“In Mr Putin's understanding of the world, if I win, you lose and if you win, I lose,” former long-serving UK diplomat Laurie Bristow said in an exclusive interview with LRT.lt, describing the mindset inside the Kremlin. So, is there any hope for progress in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine? And what message do Russia’s provocations send to NATO’s eastern flank?
Bristow has built an impressive diplomatic career – he served as the UK’s ambassador to Russia at the time when former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with Novichok. He was also Britain’s last ambassador to Afghanistan, where he witnessed the chaotic collapse of the Republic firsthand and worked until the very last moment to help people evacuate. He was celebrated in the press as a hero for his efforts.
Now retired from politics, the former diplomat shared with LRT.lt his insights on whether Russian President Vladimir Putin could realistically sit down at the negotiating table, and how NATO’s eastern flank should respond to the mounting Russian provocations in the region.
“Have retaliation on your own terms, not on their terms,” he advices.
You have said that “Putin's word is worthless”, yet President Trump brought him back from isolation and began negotiations on war in Ukraine. And as expected, they haven't led anywhere. From your experience as the UK's ambassador to Russia, how does the Kremlin typically approach its dealings with Western countries?
It's incredibly difficult for a number of reasons. One is that the negotiating model that they almost always apply is not one where you're trying to find a mutually beneficial way forward. It's very, very zero sum and in Mr. Putin's understanding of the world, if I win, you lose and if you win, I lose. There's no sense of finding what, in classic negotiating theory, leads you to a win-win outcome. I think one of the problems of dealing with Russia under Mr. Putin is that a lose-lose outcome is okay for the Kremlin as long as you lose more than they lose and they consider it worth the effort. And I think that's one of the really basic points about how you negotiate with Russia under Putin.
The other really key point is that even when you reach an agreement on anything with the Kremlin, that's not the end of the matter, it's the beginning of the next phase, where what's happening almost always is that they're trying to use the agreement that you've just agreed, to honour the bits of it that they like and frankly, not apply the bits that they don't like. And if you don't anticipate that, you really don't understand how the Kremlin operates or how to do business with it.
So in terms of Mr. Trump's efforts, I think we should always start this conversation with the basic fact that nobody wants this war to continue except Mr. Putin. The Ukrainians certainly don't, they've been invaded, their country is under attack. The Europeans, the UK certainly don't want it, it's a risk to our security. The Americans for their reasons don't want it either. It could stop this afternoon if Mr. Putin decided that it was going to stop this afternoon, but that's not where he's at [...]
Experts on Russia, including yourself, have laid out a clear steps how to help Ukraine and stop Russia: arm Ukraine, provide security guarantees to Ukraine, put economic pressure on Russia, and don't allow Putin to achieve his goals. Yet much of this not have happened. Moreover, President Trump's administration seems like it wants to make business with Russia and Europe is struggling to wean itself off from Russia's energy. Why the West lacks determination to stop Russia, even if it is in their own interest?
So let me offer a slightly more nuanced picture about the last three years. One of the things that we've all been trying to achieve – rightly, given the nature of Russia – is to push back on Russia's aggression against Ukraine, but in a way that minimises the risk of direct military confrontation between Russia and NATO. That's very, very important to us, I would say even more important to you – the state is literally on the frontline with Russia. It's in nobody's interest for that conflict to become a direct NATO Russia conflict, I would say, including Russia's. It's a very important point in there about how far we can go in terms of pushing back on Russia.
We've learned a lot in the last three years. At the beginning of the full on invasion, actually even before the full invasion in 2022, there was a lot of debate in Western capitals about whether it was safe and wise to provide specific military capabilities to Ukraine. So the first debate that I remember there, even before the invasion, was around anti-tank missiles -pretty basic stuff if you're up against an army with tanks. And after a lot of thought essentially the conclusion we all came to was that those tanks shouldn't be in Ukraine, so of course we should pay Ukraine with anti-tank missiles. And we went through the whole cycle again and again with HIMARS, ATACMS and F-16s, main battle tanks, the whole thing, and of course intelligence sharing to enable them to be properly targeted.
And my personal view is that we could have, should have moved further and faster, but there were reasons for managing that process carefully to avoid that risk of an open, outright confrontation with Russia. In the meantime, of course, the Ukrainian people, the economy are taking enormous damage and we need to spell out what Russia is doing. This isn't just a military battle on the military front. It's also the systematic, deliberate bombing of civilian targets night after night, day after day. That is, of course, A) a war crime and B) its purpose is to try to break the will of the Ukrainians to resist. And again, I think we have to recognise what's actually happening there. The amount and the cost of support, the military support, financial support to Ukraine – I would be the first to argue it's not enough and it didn't come fast enough but the numbers are very, very big. And I think that tells you something important about how most of Europe, and to some extent the United States, sees the issues here […]
You can find a reasoning behind this very slow and cautious approach, but doesn’t it invite Putin to test our limits?
That's the balance that we're now all struggling with. Obviously, what we've done, Mr. Trump's approach to negotiations has not brought Russia or hasn't brought Putin to the negotiating table in a serious way. My own analysis of what happened in the sequence of meetings up to and including the Alaska summit was that Putin was playing Trump. I mean, it's not hard to see. Whether Mr. Trump accepts that, that's a matter of him and his advisors. But that's obviously what it looks like to me.
So the question then is now what? If you look at it from the perspective of, for example, the UK, it's worth just testing what we will have if Russia, in any meaningful sense, wins in Ukraine. We will have, first of all, Russia, succeeded in a war of aggression and territorial conquest. It's not a great position for the international system. Second, Russia will be demonstrably the dominant military power in Europe. That's not great for any of us. Third, getting there will create enormous divisions within and between the Europeans and the Americans. And that's possibly the worst outcome of all, because I think one of the things that Mr. Putin is fundamentally looking for here, that he's never achieved, that the Soviets never achieved, is to split the Americans off from the Europeans. And that's pretty obviously what's going on with some of the incursions over the Baltic, for example. And, you know, we must not allow him to achieve that. Ukraine is very important to us but there are also even bigger questions for us now.
Once you have described the Doha Agreement between Trump and Taliban as a contender for a title of the “worst deal ever”. Looking at the current discussions about war in Ukraine, do you think we are risking having another such a contender for this title?
I was the UK's last ambassador to Afghanistan during the collapse of the Republic and our 20 year campaign to bring stability to Afghanistan and to squeeze out violent extremists goes back to 9/11 and the al Qaeda attacks on the United States. We absolutely failed. There are many reasons for that, but one of the fundamental reasons is the Doha agreement – an agreement that Mr. Trump's first administration did with the Taliban at the beginning of 2020, that basically said all foreign forces will leave Afghanistan within the next 14 months and we would like you to talk to the government. It's not hard to work out, if you're the Taliban, what message that is sending you. So, not unnaturally, the Taliban pursued a policy of fight and talk. The talks went nowhere; they had no intention of negotiating seriously and they overthrew the government by military means. That was an entirely foreseeable outcome from the Doha Agreement.
I think the equivalent, even worse in Ukraine, would be a bad deal imposed on the Ukrainians. So, a deal, that fundamentally compromises Ukraine's sovereignty, its ability to defend itself, takes the pressure off NATO, the West and Europe to support Ukraine financially and everything else. And if we believe that that will solve the problem we are fools, it won't. I think that there is no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Putin’s objectives in this war have changed or will change and I would say they can't change because his objectives are all about Russia. They're about what kind of country Russia is and its place in the world. It's a very imperialistic, Russian nationalist view of the world. That's what he thinks. What he thinks is not going to change. It's what his options are – those are what we need to change.
I want to turn to a topic that you touched a little bit, that brought the world's attention again to our region. Unfortunately, I mean Russia's provocations in NATO's eastern flank. The drones and fighter jets are flying in our airspace, there are GPS jamming and undersea cable attacks. What strikes me the most is how easy and cheaply Russia is able to test Alliance’s determination and limits. And it seems that those limits haven't been reached yet. Do you think this again cautious approach is a sufficient response to this hybrid war?
[…] I think with the latest incursions, it's always worth stepping back and just asking yourself, why are they doing this? What are they trying to achieve? What do they want you to do, to react? That, I think, helps you to think through clearly what is a wise reaction for us. They're trying to do several things, one, of course, is cause real concern in our societies. Think of it as information warfare, cognitive warfare. It's a bit like what was happening three years ago around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. That was messaging to the public in Europe – you didn't like Chernobyl, did you? Wait until you see Zaporizhzhia. Of course, what they're trying to do there is to get the public to put pressure on their governments to stop backing Ukraine. So one of your responses to that I think needs to be an explanation to the public what Russia is trying to achieve and to do so in a way that the public understands.
Second, it's to defy the Europeans from each other and to divide them from the United States. In a scenario – it may still come to it – that, for example, a drone is shot down, or, I hope not, but it's possible, if somebody shoots on a Russian aeroplane, the very first thing that Russia will want to see out of that is some of the Europeans saying, “No, no, no, no. These crazy Balts, these crazy Poles, these crazy Romanians, this is dangerous, make it stop”. And I think one of the things that Putin wants is that. The other thing is that Mr. Trump says that you've got to stop this happening, you've got to do a deal with Putin to make this stop, you've got to give him what he wants in order to make it stop.
Obviously when a country's territory is violated in that way, there's a full range of options. My advice always would be to choose the right option, one that works for you, not against you. […] after the [Alexandr] Litvinenko poisoning, the UK expelled four Russian intelligence officers from London and everybody else said this is all very regrettable. If you were the FSB and the Kremlin, what conclusion would you draw from that? They're weak, they won't do anything, will carry on doing it. After the Skripal poisoning, we expelled all of the Russian intelligence officers from London, even ones that they didn't know we knew about and then we got to work around NATO and the European Union. And we caused systematic damage to Russia's intelligence services and to the Kremlin by a number of things. One, of course, was destroying capabilities and the other was damaging their reputation. We know that got their attention.
So have retaliation on your own terms, not on their terms. One that I know being discussed now and strikes me as quite a good response to this is going back to what we were discussing earlier about resource pressure on Russia. There are $300 billion of Russian money held in EuroClear. Obviously it's formidably difficult to access that money, but if it's going to happen, this is a pretty good time to do it. What you're saying then to Russia is we'll choose how we respond to this, and the price will be one that you will notice.
As you mentioned, you were the last UK ambassador to Afghanistan, and you were on the ground when Kabul fell and the Taliban regained power, you also oversaw the evacuation of people. What was very interesting to me is how your testimony highlighted how quickly and chaotically this 20 year state building project basically collapsed. In today's context, what lessons should the West take from that experience about shortsightedness, which can lead so rapidly to both political disaster and human tragedy?
There are so many lessons to draw from what happened in Afghanistan. The first and most important one, though, is exactly as you mentioned is the human cost. One of the things that I think none of us will ever forget about that evacuation, it's the experience of people getting onto aeroplanes at no notice with their lives in carrier bags. That's what failure looks like. It's a pretty good test for policymakers and political leaders just to understand the human reality of failure. And, of course, we see that happening every day in Ukraine – people who are killed and injured and forced into exile from Ukraine, that's the human price.
In terms of how you make strategy, I think there are a couple of things I would really draw out from the experience in Afghanistan. One is that failure didn't just come out of a clear blue sky. It took us 20 years to achieve that scale of failure, and I think it's worth understanding why – we were trying to apply military solutions to state building in a country we didn't understand. So let's take all three elements of that – what's your range of instruments from military at one end through to very, very soft power at the other? What's the right mix? Second is a country we don't understand. One of the things that I'm here in Vilnius with the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge to talk about, is how we build deep, long term expertise in places that matter to us in the UK or elsewhere. Just understanding how the pieces fit together, which parts we have some leverage over, which parts we don't. And the most important part of all is have a clear plan. The problem in Afghanistan we were just endlessly changing in terms of what was the most important thing to us here.
If we map that onto the situation we now have with Russia, the most important thing of all is that Russia does not win a war of aggression in Europe. Nothing else is possible if they achieve that. Longer term though, we need to be thinking about how and when will change come to Russia? That's primarily a question about Russians themselves, but the things that we do now will have an impact on the choices that future generations of Russians make and I'm particularly interested in what happens after Mr. Putin leaves the Kremlin, which I think will be when he dies. What then will be the choices facing Russians? We need to be clear about that, and we need to be signalling it – we will defend ourselves as long as we have to, but it doesn't have to be this way. That's the message I think we should be sending. […]
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