KAREN DEYOUNG, The Washington Post:

Well, they were not — although the Russians charged that they were expropriated, they're still the property of the Russian government.

What the Americans did in the Obama administration was to ban the Russians from having access to them. They told them they all had to leave in 24 hours, and they couldn't come back. And then the FBI and other agencies went in and proved to their own satisfaction that what they thought was happening there was actually happening.

The Trump administration in a meeting with — between Secretary Tillerson, Secretary of State Tillerson and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, last month said that they would drop what had been a linkage between the two, what the Trump administration had said was linkage between letting the Russians go back into the buildings and have access to them again and the Russians giving up a situation that had been going on for several years in St. Petersburg, where, in response to previous U.S. sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, the Russians had refused to allow the Americans to build a new consulate in St. Petersburg.

And so the administration had said, well, let's — you give us our consulate, and we will give you back your building. The Russians said, no, you're in the wrong and we're not. This was an illegal expropriation. And a couple days later, when Foreign Minister Lavrov was here, the Americans said, OK, we won't link them anymore.

And since then, the Americans have been working on specific proposals to give the Russians about the conditions under which they will give them back. The Russians said today in Moscow that — that Tillerson had told them that they would send them specific proposals, but they haven't gotten anything yet, but they're still confident that they're going to get their compounds back.