 Cathy Vogan with Tony Kevin, former Australian Ambassador to Cambodia and Poland. Tony, you can tell us a lot about what's going on currently with Russia and Ukraine. You've been following this very closely and you've also been working in Moscow for quite a long time and you've written a book about this. Return to Moscow, I believe it's called, is that correct? That's correct, Cathy. Fill us in, Tony, on what's happening now. Well, I'm following, as you suggested, very closely on an hour-by-hour basis, essentially. I wake up all night to catch the latest news. I'm following the course of the campaign in Ukraine, this tragic and bloody and unnecessary war, I must say. Unfortunately, it's a war that has been posed on Russia, that Russia had been trying for eight years to create a peace process for the Minsk negotiations. It turned out that they were basically played along by the regime in Kiev and its western backers, who were meanwhile busily harming Ukraine and indoctrinating the country in anti-Russian ideologies, hateful ideologies. So that when Putin, the President of Russia, was finally placed in the position of being told, if you don't do something, the remaining areas of resistance in Ukraine, Donetsk and Lugansk province will be overrun and there will be a process of ethnic cleansing and there will be a huge human rights atrocity in those provinces. His hand was forced. He signed a mutual protection treaty with Donbass and Lugansk. The Ukrainian armed forces ignored it and went on advancing on those areas with their newly supplied weapons from the United States. Much more powerful weapons, much longer range, against which the local resistance had no real defence. And so he was forced to declare a general mobilisation against Ukraine in what he called a special military operation, not a war. Now that's been going for eight months and just recently a very important development happened, which I would like to share with consortium news viewers, which is that the new Commander-in-Chief of Russian Armed Forces, General Surovkin, who was appointed to this position about a month ago, after previously having had four separate commands in different areas of a thousand kilometre long front, now General Surovkin, who has massive Libyan and Syrian experience, is in charge of the whole operation. And he gave an incredibly important media conference in Russia, which I followed closely. And the main things that he said are, to put it in a nutshell, Russia is winning this war. We are fighting it in the theatres that advantage us, and we are not fighting it in the theatres that lead to loss of lives of our soldiers and loss of lives of civilians caught up in the battle. We're holding the front steady, and meanwhile we're continuing our systematic and targeted destruction of Ukrainian energy and military infrastructure across the length and breadth of Ukraine. And he expressed confidence that these tactics were working, that Russia was essentially on top of the situation, and that whatever Ukraine tried to do from here on in will simply result in massive loss of life for Ukrainian soldiers, pointlessly pushed forward into offensive offensives, because Russia has the technology and the ability to rebuff them, as it repulsed an offensive earlier this week in Karsan province, and he said they can do that anywhere. And so really he was holding out a message to Kiev regime, start talking about peace because as a war you've lost it. Can you tell us something about these military exercises that are going on, rather to close to Russia? Yes, they're extremely provocative. Ian Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, keeps talking about the nuclear threat from Russia. There's no nuclear threat from Russia, there's a very large nuclear threat from NATO at the moment of imprudence and irresponsible nuclear exercises on the borderlands of Russia, on the territory of Poland, which practically adjoins Russia. Actually it doesn't join Russia in one place. That could be misunderstood by the Russians and could trigger nuclear war by accident. That is the big risk because Russia's doctrine is they will not initiate nuclear war unless there's an existential threat to their country and they will launch a warning which means that if they have a clear warning of approaching nuclear weapons in planes or whatever missiles, they will launch. And so for the NATO forces to be exercising nuclear potential aircraft within a few hundred kilometres of Russia is massive irresponsibility. Well, isn't the expression poking the bear? Hasn't it been that since February 24th? Yes, it has. And before? And now it's particularly if you like dangerous because with Ukraine on its backheels as it were with Ukraine resorting to all kinds of terrorism type operations blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline by probably in the United States was an act of terrorism. Trying to blow up the Kursk Bridge by a team that we know now had western support. Important western support was an act of terrorism. There are attacks on Russian training camps in southern Russia. Drone attacks on blocks of flats. Terrorism, the murder of the daughter of a prominent Russian politician. She was also a journalist by the way. She was also a journalist, yes. And a few kilometres outside Moscow. She was described as the daughter of Putin's brain. You've touched on the nature of the western mainstream press coverage of this. There's no pretense of accuracy, no pretense of checking sources. They simply unquestioningly retail whatever papulum, key of propaganda regime, pumps out to them. And unfortunately it means that a large part of western audiences are not getting any idea of what's really happening in the war in Ukraine. And that's why it's really important. I think what people like me are doing, which is reading independent international sources, reading Russian sources, cross-referencing, checking on what different people are saying, and what we're coming up with is a very efficiently conducted, prudent, lifesaving war, not targeting civilians, targeting military and energy infrastructure entirely. Trying to minimise civilian collateral damage as far as possible. Most of the civilian casualties have actually been caused by badly aimed Ukrainian anti-missiles being fired up at wildly into the sky and the landing, who knows where. So unfortunately most of the casualties are self-inflicted in Ukraine. And all I can say is now that Russia has one single command structure, one single leader in general, sort of, there's a very good prospect that they'll be able to bring this war to a successful military conclusion, maybe by spring, maybe even earlier, maybe before midwinter. Do you think that the people in those four regions that are now part of Russia, do you think that they will finally have peace or are they still going to be shelled? Well there's two views on this. One is that there can never be peace while a very extreme nationalist, pathologically anti-Russian regime remains in power in Kiev and that really Russia has to achieve regime change across all of Ukraine for there to be real peace for the Russian-speaking people. The other view of course is that any peace is better than war and if it's possible to achieve some sort of negotiated solution that leaves the Kiev regime in power in a hopefully very weakened, militarily weakened state and gives the Russian-speaking and Russian value-oriented large population of the present day Ukraine a chance to freedom, that would also be a solution. I think it's too early to tell. Do you think that if the western Ukrainian regime survives aren't they going to be ruling over a country that is also financially weakened? Wasn't Donbass the money-owner of Ukraine? Isn't that where a lot of the industry... Absolutely. All the industry and all the mineral wealth tends to be in the south and east of the country and of course the south is all the Black Sea ports which are the trading lands of the country. A lot of mining as well. Yes, so what's left in the north and the west is essentially agrarian peasant or sort of country peasant economy. They'll be a lot poorer. They'll need massive western restitution, martial aid type recovery after war ends. But they brought this on themselves and unfortunately I'm sure Russia will be responsible for helping the parts of the country that have gone over to Russia and what we've seen in this referendum, these four provinces that have overwhelmingly voted to join Russia, this could be repeated because the longer Kiev continues with a futile struggle the more Russia will be forced by military logic to move forward and they already have very efficient troops along the front. They're being reinforced. 300,000 new soldiers coming forward. Many of those there already have extensive experience of paratrooper type combat which of course if you were going to take the Dessau or the nearby cities like Mikolayev, Krivirov, the paratroopers would of course play a leading role and they're sitting right there. So I think generals, the general in charge of the Russians has holes in the cards and I trust his judgement to play them well. I'm just thinking of what happened in Odessa with the people being burned alive. It is largely Russian speaking city as well. So do you think there are hopes among the citizens of Odessa that that becomes part of Russia? I would say that a large buried pro-Russian feeling not just in Odessa but right across most of Ukraine. Ukraine is essentially a part of the Russian world, the Russian civilizational world. And that doesn't mean that Russia has an imperial ambition to own Ukraine. I think they just want Ukraine as a friendly country. And so before in his speech today he did hold out a kind of a word to the Ukrainians. He said we're not trying to harm you. We're trying to harm the power structure in Kiev, the war against us. We don't mean you any harm and we're trying to protect you. This was his words to the people of Ukraine. We're just listening to Scott Ridder, he anticipated that it was going to be over very quickly thinking that the Russians might fight the same way as the Americans do with Shokinor. And in fact it was very, very slow and they had very low numbers of civilian history. I think history will judge Mr Putin not so well for this. I think he expected too much Ukrainian rationality, Ukrainian regime rationality and goodwill. He did not quite appreciate how they had been infected by Nazi ideas and how the Americans were pumping huge amounts of money into supporting elements in Ukraine that had those ideologies. I think Putin waited too long before doing the right thing, putting one general sort of open in command, giving sort of open the authority to basically fight the war as it has to be fought, which is very hard against infrastructure and against energy. Why in your opinion is the United States putting so much into this war that's on the other side of the world? What do they really want? A bit of personal history. Biden has a bee in his bonnet about Ukraine. He's been pushing the Ukrainian extreme nationalist cause for decades. His son's involved in a dubious way. I think it's personal for Biden and also of course he's desperate politically at home. So the United States is not conducting itself rationally at this point and that of course is what some observers are very frightened of that if the United States isn't approaching this war rationally there's a danger to us all. Do you think that there's going to be, look there were hundreds of thousands of people in France protesting and demanding that France leave NATO when the British people have to choose whether to eat or eat. Do you think that there's going to have to be a quick end to this as in dissociation from these activities now? I think there's massive civil unrest coming in many Western European countries. You mentioned France and Britain. I'd also mentioned Germany. There's going to be a lot of anger in the streets. Unfortunately the elites have been somehow compromised by American power, American money and also the European Parliament has been compromised. The voice of the people is not being heard and I think once the people's voice starts being expressed in the streets once people are hungry and cold we can expect to see a dramatic autumn in Europe. Well that's right and these things aren't reversed overnight are they? Once they're cold and hungry you don't just feed them tomorrow if the war's over do you? No. Right, thank you very much Tony Kevin.