This is John Batcher, a conversation with my colleague Anatole Leibman of the Quincy Institute for Responsible

Statecraft about talking with Vladimir Putin, negotiating with Vladimir Putin, looking to the future after the shooting stops or while the

shootings underway in Ukraine. What is to be done? I lay out a pattern of

assassinations and brutalities by Putin in this century starting with the

Linfinenko poisoning of 2006 mentioning the Nemsov murder by gunfire on the Muska Bridge in 2015, the poisoning of

the Scrippals in 2018 and then we deal with Nny's poisoning in 2020 and now the unknowns of his sudden death at 47.

How do you talk to an assassin? And this is Anatold's very careful and direct response to the

way of the world. How do you talk to an assassin is the question?

Antollevent Quincy Institute.

Well, I'm afraid that you begin the conversation the same way that you begin it with Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia who of course is also an assassin

You know as as we know

But you know, we should not praise either of these people.

We do need to talk to them. There is no getting around the fact that Saudi Arabia is a very major

player in the Middle East and the Muslim world. And now in Saudi Arabia of course they're all all the other

factors we know Saudi Arabia is a kind of ally a kind of ally and obviously its

domestic stability is very important to the US.

But I mean, the basic fact is, we, I mean, nobody should praise Putin or say nice things about him. But in the end he is the president

of Russia. All the evidence suggests that he will remain so and hand over to a successor of his choosing.

We have to remember that during the Cold War,

President Nixon went to China

and made a key agreement. China and you know made key agreements with Mao Zetung during the Cultural Revolution and

Mao Zetung was a murderer know, who eclipsed Putin by several orders of magnitude in the number

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