Speaking after Friday’s summit, President Putin again implied that the war is all about Russia’s diminished status since the fall of the Soviet Union.

President Donald Trump supports Russian leader Vladimir Putin's proposal for Moscow to take full control of the Donbas and freeze the front lines elsewhere for a deal with Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goals go beyond a land grab and aim at Ukraine’s capitulation. Kyiv and the West hope to draw a line.

But as the sketchy details have hardened into a growing prospect of forthcoming demands that will prove impossible for Ukraine to accept, confidence is giving way to unease, not least about the planned meeting in Washington on Monday between Mr Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“I often say that if I could do nothing else except chop for the rest of my days, I would be happy,” the chef Olia Hercules writes in “Strong Roots,” a memoir of her Ukrainian heritage that gives fresh charge to that dull old adjective “bittersweet.” “It’s meditative, it’s calming. Magical, wondrous things happen when you chop.”

In eastern Ukraine, quiet nights in the dim corridors of a front-line medical post can shatter in an instant. It was not an isolated case, but part of a broader shift in the war where medical evacuation has become increasingly difficult.

President Donald Trump said on social media Saturday that a deal better than “a mere Ceasefire” is in the works with Vladimir Putin, hours after Trump’s high-stakes summit with the Russian leader in Alaska failed to produce an agreement to halt Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The US president will meet his Ukrainian counterpart in Washington on Monday in the wake of his Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin on Friday.