Charles Crawford - Lateline - Charles Crawford

Here is my latest piece for Telegraph Blogs about Ukraine/Russia/MH17 that got picked up all over the place, and led to me appearing on Lateline (Australian TV) – the link to the recording of that interview and a transcript of it that they prepared is here:

EMMA ALBERICI: Indeed. We’re looking at that ourselves in Australia because we’re hosting the G20 in November. Is that an opportunity for Australia to send a signal and deny President Putin an invitation?

CHARLES CRAWFORD: Well I think it is, but the question is: do you want to do it? And I think there are good symbolic reasons for that. It strikes me that if you have good reason to think that the Russian state was involved in shooting down a plane flying in your direction with your people on board, you know, do you really want to entertain the leader of that country? It strikes me that’s a strong statement.

But, you see – but all these statements in a sense are slightly beside the point. The question is: how will Russia respond to them? And there is a – there’s a philosophy in Russia, I think, that, “Anything you do to us, we will do worse to you, if we can find a way of doing it.” Plus they tend to think, I think, that the Soviet legacy, that they can accept more pain than we are willing to inflict. So I think this is part of the drama of the whole thing – you can have whatever sanctions you want, but what actually do you want to do?

You’ve got to have a deal with Russia and Ukraine sooner or later, and the question is: how do you get to that deal? And the problem with sanctions and the whole place we’ve ended up is that everyone is ratcheting up the rhetoric, we’re looking for more measures, basically everyone is getting angrier and angrier and that just doesn’t create a context for having the deal we are going to get and whether it takes 10 years or six months, we’re going to get there, and that’s part of the problem, I think, with the whole situation we’re in; it’s trying to find a way out of it.

EMMA ALBERICI: You’re a former diplomat in that very region. What outcome do you think, what deal do you think President Putin is looking for?

CHARLES CRAWFORD: Well that’s the key question, I think, actually, because what is it he really wants?

… Basically, I think in Ukraine, you’ve got a country which hasn’t been independent in any sense that we understand it for centuries and the Ukrainian people are trying to find their identity, and within that Ukrainian people, as we know, there’s different views, but there is a strong body of opinion in Ukraine that actually they don’t want to be part of the Russian imperial space.

And I think President Putin thinks that Ukrainians just are part of the Russian imperial space, whether they want to be or not. And I think the ultimate problem here is that psychological drama about the right of the Ukrainian people, 30-something million people, just to live the lives they want freely.

And I think Russia somehow, I think, is still hankering after the Tsarist empire and the Soviet Union. It wants some of what it regards as its territory back – and there isn’t much of a compromise you can have on that.