The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT -- How Does Putin Hang On?

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

Bruce is back with his take on what we are witnessing as the day's news looks a lot like the old documentary newsreels of the past. Bombed out European cities, long lines of refugees fleeing to nearby borders, and a dictator seemingly out of control.  Are we doing enough?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. It's Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. It's Bruce Anderson Day. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. And, you know, when I think about the world we're living in now compared with where we were like two weeks ago, the two of us, you know, used to kid ourselves and be kidded by others because we spent a lot of time looking at old Second World War documentaries. And when we do, we see these incredible scenes of destruction and despair and lineups of refugees at borders in great European cities and great European cities demolished because of the whims of a dictator

in, at that time, Berlin, and wondering why. How can he get away with this? How did he get away with it? You know, how did he get away with it? Why didn't anybody ever knock him off? How did this keep going? And now suddenly, seemingly for most of us out of nowhere, we weren't prepared, should have been prepared, but we're reliving the thing.

But now in the high-tech world of today, where everything is immediate and you see things happening live, but the scenes are the same. Beautiful cities, some of Europe's most beautiful, like Kiev, being destroyed from the air, being destroyed from the ground. People lined up at border points trying to get out of the country, and I'm talking about lined up by the tens of thousands people living in basements to try and protect themselves from the onslaught of putin's army and air force for no apparent reason and it's just you know you have to stop and look at this and go, like, what happened? How did this happen? How are we living what people like you and I used to do on weekends

in our spare time reviewing something that happened almost a century ago, and now we're watching it in real time? It's, you know, it's incredibly depressing and mind-boggling at the same time yeah it's a really tough tough period of time and peter and i've got a a grandchild that is expected to arrive later this week the second grandchild and i've been thinking a lot about the um the times that we live in and you mentioned that we didn't see it coming and i think that's that's kind of true and it's also kind of not true i mean we'd certainly heard and had talked about a little bit you and i about what was happening and what putin was likely to do

and was he going to do it right after the olympics and all of that sort of thing. But I think your larger point is, we live in times that are both filled with distraction, the idea of a distraction economy, where we keep on moving from one subject to the other, because that's kind of how the information marketplace and the entertainment marketplace works these days. And so it's hard for us to have our attention galvanized until there's a moment when there's really no other choice but for that to happen. And the second part of it is that, you know, I'm seeing people comment that 2022 has already been a worse year than last year, and last year was a worse year than the year before and um so we're dealing with what seems to be a cascading almost never-ending series of existential crises and i don't know that there hasn't been a time like that in my life i don't think there has been in yours either we're not that different in age um but it

is you know it feels like the world order uh has come unglued and so i'm i'm happy in a way that our politicians are really talking about that right now, that that is not just a subtext of the conversation they're having, but they're speaking directly about world order. And just as a final note on that, I've been speaking with people who are very motivated climate advocates, and I'm very concerned about that issue, as are you. We both have talked a lot about it and the ipcc the un agency came out with its latest report this week which was the most uh

disconcerting of all of the disconcerting reports that they brought out in recent years i saw that the what's the clip of the vice chairman of the task force or the committee that produces this report saying, look, everybody, there's no time. There's no excuses. You've got to focus on this right now. You can't put anything before this. And I found myself thinking, well, as much as I care about that issue, if the world order falls apart, we're not going to make much progress on climate change we need to secure the world order if we're going to make progress on climate change on a lot of other priorities that we share so yeah i agree with you it's a it's a pretty rough time and it's um you know the only

thing i see that's good right now is that the days are getting a little bit longer and the winter might fade into the background and covet might too. But yeah, tough, tough week and tough month and tough year for sure. This issue of the world order is really an interesting one because in some ways the world order is in better shape today than it was two weeks ago. At least part of the world order in terms of the way that what we've always called the West, even though it's much more than the West, does seem to have its act together. It's unclear to me exactly how that's happened or who's responsible for that happened.

If you watch the American media, as I did last night, and I assume you did a part of last night as well, watching the State of the Union address, the Americans like to say, oh, this is all because of Biden, right? Like he's put the coalition back together again, and we're reliving times we used to see before the Trump era. Well, in fact, it's much stronger than it was even before the Trump era. I mean, they have their act together on this to a degree.

I mean, they're certainly operating together on sanctions, on tough sanctions, sanctions unlike we've ever seen before on anything, tougher than the sanctions that were put in place against South Africa, tougher than the sanctions that were put in place against South Africa, tougher than the sanctions that were put in place in other areas of war and conflict in the past. So on that sense, it's really good. As I said, I'm not sure who gets the credit there or whether they just all fell into this at the same time.

But clearly, and you're correct in saying, you know, maybe we didn't completely see it coming, but certainly some people in those governments saw it coming because they've been working for months to be ready for this moment as opposed to going, oh, my God, look what just happened. What are we going to do? Let's have some meetings. They were ready to go from the opening, you know, volley from the Russian tanks. But the question will become, is it enough? But in terms of how they've put this together. I think it's been really impressive.

I mean, I don't think we're going to know everything that we're going to want to know about how it came together. And, you know, the more important point, obviously, is going to be what's going to work. What will it take to protect Ukrainians and to push back Putin and hopefully ultimately to see Putin removed from office and replaced by leadership that is different. But, you know, I watched or I read the piece that CBC, I think, published about Pierre Polyev's criticism of the West. And I found myself kind of reading that going, well, that doesn't really square with what I think I've seen anyway.

He basically said that the West has had a very weak response. Europe's had a very weak response. We should be all doing a whole lot more. And, you know, I respect the fact that he's got a different opinion and that we have a good debate. And it's good that we have this kind of marketplace of ideas. But I don't actually think that a lot of people will look at how the West has responded and say it's been weak and pathetic. I think that people are now increasingly talking about what you just put your finger on, which is that if the sanctions, and in particular,

the sanctions that relate to the wealth of Putin and his oligarch friends, if those sanctions don't bite quickly enough, how much more destruction and death can we tolerate before we feel compelled to step in across that border between the NATO countries and Ukraine and take military action? And i don't think the answer i mean i understand what governments are saying about that and i think it's the thing that they feel they're obliged to say while they're waiting to see the sanctions and other support measures start to bite but i also hear the subtext being a lot of politicians saying everything, nothing is off the table in the future. And I actually prefer that resolve to something that feels more like we were

kind of impatient to get into a more serious and extensive and potentially global armed conflict. I'm not an expert in this area. So I want to be really careful not to sound as though I'm one of those people who's kind of got opinions about exactly what military operations might make sense or not. I'm more of an expert in understanding what are the tolerances and the preferences of the public. And right now, I think that the most impressive thing for me in contrast with what Mr polyeth says is the sense of unity of people outside um the area of conflict um to stand with uh Ukraine and the Ukrainian people to see their bravery to see the passion that they have for defending their country. And I think

there is a reflection that there are fascist forces, there's disinformation, there is a challenge to the world order. And maybe we need to wake up. And maybe we have woken up. And maybe we are going to draw a line at this point in time. And so I'm it's hard to feel optimistic with the news and the pictures that we're seeing. But if I have any optimism in me about what we're watching, it's it's about that. It is about the sense that we're rallying. And I saw some of that in Biden's speech and I found myself a little bit perturbed that the references were, you know, always to the United our Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, who seems to know a fair bit about how the financial sanctions bite and may be more involved in that conversation than we know at this moment. At least he remembered to say Canada,

which is a step up from some past presidents. I think it was Bush, Bush Jr. who, you know, left Canada out of the list of countries he talked about in terms of the coalition against Al-Qaeda right after 9-11. Right. I am intrigued about this discussion surrounding, well, what if they aren't enough? And what do you do?

And you see some retired generals, both in Canada and the United States and in Europe, saying, you know, they got to go for this no-fly zone. They got to go for it now. They shouldn't wait. to convince that if they put in a no-fly zone over Ukraine, that it will immediately, if not sooner, lead to nuclear weapons being fired from the Russian side and then responded to from the West. Now, you know, I think there's a lot of, and a lot of people, like, you know, I get mail, I'm sure you hear it too, from people who say, like, why aren't we doing anything? Why don't we knock out that convoy?

It's just sitting right there. You know, they always show us these pictures in past, you know, whether it was Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever, they take great pride in showing us what they can do from the air to knock out convoys. Why aren't they doing it here? And I think there's some confusion about no-fly zones and wondering, well, what exactly are they? I mean, listen, first of all, no-fly zones exist all the time. There's one over Buckingham Palace. You can't fly over Buckingham Palace. If you're flown out of Heathrow and you're taking off to the north,

if you didn't move a little bit, you would fly right over Windsor Castle. So it veers off usually to the west a little bit. You still have a great view of Windsor Castle down there on a clear day, but you don't fly right over it. And it's the same with big sporting events that happen around the world, including in Canada. They create no-fly zones for that immediate area. They don't want airplanes, you know, for security reasons, flying immediately over certain places. And when Air Force One comes to Canada, there's a no-fly zone around it and over the airport. When that happens, they don't allow other planes to take off or land at 15, 20 minutes

either side of the landing of Air Force One. Those kind of mini no-fly zones exist. In a military situation, a no-fly zone, in the case of what people are saying should happen here now, would include all of Ukraine and would be against any Russian aircraft aircraft flying over they're bombing this would stop that from happening but they would be intercepted and shot down by nato forces if they didn't respect the no-fly zone well then bingo you're into it as you said yeah maybe it's going to come to that maybe it is going to come to we're into it

i think that there has been uh yeah as i said i i don't really know what the right choice is it feels to me like we're following a path it's not just let's make it up as we go along but rather a series of sequentially stiffer measures and more lethal support to help Ukrainians in the fight. And the language has become more strident as it has been evident that the West is unified. And I think that the indications are, you know, that people are now kind of looking at this and going, okay, there's going to be some carnage in the world economy because of these measures. And so how do we make sure that we don't find ourselves destroying more economic opportunity at home than we want to. And you heard a little bit in Chrissy Freeland's remarks yesterday and President Biden's remarks about that, that you can tell that they're a little bit anxious about whether or not there's that.

But I think the point that you're raising is probably squarely on their radar screen, which is that if you say, how about a no-fly zone in an area that is twice the size of California, similar in size to Texas, that's a very big area. And what it really means is that you're up patrolling and that you're ready to shoot down. And I don't know what the truth is, but I listened to a lot of experts in Vladimir Putin, and most of them seem to be saying he's paranoid, he's desperate, he's evil, he doesn't care. He will use whatever tools he has at his disposal to protect his position. And that he may be becoming more paranoid and desperate because

of the financial pressures that he now knows he faces personally with all of the money that he's got with his oligarchs his personal money under under duress or inaccessible to him and by the way if you have a chance peter and and listeners see an interview, I think it was on PBS with Bill Browder, who is quite a well-known expert who went through some very, very difficult times in his life dealing with Putin and corruption. I saw that interview in the middle of the night, like I watch most things these days. And it was a really compelling interview because he this is somebody who really knows about that money and he was i think he was in london he had just been meeting with the british parliament yesterday talking about more sanctions and um the fellow who was interviewing him i think it was david isaacson was saying do you

you know you seem to know a lot about the oligarchs and their yachts and their homes and everything else. And he said, could you walk around London and point out the homes of the people who should be, are going to be added to the list? And he said, Oh yeah, I, I have, and I know those names and we're adding those names and those houses are, are being seized. So I think I got off topic there. But where I was going with that is that if the pressure on Putin personally is ratcheted up, if the oligarchs who hold his money are saying we're kind of screwed here. And then if we add in this no fly zone, does that have a greater chance of making him back down and stop the war or a greater chance of pushing

the nuclear button and and increasing the war and i think it's so tempting for those of us who feel anger uh at what's going on and despair for the people whose lives are at risk to say let's take all the measures that we possibly can and at the time, knowing that for the people who have to make that decision, they're playing potentially with a much bigger cost in human lives and a much bigger conflagration. So I'm sure it's a very difficult choice that they face. I don't think it's easy at all. You know, your mention of the London real estate market is one of the reasons that the Brits were not the last to come on board

with the sanctions, but had the biggest struggle with it because it's going to collapse that London real estate market. I mean, the high end of the Londonondon real estate market is all is most exclusively if not owned by the royal families owned by the oligarchs i mean they've got a lot of they got a lot of uh land and and uh and buildings there and it drove prices up um enormously and that's why it's so incredibly expensive to to live in um you know downtown london one of the reasons anyway um i do want to pick it we got to take a break but i i do want to pick up on this issue of putin and how he manages to survive by this because when you look at the

at the world headlines and you look at the resistance on the streets of Moscow and others, Russian cities, you go like, how is this guy holding on? Like why is nobody making a move to unseat him in some fashion? So we'll talk about that in a moment when we come back, but first this. Hello once again, Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. You're listening to Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth on this episode of The Bridge. And you're listening either on SiriusXM Canada, Channel 167, Canada Talks,

or on your favorite podcast platform. You know, we're not experts in world affairs. We're not experts on history. Although we spend a lot of time talking about it and our downtime, our free time, you know, reading great books about our history and world history and watching documentaries on television and there there are some fabulous documentaries uh that take you back you know more than 80 years now to to world war ii especially where there's lots to learn from

and lots of parallels to look at and one one of them, of course, is the survival of dictators, whether it was Mussolini, whether it was Hitler. How did they manage to survive? Well, two things happened. Initially, people in their countries resisted what was going on and felt it was wrong and saw terrible clouds on the horizon if it was allowed to continue. That's why the first major attempt on Hitler's life

was in, I think it was 1938. There were four in total. They're considered like major attempts to take his life, but none of them worked. And you look at it and you go, the frustration on those who were immediately around him. I mean, clearly he had some sycophants, just as Putin does. But there were others who saw this is not going to work.

This is not going to happen. And we are doomed if we let it continue. But they let it continue. And the same thing seems to be happening here because it you can no longer say there's no resistance in russia to what's going on there is resistance but how far that resistance goes or what it's capable of doing uh to ending the situation is unclear especially when you you know, some of you will laugh at this, it sounds a little overly simple, but when you look at the pictures of Putin in the last, reach 10 days, at that big hall, long table, somebody described it the other day, it looks like a bowling alley,

you know, where he's at one end all by himself, and at the other end are his, whoever they are, his senior they are his senior advisors his cabinet his military officials and we're talking about way at the other end this is a big table um and you go well nobody can get close to him and that's kind of cover story is it's all about covid he's a germaphobe he doesn't want anywhere near him and you know russia is still suffering greatly from covid but it's also don't forget this is the country where a tap on the back can be a needle of poison in you and there's no doubt that's happened and it is direction in the past in the recent past. And he must think, I don't want anyone near me.

I know what they're capable of being able to do. But whatever, until something like that happens or there's some kind of pooch where he's taken out of power, it's hard to see him changing. This does not seem to me like the kind of guy who's going to say well you know this didn't work so let's uh let's just withdraw let's back down let's negotiate uh our way you know with our tail between our legs back out of ukraine i i think that's right i think that this doesn't end well for him it seems to me even if his military occupation of ukraine succeeds in the near term i think the consequences will be worse than what they felt in afghanistan in the sense of a constant insurgency supported by the rest of the world with constant economic pain of a range and a degree

that they didn't experience before and with these internal pressures at the same time peter you i think i see the internal pressures coming in three areas i kind of feel like if there was a if the if the oligarchs, wherever they are in the world, to whatever Caribbean harbors they're in right now on their yachts, if they all set up a Zoom call, they wouldn't be all saying to one another, what can we do to help Vladimir more? They'd be wondering how bad is he going to make their lifestyle? And is there a way that they could replace him with somebody who wouldn't put it in jeopardy?

I think that Navalny, who is the most high profile Russian dissident politician who's been in jail at Putin's hands for no reason other than opposing Putin. I saw I was tweeting today saying the way that we'll defeat Putin is for all of us to end up in jail in the paddy wagons, I think is what he said. And so this notion that people are going to take to the streets, even if they're going to go to jail, that may reach a new level of willingness that we've never seen. We're seeing some images that suggest that that's the case as well. I think there's also real questions about whether or not the military that are, you know, the young men who are basically on the ground in Ukraine and are kind of faced with this notion of if you don't follow orders, your life is going to be horrible. But if you do follow orders, you feel like you're doing something that's completely wrong and unwarranted.

That's a difficult situation as well. So I think all three of those kinds of internal pressure and dissent will manifest themselves increasingly over time. And I guess it takes me to a place where I go, well, how he responds or whether Russians in some fashion or another solve the Putin problem for the rest of the world remains to be seen. But I definitely think that whatever he thought he was going to accomplish, it looks like he said he's going to end up in a worse finish uh than he imagined the problem of course is that that many others might along the way too you know the Navalny tweet today um is a sign itself of what must be going on inside Russia right now with all

this because the very fact that he was able to get that tweet out is quite something at a time I was surprised yeah yeah yeah and I heard yesterday I don't know if you you saw this but the Russian government website keeps getting taken down uh and then they put it back up and it just feels to me as though the regime doesn't really have everything kind of bolted down and ironed people who were on the democracy side of that were maybe a little bit complacent, weren't as well organized, weren't as able to kind of marshal their arguments. Their arguments sounded more kind of highfalutin and remote, whereas the fascists were better organized, better funded. Their language was more biting and they were rallying people.

And we saw, saw you know some of that in the convoy uh stuff that happened in canada and i think that is the you know it's the second most important fight here after the fight to protect ukrainians i think it's the one that we can't lose sight of after this conflict is over and hopefully over soon and in the safest possible way for people. And I don't think that we should assume that the fascists are going to lie down on it. They're going to continue the fight. I mean, we saw Max Bernier yesterday call a leader of a Canadian political party who used to be Canada's foreign affairs minister what did he do he called Trudeau a fascist and Freeland a Nazi and you know I know

some people were shocked by that but he's been kind of driving in that direction for a while and what shocks me a little bit more, and, you know, I know our conservative listeners are going to hate me saying this, but I wanted to hear a conservative party figure stand up and call that out. I want a conservative who will say that's wrong, that we can't talk about each other like that, that we can't throw those kind of terms around without regard for the consequence in our country, that disinformation aspect where people start to go, well, is she really a Nazi? Is he really a fascist?

I hadn't thought about it that way. Like the conversation goes off the rails unless we put it back on the rails. And it's up to politicians, not just on the left and the center, but politicians on the right to help with that, especially as we think about this colossal kind of challenge where fascism wants to plant roots and grow in places around the world, including here. Yeah, every once in a while you've got to kind of remind yourself, okay, where's this stuff coming from? Who was this guy, in this case, Max Bernier? Is he not the former foreign minister who, you know,

left highly sensitive documents in his girlfriend's apartment or something and then resigned as a result of it, you know? This is the same guy, right? Unlement right who has a really undistinguished career in cabinet was generally known as lazy and kind of uninspiring well he certainly has some attention following him now um we we got to be careful on you know back to the main topic we got to be careful on, you know, back to the main topic. We've got to be careful. We're not historians. We're not military historians. We're amateurs who are interested in that story. But I'll tell you, as somebody who's covered war and conflict for most of his career, going back to, I guess, the Falklands in 82, and many since then.

You know, there are certain things you see unfold at a time of war, battle, fighting, conflict, you call it whatever you want. We're in one of those times now. And one of the things you learn from watching these things, there are certain things happen in the first 24, 48 hours from the aggressor nation. And they're kind of in the textbook of how militaries operate. You know, you take out or attempt to take out command and control positions.

You take out or attempt to take out the communication systems like TV stations. And you go for airfields. Airfields, yeah. Now, that's all supposed to happen, like, in the first 24, 48 hours. Those are the first targets. Right. Now, the Russian military are not stupid, right?

The people who run the Russian military, the generals, have a fairly distinguished history. But they made one attempt of those three. They went after an airfield outside of Kiev with their commandos on day one. They took it for a few hours and then lost it. I think they have it back again now. There was no, at least from what I saw, attempt to go after Ukrainian command and control, which would seem to signal they didn't even know where it was. And the third one was...

Airfields? Airfields, I mentioned. Oh, TV communications. They didn't do that until yesterday. They knocked out a TV communications. They didn't do that until yesterday. They knocked out a TV tower. And the TV has been this incredibly powerful weapon for Zelensky. So you go, like, what's going on? Is this deliberate on the part of the Russian military?

Are they deliberately trying to screw this up? Because it would certainly seem that way. And it raises these, you know, issues about, is there a mole inside the Russian military or the Russian security services? Because the Americans seem to know everything that you Russians are about to do before they do it. So I, you know.

Without the airfields, right? I mean, we're looking at these satellite pictures of 40 kilometer long convoys. It seemed like they're stalled on the roads. Those are kind of sitting duck targets for the other side of this conflict. And presumably, if you control the airfields, you can solve your supply line issues using aircraft, at least to some degree. You don't need to have everything kind of caught up in these convoys, which are proving, I think, more difficult than the Russians may have expected in terms of how that works. I agree with you. I think that it seems as though it's a clumsy

and unexpectedly clumsy military operation by the Russians. And I would add to it that the diplomatic effort by the Russians, the psyops and the propaganda effort has also been pathetic. You know, I think I would have expected it to be better, given the strength of the response of the rest of the world. I looked at the text of the message put out by the Russian ambassador to Canada. I don't know what he put out yesterday. I just saw it this morning. But it was, you know, it was really lame, basically. It was, we're in there to wipe out nazis and uh it didn't

you know it was it was sort of bellicose about the fact that people were kind of against it and everything else and i went down as i think you know to the russian embassy in front of the russian embassy on the weekend um with with many, many, many other people in Ottawa to protest. And what I found really interesting was that people were full-throated. They were really angry at the edifice that representedussia and the people that they assumed were inside and they didn't hold back there was a lot of there was a lot of yelling there was a lot of passion and what russia has to say about it on the other side is so weak and ill-considered and poorly argued and that you really kind of feel like

this doesn't have the feel of a country that had a kind of a strongly figured out kind of diplomatic initiative alongside its military effort um we saw the images of people walking out of the un uh yesterday uh i don't know it's more than 150 representatives walked out and i don't think they could have made a good argument but i think they could have been expected to have been better prepared to make the diplomatic argument than than they seem to be right now don't you think oh yeah absolutely yeah, absolutely. You know, I mentioned the other day, and I think it's true. You know, it's 60 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, right? And yet every week we still find out new things,

especially on anniversary years as this year, about what actually happened during those 13 days in October of 62. What was going on behind the scenes? We're still finding that out. And so to assume that we know what's going on behind the scenes right now on both sides would be wrong because, you know, there's lots to find out and it may be beyond our lifetimes

before we do find it out. So we should all, we should all keep that in mind. And I feel kind of like I've really enjoyed this discussion today, but it does feel like, you know, two guys in a theory, you know, like that old, you know, when it first started that moving company, which was like two guys

in a truck. We don't know anything about moving, but we have a truck. They've come a long way since then. But, you know, I think a lot of people are trying to figure this one out right now, and we're no different than that. We have some degree of expertise. Expertise may be too strong a word, but we do have theories. And I think that's keeping

the discussion going right now about what's going on or what may be going on and where this may be leading uh i think it's really important and we'll keep doing that this week obviously and look forward to chantelle joining us on friday to to focus again more on like canada's role in all this um and that'll be on good talk on friday so bruce thanks for this today um and we will for this today and we will talk again soon. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth on The Bridge with Bruce Anderson.

A wonderful Wednesday, as we used to say. And we'll be back in 24 hours.