, Germany and the UK on the hook for military intervention.
Ukraine’s negotiators nuanced their idea further to include Russia as a guarantor in a collective treaty: if Russia attacked, it would know other countries would come to Ukraine’s defence so therefore had an incentive not to attack.
In March 2022, Russia’s attempt to capture Kyiv had collapsed and it was taking very heavy casualties as its convoys remained mired on the roads leading to the city.
Teams met face to face again in Istanbul on March 29. This time both sides agreed to a draft communique on Ukraine’s future security guarantees.
The documents, which have been analysed by academics Samuel Charap of the Rand Corporation and Sergey Radchenko, a Professor at John Hopkins University, appeared to signal a breakthrough.
"The treaty envisioned in the communiqué would proclaim Ukraine as a permanently neutral, nonnuclear state," they wrote in Foreign Affairs last year.
"Ukraine would renounce any intention to join military alliances or allow foreign military bases or troops on its soil. The communiqué listed as possible guarantors the permanent members of the UN Security Council (including Russia) along with Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland, and Turkey."
Those guarantees included no-fly zones, weapons supplies, even military intervention by guarantor states. Russia would also explicitly recognise Ukraine’s accession to the European Union.
'It seems far-fetched that [Putin] suddenly decided to accept that Ukraine - which was now more hostile to Russia than ever, thanks to Putin’s own actions—would become a member of the EU and have its independence and security guaranteed by the United States (among others)," wrote Mr Charap and Mr Radchenko.
"And yet the communiqué suggests that was precisely what Putin was willing to accept."
That the 29 March draft coincided with Russia’s forced retreat from Kyiv to parts of eastern Ukraine was probably telling.
That retreat had profound consequences: firstly, it revealed Russia’s torture, murder and mutilation of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha and Irpin.
Secondly, it gave the Ukrainian leadership the belief that its resistance could prevail and the country might even drive the Russians out.
"Western leaders, including Boris Johnson, believed Russia's word counted for zero and that Ukraine had momentum, meaning military support should be increased."
Despite that, contacts between both sides continued, mostly by Zoom. More drafts were exchanged, the last one dated 15 April, 2022.
Unsurprisingly, progress was reversed.
Russia began insisting on having a veto over the security guarantees.
It then tried to insert language requiring Ukraine to ban "Nazism and aggressive nationalism" and insisting on a say on how Ukraine depicted Soviet and World War II history.
These were clearly unacceptable to Kyiv, which saw them as regime change by another name (President Zelensky is Jewish and far right parties in Ukraine have polled at around 2%).
They could have been designed to allow Mr Putin to save face.
"By forcing Ukraine to repeal statutes that condemned the Soviet past and cast the Ukrainian nationalists who fought the Red Army during World War II as freedom fighters, the Kremlin could argue that it had achieved its stated goal of ‘denazification,’ even though the original meaning of that phrase may well have been the replacement of Zelensky’s government," wrote Mr Charap and Mr Radchenko.
But there were further problems. Russia began demanding Ukraine reduce its peacetime army from 250,000 to 82,000 and hollow out its tank and missile numbers.
"One conclusion is that Mr Putin realised he had made a dreadful mistake in invading Ukraine and was looking for an off-ramp."
In the event, the talks petered out and the fighting continued.
Western leaders, including Boris Johnson, believed Russia’s word counted for zero and that Ukraine had momentum, meaning military support should be increased.
The Biden administration took the same line, despite the fact that Kyiv had apparently not consulted Washington about the security guarantees before the draft communiqués were drawn up.
One conclusion is that Mr Putin realised he had made a dreadful mistake in invading Ukraine and was looking for an off-ramp.
But as his forces completed a humiliating retreat to the Donbass, it seemed to be too late.
Whatever the motivation, Mr Putin has relentlessly blamed the west for the failure of the first Istanbul talks, and has resumed his maximalised demands - that Russia hold the four Ukrainian regions it partially occupies, that Ukraine stop receiving military support, that Mr Zelensky be deposed, and that Ukraine never joins NATO.
The Kremlin continues to say the "root causes" of the war be addressed before it agrees to a ceasefire.
Before launching the invasion, Putin was demanding the withdrawal of NATO from Eastern European countries that are now EU members and the neutering of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.
Mr Putin appears to believe he has regained the military initiative so catastrophically lost in 2022.
Mr Trump’s return to the White House has given him further encouragement. The events of recent days reveal that both the Russian and Ukrainian leaders are battling to remain uppermost in his thoughts, a dynamic that will undoubtedly remain unpredictable.
Russia, meanwhile, continues its attacks on Ukraine.
