ATHENS — As the fighting in Ukraine drags on, any hopes pinned to the Ukrainian peace proposals swiftly evolving into a cessation of hostilities are fading. 

If the signals from peace talks at Istanbul earlier this week were markedly more upbeat than what emanated from previous tries, facts on the ground are proving them overly optimistic. President Zelensky has warned that Russian troops are regrouping in preparation for a renewed assault in the eastern Donbass region, as he dismissed the Kremlin’s promises to scale back attacks on the capital, Kiev, Agence France-Presse reports.  

Russian shelling of Kiev and Chernihiv has continued and Mr. Zelensky said in a late-night video message: “We don’t believe anyone, not a single beautiful phrase.”

Beautiful phrasing can come back to haunt lots of people when there is a war on. At Istanbul this week, the head of the Ukrainian delegation to the peace talks with Russia, David Arakhamia, said he sought security guarantees for Ukraine that would be even stronger than NATO’s Article 5. According to the Kyiv Independent, the list of potential guarantor countries included America, Britain, China, Russia, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, and Israel. That there has been no answer from the Kremlin is a kind of answer. 

That the next round of talks is scheduled to take place by video on Friday is also telling, as are indications from Washington. “We are in constant discussion with Ukrainians about ways to help ensure that they are sovereign and secure,” the White House communications director, Kate Bedingfield, said at a press briefing Wednesday, adding that “there’s nothing specific about a security guarantee that I can speak to at this time.”

“Our role is to do everything we can to strengthen Ukraine on the battlefield, as we’ve done with the security assistance — the unprecedented amount of security assistance and weapons that we’ve flowed to Ukraine — and also to … strengthen their hand at the negotiating table by continuing to apply incredibly severe costs and sanctions on Russia,” Ms. Bedingfield also said at the briefing. 

That disconnect — Ukraine’s persistence with respect to NATO-style security guarantees versus America’s unsaid but apparent insistence that they won’t happen, because they’re unfeasible — and the failure to repair it, at least rhetorically, could be seen as perpetuating peace talks that, after more than one month of war, are notable mainly for their inability thus far to bear fruit. 

As far as the “incredibly severe costs and sanctions on Russia” that Ms. Bedingfield pointed to, the jury is out — or maybe still in — as to just how damaging to the Kremlin they really are. The ruble is no longer rubble, AP reports: by Wednesday the Russian currency had bounced back from the fall it took after the U.S. and European allies moved to bury the Russian economy under thousands of new sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine.

That doesn’t mean Russian consumers aren’t smarting from inflation — they are, but so is everyone else. Consider that in Greece, by next month prices for passenger ferry tickets will have gone up by 22 percent from the start of the year. 

Speaking of matters maritime, even if the West’s concerted efforts to seize and freeze assets of the Russian oligarchs are bearing some fruit — witness the forced dry docking of one grotesque superyacht after another, the latest being a sleek beast named Phi seized at London’s Canary Wharf, “infinite wine cellar” and all  — if you’re as loaded as Roman Abramovich, you just drive your floating limousine to sanction-free shores, like the ones in sunny Turkey.

The forecast for Ukraine still looks more bleak than bright, particularly in the east, where according to a Sky News military analyst, Michael Clarke, there are already 50,000 Ukrainian troops fighting in Donetsk, in the contested Donbass region. In Mr. Clarke’s assessment, Ukraine is trying to break a potential Russian supply line between Kharkiv in the north and Mariupol in the south that would essentially section the country and possibly play into Mr. Putin’s grand plan, if that is indeed his plan. 

Who knows? Writing in the New York Times, a journalist who covered Russia’s siege of Grozny during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s, Carlotta Gall, says that in the early phases of that war, energized Chechen fighters destroyed a Russian armored brigade to the Kremlin’s great surprise, so the Russians simply regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power. 

Judging from Ukrainian cities like Mariupol, Mykolaiv, and Kharkiv — or after weeks of Russian bombardment, what is left of them — Mr. Putin has indeed seemed to trot out that same dirty playbook.