Boris Johnson and Sir Tony Radakin: Ukrainians are heroes

0:00Laura Kuenssberg:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

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1:10Sir Tony Radakin:Hello, I'm BBC presenter Laura Kunzberg, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world.

1:23Boris Johnson:If you're not a little bit afraid, then you're not paying attention.

1:28Sir Tony Radakin:We have never seen a people so united. Do not make that boat crossing. Do not make that journey. Being born in America, feeling American. Having people treat me like I'm not.

1:38Boris Johnson:We're more popular than populism.

1:41Sir Tony Radakin:For this interview, I met former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former head of the British Armed Forces, Admiral Sir Tony Radican, at the Royal United Services Institute on London's Whitehall. Mr Johnson was in Downing Street four years ago when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. As one of the driving forces behind the West's initial response, he's long been critical of the slowness of allies in providing support to President Zelensky, which Mr Johnson says has cost lives. Indeed, both he and Sir Tony believe the conflict might have been prevented altogether if Western allies had paid more attention to Putin's increasing aggression and his annexation of Crimea in 2014.

2:26Sir Tony Radakin:With the war grinding on, Mr Johnson's current successor, Sir Keir Starmer, is building a coalition of the willing to preserve peace and stability in Ukraine, but only if there is a deal to end the war. However, Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, would most likely view the presence of international troops even on a peacekeeping mission as a major provocation.

2:49Laura Kuenssberg:Sadly, there is a delusion in the United States if they think that Putin wants peace. I don't think you should underestimate how much the Ukrainians want peace and actually how flexible they're willing to be. And if you look at where we've got to in the negotiations, these are incredible concessions that Zelensky would be asking his people to make. and he can only do it if he gets really powerful security guarantees. But the thing that's missing from all of this is Putin. We've heard nothing from Moscow to suggest that they want to agree such a plan. The way to end this thing is finally, psychologically, to convince Putin that he made a strategic category error in thinking that he could simply reabsorb Ukraine into the Soviet empire, that that has failed.

3:39It's a question of now how he presents that failure to the Russian people.

3:44Laura Kuenssberg:And he has the wherewithal to explain it to them in terms that I think will be politically survivable for him.

3:56Sir Tony Radakin:Welcome to the interview for the BBC World Service with Boris Johnson and Admiral Sir Tony Radican. Take us back then to that moment, the early hours in February 2022. the phone call came and the invasion was on.

4:12Laura Kuenssberg:Yes, this was about four in the morning, maybe a bit earlier, from the National Security Advisor, Stephen Lovegrove. And he rang me to say that it was happening. I mean, we'd been expecting it really the night before. We'd all gone to bed thinking probably something was going to happen. And so I think I uttered some sort of expletives and then went downstairs and got on with it. I think the trouble with it was that And although we in the UK had been expecting it and the Americans had been expecting it, one of the difficulties in the Western response was that even at that stage, I think some of our European friends weren't convinced that it was actually going to happen.

4:53And that meant that our initial response wasn't perhaps as robust as it should have been.

4:59Laura Kuenssberg:And it took some time to get things organised.

5:02Sir Tony Radakin:And so, Tony, you weren't surprised?

5:05Boris Johnson:No, because I actually think our intelligence services, our Chief of Defence Intelligence, Jim Hockenhall, have been saying that this was going to happen literally for months. Then as we were getting closer and closer, it was really clear it was going to happen. At the tactical level, Russia was moving bloods up to their people on the border. They have mobile crematorium. You don't do that in an exercise. and then I got the call at maybe 10 past 20 past three in the morning and if I'm honest because it was expected it's almost like a relief it sounds awful to say so there's a calmness because it's happened and okay now what are we going to do about it what is going to be the

5:50Sir Tony Radakin:international response you'd spoken to Vladimir Putin not that long before you told him if he went ahead. NATO troops would go to the Russian border. Did he lie to you?

6:03Laura Kuenssberg:Of course he lied. And he lied right up to the very end. I mean, looking back on it, I think what we really, I think there was any way of stopping him in the sense that he'd made up his mind, I think, way back. And he was determined to capture Ukraine, to conquer, to subjugate Ukraine. And I think what we really should have rammed home to him was that we regarded the freedom of Ukraine, the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine, as a strategic objective for the West, that we would invest huge sums to support Ukraine. And we didn't do that.

6:42Sir Tony Radakin:Other countries were more reluctant than you and perhaps you as a payer were to make a very strong statement in response to the invasion.

6:49Laura Kuenssberg:I think that, yes, I think that, you know, I remember the Munich Security Conference not long before the invasion, talking to the German delegation. And, you know, first of all, there was this sort of denial about whether it was actually going to happen, which was shared a bit by the French and others. but also a sort of weird sense that maybe, just from a purely humanitarian perspective, it might be a better thing if Ukraine folded and if the war was over rapidly. And this was completely alien to my way of thinking and seemed to be totally wrong.

7:32Sir Tony Radakin:The expectation was that Kiev might fall in a matter of days. and then this video emerged of Zelensky walking around an empty Kiev with some of his colleagues. Do you remember seeing those images?

7:48Boris Johnson:I don't know if we thought Kiev was going to fall within date. I think that that was always up for debate and so on. But the images to me that were really striking was the battle over Hostomol just to the north of Kiev, which we knew was key to Russia's plans and the Ukrainians were magnificent, but that changed hands between Russia and Ukraine about five or six times over a couple of days. And then the other piece that then, because of Hostomor and because Ukraine were successful in not allowing Russia to get a lodgment there, that was the image that I always remember was of all that armour and the convoy that was stuck.

8:29Laura Kuenssberg:That was amazing. What happened was that the Russian plan was basically to take Hostomol, which is the airport just north of Kiva, and then all the tanks and armour were going to come down without their crews and everything else because they were all going to land by air. But because the Ukrainians fought so hard at the airport, you had all this pointless sort of Uber-like convoy of tanks without crews, and the Russians couldn't advance.

9:02Sir Tony Radakin:Before we move on, though, to the conduct of the war, do you think, though, that the UK and its Western allies were naive? Did they enable the invasion in the first place by allowing Crimea to be taken in 2014 and simply successive UK governments not taking this seriously enough when Putin's increasing aggression was there for everyone to see?

9:27Laura Kuenssberg:I do think that. And I think that the failure to do anything in Crimea in 2014 was tragic. I think that Putin was emboldened by a Western failure in Syria to punish Assad for using chemical weapons. I think that Putin was further emboldened in 2022, in February 2022, by what he'd seen in Afghanistan and a sort of general sense that the West was on the back foot. You know, he'd seen these appalling pictures of Americans being forced to flee Afghanistan, the UK pulling out as well, of course. And I think that that really did embolden him. So, yes, I think, sadly, I think the answer to your question is yes.

10:15Laura Kuenssberg:It wasn't helped by the general ambiguity of the Western position. We could have solved this problem if we'd been clear about what Ukraine was. We continually said to them, you can join NATO and you're on the path to the West. But we never made good that promise. I think if we'd had clarity and simplicity about Ukraine, rather than endless fudge and obscurity, we could have saved that. We could have prevented that invasion by being strong.

10:53Sir Tony Radakin:But as somebody who was a leading politician for much of that time, do you personally regret that if the West in general had stood up and taken a stronger line to Putin, as you suggest, perhaps this war could have been avoided? Do you have personal regrets? I do.

11:07Laura Kuenssberg:I think I wasn't obviously in office in 2014. I think I was mayor of London. But I do think we should have done more. And so, yeah, when I became Foreign Secretary in 2016, we were running Operation Orbital, for instance. We were training the Ukrainians. We were out there trying to help them in all sorts of ways. But by then, you know, there was this fundamental ambiguity and uncertainty about our attitude to Ukraine. And I've got to say, I think that is still there. The real problem is with Ukraine that Putin does not yet believe or he has not yet been convinced that the West regards it as an overwhelming strategic objective for Ukraine to be a free and independent European country.

12:04Laura Kuenssberg:And until he sees the evidence that that is our determination, I think he's just going to keep going. And that's the problem we're in. It's that fundamental lack of resolve.

12:21Sir Tony Radakin:You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service.

12:30Sir Tony Radakin:Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. In the US, increasing numbers of Americans are embracing Russian orthodoxy. Many new converts say the churches they were raised in are too woke, and they're looking for a faith which promotes traditional values. I'm Lucy Ash. Join me to find out more. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

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13:34Sir Tony Radakin:It was striking to sit down with Boris Johnson and Admiral Sir Tony Radican. They were the Prime Minister and the head of the military at a time when conflict returned to the European continent. It was eerie to hear them recount what it was like to get a phone call in the early hours of the morning on the 24th of February 2022, telling them that the invasion of Ukraine they'd been expecting was actually taking place. Britain has been seen as one of the leading allies of Ukraine at the heart of trying to galvanise other Western support. And arguably it was Boris Johnson and Sir Tony Radican who were the two most important voices leading those decisions.

14:17Sir Tony Radakin:Of course, the conflict has been grinding, bitter, for long years long. and there's huge disagreement about how to bring it to a close. But it was obvious that Sir Tony and Boris Johnson both feel frustration that Western support has not always been as vigorous or as eager as it needs to be in order to drive a conclusion to a conflict that's cost so many lives. Let's return to our conversation with Boris Johnson and Sir Tony Radican talking not just about what happened at the start, but how this war might end. There's been a pattern we've seen many times where President Zelensky has said, give me this missile or give me this bit of kit.

15:01Sir Tony Radakin:Western leaders have said, oh, maybe not yet, maybe in a while. It's often dragged on for many, many months. And then in the end, the West does often oblige. Do you think that the UK and its Western allies have been too slow and too cautious in giving President Zelensky what he's asking for?

15:18Boris Johnson:There was always escalation anxiety. And that, you know, and if you look, I think them in a way played to the UK, the UK leading with end laws, the UK leading with our main battle tanks, leading with Storm Shadow. And each time others would then follow. And each time the reported red lines of Putin evaporated. So I think it's that. But if you're if you're in Kiev, then this feels like incrementalism. It feels like it's too slow and it's deeply frustrating. And it's that it's those tensions have existed all the way through.