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BACK STORY WITH DANA LEWIS
Dana Lewis is a veteran World Affairs Correspondent. He's been everywhere. From global war zones to the streets of London where he is based.
He has been based in Jerusalem, and Moscow.
And he loves talking to people about whats behind the headlines. Award winning. "A real in the trenches reporter". Great interviewing skills and easy to listen to.
BACK STORY WITH DANA LEWIS
The Battle for Ukraine: Unraveling Russia's Strategy and Western Repercussions
Back Story with Dana Lewis takes a hard look at Putin's tactics and the potential consequences that might arise from the withheld US funding for Ukraine. We're delighted to have Bill Browder, a leading voice on the matter, to break down the situation and forecast scenarios that could befall both nations. We also examine the possible repercussions for Ukraine and NATO should Trump make a comeback to the Oval Office.
Can Ukraine hold firm against Russia's onslaught? Thomas Kent, author of "How Russia Loses: Hubris and Miscalculation in Putin's Kremlin," joins us to illuminate Russia's missteps and miscalculations in their bid to control Ukraine. He reasons that if Russia emerges victorious, it would be through brute force rather than strategic diplomacy.
Now Putin regularly talks out of both sides of his mouth. He says all sorts of stuff he doesn't mean. He doesn't say all sorts of stuff he does mean. I would.
Speaker 2:I mean he is a pathological liar, so I wouldn't hang on any word that he says Putin needs to find fanatic supporters, because ordinary Russians can see increasingly that this war is not going well, that it's costing them economically, that they can't travel to the West anymore, that their country is viewed as a pariah state. Doesn't look good.
Speaker 3:Hi everyone and welcome to another edition of Backstory. I'm Dana Lewis On this Backstory a tough week for Ukraine. The US has turned down funding requests to buy in $60 billion to allow Ukraine to fight on and maybe win against Russia. What now? Well, the Republicans are trying to force Biden to give ground on border issues, but increasingly there are questions and doubts. Can Ukraine actually win and force Putin's army out of Eastern Ukraine? Russia is the problem, and we interview the author of a new book how Does Russia Lose, thomas Ken, and it's obviously about more than just Ukraine. But first he has campaigned relentlessly for sanctions on Russia. Bill Browder talks Ukraine's setbacks in Washington, putin and ways to make Russia pay, including siphoning billions in Russian cash that remain frozen in Europe. Bill Browder is a tireless campaigner for sanctions against Russia and he joins me now. I believe you're in London, bill.
Speaker 1:That's correct.
Speaker 3:Welcome. Good to talk to you again. You too. I'm just watching and trying to wade through this never ending annual news conference that Putin holds, where he takes questions supposedly spontaneous questions from journalists and the public. I can tell you I've been in that news conference in the Kremlin many times where it is a negotiated question and they come and they ask you in advance if they're going to answer your question. What are you going to ask? Inevitably, we used to change them anyway as journalists, but I can tell you that they are not very spontaneous. One of the first.
Speaker 1:Did you ever get a question in? I did.
Speaker 3:Oh good, but I usually just changed it. So, but yeah, I did get them in quite often. Maybe that's a bad merit badge right now to be wearing, but one of the first questions from a journalist asking why a female journalist is getting something like 14 years in prison, saying, you know, should the criminal code be changed? It's harsh. And Putin said, well, maybe these prison terms are too long. Is he suddenly trying to be a champion of human rights?
Speaker 1:Now Putin regularly talks out of both sides of his mouth. He says all sorts of stuff he doesn't mean. He doesn't say all sorts of stuff he doesn't mean. I mean. He is a pathological liar. So I wouldn't hang on any word that he says as truth. I wouldn't project from anything he says to be a new trend. I think we've seen this guy. I think you know the one disadvantage he has is that we've seen him for 23 years in action. He has a track record, a very bad track record, and so it's not as if, you know, there's some mystery about this man. He is a killer, he's a liar, he's a thief and he is a mass. He is a genocidal mass murderer, and that's who he is, and whatever words come out of his mouth don't really mean anything.
Speaker 3:He's also asked by a journalist when is there gonna be peace with Ukraine? He says there'll be peace when we achieve our goals denazification of Ukraine and demilitarization of Ukraine. Your reaction to that?
Speaker 1:Well, those are the same exact words that he said on February 24th 2022. Vladimir Putin has not changed his approach towards Ukraine. There's all these people out there that are the sort of pressuring Zelensky to cut a deal, et cetera, but there's no deal to cut. You know, if Putin, if Ukraine decides to concede, then Putin achieves all the objectives that he set out to do on the very first day of this nasty conflict.
Speaker 3:Should the Russians be so confident right now? They obviously you know high fives and celebrations on Russian television all this week what they perceive to be a pretty dark week for Ukraine in terms of the US not going through with the $60 billion in war funding from the Biden administration.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, they're having a good week for sure, but I wouldn't count the Ukrainians out in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 1:First of all, the Ukrainians will fight, whether they get US aid or not, and the Ukrainians have shown. You know, three days into this war, they didn't have a whole lot of US military aid and they really gave the Russians a run for their money. Secondly, I don't believe that we're at the stage right now where the US is going to ultimately cut off funding for Ukraine. I think that this is a temporary situation, this is a tactical situation where Republicans are trying to extort certain concessions from Biden at the expense of Ukraine. But at the end of the day, I can't imagine and I could be wrong about this, but I can't imagine that we'll be, you know, into February next year and an aid package for Ukraine hasn't been approved. I think there's a longer term issue which the Russians haven't yet started celebrating, which is that if Trump were to be elected, he would withdraw he would absolutely withdraw military aid for Ukraine, and at that point then I don't believe the Europeans have enough resources to give the Ukrainians what they need to sustain a defense.
Speaker 3:I mean, in fact, they have been celebrating the coming of Trump on television. Solovyoff and some of the other pretty ugly Russian commentators have been saying you know, not only will it be an end to aid in Ukraine, it'll be an end to NATO, we will defeat NATO.
Speaker 1:Well, there is a decent chance that if Trump becomes president, he will tear up the NATO treaty. As far as the US is concerned, he tried to do that, or he thought about doing that, in his past presidency, and it was only because there was so many patriots in the US government as his national security advisor, as secretary of defense and other people that that didn't happen. But I don't think that that's an impossibility. And so you know, putin has had a big win this week in Congress. As I said, I don't think that that's a permanent win. I think that that eventually the Ukrainians will get their money, but he's holding off. He's holding on for the sort of existential win in November 2024.
Speaker 3:You said, europe can't do it alone. You know, you have people like Donald Tusk, the new, the new, old prime minister of Poland, coming to power saying we need to mobilize all of the West right now, and he's really calling on Europe to step up their game. What would happen if the US doesn't come up with money? Will Europe then start to retreat as well, or do you think they'll step up and try and fill the gaps somehow?
Speaker 1:Well, they're going to have to step up to some extent because they're much closer to Ukraine and to Russia than the US is. I mean, there's one interesting sort of Hail Mary for Ukraine here, which is that when the war started the West froze $350 billion of Russian central bank reserves, and about 220 billion of those reserves are held in Euroclear in Belgium. And it seems to be pretty obvious that if Russia has created more than a trillion dollars of damage to Ukraine and that money is frozen, that there's not a legal way to get that money for the defense of Ukraine, and it may be the necessity that forces that issue. I've been in the European Commission in various other places and everybody is sort of bureaucratically trying to avoid answering that question. But I think when push comes to shove and when it's peace in the world is at stake, the Europeans may act more decisively and that would solve the funding problem.
Speaker 3:Well, let me push. Maybe coming to shove pretty quickly, right? So the original proposal I don't want to say it's the original proposal, but the latest proposal is at least use the interest from that 350 billion. At least use the interest and give it to Ukraine. That would be a mini step towards taking all of the assets and turning them over to Kiev.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it's just an absurdity If you can use the interest, why not use the principle? I mean, how is one more legal than the other? The issue that everybody is sort of struggling with is they're saying, oh my God, this is violate sovereign immunity and, oh my God, no one's going to want to hold the Euro anymore. Well, first of all, it doesn't violate sovereign immunity, because when a country invades another country, they create damages which are need to be satisfied under a different law called the law. It's called the law on countermeasures.
Speaker 1:And secondly, I don't think people are going to start transacting in Chinese and Saudi Arabian currency because they think the EU is such a dangerous place to do business. I think if you're a dictator about to take over a foreign country, you might feel a little worried about your reserves in foreign countries, but I don't think anyone else is. But ultimately, if you're going to take the interest, you might as well take it all. And the Ukrainians need that money. And of course, there's lots of concern about not wanting that money to be stolen or wasted and there's lots of ways of making sure that doesn't happen. But if the US ultimately cuts off Ukraine from military aid, ukrainians basically will collapse if they don't get that, and if the Ukrainians collapse and Putin succeeds in his initial military objectives, then the next stop is Estonia, latvia, lithuania, poland, and so Donald Tusk is right that we need to get active, and we need to get active fast, with or without the United States, and this is the way to do. It was with the money frozen at Euroclear in Belgium.
Speaker 3:So why do they always talk about that money? You put it at $350 billion.
Speaker 1:Well, it's between $300 and $350 billion. Nobody knows exactly. How much is there.
Speaker 3:And some people have said it could even be $400 billion it could be.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Nobody knows exactly. I know that it's about $220 billion at Euroclear, which is a good start.
Speaker 3:So why do they always talk about maybe it should be used for reconstruction? Why isn't there a complete embrace of using that money to simply let them defend themselves and use it for arms?
Speaker 1:Well, the original fantasy among most heads of state and policymakers was that Putin was going to negotiate. When he's not winning and he starts to lose, he'll negotiate. That's a fantasy based on lack of understanding of how Putin operates. Putin is a brutal dictator. He doesn't care how many soldiers he loses, he doesn't care about the damage to his economy, he can't show weakness and he will never negotiate. But the idea was he was going to negotiate, the war was going to end and that money would be used for reparations. But the war is not ending, and so the conversation will very quickly shift to defense, from reconstruction, because you can't have reconstruction until you have the war over, and you can't have the war over until Ukraine either wins or decisively pushes Russia back.
Speaker 3:Is there momentum? I mean, I know you talk to a lot of European leaders and you travel Europe constantly. Has that conversation changed and are they warming up to the idea of accessing those funds for Ukraine?
Speaker 1:Well, the momentum has definitely changed in a lot of different places. I mean, the most stark example is here in the United Kingdom, where the numbers are smaller I think it's about 28 billion pounds, but still a big number. And I've been going back and forth talking to government officials here, and a year ago there was, like you know, they were all just a bunch of lawyers and bureaucrats desperately trying to avoid the issue under the previous foreign secretary. And then David Cameron, who is the former prime minister, who's really got a good head on his shoulders, came out and said explicitly exactly what we're talking about here confiscating the money for Ukraine and he said it in Washington at the Aspen Institute conference last week.
Speaker 3:Right, and once one government does it and I think Canada's moving in that direction as well once one government does it, then you know, it's like a house of cards, right?
Speaker 1:Indeed, and also I should point out that the US, while all this nastiness is going on around the aid package, there's a piece of legislation called the repo act, which is sponsored primarily, or I should say initiated, by Republicans, which is to confiscate the money in the US, at the US Federal Reserve.
Speaker 3:What is that amount to? How much is there? Do you know?
Speaker 1:Well, there is again. There's no transparency. I've heard numbers varying from 14 billion to 28 billion, but I don't know the answer to that. Sizable, sizable amounts.
Speaker 3:So Europe now is meeting this week as well. You know there's a dizzying amount of news taking place now, but Europe is meeting and they're supposed to consider 50 billion euros for Ukraine in terms of different aid, some of its grants, some of it will be forgiven. That seems stalled with Viktor Orban who today says any decisions have to be unanimous. He is saying this today now, and any aid will have to be enacted outside the EU budget and also he will not allow EU membership talks to begin with Ukraine. He won't allow it to happen.
Speaker 1:Well, Viktor Orban. He's angling for something, so he's using the veto power of any individual member state to get 30 billion that he wants allocated to his country, which has been withheld because of all sorts of nastiness that he's up to in Hungary. I think he's just forcing another issue which I think will come very quickly to the surface, which is this whole concept of unanimity that every country in the European Union has to agree on every single foreign policy point. That has to be changed, and if you can have one country which is effectively a Putin-Trojan horse inside the EU, that can't possibly be allowed, and they've allowed it for long enough. But when it comes to the national security of EU member states being compromised by this policy, I think they're going to have to find a way around that.
Speaker 3:Can I just get your long-term view as we wrap up here, bill? Do you think that Ukraine can hold the line? They're certainly not advancing right now. They're dug in. Do you think they can hold the line through the winter until maybe they do get some more aid, or at least they get some of these F-16 aircraft arriving? Maybe Sweden steps up with the Gripens to them? It's not hopeless, but it is dire.
Speaker 1:I'm quite certain that Ukraine will hold the line. It's just a question of what human cost they hold that line. The lack of weapons means that more soldiers die. I think what everyone needs to understand is that if Ukraine were to lose or to capitulate, then all the women get raped, all the children get taken away, all the men get tortured, and so this is really a fight for survival, a fight to the death, and so Ukraine's not going to give up. It's just a question of how many Ukrainians have to die before we come around and finally give them the support they need 44 million people in the original population of Ukraine when this war began.
Speaker 3:Are you disappointed that your raison d'etre, your big push for sanctions repeatedly, was to cut Russia off and really make them pay and make them feel the economic pain, and that might destabilize Putin's stranglehold on power in Russia? Are you disappointed with the fact that so many Western businesses continue to do business in Russia?
Speaker 1:Well, absolutely, but I don't think there's that so many Western businesses doing business in Russia. My analysis is that most Western businesses aren't doing business in Russia. There are a few that do, and it's like Western businesses doing business in Nazi Germany during Hitler. There's always going to be immoral actors profit-maximizing and trying to fill in the gap. But I can also say that Putin is suffering.
Speaker 1:Just because he's licking his lips right now and enjoying the chaos in Washington doesn't mean that he's not paid a huge, monumental price for his misadventure in Ukraine. He's lost, according to both Ukrainian and US estimates, more than 300,000 soldiers. He's lost 5,000 tanks. The economy is in a total state of disarray. I don't believe any of this fake numbers coming out of Russia. They've lost the most important customer for their most important industry gas. Europe is not going to ever depend on Russian natural gas again. More than a million young, able men have left the country. Who could? The drain, drain is incalculable. This has been a disaster for Putin and he doesn't care. He's not acting in the national interest. He's acting in his own personal interest. But this has been a terrible, terrible mistake for him and he and his country are paying a devastating price.
Speaker 3:And his reaction will be just to hold on longer.
Speaker 1:Well, he can hold on longer because he doesn't personally feel the pain and he doesn't care what his people feel.
Speaker 3:Paul Browder, it's always great to talk to you and get your insight. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Thomas Kent is the author of how Russia Loses Hubris and Miscalculation in Putin's Kremlin, and he joins me now, thomas, welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 3:So look the first thing I note about your book. First of all, the reason I wanted to interview you is because, you know, does Putin lose and does Russia lose, and there's certainly be a lot of debate about that. But in your book you paint a pretty dark picture of Russia no coherent ideology for others to adopt. It's weak economically. It's international ventures offer nothing to poor people. It's really a system that makes rich elite Russians richer. Even at the same time, it constantly derides the West as being corrupt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's largely true. It doesn't mean that Russia can't still defy gravity and advance its interests with very little behind it. It does it mainly through the power of information, slash propaganda, but it does score some successes, and so it's a little counterintuitive, when the world is in such turmoil and some ships are falling, the Kremlin's way, to think about weaknesses and their influence operations. But maybe that makes it even more important to focus on the kinds of miscalculations that they have made and how we can recognize them as they continue to pop up and what's still going to be a long struggle.
Speaker 3:All right, I want to talk to you more about that. But you mentioned how Putin stumbled and fumbled repeatedly, and you do, I think, six country kind of studies in the book and you say that Ukraine was actually Putin's to lose and he lost it. Do you think that you still hold that view, given this momentous week as you and I are doing this interview? President Zelensky of Ukraine really is largely leaving Washington without any kind of funding commitment for his war effort into the next year, and Putin is boasting more and more publicly. This is just a matter of time until he gets what he wants in Ukraine.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, the focus of the book is on Russian influence weaknesses at various points. If they succeed somehow in Ukraine, it will be a turnabout from a really reverse influence campaign that they ran from 2000 to 2022, which is to say, turning Ukraine from a country where, at the beginning of the 2000s, putin was probably the most popular political figure among Ukrainians into an implacable enemy. So I look at the things that Russia did that hurt its own interests in Ukraine and turn it into an enemy. Now, if they win by brute force, then they win by brute force, but it doesn't mean that they had any kind of influence victory. It just means that ultimately they had more tanks than the West was willing to give Ukraine.
Speaker 3:I guess. I mean there were revolutions in Ukraine and there were a lot of people who didn't support Putin in the 2000s and you know, yanukovych was Putin at one point before the Orange Revolution. I mean I was in Ukraine covering the election and Putin was openly campaigning for Yanukovych and in the end Yanukovych lost that election. So there was a lot of growing suspicion about Russia even at that point.
Speaker 2:There was. But one of the reasons for that was because of the way the Russians bungled their relations with Ukraine. Russia had everything going for it in Ukraine, a population that was similar ethnically they were pretty much everyone spoke Russian had its economy closely linked. It was sort of like the United States and Canada. I mean it could have been like that, but the Russians, through bluster, through threats, through overreaching, managed to turn all that around and made themselves an enemy.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's certainly true that the West was up to its elbows in trying to at various points. So we also suffered some Ukraine fatigue at various periods. But the West certainly was up to its elbows in trying to turn Ukraine in a Western direction. But there were very strong forces uniting Russia and Ukraine. If the Russians had been able to conceive of Ukraine having good relations with the West but also strong relations with Russia, perhaps even being in the EU but not in NATO, I mean, all these things were possible. As a matter of fact, putin himself spoke wistfully about the relationship between the US and Canada and between Germany and Austria in terms of what could have been with Ukraine, and that didn't happen.
Speaker 3:You study propaganda and disinformation. I'm struck today watching a 10-minute clip of Russian TV channels and I regularly look at the highlights from the night before. But this is 10 minutes, kind of the worst of, and it is a hate assembly line. So before we talk about Russia and its propaganda aimed at the West and I think some of it is still aimed at the West anyway but internally, you know, russians talk about Ukrainians being possessed by the devil. If we can't convince them, we'll kill them. Those who don't want to live with us will be shot, cutting off the heads of Ukrainians. There are jokes about raping Ukrainian grandmothers on Russian television. Denazification by any means, by killing millions if it's necessary. Drown the Ukrainian children who don't agree with Russians. Destroy Kiev, if necessary. So our Russian flag sits there.
Speaker 3:Dmitry Solovyova, who you'll know as one of the main propagandists on television, likened the war to cleansing a cat of worms. The worms are Ukrainians, the cleanse cat is Russia. Sergei Markov he calls Ukraine a sinkhole that leads to hell and will cease to exist. Chechen fighters who are, you know, doing their own media propaganda. You talk about marching on to Berlin. And Solovyova again, it's a holy war. If Russia doesn't win, the world will cease to exist. I mean, I would use the term disgusting, but beyond that it's certainly. This is the assembly line that Russians watch nightly. And when does it stop being propaganda? And it just becomes a wide held belief that the Kremlin has sold and stuffed down the throats of Russians. And where does that lead? What does that lead?
Speaker 2:Russian verbiage on this subject has really evolved. At the time when the invasion took place, or just before when, in the summer before, when Putin was issuing his 5,000-word manifesto about the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, the language was I mean, it was not comforting to Ukraine, but it was still quasi-diplomatic about how Russia didn't have it in for the Ukrainians, that it had it in for a government that was holding Ukrainians hostage, but these were brother peoples and they were going to advance together and so forth. And in the course of the campaign military campaign the whole tenor of it has changed and now we see, in a matter of fact, for a year or so we have seen the kind of things that you refer to. Why is this happening? I would think there are a couple reasons, but the main thing is that Putin needs to find fanatic supporters, because ordinary Russians can see increasingly that this war is not going well, that it's costing them economically, that they can't travel to the West anymore, that their country is viewed as a pariah state doesn't look good. I mean, it's certainly true that Russians can't get out in protest, but we see in polls and things that Russians saying that increasingly they wish this war would end, which is a different narrative than Russians saying all we care about is winning. They just sort of want it over at this point.
Speaker 2:So where does Putin find his real allies? Well, russia has a very strong right wing, very nationalist, very religious. The Russian Orthodox Church has been brought into this, which is pushing some elements of it are pushing an apocalyptic messianic line along the lines of that. This is the ultimate fight for Christendom against the decadent and immoral West, that Ukraine is just one battlefield in a much larger existential war, and if it comes to a purifying nuclear conflict, well so be it. God will sort it all out at the end and it will be the Russians who will triumph, because they are the ones who have fought for Christianity and Christian values. And it had to happen sooner or later. And if it does on their watch, so be it. I mean.
Speaker 3:I have to shake my head, and it's just gotten more bizarre over the period of the war since February of 2021. And where does that end? And when does that translate into somebody actually doing something beyond what we thought Russia was capable to do? I mean, it's really dangerous.
Speaker 2:It's really dangerous. They have backed themselves into something of a corner here. I mean they could always switch. I mean Putin could always agree to some kind of a deal and Russia suddenly say he's denazified Ukraine, we can be brothers again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, sort of declare victory in some way or another. I mean, it wouldn't make any sense, but that's never stopped Russian propaganda. So they could. They could somehow say it's been a great victory, and you know whatever they want. So they have to decide are they going to, you know, increasingly push this, this line, or are they going to, you know, make some kind of concession, the?
Speaker 2:What they're calculating is might they actually win this war in such a way that I mean, not destroy the, the, the government in Kiev, but at least hold all the Ukrainian territory they've captured, make it a frozen conflict, humiliate the West? If so, then they don't have to do anything in terms of either, you know, declaring a fake victory or using nuclear weapons. But if it turns out that they really cannot manage this conflict, then you know they could do anything potentially. Now I don't think personally what do I know? But I don't think personally that the Russian establishment, including the military establishment, is really going to go and nuke the world. But they seem to have convinced some people in the West that they might and therefore the West has, I think, probably to some degree set some limits around itself. I mean, it's it's been deterred.
Speaker 3:You know we don't want to work through it, it's not even part of the calculus on whether, for instance, long range weapons like the attack arms are provided if the Crimea is going to come under attack and the Kirch bridge is going to be taken out. And certainly that's been part of the internal debate, certainly in the US, I think, when they've been talking about how far do we go in allowing Ukraine to attack Russian forces, whether they be inside Russia or inside Ukraine. And that's still a calculation, right, because that's and that feeds into the criticism of President Biden's administration about this slow drip of weapons and an escalation, rather than just allowing Ukraine to be armed with the kinds of things that would allow it to win. They've been very reluctant on, you know, first giving armor, then M1 Abrams tanks, maybe F-16s, ok, a few F-16s, and there's been that slow, slow build, slow drip.
Speaker 2:Biden published an op-ed in the New York Times a couple months after the war started, called something like what we Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine, and it was quite clear there that I mean he said that we're not going to aid Ukraine in attacking Russia, and any you know military person will tell you that in trying to repel an invasion, what you need to do is to strike the enemy's rear. So this was our calculus going in.
Speaker 3:So this propaganda internally that we've talked about certainly convinced a lot of Russians of the need to fight the West and to be victorious over Ukraine. And then externally I mean you've seen the propaganda machine go into overdrive this week, and quite successfully. I would ask you to weigh it and measure it, but it seems successful in the sense that Putin has said we're winning, it's just a question of time. The assembly line of weapons is coming online and getting stronger all the time, and the Republicans, who at first were holding hostage funding to Ukraine over the Mexican border and immigration issues, have slowly kind of turned the attention more to well, can that war ever be won? And maybe Putin's right. And why are we just going to keep pouring billions of dollars into something that's a war that's never ending?
Speaker 2:Well, of course, the White House points out that these billions of dollars do not wind up getting buried in Ukraine. Most of it goes to American arms makers. So this is. You could view it as a jobs program if you wanted to, if you want to just be calculating about it. Well, you know, people seem to have forgotten that wars can take a while and they go through phases. In World War II, you know, we lost, you know, whole aircraft carriers with thousands of people on board, and that was part of the cost of doing business.
Speaker 2:We are in a world where we expect instant satisfaction. Now, of course, we could advance our satisfaction, I'm sure, by giving Ukraine more weapons faster. We could have done that a long time ago. But the fact is, ukraine is a big country. It's got a lot of people. It's got no choice. Essentially, it will. The Russians have shown it how they handle people in territories that they conquer. So I don't think Ukraine is going to give up and the question for us will be do we want to be with them in the long term or do we not? And from the standpoint of US politics it's not my area of expertise, but the Republicans have claimed Thomas, it's nobody's area of expertise right now because it's such a mirage, but what's going?
Speaker 2:on. Well, I mean, the Republicans have claimed that Biden lost Afghanistan, and I guess they might want to think about whether they want it said that the Republicans lost Ukraine. All these foreign adventures had their repercussions domestically.
Speaker 3:So I want to ask you two questions before I let you go, and you've been very generous with your time. First of all, in your book, I thought it was very interesting how you talk about Russia's miscalculations, if I can term it as that, and you say that Putin has this vertical power structure in a very small circle and he thinks that other countries work like that. In a way and he tends to, quoting from your book tends to ally itself, russia with authoritarian leaders who eventually fall from power, fails to build deep people to people ties, overestimates political and its economic and political strengths, underestimates the power of laws, international organizations and pro-democracy forces, and it is often not prepared for concerted resistant efforts. So what's the miscalculation there?
Speaker 2:Well, the miscalculation is all of those that a lot of Russia's appeal, so to speak, in the world is basically a propaganda appeal. In much of the Global South, for example, russia provides almost nothing in the way of foreign aid, assistance, ideological inspiration or anything compared to the massive amounts of investment in trade from the West, the effort by the US, the EU, to help build sustainable institutions that will actually improve people's lives. As I said, russia manages to defy gravity in many places simply through the power of propaganda and the occasional on the ground little project or speech or military visit or something like that. So the answer is, in my view, that since the West has so many advantages, it should simply instrumentalize the one tool that it almost never uses, which is information.
Speaker 2:Western information policy is extremely tentative, extremely risk averse.
Speaker 2:We tend to think that if we really get out there in the information domain, on the social networks and using influencers and doing all these things and posters and stickers and campaigning for Western interests, including the interests of democratic forces within individual countries, their civil society and so forth, people tend to imagine that if we start doing this, we will somehow immediately slide into doing disinformation and lying and so forth.
Speaker 2:Now my feeling is, in Western information, we should always tell the truth, but there's a lot of truth to tell, and we tend to shy away from confronting propaganda and disinformation with information operations of our own. When you consider that Russia and other authoritarian states too tend to operate above all in the information realm and are expert at creating entire illusions of their benevolence, of their wealth, of their success and so forth, then it would have seemed to me that maybe something's lacking in terms of you could call it our public diplomacy, you could call it our propaganda, you could call it our clear exposition of who we are and what we stand for and how that has made us relatively successful countries.
Speaker 3:And in terms of winning against Russia. Who is that aimed at? In terms of getting the word out better about who the West is and what we have to offer, who is that aimed at? Is that aimed at some of the countries that Russia is wooing and trying to draw away from the West? Or is that aimed at Russians themselves?
Speaker 2:It could be either way. The State Department has tiptoed in descending some videos out aimed at Russian citizens, but I think the biggest at-risk area at the moment is obviously areas in the global South, to some degree in developed countries, developed Western countries, where you just want to take these Russian errors and say really, can you possibly believe this? Isn't this contradictory to what they said yesterday? And what exactly is Russia's plan to make Ivory Coast rich? They have no plan for anything really, except for their own benefit in various parts of the world. I mean, back in the day you could credit them with communist ideology.
Speaker 3:That made sense to some of its power politics too, Isn't it locally where they send in the Wagner group to prop up a wobbly dictatorship or a wobbly administration? They provide some arms and in return get some diamonds and some gas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they do, and that's their tactic of yoking their fortunes to the strength of a top layer in a country and sending in mercenaries to support a corrupt government and oppress the people. You got to say is that much of a long-term strategy? Does that do any benefit for the people? Answer no. So who is pointing that out in an aggressive and assertive way instead of just sort of wringing our hands?
Speaker 2:When you think about a country that comes under Russian influence, we tend to say, oh OK, lost that one, let's look on the next. I mean, you don't lose countries for very long. If you make an effort, every will not end this year or even next year, I trust. So all of these countries and issues that we feel well, we lost on that one, let's look at another country because that's gone. I mean, russia never looks at it that way. They suffer defeats all the time and keep coming back. So why should we feel that every loss is the end? It does take fortitude and it does take some belief in our own societies. And if we're hypnotized, largely by ourselves, into believing that democracy is a failed experiment and our countries are endlessly corrupt, then yeah, we will lose. But if we look at free markets and free societies as being basically the major way that countries have become prosperous, then you have a different view.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's really a good point that you're making. Do you read President Putin's announcement that he's running again? He changed the Constitution. Maybe we're going to have this guy around until 2036, potentially. Do you read his desire to stay in the Kremlin as a strength or do you see it as a weakness, because any change in Russia right now, especially at the top, could potentially bring the house down?
Speaker 2:Well, I don't think he has any choice. I don't think there's anyone he would trust other than himself to stay in power, and you have no idea. He has no idea of who could succeed him or who could succeed him after the immediate first person who succeeds him, and he's got a warrant out against him from the International Criminal Court. So if I were he, I'd stay there too and I keep a gun under my coat and isolate myself and insulate myself and be very careful with those around me. He may last forever. I have no idea. I never predict Russian politics, but I would say that if he were to, I think it would be highly dangerous for him to say well, I've done everything I can. I'm now, you know, leading Sochi for a quiet retirement and I trust all will go well.
Speaker 3:Thomas Kent, the author of how Russia Loses, great to meet you and I hope we can do it again, and I appreciate your time.
Speaker 3:A pleasure, thanks so much, and that's our back story. This week, during Putin's phonion program, a western journalist watched some of the questions electronically scroll across the big screen, questions that were never asked Interesting reading. There's plenty of praise for Putin. How do we make sure Putin lives forever? One message reads a strong Putin is a strong Russia reads another. But there are critical texts too.
Speaker 3:Does Putin want to end the war? The demer give it in the job too long. When will power change in Russia? And there's this one. Could you tell me how to move to the Russia that we see on TV here? Many Russians who hate the war and, by extension, putin, have left the country and are living in Central Asia, dubai, europe, cyprus, israel. Many of them were prominent Russians, patriots who can't stand to send their kids to die in Ukraine and just can't stand to see freedoms in human rights go backwards in Russia, to see Russia set back decades by Putin in his inner circle Tragic, but here we are In Europe, and the rest of the world just has to isolate Russia and confront it too. I'm Dana Lewis. Thanks for listening to Backstory and I'll talk to you again soon.
