John Mearsheimer

He wanted to shut down that conflict.

Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, he was the French leader, and Poroshenko, who was the Ukrainian leader.

Those were the three key players besides Putin.

Again, Hollande from France, Merkel from Germany, and Poroshenko from Ukraine have all explicitly said

They were not seriously interested in reaching an agreement in all of the discussions with Putin.

They were bamboozling him.

They were trying to trick him so that they would buy time to build up Ukraine's military forces.

Putin is profoundly upset about these admissions by these three leaders.

He believes he was fooled into thinking that Minsk could work.

He believes that he negotiated in good faith and they did not.

And he believes that the level of trust now between Russia and the West is virtually zero as a result of this experience over Minsk.

I only bring this up because it cuts against your argument that leaders could pick up the phone and talk to each other and trust each other at least somewhat to work out a meaningful deal.

If you're Putin, at this point in time, trusting the West is not an idea that's going to be very attractive at all.

In fact, you're going to distrust anything they say.

Just remember they were doing that in March and the Americans came in and the British came in and they scotched a potential deal.

When you're the leader of a country in an anarchic system, you have to be very careful not to let your trust in a foreign leader take you too far, because if that foreign leader betrays you or betrays your trust and stabs you in the back, you could die.

And again, you want to remember that the principal responsibility of any leader, I don't care what country it is, is to ensure the survival of their state.

And that means that trust is only going to buy you so much.

And when you've already betrayed

the trust of a leader, you really are not going to be able to rely on trust very much to help you moving forward.