https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YDElXTPm3VQ
Hello everyone. I’m speaking once again today with Dr. Frederick W. Kagan, who’s the author of a number of books related to history and foreign policy. He also 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. He holds a PhD in Russian and Soviet military history from Yale. After we spoke a few days ago, and you can refer to that video for more in depth discussion, we decided that an update on the situation in Ukraine. Now and then, might be useful and so this is perhaps the first of those. And so, thanks for talking to me again, Dr. Kagan and I’m all ears, what’s, what’s happening in Ukraine what’s happening around the world, how do you see the situation where we going. Well thanks Jordan thank thank you for having me on and thank you for having me back. It’s a privilege to be with you and speak with your, with your audience about this. Thank you for staying on this topic. So, amazingly, the Ukrainians are still in the fight in the conventional war against the Russians, a week into it. No one who is familiar with the military is of either side, or who is familiar with basic practices of net assessment would have would have guessed that the Ukrainians would still be in a position, whether they have held their capital and help They prevented the Russians from taking the second largest city in Ukraine that our key. They have lost ground in the south they’ve probably lost the city of her son. They’re probably going to lose the city of Mario ball, but they have not lost any other major city. And they’ve inflicted fearful losses on on the Russian invaders and have been able to beat off repeated Russian mechanized attacks and airborne attacks. How have they been able to manage that. And why is it such a surprise. Well, you know, when you do when you cast a sort of a basic net assessment. You count things like tanks and aircraft and artillery tubes and rocket launchers and stuff and you look at the degree of modernization of both sides and what kind of equipment everybody has. And then you look at the numbers of troops and so forth. And by all of those measures the Russian superiority is so overwhelming that you, you know, all of your basic net assessment calculations would say that the Russian should have been able just to roll over them. They seemed to have thought that they would just roll over them. And that’s a big part of the explanation for why things have gone the way that they did. It’s really become very clear that the Russians just did not expect that they were going to be in a big fight here. They thought that they were going to roll in the Ukrainians were going to run away or surrender, and they were Russians thought they were basically going to be able to drive into key even other cities and do their will. And I think they’ve been very much surprised by the fact that the Ukrainians have just decided to fight like lions and have been also very skillful at it. And then there are some other factors that are important here too that it’s not obvious to me that when the Russians, when the Russian military put the forces in place that have conducted this invasion. They actually thought that they were going to have to conduct the invasion. And I think that it’s very possible that the initial deployments that they made were actually done more to generate psychological effects on Ukraine in the West in support of other things that Putin was trying to do. And certainly we know that Russian soldiers were surprised when they were told that they were actually going to invade Ukraine. I think it’s possible that there were there have been points over the past few weeks when Russian more senior officers were told that they were really going in and, and were, you know, we’re probably taken aback because they really, they just the Russians made a lot of mistakes in the way that they’ve set up to conduct this operation and they made a lot of mistakes in the way they’ve conducted it and the Ukrainians have made them pay for almost every one of those mistakes. What’s happening in Russia more broadly, there were demonstrations which is always surprising to see in Russia. What do you have information about the spread of those demonstrations their effectiveness, their unexpectedness, any of that, and, and then on the world front. What’s happening there, people seem around the world seem to have united in a quite remarkable manner in a manner that isn’t working out in Russia’s favor, let’s say, and so let’s talk about the Russian domestic situation first and then the international situation. We’ve seen unprecedented sort of wide large protests against the war, including some prominent personalities, and also just a lot of Russians on the streets to, you know, the Russians purportedly arrested thousands of people in these protests and, or that they claim to be part of the protests. I, you know, I don’t, I don’t know how many of them actually were. And it is surprising. It’s just it’s, you know, Russians have been conditioned to know that if you go out and protest the odds of being arrested are high. And those are not jails that you want to spend any time in. So, it says a lot about the degree to which Putin had just really failed to prepare his population for this war. And I think Russians didn’t think this was going to happen for the excellent reason that Russian officials were telling them that it wasn’t going to happen right up until the moment that it happened just about days before, like, within 36 hours of the actual Russian invasion, Russian senior officials were still mocking the West for saying that the Russians were going to invade. And the Russian people were caught by surprise. And I think there’s a there’s an element here that’s very important because it also it helps just contextualize a little bit the conversation about how much the US should or should not do to help the Ukrainians here including whether we want to go to Ukraine and fight, and so on, which no one is really suggesting and which I’m not advocating now either. You know, Russian people we’ve seen polling, we still as good polling as you can get from Russia. Russian people see America as an enemy they see NATO as an enemy by large margins. There’s an old Cold War hangover and then there’s what Putin has been doing for 20 years to stoke that they don’t see Ukraine as an enemy in the in the same way. And of course all of the narrative and rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin has been that the Ukraine is sort of lost Russian brothers in many respects and the Ukrainian government, the Russians have terrible things to say about but Ukrainians. They say are you know our Slavic brothers and fundamentally you know belong in Russia. And so I think if this had been a war against the US or a war against NATO. I think that Putin is expected to have a certain resonance among his population. But I think the fact that this is very purely a war against Ukraine undermines a lot of the messages and runs counter to a lot of messages, giving us people and I think a lot of Russians are just saying themselves what, why are we doing this, I mean that is what they’re saying people are saying why are we doing this. And as the sanctions hit. And as the economy gets worse. Has this ever been effective in a situation like this before or is there ever a situation like this before. Well, look, I mean, so in a certain fundamental sense I don’t think there has been a situation like this where we had, you know, a US administration that was saying very clearly we think the Russians are going to invade. And the strategy to prevent them from invading is to threaten them with sanctions. And we’re saying we the US are not going to enter the war so there’s no military deterrent on the table. And it’s as pure and pristine a test as you could really ever hope to have of the theory that the threat of crippling sanctions will deter large scale military action. And in that sense, it has demonstrated the, the, the weakness, shall we say of that theory, and it is about as pristine an experiment as you could hope for. I’m not surprised by it I never thought that the threat of sanctions would deter Putin if he had decided to invade. And, and they clearly didn’t, and I don’t think that they’re going to buy themselves, persuade him to stop this fight. The Ukrainians are in the process of making a strong argument about why, you know, continuing this war is not a good idea from Putin’s perspective, but I’m not optimistic that he’s going to, you know, come to that conclusion soon. And have you been surprised by the response on the international front. I’m not really gratified by it I mean when you see the Russians lose a vote in the UN General Assembly by 141 to five. You, I mean, I mean, that is that is an astonishing failure of Russian messaging information operations and public diplomacy. When, listen, the only former Soviet state that voted against that resolution was Belarus which has 30,000 Russian troops in it. Even, even the Kazakhs, even the Armenians didn’t vote against that resolution they abstained that that’s that’s a sort of a repudiation of a sword with even within the within the Russia dominated world. And the, the virtual unanimity of the General Assembly. And, you know, on that resolution is a devastating blow to Putin’s, you know, narratives over many years that he believes in collective or in in in in multipolarity that he believes in the UN that the UN should be that you know the arbiter of all of these things he’s thrown that back at the US for decades, and to be repudiated by the UN as thoroughly as he just was is a devastating blow for him informationally and it’s not going to change his calculus. Why did that happen, what do you think is, oh sorry go ahead with that. Why did that happen. It happened because you know as we talked about on the on the last show where we discussed this, you know, I think the Biden administration very skillfully conducted an information diplomatic campaign that stripped away from Putin, all of the efforts that he was making to give himself any kind of informational cover and make it look like the Ukrainians had started this or prompted it or generate any ambiguity. And then he decided to just big fat invade anyway, without any kind of a fig leaf. And that has just made him so clearly the aggressor even before he started rubbling Harkiv. And so what do you think the Biden administration did on that front that was particularly effective. So, along with the threat of sanctions which was not effective in deterring him. The Biden administration did really work hard to learn about to penetrate Russian plans to conduct information operations to conduct false flag attacks to try to assassinate so landscape to try to conduct a coup d’etat, and they publicized what they learned, they really were very very They were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very smart and they were very very very smart and they were smart and they were very smart and they were very smart and they were very smart and they were smart and they were very very smart and they they said why are wemä all yet. No, nothings that you said fact that this was what at the end of the block affects occupant radio to people of one and but he and possible. Look, my view all along has been that if Putin was willing to conduct this invasion in order to achieve his aims, the only way that we were really going to deter him from doing that would have been by making it clear that we were going to fight with the Ukrainians and we were going to guarantee his military defeat. And that’s a tough, that’s a tough game to play because of course the more that’s put forward as the strategy, the more the fear, let’s say, that’s driving him of the Westernization perhaps of Ukraine, the more that also appears justified in his eyes. Yeah, I mean, you know, candidly, I’m happy to discuss that with you but candidly that that counter argument wasn’t the one that impressed me the most because he was already where he was on that. This is the Putin is a guy who understands force. And although I you know I and the team at the Institute for the Study of War have written for years about how clever he’s been with information operations and hybrid war and lots of other things. At the end of the day, Putin understands force. And if you take force off the table and you tell him that he’s not going to have to worry about a forceful response that shapes his calculation in a certain direction. If you put force on the table and tell him that maybe he does have to worry about mixing it up with the American military or NATO, then that would have changed his calculation in a different direction. And I think, at a minimum, because, by the way, I want to be very clear that I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t advocating and I’m not advocating now that we should have said that we would have, you know, gone into Ukraine and fought in Ukraine against the Russians I think it was a very complicated series of decisions we needed to make here and I’m not going to second guess the decision not to do that. I will say that it was, in my view, unfortunate that President Biden said and kept repeating that we would not fight in Ukraine, because I think that leaving ambiguity and Putin’s mind on that question would have been a good idea. I don’t know that it would have been sufficient though, since he had decided that he was prepared to do this. And why do you think the threat of economic sanctions wasn’t a sufficient deterrent? Was the threat credible? And why do people who make such threats assume that the threat of economic sanction, which I suspect in some sense hits the ordinary population harder than the leaders, why is that viewed as a credible deterrent? Look, I mean, on the one hand, there’s a certain sort of mirror imaging here that we, you know, we think about, you know, what would we, how would we think about the world if we were facing the kinds of sanctions that we’re imposing on Russia? And, you know, how would sort of any normal or ordinary person in Putin’s position think about these things? Because we can, we are in a position to devastate the Russian economy and we are devastating the Russian economy. And that will matter to Putin. Russia’s foreign reserves are not infinite and they’re not even that extensive, honestly, and war is incredibly expensive, especially when you’re losing soldiers and equipment at a rate he appears to be. He’s going to need cash and having his economy wrecked is going to make it very hard to continue this war, among other things that he needs to do and it’s going to make his people very unhappy and that will ultimately matter to him. So, in the short term, it affects ordinary people and oligarchs, but in the longer term, it will affect him also in his ability to do stuff. But here’s the thing. Once somebody has decided that they are prepared to try their luck by force of arms, they’ve made a mental and psychological shift that it’s easy for people on the outside not to recognize because what you’re saying is I’m prepared to go into the Because what you’re saying is I’m prepared to go in and I’m prepared to kill a lot of people and I’m prepared to lose a lot of my own people and I’m prepared to run the risk however slight it might be that the war won’t go my way and really bad things will happen. If you’re in that mindset, then the threat of economic sanctions is not what is first and foremost in your mind and I think we just, you know, I think we got a lot of people collectively missed that Putin had gotten into that mindset. So, I think we underestimated the sort of rationality that is required then to think about the long term effects of economic sanctions of a certain variety. So, what do you think is going to happen and what do you think we should want to have happen. And in a relatively comparatively non catastrophic manner. And does that mean that Putin has to see a way forward that still involves him retaining control of Russia. Is there a way that he can do that without that would be acceptable to the West in any real sense. What would be our preconditions for saying, this is over and we can move on. What should they be? Well, I mean, I think at this point our basic precondition is Russians get the hell out of Ukraine and stop attacking it and then stop threatening to attack it. You know, there will be, there are Russian war crimes being committed that will be war crimes trials conducted it’s important to hold Russians accountable for the terrible things that they’re doing. And I think that, you know, I would personally be prepared to accept it. If Putin accepted the military defeat withdrew his forces and returned, you know returned Ukrainian territory to Ukraine. And I think that he returned, you know, Donetsk and Luhansk that he had all, you know, occupied to begin with, as well as Crimea. If I had to accept a piece that had a Russian military defeat, but that had Russian forces still in Crimea, without, of course, recognizing Crimea or changing our position on that in any way. I would be inclined to accept that, because the best outcome that we could hope for, and I’m not optimistic that we will see this would be that the Ukrainian military with no more assistance than the provision of weapons and supplies and so forth that it’s getting now maybe a little bit more of that defeats the Russian military conventionally and Putin accepts the defeat. That, that’s the best possible outcome that we could hope for. It will be a humiliation of the Russian military of a sort that it hasn’t experienced since the Japanese, Russian Japanese war of 1904 1905. And that’s why unfortunately I don’t think Putin can accept it. I don’t think Putin will feel obliged, does feel obliged to secure some military victory of some variety. Because as he keeps saying weaknesses lethal and being defeated by the Ukrainians. He will regard as intolerable but that’s the best outcome that we that we could hope for and it’s what we are working for right now and it’s what we should continue to work for as long as you think what do you think he might be pushed to accept as a minimally acceptable military victory. I’ve got to tell you I’m beyond the point of being able to claim that I really understand Putin’s thought process at this point except to say that I’m pretty confident that he will not be able to accept emotionally and mentally a straightforward defeat by the Russian military and the Ukrainian military without trying to escalate more, which I think he’s doing right now. And so what do you hope that we continue to do in the world outside Ukraine in Russia. I hope that we continue to flow weapons and supplies to the Ukrainians as fast as they need them. And I hope that we continue to provide them with all of the support short of actually deploying you know combat forces or aircraft to fight with them and give them what they need I hope that we continue to unite the world against Putin for this outrageous unprovoked revolution, and that we make it very clear to Putin that his choices are going to be accepting this defeat and making the best he can of it, or really beginning to stare down the barrel of the, of the collapse of his regime. That’s, but that all of that’s very tricky because when you start talking about when you start putting the collapse the regime on the table. Right now we have a wounded angry bear. And animals like that are very unpredictable, and still can do a lot of damage. And I, so this is something to be managed very carefully and thoughtfully but I think helping the Ukrainians fight off this attack. If worse comes to worst in Ukraine, or one of the worst, helping them prepare for and conduct an insurgency against Russia are important and then just continuing to tighten the vice on Putin and make it clear. We will squeeze Russia to death if he does not back off. But we will not squeeze it to death if he does back off I mean that’s that you know the off the off ramp here is if you stop this then we can, you know, we can return to some kind of, and you think that is a reasonable off ramp and is anyone that you regard as credible suggesting any other alternative to that. In terms of off ramps. No. And my problem with that off ramp is it requires Putin to make a psychological shift that I think is going to be almost impossible for him of actually accepting that he’s been defeated here. And that’s right now I’m focused on, you know, what can we do to make it clear to him that he’s not going to win this without ourselves escalating in a way that that will change this in a bad way. I think that’s the balance that that everybody’s trying to strike in terms of where Putin will go looking for off ramps or other things at that point. I’m nervous about a variety of ways that that can go one of the things that Putin could do is he could really try to return this more into a Russia NATO conflict, which would likely rally his people more enthusiastically than just a war against Ukraine. I think that he’s in a position to attack NATO militarily right now, given the problems that he has. But I think we should expect to see a chance possible change in Kremlin rhetoric and posture to try to make this more of a war to before preparation to defend against NATO and rally. And I think here again, we need to not repeat the mistake that we made that contributed to this didn’t cause this Putin, you know, we need to blame the enemy for what the enemy did. Putin’s decision to invade by the administration is not the blame for Putin’s decision, we need to be very clear about that that would be true if Trump were in office, or Bush or anybody else. And I think that today, Putin made this decision and he’s to blame. But the mistake, the miscalculation that the Biden administration made about its ability to deter him, we need to not repeat that mistake. And when it comes to deterring him from testing NATO. I think we need to recognize that he is engaged in a gunfight and we need to be prepared to bring a gun to a gunfight so the US started to mobilize forces to defend its needs to Eastern NATO members. And I think that there will be more and more discussion about how escalatory that might be and how that might trip Putin into further activity. I don’t think that’s right. I think what we need to make clear to Putin is that if he starts something with NATO, we will finish it quickly. There is nothing there for him and not allow him to imagine that there is any even initial military success he could achieve against NATO, because we just need to foreclose that option, preventing this from becoming a Russian NATO war is a very big priority right now as well as helping Ukrainians defeat the Russians in Ukraine. Yeah, well, it also means failing, in some sense to take into account the UN decision, because it’s not just NATO that’s right, rallying behind the Ukraine, but behind Ukraine. It seems like in the most real of senses it’s the entire world. Most of it and I think we need to get after the parts of the world that aren’t rallying. I think we look we need to look at the at India and say, listen, you know, it’s actually not okay that that India abstained on that resolution. It’s not okay. You know, I understand various countries have various calculations but this is this is not a time for those kinds of calculations so I’m thrilled that it was 141 to five but there should have been more countries voting for that resolution. And I think we need to focus on doing everything we can to increase that isolation that Putin feels and have the countries that abstained going to him and saying listen, you know, listen for the diminutive of Vladimir, you know, listen for this isn’t going to happen for you. And we can’t we can’t carry water for you even in this limited way you’re going to have to make a decision to end this on terms that you don’t like that message has got to be coming to him from all of his friends and all of the people who are straddling right now as well so I think you’re absolutely right Jordan that finding ways to continue to strengthen this global block against him is important. All right, well I think, unless you have anything to add to that that seems like a reasonable update. The news could be worse given how bad the situation is. And it’s quite remarkable I think to see the essential unity of the world in response to this and the fact that it didn’t that Ukraine wasn’t as easy a bite to chew as might have been expected to begin with. And I can’t see that really getting much better for for the Russians for Putin in the near future. Hopefully not slot Slava Ukrainian Slava hero and glory to Ukraine. Thanks very much for speaking with me again and we’ll be in touch again when it seems like the appropriate thing to do. Thank you so much Jordan.