Former US ambassador: Russian team full of strategists

Watch Former US ambassador: Russian team full of strategists - AlArabiya English on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00Trump's point man, Steve Whitkoff, who is leading the U.S. ceasefire negotiations with

00:05Ukraine and Russia, traveled to Moscow, and there are now questions being raised about

00:11him being part of this signal group.

00:15Where does this leave Whitkoff and the U.S. administration's credibility, especially when

00:21it comes to Putin?

00:22You were just saying there Putin doesn't want to back down.

00:25He's got the upper hand militarily.

00:27Yeah.

00:28And to play that out a little bit, if you look at who his negotiating team was today

00:32in Riyadh, it was former Deputy Foreign Minister Grigori Karasin, whom I know well.

00:38He was the deputy foreign minister in place to set up Russia's invasion of Georgia in

00:432008.

00:44He's a great diplomat, by the way, but that's what he was involved with, setting up the

00:48diplomatic table for the invasion.

00:51And then Mr. Besedov, who was the intelligence officer who had told Putin that, essentially,

01:00Kiev would fall within a couple of days if Russia invaded.

01:03So these are two men running the negotiations on the Russian side who have a history of

01:07being involved in invasions of Georgia and Ukraine.

01:11I don't think that they're the ones who really want to want to negotiate a peace.

01:16But leave that aside, I think Mr. Whitkoff himself has really undermined his own credibility

01:21by saying he takes President Putin at his word.