Fiona Hill: Balancing act: Russia, US and the world

how close do you have to get to see that someone is not wearing contactless about here so everyone can look at the person they're sitting next to have a check and you were actually seated next to put in on several locations for dinner for dinner what was the size of the table actually it was pretty large because it had a large group of people around it but it wasn't quite uh as spectacular obviously as the recent meetings that we've seen him in where he's been sitting here and everybody else has been sitting equivalent to the other side of the room on those occasions when I was in the the same meals as him he wasn't quite as nervous I think about as catching covert obviously or perhaps even if assassination which may be you know in the theme of the discussion we had earlier with Elliot Higgins maybe something that Putin himself is more concerned about as a result of actions that the government has been taking itself over the last uh the last decade so I don't think if there was a another event like this that I or anybody else would be sitting quite so close to Putin but at a time was he eating or drinking he did not that was something else that I noticed and I regretted myself having taken a sip of whatever it was next to me which is why I probably won't touch that water right now either but you know the reason that um I observed this issue about the contact lenses is not just trivial um as you're kind of alluding to because Putin has got this Persona of being invincible and infallible and the purpose of the dinner where I was sitting next to him is this regular conference that he holds the valdi discussion club that some people here might have even been to or know people have been to and he was always trying to show that he was in charge of everything he was on top of absolutely everything but he had note cards and his note cards from such a large font that I could read them now they're all in Russian and I thought this is interesting because obviously you never see Putin wearing glasses unless they're aviator sunglasses which has a certain look to them kind of a dashing you know kind of intelligence operative kind of look or some Man of Mystery and then he realized that I could read his cards because you know I'm also older so I could actually do with glasses too but I could read his cards that were so large he was trying to move them away and that created some confusion because he shuffled his cards and then got the person that he was speaking to next bit muddled up and so I realized that he's not infallible he actually could have done with glasses and he probably shouldn't have had such large font cards and that's when I looked closely and realized well he doesn't wear contacts either so maybe he's flying blind in some um of these places because once you hit 50 and above you mostly need glasses particularly for you know for class work but from this story what can you take and tell us about the general psychology of Putin because you have actually been trying to get into his head writing a book about Mr Putin the operative in the Kremlin where you analyze how is he thinking yes and as I said it was pretty important to realize that just like everybody he has some fall abilities some frailties and some vulnerabilities but that everything about him is highly orchestrated so the fact that I was sitting next to him was also significant and it wouldn't be in ways that you think and it wasn't in words that I thought initially which again told me something so I at the time when I was seated next to him was the National Intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S national intelligence Council and I thought that gosh have I been you know basically set up here because my colleagues are going to be wondering why I was next to Putin maybe other people watching this will be wondering was he trying to compromise me in somewhere and it was simply because I was a middle-aged woman and I wasn't much to look at I said he wasn't wearing red or you know kind of a large you know kind of jacket I wouldn't have stood out in any way because they were looking around there weren't very many women getting back to the theme we've just talked about in the group there was an Italian journalist with a rather plunging neckline that obviously didn't want her to sit next to Putin because she might have distracted on the television cameras and the other women were slightly older and they didn't want to have a man sitting next to him because he didn't want people to wonder who the man was because he must be significant if he's sitting next to Putin and on the other side of Putin was one of his press secretaries also a woman of similar age to me also in a kind of non-descript suit and son we were simply table decoration we were framing for the great man so everything is all eyes on Putin and that's what we see in the psychology of this war we think about it we associate this war and everything that happens with Russia with Putin it's a highly personalized environment and that's why we spend so much time speculating about his health and his capabilities and if we think about everything we've been talking about here today that's a very risky proposition I mean I remember the pictures that Tim had at the very beginning about diversification and you had some apples in a basket well in the case of Russia we've got the basket is dominated by one man there is no diversification at the top of the leadership and so every decision that Putin makes the way that he makes decisions is extremely consequential and if any of you were advising him this would not be the way to operate a country not a country as sophisticated and as large and as complex as Russia is to funnel everything through one person so if we're going to try to get into Putin's head the way he thinks about Russia the way he sees its role going forward what do you think is key well look I think the key is if we were kind of thinking back also to uh the presentation that we've just had from Eda and the bank looking at the health of the person the way that he thinks the group of people around him the kind of inputs that we're kind of getting into his decision making and that's when I would start to get very worried so you use the metaphor about the beginning the size of the table so what we've seen over the last couple of years is Putin's circle around him shrinking and the distance between him and his advisors growing metaphorically and literally we think for example that the war in Ukraine and this is based on a lot of assessment and people like Elliot Higgins have probably you know collected all kinds of additional information about this through all kinds of unusual and interesting sources but the decision making for the inversion of Ukraine came down to a handful of people maybe three or four people he was spending a lot of time in highly personalized environments with people like Victor Medved Chuck the Ukrainian oligarch which you've just read in the paper probably the last couple of days that Vladimir zielinski is stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship Victor Medved Chuck is a very close friend of Putin's going back many years and his daughter is Putin's God child so again this is the personal niche of these things another person who spent a lot of time with is somebody from his personal life going back to Saint Petersburg somebody's known for a long time one of his so-called oligarchs the business people close to him Yuri Kovalchuk and it's supposed to be a combination of Victor Medved Chuck and Yuri Kovalchuk who persuaded Putin that it would be very easy to tip things in Ukraine to literally carry out a special military operation that would be over in a matter of days and I have to ask you there because you were also responsible for Ukraine can you understand that Putin at that time in February last year thought Kiev could fall in a couple of days yes look and this gets back to all the things that we've been talking about right now about how you assess risk and how you assess potential and the kinds of information that you put across I think I mentioned to you we had a chance a little earlier you know when I was then in my other position as the senior director at the National Security Council for Russia and Eurasia I was the recipient of briefings my previous job I'd been the person giving the briefing so you know I'd had both sides of this and so I know the limitations of the kind of information that you can give now I think many of you are aware that I was supposedly the senior director and then a key advisor under Donald Trump trump didn't want any advice at all he didn't want to hear from anyone and Putin is a bit different uh from Trump um in the fact that he was an intelligence operative himself but that also means that he thinks he already knows the intelligence so he wants us information but he selects the information that he gets and he also doesn't really give particularly if you think about that long briefing table people much opportunity to present him information with Trump his attention spawn was so short that we'd have to get it out from sort of cartoon-like uh fashion in a matter of minutes this is not um uh basically then a vehicle for information absorbing and transmission and Putin has such a high barrier that people feel incredibly intimidated to bring information to him so you think about that setup it's hardly a surprise that Putin wouldn't have a full range of information about Ukraine and I know myself as a senior director when I was getting briefings I was being briefed about Russia but I and the Russian military and the strength of the Russian military which Putin would probably get as well but I wasn't being briefed about the Ukrainian military because in the case of the United States Ukraine is not our enemy I wouldn't get a briefing about the Norwegian military either even though Norway was in my portfolio you've got fantastic military setup we just kind of know that because you're part of our NATO alliance Putin wasn't particularly interested in the Ukrainian military he didn't really believe that the Ukrainian military had built itself up to be a fighting force clearly not he was more interested in how he could manipulate people because Putin's all about the people in charge and how and how you can manipulate them exactly and so he believed that zielinski again let's just sort of think into zones these characteristics actor still an actor and actually very good public performer but he'd taken part in comedies in all kinds of uh TV series that had been created by Russian production teams he was backed by an oligarch Mr iho kolomoski who put new an awful lot about some of the kind of corruption in Ukraine and the activities these oligarchs a lot of us know about them as well and so the kind of assumption was that zielinski would fold there was nothing in his background that would suggest that he would become the kind of Winston Churchill of of his era although actually if you'd looked at Winston Churchill's background I don't know he was also a performer actually a kind of even had a partial for drinking it might you know some of his you know past history might not have suggested that he would have risen to the occasion quite the way that he actually did during World War II so Putin was looking at the info the fall abilities rather not the infallibility of the person the vulnerabilities and the ways that he could manipulate and exploit and he thought that zielinski had no independent standing he'd been kind of voted in as a kind of compromised candidate because people were so fed up with all of the other uh political figures and so it would be very easy to manipulate him and he was pretty much convinced that with an application of pressure a kind of a blitzkrieg that you know we're familiar with from past uh mistakes made by that time during World War II by Hitler and the German government that by a quick application of force moving in very quickly zielinski would flee and the Ukrainian government would topple and then Ukraine would be quickly absorbed back into Russia's orbit so it's obvious to see these mistakes because he was only looking at the surface and he didn't look at Ukraine own itself as as you actually would as you know portfolio investors he didn't do that kind of due diligence in your book on Putin you you put a lot of emphasis on changes in behavior and uh have you seen any other significant changes in Putin's Behavior over this year I think what I've really seen is how much he's become he's kind of doubled down on the things that he already thought he's lost any kind of intellectual curiosity that he might have had before and he has become an aware something more of a stereotype of himself and maybe that's also a factor that he's been in power for so long I mean again we're talking about a man who's already been at the Helm of the Russian step for 22 years going into 23 years now coming in in January of uh 2000 um and we know a lot about him by this point initially we knew very little about him but we've had 22 years all of us to observe him in action and he's become very much set in his ways and also set in his thinking again because the groups of people around him have not changed he doesn't engage in intergenerational uh collaborations for example he moves people around in his Circle if they fail in one position he doesn't get rid of them he just moves them around to another position but they stay within the circle and I think that that's the problem what we've learned about him is that he's very stuck in his ways he's got a very clear world view and it's very difficult to shake him and so that is actually problematic it doesn't actually bode well for the future because it makes it very difficult for us to think about how Putin might even conceive of loss let alone cut his losses and move on to something else and let's look at that because as we're seeing from Ukraine the Russian forces are taking losses and but there is there seems to be a real possibility they could actually lose at some point how would that be uh received by someone like Putin I think it's an acceptable to him to even start to think about that again which is part of our dilemma because one of the you mentioned the book that I wrote with my colleague Clifford Gaddy at Brookings which is almost kind of 10 years ago now we started working on this Mr Putin operative in the Kremlin and what we tried to do was look at him from different Vantage points and one of the things that we noticed about him at the time which was a bit of a revelation but not so much now was his obsession with history I mean all of us are not familiar with that because we've all been living in Vladimir Putin's version of history but when we started to look at that it wasn't so well known that you know he was sort of a self-taught buff on Russian history and that he started to uh basically shape his own historical Vantage points the problem that we're dealing with now is Putin sees himself as an actor in Russian history it's a kind of sense of manifest destiny he sees himself as a Tsar he sees himself as the inheritor of the Russian State that's pretty dangerous now all of us know and particularly in the world that you operate in about that that problem of the the person who sets up a company and becomes so intrinsically entwined with it that um the company itself can't move forward now I usually have a board of directors that you know manage to figure out how to move on that person to an Emeritus position we've even had you know we've just had Pope Benedict uh be buried in a very unusual development in hundreds of years of the Catholic Church to have a pope Emeritus there's no way of thinking for Putin now about being Putin emeritus he has he and there's no one around him no um system no mechanism to move him on into something else so we have a real dilemma here of somebody who's completely stuck uh in their ways and cannot conceive of any kind of loss or lack of success he merely thinks that he hasn't put enough effort into it he hasn't adapted sufficiently that's the operative's mentality and so we're hearing more information along the lines of Putin is really willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Russian service people in the pursuit of success in Ukraine and we've just seen this in the last several days with this assault around the town of bakmut and solidar this is looking increasingly like World War one trench warfare and we all know that in the cases of looking back over history that it took an awfully long time for people to change the way that they looked at that Battlefield it's a pretty ominous thought in looking forward that Putin is willing to apply you know so much of that kind of brute force and pushing so many Russians forward in the pursuit of what he sees of a vision of reconcentrating on reconstituting his version of the Russian State the Russian Empire not the Soviet Union as it was but his idea of Russia and Russian history playing out in the present there is a Swedish Economist and who said several years ago that it seems like Putin is really using Hitler's script book what do you think of that I know Anders uh you know very well and obviously you've heard him uh making these comments for some time and if you think about it in the frame of great power conflict it's easy to apply that ideologically and in terms of some of the motivations of Putin it's quite different although you know getting back to what we heard from Elliot Higgins before as well we are seeing and hearing a lot of genocidal language that one might you know describe coming out about the delegitimation not just the Ukrainian state but the denial of the existence of Ukraine uh ukrainians as people the kind of language that we would associate back with the Hitler regime in World War II and many of the atrocities and you know war crimes that have been committed we've seen you know playing out in multiple Wars but it's certainly true in the decision or the kind of viewpoint of acquiring territory Putin has actually said openly the world had better get used to it Russia is expanding again and we haven't heard that kind of expansionist language since World War II and the idea of lib and SRAM the Angelus with Austria the annexation of the suddenlan for example and I think that's the sense that uh Anders Iceland meant because I mean everybody always says you know if you start mentioning Hitler people immediately you know their attention diverts because of just the atrocities of the Holocaust and the whole idea of the Nazi ideology and the Third Reich you can't apply that in the same way with Russia but there are certainly a lot of Hallmarks very lots of similarities between what we saw in the expansion of Germany and World War one and in in World War II and Putin himself talks about that historical period of course he tries to reverse it to suggest that Ukraine is equivalent of Nazi Germany and Russia is fighting back against it but he uses the wartime analogies repeatedly in his speeches in 2000 when the Putin was first elected president I was covering the election and I remember meeting a Russian expert specialist he said that I'm really worried because the only thing that we know about this man is that he has started a war meaning the war in chapter is there something more than territory to uh to Putin's Wars this is also about getting an effect to ratings while those things are intertwined and you know we heard from Jonathan Chang about President XI and consolidation initially if we look back to 2000 Putin was all about consolidation and in a way the kind of same factors that Jonathan learned out in terms of mobilization and I I was thinking I was listening to him if we'd been assessing Vladimir Putin 10 years into his presidency we might have had a different assessment yes there was the war in chechnya which was about consolidation of territory and of course we've seen in China Clump down and Tibet and then xinjiang as Jonathan talked about the consolidation of the periphery chechnya could have fallen into that um exactly it did because it was resolving a conflict of course that was started by Boris Yeltsin in 1994 but one that the previous Russians state had not been able to resolve and put a lot did it in terms of consolidation of territory and then the war in chechnya also enabled Putin to consolidate power of the center he created what we call the vertical of power which was strengthening the presidency at the expense of the parliament or a regional government and Hyper centralizing uh Russia but it also got control of the fiscal resources of Russia as well and you know we talk about that kind of pivot point of 2008 2009 and the Great Recession and the decline of the West and the economic problems it's all been charted in all the discussions that we've had today and that was a kind of a period really when Russia decided that the West wasn't as good as it thought it was about handling the economy and I think that becomes a kind of a pivot point for Putin when he feels such like she has that he's Consolidated power and that Russia has actually shown that it is now in a different place economically at one point of course it's hard to remember this Russia was on track to being one of the top seven economies and in fact many of you but maybe that was you know one of the periods when Skagen was thinking of investing you know more heavily in Russia Russia's economy was on a was on a growth path in part because of Commodities Rising oil and gas prices over a period of time and the Russian economy looks extremely successful and that I think fed into Putin's perceptions then of Russia being able to flex its muscles it paired off all the debts the sovereign debt the private sector debt and it's around that time that we get the Munich security speech rushes back you know we don't like the unipolar world and it's really sort of 2008 onwards I think in one of the pictures we saw from The Economist covers remember Russia resurgent that was 2008. that was really a kind of a turning point I think for Putin for thinking that Russia did not have the place in the world that it deserved very similar to what Jonathan was describing about China and the viewpoints of XI and we also have to touch on the U.S we do unfortunately because you have you've seen the White House from the inside you've been very Central there and you also Testify the impeachment hearings against uh Donald Trump but uh Donald Trump's relations with Vladimir Putin became a hot topic of course how do you see that relationship while it was a relationship with Putin himself from what Putin stood for was not a relationship with Russia so I think we have to sort of separate Putin out as a personality just like we do with she because actually president Trump was rather a great admirer of President XI but clearly not of China and if you think about that kind of uh dichotomy that that strange tension in all of this are What attracted uh president Trump to people like President Putin and president she is at their strong men it was less so about women but you know if women were more successful in at the time like the queen uh Queen Elizabeth II he was a great admirer of the queen because of the iconic you know nature of her personality and just you know what she stood for so for Putin it was all about his image it was that image that Putin had spent a lot of time cultivating and suddenly for she what they stood for and also the fact that they had no checks and balances on them apparently within the system present she has fewer checks and balances they did before but Putin by the time uh president Trump came on to office in 2017 had removed all of the checks and balances in the Russian system and it's really the kind of presidency unfortunately that President Trump himself is now apparent to most people was aspiring towards it attracted him to that and the fact that Putin had this particular iconic status this is of course prior to inverting Ukraine where people feared him and respected him for the power that exerted you know not for all the other things that we would associate with him and when we look at Putin's relationship with the us or with Donald Trump you describe also in the book how a legendary press conference where where Putin actually sets up a trap that uh Trump walks into can you tell us just just very briefly what happened and what can that tell us well that of course is Helsinki and in fact I'm having flashbacks because this room is a little reminiscent but not just not at the same size you know the kind of Scandinavian Grandeur you know modest but you know still the luck to it that Northern Light coming in through the windows you actually you actually contemplated uh uh pretending you had a fish an emergency yes or looking for a fire alarm at some point in the middle of it because of the conference let's just stopped the whole thing I didn't think this is not going well uh because Putin is very good at setting up traps and in this case you know he studies people's vulnerabilities and uh their hot button issues very well and in the case of uh president Trump of course Putin was well aware like everyone else was that there was questions about his legitimacy because of the narrow nature of the election the fact that President Trump was elected in the Electoral College by a very narrow margin of votes around 70 000 votes in Three Counties in three states and not in the popular vote of course that perception had grown up in the United States as well which people like Elliot Higgins and others can now refute that in fact Putin had elected Trump because of the intervention by the Russian Security Services in the 2016 election I think it's more clear now that that intervention was more in the perception realm than it was in the um actual effect on votes itself but nonetheless that had created a huge uh domestic uh so the problems that we're still trying to dig ourselves out of in the United States frankly and that will not go away and Putin knew all of this of course and so the more that he can be seen to be manipulating Trump the weaker Trump becomes and of course the whole idea of the press conference Trump couldn't resist a press conference I and others are directly advised against it because we knew that Putin would lure him into a situation and where again it was very likely that he would be humiliated with exactly what happened but he was a humiliated of caused by questions coming from the U.S press inevitably about uh the election and about whether Trump in that moment would denounce Putin of course with his iconic strongman so he wasn't going to do that and then you saw actually Putin himself even worrying in real time that maybe this had gone a bit too far because Trump had managed to earn Putin and actually might have a reasonably good meeting behind the scenes and which had been some agreements on taking the relationship forward and you could see flashover Putin's face at least you know I could from where I was sitting uh oh maybe this isn't quite so good William actually trying to move the discussion away in a different uh Dimension real time because he knew that immediately he wouldn't necessarily get the backlash he wanted but I'm actually a backlash that would actually harm also Russia's interest was exactly what happened and what happened there was actually that Donald Trump in effect said he trusted Putin more than he did his own intelligence Services which you know could see for a moment Putin was delighted about then he thought oh hang on maybe that wouldn't work out quite as well as I want you can you take humiliation just you know kind of so far and then it becomes a real problem because in in fact what we learned from that moment is that there were several things at that time that Putin really wanted which is why it's so jarring now to think about things in the Ukraine context because now Ukraine dominates everything it dominates the interest in the Russian economy it dominates interest in actually larger issues of strategic stability and if we think back to Helsinki the main point of that meeting which the Finns were part of as well was to actually move the United States and Russia forward in their discussions about nuclear weapons in the Strategic arsenal we were supposed to be having discussions about arms control and arms reduction and figuring out how to deal with China in that context again which you know we see is very important and we'd actually not had a breakthrough but we'd had agreements of setting up working groups between our national security councils and at that point it was it was clear that the Russians wanted that as well whereas you know obviously things are no longer clear and after that it became impossible for us to have those meetings because of the Uproar that was caused by the press conference at Helsinki and that we are soon going to take some questions from the audience coming in from all of you out there if you have a question please send it in uh on the Q a button but uh Fiona I have to ask you something that's been probably on everybody's mind in the past year how far is Putin prepared to go thinking of nuclear weapons well look I I think if you'd ask me this question several months ago I'd have been a lot more concerned then than I am now and I want to explain that because you know I you know a year ago when the war broke out I actually said we should never discount um Vladimir Putin's willingness to use any instrument you know at his disposal including nuclear weapons and we think about you know how Elliot Higgins and balenca got started not just with mh17 in the shooting down at the Malaysian Airlines but also with The Script Hall poisoning you know we now have a pattern uh and Elliot is about to be doing this documentary about assassinations in Russia that shows that you know if if there is um something that the Russians are prepared to do including taking individuals out they're prepared to be ruthless and we know that um but Putin from his training in the KGB um the dark arts let's call it is certainly his territory and he has no compulsion you know whatsoever or no let's constraint he has every compulsion let's just say in terms of using things and no constraints and that goes the same for nuclear weapons if he thought he would get the desired effect and the impact literally from using a nuclear weapon he would but there are constraints and it's not just internal constraints or let's just say you know the effectiveness of the nuclear Arsenal which you know obviously hasn't been used thank goodness you know in all this time but it's what the effect would be and it's become very clear to Putin over the last several months because of really concerted diplomacy on part of the United States but also push back from other countries that it would be actually treated not with oh my goodness we need to capitulate but actually great shock and very much damage to rushes into us more broadly China and India have pushed back very significantly behind the scenes and I think you know Jonathan was hinting at that the Chinese have been really taken aback by what Russia has done in Ukraine we have to remember that prior to February of 2022 the ukrainians had large investments from China in fact China and Ukraine's relationship was growing China was the second largest investor after the European Union not the United States in the Ukrainian economy particularly in agribusiness and in infertilizers and universally minerals Ukraine also has rare Earths and you know some of the of the minerals that we were talking about with you know with Mark in the very beginning so China actually had an interest in Ukraine and and as we we know now or we're hearing now contrary to our assumptions Putin didn't really tell she what he had planned in a special military operation might have sounded something you know quite light and you know something that he intended to have done in a couple of days so the idea now that Putin would then take that across the nuclear threshold you know for China thinking about all the other things that she has on his plate that is actually pretty much intolerable and so I think we've had a lot of pushback now it doesn't mean to say though that at some point Putin might feel that he needs to go back to this again and then he has to again we have to be able to demonstrate that the impact of the effect of this is not going to be what he wants great Fiona I'd like to invite you over here we're going to look at some questions from from the audience but while you're getting a good Applause [Music] foreign on the toes with all this movement aren't we let's go first to a very relevant question here Sweden and Finland and their potential membership of NATO and what do you think how how long can turkey or others keep keep them out well look this is actually more about turkey than it is about Russia but it's also factors in Russia because erdogan's always thinking about Russia uh you know so there are two components there so let's talk about uh turkey first turkey was in my portfolio when I was in government as well and I I have to say that I've always been personally deeply pessimistic about the prospects of erdogan um making you know the the concessions that he would you need to make in his own mind to have Sweden uh brought in it's it's less about Finland but very much about Sweden another one you know as I learned in my time in government is obsessed about several things and part of that is of course the Kurds and there are many Kurdish immigrants in Sweden but also the gulenis or any kind of political opposition and so he's trying to eke out kind of concessions that no country can uh really give about having you know various individuals returned to Turkey when many of them may not have been in Turkey in the first instance you know where he wants to have them prosecuted and put in jail and this was a major feature of really the kind of the breakdown in U.S turkey relations in the time that I was also in government because of course Federal uh the head of golanist movement is in Exile in the United States it was a constant issue and uh in our relationship as well and dominated things that at all different at different times another aspect of this is that erdogan has an election in June of this year and everything is geared towards the election you've seen that the has actually had the mayor of Istanbul position that he used to hold himself um prosecuted trying to take him out of politics because he's his most likely opponent in the elections there are many um uh key members of Civil Society philanthropists including people I've worked with closely people I'm personally friends with who are now in jail for Lifetime sentences because he's trying to kind of take all the opposition out because his position is more politically precarious you know than it might seem you know from the outside of costly Turkish economy is in pretty bad shape now as well because of his interventions and the economy so he's trying to control the domestic environment and frankly that's Sweden is about his domestic environment it's not about NATO so this is you know one of the problems that we have here so it makes it very difficult to conceive of that now the Russian element of this is important as well because erdogan being um the other dominant um uh leader in the Black Sea region is always trying to kind of think about the future of the Black Sea as a geopolitical space that gets back to all the geopolitical risks that we've had up on the screen here you know if you're in um you know kind of investments in Gray and exports and shipping in the Black Sea you have to factor in Turkey not just about Russia because uh you know I worried it many times that erdogan was hoping to create a kind of condominium in the Black Sea with Putin and uh you know with the Russians as well in political terms and security terms and of course you know one of the neurologic issues for Turkey for a long time has been the Montreal Convention you know the control of the Bosphorus Straits and of course Russia and Turkey have been fighting it out over these issues for centuries and so uh erdogan always looks at this as a kind of a continuation of the old Ottoman Russian Imperial Battle for dominance and Supremacy in this region and he's always thinking about Russia he's trying to bring himself in as a mediator but it's more about how turkey protects its interests and of course Russia is a major investor in the Turkish economy the Russians are talking about turning turkey into an energy herb Putin himself is trying to play erdogan and tried to play erdogan ahead of his elections but so this makes it very complex yeah is it conceivable that there could actually be a no indefinitely from Turkey I don't think he'll say no outright but it's whatever you know Turkish versions of you know kind of know and you know kind of different synonyms uh he could play this out yes indefinitely until he feels that you know this has gone too far we had a you know a case obviously in the United States of where um erdogan had taken hostage um basically a minister um Pastor Andrew Brunson who was an Evangelical Pastor who'd been uh operating inside of turkey and he had very important linkages to the Evangelical group's big electoral Block in the United States and um president Trump wanted him released another one did not want him released so everyone wanted to trade him for Gula and then all kinds of other trades that he wanted to make possible very similar frankly to the structural problems we're having over NATO even though he'd think that the Strategic perspective would be much more important and the only way that Pastor Brunson was released was when President Trump tweeted out that he would destroy the Turkish economy and put tariffs on aluminum and um steel you can't do that in every case the president Trump had you know kind of abilities to do things and just a different style of you know kind of hard nose trading even though the presidents wouldn't have done now that worked but that's not isn't it going to be able to do that is Sweden going to be able to do that I think not so I know I'm sounding very pessimistic here but it will take concerted action not just leaving it for Sweden and Finland to because the Finns know it's not about them and they've tried their utmost to persuade uh the Turks to move in a different direction but erdogan's thinking about all this complexity of other issues he's not thinking about NATO he's not thinking about the future security perspective in Europe it's much more personal so how do we affect that now we're going to move into a short answer question yeah sorry section because there's so much engagement here you know you're just uh getting everybody to get on their laptops I think but uh if we're going to uh go for it I know we can talk for hours on each single one but first do you see any possibility for peace as long as Putin is in power Yes actually look um I mean there's always possibilities but it will take again concerted unified effort and I think it would uh you know take us working with India with China and with other countries to you know kind of um constrain all of this and push it towards some kind of diplomatic settlement which have to take place in an international frame I mean you know the United Nations has been very weak but that's really the only framework that this would uh that this would work in we have to think about how we could play to the strengths of the human system and try to revitalize this it's not going to be resolved on the current track where Putin really just wants the United States to force Ukraine to capitulate because ukrainians themselves are going to keep on fighting and you know I think that there is always room for a negotiated uh solution but it's going to really take a lot of pressure on Ukraine and we are going to have to figure out then how to create a staged out of this you know fall Putin and the system around him because he of course is focused on his own self-preservation right now what is your assessment towards a further escalation of the war beyond the borders of Ukraine well look we've already got that let's be frank um I mean the fact that we're all engaged in um sending in uh military armaments training there are this has become the Spanish Civil War of our era there are many foreign forces already fighting um in Ukraine none of these things can be contained and of course it's all they're not going to affects in the global economy that we've already been talking about food security uh in Africa and Asia and Latin America with fertilizers I mean there are so many Global implications this is already a global impact conflict like World War one and World War II were now in terms of escalation it's very clear I mean Putin is trying to find different ways of of it wreaking so much destruction on Ukraine that it'll break Ukraine's resolve so we're going to see more of the same absent what I said again about a really concerted effort to you know push and Contra on constrain this war what I just said before about the negotiated solution I don't see it happening anytime really soon it could happen in this year because lots of things can change we're talking about an uncertain environment all kinds of things that we haven't foreseen at this moment could actually happen that could be tipping tipping events and put things in a different direction but I mean right now what we see is that Russia and Putin being prepared as I said earlier to throw more and more men at this and I try to exhaust all the equipment that they have the ukrainians are being obviously very inventive and kind of Battlefield Equipment but they're also getting you know a lot more equipment flowing in from the west but we have constraints in ammunition and it's not that it's not that easy to keep it but I I see more of a fierce fighting continuing certainly over the next weeks and months and the but the more you know territory that Ukraine is able to gain back you know the better position we actually are for some future resolution because the biggest risk is that Russia manages to retain territory that it's taken and just find ways of consolidating that going back to where we were before energy of course is a great concern and uh especially here in Norway and Norway is now the biggest supplier of gas to Europe could you reflect a little one says very briefly on what that means for our security up here in the nordics that we are now delivering the gas to Europe well I think you know we saw from what happened with nordstream too that someone out there wants to certainly suggest that other infrastructure could be at risk so really thinking about the security of our infrastructure and again diversification of risk and how this wouldn't be just on nowhere of course to ensure that would be pretty critical having these discussions in the NATO and other broader European contexts to help you know kind of Ensure the resiliency but also you know for um Norway itself you know as I think we've heard from some of the discussions here today being more forward leaning also I'm thinking about the future if I think you know to where Mark started his off well I felt very pessimistic actually I don't think nobody's called the last Optimist at the end of you know kind of listening to um uh his uh discussion there is we've really got to think very seriously about larger energy security and not just in the the pure Fuel and power generation but in all aspects of everything that we're wearing to all of our food 70 percent of food production is from Fuel and and the whole war in Ukraine is showing the vulnerabilities of every part of those chains and we all have to eat and that means it's one thing that Norway is not a huge agricultural country so the you know the the future of food Security in Europe is tied up into this as well the more that we can think about our resources our leverage and our Ingenuity and these fronts to create Frameworks the better and I think we're seeing you know the knock-on impacts not just an energy but again in the agribusiness sector and you know the the damage that's been done from pulling Ukraine off the The Grain uh markets again there's shipping and other problems fertilizer I mean fertilizer is another of those kind of products that we need to rethink because it takes so much gas and uh you know so many of the inputs and fertilizer coming from places like Russia and Ukraine and Belarus potash and you know the kind of phosphates and things as well we have to sort of there's a lot of things to think about maybe things to invest in you know as we kind of uh trying to reduce our vulnerabilities yeah and then there is the discussion that is running and uh some argue that um what the role of NATO here actually provoked Putin by the enlargement has provoked Putin into going to this war what do you think of that I think it's just the issue of Ukraine in this context not just the issue of Ukraine but former Soviet republics for Putin the idea that any kind of alternative Association was available for Ukraine Belarus even George or Armenia Azerbaijan Central Asia was an anathema I mean that's gets back to things that I said earlier Putin has a very fixed view of the world he's from a cohort of people who came out of the Soviet Union but then also thinks of the Soviet Union is the inheritor the success is there to the Russian Empire and Russia has been the successes debt to all of this so in other words if it belonged to me it still is mine I mean imagine if Sweden decided that it wanted Norway back or you know kind of Finland or in fact Ukraine because Ukraine at one point was part of the Swedish Empire as well the the problem is that Putin can't conceive of all of these territories and places belonging somewhere else or having free agency so it's not NATO per se it's about the whole idea that there are alternatives and so you know once there was that Open Door made by NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008. Putin was determined to close it but the whole expansion of NATO itself is something of a red herring because we see now that when Sweden and Finland want to join notwithstanding the fact that turkey's trying to extract as much as they can out of this that Putin wasn't quite as concerned because it is a myth that it's the kind of enlargement of NATO that's at the root of all of this at the root of all of this is Putin's thinking about Ukraine and its place in the Russian World and just not being able to conceive of Ukraine being somewhere else it's Imperial thinking and a kind of a world view that stuck in his mind you are a historian Fiona but I'm just going now to to ask you one year ahead where do you think we are well what I think we are what I hope we are I'm probably going to be two entirely different things I mean projections are always based on where you're sitting right now so where I sit right now notwithstanding the fact I said that things could change you know it doesn't look very propitious because you know we see the digging in of these defensive postures in places like bakmud and Soledad around the donbass region it starts to have the Hallmark I'm sorry I'm using my historians hats other things that we saw during World War One and World War II were you know armies dug in and they become just sort of fight over smaller pieces of territory but if we start to continue to see notwithstanding some of the more promising prospects that have been laid out here today the concerns on the part of China and other major players in the world economy this is very bad for their business and their interests we might start to see more pressure you know world wars and you know like in World War One did have devastating effects you know World War II obviously it was a multi Arena War including the war in Asia after Pearl Harbor with you know Japan attacking the United States this is still a pretty contained war in Europe it's more of these you know great power conflicts in Europe but with global effects and after a while the rest of the world is going to get tired of this there are parts of the world that are actually benefiting from it the Middle East you know for example a lot of Russian Capital has gone into the Emirates you know for example there are others who thinking it for a while that can probably benefit from this we saw commodity you know prices energy but over a period of time this is going to become very detrimental for everyone so if that becomes clear over the course of this year particularly if China doesn't have such a robust recovery and I think Jonathan was sort of hinting towards that you might see the Chinese suddenly thinking hang on we didn't sign on to this we don't want to see Russia fail but you know this war cannot go on India certainly thinks like that and in the United States as well there's going to be increasing pressure getting back to the US again because of the volatility frankly of U.S politics so we might as the year goes on start to see pressure to find a way out of this again if it's in a concerted fashion International multinational format I think we have more chance than if it's just individual countries trying to intervene here final question because you are American and what scares you most frankly the developments in Russia or in the US well actually in the United States right now because you know the capacity for leadership for the United States is being whittled away and I worry a great deal I I worry less about the kind of vibrancy of American society and more about the health of the institutions and I think we see this and what's playing out in Congress and I think if you know the um members of the main us parties the Republicans Democrats can't get their act together um I mean I don't know whether America is going to be actually a very you know reliable place for investment frankly either because there's so much of a kind of question mark there about sort of volatility in the the politics and having a knock-on effect on the economy but most certainly on geopolitics and I think you know unfortunately you know so much the rest of the world does rely on American leadership and of course America remains indispensable in some of those larger multinational formats that we would need to resolve conflicts like this in the United Nations and elsewhere so although I worry about what's happening in Russia if the United States can't get its act together I worry more because that's going to have knocking effects on all the things that we're concerned about and just you know to leave you with one thing that really gave me pause for that when I was coming out of the National Security Council I had a meeting actually with a group of Scandinavian investors and some of them told me that they were holding back on their investments in the United States because they didn't know where the United States was headed and I imagine I would probably have a similar conversation with some of them right now if they've been watching you know what's been happening in Congress um over the last several weeks so you know I I'm watching that very person myself I really hope that Common Sense will prevail but I'm not quite as confident as I am in other things about that until originally thank you so much Fiona health for coming and sharing all this with us

Channel: SKAGEN Fondene

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Id: xLDgPV9NiGg

Length: 50min 30sec (3030 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 16 2023