I want to talk to you about
three things basically-- why Putin decided to
reinvade Ukraine; second, how will this war
end; and third, what are the risks of
a wider European war, including use of
nuclear weapons. But before I do
that, just let me say a few words of introduction. I think that most countries,
including Australia, are captives of their
geography, their history, and their culture, and actually,
none more so than Russia. Talking about history, there's
a particular Russian saying about history that
I want to say. And it goes as follows. For we Russians, the
future is certain. It is only the past
that is unpredictable. And talking about the
past, here's another quote. "The reasons for Russia's
military setbacks are manifold-- abysmal preparation,
a monstrous lack of coordination
between the generals, and scant information on
the number of enemy troops, to name a few." Russia's war with Japan,
Port Arthur, 1904. Doesn't that quote
describe what's happening to the
Russian army now? Sometimes nothing changes. And I find that very disturbing. And I know Carl Wilson does
too about today's Russia. Just bear with me. In my view, Russia has
no obvious or clear-cut cultural or
geographical borders. Think about that. It's not a European country and
is not accepted by Europeans as a European country. Amongst other reasons
that's why it was never going to be a member of NATO. There are trendy types in
Russia today, particularly of local Alexander Dugin and
my old mate, Sergey Karaganov, who have conjured up yet a new
geopolitical entity that is even worse than Indo-Pacific. And it's called Eurasia. I don't know what
that means, frankly. I don't know where it starts. I don't know where
the hell it ends. But it's very popular. As Kyle Wilson has taught
me, Russia is simply Russian. And therein lies the challenge
if you're not a Russian. In the 19th century,
the Slavophile movement saw Russia as a nation apart. And Putin is pushing that
to the n-th degree now. While I talk about history-- and this is a bit
self-serving, but bear with me. In 2016, I wrote an article
for a moderately right-wing American journal called The
American Interest-- nowhere near us right-wing as
The National Interest. I said that the
Kremlin is now feeling as its most confident
state since 1991. It now feels it has a
choice between accepting subservience and reasserting
its status as a great power. And it has clearly
and decisively chosen the latter course. This direction almost
surely promises greater tension,
perhaps serious tension, between Russia and the West. Ukraine is as likely a setting
as any for the eruption of such tensions. And that is because Russia will
pursue a foreign policy that re-establishes as a first
priority Russian dominance in its neighborhood,
especially in Ukraine-- and forgive me, Ambassador--
the Baltics, and Eastern Europe. If this means
clashing with NATO, it will be prepared to
threaten the use of force and re-establish old
understandings about spheres of influence in Europe. Now, I'm really sad to say
that things are a lot worse than that prediction in 2006. I will come on to
this, but I think that we're in not only the
most serious military crisis in Europe since 1945, but, as
you'll hear me say later on, I find it hard to imagine how
this war will be satisfactorily concluded. I find it hard to imagine
that one or the other is going to be easily the
dictator without this war extending into Europe itself. And Putin, in
particular, casts around with the phrase
nuclear weapons, as if this is just a
casual, normal extension of conventional conflict. Sorry. [SIDE CONVERSATION] So the three things that
I'm going to address are as follows. The first one is, as
I've said, why Putin decided to reinvade Ukraine. There are four elements to that. I'm not one of
those academics who believe that I've found
the magic solution, that my particular theory
of international relations is the explanatory
variable for everything that happens on the planet. Real life and real policy is
rather different from that, in my view. First of all, Putin argues
that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe that Russia had experienced. He uses phrases like Russia was
robbed, and more than robbed, it was plundered. And he cites Crimea [RUSSIAN],,
our Crimea, as that example. Secondly, it talks about
the expansion of NATO. And you'll forgive
the language I use, but he uses a lot of harsh,
criminal type language. He says that NATO's expanded
to within pissing distance of Russia, quote unquote. Third, there is his
weird, obsessive attitude towards Ukraine. And fourth, that his
view is that Russia is returning as a great power. Let me just quickly go through. Each one of those is
worth a lecture in itself. And certainly, there are some
excellent books just out, which I will refer to as I go
along, fundamentally impressive books not just because they're
the best of scholarship on Russia, and not just because
they're over 500 pages long, but because, in each case,
they are fundamentally footnoted to primary sources. And I'll come to some of those. Those of you who were in Russia
at the time, the Soviet Union-- I wasn't-- when it collapsed
say that it was an unimaginable experience. You've got to remember
that, for 70 odd years, the Soviet Union had a
unique social experiment. And its theory of communism and
the dictatorship withering away and the place running itself by
the proletariat and everybody having equal opportunities a
lot of people found attractive. But once you'd visited
there and found it to be a third-world
country or worse in its standard of living and
the way things did not work, and the more you heard
people's attitudes using phrases such as
they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. [CHUCKLING] In the Metropol restaurant,
where the people are lined up who are
going to serve you, quote unquote, with
their arms folded in their neat sort of official
uniforms and ignoring you. And then when
eventually they come to see you because they
want to have access to foreign currency, which
was illegal to exchange, at great risk, you'd go
down the menu and order, and they'd say we
don't have that, we don't have that,
we don't have that. And nearly all the shops you
would go to-- and forgive my pronunciation, Kyle-- you'd look in the
window and you'd go, oh, I'd like to go in there,
it would say [RUSSIAN],, closed and being refurbished. And I could go on. But they'd worked upon this
concept of the Soviet man. And what they experienced was,
in 12 months flat in 1991, the GDP fell by 40%. Four zero. Life savings, critical
jobs in, for instance, the foreign ministry, a foreign
ministry all of a sudden ceased to exist. The seniority and
where you were looked upon if you were in
the side of the clique, particularly for a member of
the party, all of a sudden disappeared. Rough figures, in
12 months flat, when the Soviet
Union disintegrated and the three leaders of
Russia, the drunken Siberian peasant, and the leaders
of Belarus and Ukraine met, the Soviet Union became
15 different countries. 15, which we have a
representative here. The largest country in the
world lost 40% of its territory. And that 40%, by the way, was
equivalent to three quarters of the size of Australia. Think about that. Russia is now of the
smallest territorial size since Catherine the Great. We'll come back to her and
her long-time lover, Potemkim, and what he did in the Ukraine,
because it's still relevant. There are different views
in the West about this. It is true that
Gorbachev approached George Bush Senior for
huge, massive amounts of economic aid. He wanted a Marshall Plan. And he wanted $100
to $140 billion US. And I'm told by
those who were there, but it's also in
the literature now, that before this, the Federal
Republic of Germany and America were giving millions of
deutschmarks and dollars, and Gorbachev acknowledged
it disappeared into the more of the collapsing
Communist Party and the KGB. And so Nicholas Burns, I
think his name was, the US Secretary of the Treasury,
said to George Bush Senior, we can't be giving
this sort of money. It is our strategic interest
to have a Russia that is capitalist and cannot afford
a major defense capability-- and listen to these words-- and will be a third-rate power. And will be a third-rate power. Now, you can imagine the
impact of that on people like Gorbachev and his
surrounding KGB types. Second-- oh, by the way,
collapse of the Soviet Union, Vladislav Zubok,
who is a professor of international
relations at LSE, his book called Collapse you should read. It is really worth
reading because it'll walk you through all of this. The second one, by Mary
Sarotte, who is Johns Hopkins-- these are both the 500-page
books, but read them-- it's called Not One Inch. And let me explain that. It's all about NATO, that book. And actually, I have read it. In 1990, February, James
Baker, the Secretary of State, met Gorbachev and
said, look, Gorby, I know you won't like this,
but what would you rather have, a NATO that is unified but
not under control or NATO that becomes a-- sorry, a
Germany that is unified but not under control or a
Germany that is part of NATO? And if you can agree
to that, I promise you NATO will not be expanded
one inch further. That's why the book
is called that. Now, there are certain
people in this town to the right of Genghis Khan
who would disagree with that. When you look at
Sarotte's footnote, it is the day after Baker's
meeting with Gorbachev that he, Baker,
writes to Helmut Kohl. And she has read that letter
in the chancellor's archives in Berlin. And she also footnotes,
on the same day as Baker was saying that not one
inch further to Gorbachev, the deputy national security
advisor and a mate of mine, Robert Gates, I was talking
to the head of the KGB and said the same. And that footnote,
by the way, is not National Security Archives. It's the NSA. And you might want to think
about how that was derived. This is not to say that
NATO was bossed around by America, and indeed the
other European members, to become members. We all know,
particularly countries who had been occupied for 45
years by the Soviet Union, what a cruel, vindictive,
nasty operation it was. My first trip to
the Soviet Union, including going across
Siberia, was in '68, after the invasion of Prague. So it is wrong to say
that this was some plot. These countries were only
too anxious and keen, and indeed were lined up
to be members of NATO. By the way, I forgot to mention
Baker, in a recent interview, said he acknowledges when he
used that word or phrase not one inch further, quote,
"I leant a bit far forward in my skis." [CHUCKLING] But he didn't contradict it. We all know the Russians,
like most countries that have long, porous land
borders, are obsessed about borders and security. The problem is Russia
carries it to the n-th degree and, as you know,
in the process, has expanded and expanded and
expanded from the late 1500s. I mean, we think Australia
was a big territory to expand. Siberia is 9,000 kilometers
from Vladivostok to Moscow. And Russians were at the
Pacific Coast, by the way, in 1643, a bit
before my countryman, the Yorkshireman [INAUDIBLE]. And that tells you something. But it's the sense of there
are no natural borders. The longest border
in the world is between them and the Chinese. And yes, they've
negotiated it and concluded it some years ago, but towards
the end, I'll talk about some of the natural antagonisms
between Chinese and Russians. Third, the attitude
of Putin to Ukraine. June, July last year, he
allegedly wrote a 7,000-word document about why we Russians
and Ukrainians are one people, one culture, one religion. And he goes back to the
time of when Christianity was introduced, and before that,
the Rurik Scandinavian dynasty that started Russia off. And those who know
their Russian history a lot better than me say he
carries it to the n-th degree. He distorts and twists it. But even if he believes
in it, how can Ukrainians, whether they're of
Russian descent, as many Ukrainians are,
or Ukrainian Ukrainians, accept that they're now one
people, one religion, one philosophy? That has now been
broken and ruined for the foreseeable future,
I would have thought. Putin, like some other
Russians-- probably many-- has a peculiar
attitude to Ukraine. I mean, the geopolitical
complexity of Russia and Ukraine is probably worse
than that between the country I was brought up in, England,
and a place called Ireland. But the issue that Putin
believes that Russia is not a real power and will
not be a real power again if it doesn't have Ukraine. And he has said to people,
including in the West, there is no such state. It does not exist as a state. Now, clearly, not least
thanks to Zelenskyy, who's going to be speaking
to us remotely here in this university
on Wednesday, this has changed
Ukrainians enormously. They were already moving
in that direction. They were struggling with
problems, let's be frank, of corruption and a judiciary
of very doubtful independence. But again, as somebody
has reminded me, they've had six changes
of government in 30 years. Finally, Russia
as a great power. He thinks that, as I mentioned
that Russia without Ukraine is not completed as a proper
great power, [RUSSIAN].. He talks about [RUSSIAN],,
which is the greater Slavic state of Russia, great Russians,
Ukraine, little Russians, and Belarus, white Russians. And you see, it's not only
him that has pushed that line. 1997, I think it was, when
Solzhenitsyn was about to die, he said-- and by this time, of
course, six years, the 15 different countries
are in existence. Solzhenitsyn said Russia must
have one Slavic country-- Russia, Ukraine, Belarus. There are other elements
of a great power that he believes in. And that is both he and
his mate Xi Jinping. And remember just
how close they are? They've seen each other
more than 30 times. A relationship, quote,
"without limits," you'll remember, in
February this year. That the West, both
of them believe, China and Russia,
these two leaders, is weak, decadent,
and disorganized. And if you're them
looking at what happened in America under
Trump, a lot of which pleased both of those
autocratic leaders, you'd be beginning to wonder
how Putin might have thought, now is the time for
me to chance my arm, because he was looking
at a Europe that was weak and divided, a Britain
that had pulled out of the EU, with all that that implied,
certain states in Europe, not least Ukraine-- Hungary, hardly
showing signs of being a democratic member of the EU. And now he must be
scratching his head because that weak and divided EU
and Europe is pulling together in a way that I have never
seen, and neither has he. And now this EU and
the United States have imposed economic
sanctions the like of which the world has never seen. He thought, because oil prices
have been high for a long time, he'd squirreled away
$650 billion US. 650. That would be his
iron warchest that would enable not only
to finance the war, but to use it as leverage. And now, of course, these
financial sanctions, the likes of which
we've never seen before, put in barriers on access to the
SWIFT system, banking system. And he cannot easily get hold of
his foreign currencies invested overseas. So those are some
of the reasons, I believe, he decided
to reinvade Ukraine. Look, part of it is you have to
try and get in this man's mind. I'm not a psychologist. I note, by the way, that
the head of CIA, who was a former
ambassador in Russia and speaks fluent
Russian, has said recently he doesn't believe
that Putin is ill. Putin doesn't look
all that well to me, but I'm no expert on that. And we'll come on
to whether anybody's going to challenge him. So I won't go into the
military details of this war. I'm not a military person,
although, as a former head of Defense Intelligence, I
know I can find my way around. I got the invasion wrong. I watched through December and-- sorry, December and January. The Americans were releasing
a lot of what was clearly, certainly to me,
classified intelligence, the likes of which were never
seen being released before. 170,000 troops,
and my old friends in the intelligence
world in Canberra told me blood banks were
being put into the front line of the border with Ukraine. Field hospitals were
being located there. And they are some of the alarm
bells, intelligence indicators that something is
going to happen. By the way, meantime in
dear little old Australia, down in the south of
the southern hemisphere, what did our press and media
cover in December and January? Well, there was COVID,
COVID, and COVID. There was Djokovic,
Djokovic, and Djokovic. And there was whatever the
hell was going on in sport. We were thrashing [INAUDIBLE]
cricket or whatever. And I must say it made me rather
peeved, to put it politely. And there's all the
signs now, and I'm told by a friend of
mine who has just been in America that our media
is starting to get a bit bored. Have you noticed? It's not getting the
daily high-level attention that it used to. I actually said, I
think in January, Putin is going to
do something nasty, but I didn't think
it was this nasty. I also said to my wife-- but
not in public, thank God-- the Russians will be
through Kyiv like a knife through butter. Three days. I wasn't alone,
in my own defense. Three weeks before the
invasion, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff,
the most senior military person in the world, told
a closed session of the Congress 72 hours. I think the sorts
of advice and help that some of the NATO
countries and America-- and the UK is a NATO country-- had been going on for a long
time with training and advice, but not like we're seeing now. Putin had put a lot of money
into defense, something like 700 billion, after
the inadequate performance in Georgia. And it was inadequate. We saw what they
did in Crimea, 2014, and in Donetsk and Luhansk. And they performed a lot better. They performed even better in
2015 in Syria, if you noticed. If you noticed. Now, that quote I gave you
from 1904 absolutely applies, doesn't it? And worse. And it's a lot worse because the
behavior of the Russian troops, if we're to believe
half of the stuff we're seeing on our TV
screens, is barbaric and an absolute disgrace. And if Putin has been ramming
into people's minds day after day, week after week,
month after month-- he controls all the media now-- it's no wonder
that the attitudes are barbaric attitudes
by their troops. I understand why
Zelenskyy is talking about a victory for Ukraine. And they're doing well. And some of these modern
Western weapon systems, take note of just how
accurate they are. This new HIMARS, high-altitude,
multiple-launch artillery system, I believe has a maximum
range of 400 kilometers. 400 kilometers is a distance
from the northern Ukrainian border to Moscow, by the way. And the Americans ain't
going to allow that. So what are the Americans not
going to allow when Zelenskyy says, in that persuasive way
of his-- and he's a class act, this man-- I want to use HIMARS
to bomb Crimea? And I won't put my money
on the American response. For too often, we in the
Western intelligence game frighten ourselves
silly by saying that the opposition have got
infinitely better weapons than us. I can't tell you
the number of times when I was head of the
National Assessment staff in the National Intelligence
Committee in the late '70s, going as a declared
agent to Moscow and reading all this American
stuff about the Russian tanks were better. Well, the Six Day War, the
Israelis showed that was wrong. That the Akula-class
submarine or titanium hull can dive at 40 knots,
we can't even follow it. But you know what? American nuclear
attack submarines followed every Soviet
nuclear submarine when they left Severodvinsk
or Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky at a distance of 500 meters
and followed behind them day and night for months. If you don't believe me,
there's an American book called Blind Man's Bluff
and a British book where the Brits did the same, by the
way, called Silent Service. What was the other one I was
told in the late '70s by CIA? Oh, Cur, you know? C-U-R, Cur. The Soviets are developing
a charged particle beam weapon in the Caucasus that will
be able to bring down any known ICBM. Well, we're still
looking for it. And we're doing just
the same, including in this town today, about
China, who have no battle experience since '79. And do we actually
believe as some people a public organization
in this town declared in public,
China now has quieter submarines than the Americans. Oh, really? Pull the other one. Have you ever had the briefings? No. Have you ever been on one? No. So it doesn't surprise
me that, myself included, overestimated the Soviet
military, the Russian military. I don't know what a
Ukrainian victory looks like. I think Zelenskyy-- I understand
this-- he wants to evict them, including out of
Crimea and Donbas. And good luck to him. And we'll come on to, if that
happened, what would Putin do? By the way, Putin would have to
take a very different approach to Ukraine if the following bit
of history had not happened. So when the Soviet
Union disintegrated, it had 12,000 strategic
nuclear warheads and 30,000 tactical weapons. The Americans under
George Bush Sr worked overtime to
get the weapons out of places like Kazakhstan
and guess where else? Ukraine. So Ukraine signed over-- and I
forgot the name of the treaty. 1994, Ukraine had 1,900
intercontinental ballistic missiles. They didn't know how to
operate them themselves because, guess what? The Soviets had a
different way of doing that in places like
Kazakhstan and Ukraine, and not least, where the
KGB had the nuclear warheads separate from whoever
launched the missiles. They had 1,900 ICBMs and one of
the very best ones, the SS-18, code name in NATO-- Satan, 10 independently
targetable re-entry vehicles of one megaton
each, 10 megatons, made in Dnipropetrovsk. I don't know how to
pronounce that in Ukrainian. Imagine where Zelenskyy
would be now if he had 1,900. Putin would have to be
excessively careful, would he not? And that treaty
said that the United States and NATO and Russia
would protect Ukraine. And again, there's no wonder
the Ukrainians are so angry. A victory for Russia
looks like this. I'll keep my eye on the time. I see where we are. I'll just quickly
read you something that a very good
colleague of mine-- no names, no pack drill--
sent me over the weekend from a very distinguished
Moscow commentator. "Putin thinks he's
winning the war. He has modified his initial
plan, a quick overthrow of government and installation
of a puppet regime, and now basically wants
to destroy Ukraine. Putin will keep wearing
Ukraine and the West down. Russian military weaknesses
may have been exposed, but Ukraine is facing
the same pressure. Putin is betting that the
longer the war continues, the more the
Ukrainian government will face impossible pressures
and eventually collapse." Now you don't have
to agree with that, but this has been written
by a reasonable person who, by the way, also says about
the leadership, "Domestically, there is little to
be optimistic about. No one wants to challenge Putin. The people have largely
accepted the situation or feel powerless
to change anything." The issue that worries me
most, and I've said this at the introduction,
and I don't want to be too dark and
black about this but it's a black
and dark issue-- Putin is using casual
phrases about nuclear weapons all the time. The official figure is that
Russia has 1,550 deployed long-range strategic missiles. Yeah, yeah. But it has a total of
4,500 weapons in stockpile, not put to one side,
4 and 1/2 thousand strategic nuclear
warheads in stockpile. Putin has a new, over
the last two years, military doctrine
which goes like this. In the event that Russia is
faced by a technologically overwhelmingly superior force-- open brackets, my words, NATO-- attacking Russia in
its own territory-- open brackets, however you
define Russian territory to be-- we will have the right to
use tactical nuclear weapons. And he's got tactical nuclear
weapons in artillery shells, land mines, sea mines,
torpedoes, you name it. Would he use one? [SCOFFS] You bet. He ain't going to be
humiliated and lose. And that is not me
sucking up to Putin. And I have to say things
like that in this town, because part of the
reaction one gets to a lecture like in
this town reminds me of the 1980s when things got
very nasty with us people-- scholars-- in this University. We had the most senior
group of Soviet experts in this University led
by Professor Harry Rigby. I don't know whether
Richard is here. His son, who is another
distinguished China expert. And then we dropped
all that expertise in this research school
and we went along with it. Foreign Affairs told people,
we're not interested in Russian any more. Go and learn Chinese. Yeah. And it goes on and on. Right now, and this is not
classified, in ONI, Office of National Intelligence,
there's one person-- one-- who is very, very good,
who's expert on, guess where? Russia. So the issue of
losing our expertise is serious,
particularly now we're dealing with such a
challenging topic of discussion as potential use
of nuclear weapons. You can see Putin has made
it and he's covered himself by saying "on my territory." Well, I presume if
NATO attacks him in Crimea or Donbas, that is his
definition of Russian territory and he has the right to use one. The problem I have with it,
not only morally, of course, is there is no such thing,
in my humble opinion, as the use of tactical
nuclear weapons. Why? Because you're not going to
stand by somebody dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on
you without retaliating and then you're on the escalating ladder. And in this school we're
in, one of my predecessors, Professor Desmond Ball,
wrote an Adelphi paper-- one of our top scholarly
papers internationally-- on limited nuclear war. And Des Ball of
this University so convinced Jimmy
Carter, the president, that Carter wrote to Des
and said, "You have changed my mind" and he
implied, with regard to the Pentagon's view,
which used to go on endlessly about limited nuclear war. What about a
negotiated settlement? Well, if you look at this deal
on grain and so on and then what Putin did the next
day, was that in Mariupol? Anyway. Even if you negotiated
a settlement, would you trust him? I mean, I've toyed
with the idea of-- some of you will
remember in your history, the Congress of Vienna
and the concert of Europe. Yeah, lots of yes. And let's just remember,
initially those, the leaders of those countries
which included all the ones that for 20 odd years Napoleon
had monstered, invaded, and occupied-- included Russia-- the initial view was, we'll
settle this new congress with the defeat of Napoleon at
Waterloo without the French. And I don't know whether it
was Matinique, or Talleyrand, or Castlery, or who
won the group over to thinking, if
you exclude them, things will get even nastier. So imagine if we have a new
security order in Europe, which has now just been destroyed
single-handedly by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. There are those who think-- and I wouldn't be surprised if
this is Zelenskyy's thinking. I understand his anger-- who think that
there is no way we will ever talk to
the Russians again and we'll exclude them from
any new security program. Well, I know some of
you, maybe a lot of you, unlike me, don't have
time for Kissinger. Kissinger's PhD was on
the Congress of Vienna, it was called A World Restored. Worth reading, by the
way, particularly now. And he's right
when he says, there has to be an
accommodation to Ukraine, there has to be an accommodation
of some sort to Russia. Now his idea of
accommodation to Russia is to reinstate the status quo
ante, that is, they still keep Crimea, Donbas, and Donetsk. That ain't going to work,
Henry, but his philosophy is dead right. But you may well disagree. Final few words. I need to just-- I'd be remiss if I didn't just
say a few words about Russia and China. I've written a lot
about this, including a public lecture in honor of
Desmond Ball last October. Russia and China are now
in a de facto alliance. It will not be a NATO alliance. It won't have an Article V,
you know, an attack on one is an attack on all. It won't be that. But those who say that
it's going nowhere are not looking at
just what these two countries are doing together
militarily and that's my game. It's easy to dismiss
them and say, it's a marriage of convenience. Well, there's plenty
of those around. It's easy to dismiss
it and say there are fundamental racial,
cultural, and potentially boundary issues maybe. But on the military
side, listen to this. So Russia until
recently deliberately did not export its most advanced
military technology to China. And one understands that. It's now doing the
following, just give you two or three examples. I won't be too technical. So the Chinese have now got
Sukhoi 35s, the most advanced fighter aircraft Russia has. And remember, by
the way, that China has been trying for
35 years to make its own high performance
military jet engines and guess what? Has not succeeded and
wanted to buy the factory at Dnipropetrovsk
that makes them, and the Americans stopped that. Stopped that. I'm not saying that the 35 is
as good as the Joint Strike Fighter. I don't think anything is. The first thing the Chinese
would know in the South China Sea, should we ever
be going down there, would be when the Joint Strike
Fighter releases a missile, they won't see it coming. The second thing is,
Kilo-class submarines. Russian submarines are still
a bit noisy, but not as noisy as the Chinese ones. The kilo is not bad. They'll sell those to China. The s-400 air defense system is
probably the best air defense system In the world. The Ukrainians have got
the 300 version, I think. If we came up across
that to our north, we would have to use
the electronic warfare version of the
Super Hornet called the Growler, the world's best
electronic warfare aircraft. Even worse, Putin
two years ago offered to build for Xi Jinping
something the Chinese did not have, a ballistic missile
early warning radar. Finally, I mentioned
that Xi Jinping should be looking at the
problems the Russian army had and having a real look at his
own so-called modern army. Remember that the PLA, the
People's Liberation Army, oath of Allegiance is
not to defend China. It is not. It is to keep the Communist
Party of China in power. The Red Army and the Soviet
Union did not have that. It was to defend the USSR. It's a worry, frankly. So if I was talking to
Xi Jinping, I would say, so the Russians have had poor,
inadequate, joint military operations between
the three services. You need to look at your own. They have scattered
forces in battalion groups around Kyiv in the first
few days and to no avail. Russia's real
military doctrine is about building up
overwhelming force, as in the Second World
War, and then unleashing it on one overarching goal, not
penny packets of battalions of 800 people. You need to look at your
own force structure. Conscripts have
performed poorly. You've got conscripts. Russian conscripts were not
told they were going to war, they were told they were
going on an exercise. By the way, the Ukrainian
ambassador here, Vasyl, has told me when I
said to him, so what do you do with Russian
prisoners of war? He said, Simple. We frisk them down, we
find their mobile phone, we find their mother's telephone
number, we ring their mothers and say, this is Vasyl
from Ukraine here. We've got your son Ivan. Why don't you come
and pick him up? How clever is that? That is seriously clever. I doubt Xi Jinping
has that in him. There is the issue
of poor logistics, dismally poor logistics
with Russian tanks running out of fuel near Kyiv. The soldiers running out
of food and robbing IGAs if that's what they have. And the other issue is the
breakdown and poor quality of components. And Xi Jinping,
your mates in Russia have a corrupt military
acquisition organization, what's yours like? What's yours like? And you wouldn't want
to bet money, would you? So my final sentence-- there's a very
good friend of mine who's here told me this joke. It's a Russian joke. So it's the year 2040 and Sergei
and Ivan are walking together. And Sergei says
to Ivan, "Ivan, do you remember way back in
2020 when we said that China would never attack us?" As the pair of them crossed the
Chinese border with Finland. [LAUGHTER] Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
