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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Oskredminson, and I'm

joined today by two of Westminster's most authoritative Jameses, our very own James Heel and James

Johnson, director at J.L. Partners. Now, it looks like the future of Ukraine is being decided

in a meeting between US and Russian diplomats

in Saudi Arabia today. In response, European leaders, of course, had their own summit yesterday,

but it didn't seem like they were all singing quite from the same hymn sheet. James Heel,

could you bring us up to speed? Sure. So this is the four-hour meeting today between Rubio and Lavrov in

Saudi Arabia and not too much surprise what's come out of that thus far. There's going to have to

be an acknowledgement. America says that Russia will need to respect the fact that Ukraine is a sovereign

nation. And Russia, of course, is talking about the fact that NATO membership needs to be forever off the table.

Nothing too surprising at this stage.

The Europeans and the Ukrainians have been cut out of these talks.

Meanwhile, Zelensky's been having a press conference with Erdogan, criticising the very nature of them.

But I think that the last 24 hours have completely shown in microcosm why the situation has come to be this way.

We had this big Paris talks yesterday, Starmoff going into them saying they were going to be once a

generation, etc. And what happens? They come out of them. You have Olaf Schultz and the Germans

...