Irregular Warfare Podcast - From Little Green Men to Tanks Outside Kyiv: Irregular Warfare in Ukraine since 2014

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

In this first episode of our two-part series focused on irregular warfare in Ukraine, we're joined by Michael Kofman, the research program director in the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, and Kent DeBenedictis, a US Army officer and author of the book Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’ and the annexation of Crimea: The Modern Application of Soviet Political Warfare. They begin by exploring how Russia conceptualizes and implements irregular warfare at the macro level. They then explain how it has been operationalized in Ukraine specifically over the past decade, before discussing the interaction between irregular and conventional warfare in Ukraine between 2014 and the lead-up to Russia’s invasion in 2022. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

So they're going to use all sorts of non-military or irregular means and then use the conventional military instruments primarily as coercive backing or engage asymmetrically. That is, if one side's deployed in a war, right, conventionally, then the other side will back fighters and proxy groups and fund an uncertainty against them and vice versa. But both sides are now deploying conventional forces against each other. That's kind of the idea. That view of the world, of this color revolution theory driving these actions to the west is secretly subverting it, is yet again pulled from that same

Soviet mindset of that the counter-revolution is coming to introduce Western forms of government into the Soviet sphere through subversion. And just back then, the answer today is we need to get better at the West than this. Welcome to episode 55 of the Regular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Laura Jones, and today I'm joined by Kyle Atwell. Today's episode is special as it is the beginning of our first two-part series featuring an in-depth examination of irregular warfare in Ukraine. Part one of this conversation focuses on the Russian use of irregular warfare against

Ukraine beginning with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Our guests explore how Russia conceives and implements irregular warfare at the macro level, how it has been operationalizing Ukraine specifically over the past decade, and the interaction between irregular and conventional warfare in Ukraine from 2014 leading up to Russia's invasion in 2022. Michael Kaufman serves as Research Program Director in the Russia Studies Program at CNA and as a fellow at the Kennan Institute Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on Russia and the former Soviet Union, specializing in Russian armed forces, military thought, capabilities, and strategy. Previously, he served as a program manager and subject matter expert at National Defense University, advising senior military and government officials on issues in Russia and Eurasia.

Kent DeBenedictus is an active duty army officer currently on assignment in Europe. He holds a PhD in war studies from King's College London and is author of the book Russian Hybrid Warfare and the Annexation of Crimea, the Modern Application of Soviet Political Warfare, which serves as the motivation for today's conversation. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's part one of our conversation with Michael Kaufman and Kent DeBenedictus, and make sure to tune in to next episode for part two.

Michael Kaufman, Kent DeBenedictus, thank you so much for being with the Irregular Warfare podcast today. We really appreciate your time and we look forward to this conversation. Thanks for having me on your podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. Happy to be here too. Kent, tell us about your book on the annexation of Crimea and how Irregular Warfare played into that invasion. Build out what happened so we know where we are today. Yeah, thanks. So I had the great opportunity back in the early 2010s, right after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, what we saw in the aftermath was a lot of emerging

literature about what is Russian hybrid warfare. And the constant thing that came out of it was the fact that these are really just traditional Russian and Soviet practices reapplied to the modern scheme. So when we talk about the term hybrid warfare, we talk about the ways in which Russia used various informational, political, and military tools to basically manufacture the result they wanted. So it wasn't warfare in the sense of high combat operations, even though the threat of high combat operations was there in 2014 and in seeding conflicts before that. That allowed for the rapid annexation operation that we saw of the Crimean Peninsula. Then I think it continued on to Donbas, and that war became a largely frozen conflict the past several years. And then Russia initiated again here in 2022, starting on a similar path, basically the exact same playbook in 2021 and the beginning of 2022. And that's now morphed into the current conflict we see today.

A key argument in your book, Kent, is this idea that what some analysts have described as Russian hybrid warfare is in fact just kind of a historical playbook that Russia or the Soviet Union has used historically, and that it's actually nothing new. It may have adapted to new technology and whatnot. Mike, I wonder from your observations of Russian military approaches, as well as what's been going on, not just since 2014, but more recently with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, do you see kind of familiar patterns of Russia's approach to invasion and political warfare? Or is there something kind of unique that happened in the Donbass in 2014, and maybe more recently in 2022? I don't see Donbass as unique. It's very hard to find unique things in warfare,

which typically finds generations of military leaders or thinkers rediscovering things from the past, right? And adapting them and applying them to contemporary problems. And most of the time when you're on conversations with either military leaders or you're reading military thinkers in another community, which is kind of my profession, the Russian military community, right? Whatever you see them declare something that they claim to be new usually isn't. Usually whenever they declare something new, it's probably really old. It just happens to be new to them in their particular time when they're dealing with a similar set of challenges.

So I think when kind of exploring what Russia did in Crimea and Donbass and some of these cases, you saw much more continuity and evolution than dramatic change. Right. And that was not just when you look back at sort of Soviet practices. It was also when you look at post-Soviet Russian practices, because Russia was actually involved in a tremendous number of conflicts after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And you saw many kind of parallels to things Russia did in Georgia in 2008, and its involvement in a host of conflicts in the 1990s, in the early 2000s. So from my point of view, the real interesting thing that happened was the explosion of Russian interest in these topics. And that was really in the latter part of the 2000s. So there was a perception within Russian military thought that the United States was really good at this. And an assumption

that the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the color revolutions in the former Soviet space, that these were essentially engineered projects by the United States, or at least the United States had a hand in it. Part of that often had to do with the kind of bias, the confirmation bias amongst Russian elites that popular mobilization is impossible without an external hand, right, without some kind of elites mobilizing this and sort of assuming that somebody else had to be involved, somebody else had to fund it. And I think the pinnacle of this outlook was how Russians saw the Arab Spring as also kind of a foreign intelligence project to an extent. There's a strong Russian interest, particularly in the military, in various forms of warfare that could be considered asymmetric or non-contact.

Non-contact, not in the kinetic sense, but forms of warfare that are principally derivatives of political warfare or forms of irregular warfare. And that's exploded within the Russian military discourse. You know, the military itself was nonetheless primarily focused on conventional military operations as kind of the bulk of its activity. The community that wanted to talk and discuss things like hybrid warfare, Western hybrid warfare and the like really began to grow. So much so that you saw around 2019,

the Russian general staff actually tried to curtail this conversation because it felt like it was sort of ballooning and branching out. Mike, I think you make two great points there. One is on the, like you said, rediscovery of old topics and nothing's really new. And you brought up all the color revolutions as the trigger for that within Russian military discourse in the 2000s to 2010s. And what we are calling Russian, quote, hybrid warfare or irregular warfare, they probably call counter-color revolutionary war. Because as you said, anything they see as a movement like the Arab Spring or the Maidan

movement in Ukraine, or even the Rose Revolution, the other color revolutions in Eastern Europe have to be manufactured, have to be done by the West. So that view of the world, of this color revolution theory driving these actions, the West is secretly subverting it, is yet again pulled from that same Soviet mindset of that the counter-revolution is coming to introduce Western forms of government into the Soviet sphere through subversion. And just back then, the answer today is, well, we need to get better at the West than this. So when you read the literature you're talking about in the Russian military sphere,

even back in like 2013, in Gerasimov's famous speech on this very topic, he said, we must not just copy the foreign experiences and chases of those in countries, but become, outstrip them and occupy leading positions ourselves. In other words, we see the West doing these color revolutions. We have to be better at it than they are. Terms like hybrid warfare or givriniya vayna is just literally translated directly from the English into the Russian. They're not using that term themselves. We applied it to them. But again, they're trying to reapply what they see as our irregular warfare into their playbook. There's actually a debate within the Russian analysis community whether or not there is such

a thing as Russian hybrid warfare. That's just a term with which we label them, I'm clearly on one side of that debate, which is hybrid warfare is a Western concept, and the Russians began using it. But there's a whole story by some folks that actually there is also a Russian concept of hybrid warfare, and it sort of developed and evolved from Yevgeny Messer's Mityosh Vaino, and some of these concepts that Russian military thinkers rediscovered after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And I'm kind of skeptical of it because it's incredibly coincidental that Russian military thought discovers a set of tenets that are very much like what the Western discussion

on hybrid warfare and also has the same name and incidentally seems to be right around the same time when this topic takes off here. And part of the reason for this, to some extent, you definitely see other communities, right, borrow each other's terms to discuss similar problems. And you see a tendency to try to imitate what military communities think is working for others that they're looking at, right, particularly other major powers, basically look at the operational concepts of other powers, try to copy them. The biggest problem that Russia has had, from my point of view, is that it's very hard to imitate that which never was successfully. And the biggest challenges they've had in their interpretation is that in a whole host of cases, at least from what I've observed,

they have been able to employ IW effectively, but they've often tried to copy something that they believe exists, but actually does not. And that is why in many cases they fail, is because they misinterpret the causes, right, of the facts they're observing. And it's very hard to create a copy of something that never existed. In early 2014, the Russian attempt to create a counter-Maidan to what they thought was a U.S.-sponsored Maidan that forced Yanukovych to flee Ukraine in February 2014. And the counter-Maidan in and of itself was not successful for that particular reason. They couldn't create a campaign which they thought would be kind of their version

of what the U.S. had done, because actually the United States didn't do those things. So I want to jump in and kind of pull the thread on something both of you said. So we kind of talked about this nebulous idea of what hybrid warfare means to us and to the Russians. And Kent, you brought up Gerasimov's speech in 2013. Just like hybrid warfare, you hear the term Gerasimov doctrine thrown around in discussions. Is that another misinterpretation? Does that doctrine actually exist? Or what does that actually say with the integration of irregular tactics from the evolution of Soviet measures, active measures, and how they're integrated today? That's a great point. And I think Grasimov

doctrine and that term is another example of how we, especially in the military, can be very dangerous to a little piece of information. And actually, the gentleman who coined that phrase in a blog post right after that speech is Mark Gagliotti. And he has since disowned that phrase and pleaded everybody to please stop using the phrase because he says there's no such thing as this Russian way of war. I will agree with him in that there's no such thing as a Gerasimov doctrine. We're talking about General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff,

characterized as such based on a speech he gave in 2013 that was then captured in an article, and that was then retroactively labeled as the playbook for what we're talking about. His article very much captured the trends we're talking about, is Russia trying to identify these color revolutions the West is secretly conducting, and how can Russia adapt and make their own playbook for this type of model. Is Russia trying to identify these color revolutions the West is secretly conducting? And how can Russia adapt and make their own playbook for this type of model? So whereas I wouldn't say it's a distinct formal doctrine he's identifying, because again, he's identifying a Western approach that Russia is seeing in those speeches. It is still very much, as Mike mentions, this perception they see, and therefore they're trying to copy and apply to their own model.

So that's what they're seeing there. But yes, in terms of, is this a Russian doctrine that's a misnomer? I would add a couple more points to what Kevin said. So the first is definitely just kind of ran away from Mark's blogging laboratory. And he fully, as a good colleague of mine, he fully recognizes what happened here, that why you have to be careful in coining terms that sound attractive. And there is no single doctrine, there is no Gerasimov doctrine, that much is certain. What there is, though, is sort of cluster of Russian thinking on the subject. And its root may be first the belief that the Soviet Union never really lost the military conflict to the United States, but it lost the political conflict to the United States. And the United States was much better at political subversion than the Soviet Union. And then down the line, a kind of intellectual explanation for

the expansion of U.S. influence, seeing it as surreptitious advancement by irregular means. And then the military's job having to be responsive to the political leadership, because the political leadership began signaling very clearly that they see this as a principal challenge. Now, imagine you're chief of general staff. You have to explain what you're doing with your tremendously large budget as a share of GDP relative to one of the principal problems outlined by the national political leadership, which is Western political warfare, subversion, the effectiveness of Western intelligence agencies and the like, the way Russians saw them. And so you have to connect those dots and you have to signal to your own leadership that you

think this is important. And within that internal conversation, you also have to position your own establishment, the Russian general staff, as being thought leaders in that conversation too. So it's not just, you know, the FSB or other security organizations within the Russian political sphere that actually involve that conversation. On Gerasimov's particular speech, I always get overblown from back February 2013. In many ways, those were the Russian reactions to the Arab Spring. In fact, he draws them in part as lessons from the Arab Spring in that speech. And the article is a summary of a speech he gives.

The speech is more interesting. And most people have never read the speech. And the article kind of looks like three colonels tried to summarize the speech. But Gerasimov has written really interesting things since then. And, you know, not to bracket the conversation too much, but his most interesting one was actually the March 2019 speech, similar to the Russian Academy of Military Sciences. And Gerasimov basically says, okay, look, yes, there's the emergence of these new spheres of confrontation, modern conflicts and warfare shifting to integrate application of political, economic, informational and non-military measures. And they're all realized with-military measures that affect the

course and outcome of a war, and they establish the conditions for effective use of military force. So you see a lot of these instruments as being very effective at shaping the environment prior to use of force. So they're going to use all sorts of non-military or irregular means, and then use the conventional military instruments primarily as coercive backing, means, and then use the conventional military instruments primarily as coercive backing, or engage asymmetrically. That is, if one side's deployed in a war, right, conventionally, then the other side will back fighters and proxy groups and fund an uncertainty against them, and vice versa. But both sides are now deploying conventional forces against each other. That was kind of the idea. And one point that Mike makes, which was emphasizing in that speech in 2019, is that massive military power is used as a coercion tactic, not as necessarily a direct

tactic in the conflict. And that very much is in line with the model that we saw all the way up through the various Soviet campaigns into 2014. In 2014, in late February, when the new Ukrainian government was debating how to respond, the Russian leaders called them directly and said, if there's a single Russian killed, we will basically obliterate you as a country. They had the largest ever Russian military exercise on the borders right beforehand, again, as a coercion tactic. So the same thing back in those Soviet campaigns in like 1968, the threat of a single Soviet soldier being shot would lead to the end of the Czechoslovakia. In Afghanistan, there was a very swift initial operation through

a base of leadership, but then we saw a drawn-out military campaign over the decade, which ended poorly for the Soviet Union. I think that's a partial difference we're seeing today in that the same kind of playbook was laid out in the beginning of 2022, but then very quickly Russia shifted to a very conventional approach to the war, so the coercion wasn't there that we saw previously. It was a direct tool applied to the conflict. So I think there's two really interesting points to tease out here. The first is this story that from just kind of the casual observer in the U.S., you might have heard these terms, hybrid warfare, little green men that Russia has used and think, oh, this is kind of a Russian way of warfare. But in fact, the impression from Russia is that

they're kind of using a playbook developed by the West in the Arab Spring and other places. This is a kind of a theme that Seth Jones and Admiral Bradley talked about on this forum before. But I think it's very interesting to reemphasize that point that from their perspective, they may be replicating U.S. approaches to warfare. But the second thing, which I think I'd like to dig into a little bit more, and this is something you talk about extensively in your book, Kent, is the Russian approach. There's kind of the use of the military, but then there's also the use of other types of tools, political tools and informational tools. Can you kind of go over some specifics of what the components or tools are that are used in the Russian annexation of Crimea that also may have been used more recently in 2022? Yeah, absolutely. So I think

what we've been generally categorized as informational tools, there's political tools, and there's military tools. And in some ways, the military tools are even lesser importance in this political warfare tool bag that we're talking about. From the informational space, controlling the narrative and the use of propaganda and using consistent themes and disinformation and denials, it was consistent throughout. We saw that as almost a matter of policy in 2014 and again here in 2022. The second broad category from a political standpoint is the importance that Russia and the Soviet Union before it plays on the appearance of

legitimacy. So, for example, the leaders of the so-called Luhansk People's Republic and the Nazism People's Republic requested Russian support in February of 2022. And then Russia, in March of 2022, announced that they were going to defend them and recognize their independence. So this appeal for support was the appearance of legitimacy that allowed for Russia to take further action. That was the same priority for Russia back in 2014 through the referendum that we saw in Crimea. As you dig deeper into that actual referendum and the way in which about the new Crimean leadership came about, Russia completely manufactured that process from secretly meeting with the leaders who emerged as the leaders of the process and bartering between them to decide who would emerge as the next leader of Crimea to really closing off the

votes that led to the establishment of the referendum beyond that. Well, if you look from my point of view, if we look at 2014, in Crimea, you find a operation that's considered by Russia as incredibly successful, but not very repeatable, right? And most of the irregulars that were involved in it, they were backed by oligarchs like Malafeev, they were tied in with local elements. They saw the whole thing politically as disorganized. The Russian military seized the peninsula, but the political process for it wasn't planned. And these irregulars are kind of trying to corral Crimean parliamentarians for a vote to secede from Ukraine. The thing is very improvised, right? It's sort of ad hoc the way it's put together because the decisions are being made

on the fly. In the Donbass, you see Russia use proxies for kind of nobodies in the Ukrainian political establishment. These folks initially are losers, to be perfectly frank. They're nobody, marginal characters in the establishment, as local proxies to create a countermaidon, and they all get arrested very early on by Ukrainian authorities. It doesn't work at all. And's russian backed individuals who are actually from russia who then take over and turn and drive it more towards an armed insurgency a state-sponsored insurgency right and this evolves messily and eventually fails and russian military intervenes directly in august 2014 the short summary of that is sort of dunbas

was viewed as easily repeatable but a hot and massive escalation that ultimately ended up with conventional warfare. So all the regular steps involved basically kicked the can down the road while Russian political leadership procrastinated and wasn't sure what to do about it until eventually they just went with a straight up conventional intervention, faced the Ukrainian force on the battlefield, not once, but then again twice, and even a larger fight at 2015 in Tbilisi. So my own personal bias looking at these conflicts is that Russia usually tries all measures short of conventional warfare first, typically, not always, but most of the time. Second, they kind of have a generally similar flow of escalation to them. You know, you have local groups, you have local proxies, you have then certain groups from Russia like Cossacks that they add and send in to help stir things up. Then eventually you may get the addition of mercenaries or people recruited in Russia that are sent into the mix. And then for specific things they want to achieve,

you will find Russian special forces in there. And once they've created sort of an ecosystem of irregulars and paramilitaries, it's hard to separate them from what's going on. will find Russian special forces in there. And once they've created sort of an ecosystem of irregulars and paramilitaries, it's hard to separate them from what's going on, right? Once you kind of create this pool of, you don't know who's who, and it begins to look like a zoo of proxies and militiamen and mercenaries. And you can't even tell because they all kind of have a similar helmet. But oftentimes, when it comes to big political objectives, this doesn't get what they want, because you can create a very messy political situation, you can create instability, you can do something very interesting, which is seize the border. And once you seize the border,

you have tremendous escalation options, which is what Russians were able to do in Ukraine in 2014, and a good luck getting control of the border back. But ultimately, it often does escalate to employment of conventional forces. And I often have debate with folks to what point the irregular side of the house was more decisive or deterministic than the conventional side of the house. But the irregular side of the equation is really important because it often gets overlooked. But it is always the very early phase of the conflict. And something can go on for years in that manner. And where it's not successful in some cases, it may be in others. Because remember something critical, military power always needs a context to express itself. And how things shake out in one particular context

is not indicative of how they might work on another, not necessarily. You have to be very careful when you try to generalize lessons and you cut away the local context, the scenario, the actors and all that from the situation and try to say, oh, this is just how it's going to work, or this is just not how it works in modern warfare or in contemporary conflicts. Kent, I'd like to hear your kind of reaction to that. You know, reading your book and thinking about the political groundwork that was laid, the informational groundwork that was laid before conventional forces were put in in a significant way, I almost wonder if in this context, it's not inappropriate to say that the conventional invasion may have been decisive, but the irregular warfare activities were actually

like the shaping efforts to set conditions for that. I don't know if that would be a fair kind of interpretation of how the conflict laid out. Yeah, and I would just add on to that also as to how integrated is that thread from that first irregular effort to that conventional? Is that always pre-planned like that and it builds off the irregular effort or is we did this irregular thing, it didn't work, we're now completely switching gears to a conventional invasion? phases you're talking about here is the way in which the messaging that Russia employed in 2014, the same themes, the propaganda themes you're seeing today of the fascists, the Ukrainian nationalists, the misinformation about attacks on ethnic Russians going on in Crimea, and the way that spread on the peninsula, that when Russian forces did finally appear, they were greeted as the saviors by some of those Russian populations on Crimea. So I think that's where you see the example of the shaping operations you're talking about through the information domain, creating the conditions to allow for that.

I think another key point to draw what led to the success of things like Crimea in 2014 for Russia was the reason why they were able to put the number of Russian forces they did is because they were already there. So the key states that are at threat of this kind of Russian approach are those that have close relations with Russia. It's ironic, but that's what the case has been. In Crimea, Sevastopol and other bases were shared bases between the Russian Navy and the Ukrainian Navy. They even did joint exercises, talking to the Ukrainian sailors who were blockaded in their bases. When they looked out the gate, they were the same Russian sailors they had done an exercise with a week ago, or drinking vodka with the commander two nights before the invasion. Those are the same forces now threatening them and

containing them on the base and feeding the narrative that I'm here to protect you against the Western Ukrainian fascists that are going to come attack the ethnic Russians here. So those conditions allowed for the swiftness of this to turn very quickly in their favor. So I think when we talk about looking to the future, that same kind of playbook is possible. It's those same kind of states that have those friendly relations with Russia, ironically, that most are at risk of a similar incursion on their part. I think that irregular warfare and the way they approach it has tremendous shaping effects. And if you miss that, you miss the eventual opening and what could be a very long ramp towards a conventional conflict. And there's a lot of things that might get decided

or predetermined to some extent during that phase that then shape the conventional conflict that could be to come. And that's my take on Georgia. That's my take on the war in Ukraine as well. And on many other conflicts in the 1990s, whether it's Russian Volodymyr Novoselov, there's Tajik civil war. There's a whole host of conflicts that took place in the 1990s that are of interest. This, by the way, thesis ideas for those looking for wars that are underexplored and not very well read by the U.S. military. There's a lot of wars that really

could be characterized, including the ones we're currently observing now, as the wars of Soviet succession, the first and now the second generation of them. Because as Syria said, the collapse of Soviet Union is a process. It's not an event. What we are witnessing unfold are wars of Soviet succession. That's when the Gornikar-Bach war is too. And that's what the war is between Russia and Ukraine. And back in the 1990s, a lot of folks kind of felt that we got off easy in terms of the dissolution of the Soviet Union because it was interpreted as an event, as a thing that happened and then was done. But it isn't. It is a process.

Empires take a long time to dissolve and collapse. Yeah, I think the whole interwar period we're talking about between 2014 and now, and I shouldn't call it an interwar period because really it was the ongoing conflict in the Donbass, was it was a near-frozen conflict. And the perception was that Russia always had that lever there of increasing the conflict if it lets their political desires. their political desires. I think at the same time, the fact that that frozen conflict never went completely frozen also hardened Ukraine against the kind of unpreparedness you saw in 2014. For example, Ukraine was completely unprepared militarily for a Russian invasion in 2014, to include in Crimea. In 2013, the senior Ukrainian Navy heads got together to basically do their war planning, and the idea of a war with Russia came up and it was laughed off as absurd. And then a few months later, it was the beginning of the war with Russia. I think the fact that the war was ongoing the past several years, as Mike said,

basically this post-Soviet war that continues, Ukrainian perceptions that this war could not continue or go on was no longer a thing. And that allowed us to be more in support of any kind of response that we required. And I think the really geostrategic interest that Russia has when it looks at the connection to Crimea or the control of territory necessary to allow for the military presence it desires in Crimea, and therefore what territorial gains it may need, which is now consulting around to allow that to continue, is basically redrawing of those borders that were initially set upon in the 1990s, you know, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but which is not allowing the strategic goals that Russia is seeking, and therefore is looking to redraw those,

hence why we're seeing the territorial gains that Russia is seeking in the current conflict. I'd like to kind of delve into the tactics or some of the operations that tie into kind of the political and informational tools that are used, which I think we've kind of said might be shaping operations, seconditions for a broader invasion. But what are some of the specific tools Russia used in the 2014 annexation of Crimea? And do we see them again in 2022? Kent, I'd like to start with you, but then we can get Mike's reaction as well. Yeah, definitely. I think two examples that come to mind that you see a lot of is,

talked about a little bit, but the propaganda themes. And one of the key ones of those is in the rhetoric you see from Russia time and again is the threat of fascists and the threat of neo-Nazis. The key point is fascists has nothing to do with the politics of who's being targeted. Throughout the Soviet period, throughout the Russian period, the enemy of the Soviet Union is a fascist. It didn't matter the color of the politics. It was used simply to discredit the enemies because that was the enemy in the Great Patriotic War and World War II by Russian parlance. So this is like a propaganda or messaging tool that Russia systematically uses against anybody who's not on Russia's friend list, essentially. Absolutely. And the way in which we saw Sergei Lavrov dance around the fact that President Zelensky is Jewish and yet he still must be a Nazi, because that is the automatic response to who is the enemy in this conflict? It is a Nazi and a fascist. In 2014, it was in every single speech mentioned about why

Russia had to do something in Ukraine. So I think the key point is we don't need to spend any time looking for evidence of Nazis or fascists in Ukraine. Understand that it's the automatic reaction based on the propaganda theme that Russia continues to perpetuate for that conflict. A second key tool I think that we see played out again is these false flag operations. So back in 2014, one example that comes to mind was a series of masked men with assault rifles attacked the recently Russian-controlled Crimean Parliamentary Building down there in Crimea. And it made it all to all the headlines in the Russian news as well as the Western news channels of showing these masked men.

And then thanks to some very active Internet researchers, they uncovered based on the weapons they were carrying that these were actually Russian special forces who just threw on some tan T-shirts and some balaclavas in their faces. This past December of 2021, Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, said that once again, the Ukrainian army is preparing an attack of two cyber-celled territories. said that once again, the Ukrainian army is preparing an attack of two cyber-celled territories. And then there was a video that appeared on some Russian-backed social media platforms that showed a video of this supposed attack. And again, thanks to some internet researchers, they discovered that actually this video was recorded 10 days prior to the day it claimed to be. And the audio track was from a firing range in Finland. So these kind of false flag disinformation activities to provide justification and give that appearance of legitimacy to Russia's actions are some of the tactical tools that we've seen over and again.

Yeah, I very much agree that because for Russia, one of the central organizing national ideas for the country is the memory of Russian victory in the Great Patriotic War, right? If you look at kind of what are pillars of Russian national idea, that's always been one of them that's been one of the more unifying one but what i wanted to get into actually is to be both fascinating although terminologically is incredibly boring so in russian military thought for the categorization of approaches that they use on the particular information side these two terms the first one's called information technical and the other one's called information psychological. Information technical means are used to target and shape the thinking of elites,

and they actually involve complex technical means, using electronic means to insert specific information to drive decision-making in a particular direction. This is where concepts like reflexive control fall more into in terms of categories. And getting leads or decision makers to make choices or to distrust integrity in the information they receive, but to react a certain way by shaping their thinking. And it is quite technical in approach. Then there's information psychological, and that tends to focus much more on the public. And it deals with mobilizing the protest potential of the population, the notion of polarizing the population, kind of boiling the ocean. And the United States, we're very familiar with it.

That is more the approach where you see Russian bots on social media and these other activities. They're meant to, over time, gradually shape public thinking, but see if they can get the public to a place where they could actually mobilize the public to protest. And that's the part that I think is for Russia the most interesting. They can achieve these effects. Over a decade ago, of the Russian hacking of Estonia or the Estonian removal of a statue of a Soviet soldier, right? The interesting part, at least from my point of view, was not the sort of basic denial of service cyber attack

that Russia conducted on Estonia. And that's actually not what bothered the Estonians about it. It's Russian efforts along the side of that to mobilize compatriots and protests, the mobilization of people. So this dates very far back. We can see in a host of episodes that there's a technical approach, a cyber attack, an actual electronic attack of sorts. We can also see an attempt to mobilize protest potential of the public,

which in many ways can be more dangerous. It depends on the context. Yeah, I think that's what's so interesting about this Russian approach for me is this kind of significant focus on influencing the populations, both the Russian domestic population, but also potentially the population in the targeted state of invasion, so Ukraine in this instance. And at the heart, I think maybe this is what we talk about when we mean political warfare, is they're trying to kind of influence the populations to support or justify whatever the invasion is. And I kind of took this from your book, Kent. You talk about informationally phrasing or terming the enemy as fascist. The goal is really to convince the Russian domestic populace to support invasion, from what I interpreted, but also to kind of influence potentially the international community

and definitely that in the targeted state. Another thing you said that was really interesting, Kent, that I think is worth digging in a little bit more is that you argue that the Russians want the appearance of legitimacy for their cause. They're actually seeking to, their invasion is legitimate, even if inwardly they're manipulating the politics to kind of actually make a kind of false sense of legitimacy. Is that kind of an accurate interpretation of what was happening with the Crimean annexation? Absolutely. And I think case in point is you look at who emerged as and

still is leader of Crimea, and it's Sergei Aksyonov. And when he ran for office in the last election before 2014, he finished, I think, third or fourth in his minister district. But then based on the policy that went behind the scenes with Russia and the security services, he emerges as the leader through negotiation with Russia and remains in power afterwards. That appearance of legitimacy also, another key example of that was the way in which the invasion invitation came out. So when Russia made the case for taking action in Crimea in 2014, the ambassador to the UN held a letter up above and saying, this is a letter from the real president of Ukraine, President Yanukovych, requesting from President Putin a military intervention into his country. And that was then referenced by President Putin by the Russian government as justification for incursion. When

that was dug into in the years later, Yanukovych denied ever giving that statement. And in fact, when Ukraine tried to charge him with treason, Russia also denied that it was official statements. So it fell apart upon further scrutiny. I think that same justification came in 2022, in February here, when the leaders of the two so-called People's Republics put their own appeal into the Russian Federation. So that provided the grounds for their action. So your first point about, is the Russian population key in this dynamic? Absolutely. And I think we see that again today as well. And the way Russia has further cracked down on dissent within the Russian media space after the start of the conflict is to further solidify that domestic either support for the conflict or removal of dissension. I think that successfully was applied in Ukraine and other conflicts previously. But the way in which it has not succeeded in 2022, I think is very interesting.

I think Russia expected to have a similar response in the Russian speaking parts of Ukraine that it would have done in Donbass. But Ukraine's ability to use the information space as well and to build its own narratives, I think it's been highly effective. I definitely saw it as a part of Russian toolkit going back years, but it became very visible after 2014 because the confrontation between Russia and the United States and the West for at large became intensified. And you saw sort of, at least on the Russian side, that there was a license to hunt given in terms of various types of covert operations and actions and the like, right? And so you had a lot of Russian attacks in Ukraine, the Atari assassinations in Ukraine and outside of it in Europe. And you also had a campaign of sabotage, right? In fact, it took a while, I think, to detect that the GRU had a campaign of attack of industrial sabotage

taking place across Europe, where they were trying to attack munitions plants, they were trying to poison people who were involved in munition production that was going to Ukraine, and the whole host of other people that they were coming after, former intelligence operators who were used as traitors by the Russian regime. And this campaign was quite broader and took a while, I think, to piece together. There was a series of the same types of units in the military intelligence establishment, the jury doing it. But I want to comment specifically about this current conflict. Because if you look at the current war between Russia and Ukraine, you might look at and you might assume that the biggest failure on the Russian side is entirely conventional military.

We know already what some of them are. Failure of the airborne to be able to hold on to Gostinov, right? Russian forces driving in unprepared to fight, administratively driving in, poor integration of combined arms, poor resourcing, command and control. I can go down the list. But here's the interesting part to me. The real failure of this war is a failure in the regular side of the campaign that we actually know the least about. Because the conditions for a rapid Russian victory were meant to be set by an intelligence-organized campaign that was supposed to be carried out in the Ukrainian capital, in Kiev, that failed. And it failed colossally and spectacularly. First, the Russian FSB believed that they paid for something in terms of subversion and the coup they were going to

carry out that never happened. There was supposed to be an infiltration campaign. The first few days, Ukrainians were looking everywhere and at everyone in the capital, assuming that they might be infiltrators in Ukrainian uniforms. It was fear-inducing. And I know many colleagues in Ukraine who weren't sure if the regime was going to last more than a couple of days. This is a guy like Zelenskyy did not flee. He didn't surrender. But Zelenskyy himself thought he might be killed if you heard his opening statements. And why did he think he would be killed in the middle of his own capital? The assumption was that there was an organized, irregular effort by Russian special forces, by infiltrators, by intelligence. It's very clear.

And it does fail. And we know the least about this aspect of the war. But it was meant to set the conditions for what Russians expected to be the Ukrainian surrender. And that's in part why this was indeed organized as a special operation rather than a planned combined arms operation. And then that, of course, cascaded to all the other problems they had. Thank you again for joining us for episode 55 of the Irregular Warfare podcast

and part one of our two-part series on irregular warfare in Ukraine. We release a new episode every two weeks. Make sure to catch part two of this conversation next episode, where Laura and I explore the Ukrainian perspective on irregular warfare with Michael Kaufman and Kenta Benedictus. Following part two, Laura and Shana will discuss the book, The Bin Laden Papers, with author Dr. Nelly Lahoud and General David Petraeus. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode.

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