 I'm with Tony Kevin now who's the former Australian ambassador to Cambodia and Poland and former diplomat for Australia in Moscow for decades. Tony you have been following the situation in Ukraine very closely. Now most recently you appeared on crosstalk and the issue was this missile that had landed in Poland. Now I've just heard more recently that Scott Ritter seems to have said that it couldn't have been an accident which is what you thought that it was most likely I agreed at the time but Scott Ritter gave some pretty precise reasons why it may not have been an accident even though there was a comedy of errors after that in relating what had actually happened but he said that there was no way that a bomb could have hit Poland a ballistic missile without there being a target painted in the sky. So what do you think about that and is that a real problem that there may be some kind of issue in the chain of communications between Zelenski and his army have they both got the same intent? Yes I heard the Scott Ritter interview and it was very interesting as Scott always is very interesting. I don't know that it's necessary to this some analyzing this very important event to be absolutely 100% sure whether the missile was aimed at Poland or was some kind of a technical misfiring or malfunction that resulted in the Ukrainian missile landing in Poland. I'm not enough of a technical expert to make a good judgment on that what I can say as a former diplomat is that in the end I think the more interesting aspect of all this is not whether it was a deliberate attempt to involve Poland the war and if it was whether that was at the level of Zelenski or level of some renegade more junior group in the chain of command running down to the missile launching team. To me the more interesting angle is what happened in the hours immediately following and let me preface that by saying that I agree with Scott and others that the United States and NATO would have been tracking every missile in the sky while this was going on every Russian missile and every Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile. So they would have known in very real time immediately in fact that there was a Ukrainian missile for whatever reason flying into Poland they would have known that. So they would have been ready for the Polish complaint that hey two people have been killed and we want to invoke article five as an NATO member or at the very least article four that we all have to consult about this threat to peace but both very dangerous developments and so what's really interesting and I think encouraging is that Biden very quickly sat on this very quickly quashed it and he quashed it in two stages. First he said well I have no evidence that this was a Russian missile and then he left a couple of hours for that to sink in and he came up with a further statement that I believe it was a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile that finished up in Poland. So from that point on Biden was hauling NATO into line including the East European NATO members Poland and the Baltic States who were frankly speaking practically ready to start World War three on the spot but he very firmly pulled them into line and I believe that he would have done that on the advice not of anybody in State Department because they tend to be hawks in State Department always have been but on the advice of either the Defense Department General Milley the Chief of Staff or Jake Sullivan the National Security Advisor or indeed Nicholas Burns the head of the CIA both of them Burns and Sullivan have very recently been in hotline talks with their Russian opposite numbers about the subject of preventing nuclear war by accident so I would think it's very likely that both of them would have advised Biden very strongly this is not believable don't be sucked in by you know people who don't necessarily have a responsible attitude to these questions kill it very quickly so Biden killed it very quickly and then we get to the second interesting part of the story which I'm sure you're about to ask me question on which is what about Zelensky why why did he go on saying that he believed it was not a Ukrainian missile and that's an interesting question too because Zelensky pushed that to the point where NATO officials were openly becoming irritated with him and it's reported in the western press that they were saying that look Zelensky's losing his credibility with us if he goes on like this that was in the financial times yes and so we're in a situation now where Biden has very firmly headed off article four or article five responses to this missile Zelensky has said hey hang on you shouldn't be doing this this is a serious complaint I'm making and Biden and the rest of NATO simply overruled Zelensky now this leaves Zelensky's reputation very damaged very damaged indeed and it also I think sends a very important signal to Kiev to the Ukraine leadership generally don't try again to broaden the war outside beyond Ukraine because so we're going to cast a very beady eye over whatever you claim so this is really in the end very good news for Russia because it means that the war is being contained to Ukraine rather safely and it means that Russia which I believe has the advantage on the ground which can only increase in coming weeks Russia's in a very good position now to win this war and Ukraine has much less opportunity to broaden it beyond Ukraine Tony there has been a lot of talk about negotiation and maybe this is a good sign what you're saying that the brakes will put on Zelensky's and company's triggering of article five but is it a good time do you think the Russians will think it is a good time to negotiate well in the crosstalk discussion that I had with Gilbert Doctorow and Jim Jatris the view of my two fellow panellists was very much that Russia should not be losing its military momentum to enter into negotiations essentially because the Americans and Zelensky cannot be trusted that they'll simply use the pause in fighting to reinforce their position which will definitely to more loss of lives of Ukrainian young men and so they argued quite strongly that Russia needs to continue to push forward with its present strategies until it has achieved complete military victory but aunties breaks assign there should be some level of trust the brakes that were put on what you could call the false flag failure according to Ritter isn't the brakes being put on that narrative an indication that there should be some level of trust on the part of Russia that there is goodwill there to not escalate but rather negotiate is that not a sign that Russia should take well Russia's formal position formal position is that they are ready to negotiate anytime PF is ready to negotiate seriously Russia's never closed the door on negotiations but the tone coming through from Russian comments and I read a lot of Russian editorial comment on Telegram which has a lot of Russian sites on it the tone is that very much as Jim Jatras and Gilbert Doctor who was saying that Russia should not be taken in by Western honeyed words that it'll just be plenty of that I've heard plenty of that but at least just being another trick yeah I suppose the Russian now was that the West might just want to bide for time perfidious albion right exactly I mean hoping something better might turn up that you know Putin might die or something something might happen and yeah or they have time to regroup time to regroup but they haven't got much to regroup with exactly they've lost most of their men most of their equipment their energy is disappearing fast down the plug hole and Ukraine is going to cease to be a viable industrial state relatively soon within a matter of weeks if not days as this Russian bombardment of infrastructure military strategic infrastructure continues because you see when you bomb an electricity substation because it's important in the war effort you're also as collateral damage if you like making life in Ukrainian cities impossible because without water without sewerage without light without power people living in high-rise buildings can't survive I thought that it was mainly so that you couldn't transport weapons via train lines because the the trains were electric weren't they well that's true and I mean obviously cutting cutting the supply lines to the front is a very important part of this of the objective but the side effect is that cities become unlivable and I don't think that's beyond the Russian strict configure that well hey that might bring on a regime change more quickly something might happen I think to end this war yeah but it's a bad time to be turning off the power on ordinary people what temperature did you say it was in live up minus seven in yeah this is terrible this is terrible unfortunately this is the nature of modern warfare and has been since world war two it didn't stop Hitler making war on civilians during the Blitz in UK and it didn't stop the British bomber command making war on Russian cities and the latest stages of the war yeah this stuff happens in war the only differences and I will make this point firmly that Russia continues to go to enormous effort to avoid collateral civilian deaths in their bombing raids they're they're incredibly well targeted and believe me if there were a lot of deaths from these bombing raids the Ukrainian government propaganda organization would be wheeling them out for us all to see we'd have lined up bodies by the hundred well it wouldn't be propaganda it would be the truth it would be the truth and but we haven't got them and that means that the Russians are doing what they say they're doing which is very precisely targeting their strikes they can strike to within a meter they can pinpoint a target within a meter I do understand that but cutting off the power is indirect harm but we should hear some reports of people freezing to death soon shouldn't we no I hope we don't because people don't as well because people have a survival instinct and people have already been encouraged by municipal leaders like the mayor of Kiev Klitschko he's encouraging people who can to leave the city he says if you've got a safe warm place in the countryside where you can keep warm and you know live on local stored food and collect firewood in the forest leave Kiev now so this is the same Klitsch that Victoria Newland wanted on the outside back in 2014 is that right or probably end of 2013 it could be it could be I'm not sure he's a bit of a rough bit of a rough he's a former I know a former price fighter but he does seem to have the common touch that's the one that's the one he was supposed to control the mob and now he's telling them to take shelter now you see wherever they can oh how helpful is that you see going back to 1812 in Moscow the Russian high command instructed the people to leave Moscow so just in the same way as Sorovik and encourage the people of Crescent City to leave Crescent City and and Klitsch Klitschko is advising the people of Kiev to leave Kiev so look there's a bit of a Russian pattern here people when things get tough retreat to the countryside and they survive well one would hope that the population of Kiev might be quite large and I don't imagine that they're particularly financial and if their railways are down their mobility is likely reduced well we hope that things will sort themselves out but do you anticipate that there may be in this panic season perhaps and the time coming up to the arrival of the 200 000 troops that there may be some other false flag or foolish actions happening there's not a lot that can happen now because now that the Russians have withdrawn from Crescent City and they've withdrawn from the eastern bank that they hold to a safe distance from the river even if the Ukrainians blew up the dam at Kokovka it would simply run down the channel helped safely to the sea it wouldn't kill anybody would do a lot of damage of course to property but it wouldn't kill anybody because there's nobody left in that river valley now just depopulated well I was thinking more about a similar kind of problem like an attack on a NATO country I think that the problem now is the key of lost credibility yeah they can't try for Article 5 again very easily right not very easily yeah I think Russia's holding all the cards at the moment yeah and winter's coming and the ground is freezing and it's all working quite well for them because as the ground freezes up they're completing their training and they're equipping of the 200 000 conscripts and 80 000 volunteers 280 000 people and Scott Riddes always talking about and 60 000 of those people have already been absorbed into divisions on the front line they've just joined depleted divisions to bring them up to strength and the other 220 000 of my arithmetic is correct are still in the rear areas of Russia not well quite close to Ukraine I would suggest undergoing final training final equipping getting ready to go in as complete divisions and that will transform the war because once the ground's frozen hard Russian tanks and Russian mobile artillery vehicles can move very fast indeed across the frozen ground and they're not confined to the roads because the frozen ground means they can go anywhere and that means that the Ukrainians really have no resistance it'll be like a hot knife going through butter if Russia decides to go forward now the first thing that Russia will do I believe the first thing is recover the one quarter to one third I'm not sure of the exact percentage of Donetsk province that is still in Ukrainian hands they will want to get back to the original borders of Donetsk province and of Lugansk province where they almost have 99 percent now so once they've got those two provinces intact then the question for them is do they talk to Ukraine about peace if Ukraine's ready to talk about peace or do they go forward and if they go forward where do they go forward they've got a over a thousand kilometer long battlefront to choose from and my guess is for what it's worth they're laying somewhere in the south because they'll want to somehow finish up with Odessa they can't go through Kesson now because Kesson's hey there's no bridge there and Kesson's going to be pretty well defended it'll be like like the the Azafs in Mariupol they'll defend Kesson to the last to the last death last breath so they'll they'll go around somewhere to the north they might go across the river in the Karkovka area the area of the hydroelectric power station there's still apparently a functioning bridge there or they might go even further north I mean there's anywhere where they can cross the river really as long as they concentrate their forces sufficiently and then they just keep going west or west southwest until they hit the the border of Transnistria and then they've got Odessa bottled up and then they take Odessa and I think Odessa would fall into their hands like ripe fruit because the people of Odessa are so fed up with this war I understand well yeah it could get quite nasty in Odessa if that is basically the end game the last stage before checkmate because it means so much to Ukraine if it loses Odessa at the end it's going to be landlocked right and it's going to change everything in terms of their economic potential but on the other hand the people who live in Odessa is is traditionally a Russian-speaking city isn't it yeah well Odessa is like Mariupol on a larger scale I mean Mariupol was occupied by the Azov battalion for eight and a half years after it unsuccessfully tried to join Donetsk and Lugansk in setting up their independent state the Azov battalion was too strong and it drove them back and essentially they ran Odessa like a colony for the next eight and a half years now of course it's a very different situation now you've got the whole Russian army pressing down on you I think Odessa wouldn't be too hard enough to crack because whatever Ukrainian forces are there whatever Azov battalion or extreme nationalist forces are there they will know that the population would like to see them gone exactly and so I don't think they'd hold I think they'd cut and run once they realized that it was militarily untenable so I mean from my point of view if the war is going very much Russia's way and I can't see Ukraine finding a way out of a Kiev finding a way out of this I'm starting to talk about the Kiev regime because I mean it's getting harder and harder to talk about the government of Ukraine because this is a government that basically and I'm echoing Gilbert Doctor on this this is a government that basically doesn't care about the people of Ukraine that they care about their own survival they care about their ideological program they don't care about the people of Ukraine no and certainly Bostolevsky is wealthy enough to be able to beam himself out of there at any given moment yeah Tony Kevin thank you very much for updating us on what's going on there in Ukraine thank you it's always a pleasure