Angry Planet - Surprise! It’s President Putin All Over Again

Episode Date: March 17, 2018

Mark Galeotti joins us for War College’s Russian election special. The winner, Vladimir Putin, was never in doubt, but what’s the sham election all about? And what comes next for Russia and its relations with the world.And by the way, is there a Gerasimov Doctrine? No, no there isn’t.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new 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. There is, it has to be said, very little insanity that is too insane for Russian State TV. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Galt and Jason Fields.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. You'll never guess who's going to be elected president of Russia this month. Actually, I'll bet you've guessed already. The only way Vladimir Putin doesn't get reelected is if a foreign country interferes with the election. Oh, wait, too soon?

Anyway, show favorite and Russia expert, Mark Galiati, is here to talk to us about the Russian election and more important, what can be. comes next. So welcome back, Mark. Hi, it's good to be back online. So other than Vladimir Putin, who's officially in the race? Well, I mean, there's a cast of several as they try to give this the appearance of a real election, a grown-up election. Really, there's only, I would say, two people we need to talk about, and then one person who we need to talk about who isn't standing. The two people who are worth talking about briefly is Grudinin, who is the Communist Party candidate, except that he's not actually a Communist Party member. And the other one

is Senya Sobchak, former socialite, though she hates that expression, who is standing as a sort of general vote for me if you don't like the way things are going, kind of candidate. But in some ways, the real opposition figure is Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner, who precisely for that reason has not been allowed to run. And our Russians seeing anything at all about these candidates, including Navalny? Well, Navalny is essentially squeezed off all the official media. He's fighting a pretty effective guerrilla campaign through YouTube and so forth, with very enthusiastic supporters and some exceedingly slick videos,

basically highlighting the self-indulgent corruption of the Russian elite. But still, it's hard for him to make headway. So what he's really campaigning for is a boycott. He's saying just don't vote. These are not real elections. We'll wait and see what kind of traction that actually has. I mean, there's a massive attempt to actually get people to vote. I mean, I'm here in Moscow at the moment, and it feels like pretty much every other bus stop, every other billboard is a general poster just basically saying, go and vote. Our country, our president, our choice.

Because let's be honest, the subtext is go vote for Putin. you see a few posters for the Communist Party you see some posters for Zhirinovsky who is this maverick ultra-extreme nationalist and his Liberal Democrat Party that is of course neither liberal nor Democratic is also there as a spoiler

but basically the big effort is just trying and get people out to vote I can't believe Zhurinovsky's still around he's been there since Yelton, if not before. Yeah, absolutely. But let's be honest, this is also the country that worked out how to pickle Lenin. The thing is, I mean, again, it's interesting that the actual, originally the communists were likely to also feel

their own ancient and essentially desiccated candidate Zuganov. And it's really only pressure from below that forced them to choose another candidate. And the interesting thing is that this guy, Grudinian, he's actually now getting quite a bit of flack from the official media, claiming that he has foreign bank accounts and whatever, which implies that they're suddenly thinking, oh dear, he might be a bit of a problem. Not a problem in the sense of he's going to push this to a second round or anything like that, not at all, but just simply that in some ways he doesn't seem to realize that his job is to be a pretend candidate, not a real one.

I'm wondering what Putin's cell is here, or does he even need one at this point? Well, I mean, in many ways, this is the interesting thing. This is the presidential election that isn't. Putin himself hasn't campaigned. There's been sort of a couple of set piece speeches, but he's not really been doing much of the going and meeting the people. Let's be honest, I mean, he gives every impression of being rather bored. It's a little bit like the sense that they created an electoral process,

and electoral system to give it the illusion of democracy. And they're now thinking, why did we do that again? So there's not really much of a cell except just a sort of general time of, well, this is a dangerous time. And the interesting thing is that his recent speech, sort of kind of the state of the union type address, spent two thirds at the time trotting out the usual promises that Russians have heard all the time. GDP is going to go up by 50%.

And there's going to be more money for schools and roads. and Wi-Fi for the countryside and all these other things. And then the last third, which is obviously the third that we all talked about in the West, was all him salivating over the new generation of nuclear missile systems. And in part, that was a thumb in the eye of the West. But also it was part of a general narrative that he's been building, which is basically this. We Russians are at threat.

The West is trying to isolate us, surround us, change our system, change our values. We are essentially at war, even if it's not a war fought with tanks. In other words, this is the flip side of exactly what we're saying in the West about the Russian sort of political campaign. But that sort of links to a sense that in circumstances like this, it's too dangerous to not have a strong, powerful, experienced leader who can defend the motherland and Putin is the only one.

So in effect, that is his main political campaign. It's just basically, it's too scary out there. It's too dangerous to have anyone else. Right. And I think some of the other things that you're seeing that he's been talking about play into that. Because even though he's not mounting a traditional campaign, like you said, I still feel like every other week the past month or so. I've been hearing crazy stories coming out of Russian Putin specifically.

He criticized the Jews for election meddling. He claimed that he ordered the term. Fergus Pegasus Airline downed, there's the nerve gas attacks that are allegedly tied to them that are happening in the UK. Do you see that as all part of that? Yes, it's not necessarily initiated for that reason, but they are firm believers of the great sort of saying that never waste a crisis. So if one takes, for example, this nerve agent attempted assassination in the UK, and it's very, very hard not to see that as a Russian state-level hit. When I turn on, if I'm incautious enough to do so,

my TV set here in Moscow and watch Pirbi Canal, the main government TV channel, it's full of this extraordinarily rabid suggestions that basically this is all a false flag operation because the British are, in what was the most delightfully extreme claim, annoyed because they lost the World Cup, the rights to host it to Russia. And therefore, London is trying desperately to find excuses for all kinds of horrible Russophobic acts. So everything that happens, it all plays this narrative of basically it's not our fault,

it's all a Western plot, and that's why we're under risk. Did the World Cup idea actually make it onto main Russian TV? I'm afraid. So there is, it has to be said, very little insanity that is too insane for Russian state TV. Everything about this makes me wonder about how Russians view U.S. Russian relations. You know, we're so used to the Western view, which is the West is being undermined. And are Russians thinking about the U.S. in particular? And how do they view our favorite scandal over here?

interfering with our elections? I suppose it depends. When we say Russians, are we talking about a bus driver in Omsk, or are we talking about the sort of political class? If you're an ordinary Russian, you have probably internalized that U.S. Russian relations are in a fairly bad state. You might find this quite perplexing because you're also told that Donald Trump thinks that Putin is the greatest guy since Kim Jong-un, it seems. and you know it contributes to this sense that the world is a confusing and dangerous place but it's hardly the main thing on your intellectual agenda any more than if it was a bus driver

in Ohio if you're talking about the political class well here is much more complex and again it goes back to my long hell view that the Russians weren't trying to elect Trump, they were trying to undermine Clinton, whom they thought was an absolute shoeing. And certainly, from the very beginning, the Russian specialists in foreign affairs and national security were concerned about what Trump might mean. And above all, had no idea what to make of him. And quite frankly, that still obtains today. There is an official line, of course, that Russia did not in the slightest bit try to interfere in the American elections. There is, I'm encountering, a fairly general sense that, well, there was a certain amount of trolling

and such like, as is always the way, but that it wasn't crucial. I mean, to a large extent, Russians don't believe that they tipped the balance in terms of the American election. And in that case, again, I think they have this question of they're not quite sure how to consider America. But what they do understand is that America is rather more powerful. Now, their view has always been over the West as a whole is that the West has more capacity, but Russia has more will. In other words, Russia can do more with less. And we're still seeing that with its relations with Europe. That's changing with America. And I mean, particularly if one thinks back to

February when there was this attack in Syria on the oil fields that also included in which they were American personnel and then the American forces as per procedure responded with a devastating air and artillery attack that decimated this pseudo-mercenary force called Wagner, this Russian mercenary force. And it's interesting because Moscow has been incredibly meek about that. If anything, actually aggravating local nationalists who were horrified, thinking, well, these are our, you know, these are good Russian soldiers. Even if they weren't working for the defence ministry, they were Russians. And you're just standing back and letting the Americans kill them. But Moscow very clearly sort of not wanted to get involved and basically said, none to do with us, these are mercenaries, they're working for the Syrians or for private company.

So when push comes to shove, I think the Russians are not looking to directly. challenge the United States. But I think that's to a large extent precisely because of a sense of unpredictability. They have not worked out how they can game Trump's America these days. Are the other candidates, do they take any sort of different position towards the United States? Navalny in particular, since he's not a stooge? Well, Navalny is interesting because, you know, he's essentially, you know, politically he's liberal, he's a very, very fierce critic of the corruption and the arbitrary nature of the government. But on the other hand, I mean, he is a Russian nationalist. He doesn't seem to have a problem, ultimately, with the Russian annexation of Crimea.

He certainly doesn't want to see some any kind of geopolitical competition with America, but we shouldn't assume that he's somehow some, you know, America sympathizer. it's Ksenya Sochak who interestingly enough seemed to have spent half of her campaign actually in the United States rather than in Russia who has been adopting a much more overtly

liberal role but opinions very varied on Subchak I personally am pretty sceptical I mean this is the daughter of Putin's original patron back in St Petersburg this is someone who

clearly has been operating under a degree of protection. She's an opposition candidate who says some really quite striking things against the regime, and yet, unlike other real opposition candidates who have a tendency to have their homes broken into and ransacked and then false charges levered them and then sent to prison for days, weeks or months, she seems to be living something of a charmed life. I think her role is ultimately to be the fake liberal candidate in the elections to kind of create a sense of excitement, create a sense of real competition. So she says the right things. But firstly, she's not got any kind of political weight whatsoever.

And secondly, it is possible to be skeptical about whether she's just simply reading her lines. Do you think they'll ever do away with all of this, or is the political theater too good for them? Look, I'm unfashionably optimistic about Russia. I don't think there is anything in the Russian DNA that means they're sort of forged into tiny shackles and they're forever going to be doomed to authoritarianism and so forth. The interesting thing is one can look at debates about Germany before World War II. And there were people who say, well, look, militarism and authoritarianism are so deeply baked into the German psyche that really they know little else.

And yet if one looks at the Germans, not even just now, but West Germans 20, 30 years ago, extremely liberal, extremely democratic. Now, I don't think that the Russians are going to be Germans any day soon. But on the other hand, I think that we are going to see a slow progression. Putin is in some ways the last gasp of a particularly toxic mix of Soviet man, with all the instincts that that means. And also the kind of Russian who has seen the great empire fall and doesn't quite understand it and wants to know who to blame.

And it's something that pretty much every imperial country has to go through. I mean, one could say that Britain actually hasn't quite got over it yet, witnessed the Brexit vote. You know, this takes time. But I think Putin is this awful combination of the two, Soviet man and post-imperial man. The next political generation are going to be different. Now, I don't think they're instantly going to become Democrats.

They're probably essentially just going to be pragmatic, kleptocrats, happy just to steal from the country and put their money in the West. But to do that, they need to have good relations with the West. Maybe the political generation after that is going to be stepping towards being a liberal, democratic country. Because the fascinating thing is, you talk to Russians. Russians of every kind. And they will tell you, look, we are Europeans.

That's where they see themselves. And if you ask Russians, do you want to become part of the European Union? whatever, they say no, no, we're our own nation. But if you ask them to describe the kind of future they want for themselves, or more importantly for their kids, they talk about precisely a lack of corruption, a meaningful capacity to actually feel you have a voice in the future of the country, to be free of arbitrary rule by local officials and so forth, which tends to meet generally the rule of law, they are basically describing Western systems. So I think bit by bit, the Russians will get there, the same way as one can look at the countries of central Europe

that used to be under Soviet control and see a huge spectrum. Some countries are doing very well in terms of their shift towards democracy. Other countries are actually having a lot more trouble. But the general dynamic, even if it is two steps forward, one step back, is in that direction. That process will also come to Russia, just not while Putin is in the Kremlin. That actually brings out a different question for me. You're talking about the possibility of improving relations. One of the sticking points still is Ukraine.

And I guess I'm wondering, is Russia still actively fighting there? It's just been so quiet. And do you think anyone other than the Ukrainians care, or is this one of the obstacles towards any sort of thought? Well, first of all, when you talk about it being quiet, It's quiet from the other side of the Atlantic, but actually, if you're in Ukraine, basically there are skirmishes, there are shootings, there are deaths pretty much every day. So this is a hesitate to use of a term frozen conflict, because that implies everything is quiet. It is not that. Sometimes it's called it the Baked Alaska conflict, in that it's essentially frozen with a hot crust.

Because along the line of contact, there are still skirmishes going on. And Russia is absolutely there. The majority of the fighting is being done by a motley array of local militias, volunteers, auxiliaries and mercenaries. But Russia stands behind them. Russia pays them, Russia arms them. And any time it looks as if the Ukrainian army may be able to make some kind of headway, that's when the Russians surge in their regular forces to restore the status quo. look, this has become something of an, for the moment, unresolvable problem.

Crimea is different in the sense of there's no way the Russians are going to withdraw from Crimea, both for strategic reasons but also political reasons. Pretty much every Russian thinks that Crimea is rightfully theirs. The Donbass is a different matter. Nobody really cares about the Donbass. This is the tragedy of that region of southeastern Ukraine. Kiev in many ways is kind of committed to getting it back but doesn't really want it and meanwhile the Russians are committed to defending their quote unquote

in the little sort of secessionist states which are just Russian puppets even though these days they don't really want it this was never about the Donbass this is always about Russia trying to force Kiev to bend the knee and accept that it was part of Russia's sphere of influence and when they went in, I mean, I remember I was in Moscow at the time, and everyone I talked to was absolutely certain that this would be a six-month wonder. There was in six months, Kiev would have capitulated, Russia would have brought his boys home and the West would have forgotten about it.

Well, Kiev didn't capitulate. And so the boys haven't been brought home, and actually, in fairness to us, the West hasn't forgotten about it. We've shown that we can actually stick to our guns, at least so far. this is not what Russia wants but it's stuck in a situation where it cannot afford to just pull back. Putin cannot afford to just pull back.

One of the interesting things is if you look at his legitimating narrative, he isn't the man who never makes a mistake. You will try in vain to find a genuine apology, a genuine admission that he did something wrong. And there's no way that Kiev

is going to give him the mission-accomplished moment that he needs to be able to pull his troops back. So for the moment basically everyone is stuck there and this kind of miserable, gritty, low-level conflict will continue. And again, I think that will continue so long as Putin is in the Kremlin too. So when you put this together with Syria, I'm wondering if all of these foreign adventures, or should I just say these foreign adventures, are costing Russia money that it needs, especially in light of the sanctions that are on the country and the fact that all

is still not back to the $100 a barrel rate? Yes, let's be honest. Russia can, for the moment, afford to sustain what it's doing. I'm going to realize that there's a big difference between Ukraine and Syria. Ukraine is a failure that the Russians are having to manage. And it also means basically controlling a significant chunk of Ukraine that they also are having to bankroll. I mean, basically any sort of public services or whatever within the area of the Donbambe

is ultimately coming covertly out of Moscow's treasury. Syria is very different. I think they would generally regard what's going on in Syria as a victory. They managed to stabilize a situation. They managed to keep their own guy Assad in power. More to the point, they forced America to start talking to Russia again. Because I can remember they went in at a time when America was trying to isolate Moscow. And in some ways this was precisely like, no, you don't get to do that.

We can force you to come and talk to us. and it led to that distinctly uncomfortable encounter between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin at the UN General Assembly in New York. And also, you know, Syria is a war that they're basically fighting on the cheap with air power. They're using it as a splendid opportunity to blood a whole new generation of officers, test out a whole new generation of equipment, and as well, use it as a shop window. Roll up, roll up, come and see what Russian military technology can offer you. So I think for all those reasons, Syria, it costs money, obviously, but probably they're thinking that's money well spent.

In a way, they're certainly not thinking about that in Ukraine. It also proves to the rest of the world that they're a global power, right? Yeah, obviously, it depends quite how you mean global. Syria is not the same as Argentina in terms of deployment. But no, I mean, what it does is it takes Russia out of a certain box that had been placed, not just in terms of trying to contain it diplomatically, but a psychological box, a mental box, that people were saying, you know,

we go back to, again, Obama's phrase, a regional power, which really went down badly here in Moscow. And what they're saying is, well, no, we're more than that. We are a power projection nation. Of course, they're still distinctly weak. I mean, it's worth mentioning that, you know, Russian military have distinct capabilities, but it is nothing like, say, whatever, the American military capacity is. But nonetheless, it can do something that no one thought it could do,

which is precisely to deploy forces into Syria, and more to the point to sustain that operation. That definitely has forced us to have a reassessment of quite what Russia can do. Speaking of Russian military affairs, you recently published something in foreign policy, that I wanted to talk to you about, Mark. Can you tell me what the doctrine is and why you are apologizing for creating it? Well, what the doctrine is is just simply a snappy title. It all dates back, as I'm sure many of the listeners know,

to an article that was written by the Russian chief of the general staff, General Gerasimov, which appeared in the absolutely tedious military-industrial courier. And, you know, some people picked it up. It's meant to have actually been particularly some Estonian analysts that sort of spotted it first as being something of interest. They circulated it. Robert Colston of the, very Colson, of RFERL, the American radio station, translated it and sent it round.

And with his permission, I put it on my blog with a commentary from me. And, you know, as obviously I want people to read my blog, I gave it a snap. happy title. So although I did explicitly say that this was just a placeholder, nonetheless, I called it the Gerasimov doctrine. Here was me thinking I could get away with just using a glib phrase and people wouldn't take it seriously. Although the text makes it clear that there is no such coordinated doctrine, people looked at that and then saw what happened later on in Crimea and Ukraine and decided that somehow there was this extraordinarily sort of coordinated, carefully mapped out Russian doctrine that Garasimov was talking about, about how the Russians would use

non-military means to destabilise countries before sending in troops. And I can understand to an extent why, because that's what we saw particularly in the Dondas. However, a few caveats need to be applied. First of all, Garasimov wasn't talking about Russian policy. He was talking about how the world looked to Russia. Their view is hybrid war, Gibritnaya Voina, is basically something that is a Western and above all American tactic. And what he was describing about the use of non-military means to bring countries into chaos is what the Russians see as what happened with the Arab Spring risings, the color revolutions against authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space, and then in due course what happened in Ukraine, when, you know,

the sort of hesitate to say Moscow puppet, but certainly sort of Moscow inclined leader, Yanukovych was toppled. As far as they're concerned, these clearly were not organic to the country's concern. This is not just people who have fed, who had, you know, basically got fed up with inefficient and corrupt regimes. No, no, of course, this all had to have been coordinated in Langley. And as even though I keep telling people here in Moscow, the CIA will, wishes it had that capacity to basically flip a switch and bring down a government, and doubly wishes it had the capacity to do so without it being leaked to the Washington Post two weeks later. That cuts no ice here.

They have this sense of that's what the Americans can do. So Gerasimov was describing what he thought was the American way of war. And in part he was doing that because precisely this is what at the time the Kremlin was worried about. And he's trying to make the case that, look, you still need to spend money on all the shiny toys that we're in the military, need because we actually can respond to that. And when it comes down to it, and I'm simplifying slightly, but his answer is we can blow the snot out of any kind of Western attempt to destabilise Russia, because I think it kind of comes with not just political insurrection, but also special forces, teams coming across the border and stirring things up and so forth. And if you look,

for example, at the first phase of the recent major Zapad military exercises that took place, the first phase was basically wargaming that. It was incursions by foreign special forces teaming up with local fifth colonists and how the Russian military would deploy devastating fires against it. So this is what Garasimov was talking about. He was not trying to say, hey guys, we come up with this great new way of fighting wars. He was saying, yes, this is how the Americans want to fight wars and this is how we're going to resist them. But the trouble is a snappy title, a nice phrase, carries far, far more weight than any amount of sober analysis. And this term Gerasimov Doctrine acquired a sort of Frankenstein's monster,

like identity of its own, lumbering way out of my control. And so I was just trying desperately to kill the beast that I'd unleashed. Any luck so far? Ah, God. Now, I suspect that this will be across I'll be carrying for a long, long time. And in some ways people say, well, why does it matter? And I think it matters for two reasons. One is that it makes us think that the Russian campaign, which exists, I'm not saying there is not a Russian campaign against us,

but instead of thinking of it as some carefully worked out concept, I think we should realise the extent to which it is fragmentary and opportunistic. Because that's a different kind of threat and one that we respond to differently. And more generally, if we mislabeled something, we misunderstand it, and therefore we don't prepare properly for it. The essence of the quote-unquote-unquote Gerasicot doctrine, as people understood it, is it's preparing the battlefield for when you send in your little green men, your battalion tactical groups, in other words, for when the soldiers roll across the border. Now, when it comes to the West, I do not believe that is going to happen. I think the Russians have a very clear sense of Article 5 of NATO, the mutual guarantee,

and actually they believe that it holds true. They're also well aware that European NATO has more ground troops than the Russians have put together. Instead, this is about political war. This is about subversion, demoralization, disinformation, disinformation, et cetera, being deployed, not to prepare the ground for military conflict, but as an alternative to it.

So if we're constantly sitting there waiting for the little green men, waiting for the Russian commander to come across the border, we will miss what for me are actually much, much more serious threats, such as, for example, corruption within the West. Because these are the things that actually the Russians are definitely, to use the other buzzword at the moment, weaponising. Right. It strikes me both politically and militarily that one of the ways that the Kremlin keeps power is by making all of this chaos seem coordinated, making it seem more top down than it actually is. I guess that's not a question. But still, let me agree with you anyway. And I think I've been playing with this idea.

It's still an unformed concept. But, I mean, unfortunately the term hard power has been taken. But what is the opposite of soft power? Soft power, which is now a fairly well-established concept, is the idea of that basically you can have power by being a state that represents a great example, a state that other countries to put it very bluntly want to be friends with. and it gives you this kind of network power within the international system. Well, the opposite that, which I'm sort of tentatively calling dark power,

is if you're an outsider and you embrace that notion, you know you're not going to get hard power. Let's be honest, there's a few strong men wannabes who want to be like Putin, but very few countries are actually saying, Russian Federation, now there's a kind of model that I want to adopt for my country. They don't really have much hard power, except in a few little sort of historical religious, sort of ties, particularly in the Balkans.

Instead, they've almost decided, well, look, if we're going to be the geopolitical bullies, let's be good ones. Let's be scary ones. You know, if you're going to be a bastard, be the best bastard you can be. And in that respect, actually part of the value of this campaign, and also over-the-top cases such as the use of nerve agents against a defector in the UK is precisely that it emphasizes this sense that Russia is a scary and dangerous country, which therefore gives you a reason to do a deal with it.

Because this is it. This is the geopolitics of extortion. If an extortionist is going to come and try and shake you down for something, that extortionist needs to be scary. And in that respect, perversely, it also suits Russia for us to overplay how effective and how dangerous and how coordinated its campaigns against us are. Well, for us, since that's a very dark note, that's the perfect end to a war college episode. That's what we've learned.

So, Mark, thanks so much for joining us. That was terrific. It's always a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this week's episode. If you enjoyed it, please give us a review on iTunes or wherever you get this podcast. Mark Galiati has a new book coming out in May. It's called the Vorey, Russia's Super Mafia.

We're looking forward to it, and we hope you'll give it a try. By the way, he'll be coming back to talk with us about it. Also, we wanted to let you know that you can reach us on Facebook. We are Facebook.com slash war college podcast. Stop by and say hi.