An American lawyer helped open a backchannel between Biden’s White House and Putin. A Financial Times report details the exchanges, a later unofficial peace bid, and how it fell apart.

The Financial Times has published details of back-channel talks between U.S. leaders and Vladimir Putin in 2022 and early 2023. The effort began with Richard Conn, an American lawyer who had worked in Russia for many years and, after the war began, grew concerned that Putin might use nuclear weapons, with unpredictable consequences. In the fall of 2022, Conn worked through several Russian and American intermediaries to deliver a “conciliatory” message from Joe Biden’s administration to Putin. He...