Long-term implications for business following the conflict in Ukraine

Interviewer: Today I'm interviewing Nick Butler. Visiting professor at King's College London, sometimes Group Vice President for Strategy and Policy Development at BP, and advisor to Gordon Brown when he was the UK's Prime Minister. Professor Butler's extended biography can be accessed via the link that accompanies this interview. Listeners are expected to have read Professor Butler's article on the 8th of March 2022 published in Project Syndicate, before listening to this interview. Professor Butler, thank you for sparing the time for this interview. In your article, you set out in broad terms what you think is going to happen over the next decade or two. An impossibly broad question, from the perspective of commercial companies and investors, who should do what? Prof. Butler: That's a very good question to start with. Who should do what? Well, first of all, I'd hope the Russians would withdraw from Ukraine. That would be a great first step. But for commercial companies, the starting point must now be that they're not going to be able to do business in Russia as they hoped to. I was involved when BP went into Russia and that was almost 20 years ago. We went in at a time when President Putin looked as if he was going to modernize the country and bring it to the wider world, rather than having it cut off as it had been under pressure from the communist regimes. But he's turned in a different direction. Western companies are now in the process of pulling out, BP, Shell, Exxon and many others.