I don't know, maybe? All those sound plausible but then you have to try and justify each of them with some kind of evidence of some sort, otherwise you're just playing the guessing game.
Now, I don't like guessing. When Russia entered negotiations the war was clearly not going its way, so the obvious explanation is that Putin wanted to disentangle from it with the least damage to his image as possible.
The question is why the negotiations failed, if they were really as advanced as suggested in the articles I linked above. Since the name of Boris Johnson has been brought up (in the context of being one of the Western representatives that told Zelenskiy to drop the deal) I tend to believe that a peace deal failed because at least one side in the negotiations was incompetent fools who should have never made it in power. That the other side is probably the same makes no difference.
This is wrong. Completely. Russia never negotiated in good faith. The only goal of these negotiations were an attempt to force very unfavorable terms on Ukraine - taking Ukrainian land and forcing them to destroy all their defence capacity without any warranty of no future invasion. Ukraine was never going to take such deal - no Westerner was needed to tell that. This is what people actually knowledgeable about the negation have revealed.
The problem is that Western media picks too easily up even the most stupid Russian narratives.
Now, I don't like guessing. When Russia entered negotiations the war was clearly not going its way, so the obvious explanation is that Putin wanted to disentangle from it with the least damage to his image as possible.
The question is why the negotiations failed, if they were really as advanced as suggested in the articles I linked above. Since the name of Boris Johnson has been brought up (in the context of being one of the Western representatives that told Zelenskiy to drop the deal) I tend to believe that a peace deal failed because at least one side in the negotiations was incompetent fools who should have never made it in power. That the other side is probably the same makes no difference.