• yesterday
Transcript
00:00In your opinion, what was achieved during that two hour long telephone conversation?
00:05Well, anytime you can have a two hour long conversation with somebody is probably going to be positive in some fashion.
00:10My experience in the White House was that the bad conversations got very short, very brief, very quickly.
00:16So if you can have that rapport and that dialogue for that length of time, my guess is that by itself is going to have some value.
00:24I'm not really sure that Trump expected this, though, Tom.
00:29I get the sense from a lot of his dialogue before he won the election, since he's come into office again,
00:37from a lot of his body language that he thought this might be easier,
00:40that the Russians might be more interested in drawing a close to hostilities faster than they actually are.
00:47So there's a sense of frustration, I think, coming from the White House.
00:50Certainly progress was made yesterday, although now we're hearing reports here in Washington this morning,
00:54as you and I talked, that the Russians have not abided by the temporary cessation on attacks on energy infrastructure,
01:00that overnight they may have attacked some Ukrainian facilities.
01:03That would be a bad sign. But generally speaking, I think there's frustration.
01:07Slow progress, slower than they wanted, and that's frustrating to them.

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