Former MI6 Chief On the Ukraine & Russia Conflict | Oxford Union

[Music] thank you so much for joining us it's a pleasure to be here and uh it's my first opportunity to come to the oxford union so it's a it's a it's a great uh pleasure to be here and rather difficult and dangerous times so i understand why people have come out on a wet monday night well we're speaking as you say a particularly tense time in global politics as we watch the war in ukraine progress is there anything that you feel the general public should be paying attention to that we're not well we're all i certainly am glued to uh the news and following uh what is happening uh in ukraine uh and it's a you know it is a terrible series of events that we're witnessing and the intelligence machinery my service mi6 predicted that this would happen i was hoping it wouldn't in the end happen because i didn't think it was in president putin's interest or russia's interests and i think he would have a sufficient assessment of where russia's long-term interests lie not to do this but i think one of the one of the worrying features of this is that the cold calculating president putin that i watched closely for over 20 years and i i met him close up a number of times when i was working with tony blair uh larry and putin had a series of meetings early on in in in putin's formative time and most of them are what we call one plus one each each leader has a has a plus one to take a note and to chip in when it might be needed uh and i was the plus one for tony blair at that stage and so you got to see putin really close up and he was a man who'd stabilized russia after the chaotic 1990s um who actually in his first couple of years was trying to modernize and reform russia in a in a in a sensible direction um but i think the iraq war uh set back some of those relations but what really set it back were the orange revolutions in uh sorry the coloured revolutions in first georgia and then ukraine in 2003 2004 and he set himself against reform and he he sent himself the goal of of rebuilding russia but with complete tight control at the center and using the revenues from increasing oil price and oil sales and gas sales in order to fund a state that could deliver some services to the russian people and then after 2014 and the uh the crisis in ukraine then um and the collapse of the oil price it changed from being well the deal used to be you let you leave us in power and we'll deliver growing services to you they couldn't do that after 2014 because the state of the russian economy and the global economy and increasingly putin putin's deal with the russian people was you leave us in power and we will restore russia's greatness and you could see where that deal came from but he still pursued it rationally and the annexation of crimea was a a clinical cynical but effective kuduma and a successful operation that he carried out um the president putin we've been watching in the last few weeks is a different president putin he uh i don't know what's happened to him during the two years of covet uh except that he's been incredibly isolated including from his own advisors and his own officials and he seems to live in a in an information bubble um and uh i think he's made a massive error a massive error of judgment uh in his own interest not only in the interests of ukraine i think he's miscalculated how the ukrainian people would react and now he's facing a situation where his military are facing really concerted resistance how president zielenski uh to many people's surprise is providing brave and inspiring leadership to the ukrainian people um and the weight of sanctions that have been brought to bear on russia is uh vastly greater than uh president putin and those around him would have expected um and so i think uh we're now in a situation where president putin is on the back foot um now that doesn't mean he's going to lose the war in ukraine brave though the ukrainian resistance is the fact is the russians have got immensely powerful armed forces and will be able to take kharkiv and kiev even at the cost of destroying them and there's that famous quote from an american major in the vietnam war we had to destroy the village in order to take it uh in order to save it and one has this horrible sense that even though kiev is the cradle of russian civilization um in many ways putin is right to describe it as that there's a risk of destroying kiev in order to occupy it and that would be you know an absolutely terrible outcome for this but it would be entirely president putin's fault this is president putin's war it's putin's waters so what am i watching for i'm watching for how fast the russians advance inside ukraine and there's a mixed picture there how far they go how far west they go the further west they go the more resistance they will meet and the greater the risk of a clash on the borders between russia and nato countries like poland hungary romania and so on um uh i'm looking to see what the political reaction in moscow is um and looking to see what the impact of sanctions might be um i'm one of the things i do in my afterlife from from public service is i sit on the board of bp and you will have seen the news over the last couple of days of the big decision we took to exit russia now some might say well why were you there in the first place well we were there in the first place because it was a very good investment to make and with that it produced excellent returns for shareholders over 25 years in the 23 years or something but the it became impossible to be there and although it was a costly decision it wasn't a difficult decision because there was no alternative and we're seeing equinox followed yesterday shell have just followed this evening i i saw on the news before i came in here um the uh uh the the russian ruble is collapsing and and the the level of resistance of not resistance opposition in russia is growing but that said i think it's important that we leave a way out for putin from this crisis if we trap him in a corner and he feels his whole existence is a threat as leader of the russian regime then that is a very dangerous time for us all we saw him fiddling with nuclear alert levels uh on sunday and that was a warning to us i think it's really important this is this is a dangerous time the dangerous time across europe is really important this doesn't become a conflict between nato and russia and it and putin can't turn it into an issue where it looks as though we are battling against russia what we're doing is we're supporting ukraine in its independence and it's self-determination and in its sovereignty and that's the battleground we have to stay on and it has to be a battleground which whilst we support ukrainian armed forces in their resistance we do not step across the line and engage russia directly in conflict because that would raise the level of of tensions and threat vastly higher and how effective do you think economic sanctions and discussions with russia will be in the coming weeks well i'm not hopeful about the early negotiations and there's that meeting that took place on the ukraine belarus border today the russians sent us their head of delegation an extreme nationalist historian who was there to i suspect read the ukrainians a lecture i suspect he was the man who influenced president putin in his essay last july about about ukraine which some of you may have read um uh the uh so i don't expect much progress from that but it's good that zielinski wants to be able to talk and although president macron has sort of positioned himself uh uh as a sort of savior of europe or representative of europe on this actually the fact that he's talking to president putin and he spoke against putin today i think that's a good thing that's going on that is going on but the fact is the russian demands are for an unconditional surrender of ukraine the resignation of the zelinski government and ukrainian recognition of crimea has been part of russia now there's absolutely no way that those negotiable demands for a ukrainian government and what the west is supporting is a uh the elected ukrainian government deciding ukraine's future now there are some issues where the scope for for for movement and the reality is that um uh that whilst ukraine wants to become a member of nato there's no realistic prospect of it becoming a member of nato and then can you use that fact in a negotiation with russia to address one of the russian concerns the answer is i think you probably can with skillful diplomacy but it's it is difficult to deploy skillful diplomacy when you've got shells and missiles and tanks you know rolling around your capital um uh uh and you're under that level of duress so i think the sanctions which are an unprecedented level um we used to save uh the most extreme financial sanctions for global pariahs like north korea or um iran when we were trying to get them to give up their nuclear weapons aspirations and we still are of course thank you donald trump for messing that one up um the um uh the uh these sanctions the freezing of the central banks of russia's assets these are very far-reaching sanctions which um are having a direct impact on the russian economy um you're seeing the stock market is tanked the ruble has collapsed in value um ordering russians can't get money out of their cash machines this is going to play into reactions on the streets of moscow and other russian cities really quite quickly and so how that plays into the debates such as they are within the government system we'll have to watch very closely and they'll be all behind closed doors but i think it is important that we allow these pressures to come to bear as i saw in south africa the main and sanctions against south africa started in 1977 it wasn't actually until 12 years later that the process of change began in south a serious change began in south africa the real economic pressures started in the mid-80s after the riots and uh in in soweto and other other townships and the brutal suppression of them by the by the regime um sanctions take a time i don't believe anyone thinks that these sanctions by themselves will change putin's mind he's not going to say oh i can't do this i now need to withdraw but they are posing a price they're affecting perceptions and attitudes inside russia amongst the russian elite and one of the values of sanctions is that when a leader decides they do want to negotiate the easing of those sanctions becomes a motive one of the big motives in south africa was allowing rugby teams and qriket teams to play against south africans now you may not be very interested in sport but it went a big thing for for a lot of south african males who are otherwise quite resistant to the process of change um in iran when i negotiated with iran in the early years of the of the nuclear deal the prospect of easing economic sanctions was massively attractive to the um uh to the iranians and still is that's their main motive for negotiating uh a a return by the americans to the to the nuclear deal so there's a um sanctions have a certain effect straight away but they're not so much a political effect their political effect comes later once they're real impact has sunk in and the economies and lifestyles of the leadership ideally rather than the people of the country but they're pretty blunt instruments i'm afraid sanctions but they they do have an effect and i i've witnessed in south africa in serbia in the balkans wars in libya over their weapons of mass destruction uh in iran over their their nuclear program and to some extent china adjusts its its response in order to minimize sanctions or to avert sanctions um so sanctions can be an important weapon but they're blunt and they're slow in effect and uh do you think the uk could have done more to prevent the escalation of the current crisis uh i think president putin was set on this um for some months uh i wouldn't have said that a month ago because i thought that it was still possible that he could have used this force that he gathered around ukraine's borders for coercive diplomacy to extract concessions from ukraine extract concessions from the west force ukraine down a path that was more amenable to russian interests but the harsh reality is looking back on on putin's actions of the last two weeks or so was they had this in mind all along um and i there perhaps might have been more that we could have done to prepare for it to help prepare the ukrainians for it but i don't think and even even a week before the invasion began president zielinski and his government were urging the americans to calm the temperature now this isn't going to happen we need to keep things as normal as possible um to the government's credit it has done well to provide uh defence aid lethal material to the ukrainian armed forces to help them defend themselves i'm sure some of those um uh russian tanks that are lying in the gutter of um of of ukraine's roads um are there because of some of the weapons that have been provided to the ukrainian forces over the last last period and i think the um the global sanctions effort i think has surprised everybody and initially and most of you won't understand and i don't really understand how the international financial trading system works but this swift mechanism in brussels uh where is a messaging system for clearing financial transactions there was an agreement between the eu and the us just to leave that alone just let the russians do some basic business through the swift mechanism um in order so that germany could pay for its gas and that you could you could do the the bare minimum but it quickly became a sort of touchstone as to whether your sanctions were serious enough and excluding russian banks from the swift mechanism freezing the central bank's assets have had this massive impact i'm sure the chinese are watching this very carefully indeed this whole new generation of sanctions that are being introduced now well i'm keen to leave some time for audience questions if you have a question if you could raise your membership card and we will uh come round with a microphone membership card there's a challenge well and remember just at the front here in black puffer obviously you've said that it's very important that this doesn't become a battle directly between nato and russia but do you think it is appropriate and that there is room for some more clandestine operations directly in support of ukraine obviously we have mi6 we have offensive cyber capabilities within the intelligence community do you think there is space to deploy those without it escalating uh further to better support openly ukraine well that's a brilliant question and you've got a future in the security services um but it's the sort of question which obviously i i find very difficult to answer uh and i hope you i hope you you you understand the reasons for that um i think it's really important that as i said my earlier remarks we don't allow president putin to present this as the west trying to topple his regime because that then becomes an existential question for russia and some of the things you're implying would get pretty damn close to that um one thing about clandestine operations is they always become known at some point so you can't keep things clandestine forever um and the uh the second thing i would say is yes there are a variety of things that we can do to support the extraordinary bravery of uh the ukrainians uh a human level military at the leadership level uh as they go through this and i think a lot of things that we're doing uh is is very much supportive of that but president putin in one of his um uh interviews tells quite a revealing story about his own childhood about how he lived in a block of a ghastly block of flats in one of the poorer areas of leningrad as it was then some petersburg as it is now um and he used to chase rats around the stairwell and one day he got a rat and he got it in a corner now this is a this is obviously a it may have been invented this story but this is the story he tells got a rat in the corner and he trapped it and the next thing he knew the rat had flown out and hit him in the face scratched him and escaped and his lesson was never corner a rat well i don't know if he was referring to himself but there's uh there's uh there's a certain lesson in there for us that if you corner someone who's incredibly dangerous somewhat irrational and has got nuclear weapons at the end of his fingertips we need to be a little bit careful how we do that so we must leave putin a way out of this in due course so that and he we mustn't allow him to think that this is an existential system exists existential crisis for his regime that's a matter for russians to sort out um uh it's not a matter for us to determine those issues um and the what we can do to support the ukrainians there'll be a spectrum of things we can do i'm not going to get into the realm of speculating on the things that you were talking about um but clearly the the whole spirit the morale of the sentiment of the british people the british government strongly behind the ukrainian people and rightly so and that's where our commitment will lie um and i'll take a question from the member just in the yellow at the back there can you stand up so we can see you hi good evening you mentioned that sanctions are primarily a tool of politics and negotiations whose effects are seen at a later date and you also told us the tale of how one mustn't corner a rat um with this in mind hypothetically what do you think the next step is should putin increase or continue his march into russia sorry ukraine and following that what do you think of china's current position as well well i i think the russian forces will continue their march into ukraine they are vastly outnumber ukrainian forces they've got heavy artillery which i think we will see more of and there are reports of um yes are reports of of low morale and motivation amongst a lot of the russian conscripts uh who are doing this fighting um but there's also disturbing rumors that chechen irregulars have been brought in to do the dirty work that um russian troops might bulkhead so i think we do need to brace ourselves for further violence uh uh in in ukraine and ultimately i think most military analysts would say we should expect the russian forces to prevail but they will be having to occupy a country which um is almost united in opposition to what the russians are doing and will put up a very severe fight um president putin has used some rather to us astonishing language are called accusing um uh ukrainians have been nazis and he wants to denazify um ukraine uh uh i think he's remembering a distorted version of what happened after world war ii in that after the uh uh and the ukrainians a bit like the finns in this regard um they were faced with two evils they had the germans on one hand and they had the russians on the other hand um and it wasn't clear which side was a bigger dangerous their long-term national struggle but after 1945 it was very clear to ukrainians that the bigger opposition became bigger obstacle was the russians the soviets and there was a civil war in the west of what is now the west of ukraine for their independence uh in which about 100 000 people were killed uh as the ukrainians fought against the soviets and because some of them had uh worked with the nazis as well the russians accused all of them were being nazis actually they were ukrainian nationalists so there's a uh there's a history here but it's a distorted history that president putin is recalling i expect there to be after i think it's reasonable to expect that after a bloody war which will last several weeks yet the russian armed forces will prevail uh but that there will be a sustained opposition and insurgency by ukrainians against that russian occupation um now uh uh i hope it doesn't i hope ukrainians stand their ground but i think it would be wishful thinking to think that they're going to be able to prevent the russians imposing themselves on certain ukrainian cities and basically forcing the ousting of the zalensky government from from kiev so that would be my expectation but in wars they never go as planned you can never predict how they're going to run their course and politics back home can change what happens on the battlefield um so uh there is that uh there are those complications should i take the china question now um i think this is very interesting the china dimension and this is awkward for china because by far the biggest issue in the world for china is their rivalry strategic rival be the united states and russia is a sort of is a useful partner to china in that endeavor and they face some of the same challenges they want to close down freedom of information both china and russia they want to make themselves less susceptible to financial pressure and the power of the dollar and they want to be able to run their autocratic systems without being constantly hectored about their appalling human rights performances and so china and russia have got a number of common interests in here but china also firmly believes in national sovereignty territorial integrity and not intervening violently and in another country in another country next door to you and they do that for their own purposes they don't want anyone claiming to bet as independent or uh or preventing them in due course uh trying to reintegrate taiwan uh with the uh with the mainland as they govern their views on hong kong as well for the last 50 years before and after the the handover so the chinese have got strong views on those principles and they want to protect them as well i i used to deal with the chinese lot when i was in the security council now obviously the chinese were one of the p5 and you've several times felt them to be rolling their eyes at what the russians were doing um because the chinese were much more skillful much more thoughtful and were longer term and were less brutal the uh i think the chinese leadership they look back at the brezhnev era and they see a failure to modernize and rejuvenate the communist party which led to its demise they see the way president gorbachev tried to bring in economic reform and political reform at the same time and failed because it led to the collapse of the system and i think they might now be looking at president putin and thinking here's a third russian leader making a mistake of strategic proportions and and they will be studying what's happening on the battlefield they'll be studying carefully um this new generation of sanctions that they do not want to get caught up in or be subject to um and if there's one silver lining to the cloud of what's happening in ukraine i think those people who worry about a chinese attack on uh on an invasion of of taiwan i think that's even less likely now uh in the near future than it was before and we can go into more china discussion if if if any of you want to do that but i think the chinese will be following this very carefully they'll be a bit embarrassed by what the russians are doing but the biggest issue for them will be the ongoing prosecution of their competition and rival with the united states we have time for one more very brief question i'll take it from the member at the back just here you usually end these things on a light-hearted note but it's quite hard to uh to do that on an occasion like this hello thank you for your speech it's very very good so as someone who's built an esteemed career on information and intelligence i'm curious well how do you get your news all right well that's an interesting point because i i stepped down from mi6 and from the government at the end of 2014 um and i did wonder what i would do without the flow of intelligence reports and diplomatic cables and and privileged meetings with with counterparts and leaders from other countries who would beat a path to the mi6 door but actually i found that a lot of the information that i was getting at that time is incredibly detailed and i used to talk about syria earlier i used to know every damn village in syria and all the terrorist units and the different uh uh different uh areas uh where they were where they were operating some information which frankly now is not of not of a great help um there is a fantastic range of open source material during covid one of the benefits of covid was that instead of traveling to america or traveling to singapore or traveling to berlin or whatever um i could attend a meeting in singapore in the morning meeting in berlin at lunchtime and meeting in in in london tea time at nine o'clock at night i'd attend something in new york or san francisco and it was a fantastic liberation in that sense in that my network of um that i built up over the years uh many of whom are my own generation so we're beyond government now that we could communicate and uh learn from younger people who are still in government um and uh people are interested uh i i do a number of uh advisory number of advisory roles um helping people understand the world in which they're operating the tough businesses decisions they have to take how they deal with their investments in china how they manage saudi arabia bliss will not talk about saudi arabia in a gathering like this the and the uh uh what i do is is obviously you know you read the financial times of the wall street journal and the washington post and the economist uh and various other things every day and every week you you keep your network of communications and you have in my case over 40 years experience of operating in this world and being able to build on that so my i feel like i've got a privileged starting point if someone wants to talk about kashmir well i haven't thought about kashmir for a long time but i do remember negotiations on kashmir between the indians the pakistanis and i can clock back into that i know where the starting point is of the indians of the pakistanis when they start negotiating on that and that is true of you know a lot of very long-standing conflicts like cyprus or um uh ethiopia and other parts of the world middle east and it also means that you can get your head around new conflicts really quite quickly because you know how governments respond you know how politics change you know the uncertainty of the battlefield and you have some experience we're talking about sanctions i've dealt with sanctions all my life in different in different environments and i've seen what's effective and what's not effective i've seen the time scale they take i see the side effects which are sometimes very painful of a sanctions based policy but you can apply that to a new situation like ukraine so um none of you have even 40 years of life let alone 40 years of experience but you will you will i've passed this but if i was to leave you with a thought and that is that engaging in the world is fantastically important especially now when there are so many problems we're not talking about climate change this evening it's another whole dimension of uh international life which is a real challenge that we're all facing in your generation will face above any uh we're facing the challenges of technology we're facing challenges of strategic rivalry we're facing the challenge of finding a new role for britain after what i think was a mistaken decision to leave the european union but we've done it now we've got to find a new role for ourselves outside the european union where we can play a part in in extending our values and keeping dangers at a distance from us which is the essence really of our our security you don't want your security to be on the white cliffs of dover you want the security to be a thousand miles away so that you can you can operate freely and our people can go about their lives uh in freedom and uh uh and uh uh with with one hopes growing prosperity and that's what public service is about and uh i hope i feel i hope i've left you with a thought that my own personal experience of public service has been not financially rewarding but immensely spiritually rewarding uh and there's also an afterlife when you when you work slightly less hard and get paid a bit more so that's nice too well sir john thank you so much for joining us what a wonderful opportunity to speak to you today um please join me in thanking sir john furrier you

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Length: 34min 4sec (2044 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Few-Worldliness2131]

It’s now clear why we find ourselves in such a dilemma with putin. If the UK posture is set by this old Etonian clap trap then putin, KGB born of the street, would have been laughing himself silly.

[u/Cytrus01]

VERY VERY INSIGHTFUL A must watch

[u/Eugene_Bleak_Slate]

Excellent content. Thanks for sharing.