Hello, everybody. Great to have you with us on the Great America show. The Russians continue to

bombard Ukrainian cities mercilessly, the death toll rising by the thousands each week,

and the Russian war on Ukraine has gone on now for 21 days, three weeks of unrelenting

devastation and destruction in Ukraine. Against the overwhelming Russian forces that Putin has

thrown at Ukraine, the resistance and the military have held the Russians off and show no sign

of weakening. Neither does their leader. President Vladimir Zelensky, who yesterday,

offered some reason to hope negotiations with the Russians might produce a way forward

to a truce, a ceasefire. Zelensky says he sees no opening for Ukrainian membership in NATO.

The principal issue that Putin asserts and his motivation for the invasion of Ukraine.

So we'll see what, if anything, the talks in Geneva produce overnight. Both sides are constructively

as the Ukrainians put it, negotiating a 15 item agenda that could lead to a ceasefire.

President Biden, who's now scheduled to attend next week's NATO summit in Brussels,

has escalated his rhetoric against Putin, now calling him a war criminal, and Biden approved a

tremendous shipment of arms to Ukraine, including five gunship and transport helicopters,

hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, 800 of them, in fact, and 2600 more javelin anti-tank

missiles and tens of millions of rounds of ammunition. Within that context, European leaders

are holding their breath and helping the talks can halt the war and lead to a peace agreement.

Putin can't be pleased with either his military's performance, in part, because they haven't

taken control of any of the 10 largest cities in Ukraine, and they've suffered shockingly high

casualties and loss of equipment and supplies. And we do have some signals of expected progress in

those true stocks evident in the oil market, where prices have fallen by a third from recent highs,

and in stock markets, where stocks have moved higher, obviously, because investors are hopeful

...