Putin Is A 'Cornered rat' & Preparing A Second Front Against NATO | Ex-Diplomat Cormac Smith

The truth is Putin is a cornered rat, and he is going to go for one final, very, very desperate throw of the dice. In an average month now, the Russians are losing more in one month than the USSR lost in Afghanistan in 10 years. Putin doesn't care. I've been saying for nearly since January 22 that this thug would have no compunction in throwing tens of thousands of his own people into a meat grinder, and so it has turned out. This is a genocidal war. It's a genocidal war in Europe in 2026. We're looking at a very real possibility of Putin looking to open up a second front, and that, of course, could be into the Baltics, could be into Poland. We cannot discount what somebody of Donald Tusk's experience has said. Britain could be a target for a kinetic attack. If we were to let the Ukrainians down, we will pay, and we will pay a huge price. One, because Putin will not stop in Ukraine. The Ukrainians have been telling us this for as long as I've been working with them, for 10 years. Freedom is not free. I'd like to begin with the latest news on the Perm oil refinery attack by Ukraine. So they've struck 1,500 kilometres into Russia, and they've taken the refinery offline. This seems to be routine now. How much can Russia sustain? How much longer can they keep on taking these hits by Ukraine? Well, look, I look at weekly reports compiled by a friend of mine on the Russian economy, and the Russian economy is struggling. But the truth is, we can't hold our breath for it to collapse any day soon. But really, the only thing that Russia has is oil to pay for its war. And Ukraine has probably, through these strikes, reduced Russia's oil industry in the region of 50%. They are now having to import oil from Belarus, Kazakhstan, and most recently from India. So it is putting huge, huge pressure on the Russian economy and on their ability to pay for this genocidal war against Ukraine. And of course, what Ukraine has been doing, it's interesting to note, in the early days, we were giving them long-range weapons. In fact, the first long-range weapons they got from Storm Shadow from the Brits back in 2023. But we were giving them to them with handcuffs on because we were afraid of escalation, and we were saying that they couldn't use these weapons to strike military and logistics targets behind the Russian border, which was ridiculous because these were the targets that Russia was launching missile attacks against Ukrainian civilians, among others. The Ukrainians have now gone out and developed their own long-range drones and a number of long-range crews and ballistic missiles as well. So I'm not sure what exactly it was that hit this oil refinery, but from the Ukrainian point of view, it's very much in the playbook. They're trying to disable Russia's economy and therefore their ability to prosecute the war. And of course, within international law, what they are doing is absolutely within the rules of war. Whereas what Russia is doing, daily striking civilian targets and apartment blocks with precision missiles, seven people died in Kiev yesterday, is a war crime. So very, very different contrast between how Russia prosecutes this war, which of course they started, and it's an illegal war, and how Ukraine is defending themselves. We're seeing Ukraine take the initiative on the battlefield north of Liman. Vladimir Putin has recently consolidated his power, and it looks likely that there'll be a troop mobilization, perhaps 300,000 Russian troops this year, after Trump's midterms, and 300,000 troops next year. What's your take on the current state of play? The first thing I'd say is 300,000 is the absolute minimum from conversations that I've been having. Now, I've got to say, nobody really knows, but I speak to an awful lot of people, and I'm hearing some very, very worrying signals. The truth is, Putin is a cornered rat, and he is going to go for one, I would say, one final, very, very desperate throw of the dice. And this is, I've often described, recently described this as a tale of two wars. On the front line, and you mentioned Liman, and Liman is hugely important because Liman is where the Ukrainians have been shaping the battlefield for a number of months, with what we have only recently learned is called Operation Vivaldi. After Vivaldi's four seasons, it will be in four phases. They've only started to let us know, but it's shaping the battlefield around the fortress belt. And by doing this, they're pushing Russian troops back as far as the, if I just get it right, the Seversky Donetsk River. We have some recent reports that Ukrainians have actually crossed that river. So this is vitally important, because if we go back to the meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska last year, and what came out of that was what I called, you know, it was a capitulation proposal for Ukraine that I described as being written in the Kremlin and translated into English in the White House, probably using AI. And that involved not only freezing the war on the current lines of engagement, but Ukraine would give up a further 20% of Donetsk Oblast, which is the fortress belt. And that fortress belt is the key to Kiev and the rest of Ukraine. And we know the Russians keep telling us that their war aims are still maximalist. And if people need to be reminded, that is not only to occupy all of Ukraine, that is to wipe Ukraine as a national identity off the face of the earth. So what's happening in Liman at the moment is absolutely critical. The Russians are taking huge casualties. I did a check just before I came on, over 1,500 casualties a day for the last seven days. There are, in an average month now, the Russians are losing more in one month than the USSR lost in Afghanistan in 10 years. Let that sink in. Putin doesn't care. I've been saying for nearly since January 22, that this thug would have no compunction in throwing tens of thousands of his own people into a meat grinder. And so it has turned out. So back to your question on the mobilization. He is going to throw everything he can into it, and they will likely be very poorly trained conscripts. As I said, 300,000, probably a minimum. In that war at the moment, Ukraine is clearly decimating Russia's forces. The other war is where Russia, Putin, is trying to break the will of the Ukrainian people. They have switched for the first time to daytime attacks also. I speak to friends in Kiev every day, and people are worn out. And they're not just physically worn out, they're mentally worn out as well. But they know that they simply can't give up. This is existential. If Russia were to stop fighting, as a great friend told me in the early weeks, if Russia were to stop fighting, there'd be no war. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine. And I don't know a Ukrainian who doesn't realize this. So it's massive war crimes, daily attacks on civilian targets, men, women, and children being murdered and maimed. I have a friend, a Ukrainian diplomat in The Hague, and every now and again I ask him, what's the scorecard up to in terms of war crimes that have been registered for investigation with the international community? The last time I spoke to my friend about a week ago, it was, I think, 265,000 war crimes being committed against Ukrainian people, civilians, women, children, by Russian soldiers. So Ukraine knows that that's what they're in for. That's why they don't want to give up land for peace. And that's why they have to fight for every inch of land, because they know the cost of being taken over by basically a barbarian force that could have come out of the Middle Ages. Yeah, unbelievable brutality by the Russians. We're seeing on a tactical level, they aren't doing very well. In terms of the European viewpoints, we're seeing a lot of hybrid attacks, an uptick in those sort of airports being shut down, drones, incursions, for example. What's going on there? Do you think Russia is going to expand this war into Europe? Some time ago, I would have said unlikely, despite what people in the Baltics and Poland were saying. Now, listening to Donald Tusk, only, was it earlier this week or last week, saying that even an attack on London could not be ruled out. Of course, they, I better mind my language, but Russia sees, I was going to use another term, Russia sees Britain as their number one enemy, and quite rightly so, because we have been supporting Ukraine from the very start. And it was quite possibly certain critical support, which we gave to the Ukrainians, which allowed them to win the battle for Kiev. I think it is likely, because going back to what I said, that Putin will have one more last desperate throw of the dice. And I think part of that, there's two things going on here. Putin has always wanted to portray this as a wider war of not Russia invading Ukraine, but NATO against Russia. And of course, the lie and the disinformation is, one of the lies of this information is the reason for the invasion was expansion of NATO up to Russia's borders. This is absolutely rubbish. What happened when Finland joined in 2024, I think it was Finland with the 1340 kilometre border with Russia and they withdrew their troops. They didn't attack Finland and they didn't attack Sweden. Ukraine was not a member of NATO. So I think by doing this massive mobilisation allows him to portray to the Russian people that they are under attack. There is also the provocations going on. He is constantly probing for Western weakness. And I've got to say so far, he's finding Western weakness because we don't seem to want to respond in an insufficiently robust manner to that. And when you're dealing with a bully, if you don't hit back, that encourages them. But yes, I think we're now looking at a very real possibility of Putin looking to open up a second front. And that, of course, could be into the Baltics, could be into Poland. It could be longer range strikes. You know, we cannot discount what somebody of Donald Tusk's experience has said around seven days ago when he said that Britain could be a target for a kinetic attack. From a diplomatic perspective, Russia is putting Ukraine in an impossible situation. So they're saying there can be no ceasefire if peace talks are underway. Just the unbelievable amount of lies from their point of view, from the Russian perspective. What course would you take if you were on the Ukrainian team? I don't. If I were on the Ukrainian team, it would be very different because as hard as I can try, I would see things very differently and I would be having very different conversations. But look, Dominic, I don't think that I would be in a position to tell the Ukrainians to do anything other than what they are doing. As I said, they know this war is existential. They know that if they are to give in to Putin and Trump's demands, that this would simply be, it would be a capitulation and it would be giving the Russians and Putin time to draw their breath and rebuild their forces and rearm their forces. I think that what Ukraine is doing diplomatically is absolutely correct. If I had one criticism over the last few months, there has been too much of Ukraine airing their dirty laundry in public. I, for example, I would talk about the whole Fedorov situation, the former minister of defense and so forth. And look, I would not criticize Zelensky or the Ukrainian government for doing this. But by putting it out there, it plays into the Russian hands and it allows Ukraine's enemies to build on the disinformation narrative that Ukraine is a, Ukraine is a, is a corrupt country, etc., etc., etc. So I think that is one thing I would like to see much tighter discipline on. We haven't heard anything for some time. Hopefully we won't in the future. I'm not a military man. I can only understand what Ukraine is doing and I can understand the reasons they are doing it. And I certainly wouldn't criticize that. It's, it seems perfectly understandable. I suppose my, if, if I were to be out there on a government team, it would be in my capacity as a professional communicator. I was on a panel debate in India only last week. And again, I was told that this was a proxy war being waged on, on Russia by NATO. I was told that Russia had been promised that Gorbachev had been promised that NATO would never expand eastwards and lies like this doesn't matter if there was, if he was promised in a smoke-filled room by Gorbachev is now dead. And the man who supposedly promised him is 95 and no longer works for any government. There's no international treaty to back this up. Russia, on the other hand, there have been seven international treaties specifically relating to relations between Russia and Ukraine. Most famously, the Budapest Memorandum and Russia has broken every one. So I think, I think what I'd like to see, and I'll do my small bit to see it is we need to really push back. So these disinformation narratives have less and less effect on ordinary people in the West because we're democracies and it costs us to keep supporting Ukraine. So ultimately, for our governments to keep supporting Ukraine, we, the people in the street, need to support our governments and we need to understand why we're doing it. Ukraine is full of Nazis is another one. I could go on and on with the various lies. And the other thing that I think we need to do, we need to, we need to tell a more compelling, more memorable and true. It's got to be true. I'm not talking about propaganda. We've got to tell a more compelling and memorable story about Ukraine. So more people really understand because what I'm seeing all the time is either people don't understand and I'm talking about good, ordinary, decent, honest people. They have so many other, so many other issues competing, competing for their attention. People don't understand and people forget very quickly. I was involved in a piece of research at the end of last year on the effect of Russian disinformation on different groups within British society. And we find that among most people, Tory voters, Labour voters, Lib Dem voters, reform voters, we looked at the whole spectrum. But people have forgotten about Butcher, where we had those horrendous war crimes. People have forgotten about Mariupol. I wear this piece of iron on my wrist to commemorate Mariupol. It's one of the last pieces of iron that was produced in the As of Steel and Iron Works, which was the last stand. Mariupol was a city the size of Edinburgh, nearly half a million people. It was wiped off the map in seven weeks. The Nazis in Mariupol killed 25,000 citizens in two years or 20,000 in two years. The lowest estimate of the number of citizens that died in Mariupol is 25,000. And I know people who fought in Mariupol, the estimates from the mayor's office go up to 100,000 in seven weeks. A city the size of Edinburgh wiped off the map and most people have forgotten about it. So this is a roundabout way of answering your question. I can't give any diplomatic advice. I certainly can't give any military advice. I'm a communicator. And I think what we all need to do and what the Ukrainians need to do is they need to tell a better, more compelling story that lands with people in the West. And we still need to push back and rebut very, very hard on Russian disinformation. So you asked me what I would do in all humility. That's the best I could do, I think. No, no, thanks for answering that. It's more just out of sheer frustration. Like, how is this going to be solved, this problem? In terms of, there's more positive news with Zelensky receiving a batch of Patriot missiles following the UN Assembly. How significant is that? Obviously, winter's coming and that's a big issue for a country like Ukraine with its climate. Look, it's helpful. I don't know how many he's got. They'll be used up very quickly. He's also, Trump has finally, to my surprise, Trump has finally signed off on the licenses for Ukraine to produce their own Patriot missiles. Caution on this. It's going to take months and months and months, if not years, to actually get from having that piece of permission paper to rolling Patriots off the production line. So that license to produce Patriots is not going to alleviate the situation this winter. Any Patriots they have been given will help. I doubt if they're enough. We need more. As I say, we have a tale of two wars. There is the war on the front line where Ukraine is taking lumps out of Russia. As I said, there are months when Russia loses more in one month than the USSR lost in 10 years in Afghanistan. People should just think about that. And, you know, their aim, their strategic aim to capture all of Donetsk and with it the fortress belt we're seeing in Liman, that doesn't seem to be happening any day soon. But the other war that is really concerns me is the is this constant onslaught on civilians. And, you know, there's a there's a truism that we should all know. It's not armies win wars. It's not governments win wars. It's people win wars. You know, it was the famously during the beginning of the Second World War. It was the blitz spirit, you know, and that that resisted Hitler's efforts to break the will of the British people. Because if you break the will of the people, then there's no army to back them up. And that's why Ukraine has confounded, has confounded people over and over and over again for over four and a half years. Because, yes, they're only human and they suffer, they bleed and they die the exact same as you and I. But they have shown the most amazing resilience over the last four and a half, nearly coming up to five years. But that does not mean they're superhuman. They're not. So I am very, very concerned about what the Ukrainian people are facing into this winter. And, you know, when I talk to my friends a lot, sometimes they don't want to talk about the war. They want to talk about everyday stuff and, you know, what I'm doing on holiday and what they did for the weekend. Because and what I'm getting is they're not just physically worn out. They're mentally. This is taking a great mental toll because I'm on the phone to people sometimes and it's just, oh, there's more explosions. There's another air raid siren going off. And do they just go into the middle of the apartment or do they decide to go down to the underground or the air raid shelters? And if you can imagine living with this day after day, week after week, month after month, not being able to get a good night's sleep. And this is very, very deliberate. And I think that, you know, I'm glad to see that Europe is stepping up, but I really fear for the upcoming winter for the Ukrainian people. It's going to be incredibly tough. Would I back them? Yes, I would. But I wouldn't like to be in their shoes. I think if they can weather this winter, it's not a prediction because I don't have a crystal ball. I would hope to maybe see some sort of progress towards a settlement in 2027. But they've got to get through their toughest winter yet to get there. And that's just me being optimistic because I want to be optimistic. But when asked this question before, I have been absolutely clear that nothing would happen in 26. And I can't emphasize enough how desperate Putin will be. And yes, he could well bring conventional, more conventional attacks against NATO countries. I mean, I have heard various figures in terms of what he's going to mobilize. All I'm willing to say for credibility's sake is that I think 300,000 is an absolute floor. It's not a ceiling. We have got to, we have got to realize how desperately tough it is for Ukrainians at the moment. We have got to realize it doesn't matter whether the UN or any other international court has, nobody has even addressed the fact this is genocide. This is genocide and has been for nearly five years. This is genocide that passes all five tests in the United Nations Convention on Genocide. I recommend to anybody to go and look it up. What they're doing at the moment is actions designed to make life unlivable. That's what they're doing with the attacks. They have kidnapped children. The, you know, the rapes and the tortures and the sexual crimes are absolutely legion. As I said, I mentioned the figure of 265,000 war crimes registered for investigation. They can't, I mean, there's a huge, huge backlog there. This is a genocidal war. It's a genocidal war in Europe in 2026. If we let the Ukrainians down, and I pray we won't, if we were to let the Ukrainians down, we will pay and we will pay a huge price. One, because Putin will not stop in Ukraine. The Ukrainians have been telling us this for as long as I've been working with them for 10 years. And they're starting to prove that and people in the Baltics and Poland are telling us this, are telling us this now. But also, you know, we talk about a rules-based order. Our rules-based order is on life support at the moment. But if the rules-based order, and people have scoffed at the rules-based order to me for many years, and it's not perfect, but it has given us, certainly in Europe and this part of the world, the greatest period of peace and prosperity and safety that the world has ever known. And if our rules-based order stands for one thing, it's that you cannot cross another country's borders and take what you want by force. This is being ripped up in Ukraine at the moment. And if we as the West, the civilized world, the democratic world, whatever you want to call us, if we allow that happen, we have only ourselves to blame for what will happen next. Because the life, Dominic, you're a bit younger than me, but the life that you and I have grown up to take for granted and the freedoms that we have grown up to take for granted will soon disappear. If Ukraine teaches us one thing, and I will end on this, freedom is not free.