This past weekend saw the publication of a bombshell interview with former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, who over the course of a nearly five-hour interview dropped an unusual amount of detail about his efforts to mediate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine early in the war last year. The headline-grabbing news is Bennett’s claim that negotiations that were yielding fruit and that could have ended the now nearly year-long war after a little more than a month were ultimately blocked by the NATO governments underwriting Ukraine’s war effort.

According to Bennett, as early as the second Saturday of the war, or a little less than a week and a half into the war, both Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian president Vladimir Putin made major concessions: Putin, by giving up on the goals of the “demilitarization” of Ukraine and its “denazification” — meaning, as Bennett interpreted it, regime change — and Zelensky by giving up on pursuing NATO membership.

Calling both leaders “pragmatic,” Bennett says that over the course of negotiations, he “was under the impression that both sides very much want[ed] a ceasefire” and gave the odds of any deal holding at 50-50. Over a “marathon of drafts,” he claims, seventeen draft agreements were prepared. But “they blocked it, and I thought [they were] wrong,” Bennett says, referring to the Western powers backing Ukraine.