Angry Planet - The Kremlin had a plan - Donald Trump winning wasn't part of it

Episode Date: November 16, 2016

While Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump had some good things to say about each other during the 2016 U.S. election cycle, Russia expert Mark Galeotti tells War College a victory for Trump wasn't part of the Kremlin's plan. So what was the real motivation behind Russia's interference?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. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. Now, obviously, they're going to do what they can to capitalize on this moment, and particularly Trump's slightly bizarre sort of wannabe bromance with people, Putin. So who was Vladimir Putin really rooting for in the U.S. election? And why? And what's next?

This episode of War College has some answers. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Jason Fields and Matthew Galt. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt with Wars Boring. Mark Galiati, who has been with us twice before, is joining us this week. He's a senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague. He's intimately familiar with how Vladimir Putin's government works.

And he's here today to talk about U.S. Russian relations in the wake of Donald Trump's election. So, Mark, thank you so much for joining us. My great pleasure. So can we start off with a question that is apparently not very much on most Americans' mind, but has certainly gotten plenty of coverage by the media, the national media. How involved do you think Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin really were in the U.S. election? Well, they were heavily involved in a sense of clearly they wanted to influence it, they wanted to make Russia actually a part of that election.

but I think we have to have two big cautions here. First of all, there's little evidence that what they did actually had a dramatic impact on the election. One tempted to say that actually the FBI had rather more of an influence than the Kremlin. But perhaps most importantly of all, I think it's crucial to emphasise the extent to which they were not trying to get Trump elected. And to be perfectly honest, I think they have been rather taken aback by what actually happened. their kind of America specialists and so forth and something that became absolutely clear were convinced that Hillary was a lock

there was no real question in their mind but that Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president they were worried about that because they felt that Hillary Clinton was much more hawkish rightly or probably wrongly they see her as someone who had been and would be supportive of regime change in the Kremlin and so their real aim was

given they thought this was coming to basically try and weaken her as far as possible. They wanted her to be inaugurated president with a divided democratic base, with a Congress that wasn't supportive, so that in a way she'd be too busy

to be thinking about toppling the Putin regime. And that I think was their idea. Hence by some leaking memos and emails and such like, it was essentially to weaken a clinchew. presidency not to create a Trump one.

So what's the reaction been? We've heard publicly that they've talked, and Putin and Donald Trump, that is. What have you been hearing? Well, it's interesting because when the news of the elections that came out, you had a certain amount of predictable hurrahs from the more lunatic and extreme elements of Russian politics. Vladimir Girinovsky, head of the liberal democratic

party that is neither liberal nor democratic, but really just a sort of a rather lunatic fringe right wing party, actually ordered in champagne for an impromptu reception in the Parliament building. But when you actually look at what the movers and shakers were saying, it was much, much more restrained. Putin sent a telegram of congratulations, which was actually a very, very bland document actually. The deputy foreign minister very specifically said we are not euphoric. The foreign minister Lavrov, who's a very, very seasoned observer of the international scene, again was exceedingly cautious. He said, well, fine, Trump has said many things, but we all know that stump speeches are not the stuff of which real politics necessarily is going to be made.

So actually, from the very beginning, the Russian foreign policy is not. was exceedingly cautious. Now obviously, they're going to do what they can to capitalize on this moment, and particularly Trump's slightly bizarre sort of wannabe bromance with Putin, as he has resisted every attempt to get him to say negative things, and therefore we see the Russians positioning themselves for an early meeting, because this would work really, really well for Putin. If they can get Trump, or Trump's team to invite him,

to invite him to some kind of early summit. That will play very, very well at home because they'll say, you see, now that there's a new American president, they're desperate to get Putin over because we're so important. So they're going to see how they can exploit the situation. But there is considerable caution in Moscow, particularly because, quite frankly, Trump is unpredictable. With Clinton, they thought they knew what they were getting.

With Trump, they have absolutely no idea. and in geopolitics, predictability is one of the key assets you look for. What do you think that the Kremlin, what do you think their goals are right now, as far as what they can get out of a Trump presidency? What's at the top of their agenda? Well, if they actually have their full Christmas wish list, I suspect that actually Putin has been more naughty than nice, but let's say Santa does come this year.

I mean, what they would really like is some kind of grand bargain. I mean, their big aim from the beginning has been some kind of, of Yalta 2.0, like the division of Europe after World War II, so that they get to identify their sphere of influence, which is essentially the post-Soviet states with the exception of the Baltic states. So in other words, Ukraine handed over to them, regardless of what the Ukrainians may feel, Moldova and so forth. And in return for that, I think they'd be willing to stop meddling in Europe, stop meddling in North America, and quite possibly also be a lot more flexibly. in Syria. That they're not going to get. I don't believe for a minute that they're going to get because that would actually mean not only surrendering Ukraine, but surrendering our whole basic notions of what national sovereignty is all about. We are not in the 19th century, an age when Mike makes right and big states get to dominate little ones. You know, we still have a notion of international law and such like. So I think that's what he would really like at the top of his list because not only would it then give him,

the sphere of influence that he wants, it would also solidify this notion that Putin has made Russia once again a global power that the United States treats with as an equal. That's very important to him and to his narrative at home. What about the economic sanctions? Do you see Trump easing those? Is that something they're going to ask for, do you think? Well, I don't even know if they're necessarily going to ask for. They've pretended that the economic sanctions don't really have an impact. I mean, I think that is absolutely clear. The European sanctions, after all, have to be renewed every six months. And there's always been a bit of a struggle.

And I think, therefore, what they're going to hope is that if they can persuade Trump, who has already made, you know, again, we have to be cautious about taking any of his campaign statements at face value. But insofar as we can, he's already made sort of hints that, in fact, that's something that he might want to move on. Well, if America moves, then the people who are opposed to sanctions in Europe, will also move quickly. So there's quite possibly the chance that sanctions may well be eased. At the very least, the systemic sanctions, rather than the sanctions on certain individuals

who are particularly involved in what went on in Crimea and what's going on in the Donbass. So we may see movement there. Obviously, that will be good for Putin, but that's, as it were, I would suggest, second on his list. I mean, he'd prefer some grand bargain in which sanctions can be rolled in and in which recognition for Crimea could also be included.

But that's very much on his theoretical wish list. In practical terms, he'd like sanctions lifted. He certainly would like some kind of acknowledgement that Ukraine is not going to become part of NATO or the European Union. And he probably would want some kind of a deal in Syria, which keeps Assad on, not necessarily forever, but at the very least as a transitional figure. and with immunity from any war crimes prosecutions.

You mentioned that Putin might be willing, as part of a grand bargain, to stop interfering with Central and Western European Affairs. I'm a little surprised by that for two reasons. One is that it's certainly a huge pullback from what Soviet ambitions were, and it's an acknowledgement that he really has. moved into a post-Soviet era. And then secondarily, it also doesn't seem to cost him very much to meddle in European affairs. I mean, it's some propaganda and it's some hacking. I mean, low cost as far as the Kremlin's concerned. Sure, that's perfectly true. But the interesting

thing is, I mean, first of all, compared with the Soviet era, there is no ideological component to this current competition. When it came down to it, the Soviets, even in the later years, when the actual Politburo members were fat and corrupt and scarcely were really could be considered motivated by Marx's writings. In many ways, Gorbachev was the freak because he still seemed to actually believe in some of that stuff. But nonetheless, the system itself was infused by an ideology that basically said, you know, our job is not just to maintain it at home, but to bring it to the world. Putin's not like that.

He really doesn't care. He doesn't care for making the French Russian Orthodox or bringing Russian values to the people of Dresden or whatever. They can go and do whatever they want. He is, shall I say, aggressively defensive. Ultimately, he has his playpen. He has his kingdom. He wants that. He wants no foreign meddling in that.

So it means basically international law can go hang. stop trying to support anti-corruption NGOs or investigative journalists within Russia who are inevitably therefore critical of a problem for the regime. And he wants his sphere of influence, which is as much as anything else, about prestige as at his defensive perimeters

or anything like that. But that's it. He's not really interested. I mean, he's aware that for all his, frankly, quite able, playing of a very weak hand, This is a country with an economy that is smaller than Spain's. This is a country in which actually the economic, the technological, the demographic tide is coming away from it. So from his point of view, to actually hold on to what he's got would be a pretty good win.

So I think that's why he's not trying to export anything. And the second point, yeah, it is cheap what he's doing. A few million dollars doesn't buy you a fighter jet, but it might buy you an election. But on the other hand, this is one of the few things he's got to trade. What else has Russia got? It's not as though companies are queuing up thinking, wow, I really want to get into that market. It's not as though Russia is this incredibly well-off country

that we're hoping will come and invest. It's not as though Russia has got leading-edge technologies. It's quite the opposite. They want our technologies. Basically, what Putin has got is the same as what the crude protection racketeer has got. lovely European Union you've got here it'll be a shame if something happened to it we have to realise that Putin cut his teeth in politics

when he came out of the KGB insofar as you ever do and he was involved in local politics in St. Petersburg in many ways one of his key jobs was to be the mayor's fixer and he was the mayor's liaison with the city's powerful underworld in particular the so-called Tambovskyer group whose leader was actually known as the night governor.

There was this idea that there were the formal structures of authorities during the day. Tambovskya runs it at night. So in some ways, I mean, yes, of course, it's more complex than that. But nonetheless, this is a guy who his first real introduction to politics was steeped in a kind of funny political criminal milieu. You were talking about unpredictability and how that's sort of the enemy of diplomacy and foreign relations. One thing that both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have brought up separately, but still, seems destabilizing, is their comments on nuclear weapons and a willingness to use them.

Donald Trump's at one point during the campaign, though he later qualified a statement, actually said, what's the point of having nuclear weapons if you don't use them? Vladimir Putin has at different points threatened nuclear fire against the West. So do you see that that's a real area of danger, or is that just pure rhetoric? Well, obviously it's always uncomfortable when people start making these threats. I think it is essentially rhetorical. In some ways, I'm more concerned by the fact that, whereas on the one hand, Donald Trump has been very, very critical of the deal with Iran. At the same time, he has, again, since qualified, but nonetheless suggested that Japan and South Korea might want to consider getting their own nuclear weapons. He's hard to know quite, he doesn't have a problem with proliferation. He just wants to me the right kind of proliferation. So I think there is an issue there, but I think in some ways both of them are doing the same thing. Look, Putin uses the N-word.

nuclear because he knows that gets our attention. And in some ways he's in a problem because he's been using his military often as a diplomatic tool. Snap military exercises, sending military forces, particularly that sort of naval flotillas around into the Mediterranean. I mean, we had the current deployment of a, well, I say an aircraft carrier, the aircraft carrier, Russia's only rather decrepit, smoky, Kuznyetsov as part of a small battle group that is now off Syria and currently launching air raids on Syria when its planes aren't currently falling into the sea.

Now, that has no real military relevance. There is nothing that group can do in terms of bringing force to bear on Syria that could not be done from the ground airbase that the Russians have got. It's purely about wanting to project force into the Mediterranean. And to be honest, the most important element of that force is not the aircraft carrier. It's the Peter the Great, which is the missile cruiser that accompanies it, which is a very, very specialised anti-ship platform with a lot of really rather effective cruise missiles mounted on it.

So the Russians are trying to make a point. They're trying to make a point that the Mediterranean is not a NATO pond. So in a way, he's been doing this a lot. But after a certain point, you have to catch people's attention scaling up your rhetoric. And I think he knows that the nuclear rhetoric always catches our eye. So you always see references to nuclear-capable missiles

being deployed into Kaliningrad, or nuclear-capable cruise missile ships being put into the Baltic. So he's, I think, aware of what he's doing. I mean, I think it's a worrying and not very wise move. Nonetheless, I think Putin is aware. And I think Trump also, in his own way, is aware of that. He knows that when you talk nuke, this is the sort of the gold-plated Trump Tower of military references. I don't actually think this is a guy who is saying, why aren't we

unleashing thermonuclear hell on some part of the world? It is just, I think, a reflection of the fact that once one person, one side breaks the taboo, as Putin has done, because up to this point, even under the Soviets and so forth, they realized that talking nuclear was in and of itself problematic. There was something of a taboo. Well, Putin broke the taboo, because this is how Putin operates. He has got away with so much precisely by breaking rules and relying on us to deal with that. Well, as in so many other ways, I think he's now going to find that actually the world isn't quite so one-sided. Because in some way, my view is that Trump is going to be Putin's Putin.

Putin got used to us being the responsible adults. He would make all kinds of threats and brinkmanship and, I don't know, snatching an Estonian security officer over the border and doing all kinds of other things. And we would say, well, okay, this is bad, but let's see what we can do. Let's deal with it. Let's try and smooth things down. Now I think there is the possibility that he will find an American administration that is much harder to bluff, much harder to call him, much harder to know in advance exactly how it's going to respond, and quite possibly more willing to break the rules, by which I don't necessarily mean international law, but as it were, the etiquette of international relations.

So we'll just have to see how that relationship develops. You make it almost sound like it could be a good thing. In a scary and dangerous way, it could be a good thing. In the sense that precisely, in this respect, a degree of unpredictability in Washington, given that after all, it's backed by the fact that the United States is phenomenally more powerful than Russia. And it has been American restraint on which Russia has relied for so long. So it's possible that this actually might make Putin and co think, well, we can't be quite so aggressive. We can't be quite so pushing.

But, I mean, in a way, so that's the best case scenario. I mean, the worst case scenario is clearly that the Russians do something aggressive, expecting a more moderate response, but that actually triggers something that is much more aggressive and we end up in a spiral of machismo. So, you know, at the moment I'm certainly. not, I'm neither going out and sourcing myself a bomb shelter, but nor do I think that happy days have come to global politics. You know, you bring up a point that we mention every once and while on this podcast, and I think it's just, it's almost worth making every time we talk about

Russia, is Russia's not the Soviet Union in terms of its military forces, and as a matter of In fact, so many of their tanks and other military equipment haven't really been upgraded since the Soviet Union fell a quarter of a century ago. You know, you mentioned that Russia has one aircraft carrier and that it's problematic, and recently one of the planes they launched off of it fell right into the sea. The U.S. fields or puts out to sea a minimum of 10 aircraft carriers, but those are super carriers, which carry many more airplanes than the Kuznetsov. Plus, there are also another 10, effectively, aircraft carriers that are just, you know, they're classified differently. It is just an interesting point. It also, of course, goes back to the nuclear point, because if there's ever anything that equals out the playing field, it's nuclear weapons, right? I mean, they have more than enough. We have more than enough. So, yeah, it's just, it's very

interesting. I mean, will Donald Trump realize what a position of strength he's working from? Because during the campaign, he said so much about American military weakness. But I guess we can't know that, right? No, and I mean, and certainly Putin would love to be as weak as America. You're absolutely right, that Russian capabilities beyond the rather limited capacity to, you know, blowing up the world is okay if that's what you want to do. But actually nuclear weapons really have relatively limited use beyond that. I mean, even the notion that is sometimes said that the Russians might go nuclear

to de-escalate a conventional conflict. In other words, to push to a certain point and then basically go to a limited nuclear exchange to more and say, okay, let's end the war now. That's something that sometimes is being discussed by Western

military strategists. Well, I must admit, when I've spoken to people in Moscow within the military there, they also say that is looom. That is the idea that purely, as it were, civilian strategists sitting around a table can come up with, but is not actually practical. And nukes only get you so far. I mean, it didn't stop Argentina invading the Falkland Islands. The fact that Britain could turn Buenos Aires into a slab of black radioactive glass, because of course Britain wouldn't.

So, yeah, we actually have to look at conventional capabilities, and those are distinctly limited. I mean, if one even just simply look, in total, the Russians have about three quarters of a million men and a few women under arms. About 300,000 of those are in their ground forces, of whom about half are conscripts, and their conscripts serving 12-month terms. Now, again, just talking to the Russian officers, by the time they've done their basic training, so they know which is the dangerous end of the Kalashnikov. and then they've gone to their units and they've done their unit training

so there's a minimal level of cohesion. And then when you take out the last months when A, they're deem up happy and drunk and B, anyway, it's hard to deploy them unless you're actually in time of war because you'll have to pull them out at the end of the 12 month period. So what's the point in deploying them for two weeks or something?

You've basically got three months of effective use out of those conscripts. So, you know, they're not really that helpful especially not given that Russian law means that, again, shorter time of war, you can't deploy them into conflict zones like, say, Syria or the Donbass, unless they volunteer, and not many of them are volunteering. So if you don't think about it, you're talking about 150,000 troops. Given that you can deploy them only for a certain length of time

before you have to rotate them back, maybe you're talking 60 to 70,000 usable troops. Well, there's about 50,000 around and in the Donbass, in Crimea. There's about 5,000 in Syria. So actually the Russians are basically deployed most of their operational troops. So again, I mean I think that puts into context. It all looks very grand. But when you come down to it, the Russians are pretty extended at the moment and they're having to cut their defense budget. I mean, this is the big debate over how much they cut it by. But it is clear that actually the Russian military force,

It's fine for bullying neighboring post-Soviet states, but it is not a global military force. Then how did we get to a place where, maybe this is a stupid question, but I'm going to ask it anyway, where half of my friends on social media are posting stories about how Russia is going to lead us to World War III, and they're this great military power, and we should all be afraid. Well, the short answer is this is why social media is such a bad, bad thing. he said as an assiduous user himself. No, I mean, joking apart, look, what the Russians have done is, in a way, they have leveraged their full capacities.

And they have done so in very, very specific theatres. I mean, if you think about it, you know, American military power is, you know, exceedingly expansive, but it is also very, very widely spread. It's in South Korea and the Pacific. It's obviously in the continental United States. It's in Europe, it's in the Middle East, it's in Afghanistan, it's in the Iraq. Little bits of it in Syria, and so it goes.

It is playing a role as a global policeman come protector, come power projector. The Russians are actually focusing their resources in a way that actually makes them look effective. Secondly, they're using, and they're playing to their strengths. In Crimea, very, very neat operations. but that's because no one was fighting them. It's actually quite easy to have a neat operation in those circumstances. In Syria, they're essentially fighting an air war against an opposition with no anti-aircraft capabilities. We have seen them in many ways ideal circumstances and therefore they look 10 foot tall.

So that's reason number one. They're focusing their very limited resources. Secondly, they're using them. They're using them a lot more aggressively and assiduously than us. So again, it makes them look that much more effective. much more effective. Third thing is, look, I think we have a tendency and it's a very, very human tendency. We all do it, of assuming the other guy is 10 foot tall and that much smarter than us. I mean, again, little microcosm example. This is this new tank, the T14 Armata,

which is currently getting a lot of sort of coverage because it's this revolutionary new thing, and there was a deeply, frankly, I think, dubious British report. It was talking about this revolutionary new tank. Talk to Russian officers. and none of them say this is the tank we were looking for. They were at that time, Russians have got a lot of tanks, and they have some decent tanks. But at that point, because they were facing the likelihood that they'd be involved in intervention operations,

they were looking at things like wheeled tank destroyers, the sort of things which we've seen quite a few Western countries also adopt. The thing about the Armata is the tank that the grand tank producing company, Ur-Bagh-Bagh-Bagh-Bagh-Wod wanted to build. The defence minister had said, we're not going to buy any more tanks, we've got quite enough. Putin, for whom Ural-Bagons-Zavod is a key political constituency,

publicly overruled him, and shortly thereafter, the order went out to buy lots of armatas. We have a tendency to look at the tank rolling through Red Square when it doesn't break down and think, oh my gosh. Whereas, in fact, the Russians know that this is technology which is unproven, this is a tank which is ludicrously expensive, that it probably will break down

three times before breakfast. The Russians understand all their problems. We have a tendency to look at the potentialities and get scared by that. So I think those are the reasons why, and we can go back to the Cold War days when there was this big fear about the tank gap and just how powerful the Soviets were.

And it's only after the whole system collapsed that we realized just how hollow the Soviet legions were. Still, my favorite story after all was about the Soviet anti-ballistic missile system, half the time was offline because conscripts were drinking the alcohol that cooled the radars. You look at the radars and you think, oh my God, look at the anti-ballistic missile system that they got. But then you look at the reality and realize that, no, not quite so impressive. Okay, but in summary, we are talking about a world with more wild cards in it now than we had last week. And there's an element of surprise that, I mean, the Russians are experiencing not just the U.S. electorate. And, I mean, and that uncertainty is potentially dangerous.

Is that about right? It is, absolutely. And particularly because what? What it does is it kind of shifts the nature of the battlefield. You know, a lot of the talk about so-called Russian hybrid warfare, it shouldn't be called hybrid warfare, but that's another topic for another podcast, is very much this idea that sort of the Russians think that they can win the war through political means and so forth, which is not actually necessarily or not simply what they're thinking.

But if you look at how the Russians are looking at warfare, it is that sense of the trying to understand how it's going to be in the 21st century. and they realise that it's going to be phenomenally destructive and phenomenally fast and phenomenally deep that it's going to take place at every point in the country, it's not just going to be along a battle line. And it's also going to be fought through covert means and destabilization and sabotage and politics and everything else. And therefore, for me, the big concern is this. if the Russians already think that they're at war the very 21st century in which they

of the type of war in which they feel that we in the West are trying to sort of undermine their system and I isolate them marginalise them and basically make them into a sort of the kind of country that is comfortable for the West I don't agree with it but nonetheless that is a genuinely held belief in Moscow amongst the sort of the security elites my big concern is that if they feel that we in the West are getting ready for some kind of...

And I don't mean offensive, I don't mean NATO tanks rolling across the border. It's clearly not going to mean anything like that. But some kind of serious attempt to bring regime change or otherwise destabilise Russia. What are they going to do first? They're not going to just sit and wait. So I think absolutely, I mean, although one can find little sort of tatters of silver lining in this cloud, I definitely feel that the uncertainty at the moment

until we see how the Trump and Putin and the U.S. and Russian relationships evolve is definitely disquieting. Well, Mark Galiati, thank you so much for joining us to talk about this today. Couldn't be more timely. Thank you so much. Well, I would say my pleasure, but these are all rather dark times. Thanks again. No problem. Thanks for listening to this week's show.

If you enjoyed it, rate us on iTunes. or send us comments on Twitter. We're at War underscore College. We're always happy to hear your show ideas, get compliments, or criticism. War College was created by me, Jason Fields, and Craig Hedek. Matthew Galt co-hosts the show and Wrangles the guests. Bethel Hoppe is our producer.