Jens Stoltenberg on Putin, Trump and Europe’s future

0:01Lewis:This is a Global Player original podcast. The Russian full-scale war in Ukraine, perhaps incredibly, is edging towards its fourth year. Despite the endless oscillations from the Trump White House toward Putin, against Zelensky, away from Putin, back to Zelensky again, the fundamentals have remained remarkably constant. Putin wants to cripple Ukraine, and he's been willing to bet that he wants that more than the West wants to stop it. Trump has, this week, finally made good on his long-standing threat to impose fresh sanctions on Russia, the first of his administration. It's a moment, but it could also be the latest in a string of false dawns.

0:45Lewis:One man who has seen more of this war, at least the politics of this war, more than almost any other is Jens Stoltenberg, until recently the Secretary General of NATO. He was the man in the hot seat when the unthinkable came true, a full-scale land war on European soil. He was the man who had to contemplate whether World War III was about to unfold or at the very least whether the war in Ukraine was its starting gun. Stoltenberg is also a stalwart of international politics, former Prime Minister of Norway, one of that country's most successful post-war politicians. For 10 years, the leader of NATO in its most troubled period since the end of the Cold War, and again recently returning to his home country as Finance Minister.

1:33Lewis:I'm widely credited with helping turn around the troubled Norwegian Labour Party's fortunes into a shock election victory against populist conservatives in September's elections. He's just published a book, On My Watch, leading NATO in a time of war, and he's stepped into the Newsagent studio to reflect on a decade of turmoil, of shifting great power politics, of the rise of the radical right, and to answer that central question. Is the war in Ukraine the final chapter of Vladimir Putin's ambition, or merely its prologue? Welcome to the Newsagents.

2:14Lewis:The News Agents. Jens Stoltenberg, Finance Minister of Norway, again, as we've just been discussing. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming in. You've written this book, On My Watch, leading NATO in a time of war. Necessarily, it's reflective on your 10 years, your unexpected 10 years as NATO Secretary General. But before discussing the past, I kind of, I feel just talking to you, I just want to focus on the future, because in a way, it feels chilling and foreboding to ask it, but it feels necessary to ask it. With all of your experience of dealing with Russia, dealing with Putin, dealing with the Ukraine war, how likely do you think it is that this continent will find itself at war directly with Russia, let's say, in the next 10 years?

2:54I think that's unlikely.

2:56Jens Stoltenberg:And we don't see any imminent military threat from Russia against any NATO ally. What we do see is, of course, cyber threats, hostile actions like sabotage, airspace violations. but as long as NATO allies stand together Russia knows that we are much stronger than them and the purpose of NATO is not to wage war or to fight the war with Russia but to prevent war and we have been able to do so successfully by conveying our unity to any potential adversary including to Russia

3:32Lewis:So you think it's unlikely despite the fact that there have been British military voices saying that including our own chief of the defence staff who has said that we should consider ourselves to be in a pre-war position rather than a post-war position and many other voices as well basically saying the same thing but your assessment would be different you think that it's unlikely that there will be direct conflict i continue to believe

3:55Jens Stoltenberg:that's unlikely but but more importantly we can speculate whether the likelihood is five percent or ten percent or one percent or whatever it is but that's not the that's in a way not the main question the main question what can we do to minimize the risk of war uh which is a much more important issue and if you want peace, prepare for war. So therefore I strongly believe that we need to strengthen our deterrence and our defense, invest more in modern capabilities to do what NATO has agreed to do and that is to significantly ramp up our military capabilities. So this discussion about the likelihood, of course I'm not saying it's without any interest, but I'm saying that the more important discussion is what can we do to continue to preserve peace, by providing credible details.

4:41Lewis:Something Putin has obviously been doing, though, is he's been testing us, even in the last few weeks. I mean, he's been doing it repeatedly for a long time, but even in the last few weeks and months, this repeated incursion of Russian jets into NATO airspace, the Danes have responded very vociferously, so have the poles and so on. But do you think we have responded adequately to those incursions?

5:00Jens Stoltenberg:Yes, fundamentally, I think so. And I think that the way we should respond is a firm, but also a calm way. and we speak about many different types of airspace violations. Some of the drones, some of the jets. We had drones, many drones coming in over Poland. They were actually, many of them were shot down by NATO air defense capabilities. Dutch F-35s, German Patriots, Italian airwax surveillance plane, they operated together and helped to shoot down drones. Norway, my own country, we had this year three airspace violations. We have seen that before. we have a long border in the Barents Sea and also on land.

5:40Jens Stoltenberg:And we have seen it before. And what NATO does is that, Norway does, but together with NATO, is to intercept, to sometimes escort these planes. But the commanders, and I trust the judgment of the military commanders, those responsible to make the right decisions, they have deemed it not necessary to start to shoot. So these situations are different, and they have to be dealt with in a firm,

6:06Lewis:but the cold way you write about this in the book but you can you just take us back to that seminal moment of february 2022 and obviously there has been this build-up for some time and speculation that i think many of us on the outside did not seriously believe indeed president zelensky at the time was saying that it wasn't going to happen that putin would take the fateful decision to actually invade amount of full-scale invasion of ukraine when did you come to believe

6:34Jens Stoltenberg:that that was going to happen i started to realize that this was going to happen october november 2021 as far back as that yeah because we had so concrete so specific intelligence not only about the russian build-up that was obvious that they had big forces enormous capacity along the ukrainian border but we also got information about their intention it's it's easier to measure the capacity than intention but we had the combination of both the capacity and intention so it was clear that the build-up had as its purpose the aim was to invade ukraine winter 2022 what nato did and that's something we very seldom do is that nato and of course the united states we started to publish intelligence to be very transparent to actually tell the public that this is now happening.

7:29Jens Stoltenberg:But then, of course, one thing is to have the capacity the Russians had. We knew they had the plans, the intentions to invade. But, of course, until the soldiers start to march and the battle tanks start to roll and the planes fly, of course, a plan can be cancelled, changed on the last day before it's launched. So we made serious efforts in January and February to try to sit down the Russians and to prevent the war. We had a meeting in something called the NATO-Russia Council, which is a council established in the 1990s to have a better relationship between, or to institutionalize the relationship between NATO and Russia.

8:09Jens Stoltenberg:And we made an effort to prevent the war, but in that last meeting with the Russians in January, we realized that there was no way for a diplomatic path to peace. They had decided to use military force.

8:22Lewis:How much of this, when historians look back, do you think because we can argue and analyze about the long-term structural motives and structural reasons that led to that day and led to that that month you can talk about the fate of the post-soviet union states and the successor states and ukraine's relation to it and so on but how much of it do you think was purely about putin himself i.e if putin had not been there that we might have taken another decision or they might have taken another decision and i say that because you write in the book, it seemed Putin was no longer the person I had met in the early 2000s and with whom I had begun a collaborative relationship.

8:58Lewis:He was more suspicious, more willing to take risks, more hung up on his notions of recovering Russia's former greatness. How much of all of this is about Putin himself?

9:07Jens Stoltenberg:He made a decision and he has enormous power in Moscow. Then it's hard to say who would have been there if not Putin. But I tried to, in my book, to describe how I had worked with Putin for many years. Because you were prime minister of Norway in the early period when he was president. Yes, I met him first time in September 2000. He was a newly elected president of Russia. I was a newly elected prime minister of Norway. And we met and we had a good meeting. And I felt that he was a man that wanted to change Russia and to actually develop a better relationship with the West. And I believed so, but I was not the only one.

9:45Jens Stoltenberg:George W. Bush, of course, famously said that I've seen into the man's soul and you can trust him. Many of us were optimistic and maybe it was wrong all that he did then. But I think it's more likely that he gradually changed. He didn't have the courage to really open up because he realized, I think, after some years that democracy, rule of law, open societies was a threat to his power base. And therefore, he started to become more authoritarian.

10:10Lewis:And so when you encountered him again, what made you realize, what was it about him that made you realize this was a different sort of man?

10:16Jens Stoltenberg:It was not mainly what he told me and what he said, but it was mainly what he did. It started gradually, but of course Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. Then we had what we call the reset between the US and Russia, and we made a new effort to try to normalize the relationships with Russia. but then after 2014 and that was the year i i go to to nato and then of course it was harder and harder to believe that his intentions actually were constructive that he wanted to control ukraine and and to re-establish a world order with swears of influence where big powers can control what smaller neighbors can do or not do were you ever and this is a critique that one

11:01Lewis:hears in this country but also from others often on the right but also the left in that kind of horseshoe of politics about NATO, which is to say that without excusing anything that Putin has done, his argument has been and long been that NATO enlargement is a security risk to Russia. Now, the Secretary General of NATO, you more than anyone else have had reason to consider that in detail. Do you think that there is any justification for that critique? Could you understand if you were in the Kremlin why someone might feel that way i don't think there's any justification but i believe

11:39Jens Stoltenberg:that it may be some of the explanation and that's for me two very different things and of course russia they feel more encircled than they really are and and nato has never been a threat to them and this idea that nato enlargement is a threat you know that again is based on this idea that we will not respect democratic free decisions by democratic free nations. It's not NATO expanding aggressively to the east. It's the new free nation, democratic nations of Central and Eastern Europe that wants to join NATO.

12:16Lewis:On that basis, should we have allowed Ukraine

12:18Jens Stoltenberg:to join earlier? Yeah, but I mean, in principle, we have said that they will become a member. Then there have been a lot of hesitation and there is a full-scale war. and that hasn't happened. But this idea that Lithuania or Estonia or whatever it is, is a threat to Russia because they joined NATO, because they're bordering Russia. Well, Norway in 1949, when NATO was established, Norway was the only country at that time that bordered the Soviet Union. And Soviet Union said it's a provocation, it's a threat to the Soviet Union if Norway joins. Then London, Washington, Paris, the big powers at that time, they said no norway has the right to join it's up to norway to decide whether norway becomes a member of nato not moscow and i think that's the only way we can also deal with these issues today it's not moscow cannot have a veto on whether finland for instance can join the alliance and the paradox is that the purpose of this war from from russia has been to get less nato prevent ukraine from joining have less nato forces in eastern part of the alliance and not new any new members.

13:25Jens Stoltenberg:The reality is that Putin has gotten, the result is more NATO. Ukraine is closer to NATO than ever before. We have more NATO forces in this part of alliance and two new members, Finland and Sweden. And with Finland in, NATO's border with Russia has more than doubled. So the outcome is the exact opposite of what Russia wanted.

13:43Lewis:Did you, when you were sat in Brussels at NATO head quarters in early 2022, did you believe in your heart when you were also obviously having discussions with President Zelensky and so on? And indeed, there were discussions, as I recall, at the time about whether President Zelensky ought to leave the country. Did you think, in terms of the assessments you were seeing and in your bones, that Kiev would fall quite quickly?

14:03Jens Stoltenberg:Yes, I think we have to be honest. And in the book, I try to be as honest and as transparent as possible, because not only Putin believed that he was going to take Kiev within days and the rest of Ukraine within weeks, but the reality was that most NATO allies and most of our military experts also believed that ukraine would fall within weeks we were wrong and that's a good thing because the ukrainians proved much more courageous much more united and determined to fight the

14:33Lewis:russian invaders what are your memories of president zelensky at that time it must have been quite a thing when you were just talking to him seeing this man who was basically being reborn as a kind of 21st century jurchill yeah and the burden on him and the potential consequences of what might happen if this went wrong? President Zelensky I knew from before

14:54Jens Stoltenberg:because he became president in 2019 and we worked closely together in the time running up to the full-scale invasion but I didn't realize then what great leader he is and how he really took control of the situation and stated very clearly that he will be here in Kiev and fight and and mobilized his own people, his armed forces, the people of Ukraine, but also the international community in provide support. But I had some painful conversations with Zelensky a few days after the full-scale invasion, because when the full-scale invasion happened, we made two decisions that morning in the NATO headquarters with the North Atlantic Council, the governing body of NATO, and that was to step up support for Ukraine, as we did, but also to prevent the war from escalating to a full-scale war between Russia and NATO.

15:46Jens Stoltenberg:And of course, there is an element of contradiction in those two aims. If the only aim was to win the war, we could have sent in NATO troops. We didn't do that because we didn't want the war to escalate. And then I remember Zelensky called me, I think, two days after the invasion, and that was when Russian troops were on the outskirts of Kiev, and there was a risk that the whole city would fall. And then he said, OK, I accept that you are not sending in ground troops from NATO, but please at least close the airspace. Make sure that we can prevent the Russian planes and the drones and the helicopters.

16:21Jens Stoltenberg:If you do that, we can win. And then he begged for a no-fly zone. And he said, you have implemented a no-fly zone over Bosnia and Herzegovina, north Iraq. You have done it before. I know you can do it. And then I had to tell him that that will not happen. NATO will not close the airspace over Ukraine because to do so we need to shoot down Russian planes need to take out Russian air defense systems and by doing that we will have direct confrontation between NATO NATO forces and Russian forces and then we are in that war we don't want to have so yes we support Ukraine but no we're not willing to go into full-scale war with Russia That must have been a difficult conversation It was a very difficult conversation.

17:07Jens Stoltenberg:I continue to believe it was the right decision by NATO. But I also believe that despite the fact that NATO allies have now provided significant, substantial military support to Ukraine, the big mistake was that we should have started to do that much earlier, in particular in the period from 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and went into Donbass up to the full-scale invasion in 2022. hardly any NATO ally and either NATO as an institution provided any significant military support to Ukraine. We provided some training, some equipment, but not lethal aid, not ammunition, not weapons, not air defense systems.

17:50Jens Stoltenberg:It was actually President Trump who changed that a bit by starting to deliver some javelins, anti-tank weapons. But the reality was that if we had If they had even more support earlier, the Ukrainians would have controlled much more territory today, or perhaps even prevented the full-scale invasion had they been stronger earlier.

18:08Lewis:Right, we'll be back with more with Jens Stoltenberg right after this.

18:16Jens Stoltenberg:News you can trust and the conversations that matter.

18:20Lewis:With award-winning journalists at the heart of the stories from the UK and around the world. Breaking news here in Edinburgh. I'm Simon Marks. My American Week is next. Reporting from the heart of Cardiff.

18:30Jens Stoltenberg:Discover how today's story affects your life.

18:33Lewis:Listen on our free Global Player app or the new LBC app.

18:37Jens Stoltenberg:LBC, leading Britain's conversation.