The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Ukraine Attack – Emergencies Act

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

Friday Focus 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.  The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard take on two stories in the news this week that made headlines. First up, Ukraine suffers brutal Russian missile attacks knocking out power, water and heating to millions as civilian deaths mount. Is it time for NATO to step up its involvement in the conflict in the face of Russia’s blatant war crimes and complete disregard for the safety and welfare of the Ukrainian population? The donors-only second half of the program explores what Canadians have learned from a week of testimony by cabinet ministers into the government’s decision to implement the Emergencies Act to clear protesting “truckers” from Ottawa earlier this year. Was there an imminent national security risk? How are these decisions made in moments of crisis? 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.

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full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, welcome to the Friday Focus podcast. I'm Redyard Griffiths, your host and moderator. Thank you for joining us each and every Friday for our in-depth conversations with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director, the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally renowned scholar and author. We're going to go deep into, we hope, three, four stories, because again, another busy week to summarize Janice. And let's start with what we see happening in

Ukraine. I wonder if you could help me because I've had a bit of a, I don't know, what I would call it, a crisis of conscience this week, a moment. of real introspection. You know on this program, I've been maybe, I don't know, some people might think overly concerned about the risks of escalation and willing to, in a sense, at all costs, avoid a conflict between NATO and Russia. But this week, Jan is looking at what's happening in Ukraine, the dismemberment of the power grid attacks on hospitals, intentional or not.

one just has a sense, Janice, you know, how can we stand by and let this go on? This has moved beyond simply war between two armies on a front line. It is now turned into a direct Russian attack on the entire civilian infrastructure of a country that is inhabited by millions of people heading into the winter. I agree with you, Roger. This is brutality at a level of that, frankly, we've not seen in Europe since World War II. We've seen in other parts of the world, but we have not seen in Europe. And let's be really clear, this is a war crime and a crime against humanity. When you deliberately, there's no question they are deliberately targeting civilian

infrastructure, they want to knock out the power grid to plunge Ukrainians into darkness. I mean, we have horrific stories coming out of surgeons operating while nurses are holding flashlights. This is an attempt just to break the will of the Ukrainians and for Solensky to the table. And it is, frankly, god-awful to watch. It is just God-awful to watch. I don't think there's anybody who can look at this. And no matter what Russia's objectives are, justify this behavior.

If we do, I agree with you, we are leaving behind 70 years, frankly, of progress. We are just trusting it in the Ashken of history. What do I know from my work as a political scientist? I know two things. It does not work. Doing this to a civilian population does not. work. We know it from when Hitler did it to the Brits in the Blitz. We have innumerable examples. Paradoxically, the worse, the hardship, the more people rally behind their leader. And that's

what we're seeing with Ukraine. So the strategy will not work. But what it does do is leave a permanently enraged and bittered population. You know, at the Monk School, Redyard, we have a group of Ukrainian students that we made special efforts to bring from Ukraine. And they're here with us for the year so that they don't lose their year. And I met with them last week and the anger, the rage these people feel about what is being done to their country. Russia is laying the seeds.

It is sowing the seeds on its own border of a level of fury and a desire for revenge, which I believe will haunt Russia for decades. Janice, has the moral imperative for us, for NATO, for Canada, for the West now changed? I mean, do we need to acknowledge that, as you say, we're seeing the, the repeat. in a sense of horrors of the Second World War that we said would never be repeated. Putin has used the threat of his nuclear arsenal as a cloak, a cover, in a sense, a virtual iron curtain, which he has, you know, slammed down between the borders of Ukraine and NATO and said, you shall not intervene. but at what point, Janice, do we just simply sit by and watch this?

I mean, there was just this tragic story of this baby that survived for just maybe two hours. It was killed in the delivery room as its mother was taken away, kind of traumatized. And it's one story, but it just speaks to the absolute kind of horror of what's going on there. And I don't know, I'm going to point, Janice, a bit of inflection point. I would say, what if we said, okay, it's time for NATO to go into your, Ukraine defensively. We are not going to go in with offensive weapons, but we are going to deploy troops in the western half of the country, not up against the front line, but in the western half of the country with the latest air defense systems operated by Western troops who will

also be on the ground to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Ukraine. And let's start thinking about, you know, Putin, let's call your bluff here, because you have no convention. army. You have no ability at this point to threaten NATO. And if you do, you are in a sense calling down potentially the destruction of your regime. I mean, have we come to a point now, Jeddus, where we have to move aside from fearing this Voldemort, you know, ensconced in the Kremlin and act with some sense of urgency here as the people of Ukraine face not only electricity, a collapse of their entire water processing and treatment system in Kiev. Yeah, yeah.

This is the, by the way, this is the roughest moment for Kiev since this war began because there's no clean water, there's no electricity. Just think about that in a large city and one third of the population of Ukraine. It's either out of the country or internally displaced. It's almost unimaginable. So what should NATO do now? And at the Halifax Security Forum, where I was last week, Redyard, the feelings you gave voice to were, I think, were the mood of everybody in the room. Fury, do more, do not give in to nuclear blackmail.

And that came from military people as well as civilian people. We are at the watershed. So what does a watershed moment look like here? I think short of deployment of troops, there is still much more that we can do. So one, actually move much faster than everybody is moving to deploy anti-aircraft missile systems, which will knock out. You will never get 100%. And the Ukrainies are doing a great job. They are frankly now knocking out two-thirds of the missiles that are coming at them.

But one-third are getting through, deploy. inside Ukraine at a much faster basis, anti-aircraft missile systems, but without the troops, just to still preserve that thin line. Second thing, believe it or not, is how do you, and it's complementary, how do you help Ukrainians get through this nightmare period without power and electricity? So here's where the Ukrainians have been geniuses all the way along. It's the thousand points of light on the ground, right? you flood Ukraine with generators and with systems that are and you can distribute them locally.

And I don't know if you noticed, but Zelensky made a speech yesterday in which he said virtually every two blocks that will be a heating center where you can charge your phones and electricity and get food and get warm and come and stay. And that's his strategy. And that has worked for Ukraine every time. push the decision making way down, decentralize the response. Janice, what is the argument against NATO troops in a defensive capacity, operating defensive missile systems, in a sense, creating a bit of human shield here, because Putin would have to understand that, you know, one errant missile that strikes a, you know, a battalion or a platoon of NATO soldiers would then really truly risk.

Yeah. And risk and escalation. Like I'm just wondering, have we reached the point here where, you know, again, you know, mass graves discovered in Curzon, multiple mass graves. Okay. Like at what point do you act on the basis of, I mean, what would we tolerate? Would we tolerate the direct targeting of hospitals? Say, let's say. That's happening.

That's happening. Yeah. But let's say in a very conscious methodological way. they start missling the entire hospital system of Ukraine. Is that, is that a red line for us? What is a red line? Right now we've drawn these red lines way at the end of the continuum, which are the use of biological and chemical weapons.

Yeah. And the use of a tactical nuclear weapon. Yeah. This starts to feel like, to me, like Putin is playing with us. He's now pushed the yardstick so far out on one end that he's tolerated, he's now allowed to do anything, you know, short of those three kind of horsemen of the apocalypse. Well, this is a dilemma of fighting a nuclear power, right? And it's probably it's, we're going to see more of this in the world, not less. Because Iran is now moving ahead of a very quick pace that about its nuclear weapon.

So the issue is what difference would NATO troops make in Western. Ukraine to the scenario you just painted right? You're probably not a lot because Russia would still be able to target the whole of Eastern Ukraine. It's probably still would be able to target Kiev. It's not clear that it would make a critical difference if you restricted it to Western Ukraine and it puts the ball, as you say then, in Putin's corner. What if he then attacks Western troops in NATO?

What's the next step? So this is a dilemma. The first step is always easy. That's easy. But what good generals are paid for is to ask what happens after the next step. So let's follow your scenario that a missile kills Polish troops, Estonian troops, U.S. troops that are deployed in Western Ukraine. What's the response?

Is it to kill Russian troops? Where? Where? In Crimea? in Donnath, in the Donbass, and then what happens next? What are the Russians who have to that? And that's that horrible ladder of escalation that you and I have been talking about, which is chilling, frankly, precisely because Russia has put in such a lousy conventional performance. Its army is so degraded. What does it have left? Two things. These dumb missiles,

because they're not smart that are crippling Ukraine and unconventional weapons. So thinking ourselves down that road three or four steps, it puts us in a nightmare singer. I agree, but that is, that is the deterrence that he is benefiting from, from having these, you know, weapons of Soron to invoke Lord of the Rings. And you know, you think he has a lot of characteristics that are on the truth. But just to finish this point, if we accept that deterrence, then we're accepting right now the forced deportation of women, men, and children from Ukraine into Russia. We're accepting in all the cities that seem to be retaken from the Russians, mass graves. where people have been shot with their hands tied behind their backs in the dozens,

in some cases, possibly the hundreds. We're talking about allowing him to completely degrade the entire civic infrastructure of a country of, you know, tens of millions of people, all the while, while Russia suffers, in a sense, nothing on its territory. So the complete asymmetry of this, again, has to speak to some moral cause here where you just allow this 850 pound wounded gorilla to mall, you know, the child that falls into the zoo enclosure. It just, I don't know. I just, I think we're getting to a point now, Janice, where we have to start thinking about all this concern about deterrence of the eschatory. ladder. That's how Putin wants us to think. And that's his, his weapon. It's a psychological

weapon. And I don't know if we can just go on and on and on accepting the weight of that weapon on our own conscience, the smothering of our own moral imperative to act against what is clearly one of the great injustices of our generation. this is the asymmetry between those in the world who have nuclear weapons, some 9, 10 countries, depending on how you can, and those who don't. There is an asymmetry. And it gives them exactly the leverage. You know, nuclear weapons work as long as you don't use them, Roger.

As soon as you use them, it's all over. You are a huge loser, so is everybody else. But they work, contrary to what a lot of people say, they work. because non-nuclear powers or other nuclear powers are not willing to test the logic that you just put on the table. So they get, they are able to operate under a threshold. And it is up to NATO to devise solutions below that threshold, shove those anti-aircraft missiles into Ukraine as fast as you can. I think there are solutions to the electricity and power problem. There really are.

but it requires a kind of mobilization of everybody that we haven't seen yet, and that NATO country should lead and move and transfer literally hundreds of thousands of generators, private generators, into that country at the local level to obviate the worst of this. Is this going to stop Russia's capacity to slaughter Ukrainians, which is what? No, it's not. So who's the decision-maker? here, Reggie. It's, in a sense, it's Zelensky, right? And this is, and we saw something this weekend, which slipped under the radar because of everything else it was going on. Mark Milley,

the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the United States, floated a trial balloon. It is time to stop. And then the United States made an offer to Russia and to Ukraine for ceasefire with a seven-year deal. The Russians get to keep Crimea, but there'll be a referendum at seven years. And the Ukrainians stay out of NATO, but there'll be a referendum in seven years. Turn down cold by both sides in a minute. Neither side. Neither side is willing to contemplate the kind of political sacrifice that would be necessary to even get to a ceasefire right now.

So I reluctantly come down on the side. you still have, we all have to remember that Russia has nuclear weapons. The worse it is doing, the greater the probability that something happens. We saw how trigger, how hair trigger this is when that errant missile, which was Ukrainian, flew over into Poland and the, you know, the NATO command sprang into action. Just imagine if it had been a Russian missile, rather than nothing, nothing. changes the fact that this is still a serious risk of escalation and that Putin holds a whip hand as long as he can threaten to use these weapons. Well, you've run the clock out on me successfully.

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