Russia vs Europe and the Lands in Between - Mitchell Orenstein

you [Music] oK we've had a little switcheroo the person scheduled to speak next will actually speak in the third slot for this morning Chris Miller and the person who was to speak third well that will speak with us now Mitch Ornstein Mitch is the chairman of the Department of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in our Eurasia program he works at the Nexus of economics and politics and among his books is out of the red building capitalism and democracy in post-communist Europe and the book he is working on now Russia versus Europe and the lands in between is actually the subject of his talk today so you'll be getting a preview of a book in progress please welcome Mitch Ornstein well thanks everybody it's really a pleasure to be here I I could tell I just was here in the question answer session of the last panel but I can tell from the level of the questions that this is a really high level audience so I'm gonna go and I really appreciate that and I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you I hear that yesterday you heard from my colleague Kevin Platt so Kevin is a great colleague of mine and I don't know if I'll give quite as charismatic or performance as he was able to do but I'll give it a shot as as Alan said this is a talk about a project I've been working on a book that I'm writing I've actually finished a draft now of the manuscript and I've gettin some comments back and gonna start rewriting actually possibly tomorrow morning and and depending on how early I wake up and and yeah so it's it's it's pretty pretty exciting I have been working however on this project for about ten years in one form or another actually began when Adrian basore the previous speaker and I organized a conference together in Washington looking on democrat looking at democratic backsliding and the impact of the rust of Georgian were in 2008 and since that time I'm I'm I do political economy but I've since about that time I've also worked on foreign policy and so I'm going to talk to you about this work on foreign policy and essentially what I want to lay out for you is a view about you know what is really at stake in what I see is the conflict between Russia and the European Union or Russia and Europe and I'm an argue that there are different visions of Europe at at the heart of this conflict two different sort of visions of how to organize the political space of European of European continent different values different politics and also different economics and so I'll that's the sort of structure I'll go through that and you know and and talk about you know what's what's going on right now so I wanted to begin with maps I love maps I'm sure I share that with a lot of you here I like staring at maps and I also like downloading stuff from the internet which probably you guys are all so into to I and so what I did what I did here is I've just randomly downloaded some maps that I thought were interesting from the internet alright these are just stuff I find online and then I show them to my class and I think about them sometimes I'll talk to them with my class but this is like a kind of standard map of Europe I might am I right about this this this looks like kind of like how Europe looks to us right and I just want to point out a couple things about this map first of all if from the perspective of Russia if you look at if you look at it from Russia's perfective this is not a great map right right because all the there's all these happy sort of bright blue countries right and Russia's sort of in this gray backdrop right am i right that on maps you know gray is usually the color that's like other you know it's sort of like these are the things you don't focus on too much and that we want to focus on the bright blue countries as well as a sort of somewhat somewhat blueish countries like Turkey and I don't know if I can do have a little pointer here yeah there we go this sort of sort of almost country's over here in the deep blue countries another map of Europe again this is actually an official map from the Council of Europe I'm not going to get into I'm sure some of you know the difference between the Council of Europe which is a separate organization from the European Union which also has a European Council which makes things very complicated but anyway this is the Council of Europe's map of Europe and actually yeah I don't know I mean and I guess what it shows is you know in effect EU Member States right and so this Europe is like a bunch of began brightly colored countries with a whole big gray mass over here right where you don't even have Russia even you know there's not even written on this map these are just my this this however is probably my favorite map and then I'm going to show you because it indicates something I think really powerful about the way West Europeans look at Europe right today which is that you know there's a bunch of countries that are sort of like full European countries right and then there's the sort of green Europe which is almost you know it's full of European countries and then there's a step down right and then we would the step down you get the new member states that came in in to the European Union in 2004 or 2007 is another step down right along with Turkey which is very insulting right the 2007 member states I guess these are at that time applicant states and then and then you take a further step down and you get to Ukraine and Russia and and you know some of the Balkans essentially do you see where I'm going with this okay so this is not the Europe that Russia wants to live in right I think that my thesis here is that around 2006 to 2009 Russia got the picture that an EU Europe is a Europe where Russia is a second-class citizen right Russia cannot be a member of you Europe especially under the Putin regime right maybe it could have entertained the thought that it would get there in 20 or 30 years under Yeltsin for instance right but once Putin came in trying to create a much more authoritarian system he was never gonna be a full member of the European Union therefore Rizzoli's going to be second classes and it would always be a step down if not two steps down and the reasons for that are pretty clear it's because Russia is not a democracy was not heading to be a democracy and of course that's a criteria for joining the European Union how many people here in the room feel comfortable with the European Union by the way most many or some a little bit okay so that's just helpful for me now again so the the European Union is of course a economics often talked about as an economic grouping of countries it's a customs union free market zone of member states to join and then they've trade freely with each other people also move freely in the European Union as well as capital and and and goods so but it's also a political union it's it's in the way the best way to think about the European Union is that it's a federation in becoming it's kind of like the United States you know pre Constitution right it's it's sort of has some you know has some elements of federal links but not all of the elements of a federal state in essence right so it has a lot of it has different political bodies of growing European Parliament etc but - but one of the criteria for membership of the European Union is that you have to be a democracy you have to have a free market economy and you have to have a state administration that's effective enough in order to actually implement all the rules that the European Union institutions create all the laws all the legislation of the European Union and the legislation of European Union is very extensive extends to many many areas Fisheries justice and Home Affairs to a lesser extent foreign policy and and Russia was simply not going to be a democracy it was not going to be a free more good economy Putin was in in the process of trying to nationalize a lot of the oil and gas industry which is critical to Russia nationalized in effect a lot of the banks and and create state control over all the industry leaders in the country and it was not going to be an effective state in the same way as the European state so it said you know look at around 2006 I said you know maybe this isn't for us maybe this striving to become European it's just gonna take too long it's not really what we want anyway so let's just forget about it and and let's take another tack which involve eurasianism I'm not going to talk about that too much but I'm going to talk about what it means in the European context which is that Russia really wants a return to great power Europe what I call great power here and I think that as historians here I'm in great ground right I think Irby understands what I mean when I say great power Europe essentially you think about it as a return to a kind of Congress of Vienna type Europe I mean right it's not a great power Europe and that Russia is trying to start a new world war necessarily right but great power and in the sense that it wants to order politics on the European country on the European continent in a similar way to the way it was ordered in the Congress of Vienna where essentially you had a group of leaders from all the major empires right coming together periodically I don't know if that's a matter Nick over here or where he would be I don't know but the Congress of Vienna of course was created after the Napoleonic Wars which had been a huge disruption on the continent by the way of democratic disruption on the continent and the conservative powers got together and said you know we want to sort out the affairs but we want to do it peacefully we don't want to you know have you know armies marching around anymore so what we'll do is we'll just whenever there's a crisis we'll have a Congress a conference and the great powers which at that time I believe we're Britain France Prussia austro-hungarian Empire Russia and I'm not leaving anybody aside here except for the Ottoman Empire who wasn't there okay and they weren't there because they were Muslim presumably I don't know that for sure but that's my assumption and you know so they would get together periodically and say like if the poles are rebelling right there would be like okay you guys go and you know deal with the poles right if the Italians are rebelling you guys go and deal with the Italians right if the Hungarians decided they want democracy you guys go and fight them and you know Russia did go and invade hungry in 1848 for that reason so this is the kind of view and if you think about it Russia likes that for some obvious reasons first of all whereas in European Union Europe right Russia is like you know third tier right in great power Europe it's maybe first here it's maybe even above first air right because great powers are you know have their power in in theory by their military might and Russia is pretty militarily mighty country it's much more military might than other individual European countries so Putin probably thinks that he can become sort of a prima sinter Paris you know first among equals right in a you know Europe and maybe a convener of a European space in which things can be sorted out so this was an interesting illustration I just found just to say that the some once when I present I think actually presented in this hotel to a group of high school students about a year or two ago who were representing NATO and some Model UN conference and they were wanting to know one of the questions they asked was very penetrating it was like so what's so bad about great power Europe it would be so bad about you know great power Europe and and and or great power politics and you know the key thing that's wrong with it is that it's over the heads of the smaller states right so it's great essentially means great powers taking decisions without regard to the smaller powers and you could say that that's stable right it was stable in Europe from the about 30 year period but but it's not it also has inherent sources of instability because the smaller powers don't like other powers ruling over them and that's why a Serbian Ana just throws a bomb and shoots you know a pistol and ends up killing Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 and watching the First World War that's why when Poland gets invaded in 1939 you know that's what sparks off the Second World War right so it's actually my view not really so realistic to bet on realism right in European affairs because the the rule the Great Powers is fundamentally unstable in Europe and this is a picture it shows kind of why is that you know you have the Great Powers you know here sort of dividing up you know the map and you know cutting off all parts and saying this is yours this is mine I want this this is another image from the time it came out really badly but yeah but I just thought was kind of funny image so I show it to you anyway this is another vision of you know what great power Europe looks like to Russia and why it looks attractive right is because at the end of the day you just have three leaders there including Stalin right redrawing the map and and of course getting a much bigger territory actually russia's if you think about imperial russia continuously over history its greatest expanse was at the time of Stalin right so Soviet Union and this was a great moment for for Russia right so that's that's their vision of world affairs as we sit at a table with a couple leaders etcetera oops okay so the other so if you think about the broadest in the broadest scope this conflict being about how do you order security on in politics on the European continent it's also about a couple other things right which have to do with values conflict whereas you know you these may seem sort of familiar to you you know rule of law freedom respect for human eyes these are sort of taken for granted things for the most part in the United States and and also in the EU that's the kind of I don't know I like that photo too but you know in Russia the Putin regime has returned to a more traditional values kind of which is why it is deeply connected or somewhat connected to some conservative movements in the United States for instance and also in Europe better that are you know essentially pro-family is what are the ideas right we're pro-family we're anti gay rights we are for traditional relations of male-female relations right in the family for instance Russia by the way just on this one point Russia passed a law that decriminalized household domestic violence very recently it said that that it's there's no longer even I think a misdemeanor to hit somebody else in your household okay and that's part of it so the pretty traditional values and and some people think that's a great idea this is I'm not kidding this is actually the funniest slide if and I just want to preface it by saying these are just random things I pulled off the internet but but this is like a kind of you know if it's interesting to look at the discourse of this and how it plays out what do you see is a lot of Russian Central Asian leaders actually articulating anti-homosexual rhetoric and and this is kind of you know piece of that is like you know in the US and health education class people in fact are learning about you know condoms you know whatever the queer sex is probably a little bit extreme vibrators etc but so I don't think that this is either accurate for the US or for Russia by the way but just business how the discourse is unfolding but but they're you know in class learning about morality presumably better traditional morality and traditional values so that's a big issue that's represented by Russia in the sort of pushing of what they see as pushing of gay rights in European Union and European Union politics anybody recognize this photo ok country divorce so country to where she was the Eurovision Song Contest Winner in 2014 who I'm gonna get my terminology wrong here but anyway this was a picture sure really cares about Eurovision there's one thing to take away from this like you talk is if you take away anything is they really want to win Eurovision okay because they have the best pop music okay where's them right there prop music is I have to say pretty good it's kind of derivative of American pop music yeah I think the one thing that they fail to understand is that people don't want their pop music to be exactly a replica of like US pop music you know but they want it to be sort of somehow nationally distinctive and they're sort of struggling with that but nonetheless they think they should win Eurovision and so when your vision is won by a I don't know I want to say transvestite right or no maybe that's not true transsexual okay person who's wearing a beard and a gown this is like double insult right to Russia they're just like you know and it was extra insulting by the way also the Ukraine when the Eurovision contest two years ago I guess and then they were banned from even competing because Ukraine wouldn't allow them to come so it was a big mess but I think the gay rights issues really do encapsulate you know the fundamental value issues so they they always call in Russia the government will frequently call Europe not Europa but gayer OPA essentially right and they and and this has come up I don't know if I have my slides here but it came up in Olympics it'll come up again with FIFA World Cup where they have laws strict laws against promotion of of homosexual orientation towards children so and and it's very vague so having a rainbow flag could be seen as you know promoting homosexual orientation and so they were called upon by the Olympic Committee to serve say you know are people who were gay or wearing a rainbow symbol or any other symbol gonna be arrested you know when they're coming to Russia for these Olympics or for World Cup or whatever and they clarified well no no of course not no no we'd never do that you know it's so true and and there were some participants in the Sochi Olympics who who did you know we're symbols you know anyway so that that's a dividing line that's all I want to say about that so the other dividing line another key dividing line is on governance I think this is pretty straightforward I don't want to belabor it but you know there's a dividing line of democracy where Europe really does represent democratic governance although there are a couple ill marks there that Adrienne spoke about but Russia is really committed to authoritarianism it's it's throughout the the both the Yeltsin actually and Putin presidencies it's become more and more authoritarian as a country Putin consolidated power and very authoritarian manner getting rid of elections of Governors for instance consolidating his hold over a kind of mafia-like structure that that structures the entire state there he think it was him himself who said or maybe his campaign manager said that you know he's he's winning you know saying that he's gonna win the election that's coming up next year you know taking that for granted in various ways one little tidbit on this okay so just this last week how many people have heard of Navalny I think it's Alexei Navalny right who are Victor Victor Navalny who was he's the key opposition candidate and he's been attacked you know beaten imprisoned he had acid thrown at him it's pretty clear that you know Putin doesn't want him to run in Russia they have a law that the convicted felon can't run for president and so they convicted of something and so he theoretically is going to be excluded from running in the next election so instead of that this last week they they ran a different candidate this is a kind of typical tactic in Russia is that you try to find out all the demographics and then run candidates who were basically governing a kind of candidates who poses opposition candidates and they ran somebody like that Senia subshock who is like a popular sort of social media and like she's she's sometimes compared to like Paris Hilton I don't know if that's a great analogy but you know but her her dad was like Putin's boss back in Leningrad in the 1990s and it's clearly just a fake effort and draw away any voters who in fact you advertise yourself is instead of voting for none of the above vote for me all right I'm the opposition candidate all right I'm a protest candidate right so this is a very authoritarian country I'll talk a little bit about the economy briefly but Russia is you know it's probably a lot of you know it's it's primarily a resource State Riis in its political economy it's it's um particularly in exports v over fifty percent of its exports are oil and gas-related okay and then a lot of the rest of it is other minerals right aluminum nickel copper I don't know gold etcetera diamonds if you think about it Russia produces almost nothing except for Lukoil right that we actually buy in the United States right it has kind of a big problem with that and and and Putin is really consolidated to government control over specifically to go on gas industry because it's a big export earner it's also a big source of Reds big source of revenue for the government both the government budget and slush funds that end up in the pocket of Putin's and his buddies in my belief it's my belief and I think more people are coming around to this at least my discussions around academia Putin is probably the wealthiest person in the world he probably has the wealth it's in excess of 200 billion or 100 billion dollars which I think explains a lot in terms of his demeanor in terms of his body language with other world leaders in a sense of superiority but you know presumably a lot of that comes from oil wealth and so it's a pretty different economy than the European economy right which is a very rural bound it's based on rule of law it's based on just a holy holy different basis first of all not one big industry in that you can just like suck off of essentially but but much more diversified industrial economy that runs on rules and faith and you know and regulation effective regulation right so it's a pretty different pretty different situation so what is Russia want you know I think I think there's a lot of things people have talked about but I would say these are some of the key things is the key thing is trying to do is it's trying to undermine the European Union and NATO mate now NATO is sort of like you know everybody knows about that I think but what I'm trying to show in this book is that Russia has been on a campaign to sort of destroy the European Union for about you know now almost 10 years it wants to split the United States from its European allies who wants to undermine and infiltrate political processes obviously in the US as well as in Europe it wants to turn world public opinion against the Eurus us and be treated as a great power its foreign policy tools and what's interesting and one of the reasons that people may not have totally realized like why that that Russia was running this sort of campaign to undermine the Europe European Union and other Western institutions I think a key reason for that is because a lot of the techniques by which he was trying to do that or covert right as we've been learning in the United States a huge amount more about this right even even specialists like have been learning more about exactly what they're trying to do partly because you know all the things a lot of the ways they were trying to influence the US have been covertly right and so what you see is a lot of use of information warfare that includes disinformation I'll give you an interesting example of that in a second influence campaigns right they've been coming up in the media recently undermining trusts and institutions sowing confusion as well as espionage which includes hacking you know stealing information and releasing it or just somehow or also kind of a you know recruiting recruiting agents sometimes knowing agents unknowing agents did anybody read that story but people were recruited online to sort of organize protests in the United States that would be a good example of somebody who's recruited as an agent but unknowingly like they didn't know that they were you know Russian agents right but they are right and so there's a lot of that going on Russia has a number of Russians living abroad - particularly in nearby countries one of the things which my work is focused on or one of the earliest things I began working on was support for you anti-eu parties so Russia is right now probably the biggest sponsor of fascist parties in Europe strangely it sends money to them it sends organizational capacity to them as well as to other anti-eu parties whether the writer of the left and that's a really interesting story considering its history with fascism I've also written an article about the Russia tries to develop allies in the EU Member States and to use them to sort of project Russia's message within the EU or to sort of argue against sanctions or whatever as well as it has to be recognized you know conventional nuclear weapons and threats right so Russia has begun threatening Denmark for instance with a nuclear attack you know if it you know if it deploys its Navy in certain ways you know threatened Sweden right to just get countries to give a second thought to whether they should really be fighting back against against Russia so it's a wide there's a huge spectrum of sort of things that come below military conflict although there is some conflict of course in Ukraine and in other places but a wide spectrum of things that they're trying to do to pursue these goals the EU has been responding the EU has a very different view right and and for the EU I think one of their problems of understanding the Russian threat is that that they don't understand why anyone would perceive the EU as a threat the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize actually it was accepted by Harvey Ursulines I forget the year was 2004 something but the EU is is supposed to be a zone of peace and prosperity undergirded by free trade but the whole point of the european union is not to get richer the whole point is to preserve peace in europe by tying together the different economies of the european union and tying to together their cultures by the way of students interestingly in the european union now can study at any other in any other country for free or really for the same crisis suppose that they're paying a home i guess i don't know but they they have this reciprocal arrangement called the what is it called the erasmus programme where you can you know so people are studying so they're creating europeans right through these processes and that's really a big key part of what they're doing and of course europe has an interest like the US and investing in a developing your market the EU interestingly EU is typically not been a big foreign policy player because well you states like France and Britain and Germany have foreign policies the Union as a whole also has a foreign policy but but it's it's not the only foreign policy it's kind of like if you had a u.s. foreign policy and every 50 states also all the civility states could also have their own foreign policy that's kind of how things are in auu right now except the states are stronger and and the EU has nonetheless been pretty effective in fighting back against Russia right so they've they've imposed economic sanctions together with the US and other economies on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and invasion of Crimea but they've also attacked Russia in its oil and gas industry not really attacked it but they've confronted Russia's attempts to divide and rule Europe through highly discriminatory pricing of oil and gas okay so they would basically in the past particularly the gas cut deals with each country depending on how much they liked them and how close they were to Russia and how geopolitically important they were and Europe finally woke up to this after the gas cutoff in 2009 Ukraine and said we can't really deal with this anymore we you know we depend on energy and we're a free market and this is really not good for us and so they actually imposed a set of rules on Russia which Russia fought for a long time but ultimately was not successful and and they imposed rules that basically allowed more or less equal pricing across the European Union no more controls on reselling of gas like if you buy gas in the European Union you can now resell it to your neighbor that's why Ukraine still has gas is because European countries are buying it from Russia and reselling it to Ukraine they also interconnected all their gas pipelines so that you know if you have gas that we don't you can resell it and so that makes them a lot less vulnerable to energy blackmail so they've even they've used these economic tools to kind of fight back against Russia's attempts to undermine the European Union in ways that I think prove to Russia that that the EU is pretty powerful and therefore needed to be even more dismantled and it has sort of intensified the conflict that's a key part of the book so I just want to maybe and I want to leave plenty of time for Question and Answer but I do want to maybe a couple different directions I could end on here well maybe I'll get into that in a second is the disinformation examples because we actually know a lot about that now in the US but just say there are two parts of the book one is the one that I presented to sort of you know this escalating conflict between Russia and the EU where Russia decides at some point it doesn't want to play along with EU rules etc and decides to go on an offensive to undermine the EU responds with some economic measures mainly economic measures that have been pretty painful for Russia and have pushed Russia into recession for several years which it now may be climbing out of finally and it doesn't appear it appears to be an escalating conflict this is going to keep on going keep worse in my opinion and you've seen that by in a way Russia's continuing desire to attack electoral processes in France and Germany this year as well as the United States and we don't know how it will end but I think it's gonna end either one of these two groups is gonna lose either the U is going to be wrecked you know destroyed by something like a populist government coming to power in Germany or France or Putin is gonna be gone eventually one way or another right this neither not both of these things are going to out are gonna live on forever let's put it that way it's in a way a battle to the finish in essence and the other the other piece of the book that I'm writing and I'll just mention here is that I'm trying to understand not only how this conflict of all but also what effect its had on countries in between Russia and Europe and that's part I didn't talk about that I just saw indicate to you that this this conflict is that huge impact on countries like Ukraine obviously Moldova Georgia Azerbaijan Belarus that sit uncomfortably not in the EU and not in Russia exactly but sort of in between and and also in other countries in in Europe and North America so with that I think I'll just end and take your questions and get into some other issues that way that's okay with you [Applause] hi I'm Nicola Vikram when I teach geography and a suburb of Dallas and I was I'm sorry anywhere a suburb of Dallas okay cool and I was wanting to hear a little bit more about the importance of oil wealth and Russia in terms of their power like the whole Friedman theory of petrol politics and the freedom and oil and I know though that I guess my question is you know Putin himself and Russia has been so enriched by the oil are they still dependent on the ups and downs in the prices does that affect absolutely strength yeah I mean one of the reasons Putin is so powerful is because in the the oil price rose a lot in the 2000s in a way we helped this happen because of the Iraq war in my view I mean I'm not an oil price expert although I do have a friend who is an oil price expert in Philadelphia and he sort of bets you know hundreds of millions of dollars on these things and I sometimes talk to him lately he sometimes ask me what I think about things um you know I say I'm sure he's asking other people as well but but but you know so I think that you know in essence I think that after 2003 we had a big surge in the oil price in part because we knocked out one of the main suppliers right and it took a long time to get them back online they're just kind of coming online right now so I think we we had a extraordinary peak of oil prices gas prices that were went above $140 a barrel and that really helped Putin and other oil-rich dictatorships but Putin and now those prices have come down to around 40 or 60 a barrel which is not quite enough for Russia to sustain the government spending that had been doing before and that's been a huge factor for Russia and frankly it's also you know if you think about it US policy we don't talk about this very much but US policy pretty consistently across a long period of time has been to force down the price of oil right I don't know if that's always gonna be our policy because now we're exporting gas but but in essence it's it's usually been in the developed countries interests of course the price oil and for the countries like Russia to increase it so you could account for a lot of Putin's power and by just looking at the oil price incidentally you could also account for the collapse of the Soviet Union by looking at oil prices because at the time that the Soviet Union collapsed it was about 10 or 12 dollars a barrel and had been for a pretty long period of time and that's no doubt one of the reasons that the Soviet Union was in economic difficulties and may have clout so yes it does explain a lot of what's going on right now and is making it harder for people to stay in business and that kind of model the other thing of course you may know about the politics of oil and gas is that there's a political science steering I'm not sure if this is when you were referencing which says that it's if you the more oil and gas or mu tends to lead to dictatorship right by virtue of the fact that you don't really need that many people to create this wealth and therefore you don't really need to invest in people and you don't need to listen to people therefore and and it's easier to sort of maintain a dictatorship when you have these or resource rents by the way there's a great book in the United States context about this now I'm going to forget his name he's the guy who wrote about the Chicago slaughterhouses what's his name with that yeah yeah yeah Upton Sinclair also wrote a great book exposing the gas industry in California was it called yeah oil yeah oil exclamation point great book about this in the u.s. context yes so you know Hagen from Chesterton Academy in the Twin Cities my question is we look briefly at how Russia has promoted herself as this uphold or of traditional values yeah how has it been able to do that as it predominantly orthodox state in countries such as Poland and Hungary to have predominantly Roman Catholic populations because as an historian tell you there's a lot of there's a lot of bad blood between that's too faith traditions yeah yeah I think it's more complicated look obviously the appeal to orthodoxy works better with Orthodox countries right so partly the power projection Russia has its core area really as the former Soviet Union incidentally just on this is like sort of unrelated tangent but just interesting to note I was talking to somebody about you know mafia organizations and the IND and the the the underground the mafia organizations still organize themselves according to the way the former Soviet Union operated right so southern Russia also includes like Ukraine and Moldova and something so they have districts that are based on allies so in in essence you know Russia can play this card more easily with Serbia with Ukraine where by the way it also controls directly the churches in many of these countries right so in Ukraine where I was this summer you know you can see in a lot of villages and towns there's a Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate which is the traditional Church there right but since it's controlled out of Moscow Ukrainians have also created their own Orthodox Church of the what's that Kiev patriarch at and so in some of the little towns I built I was going to they were just building or trying to build a church there for a lot of people they can't tell the difference but if you're nationalist you might realize that you should be with the Kiev one and and and not with the Moscow one but in essence this gives Russia direct impact on Orthodox people in a pretty wide range that is not only confined to Russia but of course in in other countries it's less so and you'd imagine correctly that there would be you know difficulty and nonetheless so if you look at Russian propagate on family values or something like that so a typical operation will be let's set up a website together with a far-right sort of fascist organization in say Czech Republic right or Slovakia or hungry or wherever and what we're gonna do is we'll brought use that website to broadcast essentially Russian created propaganda right similar to what happened here in in and a lot of that will be sort of on traditional values right we hate Europe because of traditional values right so I think the pull is is bigger than you would think right because Orthodox or whatever right Muslim or you know there's there is a big you know backlash against sort of Western liberal values going on and a lot of it is speaking in the same language for those for you in the front so often in this conference and elsewhere we've heard of the threats of Russia yeah there's an easy slide from Russia to Putin and then Putin becomes the problem and I've always been struck because Putin is a mortal human being and so I'm more interested in the institutions he has or has not built yeah and it seems to me there is a tremendous problem when he does pass from the scene whatever happens to be you yeah do you see a deep leadership pool behind him that can carry on the kleptocracy are the the Mafia arrangement yeah that's or yeah or what yeah that's a great question and you know it's debated all the time and you know I'm very I have to say I'm still very impressed with with all your guys questions you know these are similar things to what we're debating in different Russia conferences right you know and so there there is a group of you there are different groups of people let me describe what they think you know there's some people who are sort of saying that well you know we're over personalizing this against Putin right that actually there's a whole mafia structure there and one of those guys will just come to power after he's gone and the Systema will endure right I am NOT in that camp personally I think that's you know there's there's a certain logic there I suppose but I I think that the way I look at it is this every single Russian leader and you can go back into the Soviet period as well has had a different foreign policy okay so let's think about the difference between Stalin's foreign policy and Khrushchev's foreign policy right really really different right you keep going back right or forward but look at Gorbachev his foreign policy very Pro Western Yeltsin's very Pro Western Putin but but still again different Putin totally different right so what I see is that first of all Russia's foreign policy making and decision making is very personalized and always has been because the dictators tend to have such power and they have their own approaches and personalities and ideas about what the problems were that came for them and I simply simply very hard for me to imagine that somebody else who's a non Putin a non Putin Putin or you know will will be the same I just don't think that that's possible I think that any logical person looking at the situation today would take a somewhat more benign view of the West maybe that's just me being hopeful but I can't see how you go worse than that you know you know maybe you could imagine that there's like a North Korea type person but I just don't see that it's that it's gonna gain them anything there are other ways to answer this question right so another way to think about it is institutions has are there institutions in Russia I would say not really you know so institutions in a way are in an embodiment of you sometimes charismatic prestige or some sort of process that leads to a consolidation of power and then that gets embodied in these institutions that happens by our Constitution for instance right George Washington says I don't want to be king I'd rather be constitutional leader and so then the authorities are transferred into these sort of institutions and and Russia hasn't had that process right this is a person allistic mafia-style dictatorship what maybe maybe to answer that question better we need and and therefore you know we need to understand how power transfers and Mafia's right I would argue usually it's bloody and then something and something different happens you know but it's a good question and of course we don't know the answer to that but I would just bet on I guess if I were foreign policy leader in the United States I'd bet on the next regime being a little bit better a little bit more amenable you could talk to him a little bit more or might be able to have an opening anyway to do that yes yes it in the last few years I've noticed that Western Europe is pretty aggressively moving towards alternative energy and getting junking gasoline-powered cars does Russia view this as an existential threat to its economic base well in general it is true that in developed countries the use of hydrocarbons is topped out and is starting to somewhat decline even believe it or not in the United States right we've we've reached a peak of our use of hydrocarbons and they're they're declining somewhat now that's dependent a lot on policy nonetheless we use a lot of hydrocarbons and so does Europe I don't know I don't think that you know I don't think that it's if we were talking about having or quarter it you know massively reducing then maybe it would be a bigger threat but yeah you would you would think that Russia wouldn't have that much of an interest in in perpetuating that and that gets back to the oil and gas price so there's a price at which $4 and above for gasoline I'd say as people switch to hybrids right you keep the price a little lower than that and you don't have that problem right so yes but I'm not sure that right now that's something that Russia feels like or or acts against but it's a good question I would have to look into it further to really know the answer to that yes I thank you I wondered if you could comment this sort of strategic or I guess political motivation for Russia's continued propping up of Bashar al Assad regime in Syria if you could comment maybe on what the Russian regime's long term objectives for Syria might look like and how do they reconcile this very destructive war activity with you know any kind of pledge toward you know some kind of favorable regime in the region uh-huh well I'm not i matter I guess the last part of the question I would I would probably push back to you I don't know that what do you mean by a favorable regime in the region or that was ever something that they discussed right that the Russians were concerned with the Russian position I think as I understand it on Syria has been there's a sovereign government of Syria right there were a bunch of rebels and they were supported by a number of regimes you know outside regimes that we're trying to overturn it and that is not according to international law that's not what you're supposed to be doing if you're an external power you're supposed to you know according to UN Charter to you know presume that there's a government and support the government and so that was on the international law side on the on the realism side you know Russia Russia doesn't have very many bases abroad except in the former Soviet states so it has bases at a number of former Soviet states but not elsewhere so that makes it pretty different than the United States which has bases in many many countries but where Russia did have a base was in Syria it was the only base that had in I believe the Middle East and I believe in the Mediterranean and although small its it had a valuable military asset there that they probably thought was going to be threatened by any new regime that that arrangement would be threatened furthermore it had Syria was a kind of key ally in the region and I think after what happened in Libya where Russia was upset that it was it granted NATO rights to sort of provide air support to prevent atrocities and that turned into an overthrow campaign that they didn't support that they decided to make a stand on Syria and sort of say look you know you can't just push around countries and do this you know - no accord so so and and and frankly a lot of people after after the Civil War you know agree with them right you know so I have US colleagues I have a good friend in Northeastern University max Abrams who tweets all the time it's very good source of information about this but he's been long arguing that you know it was you know the Russian position was right you know and I think that you know it's you know kind of well compared to what happened afterwards it's kind of debatable I guess so I don't know if that answers your question if you know what is their interests is that right or so again on atrocities you know it's interesting by the atrocities of the Assad regime I mean look in in this war there were atrocities on all sides right my colleague who I mentioned you know what he argues essentially is that the people the u.s. supporting was basically al-qaeda right and I'm sure that it's true that there were there I mean there there were surely atrocities on all sides of this war and for Russia clearly they don't really care about these atrocities that much except insofar as they think that you know the more atrocities the better or we want it we want to show that we can commit more atrocities that these people stop fighting that's probably their that's how I understand what they're trying to do right they're not trying to do a safe bombing campaign and targeting they're trying to say look if you don't if you don't do this like everybody's gonna die you know and that to them is a you know it's like it's thinking historically it's like the Mongol approach right surround the city give them a chance to surrender if not slaughter everybody and that you know you know that runs deep I don't think it's an issue that they're concerned with at all in my opinion if you think of Putin's rhetoric on Chechnya or his actions in Chechnya which it was pretty much the same thing the Chechen campaign was pretty much that right it's like a bunch of people rebelling level the entire place right and then rebuild from scratch afterwards you know so I just don't think that that's truly an issue that they're really sensitive on or accountable on they they would just say you know whatever that's what's happening it's a war that's why we don't want war and by the way if you'd listened to us he could have avoided the war yeah a little hello yeah my name is kregasm I teach in Austin Texas I read recently that the largest Texas secessionist Facebook group it's called the heart of Texas and it has about two hundred and twenty-five thousand people and it's operated out of Russia yeah and they have managed to orchestrate rallies in Houston encouraging people open carry bring assault rifles Jeff Sessions was recently testifying in front of Congress and it seems like the Justice Department isn't really taking it SuperDuper seriously or just meddling in the elections I'm wondering if you know much about the European response is it is sort of case-by-case basis I know that they've been meddling in Italy and all over Eastern Europe and France and Germany is is there a super national organization that's working on coordinating to counter or is it a sort of state-by-state basis that's a good question I think there are a couple organizations that are transnational to deal with it so first of all yes you're correct right that it was it was not only the Texas secessionist movement but also the California secessionist movement and also black lives matter right black lives matter one of their major Twitter sites was run by the Russians right and it was it was they're having a big internal debate now about why this happened right where you know they're obviously trying to project anything that will cause chaos or cause division within the United States has been sponsored you know by Russia for sure you know and there's going to be a debate about how organizations dealt with it about how significant this is how much impact it had on public opinion how much impact on the organizations that were helped or sponsored and I think that's just starting and and it's I don't know personally you know I can imagine that among the Justice Department is not thrilled about doing this because of course it also relates to the campaign itself right you know which also was sponsored in a similar way or even more so right in that you know it in a similar way let's say but but I think those things will continue to be debated and and I did want to mention maybe one or you know one server example in Europe just how this happened is the Lisa case which is pretty interesting so Russia in Europe had been trying to firm it anti-immigrant hostility right and does that in the United States as well of course right so the key thing is you know that they had a huge like migration crisis in 2000 at the heart of this crisis in the middle of this crisis Russia sponsored this the the Lisa case right which was a case of false a false rape of a German teenager of Russian origin in Germany right that was turned to be turned out to be utterly first but only after like it had really been used to sort of expand anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany what happened was that and this is very similar probably to what happened in the United States is that a German teenager of Russian origin goes missing she was reported to be raped by migrants according to Russian television news sources okay or Russian Facebook pages of social media the foreign Russian foreign media began to report on the case inside of Germany and then organized protests by a Facebook this is a an example where the protests write primarily among Russian Russians in Germany a russian-speaking community in Germany a lot of whom were given the opportunity to emigrate to Germany after the collapse of Soviet Union it attracted attention of in German mainstream media and then became a sort of you know case the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov then criticized Germany for not responding to the case out of political crests and correctness when the German police investigated case it turned out that she had disappeared for a couple of days is to go to her boyfriend's house and her boyfriend was a of Turkish origin it had been there presumably a long time and she'd not been raped and certainly not gang raped by a bunch of Muslim men which was the story right nonetheless even after this case even after that was revealed by the German police and discussed with Russia Lavrov actually made several statements attacking Germany saying you're not protecting our Russian citizens were very concerned do you have this huge problem going on and you're not doing an Athlon order ba-ba-ba-ba you know and then he was reprimanded by Germany for that so I think this you know that's the kind of disinformation that we're learning now we didn't know this was that I didn't know this is you know happening quite the same way in the US but it's been exactly the same thing has happened here in the United States right and and it is you know troubling you know but the question you asked is how do you deal with it so how do you deal with it you know one of the probably the most important ways is by educating people about what's going on right so I don't think you're gonna see as much you know collects it sort of stuff you know you want to see many people as many people duped by it you know as before but you have to educate so so the other way you can do it is by you know I mean this is a huge debate within Facebook and Twitter and the sort of things like you've got to get these organizations to police themselves a lot better right you know to not be a tool of you know foreign intelligence right it would seem like a very minimal you know kind of request so that's one thing education is another thing and there are NATO bodies and also EU bodies I've subscribed to I think disinformation digests of the European Union that you know regularly sends around notes and I was just saying oh they're saying this this is totally you know and that kind of tenor of things you know and then of course beefing up our oan you know I don't think people people made enough steps to beef up our own communications and information you know targeting Russia or other places in between but I know discussions are starting in that but it's it's very difficult well one of the things that you learn about this and one of the reasons Russia's trying to pick us apart using our own vulnerabilities right you know so you know Europe did have this immigration crisis you know we did have this populist wave in the United States there there are many you know that we have the Electoral College which I think was used as a vulnerability right there's a lot of things that Russia could figure out or serve ulnar abilities right of our system and one of the vulnerabilities is in a Democratic Society it's very hard to censor in media right so even now like people are asking why is Sputnik which is whether big disinformation channels just bought a radio station in Washington DC you know it's like why are they able to do this right when we know that they're government sponsored propaganda outlets like spinning out lies right determined to take us down well it's because we have pretty liberal press laws right and it's actually pretty difficult like you have to get them declare it as a foreign agent and you have to have a big investigation in Congress that will show that there are foreign agents and you know everybody understand you know why this is happening but you know similar reason I suspect why Facebook is very reluctant to go against this right because Facebook thinks has a pretty broadly you know cast definition of free speech right anything can be put right I mean they put beheadings you know on these things right and what's to say that you can't post a you can't post a video of a beheading you know I don't know if we even have that law really right I would return of those you know the Constitution is that you can do that you might open yourself up to criminal prosecution but if you're over in the Middle East like what's the chances you know so I think that's gonna be difficult for us to deal with and they're therefore the way to deal with it is more through education say look we're living in this open media space but we have to get a lot more and by the way a lot of this is going to come down at the high school level you know if there is already in Europe in Germany there's I saw an article maybe at Finland or Germany I don't know you know classes like how to be a good news consumer how to know when you're dealing with propaganda right awareness that there is propaganda and that people are trying to use you in different ways you know so it's just a further way in which we're gonna have to be more conscious of the media environment perhaps yes this sort of spins off we just said about the classes that students are taken in Germany these days yeah so if we're to do that in the US how do we you know draw that fine line between teaching our young people how to be proper news consumers and not drifting into groupthink basically mm-hmm yeah well I mean that's not really my that's not my area of expertise particularly and I'd have to look at how they're doing it but I think you know one key thing I mean there's a lot of things that people are gonna need to be better at you know in terms of dealing with social media that not only deal in the news but also dealing with like you know friend interrelationship so a lot of problems I hear about from teenagers or like taking photos of things that are totally inappropriate right and then sending to everybody and sometimes getting in big trouble for this right not realizing right so I think people will get hopefully somewhat more sophisticated about that but one of the other things they're gonna have to get more sophisticated about is the fact that you're not always being told the truth over the media right and I think there's a wide awareness now in the United States that you know stuff you hear over various media channels is not true right so everybody has like you know I guess what I would call detector right I was told when you know I mean well you know so I think everybody is dealing with these issues to some extent I don't know how the schools in particular can do that that's not really my area but I would just say that that among other institutions that's gonna have it's gonna happen it already has happened right where where your schools are gonna end up in these problems and have to deal with them you know somehow and yeah Newseum you said in DC as well as they now offer on-site classes so if you are in the DC area you can take your students to the museum and they offer an hour-long session as to how to detect fake news and you can also now access virtual classes as well hello okay hi I'm Jason Shauna's my question is is related to who are Russia's biggest trading partners for these materials that they're exporting I mean besides the EU yeah that's a great question so you'd be probably surprised to learn that Russia's biggest trading partner is Netherlands right why Netherlands because all of its oil or a lot of its oil is refined and Rotterdam and exported out of Rotterdam to the rest of the world so in essence and this is a great great point that you brought up is that your Russia is in fact totally dependent on Europe this is what makes this kind of conflict or a cop very weird right and why I think at the end of the day not really in Russia's interest that much because I'm going to get the numbers here right but and I'm not sure I can totally do that but something like 78% of all its exports end up in the European Union okay and of that other 22% there are also European countries but they're just not EU European countries so Turkey would be the number two country the number two region would be other East Europe that is not in the EU including Ukraine Belarus etc so if you think about it Russia to export all its stuff maybe kind of even even with the case of oil and also gas it's all based on pipelines that that generally run from towards Europe and they go through Ukraine and I should draw you a pipeline map it's really convoluted in complex but you know it goes through Poland and Belarus but the main ones go kind of through Ukraine and that's a big piece of the puzzle they're trying to right now one of Russia's key interests is trying to divert pipelines around Ukraine so it doesn't have to go through Ukraine but it's all going and there's battles over that I could describe in great detail but we don't have time but but in essence all its customers are all Europe and so it's fighting it's picking this battle with its big customer and the way it's trying to do that is by these divide and rule strategies again another reason why a united Europe stinks for Russia right and and so it's people a lot of people are our side of things on the western side think well we're so dependent or Europe so dependent on Russian oil but actually is the reverse is true Russia is as dependent as Europe is on unrushed on energy exports Russia is twice as dependent on Europe one way that they've tried to deal with this is is by developing a closer relationship with China and there was a proposal in fact a deal like two hundred fifty billion dollars to build a pipeline that would take the oil out to China which which covers you know has to go across a very very large expanse of Siberia to get to China right although there are some Arctic oil fields on the eastern side that you know could have a shorter route down to China and and do I think sell some to China but to access those you need Western technology which is currently sanctioned to to build so the deal with China is interesting they made a great fanfare right around 2014 when the West was putting on sanctions to say oh well we'll just sell our stuff to China and they announced a 250 billion dollar deal to build this pipeline and then as it turned out probably the deal was made because they offered China a lower price then we're getting in Europe because the deal had been under negotiation for many years China had said we'll do it if we get a lower price but not otherwise because they're gonna have to invest 250 billion into it so they wanted like you know an assurance of lower cost energy and then what happened shortly after the deal is price price of the commodity dropped and therefore the value to both sides of doing this deal dropped and the deal was shuttered and it hasn't come back so I guess and and another point with that and I know Alan listened to sort of wrap up here but another point on that is you got to think about Russia Russia likes to pretend when I when I was there doing interviews on foreign policy in 2011 one of the things that was really interesting to me is the number of people who thought that Russia should move its capital to Vladivostok and declared the Pacific century for Russia okay but this was that like the United States this is no longer the Atlantic century this is the Pacific century we're gonna make a pivot no to to the Pacific and and I thought wow these people are living in fantasy land you know and and indeed probably some of them are but just on you know one of the reasons why this is fantasy is if you think about it Russia occupies this big space but like Canada all the people live in the warm part you know and and ninety percent of Russians and an increasing share of Russians live in European Russia right so the irony of this situation is actually Russia is becoming more European and indeed an income more European than it has been before at the same time that his policy is becoming this more Eurasian so just an interesting contradiction to very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Foreign Policy Research Institute

Views: 16,376

Rating: 3.7826087 out of 5

Keywords: Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, Putin, Syria, Georgia, Conflict, Europe

Id: dY6LKH-dbK8

Length: 71min 12sec (4272 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017