The New Yorker Radio Hour - Should Biden Push for Regime Change in Russia?

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine, David Remnick has talked with Stephen Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who is deeply informed on U.S.-Russia relations, and a biographer of Stalin. With the Ukrainian counter-offensive proceeding very slowly, Kotkin says that Ukraine is unlikely to “win the peace” on the battlefield; an armistice on Zelensky’s terms—although they may be morally correct—would require the defeat of Russia itself. Realistically, he thinks, Ukraine must come to accept some loss of territory in exchange for security guarantees. And, without heavy political pressure from the U.S., Kotkin tells David Remnick, no amount of military aid would be sufficient. “We took regime change off the table,” Kotkin notes regretfully. “That’s so much bigger than the F-16s or the tanks or the long-range missiles because that’s the variable . . . . When he’s scared that his regime could go down, he’ll cut and run. And if he’s not scared about his regime, he'll do the sanctions busting. He’ll do everything he’s doing because it’s with impunity.” Share your thoughts on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The other week, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, was in the United States, meeting at the United Nations and in Washington. Now, when he was last in this country, in December, Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress. He was hailed as a hero with constant standing ovations. But this time around, things were a little different. Kevin McCarthy said Congress was just too busy to assemble a joint session, too busy trying to avert a self-imposed shutdown.

And much of conservative Washington is now balking at the price tag of military aid to Ukraine. It's no longer a handful of Putin sympathizers on the far right. Even in Europe, Zelensky is now caught up in a diplomatic fight with one of his very closest allies, Poland. Since the war began, I've been speaking periodically with Stephen Kotken. Kotkin is a historian, an expert on authoritarianism in Stalin, but he's also one of the best informed people I know on the war that's going on right now in Ukraine. Stephen Kotkin, welcome back. This is our third conversation during this Godforsaken war,

and it's a very simple question that I have. Where are we now after a year and a half? Ukraine is battling the courage and the ingenuity are still there, but they're running out of people. They're running out of 18 to 30-year-olds. The average age of the Ukrainian soldiers training in Europe at the bases in Germany or the UK is 35 or older. They're running out of munitions. They're running out of any aircraft missiles.

That's a really big one too. You saw that Putin bombed several Ukrainian cities and not being able to defend the skies going forward when Russia has an intact Air Force. It's an enormous challenge. It's obvious that losses on both sides are enormous. But what do we know about specific numbers? You speak to a lot of people in governments in Europe as well as in the United States, in various agencies. what do we know about the numbers? Losses are really high,

tens of thousands just during the counteroffensive alone. Ukraine does not publicly release its casualty numbers, so we don't know the exact number. But here's your problem. The guy in the Kremlin doesn't care. Ukrainian soldiers die.

They live in a democracy. Their leadership cares. can't just sacrifice their people in big numbers. The guy in the Kremlin, he doesn't care. And so it's not just the numbers that are bad. It's the fact that one side can throw these bodies in, cannon fodder, and the other side just can't fight like that. What's your understanding of the success or non-success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia? Yeah, so it's like the stock market now. Everyone says they're long-term investor. They're trying to produce long-term value.

And then the analyst comes along and says, well, you know, did you make your quarterly numbers? The Biden administration, our European partners, Ukrainians themselves, talk about how they're in it for the long haul. They're in it for the long term. And then they go to a press conference. And the first question is, you know, what are the quarterlies? And how come you didn't meet your quarterly numbers?

And why is the counteroffensive so slow? And when are you going to win this thing? And so people keep asking me how this is going to end. And I say, why do you think it's going to end? end. As a historian, what can it be compared to? When you talk about a war of that length, what kind of precedent is there for that? I'm worried about a TED Offensive. A TED Offensive January 68, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese mounted an offensive. Everyone was saying that the war was going well from our point of view. We're winning. The other side doesn't really have

offensive capabilities, and then boom, lo and behold, the amount of very significant offensive surprise in this lunar new year. We beat it back, actually, on the battlefield. It's a battlefield failure, but what happens is everyone is shocked that they could do this and that they did do it. And so Uncle Walter goes on TV.

Walter Cronkite of CBS News. Uncle Walter says, this war is not winnable. But it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could. That was a pretty big moment. So I'm looking at the battlefield here, and I'm looking at the Ukrainians, and they're on the offensive. Their offensive could work.

They have made some progress. And however, they could be surprised by a Russian counteroffensive, which doesn't have to succeed very much on the battlefield. It could be just like Tet. But it could send political shockwaves through Washington, D.C., through European capitals, Tokyo, people could conclude that maybe this is not winnable. Maybe we shouldn't do this. And let's remember, Lyndon Johnson declared that he wouldn't run for re-election. That's right. In March of 1968, LBJ quite unexpectedly stepped down. Do you really think that that could affect the U.S. presidential race in Joe Biden's fate?

It could. So his numbers, when did they crater? they created with the Afghanistan pullout. I observed the mishandled pullout from Afghanistan hurt Joe Biden very, very significantly. I don't know the probability, but my view is if it's possible, we've got to be ready for this. We have to prepare the public. We have to prepare the battlefield. So what I would be doing is I would be talking about this publicly. I would be talking about the coming Russian counteroffensive

and about how Putin is going to try to improvise a TED offensive style battlefield failure potentially but political triumph. But we're ready for it. These are the measures that we're using to counter it. I'd get out front of this and make it more difficult to have that political effect and even make it more difficult to do it at all.

Do you think a Ukrainian victory is impossible in the foreseeable future? Nothing's impossible, right? Here's your challenge, though. You take Turkmach, they're still far from it, but that's the next objective on their line of deepest penetration. It's on the road to Milletopal. That's on the road to the Sea of Azov, which is the littoral, that land bridge that connects Crimea and eastern Donbos. that Putin has taken since February 2020. So you take that and then what?

What's your next step? How do you then win the peace? How do you then start rebuilding Ukraine? How do you get a Ukraine that is able to join the European Union over a period of time and transform its internal institutions as a result of the EU accession process? Where do you get the security guarantee from? So I need some type of negotiated process here regardless. Every war ends with a negotiation.

Even unconditional surrender produces a form of negotiation. I'm talking with Stephen Kotkin, an expert on U.S. Russia relations based at Stanford University. We'll continue in a moment. Hi, I'm Adam Howard, a senior producer for the radio hour, and I have a quick favorite ask of you. This program has been nominated for a relatively new award in our industry. the Signal Award, which recognizes the best podcasts in the country. So if you enjoy this program, show your love by logging on to vote. Dot.Signalward.com.

You'll have to click a few times to get to the news and politics category, and that's where you'll find us. The window to vote is closing, so do it now at vote. Dot signalaward.com. Okay, we really appreciate it. Now, back to the show. Now, President Zelensky was last week just in Washington to see Joe Biden, and he was at the UN, and he gave the kind of speeches we've grown accustomed to,

where he's both thanking the West for its aid, but imploring for more and demanding constancy and the psychology that this is not just a war for Ukraine, but for the Democratic West. I'm wondering if you perceived on the other side, on the listening side, any change between now and when we last talked. So here's your challenge.

The idea is this is the international order at stake. Nothing could be bigger than this, right? This is about deterring authoritarian powers or they'll do it again. This is about deterring China from Taiwan. This is about securing the rules-based order. This is about everything. There's nothing bigger than this. But we can't put American troops on the ground in Ukraine.

So those two statements cannot be true at the same. time. You can't have everything at stake existential for the world order, peace and prosperity, but it's not important enough to put American troops on the ground in Ukraine. That's our strategy. That's why Americans don't understand our strategy. That's why our political figures can't explain our strategy. Of course, in Kiev, they got a different view about this. For them, this is about their existence, their sovereignty, their independence as a nation. So from the Ukrainian point of view, they have a maximalist understanding of what the peace is. It's about justice.

It's about reparations. It's about war crimes, tribunals. It's about stuff that they can't impose because they can't take Moscow. It's understandable. It's completely justified from a moral point of view. But you've got to live in the world that you live in on the battlefield. field and so I'm arguing for bringing the rhetoric in line with the commitments. Otherwise, we don't understand the strategy. Otherwise, you can't support this over the long haul if people

think that you're not telling the truth or you're not being level with them completely. Already we have now calls for putting American advisors on the ground. I just read a very interesting article in foreign affairs yesterday about the need to send American advisors to Ukraine. That sounds very familiar from the early 60s, the late 50s even, yeah. And then people say to me, oh, well, if you don't think it's existential, if you don't think we got to do everything necessary, put the boots on the ground, start with the advisors, get to the troops. Our commitments don't match the rhetoric, and either we go for the commitments that are necessary, or we bring the rhetoric more in line. My view is,

political pressure. The public discussion is where are the tanks? And we hem and hawn and we say we can't do it and then we send the tanks and we don't get credit even though we sent the tanks because we hemmed in heart. And then it's the airplanes, the F-16s and we hem and hawn and finally we agree and then it's too slow. So it looks like it's our fault. My argument is we took regime change off the table. Through fear of escalation, we said, we're not going to do covert operations, political stuff to threaten your regime in Moscow. That's so much bigger than the F-16s or the tanks or the long-range missiles, because that's the variable. That's the key to forcing an armistice, to getting a winning the peace conversation rather than just winning on the battlefield.

when he's scared that his regime could go down, he'll cut and run. And if he's not scared about his regime, he'll do the sanctions busting. He'll do everything he's doing because it's with impunity. In terms of Western policy, in terms of American policy, what are you suggesting going forward in order to bring Putin to the point of negotiation of any kind? So we need an armistice. We've gone down this road before you and I in the conversation, right? We need an armistice. We need a DMZ.

We need the fighting to stop. We need the 18 to 30-year-old Ukrainians who are left not to die. We need the 35 and above Ukrainians not to die. We need the Ukrainian kids going to school in Poland and Germany and elsewhere to come home and go to school in Ukrainian language and be the future of the country. We need them to invest and rebuild a new economy. we need them to start the EU accession process. We need them to get some type of security guarantee, which is about not just deterring Russia,

but enabling a successful society in Ukraine. But Stephen, you're describing terms for an armistice that would leave a lot of territory in the hands of Russia. You're saying Ukraine might agree to give up, let's say, Donbos and Crimea to the invading Russians in exchange for security guarantees. Now, that's an unacceptable view in Ukraine. When Ukraine became an independent nation in 1991, Crimea and Donbos were part of sovereign Ukraine.

Under international law, they are. But here's what you get if you take back Crimea. What do you do with the Russians? There were 2.3 million people in Crimea approximately before the war. Predominantly ethnic Russian. Depends how you measure, but you can. get as high as 90% ethnic Russian. And so you got a big population of Russians.

What are you going to do? You're going to ethnically cleanse them. You're going to force them out of Crimea in hundreds of thousands or more. How's that going to work for your EU accession? Okay. How about if you force the Russians to buy it, to pay for it? So they don't get to annex it. They have to pay for it.

You make it on the installment plan. a five or a 10 or a 15 or a 25 year plan at the end of it after they pay the money and if they behave in a way that doesn't threaten Ukrainian sovereignty during that period we would internationally recognize it as Russian territory. Okay. So is that a good outcome? It's unsatisfactory. I get that.

But if you can't get those, if you can't march on Moscow, if you can't impose the peace that's morally just. If your partners won't put boots on the ground to impose that peace with you, then what do you do in that situation? It's not something that I'm happy about.

But I got to get to a Ukraine that's rebuilding, not being bombed and destroyed, and I'll take as much of that as Ukraine as I can get in the time being. And if I don't get it all, I'm not going to acknowledge Russian occupation legally,

unless there's a bargain that there's behavior modification on the Russian side, or I'll wait it out like in the Korean Peninsula. In Poland, and it's election season in Poland, you're seeing the polls decide to stop sending military equipment because they have to replenish their own stocks. And even more importantly, in American politics, you're starting to see many people in the republicans, party, question aid to Ukraine completely, not least Donald Trump.

I have to think that Zelensky on his trip last week to the United States was extremely anxious about these developments, and I don't know that they're going to get any better in the near future. So, yeah, this is not something that we're going to be able to succeed the next 20 years at the $200 million a day from the U.S. alone, as well as our European party. So once again, if the Russian army disintegrates in the field, we're good. But if they don't, then what? What's the plan?

To pretend that you're going to get $200 million a day for 20 more years or 10 more years or five more years or three more years, whatever it takes? I don't think that's a good strategy. So let's talk about EU accession. You know, you did the Poland thing. Great example, right? the polls, the biggest supporters of Ukraine, have stopped sending weapons in the past couple of weeks. A country where there are thousands and thousands of refugees from Ukraine and children in Polish schools from Ukraine. Yeah, there's over a million Ukrainians, well over a million in Poland.

They've been open-armed about taking the Ukrainians in and sending every weapon that they could and lobbying others to do the same. No bigger supporter than Poland. And then Ukraine is exporting grain. They can't export it all through the Black Sea because of the Black Sea is a war zone, export through Poland. And Poland announces that they're not going to send the weapons. They've turned off the weapons supply for Ukraine. And so this snafu or this brouhaha over Ukrainian agricultural exports competing with Polish farmers, where there is an election, just like you pointed out, and they have a democracy.

and people have to campaign and compete and beat the rivals and farmers vote, not just farmers, but farmers vote too. And so that's a really complicated process. And believe it or not, that's harder than taking Talk Mok on the battlefield right now against those entrenched Russian defenses. Steve, finally, we've seen an increasing evidence of a global realignment since the beginning of the second phase of the war against Ukraine. That is since the full-scale invasion.

And that is Putin's effort to align North Korea, China, to some extent, India against the West. How successful has he been and how not successful? So four big victories here that we've won with our Ukrainian courage and ingenuity. one is Ukraine kept its sovereignty defended its capital and kept its independent nation no puppet regime in Kiev

it's a huge victory they won that second was just as big if not bigger from a strategic point of view the West got resuscitated unity resolved rediscovering that was a huge

victory the third was Russian humiliation they're not 10 feet tall Putin is not a genius. He's not even a tactician, let alone a strategist. I mean, he's a murderer. He's troubled, but he's no genius.

Fourth big victory, China, losing its luster, right? China had a wedge between the U.S. and Europe on China policy. So, Xi Jinping, by siding with Putin in this war, this criminal aggression against Ukraine, destroyed his own wedge between Europe and the U.S. on China policy. And Europe has come much closer to the U.S. And understands that having your economy be dependent on an authoritarian regime, like with Russian gas, was not a good idea. Same thing vis-a-vis China.

Okay, so those are four big victories. If you won those victories, you'd want to take those off the table. You'd want to not keep those at risk. You wouldn't want to be in a situation where Kiev could be at risk still, where the Western unity and resolve could be undermined because of a very, the TED Offensive or whatever. I want to grab Putin by the throat and I want to make life

uncomfortable for him politically. You know, we got defectors. We leave them inside so that they can leak to us. Let them fly out to wherever land in Warsaw, land in Helsinki, get them to the hog and have them say in the hog. You know, I got the uniform on. I'm a Russian nationalist.

I appeal to Putin's base. I'm not pro-NATO. But this war in Ukraine, train is hurting Russia. Let's get those men in uniform. Let's get those defectors. Let's pressure this regime. Let's push and push and push until he says, okay, you guys, take the pressure

off of me. I get it. We'll do the armistice. Or somebody on the inside will say, the things falling apart. People are flying planes. They're giving speeches in Russian on TV and uniform in the hog. and that's what I want to see.

I want to see that, and I want to see it yesterday, and that's how I'm going to get to a better outcome. And if you don't agree, let's at least debate that. I want to fulsome debate about that, about why we're not doing it, and what might be the consequences if we do do it, not just negative, but also positive consequences, because I want Ukraine to win.

Steve Kotkin, thank you as always, and we'll talk again soon. Okay, dude. Be well. Stephen Kotkin is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbess of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, Callalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Milly Mitchell and Gophen and Putabuele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Deccan. And thanks also to Alana Casanova Burgess. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.