Would Putin Really Invade Ukraine For This?

So what happens next?

As planned, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met in Geneva on Friday to discuss a possible peaceful way out of the crisis in Ukraine. The meeting was pitched as the climax of several sessions over the past week among senior diplomats from the U.S., Russia, NATO, and all of Europe, including Ukraine.

The stakes were high. Russian officials warned, and everyone else feared, that if the U.S. and NATO didn’t meet all of Russia’s demands (some reasonable, others not), there would be no reason for further talks because diplomacy would have reached a “dead end,” meaning Russian President Vladimir Putin might take “military-technical” measures to keep Ukraine within his country’s orbit.

Blinken and Lavrov met for 90 minutes. Neither budged from his earlier position. Yet both of them agreed to continue the dialogue. Diplomacy hasn’t hit a dead end yet after all. And, it seems, Putin isn’t quite ready to go for broke and invade Ukraine.