505. Are Trump and Putin Underestimating Ukraine?

15:26Alastair Campbell:Tell us about them. Tell us a little bit about that concept and those people.

15:29Callum McCrory:Well, it is obviously Zelensky, and it is a lot of the European in particular, the European nations. So to give you some of the names who were at the ceremony today, Jonas Garstora, who we interviewed are leading, Prime Minister of Norway. Mette Frederiksen, who we also interviewed, Alexander Stupp, who's coming out very, very soon on leading. They were all there today. So they will go off with Zelensky, with von der Leyen, with others. And then Keir Starmer, Macron, Mertz are all on video call somewhere else. And I think one of the things that is being discussed is the extent to which the change in the American position, particularly now on spending.

16:04Callum McCrory:I mean, I don't know about you, Rory, I find it completely absurd that the Americans are still calling the shots on whether there should be a negotiation process and what it should be, when right now, the Americans are making money out of all this, paid for by the Europeans buying American kit to supply to Ukraine.

16:22Alastair Campbell:It does, from the outside, seem completely insane. I think we talked about this probably when Trump came in, that what is likely to happen if the US stopped providing money and started causing difficulties for the Ukrainians is that they would lose leverage. If they're no longer the central player on the battlefield, and they've basically cutting$50 billion worth of support for Ukraine, at some point, people are going to turn around and say, actually, you don't really matter. Not just Ukrainians will say you don't really matter because you're not actually as vital to our war efforts as you might have been two, three years ago, because you've just given us$50 billion less.

17:01Alastair Campbell:But even the Russians might say, actually, we don't necessarily need to negotiate with you because you're not as critical to the war. Now, there's still certain things that the US is doing, which are quite interesting, and I don't quite understand. I was talking to my friend, Shashank Joshi, this morning from The Economist, and he was pointing out that some of these very successful recent long-range Ukrainian strikes against Russian oil facilities depend on US intelligence to be able to navigate around radar systems and get to the location. For some reason, the Americans are still facilitating that, and that will be a problem if they take it away.

17:35Alastair Campbell:But in other regards, you're absolutely right. I mean, if Europe has been forced partly by the US to provide an extra 100 billion euros of money, and the US is providing zero, and if the US wants to say, Europe isn't our problem, Europe should step up, Europe needs to deal with Russia, Europe needs to pay, Europe needs to fight, we don't care about Ukraine, then why is Europe not leading the negotiations instead of the US?

18:01Callum McCrory:Well, I think that's a very, very good point. And when we were in Munich, remember after you left, I went to the event on the Arctic where Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister, was there. And somebody said to him, now that Europe is paying all this money and buying all the kit for Ukraine, which the Americans used to do and used to give, why are the Europeans not front and centre in the negotiations? and he gave a very very honest answer he said because putin doesn't want us there and trump lets him now that has to change the other thing that i saw in fact somebody here pointed out to me i was talking to about the americans and they played me this clip of an interview that whitkoff did this week he said two things which were mind-blowingly stupid the first was quote this is a very silly war okay now you can talk about it being a horrible war a brutal war but silly makes it sound like a kind of Monty Python sketch that's gone a bit wrong.

18:58Callum McCrory:It's a war that Putin has started. The next thing he said was, Putin has always been very straight with me. Now, what does that mean? What does that mean when he keeps saying, and Trump keeps saying, that we're getting there, we're making progress? What is the progress that's being made when he's being straight? Because in his public positioning, Putin has not changed one inch since the start of this.

19:20Alastair Campbell:And I think one of the interesting things is that Trump's defense people have been proved wrong. Their basic view, I think, unless I've got this wrong, is that actually, and this was basically J.D. Vance's line before the election, so going back 18 months now, was Russia's going to win anyway. Russia is a much bigger, much stronger country. America's wasting its money, and all it's doing is prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainians. Ukraine's got to accept that it's inevitably beaten. And given that, given that Russia's definitely going to win, we might as well stop spending any money on it. And then let's go and make some deals with Russia.

19:58Alastair Campbell:Let's drop the sanctions. Let's get some mineral deals. Let's make some money because Russia's going to win anyway. And where they've been proven wrong is despite the fact that the US has done almost everything conceivable to weaken the Ukrainian side. Number one, no more money. Number two, actually stopping even selling weapons often. Number three, okay, she's turning off entire systems. Number four, making it clear that all the NATO security guarantees are much flimsier and weaker than they were in the past and threatening Greenland and all this kind of stuff. Despite all of that, what the Trump administration would have predicted because they think the US is the only power in the world and Ukraine is too weak and the EU is too weak, they assumed that the Ukrainians would collapse like a house of guns.

20:40Alastair Campbell:And they would bring about what they predicted, which is that Russia would win and get all the stuff and then we'd lift sanctions. Actually, they've been proved completely wrong. What's actually happened over the last year is that I think over the last six months, Ukraine now seems to be paradoxically almost in a stronger position than we thought it was in six months ago, because it's managing to do these long-range strikes. It's managing to do some very targeted attacks against Russian infantry. it's managing also to do these very surprising counterattacks with small troops into Russian territory.

21:13Alastair Campbell:Russia has lost, killed and wounded 1.2 million casualties, which is more than anyone has lost since the Second World War. In fact, our defense minister, Al Kanz, says that it's actually they've lost more than the Americans lost in the entire Second World War, at least 350 ,000 killed. They're having difficulty replenishing. And Ukraine now seems to be able to manufacture long-range missiles rather than being totally dependent on everyone. So actually, it's not just that they are cruel and unpleasant. They actually proved to be completely wrong in their predictions. And somebody needs to call them out.

21:50Alastair Campbell:Their assessment of the defense and security situation and the relative strengths of Russia and Ukraine and the relative strengths of the US and the EU turned out to be completely wrong. Trump was wrong.

21:59Callum McCrory:And that is what leads me to say, the talks in Geneva recently, Rory, I don't know if you're aware of this. So you had Witkoff, you had the Russians and the Ukrainians, okay, meeting in Geneva. It didn't go anywhere. The Ukrainians came out and said that what they say, the Russians said, then Witkoff said it's going very well. Then he went back and played golf with Trump. And what's interesting about that, is that officials from the UK, Germany, France, and Italy just turned up, okay? Uninvited. They just turned up. They didn't get in the room, but it meant they could talk to the Ukrainians. They could hang around.

22:29Callum McCrory:Now, I honestly think the next time that Trump comes out and says, I'm sending Wyckoff and I'm sending Jared Kushner, and it's time for Ukraine to get its act together and get to the table. I think Keir Starmer, Macron, Maloney, Merz, Tusk, I think they should just turn up. I know they would be sort of, but let's be honest, Trump deals with diplomacy in a very unconventional way. But you know, the only senior American I've seen here is Mike Pompeo, another interviewee from leading, but he's the past, right? When you saw all the leaders today, they were presented with these little candles by children.

23:04Callum McCrory:They walked up to put them down by all the flags and the pictures of the dead soldiers. I kept looking for somebody from the United States. I didn't see anybody. Now, I maybe missed it, or maybe there are people I don't recognize, but the fact that nobody's talking about who have america sent to this and it does lead you to believe and quite a lot of people i'm afraid have said to me in terms and i should make clear not zelensky people not government people because they have to be very very careful and everybody understands that but real ukrainians are basically saying look we've come to the conclusion this is a conclusion you came to a long time ago that trump is on putin's side against ukraine now if that's the case and And if Ukraine sees its future totally with Europe, then Europe can't just become the new banker.

23:51Callum McCrory:They have to become the driver of the progress that gets made. And I think there's an opportunity there. But I think it means, as you say, it means calling out the Americans a bit.

23:59Alastair Campbell:So much to get into. And I really would love to get some sense when we come back from the break, what things look like and how Zelensky is going. But one last topic before we go to the break. I think maybe if we step back and look at the last four years, one of the things that struck me is the way in which this war has reshaped so many things so far beyond Russia and Ukraine in very unexpected ways. Let's take one example. Because of this war, China has ended up in a completely different position to the world and to Russia. It's ended up essentially making Russia into a kind of tributary state.

24:37Alastair Campbell:It gets cheap oil, Russia's completely dependent on China, and China's now dominating that whole region. It's had an effect on countries like India, because of course India's got cheap oil. And then India has been hit with 50 % tariffs by Trump. It's changed the relationship between the global South, reshaped that whole balance that we were talking about with Alexander Storbin that the leading interviews about to come at, partly because they've had to make some very, very difficult decisions from Biden onwards about whether they're on the US side on this, or whether they're going to try to remain neutral.

25:10Alastair Campbell:It's completely reshaped European energy policy. As you've pointed out often, it's brought Finland and Sweden into NATO. It's also exposed these incredible fractures between the US's willingness to pay for European defense. It's created this whole situation of Europe spending far more in defense and then suddenly worrying that maybe its defense industry isn't able to absorb the money and how's it going to make this special? stuff. All of this has just happened in the four years of our podcast. So just to throw it back to you, you're right at the heart of this because you're in Ukraine. But actually what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine has reshaped things all the way from China to European economies, to the US, to the global south.

25:57Alastair Campbell:It's sort of changing the world.

25:58Callum McCrory:There's no doubt about that. And interestingly, down at the Maidan just now, a couple of people came over to talk to me. One was a journalist from Iceland. And another was a political advisor from Norway, because Jonas Garstora, the Norwegian prime minister, is here as well. And I was talking to them about our mini series we've done with Ken Rosen on the Arctic. And I was just saying, I just can't, the Arctic's just become this sort of thing. We ended up having a discussion, quite a serious discussion, about the possibility, because the Icelandics are going to be having a referendum, probably later this year, about whether to reopen the accession talks, because you know they were already talking about accession to the European Union, reopen that.

26:40Callum McCrory:And then the Norwegians kind of chipping in, well, of course, if Iceland goes into the European Union, then we're left in the EEA, European Partnership, they're part of, it's just going to be us and Liechtenstein. So then does that move the Norwegians, who would then become one of the richest countries in the European Union? And of course, what these guys said about Iceland was that, you know, if you go through the various waves of enlargement, this will be the first time in quite a while that one of the rich European democracies has rejoined the European Union. So you're 100 % right, it's completely reshaping these things.

27:12And of course, while that goes on, I don't think we should, probably is just worth

27:18Callum McCrory:bringing people up to date with some of the stats. So you mentioned 1.2 million casualties. There's some talk, and casualties, just to be clear, that means military being killed and also have been injured so they can't fight and so that so 1.2 million there is a report i read before i came out here which was predicting that if things carry on as they are we will reach 2 million casualties by the spring okay the russian deaths military deaths 325 000 so if you imagine wembley stadium twickenham old trafford the three biggest stadiums in britain that is not enough to fit in the bodies of Russians who died.

28:01Callum McCrory:And one thing that somebody who knows Russia told me is that Putin, we know that, doesn't care about human life. He doesn't care how many soldiers he loses. The one thing he's really scared of is having to mobilize in Moscow and St. Petersburg. So that's maybe just worth keeping an eye on. Ukrainian forces, between half a million and 600 ,000 casualties. As for fatalities, it's between 100 ,000 and 140 ,000. And I can't tell rory how we went down yesterday without all the sort of the the fuss that there was today with all the security and the vips and all that stuff just walking around that place where all the pictures are and all the flags are it's it's just horrible because you're looking at young men and young women and and usually the photos are of them smiling some of them it's with guns but usually it's just sort of family photos of kids who are smiling and you just go you just go on for row after row after row after row.

28:57Alastair Campbell:I thought one of the most moving things just on that is we sort of micro version of this on the helmet of the Ukrainian Winter Olympics contender who had shown some of the Ukrainian athletes killed. And the BBC did rather a good piece on this, which we'll share in the newsletter. But I thought it was such a moving way of bringing it down to the individual level because you get a little biography of the individual and then you find that often with the men, it's that they've signed up and they've been killed on the front line, some of them only two weeks after enlisting. Women trying to get their grandmothers to safety and when a bomb suddenly attacks their house.

29:36Alastair Campbell:Young girls killed out in the open on their way to and from. I mean, it's nothing compared to what you're seeing, but I just thought because it's quite difficult for us to comprehend hundreds of thousands of people, that was rather moving powerful way of making us focus on a dozen real examples yeah but the the

29:56Callum McCrory:athlete was not allowed to wear that in competition because the olympic committee said you can't mix politics with the olympics and then one of the members of the ioc is mr infantino the head of fifa who goes to the board of peace and puts on one of trump's red baseball caps so try and tell I mean, that's not mixing in politics because it is. So the hypocrisy of that is pretty nauseating as well.

30:21Alastair Campbell:Yeah. Well, let's take a quick break and then I'd love to get more of a sense of what you've seen on the ground. But quick break and then back for more. Cool. See you in a minute. Hi, guys. It's Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci here from The Rest is Politics US. We have just recorded a four-part series that's all about Donald Trump becoming the global phenomenon we know him as today.

30:45Callum McCrory:You know, Katty, I knew Donald Trump since 2005. So in this series, we rewind the clock right back and dig into the people, the events and the scandals that built him.

30:56Alastair Campbell:Yeah, we're going to take you from his days in military school, what he learned there, how he actually weirdly thrived there, to his father's ties to the Ku Klux Klan, his days as a business mogul in New York and how that really shaped his worldview and his way of doing business. And we're going to explore parts of the Trump story that you might never have even heard of.

31:14Callum McCrory:not to mention, Caddy, the nefarious trickster, Roy Cohn. Where's my Roy Cohn? I heard him say that so many times. I mean, I was only there for 11 days, Caddy. Where's my Roy Cohn? Well, let me tell you something. If you want to know who Roy Cohn was, you're going to tune into this series.

31:32Alastair Campbell:With all the headlines that come out of Trump World every single day, we just felt there'd never really been a more important time to try to understand the America that created Donald Trump. To give you a flavour of the series, we've left a clip at the end of this show. To listen to episode one of Becoming Trump, head over to The Rest is Politics US, wherever you get your podcasts.

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33:39Alastair Campbell:Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

33:42Callum McCrory:And with me, Alistair Campbell. Okay, Rory, traditional to have a little bit of plugging. after the break olaf schultz latest interview on leading really interesting very interesting on ukraine as well he actually is one of those voices who's confident putin knows he's lost well we'll see also want to plug the arctic series with ken rosen but also one of the things we've been doing here me and our long-suffering producer callum um who's had to get used to the pace at which i work roy he's finding it very difficult these young people they do and they seem to need an awful lot of rest they have to eat a lot they have to have meal breaks anyway we've sort of managed to get through it but he and i have been keeping a daily diary which is going out in the newsletter that we send out automatically to members if you're a trip plus member you'll get that anyway but if you're not well if you're not you should be but if you're not and you don't want to be just go to

34:36Alastair Campbell:the link in the description below that sounds brilliant and we'll get column side of the story on your terrible, scandalous libels against young people. So this will be great. I'm looking forward to this diary very much.

34:48Callum McCrory:Listen, I'm a fan of young people. I promote young people all the time. I go into schools all the time. And the wonderful woman, Darina, who I mentioned, she actually knew how to get hold of it because her first words to me were, I had read your book, but what could I do? So they're great young people.

35:03Alastair Campbell:Oh, that's beautiful. Well, I'm looking forward also to hearing Callum's side of the story. Anyway, can we just start a little bit on some of the videos? You sent me, for example, a video of an intensive care unit.

35:14Callum McCrory:Yeah, that was pretty amazing. So when you arrive at the railway station, do you remember in January, there was a train that was bombed and I can't remember the exact numbers, but some people were killed. So what they've done, we had this amazing briefing from the head of the railways and they've had over a thousand attacks on the railways. he showed us a map of ukraine and every red line was a drone or a missile that's been detected and the whole map was red so they've had over a thousand attacks they've lost about i think 50 locomotive engines which obviously a quite important part of their their infrastructure they've had sabotage and damage to lots of rail track what they've done with this bombed out carriage is they brought it back to keith they've parked it on the on the track inside the railway station so anybody who's coming in there can see it as a reminder of this is what we're facing but then the carriage next to it is an intensive care unit so it's a train carriage which is no longer functioning as a train carriaging it's been converted into an intensive care unit and then the next one they've they've i have to say rory at six foot three the sleeper bed was not quite big enough but what they've done in this one they've taken a sleeper train and they've made the beds all into children's beds and so they've got a train carriage there that's a children's recovery center and it was just you you see so many things like that that you just see and i'm not going to use the r word resilience but you see their kind of innovation and their invention and their creativity went to a great event uh with marta she was at a bookshop where there were some artists poets and writers and and she came up with this great line she said every act of creativity is an act of resistance because of course you know dictators don't believe in creativity they believe in telling you what you should think, what you should read, what you should write.

37:15Callum McCrory:And that was just full of young, mainly young people who were, they all had stories of people that they know who'd been killed or brothers that are at the front line. And, you know, they've all got those stories and they'll tell you those stories. But there was one young woman in particular called Doreena who just, honestly, she just left you with this sense of optimism. And I said, well, how do you stay so optimistic. And she said, well, what alternative do you have? If you got out of bed every day and only thought about the bad things that are happening and the friends you've lost and the family that are at risk, if you only thought of those things, you'd never face the day.

37:55Callum McCrory:I get up every day and I say, what can I do today to help my country? Honestly, it was just so moving.

38:01Alastair Campbell:And presumably there are people you're meeting who will be very angry with Zelensky. There have been these incredible corruption allegations. And that's a problem also for EU accession, because people in the EU would be reluctant to take them. And of course, it's a real talking point for particularly the Trump administration when it wants to say, why are we supporting Ukraine to emphasize corruption? And then there's been a lot of changes up at senior levels, the military. There seems to be a good new defense minister in, But there's got to be people, presumably, who are saying to you, Zelensky's not doing this right, we'd be better off for someone else.

38:41Callum McCrory:They're not necessarily saying the second bit.

38:44Alastair Campbell:Right.

38:44Callum McCrory:I haven't met anybody who thinks it's a good idea to have an election. and zelensky has also said that um if the negotiations the fake negotiations as some of them call it led by whitkoff if they lead to the sort of delineation that's being talked of now they would lose that in a referendum anyway there was nobody i met who said to me candidate a or b would be better than zelensky nobody and i think people recognize that he is facing such a challenge and he's done extraordinary stuff in four years. But I met, for example, a woman called Hannah Hopko, who runs something called the National Interest Advocacy Network, and a woman called Daria Kaleniuk, who runs something called the Anti-Corruption Action Centre.

39:32Callum McCrory:And I think their main argument, well, they had a lot of arguments that were very, very fiery, but they feel that Zelensky isn't going fast enough on the reform. and in part because the the corruption historically is a huge problem you know going back to days of

39:52Alastair Campbell:yunukovic who made off with 70 billion right big sort of oligarchic thing yeah am i right that the although it's not on that scale there's still been some very very disturbing allegations about people who were very close to yeah zelensky some of his closest friends some of his business partners some of his deputies. And tragically, in a war, a sense that people are making off with billions of dollars that could otherwise have been spent on defending Ukraine.

40:18Callum McCrory:Yeah, including people who've been arrested trying to flee the country. But now, again, nobody has said to me, Zelensky is personally corrupt. What they have said is that some of the people who support and surround Zelensky are more interested in their own affairs than the country. Now, I don't know if that's true or that's not true.

40:38Alastair Campbell:I mean, when one hears that, why on earth would – there must be a reason why he keeps them around. Is it that they're loyal to him? Are they effective at their job? It's always a bit bizarre when you see a situation where you've got somebody at the top who people say isn't corrupt, but nevertheless continues to surround themselves with crooks.

40:54Callum McCrory:Look, I don't know because I don't know him well enough to be able to make a judgment about that. But for example, just to give you one example, one of the people who was critical of him said that if you were to really boil down who is in charge of this reform process to get us towards the European Union, it's not him, it's not a minister, it's not the people that you've been talking to. and they gave me a name that i've never heard of and they said he's a guy who works for selensky and he's a guy who back in the day used to say that the maidan protesters shot themselves okay now i've not checked that out i'm just giving you a flavor of people thinking i guess what it's saying is that there are still people from the old guard who are around right and i said hold on you know come on give the guy a break this guy just put yourself in his shoes and she said the reason why we are still standing zelensky has done a good job in many ways the reason we're still standing is because of the strength of the ukrainian people and what the ukrainian people are saying now is we want the reforms necessary to make it 100 clear we are going into the european union we are never going back under the sphere of russian influence there was some very harsh words said it became a bit of an argument right because there was it was a room full of different people yeah um but i i think that there is still huge you can sense the respect for him i mean today just at the mid and when you see him arrive there's a sort of there were lots of big cheeses there but you know when he arrived there's a real sense around him and because we were so close to him i you know as you know i like study people's movements and body language and their face way he he looked really really stressed now you could say well why wouldn't he look stressed and of course this his just imagine what his day is like today he goes through all that ceremony stuff he's now probably got i don't know doesn't he'll have dozens of meetings with dozens of people sure and he'll every one of them he'll have a different argument a different thing to go for but what these civil society people were saying to the european commission people was

43:00Alastair Campbell:you need to put them under more pressure right um but that's a hard position i mean marty koss

43:06Callum McCrory:is you know you imagine she's the person who's got to say to the ukrainians we love you we support you we're desperate for you getting the european union but you're not ready and they can say hold a minute we're fighting a war for all of you so it's a really difficult argument i'll tell you one thing that has come through and there's a the british um ambassador they have this role of six weeks they wrote they roll in and out because you know six weeks and then you go home for a couple weeks so at the moment the the number two woman called lotty surin is in charge and she said something really interesting when i talked to her is that she said that she she referred to something called a narrative frustration and what she i think means by that it goes back to what we talked about in the first half is that between them these two very powerful propaganda machines the Kremlin and the White House.

43:52Callum McCrory:This is me speaking, by the way, now. She used the phrase narrative frustration. I'm telling you what I think it is. They create the general sense that the momentum is always with Russia, that Putin holds all the cards. What you see when you're here is actually, no, he doesn't hold all the cards because the psychology of this is all going in one direction. And if only America was right behind this, and if only the European Union really was driving the political will, you get this feeling this thing could change. But what they all say is Putin has to be defeated. I didn't meet anybody who didn't say that.

44:32Alastair Campbell:I mean, just listening to you, I'm reminded of the fact that when people like us at the beginning of these conflicts try to predict what's going to happen, one of the things that goes wrong is that anybody analyzing a conflict tends to focus on stuff they can count. You know, what's your population? What's your defense budget? How many soldiers have you got? How much fancy kit have you got? And tend to assume that the country with more of that will win. So obviously, in this case, once Russia began, the general assumption would have been that Russia could have defeated Ukraine quite quickly. It's a much, much bigger country with a much bigger defense budget.

45:09Alastair Campbell:Then the second mistake we often make is around sanctions. So we tend to look at these people's economies and we think, okay, if we sanction Russia, it's going to pose incredible pain. I think I've said to you before, I remember in 2014 when they invaded Crimea, being at a National Security Council, not in a meeting, but in a side meeting where somebody said they believed that Putin would collapse within six months during the sanctions. Of course, in this case, what happens is we impose sanctions. Actually, the Russian economy grew quite strongly in 2023, 2024. And in fact, it turned out that they found all these other links into Saudi Arabia and China and India and all this kind of thing.

45:47Alastair Campbell:And you're pointing to the thing that we never managed to count and goes wrong again and again. And I think it's at the heart of where Trump gets the world wrong, which is this question of morale and national pride. And that's really what I suppose is one of the key elements driving Ukraine here. It's defeated all the odds, despite everything that you could put on a spreadsheet. It's done extraordinary things because of this sense of national pride. And it reminds me a little bit of, in a much more difficult, a much more disturbing context, of Afghanistan, where again, the US military spent$1.5 trillion, had the most advanced equipment in the world and were effectively defeated by people riding around on donkeys with Kalashnikovs.

46:35Alastair Campbell:And that's important because so much of Trump's worldview is that America can tell everybody else, including the European Union and Britain and Canada, what to do because they have more money and they have more weapons than anyone else. And I heard that a little bit at Munich. One of the leaders and one of the huge tech giants said to me, listen, it's all very well, You're talking about trying to have its own cloud computing or AI or tech structures. But frankly, you can forget about it because you can't afford it. We're going to be spending$250 billion this year and you haven't got the money, so you just got to suck it up.

47:13Alastair Campbell:And listening to him, I felt actually you've missed the point about national pride, that the world isn't just about numbers. And I think maybe I've turned to a more pompous philosophical point, but I guess what I'm hearing from you in Ukraine is that right at the core of things is this almost impossible to quantify question of the Ukrainians just keeping fighting.

47:37Callum McCrory:No, you're absolutely right, Rory. And of course, it is intangible. There's something intangible about it. But you really do feel it. You really do feel it. Even the people who are being critical, they're coming from that perspective of, I love this country so much. I really feel for the future of this country, we will never be Russian again. They feel it so strongly. They also do say, Roy, that they think we've been pretty pathetic on sanctions. They think the only way Putin's going to be absolutely destroyed is if we really take them on the economy. They don't think we've done enough to deal with the shadow fleet.

48:13Callum McCrory:I didn't realize this. I mean, to be fair to the European Union and the UK, we have tripled the numbers of sanctioned vessels in the Russian Shadow Fleet. The Americans have not increased that number in the last year.

48:26Alastair Campbell:And the Shadow Fleet, Alisa, just for listeners, is vessels that aren't flagged as being Russian vessels, but which are smuggling Russian oil predominantly out, and a lot of it's through the Baltics, so that we could stop these ships if we wanted to.

48:40Callum McCrory:Exactly. And so, yeah, it's basically, these are the ships that are allowing Russia to continue to sell oil around the world. And of course, you mentioned India, I remember, months and months ago, maybe years ago i can't remember we did a big thing about how basically india was just becoming the place where the russian law was getting refined so they were both making money out of it um so they they the sanctions they think that they've been weak but there was one guy who said to me that the truth is when it comes to sanctions america has become a complete bystander europe has to step up even more and the other thing that you keep hearing again and again is their worry and we see this in gaza as well let's be frank about this because this is the way trump talks and it's what gets them out of bed in the morning, is this feeling that both Ukraine and Gaza are just part of a sort of bigger business commercial enterprise to make the rich Americans even richer.

49:35Alastair Campbell:A worry there is just because you've made me think about that, presumably a worry that I thought you might be about to say that what happens is that Trump freezes a conflict, doesn't get a peace deal, but he sort of freezes a conflict, claims that he's got peace, moves on and everyone then assumes, well, it's not an issue anymore. So we've seen that in Gaza, people talking much less about Gaza. But in Ukraine, I guess the fear would be he tries to force through some sort of frozen deal and claims it's all been sorted out. And then Ukraine is left in this unbelievably weak, vulnerable position where Russia reconsolidates, ready to go again, and nobody's paying any attention.

50:17Callum McCrory:Exactly. And, you know, I said I went to this event. It's called RDNA 5, Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment. And it's the fifth report because we're now going into the fifth year of war. And the numbers are mind-blowing. And this is not some sort of, you know, left-wing think tank operation. This is the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Commission, and the government of Ukraine doing this big report. They've done it every year since the war started. and they're saying that the total cost of reconstruction of the damage done so far is in the area of 600 billion dollars the when you when you look at the the areas that have been worst hit and this again just brings it home how many people have been hit by this housing is the biggest sector damage by far 61 billion the transport system 40 billion energy 24.8 billion but that's going up commerce and industry 19.2 and the other thing to say roy is that the 75 of all that damage is on what are being called the frontline oblast so i'm in kiev now keep the people here say they are in the frontline because they are getting hit and they definitely got hit by this sort of web winter as weapon of war thing but you know we've not seen where the real sort of catastrophic damage of the sort of gaza style damage has been done but the numbers those numbers are huge and that means that economically the worst thing that could happen is that trump comes along they do some sort of deal trump announces it like he did the guards of peace deal this is the biggest day for humanity in the history of humankind i should get the nobel peace prize all that stuff and then actually ukraine's economic situation and security situation remains incredibly vulnerable so this is this is why it was very interesting to read this report and also to watch the people presenting it to put it in context um

52:07Alastair Campbell:it sounds like that the sort of figures you're talking about will be very close to the total annual revenue of the ukrainian government in an all year i mean there's these incredible amounts of money he's way above that way above that and so actually to do it i mean you know normally when when we were doing you know relief uh efforts and diffid you know we felt we were being generous giving 100 million. But you're not talking about 10 times that, which is a billion. You're not talking about 100 times that, which is 10 billion. You're talking about 1 ,000 times the amount of money that international donors would usually be providing to try to get Ukraine back on its feet again.

52:47Callum McCrory:And don't forget as well, Roy, there are 4.7 million Ukrainians, many of them women and children living in the European Union. There's many more living in the UK. The overall figure was something like, I think it might be as many as 11 million people displaced, either overseas or internally. When we had a meeting with the Electoral Commission, because of course there's a big talk about when and how they could hold elections, they're really worried about electronic voting because the Russian cyber attacks are relentless. They're worried about postal voting for the same reason. But they're saying, how can you hold elections when you have millions of people living abroad, hundreds of thousands who are serving in the military?

53:35Callum McCrory:So that was a really, you know, again, we think you see Trump saying, Trump comes out and says, you know, Zelensky should have an election. Okay. And then when you sit down and listen to the people who would actually have to organize that, you just realize how virtually impossible that would be. added to it, which is illegal because you can't have elections here when you have martial law.

53:58Alastair Campbell:Two more things, just in case you've picked up particularly on them. One of them is that there's been a big story recently about how Hungary and Slovakia have got themselves into an ever deeper conflict with Ukraine, because Ukraine gets more than half its electricity from Hungary and Slovakia. And Hungary and Slovakia get a lot of their crude oil on pipelines running from Ukraine. And as they've got into a fight about this, the Ukrainians have bombed pipelines and haven't fixed it. So there's not as much crude oil coming in from Russia into Hungary. In return, the Hungarians and Slovaks are cutting off electricity supplies, stopping or threatening to veto the$100 billion EU package and to veto the sanctions.

54:44Alastair Campbell:Are you hearing much about this on the trip, that one?

54:46Callum McCrory:Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, as ever, when you're talking about the MAGA ideology, the influence of America, Russia and its role within the European Union, the name Orban comes up again and again and again. end and hungary has it's not just that they're threatening to they have said they are objecting to the european union's plan to loan 90 billion euros well given that ukraine is basically it's living almost month to month hand to mouth in terms of getting money this loan is absolutely essential to their defense and to their having some sort of budget and the foreign minister shizato hungarian foreign minister he was absolutely explicit last week he said we are blocking this eu loan for ukraine until oil transit to hungary via the relevant pipeline resumes so listen hungary is you and i've talked about this so often i am totally with on this the european union has allowed this guy to get away with way too much they're all they can't say it publicly because they're diplomats, but basically a lot is hanging on the election on April the 12th.

55:57Callum McCrory:But then again, when you hear about the level we heard in Moldova, 300 million euros being spent by the Russians on disinformation to destabilize the Moldovan campaign, just imagine how much they're pumping into Hungary to help Orban there. And of course, Trump sends a little poodle Rubio to say, vote Orban.

56:15Alastair Campbell:And the hypocrisy of that, because one of the talking points that Trump keeps selling is it's all the fault of the European unions, who are terrible hypocrites because they keep buying Russian oil. And if we didn't buy Russian oil and give all this money to Russia, there wouldn't be a problem with Ukraine. But the biggest offender on buying Russian oil is Hungary. And Trump is letting them continue to buy Russian oil, didn't put any sanctions on Hungary, and in fact, encouraging the Hungarians to torpedo aid packages, torpedo sanctions, and keep buying Russian oil, making it entirely clear that it's simply a talking point it's not real right when he actually has a chance to deal with the big offender that's buying russian oil he doesn't he just uses it to cast shame and blame on anyone that's challenging him yeah well the other the other thing that has really

57:03Callum McCrory:alarmed people is that back to sport which as you know rory is the most important thing in the world

57:09Alastair Campbell:i thought you you might you might question that given that you're in the middle of the ukraine

57:12Callum McCrory:war okay but let me tell you why let me tell you why sport is relevant in this context is that one of trump's senior is the commissioner for competition or sport or something is back the fact that russian and belarusian athletes are going to be allowed to take part in the paralympics which are going to follow the winter olympics that are taking place now now the ukrainians have responded by saying they're not going to send any officials they're going to boycott the opening ceremony and they're calling others so to do but the americans are basically to come out and i think infantino's come out as well and basically saying look you know sports not about politics it's about competition we should let these people in that is the thin end of a very very very large wedge i don't know there's a lot there's a there's there's a lot to unbundle i'll tell you what i do want to do though roy is that i talked about this um this point about resilience and it's really interesting because it's such an obvious thing to say is that if you if you were sent here now and you said, oh, minister, you've got, just make a five-minute speech and just make them feel warm and good about Britain.

58:14Callum McCrory:You would say, you know, and there's not a single person in the United Kingdom who hasn't turned on their news day after day and admired your fortitude and your strength and your resilience, okay? And you think you were saying things they want to hear. Some of them do. But I read this wonderful piece in the, I mean, if I've written my whole column in the New World about this theme of resilience, because I'm a big fan of resilience. I think resilience is a hugely important quality. I read this piece in the Kyiv Independent, and I saw the byline, Elsa Court, and I checked it out. It turns out she's a Brit who lives here.

58:43Callum McCrory:But anyway, she says, it's hard not to feel tired when those outside Ukraine choose to highlight resilience. Ukrainians shouldn't have to be resilient. If Ukraine's partners were to give the kind of support Kyiv continually begged for, civilians would not have to be suffering. Praising their resilience is like standing on the shore watching a person struggle not to drown in a riptide instead of sending a lifeboat to save them you praise them for being such a strong swimmer if you decide a nation is resilient you shrink your obligation to take any action to help them and that is a thought that i've heard quite a lot of people it's beautiful it's beautiful she could

59:25Alastair Campbell:almost been quoting a dr johnson's letter to the earl of chesterfield where he says is not a patron my lord one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and when he reaches ground encumbers him with help um bloody right now rory i'm not gonna

59:41Callum McCrory:let that go i did dear listener dear viewer i did not tell rory i was going to be reading that out so he has that he said is that what he does for you is it a memory thing that's all about memory

59:53Alastair Campbell:that's worth all the bullshit comes from well that was good that was good thank you well just Just to come to an end, I mean, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. So let me just take the four takeaways that I've taken from your trip. Number one, being on the ground is showing you simply the scale of the destruction and the horror. Secondly, it's showing you the optimism and the drive of Ukrainians. Thirdly, it's showing you how the US is increasingly unpopular, marginal, and possibly less relevant as time goes forward to the peace treaty. And finally, the great demand on the ground is for us to stop simply sympathizing and admiring the situation and concentrate on what we can do and what more risk we can take in confronting Russia and risk, because Russia will often threaten nuclear weapons, Trump will thump his chest on the Russian side.

1:00:51Alastair Campbell:But for this to work, we owe them to move immediately against the shadow fleets, to provide the financial support on the missiles, and to allow the Ukrainians to take more risk against Russia. And if they do, actually, some of the figures are beginning to suggest that Ukraine is not quite in the kind of hole that Trump and Vance were suggesting they were nine months ago.

1:01:13Callum McCrory:Rory, I think you've summed it up absolutely brilliantly. I think that's absolutely right that is absolutely right um the optimism and the sense of national pride is really really powerful and very very moving and not just moving because you have the what the leaders standing there paying tribute in the maidan is moving because you feel it every time you talk to anybody the thing i would add to that alongside the sense of america being increasingly unpopular almost derided so that quote this is a very silly war the person who showed to me says well this is the problem when you have a very silly man in charge of this so being derided and i think they really do they genuinely do appreciate the support of europe and the uk they genuinely do you hear that a lot you know i was so probably the high moment of the whole trip where it was on the trade where the ukrainian security gave her to check our passports and so calum and i are sitting in there in our carriage in our little sort of compartment and um he takes my passport he looks at it and he goes military there we are so it's all that it's all that fitness fitness training you're doing i know so i said i just i just said special forces so anyway so whether even if you're a 68 year old soldier the minute you show your passport they do appreciate europe and the and you no doubt about that but there is a big but But I think they worry that we, Europe, UK, Norway, all the others that are really supportive, I think they worry that we're still a little bit beholden to the idea that the Americans are in charge of this.

1:02:53Callum McCrory:So that's the other thing that gave me hope. I actually see this on so many levels as a massive thing for Europe. If it gets its act together, and if you then understand that what all the, I mean, just ask yourself this rule. You have all this sort of MAGA stuff coming out. Europe's a basket case. We had Brexit. But nobody else is trying to leave the European Union. They're all trying to get in. They're all trying to get in, in part because of the values. So you hear that here the whole time. We are never going to be Russian. We don't want to live like the Russians. We don't want to think like the Russians.

1:03:27Callum McCrory:We are European. So I think with that, and I think eventually, and I've told you my big vision, of course, is Ukraine, UK and Canada join on the same day. I think it's just a great idea for the world.

1:03:42Alastair Campbell:Well, Alistair, on that, thank you. And you're there actually for a few more days. So let's look forward to picking up on this next week and seeing what more that you see. And possibly I think you'll be in a meeting with Zelensky himself. But thank you so much for calling in. If this reporting is really beginning to pique your interest in detailed stuff on Ukraine, in addition to what Alistair's producing, the podcast Battleground with Saul David and Patrick Bishop is absolutely unmissable for the granular detail of what's going on in Ukraine at the moment.

1:04:13Callum McCrory:Now, those of you who are creatures of habit may have noticed that this is the main episode coming out now and question time normally comes afterwards, but question time went out yesterday. So if you missed that, you can catch up on it. And the other thing to say is because Rory's been practicing for the next Winter Olympics and has not been here, it means that I've been doing quite a lot of stuff on my own with the long-suffering Callum. So there's loads of stuff that we'll be putting out in different ways, interviews and social media clips and what have you in the coming days or weeks.

1:04:43Alastair Campbell:Looking forward to it all. See you soon. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.

1:04:52Alastair Campbell:He's the man you think you know everything about. Billionaire Donald Trump. Donald Trump. Donald Trump. But most people only met him halfway through his story. I am officially running for president of the United States.

1:05:04Callum McCrory:The manifestation of Donald Trump's personality comes with a lot of complexity.

1:05:10Alastair Campbell:A parent like Fred Trump, it's my way or the highway. There were two paths, work hard, go into the family business, or the path of his brother, who was an alcoholic.

1:05:20Callum McCrory:He goes to this military school, but he takes none of the community stuff because he's a selfish dude.

1:05:26Alastair Campbell:He had this whole carousing playboy background, which in a way was a bit of a sham. He leaves early and he doesn't drink anything.

1:05:33Callum McCrory:What Trump learns is that self-image is going to work for him throughout his career.

1:05:38Alastair Campbell:He meets Ivana Marie Zelinkova. Ultimately, Ivana does exactly as I tell her to do. The way that Donald Trump sees the world today. This is liberation day. You can see where it comes from. We let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets and everything. It's not free trade. We'll explore the events. Trump has been saying that he will run it as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a Joe. And the people. He happened to meet Roy Cohn. The ultimate dirty trickster. Who made Donald Trump into the man we see today.

1:06:13Callum McCrory:I alone can fix it.

1:06:20Callum McCrory:guys the story doesn't end there we have so much more to get into to hear it sign up at the rest is politics us.com thought sweet green was just salads think again there's

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