The Paul Wells Show - How the Invasion has Changed Ukraine, and how it’s Changing Canada

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Roman Waschuk spent more than three decades in Canada’s foreign service, beginning in Moscow in the final years of the Soviet Union, and ending as Canada’s Ambassador to Ukraine from 2014 to 2018. He is currently Ukraine’s Business Ombudsman, a role he began shortly before the Russian invasion. He talks to Paul about how the invasion has changed Ukraine, how it’s changing Canada, and how it might yet change Russia. The Paul Wells Show is produced by ANTICA, in partnership with the National Arts Centre and the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It is published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics. Our founding sponsor is TELUS and the title sponsor is Compass Rose.

It's a big world out there and sometimes it seems like it's breaking. I'm talking to the people who are trying to fix it. This week a man who's had a front-row seat on Ukraine for 30 years. My experience is that authoritarian rule is inherently brittle, and it looks eternal, and it looks unchanging until it suddenly starts crumbling. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. We're going to be talking about the fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine a lot on this show. Its effect on Europe, on Canada, on the world's food supply, on energy and the environment. We're going to be coming back to it again and again. But all summer, as we were developing this podcast, I put a lot of thought

into how to start the Ukraine conversation. And the thought I kept having was, I know this guy. His name is Roman Vostruck. I met him in Berlin 20 years ago, where he worked in the Canadian embassy. He worked in Canada's Foreign Service for more than three decades altogether, starting in Gorbachev's Moscow in the 80s, and ending as Canada's ambassador to Ukraine from 2014 to 2018. And he's still over there, because since January, he's been Ukraine's business ombudsman. That means he's in charge of trying to help businesses get treated fairly

in an environment of rampant corruption. It's a big problem in Ukraine, although since a few weeks after he started, they have a bigger one, the Russian army. I talked to Roman Waschuk about how the invasion has changed Ukraine, how it's changing Canada, and how it might yet change Russia. Roman Vostok, thanks for joining me. Glad to be here. Now, how would you pronounce your name if you were introducing yourself to somebody in Ukraine?

I would say Roman Vostok. Okay. Do I get docked points for saying Roman Vostok? No, you don't, because my whole Torontonian and Ottawa life, that's who I've been to. Well, that's a relief. And you're in Poland. Where in Poland? Today I'm in Karpacz, which is a mountain resort in the southwest of the country. Just over the next mountain is the Czech Republic. And there's this huge conference called the Karapach Economic Forum with 4,000 people attending. I moderated a session on impact investing in Ukraine, but there were like gazillions of sessions going on in parallel. I admit right off the bat to a little bit of surprise because Ukraine is currently under

Russian invasion and it seems like a really bad business environment for impact investing. It depends on the kind of impact you're looking for. Actually, what's interesting is that people on the sort of more riskier contrarian side of the private equity world, but also there was, I think, 10 New York Stock Exchange CEOs who joined President Zelensky in saying they need to look ahead to investing in Ukraine, especially in the post-war period. But there are, in fact, some parts of the economy that continue to operate and grow even now. Which gets to something that you and I have already been talking about recently, which is that when a country is under invasion, not all of it is under invasion. Some of it is just a country. It reminds me of when I was a cub reporter for the Montreal Gazette, and I would get sent to this or that Quebec town that was flooding, the spring floods. And I'd get to the town and it would be a Quebec town. And then there'd be

about three blocks that would be underwater. Is that a decent parallel for what's, I mean, well, no, it's a luridly insufficient parallel, but are there some similarities to Ukraine? Luridly insufficient parallel, but are there some similarities to Ukraine? Some similarities, yes, except with the possibility of a huge dump of water randomly through a water missile in other parts of the town. So the risk of Russian airstrikes around the country remains, although the Russians seem to be running out of their smarter missiles and the Ukrainians have been getting better and better, both in tech terms and in training terms, in shooting them down. Huh. So the possibility of a Russian smart bomb hitting a target that wasn't previously thought to be a target, that's actually declining over time? Depends where you are. I'd say outside the immediate sort of frontline cities, declining,

yes. I think maybe better than the flooded Quebec town is think of Britain during World War II, especially in sort of blitz and post-blitz period. You have, on the one hand, bombs falling on key cities and tragedy and death. On the other hand, you have engineers developing a better version of the Spitfire and Lord Beaverbrook trying to mobilize the war economy. That's maybe a better comparison. And in this environment, you are Ukraine's business ombudsman. It has been since January, if I'm not mistaken. Since January, yes. Timing is everything.

So let's look at the period from January to mid-February as a sort of a prologue and set the context for what happens after that. What is Ukraine's business ombudsman? Why does Ukraine need a business ombudsman? And why are you it? You're not even Ukrainian. No. So Ukraine was known for a number of years for having a not terribly good business environment.

Some people might have considered it in fact toxic prior to 2014, which is also then a reason why it didn't get much by way of foreign investment. After the Euromaidan revolution, there was a determination to make things better. And so the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development proposed, and the Ukrainians agreed to, creating a special ombudsman position that would be equidistant. So we have like this three-part board that consists of government of Ukraine, the European bank, and a coalition of five key Ukrainian business

associations that would handle complaints from businesses, both local and international, about the way they've been treated by authorities, whether national, regional, or local. authorities, whether national, regional, or local. And the idea there being that light would be shone into dark corners, and then systemic recommendations would be made on how to fix things so that these complaints would not keep coming back over and over again. I am the third non-citizen of Ukraine to occupy the position. I think the thinking so far is that it gives you a degree of separation from various interest groups so that you can be truly equidistant in looking at problems as they come up. Now, in a system where there's a thriving informal economy, to be polite, did you have the sense that it was possible to make progress against the kind of corruption that is the reason for the office's existence?

I think yes. It depends on the sector in which you operate. If you tried over the last 10, 15 years to penetrate into energy or metals, these sort of oligarch dominated segments, then you'd have trouble. If you wanted to set up a nice new brickworks, then generally you didn't run into much trouble or you ran into very kind of mundane trouble. Somebody misread your annual report or something and wrote out an administrative fine that you think was unfair. So there are people, and I know them, I've met with them, and who have been in business in Ukraine for years and have never actually encountered someone with an outstretched hand. Maybe that comes back to your flooded village. There are some very damp corners of the economy, but others where life actually operates quite

normally. And others where Ukraine's sort of ignoring sectors actually allowed them to thrive. Ukraine has developed a very large and successful IT industry, largely by never trying to develop an IT industry. But on the other hand, you and I were talking a year ago, before you actually had this job, and while Ukraine was still mostly in peace, about a Calgary businessman who had bought a field in the south of Ukraine and opened a solar panel farm and was selling energy off of that

solar power until the oligarch next door took an interest in his business. And then things went downhill real fast. Indeed. I think I mentioned energy as a problematic area. And I think in retrospect, it turned out that using the oligarch's transformer station as your connection point may not have been the most strategic decision. Okay.

That's an important business tip. When in Ukraine, don't ask too many favors from the neighboring oligarch. Yes. But suddenly there's a war. How suddenly? And while I'm on it, where's your family amid all of this? Are they with you? No, my family's in Canada. So my kids are at university.

My wife's at home. She's going to come and visit me in Poland. We might nip over into Ukraine. We'll see, depending on how things are going in October. Oops, I shouldn't have said that because my mother might hear it, and she would be nervous about this. Anyway, I will resolve that offline. So my spidey sense from having worked for a lot for a long

time like for three decades on and off in the region uh suggested that things were not going to be good i had uh you know conversations with uh people i used to work with on the foreign affairs side who told me it's you know the word we get is be prepared for major turbulence so i went in with eyes fairly wide open i was i think less surprised than most by what ended up happening i spent january febru February in the office being a kind of weird, come from away office Cassandra, saying to people, you should prepare, setting up a first aid course for the staff, telling people, maybe you should make plans for moving out of town, et cetera. And most people looking at me saying, like, what kind of weird

ex-diplomatic paranoia are you suffering from? Because it's hard to believe that something like this could happen. As I think people who've read the Washington Post and other media accounts, a large part of the Ukrainian government

couldn't believe it. And ironically, a large part of the Ukrainian professional military, even though they were preparing secretly for this eventuality, also didn't believe it, partly because they're too professional. They looked at what the Russians were doing and they said, this can't be enough to launch a successful full-scale invasion of our country. So surely they can't be serious because they haven't got the resources, they haven't got the right mix, they haven't got all the proper preparations done, but they weren't counting on Russian slash Putin hubris. This is the thing that kind of strikes me about the immediate pre-war period is that there's sort of three blind men feeling out the elephant to some extent.

I guess the one faction is the alarmed outsiders, the Americans and the Brits, who said, this is going to happen. It's going to be big. There's the, well, complacent outsiders, France, to some extent Germany, who say, we're looking at the same intelligence and we don't see a full-scale invasion in these tea leaves. And then there's the Ukrainian government, which was also not trying to rally everyone, not saying, I'm telling you, this is real. The Ukrainian government was to some extent siding with the French saying, eh, we don't feel it. And you think that was because the Russians were doing such a lousy job of preparing that they didn't look like they were preparing?

That's part of it. Part of it is simply that the, uh, uh, the people who had been elected were people who just, you know, weren't part of thinking about things like this. It was beyond their, uh, sort of sphere of experience. So it was hard to believe this could be happening to them. Now, I think by about the time President Zelensky went to Munich, to the Munich Security Conference, by then the Ukrainians realized, if not total war, something bad is going to happen. And I think that certainly came across in his speech at the Munich Security Conference. I think part of the problem as well was that for the complacent Europeans and for other observers,

the mistakes that US intelligence had made, whether they were mistakes or they were conscious stretches, as in the case of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or miscalculations regarding Afghanistan and Kabul, that a lot of credibility had been lost. And so they ended up in part in a kind of boy crying wolf situation when the wolf was actually at the door and about to pounce. Because, of course, as it turns out, the US and the Five-Eye community had it exactly right, and they had intercepted the preparation documents that the Russians were circulating that then gave the basis for their alarm. Basic question I've been wanting to ask you for a while.

What made you such a hawk? What made you so pessimistic about the world? Well, no, I'm actually an optimist, but maybe family lore, et cetera. I just know that people can be nasty to each other. It comes with the Central and East European territory. And of course, there are a number of other territories in the world where this happens. But for example, when the Americans and the Brits started talking about these guys have preparations that go so far as to create arrest and kill lists of people they feel are going to be a problem to their occupation. and kill lists of people they feel are going to be a problem to their occupation.

Well, I mean, that's exactly what my grandparents' generation, and of course, generations of anyone who lived in interwar Poland circa 1939 went through. You had either, you know, the Nazis going and picking people up off lists and shooting them, and then you had the Soviets taking people and incarcerating them, up off lists and shooting them and then you have the soviets taking people and incarcerating them or then you know of course the soviet uh sorry the polish pow officers who were shot but then also a number of jewish ukrainian and other people who were seen as threats to establishing their domination in the part of pola they seized and so in a way, when I heard that, again, the spidey sense told me, uh-oh, these guys have a track record. And in fact, Vladimir Putin is basically directly institutionally descended from the NKVD circa 1939.

DVD circa 1939. So that's, I think, what made me think this can happen, because it has happened. But even knowing this, when it did happen, when we saw the pictures coming in of Bucha, of the people who had been bound with barbed wire and then shot in the back of the head, it still came as a shock to me, thinking they're descendants of, but surely they've evolved a bit since 1939. But it turns out, no, they're kind of stuck in a rut and it's a pretty murderous and unpleasant rut. We'll come back to my conversation with Roman Waschuk in a minute. We'll come back to my conversation with Roman Waschuk in a minute. It takes a lot of people to make a show like this, and I am so grateful to all of our partners for helping us do it.

The University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the National Arts Centre, our founding sponsor, TELUS, and our title sponsor, Compass Rose, and our publishing partners, the Toronto Star and iPolitics. So let's take an intermediate point between 1939 and this February when all hell broke loose. Let's look at the period when you were a staffer

at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. A hell of an interesting time to be working in Moscow, 1988 to 1991. Everything happened during those three years. A lot happened. And yeah, very fortunate to be there. And it was also a very optimistic time, certainly from a Canadian point of view and from my personal point of view. Everything seemed possible.

Possibilities were opening up, whereas now we see them certainly in Russia closing down. And what was interesting is because I was a junior guy, first third secretary, then second secretary in diplomatic terms, I was put on the files that were seen as being kind of literally and figuratively peripheral, like the Union Republics, i.e. all the republics that weren't Moscow, that weren't Russia. So the real action was following, doing Kremlinology, watching what was happening in the Central Committee, who's up, who's down in the Politburo, that sort of stuff. So the grown-ups did that. central committee, who's up, who's down in the Politburo, that sort of stuff. So the grownups did that. And I did trips to the Baltics and Tajikistan and to Ukraine and places like that,

Moldova, where I discovered that things were also starting to move. They started to move slower than in the center, except in the Baltics. But you could tell things were happening. Now, this is a period during which Mikhail Gorbachev was already sort of a folk hero in the West. Perestroika, glasnost were terms that I was using at university in those days. But when push comes to shove, he does send tanks into Talon and Riga, and he does try and hold the union together by force in the closing chapters. What was your read on that sequence of events? My read actually is a bit

more generous than some of the condemnation that's been heard for over the past couple of weeks. Yes, he permitted varying degrees of force to be applied in different republics, but he was also playing a balancing game within the power elite in Moscow. And he had unleashed a whole bunch of forces, mostly through Glasnost, through the ability to say what you think, that then did things that I think he and other architects of it, like Alexander Yakovlev, who, of course, had been ambassador in Canada and apparently persuaded Gorbachev of the need to freshen things up during a walk at Eugene Whalen's farm in Amherstburg. But that's sort of the unknown Canadian origins of perestroika and glasnost.

So he was trying to manage this thing, huge country, unwieldy communist party and security apparatus, with judgment calls, some of which were wrong. But ultimately, the people who launched the coup in August of 91, when I was already back in Ottawa, felt that he had been far too soft. And that's why they tried to depose him. They felt that his brand of repression was way too limp. And of course, at that point, they instead just accelerated the political transition and the falling apart. Flash forward a few years, and now you're posted to Kiev. I am.

At least notionally post-Soviet Kiev. Yeah. In a Ukraine that seemed to be a place where great optimism was possible. Yep. And 94, 95, maybe even 96, I was still infused with some of that optimism. 1994 in Winnipeg, helping to organize the first international G7 support for Ukraine conference, which happened at the Fort Garry Hotel in downtown Winnipeg. The Ukrainian president came and was quite impressed, not just by the Fort Garry Hotel, but by Canada generally, the Ukrainian diaspora, the warm welcome, the fact that he realized that Russia was not the

only game in town, which was one of the main messages, I think, that Canada and its partner were trying to send. And so there was about two years of reformish stuff happening in Ukraine. Then the steam ran out just about the time the new currency was introduced in 1996, the currency which had been printed by Canadian Banknote in Ottawa. But then the president lost interest in change and things got a bit more frustrating, I think, for those of us working at the embassy. And certainly by 98, I was not much of an optimist at that point. It must have been tremendously frustrating. I mean, you've got family roots there.

You had working experience in the country, and you had the increasingly obvious example of other Central and Eastern European countries that were making fantastic progress. Yep. Why do you think it didn't take in Ukraine and further east? I think partly because Ukraine had a bit of a talent drought. The way the Soviet Union worked, if you were really bright and in the system, you would end up in Moscow.

And so Ukraine circa 1991, when it came to the Communist Party apparatus and everything, was kind of run by the B team. And it's the B team that kind of inherited the machine. The other thing being that, unlike Central and East European countries, Ukraine didn't have a separate state apparatus, republic administration of its own. It had a branch plant of the Soviet Communist Party. And a government that was a government in name only was there to kind of do what the Communist Party told it. So without the Communist Party, all these things didn't know what to do. So whereas, for example, in Poland, in 1989, with solidarity and the roundtable, you had a whole sort of alternate or counter elite of people who came out of the

universities, came out of Catholic intellectual circles, came out of workers and solidarity resistance groups, but people who were economists, who were Western trained, etc., and who could then move into those roles and get things going. In Ukraine, you didn't really have those people. To the extent people like that existed, they existed in Ukrainian diaspora communities that were two generations removed from Ukraine. And the sort of B-team post-Soviet people were not keen on them coming in and doing much of anything. The difference with the Baltics, for example, is that these people were welcomed, people from the United States, from Canada, were welcomed as

people with experience who could help make change. And that's why you had Weike Friberge from University of Montreal becoming president of Latvia. Or you had people from Thunder Bay becoming political director of the Estonian foreign ministry. So there was a difference there because for people in the Baltic states, somebody of their background was, if you will, closer in spirit than a Russian who had arrived there 50 years ago, but who they didn't really see as one of them. In Ukraine, which was something which was better for stability, people saw their neighbors, regardless of ethnicity, as more them than some person from Saskatoon. So this also helps explain why just about every important figure in the Estonian pro-democracy movement had spent serious time in Toronto and often in hot tubs in Toronto.

And, uh, you know, often in hot tubs in Toronto. And I, I, I had a window into this because one of my, um, beloved senior editors at McLean's when I started working there was a guy named Peter Kopfillum, who was, uh, a great magazine editor, had worked for Radio Free Europe and was the son of a legendary Estonian cabaret singer who himself played great blues guitar. So Peter Kopfelem would every once in a while vanish for a few weeks from work. And we would discover later that he'd been touring stadiums in Estonia. I assume the only three stadiums they had, but anyway, it's still better than what I was doing with my vacations. And that ends up having an effect on the trajectory of the country afterwards. That's right. Yeah.

I mean, because you either have people who uh in the case of president kuchma in his later years he basically facilitated friends of friends or uh relatives of other former directors in taking over state property which then then basically created the Ukrainian oligarch class, something that did not happen in a place like Estonia. Now, there's another thing that happens between the 90s and Russia's invasion, at least in the analysis of people like John Mearsheimer, the political scientist from University of Chicago, who says that what happened after the Soviet Union collapsed, after democratic reform began

in Central Europe, was that the West got greedy and it expanded the European Union and especially NATO at far too quick a pace and it put Russia on the back foot. And what we're seeing now is simply a reaction to that Western overreach. I'm sure you're super familiar with the thesis. Do you buy it? No. Partly because if you look at the actual history of events in years like 94, 95, 96,

and then up until 99 for NATO in 2004 for the EU, there was considerable reluctance on the part of the established members to allow these countries in. NATO expanded and the EU largely expanded because of these countries clamoring to be let in because their traumatic memories of living next to Russia and being oppressed by Russia led them to believe that they needed to get an insurance policy. And Ukraine was ambivalent about this for a long time until about 2005, 2006, by which point the doors were closing on a realistic version of this option, even though nobody rhetorically said no. So I think where Mearsheim has a bit of a point is that the 2008 so-called Bucharest decision, where on the one hand, the desire of President Bush, and if I'm not mistaken, as well, Canada at that point, to actually give Ukraine a membership action plan was vetoed by Germany and France. But the compromise was that they

rhetorically said, yes, Ukraine and Georgia will at some point join NATO, but made no real plans. And the assumption was they wouldn't for the foreseeable future. And that created a kind of a rhetoric gap that was enough to annoy the Russians, but not enough to do much in security terms for the Ukrainians or the Georgians. Oh, so it was like an evil Goldilocks situation where instead of the hard chair or the soft chair, we sat in the useless middle chair, provoking Russia but not helping Ukraine. Correct. Okay. Stephen Harper was prime minister in 2008 at that NATO meeting, and he was in there swinging for a fast accession of Ukraine to NATO.

Would have been a messy process, might have been premature, but do you think that Harper had a point? I think he did. If only because we can see which countries get invaded now and which don't. If you are in NATO, no matter how

ramshackle your own national military contribution might be, nobody invades you. But if you're Georgia or Moldova or Ukraine, to varying degrees, you get either mildly or totally invaded. So that brings us in a kind of scattershot fashion, that brings us to today. First of all, I wonder whether you're surprised by the performance of Volodymy Vladimir Zelensky as president. You

worked with his predecessors. You were, I think, as amazed as a lot of people when a television comedian got elected president. And I wonder whether you were nervous about how he would do. What do you think of his trajectory as president in this astonishing time? Yeah. Well, I wasn't quite as amazed as

some people because I am middle to lowbrow enough in my taste that I actually watched his show, Serving the People, unlike most highly analytical foreigners and Ukrainians that I knew. And knowing sort of the natural resentment Ukrainians have towards their political lords and masters, I thought, oh, there could be something here.

But yes, I mean, certainly the degree of victory and the fact that, you know, first time that a president had also full control of the parliament, that was quite amazing. Did I think that he was made for a crisis like this? that he was made for a crisis like this. To be honest, I was really, really uncertain, and I had my worries, which were by, you know, like, hour 12 or hour 24 of the invasion, largely taken care of by his very strong performance. So it's, you know, cometh the hour, cometh the man, I suppose, is what happened. And it's entirely possible that a more politician-like politician would not have been able to channel messages and emotion to both his own people, and especially to international audiences, the way Zelensky with his background has been able to do it. Now, throughout this conversation, you have sketched a picture in which Canada has tremendous and longstanding influence in Ukraine, generations old through the diaspora, in the 90s, you know,

significantly contributing to the westernization of the Ukrainian outlook. And then in recent years, how, as a tremendously engaged public servant with Ukrainian family history, what did you make of Canada's reaction to the responsibility that it had? In Kiev, Canada is like a top three, top five country. When there is major issues that come up and the government of Ukraine or various foreign embassies have to get together, Canada is almost always in the inner circle. That is not the case in many other capitals. And we're in a strange situation where Canada is almost unused to exercising influence

abroad. It's not a natural default mechanism. We're happy to advocate for Canadian things and values and interests, happy to be in the middle of the pack, part of the consensus, moving in favor of all good things. But we occasionally go a bit deer in the headlights when we find ourselves in a leadership situation. And in Ukraine, we did. Now, who wasn't deer in the headlights was the Canadian Armed Forces, Operation Unifier, which was launched in 2015 and ran until February of this year and has now been relaunched in the UK, training Ukrainian troops there, was certainly the last two years of my posting, 17 to 19, the biggest NATO ally on the ground presence in Ukraine. We had about 200 troops there at a time. We had a 30-odd person police mission

with both RCMP and municipal officers from across Canada, who again, were disproportionately effective because they were sort of peer-to-peer trainers for the Ukrainian police, parts of which were considerably reformed after 2015. So I think certainly in that period, we stepped up. And that was under, I think, under both governments, under both the Harvard government and then the Trudeau government. I think we have actually contributed more than our fair share now during this war phase, but not in a way that is as visually effective as what others have been doing. Canada is the second largest bilateral financial contributor to maintaining Ukraine's macroeconomic stability, not proportionate to

the economy but in overall absolute terms you have the united states you have canada now the bigger donor is the eu but it's a whole bunch of countries and then sort of individually germany france come below canada we don't have as many weapons to offer, but in terms of Ukrainians being able to buy fuel for this winter and the government keeping the lights on, Canada has been very important in doing that. What was it like working with Christopher Freeland? Fun. She was your boss, right? Yes. And there's an incident where our paths had crossed during my first posting.

Somebody on Facebook recently dredged up an article from the Edmonton Journal about her being expelled from the Soviet Union in the spring of 1989. about her being expelled from the Soviet Union in the spring of 1989. And among the odd jobs I was doing at the embassy, apart from looking after the peripheral republics, I was also responsible for looking after exchange students. And so as she was being expelled, I was in charge of calling her parents, making arrangements, making sure that nothing bad happened to her while this KGB-driven experience was happening. So it was interesting to then sort of re-encounter her in her role as my boss or as the

department's boss. I would say overall, she has very much sort of journalistic instincts in pursuing knowledge about things. I mean, she has a huge Rolodex internationally, of course. I think that's sometimes made life complicated for a bureaucracy that wanted to be in control and then realize that the minister actually can simply pick up the phone and call nearly anyone and they would pick up her call but it uh it made it um certainly more interesting uh in job terms and it meant that um you know i i mentioned before that canada is uh sometimes unaccustomed to exercising influence internationally. But my impression of working with Minister Freeland at the time was that she was the exception. She understood how to play the cards that we had in our pack at places like Brussels, Washington, London, like that.

like Brussels, Washington, London, like that. It was super exciting to be involved in a war and terrifying and enraging. But that was in the first several weeks, and now it's been more than six months. Do you get the impression I get that there's a certain level of fatigue setting in in Western capitals over this whole issue? And what would you say to Western leaders and Western populations

to encourage them to stick with this? Well, I think a certain degree of, if not fatigue, then at least eyes glazing over as events tend to repeat themselves day by day is almost inevitable. And I, you know, when I came to Ukraine in 2014, in fall of 2014, I initially was an avid reader of all the OSCE reports on how many shells had been fired on a given day. But after reading your 83rd report, the eyes start to glaze. Two things, I'd say at least, maybe I'll come up with more. One is that this actually affects us because it affects the international system. It affects the whole notion of European stability. It affects the Euro-Atlantic region. It affects global food supplies. Therefore,

we might want to look away, but that won't prevent it from having an impact on our security in absolute terms and on food security in global terms. The second thing I'd say is that this war is not, in fact, in a stalemate phase. We are, in fact, probably, maybe it's an optimistic view I'll express here, in World War II terms, sometime in 1942, In World War II terms, sometime in 1942, as things begin to shift and turn in the direction of the Ukrainians in this case, who have been on the receiving end for six months, but for the first time in the past week or so, have started to dictate the pace of events to the Russian side. So what that means is that the help, both in material help, financial help, the training help, and all that we've been providing, is actually having an impact, and it is changing the course of the war.

So I think it's worth paying attention to what will be happening over the next couple of weeks. And I'd say the optimistic outcome, the Ukrainians and President Zelensky has put out a maximalist option, which is we will drive the Russians from every square centimeter of our territory. And he's the president, wouldn't want to argue with him on that. But, you know, from my own past experience experience you could imagine that a shift in momentum might lead to negotiations at some point in the new year where the ukrainians would be able to strike a considerably better deal than what was on offer uh you know in the preliminaries to the war and even in the first uh you know in march when there were these attempts, the Turks brokered talks where the Russians basically said, well, you can capitulate, that'd be okay with us. So I think Canadians can say to themselves, through our contribution, we are already helping to change the course of this war.

It's happening at only financial cost to us, as opposed to blood, sweat, and tears. And the Ukrainians are determined to fight this war to victory. Before this war began, when people weren't at all sure that the Americans weren't just out to lunch on this, President Biden said, I think Putin is going to invade and I think it'll be the biggest mistake he ever made. Do you think Putin agrees with that yet? As of today, no. He still maintains that everything's going according to plan, everything's on course,

but that is generally what authoritarian leaders have to say. People further down, military bloggers are saying, oh my God, we're screwed. So that is, I think, a sentiment that is spreading both among the ranks and those people who are closely linked to the fighting force. But what Putin has refused to do, and it's actually he's refused to do something that even harder liners have been encouraging him to do, is to mobilize, is to say to the youth of Moscow and St. Petersburg and other sort of trendy urban centers, guess what? You're also part of this war and you will be going to the front.

Up until now, they've been depending mostly on volunteers or professionals from generally rural and peripheral regions. and peripheral regions. They've been sort of forcibly mobilizing Ukrainians in the territories they've occupied and put them into these units of the so-called People's Republics. These are units that have fallen apart at their first encounter with Ukrainian forces, so maybe they weren't so keen on being forcibly

mobilized. So I think it is a big mistake. I think he is incapable of recognizing it. My experience of 1990-91 in the Soviet Union, and then looking back at 1917 in Russia, 1905 after the failed short and sharp war with Japan, is that authoritarian rule is inherently brittle. And it looks eternal, and it looks unchanging until it suddenly starts crumbling. So that is not terribly helpful as an immediate day-to-day analytical framework, because it's hard to predict exactly when the crumbling of the brittle structure might occur. But I think we might, by early next year, get to that point. I mean, the Russian army has been terribly supplied and terribly commanded. The Ukrainians are likely to get a nice, you know, spare NATO country winter uniforms to make it through the winter. What happens to Russian soldiers who start freezing? I mean,

this could be the ironic situation where General Winter ends up not being on the Russian side, where General Winter ends up not being on the Russian side, just because they seem to be so terrible at doing basic supply and logistics. Fascinating. Let's leave it there. Roman Vashuk, thank you so much for sharing your insights today. You're very welcome, Paul Wells. I think we both got it right. Okay. Cheers.

Okay. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the National Arts Center and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It's published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics. Thanks to our founding sponsor, TELUS, and to our title sponsor, Compass Rose. Our senior producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Hayley Choi. Our executive producers are Lisa Gabriel and Laura Reguerre. Stuart Cox is the president of Antica.

I like Roman's line about how authoritarian regimes are often brittle. We'll be keeping an eye on how brittle Putin's Moscow turns out to be. And I wonder whether we'll have to wait long. If you haven't subscribed already, please do. We'll have another episode out next Wednesday. See you then