School of War - Ep 79: Mark Galeotti on Russia’s Military

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Mark Galeotti, director of Mayak Intelligence, host of the In Moscows’s Shadow podcast, and author of Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, joins the show to talk about the post-Cold War Russian Armed Forces. ▪️ Times      •    02:13 Introduction      •    04:26 The peak      •    10:04 In decline     •    13:04 A day in the life of a ’90s Russian soldier     •    16:23 The First Chechen War      •    21:17 Putin and Chechnya     •    24:42 Russia’s claims     •    35:10 Modernization     •    40:49 Historical karma in Ukraine     •    46:10 Big picture      •    48:20 Ukraine’s counter-offensive     •    51:49 Wagner and Prigozhin Follow along on Instagram

From the peak of its capacity, sometime around the end of America's war in Vietnam, the Red Army and the whole Soviet military establishment entered a period of decline that, after the USSR's fall, grew acute. In the 90s, fighting in the Caucasus only underscored how weak and yet somehow still just as brutal the Russian war machine had become. Then, with Putin's consolidation of power, the Russian military began what appeared to be a period of improvement, with performances in Georgia and Yugosier. This is the 2014 invasion, and in Syria, it drew somewhat respectful reviews, if only in a pure

practitioner's sense. And now, as you've seen in the news in recent months, and perhaps especially last week, question is on the table. Were we overrating Putin's military strength all along? How did this organization that had everyone so intimidated now seemed to be so ineffective? How did this happen? Where are we going? I recorded this interview with Mark Galliotti shortly before last week's abortive or attempted coup, but his answers to these questions remain just as pertinent, and I hope you find some

profit and enjoyment. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a statement. We continue to

face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, photos, and more School of War content. Follow along on Instagram at School of War.

Just tap the link in the show notes and subscribe. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Mark Galiati. He is the director of Myak Intelligence. He is a visiting professor at university college. Excuse me, honorary professor at university college. London. He is the host of a podcast called In Moscow's Shadows. He's author of numerous books and

articles, the most recent of which is Putin's Wars from Chechnya to Ukraine. Mark, thank you so much for joining the show. It's a pleasure. So can I start with a sort of a personal question, which is you are an expert in the Russian military, Russia's defense policy, strategic thought? How did you get into all of this? How does one become an expert in such things? Well, look, I mean, I've been fascinated by Russia for as long as I can remember, and in many ways do not have a good answer for quite why. Often, it's people who have some kind of family connection or whatever. Well, my English grandfather did serve in the British Expeditionary Force that went into Russia after the World War I during the Russian Civil War, but that doesn't

really count. I mean, so I've been a long time sort of fascinated by, well, what was then the Soviet Union. And also, I never really grew up, you know, like most, you. little boys, I was fascinated by militaria and such like. So back in the times when I was doing my doctorate, which was in the dying years of the Soviet Union, I was also writing on military affairs for Jane's Defense Weekly and then Jane's, what was then, Jane's Soviet intelligence review. And in some ways through the 1990s in particular, I didn't lose that interest in military affairs, but as the whole notions of security morphed and we became more and more interested also

in the threats from thugs and spies and banks rather than just tanks, then so too did I also start looking at Russian organized crime and the night, but never really lost that that core interest in military affairs. So in your book, Putin's war, as you quite rightly point out, that in Russia, as with, in some ways all countries, but somehow it seems especially obvious with Russia, that it's hard to draw a line between Russia's military history and just Russia's history, that is to say, the history of its wars and its military affairs sort of defines the place. Why don't we start? I want to come to the last 20 years or so in the evolution of the Russian military as our main subject, but why don't

we start with the Red Army? And perhaps we could just, when was the peak of Russian military power? When, you know, if we're going to, if we're, if we've kind of gone down into the Nader and back up towards the top of some sort of cycle and we're curious to know if we're at the top or at the start of another decline. Take us back to the last peak and when that was. Well, this is the interesting question because as one can see from what's happening today in Ukraine, you only really know military power when it is tested. And thank God, through the height of the Cold War, it was not seriously tested. There were conflicts like the Afghan war, but these were not in any way the kind of big war that we feared. If I had to make my own sort of personal thing, I would say, basically,

was the early 1970s at a point when the Soviets had achieved nuclear parity with the United States. So in some ways, the whole strategic issue was banked, mutual assured destruction ensured that. And they were really beginning to feel themselves to be a global power. This is when they start to build a, what's never really a blue water navy, but perhaps it's just a more sprightly shade of green. At the same time, they're moving into sort of beginning to attempt to become the kind of military that is not just quantitatively, but also qualitatively comparable to NATO.

Now, of course, tank for tank, it's not, but nonetheless, the point is that at that point they also have a hell of a lot more tanks. So, in a way, I would say that's the point when the qualitative gap is about the smallest it is going to be, and the qualitative gap is the smallest it's going to be, and the quantitative advantage that the Soviets have is at its peak. But the point is, again, would it have actually proven to be a paper tiger or perhaps a paper bear? Who knows?

Fortunately, we never got to find out. I recognize the irony of asking this question as an American in 2023, but if the early 70s marks the peak of Russian military power, And it certainly seems very plausible. Of course, when the United States pursues detente, I think not accidentally. Why does it fail in the 1980s in Afghanistan so soon after? Well, the thing about Afghanistan is that it's not the war that they were prepared for. Essentially, that the Soviets have a very kind of intellectual approach to not just war fighting,

but the whole preparation there for. They have a doctrine. They have all kinds of massive documents and phenomenally tedious military judges. journals with all kinds of different articles about how they would fight wars. And it's clear that their notion of wars are precisely, it's the big war. It's the massed mechanized warfare on the plains of Europe, or even possibly, though they talked about it much, much less, the plains of northern China. And then they found themselves in a small, scrappy counterinsurgency operation against people

who are from the Soviets point of view not rational. They're actually willing to die for their cause rather than realize when they're beaten in the kind of terrain in which actually the kind of mechanized formations which the Soviets are used to fielding just doesn't work. You know, it's the old story of what happens when, you know, whether it's Vietnam or whether it's the French in Algiers or whatever else, that you find yourself in the wrong war, but you're still having to fight it nonetheless. And the interesting thing is, look, the Soviets do learn lessons.

I mean, I produce Frostbrae, a book Afghanistan 79 to 88, Soviet air power against the Mujahideen, which in some ways flows out of my doctoral research, which was on the Afghan war. And the interesting thing is that when one looks at it, considering all the kind of political and other constraints upon the Soviet high command, they actually do learn lessons surprisingly well. The point is, though, that these are exactly the kind of lessons that are geared for a war like Afghanistan. They are deliberately forgotten in the main after that war because the High Command think, well, we're never going to be stupid enough to be sucked into another small-scale war in the mountains against Muslim rebels. So we don't want to be distracted from the big war. And then, of course,

a few years later, they're in Chechnya and they're having to reinvent the wheel painfully and under fire. So this is what I mean, in terms of, I mean, that was the problem. Afghanistan was the wrong war for them. They adapted to a degree, but they didn't want to adapt too much because they didn't think ultimately it was the kind of war that would define their future. And therefore, they tried to fight it on the cheap. They never really deployed large numbers of troops compared with, say, the Americans in

Vietnam. They didn't take massive casualties. I mean, the total casualties and 10 years of war in Afghanistan were just over 15,000. which was about two months of the Ukrainian war. You know, for all of these reasons, frankly, this was a war that they weren't going to win. And on the other hand, they weren't going to lose either. It ultimately was because Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader, decided that the political costs, as well as the economic ones, were just not worth it and pulled them out. So, again, it's a war that the Soviets didn't really lose, just simply as I say, ultimately couldn't win.

So if the early 70s is the peak and then, you know, by somewhere in the mid-90s, you are, along with Russia in general, I mean, a pretty perilous state as far as military excellence is concerned, talk us through the decline, where things basically fine, if a bit stressed by Afghanistan and then it all falls apart very quickly when the Soviet Union falls apart, was it a steadier decline? How does it fall apart? Yeah. I mean, what happens is in some ways everything ends up being a bit of a bit of about economics. The Soviet economy had been able to develop surprisingly effectively after World War II and it had adapted to becoming an advanced heavy industrial power. But it was increasingly

unable to compete, first of all, technologically with the West. I mean, this is after all the era of the Revolution in Military Affairs, when in fact, sort of mass heavy metal is beginning to be, if not replaced, but complemented by precision-guided munitions, the power of the computer, frankly, in different incarnations to revolutionize warfare. All of that takes two things. One is an advanced technological base, which, frankly, the Soviets lacked. They were having to try and steal whatever technology, copy, and therefore they were always going to be behind the curve.

But also the money, the money to retool your entire military machine. And that's where they were actually unable to do it. In some ways, I would actually draw a parallel with fascist Italy in the period before World War II. I mean, Mussolini's problem was that he armed too early, so that he spent all his money on what was a pretty good military force as of, let's say, 1930. But he couldn't completely retool it for the technological innovations that would take place through the 30s. Whereas the Germans, in effect, armed later and therefore they could arm much more advanced. Well, this is what had happened. In some ways, the Soviets had spent their money.

I mean, this is a bit simplistic, but they spent their money with the finest late 60s, early 70s kit around or available to them. But they weren't in a position to then retool it. So that was the kind of key thing. It was about economics. The second thing is also actually, I would say, doctrinal and political. that increasingly you have a Soviet leadership that either doesn't actually think the warfighting power is necessarily the crucial element to Soviet power in the world, or in fact, is desperate to rebuild, and this is what we find with Gorbachev, rebuild positive relationships with the West,

which actually requires gestures towards disarmament. Gorbachev knew that he needed improved trade, he needed access to Western credits, in Western technology, and he couldn't do that while trying to pour as much money as he could into his military machine. So just at the point when actually arguably the Soviets couldn't rearm, you also had a political leadership that really felt it couldn't afford politically to do so either. So paint a bit of a picture for us, if you would, of what it's like to be in, let's say, the Russian army in 1993 or 1994.

What's like to be a regular soldier or, you know, a young officer experientially? Catastrophically bad is the honest answer. I mean, what had happened anyway was increasingly the Soviet state had been unable to pay for and properly sort of house its soldiers. But then with the end of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, you had, you know, further economic decline, even less money around. So you're probably being paid. Not only was your salary in no way comparable to the prime.

of just basic goods. But also you were quite possibly not being paid at all or you were being paid in arrears so that inflation was eating away large chunks of it. Now, you have ordinary soldiers who are in effect trying to survive on them. If you're a conscript about $10 a month. Added to that, you've got all the troops that are being withdrawn from the former Warsaw Pact countries, especially from East Germany. And something has to be done to house them, but no one knows what. So a lot of these people are living in some unheated tank sheds. massively crowded barracks, you have a sense that, well, basically, what's the army for these days?

There's a huge moral enemy amongst them. So actually the whole structures of military political control, which used to be built around Marxism, Leninism, and the grand mission of the Communist Party, well, that's all suddenly been revealed to be bankrupt, and no one knows what they're there for now. And then worst of all, you're sliding into a war in Chechnya, in which you find yourself up against exceedingly able, exceedingly disciplined and determined, relatively few but very, very effective rebels in this small southern Russian region of the Russian Federation, who, you know, for years indeed, ever since they were conquered in the beginning of the 19th century,

have been periodically rising up against the Russians. So you are in a dangerous position. It's a tough job. You're being paid next to nothing. You're living in awful conditions. So no wonder that many of the most able volunteers, and junior officers and the like, left the service. And those people who were left were the ones who really couldn't get anything else.

Yeah. So it's a great Tolstoy, novella, Hajimura. Is that Chechnya or same general neighborhood? Yeah. I mean, I've often felt that the Russians in some ways are victim. of their own literature. Because there's a whole body of 19th century literature. This is in the time when Russia was conquering and consolidating its control over the Caucasus,

which paints the Chechens as these 10-foot-tall figures who absolutely live and breathe by their blood oaths and such like, which actually means that, frankly, the Russians are terrified of the Chechens. And you still find it today. And I think, again, that was just yet another way in which the thought of being sent to Chechnya was a particularly terrifying one if you're a Russian soldier. So if you wouldn't mind, I mean, I suspect listeners are familiar with the fact that Russia has fought in Chechnya, maybe there's been multiple Chechen wars.

But talk a bit about this first Chechen war. What starts it? What does it look like when the Russian military that you're so vividly describing actually goes to combat in the mid-90s? And what's the outcome? Yeah. As I say, the Chechens had long wanted to be free. and they had periodically rebelled and been crushed most savagely by, not surprisingly,

Joseph Stalin, who actually has the entire Chechen population during World War II depopulated. They moved to Kazakhstan and Siberia, and it's only after his death that they're actually allowed to return home. So, you know, they have a long sense of wanting freedom. Now, the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, who was a Democrat when it suited him, but was ultimately we also should remember essentially a pretty heavy-handed Communist Party local boss who then sort of reinvented himself as a Democrat when it was convenient. He had told the Russian regions, take as much sovereignty as you can swallow. And so the Chechens had thought, okay, fine, that's great.

We will therefore declare independence. Yeltsin clearly was not willing to allow that. Not so much because of Chechnya itself, but because of the example. This is, after all, a multi-ethnic land empire. And the theory is that if you let Chechnya go, a much more valuable, much more substantial region might then think, oh, okay, we didn't realize that was an option. So there's a whole variety of attempts to put political and economic pressure on the Chechen's, but they are resistant to that.

So eventually, Boris Yeltsin decides to, well, first of all, try and create a kind of deniable operation in which involves a certain number of Chechens who are opposed to the current regime in the capital, Chechen capital, Grozny, supported by a few Russian troops and Russian air power, a bit of a sort of Bay of Pigs type operation with exactly the same triumphant success as the Bay of Pigs. When that fails, essentially Yeltsin feels he has no choice but to up the ante and go for a full-scale conventional invasion. And so this is what happens. And the expectation is that this is going to be quick and easy.

Yeltsin's own Minister of Defense and a paratrooper called Grachev, Pavl Grashov, who was a much better paratrooper than he was a Minister of Defense. It says basically a couple of regiments and a few days and it'll all be over. Well, that's not the way it works. The Chechens proved to be exceedingly tough fighters. The Russians rely on mass firepower to just basically level cities and towns and villages in their path. But even so, Chechens find ways of fighting back.

There's an attempt, I mean, the first attempt to take the capital, Grozny. The Russians managed to basically commit pretty much every sin in the book, deploying tanks unsupported by infantry and so forth. And they're not surprisingly having them chewed up by, you know, just simply rocket-propelled grenades and the like. And so again, they just simply have to rely on mass firepower. The Chechen shifts the war to a more asymmetric stage. They start launching large-scale terrorist operations within Russia, which actually essentially forces a certain degree of political negotiations. And then most striking of all, under an exceedingly able rebel

commander Aslan Maskadov, they actually retake Grozny. I mean, this is the amazing thing, that the Russians are after a huge expense and a huge amount of firepower, finally take Grozny, the capital, or at least the rubbled ruins of Grozny. And then later on, the Chechens actually take it back, pushing the Russians out of that city. And this is a rag-tag rebel army does this to what's meant to be one of the most powerful armies still in the world. And that really forces Moscow to make a deal. you have a kind of truce and a kind of peace deal.

No one really thinks that it's going to last. Everyone realizes that in the grand scheme of things, this is actually a ceasefire rather than lasting peace. But nonetheless, you know, it does reflect the degree to which, I mean, you know, it's very hard to try and draw a comparison. I mean, it's a little bit like as if the entire US military have been fought off by Delaware. You know, and it sort of, it has exactly the kind of impact. on the morale of the Russian military.

Maybe West Virginia, West Virginia or the Ozarks, somewhere with hills and famously famously difficult people, with no offense to the great people of the Ozarks. So, Yolson gives way to Putin, and then this is unfinished business, yes, for Putin. So please pick up the story of Chechnya with Vladimir Putin. Mosca never really thinks this is the end to it. It's an agreement which is cobbled together, which means that Chechnya is kind of functionally autonomous, but doesn't formally break away from the Russian Federation. Now, what happens is, unfortunately, that in Chechnya itself, the regime proves to be much better as being guerrillas than as being state builders. And Chechnya itself becomes increasingly a sort of a bandit kingdom, but also the focus of international jihadism.

You actually have people who are later linked to al-Qaeda moving in and such like. So, you know, it is regarded as a real problem for Russia. But it's also an opportunity for someone like Putin, who, you know, is a pretty much unknown figure to most Russians when he's made prime minister, clearly as a preparation for becoming the president and Yeltsin's successor. And so from Putin's point of view, both in order to kind of establish his own credentials as a strong man, but also to show that he can fix the problem that Yeltsin left, there is the preparations for a second war. And this time, the Russians do it a bit more seriously. They actually sort of make sure they have the troops, they have the ammunition, everything

that they believe they need. And so even before Putin is formally made president at the very end of 1999 with elections in 2000, he's launched this war. And it's very much associated with him, his war. And this time, I mean, again, it's a thoroughly brutal war, as you'd expect, but a much more methodical one. There's sort of huge sweeps of populations. But in particular, there's also a Chechenization. As Chechens who are willing to work with the Russians are engaged, because the idea is these are people who can go and take on the rebels in their own kind of fighting out in the hills.

A lot of them are actually former rebels themselves who have flipped sides, and it also is an attempt to limit the casualties of actual Russian soldiers. So, again, it's a war that, I mean, the formal stages of the war only last a couple of years. In practice, it's going to roll on a lot longer, but then it simply becomes a sort of a counter-terrorist operation, quote, unquote. But basically, what we see is, again, a sort of combination of the application of massive amounts of firepower, a very ruthless but also methodical approach to rooting out rebels and anyone suspected of being rebels. They have these operations called Tziski, which is kind of purges, but also means a kind of a sweep-through as they sort of check young men to see if they've got bruises on their shoulders that would suggest they've been firing assault rifles, that kind of thing. And also a Chechenisation, which is what leaves the current regime in Chechnya of Ramzan Kadirov. Well, it was his father, Akhmat Kadyrov, who was the first Chechen leader, who by virtue of his willingness to work with Moscow and raise his own Chechen militias to join the military, was awarded the title of the first leader of a new Chechen regime.

Talk a bit, if you would, about the string of apartment bombings at the start of this second Chechen war. I'm curious to know your interpretation of it. it seems to me to speak to something important in the character of Putin. I'm curious to know your take on it. Sure. I mean, shortly before the declaration of the launch of the second Chechen operation, we have a series of apartment bombings across the country, substantial civilian casualties,

and this is immediately blamed upon the Chechens. Interestingly, though, no Chechen group claimed responsibility, whereas in the case of previous terrorist attacks, they've been very happy to, just to make the point. And there's at least one case in which actually an unexploded device is found in an apartment building by the police, but is actually linked back to the FSB, the Federal Security Service, which is the main domestic successor to the old Soviet KGB, and the agency which, coincidentally, Putin had directed for a year. Now, this is obviously used to create a great groundswell of public opinion, why something has to be done about Chechnya.

Now, I have no doubt that this was a false flag operation. This was not carried out by terrorists, but rather it was carried out by the Russian security apparatus. The only thing I really don't know and hasn't yet been proven, and quite possibly won't until there's a new regime in Moscow and archives are opened up, is whether or not, Putin actually was behind it, or whether it was in some ways Putin's backers. Because I've got to realize, at that time, Putin was really the candidate of choice for a whole cabal of figures around Boris Yeltsin, who realized they needed a replacement because Yeltsin notoriously alcoholic and so forth, were just clearly incapable of doing the job. And so they picked this fairly obscure figure whom they thought would be a great proxy.

They expected that he would basically dance to their tune. They were in due course deeply disappointed. But the point is it may well have been just simply that they had decided that actually Putin needed something to bolster his credentials as a man of action because certainly this allowed him not only to make the case for why we need to go into Chechnya and also why we need a tough leader who will protect the Russian people, but it allowed him to show a certain degree of passion and anger that up to now, this very controlled gray man, frankly, had not yet shown. So, I mean, I think this is very much

one of those kind of cases in which actually we have murderous political operations done for the reasons of domestic political advantage. So there's two more things I want to get to before we come to Ukraine. And I sort of defer to you on to how to sequence them because there's the important story of Putin's sort of outward facing belligerence revealing itself to the world, you know, early in the aughts. So you have 9-11, you have relatively friendly U.S.-Russia relations, for example. And then, you know, 2007, Putin gives this famously belligerent speech, 2008. You go into Georgia. So there's that story, which I'd like you to sort of draw the important points out for listeners. And then there's also around this time,

you know, serious steps in the direction of modernization in the military and creating the Russian military that will later fight in Ukraine. So however you want to tackle this, I don't know which one's appropriate to tackle first. Well, in some ways, I mean, the two are actually closely intertwined. You do not dump a huge proportion of your national wealth into a major military reform and expansion program just for the hell of it. You do so because you feel you need to. And I think here it's crucial.

From Putin's point of view, and this is something that came out in his speeches even before he was president, Russia is a great power. And it's not a great power because of its military force or its nuclear weapons or whatever. It is a great power because of that is Russia's birthright, because Russia has so long saved civilization from whoever, whether it's Adolf Hitler or Napoleon Bonaparte or whatever. And he's a very, very 19th century geopolitician, in my opinion. Here's a notion of great power. It's not about soft power and trade connections.

and anything like that. A great power has a sphere of influence. It has countries whose sovereignty is subordinate to the great powers. A great power has the right to be consulted on every major issue relating to the world, even if its own interests do not seem to be directly involved. And the great power has the right to break the rules from time to time. I mean, I don't think he wants to bring down the entire architecture of the modern global order. No country that has one of the longest land borders in the world with China wants,

to see things devolve into mad Maxian anarchy. But rather, a great power every now and then breaks the rules and just says, well, we had to do it. And these are things that he thinks America has and applies. In some cases, he may have a point. In some cases, he's clearly wrong. His notion of NATO as basically being America's Warsaw Pact, for example, clearly isn't right. But it doesn't matter. I mean, he thinks that's what Russia has to have. And look, if you are going to impose your will over your neighboring country. countries, you have to be willing and able to do that if need be by coercion. So as far as he's concerned, war fighting capacity, not necessarily its use, but the capacity

to be able to do so is absolutely essential to Russia's status as a great power. So, you know, from his point of view, he's already beginning the armament process, even while he's actually in his very early years, thinks he can build some kind of a positive relationship with the West. Again, he doesn't understand the West. You could note that this is a man who's never really been in the West. I mean, yes, he was in East Germany when he was in the KGB. But he's not like, for example, Mikhail Gorbachev,

who before he was Soviet General Secretary had traveled around Europe with his wife on holiday and that kind of thing, at least had some degree of sense of what we're talking about. This is a man who basically his life had been spent within the Soviet and then the Russian world. And from his point of view, essentially he thought that it could be an entirely pragmatic relationship with the West. That, look, all this talk about human rights and democracy and values. I mean, that's just a smokescreen. That actually everyone is as ruthlessly pragmatic as he is.

And so, for example, after 9-11, he was one of the first world leaders to express his condolences. He was very happy to provide assistance. America could send its supplies over Russian airspace and through Russian railway systems and so forth. No problem. But he thought that the understanding was, well, my particular front on the global war on terror is Chechnya. I'm not going to comment on how you fight your war in Afghanistan. I assume you aren't going to comment on how to fight my war in Chechnya.

Then when the West, in this case it's actually particularly Europe, started raising concerns about the extraordinary levels of human rights abuses there, he gets angry. He thinks this is hypocrisy and sanctimonious and unnecessary interference in Russia's affairs. So he very, very quickly sours on this rather naive notion of the deal he can strike. And over time, the more he tries to assert Russian great power through this essentially confrontational 19th century, almost colonial way. And the more the West pushes back against it, he regards this as Western aggression. But the West is trying to actually prevent Russia from being what it ought to be. So when we come to the war in Georgia, I mean, that's in part because the Georgian leader

Mikhail Saakashvili was very, very keen on integrating with both the European Union and above all, NATO. It's also essentially because Putin wants to pick a fight with a small regional country to demonstrate to the other countries within Russia's self-proclaimed sphere of influence. This is what happens if you mess with us. Because as far as he's concerned, if a country begins to drift away from Russian control, that means it's drifting into someone else's control. And that basically means Americas. So he wants to kind of lock that off.

So in 2008, he goes into Georgia. After having kind of basically manufactured a pretext, Sakashvili is known to being rather hot-headed, so he ensures that basically the Georgians are prodded by this breakaway region, South Ossetia, until Sakishvili throws the first punch, and that allows Putin to claim that he's simply responding. But the point is it's clearly a Russian imperial war. And they win. They win very quickly.

but they certainly don't win as easily as they really ought, given the massive disproportion between tiny Georgia and large Russia. And so this kind of pushes the next wave of Russian military reform. But the point is, again, to put this into a kind of the bigger context, all this time, from Putin's point of view, he has felt that actually having a massive military force is necessary, Firstly for defense, because he honestly thinks that the West is opposed to Russia and that actually, I mean, I think he genuinely believes that it would be conceivable that NATO would try and launch an attack against it.

Completely wrong, but nonetheless, I think genuinely believed. But the military power is also one of the absolutely fundamental pillars on which Russia's status as a great power rests. And without that, then Russia is vulnerable. I mean, last point if I can make on that, there's a fascinating. fascinating sort of multimedia, modern exhibition, history exhibition that was established in Moscow and then rolled out around the country. Russia, my history.

And one of the constant themes, as it sort of charts the story of Russia from its very beginnings, is a constant point about when we are weak, we are vulnerable. And I think it doesn't matter if we're talking about the Mongols of the Golden Horde or the Crusaders or the Teutonic Order. or Napoleon or Hitler, whenever we're weak, we're vulnerable. And that's a very heavy-handed point that it's belaboring, but it's very much that's Putin's line. So this modernization project that he undertakes, what are its main elements? What is so different about the Russian military that's been fighting in Ukraine over the last year

or fought in Syria in the second half of the last decade from the army that, you know, went into Georgia in the fall of 2008. Well, although there had been buying of new kit and such like, to a large extent, the army that went into Georgia was still very recognizably Soviet. It was smaller than the Red Army. There had been certain sort of innovations and changes. But all the fundamentals were still there. It was precisely failure in Georgia, or shall I say lacklust of success in Georgia,

which allowed genuine reform to be forced on a pretty conservative high command. Generally speaking, high commands everywhere tend to be quite conservative. And the interesting thing is this. The reforms that were carried out were very much geared towards creating a slightly smaller, but much more professional military, and one that was really reoriented away from big wars and towards intervention operations. So you had the division, the old sort of building block, replaced by the battalion tactical group, a much more small, much more flexible unit, which

in turn was subsumed within the brigade, again, as the sort of the key organizational function. I mean, most divisions were actually just simply abolished. Sounds like the Marine Corps, the United States Marine. Well, I mean, in some ways, yes. It was a very similar process. And so it was fascinating. And then, you know, you had with 2014 in Crimea, frankly, textbook, special forces-based operation to seize control, which seemed to show a degree of Russian capability that we had never honestly

expected. I thought it was fascinating. People kept focusing on the knee pads. I got these little green men, they're wearing knee pads just like Western Special Forces. Well, yeah, okay. I mean, on one level, big deal. But the point is, up to that point, we had seen a Russian military which wouldn't have been learning lessons from their Western counterparts.

Likewise, Syria, a deployment largely of air power to support Assad's brutal regime in the civil war, which we didn't honestly think the Russians could sustain. I mean, certainly, you know, I was speaking to a lot of the kind of military sort of Washington Wonk circle, who basically said, look, I mean, frankly, within a few months, we're going to start seeing planes falling out of the sky because of bad maintenance or whatever. Barack Obama said it was going to be a quagmire. It's going to be a quagmire for the Russians. And instead, they managed to basically, I mean, they haven't quite won the war there,

but they certainly turned it around. They stopped going to be a collapse of the Syrian regime. And, you know, again, what this said was there's something really changing about, and again, it was much more about professional forces. There was a sort of a new emphasis on bringing in contract-niki, people who have volunteers serving contracts rather than conscripts, all that kind of thing. But of course, what I don't know. say we, but certainly Vladimir Putin hadn't really considered, is precisely that these are small-scale

operations. January 2022, we have a deployment of forces into Kazakhstan to support one particular contender for power, very quickly done, very efficiently done, largely with paratroopers and long-range air support. Always small-scale deployments. Because what really happened is one had a work-in-progress reform that had meant that certain units, particularly the paratroopers and the special forces and a certain handful of brigades within the regular military, had actually been brought up to fairly reasonable capacities. But they were still a long tail in terms of there are a lot of units which are much less reforms.

But also, there was much more focus on teeth rather than logistics. All the boring stuff, the stuff that doesn't look good when you're parading it through Red Square, that had still been neglected. Because again, this was a military that thought it was not going to be fighting long wars. It thought it was going to be short, sharp shock interventions. And then Putin sends it into Ukraine. So then the obvious question, because I think I was as shocked as anyone when what unfolded in February. I wasn't shocked that he invaded. I had come to the conclusion that he was going to. But I was sympathetic to friends and, you know, professional contacts of mine who made the following argument that obviously he's not going to invade

because we've done an analysis of the order of battle and it's just just not going to work. So he's not, he's not that crazy. This is all for show. In a way they were right. And then obviously in another way they were quite wrong. And what is your account of why he makes this decision to, I mean, just to kind of go off the language you just used to conceive of. Well, it's Ukraine. It's a massive country. You'll know, I don't actually know, but you'll probably know the numbers of troops in World War II on the German side and on the Soviet side that fought over this patch of land. And how many tanks and how much ammunition was expended.

I mean, it's a huge place. And it had been at war with Russia in some fashion since 2014. So it's not exactly going to be caught, you know, completely unawares as it is in some extent in 2014. So how do you make a mistake like that? I mean, I think my answer would be it's a fascinating example of kind of historic karma. Putin clearly does not really understand military affairs. I mean, it's one thing, yes, of course, he's always happy to don camouflage and have a photo op in a tank.

But when it actually comes down to it, this is a man who has had no meaningful military experience. He did his absolute minimum reserve officer training back when he was at university. He ditched that as soon as he joined the KGBs. And really, I think he acquired an exaggerated notion of the military's capabilities. And in part, this was because of defense minister Shoygu, who came in after the Georgian War. Shogu, in seeing the able and competent political operator, one of frankly the most competent I would suggest within Putin's system.

But one of his particular skills is precisely. spin. He's very good at actually portraying everything from the best possible light. And unfortunately, he does too good a job, I would suggest, of actually selling the Russian military. But more importantly of all, this is a symptom of the Putin system. Over the years, the scope for alternative perspectives in Putin's inner circle has become less and less. Those people who used to sometimes challenge his views, have been slowly squeezed out. He's basically surrounded by a court of people who are yes men or ideological fellow travelers. And Putin himself clearly did not believe the Ukrainians would fight.

Remember, this is a man who has multiple times, again, over the period of years expressed the view that Ukraine is not a real country and the Ukrainians are not a real people. aside the fact that, if nothing else, exactly the fact that they've been eight years at war with Russia, undeclared at least, had acted to bring people much more closely together. From his point of view, it's clear that he didn't think ultimately this would be a real, this would not be a war. If you look at the forces that he actually deploys, yes, there is an attempt to sort of do a kind of a quick run at Kiev, but also a lot of the forces are actually not regular

the military. They're Roskwardia, the National Guard, which is essentially a paramilitary internal security force. He clearly thought that a lot of the challenges would be perhaps riots and the need to kind to keep the streets controlled rather than actually fighting. And it's interesting actually that there's a lot of bad feeling now within the Roskwardia, people who feel that they were exactly used as cannon fodder because likely armed internal security troops suddenly found themselves in, you know, a knife brawl with fully mechanized

Ukrainian troops. And obviously, they came off very badly. So I think this is it. He had this bizarre notion that in some ways Ukraine was going to become just a larger equivalent to the Crimean operation, that you send in some of your special forces, you decapitate the leadership. There is an assumption that Zelensky will either be caught or else that he will flee the country. again, another massive and catastrophic misjudgment.

And that most Ukrainians won't really resist. I mean, I don't think he actually believed that they would welcome the Russians with bread and salt. But I think most he thought would not. There would be some elements that would fight and find, you know, you have to have enough forces for that. But essentially that Ukraine was ripe for the plucking, which is fall straight into his hand. And this is why you don't really have any proper planning. It's not handled. I mean, this is not how the Russian military.

plans, trains and arms itself to fight a war. You don't have massive preparatory bombardments. Why do you want to sort of smash things up if you're about to own them? And you have this kind of bizarre military approach, which is a sort of approaching, entering the country on a whole range of axes without even a single unitary command. You know, it breaks every single precept of Russian way of war because it wasn't meant to be a war. So I want to do a little speculation. It can be informed speculation on your end, less informed speculation of my end about the future, both in the sort of short to middle term in terms of the Ukrainian counteroffensive

that has just been launched. And I should say we're recording this here on Friday, June the 9th. So it seems to have just kicked off and obviously too soon to say whether or not it will succeed. But I also want to speculate a bit about the longer run with you and maybe start there and kind of work our way back. You know, I do encounter, I don't know what's going to have. I don't know how this war is going to end. I do encounter a fair few people who caution that, you know, there's a lot of enthusiasm here in the United States for the Ukrainian cause, as there is in Europe, quite reasonably.

And I encounter people who caution and say, well, you know, look, the Russians are very good at doing very badly and then in the end doing well. They have a lot of people. They have comparably speaking with the Ukrainians, a lot of resources. And on a purely attritional basis, they actually do have some cards to play.

To me, that seems rather simplistic. The Russians are perfectly capable of losing wars. They've done poorly in wars and had their governments collapse. These are all matters of historical record, just as is the case of them winning wars of attrition is also on the record. So who knows how it's going to turn out here? So what's your view, both big picture and then very curious about your thoughts on the counteroffensive? Yeah, I mean, the big picture is this.

I mean, my big concern, I must say, is that although military figures I talk to fully understand this, a lot of politicians. don't, which is that driving the Russians out of Ukraine does not end the war in and of itself. It just simply shifts the battle line to the national border. Russia will continue to, if it wishes to lob shells and drones over that border, reconstitute forces and have another go, or adopt a whole other range of ways in which it could mess with the Ukrainians from further cyber attacks to sabotage and terrorism. So, you know, we have to appreciate that, in fact, we're likely to talk about a very long

and messy endgame, even after the sort of main phase of the liberation of Ukraine takes place. And that also, I think, means that we need to be fairly realistic about Russia's capacities to reconstitute its forces, which I think are going to be exceedingly limited. There's some people who say, all, within two to three years over the end of hostilities, the Russians will back where they were. I think that's nonsense, not least just simply because of industrial capacity. Sanctions are not going to end. Frankly, I think there's some form of sanctions, even if there's a peace deal and whatever else, will last so long as at least Putin remains in the Kremlin.

And the ways that that will limit Russia's capacity to rearm in terms of, you know, again, cruise missiles, precision weapons and the like, cannot be underestimated. Already we basically have the Russians fielding what is to a large extent of 1960s force, leavened with more modern kit remaining, of course. But nonetheless, they are basically sort of shifting back to the last century, even while Ukraine is increasingly fielding the 21st century army. So, you know, I think this is Putin's last war and this is a war that really is going to drain the Russians. But you're absolutely right. that doesn't mean that this actual, the war fighting phase is going to be easy.

I have no idea how the current counteroffensive will play out. No one has. And indeed, at the moment, we have no idea how it is playing out right now because we're operating in a very hazy information environment. That said, look, I think the Russians on paper have the forces to largely hold the line to absolutely give up some territory to the Ukrainians. but not be given the sort of dramatic blow that I think both Ukrainians and the West are hoping. However, the key imponderable here is morale.

I mean, I think this is the fact that there may be 200,000 troops on the Russian side, but the overwhelming majority of those are not battle-hardened paratroopers or the like. They are disgruntled, mobilized reservists, 40-something-year-olds who were driving a bus or whatever in Omsk until a few months. ago who don't want to be there, who don't really understand why they're there, and who's just about remember the dangerous end of a Kalashnikov, but beyond that are certainly not exactly troops at their peak. And we don't know how well they're going to fight.

And if they, if units do start to break, as we've seen happen already in previous offensives, well, that can often be contagious. as suddenly, you know, the units around them whose flanks are now vulnerable also decide to withdraw or whatever else. The Ukrainians have certainly demonstrated not just a capacity to outfight the Russians, but also to outthink them. And so I think also a lot will depend on how far they can precisely draw the Russians away from where they really want to make their offensive,

which at the moment seems to be perhaps towards Tokamak in the south. But the Russians ought to know that too. And again, this is unfortunately, everyone has had over a year to get used to the surprises that the other side can throw at them. I suspect that we're going to see, absolutely, we're going to see Ukrainian advances. They may even be able to break the Crimea land bridge, which if they do that, begins to make defending Crimea increasingly untenable. They're not going to drive the Russians out of the Donbass this year.

They're probably not going to take Crimea this year. I think we have to accept that this is going to be a long campaign. But I do think that you're right to assume that just simply the fact that Russia has a population three times the size of Ukraine does not necessarily convert into military power. Ukraine has been able to fully mobilize. Russia, Putin is clearly worried about the political consequences of leaning too heavily on his people. I mean, even now, there are calls that Russia needs to have another mobilization wave. Putin seems to hope that he can put it back until after elections that are held for regional

governors in September. He doesn't believe he has the support of his own people. I want to ask you one more question, and this is an important theme of the last few years of Russian military conduct, and we haven't really gotten to it. But it's the role played by these parallel military organizations, Wagner, Wagner, perhaps. and the Chechens as a sort of semi-independent military force. How do organizations like this fit into Putin's strategic concept? I mean, I think it's not so much that they fit into Putin's strategic concept. They fit into Putin's political model.

I mean, what we've seen, that Putinism, in some ways like a medieval court, rests upon having multiple individuals and institutions, usually with overlapping responsibilities, who are constantly competing. And it's through these conflicts that Putin retains his position of power and centrality, because he can basically play them off against each other, and he is the final arbiter of their disputes. Now, that has worked in its own way, a rather brutal and cannibalistic way, but very successfully for 23 years at keeping Putin in power. However, what we've also seen is when that is transplanted to the battlefield,

it is catastrophically dysfunctional. It is not, I think, that they regard it as a strength to have Wagner and indeed a whole variety of other mercenary organisations and to have the Chechens who notionally are part of the National Guard but in practice only take orders from Kadyrov back in Grozny and to have the National Guard with its own separate command structure. All of these things which have actually been real problems for the Russians in terms of trying to have some kind of unity of effort. But the point is that to deal with that, I mean, they tried by now making the chief of the general staff, the overall commander of the joint forces in Ukraine.

But even that's not working. The only person who actually has the power to force these different agencies to work together is Putin. And one of the things that we have discovered really, at least in the last year, is precisely that Putin is actually much, much less willing or able, for whatever reason, because. he's busy with other things, he's ill, he's old, he's distracted, whatever. But anyway, he is not doing that job. He is not banging heads together. We now have the extraordinary situation of Wagner mercenaries apparently coming under fire from Russian units and going and kidnapping the lieutenant colonel

in charge of that unit and forcing him to make what almost looks like a terrorist proof of life video in which there he is with a conspicuous. recently broken nose, apologizing for what he did. I mean, this is not just a challenge to the military. This is a challenge to Putin. So I think this is the issue. It's just simply that when Putinist politics is transposed over to collections of men with guns and poor impulse control, what you actually get is a military force, which becomes much

less strong than the sum of its parts because it cannot and will not work together. and it is often driven by rivalries as different commanders and different units seek the glory because they want to have a victory that they can present to Putin's feet because of the political gains that will accrue. Mark Galiati, author most recently of Putin's wars from Chechnya to Ukraine. It's been a fascinating conversation. I've learned a lot and I'm grateful to you for making the time. My great pleasure.

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