Former MI6 Officer, Christopher Steele | Full Q&A | Oxford Union

[Music] [Music] thank you so much for joining us this evening thank you for having me molly it's a delight to be back here almost two years today i think since i first appeared in one of these interviews just before the pandemic so a lot of waters got under the bridge in that time well it's great to have you we'll start at the very beginning um many of our members here might be interested in joining mi6 themselves um what made you interested um to become involved in the secret intelligence service i think i was primarily interested in international affairs to be honest um i'd been brought up abroad born abroad and had studied sort of political science at university and so it was a sort of natural progression really to want to do a job that involved overseas travel and looking at overseas cultures and in a way understanding those cultures perhaps rather deeper than most people might so really that's how it came about and i had the choice really of being a journalist or becoming an intelligence professional and i chose the intelligence professional room and what advice would you give to a member who wants to get that sort of infamous tap on the shoulder i'm not sure they do it anymore do they it's very old-fashioned um and in fact it didn't really happen to me i was recruited through a an advert in a newspaper um which was from a headhunter so there are different ways of coming out this there are different ways of being recruited and working inside and you know it's a matter of trying to target and find your way i think through this sort of maze of online tests questionnaires interviews i would say if you get to meet a real human being you're doing pretty well in that process and it's obviously a very high risk job and i imagine quite stressful what was it like to work in that environment i think it was very variable i think you're right i think you have to be quite a risk taker you have to be quite adventurous to do it and obviously some of us are masochists and go for the hard postings and the hard jobs and you know i arrived in moscow as a 25 year old into a similar sort of geopolitical time of turmoil as we're seeing now in the in those days it was the soviet union that was collapsing and the west was ideologically triumphing and our way of life and our rules of law and all the rest of it seemed to be predominant so in a sense although it was very tough and very demanding it was also very rewarding i think it's very difficult now at the moment what do you mean by at the moment with really the way in which the russia crisis the rise of china and so on is making democracy is really much more uh divided amongst themselves and much less confident i think of the the value systems and the sort of fundamental characteristics that we all took to be in uh fukuyamas where it's the end of history which didn't prove out to be the case well i'll ask you about um ukraine in a moment but um looking back at your career is there a moment that you were most frightened for britain um there were one or two moments i was very frightened for myself that um they will remain nameless i think that this i have to say and i know you're going to ask me about in a minute but i think we have to address it earlier rather than later this is a very dangerous moment in our history and i would suspect that it's the most dangerous moment geopolitically in my lifetime let alone yours um i was born i think the year after the cuban missile crisis which i think was the last situation that is comparable with the one that we're facing at the moment sadly and you ran the russia desk um at the mi6 headquarters as the as we watched the war in ukraine progress is there anything that you feel the general public should be paying attention to particularly there's a lot of things which i think have been misunderstood about modern russia and the threat it poses to us i think one of them is essentially that um over time under putin the boundaries between the government business and organized crime have more or less collapsed and so the threat that we face is quite a deep profound one and it's not just coming from obvious state actors it's coming from business folks it's becoming from agents of influence in the west some of whom are things like former german chancellors and former prime ministers of france and so it's a very disturbing sort of plasma if you like that we're facing that is difficult to determine and difficult to contain and do you think that the uk could have done more to prevent the crisis that we're watching currently i think the uk could have done a lot more to clamp down if you like to regulate to control russian money and russian business and so on over the last period and that's a big subject and i think that we're only waking up now to really what we should have been doing 10 or 15 years ago did you expect russia to invade ukraine i expected them to carry out a military operation of some sort i didn't think it would be on this scale and i didn't think it would be this dramatic and what are your views on the uk's stance and i suppose the un stance as well what do you think we should be looking for going forward i think our stance has been broadly right uh in that we have um obviously defined what nato is at the moment and you know with the best will in the world ukraine was not in a position or a state to join nato up until this point and not really into the foreseeable future but i think the support of ukraine the support of democracy there the way in which um we have not only done so diplomatically we've now imposed very severe sanctions on russia which is the right thing to do but also things like supplying weaponry and what have you i think that we broadly although we've woken up rather late in a sense to to putin and russia we're now doing the right things and you said that we may have misunderstood many of the actors in sort of the beginning of this crisis do you expect economic sanctions to be effective not in the short term but i think longer term they will create serious problems for for russia and for putin's regime fundamentally my belief is that russia has overreached in this operation it doesn't have the wealth or the manpower or anything else to occupy a neighbouring country of 43 million people against their will and i think that what they were counting on and we can talk about the way in which um information moves around autocratic regimes but the fundamental miscalculation here has clearly been that ukraine wouldn't fight back and that the sort of quizlings fifth columnist mercenaries people they bought up um to provide a shadow governance structure are not really there and so they at the very best even with military victory they'll be looking at a vacuum in ukraine politically which is a big problem for them well let's talk about um the miscalculations why do you think that they were made in the way that they were so there are different miscalculations here one of them i've just mentioned which is a logistic one really in terms of russian capabilities and i think that was i'm not sure why that came about presumably because the russians had bad intelligence or that people within putin's bubble were telling him things he wanted to hear rather than things that he should have been hearing i think the miscalculation secondary one is the the way in which the west has reacted the strength of the reaction the unity of the reaction and i think that was based upon our failure to act decisively over a number of years i don't think that we are seeing in this operation anything fundamentally different in terms of russian behavior and intent um if you go back to as early as um arguably the apartment bombings in moscow in 1999 where you seem to have had a false flag operation conducted by russian security services which involved blowing up their own people to justify a war in chechnya you know this is now 25 years old or so this this process so i think that um [Music] russia has behaved in a sort of linear way over time there have been peaks of rogue state behavior which are quite clear um but i think they expected the the west to react in a divided and weak way i think i'm certain that the debacler in kabul last summer will have encouraged this sort of operation to take place um and our speaker yesterday suggested that um putin had changed as he'd been isolated over the cover 19 pandemic um as you said you spoke here almost exactly two years ago do you think that the clover 19 pandemic has had a role to play in either the beginning of this crisis or in our response again there's a bigger question here which is what does the pandemic and its management it's handling how does it reflect upon different governance systems have we become weaker because of the pandemic has china become stronger etc i mean i would argue the pandemic has not been handled particularly well in the west and that we have kind of it's accelerated a number of processes i think one is the rise of china which ironically started it but seems to be the the most fundamental beneficiary um secondly um obviously it coincided with a frankly chaotic u.s administration under donald trump which again accelerated america's relative decline i think in the world and thirdly it probably meant that putin was more isolated and more detached from the real universe you know the bubble that he lives in clearly i mean literally when he's sitting 20 feet away from his top brass officers in meetings um so i think that um the west has not had a good pandemic fundamentally um you mentioned donald trump uh let's let's speak about that for a moment and you authored the steele dossier which alleges misconduct and conspiracy and cooperation between trump and russia and sort of prior to the 2016 election could you begin just in case anyone here is not familiar giving us a brief sort of summary of those findings so i think there were three elements to uh what's being called the dossier it was actually a series of single source intelligence reports over a period of time if you like almost a running commentary on the election campaign and russia's perspective on it and it comes from the russian end of the telescope if you like the sources of russian they were reporting on how russia saw it and of course that may in some cases be rather different than how it was viewed in america and at the other end of the telescope but it comprised three basic things one was there was a whole scale campaign to interfere in the u.s election that it was supported and funded by the russian leadership including putin thirdly that it was designed primarily to assist donald trump and to damage hillary clinton rather than just to sow chaos in the american electorate and fourthly that there were elements of collusion between the members of the trump campaign and the russians and their agents and that that was what it basically comprised and it was leaked in 2017 2017 i believe without your permission what was that process like watching it become public terrifying um so um [Music] it was initially produced for a law firm that was connected with the clinton campaign it was subsequently shared with the fbi and our own security services and then the step that led to its being leaked and becoming a matter of discussion in the world's media was a leak to the press by someone who was working for a u.s senator john mccain who we also had taken it to fearing for america's national security after donald trump had been elected so it was quite a shock when it came out and as some people may know we decided i decided to go into hiding basically for a month or two to regather our strength and reassess where we were and all the rest of it there were numerous threats against us um it's not that uncommon these days to get death threats if you're a public figure but certainly it was quite a worrying time and the reaction in certainly the us could be described as almost some some kind of mass panic about russian interference do you think that that was justified it was a panic maybe but i think it was more of a sort of marmite reaction it was more of a um it was a divisive reaction something that we would always have considered in our careers in government to be bread and butter consensus national security territory the interference of a hostile authoritarian state in your elections we never had any clue that it would become such a partisan such a divisive such a a non-um conformity issue over the years it's been extraordinary uh how it's dragged on and still actually dragging on now five years later do you think that the takeaways that the general public seemed to take were the right ones from the dossier they're different to what you were finding at the time there was a sort of tabloid uh focus on salacious elements of it um inevitably i suppose um but i think in general the takeaway was that that russia had become a very much an emboldened country in government and really a rogue government and i think we're seeing that now in spades and i think that that was really a big step for them to interfere in that way in a u.s election and i think it was another rubicon if you like they've crossed and they've crossed another one now by invading a neighbouring state so i i again i see it i see it personally as part of a process and characteristically the same as some of the other things we had witnessed we had skripal afterwards and so on but i think it's it's all the piece really with the nature of the regime and in your opinion now it's been published or leaked um do you believe that the general public do you have the right to know what goes on between political leaders is it something that you are still regretful that it's in the public eye i'm grateful that the detail is in the public eye which puts sources and methods at risk and can only aid our enemies but the actual message which was essentially that the four points that i made earlier um that it was a whole scale campaign of interference sanctioned by putin and the leadership aimed at damaging hillary clinton and electing trump and b and that there was elements of collusion with his team i think those elements did need to be in the public domain because they set down a precedent and in fact as early as sort of the spring of 17 which was just after this we saw similar things going on in france with the election of macron with an attempt to hack his campaign and so on so i think i think it it was a signpost along this route that has led directly to where we are today and you characterize this as sort of characteristic of the regime in russia with that in mind do you think you know what we might see next very difficult question um [Music] i think the the regime has changed it's hard and it's become more isolated as you've said in the world more death i would argue to rational argument um [Music] i'm not a sort of doomsday merch and i don't believe that we're in a week's time we're going to be watching nuclear missiles land on us but but i do think that this is a very dangerous moment because it's to me it's perhaps more of a first world war type scenario than a second world war type scenario everyone talked about it in the framework of it being like munich and 38 and what happened subsequently there's almost as much a risk that it's more like 1914 and in fact what you will see is some kind of mistake made in poland or in slovakia or romania um which leads to an attack on one of those by russians in retaliation and then we are dragged into this abyss and i think that is what would keep me up at night i don't think that i mean nato is a great thing but i think that there was talk i think this morning of poland providing airfields for ukrainian aircraft i mean that is the slippery slope i think do you think nato will avoid avoid sort of direct conflict and i think probably but it's not certain and i think that these things by their nature have a tendency to get out of hand i think they talk a bit in the first world war that they know that the railway timetables took over rather than the generals and i think that's the risk that we are in today i'd like to talk more about your sort of early career um in the 90s early 90s you said you worked in moscow for a few years yeah what did you learn about learn from that experience and can you tell us more about what it taught you about the culture of russia i learned a huge amount both good and bad i learned that russian people are great people with a fantastic language and culture and they have suffered massively in history they are some of the biggest victims of of history the number of i i always thought back to the number of people who died in russia in my father's lifetime uh which was 1932 to 2014 was just incredible millions and millions and millions and so in a sense i empathize with them as a people but i also think that they are not being active enough at the moment in protesting and toppling their regime which is doing generational damage to them uh in russia in 1990 to 93 when i was there the sort of arc of history was moving in the positive direction so it was a different sort of experience than seeing it move in the other direction i think one of the things that always lived with me on afterwards was first of all the brutality of their history [Music] but secondly the fact that in other eastern european and soviet bloc countries when the berlin wall came down and the regimes were toppled the security apparatus was dismantled and sadly in russia that never happened and i can well remember that um surveillance teams that were deployed on us on a regular basis went down for about three days after the coup in 91 and they were then back and they've never gone away it's probably unfair to ask you um to solve the crisis here on this date but what does this solution look like for you going forward for russia what do you think we should be looking for i don't immediately see one to be honest i think um i've been arguing for several years that that our objectives with putin should be containment the problem is that putin and the people around him have a warped view of themselves and of the west in particular and they have a zero-sum view of the world so they don't really believe in win-win scenarios they believe that if something benefits them it's damaging to the west and if something benefits the west it's damaging to them and that's a mindset which is very difficult to engage with and no matter how much you understand russia and you know russians and you understand their culture and so on their history the fact is that this is a gangster regime that's the only words you can use to describe it the people in charge are gangsters they murder people they steal wealth they lie without any morals or any compunction and so it's a real challenge to engage with them in any meaningful way other than as a quizzling and um i think that we still need to be looking at containment as a strategy however difficult that is in the present circumstances and later in your career you spent time in afghanistan could you tell us a little bit more about that well that's disinformation actually um to be honest um but what i did do was work for a while on iraq post invasion and involving the insurgency and involving um attempts really to get elections and elements of democracy and the rule of law introduced in a place like iraq which is a much smaller scale than russia and obviously was very difficult um so it's when you get out there and you see what the real world's really like you realize that your own society this society is quite an unusual place with tremendous sort of positives and values and that it's very easy to get complacent about them i mean if you look back to the second world war and the way in which britain was isolated and fighting a whole continent of authoritarian totalitarian regimes it's a miracle that we we came through in the end because make no mistake stalin's regime was pretty much as bad as hitler's in many ways um somebody said that at least hitler didn't shoot his generals when they lost battles but the fact that we came through that period at tremendous cost and tremendous sort of investment of our parents generation really my parents generation is something that's been easily forgotten and taken for granted the sort of society that we have here and has your view on that changed um sort of over your career as you've worked in different places and as i suppose the uk has changed yes and no i think that um when you look at things like corruption for example most countries are fundamentally corrupt and in some countries that corruption goes right down to the to the roots uh certainly did in russia when i was there there used to be a comment that no traffic policemen in russia could possibly live on the on the salary that they were paid and therefore the only way that they could have a subsistence existence was to extort money from motorists uh not from us because we had diplomatic immunity but it's that it's that kind of structural corruption structural um lack of justice another one so there are a whole thing a whole series of values that that you know as i say we've fought for in this country for hundreds of years and if you live in a country like iraq under saddam or you live in a country like china anderjee you're back pretty much in henry viii sort of territory as far as britain is concerned and it's really quite sobering and if you were sort of i suppose joining mi6 now how do you think your career would be different uh given coven and the technological advances we've seen i mean i think in general joining government is is is very difficult and very different than it was before i mean you've got this kind of 24-hour news you've got the tick-tock walls you've got um you know you've got everyone with a with a with a camera phone everywhere in the world and it it's almost a matter of um you know erase the bottom in some ways and the media is a bit like that as well so i think if you're if you're going into diplomacy or intelligence these days i mean the key thing is to get uh fully immersed in the cultures and the countries that you are starting and working on to to gain a fundamental understanding of them their languages their history live amongst the people as much as you possibly can although that's sometimes quite difficult and develop that real sort of deep expertise where you almost have a sick sense of of how a country is going to act how a country is going to behave how a particular issue is going to be regarded in that country and i think that's the way forward um and how do you think you've sort of touched on tick-tock generation that kind of thing yeah how do you think social media will play a part in this country's security going forward well it's a double-edged sword isn't it really um i was talking to somebody just now about how you know no doubt true future politicians as well you know once something's on social media it's in a sense it's there forever and the sort of misspent news that we all no doubt um had in the 1980s um i've never seen the light of day because there was no social media so i think it will have a mixed impact um i think it's obviously exploitable by hostile elements and hostile regimes as we've already been told that um linkedin has been used to try and target british officials i think by the chinese intelligence services at the very least but on the other hand it will also be play a really cr critical role i think in in sort of on the ground reporting you know when the russians invaded afghanistan there was no video coverage of what they were doing to the population or what they were doing to the cities and and how many of them were there and what they were being told now you've got really quite good coverage of some of this stuff and i think that's a positive and do you worry for the future of um uk elections i worry to some extent about that but only fundamentally over over funding really of the political parties i think our system of um paper ballots and good old-fashioned pencils and everything else makes uh interference in the actual votes quite difficult i do worry that um that the politics has become very polarized in this country not as bad as america where even fundamental values of national security and so on have been split apart but i think we have to take note of what's happened in places like america and be very careful not to let them take hold here and you're an expert on russia you've spoken about um i suppose the fall of the us and the rise of china what do you think we should be looking for sort of i guess across the global stage in the next year or two years i think it depends whether you're talking about europe or the wider world i think in europe russia is the key factor the key unpredictable the key destabilizer um i think in the wider world china and in the longer term will become more of a challenge to us because of its economic power and its size so in a sense you're almost looking at i think the phrase is russia makes the weather but china makes the climate which is probably true in a literal sense as well given its level of emissions and so on in the climate crisis which of course has now been put on the back burner because of all this as has a humanitarian catastrophe in afghanistan that is developing and no one is now talking about anymore um so we have to get serious i mean i think a lot of the disc political discourse in this country um you know is not really serious or real world enough to understand and appreciate just what a challenge we've got coming because i think it's a big challenge well thank you so much for um answering my questions i'd keen to move to audience questions if you have one do raise your hand or your membership card and take a question from the member on the bench just there thanks spencer thanks um you spoke before about um russian meddling in british elections in um the us as well uh and your disappointments the lack of russian resistance to putin effectively does the uk does the us have their own initiatives to build fifth column to build um resistance within places like russia and china or is that something that they abstain from ultimately i don't entirely know the answer to that question not definitively um in general the experience of trying to do that kind of operation has not been a good one and it's much better in so many ways if the people of those countries topple their own governments have their own sort of leverage over their own governments i think it's very important that our values and our education everything else is made and travel is made available to people from those places particularly young people particularly the elite dare i say that they are exposed effectively to our values and our culture because by and large when you talk to young russians certainly in private you know there's no doubt they vote for that with their feet in our direction the problem is that they've got a very entrenched security and militaristic apparatus which is suppressing them on a daily basis and lying to them on a daily basis and so information is very important communications are very important and things like culture are very important they're slow working but they are effective and that's where we need to be looking i think and we'll take a question from the elected member of access committee how how do you think putin's decision to invade ukraine what impact do you think it will have on the chinese position towards taiwan do you think it will cause an acceleration in their aim of forced reunification or do you think it's too soon to tell going to absolute basics here i think that the russian the difficulty of the russian operation ukraine will i mean it is going through some difficulties now but fundamentally the difficulty is the longer term so in other words rolling your tanks across the board is the easy bit and actually coming to some kind of settlement there's this old phrase if you break it you own it as the americans found out in iraq and i think that is what russia will face whereas i think for china and taiwan the difficult bits the first bit is getting the navy and the troops across the straits that isn't at all straightforward and i suspect that um there's quite a high chance that actually uh a chinese invading navy would be sunk uh on the way across so i think that's their calculation they're also they're also much more gradual it's much slower in trying to achieve their objectives the chinese they're not they have a different mentality to the right the russians are like uh have a sense of entitlement there's a world power that is probably no longer justified by their population and their wealth the chinese are much more reticent they're much careful more careful slower to do what they're doing i think they realize that economic power actually is is is paramount in the rise of their country and not military power and therefore if they're going to be able to reincorporate somewhere like taiwan it's probably going to be done economically rather than necessarily militarily i think um we'll take a question from the member on the front bench just over here um you mentioned russia's use of misinformation in the campaign do you think they're escaped for and is it the time for democracies to use misinformation towards strategic and tactical aims not in a sort of policy sense no um it may be on a on a battlefield in ukraine there may be some space for using disinformation to confuse an enemy but i think fundamentally what democracies should be doing is i do believe that you know our communications and everything else as i've said is very important but fundamentally we should have the confidence to rely on truth and it should be the truth that we are you know broadcasting into russia and other places where the truth is a very low priority if at all in the governance of the country and i do believe that the budgets for you know the bbc and radio free europe and all the others should be you know increased and we should be trying to communicate more systematically with the populations of these countries than we are at the moment in their languages obviously as well i will take a question from the member just over here um thank you for very interesting talk so i'm from sweden and in sweden there's a lot of talk now about joining nato as well and that is also going on in finland um as you know putin's narrative or is that the existence of nato it wasn't or isn't justified after the fall of soviet and he has been complaining about how nato has been expanding and as far as i understand it that is the main concern so to speak so i'm just wondering first of all if you think it was a mistake to expand nato to the baltic countries or poland and secondly what do you think would be a wise strategy for finland and sweden in regards to nato membership at this point very good question i don't think it was a mistake to expand nato um i think ultimately if a country is um sovereign and if a country's system of governance and its system of law and its system of military and defence policy is compatible with nato's requirements then it should be free to apply to join nato i think there were some mistakes made going back away particularly by the former vice president cheney in the day talking about georgia joining in ukraine joining you know massively prematurely i think that joining nato is a big step clearly for any country to accept that it is responsible for the collective defense of many other countries um is a huge change actually um and if i was running sweden and finland now i would be thinking very carefully about joining i'd be looking at the compatibility of that with you know other commitments and other responsibilities and so on but i think ultimately both finland and sweden should be free to join nato if that's what their people want and and we should welcome them in nato after all is a defensive alliance is it is not conceivable in any real world situation that nato would attack russia it's ridiculous and a question from the member in the blue jumper hi thank you for coming i want to see your comment on two things first putin pretty much threatened the west had the west with the nuclear war a couple days ago and wondering if that's what make you make the comparison with the cuban missile crisis or even if before that threat that was something that was on your mind and secondly there have been stories i think mostly improvement about putin's mental health and i wanted to know whether in a system like russia's that hasn't doesn't seem to have many checks and balances whether that sort of thing is is relevant then something we should be thinking about i've certainly thought up until now that russia was not a monolithic country um you know and i've seen a lot of intelligence over the years both government and our own private which suggests that actually it's quite a complex government and leadership far more so than you might think what they do of course is that they don't show that to us in the open we don't have debates in the duma where people are ripping shreds off each other and that makes it more difficult to read i am concerned however that certainly over the last couple of years that kind of collective pluralism in the leadership that that russia seems to have had in the past in the recent past seems to be weaker so i am concerned that um it's become more autocratic more dictatorial under putin and that's a big cause of concern and i think the difference between the cuban missile crisis and the situation we're now is that the soviet union had structures the soviet union had however perverse they might have seen uh seemed uh collective ways of doing things the architecture of the state was the real architecture of the state and so on the situation we've got at the moment is that it's very difficult to discern who has influence over putin and how it's exercised and um a lot of it's very capricious a lot of it's very personal it's far more like an ottoman court rationale than the soviet union was like a sort of structured communist state and the amount of power i think that putin has accumulated in his own hands now is a really big problem we'll take a question from the member in the scoff just behind you spencer sorry one other thing on that i i don't think he's about to go to nuclear war with us or nuclear strike i don't think it's got to that point and um yeah it's quite interesting isn't it that even you know the lunatics running north korea have never got to that stage so i think it's pretty unlikely but there is a small threat of it and the threat will come if things spiral out of control in the way that we were talking about just now what do you think of zielinski's decision making so far during the conflict and do you think ukraine has a chance of achieving their goals of joining nato and the eu and repelling the current russian force i think zolensky has been exemplary in the way he has run his country over this last period vastly exceeded expectations given that you know his background wasn't won in politics or the military and he will emerge from history as a hero in in some ways like um dub check and others in the past however i do think that the rate the government in in ukraine will probably fall uh and the in the in the short term um ukraine will not um be a free and democratic country medium to longer term i'd be quite optimistic that um that we can get to a situation where we have a more reasonable government running russia even if it's autocratic and that ukraine can get some breathing space my real fear is that in six months time kiev and kharkiv will look like aleppo did in syria and that's what we've got to try and avoid at all costs we probably have time for one final question um the member and the black coach just there hi um i was just wondering about your comment earlier that um russia makes the weather yet china makes a climate what do you think in this situation china's role will be if indeed any role i think china's caught on a dilemma really because china's rhetoric as a state is that the sovereignty of countries is inviolable and that it's actually quite a china is actually quite a conservative country in some ways geopolitically in a way that russia isn't on the other hand obviously china does have this rivalry of the u.s it is in china's interest that us be discredited around the world in whatever situation you're talking whether it's kabul airport or whatever um and so i think china's views of this will be very mixed uh china will never be russia's ally and in fact i would argue that if there ever will be a land invasion of russia it will come from china not from the west um but china will like the fact that that america and the west have been distracted by this are going to have to spend vast resources on this whilst they will quietly go about their business in other parts of the world importing oil from iran or whatever they do and buying up large parts of africa and sri lanka and other places but fundamentally i don't think the chinese leadership is supportive of the sort of instability and unpredictability of where we are at the moment and obviously it's not in china's interest that a full-scale war would break out in this part of the world or that there'll be a nuclear exchange so i think they'll that in public they will be neutral if not slightly sneering towards the west in private they're probably telling putin where his red lines are i suspect uh it's interesting isn't it that um this invasion took place the day after the um or virtually the day after the olympics had ended in beijing and i think that tells you something of the of the relative power relationship between china and russia in reality well christopher thank you so much for joining us we'll finish with a question we've asked all of our speakers this time which is if you could leave our audience this evening with one thing to think about for the rest of the week what would that be i think it's that life is about and careers particularly about taking calculated risks and if you don't risk anything you don't achieve anything and when i look back on my career a lot of it happened not by chance but not predictably but i would say that the big things that i've done in my life that have been positive whether it was going to restaurant or posting at 25 or leaving a civil service job at 50 45 and starting up a small business all the things i've done in life that i look back on with great pride have involved risk or be a calculated risk thank you so much do join us tomorrow at 2pm in the chamber for our emergency event on ukraine we'll have a panel of specialists to talk about the changing situation um thank you so much for joining us christopher please join me in welcoming or thanking christopher steele [Music] you

Channel: OxfordUnion

Views: 239,269

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Id: fLVQfwwN_r8

Length: 45min 46sec (2746 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/ImpressiveReward572]

He's awesome f Donny and his master in russia

[u/czechbabesrock20]

King of disinformation this guy belongs in jail

[u/CharlieMarlow84]

If you trust anything this lying POS Steele says you are a fool.