Thissus: If we begin talking as though any feasible resolution of this conflict is going to entail his ouster, that becomes synonymous with him being tried for war crime somewhere. And so now i have a fairly strong intuition that if we're worried about that, we shouldn't be doing that, and we should be building him some kind of off ramp. I think the best way to lead to an off ramp is to not allow the russians to create facts on the ground that are table," he says.