Hello, today's newscast will have a bit of a global feel because the G20 summit is taking place in Brazil and we'll be chatting to some of the friends of the podcast who are there and it's taking place against a backdrop of lots of things happening in the world, particularly developments in the Russian-Ukraine war. But we're going to start off with a matter that couldn't be any more close to home.
It is the latest edition of the Newscast trademark opening titles, which are more of an evolution rather than a revolution. But I'll let you be the judge of that as we get ready for this episode of Newscast. Newscast. Newscast from the BBC. I like Landscape. I don't think I'm being rude. Japping. Unemployed people who are overweight. That is not the agenda. It's the sun police working overtime. The Star is born. He land.
So hurt that America let this happen. Actually, I think we need a British Trump. Take me down to Downey Street. Let's go have a tour. Blimey. Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio. Although mentally, I am on Copa Cabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, because that is where the G20 summit has got underway. That's the meeting of the leaders of the 20 largest economies, although not all of them have gone, for example, Vladimir Putin.
and there's a few extra people going as well for the talks around the big, big table. Now, we're going to talk about a few issues today because there's been some developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, specifically reports from quite credible sources that President Joe Biden has finally, after weeks and weeks and weeks of thinking about it, authorized the use of these American-made missiles called ATAKAMS,
for Ukraine to fire into Russian territory. That has been a kind of diplomatic priority of the UK as well to make him make that decision. But there's also a little twist in the tail because there's a British weapon system called Storm Shadow, which whether that can be used still seems a little bit up in the air. And then Keir Starmer
on yet another foreign trip has had a big high profile meeting with Xi Jinping, the president of China, which is something that British prime ministers have actually not been that keen to do in the last few years. So lots and lots of significant things happening, as you would expect, a gathering of lots and lots of significant people. So let's gather together some friends of the podcast who are in Brazil for this summit, but because it's a summit and it's chaotic and the comms aren't great, that is a lot easier said than done. So let's see who picks up the phone.
When I say James Landale, diplomatic correspondent, where are you? I am in Rio de Janeiro. I'm inside the security bubble. It can be quite a long time to get in. The Wi-Fi is not great. It's the air conditioning into missions. They're an awful lot of journalists. And the food is distinctly average. So I would say the mood is quite flat inside the summit. As summits go. OK, I was jealous until now. And then Vicki, where are you, Vicki Young?
Okay, so I am sitting on the rooftop of a hotel overlooking Copa Cabana Beach on the other side of Rio from James and the weather is great and the food's okay too. Oh my god, a tale of two summits. Could not be more different. Anyway, put your caperina down Vicki and concentrate on doing his cast, please.
James, is this a bit of a weird meeting because actually there's a huge massive thing about to happen on the international stage in January, which is Donald Trump going back to the White House. Is everyone in a bit of a sort of pre-Trump holding pattern at the moment? Yeah, I think they are. And they're trying to work out what to do because they've spent so long kind of pretending that it's not going to happen.
in recent months, if you sit before the election, if you said to world leaders and foreign ministers, what are you doing preparing for the possibility of Trump? They said, oh, we can't possibly do it, talk about that in public, because that might offend the current administration. But now, so a lawful lot of leaders are sort of lifting their heads out of the sand. And there's quite a lot of people wandering around with it. That sort of slightly start of scratching their heads of what exactly do they do, because they don't know what's coming down the line. So they're having to work at work on it. So for example, here,
You've got a summit that is supposed to be talking about things like tackling hunger and poverty, talking about boosting climate finance. There's a big agenda here that many countries around the world are really interesting, which is reforming the way international bodies work, and are they representing the world as it is today?
And yet, again, that agenda has been knocked off as they, A, they have to deal with the story of the day, which is Ukraine, but also this agenda of what do we do about Donald Trump? So there's a lot of stuff that you could talk about now that will be completely pointless.
depending on what Mr Trump does in a few months time. Yeah, because there's lots of different interpretations of various pledges he's made about the world on the campaign trail. And James, the current sitting President Joe Biden, normally at this point, would be considered a lame dark with only a few weeks left and office can't really do anything.
But he's done something pretty decisive. Well, okay, it's decisive now that he's done it. He's taken a long time to make the decision, but he's authorized the use of these long-range American missiles by Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory. What's the significance of that?
Well, the significance is that this is something the Ukrainians have been asking for for a long time because they feel as if they're fighting with one arm behind their back. There's a lot of Ukrainians with people out there saying, you know, better late than never, but it is still pretty late because, you know, there's a long term, not much time to go before Donald Trump comes to power. And the expectation is that he will force the pace trying to get some kind of quick political settlement.
What though it means in practical terms is that it means that Ukraine can better defend that area of Russia and the Kursk region, that it has seized where it has seized territory. It's been slowly but surely losing some of that territory. If it is able to use these American missiles deeper into Russia itself, then it will be able to defend itself.
in a better way than it can at the moment. But all the experts say this is not some sort of massive game changer or silver bullet that will transform the ultimate dynamic of the conflict. And Vicki, you were on the Prime Minister's plane crossing the Atlantic to Brazil while this was all unfolding this US decision on Sunday evening.
Yeah and to be honest it was a logistically a little bit irritating because when we do these trips the Prime Minister speaks to us and he comes and does a what's called a huddle and we chat for about 15-20 minutes so you know he was talking about his priorities which he said for this summit was a shore up support for Ukraine saying that people need to go further and faster in their help and
making the point that tomorrow will be a thousand days since the conflict started and how much sacrifice the Ukrainian people have made so far and just saying that Putin can't be allowed to win, we've got to do more. And then we landed for a refuel in Cape Verde and
Then as we got back on the plane and took off, suddenly all this started breaking that maybe Joe Biden had given permission, certainly for those American missiles. So really everything that Keith Starmer had previously told us was slightly out of date. So we try to say to them, OK, can you react now to what we're hearing? And they just won't go there. I mean, they just say it's not been confirmed. Nothing's been announced. And we don't comment on leaks.
So didn't really get any reaction and then today has been well the similar the Prime Minister has been asked in the broadcast pool about the same sort of issues and he just says look I'm not going to talk about any operational details and really what we're asking is
In principle, you know, in principle, are you in favour of this? Because although the understanding is that he has been pushing to this behind scenes, when you look at public comments being made by the government, it's not, they're being very guarded about what they've said about all of this. So, look, we're going to have to wait and see whether anything changes over the next day. But as we stand, there's rumours that Joe Biden doesn't want the British manufactured missiles, doesn't want to get permission for those, but, you know, we just, we're not getting an answer out of Downing Street.
Yeah, so that's the British missile system called Storm Shadow, which doesn't go quite as long a distance as these American attack comes. But you can hear Keir Starmer being asked by Beth Rigby from Sky, who was interviewing him on behalf of all broadcasters about the American system and the British system. And you can hear Keir Starmer basically stonewalling Beth's questions. You have been asking for the use of long range missiles for months.
President Biden is now sanctioning the use of long-range cruise missiles, US ones. He hasn't yet sanctioned the use of storm shadow missiles for the UK. There's reports he is blocking this. It must be really frustrating you.
I'm at the G20 with one message, which is that we must double down on our support for Ukraine. Tomorrow is day 1,000 of the conflict. That's 1,000 days of aggression from Russia and 1,000 days of sacrifice from Ukraine. So that is my clear message here. It's number one on my agenda. Obviously, I'm not going to get into operational details because the only winner if we were to do that is Putin, and I'm not prepared to do that.
So James, what's your understanding about what's going on here? Because I remember Starmark going to Washington to sit down with President Biden with his sole intention of convincing him to allow these American missiles to be used. But now we're in a situation where Keir Starmark doesn't want to appear to take any credit for that, but is being asked about why Joe Biden is not allowing the UK to give the similar permission about British missiles.
Essentially what this is, is a confluence of different stories, different cultures and attitudes to military reporting. Because if you think about it, because the Americans haven't officially confirmed on the record, definitively, that they are going to allow the use of the attack.
That means the British system feels that it can't comment. Then you've got the fact that the military themselves hate having to talk about operational issues. Then you've got the third point, which was that if you talk to insiders about this, they say that there's an audience of one here and his name is Vladimir Putin, and that this is not a policy that needs to be announced.
All that you need is to rush in forces to wake up one day and suddenly discover that they are vulnerable to attack in a way they were not before. In other words, this is not a policy that has to come with a press release and an announcement in Parliament on anything like that. It's just something that needs to be done. And I think what you've got is a little confluence of that going on.
Precisely where the Americans are on British use, the thing you ought to remember is that the reason this has been resisted by the Americans for many, many months now, particularly because Joe Biden and his national security advisor are very, very concerned about this war escalating.
They have always been the biggest drags on any kind of, let's give the Ukrainians a new tank or a new plane or a new armored, whatever. The Americans, particularly the president, has been worried about getting in any way the US and NATO involved in a direct conflict with Russia. And it's possible that, therefore, that the Americans have said, well, we'll allow a little bit of limited use of these attack American missiles only in the cursed region.
Because if they start saying what the British can use theirs as well, then potentially that gets a bit wider. There's also the technical issue, which is this. A lot of these missiles require British and American triggers on button, fingers on buttons, to actually make them work. And that therefore the question is what sort of American and British military hardware
military kit is needed for these things to operate safely. And again, there will be concerns there about actual boots on the ground getting caught up in the conflict. So, you know, there's there's quite a lot of murkiness about this. And that's why one of the reasons why there's a degree of lack of clarity.
And James mentioned the audience of one there, Vladimir Putin sitting in the Kremlin. Earlier on, I was chatting to our man in Moscow, Steve Rosenberg, the BBC's Russia editor, to get a sense from him how Vladimir Putin might be interpreting this latest step.
Hello, Adam. So what's the reaction there to this latest news? Pretty angry, I have to say. The Kremlin didn't say anything on Sunday, but today a Kremlin spokesman said that Joe Biden's decision was reckless. He said it was dangerous. He talked about a new spiral of tension. Pretty negative. And that's because, you know, for months,
Moscow has been spelling it out, sending a message, a very clear message to Europe and to the United States. You know, just don't do this. Don't remove your restrictions on the use of your longer-range missiles. Don't let Ukraine strike Russian territory with these missiles. So the fact that Joe Biden, in the dying days of his administration, has decided to lift these restrictions, you know, Moscow is not amused.
And is this a sort of different level of not amused than we've heard previously when other weapon systems kind of have been used to up the ante? I think so. I mean, you know, I remember going back to June, Vladimir Putin set out this red line.
He said then that if Europe and America gave permission to Ukraine to use these long-range missiles against Russian territory, basically Russia would see that as NATO countries being involved in a war with Russia. He spelled it out again in September, much the same way.
The question is what exactly is he going to do? How will he react? We don't know for sure. He has hinted in the past that one way he could react is by arming Western adversaries to target Western targets. It's possible that that could happen.
But he also knows that in a couple of months' time, Donald Trump is coming back to the White House. Donald Trump, an American president who has said quite nice things about Vladimir Putin, has praised him as being a smart president, clearly admires to a large extent Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, the US leader who has spoken quite critically about
continuing military assistance to Ukraine. Putin knows that soon Donald Trump will be in the White House. And one Russian paper today suggested that once Trump does get his feet under the table, he could reverse, quote, Joe Biden's decision on the long-range missiles.
Steve, we'll look at the US presidency angle in a second. But just to go back to what you said about this idea of Russia arming Western adversaries, who are sort of Russia's allies in that space that they could do that with?
A few weeks ago, I sat down for an interview with Alexander Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, and he brought up this subject and he used as an example the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. He said, be very careful with this question of long-range missiles. He said, what would happen if
If the Houthis came along to Vladimir Putin, he said, and asked for missiles, missile systems that could be used to target aircraft carriers, he said, as an example. So he seemed to confirm that this idea was on the Kremlin's radar as one way of reacting
to Europe or America deciding to remove restrictions on the use of these long-range missiles. Now, we haven't heard anything like that in the last couple of days from Vladimir Putin, but his press secretary today did refer everybody back to his comments back in June.
And that's when Vladimir Putin, as he sat down with sort of media chiefs, came up with this idea of arming Western adversaries. And Steve, a lot of the speculation around these long-range missiles is that they would be used to strike Russian targets in the Kursk region of Russia, which is that bit of territory that was seized and held by Ukrainian troops, quite by surprise a couple of months ago. What's the latest about what's actually happening in that area?
It's a really good question. I mean, what happened in Kursk is quite astonishing. The fact that these thousands of Ukrainian troops came across the border, managed to seize a chunk of Russian territory the first time since the Second World War, that foreign troops were occupying or occupying a part of Russian territory.
And yet it's kind of kept out of the news. It's talked about to an extent, but people have got used to the idea that this is happening. So we don't actually know for sure day to day what is going there. There have been reports that Russia has amassed maybe 40,000-50,000 troops.
including thousands of North Korean troops as well, and that Russia is planning an offensive to try to push the Ukrainians out of Kursk region, out of Russian territory. But it's very difficult to know what's going on down there. We haven't been given permission to travel down to the Kursk region to see what's going on.
And that's why it's hard to form a clear picture of what's happening. So let's talk about the arrival of President Trump to the White House on the 20th of January. What's the vibe in Moscow about what might happen? Because, of course, the issue that everyone has with analyzing Donald Trump is what he says and what he then does can be quite different things.
Yeah, you're right. And one Russian newspaper the other day described on the Trump as an unguided missile who could fly in all kinds of directions. So it's really interesting. In 2016, when Trump was first elected president, I remember the Russian newspapers here were full of, you know, excited articles, almost
describing him as the savior for US and Russian relations. This was going to be the man who was going to suddenly scrap sanctions against Russia. This was going to be the American president who was going to recognize Crimea as part of Russia. None of that happened, and in fact relations under Trump got worse
more sanctions were imposed against Russia. And so there was a sense of disappointment. This time round, 2024, the papers are more circumspect. Expectations are consciously being lowered. In fact, there was a meeting, reportedly, a meeting in the presidential administration.
recently, this is reported by the Commissant newspaper here, a meeting about what experts specialists should say in public about Donald Trump in order not to get people too excited, so to avoid disappointment again. Having said that, I think
There are hopes that a Donald Trump presidency, Trump Mark II, will be good news for the Kremlin because on the campaign trail, he didn't criticise Vladimir Putin at all. You had Kamala Harris calling Vladimir Putin a murderous dictator.
Trump didn't do anything like that. Trump seemed to question the scale of US military assistance for Ukraine. It's clear he wants to push to end the war quickly, and the suspicion is that that may not benefit Ukraine at all. So I think Russian officials are hopeful, quietly hopeful, that this is good news for Russia.
Having said that, we're now in the situation with Joe Biden, two months away from leaving the White House, removing these restrictions on the long-range weapons. What is that going to do? What is the situation going to be between Russia and America? Two months from now, we just don't know.
Well, and it's so interesting hearing the conversation shifting towards a potential ending of the conflict in Ukraine. You get people in Europe, and America talking about the prospect of whether being peace talks at all or whatever you actually want to call any kind of negotiations, the idea of Ukraine just having to seed territory that's occupied by Russia, stuff that was kind of
unsayable a year ago, two years ago. I imagine none of that stuff is spoken about in Russia because Putin presumably doesn't allow any kind of that conversation to happen. You know what's really interesting, Adam? On Friday, the German Chancellor on a short telephone, Vladimir Putin, first time in almost two years. And it was really interesting looking at the readout, the Kremlin readout of that conversation. It was clear from that, Putin doesn't want to give an inch.
Here. Basically, he referred the German Chancellor back to his so-called peace proposal, peace initiative, that he voiced in June, I think, of this year, which didn't really sound like a peace proposal. It was more like an ultimatum.
to Ukraine, that under that proposal, Ukraine would have to give up completely the four regions in Ukraine that Russia lays claim to, including territory that it controls in those regions. Ukraine would have to recognise Crimea as part of Russia. Western sanctions would have to be scrapped against Russia. And Ukraine would have to give up any hopes of joining NATO.
which kind of amounts to a capitulation for Ukraine. But I think Putin is clearly emboldened. He's been emboldened by recent military success on the battlefield in Eastern Ukraine. He's been emboldened, I think, by the result of the US election and the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House. He managed to survive almost three years of sanctions.
Having said that, the economy is shaky here at the moment. Interest rates are sky high, 21%. Inflation is a problem. Prices are going up on everything, really. Butter, potatoes.
That's a problem. It's a problem for Vladimir Putin running a war and trying to run the economy too. So it's not all plain sailing for him. And despite giving this semblance of confidence, there are major problems, I think, here, which are going to get worse as we move into 2025. So he has to find some kind of solution to that.
Steve, that's so interesting you say about the real world effects on the economy because previous conversations I've had with people on Newscast that the economic impact on Russia has always felt kind of a bit macroeconomic, a bit theoretical sanctions on companies, stuff to do with the structure of the Russian economy and how much the government is spending on defense rather than other stuff. So it's actually really interesting to hear from you that people are starting to feel it in their daily lives now. It's not a sort of kind of structural
theoretical thing. It's a real-world economic impact that people are feeling.
quite fast in the shops. It's the economy that really affects, I think, people's attitudes to the person running the country. You can go in Russia from hero to zero because of economic problems. I remember Gorbachev was super popular when he came to power in the mid-80s.
There were major economic problems in the Soviet Union. Towards the end of the Soviet Union, he lost a lot of support. The same with Boris Yeltsin. Boris Yeltsin was super popular for a time. But because of the major economic problems in Russia in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he lost a lot of his support.
If the bigger the economic problems here, I think the harder it will be for Vladimir Putin to maintain support. Even with the control, the scale of control he has in the country, the control of the media, control of the police, control of everything, if people are feeling it in their pockets, if life suddenly becomes much harder, then who do they blame for that?
Steve, that's so interesting. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Take care. Okay, so lots to think about in terms of Russia, Ukraine, and Ukraine's allies, whether it's the UK or the US. Let's talk about a completely different country now, China, because Vicki, a little bit of kind of recent political history was made on the sidelines of the G20, Kyostamer sat down with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president. And that's the first time a British Prime Minister has done that for a good number of years.
Yeah, that's right. The last time was Theresa May six years ago. And, you know, I think it's fair to say that relations between the two countries have been ebbing and flowing, certainly full of a lot of tension, I would say. If you think back to David Cameron, George Osborne, the Golden Age, they heralded, you know, economic, you know, wanting to do a lot more deals. You know, David Cameron even invited the president to a pub in the Cotswolds, I think it was to share a pint. So, you know, things went rapidly downhill
not long after that, I think got to the point where, you know, people were warning that actually China was the biggest economic threat to the United Kingdom. So there's been a lot of issues and there's been a lot of speculation about how Sakhir Salman would approach this relationship. You know, it had been coming in the sense that David Lamy has been to China, the foreign secretary,
but today that moment came they went into the room together and as you probably know from these summers you know the press are letting just to film a bit at the top as they sat in their long table across from each other and did their opening remarks and it's the case dharma talking about wanting to have a consistent and respectful relationship it was interesting you also said that they'd agree to avoid surprises where possible which i think sort of sums up where the relationship
has been but what he's got to do is really navigate this because he talked to about being firm when it comes to being honest about the areas they don't agree on and of course there are many of those you know he raises human rights issues there's also sanctions against lots of British parliamentarians
So, all of that kind of thing can definitely get in the way. But, you know, Kiyos Nama keeps talking about a pragmatic relationship. And he's interested in trade. He's interested in growth because of our really quite poor growth figures. He needs that to boost the economy. But the question is, you know, how is he going to, how far is he going to go with it? He's going to be accused of putting economics ahead of human rights, for example.
What's he going to do about China investing in the UK? That was all wrote back on because we apparently didn't trust them anymore. It's got an awful lot to do there, but it seems in the short term, trying to get that relationship up and running again and with thoughts of the chance that they're potentially going to China in the new year.
Interesting that Xi Jinping gets the same message from Keir Starmer that we all get, which is, oh, we're offering stability now, and that's kind of over it, and not much more detailed than that. James, did you manage to do any decoding of this readout that was released by the two sides after their conversations? Because you never really get a lot out of the Chinese.
The fact that it happened, the fact that President Xi at the end of it said that he felt there was a broad space for both countries to cooperate. The thing is, President Xi is on a make-nice exercise at the moment. He knows that coming down the line is President Trump. He knows that President Trump is likely to be far more aggressive and punchy when it comes to
relations with China. Therefore, Xi is posing at the moment as the man for everyone. He's just come from a state visit to Peru, where he opened a very large port that a lot of Americans think could one day be a port that could take Chinese warships.
After the summit, he's agreed to have a full state visit to Brazil, so he's trying to project himself down here. In contrast, President Biden went to look at some rainforest yesterday, and it turned out this was the first time he'd ever been to South America during his entire presidency.
So at the moment, what Mr. Xi is doing is he's talking to a lot of people. He's making lots of nice noises. The era of what I call wolf warrior diplomacy, remember that of the last couple of years. That is long gone because I think that Chinese know that it's likely that he's going to get pretty tense soon.
You talk to American officials, they say that the Brits and the Europeans have had a little holiday on China, and that's going to come to an end when Trump comes to power, and a lot more pressure will be put on the British and the Europeans say, look, this game you're playing of being slightly nicer to the Chinese than the Americans is going to have to stop. You're going to have to stop picking sides. Are you with us or not? What are you going to do? Are you going to accept
Chinese electric vehicles taking over your car industry or not. What are you going to do with, you know, are you going to do a Huawei again or not? In other words, all of these kinds of questions, the Americans are going to start saying, well, we're doing this. You can't do that. And that's just not including the possibility of some kind of trade war as a result of American terrorists on Chinese imports. If suddenly that explodes and becomes a sort of three way trade war between European Union China and the United States,
the risks for a country like the UK as it gets caught in the crossfire. And so any kind of nice chat that the Prime Minister has with President Xi here in Rio could potentially become ugly OTOs in a few months' time if there's a massive trade already. Now, that might not happen.
we simply don't know at the moment whether Mr Trump is going to live up into his promises or not on that. But the likelihood of some trade tensions with China is there. So that is the context in which you should see the Chinese making nice to the Brits, because I think the Chinese are saying, when President Trump comes to power, there is a possibility that there will be fissures within the West.
And China wants to be in a good place to exploit that as much as possible, particularly if it means selling Chinese goods into Europe, if they're blocked from the US market. James, fascinating. So much to think about. Thank you very much. And good luck with the rest of the summit. Thank you so much. And Vicki, I'm going to let you go and do some other news. So lovely to catch up with you too. And you too. Bye.
And just before we go, the definition of OTO's in the Oxford English Dictionary is of belief, principle, thought, etc., colon, having no practical result, unfruitful, sterile, futile, pointless. No words that you could use for this globetrotting episode of Newscast, which I hope you have found as interesting as I did.
Right, that's it. We will be back with another episode very soon, so speak to them. Bye-bye.
