Angry Planet - The History of 'Putin's Wars'

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reign has been defined by constant conflict. From Chechnya to Ukraine and many other wars in between, Putin’s Russia has constantly been pushing at its borders and sending troops abroad. How have those wars shaped Russia and the world? And what does it all have to do with Ukraine?That’s the subject of the new book Putin’s Wars. Its author is here with us today. Its friend of the show: Mark Galeotti. Galeotti is a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. He’s also the host of the excellent In Moscow’s Shadows podcast.Click here to buy Mark's book, Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.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. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet.

I am Matthew Galt. Jason Fields is trapped in the suburbs of Austin, and he's wishing he was at the chili parlor bar. So, Russian President Vladimir Putin's reign has been defined by constant conflict, from Chechnya to Ukraine and many other wars in between. Putin's Russia has constantly been pushing at its borders and sending troops abroad. And how have those wars shaped Russia and the world? And what does it all have to do with Ukraine? Quite a bit. And that's also the subject of the new book Putin's Wars.

Its author is here with us today. It's friend of the show, Mark Galiati. Galiati is a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. And he's also the host of the excellent in Moscow Shadows podcast. Mark, thank you so much for once again coming on to Angry Planet. Always a pleasure. I'm always embarrassed when a new book of yours comes out because I feel like we've been talking for six years, maybe longer, actually. And I don't know how you've written, how many in the past decade have you written?

Oh, past decade, I don't know. I mean, all told, it's just under 30, but that's not in the last decade. And some of them are very small books. Some of them are very small. This one's not. It is an in-depth history, I would say, of Russia's recent military triumphs and tribulations. And we'll get into that, but I be remiss, but I didn't talk to you about a couple things first. A lot has happened in the war in Ukraine.

I mean, in the past couple weeks since we scheduled. this talk. And there's two things I kind of want to highlight and just get your opinions on. Curson. What does this say about the state of the war right now as we're talking on the 18th? Well, look, I see it very much as a shift, but in some ways it really confirms what was pretty much evident before, which is that Putin is no longer trying or expecting to win the war on the battlefield. More than anything else, he's trying to avoid losing it. Because he is instead putting his faith in the long term. I mean, he's digging in. The withdrawal from Hearson, that made sense militarily, even if it was deeply embarrassing politically. And I think the Russian

hope is that they can now essentially establish rather more defensible lines, dig in. They clearly using, I mean, there's about 80,000 of these mobics, these mobilized reservists who are being used, frankly, as human speed bumps for the Ukrainians. I mean, they're suffering catastrophic losses. But on the other hand, what that actually also means is there's about 150,000 of them who are in Russia or are in Belarus. They're going through a little bit more extensive training. And the idea is that they can be formed into some kind of units, I mean, bad units, bad units, badly equipped and badly trained, but units nonetheless, in their own right, which can then be deployed come spring, particularly to, again, be essentially defensive forces. And the idea is

really just to drag this war out. It is an appreciation, I mean, in part, maybe, you know, will Ukraine be able to manage to, and be willing to keep up the fight, which I think it will, but nonetheless, you know, clearly with all this devastating bombardment of its infrastructure, particularly is electricity. That's clearly in part to put pressure on the Ukrainians. But more than anything else, it's about putting pressure on the West. It's about, look, this war is not going to end soon. Your hopes that the Ukrainians will be able to deliver a quick knockout, ha-ha, we have foiled them, and instead you are facing months, maybe even years, in which you are spending billions of dollars, pounds, and euros every month, arming Ukraine, and perhaps

just as importantly keeping it financially afloat. Are you really willing to keep doing that? I mean, what? The United States has now pledged or provided $60 billion in aid, which, I mean, admittedly, when one looks at expenditures on certain areas, like the Pentagon, is not a crippling amount, but on the other hand, nor is it an insignificant amount. And more to the point in Europe,

where the cost of living crisis is that much more serious. There are some signs of a degree of Ukraine fatigue within the population, not because anyone actually has anything against Ukraine necessarily, but just simply they feel that actually if you've got a spare billion euros lying around, well, there are other things that you could be doing with it. So I think that's Putin's hope. I'm honestly not convinced that it's actually going to play out, but he's clutching at straws. This is really all he's got, frankly, because his alternatives are all rather more dangerous for him. But I think that that's what says. It was a rationalization. It was something driven clearly by the military and the military's assessment of the situation because this city was indefensible. And we see, therefore, the shift in strategy. Kind of also says that there is, despite what some people will say and point to that there is militarily some sort of steady hand and logic at the wheel, right? Yes. I mean, two things really there. One is, Putin is clearly, however, unpleasant and committed to believing a whole variety of deeply

unpleasant and often unhinged things, Putin is a rational actor, and he can get his head round at least tactical defeats given time. He did with Kiev, he now has with Khearson, without feeling the need to escalate and do everything. I mean, you get some of this that are, you know, Putin will always escalate. Oh, no, he won't, actually. But second yes, it's interesting that we are seeing belatedly a certain degree more professional rationality also coming into actually how Russian forces are being used and deployed. I mean, it's still deeply dysfunctional. And frankly, they're never going to be able to make up for the catastrophic losses they suffered at the beginning of the war. But with, for example, the retreat from

Hareson, which clearly was a victory for the professional soldiers over the politicians who rather see the embarrassment and the potential backlash. And generally, I mean, they're clearly trying to get their logistical situation a little bit more in order. They're clearly a little bit more rational, if ruthless, in how they are using the mobics. So yes, it's all looking not quite so shambolic as it did a month, two months ago. So the other thing I want to touch on involves one of my, uh, one of the characters I'm most fascinated with and has been a part of this conflict

since the beginning, uh, Igor Gherkin, I think is also, I wrote something about him and you mentioned it in your blog. And I think that's how we connected actually all those years ago. Um, so Gherkin and Sergei Dibinsky, if I'm saying that correctly, were convicted in absentee.

absentee in a Dutch court this week, or absentia, in a Dutch court this week for downing the downing flight MH17. What do you think this says, if anything, about the war and the world's reaction to it? I'm tempted to say not a lot, really. I mean, this is a sort of a natural and just process of bringing a terrible incident to a court and having a proper resolution. of that. But look, I mean, okay, Gyrkin and Strelkov to use his nom de guerre, apparently is now back in the fighting. According to his telegram account, yes. Exactly. And indeed, for contact, yeah. And we have no reason to assume anything to the contrary. So in some ways, it's faintly possible that he might even end up in a prison cell if he's actually ever

captured. But otherwise, look, it's not actually as if anything is likely to happen over MH17 in terms of reparations, a recognition of Russia's role there, unless and until there is some dramatic change in Moscow. And in some ways, look, if and when that happens, more likely when than if, I'd say, well, there's going to be a hell of a lot of things on that to-do list. And an MH17, however extraordinary and horrific it was, probably isn't going to be at the top of it. So, look, I mean, I think that fine, it's the process of the machinaries of justice. Hopefully it will give all those left behind by the sort of casualties of this terrible incident some degree of closure, some degree of sense that it has been addressed.

But I don't think it's really going to say anything about the war or its conduct. Very briefly for the audience, because I don't think we've ever talked about him on the show before. Will you give us the Cliff Notes version of Strelkov? Strelkov. I mean, he's a fascinating figure in that he's in many ways a representation of some key trends that really have shaped Russia. I mean, this is a man who, after university, joined the military, and then found himself increasingly volunteering and being in a whole variety of flashpoints in. the 1990s. As a volunteer, as a sort of Slavic Russian nationalist, he crops up in Yugoslavia, he crops up in Moldova and such like, always on the side of the Russians or the Russians

allies and proxies. In due course, he gets recruited by the FSB, the Federal Security Service, again, as essentially a hard man, some kind of commando. He plays a role in the Second Chechen War, for example, and has been connected. not for the first time and not for the last time with human rights violations in the process. And he was one of these kind of strange peripheral figures for so long. You know, an extreme nationalist voice, even more extreme than the kind of nationalists who were emerging with Putin. And then he had his moment in 2014. When he was in Crimea, he was actually busy setting up one of the various kind of malicious.

groups that really provided more than anything else kind of top cover for the Russian special forces who actually did the heavy lifting in the annexation operation. And then after that, when the annexation was done unwilling to surrender the fun, he took a ad hoc random bunch of guys across the border into the Donbass, where by his own language, he sort of triggered, he pulled the trigger on the war. And he became for a while the notional defense minister of the rebel republics until Moscow decided he was just a bit too outspoken, a bit too inconvenient, had him sacked. And then he became an opposition figure really at home, a grumbling voice in the margins. And the very fact that he was able to do that also says something about the degree to which

the nationalists have their own kind of fraternity. He was clearly being protected by people who are still within the security apparatus and such like. And I mean, with the start of this war, I mean, he emerged as a really vitriolic critic of how this war was being fought and very much represents, I think, an increasingly dangerous threat to Putin, not the liberal opposition that we, you know, that we know about people like Alexei Navalny, languishing in prison, but instead the nationalist critique of Putinism, people who didn't necessarily have a problem with invading Ukraine, but do have a problem with

it being done so amateurishly, incompetently, and with such evidence of manifest corruption from top to bottom of the system. So, I mean, he was actually, you know, being very, very outspoken. He's now seems to, I don't know if he's metaphorically been conscripted or volunteered or whatever. He's now apparently somewhere on the front line commanding some kind of unit will no doubt find out what. But I think that although Girkin himself, he's not a particularly charismatic figure, you know, he is a reenacter, you know, he likes to sort of dress up as a Tsarist officer or a Roman officer. I mean, I can't help feeling that in another life he'd been very happy painting Warhammer figures. But now suddenly he finds himself, you know, as a lightning rod

for a whole body of people who are increasingly thinking that in some ways, it is actually patriotic to be anti-Putin. And I think that's important as a development. I want to put, I want to get into the book, but I want to put it in. I mean, I just realized I think you said briefly, and I gave you anything but. But there you go. This is a man who I think is also quite fascinating. I mean, I could do like a whole half hour or an hour on him.

As I do think you're right, I think it speaks to so many currents in Russian society right now, as I understand it. And I love the idea that he may have been happy in another life painting Warhammer figures. And it's just, it's perfect. This is a guy that wrote his own memoir, what, in the early aughts, about his time in the 90s. And it's pretty fantastical, some of it, from my understanding. There's amazing pictures of him in, like dressed as a white Russian and dressed as a Roman legionaire during doing these kind of cosplay events. He, from what I understand, the reason that he fled, well, maybe not fled is the wrong word. The reason he left the Donbass is MH17 goes down. He posts to VK bragging about how they had just shot down a Ukrainian plane. Then it gets deleted immediately

when someone realizes that they shot down an airliner. And then he's back in Russia after that. But anyway, yes, okay. I want to put a pin in the idea of these kind of nationalist threats to Putin. because I think that'll be, I want to get there at the end of this conversation. Because I think that's something that we don't talk about enough here in the West. We kind of, I think a lot of people tend to have this rosy view of Ukraine possibly being the end of Putin and maybe something better will come. And that's not necessarily true. There are other forces at work in Russia that we may not like to see come to power. But, all right.

So Putin's wars is kind of the story of a leader defined by the country. conflicts that he's engaged in in his relationship to the military. Why do you think that this is an important lens for understanding this leader and this country? Obviously, it's interesting that the idea of the book and most of the writing happened before there was actually this February invasion. But what's been clear from the first is that in some ways, look, Putin's notion of what makes a great state. and clearly from his view, Russia is and has some kind of historic destiny to be a great power, is inextricably connected with war fighting. That's what makes a great power.

A great power is one that in effect can compel those around it to do what it wants. And it doesn't necessarily mean fighting wars, but it does mean having the capacity to fight wars. And for that to really be effective, every now and then, you actually have to demonstrate and assert your capabilities. And so in some ways, every now and then, a nice, victorious little war, to use a phrase that was used by the Russian Interior Minister just before the tremendously ill-fated Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5. But anyway, you know, one of those is very helpful just to remind people that, you know,

Russia is back on the map. And also, Putin was pushing back against what had been happening in the 1990s, where there was a sense, not only that Russia was on the verge of becoming a failed state, but the precise it was marginalized, despised, and ignored because it was weak. So there was a sense. Actually, no, you can't trust the West. You can't put your faith in the West's goodwill. You have to be in a position where the West has to talk to you and has to be nice to you. So on the one hand, warfighting is important to him and his vision of the state. It's also, I think, important to him personally. I mean, this is a guy with no meaningful military experience. Some total of that is when he was at

then in grad state university, like all graduates men, he had to do his reserve officer training, which anyone who went through it also in the 1970s will tell you it was an entirely derisory waste of time. But everyone got out of as much as they could. It was a chance to have a nap while a political officer was telling you about the glories of the Soviet Union and maybe, yes, you'd have to do a few weekends out camping in a muddy field somewhere. But the interesting thing is that as soon as he left and joined the KGB, he could have continued his reserve status, but instead he ditched, he used that as a reason to ditch having to do any refresher training. So this is not a man who understands the military at all, but it's a man who is fascinated by it. You know, you can't walk him past a tank

without him needing a photo opportunity peering out of the turret. He, you know, it's all part of this whole macho persona. I know how many times have we seen pictures of Putin? staring at military exercises through binocular or testing out some new gun on the range. So it's also this, I think, personal, it's part of his own persona. Not just the usual toys for the boy stuff, though that's there. But it's also, I think, part of building that legend for himself as one of the great state building heroes of Russian history. And it's interesting that, you know, quite recently he drew parallels between himself and

Peter the Great, father of the Russian Navy. generally when we have these parallels drawn, it tends to be precisely with Russian leaders in the past who have not been noted for their economic reform or anything else, but precisely for actually the capacity to go and beat the hell out of some foreigner in the name of Russia's martial glory. So I think this is why it's been important, and this is why, as it were, it's not just why he spent 20 years dumping huge amounts of money into military reform. and has fought wars at home and abroad, ranging from intervention into Syria to a very brutal civil war in Chechnya, or sort of repression of rebels in Chechnya. So he ends up fighting them, but in part that's precisely because from his point of view, that's what a state needs to do in order to demonstrate what kind of a state it is. So what is the state that he inherits when he comes to power?

What is the military like especially at that time? I mean, it's in a catastrophically poor state. You know, it has no more real functional role. It has no real identity because Russia at this time has no real identity. Most importantly of all, I mean, so much of it has been pulled out of, you know, the old Warsaw Pact countries and such like into a country which has a collapsing economy and which very little is being spent on the military. So you have, you know, years after they've been withdrawn from Central Europe,

Europe, still you have officers whose families are living in unheated tank sheds and the like. So no wonder it is subject to precisely the same sort of collapsing, institutional collapse that so much of the rest of Russia is. So we have special forces guys acting as contract killers for the mafia, or indeed training contract killers for the mafia in the special forces' own training facilities. It's quite entrepreneurial in a way. You know, we have cases of very low-level and amateurish, frankly, but nonetheless, thefts of nuclear materials. As people thought, well, you know, let's try and monetize whatever access we've got.

And more to the point, you had a military that was falling into absolute decay, rusting tanks, soldiers that quite possibly had scarcely, if ever, fired live rounds in training, all that kind of thing. and this was the situation that Putin was faced with, and at the same time, he was right from the beginning already embroiled in the second Chechen war, which is one of the reasons why they end up having to use a lot of Chechen irregulars, essentially flipped guerrillas, in order to actually bulk out the Russian ground forces, which did not exactly perform splendidly in this very brucing. conflict. What are his priorities coming in? I mean, his priority is well, I mean, because he's willing to dump a lot of money into the military and because, frankly, the 2000s are years, you know, largely that's a decade in which there is a lot of money around for the Russian state, because the time, particularly when oil and gas prices are high internationally. So in some ways, one could

say it's a little bit of everything. So we see an attempt to obviously rebuild the strategic rocket forces the nuclear deterrent because there is that sense that is not only the ultimate backstop of national security. It's one of the things that gives Russia its status on the world stage. It may have a GDP that is somewhere near Italy's, but the capacity to blow up the world instantly elevates you above Italy in the sort of grand scheme of geopolitical power. But particularly because of the needs of the Chechen War, we do see quite a heavy effort being put into building up the ground forces, because those are going to be the initially usable ones. But generally speaking, I mean, everyone has their shopping lists, all the various

services, I mean, so unlike what we see in the West. And they're all trying to outbeat each other and suggest that they have more value to the state. And although the military, the armed forces on the ground and the strategic forces do have something of a priority, we start to see the Navy being rebuilt. We start to see the Air Force being rebuilt. There's more than enough money to go around. Tell me about the second Chechen war. Why does it start? How does Putin prosecute it? Brutely. I mean, it starts because frankly, the first Chechen war under Boris Yeltsin, a war that, frankly, Russia should have won easily. I mean, it would be a little bit like the United States finding that it couldn't conquer Delaware. But nonetheless, the Chechens, both because of their

skills and capacities to fight really rather effectively, and also because of the terrible state of the Russian military, in effect, the Chechens actually fight Moscow to a draw. There is a deal that basically just puts off the problems, kicks the hand grenade down the road, in that Chechnya notionly becomes, once again, part of the Russian Federation, but on the other hand in practice has so much autonomy that really it's not. And at the same, same time, the new leader of Chechnya was entirely incapable of managing to control the rise of jihadism. After all, this is a time in which actually globally speaking,

jihadism seems to be on the rise. Chechnya's one of the battlefields. We get people coming in from Saudi Arabia, from Jordan and elsewhere. Al-Qaeda connected, who very much are trying to push a radical agenda, not just a nationalist one. This is not just about Chechen independence. This is about a wider struggle. And at the same time, you have a lot of people in Moscow who are saying, look, we can't let this happen. We cannot let one of our constituent regions basically thumb its nose at us. Otherwise, who knows who will be next?

No one really cares about Chechnya, but as an example, it matters. So in some ways, look, it was inevitable that a conflict would happen. And so when there is a cross-border incursion by some jihadists, that gives then Prime Minister, not yet President Putin, the opportunity to sort of say, right, okay, we need to move. And from the beginning, on the one hand, it's a better prepared conflict than the first Chechen war. They spent time drawing up plans, accumulating weapons and manpower for the operation. But it's also one that, as well as being methodical, is extraordinarily brutal. And Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is pretty much leveled by air and artillery bombardments.

the rear area security is again prosecuted with the kind of vigor that frankly the place hasn't seen since World War II and the Nazis were stamping around it. And again, this use of turncoats of Chechens who had been guerrillas but who are now willing to join the government side, sometimes for money, sometimes for amnesty, sometimes because actually they were horrified by this jihadist turn amongst the rebel movement. but nonetheless, by unleashing them, it also meant that in some ways this acquired all the worst characteristics of intra-communal civil war, of family-against-family feuds emerging and being prosecuted through war. So, I mean, it was vicious, it was brutal, but it had learned the lessons of the first war, including those of control of the media. All of the various atrocities of the first war were, if not lovingly, but certainly detailed. recorded, even by Russian journalists, this time they made damn sight more sure to make sure that their people were in control of what we heard about Chechnya until much later. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back on

with Mark Goliati after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. Can you tell us about the military commanders that come to prominence at this time and what Putin's relationship with them is like? This is a time where in it, we are beginning to get a sort of a new generation of more professional leaders. I mean, under Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin, after all, he came to power with the collapse of the Soviet Union. He frankly didn't trust the generals, all of whom, after all, were products of the Soviet

era. So, you know, he ended up picking people who appealed to him, who thought he were loyal to him. And, well, he might have got loyalty, but that doesn't necessarily mean competence. and in particular his defense minister, paratrooper by the name is Pavel Grachev, who as a defense minister was a very good paratrooper. He clearly had no idea of what strategic level command meant. He seemed to have genuinely convinced Yeltsin that in the first Chechen war

that basically just a paratroop regiment could just roll in and wrap it up very neatly. Well, obviously, Grachev went. we had new figures rising and usually actually quite a, you know, they more or less had to install a revolving door at the defence ministry. Because there was a period where people were coming in, and because they were saying, look, they were saying all the bad things that Yeltsin didn't want to hear. They were often then dismissed. Now, under Putin, what we actually got was a kind of a variety of defense ministers who fit the needs of the reform process that was involved. And in particular, we actually got a shift away from having generals as defence ministers to once again actually having civilian figures. So we had people like Sergei Ivanov, who was a KGB, sort of contemporary and colleague of Putin's, frankly, a much, much more effective KGB officer.

I mean, whereas Putin was always a solid B. Ivanov was one of the stars of foreign intelligence activity, very obeying and such like. but generally speaking, I mean, it's really been quite interesting because we ended up with a series of defense ministers who were both entirely subordinated to Putin's needs, very much shaped by the needs of that particular, you know, the next stage of reform, and who are always going to be faced with, as a result, a constant tension between them and the generals in the high command, in the sense of they were always trying to change. what was still, you know, at the beginning of the Putin era, a Soviet military machine, a small, you know, one small version of the Soviet Red Army, one that didn't have the money and didn't have the mission, but it had about the same number of generals. And generally, apart of being top heavy, was really not geared for the needs of the 21st century. So there's this constant struggle to try and actually also reform an institution that frankly

didn't want to be reformed. Does that dynamic persist today? How have things changed? Well, I mean, look, it's difficult to answer that now, because obviously things have changed because of the Russian military machine. And just as Ukraine is acquiring a 21st century army, thanks to Western assistance and training, Russia's is basically becoming a late Soviet army in terms of numbers of people, but also just, the fact that, you know, what they're kitted out with, poor levels of skills and such like. But before February, what we'd had is this lengthy period of defence minister Shuigu being in

position. And again, I mean, he's a really interesting figure. Shougu, who is, again, not a military man, even though he affects a uniform and has the appropriate medals, much like the Soviet Union. Putin's Russia likes giving out medals for all kinds of reasons. But, you know, his background is essentially he was an institution. turn around specialist and in many ways of, you know, one of the most effective public relations professionals within the Russian government. He was always very good at creating myths around whatever position and whatever institution he was in charge of. And so if one looks at the Shoygoo era, there was genuine progress in addressing some of the serious problems still

remaining for the Russian military, ranging from Diyadhina, this exceedingly brutal and toxic culture of bullying, of hazing within the ranks, all the way through to just seems nuts and bolts issues about just how soldiers live, because given that the Russian military was trying to increase the share of its soldiers who are actually professionals, and it reached the age of being more or less 50-50. But if you're going to have professional soldiers, you can't treat them the same way as you treat conscripts. You actually have to give them decent food and decent housing and socks instead of food of cloth wrappings and so forth. So, you know, Shoyahu was addressing some of those, but the problem was that

Shoyu was too good at PR, one could almost say. He convinced himself, he convinced Putin, and in fairness he convinced us in the West that actually he had done a better job of reforming the military than clearly has actually been the case. This is how we get those YouTube videos of spetsnots like doing backflips and throwing axes and things like this. Yeah, but also actually selling the idea of, for example, the T-14 Armata tank, which got a lot of interest, particularly from the less professional wing of the Western defence media. because, you know, it looks impressive. It's the first tank with an entirely crewless turret. You know, basically there's a crew or all in this armoured capsule in the main body and such like.

The interesting thing was that it was a very time when you actually had the West getting worried, as if there was some new tank gap opening up, talk to Russian soldiers, and they were distinctly under-impressed by it because they regarded it as being too expensive, too temperamental. And because it's all solid-state electronics, as soon as it goes wrong, there's nothing you can do except stick it on a flat bed

and bring it back to the engineers in the rear area. But again, you know, under Shoigu, the myth of weapons like the armata, the sense that they had these absolute war winners, did become dangerously profligate.

So one of the smaller quote-unquote wars that I've always been fascinated by is Georgia. Can you tell us about what happened there, why it was so fast in what the Russian, why did the Russian military do this? Or I guess, why did Putin do this? And what did they learn? I mean, the Georgian War is an interesting one. And of course, your listeners will be able to buy my little Osprey book on the Georgian War sometime next year, I believe. why it was happening was several reasons. First of all, in this small country on the southern fringes of the Russian Federation was on the one hand, in some ways, almost like a kind of a prize case study for Russian foreign intervention, because there were two parts of it,

Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which were already seeking to break away from Georgia proper. and South Ossetia is twinned with the Russian region of North Ossetia, just on the other side of a mountain range. So in some ways, Russia already had reasons to be able to claim and interest. Most importantly, under Mikhail de Saakashvili, you had a very sort of headstrong nationalist reforming government, very, very keen to join NATO, get close to the European Union. You had, for example, Georgian troops being deployed to American-led interventions in the Middle East, really just to more or less say, look, we know, we are your friends and we want to be sort of close to you, which was obviously anathema to Putin. I mean, he regards NATO as a

hostile, aggressive military alliance that is constantly trying to expand into Russia's sphere of influence. So instead of just seeing this as a hot-headed Georgian president's policies, it saw it as some kind of tacit alliance between Sarkisvili and the Americans who are of course, the dark conspirators behind all things that go wrong with Russia, except when it's the Brits. Now, I mean, in that context, this was almost a situation which was kind of inevitably going to create tensions. But then there was a third factor, which was, I think, from Putin's point of view, Georgia was a great opportunity to demonstrate to everyone else. You do not mess with Russia. You do not, if you're in a sphere of influence, you do not challenge that status.

You accept it. So what they did was, and again, I mean, in some ways, Sakishvili played into their hands. They encouraged their local proxies in Abkhazia and above all South Ossetia to needle the Georgians. There were ambushes on police patrols. There were artillery strikes on Georgian villages. And let's be honest, there was a fair amount of interneissine sort of trouble. I mean, also a lot of Georgian attacks on South Ossetians. Tensions were rising.

and they reached a point where Sarkishvili decided that he was going to launch an attack precisely to bring South Ossetia back into the fold. And this is exactly what the Russians had been waiting for, because it gave them the excuse that they didn't start this war. They went in precisely because those nasty Georgians started it. Now, of course, that's not the case. They were waiting for it. They were actually caught on the hop by when it actually happened in that Putin himself, who at this time was technically prime minister, was in a China and the notional sort of sock puppet president, Dmitri Medvedev, even though this has all been planned, um, Dernard, and we later found from some memoirs of one of the key generals that, in his

words, Putin had to ring Medvedev to give him a kick up the backside to get him to move. But basically speaking, look, Georgia, very, very small country. I mean, really, it had, what, maybe three brigades. The best of their troops were actually, you know, were even, were out of the country off, again, supporting the Americans. And the Russians were able to concentrate much more, much heavier firepower very quickly. But even then, what's striking is, they, as they will put it, liberated Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They pushed back. They went half of the way to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and then they stopped and pulled back. And in part, this was precisely a very kind of demonstrative, we could have taken over the whole country

had we wanted. Just bear that in mind. And look, although the Russians, they managed in classic style to commit all kinds of blunders, you know, we had friendly fire incidents. We had cases where abandoned airfields were hit because the intelligence was out of date. We had the main field commander blundering into a Georgian unit that was sort of pushing through. into Skinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, and getting seriously injured. And that was after he had to borrow a journalist satellite phone in order to actually get through to his own HQ. Despite all that, look, the discrepancy in the power of the two competents was such that

this was always going to be a done deal. But nonetheless, it was sufficiently messed up that it did actually very much push forward the agenda for meaningful reform. of the Russian military. Because the defense minister at the time, Anatoly Sertjoukov, I mean, his remit was precisely to force reform in the high command. He hadn't been able to do that. This gave him the excuse to go back and basically beat his generals around the head and say, this is why things are going to change. And did they change? They did. Again, it's a process, though. I mean, you know, major military reform is a little bit

like sort of trying to finish the path of an oil tanker. You know, it's not going to happen quickly. You can very quickly pass the decrees, actually changing the structures, let alone the mindset takes a lot longer. But no, but we did. We really did get movement away from a Soviet model. It was, basically, the new look army was much less top-heavy, much more geared around, relatively mobile, smaller-scale units. It was the brigade rather than the division that became the sort of the basic building block of the Russian military. We saw a greater push again for recruiting professionals rather than relying on conscripts, all that kind of thing. And they never really managed to provide the answers, but they certainly identified the important questions.

You know, in the modern world, you need to have proper, reliable communications. You need to be able to actually have that kill chain as short as possible between spotting the enemy and doing something about it. You know, all of these kind of things, the need to have relatively flexible mobile forces that don't have to be micromanaged from four rungs up the chain of command. All of these kind of things, they recognize the problem. but their success in actually dealing with anything. That was much less impressive.

So what happens in Syria? Well, in Syria, you have an interesting case that this is the time when after the annexation of Crimea, which after all it was a textbook operation in its own terms, and again, I think which is also in itself unfortunate, in that it gives the Russians or certainly the Kremlin an exaggerated notion of Russian capabilities. But then after that, there is this international effort, particularly led by the Americans to try diplomatically to isolate Russia. And at the very time, you had the Assad regime, which is one of the very, very few allies, clients, call them what you will,

left to Moscow in the world, looking as if it was near collapsed. And there was this sense that what was likely to happen was what had happened in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, that you get a regime which suddenly you begin to get sufficient elite defections, that it creates a sort of a panic and a stampede, and before you know, the whole regime was collapse. So there was this sense that actually Damascus was within months or maybe weeks of essentially collapsing as a regime. And the only other allies that Damascus had were Iranian-backed, Hizbollah militias.

So there was also a secondary element of, well, yeah, if we don't do something, then basically Iran gets Syria. and frankly, Iran and Russia are for enemies at best. They are united in their dislike of the West and the United States, but they are also rivals for authority in the region. And in that situation, there was that sense of, well, we need to show the Americans that they can't isolate us. We need to push back.

And what better opportunity than this? So what they did is they deployed a relatively limited air contingent. with some naval infantry just to provide security on the ground to Syria, in support of the Assad regime. They soon realized that that wouldn't be enough. Just simply providing air power at that point was not sufficient, given that the Syrian military was in such total disarray. So this is when we also hear about the Wagner group mercenaries,

who have since become distinctly more notorious, actually playing a role because the Kremlin, knew that this was not a war that was particularly enthusiastically viewed at home. And the only way they could really maintain the equanimity of the Russian population was that if it was sold as a Tom Clancy-esque techno war, it was one. The idea was that, oh, no, no, all our boys, they're flying, you know, bombers high in the sky. It's a war that is all viewed through gun camera and drone footage. But if they also needed to have people on the ground, they thought, well, we're going to have to use mercenaries, all kind of pseudo-mercenaries, because that way there's no state

funerals when they die. We don't have to report them or anything like that. So it's a small and frankly, unexpectedly successful deployment. It does help turn the war around. They are able to keep it going. I mean, there was a lot of doubt at the time as to whether or not they could actually sustain this operation, given how just how voraciously modern air power requires spare parts, maintenance, fuel, all the other kind of logistics elements. And there was a sort of belief that, frankly, within a month, Russian planes are going to just start falling out of the sky because no one forgot to bolt the wings on properly. None of that happened. Actually, you know, it proved to be effective. And perhaps most importantly, it got the political payoff that people were looking for. I mean, very unusually,

he usually doesn't do that. Putin went to the next UN General Assembly meeting in New York, 2015. And because he was there, there had to be an obligatory meeting and photo op, President Obama. And Obama in that picture is looking so uncomfortable at being there. And that delighted the Russians, because that was the whole point. You know, the Americans thought they were going to isolate us. We injected ourselves into an area the Americans care about. And we forced Obama to have a sit down with our president. In some ways, the very fact that the Americans clearly didn't want it made it all the sweeter. So, I mean, this was the Syrian operation. And again, in some ways, it was a sign of greater Russian competence.

And certainly, they manage this operation and continue to manage it surprisingly, effectively and well, given just how complex it is. But on the other hand, again, it was very limited, much like the Crimean deployment. And particularly for non-professionals, people who don't have any military experience, people like, oh, say Vladimir Putin and all the closest people around him, it again, I think, gave them an exaggeratedly exalted notion of quite what the Russian military could do. before we get back into the modern, into what's going on right now,

I want to ask you about a phrase that I know you have a complicated relationship with. But I did notice it appeared several times in the book. And I want to talk, I want to use it to kind of frame what goes on in Crimea and the Donbos, or the Donbass. Hybrid war. What is it? Is what happened there a hybrid war?

Does that term even mean anything anymore? Look, I would question if it ever meant anything. I mean, the problem is that, you know, for a while we were stuck with it as a term of art. Though I noticed that, for example, certainly the United States, gray zone warfare seems to be supplanting it. A term which, frankly, has little more meaning, but is a little bit more exciting, I think. Now, I mean, the problem with hybrid war, and it very much is this emerged about the sort of same time as the Crimean operation, is this sense that now warfare is one that is fought out on a whole variety of new domains, disinformation, electronic warfare, cyber attacks, as well as kind of political and economic and so forth. Oh, actually, I can throw in another plug. The sort of issues I discuss in my book, the weaponisation of everything.

It's this virtue of writing enough books. You can always find something you can use for a plug. But the point is, and I think why this was problematic for me, is first of all, all wars have been hybrid in the sense of they have been a mix of the kinetic and the non-kinetic. It's only in video games that you win by killing all the enemies, little men. In practice, wars are attacks on the political will and capacity of your antagonist. and they are one when the other side cannot or will not continue to resist. But that's the whole point.

They very rarely end with decimation, or rather than the decimation, but only in the technical sense of one in ten. So the idea that there was something new was, I think, flawed because, in fact, you know, all wars have involved a political dimension. You just think of World War II. And the effort that is made in terms of, you know, trying to undermine each side's economy and, spreading propaganda and all that kind of stuff. I mean, if World War II was a hybrid war, then the term begins to become meaningless. Secondly, is because actually hybrid carries with an implication that it's shooting plus, that it's a whole variety of other instruments being used in addition to the mainstream military fighting. And fine, there are all kind of

incidents when that is done. But if anything, I think what the modern world is about, is actually the fact that you can in some ways fight wars without shooting. And if one looks at what's happening frankly now, I mean, in Ukraine, sorry to bring it back to that, but there are two wars going on. There is a kinetic war inside Ukraine. And then there is a wider economic, social, political, cultural, legal war that is being fought between the West and Russia. And there is no expectation or desire that that is going to end up with Russians shooting NATO soldiers and vice versa. This is an entirely non-kinetic struggle. And I think this is the point. So long as we had this term hybrid, there was this expectation that all these other means

of messing with the other side were just simply about preparing the battlefield. They were at the moment until, as in Crimea, the little green men appear on the ground. And so, So I think for a long time, that became really quite a problem for NATO because we would look at, let's say, a Russian disinformation campaign carried out in the Baltic states or a cyber attack, and there'll be that point of, well, okay, when does this actually lead to Russian commandos cropping up in Nava just across the Russian-Ukrainian border when it never was going to? And I think this is another reason why I think hybrid doesn't really work for me. I mean, it's a problem now because there is a, you know, a Center of Excellence for Combating Hybrid Warfare. There's a whole collection of people for whom hybrid has now become pretty much essential to their purpose and their employment. And I wish them all very well. But nonetheless, in terms of terminology, I don't think it really grasped how war and how

conflict between nations has become in the 21st century. We're really seeing that, and I want to go, I don't apologize for bringing Ukraine back up because I think I want to return there at the end of this conversation. I think it's important. How does all of the developments over the past 30 years between Putin and the military lead to the place that we're in now, within Ukraine, or they're in now in Ukraine? I mean, on one level, it's because the Russian military had been reformed enough that a war like Ukraine could seem plausible, but not enough that it actually turned out to be winnable. So there's the sort of the real dilemma there for the Russians.

Secondly, I think it's precisely that Russia had been successful enough in its previous wars, all of which after all it had won, sometimes at a greater cost and greater effort than intended, but it had always actually won its wars, that again it created a delusion of adequacy. That really was completely out of keeping with the actual realities of the war in Ukraine. But thirdly, I think that we have to recognize the degree to which this was one of these wars which could have gone in different ways. I mean, I'm not saying that the Russians could necessarily have won, and especially not in this sort of two-week blitzkriek, which was the expectation both in Moscow and, frankly, amongst a lot of Western.

defense analysts. But nonetheless, had the war been fought the way the Russian military thinks, trains, arms, and prepares to fight, instead of, you know, as Putin almost seems to regard it as being, it was going to be just some scaled up version of Crimea, you know, he seems genuinely to have thought he had convinced himself that Ukraine was not really a state, that the Ukrainian people would at best welcome the Russian liberators, at worst, just simply accept them, that President Zelensky would flee or easily be arrested, and that the West would do pretty much nothing in response. And that last one actually is not necessarily a wholly unrealistic assumption, given what had happened in previous various military adventures. But I think in these

circumstances, Putin decided or chose not to, I don't say listen to his soldiers, but not to consult his soldiers and not to rely on his soldiers. Instead, what we got was a war as envisaged by a collection of aged spooks, whose military experience between them was probably equivalent to my own, which is that and that's saying something very, very bad about it. It's been fascinating to watch, maybe more during the first few months of this. war than recently, but the shattering of illusions. We'd spent so much time here in America, specifically kind of building up Russian's disinformation campaign.

And we've got, you know, people with Shiba Inu, Avatar, shit posting Russian diplomats off of Twitter. And the footage of the tanks rolling in that have had all of their reactive armor sold for parts somewhere down the line, it have cages built on top of them. And this idea that there was going to be a two-week blitzkrieg that they were going to come in, they were going to assassinate or capture Zelensky, and then be done. Now, here we are months later. What happens to a military and a people that has had its loosens shattered like this? I mean, in terms of the military, I mean, the honest answer is actually in the war, as long as you can, you just do your best.

And I think this is one of the interesting signs that despite all the terrible losses and all the evidently catastrophic blunders, in some ways, what's surprising is actually that the Russian military is continuing to fight as much as it is. You know, we've had localized cases of people cutting and running, but particularly up with the Kharkiv offensive toward the north. But there it was actually entirely irrational. I mean, you had a platoon strength units that were suddenly being outflanked. Of course they were going to cut and run. But otherwise, actually, in some ways, it's surprising that the Russian morale hasn't been even worse than it is. So I think, you know, for as long as they can, the military will just continue to try and do their best. There will come some kind of psychological culmination point, or they could come some kind of psychological culmination point,

at which point when actually people sort of really feel they've had enough, we've seen it after all in past wars. And already people are sort of drawing a parallel with the First World War, where actually it is precisely the actions or the inactions of the commander-in-chief that eventually led to his being toppled. And it wasn't the Bolsheviks that brought down the Tsar. The Tsar had already been brought down, and he'd been brought down by his own people. So, I mean, that's possible. But the thing is that for them and then also the wider national population, a lot of it will depend on how it gets narrated. What is the final sort of official, not official, but accepted line as to what goes on. You know, we had after World War I in Germany, we had the stab in the back myth, the fact that the military and the nationalist managed to convince themselves that it's a lot of,

not that they'd lost the war, though they were losing. It's that actually those politicians just simply let them down. So I think, you know, again, if we're talking about the nationalist critique of Putin and so forth, what's going to be interesting is precisely is the message, look, the days of empire are over. Let's just accept that we are, you know, we're a large, significant power. Yeah, I mean, let's be honest, if Russia were willing to be the kind of the Germany of Eurasia, it would. would probably prosper on all kinds of different levels, economically, socially, as well as politically. It's just this attempt to try and present yourself as being the hegemon of the region, which is the

real problem. So, you know, do they decide, okay, no, we've learned our lesson, or precisely, is it just simply, you know, we would have got away with it if it wasn't for those kids, that, you know, actually we were just limited to let down, that it was the corrupt generals who I think in some cases that, you know, instead of secure communications, they issued us with things that had little just Chinese walkie-talkies inside the cover that looks like the sort proper modern communications kit, all that kind of thing. And indeed, you know, how far was it the nasty NATO forces? You know, because after all, we know it wasn't Ukrainians we were fighting. Oh, no, it must have been, you know, NATO and Western mercenaries who are doing it.

There's room. There's still such a fan of possibilities as to the lessons that can be learned. I mean, the most positive one is that Russia accepts its real status. The Russian military would therefore be reconstituted, something that's going to take years, if not a decade. But nonetheless, as a much smaller defensive force capable of very limited power projection to deal with instability on its borders. but that's about it, which is what Russia could afford, and relies on nuclear capability for, you know, someday the Chinese come boiling across the border or some other nightmare scenario. Or conversely, does it go, you know, all the other way?

And we end up with people who are saying, well, next time, next time, by God, we'll do it right. Mark Goliati, the book is Putin's Wars. It is available now. It came out just, I think, last week, right? you did. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through all of this. It's always a pleasure. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt,

Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please kick us $9 a month on Angry Planet pod.com or AngryPlanent.com. It does help sustain the show. That $9 will get you commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes, the occasional bonus episode, and weird post that didn't. up going out. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. It's already recorded. I'm going to talk to an ex-CIA officer.

How interesting is that? Even more interesting. It's an ex-CIA officer who used to work in and around Eastern Europe and knows a lot about Russia. So look forward to that. And we're also looking at talking about what it's like to fight in and around Russia in the winter, which I think should be a topic of pressing concern in the near future. We will see you then. Stay safe.