Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Episode Summary
President Donald Trump is set to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska. But Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky won’t be in the room. On this week’s One Decision In Brief, hosts Sir Richard Dearlove, former MI6 Chief, and Christina Ruffini analyze the implications of a proposed U.S.-Russia summit without Ukraine, the uproar in Europe, and what a truce might look like on the ground. Plus: The striking parallel between Trump’s move to federalize Washington D.C.’s police and former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s abolition of London’s local council.
Listen & Subscribe
- Watch on YouTube
- Listen on Apple Podcasts
- Listen on Spotify
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Raffini: Hello, and welcome to One Decision in Brief. I'm Christina Raffini joined, of course, today by cohost, Richard Dearlove. And today, we're gonna be talking about what everyone is talking about that is the upcoming Trump Putin summit in Alaska, as well as what's going on in DC. Yes. It may be an American city, but it could have consequences for Trump's policy at whole as he makes moves to possibly take direct control over the nation's capital. Sir Richard, how are you?
Dearlove: I'm very well, Christina. I think the big news obviously is we've gone from Trump setting a deadline for Moscow to have a peace deal to Trump inviting Putin to Alaska to have a summit without Zelensky with no clear goals. It's gonna be interesting.
THE TRUMP–PUTIN SUMMIT
Dearlove: It's gonna be very interesting. I'm extremely worried. I just don't see what he's up to. There's no indication that Putin has made any concessions at all in regard of his original objectives with the invasion of Ukraine. The Europeans are throwing their toys out of the pram. We thought the situation since the NATO summit had improved somewhat, and that this sort of scenario was less likely to occur. I just don't get it. He can't oblige Ukraine to cede territory if Ukraine's not at the negotiating table, and Ukraine won't do that anyway. So I don't know what he thinks he's going to achieve. I think he's more interested in the optics than he is in the content. And, you know, there's an awful lot of worried people. I listened to an interview, and he's a good representative of European views: Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister. All of these people are apoplectic about the possibility that he might try to push through some land swap deal when Russia has no legitimate claim to any part of Ukraine whatsoever.
Raffini: Well, that's the thing. So you've got this meeting, this previous meeting between Witkoff and Putin, president Trump's envoy. And reportedly, the proposal is that Kyiv relinquished the entire Donbas of Eastern Ukraine, including Luhansk and Donetsk, in exchange for a ceasefire. And the person who spoke this to to some media outlets said, you know, they want Russia to give up Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, but it's not clear that Russia's even willing to do that. So at this point, a land swap looks a little bit more like a land grab, and then you've got Zelensky rejecting it flat out and saying they're not giving their land to an occupier or rewarding Russia's aggression. You know, Russia currently holds lines are constantly moving, but about 20% of Ukrainian territory. That's not something Ukraine is gonna be willing to give up. And, you know, Zelensky is not in a great political position at home right now anyway, and I don't see him being able to sell this to domestic population that has fought and died and watched their sons and husbands fight and die to preserve this territory that all of a sudden they're gonna give up. But at the same time, if they don't have the backing of The United States, they don't have much to negotiate with at the table. And that's why this meeting is so upsetting, I think, to the Europeans and to the Ukrainians because what they had was the moral high ground and the backing of the White House, and now they don't have that.
Dearlove: Well, if that's the case, I'm not sure that we're really in that situation. I mean, it's possible you could have something like a truce rather than an agreement, say that Ukraine doesn't yield any territory de jure, if you see what I mean. So you could have a situation which is an acknowledgment of reality, I mean, in that you could say that Ukraine is never going to recover Donetsk and Luhansk, and that, therefore, there's a truce which doesn't recognize Russian occupation. Look, I'm not trying to make an excuse for the Russians. This would be a disaster for European security. And I think that what'll happen is that the Europeans are gonna have to rally heavily behind Zelensky. The fact is that if the Germans really did step up to the plate, they have the financial clout to back Ukraine. I mean, the aggregated GDP of the European Union, without The UK, but, you know, is 12 times that of Russia. They certainly have the wealth and the means if the Americans will sell them the weapons, and it seems to me that they will. And, I mean, there are certainly people working for Rubio, who I know, who have a completely different view of this settlement and are not gonna sell Ukraine down the river. But that doesn't necessarily mean that Trump wouldn't overrule them.
Raffini: Well, there are mixed messages even within the administration. I mean, one of his envoys in particular is incredibly supportive of Ukraine and then keeps having to kind of walk back his statements. But how do you see this actually playing out between the two leaders and all these cameras?
Dearlove: I think it's largely going to be optics. I'm so puzzled as to what's happening, and I'm not sure I can put forward a suggestion or a solution because, I mean, the Europeans will be apoplectic if there is any suggestion of a deal that's gonna be forced on Ukraine. And the fact that Ukraine is not at the meeting, you can't have a settlement in a war where one side is not represented. I mean, it just doesn't actually make sense. So I've got a feeling that this is Trump optics will have another crazy meeting, which will produce nothing, and then we'll be back to the Russians bombarding Kyiv with Trump getting angrier, and maybe at that point he'll come to his senses. I mean, the only thing that Putin is gonna react to in terms of a reasonable settlement is one thing, and that is coercion. And the coercion has to be both economic, secondary sanctions, and military. And that means giving the Ukrainians kit which can give them at least a realistic stalemate on the battlefield. I'm not even suggesting that they're going to recapture large amounts of territory. But, I mean, what's interesting at the moment is that there are indications in Russia that I've certainly people talk to me about, that the Russian general staff think that the Ukrainian line may collapse in the next two or three months. And so maybe Putin's being advised that, you know, the Ukrainians really are on the back foot. I think that's very misleading. I don't think they are, and I don't think that they're ready to compromise themselves in any significant manner.
FEDERALIZING WASHINGTON, DC
Raffini: Alright. Well, let's switch to something completely different now. Trump held a press conference. Basically, they are federalizing the DC police force, sending in federal troops, National Guard, FBI, and other agencies to take back the control of DC. President said, quote, this is liberation day in DC, and we're going to take our capital back. He called DC crime an emergency, and he talked about several crime victims, one of which was allegedly this guy whose nickname is, and I can't make it up, Big Balls, who'd worked for Doge. This young kid said he was beat up, and they posted pictures of it. You know, there's questions about how, about the veracity of those claims, but that's what seemed to have sparked this. Now look, things you need to know about DC. DC is not a state. It is a territory that has this ambiguous self rule that was passed in 1973. Before that, Congress basically could rule over DC directly. So what you have is you have a very liberal, very black city run by a liberal city council that enacts pretty democratic policies, like 97% democratic. And then you get these republican presidents, these republican administrations, and they're constantly clashing with city leadership. This is something we hear a lot, but nobody has really so far taken serious steps to try to abolish DC home rule. The reason this is so frightening to a lot of people in DC is because this seems like step one in taking direct control over the district. Congress already took away a billion dollars from the DC budget for next year. That's a billion dollars of DC's own money because the weird way this legislation is written, Congress can do that. So DC taxes and revenue earned this money, and then congress took it away and said, you can't spend that. So there's already a billion dollar deficit. Now we've got federal troops on the streets, and it's a very interesting move, and it's sending a lot of shock waves through the city and across the country. I'm wondering if this is something you think people are going to care about abroad or if there's any precedent for this that you can recall in The UK. It's a pretty local issue.
Dearlove: I mean, look, I did live in DC, and I do understand the problems that DC has. If you went down to FBI headquarters, which were not the headquarters, the regional office of FBI, which was somewhere way down, I mean, was really quite a scary experience. So, I mean, I've certainly seen the underside of DC as a foreign resident and found it, in some respects, quite scary and quite extraordinary.
Raffini: That was a long time ago. This was in the '90s. The stats for this last year are they've actually been doing better, and there's a 26% drop in violent crime so far this year in DC. So, like, it has been bad, but it's not any worse than it's been, and it's actually getting better. So the question is why now? And is this really about crime in DC, or is it about Trump wanting to federalize this city so Republicans can take control?
Dearlove: Well, I'm sure it's about Trump wanting to federalize the city. But look, there is an interesting parallel which people probably don't know about. But Margaret Thatcher had a massive problem with the London County Council, which occupied a building opposite the Palace Of Westminster on the other side of the river. And at the time that she was prime minister, the London County Council, the head of it, was a very controversial, extreme left winger who went as far as to talk to the IRA, which was almost treason, who was called Ken Livingstone, who was famous for he kept newts, you know, these little aquatic animals. But Margaret Thatcher solved the problem because she had a large parliamentary majority by abolishing the London County Council. So this massive local government installation on the other side of the river suddenly didn't exist. Okay, a lot has changed since then. This is a long time ago, and we now have a different system of local government. But at the time, when Margaret Thatcher took this step, you know, was hugely controversial, but she just went ahead and said, so what? You know, I'm not having these people on the other side of the river, you know, firing political torpedoes at me, you know, when they're not representative of anything other than a small part of the population of London. So maybe what Trump is doing, maybe he's read Margaret Thatcher's playbook.
Raffini: When someone tells you who they are, believe them. We've seen that this term. He's really going forward with a lot of the things he promised, and that's what people voted for. So that's what we should expect. So Richard, thank you so much for joining me. Great talking to you. That's it for this week's One Decision in Brief. Of course, be sure to stay tuned for our regularly scheduled episode this Thursday, and we're gonna continue our coverage of this upcoming summit between president Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska with some top experts who can tell us what to expect and what we shouldn't be expecting. Of course for more exclusive content with world leaders visit onedecision.com and our YouTube page. I'm Christina Raffini, we'll catch you next time.
