In the list of campaign promises from Donald Trump, the one about the war in Ukraine stood out for the number of times he repeated it - “I’ll have that thing ended in 24 hours” - and for the undeniable way he failed to deliver, writes The Atlantic.

His self-imposed deadline, of course, passed in January, and the president has since admitted that the belligerents proved much harder to reconcile than he had expected. Still he continues to try. But his efforts have not resembled a peace process so much as a pendulum, swinging between the Russian and Ukrainian positions, with occasional stops in the middle to express frustration over the whole affair.

The latest swing to the Russian side this month has been a doozy. Last week, the White House embraced a 28-point “peace plan” stuffed with the Kremlin’s demands, and Trump gave Ukraine five days to accept it. The task of delivering the ultimatum fell to Dan Driscoll, the U.S. Army secretary, who arrived in Kyiv just as the plan leaked to the media. Its provisions looked to many Ukrainians like a set of demands for their capitulation. But their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, did not turn down the offer from his American guests. “We thought we were going to try to open the door, but the door was open,” a U.S. official said of Driscoll’s visit. “They were ready to talk”.

So were the Americans. As they went over the details, Trump’s Thanksgiving deadline fell away, as did several of the plan’s most onerous provisions. Negotiators whittled the list down to 19 points during a round of talks this weekend in Geneva, and Trump is dispatching another one of his envoys to Moscow to present the amended version to Vladimir Putin. Its fate now depends on the willingness of the Russian president to compromise, and that is where Trump’s peace efforts have so far hit a wall”, - writes the author of the article.