Is Trump a Russian asset?

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0:30The New Statesman.

0:34In 2011, Luke Harding was ordered to leave Russia, the first Western journalist to be exiled since the fall of the Soviet Union. As The Guardian's senior correspondent, he continued to watch Russia from afar, covering WikiLeaks Edward Snowden and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. But in recent years, he crept back closer to Moscow, reporting from the front lines of the war in Ukraine. His new book, Betrayal, follows the many contours of this conflict and what they tell us about the new age of global power. What kind of control does Russia have over Donald Trump? How did North Korean soldiers end up in Ukraine?

1:10Why did a reform leader undertake work for the Russian state for£40 ,000? I'm Oli Dugmore and you're listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman. Luke Harding joins me now. Luke, hello. Hi, great to be with you. Very glad to have you in the studio. Very glad to have you in the building in the New Statesman offices. Your first time. My first time, I did apply for a job here a long time ago as I was leaving university and I got a very polite brush off. But obviously, if I had got that job back in the day, I would have been here a bit sooner. Well, what a miss for us. Your reporting is exhaustive and important, and we're going to talk about many things today.

1:58I want to start with Ukraine, if we can. Just as a starter, I mean, how much time have you spent there in recent years? I mean, I started going to Ukraine almost 20 years ago when I was the Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian doing trips to Kiev and writing about the country's bewildering and, I'd say, kind of oligarch inflected politics. And then I came back after I'd been kicked out of Russia in 2014, when Putin covertly seized parts of the eastern Donbass region. Then I was there for Volodymyr Zelensky's extraordinary presidential election victory in 2019. And I came back to Ukraine, it's really a country I know well, in the autumn of 2021, when Russian tanks and troops were massing in Belarus and occupied Crimea, because I believed that a hurricane was coming, that Putin was going to do something, something big and terrible and consequential at a time when quite a few people, not least Volodymyr Zelensky, was sort of skeptical.

3:07And I was in Kiev on in February 2022 when it all kicked off big, big time. So over that period of time, how have you felt the mood of the country change? I mean, you alluded to it a little bit there, that kind of scepticism. Could you talk a little bit about that, what you've seen and the sort of the feeling within Ukraine? Yeah, I mean, this is quotes kind of, I think, misattributed to Lenin, where there are kind of decades where nothing happens and weeks where everything happens. I think probably Lenin didn't say that. But what's remarkable about visiting Ukraine, living in Ukraine, writing about Ukraine, is it's almost better to say Ukraine's, because it's been through so many kind of iterations as I've been going there.

3:52And it started off as almost a kind of carbon copy of Russia in the early 1990s. In other words, very Soviet, mafia driven with corrupt Clantist politics. But also, unlike Russia, what there was in Ukraine, which is what I found when I first started going there, was what you might call kind of contestation. In other words, there were different elites. There were the Eastern elites who looked to the Kremlin. and then there were the Western elites. And partly it's to do with history. But it just meant that Ukraine always had a kind of conversation. It always felt more plural, more vital than Russia.

4:34And one thing I discovered was it's a very, very, it's a sort of very horizontal society. I mean, back in the 17th century, the Cossacks, these sort of proto-Ukrainians, would elect a military leader called a Hetman and they would vote for him. And then when he was elected, the first thing they would do is pelting with vegetables. And that sounds trivial, but the point being that there was always a sense in Ukraine that power was contractual. There was a contract between the government or whoever was ruling and the people. And that if the ruler overstepped the mark, became too tyrannical, too czar-like, they could be overthrown.

5:14And that's what we saw with the Orange Revolution of 2004, when the sort of Russian-backed candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, tried to steal the election with help from Moscow. And that's, again, what we saw in 2014 with what the Ukrainians called the Maidan, the revolution of dignity, when Yanukovych basically shot dead a whole load of pro-European anti-corruption protesters on the streets and then scarpered to Russia. And one of the stories I did most recently, I was in Ukraine a couple of weeks ago, was about statues. I mean, there's this big plinth, empty plinth on the main street in Kiev called Khrushchatyk, where Lenin stood from the 1940s up until 2014, when he was noosed and sort of toppled by sort of pro-European protesters.

6:03And what's really interesting is that Zelensky recently proposed that instead of Lenin, there should be a statue of someone called Ivan Mazepa, who was early, 300 years ago, was a kind of early Ukrainian Cossack leader who was an ally of Peter the Great and then broke with him. And, you know, my substantial point is that countries are not static. You know, they are kinetic, they evolve, they change, they memorialize in different ways. And even since I've been going to Ukraine, I mean, I've spent pretty much the last sort of five years there, the country has changed. It's statuary as well in Russia itself.

6:47of the sort of sites that mark great literary figures and poets have become sort of locations of protest and even attending regular citizenry's presence there has sort of become a, you know, you're liable to be arrested, liable to abuse by the legal authorities just for attending there as well. We had Masha Al-Yokina, one of the members of Pussy Riot, on the podcast. I know her well. Yeah. She's great. Incredible woman. I mean, she detailed at length. She knows all of their names by heart. They're almost tattooed on the inside of her eyelids, the people that have sort of faced these atrocities at the hands of the security state, sometimes just for reciting poetry at these places.

7:27You mentioned your removal from Russia, and that practice of kicking out journalists has become widespread now. You were one of the first, and I wonder if you could... The first. Can you tell me about what it was like before the moment of your exile? I mean, harassment campaign, tell me about it. What was it like being in the country? Yeah. I mean, I was in Moscow between 2007 and 2011. And as you say, there was this big sort of KGB Soviet tradition of expelling foreign correspondents back in the 60s and 70s and actually even in the 30s for offending the feelings of the Soviet people or getting too close to Jewish dissidents back in the late Cold War.

8:20And I think what happened to me is instructive because really in the 90s under Boris Yeltsin, those methods sort of stopped. I mean, you remember that the KGB is kind of doomed coup in August of 1991 against Gorbachev, which didn't work. And really what happened in the 90s was the security services found a way back, back to power, back to riches. And their figurehead was Vladimir Putin, who became prime minister and then president in quick succession. And by the time I got to Moscow, these secret service methods had returned big time. And Russia was transforming into, I would say, the world's foremost spy state.

9:01And you think about spies and you think Netflix and John le Carré, and it's all shiny and spooky and atmospheric, darkly atmospheric. Whereas what I experienced or we experienced because I was in Moscow with my wife, Phoebe, and our two kids at that point kind of quite small, was really shonky and banal and stupidly plotted and repetitive and crass and demonstrative. And it all began in the spring of 2007 when I came back with the kids to our apartment block on the 10th floor of a kind of Russian high rise and discovered that the window to my six year old son's bedroom next to his little Ikea bed had been bust open with a sort of 25 meter drop to the courtyard below.

9:52And then various mysterious alarms went off in the middle of the night and so on. And really, it was the first of many break-ins by the FSB, the successor to the KGB, which Putin used to run. And where there were sort of all of these daft, sub-Sherlockian, sub-Sherlock Holmes clues which were left for me. I mean, the classic one, which didn't happen to me, is you come back and there's a turd floating in your loo. We didn't get that, but I got screensavers deleted. I got the central heating sort of turned off, windows open mysteriously from the inside, you know, all upper stories when the building had been locked.

10:34Break ins at the Guardian's office where I'd come back and find that the phone was off the hook out of its cradle. And I went to the British Embassy and I said, you know, what the fuck is going on? And they said, well, look, it's the FSB. They do this to us as well. We don't make a fuss about it. They harass our local Russian staff. And I said, does that mean my apartment is now bugged? And they said, yeah, yeah, it's bugged. And I said, video? And they said, well, you know, possibly. I said, is there anything you can do about these bugs? And they said, no, have a biscuit, basically, which is sort of Britain in the 21st century, still quite friendly and courteous, but we can't really do anything as a power anymore.

11:18We're kind of post-colonial, post-everything. And so I just had to put up with it. And it was on off, you know, I'd forget about it. And then they would break in. I got summoned to Leforteva, the KGB FSB detention center, which has got a kind of famous ground floor prison where Solzhenitsyn was kept, where Alexander Levinenko was kept before he escaped to London and was then subsequently murdered. And I was interrogated by an FSB guy about my reporting. there were dark hints from the Russian foreign ministry where I go and see them and they say things like, you know, are you not worried if you stay here, something will happen to your children?

11:57You know, which is as crude a threat as you can get. And basically, I was writing about, I was investigating Litmanenko's murder and the role of the Russian state. I was traveling to Chechnya and the North Caucasus where there was a kind of underreported war going on between local and federal security forces and Islamists. I was writing about Putin's wealth. Basically, he's the richest guy in the world with a state at his disposal. I mean, he's worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And everybody in the Russian elite knows this. And obviously, all these stories were unwelcome. And my reward with these shattery break-ins,

12:36surveillance, interrogations, and it all ended. And basically, they wanted me to go and my wife to throw up our hands and say, darling, let's go back to the home counties. I can't bear this. And I just thought, fuck them. I'll stick this out as long as I can. And in the end, they just cancelled my visa, locked me in a cell at the airport in a deportation zone, and returned me to London. And there was a kind of brief scandal, and that was the end of it. And subsequently, other people have been kicked out too, to the point where Russia, which is now, I would argue a totalitarian or close to a totalitarian state, it's virtually impossible to report.

13:17There's an honorable bravado to the way you tell that story. And I think there has to be a degree of confidence and assertiveness to stick out that job. but when you just detailed there about the your child's bedroom window you know i've got two young children myself and i i know that the internal pressure within our family if i was in that situation would be strong and i would be considering my options but but also just talking about the bugs you know within your own home with family arguments more intimate moments all of these things but more intimate moments so one occasion we came back from a holiday in Berlin to discover that there was a sex manual by the side of the bed, bookmarked to a page on orgasms.

14:07I read about this in my memoir about Russia called Mafia State, which came out in 2011, 2012. And I had to explain to my wife, look, this is not my sex manual. The KGB have broken into our apartment and left the sex manual by the marital bed. Honestly, darling. It's quite unusual. It's psychological warfare as deigned by a sort of like high school boy. You know, this will really unsettle him, right? Yeah, but the point was they're saying we're watching and you're not doing it right. Or it's a frequency issue or you're too conventional. Or, you know, you don't look very impressive with your clothes off.

14:47I'm not sure what the message was. But hold that thought because I don't know if you want to talk about Donald Trump or not. It's hard not to talk about him. But the whole controversy over whether the Russians have compromise on Donald Trump, who has been visiting Moscow since 1987, very, very many trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg, staying at five-star hotels, where, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the FSB have bugs in people's rooms and guest rooms. The point being that if the FSB can be bothered to install video in my bedroom as a kind of troublesome foreign correspondent – I mean, by the way, they assume that all British and American correspondents are spies.

15:28You know, that I write my copy for The Guardian by day and I get secret instructions from the Queen or the King by night. I don't know. But there will definitely be Donald Trump tapes. What they show, whether they show him drinking Camargo tea and reading Anna Karenina, or perhaps having a more exotic and exciting experience, we don't know. But the point is that even if Trump has forgotten many of the details, Putin knows and Trump knows that Putin knows. So there will be a ginormous Trump file somewhere in the Lubyanka, the KGBHQ or somewhere else stretching back many, many decades. Are you still in contact with people living in Russia?

16:14I mean, how do they – I'm sort of – I don't want this conversation to sound too glib. Like, the everyday experience of people in the country is a brutal one, can be a brutal one, isn't it? I mean, tell me about that. Tell me about the regular feeling of a Russian about the state their country's in. I mean, in a way, it's quite hard for me to say because I sort of – well, I'm banned from Russia for life. There was a stop list published by the Russian Foreign Ministry in the summer of 2022. And there were 30 people on it, politicians and journalists. I think I was number 24. So I can't go there, nor would I wish to go there now.

16:58Because, I mean, there's a really interesting question. If you look at the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Is this Putin's war, the war of, I would say, a kind of psychopathic leader who's got lost in pseudo-history and a messianic sense of his own role, his own sort of destiny and his country's destiny? Or is it a war of ordinary Russians? and the Ukrainian view is very much this is Russia's war, meaning all segments of society, not least because there are hundreds of thousands of people who signed up to be Russian soldiers who have come to Ukraine to kill Ukrainians and their own death tally is about 1.2 million killed and wounded.

17:50And many Russians, I wouldn't say all Russians, Russians believe it. They believe these Kremlin propaganda tropes, that Russia is encircled, that there's a hostile West that wants to destroy Russia and dismember Russia, that there are perfidious British spies sitting not very far away from us who wake up every morning, drink a cup of tea, and then plot to humiliate Russia. And obviously, this is nonsense. This is dark fairy tale, but most Russians believe it. They're zombified by TV, for sure. They absorb propaganda disinformation on the metro and from friends and so on. But generally, this war of aggression, biggest war in Europe since 1945, has popular support from most sections of Russian society.

18:42I mean, obviously, there are dissidents, there are people who have fled, but most people believe it or they shrug in an apathetic way and say, well, I'm a small person, what can I do about it? And what's interesting is this sort of Russian or you might say Soviet fatalism contrasts with this really dynamic Ukrainian civil society where they protest against their rulers and anarchistically from time to time overthrow them. In other words, Russia is a kind of very vertical society, Ukraine a horizontal society, and Ukrainians think all Russians are to blame.

19:19As far as nefarious British spies go, agents of the Anglo-Saxon regime. Anglo-Saxon, they're called. Anglo-Saxon. And by the way, the other Soviet cliche about the UK is that it's called Tumani Albion, which means foggy Albion. And I have to point out, not just actually to Russians, but to kind of everybody from Eastern Europe, that we don't get fog anymore, that the country's burning up, and it scarcely rains. But in their heads, it's still the foggy Albion of the 1880s and 1890s. Shakespeare should have written something like that. Two things, actually, in that previous answer you just gave.

19:56I want to zone in, actually, on the casualty count, because there is a lot of discussion about the extent to which the Russian losses, the Ukrainian losses. You said 1.2 million killed there. No, killed and injured. Can you just tell me a little bit more about that figure and where it comes from? Because I know there's a lot of argument about it. I think there's less argument primarily because the Ukrainians film Russian soldiers being killed. I mean, you've seen these clips on social media. The point about this war, which started off as a war for land, with Putin sending a kind of mega convoy of tanks and armored vehicles to seize Kiev, which was 60 kilometers long, is that it's gone upwards.

20:43It's become a war of the sky, a battle of drones. And it's transformed war, not just in Ukraine, but everywhere, I think. I mean, it's massively consequential. And both sides use these FPV drones, which are fitted with cameras. And so the Ukrainians compile videos of these Russian soldiers being killed or wounded and collate them. And they say that the killed and injured rate for Russian soldiers is running at somewhere over 30 ,000 soldiers a month. and the thing is the videos are there i've i've watched them i mean you can only watch a few and then you have to to stop so um i i i don't think i don't think russian losses are much exaggerated what is more sensitive and secret is ukrainian losses ukrainians obviously don't publicize their own losses uh and and they are significant and they are terrible and you see cemeteries all across Ukraine in villages and towns with flowers, with photos of dead soldiers, with blue and yellow Ukrainian flags fluttering in the breeze.

21:55And the toll is substantial. I mean, how big it is, I don't know. But what we can also say is that it's lower than the Russian death toll. And also the Ukrainian commanders, not always, but generally try and keep their soldiers alive in the way that the Russians don't. Yeah, I saw a stat a couple of weeks ago. There was something like the life expectancy of a Russian soldier deployed to the front line is something like half an hour once they get there, which I felt like I'd be exaggerated. I mean, no, well, it depends. I mean, underground, if you're in a foxhole, your life expectancy is longer.

22:30If you are above ground or tracking to an exposed position or trying to advance, then it's minutes. It's minutes. And what's interesting, I spent a lot of time with Ukrainian brigades sitting in their kind of command points, their observation points, is that there's total video surveillance of the battlefield. In other words, now, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, blitzkrieg, forget it. There is no blitzkrieg. You can't have a sudden shock and awe attack because everything is known and AI helps. You can scan tree lines, you can stand trenches, you can look at patterns, you can interrogate vast amounts of data and you know what the enemy is going to do before they do it so so you move the book around and you're dead closer to the first world war than the second well it's the first world war but with with this sort of lethally precise killer drone component uh which means that that some of the randomness some of the chaos of the first world war is gone and it's high-tech slaughter before we started recording we spoke about possibly having a macroscopic conversation and I just slightly off the territory but if I could invite your comment on the kind of the psychological consequence and it's not the primary concern about the horror of this battlefield but you mentioning the videos of these deaths because yeah I've I've seen them most people have seen them there's a corollary here as well to the war in Gaza and the sort of highly visual nature of the killing.

24:04And there's one video that's forever etched into my memory from Ukraine of a Russian soldier cowering in a battle in the middle of a field. And the drone operator is mocking him, sort of zooming in and flying out, zooming in, flying out. And the guy knows he's about to die. And I don't think I will ever forget the image of his face. And I just, I wonder about the cycle, the broader, at a societal level, psychological consequence of seeing the horror of war. that close because previously it was hard bastards like yourself that came back and told us about it, right? TV news wouldn't show you the bodies, perhaps not, maybe a little bit, but not a lot.

24:46And that's changed. Yeah. I mean, I don't mean to quibble, but I don't think I see myself as a hard bastard. I mean, I see myself, maybe this sounds too grand, but as someone with a calling, that I go and do this stuff because I think it's important. But as far as those images go, yeah, I mean, I've just been writing about this at the moment. I interviewed the person who collates these death clips and then releases them. And it's a really intriguing story because they have a, we pre-agreed, I could swear, right? They have a nickname in Ukrainian, which is a portmanteau word, which is a mixture of fuck and an affectionate kind of diminutive like duckling or something.

25:40Anyway, they call them fucklings. And there's absolutely a mocking element. And it's psychological. It's to try and troll the Russians because they're told this is a glorious military operation, that they are following in the footsteps of their heroic grandparents who fought the Nazis and advanced on Berlin and so on. And what they're saying is that death is grubby and unheroic and banal, funny in a kind of, because a lot of it, they cut them. So you've got this sort of Charlie Chapman sequences where the soldiers fall over, they get up, they run a bit further, they hide. And of course, in the end, they're killed because you can't outrun a drone.

26:19It's impossible. And I sort of said, look, isn't this a bit sick and off and unethical and immoral? And the Ukrainian view is they came to us. They are combatants. They're armed. They've come to kill us. And this is what they deserve. And moreover, after Budsha, you remember what happened in Budsha in Mariupol, where Russian soldiers executed hundreds of civilians and left their bodies in the street and shot up cars full of families with children who were fleeing. and then burnt their bodies in piles and captured local women and raped them over a period of days before shooting them in the head, there can be no forgiveness for Russians.

27:07And I mean, this is hard, but I can understand where they're coming from.

27:21It's a dark logic, isn't it? It's a dark logic. I mean, how can there be compassion when you go to bed every night with your family, whether you're in Kiev or Kharkiv or Zaporizhia or Dnipro, all of which are bombed on a very regular basis by Russian drones and Russian ballistic missiles. And you don't know if you're going to wake up or if your kids are going to survive. I mean, probably the odds are in your favor, but it's like it's like a kind of grim roulette. Someone always loses.

27:50We're going to take a short break. Stay with us. We'll be back after this.

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29:01You mentioned pseudo-history. It's five years this July since Putin published his essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians. How do you look back on that essay now? And do you think that perhaps it should have been treated as more of an alarm call sign than it was. Well, I mean, looking back, it's clear that that essay was a blueprint for war. It was a sort of causus belli. And also that it was nonsense. I mean, I've read it many times. I mean, I don't know how familiar your audience is. I mean, very, very educated cultured, New Statesman audience. It's the New Statesman. I'm kind of bowing here for those who can't see me.

29:45But Volonomy of the Great, I mean, to justify the biggest invasion since 1945 on what may or may not have happened a thousand years ago is, I mean, speculative at best and darkly ludicrous at worst. But basically, Putin's thesis is that Ukrainians were never a thing. Ukraine was never a state, that it was a single spiritual, orthodox, civilizational space in which sort of Kiev and Moscow were kind of twin cultures. and that they were artificially separated by the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Germans, and now the West. And this is a kind of unitary whole. And so from Putin's point of view, what he's doing is not an evil project.

30:27It's restorationist. It's bringing together something that's been wrongly sundered. But obviously that's complete kind of balderdash. And Ukrainians will point out correctly that when they had St. Sophia Cathedral in the 11th century, when they had this glittering civilization or city by the Dnipro, Russia was forest and bog. And I talked to the head of the Ukrainian Navy, a kind of wonderful guy called Nizhbapa. And he was telling me this. And then he did a frog impression of what, you know, early medieval Moscow would have sounded like. And it went croak, croak, croak, you know. So that's how they refute Putin.

31:09I mean, there was no Moscow. There was kind of Muscovy later on. So Ukraine predates Russia. Ukraine has evolved separately from Russia. And I think it's proven itself over the last few years. It clearly is a state. And the problem, I think, is that it's a state that wants to be a member of the European Union and wants to join NATO. It wants to be progressive and decent and modern. And by the way, Kiev has got great bars and coffee shops and artists. And it's kind of cool. It's like Berlin was in the 1990s. It's this sort of fulcrum metropolis, which will determine, I think, I mean, maybe this sounds hyperbolic, but will determine the world order.

31:56Actually, if Kiev stands, then it means despite Trump, despite MAGA, despite threats to invade Greenland, that actually the kind of rules-based order as we know it after 1945. Imperfect, but still exists. That Ukraine is a test case. But if Kyiv falls, if it falls under Russia's dominion, then we are in a place of... I mean, I explore this in my book, Betrayal. You can say it's a 19th century world of great powers and brutal great power politics. But I would say it's that plus just a world of nihilism where there are no values, as if the Enlightenment never happened. We didn't have an Enlightenment.

32:50And it's just a place of predation and cruelty. So on that point in betrayal, you write that a number of Ukrainians coming to perhaps a surprising conclusion that Trump might actually be better for them than Biden. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I had various conversations in restaurants and bars with Ukrainians, some of them quite senior Ukrainians, working for kind of Volodymyr Zelensky's administration. And there was just enormous frustration with Biden. I mean, one thing I write about, which is not really public domain, but I put it in my book based on Ukrainian sources, is that Zelensky and Biden didn't like each other.

33:32I mean, despite their hugging and lots of warm words and so on, and Biden even going to Kiev, I was there at the time during his trip.

33:44Zelensky basically found Biden aloof and really wrong thinking in the sense that when he thought about Russia, he thought about the Soviet Union, which he knew as a young senator, stretching back all the way to the 1970s. And he thought that today's Russia was the Soviet Union, whereas, you know, they say actually it's not the Soviet Union. It's more like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It's a kind of rogue state with a charismatic military leader and a big army. But it's not a superpower. I mean, and of course, Trump treats Russia as well, like the Soviet Union, as if it were a superpower. And I think there was such frustration over American deliveries of tanks and fighter jets and the fact that the Biden White House would say, no, no, no, worried about escalation, nuclear threat.

34:30And then eventually, nine months later, after another 20 ,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, would say, yes, this was enormously frustrating. So I talked to people who said, well, Trump, yeah, he's a maverick, but he's a surprise guy. Maybe he can help us, this surprise guy. are now saying, no, he's not going to help you. He's going to betray you. He's going to, he's basically, the Russians have him. He's, I mean, we can talk about this, whether he's a Russian asset. Do you think he is? I think basically he is, yeah. And I would just sort of caveat that by saying that it doesn't matter whether we say that sort of, you know, terminologically he's a Russian asset or not.

35:13He behaves like a Russian asset. You just have to look at what he's done. If you actually separate what he says from what he does, what he's done is cut, stop all direct military aid, American military aid to Ukraine. Repeat Kremlin talking points, which are fed to him by Putin and others. Russian disinformation to some large degree has taken over the Republican Party. humiliate Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last year. I mean, a person who most ripe, thinking people believe is, well, I mean, leader of the free world, Winston Churchill with an iPhone, you know, take your pick, but someone who's fighting very valiantly for his country's survival in an existential conflict.

36:01And just behaves weirdly whenever he meets Putin. I mean, I have a whole chapter in portrayal about the Alaska summit. And you'll remember that the two leaders, Russian and American leaders met in Anchorage, and Trump came down from Air Force One onto a red carpet. And Putin appeared at the doorway of his plane. And Trump started applauding wildly. I mean, this footage was so embarrassing that the White House didn't use it, and even its kind of media coverage, applauded wildly, gave him a ride in his limousine, the Big Beast, deferred to him when there was a press conference, it's not just me saying this.

36:39It's many people saying that there is something deeply strange about their relationship. I mean, Trump is the most pro-Kremlin president ever. He's not done anything thus far which seriously hurts Russia or Putin. America is voting with Russia in the UN Security Council and with North Korea. This is not normal. And we can talk about why I think this is the case or not. It's up to you. But his behaviour is strange. And you have to find a working explanation. It's the biggest mystery in international politics. Well, okay, let's talk about the why then. Because is there not a fairly conventional

37:22isolationist argument that Americans have been making for a very long time, not just about Ukraine, but more broadly in their foreign policy that goes, you know, funding this war in Europe is no longer in our strategic interest, we're not going to do it. And that explains his behavior rather than perhaps compromat or something else that you might be about to say to me now. Nah. Nah. Not really. I mean, Trump may be in isolation in his first presidential term, but Trump in his second term is clearly an imperial presidency. I mean, he's threatened to annex Greenland, take over Canada. He's kidnapped the president of Venezuela and stuck him in jail in New York.

38:07He started a bonkers war of choice in Iran, which is now a quagmire. I mean, these are not the gestures of an isolationist. And I sort of think the hatred for Europeans seems to me comes more from J.D. Vance. And I think it's ideological, civilizational. I mean, all this nonsense about erasure of indigenous populations, Essentially, they're saying that the white population of Europe is under threat and it's all the fault of the liberals and woke and so on. So, yeah, I mean, that doesn't explain Trump's behavior to Putin. I mean, I think briefly there are three factors, two uncontroversial, one controversial.

38:52One is there's a real kind of sense of kind of among some in MAGA that Russia is a kindred state, that it's Christian, it's godly, it hates feminism, you know, gay people, woke. The two countries are sort of ideological soulmates to the point where you get someone like Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin and sitting at his feet and recording ludicrous videos about how supermarkets in Moscow are full of food. Love the shopping trolleys. Love the shopping trolleys. So there's that element. Then there's the sort of Fiona Hill theory. I mean, Fiona Hill worked as his advisor during his first term, that it's to do with strongman envy, that Trump envies Putin his freedom to enrich himself.

39:43I mean, Trump's doing that too, but not on a Putinish scale, to kill people he doesn't like, to poison his opponents, to clamp down on civil society, to lock up the opposition. And he would like that freedom of action. And it's clear that he prefers the company of autocrats to Democrats, particularly to Europeans. I mean, look at what Trump said about Keir Starmer, for goodness sake. So there's that. But then I think the third thing just goes back to the break-ins at my apartment in Moscow is compromise. I mean, it was the KGB who invited Trump over to Soviet Moscow in 1987. I mean, I've seen the records of the Czechoslovak secret piece in Prague, the SDB.

40:26They were spying on Trump from the late 1970s when he married Ivana, his first wife, who came from behind the Iron Curtain. And we're kind of interested in him sharing their product with Moscow. And their interest increased as he started suggesting that he might go into politics and so on. And in my book, Collusion, which came out in this first time in 2017, I have a chapter about these secret memos written by the then head of the KGB, Kruchikov, where he's basically berating his sort of KGB agents abroad, operatives abroad, and saying you need to recruit more Americans. and he gives them a template of the kind of people that they're looking for.

41:08And he wants people who have affairs, who are poor analysts, who are greedy, amoral, unscrupulous, can be easily manipulated. And you get on the list and you think, it's Donald J. Trump. I mean, and it's not that the Russians, you know, the Soviet Russians were crystal ball gazers. They were opportunists. They tried to cultivate a wide range of figures across different societies, including in the developing world in Africa and Latin America. And with Trump, they hit the jackpot. Interesting reporting this week as well about Russian disinformation campaigns and the way that the MAGA movement is kind of being used to reflect information into Europe.

41:50They found that planting messages with the American right is a more effective medium for placing a message in Germany that lands with the AFT because the Americans and this idea that you mentioned earlier, right, about European civilization being in collapse and freefall, that's a meme that they find quite convincing. It's interesting the way that information dynamic is changing. Yeah, I mean, the Russians spend billions on disinformation. And again, we've all forgotten, but they gamed, or I would say pretty successfully gamed the 2016 election in the States by getting lots of cynical students sitting in St.

42:30Petersburg to pretend to be Trump supporting Americans, even organizing rallies. It's all in the Mueller report. So they've been doing this for a long time. And by the way, I don't want to get controversial here, but these same cynical St. Petersburg students were also pushing Brexit in this country. There was a massive Russian social media campaign to support Brexit and Nigel Farage. Remember him? We're going to talk about reform. Don't worry about it. But yeah, but, you know, latterly, the Russian secret services have been playing far right American propagandists. I mean, this has all come out, Tenet and other media companies who support Trump to repeat Russian nonsense.

43:09I love the idea that the involvement of Russian bops in the Brexit vote might be the most controversial thing that you've said in our conversation so far. Well, I mean, you know, you're a very educated clientele. Lots of lawyers listening to this podcast, I'm sure. And we could go further. But I think what we can say in a sort of general sense is that the Russians supported Brexit because they saw it as a way of weakening the UK, estranging it from its European partners, weakening it militarily, economically, politically. And they are all in for their forces on the kind of nationalist Eurosceptic right, whether it's UKIP or reform and so on.

43:51And Farage has said some nice things about Putin as well. AFD also pretty explicitly pro-Russian in Germany. Okay, let's just briefly turn to China, and then I want to talk about the UK, Nathan Gill reform. I mean, how does China's strategic interest align with the war in Ukraine? That's a really interesting question. I mean, I have a whole chapter in betrayal examining the China-Russia relationship, which I describe as a kind of complex sibling tale. In other words, they were rivals for quite a long time. The Russians stole slash bought vast chunks of territory from the last imperial dynasty and the 19th century Chinese imperial dynasty in what's now the Russian Far East.

44:36and then there were allies of course Mao Tse Tung and Stalin and then after Stalin's death they fell out in the 1960s and even had a brief war border war in the Amua river and what's been interesting is that under Yeltsin but particularly under Putin there's been a there's been a kind of great great blossoming and the conventional term about China Russia is a strategic partnership which is one of those slightly woolly geopolitical terms but I think it's correct insofar as they're both big autonomous players. The difference is that 30 years ago, Russia was the dominant partner. And now, of course, China is either a superpower or a near superpower.

45:18And Russia is, I would say, a kind of fading state, obsessed with the past, fighting for the right to exist in the past rather than now or the future. But the Chinese actually, they are skeptical about much of what Russia does. I think Xi Jinping was taken aback when Putin launched his full-scale invasion. But they provided enormous military technical support from fiber optics, cameras that sit in drones, to other kinds of dual use materials which the Russians have been taking advantage of. And they have substituted for a lot of Western products. They've disappeared from Russia. So China and North Korea, by the way, absolutely support Russia.

46:11And what we've seen is a kind of coming together of autocracies. I mean, it's quite interesting what you call them, whether you call them crink, China, Russia, India, North Korea, or axis of evil. I don't know. But I think a signal moment was when Putin and Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un met in Beijing last year at a summit. Well, it wasn't a summit. It was a victory parade to celebrate the Chinese victory over Japan in the Second World War. And this is the first time that those three particular country leaders had met since the 1950s. And there's definitely a kind of authoritarian resurgence. North Korean soldiers fighting in Europe, fighting for Russia, which is kind of unthinkable.

46:59One of the reasons I wrote my book. And again, I'm not sure we have fully grasped what that means for us. By us, I mean, the democratic West.

47:11just briefly i mean do those north korean soldiers know who they're fighting or why they're fighting there i mean i interviewed two two north korean prisoners of war in kiev and it was one of the strangest weirdest interviews i've ever done because they and again it goes back to the question that you know are they perpetrators or victims i mean they'd grown up in a system where where it's not just that they didn't know what the west was or what ukraine was what i concluded is they had no capacity for critical thought they didn't have the kind of mental ability to look at the world and interpret it um and they were they could have come from neptune that they were they just didn't really understand and to kind of understand what the world is beyond north korea i think takes years and in in the case of these two guys i'm not sure they're ever going to kind of get there.

48:01But they had weapons. They were trying to kill Ukrainian soldiers. They got wounded. They got captured. And they're being instrumentalized by a really emboldened Kim Jong-un, an emboldened North Korea that sees great opportunity. And according to Zelensky, as Zelensky was saying last week, that the North Koreans are sending another 50 ,000 troops to Russia. So Ukraine is not just fighting Putin. Ukraine is fighting China and North Korea and Iran and an array of hostile states. And that's one of the reasons I think that Zelensky is right when he says that his fight is our fight. Because if these states prevail, then we're in trouble.

48:47It almost feels like a good old-fashioned traditional Cold War, proxy war, where the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet, the Communist Bloc, is behaving in that same way as if it has a communal and allied interest. And that the West, parts of it are sort of begrudgingly participating. Others are splintering. This is on the hoof here. I can summarize this for you. I mean, basically, this is the second round of the Cold War. Right. Because Putin, I mean, I think he would, I mean, he described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the biggest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. And to his mind, that struggle against the West is an unfinished one.

49:36And this time he intends to win. And so as he sees it, at the moment, he's not just fighting Ukraine. Obviously, the theater is Ukraine, but he's fighting what Russian state propaganda calls the collective West. And this is end of days, Manichean struggle, as he would see it between good and evil, the forces of light against darkness, against godlessness and liberalism and, I don't know, Satanism. I don't know if you're a Satanist, but you know what I mean. What gave it away? And it is his historical task to defeat the West, emulating Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Stalin. And this task is so mighty, it can't be handed over to any successor.

50:27So Putin is an old man in a hurry. And by the way, with Donald Trump kind of helping in America, Donald Trump, whom he regards as an ally and an asset, I would say. So this is a big, forever, almost Old Testament war, as he would say. Why was Nathan Gill paid£40 ,000? Well, I mean, I don't think I can libel Nathan Gill, right? He's serving 10 and a half years in jail for bribery. Nathan Gill is what Lenin famously described as a useful idiot. In other words, a moron who could be exploited and in this case bought. I mean, he was a member of the European Parliament, the leader of UKIP in Wales, a close ally of Nigel Farage, whose office in Brussels was next door to Gills.

51:17and he was paid to deliver pro-Russian talking points in the European Parliament and to read out texts written by someone else, written by a Ukrainian former diplomat and journalist called Oleg Voloshin, who, it is alleged, basically was working closely with Russian intelligence. And I know Voloshin. I've known Voloshin for almost 20 years. And we can talk about how I know him in a minute. But essentially, Voloshin was puppeting Gil to say all this crazy pro-Russian stuff and subcontracting some of this. And then other people in UKIP were saying the same things, suggesting Ukraine was run by nationalists and mobsters and was full of extremists and was clamping down on freedom of speech because Voloshin worked for two pro-Kremlin channels in Ukraine.

52:07This is after 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, financed by someone called Viktor Medvedchuk, who is the most pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch, personal friends with Vladimir Putin. And not surprisingly, the Ukrainian government tried to clamp down on these kind of propaganda outlets. And Gil was complaining about this following a Voloshan script and getting literally envelopes of euros and dollars under the table in various nice sort of French bistros. and one of the weirdest things about the whole Gil story is that when police finally rumbled what was going on after Voloshan got stopped on an ill-advised visit to America and his phone was seized Gil wouldn't explain why he'd done it we don't know whether it was for the money or whether he believed all this stuff or he hasn't explained I mean I hope you know I hope in prison he reflects on what he did and maybe writes us a memoir.

53:12That would be interesting. £40 ,000 seems quite cheap for a patriot to sell out his country. Yeah, it turns out that the Brits can be bribed more cheaply than Russians. I mean, Russians would demand way more money to do what Gill did and Gill was happy with 5 ,000 euros a pop. Consequences might be a bit more severe for someone saying something. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is just to explain about Volosh and how I knew him. I mean, I met him when he was the press attache at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow when I was first there, you know, when I got there in 2007, 2008. And back then, you know, practically everybody in the Ukrainian government was pro-Russian.

53:52I mean, I've talked to Ukrainian contacts about it. And they said, look, there was a Russian agent in every room, including in the foreign ministry and the presidential administration. And Yanukovych himself was kind of a Russian asset to some degree. But the thing about Voloshan was he was charming. He had amazing English. He was short and energetic with a kind of weft of blonde hair. And he was a really good analyst. And subsequently, he went back to Kyiv. He was the spokesman for the Ukrainian foreign ministry under Viktor Yanukovych. And he worked with Paul Manafort. He worked with people who would go on to be extremely influential in getting Trump elected in 2016.

54:35And Konstantin Kalimnik, someone Robert Mueller identified as a Russian spy working for military intelligence. And the thing about Voloshan is he could never stop talking. And I would meet him from time to time in Kiev. He once came to London and I showed him around The Guardian with his wife, Nadia Sass, another kind of Kremlin propagandist. And he would tell me stuff. He was the source. and he was interesting. I mean, he was good company. And one of the things I asked myself was, why did he hang out with me? Not just me. I mean, he hung out with all sorts of people from John Whittingdale to American State Department employees to other foreign correspondents.

55:16And I think the conclusion I came to was that it made him look quite shiny that he was hanging out with some senior journalists in the UK and big politicians and going around the House of Commons. And meanwhile, he was looking for people who he could use and instrumentalise, and Nathan Gill was one of them. Now, I think the really intriguing question is, you know, Nigel Farage dismissed Nathan Gill as one bad apple, but the whole of UKIP in Brussels back then was saying the same stuff, same pro-Russian nonsense. Now, why were they doing that? Were they being paid? We can't prove this, But, you know, the idea comes to mind.

55:56Did they believe it? Why did Farage say he admired Putin? I mean, I don't know. But there's this kind of one, there's one sort of striking image was that Nadia Sass, Voloshin's wife, gave Farage a T-shirt. I mean, this is kind of well known. And it's a sort of mock-up t-shirt that she designed of Roger Moore as James Bond with a slogan, hashtag, live and let die Brexit. And you have to ask yourself, why were Russian spies running in and out of the offices of Farage's party? I'll just leave that there. I believe that it always peculiar. I find it strange in political discourse when people say, oh, it's just one bad apple.

56:43Because obviously the rest of the saying is a bad apple spores the orchard is sort of the good thing we have to think about. And when we're talking about this, you know, is Gil the exception or a symptom of something wider? He's a symptom of something much, much wider. And this Voloshan Medvedchuk espionage operation, because that's what it was, it didn't just involve Gill. It involved a whole host of other politicians, some of them British, some of them French and German. Many of whom have traveled to Russia, have, like Gill, been election observers and kind of fake rigged Russian elections. and it's a whole network.

57:26It's a whole network of biddable and buyable European politicians on the Eurosceptic far right who maybe they would say this stuff anyway but quite often are being remunerated by Russia. It's an influence operation of a classic KGB kind and it continues and it continues in Britain as well. Luke, it's been an absolute pleasure having you in the studio. Revelatory, fascinating. I'm so grateful for making the time. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Really, really great. Really, really great fun conversation. Thank you. You've been listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman with me, Oli Dugmore, and my guest, Luke Harding.

58:06The podcast will be back next week.

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