Vladimir Putin may be playing for time while he carries on beating down Ukraine's will to win

After all those raised hopes of peace, the second-worst night of air attacks on Ukraine since the war began.

So much for diplomacy, despite Alaska, then the Washington summit.

The Kremlin says it was aiming at military targets, but yet again, the pictures tell a very different story.

Follow latest: UK summons Putin's ambassador

One civilian building after another hit, more than a dozen dead and British Council and EU buildings damaged too

So what's going on? Why is Putin doing it?

Because he can.

He thinks he's winning this war, and it's hard to escape the conclusion that he's using diplomacy to play for time while he carries on beating down the Ukrainians will to win.

And at the moment, no one is stopping him

Ukraine is hitting back, particularly at Russia's oil installations, more of them going up in thick black smoke, hit by long-range Ukrainian drones.

It is taking a heavy toll on Vladimir Putin's 'Achilles heel', but on its own, analysts don't expect it will be enough to persuade him to end this war.

The West can wring its hands in condemnation.

But it's divided between Europe that wants a ceasefire and much more severe sanctions, and President Trump, who, it seems, does not - strangely always willing to sympathise with the Russians more than Ukraine.

He's back to blaming Ukraine for starting the war, saying earlier in the week that Kyiv should not have got into a war it had no chance of winning.

It is a grotesque perversion of history. Ukraine, of course, had no choice but to fight to defend itself when it was invaded in an act of unprovoked aggression.

Every time the US president has condemned Russia for these kinds of attacks, he has never followed through and done nothing to punish them.

More worryingly for the Ukrainians, the Russians are getting the upper hand in the drones war, taking Iranian technology and souping it up into faster moving drones the Ukrainians are having increasing difficulty bringing down.

They expect as many as a thousand drones a night coming their way by the winter, and many, many more innocents to die.

Next week, Putin will join Chinese and North Korean leaders in a summit in Beijing, both supporting his war in Ukraine.

Read more from Dominic Waghorn:
Ukrainians warn they're in danger of losing drone arms race
We are further away from peace now than we were two weeks ago

A war that began as one man's mad idea has, in three and a half years, metastasised into a titanic struggle between east and west, fought increasingly with machines in a dystopian evolution of war.

If President Trump is not prepared to use his power to bring this war to an end, what will another three and a half years of his presidency bring?

It is a chilling question.

(c) Sky News 2025: Vladimir Putin may be playing for time while he carries on beating down Ukraine's will to win