00:00Without speaking for the foreign minister, which I know you don't want to do.
00:04Which foreign minister?
00:05This one.
00:05Oh, Mr. Lavrov.
00:07Yeah, without speaking for him, did you get the sense that they're moving towards flexibility?
00:14Yeah, I'm not going to characterize our conversation other than to tell you that I expressed what the president has said publicly,
00:20which is that we feel as if we've dedicated a lot of time and energy to this matter and just not enough progress has been made.
00:28We need to see a roadmap moving forward about how this conflict can conclude.
00:32And then we shared some ideas about what that might look like.
00:35And obviously, I'll take that back to the president here as early as this evening.
00:39And hopefully, there's something that we can build on there.
00:42Secretary, a couple of months ago, you said that what was necessary to end this war would be a conversation between President Trump and President Putin.
00:53But there have now been multiple phone calls between the two of them.
00:56And yet, the war in Ukraine goes on.
00:58Does this speak to any weakness in terms of the president's ability to negotiate an end to this conflict?
01:05Or why does it persist despite them having spoken?
01:07Well, this is a war that the president inherited, right?
01:10He got elected and it had already been going on.
01:12And no progress had been made until that point towards peace of any kind.
01:15In fact, there had not even been any meetings between the Ukrainians and the Russians for quite some time.
01:20And so while there's been some humanitarian exchanges made, obviously, that's our goal here is to end this war in any role we can play.
01:29So this is not a war that started under President Trump.
01:32It's a war that wouldn't have happened had he been president.
01:34But now it's here.
01:35And we'll continue to engage and do everything we can and hopefully make progress.
01:39As I said, and I've said repeatedly, look, if we see an opportunity to make a difference in this, we're going to take it and we're going to pursue it.
01:46And that's what the president has done.
01:47And he deserves tremendous credit for having multiple phone calls with leaders from both countries and anybody else.
