Alexander Mercouris on the Ukraine war entering a new and more dangerous phase
Glenn Diesen interviews Alexander Mercouris of The Duran on the military, economic, and diplomatic trajectory of the Ukraine war.
Summary
Glenn Diesen hosts Alexander Mercouris for a wide-ranging assessment of the Ukraine war's current trajectory. Mercouris argues that Russia has shifted from a posture of restraint toward a deliberate strategy of total systemic attrition — targeting Ukraine's military, economy, energy infrastructure, and financial system simultaneously — and that this shift reflects a Russian conclusion that no diplomatic resolution is forthcoming. He identifies Ukraine's financial system as the most likely first point of visible collapse, with hyperinflation a real risk, and warns that the fall of key cities such as Orikhiv and the loss of Donbas would fundamentally alter the negotiating landscape. Mercouris also raises serious concern about the escalating dirty war — assassinations, sabotage, and threats against civilian aviation — and warns that Russian restraint, which has so far prevented geographical expansion of the conflict, cannot be assumed to hold indefinitely.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the changing dynamic of the war
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back everyone. We are joined today by Alexander Mercouris, the popular host of The Duran podcast and also his own podcast. Thank you for coming back on the program.
Alexander Mercouris: Delighted to be here, Glenn.
Glenn Diesen: I wanted to ask you about what's happening in Ukraine because, again, one should always be cautious about predicting too much, but what we're watching now does appear to be somewhat unprecedented. We've had problems in Ukraine in the past where it's been able to either mobilize more men, get more weapons from NATO, or just show some pure resilience in terms of being able to withstand the pressure. But there seems to be something unraveling at the moment. How do you see this?
Alexander Mercouris: I think that is exactly right. There are a number of factors at play. Firstly, we should not underestimate Ukrainian resilience and resolve. They have wanted to withstand and resist, and they have been successfully doing so, and that has played an important role in keeping this war going. Critically important has been the assistance of the West. If the West had not been sending weapons, hadn't been sending economic assistance to Ukraine, had not provided an enormous amount of political assistance too, then the course of events would have been different.
But I think something else has changed, and that is both attitudes in Russia and Russian capabilities. The Russians have been building up their military and economic system to the point where they're now producing even more weapons, even more machines, and even more drones than ever before. And I think that over the course of this year, the Russians came to a conclusion that there was not going to be a diplomatic or political resolution of this conflict — that there had to be therefore a military one — and they became deadly serious about pursuing it. So I think this has changed the dynamic. The Russians are now doing things that they were not prepared to do before.
The danger of escalation as Ukraine weakens
Glenn Diesen: The problem is, if you see some big cracks in Ukraine — be it the military, the economy, the political system, society overall — two things can happen. One, the Russians might get overly confident and do something foolish. Or alternatively, the Europeans and the Americans will get desperate, panic, and try to do something radical to rescue the situation. You see some of the rhetoric increasingly getting more hostile in Europe, especially out of Germany. I'm not sure if this is domestic politics — this argument that they've been attacked in Leipzig by the Russians. How dangerous do you think the time ahead of us is? Because I don't think the Ukrainian army will simply collapse, the Russians will declare victory, and then we'll call it a day.
Alexander Mercouris: Absolutely not. And I think this is the most dangerous period of the war up to now. Up to this moment, when there was a chance of a diplomatic resolution, the Russians had an incentive to act with restraint. And I think some people in the West were able to build on that and tell themselves: well, Ukraine is holding together, things are holding together, we have a potential stalemate, we can bide our time, outlast the Russians, and it will all turn out right for us.
The change in dynamic is also having an effect in Western capitals, in European capitals especially. They are becoming increasingly frightened and increasingly nervous. We've had reports — some a few weeks ago — about European leaders contacting the Americans, telling them: please get negotiations with the Russians restarted, only make sure that this time you have us in the room. The Europeans telling the Americans to negotiate with the Russians, whereas a year ago the Europeans were telling the Americans not to negotiate with the Russians. So you see that there's been a kind of flip.
You also see, as you rightly say, an intensification of the rhetoric — the talk about the Russians waging some kind of hybrid war against Europe. A drone discovered on the runway in Leipzig, and this somehow proves that the Russians are waging some kind of secret war against the West. The great danger — the thing that I think we all need to be aware of and concerned about — is that as things get worse in Ukraine, the demands for direct Western intervention in the conflict itself, to somehow prevent a Ukrainian collapse, are going to grow. And those demands will eventually translate into a demand for Western troops to be sent to Ukraine, for some kind of no-fly zone to be established over Ukraine. Things like that.
Parallels with other conflicts and the cumulative effects of attrition
Glenn Diesen: There seem to be some parallels with the war against Iran — that is, the worse things go, the more Trump takes to social media and declares a great victory. You see something of the same in Europe: the worse it goes for Ukraine, the more the rhetoric intensifies. Not just calls for escalation, but also "we're winning, we're winning." But I did want to ask about the cumulative effects of this war, because it's not just one variable you would look at. There's a lot of things at play. How do you see those cumulative effects?
Alexander Mercouris: This is partly a reflection of the way the Russians conduct war. The Russians do not conduct war in the kind of tactical way that we do in the West, where it's all based around one great maneuver which ends in some great victory and then we dictate terms over a defeated opponent. The Russians have a much more historically rooted philosophy, which is that victory in war is the destruction of the enemy's will to continue fighting. And in the case of a country like Ukraine, because negotiations have proved impossible, that means attrition in depth — attrition that affects the army, the economy, the whole of Ukrainian society, and the West as well, to the extent that the West is involved in trying to support Ukraine. All of this cumulatively creating a point of crisis in Ukraine which will create a total systemic breakdown — which will mean that Ukraine itself is no longer in a position to keep fighting, either now or in the future. It is, if you like, a plan for total victory, though not for total war.
Energy, manpower, and the financial system
Glenn Diesen: Summer is now officially over and we're heading into the winter months. I saw Putin make the argument — was it a day or two ago — that he had now given the orders to essentially knock out all of Ukraine's energy facilities, and we're seeing this at the same time as other critical infrastructure is being hit. Ukraine has also largely run out of air defenses. They also go after industrial capacity and continue to bleed the manpower, and with logistics breaking down and the economy breaking down — what do you think has the greatest impact here? Will energy become a greater problem now that winter's coming, or will it still be the manpower issues that top the concerns?
Alexander Mercouris: I would have thought — and Putin has made comments about this — that where we are likely to see the strains first become very publicly visible, in ways that can no longer be denied, is in the financial system. If you have an economy like Ukraine's which is no longer able to import or export goods, where production is collapsing, where the agricultural economy — which was to a great extent the mainstay of the economy, together with the steel and metallurgical industries — is collapsing, where the government's ability to collect taxes is reduced still further, and where at the same time, because the pressure of the war continues, spending has to continue at extremely high levels — then you are at great risk of uncontrolled inflation. Putin basically alluded to that during a press conference. He didn't use exactly those words, but if you read what he said, he was talking about the strains in the financial system.
Uncontrolled inflation can take many forms. It can take the form of very high inflation — and inflation in Ukraine is already rising — or it can lead to hyperinflation, which is ultimately a situation where confidence in the whole currency collapses. One shouldn't perhaps go to the full length of predicting which one of those it will be, but I think this is where we're going to start to see the first visible signs if this pressure continues. And high inflation has its own effect, because it means the soldiers who are being paid are being paid less — the monetary value of their wages declines — the police, the entire economy starts to suffer, and then that has an accumulative effect on everything else too.
Where the collapse will come — the final crumbling, if you like — will ultimately be in the front lines. It's always been this way in every war. It is military defeat on the battlefield that will be the point where we can start to say that the war is coming to an end.
Ukraine's political situation and Zelensky's options
Glenn Diesen: The political crisis appears to be — well, not resolved, but pushed back a little bit. I see Fedorov's pleas for elections have been resolved — the Italians gave him a job if he would get out of Ukraine and go to Italy. That appears to buy some room of maneuver for Zelensky, at least temporarily, by avoiding elections. But still, as the situation goes wrong on the battlefield, what do you see as the options for Ukraine? Because last time they bet a lot on this 40-plus-day campaign of deep strikes in Russia. Now we see Zelensky threatening Russian civilian aviation — I'm not sure if he would actually do something or if this is just low-hanging fruit. He refers to the insurers: don't fly planes. So he could achieve something just based on threats, or he might actually go down this route and kill hundreds of civilians. What are his options at this point?
Alexander Mercouris: Let's just talk quickly about Zelensky's own political position, because the reason Zelensky is able to see off political challenges in Kyiv is precisely because the West backs him — at least the Europeans specifically back him. We see that, as you correctly said, with Italy giving a job to Fedorov to get him out of Kyiv. So we have repeated political challenges, but they melt away, because without the support of Europe, Ukraine is going to lose — and lose faster. What the Europeans are doing is interfering to an extraordinary degree in Ukraine's domestic political processes in a way which is cutting off potential political options, because if one person is always securely in place, it is ultimately up to that person. And Zelensky is now so bound up with the war, and his value to the West is so much connected to prolonging the war, that he cannot ultimately himself change course and pursue a diplomatic route that might lead Ukraine to some better outcome. Another leader might be able to do that. But that option of getting another leader, because of what the West is continuously doing, simply isn't there.
In the absence of diplomacy, there is only one way for Zelensky to go, and that is further escalation. Now, military escalation on the battlefields is now beyond him — it's probably beyond Ukraine's military power. They've tried the drone offensive against Russian shipping, the refineries, all of those things. That didn't work. So now they are moving towards a much more ugly, dirty war scenario — threats against airports, attempts to dissuade airlines like Turkish Airlines from flying to Moscow, cutting off people who want to travel to Russia from the West from doing so, more assassinations, more operations of that kind. And if you look at Zelensky's statement, I thought it was dripping with implicit threats of that kind. And in Zelensky's case, I'm sorry to say, I think we have to take these threats very seriously. I don't think they are just intended to scare people off. When he's made threats of this sort, unfortunately ugly things tend to happen.
The dirty war and the risk of Russian retaliation
Glenn Diesen: On this dirty war — because this is something that has intensified, with assassinations in Moscow and the killing of military leaders in their own homes or in the streets in front of their homes — how do you see this? I don't see Russia standing on the sidelines for too long. I'm assuming that a lot of these assassinations are done in cooperation with Western intelligence agencies. Do you see any indications that the Russians might join in on this dirty war and begin to employ similar tactics?
Alexander Mercouris: I have no doubt that that is going to come, and that is one of the things I'm most concerned about looking forward, because a dirty war can continue long after the actual fighting on the battlefields ends — as we saw, for example, with what happened in the Caucasus in the 2000s and 2010s. That unfortunately is a real prospect. And of course, dirty wars by definition have no geographical boundaries. If people who are involved in waging them are based in, say, Europe, then unfortunately and disastrously we might start to see some of the backwash of that reach Europe itself.
I think this is a very, very dangerous game that we are playing. The Russians are not going to stand aloof. Up to now they have avoided getting too deep into the dirty war because until now they have thought that a negotiation might eventually happen. But just as they no longer think that — and that's lifted some of their inhibitions on the battle fronts — if a dirty war is waged against them, I think their inhibitions there are going to go away very, very quickly. And the Russians have shown in the past that if they have to wage this kind of war, they're very effective in doing it.
The front lines: Orikhiv, the southern front, and Odessa
Glenn Diesen: In terms of the willingness to use more brutal tactics — not just on the front lines, but with missile attacks — we do see a huge difference. The way Kyiv has been attacked now, days on days without stop. But we do see some cracks on the front lines which we haven't really seen before. For people who measure developments in the war only by territorial shifts, of course the last four and a half years have been very gradual, because you have these powerful defensive belts, fortified positions, Ukrainians armed to the teeth, NATO opening up their weapon depots. But we've seen over the four and a half years not just the army being ground down and the weapons being spent and the missile defenses disappearing, but also the fortified lines have been lost. And we seem to have reached some critical cities — one of them which catches many people's attention is Orikhiv, in the Zaporizhzhia region. I think the Russians hold about half of it now and what remains is almost in a semi-cauldron. Why does Orikhiv matter so much?
Alexander Mercouris: The key thing about Orikhiv is that its capture by the Russians achieves two things. Firstly, it moves the front lines in southern Ukraine northward. The Ukrainians have been repeatedly trying to attack Crimea either by land or through the air. That is going to become much, much more difficult, because with the Russians controlling Orikhiv they have the ability to protect Crimea and to establish a big belt to defend Crimea to the north.
But of course that's the defensive way of thinking about Orikhiv. There is also an offensive way of looking at it. Orikhiv is the last big place in Zaporizhzhia other than the city of Zaporizhzhia itself. It sits astride all the big railway and road communications there. If the Russians capture it, then the hold of the southern front opens up for them. They can advance north towards the city of Zaporizhzhia itself, which is mostly located on the east bank of the Dnipro. So the Russians don't have to cross the Dnipro to capture Zaporizhzhia city. And of course the Russians also have the option, if they choose, of moving northwards as well and advancing further up the Dnipro.
People who have a background in economic geography — as I once upon a time did — can say that the Dnipro is not a natural border in today's Ukraine. It is Ukraine's vital economic and transport artery. So if the Russians reach and occupy positions on the central Dnipro, it is an existential matter for Ukraine. If that happens on top of the blockade of the Black Sea, frankly it's very difficult to see Ukraine remaining a viable state beyond it.
Glenn Diesen: On that topic — the blockade — because we do see this as one of the biggest consequences of the 40-day campaign of striking civilian infrastructure deep inside Russia: the Russian retaliation. They've now put this naval blockade on Odessa, and not just a blockade but also destroying a lot of the port facilities and other infrastructure. What do you see as the objective and the significance of Odessa? Because it's not just landlocking Ukraine — it has a vulnerable geography. It's not connected that well to the rest of the country.
Alexander Mercouris: I think you're leading to the key point. I think the Russians — at least some people in Russia — have long entertained ideas about Odessa. Odessa was created — it is a creation of Catherine the Great. It was founded by a Russian empress when Russia conquered all this territory from Ottoman Turkey at the end of the 18th century. Odessa is one of the key places of Russian modern history and culture. Anybody who has any familiarity with Russian culture knows this. Odessa used to be the Russian Empire's biggest port. It was still, I think, the third biggest port during the period of the Soviet Union. It is a vital place. And of course for the Russians, control over Odessa seals that position of strategic dominance in the Black Sea.
To me — and I have to say I'm not a military person — a lot of this does look like a softening-up operation for a future arrival of the Russian army in the Odessa area, cutting Odessa off from the rest of Ukraine, cutting off its access to the sea, creating situations where the Russian army can either advance towards Odessa across the land or advance towards Odessa via the sea itself in an amphibious operation. On the Russian side of the internet this kind of thing gets discussed quite a lot. I would be very surprised if some ideas of that kind aren't circulating within Russia. And to say it very simply: if we ever get to a situation where the Russians do reach Odessa and capture it, then everybody should understand that they're never going to give it back.
Donbas, territorial swaps, and the closing window for diplomacy
Glenn Diesen: That's a great point, and that should be one of the motivations for NATO to seek a compromise now, today, while Odessa is not yet on the table — because the Russians have a lot to go through. They have to go through Kherson and Mykolaiv before they can put that land bridge to Odessa. So there's still time. But once it's within reach of Russia, I think it's going to be very hard to come up with a diplomatic settlement which the Russians won't distrust. They will assume it's deceptive, and they would rather just take the territory as a guarantee that NATO won't expand in that direction. Maybe once they get closer, NATO will start to sue for peace. But what other parts of the front are you looking at? Because the war was supposed to primarily be about Donbas, and if Sloviansk and Kramatorsk are taken, there wouldn't be much more left.
Alexander Mercouris: I think the war ultimately, when it started, was about Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. If we go back in time to the negotiations that took place in 2022 — the negotiations in Belarus and the negotiations in Istanbul, the draft Istanbul agreement — they were basically about Donbas, about Donetsk and Luhansk. And if we look at the discussions that have happened since then — the proposals Putin made on the 14th of June 2024 to the Russian foreign ministry, and the discussions that took place between Putin and Trump in Anchorage last year — they all still seemed to be very much focused on Donetsk and Luhansk. An essential part of all of the agreements was that there would be some sort of settlement on Donetsk and Luhansk, with the Russians insisting since June 2024 that the Ukrainians must leave.
But if these places are captured, then of course that completely changes the dynamic. Because if Donetsk and Luhansk are captured, in a sense they are taken off the table in just the same way as Odessa would be taken off the table if Odessa is ever captured. So where does that leave the war? Does it mean that the Russians stop after they've captured Donetsk and Luhansk? Once upon a time I would have thought that quite likely. It seems far less likely today. It is not consistent with what the Russians are saying about diplomacy, about the way in which they're talking about Zelensky's government now. It does not seem consistent with the way that the Russians are waging the war — the blockade of Ukraine, the economic pressure, all of those things.
So that then brings us back to the question: if Donetsk and Luhansk fall, Ukraine has lost its major negotiating card — what it could have played in order to leverage Russian concessions in other places — whilst simultaneously the Russians are freed from thinking about Donetsk and Luhansk. And arguably they are also freed in a military sense, in that they can start moving beyond Donetsk and Luhansk in a much more aggressive and rapid way, because there are fewer defenses and fewer positions which the Ukrainians have to hold them. So I would have thought people should be very worried about what is going on in Donetsk and Luhansk, precisely because this has been a war of sieges. It's been a war more of sieges than of battles, and sieges by definition take a very long time. I think that has created a degree of complacency in the West, because people can't quite get the idea that this war of sieges is now going to end and that we might be moving towards a war of maneuver very soon.
Glenn Diesen: Yes — wars of attrition tend to go very slowly before something cracks, when the cumulative impact really builds up to a breaking point, and then it suddenly goes very, very fast. If I put myself in the shoes of the Ukrainians, the ideal thing to do would be, first of all, to get an agreement in place which addresses the root causes of the war — restoring Ukraine's neutrality and the rights of Russian speakers within Ukraine. But then to deal with the territorial issue — the Russians demand Donbas, this is written in stone, they're either going to take it by force or the Ukrainians can trade. A trade would make sense. If they had sat down already and made a deal, they could perhaps have asked: we'll give you all of Donbas, but can you pull out of Sumy and Kharkiv? Now, if they're forcing the Russians to take it by force, then by that time the Russians might also have taken Sumy, they will stand at the outskirts of Kharkiv, and suddenly Ukraine has nothing to trade for these cities. The Russians have no reason, after fighting so hard for them, to give them up. It just seems like a whole new territorial dispute would open up if they delay this further. But do you see Sumy as very vulnerable at the moment? And do you see Kharkiv possibly going down the same route?
Alexander Mercouris: Absolutely. The assumption that too many people are making is that these places, because they're big, are somehow invulnerable. Mariupol, which the Russians captured early on in the war, is pretty big — about 550,000 people. A big city doesn't mean it's an unconquerable city. I absolutely think the Russians might want to capture these places. And of course they don't have to capture them physically in order to make the whole situation there all but impossible. If the war ends and the Russian army is permanently stationed around Kharkiv, that is not going to be good for Kharkiv. People can talk about West Berlin and all of that, but the idea that the West is going to be able to sustain indefinitely a position for Ukraine in a place like Kharkiv is, in my opinion, fantastical.
Fundamentally, you go exactly to the correct point. Last year, at the time of Anchorage, territorial swaps were a realistic prospect. In fact, what we know of Anchorage suggests that that was mostly what it was about. If Donbas is lost, the idea of territorial swaps suddenly looks very unattractive from a Russian point of view. And given that the Russians have history in all of these places — they can point to times when Kharkiv was a Russian city — one can see that there would be all kinds of people in Russia who say: we do not give up Kharkiv. It's part of our history, part of our Russian world. We don't give it up any more than we're prepared to give up Odessa. I'm not saying it has quite the same hold on the Russian imagination that Odessa does, but there will be people in Russia who will argue in that way. And they're important people — people the Kremlin listens to.
The state of diplomacy and what a breakthrough would require
Glenn Diesen: What are the possibilities now for a diplomatic settlement? Because that's another thing which has been exhausted. Alaska — it's not that easy to simply start from scratch after this. From what I understand, it was the Americans who put forth the proposal, which involved some Russian concessions, the Russians accepted, and then they never heard again from the Americans, who began to walk it back. Meanwhile, the Europeans don't even want to talk to the Russians — they want to sit at the table but they don't want to talk. I saw the Vice Chancellor of Germany at the G20, bragging about this great diplomatic victory because the Russian counterpart was invited, but he made a big deal about how they avoided having the Russian counterpart in a group photo. I mean, this is diplomacy apparently — it's like children. But in the past you saw more openness on the Russian side. Putin always made the point: we didn't shut the doors, we're always willing to talk. But now Putin seems very dismissive of Zelensky, calling this "we don't talk to terrorists" after he threatened their airliners, and Lavrov essentially dismissed not just the Ukrainians but the Americans and Europeans as well, saying this is all trickery and deception. Has that window closed now, do you think?
Alexander Mercouris: I think there is still a current of opinion in Moscow — and I think Putin is very open to it — which is not quite ready to slam that door entirely shut. I think the two people who express this best are John Mearsheimer, who you regularly interview, and George Beebe, who you also interview. There are still people in Moscow who say: do we really want to just dictate a peace? We have to have some kind of settlement with the West, otherwise we're going to be locked into permanent confrontation with them. And do we really want to take control of more and more of Ukraine, given how challenging and difficult that is going to be for us to handle and absorb? I think those views are there, and the people who hold them have influence.
The problem is we have been through such a terrible history of bad-faith negotiations — a history which, by the way, you have charted in your books better than anyone else I know, and Scott Horton too. We have had such a long history of bad-faith negotiations that it is going to be very, very difficult now — especially at this point, when the Russians must sense that a military victory is coming — to persuade them to sit down and come to an agreement. And not only that, but there will probably be opposition to doing so in Moscow which might not have existed four years ago, which is a further problem.
If we are going to break through this diplomatic wall, we in the West need to make a conceptual revolution — very difficult — and we need to come forward and make proposals like: we absolutely categorically accept that Ukraine is going to remain indefinitely a neutral country; we are prepared to enshrine that in legal documents; we are prepared to accept that Ukraine cannot have large armed forces, that there won't be Western military bases in Ukraine, and that Western troops will not be allowed there. Now, if Trump or Rubio or someone like that were prepared to come forward with proposals along those lines, then as I said, I think there would be people in Moscow who would still be interested. But short of that, it's very difficult to see. And of course, as you've just pointed out, there is absolutely no sign of anybody thinking in that way in Europe. And unfortunately, until we see a change in Europe, we're not going to see a change in the United States either.
NATO's involvement, sabotage, and the limits of Russian restraint
Glenn Diesen: Just one last question — the other issue for the Russians is NATO's continuous deepening involvement. Many point out that there's a lot of pressure on the Kremlin to restore deterrence by essentially punching back, and not accepting this premise that NATO can take the war to Russia but somehow Europe should be a safe zone for weapons production. You see the Russians making the point that weapons facilities in the West are legitimate targets. Now they haven't struck anything, but you do see some developments within Ukraine — the Russians have begun hitting a lot of Western industries inside Ukraine, which is one step still within Ukraine. I think last night they struck FedEx and some other American and German companies. But you also see a lot of either accidents or sabotage against weapons manufacturers in the West — Bulgaria, Italy, and we just had Poland. I always make the point that it's not necessarily sabotage. When you ramp up weapons production, there could be mistakes being made, insufficient know-how. So I can see why there would be more accidents in such a period. But we also have to keep open the possibility that this is Russia essentially retaliating against Europe in a way that won't take us to nuclear war — with some plausible deniability. Do you see any shifts in terms of the Russians being willing to push harder against NATO?
Alexander Mercouris: Yes, I think we are seeing increasing demands for it. I know people don't take Medvedev seriously — I take him seriously, by the way. He is the vice chairman of the Russian Security Council and the de facto head of the military-industrial commission. He's very close to senior military people. He probably reflects, to some extent at least, their views. So I don't think we should dismiss him, as far too many do. And of course what he says is repeated by many, many people. You only need to spend a little time going through Russian social media to see this. So absolutely, I think the demand and the pressure within Russia to hit back is definitely there.
Now, I was in Russia a few months ago, as you know, and I was surprised and relieved to see that overall public opinion — to the limited extent I could gauge it — is not enthusiastic for this. They're not demanding that Russia must hit back against facilities in Germany and that kind of thing. This is a country which is very used to war and which has an ability to absorb these blows that perhaps would surprise us in the West. But I do think this should not lead us into complacency. If something really bad happens in Russia — let's hope it doesn't — there does come the point when patience could snap, when people start to demand that action must be taken, and that any delay in doing so is simply going to encourage more attacks of this kind. It's a little bit like the dirty war scenarios that we were talking about. This conflict has real possibilities of escalation and of geographical expansion. The reason it has not done so up to now has been entirely because of Russian restraint. And it would be complacent to assume that restraint is always going to be there.
Glenn Diesen: I noticed that Medvedev almost plays the bad cop to Putin's good cop. But what is interesting is his rhetoric — there seems to be a lot of political support in Moscow gravitating towards Medvedev's position. One shouldn't be dismissive of it. And also this whole argument that the Russians often said they're not going to accept this and that, and then they didn't actually back up the red lines by force — this could be the case if the conflict was stable. But if the lesson learned is that they don't back up the red lines, so we go up a little bit more, and a little bit more, at some point you will reach that level where it becomes impossible for the Russians not to respond. I just think we've kind of reached that point already. Do you have any final thoughts?
Alexander Mercouris: I completely agree with that. And just to say — I think one of the reasons why Medvedev does what he does is precisely in order to draw and neutralize some of this feeling that is out there, so that somebody in the leadership talks in the way that people think, and that means there's less criticism of the entire leadership as a result. But sooner or later, if we push this too far, that kind of escalation is possible.
And think how far the Russians have already escalated in the war. We've gone from a situation right at the beginning of the special military operation when the Russians promised that there would be no attacks on civilian infrastructure — I remember this so well. No attacks on bridges, no attacks on railways, no attacks of any kind like that. They would give warnings before they attacked television stations in Kyiv, telling people to stay away two days in advance, things of that sort. We are already far past that point. The next step in the escalation sequence is not that far off, and assuming you can test Russian red lines indefinitely is an extremely reckless one.
Glenn Diesen: I was going to say that Russian rhetoric belongs back to the days when Joe Biden said F-16s means World War III — we're not doing it. I think we've all gone up that escalation ladder now. So it's going to be hard to climb back down.
Alexander Mercouris: Absolutely.