Trump officials to sit down with Ukrainian negotiators in Florida

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00:00There's some confusion about what more there is for the Ukrainians together with the Americans

00:05to do because after their recent meetings in Geneva, they said that they had come up with

00:11basically a revised version of the plan and the feeling was that the ball was in Russia's court

00:16and the feeling very strongly here in Ukraine was that Russia would refuse the revised plan

00:21and probably would have refused the original plan anyway. Vladimir Putin on a visit to

00:26Bishkek said that there was no point in signing anything with Volodymyr Zelensky

00:31because he considers Volodymyr Zelensky to be illegitimate because there haven't been elections in Ukraine

00:37and Volodymyr Zelensky's term expired. No matter that elections in Russia for the past,

00:42I don't know how many have not been recognised by the international community as being free and fair,

00:47that there's no opposition and also that the dismissal of Andrei Yermak was proof

00:53that Ukraine's democratic institutions are functioning and independent agencies can investigate corruption.

00:59All the same, Vladimir Putin manages to troll out this argument whenever a peace agreement looms on the horizon

01:06as an excuse for not signing it. More fundamentally, no matter what they discuss today,

01:11Ukrainian and international analysts agree there are points that clearly are not reconciled between the two sides.

01:19Ukraine has said clearly it's not willing to give up territory that the Russians haven't taken by force.

01:23I mean, that's in terms of just letting the Russians have it de facto and agreeing to a ceasefire,

01:29I mean, to a peace agreement. The Ukrainians have said that's a no-go.

01:32The Russians have made it clear that they want to take the whole of the rest of Donetsk region

01:36and they want the Ukrainians to give it up. And if the Ukrainians don't give it up,

01:40then they're going to carry on fighting for it. That's just one point that seems very, very hard to reconcile.

01:46Another that perhaps hasn't received quite as much attention as others is the question of amnesty.

01:51In the original plan put forward by the Russians and the Americans, there was this idea of a blanket amnesty.

01:58International lawyers here in Kiev have been saying very clearly that there is no precedent for an amnesty

02:04for war crimes of this kind when they're committed by members of one state's army against another.

02:11There have at times been truth commissions where countries such as Rwanda work things out

02:16through discussing it and through the perpetrators admitting their guilt.

02:20But there's no precedent for that when it's one country against another.

02:23And these are serious atrocities that Russian soldiers are accused of in Ukraine.

02:28And a lot of people in Ukraine and internationally are absolutely not willing to agree to something

02:33that would give them amnesty.

02:35Yeah. And so in the meantime, the fighting continues.

02:37What's the latest information you have on that front?

02:42Well, the battle for Donetsk region is still ongoing, with Russian soldiers having taken control

02:48of a large part of the town of Pokrovsk, not so much of the adjacent town of Myrnograd,

02:54which forms a sort of urban area with Pokrovsk.

02:58But that's one of the key strategic towns in Donetsk region.

03:02Another is Kostantinivka, where small groups of Russian soldiers have been infiltrating the town.

03:08And Kostantinivka and Druskivka a bit further to the north are towns that have now become

03:13very, very difficult for civilians to live in because they're constantly being hit by drones.

03:18And that is becoming true also of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, the big two towns that are still

03:24100 percent Ukrainian held in Donetsk region.

03:27So more and more civilians are leaving there.

03:29The situation there is difficult, but Ukrainian soldiers and analysts don't think that the

03:34Russians are going to be able to send troops into those towns anytime soon.

03:37There are big fortifications in between where the Russian troops are at the moment and those towns.

03:42Meanwhile, the Ukrainians also started losing ground in Zaporizhia region, where the front

03:46had remained frozen for a long time.

03:48In recent weeks, the Russians have made gains there.

03:51There's a battle going on for stabilizing the situation, as the Ukrainians put it, around

03:55the town of Hulai-Pole, a medium-sized town in Zaporizhia region, where there are reports

03:59that the Russians had entered parts of that town, too.

04:02Thank you, Mr. Gulliver, Craig reporting from Key.

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