00:00It's absolutely so fascinating how this all works. But Shane, how critical is US involvement? And can Washington actually deliver
00:09a deal when it comes to Ukraine and Russia? Because I remember when Donald Trump first came into power, he
00:15said the war would be over in 24 hours. We're now 13 weeks in and that's a lot of hours.
00:21Yeah, it's the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two. So I was reading today. I think, yeah, it
00:27is important that the US is there. And, you know, Geneva is busy at the moment, it seems as well.
00:32But I think the main lever that the US has, again, is economic and oil prices and economy in Russia.
00:40So if you look at, like, there was a lot of reports just out in the last 24 hours where
00:44the head of the biggest bank in Russia was warning that the ruble was dropping in value and was going
00:50to keep doing it.
00:51And the Kremlin came out today saying that there was a sharp drop in energy revenues. I think it was
00:5824 percent in 2025 and it was down by half.
01:00So that's, at the end, it makes it all, you know, oil and money is what makes the world go
01:05around. So I think, like, if, but I think they need to ramp up these sanctions on Russia and those
01:11need to increase heavily.
01:12Because if Russia doesn't have the economic might to continue the war, then that's obviously going to massively impact a
01:19resolution.
01:21Yeah. And I find this fascinating because I was speaking to somebody from Russia a little bit earlier and also
01:27last week.
01:27And I thought it was actually a light bulb moment for me because we look at Russia's economy and we
01:34know it's slowing and it's weak.
01:36Yeah. But it's still stronger than most European economies.
01:40Yeah, which is not hard, really. And but then that's not hard, but that's the GDP level.
01:45I would say on the ground, you've got like the war economy, but I'm talking about like if the ruble
01:50is down, then the cost of buying bread in Moscow in a local bakery.
01:54But I'm talking about the normal people. But the top GDP of the economy on paper is probably doing well.
02:01But I would say that it's squeezing the general population and real Russians.
02:07At the end of the day, I think it's the internal domestic sort of outlook on it.
02:11And I think that's what what Trump needs to do a lot more and he needs to sort of.
02:17But then the problem goes back to our first story that if if there is if there isn't a resolution
02:21in Iran and that escalates more and the oil price keeps going up,
02:25as we were I was talking about a couple of minutes ago, then that's going to be good for Russia
02:29because then it's revenues which wore down will then start to go back up again.
02:33And if Iran does get attacked or is feels that it's been under threat, then if it closes the Straits
02:41of Hamas, like 20 percent of all of the barrels go through that.
02:44So I know it sounds like a cliche and a broken record, but it's oil and that makes the world
02:49go around and it's the money that you need to follow.
02:51And that's what unfortunately determines a lot.
02:53And when you've got businessmen like that we've just mentioned running these kind of talks, then that's what we're going
02:58to look at.
02:59Yeah, it's a really good point.
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