Angry Planet - Everything You Know about Putin (and Russia) Is Wrong

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

We need to talk about Putin. Of all the leaders of state nobody is as maligned, studied, and over-analyzed as Russian President Vladimir Putin. He’s a KGB thug, he’s playing three dimensional chess while everyone else is playing checkers, and he’s turned a state into decline into a global superpower through information warfare. No one is as cunning as Putin.But that’s not quite true. Here to help us dispel myths and set the record straightish is friend of the show Mark Galeotti. Galeotti is an expert on the Russian military, politics, and underworld, the author of many fine books and  an honorary professor at University of College London and a Senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.He’s got three books coming out this month. One is We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong and another is Russian Political War: Moving Beyond the Hybrid.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Again, look, the Russians are basically geopolitical guerrillas. They're a relatively weak country trying to basically force the outside world to treat them as if they're a great power. And all of politics is about perception. You're listening to War College.

weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Derek Gannon. We need to talk about Putin. Of all the leaders of state, nobody is as maligned, studied, and over-analyzed as Russian president Vladimir Putin. He's a KGB thug. He's playing three-dimensional chess while everyone else is playing checkers, and he's turned a state that was into decline into a global superpower through information warfare. No one is as cunning as Putin. Or at least that's the story we tell ourselves here in the West, or one of the stories we tell ourselves here in the West.

Here to help us dispel some of those myths and set the record straightish is friend of the show Mark Galiati. Galiadi is an expert on the Russian military, politics, and underworld, the author of many fine books and an honorary professor at University of College London, and a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. he's got three, count him three books coming out this month. And we're going to talk about two of them. One is we need to talk about Putin, how the West gets him wrong, and another is Russian political war moving beyond the hybrid.

Mark, thank you so much for joining us. You've been very busy. Yes, indeed, but it's always a pleasure to talk to you guys. Okay, so why do we need to talk about Putin? And what are the most common myths that you hear about him in the West? Okay, well, this is obviously going to occupy him. for the next three hours, I think. Why do we need to talk about Putin?

Well, because, to be perfectly honest, I think on a policy level and on the kind of public discourse level, we so often get him wrong. And I think this is one of the things. This book is essentially, I mean, you had a chance to look at it. It's mercifully short, but essentially intemperate rant on my part. Because what frustrates me is there's still so much really good scholarly think tank and professional understanding and analysis of Russia and indeed Putin.

but nonetheless, policy making seems still to rely on these really shallow cliches and myths. And just to kind of pick up on a couple that are kind of, for me, particularly important. One is, it's the idea that Putin has a grand plan and is behind everything. And secondly, it's this idea that Putin, in effect, is the one person who is kind of running the whole, the whole campaign. Because the problem is that this totally misunderstands how Putin operates and how the Russian state operates.

And it means that we're constantly looking for a master plan, we're constantly looking for this underlying logic and then getting caught out because in the main, there isn't an underlying logic. It's conspiratorial thinking, right? You're kind of looking for this top-down thing and then trying to fit your theory into it. right?

Yeah, absolutely. And the point is, look, you know, we know that, and not just in this way, but particularly in terms of his geopolitical strategy against the West, I mean, what Putin does is not micromanage. Instead, he kind of lets it be broadly known what his main objectives are, which are essentially to neutralize us, to divide us, to distract us, to demoralize us, to the point where we actually are kind of more willing to make a deal with Putin,

that it seems easier just to make a deal and to stand up, him, or else that in some ways we are just so busy resolving internal disputes and so forth that in a way we can't muster the political will to do anything even if we wanted to. But beyond those kind of very broad parameters, Putin more or less says, well, let's see what people come up with. I mean, he's, in some ways, his brilliance is that what he's done is he has weaponized the ambitions and the imaginations of so many different Russians. So you have ambassadors and journalists oligarchs, minigarchs

heads of residenturas, the sort of, you know, intelligence cells and embassies, all these other different actors thinking, well, do I have any opportunities, do I have any leverages, just do I have a bright idea that might be able to help push forward this geopolitical agenda? And, okay, some major projects

clearly are either initiated by the Kremlin or at the very least need the Kremlin to sign off. But most of the time, the Kremlin has no idea what's going on and doesn't care. Because 4 out of 5, 9 out of 10, 19 out of 20 of these individual little attempts at mischief will come to nothing. And from the Kremlin's point of view, no biggie. They've invested no time, no money in it. But for the ones and the twos that do actually work, then the Kremlin rewards handsomely the people who are behind it and in a way takes it over and runs with it and sees how it can use it to disrupt.

the West. Can we just very briefly, like specifically what kind of projects are we talking about? We're talking about like, you know, a protest group comes up and they fund both sides or appear to fund both sides, that kind of thing. I think this is one of the problems in talking about this, because it is so diffuse and it is totally driven by opportunities. So in one situation in one country, absolutely, maybe it's exactly, it's supporting groups on the left and the right who are busy competing,

you know, populist anti-establishment candidates or whatever. Somewhere else, it may well be hacks to uncover embarrassing information or just generally to paralyse systems. In a third situation, I mean, the most extreme cases, we've seen a potential, you know, attempted coup and so forth. But it is very much, what is going on in this situation that can be worsened?

The Russians do not have magic mind control powers, They on the whole can't create these problems, but they look at what's there and they think, okay, how can we make more trouble where it is? So, yeah, I mean, it's everything from kind of political subversion all the way through to sometimes actually sort of supporting more violent acts. A term that came up, as I was reading your stuff, is the spookocracy. And can you tell the audience what that means and why it's important? Well, I mean, Putin is famously, infamously, a veteran of the KGB. And I think one of the things, if you look at his career, it's clear that he was actually pretty mediocre as a KGB operative. And much of the time, I mean, he was based in East Germany.

And he was not quite so much, James Bond, a little bit more Miss Moneypenny, in that he was much more involved in just simply rooting reports and such like than he was actually gathering. intelligence. But still, his entire career, he has been fascinated by, in effect, seduced by the intelligence community. I mean, this is a guy who, when he was a school kid, he went to the KGB headquarters in, well, St Petersburg, as it was called there, in Leningrad. This infamous building, the Belshoy Dom, the big house, which used to be the Stalinist's secret police headquarters. So, you know, its basements were where people were assassinating, killed and tortured, people went through there on the way to the gulags and so forth. And, you know, little, you know,

Teenage Putin went along saying, Hello, how can I join? So right from the beginning, he's been fascinated. And I think therefore what that means is we've seen this interesting process in which a disproportionate number of the people who have done very well under Putin in business and in politics

actually have intelligence service backgrounds. Maybe they're ex-KGB. Maybe they're in the post-Sovieter equivalence, the Federal Security Service, the Foreign Intelligence Service, or Military Intelligence, the GRU, but one way or the other, there is a disproportionate number there. And more to the point, precisely because Putin is a spook fanboy, what's happened is increasingly

I think his view of the world is shaped by the spooks. One thing we do know is, I mean, he's a late riser, spends the morning doing his workouts and swimming and so forth. When it does actually get down to work, it's usually early afternoon, the very first thing he reads, three leather-bound briefing books. The Federal Security Service telling him what's going on inside Russia. The Foreign Intelligence Service telling him what's going on outside Russia and the Federal Protection Service, his Praetorian Guards, basically telling him what's going on within the elite.

I suspect that's meant to be to, I don't know, stop coups from happening, but it's probably more like actually inside gossip. But the point is that shapes the rest of his day, that shapes the rest of his view of the world. And when you talk to very disgruntled people within the Russian Foreign Ministry, for example, they say it's so difficult for them to get through because in some ways,

if Putin is already believing what is often paranoid nonsense that has been told to him by his own spooks, it's very hard for the foreign office briefings to then go along and say, no, actually the West isn't trying to undermine us or whatever, because then he's not going to be thinking, why are the spooks lying to me?

He's going to be thinking, why are the Foreign Service people trying to basically stick up for the West? So I think this is what happened. It's not actually that the intelligence services are in command, but in many ways I think with Putin's acquiescence, they have now become the people who in a way shape the world as far as Putin is concerned,

shape his vision of the challenges facing Russia. Do you think that some of this acts as then kind of a weird check on his power? because there are these, what can I call them, shadow influences on him that shape the way he sees the world? Well, ultimately, Putin is just one guy, so obviously he depends on the people through which he rules Russia. Does this act as a kind of a check on him? Well, I would say yes, but actually in a bad way. It's a much wider issue about the role of intelligence, but I mean, ideally intelligent, should always be the people who bring you the best truth.

In other words, this is our best take of what's going on, regardless of whether it fits the political whims of the moment. Now, that's clearly not happening in Russia, quite the opposite. Basically, the intelligence services are almost competing to tell him, sort of comforting lies that basically support his own existing worldview. So actually, I think it's a check in the sense of it would be a check. if all of a sudden he decided one warning, huh, maybe it's actually not best for Russia

that will be engaged in a sort of new era of geopolitical confrontation with the West. Maybe we shouldn't be mired in a conflict in Ukraine. In all these kind of things, maybe the CIA was not behind the Ukrainian revolution. You know, if he did have this sudden kind of, you know, Scrooge-like conversion, the three ghosts of geopolitics, present, future, and past came and visited him. It would actually be really difficult for him to break out of this kind of controlling cocoon, this kind of cradle, in which the spooks have already placed him.

So that leads me to my next question. I guess that, well, it's kind of a two-part. What does he want for Russia? What's his vision here? You say that there's no grand plan. So then is it just about him surviving and being in power? And to that end, how does someone like Putin stop being the president of Russia? Is it possible?

Yeah, I mean, those are obviously a big question. Let's just start with what Putin wants. I mean, for himself, yeah, of course, he wants his political survival, his actual survival, and to continue his very comfortable existence, you can live very well when you've got all of Russia as your piggyback. At the same time, though, I mean, I think he's no longer motivated primarily by financial considerations. In some ways, I think he's outgrown that he has all the money he could possibly need. And instead, he's really thinking about his place in history. It's an interesting and slightly depressing evolution.

When Putin first came into power in 2000, he talked tough on nationalism, but he was actually strikingly pragmatic. He felt that Russia's future depended on having some kind of a positive relation with the West, not to become a Western democracy, but just to be able to have some kind of modus of ending. The trouble is his vision of how that would look was very different from the West. He felt, well, look, we're backing you on the Great Global War on Terror, therefore you shouldn't have a problem as we carpet bomb Chechen cities fighting their own War of Independence and that kind of thing. So, I mean, he became disillusioned, and over time he became increasingly antagonistic towards the West.

And by 2007, when he gave a particularly sort of momentous speech at the Munich Security Conference, you know, it is clear that relations had soured. However, it's then when he spent some time formally speaking out of office. He did a little sort of switcheroo with his tame prime minister because of term limits. So he sort of then spent one term as prime minister, but really in charge behind the scene. But I think in that time, he seems to have essentially, put it in a way, when we were radicalised himself. Like so many authoritarian leaders, over time Putin in effect became a caricature of himself. Became more and more convinced that the West was trying to undermine Russia by basically not treating it as if it was a great global power.

We're talking about a country with an economy, depending on how you count it. could well be smaller than the economy of Texas and no disrespect meant to Texas but does not make it a global superpower and at the same time I mean whatever Texans might think at the same time when

Russian started to get angry with Putin when he came back into power there were the so-called Balotnaya protests of 2011- 2012 instead of seeing this as a proportion of the electorate that was fed up, that felt, well, no, actually, you know, you don't just seem to get to swap amongst you and your friend who gets to be president. But he saw

this, in this sort of evidence that the West was behind protests and such like, and Hillary Clinton, in particular, became his sort of bett noir. So in a way, it's a very long answer to your question, but what's happened now is, I think his vision of what he wants for Russia has morphed. And it's now much more linked to his own personal vision of what he wants for himself and his historic place. And, you know, in fashionable sense, one could say it's about making Russia great again. But his notion of what a great power means is a very 19th century one. It's not about, you know, modern soft power and connections and so forth, no, it's a great power has a sphere of influence, which basically means Russia should control the other post-Soviet states, with the exception

of the Baltic states, which I think he reckons are lost. But countries such as Ukraine and Georgia and Belarus should realize that they are basically beholden to Moscow. Secondly, a great power has a voice on every single major global issue, regardless of whether there's a direct Russian role or not, because again, that's just a mark of prestige. And thirdly, that Putin doesn't want to destroy the international order or international norms or international law, but what he does want is to say,

but Russia gets to ignore them when it's convenient for it. These are all the things that he thinks for start in America has, and he feels Russia should have too. So these are very broad, and these are very emotional things. This is just about, you know, a guy who is part of a generation who, first of all, was raised Soviet. And, you know, late Soviet, which is much more about super power status, that anything to do with Marxism, Leninism. And secondly, the generation of people who are, you know, their adults,

and had to deal with this massive psychological blow, when almost literally overnight, they went from being citizens of one of the great global superpowers to citizens of this almost failing ramshackle state that was sort of being led by a drunkard and such like. You know, so I think that there is a great psychological sense of just simply Russia is Russia. And almost by definition, Russian should be treated as if it was important,

not because of its economy, which is not that great or anything like that, but because it's Russia. And in that respect, I mean, in hindsight, we shouldn't be that surprised. In 1999, before he was president, he said Russia has been a great power for centuries and remains so. It has always had and still has legitimate zones of interest. We should not drop our guard in this respect. Neither should we allow our opinion to be ignored. So even then, he was saying basically Russia has been a great power and therefore Russia should be a great power.

Now, to go on to your second question about how do you stop, I'll be honest. I think he's bored. I think he's actually fed up of the job and in some way losing his mojo. He used to have a real connection with the Russian people. That's beginning to decline. I mean, his approval ratings are still very high by Western standards, but that's not a good comparison.

But, you know, more and more Russians are actually feeling that he's untrustworthy. More and more Russians are just thinking that, in a way, his time has passed. And I think he is as well. But the problem is, when you're in this system, what do you do? I can't see Putin being the sort of person

who has his eye on a yacht, a Caribbean mansion, and a life playing kind of charity pro-am golf with other ex-presidents. You know, I think this is a guy who's going to stay in Russia. I think he's looking for a successor, someone he feels he can trust

with his legacy and his own security, and that he'll also kind of build himself some kind of constitutional system, you know, position that gives him security. But I think this is it. It's a question of whether he's ultimately ever going to feel he can let go. I think Putin would like to, but it's a difficult thing to abandon being an autocrat. It's usually a deadly thing, right? Well, I mean, Russia isn't quite that carnivorous.

I mean, if we look at what happened to Gorbachev, if we look at what happened to Yeltsin, it's not so much that actually your successors feel the need to wipe you out. it's more that you might say, you know, whether you still have the quality of life, whether you still have the freedom of political manoeuvre that you had before. The thing is that, I mean, Putin himself, yes, he's probably got a large amount of money. I think the notions that he's one of the, you know, that richest man in the world, I think, are questionable. But, you know, Nonetheless, he is in the English vernacular not short of Bob or two. But the point is almost all of that is hidden money.

It's not actually sitting in a bank account with his name on it. So the problem is that it would actually be relatively easy for a successor to basically block him from accessing those resources. So yes, I mean, there are all kinds of controls. I don't think it's actually about physical extermination he fears. It's more about just simply the fact that he becomes very vulnerable to whoever takes over. All right. Speaking of moving on, let's kind of transition into your other book, kind of how, which I think kind of covers some of the mechanisms by which Russia is power projecting and, etc. It's called Russian political war moving beyond the hybrid. And you kind of argue that the West is on the verge of political war with Russia and that the purpose of this war and the means by which it's happening are not a traditional military conflict. And to kind of kick off the conversation, I want to focus on one of my favorite Russian political figures, Vladislav Sarkov,

which I think he serves as an interesting bridge between these two topics. McKee, tell us who Sarkov is and how Putin met him and why someone like him and kind of what he does is important to moving beyond the hybrid. Sirkov, yeah, I mean, he is indeed a fascinating character, if often, way too clever for his own good. he is in many ways the architect of, I mean he's the architect of the current Russian political system with this sort of collection of fake opposition parties just to create the theatre of apparent politics

without actually the awkward inconvenience of actually having real opposition parties. So you have the communists, you have the so-called liberal democrats who are neither liberal nor democrat, you have other some smaller parties, and then you have Putin's own sort of, you know, Putin's supporting United Russia bloc. So, you know, you can have all the sort of the soap opera make-believe of politics without actually reality. And in many ways, that's really what Sulkov brought to Putin or whatever.

I mean, this is a guy who, you know, he's actually of Chechenstock. It's been claimed, and I think kind of plausibly that he was. was in military intelligence at one point. He went into business for a while. But then he moved into the presidential administration, and that, I think, is the sort of the key jump. And so really since then, since 1999, he has basically been involved in the political management of Russia.

Sometimes he's been in favour more, sometimes he's been a bit out of favour. And the interesting thing now is that, you see, on the one hand, Surtkov is in effect the kind of shadow administrator of Russian-occupied Donbass, or not quite occupied, influenced. It's very hard to define what this particular war in southeastern Ukraine,

how one calls it. But he's basically Putin's manager of that undeclared war. So he's out on the one hand. On the other hand, he's still playing with Russian politics. And actually very recently he came out with a lengthy and as is most of the cases with Sorkov, ludicrously kind of overwritten article in which he talked about Putin and Putinism

and how Putinism would outlive Putin and the wave of the future and the whole world was basically going in Russia's way. Nonsense in many ways, but the point is the kind of nonsense that A has a real message behind. it, which in my opinion is, you know, he was actually beginning to allow, to basically give formal permission for people to talk about the post-Putin succession. But also, in classic sort of

way, it was all, there was so much in the way of smoke and mirrors that in a way one didn't really notice whether there was any real truth in it, what's really going on. And I suppose to kind of segue that to this point about Russia's campaign. I mean, I think this is, this is one of the problems is that we are often trying to understand a Russian campaign at a time when the Russians

firstly they have very many ideas of what they're doing themselves but also they don't want it to be clear to us there is a lot of very deliberate obfuscation and mythology being thrown up around what the Russians are doing because

the Russians themselves are actually quite aware that they are much, much weaker than the West, not just economically, but militarily, and certainly in terms of soft power. And in that respect, I think they have decided to, in some ways, embrace their role as the geopolitical bad boys. And it sounds like a really, really trivial example, but it's well than I particularly like. I have this much treasured t-shirt, which was bought for me from the army store in Moscow, and it's Putin looking sort of nomic

with a phrase in Russian that basically means, I can sort things out in a moment or two. But the word for a moment, MiGOM, he's also a play on MiG, the Russian fighter plane, and there's a little mig in the corner just in case you didn't get the pun. So what he's actually also saying is,

I can sort things out with a mig or two. And there's a lot of this, the Russians are actually trying to basically encourage us to be scared of them. Encourage us to think of them being mavericks and renegades and people who will basically break the rules. It's not soft power. It's not hard power. I've been playing with the idea of calling it dark power.

It's almost this sense of, well, if we're going to be the bullies, we want to be the biggest, baddest bullies in the schoolyard because then actually no one will mess with us. then people will feel they need to give us some goodies out of their lunchbox. We've actually seen the Russian forces in Syria kind of along with their proxies to include VK. Wagner, their private military corporations. I kind of want to go into the hybrid portion of what Russia is trying to do. We know that the Russian troops can't go head to head with Western powers.

But what we've seen from Russia is the, is the almost the transition to the, the cyber community, the active measures, the, the unconventional kind of information warfare that they've kind of become sort of experts in. Do you see, is, is Putin laughing at, at the United States right now? Does this, because he's got, it feels like he just is really enjoying our new president and feels like he just has what the Russians call compermot over our. our president. Now, do you feel that way? Do you feel that they've kind of starting to win that hybrid war? Well, I think there's two separate issues. Let's deal first of all with the president and then talk about hybrid war because I think they are actually distinct in a way. I mean, I think, look, I don't really buy the idea that the Russians have leverage over Trump, not least because actually American policy towards Russia is now tougher than it was under President Obama. And let me be perfectly honest, if I was a case officer managing

agent Donald. I mean, the first thing I'd have been said was at the time of his political campaigning was, for God's sake, stop praising Putin. You need to be presenting him as the Antichrist, so that then when we do activate you and make you do various things that are useful to us, no one can think it's because you're a Russian asset. I mean, you know, he would be in many ways the worst possible asset. And I think from the Russians point of view, they're very happy with what Trump does in terms of spreading disagreement, disbond and disunity within the West. But the image I tend to use is, you know, imagine you're in a large ballroom with all the doors are locked. And at the moment, there is this insane elephant in with you.

And at the moment, the elephant is at the far end of the room trampling the other guys. And you're happy about that. But it's pleasure that is always tinged with discomfort, knowing that the elephant could just as easily take it into his small mind to come and trample on you. So I think that, you know, the Russians have a considerable amount of caution, I think, about Trump, because basically they're aware of America's strengths. Sorry, the Russians have cautions about Trump.

But to go under the business of hybrid war, and yes, absolutely, you know, the Russians have been building up a whole load of capabilities really effectively. And this is a central point of my book is this is a problem. When we talk about hybrid war, oh, well, Russian hybrid war or whatever, putting aside whether or not we should call it hybrid war, which in my opinion we shouldn't, but that's a whole, other semantic war to fight. In a way, there's three different phenomena we have to be aware of.

One of them is, look, the Russians think hybrid war, or as they call it, Gibridna Wojna, they just translated it across, is actually something that the West is using against them. Now, I think they're wrong, but the point is I think it's a genuine belief amongst the sort of the Russian political elite that basically we are trying to destabilise them and they're fighting back against us. But then more generally, there's how the military look at non-kinetic operations and how they use them to prepare the battlefield, which is, you know, to an extent what we've seen in Syria, but primarily the best examples are Crimea and the early stages

of the Donbass War. So yes, using disinformation, using cyber attacks, using anything else they can to subvert and to ensure that by the time their little green men, there's their Spets and as operators start sifting in, they had, if not already won the war, but at least position themselves effectively as possible, which in a way is frankly something that everyone is doing. No war has ever not been hybrid. If one looks at Desert Storm, there was a strong information operation dimension to try and get the Iraqi forces to surrender and so forth. But nonetheless, there are new opportunities in the 21st century and the Russians are absolutely very much at the foreground of exploiting them.

But then there is a third, and for me the most important element, which is how the Russian national security community think about their struggle with the West. Look, I mean, I think the Russians regard NATO as basically bulletproof in terms of direct military action. I mean, barring some kind of cataclysmic shattering the alliance in the future. But at the moment, I think they think that the Article 5, mutual defence guarantee is rock solid.

And anyway, you know, Russian military strength is not inconsiderable, but it's not in a position to take on NATO. So instead, I think what the civilian leadership has done, and let's be honest, the civilians are the ones in charge, is actually think, well, no, in the modern world, where you have, you know, sort of fact that we're up against democracies with all their kind of, as the Russians would think of them, weaknesses, actually, we can get what we want.

without a single shot being fired. So you might say if the military take is the non-kinetic means are how you prepare the ground before the shooting takes place, what the civilians are saying is, we don't need shooting at all. And in this way, I'm calling it political war because I think it's closest to what George Kennan, the American legendary, American diplomat

and many architects of early Cold War policy, what he outlined in 1914, when he basically said that political warfare, it's in broadest definition, it's the employment of all the means that a nation's command short of war to achieve its national objectives. So everything from black propaganda and economic sanctions all the way through to soft power and so forth. But everything other that doesn't really involve shooting is fair game. And I think that's what the Russians are really using against the West. It is this, this sort of, you know, and it's, you know, and it. And I think it is a war in the sense of, you know, the Russians have mobilized on almost a war-fighting basis, but that it's not intended to go into a shooting stage.

Let's focus on NATO for a second. And I kind of like the fact that you mentioned that. We're starting to see, let's say, let's look at Poland, Latvia, Lithuania. These three countries, former, you know, Warsaw-packed countries are highly, highly concerned with the President Trump's comments and kind of disparaging remarks about. about NATO and even the the the possible withdrawal from the US from NATO it seems like Russia has just kind of gotten a what I like to call an information warfare win on that because what you just mentioned is physically gun to gun you know tank to tank the so excuse me apologies Russia and the United States or the West Russia can't do that so I believe they seem to be focusing highly, they're dumping a lot of information into their cyber warfare. Do you see Poland, Latvia,

do you see the former Warsaw countries concerned that Russia is prepping them for a just kind of a walk-in and hello type of invasion? I mean, there's absolutely that concern. And in some ways, one can understand it, not least for reasons of history as well as geography. But also exactly, it's something that the Russians encourage. Again, go back to my earlier point about dark power. I mean, actually, it suits the Russians to be scaring people. Because the point is, you know, in some ways it's a very short-sighted tactic, because obviously, you know, NATO is in some ways regalvanized.

And particularly the countries are talking about, the Baltic states and Poland. I mean, these are countries that are also spending a lot of money on their defence. And also it's worth mentioning on counterintelligence, which is a second and often, I think, neglected aspect of resisting this Russian campaign. But the point is that, in a way, the Russians have understood that their armed forces are not just military assets. They are also information operation assets. So this is, I think, one of the reasons why we see a steady tempo, often really quite aggressive,

frame, you know, aggressively framed military exercises in the region. It's why we see the Russians sending long-range bomber patrols that sort of can sometimes skirt into other countries' airspace or they are buzzing planes within the buzzing ships with their planes in the Baltic Sea. It's basically to create this, this exactly this sense of impending doom because they think that this gives them some kind of political leverage. One thing I kind of want to hyper-focus on, And one of the most, one of the more fascinating stories, at least for me, is Putin's relationship with this ultra-nationalist biker gang, if you will, the night wolves. And I'm absolutely fast, as from an unconventional mindset, I'm absolutely fascinated in how the Russian, Russia and Putin for that matter, has used this group to kind of expand into the Baltics, opening up ultra-nationalist chapters. let's say in Poland, Poland's having issues with white nationalism, and the night wolves are

always attached to that. And then you mentioned my favorite story of all is the little green men. There has been reporting that this biker gang was somehow involved with that along with what was going on in the Ukraine. What's, what's, is this another kind of one of Putin's, you know, what's his plan with this group? Because they seem to be expanding, and it looks like they've got ties to the GRU and are funded by the Russian government. What's the plan there? What are they trying to do? Well, I mean, first of all, it's worth mentioning that there's just simply an element in which this is just Putin's own PR. It's just another aspect of him showing what a kind of macho figure he is. It's just like when he's riding horseback without his shirt on or whatever, riding with a

biker gang, it's another attempt to just just to show us what a manly little fellow he is. But in geopolitical terms. I mean, I think the night wolves who are also incidentally active in, in some ways almost more interestingly, in the Balkans, which is for me, I think, a much more serious potential flare-up zone than the Baltic states. So I think it's actually southeastern Europe that is vulnerable. But the point is, yeah, this is exactly how the Russians are operating. Because, first of all, you don't really have a grand plan. You don't really have an understanding of quite what, how things are going to play out next week, let alone next year. You try and build up as many and as varied a range of potential policy instruments. And particularly, you want them across

the full spectrum. So, so you want entirely civil things. You want to have Western political and business leaders whom you've managed to kind of woo and flatter so that they're positively inclined towards you. You want to have, you know, political movements that, maybe because they're anti-American or they're anti-EU or whatever, look to you positively, all the way through to the more sharp end type things. So we see the Russians, you know, trying to find ways of using Russian-based organised crime,

for example, as instruments in their political war. And, you know, amongst other, other sort of, you know, semi-violent kind of structures, we have the night wolves. So the night wolves, you know, again, it's part of this whole spectrum of instruments. And what they can be used for is several things. One is, yeah, you might need them just for armed muscle in certain circumstances. And that's what we saw in, for example, Crimea, and to a much lesser extent, in the Donbass.

Though on the whole, these guys, they're not actually good fighters. They are enthusiastic rather than able. So that's one thing. But also, there are ways in which you can actually begin to infiltrate certain kind of, you know, extreme and anti-government or at least just kind of outsider marginalised communities. And because biker gangs have a tendency to cross over the realms of politics, economics, crime and, shall I say, street politics, they're actually particularly useful in that way. So I think, you know, we shouldn't be surprised that the Russians are going to put a, you know,

what is actually a relatively moderate amount of money, into supporting the night wolves. that they become a sort of a useful and thoroughly deniable instrument because a lot of the Russian political war is based around deniability. But thirdly, we know we should realize that actually what this is is more just it's the tip of the iceberg of a whole variety of different actors and movements that the Russians are cultivating, some of which also have a violent role,

just in case they're useful. I'm going to date myself, but I remember in the late 90s, I was actually in the Balkans. I was in Kosovo and Albania and I remember being chased by Russia. We were trying to get to Pristina before the Russians were. I mean, we were painting K4 on the side of our trucks. They seem to be really invested in acquiring the Balkans. Why is that? Why do they need that?

Well, first of all, there is actually a strong historical tie. I mean, we're talking about the fact that the Russians have very, very little soft power. Well, insofar as they do have soft power, it is actually in the Balkans. It's quite interesting, you know, you go to some of these countries, and their understanding of Russia is not the Russia of the Crimean annexation. It's the Russia that helped kick out the Ottoman Empire, you know, back in the 19th century or whatever. So, you know, there's actually a strong historical tradition. So in some ways, for a start, this is, again, it's opportunity-driven.

Secondly, the Balkans are, because they are still this sort of collection of often institutionally very weak countries, which can be played off against each other to a certain extent. Again, it's a lot easier that than trying to actually lean on Germany or any EU or NATO country. But thirdly, it's precisely that this is in some ways a soft underbelly into NATO and the European Union. From their point of view, I think a lot of this is instrumental. By being present in these areas, they force us to talk to them. I mean, this is one of the reasons for precisely the dash on Pristina. It was not because actually that airport was necessarily so strategically important. It's that by having Russian paratroopers there, it made them players.

And whether we're talking about Syria or Libya or. obviously all the Balkans, you know, that is often a key thing. They want to get in there so they force us to actually have to make deals with them and talk to them and treat them like an equal. But the final kind of particular point is exactly there is a crucial role that is going to be played by Serbia. You know, and being able to actually sort of manage and nudge Serbia's distinctly troubled relationship with Kosovo and also with Bosnia.

you know, means, again, that the Russians acquire a role in an area that Europe cannot afford to ignore. So what they're doing is they're basically placing themselves there, saying, you cannot reach some kind of resolution to the, you know, often really quite difficult, political and potentially even violent challenges of the region without talking to us. So, come on, be nice to us and offer us a deal. I want to change tracks just a little bit and talk about kind of mood. I remember reading about this information warfare and kind of how Putin keeps power domestically a lot in the run-up to the 2016 election. And kind of this sense that there's so much competing information and so much disinformation that, you know, Russians tend to shut down or not, you know, certainly not all of them, but some of them. And you just get exhausted with all of the input and all of the lies and it's hard to parse what's going to. going on. And I feel like in America right now, I'm feeling that. I'm feeling that about my domestic

politics. And I'm wondering if you see similarities. Well, I mean, look, I'm talking to you from Brexit Britain. And dear God, absolutely, I think we're feeling much the same, but after a certain point, with the whole Brexit back and forth, we're thinking what the hell is going on and we're bored with this and we're fed up and so forth. But I think this, this is. But I think this is really about the modern world. This is about a modern world in which frankly anyone with a Twitter feed or a Facebook page is a media outlet. And the old structures, the old gatekeepers who were there to actually kind of control

how many different perspectives there were no longer have that power. And I think it's not something that the Russians have invented by any means, but I think particularly the Russians have been particularly effective in realising this and thinking of the particular opportunities. Again, look, the Russians are basically geopolitical guerrillas. They're a relatively weak country trying to basically force the outside world to treat them as if they're a great power. And all of politics is about perception. So all that, you know, what they're having to do is basically force us to think in in a certain way. And to that end, What they have understood is that by, first of all, in some ways, shutting down the information space,

but just so many different perspectives. I mean, this was their strategy, for example, when pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass, using a missile system that the Russians had provided, shot down the MH-17 airliner. And immediately, what you had is the Russians blasting out, umpting different, often truly ridiculous theories about what was going on. That it wasn't actually there at the time, that it had been shot down by a Ukrainian plane,

that it was already full of dead bodies when it landed, all these sorts of things. Not because they needed to convince anyone. But in a way, this was the chaff that was going to just obscure the truth and just make people think, well, we'll never really know what happened, instead of actually thinking,

well yeah we do know what's happened and I think this is the thing all the Russians have to do is take the current trend of the modern media space and just nudge it a little bit further in their own advantage and then they're not the only ones

I mean there are lots of other players who are also enjoying the opportunities to basically spread myth and lie and conspiracy theory and so forth in the modern media space but just the Russians because they're trying to basically paralyze us

are going to do what they can to encourage that. Speaking of other players, how much should the West be concerned or view as a threat, the new Russia and China? How much of a threat of them becoming closer? Is that with their shared goal? And personally, I think we should be a lot more concerned about China,

for its own sake, not because of any kind of Chinese, Russian, alliance. Look, from the Russian point of view, China is today's unfortunate necessity and tomorrow's nightmare. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, the Russians are deeply concerned about a rising China. Not legal, I mean, as who would not be with a long, almost indefensible border with China? I mean, if China was

willing to basically take on the risk of nuclear strike, basically they could conquer Russia east of the euros tomorrow because the Russian forces are thinly scattered along its lengthy border and largely supplied by two ribbon railways which will be closed within 10 minutes at the start of war if the Chinese are at all sensible. Now the point is that what they also realise is actually the Chinese don't need to use military force. Chinese can basically buy whatever they want and in some ways they are already buying the Russian Far East you know actually the amount of Russian investment

compared with Chinese investment that goes into the Russian cities along that border, and it's increasingly sort of clear that actually what happens in Beijing matters a lot more than what happens in Moscow. But the point is, for the moment, that's a threat that you can leave until tomorrow. You can kick that can down the road a bit. At present, the active challenge that Moscow believes it faces is from the West, particularly since the starting of the sanctions regime from 2014 onwards. And so to that end, they feel that they need to basically make nice to the Chinese. So there are certain common interests.

I mean, both of them do not want to see an American-dominated world, and they basically see the current world order as essentially what they call unipolar, in other words, American-dominated. But there's a limit to how far, you know, the fact that they both share the same rival, shall you? say really counts. For the Chinese, Russia's not that important. I mean, if you look at the current, so huge investment in the so-called one-belt, one road, so transport infrastructure, I mean, it's really just, a lot of it is just simply a recognition of the fact that there is just this inconvenient chunk of land called Russia between China and the markets that it really cares

about. And it's just trying to work out how you can get across them more easily. The days when the Chinese were dependent upon Russia for high-tech weaponry are increasingly disappearing. I mean, once upon a time the Russians thought they could basically sell the Chinese stuff and that the Chinese wouldn't be able to reverse engineer it. Well, they've learned the mistake of that. So I think for all kinds of reasons, as well as just historical reasons with a dash of racism, the Russians are truly worried about the Chinese. And the Russians, I think, also appreciate that the Chinese are not.

not going to do them any favours. At the end of 2014, there was a major gas deal, and Putin needed the deal, because he needed to basically show the West, we have other friends too, you know, and the Chinese knew that, and therefore, to put it very bluntly, the Chinese screwed Putin for all they could. And so much so that not all the financial details of that deal have yet been released, because the Russians are so embarrassed about the scale of the deal that the Chinese forced on them. So look, this is not an alliance. in any way. This is a or rather it's an alliance of at most convenience. They have certain common interests. They don't want to see, for example, Islam raging through Central Asia. They feel that America is a little bit too

dominant. But when it comes down to it, these are not countries that feel much, much sympathy for each other. And therefore, I think five years, ten years down the line, we will not really be talking about a Russian-Chinese alliance. Worst case scenario is we'll be talking about the fact that the Russians are now vassals of the Chinese. More likely is that they'll be in a much more antagonistic relationship. Mark Galiati, thank you so much for coming on the show and scaring us again. Always a pleasure.

The books are, we need to talk about Putin, how the West gets him wrong. Russian political war moving beyond the hybrid. And then what's the third one? Third one is an Osprey military history book on Battle of Kulikovo, 1380. A little bit of medieval historical goodness. Thank you so much for coming on to talk to us. That's it for this week, listeners.

Thank you so much for tuning in. War College is me, Matthew Galt, Derek Gannon, and Kevin Nodell. It was created by me and Jason Fields, who will not leave my cats alone. If you like the show, please read us on iTunes and leave a comment. It helps other people find. find the show. We're on Twitter at war underscore college and we're still working on that website.

We'll be back next week. We've been very busy. Coming up is a discussion of the war raging on the streets of America itself, a look at the truth behind a Japanese legend, and tips that just might keep you safe in the event of nuclear war. Until then, stay safe out there.