Read the full transcript of former British diplomat Alastair Crooke in conversation with Norwegian academic Prof. Glenn Diesen on “Alastair Crooke: Russia’s Patience Is Over, Escalation Begins”, August 29, 2025.
Introduction
GLENN DIESEN: Hi everyone and welcome back. We are joined today by Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat, to discuss Europe-Russian relations. So welcome to the program.
ALASTAIR CROOKE: Thank you very much. Always a pleasure.
Divergent Diplomatic Positions
GLENN DIESEN: So these diplomatic efforts appear to be reaching more or less a deadline. That is, the Russians want to address the root causes. The Europeans, while some of them at least still seem to hope for an unconditional ceasefire. I was wondering how you read these divergent positions and is there any possibility of actually bridging them and finding some common meeting point where peace could actually be achieved?
ALASTAIR CROOKE: I read them as divergent, and unchangingly divergent. So far, it’s quite clear that Zelensky has not conceded an inch on any point after the meetings. After the Alaska meeting at the White House, he says no to everything effectively.
At the same time, Russia has a little bit of flexibility, but it sticks to the points that it made. The framework that Putin outlined on June 14th in Moscow at the Foreign Ministry was going to be the Russian position. So not really.
Shift from Ceasefire to Battlefield Resolution
But what did change at the Anchorage meeting was the move from the ceasefire program. It may come back, but it was temporarily removed. Trump accepted the idea that the solution could be enforced on Zelensky and Europeans through force of arms by Russia – that is, on the battlefield. It would be decided on the battlefield and then would be ratified in some sort of agreement subsequently.
So nothing in that sense has changed. There’s a lot of noise and chatter about guarantees and security guarantees, but there’s really not anything much in that either.
The Reality of Security Guarantees
First of all, security guarantees depend on Russia to consent to them. But secondly, it’s pretty clear that the United States are not going to back it up in any meaningful way. The Europeans – certainly Britain, France and Germany – understand they can’t enter the battleground in Ukraine without any backup from the United States.
Russia is clear there will be no NATO troops in Ukraine as peacekeepers. In fact, the April 2022 paper that was produced from Istanbul – it wasn’t a formal agreement, but was produced then – did include the possibility of some guarantees to Ukraine. Those would be primarily the Security Council members like China. It might include others like India, maybe France or Britain, but it would be subject to permission of the guarantors, of which Russia and China would be both guarantors, and then it would only happen if Russia agreed.
Moving Toward Escalation
So I think we’re moving actually more to a period of escalation in this area. I think Trump was under pressure – many pressures. Pressures from Epstein, pressures from the Senate who are giving him a hard time over sanctions and tariffs, pressures from the dark establishments, the security space, and also from Israel.
He’s under these huge pressures and he has, above all, the unstated pressure that is always there. He has to fix the economy and that is probably the primordial task facing him – how to deal with American debt, how to get that sorted out.
Things are changing and I think things are changing in a way which projects that we’re coming towards escalation. This is coming about mainly through the prism of Israel. I can explain it if that would be useful.
The Escalation Dynamic
GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, I would actually like to know how it ties in. But on the escalation part – because when negotiations don’t work and the Russians are now appearing to be winning as well, the front lines are cracking more and more at a faster pace. One assumed that the natural reaction would be a bit of panic and escalation.
Indeed, Trump recently tweeted that the Ukrainians would have to go on the offensive if they wanted to win. And then they apparently also signed off on selling a few thousand long-range missiles. Meanwhile, you have Zelensky saying more or less that the Russians would have to feel the war as well, suggesting targeting Russian civilians.
The Escalation Dynamic and Narrative Warfare
ALASTAIR CROOKE: What is the possible escalation? I don’t think we’re going to see an escalation that is going to militarily change the paradigm that exists on the ground. You could call it an escalation, and this is where the missiles come in. I think it’s quite likely that may happen. But this was mooted even before – I remember Washington Post articles talking about the Tomahawks possibly being brought in. I believe that has been vetoed. But now we’re talking about other missiles coming in.
But this isn’t going to change the situation on the ground. Let’s be straight. It is an alternative – if you can’t win militarily on the battlefield, then you can present defeat as a victory by doing something like sending missiles into St. Petersburg and Moscow and saying, “Oh look, Russia’s still feeling the pain. They haven’t scored a victory because look, these missiles are coming in and it’s affecting them and people are getting anxious about it.”
So it’s again narrative change. You’re going to swap a real sense of victory for a narrative of victory which is, “Oh look, Ukrainians are still sending missiles into the distance of Ukraine.” The problem with this is the only way they can do that is with the help of the Americans, and the Americans know then they become a co-belligerent in the war – or the Germans or the British or the French or whatever – and they will hit back.
Russia’s Counter-Escalation Response
What we’re seeing at the moment is the escalation coming from Russia, not from the United States. Russia is hitting back.
There was an American company, American-owned company in Ukraine making electronic components. Some of those components may or may not have gone into drones of Ukraine, but it’s been destroyed. The first American fully-owned company I think that the Russians destroyed.
Then there has been the Turkish drone factory that has been destroyed. Well, Turkey is a major NATO member, but that has been destroyed in these recent bombardments. The one making the Bayraktar drone missiles has been destroyed. And then there was the German sort of component facility where they were pretending they’re not giving missiles to Ukraine, but then somehow Ukraine would be assembling them on their own on Ukraine territory. And the three components to that enterprise have all been destroyed by Russia.
So there is a pushback. But I would have to explain why this is becoming more and more inevitable. And for that I do have to return paradoxically to Israel and Iran because I think what we’ve seen in this period has been a transformation.
The Transformation of Israeli Zionism
There’s been first of all a transformation in Israel towards a much more – we follow quite closely the Israeli Hebrew press and they talk about it very clearly as being the old Zionism is gone. Initially the old Zionism founded a state, it created the state, it created institutions. But it’s tending towards a violent, militarized violence, and they talk about that in very clear terms – barbarism.
One of the Israeli commentators describes it – who’s in Haaretz, you can only read it in Hebrew, not in English version – Gideon Levy says, “This is third stage Zionism – it’s a form of barbarism.” He’s thinking of Gaza, but he’s also thinking about Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, all of these things together.
My point about this is why is this important? Because Trump and his team have throughout the first period unwaveringly supported Israel in its massacring of the Palestinians and in these other events and were co-belligerents with Israel in the attack on Iran on the 13th of April. It’s quite clear that that’s been planned – being planned for some months jointly between the United States and Israel for the attack on Iran.
The Strategy to Collapse Iran
What is significant about Iran’s attack was quite clearly it was intended to collapse what the Israelis called “the house of cards” – that was Iran. It was not just about, wasn’t about the nuclear issue really at all. It was about collapsing the house of cards.
Because coming out of this is a new sense – when we talk about Israeli policy, not only is it very evidently a militarized policy, but it is about imposition by military means, whether it is treaties that are being imposed by military means in Syria or in Lebanon or attempted in Yemen. And all of these are really to try and create a dependency.
I think originally when you listen to Blinken and others, the idea was there would be normalization with Israel from all around the region leading up to Iran. But that’s not what we’re dealing with now. We’re dealing with an imposed vassalage – to make the states basically vassals of Israel and vassals of the United States. It’s very obvious in Lebanon, for example, that that’s what is being done.
Iran’s Response and Rejection of Submission
So this has made Iran really rethink itself. Because the Supreme Leader said this very clearly in his statement earlier this week. And he said, “This is not about negotiations. It’s not about a nuclear agreement. They want us to be obedient, to be subjects of Israel and the United States. They want us dependent and not sovereign in any way.”
And he says to those who say we should negotiate with America, to those who say, “Can’t we come to terms with the West and the United States?” The Supreme Leader said, “You’re missing the point. That isn’t what they want. They want our submission. They want us to give up our sovereignty, our independence, and we will never, ever do this.”
So inevitably, this process is taking – because even the Israelis, in a recent report that just came out by INSS Institute in Israel, said, “Actually what happened in those 12 days following the attack on Iran was that the Iranian people came together and are now more solidified.” And it says, “Unfortunately, there’s no sign at all of discontent with the government or popular disaffection in Iran.” That’s gone.
They’re lamenting it because it’s an Israeli-produced report. And they say, rather contradictorily, they say, “But it should still be the objective of Israel to overthrow the government, to overthrow the Iranian state.” And they say that even though they say, “Unfortunately, what happened on the 13th was such a mess that it’s actually made it even less likely that that can be done because basically the people have come together and there’s been a show of unity.”
The Inevitability of War
So inevitably then we are moving towards war. This is the only way it can be concluded. And where the nuclear project comes into this is simply not so much in what really happened in Natanz or Fordow. It is much more the question that the Israelis say, “What can we do? The Iranians are clever at technology. They know how to manage technology. So even if all of the elements are destroyed, even if all of the components or the enrichment are destroyed” – and I don’t think Israel believes that has happened at all, in fact, it’s pretty obvious they don’t believe that – “But even if it had been this way, they can just start again and do it again.”
So the only sure way of making a guarantee that Iran cannot move to a weapons state is to change the government and to put in a Western-aligned proxy to run it like a Shah on Israel’s behalf, to make it a sort of client state.
The Absorption of Israeli Methods into American Thinking
So this sort of inexorable mood – what I’m saying is you can see components of the thinking of not so much people coming to normalization in a voluntary way, but through imposed pressure, has been absorbed and is bleeding into the American way of thinking about geopolitics in the sense that they openly adopt the idea of decapitation.
This was said very clearly by Lloyd Austin about, “Yeah, of course we’re trying to kill the Houthi leadership, we’re going to decapitate the leadership.” They talk about it in approving of assassination. “Yes, it’d be quite right to assassinate the Supreme Leader in Iran.” They endorse that and they endorse the idea of destroying the institutions of a state. We saw that very clearly in Syria.
The Shift to Coercive Dependency
So that whole way of thinking has moved in. What does it mean? I think it means really that the West has moved much more to the sense that we actually, because we cannot fight wars – we don’t have the wherewithal, the weapons, the money to fight wars everywhere as we used to think of it. Even RAND organizations and others say that America at best can deal with one war, but not two.
So then – and this is what Trump has moved to – is moved to a sort of policy of coercion, financial coercion, but a sort of calibrated dependency coercion. So it wanted to make India dependent and thus pull it out of the BRICS. The whole idea of the ceasefire, which would be not only against Putin’s interest, but would sort of pull Russia into a prolonged struggle in Ukraine, that would be built up again in due course. And all the other elements was to not only just weaken Russia, but to make it so much more dependent, a subject, not a sovereign in this new, very carefully financialized world order.
And also the threat that comes out with that: “You have to pay us. You have to pay for everything you get. And we want more money.” Well, the Europeans have sort of succumbed to that completely because they always liked the dependency on the United States anyway. And so they gave up their sovereignty pretty freely.
But Iran is not going to, Russia is not going to, and we see China very obviously saying “No” to Trump. “No, we’re not buying your soybeans, sorry. We’re going to get them from Brazil instead.” And so American soybean farmers are going bankrupt. It’s become a serious problem.
The Apocalyptic Turn in American Thinking
So this is moving, it seems, either to a resolution, to an escalation, to more serious war, or else we’re going to see everything changed by some unexpected event like a financial crisis, which could change the whole landscape in many ways.
There’s been a sort of progression of the United States normalizing more and more of what Israel has been doing. This has changed Israel – not the Israel of the European kibbutzniks and European liberal Israel, but of this new messianic Israel that says, “No, it’s fine to decapitate. It’s fine actually to follow the pattern.” And it’s mandatory to follow the pattern of Amalek. The Torah says twice, “Amalek must be destroyed.” This is an obligation, not a choice.
So this has sort of percolated and is changing, I think. Of course I’m not suggesting that all Americans think like this and there are different factions and different interests in the United States – those are complex structures. But even America is becoming much more eschatological.
Particularly when you look at the Silicon Valley oligarchs – the gang of four of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks – they’re all talking in much more apocalyptic terms. In fact, Peter Thiel has a series of lectures that are about to start in New York about the Antichrist and about Armageddon and about trying to bring back the ideas and thinking about Armageddon, an old Christian, this sort of apocalyptic early Christian thinking into the present day.
Okay, he’s one person. But those tech oligarchs together are quite a powerful influence and they have a very different constituency to the MAGA constituencies. I’m not sure how long they can coexist because they’re quite different constituencies. But they are in alignment for now. But they are completely opposed to what they understand about the economy. They want a real economy that provides real employment. Whereas the tech oligarchs think in terms of AI and tech becoming a monopoly which will provide huge rents and will be subject to, will become increasingly abstract and remote from people and people will be paid a certain stipend. Very different to what I think the MAGA people are thinking.
The Dynamic Towards Escalation
So this is why I think there is a dynamic towards some form of escalation. Because basically if America is determined that it’s got to maintain its primacy and other states are not only rising but asserting their sovereignty and their reluctance to accept dependency and vassalage to the US, then there’s going to be a clash at some point. And that clash could be a very serious clash.
But on the other hand we may find something happens – events taken out of the blue, like a financial crisis which may change everything.
GLENN DIESEN: It appears that we might be walking towards that. Of course the US is having problems, but Britain, France, Germany – their economies do appear to be entering some difficulties. But yeah, you can never time these things though. But I wanted to follow up on this.
The Economic Challenges Ahead
ALASTAIR CROOKE: United States too. Yes, it’s not, you know, I know we all, I mean, you know, the cabinet says how wonderful the economy going, everything like this. But you know, look what’s happening in the bond market, of course happening generally. I think we’re going to see, you know, great difficulties ahead, strange things are happening. I just wrote about it.
There was a reported, we don’t know who, but there’s been a huge buyer of physical gold in New York, unknown buyer buying no less than 2,000 metric tons of gold, physical gold, I mean equivalent to about 25% of the total American stock buy gold. And who doesn’t see his mind much about price? I mean, what’s going on?
We know that Trump wants to devalue the dollar to try and bring back industry and so on. Maybe we’re looking at something more, more substantive, I mean a devaluation, not just, you know, a few percent like the original Plaza Accords and something more substantial. I don’t know. No one really knows what’s going on.
But we see the ructions that the Federal Reserve, the attempt by Trump to take control of that institution so that he can bring back cheap loans and credit. That’s his vision and that’s been all his vision as a New York businessman is plenty of low cost debt is what we need to get.
The Oreshnik Missile Question
GLENN DIESEN: On the topic of Russia escalating, though, whenever people speak of Russia escalating, the thought of the Oreshnik always comes into mind. And given that, well, everything from the US planning to introduce missiles in Germany to these long range missiles being sold to Ukraine, how likely do you think it is that Russia might start using the Oreshnik missile? And what would be the consequences?
ALASTAIR CROOKE: I think this depends a huge issue on what Washington we don’t really know still. I mean it’s really bizarre after all this time. You know, Trump talks the talk of peace but he walks the walk of war. I mean we see that in Venezuela and we see it in other places. He has no hesitation.
There was a piece just I was reading today in Haaretz where they were saying, well, if you take the Israeli cabinet, which is the very right wing cabinet, as you know, and you take Ben Gvir and Smotrich and you add to that Netanyahu and Ron Dermer was the sort of topping person with Trump on one side and then you have the others on it. And then he said you’d find Trump on the far right. That’s where his position.
So I mean, you know, and that’s why and I don’t know what hold it is that Israel has over Trump but clearly Trump in some way seems drunk from being able to bring about a solution in Gaza other than, you know, his celebrated solution for Gaza with its high rises and casinos and all the Palestinians gone.
Escalating Middle East Tensions
So I, I mean tension is mounting the, the Middle East very, very obvious politics is becoming really brittle wherever you look around. As you know, there’s been now a decapitation strike in Yemen. The Israelis have just last night, in the night before tried to destroy the leadership of Yemen. I mean again as I say, what do you hear from Washington of course or Europe? Nothing.
I mean, you know, this is now normalized, you know. Yes, it’s okay. You, you know, I mean the Houthis are above us and to destroy them is okay. I mean we are in a, you know, because it’s been gradual. I don’t think people are seeing how much we have changed, you know, from our politics of even going back a few years, American politics. We’re not like this and were very cautious about endorsing Israeli targeting assassination. And now it seems to be sort of open territory in many ways.
Weaponizing Economic Dependencies
So it has moved but also associated because of the financial aspect of it. It’s become so much about, you know, I mean tariffs are now a weapon and shock and awe. Tariffs is what they are called. So the shock and awe tariffs are a weapon but also dependency is become, you know, you make yourself dependent, you agree to being dependent on the United States under pressure, coercive, calibrated dependency.
This is what India was facing in this last period. And what happens is gets weaponized against him. You have to do it or else, or else you do what Modi did and seems to be refusing the telephone calls from Trump. I mean, and where is he? He’s in Beijing making it up, you know, with the Chinese because he knows that Trump’s offer to him.
“Okay, well we’ll turn the blind eye to you selling off, you know, refined products to Europe taken from, refined from Russian oil. But you’re going to have to open your markets to American agricultural and animal products.” I think, you know, India can’t do that. It is the basic rural community of, of a small farm that surviving would be a, it will be a, a catastrophe for, for India. It would destroy the political base, let alone the social, economic base.
Anyway, the mood in India has. Change is changing dramatically. And this is what I mean by this weaponizing dependency. I mean, look what he’s done to the European Union. It made it totally dependent now on the United States. It’s going to be check mark now. Have you paid enough billions? Are there enough investment coming in? How many, you know, how much liquefied natural gas have you absorbed?
And if you do anything and you’ve opened your markets completely through our agricultural products and others coming in, but we’re still going to put 50% more generally a bit more on steel and aluminum. And as I say, they wanted dependency because they thought somehow this would ease the path for them on Ukraine. I’m not sure that it’s worked. Probably it hasn’t. But I think that was their culture somehow. They would be very nice to Trump and then, you know, security guarantees would be so. And quality, you know, for their niceness and accepting a 5% NATO surcharge, what have they got? None.
The Transformation of Western Values
GLENN DIESEN: How do you explain though what has happened to us? I mean the west, because as you said, this decapitation strike on Yemen is just another normal thing. We’re openly now talking about war with Russia again, the world’s largest nuclear power, as if it would be nothing. We blow off nuclear deterrence as blackmail. We’re now complicit in genocide against the Palestinians.
Striking Iranian nuclear reactors is, well again doesn’t get any reactions. Tariffs as a weapon is common. Stealing sovereign assets from the Russians, preventing the technological rise of China and even threatening our own friends in India. And of course you mentioned the Europeans just casually referring to Trump as a daddy and signing economic agreements they themselves recognize doesn’t make any sense.
How do you explain what is going on? Because each one of these things would have been very difficult thing to imagine only about five, ten years ago even, you know, we had sanctions against although efforts for example to sanction China, but at least it would be dressed up in the language of human rights sanctions or something. Now all of this is just gone out the window. How do you explain what is happening to the west at the moment?
The Donor Class and Western Liberalism’s Collapse
ALASTAIR CROOKE: Well, I think there has been a big change, particularly in the United States. I don’t want to single out just the tech oligarchs, but particularly among the donor class of politics in America. The donor class has become very convinced in its own right that it has earned this money, it will spend it as it likes. It is totally selfish.
The sort of sense that it owes responsibility to anyone – that it has a moral responsibility to the American people as a whole community – that’s largely gone. I mean, the collapse of Western liberalism has left this big void, and it’s been filled to a certain extent with this sort of amoral sense. “I should be able to be free to make as much money as I want. There should be no restrictions, there should be no regulations. I can use it as I want, I can do what I want. And to hell with all the people that are complaining or feeling that they’re left out. We don’t care about that.”
That is also part of Trump too. We have this disparity because you see elements of this Silicon Valley making present in that element. It was crucial to his election. The Silicon oligarchs and many of the oligarchs shifted and came to support him with a lot of money. He didn’t have all of the billionaires, but he had a lot of the billionaires, and crucially he had more of the ultra-rich rather than just the billionaires.
The “Big Beautiful Bill” and Tax Policy
What was the “big beautiful bill”? Well, huge cuts in taxes for corporations and deregulation on one side, and privatization, Medicare being cut down, and a few little tidbits given to MAGA. But basically it was for the donor class. The tax on them has gone down dramatically under the big beautiful bill, and debt has gone up by another 3.4 trillion.
This is the uneasy tension which you have there, coupled with the fact – and why I think we’ve moved to this dependency approach – financial shock and weaponizing dependency. The deep state, the permanent security apparatus, they calculate it’s necessary to see Russia as being in a state of dependency and weakness, particularly vis-à-vis China and Iran, and that it has to be suppressed down to that level.
I don’t think that means necessarily using nuclear weapons on Russia. It is a sort of calibrated coercion into dependence – that’s how I would describe this foreign policy. It’s obtained mostly by financial pressures, by targeting certain areas of life and then ensuring that the dependency is there. Therefore Russia is not a beacon of opposition to the United States, is not displaying its sovereignty, but accepting dependency and submission to the United States.
Eschatological Language and Deep Imagery
I think that element – these are the deepest structures of the deep state – the idea that Russia should not be allowed to become sovereign. When I said about the change in Israeli thinking and how it’s sort of leached across to some cultures of American thinking, look at what you see from Europeans.
I don’t know if you saw that interview recently with Macron, when he was talking about Putin. He said, “Putin is extremely dangerous. Russia is a threat. Russia is a predator. It’s a predator at our door.” Very strong symbolic language. “The beast on the doorstep. It’s a predator, a cannibal sitting at our doorstep, threatening Europe.”
We know what he’s referring to. This goes back to old Christian imagery. Putin is the Antichrist. He’s the opposite of everything we value and stand for. Russia is everything that is dangerous. You can see the interviews on French television, but language like that goes right down to some of the deepest images. Even if we are secular and Westernized in many ways, we all remember those images from the past of the devil moving people into hell.
Living in Italy, you can’t go into a church without seeing these wonderful, very vivid images of the black Manichean opposition to European values. This is eschatological Manichaeism. Ten years ago, I wrote a paper saying that I believed in the future, the wars will be about the symbols of religion – Al-Aqsa on one hand and the Temple Mount on the other. These will be the symbols around which war will be centered.
Macron just says it – “Russia is pagan.” He had to go back to the schism of a thousand years ago. “We had to get rid of Constantinople. We had to get rid of these. Anyone who spoke Greek was therefore pagan and a heretic and should be dealt with,” and the Franks who took over the papacy at that time. We remember what happened to the Cathars – well, we don’t remember because nothing existed. They were just erased from history.
He’s digging into deep imagery in Europe. And Trump, in his recent statements, again goes back into these sort of symbolisms. In a Cabinet meeting, someone said, “What about Russia?” And he said pretty much, “All of this that Putin says, that Putin says he wants to do a peace process – that’s just nothing. He’s posturing. He’s just posturing.”
That is the deep sense of that eschatological divide. These people, whether they’re Palestinians or Russians, they’re just posturing. They have no argument. They’ve got nothing to say for themselves. They’re just simply people who are bluffing. This is the language of General Kellogg: “We have to call Putin’s bluff. He’s just posturing. We put him under pressure and he’ll collapse and he’ll have his tail between his legs and will agree to the deal that we’re demanding, which will slowly squeeze him and imprison and weaken him over the years ahead until finally we can get rid of him and we can turn our attention to China.”
The Paradox of Russian Strength and Weakness
GLENN DIESEN: These comments by Macron are interesting because on one hand, he’s referring to Putin as this beast which has to be fed. On the other hand, while warning against the great dangers of Russia, he’s also pointing out that there’s no rush for peace because Russia only took less than one percent of Ukraine.
This is a common theme where Russia is always playing two roles – either this tremendous beast preparing to consume Europe, or at the same time, just pathetically weak. I often cite the Jewish scholar Victor Klemperer, who said this was kind of the Nazi rhetoric against the Jews. Hitler was always either referring to them as pathetically weak or a threat to Western civilization altogether – both at the same time, often in the same breath.
Your conclusion is that because the West is changing, they’re looking for making Russia obedient through continuing pressure. Is this why the Russians are now under pressure to escalate?
European Desperation and Control
ALASTAIR CROOKE: No, I think the West – ultimately they are really frightened and desperate. They can see what’s in front of them. There’s certainly going to be financial stress, maybe major stress, and they’re in front of their electorates, so they have to build up the threat.
How do you keep the European Union together? Well, you say “Russia, Russia, Russia, war, war.” On one hand, the German chancellor says we can’t afford to have a welfare system anymore – it’s beyond our means, it’s too expensive for us. At the same time, he says we’re going to look at compulsory military service. To start with it’ll be voluntary, but if not enough people come, then we’ll make it compulsory.
These are the images evoking the imagery of the 1930s and the wartime period – evoking the need for conscription and “we’re all in this together against a common enemy.” That was Hitler’s approach. All leaders like Churchill played on this.
I think the European elites are totally out of touch with their own electorates, who just despise them, and each knows that the other feels about it. So they are trying to both double down on control but also try and find new means to raise new money. It used to be the green process, net zero – “We’re going to have to invest, borrow money, put it into the green transition.” Now we have to put money into the military system. We’ve got to borrow money to put it into the military system. And who knows, that might actually trigger an upturn in the whole economy and save us from what is likely to happen – a big downturn in the European economy.
Russian Patience Wearing Thin
GLENN DIESEN: Well, thank you for your insights on this. It’s interesting – I noticed that the Russian strikes are now close to the British consulate and the European mission in Kiev as well. I think it was misrepresented that they were targeting them, but nonetheless, the willingness to strike nearby them – I don’t know, it seems that the Russians might be losing some of their patience, which is why I was worried about all of these things.
You just got back from Russia recently. I’m not sure if you have that impression as well – that they’re reaching a bit of the end of the line in terms of patience.
Russian Public Sentiment and Growing Anger
ALASTAIR CROOKE: No, I think they’re getting angry. I mean, Russian people, I think they’re getting angry. Russians were getting angry about it. They’re really angry about the passionists of Europe, that conductors of orchestras cannot come to Europe.
They’re very angry that many of them have lost properties in Europe. Many Russians have properties and they had properties in Italy, but if you can’t pay the rent, if you can’t pay the taxes, they’re seized by the police, an auction door. And when the Europeans turn on them and they say, “Well, all of these sanctions and you deserve it” is what they say to the Russians. And they’re angry about that.
We say, “Well, we can be wooed back at your terms.” And I think there’s been a lot of pressure on Putin to be a little bit harsher. The Europeans and Americans always like to go just push a little further, push a little further, push a little further. And so we’re seeing a little bit of pushback.
Recent Incidents and Strategic Implications
I think actually what happened with those, where there was damage to those two buildings in Kiev, British Council and other was because actually it was an attack on another target, which was an SBU data headquarters, which was put in the urban area. And this was just collateral damage from a major explosion that took place. I mean, they don’t seem to be that badly damaged. It certainly wasn’t direct strikes from the videos or photographs that I’ve seen.
So I think there is a great anger and a great sense. You’ve got to translate this into something more profound too for the Russians, which is we have spent blood getting to this point. We put a lot of our own soldiers’ blood into this place. If we end up with a sort of Minsk 3, a deal that is not a deal with a sort of phony ceasefires and all of that that they had in the former Minsk agreement. They said all it means is this investment in blood is not probably being used and we will have to pay a second instrument of blood in three or four years time after the west has re-armed and retrained the what’s left of Ukraine.
The Long-term Strategic Game
Whatever remains of Ukraine is to be a platform to weakness to be a long term – it’s like Afghanistan. I was in Afghanistan during that period. I mean the aim was just to sort of bleed Russian political will. And now I think the determination of Europe is why they won’t continue but the determination is to go back to that Brzezinski formula that he said affected by the theory of the rim land and the heartland.
“Russia with Ukraine becomes a major heartland power. Russia without Ukraine just becomes a region” and that’s what was put in his chessboard book. And we can’t allow Ukraine to be within the Russian sphere of interest. I wasn’t talking about precise territories or borderland but Ukraine useful. Ukraine mustn’t be allowed to go into the sphere of inference. That is a strategic necessity.
GLENN DIESEN: Well, thanks again and yeah I’m hoping you’re wrong about escalation but I think you’re pretty much spot on there so. Well thanks again.
ALASTAIR CROOKE: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me to talk to your audience.
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