A readout on today’s lengthy session between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, was provided to the press by top Putin aide, Yury Ushakov. According to the Kremlin’s English-language translation, Ushakov recounted:

“The President of Russia has once again supported the American side’s proposal to move towards resolving security issues for both Russia and Ukraine as part of efforts to shape a future post-conflict system of European security. It is clear that the current system is not working—that is obvious to everyone. We hope that representatives of European countries will also support efforts to agree on the parameters of a new, long-term architecture of indivisible security and peace, a process we are ready to begin immediately, in tandem with our American counterparts.”

However, Putin “recalled our vision of the key pillars of the architecture of indivisible security, which we presented back in 2021 in the form of draft agreements with the United States and NATO on security guarantees.” (These were rejected out of hand by the Biden administration in December 2021, two months before Russia’s Special Military Operation.) Ushakov continued: “These include the non-expansion of the NATO bloc, the non-deployment of threatening weapons systems near Russia’s borders, and a return to the configuration of the alliance’s forces as it stood at the time the Russia-NATO Founding Act was signed.” This is a reference to a roll-back of NATO forces to 1997, before NATO broke its commitment to Russia, and moved into the Baltics and the Balkans—long before the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government. It didn’t start with Ukraine, nor will it end with Ukraine.

The Europeans “make no secret of its desire... to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. For our part, the position of the Europeans has been comprehensively outlined. They are striving by every means possible to join the negotiations, but, as our President has said, they must decide whether they want peace or the continuation of the war. So far, all their practical actions point precisely to the latter. In particular, attention was drawn to the fact that the deployment of foreign contingents from the coalition of the willing on Ukrainian territory after the end of the conflict is being actively promoted. Yet that is precisely the recipe for an endless war.”