Local trapping for elliptic random walks in random environments in $\mathbb{Z}^d$

We consider elliptic random walks in i.i.d. random environments on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. The main goal of this paper is to study under which ellipticity conditions local trapping occurs. Our main result is to exhibit an ellipticity criterion for ballistic behavior which extends previously known results. We also show that if the annealed expected exit time of a unit hypercube is infinite then the walk has zero asymptotic velocity.