If you search for a transcript of yesterday’s White House meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, almost all of them begin in the last 10 minutes of a 50-minute meeting when Vice President JD Vance responds to a reporter’s question about whether Trump believes he is too aligned with Putin.

We will come back to that moment eventually, but the event had been going on for 40 minutes before that, and indeed negotiations between Trump and Zelensky had been going on for weeks before yesterday.