 In welcoming everyone, let me say just a very quick word about Pax Christi, formed in 1973 in Australia. It's part of an international movement, Christian background, and in Australia, very much ecumenical, open to anyone, really, of no faith, and for that matter of any faith, and for that matter of no faith, so long as they are in agreement with the general values and spirit of Pax Christi. We are here, of course, today to discuss the tragedy that's unfolding in the Ukraine and the suffering of the people of Ukraine and no doubt others, not just the casualties of civilians, which are critical, but also of those who are engaged in the use of force with many casualties on both sides. I thought it appropriate that I should read to you a couple of short extracts from a statement on the situation calling for peace issued by Pax Christi by its national president, Father Claude Mosterweig. It reads in part, Pax Christi Australia absolutely condemns the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia as we do the invasion of any country. We believe that war is always a defeat for humanity and breaks the connections we have with one another on this planet. We wish to send a message to the people of Ukraine that we stand with them in their suffering and are opposed to those who are creating violence and hate in and this strange need of war. As we unequivocally condemn the behavior of Vladimir Putin and his minions, we must equally acknowledge and condemn US and Western foreign policy that has pursued a provocative agenda of destabilization and threatened Russia's national security through NATO's expansion up to its borders. Without in any way condoning the Russian invasion, we must never forget that no country on earth has invaded more countries, overthrown more democratically elected world leaders than the United States of America. We believe that there is no such thing as a just or legal war, that there is no sanity left in the preparation for war rather than the grotesque idiocy of what is now the global military budget, not to mention the maintenance and upgrading of those nuclear weapons, mostly in Russian and American hands. We need to begin consciously creating the future of oneness and the future in which war is not inevitable. That's the end of the passage that I've quoted from the statement released yesterday. Well, the purpose of this webinar is not necessarily to cast aspersions here and everywhere, though one can of course do that if one's so inclined, but to try and understand how it is that this conflict has emerged, how we've got ourselves into this mess and perhaps if we can begin to think creatively about how we might get out of it in the short term and in a more enduring way further down the track. We have two distinguished guests with us, each of whom will speak for no more than 15 minutes and will present their perspective on what's happening. Tony Kevin, we're delighted to have you with us, is a former Australian career diplomat who served for some 30 years in several diplomatic postings and ambassadorships, including Moscow, UN, New York, Poland, Cambodia. Since retiring from foreign service has been an active advocate for change in areas such as asylum seeker policy, border protection, climate change, and of course great power relations and the rule of Russia. He has written several books, including Return to Moscow. I understand he's just returned from Moscow where he delivered a lecture to the Diplomatic Academy in Moscow, which is attached to the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry and then delivered the same lecture at St. Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences. So great pleasure, please attack the floor so to speak, Tony. Thank you. The almost universal view in Australia is that the Russian special military operation in Ukraine which began on the 24th of February, I will call it a war for convenience that the Russian government will not use that term, was an unprovoked invasion. This is the view of the White House and all Australian political parties support this view. Indeed, most of my friends and relatives do, those who follow politics at all. I believe on the contrary that this war was provoked by the government of Ukraine by viciously cruel conduct towards some of its own citizens of the Russian language group at over an eight year period since May 2014 and which is almost never reported in the Western media. Finally, the Russian government was provoked on the 24th of February beyond human endurance and after all diplomatic alternatives have been tried and failed. So the argument that it's always wrong to make war on a sovereign country without UN Security Council authorization, I would say three things. Firstly, the Western permanent members would have vetoed any Russian UN Security Council resolution draft on this. Secondly, there's all the what about precedents, all involving United States led wars of choice, Yugoslavia Kosovo, the Iraq invasion of 2003, the Afghanistan invasion which went beyond UN mandate, Libya invasion which had no UN mandate at all and in Syria, US support of violent Islamist insurgencies over many years. Thirdly and most importantly, I would cite the particularly mutual obligations of good naveliness that the Russian Federation and Ukraine have to each other as neighbouring sovereign nations but with shared multicultural values, languages and cultures and family interminglings going back many centuries. Comparable examples are England and Ireland or Scotland, Sweden and Norway, United States and Canada or even Australia and New Zealand. It would be inconceivable in any of these pairings of countries for the smaller nation to behave towards a larger nation as cruelly and offensively as the government of Ukraine has behaved towards Russia and towards its own Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens since May 2014, three months after the Maidan coup eight years ago. Since then with American bipartisan war party financial backing to the tune of five billion dollars and policy encouragement and under three presidents, Obama Democrat, Trump Republican and Bush Democrat, Ukrainian extreme nationalist parties or fanatically anti-Russian ideology have grown in power and influence. These parties honor with torch parades and songs and chants, the anti-Russian and anti-Semitic histories of the Stepan Bandera led Ukrainian fascists who collaborated enthusiastically with German Nazis in World War II. There were more Ukrainian fascist volunteers than German Nazis at Babiya. Unlike in Germany, Ukraine has never faced up to this evil past. It was swept under the rug in the Soviet post war years. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian economy, driven by corruption, never recovered. The country has been economically depressed and losing population for 30 years. It's full of angry dissatisfied men. They never had a Putin, just one Yeltsin after another. This was fertile soil for the growth of these extreme nationalist parties. And I will call them for short, the Ukraine Nazi parties. And I'm sorry if that offends anyone. I listened to them, it's verboto or freedom party. It's youth wing, C14, the right sector, the national front, and the two Ukraine Nazi battalions, Azov and Ida, incorporated and fully armed into the National Ukrainian Army. These parties precipitated with violence and false flag shooting murders of government police, the Maidan coup in February, 2014. They tried very hard to find and kill the post president, Yanukovych, as he fled by car towards Crimea. Without them, as the C14 leader boasted recently, Maidan would have just been a gay parade going nowhere. They were involved in the mass murder by burning to death of around 45 trade unionists in Odessa in May, 2014. They were protesting against anti-Russian discrimination after the Maidan coup. No one has ever been charged that the names of the guilty are well-known. That atrocity sent a deterrent message to all Russian speaking Ukrainians, the largest language minority, not the majority in multicultural Ukraine. Defy us and we will kill you. The Russian speaking Ukrainians were cowed into submission, except in the proud easternmost provinces of Lugansk, four million populations strong, whose people began civil disobedience campaigns. President Poroshenko, the president at the time, ordered in May, 2014, a massive military assault on these rebel cities. And in the first weeks, thousands of civilians were killed by indiscriminate artillery shelling, intended to make them flee into nearby Russia. Even after the Minsk ceasefire records were negotiated, these killings continued. And to date, 13,000 civilians have died in indiscriminate artillery shelling. Many more have been wounded or maimed, and over 100,000 homeless refugees have been created. This is from reliable organization for security and cooperation in Europe data. The West has never bothered to notice. Now, with an estimated no more than 10% of the population, the Ukranazi parties have gained disproportionate power through two things, covert US support through the CIA and their own fanatical discipline. Like the old Soviet political compensation system, they were embedded at all levels in the army, police and state institutions. As a noted, they have their own fully armed army battalions. They are rightly feared for their ruthlessness. They kill with impunity. The fact that the president, Zelensky, is Jewish is politically irrelevant. They exercise the real political power and they can veto anything he says or wants to say, whether it concerns peace office or even safe exit corridors. Now, let me look quickly at the recent chronology because it's very important. No, I wasn't making any sense of the solution. On the 18th of February, the artillery assault on Donetsk and Lugansk was increased. It was stepped up markedly. And by this time, most of the, as often the Ida political battalions were in the adjacent area of Ukraine. They didn't seem to care that there were 130,000 Russian troops on the border as a deterrent most of the Northeast and the South. Maybe they thought we want to bring this on. Maybe they thought that somehow the Russia had been intimidated by the United States. But for whatever reason they stepped up their artillery, more people were dying again. And then on the 21st of February, Russia, the National Security Council led by the president Putin, took the major step of saying, right, we've tried everything in diplomacy. We've done this for eight years. We've given up now. We are going to sign a mutual security treaty with Donetsk and Lugansk. We are going to help them become independent of Ukraine. Now at that point, if the Ukrainian army and the Ukranians had stopped, there would be no war today. But amazingly, they went on shelling. And then it's as if, as I say, they wanted to bring on a war. And then finally on the 24th of February, they got what they wanted. The Russian president Putin said, we are going into Ukraine on a military operation, a special operation with very limited rules of engagement. We will firstly not hurt any civilians, civilians not at risk. And secondly, we will try to not engage with military who are in barracks. We will only take out military installations. And they took out most of the American military, advanced military equipment that had been supplied over the previous year. And within the first 24 hours of this war, as I call it, the Ukrainian army as a modern fighting force no longer existed. What was left was groups of armed men with some handheld missiles, artillery, and so on up to a certain level, a complete breakdown of communications infrastructure. And Russia had complete command of the skies. Russia basically had a no-fly zone overall of Ukraine. That was in the first 24 hours. Now, at that point, even then, the war could have stopped because Russia had declared that it had three aims. Firstly, the demilitarization of Ukraine. Secondly, acceptance by Ukraine of the withdrawal of Crimea, which incorporated into Russia. And thirdly, acceptance by Ukraine of the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk. So even then it could have stopped. But unfortunately, the West immediately rolled on the information war, huge barrels of information warfare, encouraged the Ukranians and Tzenesky, who was not a Ukranian, to fight on. And so America is in a situation now of fighting to the last Ukrainian. They really don't care if a million Ukrainians die or a million Russians die. Because for them, this is according with their objective of weakening Russia. This is geopolitics on the most brutal and murderous scale. And it's clearly what America wants. They've made it clear they're not going to go into Ukraine to help the Ukrainian resistance. So they'll go on helping it in words. They're sanctioning Russia through brutal economic sanctions. This is all about weakening Russia. And Ukraine has been a pawn. And unfortunately, the longer the war goes on, the harder it's going to be to end it because obviously wars create their own atrocities. Finally, in my introductory presentation, I want to say something about information warfare. I've studied this over many years. And I'm amazed at the extent and the ability of the Western information disinformation system to present false out narratives with memes that huge brutality of Russian thoughts is going on. The fact is that the Russians are advancing to Ukraine as far as they want to advance because they have their superiority. They are encircling cities. They are not going forward into them. They are waiting for political development. So they're waiting for Ukraine to basically wave a white flag. And unfortunately, because the Ukran Nazis control Zelensky, they're not waving a right flag. On the contrary, what they're doing is they're very cleverly faking atrocities which are mostly faked. And they've got the Western media believing them, unfortunately. And let me just remind you of the casualty figures. There are still under 500 casualties in Ukraine, civilian casualties on the Ukrainian side as reported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. I believe those figures are authentic. Now, you can't reconcile those very low casualty figures with what we're seeing on television. It's a massive fraudulent information war. And unfortunately, we have fallen for it. And I'll stop there. Good evening. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you all are. Let me begin by pointing out that I am not a Ukraine or Eastern European expert. I leave that to Tony. Instead, I've given my talk the title Ukraine and the Changing Normative Architecture of World Order. So that gives you a flavor of what I want to talk about. I believe Russia's actions are illegal and could possibly amount to war crimes. That will be of little consolation if Ukraine is reduced to ashes with tens of thousands killed in prolonged deadly fighting or the world is incinerated in a nuclear war. Now, let me start off with the seemingly odd question. We're China to attack Taiwan, which legal fission aside is an independent country comparable in size to Australia, a vibrant democracy and a middle-class market economy. The geo-strategic repercussions for Australia, Japan, South Korea, Philippines and others would be great. If our next assessment is that China is engaged in a long game of displacing the US as the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific. And it's a matter of when not if we choose to fight instead of cartoon to it. Then the key question becomes, should we go to war as soon as possible to repel the attack or delay and risk China's relative power being still stronger down the line? That effectively is a choice President Vladimir Putin faced vis-a-vis Ukraine against the backdrop of how Russia has had its nose rubbed repeatedly in the dirt of its historic defeat in the Cold War. Its interest ignored. Its buffer against NATO continually shrunk and its protests contemptuously dismissed. Putin may well have made a fateful error in choosing war as a means to break out of the relentless strategic encirclement by NATO. And if so, he will pay the ultimate price. But this does not make him a madman. To understand why, consider the same analogy in reverse. We could all convert the empirical reality of Taiwan into legal recognition of it as a sovereign state, grant full diplomatic recognition, establish embassies, include Taiwan in a new collective defense back and station an ally troops in Taiwan. There is universal belief that this would cross a Chinese red line. Taiwan's sovereign rights notwithstanding. If China then launched an invasion, would the blame for the war be shared or rest solely on Beijing? Complimenting this analogy from the power end of the spectrum, now considered a normative event. On second March, the UK led 38 countries in a collective state referral to the ICC of possible Russian war crimes. Yet two years ago almost exactly when the ICC authorized an investigation of alleged war crimes in Afghanistan by the government, Taliban and US forces, Mike Pompeo attacked the judgment as reckless and issued threats against ICC personnel. In the old world order, international politics was a struggle for power. Great powers rise and fall on the tide of history. No power remains great forever. No great power retreats forever. There's no way to reliably judge in real time whether a great power has begun to descend into permanent decline or is merely in temporary retreat. And geopolitical fault lines during periods of power transition are fraught with grave risks of war rooted in miscalculations of relative power. The new international politics of the 21st century, some of us hold, is more about the struggle for the ascendancy of competing normative architectures based on a combination of power, values and ideas. A rebalancing of power and principles, however, does not work translate into a displacement of power by principles. History doesn't end and combat effective military might remains the key determinant of state's rank in the power hierarchy. Major powers have the greatest ability to define the contours of the international order in any given time, to perturb that order, to defend that order and to set the core principles, norms, practices and institutions that together make up that order. I think the roots of the present crisis are both structural and proximate. The major structural root of the crisis is the ongoing readjustments of great power relations since the end of the Cold War. The U.S. bred the house on the end of history thesis and the belief that Russia as a major power had permanently declined, ignoring their own successful history of how they had treated Germany, Italy and Japan, the defeated Axis powers of World War II that was itself based on the lessons learned after the 1919 Versailles Dictat. Instead of displaying a generosity of spirit, they openly and repeatedly disrespected Russia. In so doing, they destroyed some precious legacies, the goodwill of the Russian people who had emerged from their communist nightmare with remarkably positive feelings for the West and its values, the exceptional outcome of a peaceful end to the Cold War with the defeated side accessing through the terms of the new European order. They violated the multiple understandings that had been given to Gorbachev and his leaders about not expanding NATO eastwards. Whenever this is brought up, Americans get all loyal. Loyal, just as they did in Vietnam War vis-a-vis the 1954 Geneva Accords. They have ignored their own serial breaches of international law and principles, dismissing the world's code verdict against the US for the campaign of destabilization against Nicaragua in 1986, invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, exit from the Iran New Jersey and threatening to arrest the ICC special process. All laws and norms, let me remind you, serve two essential functions, license and leash. In its moment of unipolar primacy, the US sought to enforce the leash function on others while falling on the license function to justify its own unilateralism. They have ignored the precedent-setting importance of their own actions and they've lost the generation of senior people with the institutional memory of dealing with Russia as a quasi ignoble. All this is important because the great power-centric international order is still in transition. And there is no question whether China has taken very careful note of how the great power behaves in a structural condition of unchallengeable supremacy and promises. China in turn must believe that it cannot trust US verbal promises to refrain from harmful action against core Chinese interests, nor the institutions designed to uphold and enforce international law. Rather than a mere rule breaker, China must aim to become the preeminent rule maker and enforcer in a future sign-setting code order. That is the ultimate nightmare for Western countries. Although this is far from inevitable, on present times, for the first time in several centuries, the global hedging is poised to be a non-Western, non-English speaking, non-democratic and non-market economy civilization. Can the West make the necessary psychological adjustment to learn to live in such a world, not in the evidence so far? Proximate causes include NATO expansion, what happened in Kosovo in 1999, the Maidan coup, Putin's belief that Russia has recovered sufficiently that it can stop retreating under continued Western pressure and instead start regaining some of the lost fears of control and difference. So yes, there are parallels between US-UK-Australian aggression against Iraq and Russian invasion of Iraq, of Ukraine, between Kosovo in 1999 and Crimea in 2014, between US rejection of Cuba's sovereign right to enter into a security alliance with the Soviet Union and stationed Soviet missiles in 1962 and Russian rejections of a comparable right asserted for Iran. The common overriding theme in the latter two is a vital security interest of a great power on its borders. Does anyone seriously believe that the US would accept hostile enemy forces stationed in Canada or Mexico, regardless of what the latter's government wanted? Resorting to what President Obama called the Washington Playbook of militarized response to a foreign policy crisis, the ruling elite collude with the mainstream media in a manicure framing that redirects a natural reaction of sympathy into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation. This doesn't just enable, it ennobles the American war machine. Regarding NATO rejection of Putin's twin requests to guarantee no membership of NATO for Ukraine ever and withdrawal of NATO troops from Eastern Europe, why is this any different from every Western government's policy on Taiwan? The problem is as former Congresswoman and presidential contender Tulsi Gawad put it in a TV interview one day ago, US leaders have this, as she put it, FU attitude. The answer to my question is that in the Pacific realism rules where almost all countries have first formulated a China policy and then accommodated relations with Taiwan within that strategic framework, but in Europe, they've reversed it. NATO members have made the fate of Ukraine the central organizing principle of their relation with Russia. If you want to play hard ball in great power relations, fair enough, but then you better make damn sure you've got it right and don't complain if you lose. Putin's history of reminders of his nuclear forces since 2014, including the most recent, very public elevation of the alert level is, I think, criminally irresponsible. But do we really want to risk all out need for war? For reasons of history, geography, culture and language, the stakes in Ukraine for Russia, no matter who the ruler, and the things the terrible mistake to personalize this Putin, are enduringly greater than for any other major power. Because the US doesn't have core strategic interest in Ukraine, there will be no NATO plans over Ukraine, no boots on the ground. Before the war, Ukraine's NATO ambitions were non-negotiable. Are they negotiable now? Thank you. Thank you very much, Ramesh, for a very interesting overview of contemporary geopolitics and the shifting world order. Just a question. There has been, has there not, and I'm asking both of you, of course, a Western-led global response in terms of how we interpret what's going on, but there haven't been too many exceptions in the condemnation of Russia. There are some, and some who have hedged their bets. Given what has happened so far, militarily on the ground, the response of the West, the sanctions, everything else considered. I ask you this question. Did Putin, and those who are advising, those whom he listens to, have reasonably anticipated what was his decision to launch what he called a special operation, military operation, or has he miscalculated in terms of the strength of the response, even though the United States has made it clear there's no prospect of troops inside Ukraine? How do you see it? From just a realistic calculus, has he got a stronger response than he bargained for? I think Putin knew that he would lose the information war at the same time as he would win the real war. I think he's factored that in. I think Russia's alliance with China is the major new factor in all this, which the US had not fully taken into account. Also, there's Iran, also even Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Brazil, all sorts of very important India, and Pakistan are all on the fringes of joining this new Eurasian heartland as an alternative to the US-based global world order. So I think Putin was ready for what's going on. I don't think he was quite ready for it affecting Ukraine so much that a lot of decent Ukrainians, and most Ukrainians are decent people, would be stirred up and whipped up by the Ukrainian Nazi fervor to actually continue fighting. I think he hoped the war would be over by now. But do you think he really expected two million displaced people according to your interviews? No, I think he expected that the army, which was a professional army, would rise up against its Ukrainian Nazi commissars, whom I mentioned in my opening address, and basically say, look, we've had enough. This is it, because they are only 10% of the population, the Ukrain Nazis. So he was expecting a political transition to happen much earlier. And unfortunately, because of the massive onslaught around the Western world of information warfare, that Putin is a new Hitler and a tyrant and going crazy and the Russian people are rising up against him. So all these false hopes, all this sort of ideological ammunition that was given to the Ukrain Nazis by the Americans has led to a less satisfactory outcome than Putin would have hoped for. But I think he's still going to plow on, he's not going to give up his objectives. He knows he can't go backwards, he's only can go forward now. So unfortunately, this war is going to go on. And so it's going to be pretty ugly over the next few weeks, I think. You think only a few weeks? Yes. I think there are two different wars going on. One is information war. The other is a war on battles on the ground. The information war is being carried on as much in social media as in mainstream media. Both are overwhelmingly mammoths and controlled by Western interests rather than Russian. On the military side, we have, well, I certainly have absolutely no way of knowing what it is that Putin expected or what the real situation is. But what is very interesting is that I should add that I just don't trust the mainstream media accounts. I think it's been outright propaganda and I don't get to read the Russian side. I have no doubt that is outright propaganda on that side as well. But what is interesting is if at the end of the day in Europe, you look at the updated military maps, you have this massive convoy outside Kiev that is stationary. I don't use the word stopped, it's stationary. But in the South, in the East and from the Northeast, the Russian forces are slowly advancing. And sometimes there seem to be trying to encircle whether it's Ukrainian forces there or others, I don't know. It is possible that indeed they have met stronger resistance and taken higher casualties than they anticipated. And that's why they have stalled. But it is also possible that they are going easy and slow as a deliberate policy of trying to minimize civilian casualties. We don't know. I certainly don't know. I don't pre-justice. I agree with Tony. I think the next two to three weeks will be critical in getting a better read on just where things stand from a military point of view. We know the saying a week is a long time in politics. A week is a blink of an eye in military force. So let's just wait and see. At this stage, we don't know. I agree with Tony that at this stage, Putin has invested too much to go back. I think we are going to have to deal with Russia on the terms that it set out even before the actions began. Recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, ruling out Ukraine ever joining NATO and recognition of the tasks and the mess as independent. I think for those of you who haven't done it, I strongly urge reading in English, Putin's two or three major speeches and articles, some very long. A lot of what he said is deliberately misinterpreted in the Western media. He has given clear indications that he accepts, he regrets, but accepts the loss of Ukraine and is prepared to live with Ukraine as an independent country. One consequence of this might be greater emotional attachment of Ukraine to Europe, to Western Europe and political attachments as well, identification and political attachment. That's, I don't think Putin has given any indication that he wants to occupy all of Ukraine or Kiev. It will be madness if he does. It will be a long-term, very costly insurgency and unsustainable. All the indications are here, recognizes that. So his names have from the start been limited. If the casualties keep mounting and when it does dawn on the Ukrainians, they're not going to get a no-fly zone enforced by NATO. They're not going to get NATO troops. And the Pentagon has even vetoed Poland giving big fighters to Ukraine. At that stage, the pressure on them to come down from the unrealistic expectations and engage in serious negotiations will mount. If Russia has suffered setbacks, that's a good thing for getting them to the table as well. So let's just wait and see. Okay. Well, another question or questions for you to address because you understand you're speaking to an audience that by and large is strongly committed to the ending of the fighting as quickly as is humanly possible. So the question arises at what point would both sides be willing to agree to a ceasefire? In the case of Russia, when he thinks it can get, is that enough? If he thinks it can get some way towards the three demands Ramesh that you've just mentioned, but not all of them or at least not all of them immediately or at least some fudging, we did settle for that. And on the Ukrainian side, Tonya, regardless of what the nationalist elements you've described and have a powerful they are, if the United States were to say to them, that's it. It's now time to negotiate seriously with Russia. Would Zelensky government or whoever happens to replace him not have to follow suit? I'll start with your last question first. The American influence on the Ukraine Nazis is enormous because to put it bluntly, they created the Ukraine Nazis. The Ukraine Nazis would have had nothing like the power they've got now without the huge amounts of money that the Americans have covertly pumping into helping them because they wanted to weaponize the Ukraine against Russia. And it's part of the long-term geopolitical aim right back to as big as Przinski, the pole to weaken Russia and to turn one part of Russia against the majority part of Russia to create in Ukraine as the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has called it an anti-Russia, an anti-Russia. So they've done that. And there is this monster of an anti-Russia and it would be quite difficult for the Americans now to wind it back, but I think they could wind it back. And if they sacked Victoria, Newland, asked her to go on a very good pension scheme and if they put some new faces into State Department and if they sent a very strong message, right guys, we went a bridge too far with a story you've suffered so many casualties in Ukraine. Now it's time to end this. That would be enormously influential. But I don't see that happening yet unfortunately because they are still the Americans invested in this information war. They're very ambitious. I hear it all the time since I got back to Russia. These lies that are being pumped around that Putin's the new Hitler, that Putin's going crazy, that the Russian people are rioting in the streets against Putin, that his days are numbered. All of this is simply untrue. Russia is a very stable, patriotic, above all solid country. And whatever a few liberal intellectuals may be doing in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the vast majority of the country, they remember the horrors of World War II and they know that this Nazi boil has to be launched before it gets any bigger. So there's a solid reliable patriotism there which Putin and the National Security Council can count on. So once again, I would say, and I think your analysis is very good, Joe, if that can be done, I'll just say one last thing. I think Putin's three objectives which have been stated by both Ramesh and myself are not negotiable. What is negotiable perhaps, is not to talk about denazification as a term. And I noticed that the Russians are starting to use the term less. Peskov, who's a senior advisor to Putin in the Kremlin, didn't use the term in his latest representation of what might be possible. So the beginnings of a compromise are there possibly. Just to compliment, Donnie mentioned Victoria Newland. I share his sentiments towards her, but there's some extraordinary statement from her in Senate testimony two days ago on the 8th, which you can, it was so extraordinary that when I saw the reference to it, I checked it out for myself and I've seen the video of the exchange in Senate where she confirmed that the US has been operating jointly with Ukrainians, a biological weapons lab or biological research lab in Ukraine. And you can infer the nefarious research of that from the fact that she expressed concern if this were to fall in Russian hands. Just think about that, what they've been doing. Now, to go back to your question, the clear answer from a professor of course is you will get them both at the table when they go into the hurting stale, mutually hurting stale midfates. When losses begin to mount on both sides, complete victory becomes unachievable for either side. The difficulty in this, and this goes back to the comments that Tony was making is that you don't have those two sides, you have a third side. And the third side is US led NATO. Now there are costs on what are being done to the world and to the West as well. There will be economic consequences of these sanctions and we are feeling that already in terms of the prices of the petrol pump, for example, this will start to affect, it will damage efforts across the West and therefore across the world of trying to green our economy at a faster pace than will be sustainable anymore. Strategically, at some stage, it will dawn on the Americans that the biggest victor of any prolonged tension, let alone violence and conflict, armed conflict in Ukraine will be China. Just as the big strategic victor of the Iraq war was Iran. And that is not to their long-term net advantage. So when they realize that they're also caught in a hurting state of affairs, as well as Russia and Ukraine, at that point they will enter into things. I think Tony was right in his initial remarks, the Americans will be prepared or might at the moment be prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian, but I'm not sure that the Ukrainian leadership would want that. So when they realize that they're not getting the help that they thought they might be getting and that Russia is advancing militarily, it will be time to cut your losses and begin talking about what is minimally acceptable instead of maximalist ambitions. Clearly they're not going to accept occupation and conquest of all of Ukraine, but if they can in turn be guaranteed that that's not going to happen. And with enforceable guarantees rather than just assurances anymore because that's not going to work. And on the other side, the military costs in Ukraine and the international costs in terms of economic sanctions as well as reputation begin to mount for Russia, then they will I think be seriously interested in that. Initially I think the change has to come from our side. I think we have to accept that those minimum three demands may not be to our liking, but from Russia's strategic interest point of view, they're not necessarily unreasonable. Okay, now I've got one final question before, but before I put the final question very quickly, could anyone who's interested in asking a question, I think in the interests of not muting and unmuting, could you please write it down in the chat box and I will try and acknowledge it and then put it to our two speakers. My final question is this, apart from the US and of course, Russia and the Ukraine political establishment, are there any other significant actors that could put a break of some kind on the unfolding conflict? And that I'm asking two questions there. What about allies of the United States? Prior to the use of force, it was clear I thought that France was pushing towards somewhat more sympathetic position towards Russia and perhaps Germany to a lesser extent. So can allies apply a useful influence which might quicken the pace towards a peaceful resolution? Has the global public any capacity to influence the course of events either within individual countries or internationally more broadly? I would say that, and these are two wildcards which will surprise people on the panel I think. I think France and Germany have lost their ability to influence matters meaningfully. They've been pulled back into the corral, unfortunately. I would mention two countries, Israel and Turkey. Turkey, a Black Sea power with a very major interest in settling things down. Israel was a large, still large, even after the Nazi genocide, Jewish population in Ukraine are concerned for their welfare, are worried about the Ukraine Nazis because the hidden agenda of the Ukraine Nazis is still anti-Semitic although they've learned to conceal it. There were very long talks between the Israeli Prime Minister and Putin a few days ago. I'm sure they mostly talked about how to find a way through this. So somewhere or other, I think those two countries could make a difference. I was going to mention a third country in addition to these and let me remind you that the Ukrainian and Russian foreign ministers have in fact agreed to meet in Turkey. So that has now happened. There is a third country and that picks up on something that Joe you said in your introductory remarks and the third country is India. The credentials of these three countries they actually have good relations and have maintained good relations with all conflict parties with Russia, with Ukraine and with the Western powers. This is where it is wrong, very wrong for people to criticize and attack India for abstaining on the Security Council, General Assembly and Human Rights Council resolutions. Had it joined the condemnation, its ability to act as a diplomatic interlocutor would have diminished greatly. The fact that it has kept its good relations going, communication is open. I'm not sure how many of the people tonight realize India has had almost 20,000 students in Ukraine who need evacuation. To get them out of Ukraine safely, India has to have good relations with all the parties and not antagonize anyone. So there are good reasons for it in terms of its own history and interests not to join the condemnation but there are good reasons in terms of what it may be possible going forward for India, which does have a very large, very experienced and skilled diplomatic core for it to be able to act as a good fit mediator and negotiator. So I think there are possibilities there but of course the primary thing does depend on when the conflict parties themselves realize that they're all hurting and from this point onwards the net losses and harms are going to exceed any conceivable long-term benefit. Then I think that will be the moment to start to increase pressure from the global public to end it. Short of that, I think it will be a temporary truce and this will be a problem that we kick down the line. So I think that's where it is important to get the analysis right except or come to some common understanding of what are the bottom lines on all sides that all sides can now live with and then proceed on that basis and then identify the country's concern or potentially even China could play a useful role because it has stakes also in this and has tried to play, I don't think anyone has any doubt that China has rushes back in this but nonetheless they haven't been in public wildly enthusiastic about what Russia has done and that may give them the opportunity to be able to play some sort of role as well. Joe, could I offer a footnote to what I said? Yeah, a quick one because we've got some questions coming through. It will be a very quick one. You know who can really make a difference? Our general public in Western countries, Joe Blow in the street, Martin Murphy in the street. If we stop kicking the Russian heads, if we stop demonizing Russia, if we stop wearing Ukrainian flags on our T-shirts and painting Ukrainian flags on our faces, every time we do that, we're prolonging this war. So we have a personal responsibility to be open-minded to say, well, maybe both sides have something to say in this to stop this torrent of anti-Russian hatred that I've been so struck by in the three or four days since I've been back in Australia. I did want to make that point. Thank you. Thank you. Well, we've got a few questions coming through. One question is, has fossil fuels and calculations about that had any impact on the course of the conflict and a different question, but not unrelated. Why would the United States be at all inclined to make concessions given that they have the opportunity to bleed Russia dry? Well, the last question I've answered already in terms of, I think at some stage, US and NATO countries will have to realize that they're being damaged as well. One of the consequences of this will be to further embed the narrative that the US is trigger-happy and weaponizing trade and its dominance of the international financial system. So there will be efforts made to create alternative arrangements in order to escape this rush to punitive measures from that. And China is in a better position than Russia to do that. And Russia is starting to go in that direction as well. We should not forget the vast global network that China has created through its Belt and Road Initiative and through other measures. And mustn't forget that more than twice as many countries now have China as their major trading partner rather than the US. And that includes us in Australia. Ramesh, because of your past involvements and interest, has the UN no role in all of this at all? I think the UN Security Council has stopped being fit for purpose a long time ago. That sounds harsher than it should be. I think in conception, the UN was never meant to be able to stop a war between the major powers themselves. That's the logic behind the veto power. It was meant to facilitate the maintenance of peace when the great powers are willing and ready and able to cooperate. It was never meant to be able to stop a war by a major power when it was intent on doing so. That said, I mean, the unfortunate reality is that the Secretary General of the United Nations is the prime minister of the NATO country. He was prime minister at the time of the Kosovo war when NATO went to war. His credentials are therefore in this case a compromise right there. We tend to forget the Russian foreign minister Lavrov was the Russian ambassador to the UN at the time. I think, you know, just as we would not believe what Hitler had written as what he wanted, we just don't seem to want to believe what we have been told repeatedly by Putin, my Lavrov and by a lot of other Russians. They were deeply, deeply offended and angry by what happened in Kosovo. And there's been other events since. It's not a big secret. Why don't we believe them? Why do we think they're just making it up and acting? I've never understood that. So I think there are these factors. And as I said, because of that, and because the Russians and the Chinese have their veto power in district council and the others use it as well. I don't think that's going to work. The General Assembly vote was overwhelming. But as we've seen in Australia, when the United States and Australia have been in a tiny minority on some resolutions to do with Israel, we've won it with pride as a badge of honour. So just because the General Assembly has overwhelming vote in one issue, doesn't mean that it's going to have much influence on how Russia behaves in a particular case. It just reflects the circumstances of the time. So yes, I don't think the UN... I think the UN is better at coming up with information, in fact, finally. Sorry. Just a second. I'm just curious to just follow it up a fraction. A UN Secretary-General, be it the current one or some other one, hypothetically, can't offer a mediating role of any kind in conflicts of this kind. Secretary-General can and should. In order to be able to do that, the Secretary-General must avoid public condemnations. Guterres has been too far out in front with very strong statements against Russia. I think that would make it very difficult for him to be accepted by Russia as an honest, good faith interlocutor. You can feel good by condemning or you can make yourself good and useful by staying quiet no matter how angry you are. Could I come in there for the couple of points of detail? Guterres has had very important talks with the Russian Defence Minister, Shoygu, in recent days on the establishment of humanitarian corridors. Now, these are terribly important because Russia wants those humanitarian corridors to work, to get the civilians out of the towns and cities they're encircling. The Ukranauts don't want them to work because they want to keep their hostages. They want to continue to be able to operate with the security of being surrounded by civilians and they have a bit of a death wish, some of them. They're wanting to provoke a sort of a bell-huller where they'll all go down dead but with heroes surrounded by many victims. So I think Guterres still has good credibility in Russia and I'm a little bit more hopeful, I think. This could come together quite quickly over the next two or three weeks if the Ukrainian people find the courage to defy their commissars and to come out and say, look, we've had enough of this. And this can happen with Slav people. Slav people, I don't want to sound like a racist, but they have this incredible capacity for putting up with huge brutality on the part of their rulers and then suddenly something snaps and they just turn around and say, ah, no more. And it could happen in Ukraine. Now that we have some more questions, some large ones, the Ukraine crisis we're now seeing, what does that tell us about any hopes the global public might have and certainly peace movements might have of some kind of a negotiator, demilitarization or at least denuclearization which might set a more useful backdrop to the settlement of disputes as they arise. Ukraine hit today and somewhere else tomorrow. Is denuclearization at least the disarmament negotiations off the agenda or can they be put back on the agenda? On the nuclear front, I'm afraid. Yes, go on, Ramesh. Say it again. On the nuclear front, I think the answer is very dispiriting. I think Putin, more than any other leader of the nine countries with the bomb, has been the most public in repeatedly affirming the rule of nuclear weapons in his strategy. And this goes back to 2014 and on, but since then even the North Koreans have not been quite as brazen in highlighting the rule of nuclear weapons. And an odd result of this might well be that having taken action in Ukraine as a pushback against expanding NATO military footprint closer and closer to Russia. The Eastern European countries that are already members of NATO might now increase pressure on Washington to station NATO nuclear weapons on their territory. And I think they've seen, that hasn't covered much in Australia unless it happened in the week that I was offline because of the floods here and I haven't seen it. But last Sunday, I think former Japanese Prime Minister Abe called for an open debate in Japan about whether Japan should request American nukes to be stationed on Japanese soil. So I think we are going to be called upon as global publics to fight the battle to hold the line on nuclear sharing and continue the line on nuclear disarmament because this does highlight the very real risks that exist on the larger question of peace movements. I think peace movements had died down quite considerably since the heyday of the 80s, also the nuclear side of it. Partly because I think we also, I don't include myself in that but we in the broader generic sense, we also were allowed into complacency with the end of the Cold War that history had indeed ended. What this shows is the ever present threats and reality with the return of geopolitics, with a suddenness and a savagerness that we thought we had left behind. So I hope we go back in terms of what I was saying to a continued rebalancing between power and principles towards the principles and the norm side. But it is going to require work and it's going to require work and active engagement by all of us, particularly in the peace movements and peace research side. I would say that Russia would be the last country in the world to accept a pacifist ideology. And if you read two great novels, you'll know why. One is Tolstoy's War and Peace and the other is Grossman's Stalingrad written about Russia in World War II. Russia suffered enormously in particularly the second one, the what they call the Great Patriotic War. They lost 24 million people, combatants and non-combatants. They alone turned the tide against Nazism. All of Europe, all of the countries in the European community today that are preaching to Russia on how it needs to be more civilized. They were all Hitler's allies in World War II, all of them except Britain. And that needs to be remembered and it's certainly remembered by Russians. And the treachery and betrayal over the last 30 years is really confirming in the mind of Russians. In the end, we're not going to go through that again. We're going to have a nuclear deterrent and we're going to have to jolly well be prepared to use it. And I'm sorry if it, Edward offends my pacifist friends and colleagues, but mutual assured destruction for most Russians is their insurance policy. And they won't give up on that. There was a related question and probably Ramesh would be the one to answer it. Is the nuclear ban treaty irrelevant or does it have still some purchase in the light of the Ukraine crisis? I've just responded on chat to everyone on that. I think what this crisis shows is that even most are the absolutely critical importance of promoting nuclear disarmament and nuclear ban. I think the idea that only the bad guys are erratic and volatile is false. I think we saw in the dying days of the Trump presidency genuine fears of what an unhinged US president can do. We've seen a rise in what I would call the normalization of nuclear weapons discourse in recent years from several countries. We've seen dogfights between India and Pakistan and for the first time in one nuclear armed country firing missiles deep into the territory of another nuclear armed country and the air forces engaging in combat. We've seen a war waged by fists and sticks and rocks between China and India a couple of years ago. So the risks and threats have grown. Countries are modernizing and upgrading the nuclear weapons. The prospects of escalation through nuclear weapons either through the inexorable logic of a conflict spiral which is a real risk in what's happening in Ukraine or through inadvertence or miscalculation or misinformation. These risks have grown. We have no choice but to combat this and the idea that you can hold the line on preparation while permanently ignoring the obligation in the NPT and now the ban treaty for nuclear disarmament. That idea is so strategically illiterate and so contrary to all known human history and common sense that I'm amazed that so many people still believe in that. So I think our choice is either we keep working towards nuclear disarmament or we accept that sooner or later nuclear weapons will be used again. And if that is an acceptable price we are prepared to pay then I think this conversation is not going to go very far. No, it becomes irrelevant, doesn't it? Yes, someone has also asked my China which we've already covered but the question's been asked. China appears at least publicly to be pushing towards negotiate to be pushing pressing for negotiations. I know it's been mentioned as a country that may be able to make a useful contribution. Is this just for public consumption or does China have an interest in the reasonably quick resolution of the conflict? I'll have a go at that one. Under the Belt and Road Initiative a large part of it is about rebuilding the trade routes on land between China and Europe and Ukraine sits right a thwart one of those major trade routes, the Great Silk Road from the Middle Ages. Ukraine, although it's a basket case now is a potentially very rich country. It's got tremendous resources of mineral resources of land, of hydrocarbons. It's got good navigation infrastructures. It's got a very hardworking people. Ukraine could transform itself under a good government into a very strong economy. And for China, that's all very attractive. And if they could help put Ukraine back on a rational path of development, I think there's something in it for them. I think I have just about put all the questions that people asked, which is handy because we're getting very close to our concluding time. But someone has asked a question of Pax Christi. Is it a pacifist organization? That's not a word that Pax Christi uses but it is certainly committed to nonviolence. And it is in line with the pronouncement of most religious leaders around the world. And of course, Pope Francis, that notions of just war have reached their use by date. And that only peacemaking can be regarded as a legitimate long-term objective. And for that matter, a short-term objective. So the position of Pax Christi would be that peacemaking and peace building and the elimination of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and demilitarization more generally are not luxuries but ethical and practical necessities. And that everyone therefore is called upon to do what they can in support of those objectives. That's generally Pax Christi's position. A commitment to adjust peace without the use of force as the intermediate means to achieve it. Of course, conflicts arise and the question then is to bring them to a speedy conclusion by whatever pressures one can apply and resistance one can apply. So that in a nutshell would be Pax Christi's position. Okay, I think we have done if we have, if not tired as the, we have not in a sense gone to all aspects of what is a very complex situation. I think we've given it a good go. Before I ask Ramesh and Tony if they want to share a concluding quick comment I'd just like to mention to people that an initiative that Pax Christi strongly support called Conversation of the Crossroads will be running a seven week series beginning late April, going to early June, seven Tuesday evenings. And certainly one of the big issues among many others that we'll be considering is the Anglo world versus Russia and China is conflict inevitable. And we will have an array of distinguished guests to help us along plus a whole lot of other important interactive activities to think through this very complex problem of which war and peace is only one. We know there are so many others. If it's not the Ukraine, it's climate change. If it's not climate change, it's COVID. If it's not COVID, it is a humanitarian crisis, refugee flows, et cetera, et cetera. The point of this series will be to try and join the dots and see whether we can get a handle on a very complex but fast moving world and how we might respond either individually, collectively, nationally or internationally. So you'll all hear more about it and please spread the word if you can. So Tony, you started things off. So I go to you again. Do you have a concluding thought you'd like to share with us? Yes, I do, I have a few sentences. I have a few sentences I'd like to share in conclusion. Unfortunately, the editor of a leading Australian journal which I will not name out of my respect for him and I have great respect for him, actually recently withdrew an article I'd written which had already been published and was the most popular article in the weekend which was published because he said on reflection he didn't approve of my position that Russia had no alternative to going in. Now I've defended that position here tonight vigorously and I hope logically. I want to say thank you to you, Joe and to all of you involved in Pax Christi having had sufficiently open minds to giving me a chance to state my case fairly and without harassment or rudeness towards me. It's a great credit to your organisation and I want to say thank you. Thanks very much, Tony. Ramesh? Yes, in conclusion, just one thought. I said earlier how the Americans had contributed to this crisis through their policy of triumphalism without any generosity of spirit towards Russia as the defeated side in the Cold War. In Ukraine, despite all the setbacks that may have happened, the overwhelming military superiority still lies with Russia. Should Russia achieve its military objectives by military means, its objectives by military means? I hope in turn Putin will remember the importance of avoiding triumphalism and engaging with the other side. In particular, if the other side has been defeated with a sense of generosity and reintegrating them into the broader community. Well, thank you, Ramesh and thank you to both guests, Ramesh and Tony for very incisive and I think helpful contributions to making sense of what's going on and to how we might respond. And generosity has just been made. It's sometimes in short supply. Let's see what we can all do to raise the levels of generosity within and between countries that may be a helpful contribution to the likes of the Ukraine conflict.