A plan to end the conflict in Ukraine must address these realities:

• The best deal the West could hope for at this point will be very much worse than they could have had about a year ago.
• All the West is trying to do at this juncture is save some modicum of face.
• Russia does not trust Western leaders at this point. They have good reason to believe that there is nobody in the West that they could negotiate with and have reason to think that the other party was negotiating in good faith.
• Russia will want and get all Russian and Russian-speaking areas starting with the Donbas.
• Russia will also want and get enough real estate to put Russian people out of the range of Ukraine’s longest range weapons.
• Neither the Pentagon nor NATO has anything they could threaten Russia with or try to salvage the Kiev state with.
• The plan must offer Putin something he does not have or have a reasonable plan to obtain.
• The plan must offer Poles and other Eastern Europeans something of substantial value.

Assuming Russians were to advance to the Polish border, that would leave Putin with a giant problem that he wants no part of yet has no plan to evade. That would take the form of a viper’s nest of terrorism, hate, and revanche in what would be called a Western Ukrainian “rump state”.

Missing from the picture is somebody willing and able to serve as the honest broker to ride herd over that rump state and that honest broker would have to get some benefit from it. The obvious answer to that one is the Chinese, who need a path through Ukraine for their New Silk Road Scheme.

Donald Trump as the reinstated legitimate US president would enter the picture as the guy who could sell this idea to Western leaders and who in the West, Russians could deal with and halfway trust.

For such a plan to work of course, Biden and the people who put him in power have to be gotten rid of almost immediately. We do not have time for an impeachment process or any other kind of games.