David E. Sanger

Witkoff is there.

Jared Kushner is there.

It's pretty heated from what we hear, particularly with the Ukrainians.

But magically, the 28-point plan turned into a 20-point plan.

suddenly gone from this was a limit on the Ukrainian military to be no more than 600,000 troops.

Suddenly gone from this was that NATO troops could never be based in Ukraine.

So he clearly was trying to wrench this document back to the middle in an effort to save the peace process.

But along the way, he may have lost the Russians.

Well, clearly the president believed that by setting up this Thanksgiving deadline that he was going to rush something through and he would have an agreement.

And a cynic might say that the president was interested in speed because he wants to add an agreement between Russia and Ukraine to that list for the Nobel Peace Prize that he believes he's been nominated for for next year.

And he regularly made the absolutely correct point that it is one of the great human tragedies that we're losing thousands of Ukrainians and Russians every single week here.

And he just wants to get to something that will stop the killing.

The question is, at what cost and how much pain does he believe Putin will put up with?

That's exactly right, Rachel.

If you think about how former President Biden talked about this war from the beginning of the invasion, he always said, we're here to reestablish the rules of the post-World War II order.

that countries don't invade each other's borders, that countries don't take each other over, that this era of land wars in Europe, we were done with at the end of World War II.

President Trump doesn't talk in those terms.

He says, just tell me what it will take to get it done, because this is a power competition between Ukraine and Russia.

Russia's got nuclear weapons.

It's a much larger country.