Rajan Menon, the director of the grand-strategy program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy, is a longtime analyst of Russian affairs. He’s visited Ukraine several times since the war began and written extensively on possible solutions to the conflict. He thinks Charap’s prescriptions for an armistice are premature—that there is not yet enough will on either side to stop the fighting—but he is dismayed by the rhetorical atmosphere in the U.S. “There are people who are looking with a good-faith effort to try to see if there’s a way out of this box,” he told me. “And for their trouble they’ve basically been lambasted as appeasers or sympathetic to Putin and so on. This has got to stop.”
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