Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Battleground with me Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

With just three days to go until Donald Trump's inauguration as the 47th

President of the United States, his national security adviser, Mike Wals, has said his boss

could initiate peace negotiations with President Putin of Russia as early as next week.

We haven't set the exact framework for it yet. We are working on that, said Wolves. But I do expect a call at least in the coming days and weeks.

So that would be a step and we'll take it from there.

Wolfe also hinted at a possible time scale for getting a deal with Putin going when he went on to say, from President Trump's perspective,

he can't enter a deal if you don't have some type of relationship and dialogue with the other side.

And we will absolutely establish that in the coming months by which I suppose we mean that, you know, we'd be talking before about this.

We saw Zelensky's trying to get in there first, you know, to get his sort of personal relationship

going and then presumably Trump will then switch to Putin and try to get some sort of rapport

with him. So we've got that. But on the other hand, there's not the other noises coming from

Waltz were not particularly encouraging from the Ukraine point of view. he was asked would he pursue a just peace with adequate security guarantees?

And instead, he just repeated the Biden demand, he changed the subject and repeated that

Biden demand for Ukraine to lower its age of conscription from 25 to 18.

This is obviously going to be an ongoing theme.

He said they could generate hundreds of thousands of new soldiers.

When we hear about morale problems, when we hear about issues on the front line,

well, if the Ukrainians have asked the entire world to be all in for democracy,

we need them to be all in for democracy. We need them to be all in for democracy. He says a surge in

troop numbers would help to stabilize the battlefield before talk. So there's a slightly sort of

confusing message there, isn't it? So they seem to be saying, okay, you know, ramp up activity on the battlefield,

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