Donnacha Ó Beacháin

So, of course, the more serious your crime, the bigger an incentive you had to take up that contract.

But I'm just back from Central Asia and large numbers of people from Central Asia, they're economic migrants in Russia.

Their own economies don't do that well.

Russia provides all sorts of opportunities to work in menial jobs.

But many of them go to Russia on the understanding that they're going to work in menial jobs and then they are pushed into fighting in Ukraine.

They're often offered citizenship and then they're told that the first duty of citizenship is to fight in Ukraine.

And then you have all those ethnic minorities within Russia that we often don't hear about.

The

The people of Tuva, for example, the people in Buryatia, you're much more likely to die fighting in Ukraine if you're from Buryatia, a place I visited many, many times.

Buryat people, they're Mongol people, essentially, Russified Mongol people who are Buddhists traditionally.

You're much more likely to die fighting in Ukraine if you're from that far eastern region of the Russian Federation than if you're from Moscow or St.

Petersburg.

I mean, usually you have diplomatic negotiations that might lead somewhere when you have a mutually hurting stalemate, when both sides have a reason to negotiate.

As of yet, I mean, Ukraine has said, you know, more or less from the moment Trump first put forward the idea, which is now more than a year ago, that there should be, you know, an immediate ceasefire.

That was Trump's major idea, ceasefire, then negotiations.

The Ukrainians from the beginning have said yes to ceasefire, yes to negotiations, and the Russians have said no to ceasefire.

which is the very first step.

They said, we continue the killings.

When you want to negotiate with us, fine, but we'll continue killing in the meantime.

And they've made it clear that the starting price for any meaningful negotiations are more or less conceding, as I said, what in advance, what Russia has not been able to acquire militarily after many years of trying.