00:00We heard the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio describing the talks in Florida at the weekend as being productive, but he said that tough issues still need to be resolved.
00:10I mean, what sorts of issues do you think he might be talking about?
00:13Yeah, thanks, Tom. That's the key question. And we don't know what the outcome was of the talks because there hasn't been any detail.
00:18The tough issue, I mean, there are a couple of really, really tough ones, which reflect the fact that while the United States has been negotiating with Ukraine and with European allies, Russia hasn't negotiated at all.
00:31Russia's original demands remain what they had been from the very beginning, which is that Ukraine's government be denazified, whatever the heck that means.
00:40It means regime change, that Ukraine's military has serious limits placed on it, and that Ukraine agrees to Russia occupying, I mean, gaining and occupying all of the Donbass region,
00:53even the areas that Russia does not currently occupy and has been unable to capture through its military actions since February 2022.
01:03Now, to give up territory requires a change in the Ukrainian constitution from President Zelensky's perspective.
01:11And so that issue of territory is one that the Ukrainian delegation has previously said can only be settled at the level of the president's.
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