Hi, Bill Crystal here with my colleague Mark Hurtling, retired Lieutenant General, the U.S. Army,

and a very valued bulwark military analyst and our V military analyst of the bulwark.

Very high honor.

Anyway, we were talking about the news from Ukraine, the news about Ukraine, the Russian-U.S. apparent, I don't know, deal on an apparent

quote peace plan, which is, I don't know, mayor apparently being imposed on Ukraine. Tell us about

it. You followed this so closely, you were in Europe so many years and know the Ukraine

situation so well. So what's up? Well, at first, Bill, you know this,

but I'm a bit biased toward Ukraine because I had the opportunity to work with the Ukrainian

military for a couple of years and met the individual that literally transformed the army in

Ukraine, a colonel general by the name of Hennadai Verobeoff.

And I've never told his story before, but General Verobeoff was part of the Soviet Union,

part of the Soviet army for the first 20 years of his life.

And then when Ukraine gained their independence, he went back to Ukraine and became a

National Guardsman, rose all the way up, or their equivalent of the National Guard, rose all the

way up to be the chief of their ground forces. The very first stop I made when I was newly

installed as the commander of U.S. Army Europe was to Ukraine. And I had dealt with

the Ukrainians in Iraq in 2004, and they were a terrible army. They were crooked. They still had

the stench of the Soviet Union on them. But Robiof approached me with a list of things that he wanted to help him do.

He wanted me to help him do.

And what I found out later is he had written a Ph.D. thesis on the transformation of the Ukrainian army to Western approaches.

So he gave me this list of saying, hey, I want my soldiers to go to your NCO

Academy and Graf andvir. I want you to do more training exercises with us. If you can, can you get

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