❗️"The key aspects of a settlement are not easy to agree on, even though Russia's position is clear" 

Sergey Lavrov comments on the progress of the Russia-US negotiations.

Adding, the following is a post from 'UnHerd', by Sohrab Ahmari, dated April 15 (interview or commentary article?): 

JD Vance spoke on Zelensky and Europe

“I think it’s sort of absurd for Zelensky to tell the [American] government, which is currently keeping his entire government and war effort together, that we are somehow on the side of the Russians.” That kind of rhetoric, Vance says, “is certainly not productive”.

 “I’ve also tried to apply strategic recognition that if you want to end the conflict, you have to try to understand where both the Russians and the Ukrainians see their strategic objectives. That doesn’t mean you morally support the Russian cause, or that you support the full-scale invasion, but you do have to try to understand what are their strategic red lines, in the same way that you have to try to understand what the Ukrainians are trying to get out of the conflict.”

Vance says: “We’re very frustrated — ‘we’ meaning me, the President, certainly the entire Trump administration — that European populations keep on crying out for more sensible economic and migration policies, and the leaders of Europe keep on going through these elections, and keep on offering the European peoples the opposite of what they seem to have voted for.”

Europe’s other blind spot, Vance says, is security. “The reality is — it’s blunt to say it, but it’s also true — that Europe’s entire security infrastructure, for my entire life, has been subsidised by the United States of America.” As recently as a quarter-century ago, “you could say that Europe had many vibrant militaries, at least militaries that could defend their own homelands”.

Fast-forward to today, Vance says, and “most European nations don’t have militaries that can provide for their reasonable defence”. True, “the British are an obvious exception, the French are an obvious exception, the Poles are an obvious exception. But in some ways, they’re the exceptions that prove the rule, that European leaders have radically underinvested in security, and that has to change.”

“I don’t want the Europeans to just do whatever the Americans tell them to do. I don’t think it’s in their interest, and I don’t think it’s in our interests, either.”

Cynthia... the following is a good comment found about the interview with Vance..

(So he is saying US keeping Ukraine's war effort afloat and at the same breath that they are mediators trying to end the war? Like what? How about you stop doing what you are doing and war ends itself?) - comment found