Dan Mitchinson: US correspondent on Trump and Putin agreeing to a short-term ceasefire on energy and infrastructure in Ukraine

Donald Trump is being forthcoming in hope of improving relations with Russia - despite speculation he'll be outmanoeuvred. 

The US President called his Russian counterpart this morning to pitch an end to hostilities with Ukraine. 

The Kremlin's agreed to pause attacks on energy infrastructure for 30 days, and to work towards a ceasefire in the Black Sea. 

US correspondent Dan Mitchinson explains what could happen going forward.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Dan Mitchison is our US correspondent with US this afternoon. Dan,
Good afternoon, Hey, good afternoon, Ryan. So no cease fire,
but I mean there at least there is something a
pause on infrastructure, energy, infrastructure strikes.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Yeah, I mean, and and like you're saying, at least
they talked and a little bit of progress was made.
It was interesting. I found that the Putin, who is
notorious for keeping world leaders waiting, was speaking at this
conference right up until the time that he was supposed
to speak with President Trump, and he didn't seem very
worried about it. And he had somebody who was moderating

(00:35):
the event kept looking at his watch and saying, shouldn't
you shouldn't you be back at the Kremlin right now
speaking with the President. And he was like, no, no,
we're not going to worry about that. But again, Trump
was on social media he said the talk ended with
understanding that they're gonna be working quickly, and you know,
he wants an end of this thing, at least, that's
what he's saying. Whether or not something will come to
fruition between him and mister Putin, that's that's yet to

(00:58):
be seen.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
And obviously Trump is saying, well, I mean he's not
exactly coming out and bashing Putent like he did with Zelensky.
I mean, how's that going down?

Speaker 2 (01:10):
No, I mean it's not. I mean I think he is.
He's walking a little bit of a tight rope. I
think that you've got more people demanding this end to
the war in Europe than you do over here. Right now,
you've heard him trying to say that that they have
they had these these troops encircled, which, as you mentioned,

(01:30):
we have not verified that over here. And you know
that the Americans could be involved in World War three,
which is just trying to scare people at this point
in time. So I think I think Putin is going
to try to drag this out as long as possible.
And what kind of deal will be made, I think
we'll depend more on unfortunately, between the US and Russia
that it will be on Ukraine, which is sad.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Can you give us a sin? I was watching Fox
News for my sins for a couple of hours yesterday.
I just so happened to be had the time, and
there's actually very little coverage of the war in Ukraine.
I mean, there are a lot bigger domestic issues going on,
whereas over here it seems to be all that we're
talking about. And I mean we're probably the furthest country
that you could ever imagine from Ukraine in terms of

(02:16):
how we're directly affected by it. Is it fear that
actually most Americans sort of don't really think about it.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Well, I think it's been put on the back burner,
especially with the presidential election that we had back in
November and with the state of the economy right now
with Elon Musk. But one of the things that I've
always loved about New Zealand, and I've always said about
everybody in that country, is I think you have a
broader scope of what is going on in the world.
And when I've talked to colleagues down there that they
say that is because we are a little bit more isolated.

(02:46):
You have fifty giant states that you're trying to track
news around right now. So we have our country a
four million plus, but we are very interested in the
outside world. So I think you get a lot more
perhaps international news and a lot more interest in that
down in your part of the world than we do
up here. A lot of the time.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Yeah, we're gonna nothing's happening here.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
That's why not true.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
That is not taking hey, with anything going on, anything
juicy in these JFK documents.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
I wish, I wish we could say that we have
something to report on. And the fact that they dragged
this out and didn't release these documents and do this
big dump until just a short time ago is saying something.
Right now, we were told that we were going to
have you know, eighty thousand documents previously unreleased information in them.
Right now, most of these that we are looking at

(03:35):
and this and historians are going to tell you this
is going to take time to go through. Most of
the files are just scans of documents. We have some
blurred or difficult to read notes. There are photographs, are
sound recordings, mostly from the sixties. There are conspiracy theories
that are in there right now, several about the Warring
Commission that looked into the assassination. But there is not

(03:56):
one shining bright light that says this is going to
put this to rest and answer all these conspiracy theories.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
Isn't that funny? And it makes you wonder why on
earth would they not have released this years ago, decades ago?

Speaker 2 (04:07):
You know, well, it's true and An interesting thing is
we sort of have Oliver Stone to thank for that,
because when the movie Born on the fourth of July
came out, that's when there was a lot more interest
in this and they said, okay, we're going to release
everything within the next twenty five years because that movie
got a lot of a lot of people talking.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
Nice one, Dan, thank you for that. Damn mitchin and
you is correspondent.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
For more from Hither Duplessy, Allen Drive.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
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