The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Season 2, Episode 16

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

This program provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving 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 week's Munk Members podcast explores two stories in the news. First, Russian troops withdraw from areas around Kiev leaving a trail of war crimes in their wake. Is this a turn point in the conflict where more intervention is required to give the people of Ukraine the capacity to defend themselves against the risk of more atrocities to come? Second, the Canadian government releases the federal budget. What does the budget say about Canada's commitment to increase military spending over the medium term? And, what if anything does the budget do to nudge the Canadian economy out of what seems like an increasingly deep growth and productivity rut?  To access the full length episode consider becoming a Munk Member. Membership is free. Simply log on to www.munkdebates.com/membership to register. Under your membership profile page you will find a link to listen to the full length editions of Munk Members Podcast. If you like what the Munk Debates is all about consider becoming a Supporting Member. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. 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.com, and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www. Monk Debates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our regular monk members only podcast. This is the weekly program where we dig into the big issues and ideas in the news, hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights. 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 again this week. And great to be with our Monk members and with you, Roger. I want to have a two-part program this week, Janice. Let's dive into the fast-evolving and seemingly more intractable conflict in Ukraine, the war that is underway. And then in the second half of the show, let's unpack some of your key insights around the budget as it both relates to international affairs and defense,

but also, you know, some of the broader challenges that are. facing the Canadian economy at this moment. But I want to start with with Ukraine. Janice, we're seeing just a frankly a pretty grim week. We've we've had a redeployment of Russian troops away from Kiev to it looks like a now possibly protracted war in the Dombas region. We've ended the week on Friday with reports of a rocket attack on a railway station, 39 people killed, 70, sorry, 87 wounded. What's happening here, Janice? I'm left with a feeling this week that this war has taken an ugly turn and may unfortunately be with us for months. U.S. military, even hypothesizing this war could last years.

I think that is exactly right. We moved into a new phase. Keith clearly is now safe from an all-out ground assault. So let's just say that for a minute and stop and say just an incredible performance by a small military. I just, I was thinking back to Biden's offer to President Zelensky to evacuate him. Right. I expect that city to fall and his famous answer, I don't need a ride. I need help. So that is a major victory. But we are in phase two. The Russians have narrowed their tactical objectives.

It is now focused on the Donbass and the land bridge to Crimea. They have pulled their forces back to reorganize and redeploy. And they're hoping with shorter supply lines and more focused. focus, they will succeed on the ground. I am pessimistic that they will perform much better than they did in the first phase. Big picture headline, the risk rises as things go badly for the Russians underground. Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you about because I had this feeling and you can pick it up in both some of the reporting out of Russia, in the state press, this sense of doubling down. on the objectives, Putin supposedly pushing forward some kind of May 9 victory parade. I mean, it just seems preposterous. I'm sure the propaganda will win out over whatever the

realities on the ground are. But the fact is that all of Russia's prestige here is on the line. They're in a sense, their own perceptions of themselves as a great power is on trial now in eastern Ukraine to fail. to extract at minimum the conquest of the nombast region, the land bridge to Crimea, this would seemingly open up for the regime of Vladimir Putin a kind of an existential moment in terms of their own credibility vis-à-vis the Russian people, who knows, within their own security apparatus. So Janice, you know, is there in fact a risk here of escalation that if this doesn't go as planned using conventional forces. And we see the Russians are trying to pull, you know,

units as far out as the Tajikistan and Siberia. I mean, they are clearly stretching their professionally trained conventional forces at this moment. What is the risk here of escalation over the coming weeks? You put your finger right on the problem. Rudyard. Putin cannot fail. When you're an autocrat, a highly personal system, you cannot fail.

Main I is the annual military day parade. It's an arbitrary deadline, but he clearly wants to be on a reviewing stand, claiming victory in Ukraine. Let's just do some numbers really quickly. About 200,000 combat-ready forces, the Russian Army, 150,000 thrown into this first failing stage. Some are being pulled back in order to compensate, as you just said, forces from Chechnya, from Syria, and the Wagner group. It will take months. First of all, these are not regularly trained combat forces.

It will take months to train them. Conscripts will do even worse than what we saw in the first phase. So I do not believe that the Russian army will succeed materially better than it did in the first. And that's when the pressure to escalate grows to use some sort of, frankly, terror weapon against civilians to break the back of the Ukrainian people and to break the will. That is the big risk that intelligence and defense communities are worried about now. But against that risk, you know, again, this horrible rocket attack on Friday, dozens of civilians killed, almost 100 wounded. We similarly saw supposed increased sanctions, European reaction,

cutting off of Russian coal, you know, on the basis of the atrocities of Bucci. and what we've seen in these suburbs around Kiev. So at what point on the other side, on the NATO, Europe, Canada, United States, access, are we frankly compelled to escalate in our own way? I mean, in ways, frankly, that maybe morally, you know, the burden is increasingly on us to go beyond what we've done today, with with ukraine to provide you know weapon systems that are not defensive but are offensive in the face of the indiscriminate slaughter and killing of civilians we said we were never going to

stand for this before uh we said that after world war two we said that after rwanda you know are we going to live by that credo janice with the public public pressure on government is growing it's palpable you can hear it. You know, our foreign ministers taking the lead in referring to Pumannan to the International Criminal Court. There is enormous pressure. You hear it in Washington now, the Biden administration, increasingly uncomfortable language like butcher, war criminal. That tells you how much pressure NATO members are under. And here's the problem, Roger, there's not much room left in sanctions.

There's one big envelope left, and it is oil and gas. And Germany has already said they're not going to get there this week. They want any sanctions put off, at least until the summer to get through the peak demand periods. There's not a lot of room anymore to increase sanctions. So what do you do to, and this is this is this is this delicate balance of risk that Putin is playing on. We will continue to use missiles and artillery to fire against civilian cities. There will be civilian casualties and maybe more. And what are you, NATO, going to do about that?

Because you don't want that risk to grow of unconventional warfare. That is the big policy dilemma right now. How we square that circle, you do it centimeter by centimeter and hope you don't miscalculate. I hear you on that. And to be honest, a month or so ago when this war started, my interest, you know, in terms of we all think about our own security, was that this conflict not escalate, that we find ways to give what, we talked about in those doyos and others a golden bridge for Putin to retreat over that seems though to just have been washed away by the realities of this war it's increasing brutality it's uh it's attacks

now indiscriminate seemingly on civilians so if the golden bridge is gone um why isn't it the time now to say okay um we need to acknowledge that This is now a, in the words of Zelensky, a form of kind of genocide that is being perpetrated against the Ukrainian people. And on that basis, fighter jets need to come back on the table, you know, armor, you know, not just personnel personnel carriers, but tanks, you know, the, we're sending in some older, I think the checks are sending in some older tanks. But maybe it's time to really open up the arsenal of NATO and provide this offensive weapons at scale to the Ukrainians because that ultimately is to provide them the defense that they need against a genocidal power.

So that's clearly one way to go here, Reggie. And that is the risk that Putin is running as he strikes civilians over and over over. And we see these horrific pictures. And it's not only the civilian attacks that you talked about, it is the evidence that the retreating Russian army left behind, you know, of shooting soldiers who were handcuffed and tied their hands were tied behind their back and they were shot in the back and killed. So there really are atrocities. As Putin continues to do that, he pushes, especially the UK, the United States, the Canadian government, closer to what you just described.

There is another path here, and this is what you referred to at the beginning of our discussion, which is that this war settles into a grinding war of attrition. That's what happened from 2014 on. We forget 14,000 people were killed after the first. first wait between 2014 and 22. There were not missile attacks against cities, but everything else that were talked about happened, and that is the inflection point that we're at. Does this war become just an ongoing grinding war where Ukraine continues to fight at a lower level of intensity? That's what these next few weeks are going to tell us. Let's take May 9th, a kind of psychological target here and watch what happens right after that to get some indication of whether we're going up the ladder or tragically this stabilizes at a very high cost to the

Ukrainians yeah i mean i just uh i guess it's important to remind people you know in the iraq war over the course of the almost decade-long conflict somewhere in the order of 180 000 to 200 000 civilians were killed in that war. You know, we allowed that to happen. Yes, we did. In fact, in fact, the United States was an active participant in many of those civilian deaths. And I just wonder, you just have this feeling, Janice, that, boy, when the shoes on the other foot, the Americans are all for, you know, pumping arms and money into this conflict. to, this is the other way to look at it, to ensure that it goes on, that it is, that it is

potentially that grinding war of attrition. This time, that's okay. The other time, I guess, for the Americans, it was okay too, that 200,000 civilians died in Iraq. They certainly weren't sanctioned for that. Their leaders were not hauled in front of the international criminal court at the Hague. I don't know where I'm going with this, but I just feel that there's these double standards here that NATO and the United States can kill tens of thousands of civilians. And then we're going to go through this all over again. And it's just a certain extent we're aiding and abetting that, but we kind of have to because the Russians are so brutal. I mean, it's just a moral quagmire. It is. And you're right to bring up this issue of double standards.

We don't have good numbers yet on civilian casualties in Ukraine. There are no reliable numbers, I can tell you that they are fewer than the number of civilians who died in the Iraq war. And now, of course, we're much earlier on in. But there's no question about it that the number of civilians who died in Iraq were greater. And you're quite right. There were no, there were no governments referring any of the combatants to the International Criminal Court at that point as war criminals. There isn't the same kind of political outrage. So one of the big takeaways from this is we in North America feel differently about wars in Europe than we feel about wars in any other part of the world.

And that is an open double standard. Let's just be honest about it. Secondly, of course it is in the interest of the United States for this war to grind Russia down. The best outcome from the United States clear strategic defeat of Russia. There's already been a tactical defeat. If there was a way that they were certain that the Ukrainians could inflict a strategic defeat, they might take the risk you're talking about. But short of that, grind the Russians down. Look what's happened.

They have pulled their forces, significant forces, out of Libya, out of Syria. Those are real advantages. for NATO and the United States when we look globally at what's happening. And the government of China, to round out the map, is not suffering either if Russia is ground down here. That's how these kinds of, frankly, ugly, tacit consensus develops on how you manage the risk of respiration. It's the people who live in the country who pay the country. terrible price. It's Ukrainians. It's Iraqis. Those are the people who are tracked in a much big game, frankly. Okay, Janice, let's take a quick break. I'm back on the other side. Let's dig

into the Canadian federal budget out today. And for our international listeners, stick with us on this because we're going to talk about some broader kind of themes, economic and security that are really affecting advanced democracies all around the world. So we'll have that conversation for you right after this short break. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the rest of the episode, consider becoming a member.

Membership is free and available at www.wunkdebates.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.