Early on Tuesday morning, Volodymyr Zelensky laid a wreath by the tomb of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state, in Ankara.

The sky was grey as he stood for a picture on the steps of the mausoleum alongside his wife, Olena, and a host of Turkish officials.

It is impossible not to suspect that the Ukrainian president’s mood was equally dark – and his mind elsewhere.

For the first time since the beginning of the war in February 2022, Mr Zelensky is finding himself well and truly on the sidelines.

There were signs that his influence in the West was fading even before Donald Trump’s election victory. When the Ukrainian president visited Capitol Hill in September he struggled to meet Washington’s power-players, a stark contrast to the whooping, transfixed crowds he drew to the same building two years earlier.

But the full extent of the war-time leader’s marginalisation truly came into focus this week.

While the Ukrainian president trooped up the steps of Ataturk’s tomb, the future of his nation was being sketched out in Riyadh, where a US delegation met for the first time with Russian counterparts to discuss a way out of the war.