Russia, Ukraine, and the West | Frederick Kagan | EP 230

But now we need to talk about Vladimir Maric Putin, who was a KGB thug—a mid-ranked KGB thug—who claims never really to have believed in the communist claptrap that he was putting out. Which wouldn't make him unique among the Soviet apparatchiki, but who nevertheless obviously imbibed a sense of Soviet patriotism and some kind of belief in aspects of that ideology. He has certainly accepted the Soviet theory that the West—that the world—is out to get Russia, and accepted that paranoia doctrine. Because, I mean, as you know, Jordan, ideologies are large, sprawling, and complex. People can believe in parts of them while rejecting other parts of them. I'm willing to believe that Putin was never a committed communist per se, but it is apparent that Putin accepted the special destiny of the Soviet Union, or Russia, in the world—to be a superpower and to have influence beyond the norm. He accepted that the world was hostile and was seeking to prevent the Soviet Union, or Russia, from having that role.

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Hello everyone, I'm pleased to have with me today Dr. Frederick W. Kagan. I reached out to some of my contacts who have some intellectual credibility and some political expertise to find out who could be contacted to provide an update for everyone—me included—on the unfolding situation in Russia and Ukraine. Dr. Frederick Kagan, his name popped up instantly. So I'll give you a bit of a bio, and then we'll get right to the issue of what's happening in Ukraine.

Dr. Frederick W. Kagan is the author of the 2007 report "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq." He's one of the intellectual architects of the surge strategy in Iraq. He's the director of the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project and a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His books range from "Lessons for a Long War" (American Enterprise Institute Press, 2010) co-authored with Thomas Donnelly to "The End of the Old Order: Napoleon and Europe 1805-1815" (DeCapo Press, 2006). He worked as an assistant professor of military history at West Point from '95 to '01 and as an associate professor of military history from '01 to '05. Dr. Kagan holds a PhD in Russian and Soviet military history from Yale.

So welcome! Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. I very much appreciate it. I'm looking forward to this, insofar as you can look forward to a discussion about such topics. We'll get right to the heart of the matter, I guess, in the most pointed manner possible. Maybe you could give us some sense of what's happening right now, and then we'll move to why and what we should do about it. But as far as you're concerned, how should we be understanding the events that are unfolding in Ukraine?

So, several days ago—I’ve confessed I’ve lost all track of time—but several days ago, Vladimir, Russian President Vladimir Putin, launched an unprovoked, unjustified, and illegal attack on Ukraine for the purpose of conquering it. He has conducted air and missile strikes against multiple targets across the entire country, and he has launched a ground invasion along multiple axes. His objective is very clearly to take control of the Ukrainian government in Kyiv, but also to take control of a lot of other territory in Ukraine. He obviously aims, at a minimum, to replace the pro-Western government headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's current president, and install some kind of governance structure that will bring Ukraine, as he sees it, back into the Russian fold.

It's not at all obvious to me, or anyone really, what kind of governance structure Putin has in mind at this point, but it is very clear that he intends to do this at the point of the muzzle of the tank and that he is willing to kill quite a lot of people and do quite a lot of damage in Ukraine in order to regain control of the country. That is what is going on. In short, it's part of a larger effort that Putin is engaged in to reconstitute the Soviet Union in some way, or possibly the Tsarist Empire in some way. The geographies of the Soviet Union and the Tsarist Empire had interesting overlaps and underlaps, and it's important to keep in mind that Putin refers to both when talking about what his aims are.

Then just, you know, the last larger thing—zooming out from all of that—he's been very explicit about his intention to destroy the NATO alliance, to break the ties between the United States and Europe, to change the world order fundamentally, and to return the United States to what he regards as its proper sphere, which is a Western hemispheric power.

Let me ask you some questions about the way you answered that. So you started out by saying unprovoked, unwarranted, and illegal. Then you switched to, so I'd like to delve into that—why all of those? And then one might conclude that there's territorial ambitions here in some sense, but—and he is moving troops into a large geographical area of some value merely because it's a geographical area—but you also highlighted the importance of a shift in governance in Ukraine away from a pro-Western governance structure. So how much of this should we assume is territorial in some sense, and how much of it is his desire to create a subordinate state? Is it to support a state subordinate to him, or is it more important to him, do you think, that it's not pro-Western?

His objective is very explicitly to change the political order in Ukraine. It's not about territorial conquest per se; it's about ending Ukraine's ambitions to join, to be part of the West, to begin with. But he has written lengthy articles and he has given lengthy speeches explaining that he thinks that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent state, that it has no nationhood, that it is simply a natural part of Russia that was left from Russia by the stupid Soviets, and then by what he has called the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, which was the fall of the Soviet Union.

So it’s apparent from everything that he says that his ultimate objective is to regain full control over Ukraine in some way. The exact way in which he would govern a reconquered Ukraine is not yet clear, but that he is insisting that it be in Russia’s sphere of influence under Russia’s control is not in question.

So let’s talk about this idea, the Russian sphere of influence. Because one of the things that puzzles me in some sense is why doesn’t Russia conceptualize itself as part of the West? Why does Russia insist upon viewing itself as an entity independent of the West, especially given the fact that it isn’t exactly obvious that Putin is an admirer of what happened under Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union? I don’t understand why he—why we have to have this notion that it’s Russia against the West. Why doesn’t he trust the West? We don’t trust him. What’s the dynamic? I know they’re trying to find a fourth way or something like that philosophically in Russia. Why are we in this situation where Russia doesn’t conceptualize itself as part of the West?

I love this question. This is great! Because if you let me get in and do some of my nerdly historian stuff here. To begin with, Russia has never considered itself fully part of the West. You know, when Peter the Great broke a window into Europe—in the magical phrase of Pushkin—by establishing St. Petersburg, Peter attempted—who is one of Putin’s two great heroes in Russian and Soviet history, the other one being Stalin. Peter was trying to Westernize Russia. Ever since then, there has been a debate within Russia about whether Russia really is Western, or part of the West, or whether it is something else.

In the 19th century, this manifested itself particularly in the distinction in the divide in Russian intelligentsia between Westerners and Slavophiles. You had people like Leo Tolstoy arguing for the inherent Russian soul as being distinctive and unique. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars onward, Russia politically has regarded itself as something more than European, and the acquisition of Russian Asian territories among other things in the 19th century has led Russians to see themselves as European.

Throughout the 19th century, obviously, the West was Europe. The United States was not a big player in being the West. In the 20th century, it’s hard to know exactly where Russia would have gone, except that Bolshevism, which triumphed in 1917, was an explicit rejection of the Western political and economic model and a move in a different, unique direction.

So there is a narrative of Russian uniqueness, and there is an inherent sort of Russian messianism. The messianism actually goes all the way back to Ivan the Terrible, and I’m happy to talk about that if you’d love to delve into ancient history. But there are these strands in Russian thought going back centuries that Russia is a unique kind of place and that it must be a unique kind of place. Then, of course, as the Soviet Union was one of two global superpowers with the United States, Putin—when Putin is talking about the geostrategic calamity of the fall of the Soviet Union—what he really means is the loss of Russia’s privileged position as one of the two rulers of the world and what he is aspiring to is re-establishing that.

I've tried to understand this Russian exceptionalism. I mean, I'm an admirer of Russian literature, and Solzhenitsyn certainly did feel that it would be appropriate for Russia, if it could throw off the shackles of its Soviet totalitarianism, to return to the Russian Orthodox tradition that undergirded the Tsarist regimes, let’s say. He felt that that would produce the foundation that would allow proper movement forward. But that still to me doesn’t exactly seem to justify claims that in some sense this is a non-Western enterprise. I mean, insofar as it’s grounded in Orthodox Christianity, it’s still grounded in Christianity, which makes it broadly Western. I’ve tried to understand—

But no, but not—okay, not on the Russian historical conceptions. Because the messianism of that was established under Ivan the Terrible and the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome. The argument was that first there was Rome, and Christianity was founded there. Christianity moved to Constantinople, and then when Constantinople fell in 1453, the Russian Orthodox Church began to make the argument that the center of Christendom had moved to Moscow, which was the inheritor of the true faith. So in that sense, it is a line of Christianity that rejects sort of Rome as the center anymore. It runs through Constantinople to Moscow and claims to be its own center.

And so even in that sense, defining Christianity as a Western thing in this sense is problematic within the ideological framework that Putin and others operate.

Well, so they see that as more embedded in the remnant of the Byzantine Empire?

Yeah. And in the separation from Constantinople and Rome a very long time ago.

Correct. Do you know anything about the relationship between the Orthodox Christian authority hierarchy in Russia and the hierarchies of authority in Rome? Are the relationships good? Or do the Orthodox regard themselves as something separate entirely and in opposition to the—

Oh, it is separate. The Orthodox hierarchy in Russia does not regard itself as under the—

Under the edict? No. But are the relationships friendly? Is there communication or miscommunication?

Successor popes have reached out to patriarchs to talk with them. But one of the things that is important to understand is that Putin has carried on the tradition of the Tsars of subordinating the Moscow Patriarchate to himself. The Moscow Patriarchate at this point is fundamentally an arm of the Russian government, and so he controls it de facto. It is not an independent religious authority in reality, even though it is ostensibly.

So its relations with the Vatican are whatever Putin decides he is willing to have them be at any given moment. I don’t think I understand there to be a particularly contentious relationship except—and it wasn’t with the Vatican actually—most recently, if you want to get really nerdy on this, there was a big fight a couple of years ago because the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had been subordinated to the Moscow Patriarchate. The formal leader of all of the Orthodox communities is in Istanbul. A few years ago, I forgot exactly when, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church petitioned the Patriarch in Istanbul to grant it autocephaly, to make it independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, and that was granted.

So the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has become an independent entity directly under the Constantinople patriarch. Putin bitterly resented that, hated it, attacked it. It is one of his grievances, in fact that that occurred. That was not done by the Pope; that was done by the Patriarch.

People might be wondering why we’ve taken a detour into a religious direction, but the answer is we’re trying to sort out the issue of the degree to which Russia rightly regards itself as an autonomous community independent of the West. In order to answer that question properly, you have to delve down to the bottom of the cultural separation, and near the bottom is the relative autonomy of the Orthodox Church.

I have talked to people in Washington who are associated with the Orthodox Church in Russia, and they do claim that Putin goes to confession and that there is some validity to his claims to have adopted some approximation of Orthodox Christianity. That obviously leaves open the issue of what the relationship is between the political power and the church power. It doesn’t seem to be entirely unidirectional.

One of the things that also is a mystery to me in relation to that is that you can trace a fairly clear line of development of democratic thought in the West proper to Protestantism, in particular, which is grounded in Christianity. There’s a fair bit of emphasis on individual sovereignty in Orthodox Christianity, but there wasn’t a development into a democratic polity in the same way there was, especially in Northern Europe. I can’t really understand why that is. It doesn’t seem to be a doctrinal issue exactly that stems from the faith itself.

I’m going—I’m about to reach the limit of expertise that I’m comfortable talking about, but I will make the observation that one of the central characteristics of Protestantism is that, apart from England after Henry VIII, Protestantism was independent of state control.

Right, right.

And even Catholicism was independent of state control for most of the history of the West after the fall of Rome. I think it’s very—that independence from state control has been an important element in allowing—that the fact that Western religion, that Christianity in the West, created space, as it were, creating this separation, this gap between church and state, in which at the level of detail, at the level of legislation, and actual interactions between the church and the state and so on.

This is why, of course, why Henry VIII took control of the Anglican Church and took control of his own church. He was aggravated for having a pope having a say in anything. But in most other countries in Europe, the pope continued to have a say in things for a long time, and it created a little bit of space that was never the case in Russia. We never had an independent Patriarch who could create that space from the Tsars into which something else could happen because it was always fundamentally—at least from the Muscovite period on, the Orthodox Church was always fundamentally under the control of the Tsar. It was a state religion, and it just did not have the ability to create that kind of space.

And then there’s a bunch of other socio-cultural reasons that, as a historian, I’d love to nerd out about, why the Russians didn’t develop Western traditions of personal liberty and independence and that kind of stuff. But this religious aspect has to do with state capture, state control of the church, I think more than anything else.

Right. So too much integration at the top, which is—that's how Mussolini defined fascism in some sense, although he was thinking more about it in terms of collusion between the corporate world and the political world. But so you need autonomous organizations as close to the top as you can get, at least—that’s how it’s worked in the West.

Okay. So we’ve talked about why Russia might regard itself as somehow importantly separate. I mean, you could also say that about any number of countries within the West. It’s not like Germany and England are the same place, or France and England, or France and the United States. We’ve been able to develop an integrated West to some degree that also allows for autonomy. So I still can’t exactly see why the Russians can’t be brought under that umbrella. Certainly the idea that they’ve lost their empire and they’ve lost their central place—that there’s a, I don’t know, if there’s a resentment that goes along with that, or confusion about place.

Yeah, before you even get there, I mean look—you can’t understand the importance of the Bolshevik Revolution in this regard, because the Romanov dynasty, especially in the 19th century, regarded itself as a part of Europe as well as something more. It regarded itself as European plus. And it regarded itself as a sort of a European superpower, but it regarded itself as part of the concert of Europe and a pillar of the concert of Europe.

So the change comes when you have a revolutionary cabal take power that is dedicated to the destruction of all of the fundamental principles of the West, and that was the Bolshevik Revolution. It took control and it imposed its ideology by brute, unbelievably brutal force on a population that didn’t start believing in it, and that ideology involved not only that every aspect of the socio-political-economic structure of the West was evil, but that it was seeking to destroy Russia and that it was seeking to destroy this virtuous Bolshevik Revolution.

So we can talk about the historical Russian theories of encirclement and various other things, which, frankly, can be easily overstated when you go back into Russian history. But the Bolsheviks absolutely saw themselves as the kernel of a world revolution and assumed, naturally, that the entire capitalist world was seeking to destroy them. And to be fair to them, of course, the initial reaction of the Western powers was, in fact, to try to crush the Bolshevik Revolution. We did have American troops land in Russia during the Civil War to try to help the White Forces defeat the Bolsheviks, so there was an initial Western intervention against the Bolshevik Revolution, which gave just a little bit of color to this.

But the anti-Westernism and the notion of encirclement and being in a permanent war with the entire capitalist world is inherent to Marxism and Leninism. And then what did the Bolsheviks do? They systematically cut Soviet society off from the world and took all control of communications, prevented people from leaving the Soviet Union. It’s one of the ways that you can tell a legitimate state from a prison with a government: Does it allow its people freely to leave? The Soviet Union did not. The Soviet Union proved that it did not; the laws prevented people from leaving without special permissions and so on.

It was a prison.

Exactly right.

So that was—

So you think there’s inertia in some sense, even though Russia is no longer a Bolshevik state?

You think there’s inertia in the distrust of the West that probably developed even before the Bolshevik Revolution?

No, I don’t think that there was a huge amount of inertia along those lines among Russians themselves.

But now we need to talk about Vladimir Maric Putin, who was a KGB thug, a mid-ranked KGB thug, who claims never really to have believed in the communist claptrap that he was putting out—which wouldn’t make him unique among the Soviet apology—but who nevertheless obviously imbibed a sense of Soviet patriotism and some kind of belief in aspects of that ideology. He has certainly accepted the Soviet theory that the West—that the world—is out to get Russia and accepted that paranoia doctrine. Because, I mean, as you know, Jordan, ideologies are large, sprawling, and complex. People can believe in parts of them while rejecting other parts of them. I’m willing to believe that Putin was never a committed communist per se, but it is apparent that Putin accepted the special destiny of the Soviet Union or Russia in the world—to be a superpower and to have influence beyond the norm—and accepted that the world was hostile and was seeking to prevent the Soviet Union or Russia from having that role.

Okay, so then is it the case, then—and this is part of the expression of political variability and opinion that you hear expressed in the United States right now—it was definitely the case, and correct me if I’m wrong, my understanding is that after the Soviet wall fell, that the West did take steps quite rapidly to try to consolidate some of the border territories between the former Soviet Union and the West, and to invite the Baltic states and so forth into a much closer partnership with the West. A lot of that happened quite quickly. Then Ukraine was sort of left in an in-between state for a long time, so it didn’t get moved west as fast as some of the other states did.

Yeah, can I—I mean, I’d like to clean up the history here because I think that good details matter. So the Soviet Union formally ends at the end of 1991. There is discussion about exactly what’s going to happen to Germany and about whether East Germany is going to become a part of NATO. The Russians have a certain idea of what they were told, and we have a different idea of what they were told. There were no formal commitments one way or another, but it ended with Germany being reunited and then all of Germany remaining in NATO.

There was no further expansion of NATO until 1997. Okay, so that’s very important. It is not like in 1990—not like the year after the Soviet Union fell, NATO expanded, nor is it the case that the messages that were going from the West to Russia were, “We’re going to take all of the non-Russia parts of the former Soviet Union into NATO, but you Russians need to stay out; you’re the adversary.” On the contrary, NATO reached out to Russia also, and NATO established a partnership-for-peace program, and Russia was a member of the partnership-for-peace program along with all of the other former Soviet states. And NATO did offer various forms of technical assistance. The U.S. formed various—offered various forms of technical assistance to Russia in the 1990s, most of which the Russians rejected, some of which they accepted, which were very important. There was a lot of cooperation.

Because it’s important to note that when Boris Yeltsin was president, he did not identify the West as the enemy. He sought to integrate into the West. He sought to Westernize Russia, and he did to a considerable extent. He sought to democratize Russia, and he did. He had to fight off multiple efforts by the Communist Party of this former Soviet Union to regain power and re-establish communist rule. He fought against that, and we tried to help him with that.

But the first NATO expansion doesn’t happen until 1997, and it did not include the Baltic states. The Baltic states were admitted in, I think, 2003, 2004. I’ve forgotten the exact date, but they were not admitted in that first tranche. So the notion that we somehow just immediately started snapping up former Warsaw Pact states and then Baltic states into the alliance is false. Nor is it the case that that was initially done in a way—in the way that we expressed it to the Russians as being aimed at threatening Russia. These states sought admission into the alliance.

And look, we’ve got to recognize that the alliance was formed on a principle of an open-door policy that always—that is inherent, that is innate in the North Atlantic Charter that founded the alliance—that any state can request admission to the alliance. This is one of the things that Putin is demanding that NATO change, but that provision was not added or created after the end of the Cold War; it was created when the alliance was created. Now, obviously, the alliance doesn’t have to choose to admit any particular member, but we can now ask another question: What did we—the West—think that NATO was doing in the '90s, and why were we admitting these former Warsaw Pact and then the Baltic states to the alliance?

Yes, we were—we wanted to make sure that we had a buffer against the kind of threat the Soviets had brought into Central Europe, because it’s important to keep in mind that the Cold War was shaped by the fact that, whereas we, the United States and Britain, and then restored France as we liberated territories, we made them free and we offered them the opportunity to join NATO. They did join NATO and which became a very rambunctious alliance, which periodically told the United States to pound sand. We did not run it as an empire, Soviet rhetoric notwithstanding.

It was an alliance of free states. It was a purely defensive alliance. There is absolutely no offensive provision in the NATO charter anywhere.

So that’s what we did. What did the Soviets do? Well, the Red Army rolled into Eastern Europe. It did not liberate anybody. It drove off the German forces, and then it took control of those countries, installed puppet states which were ruled from Moscow. How do we know that? Because there were periodic revolutions in the Eastern European states which the United States and NATO did not foment and did not support, and which the Soviets crushed brutally with tanks repeatedly.

So they established an empire in Eastern Europe, and they brought millions of forces into the heart of Europe and threatened to overrun all of Western Europe, and that was the threat against which NATO was formed. I tell you all of that to say that people talk about the buffer that the Russians feel they need against the West. The NATO expansion was about giving the West a buffer from the threat that it had just managed to drive off of vast Soviet mechanized armies in the heart of Europe poised to overrun all of the West.

So there was absolutely a security thing. NATO is a security alliance, and a big part of this was gaining a buffer for the West so that Europe could actually have peace and develop peacefully and without fear, which the threat of Soviet invasion throughout the Cold War had denied it.

In addition to that, the NATO accession was also meant to help bring those Warsaw Pact states and then the Baltic states into compliance with NATO standards, which is not just about military stuff; it’s also about legal, moral, ethical frameworks about how we fight wars, about how we treat our soldiers, about how the military interacts with the civilian population. It was meant to be part of an effort that was successful to help those countries develop healthy democracies and healthy free market economies. And we invest the capacity for some autonomous function at the national level or for full autonomous function at the national level—right, complete. So we don’t control them, right?

So you’re laying out an argument essentially that claims that to view this as a dual— a duopoly, let’s say—it’s the U.S. and its satellites against Russian satellites—that's a profound misapprehension of the historical reality because it wasn’t Russia and its satellites. It was the Soviet Union, which was a block, and it’s America with its allies.

So America sits as first among equals, let’s say. Something like that in a voluntary organization that’s predicated on the preservation of freedom at the political and economic level. And if we want to look for evidence for that, we look at the response of, well, the wall in Berlin, for example, to take not the least of the examples, but the crushing of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and almost Poland when the Soviet Union did fall. And look at the response to any manifestation of genuine autonomy on the part of the Soviets.

So, okay, well we still have a question that’s lurking constantly in the background. It’s like why in the world would the Russians— the Russians are prone to reject invitation to become part of the sovereign voluntary association of Western states for some reason. They distrust the West. We’ve talked about that. They regard themselves as having an autonomous destiny. But hypothetically that could have still happened.

So let’s take a slightly different tack. What did— let’s imagine we’re trying to figure out what did we do wrong in negotiating with the Russians in the last 20 years and what did the Russians do wrong in conceptualizing themselves and then negotiating with us? So let’s start with us, maybe. Like we’re in this situation.

Well, hang on, hang on. Before—I mean, before we do that there’s a sea change that happens in Russia when Putin takes power. Because Yeltsin had been one thing, and then Putin is something else entirely. And Putin had become an anti-communist in the 1990s, and he helped Yeltsin fight off the attempts of the communists to regain power. Initially, I think, by the way, Putin identified himself as a democrat and someone who was in favor of democracy, which worked for him as long as he was actually winning elections, you know, handily and didn’t have to rig them. He didn’t have to rig the first few elections very much, and he could allow them to be relatively free because he was popular.

So, but it’s Putin who brought a new approach to this, and it’s Putin who brought a real sense of grievance and anger, and the grievance was about the fall from greatness of the Soviet Union. Now, the one thing that is necessary to have in people’s minds here: the 1990s were a horrific time for Russians, okay? I want to set aside the question of our responsibility or what we did or couldn't have done because the truth is I will assert—and I would be happy to argue with anybody about that—this wasn’t our fault and there wasn’t much we could have done about it, frankly, anyway.

Are you talking about the '90s specifically about what’s—

Yeah, yes. Well, yeah, the '90s were a catastrophe. My son-in-law—former son-in-law was Russian, and he said often when he went to school, he—him and his close relatives, who were also attending school—weren't necessarily sure they were going to come home alive through much of the early '90s. It was crazy. I was there in 1995, doing research in the Russian archives, and the ruble dropped from 3,000 to the dollar to 5,000 to the dollar in the five weeks that I was there doing research. One time it was—it was absolute. I went to the first— I went to the first McDonald’s on Tverskaya Square as it opened, and it was amazing. It was an amazing thing.

So I saw a little bit—I mean, I was standing around; there were guards with AK-47s guarding vegetable markets as I would walk by them. You know, why was that going on? Because everybody was getting cuts and their rival gangs were controlling every aspect of it. It was completely insane. It was an unbelievable—it was a horrible period for Russians to live through, and it was an unbelievable humiliation for someone like Putin, who believes in Russia, that Russia should be one of the world’s two superpowers, to have gone through that experience.

So Yeltsin tried to lead his country through that with its democracy intact, and he succeeded until Putin destroyed it. Yeltsin was never able to fix the economy really. So Putin comes in with a deep sense of grievance and burning humiliation at what had happened to the Russians in the '90s, and he needed an explanation that came readily to hand for why that had happened. And on the one hand, he blamed Gorbachev for surrendering instead of fighting, and he bitterly resents the fact that Gorbachev didn’t kill as many millions of people as he needed to just to stay in power, but he also blamed the West in many respects, quite some mostly unfairly, honestly, for Russia's humiliation.

Then we had a narrative rapidly emerge in the early Putin years that not only had the West contributed to Russia's humiliation in this way and mistreated Russia in various ways in the '90s, but now the West was trying to prevent Russia—as he kept saying—from rising from its knees, and that the West was trying to keep Russia down.

As he began to elaborate a series of narratives which attributed all kinds of malevolence and frankly much more thinking and coherence in Western policies than has ever existed to us, and also made the mistake that most humans make of solipsism, of imagining that he was at the center of everybody's thought and that everything that we were doing in the world was aimed at Russia in some way. And so he created this narrative which he has been pumping into the Russian population ever since.

Well, when things are going chaotically wrong, one of the simplest things to do always is to identify—the make a unitary assumption of cause and to make it external. Of course, it’s convenient in 50 ways, right? First of all, it gives you an enemy to unite against; it gives you an enemy to talk about politically. It solves your conscience. It’s also very simple because the reason that the—to the—and this former Soviet Union was so catastrophically chaotic in the '90s, the reasons for that are unbelievably complicated and detailed, and they go all the way from the highest levels of government to the nature of arrangements within families, right?

The whole society was authoritarian for what? 70 years? Murderously authoritarian, and to unravel that and to take responsibility for it and to figure out how to fix it is way harder than to blame almost all of it on an external enemy, right? Especially when you’re also motivated, as you said, by this sense of thwarted destiny which we could identify. I mean, in the West, we do regard a certain degree of patriotism as noble and justifiable, and you can see how that, under some conditions, noble and justifiable motivation would get hijacked if there was also reason to externalize blame for conditions for resentment generated by genuine chaos.

Right, right. I mean, look, okay, just—I mean, in addition to all the other factors you listed, we need to keep in mind how enormous was the task of trying to convert the Russian econ—the Soviet economy to a free market. Basically, you know, industrialization in Russia fundamentally happened under the Soviets, and it was done to a planned centralized economy. So Russia is still littered today with what are called monotowns—they're towns of half a million people that exist around a single huge factory in which 75 or 100 thousand people work. That was the Soviet model. The task of taking an economy built like that and turning it into a free-market economy would have been unbelievably daunting with the best of the will in the world.

Unfortunately, Yeltsin was preoccupied with the fight against the communists and keeping Russia democratic. I don’t know whether he ever would have been able to undertake that mission successfully anyway of marketizing the Russian economy, but he wasn’t even able to concentrate on it.

Well, and as you point out, that’s not merely a conceptual issue. No. Part of the reason that free market frameworks work in the West is because the actual industries and micro-industries and small shops are all autonomous and distributed, and so the legal structure matches the actual infrastructure. Whereas in the Soviet Union, as you said, because it was centralized, there were these massive entities that are not distributed or autonomous in any sense at all, and just changing the legal framework doesn’t change that in the least.

Exactly, exactly. So it was a huge task, and all of this leads to the externalization of grievance and the feeding of a grievance narrative that blames the West and then articulates this theory that the West is focused on preventing Russia from attaining for its natural position of greatness in the world and so on. Then Putin, who was a spymaster—he wasn’t a terribly good one with the KGB, but he was a spymaster—begins and launches on a new form of conflict which we now call hybrid war.

Sorry, the phrase is hybrid—hybrid war, yeah.

A phrase that’s very complicated to talk about and understand but that includes information operations and information warfare that can best be characterized by the term gaslighting. And this is the stock-in-trade of the Russian hybrid warfare effort. There’s a Soviet concept, and there was a terrific paper at the Institute for the Study of War that my wife, Kim, founded and runs, where I work with the Russia team there. But there was a terrific paper that they published a few years ago by a woman named Maria Snegovaya on Russian reflexive control.

A Soviet reflexive control doctrine because it was Soviet theorists who articulated this framework in the 50s or 60s—I don’t remember that Putin and his goons have taken and perfected. Reflexive control is the art of creating a world—a picture of the world—in your adversary’s mind of such a fashion that your adversary voluntarily chooses the course of action that you desire him to choose, thinking that it is in his best interest.

That’s a very complicated way of saying gaslighting, right? You create a false universe for the adversary to live in, and in that universe, the adversary will naturally do what you want him to do. This is what the Russians have been trying to do.

Okay, and what—

Okay, so I have two questions about that. The first is, as soon as anything like that is put forth, it instantly sounds like a conspiracy theory. And I’m not saying that you’re engaging in conspiracy theories, but that’s the reflexive response. So what’s the evidence for your—from your questions? And then what’s the narrative they’re trying to create? How effective has that been?

While we’ve already understood to some degree why, if the West is being conceptualized as an enemy responsible for Russian chaos for keeping the Russians down and for encircling them, depriving them of their just destiny, then we know the motive. There are others, but that’s not a bad core motive. What’s the warfare aimed at, and what’s the evidence that this is occurring, and how and where, and how are we subject to it?

All of that.

So, right, as soon as you’re operating in the information space and as soon as you’re dealing with this kind of psychological warfare and stuff, I will tell you there’s a mountain of evidence that this is going on and it’s deliberate, and lots of people can argue with that, and certainly we can argue about the specifics, but the evidence is first of all this is a published Soviet doctrine which we have—we can read. You can read the state where this is articulated.

Then there is Russian doctrine on warfare and on hybrid warfare that also explicitly lays out this framework. So the barrier to entry here is reading Russian. If you can read Russian, then you can read official Russian doctrine and documents laying out the theory of hybrid warfare and how to conduct it.

Now there’s one trick in the way that they tend to articulate this most clearly, and we’ve written about this; there’s a terrific paper, I would commend to your attention, by Mason Clark, the Russia team lead at the Institute for the Study of War, on Russian hybrid warfare, particularly lessons from Syria, where they used this approach and then wrote about it.

And so we have writings from actually the guys who are commanding the war against Ukraine right now—the commander of the Southern Military District, General Dvornikov, was a commander in Syria and wrote articulately about what he did there. The commander of the Western Military District, Zhuravlyov, is another Syria alum, and wrote about his experiences there.

So they’re quite overt about this stuff. The only trick is a lot of the time they describe hybrid warfare as— they claim we do it to them, and they describe their activities as defensive against our own hybrid warfare, and that we initiated this hybrid war, and they are defending against it. And then in that way, they describe exactly what they think it is, and then you can see specific actions they take.

You can see Russian bot farms that we know work to manipulate our social media, and that has been revealed.

Talk about that in some detail. So what is that? What is that exactly? How widespread is it? What is it doing?

So this is where you take—you program—you take, you know, computer programs that masquerade as Twitter accounts, for example, and they do lots of different things. Sometimes they will just either tweet out or otherwise message out spam in such volume as to drown out other voices. But a lot of the time what they do is they will repeat Russian messages from lots of different accounts that appear to be independent accounts, so they seem to be corroboration of the Russian narrative, but they’re actually all computer programs that are not—even humans. They’re all controlled by Russia.

It’s a mimicking of a bottom-up process, right?

I’m not the expert on this. Lots of people on both sides of the political aisle have written about this. There’s a lot of technical detail about this, and you can find a lot of this is not questionable.

This is that this is going on is not in question.

Any idea how extensive it is? Like if you’re on Twitter, do you have any sense of what proportion of responses that you might be—

I don’t know. One of the things that’s happened is we got wise to this, especially after the 2016 election, when we—the U.S. became—and I don’t want to get into that whole election controversy. There are aspects of what was going on that are not in question, including that there were Russian bot farms sending messages and that they were exposed and the cyber details are clear of what they were and so on.

As we became aware of that activity, the social media companies—like Twitter and others—started to get very aggressive about developing algorithms to detect when something was a bot and shut them down. So I believe that we’re probably subjected to a lot less of this than we were a few years ago because—and again, I don’t want to get into issues of social media blocking individual humans because that’s not what we’re talking about here.

We’re talking about these are machines, and it is possible to detect that something is a machine and not a human and then to shut it down. That’s one of the things that’s been going on.

So the social media companies have been doing good work in trying to reduce the number of these things and fight them, so I think you’re probably subjected to less of it now than you were in a few years ago.

But it’s still out there. It’s still going on.

Okay, so let’s tie the hybrid warfare back in. So what’s the goal of the hybrid warfare, as far as you’re concerned?

So the goal of the hybrid warfare has been to try to achieve Putin’s objectives without having to do what he’s doing in Ukraine right now because hybrid warfare is in part a poor man’s game.

So the—we talked about the economic devastation that Russia faced in the '90s. Putin inherited that. Putin has never fixed the Russian economy; the Russian economy is still deeply and fundamentally dysfunctional. Oscillations in energy prices have helped him; various other things that he’s done have helped him gain enough money to be able to rebuild his military to some extent, but his military—until very recently—was simply not capable of posing a serious conventional threat to NATO or hoping plausibly to defend against NATO if it—if the Russians began a war and NATO seriously leaned into it.

So the hybrid warfare approach was designed to help him achieve victories in reconstituting Soviet power one way or another without having to fight wars, and it worked pretty well in some important ways, but it reached its limits.

So how did it—what ways did it work, do you think?

So a classic example of hybrid warfare, if you like, was the little— remember the little green men who turned up in Crimea in 2014? And the claims that the Russians were not—they were not Russian soldiers; they were, you know, local Crimeans who were fed up with alleged Ukrainian oppression and so forth. It became rapidly apparent that they were, in fact, Russian special forces troops and that the Russians did have troops in Ukraine, but even that thinnest veneer of implausible deniability led to the following consequence: It led to the establishment by Germany and France—with Russia and Ukraine—of the Minsk Accords that established the air quotes “ceasefire” in Ukraine that held ostensibly from 2015 until Putin just broke it by invading.

Here’s a fascinating thing about the Minsk Accords: Russia is a party to the Minsk Accords as a mediator. Russia is a party to the Minsk Accords as a mediator. Nowhere in the Minsk Accords is there a recognition of the fact that it’s Russian forces in Ukraine, that the proxy republics that Putin just recognized their independence are Russian-controlled, that the chain of command of the forces of those proxies ran to the Eighth Combined Arms Army, which is Russia’s headquarters in Rostov-on-Don. Nowhere in the Minsk Accords is that recognized.

Do you think that was made plausible, rendered plausible, or possible even by a successful disinformation propaganda campaign?

Yep! Because the Russian approach, again—and all of this just changed—so I mean there’s a whole other inflection that we need to talk about about the change that’s just occurred, but the Russian approach before this invasion had been to use disinformation, misinformation, and sometimes telling the truth in weird ways to generate the following effect: “Who really knows?” That’s been the standard. That has been sufficient for Putin a high percentage of the time, and unfortunately, the rising skepticism and mistrust within our own society has been made that pushing a rock downhill.

We so mistrust each other at this point that we’re inclined to say, “Well, who really knows?” And so when the Russians create these opportunities to say, “Well, who really knows?” the point of that is so that we’ll say, “Well, who really knows? So why should we get involved in this?” So that instead of reacting to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014—which is what actually happened—the Russian military invaded Ukraine in 2014, it seized and then annexed Ukrainian territory in 2014, and then it continued a war in Ukraine from 2014 to the present. The Russian military was doing all of that. Instead of that, we’ve been talking about ceasefire.

I have a sour joke for you, Jordan. I’ve used this joke right up until the invasion. What do you call it when the armored mechanized artillery missile aircraft naval and special forces troops of two countries fight each other in Ukraine? We call it a ceasefire, because that’s what happens.

So, by sowing chaos and confusion at the level of information, you sap the moral unity of the people that you’re attacking so they can’t unite to justify to themselves even a singular and effective response. What you do is you isolate the victim, which is what the Russians have done or had done. They isolated Ukraine so that instead of seeing Ukraine simply as the victim of a Russian invasion in 2014—which is what happened—in the West we’ve had a lot of conversations about, well, are the Ukrainians living up to their obligations under Minsk? Well, are the Ukrainians doing enough here and there? You get in rapidly into this, you know, “well, faults on both sides” kind of thing which paralyzes Western response.

There aren’t faults on both sides. Faults on one side here. There are faults on the side of the Russians who invaded in 2014 and have invaded again. That’s just themselves. That’s the consequence of an injudicious even-handedness.

Exactly. That’s a tough one because there’s a strong moral impulse to even-handedness, and also to self-correction, right? To examine yourself for your own faults, which we seem to be more than good enough in some sense in the West.

Yeah. But that can be capitalized on, and it’s an interesting moral conundrum, isn’t it? Because there’s a time for decisive action that requires a certain level of moral certainty, and that means you’re not even-handed under those conditions.

So, okay, so now let me ask you another question that’s associated perhaps on with the disinformation front. There are many people around the world in the West as well claiming that in some real sense, Ukraine isn’t an independent state; it’s part of Russia. It has been historically. It’s not Germany; it’s not a country with a clear, like historical existence. It’s a—and so, what do you—so you’re obviously not very happy with that argument, but that is being made continually.

So I know I’m laughing because you mentioned Germany, and the natural—you know, of that, of course, Germany is naturally a country, really, that—

Right!

That wasn’t a natural thought until 1871.

Right, right!

Well, we forget about all how difficult it was for those countries we think were all forever around to unify themselves. Exactly!

Yeah, so—and look, and you know there was historically a lot of argument about exactly what Germany was. And then, of course, Hitler—you know, World War II, right? And then, of course, Hitler had a view of what Germany included, and it included things like Austria and Czechoslovakia.

And, you know, we persuaded the Germans that that was not the case after some considerable effort. The analogy is apt because you can look at Austrians and say, “Well, they’re Germans.” Well, they speak German. They’re Catholics; the dominant religion in Germany is Protestantism; Austrians are largely Catholic. You can tell when you get into Austria and Southern Germany by the way when the greeting changes from Guten Tag to Grüß Gott.

There’s also no shortage of dialectical variation across the hypothetically unified German language. Exactly.

Like extreme dialectical variation. Exactly, right!

So we’ve got to not just imagine that the blocks that we’re used to in Europe were always that way or have been for centuries because that’s not true either.

How do we reliably identify when there is a country?

Well, okay, let me come back to that because there’s a straightforward answer to that. But the—it was the Kenyan president or prime minister, whom I can’t believe I’m quoting approvingly, because I rarely approve of anything that he has to say, but who put this very well recently in a very, very strong statement that, “Look, if we want to get into the business of talking about how it should be the case that all peoples who identify ethnically with other people should be unified in a country, in single states, then you are signing the world up for global war on a Hobbsean scale of a sort that we have never seen.”

Because, look at Africa; look at Asia. Look—well, I’ll leave that to you, Jordan, but how many countries in the world actually are drawn that way? Virtually right? So—

Okay, so the fundamental point here is that mere linguistic and historical similarity is not a sufficient condition for presuming a superordinate autonomy, exactly.

And so we have other mechanisms to decide what a country is, and they’re very straightforward mechanisms. We live in a world where there’s a—there is a United Nations and there is a body of states, and the community of states recognizes a new member by recognizing it. We say, “We recognize you as an independent state,” and we establish diplomatic relations with them, and we give them a seat in the United Nations, and then they are a state with all of the rights that any other state has.

We did that with all of the states of the former Soviet Union, and Russia signed up to all of that.

When did that happen?

In 1990, Ukraine in 1991, 1992. All of the states, all of the former Soviet states, including Russia, were recognized as independent states and established diplomatic relations with the world. That’s the only standard there is.

Okay, so that goes back to your initial claim that what Putin is doing was, you said, unprovoked, unwarranted, and illegal. So now we’ve established the illegality element of that. It’s like he had signed agreements—or Russia had signed agreements—stating that, as far as they were concerned, Ukraine was a country among other countries. More than that, they did something even more because when the Soviet Union fell, parts of its nuclear arsenal were still in three other countries—in Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.

We worked very hard to persuade those countries—we, the United States and Great Britain—worked very hard to persuade those countries to give their nuclear arsenals back to Russia because we were very concerned about the threat of nuclear proliferation.

So we presented, and they did, in return for that—in 1994, we, Britain, and Russia signed an agreement with Ukraine committing to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine as it was recognized at the time, in return for Ukraine handing back those nuclear weapons. The Russians signed that treaty. The Russians have just violated a treaty that they specifically signed with Ukraine recognizing it in its territorial integrity as it was in 1994.

Who signed that on Russia’s behalf?

Yeltsin.

That was Yeltsin.

Okay, so Putin hypothetically doesn’t feel that he’s bound by that agreement, but within the framework of international law, he is. I mean, he can regard himself however he wants to, but he is. So not only did Russia recognize Ukraine as a country, but it specifically recognized Ukraine in the borders that it had in 1994.

Okay, so. Alright, so let’s go to unprovoked. Now here’s a mystery. This could have happened at any time over the last 20 years or anytime into the future over the next 20 years, but it happened now. There are accusations of all sorts flying around on the political front in the West about why now. As far as you’re concerned, why now? And is there a lesson in the fact that it’s now for us?

So, let me, I’ll go into this a little deeper. I read a couple of papers by Victor Davis Hanson yesterday, and he made a claim that was approximately the following, which is that the, the Democrats, for example, under Obama talked about Russia in a negative way but really didn’t do anything about Russia, whereas Trump gave Putin flattery in some sense but actually did something about the potential danger they posed.

And I’m not claiming that that’s a valid argument or an invalid argument; it’s just something that I read when I was trying to prepare for this.

Why now? Because it is being politicized like mad in the West. We think, “Well, Putin is taking advantage of our perceived weakness,” and there’s partisan reasons for that and maybe there are deeper philosophical reasons for that. Those need to be separated, as far as you’re concerned. Why now? And then we do need to get to also maybe why we stepped into this, even if it was only 20% or two percent. I don’t care. What did we do wrong that made this happen and happen now?

So, look, the question—the answer to the question “Why now?” is very hard, I think. And this is something that I’m also wrestling with because what do we—what we need to explain is the invasion that Putin has been carrying forward operations to regain control of Ukraine since 2014. He has been pursuing hybrid warfare approaches, pursuing informational operation approaches in Ukraine. He’s put various forms of military pressure on Ukraine from his occupied territories.

Right? So it’s not exactly now. This is actually an extension of a process that’s been occurring for a long time. It’s an inflection in that process now.

So what we need to explain this particular inflection, which is a huge inflection, but that’s actually rather hard to be honest with you. And there’s no simple partisan or straightforward explanation to why Putin decided that he needed to invade now, which is the question that preoccupies me as someone who’s focused on Putin’s calculus.

Well, the best explanation I’ve heard so far—and it goes along with this gradualist idea in some sense—is that part of what Putin did while he was attempting to wrest back control of Ukraine, let’s say, is build a military presence on the border.

And the fact that you’ve done that actually changes the situation substantially. If you’re going to build—if you’re much more likely to shoot someone with a gun if you happen to be holding it and pointing it at them as a precursor.

And so you could see how a gradualist approach and his initial idea might have just been, “Well, we’ll build up the military to put even more pressure on the West” and to continue this gradualist approach, but once it’s there, the situation changes. And then it could be, in some sense, relatively small and relatively random events that precipitate it at any given moment.

So I think it’s quite possible that something like that occurred. There’s a lot of technical details about—so I want to say on the air to you what I’ve been saying to other people that I talked to: I got this wrong.

Okay? We made a forecast. I and the ISW Russia team made a forecast beginning in November and then carrying forward until very recently that Putin would not launch this huge invasion, and we were wrong. Obviously, he did. And, you know, as a matter of analytical integrity, I feel it necessary to say to people explicitly, yes, we were wrong in our forecast.

We’ve been spent a lot of time trying to understand and think about why we were wrong and what lessons we can learn from that. Here’s one of the reasons why we were wrong, or let me say this is one of the reasons why we forecast that he would not do this: because when you look actually at the technical details of the way that he arrayed his forces around Ukraine, we were watching that and saying, “This is going to stink. This military operation that he’s conducting, he’s not well set up to do this.”

Surely his professional military officers are going to tell him that this is a bad idea, and it turns out that we were wrong that he would be persuaded by that reality. But we were right that it was a bad idea because the problems that he’s now encountering, we actually did predict that he would have the problems that he’s now encountering if he conducted this opposition.

Okay, so it isn’t obvious what precipitated this, and there isn’t an obvious moral to derive from the story, but yeah, there are errors in it, and okay, we’ll get to errors. But you know, before we even get to our own errors, because, you know, I’ve got to tell you this: One of the things that I’m very focused on is you need to start by blaming the enemy for things the enemy does.

I’m happy to talk about what our responsibilities are here, but this was all Putin’s decision, and I’m actually more interested in some sense now in what our responsibilities are going forward.

Okay. Right? So we should do everything we can to help the Ukrainians defend themselves, putin has said that it is an act of aggression to help the Ukrainians defend themselves, which is not true, but he has asserted that, and he has threatened to attack the countries that are helping the Ukrainians.

Might he attack Poland? Yes, he might. He might attack Poland; I can absolutely see Russian missile strikes or airstrikes into Poland or into Hungary or into Romania or into any of the states that are—

Which would be an attack on NATO territory, which would activate Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which would mean what would have to happen?

Well, it would mean that we and all of the other NATO member states would need to vote to activate Article 5, which I would hope that we would do.

And then what we would do—what I would like to see us do is what we are now doing, which is an acceleration of what we are now doing, which is sending American military power—and also British and French and other countries military power—to the NATO borders, to the Eastern NATO borders in a defensive posture to defend.

There’s no—no one is talking about attacking, but we have to be prepared to defend against these sorts of things. The complexity will come if the Russians actually begin rocketing or firing missiles into Poland. The defense against that is counter-battery fire, and at a certain point, you do start to have to shoot back at Russia, and the defense—the line between defense and offense is quite blurry.

Well, it’s not in a legal sense. This is—you know, legally, that would not be an offensive action. The Russians would have engaged in an act of war against Poland, and Poland would then have a right under international law to defend itself, and NATO would have a right under Article 5 and collective security agreements to come to Poland’s defense in that regard.

No one is going to talk about a ground invasion of Belarus or Russia or Kaliningrad or anything; I am confident that NATO will act, if it acts militarily at all, in an entirely defensive fashion and simply for the purpose of eliminating known imminent threats of attack to member states. But no one is going to talk about an invasion. We’re not going to do that, but we are going to have to change our force posture very fundamentally, which is going to have all kinds of ripple effects because this is not a short-term crisis.

The threat that Putin is manifesting is a threat that’s going to be here as long as Putin is here, so we’re going to have to be prepared to defend Poland and Romania and the Baltic states from the Russian conventional threat for the first time since the end of the Cold War. We’re going to have to be prepared to defend against the risk of a Russian mechanized attack on NATO member states.

The U.S. defense budget is not built to do that. The U.S. force posture is not structured to do that. Our national security documents are not built to do that. We’re going to have to change all of that, and we’re going to have to rebuild some defense capability, and we’re going to have to spend more on defense because China hasn’t gone away. We’ve spent more than 90 minutes here talking about Russia; we haven’t talked about China, which is great because I’m not a China expert. But this doesn’t reduce the threat that China poses to Taiwan or the requirements to beef up our capabilities in the Pacific, by the way.

We’ve got problems in the Middle East still going on; we haven’t talked about that either, and we’ve got an ongoing series of wars in the Middle East that can engage us at any moment. We’ve got to get serious about our defenses, and I can tell you right now that the defense budget that we’re operating under is insufficient by a lot, and no one wants to hear this. No one wants to spend more on defense, but the world is at war.

So let’s sum up a bit, and then let’s see if there’s anything else we need to cover. It’s been a pretty comprehensive discussion, and we’ve talked about an unprovoked, unwarranted, and illegal attack by Russia on Ukraine, which is by all indications a sovereign state, by legally and otherwise.

We’ve talked about why the Russians might have been motivated to do that historically and also proximally. We’ve talked about the situation on the ground and internationally—the Russians are having more trouble than they might have predicted on both fronts, and I suppose that’s good news in some sense for the rest of the world and for Ukraine.

We’ve talked about the pitfalls associated with that. We’ve talked about how this might move forward and should move forward, partly in terms of supporting Ukraine and the Ukrainians’ attempts to defend themselves.

And then what might occur after that? You’ve talked about your belief that the world response—because I won’t call it the Western response; the world response is likely to be measured and careful, and that, as far as you’re concerned at the moment, you don’t see radical danger in this tit-for-tatting up to some ultimate exchange.

So, well, I’m wondering if there’s anything else you think it would be useful to bring to the attention of people at this particular point. We can always have a conversation like this again as things unfold.

Anything else you think that is necessary for people to understand right now?

I think that I just want to end by saluting the heroic Ukrainians who are defending themselves valiantly against this attack—a salute to all of those who help them. I will sign off as I will going forward while this war is going on, and while there’s a free Ukraine—Slava Ukraini! Glory to Ukraine!

Well, thanks very much for talking to me today, and we’ll get this up as soon as we possibly can.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure.

My pleasure.

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