00:00For the view from Estonia, a country that borders Russia, I sat down with Prime Minister Christian Mihail, affluent Russian
00:06speaker.
00:06I started by asking him why Vladimir Putin was agreeing to peace talks while bombing civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.
00:13It's like riding a bike, being a dictator, that when you stop, you will fall away.
00:18That is the same with Vladimir Putin.
00:21For example, everybody in Europe, and I always remind my colleagues that right now Putin has more men under the
00:27arms than at the start of the war.
00:29Now, if we would stop right now and he would stop right now killing women and children in Ukraine, then
00:36what to do with those guys?
00:38They need medical assistance, but they have to glorify this hero in Russia and they will come all over the
00:43Europe and so on.
00:44So we will have everybody problems in Russia and also domestic security problems.
00:48And the Americans, of course, are leading these peace talks.
00:51Do you think they're mindful of the fact that Ukraine cannot budge on their red lines?
00:56It used to be like a 28 points plan to the Thanksgiving.
01:00Right now, it's something all different already.
01:03Europe stepping up, having 90 billions, funding Ukraine, changed the game.
01:08But we don't have 90 billions.
01:10It's frozen.
01:11We will have, because meeting Ursula von der Leyen and Antonia Costa, they have different plans how to deliver the
01:18money.
01:18And just in Kiev, they also said that they have plans.
01:21What are these plans?
01:23They will tell.
01:24Are they going to work?
01:24I hope so, because to be honest, if Europe cannot make this kind of big decisions, which affect our security,
01:33then probably there will be many discussions about how Europe will decide things altogether.
01:38Will there be some kind of enhanced cooperation, how it will go?
01:41But are we on plan C now?
01:42Because, of course, we spent months talking as well about the frozen Russian assets.
01:45They're off the table now.
01:46The Russians have said so.
01:47So and so, because they are not off the table.
01:50They are still frozen, which is a good thing, because I can remember back to each six months we had
01:57to roll over the sanctions, say, keep them frozen.
02:00But right now they are frozen permanently, which is a good thing.
02:04But we need to deliver this 90 billion, we decided.
02:07And to be honest, we decided everybody was in this room.
02:11Orbán was in this room.
02:12Fico was in this room.
02:13Babis was in this room.
02:16They decided to opt out.
02:17But we still decided.
02:18So do you feel they're traitors, well, Hungary's traitor for doing this?
02:21For a long time, I don't understand Viktor Orbán's position, but he exactly knows that nobody understands his position to
02:27have this kind of idea that we should ask for European security from a dictator from Russia.
02:34And are you being tough enough on him in these meetings?
02:37Everybody's been tough enough on him in this meeting and outside these meetings.
02:41But going forward, how do you deal with these vetoes in the future?
02:44We'll see how it goes, because I have the feeling there's probably a couple of lines everybody is right now
02:49waiting in Europe.
02:50The first one is how Hungarian elections will go.
02:54Everybody knows that that can be a game changer.
02:57And the second thing is that there's also different kind of talks of how to change the designing mechanisms, because,
03:05for example, on the economic side, Mario Draghi and his report said that we need more central designing, more federalization.
03:12But on the security side, maybe some kind of enhanced cooperation to pull in Norway, UK, Canada, Iceland, these kind
03:20of countries, which we need.
03:21One final question on the Transatlantic Bond, which is, of course, very important for both Brussels and D.C., but
03:27it's going through a bit of a rift.
03:28How bad is it?
03:29Tough to say, because on the one side, which Trump had the message that Europe should invest more in security,
03:40because Europe is very free and wealthy neighborhood.
03:43And that's to my liking, to be honest, not the wording, but also the message that we should be able
03:49to keep ourselves the way we like it.
03:51Estonia is behaving accordingly, because we have this year, we have our defense expenditure 5.4% of GDP.
03:58This is very tough thing to achieve.
04:01This is not easy.
04:02But at the same time, I know that my grandchildren will live in peace, because our neighbor knows that we
04:08take ourselves also seriously.
04:09So if whole Europe would behave this way, I would say that we are better off in 5, 7, 10
04:15years.
04:17But at the same time, the rhetorics that Europe is decaying gold and so and so and not free, this
04:24is not serious, because if you look at different indexes, we are among the freest nations in the world.
04:30Thank you very much.
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