The Daily - Putin’s Escalation of the War in Ukraine

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

In a speech on Wednesday, President Vladimir V. Putin said that he would require hundreds of thousands more Russians to fight in Ukraine — and alarmed the West by once again raising the specter of nuclear force.The mobilization signals that Mr. Putin is turning the war from one of aggression to one of defense, offering clues about what the next phase of the fighting will involve.Guest: Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Accelerating his war effort, Mr. Putin accused the West of trying to “weaken, divide and ultimately destroy” Russia.American and other officials vowed to continue sending military, economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. In a major speech on Wednesday, Vladimir Putin stunned Russia by announcing that he would require hundreds of thousands more of his citizens to go fight in the war in Ukraine. And he alarmed the West by saying he was prepared to use nuclear force. Today, I speak with my colleague Anton Trinovsky about what many see as a turning point for Putin. It's Thursday, September 22nd. Anton.

Sabrina. It's good to have you in the studio. It's good to be here. So the last time we talked about Russia and Ukraine on the show, we talked with our colleague Eric Schmidt, and he told us about the very sudden, very successful Ukrainian advance into northeastern Ukraine. And at that time, our question was, what would Putin do? How would he respond? So I woke up this morning and I looked at my phone and I saw that there was a lot of news coming out of Russia. And I immediately thought I need to call Anton and ask him what happened.

What did Putin do? So he gave a big speech, his first big address to the nation since February 24th when he announced the invasion. And what he did was tell Russians, Ukrainians, and probably most importantly the West, that Russia is not backing down. Even after this defeat in northeastern Ukraine this month, Russia is ready to escalate. It was a nationally televised address. He was sitting in this same wood-paneled office behind a big desk next to a line of old-school-looking telephones that looked very much like that same office

where he sat when he announced the start of the war. So he begins the speech by laying out how, from his perspective, this is an existential conflict for Russia against the West. The West, he said, is seeking to weaken, divide, and ultimately destroy our country. to weaken, divide, and ultimately destroy our country. He's saying that the West is getting ready to provide long-range offensive weapons to Ukraine that would allow Ukraine to strike inside Russian territory. He talks in this speech about how NATO is training Ukrainian forces

up to Western standards, and that NATO, as we've reported here at the New York Times, that NATO is providing intelligence assistance to the Ukrainians to help them target Russian forces. And so he says in his speech on Wednesday and in fact, the entire military machine of the collective West. So we think of this as a war between Russia and Ukraine. In Putin's point of view, the one that he's trying to get the Russian people and the rest of the world to adopt, this is actually a conflict between Russia and the West

where Ukrainians are proxies for the West's aims to destroy Russia. And what does that amount to for Putin? He says that means Russia can't back down. It is time to go forward with what he refers to as a partial mobilization, which means that Russians who have military experience are now going to be subject to a draft.

Okay, so I want to pause on this for a second, Anton, because this is very important. I mean, we've been asking this question for months, right? You know, Russia's losing on the battlefield. It doesn't have enough soldiers. Will Putin actually take the dramatic step of forcing Russian citizens to go fight? And it sounds like that's kind of what he's saying here. But I guess I don't understand exactly what it is he's saying he wants. Yeah. So this is a really important moment because up until now, Putin has essentially been fighting this war at peacetime strength without call-ups inside Russia. And something like 300,000 Russian men

will be drafted into service. These will be men with military experience, but anyone who doesn't follow these orders to report to duty could face a prison term of as much as 10 years. Wow. And Anton, when you say military experience, what do you mean exactly? I mean, does every Russian have military experience? There's actually a required year of military service for 18 to 27-year-olds in Russia. And Putin went out of his way to say that only a limited subset of Russian men will be subject to conscription. The way he put it, it'll be people who have certain military specialties and relevant experience. But if you look at the decree that he signed today, ordering this mobilization, it's actually extremely broad.

So he's leaving his options open for a very broad swath of the population, potentially, to end up in this war. Exactly. And Anton, remind me, 300,000 Russians, what does that do to his current fighting force? Well, it would augment it significantly. At the start of the invasion, the Western estimates were that Russia had roughly 200,000 people amassed around the borders with Ukraine. U.S. officials have said there have been about 80,000 killed and injured Russians. So this is now bringing this war into Russians' lives

in a much more direct and intense way than anything we've seen up until now. So he announces this draft, which is really quite a shock. What else does he say, Anton? What else does he say, Anton? So the next part of Putin's speech was really focused on officially expanding Russian territory, what he considers to be Russian territory, deeper into Ukraine. Okay, so how does that work? He just says it? Like, what happens?

So there are these four Ukrainian regions that Russia currently partially occupies, two in the east, Luhansk and Donetsk region, and two in the south, Zaporizhia and Kherson region. There are these highly contested areas. The war has been raging there for really the last seven months. And Putin has said that he believes that there's a grassroots movement in these areas of people wanting to join Russia and break free of what he describes as the Nazi regime.

Russia's plan now is to hold votes in these territories, starting on Friday, where the citizens of these territories starting on Friday, where the citizens of these territories will be able to vote in what they're calling a referendum on whether they want to join Russia. But Anton, are those real votes? I mean, it's sort of impossible even to imagine. It's like these are Ukrainians under Russian occupation. Yeah. I mean, Western leaders have already called this a sham referendum. If it happens, I don't think you can expect basically any country anywhere in the world to recognize

the results of these votes. And if you think about it, it does sound very similar to what happened in Crimea in 2014, that Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea that Russia took control of and annexed. And there, Russia also put on a vote. They said 97% of Crimeans voted to join Russia. And a few days later, you had Putin at the Kremlin signing a decree making Crimea part of the Russian Federation. That obviously was also widely rejected in the international community. Right. No one recognized it. Just about no one. Yeah. But Anton, why does it matter that Putin is annexing all of this territory? I mean, I understand that obviously it expands his holdings in Ukraine, which he would want, but how does it further his war effort? Well, as soon as Putin declares that these four Ukrainian regions are part of Russia,

even if no other country recognizes that, he'll then be able to go on and say, recognizes that. He'll then be able to go on and say, any further attack against these regions will be considered an attack on Russia itself. Wow. The way he put it in his speech on Wednesday was, if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. And so, as of next week, the territory of Russia, according to Putin, may well include these four regions of eastern and southern Ukraine. So, this annexation, if he in fact goes through with it it would represent a sudden real escalation in the kinds of threats that Russia is making here

in the kinds of stakes it's placing on the table as it wages this war We'll be right back. So, Anton, before the break, you were telling us that Putin said in his speech that Russia would use all of the means at its disposal to protect itself, to protect its territorial integrity. So where does that lead to? What does he say about that? So this is where we get to the most consequential and ambiguous part of the speech,

which is Putin threatening the West with Russia's enormous nuclear arsenal. He says in the speech that the West has been threatening Russia with nuclear weapons, which is not true. I mean, if you talk to people in the Biden administration or the chancellor of Germany, you know, the last thing they want is anything that would provoke a direct war between Russia and NATO. Does he say who he's talking about? No, and it's not clear to me who he is talking about. But look, for the story that Putin is trying to tell in this speech, that doesn't really matter.

And what we do have is him making the clearest threat he's made so far about bringing nuclear weapons into this. He says, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and in some cases, even more modern ones than those of the NATO countries. cases, even more modern ones than those of the NATO countries. And then he goes on to say, and when the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. This is not a bluff. Wow. So is he actually threatening nuclear war here? What's Putin doing? Well, he's trying to be ambiguous because, of course, he's got the world's largest nuclear arsenal.

And he's trying to use that here to his advantage at a time when he's suffering these battlefield defeats. He's trying to regain the initiative and find a way to scare Ukraine and especially, I think, the West into backing down. And that's the point, really, that he leaves us with in the speech. He adds a line sort of with this dark picture of other forces threatening Russia with enslavement. But I think what he's really trying to leave us with is this idea that he's ready to escalate massively if he feels that's what he needs to do to win this war. He's putting all of his poker chips on the table. Exactly.

So, Anton, thinking about everything that you've said, I guess what I'm wondering now in my mind is, what are the risks for Putin here? Well, I think Putin faces several risks here. First of all, on the diplomatic front. Obviously, the more he escalates and rattles the nuclear saber, the more the West can be expected to come together around the idea that Putin is this enormous threat that needs to be pushed back against. It also could well cause more and more problems for Putin with his partners elsewhere in

the world, countries like China and India that, while seemingly not that happy with the fact that this war has been going on, have not enacted sanctions against Russia, have continued to buy Russian oil and gas, have really supported the Russian economy in a really important way. He needs to keep them on side, and this risks that. Exactly. He would certainly risk losing their support if he really continued to escalate. Second, of course, on the battlefield, you know, it's going to take weeks, if not months, for Russia to actually take these drafted people, train them, outfit them, and send them to the front line. And until then, Ukraine could still be in a very good position to continue its counteroffensive

and potentially cause even more defeats for Russia. And then third, potentially most explosively here, you've got the domestic political situation for Putin. He has tried to make this war not really interfere in most people's lives. And then now suddenly, with this draft, that's a huge paradigm shift in how the Kremlin has been managing public opinion in this war. And already in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, we've seen protests on the street.

Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, we've seen protests on the street. We've seen hundreds of arrests already on Wednesday of people going out and protesting against the war, against mobilization, even though they're risking imprisonment for doing that. At the same time, Russian media is reporting a spike in demand for plane tickets out of Russia in an apparent scramble to leave. We are seeing flights out of Moscow to international destinations sell out. And this animation from Flight Radar shows flights one after the next. Look at them, they're all leaving, they're all going one way out. On Wednesday, it looked like flights from Moscow to Armenia, to Istanbul, to Dubai had sold out.

According to Google Flights, by 10 o'clock local time, the last remaining one-way tickets from Moscow to Istanbul were more than $11,000. And although Putin is an authoritarian leader, he still is beholden to public opinion to some degree. He is afraid of protests. So this is enormously unsettling to Russia. And we're going to have to see in the coming days, as this draft plays out, how will the general public react? I think the Kremlin really doesn't know. They think they have this situation under control

with all of these arrests they've made in the past months, their success in forcing people into exile, but still, this could cause some significant domestic unrest that the Kremlin will have to So, you used that poker analogy. I agree, Putin is very much putting all his chips on the table here. But whether he has a winning hand, I don't know. Anton, thank you. Thanks for having me. This war is about extinguishing Ukraine's right to exist as a state, plain and simple. And Ukraine's right to exist as a people. Whoever you are,

wherever you live, whatever you believe, that should not, that should make your blood run cold. In a speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, President Joe Biden accused Vladimir Putin of trying to destroy Ukraine. Putin claims he had to act because Russia was threatened. But no one

threatened Russia. And no one other than Russia sought conflict. In fact, he said Putin was making quote, irresponsible nuclear threats. A nuclear war can not be won and must never be fought. And in Russia, by Wednesday night, more than 1,200 people in 38 cities had been detained for protesting the war. In Moscow, hundreds gathered, shouting, Down with the war, send Putin to the trenches, and let our children live. We'll be right back. Here's what else to know today. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve raised its key interest rate by three-quarters of a percent.

The Fed has raised its rate multiple times this year, as it struggles to contain the most rapid inflation in 40 years. And, Donald Trump engaged in years of illegal conduct to inflate his net worth, to deceive banks and the people of the great state of New York. New York's Attorney General, Letitia James, filed a sweeping lawsuit that accused Donald Trump, his family business, and three of his children of lying to lenders and insurers

by fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars. Her office lacks the authority to file criminal charges, and she referred her findings to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. They declined to comment whether they would investigate. Claiming you have money that you do not have does not amount to the art of the deal. It's the art of the steal. James said in a press conference

that she was seeking to bar the Trumps from ever running a business in the state again. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Luke Vander Ploeg, and Will Reed, with help from Jessica Chung. It was edited by Lisa Chow and John Ketchum, fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. We'll see you tomorrow.