They tell me he is a tough man. A hard bargainer. I have sat across from hard men; a hard man does not open by wishing you mnogaya leta, many happy years. There was a call, you understand, on the ninth, the birthday of our President, and your President sang him the warm wishes, and passed along the fond regards of his wife, and the two of them talked for an hour and a half, two old friends, and when it was finished our spokesman told your press, with a composure I confess I could not have held, that neither man had wanted to be the first to hang up the telephone, so they hung up at the same instant, together, in harmony. Two nuclear powers, and the final sticking point, the one irreconcilable difference, was which of them would be so rude as to end the call. I have done this work a long time. I have never watched a nation bargain so ferociously for the privilege of being liked by the people it is being robbed by. There is a word for a man like that where I come from. We call him rubakha-paren, the shirt-off-his-back fellow, the big warm open soul who gives everything away at the table and wakes with no shirt and calls it a wonderful party. We toast such men. We do not fear them.

Now the part your newspapers chew but cannot swallow, so I will swallow it for them, as a courtesy between professionals.

We gave up nothing. I must be exact, because precision is the whole art, the difference between a surgeon and a butcher. Not “a little.” Not “a small concession for the optics, a bone for the cameras.” Nichego. Nothing. We did not commit to resume the talks; our man allowed only that we would “think about when.” We did not agree to any ceasefire; and when your President announced one regardless, declared from his telephone that an energy ceasefire now existed and that both parties had agreed to it, we kept striking their power stations that very night, in the dark, as the cold came on, because a ceasefire you announce on my behalf is not a ceasefire. It is a press release. And I am not bound by your press releases. Your President was asked, directly, how he could announce a peace that both armies flatly denied, and he answered, and I have had this translated three separate times because twice I assumed an error, “They agreed because I said they agreed.”This is not statecraft. This is a man who names his dog Poslushnyy, “Obedient,” and then points to the collar as proof the animal obeys.

And the following day our foreign minister, a man I admire the way one admires deep winter, something that does not negotiate and cannot be charmed and simply outlasts you, was asked whether Russia would honor this sacred respite. He said the Ukrainian president “has not earned a respite.” The day after the ceasefire was proclaimed. We did not sustain the fiction for even one full news cycle. We did not have to. That is the gift the appeaser makes you: he needs the arrangement so desperately that he will keep its corpse warm himself, bent over it, breathing into its blue lips, long after the other party has put on its coat and walked out into the snow. We broke the thing in public and he defended it in public. We were not even his partners in the lie, you understand.