This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Batchel with John Hardy of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy.

He keeps the long war journal informed of the Ukrainian fight,

in addition to his documents that he publishes everywhere.

And we're looking at these last hours and the attack on Russian strategic bombers

across Russia using cleverness, very careful. And we're also looking at threats made or said to

have been made by the Kremlin. But negotiations, they did not break off. There was no storming out of the room.

There was a meeting in Istanbul. It did discuss POW exchange and the exchange of 12,000 bodies.

A grotesque count, but that's modern warfare. So what we're looking at here is what negotiations

where and how.

We started two weeks ago with the bright possibility of the two presidents exchanging opinions and coming to a conclusion.

John, the conversation between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin was a good beginning, but there was a sour end to it.

Something about Mr. Trump saying, it's Europe's

affair. I know, I'm not going to handle this, or something both brief and impossible to

interpret and sounding disengaged. What's happened since then from the Washington's point

of view? Are they engaged

anywhere, or is it all Europe, according to Washington? So perhaps first it'd be useful to start

with the talks today. So yeah, as you mentioned, there's a second round of talks in Istanbul

picking up after the round last May.

So coming out of that, that set of talks, the two sides agreed to kind of exchange their memoranda for what their peace framework and ceasefire framework would look like.

I mean, the Russian and Ukrainian demands are pretty similar to what they were before.

If you look at what the Russians are demanding today, it's still really draconian asks.

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