When I ask whether the US should work harder at continuing those conversations to try to end the conflict, he tells me that President Vladimir Putin "wasn't interested in negotiating before the war. This is part of a vision that President Putin has outlined to re-gather the Russian peoples that were separated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. So what, then, would it take for Mr Putin to stop the war? "Even if President Zelenksy wanted to end the war, wanted to make territorial concessions, basically wanted to surrender, the Ukrainian people wouldn't let him." "But [Mr Putin] doesn't want an off-ramp.
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