Russia isn’t negotiating over Ukraine. It’s running a clock

Five months ago, Russia was willing to give land back. Now it is not. Nothing happened at any negotiating table in between. The front line moved, and the price moved with it.

In late February, Bloomberg reported that Moscow was prepared to sign a framework in which it would withdraw from occupied slivers of the Sumy, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions, drop its demand to cap the size of Ukraine’s army, and accept American-led ceasefire monitoring — in exchange for Ukrainian withdrawal from Donetsk.