Angry Planet - Ukraine in the Crosshairs

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Russia and Ukraine have been fighting ever since Little Green Men invaded Crimea in 2014. That wasn’t enough for Russia. The former evil empire then aided separatist enclaves inside the rest of Ukraine.The Ukrainian military was unprepared, the world mostly sat back and watched, and an ugly stalemate ensued. If a stalemate includes tanks firing at each other.Recently, Russia massed troops on Ukraine’s border as rhetoric ratcheted up.To help us understand what exactly is going on, we have Michael Kofman. He’s a Senior Research Scientist at CNA Corporation, which advises governments and organizations on security issues.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. Hello, Angry Planet listeners. This is Matthew. Thank you for sticking with us all this time. I just wanted to note that we did not have an episode last week because I got married

and I was a little busy to get things out. But we are back into normal production. We've got an episode coming to. about Ukraine and then we'll have another one tomorrow that's a continuation of our Angry Ocean series. That'll be for the subscribers of the substack, which you can jump onto at angry planetpod.com. If you are not a subscriber, $9 a month gets you two premium episodes. Without further ado, here we go. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years time will be published.

when genocide has been cut out in this country almost with impunity and when it is near to completion people talk about intervention you don't get freedom people freedom has never

safe-guarded people anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach Hello and welcome to Angry Planet I'm Jason Lewis And I'm Matthew Galt Russia and Ukraine have been fighting

ever since little green men invaded Crimea in 2014. That wasn't enough for Russia. The former evil empire then aided separatist enclaves inside the rest of Ukraine. The Ukrainian military was unprepared, the world mostly sat back and watched, and an ugly stalemate ensued, if a stalemate includes tanks firing at each other. Recently, Russia massed troops on Ukraine's border and rhetoric has ratcheted itself up. To help us understand exactly what's going on, we have Michael Kaufman. He's a senior research scientist at CNA Corporation, which advises governments and organizations on security issues.

Thanks for coming on. Thanks for our own on your show. So what's the current state of play in Ukraine? Well, the current state of play is that a ceasefire that had been in place for some time since last year, over six months, had broken down. earlier this winter. And there is now a steady escalation of violence along the line of contact between Ukrainian forces and separatist or Russian-led forces in the breakaway enclaves in eastern Ukraine, known primarily as the Donbos. Beyond that, it seems that the recent war scare that was taking place with a fairly large Russian military buildup around Ukraine, both in the south, in the Crimean

Peninsula to the east and northeast of the country, that the tension there had died down because Russia appears to be de-escalating and withdrawing a lot of the troops that they had forward deployed. But the story is not really over because it seems like they're going to keep a fairly sizable force not that far off of Ukrainian borders after all, and they're probably going to keep it too much of the year. And the reasons for that are unclear. So this looks like probably the first in what could be a series of military crises or war scares that are likely to take place. What started it up again? What's a really good question?

So, you know, like most things of this kind, they tend to be multi-causal. Part of it, I think, without doubt, was that Russia and Ukraine had reached an impasse over negotiations on how they implement the Minsk ceasefire agreement and turn that into a political. settlement. And that became pretty clear some months ago last year. Then Ukrainian foreign policy changed considerably as well. They began taking a very hard stance both towards Russia and towards negotiations over how to reintegrate the Donbos, the breakaway regions that are held by the separatists. There appeared to be a breakdown on a ceasefire going on into this year after the typical holiday lulch, which is always in the winter after New Year's and after Orthodox. Christmas. And so as the ceasefire broke down, you began to see troop movements, both on the Russian side, then some on the Ukrainian side. And then it became very obvious that the Russian plan was actually to conduct a fairly large military buildup. And then in fact, it most likely was planned for some time out. That is, it looks like they began positioning troops maybe even as early as February. What's behind us on the Ukrainian side? I think that story is much easier to tell.

which is that there was an impasse in terms of what Russia was effectively demanding for moving the negotiations forward and what the Ukrainian public would be willing to concede to. As any pluralistic country, you have your domestic political constraints on what you can give up in negotiations with the opponent. And I think that really limited the maneuver room for Ukrainian president, Szyanski. You can only go so far and he essentially reached the limit of his rope in terms of political remit of what he could negotiate. Then it became clear that those pretty good Western backing, both amongst Europeans and us here in Washington, D.C., for the Ukrainian position. For Russia,

this is obviously pretty problematic. First, if there is no real negotiation on how to reintegrate the Donbos or to compromise on Russian desires and demands, then essentially means that region is de facto annexed by Russia. It's on a trajectory for Russian annexation. And it's not really what the Russians wanted. That was never the original idea. In fact, it ruins much of the whole idea of what they were trying to do. Which is what? Well, so the Russian bid was always to impose their will on Ukraine to have a say over Ukraine's strategic orientation, never to actually own the territory have to pay for it. And the goal is always to use the territory kind of as a grappling hook in order to maintain control over Ukraine's overall foreign policy and prevent Ukraine from being able to

join NATO or European Union, things of that nature. and not to end up with a small piece, right? The goal was to essentially use it as a lever over the entirety of the country's foreign policy to some extent. That's why they had argued that they should reintegrate the Donbos, but the Ukraine should conduct constitutional reform, federalize itself, and then this specific region, right, would essentially have a say over Ukraine's overall national direction when it came to the country's orientation.

That was a scheme they had in mind originally. The whole thing was never over the Donbos. It's not a particularly useful or valuable territory. It was never about any specific part of territory, really, in that country. It became, I think, rather clear that Russians were engaging in a very coercive demonstration, and this could be, at least in my view, described as a case of course of diplomacy. That's diplomacy backed by the threat of force or by actual limited use of force, right? In the older days, when we used to do it, you'd call it gunboat diplomacy or things of that nature,

where you'd compel countries to change their policy on something with a very clear threat to use force against them. So the Russian side is a bit more complicated. They gave lots of different reasons. The people who speak on behalf of the regime put out several different reasons for why they were doing it. And I think they're all pieces of the puzzle. One of them were very clearly about the sympas with Ukraine. A second was Ukraine's reinvigorated push to try to get a, a road way into NATO. It's called a membership action plan. And to be clear, Ukraine has no chance

of getting into NATO right now, not in the near term and not in the medium term. It's not looking like that's in the car. Probably, who knows, maybe not in the long term. But the policy that they began was basically to reinvigorate their effort behind this issue. And so there were pretty clear threats from the Kremlin as well that if Ukraine has brought into NATO, then it will be an escalation of fighting in Dombos, and that could actually threaten the Ukrainian state's existence. So it was a very overt threat, and they drew a very clear logical line between a membership action plan being given to Ukraine, and them essentially conducting some large-scale military operation. Is the reason why they would never, NATO wouldn't consider actually letting Ukraine in?

Is that because it's close to a declaration of war with Russia? I think the two reasons why they wouldn't let Ukraine as first, a major European states, particularly Western European states, don't want to have to defend a country like Ukraine. Second, hey, they didn't want to defend the Baltics. When they let the Baltics in, they kind of had a general impression that they wouldn't have to defend them. And then when, and some people back then raised that in the late 90s, when those was debated, people raised the issue saying, hey, you do know that at some point their relations with Russia may change or Russia may be back because of a very serious military power that could be threatening in Europe. And then this would be, these would be security

commitments you would have to actually make good on. But main European countries back then didn't really think that way. And so post-2014 realizing that, yes, Europe and the United States have to make good on these commitments to the Baltics, which is already quite difficult and onerous actually has taken some time and effort. It's a lot harder than people imagine it to be. Well, then the question came of, what about Ukraine? Countries like Germany and France are a definite no vote on that. So that's issue one. He really don't have to defend countries like Ukraine Georgia. And the second one is that there's a major conflict already, both a territorial dispute and a conflict on Ukraine's territory in progress. And I think for many of them, unless there's a political

settlement of that conflict, it's probably a deal break right away in terms of accession. And since there doesn't look like there's going to be a resolution, not necessarily the Dombos issue, but certainly of the Crimea, right, since the Russian annexation of Crimea, it looks somewhat improbable that any major European country amongst a major Western European states, Germany, France, which carry a lot, heftom vote in the alliance, are going to agree to getting Ukraine into NATO. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, that's just, that's the reality of it.

And it's not clear that those politics are going to change anytime soon. After that, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about where Ukraine stands militarily now, because they didn't look so great in the original battles back in 2014. Are they any better prepared now, case something horrible happens? That's a good question. The earlier fights were definitely at sort of a David and Goliath battle. And outside of biblical tales, 99% of time, actually, Goliath kills David.

That's more the reality of military contests. Lots of people, I kind of think they're saying that lots of countries imagine that they're going to be like Israel, David, that takes on all these other states and is able to win. But not at then times, that's not how it turns out. So the outcomes were pretty predictable in 2014, 2015, 2015. of a very tiny Ukrainian military that was not funded, not supplied, had to depend on civilian support and not very well organized, having to take on a Russian military. And the Russian military actually didn't deploy that larger a force in either 2014 or 2015. Those battles weren't very big.

Today, Ukraine military has improved qualitatively and quantitatively by leaps and bounds. That's quite true. I think that it's a very different looking armed force than what it was in 2014. On the other hand, the Russian military has improved considerably as well, and so it's not been standing still. But two is a much larger force structure with much greater capability, combat experience, and alike. And there are now large permanent Russian military formations deployed around Ukraine, which back in 2014, 2015, there were not. So the amount of time Russia would need to gather and deploy forces into a fight like that would be much lower today. and the amount of military hardware and power they have based around Ukraine is quite larger. So the short answer today is, yeah, Ukraine's military has improved dramatically.

It still have a lot of issues to work through. They would do fairly well in a small fight, I think, of the type that happened in 2014, 2015, but that is very clearly not what's in the courts. The Russian signaling is that the next battle, if it is to take place, is going to be much larger. It will be a Russian military incursion across several fronts from south to north. that Ukrainian forces would be infectively enveloped and cut off actually in eastern Ukraine. This would be a much larger war, and this war would have real implications for the survival of the Ukrainian state. It would not be a small battle between several battalion tactical groups and

the like. In what ways is Russia signaling that? First, they fairly overtly told them that. I mean, Kozak represents the Kremlin on issues in negotiation. Ukraine said several times that if Ukrainian leadership believes that they can pursue a military solution to the situation in Dombasa, they need to understand, that escalation will result in the destruction of the Ukrainian state. They're not really, they're not making it very hard to read between the lines. They're being pretty overt about how they're communicating the threat. And that wasn't just from Ham, Zaharva and other people said things essentially to that effect. But the more important signs are that the Russian military's positioning is really not about building up

forces in the Dunbos, where the separists were. And that was the thing that was most worrisome about the last two months of the Russian military buildup. The buildup was actually off northeastern Ukraine and in Crimea. And so anyone who looks at the map can clearly see that the real Russian threat was essentially a very large attack and incursion, both from the north and from the south, and that they could essentially, if they wanted to sever most of the Ukrainian forces in the east of the Neapur River. But they were there, and they had deployed formations, permanently stationed around Ukraine, running all the way up to the border with Belarus, specifically for this purpose, that they would have this option to attack from a number of

different vectors and cut off Ukraine forces. And that's where the buildup was. It was very much looking that way. And actually had, there was a real discontinuity between what Russian political leadership was saying, which is they were pretending like they were responding to a Ukrainian military threat to retake to Dumbos. But then when you're looking where they were basing their forces, they weren't basing their forces to the turn attack on the Dunbas in the region, right? They were basing it actually along other parts of Ukraine. If you look at where Crimea is, where the Donbos are, they're separated by 300 kilometers. They're actually nowhere near each other, these areas.

Who do you think would actually come to Ukraine's defense at this point? And we already said they're not getting into NATO anytime soon. But are they without real allies? There certainly weren't great allies when Crimea was taken. That's a good question. So, Lovinius is that rhetorically, lots of people are willing to come to Ukraine's aid, and we've seen plenty of that. When it comes to the actual military side of the equation, I think there are a couple

challenges here. First, it is very much unclear that real kind of high-end war fighting contingency, if you were to have a war, that it will last any period of time sufficient for people who even thus, let's say, to come to Ukraine's aid. One of the challenges of when people think about offense, military operations, first of all, they presume territorial conquest, which is actually untrue. A lot of fights are not about territorial conquest. And in fact, most of the fights in Ukraine had nothing to do with territorial conquest. They're about compelling Ukraine to our signing an unfair political agreement, a ceasefire, and then primarily withdrawing most of the Russian forces.

So they weren't about the territory. And so people tend to assume there's going to be like a large fight and a prolonged war, but that's not how these go. Russia-Georgia was only five days long, and really only three of those days were decisive. And so you would expect that a war where Ukraine could last maybe two weeks or so, something along those lines that is a real escalation and military incursion. But by the time anybody was able to figure out what they were going to do, have those debates, decide on action, it could very well be over.

That's the modern reality. The second part of us, who would actually come to Ukraine's aid? Well, first of all, most people don't really have much in the way of military capability to aid Ukraine. And almost none of those people would ever fight Russia on behalf of Ukraine. That's for sure. So the only thing Ukraine could really count on is that countries like the United States, who have both capability and, you know, sticks, basically, weapons, ammunition, and the like, and could airlift some amount of it into Ukraine in time to be relevant for the fight itself.

Not that U.S. forces, whatever, fight Russia on behalf of Ukraine, I don't think this is going to happen. To me, this seems incredibly unlikely. And consistent, whenever this has come up when the U.S. has made political states on behalf of countries, Georgia is a good example, where they were very very very. vague and ambiguous. And then the war did happen. And there was a meeting where principals here got asked, who would actually be willing to put boots on the ground in that country and find their behalf? You'll get zero hands going up in that vote. That's the reality of it. So there's a lot of good political talk and signaling, but when it comes down to an actual cabinet meeting and you go around

and you say, who's going to fight rush over this country and is willing to put American boots on the ground there for that fight, you're probably going to get zero hands at the end of the day. But in his latest episode, the U.S. actually was making deliveries of military equipment to Ukraine. It wasn't clear what some of them were. Some of them were on Dali scheduled military equipment. That's part of our military support program, we were meant to deliver them anyway. And we were making good on that. But there were a host of U.S. flights that we could see from Germany to Ukraine delivering military equipment or who knows what, in signs of support. And I think we tried to make public deliberations of further support we could give.

The short of it is that the kind of capabilities that you can provide a country in a short notice would be very basic things that they could make use of. The kind of things that they essentially ammunition weapons that they can make use of right off the bat. And you hope that that gives some benefit to them. There's not much else in these situations that you can do beyond that. And even if you threatened publicly, like there was information, I think, given to Politico by Ukrainians that they were asking to things like Patriot 3, you know, pack air defense batteries. One, I don't think we would ever base those in Ukraine. Two, I doubt we'd sell them to Ukraine. And three, even if we sold them to Ukraine, the training cycle for those is so long that I guess maybe they'd be useful a year from now.

But it's not the kind of thing. You can really position or election you're going to provide this and it's going to be meaningful in the conflict. You can't just give this to somebody and then they'd know how they use. It really doesn't sound very good for Ukraine. If they don't, how are they going to resist doing what Russia wants, do you think? You know, they've been remarkably successful at actually not giving Russia much in the way of their political aims. That is, when we look at worst case scenarios, Ukraine's not well positioned to either win a fight with Russia, nor is anybody going to seriously come to their aid in event of such a conflict.

That's true. Roll back the footage of the last five, six years, we can see that despite losing several battles and being competitive, compelled to sign pretty unfairable ceasefire agreements, the fact of gun. Ukraine has not actually been forced to substantially compromise on any of the big picture political demands from Russia. They've not done much wanted. They've continued to retain support, both economic and political, from Europeans and military support from us in the way of foreign military financing and sales.

I think we'll give hundreds of millions of dollars per year to aid their defense the Congress annually appropriates for. So in retrospect, all things considered, it appears Ukraine actually is done fairly well. Yes, they've lost control of Crimea and yes, they've lost control of a part of the Donbos. But on the whole, they've actually done reasonably well in resisting Russian demands and political objectives. So you have to look at it in both ways. On balance, I think actually, Ukraine hasn't done that poorly. How is the domestic situation in Russia affecting all of this? And what do people in Russia think about any of this? Do they care about Ukraine at all? So that's a great question that others have well I've noticed in recent weeks because one of the things we often wonder is what is the linkage between domestic politics and foreign policy?

Is there any? Is there some? Is one primary driver of the other? I'll give you two lenses on us. So first, here's my personal bias. I think I tend to see largely domestic politics when we look at, let's say, Navalny's imprisonment and hunger strike and some of the protests have been taking place in recent months. I tend to see that issue is pretty separate from the objectives and foreign policy vis-à-vis Ukraine. They're typically to me separate because the way the regime deals with domestic politics is repression and management of elite disputes and internal security services handle this. there actually is not, from my point of view, any strong incentive for the regime to try to seek any kind of foreign policy solutions for domestic political problems for a couple reasons. First, it's not clear how it could even possibly work that way.

Like how would doing anything with Ukraine resolved in the vulnerability issue in Russia? It would be the logical linkage between those two. Second, and there's just to be clear, because often our priors dictate a lot of things. I'm a massive skeptic of diversionary war or distractionary war theory for a couple of reasons. First of all, 99% of time it's wrong in predicting anything. I mean, it's about as right as a broken clock isn't telling the right time of day. So lots of times you'll see a country. You'll see that there's all sorts of internal political problems and they don't engage in any kind of foreign military aggression or activity.

So a lot of times when you would say these factors should predict these sort of actions, you don't see anything happen. Right. Again, right now, the last couple of years, we can say again, Russia's in this, that domestic economic problem. Okay, where's the foreign aggression that's supposed to be the diversionary war that's going to solve for this? We don't really see it. The other reason for that is most leaders tend not to think this way.

They typically see foreign policy adventurersism as a cost and a risk. And actually, if anything, it carries domestic political liabilities. Almost any conflict carries more domestic political liabilities than not. And in a cases where it doesn't, it's usually when you think. you're seizing some really politically relevant territory that could be a big boom. And that was the case in Crimea, but there are no other Crimea is really to be had if that makes sense. So when people even look abroad other regions and they say Russia might commit aggression there like the Swaliki gap in Lithuania. Nobody in Russia knows what the Swaliki gap in Lithuania is just like most Americans don't know where

it is either. Okay, it's very hard to explain why this is such a heroic achievement for Russia to take some completely random part of a Baltic state. So that being in case, I just don't see that as one of the main inputs or influences of Russian foreign policy here, especially because post-2018, it became clear that most people in Russia were no longer interested in foreign policy, adventurism or aggrandizement. You saw a real shift in public attitudes and moods. And that especially came after the domestic pension law reform, but you really saw foreign policy begin to fall off the exchange. of public interest in 2018, around summer 2018, and you saw a much stronger interest in

public administration, public services, the economy, healthcare education, these kind of things. So you began to see the real dwindling of what people used to nickname the Crimea fact, the post-K Crimea, dramatic approval and public sentiment that the regime experienced fairly briefly, actually, that began to wear off. So to me, these issues are pretty separate, as far as I see it. I think they happen to be coincidental, and some people said the regime is doing this course of display to distract from the domestic situation. This is, well, no, really. I basically now de-escalated, but the domestic situation when Navalny continues, and that's yet to resolve itself. And the real fight when the Volney supporters is actually later this year when it comes to the parliamentary

elections, the doom elections. That's the big showdown between the regime of supporters. It's not right now. If you're going to do something distractionary, the time to do is when they're, that political showdown comes much later. All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back with more of our conversation about Ukraine. All right, angry planet listeners, thank you for sticking with us. Now back to the end of our conversation about Ukraine. So what's the situation in Ukraine itself now?

Under Petro Poroshenko and the people who preceded him, Yanukovych, corruption was supposed to be the order of the day. The country was in terrible shape, inflation. So where does Ukraine stand now? I think the answer to that is it's not great. That's for sure. I'd say that Ukraine is doing a lot better than was in 2014, 2015, during the height of this war. And especially after the Maidan and all the political upheavals, I'd say that the truth is that the country on the one hand has made considerable progress in some areas of political and legal reforms in a lot of other important aspects simply stood still.

And the Zayansky administration really did not show. much interest in making major reforms, either on legal issues, questions of rule of law, and just administration or corruption. That's straightforward. Ukraine continues to have a fraction of the GDP it had before this war. So to say that all these events did not dramatically damage Ukraine economically is totally untrue. The economic situation may look better than it did in recent years, but still quite bad.

In a lot of ways, Ukraine does remain a financial dependency of the West. We look at IMF loans and things of that nature that you have essentially Western countries primarily lending to Ukraine. And Ukraine substantially depends on these loans. In the political situation of self, well, the plus side is that you saw a continued democratic handover power with the election of Poroshenko was. The downside is Ukraine remains a fairly, in a lot of ways, a weak state politically, right? Just in terms of how politics and Ukraine are organized and come together. Ukraine's won a few democratic systems where the incumbent actually is a disadvantage. Almost any democracy, the incumbent has tremendous resources, right, and ability to win.

A U.S. president is very likely to win a second term. A U.S. senator is very likely to stay there for life probably, right? In Ukraine, the president is most likely to lose by virtue being the president when he comes to the reelection. He's actually probably blamed for all the country's woes. And whoever the challenger is, even if it's some ridiculous comedians, which is who Zeliensky was, who show you can, I think, find on Netflix now, right, with no political experience of any kind.

And the president is claiming to be essentially a wartime president, which is what Poroshenko was, he'll still lose. It's almost a theater of the absurd, but that's how the politics shape up. It's a very distinct and fascinating country. And I don't see that changing. I think Zelensky is doing politically quite poorly.

In the past year, he lost a law support. He is what you could call kind of the reincarnation, of the party of the regions or the political party that had more favorable Russian sentiments had begun to rise dramatically in the polls. Having seen this, he then began to ban the main media channels that belonged to a man by the name of Vid Vichuk. This is a close friend and ally of Vladimir Putin who continued to retain considerable influence in Ukraine.

You might say that's absurd. Why would people who essentially represent the Russian interest in Ukraine retain tremendous influence in Ukraine, have media channels and all these things for years after the war. I said, well, that's the nature of Ukraine. It's much more complicated than it seems. Zaynowski banned all channels last year. That's actually one of the things that I think in many ways, to put it bluntly, probably pissed what you're Putin off. And he banned them by saying that, okay, this essentially representing foreign aggressive interest, right, the interest of Russia.

Of course, he only came to this epiphany, as for many years he was president. he only came to this epiphany as his own approval rating began to decline. And only then that he suddenly realized that these media channels that represent political views and parties that oppose him in the country, that they actually now represent Russian influence. So these elements of how Ukrainian leaders continue to deal with domestic political opposition continue to this day. And I will say it's not a very democratic or liberal move to make, certainly. And I'm sure it's being challenged internally in Ukraine.

but Ukraine's a place where rule of law has a long way to go to being a real thing. That's just the reality of it. That's just the reality of it. At least that's my idea. I'm sure some people who are more knowledgeable in the country would contest that argument, but I'm just saying that you still see some of the same decisions and shenanigans taking place today that you have over the last two decades. Can I ask a complete hypothetical? Sure.

Okay. Yeah. It's my show, of course. Yeah, exactly. So when the Soviet Union broke up, 1991, 92, Ukraine actually was a place where a lot of nuclear weapons were stored. And they voluntarily gave up those nuclear weapons, or did they? I mean, that's the narrative that I've heard, right? Oh, okay.

Now, you're making a hand motion. Could you explain that hand motion? It's the hand motion that indicates that some money was involved. Yes, they voluntarily gave them up, but it's a very interesting complex story. Let me actually let you finish your question then so it's like a better answer it. But there's a lot there. It's a fascinating story. Well, yeah, I think we'd want to basically hear the story and where you think that's led Ukraine?

You know, I mean, would it have been a safer country if it hadn't given up the weapons? So you've got great facial expressions. We've got to turn this into a video show. No, no, I'm not wearing anything good. I'm just wearing one of my house shirts. So let me first come on that. But I'm originally from Ukraine. I'm from Kiev myself.

And so I lived in the latter of Soviet Union. When I say it sounds critical Ukraine and somebody comes on here and says, this person doesn't like Ukraine. I do. I'm from there. Okay. I'm like a lot of people. This country's not a fantasy place on a map for me.

So I do appreciate it. And sometimes I'm more critical of it because I'm from there. And so I feel like I have to some extent the liberty. And I've gone back in recent years. Obviously now much more is a visitor because I've been living in the United States for almost 30 years. But the story is on how Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal was really interesting. There are two parts to it.

First, Ukraine really declared its independence as a non-nuclear state. In fact, this was the original idea of Ukrainian leaders that they would be a nuclear weapons free state and they would give up their nuclear weapons. As we got early into the 90s, the thing that Ukrainian leadership was really interesting is first, to some extent, of course, getting security commitments from both Russia, the United States, and the UK at the time for giving up their nuclear arsenal to Russia. But here's what's really going on behind the scenes under the hood. First, Soviet leadership and Soviet general staff, as the Soviet Union was dissolving,

immediately went to retrieve first tactical nuclear weapons from the states where they were forward deployed. So the general staff went and grabbed Ukraine's tactical nuclear weapons in 1992 in the first half of the year, and they withdrew it very quickly. As the Soviet Union repainted itself into the CIS for anyone who remember, is the Commonwealth of Independent States. If you remember this, you're a minimo Gen X are like me. Now we're starting to separate people by age groups. So if you had ever heard the Commonwealth of Independent States and all this, then you probably are a certain age category. So first they have tactical nuclear weapons from Ukraine, whatever they could find that they had forward

deployed. The strategic nuclear weapons that Ukraine had, the launch codes and those systems were actually held at the end of the day in Moscow and the Kremlin. So they were not usable silo-based nuclear systems. Ukraine had quite a few. Ukraine, the fact, emerged one of the largest nuclear powers on Earth. Two other former Soviet republics had nuclear weapons as well, Belarus and Kazakhstan. It's not true that Ukraine is the only country that voluntarily gave up this nuclear weapons. Actually, Belarus and Kazakhstan did too.

Also, South Africa did, but that's a separate story for a different podcast. There was a whole story where nobody knew South Africa had nuclear weapons, and then they gave them up, and then people said, that's brilliant. Wait, you had nuclear weapons. So one of the things that drove Ukraine towards decision is, look, they had nuclear weapons that were strategic in nature to which they didn't really have the control keys, right? That's one. Two, they needed to disarm them, and they were part of arms control arrangements, but disarming and dismantlement cost a lot of money. So they wanted actually the West and others to pay,

and Russia to pay for them to dismantle these nuclear weapons. And they wanted security guarantees. And this is the deal they factor got in the Budapest Memorandum. That's what it was. It was both a political commitment that offered Ukraine security guarantees in exchange for giving up their strategic nuclear weapons, which were not usable anyway, but also to the latter extent, a bill of sale, which is that they were essentially given the money to dismantle these weapons, which would have been too expensive to maintain and equally expensive to dismantle if Ukrainianans had to pay for it themselves. And Belarus in many ways piggybacked on this deal and got essentially the other former Soviet republics that had nuclear weapons got similar range.

So in brief, if someone today says, would Ukraine be better off on nuclear weapons? First of all, note would not, because nuclear weapons, believe it or not, don't deter very much at all. Second, they certainly don't deter a limited conventional war. And we have great history of that. They're not very useful for coercion either. If Ukraine had nuclear weapons, it would be the subject of a whole host of new considerations between Russia, United States.

And I don't think that would do Ukraine any favors. And these would be very expensive and challenging to maintain. And they wouldn't necessarily be a survival nuclear arsenal either. A lot of people forget that it's one thing to have nuclear weapons. It's another thing to have a survival nuclear arsenal. Just having nuclear weapons by itself makes you a great target. Makes you a great target for states who would want to disarm your nuclear arsenal because it's probably not survivable and easily reachable.

So it's a big difference between having a couple of nuclear weapons and having a real robust nuclear arsenal with survivability and all that. So I think Ukraine, if anything is much better off without nuclear weapons, they wouldn't have done anything for it vis-a-vis Russia here either. And no, if Ukraine had the old silo-based ICBMs that they had before with Russia, no, this would not be a credible threat against Russia back then. And I know those people always say Ukraine had tactical nuclear weapons, and I don't think that would have done anybody any favors.

But the truth is that Russian leadership would do all the tactical nuclear weapons. they could find very early on after the dissolution of the Soviet because they weren't stupid. They'd be frank about that. Sorry, I have a question. Something that's been haunting me while you're giving that really excellent

and eloquent answer about Ukraine's nuclear weapons. I noticed something in the background. Do you have an oil painting of Jean-Luc Picard's face superimposed on a George Dahl portrait? I do have a, okay, I don't generally have an oil painting. Oh, that would be awesome. I have what could be fairly described as a print of an oil painting in a really nice,

the old, tiny kind of portrait frame of John L. Picard. And it's superimposed into the uniform of a Russian major general from the Napoleonic War period. And that's actually what he's wearing. He's dressed up as a Russian major general. But think of us, if you're imagining this podcast right now, think of a sort of Napoleonic War imperial period. Yeah, there were a George Dahl, I think, was a British portrait artist who was very famous at the time, went over there and painted a whole bunch of Russian nobility and military staff at the time. I just caught it and I was like, it was messing with me for a minute because I was trying to figure out who it was. And I was like, that's Sir Patrick Stewart.

Sorry. I'm sorry to derail the entire. I put this here early on, as the pandemic said, and I had this kind of big blue part of a wall that was empty, and I found myself doing these zones. And I thought, I need a picture of something. And then I thought, well, what should I put there? And I guess one, at least some aspect of my personality is a bit fun and trollish. So I thought, this would be good. And then we could see if this could be a good conversation starter.

And eventually someone would come, some brave soul would ask and they would say, is that really Jean-Luk Picard looking like a Russian officer? am I just imagining it and not how it's up. So it has a desired effect. So this is a tangent question, but it's the week that it is. We're recording this on the 28th, just a few days after the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. As part of that, like Ukraine has announced that like the Duga-1 radar array and some of the other sites in the exclusion zone are going to become like cultural heritage sites for Ukraine. I just wanted as someone from Kiev, what is, what do you think is the legacy of Chernobyl in general, and what is its importance to Ukrainian culture? That's a good question. In some ways, unfortunately, I'm the wrong person to answer how Ukrainian

culture interprets Chernobyl many years down the line, just because I haven't lived there in these past decades. I can give you just a few personal impressions. First, I was there in 1986 in Kiev, where I lived as a kid during the Chernobyl disaster. And so I have some, some, some, brief memories of, at least the after effects of it and the long-lasting after-effects on life in Ukraine and Kiev. But I think to me, the entire episode was very significant in the history of the Soviet Union, the late Soviet Union. It tremendously affected Soviet leadership, Soviet reputation. It was really damning of a lot of aspects of the Soviet system. And continues to be interestingly a very sore point, not for Ukraine, but for Russia.

You know, Russians were quite upset by the HBO documentary that came out. This was maybe two years back now. I don't remember. Time flies so fast. I feel like, you can't quite tell. This is a tragedy. This is a tragedy when people tell you that the 1990s were more than 10 years ago. And it's very depressing.

The Russians were deeply upset about it. They were mostly upset about it because HBO made a really good documentary. In fact, the better of a documentary you make on something in Russia, the more unhappy Russians usually are with it. Because they're not the ones that made it. So that's actually almost where the real frustration comes from. I think that in Ukraine, this is probably treated very differently. Because for Russia, this remains an indictment of the Soviet system and the Soviet Empire is in many ways viewed as the largest logical extension of the Russian Empire.

And Russia is the successor of state to the Soviet Union. Ukraine, not so much. Ukraine was a successor to some of the arms control treaties, but in general, nobody believes that Ukraine is the successor state to the Soviet Union. And so Ukraine does not carry the guilt for what happened. It carries a lot of the aftermath, but not the guilt, whereas Russians do feel like to carry the historical political implications of what happened, even though it happened in Ukraine. Ukraine feels like the victims of that situation, I think, in the grand historical context,

as unfortunately it often is in the last 100 years. That's the reality. That's how it plays out. I don't know what the current state of play is with on that zone and treatment of it. I know lots of people still like to go there, or at least from the West try to go there as tourists. I find that pretty weird, to be perfectly honest. But I'm sure it's interesting to them.

I don't know why people are fascinated to go into the exclusion zone. There's something, I don't know, man. There's something haunting about it. And we don't, there's not really another area like. that on the planet. Yeah. Right. It's science fiction.

It's science fiction made real. Something completely just stopped in time. Everybody ran away. There's just a cup of coffee sitting on a table. It's just, it's half a dozen movies that I think we've all seen. Yeah. And I think the fallout,

not trying to be cute, from that incident, like reverberated through Russian pop culture in a way that the West absorbed in a way that it didn't with other like Russian media. I think roadside picnic and then the stalker movie after it, like that kind of stuff made it over here. And I think that's part of why, too, that it's become such a subject of fascination with Americans and other ones.

And we're not, and you're not supposed to go there. And we love hearing that because then that just makes us want to go. It's very interesting. Although you can two bits, one, from my person at first, I was always a big fan of Andre Darkovsky. And thankfully, nobody here has tried to remake stalker, although they've remade Salaris multiple times now here.

The last time was Luke George Clooney. And it does not get better with each remake. Okay, so we all agree. I'm glad we agree on that. Andrei Tarkovsky's films do not require an American remake. This is just my person. They're so, like, powerfully Russian that you lose, like, it just loses any substance when you try to put it into a different context.

Absolutely. Second, we associate those two together, but in some ways, his films are so fascinating and visionary because Tarkovsky's drama film Stalker is a 79 film, Chernobyl's 86. On our minds, we probably, I'm sure a lot of people think that Tarkovsky made the film after Chernobyl kind of imagining the Chernobyl Scuzzi zone. By the way, just my own personal view, I know people tuning into this podcast, probably this is not what interested in the most.

I felt a little bit like the film annihilation that came out two, three years ago was a part rip off of stalker. Maybe that was just me watching this. I don't know if I was alone. No, 100. I really like that movie a lot, but I think it absolutely was taking inspiration from that film for sure. Okay.

So I'm based on the book, a separate book. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so to me, there's a fascinating discussion. I actually, I agree, at least, for the reason for the fascination with that zone in Ukraine. And although, yeah, it's interesting that the ramifications and after effects continue. You had the impact on Ukraine was extensive. You had lots of people who really didn't know understand radiation, try to take objects out of that zone, resell them. You had effects on children in

particular in milk because radiation could affect things like that and it would be much, the effect, impact would be much greater on kids. You had produce and other things that could be contaminated in different ways and you had people essentially checking for radiation and produce at open markets for a long time after that. It had all these other effects, I think. that went on. And anyway, it's, yeah, it's a shame. And there was also dumb conspiracy theories around it, to be honest. So, there are some people in Russia who believe that the whole thing had to do with the strategic early warning radar that's based right by Chernobyl.

And that the thing was some botched CIA operation. It's amazing the terrible conspiracy theories that surround what is actually fairly straightforward nuclear accident. If we could finish up back in more or less the present. Actually, let's finish up in the future. What do you think is going to happen next? Have we seen the end of this confrontation for a while? What do you think? Then my best speculate.

If I could see the future, I for sure will not be sitting in this house right now. When my Jean-Lau-Boucard print, it'd be easy to find a book for a lucrative trade. But here's my take on where this is like they're going to go. First, I don't think that the sort of Russian attempts to coercibly influence Ukraine's policy over both the direction of Menzsche's fire talks and Western policy in Ukraine are over. I actually think we're going to see a sustained Russian military presence, not far off Ukraine. We have Zappa 2021 coming up, which is a very large command staff, strategic experts. That takes place in Western Russia and Belarus.

And we're going to see a lot of the same force involved in that. If you're, that's going to be the next war scare. It'll be late August and then through September, all right, just to be just to be up front with that. I don't see a good way forward-curling negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. So I suspect that at best they'll reach some new framework to implement a ceasefire, but this thing will continue to hobble along at the very least until the next Ukrainian presidential election. I don't see much room for change in Russia's domestic political scene. Those who think that we're in a period of late Putinism need to understand that could be decades.

That could be well through 2036. So that is not. There's no signs in Russia today that there are going to be any tremendous changes either to the regime or to Biden's leadership of it in the immediate coming years. I don't see that happening whatsoever. And when it comes to U.S. foreign policy towards Russia, I can say with some confidence that at least this administration's approach is that they have no intention to try the better relations with Russia. Their goal is to stabilize an adversarial relationship and to make the relationship more predictable. And so their view is that now is not the time for any kind of creative foreign policy towards Russia,

but they are looking to introduce guardrails into the relationship and make this a more manageable, stable confrontation. And it seems like Moscow very much wants the same as well. So in there, at least in that respect, you see some strong alignment of interest. but it remains to be seen if that can actually happen. You have the statement from both Blinken and Biden believing that, okay, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, which is their perception that we can work and talk to Russia about key issues that fall into the strategic stability agenda while also calling out the regime for human rights violations and talking about Navalny's imprisonment and the like,

and also sanctioning them, like, as they recently did, with the same. sanctions package that got rolled out. It's a reasonable formulation. Now all they just have to do is get Russia to agree to it. So that's the only missing part of the equation. It's not clear that Russians see the relationship this way or are going to be willing to deal with the United States this way. That's an untested thesis that we're going to discover more about this year. Michael Kaufman, thank you so much for coming on the show. You were terrific. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on your program. That's all this week. Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew

Walt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please like us on iTunes. It helps other people find the show. We have a substack at angryplanetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com where, for a mere $9 a month, you get access to two bonus episodes. There's one out tomorrow. As always, please be safe out there, and we will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.