Russia’s invasion of Ukraine comes nearly ten years to the day since I interviewed Hans Blix, the former United Nations weapons inspector who concluded that there were no real grounds to go to war with Iraq and that the conflict, bar removing Saddam, was a failure.
In the wide-ranging interview, he also went on to address the threat posed by Russia a decade ago. Looking to the future and the problems he could foresee back then, he expressed his doubts over how committed the United States would be to tackling the Russian threat or its actions.
Blix, who led the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in charge of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said that while the United States would keep its eyes on what it considered its major threat in the Far East and the China Seas, a deal had been struck that Europe would take care of Russia, which at the time was certainly in the thick of Europe’s affairs after all its laundered money was found washed up in Cyprus.
Back in 2012, Blix could see that Russia was going to pose a serious problem sooner or later but more to Europe than the United States due to Europe’s dependency on gas and other prime materials from Eastern Europe and Russia’s neighbours. He was found to have been right about weapons of mass destruction. His warning about Russia was correct as well.