Russia, Ukraine, and the West ｜ Frederick Kagan ｜ EP 230 (Ys2zTL-b3eE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ys2zTL-b3eE

But now we need to talk about Vladimir Vladimir Putin, who was a KGB, a mid-ranked KGB thug, who claims never really to have believed in the communist claptrap that he was putting out, which wouldn’t make him unique among the Soviet operatrix, but who nevertheless obviously imbibed a sense of Soviet patriotism and some kind of belief in aspects of that ideology and has certainly accepted the Soviet theory that the world is out to get Russia and accepted that paranoia doctrine. Because I mean, as you know, Jordan, ideologies are large, sprawling and complex. People can believe in parts of them while rejecting other parts of them. I’m willing to believe that Putin was never a committed communist, per se. But it is apparent that Putin accepted the special destiny of the Soviet Union or Russia in the world to be a superpower and to have influence beyond the norm and accepted that the world was hostile and was seeking to prevent the Soviet Union or Russia from having that role. Hello, everyone. I’m pleased to have with me today Dr. Frederick W. Kagan. I reached out to some of my contacts who have some intellectual credibility and some political expertise to find out who could be contacted to provide an update for everyone, me included on the unfolding situation in Russia and Ukraine. And Dr. Frederick Kagan’s name popped up instantly. So I’ll give you a bit of a bio and then we’ll get right to the issue. What’s happening in the Ukraine? Dr. Frederick W. Kagan is author of the 2007 report, Choosing Victory, a plan for success in Iraq. He’s one of the intellectual architects of the surge strategy in Iraq. He’s the director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project and a former professor of military history at the US Military Academy at West Point. His books range from Lessons for a Long War, American Enterprise Institute Press 2010, co-authored with Thomas Donnelly, to The End of the Old Order, Napoleon and Europe, 1801 to 1805, De Capo Press 2006. He worked as an assistant professor of military history at West Point from 95 to 2001. And as an associate professor of military history from 2001 to 2005, Dr. Kagan holds a PhD in Russian and Soviet military history from Yale. So welcome. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. I very much appreciate it. I’m looking forward to this insofar as you can look forward to a discussion about such topics. We’ll get right to the heart of the matter. I guess in the most pointed manner possible, maybe you could give us some sense of what’s happening right now and then we’ll move to why and what we should do about it. But as far as you’re concerned, how should we be understanding the events that are unfolding in Ukraine? So several days ago, I confess I’ve lost all track of time. But several days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked and unjustified and illegal attack on Ukraine for the purpose of conquering it. He has conducted air and missile strikes against multiple targets across the entire country. And he has launched a ground invasion along multiple axes. His objective is very clearly to take control of the Ukrainian government in Kiev, but also take control of a lot of other territory in Ukraine. He obviously aims at a minimum to replace the pro-Western government headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s current president, and install some kind of governance structure that will bring Ukraine as he sees it back into the Russian fold. It’s not at all obvious to me or anyone really what kind of governance structure Putin has in mind at this point, but it is very clear that he intends to do this at the point at the muzzle of the tank and that he is willing to kill quite a lot of people and do quite a lot of damage in Ukraine in order to regain control of the country. And that is what is going on. In short, it’s part of a larger effort that Putin is engaged in to reconstitute the Soviet Union in some way, or possibly the Tsarist Empire in some way. The geographies of the Soviet Union and the Tsarist Empire had interesting overlaps and underlaps, and it’s important to keep in mind that Putin refers to both when he’s talking about what his aims are. And then just the last larger thing to zoom out from all of that, he’s been very explicit about his intention to destroy the NATO alliance, to break the ties between the United States and Europe, to change the world order fundamentally, and to return the United States to what he regards as its proper sphere, which is a Western hemispheric power. So let me ask you some questions about the way you answered that. So you started out by saying unprovoked, unwarranted, and illegal, and then you switched to, so I’d like to delve into that, why all of those. And then one might conclude that there’s territorial ambitions here in some sense, and he is moving troops into a large geographical area of some value merely because it’s a geographical area. But you also highlighted the importance of a shift in governance in Ukraine away from a pro-Western governance structure. And so how much of this should we assume is territorial in some sense, and how much of it is his desire to create a subordinate state? Is it a state subordinate to him, or is it more important to him? Do you think that it’s not pro-Western? His objective is very explicitly to change the political order in Ukraine. It’s not about territorial conquest per se. It’s about ending Ukraine’s ambitions to join, to be part of the West to begin with. But he has written lengthy articles, and he has given lengthy speeches explaining that he thinks that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent state, that it has no nationhood, a natural part of Russia that was reft from Russia by the stupid Soviets and then by what he has called the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, which was the fall of the Soviet Union. So it’s apparent from everything that he says that his ultimate objective is to regain full control over Ukraine in some way. The exact way in which he would govern a reconquered Ukraine is not yet clear, but that he is insisting that it be in Russia’s sphere of influence under Russia’s control is not in question. So let’s talk, let’s ask about this idea of the Russian sphere of influence, because one of the things that puzzles me in some sense is why isn’t Russia, why doesn’t Russia conceptualize itself as part of the West? Like why is Russia, why does Russia insist upon viewing itself as an entity independent of the West, especially given the fact that it isn’t exactly obvious that Putin is an admirer of what happened under Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union. And so I don’t understand why we have to have this notion that it’s Russia against the West, why he doesn’t trust the West, we don’t trust him. What’s the dynamic? I know they’re trying to find a fourth way or something like that philosophically in Russia. Why are we in this situation where Russia doesn’t conceptualize itself as part of the West? I love this question. This is great because you let me get in to do some of my nerdly historian stuff here. To begin with, Russia has never considered itself fully part of the West. You know, when Peter the Great broke a window into Europe in the magical phrase of Pushkin by establishing St. Petersburg, Peter attempted, who is one of Putin’s two great heroes in Russian and Soviet history, the other one being Stalin, Peter was trying to westernize Russia. And ever since then, there has been a debate within Russia about whether Russia really is Western or part of the West or whether it is something else. In the 19th century, this manifested itself particularly in the distinction, in the divide in Russian intelligentsia between Westerners and Slavophiles. And you had people like Leo Tolstoy arguing for the inherent, you know, Russian soul as being distinctive and unique. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars on, Russia politically has regarded itself as something more than European. And the acquisition of Russian, Asian territories, among other things, in the 19th century has led Russians to see themselves as European and also throughout the 19th century, obviously, the West was Europe. You know, the United States was not a big player in being the West. In the 20th century, it’s hard to know exactly where Russia would have gone, except that Bolshevism, which triumphed in 1917, was an explicit rejection of the Western political economic model and a move in a different, unique direction. So there was a narrative of Russian uniqueness and there is an inherent sort of Russian messianism. And the messianism actually goes all the way back to Ivan the Terrible. And I’m happy to talk about that if you’d love to delve into ancient history. But there are these strands in Russian thought going back centuries that Russia is a unique kind of place and that it must be a unique kind of place. And then, of course, as the Soviet Union was one of two global superpowers with the United States, when Putin is talking about the geostrategic calamity of the fall of the Soviet Union, what he really means is the loss of Russia’s privileged position as one of the two rulers of the world. And what he is aspiring to is reestablishing that. Oh, I’ve tried to understand this Russian exceptionalism. I mean, I’m an admirer of Russian literature and Solzhenitsyn certainly did feel that it would be appropriate for Russia if it could throw off the shackles of its Soviet totalitarianism to return to the Russian Orthodox tradition that undergirded the Tsarist regimes, let’s say. And he felt that a return to that would produce the foundation that would allow proper movement forward. But that still, to me, doesn’t exactly seem to justify claims that in some sense this is a non-Western enterprise. I mean, insofar as it’s grounded in Orthodox Christianity, it’s still grounded in Christianity, which makes it broadly Western. And I’ve tried to understand. But no, but not in the Russian historical conceptions, because the messianism that was established under the Ivan rulers was the notion of Moscow as the third Rome. And the argument was that first there was Rome and Christianity was founded there. Christianity moved to Constantinople. And then when Constantinople fell in 1453, the Russian Orthodox Church began to make the argument that the center of Christendom had moved to Moscow, which was the inheritor of the true faith. So in that sense, it is a line of Christianity that rejects sort of Rome as the center anymore, runs through Constantinople to Moscow and claims to be its own center. And so even in that sense, defining Christianity as a Western thing in this sense is problematic within the ideological framework that Putin and others operate in. So they see that as more embedded in the remnants of the Byzantine Empire and in the separation from Constantinople and Rome a very long time ago. And do you know anything about the relationship between the Orthodox Christian authority hierarchy in Russia and the hierarchies of authority in Rome? Are the relationships good or does the Orthodox hierarchy itself regard itself as something separate entirely and in opposition to the- Oh, it is separate. The Orthodox hierarchy in Russia does not regard itself as under the edict. No, but are the relationships friendly and is there communication or- There is communication and successor popes have reached out to patriarchs to talk with them. But one of the things that it’s important to understand is that Putin has carried on the tradition of the tsars of subordinating the Moscow Patriarchate to himself. And so the Moscow Patriarchate at this point is fundamentally an arm of the Russian government. And so he controls it de facto. It is not an independent of religious authority in reality, even though it is ostensibly. And so its relations with the Vatican or whatever Putin decides he’s willing to have to be at any given moment. I don’t think, I don’t understand there to be a particularly contentious relationship except- And it wasn’t with the Vatican actually. Most recently, if you want to get really nerdly on this, there was a big fight a couple of years ago because the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had been a component or subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate. The formal leader of all of the Orthodox communities is in Istanbul. And a few years ago, I forgot exactly when the Ukrainian Orthodox Church petitioned the Patriarch in Istanbul to grant it autocephaly to make it independent of the Moscow Patriarchate. And that was granted. And so the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has become an independent entity directly under the Constantinople, Istanbul Patriarch. And Putin literally resented that, hated it, attacked it. And it is one of his grievances that in fact that that occurred. That was not done by the Pope, that was done by the Patriarchate in Istanbul. People might be wondering why we’ve taken a detour into a religious direction, but the answer is we’re trying to sort out the issue of the degree to which Russia rightly regards itself as an autonomous community independent of the West. And in order to answer that question properly, you have to delve down to the bottom of the cultural separation and near the bottom is, well, the relative autonomy of the Orthodox Church. And I have talked to people in Washington who are associated with the Orthodox Church in Russia, and they do claim that Putin goes to confession and that there is some validity to his claims to have adopted some approximation of Orthodox Christianity. That obviously leaves open the issue of what the relationship is between the political power and the church power. It doesn’t seem to be entirely unidirectional. And one of the things that also is a mystery to me in relationship to that is that you can trace a fairly clear line of development of democratic thought in the West proper to Protestantism in particular, which is grounded in Christianity. And there’s a fair bit of emphasis on individual sovereignty in Orthodox Christianity, but there wasn’t a development into a democratic polity in the same way there was especially in Northern Europe. And I can’t really understand why that is. It doesn’t seem to be a doctrinal issue exactly that stems from the faith itself, but I don’t have any more. I’m going, I’m about to reach the limit of expertise that I’m comfortable talking about, but I will make the observation that one of the central characteristics of Protestantism is that apart from England, after Henry VIII, Protestantism was independent of state control. And even Catholicism was independent of state control for most of the history of the West after the fall of Rome. And so that, I think it’s very, that independence from state control has been an important element in the fact that Western religion, that Christianity in the West, it’s created space as it were, right, by creating this separation, this gap between church and state in which- At the level of detail, at the level of legislation and actual interactions between the church and the state. Yeah. And just the, I mean, this is why, of course, why Henry, one of the reasons Henry VIII took control of the, went to the Protestant Anglicanism and took control of his own church because he was aggravated to having the Pope have a say in anything. But in most other countries in Europe, the Pope continued to have a say in things for a long time and it created a little bit of space. That was never the case in Russia. We never had an independent patriarch who could create that space from the Tsars into which there, you know, something else could happen because it was always fundamentally, at least from the Muscovite period on, it was, the Orthodox church was always fundamentally under the control of the Tsar. And so it was a state religion and it was not, it just did not have the ability to create that kind of space. And then there’s a bunch of other socio-cultural reasons that, you know, as a historian, I love to nerd out about why the Russians didn’t develop Western traditions of personal liberty and independence and that kind of stuff. But this religious aspect has to do with state capture, state control of the church, I think, more than anything else. Right. So too much integration at the top, which is, that’s how Mussolini defined fascism in some sense, although he was thinking more about it in terms of collusion between the corporate world and the political world. But so you need autonomous organizations as close to the top as you can get. At least that’s how it’s worked in the West. Okay, so we’ve talked about why Russia might regard itself as somehow importantly separate. I mean, you could also say that about any number of countries within the West. It’s not like Germany and England are the same place, or France and England or France and the United States. We’ve been able to develop an integrated West to some degree that also allows for autonomy. So I still can’t exactly see why the Russians can’t be brought under that umbrella. Certainly the idea that they’ve lost their empire and they’ve lost their central place. There’s a, I don’t know if there’s a resentment that goes along with that or well, confusion about place. Yeah, before you even get there, I mean, look, you can’t understate the importance of the Bolshevik revolution in this regard, because the Romanov dynasty, especially in the 19th century, regarded itself as a part of Europe as well as something more. It regarded itself as European plus, and it regarded itself as a sort of a European superpower, but it regarded itself as part of the concert of Europe and a pillar of the concert of Europe. So the change comes when you have a revolutionary cabal take power that is dedicated to the destruction of all of the fundamental principles of the West. And that was the Bolshevik revolution. And it took control and it imposed its ideology by unbelievably brutal force on a population that didn’t start believing in it. And that ideology involved not only that every aspect of the socio-political economic structure of the West was evil, but that it was seeking to destroy Russia and that it was seeking to destroy this virtuous Bolshevik revolution. So we can talk about the historical Russian theories of encirclement and various other things, which frankly can be easily overstated when you go back into Russian history. But the Bolsheviks absolutely saw themselves as the kernel of a world revolution and assumed naturally that the entire capitalist world was seeking to destroy them. And to be fair to them, of course, the initial reaction of the Western powers was in fact to try to crush the Bolshevik revolution. And we did have American troops land in Russia during the civil war to try to help the White forces defeat the Bolsheviks. So there was an initial Western and the British and the French did too. So there was an initial sort of Western intervention against the Bolshevik revolution, which gave just a little bit of color to this. But the anti-Westernism and the notion of an encirclement and being a permanent war with the entire capitalist world is inherent to Marxism and Leninism. And then what did the Bolsheviks do? They systematically cut the Soviet society off from the world and took all control of communications, prevented people from leaving the Soviet Union. It’s one of the ways that you can tell a legitimate state from a prison with a government is does it allow its people freely to leave? And the Soviet Union did not. The Soviet Union, you know, the laws prevented people from leaving without special permissions and so on. And so it was a prison with a certain the certain hallmark of a totalitarian society is that you cannot it’s a prison, essentially. Exactly right. So that was so the Russians you think there’s inertia in some sense, even though Russia is no longer a Bolshevik state, you think there’s inertia in the distrust of the West that probably developed even before the Bolshevik revolution? Not. I don’t think that there was a huge amount of inertia along those lines among Russians themselves. But now we need to talk about Vladimir Vladimir Putin, who was a KGB, a mid-ranked KGB thug, who claims never really to have believed in the communist claptrap that he was putting out, which is which wouldn’t make him unique among the Soviet aparatchiki, but who nevertheless obviously imbibed a sense of Soviet patriotism and some kind of belief in aspects of that ideology and has certainly accepted the Soviet theory that the West, that the world is out to get Russia and accepted that paranoiac doctrine. Because I mean, as you as you know, Jordan, ideologies are large, sprawling and complex. People can believe in parts of them while rejecting other parts of them. I’m willing to believe that Putin was never a committed communist per se. But it is apparent that Putin accepted the special destiny of the Soviet Union or Russia in the world to be a superpower and to have influence beyond the norm and accepted that the world was hostile and was seeking to prevent the Soviet Union or Russia from having that role. Okay, so then is it the case then that this is part of the expression of political variability and opinion that you hear expressed in the United States right now? It was definitely the case. And correct me if I’m wrong. My understanding is that after the Soviet wall fell, that the West did take steps quite rapidly to try to consolidate some of the border territories between the former Soviet Union and the West and to invite the Baltic states and so forth into a much closer partnership with the West. And a lot of that happened quite quickly. And then Ukraine was sort of left in an in-between state for a long time. So it didn’t get moved west as fast as some of the other states did. Yeah, I mean, I’d like to clean up the history here because I think that the details matter. So the Soviet Union formally ends at the end of 1991. There is discussion about exactly what’s going to happen to Germany and about whether East Germany is going to become a part of NATO. And the Russians have a certain idea of what they were told. And we have a different idea of what they were told. There were no formal commitments one way or another, but it ended with Germany being reunited and then all of Germany remaining in NATO. There was no further expansion of NATO until 1997. Okay, so that’s very important. It is not like the year after the Soviet Union fell, NATO expanded. Nor is it the case that the messages that were going from the West to Russia were, we’re going to take all of the non-Russia parts of the former Soviet Union into NATO, but you Russians need to stay out. You’re the adversary. On the contrary, NATO reached out to Russia also. And NATO established the Partnership for Peace program. And Russia was a member of the Partnership for Peace program along with all of the other former Soviet states. And NATO did offer various forms of technical assistance. The US offered various forms of technical assistance to Russia in the 1990s, most of which the Russians rejected, some of which they accepted, which were very important. There was a lot of cooperation because it’s important to note that when Boris Yeltsin was president, he did not identify the West as the enemy. He sought to integrate into the West. He sought to westernize Russia and he did to a considerable extent. And he sought to democratize Russia and he did. And he had to fight off multiple efforts by the Communist Party of this former Soviet Union to regain power and reestablish communist rule. And he fought against that. And we did try to help him with that. But the first NATO expansion doesn’t happen until 1997. And it did not include the Baltic states. The Baltic states were admitted in, I think, 2003, 2004, I forgot the exact date in there, but they were not admitted in that first tranche. So the notion that we somehow just immediately started snapping up former Warsaw Pact states and then Baltic states into the alliance is false. Nor is it the case that that was initially done in a way, in the way that we expressed it to the Russians, as being aimed at threatening Russia. These states sought admission into the alliance. And look, we’ve got to recognize that the alliance was formed on a principle of an open door policy that is inherent, that is innate in the North Atlantic Charter that founded the alliance, that any state can request admission to the alliance. This is one of the things that Putin is demanding that NATO change. But that provision was not added or created after the end of the Cold War. It was created when the alliance was created. Now, obviously, the alliance doesn’t have to choose to admit any particular member. But we can now ask another question, which is why, what did we, the West, think that NATO was doing in the 90s? And why were we admitting these former Warsaw Pact and then the Baltic states to the alliance? Yes, we wanted to make sure that the alliance was to make sure that we had a buffer against the kind of threat the Soviets had brought into Central Europe. Because it’s important to keep in mind that the Cold War was shaped by the fact that whereas we, the United States and Britain, and then a restored France, as we liberated territories, we made them free. And we offered them the opportunity to join NATO, they did join NATO, which became a very rambunctious alliance, which periodically told the United States to pound sand, and which we did not run as an empire, Soviet rhetoric notwithstanding. And it was an alliance of free states. And it is a purely defensive alliance. There’s absolutely no offensive provision in the NATO charter anywhere. So that’s what we did. What did the Soviets do? Well, with the Red Army rolled into Eastern Europe, it did not liberate anybody. It drove off the German forces, and then it took control of those countries, installed puppet states, which were ruled from Moscow. How do we know that? Because there were periodic revolutions in the Eastern European states, which the United States and NATO did not foment and did not support, and which the Soviets crushed brutally with tanks repeatedly. So they established an empire in Eastern Europe, and they brought millions of forces into the heart of Europe and threatened to overrun all of Western Europe. And that was the threat against which NATO was formed. I tell you all of that to say that people talk about the buffer that the Russians feel that they need against the West. The NATO expansion was about giving the West a buffer from the threat that it had just managed to drive off of vast Soviet mechanized armies in the heart of Europe poised to overrun all of the West. So there was absolutely a security thing. NATO is a security alliance. And the big part of this was gaining a buffer for the West so that Europe could actually have peace and develop peacefully and without fear, which the threat of Soviet invasion throughout the Cold War had denied it. But in addition to that, the NATO accession was also meant to help bring those Warsaw Pact states and then the Baltic states into compliance with NATO standards, which is not just about military stuff. It’s also about legal moral ethical frameworks, that about how we fight wars, about how we treat our soldiers, about how the military interacts with the civilian population. It was meant to be part of an effort that was successful to help those countries develop healthy democracies and healthy free market economies. And the capacity for some autonomous function at the national level or for full autonomous function at the national level. Right, complete, complete, so we don’t control them. Right. So you’re laying out an argument essentially that claims that to view this as a dual, a duopoly, let’s say it’s the US and its satellites against Russia and its satellites, that’s a profound misapprehension of the historical reality. Because it wasn’t Russia and its satellites, it was the Soviet Union, which was a bloc. And it’s America with its allies, so America sits as first among equals, let’s say something like that, in a voluntary organization that’s predicated on the preservation of freedom at the political level and at the economic level. And if we want evidence for that, we look at the response of, well, the wall in Berlin, for example, to take not the least of the examples, but the crushing of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and almost Poland when the Soviet Union did fall, and look at the response to any manifestation of genuine autonomy on the part of the Soviets. So okay, well, we still have a question that’s lurking constantly in the background, it’s like, why in the world would the Russians, the Russians are prone to reject an invitation to become part of the sovereign voluntary association of Western states? For some reason, they distrust the West, we’ve talked about that, they regard themselves as having an autonomous destiny, but hypothetically that could have still happened. So let’s take a slightly different tack. Let’s imagine we’re trying to figure out what did we do wrong in negotiating with the Russians in the last 20 years? And what did the Russians do wrong in conceptualizing themselves and then negotiating with us? So let’s start with us, maybe, like, we’re in this situation. Well, hang on, hang on. Before we do that, there’s a seat change that happens in Russia when Putin takes power, because Yeltsin had been one thing, and then Putin is something else entirely. And Putin had become an anti-communist in the 1990s, and he helped Yeltsin fight off the attempts of the communists to regain power. And initially, I think, by the way, Putin identified himself as a Democrat, and someone who was in favor of democracy, which worked for him as long as he was actually winning elections handily and didn’t have to rig them. And he didn’t have to rig the first few elections very much, and he could allow them to be relatively free because he was popular. But it’s Putin who brought a new approach to this, and it’s Putin who brought a real sense of grievance and anger. And the grievance was about the fall from greatness of the Soviet Union. Now, the one thing that it is necessary to have in people’s minds here, the 1990s was a horrific time for Russians. Okay, I want to set aside the question of our responsibility or what we did or couldn’t have done, because the truth is, I will assert, and I would be happy to argue with anybody about that this wasn’t our fault, and there wasn’t much we could have done about it, frankly, anyway. Are you talking about the 90s specifically? About the 90s, yeah. Yes, yes. Well, yeah, the 90s were a catastrophe. My son-in-law, former son-in-law, was Russian, and he said often when he went to school, him and his close relatives who were also attending school weren’t necessarily sure they were going to come home alive through much of the early 90s. It was crazy. I was there in 1995 doing research in the Russian archives, and the ruble dropped from $3,000tothedollarto$5,000 to the dollar in the five weeks that I was there doing research one time. I went to the first McDonald’s on Trotskaya Square as it opened, and it was an amazing thing. So I saw a little bit, I mean, I was standing around, there were guards with AK-47s guarding vegetable markets as I would walk by them. Why was that going on? Because everybody was getting cuts and their rival gangs were controlling every aspect of it, and it was completely insane it was an unbelievable, it was a horrible period for Russians to live through, and it was an unbelievable humiliation for someone like Putin who believes in Russia, that Russia should be one of the world’s two superpowers to have gone through that experience. So Yeltsin tried to lead his country through that with its democracy intact, and he succeeded until Putin destroyed it. Yeltsin was never able to fix the economy really. So Putin comes in with a deep sense of grievance and burning with humiliation at what had happened to the Russians in the 90s, and he needed an explanation that came readily to hand for why that had happened. And on the one hand he blamed Gorbachev for surrendering instead of fighting, and he bitterly resents the fact that Gorbachev didn’t kill as many millions of people as he needed to just to stay in power, but he also blamed the West in many respects, mostly unfairly honestly, for Russia’s humiliation. And then we had a narrative rapidly emerge in the early Putin years that not only had the West contributed to Russia’s humiliation in this way and mistreated Russia in various ways in the 90s, but now the West was trying to prevent Russia, as he kept saying, from rising from its knees, and that the West was trying to keep Russia down. And he began to elaborate a series of narratives which attributed all kinds of malevolence and frankly much more thinking and coherence in Western policies than has ever existed in that to us, and also made the mistake that most humans make of solipsism, of imagining that he was at the center of everybody’s thought, and that everything that we were doing in the world was aimed at Russia in some way. And so he created this narrative which he has been pumping into the Russian population ever since. Well when things are going chaotically wrong, one of the simplest things to do always is to identify the, make a unitary assumption of cause and to make it external. Of course. It’s convenient in 50 ways. First of all, it gives you an enemy to unite against. It gives you an enemy to talk about politically. It solves your conscience. It’s also very simple because the reason that the former Soviet Union was so catastrophically chaotic in the 1990s, the reasons for that are unbelievably complicated and detailed. And they go all the way from the highest levels of government to the nature of arrangements within families. The whole society was authoritarian for what, 70 years? Murderously authoritarian. And to unravel that and to take responsibility for it and to figure out how to fix it is way harder than to blame almost all of it on an external enemy. Especially when you’re also motivated, as you said, by this sense of thwarted destiny, which we could identify. I mean in the West we do regard a certain degree of patriotism as noble and and justifiable. And you can see how that under some conditions, noble and justifiable motivation would get hijacked if there was also reason to externalize blame for conditions for resentment generated by genuine chaos. Right. I mean, look, in addition to all the other factors you listed, we need to keep in mind how enormous was the task of trying to convert the Soviet economy to a free market. Basically, basically, you know, industrialization in Russia fundamentally happened under the Soviets. And it was done to a planned centralized economy. So Russia is still littered today with what are called monotones. There are towns of half a million people that exist around a single huge factory in which 75 or 100,000 people work. That was the Soviet model. The task of taking an economy built like that and turning it into a free market economy would have been unbelievably daunting with the best of the will in the world. And unfortunately, Yeltsin was preoccupied with the fight against the communists and keeping Russia democratic. I don’t know whether he ever would have been able to undertake that mission successfully anyway of marketizing the Russian economy, but he wasn’t even able to concentrate on it. Well, that’s and as you point out, that’s not merely a conceptual issue. Part of the reason that free market frameworks work in the West is because the actual industries and micro industries and small shops are all autonomous and distributed. And so the legal structure matches the actual infrastructure, whereas in the Soviet Union, as you said, because it was centralized, there’s these massive entities that are not not distributed or autonomous in any sense at all. And just changing the legal framework doesn’t change that in the least. Exactly. Exactly. So it was it was a huge task. And all of this leads to the externalization of grievance and the narrow and the feeding of a grievance narrative that blames the West and then and then articulates this theory that the West is focused on preventing Russia from attaining great natural position of greatness in the world and so on. And then Putin, who is it was a spymaster. He wasn’t a terribly good one with the KGB, but he was a spymaster begins and launches on a new form of conflict, which we now call hybrid war. I’m sorry, the phrase is hybrid, hybrid, hybrid war. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A phrase that’s very complicated to talk about and understand, but that includes information operations and information warfare that can best be characterized by by the term gaslighting. And this is the stock and trade of the Russian hybrid warfare effort. There’s a Soviet concept and there was a terrific paper at the Institute for the Study of War that my wife, Kim, founded and runs and that I where I work with the Russia team there. But there was a terrific paper that they published a few years ago by a woman named Maria Snagovaya on Russian reflexive control, a Soviet reflexive control doctrine, because the Soviet it was Soviet theorists who articulated this framework in the 50s or 60s. I don’t remember that Putin and his goons have taken and perfected reflexive control as the art of creating a world, a picture of the world in your adversary’s mind of such a fashion that your adversary voluntarily chooses the course of action that you desire him to choose, thinking that it is in his in in his best interest. That’s a very complicated way of saying gaslighting, right? You create a false universe for the adversary to live in. And in that universe, the adversary will naturally do what you want him to do. This is what the Russians have been trying to do. Okay, and what? Okay, so I have two questions about that. The first is, as soon as anything like that is put forth, it instantly sounds like a conspiracy theory. And I’m not saying that you’re engaging conspiracy theories, but that’s the reflexive response. So what’s the evidence in your estimate? And then what’s the narrative they’re trying to create? How effective has that been? And while we already understand to some degree why, if the West is being conceptualized as an enemy responsible for Russian chaos, for keeping the Russians down, and for encircling them, depriving them of their just destiny, then we know the motive. There’s others, but that’s not a bad core motive. What’s the warfare aimed at? And what’s the evidence that this is occurring? And how and where and how are we subject to it? All of that. So right, as soon as you’re operating in the information space, and as soon as you’re dealing with this kind of psychological warfare and stuff, I will tell you there is a mountain of evidence that this is going on, and it’s deliberate, and lots of people can argue with that. And certainly we can argue about the specifics. But the evidence is, first of all, this is a published Soviet doctrine, which we can read. You can read this, where this is articulated. And then there is Russian doctrine on warfare and on hybrid warfare that also explicitly lays out this framework. So the barrier to entry here is reading Russian. If you can read Russian, then you can read official Russian doctrine and documents laying out the theory of hybrid warfare and how to conduct it. Now, there’s one trick in the way that they tend to articulate this most clearly. And we’ve written about this as a terrific paper. I would commend to your attention by Mason Clark, the Russia team lead at the Institute for the Study of War on Russian hybrid warfare, and particularly lessons from Syria, where they use this approach and then wrote about it. And so we have writings from actually the guys who are commanding the war against Ukraine right now. The commander of the Southern Military District, General Dvornikov, was a commander in Syria and wrote articulately about what he did there. The commander of the Western Military District, Zhuravle, is another Syria alum and wrote about his experiences there. So they’re quite overt about this stuff. The only trick is a lot of the time they describe hybrid warfare as they claim we do it to them. And they describe their activities as defensive against our own hybrid warfare. And that we initiated this hybrid war and they are defending against it. And then in that way, they describe exactly what they have been doing. And so you can see them talking about what they think it is and then you can see specific actions they take. You can see Russian bot farms that we know work to manipulate our social media and that has been revealed. Well, talk about that in some detail. So what bot farm, what is that exactly? How widespread is it? What is it doing and where? So this is where you take computer programs that masquerade as Twitter accounts, for example, and they do lots of different things. Sometimes they will just either tweet out or otherwise message out sort of spam in such a volume as to drown out other voices. But a lot of the time, what they do is they will repeat Russian messages from lots of different accounts that appear to be independent accounts. So they seem to be corroboration of the Russian narrative, but they’re actually all computer programs that are not even humans and they’re controlled by Russia. It’s a mimicking of a bottom-up process. Right. I’m not the expert on this. Lots of people on both sides of the political aisle have written about this. There’s a lot of technical detail about this and you can find a lot of this. This is not questionable. That this is going on is not in question. Any idea how extensive it is? If you’re on Twitter, do you have any sense of what proportion of responses that you might be subject to would be? I don’t know. One of the things that’s happened is we got wise to this after the, especially after the 2016 election when we, the US became, and I don’t want to get into that whole election controversy. There are aspects of what was going on that are not in question, including that there were Russian bot farms sending messages and that they were exposed and the cyber details are clear of what they were and so on. As we became aware of that activity with the US, the social media companies like Twitter and others started to get very aggressive about developing algorithms to detect when something was a bot and shut them down. I believe that we’re probably subjected to a lot less of this than we were a few years ago because, and again, I don’t want to get into the issues of social media blocking individual humans because that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about these are machines and it is possible to detect that something is a machine and not a human and then to shut it down. That’s one of the things that’s been going on. The social media companies have been doing good work in trying to reduce the number of these things and fight them. I think you’re probably subjected to less of it now than you were in a few years ago, but it’s still out there. It’s still going on. Okay. Let’s tie the hybrid warfare back in. What’s the goal of the hybrid warfare as far as you’re concerned? The goal of the hybrid warfare has been to try to achieve Putin’s objectives without having to do what he’s doing in Ukraine right now because hybrid warfare is in part a poor man’s game. We talked about the economic devastation that Russia faced in the 90s. Putin inherited that. Putin has never fixed the Russian economy. The Russian economy is still deeply and fundamentally dysfunctional. Oscillations in energy prices have helped him. Various other things that he’s done have helped him gain enough money to be able to rebuild his military to some extent, but his military until very recently was simply not capable of posing a serious conventional threat to NATO or hoping plausibly to defend against NATO if the Russians began a war and NATO seriously leaned into it. The hybrid warfare approach was designed to help him achieve victories in reconstituting Soviet power one way or another without having to fight wars. It worked pretty well in some important ways, but it reached limits. What ways did it work, do you think? The classic example of hybrid warfare, if you like, was the little, remember the little green men who turned up in Crimea in 2014 and the claims that the Russians were not Russian soldiers. They were local Crimeans who were fed up with Ukrainian, alleged Ukrainian oppression and so forth. It became rapidly apparent that they were in fact Russian special forces troops and that the Russians did in fact have troops in Ukraine, but even that thinnest veneer of implausible deniability led to the following consequence. It led to the establishment by Germany and France with Russia and Ukraine of the Minsk Accords that established the air quotes ceasefire in Ukraine that held ostensibly from 2015 until Putin just broke it by invading. Here’s a fascinating thing about the Minsk Accords. Russia is a party to the Minsk Accords as a mediator. What? Russia is a party to the Minsk Accords as a mediator. Nowhere in the Minsk Accords is there a recognition of the fact that it’s Russian forces in Ukraine that the proxy republics that Putin just recognized their independence are Russian controlled that the chain of command of the forces of those proxies ran to the eighth combined arms army which is Russia’s headquarters in Rostov-on-Don. Nowhere in the Minsk Accords is that recognized and so you think that was made plausible rendered plausible possible even by a successful disinformation or propaganda campaign? Yep because the Russian approach again and all of this just changed so I mean there’s a whole other inflection that we need to talk about about the change that’s just occurred but the Russian approach before this invasion had been to use disinformation misinformation and sometimes telling the truth in weird ways to generate the following effect who really knows. Mm-hmm that’s been the standard that has been sufficient for Putin a high percentage of the time and unfortunately the rising skepticism and mistrust within our own society has been made that pushing a rock downhill. We so mistrust each other at this point that we’re inclined to say well who really knows and so when the Russians are creating these opportunities to say well who really knows. The point of that is so that we’ll say well who really knows so why should we get involved in this so that instead of reacting to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 which is what actually happened the Russian military invaded Ukraine in 2014 it seized and then annexed Ukrainian territory in 2014 and then it continued a war in Ukraine from 2014 to the present the Russian military was doing a lot of that instead of that we’ve been talking about ceasefire. I have a sour joke for you Jordan I’ve used this joke right up until the invasion what do you call it when the armored mechanized artillery missile aircraft naval and special forces troops of two countries fight each other in Ukraine we call it a ceasefire because that’s what had been going on. By sowing chaos and confusion at the level of information you sap the moral unity of the people that you’re attacking so they can’t unite to to justify to themselves even a singular and effective response. What you do is you isolate the victim which is what the Russians have done or had done they were isolated they isolated Ukraine so that instead of seeing Ukraine simply as the victim of western of a Russian invasion in 2014 which is what happened in the west we’ve had a lot of conversations about well the are the Ukrainians living up to their obligations under Minsk well are the Ukrainians doing enough here and there you get in rapidly into this you know well faults on both sides kind of thing which paralyzes western response there aren’t faults on both sides faults on one side here there are faults on the side of the of the Russians who invaded in 2014 and have invaded again that’s so that’s the consequence of an injudicious even-handedness right exactly that’s a tough one because there’s a strong moral impulse to even-handedness and also to self-correction right to examine yourself for your own faults which we seem to be more than good enough in some sense in the west yeah but that can be capitalized on it it’s an interesting moral conundrum isn’t it because there’s a time for decisive action that requires a certain level of moral certainty and that means you’re not even you’re not even-handed under those conditions so hmm so okay so so now let me ask you another question that’s associated perhaps on with the disinformation front there are many people around the world in the west as well claiming that in some real sense Ukraine isn’t an independent state it’s part of Russia it has been historically it’s not Germany it’s not a country with a clear like historical existence it’s a country that’s been made up of people and so so so what what do you so you’re obviously not very happy with that argument but that is being made continually and so I know I know I’m laughing because you you mentioned Germany and the natural you know of that of course Germany is naturally a country really that right right that wasn’t that wasn’t a natural thought until 1871 right right about how difficult was for those countries we think were all who are forever around to unify themselves exactly yeah so and look so and and you know there was historically a lot of argument about exactly what Germany was and then of course Hitler had a you mean like World War II right and then of course Hitler had a view of what Germany included and it included things like Austria and Czechoslovakia and you know we we persuaded the Germans that that was not the case after some considerable effort the analogy is apt because you can look at Austrians and say well they’re Germans well they speak German they’re Catholics the dominant religion in Germany is Protestantism Austrians are largely Catholic you can tell when you get into Austria and southern Germany by the way when the when the greeting changes from Guten tag to grus got rich there’s also no shortage of dialectical variation across the hypothetically unified German language exactly like extreme dialectical variation exactly right so we we’ve got to not just imagine that the blocks that were used to in Europe are were always that way or have been for centuries because that’s not true either so then how do we reliably identify when there is a country well okay let me come back to that because there’s a straightforward answer to that but the it was the Kenyan president or prime minister whom I can’t believe I’m quoting approvingly because I rarely approve of anything that he has to say but who put this very well recently in a very very strong statement that look if we want to get into the business of talking about how it should be the case that all peoples who identify ethnically with other people should be unified in country in single states then you were signing the world up for global war on a on a Hobbesian scale of a sort that we have never seen because look at look at Africa look at Asia look at Canada look well I’ll leave that to you Jordan but how many countries in the world actually are drawn that way virtually right so virtually right so okay so the fundamental point here is is that mere linguistic historical similarity is not a sufficient condition for presuming a superordinate autonomy exactly and so we have other mechanisms we do to decide what a country is and they’re very straightforward mechanisms we live in a world where there’s a there is a united nations and there is a body of states and the community of states recognizes a new member by recognizing it and we say we recognize you as an independent state and we establish diplomatic relations with them and we give them a seat in the united nations and then they are a state with all of the rights that any other state has we did that with all of the states of the former soviet union and Russia signed up to all of that when did that happen in 1991 in 1991 1992 all of the states all of the former soviet states including Russia were recognized as independent states established diplomatic relations with the world that’s the only standard there is okay so that goes back to your initial claim that what Putin is doing was you said unprovoked unwarranted and illegal so now we’ve established the illegality element of that it’s like he had signed agreements or Russia had signed agreements stating that as far as they were concerned Ukraine was a country among other countries and more than that they did something even more because when the soviet union fell parts of its nuclear arsenal were still in three other countries in Belarus Ukraine and Kazakhstan and we worked very hard to persuade those countries we the United States and Great Britain worked very hard to persuade those countries to give their nuclear arsenals back to Russia because we were very concerned about the threat of nuclear proliferation so we pressed and they did right right in return for that in 1994 we Britain and Russia signed an agreement with Ukraine committing to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine as it was recognized at the time in return for Ukraine handing back those nuclear weapons the Russians signed that treaty the Russians have just violated a treaty that they specifically signed with Ukraine recognizing it in its territorial integrity as it was in 1994 who who signed that on Russia’s behalf Yeltsin that was Yeltsin okay so Putin hypothetically doesn’t feel that he’s bound by that agreement but within the framework of international law he is he is I mean he can regard himself however he wants to but he is so not only did Russia recognize Ukraine as a country but it specifically recognized Ukraine in the borders that it had in 1994 okay so all right so let’s go to unprovoked now here’s a mystery this could have happened at any time over the last 20 years or any time into the future over the next 20 years but it happened now and there are accusations of all sorts flying around on the political front in the west about why now as far as you’re concerned why now and and is there a lesson in the fact that it’s now for us so let me i’ll go into this a little deeper i read a couple of papers by Victor Davis Hansen yesterday and he made a claim that was approximately the following which is that the the democrats for example under Obama talked about Russia in a negative way but really didn’t do anything about Russia whereas Trump gave Putin flattery in some sense but actually did something about the potential danger they posed and i’m not claiming that that’s a valid argument or an invalid argument it’s just something that i read when i was trying to prepare for this why now because it is being politicized like mad in in the west we think well Putin is taking advantage of our perceived weakness and there’s partisan reasons for that and maybe there’s deeper philosophical reasons for that those need to be separated as far as you’re concerned why now and then we do need to get to also maybe why we how we stepped into this even if it was only 20 percent our fault or two percent i don’t care what did we do wrong that made this happen and happen now so look the question to the answer the question why now is very is very hard i think and i this is something that i’m also wrestling with because the what do we what we need to explain is the invasion that Putin has been carrying forward operations to regain control of Ukraine since 2014 he has been pursuing hybrid warfare approaches pursuing informational operation approaches in Ukraine he’s put various forms of military pressure on Ukraine from his occupied territories so it’s not exactly now this is actually an extension of a process that’s been occurring for a long time it’s an inflection in that process now so what we need to explain this particular inflection which is a huge inflection but that’s actually rather hard to be honest with and it’s there’s no simple partisan or straightforward explanation to why Putin decided that he needed to invade now which is the question that is that preoccupies me as someone who’s focused on Putin’s calculus well the best explanation i’ve heard so far and it goes along with this gradualist idea in some sense is that part of what Putin did while he was attempting to wrest back control of Ukraine let’s say is build a military presence on the border yeah and then the fact that you’ve done that actually changes the situation substantially if you’re going to build if you’re much more likely to shoot someone with a gun if you happen to be pointing holding it and pointing it at them as a precursor and so you could see how a gradualist approach and his initial idea might have just been well we’ll build up the military to put even more pressure on the west and to continue this gradualist approach but once it’s there the situation changes and then it could be in some sense relatively small and relatively random events that precipitate it at any given moment so i think it’s quite possible that something like that occurred um there’s a lot of technical details about so i i want to say on the air to you what i’ve been saying to other people that i talked to i got this wrong okay we we made a forecast i and the isw russia team made a forecast beginning in uh november and then carrying forward until very recently that putin would not launch this huge invasion and we we were wrong obviously he did we were wrong obviously he did and and i you know as a matter of analytical integrity i feel it necessary to say to people explicitly yes we were wrong in our forecast and we’ve been spent a lot of time trying to understand and think about why we were wrong and what lessons we can learn from that um here’s one of the reasons why we were wrong or let me say this is one of the reasons why we forecast that he would not do this because when you look actually at the technical details of the way that he arrayed his forces around ukraine we were watching that and saying this is going to stink this military operation that he’s conducting he’s not well set up to do this surely his professional military officers are going to tell him that this is a bad idea and it turns out that we were wrong that he would be persuaded by that reality but we were right that it was a bad idea because the problems that he’s now encountering we actually did predict that he would have the problems that he’s now encountering if he conducted this operation okay so it isn’t obvious what precipitated this and there isn’t an obvious moral to derive from the story there but yeah there are errors in it and okay sorry go ahead we’ll get to errors but i you know before we get to our own errors because you know i’ve got to tell you jordan that’s one of my one of the things that i’m very focused on is you need to start by blaming the enemy for things the enemy does i’m happy to talk about what our responsibilities are here but this was all putin’s decision and i’m actually more interested in in some sense now what our responsibilities are going forward okay right so so because that’s the crucial issue but and i’d like to hear i when i commented about mistakes then i was thinking you said his troops were badly positioned his military machine was badly positioned and so that might mean he was setting it up for other reasons but defaulted to this right why did that what is the situation he’s in now because well he’s not finding allies at that rapid a rate let’s say no no he’s not finding really allies at all look the first thing i want to say is i think it’s quite possible that he decided to launch this invasion because the intent of the mobilization i think it is possible the intent of the mobilization was to intimidate both the ukrainians and the west into surrendering without having to invade and that he he therefore you know allowed his military guys to set up a deployment that didn’t make sense for an invasion but was great for threatening one of the things that happened at the biden administration deserves a lot of credit for at least one thing that it’s done actually for a few things that it’s done deserves some criticism for other things but for the first time in history that i’m aware of the biden administration fought a counter hybrid warfare campaign back against the russians and as they became as the biden administration became aware of russian preparations to conduct a coup d’etat in kiev they told the ukrainians about it and they told the world about it as they became aware of multiple russian preparations to conduct preparations to conduct false flag attacks or stage ukrainian provocations or various other things that would have given putin informational cover and created a who really knows effect in the minds of people in the west they blew the biden administration blew every one of those operations okay so why is that a hybrid warfare response on on biden’s part and not just not just i don’t mean just but not just the utility of straightforwardness and honesty as a response to disinformation and propaganda it’s both or is that is it’s okay it’s both why both we can wage war with the truth because we’re not trying to lie putin is trying to create a false universe putin is trying to create a fictitious universe and the biden administration punctured that i’m calling it hybrid warfare because they reacted to first of all putin engaged in violence at which makes it you know politically motivated violence which makes it warfare and he his guys were conducting deliberate information campaigns to support specific preparations for military activities and the biden administration engaged game for game with them on a very tactical level so it wasn’t just sort of blanket telling the truth it was finding strategic yeah well strategic and tactical blowing all of this formed yeah and you can by the way see i have a little bit of artifact that suggests that this was true because putin whole held one of his weirdly publicly staged you know national security council meetings on monday and one of the things that happened was he absolutely humiliated the guy who is the head of his foreign intelligence agency that would have been responsible for a lot of these operations i mean he humiliated the guy in public in a way that we’ve never seen him do before and i think he probably was genuinely angry that the guy had allowed the biden administration to get inside all of these operations and i i’m hypothesizing that putin decided in the face of having all of this cover blown decided that he was just going to go for it instead of waiting for this guy nut ishkin or somebody else to get something putin just said okay screw it we’ve got the forces i’m tired of this we’re just going to do this and i don’t care that we don’t have the informational cover so frustration and anger in response possibly to the success of the bite administration’s sort of defeating all the informational stuff hmm okay okay well that’s an that’s an interesting uh explanation for a tipping point and certainly not an expected one so so you’ve covered unprovoked unwarranted and illegal i would say and we’ve covered territorial ambitions or political ambitions and we’ve talked a lot about reconstituting the soviet empire let’s say or something approximating that do you think it’s we’re so so let’s switch to something else is what he’s how do you assess the success of what he’s doing from a military and a political perspective has he miscalculated uh what what’s the situation on the ground in the ukraine how are the ukrainians resisting how are how are other countries responding like what’s the situation in your estimation so i’m going to lead by saying uh the russia you know the russian military is so much stronger than the than the ukrainian military writ large that the odds remain high that the russian military will be able ultimately to overwhelm the ukrainian defenses and take control of kiev and so forth i don’t want to offer an optimistic take here because we’re still early days in this war and the power imbalance is just so great but that having been said i would never have expected to be sitting here four days into the russian military operation with russian troops just messing around on the outskirts of kiev just finally getting into harkiv and struggling all up and down them i would never have expected that to happen except that we we did expect it to be a mess when they tried to do an invasion with the force packages that they had put together especially those that are attacking kiev and uh and harkiv so a few things have gone on one is this was a stupid way of of preparing for an invasion if you were serious about an invasion i give you all wait yeah give some details i think that’d be interesting so here’s the thing um mechanized maneuver warfare is very complicated undertaking logistically well yes logistically but even more than that in terms of command and control um when you are a commander and you’ve got multiple battalions mechanized battalions moving down multiple axes of advance sort of driving down different roads to different targets rapidly keeping track of all of that is very hard understanding what they’re doing is very hard figuring out how to support them is very hard they need artillery support they need air support they do need logistics support you need to tell them what to do as they get the particular or as they run into problems it’s a lot of burden on a commander to keep track of a lot of subordinates so the solution for as long as there’s been mechanized warfare is that you build forces where you never have more than two or three or maximum four direct subordinate units like that so battalions get grouped into regiments or brigades which are at the same echelon uh in an organizational structure and there will be not more than than for maneuvering battalions or mechanized battalions within a mechanized regiment or a mechanized brigade and then brigades and regiments get grouped into divisions so there’s not going to be more than three or four brigades or regiments in a division and then the divisions are grouped into larger organizations and this is the way the u.s military is organized and it’s the way the russian military is organized formally but the weird thing is that when they put these masses of forces into belarus and into western russia that are now attacking keith and when they built up forces opposite kharkiv they didn’t move entire regiments or brigades let alone entire divisions they pulled individual battalion what they call battalion tactical groups btgs they pulled individual btgs from all across russia the guys in belarus actually came from out of 10 or 15 different regiments and brigades in the russian far east and did they do that to not weaken those divisions and brigades where they were already located no no because they’re most of this all the stuff in belarus is coming in a place where the russians don’t need to worry about their chinese are not invading the russian far east so the russians could have taken whole regiments or brigades from the far east if they’d wanted to and they didn’t that there are various i can offer various technical explanations for why they might not have but the point is that they they put together what we’re calling just sort of collection of cats and dogs of battalions wung together from a whole bunch of other parent units not organized coherently even on the spot as far as we can tell into clear regiment brigade structures and all like that and then they just sort of told them go down you know drive down the road and go take keith okay that gets you the kind of mess that they have now where they try to they you know individual battalion tactical groups drive down and then they get stopped but then there’s not a good coordination so that there’s not an immediate other battalion that can take over and flank and keep the attack moving there are all kinds of ways of dealing with the defenses the ukrainians are putting up and the russians are not using them and i i think that that has a lot to do with the organization of the russian forces that is just it was just crazy as an organization for a mechanized operation like this and then they wouldn’t assume that just brute force numbers in some sense would overcome that possibly just that disarray in in organizational structure possibly but it but i think another answer goes to your second question the ukrainians are fighting like lions they are they are fighting like heroes it’s it’s unbelievable the determination with which i thought they would fight i mean i know ukrainians and i thought that they would fight um they are fighting with a hard and effectively i’m certain that putin did not expect them to okay so he’s having a lot more trouble locally than yes he might have expected for a multitude of reasons poor organization to begin with which which seems in keeping with the notion that the troops were put there as intimidation rather than as a reliable military force foreign invasion yep sure sure all this is provisional and also the ukrainians are entrenching and fighting back with a ferocity that was unexpected to hell yeah they have more to to lose in some sense than the russians have to gain so that’s always dangerous that’s a dangerous inequality in morality in warfare and that’s not to be underestimated and so what’s happening on the international front in response to the cohesiveness of the response to the invasion this has been very um heartening and it goes to the other one of the other reasons why i thought putin wouldn’t do this because the international community is rallying um and we i we can have frustrations with the way individual states are responding to specific requests and so forth and i have been frustrated by that as everybody else has been but the truth is in if you get out of the time dilated world we’re in in which if something doesn’t happen five seconds from now then it’s taking a long time we’re talking about within three to four days we’ve got the russians being partially kicked out of sweat the russians being partially kicked out of swift we’ve got sanctions on the russian central bank we’ve got the germans for the first time since the second world war directly sending lethal aid to the ukrainians we’ve got virtual unanimity in condemning the russian attack are there any exceptions yes and yes i want to go back to swift as well okay yes there are exceptions bashar al-assad continues to demonstrate what an evil slimeball he actually is and how much he owes the russians because he immediately recognized the russian recognition of donbass of the nezkan luhansk and for those that don’t know he is the dictator of syria who has been conducting his own little genocide there with russian as active assistance right so he’s just the kind of ally you’d hope the russians would have exactly uh i haven’t tracked this i think the venezuelans have made good noises again um when you know maduro’s on your side you ought to be thinking hard about your life choices and the the iranian what they call the axis of resistance i think was very prompt in recognizing the uh the recognition of the republics and the iranians are generally focused on blaming nato for the russian invasion of ukraine but other than that even the shijin ping could not bring himself to veto the un security council resolution condemning the invasion he just abstained and we can write so that’s a big deal it’s a big deal it tells you that what putin has done is even she is going you know vova i’m not sure that i can actually support you on this the way you’ve done this there’s just no cover he’s putin has given himself no cover and so hungry even the hungarian supported kicking him out of swift and so let’s go into the swift issue to some degree because people won’t know what that is and why it’s important it’s very complicated and it is in some respects overblown um swift is a european consortium that is the means by which banks communicate with one another to do bank to bank transfers and if you are kicked out of swift then you have to find other ways of communicating with banks in order to do bank to bank transfers there are other ways but it’s harder it’s much harder it’s much more it’s much slower it’s more it’s it it is a it introduces all kinds of friction into bank to bank transactions which is important because the russians rely on dollar reserves for their reserves and having when they have challenges interacting with the dollar market globally it’s a big problem for them and getting them interfering with their ability to use swift makes that much harder for them so it makes it harder for them to do what so they can’t get access to money to move money around including to regain you know reclaim money that is abroad or to move money to buy things or various other things that states do and that individuals try to do using banks and so on it just throws a huge amount of sand in the gears of all of that do the russians use swift to move money between the banks in russia or is that all international i don’t know how they do it in within within russia i’m sure they can work that out internally but the it’s getting getting abroad is a whole other is a whole other story okay but important that swift is actually the sanctions on the russian central bank are even more important because swift is just a means of communication and it is important and i’m glad that we’ve you know gotten gotten people around on that for the most part but we’ve even we’re you know we’ve got the eu imposing sanctions on the central bank that’s a big deal that’s a very big deal because that does that mean it makes it it can make it hard to impossible for the russian central bank actually to play on the dollar market and to use engage in the dollar economy which is a problem because the global economy remains fundamentally a dollar economy and as the ruble is predictably collapsing as this is going on the russia in fact there’s a joke going around russians russians from the soviet days and even before have a have a very dark sense of humor and they excel at that because i’m sure you know but one joke going around as soon as the invasion began was could you kindly tell us that before you invade somebody else the next time so we can buy dollars right so russians need dollars and sanctioning the central bank makes it hard to impossible for the russian government to deal in dollars and to interact in that way and how how long how long will it take the consequences of that to unfold in in some way that actually bites particularly on the military front well i mean so okay the problem is i don’t know that it will bite on the military front because we need to keep something in mind that a lesson that we learned from the soviet union a dictatorship can generally do any one thing that it decides to do when you’re running a country the resources that are available to you sanctions notwithstanding you can usually choose any one thing and actually make that happen so the soviet military threat for example reached its height at the same time as the soviet economy began to go into terminal decline in the 1980s those two facts were probably related to one another and with some causality by the way putin has a similar phenomenon here i think he probably can keep his military going but what’s going to happen is the russian economy will collapse i don’t know exactly what that means but will be badly harmed at some point okay now do you think now do you think that so okay so you you can imagine two consequences of that one would be that support for putin within the country vanishes and the demonstrations that we’ve already seen start to increase in scope and i suppose the other possibility is you know bombing people into submission so to speak often produces much more resistance than anyone attempts or intends or assumes and so is there any possibility that these sanctions might backfire and increase support for putin or do you think that disintegration into chaos possibilities is more probable the sanctions are so the the last thing that i want to flag for you which is part of our own self reflection on why we got it wrong is we assumed that putin would prepare his people for a big war we assumed that before he attacked he would have spent days if not weeks telling his people basically that he was going to have to fight a big war and here’s why and that they were going to suffer but it was going to be necessary and good for them and he did the exact opposite as he was getting ready to invade the russian officials were lampooning the west as we kept saying that he’s about to invade they were talking to the russian people and laughing at us and saying look at these stupid westerners who think we’re going to invade that’s ridiculous he did nothing to prepare his people for this war and that’s been evident and the protests that you’re seeing and the word that is coming out even from the sectors near harkiv from near the border near harkiv where the russians concentrated all of these forces i’ve seen western interviews we’re talking to russians near the border who’s saying we had no idea we were shocked when this thing kicked off so he’s done nothing to prepare his people for the war which is why have you ever seen anything like these demonstrations okay so let’s we could talk about that a little bit because it’s not like we’re accustomed to seeing demonstrations in russia not on this that’s not a thing not on the so so so how do you you account for that at least in part by the fact that this is a terrible shock to people and that they can see that it’s going to cost them they feel betrayed by this but also it’s no trivial thing to demonstrate in a place like russia i mean that’s right you put you put yourself at some risk here but not very much by doing that but there it’s it’s like reportedly already arrested 1600 people for demonstrating and those people are certainly having a very hard time in prison and will probably never emerge again i would predict and he’s i think he’s going to have to get in the business of killing a lot of russians um if this protracts they’re not going to blame us for we are not going to be the target of the anger for the sanctions and the economic suffering at this point but it’s it’s not just the sanctions and i want to be clear about this this and this is the other part of why i thought he’d have to prepare his people lots of polls show that russians see america as an enemy and a threat and all of that kind of stuff he spent 20 years getting russians to believe that and of course there’s the soviet hangover of a lot of comfort in russia you know it believing that russians have not seen ukraine as an enemy and all of the language that he’s been using about these are our fraternal slovic brothers and they we need to bring them back to the fold and all of that kind of stuff that’s been the messaging and he’s been talking about you know we need to remove this illegal junta that’s in kiev he’s got a whole narrative about how this really isn’t a war against the ukrainian people russia now it is stupid now it is they’re blowing up apartment blocks and stuff now he’s trying to keep that from his people but again russians are not that stupid and they are they are understanding that this is a war against ukraine and a lot of russians i think are just why are we fighting ukraine why are we attacking ukraine you tell me the americans are the so in so far in so far as they are their slovic brothers this is now tantamount to a civil war right right if that narrative was originally true right right so it’s he’s just he’s totally failed to prepare anybody informationally for this and that is one of the things that is generating this this outrage in russia over this unprovoked war of aggression against a a brother slovic state that did not attack russia and wasn’t threatening russia and where there are no americans because again you can even you could tell the russian people that the americans are the threat but there are no americans in ukraine we’re not fighting americans in ukraine so he has a problem and i think it’s going to many many problems many problems okay so okay so let’s we’re we’re let’s move to future actions so the the west is united well the world is united except for the exceptions that you already described and putin is having a lot of trouble on the ground and as far as you’re concerned he wasn’t well prepared either on the propaganda or the military front and he’s going to suffer substantial economic costs and so this at the moment this does not look like it’s going well for him okay so we could be happy about that except that there are also nuclear weapons and that’s always something to think about what what how do we not what’s the right reaction it’s not an under reaction it’s not an over reaction what what do you think is an intelligent pathway forward as far as you’re concerned and are you do you feel comfortable in even detailing out such a thing sure yeah i’m comfortable with it i there’s you know we don’t we don’t do secrets very well and that’s um you know this is this is straightforward um so i guess i’m not confident in your knowledge about making such a such a well listen suggestion as you as you can see i’m comfortable making forecasts and recommendations with the possibility that they’ll be wrong and i’ll accept the consequence if they are that’s it’s my job to do that um so right now we’re doing the most important thing that we should be doing which is rushing the most important kinds of defensive weapons to ukraine as much as we can we need to try to help the ukrainians save their country if there’s any way for them to do that and we need to bleed the russian military badly if we can’t i am very confident that there will be a ukrainian insurgency if putin overcomes the ukrainian conventional forces and this can turn into ukraine putin’s afghanistan war and we should absolutely help the ukrainians win that as quickly as possible and that that will be world changing we need to do that and what sort of defensive weapons we’re sending so we’re sending primarily what they need are anti-tank weapons which are mainly javelin anti-tank man portable you could fire them from your shoulder missiles and stinger anti-aircraft missiles again you know we we sent stingers to the mujaheddin in afghanistan in the 1980s and it did fear for harm to the to the soviets and we’re sending stingers here too and the ukrainians are using them to good effect against russian aircraft today those are the most important things we need to do i’m sure that there’s also sort of basic ammunition and stuff that we need to send also humanitarian supplies and they’re a bit increasing their organizations i don’t have a list right now but their organizations getting together to send humanitarian relief to to ukraine i encourage everybody to do that as long as there is an independent ukraine it’s going to need a lot of help because the russians are doing fearful damage to it and we’ll do more so that’s what people people can do that at a local level yeah and maybe we could put some links in the description of this video i’d like links from you for recommended papers okay so that people can familiarize themselves but also anything you could provide us that would would help in that practical sense would be useful as well okay you bet uh start yep right start with our websites understanding war.org and critical threats.org and we we have daily and and sometimes several times a day updates of exactly what’s going on with maps and a lot of detail so and and i’ll try to find you some links for organizations that are that are doing good work here i’ll name one spirit of america has has historically done really great work and they’ve got a ukraine program going so we’re doing all of that stuff and that’s great we’re going to bring a lot of economic pain on putin and that’s great look a wounded bear is a very dangerous animal and we must not be complacent about this i want to bound what i’m worried about here for for your listeners okay we’re not going to get into a global thermonuclear exchange that ends the world why not because as crazy as putin might or might not be he’s not that crazy why do you believe that because the because we are not going to do anything that is going to put the survival of russia at stake in such a clear and fundamental way so that’s part of the issue of a measured response is that so the measured response is to to insist upon the territorial integrity of the of ukraine right and that’s it i mean we’re not and that’s it we’re not going to attack russia we’re not going to we never were going to attack russia we’re not going to attack russia and we’re certainly not going to invade i mean you know we know anything from history do you do you want to invade drive from Warsaw to moscow again no one who’s ever tried that has enjoyed it so we were never going to do that and we’re never going to do that we’re not going to put the survival of the russian of russia at stake putin is not going to end the world because we’re never going to back him into a corner like that that hard yeah now i am worried about an a conventional expansion of this conflict yeah well because i was wondering when you were saying we start to funnel in defensive weapons well at what point well now we should be the global community not the united states to the degree that that’s possible and then but it’s still at what point does the funneling of defensive weapons become active engagement in the war process i mean is that means the movement of troops i would presume from other countries that maybe that’s a dividing line no i mean no one is sending no other countries are sending troops into ukraine and you and you think that’s an that’s appropriate certainly at the time and perhaps into the future that i’m going to tell you the the i’m going to tell you what i’m worried about before i say that that that’s appropriate indefinitely look um we know what putin did to syria we know in syria that russian russia was using precision guided munitions to attack bread lines and hospitals in syria we know that he was supporting what the war called siege and starve campaigns to compel communities to surrender by literally cutting them off from food and water and watching them die until they surrendered these are things that russia did in syria and it’s very well documented in fact i mean like the doctors without borders and other organizations had to stop announcing the locations of their medical facilities in syria because the russians were using those lists which are supposed to be do not strike lists as target lists they did that in syria if they start doing that in ukraine and i’m very worried about the fact that the russians are bringing weapons toward harkiv of the sort that one uses to exterminate city blocks in short order i’m hoping that that’s not what they’re going to do with those weapons if they do anything with them the west is going to ask have to ask itself if the russians go that route in ukraine are we actually just going to stand by and watch i don’t have i’m not going to offer you an answer i’m just telling you that’s a decision that’s a decision to take down the road if they go there and i hope that they don’t um but as long as they don’t go there we’re not going to see western troops going into ukraine and i’m not going to advocate for that and i’m not i’m not getting into you know i’m not suggesting that we should do that now we should do everything we can to help the ukrainians defend themselves putin has said that it is an act of aggression to help the ukrainians defend themselves which is not true but he has asserted that and he is threatened to attack the countries that are helping the ukrainians might he attack poland yes he might he might attack poland i can absolutely see russian missile strikes or airstrikes into poland or into hungary or into romania or into any of the states that are which would be an attack on nato territory which would activate article 5 of the nato treaty which would mean what would have to happen well it would mean that that we and all of the other nato member states would need to vote to activate article 5 which i would hope that we would do um and then what we would do what i would like to see us do is what we are now doing which is or an acceleration of what we are now doing which is sending american military power and also british and french and other countries military power to the nato borders to the eastern nato borders in a defensive posture to defend there’s no no one is talking about attacking but we have to be prepared to defend against these sorts of things the complexity will come if the russians actually begin rocketing or firing missiles into poland the defense against that is counter battery fire and at a certain point you do start to have to shoot back shoot back at russian the defense line between defense and offense is quite blurry well it’s not in a legal sense this is you know legally that would not be an offensive action the russians would have engaged in an act of war against poland and poland and nato would poland would then have a right under international law to defend itself and nato would have a right under article 5 and collective security agreements to come to poland’s defense in that regard no one is going to talk about a ground invasion of belarus or russia or kaliningrad or anything i am confident that nato will act if it acts militarily at all in an entirely defensive fashion and for simply for the purpose of eliminating known imminent threats of attack to member states but no one is going to talk about an invasion and we’re not going to do that but we are going to have to change our force posture very fundamentally which is going to have all kinds of ripple effects because this this is not a short-term crisis this the threat that putin is manifesting is is a threat that’s going to be here as long as putin is here so we’re going to have to be prepared to defend poland and romania and the baltic states from russian the russian conventional threat for the first time since the end of the cold war we’re going to have to be prepared to defend against the risk of a russian mechanized attack on nato member states the u.s defense budget is not built to do that the u.s force posture is not structured to do that our national security documents are not built to do that we’re going to have to change all of that and we’re going to have to rebuild some defense capability and we’re going to have to spend more on defense because china hasn’t gone away we’ve spent more than 90 minutes here talking about russia we haven’t talked about china which is great because i’m not a china expert but this doesn’t reduce the threat that china poses to taiwan or or the requirements to beef up our capabilities in the pacific by the way we’ve got problems in the middle east still going on we haven’t talked about that either and we’ve got an ongoing series of wars in the middle east that can engage us at any moment we’ve got to get serious about our defenses and i can tell you right now that the defense budget that we’re operating under is insufficient by a lot and no one wants to hear this no one wants to spend more on defense but it’s the world is at war so let’s let’s sum up a bit and then let’s see if there’s anything else we need to cover it’s been a pretty comprehensive discussion and and uh we’ve we’ve talked about an unprovoked unwarranted and illegal attack by russia on ukraine which is by all indications a sovereign state by legally and otherwise we’ve talked about why the russians might have been motivated to do that historically and also proximally we’ve talked about the situation on the ground and internationally the russians are having more trouble than they might have predicted on both fronts and i suppose that’s good news in some sense for the rest of the world and for ukraine we’ve talked about the pitfalls associated with that we’ve talked about how this might move forward and should move forward partly in terms of supporting ukraine’s and the ukrainians attempts to defend themselves and then what might occur after that you’ve talked about your belief that the world response because i won’t call it the western response the world response is likely to be measured and careful and that as far as you’re concerned at the moment you don’t see radical danger in this tit for tatting up to some ultimate exchange and so well i’m wondering if there’s anything else you think it’s would be useful to bring to the attention of people at this particular point we can always have a conversation like this again as things unfold anything else you think that that is necessary for people to understand right now i think that um i i just want to end by saluting the heroic ukrainians who are defending themselves valiantly against this attack salute all of those who helped them and i will sign off as i will going forward while this war is going on and while there’s a free ukraine slava ukraine glory to ukraine well thanks very much for talking with you today and we’ll get this up as soon as we possibly can thank you so much thanks for having my pleasure my pleasure you