Max Seddon

Thanks for having me.

Well, the Russians have tried to play this down and express cautious optimism. But I think looking at what Trump's team have said and Trump himself, this has really gone about as well for them as it possibly could have. And the Russians didn't really have to do anything to make it happen. They haven't budged an inch.

any of Putin's pretty maximalist demands that are more or less unchanged since the start of the war. And the United States has just in a matter of about a week completely fallen into their lap. It's made some major concessions already on U.S. policy, and it appears to be ready to accept a large swathe at the very least of Russian demand.

So I think if you're Russia, you really have got to be pretty thrilled about the way this is going. It's like where we were a month ago and compare it even two weeks ago and compare it to now. It's like two different worlds. The idea that you could have the palace where this is taking place in Riyadh today, you had the US and Russian flags side by side. That was completely inconceivable.

And now it's just the reality we live in.

I think it's very much a message that Russia's way of the world is winning out and that the US seems to share it, which basically means that Ukraine is going to have the worst possible option for Ukraine, foisted on them, and the Europeans are also going to have to deal with it.

What this is really about, if you're Russia, and Putin has been pretty clear on this, is that for all his obsessions with Ukraine, Ukraine has been, in his mind, the pretext to this war, which in mind is really about broader geopolitical confrontation with the West, chiefly the United States. And what he's wanted is some sort of new Yalta conference

if you will, where the great powers can sit down like Roosevelt and Churchill did with Stalin, and they carved up Europe into spheres of influence. And that's very much what he has been pushing for. And it looks like with this very transactional view of the world that Trump has, that he's been able to push the buttons of the U.S. really spectacularly.

I was just watching again just now this clip from the TV spot that the American delegation did where Rubio was saying, we're very excited that this all goes well, that we'll be able to partner with Russia on a whole range of issues. And really, this has been Putin's dream.

This is the message that Russia has been putting out on TV and through all their official mouthpieces throughout this war, that this is really a matter for two great powers to discuss. And that is an enormous triumph for Russia, just the fact that this meeting

even happened is a really gigantic step forward for them back in from the cold and with a seat at the table of great powers, which is where they want to be.

So two things. Firstly, I think it's important just to go back and say very simply what the Russian goals are. They are for Ukraine to cease to exist as a viable state, to be so weak they can't effectively defend itself and not integrate it enough into Ukraine.

Western security architecture, NATO or some NATO substitute that would protect it sufficiently from Russia to ideally have a more pliant leadership. Putin still seems to think that he could have some sort of Moscow-friendly politicians like the ones who ruled Ukraine. for the first 15 years or so of its independence. And again, when Viktor Yanukovych was president in the early 2010s.

And going beyond that to what we just talked about, this new European security architecture, which is really dividing up the world into spheres of influence and rolling back US influence in Europe. And the thing is that, this brings me to a second point,

There are these very maximalist demands, and it is pretty clear from what I hear and from whatever intel appears to be out there that there's no reason for Putin to stop unless he gets what he wants because he is getting a lot of that anyway. He's basically already secured. Even before Trump took power, it wasn't realistic that Ukraine was going to get to NATO.

It wasn't realistic that they were going to... their territories. So it wasn't necessarily that Hegseth was wrong to say that because that assessment isn't that different from what you would have gotten from the Biden administration or your PM ally. But the second point is that these things are supposed to be leveraged because these are policy steps that the United States can take, right?

And what is just extraordinary to me is the U.S. has basically conceded all of that, some of it before negotiations even begun. And again, today, there seems to have been a pretty big focus on the lifting of sanctions and on economic cooperation between Russia and the U.S., this idea that American and Russian companies can invest together. Let me remind you that Under U.S.

law right now, most of this is illegal because of sanctions. And you would think that what is the point of sanctions? You could argue a lot, and people have, looking at Russia, Iran, Iraq over the years, Venezuela. about whether sanctions are effective in achieving political goals.

But the whole point of having sanctions, and Trump himself has said this, is that these are supposed to be the carrot. This is the leverage that the United States has for making concessions.

And Keith Kellogg, the special envoy for the conflict, who has been, not only has he been sidelined from talking to Russia, and he wasn't there today, but the White House also let the Kremlin basically announce a personnel decision today. Yuri Yushakov, Putin's foreign policy advisor, said that Kellogg wasn't going to be talking to Russia. He was only going to talk to Ukraine and Europe. And

Trump was going to appoint someone else who was going to be the U.S.-Russia person on Ukraine. He knows this well, and it was a big part of his plan. He made this very clear. But it seems that that has all gone out the window. And that is just what is, I think, the most remarkable thing about this is that evidently Trump wants to get a deal as quickly as he can, and he isn't very interested in

in using any of the leverage that the United States has. And if you're Russia, you can't be anything but thrilled about that.

so let's separate Western and Eastern Europe for, for a minute. Cause I think there are some important distinctions that need to be made. Uh, I am a very ardent proponent of, of the theory, you know, this, this was sometimes hard to get across during the first Trump administration, but really this, this was not something that, that Russia created.

These, these were tendencies that were happening already in American European society, the, the rise of, uh, populist parties and, uh, and right-wing parties, backlashes against globalization, immigration. We don't need to go into that. And I think if you're Russia, you just look at European politics now, as well as Trump coming back.

And there's this book about the KGB's plans to influence the third world that's called The World Was Going Our Way. And I think if you're Russia, absolutely, you do think the world is is going your way. In France, it's entirely possible that Marine Le Pen might finally become the president. In Germany, the AFD is expected to do very well at the elections later this week.

In Austria, you have this party that is likely to form the government. They are currently in coalition negotiations right now, if I'm not wrong, because I don't know very much about Austria. that is actually a partner of United Russia, Putin's party. They still have this partnership. So I don't think they need to do very much.

I think there's enough that's going on in Western society, West European society, where if you're Russia, you feel very much like the things that Vance talked about in Munich are going your way. If you think about The former Soviet and Soviet occupied countries, I think there is a bit of a difference there because it's more about how Russia perceives threats.

Georgia, they've basically sorted that out. You have this authoritarian, Moscow-friendly, in as much as any government in Georgia can be Moscow-friendly. They've done an effective job of suppressing opposition to drifting into the Russian embrace. There's no prospect of Georgia joining NATO. Moldova...

is more problematic for them to influence now, especially that's one consequence of the war, because Transnistria, the enclave with a small Russian troop deployment there is basically cut off now from Russia being able to influence it seriously and the government just about squeaked through the pro-EU referendum there.

But the real issue is the Baltics and not just the Baltics themselves, what the Baltics means about European security, because this is the absolute nightmare scenario if you are a NATO advocate, is that seeing how Trump feels about European security, which is basically, you know, you do it, you know, so much for the... American security umbrella that NATO is built on. Go deal with it yourselves.

K thanks, bye. And by the way, here's the bill. And what the scenario has always been is that you have these you have these NATO contingents in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. You have some cities that have quite large Russian-speaking populations where there is still, some of them do sympathize with Russia to some extent on the border, like Narva in Estonia, Dogovpils in Latvia.

And you try something there and some sort of limited incursion doesn't have to be some big invasion. I don't think Putin is interested in the Baltics the way that he is in certainly not Ukraine or even the Caucasus and Central Asia. I remember a few months before the war, He said that the Soviet Union broke up into 12 states, not 15, leaving out the three Baltic states.

And an Estonian expert I know texted me in that moment and said, phew, thank God. But what they are important for is using them to undermine NATO. Because if the United States doesn't respond in any kind of serious way, That essentially shows that Article 5, the collective defense clause of NATO, you know, attack on one members and attack on all, that shows that it's essentially paper tiger.

It amounts for nothing. And, you know, Putin could feel that he's essentially dealt with the NATO problem once and for all. And, you know, that is the scary problem. I think, you know, not that he wants to. You get these really extreme people in the Russian system like Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen dictator or people like that. who say, yeah, we want to drive to Poland on tanks.

That is all for show. I don't want to say that he's not interested in empire and not interested in gathering the Russian lands like Peter the Great, because he is. But really, more than anything else, this is about the new world order for him. And I think that anything he does with regards to Europe will be achieving that.

Well, if you look at the dissatisfaction in Russia such as there has been any, it's mostly been with the economic impacts of the war rather than the actual war itself. There's a great Russian sociologist, Greg Yudin, who has this analogy that for most Russians, the war is like rain. You know, you don't like the rain.

You want to avoid it best as you can, but you think that it's this sort of, you know, being imposed on you externally that is completely beyond your control to do anything about. And that atomization has existed at Russian society for centuries because of the way that the state has been formed and reformed, the way that Russians have been ruled. It's very different from a country like Ukraine.

And in terms of what dissatisfaction that there could be over people dying in the war, you have to remember that it was mostly around mobilization when people were being forcibly drafted into the army. They were, you know, hundreds of thousands of them fled the country to try to escape that.

But now what they switched to and they've been able to do it pretty successfully and more or less replace men casualties at the front lines with new recruits. It is by paying people. You have these enormous payouts that are. bigger than a year's salary on average in a lot of these pretty poor regions where most of the recruiting is concentrated.

And that combined with the low value that's been placed on human life in Russian society, that has encouraged a lot of people to sign up. And if you go on Instagram and TikTok, there's this whole subgenre of posts of the wives of these guys on the days that the payments come in for when they're fighting or when they get the payments for

for their husbands being injured or killed at the front, they all go shopping. And there has been a consumer boom in Russia that has been driven in large part by this war spending. So that doesn't mean that there isn't a part of Russian society that is actively against the war, but it's never been the majority. The majority has always been passive society.

And the people who are actively against the war have been very effectively suppressed. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of political prisoners. We know people like Navalny and some of the dissidents who were freed in the Evan Gershkovich exchange, like Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Karamurza.

But there are hundreds and hundreds of ordinary people in the far-flung bits of Russia who just got picked up because police have a quota. They said something on social media or at a bus stop or in some sort of private setting. And someone informed on them and they're now in prison serving these often very draconian sentences. So any kind of real opposition to how things are.

uh going on is uh pretty much impossible and for the opposition that are outside the country they're they're in a very sad state right now uh because um The longer this goes on, the greater disconnect they have with Russian society. They have been largely unable to swing that. Navalny's death was obviously an enormous blow.

And for those of you who have read about the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the various other

anti-Tsarist leftist groups in the early 20th century in exile or Soviet dissidents won't come as a surprise that they seem to spend most of their time fighting each other over various slights and perceived differences and things like that that are just a really big turnoff to the average Russian or the average, whether they're in Russia or exile. I think it's also worth making the point

that really one of the most active groups in Russian society in trying to make sure that the truth about the war that gets out, it has been the media. And one thing you're seeing at the moment with Trump's attack on USAID, firstly, that so much of the exiled population

Russian media that has fled the country because you go to jail for telling the truth about about the war, the extent to which they were dependent on funding. I think many of them without them even necessarily realizing it, just how dependent it all was on USAID. And secondly, they also have the same problem that it just gets harder and harder to reach audiences. People are reluctant to speak.

And they're really struggling. And so it's a pretty sad scenario all around for those people, I would say.