Welcome to this evening's public lecture, "Two Years On: How Russia's War on Ukraine Ends." My name is Brendan Taylor. And it's my absolute pleasure and privilege to introduce emeritus professor, Paul Dibb.

He has, of course, previously been the Deputy Secretary in the Australian Department of Defence, at the head of the Defence Intelligence organisation. And he was the author of the 1986 review of Australia's defence capabilities, often referred to as the Dibb Report. 

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming emeritus professor Paul Dibb to the podium. [APPLAUSE] 

As I was preparing for this, I learned the following about Russian defence spending. It is 10% of GDP, if you include the intelligence services. Ours is a bit over 2%. It's 30% of the budget, and it's just gone up by 50% from last year's defence budget.

And Putin has got the defence industries working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And paying accordingly. And wait for this, this is especially for defence minister Richard Marles, Putin last week in front of a gathering of defence industry said he'd instructed the Russian Ministry of Defence to pay the companies who are making weapons 80% in advance of their manufacture. 

Now, there's one to sort out speed of decision making, I would have thought. OK. We've just been discussing, how it is in Australia, have you noticed that this nasty war, which has been going on for two years, has fallen off the ABC National news, both TV and radio.

I was supposed to be talking to ABC National radio tomorrow morning at 8:30, they've cancelled it for some other priority. I'm not dismissing the Middle East and what's going on there, but you've seen how it's slipping off the priority list and people are getting a bit bored, which is unfortunate, because it's not boring. It's very dangerous. 

So as Russia enters its third year of this war against Ukraine, we need to ask, how will it end?

I'll examine the prospects for a military end to the war. And let me stress, I'm not a military person. And what are the realistic chances of a ceasefire or even an enduring peace?

I'll then examine what are the risks of this war extending further in Europe. And my view is there are real risks of that. Real risks. 

And finally, I ask the question, how can Russia be defeated?

There's an increasing view in this town by people with no background in Russia or the Soviet Union, let alone their weapons systems, and saying we, meaning the West, must see Russia defeated.

I want to discuss with you, and I'd welcome different views, how do you defeat a country with 1,500 strategic nuclear warheads and another 4,500 in various states of storage and reserve?

Most days I watch an American daily assessment of the war. It's called The Institute for the Study of War. It's fairly right wing, I've got to say to you. It produces tremendous overwhelming amounts of information, battlefield by battlefield, weapon by weapon. But on Saturday, the anniversary of this war, that daily report said the following to me, and I quote,

"The situation today is grave, but it is far from hopeless. Russian forces have gained the initiative across the theatre and are making gains." Now, for that organisation to admit that, it's quite revolutionary.

They are seriously, for obvious reasons, not just anti-Russian but very careful what they say about Ukraine. Also, over the weekend, from my social media sources, I find an American assessment that says, as we speak, Russia is setting conditions to conduct hybrid warfare operations in the Baltic states and Finland. Doesn't say they're going to war.

It's saying they're stating the conditions of. And you might also not know, in the independent country of Moldova, which is between Ukraine and Romania, there's a breakaway province which has occurred since 1991 in the disintegration of the Soviet Union called Transnistria, and there is word that is Putin's next objective to make that a separate state of Russia.

So there is a lot going on. 

Before I start, let me just recap with you, for those of you who did read the August 22 speech, what are Putin's excuses and explanations for going to this war? Because it's important, both as an academic and in my previous profession of intelligence officers,

you need to be able to get inside this person's mind. You don't agree with the person. And I certainly don't. I think he's a nasty piece of work. 

And his reasons are as follows.

First, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the most serious geopolitical catastrophe in modern history, he says. And we need to remember that the Soviet Union in the first year of Russia, the GDP in one year fell by 40%. Inflation was 1,900%. People's savings meant nothing. Russia lost half its population of 280 million. 140 million separated. And it lost 70% of its territory, which is most of Australia as a comparison. Certainly, a bigger chunk than Western Australia. 

He does not accept that there is a separate country called Ukraine, even though the then government under Yeltsin, in the famous meeting in the Belarusian woods, the leaders of Russia, Belarus, met and they decided that there would be separate countries. One of Yeltsin's advisors hauled him back and said, you haven't discussed with Ukraine the situation in Crimea. He said, that will be handled later in international legal discussions. Well, it hasn't been handled with international legal conditions.

Second, Putin believes there is no such country as Ukraine, even though his country under Yeltsin agreed there was, an independent country with independent boundaries.

In a piece he wrote a year and a half ago, whether he wrote it or it was ghosted, I don't know, he says, we are one country, one people, one language, one Russian Orthodox faith. 

Well, demonstrably, if that was ever true, which I don't think it was, it's now certainly not the case in Ukraine. You can imagine what people's attitudes are. But it tells you about with both the catastrophic disintegration of the former Soviet Union as a great power, the humiliation of Russia, and his view that he wants to rebuild it. 

Solzhenitsyn, not some left wing Communist before he died and the Russian Soviet Union had disintegrated, called for a new country which combined Russia, great Russians, Ukraine, little Russians, and Belarus, white Russians. A call for that before he died.

As for the rest, he said, who's interesting Kazakhstan, the Central Asian republics, or the Caucasian ones? They're not Russian. So there's complexities in this.

Third, Putin's view that NATO expansion to the borders of the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, is an act of military aggression. And look, many of you may have different views. I had the Russian ambassador here in Canberra, Moiseyev, say to me in 1991, as the economy was collapsing and inflation was rampant, Paul, you in the West need to have a Marshall Plan of economic aid. 

Because we are in a bad shape, and it's going to get worse. And if you're not careful, if you don't help us financially, you may end up with a Weimar Republic. Well, where are we now? 

Teetering on the edge of it, in my view. And there were people in the American administration, the George Bush Senior administration, he was a serious president, unlike some others we can think of, and his Secretary of Treasury said to George Bush in answer to a question, can you get a Marshall Plan together?

The Secretary of the Treasury, said to the president, No, Mr. President, I don't think we should be helping them at all. We should put them in the direction of being a third rate country economically, and with all that means militarily.

The catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union, no such country as Ukraine, NATO's expansion to the very borders, and Ukraine's ambition to be a member of NATO is seen by Putin as a first order strategic challenge. A spear aimed at the heart of Russia is the sort of language he uses. 

In Addition to those four main excuses, explanations, he has of late introduced a fifth one. 

You remember at the very beginning he talked about the nazification of Ukraine?

Whatever that meant. It had some truth in the Second World War, but certainly not since then. But now the new theme, which is going down much better with the Russian population, and 62% of a reasonably reliable opinion poll is saying that 62% of Russians believe there is a new strategic threat to Russia, Holy Mother Russia, from the West.

The West is seeking to destroy Russia. And Russia is now fighting for its, quote, "very survival", unquote. 62%. 

I might turn then to the issues of the war, and how it's going.

You'll notice there have been two phases of this war. At the very beginning, 24th of February, 2022, most of the pundits, and I was getting advice from colleagues, former colleagues, that there were 175,000 Russian troops on the very border. And then once I was told very discreetly that we detected the movement of blood banks and hospitals up to the border, that was good enough for me. 

And I went public and said he's about to do it. I since learned that a couple of weeks earlier in a classified briefing of the Congress, the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said exactly the same, in 72 hours they'll be in Kyiv. Game, set, and match.

And how could we get it so wrong? There's been an intelligence failure in the West.

It's happened before, by the way, on Allied intelligence assessments of the Soviet Union as being this military superpower with no weaknesses, when in fact, it had plenty of weaknesses.

The issue of what's going to happen in future, do you remember there was a talk of a massive Ukrainian offensive?

Well, it hasn't happened, has it? 

It has not happened. And that's not a criticism of Ukrainians. I think there was over expectation as usual from our American friends. They wanted to impose on the Ukrainians manoeuvre warfare. And unless you have air superiority and electronic warfare superiority, you're not going to do that. 

You've got to remember there's still the DNA in the Ukrainian military of their Russian heritage. The new Commander in Chief of the Ukrainian army was trained in the military in Russia. And he was born in Russia. One would be surprised if there aren't some issues there. 

So that huge manoeuvre to evict the Russians out of Ukraine has not occurred. Not that Putin has done well. From the very first day, the name of the suburb where the airport is outside of Kyiv, I've forgotten, but that's where it all started, when Ukrainians got hold of weapons systems, both military and civilians, and the Russians made no real impact at all. Including a particular special force that I've been watching for years, the 71st airborne guards’ division, the elite of the elite, who went into Afghanistan and killed the then Communist leadership. 

They put in another one. They went into Georgia in 2008. And they were dropped into Kyiv, and had to scuttle out. And this is one of the elite divisions. 

You can see that Putin's hanging on to Crimea. And with apologies to any people of Ukrainian descent here, 90% recurring of Russians will believe that Crimea is Russian.

I won't bore you with too much of the history, but at the time of Catherine the Great and her great lover, Potemkin, she said to him, my predecessor Peter the Great has just defeated the most powerful country in the North of Europe, Sweden. And we've got access to the Baltic. We now need to go to the Black Sea. Well, the then Crimea at that time, in the late 1700s, was occupied by guess whom? Muslim Turks. And there were three major battles. All of which Potemkin won. 

And he had a bit of a classical Greek background. So he created the following cities. And listen to them. You will know them. Mariupol, Kherson, Odessa, Mykolaiv. 

And Catherine the Great said to him, this is new Russia, Novorossiya. Just cross the border.

And that's how the word Ukraine was derived. And there's a debate about this. Crimea, beyond the border. And it was very lightly populated, black Earth, rich soil, agricultural, great potential. Breadbasket of the Soviet Union. It should have been. 

I don't see him giving up Crimea under any conditions. When the little brown men and women with no badges of rank went in 2014, you recall, there were huge crowds, organised by Putin's people, in the main cities in Russia chanting, Crimea is ours. 

It remains to be seen if Russia can now turn the military tables and transition to a victory of sorts over the Ukrainian forces. My personal view as a non-military person is, I don't think there's any victory in sight either side. I just don't see that. It is almost classic first world war now, isn't it? What is it? Trenches. Trench warfare. Anti-tank devices. Huge minefields.

And yet, the equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gerasimov, who is the senior military person to this day in war time Russia, wrote a piece before all this happened. Just a few years before he said, in future, there will be no such conventional conflict of armies. It will all be done remotely with drones and overhead intelligence. And there'll be no face to face battle. Well, how wrong can you get it? How wrong can you get it? 

One of our Australian commentators, Mick Ryan, who was a Major General until relatively recently in the ADF, has written a piece in the American Journal of Foreign Affairs, and he's not pro-Russian. 

It's called, the article, Russia's Adaptation Advantage. And he's saying that the Russians really got caught flat footed, and it was a dismal defeat in those early months. But now, with this trench warfare, and it's more than just trench warfare, they've adapted.

And at present, we have a stalemate. And it may well exist for quite a significant time.

He goes on to say, Mick Ryan, that if Russia's strategic adaptation continues to persist without an appropriate Western response, meaning the $60 billion of American military aid that's clogged up in Washington, our great and powerful ally, without an appropriate Western response, he says, quote, "the worst that can happen in this war is not a stalemate. It is a Ukrainian defeat." 

By the way, in that article he does not go on to look at--not only from his view defeat is still a possible outcome for Ukraine, but he does not address what the implications are of a Russian victory for the future strategic stability of Europe, which I'll turn to shortly.

But before I do, moving on to the military situation. 

You've heard mutterings in the press around the world that there's a possibility for a ceasefire. Negotiations aimed at an enduring peace. Zelenskyy's tried that on with a bunch of developing countries and others, but no Russians present.

There been some rumours recently that Putin may be interested in a ceasefire and territorial negotiations. I think that is a KGB trap. He is not interested in negotiations. He's not interested in a ceasefire. He thinks time is on his side, He's got a population of 140 million. Ukraine is significantly less than 40. It used to be 40, about 6 million people have scooted. 

There's been some speculation in the UK Financial Times, an honourable newspaper of late, that Ukraine might have to bear the bitter price of a permanent peace in which Russia retains part or all of its occupied territories. In other words, Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and so on. But I would observe that that would turn Ukraine into a weak, truncated state, nominally independent, but at Moscow's mercy. 

I just don't see it happening.

On the 22nd of January 2024, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Russia, quote, "has always been ready for negotiations." Unquote. But he went on to make it perfectly clear that, quote, "Russia is only interested in negotiations that result in the removal of the current Ukrainian government from power." Close quote. 

Putin himself consistently refused to recognise there's any such separate country.

And he refuses to recognise that he will be in negotiations with Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy doesn't exist. 

I think half Putin's problem is, unlike in the old Soviet days, he doesn't have a Politburo, a ministry, who you will recall voted Khrushchev out of power. There is no such Politburo. No such group of ministers. They're just his acolytes, his sidekicks, who he ridicules in public.

Like 5:00 in the morning of the invasion, he said to the Chief of Intelligence, Naryshkin, stop

stuttering and going on. Say something I can understand. On international TV. This bloke is the tsar of all the Russia's like nothing we've seen. Other than Stalin. 

The said Sergei Naryshkin, the Director of SVR, the Russian's foreign Intelligence Agency, said on the 28th of January, quote, "The Kremlin is not interested in any settlement short of the complete destruction and eradication of the Ukrainian state." 

I don't see Putin under any circumstances, and I could be wrong, not for the first time, of him handing back Crimea to the Ukrainians.

The only way I can see and perhaps conceding to return the 18% of Ukraine's territory that Russia currently occupies is a decisive Russian defeat on the battlefield. Whatever does that mean? 

Even then my view is that rather than concede victory to Ukraine, Putin is more likely to perhaps broaden the war to a war in Europe against Russia's neighbours, such as Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Just remember the Baltic republics, now independent countries, vibrant democracies, I have no criticism, were part of the Soviet Union.

And Poland, as Medvedev, the former prime minister and president sidekick, has recently said, Poland is traditional enemy of ours. And he goes back to what Putin calls the Time of Troubles.

You may not believe what I'm about to tell you on Australian historical standards, but every Russian secondary school educated person knows what the Time of Troubles is.

Smutna Vremena, 1606, for 10 years there was a disintegration between the end of one tsarist dynasty, the Rurikids and Ivan the Terrible, and the takeover by the Romanovs for 300 years. And there was a succession of short-term tsars.

The nobility couldn't really agree. And it meant that because of instability at the very top,

in the Kremlin, foreign states took advantage of a weak and distracted Russia.

This is Putin's point. Sweden invaded the medieval city of Novgorod, where elements of democracy amongst voting nobility first started. More importantly, the Poles militarily occupied the Kremlin.

Let me repeat that. The Poles militarily occupied the Kremlin. And said to the nobility, we've got a new tsar for you. This new tsar is known in the history as the False Dmitry. Also told the Kremlin, he's Russian. He speaks Russian. And he's Orthodox. The nobility rapidly found out his Russian was heavily accented Polish. Even worse he was Roman Catholic. The Orthodox Church does not get on with the Catholic Church. 

And so they chopped him up into pieces while he's still alive, stuffed his remains down a couple of cannons in the red square, and shot his remains in the general direction of Warsaw.

Look, I'm sorry to bore you with something that's 400 years old. But if you think Russians don't remember this, they do. And Putin plays this like a violin. 

I have this vision, it's in a particular room inside that glorious Kremlin, I've only seen a few rooms, it's called the faceted chamber. Dates from the medieval times. That's where Ivan the Terrible murdered his son. And Putin's going into all this history-- you saw in that recent interview with that extreme right wing American TV journalist, who asked Putin a question.

30 minutes later, Putin's going on about the Time of Troubles. 

On the 11th of this month, the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, warned that Europe needed to, and I quote, "arm itself for a possible decades long confrontation." Unquote-- with Russia. 

About the same time, the Defence Minister of Denmark warned that, open quote, "It cannot be ruled out that within three to five years Russia will test the strength of Article V of NATO solidarity." Close quote. 

This brings me to the subject of, what are the risks of this war extending further into neighbouring NATO countries? 

I am not, underlined, arguing here that Putin would casually enter in such into such a high-risk military conflict. But as I have argued at the beginning of this essay, Putin will simply not accept the existence of a separate nation state called Ukraine under any circumstances, on its borders and becoming a full member of the EU and NATO.

One possibility we might have to face up to is that he might decide to use tactical nuclear weapons.

He's got about 2,000 landmines, torpedoes, aerial stuff. The Americans have virtually got none.

Both he and Kremlin leaders such as former prime minister Medvedev, as well as international security advisor of a Russian contact of mine, Sergey Karaganov, are increasingly and repeatedly being raucous about threatened use of nuclear weapons. Now, a lot of this is for effect. It's for threatening. 

But the current director of CIA, who was the man who said you need to get inside Putin's mind, before he became director, he was ambassador in Moscow, and a good one, and he says that you cannot dismiss the possibility that Russia might go nuclear. He doesn't say it as crudely as that.

I've mentioned Poland and Ukraine being traditionally a historic enemy. And it's been talked about as such in recent months. There's been recent threats to the Baltic republics about them forcing some of their Russian populations to undergo a local language test if they are to continue to be Russian citizens.

They are in what Putin calls the near abroad, the former Soviet Union. And he's using that like a violin domestically. 

On the other side of my argument, Putin has not yet attacked NATO countries such as Poland and Germany who continue to facilitate very sophisticated advanced weapons from Europe and the United States through to the Ukraine. I don't exclude him doing that.

My bottom line is that if push ever comes to shove, Russia will not accept a battlefield defeat in Ukraine. That's just my view.

And the fact is that if push ever does come to shove, escalation to a full-scale war with Europe cannot be casually dismissed. 

I've quoted to you the current director of the CIA. "It would be foolish to dismiss escalatory nuclear risks entirely." Unquote. 

But people like the CIA director seem to casually pass over that by describing "Putin's war as a strategic failure, which has exposed Russia's military weaknesses." But this may result in itself in Putin escalating to the unthinkable. 

That brings me to the question of if the aim of the US and its NATO allies is to "defeat",

Russia, how will this be achieved, as I've said, against a country with strategic nuclear warheads?

And what would a defeated Russia look like? Would it be a Weimar Germany?

Remember what happened to Germany after the Treaty of Versailles and Germany was for what were thought to be good and moral reasons by the French the Brits and the Americans forced into huge financial, retributions, costs. And were not allowed more than a very small number of people in their military.

We all know what happened after the Treaty of Versailles 1919. 1933, Hitler's in power. '39, we're at war. 

Would it be a Weimar Germany looking for revenge? Make no mistake about the unique sense of Russians about their Russianness. The problem is they don't know where Russia begins and ends. Because unlike us surrounded by water, it begins and ends wherever you think it should or might. 

I think these imponderables by themselves should leave us deeply concerned. And we need to pay more attention to it, unlike our newspapers.

But can we conceive of other outcomes under a new Russian leadership? If Putin were overthrown? Well, Prigozhin denies that he was seeking to overthrow Putin. But you saw how angry Putin was, accused Prigozhin of treason. Then hauled Prigozhin a few days later with his second in commands to talk. Then Prigozhin gets into his private aeroplane, and all of a sudden, it explodes. 

My own view is that if there was any such new Russian leadership it would be more likely to be Putin mark two, God bless us, than some form of Western Democrat with all that means for a peaceful outcome.

There are people in this town, no names, no pack deal, who believe we, meaning the West,

because we're not making much contribution, we need to see Russia defeated. We need to see Putin killed. And then, I presume, a Navalny mark two comes in and introduces Russia to democracy. For the first time since the very early months of the end of the Soviet Union and the early stages of the Russian Civil War. 

There is not going to be a democracy foreseeably in my view. There might never be one. 

What does all this mean for Australia?

Ukraine in itself and the challenge to the International rules based order, whether you believe in it or not--I do-- to the sacred borders of an internationally recognised state recognised by the United Nations and Russia itself, amongst others, called Ukraine is not to be sneered at. I am not saying, by the way, that Ukraine, I've never been there.

When I used to go to the Soviet Union as a declared intelligence officer and an undeclared one, I used to think that this place is really impossible to understand.

Where does it begin and end? Do they see themselves as Europeans? No.

A lot of my friends in Russia do. But a lot increasingly now are dismissing Europe.

Why? 64% believe that Europe is wanting to dismantle Russia. And they're calling themselves Eurasians. 

I mean, it's an even more silly phrase than the Indo Pacific, in my view. Eurasians, what does that mean? 

Well, it means obviously China. And who's the dominant power there?

Well, it's clear. It's a clear move to the East.  We should not make the mistake, if the balloon does go up, we have a small, pathetically small, defence force. 60,000. About half a decent crowd at an AFL grand final in Melbourne.

We've always had about six battalions, about 11 surface ships, about six submarines, and about 100 combat aircraft.

Yes, they're all more modern and more capable, but that's where we're about we are.

If the balloon goes up in Ukraine, that's for NATO. That's what Article V is about. We need to be getting ready for, and I'll come to this, if China invades, a dramatically Democratic country. 

Putin's view of Ukraine is gross and stupid. But although it's had six changes of leadership since it became an independent state, it has been a corrupt, violent country. Recently, Zelenskyy sacked all the heads of military recruitment in Ukraine, 16 of them, for corruption. 

He recently has put on trial the chief judge of the Supreme Court for guess what? Corruption. They're making progress. Let me not be just too critical. They're making progress. 

But the democracy, you go to Taiwan-- I've been there four times, met two presidents. The democracy-- this is a vivid democracy, changes of government, no fixing the ballot boxes, a proper judiciary. And so on. That should be our focus. 

Not that it would be trivial either.

Secondly, it is crucial and the world is watching, is the United States going to weaken over Ukraine? Are they going to use the excuse of the $60 billion held up in the Congress?

And in any case, if, and it's not just to be dismissed, we get a second Trump, he might do a deal with his friend authoritarian mate Putin. And that would be the end of the game for nearly 50 million Ukrainians. Its importance for the US alliance. The world is watching. 

Finally, there's the issue of whether the weaknesses of Russia's military performance have had any impact at all on the attitude of China's President Xi Jinping towards going to war with Taiwan.

I would hope that Xi Jinping would understand what a poor military performance his Russian friend for life President Putin has shown to the world. Xi needs to understand that some of the inherent weaknesses in the Russian military establishment are also deeply reflected in the DNA of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, given their common origins. 

These weaknesses include the distrust by authoritarian leaders in both Russia and China of delegated tactical battlefield decisions to NCOs. Because they don't have NCOs. That's how much they don't trust battlefield decisions. 

The corruption of both countries of their logistics supply and their defence industry, in both Russia, and mark my words, in China. Invading Taiwan across the 200 kilometres or so of the Straits of Taiwan is an infinitely greater military challenge than walking across Ukraine's borders with Russia. Infinitely greater challenge.

Authoritarian leaderships in both China and Russia are typified by deep seated despotism and pervasive corruption that sets the fighting strength of their armed forces. 

Most recently, President Xi has sacked his foreign minister, his defence minister, and eight senior generals, including in the strategic nuclear rocket forces. In what? The strategic nuclear rocket forces. For what? Corruption. 

Moreover, it's more than 44 years now since China has absolutely used military power. I remember as an intelligence officer, December '79, we watched four Chinese divisions, we had the call signs, come across the North Vietnamese border and teach a Communist Vietnam a lesson, which he failed at.

China has no experience of combat. It's all right having pretty little exercises. That is not the same. Xi, in my view, needs to consider the clear risk in any serious military conflict between America and China over Taiwan. There is also, and I'm sorry to harp on this, a clear and present danger of devastating escalation to the use of nuclear weapons. Those in this town who say that will never happen and America will quit beforehand, well, if that's the case, that's not an America we want to be an ally with. 

Thank you.

Thanks so much for that, Paul. It's a lot of food for thought and that, but you've also been characteristically disciplined and left us about 15 minutes for questions. 

I was wondering if negotiations ever do happen, would the Ukrainian people accept that?

Would Zelenskyy have to resign if the feeling of outrage from the Ukrainian people is enough?

I've never been there. I'm not sure, under current conditions, I particularly want to. And I'm one of the 120 critics of Russia who is permanently banned forever visiting Russia again. 

Zelenskyy's popularity, as you know, is very high. You've got to take your hat off-- from a person who was a comedian in a show, acting to be a president, to actually get elected. And the seriousness with which he handles high level international meetings, at the highest levels, and deliberately wears a khaki t-shirt and trousers.

Not many others would get away with that in the White House or elsewhere. And he is very popular. But so is the now departed Senior General Zaluzhnyi.

Don't tell me there aren't Russian agents deep inside Ukraine. I think the answer to your question is we're in a no-go situation. It's not just the Russian side, but for reasons I understand and accept, the Ukrainian side. 

And that then leaves us with either escalating military stuff with all the dangers I've outlined, or we just live permanently with a long, lingering, conventional conflict. You saw this morning Zelenskyy announced there have been 31,000 Ukrainians soldiers killed.

He will not give the numbers wounded because that, as he says, would reveal the state of the population demography to the Russians. The latest British intelligence estimate that I've seen for the Russians is about 88,000 dead and a total dead and wounded over two years of 300,000.

While I think about it, one important thing I forgot to say to you if you'll forgive me.

Compare Putin's strutting around at the most important holiday in Russia is the patriotic Second World War defeat of Nazi Germany, in which the Russians lost 27 million dead. 13 million of whom were German.

So here, we are precisely at year two of this war in Ukraine. At year two in the Soviet Union's war against Germany, it had reoccupied the whole Eastern part of Ukraine, including Kyiv, Kharkiv and down the Dnieper River to Kherson. Two years and six months, the Battle of Stalingrad occurred. 

And that was the beginning of the end for the German army.

Surely, Putin, if he compares where he is now, and of course he can't be exact. He's not using total mobilisation like Stalin did. But there he stands measured. A draw after two years with a country that in his own words is a pathetic nonentity.

Right in the centre of Europe you have Hungary as perhaps the most maverick member, both of the European Union and of NATO.

What do you think Putin would now most want from Viktor Orban?

Look, again, I've never been-- I never went to anywhere in Eastern Europe, again, for the reasons you would understand. The only place you went to was Moscow. And he is clearly a problem for the EU and NATO.

He's significantly right wing. And there are some other worrying right wing elements occurring. Have you noticed Germany? Is it called the Alternative for Germany--

Yeah. --the right-wing organisation? Well, even the sort of faint hint that there's now a significant group of Germany voting right wing is a terrible nightmare.

I think on the good side-I thought NATO would just go to pieces when the mighty Red Army went in, in 72 hours, sorted out Kyiv, put in a puppet government, game, set, and match. Ukraine, welcome back to the Soviet Union.

NATO has been remarkable. I mean, they've got some backbone. They are actually, as a total expenditure, both military and economic, marginally outspending America. But when you come to the military kit, there is no comparison. And as other people in this audience will tell you, that's because American military kit is, by and large, so superior to most of the European stuff.

I think that issue that you've raised, it remains to be seen how NATO would stand together if-- and I hope I'm wrong--Putin decides to have a crack at Poland or the Baltic republics.

The Baltic countries are small countries. From the nearest NATO border in Estonia to Saint

Petersburg is Canberra to Cooma. Now, if you're a defence planner, it would really focus you, wouldn't it? Canberra to Cooma, that's what happens when you share land borders. 

I would like to ask following the current affairs with Russia taking over the presidency of BRICS, and BRICS itself expanding over Asia and more new superpowers, how do you see it changing the dynamics of the war itself?

How will it change the dynamics?

Look, I'm not sure that BRICS amounts to much, quite frankly. It is one that Russia increasingly seems to have influence over. 

For 11 years on behalf of Foreign Affairs, I was a member of the ASEAN Regional Forum 26 countries on a particular issue called preventive diplomacy. It was a total, utter waste of my time. 

The ASEAN countries-- I said, have you ever negotiated with them. They can't agree on the time of day. I'm not saying the BRICS is as bad as that.

The Shanghai Cooperation organisation, which was conjured up by China and Russia, has some utility. But increasingly, Putin is looking like the supplicant to Xi Jinping, isn't he-- the supplicant? That's where the economic power is.

They can handle Russia's oil and pay whatever price. And they can even carefully send some military equipment. We've noticed Xi Jinping has been very careful about not endorsing Russia's war on Ukraine.

I'm Polish and Ukrainian. I'm listening with great interest to what you are saying. And what I understand is that there is no hope. Putin has quite a high likelihood of attacking everybody around Ukraine, that would be the Nordic states and so on.

But you also agree that if Ukraine got weakened, then it would really encourage him to keep going?

Yeah. And if he would not negotiate with Zelenskyy, then obviously, once Russia can dictate to Ukraine who the president can be, that's not the state. That's not the independent state. That's game, set, and match. Is there anything that can go right in this case?

Look let me stress, I'm not an expert. I haven't been to Ukraine. And Putin is stupid.

And you would know this infinitely better than me to dismiss Ukrainian language, history, culture. In as late as the 19th century, there were great Ukrainian poets and literature people, as I recall it, not that I've read any. I read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and all that stuff.

And the Russians deliberately crushed that in Ukraine.

So, it's got a proud history of its own. I don't speak the language. But obviously, the Ukrainians believe it's significantly different. It is different.

And as you well know, the Uniate Orthodox faith is very different from the Russian Orthodox. Correct me if I'm wrong. The Uniate Orthodox faith is Orthodox in the procedures

and the language. But it looks to its leadership to the Pope in Rome. And of course, for the Russians, that is a no-go area. 

You've got a very good ambassador here. He's working hard on second hand helicopters, bushrangers, Hawkeye vehicles, and so on. But I think it's hard for him to understand.

I've tried to tell him this. We have a small defence industry. Most of it is foreign owned and some very good companies. But when you look at the Australian owned ones and even the foreign owned ones, our actual manufacturing capability is very small. 

We don't have the European background. And the Europeans are struggling. Germany is promising 1 million 150mm artillery shells. And it's recently admitted it hasn't even started yet. And it may not get there.

I do hope your country of birth is successful because the opposite is really serious for world peace. 

I think we've got time for one more question.

Thank you, sir. I have a question about your thoughts for the lessons of Australia's defence industry reflecting the war in Ukraine. As we have seen, the war in Ukraine has really impacted the Western and even American defence industry in trying to fulfill the weapons and ammunition needs for Ukraine.

And now that the outer region is also facing the threat from China, what do you think that Australia's defence industrial policy should be in preparing for the defence of the region?

It's a long time since I've been in harness in defence, but I keep reasonably up to date. A primary focus of strategic concern, as the defence strategic review has recently said-- is the defence of Australia. It's a continent. We're the only country with a continent unto ourselves. Sparsely populated, it includes the Northeast Indian Ocean approaches, including Cocos Keeling Islands, where we need to build longer airstrips for the P-8s. It includes the whole of Southeast Asia, both Continental and Maritime. 

In other words, including places like Vietnam and the whole of the South China Sea, with all that that implies. And it includes the whole of the South Pacific, certainly far out as Fiji. And we often forget-- not that it's primarily military-- but we have claims to the Southern Ocean parts of Antarctica. 

For a country of 28 million people, that's more than enough if things start to go wrong. 

And it's a common statement now--that we're now in a much more difficult, challenging,

and uncertain strategic situation than when I was working 30 years ago reviewing Australia's defence policy. 30 years ago, we knew that short of nuclear war, there were very few countries that could seriously damage us. 

The following countries in Asia were not capable of building the massive conventional forces to attack us-- Japan, China, India. They just didn't have the capability. And we would see from intelligence sources, of which we have plenty and seriously good ones, several years for them to build up the unique fingerprint of a long-range amphibious assault force, which you would meet as they came further and further south with their vulnerable logistics resupply with strike. 

That has all changed. I worried a bit about an Indonesia going bad on us, which it had under Sukarno, when it was armed to the teeth by Soviet jet fighters that were better than ours, Soviet bombers that were better than ours, and Soviet submarines that were better than ours. That's why we bought the F-111s strike aircraft. And that's why we bought the Oberon submarines.

The situation now is seriously more uncertain than that. The problem I see is there's something badly going wrong in my former department in relations between the minister and the bureaucrats. It is the first time we've had it splattered across the front pages of the newspapers. Kim Beazley could have done that with me, given that, for a year, the then Secretary and Chief of Defence Force, the two most senior subadvisors, couldn't agree on the time of day about force structure priorities for the defence of Australia.

He didn't. He gave them to me. And we never mentioned them in our report. How it has got to this situation, and talks of defence not reaching excellence, is deeply disturbing. The issue of long-range strike is a contentious one. My personal view is we need long range strike missiles with ranges in excess of 2,000 kilometres so we could hold off a potential threatening force at distance.

I see we're putting in some orders for those, and there's talk about some manufactured.

But it certainly won't be at that level. It takes the Department of Defence now three years,

from the hint of a decision about buying something, to actually come to a contract. I'm not saying we should have some corrupt acquisition system. You need checks and balances, but I think it's all gone far too far.

And in the end, we're playing the violin while Rome burns.

And it is China, frankly. 

Well, thank you all so much for coming along this evening.