The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members Pod, Ukraine Invasion Special Edition: Season 2, Episode 10

Episode Date: March 1, 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 is a special edition of the Munk Member's podcast focusing on the extraordinary series of developments in Eastern Europe that have culminated with Russian troops invading Ukraine triggering the largest ground war in Europe since WWII. In this episode Janice and Rudyard are joined by U.S. security expert Joshua Rovner, Associate Professor at the School of International Service of the American University in Washington, D.C.. Joshua walks Janice and Rudyard through the different risks that could escalate the conflict in the coming days from cyber to conventional forces to nuclear. 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.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this special edition of the Monk members only podcast. Throughout this crisis, we want to bring you the latest analysis and insights into this fast-developing event, the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. So once again, we've opened up Janice Stein's amazing rolodex and pulled up for your listening pleasure. America's top security experts, Joshua Rovner. He's an associate professor at the School of International Service of the American University in Washington, D.C. He's someone who knows a whole lot about conventional cyber nuclear threats. And he's going to walk us through how these different

risks could escalate this conflict in the coming days, what we need to be watching for, and what we need to be careful of. The next voices you're going to hear is me welcoming Joshua onto the podcast with Janice for a three-way discussion. I hope you enjoy this program. Josh, great to have you on the Monk members podcast. So much to dig in with you on, but let's start with, I think, what has been an abiding concern, a real source of anxiety, I think, amongst publics around the world.

which has been this persistent airing and raising and elevating of a discussion about nuclear weapons in the context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This is primarily emerging from the Russian side, as we know. But this boy, this seems new. You know, I'm 51 years of age, so I grew up at a time when I was, you know, politically conscious of the threats of nuclear annihilation. And I've spent the last 30 years blissfully forgetting that period of my life. And now I think like many people, were being thrown back face to face into a kind of conversation about these existential risks.

How concerned are you about the developments of the last seven days in this regard? Great. Well, thanks for having me. And I'll say I am concerned. I'm concerned about the prospects for escalation in this conflict. One thing that we should be clear about is that nuclear escalation isn't the only kind of escalation. Russia could take this conflict in new and nasty directions that have nothing to do with nuclear weapons. You could escalate in conventional terms. You could use other kinds of violence. violence in Ukraine and outside of Ukraine. He could go the cyber route. There's other ways of escalating. But, you know, he's made a point of making this now a nuclear crisis. He had a this choreographed, televised announcement that he wanted Russian nuclear forces to raise their alert levels. He brought in senior military officials to sit in. next to him while he made this announcement, I think in a way which was meant to implicate them, right, to make it so that they don't have an easy out, right, much in the way that he did the

same thing with his Security Council last week. He's enlisting all of these people and making them go on camera as a way of binding them towards him. So that's a cause of concern, right? And the rhetoric that went along with this announcement was pretty alarming. He sounded a lot like Trump sounded in 2017 when he was threatening North Korea. Putin said, you will encounter consequences you've never encountered in your history.

And that had the whiff of fire and fury. That had the whiff of that, which is a cause for concern. for concern, right? This kind of heated rhetoric combined with enlisting his officers is something we should pay attention to. Josh, let's just pull this apart into the different pieces that you put on the table here. And let's come back, by the way, to this issue of how he's implicating his senior military and staffers, because that to me suggests almost an insecurity. But first, let's talk through what happened, the choreographed theater, but then a raising of the alert of Russian

nuclear forces. We don't know to what level. And we do know two things. We do know that U.S. intelligence is watching carefully to see whether there is action that matches the words. we don't know. But we also know that the Biden administration was really careful not to respond, to dismiss it. It did not go up in return. And is that an effort to control the risk of escalation? Is that how you see it? I think that's right. I mean, I think that the Biden administration is studiously avoiding the conversation. If the Biden administration were to escalate its own rhetoric, that could be dangerous. On the other hand, if the Biden administration was to sort of challenge Putin on this,

or excuse me, if it was to step away from this and appear meek, then that would be problematic. So Biden is seeming to ignore it. When asked about this, you know, should Americans be concerned about escalation, he simply said no and carried on, right? Which is probably the right thing to say at that moment. I don't know what the better answer could be. Now, on Russia's alert itself, the only sort of potential good news that has come out of this, as you say, is that we are watching and there don't appear to be physical signs of mobilization, right? Nuclear experts who are watching this closely suggest that this is kind of a way of ensuring that the command and control system is ready if needed. But we haven't seen any steps to move materials or

send out road mobile launchers or call up troops or increased security and bases. All of those observable indicators that Russia was ramping up. Apparently, we We haven't seen that yet. So that's comforting. And that is good news. That is good news. Well, let's, yeah, before we turn, because I want to spend some time with you on cyber and conventional,

this is going to be our kind of our escalation discussion for our members here on Tuesday, the 1st of March, a week into this invasion. People have surmised that there could be a variety of circumstances. where the risk of some kind of nuclear escalation increases. One of them is a scenario where the Russians get bogged down, increasingly in Ukraine. We'll have to see if that happens or not.

Others talk about the potential here, and this is what I'd like for you to reflect on, is the extent of these sanctions, the speed and severity, of the approach over the last 72 hours, the Russian ruble collapsing 30%, the central bank effectively cut off from international debt markets. To what extent do these, do the effects of non-kinetic responses become provocations because their internal effects in terms of Russian security and the stability of the Russian state are in some ways equivalent to a kinetic effect,

a kinetic strike of some sort. Is there a concern that you have there about the pace of everything, the extent to which it does feel, at least to me in the last 72 hours, like we are in a phase often where, you know, events are overtaking us. There's a there's a rapidity to this that at least I find alarming. Are you concerned about that too? Yeah, I am concerned about the speed of this all and the effects of this all. I think that you're in a dangerous position now because we're running the risk of like a catastrophic success.

What happens if both if Russia succeeds at toppling the government and occupying the government, and occupying the country, if it succeeds in its sort of narrow conventional terms. And what happens if we simultaneously succeed in strangling the Russian economy, right? In that situation, there's a real danger because at that point, Putin would be on the horns of a dilemma, right? Ukraine is a vital interest. I've invested a lot into it. For whatever reason, this is incredibly important to his vision of Russian security and Russia's identity. At the same time, the economy might come into a situation where it's collapsing. And he can't survive as a great power in that situation.

So the U.S. and European allies and NATO and everyone else is trying to compel Russia to get out of Ukraine through this economic pressure. and how does Putin respond? Does he get out or does he lash out? And I am stuck on this World War II analogy that keeps coming into my head. It feels a bit like Japan in 1941, right, where Japan had successfully occupied China, which it considered a vital interest,

And the United States responded by putting an embargo on Japan to try to strangle its economy and compel it to leave China. Well, Japan didn't. It lashed out and set. It hit Pearl Harbor. It hit a number of other targets as a way of breaking out of this dilemma. It escalated the war in dangerous ways. Now, Japan's decision to escalate the war was incredibly stupid. It was self-destructive. It was foolish. It was a gigantic gamble that it should not have done. But Japanese leaders were not great strategists. They were self-destructive. And what concerns me today is that Putin is not a great strategist. In fact, I think he's a pretty lousy strategist. And he's made a series of self-defeating decisions over the last decade. So the result of all of this is that you have a,

a dangerous situation, and you have a subpar strategist trying to break out of what seems like an existential problem. So yeah, I am nervous. Josh, just to elaborate on that point for a minute, let's go back to the fact that Putin, and you're absolutely right about this, has his senior officials in the room every time he takes a step up the ladder. Now, when I look at the that. That is somebody who is trying to share the ownership here in order to make sure that the security folks and the military folks, they're not the same groups as we know, own this and are therefore less motivated to move against them. Is that how you read it? Is it a sign of insecurity? I don't know that it's a sign of insecurity. I think that that is probably what's going on with

these grotesque, staged, managed events. I will say, Putin is really good at staying in power, right? So I think that he's not a great strategist abroad, but he's really good at clinging to power at home. And, you know, he's had over 20 years of experience and coup-proofing to prevent himself from internal threats, right? So he's never run in to the, kind of pressure on the economy that he is facing now.

Yeah, this, this is, this is, um, much bigger than, than in the past. This is, this makes the 2014 sanctions seem like nothing, completely trivial in comparison, right? So he might be calling on all of his skill and experience at safeguarding his position in Moscow, um, because he does sense that there's a problem. I don't know if that's the case. that we will see. Josh, let's turn to cyber. I think some people have wondered why we haven't seen, you know, some flourishes of cyber attacks,

specifically in Ukraine instigated by Russia. And then just more generally, you know, leading up to this, there was a moment of real tension in 2021 around the colonial. pipeline hack in the United States and a, you know, a sense that Russia was increasingly using proxies and cutouts to kind of so the horrible thing I think about cyber is the way it sows kind of anxiety and uncertainty in often very opaque and kind of murky ways amongst the public. So the Biden administration, as you know, had entered into this big dialogue with Russia to try to push back against this interference in the U.S. economy. So where do we stand now?

Why are we not seeing cyber? Does that mean it's off the table? What are the risks? It's a great question. For a long time, people had anticipated that in the next big conflict, it would start with this sort of wave of cyber attacks. And that hasn't been the case. There's been a little bit of harassment online, website defacement, small scale stuff. You know, as a colleague said the other day, this has been a war of metal and money. This has not been a war of ones and zeros, at least not yet. That could change. There are various reasons why that might be the case, right?

One reason I suspect is that big consens. consequential cyber operations aren't that easy to do. We have a kind of Hollywood conception of what it takes to do us, a massive damaging active cyber sabotage, but it's really hard. It takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of skill and organization and dumb luck, right? You need to have a way into a target system. So it's not simply a matter of just pressing a key

and turning the lights out. So that could be one explanation about why you haven't seen that. Another, I think, plausible explanation for why you've seen less cyber, is that within Ukraine, Russian forces feel like they need to use those communication networks, right? There's lots of reports that Russia is having logistic difficulties, that their forward forces are using cell phones a lot, right? they're communicating in the plain air. They're basically not encrypting communications, which suggests that, you know, if they

were to launch a serious cyber attack against Ukrainian communications, that would be self-defeating because they would, they themselves would be in the dark. So those are possible reasons why cyber hasn't been a big deal. And then the third explanation is, well, maybe they're just waiting. Maybe this is a calculation that if Putin were to go big on cyber early, he would lose that card. Maybe this is, as you say, something that he can use to keep the West anxious and nervous. Just to follow this, train of thought, Josh, one more step down the line before we turn to the conventional scenario of escalation, which is very real. I think people are worried about a cyber attack against financial institutions in Europe and North America.

We know the Russians are all over our grid. And let me tell you, the Canadian grid is not as well secured as the American grid is. That hasn't happened. Now, is that because we are all over the Russian grid as well? and as you say, there's at this moment, no desire to put all of that at risk. But how long does that scenario last if the squeeze and the economic crunch is really gripping? Yeah. At a certain point, there won't be much reason for Russia to show restraint. Yeah.

At a certain point, either Russia will have to try to impose costs to change our calculations, or whatever hypothetical cyber capability it has will be useless. But there might be a kind of prosaic explanation for all of this as well, which is, you know, the U.S. and others have spent a lot of time over the last decade trying to improve public-private collaboration. they've been intensely concerned about threats to finance and attacks on banking. Maybe they have figured out a way to make this a lot harder for outsiders to do. I don't know, but it strikes me as plausible that the defenders might actually have

advantages now that they didn't have in the past. Josh, walk us through a conventional escalation. You know, it is hard to exaggerate how nervous colleagues are. We had a discussion with some colleagues in Estonia this week. How nervous and concerned people are in the Baltic states and along the borders of Ukraine by people who are formally part of the Soviet Empire or the Warsaw Pact. Are you worried about conventional escalation? Conventional escalation is certainly possible. My immediate concern is not the Baltics. It's more the shipment of military gear to Ukraine. There's this wave of enthusiasm for resupplying Ukrainian forces for very good reasons, right? They're going to run low on ammunition. They're going to run low on anti-tank weapons. and all the things they need to ward off an invasion.

And so NATO allies and others have been rushing to deliver military supplies. I would imagine that Russian military planners are watching this closely, and we'll try to interdict those supplies. So this creates a practical risk that non-Ukrainian forces simply trying to deliver weapons will come under attack. There was a report this morning in the Times that Russia has begun flying interdiction flights along the Polish border, helicopter flights,

specifically for this reason, looking for what appear to be military convoys delivering gear. I don't know what happens if a NATO member comes under attack in that scenario. Is that an attack on NATO? Is that something that would trigger Article 5? I don't know that we've thought this all through. And I think that we should be very careful about assuming that there's this sort of ironclad border

between Ukraine the zone of conflict and Europe, the zone of peace, where we can do whatever we want without consequence. If Russia feels like it is in danger here, it would cross that border. And then we would have a conventional interaction, which could lead to conventional escalation. Yeah, Josh, I think this is a really important point to focus on because, you know, these are now not insignificant weapons that are coming both immediately from Russia's, at least historic enemy, Germany, in the form of RPGs and Stinger missiles, but also this remarkable pledge, half a billion dollars of arms funding that the European community is putting aside to support the Ukrainian government. And one, Josh, I mean, if you're sitting in the kind of Russian command and

control center, I mean, this seems like an escalation, doesn't it? I mean, these are weapons that are coming in to kill your soldiers. I mean, it's no more complicated than that. Yeah, I mean, from from from from from from from from Russia's point of view, this is a third parties supporting my enemy. Yeah. And and like again, we have a lot of history with this, right? This was a a cause of conflict in both world wars in the 20th century. Right.

North Americans aiding Europeans and causing Germany to try to stop that. So we have a long history of material support threatening one of the parties, which then intradicts it to try to stop it. And I'm not making a moral judgment. I'm not defending Russia in any way here. I'm just saying that this is how it's, it wouldn't be surprising if it tried to attack those supplies. No, Josh, fundamentally you're arguing, look, this is how it spins out of control.

And this is, of course, what people worried about. I've watched President Zelensky this morning. I don't know if you had a chance to see. Give the most stirring speech to the European Parliament and get a standing ovation by everyone in the room. And, you know, this is clearly a man who has met the moment. There's no question about it. And he defined this conflict.

He said to the Europeans gathered in the room, we are fighting for you. This is not about Ukraine. This is about you and your democracy. We are fighting for you. I sense growing pressure on European governments and in the United States as well, do more, do more, do more. And that's clearly the political dynamic, partly in response to an outstanding performance by a beleaguered leader. That itself can create escalatory dynamics. How strong is that firewall that Biden put in place? No forces.

I don't know. And you're asking exactly the right question, is there is momentum to get more and more involved in this conflict. Solensky hasn't gotten everything he's asked for. He's calling for a no-fly zone. And the answer from the United States was no. He asked apparently for European fighter jets. and they had this plan to have Ukrainian pilots go retrieve them and fly them back, and then they put that off for, I think, very good reasons. But there is growing pressure to get allies involved more directly. And from Zelensky's point of view, this is important and it makes sense, because the balance of forces is not in his favor.

despite putting up a very stout defense in the first week of this war, they're over-matched. And Russia still hasn't brought the majority of its forces to bear in this war. It's barely used its air force at all. And Zelensky knows this, and anybody can see this. So the more that he can bring in outside allies to the fight itself, the better. The question for those outside countries is whether or not it's worth taking the risk. If they agree that this is a battle for democracy in the future, well, maybe they will start to entertain that seriously. And if they do, then escalation is inevitable.

Final question to you. What are you watching for in the next three, four days? because we are clearly entering into the second phase of this war right now. So I am watching for a few big things. One is the degree to which the West restricts itself to providing aid rather than direct support. I'm watching to see the Russian response to large amounts of aid flowing towards Ukraine and in Ukraine, which might be a target. I'm waiting to see if cyber operations remain non-factors. And in terms of escalation, I'm waiting to see if there's any real movement

in raising the alert level of Russian forces, doing the physical things that they have not yet done, that would be a cause for alarm. I'll say one last thing. Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the war is what I won't be able to see, which is whether or not the United States and allied countries start doing quiet diplomacy towards de-escalation and war termination. For instance, using intelligence services to quietly reach out, kind of a subterranean diplomatic channels with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts,

out of the public eye to see if there's a way of resolving this or to keep it from becoming a true catastrophe. Up until now, intelligence in this conflict has been very public, amazingly public, how much intelligence has been on the front page throughout the whole run-up to this conflict. Well, it might be better at this point for intelligence to return to the shadows and go back to the business of quiet communications, leaving those channels open so that we can start to think of a way out of what could be a spiraling disaster. Josh, thank you so much for your analysis and insights today. This has just been a hugely informing conversation, and it's such a frenetic moment right now.

So the opportunity just to kind of press pause with you and think a little bit and try to think through these things logically with some kind of coherence. And what I appreciate is your sense of history and a bit of perspective here. A reminder that we have been through similar events before. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. There are lessons there and it might be a good time to turn to them. So thanks so much, Josh, for coming on the program. Thank you very much, Rudyard.

And thank you, Janice. Thank you for listening to the Monk members only podcast with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, and myself Rudyard Griffiths, your moderator. As always, we'd love your feedback on these Monk member podcasts. What are the questions or topics you think we should be covering? Let us know how we're doing. Please send us an email to membership at monkdebates.com. Thank you for being part of our community and helping us restore the art of public debate one conversation at a time.