Trump claims Russia didn't start the war, Ukraine did.
He insists he could have negotiated a deal preventing any casualties or damage.
Transcript:
Emily Maitlis
So there we have it. It wasn't Vladimir Putin. It wasn't Russia who started the war with Ukraine. It was Ukraine which started the war with Ukraine. And that is not from Moscow. It's not from the Kremlin. It was from the White House, from President Trump himself. Talking to reporters on Tuesday was to hear a version of reality, a history which would have been completely unrecognisable to any other American president or indeed anybody grounded In any form of reality at all.
Jon Sopel
Donald Trump spoke these words at his Mar-a residence in Florida, but it sounded as though every single word had been written in Moscow because these were the Kremlin's talking points. Everyone may want peace right now. Of course, you'd be mad not to. But what hope is there of a just peace when all Donald Trump is doing is parroting Vladimir Putin? Welcome to the News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And in what has been a dizzying few days, where your head is spinning fast, what Donald Trump did yesterday was make your head spin even faster, while your jaw drop even further, if any Of that is anatomically possible because Donald Trump went way further than anything else we've ever heard and I think in fairness to him it's probably worth rather than just playing That short clip that we did in the introduction to play all of what he said where is all the money that's been given where is it going and nobody I've never seen an accounting of it. We give hundreds of billions of dollars. I have, I don't see any accounting. So I want to see peace. Look, you know why I want, because I don't want all these people killed anymore. I'm looking at people that are being killed and they're Russian and Ukrainian people, but they're people. It doesn't matter where they're from on the whole planet. And I think I have the power to end this war. And I think it's going very well. But today I heard, oh, we weren't invited. Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been Demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down. (Time 0:00:18)
This departs from decades of US foreign policy rejecting spheres of influence.
Transcript:
Emily Maitlis
Words, words fail. Words fail which isn't ideal for a podcast and it's something i've never seen from no no um look i think that it would be one thing trump could have said and i think it would have been wrong Strategically i think would have been wrong morally but i think what perhaps the world was expecting because Trump obviously signposted his views on Ukraine he said he could end it Very very quickly all of that sort of thing we knew that he was fond of Vladimir Putin from his first term so I think you know you could have imagined a world where Trump had come in and said Look this war isn't going anywhere actually Ukraine has started to lose we're pumping enormous amounts of money, enormous amounts of arms into this. It's not getting away. There's huge bloodshed. That is indisputably true. Ukraine, many Ukrainian cities are a wreck. There's nothing left of them. And he could have said, I am going to pull a plug in an effort to stop this war. That would have been one thing. I think, as I say, it would have been wrong. But he's going one step further. What he's doing is not only aligning himself with the Russian strategic position. He's aligning himself with the Russian Kremlin version of reality. Which is false, which is wrong, which simply did not exist, which no American president or no Western leader that I can think of over the last 80 years would have accepted. And he is basically suggesting that Ukraine is responsible for this war, which legitimates Putin's war in the first place. Remember what this entire war is about. Putin is trying to say and trying to argue that the reason this war started is because Russia has a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, which is theirs. And every American president since 1945 has rejected, even during the Cold War in the Soviet Union, you know, don't forget that in the Cold War, the United States, every American president Didn't even accept the Russian, the Soviet occupation, the Baltic states never recognized them. Here you have an American president basically turning to a Russian leader and saying, you know what? You're right. You do have a sphere of influence. You basically have the right to tell these countries how to live. And this war would never have started if these countries, if Ukraine had just accepted Russian domination to begin with. It is mind boggling. (Time 0:03:03)
Call for Elections
Trump's call for Ukrainian elections during an invasion is illogical.
Boris Johnson criticizes Trump's stance but suggests Europe should help him end the war.
Transcript:
Jon Sopel
It is mind boggling because we have a United Nations and we have countries that have sovereignty. And ever since the United Nations was founded, the broad idea is you can't invade another country without reason and take over their sovereignty.
Emily Maitlis
And you don't have spheres of influence. You don't have spheres of influence.
Jon Sopel
That world is gone. The world is gone with the Soviet Union and the collapse of it and post-Yalta. The world is not carved up like that. I think what's really interesting is just two or three of the other things that Donald Trump said in the course of his remarks, which was that Zelensky has only got 4% approval ratings. He ought to hold an election to see whether he still commands the support of the ukrainian people how about we have an election in russia so let me just read you something that boris johnson Has posted because i think it's really interesting where boris johnson to give him his due as prime minister was firmly behind ukraine and was one of the first to say we will give arms And we will give help to uk and was absolutely damning about the Russian invasion. And he said this. It's worth reading. When are we Europeans going to stop being scandalised about Donald Trump and start helping him to end this war? Fair enough. And then he goes on. Of course, Ukraine didn't start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor. Of course, a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945. Of course, Zelensky's ratings are not 4%. They're actually about the same as Trump's. Trump's statements are not intended to be historically accurate, but to shock Europeans into action. I was left thinking, well, what does he want to shock Europeans into action to do? Because if you are going to accept and not challenge Donald Trump's talking points, which, as we've discussed, Vladimir Putin's talking points, then you end up with a peace deal that Is very much on Russia's terms, where Russia gets exactly what it wants. (Time 0:05:27)
Putin's Endgame
Putin's goal is to install a pro-Russian government and push NATO back.
Trump's support for this would allow Russia to manipulate Ukrainian elections.
Transcript:
Jon Sopel
What does Russia want here? What's Putin's game?
Emily Maitlis
At the start of this war, what Putin actually said he wanted was not only Putin to have the government in Ukraine that he wanted of his choosing, because he said that the Ukrainian government, The Zelensky government was a Western stooge government. It was a Nazi government. You know, all this complete bollocks, all this nonsense. But he also said he wanted something else. He wanted the US and NATO to basically withdraw to its pre-Soviet Union collapse borders, i.e. Not have Poland, not have the Baltic states, because he felt NATO encroachment had gone too far. That is something now that is back on the table, effectively. When you put together everything that Pete Hex has said, the defence secretary last week, when you put together what Trump is saying now, what is Putin's endgame here? He would like, and he keeps saying, and irony once again is exhumed and its head is severed, right? Putin, and Trump is going along with this, is suggesting that any peace deal would be incumbent upon there being fresh elections in Ukraine. Well, first of all, how about we have a fresh election in Russia for a start? Irony is dead when Vladimir Putin is going along and coming along and telling other countries how to have elections. But why does he want to have an election? You can see how this is going to play out here, right? You get a quote unquote peace deal, which Trump basically gives more or less everything that Putin wants. There's a cessation in the fighting where Putin can reestablish order and he can try and reassemble his troops and his material and so on. And in the meantime, there's an election in Ukraine. And what will Putin do about that election? If he doesn't like the outcome of the election, he won't accept it. And guess what? He'll probably use that as a pretext to go back into Ukraine or he'll get the result he wants. And how will he get the result he wants? Because he will manipulate that election, which we have seen him do time after time in country after country. Look what's going on in Georgia at the moment. Now, we would expect that from Putin. We knew that this is what Putin would want. But to see it come and be aided and abetted as direct policy from the White House itself. (Time 0:07:27)
A New World Order?
Zelensky calls Trump's view a disinformation bubble.
The West faces the dilemma of how to react to Trump's pro-Russian stance.
Transcript:
Jon Sopel
John, this is a new world. Yeah, it is a new world. And it's how to react to it that I think is so interesting and such a conundrum for the West. Now, Zelensky today, and you can imagine what it must feel like after three years of having your country being assaulted, of three years where even last night, the drones are still flying In from across the Russia border, killing Ukrainian civilians. So they didn't, Trump didn't even ask for that to stop as part of this negotiation. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. That in itself. But Vladimir Zelensky has said that the US president is trapped in a disinformation bubble. And you can see why he said it. And he has justification to say it. I've got to say, I'm not sure it's going to help Vladimir Zelensky to be saying that because you don't want to make an enemy of Donald Trump any more than he is already. And I just think it's a really fascinating thing. You know, we have got Keir Starmer going to Washington next week and we have seen the UK being softly, softly and trying, understandably, not to upset any apple carts. But there comes a point, surely, where the West has to say, this isn't accurate. This isn't right. This isn't historically truthful, what you are saying. And I think, you know, there is going to come a moment where the West is going to have to say to Donald Trump, sorry, you're just spouting what Putin thinks. We can't allow this to happen.
Emily Maitlis
I suppose. I mean, what is he supposed to say? He clearly can't accept what Trump is saying. I mean, because it's nonsense. It's just not true. And obviously cast his own country as the aggressor. We're all waking up to this world. The thing that I can't get my head around, John, is that we're waking up to this world. And in this way, it really does feel like a new world order in the sense that we are seeing what feels like the emergence of not just, as I said, like a kind of US which just accepts the real Politic of the situation, doesn't like it, kind of wishes that Ukraine had won, but we're just saying, you know what, this is over, we're pulling the plug. That would be one thing. We don't like Russia, but we're pulling the plug. What we're seeing is something else. We're seeing what feels like the emergence of a US-Russia axis. Now, we have not seen anything like that for 80 years. In fact, ever, really, because even during the war, it was a marriage of convenience between the Soviet Union and the United States. And for Europe, the implications of that are staggering. They are absolutely staggering. (Time 0:09:30)
Geopolitical Play
Trump's pro-Putin stance might be part of a larger geopolitical play.
This could involve breaking the growing alliance between Russia and China.
Transcript:
Jon Sopel
My question is, is there a wider geopolitical play going on here that is more sophisticated than just Trump for whatever reasons? And it's a fascinating subject in itself about why he cleaves so closely to Vladimir Putin. Is there a bigger geopolitical play here going on that's about Russia, about China, about the US?
Emily Maitlis
Is Trump, in a very clunky and clumsy way, trying to break the relationship that has been growing since the invasion between Russia and China? Why is Trump behaving in the way that he is towards Putin? I think broadly there are four reasons, many of which we've already discussed. Part of it is genuinely part of like the radicalisation of the kind of MAGA movement. Some of them believe this, as Zelensky is talking about, this ecosystem of misinformation. They believe this stuff. Hence the stuff we saw with Vance as well, sort of lecturing European countries about sort of largely confected stuff about freedom of speech. They believe this stuff, right? That's one. Part of it is ideational, like we've talked about it on the show before, like Trump likes what Putin stands for. He likes the fact that he's an autocrat. He and the sort of MAGA movement like the fact that he's on their side in the culture war. They like the fact he's a traditionalist. They like the fact he's not a kind of liberal cosmopolitan figure. He's a conservative with a small c. Part of it's commercial. They genuinely see commercial opportunities with Russia. And they've talked about that in quite open terms about the potential to make money. And some of that will be legitimate. And you can imagine some of it will not be legitimate. And the fourth one, John, I think you're absolutely right, is there is a sort of wider, grander game, which is about something that Henry Kissinger talked about, which is, you know, Kissinger, the great American Secretary of State, very controversial one, but, you know, talked about the objective of American foreign policy, and this goes back in the 70s, must Always be to ensure that there is not an alliance between China and Russia, because even the United States, these three massive territorial players in the world, cannot necessarily Be able to withstand that or will not be able to be as strategically autonomous as it might be otherwise. And obviously, as you say, that's what's emerged in recent years, this alliance between China and Russia. And like, not only do they like Russia, but they don't perceive Russia to be a threat. It's not an economic to the United States. It's got an ailing economy. It's got an ailing country in many ways. It's got a massive population crisis. Whereas China, they see as the rising force. And we know that Trump for decades has been very, very sceptical, if not actively hostile to China.
Jon Sopel
So, yeah, I think there is a bigger geopolitical game going on as well. There is something else that I think that is also worth examining, and that is the state of American public opinion vis-a Russia, vis-a Ukraine. Now, so often on the podcast, we have talked about how Donald Trump is brilliant at reading the public mood of Americans. He got it right in the election campaign, focusing on immigration, focusing on inflation, focusing on woke issues, which sort of resonated with an awful lot of Americans. He gets it right on so many occasions where he taps into national mood. On this, insofar as Americans think about Ukraine and Russia, and probably they don't give that much of their time to considering these issues. (Time 0:13:25)
Trump's Latest Attack
Trump called Zelensky a "dictator without elections" on Truth Social.
He is actively delegitimizing Zelensky, echoing Putin's strategy.
Transcript:
Jon Sopel
Out.
Emily Maitlis
Right, we're just going to mess with the timelines a little bit here because we were just about to publish this episode. When, of course, inevitably, Donald Trump had something to say. He posted something on Truth Social. You heard in that conversation with me and john with john saying that he didn't think that trump would much like what zelensky had had to say about him even though many ways it was quite Diplomatic today well guess what he didn't trump has said trump said this think of it a modestly successful comedian vladimir zelensky talked the united states of america into spending 350 billion to go into a war that couldn't be won, never had to start, but a war that he, without the US and Trump, will never be able to settle. He then goes on to repeat a load of misinformation, untruths, lies, whatever you want to call it, and then says this. He refuses to have elections is very low in ukrainian polls and the only thing he was good at was playing biden like a fiddle he is a dictator without elections zelensky move fast or he's Not going to have a country left this war of words between zelensky and trump has got worse and intensified even in the couple of hours since we recorded that conversation this afternoon. It is very clear now that Trump is very much doing what Putin wanted. He is now part of delegitimizing Zelensky and his government for all to see. (Time 0:19:44)
Differing Views on History
Putin views the Soviet Union's collapse as a catastrophe, unlike the West.
Former Soviet countries chose democracy, rejecting Putin's view.
Transcript:
Emily Maitlis
This is The News Agents. It's funny, John, we were just talking in the break and we thought we'd pick it up again here because it's a really important point, actually, that, you know, lots of people listening To this at my age and younger, you know, I was born in 89, so the year the war fell, the Berlin war fell, grew up with no conception of the Soviet Union, apart from it being, you know, it might As well have been like the kind of Prussian Empire or something, right? It's just a sort of historical remnants. But of course, all of this really does go back. When the history of this period is written, historians will go back to those, you know, truly totemic seismic events between 1989 and 1991. From the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because ultimately, all of this is about two very competing versions of history about those events. Right. There is what we would understand in the West, which is actually we lauded. This was a great event. This was something this was a victory of the West for sure. But it was also about the rights of self-determination for these states which broke away from the Soviet Union, the Polans, the Baltic states, yes, Ukraine, and others as well. There's others like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and others. But particularly in Europe, when they turn to democracy, there's another version of it, which is the more haunted version of it, the darker version of it, which is the one that Vladimir Putin has. And never forget, people shouldn't forget that Vladimir Putin, of course, was a young KGB officer in Dresden, then East Germany, while these events were unfolding. And he has since said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. You know, not the Holocaust, not the First World War, Second World War, not even as the Russians would call it, the Great Patriotic War, where 15 million Russians died. The collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, many people would say, myself included, that the way the Soviet Union collapsed was actually a miracle because we have never seen, we have never seen an empire, because it was an Empire, an empire of that side collapsed without a single shot being fired. And that was Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the last general secretary of the Communist Party in Russia, in the Soviet Union. That was his great contribution, right? Because he could have done what China did in 1989 in Tiananmen. Which is to crush. Yeah. You see the riot starting, you see the discontent starting, you send the tanks in. He didn't do that. Let it collapse he let these countries choose their own future vladimir putin has never recovered from that he's never got over it and it's so fascinating that you kind of benchmark
Jon Sopel
It from when you were born it's the same year my son was born yeah and here i am a young parent first child born and thinking god the world's a great place yeah what what what an amazing time That my son is being born into a world where the Berlin Wall is collapsing and Rostropovich is playing his cello by the Berlin Wall and there are people streaming across. And you suddenly got this sense of liberation. Like the walls literally came down and people were free to do what they wanted to do. And they were free to vote who they wanted to vote for. And they were free to think how they wanted to think. And they were free to say what they wanted to say. And the kind of culmination of this sclerotic set of countries, the USSR, was falling to pieces. It was economically falling behind United States of America. And just as you say, there was a Communist Party General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, who suddenly decides that actually you need to embrace some of the change that is out there. And then it just falls apart. It just crumbles. The Warsaw Pact countries that had been there since the Second World War, since the separation of the powers, and suddenly all these new countries are kind of free to do what they wanted To do. It wasn't all perfect. It wasn't all kind of beautiful immediately. Back. But they don't want to go back. They do not want to go back. And the birth of all these countries that are, you know, that we now take for granted as being part of the European Union, as part of being Western democracies, as being part of our way Of life, came about in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and that gap between the east and west was suddenly eradicated. (Time 0:21:41)
Post-Soviet Russia
Maitlis recalls visiting Russia and seeing both poverty and extreme wealth.
Former Soviet countries don't want to return to Russian control.
Transcript:
Emily Maitlis
So an extraordinary night of euphoria in Berlin. Within hours of East Germany's decision to let its people go by opening the border to the west, the city erupted in a frenzy of celebration.
Jon Sopel
This is the middle of the checkpoints. The police are making no attempt to stop people. The gates have been thrown open and thousands of people are pouring over to take a look at a West. In some cases, their first look. And the elation is enormous. And I remember going to, you know, to Russia soon after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. And you still saw so much of the old Soviet state where you'd go to a supermarket the equivalent of, I don't know, Sainsbury's or Tesco's and at the checkout the woman has got an abacus And she's moving things across to literally literally to work out how much you had to pay for the few bits you'd been able to buy at some shitty supermarket where they had next to nothing On the shelves. There was no self-checkout and just across the road from the shitty supermarket with nothing in it you would have a dolce and gabbana shop for the super rich muscovites who had suddenly Got really rich and that lived cheek by jowl there was a disjunction but you could see that change was coming yeah and look there's no doubt that you know many Russians in particular felt
Emily Maitlis
Humiliated in this period. And particularly, obviously, then you have, you know, the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, who's the first president of the Russian Federation. And, you know, rightly or wrongly, lots of Russians feel that, you know, he's too close to the West. He's giving away the store that Russia is becoming, you know, people, you know, Russians in particular. And of course, the Soviet Union was a multinational state, but of course it was dominated by Russia. It was a form of a Russian empire. And, you know, this country, which had been used to thinking of itself as a great power, suddenly felt supplicant to the West. And Putin is the one who kind of rides that tide, surfs that tide over time. And he shares that resentment. He shares that antipathy. He shares that dislike. And look, you can definitely have a debate and an argument about how the West decided to handle that period and where the more could have been done to bring Russia in from the cold. And historians will linger over that. But what you cannot argue about, which is basically what too many of these kind of Kremlin shills everywhere kind of do, is suggest that somehow the West, I think, was wrong to allow these Countries in to the club. They wanted to be part of the club. If they wanted to be part of the Russia club, they could be part of the Russia club. The West wouldn't stop them. If Poland, if the Baltic states, if Ukraine had all wanted to remain within the quote unquote Russian sphere of influence, they could have done. Almost universally, they have elected literally and figuratively to choose not to do so. And what is the West supposed to do in those circumstances? Putin sees it as an encroachment. (Time 0:26:07)
Fear of Russia
The Russian invasion has solidified anti-Russian sentiment in Eastern Europe.
These countries now fear Russia and view the US as abandoning them.
Transcript:
Emily Maitlis
And, you know, Kremlin people who take the Kremlin line will see it as an encroachment up russia's borders but as we said before the point is is that nato has never invaded anyone it is A defensive alliance and it is russia's choice to internalize that as a threat to them when in fact it is not you know you talked about putin's origins and being the mayor of St Petersburg.
Jon Sopel
And I went to a G8 summit to interview Blair years ago in St Petersburg, where these sort of kind of dachers, these kind of they were almost Potemkin villages. Looked incredibly grand. And St Petersburg is the most beautiful city. It was to show the world that Russia was a great and sophisticated country that had every bit as much grandeur and beauty as the France of Versailles or whatever it happened to be, because Russia wanted to project itself to the world like that back in the day, back at the end of the 19th century. And you go to Russia today. It still wants that. But the people who've been part of it don't want it anymore. The people who were part of the former USSR are thinking, actually, we've made our choice. We've got our independence. I don't think that if there was a referendum held in any one of those countries from the Baltic states, from Slovenia, from Yugoslavia, there would be voting. Oh, yeah, let's go back.
Emily Maitlis
And actually, ironically, the one of the effects of the war has been to cement anti-Russian feeling in all those countries. In many of those places, including Ukraine itself, opinion was to some extent more polarised about the extent to which those countries should continue to try. Many of them wanted to try and maintain positive relations with Russia because they're, of course, being part of the Soviet Union and elsewhere. There was a long history, yes, of domination and antipathy, but also of kith and kin and sometimes language and family and all of that sort of things culture religion in some many cases The orthodox church so of course that was all there but what this the russian invasion has done which is perceived and internalized rightly in my opinion as an exercise in russian imperialism Actually not returning to the soviet union but actually returning to something much more like Tsarist Russia, the precursor to the Soviet Union, what it has done is to cement anti-Russian Feeling and intensify, for totally understandable reasons, fear of Russia, which has haunted many of these countries, which are historically Europe's bloodlands, trapped between, You know, sometimes German expansionism in the West, Russian expansionism in the East, terrified these countries about what their future holds. And their country, the country they look to, not only is their ideological lodestar and inspiration, but also their security guarantor, ultimately, the United States, appears now To be abandoning them. (Time 0:29:16)
