English transcript

No, I am not the pen pal, but the phone pal of Poroshenko and Arseny Yatsenyuk and now

the speaker.

I literally, without exaggeration, the last four years, I'm on the phone two to three

hours a week with those folks.

There's an overwhelming instinct in Europe to say, hey, before you guys became president,

this was owned by Russia anyway.

They had a puppet there.

What difference does it make?

What the hell's the difference?

Why are you making us engage in these sanctions?

You remember last year I was authorized to say we do the second tranche of a billion

dollars and he didn't fire his chief prosecutor.

And because I have the confidence of the president, I was there and I said, I'm not signing it.

Until you fire him, we're not signing it, man.

Get it straight.

We're not doing it.

Until you form a new government and you actually bring in someone who will move on this, we're

not playing.

Not because we're trying to play hardball.

Because we know if they give an excuse to the EU, there are at least five countries

right now that want to say, whoa, we want out, at least five right now.

And so what we put together, we're putting together now, is a basic detailed roadmap

of who goes first and who goes second.

And there's two pieces of this, folks.

One is the security guarantees that are to flow from Russia and two, the political steps

that Ukraine has to take.

And some of the steps are very difficult to take.

They've already done the energy piece.

They've done some other things.

But my point is that when you say the dumb boss is going to have a special status and

you're going to amend your constitution, it's like saying, okay, Texas is going to have

a special status that we don't want because we want Mexico to have more influence in Texas.

And we're going to pass that through the United States Congress.

So there's some really tough stuff they've got to do.

They're willing, I'm convinced they will do it.