How should Britain Respond to Russia and Ukraine Crisis? | Panel Discussion | Oxford Union

[Music] uh thank you all so much for joining us um we'll start with the chance for you to sort of each introduce yourselves um the first question i supposed to ask is were you expecting russia to behave in this way thank you very much molly thank you for the invitation to be here at the oxford union this afternoon this is a terrible time for ukraine but also for europe and for that matter for the world this unprovoked premeditated aggression i feel it very deeply because i spent four years living and working in ukraine at the beginning of the 2000s and i still have many friends who are there um i want to just touch very briefly on four points one is what's in putin's mind then the ukrainian resistance western resolve and where does it go next we spent a lot of time speculating what is in putin's mind i think what's become increasingly clear is that he is obsessed about ukraine he has been locked away for much of the last two years out of fear of catching kovid and i think that has not helped his frame of mind i found the televised meeting of his national security council just over a week ago rather telling that even very senior people like the head of the foreign intelligence service were nervously rehearsing their lines in front of him it was clear there'd be no process of collective decision making putin has this sort of mystical pseudo-historical view of russia the russian world incorporating ukraine and belarus which doesn't stand up to historical scrutiny and is certainly not shared by historians in ukraine but this obsession goes back certainly as far as the orange revolution in 2004 is during the time i was was in ukraine when putin had clearly been complicit in trying to get viktor yanukovych into the presidency in a rigged election even went as far as going on ukrainian television after the second round before the official result was announced and saying that yanukovych had been elected when most ukrainian voters could see that wasn't the case so putin was was humiliated at that time and i think has been deeply unhappy about ukraine ever since he's made two very serious miscalculations first of all about how the ukrainians would react to his invasion with massed force and what the ukrainians have shown is that they will defend their country they're fighting very bravely they're being led very bravely by voladimia zelensky um huge numbers of ukrainians have volunteered have got weapons training and their their armed forces are at this moment fighting extremely bravely and of course this shouldn't really come as any surprise to us at the end of the second world war when stalin had just re-taken western ukraine the red army was at the height of its power nevertheless the ukrainian partisans held them off for the best part of 10 years and we've seen that more recently since the annexation of crimea in 2014 and then the fermenting of conflict in the donbass the ukrainians have fought back in the donbass there have been 14 000 more than 14 000 deaths and millions forced to flee in the last eight years that was before the present invasion i think the other big miscalculation has been how western europe the wider free world would react to this and it has been with remarkable resolution and unity and just to pick one example i think the decision by the new german chancellor on behalf of the new german government really to reverse a lot of the basis of german foreign and defence policy over the last decades is very very striking that germany is now putting a lot more money into defense is going to meet in practice that goal of two percent of gdp spent on defense and is providing defensive weaponry to a country which is defending itself as what all this is is very new the western countries have put in place a massive range of sanctions against investment trade aviation shipping even sporting and culture i won't enumerate at all now you've seen it leaving russia isolated and a pariah but this is really as i started about putin not about the russian people about putin and and his cronies so where do we go next i think it could go one of two ways either putin will continue to use massive force out of proportion indiscriminate and cause a great deal of death and destruction or a way will be found to stop him to bring this to some peaceful resolution there's already been one round of talks on the border with belarus between ukrainian and russian delegations and they agreed there would be a further meeting i don't know whether there was any meeting of minds at all of that and then i was encouraged to see in the financial times this morning a headline that china has started to talk about a role as a mediator and possibly china which has decent relations both with russia and ukraine has been trying to sit on the fence it abstained in the euro in the united nations security council might be able to negotiate a way through we can only hope so thank you thank you and uh professor mcfarlane thank you um it's an honor to be on this panel and thank you for the invitation uh i'm told i have five minutes i will keep to five minutes i want to talk briefly about the implications of russia's large-scale invasion of ukraine for regional and broader international order after all that's what i do i'm professor of international relations um a few brief comments one this appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the post-cold war era of peace and integration that probably includes significant significantly greater difficulty in sustaining the arms control regime whatever's left of it to at a regional level i suppose most people here don't remember the charter of paris for a new europe in 1990 this was a vision of one europe whole and free now that was always problematic but i think it's probably over and done with um we are now apparently moving towards a clear and deep line of division crystallizing in europe once again for those of us who remember the cold war this is all very familiar thirdly as was mentioned a united policy has emerged in both nato and the eu with respect to russia the common security and defense policy and the common foreign security policy of the eu have existed for many years but there's no meat in it now there is meat in it and they are capable of acting together fourth russia increasingly isolated will likely turn towards china increasing its dependence on the chinese and that has broad implications for the global balance of power fifthly um the post-cold war peace dividend i.e the diversion of defense spending to domestic purposes has ended seemingly germany's change of mind on this subject was just mentioned i won't go into detail in terms of american foreign policy this in a way ukraine i'm sorry to say is rather inconvenient the u.s for example has long contemplated an eastward transition in its global focus a turn to asia and the pacific the previous president even suggested that the u.s might withdraw from nato to get on with more important things that's not now not going to happen and as for nato itself nato has been an institution in search of a mission since the end of the cold war uh now it's got one i returned to where i started the post-cold war era is now well and truly over what appears to be replacing the long piece is a renewed and rather traditional great power competition in europe and possibly globally i have one caveat and that is that this prognosis is based on the assumption that putin remains in power his position to my mind remains strong but if the ukraine war continues for a long time and goes badly and sanctions really begin to bite it's plausible he could be replaced the open question then would be by whom and what difference would it make to russian foreign policy allow me to close with the observation that while what i've said is pretty anodyne and analytical at a personal level i find russia's aggression in you in ukraine to be deeply upsetting we all owe it to the victims to express solidarity and to act on it thank you and uh so david well thank you molly thank you for the invitation thanks to all of you for coming and obviously showing your interest and concern in this um your question molly at the beginning did did we expect it um i didn't expect it but i didn't expect crimea in 2014 and i thought if he did do it he would probably stop in the luhansk in donetsk area and reinforce there and try to make uh rump ukraine unviable um i was wrong and i now suspect he will go the whole way but i hope robert is right and that actually there is still a chance for peace uh i think in assaulting ukraine he's assaulted the post-war and post-cold war international order in exactly the way that professor mcfarland has been saying it's over something very dramatic has happened in the last few days and we have a russia now that is completely contemptuous of the rules and regulations it itself helped to set and signed up to both when it was the soviet union and as russia which was that borders in europe can't be changed by force and that we all respect one another's sovereignty and putin hasn't even manufactured a crisis and tried to take it to the u.n he's also rejected the un charter which as a permanent member of the security council of course russia should be upholding so this is a massive change in the outlook for the international order i think and i very much agree with my colleagues that this partly comes in putin's case i think from a it's not just this vengeful isolated um extraordinary view he has of ukraine and how it should exist as part of russia but i think it's also deeply uh it's a result of deeply misunderstanding the world around him for whatever reasons and i share robert's view about some of the factors at work i'm sure and robert knows much more than i do that this has been a great bolster for ukrainian nationalism i mean it's only i think uh 20 years ago that a majority of ukrainians didn't want to join nato and we're actually sort of vaguely pro-russian well you can reverse that now and uh that doesn't save them in the short run but i think it makes it very difficult to imagine ukraine being reintegrated into russia in the long run even if putin occupies it for the for the foreseeable future and that surely wasn't the purpose of what he thinks he's doing um i'm also struck uh by the bravery of russians we don't let's forget here that there are an awful lot of russians i suspect who don't like what's going on you have to be very brave to come out in in opposition to this and it's not just in petersburg and moscow where this has happened the numbers may not be great but when you risk being beaten to a pulp uh it's extremely brave to come out at all and there was an amazing uh petition or statement yesterday by many of russia's leading scientists objecting to what has happened so we i think it's very important we remember that our quarrel is with putin and his clique and not with not with the russian people as a whole and certainly if the stories and accounts of young conscripts arriving and not knowing why they're there and wanting to give up their weapons or anything to go by i mean putin has a domestic issue here of course he can squash protest but i think it's important for the medium and long term to remember that's what a lot of russians basically feel they're not happy at seeing this world order overturned like this i very much agree with professor mcfarlane that two of the most important things that have happened and again this is putin underestimating is the are the reactions of the eu and nato uh i think putin thought that the eu would be divided and prissy feeble would probably not put a sanctioned package together that really had any bite certainly didn't after the russians invaded crimea in 2014 instead it's produced probably the most ferocious sanctions package we've ever seen striking not just at national banks but at the the the russian central bank which at a stroke means that half russia's reserves are out out of action they're unavailable for russia and we've seen the response this has had in terms of having to have emergency interest rate hikes run on the banks the collapse of the ruble the closure of markets none of that is going to stop putin in the short run but it's certainly going to have an impact on people around russia and it does make the calculations for sustaining the the the russian invasion and the the russian state in the medium term much more complicated uh and nato too uh i think you know it's only two years ago that president macron said that he thought that nato was probably brain dead well it certainly isn't brain dead now and the degree to which countries have been willing to reinforce the the nate the eastern flank of nato i.e russia's western flank has been very striking including british efforts in the baltic states and very importantly i think president biden although as professor mcmahon has mcfarland said wants to concentrate on the far east and putin may have wondered whether there's the bandwidth in washington to concentrate on two crises at once has moved troops to europe so nato is in is in business and working um and it's being reinforced now by the fact again as professor mcfarland said that the eu has suddenly decided that it is going to find money and have its own arms supply policy to ukraine i mean this is a first so taken together these two reactions and the two great sort of western uh organizations are very striking and they're bad news for putin and i think he underestimated that um again i would just endorse what has been said about germany here is a huge sea change uh the germans in the past have certainly since the second world war wanted a relationship with russia that is essentially a commercial and a cultural one now they are in the business of uh spending an extra hundred billion euros on their defense suddenly coming up to the target of two percent of gdp for nato members which they've constantly resisted putin has achieved something that four previous american presidents asked the germans to do and they declined so that again is surely the law of unintended consequences as far as putin is concerned and the fact that the germans are going to uh take this completely different posture and anyway put into abeyance and i suspect it stayed put into a bench nordstrom 2 this pipeline project have agreed to supply weapons this is going to change the balance of power inside europe and inside nato it's hard to know in the medium term what this means but suddenly the germans are going to be much more powerful military players and it cannot have been in putin's calculations that he wanted a powerful german military on his western border and incidentally i think it raises issues about what happens in the eu now because if president macron was re-elected and if you have a german chancellor in schultz who is interested in projecting european power this could change the way that the european union develops um i also think that there is as professor mulholland has said this issue about the china you know what what does it mean for russia for china for the west um china i think we'll see both threats and opportunities i'm struck by the degree to which the chinese anyway so far have sort of backed away from endorsing this um and as robert said have been looking in the last 24 hours to to play the role of peace peacemakers uh of course they will be very concerned to see how the west responds they will gauge what the united states does for their own interests in taiwan but i might my personal view is it's a mistake to think that this uh marriage of convenience at the moment between russia and china goes very deep i i i think that uh they while both would like to overthrow the liberal world order and have an order that is based i think in gideon rachman's uh uh phrase on based on a part a a world order of power relationships um i think they are probably very reluctant to endorse the the uh change of borders by force um and uh that we will have to see how this plays out it's worth remembering that the russians if they allow themselves to be forced towards china because of the western reaction and they may have no option um will be the junior partner when the soviet union collapsed when i was in moscow russia had a bigger economy than china now it's the tenth of the size of china's economy when i was there it spent one and a half times as much on defense as china now it's vastly reduced and the russians will feel very uncomfortable about that relationship they're fearful of the chinese underneath and i think the chinese themselves don't forget that the russians may seem a long time ago but chinese have long memories changed the borders in the far east in the 19th century and china has china then lost as a result of russian imperialism one and a half million hectares of land which they still refer to as the unrecovered territories so there are some fundamental differences of interest here um finally let me just touch on nuclear issues because we've had putin anyway implicitly threatening that he might use nuclear weapons this again is a complete departure from the way in which the international order has been in involved in the last 60 years it's not since cuba that we have been worrying about whether in europe we might be faced with some kind of nuclear exchange and my own view is that putin won't use nuclear weapons but i was wrong about him invading so i might be wrong about this and certainly you can't i think take any risks but what i am sure is that it will push again against the non-proliferation treaty make it harder to contain the spread of nuclear weapons it's already striking that the former japanese prime minister has talked about asking the americans to deploy nuclear weapons to japan and i wonder about other countries turkey thinking about whether they perhaps need nuclear weapons and again it cannot have been putin's intention to uh to make it more risky for for for russia with more countries developing nuclear weapons around his borders um just to conclude somebody reminded me earlier this week of a state of equip by lenin who is i confess not my favorite but uh he said that decades go by and nothing happened and then weeks go by and decades happen and i think that's exactly what we've been living through thank you um and when we come to the role of the uk do you think that the uk could have done more to prevent the escalation of the crisis in russia and ukraine you've all spoken about the western response but should we have been uh responding to this months or years ago july yeah hindsight is a wonderful thing isn't it you know we we have a disaster like this and look back and ask ourselves what could we have done should we have done more well probably we should but if you just take the uk which you've asked about the uk really ever since 2014 has been supporting ukraine with economic assistance with military assistance with training and weapons and that's been considerably stepped up in in the last few months so i think the uk has actually been leading our allies in that support of ukraine and many other allies have now come in to support that as well i think there's a a rather dangerous fallacy which is that when there's a disaster in the world like the invasion of ukraine it must be the west's fault i'm sorry i don't subscribe to that i agree with that if i may um i i guess uh concerning the uk i think the uk like my country canada has been doing about all it can the question is whether what we have meets the dimensions of the problem and this is why the united states is so important and germany is also very important um none of the older former great powers or current great powers is in a position to do this alone it has to be done together and i think that we are making good progress on this quite how putin responds to this if he gets into deep water brings me back to your point on his mention of the possible use of nuclear weapons frankly i i share your doubt that this will happen but i also am i understand that i really have no idea what goes on in this man's head it's just a mystery and this is vaguely disturbing and to that point i think you know we have one man rule in russia even during the communist period you had a politburo i mean what is so difficult and i think robert tried very well to describe putin is getting alongside the way he works and thinks this is very very hard to know i mean i would just add one uh point to you to in answer to your question about the uk i i absolutely agree with robert um hindsight is wonderful and it's you know it's it's very easy where there hasn't been hindsight and where i do think the british performance is open to criticism is what's known as the london laundromat and the degree to which we have been processing huge sums of russian money which we've known to be in quote dirty money but haven't done anything about it now i think that is a signal you know whatever you think about the morality of having the money here and the people who come with it the issue i think if you're looking at it from moscow the assumption you make is well they talk tough but they don't mean it and that was also true about the sanctions package we were going to put together after crimea and we didn't really though robert's much more extra on this than i am and i think the same thing you can level the same kind of charge about weak signaling at germany because it is extraordinary that it is only now anyway to my mind that nordstrom 2 has been cancelled or at least put into a balance and i think this creates a sort of a set of assumptions in moscow about what it's safe to do so i wouldn't criticize the way we have been trying to respond as this crisis has built up but i think i do feel that we should have been sending stronger signals particularly since 2014. and so david do you think that changes the way that we ought to be responding to the crisis now no i think we're responding now um you know absolutely in the way we should and if i'm honest i'm delighted and a bit surprised at the degree of solidarity and the uh impact of sanctions that we now see i i would have been more cynical and more um more doubtful that this would actually happen and i'm certainly surprised and delighted personally by the german response and i don't you know it would be very nice if we could create a no-fly zone but i'm not absolutely sure the prime minister's right you created no fly zone you're in world war iii you know that's actually not going to help ukraine any more that's going to help the rest of us so i i wouldn't criticize what we're doing at the moment i think ratcheting up the sanctions even more is a good thing to do and i think the most important two things i would be very keen to do are to keep signaling to the ukrainians as meetings like this do that we're absolutely with them and if you can at least say that it wants to open negotiations for eu membership i think that'll be a very strong signal of course it's not about to happen but it's a signal the other thing i think the west needs to do is try and occupy more of the communication space inside russia russians are cut off by their own state media from a lot of the broadcasting but it's not impossible to get in certainly through social media and so on and making them aware first of all what the truth is on the ground and you're sent you know you're arrested if you call it an invasion but they need to be perfectly well aware of what is going on um but but secondly also to pass this message which i was talking about in my introductory remarks but our quarrel is not with them but it is with putin can i follow up on that i think within russia let's not forget that a very large number of russians have either family or friends in ukraine so whatever the state does to clamp down on news they'll find it much more difficult to clamp down all those phone calls texts whatsapp messages whatever it is of people in ukraine telling them what's actually going on so i think that will be undermining the message that the state media are trying to hold and so far we've had a a remarkably wide level of agreement among the panelists which which is good but if i if i can just introduce a note of criticism of the way that the british government has react in general i think they've done very well but one thing i'm less happy about has been the home office's very small-minded attitude to um loosening the visa regime allowing in ukrainians fleeing for their lives from from ukraine the rest of the european union the schengen area hasn't had visas for ukraine for several years now i think it's really time that we we followed suit could i just add something on that i i share your dismay about the uk government's approach to refugee status or humanitarian protection status in the uk i i thought when i heard this it was completely mad because there was absolutely no way that policy could be sustained in the face of the pressure that the uk faced from its own population but also from friends and allies and uh i'm glad to say that there seems to be some movement on this already molly can i just add there's a pattern here and of course both robert and professor mcfarlane are right you know two weeks ago we were very slow to introduce sanctions after the russians moved across the border and sanctioned i think five banks and three oligarchs and the three oligarchs were already sanctioned by the united states so this looked pretty much like gesture politics and then there was huge pressure not least inside the conservative party and we suddenly shifted and exactly as you've described the pressure has built up over doing something about refugees and two days later we have to uh ramp it up it's such a pity that we don't do it when it happens and we have to play catch up we have seen almost an unprecedented level of economic sanctions i wonder if you could speak a little more to how effective you think that will be in the short term and the long term um professor mcfarlane if you can sure well i think i've watched sanctioning of russia for a long time including in 2014 and i agree with what i gather is the sense of panel that the the 2014 sanctions which still endure in the eu context um were a surprising show of unity for the eu by the way but they were pretty marginal in terms of actual effects on the russian economy the current sanctions will have a much more and are having a much more significant effect that's not not least the sanctions on banks but i think that the one uh apple that nobody wants to bite quite yet is a prohibition on the import of russian oil and gas and i understand why that is so but if you look at the share that oil and gas play in russian foreign exchange income this is the big one and we aren't yet sure we want to do that not least because of the trends and energy prices in the uk and in europe and in the states already in that context if i may just sorry a footnote the uh the rapid increase in oil prices is partly a result of um uncertainty caused by the ukraine crisis but it's also a result of the constriction of production by states like saudi arabia to sustain the price and i think if saudi arabia loosened the tap a bit we might have a slightly different view yeah on the oil and gas of course we western europe has got into a position where it is to a high degree dependent on russian supplies of of oil and gas which can't quickly and easily be replaced by other sources the goal has been clear for years that that dependence should be reduced i think now really is the time to do it and as our prime minister has put it to stop mainstreaming this addiction of of russian hydrocarbons and that that's feeding the main flow of money into the into the russian economy but if we just stopped it a lot of people in europe would be would be freezing because there's no immediate replacement um i'm very keen to leave plenty of time for audience questions but i'll finish um with one final question from me as we watch the war um progress is there anything that you feel the general public should pay attention to which we're currently perhaps not uh i've got one which is quite speculative uh one thing that is concerned to me about the current progress other than just the mass tragedy that it creates is that putin is having trouble at the moment militarily he is having trouble in part because of western military assistance to ukraine and consequently it must occur to him that the temptation must occur to him to do something about that by uh interdicting that or by retaliating against the nato country in which case the flag goes up can i i think just endorse that i think that our leaders need to be very clear with us that dealing with this is painful it's not just going to be painful for the russians and terrifying to the ukrainians but we've got to be willing to take economic pain ourselves and just to remind people actually that liberal societies democracies need defending this is not a natural state of affairs and perhaps certainly my generation us oldies have been very lucky since the second world war in assuming that this is the natural state of things and we've suddenly been tipped back into something that looks horribly like the 1930s and it's a big shock for us you know nobody since hitler has annexed other bits of europe and now this has happened and i think being honest with with the public about what this means and the sacrifices we may be called upon to make is very important in sustaining the resistance to putin's vision of the world he may be gone tomorrow my guess is he won't and i think this is a medium term at the very very best problem and we've got to have the strategic patience and the resilience and the determination to stick with it in which case i look for questions from the audience if you just raise your hand i'll begin with the member just here thank you very much could it be said that obviously you mentioned hindsight before and uh i do a history degree i'm afraid so would you say that it is it would it there is a role to be played by the the failure of the west to properly integrate uh the post-soviet russia into a new kind of uh you know a western alliance and there was suggestion of uh putin wanting to join nato early on in his rule wasn't that a missed opportunity which we regret thank you i would say that we tried very hard particularly in the 1990s to create opportunities for russia to take part in european security structures in 1997 we agreed with russia the nato-russia charter of rome the nato-russia council um [Music] there were discussions about russia joining nato but russia wanted to join in such a way that it had a veto as on the u.n security council and that wasn't going to be acceptable to to the rest of nato but the expansion of nato was all driven by the security wishes of those countries which had lived close to russia and wanted to feel more secure with inside the nato security structure it wasn't aimed at russia it was listening to the security interests of the central and eastern europeans i think that too can often be a problem in this debate you get i think particularly across the atlantic where people focus on what a u.s interests what are russian interests and forget about the interests of all those european countries in between like 43 million ukrainians i think i agree completely that the purpose of nato expansion or enlargement had nothing particularly to do with russia per se it had to do with the demand coming from the region and also as nato made clear in its enlargement paper this is about spreading stability democracy and peace now the problem unfortunately is that very few people in russia actually believed that was what we were doing i mean many people in russia ask why did nato continue to exist after the cold war since it was established as a cold war alliance directed against russia or the soviet union and then the warsaw pact but that's water under the bridge nato state nato has played a constructive role in european security in yugoslavia for example in the 1990s but one of the unintended consequences of this i think is a a gradual creeping alienation of russia i think this is a very good and important question and one that will go on being debated for a long time to come there are new books out about it the promises that may or may not have been made by james baker when the soviet union collapsed promises that may or may not have been made later in the in the decade and to the then russian leadership um and i was with the british prime minister in moscow just after 9 11 when putin actually raised this question with him about should we join could we join nato and i think what we need to do is put this into context as robert has said you have to remember all the countries that had escaped from the clutches of the soviet union and had joined nato in order not to be in the clutches of russia and the idea we're then going to invite russia in was a very very big leap and i think it wasn't conceivable that russia could join i think there is a legitimate discussion to be had about whether you could have tried to devise some sort of different european security architecture where where russia had some sort of partnership role without the veto and that is indeed what blair and bush started to discuss with putin after 9 11 and as robert has mentioned the nato-russia council was developed before that that the discussions with russia in nato had been 19 to 1. the idea was that we would develop a council in nato where everybody was equal and we would have a joint agenda and it would be on things like cyber and weapons of mass destruction all these sorts of things and putin promised that he would be sending a very senior and serious ambassador to nato to try and put flesh onto this idea this chap never turned up and i can remember american colleagues saying to me well this would be very hard for putin to sell in in moscow because the general staff need nato otherwise they've got an enemy and i mean that actually there's reverse there's a mirror image here i mean we can imagine our own military being wondering what they were for but i think even if you go for the counter factual and i think it's a perfectly legitimate debate the problem about having a partner in russia after say 2001 was it could only work if we had shared values and it became perfectly clear between say let's go to 2005 that putin was not a democrat you know putin is basically a kgb officer and he does not share the liberal values of the west and he would have had to have been the champion of a new and democratic russia that would be a partner with the nato countries all of whom have to be democracies to be part of nato and i think it's very hard to imagine russia developing like that under putin you can argue well if they if we've had the partnership maybe they would have been democratic i i find that very hard to believe that was never putin's agenda so i don't think it would have worked but for all that there's a little bit of me that wishes that we had tried harder in the 90s pre-putin on the economic side to help russia when oil was only ten dollars a barrel and people were selling practically their children in the street i'm afraid um and you do wonder what would have happened if a different sort of uh regime had emerged in the late 90s we have time just a few more brief questions i recognize the honourable librarian-elect um thank you very much and something that you've all touched on um briefly but i was wondering whether you see this as being a knee-jerk reaction to demands to nato that didn't get accepted or as part of a long-term strategy that putin has with regards to the former soviet states that might have potential connotations for the baltic states or georgia in the future especially given his actions in kazakhstan a few months ago i mean i i don't know i wish i did i mean i i think one of the things we don't know and you know as my colleagues have been saying too we don't know putin's mind um do we think he would go on if if he if he does achieve what he thinks he wants to in ukraine does he stop there he's certainly in some of the statements he's made he implies that you know he wants to reorder um more than just the relationship with ukraine he's already while we've all been focused on ukraine he's reabsorbed to all intents and purposes belarus so i don't think you can rule it out which is why it's very important to be sending strong signals that we mean what we say the difficulty of course with georgia and moldova as opposed to the the baltic states is that they do not have the article five guarantee president biden's been absolutely clear that one inch of nato territory in its war but you cannot say that for georgia and moldova no i i if i may i i agree uh with sir david um i don't i really don't think that there is a grand secret plan out there but i do think that putin has certain well-established preferences as to the structure of regional order in the former soviet space that doesn't mean invading everybody and taking them over i think he's reasonably happy with kazakhstan he's reasonably happy with uzbekistan he's reasonably happy with armenia but not least because he now has his fingers around armenia's neck effectively in conjunction with the ongoing conflict in azerbaijan i do worry about georgia because if you look at where russia has actually used force against neighboring states it tends to be states that express their avid desire for membership in nato ukraine is one the other one is georgia i i think what we're dealing with here is not some grand plan but it's more a set of attitudes among certainly the russian leadership but i think quite widespread in russia that russia is a great power and is surrounded by lesser powers or if you like second class powers which do not have the same rights as russia and this comes out in expressions like russia's near abroad so in other words they see the the countries close to them as in some ways different from those who are further away or they talk about a sphere of russia's privileged interest but this doesn't square at all with the international rule of law the legal reality that these states since 1991 have been sovereign members of the united nations with all the same rights to independence and territorial integrity but i think that's the problem we're up against that for the russian leadership with a lot of sympathy in russia they just don't see these as fully valid sovereign states if i could just footnote that i think that's exactly right um but one of my pitfalls as an academic is spending time reading things like commonwealth independent states internal documents an odd preoccupation but anyway the interesting thing to follow up on the point about whether russia considers its neighbors fully sovereign and independent i would only note that in 1991 and again in 1993 first in the declaration of the commonwealth of independent states and second in the charter of the commonwealth of independent states those principles sovereignty territorial integrity and non-interference in internal affairs were explicitly accepted by russia and russia has to my mind systematically violated those principles ever since so they're a tough customer to work with thank you unfortunately we're out of time um but as you all know and as i hope our audience knows we'll be hosting an open discussion um here in the chamber in just a few minutes on the crisis perhaps you could leave us each with very briefly if fewer i suppose food food for thought for the discussion that's about to commence okay one thought that has struck me is that the roots of this crisis really go back a very long way and let's let's just pick one episode the second world war the second world war pitted the two great totalitarian powers nazi germany and stalin's soviet union against each other and as we all know nazi germany lost the soviet union came out on the winning side nazi germany was occupied it was denazified a lot of people were put on trial some of them were executed and the germans as a whole learnt their lesson and have become thoroughly pacifist and what we've seen in the last few days has actually been the first time since the second world war that germany has started to come out of that very pacifist attitude for the soviet union there was never a reckoning there was no accountability for all those crimes the horrors the deaths of soviet communism nobody was ever brought to account right my my point is uh much simpler thinking about the subsequent discussion i think one thing we all need to think about is given the constraints of deterrence and also the regional balance of forces in the western part of the former soviet union what can we actually do more effectively to support ukraine and i think my point would be one i touched on really which is the fragility of democracy and our values and the need to defend them and the irony that actually nobody queues up to as far as i know to go and be a refugee living in russia or china but our values remain extraordinarily powerful and they have just reasserted themselves and i think especially for the you know your the young generation you represent it's terribly important that you take on the role of championing them and defending them particularly at the time when our democracies are in some disarray i think polarization is bad there are there are difficulties both on the side of the atlantic and on the others but i think don't lose sight of how valuable uh open societies are and how vulnerable they are and how much it matters that you care about them thank you our guests joined us today on very short notice and we're very grateful to them please join me in thanking them for their time you

Channel: OxfordUnion

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Length: 52min 41sec (3161 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2022