The Munk Debates Podcast - Donbas Falls? - Biden Presidency

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Munk Members Podcast provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.   This edition of the Munk members podcast features two stories in the news. First, with Russian troops set to capture the strategic city of Severodonetsk in the Donbas region, are we seeing the beginning of the end of the war? What are the chances that Russia will consolidate its positions in the Donbas and southern Ukraine in the coming weeks? Will new NATO weapon systems give the Ukrainian army the opportunity to turn the tables on the plodding but so far effective Russian advance? Second, the Biden Administration is courting some of the lowest approval ratings of any recent presidency heading into crucial mid-term elections. What is the cause of Biden’s sagging popularity? What could it mean for the mid-term elections and what happens after in terms of political and policy gridlock? How should Canada be positioning itself for a period of political instability in the U.S.?   This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue.   More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk Podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.Munk Debates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. to this, the regular monk members only podcast. This is our weekly program where we dig into the issues and ideas, making the news, and we do this each and every week with Janice Gross Stein.

She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs and internationally renowned scholar and author, and she's all ours for the next half hour. Janice, great to be in dialogue with you. Great to be here, Roger. And since you mentioned, The Monk School, President Zelensky came to the Monk School on video on Wednesday and talked to Canadian University students across the country. And anybody who missed that, you might want to catch it on the YouTube channel of the Monk School. Great.

Yeah. And that's where I want to start our show this week, Janice, which is all signs indicating the Russian advance has completed its occupation all but of Severnansk, which is one of the last of two remaining important cities in the Lujansk province. So that's the second of the two big Dombas provinces. How significant do you think this development is, Janus, are we? in a sense, seeing the beginning of the end of this war? It is a really significant development, Rudyard.

You're right. This will complete the Russian occupation of Lujansk. The Ukrainians announced early this morning. They are withdrawing their forces, and that is a very bitter pill for President Zelensky. when you withdraw off from destroyed urban areas, really hard to get them back. And there are still parts of Donetsk that are not occupied,

but effectively this meets the original so-called war objectives of Vladimir Putin, occupation of the Donbass, or most of it, and the land bridge to Crimea. but there is absolutely no indication that either side is going to stop. U.S. long-range artillery is just now, just literally yesterday, beginning to reach Ukraine, not large numbers, frankly. So I think it's important not to overestimate very small numbers. They're very effective pieces of machinery, but small numbers of them. and there's no indication that Putin's ready to stop, which is the bigger question.

So we still may be in for a slog over the summer months in which Putin seeks to take advantage of this moment. Just picking up on Zelensky's address at the Mug School, there was a, I don't know, a kind of tone there, a pleading of not to forget Ukraine and the school. war. And you have to wonder a bit, Janice, that the Zelensky government seeing casualty rates that sound as if maybe upwards of a thousand or more Ukrainian servicemen and I'm assuming some women too perishing on a weekly basis. So these are now very significant deaths, unfortunately, amongst the Ukrainian armed forces. You have to wonder if his government. His government, government is not being pushed here to a bit of a breaking point. How long can you continue to take those types of casualties? And I guess my question to you is, I don't know, I don't want to be

overly cynical, but to what extent have the NATO allies, the United States in particular, to what extent would they not have anticipated this outcome? You know, they knew that the weapon systems were slow getting there. They knew they were playing a game in terms of not providing the Ukrainians with weapons that would destabilize the conflict to the point where the Russians could be provoked into attacking a NATO country. So we try to walk all these different lines, Janice. And to me, it feels at the end of the day, as if this is now inevitable, Ukraine is going to be brought not to its knees, but brought to a realization that there is no taking back of the Dombas region.

This is now the de facto reality of their country. It is severed. It is dismembered. There is no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. You know, the role of the end is very interesting here. And we won't know, really, because we weren't in the room. But let's remember that the original intelligence assessment in the weeks before February, the 24th, was the Russian military would collapse after three days.

And the Russian government would take Keef. Sorry, the Ukrainian military would collapse. Pardon me, the Ukrainian military. You're absolutely right. Would collapse. And they offered, you know, in that famous exchange, they offered Zelensky a ride out. Well, they got the battlefield dynamics wrong, and there is now demands for an intelligence investigation of the failure of U.S. intelligence to assess the battlefield appropriately. So let me just start by saying intelligence gets battlefield outcomes wrong very often.

And the reason they get it wrong so often is they count weapon systems. but they can't get at the harder things like morale. I saw Admiral Stavridis, who joined you earlier this year at a dinner, David Petraeus, to very well-known military experts in the United States last week, saying they would bet on the Ukrainian military still because the asymmetry in morale and motivation was so great. Is that really the case anymore? I mean, you are now finally getting reports out of the media, which, you know, I think to its credit, has become a little bit more balanced in the coverage of the war as it moved from Kiev into the Dombas region of Ukrainian units effectively revolting and saying, look, we have no ammunition. We are being thrown into a combat situation where there is overwhelming Russian firepower.

And there are needless deaths occurring on a scale here, which for it seems like a not insignificant portion of what is, let's remember, a largely civilian and volunteer force at this point in Ukraine, a sense that their their own morale is not what it was a month or eight weeks ago. So I think that's really important change, the one that you've just identified with your idea. And one of the indicators, one of the markers is the Ukrainians are now throwing in new recruits to the battlefield. They are not trained soldiers. And when you see that, you really understand how badly stretched the Ukrainian forces are. But the Russians are doing the same thing. They are running out of manpower. So you have, in a sense, what many analysts predicted,

had what happened by now, a slog on the ground. Both sides are taking very high casualty. Both sides using untrained personnel to fight, but the differences that in Ukraine, that will have much greater impact on the decision makers and on the morale generally in the public because the Russians can keep this up for several more months, without having any perceivable impact on Putin.

And Putin is deploying a second strategy, which is up the pain on Western economies, so that ultimately the Western alliance will fracture. So this is now, and that's why I don't see an end in sight, Roger, because the battlefield is moving by interest, frankly. That's what's happening. There was no great Russian offensive that is going to break through. Ukrainian lines. You've talked before that, you know, the end of the day, we don't like necessarily

how these conflicts end, but they end on the basis usually of great powers coming together to push, in this case, Ukraine, towards some kind of resolution. So if we wanted to be put our realist hats on here, you would, wouldn't you say, look, the east of the country is lost? there is no reclaiming it through some extended military campaign that would incur, because again, you're moving out of defensive positions, you're going on the offensive against the Russians with overwhelming artillery power. I mean, I just don't see that. And then if you're looking at, I mean, I don't give no credence to someone like Lavrov,

but his quip, you know, that NATO was willing to fight this war to the, last dead Ukrainian. I mean, at what point do the Ukrainians themselves say, look, we, you know, we are, as in the First World War, you know, we're losing our best and brightest. We are losing, in a sense, the future of this country in a, in a pointless almost could be in a matter of months, if allowed to continue, almost a First World War kind of dueling artillery in trenches. I mean, it doesn't get worse than that. I mean, why isn't it time for the great powers to come together and say, okay, we don't like it, but there's a new status quo ante here,

and we're going to have to move towards some kind of resolution, simply to stop the slaughter. I don't actually think it's great powers. We'll have to do that, Rudyard. Zelensky is a realist. He understands how, difficult this situation is now. And you're right, what's coming is grinding slaughter, which is the way you describe World War I. That is what's coming if this continues on both sides

for literally inches of territory. I don't think the United States or NATO are going to have to force this on Zelensky. The dynamic is switched now. What brings Vladimir Putin to the table. And he's made it pretty clear, lifting the sanctions. Now, that is extraordinarily difficult for United States, Canada, Germany, France, all the NATO allies that came together individually, not as NATO, but nevertheless imposed the most severe and draconian sanctions on Russia that we've ever imposed, frankly. How do you look politically? How do you lift those sanctions with Russia occupying the Donbass and part of southern Ukraine?

So I don't think Zelensky is the issue now. Is there, is the genus, I guess, an intermediate step? I agree with you. You know, there's going to be a much longer conflict and, set of heightened tensions between Russia and the West that could extend these sanctions and Russian countermeasures on energy for possibly years to come. But I guess I'm just thinking of the war as it is now, these two forces aligned against each other. Could we see, you know, I don't know, a ceasefire, a some kind of pause in the hostilities on the basis that Ukraine,

acknowledges, and this doesn't even necessarily have to be public, it just has to be a matter of a shift in a change in policy that the Lashansk and Dombas provinces are lost. The land bridge to Crimea remains. And this idea of somehow escalating this war to push Russia back to the original territorial borders of Ukraine, February 2020. I mean, I don't know, Janice, I would hope for that outcome, but it just does not seem credible to me. It seems like a fabulous view of where this war could end up. And if it's not going to end up there, then don't we have a responsibility to acknowledge where it is ending up and try to search for, if not peace, at least a de-escalation and a moving. towards an end of hostilities?

So many wars don't have an official end right here for the reasons that we just talked about. The political obstacles are overwhelming and leaders on both sides who try lose their heads at the hands of their own publics. So there likely will not be any public official end to this because the domestic politics on both sides are unforgiving. Here's a Ukrainian nightmare. There is a functional pause when we get to the fall. Russia consolidates. Ukraine tries to recover and hopefully gets massive amounts of financial aid in that process. And then Putin starts up again in 18 months. Because he's retrained,

he's re-equipped his forces. They've learned from their mistakes. And they push further. That's a nightmare. And none of us, so none of us can say that's not possible because it is possible. And Ukraine has lost that natural defensive line. Now, the only encouraging element here is it's become pretty clear to the Russian general staff. They do not have an army large enough, well equipped. enough to occupy all of Ukraine and to capture Kiev.

So we hopefully are talking about a period of five years in which Ukraine gets a chance to consolidate and rearm itself. But I think the concept that there will be an end because this round is lost, there's nothing in other parts of the world when the conflict is this visceral. when neighbors go to war against each other and the vulnerabilities are so great. You know, the United States can withdraw from Iraq and can withdraw from Afghanistan because that's over there somewhere. Yeah.

But look what's gone on between Palestine and Israel. It's 100 years of living next to each other, fighting, a ceasefire, regroup, fight again, change tactics. But there's the attachment to the territory is so great that the war continues in faces and in different ways. Well, we'll continue to watch that here on the monk members only podcast. Back after this short intermission with the second half of our program. You've been listening to a sample of the monk members only podcast. To access the rest of the episode, consider becoming a. a member. Membership is free and available at www. monk debates.com. Once you've joined as a member,

go to your membership profile to access the rest of this episode and all of our monk members podcasts. Thanks for listening.