Ukraine Update | Frederick Kagan

Hello everyone. I'm speaking once again today with Dr. Frederick W. Kagan, who's the author of a number of books related to history and foreign policy. He also worked as an assistant professor of military history at West Point from 95 to 2001 and as an associate professor of military history from 2001 to 2005. He holds a PhD in Russian and Soviet military history from Yale.

After we spoke a few days ago, and you can refer to that video for a more in-depth discussion, we decided that an update on the situation in Ukraine, now and then, might be useful. So this is perhaps the first of those. Thanks for talking to me again, Dr. Kagan, and I'm all ears. What's happening in Ukraine? What's happening around the world? How do you see the situation? Where are we going?

“Well, thanks, Jordan. Thank you for having me on and thank you for having me back. It's a privilege to be with you and speak with your audience about this. Thank you for staying on this topic. Amazingly, the Ukrainians are still in the fight in the conventional war against the Russians. A week into it, no one who is familiar with the militaries of either side or who is familiar with basic practices of net assessment would have guessed that the Ukrainians would still be in a position where they have held their capital. They've held Kiev. They've prevented the Russians from taking the second largest city in Ukraine, Kharkiv. They have lost ground in the south; they've probably lost the city of Kherson. They're probably going to lose the city of Mariupol, but they have not lost any other major city and they've inflicted fearful losses on the Russian invaders. They've been able to beat off repeated Russian mechanized attacks and airborne attacks.

How have they been able to manage that and why is it such a surprise? Well, you know, when you do a basic net assessment, you count things like tanks and aircraft and artillery tubes and rocket launchers and stuff, and you look at the degree of modernization of both sides and what kind of equipment everybody has. Then you look at the numbers of troops and so forth. By all of those measures, the Russian superiority is so overwhelming that all of your basic net assessment calculations would say that the Russians should have been able to just roll over them. The Russians seem to have thought that they would just roll over them, and that's a big part of the explanation for why things have gone the way they did.

It's really become very clear that the Russians just did not expect that they were going to be in a big fight here. They thought that they were going to roll in, the Ukrainians were going to run away or surrender, and the Russians thought they were basically going to be able to drive into Kiev and other cities and do their will. I think they've been very much surprised by the fact that the Ukrainians have just decided to fight like lions and have been also very skillful at it.

Then there are some other factors that are important here too. It's not obvious to me that when the Russian military put the forces in place that have conducted this invasion, they actually thought that they were going to have to conduct the invasion. I think it's very possible that the initial deployments they made were actually done more to generate psychological effects on Ukraine in the West in support of other things that Putin was trying to do. Certainly, we know that Russian soldiers were surprised when they were told that they were actually going to invade Ukraine. I think it's possible that there have been points over the past few weeks when more senior Russian officers were told that they were really going in and were probably taken aback because the Russians just made a lot of mistakes in the way that they set up to conduct this operation and they made a lot of mistakes in the way they've conducted it. The Ukrainians have made them pay for almost every one of those mistakes.

So what's happening in Russia more broadly? There were demonstrations, which is always surprising to see in Russia. What do you have information about the spread of those demonstrations, their effectiveness, their unexpectedness, any of that? And then on the world front, what's happening there? People seem to have united around the world in a quite remarkable manner, in a manner that isn't working out in Russia's favor, let's say. So let's talk about the Russian domestic situation first and then the international situation.

Well, we've seen unprecedented wide large protests against the war, including some prominent personalities and also just a lot of Russians on the streets. The Russians purportedly arrested thousands of people in these protests, or that they claim were involved in the protests. I don’t know how many of them actually were. It is surprising. Russians have been conditioned to know that if you go out and protest, the odds of being arrested are high, and those are not jails that you want to spend any time in. It says a lot about the degree to which Putin had just really failed to prepare his population for this war.

I think they didn’t think this was going to happen for the excellent reason that Russian officials were telling them that it wasn’t going to happen right up until the moment that it happened. Just about days before, like within 36 hours of the actual Russian invasion, Russian senior officials were still mocking the West for saying that the Russians were going to invade. So the Russian people were caught by surprise. I think there's an element here that's very important because it helps contextualize the conversation about how much the U.S. should or should not do to help the Ukrainians here. This includes whether we want to go to Ukraine and fight and so on, which no one is really suggesting and which I'm not advocating now either.

Russian people, we've seen polling, the best polling you can get from Russia, see America as an enemy. They see NATO as an enemy by large margins. There's an old Cold War hangover and then there's what Putin's been doing for 20 years to stoke that. They don't see Ukraine as an enemy in the same way. Of course, all of the narrative and rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin has been that Ukraine has sort of lost Russian brothers in many respects. The Ukrainian government—the Russians have terrible things to say about—but Ukrainians they say are our Slavic brothers and fundamentally belong in Russia.

If this had been a war against the U.S. or a war against NATO, Putin could have expected to have a certain resonance among his population. But I think the fact that this is very purely a war against Ukraine undermines a lot of the messages and runs counter to a lot of public sentiment. I think a lot of Russians are just saying to themselves, 'Why are we doing this?' I mean, that is what they’re saying. People are asking, 'Why are we doing this?'

As the sanctions hit and as the economy gets worse, have sanctions ever been effective in a situation like this before? Or is there ever a situation like this before?

Well, in a certain fundamental sense, I don’t think there has been a situation like this where we had a U.S. administration that was saying very clearly, 'We think the Russians are going to invade and our strategy to prevent them from invading is to threaten them with sanctions.' We’re saying we, the U.S., are not going to enter the war, so there's no military deterrent on the table. It’s as pure and pristine a test as you could ever hope to have of the theory that the threat of crippling sanctions will deter large-scale military action. In that sense, it has demonstrated the weakness, shall we say, of that theory.

It is about as pristine an experiment as you could hope for. I'm not surprised by it; I never thought that the threat of sanctions would deter Putin if he had decided to invade, and they clearly didn't. I don't think that they're going to, by themselves, persuade him to stop this fight. The Ukrainians are in the process of making a strong argument about why continuing this war is not a good idea from Putin's perspective, but I'm not optimistic that he's going to come to that conclusion soon.

Have you been surprised by the response on the international front? I've been very gratified by it. I mean, when you see the Russians lose a vote in the U.N. General Assembly by 141-5, that is an astonishing failure of Russian messaging, information operations, and public diplomacy.

Listen, the only former Soviet state that voted against that resolution was Belarus, which has 30,000 Russian troops in it. Even the Kazakhs, even the Armenians didn't vote against that resolution; they abstained. That’s a sort of a repudiation of sorts even within the Russia-dominated world. Then the virtual unanimity of the General Assembly on that resolution is a devastating blow to Putin's narratives over many years. He believes in collective, in multipolarity. He believes in the U.N. and that the U.N. should be the arbiter of all of these things. He’s thrown that back at the U.S. for decades, and to be repudiated by the U.N. as thoroughly as he just was is a devastating blow for him informationally.

Now, it’s not going to change his calculus. Why did that happen?

It happened because, as we talked about on the last show where we discussed this, I think the Biden administration very skillfully conducted an information diplomatic campaign that stripped away from Putin all of the efforts he was making to give himself any kind of informational cover and make it look like the Ukrainians had started this or prompted it or generated any ambiguity. Then he decided to just big fat invade anyway, without any kind of a fig leaf, and that has just made him so clearly the aggressor. Even before he started rumbling in Kharkiv, what do you think the Biden administration did on that front that was particularly effective?

So along with the threat of sanctions, which was not effective in deterring him, the Biden administration did really work hard to learn about and to penetrate Russian plans to conduct information operations, to conduct false flag attacks, to try to assassinate Zelensky, to try to conduct a coup d'état. They publicized what they learned. They really were very, very fast to declassify intelligence and publicize all of the Russian attempts to create this fictitious universe to gaslight us and persuade us that this is somehow Ukraine's fault or that the Ukrainians had prompted this.

It was a very skillful campaign that the Biden administration ran. Now, I need to be careful. We need to be careful about overcrediting them because I think that they did think that by doing all of that, they would deter Putin from attacking, because they were presenting him with the reality that he would have to go in without any informational cover. At the end of the day, Putin decided he just didn't care and he was going to go in anyway. So that campaign failed from the perspective of what it was intended to do, which was to deter him.

But it did put him in this very bad spot where he’s stripped of informational cover. He is nakedly the aggressor, and the international community, at least in the first week of this war, has largely, with a couple of notable exceptions, rallied against him in a way that we really haven't seen it rally against anyone since Osama bin Laden, and that's quite an accomplishment.

What do you think might have constituted a more appropriate strategy of deterrence or let's say a more effective strategy of diplomacy that might have avoided this altogether, or is that even possible?

Look, my view all along has been that if Putin was willing to conduct this invasion in order to achieve his aims, the only way that we were really going to deter him from doing that would have been by making it clear that we were going to fight with the Ukrainians and we were going to guarantee his military defeat. I don’t think anything short of that—and that’s a tough game. The more that's put forward as the strategy, the more the fear, let's say, that's driving him of the west, of the westernization, perhaps, of Ukraine, the more that also appears justified in his eyes.

I mean, candidly, I'm happy to discuss that with you, but candidly that counter-argument wasn't the one that impressed me the most because he was already where he was on that. Putin is a guy who understands force. Although I and the team at the Institute for the Study of War have written for years about how clever he's been with information operations and hybrid war and lots of other things, at the end of the day, Putin understands force. If you take force off the table and you tell him that he's not going to have to worry about a forcible response, that shapes his calculation in a certain direction. If you put force on the table and tell him that maybe he does have to worry about mixing it up with the American military or NATO, then that would have changed his calculation in a different direction.

At a minimum, because, by the way, I want to be very clear that I wasn’t advocating, and I'm not advocating now, that we should have said that we would have gone into Ukraine and fought against the Russians. I thought it was a very complicated series of decisions we needed to make, and I'm not going to second guess the decision not to do that. I will say that it was, in my view, unfortunate that President Biden said and kept repeating that we would not fight in Ukraine, because I think that leaving ambiguity in Putin's mind on that question would have been a good idea. I don't know that it would have been sufficient, though, since he had decided that he was prepared to do this.

Why do you think the threat of economic sanctions wasn't a sufficient deterrent? Was the threat credible? Why do people who make such threats assume that the threat of economic sanctions, which I suspect in some sense hits the ordinary population harder than the leaders, why is that viewed as a credible deterrent?

Look, I mean on the one hand, there's a certain sort of mirror imaging here that we think about what would we, how would we think about the world if we were facing the kinds of sanctions that we're imposing on Russia? How would any normal or ordinary person in Putin's position think about these things? Because we can devastate the Russian economy, and we are devastating the Russian economy. That will matter to Putin. Russia's foreign reserves are not infinite and they're not even that extensive, honestly. War is incredibly expensive, especially when you’re losing soldiers and equipment at a rate he appears to be. He’s going to need cash, and having his economy wrecked is going to make it very hard to continue this war, among other things that he needs to do, and it's going to make his people very unhappy. That will ultimately matter to him.

In the short term, it affects ordinary people and oligarchs, but in the longer term, it will affect him also in his ability to do stuff. But here's the thing: once somebody has decided that they are prepared to try their luck by force of arms, they've made a mental and psychological shift that it's easy for people on the outside not to recognize, because what you're saying is, 'I'm prepared to go in, and I'm prepared to kill a lot of people, and I'm prepared to lose a lot of my own people, and I'm prepared to run the risk however slight it might be that the war won't go my way, and really bad things will happen.' If you're in that mindset, then the threat of economic sanctions is not what is first and foremost in your mind.

I think we just, you know, a lot of people collectively missed that Putin had gotten into that mindset and then overestimated the sort of rationality that is required to think about the long-term effects of economic sanctions of a certain variety. So what do you think is going to happen, and what do you think we should want to have happen? If this could end in a relatively, comparatively non-catastrophic manner, does that mean that Putin has to see a way forward that still involves him retaining control of Russia?

Is there a way that he can do that without that would be acceptable to the West in any real sense? What would be our preconditions for saying this is over and we can move on? What should they be?

Well, I mean, I think at this point, our basic precondition is Russians get the hell out of Ukraine and stop attacking it, and then stop threatening to attack it. There will be Russian war crimes being committed; there will be war crimes trials conducted. It's important to hold Russians accountable for the terrible things they're doing. Beyond that, you know, I would personally be prepared to accept it if Putin accepted the military defeat, withdrew his forces, and returned Ukrainian territory to Ukraine. I'd like to demand that he return Donetsk and Luhansk that he had all occupied to begin with, as well as Crimea.

If I had to accept a peace that had a Russian military defeat but that had Russian forces still in Crimea, without of course recognizing Crimea or changing our position on that in any way, I would be inclined to accept that. Because at the best outcome that we could hope for, and I’m not optimistic that we will see this, would be that the Ukrainian military, with no more assistance than the provision of weapons and supplies and so forth that it’s getting now, maybe a little bit more of that, defeats the Russian military conventionally, and Putin accepts the defeat. That’s the best possible outcome that we could hope for.

It will be a humiliation of the Russian military of a sort that it hasn’t experienced since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and that's why unfortunately I don't think Putin can accept it. I think Putin will feel obliged, does feel obliged to secure some military victory of some variety, because as he keeps saying, weakness is lethal. Being defeated by the Ukrainians he will regard as intolerable, but that's the best outcome that we could hope for, and it's what we are working for right now, and it's what we should continue to work for.

As long as you think that, what do you think he might be pushed to accept as a minimally acceptable military victory? I've got to tell you, I'm beyond the point of being able to claim that I really understand Putin’s thought process at this point, except to say that I'm pretty confident that he will not be able to accept emotionally and mentally a straightforward defeat by the Russian military of the Ukrainian military without trying to escalate more, which I think he's doing right now.

So what do you hope that we continue to do in the world outside Ukraine and Russia?

I hope that we continue to flow weapons and supplies to the Ukrainians as fast as they need them, and I hope that we continue to provide them with all of the support short of actually deploying combat forces or aircraft to fight with them and give them what they need. I hope that we continue to unite the world against Putin for this outrageous, unprovoked act of aggression, and that we make it very clear to Putin that his choices are going to be accepting this defeat and making the best he can of it or really beginning to stare down the barrel of the collapse of his regime.

That's, but all of that's very tricky because when you start talking about putting the collapse of the regime on the table, right now we have a wounded angry bear. Animals like that are very unpredictable and still can do a lot of damage. This is something to be managed very carefully and thoughtfully. But I think helping the Ukrainians fight off this attack, if force comes to worst in Ukraine, or one of the worst, helping them prepare for and conduct an insurgency against Russia is important.

Then just continuing to tighten the vice on Putin and make it clear we will squeeze Russia to death if he does not back off, but we will not squeeze it to death if he does back off. The off-ramp here is if you do stop this, then we can return to some kind of… and you think that is a reasonable off-ramp? Is there anyone that you regard as credible suggesting any other alternative to that in terms of off-ramps?

No, and my problem with that off-ramp is it requires Putin to make a psychological shift that I think is going to be almost impossible for him. Right now, I'm focused on what can we do to make it clear to him that he's not going to win this without ourselves escalating in a way that will change this in a bad way. I think that's the balance that everybody's trying to strike.

In terms of where Putin will go looking for off-ramps or other things at that point, I'm nervous about a variety of ways that that can go. One of the things that Putin could do is he could really try to return this more into a Russia-NATO conflict, which would likely rally his people more enthusiastically than just a war against Ukraine. I don't think that he's in a position to attack NATO militarily right now, given the problems that he has.

But I think we should expect to see a possible change in Kremlin rhetoric and posture to try to make this more of a war, to prepare to defend against NATO and rally. I think here again, we need to not repeat the mistake that we made that contributed to this—didn't cause this. We need to blame the enemy for what the enemy did. This was Putin's decision to invade; the Biden administration is not to blame for Putin's decision. We need to be very clear about that. That would be true if Trump were in office, or Bush, or anybody else.

At the end of the day, Putin made this decision, and he's to blame. But the mistake, the miscalculation that the Biden administration made about its ability to deter him, we need to not repeat that mistake when it comes to deterring him from testing NATO. I think we need to recognize that he is engaged in a gunfight, and we need to be prepared to bring a gun to a gunfight.

So the U.S. has started to mobilize forces to defend its eastern NATO members. We need to keep doing that. There will be more and more discussion about how escalatory that might be and how that might trip Putin into further activity. I don't think that's right. I think what we need to make clear to Putin is that if he starts something with NATO, we will finish it quickly and there is nothing there for him.

We need to not allow him to imagine that there is any even initial military success he could achieve against NATO because we just need to foreclose that option. Preventing this from becoming a Russia-NATO war is a very big priority right now, as well as helping Ukrainians defeat the Russians in Ukraine.

Yeah, well, it also means failing in some sense to take into account the U.N. decision, because it's not just NATO that’s rallying behind Ukraine, but behind Ukraine it seems like in the most real of senses it's the entire world, most of it.

I think we need to get after the parts of the world that aren't rallying. We need to look at India and say, “Listen, you know, it's actually not okay that India abstained on that resolution. It's not okay.” I understand various countries have various calculations, but this is not a time for those kinds of calculations.

So I'm thrilled that it was 141 to 5, but there should have been more countries voting for that resolution. I think we need to focus on doing everything we can to increase that isolation that Putin feels and have the countries that abstained going to him and saying, “Listen, for the diminutive of Vladimir, this isn’t going to happen for you. We can't carry water for you even in this limited way. You're going to have to make a decision to end this on terms that you don't like.” That message has got to be coming to him from all of his friends and all of the people who are straddling right now.

I think you're absolutely right, Jordan, that finding ways to continue to strengthen this global block against him is important.

Okay, all right. Well, I think unless you have anything to add to that, that seems like a reasonable update. The news could be worse, given how bad the situation is. It's quite remarkable, I think, to see the essential unity of the world in response to this and the fact that Ukraine wasn't as easy a bite to chew as might have been expected to begin with. I can't see that really getting much better for the Russians, for Putin, in the near future.

Hopefully not, Ukrainian slave! Glory to Ukraine! Thanks very much for speaking with me again. We'll be in touch again when it seems like the appropriate thing to do.

Thank you so much, Jordan.