I'm a bit confused by this:

“For [the pro-Palestinian protesters] to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message, Mr. Putin’s message. Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see.

Let's just put aside the fact that asking for a ceasefire for most people is a humanitarian request. You don't need to have picked a side to accept that the ordinary people need some kind of help getting to safety (or relative safety). I'm not commenting on that here though.

It may be that I'm missing something obvious, in which case fine. But, how does a cease-fire in Gaza benefit Putin? I would say that any instability elsewhere in the world (Gaza, Houthi rebels, the Iran Pakistan thing the other week) work entirely in his favour. While the west (and some of the rest of the world) need to move to stabilise problems aside from the war in Ukraine, they have less time, resources to spend checking up on his activities in Ukraine. The media time is split away from what's happening over there and of course, military budget is redirected away from arms for Ukraine, to operations in these other regions and arms for Israel.

I must be missing something, right?