The Duran Podcast
Failure of British Policy in Russia - Ian Proud, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
Welcome everyone. My name is Glenn Diesen and I'm joined today by Alexander Merkurs and Ian Proud. Ian Proud is a member of the British Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. 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 program 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 is just 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 in the past kind of two decades where ministers and advisors in white or think they have all the answers and certainly when Finland became foreign secretary he had very clearly a hawkish view on Russia and from that point on advice and analysis from the MC 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 MC had to say I think that's the trend that has very much continued and continues to stay where I sort of like in the MC as a pretend greenhouse in Moscow now with a cardboard cut-out ambassador that is there he's keeping the MC alive keeping the basic trappings of the pregnancy going but the ability to influence decision-makers 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 word I sensed at the time that we went back a little earlier than I realized 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 were 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 from your book firstly that the problems actually started earlier than Minsk too they started the previous year with a normal default 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 perhaps going a bit far now and saying this but it was one of the things that made us into spoilers in the whole negotiation process in Ukraine and 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 it 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 Yonkor Yunka 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 Yunka out from that key kind of role in Europe that he was completely distracted when things were really starting to heat up in terms of the negotiation process on what's happening in Ukraine and so when it on came up with the idea of the Normandy meeting you know 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 this time but we didn't and that was a choice not a strategic choice a tactical choice and you know one driven by the other event so I think you're right in saying that what that left the UK doing was grasping for a role in the Ukraine crisis you know we didn't really have a role in the negotiating process because we're out of the Normandy format we needed to find another role our main role became flag bear for sanctions and then very much kind of getting much more closely lined with the Americans in terms of their stance on on Ukraine with much less say over over what they were doing in fact did anybody suggest an alternative that perhaps the way to get into the Normandy for process was to actually talk to the Russian well Cameron tried after the after the fact in one of my footnotes you'll notice that there's that time of the asking I think it was meeting Milan or initially somewhere where you know a long miracle Polish anchor and Putin were going to meet and Cameron was very much keen to get in on that meeting and so the head is kind of rather awkward breakfast if you would call with Renzi Matteo Renzi at the time but then Cameron was quickly shut to one side of the Normandy forward 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 that 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 will it will lead on this now and you the UK increasingly distracted bike and the buildings around so possible referendum and so on and European membership you know there's no place for you now here and this third leads sorry go on no sorry first glad glad you I've been talking a lot good you go ahead oh no I just want to ask because you you mentioned the door was for the British was more less shut towards European and the Russian 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 what what was the main influence of 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 has we covered by many leading Ukrainians such as General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin but I was wondering what were 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 sections policy where you know within the EU kind of framework sections conceptual thing you know you agree sections but there's lots of lobbying that goes on in Brussels and in European capitals around what the next chart should be whether sanctions should be maintained or 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 country Italy and Spain in particular heavy agriculture 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 sanctions status quo which is a fairly low those common denominators say status quo but nevertheless it still involve pretty punitive sanctions against Russia and that was very much sort of you know driven in part by the dialogue we're having in parallel with the Americans but you know we're there in the intersection because the difference between the European and US sanctions is that when the American sanctions getting posed that they're there for life essentially as the same keyword you know the country's bringing in Europe they've all over they have to be agreed agreed agreed and the UK put a little effort into ensuring that they were we agreed and rolled over and I think after the summer of 2015 off in the cypress's visit they then became set in stone that's one safety second on energy policy this kind of fixation on north stream too lots of pressure from the Americans hit themselves you know on the back of Obama making it easier for American exporters to export LNG you know at the 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 too but SaaStream if you will call that got mixed after pressure on the Bulgarians end up in Turkey Masson 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 that Ukraine got three billion dollars a year even today Ukraine still earns revenue from transit at much smaller levels of course of gas but much into into the European Union and that would be that would be another and the third I say critically was about the kind of implementation of the mister to agreements and obligations on all the parties and let's remember the mister who was principally about the agreement between you know the Ukrainian state and the septists in the Dolbas 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 in the Dolbas and have some meaningful way to have a dialogue to could de-escalate there through a process of phased de-pollution and that sort of thing and of course there's never really any pressure on the Ukrainians to hold up there into the bargain on that I mean I think Alond and Merkel briefly had a flat but sort of trying to kind of press the Ukrainians to can hold up or in good faith push forward with their obligations under the mister agreement against the backdrop of very little kind of domestic fiscal 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 there into the bargain and that therefore rendered the mister agreement pretty much then in the water you know fairly soon after it after it was born for that reason and through that means because sanctions were critically linked to full in this idea of full implementation of the mister agreements sanctions also became set instead against Russia. What's this deliberate though the well sabotaging means goofy although or not not not pressuring Kiev to uphold these 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 was this like a logic behind it or was it just the way it was just that it was deliberate? I don't think anybody really thought of 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 back on elasiness and a determination for Ukraine to come out on the right side of this conflict and for us to support them you know in these kind of hackney phrases these days as long as it takes you know in their kind of a difficult relationship with with Russia so I don't think I think very little throughout this whole kind of decade has been deliberate or strategic I think you can have 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 want don't want to do and very punitive against Russia where we see sanctions in in the absence of our willingness to actually fight a war in the Ukraine we've seen sanctions as a main kind of tool to kind of effect Russian behavior and that clearly hasn't worked it has why why why why didn't the sanctions work because this I guess have been one of their main surprises not not just the sanctions after 2022 but the preceding those years as well so there are a number of reasons why sanctions haven't worked the first certainly you know that the US sanctions the US didn't really have it as deeper an economic sort of relationship with Russia that the the 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 conceptual nature which they were negotiated you know they end up as like at least at the start back in 2014 a fairly lowest common denominator of things all of the European member states could agree with carve-outs here and there for you know Slovenia banks and you know French helicopter kind of levels of the carve-out the French eventually caved or on sort of when they you know they contract with the Russians you know they're gonna cap the carrier and a deal and that sort of thing lots of kind of carve-outs you know we wouldn't we wouldn't do swift and bleepy swift was one of the things on the table at the time but I 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 there are always kind of bigger economic shocks exogenous economic shocks coming along anyway so there were two all twice collapses during the period that I was in I was in Russia at the end of 2014 at the start of 2016 you know these these shots were far bigger you know on the Russian economy than the impact of sanctions themselves and you know estimates vary but you know I'll be talking to the IMF and the World Bank and other people that 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 cove it before this all kicks off and that's even worse still so by that time go the sanctions impact is fairly low compared to the impact of these other bigger economic shocks that are happening you know on Russia and the third I think critically is that kind of 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 silver key you know the bits of how the country is rotten how the kind of the heights of the economy of on 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 elvira elvira, nabuna no and until so on up here in 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 very small effect all price collapse is covid much bigger much bigger effects which has led to you know a gradual when people talk about the militarization of the Russian economy today actually but the Russian economy structurally has been adapting really since 2015 and that's largely down to kind of handling of kind of the you know nabuna and and so on over 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 a diminishing marginal returns in terms of the economic impact and I think the biggest reason why sanctions haven't worked and I'll stop after this let you guys do some talking yeah is that actually that you know that they've been seen as essentially a punitive measure they've not been seen as something that that can you know facilitate that change in any way particularly their their conditionality now linked to them is to agree that you know no reduction of sanctions and this is full sort of very implementation of the mensick which is obviously you know basically impossible to achieve and that has built resentment so much against actions that Putin will do anything possible not to comply in 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 you know they're not affecting change they're not having sufficient economic economic impact and they're not actually kind of facilitating any resolution of the fundamental reason that they exist or they're put in place which is a conflict in Ukraine where you know up Mr Bastia towards the Ukrainian government has meant that you know there's no incentive for them to comply on their side if I can just come here because this is this is exactly where you were at the center of it because you were there at the embassy and you were at the economic section and you were basically the person who was discussing sanctions and you were trying to get London so so I can feel you're trying to get London to understand this and by the way you're the only person one 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 a collapse it is a sign of the economy adjusting and this is something that I've I've also tried to explain to many people in 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 were 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 Russia economy was gradually shifting in a way that would make them less effective again am I right in this isn't it's pretty right in effect Russia explicitly moved to weak removal policy so when after war started the ruble absolutely collapsed Russia made enormous profits from its exports of minimal resources in that first period they made a huge kind of coming out of the surface new firmware exports that imports and so yeah that 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 if you work in as a British diplomat you're interested in sexy politics politics is a thing that floats people's boats because you can waffle on all day about politics and you know busk to your heart's content and you have somebody who's willing to kind of listen to you know when you talk about economics you need to actually to be thinking about hard data and analysis and trends and shifts you know and that sort of thing and there's 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 communist they join because it won't be different that's one thing and sadly medicine is just not interested you know sanctions are seen as men in themselves you know a decade down the track now you know will list trust you know as foreign secretary she just wanted to sanction anybody she wasn't really interested in you know the impact of sanctions her main priority was that the UK and therefore she be seen as the most active in adding new sanctions or much than anybody else in the European and also you know the US kind of grouping now that was that was her that was her main kind of concern but there were slight cheeks 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 critical so you know you know they never toured in there you know the former mayor of Moscow you know formerly voted the most formally considered the most corrupt woman in Russia she's never been sanctioned uh michal forkoski has never been sanctioned and they haven't been sanctioned well in her case because of her links to you know Sally Kalan's charity in the past and Hunter Biden and michal forkoski because he says what ministers want to hear you know so so the whole reason for people being sanctioned then then become very very confused too and make kind of critically loaded who we do you know and who we don't uh sanction Yevraz you know the big Russian conglomerate the reason it took so long it took over a month the sanction them up to war started was because people were worrying about job losses in the US and Canada you know Yevraz had holdings there and you know policymakers were worried about well what people in Washington gonna think if we say to Yevraz you know because that would mean some US job losses and it becomes very very kind of 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 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 political policies but this is not not exclusive to Britain though this idea that sanctions it becomes an end on its own that instead of trying to force pulses shift it's merely creating economic pain becomes an objective in itself and 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 successfully so I would say yeah very much so but then this 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 belligerent 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 how calculated how much pain how 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 wondering what 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 a substantive way I'd say I sort of think people really care that much that's far too much detail I mean you know people worried about the kind of Russia sign I could have to I think more because of what that means in the sad China city I think in more than I could only I would argue but also actually again what people don't understand is it kind of um Russia's to get tilt to the east is also partly political in terms of the growth of the BRICS grouping you know bear mind and Putin has said this himself that the 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 China India it's about so Russia India and Russia China as well um I don't think really people were thinking about that of course now we see BRICS plus where BRICS is now you know now Russia's out to the GA to BRICS is very much seen as a big or to kind of generate a fiscal discussion about kind of issues in the global south I think the BRICS grouping is really going to take into lead in terms of that whole agenda this kind of what some people call this kind of shift the multipolar world idea that's very much I would argue um being driven in a significant in a significant way by the emergence of although the greater imports of BRICS group in the on the back of what happened in the Ukrainian 2014 does anybody ever discuss in Britain the opportunities that Russia might have presented because this is the other thing that I I never see anywhere in your book that you talk about the lack of strategic thinking the lack of a sense of drift because it does seem to be is it more than anything else there is a kind of drift um filling up Philip Hammond a foreign secretary that you are particularly critical of you'd have expected that he would understand something about economics after he sees to be foreign secretary became Chancellor after all I think it's an accountant I understand you'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 Russians very much um am I wrong here Theresa made the same she doesn't seem to 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 I mean and then we depend 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 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 but 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 for the power made by the Chancellor that he made it for the Secretary but it's just a personal view of mine and um and he was very very hawkish on on Russia you absolutely why there's that there's a hardball determination just not to engage at a political level with Sergei Lavrov um you know and you know it's didn't matter and the states people you know for Techies is our biggest states person I suppose uh sort of you know the market and then the prime minister you know it's not about liking people it's perhaps kind of a craft relationship with them it doesn't really matter if you if you like or don't like the person you're dealing with the challenges how can you build uh as the relationship with that country with that sort of opposite number to de-complete but also to talk about it is a mutually beneficial corporation that can bounce off you know the difficulties and the tensions that exist in the relationship and because all this was happening it gets a backdrop of the UK kind of stumbling towards a any you referendum and the whole even though the EU gets very distracted by a certain internal kind of machinations these days the whole basis of the of the peace settlement in Europe after the Second World War was this gradual kind of integrate economic integration between previous kind of warring states you know they can afford freedom so people don't like to talk about these things particularly in the UK but that commerce as a vehicle towards peace was was vital in a way that it could have been really helpful with with Russia as well but I think you know that there are two types of kind of people with a view on on you know the UK's relationship with Russia they're noticing that politics should come first you know we should only engage plistally with the country we should only engage economic with the country when plistally you know we find some sort of common understanding and clearly there was nothing 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 seek of economics and commerce as a vehicle towards greater kind of peace and mutual understanding as the view has become you know increasingly unpopular particularly in in the in the European family now as a intent on sort of having some sort of full blown wall with with Russia it seems but but Hammond as a states person was very much on politics first you know you know we don't agree with Russian action therefore you know we there's no benefit in talking about some economic future you know with Russia as a kind of as a boot towards 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 like Sander mentioned actually you you discussed earlier as well you mentioned there was no clear strategy I think you called a foreign policy being lazy or at least being on autopilot and and I was just just because I want to yeah quote a great British which is John Stuart Mill he I found this quote from him from 1836 when he wrote about the the British military budgets being out of control and he wrote that quote ministers are smitten with the epidemic disease of Rosophobia and two years later in 1838 the Chronicle who called for a more rational approach in which he wrote let Russia be washed and when detected in hostility were hostility towards us let us retaliate but let not a great nation make itself ridiculous by an insane Rosophobia so I guess with Rosophobia 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 component do I guess do do do you see any of this today of course it's 200 years to go on a high level of mutual distrust in which has gone it's only gotten worse and there's now in just a complete disastrous state between our two countries because it works both ways in a relationship so 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 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-out war you know despite what sort of policymakers in sort of Paris may see they 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 in in peace without trying to kind of impact Russia's intel critical 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 you know and I think we're right from the start we needed to make that kind of fairly binary I have to say because I think this is something that the Russians understand quite well you know 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 get a war with Russia and have an end to it and then we'll all be damned and probably nude 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 cripple us and made us ridiculous I just wanted to turn on that to the issue of the foreign office and the state of the foreign 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 Russia now I assumed that anybody who got posted to the embassy in Moscow would have at least a degree 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 we and 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 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 have to cope you had to cope with I think two weeks before that firstly the ministers just don't care about diplomacy which is essentially about kind of getting out and understanding that the country that you're in so that you can give good advice you know through diplomatic and communications to ministers I mean that that's the basis but we don't do just sort of fun with you know you learn Russian so you can get out into Russian into the country meet ordinary Russian people meet decision makers in Russia and get a sense of what they think about trending UK Russia relations about sanctions about you know where the country's headed into the internal 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 can well when ministers already have their mindset set on all what the policies should be then the need for people like me you could have invested in their kind of diplomatic training and spend the time outside of the embassy buildings of meeting Russian people can force away so there's that you know got quite important sort of strategic reason why and secondly the foreign office just doesn't really do well enough for holding officers to account and making sure it sends people out with the right skills you know we've had so many changes admitted and William Hayte was quite good on this and then we got a foot of hammer and you know my views on my views on him you know Dominique Wilde came in he wanted to turn the foreign office into a sort of version of Boston consulting consulting boot will all 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 in the you know going through a long and slow kind of death at the time so he wanted to double language use but then you know the organization he'd be going anyway and did doing the thing on that then the organization has become lazy in showing you know officers have the skills that they need you quickly language skills and that situation is going backwards just seeing today information from the point up is saying that you know of all that kind of people that we train in foreign languages every year over 30 percent just just never hit over 30 percent just never hit their qualifications in language and this is all languages you know around the world and I'm quite short for Russian it's much lower than that actually the number of people have people passed and that's like seven several million pounds a year in officers training but just goes out of the completely out of the window so there's laziness on the foreign officers part that it's never really going to grip this this issue. I've had an interesting this yeah the client 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 you know 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 cut off and this is also what we saw from was Philip Hammond when he just decided to cut all high level dialogue with Russia in 2014 at the very point when you need the diplomacy the most how do you see this as a diplomat this is how we change diplomacy which used to you know be about you know harmonizing interest in managing competing interests 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 it's in this quite a well-form sense I have to say in fact I'll say that it's a very accurate trail of the way things weightings are kind of these days and you know partly partly a speech I mean in the in the past there's always going to have a healthy tension between the embassies and London you know policymakers and London will pull the hair out the emcee wants to take a slightly more nuanced line on this or that country about this or that kind of issue but that was healthy because you know good advice was being sent up and you know ministers were receptive to kind of differences of thought and ideas on it's rooted in confidence you know from the ground so you always had different healthy tension that's gone away I think these days if you're a senior it's a diplomat and you're saying something that the minister doesn't want to hear then it can be very intimidating and because you know diplomats by the nature of a consensual sort of middle ground type of type of folk and if you're saying take a really good example if you're the ambassador in Spain you know and you're taking your view on sort of issues around some EU you know policy that's different from what the foreign secretary you know is taking this dominant environment 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 can be smart tweeting you're a complete prat or whatever words he used and you know senior diplomats don't want to take that risk and therefore there's that kind of you know and that's the big elastic band pulling them towards saying what the ministers want to hear there are there are some actually it's always rather sad moments because you talk about the embassy being essentially a Potemkin embassy it becomes more so this time I mean the the the first ambassador you had seems to have been a real diplomat who had I mean he had his eccentricities I suppose but he seems to have been somebody who was you know did diplomacy but but over time one sense is that it 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 a bit perhaps you won't like what I'm going to say but there seem to be only two people who actually do 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 that on that I mean you know what one is one is fear you know before you got a posting to Moscow you 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 so people arrive in a kind of state of fear that all these awful things you know people are going to pull your toilets when you're out of work all day in that and that sort of thing so people live in this kind of creation of a genre genre carry 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 the culture of reality is different I mean yeah you you know 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 because that's a victory for Russia too like is it you know that if they're limiting our ability to act and that's a victory for them too so there's that you know fear is a big it's a big part of that and you know I never found that in the embassy in Beijing it's fascinating it's the same sort of high threat type of place equally as high threat a place you know there's a bridge that there's Moscow and yet people were just going out enjoying life and doing the work difficult work at times but still having a fairly normal life outside of being inside of the chance you can obscure walls the chance in so on that felt really different and I never really understood why but I thought it was kind of fear we can whip up this idea and it's been this really high threat place and it's not that much frankly I have to say I mean there are threats but you can imagine risks you know so on Beijing was never like that that's what the second the second is like a culture you know as we disinvested in skills language skills but also diplomatic skills everybody wants to be doing policy whatever that means everybody wants to be talking to the London mothership about the latest thing they've kind of put through Google translate from a you know Russian BBC monitoring report to me that they don't really want to be in your offices you know with a lack of fundamental training diplomacy they want to be talking to big cheeses in London about policy even though even if we don't have a policy they want to be talking to to London about policy they don't want to be out from the bout in you know out in the urals somewhere down in Rostov on dawn talking to ornate people because that will take them away from having FaceTime was seen as in London and so that's a massive massive cultural thing that is really really hardship you know that was only kind of progressively getting worse in the time that I was in Moscow it seems to me that reminds me I mean there was there's an extraordinary scene at the beginning of the ambassador having the people from the chance to re-round 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 all 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 and like Kostit the head of VTV for example who I know somebody who worked for Kostit and he displays to me what a interesting complicated man Kostit 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 at Kostit in particular about others two is if you see them in public if you go to economic form up in St Petersburg or somewhere else they hit me bled in the face steam come out of his ears smashing his fist on the table calling out Western lackeys trying to kind of encircle Russia and all these things if you're making face to face he's much more nuanced than that and he's much more kind of realistic about me actually he's not at all angler foam quite the opposite I mean he speaks excellent English he's sort of had a posting to the Soviet embassy sort of you know back in the day you know I always kind of sensed he wanted to kind of find a way you know the 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 the I think what British media see when they see the Russian state is the kind of hard ready-to-face theme coming out of the ears you know smashing the fist into the table image which just kind of works in you know Russian domestic kind of political context we're 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 in that gateway out of difficult situation that they that kind of contrast between the very public hard times hard quality of the time these days to the face when 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 willing to kind of listen to their side if you're going to get your points of course about things that you know matter to you as well a lot of uh we actually used to work in Moscow at the same time I was there at higher school of economics when you were at the embassy but I school the the Russians I I spoke to they always mentioned that they felt western diplomats were often not just british but western overall were somewhat duplicit because when they whenever they spoke them they you know laid forward these ideas that you know we can work on A and B but then as soon as they went back to Brussels or or ever then they would suddenly frame everything in a very different light do you do you see this diplomatic is there anything to this diplomatic language or do you have you have you had any experience with it uh the Russian feeling that we're duplicitous well yes I mean or then like as well of course practically daily basis took you towards the end of my time um in in Moscow um I think uh because the narrative you know it's hard to kind of shift the narrative sometimes and that may go back to the point I made earlier about actually um the diplomatic advice nobody can landing in capitals in the way that they're used to you know that's a tension between the embassies out out in the sticks and then you know policymakers uh you know backing capitals and looking at that's very very much uh true I mean it's very very hard to ship the European Commission on which was I'd say larger than the trade and economics focus and sanctions focus when I was there you know because the sanctions line was so low it's common denominator anyway to them sort of getting a shifted view on that I know the EBRD the European Bank of history reconstruction and development were very very concerned about you know they're they weren't being limited and you know it's kind of harsh shift I guess the challenge is actually having the political leaders who kind of take a punt on actually sort of reaching out but you know stepping away from you know the blob in all the capitals including you know the Moscow blob too because they have one you know just the same and actually reaching out it's only really the level of leaders you can cut deals you know despite everything that we do as diplomats ultimately you know if you want to find peace you need people talking to Putin you know to get things done that's that's the only way you're really going to get things done and you know as we've moved away from dialogue those opportunities for that kind of statesmanship have 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 you know 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 I can I my memory goes back to the 1960s and the British Foreign Ministry of the time Alec Douglas home developed a very good strong mutually respectful relationship with Andre Grameka 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 all 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 Vietnam and 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 take the agree I mean the biggest two moments of self isolation for us were obviously warm on the Normandy where we kind of got flat-footed completely on that but also back to itself where you know we're within the European family whatever your views on the E membership or not you know we had weight within that group we had influence within that group over decisions I mean we had quite a critical influence even though I don't necessarily agree you know with that particular policy on sanctions and we had a lot of influence on sanctions policy now I personally think sanctions policies are failing but the point is we had influence but Brexit has meant that we've basically drifted towards a close relationship to the US where we have no influence you know we're just passengers you know in their kind of outfit control rollercoaster car you know on Russia and I think that that is a the big difference for us you know we've kind of we we've lost my losing our place you know in the world and particularly in the context of trends like de-tolerisation and shifting investment flows I mean that that matters to us long term maybe not short term but long term in terms of London's positions the global kind of financial center and so on you know all these things over the much longer horizon start to be threatened I think but by the kind of the posh 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 rose were raised on essentially watching yes minister was almost disappointed to read the there was not more scheming or a strategy that as you referred to many times as lazy I thought it was an interesting part of the book that it might have gone only on autopilot so but yes well we can leave it there unless you have some final words in I don't think so I think it all comes back to this critical war war piece kind of you know tapping into Leo Tolstoy you know I think we need to take the choice that either way whether we want peace for Ukraine in Ukraine or whether we want war with Russia and very obviously you know I think a decade down the track with us being completely you know rooted admired in that sort of conflict which shows no sign of being dissolved and will never be one let's be honest but by Ukraine actually we need to find a way to be introduced to statesmanship and then search for peace I'm going to add a final word which is a strong advice people to read your book in proud 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 in for joining us today thank you it's my pleasure [Music]