Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's March 30th. We've made it to Wednesday. I'm Naila

Boudin. Here's what we're following. US COVID booster strategy takes a page from Choose

Your Own Adventure. Plus, young women are out earning men in more than 20 American

cities. But first, today's one big thing. A reality check on Russia Ukraine Negotiations.

After several hours of peace talks in Turkey, Russian officials said yesterday they would

scale back military activity near Kiev and to the north. Here with details of the negotiations

so far is Axios' Zach Basu. He's Zach. Hi, Naila. So Russia agreed to pull back from two

different cities, but we should note their advances there had already been stalled. Where

is Russia's military forces focusing on now? Right. So first off, I think it's really important

to be skeptical of Russia's claims about military positioning. But with that being said,

the US has seen a small number of Russian forces start to pull back from Kiev, where they'd

been stalled for weeks. The Pentagon believes it's a repositioning, not a real withdrawal,

and the Russians themselves have the operation is entering a new phase focused on seizing

territory in eastern Ukraine in the region known as the Donbass. Even before all this,

the US had seen indications that Russia was committing more energy and resources

to fighting in the Donbass. Although that is not to say that the threat to Kiev and these

other cities across Ukraine has subsided. We really don't know that yet.

What are we hearing from the Ukrainians right now about what they're proposing?

So Ukraine has proposed a framework in which they would adopt a neutral status, meaning they

can't join NATO or host Western troops in their territory, in exchange for international

security guarantees from countries like the US, the UK, China, France, Germany, Israel,

Turkey, and a couple others. It would essentially be a similar collective defense agreement to NATO,

...