No deal, no peace but just by turning up, Putin proves the winner in Alaska

The Russian leader has tightened his grip on power at home by avoiding an end to the war in Ukraine

- Giles Whittell

En route to Alaska, Vladimir Putin stopped at a fish oil plant in what used to be the capital of Stalin's Siberian gulag. Putin packed in four other local visits then flew on to attend to US-Russia relations, his spokesman said, almost as if they were an afterthought.

They were anything but. For more than eight months, the Kremlin has planned meticulously to resolve a potentially disastrous tension between the need to accommodate a new US president determined to garland himself in the laurels of a peacemaker and the need to go on fighting until Putin can claim victory in Ukraine. So far, he has succeeded on both fronts.

Putin and Donald Trump have been speaking on the phone on average once a month since January. In February, their foreign ministers met in Riyadh to agree on the Arctic and energy as potential areas of cooperation. In April, Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund and a key go-between with the new US administration, flew to Washington for private talks with Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy.

Throughout, according to the author Simon Shuster, Trump was in touch with the Kremlin via a second and more surprising - interlocutor, Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus.

It was to Lukashenko often called "Europe's last dictator" - that Trump placed one of his final calls on Friday before touching down outside Anchorage at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. Ostensibly, the point of the call was to thank his counterpart for releasing 16 political prisoners. For Lukashenko, the point, as ever, was to insist Putin was serious about peace, however much his drone and rocket attacks on Ukraine suggested otherwise.