Putin’s Gambit: Why He Chose War and How it Will End

[Music] good afternoon everyone uh thank you so much for coming i think it we're all reading the headlines every day we know this is a time of uh uh ethical change in the uh in the world system uh so i think it's uh so important that we gather here uh frequently and discuss share ideas and think about where this is all going and i see many familiar faces here and uh i deeply appreciate those who have been making the time every week and i think i hope you've been getting as much out of it as i have and uh we've had quite a string of great speakers and another one today so we welcome thomas graham today he's distinguished fellow at the council on foreign relations his co-founder of the russian east european and eurasian studies program at yale where he's taught for the last decade he was also a special assistant to the president and senior director for russia on the national security council staff from 2004 to 2007 and director for russian affairs on the staff between 2002 and 2004 so we're thrilled to have him here i got to hear him speak uh maybe six weeks ago at a russia conference and was completely fascinated by his uh his perspective so i'm so glad he could come to the watson institute and share ideas with us great thank you very much it's a it's a real pleasure to be with you uh today and it's thank you for inviting me to the watson institute it's i've heard about it for many many years it's my first uh actual uh visit to the institute so thank you very much uh so in my open remarks i want to touch upon four four questions uh you know what is the nature of this conflict from putin's standpoint why now and not some time earlier where do things stand right now and how is this going to end so on the nature of the conflict i think before western and american audiences it's always important to stress that from the russian standpoint this isn't simply about ukraine this really is about uh european security architecture and a desire on the part of russia to revise the post-cold war settlement of the 1990s that they believe was imposed upon them at a time of tremendous weakness and they've watched over the past two and a half decades the extension of euro-atlantic institutions particularly nato which we remember was formed to contain the soviet union that is russia and the european union which is a is a community of nations to which russia can really never aspire to join so and these institutions have expanded eastward over the past two and a half years towards russia's borders and this has had two uh consequences that pose from the russian standpoint something of a psychological and a strategic threat on the psychological side it's important to remember that russia's sense of itself as a great power is intimately connected with europe after all russia demonstrated its prowess as a great power on the great battlefields of europe over the past two to 300 years at the grand diplomatic conferences strategically this eastward expansion particularly of nato has narrowed consistently over time strategic depth or the buffer zones uh that russia historically has considered critical uh to its own security and this is something that goes back more than two to three hundred years so uh russia sees these things as a threat and if you look at the draft documents or the draft treaties that russia released in december of of last year one as a bilateral treaty with the united states the other bilateral treaty with nato ukraine hardly figures in those two treaties what russia is looking for are three things that putin stressed in december january and february right up to the beginning of the of the actual military conflict that is russia wanted no further expansion of nato eastward it wanted an agreement not to deploy what they call certain strike weapons uh on the territory of new members of nato that were capable of hitting russian territory and most important they wanted nato to withdraw its infrastructure back to the lines that it was at in 1997 that is a year in which the nato-russia founding act was was signed and two years before the first actual expansion of of nato nato eastward now it's also clear that this is this is about uh ukraine ukraine is in fact the center uh all these concerns about nato expansion eastward and when putin launched the uh the special military operation he underscored uh two points uh two goals the demilitarization of ukraine and the denotification of ukraine uh i think was all of us interpreted as as regime change um i think it's also worth pointing out that uh for putin himself uh ukraine is important beyond simply the the question of european security architecture if you read his document from from june of last year it's clear that he considers ukraine to be an integral part of russia more russian than anything else and that ukraine in many ways is a is a made-up uh nation uh something created in in the west uh not not something that has grown organically out of developments uh in in east central europe uh or or eurasia so the conflict is about european security architecture and that means that even if we resolve this narrow ukraine crisis sometime in the near future the problem that we have with russia is going to continue now why now uh because his concerns about european security architecture have been around for for many many years in fact they've been around from the moment the the soviet union broke up in 1991. i like to think of this in terms of three three baskets of developments two that intensified the threat from the russian standpoint uh and one set of developments that provided the opportunity so if we look at the uh at the threats first there's the set of threats that were emerging from ukraine itself uh the politics of ukrainian president vladimir zelensky over the past year year and a half a clear effort to clamp down on the pro-russian forces inside ukraine itself he went after some big business people oligarchs uh one in particular uh victor medve chuk uh who had served previously in the ukrainian government but most importantly had a personal relationship to russian president putin zielinski also went after media particularly television stations uh that broadcast in russian and and positions that were close to those of the russian government the second thing that zelinski did that was of concern to the kremlin was to make a concerted effort to put pressure on nato to make good on its promise at the bucharest summit of 2008 that ukraine would eventually become a member of nato that is he wanted to put ukraine on a fast track in the nato membership and third is that zielenski as one of his uh programs uh founded what he called the crimean platform uh this was an effort to bring together uh particularly european uh states but and others to put focus attention on the status of crimea to raise the international profile of russia's illegal annexation of crimea in 2014 and hope that that would lead to further pressure on russia to consider sometime in the distant future i would imagine the return of crimea to ukraine so there were things happening inside ukraine that were undermining the russian position from the kremlin standpoint uh the second set of developments concern the relationship between nato and ukraine in 2020 nato granted ukraine something that was called an enhanced opportunity partnership this led to closer ties between individual nato countries and ukraine a greater supply of weapons training exercises joint military exercises both on lan in the black sea the united states played a particularly large role in these efforts and the united states was also using this as an opportunity to conduct more active strategic reconnaissance uh flights uh over ukrainian territory close to the to the russian border again something uh that the the kremlin found very disturbing so uh if up until say 2019 2020 uh russia was concerned about ukraine joining nato from 2020 onward it was concerned about nato entering ukraine so that in many ways ukraine became a de facto member of nato from the russian standpoint now the set of opportunities uh this really comes from the situation uh in the west um we had a new president in the united states uh the president who made clear if you read the initial statements and security documents that were released about this time last year they didn't want to spend a lot of time dealing with russia china was the clear priority and you add on top of that a very chaotic withdrawal from from afghanistan in august of last year uh and a sense in the kremlin uh that this was a president that wasn't going to do a lot uh to to uh excuse me uh to push back against whatever russia might want to do in and around ukraine you add to that to the situation in in germany america was going to step down it's clear you were going to get a new coalition government the coalition government that did emerge was um something of a novelty uh in in german politics a three-party coalition uh it was clear that this was a a coalition that wanted to focus largely on domestic affairs foreign policy was not at the uh the top of the list by any stretch of the imagination uh and that was going to provide a a further opportunity for russia to meddle in ways and not get a severe reaction not from the germans third was the french presidential elections and the assumption that this would occupy the uh the attention of french president macron for some time and also focus him on domestic politics as a as opposed to foreign policy you add to that uh the europeans failure to fill the gas storage facilities adequately uh last summer so that we had a an energy crisis that emerged uh in the fall and into the winter of last year uh something that obviously played into uh russia's hands given the the great reliance of uh of europe particularly germany countries east of germany on russian gas um and then finally two factors uh the sense that zelensky was not a popular president uh in ukraine and certainly was true if you looked at the polls uh and that ukrainian politics uh was a a serious internet sign struggles between zelinski former president petroshenko and others so an unpopular president and then finally a russian military a russian military that putin himself had had set about to modernize over the past 10 years and military that have performed from the russian standpoint almost flawlessly in crimea in 2014 had demonstrated tremendous capability in the incursion uh in in syria in 2015 um and had been exercised uh quite actively over the past decade uh and provided with a lot of modern equipment uh so a military uh that was in peak form and capable of carrying out uh fairly complicated uh military operations now as we all know putin miscalculated uh almost across the board um ukrainian uh the ukrainians rallied around uh president zielenski zelensky turned out to be a very charismatic military leader uh the resistance turned out to be much stiffer than than the kremlin had anticipated uh and certainly the kremlin wasn't being greeted like liberators as the troops moved across the border towards kiev uh the way uh that putin had anticipated when he launched this operation second the response of the west uh was much more rapid uh and a greater scale than uh than putin had anticipated the sanctions were levied fairly early on uh to the surprise of people in washington europeans were actually out in front uh pushing the administration uh to levy sanctions more heavier sanctions more rapidly than the administration itself had wanted to do that came as a surprise particularly surprising was the reaction of germany which fairly early on suspended the the north stream to uh gas pipeline uh decided that it needed to spend more on defense and that it was going to support ukraine uh in a in a significant fashion uh so the the the sanctions uh both the economic and other sanctions uh were stiffer and more severe uh than putin had uh had anticipated and finally the russian military turned out not to be all that good at the end of the day it ran into logistics problems from the very very beginning we all remember seeing those long lines of military equipment on the road outside of kiev not moving at all providing easy targets for ambush by by the ukrainians and to the extent that putin didn't get to deliver his victory day speech in in kiev and probably won't um you thought he would be there in three or four days uh that you would have regime change none of that happened uh and in fact uh russia at the end of the day decided that it was going to have to withdraw and enter the second phase plan b as they call it but if you listen to the russian media all this is going uh according to plan that phase the the first phase has been successfully completed in and around kiev and now they're working on the second phase in and around the dom boss so where are we now you know as i've already indicated we are moving towards the donbass region this is the focus of the immediate russian military campaign in a sense it's putin returning to what he announced as the uh original goals of the of the campaign way back on february 23rd and 20 february 24th that russia was going in to protect the independence of these states that they had recognized 48 hours before for 24 hours before against a an imminent attack by by the ukrainian forces to protect them from acts of genocide uh and so forth uh it's also clear that part of this uh operation includes building a land bridge uh between the donbass region that is occupied by russia at this point uh and crimea um that's why mariupo which has been under siege for the past uh eight or nine weeks and has fallen or not fallen uh depending on how you define having fallen um but the you know military operations are still consent continuing in and around uh uh in and around mariupol a senior russian military officer also suggested that the the plan included extending a corridor from crimea through odessa to a a separatist region in moldova transnistria where there are about 15 1500 russian troops located whether that's indeed part of the plan or not we don't know but we have seen some some actions in transnistria over the past over the past few days which suggests that someone's trying to make an effort to draw this into the uh into the conflict we've seen ukraine shift its forces for a major battle in donbass and we've also seen over the past couple of weeks is a much intensified effort by the united states and its nato allies to supply the types of weaponry that the ukrainians need in order to push back against what is going to be a major conventional operation now what's interesting uh is uh the change uh in views on the part of the west uh you know my sense from having talked to people in washington is we share the same assessment of the russian military and the ukrainian resistance that that putin did and we thought that this would be a fairly major operation tremendous success at the very beginning and the types of weapons that we provided uh the ukrainians at that time the javelins and the stingers are great for insurgent warfare but we hadn't provided them the types of weapons you need for large conventional battle the heavy artillery some of some aircraft tanks and so forth and that is what is being rushed into uh ukraine uh right now as uh as the nature of the uh of the conflict shifts in the eyes of the west you've also seen an escalation in the rhetoric and the part of the united states in particular uh laying out a um a goal somewhat diffuse it's hard to know exactly what it means but the the goal now is to degrade the russian military to the extent that it cannot uh that it would not be able to conduct another type of operation similar to one it's conducting in ukraine uh any time in the near future now i drop a few conclusions from where we are at this point uh first it's clear that there's no near-term uh political settlement to this this conflict uh there was some dialogue between the ukrainians and the russians that's ongoing as far uh is my understanding but it didn't appear to be serious on the on the part of the russians if you look at the terms that the russians were presenting to the ukrainians basically there were terms of surrender capitulation uh something that the the ukrainians weren't prepared to uh to entertain seriously and and still aren't um so i i don't see uh negotiations at this point uh in part because uh both sides believe they can gain on the battlefield what they need and there's no real need to negotiate at this point uh the second thing i think to remember is that this is going to be a prolonged conflict the original i think assessment uh in in the west and in russia that was that there was a fairly short operation i think xi jinping in beijing also shared that was hoping for a short military operation would have made his life a lot easier but i think now we realize that this is more likely to be prolonged than it is to be short in part because this is an existential conflict uh for for the various parties certainly for the ukrainians this is about their independence and sovereignty freedom uh as a nation uh it may not be existential for the russians uh even though the russians say that but it's certainly existential for putin uh who has uh bet his his political fate on being able to produce something that is six that he can call a success uh in ukraine uh and i would argue that if it's not existential for the united states and and europe we certainly have framed this in a way the president talks about this battle between freedom and autocracy democracy and autocracy that it's hard to see how the united states can accept anything less than a failure on the part of russia at this point i think because it's going to be prolonged because there's no negotiated settlement on the on the horizon and this would be my third point in this regard is that there's a tremendous risk of escalation the longer this conflict goes on uh the greater the risk that it's going to spread and that different types and more devastating weapons are going to be used i see the escalation coming from two possible scenarios one is if um if the russians do poorly uh if they uh don't make much progress uh in the donbass the ukrainian resistance turns out to be as stiff in the donbas as it was in and around kiev at that point i think the russians consider putin considers the use of weapons of mass destruction chemical weapons most likely in part because the russians have used these before in combat situations in syria for example over the past several years but certainly we can't rule out category categorically the use of nuclear weapons certainly putin himself has been rattling saber rattling over the past over the past several weeks and even yesterday made another statement about warning the west against getting too involved uh in this in this conflict on the ukrainian side and animating that russia had means of responding quickly and with devastating force um clearly had in mind nuclear weapons the second way we get escalation is if russia decides finally to go after the the convoys that are carrying the weaponry into ukraine at this point something that strangely enough they've avoided uh doing in a serious way so far it is much easier uh to go after those uh over over those weapons go after those weapons not when they're in convoys traveling into ukraine it's much easier to go after them at the trans shipment points where they're gathered together for shipment into ukraine all those lie in nato territory particularly in poland and i don't think we can rule out over the next um several weeks or months possible strikes against those trans shipment centers in in poland elsewhere that's nato nato territory the president of the united states uh has uh has has promised that we will defend every inch of nato uh nato territory there is an article five guaranteed and so this is a serious [Music] serious risk of escalation and then finally something that we had thought we would see early on but haven't so far is is some sort of significant cyber attack against against a nato country or particularly united states a massive attack against some element of critical infrastructure uh perhaps financial sector in a sense a symmetric response to what the united states uh and nato countries are trying to do to uh to russia on the economic side and all of this would require some sort of more forceful response on the part of the united states given the public and congressional pressure that would mount after a significant cyber attack now i also think um that we that it is possible uh that we'll see the escalation on on the western side on the american side let's get back to a point that i raised just a little while ago if russia is succeeding the united states finds itself in a very difficult circumstance given the president's rhetoric the way we frame this issue and i think the question you would have to ask in washington is how far are we prepared to go in order to prevent russia from succeeding in ukraine you've seen an increase in the rhetoric as i've said over the past 24 to 48 hours we are providing types of weapons that we wouldn't have considered some time ago the question i think the the most serious question that has to be addressed is the question of boots on the ground the president has ruled that out repeatedly over the past several months but as the consequences of this conflict become clearer the stakes become clear is that something that the president is going to be able to be able to stick to is that something uh that won't be resisted by significant members of the of the us congress and the public i don't know the answer to that question but i think it's something that we need to bear in mind in fact i think it's something that we ought to have a significant uh public debate about so that however we move in this regard the administration has sufficient uh public support now finally just a few words and how does it end um the short answer is i don't know i certainly don't know when it's going to end but this is a conflict that could last for as i said for several months it could last in terms of years uh i don't think you're going to have a near-term political settlement so how do we see this winding down i think there are two ways neither one of them pretty one is exhaustion you know after all this has become in some ways a war of attrition as the two sides are exhausted they simply will either move towards negotiation or simply stop fighting the other possibility is a military stalemate which is somewhat different from exhaustion it comes from the recognition that there's no uh in both kiev and moscow that there's no sort of military way to break open this conflict to reach your ends and therefore it is time either to wind down the conflict or to move towards serious negotiations if we don't get serious negotiations we could get a frozen conflict as we've seen in many of the uh conflicts that have erupted in the uh in the in the post-soviet space over the past 25 or 30 years um if we get a political settlement i would imagine that it'll be something along the lines of uh ukrainian neutrality with security guarantees um some recognition of crimea as part of russia uh and the dom boss goes back to ukraine something that i am persuaded we could have negotiated if we were serious about it before the conflict uh but the way things turn out in the real world often is that you have to go through the death and destruction to get a solution that was staring in the face if you had the political will to pursue it earlier um so let me end on that pleasant note well tom thanks so much that is a deeply insightful analysis i'll be going back through my notes really carefully so uh i invite people to um to share some questions if we can keep the questions on the short side i think that will allow us to get more questions in so okay please sir thank you very do you think much world is preventable and if what happened now is due to miscommunication misunderstanding this conception and dismantling from both sides perhaps more on american side uh you know my sense is that um that there was a there was more room for negotiating in january and february uh if the united states have been prepared uh to engage in that um you know that said i mean you the russians didn't help the negotiating process by uh by by publishing the uh the treaties um and and throwing a negotiation that is best conducted uh in private and confidentially uh into the public domain which made it very difficult for the united states to respond in a um [Applause] in in a in a full fashion uh because of the the what the public consequences of it would have been i think the united states um should have been prepared to negotiate the the issue of nato expansion now or at least put it on the table and have a conversation with the russians about it the open door policy that we stood behind equivocally is one i think a misreading of the nato treaty which is not really an open door uh the article 10 of the uh the founding act for nato says that nato has the uh reserves to his self the right to invite uh states to join that they believe would enhance the uh the security or the uh make a significant contribution to the purpose of the alliance um that doesn't mean that any european country has a right to join nato and many times it's presented that way in public i think second it was clear that we weren't going to admit ukraine anytime in the near future the united states wasn't prepared to do that and certainly our significant european allies the germans and the french were not prepared to do that um so i thought that we should have been able to sort of put that on the table and try to work towards a formula that could have satisfied russian concerns about eastward expansion maybe not forever but over a significantly uh long period that it wouldn't have been an issue for putin you know for a president for president putin forever probably means as long as he is alive um and so i'm sure we could come up with a number uh that was longer than even he thought he was going to survive so i think we should have been more active in trying to negotiate that you know my colleagues or the contacts in the government say they don't think that putin was ever serious about negotiating for what reason it's not clear i think we uh we would we should have been a bit bolder in the way we approached it uh and perhaps been unable to extend the negotiations for some time uh that would have delayed and uh perhaps even um uh prevented a a military conflict from from erupting in the past can i two finger on that because um i think if i read your um your important article in politico where you in in i think it was in january where you elaborated on what a possible solution would look like and i urge everyone to look at that article it was extremely well done and got a lot of attention at the time but i think you said there that the focus is re the burden is on washington i mean it should be a moscow washington deliberation and if i got you right but i wonder if if if european leaders maybe had more wiggle room more attention um i think the negotiation well uh let me let me put it uh this way uh a significant element of any negotiated solution of this problem has to be a u.s russian conversation this is about european security architecture and from moscow's standpoint the country in the west that has the most weight when it comes to european security architecture is the united states um you know certainly they believe that ukraine is being run by the united states at this point uh they think most of our european allies are little more than basels and so the country that you need to have a serious conversation with is the united states uh you know that said it's also clear that the united states has to be in close consultation with its allies um it would have to be in close consultation with the ukrainians but i think it's very difficult if you're going to have serious negotiations to insist that we won't talk about the europeans unless the europeans are in the room we won't talk about the ukrainians unless the ukrainians are in the room once you get a meeting at uh at nato 30 member countries plus russia that's an exchange of views that's not a serious negotiation if you move it to the osc that's what is it now 54-55 countries but in any event the same sort of thing it's a exchange of views but not a serious negotiation the united states needed to sit down with the russians in a bilateral channel confidential format uh and so to see what the room was for a diplomatic exit to this this this problem as it was as it was building uh in the uh and over the winter and into the into the spring uh you would take that back obviously to the allies you would take it back to ukraine uh but you would take it back with at least some sort of package uh that people could look at uh and weigh the the pluses and the minuses um final point here you know this has to be done confidentially the problem with the way the um the diplomacy unfolded it was all done in public yes they talked behind closed doors but then they had to go out and talk to the press agreements or documents were released to the public if you're going to have a a serious negotiation people have to make compromises that's the nature of any negotiation any each individual element of a compromise if taken out of context can be criticized to death and that's what happens when it's in the public domain you have to be able to put the whole package together and then present it to the public you'll still get a lot of criticism uh but when people can see how the trade-off plays out what you get uh for having given up what you get for what you have given up on part b and so forth uh and maybe the whole package makes sense for each individual element it doesn't appear to make sense in isolation so that's where i come down on tonight so i would had a much broader negotiating effort uh but you made a great effort i think uh professor barton thank you so yeah i mean i think you made a very argument or describe the situation from one kind of perspective which i think we've heard more than once also in this forum um and i'm i'm curious whether you would entertain uh another way of looking at things um so you gave both this sort of deep background of this that is russia's frustration with what occurred since the fall of the soviet union and the more immediate reasons for this particular conflict right that's the two um arguments you made and and i'm wondering if we could think about it differently that is had uh nato not expanded to include poland lithuania and so forth what would things have looked like right now that is would russia have said well i mean the independent countries we are not going to meddle um because they are not members of nato or with the responsive being we still want to recreate either the spheres of influences the soviet union had or actually what the russian empire was so that's one question i'm just wondering if you could think about it that way the second is the the question of um loss or victory which is a really interesting one so we sort of agree that the loss for russia would be dangerous uh right because they may respond in ways that would endanger world security and we also i think would agree that a victory for russia is dangerous because russia has been victorious in all the previous attempts to expand and that's one reason why i thought it could go into ukraine that's what you were explaining yourself um so what then what do we want more uh victory or defeat [Laughter] and your your response is uh negotiation which i think is i totally agree with that but the way you presented it now was basically that the united states and russia would agree on what would happen to ukraine and that is precisely the kind of scenario that we have seen in history that is that for the benefit of peace you would go over the people that you are willing to sacrifice and what kind of precedent would that create considering that what russia did was break international law and conduct what is internationally accepted a an illegal war a war of aggression wouldn't that mean that you do that and then the person the country that you did it too then its faith would be negotiated over its head by those or one party would be the party that broke all the rules of the game okay two very good questions first on um on the question of if we hadn't expanded nato i think russia still would have wanted a sphere of influence uh in in eastern europe how far it would go uh is a matter of speculation at this point but it would wanted some influence uh on the countries in that region certainly ukraine belarus uh whether it would also be the baltic states in poland uh is is something that we can debate uh you know i was not opposed to nato expansion uh i think that we handled some of it uh in ways that made it more threatening to russia than it needed to be uh and there are two aspects to that i thought that we never gave uh enough or put enough effort into the these joint fora that we created with the russians uh certainly the the initial one we created in 1997 uh this permanent joint commission uh where nato sat down with russia to discuss um various issues but the one that i'm most familiar with is the one that we set up in 2002 which is the nato-russia council where nato countries and russia were supposed to sit down in their national um uh international positions not as members of the alliance plus russia and discuss a limited range of of issues as search and rescue some missile defense a few other things along those lines looking for sort of joint assessments and areas where we could perhaps have joint efforts the united states from the very beginning uh i think uh handled that in a way that was uh that put was off-putting for the russians and that is before any meeting of the nato-russia council we insisted that nato would sit down and decide on a on a unified position which each country was then obliged to defend within the nato-russia council now the polls and the balt also wanted it that way but we turned this into what the previous uh joint committee had been and it hadn't worked because uh russia didn't feel that it was being treated as an equal the way it had been promised now there was always a risk in doing that my view looking at this in 2002 2003 was that the asymmetry and power between the united states and russia was so great at that point that we could have run the risk that russia would not have operated within that council in good faith they had operated in good faith uh we could have tried to expand it and see how far we could push the cooperation if they had acted in bad faith uh i think it would be very easy for the united states to recoup whatever it lost uh and fairly good offer uh in good order again given the asymmetry uh in in power so then i think finally uh we handled 2008 and the promises to ukraine and georgia uh improperly uh it was clear uh that there was significant resistance within nato uh to uh offering the membership action plans at that point and the formula we came up with was as everybody recognizes that was the worst of all possible worlds uh saying that at some day they will become part of nato so we disappointed the ukrainians and the georgians and we raised the concerns uh on on the russian side so i think we could have handled it in a different way and perhaps uh have come to a somewhat more constructive relationship between nato uh and russia over the past 30 years um the second question uh you know what i was discussing initially was a negotiation before the conflict broke out and there as i said i think a russia channel a u.s russia channel was critical uh we would have been in close consultation with ukrainians we would have been in close consultations uh with the russians that doesn't preclude other types of conversations as well but i think that that channel was essential to get making any progress any any sort of deal or agreement we would reach with the russians clearly had to be approved by the ukrainians would have been acceptable to our european partners as well um but i think it's easier to sell something if you've got a whole package and as i said it's trying to sell individual parts along the way now that the conflict is broken out we're in a somewhat different situation right uh and the the question is you know what we could settle on uh that would be adequate for our uh purposes uh that the russians would would agreed to uh and that the ukrainians would agree to as well uh a couple of points here first something that we generally haven't recognized in the west or in the united states in our public debate uh is that while our interest overlapped to a very great degree with ukrainians there's not a hundred a perfect overlap in those in those interests uh and we have to decide uh what our interests and facts are the public rhetoric to this point and i think secretary blinken said it yesterday is whatever the ukrainians want we're prepared to support i step back and say really you know we might not want to push the russians as far as ukrainians would prepare to push the russians that they could in part because of the consequences on the on the nuclear side in part because we have global responsibilities they're not concerned simply about ukrainian dependence and sovereignty at this point um second uh again it's harder to find um you know i think we know what success would look on the on the russian part uh what would failure look like on the russian part um uh ice where i think our interests lie is pushing the russians back so that the military operation does not gain them any territory in ukraine uh so back to the uh the lines that were drawn on february 23rd russia is still in control uh of crimea uh and russia is still in control of a of a part of the dombas region whether the russians could uh present that as a victory um i don't know but if you threw into the mix no ukrainian membership in nato putin and his propaganda machine ought to be able to make something of a uh of a victory a victory out of that and if you throw in the ozof regiment as well disbanded uh then he can claim that he denotified part of the uh of the ukrainian military so i think the ways of doing this that are less than a capitulation on the part of the russians something that's acceptable for them works for us it may not be all that ukraine wants at this point but it's certainly a better a much better situation than they will be in otherwise and would put an end to the devastation that's being done to their country and will continue to be done to the country as long as this conflict continues okay folks we've got about uh just about 10 minutes left so um if you permit we'll we'll uh go through kind of a speed round which here i would like to just invite anybody who has a question to rather quickly uh voice their question and then and short answers so just yes or no no no no no no no what i mean is we'll have all you know three or four questions and then we'll we'll give you a chance to just close the uh the deal as it were and and give us your final thoughts on and whatever you're able to answer quickly but okay so michael quickly if you can sorry i can be quick so uh dr graham and this is such a fantastic presentation and here's the question could you make an account for what the ukrainians could have done differently not only in terms of averting war but could you say that the ukrainians actually maneuvered us into this position where they are now given a greater chance of sovereignty and recovery of their own territories than they could have otherwise been great what a great question so uh tom do your best but yeah i like this question about the um the military just two quick comments there was a russian analyst after the invasion who had said that it wouldn't happen couldn't happen who said um you know i was wrong about whether russia would invade or not because i was right about the consequences and i couldn't understand how many how any rational figure could have chosen those consequences which i think is an apt way of putting it um you know the second thing is that it really is shocking the extent to which putin and washington both exaggerated the uh the capabilities of the russian military uh and underestimated the the cape the resistance on the ukrainian part now our military analysts were very good in saying that this invasion was going to occur that the russians were lining up all the forces in order to do this um and then they were totally wrong about what the uh what the consequences of this would would be so i take with a grain of salt anything that i hear from a a military analyst at this point is how this conflict is going we totally misread it that is the real intelligence failure that we got right the date of the invasion was more through because we had access to certain information that was fairly definitive but we missed totally what the capabilities of the russian military are and if i were sitting in washington now i would have in my intelligence community go back and say what is it that we missed how did we get this as wrong as we did yeah no absolutely as except the point i made we were supplying them with weapons for an insurgency because we didn't believe that they would be capable of pushing back uh the way they had uh and if we had we would have provided them with a different set of military uh equipment so um there is a there are a lot of questions here that have to be answered yeah yeah yep uh we also um we we also missed the end game right uh because we thought the um the afghan government would as long as we had troops on the ground the afghan government would help hold up they they deserted the country two weeks before we left fighting the last one finally so just a lot of questions here to answer your question i don't think the russia is actually gained by having hola dombas um uh but the flip side of that is um would ukraine be better off without the occupied areas of the donbas at this point uh because you know they uh the donbass if they take it for themselves it does deprive them of some leverage that they would have had in uh in internal uh ukrainian politics by the same token if you're sitting in kiev without those occupied areas of the dombas you have a a greater chance of developing the type of consensus you need to build a a a a a a a strong and efficient state and nation um germany uh i think that that russians are reconsidering their their their vision of germany at this point uh that relationship though has soured over the past uh eight years in any event um the steps that the the coalition government uh has taken i think are surprised for the russians but again an indication of how radically things have changed because of a clear unprovoked aggression on the part of the uh of the russians um and your question which i wish i knew the answer to uh but um [Music] to some extent uh you know you can see that playing uh playing out the ukrainians in fact pushing us farther than we wanted to go uh uh for various reasons i mean zelinski has really been critical uh in that regard he's turned out to be a very able war war leader he's great he's great media he is straightforward in his comments always always asking for a little bit more uh you put on you you have that on top of uh sort of the very valiant resistance by the ukrainians and it's a great story right and so you've got the secretary of state of the united states basically saying in public you know we're prepared to provide the ukrainians um uh with what they need to accomplish whatever they want to accomplish um which may be a noble sort of thought but is not really what you're supposed to do when you're in uh in a national security position we need to define quite clearly what our interests are we need to convey those that to the ukrainians as i said there's going to be a tremendous overlap but it's not a hundred percent uh and uh we ought to be conveying if that's indeed what we think we ought to be conveying that to the ukrainians right now something that they should factor in um to uh to what they're doing and what they hope to accomplish well thank you so much tom please join me in thanking our guests you

Channel: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

Views: 944,743

Keywords: Watson Institute, Watson International Institute, Brown University, Brown u, Brown, Public Affairs, Thomas Graham, Putin’s Gambit, Council on Foreign Relations, Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies, Yale University, MacMillan Center, Russian foreign policy, National Security Council, White House-Kremlin strategic dialogue

Id: LPZbqfH2hLI

Length: 58min 15sec (3495 seconds)

Published: Tue May 17 2022