Hi, everyone and welcome. I am joined today by Alexander McCurs and Dimitri Poliansky, the first

deputy permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations. And it's wonderful

to be able to speak with you, especially in these diplomatic, interesting times. As we've seen,

the Trump administration appears to go from Biden's

forever war to, well, seemingly seeking a peace, but a lot of us were a little bit perplexed,

I guess, by the ceasefire because the Russian position seemed to be very clear that they wanted

a political solution, not just a ceasefire, which wouldn't be used to any clear purpose.

So I wanted to hear how to get your take on this.

How are you understanding the new American approach?

Well, I think that the main idea was to get something from Ukraine, something that will be different from previous narrative that they were pushing, and they succeeded in this, because you see that all of a sudden Ukrainian officials, I don't know what were the arguments that the US side used,

but all of a sudden they started to sing a different tune.

Before that, Zelensky himself was saying that there will be no ceasefire because ceasefire is in Russian interests,

and Ukraine will never agree to this without guarantees and so on and so

forth but all of a sudden after the meeting in Jidda they started to say that yes we are in favor

of ceasefire now the ball is in Russia's field and you will see that Russia doesn't want peace

and that was all games and all these things.

For them it was kind of a maneuver with which I think they wanted to put us in a position

which wouldn't be too comfortable because previously we repeatedly explained that it's not about ceasefire.

Of course there will be a ceasefire at some point.

But before we come to this, it's a big work to be done. And it's about the root causes.

It's about the situation, what will happen during this ceasefire and this is exactly what my president

and other officials explained that they accept this proposal of president trump because the

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