Douglas Murray: evaluation

Transcript context

…And probably, all four territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson. You couldn’t lay any of that out because it has to be negotiated on. And I think the ease with which non-Ukrainians are currently speaking about the Ukrainian ceding territory is concerning because these territories include hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who do not want to live under Putin’s rule, and people who have families in the rest of Ukraine and much more. And I recently interviewed children who had managed to get out of the Russian occupied areas, and it’s brutal for the Ukrainian to be growing up in that territory. So, when people say, “Well, obviously Donetsk has to be given to Putin.” I think that is not as easier a thing if you are in Ukraine as it is if you’re sitting in New York say. There is a school of thought that obviously President Trump to some extent was floating in recent weeks, which is that if a deal is done, a business deal in relation to minerals or anything else, you get a buffer zone of American businesses and investment. And therefore American business people in the region, which would effectively warn Putin not to invade. I don’t follow that idea because not least there were Americans in the regions that were invaded in ’22 and they left fast… … in the regions that were invaded in ’22 and they left fast. And we know from Hong Kong and other places, just because there are international financial interests in the region does not mean that a dictatorship will not, either militarily or covertly, take over. I don’t see American miners as being an effective buffer zone against Putin. By the way, what did you learn from talking to the children, Ukrainian children from those regions?…

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