George Barros

And one of the key Russian negotiators is Kirill Dmitriev.

And I think Kirill Dmitriev has been a tremendous asset for the Russians in this whole negotiations thing, because Kirill Dmitriev really knows how to work the American side.

I think he's a very effective communicator, a very slick guy.

He knows what buttons to push, and he can perpetually convince the American side that, yeah, yeah, actually, we're down to have peace if we can just get these concessions, get these things figured out inside of these points.

We can just get all our... Really, that's not...

That's not representative of the Russian position at all whatsoever, actually.

And I think the whole point of this is, is to have this thing blow up.

I think the point of this is to work out a document that the Russians don't intend to accept anyway, by the way.

bring it to the Ukrainians with enough poison pills that the Ukrainians cannot accept it, mostly not because of the capriciousness of the Ukrainians, but because it's contrary to their core interests.

And it's also, it would be in violation of Ukraine's constitution and laws.

So, you know, any president in legal standing wouldn't be able to do anything with that in the first place.

Have it die in the Ukrainians' hands.

And then that becomes the basis for a big information operation saying, look,

We tried, we got a deal.

It died with the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainians are the obstacles to peace.

They're the bad guys.

So let's just plug, like, why are we even trying about this?

They're completely, completely irascible.

And that's, I think, like the really sophisticated campaign design behind all of this whole thing is they're trying to put this tactic together.