The Duran Podcast - Failure of British Policy in Russia - Ian Proud, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

Failure of British Policy in Russia - Ian Proud, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Welcome, everyone. My name is Glenn Dyson, and I'm joined today by Alexander Mercuris and Ian Proud. So, Ian Proud is a, well, I was a member of the British Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2003. He also served at the British Embassy in Moscow between those important years between 2014 and 19, and recently published his memoirs about, in his words, how British diplomacy in Russia failed. during those years. So welcome to the both of you. Thanks for inviting me. Great pleasure and delighted to have you in and I was saying that just before we started the programme that I found your book a misfit in Moscow, absolutely compelling read and it kept me up long into the night. It was an absolute page turner and extremely interesting and

very interesting to see what was going on in the embassy in Moscow and in the foreign office during this critical period when we basically took a disastrous turn. And the thought that I had about this, the immediate sense I got from it is that you're working very hard in Moscow. And I think it's fair to say you weren't entirely alone in trying to work hard in Moscow. there were some people in Moscow who were also trying to do things to build some kind of a dialogue with the Russians, perhaps even a relationship with the Russians. And what was really holding things back more than anything else, this is the sense I got, is a complete lack of interest in London, occasional flashes, perhaps Boris Johnson interested sometimes,

but overall a sense that London just wasn't engaged in the way that it should have been. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily say it's a lack of interest. I think there's been a shift in the UK over the past kind of two decades where ministers and their advisors and Whitehall didn't have all the answers. And certainly when Frithman became Foreign Secretary, he had very clearly hawkish view on Russia. And from that point on, advice and analysis from the embassy in Moscow just wasn't welcomed if it wasn't saying what he wanted to hear.

So there was interest, but there wasn't any interest in what the embassy had to say. I think that's a trend that has very much continued and continues to the day where I sort of liken the MC as a Potemkin house in Moscow now with a cardboard cutout ambassador that is there. He's keeping the embassy alive, keeping the basic trappings of diplomacy going, but the ability to influence decision makers, and particularly ministers in London,

has disappeared, and in fact, it disappeared in 2014 when things really started to get quite difficult in the relationship with Russia. And the other thing that came across to me, and it was something by the way that I sensed at the time, though it went back a little earlier than I realised. I mean, I always felt that when the Germans and the French, together with the Russians, basically came up with Minsk too, that this was a watershed because we had this agreement

about a war in Europe, a major crisis in Europe, and Britain was not a player. We were completely frozen out. And I said at the time, I remember saying this is going to cause trouble. and that the British were for the first time, I think since the 17th century, essentially excluded from major European diplomacy, and this was going to make problems. Well, I learned two things in your book.

Firstly, the problems actually started earlier than Minsk, too. They started the previous year with a Normandy Four meeting. And secondly, that that was absolutely the awareness in London. and that it caused great bitterness and revulsion, and was one of the things, I'm perhaps going a bit far now in saying this, but it was one of the things that made us into spoilers in the whole negotiation process in Ukraine.

Am I going too far on the last point? I don't think you are, actually. I think politics in the UK at that time was very distracted. Cameron was very distracted by a number of things. You know, he'd had this kind of successful kind of, pitch on Scottish independence that had gone well and you know

he wanted to have a punch up with the Europeans over who should be the European Commission President Yonk or Juncker you know and there's no kind of real support in Europe for that I mean that that was clearly going to happen but he invested so much political capital in trying to kind of you know leverage

kind of Yonka out from that key in Europe that he was completely distracted when things were really starting to heat up in terms of the the negotiation process on what's happening in Ukraine. And so when Alon came up with the idea of the Normandy meeting, he was totally distracted by other things. And so that feeling of isolation was self-imposed.

I think we could have positioned ourselves within that format at the time, but we didn't. And that was a choice, not strategic choice, a tactical choice, and one driven by other events. And I think you're right in saying that what that left the UK do was grasping for a role in the Ukraine crisis. You know, we didn't really have a role in negotiating process because we're out of the normandy format. We needed to find another role. Our main role became flag bearer for sanctions and very much kind of getting much more closely aligned with the Americans in terms of their stance on Ukraine with much less say over what they were doing, in fact.

did anybody suggest an alternative that perhaps the way to get into the normal default process was to actually talk to the Russian? Well, Cameron tried after the fact. In one of my footnotes, I noticed that there's that time at the Ascom, I think it was meeting in Milan or in Italy somewhere where a lot of Merkel, Poloshenka and Putin

were going to meet. And Cameron was very much keen to get in on that meeting. And so they had this kind of rather awkward breakfast, if you recall with Renzi, Mateo Renzi at the time. But then Cameron was quickly shut to one side, and the Normandy Ford went off to a different room to have the actual substantive meeting about the process itself. So, you know, Cameron did want to get back into that,

but I think the door was very firmly shut. And it wasn't just shut on the Russian side. It was very much shut, I think, on the French and German side, because they thought, well, you know, we're believed on this now, and you, the UK, increasingly distracted bike and the bumblings around, so the possible referenda and so on, European membership. You know, there's no place for you now here. And this third leads, sorry, go on.

Sorry, you first. Glenn, I've been talking a lot. Go ahead, Glenn. Oh, no, I just want to ask, because you mentioned the door was, for the British, was more, less shut towards the Europeans and the Russians. So Britain then leaning more, again, towards the United States. I was just wondering, during those years, especially when you're in Moscow, what what was the main influence of the United States on British policies?

Because I guess one of the big things that really stood out in Ukraine after 2014, which hasn't been really reported quite well, is how the extent of American influence over the Ukrainian government, which is covered by many leading Ukrainians, such as general prosecutor Viktor Shokin. But I was wondering what part of the main influence of the Americans over British policy or were they already aligned? So I'd say three things, probably.

The first would be sanctions policy, where, you know, within the EU kind of framework, sanctions is a consensual thing. You know, you agree sanctions, but there's lots of lobbying that goes on in Brussels and in Europeans, you know, capitals around what the next trend should be, whether sanctions should be maintained or dropped. And there's actually, in the first year after sanctions were imposed, there's a lot of pressure from the southern European states in particular, countries of Italy and Spain in particular,

heavily agriculturally dependent on Russia, to kind of drop sanctions. And there's a real kind of moment in 2015 when Cyprus went to St Petersburg, we thought that the sanctions deck of cars could completely collapse. But actually the UK is really kind of firm in lobbying behind the scenes

to kind of maintain the sanction status quo, which is a fairly lowest common denominator, I have to say, status quo, but nevertheless it still involve pretty punitive sanctions against Russia. And that was very much kind of, you know, driven in part by the dialogue we're having in parallel with the Americans about, you know, where they're going on a sanction. Of course, the difference between the European and US sanctions is that when the American sanctions get imposed, they're there for life, essentially, as we see in Cuba, you know,

other countries. But in Europe, they roll over, they have to be agreed, be agreed, be agreed, and the UK put a lot of effort into ensuring that they were re-agreed and rolled over. and I think after the summer of 2015, after the Cyprus's visit, they then became set in stone. And that's one sector. Setting on energy policy, this kind of fixation on North Stream 2, a lot of pressure from the Americans who themselves, you know, on the back of Obama, making it easier for American exporters to export LNG, you know, at a time of kind of the big shale boom in the States, a lot of pressure on us to kind of push back on Russian pipeline projects, not just North Stream 2, but South. if you recall, that got next after pressure on the Bulgarians end up in Turkish stream and so on. And actually this kind of energy conditionality where, you know, pushing back on new pipeline projects but also insisting that gas continued to be shipped through Ukraine because of the very generous

transit revenues of Ukraine got $3 billion a year. Even today, Ukraine still earns revenue from transit, much smaller levels, of course, of gas from Russia into the European Union. That would be another. And the third, I say, critically, was about the kind of implementation of the Minsk II agreements and obligations

on all the parties. And let's remember that Minsk was principally about the agreement between the Ukrainian state and the separatists in the Donbass. I mean, the Russians were there. They signed it. The French and Germans, they signed it. But the agreement was really about how to kind of bring an end to that

that conflict in the Donbass and have some meaningful way to have a dialogue to kind of de-escalate there through a process of phased depollution and that sort of thing. And of course, there's never really any pressure on the Ukrainians to hold up their end of the bargain on that. I mean, I think Alon and Merkel briefly had a flap, but sort of trying to compress the Ukrainians to can hold up or in good faith push forward with their obligations under the Minsk Two agreement against a backdrop of very little kind of domestic political support in Ukraine for them to do that. But of course, with the US in particular and also with the UK, there was no insistence on Ukraine that they can have, you know, in good faith, hold up their end of the bargain and that therefore

rendered the Minsk two agreement pretty much dead in the water, you know, fairly soon after it was born for that reason. And through that means, because sanctions were critically linked to this idea of full implementation of the MISC agreements, sanctions also became set in stone against Russia. Was this deliberate, though, well, sabotaging Minsk too, if you will, or not pressure in Kiev to uphold its obligations and at the same time train and arm the Ukrainian army. So, you know, we preserve the sanctions against Russia and make, you know, Ukraine further cemented in the... Western camp, if you will. Was this like a logic behind it? Or was it just the way to... To suggest that it was deliberate? I don't think anybody really thought at that kind of strategic level to kind of come up this grand plan that it should map out that way. I think it's more about

kind of laziness and a determination for Ukraine to come out on the right side of this conflict and for us to support them for, you know, in these kind of hackneyed phrases these days for as long as it takes, you know, in their kind of difficult relationship with Russia. So I don't think, I think very little throughout this whole kind of decade has been deliberate or strategic. I think we've kind of lazily wandered into these two sets of relationships. One, how we engage with the Ukrainian state, where, you know, very permissive, not wanting to pressure them to do things that they don't want to do, and very punitive against Russia, where we see sanctions in the absence of our willingness to actually fight a war in Ukraine. We've seen sanctions as a main kind of tool to kind of affect Russian behavior,

and that clearly hasn't worked. Can I ask why? Why didn't the sanctions work? Because this, I guess, have been one of the main surprises. Not just the sanctions after 2022, but preceding those years as well. So there are a number of reasons why sanctions haven't worked. But first, certainly, you know,

the US sanctions, the US didn't really have as deeper in economic relationship with Russia that the EU had with Russia. So, you know, American sanctions against Russia would never really, in economic terms, have that much of an impact. But the European sanctions, because of the vacant and consensual nature in which they were negotiated, you know, they end up as like, or at least at the start back in 2014, a fairly lowest common denominator of things that all of the European member states could agree

with caravats here and there for, you know, Slovenian banks and, you know, French helicopter, kind of, that was the carvite, the French eventually caved on sort of Renegging on that contract with the Russians, you know, the kind of the carrier deal and that sort of thing. Lots of kind of carve out. You know, we wouldn't do Swift, and believely, Swift was one of the things on the table at the time, but that was seen as too much as a nuclear option. So the lowest common denominator of EU sanctions, you know, weakens their impact. You know, that would be the first thing.

The second thing would be that they're always kind of bigger economic shocks, exogenous economic shocks coming along anyway. So there were two all price collapses during the year that I was in Russia at the end of 2014 at the start of 2016. You know, these shocks were far bigger, you know, on the Russian economy than the impact of the sanctions themselves. And, you know, estimates vary, but, you know, I'll be talking to the IMF and the World Bank and other people, economists on the Russian side as well. You know, at best, sanctions accounted for 10 to 30 percent of the impact on the Russian economy from, you know, compared to the impact of the oil price shocks themselves. That's one thing. Then you fast forward to kind of COVID before this all kicks off and that's even worse still. So by that time, the sanctions impact

is fairly low compared to the impact of these other bigger economic shocks that are happening on Russia. And the third, I think critically is that Russia actually has a very kind of smart and very competent macroeconomic sort of policy-making machine, despite the, you know, the influence of the Ciliwiki and other bits of how the country is run, how the kind of the heights of the economy of run in terms of the central banking policy, kind of fiscal policy and so on has been very, very stable and very kind of well managed by Elvila, Elvou and Abun and O, and Anton Siluano, you know, the finance minister. And so they've had that kind of consistency in economic decision-making throughout that time,

which has allowed them to kind of manage the economic shocks of, you know, the sanctions, fairly small effect, all price collapses, COVID, much bigger, much bigger effects. which has led to a gradual, when people talk about the militarisation of the Russian economy today. Actually, the Russian economy structurally has been adapting really since 2015, and that's largely down to kind of handling of the, you know, Navu, and Scylis and in particular. So, you know, when we get to, you know, war starting in February 2022, you know, quite stringent sort of additional sanctions were imposed, but you're very quickly hitting sort of diminishing marginal returns in terms of their economic impact. And I think the biggest reason why sanctions haven't

worked, and I'll stop after this to let you guys do some talking, is that actually that, you know, that they've been seen as essentially a punitive measure. They've not been seen as something that can, you know, facilitate change in any way, particularly their conditionality, they're linked to the Minsk to agree with, you know, no reduction of sanctions. And it's the full sort of implementation on the Minsk, which was obviously, you know, patiently impossible. to achieve and that has built resentment so much against sanctions that Putin will do anything possible not to comply and you've seen this kind of quite structural pivot towards you know Asia towards India as well particularly on the back of what's happened in war so it you know they're not

affecting change they're not having sufficient economic economic impact and they're not actually facilitating any resolution of the fundamental reason that they exist or they put in place which is a conflict in Ukraine, where, you know, our permissive attitude towards the Ukrainian government has meant that, you know, there's no incentive for them to comply on their side. If I can just cover it, because this is exactly where you were at the center of it, because you were there at the embassy, and you were at the economics section, and you were basically the person who was discussing sanctions,

and you were trying to get London, so I can, I feel. You're trying to get London to understand this. And by the way, you're the only person, one of the only person I've seen in Britain who seems to have understood the ruble issue properly that, you know, the fall of the ruble when oil prices fall is not a sign of the collapse. It is a sign of the economy adjusting. And this is something that I've also tried to explain to many people over the last 10 years or so. And I've always failed, by the way. Every time the ruble falls a few points, this is a sign of collapse. It's not, but it seems you're having the same problem with the people you were reporting back to in London. They didn't seem to understand that the sanctions were not achieving whatever objective they were supposed to be achieving, and that the Russian economy was gradually shifting in a way that would make them less effective.

again, am I right in this? That just isn't essentially. That's pretty right. In fact, Russia explicitly moved to a weak renewable policy. So when after war started and the rule absolutely collapsed, Russia made enormous profits from its exports of minimal resources in that first period. They made a huge kind of counter-hand surface, you know, far more exports than imports. And so, yeah, you know, this kind of talks to a basic,

two things really, a basic lack of economic literacy in the foreign office itself in the UK. People are, if you work in there's a British diplomat, you're interested in sexy politics. Politics is a thing that floats people, suppose, because you can waffle on all day about politics and, you know, busk to your heart's content and you'll have somebody who's willing to, kind of listen to you. You know, when you talk about economics, you need to actually be thinking about hard data and analysis and trends and shifts, you know, and that sort of thing. and there's much less appetite for that firstly because it's not political, it's not as fun as politics. And people just don't have the training to engage with that anyway.

I mean, you know, diplomats don't generally join as a congress. They join because they want to be a diplomat, right? And that's one thing. And secondly, ministers are just not interested. You know, sanctions are seen as an end in themselves, you know, a decade down the track now, you know, where Liz Truss, you know, was foreign secretary. she just wanted to sanction anybody. She wasn't really interested in, you know, the impact of the sanctions. Her main priority was that the UK and therefore she be seen as the most active in adding new sanctions on Russia than anybody else in the European and also, you know, the US kind of grouping.

I mean, that was that was her main kind of concern. But there were slight chinks in that because, you know, what's interesting about the sanctions introduced after war started was. the people in the UK who weren't sanctioned. You know, so the choices about who got sanctioned was very, very political. So, you know, at Yelena Bertudina, you know, the former mayor of Moscow, you know, formerly voted the most, formerly considered the most corrupt woman in Russia. She's never been sanctioned. Mikhail Kornkovic has never been sanctioned.

And they haven't been sanctioned, well, in her case, because of her links to, you know, Sally Kahn's charity in the past and Hunter Biden and Mikhail Kovsky, he says what ministers want to hear. You know, so the whole reason for people being sanctioned then then become very, very confused too and very kind of politically loaded, who we do, you know, and who we don't sanction. Yevraz, you know, the big Russian conglomer, the reason it took so long, it took over a month the sanctioned him up to war started was because people worrying about job losses in the US and Canada.

You know, Yavraz had holdings there and, you know, policymakers in London were worried about, well, what are people in Washington going to think if we sanctioned Yevarez? You know, because that would mean some U.S. job losses. And it becomes very, very political at that stage. But, you know, people have long since forgotten to think about the economic consequences and sanctions themselves and how this would worsen quite significantly relations with Russia. People often forget. Sorry.

Well, people often forget that sanctions, of course. They're supposed to have a, you know, economic pressure for political, to change. Yeah, policies. But this is not exclusive to Britain, though, this idea that sanctions becomes on its own, that instead of trying to force policies shift, it's merely creating economic pain becomes an objective in itself. I think one of the things that made this even more disastrous was that after the toppling of Yanukovych, with the backing of the West in 2014, the Russian made a very determined effort to shift their economy from this goal of, you know, integrating with greater Europe and instead went east to this greater Eurasia. So, this huge...

Successfully so, I would say. Yeah, very much so. But then the sanctions, a key problem of sanctions is often, as, you know, history taught us, if you push them too hard, the country is sanctioned merely learns to live without the belliger. And at this point in time in history, when you have this huge east opening up, which is strong and dynamic, that it wasn't calculated how much pain, how huge changes they also had by having Russia effectively move its economy from being Western-centric to pursuing this greater Eurasia. I was just, were there debates within our discussions within the British diplomatic service about the possible negative consequences?

In other words, to what extent this would undermine Britain and the West's own economic interests and security? Yeah, not in any substantive way. I'd say, I still think people really care that much, so that's far too much detail. I mean, you know, people worried about the kind of Russia-Sino kind of tilt. I think more because of what that means in the South China City, I think, you know, more than economically, I would argue. But also, actually, again, what people don't understand is that kind of Russia's can tilt to the east is also partly political in terms of the growth of the BRICS grouping.

You know, bear in mind that Putin has said this themselves, that, you know, BRICS is partly about balancing the tensions between Russia-India and China. It isn't just about kind of Russia-China. It's about sort of Russia-China. about sort of Russia, Indian and Russia, China as well. I don't think really people were thinking about that. Of course, now we see Bricks Plus, where Bricks is now, you know, now Russia's out of the G8, Bricks is very much seen as a vehicle to kind of generate political discussion about,

kind of issues in the global South. I think the Bricks grouping is really kind of taking the lead in terms of that whole agenda, this kind of what some people call this kind of shift to the multipolar world idea. That's very much, I would argue. been driven in a significant way by the emergence of or the greater importance of Brooks' grouping on the back of what happened in Ukraine in 2014. Does anybody ever discuss in Britain the opportunities that Russia might have presented? Because this is the other thing that I never see anywhere in your book that you talk about

the lack of strategic thinking, the lack of the sense of drift, because it does seem to be is that more than anything else, there is a kind of drift. Philip Hammond, a foreign secretary that you are particularly critical of. You'd have expected that he would understand something about economics. After he ceased to be foreign secretary, he became chancellor, after all. And he was an accountant, did I understand? He'd have thought he would understand some of these things and about how markets work, exchange rates work.

He doesn't seem to have been really interested. He doesn't seem to have liked. That's my impression. He didn't like the Russian. very much. Am I wrong here? Theresa made the same. She doesn't seem to have really like the Russians, wanted to engage with them. And yet you have this huge country, enormous resources, lacking at that time investment capital, which is what we are in Britain particularly good at. And we're dependent on, actually. And we're dependent on. I mean, this was a huge opportunity,

I would have thought. And we never built it. And you talk. And you talk. much in your book about, you know, we could have worked to build economic relationships, and in time that might have also led to a political, a successful political relationship as well. I got the sense throughout the book that just people in London weren't paying the kind of attention that they should and weren't thinking about it properly. Yeah, I think Phnomainan made a better chancellor that he made it for the secretary, but it's just a personal view of mine. And he was very, very hawkish on Russia.

You absolutely why there's a hardball determination just not to engage at a political level with Sergey Labrerov. And, you know, it's different mass. And the statespeople, you know, Ford's secretary is our biggest statesperson, I suppose, short of, you know, the monarch and the prime minister. You know, it's not about liking people. it's about how to craft a relationship with them. It doesn't really matter if you like or don't like the person you're dealing with. The challenge is how can you build a relationship with that,

contribute with that sort of opposite number to decomplate. But also to talk about it is a mutually beneficial cooperation that can bounce off the difficulties and the tensions that exist in the relationship. And because all this was happening against the backdrop of the UK kind of stumbling towards an EU referendum. And the whole, even though the EU gets very distracted by certain internal kind of machinations

these days, the whole basis of the peace settlement in Europe after the Second World War was this gradual kind of economic integration between previously kind of warring states. You know, the kind of for freedom and so people don't like to talk about

these things, particularly in the UK. But that commerce, as a vehicle towards peace, was vital in a way that it could have been really helpful with Russia as well. But I think, you know, there are two types of kind of people with a view on, you know, the UK's relationship with Russia. They're those who think that politics should come first. You know, we should only engage politically with the country.

We should only engage in the economy with the country when politically, you know, we find some sort of common understanding with them. And clearly there was none. And therefore, you know, why should we engage economically with the country that we disagree with? so deeply as you do with Russia. And those like me who see kind of economics and commerce as a vehicle towards greater kind of peace and mutual understanding. And that's the view that's become, you know, increasingly unpopular,

particularly in the European family now as they intend on having some sort of full-blown war with Russia at seems. But Hammond, as a statesperson, was very much on the politics first. You know, we don't agree with Russian action. Therefore, you know, there's no benefit to talk about some things. economic future, you know, with Russia as a boot towards peace. And I think that's one of the big challenges we face we face there. I wanted to follow up on something, yeah, Alexander mentioned. But actually, you discussed earlier as well, you mentioned there was no clear strategy. I think

you called foreign policy being lazy, or at least being on autopilot. And I was just curious, because I want to, yeah, quote a great British, which is John Stuart Mill. He, I found this quote from from 1836 when he wrote about the British military military budget being out of control. And he wrote that, quote, ministers are smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia. And two years later in 1838, the Chronicle, who called for a more rational approach, in which it wrote, let Russia be washed. And when detected in hostility towards us, let us retaliate.

But let not a great nation make itself ridiculous. by an insane Russophobia. So I guess with Russophobia, referring to irrational fear. I'm not saying that there's no competing interests between the British and the Russians, or there's no reason to criticize Russia, or no reason to fear Russia. But over the past 200 years,

there's often been this argument that there's often been, the competition hasn't only been influenced by rationality, but there's also been some instinctive or irrational compliance. Do you, I guess, do you see any of this today, of course? It's 200 years ago. There's certainly a high level of mutual distrust in which has only gotten worse and is now in just a complete disastrous state between our two countries because it works both ways, you know, relationships are back on two parties after all.

But I think, you know, we've made ourselves most ridiculous by sitting in this kind of policy, no man's land between wanting war and wanting peace. and I've said this kind of maybe alluded to a bit in the book that you know we haven't wanted to go to war with Russia in Ukraine I'm happy to kind of sponsor the proxy war

in Ukraine but we don't actually want an all our war you know despite what sort of policy makers in sort of Paris may say at the moment but neither have we wanted to live in peace with Russia you know we haven't really wanted to have kind of a better

relationship not necessarily a happy relationship not necessarily a loving relationship, but a relationship in which we can live in peace without trying to kind of impact Russia's internal political settlement and all these kind of things that we get easily distracted by. And in the middle of that, you've got Ukraine that is suffering from this. And I think right from the start,

we needed to make that fairly binding, I have to say, because I think this is something that the Russians understand quite well. Do we want a peaceful relationship, a peaceful way out of this conflict, which frankly we've helped to kind of create through what happened in February 2014 or do you want to go to war with Russia and have an end to it and then we'll all be damned and probably newt in the process

and I think it's that inability to kind of focus on what we want in Ukraine and what we want in terms of our relationship with Russia which is going to crippled us and made us ridiculous. I just have to turn on that to the issue of the Foreign Office and the state of the Foreign. in office. And there were some things that, frankly, I found very disturbing. I found it astonishing,

for example, that at our embassy in Moscow, there were so few people with the highest qualifications in Russian. Now, I assumed that anybody who got posted to the embassy in Moscow would have at least a degree at level Russian, but it turns out not. We apparently have an increasingly thin training and preparation of diplomats that we sent to these places, especially to Russia

where you would definitely need to have pretty strong diplomats. I would have thought. As far as I can understand, this isn't just Russia, this is a general problem across the entire foreign office system that we are giving

far less emphasis to diplomacy than we're, ought to be, which is very strange at a time when we've gone from being a superpower, which is what we were, you know, 60, 70, 100 years ago to becoming a middle ranking, still important state. A country like that would need diplomacy even more, one would have thought, than a great power used to do. But it is going in the wrong direction. And again, any explanation for this? And why is this happening?

Is it because ministers, the political system, aren't interested in this? You talk about the very large number, the incredibly high turnover of ministers that you had to cope with. I think there are two reasons for that. Firstly, the ministers just don't care about diplomacy, which is essentially about kind of getting out and understanding the country that you're in so that you can give good advice, you know, through diplomatic and communications to your ministers. I mean, that's the base of it. We don't do it.

Just for the fun of it. You know, you learn Russians so that you can get out into the country, meet ordinary Russian people, meet decision makers in Russia, and get a sense of what they think about trends in UK-Russia relations, about sanctions, about, you know, where the country's headed, until political situation, that sort of thing. It gives you that entry point to kind of build relationships and build understanding so that we can advise ministers kind of well.

When ministers already have their mindset set on what the policy should be, then the need for people like me who could have invested in their diplomatic training and spend the time outside of the embassy buildings of meeting Russian people, kind of falls away. So there's that, you know, quite an important sort of strategic reason, why. And secondly, the Foreign Office just doesn't really do well enough, but holding officers to account and making sure it sends people out with the right skills. You know, we've had so many changes of, William Hay. was quite good on this.

And then we got Philip Hammond and, you know, my views on my views on him. You know, Dominic Wild came in, he wanted to turn the Foreign Office into a version of Boston consulting bootwill, kind of trade in Excel spreadsheets and that sort of thing, very little focus. Jeremy Hunt was quite good on languages, but we saw him as a kind of a journey man because Theresa May's government was going through a long and slow kind of death at the time. So he wanted to double language use, but then, you know, the organisation knew that he'd be going anyway and didn't do anything on that. The organisation has become lazy in ensuring that, you know, officers have the skills that they need, particularly language skills. And that situation is

going back, we've just seen today information from the foreign officer saying that, you know, of all the kind of people that we train in foreign languages every year, over 30%, just never hit, over 30%, just never hit their qualifications in language. And this is all languages, you know, around the world. And I'm quite sure that for Russian, it's much lower than that, actually, the number of people who passed. And that's like several million pounds a year in officers' training, but it just goes completely out of the window. So there's laziness on the foreign officer's part that it's never really kind of grip this issue. I find an interesting, this decline of diplomacy, because it seems to be the whole diplomatic

culture appears to have changed. We seem to treat often diplomacy as, you know, bestowing legitimacy on someone. So, like, this is not only just in 2014. We saw the same back in 2008 when the Russians have the conflict with Georgia. As soon as there's actually conflict and we need diplomacy the most, we see a complete cutoff. And this is also what we saw from, it was Philip Hammond, when he just decided to cut all high-level dialogue with Russia in 2000. at the very point when you need the diplomacy the most.

How do you see this as a diplomat? Is this how we change diplomacy, which used to be about harmonizing interest, in managing, competing interest, and until, effective being some kind of reward system for working with people we all already agree with? Because there's this often sense that diplomats don't do diplomacy anymore, which is a strange development. Yeah, and it's quite a well-former sense, I have to say. In fact, I'll say that it's very accurate portrayal of the way things are these days. And, you know, partly it's been, I mean, in the past, there's always kind of a healthy tension between the embassies and London. You know, policymakers in London will pull the hair out that the embassy wants to take a slightly kind of more nuanced line on this or that country about this or that kind of issue.

But that was healthy because, you know, good advice of what was being said. up and, you know, ministers were receptive to kind of differences of thought and idea as long as it's rooted in, kind of evidence, you know, from the ground. So you always had the kind of healthy attention. That's gone away. I think these days, if you're a senior sub-dipramat and you're saying something that the minister doesn't want to hear, then it can be very career-limiting. And because, you know, diplomats by the nature, a very consensual sort of middle ground type of type of folk and if you're, say, take a really good example, if you're the ambassador in Spain, you know, and you're taking a view on sort of issues around sort of EU, you know, policy that's

different from what the Foreign Secretary, you know, is taking, it's Dominic Marb at the time, is in all the newspapers, you can look it up, then, you know, you could be called out, you could, you could have Jake Kovicemogg tweeting you're a complete Pratt or whatever words he used and, you know, no senior diplomats don't want to take that risk and therefore or there's that kind of, you know, a big elastic band, pulling them towards saying what the ministers want to hear. There are some, actually in some ways rather sad moments

because you talk about the embassy being essentially a Potemkin embassy, and it becomes more so at this time. I mean, the first ambassador you had seems to have been a real diplomat who had, I mean, he has his eccentricities, I suppose, but he seems to have been somebody who was, you know, did diplomacy. But over time, One sense is that the embassy essentially turns in on itself and becomes less active and comes under more and more pressure with expulsions and other things. Then you go to St. Petersburg and you find the consulate there doing lots of things that the embassy in Moscow isn't doing.

And then you go to the embassy in Beijing and you find the embassy there is also doing lots of things that the Moscow embassy isn't. doing. And is there something specific about the Moscow embassy, the Moscow posting, that it just isn't getting the energy or hasn't had the energy that it needed to have in order to function properly? Because there's one particular point in your book where it seems, there's only, I mean, perhaps you won't like what I'm going to say, but there seem to be only two people who are actually doing things. One is yourself and the other is a person who actually does speak Russian and learns to figure skate and discovers that that's a way of making friends. So, I mean, is there something about the kind of people who get posted to Moscow that

gradually is eroding the embassy away? I think there are two things on that. I mean, you know, what is fear? you know, before you got a posting to Moscow, you know, you have all these briefings where people tell you about honey traps and all the kind of devilish things that may happen to you when you get there. And so people arrive in a kind of state of fear that all these awful things, you know, people are going to poo in your toilets when you're out to work all day and that sort of thing. So people live in this kind of creation of a Jean-La Carre novel where it's also desperately kind of worrying. the only difference being that they don't want to go out and engage in that context. And of course, the reality is different. I mean, yeah, harassment exists, but it never limited me in any way.

I didn't find me. That's a weird and wonderful things happen to me. But for a lot of people, it just forces them to stay in the building. Of course, that's a victory for Russia too, right? If they're limiting our ability to act, then that's a victory for them too. So there's a, you know, fear is a big part of that. And I never found that in the embassy in Beijing, it's fascinating. And that's the same sort of high threat type of place,

equally as high threat at a place, you know, as a British diplomat as Moscow. And yet people were just going out and enjoying life, me doing the work, difficult work at times, but still having a fairly normal life outside of being inside of the chancery, kind of skier walls of the chancery and so on. That felt really different. And I never really understood why, but I thought it was kind of fear we kind of whip up this eye,

idea this really high-frette place, and it's not that much, frankly, I have to say. I mean, there are threats, but you can imagine risks, and so on. Beijing was never like that. That's what. The second is like a culture. As we've disinvested in skills, language skills, but also diplomatic skills, everybody wants to be doing policy, whatever that means. Everybody wants to be talking to London mothership about the latest thing they've kind of put

through Google translate from a, you know, a Russian BBC monitoring report. I mean, they don't really want to be. Young officers, you know, with a lack of fundamental training and diplomacy, they want to be talking to the big cheeses in London about policy, even though, even if

we don't have a policy, they'll want to be talking to London about policy. They don't want to be out and about in, you know, out in the Yills somewhere, down in Rostov and Don, talking to all many people, because that will take them away from having FaceTime, the seniors in London. And so that's a massive, massive cultural thing that is really,

really hard-ship. You know, that was the only kind of progressively getting worse in the time that I was in Moscow, it seems to be. That reminds me, I mean, I mean, there's an extraordinary scene at the beginning of the ambassador having the people from the chance to read around the table. And I have to say, it reminded me a little of some law firms I'm familiar with, where you have the partner and he's got all the associates and they're all coming. up with these bright ideas, none of which really amount of anything. And there's a huge amount of activity, but nobody's actually doing anything real. And of course, going out and meeting people and not just, you know, just ordinary people, because you met quite a lot of very interesting people

when you were in Moscow. And you found that you could establish quite good relationships with them. even people like Alex, like Costit, the head of VTB, for example, who I know somebody who worked for costing, he disclosed to me. What an interesting, complicated man, costing can be. But you can actually, you do actually go and meet people like that. And that gives you a sense of the country beyond this, the person in the Kremlin, Putin, who has become almost the metonym for the whole country. And this is another problem that, you know, we don't in Britain seem to understand that there are more people in Russia and more decision makers in Russia than just one. That one may be very important, but he's only one human being and there's only 24 hours in the day. He cannot do everything, a point you make in your book.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think what's interesting about people that costing in particular, but others too. If you see them in public, if you go to some economic form up in St. Petersburg or somewhere else, he'd be red in the face, steam coming out of his ears,

smashing his fist on the table, calling out Western lackeys, trying to kind of encircle, all these things. If you're meeting face-to-face, he's much more nuanced than that, and he's much more kind of realistic about need actually,

he's not at all anglophone, quite the opposite. I mean, he speaks excellent English. He sort of had a posting to the social your embassy sort of, you know, back in the day. You know, I always kind of sense to he wanted to kind of find a way, you know, that didn't diminish Russian anyway, but a mutually beneficial way in which we could kind of have a better relationship than we had, or than we have, which is a terrible relationship.

And so you always get the kind of, I think what British media see when they see the Russian state is the kind of hard, read in the face theme coming out of the ears, you know, smashing a fist into the table image, which just kind of work. in a Russian domestic political context where kind of playing to the domestic galleries, I think, kind of works quite well. If you actually engage people one to one, I always found that you get a much more nuanced, you know, perspective, people much more willing to talk as equals, you know, because they basically think that we, Russian people basically think we look down at them, but they want to have a

conversation as equals, but how we can together, in a final way, navigate a way, and we can, out of difficult situations. And that kind of contrasts between the very public, hard at times, hard, a lot of the time these days face. What we see in private, it was fascinating to me. And actually proved to me that, you know, that dialogue can actually take you a long way, if you're willing to kind of listen to their side,

if you're going to get your points across about things that, you know, matter to you as well. A lot of, you know, we actually used to work in Moscow at the same time. I was there at the higher school of economics. or when you were at the embassy. But the Russians I spoke to, they always mentioned that they felt Western diplomats were often not just British,

but Western overall, were somewhat duplicate because whenever they spoke to them, they laid forward this ideas that, you know, we can work on A and B, but then as soon as they went back to Brussels or wherever then, they would suddenly frame everything in a very different light.

Do you see this diplomatic, is there anything to this diplomatic language, or have you had any experience with it? The Russian feeling that we're duplicitous. Well, yes, I mean. Or they might be as well, of course. Well, a practically daily basis, particularly towards the end of my time in Moscow. I think the narrative, you know, it's hard to kind of ship the narrative sometimes. And that may go back to the point I made earlier about actually. diplomatic advice not really can landing in capitals in the way that it used to, you know,

that tension between the embassies out in the sticks and, you know, policymakers, you know, back in capitals and I think that that's very, very much true. I mean, it's very, very hard to ship the European Commission on, which is, I have to say, largely can be trade and economics focus and sanctions focus when I was there, you know, because the sanctions line was so low as common denominator anyway to them, sort of getting a shift, you know, view on that. I know the EBRD, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development were very very concerned about, you know, their work being limited and it was kind of hard shift. I guess the challenge is actually having the political leaders who kind of take a punt on actually

sort of reaching out, you know, stepping away from, you know, the blob in all the capitals, including, you know, the Moscow block too, because they have one, you know, just the same and actually reaching out, because it's only really at the level of leaders. You can cut deals. you know, despite everything that we do is diplomats, ultimately, you know, if you want to find peach, you need people talking to Putin, you know, to get things done. That's the only way you really going to get things done. And, you know, as we've moved away from dialogue, those opportunities for that kind of statesmanship have evaporated with it to the point now

where any mention of talking to Putin gets you called out as being, you know, Russia-friendly or Putin-friendly or something like that. But, you know, that is how statesmanship works. who you have to talk to leaders, especially when you have significant areas of disagreement with them. Which is what we used to do. I mean, my memory goes back to the 1960s, and the British Foreign Minister Secretary at the time, Alec Douglas Home, developed a very good, strong, mutually respectful relationship with Andrew Grameh, who was the young Russian, the Soviet Foreign Minister of that time. And he was, by all accounts, a very difficult man.

I mean, he was not an easy man to, you know, win his respect or to face across a table. But it was done, very different people, completely different outlooks, but they did develop a relationship and a partnership. But we did diplomacy in those days. And we had a functioning embassy in Moscow, also, as far as I can understand, in those days. And today we don't. And the point is, we're not isolating the Russians. We're isolating ourselves.

Or so it seems to me the Russians have now made friends in China, in India, in all sorts of other places. We are increasingly finding it difficult to exert influence on world affairs, which is a trading nation we need to do. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, the biggest two moments of self-isolation for us, obviously, one on the Normandy when we kind of got flat-footed completely on that, but also Brexit itself, where, you know, within the European family, whatever your views on the EU membership

or not, you know, we had weight within that group. We had influence within that group over decisions. I mean, we had quite critical influence, even though I don't necessarily agree, you know, with that particular policy on sanctions. I mean, we had a lot of influence on sanctions policy. I personally think sanctions policies are failing. But, point is we had influence. But Brexit has meant that we've basically drifted towards a close relationship with the US where we have no influence. You know, we're just passengers, you know, in their kind of out-of-control roller coaster car, you know, on Russia. And I think that is the big difference for us. You know, we've lost and are losing our place, you know, in the world.

And particularly in the context of trends like de-dollarization, shifting investment flows, I mean, that matters to us long term, maybe not short term, but long term in terms of London's positions, the global financial centre and so on. All these things over the much longer horizons start to be threatened, I think, by the kind of the posture that we've taken. I'm afraid I have a hard stop, but I'm going to leave the last word to Glenn. Yeah, no, we have to wrap it up there. No, I was just going to say as someone who was raised on essentially watching yes minister. I was also a little bit of a lot of almost disappointed to read. There was not more scheming or strategy that, as you referred

to as many times as lazy. I thought that was an interesting part of the book that it might have gone only on autopilot. But yes, we can leave it there unless you have some final words, Ian. I think. I mean, I think it all comes back to this critical war piece, kind of, you know, tapping into Leo Tolstoy. You know, I think we need to take. choice either way, whether we want peace for Ukraine, in Ukraine, or whether we want war with Russia. And very obviously, I think a decade down the track with us being completely rooted and mired in that sort of conflict, which shows no sign of being resolved and will never be one, let's be honest, but by Ukraine that actually we need to find a way to reintroduced statesmanship

and search for peace. I'm going to add a final word, which is I strongly advise people to read your book in Proud's book, A Misfit in Moscow. It is a really actually rather astonishing picture of the way in which British diplomacy is conducted nowadays. And I think people in Britain really especially need to read it and understand and think very hard about what it says. So just wanted to say that. And thank you, by the way, Inve, for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you.