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Is Donald Trump a Russian asset? And what exactly happened between Welsh Reform and Russia? To answer those questions and more, Luke Harding, senior foreign correspondent at the Guardian and author of Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest, sat down with our reporter Sian Norris to discuss his reporting on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. You can watch the podcast here, or read this shorter, edited extract from our conversation below. Sian Norris: You were in Ukraine at the start of the full-scale invasion. What was your assessment of those early days? Luke Harding: After my dark experience in Russia [in 2011, Harding became the first Western journalist to be expelled from since the fall of the USSR ], I felt, probably rightly, that I knew those guys. I understood that they don't think the way people in the West think they should think, as one diplomat put it to me. In other words, they think the West is an enemy, that Russia is encircled, that it's an eternal victim. There’s also a strong, if we want to be generous, restorationist drive to bring back the Russian Empire, which the Soviet Union enjoyed, in terms of a...

Trump seemed set to expand war on Iran. So why the hasty retreat from the UK? And what does it mean for the conflict?

Last week, in an openDemocracy column examining the US’s reliance on the B-1B strategic bombers stationed at the UK’s RAF Fairford, I argued that the thin-skinned Donald Trump was likely to escalate his failing war against Iran to avoid being seen to admit defeat. And so it proved. Hours after my article was published on Thursday 1 October, the Pentagon announced a substantial increase in its naval and Marine Corps forces in the Middle East – a move strongly supporting the view that Trump wants yet more war. That raises the question, then, why, on Sunday 4 October, did the Pentagon make the sudden and unexpected decision to withdraw all 12 of the US Air Force’s strategic B-1B bombers – essential to any new offensive – from their forward operating base in Fairford? Various reasons were offered, ranging from a nonsensical re-ordering of the US’s overseas bases to Trump saying there were “some threats”. The latter is a drastic understatement of the most plausible explanation: US intelligence learned that Iran has gained the ability to launch a serious armed drone attack on Fairford, much like the one Ukraine launched on Russian strategic bombers to great effect in June last year. That might seem far-fetched given the Ukrainian action took a year to prepare, but remember how frequently the Iranians have been able to catch the Israelis and the Americans off guard over the past seven months. It shouldn’t be surprising; the Iranian military has been preparing for war with the US for close to 40 years. The substantial reinforcements the US had just sent to the Middle East at the time of the hasty Fairford retreat will add 9,000 sailors and Marines to the US’s overall force in the region. They are deployed across an aircraft carrier strike group centred on the USS _Theodore Roosevelt_ and supported by destroyers and supply ships, along with an amphibious ready group, the 13th Marine Expeditionary Ready Group, on a flotilla headed by the USS _Makin Island,_ with two more amphibious warfare ships. These forces will arrive in place by early November, around the time of the US’s mid-term elections. They will join the two carrier strike groups and an amphibious warfare group already stationed there – the first time that three US carrier strike groups have been deployed to the Middle East at the same time for over 20 years. These fresh deployments meant any expectation of a peaceful settlement between Iran and the United States was highly unlikely. The war is going terribly for the US, causing oil and gas prices on world markets to increase, but any current negotiated end would largely be on Tehran’s terms, with Iran’s armed forces time-and-again showing themselves to be ahead of the Pentagon in their planned responses to the US-Israeli assault. In these circumstances, Trump’s circle of influence may view an all-out air assault on Iran, especially on its economic infrastructure, as a strong card to play, especially as its economy suffers substantially from the severe Western sanctions. The thinking is likely that it will take a sustained series of air attacks to force Tehran into any settlement agreeable to Trump. This is where the retreat from RAF Fairford is so significant, even if it seems strange that withdrawing bombers from a single overseas base can be so relevant to the outcome of a war. The Gloucestershire base would be essential for such air attacks. While the Pentagon’s three carrier strike groups are sufficiently well protected from Iranian attack, its land bases in or near the allied Gulf states have proved vulnerable on numerous occasions, much to its embarrassment – stationing the B-1Bs at these is not an option. And even if the bombers could attack Iran from the US, rather than Fairford, it would add many thousands of flight miles for every plane and bombing sortie, requiring a huge increase in air-to-air refuelling, increased crew fatigue and the much-increased risk of mistakes. In short, the sudden B-1B retreat from RAF Fairford does serious damage to Trump’s chances of the war with Iran ending on his terms. It also has a much wider significance. On Sunday 4 October 2026, the most powerful forward-based bomber force of the world’s only military superpower had to retreat thousands of miles from its station in a friendly state to its own safe territory at a few hours’ notice. That alone should make the date one for every self-respecting student of international security to remember.

Trump, Russian bribes, and Reform: What really happened?

Is Donald Trump a Russian asset? And what exactly happened between Welsh Reform and Russia? To answer those questions and more, Luke Harding, senior foreign correspondent at the Guardian and author of _Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest,_ sat down with our reporter Sian Norris to discuss his reporting on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. You can watch the podcast here, or read this shorter, edited extract from our conversation below. **Sian Norris:** **You were in Ukraine at the start of the full-scale invasion. What was your assessment of those early days?** **Luke Harding:** After my dark experience in Russia [in 2011, Harding became the first Western journalist to be expelled from since the fall of the USSR ], I felt, probably rightly, that I knew those guys. I understood that they don't think the way people in the West think they should think, as one diplomat put it to me. In other words, they think the West is an enemy, that Russia is encircled, that it's an eternal victim. There’s also a strong, if we want to be generous, restorationist drive to bring back the Russian Empire, which the Soviet Union enjoyed, in terms of a zone of influence stretching all the way across Central and Eastern Europe, encompassing the Baltics, Central Asia, Poland, Finland, and, and so on. So there was an ambitious neo-imperial project. The other thing is that Vladimir Putin, the older he gets, the more he becomes addicted to force solutions, to violent outcomes. By late 2021, I thought something evil was brewing. There was evidence which the Americans and the Brits were sharing with their counterparts, showing the deployment of forces, of tanks in Belarus and occupied Crimea, of blood banks. The mechanics of war were being assembled. I went back to Ukraine. I toured Mariupol. I went to what was then the frontline with Ukrainian soldiers. I was telling everyone, a bit like the Ancient Mariner, “It's coming. There's gonna be a hurricane.” I didn't quite know what form this storm would take, but I was certain that Putin was going to do something, at a time when a lot of people – including the heads of the French and German intelligence services, and some of my colleagues – thought, “Nah, it's bluff, it's theatre, it's threat.” Sure enough, when it began, I was in Kyiv; tanks rumbling towards the Ukrainian capital, explosions on the horizon, a sense of dread and panic, with millions of people trying to flee west to Poland. Russia has become the defining story of my professional life. I knew this was something I would continue to go at for as long as I could. And, five years later, I'm still doing it. Trump, Putin and the Betrayal of UkraineLuke Harding on Putin’s war, Biden’s hesitancy, Trump acting as a Russian asset, and Kremlin links to Brexit and Britain’s hard right.openDemocracySian Norris **I want to talk about the global response – we will come to Trump, but can we talk about where Joe Biden’s White House went wrong?** One thing that surprised me when I was doing the book was that a senior person told me that Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Biden disliked each other. You watch on TV, and they look close. Biden went to Kyiv in 2023 and was a big proponent of Ukraine's cause, talking about as long as it takes, battle for freedom, all of which is true. The problem was that Biden was essentially terrified of the prospect of nuclear escalation. I describe it as a kind of ghost in the White House cellar clanking its chains from the Cold War. He slow-rolled assistance to Ukraine, whether it was tanks, which Zelenskyy wanted, or fighter jets or sophisticated artillery systems. He also imposed endless red lines on the Ukrainians, telling them they couldn't really attack Russia at all. In Biden’s head, Russia and the Soviet Union were basically the same thing. And of course, they're not. Today's Russia is more like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It’s a sort of rogue state with a very powerful army and a charismatic dictator at the helm, but it doesn't have the might or the influence of the Soviet Union. It's a weaker power. But Biden treated it as a kind of global superpower, as indeed does Trump. **Let’s talk about Trump. Is he a Russian asset?** The answer broadly is yes. I was halfway through writing _Betrayal_ when the Alaska Summit took place in the summer of last year between Trump and Putin. There was one scene that is just so bizarre: basically Trump flies in on Air Force One, goes down the steps, walks onto the red carpet, and Putin appears at the doorway of his plane. Trump, lacking his usual kind of alpha male swagger, starts applauding. He sees Putin, he starts applauding. And whether you think he's an asset or not, you have to have some kind of working theory to explain this surreal behavior. I mean, it's odd. Putin is a mass murderer wanted by the International Criminal Court. The instigator of the biggest and deadliest war in Europe since 1945, and there is the president of the United States applauding. During the summit, Trump defers to Putin and flips American policy on Ukraine, saying, “No, we don't want a ceasefire,” which was previously the American position. “We need a comprehensive deal, and then the fighting can stop.” He adopts the Russian position. Everything he's done since returning to the White House, whether it's cutting direct military aid or tossing Zelenskyy out of the Oval Office during their famous encounter in February 2025, or just repeating Kremlin disinformation endlessly, has helped Russia. I think there are three factors which explain this, which are overlapping. One is ideological. There are a lot of people in, in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party who admire Russia and see it as a conservative, white, Christian, nationalist, family-orientated society which hates people like you and me, liberals, progressives, feminists, gay people. Then there's the whole strongman theory that Trump, when he sees Putin, envies Putin's freedom of action. Lastly, there's the whole story of kompromat. We know that the Czechoslovak secret police had been spying on Trump and his family since the 1970s when he married a woman from behind the Iron Curtain, and that their interest grew in the mid-1980s when Trump started expressing a desire to go into politics [and he was invited to Leningrad]. He made several repeat business trips, including in 2013 for the Miss Universe beauty pageant. Of course the KGB or FSB would be surveilling Trump, or indeed anyone staying in the penthouse suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel [in Moscow] if they're American, whether it's the Obamas or Hillary Clinton or whatever. There'll be tapes of Trump, including those shot privately in his bedroom. There will be an extensive personality profile. There'll be agent reports going back decades. The point is that Putin knows precisely what's in this file, and Trump knows that Putin knows. You can call him an asset or you can take it down a step in KGB parlance and call him a confidential contact or an agent of influence. It doesn't matter. He wants Russia to win. Even if you say, ‘no, that's too much’, it's clear he's entirely indifferent to what happens to Ukraine, to the fact that every day civilians are being killed by jet-powered drones and ballistic missiles. In Kyiv and Kharkiv, trade unions are fighting for Ukraine’s futureOn the bombed roof of a college in Kharkiv, we saw how trade unions support their members in times of waropenDemocracySian Norris **And what about our own branch of MAGA-style politics – and particularly the Nathan Gill case, with Reform’s former Welsh leader now serving a 10-year sentence for taking Russian bribes?** It's really a strange story. So Nathan Gill goes to Brussels as UKIP MEP and he's befriended by someone I know very well, a Ukrainian journalist and former foreign ministry press attaché called Oleg Voloshin. And Voloshin is way cleverer than Gill. Ebullient, with brilliant English, talking very fast, a good analyst, someone who made absolutely no secret of his pro-Russian views. Voloshin befriended Gill and then started paying him €5,000 wrapped in rubber bands in envelopes. The epigraph of my Gill chapter is something that Voloshin sent Gill by WhatsApp, saying: “I will write everything.” He was using Gill as a kind of ventriloquist dummy, writing speeches complaining about Ukraine's clampdown on pro-Russian media outlets, including the one he and his wife worked for, saying Ukraine was backsliding on democracy and advancing a “peace” agenda. This was Russian propaganda dressed up in the language of rights and transparency. And this went on for quite a long time. And it was a massive, multifarious espionage operation. And what's astonishing is, as a thought experiment, can you imagine if a Labour MP had taken £40-50,000 from Russian spies? This story would be running for months and months. Whereas Nigel Farage's guy is exposed as a traitor, and the story vanished because the right-wing media had no interest in pursuing it. Voloshin’s wife, Nadia, gave Farage a T-shirt that had Roger Moore on it as James Bond and the slogan ‘#Brexit, leave and let die’. Why is Farage getting naff T-shirts from Russian spies? I would just say, as a final thought: we haven't got to the bottom of Russia and Brexit because there's been no proper inquiry. We haven't got to the bottom of who is funding Reform. And I think it's crucial. It's crucial for our democracy.

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