Rob

There's also the fact that Trump, I guess, has signaled so much impatience with Ukraine.

He's like quite mercurial.

You know, it seemed at some points last year like he maybe was going to basically withdraw support for Ukraine.

Doesn't that create like an enormous incentive for Putin to just hold out and

hope that at some point US support for Ukraine will be completely cut off and then they'll really be in the driver's seat in the war.

I see.

So that's the thing that creates room to negotiate a deal that might be seen as mutually beneficial.

I guess it seems like we're threading between many different challenging constraints here.

Absolutely.

We need a deal that we believe that both sides will plausibly stick to, where Ukraine doesn't feel too vulnerable about potential more Russian aggression.

We need Russia to view it in their interest, despite the fact that

They feel on the front foot militarily, but we need Ukraine to swallow an incredibly bitter pill of effectively ceding a lot of territory and closing the window, I guess, on getting revenge against a country that has caused them enormous harm and committed war crimes and so on.

Could you paint me a picture of if things went really well over the next year or two and we did end up with a ceasefire, in broad strokes, what would the process look like and what would the ultimate deal look like that seems most plausible?

I was a little bit surprised to find out that the idea of Ukraine joining the EU is on the table as much as it is.

It seems like things are trending towards Ukraine agreeing to be neutral and not joining NATO, but it might be acceptable for it to join the European Union.

Does that look plausible for Russia to swallow that?

I guess I have the perception that Russia really didn't want Ukraine to be poured into the Western sphere of influence.

And it feels like joining the EU was really quite getting poured into it.

Hmm.

I guess we've mostly talked about how we could make this palatable to Russia and Ukraine.