Will Putin’s War Starve Millions Around The Globe?

Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove

Guests

Maria Tadeo

Maria Tadeo is a Bloomberg journalist covering the impact of Ukraine port blockades on global food supplies and vulnerable nations.

Stephanie Hegarty

Stephanie Hegarty is a BBC journalist reporting on global population, demographics, and the ripple effects of supply chain disruption.

Episode Summary

The blockading of the Ukrainian port city of Odessa is having disastrous consequences, not just on Ukraine. Millions of people around the world live in countries that are overwhelmingly reliant on Ukrainian exports. The country, known as the breadbasket of Europe, ships cereals, grain and fertilizer around the world - as does Russia. The disruption of these goods flowing out of the region is impacting places in the African continent which are already struggling due to drought and failed crop harvests. One man can possibly put a stop to this - Vladimir Putin. We speak to two journalists covering Europe and global population and demographics - Maria Tadeo of Bloomberg and Stephanie Hegarty of the BBC. And of course with the smart takes of former Chief of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove.

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Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Mcfarlane: Welcome to One Decision. I'm your host, Julia McFarlane. On the June 3, the President of Senegal, who is also the leader of the African Union, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Russian resort city of Sochi. He was a man on a mission to plead on behalf of the tens of millions of starving and vulnerable people on the continent of Africa who desperately rely on the export of cereals and fertilizer from Ukraine and Russia. Much of those exports are being blocked by the Russians, who've blockaded the Ukrainian port city of Odessa. Putin was apparently amenable to helping out, but days later in a phone call to President Macron of France and Chancellor Scholz of Germany, he claimed that the global food shortage was the fault of Western sanctions on Russia, not on his actions in directing his military to cut off Ukraine's vital shipping routes. Pressure is mounting as many countries, not just in Africa, but also parts of The Middle East and Asia are becoming increasingly affected by food shortages, causing staples to rocket in price. The impact of the decision to block this one major city in Ukraine could potentially lead to starvation on a massive scale, particularly on a continent like Africa, which has seen multiple failed harvests recently due to drought. We've enlisted two journalists to join us on one decision to discuss what is happening and what this all means. I wanna welcome our guests with us today. Firstly, we have Stephanie Hegarty, who is global population correspondent at the BBC. She covers migration, demographic change and trends across the world. She's also spent three years covering Nigeria and the West Africa region from the BBC's Lagos Bureau. And also Maria Tadeo, she's a correspondent for Bloomberg based in Brussels, covering the politics and economic developments in the region. And of course we have my partner in crime, Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 here in London. Now, Stephanie and Maria, we're looking at some very pressing global issues in both of your patches. The devastating war in Ukraine also is triggering a food crisis far beyond its borders. There's a raft of Middle Eastern and African countries relying overwhelmingly on Russia and Ukraine for various grain exports to sustain their populations. And there is, of course, this incredibly painful energy crisis that is gripping Europe, and that's likely to get worse as the bloc tries to find a way to further sanction Russia at the expense of secure energy supplies. The challenge, of course, is for the West to somehow force Putin to climb down and end his war in Ukraine without driving him into the arms of China's president Xi and without excessive financial cost to the EU, which not all of its leaders are yet entirely resigned to. And we'll get into that in a short while. But Steph, I wanna start with you. On top of the people in Ukraine facing bombardment, millions of people's livelihoods hang in the balance. Senegal's president and the head of the African Union made a personal appeal to Putin recently to enable the export of Ukrainian grain for the good of the African continent. That came just a day or two before we saw footage purportedly showing the Russians actually directly bombing a Ukrainian grain warehouse. Take us through the situation here. We know that the Port Of Odessa, where a lot of these food exports usually sail out of, that is being blockaded by the Russians. So who stands to lose the most from these really essential food exports being halted and disrupted?

INTERVIEW

Hegarty: So the countries that relied on Ukraine and Russia's exports too, actually, because seen this war has disrupted exports from Russia as well. Countries that relied on, I think 25% of the wheat traded in the world comes from that region, the Black Sea region, Ukraine and Russia. The countries that really rely on it are most of North Africa, and then also, of course, the World Food Programme, and so that was feeding millions of people on the absolute brink of starvation in Yemen, in Afghanistan, and in Somalia. So this is a huge crisis triggered by this war, but the food crisis is much deeper than that. What we're seeing here is just the tipping point of something that was really in a state of absolute insecurity before Russia invaded Ukraine. And that's for lots of reasons, COVID, of course, supply chain disruptions, also labor disruptions. So it's not just wheat. I mean, the biggest pressure now is on wheat and veg oil around the world. So there's lots of different types of veg oils and they can kind of be supplemented for each other. But the main ones in Europe are from sunflower and Ukraine was a huge provider of that. Then palm oil from Indonesia. And then we have canola, which we call rapeseed here. And what we were seeing was a real problem with crops in the canola crop in Canada didn't do very well last year. So that would have been supplemented with Ukraine sunflower crop, but of course that hasn't happened. So these systems, they rely on this kind of give and take, and there was just no give and take in the system at the beginning of this year. So when this crisis happened, it just exploded. And sorry, another really interesting factor that I learned recently, which makes us have to remember COVID and all of this, is that the palm oil supply in Indonesia and Malaysia, that was affected because of labor shortages. Palm oil is really labor intensive, people have to physically climb up trees, hack the fruit down, collect it, and during COVID, they just didn't have the labor supply to keep that going. So all of these factors climate change, COVID, the war have created this perfect storm, and Ukraine's definitely the tipping point, but it didn't cause this crisis by itself.

Mcfarlane: You're definitely right to point out Malaysia and Indonesia, and of course, Indonesia had a really acute COVID crisis about a year ago. And I think that they paused their palm oil exports in order to secure domestic supplies, which of course has made things even worse for the global supply. I read recently that Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, they all buy more than half of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine. Kenya also is about a third of its wheat comes from Russia and Ukraine. We're seeing supermarkets in Italy and Spain limit the purchase of sunflower oil. This is really a hugely global issue. I think Yemen is particularly vulnerable, which has been hammered by a war over the last few years. A lot of African countries have been really affected by droughts and a lot of failed rainy seasons recently. What happens? Take us through the next stage when a lot of these crucial food supplies are interrupted, what are the knock on effects? What happens next? What can we expect to see?

Hegarty: Well, we'll see really. I don't think we've ever been in this position before, but what we know already is the head of the WFP, David Beasley, he said they're already having to cut rations to the people they supply food to, rather than just supplying starving and almost starving, they're having to focus on the people who are really on the brink of dying for lack of food. So we're just going to have to reprioritize where food goes to. And people will die. I don't think there's any question that, you know, we will see the effects of this in people's lives. We're also seeing this is all very grim and depressing, I hope we might get to some lighter notes later but we're seeing really severe drought in Somalia now, with agencies like the WFP in a much weaker position to help with its neighbor, Ethiopia, also facing a war. We're just seeing a confluence of so many crises here. And the fact is that the people will suffer. I mean, it will get worse as well, because, you know, governments like Egypt, where they subsidize wheat, been kind of compensating. I've been doing a story at the moment about just trying to talk to people about how they're adapting to food prices. In quite a few places, you know, the rises so far have been gradual enough, governments have been able to step in with subsidies, like in Indonesia, I was talking to someone there earlier today, it's only gonna get worse and governments are only going to feel more pressure and if they will be able to keep up, we'll see, really.

Mcfarlane: Yeah, I mean, Richard, I was gonna ask you, what sort of impacts can we see? We know that it was essentially a peasant's revolution in Syria that kicked off the uprising there. The Middle East and The Levant that stands to lose a lot from the situation in Ukraine because of these halted food exports. I mean, Putin knows what he's doing. He is deliberately bombing these wheat silos. He's deliberately halting the export of food, I mean how far is he gonna go?

Dearlove: Well I think it will depend on you know how Russia fares in Ukraine. I mean let's put it like this, Putin's plan was that the whole thing was going to be over in ten days or two weeks and I don't think part of his plan was to trigger a global food crisis. But the other thing we have to remember is that you know throughout the Cold War and I think a lot of people generally didn't understand this, that the grain trade with Russia was never disrupted, it was extraordinary. Throughout the sort of Cold War crisis Russia depended very heavily to add foreign currency on exports of grain globally and of course that included Ukraine at the time. So I think we're in a rather unprecedented situation. This certainly hasn't happened, that this degree of international disruption of the commodity market hasn't happened in our lifetimes, I would say, or not since the end of World War II anyway.

Hegarty: One other thing to note is just how easy this is for Putin. You know, he has to do very little in the Black Sea to keep this blockade going because Ukraine has no or little navy to speak of. So whether it was his plan or not, like you mentioned, Richard, it's happening and he's managing it without much effort really from his navy, in contrast to the war, which is obviously proving difficult for Russia.

Mcfarlane: That's a really good point. I think the Ukrainians have also mined the Black Sea to death to try and stop the Russian ships getting close to its ports, but that also has the effect of limiting how much movement they can have outside of their own ports. Maria, I just wanted to jump in to ask you, Putin recently blamed the global food shortage and the blocking of exports on EU and Western sanctions. And the EU Commission head, Ursula von der Leyen, she reacted pretty angrily to that last week. There was a summit in Brussels to discuss this, and she laid the blame very squarely on Russia, on deliberately blocking ports like Odessa. What can the EU do really? Because clearly it wants to tighten the screws on Putin, but obviously this is having a huge impact, not just on EU citizens, but also, I mean, the African continent is really hanging in the balance, isn't it?

Tadeo: Yeah, for sure. And I think what's interesting here is that clearly there's a commodity aspect of this, and we talk about food, but there's a bigger also as equally big potentially, which is energy, fuel, gas, petrol, all of this is very much combined. And the idea is that the more he feels cornered perhaps is gonna use that as a geopolitical weapon like he has been doing for a while now, only now it's become very intense. And just to kinda give you an anecdote, we know already that the Egyptian government put out a statement seeing a lot of the cargo ships that we were expecting from Ukraine are not here. So clearly, is already an issue as we debate it. Now for the European Union, they worry about two things. Of course, they worry about the implications that this will have on the European economy, on the average European citizen. The more you sanctioned, the more it hurts. And the more you need to have a narrative that shows this is not the people of Ukraine. This is not the European Union. This is not the West. This is all Russia. And this was an unprovoked war. The other thing they worry about, and I think this really ties everything that we talked about is that we are very invested in this. Of course, for continental Europeans, for the West, The UK, The United States, this is something we care about. And we see it from the perspective in which for us, it's very clear that Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is a country that's being invaded. But Vladimir Putin looks at countries that perhaps may not be as familiar, may not really follow this as much. And he's kind of trying to change the narrative there saying, you see, this is Ukraine being used as a tool by the Anglo Saxon world. This is a war by NATO. All of this will have repercussions of you, but Russia is the good guy here. We're trying to fix this problem. We're trying to help with this food shortage. So they worry about the propaganda that will come with this and the narrative that Russia is trying to feed very slowly to the world, saying, you know, we're ready to solve this. The problem is the Ukrainians. I think when you have a phone call, the one Macron and Scholz and Vladimir Putin had two weeks ago, you can see the spin very clearly. You know, the Russians use that call not to talk about the ceasefire, not to talk about Ukraine, but simply to put out a message saying everything that we're seeing is a fault of the West, and we're ready to fix it if you guys move away from sanctions and all the aggressive behavior. So I think they worry about the implications of it from a societal economic perspective, but they also worry very much about the narrative that Russia may wanna shape.

Mcfarlane: I totally agree. It's definitely shaping up to be a war of competing narratives. And it's really, really hard getting the truth out, particularly when there's so much distrust in the media. There are allegations that photos are doctored. A lot of old photographs from totally unrelated conflicts have surfaced up and that's muddied the waters and that's been really problematic. You point out that the EU is very invested in this conflict, and you say we care a lot about the suffering of the Ukrainians. I just wanna broaden out a little more and ask you just a bit more about what the current mood is in Europe. And I think it's really interesting because after quite a number of years of us all being obsessed with Trump and American politics and what's been going on in China and North Korea, and it seems like the center of international discourse is now really sort of centered on Europe because of this war in Ukraine. I mean, it's so much more than a war just between two nations. As we've heard, it's got these ramifications across the globe. And look, it's pretty hard to talk about the EU as a monolith, it's a block of 27 nations, as a coalition, there are a few more nations in its orbit. And so there is a wide array of opinions and allegiance, you've got strong backers of Ukraine, like the Baltic nations and Poland. And then you have people like Hungary's Viktor Orban, who has strong ties with Vladimir Putin, and to some extent, the Germans have also been fairly agnostic towards the Russians in the past for historical reasons. But despite all of that, I just wanna, despite the fact that you can't really talk about the EU as a monolith, I'm still gonna ask you, what is the mood in the EU and how unified really is the EU? And is there even a situation where you have countries that are trying to tread water because they have a little bit of neutrality as to who wins the war and they just want it to end soon before the economic cost really starts to bite?

Tadeo: Yeah. And, you know, I think that this is going to be a critical time because the more you sanctioned, talked about this, the more it hurts. That is clear as day. And we've seen that the European Union so far has really sanctioned a lot. We've seen six different packages of sanctions that have come together all unanimously. So when you ask the question, you know, how united is the European Union? Well, on paper for six times, they've agreed to sanctions that they're all very aware are going to hurt. I think when it looks or when you ask the question of what else can they do, you know, I think they don't know here. And that's a real question. You know, I think by now all that they can do is to go after the gas kind of energy and tackle that. But, know, this has huge ramifications going into the winter. The winter, just to make it very clear to everyone that listens to the podcast, is the time of the year where the European Union is the most vulnerable to Russia playing politics with energy because well, you need people to heat their homes. Of course, companies use it and you need it to keep an economy alive. You know, if we talk about the impact that this will have on average kind of everyday person on the street in Europe, you can be in a situation where by the end of the year, as awful as it sounds, this is a war that's dragged on for months. The impact is not as big. The news cycle kind of falls away from it. And you see that inflation, there's all these issues with food. And then on top of that, you're paying a lot of money to heat up your home. So I think for them, it is a real question in terms of how much pain they can tolerate from these sanctions. And one thing I picked up on the European Leader Summit that I covered a week ago is that there's a sense among a number of countries here that they kind of just feel, let's take a breather now. You know, we've done a lot. We need to just pause here and kind of wait and see how it goes. The issue, and this is a tragedy of it and is a fundamental point of tension between Ukraine and the European Union is that the Ukrainians don't have time. I mean, for them, it's very clear they can't wait. So I think this is going to be an issue. And in terms of, I think, and you made a great point. When you say the vision for Ukraine or how the war ends, I've put this question to so many officials on the record, off the record. And to me, what is striking is that they all say Ukraine has to win. But when you ask in terms of what does victory mean, I don't think they have an answer. And that is going to be a problem, especially as we see that Ukraine is very sensitive about the idea of just give away the Donbas. Also, you have to look at the Donbas on a map. This is a huge piece of land. You know, they can't just like give it away to appease the Russians.

Mcfarlane: No one wants to tell Zelensky that he's gonna have to balkanize his own country in order to stop Putin.

Dearlove: But Putin can wait, I mean this is the thing that the longer it goes on the more disintegrated becomes Brussels position and the one thing that Brussels is not good at and has never been good at and doesn't really practice is geopolitics. And you know it's faced with a geopolitical crisis that actually is the most serious probably in the whole of its existence and to get the 26 nations to operate as a single bloc is just out of the question because you've got you know, the national interests of the specific players, particularly the bigger players, beginning to show very clearly. And, I mean, this is why Putin spins it out. I mean, in a way, you could say militarily, it would have already been in his interest to start backing out of the conflict, has gone so badly, but he gains advantage because he knows that there will be, you know, splitting off from the EU bloc, and I mean you see it most clearly with Hungary, of course. But I mean, even, you know, Germany's promises are unfulfilled. You've got Scholz making very aggressive statements, but then Germany not really carrying them through. I mean, one wonders what actually is happening inside the German government.

Mcfarlane: That's exactly what I was gonna ask because one of Richard's favorite topics is Germany and German policy regarding Russia. And so, Maria, I just wanted to ask you, what is the view from Berlin on the situation today?

Tadeo: Look, I think they know and I think the moment's already hit where they feel there was a mistake that was made for many years. It was a political mistake. They clearly did not read Russia well. You could argue this goes back to some of the war guilt that they may have already, which if you go to Germany, it's always funny how in some ways it always comes up, that this is not an issue that they can just forget easily. I think the fact that the country of course was split in two and have some sensitivities with Soviet Union also may have played a part in this. And something that perhaps we don't talk about enough. It's not just about the politics, but also was very good business. I mean, if you look at an economy like Germany and we talk about made in Germany and how this is a great industrial power. Yes, sure, they've done it. But a lot of this comes with a cheap energy that they've had from Russia. I mean, this was very good business for everyone. And I think that now they realize that it's a shock, it's unraveled. They know that relations cannot be as they were before. The Nord Stream 2, which was iconic of this very close relationship, now it's all about debt. We know that this pipeline is not going to see the daylight. But I think they still worry about things of, you know, military escalation and what happens if, you know, Ukraine actually goes too tough on the Russians. And I think I'm not really sure how much they trust the Ukrainian government too, and in terms of how they behave and how they operate. And for the German industry, again, they repeat, okay, sure, we'll have to find a new way of doing things, but we need time to adjust. And again, going back to the fundamental issue here, the Ukrainians will say, well, it's not our fault that you misread Russia for fifteen years and we don't have the time to wait. So this is always a perennial kind of source of tension. And on top of this, I think it's amplified by Germany because this is supposed to be well, the big country that kind of leads the way in conflicts. And it's funny to me when you ask Ukrainians, they really value The United States. They go directly to The United States for weapons. They love Boris Johnson because he talks stuff and they love the Polish. But when it comes to the Germans, there's a lot of tension.

Mcfarlane: Yeah, I think interesting because since we had that incredibly momentous day where Olaf Scholz suddenly reversed decades of German policy, there seems to be a little bit of a loss of momentum since then as the months have gone by. I wanted to ask Steph, I just want to bring you back in because something that I think is possibly going to have an impact on Europe and certainly is going to perhaps take some time to filter through is the fact that millions of Ukrainians have had to leave their country, and they've crossed the border into Poland. And the Poles have been absolutely incredibly welcoming. They have opened their arms to millions of Ukrainian refugees, they have sheltered them in their homes, the Poles are spending a lot of their own money and a lot of their own economy to support these people who've been made refugees from this crisis. And a lot of people have said, this is quite a distinction from the influx of refugees from Syria and other Arab countries through the Middle East who've tried to get into Europe. But how has this huge influx of refugees from Ukraine, how has that affected Poland, if at all? Do you think there are gonna be any issues coming down the line because of this? How long do you think the Poles are gonna be happy to host so many displaced people?

Hegarty: Well, I think that's impossible for us to predict, but I think we are already seeing the cracks in the systems that Poland put in place and other Europeans, EU countries put in place. There was this initial kind of free pass for Ukrainian refugees to live in Europe for three years. There was benefits and right to work, but I'm already hearing stories that there's already been reports of refugees having real difficulty accessing any of those benefits or accessing kind of housing, that sort of thing. You know, we did have this amazing reception, but this is 7,000,000 people, not all of them in Poland, of course, but the majority. And it's just one of the biggest refugee exoduses that we've seen in recent history in the shortest amount of time. You know, Syria took much longer. We saw a million people in a matter of weeks leaving Ukraine. Syria, to get to that point took much longer. There is, of course, the kind of, I guess people would call them cultural ties. They are neighbors. Clearly Ukrainians are being more readily accepted than Muslim refugees. We're not seeing the level of racism that we saw before, which is sad, but true. And maybe that will lead to greater integration. But how long people are going to want to stay? I mean, that's impossible to say it's only been three months. Clearly, Ukrainians are going to be keen to get home again. Also, we have the fact that it's just women and children. You know, this is families that have been separated really brutally. So whether that will lead to kind of a sustained immigration in the EU, I don't know. But I imagine a lot of those women and children will be keen to get home and to reunite their families again. I mean, we get that in every refugee crisis, of course, it's really sad. But it kind of does give it an almost temporary nature to this that men are still stuck in Ukraine, I think potentially. But when you were talking about, I realized we didn't talk about the energy crisis impact on farming when we're talking about food and that, you know, that will be huge, not just in terms of needing petrol and needing diesel to run your farm, but also gas being such a big input in fertilizer. We're already seeing fertilizer prices double as far away as The US, the knock on effects of Russia and Ukraine being huge fertilizer producers because of their easy access to gas is it's only going to make fertilizer more expensive this year and probably into next year. So the knock on effects of that will be huge.

Mcfarlane: Yeah, you're so right. And that's another issue that is also disproportionately impacting African countries. And also, even if Russia were to lay off Odessa, the fact is where are the farmers? The farmers are all soldiers now. And how are they able to have a harvest when they're being bombarded?

Hegarty: I'm not sure that's true because agriculture workers are exempt from fighting. That doesn't mean a lot of them don't volunteer anyway. But so I think there is probably more of a functioning infrastructure than we acknowledge. I think the real problem is getting this food out of the country, because 90% left through those ports. And to get that 90% across the land borders, it's just so difficult, the logistics of it. So Ukraine runs at a Soviet rail system, which is wider than the European rail system. When these carriages get to the border, they have to either be taken off the wheels and put onto a new set of wheels or physically unloaded and reloaded again. So you've got queues of 25 kilometers long of rail carriages, and even worse at the road borders. And then of course, it's so expensive, whereas before traders were exporting huge ships full of grain. Now they're doing it in these much smaller shipments in like a wagon on a train or a container and a truck. And it's just it's made it so much more expensive than the cost of fuel on top of that.

Tadeo: And if I may just to that point, I know just from the kind of logistics perspective that the commission was looking into ways to try to fix that, especially to try to make sure that it could go from one area to another. But I think what concerns them, and this goes back to the military situation is that they could become targets. So for them, what they say is that even if we put the infrastructure in place and we try to help some of the issues, the concern is that again, it becomes a conflict area and all of this is happening in the midst of a war. So even if on paper looks easy, in real life, it's harder than it seems.

Hegarty: I was talking to a few farmers actually for a piece I wrote recently, and they were complaining that the paperwork also that the EU is making a lot of noise about trying to help get food out over land borders, but the paperwork that they have to fill in. And whereas before it would have been, you know, the traders would have kind of taken advantage of that, they would have taken care of that because they were making such huge system of export through Odessa and through Mykolaiv and through the Black Sea ports. Now farmers are having to do that themselves if they want to get this grain sold. And they're just selling it kind of piecemeal to people, to buyers in Romania rather than, you know, selling the bulk of their harvest to one trader before. So it's just logistically an absolute nightmare.

ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE

Mcfarlane: Richard, I just wanna ask you a question. So we have this violent war going on in Ukraine. We have the blocking of food exports that are hugely important to a lot of vulnerable countries in the African Continent and The Middle East. Is there some further strategy of Putin to trigger more instability and crises in these vulnerable countries that often see their people fleeing to the EU? I mean, we've all seen how migrant flows have destabilized the EU in the past, and it's caused fractures in the alliance. And so do you think Putin is deliberately using these food blockages in order to damage the EU?

Dearlove: Was there a strategist in the Kremlin that worked all this out? No, there wasn't. Putin is an opportunist, and as these situations develop, then, you know, he's going to exploit them, and I think the migration crisis has been exploited at times. I think that obviously now, you know, he will use the food crisis to his strategic advantage to try to come out of this militarily and politically ahead of the game. It looks as though that's going to be very difficult for Russia. But I mean I think one has to see this as a post imperial crisis in Russia's own psychology and psychological thinking about itself and I mean I personally I don't think Russia, it will come out of this crisis badly whatever happens.

Mcfarlane: The question is what will be the end result? You don't think he's going to ease back on food blockages, you don't think he's really going to feel the pressure just because millions of people around the world are going to die, he's not going to lift the blockade in Odessa?

Dearlove: Not until militarily they've achieved some objectives which they can claim, you know, gives them a successful quote unquote special military operation, but whilst it's going badly and looks as though, you know, if you take the fighting in Severodonetsk, which should have been relatively straightforward for the Russians to take that city, it looked as though they almost took it and suddenly they're being driven back. You know, we get reports yesterday of two generals, two leading generals killed in an ambush. I mean, things are obviously going really badly for the Russian military. They're not equipped either psychologically or logistically to fight this war. They've made a massive miscalculation. They had no idea that they would be opposed in the way that they've been opposed. And now to have a whole country fighting against them, I mean Ukraine doesn't have the depth of resources, but it's still a very, very significant economic and political power. And with Western backing, this is a war that Putin is not gonna come out of well. There's gonna be a crisis in Russia of some sort. And, you know, all political regimes that end in Russia end unhappily, and we just don't know yet how that's gonna happen.

Mcfarlane: Okay. Maria, I just want to ask you because of something really interesting that Richard said. He said that Putin is not going to ease up on the food blockade until he achieves some kind of military objective that he can pass off as a victory. Now, basically, if that is the case, essentially, that means that the EU is going to have to decide whether it's going to try and push Zelensky to cede territory to Putin, in order for him to get some kind of victory. Because there are tens of millions of people who are at risk of imminent drought and famine and the knock on effects, not just of the food blockades, but also just terrible weather conditions, and the lack of harvest anyway. So how do you think that is gonna play out in the EU?

Tadeo: You know, I think it's very hard to tell, but I also find that the day where he decides he needs to say the special operation has ended with great success, the Russian propaganda machine will say that. I mean, I think that that's the big competitive advantage that he has over any other government. You know, the way they decide this is over, it will be the great success of the Russian Federation. I think for the Ukrainian perspective, and again, it kind of ties back to what we said about, you know, the great powers of the EU and so on. I think we saw on Saturday, this very furious reaction from the Ukrainian foreign minister who tweeted, stop arguing that we need to cede any piece of land and also look at it on a map. When you look at Donbas, this is the size of, you know, if you believe what Zelensky says, 20% of Ukraine is now occupied by Russia. This is total size equal to Portugal. You know, these are not tiny villages that Ukraine is just gonna give away. And the location of it, of course, are very strategic. And just for the Ukrainian pride, they don't wanna do it. And I think it goes back also to something that every Ukrainian official has told me every time we've interviewed them on and off the record again, that they believe fundamentally they made a huge mistake when they signed the Budapest Memorandum. When they kind of just gave everything in return from nothing. They really feel to some extent that's the original sin. So they kind of go, why should we repeat that again? After a full scale war, what signal do we send to Russia? So again, I'm not really sure how that will square with the EU, this total victory that Ukraine wants, this huge victory that Russia wants. Of course, it doesn't really feed well with the diplomatic solution that the European Union needs. And I think that's going to be definitely a huge point of tension.

Hegarty: How much of this is Ukraine's choice is something I think when I hear them make these statements, you know, they're so reliant on foreign military assistance in this war. And ultimately, will they be the ones making this decision?

Mcfarlane: Well, the question I have for you, Maria, which ties on from what Steph is asking here is, does the key lie with Europe? Because The UK and The US, no matter how much they want to donate aid, military aid, any kind of aid to Ukraine, that does not happen without the EU, because Ukraine's borders are with the EU. Anything that is sent in to help the Ukrainians has to go through Poland and other countries it shares a border with. So do the Europeans realize this, that essentially they really decide whether Ukraine will lose this war or whether they can make the decision to go in whole hog and really go for it with helping to weaponize?

Tadeo: You know, Julia, I think it's a great question. And again, it goes back to what we debated before. The idea of what does victory look like for Ukraine in the eyes of the European Union. Again, it depends because if you ask a Lithuanian, they will tell you it has to be a crushing defeat of Russia. If you ask the Polish, they will tell you never again. Vladimir Putin is a killer. You know, that's how they see it. There's many different sensitivities around this. When you ask perhaps Germany and France, they continue to repeat, it will be done in Ukraine's term, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. But then they also say, Russia is not gonna go away. You know, this is a country that geographically, whether you like it or not is right there. You know, we have to be present if we wanna create a peace. So I think, you know, the narrative around it changes a lot depending on who you ask. But I would also be very careful to kind of frame this as Ukraine will focus on The UK and The US as a real guarantors of their peace in the future. Clearly they do in terms of the weapons, but I think not so much in the political aspirations. I think that when you kind of frame it as they only hear about The UK US, it's not really that simple because they've had a major reality check on NATO. They also know The US is not gonna fight on the ground. And politically, their biggest aspiration to date is to join the European Union. I mean, this is right now where they've placed all their energy and their cards. They wanna be a candidate EU country by the end of June, which is in three weeks time. So they still kind of cling into this would belong in the European family and we're a European Union country. So I think it's a little bit more complex than they just kind of pick sides and they hate the French, the Germans have really love the Anglo Saxon world.

Mcfarlane: But would you say that the EU can essentially decide the outcome of the war on its own?

Tadeo: If you look at the policies that they have, what they kind of believe is that the sanctions will do a lot of damage. And the more they continue, the more you're going to see the impact, not just on the Russian political elite, but on the Russian everyday person. And again, it's a two way street. It can hurt the EU, but it will hurt Russia. And I'm not really sure that Russia can count in China and India to kind of fill the entire void. I'm not sure that's kind of how you replace one with the other very quickly. I think militarily, if you look at the actions on the ground, it's very clear that Ukraine is not defending itself and trying to, like, push out the Russians with the help of the EU. It's very clear that they depend entirely on The US supply. And that's why they go directly to Biden when it comes to the weapons. And they have been smart to some extent to convince the Americans that they can win the war. And the definition of America is that Russia will be weakened to an extent that it won't ever be a threat to neighbors, which is exactly what the Eastern Europeans wanna hear.

Mcfarlane: That's it for this week's episode of One Decision. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. We drop new ones every Thursday. From me and the team, thanks for listening, and see you next time.