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Russia’s Modern Wars – Vladimir Putin – Mark Galeotti
301 Plays1 year ago
Ep 017 - Nonfiction. “Ukraine is very different from all the other wars... it’s one in which Putin involves himself much more personally.” Mark Galeotti demystifies Russia's wars since the 1990s & discusses his incredible new book, "Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine."
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Transcript
Introduction and Book Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello, everyone. This is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I am so excited to have on Mark Galliati for his new book, Putin's Wars from Chechnya to Ukraine. Mark Galliati is a scholar of Russian security affairs with a career spanning academia, government service, and business.
00:00:30
Speaker
He is the prolific author of over 25 books, and he has the Mike Intelligence Consultancy. He is also an honorary professor at University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and he holds numerous fellowships and is taught at many universities. Mark, how are you today? I'm fine, I'm fine. As I mentioned before, we went on Mike.
00:00:53
Speaker
turn into the cold. So I apologize to you and our listeners if at times I croak and wheeze a little. No, that's okay. Uh, it sounds great on my end, but we're all warned now something that, um, so we, you had mentioned to me, speaking of your bio.
00:01:10
Speaker
You had mentioned to me that you had traveled to Boston for an award. Is that right? Yes, that's right. The Fletcher School's Russia program at Tuft University were kind enough to pick Putin's wars as their best book of the year on Russian-U.S. relations. And in some ways, it's a pretty depressing but probably accurate reflection of relations that a book about war
00:01:35
Speaker
actually becomes regarded as the most salient book on US-Russian relations. But there you go. Congratulations to you for that award. Thank you. We'll append that to your bio. But yeah, I guess, you know, it's not a topic that, you know, it's not a positive topic, maybe. But your book, like I mentioned to you, I really liked and it was very informative.
00:02:03
Speaker
I'm not a Russia expert.
00:02:05
Speaker
And I remember back in early 2021, I was reading a news article and it talked about how the US was warning Ukraine of a Russian buildup on
Historical Context of Russian Conflicts
00:02:18
Speaker
its border. And I was like, what? And then, of course, Russia invades Ukraine. And I'm like, how did this happen? Where did this come from? And I thought your book did an excellent job of answering the question
00:02:34
Speaker
How did this happen? How did we get to this point? So very well done. Thank you. Yeah, maybe first just tell me, why did you choose to write this book?
00:02:47
Speaker
I mean, I chose to write it. And remember, obviously, such as the nature of production schedules and writing schedules, that this was envisaged between myself and Osprey, the publishers, at a time when we didn't actually expect there to be this kind of a conflagration taking place. Instead, it was, in some ways, a reflection of the degree to which
00:03:13
Speaker
It had become clear that war fighting was a central element of Putin's vision of what a great power was. He's not some sort of hippie 21st century soft power and connectivity and such like guy. No, he's a very 19th century geopolitician.
00:03:30
Speaker
that a great power is, in part at least, in large part, measured by its capacity to intimidate and, if need be, coerce other powers to doing what it wants. And I suppose it was reaching the point where we were starting to talk about late Putinism, a sense that's almost
00:03:49
Speaker
what creative capacities there were within the Putin era. And we have to recognize that. I mean, without in any way trying to exonerate him for what he's done, we have to recognize that the first two terms of Putin's presidential career were actually for Russia very successful.
00:04:06
Speaker
it's the third and fourth, which had been so catastrophic. But so, no, it seemed to be that we were on sort of the downward curve of that arc, and we could actually sort of say something more general about Putin, his political career, and the way his vision of Russia has been so centrally underpinned by the notion of
Conflicts Under Putin
00:04:26
Speaker
war. I mean, in all the period in which he's been either president or president behind the scenes, while notionally prime minister, 23 years so far,
00:04:35
Speaker
Only three of those years was Russia not in effect at war.
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, and that's from your book. So the wars that you, I've got them listed out here, the wars that you talk about, Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbass, Syria, Ukraine. I knew almost nothing about Chechnya in Georgia. Obviously, Crimea was a very, that was a very famous, that was a very well-known event when that happened.
00:05:06
Speaker
But yeah, you're right that for almost his entire presidency or for when he's been calling the shots, Russia's been at war or they've been preparing for war, which I found very insightful.
00:05:23
Speaker
Let's maybe just kind of start with those first two wars that you talk about in your book, Chechnya and Georgia, although I think you talk about Yugoslavia a little bit too. But maybe let's start with Chechnya because that was really Putin's first war. Can you just real quick talk about
00:05:43
Speaker
how did this war start? How did it begin? What was going on in Russia at the time when this started? And I think there are actually two Chechnya wars. There are, I mean, and it's a very dangerous question to ask someone who considers himself primarily historian, because precisely I want to, if you ask when it starts, I want to say, well, 200 years ago. I mean, but suffice to say that the Chechens, a particular people of the North Caucasus region, right in the south of Russia,
00:06:12
Speaker
very fierce, very strong reputation for being independently minded. They were brought into the rule of the Russian Empire in the 19th century and essentially had periodically rebelled whenever they felt that there was an opportunity. Stalin, being Stalin, adopted a rather maximalist response to this and during the Second World War, almost entirely over one night, he had the whole Chechen population
00:06:41
Speaker
rounded up and removed by force and scattered across Kazakhstan, Central Asia and Siberia, a process in which a large number of them died. And it was only after Stalin's death that they could actually return home. But still, one can understand quite why the Chechens for a long time look for their opportunity. Now, in the 1990s, before Putin's reign,
00:07:02
Speaker
under Boris Yeltsin when, frankly, the Russian state was very, very weak. They spotted an opportunity under former Soviet Air Force commander called Dudayev. They declared independence. Yeltsin wasn't willing to allow that to happen because he was afraid that this, what is after all, a multi-ethnic land empire could possibly fragment if he seemed to be perfectly capable of just simply waving goodbye to the Chechens.
00:07:28
Speaker
And what happened was, from the Russians' point of view, a disastrous, catastrophic blunder. The Chechens proved to be not just very tough. And let's be perfectly honest. I mean, from my perspective and my very first research in my doctoral program, I did my thesis on the impact of the Soviet-Afghan War. Well, frankly, tough as the Afghans are, frankly, I think the Chechens would more than give them a run for their money.
00:07:54
Speaker
And what happened is, in effect, tiny little Chechnya, by virtue of how it fought as guerrillas on the battlefield and also by launching terrorist attacks within Russia, essentially forced Moscow to a draw. Now, that wasn't a situation that could be allowed to continue. And so even before Putin was president, when he was still prime minister briefly, he was responsible for rolling into place the start of a new campaign, a much bigger, more properly arranged one.
00:08:24
Speaker
And one also in which, and you mentioned that you hadn't really sort of known much about it, the state made a much greater effort to control the narrative and limit who actually could go and report. It was a very, very brutal, I mean, civil wars tend to be, but even by the standards of civil wars, we saw the capital of Chechnya sort of leveled in the same sort of way that we're now seeing Ukrainian cities being sort of hammered flat.
00:08:49
Speaker
That was, I think that was the one thing I knew about Chechnya is that it was devastating to the cities that were in Chechnya. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. It doesn't matter if we're talking Aleppo in Syria or, you know, Mariupol and now Bakhmut in Ukraine. Unfortunately, where the Russian military goes, they tend not to have compulsion, compunctions about doing this kind of damage.
00:09:14
Speaker
The first Chechnyan conflict was in 1995, 1996? Yes, this is an awful thing. Yes. I mean, unfortunately, please try not to test me too much on dates. That's my absolute blind spot, numbers. I always have trouble remembering. Yes, exactly. I'll stick to that. Now, I mean, but so, you know, after that, so Putin launches this war and the Russians win, but they win very much by Chechenizing the conflict, by finding Chechens who are willing to fight for them.
00:09:44
Speaker
in return for power and money and everything else. And so, you know, they managed to this time sort of defeat the Chechens, which allows Putin to basically show that after a decade in which actually the Russian Federation seemed to be falling apart and into chaos.
00:10:00
Speaker
Now we have a proper leader, one who is actually willing to reverse the process, fix the rot and reassert the power of the state. So yes, absolutely. To go back to the point you made before, this is a war which is also quite central to the building of the Putin myth. And so this war then
00:10:22
Speaker
being Putin's first war, what are, so you talked about just like total devastation of the cities, what are some of the other maybe hallmarks of how he wages this war? Well, I mean, to a large extent, interestingly, unlike the more recent conflict in Ukraine, we see that Putin is willing to let the generals do the generally.
00:10:45
Speaker
I mean, Putin basically sets the political objective, which is bringing Chechnya back into the fold. He makes sure that there are the sufficient resources which are available. And indeed, this is a much, much better resourced war than the first Chechen war. He plays a crucial role in creating the political context for both victory and a post-war settlement. But essentially, he does not try to micromanage. He does not try to do that sort of thing. And this is something that we've seen in most of his wars.
00:11:15
Speaker
right up until the most recent. And the other point is, look, although clearly the Chechens demonstrated extraordinary success in the 1990s, but nonetheless, when it comes down to it, there was never much of a doubt.
00:11:29
Speaker
I mean, again, unlike the most recent war, another hallmark has always been Putin picks relatively soft targets. He does not, I mean, for all his macho posturing, he is not a risk taker. He's actually quite timid and tends to sort of also agonize over major decisions. So in this case, absolutely, you know, he picked a fight, but he picked a fight that ultimately he knew he should be able to win.
00:11:55
Speaker
So maybe talk a little bit about the differences between Chechnya
Georgia Conflict and Military Reform
00:12:01
Speaker
and Georgia. So there's a seven-ish year time span in between these two wars. First talk about Georgia and how that came about. Well, I mean, Georgia, it's a small and independent country, which was part of the Soviet Union. And
00:12:22
Speaker
like so many of the post-Soviet states, probably with the, you know, I think probably the only exceptions really being that the Baltic states, as far as Putin is concerned, they were independent, but only up to a point. See Putin's notions of great power, and again, I go back to this, it's very, it's a 19th century notion, and I say 19th century rather than 18th or 17th, because 19th century was also the heyday of the colonial imperial era.
00:12:48
Speaker
And I think as far as Putin is concerned, a great power has a sphere of influence. It has other countries whose sovereignty is subordinate to the center. It's not that he actually necessarily wants to run these countries.
00:13:00
Speaker
but that he feels that they have to realize that they are essentially Moscos. This is very much a notion that the world can be divided between those countries that genuinely have agency and those countries whose fate is really to be like, I don't know, squares on a game board. And the only question is who actually owns them? And if you don't, then someone else will. So from Georgia's point of view, Georgia was very much
00:13:27
Speaker
moving towards closer integration with the West, wanting to join NATO, wanting to connect up with the European Union. The Georgians were sending forces to go and work with Americans and indeed were clearly trying to actually Americanize their own military.
00:13:45
Speaker
And I think from Putin's point of view, and this technically comes in the period when he's not president but prime minister, but in practice he was still running things behind the scenes, this was unacceptable for two reasons. One is that Georgia itself should not believe that it can break away, especially under a firebrand president called Mikhail Sakashvili, who was very, very hostile to and critical of Putin personally.
00:14:09
Speaker
But also there was an issue, just as Chechnya was in part about showing the other regions of the Russian Federation, you do not try and even think about breaking away. Well, so too with Georgia, it was a sense of, it was a good opportunity to show the other post-Soviet states. This is what happens if you go against Moscow.
00:14:30
Speaker
So it was basically a question of just generating a conflict to allow Moscow to put its foot down and demonstrate that it can cause trouble for anyone who tries to move away from its orbit.
00:14:43
Speaker
Yeah, and it's really interesting because to me, I'm thinking the differences between Chechnya and Georgia. The major difference is that Georgia is its own independent state, but Putin does not see it that way. So from his point of view, they're actually very similar in the sense that they both are kind of under the Russian umbrella.
00:15:07
Speaker
And I think one of the things too that you get from your book a lot is the West doesn't seem to understand Putin so much as we say Putin doesn't understand us. And I mean, with Georgia, I think that's very clear.
00:15:25
Speaker
Yeah, very much. I think there was an element with the West of sometimes wishful thinking, especially when he was no longer president and his proxy Dmitry Medvedev was there as president. And particularly it was the Americans who in some ways they were trying to treat Pinocchio as if he was a real boy.
00:15:45
Speaker
And not only did this mean that they missed what was really going on, but also, actually, they deeply annoyed Putin. And it's one of the reasons why probably Putin convinced himself he was indispensable and had to return to the presidency. That was that sense of, well, if the Americans like this Medvedev chap, then he's not the guy for Russia. But yes, exactly. As far as he's concerned, going back to Georgia,
00:16:08
Speaker
Georgia is not a genuinely independent state. It has to realize that, fine, it can cosplay independence so long as it doesn't actually try to use that to break away from Moscow.
00:16:23
Speaker
Yeah. And so in terms of how the war, if you want to call it a war, the conflict in Georgia, would you call it a war? I don't know. I guess it was Russian. It was a brief war, but it was, I mean, only five days long in terms of the actual sort of hostilities. But no, it was definitely a war. How was this? So how was it? How was the war actually waged?
00:16:48
Speaker
Well, the Russians were very keen to not seem to be throwing the first punch. Now there are two small parts of Georgia which had already in effect largely broken away from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital's control.
00:17:04
Speaker
Abkhazia on the coast and South Ossetia, which is right up on the Russian border. And the South Ossetians were much more aggressive in asserting themselves as independent from Georgia. I mean, it's something it was kind of, think of those Russian Matryoshka dolls. I mean, Georgia is a small enough country, but even so, you open it up and you can find even smaller countries inside it.
00:17:28
Speaker
And so what happened is with the Russians' encouragement, the South Ossetians began a campaign really of trying to needle the Georgians into a sort of foolish first move. Now, at the same time, Mikhail Sakashvili, the Georgian president, was actually contemplating military action to try and bring South Ossetia back into the fold.
00:17:49
Speaker
He's not really a man prone to half measures or spending too much time planning or thinking about things. In a way, the Russians were pretty sure that Sakashvili was the kind of guy whom they could provoke into an unwise act.
00:18:05
Speaker
They did, and Sakashvili sent his forces into South Ossetia. They were Russian peacekeepers in the South Ossetian capital, Skindvali, and they came under fire, probably not because the Georgians wanted to, but just simply in the chaos of conflict. And then the Russians were able to say, we are going in to restore peace. We are going in because the Georgians have clearly sort of broken our understandings and they're firing on our own guys.
00:18:33
Speaker
And the Russians had their forces all ready to roll. So again, it was one of these contests, which was no contest. I mean, Georgia, tiny country, its best troops were any way out of the country. Again, as I said, sort of basically providing support for allied counterinsurgency operations. And the Russians were able to convincingly break South Ossetia and Abkhazia free.
00:19:01
Speaker
deliver some devastating damage to the Georgian forces, go half the way down the road to Tbilisi, and then just stop, agree to a peace and withdraw. And again, it was a very performative act. It was that we could have carried on. There was no way you could have stopped us from taking Tbilisi had we wanted to. But that's not what we're about. We're just here to teach you a lesson.
00:19:25
Speaker
So, you know, it was a five day war. The interesting thing is, of course, the Russians won. I mean, they were just such a ridiculous mismatch of forces. But on the other hand, they certainly did not win anywhere near as well as they ought. There were all kinds of catastrophic and clumsy blunders ranging from airstrikes being launched against airfields that hadn't been used for years.
00:19:49
Speaker
a lot of friendly fire incidents, cases of the Russian communication grid not working so that a general actually had to borrow a journalist satellite phone in order to issue orders, all that kind of, another general getting actually very, very seriously wounded because he just blundered into a group of Georgian special forces. And so in some ways, actually, there were two separate lessons that could be learned. One is, hey, the Russians are still powerful.
00:20:16
Speaker
But also, my God though, they haven't reformed their military anywhere near to the level they should. And this is why the Georgian war, it's a very small war, but it proves absolutely crucial in terms of the history of the Russian military in that it finally forces a long overdue process of reform onto what was still at that point, pretty much a shrunken Red Army rather than anything else.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, and actually one of the anecdotes from your book that comes to mind in terms of reforming the army is when Russia gets a new defense minister, one of his reforms that he does is apparently Russian soldiers wore square pieces of cloth on their feet instead of socks. Talk about, how does that work? Yeah.
00:21:08
Speaker
I mean, look, in their own way, these sort of foot cloths, you know, they kind of work, but it's something that Russian soldiers have used for centuries. The idea is that you sort of work out quite how they, it's a whole art to how you fold these things around your feet. And then the point is you can then at the end of each day, you can rinse them out, wash them and hang them up and they'll be dry by the morning.
00:21:37
Speaker
Now that's all very well in theory, but yes, we do have this modern technology called the SOC. But it was interesting that it actually came with a new defence minister. His predecessor, Serjukov, had been massively unpopular with the Russian High Command, as is almost inevitable the person who's actually pushing through the reform after the Georgian War. Not least because reform also meant fewer posts for generals, so there's a lot of enforced retirement. Anyway, Serjukov,
00:22:07
Speaker
did what he had to do politically, but unfortunately he did things that he shouldn't have done in his personal life, got caught having an affair with the daughter of one of Putin's closest friends and allies and had to go. So in comes Sergei Shoigu. And the thing about Shoigu, who is still the current defense minister today, is he's not a career military officer. He's a very, very competent political fixer, but also he really understands what we might think of as public relations.
00:22:38
Speaker
And so, you know, he was clearly casting around for some very visible sign that things are changing. And yes, he fell upon this idea of replacing footcloths with socks across the entire Russian military, which we might think of as kind of ridiculously overdue and obvious. But again, it says something about the essential conservatism of the Russian military that, you know, this is not something that the High Command had been bothered with.
00:23:07
Speaker
And it's something that in my own conversations with Russian soldiers cropped up time and time again as a kind of small scale reform, but one that absolutely had a real impact on their quality of life.
00:23:22
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess, I mean, like you just said, it is an interesting kind of story to talk about. Oh, you know, the big reform that was brought in was, you know, we have socks. But there were, in all seriousness, major reforms in terms of equipment, especially, that were brought in, even just like the equipment that the soldiers used, which would show up when we get to Crimea. But what were some of the other ways that the Russian military had modernized after Georgia ends and before Crimea?
00:23:52
Speaker
I mean, it's even more than equipment, it's in organization. Look, the Russian military up to that point had, as I said, pretty much been the Soviet military, just a bit smaller. And the Soviet military was always essentially built as a machine for mass mobilization. You know, it was essentially still operating under the shadow of the Second World War. And that need to where we might find ourselves in a position where we literally have to be fielding a million man army.
00:24:22
Speaker
Now, what does that require? Well, obviously you can't have a million people under arms at the same time, too expensive and such, right? But nonetheless, that's why you have conscription so that you have a huge pool of reservists who at least have had enough basic training so that they know which is the dangerous end of a Kalashnikov and who can be called up to arms in the case of a big war. And yet what was clear at the time or seemed to be clear at the time was that actually Russia didn't honestly face the threat of a big war.
00:24:52
Speaker
You know, it had its whole notion of war fighting was built around an increasingly mythical scenario. You know, NATO was not about to roll eastwards across the border. The Chinese, it's more of a threat, but in some ways the Chinese are just so big that frankly the only way you can deter them and indeed fight them back is with nuclear weapons. So instead, what we actually see is a very, very rational
00:25:19
Speaker
form of reform that basically says, look, we are not going to be fighting a big war like that anymore. We are more likely to be involved in smaller, scrappier conflicts, wars of choice, which may well involve deploying our forces quite far from our borders.
00:25:36
Speaker
And therefore, actually, we need better, smaller, more flexible, more mobile forces. So I mean, as one element of that, for example, the basic building block of the military shifts from being the division, which is a rather large and cumbersome, but nonetheless, very kind of survivable force into the smaller brigade. So, you know, again, it's interestingly enough, these will end up coming back to bite the Russians in Ukraine.
00:26:05
Speaker
But in the short term, if you are thinking you're not going to be fighting a major war with, say, a country of more than 40 million people.
00:26:12
Speaker
Actually, it allowed Russia to create rather more efficient, but nonetheless, relatively smaller scale mission-oriented forces, which have capacity to, as we saw, take Crimea very, very efficiently, support an undeclared conflict in the Donbass, deploy to Syria. I mean, all of these things, actually, one could have questioned whether pre-Georgia
00:26:39
Speaker
the Russians could have carried them off, or certainly not with anything like the same efficiency. So, you know, it actually created the forces that could do this. But as I say, the irony is it also created forces that will then actually be much less well suited to the kind of meat grinder conflict that they now find themselves in Ukraine.
Syria and Modern Military Tactics
00:26:57
Speaker
Yeah. And would it be fair to say that with Syria, that was kind of a testing ground for them in terms of this new equipment and these new reforms?
00:27:06
Speaker
I mean, wars always are. I mean, it's not that I think that this is why they went. I mean, they had a whole variety of reasons. But certainly once they had this small scale deployment in Syria, which is primarily some special forces, but mainly air power.
00:27:21
Speaker
It became sort of a crucial opportunity to cycle your best pilots through, but also your best air commanders through. You know, everyone wanted to punch their card. It was not only kind of very useful for your career. It also gave the Russians a chance to have a sense of, okay, well, you know, who's any good?
00:27:39
Speaker
in reality rather than during the kind of choreographed exercises which, unlike Western military exercises, Russian military exercises tended to be more about pageantry rather than actual real sort of tests of skills. So yes, they tested a lot of equipment, including sending in, for example, their new stealth fighter, well, multi-role aircraft,
00:28:07
Speaker
which wasn't really needed in Syria, but again, they just give them a chance to put it in there. This is where they also began to test out the use of ground-based drones, for example, little tracked robots, which haven't proved to be particularly effective.
00:28:24
Speaker
But nonetheless, we see it as a nice kind of, from their point of view, it's a nice contained sandbox opportunity to test out new models, new equipment. And also finally, a new command structure or a way of managing their warfare. They have this very sort of high-tech national defense management center in the deep basement of the Defense Ministry building, which looks like any kind of command center in a sort of modern war
00:28:52
Speaker
film of your choice, lots of big screens and people behind computer banks and such like. But the point is, this was basically
00:29:03
Speaker
inaugurated right after the Crimean conflict. So Syria was its first chance to actually see how it really could manage. A war that, let's be honest, most of the West did not think that the Russians would be able to sustain. When they actually first deployed their planes, the received wisdom by a lot of Western defense analysts was actually the Russians will not be able to sustain this.
00:29:25
Speaker
their planes will start falling out of the air because they're badly maintained. They won't be able to keep the supplies flowing or whatever. And in fairness, the Russians did actually keep all that working. And that was in part because of this new command model. So let's talk about then Crimea and talk about how this very swift takeover happened.
Annexation of Crimea
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Crimea
00:29:50
Speaker
Obviously, it's a very historically fraught topic, but essentially it was Russian territory until the 1950s. Then it was sort of shuffled between the Russian and Ukrainian parts of the Soviet Union. But still, from Russia's point of view, it was absolutely crucial, not least because it has historical and political roots, but essentially it's the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, the most powerful of Russia's conventional fleets.
00:30:19
Speaker
And when Ukraine had its, goes by different names, the Yoro Maidan or the Revolution of Dignity, the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014, which swept away a deeply corrupt regime, which to a large extent was in Moscow's pocket.
00:30:38
Speaker
What was actually an organic rising from Ukrainians who just had had enough was perceived by Putin, who has this exceedingly sort of paranoid mindset, as clearly a plot, a plot by the CIA. And I should mention MI6. It's always nice in the modern world to find at least someone who thinks that Britain still matters.
00:31:02
Speaker
Anyway, so it was all a plot to basically, again, as he would see it, steal Ukraine away from Russia and put it into NATO sphere influence. So from his point of view, this was unacceptable, but particularly Crimea. Crimea, which actually has a large population of ethnic Russians, who in particular acts of naval veterans and their families who settled and everything else. So he very quickly said, look, we need to bring Crimea back into the fold.
00:31:31
Speaker
Now, there had been operational plans for this for a long time, probably going back to the 1990s. That's because soldiers jobs or military planners jobs are to come up with responses to all the various potential scenarios that they think could happen.
00:31:48
Speaker
Anyway, so basically the plan, the op plan was pulled out of the relevant drawer, blown clear of dust, and they quickly moved into doing it. What was really interesting about the Crimean operation is the degree to which we saw the integration of not just military, but non-military tools. The heavy lifting for taking over the peninsula was done by the so-called little green men, or as the Russians call them, the polite people.
00:32:16
Speaker
In other words, Russian naval infantry, Marines, and special forces who are just not wearing their insignia and such, which so much was made of that. It was some kind of novel tactic. I had heard of the little green men, and it's one of those things I hear in the news. In your book, you talk about they're just like soldiers without insignia, but how does that work exactly?
00:32:41
Speaker
Well, really, I mean, let's be honest, I mean, often it's not unusual for soldiers not to actually have big flags and badges saying what they are. It's really that, in a way, the ruthlessly cunning tactic that the Russians used was to lie.
00:33:00
Speaker
When this first happened, when you first actually had forces coming out of the bases, because they're already there because of the Black Sea Fleet being there and starting to occupy key locations, immediately people turned to the Russians and the Russians said, it's not us, nothing to do with us, mate.
00:33:16
Speaker
And again, we might think that's so obvious, but that is a major breach of what we might think of as sort of diplomatic etiquette. You write about how Putin even says, he jokes that maybe they bought their equipment at a surplus store. Yeah, exactly. Now, I was actually in Moscow, I lived in Moscow for most of 2014,
00:33:38
Speaker
And I just out of curiosity, I duly did the rounds of all the various army surplus shops I could find. And surprisingly enough, none of them had latest version Ratnik military kit that these guys were wearing. That's a nice bit of reporting at its finest.
00:33:54
Speaker
Absolutely quiet. And who'd have thunk that it turned out that in fact Putin was lying? The point is, look, what that did was it gave both Kiev and the West just that hesitant moment in which they were thinking, well, you know, could it be that there's something else? There were all kinds of weird and wonderful theories circulating that these might actually be mercenaries or that this was some kind of maverick operation by the Black Sea Fleet that hadn't been endorsed by Moscow or whatever.
00:34:22
Speaker
But it did the job in that it gave the Russians 24 to 36 hours grace, by which point they had pretty much locked down the peninsula. Yeah. And these are people who have gone into government buildings and these little green men were basically just soldiers who infiltrated
00:34:43
Speaker
the Ukrainian government. But it's not just that. I mean, actually, the irony is there were more Ukrainian troops than Russian on Crimea, even though not all of them were sort of actual combat troops. But the point is also it meant that the Russians could basically take up positions, commanding positions, bottling up all the various Ukrainian elements quickly enough. But see, at the same time as this was happening, you also had, again, as part of the whole diversionary tactics,
00:35:12
Speaker
local quote unquote self-defense volunteers being mobilized who were on the whole genuine locals. It's just that in many cases they happen to be for example figures from local organized crime groupings who are coming out who were basically playing the part of concerned local citizens who are just trying to defend their peninsula against what they call a coup from going on in Kiev or whatever.
00:35:40
Speaker
Interestingly, a lot of these thugs turn out to have surprisingly advanced and brand new and shiny weapons when they sort of come out. But as I said, they're not really good as fighting.
00:35:55
Speaker
elements. But what they are is, they create the illusion that this is a genuine local rising that maybe just has a little bit of help from the Russians, rather than really what it was, was a Russian coup demer to take the peninsula, which they did supremely effectively. I mean, one has to recognize just how efficiently and well they did it. But of course, at the same time, we also have to recognize the degree to which these were the perfect conditions.
00:36:21
Speaker
I mean, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the previous Yanukovych government in Ukraine, basically chaos reigned. The military chain of command was, if not broken, at least looking very, very fragile. The government didn't really know what to do. And in fact, its Western partners were advising it to be cool and not immediately try to take back the peninsula.
00:36:47
Speaker
So in these circumstances, when you're also taking a peninsula where you've already got your best troops, where you already have a large level of local support, in a way, one could not imagine more propitious circumstances, but still one has to recognize also that this was a textbook special forces operation.
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, and it should be noted too that Putin's when he took Crimea, it was incredibly popular in Russia. You write about I think being in Moscow and like people were waving flags and maybe shooting off fireworks and celebrating.
00:37:23
Speaker
Talk about really at this point in 2014, we started with Chechnya and how these wars have progressed up through Crimea. How have things changed for Putin by the point he takes Crimea?
00:37:37
Speaker
I mean, this is in many ways kind of a high point. In the early days, I mean, actually, although Putin from the beginning, shall we say, marketed himself as the sort of tough defender of Russian interests, that was much, much less important to most Russians than the fact that actually the 2000s were years of plenty.
00:37:56
Speaker
energy prices, global energy prices were high and therefore an oil and gas exporting country like Russia had the money. And so yes, Putin can dump a lot of money into military reform, and he can also turn a blind eye as his cronies in bezel on an industrial scale, which they do. But there's also a lot of money left over in and frankly, Russians lived better than they had at any point in living memory.
00:38:23
Speaker
Now, this is the point when Russians got their apartments and they were able to actually enjoy consumerism and they begin to travel a bit and be able to do some tourism and all that kind of stuff. So Putin was pretty popular then. But of course, any politician knows that being effective yesterday does not necessarily ensure that they're going to support you tomorrow.
00:38:47
Speaker
And I think, you know, as we began to see, you know, Putin began to lose some of his luster, because also a key element of his appeal had been that he kind of in some ways brought back stability after the chaos of the 1990s, which was a period of massive, not just uncertainty in people's lives, but misery, violence on the streets, you name it. You know, Putin did bring back a degree of, you know,
00:39:10
Speaker
law and order and stability and predictability. But this was beginning to decline. When he returned to the presidency after his period sort of as prime minister, which he did just to get around the term limits of the Constitution, he was met with protests in Moscow. You know, people were really thinking, actually, no, you know, you've we appreciate what you've done, but your time is not necessarily still now. Crimea changed all that for a while.
00:39:40
Speaker
All of a sudden, you know, it was that actually, you know, the things that Putin was saying about the need to a certain defend Russia's interests seem to come true. You know, Ukraine's fallen into chaos, but it doesn't matter because Crimea is now back Russian. And what's more, it's done almost bloodlessly. There's no more than five deaths in the entire takeover, and at least one of those was self-inflicted.
00:40:06
Speaker
You know, it seems to have been a sort of a perfect example of power projection on the cheap that has now brought this territory back home, as I said. So yeah, it was tremendously popular. I mean, the evening of the day in which the thoroughly rigged referendum in Crimea to want to join Russia came through, I scarcely got a wink of sleep.
00:40:32
Speaker
because I had an apartment which is on one of the big ring roads in Moscow. And exactly all night long people were driving in convoy round, blowing their horns, cheering, waving flags and such like this. This is not something that the Kremlin had orchestrated. This was a genuine outflow. The point is though, that I think from Putin's point of view, he drew some rather inaccurate conclusions. First of all, he thought that this popularity bump would last, which clearly it doesn't. You know, everyone's enthusiastic today, but then what?
00:41:00
Speaker
Secondly, I think that he overgeneralized it. He felt that because Russians were enthusiastic about Crimea, that they would generally be enthusiastic about any assertion of Russian power. And that's clearly demonstrated itself to be false. Crimea was a special case.
00:41:18
Speaker
So talk about, so after Crimea happens, I mentioned at the beginning of the show that as me who's just, I read the newspaper and that's about it, this full scale invasion into
Invasion of Ukraine
00:41:31
Speaker
Ukraine, it seemed like such a crazy thing and just kind of out of nowhere. But talk about from Crimea leading up to 2021, should people have been so surprised at the Ukrainian
00:41:48
Speaker
at the invasion of Ukraine, what was the build up there? Well, I mean, I should hold my hand up beforehand and say that until about a week before the invasion, I thought it was no more than 30 to 40% likely, because it did not make sense. And I'll
00:42:06
Speaker
sort of come to quite why. But yes, I mean, in terms of the progression, look, human beings are great engines of pattern recognition, sometimes where no pattern exists. So we have a tendency to think, well, he invades in 2022, he sees his Crimea in 2014, we should be able to draw a nice neat straight line. It's not like that.
00:42:26
Speaker
When he takes Crimea, he has no plans to do anything else beyond that. This is just about Crimea. But in some ways, because it's just so easy and so straightforward, it kind of creates its own momentum. Oh, we've got away with that. What else could we get away with? More to the point, at the same time, a whole bunch of other sort of agents and actors are themselves muscling in to sort of a rising tension in southeastern Ukraine, in the so-called Donbass region, which has a large
00:42:56
Speaker
population of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. They're Ukrainian citizens, but nonetheless, they have a lot of family ties and everything else across the border with Russia. And they were not necessarily happy with what had happened in Kiev. They were worried that they were going to face a backlash from the Ukrainian speakers, all that kind of thing. And there are people who want to try and basically capitalize on this. And the thing is, again, we have a sense of the Putin regime as being something that's incredibly controlled and disciplined as if it's some kind of
00:43:25
Speaker
modern equivalent of a sort of Bond villain specter type organization where Putin sits there giving instructions. In fact, it's a lot more chaotic and Putin is a lot more lazy. And often he's willing to give people a certain amount of leeway without actually committing just to see what happens. And, you know, he
00:43:48
Speaker
He's willing to basically allow those figures who are trying to basically stir up a rising mutiny in the Donbass until he more or less feels that he's committed to it. It's a sunk cost fallacy that you sort of think after a certain point you think, well, I can't really let this go. When in fact it looks like the Ukrainian forces, which have kind of got their act together,
00:44:09
Speaker
are going to be in a position to retake control against these various rebel groups. He feels, no, I can't allow that to happen. And in summer of 2014, we see Russian forces being deployed, denied, but deployed to actually stop that from happening. So you have this conflict that rolls on from 2014 onwards.
00:44:31
Speaker
And this is not really about the Donbass. Putin doesn't care about the Donbass. This is just simply about a way of trying to cause trouble for Kyiv, to try and teach Kyiv a lesson and get them to think, as Putin would see it, that they must realize that actually their destiny is to be part of Russia's sphere of influence. So stop all this messing around with the West. Come back into the fold and recognize your place, which the Ukrainians clearly were not willing to do. But nonetheless, it means you have this rolling, undeclared conflict
00:45:01
Speaker
And I think, again, after a certain point, Putin comes to think, well, no, this is not acceptable. I mean, I either win or I lose. Everything's been so easy for him up to this point as well. Yeah, exactly. And look, Putin, I mean, he clearly has an extraordinary blind spot when it comes to Ukraine. He does not believe Ukraine is a real country. He thinks of it more as a sort of annex to Russia. Historically, it's a very kind of complex relationship. But nonetheless, you know, he doesn't think Ukraine is a real country. He doesn't think the Ukrainians are a real people.
00:45:31
Speaker
And he clearly doesn't actually think that if push comes to shove, they'll be willing to fight. And he convinces himself of that. And it may well prove that this will have been the first COVID war, shall we say, because clearly the COVID era sees him go into very deep isolation. The circle of people around him, which have been shrinking anyway and becoming more and more people who are ideologically the same as him and just general yes men.
00:45:59
Speaker
but it shrinks much more dramatically. And he comes out of that seemingly sort of convinced that basically his legacy is dependent on breaking Ukraine's will to continue to defy Moscow. And you have from basically a process from about 2021, spring 2021, a steady buildup of troops on Ukraine's borders.
00:46:24
Speaker
So that doesn't necessarily mean that he planned to invade, because here's the irony. Right up to the point when he actually launches his invasion, Putin was winning. He had this huge force on Ukraine's borders. These troops were on Russian or Belarusian territory. But nonetheless, under the shadow of Russian guns, investors were fleeing Ukraine. The Ukrainian economy was tanking.
00:46:47
Speaker
And the West was worried about the risk of war. So you had a constant stream of high profile visitors going to Moscow, putting Putin in exactly the position he likes to be, one of centrality where the supplicants come and beg something from him. And some European countries, I'll spare their blushes,
00:47:08
Speaker
by not naming them, but, you know, we're clearly putting quite a lot of pressure on Kiev to make some concessions to Moscow just to make the threat of war go away. So, you know, Putin really had been this geopolitical mastermind was sometimes told he would have let that continue. But I think in part he was impatient, but also look, he again didn't believe that Ukraine would resist. See up to now, his secret has always been to pick easy fights.
00:47:37
Speaker
And this is why I was so perplexed about the prospect of war, because I think he surely, surely, he can't be so stupid as to think that a country of more than 40 million people, a country that spent the last eight years expecting and preparing for a Russian invasion.
00:47:55
Speaker
can't think this is going to be a pushover. But the irony is that the very people who were most bullish about the fact that the Russians would invade, and we're obviously particularly talking about the sort of American think tank close to the government sort of community.
00:48:11
Speaker
were also the ones who seemed to be most bullish that two weeks in it will all be over, which is clearly what Putin was thinking. He thought that basically he could roll in. They could quickly seize Kiev. President Zelensky of Ukraine would either flee or be arrested or be killed. A new puppet government could be installed. Yes, there'll be some trouble. There's a few holdouts that have to be eliminated.
00:48:36
Speaker
There'll be some protests and it's worth noting that a large portion of that initial invasion force were not actually troops, but National Guard, sort of paramilitary security forces, rioting and glorified riot police, precisely because that's what he thought he would face, riots, not warfare. But basically he too seemed to have thought that two, three weeks and basically he'll be a done deal. So, you know, from my point of view, I was thinking Putin wouldn't invade because it would be a hard fight.
00:49:06
Speaker
Putin ultimately invaded because he convinced himself and no one was willing to disabuse him of this view, that it would be easy
00:49:15
Speaker
And therefore almost, why wouldn't you invade in that case? Yeah. Well, I think it's fair to say that post-invasion things have gone badly for Russia. But frankly, for me and for everybody, it's hard to get news about how things are actually going. A question I've got for you as a Russia expert is how bad are things right now?
00:49:45
Speaker
How much has Putin's popularity dropped?
Consequences for Russia
00:49:50
Speaker
Here we are in April, 2023. What's the casualty count even on the Russian side? Of course, I mean, we don't really know for sure. The best kind of estimates we've got are that the casualty count, which obviously is both dead and wounded, between 180 and 220,000.
00:50:11
Speaker
which is obviously appalling if one thinks of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, for example, in 10 years, they lost just about 15 and a half thousand troops. And Russia, a smaller country than the Soviet Union, has lost this many. But of course, the Ukrainians have also been taking a lot of casualties as well. You know, if we accept the sort of, again, the generally sort of distributed figures, then proportionate to population,
00:50:41
Speaker
Remember, Russia is more than three times the size of Ukraine. Well, proportionate to population, the Ukrainians are suffering heavier losses, even though in absolute terms, they're more like maybe 120 to 150,000. So I mean, in that context, it's pretty bad. The striking thing is the degree to which actually Russia is at the moment able to sustain this war effort after a fashion.
00:51:06
Speaker
both in terms of the battlefield, even though they're increasingly pulling 20, 30, 40 year old tanks out of mothballs in order to be deployed, but also at home. And the real answer is this. What we have is a case of an authoritarianism that is beginning to move towards a totalitarianism. You know, Putin still has control over the security apparatus. There are a lot of Russians who are deeply opposed to this war.
00:51:33
Speaker
But on the other hand, and indeed, tens of thousands of them have come out to protest, even though they pretty much know for sure that if they're lucky, they'll be arrested and fined. If they're unlucky, they'll be beaten or worse. But nonetheless, they did it. But for most, they feel that this is futile. Let's be honest, most of us are not heroes. Most of us are not willing to go out and know that the riot police will truncheon us down, but think, well, that's the right thing to do.
00:52:00
Speaker
But what it does mean is that although on the surface, the Russian system is actually coping surprisingly well. GDP is relatively stable, they're suffering. Average real wages have dropped by about 1%. Noticable, but again, not catastrophic.
00:52:21
Speaker
But behind beneath that, I think there are real signs of strain on the system. And in particular, kind of a hollowing out of the regime. So after all, Putin tend basically depended on three key assets.
00:52:36
Speaker
One was legitimacy, the degree to which Russians actually did, they may not like him, but nonetheless, they accepted the legitimacy of his rule, and they thought that he knew what he was doing. Well, that's increasingly declining. I mean, very roughly speaking, we've probably got about a quarter Russians who are still supportive of the war, a quarter who are actively hostile towards it, and the half who don't know what the hell they believe, but would rather just keep their heads down and not have an opinion.
00:53:02
Speaker
So, you know, one way of thinking that is only a quarter disapprove of the war, but I think actually more relevant is to say that only a quarter are supportive.
00:53:11
Speaker
So legitimacy is declining. His second key asset was the capacity to throw large amounts of money at particular problems when they arose. Well, what we're actually seeing is under the pressure of the war and of sanctions, actually the available reserves are shrinking very rapidly. So he's not going to be in that position. I mean, like take the very specific example, the Russian car industry, it's been kept afloat thanks to lots of subsidies.
00:53:36
Speaker
It's not producing cars that anyone really wants to buy. I mean, they now have these special edition, which means they have no airbags or, you know, advanced systems or whatever. Yeah, because they can't access them. So again, you know, in good marketing speak, what they're actually saying is, well, we now have 1990s vintage cars for you, but we'll call them special edition.
00:53:58
Speaker
But the point is, so people may not want to buy these cars, but the point is they have to keep the industries going in order to prevent mass unemployment. So the money is coming under pressure. And the third element is the security apparatus.
00:54:12
Speaker
And even here, we're beginning to see some tensions. There are people who feel that Putin has taken the wrong turn, but there's also the so-called turbo patriots who didn't have a problem with invading Ukraine. They have a problem with it being done so damn badly and the incompetence, the amateurishness, the corruption that has been evident as a result. And so, you know, many of them are coming to think that it's patriotic to be anti Putin. Now, put that lot together.
00:54:42
Speaker
In and of itself, it's not going to bring Putin down. But what it does mean is when there is some kind of systemic crisis, and there will be at some point at some point, the black swan will fly over you. And, you know, there'll be a collapse of the front lines in Ukraine, or a cascading economic crisis or serious illness by Putin that they can't cover up or whatever.
00:55:03
Speaker
When that kind of a crisis happens, I think that's when the regime will be demonstrated to be actually have much, much less capacity than it really looks like it has, particularly because so many in the elite are deeply dissatisfied.
00:55:17
Speaker
They're not Putinists, they're kleptocrats and opportunists. They supported Putin because basically then they could steal and live great lives. Well, now that there's less money, there's more risk, and you can't go and enjoy, you can't buy your nice penthouse in London and send your kids to an American university and anchor your yacht off the south of France and send your mistress shopping in Milan and do all these other fun things. They did not sign up to become North Korea 2.0.
00:55:48
Speaker
So if you had to put a number, I don't even know if this is possible, but we'll say like when Putin, after he invaded Crimea, he became very popular in Russia, maybe his popular, if you were going to put like a poll number, like maybe 90% popularity or something at that point, where we're at now,
00:56:06
Speaker
What would you put a number on for his popularity in Russia? Well, here's the interesting thing. There's two numbers we have to look at. There's his approval ratings and his trust ratings. His approval ratings tend always to be pretty high in the 80%. The sort of level that, frankly, any Western politician would happily sell their granny in order to have. But the trust level is often in the 30%.
00:56:30
Speaker
Now, that seems to imply that you've got about 50% of Russians who approve of someone they don't trust, which looks weird. The one is the approval rating kind of, in some ways, it's almost a mark of patriotism. Putin has been in power for 23 years. But for many people, they don't really, they can scarcely remember a pre-Putin era. So the approval rating is just almost just simply a way of saying, I'm happy with the fact that I'm a Russian and such like. The trust rating
00:56:57
Speaker
is actually a much better index of where Putin really stands, particularly because we find that the United Russia Party, which is his main kind of the main pro-Putin party, tends to get very similar results to Putin's trust ratings. Now, the thing is that what we saw is after Crimea, we saw greater convergence between approval and trust. So actually, you know, that was a pretty good sign that there was genuine support for him.
00:57:26
Speaker
What we're now seeing is actually an increasing opening of that gap, that his approval ratings still roll along. But then again, who, when they're asked a question by a person with a clipboard, is going to say, Putin, I hate him. But his trust ratings continue to slide further and further down. So now we're, I don't know,
00:57:48
Speaker
It's very hard to tell, but again, we're probably around that kind of 25% who broadly speaking approve of Putin. The problem is there is no one else, you know, I mean, and, and frankly, that's why people are more likely to be kind of turned off politics than actively support someone else.
00:58:05
Speaker
So you would say that most Russians sitting around the dinner table know, you know, they're not being asked by a reporter or anything. Most Russians don't. They have real concerns about the way their their country is being run. Yeah, exactly. And it tends to manifest itself not so much in I hate that damn Putin.
00:58:25
Speaker
not least because that's a dangerous thing, but rather in terms of grumbles and complaints about specific things. And above all, again, in terms of such polling as is being done, demonstrates much, much greater concern about the long term. You know, those people don't feel that the trajectory is a good trajectory.
00:58:45
Speaker
And so actually, yeah, they'll complain about their local mayor or their local governor rather than Putin, because it's safer and because this person's closer. But actually, they're talking about the system. And I think concerns about corruption, concerns about the sort of widening gap between the House and the have-nots, all of these things are becoming increasingly evident. And there is even still protest. I mean, all the sort of the high profile opposition leaders have been either pushed into exile or put in prison.
00:59:14
Speaker
There is no sort of national opposition. But again, although it doesn't tend to get much attention, there's still a lot of local protests and agitation at very, very local issues, because that's kind of safer. If you say down with Putin, before you know it, you have been sort of swept up into a police wagon and face-to-face prison.
00:59:37
Speaker
But there's still just a little bit of space that you can complain about why this road that was meant to be built hasn't been built, why that environmental problem hasn't been addressed. There is clearly signs that Russians, for all the myths that Russians are these kind of bovine figures who happily just accept whatever is thrown at them, no, Russians are still complaining. And when they can, they're still protesting.
01:00:06
Speaker
Well, in terms of the way that the war is being waged right now, you have a chapter in your book that you title Ukraine 2022 Putin's Last War with a question mark at the end.
Future of Putin's Regime
01:00:19
Speaker
Explain that and then maybe talk about your predictions then for where things go from here. I mean, I don't think that Putin is going to be in a position to have another war in him.
01:00:33
Speaker
Because I don't think he's really going to have much of a military. I mean, because of the sort of a series of catastrophic blunders, catastrophic seems to me by word of the day, which is singularly appropriate in the context. Anyway, because of that, you know, it's so much of the best of Russian kit and Russian troops were squandered in the early weeks and couple of months of the war.
01:00:55
Speaker
And although, yes, Russia now has still a large military, it's mobilized 300,000 reservists and so forth. But in terms of the quality of the force, it's seen a dramatic decline and it's going to take at least a decade, I would say, to reconstitute Russian forces to the level they were in January, 2022. And that's assuming that Russia is willing and able to pay what it's going to cost, not so much in money, but in terms of industrial capacity.
01:01:25
Speaker
And it also presupposes that Russia will, for example, get the microchips it needs and all the other sort of basic ingredients. So first of all, I think basically, you know, whatever happens with this war, Putin is not going to be in a position to threaten NATO or almost anyone else. Secondly, though, politically, this has been a major blunder almost so catastrophic again. There you go. In the sense that, look, Putin had made assumptions about Ukraine.
01:01:55
Speaker
and built a whole strategy around that. And Putin continues to try and micromanage this war in terms of personnel decisions, in terms of, you know, what can be done. I mean, if one takes, for example, the case of the city of Kherson, which the Russians took, but was actually pretty much impossible to hold. Well, we know that weeks or months, Russia's generals had been begging Putin
01:02:22
Speaker
to allow them to withdraw, because frankly, they were just simply getting hammered by long-range artillery and could do nothing about it. And again, it took them a long time to be willing to actually allow them to do that, frankly, rational withdrawal. So I think this is a very different war from all the other ones. It's much, much larger. It was clearly badly conceived, badly executed, and it's one in which actually Putin involved himself
01:02:51
Speaker
much more personally than in any of the other conflicts. And I think that's really important because of the political damage that it does him. I mean, he likes playing the political historical comparisons game. And at times he compares himself with people like Peter the Great and whatever these state building colossi of Russian history.
01:03:11
Speaker
Well, increasingly he's looking more like the very last Tsar Nicholas II, who cautiously identified himself with Russia's involvement in the First World War by making himself commander-in-chief, and who clearly had nothing to offer, because he had basically the same amount of military expertise as the mug from which I'm drinking tea.
01:03:37
Speaker
And all he could really offer was just one more push, one more offensive and we'll be in a better position to dictate peace terms. Well, Putin doesn't seem to have any strategy beyond hold on and eventually Western unity will fragment. They'll stop supporting the Ukrainians and the Ukrainians will be forced to make some kind of an ugly deal with us. Now, it's possible that that might happen. But the point is, there's very little evidence to
01:04:04
Speaker
base your entire strategy around that. And yet that's all he's got. That's all he can offer. So I think from this point of view, I think it's Putin's last war, firstly, because it may well be that it contributes to his fall, his downfall.
01:04:19
Speaker
we'll have to see just how badly things go. Secondly, because even if he's still around, I think he has much less political capacity to launch any other conflict. And thirdly, because even if he did want to, he's not really going to have the military to be able to launch more than the smallest and most limited of conflicts. Well, what lessons are you hoping that people take away from your book when they read it?
01:04:49
Speaker
I think that really, I think it's to get a sense of quite what military power and war fighting meant to Putin and still means to Putin in terms of his vision of Russia. It's also, I think, something that I can insert an entirely gratuitous publicity moment that I talk about in depth in my book, The Weaponization of Everything.
01:05:16
Speaker
which is actually in the modern world, shooting wars have become vastly less predictable, more expensive and more dangerous to launch. As I said, I mean, while he was fighting a non-military war with Ukraine, he was winning. It's actually as soon as he turned it into a shooting war that he started suffering serious losses. So I think it's also, you might say a case study,
01:05:41
Speaker
for how someone who doesn't really understand warfare and the military, remember this is a man with no meaningful military experience himself, someone who doesn't really understand war fighting and particularly doesn't understand how it's changing in the 21st century can so disastrously blunder, not just in terms of the sort of plan, you know, why fighting a war, but how to fight the war.
01:06:08
Speaker
And I think that's again, sort of one of the more sort of generalizable things. Russia had reformed its military really quite effectively, but it had reformed it to fight a different war. And in fact, having reformed itself away from this kind of big war scenario, it then found itself fighting that. How often do countries essentially build a military with one particular type of conflict in mind?
01:06:37
Speaker
and then suddenly find, oops, we're actually going to have to use the military we've got to fight a very different conflict. This is one more case study of that. Well, Mark, this has been a really insightful interview and super interesting answers you give into my questions. So thank you for that. Kind of lastly here. So you've, I mentioned at the beginning, you've written 25 other books. Maybe this is 26. What are you working on next?
01:07:08
Speaker
I mean, I've got a book that's currently with, with the publishers, which has nothing to do with anything military. It's essentially a history of the world told through the prism of organized crime, kind of tentatively titled harm or criminal is, but in, in terms of this sort of area, I'm working on a sort of follow-on for Osprey. Again, so tentatively titled forged in war, which is essentially a military history of Russia.
01:07:33
Speaker
from the very very beginnings when warless Russia was kind of created through invasion through Viking invasion all the way through to the present day and very much tries to sort of assess the degree to which instant not so much instability but actually insecurity has been at the center of Russian leaders doesn't matter if they're czars or commissars understandings of their position and in a way that has shaped Russia's history in terms of being an authoritarian regime
01:08:03
Speaker
being aggressive, feeling the need to push its boundaries outwards constantly in that sense of, well, next time we'll be able to put ourselves in a position in which we feel secure. So it's an attempt to do a very, very big picture notion of what's going to happen.
01:08:20
Speaker
Wonderful. Well, I hope you'll come back on the show when you published that book. I mean, 25 is very impressive. So if you've got another 25 in you, then, you know, maybe we'll have several. I'm not sure about that. We'll see about that. But I'd be delighted to come back. Thanks very much indeed for this. Wonderful. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Mark, if somebody wants to find you or follow you, are you on social media? How can they get in touch? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Who isn't these days? I'm on Twitter at Mark Galliotti.
01:08:49
Speaker
I have a blog called In Moscow Shadows, and I also have a podcast kind of weekly, also called In Moscow Shadows. Oh, wonderful. Well, Mark Galliati, Putin's wars from Chechnya to Ukraine, go buy a copy, go check it out from your library. Really informative and a terrific read. Mark, thank you so much for your time today. My pleasure. Good to talk to you.