You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War in the Rocks. And I'm sitting here with two guests,

and we're going to be talking about the sort of fumbling and stumbling

to the ever-elusive peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. I'm sitting here with my friends

who are just about to introduce themselves right now. Darrah Massaco, senior fellow Carnegie Endowment

for International Peace. Mike Admon, also senior fellow Carnegie Endowment, same program as Darrow.

Thank you both for taking time out of your weekend to talk about this.

Let's step back and discuss how we got here. Let's say post-disastrous Zelensky meeting at the Oval Office,

how we sort of got to where we are today. Just a little narrative, a little chronology.

Let me try to do a very

reference. So immediately after that meeting, I think Zianski goes to London. Brits meet with him

and then try to smooth things out with the United States. And they sort of act for lack of a better

term as a sort of whisper. I've heard the term marriage counselor thrown around by Europeans,

but essentially the British and the French

start trying to figure out how they make this work. And things do begin to smooth out a couple

weeks later. The U.S. cuts off military support and intelligence to Ukraine, but then restores it.

Zaidiansky starts to kind of say the right things, give the right signals. Behind the scenes,

they're still negotiating the minerals deal, which is really a series

of deals. It's actually three different agreements. And those things are being handled by technical

folks. And in the meanwhile, you have a whole separate parallel effort, I guess led by Whitkoff

with Russia. And these negotiations start taking off with Russia. It's not really shallow diplomacy.

It's more like two parallel tracks.

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