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The Monocle Daily
Netanyahu and Trump meet at the White House, Moldova remains pro-EU despite Russia’s best efforts
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- [00:00]
Isabel Hilton
You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on 29 September 2025 on Monocle Radio.
- [00:06]
Andrew Muller
Netanyahu at the White House. Will a deal be done at last? Russia fails to buy another European territory. And why finding a drink in Poland may become more difficult. I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts now.
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John Lyons
Hello.
- [00:32]
Andrew Muller
Welcome to the Monocle Daily coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Isabel Hilton and Jenny Mathers will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll hear from the ABC's John Lyons about his new book drawn from his up close experiences of Ukraine's resistance to Russia's invasion. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily, I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Isabel Hilton, founder of China Dialogue and a visiting professor at King's College London's Lao Institute. And Jenny Mathers, senior lecturer in international politics at Aberystwyth University. Hello to you both.
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Isabel Hilton
Hello.
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Andrew Muller
Hello Jenny. First of all, you are of course a familiar voice to Monocle Radio listeners by this point, but a rare in person appearance. Welcome back to the Daily Ages after your debut appearance.
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Jenny Mathers
Absolutely.
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Andrew Muller
What does bring you to London?
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Jenny Mathers
Well, I'm here for a workshop of all things solar geoengineering and the aim is to bring together people who have expertise in different sort of actors interest in this topic, which is an attempt to try and ameliorate the effects of greenhouse warming, to try and sort of role play what might happen if we actually got closer to actually using this technology. How would different states react? How would different international organizations react?
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Andrew Muller
So you've come to London to fix the climate basically?
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Jenny Mathers
Well, at least to experiment with how it might be fixed, yes.
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Andrew Muller
Okay, Isabelle, can you beat that?
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Isabel Hilton
I very much sympathise with the effort, I have to say. You know, I've had rather a kind of, you know, dull week really. Well, I fix things.
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Andrew Muller
But. But you have, you have been to Montreal. That's quite exciting.
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Isabel Hilton
That's true. That was very exciting. I mean it was this sort of exchange of anxieties really between the UK and Canada. We find we share quite a few of them. You know, they're a bit more worried about the high north, but. But we're equally worried about what's to the south of them.
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Andrew Muller
As for the principal anxiety, do you kind of figure out what it is if you arrange the words America, states and united into a well known phrase.
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Isabel Hilton
Or saying that gets you very close. Yes.
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Andrew Muller
How anxious are the Canadians just at the moment?
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Isabel Hilton
They're really cross for Canadians. You know, Canadians are, on the whole, very mild mannered and polite. But there were endless stories of people who had cancelled their habitual trips to Florida and other sunny places within the borders of the United States. So I guess Cuba and the Caribbean must be having a bit of an upturn of Canadians. But they're very angry but also very worried. Yeah. I mean, look, a lot of the rhetoric and indeed the measures coming from the United States are ludicrous and can't be dealt with. So apart from, you know, muttering and complaining, there's not much Kana can do.
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Andrew Muller
Well, we will start in Washington, D.C. where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting U.S. president Donald Trump at the White House. Trump had heavily foreshadowed that the meeting was going to portend, quote, something special. But as he says that about everything, it would probably be wise to temper expectations and or excitement. I wrote this about an hour ago before anything whatsoever had emerged. Let's see how it holds up. Jenny. How it appears to be holding up is quite well, which is to say that we haven't actually heard anything definitive from inside the White House. We have heard of a possibly not coincidental uptick of airstrikes in Gaza City. But where would you place your own options, optimism on the scale of whatever to whatever?
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Jenny Mathers
Well, I'm afraid I'm not terribly optimistic. I mean, Trump desperately wants that Nobel Peace Prize. He wants that place in heaven, really.
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Andrew Muller
He doesn't mention it very often.
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Jenny Mathers
And so this is just another attempt to try and broker a peace deal for an intractable conflict. And yes, there is a whole range of different issues apparently that may be resolved through this 21 point peace plan. And it looks a lot like a real estate carve out, to be perfectly honest. There's a lot of very rich people involved, a lot of very powerful people involved. There's not a lot of Palestinians involved. And there's big questions about whether or not the right on the political spectrum in Israel would really put up with some of the things which apparently it would allow. So I suspect that we're not going to see the major breakthrough for peace in the Middle East.
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Andrew Muller
Isabelle. I think Jenny there pinpoints one of the big difficulties, which is the dynamics of domestic politics in Israel is the problem, not just now, but for pretty much the last nearly two years, that Netanyahu can't stop, because if he does stop, he potentially loses his governing coalition, which means he potentially loses his job and such is his current legal jeopardy, perhaps his liberty along with it.
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Isabel Hilton
Well, indeed. I mean, there are corruption charges which would then be brought. He might well go to jail. So he doesn't want to lose power. I also suspect that the far right, what's left of the far right in the coalition, not everybody stayed, but I suspect they don't want to lose power either because things are going quite nicely for them. So what do they do in this situation? It's quite instructive to look at what happened under Biden, who also had a framework. And you will remember that negotiating from the framework to a peace agreement took many months. And then in the end, Netanyahu, having accepted it, carried on the war anyway and disassociated himself from it. So if you were Netanyahu, this seems to offer exactly the same opportunities. We have a framework, but all the detail remains to be negotiated. Well, how long can that take? Quite a long time if you're, you know, nitpicking every little bit. We don't even know what Hamas might think about it. Sort of guarantees they might want about their own safety if they were to leave, or indeed the release of the thousands of Palestinians who have been hoovered up by Israel in the course of the last two years to act as, you know, reverse hostages. I can see this dragging on for months. And meanwhile, unless the Americans tell him to stop and seriously put pressure on him, he will go on reducing Gaza to rubble and expanding settlements on the West Bank.
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Andrew Muller
Well, on those subjects, and returning to the 21 point plan which you mentioned, Jenny, for Netanyahu to agree to it, he would have to pin himself into some quite tight corners because it does require him to commit to not annexing the West Bank. And it's an open question as to whether he does or does not want to do that, but I think he enjoys the ambiguity around it. There would be no settlements in Gaza. There would be a gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Strip, and there would be, it says here, and I'm not sure how willing many Gazans would be to bank heavily on this, but it says there will be no forced displacement of Gaza's people.
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Jenny Mathers
Yes, I mean, it sounds, you know, aspects of it sound very positive, you know, an end to the bombing and humanitarian aid comes back and all the rest of it, but it is, it just looks like a plan that was written by people who don't actually have to live with the consequences. And it's another example of an attempt to bring a settlement to a very complicated political situation. Without actually dealing with the underlying issues and dealing with the attitudes that create those underlying issues. So to what extent are the Israelis willing to tolerate the existence of a legitimate Palestinian state? That's a big question and we don't know the answer, for example. So, you know, there's so it's so much up in the air. And of course, Trump wants the quick deal. He wants the quick fix and the instant success, and that clearly isn't going to happen. You know, as Isabelle be easy for Netanyahu to smile and nod and say yes, yes, and then drag it out endlessly. So, yeah, I'm not too optimistic, I'm afraid.
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Andrew Muller
Isabel, on the question of the future governance of Gaza. I mean, I think the one thing on which there is agreement from pretty much everybody, and this includes Israel, the United States, European powers, and whether they will admit it in public or not, Middle Eastern countries as well, is that nobody wants Gaza, nobody wants Hamas to have anything to do with it anymore. I think everybody is done with them. But the suggestion, not formally part of the 21 point plan of Governor Tony Blair, do you think that's a plausible prospect?
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Isabel Hilton
I think in this scenario it's all too plausible. Whether that's a good idea is rather a separate question, but it's exactly the sort of name that this kind of project might reach for. You know, former prime minister, remember he was kind of in charge of a similar project just after he stepped down from being prime minister. He barely visited. He had no relationship with the Palestinians. There was quite a large operation in one of the hotels in Gaza, but he himself hardly showed up and nothing happened. So if you wanted a figurehead that added a degree of plausibility just because of the status of being a former prime minister, you might want to think that that was a good idea if you wanted someone actually to make it happen.
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Andrew Muller
Jenny, just finally on this, is it necessarily a terrible idea, though, if we remove either the figure of Tony Blair from the prospect or indeed people's opinions of Tony Blair? Because I guess the obvious analog would be something like the succession of UN high representatives to Bosnia Herzegovina, a post which is still ongoing 30 years after the war ended, which tells you something about the patience you need to make these stick, but for better and for worse, and you know, I spent time in Bosnia with one of those high representatives, the late Paddy Ashdown. There are good things and bad things about it, but is it necessarily a bad idea?
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Jenny Mathers
Well, I think the problem is that these kinds of very high level international solutions to these kinds of problems with really Big names. What they tend to do is just reproduce the same problems that have already been gone through before. They don't seem to learn the lessons of the importance of local context and local knowledge. They don't seem to listen to the local people. They bring in the solutions and they want to impose them from the top down. And, you know, looking at the kinds of people who are likely to be chosen for this sort of, you know, governing group, should it go ahead, it looks like just a rerun of things we've seen elsewhere. So, you know, again, I just don't have a lot of faith in its ability to actually deliver what the people on the ground would need in order to have a meaningful peace.
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Andrew Muller
Well, to Moldova now, the parliamentary elections of which would, in happier times, elicit almost no international attention whatsoever. Yesterday's Moldovan parliamentary election had rather more riding on it. Russia waged a campaign of great reach and little subtlety and at considerable expense, trying to get Moldova's pro Russian elements into power. And failed voters awarded first place and a parliamentary majority to the pro European party of Action and solidarity of President Maya Sandu, knocking the Putin into enthusiasts of the patriotic electoral bloc into a distant second place. Jenny, first of all, this very much being your bailiwick, President Sandow said in the days before the election that Russia had spent hundreds of millions of euros trying to pull this off. There is a joke which I heard in Moldova when I was there a few months back to the effect that if the west really wants to bankrupt Russia, they should just hold elections in Moldova every weekend. But basically, why is Russia spending this much money and this much energy trying to suborn a very small country?
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Jenny Mathers
It's part of a bigger picture, really. And the bigger picture is Vladimir Putin and his supporters are convinced that in order for Russia to be a great power, it must have a sphere of influence. It must have influence, if not direct control over the countries and the governments that are near neighbors and even not, not quite so near neighbors to Russia. And in order to have this sort of status, which Putin believes is sort of given to him by destiny, this is a necessity. And therefore there's no money that couldn't be spent for this purpose. Right? And they also have Russia has the tools at their disposal because Russia has spent many generations as the Soviet Union before it did, honing these kinds of tools through its intelligence and security services in terms of how to wiggle its way into different societies, how to influence, how to use disinformation, and now simply how to just pay lots of money to try and get people to vote a certain way. So this is part of a much bigger picture. It's much bigger than Moldova. It happens in lots of different countries in different ways. And so Russia changes its tactics to suit local context, depending on what it thinks is going to be effective.
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Andrew Muller
Just a quick follow up on that one, Jenny, because it is a question of. That fascinates and perplexes me this idea that Russia feels like it must have this sphere of influence, because I think to most people, at least people from a modern post imperial context would look at Russia and think you are the biggest country in the world and it's actually quite a big drop off to second place. You are 11 time zones wide, defended by nuclear weapons. Nobody in Western Europe has the remotest ambitions of acquiring a square foot of your territory. You could defend that entire frontier with a toll booth really well.
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Jenny Mathers
It isn't just about land, although land is important. It's also about ideas. And this is the key element really is that Putin is very worried about the passage of foreign ideas through these buffer states into Russia. And he very much sees his position as sort of bastion of certain kinds of values and in opposition very much to Western liberal values such as gender equality, for example, among others. And so it is partly about having a sort of a physical buffer zone, but also about having an ideological ideational sort of buffer zone to protect what is pure about Russia.
- [15:18]
Andrew Muller
Isabelle, people were genuinely nervous in Moldova about how this might go. I spoke to various people over the summer in and around government in Moldova and they definitely did not discount the possibility that the pro Russians could win it or perhaps it would be better expressed steal it. How bad would that actually have been? I guess how anxious would it have made the rest of the European Union?
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Isabel Hilton
I think it would have been a very bad sign. We have enough troubles within the European Union vis a vis Russia as things stand. And all the countries that most seriously support Ukraine, for example, seem to be suffering an accelerated incidence of cyber attacks, including the uk. So clearly there's a kind of of Russian offensive against support for Ukraine. You have a rising tide of populist parties with ambivalent approaches to Ukraine, if not outright support for the Russian position across Europe. So I think for Russia to score a victory in Moldova would have been a serious psychological blow. I mean, it's a small country, but these steps matter, you know, And I think at this point a Russian success has quite a serious effect.
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Andrew Muller
Ginny, how do you anticipate or based on your research and learning, how should we anticipate Russia reacting to a setback like that, because they don't strike me as the kind of people who are going to respond by going, oh, well, we tried and failed. The best team won. Good luck with everything. I mean, is there any prospect, for example, they might try something even more drastic via their strange little semi statelet of Transnistria, which has been carved out of Moldova over the last 30 years or so? There's somewhere between 10001500 Russian troops stationed there, though, I suspect, and have been led to believe that they may not be the absolute elite of the Russian armed forces so much as people who were able to pay somebody off to shunt them to a relatively cushy number. But what does Russia do now?
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Jenny Mathers
I think they probably have a think about what strategies to continue to use. I mean, it's a bit like trying to stop the flow of water. It's going to get through the cracks somehow, and it's a matter of trying to stop up those cracks and try and divert it somewhere else. So Russia has a lot of resources to use in these kinds of activities. And it has multiple agencies which compete with each other for power and money and prestige and for Putin's attention and his approval. And so they have a lot of motivation to carry on doing what they're doing even if they're not successful this time. They would probably almost certainly try again, not only with elections, but just in other ways, try and support political parties in different ways to try and keep that disinformation flowing. And if one tactic doesn't work, then they'll try another one. So this is a real kind of cottage industry almost in Russia, and it's not something that's going to disappear. And I think that's what's really important to remember is that this is a key tool in Putin's toolbox, in his foreign policy toolbox, and he's not going to give it up easily.
- [18:35]
Isabel Hilton
I think also, if I may, that I think that that's part of the reason why this is so important, because part of the battleground is to destroy the faith in the integrity of elections, or indeed in the idea that elections can make any difference. And that is very much the Putin playbook. So to see the range of tools deployed against little Moldova and finally to have very decisive victory in that election, it's morally and ethically significant.
- [19:05]
Andrew Muller
Just finally on this one, though, Jenny, it does give the EU a different kind of headache, perhaps not as bad as the headache they would now be experiencing had the pro Russians won, but they now have to think about, well, what do we do about Moldova? Because Moldova was made an EU candidate in 2022, obviously in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and an obvious attempt, I guess, rebuke Russia. Should efforts be made to hustle Moldova into the EU formally as soon as possible without perhaps being as concerned as they might be about basic standards Transnistria. How unhappy those countries and the Balkans who've been waiting for decades are going to be. Because it did strike me that one thing I kept hearing from people who were worried in Moldova when I was there was that one of their great strengths as a country, which is that quite a lot of Moldovans can and indeed have applied for Romanian citizenship, did make Moldova vulnerable. That's what people were worried about. If the pro Russians win, all those people with Romanian passports, which is about a third of the population, will just think well, I can be anywhere.
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Jenny Mathers
Exactly. It's a tough one for the EU and I don't know the answer, but I think they definitely need to be pragmatic both when dealing with with Moldova and also with dealing with Ukraine and indeed other applicant states. They need to have some serious thinking about how long should these states have to wait, how high should the bar be for them to jump over without actually totally undermining ideas about common standards of values and democracy and so on.
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Andrew Muller
Well, to China now, which appears unsurprisingly happy to take advantage of the United States current strategy of self defeat. This week China will launch what it is calling the K visa for young foreign graduates in science, technology, engineering and maths, the STEM disciplines. With an extremely thinly veiled subtext of if America doesn't want you, we do. The K visa will allow holders to live in China even without a pre existing job offer, which may well entice those who cannot find an American company willing to stump up the $100,000 per annum now attached to the similar American visa, the H1B. Isabelle, $100,000 a year is a lot to ask of your and that's on top of them actually paying salary.
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Isabel Hilton
Oh that.
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Andrew Muller
But is this a thing that is likely to tempt up and coming graduates from elsewhere? Because I'm guessing the life of a young undergraduate or a young graduate in China is probably pretty different to the life of a young graduate in the United States.
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Isabel Hilton
Yeah, it's not awful being a young graduate in China. Except most of them are unemployed. I mean that's the odd thing about this. There is a very very high rate of unemploy employment in China's own graduates and China produces more STEM graduates than pretty much the rest of the world combined. So whether these young people will be able to find jobs is, you know, maybe a little doubtful. They're facing language barriers. You know, it's a huge sector in China and the government pours money into it, but it's not going to be absolutely guaranteed that these no doubt talented young people will be able to find a niche. And interestingly enough, given that the largest cohort who benefited from the American visa were Indian, it will be curious to see whether Indians are absolutely enthusiastic about going to China, where it hasn't traditionally been thought of as a friendly country.
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Andrew Muller
And the language issue you mentioned, Isabella, I'm certain more Indians speak English than Indians speak Chinese. In fact, given the numbers, probably I would make the bet that more Indians speak English than Americans.
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Isabel Hilton
Probably more Indians speak English than UK.
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Andrew Muller
Than in any other country on earth, actually, now that I think about it. But is that something that China has ever shown any sign of adjusting to? Is the language of China's tech sector still Chinese?
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Isabel Hilton
Well, it's both because you know so much, certainly in the early days was published in English that, you know, you can't, it's quite hard to read the existing literature without the language. That's getting a lot easier though, because, you know, you have instant translation now. So actually the incentive to learn English is diminishing. And certainly in terms of kind of day to day operations, Chinese is the language of just day to day work. The Chinese have already been poaching or trying to poach the kind of talent that they want and that tended to be rather higher level. So if you were an outstanding professor in the United States or the uk, you would suddenly get an offer of a lab of your own and lots of research students and money and, you know, no funding worries and, you know, you can see the temptation of that. But this, this is an offer for a rather younger cohort, unless it comes with, you know, no check attached.
- [24:14]
Andrew Muller
Ginny, as yourself, an American academic abroad, how strange has it been watching a US administration kicking the legs out from under its own, you know, academic industry, which, aside from being absolutely world leading and of incalculable benefit to the United States in all sorts of ways, is an absolutely gargantuan cash cow?
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Jenny Mathers
It is, and it's just one of so many examples of the Trump administration really taking what actually does make America great and throwing it in the rubbish bin because, you know, without a strong university sector that attracts international talent, both at the level of the academic professors, but Also the level of students and creates a lot of the knowledge that business then is able to use and exploit. I mean, there are big questions about how dynamic the US economy is going to be in the future. It's quite extraordinary. People tell me that flights to the US now are mostly empty. Tourism is also collapsing. Why would someone go to the United States these days? A lot of the attractions are no longer there. And so the question is for these young STEM graduates. Well, well, if the United States is going to be inhospitable, maybe they will take a chance on China. They've got to look somewhere. And certainly the world is changing pretty rapidly.
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Andrew Muller
You haven't been offered your own history lab in China or anything?
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Jenny Mathers
Alas, no.
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Andrew Muller
It's a shame. Isabelle, just finally on this, though, is China entirely serious about this? Because you mentioned the youth unemployment. They already have, and I was wondering about that myself when I read of this. Are they kind of just doing this a little bit to wind Trump up? Because China would also have at its own concerns, would it not have becoming maybe too open and welcoming in maybe too many people from countries where they get to vote and read what they like and say what they like about the people in charge and so on.
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Isabel Hilton
Yeah, that's true. Although the numbers are down. They haven't really recovered from COVID So in terms of, you know, the kind. In fact, a figure I saw admittedly earlier in the year suggested that in terms of percentage of population, there were fewer foreigners in China than there were in North Korea, which is quite a startling statistic. It's a very large population in China, but it's a. It's an indication that China hasn't felt sort of terribly warm and friendly. Now China's making enormous efforts to be more warm and friendly. You know, visa free travel for lots of European countries, for example, and this kind of, and certainly encouraging Chinese students who had or Chinese graduates who've been studying in the States to come back. That's been a big thing in terms of numbers of foreigners going and settling and becoming Chinese. I really can't see that. It's never been, it's never been really on the cards in China and I doubt that's going to change.
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Andrew Muller
Well, to Poland now, where listeners who enjoy listening to this, the Monocle daily late at night with a quiet drink may have to start stocking up in advance. The national government is going to have a lash at making it slightly more difficult and or discouraging for polls to buy alcohol. Measures under discussion include banning advertising, curbing sales at petrol Station stations and online stores and compelling stores which have such things to lock their drinks cabinets between 10pm and 6am or so. The depressing statistic underpinning this is that Poland has the EU's second worst numbers for alcohol attributable deaths, outstripped and indeed out drunk only by Slovenia. Jenny, the headline measure here is this idea of making it impossible to buy a drink from a shop between 10pm and 6am My instinct is that that's probably not going to make much difference to the absolutely determined hardcore. It may just deter that person who at about half past ten one evening just thinks, God, I'd like a beer to take home and then can't find one.
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Jenny Mathers
Yeah, exactly. The people who really are serious about their drinking are not going to be deterred or impeded, shall we say, by this measure. So it's interesting to think about. Well, on the one hand, perhaps measures which are designed to improve, improve the health of a nation shouldn't be discouraged or laughed at, but it does raise questions about, well, why do the Poles drink so much? What is it that is causing this high level of alcohol consumption and perhaps alcoholism. And if they don't want to address whatever those root causes might possibly be, then restricting the hours when you can buy alcohol is probably not going to really do much.
- [28:47]
Andrew Muller
Is there something to be said, Isabel, for the idea of, even if it doesn't make any practical difference, if you set a tone, if you just sort of communicate that this is really not sensible behavior and people seriously, you should try to rein it in a bit. Does that help at all?
- [29:04]
Isabel Hilton
You are talking to a Scot. Need I say more? Actually, I think the Scottish consumption of alcohol is higher than that of the Poles and our experience of restricting ours, that that alcohol could be sold, I seem to remember, was regarded as a bit of a failure because what it meant was everybody went to the pub and drank furiously to 10 o' clock and got really quite drunk.
- [29:31]
Andrew Muller
There was, I forget the exact period, but in Australia I think in the post war years there was an idea that pubs would close at 6pm which led to a tradition, fairly self explanatory, known as the six o' clock swill, which basically meant everybody leaving work shortly after 5 o', clock, then hastened to the pub, drank as much as they possibly could before closing time with consequences. I invite you to take a wild guess at.
- [29:57]
Isabel Hilton
Well, quite. Although I mean it is fair to say that in Poland I think the trend more recently has been to relax controls. So perhaps this is just a kind of Correction. Since polls were clearly taking advantage of it. I think the idea that, you know, motorway service stations sell alcohol is probably a bad idea.
- [30:16]
Andrew Muller
I can see, see, I can see the difficulty there. Again though, referring to my own homeland, it does still make, I mean they're still there in a fixture of many suburbs. The literal drive through bottle shop.
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Isabel Hilton
I particularly enjoyed, by the way, the law in Poland that was passed in 1982 on this issue and it's called the act on Upbringing in Sobriety and Counteracting Alcoholism, which is fairly.
- [30:41]
Andrew Muller
Does that render in Polish as some incredibly snappy acronym?
- [30:44]
Isabel Hilton
That is probably absolutely.
- [30:47]
Andrew Muller
Jenny, there is an argument that's also being made that this does have a, an effect on antisocial behavior. Would we concede that there is maybe an argument to the fact that nobody has ever bought a bottle of vodka at 2 o' clock in the morning for entirely non antisocial reasons? I mean, that's just not going to end well, is it?
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Jenny Mathers
No, probably not. Yeah, it's hard to imagine how far down that road you can go without ending up in a bad place. So.
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Andrew Muller
Yes, but where you were from in the U.S. do you come from a dry city or a dry county or are there any such anywhere near you or were there when you were growing up? There certainly were because I've been caught out by that a few times, I can tell you.
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Jenny Mathers
There certainly were. Well, Aberystwy was dry on Sundays I think when I first moved there in the 1990s, so it's not so far from living memory. But yeah, there were certainly some dry cases counties around in North Florida when I was growing up and it was seen as, you know, very much led by the church, churches and a very sort of religious fundamentalist.
- [31:49]
Andrew Muller
And so everybody in North Florida is a model of abstemiousness. Alas, no, I'm not going to ask the same question to a Scott Isabel, because it would obviously be ridiculous were there any dry counties or.
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Isabel Hilton
No.
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Andrew Muller
But what would be your threshold for giving up if you wanted a drink and couldn't find one? Like how long do you keep looking if you're in a foreign country, a foreign cities? Feel like I'd quite fancy a drink to take back to the hotel. At what point do you give up on it if there isn't one?
- [32:18]
Isabel Hilton
Oh, quite quickly, I think. Yeah, I mean it certainly kind of. If it was further than a 50 minute walk from the hotel, I think I'd probably think, oh well, never mind.
- [32:31]
Andrew Muller
Maybe it does work. Isabel Hilton and Jenny Mathers. Thank you. Thank you. Both for joining us. Finally on tonight's show, reporting and analysis of Ukraine's remarkable resistance to Russia's full scale invasion of three and a half years ago has tended to focus on the undeniably remarkable figure of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He has not done it alone, however. And a new book by Australian journalist John lyons, formerly the ABC's global affairs editor, now it's America's Editor, focuses on the ordinary Ukrainians who have put up such an extraordinary fight. The book is called A Bunker in Kyiv. The astonishing story of People's Army Defying Putin. I spoke to John earlier and began by asking whether he thought the Ukrainian people in the early days of the war kind of surprised themselves.
- [33:16]
John Lyons
They did, Andrew. And there was certainly a view in Ukraine that surely in this day and age, a country as large as Russia, the fourth largest army, would not launch a land invasion in the middle of Europe, as if that would happen. So Ukrainians, although they kept seeing reports of the Russian soldiers, as many as 100,000, we were all seeing pictures of this in, in Europe and in Australia and everywhere else. We were seeing the intelligence and the images, but the Ukrainians believe they wouldn't. But when they did invade, those first 48 hours or so, those first two or three days were very dramatic, were incredible. And I go into them person by person in the book, but they did surprise them. They were outgunned, they were, you know, out planned, but they did all sorts of things. For example, as some Ukrainians were retreating, they were painting over street signs or they were turning street signs in the opposite direction. Now, it may sound trite or silly, but their view was if the Russians do push in here in their tanks and their, their trucks, then they're going to be taking wrong turns and they won't know which way that town is or this town is. Even in the age of GPS and everything, they wanted to do everything they could, every absolutely small thing, to create chaos for the Russians and to begin the fight back.
- [34:43]
Andrew Muller
But did that strike you as entirely organic? Had there been much in the way of preparation, even at a low, quiet level from the government? The Ukrainian government was insisting up until the last minute there's no cause for alarm, no need to panic. We don't think this is going to.
- [35:01]
John Lyons
That's right, it was organic. I tell the story in the book of this small group, about five of them, young, smart Ukrainians who run an open sort of think tank, an intelligence, you know, gathering information, gathering organisation that provides information to the various ministries. Anyway, they Believe watching Russia, Watching Russia was calling for increased supplies of plasma. The Russian media was clearly getting ready for a big invasion. So this young group, they're all in their 20s, went out to a drink in Kiev the night before and basically sat at a table having a cocktail saying, this could be the last time we have a drink before the invasion. They had packed, ready to go bags because they were looking at the Russian media and Russian intelligence rather than just relying on what the Ukrainian government was saying. I tell the story of a corporate brand manager manager who had studied military history at university. He turned up to enlist the next day and the guy signing people in said, oh, you know, what do you do and what have you studied? He said, I studied military history at uni. And the guy said, fantastic, you can be a commander of a unit. And that guy went off to the front line as a commander this was. And the university lecturer headed straight to the front line with his iPad and did his lectures from the trenches at the front line so the students wouldn't be disrupted. It was the most remarkable and chaotic 72 hours.
- [36:30]
Andrew Muller
Did you find a particular difficulty or at least I guess, were you aware that you're trying to explain this war to a country and an audience who are a long way away? Was it important, do you think, to make those human connections to try and make this story play with an audience that was that far from where the conflict was happening?
- [36:49]
John Lyons
Yeah, that's a big point, Andrew, because we are a long way from the rest of the world in Australia, physically, the story. That's why whenever I cover wars, conflicts around the world, I try to make them concentrate on the people, the victims, the children and so forth. For example, there's one story in the book of a young guy, he's 23, and he thought, what can I do to help the Ukrainian, my people? So he got all of these cameras and began an organization called Beyond Blue Eyes and Behind Blue Eyes. And he would go, has gone around and given these cameras to all of these 10, 11, 12, 13 year olds because a lot of children in war zones particularly can't talk about it, they're so traumatised. He knew this, he knew the mental health problems. So what he did was he gave these cameras and once a month he goes around with his team. They sit with these kids In a circle, 10 or 12 of them, the children. And each child then talks about their favorite photographs, the photograph they're most proud of. And the one he mentioned, mentioned to me was a girl, 10 year old girl, whose hamsters had all died. The Russian army had come in, pushed her family and her community out of the town, taken over for some months, and then were forced out. But the hamsters, of course, had died. And so she couldn't talk to anybody about this trauma, about her pets. But when she took photos of where the hamsters had been and the sawdust in her grandfather's workshed, which she used to put at the bottom of the cage of the hamsters, it allowed her to, to start talking to these other children and these adults about war.
- [38:26]
Andrew Muller
And just finally, this isn't a spoiler, but there is a somewhat sobering moment towards the end of the book where, as you put it, Ukraine is slowly losing this war. Where do you take that thought? How do you see this actually ending?
- [38:40]
John Lyons
The key to it entirely, as is the key to other conflicts such as Gaza. At the moment, all roads lead to Donald Trump. And so what's fascinating is watching the politics. My last chapter is between looking at Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. And sadly, in my view, although Donald Trump promised he could end the war within 24 hours, in my assessment, Vladimir Putin is outplaying him. Vladimir Putin has seen off five or six presidents. I think he's contemptuous of Donald Trump. And every time they have a discussion on the phone, it's interesting, within hours, Vladimir Putin and the Russians order much bigger attacks on civilians in Ukraine. And so that got dynamic will be the key dynamic. Is Donald Trump prepared to stare down Vladimir Putin or is he afraid of his nuclear arsenal and other factors?
- [39:31]
Andrew Muller
That was John lyons, now the ABC's America's Editor. His new book is A Bunker in Kiev, the Astonishing Story of the People's Army Defying Putin. And that is all for this edition of the Daily. Thanks to our panelists Isabel Hilton and Jenny Mathis. The show was produced by Carlotta Rebello and research by Daniel Abroad Smith. Our sound engineer was Elliot Greenfield. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily returns tomorrow. Thanks for listening.