Quality of Life lessons from Lisbon, plus the headlines from London and Oslo

Right, what do we want to talk about first? Who wants to kick things off? Russia-Ukraine is an interesting thing that's happening this week, or this weekend, when you have Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner having three hours with Vladimir Putin yesterday.

Ash, what's your observation on all this?

I saw the video of Witgoff heaping praise and generosity and wonder onto a man who has ordered the most heinous war crimes.

And given how often the right-wing, MAGA-esque Americans talk about the protection of Christianity, given that Vladimir Putin has led to the killing of more Christians than anyone else in recent time, I just think it's...

The level of hypocrisy and corruption is awful.

Those two are so clearly just... trying to create business deals for Trump and his family.

It's obvious.

I mean, the last time that they presented a peace plan to the Ukrainians, it was literally written by the Russians and then translated with chat GPT into English.

How anyone would ever see these two as...

I just find it difficult they're even called diplomats.

It doesn't fill me with hope.

And I can't see why the Ukrainians would, whilst Ukraine really wants the war to end, every time the Vykoff-Kushner actors are presenting something on behalf of the Russians, it's exactly the same as it was in 2022.

Let's deal with the root causes of the war.

We need the land.

Yeah.

I can't see it leading to

anything.

And it's an interesting attack that the Russians have taken with this one.

And this is from Putin as well yesterday that convincing US negotiators that victory in Ukraine is inevitable is easy enough when you've actually got two people who are very open to the Russian idea.

Well, when they know very little, when they have no professional backup, when they travel without the kind of support networks that any serious negotiation has to have.

I mean, I honestly wouldn't call this hapless paired diplomats or negotiators.

They've shown no evidence of being able to do either.

And as Ash says, the last big reveal... was literally a Russian written plan.

And the key, you know, these telling phrases like the root causes of conflict that must be addressed according to Putin, the root cause of the conflict is the existence of Ukraine.

So whatever he might sign up to, even if we imagine there is something that these two clans could come up with that Ukraine would sign up to, The US has said it won't allow any, it won't provide for any security guarantees.