Putin's Russia, Ukraine's Reparations (ft. Jamison Firestone) | German Spies, Iceland-EU, Iran

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Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. May slow when network is busy. See terms. I said this to a bunch of German students when they said, why do you think it's so important to defend Ukraine? I said, let me just ask you a question. You're all from Germany. You all care about human rights. You're all peaceful, right? I said, would your outlook be any different if Hitler won? Because that's what the Russian outlook is going to be if they win. It's going to be Moldova, Estonia, the Baltics restoring greater Russia. And then either NATO is going to be at war or at least the EU is going to be at war. So the EU understands completely that Russia needs to be stop. We're. It is. Hello and welcome to One Decision. I'm your guest co-host, Rosanna Lockwood. I'm joined by my co-host and former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Hello, Sir Richard. Hi, Rosanna. All well, I hope, with you on the Pacific coast. Indeed, still in L.A. six months after marrying an American. And soon, hopefully, to receive some paperwork and maybe hit the skies. Have you traveled anywhere recently? I was on the east coast of the United States. My next trip, I think, is to Arizona for a conference in Arizona, which I'm quite looking forward to. And then after that, I'm going to Venice, which for me is certainly iconic culturally. I'm a great enthusiast for Venetian painting, which I've been looking at for years. And then my next trip after that will be to Iceland. Ah, that's that is topical because I think we're going to talk about Iceland a little bit. Indeed it is. I'll take your denim shirt for Arizona, both of us wearing denim shirts again today. Let's let's get to Iceland because it's really interesting. Just to let you know, we've got a really exciting guest joining us for our main conversation this week. Russia expert, lawyer and human rights advocate Jamison Firestone joins us to discuss his new book, Rule of Lies, his first hand account of Russia's slide into a corrupt authoritarian state. And listeners, if you're not already subscribed to One Decision, now is the time. Subscribe to our YouTube channel or wherever you listen so you don't miss out on anything. I'm Jamison Firestone, and I'll see you in the next episode of One Decision. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. not vote for EU membership eventually, when they realise the cost, particularly in areas like fishing, which are so fundamentally important to the Icelandic economy. So that's the first point. And I mean, the second point is, I think that Iceland are feeling the draft because of what's happened in Greenland and to Greenland in terms of American attitudes towards Greenland. Interestingly, Iceland hasn't been mentioned, you know, by Trump, but they are strategically important to the northern approaches. And of course, there's a lot of military activity now, especially with both Russian and Chinese assets in that part of the world. And it does protect the North Atlantic. So the key issue for me isn't so much EU membership. It's what happens in terms of Iceland's relationship with NATO. Iceland is a founder member of NATO, but it is the only NATO country without any armed forces at all, which is in my book a little bit surprising. Some Icelandic politicians have written about this, and there is a which I got a copy, which is headed, does Iceland need an army? I think what it really needs probably is some greater naval capability. And of course, what I certainly have in mind is given the development of naval drains and autonomous vessels that don't need crewing with new technology, could Iceland develop a role which contributes to the security? Well, I don't think it's going to be a role which contributes to the security of the North Atlantic. There is a NATO base in the airport there, Keflavik, but it's mothballed, and it's what is regarded by NATO as a forward operating base. So it would be de-mothballed and quickly populated by the American Air Force if there were to be a crisis. But in fact, the Icelanders were very keen for NATO not to have massive operations. They were keen to have a massive amount of capability, although my understanding is there are new agreements that they are considering, if not already signed with the Americans about servicing American submarines in Icelandic ports. So there's a lot going on on this issue. It's very topical. And I think my new thought for Iceland and Icelanders is what about autonomous naval capability, which could contribute significantly to the security of the northern approaches, because they are going to be a highly important strategic area. Perhaps spread that message in a few pubs and bars and fish restaurants around Iceland when you're there. Let's see if it takes hold. Sowing the seeds of thought on autonomous navies. Now, of course, it wouldn't be one decision if we don't touch the latest on what's happening in Iran. And a fair amount this week marks the 60-day deadline from that June Memorandum of Understanding that has expired as of Monday, August 17th. We've also got Mojtaba Khamenei several months into his tenure as Supreme Leader. Trump, of course, has threatened to strike Oman if it interferes in a potential deal over the control of the Strait of Hormuz. We've also got Trump pulling back on some naval exercises, so rather joint military exercises with South Korea, citing good relationships. So there's all kind of feeding into this idea that the US may be potentially a little bit stretched thin at the moment over there in the Strait of Hormuz and Iran kind of reassembling their top brass. What do you make of it also, Richard? Well, I think my predictions prove pretty correct, which was the Memorandum of Understanding was unlikely to go anywhere and it has expired as of Monday. So that puts us back to square one. I also predicted the intransigence of the Iranian regime in terms of giving ground over the strategic control of the Straits of Hormuz. My expectation is that the conflict may be at a low level. The low level will continue and that the blockade of Iranian ports will continue. And of course, the other concerning development is rising tension between the Houthis and the Saudis and the attacks that the Houthis have made on the other strategic exit for Saudi oil through the bottom of the Red Sea. I frankly don't think a great deal has changed. I am still of the view that the US and Israel are probably in agreement about either breaking the Iranian regime in two so that you have a more amenable group who emerges and are prepared to negotiate or that the whole thing collapses under the weight of the blockade, which is having a hugely detrimental effect on the Iranian economy. And you know, Besant in the US is upping the pressure hugely on the economic side. So some of the commentary at the moment, which says, you know, the US is in a difficult place, they're in a muddle, they don't know what the hell's going on. I mean, I don't really agree with that. I think there's more clarity than one realizes. And a lot of the analysis that one hears, particularly from the BBC, is along those lines. And as the debate continues, I think the Iranian position is actually parlous as we speak. And I think there is probably intelligence, which is encouraging the Americans themselves to be intransigent about, as it were, fractures inside the regime in Iran. And the unpopularity of this war stateside continues as of course, we near the midterm. So as you say, it might be coloring the way that some of the information is being reported. We'll stay across that story as well as the other ones we've mentioned today. But now it's time to get on to our main interview today. A dictatorship of law. That's what Vladimir Putin promised in 2000 to a post-Soviet Russia exhausted by a decade of chaos. He delivered on the dictatorship, less so on the law. And our guest today argues that Putin now sits atop what is essentially a criminal enterprise built to loot the state. Jamison Firestone is an attorney and human rights advocate who founded Russia's first independent foreign law firm after his colleague Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in prison for exposing government fraud. He was a member of the government corruption Firestone helped lead a campaign to establish new international sanctions against corruption and human rights abuses. His new book is Rule of Lies. My wild ride through chaos, corruption and murder in Putin's Russia. He joins us today to talk about practicing law in Putin's Russia, the corruption scheme that Magnitsky uncovered, Ukraine war and the prospects for Russian democracy. Welcome Jamison. It's so great to have you on the podcast. Hey, it's great to be on the podcast. Thank you very much. Well, I've got to start by saying a minor admission. You may or may not be aware, not all journalists read all the books they're sent before all the interviews. There sometimes just isn't enough time. But yours, I actually couldn't stop reading it, finished it and rarely say this as a kind of plug for the podcast. But anybody listening to this, it is a very entertaining, informative book. It's one of the best explanations I've ever heard about how the system in Russia has become the way it is, why the Russian people are now so limited, but also at times very personal, very poignant. It's sometimes entertaining, if you can imagine that. And I kind of want to start there because your potted history of your upbringing in New York set the scene for what later came in Russia. So for those who aren't familiar with you, can you give us a sense of how the gangsters of your youth inspired the gangsters that you would later work with? I had a really strange upbringing in that my parents were very wealthy. I was born in Beverly Hills. As a matter of fact, if you've ever seen Down and Out in Beverly Hills, that was my house. And my parents at some point went, my dad went bankrupt, went down out in Beverly Hills and moved to New York. My parents divorced, but my dad made a lot of money again. And so I, my mom was living on Park Avenue in 11 rooms. My dad had a six floor brownstone. We had a garden in the center of Manhattan and we had a fully crewed yacht past the Hamptons. But I never knew what my dad did for a living. He was always really cagey about it. He'd always be like, I'm a businessman. You know, just tell people I'm a businessman. When I was 15, I found out what my dad did for a living because the police came to the door. And they handcuffed him to take him to his arraignment. And apparently what my father had been doing was defrauding hundreds of investors and the IRS of tens of millions of dollars in a tax shelter scheme where if you invested in American energy under the Carter administration, and if you remember under the Carter administration, the Iranians weren't giving America any gas, right? So we had the gas crisis. He gave everybody this four to one tax write off, invest $100,000 in American energy and get $400,000 off. And your taxes. So my dad got a lot of investments from people to invest in American energy. The problem was he just never mined any coal. So he tried to take all the tax write offs for him and his investors without actually doing anything. While awaiting trial, my dad, as many people do when they have criminal trials facing them, went a bit nuts. He started doing drugs, crack. He bought New York's most expensive brothel. And he filled our house with prostitutes. It's like something out of Risky Business, that movie that made Tom Cruise, right? That was my life as a high school student. And he also filled it with loan sharks and contract killers because he liked hanging out with them. And he did put me in a five day boarding school. So at least I was away five days a week. But every weekend I was coming back to this brothel crack den filled with Mafiosi. I mean, look, they were fascinating. I mean, listening to their stories, I didn't want to be like them. And their stories were horrifyingly interesting, but I just wanted as far away from that life as possible, but they had other plans. I mean, I was going to go to university and my dad was going to go to prison, I guess, under some of their protection. Right. And then I was going to get we were both going to get out. Right. And they had plans for me maybe opening a dry cleaning business where a few of their guys were going to be working for the dry cleaning business. Or as they explained it, I mean, no one's going to be working there, but you's going to be paying them. And of course, I didn't want to do these things. And they're not the kind of guys who can say no to. And so I kind of developed a strategy of how you talk to mafiosi. Right. They demand respect, kind of like a New York City police officer and also like the New York City police officer. They really only understand yes, sir and no, sir. There is no other acceptable answer. So I would just kind of like make them laugh and be funny and but be also hopeless or useless. If they wanted to form a criminal enterprise with me, they would realize I was so useless that I was going to get us all caught and everybody would go to prison again. Right. And so finally they would go, you know, you don't look like you get out much. Never mind about the dry cleaning business. Right. And I learned how to do that. And that became a really good skill later on, because when I went to Russia, I wasn't expecting to walk into a society that would quickly go completely mafia overload. But that's what happened. And so those skills really came in useful later on when I went to Russia. Jameson, I find it extraordinary you took that step into the unknown in a way. You had been there on a sort of travel trip before and you had those friends described in the book. But to go to Russia as you did was a pretty courageous move. I mean, I experienced Russia officially in that period when, you know, we had a honeymoon relationship with the Russians at the end of the Cold War. And I was going there, you know, in a rather different capacity to you. But, you know, I do recall when you stayed in a posh Russian hotel in the middle of Moscow, it was like the if you were being looked after by what was originally the KGB. It was a mind blowing experience. But what was the motivation for taking that extraordinary career step? So it was very strange. So when my father put me in that five day boarding school, some people would say that his kids didn't have to deal with the craziness. But I think it was more like he just wanted to play with the drugs and the prostitutes and have the kid out of his way for five days a week. So when he put me in that school, he insisted that I was going to I insisted that I learned Russian there, which I felt was crazy. And he told me, he said, you know, I said, why? He said, well, Soviet Union is going to fall apart while you're still young. You're going to go there and make a lot of money. And I thought I thought that was insane. I thought that wasn't happening. But that was the condition. You know, he was paying. So I had to take Russian. So I took Russian for two years in undergrad. I didn't show up for Russian very much. And the I stopped taking Russian. And then I went to law school. And while I was in law school, you had Gorbachev starting to transform the Soviet Union with glasnost and perestroika and this whole idea of kind of a limited welcoming of business. And McDonald's went over there. And someone who went over there was really important was Esther Dyson, the tech investor. So she goes over there and she writes this mind blowing article in Forbes about just the transformation and the human capital there, the talent and that it's underused. And she writes this mind blowing article in Forbes about that you can hire like a nuclear physicist or or or a computer programmer. All the best talent in the world is available for like ten dollars a month. And I went, I really should be there. I mean, what a thing to miss. Right. But I had two more years of law school to go. And so I kind of put it out of my mind. And then I got this letter from my dad in prison like two weeks later and I open it up and it's the same article. It's got this posted on it because, Jamie, you must go. And I thought, all right, why not? Right. I mean, I'm going to graduate in two years. What do I have going? You know, I didn't have anything. So I graduated in two years, one hundred thousand dollars in debt on my college loans and thirty thousand debt and credit cards. I took the bar exam and I got on the first plane. And in a way, it wasn't that much of a risk because I didn't feel I had anything in the U.S. I mean, my dad was going to come out of prison shortly, but that's nothing. And I didn't want to be a lawyer at the time. So I just thought, you know, go east, young man. Right. Where the excitement and the opportunity is. I've got one personal question to ask you. How can you allow your father, given his character, to come back to Moscow? Because that that spelt trouble the moment I read about it. You know, the fact that he wants to sell, you know, selling selling motor cars in Russia already is already attracting the sort of criminal flies that you are familiar with. And I thought that bit of the book was so funny, but I just thought, how the hell did you let that happen? Yeah. You know, I was I was a dumb kid. I mean, if you think about it, I was a dumb kid. If you think about it, I was 24 years old. I went to Russia. I had about five thousand dollars in my pocket and I was one hundred and thirty thousand in debt. I was living, you know, far from the center of Moscow at the time, really had very little money. And even though this was the land of opportunity, I didn't know what to do. And it's it was intimidating. And then all of a sudden my father comes in with why you just fly in, go to a country club and make a presentation of a few investors and see what they give you. And so I pitched some guys over lunch and ended up with four hundred thousand, which buys a lot of used cars. Right. And so it was just easy. And the next thing I know is rolling with it. But you're right. I mean, when my dad immediately started hitting it off with mafia groups in Russia and bringing them into our car, I was thinking, what was I thinking? Right. And how do I get out of this? So, yeah, not the best decision, as I say in the book, not the best decision ever made. Yeah, that's a great story. Kind of following on from Sir Richard's question there. But before we get kind of get down to brass tacks in terms of what happened during your career and Sergei Magnitsky, we'll get on to, of course, to Navalny as well, Ukraine, the corporate raids. But just as a kind of frame for that, what led you to Russia and then what's led you to continue campaigning for Russia, despite all of the kind of horrors that have unfolded in the two decades since you're now based back in London, but you've got lots of Russian exile friends there, a fair amount of Jews, the government, the regime, Putin, what's happened, everything are still sort of Russophiles. They love the language. They love the people. I think you summarise that incredibly well in your book. If you can, just for our audience, talk to us about what makes you still care about Russia, despite everything it did to you, did to your friends and the rest of it. I went over to Russia with a lot of hope. And within two weeks of being there, the hardliners rolled tanks into town, kidnapped Gorbachev and said all the reforms were over. And then something happened, right? What happened was people came out. People came out in the streets and they surrounded those tanks and they started yelling at those like teenagers in the tanks and 20-year-olds in the tanks, you know, we're your grandmothers, we're your mothers, you know, you don't want to kill us, right? What are you doing? And those kids were miserable. The last thing in the world they wanted to do was run their grandmother over with a tank. And then Yeltsin stood up on a tank and he said, free Gorbachev, free, he's the legitimate president of the USSR, free him. And they lost their nerve and they pulled out. You have to understand what an amazing thing that was to the Russian people. They just couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe that they had done this. The hardliners had backed down and now anything was possible. I mean, Karl Marx's statue had forgive me in Russian painted on it. Somebody flew a Russian tricolor over the Kremlin. I mean, that means some Soviet official put a Russian tricolor. I are great. I know saying that risks a lot because Russians are doing horrible, terrible things right now. But you've got to look at it like Nazi Germany. Because I think today when you look at Germans and when Germans look at their past, Germans are horrified by their past. They wonder how that could have happened. But now you have this democratic, peace-loving people that care about human rights. And Russians have really been led by Vladimir Putin to become what they are. There was a period under Yeltsin of introspection where you had groups like Memorial that said, let's talk about the gulag. Let's talk about all the people Stalin killed. Let's talk about all the people sent to prison camps for no reason. Let's name them. Let's find them all, list them, and name them so we remember them. We're a living memorial. And Russians started to do that. And then I. Unfortunately, they were given, and they were literally given because Yeltsin resigned on national TV and gave the country President Putin, a KGB thug who changed the conversation. He said, we don't need to talk about those things. What we need to talk about is Russian greatness. We have to talk about Stalin and the sacrifice of World War II. And he built this thuggish, thuggish mentality that eventually is so built up that it allows Russians to attack what are basically their Slavic brothers, right? And so I look at this as a tragedy for a country that I love and where people who I care deeply about fought and died for that country. I mean, Sergei Magnitsky, Alexei Navalny, in a way, my former law partner, Terry Duncan, people like Kara Morza, who went back and sat in prison. We all have a vision of a country that we want, and it needs to be saved from Putinism. Now, that doesn't mean that when Vladimir Putin disappears, the problem goes. But somehow, we want to rescue that country, the country that we love. So that's why I'm the way I am. And many of my closest friends are Russian. As a matter of fact, I'm on vacation with my extended Russian family right now. The story of how I got that family is in the book. We love Russia. We just want new management. But realistically, Jameson, is there any way back? I mean, I agree with many of the things you're saying about Russia, even though, you know, I was in the front line of the Cold War. They were our ultimate adversary. But those of us who know something about Russia, I don't claim to know it anywhere near as well as you do. I mean, it's a magnificent culture in its own way, you know, the most extraordinary language, the most extraordinary literature. And there are so many things about the place which are thoroughly extraordinary and admirable. But what I find depressing is the speed with which this excitement that you disappear. And was generated, you know, when you first went to Moscow, then was so easily snuffed out. Is it, can it recur again as quickly as it appeared last time? First of all, I think revolutions in Russia tend to happen quickly. You can see what happened in 1917 twice. And you can see what happened in 1991. I think the thing is, look, people are willing to cede power to dictators when things are good, like the United States right now. If you look at what's happening, things are good. Stock market's up. People are making money, right? And so people are OK with voting to snuff out their own rights, so to speak. That's the compromise you make. Where people are not OK with it is when all of a sudden they're not getting the good life that was promised to them. So the Putin bargain is, I deliver you a good life, right? And you basically get out of my way. Let me do what I want. In the midst of that bargain, Putin started this war. And this war has gone off track for him. And so now, five years into the war, the question is, and this is my whole job, right? Trying to help create that inflection point again, that crisis point. What would make the Russian people say enough? And so Putin seems to think that one of the things that might do it is a general mobilization. And so he's tried to avoid it. He did it once. But he did it very early in the war, when people had no idea what they were in for. So there wasn't a lot of protest, but 400,000 people left the country. And then he stopped doing it. He emptied the prisons out instead, put the prison army under the leadership of Prigozhin. And like an old scene out of Roman history, right? Prigozhin marches his prisoner army on Moscow. So that didn't work out too well. Plus, there aren't many more prisoners to go. So then he started bribing everybody to enlist. And paying this huge amount of money to get people from the middle of nowhere to enlist. And now we've starved Russia of money through sanctions. There isn't a lot of money to go around. There's a certain point at which they're recruiting now, which isn't replacing their losses. So it looks like if Putin wants to take land, he's going to have to do a general mobilization. And if he does a general mobilization, how do the Russians react to that? And what if it's worse than a general mobilization? What if it's a general mobilization coupled with nobody between the ages of 20 and 45 can leave Russia without permission, so that 400,000 people don't leave? And so we're all just trying to push towards this point where Putin has to do something that could really threaten his popularity. Because what hasn't happened is drafting the young of Moscow and St. Petersburg. And I tell my friends this in Russia, and I mean it, I say, "I love your kids." But my job is to get them drafted. That's my job, because that's what it takes to get you on the street. When the comfort breaks down, when having no choice breaks down, when affluent people's children may have to go to war and nobody can travel, that's when people go, "Hey, wait a minute, maybe ceding this power wasn't a great idea." So we're trying to get it there. And by the way, if Putin is removed from power because of something like that, that doesn't mean we're going to get a nice guy. I mean, we may get another pretty hard-to-get guy. But what we're going to be is out of the war, which is a step in the right direction. And eventually people will think. People will think, "Who led us to this?" I mean, with Nazi Germany, fine, we had to flatten the place. We needed an unconditional surrender. We're not going to get that here. We're not even aiming for that here. What we're aiming for is a breakdown in the quality of life and the safety of average Russians to the point where they say, "Why are we here?" You seem to be saying that we are actually quite close to a tipping point. We may be close to a tipping point. For some reason, he seems to be waiting until after the Duma elections in late September. I don't know why Duma elections really matter because it's all a joke at the moment anyway. Maybe he fears that if he did the mobilization before that, then they wouldn't be a joke anymore. But in any case, I think he's perfectly capable of doing a mobilization and sending 400,000 people to war. The question is what happens if there haven't been any gains in a year and we're still at war. I think people will tolerate a general mobilization for a month, two months, six months. But if Ukraine can hold, then I think Europe will give them the money necessary to hold. We get to that point. I mean, one of the things that I'm more afraid of, because I'm not afraid of a general mobilization. I'd like a general mobilization to occur, so we push it. What I'm more afraid of is what if Putin doesn't do that? What if he decides that his medium term goal is simply to hold what he has and continue to bomb Ukrainian cities with long range missiles, take out their infrastructure and minimize the loss of life and see if the Ukrainians can handle that for a year or two. That's actually more risky for the West because then he doesn't do this huge mobilization that makes him tremendously unpopular. So we'll see. But I think we're pushing him to the point where he might have to make a very unpopular decision. And then depending on how long the status quo stays with that, he may be gone or he may do something else like actually make a peace that we can accept. Those points you make about the comfort of the average Russian and the generational changes points out always speaks to people about when it comes to the future of Russia. Because in the mid to late 2000s, you know, Internet is fast. Homes are warm. Everything's easy. They've got a very modern society. People who haven't visited don't quite realize. But with the bombing of these wild berries depot, which are like Amazon depots, if that would happen anywhere in, you know, major cities in the US, if energy prices start becoming difficult, energy is currently being rationed. That's a big thing. But the youth factor is so huge. Anybody who's met Russians currently exiles outside Russia. I've got lots of friends in Dubai, London, etc. They're avoiding a draft. They're avoiding mobilization. Of course, of course they are. And I think you're right. That is the key catalyst that changes the older generation. If their youth get drafted. It does make me question, though, whether because, you know, China, India, they've got youth problems at the moment with Gen Z out on the street. China, not so much, but India, certainly. It makes me think generationally in like 20, 30 years from now, those who remember the mobilization post Putin, whether that is where the future of Russia lies further down the track. I wanted to ask you about the 300 billion in frozen funds that you want and a lot of people want. The West to donate to Ukraine, which is frozen funds from Russian sanctioned money. It sounds like you say you think we're closer to that. And that will obviously enormously help the Ukraine war and restoration effort. The frozen 300, approximately 300 billion dollars in Russian government money is taxpayer money. So it's nothing to do with the oligarchs. And so the question is, what do you do with it? So what's the first thing is, is that there's only five billion of it or so in the US. We think there might be eight billion pounds in the UK, but the UK has not disclosed what it's holding. And there's approximately 220 billion euro of this money in Europe, of which 190 billion is held in Belgium in Euroclear. And then there's a very large chunk in Japan also undisclosed. So when we look at what's going on right now, the people with the biggest problem other than Ukraine are the EU. I mean, for the EU, Ukraine is also an existential question. It's an existential question because if Russia reaches its goals and conquers Ukraine, which let's admit its original goal was to conquer both coasts of Ukraine and put in a puppet government on a land on a small landlocked country in the middle there. Right. If Russia realizes that goal, Ukraine is going to be a bit like the occupied territories now. Right. They've all been basket cases except for Crimea. And now Crimea is turning into a basket case. So you're going to have a failed state. A failed state in the middle of Europe if Russia realizes its goals with a refugee problem that dwarfs anything like they've ever had under modern times. And the EU realizes that they have to avoid that. They also realize you've got to understand that the mentality of Russia right now and Russians, what Putin has built. Right. They see 24 hours a day Ukrainian Nazis, the West against us, all their talk show. Let's drop the bomb. Let's bomb America. Let's bomb London. Right. No sane government promotes that stuff, except this is what the Russian government is promoting. The Russian government is not prepared to do any of this stuff. For sure. two reasons. One is we all saw Vladimir Putin during COVID. He sat, you know, 20 feet away, 30 feet away from Macron. This is a guy who doesn't want to die. This is a guy who fears death, who lives in a bunker, who won't meet his own people. And he realizes if there's an atomic war, he dies. That doesn't mean we don't die, but he knows he dies. And the most important thing for Putin is not dying. The second thing is Big Brother Xi has told him not to use atomic weapons. And so if he uses an atomic weapon, even a small one, Russia gets cut off and Russia collapses because the only thing keeping them alive is that. So we have to look at what happens if Russia wins conventionally, right? And what happens is, I said this to a bunch of German students when they said, why do you think it's so important to defend Ukraine? I said, let me just ask you a question, right? I mean, you're all from Germany. I said, would your outlook be. Would it be any different if Hitler won? Would your world outlook be any. It's not going to be, we realize our aims, we're stopping. It's going to be Moldova, Estonia, the Baltics, restoring greater Russia. And then either NATO is going to be at war, or at least the EU is going to be at war. So the EU understands completely that Russia needs to be stopped where it is. So now we come to the money, right? How do we use the money to stop Russia where it is? And who's most at risk by not doing it? Europe. So Europe has the most money, and Europe is most at risk of a loss. And so there are two ways to take this money. Essentially, we have this doctrine which we will call sovereign equality, not sovereign immunity. Sovereign immunity simply says that you can't sue another country in your courts. So you can't sue Russia in a New York court. No jury. No jury. Sovereign equality is the principle that states don't steal from each other. We don't take each other's money, right? That is a part of international law. We also have a piece of international law, which is you don't commit the crime of aggression, which is to take your neighbor's land, which is what Russia has done. So Russia has committed the crime of aggression. The United Nations General Assembly has ruled that Russia has committed aggression, that Russia should stop where it is, and that Russia must pay reparations. We also have an ICJ, a judgment to that effect. So what we know is that when this war is over, if the state of Ukraine still exists, Russia is going to have to pay reparations. So the question becomes, why wait? Why wait to make Russia pay to the end of the war when Ukraine needs the money now? The money that's sitting in Europe, which has been frozen under a European law that says we will not give it back until Russia pays reparations. Which means it's held forever, essentially. Why not just give that money to Ukraine as a payment of reparations under international law and give Russia a credit towards its bill for the same amount? You owe HMRC 10,000 pounds or IRS. The bank garnishes your money, sends the 10,000 to the tax thing. Your tax bill is 10,000 less. Nobody's stolen your money. We can do that under international law. The Europeans have chosen not to do it because they're afraid, in a sense, that countries will say, oh, you know, if you're willy-nilly taking people's money, then we're not going to buy your bonds anymore. Now, I think that's a crazy argument because we've already frozen. Not only have we frozen the European money until Russia pays, which is the same as taking it, but we've also borrowed against it. We've lent Ukraine 50 billion U.S. dollars, the G7. All the G7 countries came together. dollars, the G7. dollars, the G7. And made loans from 5 billion to 2 billion against essentially the profit being generated by this money, which will take 35 to 40 years to pay. So we've already kind of saying we're not giving this money back for 30 or 40 years at least till we get paid. And we're not giving it back unless you pay Ukraine. So let's stop kidding ourselves. This money is never going back to Russia ever. So what the EU has done is come up with another with a brilliant workaround. How do you use the money and not take it? And this is what I think we're going to see in 2027, the end of 2026 and 2027. And it's called a reparations loan, but it has nothing to do with reparations. And here's how it works. When you put a thousand dollars into a bank, it becomes the bank's money. And we all know how banks make money. They lend the money out. That's what they do, right? So you don't expect the bank to keep your thousand dollars somewhere. All you have is what's called a claim, a claim that the bank owes you a thousand dollars under these terms. And basically those terms are a thousand dollars plus this rate of interest. So all of the money, you don't freeze money. No money is frozen. What you freeze is the ability of Russia to use it. We've told the banks with our sanctions, don't listen to any instructions from Russia. Russia wants to make a withdrawal? No. Want to transfer? No. That's what sanctions are. No money is frozen. So right now in EuroClear Bank by itself, there's 190 billion Euro of EuroClear's money. It's not Russia's money. It's EuroClear's money. EuroClear can't lend that money out because if sanctions were dropped, we'd need $190 billion tomorrow, which is a little hard to come up with, right? So what does EuroClear do? EuroClear invests the money every night, just one night investment. And EuroClear made 5.2 billion Euro the first year and a half, two years of the war doing that, which it put in its pocket because it's its money. And what we're doing now is we're going to put it in its pocket. And what we're doing now is we're saying, okay, no more money in EuroClear's pocket. We're going to take that money and put it towards paying this 50 billion in loans that we've done. And in 45 years, there'll be enough interest to pay it down. But the Europeans have this new plan and it's brilliant. Why don't they just borrow the whole thing? The EU borrow the whole 190 billion from EuroClear today, interest-free, right? And loan it to Ukraine also interest-free. And just say, if Russia ever pays you reparations, pay us back. Now, if you think about what's happened, that's your, and they do one more thing. They give a EU guarantee. That's like treasury bonds to EuroClear saying, if for any reason you need to pay Russia, the EU will pay you 190 billion at the expense of the EU taxpayer. You will have that money if you need it. So you haven't taken Russia's money because you've taken, all you've done is taken 190 billion of EuroClear's money and you've made EuroClear's solid enough so that if it ever has to pay Russia on 10 minutes notice, it can. And that's their plan. That's called the reparations loan. And there was, they proposed it in December. And what happened was Orban was still in power. He said, I'm not going to support it. Belgium said, what if, you know, what if the Russians sue us and this is illegal? We didn't even do this to the Nazis in World War II. And by the way, whenever De Wever speaks in Belgium, and he's a great speaker and he's kind of funny, but you got to look deeper than what he's saying. The way the money works in Belgium is like this, 190 billion, sitting in a bank, earning approximately 3 billion, 4 billion interest a year. Belgium taxes that. It takes a billion off the top. And then the remaining 3 billion goes to the EU and is used to service all those loans that we gave Ukraine. And so, Belgium has a 1 billion euro a year interest in keeping that money where it is. The amount of money that Belgium contributes to the war effort is less than the billion. So, they're profiting off having this money. And so, the big conversation coming up in Europe is going to be when all these objections came up is they said, Ukraine needs the money quick. We're going to borrow 90 billion on the market at European taxpayer expense. We're going to lend that 90 billion to Ukraine. They've done that already. That's going to carry Ukraine to 2027. But in 2027, you can bet if this thing isn't over and Europe has to choose between reaching into its own taxpayer's pocket or borrowing that money interest-free from Euroclear, this question of the reparations loan is going to be back. I mean, I thought that was very close now to being resolved. And that, you know, the Belgian ability to do that is going to be back. And I think that's going to be back. The Belgian ability to stand out against what is a pretty unanimous decision by the other EU members is, let's say, being eroded. So, I mean, I would have expected, I mean, I think it's a great description you've given us of the conundrum. And of course, it's a vitally important issue. But, you know, my prediction is it will happen in 2027 along the lines you've described. Richard, I think you're right. One of the interesting things here is that when the EU proposed this reparations loan legislation, it was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very important legislation. It was, there are two very important things about it. One is it only requires qualified majority to pass. So, it's, so Belgium and Slovakia could vote against and it could easily pass. And it's still on the books as a proposal. So, it can be revived at any time. In December, the EU simply didn't want to go through this big confrontation. It wanted the money quickly. And so, it just did it and borrowed the 90 billion at taxpayer expense. But I think you're correct that the next time it comes to head, we will get over this. Nobody's talking about it now because we have the money, right? We just, we just appropriated the money in December and the money is going to take us into 2027. But you can be very sure that if we're still fighting when this money starts to go down, that we're going to be right back here. We will we will overcome Belgium. One of the things Russia does is like Russia sues. Right. So Russia has sued Euroclear. But think about this for a minute. I give the bank a thousand pounds and now I sue my bank because I find out that my bank has made a loan to so and so. Right. I don't have a right to do that. I mean, I can get into court, but I'm not going to win. So one of the thing is educating European lawmakers now about how absolutely toothless any Russian lawsuit is so that people can just laugh them off and not pay attention to them when making these political decisions. There's so much we need to cover in the time we've got remaining. I just want to talk to you about other countries relations with Russia, specifically the US to start. Given you are American, you now live in London. You do come back and forth to the US. You've been huge on party, obviously huge. Huge bits of law through Congress, not to mention the Magnitsky Act, which we'll get to. But I just want to talk about the current the current US administration and its views on Russian relations. Obviously, it was oscillated throughout both Trump's terms. But I was struck by your description of Yeltsin and, quote unquote, the family during the time of the late 90s in Russia, using sort of his family's enrichment from Yeltsin's time in power, kickbacks awarded for renovating the Kremlin. There's some obvious comparisons to be made. And I wanted to talk to you about that and also what you felt when you the first time you heard Trump using the term lawfare when he was coming up to his reelection. Yeah. So, first of all, there's there are similarities between Yeltsin and Putin and Trump. When the reform started, basically after after after the Soviet Union fell apart, the whole idea was let's let's let's privatize everything. Let's get all the assets into the hands of people, because once people own stuff, they won't give it up. So the idea was if we. Privatize everything quickly, the communists will never come back to power. The problem was that privatizing everything really quickly in a country where nobody understands how to act in a commercial relationship. Right. Nobody understands inflation. Nobody understands costs. I mean, business had been criminalized until right before that means that there'll only be a very small part of the population that understands how to grab all that stuff, which is what occurred. So the oligarchs grabbed all that stuff. They became very rich and everybody else became dirt. Poor and you have this Congress opposing President Yeltsin and the Congress was saying, slow down the reforms or stop the reforms. And finally, the Congress impeached President Yeltsin and President Yeltsin didn't leave office. What President Yeltsin did is reminiscent of what President Trump did at the end of his last term. Yeltsin attacked his own Congress. He rolled in the tanks and he shelled the Congress building. He shelled Congress into submission and then he replaced it with a Congress. More favorable to him, which still, by the way, wasn't wasn't Plato. I mean, it actually was a real, surprisingly, a real Congress until Putin came along. So that's a big similarity between Yeltsin and Trump. As far as Putin goes, Putin, look, if you look at the Putin playbook and I said this to a bunch of lawyers in America, I spoke about Putin and Yeltsin for 45 minutes. And then I said, you know, one of things I've learned is democracy is really fragile when you. Pull the nation's leading comedy show off the air because it's making fun of the president. When you attack journalists, when you attack universities, when you weaponize the justice system and then you spin this whole myth that the country was in the garbage can until you became president and it can't survive without you. Rule of law goes out the window and democracy follows quickly afterwards. And then I looked at it and now if you're wondering why I just switched to talking. About President Trump after 45 minutes of Putin, I'm not. This is the president. This is this is what Putin did. And it just so happens that Trump has done all of these things also. So if that disturbs you, it should. Right. So these are the similarities we're looking at right now. And it's very disturbing what's happening in the United States. And I keep trying to tell Republicans you can't vote on policy alone. I understand some people don't like abortion and some people don't like marriage equality. And some people want to ensure their guns and please vote on those issues. But when you rip apart the system so that it doesn't work anymore to get what you want right now, that system is going to turn on you. That system is not going to protect anybody. And we lose the most important thing we have as America, which is the functional system of American democracy. James, looking at the future in Russia, you know, with things in mind like the murder of Magnitsky and Navalny. It would strike me that it's very difficult for, as it were, any initiative to arise, which is a significant opposition to Putin's regime. Although I agree with you, revolutions come early, you know, without some infrastructure, without some organization, because that doesn't really happen historically spontaneously. I mean, is there any evidence that you see in Russia? Of any organization at all, which has been, you know, not suppressed, that is able to fulfill that role if things begin to go wrong, let's say with mobilization in the way that you described. And I think that's a very likely social and political scenario. Yeah, I do not see an organization for the simple reason that it is illegal to have such an organization. It is illegal. You go to you go to. A prison if you say Russia is going to have serious financial crises if it continues its policies and we keep up our sanctions. But what I do see is that it's not necessary to have that organization. I see one of three things happening. One is Putin realizing that he's getting close to that Qaddafi moment and deciding to declare a victory and just make a peace that's acceptable to Ukraine in the EU. Or I see people around Putin pulling the famous Russian Swan Lake maneuver where Putin gets kidnapped or Putin gets killed by his own. And we watch Swan Lake until we figure out until we're told who the new guy is. The other thing that could happen that doesn't need any organization behind it is spontaneous riots. I think they're less likely. But I just don't. If you look at the macroeconomics of Russia, it can't hold like this much longer. It's got breathing room. Putin can thank Donald Trump for the Iran war and jacking up the price of energy so that Russia has got some breathing room. But even with these jacked up prices, Russia is not able it won't be able to keep its macroeconomic stability ticking along. Can it stay in the war? Yes, but not without not without making all these things that cause unrest happen. So I think that's the way it goes. I don't think it's going to be any NGO that rises. If there aren't any anymore. In the book, you talk about Medvedev, the interim leader between Putin's lead, the sort of very staged and coordinated chess move that was. And you talk about him asserting himself that maybe if he had if he'd chosen, quote, to become his own man, Russia might walk a path towards a functional democracy. Question being, do you think Russia has it in itself to be a functional democracy? I mean, it really I mean, it's called czarism, communism, a very brief attempt at a functional democracy. And now we've got what it is today. I mean, a country of that size, is there always going to be a strong man leader? You know, people say that Russia needs a strong man to lead. I don't I don't buy it. All right. I don't think that Russians are inherently different than fundamentally people want the same things. Right. People people want to love their parents if possible and love their children if possible and have a good life and have a better life for their children. And for most of the world, we've decided that the way. To do that is through democracy. That democracy is what's brought prosperity and fairness. Now, there are parts of the world that have managed to get away with not having a democracy and increasing people's living standards greatly. Russia was one of them, not because Vladimir Putin was a genius, like he likes to tell us, but because the price of oil and energy went through the roof right after Yeltsin resigned and handed him the country. So he's credited with this this move. Russians. They're fast learners and they had a kind of they had a kind of democracy under Yeltsin. We had a parliament after Yeltsin shelled it. Surprisingly, we had a parliament that wouldn't do everything that Yeltsin wanted it to do. We had a Supreme Court that would go against Yeltsin. All of that stuff was ended by Putin. But do I think they can learn it? Sure, they can learn it and they can get it back. But it it takes a crisis to create a desire. Can I just follow up with one comment? I mean, I. I could say the misfortune or the good fortune to meet both Gaddafi and Putin in my previous professional life. And I think what both suffered from was no one would say no to them. Sitting with Gaddafi, listening to a two hour diatribe, you know, was an interesting experience because you understood in a way his isolation and his detachment. from reality, and it strikes me, I mean, as you've already indicated, that. Putin himself is wandering a long, long way from reality now. Just from my own experience, and I'm not going to say who or when or why, but I've sat in meetings where people have said across the table to a British prime minister, don't be so blank, stupid, prime minister, which is actually a very encouraging experience because it brings home to you the fact that we live in a world where you can say that to the prime minister and no one pats an eyelid and the prime minister says, oh, yeah, maybe I'm being a bit silly here and I need to reconsider that. It strikes me that that element now, it certainly disappeared completely in Libya, and I would guess it's almost completely disappeared in Russia too. I think you're right. I mean, we saw the Security Council meeting three days before the invasion where everybody was expected to say something, and even then it was obvious these people didn't know that the war was coming in three days. Putin? Putin is isolated. I mean, it reminds me of, I don't remember, there was a movie called History of the World Part One, right? And you've got Louis XVI wandering around the grounds of Versailles and somebody comes up to him and goes, sire, the peasants are revolting. And he looks at him and goes, oh, do you find them to be so too? Right? I mean, he's in his own world, Putin, with his fake meetings and his palaces, and he's got, and nobody gives him real, real input because the cost of real input is a loss of your job and possibly a loss of your freedom. So I don't think he's making rational decisions anymore. He's making decisions on the information that people are willing to tell him. And it's by choice because people understand that you can't tell him the truth. He wants what he wants. You know, I mean, people always ask me, you know, how do you explain the war in Ukraine? I mean, the war in Ukraine is the simplest thing in the world. Putin took it because he thinks it's his. He thinks it should belong to Russia. You know, forget all this, like all the story about the NATO or Ukrainian Nazis. I mean, it's all garbage. I mean, it's just greater Russia. Yeah, he, you read his piece and it's very, it's very similar to Hitler. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf and talked about the room they needed to get, which happened to be out in Ukraine. And people put that aside and didn't think about it. When Putin wrote that, with that speech, it was pretty obvious, or that treaty or whatever you want to call it, that essay, it was pretty obvious what he wanted. He wants Ukraine because he thinks it's theirs. Just building on from Sir Richard, touching on the UK there, because obviously you're speaking to two Brits. You now live in London in exile with your extended, as you said, Russian family in exile. You've got lots of friends that you've arranged to come over to the UK. So clearly you feel it is the safe haven that it is. In the book, you deliver quite a stark assessment of a few years ago during the state's sanctioned murder of Peri Pletchny in London and the failure of the UK government at the time to investigate that. It was quite a stark assessment. It was quite a stark assessment of the UK. Then the Novichok incident happened in Salisbury. Then, of course, the war and things feel very, very different in the UK now. Just in terms of your personal safety, because you can't overlook that when you write a book like this, the Russian government goes after people who write books like this and they have done state-sponsored murders in the UK. How do you feel about your personal safety these days? How do you handle that? How do you feel about your life in the UK? So, you know, I haven't been one. I haven't been one to worry too much about personal safety after I got out of Russia. That's not to say that I'm not worried that somebody might try to kill me or not. It's more of you can't be half of an activist. On the personal thing, I just do what I do. On the what guarantees my safety, nothing. Putin kills who he wants to kill and can clearly kill people in the United Kingdom. He has chosen not to go after Bill Brantley. He hasn't gone after Bill Browder yet or me yet. I mean, certainly he's tried to extradite Bill Browder so that they can bring him back to Russia and kill him in a prison cell like Sergei Magnitsky. But he hasn't chosen to send assassins out against us yet. He's got his hands full with Zelensky. I mean, maybe one day he'll go out there and get to other people on his list. But, you know, I just don't feel that's his aim at the moment. Plus, you know, there's no real reason to piss off anymore. We're people than they are. But but I I don't think the United Kingdom is capable of ensuring my safety. I'm grateful to the United Kingdom for giving myself or I mean, I could have gone back to America, but for giving my Russian friends and my extended Russian family a safe haven where they have a shot at a nice life in a democratic country. And so I'm very grateful to what was at the time Her Majesty's government for doing that. I don't think I could be protected any more in the UK than I would be in the US. Putin, he wants to kill you. You're you're you're going to get poisoned. It's a sensitive question. And thank you for answering. You have one big advantage. You're not actually Russian. This is true. Putin tends to kill his own and people he feels have betrayed him, whereas we never owed him any loyalty. I mean, I don't think anybody owes him loyalty, but he seems to confuse or conflate. Loyalty to Russia as loyalty to Vladimir Putin. So I just want to ask about obviously your close friend, your employee, Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered in jail and to which inspired the Magnitsky Act. What do you think he would have made of the Magnitsky Act today and what it's achieved? I mean, I think he'd be happy and proud. But also, you know, there's this I try to tell the very human story of Sergei. He worked for me, but he worked with me. I sat in an office with Sergei. Sergei for ten plus years. I watched his children grow up. I knew his wife eventually worked for me as well. He didn't know he was risking his life when he did these things. He was very sure. And I had these conversations with him. He was very sure in Russian law because we we used to win all the time. I mean, we would fight the Russian government and we would win. But, you know, it's different when you're fighting the tax inspectorate. We're the tax inspectorate says your client owes more money than it does. That's you're kind of in an impartial machine. And even if there are some tax inspectors who were asking for bribes or they were going to start this process, they still couldn't make the whole they couldn't make the whole system railroad you. But what you have today with the weaponization of the justice system is somewhere where you can have the whole system railroad you from the from the investigators to the prosecutors to the judges so that the outcomes never end. And Sergei really never realized that he was in that situation until he was almost a year through prison. And he would be holding to these hearings where he would then realize he would never get to speak that that his skills as a as a tax lawyer, because he was a licensed auditor, which gives you the right to to practice tax law were meaningless. So if you if you kind of think of a situation where you train your whole life to do something and you're the best in your field and then all of a sudden nothing matters anymore, your whole skill is meaningless because because the whole system is just rigged. That's what it's like to be a lawyer in Russia or what Sergei learned he was in. So he was in this position of complete helplessness. So I think, sure, I think he would be happy, you know, if you could know that your death counted so that the people who do these kinds of things to people face some kind of of punishment and that there is some consequence. But but, you know, in the big picture, I mean, he lost his life and his family lost him and we lost him. And it's just there's no monument. I mean, it makes us feel better and proud to have done this in his name, but there's nothing we can do to fix it. Jameson, we always ask our guests what one decision they're looking out for. We want to ask you that. What one decision are you looking out for as it pertains to Russia in the news and in what's currently happening? Right. So that one decision is watch Russia from the end of September when the parliamentary elections are over. And let's see if between the end of September and the spring of 2027, whether Putin launches a mobilisation. That's going to be because if he does that, we're in a new world. Thank you very much. For joining us on the podcast, Jameson Firestone. Hey, thank you for having me. And really, the biggest compliment you paid me is you both read my book, which is and liked it, which is really great. So much. I'm going to recommend it to everyone. I know it's so good, Jameson. I really couldn't put it down. It's been an extraordinarily interesting discussion. Well, Sir Richard, that conversation certainly delivered what we thought, because he's just got such a huge breadth of knowledge about Russia and having lived there for almost 20 years and his whole extended family basically being Russian now, but also, you know, what he's practised, what he's achieved with his law and also his colourful family history. I mean, what takeaway did you have from the conversation? Well, his extraordinarily developed understanding of things like the reparations loan that the EU will probably grant to Ukraine in due course, which, of course, are crucially important. And I thought his focus on the issue of mobilisation. I've not heard anyone give exactly that analysis of Putin's position. Putin's possible political fate. But I think he might actually be right. And it certainly gives me a different, quite precise, but different perspective to think about in trying to calculate what the future is likely to be in 27, 28. Ukraine is coming to a head. And something, it can't just continue like it is, there will be some point of breakage in the system. And you know, the worrying issue is how much the Ukrainians can stand if they're just submitted to continuous aerial bombardment. But the history of aerial bombardment is that tough populations like the Ukrainians can withstand for a long time. I agree with you because of his legal profession, his advocacy and the work he does now, he's so good at breaking down and getting people to understand things like reparations and the loans and the corporate raiding that happened. He unpacks that so well in the book. And explains it so clearly to the average reader. I feel, as an interviewer, I always feel bad asking questions about, very personal questions about his personal safety and how he feels. But you can't overlook that. And he does actually talk about it at the end of the book about how the publishers have supported him because obviously other writers of books about Russia have been sued. And it's a really complicated thing to do. So it takes an act of enormous bravery to speak the way he does, to talk the way he does. He's a human rights activist now. And as he said, you can't keep one foot in and one foot out. And I'm glad he feels. At home in the UK. That pleases me. Yes, I agree. Well, Sir Richard, we have both shared our thoughts. And now it is time to hear yours. As ever, we've received many thoughtful emails and comments from all of you across the globe. Olly Mayo sent us an email and he said he looks forward to our episodes every week. Good to hear that, Olly. We appreciate that. He also asked a few questions, Sir Richard, relating to Ukraine and drone warfare. Very relevant to today's conversation. Olly says, quote, we've seen in Ukraine that the two most dangerous weapons are hypersonic missiles and drone swarms. I imagine that in future conflicts, thousands of drones could be deployed at once. He goes on to ask how effective electronic jamming interceptors or other existing technologies would be in such situations to counter the threat. Quote, and more crucially, he asks, how well equipped and prepared is NATO and especially the UK to defend itself against a drone swarm? I don't know if you've got the answer to that, Sir Richard. Well, I don't have the absolute answer because it's a complicated question. We are, I think, going to do a podcast on the future. We're going to do a podcast on the future. We're going to do a podcast on the future of a war in the coming weeks. And of course, that will look in more detail at the drone problem. Let me just quote a recent British Army exercise, which was a conflict staged with a group of Ukrainian drone specialists and the UK's response to that. And all I would say is that the British Army, which can be very expert, lost quite badly to the Ukrainians. So that's my of the results of the exercise when it was assessed afterwards. There's no question that Europe's armies have understood the overwhelming importance of developing drone technology for a future European conflict. Let's hope that there isn't one. But on the other hand, they have to be prepared. And I think the whole issue is the speed with which this technology is developing. It's not just the technology. Of course, it's training the military units, who are going to use it. And I think in that respect, at the moment, NATO is almost certainly lagging behind the scenes. There is huge, of course, battlefield expertise and experience available in Ukraine. To imagine that the Ukrainian army, whilst they're fighting a major war, can then go out and train Europe quickly is, I think, misleading and apocryphal. But it will happen over time. The answer to the question is, it's an issue that has to be focused on by all the main European militaries, even the smaller ones. And they have to learn quickly. And there is, let's say, a gap in the defence market, not for the drones themselves, but for training the operators. I think that's what it boils down to. You're going to want to listen to that future episode, Olly, and the rest of you on the future of war. Because Olly followed up saying the UK's defence investment plan is supposed to help us fight the next war. But are we overlooking the war after that? The next, next war. What do you think of that, Sir Richard? Yeah, that's a complicated question. And I think governments, however sophisticated, are not good at next, next problems. I mean, they do think about the next problem. But then when it comes to the next, next problem, they're usually having to, as it were, pull in futurist gurus from the universities and academia and talk to them about those issues. So there is a certain amount of thought. Going into these issues, how much planning is a different matter, because it's a question of affordability. But I think the next, next problem are the application of things like quantum computing when it is scalable. And of course, AI to the battlefield. I mean, AI is happening already quite fast. So the digitisation of the battlefield is advanced, but probably not as advanced as it should be in countries which are not actively fighting the war. So I think it's Ukraine digitised their battlefield very fast. And, you know, beyond that, I think the issues that arise are, of course, the dimension of space as an area of new conflict because of the importance of satellite, satellite surveillance and interception carried out from space. So how do you knock out your opponent's capabilities? So those are some of my spontaneous thoughts. Plenty more to be explored in that episode that's going to come up in the next few weeks on The Future of War. So do stay tuned for that. And if you've got a question like Olly did there, which Sir Richard so kindly answered, do email us [email protected]. And we may just address your question on the podcast. That is all for this episode. Do join us every Thursday for more exciting conversation about world events that goes beyond the usual headlines. Subscribe to One Decision on YouTube so you never miss out on a conversation putting the global news in context. Email us at [email protected] for more conversations with leading decision makers and thinkers. Do check out One Decision dot com where you'll find additional commentaries, conversations and explainers. I'm Roseanna Lockwood joined as ever by Sir Richard. Thank you for listening. 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