All right, Alexander, let's talk about the diplomacy that is taking place between the United

States and Russia and the United States and the Europeans and Ukraine.

And the topic that everyone is focusing on on all sides are security guarantees.

So let's talk about security guarantees, something that was brought

up in March, April, 2022 in Istanbul during the first negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, the

negotiations that eventually Boris Johnson sabotaged. But security guarantees is something

that has been discussed before, something that was almost agreed on, but now it is the major

point that all the parties are disputing. So what are your thoughts? Well, indeed. And I think

we've now had absolute clarity about the Russian position on this.

Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, first gave a long interview to Russian television about two days ago,

and then he followed up with comments that he made yesterday in a press conference during the visit to Moscow of the Foreign Minister

of Jordan. And I think he made the Russian position crystal clear. And I say this because there's

been a lot of misrepresentation of what the Russian position was. And it originates from what was

supposedly discussed by Trump and Putin in

Anchorage. And Wickhoff has given the impression at times that the Russians agreed to

the Western powers giving Ukraine Article 5 type security guarantees and there were suggestions also supposedly

originating with Trump and supposedly originating from a phone call Trump made

after the meeting with Putin that Putin had dropped Russian objections to European troop deployments

in Ukraine. In our various programs, we said that this is all a complete misunderstanding,

that the Russians absolutely would not drop their objections to European troop deployments

in Ukraine, and that the security guarantees that the Russians were thinking about

and which they probably discussed with Trump and Whitgolf and Rubio in Anchorage

...