[00:00:00] Due to the themes of this podcast, listener discretion is advised.
[00:00:08] Lock your doors.
[00:00:09] Close the blinds.
[00:00:10] Change your passwords.
[00:00:11] This is Secrets and Spies. under circumstances not yet known, he may well have been poisoned, he may well have been beaten to death, or he may well have died of natural causes due to neglect. The Russian authorities refused to release his body and until it is independently seen, it will be difficult to verify exactly how he died. One other note as well,
[00:01:40] Edward was selected by the Liberal Democrat Party
[00:01:42] as a prospective parliamentary candidate
[00:01:45] for the constituency of the death of Alexei Navalny, and I was wondering if you could give us a bit of sort of background about Navalny and how he came to be seen by Putin as a threat to his leadership.
[00:03:00] I think Xi Jinping's of backbone of his effort. He also did run for president. He had good ties with other parts of the Russian opposition
[00:04:20] who disagreed with him often on politics. So the sort of lefty feminists of Pussy Riot killed with a single blow to the heart, which is a KGB specialty. But until his body is released, and maybe even after his body is released from the authorities, we won't really know. In a way, I think it's not the point. Once you are in the prison system, you are in the custody, both in a negative and positive sense of is appalling, and there are many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in appalling conditions in the Russian penal system. It's not always as bad as this. This was a sort of harsh regime, penal colony. In other places, it's monotonous food and sort about Putin, misplaced about the opposition's ability to derail Putin, misplaced about Medvedev when he came in, misplaced, then again, another loss of opposition, misplaced. I'm optimistic,
[00:08:20] in many ways, about Ukraine's ability to roll back Russian invasion last summer. That was Swedes and maybe the Norwegians and the Danes on a good day. There's the countries that won't fight and are profoundly against this, and that would include Ireland, the famous free rider, the Austrians who are money laundering, cesspit, the Hungarians who are in the Kremlin's pockets, and a whole load of other countries that just don't see it as their business. Then there's the muddled middle counter argument that in order to be hot dog, the world's most important and powerful and therefore safest and probably richest country, the United States needs allies and allies are perfect. But if you don't have your European allies, you have no chance of standing up to China.
[00:11:00] Yeah, yeah, indeed, indeed. One sort of on that sort of topic, I mean, do you think the
[00:11:05] general public is up to speed with their own crimes in the colonial
[00:12:23] past. But it's not necessarily a great spinestiff when it comes to standing up against real list approach. And then you've just got plain old greed, which is very important. Indeed. Yeah, a lot of people have made a huge amount of money out of servicing Russian kleptocrats, and they would love that to continue. Yeah, indeed. Well, that kind of maybe ties in a little bit to how the West maybe should respond to Navalny's death, because we've talked in the past about sort of Russian money within
[00:13:42] the UK banking system. And obviously, there are individuals in the West who still profit from And it'd be a bit like Rick in Casablanca saying, I know he are, your cash is good at the bond, you're lucky, you're served even there. So there's a lot more we could do, but we don't want to do it, because fundamentally, this is all about political will. It's not about means, we're much bigger and richer than Russia. We just choose not to leverage our power and size and wealth against Russia,
[00:15:02] because it's more convenient to keep business as usual. extend its reach deep into the economy as part of making the war economy that's necessary to fight the war, and the sense of international isolation and the world's out to get us. I think there's some legs on this. I think there's several ways change could happen. One is a poach within the Kremlin, where the elite gets fed up with Putin. I think that won't
[00:16:20] happen while the war is supposedly going well. It's catastrophe. You'll see a, I mean, if there's a serious military setbacks in Ukraine and Ukraine's force, you'll see refugees in very large numbers heading East from cities. If we have cities like Kharkiv and Dniepro fall or even worse Kiev and Odessa,
[00:17:42] that's millions of people on the move because they don't want to stick around to
[00:17:45] see what life's like under Russian occupation.
[00:18:45] are defensible only with the full weight of the West behind them. We already know, we haven't really got America, and what's left in Europe isn't terribly impressive. So I
[00:18:49] think if I was Putin, that would be very high up my to-do list. If that happens, then that's
[00:18:55] the end of NATO. And we face a Europe again of the 1930s.
[00:19:00] Yeah, definitely. And it doesn't really hopeless. And I think that Trump would be, I mean, in a way Trump's irrationality
[00:20:22] is actually quite a deterrent
[00:20:24] with this extremely sort of finely grained nuanced approach
[00:21:25] decisively because we didn't start our artillery and barrels and ammunition production fast at the beginning of the war.
[00:21:27] We've shown ourselves fundamentally divided and scared, and that's a bad thing to show.
[00:21:33] I'm quite pessimistic about that, I'm afraid.
[00:21:35] I think that the Republicans in Congress feel that Trump's against this, so we're against
[00:21:43] it.
[00:21:44] They don't fully understand. And I feel that
[00:23:01] we're very how that goes.