The Trump-Putin encounter in Anchorage has angered some, disappointed others and baffled many more. Yet it has told us much about the state of the war in Ukraine, and the obstacles to the ending of hostilities.

Anyone wishing to make sense of the event would not have been helped by Trump’s proverbial incoherence and self-promotion. Nor was the banal coverage on offer in much of the Western mainstream media any more helpful.

Trump’s grave mistake in the weeks prior to the summit was to give the impression that a ceasefire agreement could be secured by the threat of sanctions. Once it became clear that the approach was doomed to failure, he turned his mind to diplomatic summitry, an option Putin welcomed with undiluted enthusiasm.

Not surprisingly perhaps, media reporting became fixated on the theatre of the occasion and the failure of the summit to produce “a ceasefire deal”.

The warm words of welcome that greeted the Russian president, the red carpet extended along the runway of the airbase in Anchorage, the effusive praise Trump lavished on Putin in his subsequent interview on Fox News were clearly not to the media’s liking.

The early finish of the meeting, the changes made to the previously announced program, the hastily concluded press conference at which both leaders refused to take any questions were all depicted as signs of failure.

Almost unanimously, the media offered the contradictory assessment that Putin had triumphed and that no agreement had been reached. Few bothered to entertain the thought that Trump was careful not to commit to a deal that would be unacceptable to America’s European allies, let........

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