The Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Motives and Response | Dr. Daniel Kempton

[Music] good afternoon i'm gia smith the president of franciscan's political science association on behalf of the association i'm very excited to introduce our speaker today to speak on the russian invasion of ukraine dr daniel kempton dr kempton received his bachelor's degree from notre dame and his m.a and phd from the university of illinois in political science at northern illinois university he served as the chairman of the department of political science for seven years dr kempton is vice president of academic affairs here at franciscan as well as political science professor here dr kempton is widely published including his books soviet policy in south africa the national liberation movement connection and a co-edited volume of unity or or separation center periphery relations in the former soviet union dr kempton has received numerous research grants and 12 fellowships including twice the prestigious fulbright fellowship to rhodes university in south africa and to tavare university in russia in addition to his books dr kempton has also published articles book chapters case studies and book reviews in journals such as puk studies and international affairs international journal and public administration and russian review to just name a few without further ado political science association would like to welcome dr kempton thank you gian thanks for coming today i wish it was a more pleasant topic to talk about but it is certainly a poignant talk topic to be discussing today i've designed my talk today around two basic questions that i think i am more qualified to address than some of the others you might have but i'm hoping you'll come back with i'm trying i'm going to try and speak for about 30 to 40 minutes and then leave the last 15 to 20 if this works well i haven't timed it so i'm not sure it will but leave the last 15 to 20 for questions about some of the other topics i really am more of a russian expert than i am a ukrainian expert i started going to russia back when it was the former soviet union i should actually say my undergraduate degree was in government and international studies and russia was my area studies specialization and i studied the russian language which i do not speak well but i do speak well enough to get around in russia in as gia mentioned in 2008 i was a fulbright scholar at uh tv university which is first state university which is just north of moscow but simultaneous to that my daughter was actually a peace corps worker in zaparisha down in southern ukraine so i spent a fair bit of my weekend time going back and forth between ukraine and russia during that period so i've been to most of the eastern parts of ukraine and although i haven't done a lot of research there so i've chosen two questions which are really focusing on the russian side and americans response to it and whether it's an effective response the first question i wanted to speak about is assessing putin's motive what was he after why has he been going in i think it's a lot more complex than you sometimes hear and it certainly isn't a recreation of the soviet union which is sort of one of the simplified assessments you sometimes get in the western press the second question i want to talk about is sort of assessing my take on the american response thus far i mean what did we do wrong in the past what have we done right what have we done wrong since this started to unravel let me start with putin's motives and what it's about i'm really going to be talking about sets of motives in three different areas the first set of motives i think are a series or a set of cultural factors that one of putin's primary arguments of his entire presidency his president sees i should say since he was president and left the presidency put his friend in charge of the presidency and then conveniently came back when he had served the term out of the presidency but one of the things he's always argued is that there was a great loss in the creation of the soviet union he's always argued he is reported to have said something to the effect that one of the greatest greatest geostrategic tragedies of the 20th century was the collapse of the soviet union that statement is sometimes taken to mean well he was a kgb colonel he's still a kgb he's still a believer in communism i do not believe that is the case i do believe he's a believer in russian great power status so this cultural argument i think is quite important to him he traces back that great power status to an early state called kievan rus which was founded in the late 800s it was a varangian state meaning it was founded by the voyagers of the virengians from the peoples of norway and sweden basically the vikings as we had said today the center of that state was really in kiev which was the capital of it so it's often called kievan rus referring to the people kiev referring to the seat of it what's interesting about this map is this is a little bit later i think this map is about 10 11. it shows the principal princetons of kiev russ you will note one admission i wrote kiev and nimoscova not moscow moscow doesn't even exist in the kievan state but putin wants to claim that he is the successor state to kiev and that's very important to him the kiev actually is the center of this great culture by the way it's the largest and one of the more popular states populous states throughout the 10th and 11th century so it really is a great center of early european culture power military might um linguistics lots of different ways and that's why both countries are trying to trace their way back to kievan rus one of the more important parts of kiev russ is this gentleman here it's kind of funny because i think most of you know the president of ukraine is vladimir zelinski and the president of russia vladimir putin it's the same name basically and both of them find their way back one is ukrainian one is the russian pronunciation um but the most famous vladimir is this uh vladimir who was the in some ways the founder although it already already existed of the kievan rus he is the one who made it great and in many ways very important he is the one who christifies it he converts to christianity according to the stories he sent out emissaries to all the different religions heard from islam didn't like islam one of the problems with islam is you couldn't drink or eat pork i agree with him on this point christianity however you could drink you could eat pork you could also marry the princess of constantinople the great byzantine empire and he did so and that created the christianization of the slavic world in particular and he was a leader of that this is critical because i argued that putin is not a communist recreated he is a great power russian nationalist and he sees the heritage of russia tying back to kiev russ and russia being what is sometimes called the third rome what he means by that is rome was the original rome of course but when rome got corrupt and began to fall byzantium busine became the center of christianity when kiev russe falls he argues that moscow and the patriarchy of moscow becomes the center in modern times this will become very controversial once again partially because orthodoxy has a tradition of what is called autocephalous self-headed churches and what that literally means is usually the church goes with the state and there is a different orthodox church and a different independent bishop in each of the major countries of orthodoxy up until 1917 basically there was one orthodox church 1917 a first one breaks away well there's actually an earlier one tied to rome but a second one breaks away claiming ukrainian independence it happened again more recently in that the orthodox church in 2018 in ukraine the most significant one declared its or requested its independence from the russian orthodox church in putin's world this was a big deal because it undermines the claim to the legitimacy to all of this cultural heritage the soros state also saw this as a point of continuity between kievan rus and the russian state peter the great helped take part of ukraine back from what was that time the ottomans catherine the great also takes part back she takes back what was called the crimean khanate and she actually refers to the people that she sees back as novorossiyski new russians and tries to make the argument that this is essentially the same people so this question of ukrainian identity which we hear being played out with putin's claims and the ukrainian denials is not a new question this is an old question ukraine existed as a state intermittently from about the 1200s on at some times it's under the control of poland at the time under time under the control of the teutonic knights at other times under lithuanian and other times under russian control so different parts of ukraine are under different controls at different points in history what really happens if i can go back a bit prior to the mongol invasion kiev is clearly the cultural the political the military center of this area but kiev was one of the last areas to break away from the mongols moscow actually receives its centrality when it begins breaking away from the mongol invaders it's one of the earlier and one of the central ones in fact moscow and fear were the two prince and dems that broke away first the symbol of tv where i used to work was an empty throne meaning the throne should have been there but moscow stole it as far as they were concerned so moscow then emerges after the russian pier or after the mongols as the center of the empire as the center of slavic particularly russian culture i think that's very much part of the issue the other part of the issue is that if you can uh look down here we're not going to get a very good think of it but there's a long russian ukrainian border over the centuries this border's moved back and forth and in fact crimea down here you'll often read the news was given back to ukraine but to the ukrainian socialist republic by nikita khrushchev who is actually born in ukraine as part of a gift celebrating an anniversary so the border has been very fluid what that means is when you look at the eastern half of ukraine it tends to be more russian speaking and more ethnic russian and it's important you make a distinction because those are not the same there are ukrainians who are primarily russian speakers there are ethnic russians who are primarily ukrainian-speaking um depending on where in the country they live what school system they went to et cetera but again there's this whole cultural argument that's very important to president putin to say russia ought to be a great power because they've always been a great power they've been this long-term source of stability and history the second i think critical factor for russia in wanting control of ukraine is geostrategic policy i think many of you know the traditional argument if you look at russia either the russian federated republic as it existed or even the so whole soviet union one of the things you note is most of the water border is in the north russia didn't have warm water ports the one traditional sometimes exception was sevastopol and the crimean peninsula so that was always very important to them i think that can be overemphasized a second argument i would make and in some ways more important in russian history and russian understanding of the world let me start by saying something about america we have a very strange view of history in america because our history is very strange if you look at american history think of all those times america has been invaded and all the major threats to america okay 1812 well sort of maybe a big deal they burned the capital that was really mean nasty but you know not massive invasions our borders are the atlantic and the pacific on the east and west then we're faced with our great rivals canada and mexico so we tend to have a very unusual view of war of threat of history conversely if you think about the russian view of history it's a history of invasion some of those other people's countries that have invaded are the mongols the teutonic knights the ottoman empire the polish empire the kingdom of lithuania the swedish kingdom france america britain germany twice japan once i mean it's a long long history of evasions of other countries putting troops into russia one of the problems is russian geography there's a long time argument that your foreign policy is often affected by your geography russia has some fairly high molten ranges but they're all along the eastern coast from moscow and certainly from kiev to the west is a large european plain the ural mountains most of the russian population lives west of the ural mountains and the invading ally goes all the way to berlin essentially so russia has been the subject of frequent invasions russia's always had a problem of how do i be secure one modern historian essentially said the russian response has been the lombardi doctrine no they didn't know the green bay coach but they adopted a very similar policy if you've studied the green bay packers their philosophy was i was the best defense is a good offense and what the russians have historically done is make sure they can control some of the areas around them if they've got no natural borders you've got to control your neighbors and that's what russian history is a long attempt to try and control some of the neighbors russians themselves refer to so the in here is the russian republic when the russian when the soviet union fell apart essentially the soviet republics the ones that say ssr became separate countries there wasn't a whole lot of logic to it that was just the way the soviet union was designed borders had shifted back and forth but when putin talks one of the arguments he's trying to make is that these borders don't make any sense that they were a fiction created by some of the soviet leaders many ways he's right about that russians when they categorize their foreign policy talk about blizznia zarubaya which refers to the near abroad the near abroad some people in america talk about a sphere of influence well in some ways that works there are times in american history where we say stay out of our hemisphere that the european power should not be involved in here but this is much more permanent and it's much more distinctive in saying these countries that are part of the near abroad they're not really separate they're not really entire autonomous by virtue of their history by virtue of their geography russia has a special role to play in all of these countries so when putin's making these arguments he's not treating ukraine or even latvia lithuania or estonia like any other country he's saying these are in some ways by definition of geography by definition of history culture our area so it's like spheres of influence it's like the monroe doctrine but it's much more rooted in history it's much more affirmed it's much more a part of the russian psyche the third argument i would make is economic and sometimes we started talking about this at the beginning of the war it's disappeared very quickly but if you look at ukraine has always been very important to the russian tsarist economy to the soviet economy this map doesn't show it but one of the main waterways the nipper river comes down just to the west of the crimean peninsula that was a major trade track for the russians soviet economy it was also important because of the natural resources eastern ukraine is a big eastern northern is a big coal manufacturing sort of the western pennsylvania west virginia eastern ohio part of the former soviet union ukraine is also the breadbasket of the soviet union which makes it all the more ironic that stalin once starved them out and took away their grain during the haladmore so this is very critical to the russian economy in the last 20 years it's become even more critical why because russia is now major making a huge percentage of its foreign earnings through the sale of natural gas and oil basically germany heats itself with russian gas pretty much most of the states around it do as well germany gave up on nuclear power germany gave up on coal which used to buy from poland so many of the states in western europe are totally dependent on russian oil and gas that also means the russian economy is almost entirely dependent on selling these products one of the main couple of the main routes for russian gas this is one of the old routes there was another one that went north directly through ukraine russia was always upset that ukraine said hey you're shipping your oil and gas across our country you're maintaining pipelines in our country you should give us a cut of this and by the way we shouldn't pay the same amount that germany pays for your oil and gas so there were times where the ukrainians literally held the russians hostage and said lower the price we won't pay the higher price if you want your the rest of your gas to go to germany you'll give sell it to us at a lower price russia didn't like that so part of this is russia knows it needs this natural gas needs to sell it to the west some studies say up to 35 40 percent of the russian gdp or the russian budget is created by oil and gas sales so essentially cut our budget by a third imagine what that does to the american economy if russia can't sell oil and gas that's a large percent of its annual national budget a second thing i want you to note on this map is the black sea we believe is one of the world's next great oil and gas reserves the caspian on the other side is already being developed already the this is where this gas route is is russia recently formed a new route to go through tur means turkey so it's going through the black sea but not through ukrainian waters anymore this is the ukrainian exclusive zone the romanian and the russian zone here on the far right but what we're also learning is that where are the big oil and gas finds well look at that they're all along the ukrainian coast so these oil and gas fuels are either a huge competition for russian foreign sales or b the excess product for russian sales to increase their economy so again i don't think these are entirely separate motives but the last thing russia wants is ukraine developing all of these oil and gas fields that are technically in ukrainian waters and at the end of this we'll look at a battle map of where we are and it corresponds very closely to where the oil and gas fields russia is pushing very hard not only for kiev but also for the southern route along the russian-speaking zone so you can almost tie their battle plans to what i think putin is trying to achieve so for a variety of reasons geostrategic cultural and economic russia has always felt that it needs to control president putin has argued from his very beginning as president that part of their greatness is controlling that the way to russia's great power status which i think is his driving force is to make sure he controls some of the near abroad and particularly ukraine um a couple of let me switch a little bit over to the ukraine this let me start by ask looking at american foreign policy in a couple of different ways i'm shifted to that second question now how do i assess the american response to this well first of all some people think russia has just recently gotten involved and others say no no 2014 they took crimea 2014 they did this in 2004 this man was the main ukrainian candidate for the presidency of ukraine this cup has his name on it yushenko this is from what's called the orange revolution he was running for president and suddenly he broke out with this horrible horrible disease which they later found out was dioxin poisoning surprise surprise he's recovered significantly from that but his face will never be the same he never died from that as dr doyle was saying before the lecture started the russians really love their poisons don't they yes they do i just learned today i'm a big chelsea soccer fan the owner of the chelsea soccer team is a former russian oligarch former russian governor they just found out today during his time in kiev trying to help facilitate negotiations he was poisoned shocking i wonder who did that i think we'll pretty soon find out that it was the russians once again so let's talk about what our american goals let me switch slides for just a second what does america want in our dealings with putin how well have we done let me start out with a statement by biden president biden considers himself a progressive president i would like to compare him to america's first progressive president who i think had some very interesting foreign policy divide advice theodore roosevelt actually ran a party called the progressive party um did a lot of progressive things politically but had a foreign policy which alternately he said walk softly and carry a big stick sometimes he said talk softly and carry a big stick both of them by the way are not original to him they're both based on an african proverb of how one behaves successfully in life but this was really roosevelt's foreign policy which was a quite expansionistic but also successful foreign policy of pushing american power what did it mean what roosevelt was really talking about was look to be effective in the foreign policy realm you've got to act tough you've got to prepare to be strong in particular roosevelt wanted the navy rebuilt he wanted the navy made more powerful so american power would be projected but he argued that you shouldn't push your enemy to overtly you shouldn't talk about it too loudly because that was counterproductive in other words be tough and be ready to defend yourself be ready to take action let your military power speak for itself to the extent that i think there is a doctrine emerging related to that from the brighton foreign policy apologize i've used this with my students the biden foreign policy seems to be talk loudly and carry a nerf gun a lot of what we have going on is we have should have been preparing for the last decade ukraine for this day this is not a surprise this is not just president biden's failure although i will argue specifically there are some serious failures here successive american presidents have botched this one because of the way putin has talked we should have known from the very beginning that this was part of putin's motivation again when you say things like the collapse of the soviet union was one of the biggest geostrategic tragedies of the 20th century same century as world war one same century as the holocaust it kind of sends the signal i think the soviet class was a bad thing not technically reversing it but trying to recreate that great power status so from the beginning we knew this might be a problem in 2008 in fact ukraine reached a point where they were trying to join nato they had in april of 2008 they filled out the paperwork to become nato members and were actually accepted into this map for progress plan where they would propose their way to nato membership they would have to do some things to reach nato membership which they hoped would happen within a year or two so this is april of 2008. december 2008 however there is a new president elected in the united states or actually november 2008 we have the election of president obama with his vice president vice president biden they are not so interested in bringing ukraine into nato partially because putin makes it clear he sees this as provocative george w bush was very friendly with putin but actually was moving ukraine onto the track for nato membership in 2010 they actually ousted yushchenko he gets replaced by a man by the name of viktor yanukovych who is actually a russian ally wins the election some shenanigans occurred in the election we're still not sure who run a couple of the ukrainian elections but yanukovych essentially takes them off track and the opportunity has been missed by 2010 on both sides they're no longer pushing so hard for nato membership uh we're no longer so interested in nato membership for the ukraine so one should say well it's a shame we missed an opportunity that we could have made a commitment to ukraine that might have deterred putin that might have prevented him from acting very clearly we don't want to respond to putin we don't want to get involved in the war with this i fully agree with president biden we don't want to be involved in a boots-on-the-ground war in ukraine our goal should have been and we failed in to deter a russian intervention we should have deterred it but i would argue that in fact we didn't just miss one opportunity we missed multiple opportunities let me take you back a little bit further when the soviet union collapsed there were actually four successor states that had nuclear weapons russia belarus ukraine and kazakhstan all four of them have nuclear weapons technically at that point in history ukraine is the world's third biggest nuclear power in terms of number of warheads we believed this was a bad thing for the world we thought they really shouldn't have nuclear warheads having three more members of the nuclear club isn't a good thing we pushed for an agreement we pushed for belarus ukraine and kazakhstan to get rid of their nuclear weapons we eventually reached an agreement called the buble pest memorandum on security assurances that was signed in december of 1994. what that said was that the other successor states would give up their nuclear weapons we would demilitarize their nuclear weapons we would the russians would help take back their nuclear material they would reprocess the material from those warheads and they would join the non-proliferation treaty they would become official committed mom members of the nuclear proliferation agreement but it wasn't just russia ukraine kazakhstan belarus that were working on this agreement the u.s united kingdom were also parties to the agreement now if you read the agreement again signed in december of 1994 it says they guarantee that they will release their nuclear weapons turn them over will not continue nuclear power research or nuclear weapons research and will turn all over their weapons the u.s the united kingdom and russia as guarantors of that treaty promise that they will be served as guarantors of the territorial integrity of the states surrendering their nuclear weapons so we literally are saying we are guarantors of your sovereignty russia has it's been pointed out recently is violating this agreement by invading well in some ways we're violating the agreement by not serving as our full guarantor function again i don't think it's prudent to do so but as you can see we missed some opportunities along the way the final opportunity i think we missed was the biggest thing i know president trump and putin looked like friends they got along they talked on the phone they seemed friendly trump still says some nice things about putin's at times but trump did the worst thing to putin he could possibly do what did he do he took the limits off the american oil and gas industry he took the limits off the american oil and gas industry what did that do to russia 58 percent of my foreign income is coming from oil and gas suddenly the one of the largest consumers of oil and gas within four years drops from a major consumer to a somewhat of an exporter that changes the world oil market i loved it i was paying 1.89 a tank i mean or a gallon for to fill my tank you all probably appreciated it as well but for russia that was a horrible thing now where are we well one of the first things president putin or president biden did for mr putin was to take off the sanctions on the nord stream ii pipeline this is a pipeline that russia built for its natural gas to flow from russia to germany without going through ukraine so you're limiting ukrainian power if you allow this to take place trump sanctioned it he thought it wasn't a good idea it was going to make germany totally dependent he was right about that what he didn't talk a lot about but was also absolutely critical is ukraine had some control over russian behavior when the nord stream isn't in effect i hope the nordstrom 2 never came this is too this is the second one of these i hope it never opens but if we back away if uh president putin says okay we'll negotiate that's going to be one of his first requests we want the nordstream 2 sanctions off this to open oil and gas to flow to germany so in my opinion this was something we should have been trying to deter i don't think we've handled it particularly well since it's broken out i will say that president biden's personality has been easier for our european allies to work with in many ways it's a foreign policy strategy i saw with president obama which some critically called leading from behind but meaning we're letting germany take the lead i mean germany looks tougher in all of this poland looks voracious in all of this and we look well weak willed in all of this i should have pointed out another thing we did that made all of this possible was when we pulled out of afghanistan without a permanent guarantee of afghan territorial integrity we were essentially saying look we're not into protecting our commitments abroad i realize that's a step trump wanted to make and couldn't make he didn't make it but he was talking about it too but once you start backing away from global commitments you're sending a signal to this guy here who has for a decade and a half wanted to take over ukraine saying hey you've got a unique opportunity the economic pressures are off america looks like it's going to be weaker and it doesn't look like there's a firm american commitment to the ukraine at this time i was very pessimistic when this all started ukraine has been amazing zielinski i mean church hillian is the word often used i buy it i mean i have not seen a leader turn such a negative position into a positive one in recent decades i know there's things about putin that are good there's things about ziranaski you don't like but people are complex characters p zelinski people are complex characters i would not confuse the man who says i oppose lgbt rights with the one who's killed 23 documented journalists and probably over 150. i mean there's some horrible things going on even though there might be some things you like in his policies um and i think the world is not going to be safer with a more powerful more aggressive russia which could easily lead to a more powerful and more aggressive china as well and i'm going to actually stop there i promise 20 minutes for comments and questions so let's move to the oh i wanted to do one more thing before i do that remember i mentioned those oil and gas fields if you overlay the map this is where across here is where most of them are when i mentioned the russian speakers this is where most of them are i mentioned the port facilities suddenly this becomes a russian like and rather than an international sea so if you look at the strategy i think the the original putin strategy was twofold one was to take parts of russia this is not a new game it's happened in moldova transtinester is now effectively part of russia um it closer to russia than the rest of moldova it's happened in georgia with south assatea it's happened across the near abroad they took before crimea i think they had in their sights donetsk and luhansk and maybe the one russians the one major ukrainian city that has fallen is kercson why does that matter again major transportation route major oil and gas fines i don't think that's coincidental i think the rest of ukraine he may be willing today we heard about the two-state solution i think that's been something putin's had in mind as a backup policy i think he wanted it all i think he wanted a guy like yanukovych in charge but i think he would be satisfied if he can get a demilitarized he would call it uh denotified ukraine but a puppet state in ukr in the rest of ukraine and seed some of the ukrainian key territory maybe the coal fields maybe the gas and oil fields maybe the russian speakers become part of russia and certainly by the way my daughter was terrified right here is a city called zaparisha but the power the nuclear power plant that serves the entire crimean peninsula is up there and that's why they think they went for that i told her i don't think they want zap i think they want um just to control the power plant they now control both the water aqueducts going to crimea and the power lines going to crimea which makes it a much more stable part i wish i could be optimistic i'm joining father in my prayers my daughter has lots ukrainian friends i have a few i have lots of russian friends keep in mind that if if we're going to bring down putin it's going to be done domestically one more comment i'm sorry i keep walk softly but carry a stick a big stick that means calling your enemy i quote a pure thug a killer a butcher a brute and a bully a murderous dictator a war criminal and saying this man cannot remain in power essentially closes the off-ramp we need unless we're going to have some way of taking putin out which i don't believe we do he doesn't even sit within 20 feet of anyone else anymore if we're going to try and take him down that's one thing but we really need to negotiate an out for him and to me i think all of us should be calling him names all of us should be hating him but it's not really a good thing for the president to do because the president like um presidents before him may somehow have to deal with a putin in the future and to negotiate with him you shouldn't really be calling them names especially they're they're true but still don't do it yeah is what i'd say thanks bob i think we better end i think we're a quarter after your ending time but thank you very much absolutely i'd like to give a few thanks before we end um first i'd like to thank all the executive committee members of the political science association they've done like all the behind scene stuff so yes i would like to thank them a lot um i'd like to thank mrs orr for helping the association so much putting this together um i'd like to thank the political science department including dr creason who's helped us with um like all the refreshments getting that here and funding for it and of course i'd like to thank dr kempton so let's give him another round let's thank gia for her help too thank you [Music]

Channel: Franciscan University of Steubenville

Views: 100,329

Keywords: Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio, Catholic, college, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Franciscan University of Steubenville (College / University), Dr. Kempton, Daniel Kempton, Russian Invasion, Russia and Ukraine, Putins Motives, Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Russian motives, Response to Russia

Id: t3GO6Xvmh8k

Length: 42min 56sec (2576 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2022