Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen discuss whether Putin has shifted from diplomacy to war
Glenn Diesen interviews Alexander Mercouris, host of The Duran, on the changing posture of Putin and Russia toward the West.
Summary
Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris examine whether Vladimir Putin has undergone a fundamental shift away from diplomacy and toward a war footing, prompted by Western escalation, drone attacks on Russian territory, and increasingly open European rhetoric about war with Russia. Mercouris argues that a key turning point was a December drone attack on Putin's residence at Valdai, which many in Russia interpreted as an assassination attempt, triggering weeks of internal Kremlin debate that has now concluded with a harder, more militaristic Putin. Both speakers discuss the impossibility of a negotiated end to the conflict given NATO's consistent rejection of peace opportunities since 2014, and the likelihood that Russia may feel compelled to push well beyond its initial territorial objectives. Mercouris also reveals, in confidence, that at least one of the four British prime ministers who left office since 2022 came into power intending to change the Russia policy, only to discover almost immediately that doing so would cost them the premiership.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Today we have the great privilege of being joined by Alexander Mercouris, the very popular host of The Duran. It's good to see you again.
Alexander Mercouris: It's delightful to see you again, Glenn, and very happy to be on this program.
Has Putin Changed?
Glenn Diesen: I want to talk to you today about whether or not we're seeing a new Putin in this war. Putin just gave a speech and also gave an interview, and he has now seemingly recognized that the West is behind attacks on Russia. I think this was common knowledge, but with this admission it also implies that there's pressure on him to do something. He's also no longer talking that much about diplomacy as he did last year. Instead there's more talk about war and victory. In the interview he just gave, he talked about liberating Donbas and Novorossiya — which, historically, would include Odessa. He wasn't specific, but he also wants a long buffer zone as punishment for what Ukraine did in Kursk. This means not just a buffer along Kharkiv and Sumy, possibly Chernihiv, but indeed the Russian army is getting fairly close to both Kharkiv and Sumy. So there might be the temptation of actually seizing Ukraine's second largest city. What is happening? Is this a new Putin?
Alexander Mercouris: It is a new Putin. I have been talking about this for some time. I think there was a key moment for the Russians which happened in December, when there was a drone attack on Putin's residence at Valdai. A lot of people in Russia — maybe Putin himself — believe that this was an assassination attempt, and an extraordinary statement that Zelensky made just before the attack perhaps reinforced that belief. What then happened was that Putin went through a lengthy period, lasting several weeks, of basically not talking very much about Ukraine. That always made me think there was some kind of internal debate going on in Russia within the leadership about what to do.
Then of course what happened is that the West escalated. It escalated with these drone attacks, which it is clearly heavily involved in, against Russia. More missile attacks too against Russian facilities, and a general narrative that the initiative in the war has passed to the Ukrainian side. I think that probably contributed to the debate that was already happening in Russia. That debate has now clearly ended. Putin has come out the other end, and he is a Putin who no longer is talking diplomacy. He's no longer talking about negotiations. He's focused exclusively on victory. At the same time, he's keen on stabilizing the internal situation within Russia itself. So this is a much harder Putin than the one we saw last year.
European War Rhetoric and Trump's Pivot
Glenn Diesen: Part of the reason I think why he's chosen to change his posture is obviously the rhetoric from the Europeans. It does appear that the European leaders are preparing for war. Trump seems to be making a pivot back towards Ukraine, but he seems less eager for a direct war as opposed to the European leaders. How are you assessing that side of the equation — the Europeans, and Trump's renewed interest in Ukraine?
Alexander Mercouris: I recently was in Russia. I attended a conference in Pskov and met with some people in Moscow. The overwhelming consensus I encountered — and I'm not just talking about people in government or connected to the government, but people who work in factories — was that this war is very much seen in Russia-West terms. For the first time I met people who work in factories who see it that way. I think the rhetoric coming out of Europe about Europe being in effect on the brink of a war with Russia has communicated itself to Russia and to Putin himself.
A couple of days ago, Putin actually said that the Europeans — in fact I think he spoke about the West — are preparing for war with Russia, and Russia must prepare for war against Europe or the West. He was careful to say that Russia is not looking for a war, that it is not being aggressive, but that it will defend itself and has adequate means to do so. All of this happening in conjunction with the drone attacks on Russia has been more than enough to convince most people in Russia that when people in Europe talk about war with Russia, Russia really does need to prepare for it — because in a sense they're attacking it already.
Russia's Restraint: Caution or Preparation?
Glenn Diesen: Whenever I see the restraint from Moscow, I'm not sure how much of it is concern about ending up in a world war — possibly a nuclear war with NATO countries — and how much is buying time for preparations. If you think about it, the Europeans are very openly stating dates for when a war with Russia will start. If I was advising Moscow, I would tell them to ramp up the Oreshnik arsenal, prepare a lot of ammunition, make sure this war will not be fought on the enemy's terms, hit out heavy, and then quickly offer the Europeans some kind of peace and a chance to back off. But I'm not sure which it is — it could be both.
Alexander Mercouris: It could very well be both. But I think basically you are correct. Increasingly the Russians are now seeing that they are dealing with a West that has lost its fear of war with them and is talking about war all the time. I live in Britain, and the amount of rhetoric there is about war here is absolutely extraordinary. The lack of popular opposition to the idea of war with Russia is also frankly dismaying. Once upon a time there would have been a lot of opposition, but there is very little now. I think the Russians have drawn their own conclusions that war may very well be coming and that it is time to prepare for it.
We have other people in Russia — people like Professor Karaganov, whom of course you know and have interviewed several times — who have been talking about the need to restore in the West that sense of fear of war which currently no longer exists. A year ago he was still an outlier, basically talking mostly for himself. I get the sense that more and more people in Russia are now listening to him. When I talk about people in Russia, I mean people in the leadership — the Kremlin, the Security Council, the General Staff — or people who have access to and are advising people in the government.
So we have had a very significant darkening of the mood and really no further interest in diplomacy at all. In this interview that Putin gave, the one you just mentioned, he spoke about the various diplomatic initiatives he's just received from the West and completely dismissed them. He said these are of no value, they're just tricks, they're not really intended to move us forward to a proper negotiated resolution. And he also said for the first time that there was no actual deal or agreement reached with the Americans in Anchorage. The significance of that is that if there was no deal reached in Anchorage, then whatever the Russians agreed to in order to get that agreement no longer applies. They're no longer bound by it. They can walk away from whatever concessions they made because ultimately the Anchorage process failed. So a very, very strong darkening of the mood, and I think it's reflected right across Russian society.
Can Russia Avoid a Permanent War?
Glenn Diesen: Usually the discussion would be how to restore the deterrent and also how to win the war, because Russia can go two ways. It can either knock out Ukraine — and then the Europeans will be without their proxy, though of course the Europeans could still go to war with Russia once they've been exhausted a bit — or alternatively Russia goes after the puppet master, that is after the NATO countries. It makes sense to focus on Ukraine, but on the other hand, is it possible that defeating Ukraine wouldn't end the permanent war?
I say this because it's hard to imagine NATO giving up on this powerful proxy. Keep in mind there have been a lot of possibilities for peace. Initially the European countries agreed to a unity government back in 2014 when Yanukovych was destabilized — they ignored it and toppled him instead. Then we had Minsk. The Europeans and Americans had a chance to make peace and they didn't want to. They continued to develop Ukraine as a proxy. In 2021 we have people like Kurt Volker — the former NATO ambassador of the United States — making the point that we don't need a peace deal with the Russians. He had a phrase: "conflict is success," essentially arguing that peace is not in our interest.
And of course in 2022, when the Russians invaded, they immediately contacted the Ukrainians to set up the Istanbul talks. And again, in retrospect, why would NATO accept the Istanbul agreement going through? They spent all those years building a powerful Ukrainian proxy army of hundreds of thousands of men. Why wouldn't you use this to weaken a strategic rival? Peace doesn't really make sense. If there's peace, this army is of no use anymore. Why not bleed the Russians a bit? As the Turks said, as Naftali Bennett said, as the former head of the German army said — this was the consensus.
But I'm saying that even if Ukraine loses all of Donbas, all of Novorossiya, even Kyiv — why would the Europeans want to end this? Why not keep the Western Ukrainian resistance alive? As long as they hold part of Ukraine and control the population, they can continue raining missiles into Russia, trying to knock it out and weaken it. It doesn't seem like Russia and Ukraine necessarily get to decide when this war is over. NATO largely started this war in 2014 and it looks as if they could decide how it ends. So how can Russia avoid a permanent war?
Alexander Mercouris: I think you have summed up the situation very well, and you've also touched on the continuing internal debate taking place in Moscow. The debate is no longer "can we negotiate a resolution to this crisis?" It is whether achieving deterrence with the West through victory in Ukraine — in other words, whether merely achieving victory in Ukraine by itself — will be sufficient to restore deterrence in relations with the West. I think that is still Putin's position. Alternatively, a more hardline position is starting to emerge: that in order to restore deterrence you have to go further, you have to go beyond victory in Ukraine, you have to start doing other things which will, going back to Professor Karaganov's words, finally restore fear in the West, because only through that means can you restore deterrence.
I think that debate is going on. And there is something else which takes us directly to the point you've just been making, which is that it's probably going to change the ideas the Russians have about what victory in Ukraine means. They're very close now to achieving their initial objectives, at least their initial territorial objectives. I don't think anybody who retains any connection with reality any longer doubts that they're going to capture Donbas very soon. It's probably going to take a few months, but we are closing in on that. Probably the same is going to eventually prove true about the other four regions — Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and so on. The Ukrainian military looks increasingly exhausted, the Russian advance increasingly irresistible.
But the question then becomes: what do you do when those objectives are achieved? Do you try to return to negotiations, trying to see whether there's some kind of deal that can be done at that point, trying to get the West and Ukraine to accept these realities and agree to Ukrainian neutral status? I think there are increasing doubts in Moscow that that is possible. In which case the Russians, very much against their initial wishes, might decide they have no real option but to push further west. I think that is something that in the West we have not understood. There's an assumption that because the Russians have taken so long to get to this point, they're not going to have any appetite to go beyond it and won't have the means to go beyond it. I think they may not have the appetite, but I think they may feel they have the obligation to go beyond it.
And I think that by the time Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and all the rest are captured, the Ukrainian military and Ukrainian economy will be so shattered that the rest of the war is not going to take as long as some people assume. By taking this extreme line, we are very close to sealing the fate of Ukraine — dooming its future as an independent state.
The Attrition Endgame
Glenn Diesen: We keep seeing that argument: "How can Russia possibly take Odessa? Look how long it took them to get Donbas." But as you said, this is a war of attrition. You look at the decline in manpower, weaponry, equipment, the economy, social stability, political stability, the fortifications — you can measure it along many lines, but all of them indicate it's heading towards an end. When that end comes, it's not as if the Ukrainians can hold that line as they did in the former four years. So this is some of the sweet talk people tell themselves in the West to hold on to the "Ukraine is winning" narrative, which is apparently back in fashion.
I did see the President of Finland, Stubb, come out and say that their conditions are still that Ukraine should be part of NATO — which is a very European way of pretending to be for Ukraine but really saying there will be no peace. If you demand NATO membership, that's what you're saying. You did mention that the war's escalation will take other forms. We've also seen what you've talked about — the rise of a dirtier war. The Russians are now playing a greater role. How is this developing?
Alexander Mercouris: I have to say that dirty war is something that makes me very, very uncomfortable. But for the first time that I can remember in this conflict, the Russians have admitted carrying out — in some place and in some way they don't tell us about — the assassination of a Ukrainian military intelligence official. If the Russians have done this once, there's no reason why they won't do it again. If we get into a situation of tit-for-tat killings of intelligence officials, there's every reason to fear it will start to expand beyond intelligence officials and start to extend to people within the political system as well.
The Ukrainians have never shown any hesitation or inhibitions here. Up to now, the Russians have — I suspect in part because they have always hoped that ultimately they will achieve a negotiated end to the conflict and they need to keep the people they're going to negotiate with alive. But of course, if that calculus changes, then we could start to see that also shift. The Russians have far more resources and far more capabilities in this area than the Ukrainians do, and nobody should be in any doubt about that.
If we start to see a dirty war of assassinations and extrajudicial killings begin, there's no reason to think it will be limited to Ukraine. It could start to spread to Europe, where a lot of these people probably are, and play out in all sorts of other places as well. This is going to be very, very uncomfortable. I can remember how Europe became the location of a dirty war in the 1970s between the Palestinians and the Israelis — bomb attacks, assassinations, killings — and it was very uncomfortable for the European governments that had to see all of this play out on their own territory. There was a massive disruption of the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, just for example. But the players who would be playing this game are going to be measurably more powerful. We're not talking about Israelis and Palestinians. We're talking about Russians — a superpower or at least a great power — on one side, and ultimately if the Americans get involved too, you can imagine how deeply unpleasant and dangerous that can easily become.
Glenn Diesen: Of course there are different technologies in play as well, with drones. I keep wondering, when we see all this drone warfare, how this is going to change terrorism. Drone terrorism is going to be so easy to carry out from now on. It's quite frightening.
The intelligence official killed on the Ukrainian side was Budanov's subordinate. You haven't seen this much from the Russian side before. But on the development of the war — you and I are both Europeans, and we know that it's obligatory in Europe to pretend that Ukraine is winning. This is what we have to chant now to show our loyalty to our countries. If you recognize the realities on the ground — that in fact they're not winning — that's considered a pro-Russian talking point and one is smeared for it. But nonetheless, when we look at the casualty rates, even measured by the exchange of dead soldiers, we tend to see that for every thousand Ukrainian dead there are about fifty Russians. Something's not right there. And we're told that the Ukrainians are retaking their territory, so it's very hard to explain. I try to ask people this question — how does this make sense? — but there's some cognitive dissonance and usually people get angry and reassure me that it's a Russian talking point, even though no one's disputing the numbers or the facts. It's very difficult to have any sensible conversations anymore in Europe. How do you see the front lines moving in this war of attrition?
The Front Lines and the "Ukraine Is Winning" Narrative
Alexander Mercouris: First of all, your frustration is entirely justified. You point out these logical inconsistencies, these factual contradictions, and all you get is sullen anger — sometimes open anger. People simply do not want to address these realities.
If we're talking about the situation on the front lines, anybody who observes what is happening objectively can see it for themselves. The Russians are now at the gates of Kostiantynivka, Sloviansk, all of these places — the last defense line left in Donbas. Beyond that, apparently it's mainly open steppe until you get to one or two big towns, and then the Dnieper itself. In the Zaporizhzhia region there's been a lot of movement on the front lines, but the movement is clearly in favor of the Russians. In northeastern Ukraine — Sumy, Kharkiv — indeed as you also pointed out, these two cities, Sumy and Kharkiv, are now also threatened.
So this narrative that Ukraine is winning, that the Russians are losing, that the Ukrainians are getting the initiative, that drones are somehow the miracle weapon that's going to restore the initiative to the Ukrainians — all we need to do is keep doing the same thing again and again and this time it's going to turn out right because there's been a 0.5% uptick in the inflation rate or because growth has been slightly less strong in the Russian economy. These narratives, these illusions we hear all the time, are simply wishful thinking rationalizations put out by people who simply want to continue the war. What they are doing is ensuring that the defeat, when it comes, will be more complete and more disastrous for us than it might otherwise be. And going back to your point about Ukraine — more disastrous first and foremost for Ukraine, which is the nation we are supposed to be defending.
The "Pro-Ukraine" Narrative and Attacks on Russian Infrastructure
Glenn Diesen: Which is why this concept of "pro-Ukraine," or "standing with Ukraine," or "supporting Ukraine" — they never really unpack it. Everyone has empathy for what Ukraine has gone through, but they monopolize the content of what this concept should entail. If you want to be pro-Ukrainian, for example, you have to look the other way when there's this brutal recruitment of men, because acknowledging it could undermine support for the war. You also have to support a boycott of diplomacy and ignore that most Ukrainians actually want immediate negotiations — that's also considered pro-Ukrainian, because otherwise you undermine support for the war. It's a very strange set of narratives they've built up.
But while there's a lot of fake news and narrative-building about Ukraine winning, it has to be said that NATO and Ukraine are causing some real pain for Russia, especially in Crimea. There's a fuel crisis, attacks on infrastructure — this is becoming a huge problem. Whenever the European leaders and media celebrate these attacks, they don't seem to appreciate that this is making it very difficult for Russia to restrain itself, essentially forcing its hand to do something extreme. How are you seeing this component of the war? Because I always make the point: how much success do you want against a nuclear superpower — the largest nuclear power in the world — who is fighting for its existence? This perpetual goal of humiliating Putin — no one really discusses the logic of this, whether or not this is something that either Ukraine or NATO would benefit from.
Alexander Mercouris: Again, you're making absolutely the correct point. Crimea in particular is a very big problem for the Russians, but it is a problem they will overcome. I say that based on what has consistently happened in the war up till now. We've created problems for the Russians in all sorts of areas — in their domestic economy, on the battlefields with the Ukrainian offensives of 2022 and 2023, with all sorts of other things we've done at various times. The one iron lesson we get from this war is that the Russians have the resources, the ingenuity, and the will always to come up with solutions. So this is a problem for them in Crimea, but they will overcome it in some way.
The question is not whether we are inflicting pain on the Russians — obviously we are. Is it enough to get the Russians to give up on the war and give up on their objectives? Or is it going to do something completely different, which is make the Russians more angry and more determined to see the war through and achieve an outcome that might be less beneficial for us? I would say emphatically the second. We could hurt the Russians, but we can't knock them out. That's another iron lesson we've learned from the war. So what we are doing by these attacks is making life more difficult for them, but ultimately we're going to make life worse for us and a lot worse for the Ukrainians.
There is a further point which you did make and it is an important one: constantly poking a nuclear power is never a good idea. Once upon a time during the Cold War this was fully understood. We both lived through the Cold War. I remember it vividly. I never remember a single situation where these kinds of attacks were carried out by one of the two superpowers against the other. Now we do this all the time, and we've got into a situation where we think we can hit at the Russian superpower continuously and never provoke a response. What we are overlooking is that it is taking all of President Putin's determination and authority to maintain that sense of discipline and restraint on the Russian side, and that is not something we can afford to assume will remain the case forever.
I'm firmly convinced that had it not been for Putin, had there been some other leader representing Russia, it would most likely be much, much more hawkish and Europe would be a much more dangerous place today. So it confuses me a bit why there's such an eagerness to try to humiliate Putin, to push him aside. Whenever there's an argument that Putin is losing support — he still enjoys support that no other European leader enjoys — what exactly do they think is going to replace him? The idea that this slow war is going to be somehow replaced with capitulation? Or is this slow war going to be replaced with massive retaliation against European countries, betting on the United States not coming to their aid? I just find it to be foolish.
The Transformation of European Political Culture
Glenn Diesen: It is a question about Europe. How do you make sense of the leaders these days? Because if you'd gone back a few years — a decade ago — and you'd told me we're going to be launching missiles directly into Russia from our territory, with our weapons, with war planners openly bragging about our participation, with our contractors and intelligence officers on the ground, with politicians bragging about how we're going to bring the war to Russia, with the President of Finland telling people the only way to win the war is to kill more Russians — this is so far beyond anything. Forget about the Cold War. Even a decade ago, any of this would have been unthinkable. Five years ago, this was unthinkable. Now you have the Germans wanting to take the lead in the campaign against Russia, wanting to be the largest military power in Europe. This happened fairly quickly, and they only talk about war. The Europeans are still not talking to Russia. How do you explain what is happening in Europe? I don't recognize my own society anymore. It's become a very ugly place.
Alexander Mercouris: I'd say exactly the same about Britain. It's become very, very difficult to talk about these things. One of the reasons why we have this constant pattern of escalation is because the internal debates that ought to be taking place never are, because all debate is closed down. If anybody comes forward and says, "Is this really a good idea to be conducting missile strikes into the territory of the world's most powerful nuclear power?" — the moment you say that, you're told it's a Putin talking point. You're accused of defeatism, or worse still of actually being on the Russian side. The momentum, the rhetorical advantage, is always with those who advocate escalation. The political advantage is always with those who advocate escalation. This is a very, very dangerous situation, and it's one that we have created amongst ourselves — because never mind that we can't talk to the Russians, we can't talk intelligently any longer amongst ourselves. That's the real problem.
Glenn Diesen: That's one of the biggest shocks for me. I always assumed that if we came into a conflict like this, at least we're going to have a rational discussion and make rational choices. But I think this is also a bit of the flaw in how the post-Cold War era was going to end — the era of collective hegemony or liberal hegemony. I remember Charles Krauthammer wrote this article in 1990 about the unipolar moment, and the argument was: we'll dominate the world as long as the distribution of power permits it, and once the distribution of power shifts and we have a multipolar world, we'll embrace it. I don't think people recognized we would have this whole thirty-year-long rise of a new political class completely immersed in the ideology that our dominance is the only source of peace, and that we'd rather have war than accept the new distribution of power. So the rationality is something that took me a bit by surprise — how quickly it went away.
Alexander Mercouris: I think you're absolutely correct about this. By the way, you've charted a lot of this in your various books, which would be very useful reading for many people. I remember reading one of your books in which you showed the extraordinary arrogance with which Western officials — European as well as American — dealt with their Russian counterparts, consistently refusing to accept that the Russians had any legitimate security concerns at all, and applying what you described as salami tactics against the Russians all the time.
Yes, we've worked ourselves into that situation, and it's very difficult to see how — short of a major crisis and a real defeat in some form — we're ever going to be shaken out of it. The one thing I would say is that despite the fact that opposition to war in Europe is not very well organized and not very articulate, it is there nonetheless. Germany is finding it all but impossible to find people willing to join the army to fight Russia. I read that something like 200,000 young people were contacted and invited to enlist, and only 500 said they would. In Britain I hear the same story — that recruitment rates for the army are actually down rather than up. So there is no huge enthusiasm amongst the European populations for this great duel and war with the Russians.
The political leadership has closed down dialogue and debate. One of the reasons those contradictions survive — people being able to talk about the Russians being enormously powerful and threatening even as they're supposed to be losing the war in Ukraine, both at the same time — is precisely because we don't have debates in Europe anymore. In the United States it's a little different. I think the Americans do have some greater sense that this isn't really rational anymore. And I do get the sense that, in spite of the fact that Trump has probably to some extent pivoted somewhat back to Ukraine recently, if you read the American media you get the feeling that some of the passion has gone out of this war as far as the Americans are concerned. They've seen that it was attempted, that it has failed. They're now thinking about other things.
Can Opposition Parties Change Course?
Glenn Diesen: Let me ask a last question about this, because it's often assumed that the war could come to an end once the European leaders who have been championing it begin to be voted out. That's one problem — or potential solution — we have now in Europe: the severe unpopularity of governments across the continent. At least the British, the French, and the Germans have a big opposition. In Scandinavia, everyone is more or less marching in line after the government's tune. But in those big three European countries, the leaders are extremely unpopular and there's a huge opposition growing. But again, it's all premised on the idea that it matters who sits on the throne. From your case sitting in Britain — Starmer has now resigned. Does it matter who replaces him by now?
Alexander Mercouris: At the moment there's no sign at all that we're going to see any change in policy from the new prime minister, who is almost certainly going to be Andy Burnham. People talk about the fact that we've had six prime ministers in the last ten years. They hardly ever say that four of those prime ministers have been forced to leave since 2022 — in other words, that the rotation has actually accelerated because of the conflict in Ukraine and the enormous economic costs that Britain is experiencing as a result. Nobody talks about that. The result is that we just have one prime minister replacing another, carrying on exactly the same policy with respect to Russia. The economic situation continues to deteriorate, the prime minister becomes unpopular, but all that happens is that the political system coughs up someone else who does exactly the same, and the rotation just continues and gets worse.
I'm afraid this is the trouble right across Europe. Yes, there is opposition — parties in Germany, in Italy, in France which consistently show that they want to change course. But the problem they always run into is that not only is the political establishment very wedded to its existing policy, but because it regards anybody who challenges that policy as effectively being pro-Russian and ultimately treasonous, its inhibitions about doing things to stop those who advocate alternatives seem to fall away. So we've had elections cancelled in Romania. Extraordinary things have happened in elections in Moldova and in Armenia. We've had very strange things happen in Austria too. Sooner or later, they're going to start happening in the big European states as well. I know this is something people find very difficult to accept, but the iron lesson is: if you export these kinds of practices, eventually they start to get imported back. We're going to see them in the big countries in Europe too.
I personally am less confident that we're going to see a big change from these opposition parties, certainly in the relatively short term — and we are in the midst of a crisis that is playing out in the relatively short term. In five years, in ten years, it may be different. But what we need is a change now.
Glenn Diesen: I often look towards the American example — how Trump ran on the ticket against the establishment, no more wars, I'm going to put an end to the war in Ukraine. And here we are. It doesn't seem like it mattered who sat in the White House. Much of the policies remain. Anyways, Alexander —
A Confidential Disclosure About British Leadership
Alexander Mercouris: Can I just finish on one very last point? I have to be very careful what I say now, because I'm talking about something I was told in confidence by somebody who has worked at the very highest level of the British government. But one of these four prime ministers — I'm not going to say which one, though it's not actually that difficult to guess — who lost their position over the course of the four years since 2022, came into government apparently saying that this policy with Russia is unsustainable and needs to be changed. And apparently very quickly this person discovered that if they really did try to change the policy, they would not be prime minister for very long.
Glenn Diesen: In Italy they refer to Meloni as "before and after election" — how everyone has to fall in line essentially.
Alexander Mercouris: Exactly.
Glenn Diesen: Anyways, thank you so much. It's always a great pleasure.
Alexander Mercouris: Thank you, Glenn.