Front Burner - Putin’s Wars: A history in conflict (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

You can’t understand the chaos in Ukraine without understanding Vladimir Putin. The Russian president rose to power as a wartime leader, and that legacy has shaped his approach through decades. Ben Judah is the author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin, and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. He spoke to us about how Putin sees the world and what his past could tell us about Ukraine’s future.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. If you caught yesterday's show, you'll know that we're taking a two-part look at some important history in Ukraine and Russia to help understand the war right now. Part one about Ukraine specifically is great, but you can still appreciate this episode without having heard it. I think it's fair to say that you can't understand this invasion without understanding the person waging it, Vladimir Putin.

Today, we're going to try and do that. From the wars that he's waged in the past to the ways his presidency has changed through these conflicts. Ben Judah is the guy who knows all about this. He's the author of Fragile Empire, How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. And he's a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Europe Centre. We got him on the line and Ben started by telling me about the context in which Putin came to power more than two decades ago. in which Putin came to power more than two decades ago. It's really important to talk about Russia first and not just Putin.

Russia at the end of the 1990s was in a very difficult position, economically, geopolitically, internally. All hopes of a better life, of living standards, reaching those of the United States or Canada within a few years had been dashed as the Soviet economy had imploded into chaotic, heretical privatisation, runaway inflation and finally a default. And within Russia, the breakaway territory of Chechnya had defeated the Russian army humiliatingly, leading to widespread fears that not only the Soviet Union but also Russia itself and all of its many Muslim republics within the

Federation, in the Caucasus or even in the Volga, would start to break away as well. In this context, the frightened leader Boris Yeltstsin feeling that on some level he'd led russia into this terrible situation surrounded by a group of uh officials and oligarchs known as the family became very frightened that if they left office or they gave over power they might phrase a prosecution this family began searching for a president to put in place and the man that they found that the oligarch boris borisovsky found was vladimir putin vladimir putin had risen rather chaotically from being a lieutenant colonel for the kgb in dresden back to politics in uh st uh St Petersburg uh where he's from natively and then through a whole kinds of uh strange twists and turns that ended up as a figure in

Moscow and as a head of the FSB Russian Domestic Intelligence and Berezovsky thought that this would be a great guy to be a bodyguard president for the family because he had sort of security rank he was relatively young he was pliable he was healthy in fact he was everything that Boris Yeltsin was not. So first, Boris Yeltsin made Putin prime minister, a clear sign that he was laying a path for the presidency. Just a month later, a series of mysterious bombings in Russian apartment blocks. 300 people dead. The government blames Chechen terrorists, and this serves as a catalyst for the second Chechen war. Putin speaks in strong, crude terms.

We will follow the terrorists wherever they go. If they are at the airport, we will be there. Excuse me, but if they're in the toilets, we will go in there and blow them away. That's all there is to it. The problem is solved. And suspicions have long lingered that these attacks might have actually been orchestrated by Russian intelligence services. Later independent investigations presented evidence that strongly suggested the bombings were a false flag attack

coordinated by Russian security services to win support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya. Just a few months later, Putin is riding a wave of popularity for his tough stance on terrorism, and Boris Yeltsin hands over his presidency on December 31st, 1999. On December 31st, 1999. At the start of Putin's presidency, it really sort of begins in war with Putin's spin doctors, although really at the time they were Berezovsky and the Yeltsin family's spin doctors, take him to Chechnya shortly after midnight in New Year to sort of celebrate the sort of chiming of the Kremlin clocks at midnight with the troops and little plastic shot glasses of vodka. So being a war president was a fundamental part of the message from the very beginning.

And tell me more about how Putin handled this war, known as the Second Chechen War. So the Second Chechen War, that's Putin's Chechen War, ends in Russian victory. And it ends in Russian victory at enormous cost, which is the siege of Grozny. There's nothing left, as Mirzara kept repeating. There's nothing left. Nearby, an awesome array of military equipment stands ready for the task of levelling the city. The 20,000 civilians left inside won't be allowed to stand in its way. Devastation of the city captured through artillery fire and multiple human rights violations,

pretty similar sadly to the sieges we are seeing in Kharkiv and we are likely to see soon beginning on Kiev in Ukraine. Putin, at the time, was not yet a personalist dictator, as we like to call him in political science. Putin was a sort of populist strongman. It wasn't clear how democratic russia was or wasn't and putin presented himself as a sort of west friendly nationalist that wanted to sort of modernize his country and his economy wasn't expansionist ideological or imperial was simply trying to bring this rebel province to heel and

who was fascinated by figures like Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, who viewed him as sort of model modern leader. Putin presented his war on Chechnya as an anti-terrorist operation. So notice the language that's lingered to the present in which he's describing his war on Ukraine as an anti-terrorist operation. And when the West took no real steps to sanction or place any pressure whatsoever on Putin because of his intense rhetoric that this was something necessary for Russian security,

these were terrorists, he was ready to help the West on all of its other dossiers, he took a lesson from this, which is that the West is all talk and no bite when it comes to human rights violations. This friendlier relationship with the West that Ben mentioned might be hard to imagine now. But in March 2000, Putin entertained the idea of Russia joining NATO

when asked about it by a journalist. Why not? Why not? I do not rule out such a possibility in the case that Russia's interests will be reckoned with if it will be an equal partner. In April of that same year, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, I believe that Vladimir Putin is a leader who is ready to embrace a new relationship with the European Union and with the United States, who wants a strong and modern Russia and a strong relationship with the West. and a strong relationship with the West. Putin was the first international leader to call then-U.S. President George W. Bush after the 9-11 attacks. By November, he was visiting Bush at his Texas ranch.

Yesterday, the two presidents took a car ride on the estate of George Bush. That's approximately 650 acres. And that was followed by a cowboy-style dinner with country music. They even addressed a local high school together. Yesterday, we tasted steak and listened to music, and all of this with a single purpose and objective, to increase the level of confidence between the leaders and the peoples. President Putin liked the barbecue last night.

Ask him. I just don't know how you can make such meat. It seems like it doesn't happen. Just I had a hard time imagining how could a living person create such a masterpiece of cookie. Fantastic. living person create such a masterpiece of cooking. Fantastic. An assembly that ended with Putin enlisting the help of the students to invite Bush to Russia.

At the count of three, those who want your president to come to Russia, raise your hands and say yes. One, two, yes. Thank you all. Very good night. But obviously, Putin's behavior towards the West changed. There's a big strategic picture where the West is at fault. And then there is a personal picture about how leaders interact with each other and how they can trust each other where Vladimir Putin is at fault. So let's unpack that.

The big picture failure is that Russia began the dissolution of the Soviet Union, convinced deeply idealistically that even after the confrontation it had pursued with the United States and its allies for decades, it was going to be sort of welcomed into the community as a sort of vice president of the West and not a ceremonial one. And the West would offer it a sort of Marshall Plan. And the West was never able to provide the necessary funds. There was never a Marshall Plan for Russia, and the West was never able to offer some kind of route map to genuinely actually joining the West structurally. And the reasons are the reasons in the second category. They're the reasons of how politics operates

personally. And that's they simply never could trust Boris Yeleltsin and vladimir putin who were practicing human rights violations already with the first chechen war and in the second chechen war already where russia was pursuing elements of revanchism in the baltic states viewing itself as a suzerain over ukraine and central asian uh territories so from a kind of big picture, mega strategy perspective, the West was never able to integrate Russia into its solar system and strategists view that as a failure. And maybe if it had managed to do so, we wouldn't have ended up in this tragic situation we're now in.

But you can understand why it didn't happen, because politics doesn't take place on the level of strategy, it takes place on the level of people. This simply wasn't a country that was behaving in its leadership like it could ever really become a genuine NATO ally, which means not just signing a pact with the West, it means integrating into the West's actual defensive military structures. So for them, and I tend to agree from the leader's point of view, it looks impossible. Earlier, Ben described Putin coming to power as a sort of populist strongman. But the nature of Putin's rule, it started to change. And Putin's turn against the West continued. Putin moved into an anti-Western position because of a couple of factors. The first is his strongman rule started to evolve into an authoritarian regime.

The elements of democracy that had been constructed by Boris Yeltsin were dismantled and then progressively destroyed. The elections of 2004 were almost completely rigged. As he entered the Great Hall of the Kremlin for his inauguration, Vladimir Putin was well aware that he has a free hand for what is supposed to be his second and last mandate. And then he started to fear a democracy was coming from protest movements across the former Soviet Union. A lot of it supported by Western foundations or Western idealism or grants. When he looked at two revolutions that take place, one in Georgia and one in Ukraine in 2003 and 2004 respectively,

Georgia and one in Ukraine in 2003 and 2004 respectively. Putin doesn't see the dynamics of simply open societies westernising and dreaming of a place in a common European home that's democratic and anchored around Brussels, where both the EU and the NATO headquarters are. He sees CIA plots to his sphere of influence that he believes is rightly his coming for him next. We've got a backdrop here of the Iraq war. of what in hindsight, you know, foreign policy analysts and historians view as a highly dangerous, belligerent American unilateralism with very destructive consequences. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict. Which frightened Putin, made him think that this country was unstable and hostile and had not come to terms with a sort of peace, a cold peace after the Cold War and was in fact the next opportunity going to try and sort of come after

Russia in whatever ways and he starts to think the relationship with the West has gone south. Things get tense, things come to a head in what's called the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008 and just as a kind of sign of how close the relationship was Putin had accepted NATO's eastern expansion to Romania, Poland, even the Baltic states that were part of the Soviet Union, because he said, obviously, NATO is a defensive alliance. It's not kind of aimed against me or attacking me. And he still harbored hopes of playing an important political role sort of around it. He was at the summit and at the summit, the question of should Ukraine and Georgia be given a sort of action plan to join nato came up here in bucharest we must make clear that nato welcomes the aspirations of georgia and ukraine for their membership in nato and offers them a clear path forward to meet that goal

putin famously said that ukraine is not even a state it's really just an extension of russia that's accidentally become independent and made it clear that a decisive break in the relationship would happen if this went ahead. A compromise was decided on, and actually in hindsight, the compromise itself looks rather dangerous,

in which these countries would be told they have the option, the possibility of joining NATO in the long run, but that was not going to happen anytime soon. And in that uncertainty, things start to go wrong geopolitically. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

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That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. So I wanted to get a sense from Ben of Putin's other military incursions besides Chechnya. Into Georgia in 2008. Into Crimea in 2014, the bombing campaigns in Syria starting in 2015, and what Putin might have learned from them. You know, it's not only as political scientists like to say, you know, the state makes war and war makes the state. It's also the leader makes war and war then remakes the leader. Putin was determined to stop Georgia joining NATO. He provoked Georgia into attacking a rebel area of Georgia under

Russian influence and he staged an intervention. Columns of Russian tanks and troops rolled into the American-backed former Soviet Republic of Georgia today after a nighttime barrage of artillery fire and rockets. It was a rapid lightning war. It actually smashed the Georgian military. People were very scared and some people are trapped right now. Civilians, many civilians are trapped in their houses in those cellars as very heavy fighting still goes on. And with it, any hope of that country joining NATO.

And the response, no Western sanctions, Georgia's NATO EU membership, not only being completely taken off the table as a realistic prospect, Georgian society entering into a sort of spiral of defeats, which resulted in a sort of oligarch with a more sort of Kremlin accommodationist politic taking over the country. Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia's newly elected prime minister, and with a fortune estimated to be around $6.5 billion, he's also the country's richest man.

He viewed that as simply what he had to do. You know, he had to cut through all this rhetorical guff that was emanating from the West, find out where power and response really lied, and then act. And once he acted, he could recreate facts. So after that, we see a desire to have a reset. We see a desire to have a relationship with the West, coming from the Western side with

Russia that puts these things behind. And he interprets that as a sign of weakness. And then we have a few more of these interventions. The next one is in Ukraine. Putin decided that he had to take action like in Georgia to stop Ukraine leaving this, what he believed was a Russian sphere. He annexed Crimea. It was an operation that was done incredibly successfully, a special operation done with almost no resistance. With the stroke of a pen, Russia defied protesters in Kiev, minorities in Crimea and leaders across the Western world. Crimea is about Sevastopol, a legendary city.

There were Western sanctions, but they were not really serious. They didn't dismantle Russia's place in international capitalism. They didn't stop Russia's presence in the sort of international oligarchy around the world enjoying the high life in the cote d'azur or in london's mayfair or in switzerland or even in the uh united states and he thought actually yet again they're all uh talk and no bite i can live with this i can live with a bit of tension a bit of cold war actually serves me if these oligarchs get sanctioned then putin decided to do it again and to intervene in uh syria and through a very bloody very messy very chaotic series of special uh operations cockpit video from

russian bombers over syria today pinpoint strikes against terrorists claim the russians as ever in war such claims should be treated with extreme caution the russian military managed to turn the tide in favor of uh assad the syrian uh dictator in his regime and they managed to turn syria into a sort of russian client state and you'll notice that syria within hours had recognized putin's uh recognition of the sort of fake republics of Donetsk and Luhansk that started this war. Sometime after that, Putin changes. I'm going to pop in one more time here, because you're about to hear Ben use some political science speak about yet another change in Putin. He says Putin starts running a personalist dictatorship. Basically,

the decisions of Putin and Putin alone determine policy. Putin goes from being an authoritarian leader ruling a regime, a guy who when he made the decision to annex Crimea, gathered his henchmen around him, they did a polling, see how it would play with the country's population and then only then did they strike to being you know a personalist dictator and in this sort of phase of personalist dictatorship Putin begins to believe things that are not quite true he begins to overestimate himself he begins to make poor decisions he begins to make make poor sort of military choices and he begins to draw up a battle plan for a special operation to bring down Ukraine. Putin thought that he could do a special forces lightning attack to collapse the Ukrainian government within days, send the Ukrainians really bring them back into the uh russian fold in some capacity and do that

shock the west and before the west knew what was happening he would have gotten away with it and there wouldn't be any serious sanctions and the sanctions there would be he could withstand that now what's happened is that as often happens with personalist dictators they make a terrible mistake they draw up utterly ridiculous war plans. And Putin's made a lot of mistakes in the first few days. He thought that he would grab huge swathes of territory and actually turn into a really difficult slog. So we're now in that phase. And Putin underestimated the West. He sort of bought the froth really online about the end of the West and the West sort of having collapsed under European sort of indolence and corruption and Brexit and Trump and sort of rubbish about Biden's age. And he's set out to revive an empire like the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. In fact,

he's revived the West. He's been hit with very severe sanctions that have actually pushed him, I would go as far to say, out of international capitalism. Given all this, given how this war is certainly somewhat more, as you've said, more of a challenge than he was expecting. I know you can't predict this, but how then does this end? Or where could it go from here? So how do wars end? How does a war like this come to its conclusion. When a personalised dictator goes to war, it's really all about him. So we can see two things that a personalised dictator can do in this context. One is he starts to see cracks at home and dissent, panics, and then cuts a deal. Or he can think, I'm looking weak. I need to go all in i need to keep fighting otherwise they'll get

rid of me so those are the two realistic ways that putin is going to approach this it's not as if russia has entered into a war and then there are a whole series of russian leaders they're going to be pushing him to keep this going that would be the wrong way to look at it and really how's it going to end we could see two scenarios uh there you know one is that he fights on for uh another week or so and starts then seeing us to the west if they remove the sanctions on the central bank and they remove all these banking sanctions he'll declare his special operation complete uh in exchange for an agreement that ukraine will never join uh nato and the country demilitarizes to some capacity or he could have concluded that actually a break

with the west a break with catholicism itself sort of suits suits him and he will rule as a sort of uh sort of north korean dictator of the largest country uh in the world in a sort of hermit state and in order to achieve that and retain his throne he has to sort of press on like the war all the way to for a siege of kiev and uh all of the blood that will come from that, in which case we might see the map of Ukraine come to resemble tragically the map of Syria, in which there are, goes on for a very, very long time. There's an incredibly complicated map of sort of patrols, semi-rebel held areas, rebel held areas, a real sort of patchwork, roads that are controlled by sort of rebels by night and the government by day, and a lot of bloodshed and a lot of refugees coming

out of it. So the answer is we don't know. Certainly the Russian military appears to have received orders to switch into Chechnya mode and out of special operation mode. But we need to be humble about what we know about a black box like the Kremlin. Okay. But Gina, thank you so much for this. Thank you. Thank you. That's all for today. Front Burner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. Our producers are Simi Bassey, Imogen Burchard, Ali Janes, Katie Toth, Derek Vanderwyk. Mackenzie Cameron and Noorah Dean Karane do our sound design. Joseph Chavison did our music. Our intern is Samantha McNulty. The executive producer is Nick McKay-Blocos, and I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.