 Roedd ydych chi'n gwych i gynllun y lleol, ac yn mengyni'r lleol ar gyfer gyrraedd oddi, ond mae'n teimlo cael ei weld gyda'r ffordd y dystyried cyffredinol. Mae'r ddybilio'r gennych cyntaf gyda, ac mae faggoldas yn teimlo, ond mae'r amser yn cyfrifolau gweld, yn cael y tim rai, ac mae'n ffordd yn mynd. Mwraeddu ar y dda chi am grandchildrenau. If you turned up to hear me, then my apologies. I'm saying to our colleagues before that the reason I didn't come was I went to Stans dead and forgot my passport. And there's a former foreign correspondent, I felt deeply, deeply stupid. But could do nothing about it. They did not accept the fact, that a driving licence would get me into the Republic of Ireland.thank you. So my apologies.. I'm glad to see a former colleague from Bosco here James Martin who covered the Soviet Union and Russia for the Irish Times around about the same time as I did. Both of us had the same ethnic experience. We were told to go to cover one country, the US-SR, y Swwiad Y Uniwn i'n gweithio i ddechrau 15. Mae gennydd i fynd i'n gweithio ar hynny, a'i hynny yn amlwg i'n gwneud bod yw rydych chi'n cymryd y Swwiad Y Uniwn o awtion, nawr o gweithio ac yn rhoi, yn cael ei ddweud, yn ddwy o'r peth o'r wneud o'r podion o'r Lennon yn cael ei gwybod o'r ffaith ar y Maidai Pyrreid, a'r dweud i'n wneud i chi gweithio, felly fe yng Ngheilu Ddaeth am y Cyfrifenedd? Og heddiw'n cyfrifenedd yng Ngheilu Ddaeth fydd menlyio pan fydd y cynhyrchu ar gweithio diogeluaeth mewn gwagliannod, ychydig, ac yn y brydol yn gallu lle i fe sydd wedi'u siaradau o fofennol byddwch Mosgo i gyfrifenedd yng nghyrch ag y ladlu a ches eu gilydd eitw pethau o'u newydd hwnnw a'r penderfwylliant o eich gwrthfyn o'r ddydd yn gweithio many, many decades, a world event, but so many world events were packed into these years of 89, 90, 91, 92, and then of course the chaos that succeeded the end of the Soviet Union that you began to get a bit blasé, another world-shaking event, well, I still don't know, should I go or not. And in that period, much of the 90s, from 91 onward in Russia I was there for six years covering the last year and a half of Gorbachev and the first, more or less, five of Boris Yeltsin, it was a country whose leadership, both Mikhail Gorbachev bringing in Glasnost, opening on translation of it, and Perestroika, a reconstruction of the economy, not to make it capitalist but to make it more efficient as socialism, and then succeeded by Boris Yeltsin who dug underneath the foundations that Gorbachev was trying to make both for himself and for the Soviet Union, and finally after a unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev, finally succeeded him and succeeded in breaking up the Soviet Union into its 15 constituent republics in that period, the period when we were there, especially the first four or five, six years, the assumption was, the correct assumption was that the politics which the new leadership were following were broadly speaking towards a liberal democracy, never got there but it was towards a liberal democracy, and it was pro-European. You will remember perhaps some of you that one of Mikhail Gorbachev's slogans which was echoed by Boris Yeltsin was for the creation of a common European home that Yelts, I think Gorbachev was the first to put that phrase into common political parlance, he saw Europe, he saw Russia, the Soviet Union or much of it within in Europe and saw the common European home by which he meant that we, all of us, we Europeans and of course he included the Americans perhaps the whole of the world had to get over this cleavage which the Cold War had imposed upon us and see the common values and the common problems and come to some kind of common action to deal with these problems. But Putin's period from the 2000 onwards, the last decade and the half has been quite different which is what I want to speak about. I take the place now, luckily, in a way that lucky that I didn't come last time in one sense because I was able, my guilt impelled me to come whenever I was asked, and Raghuramur asked me to come to take the place of Dimitri Trinin who was to be here. I know Dimitri well, he's head of the Carnegie office in Moscow, has been for some time, he was a former military intelligence officer and then became an analyst, one of the best I think post-Soviet analysts, but he fears and feared then when he was supposed to come that Carnegie might be in the sites of the Kremlin for closure and decided he should come. In the past three years laws have been passed in Russia which severely limit the activities of the NGOs and other institutions with links abroad. The foreign agents law, the inustraniagent which in Russian sounds more sinister than it does in English because the inustraniagent, the foreign agent was regarded as the viper in the bosom of the Soviet state. NGOs which take money from abroad and which operate in a very, very broadly defined political space are named as foreign agents and their funds are cut off. The NGO which I'm chairman of, I didn't create it, it was created by two Russians and I was in Russia at the time and became friendly with them and supported it, was originally called the Moscow School of Political Studies which somewhat right squarely in the middle of the air of what the Kremlin most hated. We renamed ourselves somewhat clumsily and late into the Moscow School of Civic Enlightenment in order to get a bit of what might call Voltarian gloss onto what we were doing but it didn't fool anybody and a few months ago after a number of appeals the money was frozen which meant essentially since most of our money did come from abroad we could no longer operate and we're now trying to operate excuse me outside of Russia and the donors who include George Soros who has given so much of his money, he's got a lot of money but he's given an awful lot of it away to support institutions like that in the former Soviet Union, in Central and Eastern Europe. He's continuing to support with others and we hope to keep it going in some way. At the same time another law was passed only a couple of months ago which seems to be about to allow the government to close foreign NGOs which were regarded as undesirable, un-desirable. What does undesirable mean? Well, it means what you want it to mean. It means that if you don't like the Carnegie Institute or Human Rights Watch Office which has an office in Moscow then you say it's undesirable and it's closed rather than the way that the Russian NGOs of which the one that I'm associated with was one was also closed, the money will be stopped, the premises taken away and the work no longer allowed. So that's part of the backdrop of what's now happening in Russia. There's much more of course and these laws have to be taken together with, as you will all know, but just to go through it briefly, the seizing of Crimea, the southern part of Ukraine, the sponsorship and provision of troops and weaponry to Noviarsia, that part of eastern Ukraine around the Donbass cool and steel area and we speak on the anniversary of the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner MH17 with the loss of, I think, some 300 lives, nearly half of them Dutch, the rest Malaysian and the anniversary is today. Russia still denies any part in it although it's generally accepted that the rockets, the anti-aircraft rockets which they supplied to the rebels which they sponsored were responsible for the shooting down, the threats to the Baltic States which Russia has made continually and continues to make the large new resources that it's devoting even now as the economy shrinks and in some ways shrinking quite dramatically down to five, six, seven percent negative growth still is devoting large new resources to the military, the army, the air force and the and the navy and the very high volume of propaganda both through Russia today, the English language is also in Arabic and other languages, Spanish I think, but even more virulently, much more virulently within Russia where people like a man called Kisilioff who's one of the main Churchill hosts threatens to annihilate America with nuclear bombs, conduct a war which seems to be one of his particular obsessions against gays which he sees as a sign of western decadence and amplifies the speeches of Vladimir Putin of the president that the west is both decadent and threatening, so we're a decadent threat, the two are encompassed in one. The rationale which the Kremlin puts out for this is that it is many fold and some of it is correct, one, this is not correct I think, is that NATO had promised Gorbachev way back nearly 20 years ago not to expand into any part of the former Soviet space or indeed even into the former Comicon space east central Europe and they renaid on that, that's the charge and that Russia is surrounded by NATO bases north the Baltics so until recently there's been no major NATO base there and in the south Turkey that the west has stimulated and this in a way is the most serious charge I think or seemed to be the most serious by the Kremlin that the west has stimulated anti-Russian movements in Moldova some time ago in Georgia where of course the Russians invaded nearly 10 years ago now after the Georgians tried to get back some of their territory Abkhazia north Asetia and most importantly of all centrally important Ukraine, Ukraine centrally important to Russia by far the biggest of the Soviet republics after Russia, Slav as Russia regarded essentially during the Russian imperial period and during the Soviet period as essentially part of Russia a language which is more or less comprehensible by Russians vice versa a integral part of the Soviet economy and to degree still of the Russian economy because of the the coal, the steel and the weapons and aviation industry that Ukraine had and to a lessening degree still has so that the charge is that the west stimulated the orange revolution in Kiev and forced the fleeing really not just the resignation but the fleeing of the former president Yanukovic and installed what is said to be the European Union installed a Nazi or a fascist government led by president Parashenko there's a in today's times the London times there's a an interview with Atsene Yatsenyuk who's the prime minister of Ukraine who said that he is convinced that Russia wishes to to end all pretend all possibility of a of an independent Ukraine and says that everything points to a new confrontation on Europe's eastern border that's Ukraine's eastern border he says from classified and unclassified sources and satellite images you can easily see that the Russia has stationed tens of thousands of troops and Russian led guerrillas in Donetsk and Lukhansk the two major two of the major cities in this area now called Novireya sea a new Russia in the the Donbass they are still supplying tanks howitzers uh even surface-to-air missiles Russia has created a massive military group in the east of Ukraine and he goes on to say that the truce which is essentially being broken all the time but with relatively minor skirmishes will break down in a big way by by the end of autumn and fighting will again resume in in august and the the NGOs in Russia are supported by the west as I said before are spreading are also spreading anti-russian propaganda from right within the country itself this is the charge and western NGOs spread western propaganda throughout both throughout Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union the Moscow school which I was associated with was founded at the end of the the Soviet period but before the Soviet Union collapsed explicitly to as a kind of a civic education organization two people who founded it married couple she was she is an art historian he a philosopher came to the view that Russia had never really had any kind of democracy or real civil society and therefore both a broadening of the Russian mind and an education of Russian civic habits was essential and it got a good deal of money from abroad this was when Russia was receiving a lot of money not just from from George Soros but from many quarters and from governments and built up a big network of seminars conferences publications and um and supporters and brought in people from abroad um to speak to to to debate with Russians and it wasn't a one-way street at first it was a bit because um the west was regarded as by some especially the the young intelligentsia as the source of all wisdom they soon realized it was not and we we had a debate and they were often very fierce especially when there was an invasion the the western the NATO war battle against the serbians the serbians traditional ally of Russia the Soviet Union lots of disagreement about that more recently big disagreements about Syria and the support of the rebels or support of the Assad regime so it isn't a one-way street but it is a dialogue or a multi-log a place in which arguments and debates and new propositions can be heard and we had a large number of distinguished people coming to these debates on both sides both distinguished Russians and other former Soviets Georgians Ukrainians and so on and also people from United States from Europe and from elsewhere I got Boris Johnson to come and this was I think before he suddenly before he was mayor of of of London I think he perhaps was a Tory MP but he already was regarded as being the coming man the the man who sooner or later would transform himself from being a from being a political clown into being the leader of the conservative party and and possibly of the country if not Europe and the world and I got him to come and he spent quite a lot of long time quite a lot of time with others in the bar he came and and gave his talk and he looked at these 150 Russians in this long rather rather inconvenient room which we gave talks in there was of course a simultaneous translation and he looked at them and said I'm going to talk to you today about the British sausage and there were people looking at the gut was the translation right the British sausage he said I'm going to tell you why the British sausage is under threat it's under threat by Brussels it's Brussels wants to make it straight and and after a while of going on like this I was sitting by the translator's booth and the guy who I knew came out and said I can't do this anymore I can't I can't make sense of this I said well don't don't just translate it as it comes because nobody else is making sense of at least of all him but it was it was Boris at full flood and actually after 10 minutes one saw at the the leadership potential of Boris Johnson because people were laughing without hearing the translation because he was so expressive his flayer flopping his arms going and his his face purple with a kind of pseudo indignation and he went down extremely well he could have been president of Russia had he had he stayed that that unique unique place the Moscow school is now kicked out of Russia may I hope survive but but who knows Russia and this I wanted to put this out to see what you made made of this I don't know if it's it's a rather tentative thing but I think that Russia to some extent at least acts in lock step with other authoritarian countries and is seen Vladimir Putin is seen as someone whom other leaders can take a lesson from as he took lessons from Sylvia Belosconi or kinds of lessons but but one of them at least that you have to dominate the media and insofar as you can own it in the sense he does own it because the dominant media in everywhere is television and it's it's all under Kremlin control and so news is all nearly always begins with whatever the president is doing that day it could be opening a sewage plant but as long as the president is doing it it is the top story and Russia I think as I say acts in lock step with others who take the same view I think of president of centralized authoritarian power or authoritarian in different ways China obviously to which Russia is much much closer it had of course been almost an enemy for much of the Soviet period of the large parts of the Soviet period it fears and still does fear the encroachments of Russia into the far east the Russian part is is largely empty the far east if you under one definition is that space bigger considerably bigger than Europe not just one country of Europe but Europe itself with 6000 people in it so it's pretty empty but the Chinese are grasping after more labor and throne and beginning to filter across and have many many now deals and contracts with the the far east and and with the governance of Vladivostok in Russia too since Xi Jinping took over you've had the imprisonment of many many of the human rights lawyers the closing of NGOs Chinese and foreign sponsored and a stamping on journalism which had been actually quite active lots of investigative journalists many of whom have come to thing I started in Russia called the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism many have come there young Russian journalists Chinese journalists who want to do to do real journalism want to analyze investigate and reveal but are now essentially stopped from doing that many of them fired not of them put in prison it's not gone back to the Mao days but it's but they can't do that kind of journalism anymore the same time he's made a he's successfully I think I'm no synologist but he's successfully tackling corruption which was threatening the party itself but he's he's brought the two together he's brought western influence and corruption together and and presents them as in some way the same thing in Turkey president previously prime minister Erdogan has explicitly taken a leaf out of Vladimir Putin's book their friends see each other not all the time of course but fair amount seem to talk a bit and he too has muzzled the press he too has harassed NGOs and although in the recent election it's shown that democracy party democracy is still pretty robust in in in Turkey and deprived him of the 2000s majority he would need to change the constitution to allow him to be of an executive president still he's he's going to still try to dominate and still does dominate the Turkish society and politics and in Hungary prime minister Orban who came in as a liberal is now like Erdogan friendly to Putin like Erdogan and Putin and Xi Jinping has muzzled the press and has signed the opposition so is there a question really and I think it is a question it's not her statement is there a new authoritarian international not any longer a communist international held together largely as it was by the Soviet Union but is there an authoritarian international which has got no one center but has got common approaches to society and to politics India isn't part of it India is the second largest country in the world will soon be the largest prime minister Modi although many think he is has got authoritarian tendencies has not it's probably impossible in India I mean party because the politics are so chaotic but also because the the vision of powers regionally among the states are such that no one person could dominate again no Indian expert but that seems to be seems to be the case Middle East is too royal to by conflict really to the state which has become very authoritarian is Egypt under Field Marshal Assisi who dethroned the president Morsi who's elected as the head of the muslim brotherhood and whose rule was becoming increasingly threatening but who was displaced is now sentenced to death I think but it's under under appeal yes he has been the death penalty has been leveled against him probably not he probably won't happen it's being appealed and the thought is it'll be commuted to life imprisonment but certainly he's out of it and in Africa and South America you have diverse diverse movements this way and that with Africa many states in Africa increasingly actually under Chinese influence rather than any other so the key person is in Russia is Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000 was a a colonel in the kgb I was saying earlier that every time you hear about somebody in the kgb they're always a colonel you wonder what where are the lieutenants and the sergeants everybody's a colonel he was a colonel he was in east I think a lieutenant colonel he was in east Germany when the Soviet Union collapsed in Dresden and he saw a mob coming to to attack not his headquarters but the headquarters of the German the east german secret police and did so and got files and so on was horrified horrified not just by what he was seeing but by the collapse of political authority in his own country and as clearly sees as he said famously this was the great geopolitical event of the 20th century and although many can many could quarrel with that for him I think it really was because it was personal he had from a working class leningrad background had become a moderately successful kgb officer and that which he'd been sworn to protect had collapsed so he came to power ushered in by the oligarchs who were very powerful under Boris Yeltsin Boris Yeltsin by that time rather ailing and seen by the oligarchs as their man a man whom they could trust they people like Boris Belizofsky Vladimir Gusinsky Vladimir Putanian and many others controlled not just the natural resources especially the oil but they also controlled the media especially television so they were the real powers in the land so he came in he was lucky because around about the same time the oil price began to climb and kept on climbing through much of his rule although one has to say that although he benefited from that he does no longer he he did not he has not and seems to have no intention to modernize the country's industry an attempt to make a silicon valley near in a place called Skolkovo near Moscow has has literally disappeared into the into the mud he was right I think to assert the state any state which is wants to to be a responsible state to reproduce itself has to in some things be dominant and but on the end of the Yeltsin state the oligarchs who had got hugely wealthy in part by supporting Yeltsin in his second election by putting all of their media at his disposal and then by controlling the natural resources in the media of the country had become more powerful than the president any functioning state could not endure that whether it's democratic or authoritarian so he had to assert central political power he did so he called them in and much to their amazement surprise and chagrin said I'm in charge you can make money you can keep money but get out of politics and if you don't then you will have to pay and of course someone did pay we call hodarkovski the richest biggest oil baron and actually the most liberal somebody who was already beginning to to grasp for a new Russia a new civil and democratic Russia and put his money including towards the school I was part of but to other other institutions he took Putin on in in the semi public event said that that the kremlin was corrupt and then disappeared into into a prison camp for the next 10 years which from which he emerged only last year and he's now flits between London Geneva and elsewhere he's still got a few hundred million nothing like what he had but enough to keep body and so together and and also to fund opposition which he said he wouldn't but he but he is it's also of course galling for any president prime minister to have foreigners in your country saying this isn't the way you should run the country so the NGOs both the russian ones which are sponsored by the west and the western ones themselves were clearly not going to be popular they weren't popular under Yltsin but they were not just tolerated but actually in a sense encouraged people around the president the democrats the reformers got irritated by the people coming over saying you're doing it all wrong but accepted that they were doing it all wrong or they had much to learn or they needed cooperation now it is simply seen as something which can no longer be tolerated and is tantamount to treachery hence the word foreign agent it's treachery it is it's it's something which can no longer be born and thus must go finally question to leave you with is a reset possible you will know that when president obama came in as president of the us now seems a long time ago six six years ago now you tried among other things to get a reset with russia because relations were already worsening they were better than they are now is it possible to have a reset is it possible to have this important country with a with a highly civilised people who have contributed so much to european culture i think literature music art um and who uh even under stalin in a sense saved our bacon the russians the soviets lost millions millions tens of millions of people uh in the nazi invasion and in the war against the against nazi germany and had they not then probably britain would have been overrun god knows what kind of europe we would now have we owe russia historically a good deal would be much better for us in europe to have good relations with a country which defines itself still but certainly by the liberals as a european country but how how can we have one well it's very easy for journalists to say this is what you should do because we don't do it but um one you need a new deal in ukraine which may mean that that part which is now under russian control would would have to have substantial devolution remain part of ukraine but very substantial devolution as long of course as the russians withdrew their their military aid you'd have to have i think a some kind of um some sort of um commitment from nato not to expand into ukraine at least which um i think nato might resist but probably would regard as necessary as i say nato didn't promised gorbethroff they did have discussions about about it but didn't promise it may be necessary that at least for say a decade nato says it won't expand uh you'd have to recognise therefore russia's interests but you also crucially have to have russia recognize that ukraine like all the other 14 states of the former soviet union are now independent sovereign countries they are no longer part of the russian empire however defined and must go their own way as they wish uh going their own way of course should not threaten russia militarily in in sense and if they feel so then there should be debate discussion and so on with western powers but they are sovereign states and mr yatsyniwch the um prime minister of ukraine whose comments i read earlier um um he may be right that that's that they're not doing that now they must be brought to do it and of course they have to regard to see that they need to modernize the economy um because clearly they can't rely upon oil one which the demand is somewhat declining may go up again in the future but it's declining at the moment the price is low and the price like the people who who want to make the country from which i come independent scotland will be this has the same problem it relies very much on oil the s n p's economic program assumed an oil price of 110 dollars which was optimistic even then and is now absurd both russia and scotland have to have to realise that that's no longer possible to rely upon that and come to some kind of modernisation in which the west obviously could help not so much in civil society in democracy but in technology and in running a new running a complex society that's a sketch of what i think must happen but whether or not it can whether or not it will under putin or indeed under a successor who many people think may be more nationalistic than he is i leave you thank you