When Vladimir Putin set foot on American soil to meet with Donald Trump in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, the world held its breath. Three weeks later, the war in Ukraine had bogged down further, and the Russian leader had returned to a strategy of ambiguity. The rumors of a ceasefire and the military lull that had preceded his summit with the US president had only been temporary. Since then, the attacks have only intensified.

During the night of August 20, a missile struck a factory belonging to the American company Flex Ltd, located near the city of Mukachevo, in western Ukraine. One week later, Kyiv was the target of deadly bombings, in which at least 23 civilians were killed, and the offices of the European Union delegation and British Council were damaged. That did not stop the Kremlin from promptly declaring that, while the strikes would continue, it "remained interested in continuing the negotiation process in order to achieve our goals through political and diplomatic means."

On September 3, the Russian president held a place of honor on a viewing stand at the military parade his Chinese counterpart and "old friend" Xi Jinping had organized in Beijing, alongside 24 other foreign leaders. The next day, while the "coalition of the willing," a group of Ukraine's allies, gathered in Paris to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Putin warned that any Western forces deployed in Ukraine as a security guarantee would be "legitimate targets" for the Russian army. After Beijing, and a stop at an economic forum in Vladivostok, he wrapped up his Asian tour as if he were going back to managing day-to-day matters, freed from the isolation that Western countries had sought to impose on him.

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