If Ukraine continues to beat Russia Putin is doomed | Daniel Johnson interview

afraid it's the eu that's looking rather more brain-dead than nato hello and welcome to offscript my name is stephen edgington has russia's invasion of ukraine united the west or has it exposed divisions between countries like the uk and germany to discuss the west's reaction to putin's invasion i'm joined by the editor of the online site the article and former telegraph journalist daniel johnson has russia's invasion of ukraine united the west i think we all hoped it would initially and there were signs that you know europeans americans brits were were trying to pull together but as time has gone on it's three months now we have started to see really important divisions opening up fortunately not so bad that putin's been able yet to exploit them but i think they are nonetheless very serious and worth are discussing because uh when you read for example that um the italians are putting forward a new peace plan or that uh emmanuel macron's been chatting to his friend vladimir in in the kremlin again you suddenly think help you know what are they actually planning there and why aren't we being involved in these negotiations um the truth is of course that the war is still being fought at a tremendous intensity especially in the donbass and i think it's quite inappropriate that we should be negotiating while the russians are still occupying huge tracts of ukraine uh abducting hundreds of thousands of people killing and torturing and raping many more thousands uh i think it's too soon to be negotiating with russia so that whole line of discussion which is very popular in places like paris rome and berlin seems to me to be very premature we have to help the ukrainians to win the war and then i think we can have meaningful negotiations with moscow uh but at the moment uh how divided are we let's think i mean on the main questions of of uh economic uh warfare sanctions and so on diplomacy uh and above all the military side uh there are wide gaps between what i would call broadly uh the anglosphere the u.s britain uh to a lesser extent australia and canada um together with the central and east europeans and to some extent i think the scandinavians we're all for a pretty tough line on this maximizing the support that we can give to ukraine both military and economic and in terms of diplomacy uh we think the effort should be focused on uniting the west uh preventing at least some of the damage that's being done by this war uh to the rest of the world to the particularly the poorest nations which are desperate for food from ukraine and also strengthening nato by enabling finland sweden and possibly other countries to join so that seems to me to be the priority but in brussels and in the other major european capitals they seem to have a very different view about what we should be focused on now uh they don't seem to place much emphasis on the military support in fact they sometimes seem to be more worried about the idea of ukraine actually winning than uh than they are about uh russia winning uh in other words what they want is an immediate ceasefire that would freeze the conflict leaving russia in control of large parts of ukraine we've seen this of course with previous wars that putin has started frozen conflicts in the caucasus in ukraine itself and um and in syria and so i think that's a real risk uh on on the on the sanctions front we've seen uh an inability of europe to really go beyond the initial sanctions that have been very effective but go nowhere near far enough so particularly on energy there's been a lot of foot dragging eventually they decided to stop importing russian coal coal for heaven's sake is a is a mineral that exists in abundance in in europe we don't need russian coal uh the only real reason for for importing it anyway was that it was cheap and that it enabled rather hypocritical uh green-minded politicians to pretend that they were not uh digging up fossil fuels you know but it was fine for somebody else to do it so we stopped importing coal but oil is still coming in and they still haven't agreed an oil embargo and then on gas well i mean it's interesting that the russians actually cut off gas supplies to several countries particularly poland the poles seem to have coat so if they can cope then why can't germany and all the other eu nations that import huge amounts of russian gas the answer is they're not prepared to take the hit you know this might mean a percentage or point or two off their gdp and it's a difficult time as we all know cost of living crisis not just in britain but across the western world so politicians don't particularly fancy that um i mean it's interesting that some of the countries that were keenest on uh the southern europeans back in the uh you know the last big big economic crisis after 2008 they were very keen then on greece and other countries uh taking a big hit to their uh their economies uh in in the name of uh fiscal probity and and um you know tight money um now uh they're not prepared to accept the same sort of sacrifices themselves and so i think there is real hypocrisy in western europe but interestingly public opinion is not necessarily with the politicians and we've seen in germany in the last few weeks two big regional elections in schleswig-holstein and north rhine westphalia where the ruling dominant coalition party the social democrats which has been traditionally the most pro-russian party have had a bloody nose and schultz uh oscar uh olaf schultz the the chancellor uh has obviously been forced to have a bit of a rethink uh because if he's losing popularity then i think uh it's only a matter of time before the policy changes too uh but meanwhile his rival within the coalition annalena bierbach the uh the foreign minister is agreeing uh is taking a much more hawkish line with with with moscow and much closer i think to the anglo-sphere view which is a very interesting dynamic you know you wouldn't in britain expect greens to be uh taking a tough hawkish line on foreign policy but germany's different you know the greens are a mature party there they've been around for half a century and uh interestingly they they seem to have uh been much wiser to particularly the human rights violations by by putin uh but also a kind of real politique uh which which means that i think uh you know boris johnson can make common cause uh uh there's trust as well uh with people like berbark uh and and her colleague harbeck uh who's the uh energy minister and deputy chancellor um he he seems to be keener on weaning germany off its dependence on russian energy than than the rest of the political establishment so there's a very interesting debate going on in germany and similar debates in paris and rome and other capitals essentially what this all bubbles down to is whether we want ukraine to win this war and what that means for the west exactly it's not just about economics if you look at what henry kissinger said today he argued that the west shouldn't be hoping for ukraine to absolutely defeat russia to humiliate putin for two reasons he says first of all it's strategically important that we have a strong russia in order to create a balance of power in europe that's been there for a long long time and secondly so that we don't push russia into a permanent alliance with china which has been another aim of sort of western leaders for a long time since the cold war and throughout the cold war so do you think that there is actually a strategic argument not just an economic one that says ukraine needs to concede land to russia in order to save face for putin and end this conflict which is what kissinger was arguing for well i have great respect for henry kissinger i've met him i admire him i've read him over many years and he's usually right on this i don't agree with him i think russia would be a much stronger country without putin i think the way to turn russia into a strategic partner rather than an enemy is to hasten the demise of the putin regime i'm not talking about using force to achieve that but i think nothing less than a humiliation is going to force the russian establishment both military and civilian to think again about the whole direction of russian foreign policy for the last 20 years i i think that in terms of china it's obvious that the chinese are now tiptoeing away from their alliance with with putin they've seen what's happened in ukraine they're not very impressed and i think that whole gamble of putin which obviously depended on support from china just on the eve of the war you may remember he traveled to china uh you know it was pictured with xi jinping uh you know this sort of iron friendship a sort of latter day axis one might say well now there is a deafening silence from beijing i don't think that the chinese want to be allied with a loser but it's true that putin is running out of options and he may try to revitalize that but quite frankly i don't think we should be in the business of saving face for him i know that that is the view of emmanuel macron he said so only a couple of weeks ago speaking to the european parliament that russia must not be humiliated well it's only a humiliation for the evil men who ordered this horrible horrible invasion it's not a humiliation for the russian people there are many many russians who have left russia even you know sacrificed everything in order to not be tarred with that brush so um i i i'm on their side you know i think there are plenty of more rational people in russia even perhaps in the russian hierarchy uh to whom we could be talking um at the moment putin seems absolutely determined to double down on uh his policy he he has no choice and his most likely successor um nikolai patruchev uh the secretary of the uh national security council in russia seems to be if anything even more anti-western and hawkish and generally hostile so the immediate outlook is rather grim if it's true as i believe it is that putin is a very sick man and will at some point need to take time off at the very least for medical treatment um then the likelihood is that initially at least he will be replaced by petruchev or other hardliners so that won't we can't expect any change in policy immediately but in the longer term if as sir richard dearlove the former head of mi6 was arguing this week putin disappears into a sanatorium and never comes out or only comes out as an ex-leader of russia if that scenario happens i don't think the regime is stable enough strong enough successful enough for russian public opinion in the long run to support an unelected faceless bureaucrat like patruchev so i think we will start to see open debate within the russian elite and to a lesser extent among among ordinary people i think it's bubbling up already we're seeing isolated protests from you know mothers and fathers and others of soldiers who've died we're seeing uh arguments happening on russian state tv that we haven't seen before you may remember last week the their leading military expert suddenly said well you know we are isolated we are the whole world's against us this has to change we have to do something about this and by the way the ukrainians will soon have a million men in arms you know that's something we have to take very seriously these people will fight to the death they're not going to collapse so uh if if people in russia are beginning to the penny is beginning to drop just what trouble they are in then i think we could see maybe not a coup but but a shift at least within the russian leadership uh again maybe not under putin but putin will not be there forever now you mentioned earlier real politik and i think henry kissinger who sort of the master of of that documentary is yes uh he would probably argue and i'm sure he would argue that what you're saying is wishful thinking and that removing putin or in the long term putin sort of putin s government being removed from power by his own people or whatever is highly unlikely and that ukraine's natural state this is what kishan just said again ukraine ukraine's natural state is as a buffer state not as a frontier of europe and it must accept that what do you say to this argument that perhaps this is wishful thinking from you and what happens in the situation or scenario in which you're wrong and putin does stay in power which i think personally is probably more likely okay well you're absolutely right we always have to plan for the worst case scenario uh let's suppose that putin recovers that he uh he strengthens himself he certainly is purging his enemies he's eliminating possible rivals he sent alexei navalny who's a very dangerous rival uh to a penal colony uh so yes he he may stabilize the domestic situation and perhaps uh you know find ways of of maintaining his popularity and mobilizing uh russian uh opinion i mean if we make we must always be very careful about comparisons with hitler's germany but after the battle of stalingrad uh joseph goebbels the nazi propaganda minister famously organized a huge rally in the sport palace in berlin where he called on he whipped them up into a sort of frenzy uh tens of thousands of people and called on them do you want total war and they all yell back that they did you know we want total war and maybe putin is capable of mobilizing that kind of fanaticism so what do we do then well i think the first thing we have to do is make good on our promises to ukraine the very least we can do to for ukraine is to give them our best weaponry our best training and sufficient supplies so they are not desperately running out with their backs against the wall they are after up against a superpower and in military terms at least and uh it is a david and goliath kind of contest i i don't dispute that and there is no question of ukraine encroaching on russian territory all they're asking is for the russians to leave their territory so i think that's the very first thing we should do and we're not doing that by the way yet i mean even britain and the us are not giving enough military support to sustain offensive operations by the ukrainians they've only been able to mount very very limited counter-attacks um because what we're beginning to see i think from a sort of military history point of view is that the initiative seems to have returned to the defense in this war it's easier to defend than to attack it is the attackers the russians who've taken by far the heaviest casualties um so it's somewhat more like the first world war than the second world war you know rather than this being a blitzkrieg uh it's turned into more of a kind of war of attrition you know trench warfare that kind of thing so very difficult for the ukrainians to recapture places like kerson and mario paul but let's also remember that zelensky is a democratic politician unlike putin he does depend on public opinion and support and there's no question about it that 44 million ukrainians are determined to regain their sovereignty and they expect their leaders especially zelensky uh to deliver that so exactly as in the second world war if winston churchill had been minded which of course he wasn't uh to make some kind of concession to the nazis such as oh well you know perhaps you wouldn't mind if we just that you have cornwall and kent say do you think the british public would have worn that of course not not for a second in fact when churchill made his great speeches you know during the battle of britain um he even hinted the possibility that we might be occupied by the germans in which case we would carry on the war from the other side of the atlantic you know his proposal was that under another prime minister because he was determined to die uh in the defense of london but uh but under some other leader you know the the war would be carried on and i think that's exactly the mentality in kiev now so i think we need to honor that i think we need to tighten the grip on russia through sanctions and that there is much more that can be done on that i don't think the full force of sanctions has been felt yet but it will be over the next few months uh i think it's it's almost inevitable that russia will suffer hyperinflation that it will uh there will be major shortages that um the you know they will go back to the the worst days of the 1990s the post-soviet period when uh living standards fell rather dramatically and uh i think once that happens let's stand back and see but i i think that will change the calculus um but in order to get from where we are now to that point uh we do need to maintain the unity of the west and that brings us back to your original question you know how do we do that how do we persuade our european allies uh that they need to do far more than they're doing right now well first let's talk about germany now this is a country that you've spent a lot of time in even reporting about for the daily telegraph absolutely a long time already a long time ago well it was it was over 30 years ago i i i reported on the fall of the berlin wall and this is an interesting question about the fall of the berlin wall because famously margaret thatcher she didn't want germany to be reunited to be unified because she argued and you know many people you know thatcher was a bit of a sort of uh she wasn't too friendly to the germans generally however she did have an argument about this and this was that germany would become the dominant power in europe without any of the without taking any of the responsibility that comes with that do you think that we've seen that now in response to this crisis in ukraine and leading up to obviously angela merkel and her government sort of being quite close with putin in some ways obviously so do you think that it was a mistake you know in hindsight for germany to to be reunited okay well i think there are several distinctions that need to be made here uh you're absolutely right that that margaret thatcher was deeply concerned about german unification this went back to her childhood when her family looked after a jewish refugee from austria in the 30s and i can remember having that discussion with her in the aftermath of the uh after the event as it were uh and um she was very emphatic about it uh but but um if you were there on that night of the 9th of november uh 1989 it was perfectly clear that nothing could stop this this was the tide of history um this was this was a nation which had been artificially divided in the most horrible way for 40 years coming together and no statesman however great and margaret thatcher was a very great states woman can stand in the way of that kind of tide um helmut cole then the german chancellor a great chancellor uh far greater than angela merkel or schroeder or schultz the other the last three german chancellors uh i would say that the earlier german chancellors adenauer brandt schmidt and cole were all much greater leaders and they all understood the danger of of germany being too powerful in europe and they were determined not to let that happen so cole brilliantly outmaneuvered gorbachev and the russians to enable unification to go ahead smoothly um but uh and without germany detaching itself from nato and becoming this sort of free-floating rather dangerous neutral state in the middle of europe which was i think a major worry for people like mrs thatcher um so in fact germany uh germany didn't become that sort of danger what it did however do was to abandon the cold war mentality which made it realize that it made a terrible mistake under the nazis all kinds of mistakes of course but in particular a strategic mistake by uh uh becoming an enemy of the west and and you know under i mean i i still remember how helmut cole his favorite music was the american air force big band you know i mean he was of that generation for whom the americans were the liberators and saviors of germany from the russians and so liberated from the nazis and saviors from the russians and i think that generation of germans understood that very very well i think since then we've had a rather different generation who didn't have that experience and who've allowed germany as you rightly say to become much too close to russia and they have as it were dismantled their defenses to a really dangerous extent i mean back in the 80s i visited the bundeswehr the german army spent several days with them it was then a very fine army very well trained very well equipped that army no longer exists uh this was one of the first revelations at the beginning of this war in ukraine was when the head of the german army admitted he said we have been stripped bare he said we have nothing um it wasn't quite true they do have enough tanks and guns uh to help the ukrainians but it is true that uh it is it has ceased to be an important military power and schultz the best thing schultz has done was to announce that he was going to spend 100 billion euros rearming germany good for him it's nothing like enough though and uh and and and that doesn't get him off the hook because uh that's a long-term project the short term which is vital is helping ukraine and that is what they're not yet doing they've been you know arguing and obfuscating in in ways that i think are almost uh almost corrupt actually i mean you know what what has emerged in the last three months is the depth to which some german officials and politicians were prepared to collaborate with putin and his his minions uh uh in in in very murky and obscure ways which which have meant that um for example the building of the nordstream pipeline you know this was got through against all kinds of opposition all kinds of advice from america and britain and others and uh it it should never have happened and it was only done by subterfuge uh and it took schultz a very long time before he was even prepared to say to putin okay if you attack ukraine you can forget about nordstrom if you'd said that much earlier or better still cancel the project anyway i think putin might have got that message uh but that's of course speculation that's that's history now uh but i think we we we have to see that germany had become over those 30 years or so so uh so deeply entwined with the russians particularly on energy of course um but also other forms of trade you know cars and high-tech goods all kinds of manufacturers i mean for most of that period germany was russia's biggest trading partner and so the vested interests were enormous and in particular the social democrat party which wasn't in office for some of this time but but was the junior partner of angela merkel for a lot of her time um seems to have interpreted the policy of ost politique which was initiated back in the 60s and 70s by willie brand that was designed to as a form of detont to overcome the division of germany by finding you know areas where cooperation with the eastern blot was possible that was relatively innocuous you know that did not get in the way of wider western interests but what ospolitique has become now has unfortunately become i think disastrous for western interests and has given the green light to putin in ukraine to be fair to the germans there was much argument throughout the early noughties and even into the sort of late mid-90s that it was time for us to accept russia into the community of western nations and we should uh have this sort of more conciliatory approach to them so that they don't end up in this situation that we have today in which they are basically an enemy an opponent and a whole series of mistakes was was made obviously on both the russian side and on in the west side in terms of our sort of dealings with russia many people argue that in the 90s we really betrayed them by by sort of raping their economy through um you know with with uh sort of unfettered capitalism and allowing for these great oligarchies to to form and things like anyway but there's so what i'm trying to say is there are some debates as to whether you know this wasn't always such a clear-cut moral issue because putin wasn't always there and there was always this argument the same with china that we shouldn't isolate them in this in this way because we should be trying to to keep them sort of relatively allied and close to us anyway there's another and you can respond to that point but i want to make one other argument as well to respond to in britain that many people uh have sort of had this glazed opinion of germany over the last few years i'd say particularly from the sort of left from the kind of center left as this uh bastion of uh you know this is heaven within europe this great country that we should copy this efficient uh peoples who whose politicians are incorruptable and are sort of you know the the perfect example of how a a social democratic state should be run do you think that this uh this image has finally sort of been broken in britain oh well two slightly separate questions i'll deal very briefly with the russian point look russia is a great country no question about it great history great culture great people but uh it has always suffered from disastrous leadership uh it has never had a democratic government you could argue that yeltsin briefly in the early 90s it was a kind of quasi-journal a quasi-democracy but um no the the corruption uh of the oligarchs and everything that's flowed from that that is not the fault of the west i i mean certainly westerners um made money in russia but i think i think you mustn't buy into the putin propaganda that there was some sort of conspiracy or you know that we raped the uh russia far from it what russia needed was investment from the west and it did eventually get that but but without the democratic and human rights progress that should have been the quid pro quo and uh unfortunately we are still living at the consequence of that um you know russia is a dictatorship uh which has exploited capitalism uh and used the proceeds for military might but coming back to germany um again germany is a great country and it's a country that i know very well that i've spent most of my life writing about and which i love deeply and i'm very proud of the modest role that i played in 1989 uh helping to bring down the berlin wall but um i don't think germany was ever paradise and i never agreed with my former telegraph colleague john kampfner that he wrote a book a couple of years ago called why the germans do it better yes the germans do some things better of course they do they make very good motor cars for example that doesn't mean that it's a better country or a better political system or that germans are somehow better people of course not and actually very few germans would say that i think britain and germany are actually extremely comparable very very similar countries in many many ways and ought to be very very good friends and for a lot of history we have been um but uh i think what has been exposed particularly in the last few years and particularly the last few months is the imperfections of the german system uh which which are many and uh i can't even begin to do justice of this but one point i would like to make is that we've seen an unholy alliance of business german business operates in a pretty ruthless corporatist way keeping our rivals dominating other countries you know we've seen this happen in a number of cases and german business did not want to give up its interest in russia and that was allied with german intellectuals um and this is an area on which i perhaps have a little more expertise um i mean i've written about this actually in in the latest issue of uh magazine called the critic um we've seen for example the open letter signed by many of the leading german intellectuals in the feminist magazine emma and the people behind this what they want is basically for ukraine to to submit to the wiser more sophisticated german view of the world i mean for example the famous philosopher jurgen habermas who's uh actually not one of the signatures of that but wrote his own article in another paper uh argues that whereas um ukraine is still in a rather primitive nation-building heroic age germany is in a post-heroic age you know germany has overcome all these ideas about nationalism and so on and um and the poor old ukrainians are sort of trying to catch up and the problem he see as he sees it is that a lot of german intellectuals uh have um been rather rather um impressed by the heroism of the ukrainians and he thinks this is very foolish and they should stop trying to pressurize chancellor schultz into taking a tougher line and instead persuade the ukrainians that they've got to accept a compromise you know a ceasefire giving the russians at least face saving concessions and what what this implies is it's the idea that ukrainians are not real agents you know they're not really in control of their own destiny they're not really equal as a nation to a great historic nation like germany you know they they should accept that you know their it's their destiny to be a buffer state i'm sorry but on that i i'm afraid i think kissinger is is sounding a bit more like the german intellectual that he once was he falls after all born in germany um and you know who wants to be a buffer state i mean what a nightmare you know imagine if britain were a buffer state we wouldn't put up with that for a minute we didn't even like being a sort of offshore island of the european union or at least a lot of us didn't and um no we wanted our independence and our sovereignty and and ukraine is a much newer state of course and this is why a lot of people not just in germany but in other european countries don't take ukraine seriously i mean at the um commemorations at the end of the second world war uh earlier this month um the ukrainians were not allowed people were not allowed to fly ukrainian flags which of course thousands of them wanted to do um in in berlin and they took this as quite an insult and and the uh ukrainian ambassador there uh andre melnick said i think there should be a war memorial to all the ukrainians the eight million ukrainians who died in the second world war right here in berlin you you have a holocaust memorial right in the center let's have one for the ukrainians too there's a huge soviet one but the trouble is the germans tend to identify the soviet union with russia and a lot of us do this without even thinking and so the ukrainians have been somewhat invisible um since the end of the soviet union and now they're not you know now they are asserting themselves and demanding to be taken seriously let's talk about chancellor olaf schultz for a moment he's obviously a relatively recent chancellor most people in britain probably haven't got a firm opinion of him yet we're unsure about him i would say and compared to angela merkel he seems pretty weak he seems pretty invisible on the world stage and if you look at what emanuel macron's doing on the other hand he's trying to become a sort of leader of the european union a leader of europe and schultz in a way is sort of letting him it seems to some do you think there's any truth in that and why is schultz being so invisible well he is new uh that is a point and uh and and he is he's a technocrat a former finance minister he's never really had to exercise power at this level on the world stage before so i think one must make some allowances um unfortunately however i don't think that's quite good enough i think the problem with schultz is that he uh like merkel um who has been effectively his mentor even though they come from different parties but most of his career has been spent rather in her shadow i think he believes that somehow he can maneuver in between uh the americans on the one hand and the russians on the other and the chinese uh and that europe he is a passionate european of course that europe needs to uh maximize its political and even possibly military weight well if only that were true but the truth is that europe has shown that it is less than the sum of its parts really that um the individual nations can make quite a big difference but uh europe as an institution uh the european union that is uh moves at a very snails pace you know that it's very very difficult to uh to unite behind a policy and then stick to it um now macron in a slightly different way also believes that europe should be uh you know he's a passionate uh believer in in a more federal europe um however uh he being french uh interprets this really as a sort of extension of french sovereignty you know rather as charles de gaulle his great hero did um it's interesting that um that both uh that that macron and schultz are both originally men of the left uh but they moved to the center uh and um they are both i i think treating europe as a sort of substitute for socialism in a way you know europe has become uh the sort of rallying point their new ideology their new ideology exactly um but you see uh just as we saw during the pandemic uh europe turned out to be uh rather ineffective as a means for organizing um vaccines and you know other sort of medical necessities so in wartime europe hasn't yet proved to be a very useful mechanism if anything i think it's it's it's slowed down the response i mean britain i think has been much more dynamic much more flexible much more able to respond quickly to the emergencies and uh and for example in building uh diplomatic support for the scandinavian countries to join nato nato has um had a sort of new lease of life and uh macron let's remember wrote it off as brain dead only a couple of years ago uh suddenly it's it's i'm afraid it's the eu that's looking rather more brain dead than nato on schultz i'm interested in him as a character now you describe him as a technocrat do you think it's against his own sort of i don't know personal beliefs or essence to or maybe his against his own ego i mean if you look at macron's ego he he's a massive narcissist who obviously wants to become this as i say this little leader of europe whereas schultz perhaps he's more modest in a way and maybe it's against his own character to to want to do this and the second thing i want to ask about schultz is does he have a sort of historic lens in which he views his own position as chancellor you talk about him being sort of the legacy of angela merkel's of continuing that and macron obviously sees himself as the new charles de gaulle or whatever maybe boris sees himself as the new winston churchill uh maybe zolensky does as well how does schultz view his his position from historic point of view does he look to add an hour does he look too cold do you look to other other chancellors well certainly not to i don't know because they are men of the right and and he is above all he is a a solid social democratic party man brandt a bit but actually helmut schmidt because schmidt like schultz came from hamburg and the hamburgers have a distinctive character and tradition which which is very honorable uh they they have the reputation of being you know merchant adventurers very anglophile uh they're the closest port to britain um and outward looking you know not not as it were continental but more atlanticist um schultz however has disappointed so far on that i mean that was true of helmut schmidt uh who was uh a a great statesman back in the sort of 70s and 80s though he failed in the end because his government collapsed because he could not prevent the rise of the left and i think with schultz he's largely conceded to the left you know rather than fight them he has uh he's gone along with them and part of that i think has been this very pro-russian uh policy um it isn't of course just schultz i mean the current president steinmeier who was foreign minister in the same coalition government with merkel uh he he's very pro-russian um so much so that the ukrainians actually disinvited him when he tried to wangle an invitation to kiev they said no sorry you're not welcome here which schultz then reacted in the most extraordinary way he went on television and um put on an extraordinary display of of of kind of wounded ammo prop uh you know he said well this is completely unacceptable this sort of treatment of our president and um until uh we receive an apology uh i don't think we we have anything to say to them you know that it was that sort of tone and um the ukrainian ambassador uh melnick who i mentioned earlier um uh called him a sulky sausage um leben's um uh which uh you know is a is a um is a german expression meaning you know someone who's much too thin-skinned and um that didn't do schultz any good uh i think i think in other words he's still inexperienced in the way that he comes across in in public uh i'm sure he was a relatively efficient and and and sound finance minister but uh i think what is required in this situation is statesmanship and a sense of history as you say you know who is your model and and what does that actually mean and at the moment uh look briefly as though on the very beginning of the war he suddenly announced right this is uh in a titan vendor uh a changing of the times a um a turning point um and everyone thought right you know we're going to see a completely new policy direction from from schultz but then it didn't really happen you know there was this announcement about defense uh he went along with limited sanctions but then it all kind of petered out and then it turned out that he was actually actively disguising the fact that they weren't giving the ukrainians the heavy weapons that they were asking for you know he was actually being dishonest about that and he was exposed by the press german press has played a rather impressive role in exposing the government and and and the ruling demo social democratic party and uh i think schultz is going to have to shape up or he will be ousted i i think it's quite likely that um schultz will not survive this war let's move on from germany and talk about france and then britain and then america so let's start with france emmanuel macron's response to the crisis in ukraine the invasion has been one in which i would argue he's been humiliated a few times he's tried to negotiate with putin which perhaps was sort of you know morally that's a good thing to do we want to end the war we don't want a war to happen however it looked like putin was sort of running rings around him and lying to him and he was sort of letting this happen and as you say as you rightly say france and germany again are sort of piling pressure onto ukraine to to concede land to sort of for a ceasefire whatever and again there is an argument to say well we should do everything we can to stop the war in ukraine they're suffering war is a terrible thing why should we be criticizing countries who want to stop war from a moral point of view and of course you've already laid out why perhaps why the the other side of that argument how would you how do you view emmanuel macron's response to this entire crisis well i i mean macron is uh so dominant in french politics that in a way he can he can get away with a a flat-footed response which i'm afraid it has been um this is not french diplomacy's finest hour uh macron has tried to play the role uh first coined by uh bismarck in the 19th century of honest broker but instead i think he's been a rather dishonest broker and he's he's not been entirely open at every point with either his allies or with ukraine about what he's been saying to putin i think he may now have recognized that those negotiations only embolden putin they certainly didn't inhibit him so the question is what has macron actually achieved he he he likes to present himself as the leader of europe but what has actually been his contribution has he has he for example uh defeated the uh pro-putin factions within europe um i would argue not uh he's he's certainly won that election and it helped him perhaps that both on the left uh jean luc melanchol uh and on the right eric zamor and of course uh marine le pen were all much closer to putin than he was so he was able to pose as the the pro-ukrainian candidate even though uh he from kiev's point of view uh he was a rather um you know fair-weather friend um uh as a matter of fact the french did have one candidate um valerie pecress the moderate center-right candidate who was more pro-ukrainian but somehow nobody noticed that she was just pushed aside and uh it wasn't an election about ukraine is the bottom line um you know the the only way in which i think that played a big part was during the debate between uh macron and le pen when macron was able to say to the pen putin is your banker because she had actually borrowed money from the russians and that was a devastating blow from which she didn't recover so i think the french were not comfortable with the idea that they were somehow in the russians pockets but french culture has always been very romantic about russia ever since the napoleonic era when actually the russians occupied paris at one point or at any rate were there uh but they were rather popular and you know you only have to look at all the stations in paris that are named after russian stalingrad you know uh the french communist party of course was very very powerful during the post-war era uh and to some extent people like melanchol have inherited that mantle um so uh although they're a very honorable french intellectuals uh like uh bernardori levy for example who will uh fight against the putin apologists and uh defend ukraine i would say the majority of the french elite uh the intellectuals who as in germany are much more influential than they are in britain um are quite sympathetic to russia and this gives mackerel cover you know this means that he can maneuver without being seen as uh morally um compromised i don't think boris johnson for example would get away with that even if he wanted to which he doesn't but you know no british prime minister would would have got away with putin's equivocations um so i think french culture like german culture is very different from britain and uh we we we have to take that into account but that doesn't mean that the french should be led off the hook it's true that they're not dependent on russian energy in the way that many other european countries are they have of course nuclear energy but um it took them a very long time for some of their big manufacturers to close down their factories in in russia renault for example was one of the very last uh rather amusingly uh that factory has now been nationalized by the mayor of moscow who is now producing the old moskovic cars that date back to the soviet era so that sort of russian nostalgia is still very very strong and i think the french rather admire all that um so i mean to cut a long story short i think we cannot expect the french anytime soon uh to have the sort of enthusiasm for the ukrainian cause that you do find in britain i mean if you travel around britain right now it's not so obvious in london but there are ukrainian flags everywhere i suspect we're going to see on the queen's uh platinum jubilee an awful lot of ukrainian flags alongside the union jack which i'm fine with you know i think that this is the cause of our time you know for your generation uh as for mine it's uh it's a very very uh good time to be alive but somehow on the european continent in france and germany and italy too i would say um they don't feel that way on the contrary they fear russian even if they're not enthusiastic or romantic about russia they fear russian power they fear above all nuclear weapons and of course it's not great time to be alive if you're ukrainian to be fair uh but that wasn't no i didn't mean that but i but i didn't mean that in a sense ukrainian identity yes has been forged in this cauldron of of fire and perhaps the west has sort of found its purpose again and nato has become strong again and this is a good thing and if you look back to the cold war there was much more of an ideological bent within sort of the west let's say thatcher and reagan who who had a very specific goal of ending the soviet union and that was a great motivation and some sort of unifying factor and obviously since the end of the cold war perhaps we've lost that motivation and that that sort of unity which has led to many many problems not just on the world stage but domestically and i want to mention britain because we've been through a lot of political turmoil in recent years with the brexit vote and the negotiations and let's be honest theresa may probably didn't do great things for british image abroad uh nor did the civil service in many parts of the british establishment and uh you know this caused a lot of problems for us in terms of our image has this invasion of ukraine and britain's response to it restored our image in a good way in a positive light and has it give has it given britain a sort of a new lease of life in terms of our foreign policy i would give a qualified yes to that i i i certainly think it has re-energized our foreign policy uh and by the way i would give liz trust a lot of credit for that uh and i think ben wallace has also played a very important role as defence secretary but but the lion's share of the credit must go to boris johnson uh boris uh who's long since been a sort of legendary figure you know i mean he's recognizable around the world in a way that very few leaders are but he's often been seen as a figure of fun as a buffoon as you know a joker and of course in some of the european elites still see him in that light and that will probably not change but i think ordinary people look at it differently you know they see a man who is working very hard to give zelensky the tools to finish the job to coin a phrase um and the fact that zelensky has singled out boris and britain more generally uh to quite an extraordinary extent you know that that we have almost uniquely stood by ukraine um even more than the americans although the americans of course have given far more in the way of military hardware but i think zielenski has seen something about the british which perhaps we'd lost sight of about ourselves you know he sees when he looks at britain he sees a proud ancient country with a fine history which is doing the right thing whether or not it's in our immediate economic interests um after all you know many british companies have lost a lot of money in russia too we've lost investment here um you know it's it's not um it's not cost-free uh supporting ukraine in the way that we've done uh but it was clearly the right thing to do and i think there is almost unanimous support here um of course there are the jeremy corbyn's uh on the left and a few idiots on the right to the extreme right uh who support putin but uh i have been really struck by the um consensus across the political divide in support of boris's policy and uh i i i i'm really very struck by that and i think i think that british prestige in the world has undoubtedly been increased and and my goodness it was it was a good time for that to happen because it's we've almost forgotten this but less than a year ago we and the americans were humiliated in afghanistan and that was not our finest hour although it was it was a very impressively executed um uh retreat but but nonetheless it was it was a retreat and and we left them in the lurch and we have not been particularly generous in allowing those who supported us there to to come here so that's a somewhat embarrassing episode in in our recent history uh much worse for the americans i think uh but but not good for us either uh so i'm very proud of the fact that we've i think recovered that ground and some by the way that we've handled ukraine on the afghanistan thing i mean when you say it's an expert expertly sort of retreat or whatever for the phrase you used well all i meant was that the the raf uh and and the troops on the ground behave with with great uh heroism uh in getting our people out they did that very well but you don't win wars by retreats it was a sort of dunkirk type thing i agree with you in a sense because what they did was fantastic and we should appraise them for that but the planning for it etc was i think and you can blame the americans for that probably but but also the foreign office was a complete disaster oh i agree i i'm not defending that at all yeah and you know the foreign secretary was on holiday as i should remember uh you know no it was it was it was it made us a bit of a laughing stock and um and what's happened since with the taliban doesn't bear thinking about you know the poor afghans have had a horrible time uh and a lot of people were um i think the scales have fallen from their eyes about about that let's talk about the leader of the free world and america joe biden us president i'm sure you've got lots of opinions on him um his response to the ukrainian crisis uh has been one of supporting with military aid a lot of money 40 billion dollars i think recently congress approved um in in aid to send to ukraine and this is very controversial in the states and i think there's a slightly different debate over there you say in britain there's a consensus although i would say that and you're right there is a consensus i i would say that maybe you know maybe that isn't necessarily a good thing because healthy debate in a democracy we should you know you should be out allowed to sort of dissent without accusing someone of being putin of course and in the states there is another argument out there as to whether this should be a priority and in particular in the context of massive inflation across the west and in america it's a huge problem their economy is really really going for a tough period as economies are at the moment and a lot of americans on the right said what what are you thinking this is a you know they have this mentality of what trump called america first why are we sending 40 billion dollars to the ukrainians when people here can't even uh buy sort of baby formula for their children or um or whatever and gas prices are hugely high and and people were really struggling so what do you think of this debate in america that says well actually we should be focusing on the domestic economy here and not propping up the ukrainians you know they've we've got our priorities wrong well just on the on the british point i i like to modify what i said earlier because uh let's remember that jeremy corbyn led the labour party into the last general election and they might have won and kierstarma supported that you know he was very happy to put um corbin into number 10. and i do not believe that kierstama were he now the prime minister would have been nearly as tough on russia as boris johnson has been so i'm not saying there's no difference between labor and and the conservatives on ukraine i i strongly suspect that the conservatives uh are are a far more reliable uh government than labour would have been were they in in power uh all i'm saying is that is that so strong has boris's leadership been so convincing for most people that kirsten has had no choice really but to go along with it you know it would have been a great mistake for him to oppose boris over this um and i i i give him credit for probably you know as a sort of decent man uh um feeling the right instincts on this too so that's britain the united states well joe biden is not a great president i don't think even his strongest supporters would say that uh he has presided over a terrible economic record and uh he has given far too much away to the far left and he there are many many ways in which i think he's been a great disappointment i would say that his handling of ukraine has been one of the few bright patches in what is otherwise a pretty mediocre administration i i i think his his initial uh diplomacy was uncertain he sent out mixed messages uh to moscow in in the run-up to the war uh if we remember back last autumn and in the winter uh he was blowing hot and cold nobody was really quite sure what message he wanted to send at one point he talked about well you know if it was only a limited invasion then maybe that would be you know different from a full-scale one and this may even have given putin the idea of calling it a special military operation you know so i don't think biden should be led off the hook completely but i do think that uh since the war began he has actually been uh quite statesmanlike uh he's given some good speeches notably one in warsaw which was very controversial where he appeared to call for regime change i was on his side on that uh a lot of other people weren't which by the way was was reversed by his press secretary or at least they said yes it was but we didn't say that well they do this a lot they do this a lot uh biden says something and then somebody else walks it back uh we're seeing this over taiwan at the moment you know where biden has now three times said that america would come to taiwan's assistance and then uh his his diplomats have sort of said oh no no no he doesn't really mean that there's been no change in policy but it's sending a signal to beijing which beijing needs to hear and in the same way i think moscow needs to hear that the united states is not to be messed around with uh over ukraine the united states is not going to just cut a deal over ukraine that's very important i've been very impressed by lloyd austin the defense secretary in the pentagon he again said something very controversial which is that in his view the end result of this war should be that russia is weakened actually weakened so that it can never do this again i mean we forget perhaps we shouldn't forget that putin's now done this a number of times you know he's he's launched little proxy wars or actual wars uh on his borders he's intervened with neighbors um he's treated uh um supposedly independent states like like belarus or kazakhstan as though they were just puppets um he's uh he's still behaving like an imperial uh aggressive uh tyrant and whether it's him or whether it's his successor the kremlin needs to change its whole attitude to its neighbors and this is what i think the biden administration if i can speak more more broadly uh is trying to achieve and and that i do support i would say that joe biden uh fits into the category uh my old friend and mentor irving crystal the founder of neoconservatism once said uh he's a liberal mugged by reality uh and you know biden is a lifelong liberal in the american sense which in our sense means you know sort of a man left of center but i think he has been mugged by reality now and i think he's got the message that if he achieves nothing else in his administration the defeat of vladimir putin must be priority number one thank you so much daniel for joining us i really appreciate your time thank you very much too

Channel: The Telegraph

Views: 434,738

Keywords: Telegraph, News, ukraine, putin, russia, russia ukraine war, vladimir putin, ukraine news, russia ukraine news, ukraine war, russia vs ukraine, ukraine russia news, russia vs ukraine war update, russia ukraine, russian, war in ukraine, ukraine russia, macron, emmanuel macron, macron vs le pen, france, scholz, olaf scholz, Boris johnson, Joe Biden, Biden Ukraine, Zelensky

Id: yMeuVdodfVw

Length: 66min 10sec (3970 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022