I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, March 11th.

We have an opportunity to speak for about 10 minutes now with the U.S. State Department official

on U.S. policy toward the war in Ukraine.

He is Derek Shoulet, whose title is counselor or undersecretary of state.

He served in the Obama administration, too, as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International

Security Affairs, where he managed U.S. defense policy toward Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the

Western Hemisphere. He was last on this show in 2016 to talk about President Obama's foreign

policy legacy, and he is co-author of a book that came out back in 2008, but is actually

very relevant right now about the period after the Cold War ended called America Between the Wars

from 119, which is a Berlin wall falling reference, 119 to 911.

Secretary Sholle, thank you for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Hey, thank. It's great to be back with you. Thanks so much.

And since we have just 10 minutes,

I'll dive right in on the hard parts, okay? On yesterday's show, we had Slate Magazine's

military affairs columnist Fred Kaplan, who wrote an article outlining a potential peace agreement

to end the war when both sides are exhausted enough to be ready. If you know Fred's

work, you know he is not at all a Putin apologist. His goal, he says, is to allow Putin to save

face by declaring victory while not actually giving him anything. So it involves recognizing

Russia's annexation of Crimea from 2014, because we're not reversing it anyway,

and the people there seem mostly okay with it, he said.

It involves setting up a referendum in the eastern areas with the pro-Russia separatists,

let people vote whether to stay in Ukraine, supervised by the UN, so it's a real election,

...