Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau, and with me are Susanna Monshank and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about diplomacy. Transatlantic diplomacy in Alaska, in Washington, and in Scotland.

At the end of last month, Osala von der Leyen and Donald Trump struck a trade deal.

Still not implemented, but a deal was reached, widely

criticized in the European Union as being disadvantageous to the EU. But nothing like what

happened in Alaska, which was so seen as being so severely disadvantageous to the EU, it looked

like Donald Trump was riding roughshort again over EU interest,

beholding a summit with Putin and agreeing with Putin on a procedure for peace talks that did not include a ceasefire very much to the annoyance of the Europeans.

They made it up with a summit in Washington.

That was starting from where it did to be relatively successful, though this is not

a sort of a category for us that we normally buy into because what really happens and

going to happen is much more interesting and relatively independent of whether the mood

in Washington was good or bad. So we will talk about

the way forward for Ukraine today. This is our theme. What to expect in the peace talks, whether they

will even start, what the security guarantees mean that Trump has promised. That is a theme for the second section of our podcast. For the first,

let us focus on the diplomacy itself, what happened, where we are. Jack, can you give us an

update and sort of an indication of where you see this going? Yeah, so of course, firstly at Alaska, as you rightly said, Donald Trump

moved away from the idea that he wanted an immediate ceasefire before peace negotiations and said

that negotiations as well as a peace deal would have to come before a ceasefire. There, of course,

Putin also reiterated his demands basically for what would constitute an acceptable

peace in Russia's terms. And the most notable terms of that was the transfer of the entirety

of the Dombas region. So the Dombas region is the Ukrainian oblasts of Danyetsk and Luhansk to Russia.

...