If you read further into the article, you will find:
Fiona Hill, who served as the senior director for Europe and Russia on the US National Security Council in the Barack Obama administration, co-authored an article for the September/October edition of Foreign Affairs titled “The World Putin Wants.”
The former top US national security official overseeing Russia policy wrote:
According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries. But as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated in a July interview with his country’s state media, this compromise is no longer an option.
These terms had apparently been ironed out in face-to-face peace talks in Istanbul, Turkey on March 29.
“But as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated in a July interview with his country’s state media, this compromise is no longer an option.”
Russia torpedoed it. They insisted on ridiculous demands on top of
“Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries. “
To the effect of, anyone in NATO being approached by Ukraine for those security guarantees would be required to say no.
That’s written into the conditions presented to NATO in December. Which extended the NATO members withdrawing its guarantees from the Baltic as well as from Ukraine.
I’m stunned at the inability of people to add 1+1 and yet refuse to accept the answer is 2.
As I said, Russia’s own negotiating team were stunned by a ridiculous demand that they knew would go down like a lead balloon and kill the negotiation.
When Lavrov said “Compromise is no longer an option” he omitted the reason. The Kremlin insisted on a demand on NATO that NATO couldn’t countenance.
Russia might as well have said “Ukraine, we’ll agree to your terms but only if you totally disarm yourselves, accept no weapons from NATO, don’t join NATO, don’t even seek any help from NATO, and your security guarantees are only from Belarus and Georgia which will suit us just fine when we’re ready for Round 2 of Grozny-fying your cities”.
It was ridiculous even before adding “oh, and NATO... Get out of the Baltic states too” to the shopping list of stupid.