If you were to only listen to Russian President Vladimir Putin's account of the war in Ukraine (as many millions of Russians do), you might conclude that Russia somehow stumbled into the conflict unwittingly, almost as if it were forced to invade its neighbour.
Russia's leader told reporters at this week’s St Petersburg International Economic Forum that he had told former US President Joe Biden during one of their last phone conversations (clearly, just before Moscow began its full-scale invasion in February 2022), that "conflicts, especially hot conflicts, must be avoided, and that all issues should be resolved through peaceful means."
It was a brazen-faced claim from the man who started the largest conventional war in Europe since World War II.
Mr Putin, just like current US President Donald Trump, is running a narrative that the Biden administration was at fault for not trying to stop a war that, in truth, Russia was hell-bent on starting anyway.
Since returning to the White House in January, Mr Trump has repeatedly said that the conflict is "Biden’s war".
Mr Trump has also repeatedly claimed that the war would not have started if he had been president.
On this hypothetical point, Mr Putin is now in agreement too.
"Indeed, had Trump been the president, perhaps this conflict would not have happened. I fully acknowledge that possibility," said the Russian leader during the same press event on Thursday in St Petersburg, an event dodged by Western businesses since the start of Russia's invasion.
What Mr Putin really means is: the Biden administration opposed Russia’s demands to subjugate Ukraine, whereas Mr Trump, had he been the US president in the months leading up to February 2022, would have been more likely to pressure Ukraine to give in to Russia’s demands.
For his part, Mr Trump blames another former US President, Barack Obama, also a Democrat, for not dealing with Russia a decade ago.
At the G7 meeting in the Canadian Rockies earlier this week, he said the war in Ukraine would not have happened if Russia had still been a member of the club, or G8 as it was known. (Russia was kicked out of the G8 in 2014 after its illegal annexation of Crimea).
Despite Mr Trump’s claims about how he could have averted the war from starting had he been president, he has failed in his promise to quickly end it since returning to the White House in January. It was always an unrealistic pledge.
To its credit, the US, aided by Turkey, managed to get both Ukraine and Russia to hold two sets of brief, but direct talks in Istanbul in May, albeit at a low diplomatic level.
Getting Ukraine to the table was never an issue.
As early as the second week of March, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had said his country was ready to sign up to a US proposal for a 30-day unconditional ceasefire.
The barrier to any ceasefire deal has been Russia, which has repeatedly rejected the US and European-backed ceasefire proposal.
Those two sets of direct talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations last month in Istanbul have delivered large-scale prisoner exchanges, humanitarian gestures that do just about enough to keep the US engaged in the process.
But otherwise, the talks are at a standstill.
Russia is talking about a third set of direct talks, but the Ukrainian side say they have heard nothing from Moscow.
And the tone coming from Russia's leadership does not bode well for the next meeting.
Yesterday, at the same conference in St Petersburg, Mr Putin said, as he has done previously, that he considers Russians and Ukrainians to be "one people".
"In that sense the whole of Ukraine is ours," he said.
That statement shows that Russia's position has not changed since it launched the war. It still disregards Ukraine's sovereignty, although Mr Putin also says that Russia is not seeking Ukraine's capitulation.
According to Ukraine's first deputy foreign minister Serhiy Kyslytsya, during the second meeting in Instanbul, the head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, described the war as "Russians killing Russians".
Mr Medinsky, an ultranationalist historian, has previously questioned the existence of the Ukrainian state and Mr Putin’s decision to appoint him to lead the Russian delegation is a clear signal that Moscow has no intention to negotiate at this stage.
"The talks in Istanbul have demonstrated that Russia has no interest in pursuing peace and is pursuing its maximalist demands," Peter Dickinson, a Kyiv-based editor of the Atlantic Council's Ukraine Alert, told RTÉ News.
Instead of pursuing peace, Russia, emboldened by a lack of pressure from the US to end the war, is intensifying its drone and missile assaults on Ukrainian cities.
Last Tuesday morning’s deadly Russian drone and missile assault on Kyiv – a nine-hour assault and the largest so far this year – killed 30 people and injured more than 170.
Twenty-three of those killed were residents of a 9-storey block of flats in the city’s western suburb of Solomianskyi. It was struck by a Russian missile.
"I think people in Kyiv are very alarmed about the rising number of attacks," said Mr Dickinson.
"There’s a feeling that people are sitting ducks".
This week, Mr Putin also said that he was willing to meet with Mr Zelensky during a final phase of negotiations.
However, he quickly followed that statement by questioning the legitimacy of Mr Zelensky’s presidency – a long-running Kremlin propaganda narrative that Mr Trump briefly bought into back in March, wrongly labelling the Ukrainian president as "a dictator without elections".
Russia argues that Ukraine must hold new presidential elections given that Mr Zelensky’s term as president officially ended in May 2024.
It was the stuff of more counter-narrative fantasy.
Ukraine's constitution forbids holding elections during martial law, which has been in place since the start of the war.
Besides, Mr Zelensky is a democratically elected leader whereas Russia’s elections are rigged like a piece of scripted theatre.
While Mr Putin continues his counter-narratives and Russia continues its attacks, Ukraine is still pursuing its strategy of calling for a ceasefire first before there is any talk over territorial issues.
Mr Zelensky had arrived in the Canadian Rockies for the G7 meeting on Tuesday - the same day that Russia launched its massive drone and missile on Kyiv - hoping to get some face time with Mr Trump.
But his long journey had been in vain.
Mr Trump had left early to deal with the escalating situation in the Middle East, according to the White House.
And so Mr Zelensky ended up meeting his European partners (plus Canada's new PM Mark Carney), just as he could have done in Europe.
Mr Trump's departure may have been a coincidence but, either way, it demonstrated just how low down Ukraine features on the US president's list of priorities.
"As of now, no productive talks are possible," said Oleksandr Kraiev, a Ukrainian foreign policy expert at the Ukrainian Prism thinktank in Kyiv.
The West, he argues, needs to consider targeting Russia's trading partners in Asia, particularly China, with "proper second-grade sanctions" in order to pressure Moscow to stop the war.
"The idea from the Ukrainian side is to find a new format that could change the pressure on Russia," said Mr Kraeiv.
That new diplomatic format would need Europe to play more of a role in pressuring Russia to seriously negotiate given the Trump administration's reluctance to introduce new sanctions on Moscow.
But more than a month after the leaders of France, Germany, Poland and the UK travelled to Kyiv and gave Russia a 48-hour ultimatum to agree to a ceasefire (or face new sanctions and increased military aid to Kyiv), the steam seems to have run out of European efforts to up the pressure on Russia.
Mr Putin had torpedoed that ultimatum by offering direct talks in Istanbul, which Mr Trump approved.
'The Coalition of the Willing', a British and French-led initiative to shore up support for a European peace monitoring force in a post-war scenario, has gone quiet too, perhaps waiting for the outcome of this week's NATO annual summit in The Hague. Crucially, it also lacked US support.
"The question now is how do you get Russia to be interested in peace," said Mr Dickinson, who believes it's "futile" to expect the US to make the breakthrough.
"Now, it's up to Europe to step up and take action but there is still no political will".
