On Thursday, Sept. 12, when Russian and American diplomats came to the negotiating table in Geneva, the Russian side came in with the upper hand. The previous night, they had sent Washington a proposal for dismantling Syria‘s stockpiles of chemical weapons. According to the Russian diplomat Alexei Pushkov, who discussed the outlines of the proposal with TIME, it includes several complicated phases and gives Syria a leading role in the destruction of its own chemical arsenal. The American side, meanwhile, has one trump card in these negotiations — the threat of a military strike against Syria. But Russia seems ready to call that a bluff. …

The Russian proposal, which Syrian President Bashar Assad has signaled his willingness to accept, would take much more than a couple weeks to carry out, says Pushkov, who was briefed on the contents of the proposal but declined to show a copy of it to TIME. “It envisions several stages,” he says. In the first step, Syria would join the Chemical Weapons Convention, an international agreement that bans the production, storage or use of these weapons. (Since it came into force in 1997, the convention has been ratified by 189 nations; Syria is so far among the handful of states, including Israel, that refused.) The second stage would allow Syria time to prepare a report on what kinds of chemical weapons it has and where they are located. The third stage would allow Syria to negotiate with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the U.N.-affiliated, Netherlands-based administrator of the Convention, on how the organization’s inspectors would work inside Syria.