US-mediated shuttle diplomacy in early September produced tentative agreement to resume trilateral talks but yielded no bilateral summit between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents, consistent with Vladimir Putin’s repeated statements that expert-level agreements on core issues must precede any direct encounter with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Moscow continues battlefield advances in Donbas while rejecting broader ceasefires, and Kyiv maintains its refusal to cede additional territory, leaving the fundamental gaps that blocked earlier proposals unchanged. Recent US envoys’ visits and phone calls between Donald Trump and Putin have revived diplomatic channels without generating the preconditions or scheduling signals that would shift the near-term outlook for a leader-level meeting before year-end.