YouSaid · the spoken record

Hannah Lucinda Smith

lines on the record: 55
first: 2026-06-20
most recent: 2026-06-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But also for its strategic importance as soon as Putin annexed the peninsula in 2014, they started rebuilding up that Black Sea fleet. And that's been really important in the kind of the control or the influence that Putin's been trying to project navally in the Black Sea as well.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Backroom channels going on through Turkey and through interesting Roman Abramovich, the former owner of Chelsea. He was kind of playing quite a key role in bringing together Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Istanbul. And the key sticking point, as I've been told by contacts, was always Crimea. And they just could not agree. And I think that speaks, you know, not only to the sort of Depth of historical feeling about this place where so many wars have been fought. And, you know, what's really interesting about those wargrave sites is, you know, the same trenches that were dug in the 1850s were then used by the Soviet troops when they were battling the Nazis in the 1940s. Sevastopol was briefly occupied by Nazi forces aided by Romanian forces and had the status of a Soviet hero city because they fought back using these same trenches.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the other hand, there were other people who I met who had supported Russian rule. One was a Cossack leader who'd actually been involved in the annexation. He was one of what they call the Little Green men who were sort of helping the Russian troops take over sort of key buildings and government installations during that annexation. And he'd changed his mind because he said, well, is that the economy to be quite so bad? And they're destroying our environment with all this building. What was also interesting, it was 2019 when I went there. And it was really clear that Russia was embedding its presence through construction. It built a huge new airport in Symferopol, which is sort of capital of Crimea. It obviously built the Kerch Bridge, which connected Crimea to Russia. And one of the key sticking points actually when the Ukraine war began.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just keeping it maintained, which I found really, really touching. You know, they had no reason to do that, really, but they were. But despite that, despite her livelihood disappearing overnight, she was nothing but enthusiastic about Russian rule. And it was... Nothing really to do with Know economics or reason, really. It was about a gut feeling.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Herrier and explaining to them, Well, this happened here, and this happened here. And the bottom fell out of that overnight after annexation because Crimea was put into sanctions. It's now very, very difficult for Brits to travel there. British organisations can't work there anymore. So there was an organisation that was raising money in the UK and using it to look after those war graves in Crimea. And they had to stop working overnight. So I went and found some of those British war graves and they're sort of falling into disrepair. It was very touching actually. There was one site and there was a village nearby and the locals were actually sort of themselves.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“who were extremely happy about it, including the lady that I begin the chapter with, she was a tour guide before annexation. She's got this sort of encyclopedic knowledge of the Crimean War of the 1850s, which is such a key part of the British historical imagination because it was the first trench war, first war to be documented in a newspaper. And if you're sort of British and into history, Crimea is one of the things you'll get very excited about. And prior to annexation, there are a lot of British tourists who went there to look around the valley of death, which is obviously immortalized by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem, Look around those war gravesites. There are British war graves there. And that had been this lady's profession and income was mainly taking Brits around this.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are not well disposed to Russia. They have these memories of what happened to them under Stalin almost immediately after annexation, a kind of new crackdown on Tatars began this time under the pretext of them being sort of radical Islamists, being rounded upon terrorism charges. So, yeah, they've formed a sort of major part of the opposition in Ukraine. And actually, the defense minister in Ukraine for a long time, a guy called Rustem Umarov, he's from the Crimean Tatar minority. He's been quite a sort of key figure both in the Ukrainian government and also in negotiations, back negotiations going on between Kiev and Moscow. But you also had this quite large population within Crimea that actually welcomed the annexation. And I met people in Crimea.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in Sebastopol, particularly that's a particularly Russian identifying city. So Turkey has an interest there. The Crimean Tatars are super interesting because they speak a form of Turkish and have they are Muslims and they have very close links with Turkey itself. And so actually that's the main basis when Crimea was annexed by Russia. The main basis for Turkey not recognizing that wasn't necessarily a sort of strong alliance with Ukraine. It was to do with its relationship with the Crimean Tatars because the Crimean Tatars”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was about to run out, actually, or had just run out when the annexation happened, which I think is a sort of story that's not widely told in the sort of understanding of it. But its population has had different kind of majorities at different times. So for many centuries, the majority was actually a kind of Turkic population who today we know as the Tatars, the Crimean Tatars, who make up still a significant portion of the population. Actually, during the Soviet era, they were hugely oppressed by Stalin. He deported most of them to Central Asia. Absolutely, you know, horrific stories of that expulsion. And the breakdown of the Soviet Union, many of them came back and sort of reclaimed their land, a minority, but a big minority there in question, influential minority as well. And then you have Ukrainians and you also have people who would identify as Russians.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Crimea is one of the two hinterlands in the book where borders have already shifted. The other one being Nagorno-Karabakh, which was, yeah, was ruled by an ethnic Armenian administration for nearly three decades and then seized back by Azerbaijan. But Crimea, of course, it was part of Ukraine after the breakup of the Soviet Union. And then it was annexed by Putin in 2014. And now, I mean, it's still internationally recognized as the territory of Ukraine, but in practice on the ground, it's controlled by Russia. It is like all of the hinterlands, a place that's incredibly complicated in terms of”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come on, not on any level. And, you know, the fact is, okay, it started as a trading block, it then expanded to other things. Yeah, I personally believe that trade is the kind of basis of peace actually. I think it can be a real kind of basis of good relations. And I think we've been far too careless to sort of criticise and throw out these institutions or not defend them staunchly enough.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's right. And I think also there's been a kind of careless cynicism about the UN and also about the European Union, actually. Look, both of these organizations are massive, unwieldy in many ways undemocratic, imperfect organizations. There's a lot to criticize. However, ultimately in their aims They've succeeded to date, right? Like I say, they've broadly kept the world, and particularly Europe. I mean, You know, it's so fashionable to hate on the European Union for so many things, and particularly amongst a certain part of the British population. You know, you only have to go back to my grandparents' generation. And this continent was at war. Right destructive horrifically destructive war. Do we really want to go back to that?”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that is chilling because that has been the system that is sort of. Broadly kept piece in the world. I don't want to sound glib about all the horrific and destructive wars that happen all the time. But in terms of a kind of like broader global conflagration, that's what's kept that at bay. And that is breaking down. And the question is, what's going to replace that? And I don't think we're anywhere near, I mean, even starting to think about figuring that out, let alone approaching an answer.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first time that we really saw the inherent weakness in the system, the rules-based system that's based on the UN Security Council. Because as soon as you have a situation in which one or more of those members don't agree with the sort of general consensus, you're screwed. You're paralyzed. And that's what happened in Syria. Resolution after resolution against Assad was put forward and blocked by Russia and China. And that's going to keep happening. And I had quite a sort of chilling conversation quite recently with a former British diplomat who's now heavily involved in the UN and the panel of experts. And I said, do you think that the UN can survive in its current form? And he looked at me and said, that's not the question. The question is, can the UN... And survive”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“War, and particularly looking at the financial aspects as well, you know, Bretton Woods, etc. It's very, very young. It's less than a century old. And I think this, again, is human nature to look at what we've experienced in our lifetimes and assume that it's permanent. And I think speaking as a Brit, we tend to do this with borders, right? Because we're an island nation since the early 18th century, the kind of the island of Britain has been one country or one union, let's say. Don't want to offend the Scots and the Welsh. But even that isn't permanent. I think because we have these sort of defined borders, that's how we think about borders. And that's not how borders are and that's not how the world works when you look at it in the longer term. And I think we are seeing this moment really, again, coming back to Syria, one of the reasons why I think Syria is so pivotal, because it was.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As well, particularly looking at drone production. And there are increasing conversations going on about Whether you know Turkey can be, you know, we can rely on Turkey as a major arms producer for the kind of Western alliance, right? But on the other hand, Erdogan, like Putin, is a disruptor. He doesn't want this kind of Western-dominated world order. And he talks about that openly. He stopped saying it recently, but about a decade ago, one of his catchphrases was, the world is bigger than five. He was talking about the UN Security Council and the five states on that. And he was saying, what about these other states? What about us? And he has a point in that, actually, you know. But, you know, what we refer to as the rules-based order, this order that is based around the UN and its Security Council, is only something that's come about post-Second World War. I mean, okay, like, if you go back to the League of Nations post-First World War, but really post-Second World War.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“sure well i i think first he just to say a little bit about turkey turkey is such an interesting case right because it sort of sits in both worlds and erdwan and actually like a bit like yugoslavia it's never been a perfect ally of the west and it's never been a perfect nato ally i don't know what a perfect nato ally would look like but it's always been problematic let's say right and you know the reason why it's part of nato is its geography on this eastern flank controlling or being the custodian of the the bosphorus and darzanel straits being the kind of bulwark against what was the soviet union but i would place Erdogan actually in both camps and he flits between them quite skillfully so on the one side turkey of course is a NATO member it's got the second biggest army in NATO it's got an increasingly important defence industry”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, these countries prove that they've reached the norms to reach the EU, but then what if they start then backsliding? And that happened in several of these states. So the EU got really distracted by these internal things, and it sort of took its eye off the ball in places like the Balkans. And this is something that I heard from politicians, particularly in Kosovo, who, you know, they are constantly under pressure from Serbia. and are really, they're just so desperate to join the EU and NATO because it will give them some kind of bulwark against that. But they just feel like they've been abandoned. And it created this opening for Putin and also China in an economic sense to really kind of walk in.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To try and scare Brits into, you know, making outrageous claims or saying millions of Turks are going to come to the UK. And then you had the kind of authoritarian turn of leaders like principally Victor Orban in Hungary. And the EU basically being toothless to fight bad because, you know, when this expansion was happening of the EU in the first part of the millennium Nobody really thought that it could go the other way, right? I was at university at that time when that...”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years become very, very distracted throughout the 2010s, firstly by the refugee crisis that erupted in 2015 when you saw about a million, mostly Syrians also Afghans, also people from other parts of the Middle East and Africa going from Turkey to Greece in these small rubber boats and then making their way to principally Germany, also Sweden in different places. And that, you know, I mean, it basically it broke the Dublin Agreement, which was the agreement that governed how Europe deals with asylum claims. It broke relations really between a lot of European states because you had Germany trying to dictate that different states would take a different number of refugees and other states going, well, no, you know, sort of revealed quite a lot of tensions. And then, of course, you had Brexit, which in a way was a kind of follow-on from that refugee crisis. Certainly the leave campaign used a lot of imagery from that.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was started, I think, in the late 1980s, fell by the wayside during the wars, and then Gazprom gave the money to finish it off. And Putin appeared on the steps. And I'd been waiting for hours and hours and hours. He was meant to, you know, appear at some time. He appeared about three hours late. And there were all these Serbs waiting with me. And he appeared. And then he said three words. And then he disappeared again. And everyone's brilliant. And then Turnhind went home. So there was a real show of, you know, the kind of links that had been built. But I mean, in some ways, you know, Yugoslavia during the Cold War was non-aligned, right? Tito, the Yugoslav leader famously just refused to fall into line with Stalin's Soviet Union and pursued his own kind of socialism. But I think more broadly in the Balkans, what has happened is that the EU...”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Building links with leaders like Putin and also Xi Jinping in China. I was in Belgrade for a state visit by Putin in January 2019. And it was something to behold. I mean, he was kind of, you know, when he flew into Belgrade Airport, there were fighter jets from the Serbian Air Force flying alongside him. And the red car was rolled out. And he gave Vucic some kind of, you know, high Russian honor. I think Vucic gave him a puppy, as I remember, because Putin likes to collect dogs. It's one of the things that he does. And then he came and spoke to the crowds in the center of Belgrade. On the steps of Stava Temple, in the centre of the city, which in itself is symbolic. It's one of these, it's a huge Orthodox Christian temple. It looks old. It's in fact very new.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that changed in the early 2010s when Vucic came to power initially as Prime Minister, lovely as president. And it's turned back towards this very kind of chauvinistic nationalist denialist path. So, you know, denying genocides committed by ethnic Serb troops in Bosnia, which have been documented. You prosecuted at the Hague proven.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this sort of golden decade that Serbia had in the 2000s between ousting Milosevic and Milosevic being carted off to The Hague where he subsequently died before facing justice, there was this decade where Serbia really seemed to be liberalizing. They had a leader called Boristadic, who was very pro-EU. They hunted down the last of those kind of big war criminals and sent them to The Hague. In 2008, Kosovo unilaterally declared sovereignty. And of course, they weren't happy about that. But still, despite that, they didn't sort of turn away from their kind of European wood path.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make efforts in terms of reconciliation between different groups. Recognize minority rights, all these kind of things. And for a while, I think that was working, including in Serbia, Serbia is still an EU candidate country, right? But under its current leader, he's a guy called Alexander Vucic, who first sort of He's an interesting guy because he looks very young and he actually is still quite young. I think he's in his early 50s, but he's got a very, very long political history in Serbia going back to Yugoslavia, actually. And he was a propagandist for Milosevic during the wars. He was a guy who came up with a very famous soundbite, touted by Milosevic, which was for every Serb they kill, we will kill a thousand Muslims. I mean, this kind of stuff.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I find really disturbing is that the EU and now Britain as well, because obviously we're not in it anymore, has sort of lost interest in taking a role as a sort of, you know, promoter of democracy and a promoter of human rights. Nominally, it does, but in reality it doesn't. So, you know, when those Yugoslav wars came to a halt, The idea was that it was going to be the EU and to a degree NATO, mostly the EU that would be sort of like pulling them towards democratic, liberal, pro-Western and peaceful future, right? It would be the kind of carrot of EU membership that would encourage these states or force these states to democratize, to stamp down on corruption, as you say, to”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have values that are really worth defending. And I think sometimes we're a bit embarrassed to do that. But it certainly created a very, very useful fault line that leaders like Putin with not much effort and not much use of blood and treasure can exploit very effectively.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of, yeah, Western moral authority. And I think that's really something that leaders like Putin can exploit incredibly well in all kinds of places, including in the West. I mean, you know, one of the things that does horrify me, and I hope I don't sound like a raging nationalist when I say this, is the lack of kind of pride that a lot of people, normal people in the West take in the sort of the democracy and the liberalism and the pluralism that we have and the way that there's a lot of like self-flagellation going on about things that go on in the world. This is not to say by any means that the West is a sort of, you know, benign actor. No, of course it is, you know, responsible for terrible things. But, you know, I do think like.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking to those Yazidis because a lot of them had worked as translators with US forces during that invasion because they are sort of by their nature. They're horribly oppressed by Saddam Hussein, you know, pro-Western by nature. And it wasn't, they weren't annoyed that 2003 had happened. They were annoyed that the Americans had pulled out, actually. And I think that's something that gets lost is just how brutal Saddam Hussein's regime was and how glad a lot of Iraqis were actually to see those forces. They weren't glad of the mess that they're, you know, particularly the US made of, you know, administrating Iraq after the fall of Saddam. That was done incredibly clumsily and with horrific results. But I think it's far more nuanced than is often appreciated. But it certainly marked this moment, not just in the Middle East, but in the world of the kind of decline.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saved lives, right? And, you know, I think obviously a lot of us were very, very against the idea of liberal intervention in inverted commas in Iraq. You know, I myself joined those protests in 2003. I was a student at the time. I was very, very against it, although I think probably I didn't have the sort of, you know, the expertise and the sort of geopolitical sophistication to know exactly why I was against it. I was in my bones. I think a lot of people felt like that. And it proved to be not a success in any sense. Although I do have to say, there's nuance to it. I mean, when I was reporting in Iraq in sort of 2013, 2014, at the time when the genocide of the Yazidis was happening, it was very, very interesting.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those countries. You know, it's amazing still when you go to Kosovo today, it's so pro-British and so pro-American in a way that is quite bizarre to see because certainly in the Middle East, you're not going to find that in many places at all, right? You know, to the extent, and I mentioned this in my book, there's a crop of children in Kosovo born around the turn of the millennium just after that Western intervention who are called an Albanianized version of Tony Blair because he's seen as a hero, right? And Bill Clinton likewise, there's this statue, this sort of medium-sized statue of Bill Clinton in Kosovo sort of waves at this horrible, snarled-up traffic on the outskirts of town on Bill Clinton Boulevard. And it's amazing. But, you know, for the people there, liberal intervention,”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I think that's a really, really good point. I mean, I don't talk actually about the kind of US invasion of Iraq in the book, but it is an important turning point. And that's because I think that marks the real moment where we see the beginning of the decline of the US and the West as a sort of, you know, moral authority in the world, right? You know, it's so weird to think back now that before the invasion of Iraq, there were two other big kind of liberal interventions. One of them was Sierra Leone and one of them was Kosovo. And both of those were extremely successful in that they stopped massacres, genocides actually, and return those countries to some kind of imperfect peace and were widely welcomed by the populations.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From this wide range of countries, and very, very quickly, it was obvious really as early as kind of like early 2013, I think, that this wasn't a civil war anymore. It was a proxy war.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Himself and his family are Alawite Muslims who are kind of sect of Shia Islam. The majority of the Syrian population are Sunni Muslims. So it was a sort of minority religious rule in that country with links to Iran. And this is quite bizarre because the Alawites are a very sort of secular and not particularly observant part of Shiaz Amir is obviously, you know, Iran is a fully-fledged theocracy. So it's weird, but that's where the link is. So when it comes to Syria, there are these two seriously big powers that are hostile to the West backing this regime. And on the other side, particularly initially, the opposition, both the political and the armed opposition, had a wide range of support from European countries, from the UK, from Canada, from the US, from France, also from Turkey, from Qatar.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know Russia wasn't particularly happy with what was going on. But, you know, Russia didn't block the UN sanctions that were put on Gaddafi in the way that it did repeatedly with Assad. And the reason for that is, you know, there's a relationship that goes right back to the Cold War between the Assad family and their Syria and the Soviet Union initially and then, you know, Russia, lastly, on all kinds of levels, but particularly on a military level. I mean, Russia has this military base at Tartu. So on the Mediterranean Sea, which is its only Mediterranean base, obviously incredibly important for it. So it's got this asset that it needs to protect. And then also, you know, the Assad regime has this link with Iran as well through religion. So not to get too down into the weeds, but Assad's regime.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our government here from really taking on Putin when they probably should have. You know, I think it was as far back as maybe 2008 or 9 that Alexander Litanyenko was poisoned in London. But the reason why I started in Syria to come back to your question is because that was really the point where I think Russia under Putin had reached a point where it felt strong enough obviously it had the petrochemicals boom of the 2000s that had really sort of pumped its economy back up, felt politically powerful enough also and had enough of an interest in Syria to really get involved full scale and fully oppose the West there. You can say like there were other places in the Arab Spring, particularly in Libya where”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money had a huge amount to do with it, particularly in Britain. I mean, that's no secret, the sort of flood of Russian money into London in particular, into the property sector, into all kinds of things. I think.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I remember there was an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine. It must have been probably around as late as 2010, I think, where the big question was, could Russia join NATO? This was a genuine question. But if you look back, I mean, yeah, there was the first check in what happened before Putin took power, but he carried that on with the incredibly bloody second Chechen war in which ultimately he placed his kind of, you know, vassal leader in power there. And then, you know, most obviously and most seriously the invasion of Georgia, I mean, the annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia that happened in 2008. For various reasons, probably a bit of optimism.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Russia just wasn't strong enough to really play its own role there in the 90s. It had its own internal problems. And what's quite remarkable to look back on now is, you know, that Russia was joining in with the NATO peacekeeping operations. It's bizarre, isn't it? And in the first years of the new millennium, you know, there was all kinds of discussions and not even just discussions actually, you know, Russia and NATO were joining together in these sort of councils. They were talking a lot. Not just...”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think so. I think so. You know, looking back on it, the 90s for the West at least was a great decade, wasn't it? You know, there was a sense of sort of hubris, again, coming back at Safiyama's famous essay that somehow the Western idea of liberalism had won. And that was inevitably the way that the world was going. And the fact was, you know, In the 90s when particularly when the Balkan wars are happening, you know, this is a place that Russia does have an intrinsic interest in because of the Slavic links, because of all sorts of things.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the key word that you use there is overt, right? Because it's not like Putin's Russia, who I would say that's the kind of the major player in this alternative axis or coalition, right? Certainly the most... That didn't happen. Actually, hindsight's a brilliant thing, isn't it? When you look in hindsight, it's a kind of dynamic that had been growing since he came into power. And I think it just sort of suited Western powers to maybe stick their head in the sand a bit and try and be optimistic about things with Russia.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think, yeah, it was really in the Balkans that I started to realize that there's something else happening here. And then I started to sort of look into it more deeply across these hinterlands and kind of see where these fault lines were being drawn.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which has its own kind of history in the region. Obviously, it was an imperial power there. And with some quite kind of, you know, worrying effects of that, particularly in Bosnia, there's a semi-autonomous region called the Republic of Srpska in the northeast that's largely inhabited by ethnic Serbs. And the leader there is a guy called Milaradik. became increasingly patronized by Putin. I mean, this guy at this point is going to meet Putin several times a year, which is insane because he's the leader of a quasi-state, right? Who is he? And sort of bolstered by that support that he's getting from this huge outside sponsor. He repeatedly threatened to secede from federal Bosnia, which is an incredibly dangerous place to be. Because once you start redrawing borders in that region, it empowers other kind of local nationalists and local populists to do the same.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now since the war in Bosnia finished and nearly three decades since the war in Kosovo. And, you know, largely the region's been at peace, but it hasn't been really put back together in terms of the social fractures that those wars caused. And obviously it's an ethnically mixed region. So particularly in Bosnia, which is the most mixed part of the Balkans, you have three main groups. You have the ethnic Serbs who are Orthodox Christians. You have the ethnic Croats, Catholic Christians, and then you have the Bosniaks who are Muslims. And what I realized was starting to happen was that these different groups were being patronized by different outside powers. So in the case of the ethnic Serbs, by Russia, using that kind of intrinsic link that they have through Orthodox religion, through being Slavic, and then with the Muslims from Turkey.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They weren't geopolitically irrelevant anymore. And actually, what really started with the Syrian conflict, which began in 2011, that very quickly turned into a proxy war between broadly and imperfectly the West on one side and on the other side an axis of Russia and Iran and to a degree economically China as well and other countries sort of aligned there. And that sort of was spreading across Europe throughout the 2010s through various means through misinformation campaigns, through patronage of different leaders in these liminal places, these unstable places where borders have not quite been agreed. And particularly in the Balkans, which is very, very fragile place, actually, you know, it's three decades.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kosovo actually was the first place that I ever went as a foreign correspondent back in 2007 when it was also a hinterland, really hinterland, because it was still internationally considered part of Serbia, but had sort of actually on the ground broken away following its war with Milosevic and was a UN protectorate. So when I went through the airport in Pristina on that first trip, it was a UN stamp that was stamped in my passport. And I remember turning on my phone and getting a message saying, welcome to Monaco because they'd lent them the dialing code. Like, mad stuff like that. Yeah, they are very, very just interesting generally, right? But I would say probably towards the end of the 2010s, I started realizing that”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Connected from the world. So, for example, if a shipping company was to use a port on the northern side, they would then be banned from using a port on the southern side, which is a big problem because it's a big shipping hub. So yeah, sort of very kind of underdeveloped the first time I went there it was sort of quite a difficult place to get around because even sat navs and Google Maps didn't work there. He had to rely on like paper maps to get around. For the people who live there, it's incredibly difficult because they can't, you know, get Amazon deliveries, for example. There's all these kind of like things that you don't even think about when you're living in a fully functioning and recognized state that in the modern world we sort of come to rely on and they can't do, right? So that was the first place I went. And I also spent quite a lot of time in the Balkans generally the Balkans was”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unilaterally declared sovereignty and has been recognized by nobody apart from Turkey. Absolutely nobody. And that leaves it in this weird gray zone, right, where actually it's very easy to get in there. You either, if you want to fly, you have to go through Turkey because only Turkey recognizes it as an aviation destination. Or you can go over land. If you go into the south, you can go through this border that cuts right through the center of Nicosia, the capital or levia on the Turkish side it's called and it literally if you have a European passport or a British passport it takes about two minutes like you show your passport on one side and you walk through and you show it on the other side and suddenly you're in this completely different place it's like going in through a time warp almost I mean it's not just the language is different it's yeah because this this northern third of the island has been under embargo is because it's not recognized Greek side does everything it can to keep it disconnected”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About a million Brits go there every year. But they all go to the south, the Greek speaking part, which is internationally recognized. It's called the Republic of Cyprus. Member state fully kind of engaged and embedded. The world, in financial systems, but the north, the northern third of the island. It calls itself the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus. The island, yeah, it was split in 1974, but in 1983 this northern part.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This airline version of EZ arriving. And you can go to a lot of places in these hinterlands. So the first one that I was interested in was North Cyprus, which you could get to very cheaply. I think I paid about 15 quid first time I went there from Istanbul. And a lot of Brits, particularly no Cyprus very well as a holiday destination”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT