The Decibel - Putin doubles down on the war in Ukraine

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin called up 300,000 reservists in a partial mobilization for the war in Ukraine. That sparked protests in several cities in Russia, and a flood of people trying to leave the country. This is happening just before referendums are set to take place in four regions of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia – and many suspect Putin will use the referendums to claim the regions as Russian territory and further escalate the war.The Globe’s senior foreign correspondent Mark MacKinnon is back on The Decibel to explain what is happening in Russia right now, what the repercussions of Putin’s escalation might be, and what it means for the broader conflict.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. That's the sound from one of many protests that took place across Russia on Wednesday night. After only a few hours, at least 1,300 people in the country had been arrested for protesting the war in Ukraine and the latest measures from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Earlier, Putin went on national television. He announced that he would be calling up some of the country's reservists to fight in Ukraine, and that he was willing to use Russia's nuclear arsenal. And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will without question use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people.

This is not a bluff. Putin's doubling down on Ukraine marks a dramatic turn of events in the war. Mr. Putin is saying, no, this war doesn't end just because Ukrainians had a breakthrough in Kharkiv province. We have millions and millions more troops that we can call up. It's certainly signaling intent to continue this war. The Globe's Mark McKinnon is in Kyiv, and he's back on the podcast. This is The Decibel. Mark, thank you so much for joining me again. Thank you again, Minika.

I mean, this is a little sooner than we thought, but things seem to be moving quickly this week. So I'm glad we can bring you on to help us understand what's happening. Yeah. I want to start with these protests that we've seen in Russia. What are you hearing from people inside Russia right now about what's actually going on there? They were, you know, across the country, 20 protests, but none of them terribly large. And we quickly saw why, because the Russian riot police absolutely crushed these protests very quickly, using batons, throwing people into prison seemingly at random.

Now, this morning, we're learning that some of those people who went to protest against the war, against conscription, have been conscripted directly from the police stations they're being held in. So now if you're protesting against the war, protesting against conscription, you can literally get sent to the war. The defense minister of Russia, Sergei Shoigu, who went on television right after Vladimir Putin, said, oh, it's just going to be 300,000 people were calling up, just 300,000 is a large number, obviously. And we're going to call up those who have previous combat experience. And so a lot of Russians did this math and said, well, that's not me. I should be OK.

A lot of other people immediately tried to flee the country. This is essentially conscription then, right? They're being conscripted to fight in Ukraine. If you were part of the military reserves in Russia, and apparently if you had previous combat experience, if you'd done a tour in, say, in Chechnya or in Syria, they were calling those people up. They said, we're seeing this morning what looks to be much larger, much wider conscription, particularly in the areas where non-Russian ethnic minorities live. Places like Buryatsha in the Far East, Chechnya in the South, it seems like all men of fighting age are just being loaded onto buses.

And the actual decree posted to the Kremlin's sort of official website does not specify a number. In fact, there's one clause in the decree that was kept secret. And this morning, Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper founded by the Nobel Peace Prize winning Dmitry Morozov, is saying that actually that hidden clause says they're going to call up a million men. So we really don't know the scope of this, how fast it's going to move. A lot of people that I'm talking to inside Russia are obviously quite worried about what comes next. And there's also reports of lots of people trying to leave the country as well. So I guess this is also because of what's going on? Yeah, this afternoon I spent some time on the Aeroflot,

the Russian Airlines website, and on Turkish Airlines, just trying to see what was possible in terms of booking a flight out of Moscow. The first flight that I could see out of from Moscow to Istanbul, I think it was via another city, it was a business class ticket six days from now for $4,000, which dollars a lot more than that very usually a very cheap route same thing for flights to yerevan the capital of armenia flights to you know basically any place where russians can land without a visa i couldn't see uh tickets available for for at least a week in any of those cases and then we're seeing massive lineups at

the land borders with georgia another country that allows russians without a visa and even mongolia people are just driving for the borders, flying for the borders, trying to get out before they get served with a conscription notice. Wow. A lot of this, of course, then has stemmed from that speech that you mentioned that Putin gave on Wednesday. Why did Putin choose that moment, I guess, to broadcast this speech? I think it's hard to separate that decision from the very successful Ukrainian counteroffensive that we've seen this month. The war had kind of reached something of a stalemate over the summer. The front lines hadn't shifted very much from when

I was here last in July. And then suddenly the Ukrainians, everyone expected an offensive in the south of the country in the Kherson region. Suddenly in Kharkiv, they burst through Russian lines and effectively drove the Russians completely out of Kharkiv oblast and now look like they're going to push into Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts. And so what Putin has done now, he's done two things. He's called up the reserves, a new fighting force that frankly will probably take a long time to be effective or to reach the battlefield, especially in an effective way. But he's also declared that frankly will probably take a long time to be effective or to reach the battlefield especially in an effective way but he's also declared that russia will recognize the results of some very hastily organized stage managed referendums that are taking place

starting uh september the 23rd and over the coming four days in four different regions of ukraine that are under partial russian occupation and he's made it very clear, Russia, it will accept the results of these referendums and annex these areas. And then from that moment on, he's made in that speech and his officials have made even clearer since that speech, Russia will consider that Russian territory and will take any measures, use any weapons at its disposal to defend Russian territory. That obviously includes nuclear weapons. Which is a very scary prospect there. So just to be clear here, Mark, where these referendums are happening, that's Ukrainian

territory. All of this is Ukraine. And I was in Crimea in 2014, when the referendum was held, I saw how it was. So there were Russian, mass Russian soldiers on the street staring at people as they went in and put their ballot into a glass voting booth. You could see how everyone had voted. And, you know, can you imagine voting no under that in that situation? And even if they did vote no, the Kremlin is going to make up its own math here anyways. They are going to say that the people of these regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia have declared their willingness to join the Russian Federation. You know, and like I said, Russia only controls parts of these oblasts

of these provinces. You know, they'll probably demand that the Ukrainians leave territory they can currently control or dot, dot, dot. And what is that dot, dot, dot? Like, what could we see after these referendums then? Start off by saying that Vladimir Putin has used the nuclear card before he's threatened you know that russia has it reminds that people on a regular basis that russia has this arsenal and should be respected as a great power largely because of its veto at the united nations security council which ukraine is now questioning and its large nuclear arsenal, the largest in the world. I think at this point, the threat is not that he's going to engage in a nuclear war with the West,

but that he's threatening to retaliate against a country attacking, quote-unquote, Russian territory with any weapon at his disposal. Russia has a large arsenal of chemical weapons, of biological weapons, of nuclear weapons, including smaller battlefield nukes, which these are, they call them tactical nuclear weapons. They're designed for use, not at a city like we saw in the Second World War, where the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are not designed to obliterate an entire city, but they're designed to sort of shape the battlefield. It's completely unpredictable other than I can predict that that's the next threat that's going to be waved around at the Ukrainians. And to be clear, this is not a war, according to Putin and the Russian government right now, right? Even at this moment, even as they're mobilizing their troops, they haven't formally declared war on Ukraine. They haven't instituted martial law.

They still refer to it as a special military operation. But in the defense minister, Sergei Shoigu's subsequent speech on Wednesday when he spoke after Putin, he did refer to Russia as being at war with the West, not with Ukraine, but with the West. And this gets to the Russian explanation of why it's taken so long, why they are faring so poorly, and why they need to escalate. They believe they're locked in a struggle with the West and that the West wants to not just defeat Russia, but break it apart. And there was also something else that changed this week. Laws relating to Russia's military operations changed as well. What's different now there? Yeah, the main change worth talking about surrounds the concept of voluntary surrender. You know, in the wake of all these retreats that we've seen in the Kharkiv region, a large number of Russian soldiers simply surrendered when they

saw the Ukrainians had outflanked them. Under the new law, you can get 10 to 15 years in prison for having surrendered yourself to the Ukrainians. So previously, Russian troops in the field may have thought, well, I'm in a terrible position here. If I surrender, maybe there'll be a prisoner exchange in the future and I will get to see my family again. This new law makes it very clear that if you do so, don't expect that you're going to come home to the good life. You're going to go straight to prison. We'll be back in a moment. We started off talking about how people in Russia, men in Russia are being conscripted now to essentially fight in Ukraine. I guess the question I have is, and this may seem basic, but I still

wonder about this. Russia has always had more troops than Ukraine. Why does Putin think he needs to bring in so many more troops at this point? Right now, the Ukrainians have an equipment advantage in some ways. They've got a lot of Western supplied artillery and rocket systems that have tilted the war. You know, the number of, you know, in the Second World, sorry, in the First World War in particular, the number of people in the opposing trench mattered a lot. Right now, in this type of conflict, which we're seeing, you know, where it's a fast moving, suddenly a fast moving conflict, which is being dictated by artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, it matters a lot less than it once did. That said, obviously, Mr. Putin is saying, no,

this war doesn't end just because Ukrainians have had a breakthrough in Kharkiv province. We have millions and millions more troops that we can call up. It's certainly signaling intent to continue this war. And in your reporting, Mark, you've said that Putin has been reluctant to call up reservists so far in this conflict. Why that reluctance? I think it's, you know, Mr. Putin has, despite being a totalitarian ruler or increasingly totalitarian ruler over the last 20 years, has always been cognizant of Russian public opinion. He's always been something of a populist. And he knows that it's one thing for the russian population just to support the idea of a war far away another one you know when it's people's brothers husbands fathers being being called up and sent to the front and the videos we're seeing today of people

being drafted as i mentioned are often it's in russia's region so far. The big call-ups are in places like Buryatia, like in the south of Russia. And we're not quite seeing that in Moscow or St. Petersburg at this point. The places where you might not want to anger the population, where this becomes an issue of people turning against the regime so far. So the fact that Mr. Putin, who back in March, I think, promised that he wouldn't do this, feels the need to do this, quote, unquote, partial mobilization. And it seems like he's had to hide the extent of the mobilization so that people aren't reacting to the full extent of what's going on. It shows they're a bit nervous about, I mentioned the First World War a minute ago, the, you know, turned very poorly for Nicholas II when the soldiers on the front, you know, a bunch of armed men in the front decided this wasn't a war worth fighting anymore.

Yeah. And I want to come back to the protest, Mark, because clearly Putin has upset a lot of people in Russia, a lot of Russians. Do we have a sense of how strong the anti-war sentiment is in Russia? It's, you know, it's very hard to measure because Russian public opinion surveys suggest there is support for Mr. Putin, even now very high support, close to the 70 percent he's always claimed. And support for the special military operation is similarly high. Most people who were deeply opposed to the war, deeply opposed to Mr. Putin, have left over the last 20 years. I mean, before I came to Ukraine, I attended a Russian opposition meeting in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, and there were some excellent speeches being given by Russians who have been opposed to Mr. Putin their whole lives, but you couldn't help but think, you know, they're not even in the country. They can't affect what's going on in there at all. And I guess, what did the protests tell us about the state

of things inside Russia? Could they actually make any difference? I don't think the Putin regime is threatened by the street protests, though they obviously probably represent the feelings of a lot more people that are brave enough to come out in the streets. I think what's really important is how unified or disunified the Russian elite is right now. And that obviously we can't know. Nobody expects sort of a coup in the Kremlin until it happens. Now, if there are people around him who decide this has gone too far, you know, my family is personally suffering as a result of this guy's imperial ambitions. Maybe there's a palace coup, which is much more likely.

How different the next leader would be rather than Vladimir Putin, we obviously can't know that. How possible is it? We'd just be guessing. But if you ask me, do I think the change of regime in Moscow comes from the streets, comes from the election, or something behind the curtain, I'd tell you 100% something behind the curtain. What are Western countries meant to take away from everything that Putin has said and done in the last few days, Mark?

Well, I mean, we're heading towards a real inflection point. I think I've used that line a few times on the podcast this year. And it's if Mr. Putin escalates again, if he uses chemical weapons or nuclear weapons of any sort, what will the West do? And Joe Biden was asked that pretty directly on 60 Minutes last weekend. And his answer was, well, I'm not going to tell you, but it'll be consequential because I'm not sure there is a playbook for how we respond to a, quote unquote, limited nuclear conflict other than to head straight towards a Cuban Missile Crisis sort of situation. And that may actually be what Vladimir Putin is going for right now, trying to force an end to this on terms that are more favorable to Russia than currently exist by escalating this right up to a nuclear standoff. I thought it was very telling that during Putin's speech, Mark, you actually tweeted

out that Putin was basically saying he's okay with World War III, if that's where this is going. Is that how we should be thinking about this moment in the war? He certainly wants us to think that he's fine with going to World War III. I mean, whether he is or not, I mean, the Russian military at this point is struggling to take the Donbass region, let alone wage war against the West. The nuclear arsenal obviously is the trump card that Russia has always had. And yes, he certainly wants us to be thinking about World War III. I think he's, the question he's posing to Western governments, who he sees being the real enemy here, is how far are you going to go to defend Ukraine? I'm going to go all the way to defend Ukraine. This has always been, in his mind, you know, a part of Russia that was taken away

from Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed. Does the West feel as strongly that Ukraine deserves to be an independent state? That's the question at the essence of this. And if so, how far do we go? So far, we've gone a long way. Both sides have gone a lot further than I think anybody expected this war would go back in February. And now he's taking it right to the edge. Wow. So Mark, you're in Kiev right now. And I guess given everything that's going on in Russia this week, have you been able to talk to anyone and how are people there feeling? I was in Kiv now, I was in Kharkiv region most of the week. I mean, there is a sense of optimism. I was speaking an hour ago with one of the fighters who just come back from the front

and they feel like he's spent most of his time on the southern Kherson front. He was talking about liberating the city of Kherson by the end of the year being sort of an ambition that he thinks is achievable. So the Ukrainians think they're on the advance, ordinary people. I mean, outside on the streets here, there's a traffic jam, which, you know, wasn't happening for the first few months of this war. Obviously, people had fled. Now life has returned. I tried to go to a restaurant last night and the lineup was too long to get in. So I kind of walked back home. So, you know, there's a sense, there's an optimism here obviously there was there was an air raid siren again today and that reminds you there's a conflict going on and if you drive out to Kharkiv and especially to the newly liberated

areas where they've found these sort of large cemeteries outside of the city of Izium and all these other horrors I mean this country is uh still very much at war, but the mood is very, very different than it was in March, April, May, June, July, when I was here previously. Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me again today. Thank you again. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.