Lord Rickets, who headed the State Department before becoming the country’s first national security adviser in 2010, said he was “pessimistic” about the chances of a ceasefire. “It looks more and more like the worst days of World War II,” he told the Oxford Literary Festival. Rickets, who retired from diplomacy six years ago, said President Putin had made a “huge strategic mistake” and that his plan to invade “had not survived first contact with reality.” Rickets said, however, that while Russia’s failure to “get to Kyiv quickly” had reduced its scope
