If you’ve never flown over central Sudan, it is hard to understand just how immense and empty the land can feel until you hit a town where everyone has been displaced, and suddenly the emptiness becomes a crowd. Tom Fletcher, the UN’s aid chief, has spent the last week moving between airstrips, checkpoints, and cramped rooms that pass for negotiation venues. When he returned to New York, he looked like someone who had seen too much in too little time.

He said the meetings with Sudan’s warring factions were “useful,” but anyone who has listened to peace talks in this region knows that word can stretch to fit almost anything. With the army chief, the conversation focused on access. With the RSF commanders, it was sharper demands for guarantees, for unarmed routes, for civilians not to be treated as bargaining chips.

The city that most haunts the UN right now is El Fasher, a place hammered by siege for more than a year. Fletcher described it as something close to a crime scene, which in UN-speak is as close as one gets to saying the place has been mauled.

There is no reliable count of the dead. There never is, when militias control the roads and families disappear before their names are recorded. What the UN wants, at minimum, is to get its own people inside, unescorted and unmanipulated, to see who is still alive and what can still be saved. Sudan has a way of swallowing promises whole. Whether this round will be any different, no seasoned observer dares to guess