385. Question Time: Trump, Putin, and the Future of Ukraine

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1:34Welcome to the rest of this politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. I'm with me, Alistair Campbell, and the main episode was pretty domestically heavy. We did tariffs, then we did farmers, we did welfare in the UK. So let's have a few foreign policies. Let's start with a summary from Ancher, who's in Bucharest, member of TripPlus. Thank you. How likely do you find it for Putin to be able to obtain everything that he's currently asking for, as in the very maximalist variant of the Russian request, NATO on the 97 borders, demilitarized Ukraine, etc. This would be a defeat for Europe, with the American Administration establishment also see it as a defeat.

2:07Now this may be overtaken by events later in the day when Trump and Putin have this phone call, but what's your take thus far, Rory? My take is that anchor is right to be worried that Russia is in a very strong position. On the surface, it looks like Trump has proposed a ceasefire deal, and in particular, there was this meeting in which Waltz and Rubio seem to be setting pretty clear terms for ceasefire and waiting for Russia to respond. So that might sound, if you said it quickly, as their Russia was in a difficult position because if it didn't respond, it would be in trouble. But the reality is that Russia holds most of the cards here because they know that Trump does not want to escalate.

2:45He doesn't want to confront Russia. He doesn't want to get involved and he wants to get out as soon as possible. So there's no real reason for Russia to accept these terms. Now they're not going to want to openly piss off Trump. So what they'll do is they will slow -rolet. They'll come up with very small excuses and meanwhile they'll continue to advance. So while we're speaking, they've taken course, they're advancing in Donetsk. And they will continue their central strategy, which is to make sure that they get Putin to negotiate directly with Trump. Because every time they negotiate directly with Trump, he comes out repeating Russian talking points.

3:22And he's more and more sympathetic towards Russia. You know, he's been talking recently about how Crimea should be recognized as part of Russia. He seems to be suggesting that the Zaparishka energy plant, which is well inside Ukraine, should be part of Russia. That's my feeling Russia over here. We're still at the stage where it strikes me that Trump is demanding an awful lot of Ukraine and it's nothing of Russia. I think we've got to be careful this idea of saying that Russia holds all the cards. They've not been advancing as quickly as they want. Their economy is much weaker than certainly than the whole of Europe.

3:55So I think we've got to be very, very careful. Trump is desperate to get a deal. Putin wants to take the whole of Ukraine. His overall objectives have not budged one Iota. Somebody was saying it was like his response to Ukraine saying they would support the ceasefire after the Americans brought together that proposal and people were saying it was the Vicky Pollard approach, you know, yeah, but no but and it was very much by the end of it focused on the no but. And let me just say right, I don't know if you saw this tweet from Demetri Medvedev, former president who was the president during the four years that Putin pretended not to be president.

4:31Just listen to this, Macron and Stama are playing dumb. Time and again they're told that peacekeepers must be from non -nato states. No, we will send tens of thousands. You want to give military aid to the neo -Nazis in Kiev. That means war with NATO can sort with Trump's scumbags. It's pretty clear, isn't it? I was talking to Jack Watling, who's this amazing analyst from Roussi, who spends about half his time Ukraine just got back from Ukraine. And of course, Ukrainians sort of saw this coming, but they're also very, very worried about what's going on, but the one thing that he's clear about, which we've been saying for a few weeks now, is that there is no way that Trump is going to provide security guarantees, that Trump has been very clear from the beginning that he doesn't want to provide security guarantees, and Macron has completely misread this.

5:18I mean, Macron's got real form on this, I know I keep attacking him for a Macron while we keep trying to get him on leading. He totally misread Putin in January 2022, he misread Putin in the Minsk agreements. And he again tried to say in that Trump meeting, Trump was prepared to provide US security guarantees. There's no way Trump was to provide US security guarantees. He's an isolationist. He doesn't care about Ukraine. He doesn't care about Ukrainian sovereignty. And in so far as his defense department has the theory at all, when it's not isolation, it's about this pivot towards Asia. And I think all that Trump cares about now is an idea that he's gotten his head that the European Union can increase defense spending so that they can buy more American defense equipment, which will save American money in Europe and mean that it'll be good for American manufacturing jobs.

6:08And that's literally all he cares about. The point about this call that will know by the time this podcast is out, will have detail of what they discussed in the tone of it. But it's entirely in keeping with the way Trump has handled this so far. So for example, Putin keeps saying, ceasefire talks should be based on the reality on the ground. Well, reality on the ground means we've taken the fifth of Ukraine. What did Trump say ahead of the call? Obviously any agreement has to be based on the reality on the ground. So what he's doing in saying that is saying, yeah, you've won Vlad, you should get a bit of this.

6:43Promise me you won't do it again. Promise me. Then he'll go out and say, I've done a deal. I'm an amazing deal maker. It would amount to a surrender by Ukraine. And it would also say there's nothing all with taking countries that don't belong to you by force. We regularly shout out, or Peter Kellner, the Paulster and strategist on here. He sent me yesterday an editorial from The Times in October the 1st 1938 and it is a pin of praise to the deal -making diplomatic negotiating skills of Neville Chamberlain and how the world and history is going to owe him everything for having secured from Hitler.

7:19This proclamation that the desire of the two people never to go to war with one another again, shall henceforth govern the whole of our relationships. Well, we won't get that out of Putin, but we'll get enough for Trump to say that's what he's got. It's pretty grim. Let's see, maybe we've been too harsh, maybe he'll pull off some amazing thing, but the point is you can't, you mentioned Macron and Minsk, you know, they sign deals, anybody who's ever signed the deal with Putin, unless it's, you know, Lukashenko who signs whatever he's told him to. He goes back on the deals anyway, so Trump really has got to watch it, but I don't expect that he will.

7:56Here's the second one, which is sort of twin, isn't it? Which is the Gaza ceasefire, where Trump has come in and said that he wants Gaza to be American territory and everybody to be removed or the Palestinian supposed to go to Egypt and Jordan and now. Today, the Times of Israel is suggesting maybe the Palestinians can go to Syria instead, they're quoting US and Israeli officials saying that Amid al -Sharah, the President of Syria, that we interviewed might be happy to take a million Palestinians, so that seems very unlikely. And Trump has been negotiating directly with Hamas for the release of hostages and has been claiming credit for bringing an end to the fighting.

8:32But at the moment that we're speaking, Israel has begun attacks again overnight. In fact, some of the largest attacks that we've seen in the last couple of months, certainly more than 300, perhaps 400 Palestinians killed. And Netanyahu's signaling that he's doing this because he says the ceasefire talks have broken down and it leaves us with a fundamental question which I guess we never get away from, which is why would Hamas hand the hostages back because I've had senior Israeli officials say to me as soon as they get the hostages back they're just going to kill everybody in Hamas and that the only thing holding them back is the hostages.

9:06So what incentive would Hamas have to help those hostages back if that's the only thing that's containing the amount of violence directed against them? If we go back to the Michael Wolfe Trumpers reality TV star, the tale of two ceasefires, he was all over the ceasefire as it was called, as it was brokered, as it was negotiated, and as it appeared to give quite a lot of hope, I think you and I were both pretty skeptical at the time, but it was a ceasefire and then it was set out in these three phases, but I think there was a feeling that both sides would find reasons for it not to hold, and that seems to be what's happened.

9:40These strikes overnight, particularly going on as Trump is seemingly trying to negotiate this other ceasefire in Ukraine. I don't know whether that figured in their thoughts about timing at all, but 400 people, lots of women, lots of children, and we've sort of, there's a real danger that we become slightly sensitized to all this. This feels like they're stepping it up, and at the start, they did at least try to say we hit this place because we know that two senior Hamas leaders were there, we had intelligence of this and tells us for that. This looks pretty indiscriminate and I know we'll get the usual kind of calling out by lots of people in the Israeli government and others but it's hard to see this as being part of this overall strategy and so I think this is in a very bad place now and hard to see how they get it back onto a better place.

10:31It's the question of time isn't there? As time goes on the relationship between the October 7th, terrorist attacks and the response gets bigger and bigger. So I had people who were sympathetic towards what Israel was doing one month after, even three months after saying that they needed to attack Hamas and that this was about deterrence. But as you move on in time, you're getting into a very strange situation. I had a talking to somebody in Israel and this was two days ago. And they were talking about how they feel there is Now a very, very dangerous self deception taking place that they feel when they're going out in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, that people are lying to themselves.

11:13They're just not acknowledging what is happening in Gaza anymore, that there's a narrative which is very focused on October 7th still, very focused on the Holocaust, very focused on anti -Semitic acts in the West and graffiti, and that dominates the entire conversation and almost nobody is talking about the fact that there are well over 40 ,000 people, perhaps many, many more, are being killed just a few miles away from where these conversations are happening. It's a really difficult psychological moment for what was the liberal democracy to try to live through this dissonance, this kind of gap in your head.

11:49On the point about liberal democracy, rule of law institutions, really powerful quote this week from Ayrton Barak, the former Prime Minister, I haven't got in front of me, but just paraphrasing. He said that Netanyahu has gone completely off the rails. He's trying to get rid of the head of Shin Bet under the most important security services. And as I understand it under the Constitution, shouldn't and couldn't do that without the Attorney General's approval, but is essentially going down the Tom Homan route, Tom Homan, the American goes in charge of these enforcements of kicking out alleged legal immigrants who is involved in this tussle with a judge.

12:28Basically the judge is demanding to know why I think it was 200 % of Venezuela when they'd been specifically ordered them not to and homeless on television saying I don't give a damn what the judges say. Yeah, there's a read across in that. If America starts to say we don't give a damn what the judges do, then don't be surprised if you see that sort of approach in other parts of the world. Just to explain very quickly again for people who've not been following every in and out of this. It's a very strange situation in Israel because what's happened is that the head of Sinbet has been investigating two of Netanyahu's aides under allegations of receiving payments from Qatar.

13:07Now the story normally that Netanyahu has been spinning over the last few months is that he's angry with Qatar because he accuses them of supporting Hamas and Gaza and funneling cash and so you'll get a lot of pro -Israeli voices criticizing in Qatar. And now it seems as though actually the relationship of his AIDS to Qatar are closer than Netanyahu would like to admit. But once the investigation starts, he does something that no Israeli Prime Minister has ever done, which is to fire the head of your internal security service. And we've never done that in Britain. They never fired the head of MI5.

13:39And it would be particularly odd to do it at the moment at which they were investigating misconduct by two of your own AIDS. Yeah. Now let's stay broad. Either, please could you talk about the protests in Serbia, Tom? What do you think is behind the student demonstrations in Belgrade? Why is there a Trump hotel, Blambar the city? What has motivated Donald Trump, Jr. to spread falsehoods about who's funding the protests? I mean, this has been going on now for some months and it's built and it's built and it's built and it's built. We've talked about it before. It was about the collapse of a building project at a railway station, over a dozen people killed, and students without a leader, form the movement and it's grown and grown and grown and grown.

14:19They've now been joined by veterans, they've been joined by different walks of life and the I don't If you saw any of the coverage of the weekend Roy, it was huge. There's always a battle of you know How many people on a protest march, but it was in the hundreds of thousands which were relatively small country Is a lot and this is putting massive pressure on president vukich. He's lost his prime minister already other ministers that have gone The key question is Will they be able to to form an opposition properly. This is very weird thing that the student leaders, and this is something I've seen in the States to maybe a problem with the new politics.

14:55Everybody hates politicians so much that they seem to be saying, we're not gonna have any political parties here, we're not gonna have any European Union flags here. So, completely different to Georgia, Georgia they say, here's the political party, here's an opposition, we've got a very clear request, which is we want elections run again. This is what we want in terms of law and this is what we want in terms of European Union. Whereas in Serbia you've got the opposite extreme. You've got this protest movement that's really big, but if Vucic triggers an early election, he can still rely on enormous votes from over 65 pensioners.

15:26And it's very difficult to see who the candidate is, who beat him. Now, which brings us to Hungary, which on our tale of two cities. So Hungary, big protests against Orban. But there it feels like there is a candidate, and there is somebody who could potentially beat Orban with an organized political party against him, and all -bound could be in serious trouble if he went to an election. Yeah. Yeah. Is that your reading of Hungary? I mean, I wish I could speak Hungarian, I can't. But I watched... Is it Peter Maggiar, as they say? Yeah, Peter Maggiar. I watched his speech to this again. Huge crowds.

15:56I mean, it really was a week of protest in... Because you had them in Romania, where there's this sort of rerunning of an election. You've had ongoing protests in Georgia, and we talked a few weeks ago to President Zorapis Vili, who was forced to leave the building where she was president and this performer Manchester City footballer isn't now in there but she still recognizes the president by lots of Georgians and then Hungary as you say, Hungary in Serbia, these huge protests and look it's very hard to know because of course one of the things that all ban has done and he says he's going to do more of it, he's he's going to be cracking down further on media, he's going to be cracking down further on protests, but Peter Maggi made a pretty powerful speech and essentially was saying, as Franz Timmerman said to us, when we interviewed him leading the Dutch politician, he said, all bans days are unnumbered.

16:46This is the people rising up against the regime that they know to be corrupt and all the other things we've talked about before. Now, all ban is a bitter survivor. He's very, very, very well connected. He's one of the few that is close both the Putin and the Trump. So he also feels he can tough this out, but I thought it was a very, very interesting development. And it's also interesting because it's this line isn't it between populism and outright fascism, which is, or then, is still just about on the populist edge, not the fascist edge. There aren't political prisoners in Hungary. There isn't yet a sense that he's going to abolish all elections and declare himself dictator for life.

17:24He's not kind of torturing his enemies. So the real decision point is going to come when he isn't risk of losing power in election. And then the question will be, can we trust the fact that he's in the European Union? He's very dependent on German car manufacturers, his economies in trouble. And so in the end, he's going to stick to the Democratic route and go nicely. Or have we answered a new world? And this I guess will be the question with Trump too. I mean, Trump too, how far does it go? So the optimistic view is, yeah, he's doing all this stuff, but the Democrats will do really well in the midterms and he'll be out at the next election.

17:58That's all fine. The Democrats are all over the place. The pessimistic view is no, we don't really understand the dynamics of fascism and that actually Hungary may be the exception because it's in the European Union, but other countries have much, much further to go in terms of getting more and more authoritarian and actually the elections may not happen again. That was a very interesting question about why Donald Trump Jr. was there, whether it was some sort of business deal, whether it was political support, But I think the other thing that we're seeing is around the world. I was talking to somebody yesterday who does polling analysis in every country in the world, one of these sort of, you know, big, they do big thematic stuff.

18:36And they were saying that Trump now in most parts of the world is a big driver of negativity towards anybody who supports him. One or two Exceptions to that India, he's fairly neutral, parts of Asia, he's fairly neutral. But Europe, absolutely. And this is why I think Farage is a bit worried about Trump and Musk right now. For all, man, I wonder if actually that is part of the reason for the surge in protest against him. We got a question related to this, which maybe we can return to, which is Jeanette on what does Saudi and UAE think of Trump. We didn't talk about that, but I'll go back and find out.

19:14Just as a sort of starter, which I'd love to see what your person was. Because I think the regimes there were much anger with Biden than we like to acknowledge. They really felt, remember Biden came and said Saudi was a prior state, refused to shake Muhammad bin Salman's hand, and then had to go back kind of groveling on Bended knees to try to get concessions on oil. And they feel that Trump is allowing Riyadh to host the talks between Putin and Trump. UAE is being able to host staff around Iran. They probably feel that America in general is not very reliable. But I guess those governments to put it politely, the Emirates and the Saudis are not that troubled about separation of powers, the strength of the judiciary, executive orders, freedom of speech in universities, corruption in the American system, and probably not that fast about defending sovereign borders against Russia.

20:10But I think what may change is that they're still believed that he can be flattered and placated and are still tempted to think, just don't take him seriously. So when they hear the guards of the stuff, their instinctive reaction is, nah, it's not going to happen. And it'll be interesting to see, as Trump continues, and as places like Jordan, which are really under strain at the moment, begin to come under more strain, whether they begin to change reviews. Now, as you know already, the rest of the policies is powered by Fuse Energy, and on the topic of energy, you've got a really good question here from Cat Walker.

20:42What would a serious long -term UK energy strategy look like, one that deals with climate, cost of living, and energy security simultaneously? Why does no government seem able to deliver one? I think the first thing is that there's a big problem about the fact that climate is global and our levers are national. The problem with UK, Europe, Canada doing an incredible amount on controlling carbon emissions is that if other countries don't play ball, global mean temperatures will still rise because we're a very small part of the emissions. Well under 10 % of the emissions and we will damage our industry in the process.

21:22So the first thing that we need to do is get the international framework right. Well, only question why does no government seem able to deliver one, I am going to give a shout out to a former government, the Labour Government I work for, in the context of a wonderful play that I saw last night at the Soho place. And this is a play, I didn't even have heard about it, it's a play, it's called Kyoto, and it is about the Kyoto agreement and how it came together. The main character is somebody who worked for the George Bush senior government who becomes an oil lobbyist, and he is desperately trying to screw over those who are trying to get serious timetables and serious targets on fossil fuels.

22:09And they tell the whole story over quite a few years from these summits in Geneva, then Berlin, then Shanghai, then all over the place, and then it comes together at Kyoto. I was quite moved actually, even though the actor had a beard because he was like a lot of these productions, he was playing several characters. But John Prescott comes over as a heroic figure at the end, really driving this thing. Angela Merkel, who was also, who was then, she was actually the environment minister in Germany for the first cop in Berlin. So what it showed was that this goes to the Tkach's question, you need political will.

22:48You need a broad understanding of the facts, and you need political will to see down people who are trying to trying to destroy the arguments that you're making. It was very, very moving. I found it really, really moving. To any of you who says politics doesn't achieve anything, this was politics or work. Well, thank you, Kat. Thank you for that question. Thank you, Fuse for sponsoring the show. Quick reminder, Fuse are giving away free trip plus membership for all of 2025 to new signups. And of course, being a trip plus member gives you access to our exclusive bonus content like, uh, in few with the Danish Prime Minister, add free listening, early access to question time episodes like this one, ability to book discounts, pre -sale tickets for live shows, our members chat room are much more so to sign up.

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23:43I'm David Ollishogga, Historian and Broadcaster. And I'm Sarah Churchill, author, journalist, and academic. And together we are hosts of Gollanger's latest podcast, Journey Through Time. We're going to be looking at hidden social histories behind famous chapters from the past. Asking what it was like to have lived through prohibition or to have been there on the ground during the Great Fire of London. We'll be uncovering all of that. And we'll have characters and stories that have been totally forgotten, but shouldn't have been. This week, we're looking at a terror attack that shocked New York, that cost American lives, caused millions of dollars of damage to buildings across Manhattan that led to the establishment of new security agencies and that helped push the United States towards war.

24:27But it's not 9 -11. This is the Black Tom explosion of 1916, the story of a massive sabotage campaign as Germany made a desperate effort to keep America from helping the Allies during the First World War. And the cast of characters for this story involves playboy diplomats, there's a stranded sailor and opera singer who's managing a brothel in New York and there's a hapless spy who leaves secret documents on a train. So join us on Journey Through Time and hear a clip from the Black Tom Story at the end of this episode.