Vladimir Putin hosted an emergency meeting in the Kremlin this week to deal with fuel shortages caused by Ukrainian drone strikes on oil refineries inside Russia. He is also facing setbacks on the diplomatic front.Putin’s woesA few hours after Putin met the heads of Russia’s biggest oil companies on Sunday, he told a television interviewer that while tackling the fuel shortages that have caused queues at petrol stations, Moscow also faced a challenge in protecting energy infrastructure from Ukraine’s attacks. He said Russia had effective systems to defend against drones but it needed to produce more of them to deal with an offensive he claimed was part of an effort to destroy the country’s morale.“Its purpose is to undermine our confidence in ourselves and our capabilities and, ideally, to create divisions within Russian society, force Russia to suspend, even temporarily, the advance of our forces along the line of contact and create conditions for launching negotiations on terms favourable to our adversary,” he said.Last summer, when Putin met Trump in Alaska, it was Ukraine and its European allies who were afraid of being bounced into negotiations on the basis of a deal struck between the American and the Russian leader. But Putin admitted on Sunday that there was no deal agreed in Anchorage, only a discussion of American proposals for a compromise.“Nobody signed anything, but we talked about certain possibilities for ending the conflict in Ukraine,” he said.The United States proposal would have seen Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk recognised as de facto Russian and the line of contact frozen in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. But Axios reported last week that Trump has been expressing growing frustration with Putin, signalling that he could walk away from the so-called Anchorage understandings.The Ukrainian drone strikes deep inside Russia are themselves evidence of the shallowness of any attachment Trump may have felt towards Putin. While the Biden administration restricted Ukraine’s access to weapons that could strike inside Russia for fear of escalating the conflict, western intelligence now helps Kyiv to target Russian oil refineries with drones and to evade air defences.As Trump intensifies his engagement with Xi Jinping amid talk of a grand bargain between the US and China, his vision of a new world order does not appear to include a sphere of influence for Russia. Meanwhile, Russia’s global influence has receded as the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria saw it lose its foothold in the Middle East and the retreat of its mercenaries in Mali has shaken the confidence of other African military regimes in the value of Moscow’s security support.After Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, other Brics member-states including China and India continued to buy Russian energy and to replace goods no longer available because of western sanctions. But while these countries and others in the Global South rejected US and European sanctions as illegitimate and hypocritical, they never had any intention of forming an overtly anti-western bloc with Russia.In the multipolar order that is taking shape, regional actors are forming smaller, looser groups that no longer depend on a superpower sponsor and resist being drawn into Cold War-style blocs. In this new world, Russia remains an interesting partner for many countries in such areas as energy and defence but its scope for exerting hegemonic power is diminished.With the line of contact on the battlefield scarcely budging despite heavy casualties and both Ukraine and Russia striking each other’s cities, the war continues to cause immense suffering. Putin told his interviewer on Sunday that back channel contacts remain open, claiming that Ukraine had proposed both sides suspend long-range attacks.Kyiv and its European allies might view Putin’s current adversity as an incentive to double down on the military campaign and to defer negotiations until Russia is weaker. But fortune in this war has proven to be fickle and there may never be a better moment to agree a ceasefire and start talking about peace.Please let me know what you think and send your comments, thoughts or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered to denis.globalbriefing@irishtimes.com