Angry Planet - What the War Means for Russia

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

Returning guest and Russia expert Mark Galeotti comes on the show to give his perspective on the war in Ukraine.You 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 with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I am Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. We've got Mark Goliotti on the show today. I have no one. prep. I have no intro. If you're following the international situation, we are recording this on March 1st. I'm giving you the timestamps because the last episode we recorded, which is also about the Ukrainian conflict. Some of the conversation was invalidated mere hours after we had it, which was kind of fascinating. That's how quickly things are moving right now. If you know, Mark has been on the show,

if you're a listener, several times. I think he's the most, I think you've been on more than a dozen times now. You've been coming on for years. You're a guy that knows a lot about Russia. You've written a dozen books or more, sometimes about specific conflicts, sometimes more wide-ranging. Mark, thank you for coming on to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing okay, deeply depressed by what's going on, but, you know, in those circumstances and given the time, you've basically set me up as the sort of angry planet man with no life. Here I am at your disposal. That's us. Well, let's give for new listeners, you may be tuning in, can you give me your CV, a brief CV? Where are you working? I mean, I, at the moment, I run my own little boutique consultancy company,

my act intelligence, looking at Russian politics and security issues. I'm also an honorary professor at University College London. And I'm an affiliate with a different bunch of think tanks, Rucey, Council on Geostrategie, Institute of International Relations, Prague. I'm kind of mainly an academic. I spent time at the foreign office, and I've been involved in think tankery. But basically, I've been sort of tracking around those, and I spent, what, seven years in New York at NYU and various times in Moscow, in Prague, in Florence, and I'm now back in London. I've been referencing your book. We need to talk about Putin quite a bit lately. with people. I think that that is a pretty good, very brief read and a good resource that I think

will give you kind of a quick background on him if you don't have it and where his more recent state of mind might be. Mark, what are you, I mean, I don't need, there's so many questions I have. What are you kind of focused? What are you focused on right now? Where are you, where are your eyes at? There's so much going on. Yeah. Well, I think, let's sort of put it on kind of three levels. One is actually what's happening in Ukraine and what that tells us about what the Russians are really about. Two, what's happening in Russia. And three, what's happening in the most arcane domain of all, which is the deep, dark recesses of Putin's head. In terms of what's going on in Ukraine, I mean, we have obviously Russian forces massing around Kiev.

after a campaign, the early start of a campaign that really has been marked by what seems an astonishing series of blunders and misunderstandings, misapprehensions about how this war would actually be fought, which actually, I think, tracked back to the whole business about Putin. And in a way to foreshadow what I'd say about that, if you automatically assume that Ukraine is not really a state that the people of you, you have, you, Ukraine are groaning under the weight of a neo-Nazi regime that is an American puppet in any case, then it might seem conceivable that you can race a few companies of paratroopers and Spetsnaz into Kiev. No one's going to resist. The state structure is going to collapse around you.

You can grab Zelensky, impose a new regime, that kind of thing. The teeny tiny, tiny problem is, of course, that that's a total misreading of the situation, that the Ukrainians are frankly more unified than they have been, I wouldn't say at any point in history, because I really wouldn't want to push too far back. Certainly, if we think of ever since 1991 and the creation of the modern Ukrainian state, they have kept having, shall you say, not quite complete state building moments. Well, this has been the real state building moment. Plus, the Ukrainian military has been expecting and preparing for this for a long time, and the Ukrainian people are willing to become a nation in arms. So I think for all these reasons, obviously the initial Russian attack failed.

It also failed for another reason that was to do with Putin, which is that basically most of them didn't know they were going to be doing this. In the sort of quest for presumably operational security, even though Western intelligence agencies had known for a long time what's going on, didn't tell most of his, well, most of the middle-level commanders for certain, let alone the ordinary soldiers. They're not enthused. They're not happy. They haven't had a chance to prepare. And, you know, the usual kind of logistics mess-ups for which the Russian armies are rightly famed have all crept in. The trouble is that there's still a hell of a lot of soldiers. And I think what we're going to see is the Russians reverting to how they generally fight wars,

which is with massed firepower in the van before sending in the ground assaults. So I fear this is going to get really ugly, uglier than it has already. So that's on the ground. Second level, in terms of Russia, the economic sanctions, I mean, it's not just that the Russians had no idea what was going to hit them. I don't think anyone else did. I've talked to people in D.C. and London, who are amazed by how quickly and with what unity, the West came together. It's almost actually become almost problematic as countries almost

vie to be able to come up with new sanctions that they can impose, some of which don't make sense, some of which frankly affect ordinary Russians rather than the regime. But this has become something of a bandwagon. And we've honestly no idea what's going to happen. This is the first time we have seen economic warfare of this scale directed against a country that is so large, but also so deeply interconnected into the global system, into the energy markets, into the supply chains, into the banking system and so forth. This is not North Korea. This is not Iran. So, you know, you will find economists who will confidently declaim one way or the other, but frankly, I think no one really knows, and this is what's going to make the textbooks.

Of course, miserable time to be an ordinary Russian, which I think is a problematic thing. On one level, there is always a sort of a strategy where you know, you squeeze ordinary Russians and they should topple Putin. People power only ever works when the security forces are divided, demoralized and so forth. I mean, actually, of all people, we can go back to Lenin. We said that essentially, you know, revolutions succeed when the elite has a critical absence of will. But at the moment, unfortunately, the elite, the men with the guns, the men with the rubber trunchons, still seem willing to obey their orders. And thus, you know, hats off to the thousands of Russians who have already been arrested,

protesting against the war, all even the figures, you know, journalists, think tankers and so forth who have publicly come out against it. This is an increasingly authoritarian and, frankly, spitefully intolerant regime. It takes a lot of guts to actually stand up against it, knowing that your liberty, your livelihood are both on the line and maybe your kneecaps as well. I'm not sure if I'd have the guts to do it in that situation. Who knows? So, you know, Russia is bracing itself, and this is really going to have a serious long-term

impact. And the final point, and I'm rambling on, but, hey, you haven't got questions. So, you know, I'm doing your favour. Is Putin itself? And again, I think this is, this is for me one of the interesting in academic terms, worrying in human terms, points. I think we are seeing a new Putin, a new kind of evolution, the final sort of the final stage of his evolution, degeneration, call it what you will.

He's truly become a caricature of himself, which is something that tends to afflict authoritarian leaders who've been in power for too long. There is actually a good reason for term limits. His circle has shrunk, had shrunk even before COVID, and then COVID and the quite extraordinary biosecurity measures that will put in place around him. And they're still there, you know, these ridiculously long tables at which he sits, even when there's a his officials, which to some does, you know, does imply that actually there may be other underlying health issues there, that it may be, because, you know, we were told that he'd taken the vaccine, but it would be such an obvious photo op, and yet we never actually saw it.

They never even actually told us precisely which vaccine he was meant to have been given. There are, therefore, suggestions that he may be, you know, taking treatments or having some illness that might change the balance of his mind. Who knows? It might be age, two years with too much time on his hands, brooding about all the injustices meted out on Russia and what his place in history is going to be. I don't know. But the interesting thing is, I mean, when we saw last week's televised security council meeting, at which Putin was ostensibly there to get briefings from the most powerful officials in his country. And yet he bullied them, he browbeat them.

I never thought I would feel sorry for Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. But, you know, he really was openly bullied. And given that this was not actually shown live, and this was an edited cut, they actually chose to keep that in so that the entire Russian population and indeed the world could see Naryshkin being.

bullet. When his Prime Minister, Mishustin, tried to tell him about the economic situation, Putin was obviously bored, not listening, cut him off. When his main negotiator with Ukraine through the Normandy Format actually wanted to weigh in on some crucial issues, Putin cut him off. He actually pushed further. Putin cut him off harder. Again, this was not actually about a briefing. This was about basically a ceremonial demonstration of loyalty to support a decision. Putin had made. And then we had these two speeches, one recognizing the rebel pseudo-states and the other one essentially the Declaration of War. These were, again, almost caricature Putin. The basic themes about hostile NATO that had cheated Russia in terms of its expansion, Ukraine that isn't a real

country and might become a base for NATO aggression, that kind of thing. Those were not new. but the venom with which he outlined them, the extraordinary passion he clearly put into it, and this is not a man who does passion particularly. All of this, as I said to me, it was a new dark Putin. It was a new evolution, and that's what scares me. Someone who, on the past, was very much a risk-averse geopolitician, very much this macho persona, but in practice he was very cautious, very gradualist and so forth, and would actually often back away when they actually confronted, whether it's the Turks or the

Americans or whoever. Now we see this old man in a hurry willing to make massive gamble, and the gamble that I think clearly is not working out. And that means that we have to recalibrate how we think about him and how we respond to him. I've been looking back at pictures of Grozny in Chechnya, specifically preparing for something I'm working on, And now I'm wondering, since it hasn't gone over well to begin with, the quick assault, the, you know, Blitzkrieg, if you will, are we going to see another Grosheny out of Kharkiv or Kiev? I mean, complete flattening. Is Putin or Russia willing to go that far? If you'd ask me a month ago, I'd have said no. Now the honest answer is I don't know, because it's certainly true. If we look at past history of how Russians approach urban warfare, which is after all, very messy, dangerous business. Now, Russians do not feel any particular animus towards the Ukrainians. We've seen this in opinion polls and such like. They do regard the Ukrainians as their

brothers, cousins, or whatever. Although they're being fed this extraordinary vitriolic propaganda about, you know, Nazi state and such like, there doesn't seem to be much particular traction for that. So I think the regime wanted to avoid that kind of an attack. And it didn't feel the need to. But now, look, I imagine Putin must feel he needs to have some kind of successes. He needs to acquire some kind of momentum. I mean, originally, I understand, and this is the sort of word in NOSCO, is that the overall plan was that Kiev would have fallen within two days, and the whole operation would take two weeks. Well, that's a very important. not exactly going to timetable. And I suspect that precisely we're going to see, I mean,

whether we're going to see a kind of a flip of the switch from the current approach to full on, just blow it to rubble, I'm not convinced. But I certainly think we're going to see a further gradation upwards with a willingness to basically be a lot more destructive and therefore a lot more lethal. But yeah, I think we're probably going to find even actually the Russian commanders on the ground, trying to avoid being quite in that position. Do you, I hate to, this is a war that eschews simple predictions, but you are a person that has studied the Russian way of war for a long time. You know it in and out. You've written some of the best books on it, to my mind. Do you think they eventually win this? Does Ukraine have a chance?

it almost feels unfair or disloyal to not say Ukraine has a chance. I think we have to disaggregate. I think we have to do that, though, because we are, and I want to talk about this, and Ukraine is absolutely winning the information war, right? And they are making it look like they are kicking ass. And perhaps they are. But the reality of what the public sees about war and the reality of the war on the ground are two different things, right?

Totally right. Absolutely right. Absolutely. And particularly, I mean, we live in an age of instant gratification. You know, we always want to binge watch the series. And therefore, we expect things to sort themselves out really quickly. Wars often go on a long time. And yes, you're absolutely right that we can't generalize from just the first few days and also what we see precisely from, you know, media that is on the whole,

on the Ukrainian side, in both senses of the words. So I think in that context, look, I mean, clearly the Ukrainians have done a hell of a lot better than we might have expected. They not only have often put up a fight, but though, you know, there are areas. I'm clearly on the sort of the Crimean axis of advance really has moved quite effectively. They have shown themselves capable of, you know, coordinating activities, maintaining against a massive indictment of the Russians, maintaining a certain degree of air defense capability and indeed active air capability. And they also have been successfully targeting, for example, fuel supply routes and trucks, which is clearly something of a weakness of the Russians.

All that said, they have also benefited from the fact that in these early days of the war, the Russians really haven't been fighting to full strength, and they really haven't been frankly trying to, they haven't been fighting the way they train, plan, prepare an arm to fight. As we now move into what is likely to be a second stage, we're seeing, I mean, at the moment, I think it's 80% of all the sort of the entire forces that were arrayed are now being deployed. We basically have not seen Russian air power in extensive use at all.

And despite calls for a no-fly zone and such like, that's not going to happen. The Russians will ultimately dominate the airspace. And I think, therefore, the Ukrainians on the battlefield are ultimately going to lose. But the fact is that's just the first stage of the war. I mean, the cities are going to be tougher nuts to crack. But even if the Russians do then manage to a certain degree of control over then, you know, it then moves into exactly the counterinsurgency struggle. And that's going to be another matter. I mean, I'm not convinced that the Russians have the forces, let alone the will,

to maintain that kind of a struggle on a country, the size of France that has a large population. I mean, it's interesting, there's actually quite, I mean, obviously, some huge differences in culture, in geography and everything else. But in raw terms of size and population, you can map Ukraine and Afghanistan onto each other. And if one thinks about it, think of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. At peak, the Soviets had 150,000 soldiers in theatre. And they had just over 100,000 Afghan government security forces. So they had a quarter of a million troops in country.

And, I mean, yes, it's difficult fighting in the caves and mountains and so forth. But it also is in some ways easier compared with actually, fighting in a much more urban built-up environment. More to the point, the rules of engagement that the Soviets used are clearly, vastly more permissive than the ones that one can expect in Ukraine. Well, look, I don't think Russia can maintain a quarter of a million troops in Ukraine for any length of time. I don't know if Russia could put a quarter of a million troops into Ukraine at any one

time. So, I mean, I think that, you know, we really have to appreciate the extent to which I don't think this is ultimately a winnable contest if it's purely in military terms. Now, it may be that actually at some point, President Zelensky decides that he needs to capitulate just simply to save lives. And then there will, that there will be some kind of political settlement of sorts that clearly would benefit the Russians. I have no idea if that's possible, conceivable, or would happen. But even then, it's not going to be something that then people will just shrug and think, well, that was a shame. We gave it a good go to maintain our independence, and it didn't work out, oh, ho-hum, maybe the next generation. No, I mean, I think that this will continue to be.

At best, the Russians will face a terrorist campaign. You know, if they're lucky, they're really, really lucky, vastly luckier than I think they will be. They'll have Northern Ireland. A Northern Ireland, during the troubles, the size of France. If they're unlucky, they'll have an Afghanistan. I think these are debilitating for the Russians. And that's not to, I mean, that's completely setting aside the geopolitical fallout, right? I mean, it feels like we are living through a burst of tensions, a realignment of some kind. I don't think anyone would have ever imagined that the West would come.

together so quickly and so uniformly, like people that stayed out of World War II are invested in this. How does Russia recover its international standing or does it? This Russia can't. A post-Putting Russia may be, depending on what happens. But no, I think this is it. I think amongst the many, many casualties has been any notion that Russia offers some kind of positive alternative position in the international seat. And, you know, let's face it, this was pretty limited anyway. Russia didn't exactly have a vast amount of soft power. But also what's going to mean is what is going to mean is that a Russia that, you know, is a sale, regardless.

I mean, it's a lot to put aside. But let's put aside what's happening in Ukraine. But even everything else, I mean, basically, you know, sanctions will maintain until there's some kind of a political deal that means Russia pulls out of Ukraine. the damage done, I mean, the scarring to the Russian economy and probably to Russian society is actually going to be deep and will take a long, long time to heal. There isn't going to be the money. There isn't going to be the credibility for the kind of imperial gambits that we've seen, well, obviously in Syria, but in Africa, in Latin America and so forth. The relationship of Moscow to Beijing, I think, again, is dramatically tilting.

Because on the one hand, you have Beijing that clearly does not want to get involved. It is not backing the Russians. I mean, this is after all, I must remember the Chinese, they haven't even recognized the Crimean annexation. And so in this, they're just simply saying, you know, we understand that the Russians have a beef with NATO, but this should be resolved with negotiation. So it's not like they're exactly kind of riding over the crest of the hill to come to help the Russians.

They will be willing to do business with the Russians. but the price of that will be essentially vassalich rather than anything else. So I know, I mean, I think that exactly as long as Putin is in power in the Kremlin, then actually his lengthy campaign precisely to remake Russia into a great power clearly has failed. Another phrase that keeps reverberating through my mind as I am watching, especially the information war play out, in the context of this is like, Russia's ability to manipulate, maybe manipulate is the wrong word, occlude information over the past 10 years, I think has been really fascinating for me to watch. But I would never imagine that they would so completely be, it just feels like suddenly they're outclassed and everything is different now.

And their ability to kind of muddy the waters about what's going on is being completely outmatched by Ukraine. Can we talk about like what's going on in the information space right now and how Ukraine has. kind of turned everyone on their side? Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's a lot harder to muddy the waters when it comes to a massive armored invasion. There's a certain lack of ambiguity there. These thousand tanks just took a wrong turning. But more broadly, yeah, I mean, I think that, firstly, I think we always overplayed the

Russians' capabilities. They were sometimes the universal scapegoat. Whenever we failed to get our message across, it was actually because of the power of Russian disinformation, which often wasn't that powerful at all. Secondly, again, this is a recurring theme that you can't just simply ramp up an effective information campaign like that when you don't have anything really positive to give.

And precisely because of Putin's secrecy, precisely the fact that most Russian officials found out about the invasion the same time we did and were not quite, well, in their own way, I think most of them was horrified as we were, obviously different kinds of horror for a different sort of thing. But it did absolutely mean that they didn't have anything already in the cant. They didn't have prearranged lines. They didn't already have people ready to control with particular ideas. So they've been scrambling desperately to put out their own sort of new memes.

And what's interesting is the extent to which actually there are some people, particularly the sort of toxic TV commentators who, you know, they are used to spinning on the proverbial dime. You know, O'Shaania has never been at war with Eurasia. And they're saying all the quote unquote right things. But one of the ways that the Russian information operations worked is precisely there is a considerable body of people who are serious, journalists, scholars and such like, who kind of can be mobilized for the right message. And it's interesting how actually far few of them seem willing to put themselves forward for this, in part because of sheer distaste what's going on, in part because they think it's actually a totally stupid and dangerous move.

And in part, I think because, and again, this is, I think, a really interesting thing because it has some serious implications for the stability of the regime. But if you have just that inkling that things might actually go rather badly and that you might actually someday have to answer for what you say and do, then even the most cynical and soulless individual might think, I'll try and sit this one out precisely because you think that this one might be just a bit too dangerous. So I think for all these different reasons, we're seeing much more the B team being deployed, or even the C or D team. And then you can contrast that with the Ukrainians, who first of all, again, have right on their side.

They have the underdog factor. They have all of these things that makes them appealing. They also have an astonishingly powerful sort of icon in the form of President Zelensky. Now, again, I don't in any way want to make this sound as if I'm sort of minimisive. it when I say, you know, he is a trained, an experienced performer. He's a comic and an actor. Now, look, all politicians are actors in some way or other. But he knows how to do it well. People wondered if he ultimately would have the backboat to be an effective leader in a time of crisis. Well, I think he absolutely has demonstrated that that's the case. And you have this incredibly

powerful juxtaposition of the aging Botoxed Warlord in his bunker and the relatively young vibrant Ukrainian president who's not wearing a suit, he's wearing a t-shirt and a flag vest, and he's out in Kiev demonstrating that he's with his people. I mean, that's powerful for the Ukrainians themselves. People need these kind of cohering figures. And it's also incredibly powerful. We saw when he spoke to the European Parliament just today, you know, massive, lengthy standing ovation, even though in effect, he was actually berating them for not doing more. So, I mean, I think, you know, all of these things have come together. But I would just throw in one other fact.

We have always in the West pretended that we are the good guys, which we kind of are, and that we don't use more underhand methods, which we do. But especially in the Cold War, we were very good at political war, all kinds of different ways of fighting political war. And then to an extent we seem to have got, after 1991, a bit fat and lazy, we sort of kind of forgot. But I think the muscle memory comes back really very quickly. And I think we're also saying that actually we in the West, we are definitely not only giving the Ukrainian information campaign a nice boost, but also there are other instruments being used already. And I think this is it. Really, we are returning to the Cold War. It's not an

ideological Cold War, really, but it is absolutely going to be the Cold War. And a lot of the old Cold War skill set is, I think, going to find itself sort of brought out and adapted to the modern age, which is, of course, what I talk about in my book, the weaponization of everything, incidentally. Is it dangerous that Zelensky is so good at what he does? And what I mean by that is can the West actually sit back and watch Zelensky get a bomb fall on his head? Is he enticing us into war? I mean, it's a good question. And certainly the current campaign, in some ways I think, you know, again, this is what you do in these circumstances. But, you know, the Ukrainians having got, I think, much more than they were anticipating in the sort of first stage in terms of material, in terms of sanctions against the Russian, and such like. Of course, in that situation, you're not going to say,

well, well, that worked out pretty well. No, no, no, we're fine now. You know, they're going to push further. They're going to try and take fullest advantage of the momentum. And I think this is what we're getting in terms of calls for a no-fly zone, calls for other kinds of sort of direct intervention and such like. And yes, it becomes very difficult to deny Zelensky that. On the other hand, I think we should never, ever underestimate the ultimate cynical self-interest of Western politicians to be able to, on the one hand, clap Johnny Foreigner warmly on the back and say, we're right behind you before wandering back off to go and do something else. I think that, yes, if Zelensky dies, he will be obviously a very

powerful figure of martyrdom of, you know, more or less to become a new secular saint of Kiev and Ukraine. But I think that so far at least, as I say, I get the sense that the West has sharp identification of the lines beyond which they're not willing to go. And therefore, you know, they're not going to just get through into that point of thinking, oh, God, how can we say no to him? Okay, let's, you know, start shooting down Russian planes or similar. I think everyone is aware of the potential jeopardy here. And, of course, Putin has been doing some nuclear sabre rattling just to remind them in case they had forgotten. That's going to be like television we haven't seen in a long time from Europe to watch Ukraine fall. It just sort of boggles my mind.

And I think it'll be a real test. Well, it won't be, it also won't be on television. It's going to be on Twitter and telegram channels, right? Yeah. Well, translated to TV. you didn't be. Well, again, I mean, you have all these segmented audience. Exactly. This is it. I mean, you know, it'll hit the social media channels first and then kind of like a rolling shockwave. It will move to other media and even then end up on imprinted newspapers. But yeah, I mean, I think, and again, that will be an issue because also there's the question of, you know, already what there's 600, more than 650,000 refugees in in European, European Union countries. there's, I can't remember, certainly more than a million internally displaced refugees within Ukraine. And again, you know, one can expect that they will end up being pushed into Europe.

And that's going to have a massive, disruptive impact there. And, you know, in a push for this notion that, well, something has to be done. We can't just simply sit back and let that happen. And, yeah, I mean, look, it's not impossible. I mean, I think that the point is that I suspect that it can. again, if we do reach that stage. And I think it's impossible, actually, that the Russians will have such a bloody nose that they might actually revise their notional objectives. I mean, at the moment, it's Putin saying, oh, it's all, it's not about conquest, it's about demilitarizing Ukraine and denazifying it.

Well, obviously, that actually all requires control over the whole country. But it might be that actually they'll push back to, say, the Donbass region and say, no, no, no, as we said, we were never about invading Ukraine, but we want to protect the ethnic Russians and the Russian speakers of the Donbass region, and therefore that that's where we're going to consolidate. So it's possible that we might see something like that. But again, I'm not convinced that the current iteration of Putin would be willing to do something that clearly would be a reversal unless he suffered very, well, he, Russia had suffered. very badly beforehand.

We'll have to wait and see. But I think a particular concern of mine is this. Let's say, give falls or surrenders. And essentially the Russians control the country but are fighting an insurgency. You know, it's fairly clear that we have made it very clear in the West that we will continue to assist that insurgency. Now, obviously, the Russians will be doing what they could to interdict any such assistance. And so, yes, you're going to have helicopters and Spetsnaz out there. on the borders, trying to catch shipments and such like. However, I find it very hard to believe

that the Russians won't actually be rather more aggressive than that. And I'm not talking about sending sort of armed task forces across the border into NATO countries. That's an immediate Article 5 issue. But think about what happened in 2014 in the Czech Republic, a place called Vrubyatica, where a civilian arms depot was bombed by operatives from Unit 29155, the sort of Russian military intelligence hit squad because munitions there were being sold to the Ukrainians. And then they went after the Bulgarian arms dealer who was responsible for the deal and tried to poison him. Well, if they could do that in 2014, I see no signs to suggest that the Kremlin is any less belligerent and risk-taking in 2022. So again, I mean, I think we will see these

kind of operations being launched, and that will in itself pose a political challenge to the West. I mean, you just simply regard this as a policing and counterintelligence function, just to try and catch these people and then put them on trial or humiliate them or whatever. Or do you think, no, we also have to respond in some way ourselves, perhaps not by sending operatives across the border, but perhaps, let's say, with more aggressive cyber attacks against Russian military-industrial targets. And that can lead to the kind of slow accretional escalation rather than the big, I hesitate to use this word, bang,

types of shift in the nature of the relationship. I worry about cyber attacks, cyber attacks specifically. I feel like so much of that is new and the boundaries around it and what does and does not constitute war are undefined. And I'm waiting for the day that a cyber attack is met with retaliation that looks like war. But, you know, we'll see how that plays out in the future. Tell me more about the weaponization of everything. Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it sounds quite ironic and as if actually the basic thesis of the book has been disproved by Putin. Because one of the

the key thesis of that is actually that state-to-state wars become much less common. they're too expensive. They're too counterproductive, and particularly in this integrated economic age, we're all within the same economic space, but also the same information space. They're actually that much harder and to pointless to fight. But on the other hand, that people are still people, nations are still nations, and the various rivalries that exist between us, continue, and in some ways are actually much less constrained in the post-Cold War era and in this age of mutual integration. And essentially, therefore, the book is really a kind of a guide to different, all kinds of different ways that nations can mess with other nations to try and bring about the effects

that they want. Because after all, it goes back to the whole Klausovetsian notion. War is a continuation of politics. War is just basically one of the means you use to make another country do something it doesn't want to do. And I think that there's vastly more options these days. And we know about things like disinformation, but there's also lawfare, there's the mobilization of culture. There's not just economic warfare in the form of sanctions, but there is

the sort of thing that the Chinese are very good at, which is essentially using influence, strategic influence, as a means of undermining and challenging other countries. So basically it's that. And to link it to the Ukrainian war, what's actually striking is that right up to the point when Putin pulled the trigger, things were going his way. He built this massive task force on Ukraine's border, which absolutely could roll in and fight, but just simply by its presence, it was a massive form of coercive diplomacy, of heavy metal diplomacy. And not only was it really harming the Ukrainians, I mean, the Ukrainian economy was tanking at that point, but also it was sufficiently scaring the West that they were beginning quietly to prod and push Kiev to make concessions

to Russia. Meanwhile, Ukraine was being barraged by the whole range of non-kinetic attacks. We had cyber attacks. We had obviously economic warfare, particularly the use of energy. We had disinformation, subversion, essentially state terrorist style, low-level physical attacks. All these kind of things were going on. And so at that point, if Putin had only read my book, he would have realized just how powerful all these instruments were. And actually, he was winning. Because also, I mean, he could just simply maintain this force in being. I mean, there are costs, but not costs that an authoritarian regime cannot afford to pay, especially not one that's got a half a trillion pounds foreign reserves.

So it was there in force. He could have just sat back, let the Americans nominate one more date after another when they thought the big invasion was going to happen, and then just sit back after a certain point and say, look, we told you we weren't going to invade. and particularly to the Europeans, say, so tell me, why do you think the Americans were lying to you? And what else do you think they've been lying to you about? I mean, it was all going his way. But for whatever reason, he was too impatient.

He needed to seize the initiative. This wasn't dramatic enough. Or maybe he just hates the Ukrainians that much. I mean, who knows quite what the human imperatives, what is clearly really a one-man war were. And now we're in a situation in which, in some ways, he is using the kinetic means, and we're in the West are using all the non-kinetic means at our disposal, increasingly so. And we're going to have to wait and see which of these is more powerful. But when it comes down to it, as we see, what, 30% off the value of the ruble,

as we see the Russian economy really coming under very heavy pressure, as we see Russia more and more isolated, which, incidentally, when it comes to the Russian people, I think it's a very bad move, but there you go. You know, in all these cases, I think we're actually going to find that Ultimately, it's going to be the non-kinetic means that will prove to be more powerful. I have only one more question, Matthew, you might have something else. But my final question is, what about Belarus? Is Belarus ever going to get rid of the Russians?

Or did we all just throw up our hands and say he can keep that? Maybe not two countries, but he gets one. All indications of the last 48 hours seem to be they get to keep it. But I think in some ways they had already really sort of taken out the mortgage on Belarus when they bankrolled Lukashenko. I mean, he continued to basically sort of try and play the autonomous figure. But in practice, where else was he going to go? It was no way he could again walk back what he'd done.

He couldn't go back to the West and say, actually, come to think of it, you know, the old order in which I played you off against Moscow and vice versa. Can we go back to that, please? No, I mean, I think, again, he was stuck, and, you know, the Russians have now, well, firstly, they've moved 20,000 plus troops into Belarus, of whom, you know, only some were ever going to leave anyway. But now they're essentially forcing Lukashenko, again, to incriminate himself in this war, you know, to actually send troops to provide military assistance. And we certainly know that attacks on Ukraine have been launched from Belarusian soil with Belarus,

or with Lukashenko's approval. So, I mean, one could say, yeah, well, you know, at least he gets that country. And there are certainly some commentators in Russia who are saying, exactly, you know, the whole Slavic Union is back together. We're bringing the ban back together. But let's be honest, is Belarus an asset or a liability? I mean, actually, that means that, again, Russia, even if suddenly this war went away, which obviously it's not going to do.

You know, Russia is now stuck with a pariah state that it has to shield and it has to bankroll. I've got one more, Jason, before we let you go, Mark. So in the weeks leading up to this, you know, obviously U.S. intelligence was telling people exactly what was going to happen. Nobody believed it for good reasons, I think. But also there was a lot of people, a lot of journalists and a lot of analysts who are Russian speakers, some of them native Russian. who know this stuff in and out. We're looking at this and they were saying, you're all crazy.

Putin's not going to invade. It's not going to happen. I've been watching this guy for my entire career. I know his mind inside and out. This is not, he's playing a different game here. You don't understand 40 chess, etc. And now they were all taken by surprise. Many of them have said this is completely recalibrated everything I thought I knew.

What do you make of this new Poooo? Yeah, I mean, and it's worth saying. I mean, I'm one of those. Again, it's interesting, it's the military analysts who were actually sort of hawkish all the time. The political analysts on the whole were saying, no, come now. I mean, from my view, I mean, I didn't rule it out, but I thought 30 to 40 percent chance that we'd have this military escalation, but the higher likelihood was not that this was actually coercive diplomacy. And, you know, let's be honest, maybe if actually Putin had got enough of what he wanted. beforehand, maybe he wouldn't have pulled the trigger, who knows. Again, that's, you know, someday we'll get the memoirs of his bodyguard or whoever actually listened to the actual conversations and we'll find out whether he was just all along that barking mad. But I think the thing is, it's often very difficult to kind of spot a paradigm shift until it's just bitten you.

I mean, in this case, I mean, I think back to the fact that it wasn't just that it didn't seem to me as if Putin would do that. It's that everyone I was speaking to in Moscow thought the same way. And again, because, you know, Putin wasn't telling people what was happening. This has come as a real shock to everyone. And I think this is what suggests that we're dealing with someone, as it were, not who's totally new. And I hesitate to say mad. I mean, there's a lot of it. There's always mad. The trouble is, if you say he's mad, you're more than saying from this point onwards, we cannot possibly try and predict him. And I think we have to continue to talk. We have to assume that there is a logic and try and understand it, not to forgive, but precisely to know what we're dealing with. But again, I think that just as in some ways the annexation of Crimea was a paradigm shift, where he actually decided, hang on, no. You know, I knew the West was coming after my allies and so forth and didn't really like Russia and wanted us to sort of be neutered. But when the CIA created,

the Euro-Maidan rising in Ukraine, because, you know, as far as he's concerned, of course, it couldn't just simply be a natural organic rising against a corrupt and unresponsive government. But when the CIA did that, that's when I knew they were coming for me. That's when they were actually coming right into my backyard, and that's when we started to be a war. And I think this is it. I think what we actually got from 2014 onwards was war fighting Putin. Again, political war, but, you know, that was his mindset. But in a way, we didn't really know it until, I think, the annexation of Crimea really marked that stage.

And we haven't really seen much of Putin in the last couple of years. I mean, again, particularly, but not exclusively because of the COVID. You know, we have occasionally seen him in, well, at the end of very long tables or, you know, in carefully staged events. But, you know, actually, Putin has not been particularly evident. We haven't really had a chance to savor the full breadth and richness if he's thinking. And that goes for Russians in the presidential administration as well as for pundits and observers. So I think this is the issue that there has been that new paradigm shift. And yeah, it's hard to spot it until it happens.

Mark Goliati, thank you so much for coming onto Angry Planet. It's always a pleasure, one of our favorite guests. Thank you. It's always fun for me too.