Donald Trump often boasted that once he won the 2024 election, he would get “the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled.” At a 2023 rally in Pennsylvania, he said he would sit down with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin of Russia and that the war would “be done within 24 hours, you watch.”

After Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian air bases, the two sides talked for less than an hour in Istanbul and a halt to the fighting seems out of reach for now.