Douglas Murray: observation

Transcript context

…Behind that, isn’t there always a kinetic threat? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, you disappear some booksellers and students are protesting, of course. But to go back to this, yeah, of course. Okay. The countries believe they have or would like to have spheres of influence. I do think at some point that the so-called realists on that have to try to decide how much leeway that allows you to give to a fairly rapacious regime. I mean, it’s not the easiest calculation always to make. You have to work out whether or not, for instance, it is true that if Putin had managed to go all the way to Kiev in the first weeks of the war in ’22, he would’ve gone straight on to other places. And maybe he would’ve done, maybe he would’ve taken his time, maybe he wouldn’t have done. And this is a very fine calculation that changes every week, let alone every year. My friends in Georgia I thought were wildly off the mark when they were believing that after 2008 they could get, for instance, either NATO membership or EU membership. And I thought that was completely unlikely. And I still think it’s unlikely and almost suddenly undesirable for Europe and for NATO, because you’ve got to be very careful. And obviously, this is one of the issues with Ukraine and has been since the ’90s, are you going to set up a trip wire to start World War 3? And that’s not a small thing to consider. So what do you think the peace deal might look like, and what does the path to peace look like in Ukraine in the coming weeks and months?…

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