00:00Oliver, just talking on Zelensky's immediate reaction, he says it seems like Donald Trump is hearing us.
00:06And that comes after a very positive reaction from Marco Rubio, who says progress has been made.
00:11How would you reflect on those statements?
00:15Well, also earlier, Rusty Mumerov, former Ukrainian defense minister, his title now is head of the National Security and Defense Council,
00:24one of the men on that Ukrainian delegation was saying that the new proposals took into account most of Ukraine's demands, which sounded extraordinarily positive.
00:35The Ukrainians, though, haven't actually been saying anything concrete about what exactly has been changed in the plan, nor did Marco Rubio.
00:44And it's perhaps worth noting an earlier tweet from Volodymyr Zelensky, a written one that was quite long and seemed to be arguing that one should really not trust Russia on their willingness to end the war.
00:59We're talking about Vladimir Putin's determination to continue to wage war and right to continue to wage war.
01:05And it was rather long winded and it wasn't entirely clear what he was getting at, but it sounded rather as though he was getting at the idea that he didn't trust the Russians to want to end it.
01:16And he didn't want people to raise their expectations about this ending any time soon.
01:22I mean, clearly, the Ukrainians are in a very difficult position.
01:24Volodymyr Zelensky bending over backwards to be grateful.
01:27Nevertheless, having Donald Trump writing on Truth Social that the Ukrainians hadn't expressed any gratitude for the American efforts.
01:35Efforts that most commentators in Ukraine, the ones who are a little bit further away from the delegation in Geneva, are having no hesitation in calling a 28-point peace plan that amounts to Ukrainian capitulation.
01:48And that looks very much as if it was drafted in Russian and simply handed to the Americans, which Marco Rubio reportedly told some U.S. senators was indeed the case before then, denying that he ever said that.
01:59This is all really interesting because it points to a dramatic shift in Washington's own position, as you say, and the Europeans also trying to push their own plan.
02:11It remains to be seen whether any adjustments can be made.
02:15Do we have any indication at this stage if the U.S. officials have had their ears twisted to a significant extent that this peace proposal will really reflect Kyiv's key points?
02:27Well, the only document that came out that had any concrete information about the changes that might be made to the plan was reportedly a draft of a Ukrainian, European or by the three European countries present there proposal for a 24-point plan, which is basically a series of adjustments to the Russian and American plan.
02:50One of the most important ones, I think, was a much clearer definition of the security guarantees that Ukraine should get, saying that these should come from the United States, should be enshrined in law, and should resemble Article 5 guarantees, which is the NATO guarantee that an attack on a country will trigger a military response from the ally.
03:10That's what's very much implied anywhere from the NATO treaty, and I think if Ukraine could get that, that would really make a change to Ukraine's approach to this whole thing, despite all the other things that are in the plan that are very difficult for Ukraine to agree with.
03:26But most analysts think that the United States is not really about to give Ukraine that kind of security guarantee, and Ukraine is not really about to be fobbed off with anything less, given that they've already had the experience of the Budapest Memorandum in 2004, where they got what they thought were security guarantees, but turned out not to be worth the paper they were written.
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