Putin loses support as Russia heads towards becoming a ‘vassal state of China’ | Christopher Steele

the trend of Russia is to become a vassel state of China effectively both economically and politically which is deeply unpopular amongst the Russian people for whatever reason and Military dependency on the likes of North Korea and Iran I mean this is not where your average Russian even not particularly well educated Russian wants the country to be most Russians still want the country to be a European power and to have significant relationships with Europe both economic and social cult hello and welcome to Frontline for times radio with Me Kate chabo and this time we're talking to a Former Intelligence officer with Britain's secret intelligence service MI6 Chris steel ran the Russia desk until his retirement in 2009 when he co-founded Oris business intelligence he famously became known for the controversial so-called steel dossier or the Trump Russia dossier compiled in the runup to the 2016 US presidential elections Chris steel welcome welc to Front Line good to have you here um what was your reaction when you learned that Britain is expelling Russia's defense atache I was relieved in a sense because I think there's evidence that Russia is conducting the sorts of operations that a country does when it's at war with another country within Britain and other European States and I think that it was high time that we took some fairly drastic action to combat this the Home Secretary James cleverly says he was an Undeclared Military Intelligence officer I mean that in itself is not entirely a shock because you expect defense attaches to collect information what was the risk exactly do you think I suspect that uh the service to which this guy belonged which is the guu Russian military intelligence is involved in planning and carrying out um sabotage type operations kinetic operations as we call them uh both in the UK and and in Europe in our allies and I ECT that he was removed precisely for that reason the move extends to removing diplomatic status from some properties and will limit the length of Russian visas um malign activity was the phrase that James cleverly was talking about um how effective a defense do you think these moves will be it's difficult to say because Russia has huge intelligence services and resources and assets around the place I mean clearly acts like this removing cutting the head off the off the Hydra as it were is a is a good thing to do but of course a lot of their operations are carried out by traveling people under or agents under what we would call non-official cover um this is an official cover officer who's been removed but probably someone who knew quite well what was going on in Britain and Britain itself and was reconing um the country and so on and therefore you know worthwhile to stick a a spanner in the word Works in this way I think you said at the beginning of this interview that um you were relieved um can you just describe how you think uh Russia has been developing its Espionage and intelligence gathering in in the UK and and in the west well I think the the starting point for that has to be the fact that that Russia and the leaders of Russia at least believe that they're at War not just at war with Ukraine but also war with NATO and of course Britain is one of the strongest members of NATO one of the strongest supporters of Ukraine um and therefore we would be a very high priority Target both for Espionage Gathering intelligence but also disruption which is what sabotage effectively comprises and you were on the Russia desk until 2009 during your time uh the former Russian spy Alexander lipenko was poisoned in London or or just around the time of you starting on the Russia desk H how did you see the threat by posed by Russia at that time I think if you go back right back to the beginning of this Putin regime and the so-called Moscow apartment bombings I don't know if you're aware of them but these were explosions in uh housing blocks in Moscow and elsewhere which killed up to 300 Russian civilians uh and was blamed on chesan terrorists when in fact it looked very much like it was a provocation by the Russian Security Services themselves which gave us I think a pretty clear idea of what sort of regime we were dealing with here and I think we were in denial about it a governmental level for quite some time and the reminder I suppose of lineno case on our own soil should have really moved the dial um and I was there at the time and I'm not sure it did practically there were a lot of people who wanted to believe the best of of Russia after the 1990s and the need to co-op Russia onto a sort of anti-islamist terrorist uh Alliance um all of which played out in such a way that it gave Putin and others encouragement and breathing room I think to develop the sort of you know statecraft and sort of policies that they are pursuing now and looking at this week's inauguration of President Putin for a fifth term and what he said at the Victory Day Parade in Russia Today that Russia would do everything to avoid a clash of global Powers but would not let itself be threatened that its strategic forces are always in a state of Readiness uh read into that nuclear capability what does this tell us about his Evolution as a leader since the fall of the Soviet Union I think he's probably more of an opportunist and more of a tactician than a strategist I don't think when he set out in 2000 he would have envisaged being in the position he is in now where you know Russia's turned away from Europe um and turned towards Asia strong alliance with China military dependency on the likes of Iran and North Korea so I I don't think that was inevitable and I think part of the blame for that in a sense lies at our feet because we misread him and misread Russia over that period And I think our deterrence effectively um was dissipated and if you look at for example uh Chancellor uh merkel's approach to Russia over the years which was engagement would lead to a better behaved more civilized country then that's now entirely discredited and we see I think the old KGB officer who loved the fact that Soviet Union was a superpower that um it was respected and feared um effectively imperialist power actually on the on the Eurasian continent coming back to the fall and I think you know there are several putins and and we've seen a number of them over the years what we're seeing now is a a very much Retro One um from his days in the KGB and when you were in Moscow between 1990 and 1993 working in the embassy there you witnessed the collapse of of the Soviet Union and you say that we kind of misread Putin and misread his Russia I mean what was your feeling at the time with hindsight and why did we misread things uh I think we misread things because I think we saw what had happened in Eastern Europe when the wars so pack collapsed in countries like Poland and the Czech Republic and others and I think we assumed that that was the sort of path of evolution that would come about once Communism had been abandoned uh or had fallen and I think that was one of the fundamental mistakes we made those of us that were inside the system I think were always conscious that unlike in Eastern Europe there had never been really a Reckoning with the excesses of communist rule in the Soviet Union and the intelligence and Security Services were never properly reformed after 1991 and I think that was a a sort of concern in the back of our minds that as long as that remained the case there was a risk of this kind of Revan that we've seen now where Russia is run effectively by the security services most of the top people in government even people in business now are sort of peers of Putin's from his time working in the KGB and if you R rewind the clock back to to that that moment when you were where you were in Moscow I mean what did you actually think at the time you talk about the risks and the concerns you had um how optimistic were you at the time well there was genuine change I mean I'm not going to pretend that there wasn't I mean if you look at the way Society was evolving in the early 90s in Russia you had the emergence of a messy but definitely pluralist political system where elections were genu genuinely contested uh and you also had effectively a pretty Free Press I mean I was very impressed with when I was there the development of the Free Press and Reporting and investigative reporting and so on um but what you didn't have which does seem to be the fundamental building block of a of a proper mature democracy was an independent strong Judiciary and I think it's the lack of that in Russian evolution in the 1990s which allowed there to be this revanchism if you like as I've said to a more autocratic State and even if you look at for example Trump in the United States now uh it's interesting to note that neither the legislature nor the executive uh have been able or were able to bring him to book but it's the Judiciary which has and I would argue that's further evidence that the fundamental building block of a mature democracy as an independent Judiciary and Russia's never had an independent Judiciary what do you make of the recent more hawkish stance taken by the French President Emanuel maon who warns of the prospect of foreign ground troops being deployed to the war in Ukraine and the British foreign secretary's assertion that Ukraine has a right or had the right to use weapons provided by Britain on targets inside Russia I think it's a development in relation to what's happening on the ground I think the for the first time in the the last couple of months certainly we've seen a prospect not a likelihood of the Ukrainian defense and the front line collapsing um and what the actual ramifications of that would be which would be I think several million refugees coming into into Europe which would be horrendously difficult to finance and to manage including politically um so I I think there's a realization perhaps with macron now that um actually one of Putin's key aims and this is something something I believe for for as you know for a long time is to undermine and and sort of destroy the EU itself and by working through the likes of Victor Orban in Hungary and others um that is a real perceived threat now and of course macron is looking strategically at the EU and France's influence and power within that body and seeing it being undermined what do you make of that the the fear of escalation that has been uh kind of warned against by so many leaders in this situation I mean you're presumably talking about nuclear um exchanges or use of nuclear weapons or even an attack on this zarian nuclear power station in that regard and I think the issue there will be whether the Chinese in fact are restraining the Russians on all that and I think they are that's certainly what our understanding is uh and that's somewhat reassuring but um you know the one of the problems in Russia is that uh the leadership lives in an increasingly small isolated bubble it's very clear throughout this war in Ukraine and the precessing period um that accurate information and policy advice was not passed up to the leadership and that's a big problem in an autocratic system and it means that it becomes somewhat unpredictable as to which path the country takes and I think one of the things that's really been uh Saving Grace if you like is the fact that that Russia's intent has never really been matched by its capabilities either economic or or military or political and um that's basically what saved us I mean China in a way is the is the opposite has huge capabilities but not as malign and intent um so I I think that's how we have to look at Russia and we have to realize that it's being run by a very small click of people who are selected as a result of their loyalty to Putin rather than their competence and that the transmission of information upwards and downwards is very difficult and that's a problem and in response to those comments by the British foreign secretary Russia Russia has come back saying it could hit back at British military installations and equipment in Ukraine and elsewhere and threatening in its Southern military District to carry out exercises how could the war in Ukraine escalate Not By Design but by accident yeah well I've talked again about this before that the war in Ukraine looks more to me like the first world war than the second world war in that sense um and we all know that you know events can sort of take on a or accidental or small events like the the saravo assassination in that case um can kind of escalate very quickly and get out of control and I think that's the risk here it would be that effectively um someone would make a mistake or miscalculate in an attack and you know a missile would land on Poland or a a Romanian plane would be shot down or something like this which could lead to you know exchanges at a higher level I hope that doesn't happen um I think the Russians are being utterly Reckless at the moment they're jamming operations in the Baltic for example are very dangerous and uh could result in precisely this fear being uh realized with elections in the US in the UK and in many other countries at this year do you see any signs of Russia already meddling trying to shape their outcomes yes I think the uh early signs are there and I think that uh it will look different and feel different from what it was in 2020 certainly in 2016 I think Russia sort of got more Savvy about this and they will be using for example Third Country Nationals in many cases to achieve their sort of objectives I also think that things like the way in which the oil price is manipulated clearly um inflation is a big issue particularly in America uh as as an an election issue effectively between Biden and Trump and if the Russians are able through their sort of close relationships with the Saudis and the Iranians the Venezuelans to push the price of oil up over the summer for example and put a spurt of inflation into the American economy just before the election that will play very badly for Biden and I suspect that that's the kind of thing we need to be looking out for what do you think President Putin would like to see in terms of the next US president I think he wants to see America weakened an isolationist fundamentally and and anyone both in Congress and in the presidential campaign that falls into that category would be welcome and and worthy of support uh clearly I think he would have a massive preference for Trump over Biden but I think it's slightly more complicated than that because of course quite a lot of this decision making in America that we've seen and particularly with the aid package passage for example in Congress doesn't actually depend on the president necessarily it depends on other parts of the governmental structure and so they'll be looking across the board at that they'll also be looking at who might get some of the key jobs defense secretary treasury secretary whatever Secretary of State obviously CIA Chief uh and looking at that how that's going to play out under either either scenario you recently said that the global geopolitical situation is more worrying to you right now than it has been in the whole of your 40-year career what worries you the most what worries me the most I think well several things one I don't think uh democracies our Western democracies have really woken up to the fact that they are we are living in a new era we are no longer living in the the postcommunist era where um we didn't have to spend a lot of money on security and defense and other things um and there's a sort of sense that uh there are still quite significant divisions in Britain what worries me is is our relationship with with Europe and particularly the European Union which is key to defending ourselves from incursions and instability directed at us by hostile States like Russia and China so I I think we are not particularly well LED I think that the um States concerned have got their tails up uh they're seeing an opportunity to fill a vacuum not least in the global South as it's called where they are able to exert influence and uh point out things like so-called Western hypocrisy over Gaza and what have you so I I think that we are for the first time certainly in my career on the back foot in the west and I think that's very concerning and if you were at MI6 now on the Russia desk what would be your priority I think it would really be to understand the Dynamics inside Russia and the leadership but also to look at what's actually happening in Russia I mean there's a lot of things happening in Russia which are which are kept quiet which are not publicized there was a there was a figure issued um I think came out the other week which showed that the murder rate in Russia was up 900% in the last year I mean clearly the the war is having a massive effect on the social fabric of Russia presumably thousands of troops coming back from the front lines in Ukraine PTSD and everything else all of which is being suppressed uh plus all the prisoners that have been let out of prison of course virtually the whole young male Russian prison population has been LED out to fight Ukraine and then allowed to return to civilian life after six months I mean those are the sort of social experiments that I would like to be experiencing in our own country and I really think that Russia is on a very steep slide both culturally and socially and everything else um as we look at it today I think that strategically in long term Putin's current management of Russia is catastrophic for the country and what I mean he's just started his fifth term as president what kind of future do you foresee for him I don't know about him there lots of rumors and and information about his health and so on there's there's a good degree of instability in the leadership just underneath him where people are jockeying for the succession uh one of the Russian key Russian leaders U Eagle set and his son died a couple of months ago in Moscow in very mysterious circumstances plus you have a lot of the instability around the economy with you know people falling out of Windows and uh people having heart attacks in their 50s and all the rest of it so there's a good deal of instability just under the top leadership cir circuit and I think the trend of Russia is to become a vassel state of China effectively both economically and politically which is deeply unpopular amongst the Russian people for whatever reason and Military dependency on the likes of North Korea and Iran I mean this is not where your average Russian even not particularly well educated Russian wants the country to be most Russians still want the country to be a European power and to have significant relationships with Europe both economic and social and cultural you were based in Moscow at one of the more optimistic times for relations between Russia and the West what hope can you offer for the future now not much in the short term I'm afraid I mean I think that if you look at Russian history often where there's been a war that Russian's been Russia's been involved in and it's either lost or is perceived to have lost then you get reform and regime change and I think that has to be the hope that eventually this war there's a trigger point amongst the Russian people a and the regime changes as it did in after 1905 and it did in the 1850s after defeating the Crimean War um that's the sort of Circle of Russian history if you like it's not a linear history like ours it's much more of a circular history so I think the hope is that Russia kind of burns itself out on the Battle Ground in Ukraine and that we see some kind of regime change leading to reform but I'm certainly not saying that's inevitable or indeed probable but it is possible Chris deel it's been good talking to you thank you very much for your time thank you you've been watching Frontline for times radio with M K chabo if you'd like to support us you can subscribe now or listen to times radio or go to the times.co.uk my thanks to our producer Lou likes and to you for watching bye for now

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Id: Y-BYrXx71c8

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024