Niall Ferguson

He's going to have to be able to sell something to his people to justify all the slaughter.

I think that probably involves him abandoning his original goal, which was to take the whole of Ukraine and turn it into another Belarus.

I think we've pretty much told him that's impossible.

And we've also, I think, pretty much told him you're not going to destroy NATO either.

But I think we have to give him some territorial win to end this war.

And that is why I think the 28-point plan, the original version, was not a bad starting point for negotiation in that the Russians were prepared to talk about it.

And the fact that the Russians were prepared to talk about it so much so that they even claimed authorship of it meant that you were getting somewhere.

This was why the involvement of Jared Kushner was so important.

He is a highly skilled negotiator.

Steve Witkoff on his own was not getting very far.

Bring Jared in and you start getting results.

We've seen that in the Middle East.

I think we begin to see it with Ukraine.

It's tough.

But I don't think the Europeans have helped at all.

In fact, what happened was that after that 28-point plan did the rounds, the Europeans said, no, no, no, this is far too good for Russia.

We insist on changes.

And they insisted on changes that, for example, left the Ukrainian army even bigger.

And, of course, the Russians said no.

I mean, I can understand some of the American frustration.