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Russia-Ukraine War – Putin’s Global Aims – Samuel Ramani
231 Plays1 year ago
Ep 033 – Nonfiction. Why did Putin opt for regime change in Ukraine, rather than a smaller-scale intervention in Donbas? Samuel Ramani joins me to discuss his new book, "Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia's Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution."
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Transcript
Putin's Hesitance in 2014: A Misstep?
00:00:00
Speaker
I think that maybe Putin's biggest mistake from his own perspective was not going all in 2014, because he had disunited Ukraine, who had fought the world by surprise, and he would have had probably a much easier time at it. Especially given the fact that it seems as if military modernization after 2008 didn't do very much to change their fighting doctrine. So those extra eight years of military reform probably would not have done much to remove the needle.
Introduction to War Books Podcast and Guest Samuel Romany
00:00:37
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 really excited to have on the show Samuel Romany for his new book, Putin's War in Ukraine, Russia's Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution. Samuel teaches politics and international relations at the University of Oxford.
00:01:02
Speaker
He's the author of Russia in Africa and an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. He contributes regularly to foreign policy, the Washington Post, the BBC World Service, Al Jazeera, and CNN. Samuel, how are you doing today? I'm doing very well. How about you? I'm great. I'm great. And we were just chatting a little bit before we started recording about some of the really interesting Russia-Ukraine books that are out
Themes of Romany's Book: Putin's Ambitions and Ukraine
00:01:31
Speaker
right now.
00:01:31
Speaker
And your book specifically, I thought, was great for giving a whole history of this war and focusing, too, on some of the more global elements to it, which don't often get talked so much. So thinking about Syria and the Middle East and Africa and China, I thought that you had some really interesting ideas. So very excited to hear you talk a little bit about them.
00:02:02
Speaker
Um, maybe first off, could you just start by, by telling our audience here, what is your book about in your own words? So basically the book basically tries to explain why did Putin launch a full scale invasion of Ukraine instead of a more limited risk, uh, a predictable intervention in the Donbass. The second was why did the Russian military fails so spectacularly achieving its initial goals in, uh, which was regime change in Kiev and, uh, takeover of the vast majority of the country territorially.
00:02:32
Speaker
And also, how did Vladimir Putin manage to survive this catastrophic failure, even in the face of Western sanctions? And also, how has Russia managed to position itself on the world stage, even though it's largely isolated from the West, how resilient, how durable are its partnerships in the post-Soviet space and also in the collective non-West, like China, India, Iran? That's really what the book seeks to cover. So the majority of the book's content
00:03:01
Speaker
really focuses on the period from the first mobilization in the spring of 2021 onto the second mobilization followed by the invasion itself and then the war. But there are also a few chapters at the beginning which deal with some of the formative and critical developments that led up to this point.
Putin's Global Strategy Against Liberal Democracy
00:03:18
Speaker
events like the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, that it created Putin's fear of liberal democracy and popular revolutions in Ukraine, that later built into the Euromaidan Revolution, and also unrelated developments like the Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War, and things that need expansion, things that kind of shaped Putin's anti-Western thinking. So it really describes
00:03:42
Speaker
What happened in Putin's Russia to make this war possible? And then granular analysis of how the wars unfolded over the first year of its Jewish. Yeah. And the subtitle of your book really caught my eye. So Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution. I feel like that's like a very, I don't know, that sounds scary a little bit. But explain what you mean by that title. Like, what is global counter-revolution?
00:04:12
Speaker
So basically, one of my arguments, one of my key intentions in this book is that this is not just a war in Ukraine. This is not just a war to recapture the former Soviet Union and reconstitute Russian greatness in your territorial sense. Putin's war in Ukraine is also a war against the liberal international order and also against liberal democracy more broadly. So counter-revolution means overturning the outcomes of democratic popular uprisings and popular revolutions. So it's about autocracy promotion.
00:04:42
Speaker
And it's about undermining the impact of these episodes of Popular Unrest. And I think a core reason why Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and sought to overthrow Vladimir Zelensky was because Zelensky was a product of the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution. And he was representative of a democratic experiment that was underway in Ukraine that could create an alternative model of governance for post-Soviet states to what was being offered inside Russia, with Putin's
Opposition to Uprisings: Russia's Strategy in Ukraine
00:05:10
Speaker
Russia.
00:05:10
Speaker
So alternative, successful democratic model. And this is something that was quite alarming and scary for Vladimir Putin and something that he could not tolerate on his doorstep. So it's something that he had to overturn and had to change and had to prevent. And when you look at the entire history of Putin's Russia, you see a consistent trend of escalating responses to popular unrest and popular revolutions, even when Putin's regime has appeared to be getting more and more authoritarian, more and more secure.
00:05:38
Speaker
In the early 2000s, the Bulldozer Revolution in Serbia, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and the 2004 Revolution in Ukraine were greeted with frustration, but little more than rhetorical criticisms and small-scale election meddling. Then we started seeing Vladimir Putin seek to undo the impacts of those revolutions. So invading South Ossetia in Georgia in 2008, which threatened the Sakashvili government's hold on key parts of its territory.
00:06:06
Speaker
And then, engaging in various forms of economic warfare against Yushchenko's Ukraine in the hopes of undoing the Orange Revolution. And then we saw the Arab Spring come in, and the 2012 protests in Moscow and Blotnaya Square make it even more fearful of these episodes of unrest, followed by the revolution in Euromaidan and Ukraine, which led to the invasion of Crimea and Donbass, and then the revolution in Syria, which led to Russia sending fighter jets alongside Iranian forces.
00:06:35
Speaker
to help keep Bashar al-Assad in power. And then finally, the 2020 unrest in Belarus, where Russia did use a variety
Anti-Western Sentiment: Building a New Russian Identity
00:06:43
Speaker
of tactics to prop up Alexander Lukashenko and prevent the demise of its closest ally in your neighbor, autocrat, who was kind of following a similar model of governance. So as you can see over the course of 20 years, you see a consistent thread of opposition to popular unrest and popular revolutions, and also drastic escalation in means of resisting them.
00:07:03
Speaker
criticizing them, delegitimizing them, to limited military interventions, to full-scale invasions, like we're seeing now in Ukraine. And finally, it's interesting because I think the counter-revolution represents Russia's conservative values, Russia's illiberal values, and it's a way of uniting the Russian people about a common set of ideas and creating a new contemporary Russian foreign policy identity.
00:07:28
Speaker
Because after the collapse of communism, after the collapse of the Soviet Union's superpower status, Russia was left rudderless. It didn't really have a sense of purpose as a country. It really didn't know what it stood for on the world stage. Was it a part of the West? Was it a part of the East? Was it something else entirely? Was it a different orthodox civilization? It didn't really know who it was, and it was often quoted in the 1990s that even our sub-regions, like the Chechens and the republics that we ruled over, like the Kazakhs, have a clearer sense of who they are than we do. And counter-revolution.
00:07:58
Speaker
opposing popular uprisings, opposing liberal democracy, opposing these liberal values, allowed Vladimir Putin to unite various ways of the Russian people around, anti-Westernism, liberalism, and his variant of conservatism.
Russian Propaganda: Continuity from Soviet Era
00:08:12
Speaker
And that, I think, is crucial for his regime security and also for convincing the Russians that they have a place in the world, something that they're standing for on the world stage.
00:08:22
Speaker
And finally, there's long history here. This narrative of popular revolutions being fake, of popular revolutions being conduits or vehicles for the expansion of malign and nefarious Western influence are very, very similar to the narratives that Russians have been hearing for about 50 or 60 years. From the 1953 unrest in East Germany to the 1956 unrest in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia,
00:08:47
Speaker
1993 constitutional crisis in Russia. Revolutions and protests were equated with fascism. They were equated with Nazi infiltration. When the Soviets went into Hungary, they thought they were told the Soviet troops were told they were fighting Nazis in Hungary, just like the same way the current Russian troops are being told that they're fighting Nazis inside Ukraine. And this image of Western back to instability and revolutions being a
00:09:11
Speaker
conduit or a vehicle for values that are alien to Russia is something that can resonate from people who grew up under Putin's Russia or to people who grew up in the Second World War. All generations are united
Does Russia Still Threaten the West after Ukraine?
00:09:22
Speaker
here. And that's why I think counter-revolution and its overturning of Euromaidan and the pursuit of regime change in Ukraine was so essential and so central to Putin's decision to invade.
00:09:33
Speaker
Yeah, and you know, that's that's so interesting. And I was, I mean, since we're talking about, you know, global kind of revolution, I was gonna ask you about this later in the interview. But I think if you would have asked, I mean, if you would have asked me, I'm not an expert, but I think if you would have asked most people before the
00:09:49
Speaker
invasion of Ukraine, I think there would be consensus that Russia was meddling in the affairs of a lot of countries in the West, whether that's 2016 election interference or that's poisoning dissidents in the UK or targeting journalists. I'm curious
00:10:10
Speaker
Now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, do you think they still have that kind of global reach that the West was very fearful of before their invasion? Do you think they still have those capabilities? Well, I mean, I think that they certainly have the ability to continue to carry out election interference, I think, and affect the outcomes in Western countries.
00:10:36
Speaker
I mean, obviously some of their tools have been stripped because of the invasion of Ukraine. I think the closure of RT and Sputnik is a big loss for them in terms of being able to amplify messages that are favorable to them. We should also not underestimate the number of surrogates that they still managed to have, particularly in the far left and the far right of the political spectrum, especially in continental Europe. So people who are opposed to the
00:11:01
Speaker
the economic consequences of this war and believe that sanctions on Russia are leading to higher energy prices, higher food prices, the slice of the population for whom that narrative would resonate and those people are pushing for a political settlement. But the problem is Russia's ability to influence outcomes inside Western countries is limited
00:11:19
Speaker
now by its limited popularity and limited appeal. I mean, there was a new Pew Research survey. The highest level of support for Russia that was observed in continental Europe or the entire collective West, as the Russians like to call it, was Greece, 32%. Almost every single country has an overwhelming, the unfavorable images of Russia. And now the Russian media outlets are gone. So they have to rely on kind of lone wolf surrogates to kind of promote their messaging and promote their narratives. And those surrogates are largely clustered on the far left and the far right.
00:11:48
Speaker
of the political spectrum in those countries. Of course, there are some elements of that becoming a bit more mainstream. So maybe Trump and DeSantis in the United States a little bit, and also people like Orbán in Hungary, maybe taking some of the narratives that they're pushing and bringing them into the popular domain, harboring the pen in France. But in general, Russia's ability to influence is largely radicalizing those who are already radicalized and are already kind of suspicious.
00:12:15
Speaker
of the establishment of the institutions in the system, and just trying the flames and making it worse.
Russia's Influence in Non-Western Regions, Especially Africa
00:12:20
Speaker
Elsewhere outside the West, however, I think that Russia's got a greater ability to kind of be able to influence outcomes and engage in political interference. Because I don't think that Pergosian's machinery, the one or two machinery, is necessarily going away. His media outlets and his political technologists have been shuttered. But RT chief, Margarita Simonian, says they're the best in the business and they want to hire them.
00:12:42
Speaker
Also, Russian diplomats are being expelled from Europe. Many of those are spies and were experienced in various tactics of political interference in espionage. Where are they going to go? They're not off the payroll of the Kremlin. They're going to be stacking and staffing the embassies in sub-Saharan Africa, in the Middle East, in the Indo-Pacific region. And we're seeing an expansion of Russia's media presence in those regions as well, everywhere from RT landing in South Africa or in Serbia.
00:13:07
Speaker
or Sputnik Francophone channels gaining massive ground in West Africa, from Tunisia, crowding out French outlets, and also Chinese outlets reinforcing Russian disinformation in places where Russia can't reach. I think that Russia's information warfare, their ability to meddle in other countries' affairs, promote a democracy in the global South, is alive and well, and maybe even stronger as a result of this war. So as you can see, it's a mixed picture. I mean, I think that they're able to more effectively radicalize the extremes in the West, but not necessarily the mainstream opinion, but in the global South,
00:13:37
Speaker
They are able to run riot, and I think they are serious, serious, surreptitly to anybody who believes in liberal democracy. Yeah, and I think one thing that I found was interesting this week, thinking about Pergosian, is as we're recording this this week, there was a video of him that came out.
00:13:57
Speaker
where he's like, all right, Wagner mercenaries, we're pulling out of Ukraine and we're going to Africa. And I'm like, what? I didn't realize that Russia, that Africa was so strategically important to Russia. As somebody who's written a book about Russia in Africa, talk a little bit about that importance, that in the global South, as you call it.
00:14:24
Speaker
that Russia is putting on that region. So yeah, it's great that we talk about this right now because next week is going to be the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, where Russia is expecting dozens of African leaders to be in attendance and hoping that the aftermath of the scrapping the Black Sea Rain export deal and effectively taking measures to starve the poorest people in Africa is not going to lead to African countries turning on Russia. And oddly enough, so far that hasn't seemed to happen. Nobody believes in this, is talking very much.
00:14:54
Speaker
But, yeah, it's interesting that Georgini Progotion would be trying to beef up and strengthen Wagner's presence in Africa, because he knows that Wagner is indispensable over there for Russia's influence and its operations. This can't easily be dislodged. Their forces are guarding Libya's vital oil ports. They're guarding the main gold mines in Sudan. They're serving as bodyguards for the president of the Central African Republic. They're fighting in shared military bases in Mali against counterterrorism.
00:15:19
Speaker
And you can't change those personnel overnight without severely disrupting counterterrorism operations and risking oil and gold and other vital mineral reserves that bring hard currencies to the Kremlin falling into hostile heads. So, Progosion is fairly smug about his position in Africa and fairly confident that he's going to be able to continue to exert influence. And I think he's going to still try to market his services to other countries as well. We've already been seeing the Russians try to market their services more aggressively in coastal West Africa and also some of the countries surrounding Central African Republic.
00:15:49
Speaker
particularly both congos, a Cameroon, how far they'll be able to go. Given now the doubts about Wagner and the Russian state having this falling out, it's unclear, but they're definitely going to be trying to have an interest over there.
Russia's Alliances and Influence in Africa
00:16:03
Speaker
And the reason why Putin needs to tolerate Pergosian in Africa, and Africa is important for him, is several fold. First of all is a practical consideration. Obviously, Russia is shorn of its Western partners and it needs to really rebalance its foreign policy towards the non-West.
00:16:19
Speaker
One of the stated goals of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, if you listen to Dmitry Medvedev or Sergei Lavrov or any of the leading Russian officials, is that we're trying to create a more equitable global order. We're trying to create a multipolar world order. And multipolarity means embracing the other poles of the international system that are not the United States and Europe. So embracing China, India, Africa, Brazil, the Persian Gulf monarchies, Iran, you get the picture, right?
00:16:45
Speaker
a various range of regional and great and aspiring great powers in the collective non-west that Russia needs to strengthen its partnerships with. The second thing, obviously, is that Africa remains a fairly lucrative, if small, market for some of the extractives that Russia can invest in. Like, you know, Russian mining companies have considerable presences there. So everything from Rosetama Nuclear Energy to El Rosa Diamond, Roussel for bauxite and aluminum.
00:17:13
Speaker
Then also, of course, the energy companies like Gazprom and Blue Coil and others. And also Russia's traditionally been the largest arms supplier to Africa, though that may be called into question because of doubts about the efficacy of Russian military technology and the tighter secondary sanctions risks that we're seeing. So that's why Egypt, for example, didn't buy the SU-35s and Iran had to purchase them, and they're still working all that out. And the third thing, obviously, is symbolic for Russia.
00:17:42
Speaker
Because the Soviet Union had a history of superpower status in Africa. Africa was the flagship theater of their decolonization, their resistance to imperialism. And Russia frames its current influence in Africa in exactly the same terms. Like it is fighting Western neocolonialism. It's fighting French neocolonialism in West Africa, claiming the French are not fighting terrorists, they're just seizing minds, right? They're fighting American interference. And backing people like a Simi Goida is like the same way the Soviet Union
00:18:10
Speaker
tried to make overtures towards African liberation heroes like Kwame Nkuruma in Ghana, right? Goite is the military Yinta dictator in Mali, for those who are not following this so closely. So, as you can see, that Africa was an integral part of the Soviet Union's image as an anti-imperial, anti-Western power, and superpower status there was important for that. And now, as Russia sees itself as the inheritor of many of the elements of Soviet greatness,
00:18:38
Speaker
without the Marxist-Leninist ideology, but still the image of greatness and super power status that it wants to inherit is teasing influence in Africa as a natural continuity.
Motivations Behind Putin's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine
00:18:48
Speaker
So it's about status, it's about extractives, and it's about multipolarity.
00:18:52
Speaker
Yeah, well, thinking about Putin's goal to reclaim the same kind of influence that the Soviet Union had, maybe let's talk about a big question from your book, which could be a hard question maybe to answer because you have taken several hundred pages to write about it. But why do you think that Putin opted for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine?
00:19:20
Speaker
rather than just continuing his small scale intervention in the Donbass. Well, there were several calculations that were at play over here. I think the first was underestimation of both Ukrainian and Western resolve. So he was basically reading the Kool-Aid and taking it all in. He basically was believing that the large portions of the Ukrainian population, especially those who were ethnic Russian or even Russian language speakers, not even ethically Russians,
00:19:48
Speaker
would turn and support Russia and greet Russia as liberators. So the narrative for eight years leading up to the 2022 invasion, so after the year of my death, was that the government in Kiev was illegally installed. It was legally installed by the United States and it was radicalized and it was extremist. It was dominated and effectively Zelensky was being held hostage by Nazi and fascist battalions. And those Nazi battalions and fascist battalions and Zelensky
00:20:18
Speaker
by extension were inherently Russophobic, and were trying to extinguish Russian culture, Russian language, and the Russian ethnicity from Ukraine, to the point in which they came up with this idea that ethnic Russians and Donbas were actually being victims of genocide. And while this seems like an alternate reality, it's something that was repeated in the Russian media day in and day out for eight years, and it seemed to infiltrate the views of some of Putin's closest advisors.
00:20:43
Speaker
like the hawkish national security adviser, Nikolai Patrashev, or the head of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, or Dmitry Medvedev, or many of these other figures who he was listening to in the days and months leading up to the invasion almost exclusively because he was hiding his plans from everyone else. So this group thing really, I think, influenced Vladimir Putin to believe that large numbers of Ukrainians would be on side.
00:21:05
Speaker
At the very least, you'd have the support of the second largest political party inside Ukraine, which is Viktor Medvedchuk's opposition bloc. At most, you'd have grassroots local resistance that he'd be able to tap in on and be able to move forward. Of course, this was a contradiction of modern history, because Russia had exactly the same set of assumptions in 2014 and 2015, and they were so confident in those assumptions that they didn't even declare war. They didn't even officially send their own ground trips. They did send separatists some proxies.
00:21:34
Speaker
to take over and they hoped that they'd be able to go all the way from Crimea to Kharkiv to Odessa and create Novorossiya, one third of the country being liberated. They did take over Crimea, they did succeed in Donetsk and Luhansk because of the chaos that followed Yanukovych's leadership. But as soon as Ukraine, even when it lacked neoclass weaponry, even when it was demoralized by years of underfunding of its military under Yanukovych, and was divided into society, was able to even create some kind of resistance.
00:22:03
Speaker
Russia was unable to advance, and those ethnic Russians and those Russian speakers fought on the side of the Ukrainians, not on the side of Russia. But because of the groupthink, and because of these years of propaganda, because of Putin's reliance on a very small closed circle of advisers, he had this alternate reality in his head that large portions of the Ukrainians have agreed to as liberators, and that extended
Legacy and Logistical Failures in Ukraine Invasion
00:22:23
Speaker
from Putin down to the 18-year-old Russian concerts on the ground, who were shocked that they were being spat on and assaulted when they landed in Ukrainian territory because they told their mothers they thought we were coming here to liberate people who were suffering under Nazi oppression. So that's kind of one arc of it. The second was obviously the underestimation of the West, and that was somewhat more rational because Western countries had always talked a big game but underperformed when it came to countering Russian aggression in the past.
00:22:51
Speaker
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, and there were no sanctions that were imposed, or no divestment from Russian energy inside the West. Russia carried out atrocities like some of the very similar kind that we're seeing in Ukraine and Chechnya, including the use of filtration camps.
00:23:07
Speaker
and the mass leveling of cities, like think about back mode, and think about Marry-O-Pole, and go back to Grozny. And there wasn't even more than just a mere slap on the wrist. There was talk about engaging with Russia and bringing Russia into the collective West. They carry out war crimes with fighter jets and bomb schools and hospitals in Syria. No sanctions. They annex Crimea. A small number of elites get sanctioned, and Germany expands its dependence on Russian gas by signing Nord Stream 2 just months later.
00:23:38
Speaker
So, Vladimir Putin believed that the same thing would happen again, and the Western response would be just as feckless. So, Western societies would be divided between the political extremes, and the far left and the far right, and populist economic sentiments would deter serious sanctions.
00:23:54
Speaker
Also, the West would not supply large-scale military technology to Ukraine because they'd be able to use a nuclear weapons card to scare and thwart any movement of artillery, fighter jets, anything of any substance. So they figured that they were going to be able to succeed, and they were fighting against a disunited Ukrainian army.
00:24:12
Speaker
that had a Ukrainian society that had substantial support for them. So that was one big decision why he believed that the invasion of Ukraine would be something that was low cost and very high reward. It was almost a guarantee to succeed. And you see that because Russia only planned for supply lines of two to three days on many of their early interventions in Kiev. And troops just ran out of cold weather gear. They ran out of food. They ran out of things that they should never have run out of if they had planned an intervention properly.
00:24:40
Speaker
And they had only one supply station for a U.S. military would have three to five and the Russia puts one because they don't think they need that. Right. So that's just an interesting contradiction and point. Another thing, I think, was that Vladimir Putin wanted a legacy defining achievement, I think. And undoing the U.M.I. revolution, kind of reuniting the core parts of the Russian empire, as he saw it.
00:25:22
Speaker
conservative axis here, would be kind of his defining legacy. And that's kind of what I think he saw this as being, because in the first decade of his time in power, it was stabilization of the country after the 1990s and defusing detention, separatism, threat, and economic growth.
00:25:32
Speaker
Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, under a common destiny and a common set of leaders.
00:25:37
Speaker
The second decade, it was reclaiming Crimea and rebuilding the Russian military. In his third and what may well be his final decade in office, it would be reuniting the Russian world. So I think that that was the other reason why he wanted to go big and go all in, and he thought the costs were limited, and he ended up being extremely wrong on all fronts.
00:25:56
Speaker
Well, you actually summarized several hundred pages very succinctly there. So thank you for that. A couple of things that I think are really interesting that you just said. One is Putin's isolation. But actually, first I want to ask you about when you were talking about the West and Crimea.
00:26:19
Speaker
How much of a mistake do you think it was in 2014 that Putin seemed to receive no, hardly any consequences for his invasion of Crimea from the global stage? Well, I think that that was very significant, I think, and it really kind of created a bit of a false picture of what might happen later
Western Responses and Putin's Confidence
00:26:40
Speaker
on. And there was only one military columnist, Mikhail Karyanak, the retired colonel, who wrote an article in versus Guy Gizia, who warned
00:26:48
Speaker
that the West would be much more supportive of Ukraine this time around because Ukraine had been integrated much more into NATO structures from drills in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea than it was then.
00:27:00
Speaker
He assumed that, yeah, there was going to be no major Western support for Ukraine, no Western country gave lethal arms to Ukraine. Lithuania was the first. It was years later. Trump authorized the javelins in 2019 to come to Ukraine. Obama didn't give any kind of military assistance at the time. So there was a history of the West not backing Ukraine and also the West not sanctioning Russia anywhere near severely enough because in 2014, they were the official rhetoric when I was talking to people in Moscow.
00:27:30
Speaker
from the advisers, like Surya Karaganov, because they were shocked that Germany even sanctioned Russia at all. So they were shocked that some sanctions were there. But privately, they actually were expecting sanctions to get much more severe than they actually were. Alexei Kudrin, one of the key economic advisers, actually drove a plan for what Russia would do in the event of Russia being kicked out of Swift in the summer of 2014. Or even if one country did this, like Britain, for example, decided to do it in the aftermath of Brexit,
00:27:57
Speaker
If they just did it all by themselves, what would that be? And they already were concluding that, you know, they can try to figure out ways to keep GDP declined to less than 5%. And they were kind of coming up with strategies for this.
00:28:07
Speaker
So the Russians had a lot of bravado and a lot of confidence that you see the West is going to do nothing because they need us. But privately, even they, I think, were surprised by the weakness of the Western response. And that just encouraged them to go further and Putin to kind of push the boundaries as far as possible. So I think that that was a very serious blow and combined on the heels of that with a non-reaction to what they just did in Syria. I think that that was a gateway to bringing this forward. And finally, I think the very fact that, you know, the
00:28:35
Speaker
the 2016 interference in the U.S. elections, as egregious as that may have been as an attack on liberal democracy. God did lead to sanctions and did lead to so much coverage, but Russia's international ventures were barely greeted with a slap on the wrist, led Russian policymakers to conclude that Russia was becoming an issue of domestic politics and not really necessarily being viewed in national security threat terms,
00:28:58
Speaker
So if the Russians attacked Ukraine but didn't necessarily combine that with some kind of hybrid attacks on the United States, the US responds to be very limited. I think that that over-emphasis and over-dramatization to some extent of attacks on the home front and lack of dealing in a similar way or in a more severe way where the attacks abroad kind of convinced Russia to escalate in the moment that they did too. That's another narrative I was hearing in the Kremlin between 2014 and 2020. So I wanted to bring that up.
Putin's Decision-Making and Military Involvement
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, very famously, I think in like the 2012 US elections, the candidates were speaking about Russia as a regional power and very much discounting like their influence around the globe. This might be kind of a hard situation for us to imagine, but I'm curious if the war right now was being fought in 2014, how do you think that would be different?
00:29:56
Speaker
That would have been interesting. I think that, first of all, Ukraine would have been in a much weaker position than it was right now because the Ukraine's intelligence services were severely compromised by collusion and cooperation with the Russian security services, so much so that when the Russian forces went into Crimea, there was actually bases and installations where the people just fled and they even left their computers and their IT and all kinds of valuable information for the Russians to pick up and to collect.
00:30:25
Speaker
And there were also a lot of very active collaborators who would have helped and steered it from the ground. So, Yanukovych probably would have retreated to the east and then probably stayed there. And Medvedchuk would have been doing his work in terms of facilitating and moving this. There were even corrupt dealings between Medvedchuk, which was Russia's preferred successor, in Ukraine. And Putin is the godfather of his daughter, and poor Mr Poroshenko.
00:30:51
Speaker
which were later revealed onward. So Russia had a much greater ability to exercise soft power, spread disinformation, use local surrogates, corrupt even officials who were against Russia's side, and create confusion and create chaos. And also the Ukrainian military lacked NATO-class equipment, given severely hollowed out in the previous two decades. And there were high rate of defections in the intelligence services that I just noted.
00:31:18
Speaker
And I think that that would have meant that the Russians would have gained substantially more territory before the West would have been able to have kicked in with weapons deliveries. And we probably would have looked at Russia probably retaking, maybe even over the sea, and then the West may have finally only been able to woken up when Kiev itself was under threat. And then we would have seen a protracted and long war, which may have ended in very well in some kind of a frozen conflict, because it may have been just too much territory for the Ukrainian citizens lodged from Russia at one time.
00:31:48
Speaker
So I think that maybe Putin's biggest mistake from his own perspective was not going all in 2014 because he had disunited Ukraine who would have caught the world by surprise. And he would have had probably a much easier time at it, especially given the fact that it seems as if Russian military modernization after 2008 didn't do very much to change their fighting doctrine. So those extra eight years of military reform probably would not have done much to remove the needle. That's very interesting.
00:32:18
Speaker
Well, I'm curious about something else that you had mentioned in regards to Putin's isolation. So this became very apparent to everybody during the pandemic when you would see images of Vladimir Putin. He was at the long table and he was physically isolated from everybody. But as you noted, he's
00:32:40
Speaker
really just had like a small group of people that, you know, his inner circle that he relies on. And so he has been very isolated in terms of the knowledge that he receives. I'm curious, how isolated is he still given what's gone on with like the Pergosian mutiny, given that the war, I think from any angle, it's not going well and it's not what he expected. How isolated does he remain?
00:33:11
Speaker
So what happened was I think that he had a tendency to make decisions of these kind of military interventions with a very small circle of leaders. And the same exact decision making process was used in the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Even Sergey Lavrov was not in the room when that decision was made by all the accounts of experts they interviewed inside Russia and also in the U.S. who were familiar with Russian decision making. And he, I think in this invasion too, he was caught off guard because Lavrov the previous day was saying that the invasion was not going to happen and then
00:33:40
Speaker
he had to come with his UN team and come up with some kind of Article 51 national self-defense case to justify the invasion. And it seemed like a bit of a scattershot thing. So it was very likely that Vladimir Putin, in both of these interventions, merely consulted with his national security team and the head of the FSB, and maybe some people in the top of the military top brass, like Shorygu and Gerasimov. I would say that Patrick Shev,
00:34:09
Speaker
for example, from the national security team, maybe an influencer in policy and steering in this direction, or as Shoryu was merely an implementer and a passive implementer. So that's kind of how it would have looked like. So the number of influencers, even in that group of five or six, may have only been two or three.
00:34:24
Speaker
So if that's just, this gives you a sense of how close circle these decisions are made on issues like the war in Ukraine. I don't think that necessarily extends though to every single issue. I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. One of the things I know, for example, in Russian, Africa, the other book is a striking degree to which decision-making there is actually coming from the bottom up. It's coming from say, don't companies is coming from individuals like Pergosia. It's coming from do members and Federation council members and advisors to the president. And later, Putin just takes the agenda.
00:34:53
Speaker
in broad terms and does the trips and does the things and kind of lets these guys run it and just gives a thumbs up. So I wouldn't say that he was always isolated and the COVID isolation was just extending to every aspect of policy. He just said he keeps a very, very high degree of paranoia and secrecy about these highest level national security issues. And he wants to use these issues maybe to kind of unite the bureaucracy, pay people against each other. Maybe that's probably why he's doing that.
00:35:21
Speaker
because it doesn't seem to make much operational sense, not to get as wide a range of opinions as possible on the same thing. So I think it's less the COVID isolation, but more how he just has a pattern of conducting himself, trying to put the most high-level security issues that could lead to profound changes in Russian society and potentially pose threats and opportunities for regime consolidation, being determined by a small group of like-minded advisors and the rest of policy having other figures. And I think that as the war has proceeded,
00:35:48
Speaker
He has gotten much more hands-on and on the ground in terms of figuring out what's happening. There's lots of reports, for example. I've read Putin talks regularly to generals and even levels below general to military figures to find out what's happening on the front lines without showing you Andrazinov's consent. He's actively involved, of course, in the regular rotations that we're seeing in the southern, central and other military districts and personnel changes that we keep seeing on the ground because he's frustrated with how they're performing and he keeps trying to reassign them.
00:36:16
Speaker
And he's outsourced large amounts of domestic policy, I think, especially economic policy, to his prime minister, Mikhail Mishistan. So he's capable of delegation. He's capable of consultation. He's not about a state of mind. He's just about how he wants to micromanage and also is a bit paranoid when he's handling these very, very high-level security issues and high-risk interventions.
00:36:39
Speaker
Yeah, well, thinking about his kind of close circle of advisors and thinking about Shoygu in Jarasimov and the Pergosian mutiny, which was very directed at their failures, not Putin's failures, their failures. I'm curious how they obviously remain in their jobs and they obviously remain in Putin's circle.
00:37:06
Speaker
How, how important are both of them individually to Putin? And I guess, you know, how, how is Putin receiving the criticism against them and what actions does he take in, in response to that? So, uh, it was interesting. His progression is speech, which I think is very, very important to understand the mutiny, even more important than some of the gesticulations that he did before, like talking about how the Russian defense minister were attacking his forces. Speech is very revealing.
00:37:36
Speaker
of what his grievances towards the Russian military leadership were. And his argument was basically that Sergei Shoigu was corrupt. He was kind of pursuing his own ambitions and basically effectively squandering Russia's military resources and reforms to probably enrich himself. And also he was working in conjunction with oligarchs whose sole purpose was to plunder Ukraine, right? And Putin was kind of seen as a figure who was incompetent
00:38:06
Speaker
And I'm able to deal with that or manage what the people underneath them were doing. I tried you and the oligarchs were planning all this, and they were able to pull wool over his eyes to see them, and Putin didn't stop it. So thinking of Putin was deceived into believing that the people of Donbas were experiencing genocide, and NATO was about to expand under Russia's borders, and that Ukraine was going to be used as a launch pad to attack Russia itself, all these type of things. So precautions and the monitor
00:38:33
Speaker
was, yes, first and foremost, aimed at changing the Russian military leadership. And I have doubts as to whether he actually intended to overthrow Vladimir Putin on the day, or rather try to get to the gates of Moscow and blackmail Putin almost into firing these figures and replacing them with people like the disappeared general, Sergei Seravikin, or Teplinsky, who was rumored to replace Jarazimov, and then that rumor died down, and people like that.
00:38:57
Speaker
So, but also he was taking a direct aim at Putin's leadership and also Putin's ability to manage his subordinates. I think that may have been why that was a real red line for him, right? And that guy in terms of his future inside Putin's inner circle, more so than some of the other, uh, dramatics that he had carried out before, like standing in front of the corpses and crying about munitions and accusing the defense ministry of treason and other stuff that he had done. Cause he was attacking Putin himself there. I mean, that's the important thing to bring up.
00:39:24
Speaker
I think that with regards to Shoigu and Gerasimov, I think that Shoigu has been a long-term position in the world. He's been there since 2012. He did manage the interventions in Ukraine and also Syria. To some degree, though, I think the actual credit for the successes were probably the generals on the ground, like Dornakov and Simeksen, largely Sergey Sirovikin, and their coordination with Assad around Hezbollah. He was largely just overseeing personnel and
00:39:53
Speaker
and equipment and things like that. He's an administrator of emergencies before that. He doesn't have a military background. He's not especially respected by the military top brass, by veterans, by the FSB, or by, for that matter, Putin, by somebody who runs the military in administratively efficient enough way. And even if he's not strategically sound, and even though he's got corruption and vulnerabilities, he's not going to have ambitions to replace Putin.
00:40:20
Speaker
and try to overthrow him, and try to disrupt the apple cart and disrupt the system. By keeping Shoigu in power, the military is effectively, quote, coop-riffed. So that's probably why I think that Shoigu has stayed in place, and Shoigu is unlikely to be removed in the near future. Gerasimov is a slightly different kettle of fish, because Gerasimov actually was a contributor to Russia's military doctrines and military reforms. There's two fingers, right? There's Sir Duchov, the first defense minister before Shoigu, who was seen as too much willing to challenge authority, which is why Shoigu
00:40:49
Speaker
who was more pliable, was put in, and Durozimov, who came up with their hybrid war doctrine. So their doctrine of cyber warfare, their doctrine of using proxies and surrogates, information warfare. And that doctrine has proven to be ineffective in Ukraine, because they couldn't influence Ukrainian public opinion to be pro-Russian. They haven't carried out any meaningful cyber attacks. And their ability to use proxies and surrogates like the Luhansk and Diodinius militias, or Chechen Katerofsky,
00:41:17
Speaker
have been marred by chaos and infighting and a lot of problems. But Jerazimov is the antidote, at this point, to the ultra-nationalist or opposing a threat to his regime. Sir Vicken was clearly demoted and replaced by him to be writing the forces in Ukraine. So I don't think that Putin for the near future will dismiss him.
00:41:38
Speaker
because doing so would be kind of acknowledging that the ultra-nationalists were right and would give them some oxygen. Just today, one of the biggest ultra-nationalist critics of Putin, Igor Gherkin, was just to take. So that's the sign that he's really trying to crack down on that block and not try to empower them. So of the two, I think Jarazimab was more of a contributor to the failed war, and therefore he's more vulnerable to being dismissed than Shoigu, but he's not likely to be dismissed in the current climate.
00:42:03
Speaker
either because of the ultra-national threat and the fact that Russia just wants to climb down on these people and not give them concessions.
Russia's Current Role and Achievements in Syria
00:42:12
Speaker
Yeah, and that's very interesting, what you say, because even if Putin wanted to dismiss Gerasimov or Shoigu, to do that would be almost like an admission of his own failure. It would make him look weak, like he could not manage them. So that is very interesting.
00:42:33
Speaker
I want to pivot a little bit here and talk about Syria, which has been brought up a few times. What is the relationship like right now between Russia and Syria? Well, I think that Russia has largely achieved its major objectives in Syria, as they were defined when they intervened in 2015. So I was in Moscow where the intervention in Syria began, and they framed their operation in very much Bush doctrine type terms.
00:43:03
Speaker
We have to expel ISIS from Syria. We have to fight the terrorists before the terrorists end up in the North Caucasus, right? So it's like we have to attack Iraq before the WMBs end up in the streets of our cities. It's the same kind of analogy, almost the same rhetoric, and such an irony, given how much flutter Putin has spent the past 20 years attacking US unilateralism and US military interventions. But that was what they set the goal to be.
00:43:29
Speaker
They played a roughly minimal role in the actual defeat of ISIS because 92 to 94% of their strikes were targeted and focused on various Syrian opposition groups and also some affiliated to al-Qaeda like Jabir al-Nusra, but also many who were just grassroots opposition groups. And the U.S. did the heavy lifting in terms of the fighting against ISIS. So ISIS has been defeated in Syria for the most part, which is good for him. And also Assad has managed to take control over the integral parts of the country.
00:43:59
Speaker
He managed to take over, secure Damascus, take over Aleppo, take over Palmyra and some other surrounding cities, and effectively just some pockets of it live in the Kurdish areas, are all that are left. So Russia does not need to really do much in Syria these days, aside from just giving Assad the degree of air support and the degree of naval support and the personnel on the ground for training in logistics to make sure Assad keeps what he has. So that's why the frequency
00:44:27
Speaker
of airstrikes in Syria after the war in Ukraine began, reached an all-time low. And that's why, you know, after the Moscow cruiser was sunk, there was not much disruption to Russia's intervention in Syria, like some predicted, because it doesn't need those kind of heavy equipment anymore to function and to develop. In the longer term, I think that Russia is going to play a wait-and-see approach and be very patient in Syria, because it, Iran, and Damascus are all under international sanctions. So the question is, who gets the sanctions lifted first?
00:44:56
Speaker
Will countries like the UAE who've been lobbying for Cesarac sanctions in Syria to be lifted to rebuild the country get some kind of a concession on Syria? Will there be a JCPOA that brings Iran to Cesarac sanctions lifted? Or will there be some kind of a ceasefire or deal with Russia or something that leads to Russia seeing some more freedom to maneuver and to invest? And right now, neither of those three scenarios are very likely, so they can't really engage in the reconstruction process.
00:45:24
Speaker
But when one of those or multiple of those scenarios kick in, they want to make sure that they outflank Iran and that they're first in line for the oil, the petrochemicals, and the other areas of the Syrian economy where their companies have quietly been making outreaches and deals in the event that that does happen. And the second thing I think they want is to maintain long-term military presence in the Mediterranean, in the Middle East, in Syria, and that means modernizing their bases in Tartus and Khmeimim and keeping sure they keep them for a minimum of 50 years.
00:45:54
Speaker
So I think that that's really what their in-game is in Syria. And also they've achieved something else when they've gotten Syria into the Arab League. And they've managed to de-escalate somewhat Syria's tensions with Turkey, even though the Turkish military presence on the border remains. So they've achieved most of what they want. The next steps are reconstruction and staying there for the remainder of this half century or maybe a century. I'm curious if there's anything in the reverse direction.
00:46:23
Speaker
Iran is supplying their drones to the Russians to use in Ukraine. Is Syria supplying anything to the Russians to use in Ukraine, whether that's manpower or equipment or anything? No, there's really no evidence of that. There were rumors that Syria would supply barrel bombs that it used to Russia, and that's still a possibility given the fact that the US is giving Ukraine costume munitions, but that never really got off the ground.
00:46:50
Speaker
And there were also rumors that Syria was going to actually maybe even send foreign fighters or ground forces, or the Russians were trying to give up enthusiasm for that. There was that famous rally in Damascus University where Syrian students were wearing the flag colors of the Syrian Arab Republic flag, formed a zed, and there were some gestures like this to try to encourage and inspire support for the war in Ukraine. But the vast majority of the Syrian people see themselves, particularly the Syrian Sunnis.
00:47:19
Speaker
and also the Syrian Kurds, see themselves as being victims of Russian to Russian directly or indirectly. And they view basically in Syria and they have a lot of solidarity with Ukraine. There's plenty of Syrian opposition fighters who are wearing Ukrainian flags, many more of them than Syrian pro-government people carrying zets. So I think in general, there's not much enthusiasm for bringing forces into Russia. I don't think that the barrel bombs are going to be transferred
00:47:47
Speaker
also to Russia, even if they might prove to be useful, however brutal they may be for some of Russia's attacks on Ukrainian cities.
U.S. Cluster Bombs Support to Ukraine
00:47:56
Speaker
And you bring up cluster bombs. Do you think that that is a mistake to supply cluster bombs from the US to Ukraine? Well, I mean, I think that it's a complicated question, a complicated situation. I think that it's something that the US would rather not have done, I think.
00:48:15
Speaker
I think given the fact that it's the only weapons shipment in modern times that's really polarized and divided the NATO alliance, because so many countries in NATO have signed on to the opposition to the ban on cluster munitions. So something they would have rather not done, but there were some strategic reasons why it may have been a necessary move. Number one, Russia's been using cluster munitions on the front lines, and Ukraine does have its stocks of Soviet air cluster munitions as it's used to. So it would be using some of them probably regardless,
00:48:45
Speaker
And the Russians have used them. So when Russia says that they will threaten to use more of them, they may use more of them, but they were in the first month of the war, there were 24 instances of me using custom munitions. And they were trying to use them when they were trying to advance in multiple directions on Kiev, on Kharkiv, in Donbas. The second thing is that Ukraine's Canada offensive right now is moving at a relatively slow pace. And that's because of the intensity of Russia's fortifications.
00:49:13
Speaker
The fact that Russian forces have gotten more sophisticated in terms of rebuffing Ukrainian forces, they can use A.T.A.G.Ms, for example, and attack helicopters and take advantage of the Ukrainians being stuck in the mud in the fortifications and attack and disperse units. They've been more effective at jamming chemars and other systems. They've been able to adapt to it. They're fighting alongside a single one or two axes of advance with more of a traditional Soviet-Russian doctrine.
00:49:40
Speaker
instead of just the kind of chaos that we saw during the early days of the war. And they got more people. They got 300,000 conscripts brought in, plus now another 128,000, I think, brought in the first half of this year. So they don't have the manpower shortages that they had before. Even with Wagner out of the table, Wagner are offensive units, they're not defensive units. So I think that given that, given the slow pace of the Ukrainian counter-offensive and the fact that Ukrainian cities are being pummeled relentlessly,
00:50:07
Speaker
not just by Russian potential combinations used, but also of course the daily bombardments of strikes and of Iranian drones, as you just mentioned before. And I think that this is just something that gives Ukraine another small step towards leveling the playing field. Of course, it's not what the Ukrainians really want, which is aviation and F-16s and adacams, long range missiles.
00:50:31
Speaker
whether Russia can jam those, like the way they do with HIMAR, that's a question. But jets are what they really want. But this is just another thing that could help them in a small way at this difficult time in their counter-offensive.
Possibility of Russia's Internal Collapse
00:50:42
Speaker
Yeah. Well, thinking a little bit about the future, the conclusion of your book, it is subtitled Russia in 2023, a year of implosion with a question mark. Explain that.
00:50:59
Speaker
So, well, I think that there's many ways in which Russia could implode in 2020, right? I think that it's, we almost already saw an example of it just on display last month. If the Progosion two had not necessarily succeeded, but also not failed, substantial parts of the Rosalynia and the Russian military and Russian regional governors followed the path of Rostov and handed over to support the Progosion and people like Sir Vicky worked on his side, we could have been seeing something resembling what we're seeing play out in Sudan right now, a clash between the national army
00:51:29
Speaker
and a powerful paramilitary force, a civil war occurring in the face of an interstate war. And that would have been something that could have led to a complete destabilization of Russia and its power circles. And the threat of ultranationalists inside Russia to the Kremlin as the war continues to go badly is certainly something that is a major concern. We're seeing the Russian economy hold up much more resiliently than expected, in part because they've been able to sanctions-proof themselves over the past decade.
00:51:57
Speaker
They've been able to redirect a lot of the raw material supplies to the collective non-west. They've also been able to get semiconductors and other tech products from countries like China, Turkey, the UAE. But this is when I was saying implosion. I was thinking about a scenario where a perfect storm happens. The economic sanctions really started beginning to bite stronger than before. And Russia engages in reckless moves, like eventually attacking its operation nuclear plant or
00:52:22
Speaker
blocking the Black Sea grain deal, as they've already done, or even experiments with tactical nuclear weapons, at least the world isolating them. And then, clashes break out internally between the ultra-nationalists, who are dissatisfied with the Russian military and the Russian military, and you see some kind of a mix of the Soviet Civil War, 1917, and the 1990s economic crash all happened at once.
00:52:46
Speaker
That potentially leads to the worst case scenario for Russia, a destabilization of central authority, a failed state that regions are breaking off. I mean, I don't think that's a likely scenario, but I just want to raise the question in this vector because it's ironic that Russia thought wanted to destroy Ukraine. I wanted to disunite Ukraine, wipe it off the map and create a failed state in Ukraine, even if it didn't succeed militarily. And all it's done after one year of war, a year and a half of war.
00:53:11
Speaker
is risk creating a failed state in Russia. It's more likely there's going to be a failed state in chaos in Russia, and there is to see Ukraine being wiped off, which is an irony from Putin's perspective. Well, I know you said it's not likely, but if you were to put a percentage on it, if you can, what is the percentage likeliness that Russia sees an implosion in 2023, you think?
00:53:36
Speaker
Along the lines that I was just describing with many of those facets probably between five and 10%. I would rate it relatively low. I think that the swift defeat of the Progogen coup and Progogen returning to Belarus will probably discourage somebody else from doing that in the very near future, but not in the longer term future because Putin was also exposed to being internationally isolated. I mean, only Cuba and North Korea and Venezuela came out in support of them and all three of those came out in support of them after Progogen went to Belarus.
00:54:05
Speaker
China said nothing, Iran didn't take his side. There were lots of weaknesses. And also, even though many people were making bland statements for unity, there certainly was not a pro-Putin mobilization. It's the apathy that the Russian public and Russian propaganda puts on the Russian people to ignore war crimes and to ignore the war in Ukraine. That same kind of apathy now seems to be extending to Putin's leadership. There isn't the kind of mobilization like we saw against the Orange Revolution, pro-Putin nationalism coming from groups like Nashi and young people and students kind of joining that.
00:54:35
Speaker
doesn't exist anymore. So I think that Putin has got serious vulnerabilities to an internal challenge, and there are a lot of potential, given depending on Russia's actions, for Russia to become more isolated and have economic shocks. But I also think that with the progression of mutiny being defused, with the non-west largely standing behind Russia in some way, shape, or form, he's probably the worst-case scenario is most likely going to be averted.
Impact of Russia's Exit from Black Sea Grain Deal
00:55:00
Speaker
Well, you mentioned the grain embargo. And so this week, as we're recording, Russia has put a blockade on Ukraine. I believe Ukraine, in response, put a naval blockade on Russia. How significant is what's developing the naval situation? How significant is that right now? So the bossy grain deals collapsed. It's something that was
00:55:30
Speaker
wanted by other hardliners who don't want any kind of diplomacy with Ukraine and also who believe that the grain and fertilizer from Russia was being sanctioned or was not being allowed to enter international markets in a free and fair way. So they saw the deal as inequitable and unjust. So I think from a lot of nationalists at home will greet this as a positive and belated move that was necessary to undertake. I think that was the primary impetus behind Putin's
00:55:58
Speaker
decision to suspend the grain deal at this time instead of just doing the 60-day extension and expressing dissatisfaction, like he was doing the previous few times. Also, the Ukrainian strike on the Crimean Bridge, which happened right at the same time, and warring Ukrainian drone strikes on Crimea itself gave Russia a segue to a pretext to leave, because it was saying that Ukraine was threatening Black Sea shipping and Black Sea security, and especially militarizing the Black Sea. So we have to treat all goods, whether they be grain as the equivalent of arms caches,
00:56:28
Speaker
or the equivalent of military components coming out. So those incidents also gave Putin a way out. And finally, I think the other thing that gave Putin a way out was the recent decline in relations between Russia and Turkey. Russia and Turkey are releasing the Azov Battalion members who were traded for Medvedevk ahead of schedule. They're supposed to stay in Turkey until the end of the war. They were released to return. Turkey is supporting the Ukraine's fast-tracking session to NATO. And Turkey, it's due to expand drone
00:56:58
Speaker
even, to some extent, greenlighting the cluster munitions shipments to Ukraine, as well as Turkey's refusal to withdraw from northern Syria, which was a command from Assad. All these things happening at once in the anti-Turkish campaign that was being fired up in the Russian media, where basically they were trying to talk about how Turkey is in a position of weakness, that Erdogan is like needing Putin's help in 2016 after the coup, because he was alienated from the West.
00:57:24
Speaker
I think that given the fact that Turkey was the key guarantor of this and the relationship is under strain right now, I think fighter Putin also felt it'd be okay to get out and to leave. The question is, what comes next? Obviously, leaving the grand deal of long-term is going to be bad for Russia's image in the global South, even if African leaders are keeping mysteriously quiet about this. And having the image of starving the world is certainly not a good one when you're dependent on the global South. So that's something that needs to get resolved.
00:57:53
Speaker
Also, Russia doesn't have the ability to blockade the Black Sea anymore. I mean, they've lost the Moscow. And also, too many of their naval carriers are vulnerable to Ukrainian Neptune missiles, as well as Western-made anti-ship missiles that have come in since the Moscow sinking. So I think that Russia lacks that. Russia's only recourse right now is to stall inspections wherever the grain is still coming out, and also to bomb and attack Ukrainian port infrastructure with shiad drones and with
00:58:22
Speaker
the, and also with missile, cruise missiles and other strikes. And we're seeing that happening in Odessa on a day-to-day basis. So I think the fastest way to get Russia back into the grain deal is to make sure that the air defense systems in Kiev are working extremely well and they're limiting major attacks on the capital. Getting those kind of air defense systems or air defense equipment somehow being moved to Odessa right now into Ukraine's grain ports and securing them would probably be the fastest way for Russia
00:58:49
Speaker
to recognize that it's war on grain shipments is going to do more harm than good. And it has to go there, or less likely, if African leaders just simply don't turn out next week at the summit, or there's some kind of friction about this, then maybe he might want to go back to the drawing board. Or some kind of hidden pressure from China, which was also sustaining deluge from this disruption in grain and is seeing food price inflation as concerning to it. India is also seeing the same kind of thing. So maybe pressure from China and India might be what moves it to.
00:59:18
Speaker
So you would say it's pretty unlikely that Russian ships start sinking merchant vessels coming out of Ukraine, carrying grain shipments. It's possible that they could try to do that and do so in a relatively deniable fashion. And by claiming that they were armed shipments and the same stuff coming through from there, creating a bit of a crisis and creating an escalation, I think that I would not rule that out. But I think that, you know, it's not the most likely outcome because Russia is having strains in relations with Turkey, but Turkey is also not sanctioning Russia as the only NATO country.
00:59:47
Speaker
as really not sanctioning Russia and it's allowing Russian energy to reach Europe and it's allowing Russia to get access to technology. Many Russian nationals and tech companies have relocated there to do business. So I don't think they really want to push the boundaries of their relations with Turkey from a period of tension into a full blown crisis. So I don't think that they're going to necessarily engage in measures like that, but also them rejoining the Green Deal as it was and complying with it in the full spirit of how it was intended.
01:00:16
Speaker
I think is also unlikely, too. It's going to be intense back and forth here, whether we wait and see what happens. Well, Samuel, this has been a terrific interview. You've given such thoughtful answers to my questions. One last question I've got for you here is, what are you hoping that readers take away from your book?
Understanding Ukraine's War in a Global Context
01:00:41
Speaker
Well, I'm thinking that people should really place the Ukraine war into its global context. I think that the point that you made at the very start I think was very important. It's important to recognize that this war in Ukraine is not just about poking the nose of the West or poking the nose of NATO or trying to just recapture the Soviet Union for the sake of recapturing it. It's also about recreating an identity inside Russia that's conservative and liberal. It's about uniting the Russian people. It's about presenting Russia
01:01:09
Speaker
as some kind of a vanguard inside the multipolar world order. So it's about Russia's vision of a world order, Russia's aversion to liberal democracy and willingness to resist it, and Russia's desire to construct an identity at home.
Following Samuel Romany's Work
01:01:21
Speaker
The origins of this war are not based on external provocations. They're based on how Vladimir Putin sees his regime's stability and legitimacy, and also forces from within, nationalist forces,
01:01:34
Speaker
and illiberal forces that are coming from within. So we should always look inside Russia to understand what Russia is going to do next, because that's the best indicator, and not to be so focused on the external triggers and the external stimuli.
Twitter vs. Russia: Likelihood of Implosion?
01:01:47
Speaker
Wonderful. Well, if folks want to stay in touch with your work, if they want to follow what you're doing, are you on social media? How can people stay in touch with what you're doing? Sure. The main place where I post everything almost ubiquitously is on Twitter, at SamRammity2.
01:02:02
Speaker
And he's got over 200,000 followers there. I've got all my interviews, my links to my publications there on a regular basis. So just to keep an eye out of all of my day-to-day thoughts on what's happening with events in Russia and Ukraine and also further afield. I stretch out pretty wide net there. Would you say a Twitter implosion is more likely than a Russia implosion? Sadly, I think yes.
01:02:26
Speaker
It's easy to wonder what he's going to come up with next, right?
Conclusion and Thanks to Samuel Romany
01:02:30
Speaker
Yeah. Well, Samuel Ramany, Putin's war on Ukraine, Russia's campaign for global counter-revolution. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. Some really great information in here. And Samuel, again, thank you so much for your time. Pleasure. Thank you so much, Ajay.