00:01:36.060And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:41.220As you know, with the events in Ukraine, there's been a lot of discussion and debate about the history of that country, the history of the conflict and how we are where we are.
00:01:49.520And because of that, we are absolutely delighted to be joined today by a British historian who's written a number of books about that part of the world, about World War II, including this book, which I'm a huge fan of, The Devil's Alliance.
00:02:00.740And Roger Morehouse, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:02:03.120But before we welcome Roger, just to let you know that it is a live episode and we will also be doing super chats.
00:02:09.380You get your chance to ask questions to Roger during the break.
00:02:22.100I've been meaning to get you on for a long time anyway, but the opportunity is now presented itself.
00:02:26.800Before we get into the subject we're going to be talking about, tell everybody a little bit about who you are, how are you, where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
00:02:41.720I studied in the early 90s at the School of Slavonic Studies in London.
00:02:47.260Had a sort of fascination with central European history, particularly, which grew out of.
00:02:52.50089, which is ironic, really, given what we're talking about now, because that's the sort of start point of where we're now potentially at the end of that sort of, you know, 30 year piece.
00:03:04.660So I was fascinated by the events of 89 and that sort of inspired me to go to university, studied that and all carried on from there.
00:03:11.460Ended up researching with one of my professors, the great Norman Davies, and then started writing in my own right as a freelance.
00:03:29.240You've written a bunch of other books, including your latest book, which is called First to Fight, which is about the invasion of Poland in 1939.
00:03:37.700And you've written quite a few books about the cooperation between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany at that time, which I hear has has doesn't keep everybody happy, particularly on the eastern side of the world.
00:03:50.380Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, particularly that one, the Devil's Alliance, which is the period of the Nazi Soviet pact, which is, I think, one of the most sort of crucial events in in World War Two, actually.
00:04:02.840And that German-Soviet relationship is one of the most crucial great power relationships in the world.
00:04:08.540But it gets, you know, routinely ignored in the Western narrative.
00:04:12.920We treat the Nazi Soviet pact essentially like it's the last sort of chess move in the run up to war.
00:04:18.800But it's actually the opening salvo in a two-year relationship between the two, between Moscow and Berlin, which is very thoroughgoing.
00:04:27.240And there's collaboration. There's like four economics treaties in that time.
00:04:31.100They collaborate actively in the destruction of Poland in 1939.
00:04:36.500So there's it's a it's the forgotten great power relationship.
00:04:39.600And that's the story I wanted to tell, which I think I did reasonably well.
00:04:43.800And there's the Russian narrative currently, which has hardened a lot under Putin in the last few years.
00:04:50.340That came out in, I think, 2014 at the time and then since the Russian narrative on the Nazi Soviet pact has hardened a lot.
00:04:59.660And it's very dismissive, really, of that, you know, particularly my effort to try and put it into a into a proper context.
00:05:09.500They still very fixed on this sort of the immediate Stalinist justification for it, which came after 41, which was just to say that this was, you know, a defensive necessity that we knew Hitler was going to attack us and we had to do this.
00:05:24.560It really isn't that simple. It's much more complex.
00:05:27.180The reason I bring it up is the elements of that story that will become relevant when we start talking about the history of Ukraine, which is what I want to do now.
00:05:33.620So prior to the invasion, as you know, Vladimir Putin made a speech in which he essentially made three big claims, let's say.
00:05:41.100The first of which was Ukraine was created by Vladimir Lenin and allowed to be expanded by other communist leaders like Nikita Khrushchev.
00:05:49.060And these are weak decisions made by weak leaders that resulted in creation of a fake country.
00:05:53.500Essentially, that's the first argument. The second argument is that this led to the splitting up of the Russian people, the Russian nation, and a piece of the Russian nation was split off and glued together with pieces of Poland and pieces of Hungary, which is where we're going to come on to the Nazi Soviet pact potentially.
00:06:10.780And the third argument is the eastward expansion of NATO since 1991 has is a threat to Russia.
00:06:19.140Russia is about to be attacked by initially by Ukraine with Western help.
00:06:24.180And this is Russia defending itself by sending peacekeeping forces into the Donbass.
00:06:30.740We have seen how that has played out over the last few days.
00:06:33.900So let's stick to the history first. What is the history of Ukraine?
00:06:38.040Did it exist? Was it artificially created by Vladimir Lenin? Talk to us about that.
00:06:43.900Yeah, that's that's a whole crock of nonsense, I have to say, for a start.
00:06:47.760I mean, the idea that Lenin sort of creates Ukraine.
00:06:51.200What what like all of these things, there's always a sort of a kernel of truth that they then elaborate and run with, you know, at the expense of everything else.
00:06:59.280And in this case, the sort of kernel of truth here is that the early days of the Soviet Union of necessity,
00:07:06.140this, you know, Soviet policy, particularly under Lenin, was very accommodating towards the nationalities of the Soviet Union,
00:07:12.460particularly in the Caucasus, where you've got these sort of, you know, fractious Armenians and Azeris and the rest of it.
00:07:17.520So but elsewhere as well. So it's very, very accommodating because central power, you know, during the Civil War was so weak.
00:07:23.980And after 1918 onwards, after the revolution, you essentially had to make those concessions.
00:07:31.000But they made it, you know, as part of, you know, part of the sort of almost the moral argument of communism was that we're going to be nice to the nationalities in the way that the Russian Empire wasn't.
00:07:39.780And a lot of people bought into that very quickly at the end of the 1920s,
00:07:43.800once Stalin's got back into power after 28 onwards, you know, that this tolerance of minority ideas and so on is completely crushed.
00:07:54.500So anyone with any ideas about, you know, not necessarily separatism, but even, you know, a national policy in somewhere like Ukraine is crushed.
00:08:04.800And you can see that as one of the drivers behind the terror famine, the holodomor of the early 1930s.
00:08:10.700It's part of that, part of it's ideological and part of it is also an effort to crush Ukrainian national ambition.
00:08:18.420So there's an element there where, yes, they were, you know, encouraging of national identity and national ideas in places like Ukraine after the revolution, but as a tactic.
00:08:28.960But Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian national identity goes way, way back.
00:08:34.960They go right back to Kiev and Rus, which actually predates Moscow.
00:08:38.440So, you know, if you go right back to sort of 10th century Kiev and Rus, you know, if Putin wants to play, you know, who's the senior partner games, then, you know, Kiev wins hands down over Moscow.
00:08:50.540So it's a nonsense to say that Ukraine has no sort of history beyond the 20th century.
00:08:58.200It seems to me, and again, correct me if this is wrong, we don't understand Putin and his actions and his attitude to Ukraine because we don't understand the culture.
00:09:10.920We're not really taught about the Soviet Union.
00:09:13.700So his actions to us seem completely bizarre.
00:09:21.640I think what one aspect is, and I sort of rail about this quite a lot, I have done almost into the void up until last week, is that we in the last certainly 20 years since Putin's been in power, and I think during the period of the Soviet Union before that, we in the West have fallen into the trap of treating Russia and before that the Soviet Union as if it's a normal state, as if it's a rational actor on the world stage.
00:10:27.980But I think that policy, whenever it was, that came in the 1990s with the educational reform where you've got this foregrounding of German history, Nazi history, with the Holocaust attached, which is all well and good.
00:10:40.360But it leaves generations, certainly of British kids and others beyond as well, where there's sort of an imbalance in their knowledge of 20th century totalitarianism.
00:10:51.360And I think you can see that playing out with a lot of the footage and stuff and a lot of the memes on social media and so on and the comparisons made in opinion pieces in the last week that sort of juxtapose Putin's actions with Hitler's from 1938-39.
00:11:07.780And there's an argument to be made there.
00:11:10.860But, you know, Putin is playing out Stalin's playbook as much as he's playing out Hitler's playbook.
00:11:16.900I mean, it's a totalitarian playbook, right?
00:11:19.120And if we knew more than just sort of, you know, Hitler and Nazi Germany collectively, then we could actually make some meaningful comparisons and meaningful comments.
00:11:27.720But we're kind of stuck in this world where the only point of reference that we have historically for the bad guy and the bad regime is Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, which is kind of rather silly.
00:12:29.640But, you know, you can look at, you know, editorials and newspapers and, you know, across the West of the world talking about this, you know, it's referred to in one editorial as Tutoslavia.
00:12:40.000You know, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as one entity, all the way from, you know, the Rhine, effectively, to Vladivostok, referring it to it as one entity, which, you know, to a large extent it was.
00:13:15.080But, you know, that essentially was what stuck.
00:13:17.880I remember publicizing that book in, you know, 2014, 2015.
00:13:21.880And I was doing a public event and old chap stood up at the end.
00:13:27.600And he was obviously the wartime generation.
00:13:30.060He stood up and said, how dare you talk about Stalin like this?
00:13:34.220So these ideas are still out there, that Stalin's somehow a good guy.
00:13:38.420I mean, I find that absolutely astonishing.
00:13:40.360And it's particularly prevalent on the left, who refused to condemn the Soviet Union many times, despite knowing that there were atrocities happening.
00:13:49.820Yeah, this is one of those peculiarities, particularly the Cold War, that, you know, that sympathy for, and not you didn't even have to be a card-carrying communist, but just sympathy on the left, that socialism in the communist sense was seen as something that, yeah, it might have, you know, it might have broken a few skulls in Ukraine.
00:14:09.040It might have, you know, made a few mistakes, but it was still something that was worth defending.
00:14:13.860So you kind of caught yourself short of criticizing, even when it needed to be criticized.
00:14:21.880So that meant, again, that imbalance is just perpetuated, that you've got all of this sort of study on Nazi Germany, on the Holocaust, all of which is right and proper, but it's not balanced out by a concomitant study of, you know, the Holodomor, for example.
00:14:35.500You know, 4 million people died in the Holodomor.
00:14:37.800Well, actually, there's some dispute about that.
00:14:54.460Well, let's come back to the present day, because I think that's what a lot of people watching this and listening to this will care about, and rightly so, of course, with what's happening in Ukraine now.
00:15:02.980Now, one of the things that, so the way I see the media landscape shifting in the last few days, even, is initially nobody knew what the hell was going on.
00:15:11.840So Francis and I had a conversation, which I know you watched, and which I laid out some of my thoughts as a sort of amateur historian who's a big history buff and pays a lot of attention to it, and modern politics as well.
00:15:22.040But there is a competing argument, which I'd like us to talk about, which says that Russia is not an aggressive country under Vladimir Putin.
00:15:31.140It was not an aggressive country until NATO started expanding eastwards, and apparently, some people argue, the verbal commitments were given to Russia, to Mikhail Gorbachev in particular, that NATO would not expand eastwards, therefore sort of entering the strategic area of interest for Russia.
00:15:51.700And instead, what happened was in 1999, Poland, which has a small border with Russia and a couple of other countries, were allowed to join NATO.
00:15:59.440And then in 2004, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, countries that sit right on the border of Russia and form a corridor between Kaliningrad and Russia, very strategically important for Russia, were allowed to join.
00:16:11.020And over time, this was an irritant for Russia.
00:16:14.840This is the equivalent of, you know, Mexico entering a defensive alliance with the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War, people argue.
00:16:21.800And as a result of that and further encroachments, and now Ukraine sitting right on the border, part of the historical Russian sphere of influence, etc., NATO's planning to, they've said they would let Ukraine and Georgia in.
00:16:36.020That's when Vladimir Putin went into Georgia, and now he's gone in Ukraine in 2014, when he could see that, you know, these people don't, the people who say this don't understand the history of modern Ukraine.
00:17:05.380I think the key phrase in all of that, I mean, there was a lot packaged in that, but the key phrase in there was the idea of a Russian sphere of influence, which is kind of an item of faith in the Kremlin still.
00:17:19.720And it isn't for the rest of the world, effectively, and certainly for the world that we're talking about, the Baltic States, Poland, and now Ukraine as well.
00:17:26.100And this is where I think we come back to that sort of wider issue of where we are in a sort of geopolitical sense.
00:17:35.880We've had a 30-year peace, effectively, from the Cold War.
00:17:39.660We in the West, you know, arrogantly, naively, whatever, we thought the Cold War was over in 1989-91, Soviet Union collapsed.
00:17:48.400Places like Poland finally become independent, so, you know, 40-odd years after the end of World War II, when us, the British and the French, went to war to, you know, supposedly defend Polish independence and integrity.
00:18:03.120That isn't actually restored until 1989, tragically.
00:18:07.020But again, 91, Baltic States re-emerged as independent states and have flourished, done brilliantly.
00:18:12.320So, you know, from the Western perspective, this is all good, right?
00:18:15.000Russia is independent. Russia is under this strongman, but, you know, someone we can supposedly do business with, we thought.
00:18:24.600Ukraine is somewhere in between independent states.
00:18:28.000And we see that world as a positive development.
00:18:31.500These are free countries that are, you know, forwarding their way, making sovereign decisions,
00:18:35.480whether they join the EU like the Baltic States did, or join NATO, again, like the Baltic States did, and Poland.
00:18:41.340And that, to us, is all fine and normal.
00:18:45.600This is how normal states behave, right?
00:18:49.640From the Kremlin perspective, they're still thinking in terms of a Russian sphere of influence that has been undermined, that has been damaged by that process.
00:19:01.140So, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, obviously, you know, in 1989, they lose that effective control over Eastern Europe,
00:19:07.940which they had through communism, through those satellite communist regimes.
00:19:11.500And then the Soviet Union itself collapses.
00:19:15.000For them, that is, you know, Putin said this, I think, in about 2000 or just before.
00:19:20.140He said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe that happened in the 20th century,
00:21:00.940You know, they were never really with us from a Kremlin perspective.
00:21:05.900And letting them go was probably, you know, easier than trying to keep hold of them in 1991.
00:21:11.300But letting Ukraine go is unthinkable.
00:21:14.880And it goes back to what you said earlier on about this idea of, you know, Russian nationalism isn't just Russia in its, you know, modern boundaries.
00:21:22.560It implies a sort of claim to Ukraine.
00:21:26.140It has this sort of greater Russian idea to Ukraine, also to Belarus.
00:21:31.200So to let one of those two go is absolutely not acceptable from a Kremlin perspective.
00:21:37.320And this is where, you know, Belarus, the problem with Belarus, again, from a Kremlin perspective, has kind of been solved, right?
00:21:46.980You had that, the election of last year, Lukashenko's still there, you know, defying a lost election.
00:21:53.860He's clamped down, thrown out those that, you know, legitimately should be the government.
00:21:59.580So yeah, Lukashenko has done a brilliant job of going around the world and getting handshakes and photo ops with the rest of the world.
00:22:05.720Well, I fear that's probably game over for Belarus, for the foreseeable.
00:22:11.420So that, from a Kremlin perspective, is Belarus problem solved.
00:22:15.660But Ukraine was edging towards some sort of, you know, looking westward increasingly democratic, reasonably successful functioning.
00:22:25.740These are all things that the Kremlin can't accept.
00:22:28.500But wasn't 2014 a coup supported by the CIA, I hear?
00:22:32.940I mean, this is just, this is just, there's that great line, Kremlin 101 or Dictator 101 is kind of, accuse your enemy of what you're doing, right?
00:55:16.860Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website?
00:55:20.940Well, if you do, then EasyDNS are the company for you.
00:55:25.320EasyDNS is the perfect domain name registrar provider and web host for you.
00:55:30.440They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be cancel culture, de-platform attacks, or overzealous government agencies.
00:56:29.420The first question is we've got one from regular Icky Ike, and he says,
00:56:33.560I'm sure Putin doesn't believe his own propaganda, but if you're swimming in misinformation, can't it corrupt your perception of reality?
00:56:43.120Could Putin absorbing a bit too much of the Kremlin Kool-Aid have led to his overreach?
00:56:49.340I think that's a pretty fair assumption, yeah.
00:56:52.940And you can see that from a lot of that sort of footage of the last few weeks of the sort of theatre within the Kremlin,
00:57:01.420of how he is presented and how he's presented with other people, that ridiculously long table, for example.
00:57:06.380And then sitting there in the hall, you know, distanced from his oligarchs and his ministers and so on.
00:57:14.460And this COVID paranoia that he evidently has as well, that everyone has to, you know, provide stool samples and, you know, two weeks of isolation or whatever it is.
00:58:58.460And that's going back to, you know, the end of the Yugoslav wars.
00:59:02.860That was the NATO, first of all, no fly zone.
00:59:06.400And then the bombing of Belgrade, which was deemed necessary at the time.
00:59:12.800There were obviously voices of dissent.
00:59:14.880And then the same thing with the creation of Kosovo, which, to a Serbian mind, Kosovo incidentally has a sort of almost mythological element.
00:59:27.460It's a mythological territory for Serbians, right?
01:01:27.420And so even in the eyes of our fellow citizens.
01:01:30.460Criticism of Russia in the situation can sound a bit hollow because of the immoral, illegal, you know, improper, whatever word you want to use.
01:01:43.140It's actions that we take time and time again in the last 20, 30, 40, 50, 70, 200, 500 years.
01:01:53.080The other thing about the West, which, as you know, you I think we all feel strongly about, is the constant undermining of the values of our civilization from the inside and therefore withdrawing from the world.
01:02:07.540And so we sort of hint to Ukraine that it can come and join the family of Western nations, but we don't do it properly.
01:02:14.740We say, well, yeah, you're welcome, but we're not actually going to help you make that a reality.
01:02:18.780What is the West's role, in your opinion, and what mistakes do you think we have made that have caused this to happen or have contributed to what's happening now?
01:03:54.260But on that point, though, and I think we've seen this in the last week, this has been, I think, a very valid and valuable wake-up call for the Western world.
01:04:05.320To actually look at, stop looking at our navels and stop talking about, you know, for once, microaggressions and, you know, transgender toilets or whatever it is.
01:04:16.960And actually look at what values we hold in common.
01:04:22.340And the rest of the world has stood up in the last week, last year, last week, rather, and said, yes, they are worth defending.
01:04:27.540You know, those basic freedoms, democracy, you know, freedom, rule of law, all of that stuff is worth defending.
01:04:34.860My big concern with what I'm observing in the last week is that, look, the anti-imperialist, anti-war, anti-establishment left has always been very open about hating the West, hating the Western values, cozying up to dictators, whether it be in the Soviet Union and Venezuela or whatever.
01:04:54.040Because, ideologically, they're motivated by the belief that the West is evil, what it does around the world is evil, and any evil that happens around the world is inevitably a consequence of Western evil.
01:05:18.860Some of them, I don't agree with them.
01:05:19.960I think they're badly wrong, but that's what they think.
01:05:21.860But what hadn't occurred to me, and what I think we're starting to see now on some parts of the right, is they hate the West too now because of all this work shit.
01:06:25.800With Francis and I, we're having a very honest conversation about this last night.
01:06:30.480You know, I think lockdown broke a lot of people's brains, mine included.
01:06:35.120I found it very difficult to just hold myself from going over into sort of conspiracy and madness because what was happening around us made so little sense that you could.
01:06:48.360I think everyone felt a desire to kind of reach for an explanation.
01:06:51.980And if what's happening in front of you is so ridiculous, it's natural then to seek ridiculous explanations for what's happening.
01:06:59.400And that is a big concern for me in terms of the ideological space that we're now in.
01:07:04.000I agree with all of that, Constantine.
01:07:06.280The only thing I'd say, again, is that in the last week, the way the West has responded has been hugely heartening.
01:07:54.660Right, we've suddenly found out that there is an external enemy and we've got to concentrate on that.
01:07:58.980And hopefully it means we can concentrate a bit less on the navel gazing in the process.
01:08:03.300There's also one country who we haven't spoken about, who are, I'm sure, looking at this with a very keen eye and it's China.
01:08:12.180What role do you think they're going to be playing and what do you think they're going to be taking out of this?
01:08:16.620I think they're watching very closely, you know, because, of course, they have their claim to Taiwan.
01:08:23.220That's their sort of piece of iridenta in the world.
01:08:28.520And they're going to be watching very closely as to the Western reaction.
01:08:31.460And I think, again, I think they will be held back, actually, by that reaction, by the strength of that reaction.
01:08:43.440Because if you look, all the stuff we've said about the Western world being divided amongst itself, you've got, you know, the Brexit thing, you've got the woke stuff going on.
01:08:50.940And, you know, the Western world in the last sort of five, six, seven years has been, you know, kind of as divided as I can remember it in many ways, probably since the Cold War, when we had those great chasms in sort of opinion and so on.
01:09:07.880And yet in the last week, almost complete unanimity, except for the fringes, you know, your Diane Abbots and so on, who still want to come out and stop the war and the rest of it.
01:09:19.080And again, the analogous on the right, which we talked about, but I think that they're fringe voices, real unanimity.
01:09:26.120And I said that, that, that sense of this, we will defend.
01:09:56.820But the Chinese have played a very closed hand on this one.
01:09:59.880They haven't supported Russia outwardly.
01:10:02.600They keep talking about how there needs to be peace and whatever.
01:10:05.620So we wait and see, as you know, in the chat we had a week ago, I was perhaps a bit doom and gloom about things.
01:10:13.240I've been surprised, as you have, by the response from the West.
01:10:16.380And also the Chinese don't seem to have jumped on this as the opportunity to think this is the time to go for the jugular, which is a relief.
01:10:22.540I think if the West had hesitated, the way that I would have expected, and certainly Germany would have, I thought Germany would be the brake on any sort of serious EU involvement.
01:10:32.120Had that happened, then I think you might have seen some Chinese action elsewhere, because they're just exploiting the opportunity.
01:10:38.880That's why I think that they're staying at home.
01:10:40.580So there's a bunch of questions that have flown in.
01:10:45.240Kat says, with the 10 Aussie dollars, says, what are your thoughts on the cultural sanctions currently being implemented by the West, such as banning Russian artists and athletes?
01:10:57.780It's tough on the individuals themselves, who in some instances, you know, we don't know, but in some instances are, you know, blameless in all of that.
01:11:08.360But so that there's going to be collateral damage, of course.
01:11:12.380But then you look at something like the boycott in South Africa that were running through the 1980s up to the end of apartheid, which by all accounts, you know, that cultural isolation, sporting isolation worked.
01:11:26.780So it's got to be, I suppose, part of the toolkit of the West.
01:11:33.320We have to, I think we do have to hit quite hard.
01:11:36.260And if that means, as I said, some collateral damage along the way, then that's regrettable.
01:11:55.980I'll tell you what, Russian literature from that period needs a lot of trigger warning.
01:11:59.720But what I would say is, I think it's very important that sanctions are targeted at people who are supporters and abettors and whatever the right words are.
01:12:11.340People who are allowing this to happen by their support.
01:12:51.700So I don't know how much punishment there is.
01:12:53.500And of course, just punishing, like, Russian people in the West.
01:12:56.740Most of them are in the West because they don't like the regime.
01:13:00.040So you're sending Putin's critics back to Russia to punish him?
01:13:04.020But that, again, goes against everything that, you know, the Western model should be.
01:13:09.020In an ideal world, you know, whatever happens with Ukraine, but in an ideal world, there has been a sort of a growing middle class in Russia who have contacts and they have feelers out in the Western world.
01:13:22.600They don't necessarily buy the propaganda.
01:13:25.060And you need to give them a workable model for them to say this is what we want Russia to be, right?
01:13:30.760We don't want to, as you say, throw the baby out of the bathwater and start, you know, arresting people in the street and, you know, breaking our own laws to basically, you know, punish random Russians because that's not sending a positive message.
01:13:43.820So it has to be, you know, legal and sort of commensurate.
01:13:48.280So what do we do with a channel like Russia Today?
01:14:26.460I'm, I'm instinctively very hesitant to approve of that for the reasons that you gave earlier, actually, which is, that's a very un-Western thing to do.
01:14:36.100But I think if we accept the thing that you and I both have actually said, there's an argument to be made, at least.
01:14:41.720I still, I think I would, I would resist that temptation.
01:14:44.620But I think reasonable people can disagree about that one.
01:15:01.080And not that I'd call myself an expert, but me too.
01:15:04.660And I think it's that question we addressed at the beginning, is that we're kind of thinking in terms of Putin being a rational actor.
01:15:13.860And he, and he is getting, he was getting everything he wanted by saber-rackling, by, by sort of throttling Ukraine and getting all of that sort of Western attention, which he wants.
01:15:25.500He wants to be reminded that Russia was a great power and a big player in the world and all of that.
01:15:29.480And it seems unthinkable that he would want to launch full out, all out war.
01:15:45.560That said, there were enough voices amongst the sort of intelligence community and so on who'd seen various briefings.
01:15:54.280And I listened retrospectively, actually, earlier this week, I listened back to a podcast, American intelligence community podcast, which had three or four commentators on there.
01:16:14.280And two of them said he wasn't going to invade and two of them said he was.
01:16:17.840So there were voices that were saying, you know, the intelligence is such that, you know, this is not a drill.
01:16:24.280So there were voices there that were saying that.
01:16:27.120But as I said, I think the rest of the world just assumed that, you know, he was effectively Iraq.
01:16:32.840If you actually look at Putin's history, former head of the KGB, you look at, you know, the case of Alexander Litvinenko, you look at the poisons in Salisbury.
01:16:43.260This isn't a man who values human life very highly, particularly if it's if it means that he can eliminate them in order to get what he wants.
01:16:52.340But again, this is I'm sorry to say this with you there, Constantine.
01:16:57.640But this is kind of also an element of the Russian psyche.
01:17:08.200I mean, you've got to understand this is a country that killed 20 million of its own citizens only 70 years ago, 80 years ago, whenever it was.
01:17:16.300And you go to it, you go to the thing that always surprises me in a way is you go to any of the Red Army's cemeteries.
01:17:23.900There's three in Berlin from the Battle of Berlin in 45.
01:17:27.100The biggest one in Treptor Park, which is spectacular, sort of monuments and all sorts of things.
01:18:39.340And if the individual falls off the side, then so be it.
01:18:42.500It's that classic kind of, you know, communitarian mentality that the community is everything the individuals love.
01:18:52.300There's another piece to it as well, which is Russia is a massive country.
01:18:56.080And because of that, logistically, it was very difficult to govern.
01:19:00.100And what you therefore needed is very strong central leadership to prevent the regions from becoming, you know, mini-tardums in which the local uppity king would do whatever he wanted.
01:19:12.380And because of that, this is the anecdote I always use to explain this, to try and explain this to people, is one of the huge names in Russian history is, of course, Ivan the Terrible.
01:19:24.780He's not called Ivan the Terrible in Russian.
01:19:58.200If you operate under the Western moral framework, it's impossible to understand people who would bury 5,000 soldiers who secured victory in the deadliest war in the history of humanity.
01:20:12.600You know, in an ideal world, in an ideal world, they carry on the negotiations, which I think have been rather kind of cynically led, particularly on the Russian side so far.
01:20:23.320That's a ruse to buy time, reorganize, whatever it is.
01:20:28.420But anyway, at the moment, those negotiations, in an ideal world, you might see Ukraine being able to fight them effectively to a standstill or make the costs so great that Putin is ready to make some sort of deal.
01:20:42.040And I think the best they could probably achieve from the Ukrainian perspective is a return to status quo.
01:20:47.860So you can have Donetsk-Luhansk, you can have Crimea, but Ukraine is allowed to exist.
01:20:55.220Now, whether it can exist with an independent, sovereign government is a quite open question.
01:21:02.720I think anything else is kind of, you know, requiring it to be in a sphere of influence, pandering to Russian paranoia is a hollow victory.
01:21:20.340I think that's about as good as it's going to get.
01:21:21.880The other side of the spectrum, the realistic side of the spectrum, is, I think, the destruction of Ukraine and occupation of Ukraine, which is going to be bloody.
01:21:37.100And Ukraine's democratic ambitions, its ambitions to join the West, Western world in general, are going to be put back by decades.
01:22:33.620So, you know, we do need to carry on that fight.
01:22:37.340Do you think the West, I mean, we've all been surprised in the last week by the resolve of the West.
01:22:42.180But do you think if Ukraine is overrun, you know, Russia annexes the eastern and central part or installs a puppet government, do you think the West has the appetite to maintain these sanctions in perpetuity?
01:23:03.840And as I say, I don't think we can, in all conscience, go back to business as usual and sort of normalization.
01:23:10.560Because you'd have an effect in a regime like Lukashenko in Belarus, in Ukraine.
01:23:17.140I think that's probably the most likely outcome, which is horrible to say.
01:23:23.020And to me, that is a tragedy for Ukraine.
01:23:31.460And it's something that we should carry on, you know, carry the torch effectively for the freedom of Ukraine.
01:23:42.360We certainly bolster our defenses on that eastern frontier.
01:23:45.200You know, Poland has to make, you know, realize that it's a frontier country now, which I said that last week prior to the invasion.
01:23:55.420It already has felt that way with Belarus and with the manufactured migrant crisis of a few months ago.
01:24:02.860But Baltic states, Poland, you know, all those NATO members on the eastern fringe of Europe, we have to make sure that that is an inviolable line.
01:25:45.560You can never be too far away from knowledge and sexually frustrated librarians.
01:25:50.640For those of you who do want to learn a language and connect with another culture or maybe just brush up on your Spanish for the next holiday,