Today, Explained - Why Ukraine matters

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Vox’s Jonathan Guyer explains how a Russian invasion of Ukraine could affect me and you and everyone we know. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Who had Russia and Ukraine on their bingo card for 2022? The biggest story of our newish year is one that feels super old, right? Like East versus West, democracy versus authoritarianism, former KGB member not terribly nice when given free reign over Russia.

Yeah, but it's all very important. You've surely noticed that. The president's talking about it. It's all over the news. So today on the show, we're going to try and take a step back to explain why. Why is this Ukraine, Russia story such a big deal? We asked Jonathan Geyer. He reports on the world for Vox. Well, there's a lot of factors at play here. One of the big ones is energy and the economy. But I don't want to be callous about the bigger human implications of this. I mean, if there's the biggest land war in Europe since World War II, or definitely since the Kosovo crises and wars of the 90s, that would be a lot of refugees, a lot of people dead. And NATO,

the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which the U.S. is kind of the most muscular member of, is going to take responsibility for keeping peace in Europe. Can you help us understand the obligations the United States has to Europe, especially via NATO and where those obligations began? So the Cold War may seem like ages ago, but NATO is this really important security alliance from those days when the Soviet Union and the U.S. were in this fraught, kind of daily, stressful, potential nuclear war. For over 40 years, the United States led the West in the struggle against communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values.

It forced all nations to live under the specter of nuclear destruction. But after the breakup of the USSR in the 90s, NATO still existed. Mikhail Gorbachev said it best today, just moments before he resigned his post as the last president of the Soviet Union. If you have to go, you have to go. It's that time, he said. Time for Gorbachev's departure, but of greater importance, time for the end of a state that in its brief 74 years had murdered and oppressed its own people, enslaved other countries, and threatened the peace, the very existence of the whole world. This alliance of Western countries, you know, meant to protect Europe and North America. And the kind of

key article of their treaty of this group of allies is an attack on one NATO country, is an attack on all of them. But there were a lot of questions of what does NATO do now? What is its role? It had literally been designed to counter Soviet influence. The Soviet Union's gone. And there were a lot of glimmers of hope that, you know, Russia and the US and Russia and Europe could get along. There were some agreements. There was a lot of opportunity. But I think with the rise of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president in the early 2000s, we saw kind of recalitrant Russia, a Russia that was full of grievances about how the Cold War ended. And I've reiterated many times, and you're well aware, not an inch eastwards. This is what we were promised.

Not an inch eastwards. In the 1990s, we were told, well, basically, they swindled us. They swindled us. They lied to us. Five waves of further expansion to the east. This is what NATO engaged in. And, you know, a desire of Russia to assert itself again on the world stage. And this is where NATO's come into play as Russia's kind of invaded Georgia. Georgia said it was trying to retake control of South Ossetia, the breakaway province on Russia's border that's policed by Russian peacekeepers.

Claiming more than 10 of its soldiers were killed in the night attack, Moscow said it would retaliate. Russian jets bombed four airfields, according to Georgia, and there are conflicting reports tonight over who's controlling Ossetia's main city. Invaded other countries in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine in 2014. This morning, more unidentified pro-Russia armed militias controlling the streets of Crimea's capital. These troops are standing guard just a few hundred feet away from a Ukrainian naval base. They have twice asked the base command to surrender.

So far, they have refused. And this calls into question, you know, can the U.S. be the world policeman? Can it, with NATO, protect the sovereignty and the borders of a smaller, weaker country than Russia? Because it's not like Ukraine could necessarily win on the battlefield without the help of some of U.S. allies and partners. Does Putin just feel left out? Does he just really want to be a part of NATO? Has he ever asked about that? Throughout the 90s, there were opportunities where Russia's kind of saying, hey, why can't we be a part of this security architecture in Europe? We're not the bad guys anymore. And, you know, this goes to questions historians are really thinking about

right now, which is, did some of the mistakes of the United States of this era by pushing for adding more Eastern European countries to NATO, did that aggravate Russia? Now, certainly that's what Putin says today. We don't need to, you know, hold his word at face value. And we probably should challenge what Putin says. But there definitely were opportunities where after the Cold War, Europe could have been totally reconceptualized. And the whole kind of undergirding structure of European security didn't have to go through NATO. NATO could have been disbanded, in fact. And now the potential inclusion of Ukraine in NATO has led to this conflict we're in right now.

Tell us more about how Russia's invasion of Ukraine could affect the region and the world. One of the first things we're going to see, and the White House is setting these up now, are sanctions. We're implementing full blocking sanctions on two large Russian financial institutions, VEB and their military bank. We're implementing comprehensive sanctions on Russian sovereign debt. That means we've cut off Russia's government from Western financing. It can no longer raise money from the West and cannot trade in its new debt on our

markets or European markets either. So a whole package of ways that the United States will try to punish Russian leaders, Russian oligarchs, Russian folks involved in this new effort to invade Ukraine. But, you know, sanctions don't just kind of happen. You don't just kind of stop one side of financial flows without having a bigger effect. Right. And so that's going to have effects on the European economy. And then that's going to have an effect on our economy and possibly gas prices, possibly all sorts of financial nuances that may seem minor but could have a huge effect on inflation, for example. Right. And as we covered on this show on Friday in an episode all about sanctions, they don't just hurt governments.

As you mentioned, they hurt economies, which is to say they hurt the Russian people, people in Western Europe, people in the United States even potentially. Exactly. Even the most targeted sanctions are going to have kind of a blowback or unanticipated effects. And one thing to keep in mind is that Putin and his allies in the Russian government have been preparing for sanctions. They might have cash flows ready to bolster their own position and work around these sanctions, which then kind of ricochet into Europe, into America, and definitely would affect Russians and Ukrainians. And beyond sanctions, there's a whole host of other economic implications here, right? Well, of course. I mean, Russia has a lot of raw materials that Europe and the world depend on. That could be, you know, platinum and rare minerals and semiconductors,

but definitely energy, gas, oil. And a pipeline, by the way, has been at the centre of this. It's been contentious since the day it was proposed. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was due to bring gas from Russia to Western Europe, but now it faces a shutdown before it's even begun operations. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Tuesday that he was putting its approval on ICE. Energy is a major component of this. So that's the economic side of things. Let's talk about the actual war side of things if it gets there.

Ukrainians will die undoubtedly. Right. And that's quite terrifying because there's already a simmering civil war in Ukraine's east, this area where the beginnings of an invasion are basically unfolding right now. Inside rebel-held territory with local cameramen filming, authorities have evacuated 30,000 mostly women and children and called up men, young and old, to be ready to fight Ukraine. And Russia has been using these kind of proxy troops, separatist movements, you know, not quite the military, kind of like militias funded by Russia. And 14,000 people have died since 2014. So this is a pretty real conflict.

And that's going to get a lot worse if you have the much more highly trained Russian army coming in with much higher tech weapons. U.S. officials tell PBS NewsHour at least one-third of Russia's 150,000-plus troops on the border have already left their staging areas and moved to attack positions. That's documented by new satellite images of new deployments of armored equipment and troops moving toward the border. And we know Russia typically doesn't just wage, you know, terrestrial warfare.

There's also cyber warfare. What Russia really has been deploying since their 2014 first invasion of Ukraine are what's called hybrid tactics. These are this whole slew of unconventional ways of waging war. A big part of that is cyber attacks, but that also means all sorts of tricky behavior. You know, they've leaked phone calls of American diplomats. And some of this even culminated in the hacking of various emails of American leaders in the 2016 election. So there's a lot of cyber warfare that's already been going on and is very likely to escalate. Hmm. How do Russians feel about this conflict? Do we have some Gallup surveys from Moscow?

It's really hard to understand what's exactly happening in Russia, given the chokehold that Vladimir Putin has over the country. I think there is a huge strain of Russian nationalism, and Russia does feel somewhat embarrassed on the world stage. This is a great power, a former empire that's been kind of shriveling up in recent decades, has an economy the size of Spain, which isn't much for such a big country. But the other thing to keep in mind is that Russians and Ukrainians share a lot. There's a lot of familial ties and shared identity and shared language. So I think it's probably fair to say that very few Russians want war and absolutely no Ukrainians want an invasion. And many of them, in fact, in a recent poll, don't even think one is going to happen at the great scale that the media seems to be predicting here in the United States. And what about Americans? As this becomes, you know, foreign policy priority number one

for President Biden and his administration, how do Americans feel about this faraway country and its faraway problems? So this totally goes to the heart of what is the role in America in the 21st century. I think after the debacles and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no option that involves, you know, American troops on the ground in Ukraine. And the United States is a nuclear power and Russia is a nuclear power. So everything needs to be done diplomatically to avert a war between these two countries. And Biden has been playing a two-track game with his diplomats doing everything they can to jockey towards a diplomatic solution while also preparing the ground, whether that's through arms and weapons, you know, free weapons to Ukraine, through setting up sanction packages, basically, you know,

good cop, bad cop, readying for whatever Vladimir Putin is going to do. And this has been our big question, you know, even as an invasion or the beginnings of one has been unfolding, to what extent will it be? Is this still a big game of chicken or will it be quite deadly and widespread in its repercussions? I'm going to go. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself.

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operating agreement with i gaming ontario ukraine okay so jonathan where we left off you were setting this up to be quite a test Ukraine Explained. It's Ukraine Explained. Okay, so Jonathan, where we left off, you were setting this up to be quite a test of the Biden administration's foreign policy. What exactly is the Biden administration's foreign policy? Does it have some themes, some overarching goals? If you asked me a few months ago,

it was going to be respond to the pandemic, counter China, rebuild the U.S. economy, and deal with the climate crisis. But now, those four pillars are basically out the window because almost all attention is focused on Ukraine, Russia, and the potential for a really big war. Which is to say, he would have much rather not have had to deal with this? Absolutely. Who in the Lord's name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called countries on territory that belong to his neighbors? This is a flagrant violation of international law

and demands a firm response from the international community. So what we do know is that Biden himself is really involved in this and has been a decision maker in the Senate and as vice president, a problem solver on these very issues. Let me tell you the reason I picked Joe Biden. If I'm in the room making the kinds of tough decisions that the next president's going to have to make, both on domestic policy and on international policy, then I want the counsel and advice of somebody who's not going to agree with me 100% of the time, and Joe Biden doesn't bite his tongue. So probably no one has thought more about Ukraine in the American presidency than Joe Biden himself. But what I worry about is Biden comes in with a very Cold War frame.

And we were talking about NATO and what NATO means. I think he still sees European security, European allies, and NATO sometimes through a Soviet lens, through a kind of old school position. And I worry sometimes that Biden and his team aren't seeing what's right in front of them, which is a very 21st century conflict with Putin. Explain, how is this not just the Cold War in 2022? Well, Russia today is not the Soviet Union with its kind of international reach and power. This is a much smaller and less powerful country. And, you know, we're not at war with them. This isn't a decades-long conflict. This is a new conflict. This is Vladimir Putin

kind of doing the smallest thing he can do, which is assert himself in a former Soviet republic, maybe unsuccessfully. It's a lot different than a Cuban missile crisis or proxy wars in Vietnam or Korea or these kind of larger theaters of war

that unfolded over decades and really tested American power. This is something much smaller and Biden is very much prepared to deal with it. But I think a lot of progressives are wondering if a diplomatic solution could have been better to this. No one knows exactly what the human costs of such a war would be. There are estimates, however, that come from our own military and intelligent community that there could be over 50,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine, not to mention millions of refugees flooding neighboring countries as they flee what could be the worst European conflict since World War II. And one way to think about it, I think, is cognitive empathy or empathizing with your enemy. Empathizing with Vladimir Putin.

Right. And this is something that, you know, one of the great hawkish leaders of the Pentagon, Robert McNamara, kind of architect of the Vietnam War, said, which is, you have to empathize with your enemy. Robert McNamara, killer of hundreds of thousands, says you should empathize. But there's something amazing about this because we made it out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, you know, without a nuclear war. And that was in large part to this axiom, which, you know, I think McNamara was the first to admit we didn't empathize with, you know, the Vietnamese fighters, and we kind of missed the boat. And we treated that crisis as something that it wasn't. What kind of support does Biden have in the American political apparatus? It sounds like there are some progressives who would choose more empathy. Does that mean that the more hawkish Democrats and Republicans are

with him 100% here? You know, I've spoken to, you know, half dozen or more former diplomats to European countries. Everyone thinks Biden's doing an outstanding job, kind of doing a full court diplomatic press, working really closely with French, German, other European leaders. And one really interesting thing that Biden's been doing is sharing bits and pieces of intelligence, declassifying intelligence. This is where we've seen all these kind of mind-boggling warnings that Putin is about to invade Ukraine for weeks and weeks. We are ready to respond decisively to Russian attack on Ukraine,

which is still very much a possibility. This has been a response to some of Russia's scarier tactics, which is Biden's just putting it out there, what his intelligence agencies are telling him. The Russian defense minister reported today that some military units are leaving their positions near Ukraine. That would be good, but we have not yet verified that. We have not yet verified the Russian military units are returning to their home bases. Indeed, our analysts indicate that they remain very much in a threatening position.

It's a little confusing and very little of it can be verified, but it does show a kind of new approach that this administration is taking. Is that approach meant to be sort of contrasted with the approach of the prior administration? Obviously, the former president's whole thing was sort of focusing on America first. I think that's a huge part of it. But there's even a more recent example we could use, which is Biden, I think really bravely withdrew from Afghanistan this summer, ended this war that no one wanted and that wasn't doing any good. But it also showed a real lack of coordination with allies, with Afghan partners.

And it was a huge mess to clean up and really caused a lot of problems for Biden. It was kind of a self-made foreign policy crisis, even though there was going to be some kind of disaster in Afghanistan, considering it wasn't kind of the real nation building that that country needed or wanted. It was a U.S. occupation invasion for many years. So I think Biden is kind of having to do repair from the Trump years and repair from his first years and kind of show European allies that they matter and that America will have their back, especially because the U.S. military and U.S. investments in European security are really key to what makes NATO tick. And in trying to sort of restore America's place in the world, I guess Biden's also trying to say that, you know, you can't infringe upon sovereign democracies. Is that the larger message here for Vladimir Putin? This is something a lot of conservatives have been saying, that if Ukraine is invaded and the U.S. doesn't do anything, it really sends a message to China that they can invade Taiwan,

which China doesn't totally recognize or see as a sovereign country, but is a close U.S. partner. It sends a bigger message that, hey, if you're a smaller country, your sovereignty, your autonomy is not necessarily guaranteed. And this is something, you know, when it comes to the power of the powerful, that's the question that is being posed by a Ukraine invasion. That makes this conflict seem so big. But I guess one surprising takeaway from this conversation with you, Jonathan, so far is that you make it feel kind of small. Russia's economy is only as big as Spain's. This is a sort of last ditch desperate effort from Vladimir Putin to cling on to any sort of power he has to exercise in this region.

Is it big or is it small or is it both? I mean, that's yet to be seen and it will be a big crisis if it's a big war and a lot of people die. But I think what we're seeing is that Vladimir Putin is somewhat small. He's a 69-year-old leader. He's wondering, I think, what his legacy is. He spotted some weakness in the Biden administration. In 2014, when Putin went ahead and invaded the eastern part of Ukraine and also annexed Crimea in the south, the Obama administration, they kind of blinked. They didn't really go after him.

And so many of the same advisors from those Obama years are now in key positions in the Biden administration. So one wonders if, you know, Putin saw the lineup and said, hey, this kind of worked eight years ago. Maybe I can do this and the Biden team won't flinch. I went back to a speech that Biden gave about Russia about four years ago. And you know how Biden's always so folksy. He gave one of his kind of classic little aphorisms

where he said, my dad had an expression. And never back a man in a corner his only way out is over top of you. And I think that's where we are with Russia right now. They're backed into a corner. And this is the job of diplomats, right? It might seem like diplomacy is impossible right now, but diplomats have to figure out a way to empathize with his desires and give him an off-ramp so that the outcome of this isn't 100,000 people invading a country and, you know, untold number of deaths, but creating a way so that Putin can get out of that corner without climbing over the United States. Jonathan Geyer is a senior foreign policy writer at Vox. You can read his work at Vox.com, Abdi. Our episode today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi, edited by Matthew Collette,

engineered by Paul Mounsey, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. It's Ukraine Explained. you