 I just want to start with a couple of quotes just to put into context where we are. There's a magazine I've got here called The National Interest. It's an American magazine, a journal, a conservative magazine, and this with the foresight here is called Countdown to War, The Coming U.S. Russia Conflict. It's by two prominent conservative American academics, Graham Allison and Dmitry Simes. The latter obviously came from Russia. The other quote I want to give you is Brzezinski, who you know to all of you, in which he says we are already in a cold war. I could go on at length and say that there are some other more excitable quotations. Somebody has sent me a document which has at least 10,000 words long by. Somebody I don't know called Max Fisher in a journal I've never heard of called Vox. If somebody knows what it is, please enlighten me. It's got a beautiful title and I quote, How World War III became possible. In a more measured way, I'd just like to reflect on something I said at this time last year when we at strategic defence study centre produced this document, which Andrew is the person who masterminds. It was about the implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I said at that time, so it's a year ago last month, this is the worst crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War. It marks the return of a Russia hostile to the West that is prepared to reject international norms about state sovereignty and risk confrontation with NATO. Under Putin we can expect protracted and wider confrontation with the West. So how have we arrived at this situation as Michael said? It's nearly quarter of a century ago since the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union disappeared and rarely in world history would you have a superpower like the Soviet Union without going to war, willingly disintegrate, will indeed go to sleep. And you know Putin has called that disintegration of the Soviet Union and the geopolitical crisis in the last century. Now we would have different views on that and one of the views is that from my point of view and I recognise many of you will have different views about what I'm saying this evening part of the problem we face now was also to do with American hubris and victory about quote, we won the Cold War. Well they actually didn't, the Soviet Union defeated itself. And I think as I will explain later the sense of hubris carried on to as a Russian ambassador in Canberra said to me in the early 90s just two or three years after the end of the Soviet Union he said to me, Paul, why isn't the West and in particular America and NATO developing a Marshall plan to come to our assistance? Because if Russia disintegrates the way it looks you could be facing a Weimar Republic. Well you know, we're not yet at a Weimar Republic and we're certainly not facing Nazi Germany but I think we are now reaping some of the things we sowed 25 years ago. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's all our fault I'm not saying that Putin isn't a particularly nasty authoritarian leader and I'm not saying as you'll hear me say that many of these issues we face geopolitically with the Russians are deep in Russian history and culture they are. But we're not scot-free and we're now reaping some of this in my view. So how have we arrived at this situation of acute potential danger with a resurgent Russia a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War? There are several answers, I don't have them all. They include the failure of post-Soviet democracy and Russia reverting to traditional 700 years of authoritarianism both under the czars of all the Russians and under the Communist Party. Secondly, there is a perception in Moscow real or not whether we like it or we don't like it of what they see as a palpable geopolitical threat from a NATO that has expanded to the very borders of Russia and has taken over from Moscow's point of view the former Soviet strategic space and the buffer zone that Eastern Europe provided to Russia that was traditionally invaded through Eastern Europe. Bona part obviously and after that of course Hitler. Now again I'm not saying that one has to agree with that view but I am saying there's any good scholar indeed intelligence officer, Michael Wood that you need to get inside the skin of the country you study and you need to absorb its language and culture and history because if you don't you're going to get it wrong by dismissing a sum-do that NATO has seen as a geopolitical threat to Russia I think we risk a serious miscalculation. Third, so we now have a resurgent Russia on our hands determined as I said 12 months ago to challenge the established order in Europe. Putin does not accept the established strategic order in Europe. And so we now have a Vladimir Putin threatening the use of nuclear weapons and encouraging dangerous military brinthmanship. He has in the last several months reminded the West not once several times that Russia is a major nuclear power and indeed it still is. It depends how you measure the number of both active and reserve nuclear warheads but you can take it that Russia currently has about 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads and several thousand, maybe 10 or 15,000 tactical nuclear weapons. You compare that with another so-called superpower which is not a superpower of China which has in the estimates vary between 200 and 400. Well it's incomparable. Putin has reminded the Americans Russia is the only country that can destroy the United States and they could do that in my view in a period of about 12 to 24 hours. That's how long a all-out nuclear war takes. It is not to argue and I wouldn't want you to get this wrong that Putin's Russia is now the former Soviet Union in military power. It is not. It doesn't have the global conventional reach and it doesn't have the overwhelming conventional forces that in the Cold War would have put the Red Army at the channel in 7 to 10 days. But in its near abroad, as Putin calls it, in its neighbourhood, as we've seen in Crimea and in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine it certainly has that capability. Running through the context of what I'm going to say to you in this short talk but I will be writing a longer document in the next month or so. The sort of themes I'd like you to hold in mind and I've touched on the first one that Russia is a prisoner of its history, geography and culture probably more than almost any other country although many other countries also have that issue. China certainly does. In a different way, as a former defence planner, I would say that Australia does in a different way. But quintessentially with Russia it's lack of natural borders. Senior advisers to Putin are saying clearly at meetings of the Valdai Club which is Putin's favourite public venue. We have no natural borders. We've lost the buffer zone to the east and now with Ukraine wanting to join the EU and perhaps NATO to the south. Next, one of the themes that in my thinking about today's Russia is it's not just Russia we're looking at. You remember after the end of the Cold War Francis Fukuyama said in that rather arrogant American way this is the end of world history. The only future is democratic capitalism. Well, really. In China we have extreme cowboy capitalism coupled with authoritarianism. In Putin's Russia I see no democracy. I see no democracy. And what we've now got challenging the established order invented in the norms of behaviour and rules of the game invented by the West ever since the end of the Second World War we have in their two different ways two authoritarian powers, Russia and China challenging the international order being increasingly anti-Western in their views Russia more so than China and in Russia's case using force and in China's case threatening military coercion in the east and south China's season This is a new geopolitical situation for us and it better be reflected in this new defence white paper or we might have to rewrite it. And I guess the final theme sort of you know suffusing my current thinking is that we live in an era where geography and geopolitics is reasserting its traditional place in the global order. We've seen that economic interdependence is no guarantee either of democracy or an abiding peace. So, in the body of this talk I will address the following four issues. First, what are the characteristics of Putin's Russia and its ambitions in the post-Soviet space? Second, why does Russia feel so threatened and how does it perceive NATO and the United States? Third, what is the threat to Europe and what are credible scenarios for military conflict or war? And fourth, what are all the implications of all this for a Australia that in my view is not taking this issue at all seriously? We've become obsessed with two things. ISIL and terrorism. I understand that, but I do not see ISIL as an existential threat. The word existential is used two casually these days. And the other preoccupation is obviously the rise of China, which is a serious issue and which there are many different views, including director in our own research school. The upcoming chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in America, whose name I've gone and forgotten and somebody can remind me, he takes over I think in November, has described Russia as an existential threat. So, you know, 25 years on, we've come in full circle. So, turning to the first point, Putin's Russia and the post-soviet space. What are his aims? First of all, and I'm no longer an expert on day-to-day politics and the economy of Russia, so forgive me if I can't answer detail questions, my bag is strategy and geopolitics. Putin's aims have become increasingly obvious. He is now, if you like, the czar of all the Russians. He is absolutely in that line of dissent in his attitudes, in his increasing power, in the suppression of democracy, in his suppression of Western NGOs, which are bringing vile Western values, including democracy into a Russia that, and you've got to remember, he's now a convert to the Orthodox faith. He has his own patriarch. It's nice, isn't it, our KGB kernels who were atheists suddenly changed. And you need to remember, and I know a reasonable amount for private reasons about the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Orthodox Church sees itself as the third Rome. The first Rome, Rome became decrepit in the Orthodox view, went the wrong way. The second Rome in Constantinople disintegrated. So the true Christian faith in an Orthodox view is in Russia. The arch patriarch of Russia are very close to Putin, and they echo his ideas. His ideas that Russian people are neither European nor Asian. This is deep in Slavophile history, particularly in the 19th century. You look at Russian literature and so on. We Russians are different. As the great Russian poet Alexander Block once said, we are Scythians, meaning out of Genghis Khan. And we're coming to the West. And you need to remember, by the way, that Genghis Khan occupied and his host occupied Russia for 250 years, just as democracy was starting to flower. Just as we got democracy starting in a town called Gaspidin Veliki Novgorod. They learnt bad habits of the cow town and the note and punishment. Now we have the Russian Orthodox faith. I was going to say, encouraging Putin to say, the West is decadent. You're all atheist and unlike Russia, you have same-sex marriages and you have homosexuals, none of which exist in Russia. And he's closing down Western NGOs as mouthpieces to encourage coloured revolutions. You know the revolutions that went under various colours in Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere. And that, I think, is abiding fear about what happened to Yanukovic in Ukraine and that that could happen to him, that he could be overthrown. But actually if you look at the opinion polls and I do wish Mr Abbott and Mr Shorten were here to hear this, there are various opinion polls in Russia you don't trust but the Lovada poll is generally recognised as not part of the regime. The latest opinion poll I have is that Putin has a popularity rating of 89%. Dream on Abbott and Shorten, you know? As I said he perceived the disintegration of the Soviet Union as the worst geopolitical catastrophe, he said, of the last century. And he wants to see the rebirth of Russia as a great power. And he's got this idea called the Eurasian idea. And if you read some of the rantings and ravings of the Russian academics and advisers close to him, it is a sort of pseudo-geopolitics across between Macindor and I was going to say Leibbentram, but Leibbentram meaning geopolitical breathing space to the west. It is true of course that Russia is still the largest geographical entity in the world. It's about three times the size of Australia. So you know from Petersburg to Vladivostok is three times the distance from Sydney to Perth. So how would we feel if we were sat in Canberra and we were ruling another large resource-rich sparsely populated country where Perth would be where Vladivostok now is? That's the exact similar distance. Lord knows in my defence planning days we knew that no Australian politician could dismiss the fact that we sit in a large sparsely populated resource-rich country that one day, particularly in the northern approaches, could leave us very vulnerable. And of course Putin sits on a Siberia that is very vulnerable, not least because China has not formally renounced what it calls the unequal treaties of Nechinsk and Aegon. How credible are all these ambitions of this man who's going to be around till the late 2020s unless somebody knocks him off? How credible is it? Well, colleagues would immediately remind you that Russia has enormous weaknesses, more so than the former Soviet Union. The demography of Russia now is in serious trouble. The average age of expectancy of men is about 60, 62. And that's because, frankly, they drink themselves to death. And it's no exaggeration. Go there and try drinking with them. They drink hard stuff, you know, 60% proof vodka, and they're dying early and it's nothing new in Russian history. If you go back and read Dostoevsky and Turgenev and others, you'll see it's there. It's an illness of the first magnitude. And economically, it's a petro-economy that is the largest exporter of oil and natural gas in the world bigger than Saudi Arabia. But the prices dropped from over $100 to, what's it now, $40 or something? A barrel. And what else does it have? Well, it's the second biggest exporter of arms, particularly to China and India. And it has precious little else. The educated elite are leaving in droves. And you'll meet them, by the way, in Canberra. You'll meet them in all sorts of occupations. But because it controls the power and the money in what a famous American academic, Karen Dyshia, is called Putin's kleptocracy. I mean, you know, the billionaires outnumber pretty well any other country except China. Go to Kensington and see how they own most of London. It's a kleptocratic state, deeply corrupt. But he controls the levers, not just of power but of money. And he has announced in the last 12 months that increasing money will go into the Russian military. By 2020, 70% of the Russian military will have modern high-performance weapons, he says. Now, that depends very much on the trajectory of the economy and where oil and natural gas and other things go. But don't get me wrong on this. Although they've lost a lot of very bright people, there's still fundamental deep nationalism in Russia. The acquaintance with the Russian soul and the Russian soil and Russian music and literature is deeply entrenched, including amongst the elite. And they still have the capacity as a highly educated country, more so than China at present, to develop particularly advanced and nasty weapons. Particularly advanced and nasty weapons. And Putin has announced, you know, new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles with capabilities, so he says, to evade American ballistic missile defence, new generation of ballistic missile firing intercontinental nuclear warhead submarines. And you've seen, you know, new fighter aircraft tanks and so on. And you saw both a particular crime here, a professional operation with special forces, Spetsnaz, and the elite airborne troops, cutting off the entirety of the Ukraine communications and cyber suppression, and militarily ffata-complete. And in a different way with the little green men in eastern Ukraine, you're seeing that sort of pressure. It's a new form of hybrid war, deniable. We all know his line through his teeth. I've just read something before I came in out of Moscow that the 76th Airborne Division in Pskov, within 20 kilometres of the Estonian border, lost 40 people recently dead in Ukraine. All this has been hushed up and so on. Moving on. So why does Russia feel so threatened? Well, I think I've answered a lot of that. The geographical vulnerabilities they feel are enormous. And it wasn't just Bonaparte and the Germans. It was, as I've mentioned to you, 250 years of brutal occupation by the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan. And in Australia, much to the despair of whichever Swedish ambassador we have here, we all forget the defeat of the Swedes at a place called Portava, which is deep in Ukraine, where the Russians in 1709 lured the Swedish army, which by that time was the big military power in that part of Europe, deep into Russia, and then finished it off. So both its geography and its experience of war, and not least of course the Second World War, is a big part of the answer. I mean, we often felt in the Cold War that the Soviets and the Communist regime really exaggerated the Second World War. And we used to have big brawls between defence intelligence and ONA about whether the losses of the Red Army were real or were exaggerated. Well, we now know that the figures based on very careful demographic analysis is that the total losses by the Soviet Union in the Second World War were 29 million dead, of whom 10 million were soldiers and the rest were civilians. Now you say they brought a lot on themselves, because of Stalin's ignoring the threat from the Germans and the way he killed a lot of the senior military figures in the great terror of the late 1930s. But for most Russians still these days, including ordinary Russians, the May Day celebration of victory for what's called the Great Patriotic War, and it's worth by the way watching that parade, watch 16,000 members of the Moscow garrison marching in absolute step, almost as good as the Commonwealth, what's it called? Federation Guard. I was being a bit sarcastic. I shouldn't do that. So I don't dismiss their concern that now they have Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland sharing common borders with a Russia that has not shared them with those countries for a very long time. Now of course there's a sense of victory in those countries and I can understand that there were countries that were so badly and brutally occupied in the communist period. But there are issues that will not go away in my view and I'll come to that shortly. Let me give you one sort of example. Why in my view is Vladimir Putin's non-negotiable demand on Ukraine? Is it EU? Is it NATO? Is it both? My view is non-negotiable bottom line whether we like it or not, we don't like it and shouldn't, is he will not tolerate Ukraine being a member of NATO and it will be prepared to go to war. If there are Ukrainians here they will probably now contradict me. A Solzhenitsyn who was not some left-wing communist said when he went back to Russia and I quote all we Russians have Ukrainian blood in us. All we Russians have Ukrainian blood. Now a Ukrainian would dismiss that and say the language and all that that is not the view of the vast and overwhelming majority of Russians. And you know it's not something I care for. I can see that Ukrainians want to have an independent one of these days democratic which it sure as hell isn't a present country. But if NATO had troops in the northern part of Ukraine the distance from those troops to Moscow is the distance from Canberra to Melbourne. And ask me how we would feel if we had troops from a certain nation country to our north that distance away from us we'd got our tiny little mines. So the NATO thing in my view is central as well as his fear that democracy will be imposed on him by a coloured revolution. They're the two critical issues. So he's now in league with President Xi Jinping who sat next to him at the May Day Parade this May. In their different ways I think they're both in league to resist American hegemony and the established order. Putin is more anti-Western in my view but some others might have a different view than Xi Jinping for obvious reasons. And I'm not suggesting some sort of alliance. I think it's a relationship of convenience. The Chinese have been careful not to treat Russia as little brother because Russia was always the superior power. And if you go to Siberia this should be well known to us Australians. Again, Siberia, large sparsely populated resource rich difference sharing a 4,600 mile border with 1.2 billion Chinese. There's no love lost, frankly, racially and culturally. What is the perspective from Europe? This March I was in Stockholm and Helsinki main reason why I was doing some work with foreign affairs but they asked me to stay on and talk to the defence and foreign ministries of those countries and the intelligent people about how they saw regional security. And I went along well armed to talk about the rise of China and the choice between China and the United States and all that good stuff and they rapidly told me they were not terribly interested in that. Paul does only one country. It starts with R and ends with A and it's not up to any good, their views. And they walked me through the military provocations now that Russia is mounting which are at least on the same basis in frequency and proximity and potential danger as they experienced in the Cold War. So in the last calendar year the Russians mounted 400 close proximity military aircraft penetrations of NATO airspace and of non-NATO EU countries. I was shown a photograph in Stockholm of an SAS airliner leaving Copenhagen with a Sukhoi 1390 meters off the wingtip with his transponders turned off which means you can't detect him in a civil aircraft. And that's common now, that is common. And we often forget while we think about those things that in Japanese airspace the Russian military aircraft still penetrate Japan's airspace more so than China. Not much more so but more so. The Swedes told me that they detected three Russian submarines in the archipelago that screens the territorial approaches to Stockholm but the Swedes like the rest of us including this country have dramatically run down their anti-submarine warfare capability. One day we'll learn that there are other things we need to be good at and the Swedes will now make that a very high priority. And the Finns told me that they too have recently detected a submarine in the approaches to Helsinki harbour. They didn't drop any depth charges they dropped a couple of hangarines to let the submariners know that they've been fat. We're seeing a build-up of Russian forces near the Baltic countries including my favourite unit the 76th Guards Division Airborne troops out of Peskov. And the number of military exercises that Putin is ordering is enormous and they are often now without warning exercises. Now do we get those in Australia? I don't think so. And that's classical of, you know, the Tsar of all the Russians. Do this. And some of those, not just a few of them last year, those exercises no warning exercises to the strategic nuclear rocket force is to see how capable and quickly could they lock on to assigned targets. I think there is deep consternation if not fear in certain parts of Europe but Putin, you know, can exploit the weaknesses of Europe. Look at the differences of view on economic sanctions to Russia the Germans, big trade with Russia being more careful, so the French. We're seeing it on other weaknesses now in the EU. I can well imagine that Putin is scrutinising the situation in Greece very carefully right now because he can see the possibility that this might be the unraveling of the EU particularly if Greece defaults or there is an internal uprising. And he's got sufficient foreign currency reserves and by the way sort of the Chinese to mess around with that and think what that would mean for the EU if that happened. I'm not saying it's happening, I'm just saying I can well imagine situations in Putin's mind where he might want to take advantage. My former intelligence colleague John Bessemius, who's also a colleague at the... Where is he? John? John, see you. I'm going to quote you John and thank you for all the documentation you've given me. John has recently written that Putin views EU decision making with contempt and I entirely agree with you John with contempt and why wouldn't he? I mean he's 12 months on from his occupation of the eastern Ukraine where is he? Well he's still there. 15 months on from occupying Crimea where is he? He's still there. So why wouldn't he be confident that he can get away with this? There are now talks about in my discussions in Scandinavia about credible scenarios in which Putin's next step and these are speculative but they're not incredible in my view that Putin's next step might be to put military pressure on little green men I don't think there are any little Russian green women to penetrate either Estonia or Latvia 20 to 25% of which countries are Russians and therefore under his doctrine they are part of the Russian world in the near abroad and he insists he must protect them as he is doing in the Donbas. And what are the military capabilities after 25 years of independence of these countries, Estonia and Latvia? Forgive my academic language. Bugarol. It is pathetic frankly and they keep calling upon NATO while the Germans are really keen to fight the Russians aren't they? And so are the French. No. The Poles probably are and by the way I think most of us don't realise the long enmity between Poland and Russia and it's not all Poland's way by the way. Go back to the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom which humiliated Russia in the 1600s at a time of great weakness called the time of troubles and they asked me if Putin quotes this in his valdi club statements. Yes he does. At one time the Poles humiliated us. For Australians but not for Englishmen like me by birth this dimension of history is not a problem. So what could be this credible conflict you know Estonia and Latvia? He puts pressure on. He perhaps uses some conventional forces more clearly. Depends where he is in his mind. And then Estonia or Latvia in voc article 5 of NATO which unlike the answers treaty says in the event of an attack on one is an attack on all. And if we can imagine the Americans and some of the European NATO countries put in military forces to confront Putin in Estonia one of the concerns I discussed in both Stockholm and Helsinki and it's in some of the American literature now in the I double S journal survival is that Putin's new military doctrine is very clear. He knows he doesn't have overwhelming conventional technological superiority or mass as he had in the Cold War with regard to Europe. So the new Russian military doctrine says very clearly in the event that we face an overwhelmingly superior technological conventional force I think it's qualified on our territory on what he would claim is his territory which may malbeat parts of the Baltics. In that event we shall have recourse to tactical nuclear weapons. Is he the sort of person who might think about doing that? He certainly would think about doing it. He's certainly rattling the cage with nuclear weapons. Whether it would or not remains to be seen but he has the capability. Do you know what NATO's tactical nuclear weapons look like? Nothing much. Run down since the end of the Cold War including America's. America needs to develop a new generation of tactical nukes. It's said to you that Putin aims to have 70% of his armed forces with modern equipment by 2020. Whether he can do that in terms of the economy and so on I don't know but that is his ambition. So this is all nice academic theory you might think Paul Dibs indulging himself. I've got a bigger threat than Hugh White's managed to conjure up so far but you know. Hugh will like all this. One of my concerns in this town is that today we've run down seriously our Russian expertise. I mean I've been three times in this university in two research schools and three departments or centres. In the late 60s we had Professor Harry Rigby who was when I used to go to the CIA and talk to the director CIA about the Soviet Union in the 70s Harry Rigby was recognised by the Americans as in the top 10 in the world. We had a Russian language department we no longer had. We had great experts like Rigby and Jeffrey Jukes who was an expert on the Soviet military. Bob Miller who was an expert on the economy and others and we had people like John Besmears and Kyle Wilson coming through and John unless I'm wrong we've lost all that. We had a committee on Soviet and East European affairs which I was a member of for 25 years. All that's gone. Now look I do understand when the Soviet Union disintegrated it was time to move on and I moved on too by the way. I lost interest because I was obsessed with Australian defence policy but I think there's now a detecting camera sense of unreality. As some colleagues say to me, Russia is a distant country, it's weak and it's finished poor and it can never challenge European security says this person in the same way that China can challenge Asia security. Oh really what have I just been talking about? So what does all this mean for Australia? I'm not suggesting that Australia should prepare itself for a major war in Europe but serious consideration needs to be given to what our reaction would be if there were a conflict between Russia and the United States over one of the Baltic countries. What would our reaction be? We are ever ready these days to involve ourselves in each and every conflict in the Middle East so where do we stand Mr Abbott on defending European democracies? That's a question. In addition there are other if you like more tangible Australian defence and strategic interests in my view they're involved first. Moscow is testing American extended deterrents including extended nuclear deterrents and conventional deterrents in a treaty called NATO and America's ability to counter coercion is being challenged and tested by Russia. Open brackets and by China too close brackets. How things work out in Europe will affect American ability to reassure allies and partners everywhere including those in our region who must contend with coercion by China. So there'll be a measuring rod. Secondly, a Russia that is willing to use military force around its periphery will occupy US time and attention. This combined with Middle Eastern security will further distract the Americans from their rebalance to the Asia Pacific region. China will take advantage of this as American allies and partners in the region including Australia will be subject to further uncertainty about American military commitments to Asia. Now that would be worse if what I've speculated about happened and the Americans really had to refocus. We could forget the American rebalance to Asia in my view. Third, Russia's aggressive military behaviour makes China's creeping and insidious incrementalism in places such as the South China Sea harder to counter. If we can't counter the Russians, what are we going to do about China? Fourth, as a result of Western sanctions Moscow will be more determined, not less determined, more determined to sell advanced military equipment and technology to China including nuclear submarines, fighter aircraft and air defence systems some of which in the past for obvious reasons it did not want to sell to China. You know, you don't export your crown jewels. Nobody does. Not even the Americans. We're now seeing Putin weakened on this. Obviously he needs the money with the fall and the price of oil and natural gas and the Chinese will be keen to get on hence on advanced systems like the S-400 air defence system. With this happening that is Russia's applying more cutting edge technology to China and better kit frankly than the Chinese have developed so far this will add to China's own efforts to challenge American military superiority in the region and this should be a matter of direct national security concern to Australia in my view. Fifth, the West will no longer be able to count on Russian support on policies on the proliferation of nuclear weapons transfer of sensitive conventional weapons and technologies and regional conflicts involving Russia's friends such as North Korea and Syria. And we're already seeing allegations by the Americans that the Russians have broken the INF Intermediate Nuclear Theatre Forces agreement from the Cold War. And the Russians have developed a missile called Escanda which is not a theatre missile but which is in current rapid development. It has a range of 20 to 500 kilometres, carries two nuclear warheads and they're so manoeuvrable that they can actually be guided by an AEWC aircraft or a drone. And they will be deployed in a place called Kaliningrad which is the piece of territory between Estonia and Poland. It's on the Baltic, Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic Sea. It's an exclave. The launch time with that particular missile, Escanda from that site to Warsaw is about four minutes, I would have thought. So we'll have a musko, we'll not be interested in any nuclear arms control agreements that limit its nuclear war fighting capabilities. All this to me points to us taking the Russian threat more seriously. I've got a couple of things more to say and then I'll be quiet. I will end with another quote. I said that the about to be chairman of the joint chiefs of staff of the committee in the United States has now described this month, Russia as an existential threat. Earlier this year the former head of MI6, John Swars in the UK said the following. The Ukraine crisis is no longer just about Ukraine. It is now a much bigger, more dangerous crisis between Russia and Western countries about values and order in Europe. He concluded by saying, and I quote, Managing relations with Russia will be the defining problem in European security for years to come. The very final word is a slight difference of tone going back again to history and Russian history. When Catherine the Great struck a medal in 1793 to commemorate the second partition of Poland, the one that gave her a large piece of Ukraine, this commemorative medal said, read, and I quote, I have recovered what was torn away, unquote. And there in a nutshell 222 years later is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin's uncompromising stand on this issue over which one way or another he may well miscalculate or even risk war. The consequences of a new era of confrontation with a heavily armed and belligerent Russia will introduce tensions into the international system that at the least will be extremely destabilising and at worst might well return us to the levels of geopolitical brinkmanship and nuclear dangers of the old Cold War. Thank you.