Irregular Warfare Podcast - The Motivations and Methods Behind Russian Hybrid Warfare

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

How do significant historical events and Russian cultural memory—especially those surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union—shape the Russian worldview? How do they motiviate Russia President Vladimir Putin? And what impact does that have on the way Russia employs hybrid warfare? In this episode, Shashank Joshi and Dr. Rob Person join to discuss these questions and more, including potential Western responses to an increasingly aggressive Russia. They conclude by exploring some of the implications for both the public and the practitioner. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

One view is to say he wants to destroy the West, he wants us to crumble, you know, which is sort of almost sometimes verging onto the Bond villain theory of Russian foreign policy behavior. Whereas I think it's more productive to think about some of this as being driven by insecurity or indeed, if you prefer to be less charitable, paranoia. insecurity, or indeed if you prefer to be less charitable, paranoia. Corruption is not a feature of the system. It is the system. Putin controls the flow of all of that revenue that's coming in from Russia's natural resource sales. He's the one that decides where it goes, who it goes to, how it's used. Welcome to episode 48 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm Abigail Gage, your host today, along with Shauna Sennett. Today's episode explores the historical motivations and modern methods behind Russia's use of hybrid warfare on the international stage. Our guests begin

today's conversation discussing how significant events in recent Russian historical memory have shaped the worldview of the Russian state, with particular emphasis on the role that the collapse of the Soviet Union had on the psyche of Vladimir Putin himself. They then explore Russian motivations and methods since the end of the 20th century, pivoting to potential Western responses to an increasingly aggressive Russia. Our guests conclude with implications for both the public and the practitioner. Shashank Joshi is the Economist's Defense Editor. Prior to joining The Economist in 2018, he served as Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and Research Associate at Oxford University's Changing Character of War program. He has published books on Iran's

nuclear program and India's armed forces, written for a wide range of newspapers and journals, and appeared regularly on radio and television. He holds degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, where he served as a Kennedy Scholar from Britain to the United States. Dr. Rob Person is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, where he teaches courses in Russian and post-Soviet politics, international relations, and comparative politics in the Department of Social Sciences. Dr. Person holds a PhD in political science from Yale University and an MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies from Stanford University. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a resident fellow at West Point's

Modern War Institute. 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 our conversation with Shashank and Rob. Shashank, Rob, thank you so much for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare podcast and welcome. We're excited to have you both today and we appreciate you taking the time to join us for this timely conversation. Thanks very much, Abigail. Really looking forward to our discussion and it's an absolute honor to be on the show. I'm a longtime fan, so thank you very

much. Yeah, thank you so much, Abigail. Really pleased to be with you and your listeners today. I've long admired your work and really am thrilled to be able to talk about this really important part of the world with the podcast today. Thank you. So today we're talking about Russia, the bear to our eagle. We're going to be discussing Russia's motivations and methods in hybrid warfare. Russia is using an increasingly bold combination of conventional and unconventional instruments of power, as well as subversion and disinformation throughout its

international relations. This trend is not new, but as of recording this on the morning of March 1st, the world stands witness to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It feels almost cute to be asking, but why is this an important topic to discuss in 2022? So about 20 years ago, actually it was 2003, I was starting graduate school and I had a very well-meaning advisor tell me, and this is a verbatim quote, if you want a job in political science, don't study Russia. Russia is finished. Nobody cares about Russia anymore. I was stubborn. I stuck with Russia and have been working on it ever since. But I think it sort of reminds us today that Russia is not finished and we ignore Russia at our peril. And

despite what people predict about a declining power and a rising China, the reality is that Russia can continue to significantly affect and harm our national interests and those of our allies. So, you know, that's why we're here today. That's what they're doing. And I mean, from my perspective, of course, I agree with all of that. But I'd also say I'm here from a country where Russia has mounted not one, but two unconventional radiological and then chemical attacks on British soil in the past 15 years. Something perhaps, you know, if you stood here from the vantage point of 1995, 1996 and said, you know, what would be the odds of Russia using Polonium-210 on the streets of European capital to assassinate a dissident? And that's, of course, Alexander Litvinenko, or using Novichok, this astonishingly potent nerve agent designed for military purposes, to attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal, the former Russian intelligence officer. You'd think

this was preposterous. And yet here we are, which is just one of the instruments we may discuss in the conversation ahead of us. Yeah, that's a great context. And I think to set our baseline a little bit, I'd like to ask Rob, if you could give us some background in what aspects of Russian cultural memory and Russian psychology drive the way they interact with the international community. Sure. So I think the foundational moment in the Russian national psyche is the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It exerts a traumatic economic, social, psychological effect, I think, on all the citizens across the former Soviet Union. It ushers in an incredibly traumatic decade of transition, economic collapse, weakened democracy and whatnot. So this is sort of a

collective trauma that they have all experienced and certainly shaped the way they think about domestic politics. That experience in the 1990s really kind of sours the idea of democracy, opens the door for someone like Putin. Speaking of Putin, I think we all know now that the Soviet collapse also exerted a pretty massive effect on his personal psyche. He's often spoken about it as this great geopolitical tragedy. And many people think that part of what he is trying to achieve now and has been for the last two decades is not necessarily the recreation of the Soviet Union in territorial terms,

but the restoration of Russia as a great power. And so I think that is a really important sort of historical, cultural, psychological influence that we're seeing played out today. cultural, psychological influence that we're seeing played out today. What I think is so interesting is also this pull of history that you talk about. We can't avoid, I think, talking about the speech delivered by President Putin, perhaps a week before the point at which we're speaking here, this extraordinary speech in which he talked not just about Ukraine, but more generally about the dissolution, not just of the Soviet Union, but going further back, the dissolution of the Russian Empire and his bitter, hostile language towards the Bolsheviks, who he blamed for letting Ukraine go. And of course, if you're sitting there

looking at this from the perspective of other countries like Finland, another former Russian possession that was cleaved off during the Bolshevik era, you'd be looking at that pretty worried. So while the Soviet collapse is that focal point, I'm really interested in your view as to how much an earlier sense of territorial loss of kind of fragmentation going back to the 1910s, the 1920s, also still inflects Russian strategic thought today. Yeah, that's a great question and a great set of observations, Shashank. So Ukraine has a very complicated territorial history and a very complicated and lengthy relationship with Russia and its predecessors. Parts of today's Ukrainian lands

have been under Russian imperial control going back centuries. Other parts in the west of today's Ukraine actually are fairly recent additions. And so there's this very complex sort of cultural landscape that maps onto the territory. And in many respects, it does come down to what you've identified, which are different historical narratives, it does come down to what you've identified, which are different historical narratives, different narratives about how the Ukrainian people relate to the Russian people, how those cultures interact. Are they different? Are they the same? And one of the things that we have seen Putin is very adept at doing, as you noted in your comment about the recent speech, is the

manipulation and the utilization of historical myths. And let's call them for what they are. They are myths about this complicated history, and he uses them to serve his contemporary political objectives, as he's doing in Ukraine, as he has done in the Baltics, as he has done in Georgia. It's a powerful tool in his hybrid arsenal. So Shashank, when we consider what Russian motivations are right now, how do we disentangle Russia, the state from Vladimir Putin as a leader? And is that something that's unique to this current time period? Or is this something that we've seen throughout

Russian history where the leader might have some sort of outsized influence or personal type of experience that influences the way the state operates. When George Kennan was assessing Soviet foreign policy at the beginning of the Cold War, he was looking at what he called sources of Soviet conduct. He was looking at what he saw as deep-rooted impulses, tendencies, beliefs that he felt transcended any particular individual leader who embodied lots of these different currents. So whoever you put in the Kremlin, to some extent or other, would behave in similar ways because they were being driven by these structural factors that had their roots in Russian imperial thinking. And, you know, I'm sure modern historians will look at those views very

critically. What I think is really interesting about Putin is that from an outside non-expert perspective, I'm just a sort of humble journalist trying to make sense of this. My assumption was, and our assumption was, he did also embody lots of those bigger trends. You know, he was doing what many Russian leaders might have done in the same circumstances in terms of trying to exert this control after a period of relative Russian weakness after the end of the Cold War. He was trying to reassert control over the space that he felt was justly Russian and had been lost and ceded. In the last couple of weeks, I'm kind of rethinking some of that and wondering how much of this really is Putin. I'm sorry for us to drag it back to the Ukraine crisis because we don't

want to just get bogged down in that. But it is important to say when I saw his interactions this weekend with Sergei Shoigu, his defense minister, and with Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the army staff, they looked pretty terrified when he was raising the nuclear alert level. When he spoke to Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, he was stumbling, mumbling his words to Putin. He was also terrified. I think we're looking at a much more personalist dictatorship, a regime where the whims of one man are much more important. And that perhaps somewhat disassociates it from these kind of underlying structural trends in Russian foreign policy. Rob, is that right? Or am I overstretching that?

No, I actually think that you're pretty much dead on. I think that many of Russia's highest strategic objectives, the kind of world it is trying to achieve, create for itself right now, a lot of those strategic objectives, I think, are grounded in a deep sense of insecurity that is the product of history. It's the product of geography. And so in that respect, I do think that you could insert another Russian leader and they would still hold more or less the same strategic worldview and orient Russia towards those same goals. In that respect, I've long sort of thought that it's not necessarily Putin centric, although he certainly puts his stamp on the way that Russia pursues those objectives. But I'm with you, Shashank. In the last few weeks, I think we are seeing that much of Russia's behavior in recent weeks, months and years seems to be increasingly dominated by what goes on in Putin's head and

inside his head alone. And I think that could be a product of increasing isolation of Putin during the COVID crisis. But also, as you note, even in isolation from his own advisors, his own inner circle, that perhaps these battles are now playing out in his head without a lot of external influence from even his closest so-called advisors. The Russia way of governing seems pretty alien to our democratic principles. Shawshank, are there any particular difficulties or rather barriers to translating Russia's government for a Western audience? There are many difficulties, but one of the things is the information environment. You know, I worked in Russia briefly in 2006 for the National Democratic Institute, NDI, and it was a time when repression was still occurring at the beginning of Putin's rule,

relatively the beginning, six years in. But it was nowhere near the level it is today. You know, you could still have foreign NGOs operating, NDI was operating, you know, an American state linked NGO that was operating in Russia for democracy promotion. That couldn't happen today. The information environment has become more and more constrained in Russia. Independent press outlets have been squeezed, civil society has been squeezed, political opposition has been squeezed. And I think the result of that, or one result of that, is it's more difficult to understand what's going on. It's more difficult for people to penetrate the thinking of the Russian leadership. Less news gets out. The Russian elite itself is cut off from the Kremlin to an even greater extent, which, by the way,

I think is one reason we see this utter shock among the Russian elite at the invasion of Ukraine. They simply didn't expect it. No one expected it. It was very tightly held. So there are many reasons it's difficult to sort of understand it for us. But I think the information environment and the lack of good, reliable news from that inner circle, the lack of sort of transparency is a huge factor in that. Is there a structural component to this too, where it's hard to grasp that a state works like this? Yeah, I think a lot of this comes down to fundamentally different worldviews in the United States compared to Russia, especially when we're talking about foreign policymaking elites and the orientation of the country's foreign policy. Since the end of World

War II, the United States has pursued a very active liberal institutionalist vision. We basically built the institutions, the organizations of the global economy, and built it on the principles of free markets, free peoples, democracy, because that suited our interests. And so I do think that we tend, as Americans perhaps, to sometimes take an over-idealistic view of the world and the actions and intentions of other countries. It's very clear that Russia and Putin are playing a very realist game to reference, you know, the realist tradition of international relations theory. This is sort of the body of thought that says that international politics is all about power.

It's all about balancing the power of others, maximizing your own share of world power. It's a hard-nosed realpolitik game. That's the game that Russia is playing. That's the game that Putin believes in. That's the world that he sees. And so part of our difficulty in understanding what the heck Russia is doing right now, I think stems from the fact that it's just such a different way of thinking about the world than we're used to, that we are stunned that we're seeing this raw exercise of naked power right now on a scale that we haven't seen since 1945. This creates a great opening to talk now about what Russia's parallel experience

to the post-911 experience has been. So about 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9-11 occurs on American soil. The U.S. and its allies head to war, conducting counterterrorism and coin operations in MENA in Africa. What's Russia doing during this period? Well, at the beginning of this period, of course, it's wrapping up or engaging in the Second Chechen War, which is, you know, something that sort of Putin initiates and rides initially to great popular success. And that actually, as some people may remember, creates a certain convergence between the United States and Russia in that period. You know, Putin is seen as a counterterrorism partner. This is a high point in some ways for NATO-Russia relations. You know, people like the Secretary General of NATO were

meeting with Putin and saying, our differences are behind us relations. People like the Secretary General of NATO were meeting with Putin and saying, our differences are behind us. This is all history. And of course, that's not how it turned out. And then as you go on through the 2000s, that changes. And by 2007, I remember Vladimir Putin gives a famous speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he articulates the grievances against NATO, against the West. He accuses America of overstepping the boundaries after 9-11, of sort of exercising its own raw assertion of power and acting like as if no one else has any legitimacy. And he sort of delivers a speech that shows how frustrated he is. And then these other grievances begin to play out,

you know, the invitation for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. And then in 2008, we have the Georgia War. Russia invades and attacks Georgia. It goes very badly. And that precipitates a period of military modernization. So all in all, you know, relations are good at the beginning. They then sour. And Russia spends a lot of that 20-year period when America is fighting counterinsurgency to rebuild its armed forces into what is supposed to be a leaner, more effective force. But as we've seen in recent days, may not in fact be quite that. Rob, this seeming synchronization between the United States and Russia on the topic of counterterrorism, was there actually alignment there? I mean, it sounds like it was fairly fleeting and perhaps

superficial. Early on, post 9-11 period, when we do have this warmth and relations between Putin and George W. Bush, part of what Russia is hoping to get out of the United States is an acknowledgement that Russia's war against Chechnya is an anti-terrorist operation and part of that global war on terror. And we make some sort of symbolic gestures and statements sort of in recognition of that. But as Shashank noted, that period of cooperation and warm relations, it doesn't last very long. It's pretty much over by the time the United States goes into Iraq in 2003. Since we're discussing hybrid operations and hybrid warfare, it is worth saying that the event that I alluded to at the beginning of this podcast, the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko on British soil, that was 2006,

before the Munich speech, before the Georgia campaign. And if you're looking back at indications of this more aggressive, robust Russian approach to political warfare against the West, and assassination has certainly been one tool of that, it goes back perhaps further than we imagined. You know, 2006 is now not very far off of two decades ago. So that tells you how, you know, the lineage of this is quite far back. So I'm actually going to go even farther back than that, because I think that the colored revolutions in the post-Soviet space, which really have their starting point around 2003, are a really, really important element of understanding where Russia is today in terms of their strategic behavior and in terms of their utilization of these hybrid tactics. Colored revolutions, first we see it in Georgia in the Rose Revolution,

then we see it very prominently in Ukraine in the Orange Revolution of 2004 and 2005. These are instances where corrupt, fraudulent elections result in the toppling of pro-Russian governments or pro-Russian candidates. And in Ukraine's case, it ushers into power a very staunchly pro-American, pro-Western governing coalition. And this is really significant because I think it affects Russia and Putin's thinking about the world around it in really important ways. Number one, this is the first time that they have awoken to the possibility of losing Ukraine to the West. And that is a major strategic red line for Russia, as we're seeing today. But the other reason that this is such an important moment for us to understand and

appreciate is that I think this is where Putin is faced with the prospect of corrupt autocrats like himself being driven out of power thanks to popular protest and mobilization. And so he takes it as a threat to his own political control as well. And so he takes it as a threat to his own political control as well. If it can happen in Tbilisi, if it can happen in Kiev, it can happen in Moscow as well. And interestingly enough, he starts to believe that these popular protests that are part of the colored revolutions are actually instances of American instigated hybrid warfare. So in Putin's mind, America is the country that's been waging hybrid warfare, political warfare, irregular warfare against Russia for decades.

And I think he believes that he's only fighting back now using the same methods. Well, since Rob raised the color revolutions, I thought it's just worth adding a sense on. I talked about assassination. And of course, we should mention then the attempted poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin, a sort of toxic substance, was in 2004. So even by then, we were seeing some of the instruments of this sort of Russian subversion or direct targeting of hostile individuals, even in 2004, linked to those revolutions. One other thing that Shashank raised that I think is worth delving into a little bit more.

So he mentioned the effect of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War on Russia's military modernization program. As he noted, Russian forces don't perform that well in that conflict, and that's what launches this modernization program. But the other thing that they learn from that conflict is they got their butts handed to them on the international information space. They basically lose the information war in Georgia in 2008. And so I think that's a moment that spurs them not just to modernize their military, but to really step up and start investing in and cultivating those methods of informational warfare that we see deployed to great effect in 2014 in Ukraine. So Shashnik, when we consider this period in totality from that post 9-11 period to 2014, when we have that Crimea inflection point and things start to change,

would you characterize most of Russia's behavior as focused on international interactions, those proxy wars and external engagements, or focused on domestic stability? And can these two things even be disentangled? You know, I'm just trying to think of the broad sweep of Russian actions over that period. And I just see so much of it connecting to moments of what Rob talked about as insecurity, Russian insecurity at different points, whether that's the color revolutions on Russia's periphery, whether that is the sense of the 2011 protests in Russia that, of course, Vladimir Putin seems to have personally blamed on American leaders and American politicians as fomenting those. And actions that we would see as an aggressive Russia trying to cause chaos in our democracies, and this includes everything from examples that you'll know about extremely well, like intervention in the 2016 election, to things that perhaps we now think less about, you know, things like the false flag attacks on French television stations designed to look as though they were Islamist attacks. Things that look, you know, kind of puzzling from the outside. You would think, why is there some guy in Russian intelligence who has

been told to launch a fake cyber attack on a French television station? And I think one view is to say he wants to destroy the West. He wants us to crumble, you know, which is sort of almost sometimes verging onto the Bond villain theory of Russian foreign policy behavior. Whereas I think it's more productive to think about some of this as being driven by insecurity, or indeed, if you prefer to be less charitable paranoia, and the way in which that cascades and reaches a crescendo in the last decade with things like 2011, the protests and so on. So I think the other thing to keep in mind is there are multiple sort of angles and elements of insecurity. And much of the discourse tends to be focused on Russia's perceptions of externally oriented insecurity, the threat that NATO enlargement has posed to Russia,

the threat that Ukraine's defensive cooperation has posed to Russia. But insecurity is also a domestic variable as well. And it's something that Putin is highly sensitive to, or at least aware of. And if you think back into history, it's worth remembering that the most significant moments of either Russian political reform or outright state collapse have been tied to external conflicts that Russia has been involved in. So the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 is a disaster for Russia. It leads directly to the Revolution of 1905 that forces Tsar Nicholas II to make these sweeping concessions to essentially liberalize Russian imperial politics.

Of course, we know that Russia's disastrous performance in the First World War leads directly to the Russian revolution, the collapse of the imperial state, and the creation of the Soviet Union. And 74 years later, Russia's loss, essentially, of the Cold War, its inability to compete internationally and to survive economically, brings about the collapse of the Soviet state. So there's this very tight linkage in history between Russia's external insecurities and external conflicts and some really cataclysmic moments of domestic instability, insecurity and collapse. And I have to believe that those historical lessons are on Putin's mind today. We've been talking about Russia and Putin almost as if being interchangeable. We've said Russia, we say he. What gives Putin such a strong hold on Russia?

When ordinary people think of Russia, they may think of the Kremlin, Putin, and oligarchs, kind of this class of rent-seeking, enriched business leaders that made a lot of money off the shock capitalism inflicted on Russia in the 90s, and who have lots of economic and political power in Russia. And Rob will correct me if I'm mistaken about this, but my sense is that is, that's also somewhat out of date. And when you know, we look at Vladimir Putin's war cabinet today, the kind of locus of decision making, the people I'm looking at are a very narrow coterie of people, right? The head of the National Security Council is Patrushev, a former intelligence person, the head of the FSB, of course, is an intelligence person. The head of the SVR is an intelligence person. The defense minister. These are quite

old people. I think their average age is in the mid-60s. They mostly have a KGB background. They're securocrats. The collapse of the Soviet Union that we talked about at the beginning was a formative experience for them. And over the last six or seven years, they've all been implicated in Western sanctions. They're all in the bunker with Putin. Right. They have nowhere to go. They can't take their assets and run away. They can't go abroad. And so that cluster of people around Putin has grown narrower and tighter. And it's not as if there are these economic liberals with an eye on Russia's economy that have the ear of the president. So I think the voices that

really matter in the Kremlin have narrowed and sort of shrunk, leaving that smaller group of KGB inflected people. Rob, is that too crude? Am I putting it too simplistically there? No. So the thing that we have to understand about Putin's regime is that corruption is not a feature of the system. It is the system. Putin controls the flow of all of that revenue that's coming in from Russia's natural resource sales. He's the one that decides where it goes, who it goes to, how it's used. Anyone who is an oligarch in Russia doesn't actually have sort of long-term control over their wealth and their assets. It's all at the behest of the Kremlin. It's all about staying in Putin's good graces. So coming back to the huge question that Abigail started

with, I don't think it's a stretch to say that it is really hard to imagine a Russia without Putin, or at least the current system functioning without Putin in that role. And so it's hard to see how the elites could perhaps try to replace him if there were enough dissent. It's hard to see how the elites could perhaps try to replace him if there were enough dissent. It's hard to see how somebody else could step into that role and continue doing what Putin does, because there is nobody who is positioned to do that now. And so this has some serious implications about the long-term stability of Russian politics, I think. We've been talking about a lot of Russia's strategic objectives, both foreign policy and domestically. Can we hone in a little bit on what tools they're using or how they're

enacting this? And I'd like to start with how does Russia leverage unconventional instruments of power, state power, tools of subversion, disinformation, cyber, psyops, domestic opinion, throwing all these things in one bucket? How have they been leveraging those and have they been effective? I'll start with Shashank. I mean, where do we even begin? Yes, to all of the above. I'll scope you to Europe, okay? Well, I think that's useful, you know, because in the post-Soviet space, I do think we've seen a similar approach to control post-Soviet states, keep them in the Kremlin's orbit, using all these things, but particularly things like economic leverage. But in Europe,

the approach is somewhat different. Every instrument you've listed, I can think of interesting examples of that in Europe. But I would say there's sort of a few categories of things, right? There's a kind of short, sharp blow designed to throw people off balance, designed to destabilize. And I would put in that category things like the hack and leak operation against Emmanuel Macron's presidential election campaign. There is stuff that we throw in the hybrid warfare bucket that I really don't think belongs in that bucket. So for example, a lot of Russian cyber activity is indeed routine espionage. Now, you don't have to like it, but I'm afraid it is routine espionage

that most major powers do against one another. And I'm really resistant to put that in the same bucket as assassinating someone or pumping disinformation into a European state to try and pollute the information environment. Not in Russia's favor. But are the rules that they operate under when they're using cyber tools, are they still different? Well, let's not forget there are multiple Russian intelligence agencies doing their own thing in the cyber domain, right? And so when we talk about what is Russia's cyber behavior like, the answer to that question is different if you look at the FSB, which has traditionally, for example, been a more cautious actor in cyberspace in some regards, than if you

look at the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, which has been a much more reckless actor in cyberspace and has taken on more risks in the way it's behaved. So, you know, that varies. And then there are different operations. You know, some operations are, you know, let's just steal secrets, whereas other ones that we've seen, for example, the cyber operations against Ukraine in 2017, the NotPetya attack, was an effort to destabilize and attack Ukraine. But look, this caused $10 billion of damage around the world, and it had huge consequences. And I would call that pretty reckless. So even when you have a kind of targeted operation, the willingness to kind of inflict consequences on the rest of the world to take

risks is quite high. So that's one thing. I guess the other thing I would say is, from a European perspective, what worries me most or what I think about the most is not really the assassination stuff or the kinetic stuff, because that's bad and it's norm-breaking and it's dangerous, but it isn't kind of systemically a problem. It's the information stuff that worries me the most, because I see Russian state-linked media outlets and troll farms and bot networks really polluting the information space across Europe. And the big problem is that it's not that it just promotes Russian views, which would be bad enough. It's that it makes Europeans unsure of whether they can believe anything at all, right? It's a kind of information chaos approach. And although we've got better at handling it, that's the kind of line of hybrid attack

that I think has been most egregious and troubling in the Russian approach to Europe in the last decade or so. I'm going to use that as a launching point to get at what I see as as sort of more the strategic purpose of these hybrid, gray zone, irregular, asymmetric, shenanigan tactics. We still haven't really settled on a good vocabulary for them, but there's a tendency, I think, for folks to get a little bit over-focused on the tactics themselves and lose sight of the broader strategic picture that Shashank sort of alludes to. So it's too bad that I can't share pictures on a podcast since it's just audio, because if you look at a graph of Russia's GDP over the last 30 years compared to the GDP of the United States and China, you control for inflation and

all that stuff, you'll see that not only is there a really wide gap between the size of Russia's economy and the size of America's economy and China's, that gap is only getting wider and wider, which is to say that Russia's economy essentially is growing slower than the other two economies. And so if we think about GDP as this really blunt sort of metric for, you know, how much money do you have to spend on achieving your strategic objectives? The reality is that Russia has a pretty weak hand and And there's a lot of macroeconomic trends and structural issues in the Russian economy that basically suggest that they don't have the ability to bend that line upwards in the coming decades. So if your main strategic

challenge is how do I narrow the gap between my country and my top geopolitical adversary? I think Russia has concluded that a more effective strategy than trying to develop their own internal resources is to do whatever they can do to tear down the United States, to weaken, to divide, to undermine essentially the chaos strategy that Shawshank noted. And so that's why I think these tactics that do just that are such a prominent tool in their strategic toolkit. Aside from all the conventional stuff that's going on in Ukraine, we can't take our eye off the ball of those asymmetric tactics that will continue to be waged against us and our NATO allies. Rob, would you say that all of these activities up until basically a couple weeks ago were in

preparation for the culmination of conventional activities in Europe? And would you say that their move to more conventional types of engagement has been successful or effective the way they envisioned it? That's a great question. I'll be honest with you. I have been a bit surprised that we have not heard or seen more sort of from the information cyber asymmetric front in its current conflict and the lead up to it. cyber asymmetric front in its current conflict and the lead up to it. Again, that is how Putin got away with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It could simply be that media coverage and attention

is just so focused laser-like on the conventional attack right now that we're just missing a lot of what's going on in sort of the irregular realm. But it has been surprising to me that they don't seem to have gone to that sort of toolkit in the current conflict as prominently as I would have expected. Yeah, I think that's really true. You know, cyber operations in particular are the dog that hasn't barked. Everyone expected to see some kind of destabilization of it. If you're going to try and topple the government in Kiev, surely you'd think, you know, television stations, radio stations, power grids, train networks would all go down from the sort of much vaunted Russian

cyber capabilities. And indeed, they've done dry runs, right? They took the power grid down in Ukraine in 2015, 2016, briefly on two occasions. It didn't happen. This war was very badly planned and it's been botched. That is my preliminary conclusion to all of this. But we haven't seen significant use of non-kinetic instruments to supplement that military advance in any fashion. And I want to jump in here too and give credit where credit is due. I do believe that the Biden administration's strategy of very aggressive declassification of intelligence and then sort of pushing that out to the world, shining a bright light on Russian planning and their subversive actions in the lead up to the conflict, I think

that has been tremendously effective, not because it deterred Putin or slowed him down, but I think it was really critical in unifying global public opinion, unifying our NATO allies so that there was no doubt exactly what was going on when this conflict started. And I think that to sort of zoom out a little bit more broadly, I think that's an important lesson that we need to remember as we continue to fight an information war against Russia in the years to come. We know that they will not pull any punches, and we have to be prepared to defend that. And I think this strategy of very aggressively illuminating their lies, their deceptions,

strategy of very aggressively illuminating their lies, their deceptions, their deceits, could be an important tool going forward in this much longer and broader strategic conflict that we've been talking about today. It's clear that Russia, especially Putin, are set on remaining relevant in the near and long-term future. what options do Western democracies have left to respond to Russia? By way of answering that, let me just make a quick point, which is there's a way to look at this which says the pre-Putin era, the sort of 90s and the early 2000s, were the exception, not the norm. Last year, I read an excellent book by Thomas Ridd, a professor at Johns Hopkins at SAIS, an extremely good book called Active Measures, which is a history of Soviet and to some extent also American active measures. What was the Soviet term for what we might now call disinformation along with

other hybrid measures, everything from forgeries, fake magazines, fake broadcasts, all that kind of thing. And, you know, it's a reminder that the Soviet Union invested massive amounts in this through the KGB, huge, huge amounts, you know, in today's money. And indeed, the CIA also dabbled in this in the 1950s, although sort of ramped down a lot on that as the Cold War went on. So you in particular in the United States, but also us in the United Kingdom, we have a rich legacy of looking at this problem and how you confront it and how you tackle it. In the UK, we have something called the Information Research Department in the Foreign Office, which was pretty much a kind of bunch of intelligence people producing disinformation and propaganda. Because, of course, not all propaganda is simply fake news.

It can be kind of real news used in sort of strategic ways. One way of answering that is to say, look at the history. strategic ways. One way of answering that is to say, look at the history, look how we confronted it in the 70s and 80s, when the Soviet Union was doing this on an industrial scale. And I think the second thing I would say is, you know, I just got back from an excellent trip to Finland, where I spoke to lots of people, but it's also the home of the hybrid center of excellence, which is a joint EU NATO institution that is thinking about these precise problems. And when we look at the Nordic states, the Scandinavian states, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, the other Baltic states, we look at countries that have a lot of experience in this and who are pretty far ahead of the curve

in making their societies more resilient to it. And I think in Western Europe and in the United States and in North America, we have a lot of lessons we can draw from those countries. We shouldn't assume, you know, just because they're small, that we have it all sorted and we know more than they do. I think that's a really critical insight. In a lot of circles, there is a tendency to focus on Russia's military threat to NATO. And obviously, the current conflict in Ukraine reminds us that we cannot ignore their conventional military capabilities. But I have long argued and continue to believe that the single greatest threat that Russia poses to NATO as an alliance and individual NATO allies is exactly in this hybrid disinformation

cyber asymmetric space. And so I think we have to remember that this non-kinetic threat is very real, very corrosive, very dangerous. And so we need to keep investing in those capabilities through centers like the Hybrid Center of Excellence, the Strategic Communication Center of Excellence, a NATO center in Riga. They're doing fantastic work on these fronts, but we can't lose sight of that ball as we continue to take Putin's curveballs. Typically, we ask about implications for a community that's different from yours, right? But I actually think for Shashank,

you have a really unique position in your role as a defense editor at The Economist. And I'd like to actually tailor our implications question to you with what are the implications of this discussion for the public? And how can the public know what to consume when it comes to information about Russia, how to vet it and how to understand it and apply it? Gosh, there are so many. We've just had a debate here as to whether we should ban RT, the state-linked television station, and this might be done in the EU. And we're hesitant because to do that would be perhaps effective in making it more difficult for people to consume the

nonsense they spew out. But on the other hand, it would result in the BBC being further banned from Russia, which I personally think is much, much more important. We continue to broadcast high quality information and news to Russians. Then we strip away a station that not that many people watch in the UK or in Europe. So, you know, I just want to say, even as we think about how we help ourselves, you know, ultimately, we also have to think about the impact it has on Russians and on that side of it. From my perspective as to how the public think of it. well, you know, people like me are the conduit. And I think it's important that we continue to have really good sources of Russia expertise. I'm thinking of Rob's comment at the beginning, you know, that in the 90s or the 2000s, there were people who would tell students, don't study Russia.

You know, you're going to ruin your career, study something else. who would tell students, don't study Russia, you know, you're going to ruin your career, study something else. And I think it's a reminder for us that if you want people like me to be able to write about these things in a way that informs people, I have to have people like Rob, whose papers I can read, whose books I can study, who I can talk to for commentary to say, what does it mean where the Russians have said this or the SVR has done this. What does that mean in the context of Russian politics? So it's an indication that in Western societies, we have to fund real academic and substantive language and area understanding if we want to have an informed public. And if we don't have it, in 10 years' time, what you'll have in society without that. And societies that don't understand their rivals tend to do dumb things. Let's talk about the implications for the practitioners in the field.

I think the thing that we have to wrap our minds around is the fact that we're settling in for the long haul. This will be an extended and lengthy conflict with Russia. And I think the broad paradigm of containment is probably the right one to dust off and think real hard about. Going back to the Soviet period and the father of America's containment strategy, George Kennan, he's an American diplomat. He's working at the American embassy in Moscow in the 1940s. And in 1947, he publishes this anonymous article in Foreign Affairs called The Sources of Soviet Conduct. And in that article, that really has a lot to teach us even to this day. In fact, I think Shawshank referenced it earlier in the podcast. He wrote that Soviet power bears within it the seeds of its own decay and that the sprouting

of these seeds is well advanced. That was in 1947. It would take another 40 years before those seeds would fully manifest themselves and the Soviet Union collapsed due to its own internal contradictions and its own economic flaws that had been there since the founding. And so I think we have to recognize that this will be a long struggle that we have to be prepared to fight on new fronts. Many people have used the term Cold War 2.0. And in some respects, this current conflict and containment strategy may bear some resemblance to the first Cold War, but we know that it will be fought in different

places with different tools and with different actors that could really change the equation in very important ways. China, as a major global power in the 21st century is a variable that will inevitably shape this conflict. And we don't yet know how that dynamic will play out, but it will be very different than the dynamic of the 20th century Cold War. So settle in for the long haul. Russia is not going away. The threat that Russia poses to American and Western national security interests is not going away. And so we need to spend some time sitting down and thinking about how to play the long game. We've run out of time for this episode, but hopefully our discussion sparks many more. ZhaShang, Rob, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for another great

conversation on irregular warfare. Thanks so much, Abigail. It's a really absolute pleasure. Thank you for another great conversation on Irregular Warfare. Thanks so much, Abigail. It's a really thought-provoking conversation and a privilege to be able to have it with such interesting people. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much, Abigail and Sean. I really had a wonderful time. Thank you for joining us for episode 48 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks.

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