Podcast: Examining Putin: his logic, mistakes, and hope for Ukraine

TRANSCRIPT: Examining Putin: his logic, mistakes, and hope for Ukraine

Ivan Krastev:

While the Soviet leaders wanted their mummified goddess to be put in the mausoleum, I do believe that Putin succeeded to mummify the body of Russia itself.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we look at Vladimir Putin's military campaign in Ukraine. After two months of bloodshed, where does the conflict go from here and how much more human tragedy is on the horizon before peace can possibly be realized? This week I speak with political scientist and renowned Russia expert, Ivan Krastev. He's written extensively about the state of play in Ukraine. Let's do this.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, first Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of service, safety and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more. GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. Challenge yourself to change the world on season three of Course Correction, a podcast from Doha Debates. In partnership with the UNHCR Refugee Agency, host Nelufar Hedayat takes listeners on the journey of a refugee from the moment of displacement, to mental health risks, to integration, and assimilation. Learn about the issues affecting displaced persons around the world and what you can do to solve them. Follow and listen to Course Correction wherever you get your podcasts.

Ian Bremmer:

Ivan Krastev. Welcome to GZERO World.

Ivan Krastev:

Thank you very much for inviting.

Ian Bremmer:

So I want to start with the obvious question because from my perspective, I look at what we've seen over the last couple months and I see the biggest miscalculation made by a major leader on the global stage since the Soviet Union has collapsed. Do you agree with that? Do you think that that is true in terms of Putin's decision to invade Ukraine and to the extent that you do, why do you think he made that mistake?

Ivan Krastev:

I do believe he miscalculated, but his miscalculation cannot be easily explained simply because of a poor intelligence or basically poor performance of the Russian troops on the ground. In my view miscalculation goes very much deeper to the way he sees the world after the end of the Cold War and what is happening there. Here there's three things that in my view works very much to explain why he did what he did. One is he never took the end of the Soviet Union as a natural result of the end of the communism. For him, the fact that communism was over was not bad news, but he could not understand how it is possible that nuclear power can lose its sovereignty and basically lose its state. So from this point of view, restoring historic Russia was something that was always, for him, the most important thing to happen but to do this, he totally mistook and misunderstood the nature of the Russian state and the Soviet Union before.

So when he said that the Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, he believed it and this was a major miscalculation. Secondly, and in my view, this is also important for him. He really believes that the West is in such a deep crisis that the West is impossible to react, that the West was going to tolerate, nevertheless that it is not going to like what he did but then this is the problem of time. He created the system, which is so much around him, it's so much a personalized regime that he wants to fix all the problems that Russia is facing in his lifetime. He mistrust the world, but also him mistrust his successors.

This is why the idea that the time is not on his side, in my view, very much defined the fact that he wanted to do it now, he wanted to do it quickly, and basically he wanted this historic Russia that he was imagining to happen while he's in his strengths. So all these three things led to what we see today and I agree very much with you. This is a miscalculation and even now he knows that it doesn't work in the way he expected it to do. I'm not sure that he understands that the problems that he's facing are not just the result of kind of accidental factors on the ground.

Ian Bremmer:

Do you think he understands how badly it is going for him? I don't just mean in terms of is he getting correct information in terms of the military on the ground and their losses and the poor morale and how badly prepared they were and all the rest. Is he receiving an objective view of how the military is going, but also do you think he understands how the permanence of the damage that's been done in terms of Russia's relationship with the West, which did hold a lot of importance for Putin and for Russia over the past 30 years?

Ivan Krastev:

Listen, he understand certain things and obviously he's angry and obviously he's very unhappy with what is happening on the ground, but according to him, and this is now for more than a decade, he believes that he's in a war with the West. So for him, the breaking with the West is not the news. In his own understanding of the world, the West is trying to weaken Russia, the West is trying to weaken him. The West is about regime change. Nevertheless, it's what it's saying. Secondly, he does not believe that he's so isolated in the world in the way we believe he is, and to be honest, in a certain way, he has his own arguments for this and certainly while he's very unhappy what is happening on the ground, he still believes that he can turn it. He still believes that what happened in the first one month was just bad luck.

That with a better for performance on the ground with a stronger military offensive, and this is what we are seeing in Donbas and in Donbas, we are going to see Russia army performing better than it has performing in the last months. He believes that this is going to change the dynamics. He has not lost the hope that at the end of the day the game can turn better for him and this is why he's walking around and he sees, okay, the West was unified. True, but for how long? I'm sure that following the elections in France was no less interest than President Macron or Le Pen.

Ian Bremmer:

I'm sure you're right, Ivan. I'm sure you're right.

Ivan Krastev:

He's also looking at what is happening in the United States and saying, okay, Biden is fighting me. He did things that I didn't expect him to do. I never expected that Americans are going to sanction Russian currency reserves but what about his approval ratings? So from his point of view, he's in the beginning of a war, not at the end of it and in the case of Ukraine, what remains to be is just incredible resentment and part of the cruelty that you see is out of this, he's treating Ukrainians as a traitors.

Ian Bremmer:

Because that's what I wanted to get to. I mean, no, if you say this is the beginning of the war, I mean perhaps the biggest mistake he made was not about the West. The biggest mistake he made was not about his own military. The biggest mistake he made was this notion that Ukraine was going to welcome him, that the Ukrainians were really Russians in disguise. Because of course, the implication of this war, first and foremost is that every Ukrainian that imaginable is going to view Russia and Putin as their permanent enemy for generations and how can you possibly think that that's something that you can suddenly win? It's gotten so much worse for him as a consequence of the invasion.

Ivan Krastev:

Totally and I do believe here he's at his worst because strangely enough, what is at the heart of his mistake was the experience of Crimea during the annexation of Crimea-

Ian Bremmer:

Which was mostly ethnic Russians, by the way.

Ivan Krastev:

It was an ethnic Russians. But don't forget something critically important, there was a 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers and they didn't fight back and this idea that Ukrainian people deeply in their hearts are loyal to Russia, but you have this corrupt western colonizing elite, which is working for the West. This was how he was perceiving Ukraine as the Western protectorate and people waiting basically for him to come and to liberate them and then this totally backfired. There is a story that for me is very powerful to understand also how much Ukraine has changed for the last seven or eight years. Because don't forget 10, 11 years ago, Ukraine was the most Russia friendly country in the world. You go on the opinion poll, they like Putin, they like Russia. This similarity of language, similarity of culture was there. So Ukraine was not Russia.

Ian Bremmer:

Before the 2014 invasion.

Ivan Krastev:

Before 2014, and then came 2014 and President Putin always positioned himself as an expert on humiliation. He can talk for hours how humiliated Russia is, but he does not have a sensitivity for humiliating somebody else and what the Ukrainians experienced in Crimea was not simply the Russians betrayal, but they were humiliated.

There was the story that stayed with me for all these years out of all Ukrainian ships that had been basically encircled in Sevastopol. There was only one, whose captain said, "we are not going to surrender" and when the Russian ships went around him and said, "but surrender, you don't have a chance", his answer was, "we, Russians, don't ever surrender".

It was back in 2014. Then you have 2022 and you have the famous story with the Snake Island where you had this group of ...

Ian Bremmer:

"Russian warship go F- yourself," yeah.

Ivan Krastev:

-was "Russian ship, go to hell". I can believe for this seven years, a new Ukrainian nation that has been built is strongly anti-Russian, strongly anti-Putin, and very much kind of proud with its determination to resist. He missed the birth of this nation and this is very funny because he's the father of this nation, this anti kind of Russia. Ukraine was very much the result of his actions, but he missed to see it. He was still seeing something that existed before

Ian Bremmer:

He missed it, even as there was ongoing fighting with thousands of deaths every day, every week over the Donbas, the occupied territories, and the little green men. I mean, the Ukrainians were resisting. He missed all of that.

Ivan Krastev:

He missed all of this because it didn't fit to his deep conviction that the Russian world is a special civilizational space. That all these Russian-speaking people are Russians. He also had incredible dismissal about the Ukrainian state, that this is not the state, that they do not exist, that they cannot perform, that there is very dysfunctional, and part of it is also very much rooted in a very different way the Russians and the Ukrainians experience their states. Russians, even anti-Russian, anti-Putin Russians, has a respect for the vertical of the state. The state should be strong and the strong state means strong leader and you basically can disagree who is the good leader but this is there. The Ukrainians is not by accident that some of the strongest anarchist movements in Europe were very much based in Ukraine. Mahkno was in Ukraine. So the idea of state is totally different.

First of all, society is stronger than the state. They basically prefer kind of a state which is not trying to oppress. You have this idea of a freedom which is very much against your own state. From this point of view, I have the feeling that Russias not only Putin, have been historically misreading Ukraine because they're always expecting the Ukraine to view the strengths of the state in the way the Russians do it. This is the most difficult to understand your neighbors. It's more difficult to understand your relatives because you're so sure that they are like you and then suddenly they realize it's not the case. Now he has also a problem because before Putin never has ever faced a strong but different leader in opposition to him. For the first time it happened it with Navalny and to see that he basically had to put him-

Ian Bremmer:

The opposition leader who's now sitting in jail in Russia, yeah, in a labor camp.

Ivan Krastev:

And now you have Zelensky. You should imagine that from Putin's point of view, the fact that now Zelensky has captured the imagination of the world, and he's the rebel leader that everybody's admiring. For him, this is the end of the world because this is a comedian, this is kind of a TV personality. For some Secret Service call now, there is nothing more dismissive than a comedian and this comedian is not simply capturing the admiration of the world public, but resisting him, fighting him on his own game. So in my view this a very transformative period, and there is a lot of intelligence coming from Russia saying that President Putin is permanently angry. I can understand why he's angry, suddenly all the world that he has constructed for himself is crumbling down.

Ian Bremmer:

So what we're talking about, of course, is two completely different worldviews, two completely different perspectives of what Ukraine is, can be, should be, role of the state, role of the military. I mean, this is obviously not sounding like something that is leading to a climb down, a negotiated settlement or even a ceasefire and a freeze. So look, we all know that the Russians have started their so-called second phase and they intend to take the greater Donbas, which they should have certainly better military capability of doing than going into Kyiv but what happens, let's assume they get it. Let's assume they're able to take this additional territory. They've got their land bridge to Crimea. But from what I'm hearing you say, Ivan, it's not in any way over then. In other words, this is not 2020, 2014 redux where they take some more territory and they say, okay, done. Now we can have a ceasefire. Where do you think Putin wants this to go?

Ivan Krastev:

It has changed. He was first, when it started, by the way, when he said that it's a special operation, he believed it was a special operation. He didn't believe that he's starting a war. He believed it's going to be special operations, very similar to what happened in places like Crimea or before it what the Soviet Union had been doing in eastern block and then basically you are going to unify historic Russia and suddenly the Ukrainians are fighting back and not simply a fighting back, but they're fighting furiously and from his point of view, fighting without the hope of winning. This is why for him, this became a punishment operation. So in a certain way, if you cannot convert, you should punish.

There is something really perverse going on. Imagine this is the leader of an orthodox country and he started the war against another Slavic Orthodox people. Two third of the Orthodox lives in Ukraine were part of the Moscow church and he's starting the offensive in the Easter week before the Easter? Now all this story that as if somebody has replaced the Ukrainians with some other people and he's there to transform them and turn them to their senses, all the stories that they're certain type of a zombies, because this is the other story, if you're listening to Russian propaganda, nobody talks about Ukrainians. Russian public does not believe that Russia is fighting Ukrainians. They believe that Russia is fighting NATO or fighting West, basically fighting Americans. This is also his story and this is why-

Ian Bremmer:

This was when the Moskva, when the flagship carrier, was sunk. That wasn't the Ukrainians, that was NATO. That's what you see in the Russian media.

Ivan Krastev:

It's by the way, it was even kind of more absurd because their first idea was that of course it was not sank, it was an accident, it was a fire, but this was a fire and then they said, "but we should retaliate". So the problem, the inconsistency of the Russian propaganda comes from the fact that you cannot really tell the people we are fighting a war with Ukrainians because the Ukrainians should be Russians. This is why we are there and then these Russians are fighting for whom? They're fighting for NATO, they're fighting for the West. So my feeling is that he will escalate and he will escalate for three totally different reasons. One is there is many things that President Putin can live with. There is one thing that he cannot live with, being perceived as weak. The perception of weakness is the curse for any authoritarian leader. Authoritarian leaders can be evil, they can be awful, they can do other things but the moment when they're perceived as weak, they have a problem.

Ian Bremmer:

It's over. Yeah, exactly.

Ivan Krastev:

It's over. The second thing in my view is that in order to solve this problem, you should make it a bigger problem, because if you're fighting the West particularly, what he now knows is that nevertheless how the war in Ukraine is going to happen on the ground, even if they're going to be ceasefire, American financial sanctions are going to stay, not necessarily all European sanctions. This is a difficult war for him because this is going to be a distraction for his economy. So the only way is to make his own war, somebody else war too. In my view of the escalation also goes on this. So I'll not be surprised if you're going to see certain type of a places of conflict outside of the territory of Ukraine, not the military operations, but basically try to make the cost higher in order to put pressures on the West to get the sanctions out of him.

Certainly in my view, this is also the way what you're doing with the Russian nation at this moment, because there is now consolidation around him, for sure. People now under the flag, most of the Russians are buying the narrative that the West tried to weaken Russia, to destroy Russia and Russia is in self-defense, but this cannot stay forever. He destroyed the life of the middle class Russians, full stop. These people used to travel, these people used to have businesses, and these people believed that they entered the world. So he nationalized the elite, he closed the country, but unlike the Soviet Union, he closed the country without the promise that the future belongs to Russia. In my view, this kind of a claustrophobia is something that he's going to face because you are right. He can get control over Donbas. This is a totally destroyed area. Who's going to rebuild it?

Ian Bremmer:

What do you think happens in Russia when Putin, after all of this has transpired with a permanent break, certainly in the relations with the United States and active hostility and conflict with NATO? What happens to Russia after Putin?

Ivan Krastev:

Listen, it's a great question, and I'm probably not going to surprise you if I tell you that I don't know the answer but there are several things that probably we should think about when we try to answer this question. Putin, basically, he's preoccupied with his demography and Russia's demographic decline. He was repeating recently several times that if it was not for the revolution, if it was not for the World War II, if it was not for the disintegration of the Soviet Union, they're going to be 500 million Russians in the world but now in Russia, there are less than a hundred and 45 million people. So this fear of a shrinking population that is populating one of the biggest territories in the world, in my view, this is hard to understand where all this anxiety comes from.

In my view, this is becoming a problem for Russia itself and one of the problems with Putin is that he's not allowing basically, Russians to talk openly of how post-Putin Russia can look like. If you see what Europeans are talking about, we want an economy that does not rely at all on Russian gas and oil. We'll basically want to make clear that they're not going to be a movement of people. We want basically reduce the relations as a result of it in a certain way, particularly the West starts to dream about the world without Russia.

Ian Bremmer:

Yes, certainly the western world without Russia, yes.

Ivan Krastev:

And in a certain way now Russia started to dream about the world without West, but Russia was much more part of this western world than anything else. China is a very reliable and important ally now, but I have not seen many kind of Russians that are culturally attracted by China. It's simply very far, it's very-

Ian Bremmer:

and there's no infrastructure. There's very little trade compared to the West. I mean, it's just not there.

Ivan Krastev:

So from this point, paradoxically, the result of all this is that what Russia is getting is COVID forever. The quarantine, you're staking out your house, you cannot get out, and you have this sense of claustrophobia. Also some of your best people are leaving. If you see how many IT people has left the country for the last two or three months, this is an issue.

Ian Bremmer:

Hundreds of thousands, yeah.

Ivan Krastev:

Hundreds of thousands. So in a certain way you can survive because you're a nuclear power, so you cannot be defeated in conventional terms, but then your country, which cannot even dreaming about your own future. This is a problem, by the way. It's a problem for the West, not only for Russia. I do believe that we also lost the capacity to imagine a different Russia. I do believe that different Russia is probably possible, but this is the Putin effect. While the Soviet leaders wanted their mummified bodies to be put in the mausoleum, I do believe that Putin succeeded to mummified the body of Russia itself.

Ian Bremmer:

Ivan Krastev, powerful words to close our conversation. Thanks a lot. I hope you're wrong.

Ivan Krastev:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it. For today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast, like what you've heard, come check us out at www.gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, first Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of service, safety and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit .firstrepublic.com to learn more. GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. Challenge yourself to change the world on season three of Course Correction, a podcast from Doha Debates. In partnership with the UNHCR Refugee Agency, host Nelufar Hedayat takes listeners on the journey of a refugee from the moment of displacement, to mental health risks, to integration, and assimilation. Learn about the issues affecting displaced persons around the world and what you can do to solve them. Follow and listen to Course Correction wherever you get your podcasts.

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