Good afternoon and welcome, everyone. My name is Chris Martin, and I'm the Interim Executive Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies here at Harvard University. We're so glad that you've joined us for tonight's session of our year-long series, Russia in Search of a New Paradigm: Conversations with Yevgenia Albats.
Today we have the privilege of hosting both Dr. Fiona Hill and Lucian Kim for the conversation, Unfair Triangle: Ukraine, US, Russia. I invite you, our audience, to participate actively in today's discussion, which is being video recorded, and we post it on the Davis Center YouTube channel. And now I'll introduce our speakers, but please note I have made their biographies brief because if I read them in full, we wouldn't have any time to have a conversation.
So Dr. Yevgenia Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author, and radio host. She received her PhD in political science from Harvard University and has since then split her time between academia and journalism. She taught political science at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, where she was the first professor to be fired for her political views. She has been editor-in-chief of the political weekly The New Times since 2007, as well as the host of Absolute Albats, which formerly ran on Echo of Moscow and is now available on her YouTube channel.
Since being forced out of Russia in 2022, Dr. Albats has taught at NYU, served as a media and democracy fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and is now a visiting fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. She is the author of four independently researched books, including "The State Within the State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia, Past, Present, and Future."
Dr. Fiona Hill is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center on the United States and Europe. She also serves on the Harvard University Board of Overseers and is the Chancellor at Durham University in the United Kingdom. Dr. Hill served as Deputy Assistant to the US President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, as well as a National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the US National Intelligence Council from 2006 to 2009.
She's the author of the bestselling memoir "There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century" and the co-author of "Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin" and "The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold," both published with Clifford Gaddy. Professor Hill is also a Davis Center alumna. She holds her master's degree in Soviet studies from the Davis Center and also has her doctorate from Harvard in history, where she was a Frank Knox Fellow. She also holds a master's degree in Russian and modern history from St. Andrews. But we prefer to talk about the Davis Center first.
And she studied at Moscow's Maurice Thorez Institute for Foreign Languages as well. Lucian Kim is a senior analyst for Ukraine at the International Crisis Group. He has reported on Ukraine and Russia since Vladimir Putin's first term in office, based in Moscow and Berlin for more than 20 years. He covered Central and Eastern Europe as a correspondent for National Public Radio, Bloomberg News, and the Christian Science Monitor. He's the recipient of the Wilson Center Fellowship in Washington, DC, and without further ado, I'll turn it over to Dr. Albats.
Thank you very much, Chris. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much to all of you for coming, and of course, thank you very much to Dr. Fiona Hill and to Lucian Kim for coming to this event. I headlined this event as Unfair Triangle. It is an allusion to the famous Russian painting, "The Unequal Marriage." A young, beautiful woman from a low-income family is forced to marry an old, bald, and ugly man, three, if not four times her age. No comparisons, just my emotions about what is going on concerning negotiations between the US and Russia and the US and Ukraine. And you can guess who is a young woman in this triangle.
We are going to discuss all these questions today, you know, these negotiations, outcomes, what to expect, how it's going to go. A lot of news, you know, there were in the last month regarding all these questions. So with Fiona Hill and with Lucian Kim, by the way, with Fiona, we were grad students at the same time at Harvard. She was a student of Richard Pipes, the historian of Russian history, and I was a student of Timothy Colton, you know, of course, who was back then the faculty director of the Davis. It was Russian Research Center, which was of course established 76 years ago.
Okay, so Lucian Kim is also the author of the recently published book, "Putin's Revenge: Why Did Russia Invade Ukraine?" I am very interested in your answer to these questions. Yeah, I know Lucian from Moscow when he covered Russia and Ukraine, and I'm eager, of course, you know, to hear his thoughts about these questions. But first we're going to show you a short interview with Aleksandr Dugin.
He's a right-wing Russian philosopher and inheritor of another Russian fascist, Ivan Ilyin. Dugin, whom American media named Putin's brain, and who is not by any means, and who had never been an advisor to Putin. It's all a myth that for reasons, you know, kept repeated in the foreign media. But you know, he's a godfather of the KGB people. And after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he got a chair at Moscow State University. Now, you know, he's a professor, he's teaching students, of course, who else, you know, of course you need a fascist to teach students. So I would, and you know, we'll see this, that's an interview of Aleksandr Dugin to CNN's Fareed Zakaria. So, and then I would like to ask both of you to comment on it. Thank you.
You write in your most recent book that "Putinism has won in the United States." What do you mean by that?
I think that now we are witnessing a huge transformation of the global system. Trump, in my opinion, is something very special. It is not just a charismatic leader, but he represents the kind of ideology that changes the balance of power in the world. So we have a different United States, not the stronghold and the headquarters of globalism, but a kind of sovereign national state, global power with traditional values as well, with a totally different agenda on the level of international affairs. And in these new conditions, I think Putin's Russia and Putin personally stop being the main enemy, the main evil guy, bad guy. So I think that Trumpists and the followers of Trump will understand much better what Russia is, who Putin is, and the motivation of our politics. So we have now, immediately we have discovered many points that are common for the United States of America, Trump's America, and Putin's Russia.
Would it be fair to say, is what you're saying, that there is now a kind of deep ideological alignment between Trump and Trumpism and Putin and Putinism, and it is against Europe? The United States and Russia in that sense are now together, and Europe, European liberalism is in some sense the new enemy.
We have many points in common with Trump's America, much more than it seems on the surface, but maybe it is too early to speak about a real alliance between the US and Russia against Europe. Because it is not against Europe, it is against globalism. But nevertheless, I think that if, for example, Trump would withdraw the United States from the war against us in Ukraine, there could be a situation that we will fight against European globalists, European liberals in Ukraine without America. So I think that Trump, sooner or later, and maybe sooner than we presume, he will discover that Putin has absolutely nothing against the United States, no reason to continue the fight. No reason. So to oppose, or no way, no field of competition that is different from China.
Putinism won in the United States of America. And second, my question, he basically says that if the United States of America stops supporting Ukraine, then Russia and the United States can fight together against European globalism. So basically, I don't even, you know, what is it, you know, the fourth, World War III, but you know, in some different configuration than it was back in 1939. So what do you say?
Well, actually I'm not all that surprised by this. I mean, it is kind of weird, but I met Dugin 25 years ago when he'd just written his book on the pivot of history. And I met him when I was doing the research with a book with Clifford Gaddy on Siberia back in the very early 2000s. I'd gone to Kazan to a conference and I was there with Michel Tournier, who's also written a book about kind of Putin and, you know, Putin's kind of revanchism, etc. And we spent an entire day, just the two of us, with Aleksandr Dugin. I mean, I'd never met him before, but I do remember that our Tatar host said, "Well, you must meet him, he's a fascist." And this is in the early 2000s. And I thought, well, what does that mean, a Russian fascist? You know, in that kind of context. Well anyway, then I met Aleksandr Dugin and I quickly realized that basically this is somebody who's kind of obsessed with basically putting out this whole, you know, as I said, these pivots of history. We spent most of our time talking about Sir Halford Mackinder, who many of you will know who that is, of course, who wrote that very famous pamphlet in 1904.
So this is really what he's taking us back to about, you know, kind of basically the pivot, the fulcrum, and it obviously being on the Eurasian landmass. And at that point there was Britain and the kind of the great sea empires. The United States was kind of part of that. And his whole thesis at the time was that through the revival of Eurasianism, that Russia would be back in its kind of rightful place in the world, and probably would cooperate with the United States as the great ocean-going power. So he actually was thinking about things like this back, you know, 25 years ago. And I mean, interestingly enough, you know, there's more of a hearkening here to 1984, not just 1904. I've had a number of students come up to me at various talks, not unfortunately with either your book or my book, Lucian, but carrying copies of 1984 that they've got from their grandparents, you know, kind of all, you know, kind of bundled up in their pockets and saying, aren't we in 1984? Well, we have Oceania, Eastasia, and, you know, kind of basically Eurasia dividing the world up among them. And that's a very Halford Mackinder, but it's also an Aleksandr Dugin thinking. So this is kind of vintage Aleksandr Dugin.
But what he's touching upon is actually a very perplexing and troubling set of circumstances, which, you know, I'm sure that Lucian will also speak to here, that indeed if the US is kind of pulling away from supporting Ukraine, that in fact does leave Europe exposed to a war that is with Russia, but where Russia is backed, not perhaps by the United States, although, you know, I think that we are seeing Trump trying to draw closer to Putin and to reset the relationship in ways that he wanted to in his first term, to be frank. But one that is actually supported by China, by North Korea, and Iran. So we're in an actually rather difficult position for Europe. And this raises a lot of questions about European security, which is why of course Europeans, you know, are trying to figure out what to do.
I mean, Dugin himself is a kind of a throwback, no offense to gentlemen with beards, but to, you know, kind of a different, you know, kind of peerage of Tolstoy, and he's always been, he's been cultivating this for the last 25 years. His beard is just longer and grayer now than when I first met him. And he did, yes, which is ironic, of course. But he did talk a lot about Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy, you know, many others in that very first odd encounter that was seared on my memory, you know, forever as well. But it's kind of vintage Dugin. I'm not surprised in the slightest that you're seeing things in this way.
You mentioned, I will, you know, I will ask you, Lucian, a question, but very quickly, you mentioned China and just recent news, Ukraine has reported capturing Chinese citizens fighting alongside Russian forces. So would you say that Chinese are ready to put boots on the ground?
I'll bring Lucian in here because he's been looking at this bottle for some time.
Well, I also, that report, what it seems like what we're looking at with these Chinese soldiers is more probably foreign troops that were recruited there. And I think what this indicates is also Russia's desperation to find troops from other countries. The fact that North Koreans are fighting there is one indication, of course, that was an offering from Kim Jong-un to get into Putin's good graces, because he saw a lot of benefits from getting North Koreans to fight.
Just added the number 3,000 soldiers or troops, North Koreans.
But we know that there are also hapless Indians and Nepalese and people from all sorts of backgrounds that are being somehow recruited, even unwittingly, into this war and find themselves on the front line. So I think one way of reading it is, I don't think this is necessarily with any Chinese state sanction, but we are looking at a situation where Russia is really desperate to find the manpower.
But so you don't think that these Chinese, you know, in any way that China sent, you know, this, you know, a battalion, say, or something like that. No, you don't think that, you're just somebody, some Chinese, you know, across the border on the Amur River and just went all the way, got to Ukraine.
Well, we know that there have been recruitment efforts, right.
That we don't know, but I mean in other places, for example, in India. So I don't, I don't know, I don't, I, you know, this.
China is a surveillance state, you know, there are cameras in each and every lavatory. So, you know, I just cannot imagine how it's possible to recruit Chinese soldiers. But there, without knowledge of the Russian, there.
There are lots of Chinese, well, we have to find out, first of all, were they actually soldiers or are they being trained in Russia? Right? So they're members of the Chinese military. That's an open question and perhaps not, perhaps as likely as Lucian is saying, but I think Lucian is absolutely right that Russia is recruiting everywhere. Lots of Central Asians, particularly those with dual nationality and passports, as you mentioned, in India without some, without. Yeah, and the question is whether these are Chinese who were, you know, working in the Russian Far East or, you know, elsewhere in Russia that have been recruited.
If you talk to Paul Whelan, you know, basically the American who was kept, you know, hostage in Russia after being seized, he'll tell you all kinds of stories of people he met in jail. And I hope he'll, you know, at some point come, you should probably have him come and speak. It's actually fascinating insights into the way that recruitment was taking place for the front, people being swept up, being arrested, ending up in Russian detention, then being sent to the front, you know, for example, of all kinds of different backgrounds and nationalities and citizenship status. I think what's going to be the most important point is how China responds to this and how the Chinese state deals with this in their bilateral relationships with Ukraine. And also, you know, how they deal with this publicly. That might tell us a lot because as I said, the, I mean, the real, you know, kind of question is now if the United States is not just switching sides, but is moving out of the conflict, because China, North Korea, and Iran have seen this as a proxy war against the United States, and they've been very open in telling the Ukrainians this, it's not about you, it's really about our relationships with the United States. How do they then, you know, react to the US shift? Do they continue to support Russia in its war against Ukraine? Because this is now a European war very clearly, and one about the future of Europe and European security.
Judging by the latest piece published in the New York Times, this huge investigation about the war in Ukraine. You know, we found out that there was a headquarters, joint headquarters, Ukrainian and Americans in Germany. And that apparently, yes, we do, we did know that Americans were instrumental in providing intelligence for Ukrainian, you know, missiles and for their attacks. But now, you know, from judging from this investigation, you know, especially at the first part of the war, Americans were instrumental in helping Ukraine. To some extent, it is a war between, a proxy war between Russia and the United States. Not, what would you say? Lucian?
Well, it has certain, I mean, you bring up a good point. I mean, there are certain characteristics, and this is of course what the official Russian narrative has been from the beginning. That this, they used their favorite phrase, the collective West, that we were fighting the collective West. And so certainly reports that come out showing the depth of the US involvement would seem to confirm that. On the same, at the same level as someone who's spent a lot of time in Ukraine in the last year, I would say there's also quite a lot of frus-, there's been such a high level of frustration with the Americans. So even though that there was this joint, there was a joint staff in Germany doing, you know, it seems like its main purpose was to figure out what were the proper weapons that should be supplied to the Ukrainians. At the same time, there was such a deep level of frustration with the Biden administration and the speed with which weapons were being delivered. That what was interesting, I was just in Ukraine in February and, you know, I didn't hear the name Joe Biden one single time. It's not like I felt like even anybody really was missing the Biden administration, which is maybe surprising. And I heard those signals already last summer. There was the naive hope, I think you can say naive hope, that people thought Trump, despite his record already in Ukraine and during his first term there, that he would somehow be able to rattle up the situation enough that something, something better would, there would be a better outcome than if the war simply continued in its present direction. Of course, I think now just in the last couple of weeks, I think the Ukrainians have been disabused of those illusions.
Yeah, but you know, did you see, you know, I traveled also, you know, through Ukraine in March of 2023. I never met, you know, there were a lot of Americans, of course, in Kyiv, but nowhere in the west or in the south where I was, you know, I didn't see any, I didn't see any Americans. But still, you know, I keep asking myself if this war was so essential for the United, so substantial, even for the United States.
It wasn't though. That's the whole point.
But they, why did you allow yourself to lose the war?
Who, who allowed themselves to lose the war?
Or Lucian or the audience? You mean Americans?
No, I'm so sorry. Yeah, I mean, you know, the, you know, the government of the United States of America, everybody was saying, you know, everything was too little, too late. Judging by this piece in the New York Times with, you know, long, long investigation, it turned out that there was the possibility to finish this war in the summer of 2023.
Well, I think you've just put your finger on it about the, well, there's a big difference between what military assistance was trying to accomplish, which is to help Ukraine defend itself, potentially turn the tide, and a political sense. Getting back to what Lucian has just said about, you know, the disappearance of Joe Biden, that it wasn't an existential conflict. I mean, if you think about it right from the very beginning, President Biden made it very clear that his number one goal was to avoid World War III, nuclear Armageddon, World War III, and Trump's been talking about the same thing defined as a nuclear exchange. And if your number one goal was to kind of basically avoid a nuclear war with Russia, that's not the same as actually, you know, kind of basically prosecuting a war that would allow Ukraine to win.
I mean, I've been, you know, many of you have all been in the same, you know, position. If you were doing a kind of a decision tree and your number one, you know, goal was avoiding nuclear war at all costs, then all the other things about Ukraine come much lower down. But for military people who are set to a task, which is about, you know, how do you help Ukraine defend itself, you know, they're then of course they're going to be setting up a very different set of decision trees to figure out, as Lucian pointed out, vis-à-vis rather than with boots on the ground, how are they going to help Ukraine figure out what kind of weapons systems it wants? But all the time there's been a constraint on, you know, basically going on the offensive. And you remember that General Milley, you know, made it very clear, what was it now, a year and a half or so ago, maybe two years ago, that he thought that the Ukrainians should dig in and it should basically be defending the line, and that that would be the, you know, the line of contact as it was then, and really kind of lean into that defensive war. But at the time, Ukrainians didn't want to do that because that would have meant giving up the opportunity of retaking back Ukrainian territory. So there's always been these kind of competing things going on at the same time with different, you know, levels of engagement, different viewpoints, and different goals established.
Now, of course, Ukrainians always wanted to win the war, and that's why there was, that's been always very explicit for them, because it is existential for them. And that's kind of basically what you've been trying to cover the whole time, Lucian, but it's not been existential for the United States. And again, that gets to the complexity of what China and North Korea and Iran and others have thought that they were doing, you know, around the war, or what Europe was doing. A lot of Europeans were actually of the view, well, the United States has decided to step in, so maybe we don't. And now an awful lot of Europeans, not the UK, it has to be said, and the Poles and Balts and many others, are now realizing this is actually existential for them now too.
Okay, you know, setting one of our common friend, you know, Americans did want Ukrainians to win, but not too fast.
But nobody defined what win was. I mean, Lucian, you could probably talk to this, because you tried to talk about this in the book as well.
Well, people have been saying that they want, you know, Ukraine to win, but not too fast for some people.
So to bleed, to bleed Russia. So to bleed the Russian economy, to exhaust it. So to destroy, you know, Putin, you know, at the expense of.
Some people have said that, the UK, but that wasn't necessarily the Biden administration's policy.
Well, and it seems, I mean, even I've, I heard that frustration last summer already in Ukraine, because for a long time you were hearing from Russians, oh, those Americans, they're ready to fight, you know, us, until the last Ukrainian. But then I started hearing that same thing from Ukrainians, that, you know, the Americans wanna fight, want us to fight the Russians to the last Ukrainian. So I think again, it was that level, level of frustration and the inability to understand what the, what the Americans actually actually wanted. Because simply, you know, to keep, at some point there was a lot of Ukrainians had the feeling that they were simply being sustained, as opposed to being given the equipment and the weaponry to actually succeed and to actually, to actually win.
Thank you. Russian sources report that the first round of talks between the United States and Russia, which happened, you know, in Saudi Arabia, lasted 12 hours. The second round lasted for nine hours. So what did they discuss that took it that long? 12 hours and nine hours. Can you, but you, you probably, you know, Fiona, you took part in many negotiations including, you know, these semi-secretive negotiations in Geneva, etc. What could they discuss for 12 hours? Do you think that they were discussing, you know, really Ukraine, or there was something else like, you know, the discussions between Churchill and Stalin, you know, in 1944?
Look, you've, you've got, I've, I mean, I've talked about this in other settings. You've also got to think that the people around Trump, most of them who were going to these negotiations or discussions, have never met with Russians before. I mean, you've got Witkoff, who's a real estate, maybe real estate deals take 12 hours or nine hours. I don't know, I've never been in a New York real estate deal. I'm sure they take a lot of time getting to know the person. I mean, they don't know anything about Russia or Russians or even, you know, basically the, you know, the terms of what Russia is putting on the table. Now, we do know that a lot of these meetings were taking part in English, which is different, because previously you could have said, well, they have to be translated, you know, so that takes up a lot of time. I don't think you can say that this time around, because people like Ushakov and Lavrov and Kirill Dmitriev, I mean, their English is impeccable. It's better than mine, you know, I mean, not, not, not joking here. I mean, these are, I mean, amazing, you know, diplomats, Ushakov and Lavrov, who've just been around the block over and over again.
But on the US side, although you've got, still got people that, you know, I and others, you know, worked with, graduates of the, you know, the UREKA program who are still there in the State Department and in the intelligence services prepared materials, they're not there with them. So, I mean, and maybe they haven't even bothered to read their materials. So they're just kind of getting to know them and getting to know the situation. And we know from some of the statements, and you can speak to this as well, that the statements that were made by the Russians, just rehashing the whole kind of history of US-Russian interaction over the last several years. They're just kind of picking up where they, you know, left off, rehashing, you know, the same things, the bilateral irritants, the terms that we used. I mean, basically they're kind of going back to the basics and kind of starting again. So I'm not surprised it would take 12 hours or nine hours.
It's my understanding that those talks were on a pretty technical level. And that's why, what's the talks that were really important were Steve Witkoff's two meetings with Putin, which we, I think both of them lasted at least three hours.
Yeah, probably Putin gave him a lecture on Russian and Ukrainian history in which.
And he was ready to, he was ready to repeat that in his interview with Tucker Carlson.
Yeah, and I mean, remember how long Putin talked to Tucker Carlson in the same way. And Tucker Carlson kept saying, is this relevant, Mr. President? And Putin said, yes, of course it is. And then he went on again. So I can just imagine, just as Lucian says, that this was a lot of being talked at. And then the question is, you know, what did they take from that? And then the technical issues do take some time to thrash out.
I tend to think though that the Steve Witkoff meetings were maybe more flattery, because in the Tucker Carlson interview, Steve Witkoff claims that he was not manipulated by Putin. And then he turns around and the next second he's saying that Putin presented him with a beautiful portrait of Donald Trump, which he took back to the White House. So, you know, the inability to understand that you've just contradicted what you just said is rather astounding.
Right, there were reports that agreement was reached on a specific ceasefire, such as those concerning energy infrastructure. However, in the last two weeks, Russian forces attacked the Ukrainian city Sumy, 70 people, 70 people, seven zero people killed and wounded. Kyiv, four people killed, including a dad and his son. Kryvyi Rih, a missile hit the children's playground, nine children aged three to 17 killed. Finally, while visiting the new submarine in Severodvinsk on the bank of, you know, that's the city, closed city on the bank of the White Sea, Putin said, "We will finish off Ukraine." So what kind of ceasefire or peace negotiations are there? You know?
But so you, you want to say that there is no really any negotiations, but, you know, people say that President Trump is, you know, does want to get a peace deal. And to be honest with you, Fiona, I did think that if anybody, Trump was capable of doing this because he's as ethical as Putin is, but apparently, you know, I just really don't understand what it's all about. Then what did they talk about 12 hours and the 9 hours?
I think it's actually, and Lucian, let me just jump in here as well. I think it's like, it's fairly straightforward. Trump wants a ceasefire. He wants to be able to say that he's brought a peace deal, but neither Putin nor Zelensky asked him to negotiate or to mediate. And as the rest of the world has thought that the US was a party to the conflict. You know, it's also kind of a bit complicated here, you know, to mediate. Trump is always talking about, you know, the Nobel Peace Prize, as we know. And Teddy Roosevelt, and many of the people here in this room know about the Portsmouth Peace Treaty. It's just up the road. And after the Russo-Japanese War, in that case, Teddy Roosevelt was asked to mediate both Russia and Japan. And the United States was a neutral party back in the 1900s. It had no real beef with either Russia or Japan. And this was a real negotiation. The people of Portsmouth, New Hampshire were basically part of this, it was a great act of public diplomacy. It was in the Wentworth Hotel, it was in a kind of a neutral space, and they thrashed it out basically with a bit of mediation. That's not what's happening here.
Trump is trying to force basically a peace deal. And it now seems to be on Russia's terms, but it's really, you know, from the point of view that he has all the leverage, as he told Zelensky, all the cards when it comes to Ukraine, because from his view, and look, we all heard what he said in the Oval Office, he made it very clear that he thinks that America made Zelensky a tough guy. That yes, America has been basically making this war feasible, and this is what news says can we speak to for Ukraine. And therefore, if he decides to withhold US arms and intelligence, he can force Ukraine to basically, at least on its part, hold to a ceasefire. But he never obviously got any agreement from Putin at all. He got a portrait, he apparently got prayers, and he got, you know, kind of, you know, all kinds of opportunities to have a chat to Putin as he kind of wanted. And he's now getting a whole host of discussions about the reset of the US-Russian relationship, which is something that he wants.
But his ability to actually have a genuine ceasefire that's two-sided, not just one-sided, and a peace deal remains elusive because for Putin, this is all about the US-Russian relationship. And Putin's goals for Ukraine, which Lucian, you know, lays out pretty clearly in his book, have not changed at all. So Trump, you know, can't do anything and basically provide for Putin anything that he particularly wants in this moment.
And so to just to follow up on that, so what we're seeing is actually a decoupling of bilateral relations between Russia and the United States on one hand and the Ukraine war and, as Yevgenia. So, you know, what were they talking about? I think what they were also talking about, especially Kirill Dmitriev when he was in Washington last week, was about deals. This is what we can do together. And this is something that again also came up in, in the Tucker Carlson-Witkoff interview, wouldn't it? Just think of all the great things we could do together in outer space and AI.
Look, the space issues are real because, I mean, look, NASA and, you know, the Russian Space Agency.
Yeah, it's Mars. Exactly. It's just Lucian saying here. What was also interesting, one of the things that Kirill Dmitriev did announce, someone after read, he said he was going to be talking to Elon Musk. So there's a Musk factor in all of this as well. And he said that they were going to talk about space flight, including to Mars. And also, interestingly, and I, you know, about the whole issue of atomic energy and Rosatom was going to be, you know, part of these discussions as well. The US-Russian space cooperation was actually one of the great bright spots of, you know, the whole kind of period after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If you think about for Elon Musk, who's also been having his own conversations with Putin and others, this is probably a childhood dream come true. What's the country that created, you know, the first space rocket? It's Russia. It was thought of by, you know, a credible autodidact, fairly quirky guy, you know, a little bit like Elon Musk himself, Korolev, you know, out there, you know, and Kluge, in the middle of nowhere in the 1880s and 1890s. It's an amazing story, you know, and if you are a space wonk, I mean, I kind of love some of these stories as well. What a dream come true to be able to work with the, you know, the Russian space sector. First man in space, first dog in space, first woman in space, you know, I mean, and then first possibility of getting to Mars. It's all about this at the moment. And I think, you know, the sky is the limit is basically, or Mars is the limit of some of these discussions. It's about all kinds of other things, but not what's happening on terra firma in Ukraine.
Space industry in Russia is basically in ruins.
Russia failed time and again.
But this is an opportunity, you know, to put this on another path. And for somebody like Musk, this is a, I mean, I honestly genuinely think this is a dream. I mean, you know, come true.
And I think, so going forward, I really, I do think that we will see a wider separation and kind of a certain dissonance between what's happening in US-Russian bilateral relations and what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. And they will no longer be sort of mutually contradictory. They will just be two different things in as far as the Trump administration sees it.
And Trump has seen it like that from the very beginning, honestly. I mean, he keeps saying it over and over again and people don't necessarily listen to him. This has nothing, got to, not got anything to do with me or Ukraine, nothing to do with me at all. In the very first conversation that he had with Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, she said something to him, what are you gonna do with Ukraine? And he said, what do you mean, Angela? What am I gonna do with Ukraine? What are you gonna do about Ukraine? What's it got to do with me? That was a bummer. And you know, all those kind of people, you know, beforehand, I've nothing to do with Ukraine. So he has been pretty consistent. And now he'd really like nothing to do with Ukraine. He would like to have this ceasefire and hand it off.
Fiona, you advised the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the President of France on their strategy with respect to Putin. And you know, especially as far as I understand, you know, if Russia will start the war against Ukraine. So you does have money, but it doesn't have army. United Kingdom does have army, but to certain extent, at least what, what, you know, some specialists who may ask told me that, that United Kingdom does, but you know, of course know better. Will you expect deployment of British or French as, or both peacekeeping or both as peacekeeping forces in Ukraine? And do you think that Europe, given the position of the president of the United States, will be able to help Ukrainians to, you know, to end this war at least?
Well, I think these are all complicated and also very different questions because I mean, we're so far from a peace plan or kind of basically a peace process. I mean, these negotiations, I think as we've all, you know, kind of agreed, are much more about US-Russia at this point than they are about Ukraine. And even, you know, in the case of a ceasefire, look what's just happened in Gaza. I mean, the ceasefire seems to have vanished, you know, entirely. All of these things are pretty tenuous. In any case, we know that for many conflicts we think about the Balkans, you know, for example, I mean, it took a long time, you know, before we really were, were able to get something in motion there. So, you know, there's a possibility for Europe to help Ukraine hold the line, you know, and deny Putin the ability to move further forward. But that, you know, is kind of a different set of discussions.
But we're way away from peacekeeping. I think what we, what you heard Kier Starmer and Macron are saying that if there was really genuinely a peace deal, and if Trump was able miraculously 24 hours, if he was really correct that Putin had promised him all kinds of things to happen, then they would be prepared to do something basically to tend to signal this is about Europe as well, and it's France and the UK, because France and the UK have the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, the ARRC, which is kind of part of this sort of NATO reaction, but it's kind of done through a bilateral arrangement between France and the UK. But these allied reaction corps before were meant for more expeditionary activities, which is, you know, a bit different from what we would be, you know, dealing with on the ground in Ukraine.
But Europe is now talking very seriously about the whole future of European security. The war in Ukraine is seen as like World War I, World War II, a massively pivotal event. It is the largest land war in Europe since World War II. That changes everything. And if the United States is doing a, you know, what it has often done in times of history, which is pulling out again after 80 years of being the most consequential military power in Europe and is pulling itself out, that means that Europe has to start thinking very seriously about the future. And the war in Ukraine becomes that pivotal moment. And what they do with Ukraine becomes very important as well.
And of course, Ukrainians have put 800,000 men in the field and they've also, you know, turned around their whole defense industrial, they're producing drones themselves, they're producing armaments themselves. Ukraine is a completely different place than it was before. Not just in terms of losses of territory and losses of, of population, but in terms of the whole way it thinks about defense, more like Finland. And Finland was after World War II. So we're seeing a massive change here. So it's, in a way we're kind of distracted by this whole talk of ceasefire, peace negotiations, and sending in peacekeepers when really something bigger and more fundamental is taking place. I don't know what you would, you know, say from your time in Ukraine as well. I think there's definitely a dramatic shift here that's going on within Europe and how Europeans think about their defense.
How long will it take for Europeans to build an army, you know, people, you know, once again, you know, I'm talking, you know, I spoke, I know nothing about that. You know, I spoke to some specialists and they say that there are still, you know, each country produce Jeeps and, you know, there is no coordination. And even though we think about European Union, you know, you know Spain, she, you know, her contributions 1.2% GDP, she couldn't care less. And you know, anyway, so are the Europe, do you expect European Union really to stand up and to get, how long will it take to prepare?
Although European Union isn't going to do that, because that's not the role of the European Union, and it's the European pillar of NATO.
that we're really talking about. And then other bilateral relationships. And I mean, I wanna bring, you know, Lucian in, you know, and this is all about how it looks in the Ukrainian perspective, but there's actually a lot more capacity in Europe than we're giving it credit for. There's also all kinds of arrangements. There's something called the Joint Expeditionary Force, which is all the Nordic, you know, countries and the Baltic countries, all of which spend way more than 2% of GDP. And it's not about the percentage of GDP, it's what they actually do. And you know what they can, you know, actually what the capacity they have, Finland, which is a country of 5.5 million people has a standing army of 125,000 and can pull up even more. Look, Ukraine overnight created a massive army because it had to, out of necessity, if countries have to mobilize, they will do it in the face of a threat. But the big question is, you know, what happens in the future of Ukraine, getting back to, you know, what we're talking about and what Europeans see as their future long-term threat. And there's all kinds of threats that don't require having hundreds of thousands of people in the field. You've just probably been reading in the press about these sensors washing up on shore from, you know, Russian ships that were clearly meant to be, you know, basically picking up data from the seabed about undersea cables and pipelines. For the UK, one pipeline from Norway carries 70% of UK's gas. I mean, you know, we talked about what happened with Nord Stream.
And there were Russian submarines just recently, right?
Exactly. I mean, so there's critical national infrastructure that's at risk. There's, you know, GPS blocking and there's all kinds of things that could happen. There's poisonings and assassinations and acts of sabotage. There's all kinds of things happening in Europe that have to be addressed. And then there's what's happening on the ground, Ukraine, and I'll push back over there to what's happening on the ground in Ukraine, because that has to be factored in about where the state of players in Ukraine right now, 'cause what is it that Europeans could do, you know, the most help Ukraine at this point.
Right? I mean, I don't think it's what can the European Union do? I agree with Fiona. I mean, I think we are looking at what they're calling coalition of the willing that can be much broader than the European Union. And certainly a country like Turkey could play a key role in a coalition of the willing. So, I mean, inside Ukraine...
But a certain, you think that Erdogan will go against Putin?
Well, look, because I mean they're limiting access to the Black Sea as they are supposed to do with the Montreux Convention.
In times of war also, the Black Sea fleet of the Russians is not being replenished by ships coming from the Baltic, and who provided Ukraine with drones in the first instance?
Anyway, back to Lucian again, but just to be clear that, you know, Turkey is doing various things.
Turkey is walking a very fine line, a very fine line also because of its energy dependence on Russia, and its quite large bilateral trade. So I think in Ukraine there is a lot of, I mean, the only hope that the Ukrainians have now is on the Europeans somehow getting their act together. But again, I mean, this, you asked, you know, how long is it gonna take to create a European army? How long is it going to take to have an integrated Ukrainian defense, or I'm sorry, excuse me, a European defense industry that's also capable of supplying the Ukrainians? And you know, for the moment it's still only the United States that can sort of pull up, pull together enough resources to supply the Ukrainians. So it's often, I think when we're talking about UK, what the Europeans can do, we're talking about something that's happening in the midterm or longer term. And for the Ukrainians, this could become an issue of this summer when the last USAID runs out.
Yeah, can I just add onto this, just to make it very clear to people, you're not creating a European army. What you're thinking about is how existing European armies come together, because the United States has been the glue there in terms of leadership, you know, within NATO, the Supreme Allied Commander, General Cavoli, who you know, recently testified and actually made it clear Ukraine's in better shape than, you know, people have been giving it credit for. But it's that kind of leadership. And then it's the equipment, as Lucian talked about, that's pretty critical. The Europeans probably could fill in for US equipment, but over time, 'cause they need a bridging capacity, there's also the intelligence, but you know, there's intelligence collected by Europeans as well. It's just that the United States is too scale all the time. But look, if the US pulls out of Europe, Finnish troops don't pull out of Europe, Turkish troops don't pull out of Turkey, British troops don't pull out of Britain. You see what I'm saying here? These are voluntary contributions of those national armies to a larger European endeavor. There is a European army because there are European armies. It just depends on how they configure themselves and how they organize themselves. They can use basically the frameworks of NATO, the NATO policy plans don't disappear. They've already been training and operating. And there are sub-NATO entities like the Joint Expeditionary Force that has a headquarters in Britain. And it's again, like I said before, includes all of the Scandinavian and the Baltic countries. They could add on Poland to this. There are relationships between the UK and France we mentioned before, Germany and France, and Germany and the UK, and you know, there's all kinds of other bilateral and regional relationships that could come into play. It's just a question of time. And then the question is, what are you doing? Are you helping bolster Ukraine or are you kind of defending your own territory against Russia or what other kinds of operations you conducting? And all of that is being discussed. And it's, as you said though, they're having to discuss it in real time very fast because within the hundred days of Trump, everything has been turned on its head.
Europe led with two Germans, right? For 40 years. Moldova has a secession region for almost 30 years. Germany reunited and Russia is lacking resources to support Transnistria. Would you envision two Ukraines, pro-European West and pro-Russian East, as an outcome of the ceasefire, whatever?
I think that's the most likely outcome of any ceasefire. I mean, the Trump administration has made it clear that they expect Ukraine to cede territory. So the idea that somehow in the foreseeable future Crimea or Donetsk would end up in Ukrainian hands is almost hard to imagine. So I think-
What about Mariupol, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson region?
Well, I mean, including those areas, Ukraine doesn't have the military force to reconquer them. But where I think it's the difference with, I mean, you talked about East and West Germany, of course East Germany was still a country, right? And the problem is that these areas that we're talking about are now, you know, integrated into the Russian constitution and into the Russian state. And how are you ever going to, you know, pry them back out is hard to imagine. They certainly, it's even not really comparable so much to the Baltic states. Because the Baltic states had their own languages and they're very distinct identities. Whereas these regions are depopulated to a large extent and ravaged by war and are being populated by people coming from Russia. So I think even the whole character of a lot of those regions is changing,
Which is obviously a deliberate policy on the part of Putin.
That's exactly what the Soviets did after the war with the Baltic nations.
They sent half of the population to Siberia and they brought Russians to settle there.
But you'd already, I mean, on the language, I mean, so many people are making the argument that these regions bond with Russia because they're predominantly Russian-speaking. I mean, all of us know here that language is not the only bearer of identity. We're all speaking English, but I don't think any of you guys think you're English. Right? Even I don't think I'm English. So that's a kind of another kind of question.
Don't tell an Irishman that he's English.
That's because that's what I'm saying. Because I mean, part of my heritage is Irish and Scots and Welsh, and you know, so I'm confused like most people, you know. So, but so this is kind of, you know, a problem though is basically that the Russian state is actually saying if you speak Russian, you are a Russian. And the idea of people identifying with Ukraine and the Ukrainian language in Russia, you know, has come under attack. Even in the most recent census, you saw the number of people self-identifying as Ukrainian, you know, really massively reduced from 2000, you know, back in 2000 because it was like 11 million, I think it was people who identified as Ukrainian might have had Ukrainski, you know, in the passport. But you know, that's kind of been diminished. But that's what happens over time. If you went around in England and asked everybody with a Scottish last name if they thought they were Scottish, they would probably say not. Or even with an Irish last name. You know, that's over time those identities, you know, tend to fade. And that's what basically Putin is banking on, that there will be no way for Ukraine later to, you know, try to take back Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and everything else as well. Look, even reincorporating the eastern parts of Germany in Germany has proven difficult. Look at the voting patterns for Alternative for Deutschland. And I was in Germany two years ago doing and producing, lived there for many years doing a lot of interviews of people in what was formerly East Germany. And they said they didn't feel part of the new Germany, 'cause they did have their own states. And I mean, you can, you know, you can speak to that. The experience that you had being in Germany for so long, that wasn't an easy transition. So even miraculously if those areas came back, it wouldn't be that easy.
And if I just wanna add one point to that is these regions that we're talking about, these four regions plus Crimea, that was never the goal. I mean, incorporating them into Russia was never Putin's goal.
He said on the eve of the full-scale invasion, we have no plans to occupy any Ukrainian territory. And I don't think he was lying. I think his idea was we are going to have a shock and awe invasion, we'll decapitate the Ukrainian government and we will install a puppet sympathetic regime that will not require us to occupy these regions. So of course everything has gone completely differently than what Putin wanted. And he's almost had to incorporate these regions into Russia because no one else is controlling them. But that's not, he's not going to be happy. I mean, Steve Witkoff also said it in his interview with Tucker Carlson that he's, that, you know, well maybe they should get these regions because they had these fake referenda. Of course that's not what it's about. Putin is not going to rest until Ukraine is subordinated to the Kremlin. And so, you know, moving some borders around, this is not what this conflict is about.
You know, the Russian army was supposed to occupy Odessa in August 2022. That was the initial plan. So it wasn't just, you know, to occupy Kyiv and retract and just topple the government and retract. But you know, obviously there was a more extensive plan because for some reasons Russians do want a port of Odessa. And so I'm no longer sure that, you know, that Putin had, you know, this short-term goal to be honest with you, you know, there were several plans. And anyway, I would just say...
To that though, Genia, I think Putin was always willing to just take what he could get.
You know, so you can have different stages of a plan. You know, you might not have enough military to occupy it. But you know, over time, and I know we've got colleagues from Georgia here, we talk about creeping occupation, reoccupation of Georgia. And we think, you know, scaling that up is really kind of part of the goal and what has happened in Georgia, you know, with a kind of complete reversal of Georgia's position and diluting of its, you know, identity again, return of Russian language. We were talking about this a little bit earlier today. You know, that would be, you know, kind of another possibility of Ukraine if you could pull that off, Odessa. Absolutely, I mean, I worried actually when I heard Witkoff talking about ports, I thought, God, were they talking about Odessa? You know, because that was, if you look back to 2014, in fact when, you know, basically it was all of these insurgent movements being encouraged in Donetsk and Luhansk. And you remember also in Odessa there was this effort, the whole idea of Novorossiya of going back to the period of, you know, Catherine the Great's acquisitions, and that's what Putin was trying to tell Tucker Carlson, look, anything that we ever touched in the past, everything that we ever had a treaty of, everything that we ever occupied, and giving him the letters from Bohdan Khmelnytsky, you know, in 1647 and 1648. You see, you see this all kind of belongs to us. Anything we had before, you know, is up for grabs. I think that, you know, still as Lucian is suggesting, there's still all of those kind of ideas there. They haven't gone away and he'll take what he can get in whatever way he can.
Peace deal, the United States proposed a plan which presupposes a huge investment of the United States in Ukraine. However, you know, I spoke with some people who were involved with those plans, both in Washington and Kyiv, and I asked them about, you know, the deal, and the answer was that in order to get rare earth elements worth 500 billion US dollars, the United States will have to invest more than a trillion dollars. So, you know, one person told me that it would probably be $1.5 trillion, assuming that, you know, some money will get lost in the middle. But some other people, they say that that deal, you know, can serve as a sort of a security guarantee to Ukraine if the US takes control over major ports in Ukraine and gas pipelines, Putin will think twice before bombing Ukraine. So what do you think about that? So two sides of this story that, you know, it's not about really, you know, ports or pipeline or Ukrainian resources. So what do you think about that?
Well, I think it's important to remember the pre-history of this so-called minerals deal that when the election campaign in the US was still in full swing, Volodymyr Zelensky actually proposed some kind of minerals deal in what he called a victory plan, which he presented here in the United States. He presented it to the Biden administration, but the part about the minerals deal seemed especially aimed also at Donald Trump, this offering a very transactional deal. And so what I find rather astounding is almost within a week or so of taking office, the Treasury Secretary traveled to Kyiv with this deal, which seemed at that point pretty half-baked and really was presented to the Ukrainians as an ultimatum. And of course we know that it's now gone through several iterations. It was supposed to be signed on February 28th when Zelensky had his unfortunate meeting in the Oval Office and it has since then been revised. And what we're hearing is that of course it's much more now than rare earths, that it includes all of Ukraine's natural resources.
And, you know, and ports, that's the most important.
And it's an extremely expansive agreement that involves a fund that would be controlled by the United States.
Right, but don't you think that it can be on some sort of a Marshall Plan the way, you know, the United States created this fund back then to rebuild Germany and, you know, Europe in general?
No, because I think exactly the point that your contacts were saying about the initial investment, you need to attract private American business to Ukraine if you wanna develop those resources, and I have a hard time imagining any American companies investing so much money in a country with such an uncertain future. So I don't see how this would really give Ukraine any security guarantees in a concrete way.
No, look, I agree, but I think there's also some other things going on as well. I mean, in all these cases it's never just black and white, and there's always all kinds of other, you know, hidden motivations in part. I mean, Trump is the master of the art of the deal, and he wants to show that he's got a good deal out of, you know, support for Ukraine. So, you know, what's the big issue of the moment? It's rare earths and, you know, raw materials and minerals for the 21st century economy. And, you know, everybody seems to be in the business of expanding their territory for those purposes. I mean, Putin himself, remember, was part of the justification for invading Ukraine. I mean, he had some of his own ministers sitting there talking about all of the abundance that Russia was going to acquire from the same property set of minerals and, you know, raw materials and rare earths and agricultural products. You know, at one point, I mean, that was a feature just not so long ago that I think you were, you know, kind of covered in some of your media and certainly in your book. There's also the fact that Kirill Dmitriev and others have told Trump that the US has lost out on all kinds of business opportunities through sanctions and this rupture in relations. And, you know, that figure of 500 billion and before 300 billion has come from Dmitriev saying this is the opportunity lost, you know, to the United States. I mean, there was never that level of investment or of trade between the US and Russia, but it's that idea, you've lost something. And Trump's always exaggerating the amount of money that they've been ripped off about. And so he wants to kind of show that the US is being compensated. There was a kind of a shock and awe for his base that he was hoping was gonna happen in the Oval Office and, you know, basically Zelensky didn't play along. And the other thing is that Trump's all about making deals with him personally. And basically, as you recall, he told Zelensky that any deal that had been made with Obama or Biden or anybody else in previous US administrations with Ukraine was null and void because nobody respected all these previous other idiot presidents, only people who respected him, that's exactly what he said, remember. And that this deal had to be with him. So this kind of personal gifting, who sort of like a dowry, getting back to the image we started off with of the young lady having to produce her dowry chest and her fine linens, and you know, is that kind of suitable? I mean honestly, I've been thinking the same image that he's not gonna marry Zelensky unless he's got a fine dowry to go with it. If he doesn't like the dowry, he's gonna, you know, send it back again. And even the whole way it was talked about, that sort of transactional, where kind of having a marriage of convenience, you and me, nothing else before, you know, cancer, but none of this, you know, is equivalent, as Zelensky was pointing out, to some kind of security guarantee. There are also lots of other people with those same concessions. There's been 30 years of investment, you know, in Ukraine and elsewhere, other business people. It's just the same with Greenland. You know, Greenland would be delighted and would have been delighted to have all kinds of US investment. The Danes and the, you know, Greenland government made this entirely evident to the United States, but there was more UK and Canadian investment than there was US investment because of basically the upfront costs that, you know, the trillions of, you know, investments you, you know, extract because of lack of infrastructure. So I mean, it's the same set of problems. So this is all, you know, unfortunately a game that's going on and it's not a very nice one, but it's all about appearances and it's all about, you know, trying to kind of show that you're getting something out of everything and that the United States is not just gonna support Ukraine for nothing.
Well, and it makes a caricature of reality in the sense of showing, telling the world this is what it was all about all the time anyway, it was all about resources. Whereas I don't think the United States initially had any interest in Ukrainian resources when the war started.
And that takes us back to Dugin and Sir Halford Mackinder in 1904 when, you know, Britain and others have been carving up the world for resources for colonies. And we now seem to be back in that, you know, kind of period again. Certainly, and then Putin of course encouraging Trump to think about Greenland in a recent speech.
You know what's interesting, that markets are much more enthusiastic about the perspectives for the peace deal. Goldman Sachs stated yesterday that markets are pricing in 70% probability of a Ukraine peace deal. Why? What do they understand that at least all three of us don't? No, I'm serious.
No, no, I know you're serious. I'm trying to compose myself to think about this. Lucian, any thoughts while I'm thinking through about what they might understand?
I mean, was there a rationale presented or anything?
No, no, no, it was just the analysis and, you know, it's not just JP Morgan also, you know, they said, you know, 70% probability. I just, you know, I'm perplexed. You are a capitalist. I am, you know what, you know, I'm a Soviet, we understand nothing about that, you know?
Look, I think when it comes to the markets, there's a lot of gambling going on, right? I mean, that's kind of purely what this is in terms of speculation. And there's a kind of certainly a hope all the time that there'll be some breakthrough, particularly in the US-Russian relationship, you know, getting past whether there's gonna be a ceasefire and a peace deal in Ukraine. That this is more about the kind of line of travel of the US-Russian relationship. Kirill Dmitriev was of course at Goldman Sachs, you know, at one point, when many other places as well, he knows how to play this game. He's probably talking to the markets that's kind of gonna encourage, you know, Trump, you know, to go further in all of this. I mean, well, talking to markets, I mean talking to people who talk to analysts who then, you know, try to shape the markets because there's this whole idea that there's a lot of money to be made in all of this. That's basically what the message, you know, for Trump and Witkoff and others is, you know, we all need to have this peace deal so we can all make a lot of money. And, you know, what's not to like about making a lot of money? This is kind of like the messaging that's out there. And getting back to what Lucian said, it was all about this all the way along. Putin really did genuinely think that, you know, dealing with Ukraine was all about getting the price right, getting the price right. What was Ukraine willing to pay for its freedom? Or us? What was the cost? He's shown that he's prepared to play an enormous price and a cost to get what he wants. 800,000 casualties, you know, kind of on the Russian side, not just people killed, but grievously wounded, you know, all of this, you know, efforts, you know, for overall it is time to keep focused on this. It's just getting what's the price that's right. And markets are trying to figure out the same thing. If the US-Russian relationship is gonna change, maybe we'll make some money. Maybe the sanctions are gonna lift, the financial sanctions. Maybe there's not gonna be secondary sanctions. Maybe the US going after the shadow fleet is gonna disappear, and lots of people are very willing to go back into Russian financial markets and to trade Russian debt and bonds and things. But whether, you know, people are willing to go back and invest in material things in the Russian market is another matter. But if space is, you know, kind of in your future and Mars is the limit, you know, all kind of space futures. Look, Elon Musk was selling land on Mars. You can sell anybody anything, it appears. I've got a nice piece of Mars I'd like to sell you.
A Mars Bar, but anyway... Lucian, are you selling anything?
Thanks God, I have nothing to sell.
Lucian, so why did Putin invade Ukraine in the first place? And what are motives that will make him to agree on a real ceasefire? I know the question is a simple question, but you wrote a book.
