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Wars are complicated. A huge country attacks a much smaller neighbour. They have a far
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bigger army, many more tanks, many more planes, much more ammo. They even have a powerful
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navy while the country they are attacking doesn't have a navy at all. You would think
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that it's a slam dunk. But the world is a strange place and as every good woman could
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tell you, size isn't everything. You have to look at incentives. One side is fighting
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just to win a war. The other one is fighting to stay alive. You have to look at history
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and a deep dive into Russia's history might indicate that Putin's hyper-nationalism is
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not something unusual for them. But if you look at Ukraine's history, you'd also realise
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that they weren't going to roll over and give way. You also have to consider human ingenuity
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and human incompetence. And in today's conversation, you'll find many examples of incompetence
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from the large Russian army and many examples of incredible ingenuity from Ukraine, including
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when they build something exactly like an Uber app to coordinate military hits on the
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enemy. You will also realise, as I did, that this war concerns us all. If you care about
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human freedom, if you want liberal democracy to flourish, it's important that Ukraine
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win this war. It's not just Ukraine's existence as a nation-state that is at stake. All the
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about are also up for grabs. This war matters. Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly
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podcast on economics, politics and behavioural science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen. My guest today is my good friend, the brilliant Ajay
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Ajay is a geek who, once he gets into a subject, really gets into it. He's always been into
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military history and history in general, and once his Ukraine-Russia conflict started,
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he made himself such a geek on it that the Southern Command of the Indian Army invited
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him to give a talk on this conflict to their top brass. We sat down and recorded this episode
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on Sunday, June 18th, and we went in detail into Russian history, Ukrainian history, modern
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geopolitics, military weaponry, military strategy and so on. This is a comprehensive deep dive,
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I know you'll love it. Then on June 24th, when the Wagner Rebellion happened, we decided
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to add an addenda to this episode where we discuss Wagner. That'll come at the end of
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the recording, so hang around after we say bye because hey, we returned. Also, we meant
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to release this episode next Monday, and before that, release episode one of a YouTube video
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podcast Ajay and I are starting called Everything is Everything. So we start this conversation
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talking about everything is everything as if it has already released, but sorry, not
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yet. It will release at noon, India time, this Friday, June 30th. I'll post a link
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on my Twitter at Amit Verma AMI-TV ARMA. Meanwhile, do listen to this episode. I hope you start
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geeking out like us and don't miss the resonance to what is happening in other parts of the
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world as well. But first, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Ajay, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. It's great to be here, Amit, as always. Not
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only is it the eighth or ninth time that I've had the good fortune of having you on
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The Scene and the Unseen, but we've also started our YouTube show together. Everything is
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everything. And logically, one could say you are already doing a YouTube show. Why don't
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you talk about the subject there? And this subject didn't fit that format because that
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format is really one hour or 15 minute chapters and doesn't really fit this. But at another
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level, it does fit the theme of the show, because the theme of the show, as that name
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indicates, everything is everything, is about the interconnectedness of everything. And
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in a sense, that is also why you felt that you wanted to talk about the Ukraine-Russia
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war, because it is deeply connected to all of us here in India, here in Bombay, in fact,
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to anyone anywhere in the world, wherever you're listening to this. It's not a random
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war in some far off corner of the world. It is deeply interesting from a point of view
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of history, from a point of view of warfare, from a point of view of society, and from
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a point of view of our local interests. So tell me a little bit more about this. And
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what are the different sort of strands of interest that brought you to thinking about
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this? And why do you take it so seriously? My interest is in the world. And I'm always
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trying to understand all the pieces that are in motion. It requires an interdisciplinary
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perspective. And here, there is, as you mentioned, the fields of history, international
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relations, military affairs, economics, a whole bunch of things are in motion together.
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And there is so much in play. The world is now richly interconnected. It is more
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interconnected than it ever was in previous high intensity conflicts. So I just got sucked
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into reading more and thinking more and pulling on threads and understanding how X is linked
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to Y. And so at the outset, I just want to warn everybody that I'm not an expert on most
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of this. I know many of the pieces, but there is a great deal of intellectual trespass.
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I've not written on most of these fields. I've been an enthusiastic reader. So I just
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like to warn everybody there will be mistakes. Our hope today is that we will show you something
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about how interesting and important this is. We hope to give you the broad contours of
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the story and its interconnections into the world and get you going on curiously plucking
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at the pieces on your own. And you know, as we record this, I felt this breeze on my foot.
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And I have to tell you that we are recording this almost in a semi outdoor place in a village
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in a distant India. So if you hear sounds of a storm brewing, well, you know, metaphorically,
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we're in the middle of a storm, but there might well be an actual storm, but you can kind of
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excuse us. Before we begin, I sort of have a sort of question on how people approach A, history
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and B, current events and you know, both of them. One, there is a tendency to always look at
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current events as part of some kind of historical trend in some way to have this teleological
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narrative when things are determined. You know, Timothy Snyder once, you know, spoke about
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the tendency of calling Putin fascist. He said, quote, it sounds weird, but to say that he is
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influenced by fascism is to give him credit. He's not just a historically determined piece in the
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story of transitions. He's been doing something different for more than a decade, stock quote.
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And a tendency for, and this is like many of the authoritarians that Snyder has studied, like
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Stalin and Hitler in different ways, believed in a historical reading of the world and how, what
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they were doing, perhaps, you know, apologists for Stalin will often say that this, he was building
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a modern society into being, this was the only way to do so, you know, the end justifying the
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means. Hitler would also give a similar historical justification that, you know, this is something
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that had to be done, and this just happens to be the way that I do it. This is, you know, the
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power of the will, as it were. So one way to look at current events is to look at them as if, you
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know, everything in history has led up to this point, almost as if this is inevitable. And
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therefore, if this is inevitable, there is also the sense that what follows will be inevitable.
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Another way to look at history is to perhaps, while using heuristics of the past, to not be too
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intellectually lazy and to actually look at the world and say that, look, it's madly complex.
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You know, history doesn't repeat, it may rhyme, it doesn't repeat, and you have to look at every
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event in a new way, right? Every person is a new person. Putin is an individual all his own with
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his own motivations, with his own sort of view of history. And that's one thing, that you embrace a
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complexity of that. But at another level, you know, like Snyder's book on tyranny itself, you
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know, aims to find a common thread in tyranny. You know, Jean-Werner Muller had a great book on
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fascism, very aimed to find that common thread of what fascists have in common. And you read that
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and you see a resonance of that, not just with Putin, but many other leaders of the current
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time. So what is sort of your sense of this, that to what extent does history and historical
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narratives play a part in understanding where we are? And to what extent must we watch out for
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that as a danger, and just try to see what is happening as something that cannot necessarily be
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I don't share an old Marxist conception of history as the inevitable play of historical
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forces and the so-called scientific claim that these forces are at work and we've got to
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understand them. History is deeply contingent every step of the way. History is made of the
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thinking and the choices and the values of a lot of us. And we each, puny individuals, we matter
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in how things work out. I find it very useful to use the intuition of nonlinear mathematics.
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Nonlinear mathematics shows us worlds where initial conditions matter into deep in the future,
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where the fluttering of the wings of a butterfly in the Gulf of Mexico generates a tornado in
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Texas and so on. So things happen that appear to be disproportionate, and I believe that recaptures
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human agency. So because there is nonlinearity in the equations of the world, so to speak,
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we regain human agency and we each of us matter, and we each of us matter disproportionately.
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So that's my version of thinking about it that, of course, there is a flow of history and there is
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a lot to understand. And at the same time, each of us are here as sentient, conscious players.
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We are pebbles in the avalanche, but what we think and do matters. At the other flip side,
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there are many people who are too lazy to think deeply and will make do with a superficial sense
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of the arrangement of power today. And very often these are also people who just want to get along
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and figure out how to play their cards in a way that's reasonably viable with today's world.
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And there's a willingness to ignore or overlook history. So I think it is interesting and useful
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and important to have that historical context, because over and over in history,
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if you look at a small data set, if you look at a data set of two years, you will be surprised
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at what comes next, because you just didn't know the distributions that were involved.
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Whereas when you look at a data set of 200 years, then you have a better sense that this can happen,
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this can happen in these conditions, this kind of person does this. Today, when we talk about
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military affairs, I'm going to appeal intensively to history, because actually history teaches us
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a lot about how you wage war and what works and what doesn't work. And so that is valuable knowledge.
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There's a beautiful pithy saying, history does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.
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So I'm somewhere there. So I feel that we should not become despondent.
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We should not feel that we are irrelevant puny figures on a stage where grand men walk the world
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and they make the decisions to do things like invade Ukraine and our job is to fall in line
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and cover and hope that nothing bad happens to us. I feel that it's good and important to read
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and think and understand and then make up our own minds for what we each of us can and should do
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I was just thinking about the butterfly fluttering its wings in the Gulf of Mexico
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and it strikes me that a million other butterflies fluttered their wings at that exact same moment
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and nothing really happened. So it's only with hindsight that you can say it is that specific butterfly.
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But in a particular moment, what will be a butterfly, you never know.
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I mean, if Gavrilo Princip ate something different the night before he shot Franz Ferdinand
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and he got a stomach upset and he didn't go out, the 20th century is different.
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Well, I'm more sympathetic to the Marxian view there that the Indian plate was crashing into the Asian plate.
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And if the tallest point is not Everest, the tallest point would be something else.
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There were great social forces at collision there and it was only a question of how they would play out
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and it would be very different messy outcomes. But on this narrow example, I feel that in that mess
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of continental Europe that had not worked its way out to stable liberal democracies, to modern Europe,
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as long as you don't get to modern Europe, continental Europe was scorpions in a bottle
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who were going to keep striking at each other.
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Before we begin our deep dive into Russia, Ukraine, where we're going to talk about history, military strategy, economics, a lot of other stuff,
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I want to first ask a broader question of why should I care?
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You know, at one level you said, yeah, everything is interconnected and it comes back to us and all of that.
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But there's also a war of ideas, a war of ways of looking at the world.
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There's also, you know, there's that famous quote by Martin Luther King, those memorable words about how the arc of history bends in a particular way.
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I think he meant toward justice. But for me, growing up, it's always been the assumption that the arc of history bends towards freedom.
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You know, it needs constant vigilance and all of that eternal vigilance, but it does bend towards freedom.
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And more and more over the last 10, 15 years, I've kind of come to doubt that I've come to doubt that even in not just in geopolitics,
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but also perhaps in the intellectual space where new intellectual traditions that have now become fashionable seem to care less and less about freedom.
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In the bigger picture, what is at stake here?
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The great question of the 20th century is precisely what you alluded to.
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It was the drama of the idea of freedom and liberal democracy facing up to nationalism and in its nationalist socialist version,
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that is the Nazis and Stalin's version of nationalism and populism.
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And that is the grand story of the 20th century.
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And it feels happy that things worked out as they did.
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So, you know, we're all very thrilled that in 1945, Hitler lost and Imperial Japan resigned, so to speak,
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and that in 1989, the USSR collapsed. These were historic moments.
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And in the recent years, it seems that there are revisionist attempts at questioning all this.
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And this war is the biggest example of a frontal attack on the ideas of liberal democracy and freedom gradually taking root all over the world.
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As you've emphasized, there are also other undercurrents that were going in an unpleasant way.
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And these things are all connected as we'll talk today.
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But there has been no bigger, more frontal assault on the concept of the post-Second World War order as being peace, liberty and democracy than this war.
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And that is why this war is important.
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I could give you many practical stories about the energy market and the wheat market and so on.
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But there is one huge thing, which is that the whole concept of us coming out of the 20th century holding something better
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as having put some demons to rest in 1945 and 1989 is being litigated all over again.
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You know, it's sort of ironic that where you and I think of the fall of the Soviet Union as such a big moment in the fight for freedom
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that Putin himself considers it a geopolitical catastrophe in his words, something that absolutely needs to be reversed.
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And I think it's important to note, because do you think in all of this talk among elites like us that we often almost glibly take the end of history for granted?
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Now, of course, the original essay, the end of history, the end was meant in a different way.
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It was a means and ends kind of end. It's a much misunderstood essay.
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And the original essay had a question mark at the end of it, like, is this the end of history?
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And a sensible question mark as it turned out.
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But are these contrary currents something that we sort of ignored?
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That thinkers of, you know, the last three, four decades perhaps made a mistake saying that inevitably this is where we were going to come.
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And suddenly we find that, no, we don't really matter so much.
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And there are other directions the world is going in and there's not much we can do.
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Let me decompose that first on the question of inevitability.
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I think every generation has to fight its old battles and the story never ends.
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There will never be a destination where everything is sorted and then we are shiny, happy people holding hands that will not happen.
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There will be these problems over and over.
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That said, I am quite optimistic about how this works out.
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So I am optimistic that the central achievements of the 20th century have held and will hold.
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So, for example, you take the incredible rise of the Make America Great Again, the MAGA people in the United States.
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It is an embarrassment and a shame for the United States that this has come back.
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And many a discerning thinker will say to us that, but you know, this stuff was always there.
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It had never entirely gone away.
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There were people who had made their peace and they were holding their tongues.
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But this socially regressive, racist, isolationist, nationalist, all this stuff was there.
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Well, and then I will say that all said and done, the fact is that Trump polls about 35 percent.
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So the glass is half full or is the glass half empty?
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It is not true that a great mainstream of the United States is thinking like a MAGA,
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that a better society has been built and that most people understand and appreciate that that's the direction to stay in.
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Similarly, consider Europe. Marine Le Pen and the AFD are Nazi parties in France and Germany.
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So the glass is half empty in that Nazi party still exists.
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And we would have been shocked 50 years after the Second World War to think that there isn't a viable Nazi party in Germany and there's a viable Nazi party in France.
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Recently, there have been a bunch of arrests where many Nazis had infiltrated the national security establishment.
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So police and intelligence agencies and military agencies are particularly susceptible to nationalism.
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And that's part of how recently there have been some remarkable tours of coffee shops by General Mark Milley in the United States,
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where again and again he's the true blue military guy and he has stood up in coffee shops and done speeches that the purpose of the military is to protect freedom.
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And he always underlines the connection between the liberal dream of freedom and agency and the reason why a military force exists.
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We are not there in its entirety. There is still a Nazi party in France and there is still a Nazi party in Germany.
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But then look, the glass is half full because these get vote shares like 15% and 20%. They're not that important.
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So I think that all in all, the prosperity and peace and the values that have been created in Europe remain a great civilizing factor.
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And by and large, most people are persuaded. So yeah, there are a few holdouts.
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But as this war has shown, all in all, Europe has rallied around the cause.
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I'm going to tell a story where many times it looked like other countries faltered in the story that led up to the Ukraine war.
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But when Bush came to shove, the rest of the world has largely delivered, the rest of the world has largely performed.
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So I'm not that gloomy about how it goes.
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Maybe if we said to ourselves that any reasonable person who looks at the spectacle of the 20th century
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should think in a way that favors freedom and putting an end to these wars between nations
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and think much more like imagine there's no country rather than killing people and committing war crimes and such.
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So the story is not finished, but I think we are in a much better place than we ever were.
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And there are many elements of the story of this war which actually give me hope.
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So I agree with you about we are in a better place than we were.
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But I think one of the key reasons for that is also how technology has empowered individuals in so many unforeseen and unforeseeable ways and will hopefully continue to do so.
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But if I can look at the glass half empty just for a moment before we dive into the weeds,
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which I guess listeners are waiting for, but just to sort of respond to that bit,
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I'm a little more pessimistic because what I think is that assume that we contain multitudes and these strains have always been there with us.
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And your point is that strains have always been there.
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There was a time where they came to dominance, but they went and we've learned the lessons from history.
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And the numbers are too small and they won't come up again.
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But even 35% and 15% scare me.
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One reason for that is individuals also contain multitudes, obviously.
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And I think what happened and we spoke about this in one of our YouTube episodes is that you sort of had a preference cascade at some point
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where many of these people who, you know, had a MAGA strain to their characters could now found that strain amplified,
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now found the incentive strong to, you know, join people in that tribe and to find ownership and all of that.
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And that made the Trump movement, the preference cascade for Trump as it were, much stronger than it would otherwise have been.
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You know, and that's something to worry about.
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One that the incentives of our times where social media almost pushes you to be tribal and where there is a drive towards the extreme
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because that is how you stand out even within a party can exacerbate those aspects.
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And the other thing is that even if only 35% of the people support Trump or any other leader you might name,
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those 35% are going to be much more committed than most of the other 65% because in politics you need another and they have another.
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Whereas people like you and me might be tempted to look at nuances everywhere and sit on our armchairs and not do much
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and maybe we go out and vote against whoever the demagogue is.
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But people like us by and large will have much less motivation to go out and do the activism and do the politics and do the voting even
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than the other 35 would be. So that does scare me a little bit.
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And of course, when it comes to authoritarian leaders who get to power by populist means, that's a very tall hill to climb.
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I mean, stopping that is a tall hill to climb because you look at Putin or Orban or other populists across the world.
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Shall we come back to this point in the discussion at the end?
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Because a lot of the facts that we will talk about will shed light on these questions.
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Right now, I just want to put up a headline. I am open.
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Fair enough. Let's begin. So why would you like to begin this deep dive into Ukraine, Russia?
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So we should first do some amount of just the history. It's a bit tedious, but we need to know some facts.
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And then after that, I feel this landscape is target rich with insights and lessons.
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So what is really exciting is the insights and the lessons.
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So how has this changed our view of the world? And how do we think about the world looking forward differently?
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So let's first get started on history. We should start at some deep history of Russia.
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So the first idea that is fairly well known is that Russia has been an empire run out of Moscow for a long time.
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Empires are not federal republics. Empires involve centralization of power at the capital, in this case, Moscow,
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and the imposition by individuals at the center upon everybody else in the periphery.
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There is a nice phrase for this. In Russia, it's called Russification.
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So the linguistic and cultural assimilation of the periphery by coercive and other means is called Russification.
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And by some metrics, it's been running from 1550 onwards.
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So it's been going on for a long time that Moscow believes it is the center of the universe,
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and it imposes language, culture, and upon its lands, and the lands are constantly expanded by force.
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So this is empire, stark and raw. The regime may have changed. It was a socialist regime.
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It was the USSR. It is Putin. But this is the basic character of Moscow.
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Now, as we can imagine, Russification doesn't work very well.
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And many times, there were countries that were reasonably stable and comfortable inside the empire.
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But then when you prodded them and poked at them with Russification, then they broke away.
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Famous examples are Poland and Finland. So both Poland and Finland were reasonably assimilated into the empire.
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And then Russification initiatives came, such as the use of Russian.
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And the Poles said, no, excuse me, I love my language. And so did the Finns.
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And these were critical factors that led to Poland and Finland breaking away from the empire.
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So this has been a tension that has been there forever.
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Periodically, a strong Moscow conquers territory, and then it becomes overbearing.
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It tries to force its control, its elites, its power, its language upon other people.
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And then that makes other people hopping mad. And then whenever they get a chance, they try to leave.
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This is a recurring theme in history.
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To give you a flavor of how bad Russification could get, here's an example in 1876.
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HQ, that is the center, banned publishing in the Ukrainian language.
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So the state power, the state coercion was used to prevent you from buying a printing press and publishing stuff in the Ukrainian language.
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It's that level of grotesque oppression. And most people would not take that mildly.
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Now, the Tsarist Empire was endlessly in a messy power game with the West.
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They faced military threats from Germany, from Sweden, from European powers.
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And they were always lagging in their cultural, financial, technological power compared to the West.
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So again, back to the ancient days, they were under very high levels of pressure to buy equipment from Europe, most notably to buy from England.
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So the UK was a military equipment vendor to Tsarist Russia.
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And to get that, they had to export something. And so they were exporting grain.
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So this is again a recurring character that Russia did not have European culture.
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And so they were permanently lagging. They didn't have the fire of what was going on in Europe.
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So just to give you the compare and contrast, while the Industrial Revolution began in the UK,
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the Industrial Revolution spread all over Europe, carried by equipment salesmen and wanderers of British origin who went all over Europe and carried their knowledge,
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carried by European people who became apprentices in the UK and took the knowledge back.
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But there was no barrier. There was no gap. So by the time we got to the First World War,
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by most accounts, Germany was a more successful industrial and engineering nation than the UK.
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In 1932, one year before Hitler gained power, there were more Nobel laureates in Germany than in the UK.
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So there was no gap. Continental Europe had every bit of the cultural, financial, technological, institutional capabilities of the UK,
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even though the UK got those revolutions first. That was not the case with Russia.
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Russia was always lagging. But Russia was under the military pressure of having to face up to conquests and invasions from Europe.
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For example, Napoleon's invasion. So that permanently put Russia under threat.
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And the Tsarist government used to scramble to try to create conditions where they would basically grow wheat, export wheat, get hard currency and buy warships and such like.
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That led up to a war with Japan in 1905, which is a historic moment in world history where it shows the Japanese catch-up.
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After the Meiji Restoration, Japan embarked on modernization where they started picking up the entire package of knowledge and institutions from the West.
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And by 1905, they were good enough to defeat Russia in a war.
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They probably did not match what was possible in Western Europe, but hey, they won a war against Japan in 1905.
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And then came the First World War where again Tsarist Russia lost decisively the Battle of Tannenberg and other things that happened on the Eastern Front.
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And these two things came together and created a regime collapse.
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That's another interesting and important lesson that authoritarian regimes don't derive their legitimacy from democratic wellsprings.
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Then dealing with a lost war is far more difficult.
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Losing is much more life-threatening for an authoritarian regime than it is for a democratic regime.
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When the UK fared terribly in the Second World War in 1939 and 1940 all the way to 1941, nothing threatened the regime.
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Liberal democracy in the UK was unquestioned as the only game in town.
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Whereas authoritarian regimes, which are also based on whipping up nationalism, tend to become much more fragile.
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And losing a war is far more devastating for an authoritarian regime.
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So these are the conditions that led up to the Russian Revolution in 1917.
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And then we got the early modernization with Lenin and then Stalin, which led up to the spectacular victory of the Second World War.
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And by 1945, there is little doubt that the Red Army was the greatest land power on the earth.
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Nowhere else in the world was there the force and the knowledge, the capability.
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By 1945, the Red Army knew how to fight modern war, modern war by 1945 standards.
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So it's interesting that in the interwar years, Marshal Tukhachevsky was one of the pioneers of modern war.
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But Stalin was an insecure, weak man who killed off the entire Russian military elite and thereby lost a lot of those ideas, a lot of that knowledge.
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And then after that, the baton of innovation moved to Germany.
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But through the process of fighting the Second World War, they created those feedback loops whereby they lost and lost and lost and lost.
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But then they started learning and they also had huge support from the United States and other Western powers.
#
And all in all, they came together in 1945 as the greatest land power on earth.
#
It was an enormous achievement of the Stalinist state.
#
So while there was a moral hole in the heart of that state, at that time, you had to admit that this stuff worked.
#
It was effective that if you had the barbarism of Nazi Germany clashing with the barbarism of Stalin's USSR, Stalin's USSR did work in terms of winning wars.
#
We could go into that at length, but that's not essential for today.
#
Now, through all this, there were very high levels of cruelty inside the USSR.
#
Many left-leaning people in India tend to gloss over that.
#
And I think that's just wrong. That's not a fair reading of history.
#
There are estimates that the regime killed between 10 to 20 million of its own people.
#
And that's really despicable.
#
And I think they get the third slot in the world behind communism in China and Nazi Germany as a state that murdered its own people on a truly titanic scale.
#
So this was a regime where there was just everyday practice of cruelty and murder on a massive scale.
#
It is a dystopian nightmare, the likes of which has seldom been seen before in the world.
#
As I say again, the only rivals are Mao's China and Nazi Germany.
#
The French philosopher Bernard Henry Levy said about the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn.
#
He said, I quote, the communist dream dissolved in the furnace of a book.
#
And it is really very important that there were people who started writing these books and that changed the world forever.
#
It destroyed any claim that the regime could have for legitimacy.
#
And this also took place in the West before that.
#
People like Arthur Koestler understood the show trials of 1936 and started writing books.
#
So many, many brilliant, important, wonderful thinkers participated in this.
#
Similarly, there's a beautiful line by Boris Pasternak, another great Russian intellectual.
#
I quote, a book is a squarish chunk of hot smoking conscience.
#
That is how those people lived.
#
They lived in the world of books and those books mattered.
#
And those books burned out the legitimacy of the regime.
#
And for everybody who thinks excessively about hard power, it's important to remember that ultimately legitimacy comes from below.
#
The next big event in the history of the USSR was the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
#
All in all, when you read the Russian archives, they were not as delusional as they seem today in the context of Ukraine.
#
They tried something, they understood it did not work.
#
They always wanted to get out.
#
But they lost 15,000 people in that war.
#
Jihadis in Afghanistan were using stinger missiles to shoot down attack helicopters.
#
And all of us know the story.
#
After nine years, Russia left and came back.
#
And I just want to emphasize that the archives don't look so bad for the regime.
#
The regime understood that this isn't working and it's a mistake and it's not worth this expense of blood.
#
They had 15,000 people die over a period of nine years, about little more than two X in terms of wounded.
#
And they made the rational decision to walk away and they exited.
#
But again, that war mattered disproportionately.
#
It exerted a cost on the regime that 15,000 people died and 35,000 people were wounded.
#
And then through the friends and family, the disrespect of the regime percolates.
#
What was this nonsense?
#
You went to this war for nothing.
#
And that led up to a country where the regime was on weak legs.
#
And it was once again a weak economy and a weak society which depended on export of oil and the import of grain.
#
And when the prices of oil and the prices of grain went in the wrong direction, we got to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
#
So this is the quick story about the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.
#
The moment the Soviet Union collapsed, a whole bunch of countries chose to walk away.
#
And if you are a hardcore nationalist and you believe in inviolable national boundaries, then this seems like a bad thing.
#
But if there is a feeling in the people that they'd like to leave and build their own country, beyond a point, it is interesting and important to respect that.
#
So many, many countries walked away.
#
And it's interesting to recall that the countries that walked away had different, different colonization dates.
#
So, of course, the Baltic Republics, which had been captured by Stalin only after the Second World War, they walked away.
#
But many other parts of Soviet Russia chose to walk away.
#
And when a bunch of referendums took place, the people were overwhelmingly clear that I don't want to be part of that Russian Empire.
#
Certainly, the Soviet regime didn't work and I don't want to know what comes next.
#
I will build my own country.
#
So there was a very strong sense amongst many, many countries that they'd rather walk away.
#
There was a great deal of confusion and chaos after 1989 that led up to the rise of Putin in 1999.
#
And things appeared to stabilize, things got better after Putin consolidated power.
#
But once again, it's a story of the price of grain and the price of oil.
#
So because the price of oil went up, Russia at one point was the world's highest oil exporter.
#
And suddenly, Putin had a gush of money coming in and that money created prosperity.
#
Putin found ways of pushing that money into various expenditure corners of the country and things appeared to get better.
#
I fault many people more with the benefit of hindsight elsewhere in the world who thought that the fall of the USSR is so pregnant with implications
#
that any sensible person in Russia will never try to go back to that.
#
So people abroad were a little complacent that, you know, just give it time.
#
They'll figure out that everybody knows it's got to become a democracy.
#
The same optimism debate we were having.
#
People worldwide thought that we don't have a Russia problem anymore.
#
We have a China problem because China never went through the collapse of the communist regime.
#
But here they've done it.
#
They've had a communist regime and they overthrew it themselves.
#
And the people ran away from the old USSR and formed their own countries.
#
And it's patently obvious to anybody that that old stuff didn't work.
#
So now, yeah, you'll meander a little, but you'll find your way.
#
You'll come to liberal democracy because that is the only answer, that is the only game in town.
#
And that's not how it worked out with Putin.
#
And there is a very fundamental way in which, as you said a moment ago, Putin stands for the reversal of 1989.
#
In 2005, he said, and I'm going to quote, and these are sentences that are incredibly important,
#
and I'm not plucking out two sentences that are being quoted out of context.
#
Putin has an entire body of literature in which he's hammering on these two themes.
#
So I'm just going to read out carefully.
#
Quote, first and foremost, it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union
#
was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.
#
So what you and I might consider the greatest moral triumph of the 20th century alongside 1945.
#
Putin considers the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.
#
And I go on with Putin. Quote, as for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy.
#
Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.
#
Unquote. OK, now this is longing for empire.
#
What he was saying is the revisionist idea that I ain't done.
#
That there are people who may have voted to leave the USSR, but I consider you Russian.
#
I consider them Russian people. So there is this very scary concept that is called a civilizational state.
#
And he is saying that you may have left the USSR and you may not be a part of modern Russia,
#
but I consider you Russian people and you are stranded beyond the fringes of Russian territory.
#
And he was keen on the project of rebuilding the old USSR.
#
And that is going to take us to the war in Ukraine.
#
OK, so this is my brief narration of the deep history of Russia from the 15th century till the modern Putin regime.
#
Marvellous, capped history.
#
And also, just to take that theme forward of how he considered the Russian people as much larger than the people in Russia.
#
In 2008, when he was then Prime Minister under Medvedev, that brief period, he told George W. Bush,
#
Quote, Ukraine is not even a country. Stop, quote.
#
And at different points in time, he made similar claims about the other former Soviet states.
#
At one point, you know, he said that before Nur Sultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, he said, quote, Kazakhs never had statehood. Stop, quote.
#
And in 2016, Putin said Russia's border has no end. Right.
#
So, you know, my question here sort of is that in Putin's mind, there seems to be this grand empire narrative where there is a Russian empire
#
and it has been allowed to wither away. And 89 was a moment when it withered away, not 1917 when the regime changed,
#
and 99 is when it sort of withers away and he wants to reverse that.
#
And I want to ask about this grand narrative of empire.
#
Is it something that, you know, in your view, was something that a few fringe nationalists like Putin would have felt?
#
Or was it part of the larger ethos of the country where, you know, how widespread is that sense of a greater Russia, you know,
#
which extends through empires, which extends, you know, which includes the Soviet Union.
#
So it is not as if a regime changed that. How widespread was that?
#
Because Putin, you know, it's often been mentioned how he almost sees himself as a successor of Catherine the Great.
#
Now we are going a long way back. But in his mind, it's this united history of Russian supremacy.
#
The Russian people are one, no matter what the regime is. And now it's fallen apart and he's got to get it together.
#
Now, equally, it is clear from the referendums that you mentioned that not all the what he would call Russian people see it like that.
#
They see it very differently, you know, or at least they seem to see it very differently as expressed in the popular will and so on and so forth.
#
How big is the constituency that sees it the way Putin does of this grand Russian empire and the story?
#
And how deep seated it is, because, you know, sitting here, we here, I mean, not to try to draw parallels too assiduously,
#
but sitting here, one can look at a Hindu Rashtra and I can have the sense that, OK, there is one narrative like that.
#
But it is one small narrative of many. And in our lived reality, it has never really been.
#
It has never really existed as such. We are quite happy coexisting and all that so far, most of the time.
#
But it is a real strand and it can be played upon and it can be amplified.
#
So what's your sense of that? Are Putin's nationalistic beliefs that are so heard by 89, are they common enough for him to have that sort of constituency?
#
There is a piece of every human mind that is susceptible to nationalism.
#
And then you are one step away from empireism, if I may coin such a phrase.
#
Empires are nationalism, but in a different way. There is an arrogance.
#
There is a domination streak inside empire thinking.
#
Now, I'm not one to be skilled in psychoanalysis.
#
But if in 1945 you were the greatest land power in the world, then maybe it goes to your head.
#
Maybe you start inhaling some of this stuff.
#
And by 1944, 1945, what the Red Army was doing is just bewildering in its scale and complexity.
#
So just to give you little bits of story, many of us who are brought up on mass culture tend to be conscious about the D-Day landings and the Western theatre of the Second World War.
#
What happened there is nothing compared with what happened in the Eastern Front.
#
The mighty German Wehrmacht was pounded to nothingness on the Eastern Front.
#
I think in July 1944, August 1944, exactly the time when the D-Day landings were taking place.
#
Sorry, the D-Day landings took place in June.
#
In July 1944, there was something called Operation Bagration, which destroyed Army Group Centre of the Germans in Russia.
#
When you look at the scale and size of that, it was just staggering.
#
So imagine that you start at a little bit of nationalism.
#
You start at a little bit of empire.
#
You start at some superiority complex that Moscow contains intellectually more advanced people than Kazakhstan.
#
They couldn't say that about Ukraine, but they could maybe say that about Kazakhstan.
#
And then you layer on top of that the brute military might of the Red Army in 1944 and 1945.
#
And then maybe this stuff can go further.
#
Another feature is that empires operate coercive power all over the empire through a range of individuals and intermediaries.
#
So there are agents of the centre everywhere.
#
There are policemen, there are investigators, there are taxmen who are the frontline enforcers of the empire.
#
And then these people often tend to be culturally, linguistically drawn from that core.
#
And they're sent out to the periphery.
#
They're agents of empire.
#
And they maintain this us and them that we are here to crush you.
#
So this is the kind of rot that fills the mind of people in empires.
#
This has been there in other empires at its worst.
#
There was a flavor of this in British colonialism.
#
Mercifully, they have exorcised these things to a great extent.
#
Today, Britain has no delusions of empire.
#
They are not here to invade Sri Lanka and regain their empire.
#
Right. And you spoke about the casualties in Eastern Europe.
#
I'll just quote Anne Applebaum on that to give a sense of what that is like and the mark that it would have left.
#
Where Applebaum said, quote, When the numbers are added up, the result is stark.
#
In Britain, the war took the lives of 360,000 people.
#
These are horrific casualties, but they still come to less than 1.5 percent of those countries' populations.
#
By contrast, the Polish Institute of National Memory estimates that there were some 5.5 million wartime deaths in the country, of which 3 million were Jews.
#
In total, some 20 percent of the Polish population, one in five people, did not survive.
#
Even in countries where the fighting was less bloody, the proportion of deaths was still higher than in the West.
#
Yugoslavia lost 1.5 million people, or 10 percent of the population.
#
Some 6.2 percent of Hungarians and 3.7 percent of the pre-war Czech population died too.
#
In Germany itself, casualties came to between 6 million and 9 million people, depending upon whom one considers to be German, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And so on and so forth.
#
Like Applebaum writes about how in Eastern Europe in 1945, you wouldn't have been able to find a single family that had not suffered a serious loss.
#
Yeah, so Timothy Snyder has the phrase Bloodlands to describe Eastern Europe.
#
And this was a historical catastrophe in my mind.
#
And then we got the civilizing moment of 1945 and then 1989.
#
Yeah, and Snyder's phrase is actually taken from a poem by Anna Akhmatova called Requiem, which is very moving.
#
I mean, as an aside, Akhmatova's son was sort of captured during that time and she spent many years trying to free him and therefore, you know, going in all kinds of directions.
#
And Requiem also is slightly overwrought compared to some of her earlier work.
#
But it shows again what he was speaking of, the power of literature to speak across generations like Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak were both actually banned in Russia at the time.
#
So a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich or Gulag Acapulco obviously would not have been read in Russia itself or in the Soviet Union itself as it then was.
#
But today they act as cautionary tales and they have survived and they stand much taller than all of that.
#
And you'll be pleased to know that Memoriam, which is Anna Akhmatova's book, was used as a name of an organization in post-Soviet Russia where the dream was to write down the names of the people who were killed.
#
And that organization has been banned by the Putin regime.
#
Yeah, because she had an incredible line about, let me see if I can find it, I'll quote it.
#
Yeah, she's standing at the gates of the jail and a woman turns to her and says, can you describe this? And she says, yes, I can.
#
And then the rest of the poem runs.
#
This poem is the most spectacular moment of the book Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick.
#
Which is such a great book. Yeah, her exact lines were, I'd like to call you all by name, but the list has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.
#
I wonder a bit about memory, like we'll do a deep dive into Ukraine in a moment, of course, the same way we did into Russia.
#
But I wonder a little bit about memory in the sense that on the one hand, you know, within families, for example, that in India experience partition, it lives partly in, you know, the concrete stories of the relatives with their names and what exactly happened to them.
#
But those die out in a generation or two and all that remains in a sense are numbers, you know.
#
So what Akhmatova says about, you know, I wish I knew the names after a couple of generations, no one knows the names, but there is still across nations, across nationalities, across people everywhere.
#
There are all these, I mean, this sense of loss, these narratives that no longer have a concrete to hold, so to say, but they remain strong and they remain a source of resentment.
#
More generally, every evil regime needs to end, not just in a political collapse, but that needs to be followed by the process of truth and reconciliation.
#
We saw that happen in Germany, we saw that happen in Japan, where the people understood that they had done something terrible and they went deep in their hearts and they pushed that aside to a point where, you know, Nazi parties poll at about 20% in Germany today.
#
For the rest, Germany is one of the great, beautiful, civilized, pacifist countries of the world.
#
That process of truth and reconciliation did not take place after the fall of the USSR.
#
As I said, an organization like Memoriam, which tried to assemble this database of the names of the people murdered by the regime, was banned and shut down by Putin.
#
So similarly, in China, you've got to think that in some ways China has become a capitalist country, but in some ways China zealously runs an official party line around the Cultural Revolution, around Tiananmen Square and so on.
#
So it is not enough to have the disruption of the power of the regime.
#
It is equally important to do what the poets do, what the philosophers do, what every mother and every school teacher does, which is to bring up people who think in new ways.
#
And sometimes it's easy to have the truth and reconciliation, or at least possible to have the truth and reconciliation, when it is solidified in the shape of a regime that rules for a while and is then overthrown.
#
But if you just have, say, a history of communal riots in a country like India, which lasts decades and centuries, and there's no truth and reconciliation, there is always just a calm after the storm and then the calm before the storm.
#
And that kind of makes those fault lines much harder to navigate.
#
I mean, you can, even if you could hypothetically do a truth and reconciliation around partition, which never happened, you still, it still wouldn't do anything about the greater problem of the mistrust between Hindus and Muslims and so on.
#
We should debate that separately.
#
We should debate that separately, and in a sense, this is also a recounting of similar tropes, which may or may not apply to that extent.
#
Okay, here's the deep history of Ukraine, and then we are ready to tell the current story, which starts in 2014.
#
So, Ukraine was very much a country. It was sometimes ruling itself, they were sometimes in conflict with Poland, they were sometimes ruled, pieces of Ukraine were ruled by Poland and Sweden and so on.
#
Most of today's Ukraine fell to Russian rule in the 18th century, and after the Bolsheviks won the civil war that followed the 1917 revolution, most of Ukraine fell under the USSR, but parts went to other countries, and that did not work well.
#
In 1932, Stalin famously did the collectivization, where all farmland was expropriated and brought under government control, and then we were all supposed to live in communes, tailing the commons, and that didn't work very well.
#
Some of the greatest resistance against collectivization came in Ukraine. Ukraine is very good agricultural land. It has been called the breadbasket of Europe. In some ways, it is the breadbasket of the world.
#
It is amazing, open, flat land, great for growing wheat, great for tank battles, and the rich landowners in Ukraine did not like being expropriated and they resisted.
#
Stalin executed a famine, so what they did was that they put up barriers that prevented any bringing in of grain, and the Communist Party rigorously expropriated all grain that they could find, and so they pulled off a famine.
#
And 13% of the population of Ukraine died in that famine in 1932. So for a sense of scale, all of us in India were used to the Bengal famine of 1943.
#
The population of Bengal was about 6 crore, 60 million, and the proportion of the people of Bengal that died in the famine of 1943 was 3%, whereas for comparison, the fraction of the Ukrainian population that died in this famine was 13%.
#
So you can imagine every single family in Ukraine hated Stalin and hated the USSR. So when the Germans invaded in 1941, for many Ukrainians, they were very happy to support anybody who would attack the Soviet regime, and many of them readily accepted Nazi monikers and so on, which seems quite scary, but you've got to put it in context.
#
If Hitler had any intelligence at all, he would have harnessed the hatred of the USSR in the eyes of all the peoples. So the Communist regime or Stalin were never popular all over Soviet Russia, so if Hitler had any intelligence, he would have supported these people and they would have become his loyal partners in the project.
#
But no, Hitler was another fool. He had crazy racist ideas and German cruelty was equally deployed towards Ukrainians as it was towards Russians.
#
Some of the most amazing stories of the Second World War, there were great battles that took place on Ukrainian land in 1941 and then 1944.
#
So that's a period of Ukrainian history which was not very nice. 1932, the famine, the German invasion in 1941 and then the Red Army winning in 1944.
#
After the Second World War, Ukraine found its feet and did rather well. It generally has higher education and literacy as compared to the averages of Russia.
#
And then we get to the 1986 Chernobyl accident. The Chernobyl nuclear reactor is physically located inside Ukraine.
#
So people in Ukraine and large land area inside Ukraine was again at the brunt of the incompetence and stupidity of the Soviet regime that created the Chernobyl accident.
#
So there were not a whole lot of happy memories of Soviet rule. Ukraine was never a happy part of the Soviet Union.
#
So when the 1991 referendum came, 90% of Ukraine chose to leave. So the referendum won with a 90% margin, 90 to 10.
#
By the way, there is a part of Ukraine that is called Donbass where there are more Russian speakers. In the rest of Ukraine, there is more of the Ukrainian language.
#
On the east, there is a piece of Ukraine that is called the Donbass. It's an industrial area.
#
And there are more Russian speakers there partly because workers were brought in from Russia to live in the Donbass to be industrial workers.
#
And I remember Boris Yeltsin asked about the referendum saying, what about Donbass? Did we lose in Donbass too?
#
And the answer came back, yeah, that Russia decisively lost in Donbass too.
#
The people of Donbass, even though mostly Russian speaking, were happier saying bye bye to the USSR or the new Russian regime and saying, we will be Ukraine.
#
We will be a brand new country. And there was no interest in staying.
#
Now, at that time, a lot of Soviet nukes were on Ukrainian soil.
#
Ukraine had the third largest number of nuclear weapons of the whole world at the time after the USSR, after Russia and the US.
#
There was a ton of nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil.
#
And in 1994, an agreement was worked out, which is called the Budapest Memorandum, where all those nuclear weapons were to be given to Russia.
#
So again, the Western conception, which now with the benefit of hindsight, one would disagree with.
#
The Western conception is Russia is the great power that succeeds the Soviet Union.
#
And so Russia will get that United Nations Security Council seat and Russia will become that nuclear power.
#
And somehow Russia will be a responsible state that will be wise in its use of the nuclear weapons and so on.
#
Somehow the West jumped to the conclusion that everything is going to be fine. Russia is going to become a democracy.
#
And we now know with the benefit of hindsight that it didn't work out that well.
#
And I just want to point out one note of great bitterness.
#
In return for handing over all the nukes, Ukraine got security guarantees from the UK and the US and Russia.
#
They guaranteed the borders of Ukraine and they guaranteed that none of them would mess with the borders of Ukraine.
#
And so that 1994 treaty clearly did not work in the hands of Putin, who felt comfortable violating that treaty and invading Ukraine.
#
So this is the deep history of Ukraine that takes us to the threshold of the modern stuff.
#
Tell me one aspect of it. I can get the Ukrainian hatred of the Soviets and the Russians and their desire to be not part of that particular process.
#
But is there also a Ukrainian nationalist narrative of their own?
#
Like who they are, a certain kind of pride that emerges from that.
#
A history and a culture that is starkly independent of their being colonized as it were by Russia.
#
I wouldn't say starkly independent because all neighboring regions tend to know each other.
#
They tend to socialize it and to blend into each other.
#
But yes, there was a Ukrainian nationalist narrative.
#
Okay, actually, let's look back at the events after 1991.
#
After 1991, the Ukrainian state started trying to find its feet.
#
And actually, there were many individuals inside Ukraine who were skeptical, who viewed themselves as Russian.
#
So while 90% voted in the referendum to leave, partly there were 10% that didn't.
#
Also, the early birth pangs of a new country are never edifying.
#
So many people started looking to Russia and Russia started meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine.
#
It is very difficult to be a fledgling country trying to find its feet as a neighbor to a giant that is meddling inside your local politics.
#
So there was constantly this tension between a Russia leaning faction or somebody that would gloss over the differences and say,
#
Yeah, we're basically Russian versus a much stronger Ukrainian nationalist narrative saying that we are distinct.
#
We have our own language. We have our own culture. We are different from Russia.
#
So there was a long element of these birth pangs in the period after 1991.
#
And it didn't help that in many ways the country was floundering, the country was finding its feet, as was Russia.
#
But Russia had that oil. So they had huge revenues from oil after Putin came to power.
#
And that in a way papered over many of the difficulties.
#
But Ukraine was in a messy state and had many difficulties in terms of finding its feet as a country, fixing up a republic, getting to rule of law.
#
All those things were very difficult.
#
They had a better hand of cards than mainland Russia in that they had more talent, they had more human capital.
#
In a way, not having oil is a blessing because of the resource curse.
#
The best thing for a country that you would hope for is to have no natural resources so that then only intellectual capital is the way to get ahead.
#
And that happened to Ukraine. So they started building bigger and bigger human capital and capabilities through the years.
#
But it was a tough period.
#
So let's come to the present day or rather let's come to 2014, which is when the next big rupture sort of happens. Tell me about that.
#
So the Ukrainian state was messily moving along in this fashion.
#
And there was a head of state called Yanukovych, who was basically a friend of Russia.
#
Arguably many unpleasant things done by the Russian state helped to get Yanukovych to power.
#
In November 2013, there was a big milestone.
#
There was an important agreement with the European Union that was to be called an association agreement.
#
Which would really deeply connect Ukraine into Europe.
#
That agreement was about to be signed and Yanukovych, under Russian pressure, decided to not sign it.
#
So that was a big turning point for Ukraine because the people took to the streets.
#
Just lakhs of people came out in demonstrations every day.
#
There were many, many days where 10, 20, 30 people would be killed by security forces every day.
#
So you can imagine lakhs of people coming out into the streets and 10, 20, 30 people being killed by government, police and troops every day in the course of those protests.
#
All around one question, do we lean Russian or do we lean European?
#
If the association agreement was signed, it would bind Ukraine more into the European economy.
#
And the people were out on the streets.
#
There is a phrase for these protests. They call them Maidan protests.
#
We will recognize the word Maidan of course.
#
So with the Maidan protests, the people of Ukraine screamed at the regime, at the pro-Russian regime saying,
#
We want to lean European. We do not want to lean towards Russia.
#
So here once again you see a milestone of how the unique Ukrainian character was created.
#
It was created out of this adversity. Modern Ukraine has been created out of these battles.
#
And lakhs of people coming out to the streets and fighting the regime every day.
#
And it ended when Yanukovych fled Ukraine.
#
The date is important. He ran away from Ukraine on the 22nd of February 2014.
#
Now that was bad for Putin because Putin was nurturing the dream of making Ukraine a part of the Russian empire with various shades of grey.
#
One ready demo is Belarus.
#
Belarus is right next to Ukraine, in between Ukraine and Russia in one part of its border.
#
And Belarus has a government which is completely in bed with Putin.
#
So Putin effectively has control over the Belarusian government.
#
While technically Belarus is a separate country for all practical purposes,
#
Belarus is a puppet in the hands of Putin.
#
So that was a model that Putin would have liked with Yanukovych.
#
And that didn't work out. Yanukovych had to flee the country.
#
So on 22nd February Yanukovych fled the country.
#
On the 27th of February Putin organized the invasion of Crimea.
#
So Crimea is the piece of land jutting out below Ukraine into the Black Sea.
#
It's a beautiful piece of land from which you can build naval power and dominate the Black Sea.
#
And Putin preserved deniability by sending in Russian soldiers wearing non-Russian military uniforms.
#
So on paper it was claimed that no, no, this is not a Russian invasion.
#
These are Russian loyalists inside Crimea grabbing power from the Ukrainian government.
#
But actually they were Russian soldiers.
#
There's a phrase from that period they're called little green men.
#
So it was claimed that they are just militias.
#
They are angry Ukrainian people who want to be in a brotherhood with Russia.
#
But within a matter of weeks Putin agreed that this was Russian soldiers that were sent in.
#
And they grabbed Crimea.
#
And on the 7th of April Putin did an old trick of the Stalin and Hitler period
#
where you create a fake republic in an adjoining country.
#
So Putin invented the DPR, the Donbass People's Republic and the LPR, the Luhansk People's Republic.
#
These are bullshit names which are given to a separatist movement in a neighboring country
#
which is a bullshit name given to your own troops fighting in another country.
#
So this is standard playbook of Stalin and Hitler.
#
These are things that the tyrants of the 20th century did.
#
And that playbook was rolled out here and a war started in the East.
#
So in February Putin invaded Crimea and in April Putin started a war in Donbass.
#
And both times on both sides at first it was claimed, oh no, this is not Russia.
#
These are local people. This is a rebellion by local people who want to be embraced by Russia.
#
But actually they're Ukrainians who are fighting against Ukraine.
#
And Russian propaganda is very effective.
#
You'll be amazed at the number of people in India who have bought into a lot of this.
#
Many Indian newspapers regularly carry Russian propaganda.
#
And it doesn't stand up to a little bit of scrutiny as does a lot of fake news.
#
But you've got to know a little and think a little and read a little bit of history to understand these things.
#
Now what did all this do? Ukraine had a struggle of its life on their hands.
#
On one hand, a chunk of Ukraine, namely Crimea, had been grabbed.
#
On the other hand, there was a war on the eastern side where Russia was basically invading Ukraine.
#
So the first is Ukraine once again embraced Europe more closely.
#
So that agreement that was blocked by Yanukovych was finally signed in 2017.
#
In June 2014, a smaller version of that agreement was signed.
#
But the full association agreement that was planned in 2014 was finally signed in 2017.
#
Many of us will remember MH17, a plane that was shot down where 298 people died.
#
Well, it was Russian forces who shot down MH17.
#
So it was just incompetence at the front. They didn't understand that this is a civilian airline.
#
I'm reminded in the late Soviet period where there was a South Korean flight that was shot down over Russian soil.
#
It was that kind of thing that the incompetence of the military forces led to the shooting down of a civilian plane and 298 people died.
#
Across all this grabbing Crimea and invading the East, what did the rest of the world do?
#
It seems shocking to look back, but with the benefit of hindsight, the world did nothing.
#
I mean, there were some sanctions. Russia was ejected from the G8.
#
The G8 became the G7, but basically nothing happened.
#
But despite the Budapest agreement, the guarantees didn't work.
#
And Germany continued to embrace Russia.
#
France continued to embrace Russia.
#
They were doing appeasement straight out of Chamberlain and Hitler.
#
And they were every day binding the economies closer into a gas and crude oil dependency upon Russia.
#
So in all this, Obama doesn't look good. Angela Merkel doesn't look good. Macron doesn't look good.
#
We tend to think about people in very sweeping ways.
#
People are rich and complicated, and I enormously admire Obama and Merkel for many things.
#
But this is one big thing where they got it completely wrong.
#
So they basically just sat back and did nothing while Putin grabbed Crimea and started a war in the East and started gobbling territory.
#
Agreements were signed with NATO, and NATO started training the Ukrainian army to come out of being a low-quality Russian-quality army
#
to rising to NATO standards of knowledge and training and some amount of small equipment.
#
No big equipment went to Ukraine yet.
#
And that war in the East ground itself down into a stalemate.
#
So that was phase one of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
#
So there is phase two, and we're going to come to that, which started in February 2022.
#
But actually, the invasion began in 2014.
#
Russia invaded and grabbed Crimea and a chunk of the East in 2014.
#
And in the case of Crimea, not a shot was fired.
#
In the case of the East, it became an active hot war, which ground down to a stalemate where 1,500 people would die every year.
#
Germany and France have long had this notion that they will be a bridge between the East and the West.
#
And by the way, they believe this with the communist USSR.
#
There were many pieces of Germany that were not entirely on board on the more hawkish project of the destruction of the communist regime in the USSR.
#
They were in a mood to make peace.
#
They would gloss over these differences, and they had this idea that we will civilize them through trade.
#
With the benefit of hindsight, we know none of this is true.
#
There has long been that strand of thinking in Germany that you make peace with Russia
#
and that Germany and France will be the middlemen who will be the peacemakers between Anglo-Saxon hostility towards Russia
#
versus this concept that you can make peace and that you can live and let live and don't need to come to blows.
#
Some of it may be rooted in German pacifism.
#
There is a deep sense of guilt in Germany for what German armed forces did in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
#
So they feel that pang of guilt, and so then they think, oh, but we should be nice to these people.
#
But there I feel they made a mistake in conflating the people and the state.
#
The state and the people are completely different.
#
And by the way, similarly, many times there are accusations of Russophobia or hatred of Russia,
#
and I think that again reflects the mistake that many people make that the Indian state is the same as the Indian people.
#
They are not. They are two distinct communities, and it's possible to have a very different view of these two.
#
It is perfectly possible for a person such as myself to be a great admirer of the Russia of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky and Vasily Grossman
#
and movies like Dersu Uzala and so on.
#
I am a great admirer of Russian culture and Russian science.
#
I am very conscious that some of the first proofs of the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem came out of Russian mathematicians and so on.
#
We admire the people. That doesn't mean we make peace with the state.
#
The state and the people should always be seen differently.
#
And Russia will blossom into becoming a beautiful, great country, as happened with Germany and Japan.
#
When they get the pieces right of a civilized state that protects the people and does not oppress them and does not deploy violence against its own people, this is the same everywhere.
#
So I feel it's important to maintain that distinction.
#
And I feel that for many in Germany and France, there was this mixing up of we want to be nice and kind to the people of Russia.
#
And so then they became nice and kind to an authoritarian regime that ruled Russia, and that's not the same.
#
Sama, I thought that during this episode, if you had to mention cinema, you might mention Eisenstein, but I didn't expect Kurosawa to come in there with Dersu Uzala.
#
And that line, we will civilize them with trade, is again, like you point out, a great line when it comes to the people,
#
because you change the incentives and it's a great way to just bring about peace.
#
But when you're talking about a regime, you can't do that.
#
Like a phrase that our friend Pranay Kutasane is very fond of using when it comes to Pakistan is a putative state of Pakistan, where the point is there is a military jihadi complex.
#
It's not even clear that the people want that.
#
But the people are so different. The people are basically us culturally, you know, so that's something to remember.
#
Bring me up to the current day, like I'm particularly interested with if I'm a Ukrainian, how am I reacting?
#
Because I am, for example, imagining, let's say China takes over Arunachal Pradesh and they make an in-road somewhere in Ladakh where there's an active war and whatever.
#
And then I'm just sitting around and waiting. Like, what are my feelings? What is going on? What is happening in internal politics?
#
You know, doesn't internal politics change because you're likely to have more nationalistic voices coming?
#
What's the domestic scene like and how do we get to the present day?
#
And so first of all, this is the, I want to use adjectives with care.
#
This is the worst high intensity war since the Second World War.
#
The ferocity of modern weapons and the capability on both sides has never been seen since the Second World War.
#
So there is something unique about the horror of this war. As a consequence, this is not a faraway war.
#
This is not China making trouble in Arunachal Pradesh, China making trouble in Ladakh.
#
This is a war that hits at the lives of the people in a way that takes you back to the Second World War.
#
Nobody can ignore this war.
#
You're referring to the 2014 Donbass thing or you're referring to the current war?
#
The current war. So if you are an average citizen of Ukraine, you can't ignore this. This is not something happening far away.
#
This is a ferocity and mayhem and destruction.
#
No, I was referring to the reaction to Donbass, but carry on.
#
And I'll come back to this. A very, very important person that shaped the story here is Volodymyr Zelensky, the present head of state.
#
It's an interesting story. Zelensky was a television star.
#
And in fact, he acted in a TV show in which he played the head of state of Ukraine when Russia invaded Ukraine.
#
It's like this is life imitating art on an unbelievable scale.
#
He also did a skit where he plays a piano with his erect penis.
#
So Zelensky is just this amazing, interesting guy.
#
And you've got to psychoanalyze Putin. Putin is this grim, strong man, right?
#
Who just will instinctively look down upon this bright, clever, witty person.
#
It's just in the nature of human beings that when you are this dour, strong, aggressive person,
#
you will tend to look down upon the creative types.
#
Well, Zelensky was a creative type. Zelensky should not be underestimated.
#
He has a law degree. He's a successful businessman.
#
And he has shown character of a Churchill level in this war.
#
And so he's really rallied the people. And I'll tell some of these stories in a greater extent.
#
So this war has forged Ukrainian cultural and national identity in a way that Putin could not have imagined.
#
So to go back to your previous question, was there that much of a distinctive Ukrainian culture and nationality?
#
I would say softly earlier that, yes, it was different.
#
Gujarat and Maharashtra are different. For anybody from a distance, we are all alike.
#
But we will each emphasize how we are different like that.
#
So I would not overstate the differences between Ukraine and Russia in the earlier period.
#
But now this war has forged the Ukrainian identity and the leadership of Zelensky has forged that identity.
#
He has been Churchillian in terms of his, to adapt an old phrase.
#
It is said of Churchill that he picked up the words of the English language and hurled them into battle.
#
Zelensky has done that every night with his own people.
#
He's talked to his people. He has brought hope and courage into his people.
#
And so today there's a very distinctive sense of the fight that has taken place.
#
Every family in Ukraine has been affected.
#
Millions of people have left as refugees and lived for some time in Eastern Europe and Western Europe as refugees,
#
have come back when it looked like their town was stabilized.
#
So all kinds of things have happened to everybody in the country that this war is not something far away.
#
This is something that people have had to look at.
#
So what's sort of been happening since then?
#
Because I would imagine that Putin takes over Crimea.
#
Putin starts what he starts in Donbass which is something that is simmering there constantly
#
and it's sort of on the burner all the time without quite exploding.
#
What is the plan? What is the plan and what do others perceive the plan to be?
#
What does Ukraine perceive the plan to be? What does the West perceive the plan to be?
#
What's going on here and what brings it to a boiling point?
#
So one part of this story is Putin was a KGB person before he became head of state.
#
And he deeply understood hybrid warfare.
#
Simple warfare is where you pick up a gun.
#
Hybrid warfare is where you use many other tools and often tools that have deniability.
#
So it is an intelligence coup to send in little green men into Crimea.
#
So you don't apparently overtly launch a war,
#
but suddenly your people pop up all over Crimea and grab control of offices and so on.
#
It is an intelligence man's idea that we'll create a fake LPR and DPR
#
and we will say they are fighting the war against Ukraine.
#
They are rebelling against Ukrainian rule.
#
In similar fashion, Putin invented many ways in which he could fight an asymmetric war against the West.
#
You mentioned the rise of social media and Putin and his people understood
#
how to use modern internet and social media to attack institutions
#
and shape state power and the working of elections in the West to a remarkable extent.
#
So the phrase that is used in the modern world is either influence operations
#
or the phrase that is used is Femi.
#
He played this very well in the UK.
#
Putin was a major player tipping the scales to get the UK to leave the European Union.
#
Now this was a long term historic Russian strategic objective to separate the UK from Europe
#
because if the UK and Europe work together, that would be a much more powerful opponent against Russia.
#
So he achieved something remarkable by using all the screaming on Facebook
#
and weaponizing the kind of nonsense that can be written on the internet.
#
He actually, in my opinion, achieved Brexit because the margin was wafer thin.
#
And if Putin's operations moved 500,000 votes, then that suffices to tip the Brexit outcome.
#
But that is still speculation.
#
Even his role in Russia's role in the 2016 election was later found to have been extremely overblown.
#
No, I want to say this in two parts.
#
So let's start with Brexit.
#
There is no doubt that Putin played for Brexit.
#
He worked hard for Brexit.
#
Investigation reports are now out.
#
There was no collusion between Putin and Boris Johnson.
#
So that's the British case.
#
So in the American case, first, there is no doubt.
#
There is intelligence documents that we know about Putin's internet actions trying to damage Hillary Clinton and help Trump to win.
#
There's no doubt that that happened.
#
What is not clear is the level of collusion, is the extent of collusion.
#
The reports were redacted and you could not indict a sitting president.
#
And for right now, I'm willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
#
Putin understood that getting a bad president for the United States is a great deal for the US.
#
And he also did some things to plant important ideas about Ukraine into Trump's world.
#
Now, again, we don't know how much bribery.
#
We don't know how much was the quid pro quo that you helped me on winning the American election.
#
I will help you on Ukraine.
#
Here are elements of the smoking gun.
#
There is a man in America named Paul Manafort.
#
Paul Manafort was a consultant for Yanukovych, the person that I just described.
#
Imagine Paul Manafort worked for the Russian stooge in Ukraine and was paid for by that person and by Russian interests.
#
Isn't it the case Joe Biden's son also did for Red Matter?
#
Hunter Biden had Ukraine businesses.
#
This guy worked as an election advisor and an election manager for Yanukovych.
#
So it's as direct as you get and got payments from oligarchs who were linked to Putin.
#
Paul Manafort pitched for and won the job of being a campaign manager for Donald Trump.
#
So here you had the election campaign of Donald Trump being run by somebody with strong Russian links,
#
with a payment of zero.
#
Who does the work of being a campaign manager for zero?
#
So in all probability there was some other quid pro quo going on where Manafort was carrying some agendas perhaps and getting deeply embedded into Trump's orbit.
#
There was some remarkable stuff that happened right before the Republican National Convention where Paul Manafort changed the Republican Party.
#
The Republican Party position on Ukraine to become more pro-Russian.
#
So Putin was playing asymmetric warfare.
#
Just to clarify by the way, I actually agree with you and I'd go further and I'd say that I agree with you on the evidence of collusion and the implication that Trump was practically a Putin client.
#
I agree with all of that.
#
I'm just saying his influence on the 2016 election itself was later found to be very overblown and not remotely as much as stated.
#
But that's a different matter.
#
Let's discuss information warfare separately.
#
I think the world has been getting better on information warfare.
#
All of us are more skeptical about the rubbish that comes to us on WhatsApp or social media.
#
But in 2016 everybody was a little more credulous.
#
So there's a separate argument.
#
There was a significant Putin program on trying to move the American elections and he got Paul Manafort and some other shaky characters deep inside Trump's orbit.
#
So all in all these were very interesting hybrid warfare activities through which Putin was able to punch above his weight.
#
So now let me pull together Putin's mind.
#
In 2008 he invaded Georgia, by and large Godavay Scottfrey.
#
In 2014 he invaded Crimea and started a war in eastern Ukraine by and large Godavay Scottfrey.
#
Now he executed Brexit, which he thought would reduce the collaboration between the UK and Europe.
#
He thought that Germany and France are collaborators, are appeasers like Chamberlain.
#
And he thought Trump is a bit of a fool and is somewhat compromised.
#
So he was actually looking at the chessboard and thinking, hmm, this is going pretty good.
#
And that led to the decision on invading Ukraine.
#
So I just want to reconstruct his mind that there was a lot of laying the groundwork in terms of hybrid warfare to create conditions on the chessboard under which he may have thought that he would get away with this.
#
It is also said that he responded to Covid in a ridiculously paranoid way.
#
He famously stopped meeting people like nobody would get to meet him.
#
If you had to meet him, you had to be quarantined for two, three days, taking many a test and only then you would be admitted into the room.
#
And then he would keep the person 15 feet away on a long table, those kinds of things.
#
So not being around human beings may have further warped his mind.
#
So when you're a powerful person, always and always you see the world less well because everybody is lying to you.
#
So there's a great line by an American novelist, the further away you are from power, the more clearly you see.
#
And I flip that around. The more you have power, the less you can see the world because you are warped in the best of times.
#
And on top of that, in a Covid environment with the paranoia, not meeting people, it probably further contaminated his decision making and maybe he succumbed.
#
He's a 70-year-old man. He's got a lifetime of stewing on resentment by Russian standards. He's a short man.
#
Maybe all these things came together. He's five foot seven.
#
So maybe all these things came together and that led to the decision to press the killer.
#
Hitlerian stature. I think Hitler was also pretty short.
#
So this is what brings us to early 2022, right up to the war.
#
Perfect. So let's talk about early 2022.
#
So Putin made the decision that we're going to invade Ukraine.
#
I'm first going to describe what happened and then we're going to go back and analyze what was going on under the hood.
#
So first for the facts and then a little more of the insight. And I think the insights came later.
#
At first, I'm just reporting the shock and awe. Remarkably enough, Western intelligence had penetrated Putin's regime completely.
#
So it is just amazing how Western intelligence knew everything that was going on blow by blow.
#
And they chose a remarkable strategy. They kept on releasing everything into the public domain.
#
So, you know, you think of hard-won secrets to be held tightly to their chest.
#
They kept on releasing this into the public domain.
#
And I think that is an interesting new strategy of the 21st century that sometimes the best way to defuse something is just to release the information in public.
#
And the person who may have been preparing something in secret suddenly realizes all that is exposed.
#
But don't you lose your access or whatever?
#
They would have thought about it. All the way till today, the West has excellent sources inside the Putin regime.
#
So there are enough people who hate the regime.
#
So like in old communist Russia, there are enough people who don't like what is going on and they are managing to access many, many documents.
#
I guess they would think that I've got to get the document from three different sources.
#
Only then I'll release so that it can never be identified that it came from one source.
#
And they kept on releasing all these plans in the public domain.
#
Also, this is psychological warfare against the mind of Putin.
#
Putin is an intelligence guy. He's a KGB guy.
#
So particularly in messing with his mind, in running interference against his mind, it may have helped to say to you, you think you're an intelligence guy?
#
We have penetrated your system. Your counterintelligence people are not good enough to stop us.
#
There may have been an element of that.
#
And everybody thought that this would never happen. Everybody thought invading Ukraine is dumb.
#
So if you go back and read the commentary of that period, people were just kind of enumerating the kind of steps the West would take.
#
And even Ukraine was relatively complacent that an invasion would not happen.
#
They were surprisingly ill prepared.
#
There is a famous moment where there was a visit to Zelensky by a key person just from the US.
#
Just two, three days before the invasion, where that person just had to fight with Zelensky.
#
No, there is an invasion that's coming.
#
Don't kid yourself. This is real.
#
And Ukraine was really unprepared for the invasion because they thought that this is so dumb, Russia will never do it, that Putin will never make such a big mistake.
#
They thought he's just saber rattling.
#
So you gather troops on the border, ask for a concession.
#
He wanted Ukraine to guarantee you will not join the European Union, you will not join NATO.
#
And Ukraine was, as usual, answering, I'm a sovereign nation.
#
I'll do whatever I want.
#
So it's like India saying to Bangladesh, you will not join some association of country.
#
And Bangladesh will say, who are you?
#
I'm my own country. I'll decide what I like.
#
That kind of dysfunctional conversation was going on at the surface.
#
And Zelensky and the Ukrainians thought nothing is going to happen.
#
But lo and behold, it happened.
#
So on the 24th of February 2022, tanks started trundling towards Kiev from Belarus.
#
Note, I said Belarus is not Russia, but for all practical purposes has been controlled by Russia.
#
So there was an attack vector from Belarus.
#
And there was a huge invasion story all across Ukraine.
#
From the top at Kiev, from the sides, from the east and from the south, everywhere there was a big long invasion front.
#
As an aside, the Russian invasion front in Ukraine at February 2022 was longer than the German invasion front in June 1941.
#
And that should straight away make you start thinking because surely the Russian army of 2022 was less powerful than the German army of June 1941.
#
But you can start seeing how this is not going to work very well.
#
But it was breathtaking looking at all that.
#
And we should think a little more ahead about what was going on, what were they really trying.
#
Because in a way, this makes no sense.
#
If you wanted to do an invasion, Russian military capability would not have come up with this invasion plan.
#
I mean, one narrative that we've read about after the fact is about how the Russians underestimated the strength of the military.
#
And they underestimated the extent of corruption within that military.
#
There's a great video from a YouTuber which you sent me, which is about the corruption in the military.
#
And one of the things it talks about is that it is not enough to say that there is 20% corruption.
#
That doesn't indicate exactly what is happening.
#
If someone is stealing the wiring of your reserve vehicles, if someone is stealing your fuel to buy vodka for himself,
#
then that amounts to a very small proportion of corruption in terms of costs.
#
But when your vehicles are actually rolling towards wherever they are going in the middle of an invasion, it can be catastrophic for the invasion.
#
So on the one hand, there is a force that the military itself is not as strong as you thought it was.
#
Because all of this was institutionalized and you had no idea how broken and corrupt it was from inside.
#
And at the same time, the planning was terrible because you had all these tanks and military vehicles going towards Kiev, but no supply lines.
#
And it was just so easy to cut them off.
#
And eventually, as happened in many cases, the Russian soldiers just had to leave their tanks by the roadside and come back for them with tractors and so on and so forth.
#
So just describe the chaos that happened because it seems to me that in his hubris, Putin assumed that he simply marches to Kiev,
#
puts his own government in place after overthrowing these guys and that's it.
#
It's a done deal. It's like Georgia. It's over.
#
Or it's like it's the same kind of hubris which the Americans imagined in Iraq when they went in that,
#
oh, we'll go to Baghdad and we'll quickly take over and that's the end of the story.
#
And we'll outlaw the Baat party and then we'll just take over and it'll be fine.
#
And of course, it wasn't. So tell me about it.
#
So we all know what happened. The roads turned into a killing field.
#
The Russian army fared very badly.
#
There are some decisive moments in this.
#
So first, on the 26th of February, there is an amazing moment where the Americans offered Zelensky an escape.
#
And Zelensky famously said, I don't want a ride. I want ammunition.
#
And I think that's a line that's going to go up on a lot of T-shirts in the years to come.
#
There was a remarkable moment where there was a Russian raid on Hostomel Airport,
#
which is literally a suburb of Kiev.
#
So it's like an airborne force comes and captures Sahar Airport or Delhi Airport.
#
And in theory, they are like 20 kilometers away from the house of the head of state.
#
And then they are potentially able to mount that lightning assault.
#
But the Ukrainians were able to fight back and destroy the special forces that came to Hostomel Airport.
#
But you will think, how did they get hundreds of kilometers inside Ukraine using helicopters?
#
Because that was a special forces assault done using helicopters.
#
The answer is that Russian electronic warfare and Russian cyber warfare worked.
#
And it completely messed with the Ukrainian air defenses.
#
So that way helicopters were able to come in because the surface-to-air missiles of Ukrainian air defense had stopped working.
#
So there was quite a bit of drama and confusion in the beginning.
#
But fundamentally, Ukraine stood their ground.
#
So it's interesting to ask, what went wrong? Why did Russia not win?
#
So for all of us at the early stages of the war, come on, Russia is like a small superpower.
#
They're not remotely equal to the United States, but they are a small superpower.
#
So if they invade a country like Ukraine, of course, they're going to win.
#
There was no question to most of us that, of course, they're going to win.
#
And the only question is how and how much time?
#
And then what kind of insurgency will come up?
#
I used to think that Ukraine will run an insurgency that will make Afghanistan seem like a walk in the park.
#
But really, one expected the Russian army to win.
#
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we understand that actually it was not planned as a military invasion.
#
It was planned as an intelligence style coup that you show tanks, you show force.
#
They believed their intelligence assessment was that the Ukrainians have no will to fight.
#
They believed it was a Crimea. They believed that the West had no will to fight.
#
So Putin believed that Germany and France will be pacifist and they'll be vaguely left leaning.
#
And they'll try to support Putin.
#
They will protect Putin from the wrath of the Anglo-Saxons.
#
In any case, America is absorbed on overcoming its MAGA problem.
#
And Boris Johnson's conservatives in the UK are not too effective.
#
So Putin thought he'll get away with all this and Ukraine will fold.
#
So it was designed as an intelligence coup.
#
It was designed as a spectacle that when you see so many tanks, you're supposed to just give up.
#
And they also knew that they had many, many quislings at positions of power inside the Ukrainian government.
#
So at the right time, those people would throw down the keys or throw down their arms.
#
Our entire divisions would switch loyalty and join the Russian army, which was the sort of thing that happened around Crimea.
#
But in fact, Ukraine stood and fought.
#
And the moment Ukraine stood and fought, the invasion plan was the wrong one.
#
So I don't read a lot into Russian state capacity.
#
There is the Russian incompetent story.
#
So like you described very correctly, when a person steals 0.1% of the military budget by ripping off some critical parts out of a tank and selling them,
#
the impact on combat power is not 0.1%.
#
The impact is disproportionate because the tank stops working well.
#
So there were many, many things rotten in the Russian army.
#
However, if a correct military operation had been designed for fighting with Ukrainian resistance, they may well have come out much better.
#
It's just that they tried the clever intelligence-based coup, which had worked in Crimea, which had worked at other points in history.
#
My analogy is the invasion of Crete, the island of Crete by Hitler, never before in world history had there been an attack by paratroopers.
#
And thousands of parachutes landed on Crete and conquered the island.
#
And it was shocking how nobody had ever thought about this before, but they did it.
#
They came down by air, they captured an airfield, gliders came in, planes came in carrying heavy equipment, and they conquered the island.
#
So that kind of amazing, surprising, daring operation, like all the way to the raid at Hostomel.
#
The plan was to land in Hostomel airport, to dart into the capital and find Zelensky and kill him.
#
And if it had worked, then they would have been in a different place.
#
But the thing is, Ukraine stood and fought, and then all the Russian incompetence came back to bite them.
#
So famously in that period, their own electronic warfare people were jamming frequencies where their own surface-to-air missiles were operating.
#
So their own jammers were messing up their own SAMs.
#
And so we get this amazing spectacle of a World War I type plane, a drone, the Turkish biractor TB2 plane,
#
was lazily loitering about a SAM system and killing a SAM system.
#
This is just a joke. SAM systems are surface-to-air missiles that kill modern Western planes.
#
And here you have a World War I quality plane that is able to destroy a SAM system.
#
And the reason is, this is Russian incompetence, that their own electronic warfare was messing with their own SAM system,
#
so the SAM system was not working correctly.
#
And this was a people's war.
#
So you've got to worry about stories and anecdotes, but there are many pieces that just resonate in the mind.
#
There are Ukrainian citizens who went up into forests with modern high-quality hunting rifles,
#
which are basically sniper rifles in a way, and hiding in the woods, picking off one Russian soldier at a time,
#
on roads a couple of kilometers away.
#
And they were just dissent and disagreemented every step of the way by Ukrainian forces,
#
and they just completely disrupted this first assault.
#
It was spectacular for the global media to see an attack from Russia coming towards Kiev,
#
failing, and they gave up, and they retreated, and they completely exited the northern quarter.
#
So there is something remarkable that Russia lost and withdrew.
#
It is also true that these same Russian tactics worked much better in the south.
#
Famously, there was the Novokukhovka Bridge, which was vital to assaulting Kherson Oblast,
#
where it is believed today that collaborators in the Ukrainian army did not blow up the bridge.
#
So the Russian army was able to roll in and conquer the entire province.
#
So on the south, a lot of their operations worked out better.
#
Around Kiev, they famously did not, but by and large, they gained a lot of territory.
#
They grabbed land, particularly in the south.
#
So this was the stage one of the operation that Russians, electronic warfare, cyber attacks,
#
quizlings, all that stuff layered on top of the world's second largest army,
#
a small superpower, incompetence, corruption, all of it delivered a significant invasion,
#
which grabbed a lot of land in the south and in the east, while failing around Kiev.
#
So it was surprising for us to see it fail around Kiev, because generally you expect Russia is going to win.
#
I mean, who is Ukraine to stand up against Russia?
#
So what's now the response to it at this point in three different fronts?
#
One is, how is Russia itself reacting to this setback?
#
Because the imagination is that, okay, they saw it as an intelligence operation,
#
they realized, oh, what the fuck, it failed, those guys fought back.
#
But if their military is anywhere near as good as it is,
#
and Putin at that time still seems to think that it's a superpower military,
#
how do they recalibrate in what they do?
#
Secondly, how does the West now react to this?
#
And thirdly, what happens within Ukraine itself?
#
What is the state of Ukraine's army?
#
What are the incentives under which they are functioning?
#
Are they a better army simply because they're smaller?
#
We're number two, so we try harder, that kind of Avis Hurts kind of thing.
#
How is it all working out?
#
All three great angles to think about, so let's go step by step.
#
Russia is an authoritarian country.
#
It is the fundamental nature of power that you don't learn.
#
So it takes a certain kind of decent civilized discourse
#
where power is kept out of the room for people to be able to talk honestly to each other,
#
to be able to diagnose a problem, to be able to listen to evidence,
#
to be able to listen to experts, to be able to bring intellectuals into the room.
#
All that doesn't happen in Russia. It is brute power.
#
So messages filter up badly and slowly.
#
So Russian learning did undoubtedly happen,
#
but to a smaller extent than one would think is optimal.
#
So as an example, they figured that their electronic warfare is jamming their SAMs.
#
So there is an abrupt date where they fixed this problem,
#
and suddenly the Turkish TB2s became useless.
#
So there were these little tactical things that the Turkish drones ran wild for a bunch of days.
#
And then abruptly, like over one week, they became useless
#
because once Russian SAM units could actually engage with those planes,
#
those planes had no ability and the Ukrainians completely stopped using them
#
because they would just get shot down every time.
#
So there were incremental improvements.
#
But it is very difficult in an authoritarian regime
#
to be able to accurately diagnose to pass blame correctly.
#
In an authoritarian regime, everybody is cover your ass,
#
is lying to the boss to pass the blame on to somebody else.
#
So the reactions that are taken are often not the correct ones.
#
So somebody gets killed, somebody gets sent to Siberia,
#
some new people are recruited, but oftentimes these diagnoses are not correct.
#
Power is a curse. Strong leaders and fear psychosis in a system
#
where people worry that they will be harmed in ways that are unspeakable.
#
Then suddenly, every use of the brain and every sentence that is uttered
#
is an act of self-preservation rather than of winning the war.
#
So to fare well in any large organization,
#
what you need to do is to reduce the power from the room.
#
So if people will talk to each other in a civilized way
#
and you will not impose horrible retribution on people for disagreeing with you,
#
then you start eliciting knowledge and ideas.
#
And also, the gap between a Putin-like figure and a Zelensky-like figure,
#
for better or for worse, the people dancing on one leg are the clever ones.
#
And there's a cultural gap between the grim, hard men and the clever ones.
#
And societies succeed when the clever ones get a bigger say in the working of organizations.
#
So this is the first set of responses about what happened in Putin's Russia,
#
that yes, a process of military learning did commence,
#
but the feedback loops are not as strong as they should be in a healthy society.
#
Second, what happened in the West?
#
This was a bit of a turning point and the analogy I make is that
#
Hitler annexed Austria in 1938 and the apologists said that you can do business with Hitler.
#
Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939
#
and the apologists understood that this was going badly and Chamberlain lost power.
#
And Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939
#
and France and Britain declared war on Hitler.
#
So there is this learning process.
#
Again, authoritarians often interpret this exactly wrong because they are lost in their power
#
and they get adulation, they get respect that, sir, nobody challenged your invasion.
#
So like that, when Putin invaded Georgia, the world did nothing.
#
When Putin invaded Crimea, the world did nothing and started a war in the Donbas.
#
And I described to you the entire hybrid warfare that he felt that he had corrupted Germany and France
#
to a point where they would not be able to question Russia,
#
that Germany was so drunk on their gas and oil dependence
#
and their ideology of supporting a socialist regime
#
and seeing it as different from Anglo-Saxon influences.
#
This was the drug that was shaping French and German support for Russia
#
and he thought that he had messed with the British alliance with Europe
#
and he thought that he had messed up America by helping to build Trump.
#
In fact, just like Poland on 1 September 1939,
#
the world woke up and said, this is not on,
#
that the whole concept of the post-Second World War arrangement is that you do not invade your neighbour.
#
That's it. No questions asked.
#
You can be unhappy about a border, you can argue about a border, you can criticize a border,
#
but invasions are not on and the world will punish you very badly when you invade.
#
So for example, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait,
#
the world came up with extreme responses to make his life miserable
#
because we do not accept invasions.
#
That's the only way to put an end to the nonsense of the 20th century.
#
Otherwise, you know, stupid countries will keep invading each other
#
and you keep on going for this misery till the end of time.
#
So Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a moment of clarity
#
and all the Putin apologists ranging from Angela Merkel to Macron to Obama were made visible
#
and there's a Chamberlain analogy that once Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia,
#
Chamberlain's appeasement was seen as being wrong and unacceptable.
#
And so then you start getting a more Churchill phase in terms of standing up to the strongman.
#
And third, what was happening inside Ukraine.
#
Inside Ukraine, it was a catastrophe.
#
People were running helter-skelter wondering what the hell to do.
#
How the hell are we going to respond to all this?
#
There were refugees running away.
#
There are beautiful stories about the train system
#
that the trains basically stopped asking for a ticket
#
and just running at full capacity, taking refugees out.
#
There were people inside the train system who organized themselves to just operate for refugees
#
and they organized a whole set of concealment and hiding
#
because they knew that the other side could destroy the command and control of the railways
#
and shut down the railways.
#
Amazing. So the phrase the trains ran on time takes another opposite...
#
And they just basically said trains are open.
#
So jam-packed trains filled with refugees started going out into Poland
#
and the country was in complete turmoil.
#
This is really the greatest moment of Zelensky and the Ukrainian state
#
of stabilizing under these conditions.
#
So they immediately called out a full mobilization
#
where essentially all men in Ukraine were obliged to offer themselves up for military service.
#
It is a horrible coercive thing to do,
#
but there are times in the life of a nation where these things have to be done
#
and then based on the capabilities of the people,
#
they would be sorted to different things and often sent back into civilian life
#
because you do need to run a civilian economy.
#
But the military and the government aspect gets first pick on the human labor of the society.
#
So it is a conscription moment and they announced it immediately.
#
Before that, they had vast amounts of volunteers.
#
People said, give me a gun, I'll be a guerilla.
#
The Russians are going to conquer, but I'll be there as a guerilla.
#
I'll kill five Russians before I die.
#
So all over Ukraine, people went forward and there were open mailers
#
where guns were being handed out.
#
Now that's no solution. You can get some kind of bad quality insurgency.
#
I don't even want to say that's a good quality insurgency
#
because actually running an insurgency is a very high-skilled operation.
#
So I just felt it reflected the resolve and the hatred of the people,
#
but it was not going to solve a military problem.
#
At that time, Ukraine basically mobilized itself in terms of weapons with support from the West
#
so that a small core of the old army was able to hold off the messy Russian invasion,
#
which was overextended over a thousand kilometer front,
#
which was more a shock and awe kind of invasion and not a real invasion.
#
So a small Ukrainian-trained army was rapidly given better weapons.
#
So famously, the weapon of this moment, and as we tell the story,
#
the weapon of the moment is going to change.
#
The weapon of this moment was the anti-tank guided missile ATGM.
#
This is a shoulder-launched thing which you fire,
#
and you've got to put a tank into the crosshairs about two, three, four kilometers away.
#
And this thing will fly in the air, and it has a top attack configuration.
#
So it will go up and then come down vertically on the tank,
#
on the most vulnerable top of the tank, where the armor plating is the weakest.
#
And you can take out a tank.
#
And these things are made for prices like $100,000,
#
and they destroy a tank costing $3 million.
#
Because it's a very adverse exchange rate.
#
Also, just simple Ukrainian artillery was used effectively
#
to just destroy concentrated Russian forces,
#
because the Russians had not planned a proper invasion.
#
Russian military doctrine understands concentration very well.
#
They would have dispersed their fire. They would not have been so vulnerable.
#
But they expected the Ukrainians will fold.
#
But the Ukrainians didn't fold. They stayed put with their artillery.
#
So remember, all the equipment at that point was Russian.
#
So they rapidly got Russian 152-millimeter ammunition from all over Eastern Europe.
#
They even supplemented with many Russian 152-millimeter guns.
#
And the old, small Ukrainian army, supplemented by supplies,
#
was able to hold off the incompetent Russian army,
#
invading on a front longer than Operation Barbarossa of June 1941,
#
layered with Russian levels of incompetence.
#
So all these things came together,
#
that it was intended as an intelligence operation, not as a proper invasion.
#
It was overstretched across 1,000 kilometers,
#
and there was monumental incompetence and corruption in the Russian army.
#
All these things came together.
#
And the small Ukrainian army was well equipped with Russian kind of equipment
#
and some clever additions like anti-tank guided missiles.
#
By that time, some intelligence flow also started.
#
So NATO has the most amazing intelligence apparatus in the world,
#
combining planes that overfly international waters
#
and the Polish border. Remember, Poland is a member of NATO.
#
So NATO planes never fly into Ukraine.
#
But standing at the edge of the NATO border,
#
they are able to peer for hundreds of kilometers.
#
Similarly, they do that in the Black Sea.
#
They fly over international waters and they peer over the battlefield,
#
and of course by satellites.
#
So NATO intelligence helped Ukraine at that time,
#
but the Ukrainians held off.
#
In parallel, they started this vast mobilization,
#
and we can only reconstruct what must have been the conversations.
#
You have to make the call, how long is this war going to be?
#
Because there are many, many training and organizational change mechanisms
#
that you will embark on now that will yield results one year from now,
#
two years from now, three years from now.
#
If you think this war is going to end in six months, one year,
#
then that seems pointless.
#
On the other hand, if there is even a low probability
#
that this war will go on for three years,
#
then you're going to be so grateful
#
that you embarked on those long-range programs.
#
By and large, the West was late and inadequate in everything that they did.
#
With the benefit of hindsight,
#
whatever equipment came in inadequately small quantities,
#
only gradually did the West ramp up the quantities.
#
Whatever equipment came one by one, the weapon systems came late.
#
So with the benefit of hindsight, we disagree today
#
with the pace at which things were brought in
#
and the quantities in which they were brought in.
#
But by and large, Ukraine found its steel
#
in terms of starting with a small Russian-quality army
#
and starting to build out towards a Western-quality force.
#
Along the way, by the way, just think,
#
you have to do brain surgery while in flight.
#
They began replacing all the Russian weapon systems
#
with Western weapon systems while fighting in the war.
#
So these are the things that were happening in Ukraine at that same time.
#
Incredible. Let's take a quick commercial break
#
and on the other side of the break,
#
continue talking about what has happened in the last few months since the war started.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me
#
because of my blog, India Uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009
#
and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I loved the freedom the form gave me
#
and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercised my writing muscle every day
#
and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons
#
and now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I am doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter
#
at indiancut.substack.com
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I will write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com
#
and subscribe. It is free.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write
#
will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
Welcome back to The Scene On The Unseen.
#
My name is Ajay Shah and we are taking a deep dive into the Ukraine-Russia War.
#
Before the break we have spoken about, you know, sort of,
#
we have set a context for this with the deep history of Russia,
#
deep history of Ukraine, the geopolitical context of the current times
#
and we got to the start of the war,
#
which is the first assault and, you know,
#
why the assault into Kiev kind of failed,
#
why it was so much like an intelligence coup as it were
#
and that did not work out.
#
They have been repelled from the north, from Kiev,
#
but in the south it is a little bit different
#
and, you know, the Novokovka bridge across,
#
as you are saying, isn't blown up because of the quizzlings and so on.
#
Now how does it sort of begin to evolve from here,
#
both in terms of what the Russians do
#
and how the Ukrainians manage to mobilize and fight back?
#
So in part one, there are some people who portray the part one,
#
the failed campaign against Kiev, as an important military failure
#
I view it as an audacious intelligence coup and it didn't work.
#
And look, that is part of life.
#
Okay, so over and over in military history,
#
there have been many moments where an amazing, risky raid was imagined
#
and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't work.
#
Part two is more by the book, military campaign,
#
which worked out spectacularly for Ukraine,
#
where it was just fair and square, a pure military battle
#
and they came out out thinking the other side.
#
So the situation was like this,
#
that I described the Novokovka bridge had not been blown,
#
above that is the Kherson Oblast, Oblast is Russian for province,
#
and Ukraine understood that there were just two or three bridges
#
to the Russian land, the Russian-held land above the river.
#
The Dnieper River is a very big river, it's not easy to ford.
#
So it's a major natural barrier.
#
In 1941, in 1944, the river was the defining feature
#
of German and Russian campaigns in that region
#
and we see that all over again today
#
because doing a river crossing there is truly hard.
#
The Ukrainian side understood that there were just a few bridges
#
to the Russian-held territory above the river.
#
And what they started doing is they started loudly shouting,
#
we're going to attack this place, we're going to attack this place.
#
Now in military affairs, you always got to be wondering,
#
why is this guy saying it?
#
But they just kept on saying it, we're going to attack this place.
#
And they got the whole world hyped up,
#
that we're going to attack this place.
#
And the Russians actually ran reinforcements
#
and increased their strength on the Kherson Oblast of their holding.
#
At that time, Ukraine started blowing up the bridges.
#
So there was a finite list of bridges
#
and they started destroying the bridges in this.
#
They used the wonder weapon of phase two of this war.
#
The wonder weapon is called High Mars.
#
High Mars is a US rocket system with GPS guidance.
#
So it flies in the air and it has a circular error probability of about 15 meters.
#
CEP means that if you aim at a dot, I just said CEP of 15 meters.
#
If I aim at a dot, I'm going to draw a circle of radius 15 meters around that dot.
#
There's a 50% chance it will hit inside the circle.
#
So that's the measure of precision.
#
So they started using the High Mars rockets and destroying the bridges.
#
So they created a logistics crisis for the entire Russian operation.
#
Because the troops are now trapped inside and there's no way to get supplies to them.
#
And anything you know from war of old is out of date with the way in which modern armies drink supplies.
#
So if you think of fuel and ammo, the rates of consumption today are out of the world.
#
They are beyond anything known.
#
So if you think of D-Day, the logistics operation in D-Day required a small trivial problem.
#
If you don't have a harbor, you could not possibly supply an army at Normandy.
#
So the Allies did the job of prefabbing 1.4 million tons of a concrete harbor
#
and towing it and keeping it in place at the beach.
#
So once they captured the beach, they dragged in the so-called mulberries was the secret name for the harbor.
#
And that's how they supplied the army at D-Day.
#
So logistics is incredibly important and it's make or break.
#
If you don't have fuel, if you don't have ammo, the story stops.
#
You also need to constantly get wounded soldiers out.
#
So Ukraine went after the logistics and the Russian army in the Kherson Oblast got trapped.
#
When that army was trapped, Putin's attention was fully there.
#
And because they had shouted, we are going to attack here, we are going to attack here,
#
the Russians had actually moved reinforcements there.
#
At that time, they did a lightning brilliant operation.
#
They got good intelligence that in the Kharkiv region, the Russians were unusually undefended.
#
That is to the north and the right.
#
So closer to Kiev, there is a region in the north which is called the Kharkiv region.
#
And in order to reinforce the Kherson Oblast, Putin had probably pulled out troops from the Kharkiv region.
#
The Ukrainians had good intelligence.
#
Now again, Western intelligence, NATO intelligence, whose intelligence?
#
But they had the intelligence that the lines there were hollow.
#
And suddenly they punched through those lines.
#
And then they did one of those amazing exploitations.
#
So in modern war, the terms are to score a breakthrough and then to do an exploitation,
#
where you go behind the rear and you just run riot and destroy their logistics
#
and put fear in the heart of everybody because you are behind them.
#
That's called exploitation.
#
And in modern American jargon, there's a phrase called the thunder run,
#
where after an exploitation, very lightly armed troops, literally in jeeps,
#
take enormous risks and fly at 50 kph.
#
So that's called a thunder run, where you just go at very high speed and go deep into the interior.
#
And when you go so deep into the interior, the interior troops are not ready for a battle
#
because they didn't even know. They thought the front is 50 kilometers away.
#
Suddenly your guys are appearing and shooting at people deep in the interior.
#
And people deep in the interior were not even ready for that war.
#
Also, it helps that in bad armies, information doesn't flow correctly.
#
So the information that flows is just chaos.
#
And suddenly people behind start seeing enemy vehicles showing up, firing guns,
#
and 20 kilometers in, 30 kilometers in, you start getting artillery strikes.
#
And they assume the front has fallen completely.
#
So that's what they did in the Kharkiv area.
#
So they got the world and Putin transfixed on the Kherson region,
#
made a lightning attack there in Kharkiv, gained a lot of land,
#
and by the way, even more happily for them, gained lots of equipment.
#
So the Ukrainians always joke that the biggest supplier of equipment for them has been the Russian army
#
because the Russian army has left tons of stuff behind, equipment, tanks, ammunition and so on.
#
They love getting Russian ammunition because in the West there is no source left for 152 millimeter shells
#
and other supplies and parts that go into Russian equipment.
#
Then they turned attention back to Kherson and said,
#
now I'm strangulating you because you can't get supplies in.
#
So it was quite a remarkable play and they won both.
#
They won at Kharkiv and they won at Kherson.
#
Again, a lot of people, in my opinion, overstate the achievements of the Ukrainian side
#
because there is one tail thing which worked out very well for the Russians,
#
which is the Russians got a great fighting withdrawal.
#
So I would have expected that with modern spy satellites,
#
you'd have been able to see the withdrawal and make life hell for them.
#
I don't know what happened. I don't think anybody knows what happened.
#
The Russians got a ton of their people and equipment out safely.
#
So they did a very high quality withdrawal.
#
And as they were leaving, the last thing they did was they blew up the bridge.
#
So the Novakakovka bridge was finally blown by Russians on their way when they were running away to the South.
#
And with that, the Dnieper River now has no bridges.
#
So that's part two of the campaign.
#
Perfect. So should we move on to part three or are matters evolving in terms of...
#
This is all going together.
#
Then part three is the Black Sea.
#
All of us believe that Russia has a Black Sea fleet and Ukraine has no navy.
#
In fact, for some time, there was even talk of a naval landing at Odessa
#
that not only would there be a land assault on the South, there would be a naval landing at Odessa.
#
And there was that level of fear of the Russian navy.
#
And Russian naval ships were routinely lazily loitering in the Black Sea and firing long-distance cruise missiles.
#
So they had complete domination of the Black Sea.
#
The Ukrainians built surface-based missiles that would attack the capital ships of the Russian Black Sea fleet.
#
And they got intelligence about the presence of the biggest and most important flagship of the Black Sea fleet, which is called the Moskva.
#
So it's a poetic name, Moskva.
#
There could not have been a more impressive name for propaganda purposes.
#
And they found out the location of the Moskva and it was within range of their shore-based missiles.
#
And they say that they fired two missiles and they sank the Moskva.
#
So that was an amazing blow that the most important ship of the Russian Black Sea fleet was destroyed by the Ukrainians and they don't even have a navy.
#
And there was some skirmishing around Snake Island, where again for some time the Russians thought they had captured Snake Island.
#
And it's a real choke point at Odessa to be on that island.
#
The Ukrainians got them out of Snake Island.
#
And then there was a remarkable event that they started using naval drones for the first time.
#
So imagine we know about drones that fly in the air.
#
Same idea applied to a ship.
#
So you run a small boat going low in the water, charge it with 500 kg of explosives.
#
And it's either going on its own autonomous guidance system or it's got a video camera and there's got a guy with a joystick sitting far behind.
#
And they started guiding these boats in to generate explosions at Sevastopol harbour.
#
And a lot of the Russian Black Sea fleet that had to be pushed back behind to safety beyond Sevastopol harbour.
#
And finally in 2018, so in 2014, Putin had got Crimea.
#
In 2018, Putin had commissioned a bridge from the Russian mainland to Crimea, which is called the Kerch Bridge.
#
They pulled off a spectacular special forces operation where they blew up a chunk of that bridge.
#
They damaged the railway line and they destroyed the automobile bridge.
#
And it took some months for it to rebuild.
#
So these are all the things that happened in a naval war.
#
And you would have thought, but Ukraine has no navy.
#
And I think the answer goes that when you start thinking and building and innovating, then all kinds of things become possible.
#
And this is all building and innovating under fire that under war conditions, they started building naval boats and shore based missiles and so on.
#
So it really speaks well for the intellectual capacity and the scientific and engineering skills that they were able to bring to bear.
#
In terms of military evolution, you know, what do we learn from this?
#
Because there is, you know, for example, the distinction that is drawn between offense and defense, right?
#
Well, you could have a cavalry of 50 people charging at you with guns.
#
But as a defensive weapon, if you have one machine gun and a sack to hide behind, you can take care of that.
#
It takes less resources in defense.
#
Even here, they don't have a navy in an offensive sense that they can't actually attack.
#
But in a defensive sense, they can completely, you know, so even the ATGMs, which you described hundred thousand dollar missile,
#
but you can take out a two million tank or whatever.
#
Similarly with high mass and, you know, these surface based missiles.
#
So, you know, in terms of the evolution of military warfare, what sort of a role has this war played in sort of perhaps giving expression to some of it?
#
Because I would imagine in guerrilla warfare of the past, a lot of this has also come into play.
#
The thumb rule in land war is that you need about three X the combat power to break through as an attacker.
#
So the defense has an advantage of about three X.
#
So you need to think about how you will define combat power.
#
But and it varies with the amount of entrenchment.
#
So if you can build really good concrete bunkers and all that, then the ratios can become more asymmetric.
#
An attacker needs about three X is a thumb rule.
#
And I want to emphasize is only a thumb rule.
#
So it has always been the case in land war that a defender does better.
#
And in modern war, some of these things have become worse.
#
And I'll come back to lessons for modern war based on this in a moment.
#
So let's talk about what happens now that the Russians are, you know, facing all these setbacks.
#
How is that army kind of behaving?
#
Do they have, you know, scorched earth policy?
#
How are they dealing with it?
#
Are there war crimes happening as you would imagine what's going on here?
#
So for many people, the idea of war is the war is always total war.
#
War is like the Second World War, where there are no limits to depravity and barbarism.
#
Actually, that is not true.
#
And there is a well-established doctrine where there are laws of war where state actors are supposed to try to kill and destroy each other.
#
And willfully targeting civilians is a war crime.
#
That's it. It's a very simple line.
#
If by mistake, my bullet fell in the wrong place and it hit a civilian, that's a mistake.
#
But if you targeted a civilian, then that's a war crime.
#
So there's a very clear doctrine around it.
#
And the International Criminal Court has emerged as an institution where you are able to start check and balancing the unlimited brutality and barbarism that we are used to.
#
So what the Pakistan army did in Bangladesh is war crimes.
#
And in modern times, there would be an increasing escalation of punishment against war crimes, which I consider a welcome development that unlimited brutality and barbarism in the hands of an occupying army
#
is medieval and we should not allow that to happen.
#
But does it have practical application in the actual chaos of war?
#
Yes. A, a professional army, the soldier should be trained that while you have unlimited ability to inflict death and destruction upon the other state actor, which is an army,
#
you don't have the power to harm civilians.
#
That is the training of professional soldiers.
#
And B, we are coming to a world where there are war crimes, prosecutions.
#
So the Nuremberg trials were the first when there has been increasing development of doctrine and institutions.
#
So there are pretty bad elements of evidence of war crimes committed by Russians.
#
So right at the beginning, when they failed on the attack to Kiev and they went back,
#
what was found at Bucha, at the town of Bucha was war crimes where civilians had been killed, civilians had been tortured.
#
And in this age of the Internet, it is remarkable how much investigation can be done because there are stupid soldiers who shot selfies of themselves with those corpses.
#
So there is a whole community today that is working on using public domain data to investigate Russian war crimes to be able to clearly pin down this soldier did this.
#
Now we hope the wheels of justice will grind away for the next 50 years.
#
We don't know when we will get that guy.
#
Today Russia will say, I am not turning him over.
#
Maybe at the end of the war, as part of the treaty, Russia will be compelled to serve up its people for war crime trials.
#
Maybe there will be a new regime in Russia and they will extradite those people in the future.
#
So we don't know how this goes.
#
But there is a different level of data and documentation and the establishment of dossiers to go after soldiers who have misbehaved on the subject of war crimes.
#
And the Russian record is not good.
#
The second thing that the Russians have done on a large scale is destruction of infrastructure and housing and buildings.
#
And there is a gratuitous destruction that seems to have gone in their war effort.
#
I don't quite get the military motive.
#
So for example, they periodically keep lobbing missiles at Kiev and other urban centers.
#
From the viewpoint of military expertise, each missile that you waste killing civilian targets is one missile less that is available for military objectives.
#
And they are not exactly flooded with equipment.
#
So there just seems to be this attempt at breaking the will of the Ukrainian people, which I consider an intelligence failure.
#
They have not understood the will of the Ukrainian people.
#
After all that they've come through, now a few more missile strikes disrupting electricity supply in Kiev is not going to change the will of the Ukrainian people.
#
Finally, there's been a lot of stealing of people.
#
Going back deep into history, there has been a recurring theme that tyrannical states want not land, but people.
#
Tyrannical want to be able to tax people.
#
Tyrannical states want to be able to conscript people.
#
People are the prize because when the state is a community that gets to rule the people and extract resources from the people, then it wants more people.
#
So there is evidence of claims by Russians that, oh, but these Ukrainians are just Russians.
#
And so we grab them and we'll take them to a good life in Russia.
#
And they're grabbing children, they're grabbing adults and taking them out into Russia.
#
And that was the subject of one of the war crimes trials where Putin has been convicted because the litigants were able to obtain hard evidence at the International Criminal Court
#
that Putin authorized the kidnappings of children from Ukraine to take them away from their parents and take them away to Russia,
#
where they are trying to put them up as foster children with Russian families and turn them into Russian citizens to help reduce the demographic crisis of Russia.
#
This is crazy. I wasn't aware of this. And it's happened on a large scale.
#
And adults also, you said?
#
So if you are a Ukrainian living in a Russian-occupied zone, you run the risk of being given a Russian passport.
#
You run the risk of them being deported or relocated or being taken for your own safety.
#
So they don't respect the commitment of a person to their place.
#
So people are being forced to take Russian passports because we have occupied this land. Now this is Russia.
#
So when the invasion started, it appeared that, OK, the initial impression was that it will just happen very quickly.
#
Russia will steamroll their way through and that doesn't happen.
#
There is all of this fighting. You could even say Russia is losing for a period of time.
#
And then the weeks pass and then the months pass.
#
Now the danger when weeks pass and months pass is that often it can almost get normalized, the situation that you're in.
#
And what also happens in that particular part of the world is that the conditions change because winter is coming.
#
So tell me a little bit about what happens in that passing of time?
#
What are the stalemates? Where is the fighting still happening? And what happens when winter comes?
#
There's a lot of thinking around the Russian winter.
#
And it's important to think carefully about the temperature.
#
If the temperature goes to minus 10, the ground freezes solid and you get perfect tank country.
#
So for the places where the ground freezes solid, it is perfectly possible to have grand war of maneuver and tank battles as we saw in the Second World War.
#
Ukraine is in a middle zone where a lot of the ground freezes solid only for a short time or it doesn't freeze.
#
So if it doesn't freeze, then it just becomes mud and slush.
#
And it's just horrible. Nobody wants to be there in the winter in trenches.
#
It's just the most unpleasant place.
#
So you've got to think of the temperature and the extent of frozen ground to think about a winter war.
#
Many people in the West tended to jump to the assumption that general winter works for Russia.
#
I mean, yes, but it depends on where in Russia you are and who is the invader.
#
So if you had a German invader playing in minus 20 centigrade for the first time, yes, the local Russian troops know how to operate in minus 20.
#
But if you have a Russian invader playing in Ukraine, then the Ukrainians know their locale better.
#
And in fact, a large part of the Ukrainian winter just turned into mud and slush.
#
Now it varies year by year. It was very interesting that you had to watch the weather forecast carefully
#
and you needed a couple of days of minus 5, minus 10 for the ground to freeze.
#
Then you could do a tank-led fast assault.
#
This was an unusually warm winter and it never really happened.
#
So there was not a lot of opportunities for attack.
#
So this is the feasibility of what you could do in winter.
#
Now, in the back of your mind, you also had to think that both sides had just been through an exhausting time from February
#
and then the summer drama of Kherson and Kharkiv, like I described to you,
#
and Ukraine had been in a mass, large mobilization gradually building their forces by that time by winter.
#
They were in the midst of giving up on their Russian equipment.
#
In June, they were at the end of their tether on running out of Russian ammunition.
#
And all over Eastern Europe, there was no more Russian ammunition available to give them.
#
And so then they were in the transition to Western standards.
#
Like the Russian standard is a 152-millimeter artillery shell.
#
The Western standard is a 155-millimeter artillery shell.
#
For example, the Indian Bofors gun is a 155-millimeter gun.
#
Then you need to replace the hardware also.
#
You need to replace the hardware and training. And all the manuals are in English.
#
Whereas every Ukrainian soldier knew Russian, they could read Russian manuals.
#
There was a big problem because all the manuals are in English.
#
The training materials are in English. Modern war requires English knowledge to a great extent
#
because the entire conversation around this, like in many other technically complex areas,
#
the books are in English, the videos are in English, the manuals are in English.
#
So these were all important choke points.
#
So both sides were exhausted and it was a good time for force regeneration.
#
And I remember thinking about this dilemma from Putin's point of view.
#
If Putin was thinking that this was going to be a long war,
#
it was optimal for him to lie low in winter and do force generation.
#
There was a time to take conscripts and train them for a couple of months
#
and rethink what you want to do next.
#
Instead, Russia continued to attack to the best of their ability
#
at one irrelevant small city that is called Bakhmut.
#
And this just made no sense to me.
#
Bakhmut is a smaller scale version of Stalingrad.
#
That in and of itself was Stalingrad, that important no.
#
It was turned into a prestige point because Hitler thought
#
that it's fun to grab a city with the name of Stalin.
#
And Stalin said, very well, we'll make your life difficult.
#
And then Operation Uranus generated an encirclement
#
and the German Sixth Army got trapped.
#
In similar fashion, there's nothing that important in Bakhmut,
#
but the Russians chose to put huge effort into taking Bakhmut.
#
Conquering cities is difficult because every building is an obstacle,
#
every building is a defense.
#
So it is really efficient to do a war of maneuver where you bypass cities,
#
you do great sweeping things in the open plains of Ukraine
#
rather than going into a city.
#
But that's what the Russians did.
#
The Ukrainians thought partly it did become that prestige thing
#
that we will not lose Bakhmut.
#
Partly we will disproportionately asymmetrically bleed them.
#
So the Russians lost their winter of regeneration
#
because the defenders have an advantage.
#
And a modest Ukrainian force over the entire winter ceded Bakhmut.
#
More or less they lost Bakhmut completely.
#
There's a little bit left.
#
More or less they lost Bakhmut completely,
#
but they imposed asymmetric losses upon the Russians.
#
Then simultaneously at the end of the winter,
#
we are now standing in June, but by Feb-March,
#
they started a flanking operation going to surround Bakhmut from the other side.
#
It's not gone anywhere far.
#
But this is just potentially like a waste
#
and I didn't understand what that was all about.
#
And in Bakhmut, things collapsed into World War I type trench warfare
#
because the defenders' advantage was so great.
#
Neither side had the strength to smash through and break the line.
#
So it became like World War I, which is just horrendous,
#
expensive war where both sides keep losing people.
#
And it was a very antithesis of what we've learned from World War II onwards,
#
which is that the right way to do this is a war of maneuver.
#
Like I described, do a thunder run at Kharkiv.
#
These are the dreams of how modern, mobile,
#
what the Germans called Bewee Gungskrieg.
#
Every German listener I have is now going to switch this off
#
and say like, what the hell is going on here?
#
Krieg is war and Bewee Gungskrieg is maneuver of motion, of mobility.
#
And that's really modern doctrine.
#
The Russians know it, the Germans know it, everybody knows it.
#
But it was odd and weird how both sides settled into trench warfare in Bakhmut.
#
So the Ukrainians didn't have the force to attack,
#
partly because they were sitting and building their first generation.
#
So they were putting people into training, learning Western weapons.
#
And the Russian side chose to do a lot of attacking
#
and they just burned through vehicles and people attacking trenches and buildings.
#
And it was very costly.
#
So that was part five of the Winter War.
#
And now we are at part six, which is the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
#
So Ukraine appears to have built around 12 brigades
#
with world-class training and world-class equipment.
#
A brigade is about 4,000 people.
#
So this is about 50,000 people.
#
It is claimed high levels of training and high levels of equipment.
#
And potentially they are ready to do Bewee Gungskrieg now.
#
And we'll see how it goes.
#
Early stages of those maneuvers have begun.
#
There are fundamental ways in which war has changed
#
because of all the new technology and we should come back to that later.
#
So this is not World War II.
#
Every now and then I sort of remind myself that
#
the trade-offs and the arguments that we would have made in that position
#
of what a person would have done in this situation
#
are not the trade-offs that apply today.
#
So that's where we are.
#
There is a new counteroffensive that has begun.
#
We don't know how well it will work out.
#
That's going to be the story of this summer.
#
Will they win? Will they lose?
#
And we don't know how it will play out.
#
So in short, where we are today,
#
you were pointing out the date is 18th June.
#
A Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.
#
It's been running for about a week or 10 days.
#
And it's at early stages.
#
We don't know how it will go.
#
Using modern Western weapons and Western training,
#
the game will be to find these thunder runs
#
and make remarkable progress with exploitation after a breakthrough.
#
Maybe the Russians have built up so much defenses
#
that really there is no ready way to score a breakthrough.
#
So we don't yet know whether the Ukrainian force
#
will be big enough to smash through the established
#
defensive lines that the Russians have built.
#
Russia is at least a small superpower.
#
They get into a war with a neighboring country.
#
You expect them to just dominate completely.
#
And yet they don't dominate completely.
#
And beyond what we've already discussed,
#
you can say that there's a lot of corruption within the army,
#
that everything is creaking,
#
things are not as good as they're made out to be.
#
But regardless of that,
#
just the asymmetry in the size of the military budgets,
#
for example, would be so massive that you assume that
#
And the thing is, even if Putin is completely blinded,
#
listens only to yesmen,
#
the quality of discourse there is extremely low,
#
even then you would imagine that after the initial setbacks,
#
they'd get their act together.
#
There's surely enough intellectual capacity as well
#
within that establishment to figure this shit out.
#
Because fine, they made an early mistake when they thought
#
an intelligence operation kind of cool thing could sort it out,
#
but that didn't happen.
#
But then you imagine people would sit back, take stock and all of that,
#
and it would be sorted.
#
But it's still going on.
#
So what is your sense of why that happened?
#
And does Russia need to keep continuing making mistakes
#
for Ukraine to have a chance?
#
So I think we make a mistake when we jump to conclusions
#
such as a nuclear power cannot lose a war
#
or a superpower cannot lose a war.
#
Sorry, it has happened over and over.
#
The United States lost in Vietnam,
#
the French lost in Vietnam,
#
Russia lost in Afghanistan,
#
and all in all, America lost in Afghanistan.
#
So nuclear powers do lose wars,
#
and superpowers do lose wars,
#
and so you've got to go deeper into thinking
#
what is that overwhelming force,
#
what is put up as a defense, and so on.
#
The next mistake that we make is that
#
we count people or guns or tanks,
#
and we say, oh, I have 1,000 tanks,
#
you have 500 tanks, how can you win?
#
So this whole counting approach is just profoundly wrong.
#
Israel was inferior in the Six-Day War of 1967.
#
If you counted tanks, if you counted people,
#
all the Arab countries put together had more toys than Israel.
#
So if you sit and make spreadsheets
#
then the Arab powers were much ahead of Israel.
#
But the fact is, Israel knew how to do this.
#
As the old phrase grows,
#
it's not the length of the wand,
#
it's the magic in the stick.
#
So what is really important is what you do with it
#
and how you use these things,
#
and that's about people, incentives, management,
#
culture, doctrine, information flows,
#
the arrangement of power.
#
And there, I think you come into a more normal,
#
bailiwick, consider a government
#
that tries to run a government-run education system.
#
So we know very well that if you start counting schools
#
and school teachers and blackboards or computers,
#
There is no way buying computers and blackboards
#
and school buildings and teachers
#
generates a good government-run education system.
#
If you think a government will put up buildings
#
and ICUs and hire doctors,
#
will it get you a government-run health system?
#
And so it is with military affairs.
#
That just buying shiny toys is the least of it.
#
It is all about how you put things together.
#
So in the jargon of inputs, outputs and outcomes,
#
all the equipment, all the people,
#
all the money is just the input.
#
And by no means does it guarantee a good outcome.
#
Like I'm reminded here of that old riddle
#
about in a bacon and egg breakfast,
#
what is the difference between the chicken and the pig?
#
And the answer is the chicken is involved,
#
And is that the same thing here in the sense that
#
if you just look at the bare incentives
#
and forget everything else,
#
for Ukraine, it's an existential thing.
#
They don't have a freaking choice.
#
Whereas for Russia, it's not quite that,
#
especially for the army, which, you know.
#
Many, many extensions on that theme.
#
Who runs faster, the fox or the hare?
#
And the answer is the hare.
#
Because the fox is only running for his lunch,
#
the hare is running for his life.
#
And similarly, people say that,
#
oh, Ukraine and Russia should stop fighting.
#
And the answer is if Ukraine stops fighting,
#
And if Russia stops fighting, the war ends.
#
So, there's a very asymmetric position of the two.
#
So, yes, by the way, I also want to flip this around
#
that if you're a small country being managed
#
by a neighbouring nuclear power, there is hope.
#
I mean, look at Ukraine.
#
If you counted tanks, you would have thought it's hopeless.
#
But there are many things a small country can do
#
And we'll come back to this.
#
And I find many similarities between
#
Hitler in World War II and Putin today.
#
Hitler in World War II was very strong in tactics
#
and very strong at the operational level.
#
But they were really bad at strategy.
#
They just didn't understand how war plays out
#
at large amounts of time and force and space.
#
They just didn't understand the strategic dimension.
#
They thought that male braggadocio and machismo
#
and cleverness in military is how you win wars.
#
And I fear that a lot of people sink into that.
#
But on a strategic scale, it is the economic and technological
#
and intellectual and cultural and military might
#
of the Allies that gets through.
#
So Sir Ian Jacob, who was Churchill's military secretary,
#
once said to Churchill that the Allies won the war
#
because our German scientists were better
#
than their German scientists.
#
So when a regime loses its best people,
#
then that doesn't bode well.
#
And that is exactly what we have seen in Russia.
#
A half million of their best people in some ways
#
have left the country after the war started
#
because they just don't see a future in today's Russia.
#
These things matter on a strategic scale.
#
In the long term, these things matter about everything else.
#
So as in everything else in life,
#
the puzzle is about creating a power structure
#
where decisions are shaped by clever people
#
who will think and debate and criticize and create.
#
And if you just have a brute imposition of power
#
with generals instructing and ordering each other,
#
then I would like to again remind ourselves of Churchill
#
that war is too important to be left to the generals,
#
that there is much more going on in these things
#
than can be comprehended by the generals.
#
And so on a strategic scale,
#
you've got to point out that Russia is a GDP like Spain.
#
It is hilariously outmatched
#
against Western economic and technological might.
#
So you can't fight a long war.
#
So Putin should have tried an intelligence coup
#
and he should have swallowed his pride and said,
#
When Putin and Russia try to fight a long war,
#
they are in trouble because on a strategic scale,
#
it is economic technological might that rules.
#
And the best is just streets ahead of Russia.
#
Russia is a bit of Saudi Arabia with nukes.
#
They're a Spain-sized GDP.
#
They're not a country that can keep pace with the challenge.
#
There's one area which might have given Putin confidence,
#
which is that given that Russia is a nuclear power,
#
they can play the game of chicken better
#
because Putin certainly seems to be unstable and unpredictable
#
and is certainly completely in control of Russia.
#
Whereas in the Western world,
#
there's no leader who's completely in control of his country.
#
There are various voices.
#
Among those various voices, there will be many voices saying,
#
let's not go toward nuclear armageddon.
#
Why are we getting involved?
#
Why do you want to risk a World War III?
#
All of which are powerful and compelling reasons for caution.
#
And yet, those arguments didn't win out, thankfully,
#
though they still take place.
#
And yet, NATO kind of got its act together,
#
what you call making NATO great again.
#
Tell me a bit about what's happening there on the international scene
#
and how the tide kind of turns,
#
which I think someone like Putin would not have expected.
#
On the nuclear side, actually,
#
this is a very interesting story about escalation management.
#
If on day one you send F-16s to Ukraine,
#
then you run a greater risk.
#
Mr. Putin says, I will explode one nuclear bomb
#
at the border between Russia and Ukraine,
#
and I threaten you, and you must take your F-16s back.
#
These are subjects that have been very well studied.
#
So for decades, people have thought a lot about nuclear arms
#
and the doctrine that surrounds them
#
and the ways in which these are to be used in modern statecraft.
#
And by and large, I think the Western powers just out-thought Putin
#
and they managed the escalation trajectory.
#
So today, we are at the threshold of sending F-16s to Ukraine.
#
Everything else has been done.
#
All the escalation management has been done.
#
Every now and then, Putin has done saber-rattling with nukes.
#
And then lefties in the West and the supporters of Putin in the West say,
#
oh, look, it is so dangerous.
#
Let us not anger him, otherwise there will be a nuclear war.
#
So by now, it has just lost all its credibility
#
and the escalation management has been completed.
#
I do not have the hard information,
#
but I believe certain threats have also been delivered in private to Putin
#
that if you do the slightest nuclear thing,
#
I do not know what the X is.
#
One example that has been written about in public domain is that
#
So remember, after a nuclear escalation by Russia,
#
nobody wants to harm the Russian people.
#
Your problem is with the Russian state and with Putin,
#
not with the Russian people.
#
So even if Putin kills a lot of civilians with a nuclear attack,
#
nobody wants to go kill Russian civilians.
#
A crown jewel of the Russian state is the Baltic fleet.
#
It is a significant piece of military hardware.
#
F-35 planes can completely destroy the Baltic fleet.
#
That is an example of a threat to make,
#
that you spent $100 billion building this crown jewel.
#
You make one mistake and use a nuclear weapon,
#
and we will just use F-35 planes and we will completely destroy the Baltic fleet.
#
Or imagine that if China and India can be persuaded that
#
if you use a nuclear weapon,
#
then we will stop buying oil from you,
#
and then the money flows into Russia's stocks.
#
So I do not know what diplomatic arrangements were made behind the scenes,
#
but by and large, the escalation management was done pretty well.
#
And this is also reminded to us that
#
it is a childish view of arms that the guy with the biggest bomb wins.
#
So nuclear bombs are very big bombs,
#
but it does not necessarily translate into power and influence.
#
There is a need of a very clever layer of game theory on top of it,
#
on how and when to threaten and use and not use nuclear weapons.
#
And I just want to emphasize that just dumbly getting nuclear weapons
#
and randomly engaging in nuclear threats when you feel unhappy
#
does not get things done. You do not gain power by that.
#
Nuclear doctrine requires game theory.
#
But doesn't the game theory require at some level
#
either rationality on the part of the other person
#
or at least a way to estimate the probability of rationality
#
on the part of the other person?
#
Because as we discussed towards the start of the show,
#
people are different, people are unique,
#
and Putin could just be at a stage where he is in his 70s,
#
he wants to be Catherine the Great,
#
maybe dressing up like her is not enough if he does that,
#
and everything is going so bad and he could just completely lose it.
#
There is no perspective.
#
He could literally just go mad and go off in that direction
#
and none of this thinking that he will want to save his Baltic fleet,
#
it may not even matter.
#
At that point he is a 70 plus man, he is dying,
#
he is wearing Catherine the Great's gown if that is what he is doing.
#
What is he going to do?
#
It is also hard to find good uses for nuclear bombs in battle.
#
So case one, it is a tactical operation.
#
There are trenches, there is fighting going on.
#
You will use a nuclear bomb, you will burn up 50 square kilometers of land.
#
A tactical nuclear weapon will burn up 50 square kilometers of land.
#
Some of your own people will die.
#
Then what? It just turns into a Chernobyl exclusion zone
#
and you start all over again.
#
So it doesn't win wars.
#
Wars are won in conventional war.
#
Correct. So case two, he will nuke Kiev.
#
You think the people of Ukraine are going to give up the fight?
#
The entire world will now come together and support Ukraine.
#
Not even China and India will buy your crude oil.
#
So there is no clear path of using a nuclear weapon that really helps.
#
Not where he is placed.
#
So fine, even if he lashes out, he doesn't win the war.
#
And so far he has not lashed out.
#
And this relates to NATO.
#
So once again, if you had done German appeasement or French appeasement of Russia,
#
then maybe all this would have played out differently.
#
What is crucial is NATO has come together.
#
So this is the invasion that brought NATO together.
#
There were many, many problems in NATO.
#
Trump openly talked about getting America out of NATO,
#
which was the greatest coup for Putin.
#
So Putin tried to disrupt the Western alliance by getting Brexit done,
#
by getting Trump into the United States.
#
And German and French appeasement were well in place.
#
There was European energy dependence.
#
All these pieces were there.
#
And remember, we may respect Barack Obama in many, many things,
#
but when faced with Crimea, Obama folded.
#
So maybe today's Republican-dominated House of Representatives in the United States
#
would vote against American support to Ukraine.
#
All these things could be done.
#
At the outset, I did not know which way the West would go.
#
I want to emphasize how remarkable it is.
#
And I think Biden and company need a lot of the credit
#
for assembling and maintaining the coalition that the Western alliance came together.
#
And there are big shifts in the military posture in many, many countries,
#
including Poland, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Australia.
#
All these countries have seen the world differently.
#
So the moment this war started, suddenly Taiwan understood that
#
you can't be calm that Xi Jinping will be rational.
#
Australia understood that you can't be comfortable about what China will do.
#
Japan understood you can't be comfortable about what China will do.
#
So there's been a tremendous resolve on the part of the Western alliance.
#
So for me, as I am a child of the 20th century,
#
I think a lot about how the allies let down Spain in 1936
#
when the Spanish Civil War began between the Republicans and the Nationalists.
#
And the Nationalists were supported by the Nazis.
#
The rest of the world basically left the Republicans to burn.
#
And there was no great support for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.
#
And that has not happened.
#
And the last straw for Putin is that after 200 years of neutrality,
#
Sweden chose to join NATO.
#
And after the entire post-Second War period of what is called Finlandization,
#
where Finland tried to be particularly careful about offending Russia,
#
Finland has gone and joined NATO, saying, we don't trust you.
#
If you could invade Ukraine, you could invade us.
#
So these are huge milestones in growing NATO
#
and making NATO the most important security system of the world today.
#
So what's sort of interesting about a war like this is that
#
it's not just a historical event that is happening, that is unfolding before us,
#
but it is also an evolutionary event.
#
It's also something that teaches us about how warfare is conducted in the modern age.
#
So tell me a little bit more about that because we are in a time
#
which is actually in an in-between time in the sense that
#
wars will be fought in an even more different and radical manner
#
because AI would have created huge unknowns in terms of advances,
#
but we can discuss that later.
#
But just this particular war, how has technology changed it?
#
How has our understanding of strategy changed it?
#
Tell me about the different ways in which has been changed.
#
There are a bunch of dimensions in which lessons are being drawn.
#
And by the way, there's a whole bunch of beautiful papers that have come out
#
of looking back and diagnosing what have we learned?
#
How does our view of the world change in military affairs?
#
I want to single out a couple of points that struck me.
#
The first is the radical transparency of the modern battlefield.
#
So earlier today I mentioned Operation Bagration
#
which was built by the Red Army in July 1944
#
where the German Army Centre was destroyed.
#
The Red Army massed massive forces,
#
first attacking at the bottom,
#
then suddenly putting everybody on trains
#
and taking them to the top and starting a new campaign.
#
And at that time the Luftwaffe was largely broken.
#
The Germans had absolutely no idea what is going on.
#
So you could amass forces, you could concentrate forces
#
and you could preserve operational secrecy.
#
All those things are gone.
#
There is radical transparency in the battlefield.
#
So step one, there are drones.
#
So drones have proliferated and they have become consumables.
#
They have become like ammunition.
#
A drone dies all the time.
#
So both sides are trying to kill drones.
#
I believe the Ukrainians are going through 10,000 drones a month.
#
Can you imagine? They are going through 10,000 drones a month.
#
So there is enough supply chain that they keep getting new drones.
#
So drones have become like a consumable
#
and all kinds of people are putting up drones and looking.
#
And suddenly if there is any force concentration,
#
you get it right there.
#
So these drones will have basically cameras and GPS?
#
Camera, GPS and some drones will just do the nice thing
#
and carry one hand grenade also.
#
So just in case you see some good target,
#
don't wait to get the artillery fire.
#
So one hand grenade can go into one trench based on one drone.
#
That is the way modern warfare has become.
#
It's a nightmare in the battlefield
#
because you are just naked, you are looking up
#
and there are people looking at you
#
and there is no secrecy.
#
The second is that every Ukrainian civilian
#
is an intelligence scout in disguise
#
because every mobile phone has a camera, has a GPS.
#
So they see something, they take a camera,
#
they have set up encrypted channels
#
through which all these things go to Ukrainian intelligence.
#
So in all the Russian occupied zones,
#
they are constantly vulnerable
#
that partisans are gathering intelligence.
#
They are taking a picture,
#
picture is tied with GPS coordinates
#
and there are ways to get it back
#
in a safe and encrypted way
#
back to Ukrainian intelligence.
#
So the Ukrainian intelligence is constantly seeing
#
in the back field, behind the front,
#
wherever there is an occupied zone
#
where there are Ukrainian civilians,
#
the partisans are carrying information back.
#
The third is all over the occupied zone,
#
there are ordinary surveillance cameras
#
So in a compound there is one surveillance camera
#
and the Ukrainians know about a lot of those systems
#
or they have been able to find out
#
and a lot of those systems permit remote access.
#
So there will just be one innocent camera
#
in a parking lot in a Russian occupied zone
#
and because they are local Ukrainians,
#
they are managing to break into its feed
#
Or just turn the camera slightly
#
and suddenly it is looking at an airfield.
#
Now you have a monitoring camera on an airfield.
#
The plethora of surveillance cameras
#
that are there in modern buildings
#
and compounds and compound walls
#
are all generating radical transparency
#
NATO is arguably the world's greatest
#
intelligence organisation today.
#
They are running surveillance aircraft,
#
flying over the Black Sea and international waters,
#
flying high up and looking into the battlefield
#
And they have spy satellites.
#
They are the world's best spy satellites.
#
They have the machine learning and the AI
#
to process the data explosion
#
coming in from spy satellites
#
to find features of interest.
#
And they are almost in real time
#
delivering that intelligence to the Ukrainian side.
#
So there is radical transparency of the battlefield.
#
And this is completely different from World War II.
#
In the modern battlefield,
#
what you cannot do is concentrate forces.
#
So our old theory was that
#
there is a defensive barrier
#
which is 100 people, fine, I will generate 1000 people.
#
So 1000 people with 100 vehicles
#
will try to go blast through that obstacle.
#
But to create that concentrated force
#
of 1000 people and 100 vehicles,
#
how do I do it in secrecy?
#
Because some stupid drone or partisan or something
#
will see that and then within minutes
#
you will start getting artillery fire
#
on that concentrated position.
#
So force concentration has become a problem.
#
That you just don't know how to operate.
#
Everybody has to be very dispersed.
#
But then when you are dispersed,
#
how will you mount an attack?
#
So the radical transparency of the battlefield
#
changes the nature of war in a fundamental way.
#
So this is my first claim.
#
And then I guess if you have precise information,
#
you can also launch precise offensives.
#
And you now have the ability to do this.
#
So tell me about how precision guided munitions...
#
That takes you to PGMs.
#
So let's go back to history.
#
What is interesting about a tank
#
as opposed to artillery?
#
A tank is called direct fire.
#
Direct fire is where the crosshairs are on the target
#
when the operator presses the button.
#
And so with tanks, while the shell is in flight,
#
it's falling under gravity.
#
So you need an adjustment based on the range.
#
So you have to just compensate
#
for the falling of the artillery shell.
#
So in one second it will fall by so much.
#
And for the rest, you see a target, you can kill it.
#
That's great about tanks.
#
I'm firing an artillery shell.
#
It goes on a long looping parabolic trajectory.
#
It can hit 10 kilometres, 20 kilometres inside.
#
But I don't know what the hell it's hitting
#
because I can't see the target.
#
So the old doctrine was that you had to have
#
a forward artillery observer.
#
This is a person close to the target
#
who's able to look with binoculars.
#
Your first round lands and he says,
#
you know, move it 200 metres to the left.
#
Then your second round lands and so on.
#
And the artillery guns were imprecise.
#
The rounds were imprecise.
#
OK, so that was the old world.
#
The revolution is that the guns have become more precise.
#
The guns left to themselves have just,
#
tolerances have improved.
#
So you put in the precise dose of
#
the precisely manufactured TNT
#
which generates an explosion with a precisely predictable
#
muzzle velocity of the shell.
#
And the shell is precisely perfect.
#
So it flies in a predictable way.
#
And then it reaches the target in a predictable way.
#
So accuracies have gone up.
#
And then, of course, you get to the next level of craziness.
#
There's something called an Excalibur round
#
where the GPS guidance unit has been put in an artillery shell.
#
As of now, they're costly.
#
But basically, this is a GPS guided artillery shell.
#
So an artillery shell now gets a CEP,
#
a circular error probability of less than 10 metres.
#
So you could be flying from 20 kilometres away
#
and hit a target with an error of 10-20 metres.
#
This is just a revolution in precision guided munitions.
#
And then I have already described the anti-tank guided missiles.
#
The Ukrainians had a good system that is called Stugna.
#
The British have a system called the En-Law.
#
The Americans have a system called the Javelin.
#
All these three are there in force.
#
In Ukraine, at two kilometre, three kilometre ranges,
#
they can kill a moving tank.
#
Drones have become PGMs. How?
#
Step one, on a drone I mount a small munition.
#
So a drone just sees a fuel truck
#
and it flies into and collides with the fuel tank.
#
And then it's a small munition.
#
You just need half kg, one kg of high explosive.
#
And the explosion of a half kg of high explosive
#
is enough to make a fuel tank go up in flames
#
or an ammunition dump go up in flames.
#
So a drone, it's called a kamikaze drone
#
because a drone commits suicide.
#
Now a drone can loiter in the air waiting to see a target,
#
which an artillery shell cannot do.
#
An artillery shell can only be fired when you see a target.
#
This is called a loitering munition.
#
The damn thing flies up and it's got 20 minutes of juice.
#
So it's just rotating and it's waiting and it's waiting and it's waiting.
#
And if in 20 minutes I acquire a target,
#
then it will go commit suicide going into the target.
#
This is a different level of monstrous,
#
precise fire being managed by the other side.
#
Finally, I already described a very simple set of adaptations.
#
There are little garages all over Ukraine
#
where they're taking commercial grade drones
#
and affixing one hand grenade on its bottom.
#
So the drone flies, it looks down,
#
the hand grenade, 500 grams, falls precisely vertically.
#
So you want to be 500 meters above a trench,
#
but you just want your gyroscope and your compass to be precisely correct
#
so that what you see as vertically below you is precisely vertically below you.
#
And then you drop one hand grenade
#
and spoil the whole day of blokes on the other side.
#
So all these things have generated a revolution in warfare
#
because that precision just changes things.
#
In the olden days, people used to say that the rise of PGM means
#
that you won't waste so much ammo.
#
So in the olden days, for example, during the Second World War,
#
if a plane tried to drop a bomb at a factory,
#
the circular error probability was like five kilometers.
#
So it's like a large amount of bombs were thrown
#
and just a few would manage to hit the target.
#
So the original idea was that when you get towards more and more precision,
#
the PGMs will precisely hit the target.
#
Now you won't need so much munition.
#
On the other hand, the sensor packages, the sensor platforms have grown.
#
So you're getting so much intelligence.
#
You're getting so many juicy targets and you precisely hit them.
#
You've got a lot more information.
#
You hit each piece of information, actionable information precisely.
#
But because we're getting so much more information,
#
we consume a lot more ammo.
#
That's the nature of modern high-intensity war.
#
It's completely different from the way things used to be.
#
I was reading Wittgenstein's diaries from the First World War
#
and he was writing a diary while I think he was in the trenches.
#
And if I'm not mistaken, he wrote part of or most of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
#
But whatever, he was writing a diary.
#
And every entry in it is basically a combination of two things in different words.
#
I'll put a link from the show notes as well.
#
He's basically either saying I'm very sad or he's saying I'm very horny.
#
And these are the two things that keep kind of recurring.
#
And I'm just thinking that if he was in the trenches today,
#
a grenade would blow him up long before, a grenade randomly dropping from the sky.
#
And just think of the fear levels.
#
Just think of what happens to the psychology when you think you're deep behind enemy lines.
#
You think you're 5, 10, 20 kilometers behind, but there is no safety.
#
Get that continuous pressure of being surveilled.
#
A man has to be in camouflage all the time.
#
You can't go out to drink water because a drone carrying a hand grenade
#
is happy to use its munition to take out one person.
#
So you won't waste an artillery shell for one person,
#
but you will waste one hand grenade below a drone for getting one person.
#
So the psychic burden of this kind of modern warfare is very high.
#
Let me just go on on the subject of PGMs.
#
So now what is the use of a tank?
#
So I just described that tanks had an advantage because of direct fire,
#
and direct fire was more precise, and now we're getting many other channels
#
to get a fire correctly, to land around correctly.
#
Some of the videos that we see about tanks getting destroyed
#
are because they're being badly used.
#
There's just a lot of bad doctrine about how tanks are being sent alone.
#
Children in World War II knew that you never send a tank alone.
#
A tank has to go with infantry.
#
There are combined arms between infantry and tanks,
#
and you never send a tank alone. That is just foolishness.
#
But even after optimization of the role of the tank, why do you want a tank?
#
Because you don't need that precision through direct fire
#
because you have other ways to get fire.
#
Some people are thinking that the unique feature of a tank
#
is as a sensor platform, not as a fire.
#
So what is unique about a tank is it's armored, it's heavy,
#
it's got power supply, and you can go closer to the field,
#
and then you can see the world, you can carry cameras,
#
you can carry infrared cameras.
#
Good infrared sensors have to be very big
#
because you're getting into the wavelength of light, so you need big pixels.
#
So you need fairly large sensors, you need to cryogenically
#
make them cold to be able to see the heat.
#
You need quite some kit to hold the night vision sensor,
#
and then you can't just carry it with an individual or mount it on a drone,
#
Go out, take the risk that you will get hit, but go out and look.
#
So you could use tanks as a sensor platform rather than as direct fire.
#
So there are some traditional uses like storming a trench,
#
but beyond that, there is going to have to be significant rethinking of a tank,
#
particularly because of this asymmetry of $2 million tank,
#
and the anti-tank guided missiles are soon going to drop to $50,000.
#
It's just asymmetric, like the exchange rate in economics is not correct.
#
And finally, I want to talk about planes.
#
So again, our knowledge of World War II,
#
what the Germans invented was Blitzkrieg, the combined arms warfare,
#
of tanks breaking through infantry, protecting the tanks,
#
and ground attack support aircraft,
#
who would deliver cannons precisely on one artillery outpost.
#
Why do I need a plane to precisely deliver fire in support of ground troops?
#
Because I have so many other PGMs.
#
So once you have many, many precision guided munitions,
#
you don't need ground attack helicopters, you don't need ground attack planes,
#
because you're getting that job done with a GPS guided artillery shell,
#
or with a drone dropped munition.
#
So the whole concept of air power for tactical support needs to be rethought.
#
Air power has its place.
#
But this is an example where close ground support of an infantry attack
#
being done by planes or helicopters has just become obsolete.
#
And of course, one more problem in that is man pads,
#
that a human being can hold a missile,
#
which can take down a low flying plane or a helicopter.
#
So that just underlines that that's too precious an asset.
#
The exchange rate is not right.
#
The amount of money it takes for a man pad,
#
and the amount of money it takes for a helicopter or a ground attack craft is just unequal.
#
So suddenly you need to rethink, why do I have those planes?
#
So precision guided munitions are now available through artillery and rockets,
#
like the High Mars, and through drone based attacks.
#
And now that these three are here,
#
you need to rethink all the other things we were doing
#
in order to achieve precise fires at the front or behind the front.
#
And I think what this points to is that what every modern army has been investing in so far,
#
with perhaps the exceptions of those really ahead of the curve,
#
and what certainly the Indian army must be investing in,
#
is mostly already thoroughly outdated.
#
You can't fight a modern warfare with that.
#
There aren't these big impressive manly macho machines like tanks and airplanes
#
and big ships that are really going to make the difference.
#
It is really a tough quandary for military planners.
#
Because of the nature of how expensive military gear is,
#
nobody can turn on a dime.
#
Nobody can change the force design quickly.
#
The way this is supposed to work is you do a national strategy document,
#
you identify the threats,
#
then you're supposed to do a force design.
#
What is the organization and the equipment using which I will fight off these threats?
#
There's supposed to be a systematic intellectual process that gets up to the force design.
#
When you do that force design, you have to reckon with the fact that you can't change.
#
The amount of money required to trash my existing gear and force
#
and design something completely new is just way out of reach.
#
Then you have to be in North Korea.
#
The kind of money that is required, 20% of GDP, 50% of GDP,
#
50% of GDP is never going to happen.
#
I'm giving you only 2% of GDP.
#
Every five years, you're supposed to change course in an incremental way,
#
respecting the platform's capabilities that are in place and incrementally evolving them.
#
This five-year journey of a national security strategy and then rethink the force design,
#
but rethink the force design not as a radical,
#
but rather as combining all this frontiers knowledge with a deep understanding
#
of the present capabilities of this organization and the equipment
#
and then saying, now how shall we tack?
#
Or should we incrementally move this supertanker and make progress?
#
So we need this very intentional process of rethinking and debating
#
and at the same time being conscious of path dependence, that we are where we are.
#
You can't wish away the journey where we have been and I'm not here to litigate the past.
#
Let's just treat that as the given that we've got this path dependence
#
and now how should we go forward?
#
I'm reminded of Clayton Christensen's innovators dilemma
#
and it feels to me that every modern army in a sense is Kodak in the age of digital photography.
#
That the incentives are completely against your innovating or disrupting yourself.
#
Why the hell would you do that?
#
And also it would involve taking a look at yourself and realizing that 90% of what I have is inadequate
#
and it's completely outdated and no one will really want to do that
#
or give that message to the generals or whoever you're reporting to.
#
So that brings me to the next subject which is, so what are the deep sources of state capacity?
#
So I already talked about the strategic thinking of how you build and design a military force for every country.
#
For every country this is the systematic drill that we should be dreaming of.
#
That step one, write a national strategy document where we understand threats,
#
we write down the threats and we ask ourselves what is the force design that will best address those threats?
#
Although advanced countries do that, they're beautiful documents.
#
One of the good documents that came out recently is from Japan and they were so kind,
#
they translated it in English so we can all read it.
#
And it's just an eye-opener of simple clear logical thinking that our threat perception has changed
#
because of the rise of China, because of the Ukraine war.
#
So now we consider ABCD kinds of invasions more likely.
#
We are where we are, this is the force that we have.
#
Now this is the incremental strategy by which we will modify things.
#
It's a clear argument about where we are and where we are thinking.
#
And then you lead to the organization design.
#
So if you're not going to have ground attack aircraft, you need to redesign the way you think about the Air Force.
#
If you're going to have drones, will there be certain drones that are controlled by the Air Force?
#
Will there be certain drones that are controlled by the frontline infantry?
#
So what is the force design?
#
What is the organization through which you will be running your next generation army?
#
And then finally, what is the procurement strategy,
#
whereby you will give out R&D and production contracts to private people to build all the kit?
#
That's the systematic way in which you should think about military strategy.
#
There are three elements that are conducive to state capacity in military affairs over and beyond this.
#
And in a way, this is all old knowledge, but for me, I relearned it out of the Russian conflict.
#
The first is combined arms warfare.
#
Combined arms warfare is this idea that there are many different tools and techniques and weapons in every army.
#
And they should not fight in isolation.
#
They should come together to win.
#
Our game is to win battles, not to play separately.
#
So in the Napoleonic age, there was artillery and there was infantry and there was cavalry.
#
And in a way, they did three separate battles of their own.
#
They didn't really weave together.
#
All the way to the beginning of the First World War, separate components worked separately.
#
It was during the First World War that first the Germans and then the Allies learned how to fully weave these together,
#
how to make them a seamless whole.
#
So see, from a management point of view, it's very easy for us to say, let's start a department of drones.
#
And they'll own lots of drones.
#
They'll operate the drones.
#
What you need to do is to deeply weave it into everybody.
#
Maybe every tank should be carrying three drones.
#
Maybe a tank should carry a drone group in tow.
#
I'm just trying to create a separate vertical thing.
#
Now I'm on top of drones because I've got a department of drones.
#
We're buying 10,000 drones every day.
#
OK, that's the wrong way to see it.
#
Combined arms warfare is the idea that we synthesize all the pieces in our command to win battles and to win wars.
#
And these things, they have to work together.
#
So for a bad manager, it's very easy to create an IT vertical, a marketing vertical, a production vertical.
#
And they become empires and they barely talk to each other.
#
But in the hands of a good management team, we do combined arms warfare where all these come together.
#
They give covering fire to each other.
#
They protect each other.
#
They support each other.
#
They fuel the creative energy of each of them.
#
And they come together to win in the marketplace.
#
Just from a political economy point of view, I'm thinking aloud.
#
What if we reach a stage where airplanes are completely redundant because of more PGMs and better drones and all of that?
#
There's no way the Air Force is going to say we are redundant.
#
So you then get into these organizational turf battles where essentially every government department will try to increase its budget.
#
And that's where the incentives are.
#
And that is definitely an issue.
#
You don't have to go so dramatic.
#
I do not believe the Air Force is obsolete.
#
I'm just saying in the case.
#
But subsets are already happening.
#
There are elements of a conventional force structure which just don't make sense.
#
So you need to rip up your management structures all the time.
#
And then like in every organization, there is great resistance that nobody wants to change something that's running.
#
If I built my life and career and identity and capability around a particular way of thinking and doing, why will I allow that to change?
#
So this is a usual reorganization problem.
#
So combined arms warfare is this puzzle about how to weave elements together in a battlefield as a seamless whole.
#
It goes from good to great when one element of the combined arms, like imagine an infantry, does certain things.
#
When the other guy tries to respond to that, then a different element such as the tanks will then kill you.
#
So how do you create killing zones where some elements of your capabilities are bringing people into the killing zone?
#
And then you are able to win battles by destroying things in the killing zone.
#
So this is the art of combined arms warfare.
#
This is well established.
#
As I said, late in the First World War, combined arms warfare was invented.
#
Now, this takes tremendous thinking and training.
#
It's very easy to build separate vertical things.
#
I know how to operate a tank.
#
So think of training levels.
#
First, I join the army.
#
They teach me how to hold a gun.
#
Everybody has to hold a gun and do some PT.
#
Then they teach me how to be a loader inside a tank.
#
Or maybe I have a Russian tank.
#
It's got an autoloader.
#
So they teach me how to be a tank.
#
I learn manuals, procedures of how to be a tank.
#
But no, you want me to do combined arms.
#
Oh, so I have to collaborate with the infantry unit, which is going to run with the tank.
#
Collaborate, deeply collaborate.
#
Meaning sometimes they'll say things to me,
#
where I have to put my life on the line to obey them and to help them and vice versa.
#
Sometimes I have to say things to them, where they have to do certain things,
#
where they have to put their life on the line to do things that are required for me.
#
So it's not a sterile collaboration.
#
We have to really trust each other.
#
Then we'll be able to fight as a seamless whole.
#
Oh, but then the drone guys, we need to collaborate with them also.
#
So you can see one by one, electronic warfare, drones, long-range fires, tanks, ATGMs.
#
The number of different things happening in modern armies has raised the training complexity
#
of getting cultural coherence and true partnership in combined arms warfare.
#
So all of us have always known that combined arms warfare is important.
#
There have been some very silly things that the Russians did in the early stages of the war.
#
It is not that they don't know combined arms warfare.
#
They know combined arms warfare.
#
They were doing an intelligence coup.
#
But World War II type combined arms warfare doesn't cut it anymore
#
because of the plethora of the tools and capabilities that have come into the modern battlefield.
#
And it is just absolutely wrong to count guns and count tanks and think that is capability.
#
The subtle thing that you're not measuring is these capabilities.
#
Do they understand all this?
#
Have they trained deeply, rigorously with each other?
#
Have they melded as a force?
#
Do they have a coherent culture?
#
Are they all able to speak a common language?
#
So everybody in Ukraine speaks Ukrainian and they have manuals in Ukrainian.
#
Do they trust each other?
#
Do they have ego problems?
#
Do they have a caste system?
#
There are tankers somehow viewing themselves as bigger and more important than infantrymen.
#
If one says to the other, I want you to put your life on the line, will they do that?
#
Or do I lose trust that when I tell that guy, he'll not do it.
#
He's supposed to be reporting to some other structure.
#
So it's like a typical Indian corporation.
#
When accounting says something to IT, IT is not going to do it.
#
They have to bubble up all the way to the CEO.
#
There you are, Russian army.
#
That rigid command structure, everything goes back up to Moscow.
#
If a general doesn't order it, things don't get done.
#
Whereas in the Western way of war, you get this fluidity of combined arms warfare at the junior level.
#
Here's a question, a tangential question.
#
Is this sort of cultural coherence and this coordination that you're talking about
#
both incredibly critical in warfare today and absolutely irrelevant in warfare at a future date?
#
Because at some point you will have enough automation and AI
#
that you may not have humans driving tanks or doing the artillery work
#
and PGMs will be doing so much of the work.
#
Like you said, they've almost made airplanes unnecessary.
#
So if you're looking at a future where a lot of fighting is being done by drones and robots
#
and AI is doing a lot of the coordination and taking the decisions,
#
then not only do you have a situation where you need modern technology
#
and not modern armies per se of people,
#
but then you also have a situation where technically hitting any human being
#
could be a war crime because everyone is a civilian.
#
To make an analogy with algorithmic trading,
#
in the financial markets, yes, of course, all the trading is done by programs.
#
But the programs are written and controlled by the people.
#
So it's actually the people.
#
So we should think of algorithmic trading as one person sets a hundred horses into the race
#
and is watching and controlling them.
#
But much less people involved in that case.
#
You don't have an artillery soldier.
#
So we can debate how this will go.
#
But I just think at every step, the evolution of weapons
#
will create complex demands for coordination.
#
For example, I talked about spy satellites
#
with generating a torrent of information coming down as images.
#
No human being can process all those.
#
So we run machine learning algorithms to identify where is the tank in the photographs.
#
And then some humans are set together.
#
Then the human coordinates who has the artillery fire capability right there
#
and sends the information there.
#
So that humans coordinating, more and more work will be done in information processing.
#
But finally, that doesn't substitute for human consciousness.
#
It is the humans who have to wage the war, all those other tools.
#
And it is humans who will have to keep innovating and surprising each other.
#
The computers will never innovate.
#
We're back to a different discussion that we have done.
#
Yeah, but my point is like a lot of the Russian dilemma right now is
#
where do we get the soldiers from?
#
You know, all these botched conscriptions are happening and everything.
#
And the point is, in a future war, you'll need a bunch of generals
#
and you'll need a bunch of coders, but you don't really need actual...
#
It evolves that way, but I think in the deep future.
#
For a while right now, we're just making that soldier in the modern battlefield
#
some cyborg where the soldier is supported by CPUs and processing
#
and a personal drone to go look around the next corner in that room who is there.
#
So that's where we're definitely headed.
#
That immense sensor packages, information flows.
#
Soldiers are being overloaded with information.
#
So now you have a very different problem of how do I sift through all this information
#
and deliver the relevant information?
#
So you may have heard of heads-up displays where there's a complex helmet
#
where they can see things, including at night, there's night vision goggles.
#
But then maybe the bloke there sees something that I don't.
#
Is he able to tap a button and show me what he's seeing?
#
Things like that. So that's where we're going right now.
#
Heads-up displays or HUDs, as they're called, are a very common poker term
#
because that's what gives you a lot of the information on how an opponent
#
has been playing through a bunch of different sessions
#
and how you yourself are playing through a bunch of different sessions.
#
Is it fair to assume, as I am, that NATO, which is supplying Ukraine now,
#
would have state-of-the-art equipment, but Russia would not, and therefore that again...
#
So generally by now, there is a bit of a battlefield advantage
#
that NATO equipment is generally technically superior to Russian equipment.
#
But then, as I said, all this complex equipment comes with a tremendous training problem
#
that it's not easy to operate and not just operating a tank.
#
I have to learn how to do combined arms warfare.
#
So the fellow who's being trained to fly an F-16
#
then has to go through training on how to cooperate and collaborate with all the others.
#
So it's a very long training cycle.
#
And that brings me back to the sustainment problem
#
that we have to undertake training projects today that will yield results
#
one year out, two years out, three years out.
#
And all those have to be truthfully conveyed to Mr. Putin
#
so that he and his friends, collaborative decision-makers,
#
understand that on the Ukrainian side there is the ability to fight a long war
#
and then maybe you want to make peace right now.
#
So this entire pipeline of sustainment and force generation,
#
it is wise to show it to the other side because actually this is a game of game theory.
#
There's no point fighting it if the other guy is going to do all these things.
#
Whereas generally on the Ukrainian side there is a sense that Russia is not able to sustain.
#
Russia lacks the resources, the technology, the production to be able to keep up this arms race.
#
What have we learnt about how decisions are delegated, how militaries are run per se?
#
What have we learnt about that?
#
So there is a big problem in Russia which is of excessive centralization
#
that I alluded to a moment ago.
#
Frontline people are often conscripts.
#
There are prisoners who are being brought in as conscripts.
#
And the Russian way of war involves a lot of obedience,
#
probably culturally consistent with authoritarian structure.
#
And then people at the frontline are not thinking too much, thinking too well.
#
As an example, very senior generals have to go close to the frontline to fight the war on the Russian side.
#
I seem to think 12 generals have lost their lives close to frontlines.
#
Whereas in the case of 20 years of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
#
only one general died and this was in an assassination.
#
It was not at the battlefield.
#
So there is a problem in terms of management.
#
Let me go back a little to history.
#
There was a Prussian innovation.
#
There was a Prussian way of war which was then brought into the German officer's core with immense success.
#
This is the idea that the first flush of modern European war making was based on obedience.
#
So in a way an oriental army was an undisciplined mob which would show up on the battlefield and scream a lot
#
and turn tail and run based on individual initiative.
#
The western way of war starting with the Greeks and the Romans was about instilling discipline and obedience.
#
So the Greeks with a shield would stand there
#
no matter what wave of barbarians came at them and that was the western way of war.
#
And the same with the Romans and that four foot spear.
#
They would just stand there and that's training, training, training.
#
That under no circumstances will you break and run.
#
So it was discipline and obedience.
#
That was the western way of war.
#
The training drill and brutal levels of obedience.
#
Great innovations took place in the late 19th century in Russia
#
and then were built on spectacularly by the German officer's core in the early 20th century
#
around the concept of some parts are orders and some parts are empowerment.
#
So what they understood was that at every level of the army
#
layer N gives an order to layer N plus one on certain issues.
#
Saying I want you to go get that hill and I'm your boss, I'm ordering you.
#
You have no right to question why are we going up that hill.
#
But how you will go up that hill is your business.
#
And then when that person who's asked to conquer that hill gives orders to the next layer.
#
Once again, there'll be some parts of the order that are absolutely inviolable.
#
You will just obey like any other army grunt anywhere in the world.
#
But the rest of it is left entirely to frontline individual initiative.
#
So that is part of the secret of the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War.
#
That there was immense empowerment.
#
The idea being the guy fighting at the front knows what is going on.
#
And don't ask for complicated chains of command where a question goes back
#
five minutes later, ten minutes later, one day later, an answer comes back.
#
So there are these famous stories about Rommel getting across the Meuse River.
#
There were very good French tanks on the other side.
#
They sent back for instructions saying am I allowed to blow this guy out of the water?
#
By the time the answer came back, Rommel had crossed the Meuse River.
#
So the speed of decision making, the frontline being empowered to look at the world
#
and make decisions is a critical part of modern war.
#
Nobody has carried that further than the Americans and by and large the NATO way of war.
#
And this is something which is lacking.
#
So you need a very flexible, nimble, creative, clever, not dumb conscripts, not dumb grunts.
#
So sometimes I hear stories about army recruitment in India where hundreds of people show up at a village
#
and they're told to run 15 kilometers and the first 20 people who reach the other side
#
get kicked up into the level two recruitment.
#
This doesn't seem like a very good way to find clever, intelligent, creative, problem solving people.
#
Modern armies need to be clever, creative, problem solving people.
#
And there needs to be this delegation at every stage.
#
And everything I'm saying actually applies equally in the world of business.
#
If a CEO is telling everybody in an organization what to do, that organization will be very mediocre.
#
At every layer you need this separation of I'm telling you this part, how you do this part you know well.
#
You watch the world, you make decisions and you adapt.
#
So the improvisation, the adaptation should be happening at the frontline.
#
And this is a very important thing we have known since Russia before Bismarck's reunification of 1870.
#
And it's just doubly come back.
#
So partly Ukrainian heroism and patriotism and love of the country is generating this kind of creative problem solving.
#
Partly they are also unlearning the old Russian military training and they are graduating up to Western standards of war
#
and they're getting all this knowledge about how to organize an army.
#
And there's incredible knowledge that is being fed to Ukraine today.
#
And what's wonderful about it also is that the Ukrainians would effectively be graduating from an old way of playing poker
#
to a new way of playing poker while they know how the enemy thinks.
#
So the Ukrainians often say we know everything about how Russians wage war because they studied it themselves.
#
They know all the manuals, they know all the procedures, they know all the rules and all the inflexibility
#
and they're able to exploit it to the hilt.
#
I want to describe one remarkable system that happened in this war which just struck me at how clever and how revolutionary and how subversive.
#
So you have a problem that somebody has acquired a target.
#
We know there is a SAM system at some lat long.
#
Maybe a drone saw it, maybe a spy satellite saw it.
#
I want to get a fire there.
#
Traditionally, the fire control goes in a hierarchical way.
#
So leadership, leadership, leadership, it flows down a tree and somebody chooses that this is the gun closest to that target.
#
And does that gun have the correct ammo?
#
Do they have any other fire package priorities?
#
And are you free and ready to do this package?
#
And then I want you to send fires to this lat long.
#
This is the traditional way of doing it.
#
In the early days of the war, there was complete chaos.
#
So Ukrainian command and control had frankly broken down.
#
And they innovated their way into it in a completely novel way.
#
What they did was they basically adapted the Uber app.
#
So there are enough geeks in this modern world who know how to write an Uber app.
#
It's not a complex app.
#
So the principle was like this.
#
That somebody acquires the target.
#
That information goes to an HQ.
#
And HQ just confirms that this is indeed a good target.
#
We don't want to waste ammo on stupid targets or somebody is wrong.
#
They'll kind of try to confirm and verify that I want to kill this.
#
Then HQ sends a request for a ride on the entire Uber system saying at this lat long, we have a nice, fat, juicy target.
#
And some drivers say this ride is mine.
#
So two, three, four different fires say this is mine.
#
And there could be different fires.
#
There could be artillery.
#
There could be some rocket.
#
There could be some BGM.
#
So who knows what is there in that landscape?
#
In the chaos of the early days of the war, nobody knew what is where.
#
So they just send this as a broadcast on the Uber system and two, three, four people will take it.
#
Their protocol was that then HQ, they'll say to HQ, I can do this.
#
So two, three, four people will say, HQ will give back a time that at 2 colon 36 colon 49, we want your fires to land because you don't want to get that guy to start running when the first fire lands.
#
And everybody says, okay.
#
Now they are all at different distances.
#
So they do the calculations and so on.
#
They want to get the expected time at destination.
#
And then they all fire together.
#
Rather they fire so that their fires reach the destination at the correct destination time.
#
And multiple rounds come or multiple weapons come from different directions and they kill the target.
#
So any one round may go wrong.
#
You'll kill the target for sure.
#
It's a decentralized way of war where the gun is choosing.
#
Am I going to do this target or not?
#
Nowhere in the West is there that capability.
#
This is Ukrainian hyper empowerment of the front line.
#
And also it's coming from hyper motivation because these soldiers are not just order following.
#
They're fighting a patriotic war.
#
They're fighting a war to protect their country.
#
Now this has one amazing side effect that not enough people understood initially.
#
And I just laughed my head off.
#
We should never take away the horror of what is happening.
#
But there's something amazing that happened alongside the system is called GIS for RT.
#
RT short for artillery.
#
So the way this works is like this.
#
Now in the artillery game back to the Second World War, there are duels that happen because I try to fire an artillery round.
#
The other guy has radars whereby they are watching these ballistic trajectories.
#
They're just gravity driven ballistic trajectories.
#
And the equipment solves all the differential equations and works out my location.
#
So when you fire a round, the other guy has radars that work out your location.
#
And those radars can sometimes be connected live to a gun, which will then bring back return fire on me.
#
It's been there since World War II.
#
This gun laying radar was part of the radar development of World War II.
#
Now this GIS for RT system sends five different things from five different directions to the target.
#
So the gun laying radar doesn't know where to look.
#
Old style gun laying radars believe that there is a battery of guns where there are multiple guns and they all fly together.
#
So it thinks that it will calculate all those locations and average them.
#
It will actually get a statistical noise reduction.
#
Here, when it averages across five different guys shooting in a synchronized way, it gets nothing.
#
So the entire business of counter battery fire that was there in Russian hands just became important because of this innovation and warfare.
#
So this is hyper empowerment, use of modern technology, all built within days after the invasion began.
#
You want people with that level of cleverness, intelligence, innovation, adaptation and the computer engineers thirst that no hell with you in one night.
#
I'm going to write this.
#
You want that kind of aggressive culture around software development.
#
It's absolutely mind blowing and the incentives.
#
And I want to ask a question here about like if you go sideways for a moment about Russian soldiers themselves,
#
like there was a RAND report which estimated at 97 percent of Russian army and airborne personnel were deployed in this conflict.
#
So basically essentially everybody is there, much higher percentage than Afghanistan or Chechnya and all of that.
#
And Russian forces have sustained more casualties in the last 16 months than in 10 years of war in Afghanistan or two campaigns in Chechnya in the 1990s.
#
So the body count is horrific.
#
Pretty much everybody's involved.
#
Morale is incredibly low.
#
The Russian army is often working at, you know, different units are working at cross purposes.
#
Like you said, there's, you know, there are coordination problems and all of that.
#
And how does this play into the thing?
#
Because it seems that if the level of motivation on the Ukrainian side is abnormally high, it would be abnormally low here.
#
A lot of these people have been forcibly conscripted.
#
They don't even want to freaking fight.
#
So this is all the invisible stuff that I keep on saying.
#
Military might is in the mind.
#
It's not in counting tanks and guns.
#
It's about the management.
#
It's about their skills.
#
So combat effectiveness is way, way more than counting guns.
#
And I've just been describing the elements.
#
Do you know how to do combined arms warfare?
#
Do you trust your buddy that when you ask them to do something, will they actually do it or will they lie to you saying, yeah, yeah, I did it?
#
How much delegation of decision making is there?
#
Are there alert, clever people at every level who will think and respond rather than just having B grade and C grade agricultural workforce being attracted into the army?
#
So these are all some of the things that we learned about modern warfare.
#
And in some ways, it just reinforces the old lessons.
#
In some ways, it is an escalation of the old ideas and the trends.
#
So there is a reason why after the Treaty of Versailles, the German army was limited to 100,000.
#
And 100,000 of the best people of Germany showed up in that army.
#
And that created the foundations for arguably the best fighting force of World War II in the sense that the German Wehrmacht never lost a fair fight.
#
If there was ever rough parity in the number of people and equipment, the Germans always won.
#
They only lost when they were overwhelmed on the strategic scale because they were up against countries with more people and more equipment that Germany could ever master.
#
So these things matter and the quality of the people.
#
So today there is an amazing warrior ethos that has come together in America through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
#
They are very high quality people who go into the army.
#
They are not dumb grunts. They are not obedient.
#
They are clever. They are thinkers. They will be resilient.
#
They will be able to handle emotional and practical problems.
#
They will problem solve on the fly.
#
The Western way of war has become this hyper empowered wars of mobility and cleverness.
#
Let's talk about the military industrial complex of Russia itself and then of NATO itself.
#
Because like you've pointed out, the daily use of ammunition and equipment is just at a different kind of level.
#
How have both sides coped with that?
#
Because both sides obviously have also simultaneously because of the war as any war would do, faced an economic crisis.
#
Any resources that you pump into a war is taken away from somewhere else and has huge knock-on effects as such.
#
There's a massive opportunity cost.
#
What's kind of been happening there?
#
First is the consumption of ammo is at ridiculous levels.
#
It is at insane levels.
#
Look, in World War II, we just converted the entire country into a factory.
#
Nobody's going to do that today.
#
The consumption of ammunition has been at insane levels to some extent
#
because people were a bit incompetent.
#
Let me say it like this.
#
You have a bad product.
#
You're a marketing manager.
#
I'll give you infinite money for advertising.
#
You'll somehow try to sell the product, but actually it's not optimal.
#
In similar fashion, many other disabilities are made up by just burning more ammo.
#
Imagine in a one kilometer by one kilometer piece of land that I want to conquer, I'll saturation bomb it with one shell every 10 meters.
#
A grid of 100 by 100 artillery shells will be sent in there.
#
That's 10,000 artillery shells for one square kilometer.
#
I can reduce it to rubble, but is that a wise, clever way of doing it?
#
You're just wasting a lot of money doing that.
#
Shell consumption rates in the early stages of the war were at just ridiculous levels.
#
After the Russians lost in the Kiev campaign and they looped around and started attacking Bakhmut,
#
for some time they were just burning up ammo at ridiculous rates.
#
Once again, tactics versus strategy.
#
You can't keep going at this level.
#
There is a phrase in this field.
#
It's called shell hunger.
#
You just desperately want more shells.
#
And similarly on the Ukrainian side.
#
On the Ukrainian side, the problem was that they were using 152 millimeter Russian standard guns.
#
And where are you going to get Russian ammunition other than by conquering more and more Russian territory?
#
And they were very thrilled at the amount of ammo the Russians left behind in the Kharkiv campaign.
#
But in general, you can't get those guns.
#
Then they started transiting to Western munitions.
#
In the West, for long years, consumption rates have been very low.
#
So they've really been tailing off their production.
#
So in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the French have occasionally done some things in Africa,
#
consumption rates have been very low.
#
But as an example, in the small conflict in Libya, within a matter of days,
#
the French and British forces that ran out of PGMs.
#
So consumption rates can easily spike in a genuine conflict.
#
What everybody is looking for now is partly revving up the military industrial complex
#
and also trying to construct ways to make it have high adaptability.
#
So you want a high peak capability while you're idling in peacetime.
#
So there is a fresh focus on this question of how to create military industrial capability
#
that can achieve very high peak load while humming away at a modest base load
#
so you don't have to spend too much money on this.
#
I have an article on the subject.
#
But there's been quite a task in the West of revving up all the supply lines.
#
There have been situations where it is essentially impossible.
#
The famous Stinger missile uses some integrated circuits from the 70s
#
that nobody in the wide world makes today.
#
So you actually have to specially redesign the circuitry to use some modern chips.
#
It's not very complicated.
#
But to do anything at scale, this is hard because you effectively have to rebuild the design.
#
You have to put it into a new factory.
#
And now you're producing Stingers again.
#
Similarly, for the Javelin and anti-tank guided missile,
#
the Ukrainian consumption rates were just way beyond daily production rates in the United States.
#
So they're all struggling on revving up their industrial systems.
#
So in Europe, there's been an important objective to get one million shells produced for Ukraine in a year.
#
And it took a lot of pushing and fighting to get all the countries to agree to that number.
#
And so various factories are revving up all over Europe to get to that target of one million shells.
#
On the Russian side, partly they've been importing equipment.
#
They have two countries that are giving them lethal aid.
#
Most countries are not giving them lethal aid.
#
By and large, China is not giving them lethal aid.
#
A certain amount of drone equipment is going from China to Russia,
#
where China has plausible deniability because they claim this is a civilian drone.
#
So I say it's shades of grey.
#
But by and large, China is not giving lethal aid to Russia.
#
There was a very interesting moment recently that
#
the ANC leadership in South Africa has an ancient affection for the USSR,
#
like many people in India do.
#
And United States intelligence nailed a Russian ship that came to South Africa,
#
got filled with military equipment, and went back into Russia.
#
And there was a diplomatic brouhaha.
#
And we don't know what will happen next to South Africa.
#
But these are the ways in which Russia is desperate to obtain more equipment.
#
And potentially this cannot be done too much because the South Africans can get one ship.
#
Western intelligence has penetrated Russia so completely that none of these things can stay secret.
#
So nobody can sell lethal aid to Russia and it will stay secret.
#
On the Russian production side, A, they've done an impressive job of production.
#
It used to always be said that Russian inventory levels are enough to fight a war for a thousand years.
#
That was a bit of an exaggeration.
#
There is significant production going on in Russia today and it's impressive how far they have come.
#
They're facing two kinds of constraints.
#
First, for complex equipment like the precision guided munitions, guided missiles, cruise missiles and so on.
#
These things are filled with complex Western equipment.
#
Russia never had the ability to make good integrated circuits and complex electronics.
#
So all that electronics is Western.
#
And in the sanctions regime, they're not able to get those parts.
#
So there is a smuggling business.
#
At suitcase quantities, filling up one boot of a car at a time, they're able to get important equipment in.
#
But they're not able to run factories effectively to do these things.
#
The second problem is a deeper problem.
#
Is that all their machine tools that make the high precision military equipment are German.
#
And those tools wear out and Germany will not give you spares.
#
So the German sanctions include sanctions covering the high precision machine tools that make military grade parts.
#
So bit by bit, slowly Russian production capacity is being whittled away.
#
But they're still some distance away from serious trouble.
#
But by and large, I think they've done a good job of keeping a remarkable production system going.
#
And how does it affect their export market, whether military suppliers?
#
Because I'm guessing in the past, export markets, as you've pointed out previously,
#
would be super important to their own domestic production because they would enable more economies of scale,
#
more useful for funding the R&D that goes into that.
#
So being a good military supplier automatically for them would mean that they also have a better army.
#
Absolutely. So as I said earlier, Russia is a Spain sized GDP.
#
But they are number one or number two or number three on essentially every category of global arms exports.
#
So they are a giant player in global arms exports.
#
The only way they could fund the important high quality systems development in Russia was using export markets.
#
Because if you're a Spain sized country, you don't have the economies of scale to do the R&D
#
and to do the production lines because your needs are too small.
#
So Russia ran a brilliant system for the last 30 years where they exported military equipment on a large scale
#
that generated the resourcing for R&D, that generated the resourcing for economies of scale of building assembly lines.
#
And some of those cheaper equipment would be purchased by the Russian army.
#
That whole story has run into trouble from a couple of points of view.
#
First, the intensive use of equipment in Russia today of arms and munitions in Russia today
#
has meant that Russia has reneged on contractual promises to many countries, including India.
#
So there are buyers who are a little miffed saying you were supposed to give me X this year
#
and you weren't able to because you're busy diverting all that equipment to fight a war.
#
Second, Russian equipment has not fed so well in this war.
#
In my opinion, that is a bit overstated because partly it has been the combined arms warfare
#
and the training levels and under-motivated conscripts.
#
I feel certain that Russian equipment is capable of better as compared to what they have done.
#
But in a image management and a marketing point of view, they really look lame because there are too many videos.
#
For example, what I described to you about a Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drone flying like a World War I plane,
#
shooting down a $10 million state-of-the-art surface-to-air missile system.
#
There are too many such videos that have damaged the reputation of Russian equipment
#
and they have some work to do to rebuild that reputation.
#
And that brings me to point three.
#
Suppose either because of difficulties of production owing to sanctions
#
or because of the loss of respect and reputation for Russian equipment,
#
there is a dip in Russian arms exports, which I consider likely.
#
Then suddenly the whole economic magic of the Russian arms industry gets into trouble
#
because they need those economies of scale.
#
If they don't have those scale economies, then suddenly they don't have enough money domestically
#
to do that same amount of R&D to produce on those industrial scale assembly lines and so on.
#
So I think it is a very big battle for figuring out what to do as Russian arms manufacturing.
#
And this is a place where we in India have skin in the game.
#
We'll come back to that later.
#
Let's talk about the other aspect because wars are not just fought on the battlefield,
#
but they are also fought in diplomatic terms.
#
One thing that Russia would have hoped geopolitically is that Ukraine is alone in this.
#
One of the reasons why Ukraine has now started doing so well and the outlook looks not so bleak at all
#
is that NATO has stepped in, they are being provided with arms, technology, know-how, all of those things.
#
But the Russian assumption at one level would have been that the West is going to stay out for a variety of different reasons,
#
including the energy needs of the West.
#
I remember when I had done my episode on Russia-Ukraine right after the war started with Pranay Kutasane and Nitin Pai,
#
and one point they made out was about the catastrophic decision that many European countries made
#
that they would have direct pipelines supplying gas and oil and whatever from Russia,
#
therefore tying themselves to Russian energy instead of building LNG terminals
#
and then taking fuel from whoever wanted to sell it to them.
#
And they did not give themselves the flexibility, and interestingly India did,
#
and they did not give themselves that flexibility,
#
and because of which Russia kind of had a stranglehold on them because Europe needed Russia for its energy.
#
For Putin that must have seemed like a massive trump card, but it hasn't quite worked out that way.
#
So tell me a bit about that.
#
This has just been such a surprise.
#
So at the outset, I was exactly where you described Nitin and Pranay's thinking that how the hell is this going to work.
#
So here is the outline, step one, February 2022, the war starts.
#
Okay, the Germans had been so imprudent.
#
Not only did they have pipelines to Russia, Nord Stream 1, Nord Stream 2 and some others,
#
not only did they have these pipelines,
#
they also had handed over a large part of German gas storage in Germany under the ownership of Gazprom,
#
And just coincidentally Gazprom in February 2022 said that all these tanks needed lots of maintenance,
#
so the tanks were all empty.
#
So in February 2022, Germany had a large amount of empty gas tanks.
#
And then again, the advocates of a more pro-Russia stance in Europe were arguing that if Russia cuts off gas supply and crude oil supply to Europe,
#
we will have a recession, prices of gas will go to infinity, poor people will suffer.
#
In the recession, people will lose jobs.
#
And echoing Keynes after the Second World War, they said that this will fuel Nazi parties all over Europe.
#
After the First World War, you mean?
#
What Keynes did after the First World War, but more at the late stages of the Second World War,
#
where Keynes thought through a whole array of what he thought were government interventions into the economy,
#
saying we should protect the possibility of civilisation, because otherwise we will get into Nazi and communist barbarism.
#
I was remembering his economic consequences of the peace in 1921.
#
I'm on a later thing that he wrote very articulately about the glory and beauty of Western civilisation,
#
but in a pessimistic way that populism is going to win.
#
Poor people will be incited to rebel and eat the rich.
#
And the only thing that keeps us away from the pitchforks is going to be some kind of welfare state.
#
So not that I like it, but it is the only way to keep the Nazis and the communists at bay.
#
That was his argument to protect the possibility of civilisation, as he stated it.
#
In similar fashion, there were people in Europe saying to protect the possibility of civilisation in Europe,
#
we should let Ukraine go.
#
Because if Putin cuts gas supply and oil supply, the price of energy in Europe will go to infinity.
#
There will be a massive recession. Billions of people will lose their jobs.
#
Nazi parties are ready to take them with open arms.
#
So populism, Marine Le Pen, Italy, AFD, all these things will go bad.
#
And the entire Europe will turn into right-wing populism and nationalism and Nazi ideology.
#
So that's how dangerous it is. Do not provoke Putin on the question of oil and gas.
#
That is how bad things were at the start.
#
And I already mentioned the Gazprom story about how imprudent it was for German appeasement
#
and accommodation of Russia that they had given over control of gas storage inside Germany
#
to Gazprom, the Russian energy giant.
#
And Europe went ahead and supported Ukraine and Putin cut the gas supplies.
#
So the energy blackmail was played at the full scale that anybody had feared.
#
Putin thought that Europe would squeal and come back and say,
#
okay fine, sorry, I won't support Ukraine so much, please restart the gas.
#
And what instead happened was just out of the world, it was remarkable.
#
So here is a long list of responses.
#
Gas production in Europe went up, including through Norway.
#
Nuclear production in Europe was increased.
#
There were plants that were scheduled to be closed down. They were not closed down.
#
Then when you actually get German engineering into fray,
#
by God, they know how to do things.
#
If we will ask anybody in the world how much time it takes to build an LNG terminal,
#
we say two, three years.
#
The Germans got LNG terminals done in six months.
#
So they had the engineering punch to get these things done when you really need them.
#
The Chinese would do it in six weeks, but you don't know if it would work.
#
Yeah, so here the Germans built some LNG terminals in six months.
#
They scoured the entire world, bought up every LNG ship,
#
which triggered off electricity crises for Bangladesh and Pakistan
#
because ships that were destined from Qatar to Bangladesh and Pakistan carrying gas
#
were bought up in the high seas by European gas buyers at high prices
#
and diverted back to Europe, which generated large electricity blackouts in Pakistan.
#
Look at how the whole world is connected.
#
OK, but bottom line is they augmented European energy supply remarkably.
#
Energy prices did go up.
#
They had the state capacity to build and roll out large scale welfare programs,
#
which paid the incremental energy bills of poor people.
#
So they said, look, there's a temporary dislocation in the European winter.
#
You don't want to be cold. It's like highly inelastic.
#
You just buy gas because you don't want to freeze.
#
Putin has regularly talked about Europeans freezing to death this winter.
#
They delivered precise fiscal subsidies to the households,
#
reflecting the magnitude of the minimum gas purchase required
#
to make it through summer multiplied by the increase in the prices of gas.
#
So they staved off the political catastrophe that had been forecasted.
#
Finally, they took every single inch of renewable projects that were presently underway
#
and just put them on steroids.
#
So Europe got a great surge of renewable commissionings.
#
These things take time.
#
So in February 2022, when the war started, they looked around the landscape.
#
They looked for every single plant which involved renewables.
#
When I say they, I mean the private sector because energy prices rose.
#
Because prices rose, they sent the price signal.
#
So every private person said, these are great prices.
#
And they doubled and tripled their effort and started running three shifts a day
#
to build out all that renewable capacity.
#
So they have been a great surge in European renewables capacity.
#
So all in all, Europe has fared well.
#
Gas prices today are back to where they were before the invasion.
#
And there has been no disaster.
#
So this shows you once again that the advanced democracies,
#
the liberal democracies of the world are incredibly resourceful and capable
#
once you get them going.
#
Exactly the lessons that Hitler discovered many years ago.
#
Strong men can poo poo the indecisiveness and the confusion and the debate
#
and paralysis through analysis of liberal democracy.
#
But in the end, this works out the best because the capabilities are out of the world.
#
You're not working with conscripts.
#
You're working with very smart people.
#
You're working with the price system and so on.
#
I want to make one last ironic comment.
#
Europe was headed for net zero in 2035.
#
So by 2035, anyway, their gas consumption was going to zero.
#
So basically we're going to switch off almost all gas consumption by 2035
#
or all gas consumption by 2035, all crude oil consumption by 2035
#
or almost all crude oil consumption by 2035 anyway.
#
Now we're standing in 2023 and their purchases from Russia have gone to zero.
#
Now what do you think is going to happen from now till 2035?
#
Do you see a possibility of a Putin or a Putin-esque regime in Russia
#
emerging at the end of the war?
#
So say in one month or one year or two years, the war ends.
#
Imagine if some Putin or Putin-esque regime in Russia tries to turn back to Europe
#
and say, OK, fine, the war is over.
#
Now will you buy some gas?
#
And the Europeans are going to say no, because we figured out how to live without your gas.
#
And anyway, we are on a tapering trajectory.
#
We're never going to eat gas again.
#
So gas is going to sit in Siberian deposits forever because of this war.
#
It's just an amazing outcome.
#
So I claim that Trump and Putin should get a Nobel Prize
#
because of all the contributions they made to galvanizing the global response to climate change.
#
I wonder what Greta Thunberg would think about her Nobel Prize going to Putin.
#
Not that I like either of them.
#
Tell me more about the scene within Russia right now.
#
You've got one strong man.
#
He's made a terrible decision.
#
The war is going badly.
#
It's going to continue going badly, one assumes.
#
And we'll come back to what directions it might go in and what the end game could be.
#
But as far as Putin is concerned, what is his scene right now?
#
I would imagine this would have made him even more paranoid.
#
He'll be even more scared of being overthrown from within.
#
How does all of that work?
#
How does all of that play out?
#
So he understands the dark arts of the coercive instruments of the state.
#
He has organized power into five or ten verticals that don't get to talk to each other.
#
And they all spy on each other.
#
It is very difficult to mount a coup against Putin.
#
So everybody thinks that shouldn't the Russian elites get together and overthrow Putin?
#
And I think that that is not an accurate reading.
#
The oligarchs are not independent rich people.
#
They serve at the pleasure of Putin.
#
The oligarchs are under everyday fear that Putin will turn on them.
#
There is a Wikipedia page on mysterious deaths of rich, powerful Russians.
#
Where on an average, once every ten days, one very powerful person has fallen out of a window.
#
So there is conflict going on in the regime.
#
And it is very dangerous to act against Putin.
#
And the oligarchs don't have real power.
#
So like many authoritarian regimes, the state is on top.
#
The state has monopolized power.
#
And Putin has very good tradecraft.
#
He understands how to organize and wield the coercive instruments of the state.
#
There is also an economic problem going on in the country.
#
By March 2022, an array of Western sanctions were in place.
#
And a lot of Western companies were exiting Russia.
#
These are disproportionately important because there is not a whole lot of internal capability in terms of the firms in Russia.
#
Foreign companies are very important.
#
The flight of skilled people accelerated when conscriptions began.
#
So many people who were told that you have to join the army, they basically ran away.
#
And Putin has not done a whole lot to prevent people from leaving the country.
#
He is probably thinking that these elites, the intelligentsia, these English speakers are not my support base anyway.
#
They will foment trouble for me.
#
They can organize a political movement to unseat me one day.
#
And it is better for me if they are gone.
#
So it is better for a populist to rule over country hicks rather than support the emergence or the presence of a sophisticated English speaking elite in the country.
#
And this has created an awkward power situation in the country where Putin continues to monopolize power.
#
There is no meaningful resistance or an opposition arrangement.
#
There were a whole bunch of demonstrations at the beginning against the war.
#
And again, by the way, I admire people who will go out into the streets and protest against a war.
#
Can you imagine in how many countries would people have the guts to go on the street and complain about their own authoritarian government invading a neighbor?
#
You can imagine that happening in a democracy.
#
We saw that with Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam wars in the UK and the US.
#
But in an authoritarian country, militarism just runs amok.
#
It is very difficult and dangerous for anybody to challenge the war decided by the state.
#
The state is something lofty.
#
In fact, one of the things that blew my mind when the conflict had just started, very early in the conflict,
#
is that every single Russian chess player, all their top grandmasters, barring one coward named Sergei Mukaryakin,
#
but every one of them, some 30-40 of them spoke out against Putin and against a war.
#
And that's very early in the game.
#
It's just such a show of courage and I wish more of us here could be inspired by that.
#
So there is a particular monument in Moscow to a Ukrainian hero.
#
So the critics of the war started taking it as a way to make a covert statement.
#
They would go place flowers at that monument.
#
So the security forces understood this and they stand there.
#
And every few hours, one person goes there, places flowers, gets arrested, goes away.
#
And being arrested in Russia is no fun.
#
I mean, their prison system is one of the worst in the world.
#
So there is remarkable decency on the parts of some people, but there is no realistic threat.
#
Let's turn to the economics of what happened to the Russian economy out of this.
#
I felt that early in the game, it was clear that this was a disaster for the economy.
#
Why? Because you cannot suddenly switch off globalization.
#
Once a country integrates into global technology, global supply chains, global customers, global sources of capital,
#
it's just such a rich and intricate web.
#
And if you try to throw a switch, the whole thing gets disrupted.
#
So it was one thing for the USSR to be self-reliant in all the years leading up to 1989.
#
That fact doesn't prove that now it will be easy for Russia to go back to self-reliance.
#
Once you're enmeshed in the world economy, there's no going back.
#
And I feel that by and large that is the way it has worked out.
#
Let's think in some pieces.
#
Step one, the ruble exchange rate.
#
So some people say that the ruble has not devalued all that much.
#
Well, the trouble is that it started out that the ruble was a hard currency.
#
And after the war started, Russia brought about complete capital controls, much like India.
#
So they went from a world-class hard currency to an Indian-style controlled currency where people couldn't take their money out.
#
So, yeah, I mean, I see some exchange rate, but it's not really a market-based exchange rate.
#
It's something that has been artificially created by restrictions and a control of the central bank.
#
Then one by one, many statistical indicators were switched off by the government,
#
which to me is a hallmark that things are going worse than you think.
#
So they report some data, the data doesn't seem consistent with other indicators.
#
So they would switch off the other indicators.
#
So that's happening regularly.
#
So you start thinking something is amiss.
#
And finally, on a strategic scale, I want to emphasize the demographic disaster.
#
Hannah Arendt has a great line.
#
She says that totalitarian rule is truly possible only in countries that are large enough to be able to afford depopulation.
#
Like in many other authoritarian countries, Russia stopped giving people the happiness and the social constructs
#
within which people feel comfortable enough to have children.
#
So Russia has long been on a demographic decline.
#
And the war is a catastrophe, both because conscripts have been killed and because elites have fled.
#
When you put it together, it's a massive demographic catastrophe of men in their reproductive age.
#
And that's going to bear on the Russian economy in the years to come.
#
What are the lessons in this when we think of, and I'll get back to the war,
#
but just thinking about the one thing that Russia did seem to get right to a large extent is a whole propaganda machine.
#
And in a sense, propaganda has been cutting edge.
#
They've been playing with social media and sort of mastering those dark arts right from Brexit and the Trump election and all of that, as you pointed out.
#
And there's a great piece again from Rand that I'll link from the show notes,
#
which talks about some of the aspects of what makes it work for Russia.
#
And they might be relevant to propaganda elsewhere in the world.
#
So wherever you're listening to from, just listen in.
#
And one is that Russian propaganda is high volume and multi-channel.
#
You know, there's a lot of it and it is coming from, you know, every sort of channel imaginable from WhatsApp to what appears to be new sites to just everything.
#
Russian propaganda is also rapid, continuous and repetitive.
#
And it plays into that bias that we often have that many of us automatically, the first thing we hear, we're likely to accept that as the truth.
#
And when we are getting more and more of that coming right away, then, you know, that kind of reinforces that.
#
Then Russian propaganda, of course, makes no commitment to objective reality.
#
And to the extent that they often invent fake books by writers, so they'll take an expert's name and they'll say so-and-so expert says and so-and-so book.
#
And the book is fictional, but the expert is real.
#
So and so this thing is happening.
#
You know, they invented a book by Edward Lucas called How the West Lost to Putin, for example, which, of course, Lucas did not write.
#
So they're going to that extent.
#
And the fourth one, which is really interesting and a lesson for all of us, is that Russian propaganda is not committed to consistency.
#
So it is not as if there is one party line and you have to throw that line out because that would involve time taken for the news to go out there.
#
No, they'll have a hundred people doing different kinds of propaganda, say whatever the hell you want, doesn't have to match up with it.
#
And there's this great line in this article which says, quote, don't expect to counter the fire hose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.
#
Right. And the two things that work according to them is one forewarning that wherever you feel that fake news is going to be manufactured, you get there first with the real truth.
#
And this seems to be in practice to be way more difficult on how many fronts can you really fight.
#
And the other is that you can't counter the fake news, but counter the effects of it, which is interesting, but also complicated.
#
Right. And we live in times where there are populists all across the world, where a lot of politics has become not an argument about the facts or a debate over policy, but just narrative warfare where the facts no longer matter.
#
So what are the lessons that we learn from this, what the Russians did right and how they can be countered, which is also a key part of that puzzle.
#
Information warfare is a central feature of the modern age.
#
We need a much larger discussion on information warfare, but for this narrow discussion, what you're saying is precisely correct.
#
Russian skills in information warfare are quite strong and they actually go back to propaganda operations under the USSR.
#
So right from communism, communism had the zeal to propound its ideology all over the world, run propaganda outlets all over the world, where in a way liberal democracies have never felt the need to convert others.
#
You just live your happy life.
#
Russian information warfare or FMI was particularly active in things like Brexit and the Trump elections.
#
By the way, they are very active all over the so-called global south in poor countries.
#
They are active in India. And here's a small funny story.
#
Our friend Renuka Sane wrote one column in the print about the Ukraine war on Indian interests.
#
And shortly after that, an article appeared on the web on some obscure outlet claiming to rebut her, claiming to be by an American journalist who lives in Moscow.
#
We don't know whether real or fake.
#
And then the entire social media machine of sending out this URL as the response to Renuka Sane's article.
#
So this shows that there is a machine that is looking out for articles that write on this war in India.
#
Similarly, there are early studies about Russian Twitter warfare on this war and a lot of the Twitter bots were run out of India.
#
So India is an important site of Russian information warfare.
#
I have met lots of people in India who are blithely immersed in standard Russian propaganda claims around Ukraine, around the war, around the perfidy of the West and so on.
#
So this is a serious concern.
#
Now, how does this get better?
#
Again, it's a long discussion.
#
We should be deeply understanding Femi and thinking about how to immunize all of ourselves as individuals and as societies to this modern curse.
#
I have only one important opinion for right now, and I'm actually stealing this idea from Rajesh Jain.
#
Long ago in India when mobile phones first appeared and your WhatsApp comms were with a few trusted friends and family,
#
WhatsApp as a medium was elevated to the level of trust that went with friends and family.
#
So if you only heard genuine conversations from your friends and family on WhatsApp, then some of that rubbed off to WhatsApp as a platform and you started respecting WhatsApp.
#
So in the 2010, 2012, 2014 period, when information warfare started around WhatsApp, people were gullible.
#
They accepted, oh, it's coming on WhatsApp. It must be true.
#
Over the years, that has changed. People have all understood that.
#
Don't believe everything that you read on the internet and you started to become more skeptical.
#
I have done endless surveys of a very boring kind that I'm on lots of mail chains.
#
And every now and then some good, sensible Indian person would be sending out one of the Russian propaganda URLs.
#
And it takes two Google searches to understand this is Russian propaganda.
#
I have tried to take the trouble of doing a reply all saying this is Russian propaganda.
#
And here's my demonstration of how I know that this outlet is not to be trusted.
#
It is Russian propaganda.
#
So I think that slowly people are learning about information warfare.
#
I don't want to portray information warfare as exclusive preserve of foreign agents.
#
Information warfare takes place domestically.
#
I mean, there are campaigns by all kinds of people trying to mess with our minds.
#
You and I have a difference of opinion on this in that I am not part of social media
#
because I just worry about this stuff polluting my head.
#
I read RSS feeds. So I have curated RSS feeds. That's all.
#
So I know a list of people and outlets that I'm reading.
#
I control that. I don't want to hear the shouting or anger.
#
I find that the emotional voices raised of social media messes with my mind.
#
I like to be slow and quiet and I read from an RSS feed.
#
So different people are making their choices differently.
#
I'm actually in agreement with you on this except that I have to be on social media to broadcast my links as it were.
#
And also I figured out a way of cutting out the noise and getting more signal.
#
But if you curate your list properly and if you block every rude asshole, you're kind of fine.
#
But anyway, if Russian operatives are listening to this, I would request them to please create a lot of content rebutting us
#
so that our episode gets more viral than it's going to be anyway.
#
So I think that the world is slowly changing.
#
People are understanding that just because a message comes along on WhatsApp or Facebook, it is not to be trusted.
#
And gradually these things are changing.
#
So I don't at all want to understate the dangers of information warfare.
#
But I think the high water mark of the early 2010s,
#
I think the 2012 to 2016 period was the peak where mobile phones had exploded all over the world
#
and people were naive and willing to listen to this.
#
I think some of this is declining.
#
I've written a column about this.
#
I'll share it with you.
#
I'm also optimistic about the optimization of the tech giants.
#
Google's valuation relies on Google search generating good answers.
#
All too often today, Google search or YouTube search takes you to misinformation and information warfare.
#
I wish Google would get the YouTube search right.
#
There's all kinds of crap and nonsense on YouTube and on Google search.
#
But I think that they have the correct incentives because they've got a trillion dollars of market cap at stake.
#
People will wake up gradually and use YouTube search less and use Google search less.
#
In a similar fashion, there wasn't a time and an age when Facebook appeared infinitely interesting and powerful.
#
And a large part of it is the contamination of Facebook by information warfare.
#
And I think and hope that one of the important priorities inside Facebook should be to create better algorithms to block the information warfare.
#
And that would be a way to rescue the interestingness and usefulness of Facebook.
#
In that sense, while it is often alleged that virality and the screaming on the Internet is the fuel for advertising and Internet giants,
#
I will claim that is true only in the short term and not in the long term.
#
On a strategic scale, it is a catastrophe for Google that when you go run a search on YouTube, all too often you're just stumbling on information warfare content.
#
So I do believe that they will get that point.
#
I mean, I agree with you that the incentives are right.
#
But I worry that the structure is wrong because can a big company be nimble enough to move in the ways that they need to do and get past whatever the status quo bias might lead them towards?
#
I want to ask a final big question about the specific war before we go on to the geopolitics of the whole situation.
#
And the question about the specific war is that what is the end game?
#
One of the things that you've pointed out in this preceding sentence that you wrote in the notes that you shared with me is that Russian strategic defeat is not the same as Ukrainian strategic victory.
#
And there is practically nothing that both sides would agree to right now.
#
Tell me a little bit about what each side would want and what is the realistic path to that and what are the possible sort of end games on either extreme?
#
We can judge Russian success or defeat against a list of objectives.
#
Now, they never stated their objectives like all bad governments, they kept on changing their objectives.
#
Okay, so we did this for this reason that didn't work.
#
No, no, no, that was never why we did it. We did it for this reason.
#
Reminds me of demonetization.
#
So to the best of our ability, let us try to reconstruct Russian objectives based on Putin's writings and claims around a civilizational ethos and all the things that he has written about geopolitical, historical catastrophe and so on.
#
So there was an objective to keep Ukraine as a client state, to not allow Ukraine to merge into Europe culturally, emotionally, institutionally.
#
Okay, if that was objective, sorry, they failed.
#
They have forged a modern Ukrainian cultural identity and that identity is European.
#
Today Europe is the self-identity of what a Ukrainian person thinks.
#
Nobody in Ukraine wants to be Russian anymore.
#
Second, the objective was to keep the West divided, that this would create conflict where some parts of the West would be more hawkish, the East Europeans would be more hawkish.
#
The Germans and the French would break with the hawks saying, no, no, no, we have to appease Putin.
#
In fact, the West united and it turned into a campaign of make NATO great again.
#
And after 200 years of neutrality, Sweden became a member of NATO.
#
And after 70 years after the Second World War, Finland took the plunge and signed on for NATO, turning its back on many tacit forms of Russian power, which used to be called Finlandization.
#
Third, the claim would have been that we will assert Russian power and we will increase Russian clout in world affairs because people will see that Russia is so strong.
#
Russia has the impunity of invading Syria, invading Georgia, invading Ukraine and nobody is able to do anything.
#
Okay, so sorry, failed. Russian clout in world affairs went down.
#
Everybody saw the limits of Russian power.
#
Today we understand more than ever before that this is a Spain-sized GDP, that this is a Saudi Arabia with nukes.
#
Finally, they would have tried to, they would have had an objective of reducing Ukraine into a Belarus-style level of indirect control or ideally into full occupation a la Crimea.
#
No, that has not been achieved.
#
They have increased their landholding.
#
So they now control 17% of Ukraine compared to the 1991 border.
#
Okay, so 17% is a lot, but they haven't got the whole of Ukraine.
#
And for a long, long, long time, it is impossible for any Ukrainian government or regime or head of state to acquiesce to a Belarus-type acceptance of Russian domination.
#
So I think this is comprehensive Russian strategic defeat.
#
However, that's not the same as Ukrainian strategic victory.
#
What is Ukraine's objective? Ukraine's goal is to get back to the 1991 border, to eject the Russians from Crimea.
#
But equally, Ukraine needs an enduring peace.
#
It doesn't need a frozen conflict.
#
It doesn't need a place where 5-10 people are dying every day.
#
It needs an enduring peace because without that, the reconstruction and the investment will not start.
#
Okay, if Indian infrastructure vendors are going to go compete and build vast amounts of Ukrainian infrastructure, which is a fabulous opportunity for India, assuming that Indian foreign policy plays its cards correctly,
#
then they need to know that their projects will not be bombed down.
#
Okay, so Ukraine needs an enduring peace.
#
Otherwise, the reconstruction and the investment into the economy cannot restart.
#
So far, there is no sign of both these.
#
Okay, so it is perfectly consistent today to understand that Russia has lost and Ukraine has not won.
#
That Ukraine has a definition of victory, which is elusive and not within reach.
#
Russia has a definition of victory where they have definitely lost.
#
There is no Russian victory inside.
#
Okay, so then how does the war end?
#
What are the terms on which this war can end and who can do what to make this work?
#
So let's understand, if you gave Russia a blank check, what would they want?
#
They would want what they have already done, that they have got an amended constitution that has grabbed a lot of Ukrainian land.
#
They would want to convert that de jure into de facto.
#
They don't control all that land today.
#
They would want Ukraine to quietly retreat from their positions and hand over all those provinces to Ukraine as have been defined in the Russian constitution.
#
So imagine if India modifies the Indian constitution and says that Bangladesh is a part of India
#
and then starts demanding to Bangladesh that you should quietly retreat and give me Bangladesh because it's in my constitution.
#
That is what Russia is asking for.
#
Second, Russia will want all their overseas assets back.
#
Vast amounts of Russian assets abroad have been blocked by Western countries.
#
And finally, they will want the West to resume economic normalcy because the sanctions regime is very costly for Russia.
#
These would be the three things that Russia is asking for.
#
Okay, currently there is no sight of getting any of these.
#
What would Ukraine want? Ukraine would want 1991 borders.
#
They would want investigation and punishment of war crimes.
#
They would want reparations to pay for all the destroyed infrastructure using Russian money, potentially using assets that are frozen abroad.
#
And they would want security guarantees.
#
They basically want a NATO membership with Article 5 and they would want an EU membership.
#
Okay, not on the table.
#
So we have an irreconcilably distant set of positions between the two.
#
How is this going to work out?
#
The most important thing that I think the world needs to do today is to just grimly lay the long-range foundations for sustenance and combat power for Ukraine
#
so that at some point rational minds in Moscow will look at this pipeline and say that we can't match this.
#
And so it's game theory that you don't have to actually fight to win.
#
You just have to credibly show so much investment and commitment to a long pipeline of ever escalating Ukrainian capability that beyond a point Russia just says like give up is all there is.
#
And then they will come to the negotiating table and there is a possibility of something.
#
It's hard to get peace while Putin is in power because one of the deep insights around authoritarian regimes is that
#
authoritarians find it easy to get into bad wars because there's no check and balance.
#
They don't have debate, discussion, criticism, so they make mistakes on starting wars.
#
Authoritarians find it difficult to get out of wars because nobody's criticizing them.
#
So the United States ended the Vietnam War because the intellectuals of the United States rose up and criticized the war because it turned into demonstrations on the streets
#
because young people in the US said I don't want to be conscripted to fight this useless war in a faraway land.
#
And that is how the United States ended the war.
#
The democratic forces, the checks and balances, the reasoning, the analysis, the criticism, the intellectuals,
#
these are the ways in which a country rationally steps back from a war.
#
If you don't have all these forces, then you're stuck with male braggadocio, short male braggadocio.
#
And I don't see how you get to peace while Putin is in power.
#
I don't see how there will be a mistake in the security arrangements around Putin and there will be a coup.
#
So I really don't know.
#
Finally, there is a wild card, which is Donald Trump.
#
If Donald Trump becomes president, who knows, maybe you're back to a cozy relationship between Trump and Putin.
#
Maybe today Putin is laying the groundwork for Trump to fare well in the 2024 elections.
#
And the Maga Republicans are already saying that the United States should not support Ukraine as they do.
#
When you look at the betting markets, there's a full 22% chance that Trump will win in November 2024 and then take charge in January 2025.
#
22% is a very high number.
#
This is really the best chance that Putin has.
#
On the other hand, January 2025 is some ways off.
#
So I think we get a clean stretch of Biden and the Western alliance playing from now till January 2025.
#
As of today, our estimate of Trump becoming president in January 2025 is as high as 22%.
#
This is a great shot for Putin.
#
So if I was advising him, I would say do everything you can to get Trump elected.
#
Yeah, and somehow wait it out and somehow not die because he is not just a short man.
#
He's an old man. He's 70.
#
So in a post-Putin scenario, forget who comes to power and how and I don't imagine we know the internal politics well enough.
#
But for whoever comes to power, the incentives are to end the war immediately but also to save face.
#
Yes and no. There is a crazy militarist hardline right wing in Russia.
#
So it could be that he's deposed by somebody who thinks we've not been crazy enough, by somebody who thinks we should have nuked Kiev.
#
So don't know. There are some researchers who've been saying this that don't be too sure that a coup replaces Putin by a more rational person.
#
Remember, it is the military who is at the firing line.
#
It is the military that is furious that 12 of their generals have died.
#
It is the military that is having its assets being chewed up in this war and their answer may be nukes.
#
Yeah, why throw people into it? Let's just throw bombs into it.
#
So it could be that somebody comes in who is even more radical.
#
So there is no ready pathway to ending this on the Russian side.
#
And the danger of hated strongmen being replaced by someone even more radical and making them seem statesmen like in comparison can be a fear that can apply to anywhere in the world.
#
In a way, that's the story of the USSR.
#
Okay, we went from a mild old man Leonid Brezhnev to a nice man Gorbachev to Yeltsin and then Putin.
#
Yeah, but before that it also went the other way. We got much better Stalin.
#
I'm just saying you look at the local time series, the USSR is a nice example where a stable bad authoritarian regime was replaced by something worse.
#
Fair enough. Let's talk about another authoritarian regime and another strongman.
#
Xi Jinping is sitting in China and he wants Taiwan and who knows at some point he might even want some of India.
#
What are the lessons he is learning from this?
#
Is it really good for both Taiwan and for us that he would have seen the rest of the world unite so forcefully against the invasion?
#
And are there any strategic lessons that he can learn from this on how to proceed?
#
Like if at some point, assuming in a thought experiment, at some point he's decided that he definitely wants Taiwan, right?
#
So how does he now calibrate his plan of achieving that?
#
So he would now be under no doubt that the West will stand with Taiwan, whereas earlier there was doubt.
#
So look at Mr. Putin. He stole land in Georgia. He stole Crimea. He invaded Ukraine on the East.
#
He keeps getting away with all this. So why can't I do that too?
#
And he worked with Trump in certain ways. Maybe I could do the same.
#
So Trump has openly praised Xi Jinping, such a nice strongman.
#
Maybe there is a deal. Maybe there is a real estate investment.
#
And Xi Jinping could play American politics in the way that Putin played American politics.
#
So this was all very attractive for Xi Jinping before February 2022.
#
Today, there is no doubt that the West will rally around Taiwan.
#
Taiwan is an advanced economy. They are an OECD country in everything but signature of the treaty.
#
They are a critical component of the world economy.
#
And there is no way the world economy will allow Taiwan to go down.
#
So today, I think it appears a little dumb for China to try to invade Taiwan.
#
There is a so-called occupying strategy being applied in Taiwan where they are building up layers of defenses so as to make it horrendously difficult for China to invade.
#
So China is fully able to bomb the hell out of Taiwan, but occupying Taiwan is difficult.
#
There is a sea that helps. So there is no land border unlike Ukraine.
#
So I think that the environment on Taiwan is a pretty good one.
#
Then you are back to Xi Jinping and his age and that civilizational ethos.
#
Civilizational ethos is the pathway to doing terrible things that make no sense.
#
So to what extent is he imbued with Chinese civilizational ethos,
#
where he thinks of the Taiwanese people who would vote 90% in a referendum to not be part of China?
#
To what extent that he thinks that they are errant Chinese and who just need to be firmly shown the way that they need to actually be a part of China?
#
And what lessons are there in this for Taiwan when they look at how Ukraine responded to the Russian invasion?
#
Like it is something that they have to be wary of at all times, that at some point China could invade.
#
And I would imagine that there are, one, the story of Ukraine is very heartening.
#
And it acts as a great deterrent to China, of course, because it shows any country that it's not so easy to just invade a smaller neighbor and get away with it.
#
But in terms of how to handle the diplomacy and geopolitics, in terms of how to approach their own military deterrence and their defense and all of that,
#
what are the lessons that you think they take from this?
#
So Taiwan is more deeply integrating into the great democracies of the world.
#
There is no NATO in that region. So there's no NATO Article 5 that can protect them, as there wasn't for Ukraine because Ukraine was not a member of NATO.
#
So remember, Poland is protected by Article 5 of NATO, which requires that if Russia attacks Poland, all NATO members declare war on Russia.
#
Whereas Ukraine had no such protection. Similarly, Japan, Australia, Taiwan have no such protection because there's no NATO there.
#
Short of that, complete diplomatic collaboration, military integration is right now taking place.
#
There are some recent remarkable announcements around United States and Japanese integration of drone data,
#
so that the drones of any country will share information with drones of other countries, things like that.
#
And Taiwan was a little bit of a laggard on genuine, serious military defense.
#
They thought the Chinese will never invade. And this has been a rude wake up call saying, no, this thing can go wrong.
#
And so you actually need hard power. You actually need to gear up and make yourself very unpleasant.
#
I am optimistic that Taiwan is a great country. It's a democracy. It's a liberal democracy. It's an advanced economy.
#
They have intellectuals. They have dissidents. They have critics. They have all the good stuff.
#
They have the machinery of check and balance. They're a free society.
#
So once they put their minds to it, they'll do it well. So I'm not worried about Taiwan. It's a question of timing.
#
So I thought that the scariest period was calendar 2022. If there was a sweet spot for Xi Jinping to invade Taiwan,
#
it was 2022 while the world was a bit distracted dealing with Ukraine and while Taiwan was not yet ready.
#
Because every day after that wake up call, Taiwan is building. Taiwan is readying and the cost becomes higher.
#
That said, some of these claims around the vulnerability of 2022 are a bit overstated
#
because the US assets that come into play in a Taiwan war are US Navy, which is not at all in the fray in Ukraine.
#
It is US Army that is in the fray in Ukraine. So the United States is fully able to fight those two wars without skipping a breath.
#
Let's talk about India's interests. You know, how should India have thought about this?
#
How did India think about this? What were the threats for us during this time?
#
This is a very important question that we need to think more about in international relations and in foreign policy everywhere in the world.
#
There is a combination of interests and values. Values should be thought of as a strategic view on interest.
#
So I want to say it conceptually. When you and I have shared values, we know that on a deeper scale,
#
beyond our present interests and contracts, there will be an alignment.
#
So I think of interests as short-term and tactical and values as the foundation for long-term interests. It's all ultimately interests.
#
So if I can use you and me as a metaphor, you and me would have shared values in terms of caring about freedom,
#
of behaving with decency towards each other. And our shared interests would be things like the YouTube show we are doing together and so on.
#
But that interest may or may not exist tomorrow. But those shared values will kind of always bind us.
#
And that's part one. But part two, ten years from now, our shared values will translate into tangible shared interests in ways that we can't predict.
#
So the values match of today is a shared interest of tomorrow.
#
So there are people who are derisive about values saying that's like an unrealistic, idealistic Nehru who would believe that China would not invade India.
#
So values do lay the foundation for interests and they're not just an idealistic thing that should be belittled by hard people.
#
I am a hard thinker and I see the role of values.
#
So what are India's interests? India's interests are largely with the West.
#
What is the single source of dynamism in the Indian economy today? It is IT.
#
It is exports of IT. It is the exports of IT enabled services, the category that is called other business services in the Indian balance of payments.
#
IT is India's biggest industry. IT is the one thing that India does and everything else we are fumbling and failing.
#
I did a recent analysis of goods exports and there is no great buoyancy with Indian goods exports after netting out United States inflation.
#
So Indian goods exports expressed in USD, a ten year growth rate is about one to two percent, which is nothing.
#
The growth is in IT, IT services, IT enabled services. That is India's future.
#
For all this, the technology comes from the West. The financing comes from the West.
#
The capability centers come from Western companies. The export markets lie in the West.
#
The kids of the Indian elite go study in the West.
#
When is the last time you saw a child that went to study in Russia or in China?
#
So all these factors put together, our language is English and not Russian.
#
So all these factors put together say to me that India's interests lie with the West.
#
There is no distance between the objectives of India and the connection with the West.
#
We should foster those relationships and we should be good neighbours.
#
So when there is a fire in their house, we should try to help because they are ultimately who we are with.
#
So that is my first element of how to think about Indian interests and our engagement into this conflict.
#
The second big thing we should think about is Russian military equipment.
#
About half of Indian military equipment today is Russian.
#
It is not possible to wish this away.
#
As I have said, military platforms are 25-year, 30-year, 40-year stories and you can only gradually evolve them.
#
There is a direct and tangible threat that because China today has so much influence over Russia,
#
China is one of the few countries that is helping Russia to the greatest extent today,
#
that potentially tomorrow there will be a next invasion by China into India.
#
And at that time China will prevail upon Russia to cut off critical military supplies to India.
#
So we should consider the problem that China and Russia are now allied more deeply than we can think.
#
And we are an irrelevant small player in the eyes of Russia and then we run this risk.
#
So there are greater threats of sustainment and peak surges of Indian military requirements from Russia than they used to be earlier.
#
There is a gradual process whereby India has been diversifying military sourcing from all over the world.
#
Also right from the Vajpayee period amazing things have been done by way of building Israeli electronics and weapons on top of Russian platforms.
#
So that kind of process can go further and there will be an incremental process.
#
India will have to juggle these considerations.
#
There is no saying no and yet in the long term there is room for flexibility.
#
There is a very big global market that has opened up for India thanks to the prospect of declining Russian arms exports.
#
And this is an idea I got from an article by Banner G and Catch.
#
There is a name I am not pronouncing correctly.
#
They wrote an article pointing out that there is a low price arms market worldwide that is being served by Russia.
#
And there is a natural opportunity for India to go towards this market.
#
And India needs to rethink what is the force design, what is the place of Russian weapons and what is our future pathway.
#
Modern complex weapon systems have become so complicated and so expensive that outside of the United States nobody can go it alone.
#
Not that the United States goes it alone.
#
Effectively to build a high quality artillery gun, to build a high quality aircraft carrier, to build a high quality fighter plane, all these things have to be multi-country projects.
#
So then once again the pathway is not for India to do self-reliance of saying I will build the Arjun MBT on their own,
#
but rather to collaborate with others and not as we do today where we buy an engine,
#
rather to work jointly with other countries saying let's do a joint R&D project, evolve a new design,
#
do multiple redundant pieces of manufacturing in multiple countries,
#
do the deep alignment of international relations and military affairs to bring this group of countries together
#
so that we are able to trust each other to do military equipment.
#
So this is the second problem of military equipment.
#
The third thing is the big play which happened in crude oil imports.
#
It would take some time to explain the genius of how Europe forced a price limit of $60 a barrel upon Mr. Putin.
#
So not that Mr. Putin wanted it, but Europe controls the world's insurance and the world's shipping,
#
and they use that power to say to Russia that you will be able to export crude, but we will not allow you to export above $60.
#
Russia desperately needs money to fight the war, so they actually want to sell more crude, not less.
#
And China and India emerged as the buyers.
#
So this is a huge rescue of Putin's resource situation that was brought about by India,
#
and India needs to think carefully about the extent to which this is wise.
#
Finally, you already began on lessons for a future Chinese attack.
#
So how did Ukraine withstand an invasion by a very powerful neighbor, and what can we learn from that?
#
So Ukraine dealt with a country with 5X the GDP, sounds to me like India and China,
#
with overwhelming paper military superiority, sounds to me like China.
#
It was done through military cleverness, it was done through partnership with the West.
#
We need to study these things.
#
My co-authors and I, R. A. Mashelkar, Vijay Kelkar, Ganesh Natarajan, Ajit Ranade, and I,
#
wrote a book after the shooting started at Galwan, where basically we explored this idea
#
that we're a small country, we should recognize the resource limitations, and we have to form deep coalitions.
#
I forgot to mention Gautam Bambawale as the authors of the book.
#
And this is our main argument that India is a small country, we cannot stand up to China alone.
#
What we need is a system of alliances.
#
We need to form alliances in our region, we need to form alliances with the countries that have friction with China,
#
and we need to form alliances with the West.
#
This is our pathway to confronting a powerful China.
#
So, you know, both of us love markets, and therefore I will playfully say that both of us love speculating as well.
#
I know you have a series of speculations about the current time and about the world as it is going to unfold,
#
arising from what you have learned about the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
#
So why don't we start by talking about Eastern Europe?
#
I speculate about a world where this conflict comes to an end, and somehow Russia stops menacing Eastern Europe.
#
There are two ways in which this can happen.
#
The conflict comes to an end, Russia is battered and bruised.
#
For 25 years, they don't have the strength to threaten the Baltics and Poland and so on.
#
Or even better, Russia becomes a democracy, becomes a member of the EU.
#
Game over, Russia becomes a member of NATO.
#
So in our dream world, Russia becomes a liberal democracy and becomes a member of NATO and becomes a member of EU.
#
Then we have finished the 20th century, finally.
#
But failing that, even if Russia does not rise to being a democracy,
#
maybe there will be some messy military dictatorship, something authoritarian.
#
It will take them 25 years to lick their wounds and rebuild, to have a next go at invading something.
#
I think that this is a transformative moment for Eastern Europe.
#
Eastern Europe has found its feet.
#
Internally, emotionally, Eastern Europe has become a first-class member of Europe for the first time in a thousand years.
#
They used to be the backwater, today they are a first-class part of Europe.
#
They're still a little weak, so there is still a lot of messy nationalism and religion in Poland.
#
Viktor Orban in Hungary is still a right-wing authoritarian, but for the rest, the rest of Eastern Europe is blossoming.
#
They have benefited from enormous flows of people from Russia and from Ukraine.
#
Some of the best and brightest have left and a lot of them have showed up in Eastern Europe.
#
It is a huge infusion of human capital and the brainpower that is there in Eastern Europe today is spectacular.
#
I predict there will be an economic boom in Eastern Europe out of all this.
#
I predict that if you are an Indian company that travels the world trying to sell X,
#
then you need to think more about selling into Eastern Europe
#
because there is going to be a different level of energy and vitality and dynamism and economic prosperity in Eastern Europe compared to the way things have been in the past.
#
Further, I think that the balance of military power in Europe is going to shift away from the old arrangement of UK, Germany, France.
#
See, the old arrangement was UK had little bits of trying to be a global player on military matters.
#
France similarly wanted to be a first-class member of the United Nations Security Council,
#
occasionally land paratroopers in some hidden corner of Africa,
#
and Germany wanted to be this gentle giant superpower not engaging in military action.
#
This was the old configuration of Europe.
#
Germany is changing. Germany will change.
#
Germany has got up to 100 billion euros of military spending per year.
#
So I'm not saying Germany is coming out of this the way it is,
#
but it will take them a long time to figure out their place in the world.
#
And again, they're a gentle giant.
#
I admire their introspection and care in terms of what Germany becomes.
#
They never want to become a disgusting militaristic country again.
#
What has not been widely noticed is the emerging military power of, of course, Ukraine and Poland.
#
Ukraine is holding one of the world's best military forces today
#
because they have actually fought the most remarkable high-intensity war since the Second World War.
#
They have gone into the trenches. They have innovated.
#
They have understood tactics, training procedures.
#
They have understood how to synthesize modern equipment in a modern battlefield.
#
What other people only theorize? They have done it. They have lived it.
#
They've got a capability like none other.
#
And hey, they have amazing equipment.
#
They have the largest pool of trained people.
#
So Ukraine is a military power today of no mean nature.
#
And the other is Poland.
#
Poland understood crystal clear that if Ukraine were to lose,
#
which is not a zero probability event, then the next target would be Poland.
#
So the day the war started, Poland started building out a large expansion of its military force.
#
By the way, very interestingly using a lot of South Korean equipment so as to keep costs down.
#
So very interesting new line of attack.
#
They're not buying American F-35s or Abrams M1 tanks.
#
They are going with a lot of Korean equipment, but they're building out a very significant military force.
#
East Europe has the moral high today because for 15 years they warned the world about Russia.
#
And Germany and France were pacifists and they won the argument.
#
And now everybody knows that East Europe was actually right.
#
So East Europe's moral influence is much greater.
#
And through this combination of moral influence and military might,
#
Germany and France and the UK will call the shots to a lesser extent in Europe than used to be the case earlier.
#
So I speculate that there is a remarkable renaissance of brilliant people, good demographics, military capability,
#
a skip in the step, confidence and state building in Eastern Europe.
#
Modulo to weak links. Hungary has to find its way to becoming a liberal democracy.
#
And Poland has yet to exorcise the nationalism and the religion.
#
Fabulous. Your next speculation is about Western rearmament. Tell me about that.
#
All over the advanced rich economies, there is a revolution going on in terms of spending.
#
Germany and Japan have announced huge increases in military spending.
#
NATO is rejuvenated in spirit. In some sense, in 1989, NATO lost its will to live.
#
And today NATO is back. The lessons of this war are being brought into deep collaboration.
#
So NATO always involved collaboration between countries.
#
But I described a moment ago shared intelligence across drone fleets.
#
So imagine different countries are flying drones, but their data is all going onto a common bus
#
and will go into machine learning and AI and decision systems and kill loops that are operated by multiple countries.
#
It's a different level of ERP integration of all these countries.
#
These countries will push back into conventional arms.
#
Earlier, we were all a little complacent saying, look, nuclear weapons have rendered conventional war irrelevant.
#
Now you just have to do a little counterinsurgency from time to time.
#
So you'll have to do a small operation like Iraq or Afghanistan.
#
Sometimes for the rest, there's nothing to be done.
#
OK, now everybody knows loud and clear, no, that you need to be ready to play for a large conventional war.
#
And there will be two dimensions.
#
One is that money will have to go back to military affairs, which is a cost.
#
OK, so spending money for explosives is no fun.
#
You tax the people and some bomb blows up.
#
That's not good for any country.
#
So there will have to be this fiscal capacity for all this spending, which presently seems like quite a stretch
#
because after Covid, everybody's fiscal systems are under attack.
#
But also that military spending will generate manufacturing demand, that military spending will create a new push towards R&D.
#
And we know from the Cold War period that military R&D had a way of spurring the high levels of science and technology
#
that ultimately fed its way into civilian innovation.
#
So I find all this an interesting and exciting pathway around what is going to happen by way of Western rearmament,
#
the fiscal planning, the money that will go in from all these countries,
#
and the emergence of NATO once again as a network and Article 5 of NATO.
#
NATO is a fundamentally defensive organization.
#
If you are invaded, I will declare war on your invader.
#
NATO is not a coordination capability to invade somebody.
#
It's a coordination capability on the defense.
#
And this obviously changes everything for what you described as a post-1991 peace dividend as well.
#
So it's a fascinating episode I learned a lot both from talking to you and from reading your notes
#
and going through the links you sent me, many of which will be in the show notes.
#
So the show notes for this episode are particularly fascinating.
#
What are the lessons we kind of take away from this?
#
Like what's really happened in the last two or three years is that I think in certain ways,
#
we got used to the world going in a certain groove and we were just chilling and everything was happening
#
and the old normal was the old normal, as it were, to use those hackneyed terms.
#
And then COVID happened, firstly, and two years of COVID really changed a lot,
#
including, I would argue, our understanding about human beings and the kind of lives that we can live.
#
There's been massive technological progress in terms of AI and so on,
#
which we discuss in our video show on YouTube.
#
And there's been this war, which almost seems sort of like a throwback to an earlier century
#
but like you said, the 20th century isn't over yet.
#
So sitting here, perhaps from this or perhaps just even going beyond the Ukraine-Russia war,
#
but what do you know about the world today, which you didn't know three years ago?
#
This is a reminder about the great arc of the 20th century.
#
We organize ourselves around the good things that happened in 1945 and 1989
#
and that story is not over. That grand story remains alive and vital in our lives.
#
Putin stands for restoring the old USSR and this matters.
#
So we're not finished and we have yet to lay the foundations of a better world.
#
There is a real human catastrophe in this, which it is impossible to overstate.
#
Civilians having their lives destroyed, the victims of war crimes, the poor blocs, the soldiers on both sides,
#
people sitting in trenches in muddy winters with rats walking around their feet.
#
We thought these scenes had been purged from our memory, but here we are all over again.
#
I also think a lot about Europe. Europe is really a great model of what human societies can be.
#
Just think about it. In 1870, Germany invaded France. In 1914, Germany invaded France.
#
In 1940, Germany invaded France. These are countries that had every reason to hate each other
#
and it ended with an allied occupation of Germany. It was that bad.
#
But lo and behold, Europe built the level of civilization where Germany and France no longer have border guards
#
and cars just whizz through and people live in France and work in Germany and people live in Germany and work in France.
#
So there's something remarkable about the European Union in that it is a fully articulated vision of a post-nationalism world
#
where they actually brought the 20th century to an end and recreated a decency and a civilization and a safety
#
and full freedom on the movement of capital, labor, goods and services.
#
It is something fantastic that has been done, that from that arc of the creation of the Westphalian state
#
to the age of nationalism and people killing each other, to the Second World War, to the European Union.
#
I think there's something very precious in the idea of the European Union.
#
And if they learn how to make it work, maybe many others will.
#
So many elements of political theory originated in the West and then diffused all over the world.
#
Could it be that this kind of post-nationalism integration of countries into a union
#
where you really shed the belligerence and the hatreds and you just, can we all just get along
#
and you have full freedom, people, goods, labor, capital, everything, Schengen visas.
#
You fly into Portugal and drive to Poland. Imagine what a beautiful world that is.
#
So I think the European project is important. This war is a fundamental question and a threat to the European project.
#
Because if Putin wins here, next is Belarus, next is Poland, it goes on.
#
Suddenly you're back to the European wars of the 20th century.
#
And then flipping this around, if all this works well, Sweden and Finland are in NATO.
#
NATO is the great stabilizing defensive treaty that holds a large part of the world together.
#
Potentially Ukraine will join the EU, potentially at some point Ukraine will join NATO.
#
So many other pieces can fall into place to undergird and strengthen this zone of peace and civilization and stability.
#
So I think that there's a lot riding here. We are not European. You and I don't live there.
#
But I remain impressed that there's something important going on here.
#
And precisely as this European Union dream of a post-nationalism world of living as a nice civilization without warfare, without borders,
#
this war should be seen in the context of that democratic backsliding of the last decade and the rise of right-wing authoritarians.
#
So there are collaborations and connections between Trump and Xi Jinping and Putin and Erdogan and Bolsonaro and all that.
#
So it's again the 20th century playing all over that on one side is the idea of a liberal democracy.
#
On the other side there are populists and right-wing movements and nationalists and Nazis and oddly enough supported by communists in some countries.
#
So the far left and the far right have come together to hate the middle, to hate the simplicity, the decency, the disarmament of liberal democracy and these are important issues.
#
So in that sense, Ukraine is not a faraway border dispute as some observers like this person Tucker Carlson in the United States has said.
#
The idea of freedom is at stake and it's important and interesting.
#
This is a continuation of the great 20th century story of liberal democracy, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the USSR, 1945, 1989.
#
And I'm reminded of how Hemingway chose the title For Whom the Bell Tolls, his beautiful grand 1940 or 1941 book.
#
So by the way Hemingway and his girlfriend ran away through France when the German armies were advancing.
#
And he took one copy and walked across the mountains into Spain and she took one copy and escaped over the sea and went to England.
#
So that's how the book came out.
#
And For Whom the Bell Tolls is from a poem by John Donne where he says that each man's death diminishes me for I am involved in mankind.
#
Therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
#
And that to me is the logic of deep globalization.
#
Everything is interconnected. Everything is connected to everything.
#
We are all part of this world.
#
Putin's invasion of Ukraine triggers of 50% electricity blackout in Pakistan and so on.
#
Everything is connected to everything.
#
And we should understand the complexities of this world and we should think and act in our own way.
#
And of course it's all particularly poignant for India because we are a small weak nation placed next to a belligerent powerful nation.
#
These lessons are triply important for all of us.
#
Just for a moment I'll be an optimist and a romantic which is quite unlike me.
#
And point out that I think along with that 20th century story you speak of of liberal democracy and the fights that were fought in its name.
#
I'll also say that maybe there's a 21st century as well where in the 21st century across the world, across fields,
#
we've seen different kinds of mainstreams crumbling and a decentralization takeover.
#
And I wonder if that's happening to nation states as well where technology and economics make geography irrelevant
#
and which bring all of us together and which increase the incentives for all of us to come together in different and disparate ways.
#
And in that sense a Russia-Ukraine war I would hope from a naive place is a throwback and perhaps even the last war because some war has to be the last war.
#
So who knows, maybe it is.
#
This is a very uncharacteristically happy note for me to end on.
#
But thanks a lot for this episode.
#
Everything is indeed everything.
#
And hopefully people will follow our new show on YouTube.
#
But for now this was a great episode.
#
So, Ajay, welcome back to The Scene on the Unseen.
#
Once again, we are still in the same episode recording like exactly one Sunday after we last recorded.
#
And that's because we needed to do an addenda about the recent developments.
#
Like yesterday was Saturday and the Wagner group mutinied under Afghani Pregozhin.
#
And they were kind of, they had taken Rostov and they were marching towards Moscow.
#
And everybody thought, wow, civil war.
#
So I called you and I said, OK, we got a really easy episode right now.
#
And we got a record in addenda because now there's a little bit more to make sense of.
#
And by the time you've landed up here, the Wagner's group is back down and Pregozhin is going to Belarus and whatever.
#
So it's all damn confusing.
#
But just take us through exactly what happened here, what's going on.
#
The first thing we should understand is that a military force that is cut up into multiple rival and private pieces is actually something that happens.
#
It's not entirely new in world history.
#
Famously in Japan during the Second World War, in the period leading up to the Second World War, there were actually two military forces.
#
There was a so-called army and there was a so-called navy bracket.
#
It was called a navy, but it was actually a full military force.
#
They had infantry and everything.
#
And they competed for influence.
#
The army wanted to invade China and go all the way to India on the overland route.
#
And the navy wanted to go island hopping in the Pacific and take on United States power.
#
And they both competed for influence with Tojo.
#
And in fact, the Japanese war in Manchuria started because junior blokes in the army decided to start fighting a war.
#
It was not a war authorized from the top.
#
So actually the front line triggered off the war in Manchuria in 1936.
#
Similarly, Hitler at first made a deal.
#
So when Hitler came to power in 1933, he commanded an important militia.
#
He commanded his own goon squad, which did violence on the streets and killed the Democrats and the communists on the streets.
#
Then when he came to power, there was a conflict for influence between the formal military, which was an old aristocratic German system,
#
and this new street rabble, the Nazi rabble, the underclass with the hatred of the elite.
#
There were two very different forces.
#
And Hitler made a deal with the army that he would give the army what they wanted.
#
And the army in return said, step one, we want to kill the brownshirts.
#
So there is the famous night of the long knives on the 30th of June, 1934,
#
where the army took to the streets and killed the entire force of the brownshirts.
#
And then the army assumed the monopoly of violence in Germany.
#
Alas, that did not last because the professional aristocratic old German military traditions started running afoul of Hitler's ways.
#
They started understanding that Hitler was leading this country down into ruin,
#
and they became increasingly uncomfortable and there were some attempts at killing Hitler also.
#
So Hitler started getting uncomfortable and he needed to reduce the influence of the formal military.
#
So he started turning the SS into a full military force.
#
So this is the story of what happened in Russia under Putin.
#
Putin is an intelligence man.
#
He understands how the coercive organs of the state work and he fragmented power across multiple units.
#
So in Stalin's age, there was just the NKVD and there was a Red Army inside the Red Army.
#
For example, towards the end, Stalin set up a race between Rosakovsky and Zhukov on who would get to Berlin first.
#
Putin went much further.
#
So there is the FSB. There are a couple of other shadowy intelligence agencies.
#
Then there is the formal Russian military, where there is a defense minister who has no military background, Sergei Shoigu.
#
There is a general who is Gerasimov.
#
There is the man running the operations, Surovikin.
#
And then 10 years ago, they created a mercenary force run by Prigozhin, which was called the Wagner Group.
#
This was created at first to play overseas with plausible deniability.
#
So suddenly a band of Russian mercenaries would appear in Africa and do things that are consistent with Putin's foreign policy.
#
But Putin got to claim, oh, that's not me. That's just some mercenaries.
#
And effectively they were Russian military-backed formations.
#
But officially Russia could say, these are not ours.
#
Interestingly enough, in Syria, where America and Russia were both operating,
#
there was an internal agreement that the Russian army would coordinate the locations of Wagner and the locations of the United States Special Forces.
#
And there was a point at which the two fell into a battle.
#
And it is said that about 300 Wagner troops died in open conflict with American forces.
#
This is not a widely known story. And there has been a lot of retribution.
#
Wagner claims that the Russian army deliberately walked them into an American position.
#
And ultimately a mercenary group cannot compete with American firepower.
#
So Wagner came out looking very bad in that.
#
Today in Russia, there are multiple forces.
#
So there is the formal Russian military.
#
There is a Wagner group headed by Prigozhin.
#
Then there is the Carderites, the Chechens, who are one more independent military force of their own.
#
The oil company Gazprom has created a private army.
#
Serga Shoigu is creating a private army.
#
These are all jostling for influence.
#
In the period of the Ukraine war, in some ways Wagner did a lot of the fighting.
#
And at some point Prigozhin turned into open conflict against the Russian military, saying, you're not giving me the resources.
#
So he complained about having enough shells, having enough ammunition.
#
And it could be, who knows, it could be that the Russian military is formally starving him of resources.
#
Just in case anybody here gets the wrong idea, there is nothing to choose between all these characters.
#
Prigozhin is an ultra-nationalist, ultra-militaristic, imperialistic guy.
#
There are videos of Wagner people using a hammer and cracking the skull of somebody that was disloyal to them.
#
There are no redeeming features of these gangs.
#
I'm just coldly describing what is happening.
#
So there has been a great power conflict between them.
#
And again, appealing to the knight of the long knives, you can imagine that the military will want to go to Putin and say, we want to shut these guys down.
#
So a couple of days ago, about 15 days ago, Sergei Shoigu issued a diktat saying that every member of every militia,
#
you could be working for Gazprom, you could be working for the Chechens, you have to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense.
#
And I'm sure that contract involved clauses that when push comes to shove your mind.
#
And Prigozhin said, no way, none of my people are going to sign that contract.
#
And Prigozhin became steadily more bellicose.
#
His pitch to Putin was always get rid of Sergei Shoigu and Gerasimov and make me your Minister of Defense.
#
And finally, in the last few days, matters came to a head.
#
And there was a fairly big military operation where the Wagner forces took Rostov on dawn for a sense of scale.
#
It's a city, it's the 11th largest city of Russia.
#
So it's not a small place.
#
And then they started marching towards Moscow.
#
They don't really have heavy equipment.
#
I don't think it is designed to fight a serious battle.
#
It is designed to be a rebellion and trigger off a civil war.
#
And who knows, maybe some divisions of the formal Russian army will choose to join.
#
Maybe the Chechens would choose to join.
#
So this is the backstory of how we got here.
#
Now we should go into the skull of Putin and Prigozhin and think of each other.
#
They know each other very well.
#
And what is the bargaining that is going on?
#
I think that with the Ukrainian counteroffensive presently in play, Putin is unusually vulnerable.
#
The last thing in the world he can deal with is a diversion of force to fight the Wagner group.
#
So I don't want to suggest that there was any possibility of the Wagnerites capturing Moscow.
#
They don't have the kind of capability.
#
But it's a moment where Putin is vulnerable, where he needs every scrap of military power to be devoted to Ukraine.
#
And so Prigozhin would be able to drive a harder bargain.
#
So if you think that by and large Shoigu and Gerasimov were gaining an upper hand
#
and Wagner was increasingly retreating from the Ukraine battlefield,
#
Prigozhin had the choice, do I dwindle away to insignificance or do I use this moment to drive a hard bargain?
#
And my expectation is that he chose this moment to drive a hard bargain.
#
And we don't know the terms of what bargain was negotiated behind the scenes.
#
All we know is in public domain that Prigozhin will live in a building without a window in Belarus
#
because living in a building with windows is not good for your health when you are one of Putin's opponents.
#
Beyond that, we don't know the terms of the deal.
#
I expect he would have driven a hard bargain. We don't know how this is going.
#
Putin did something remarkable when this conflict erupted.
#
He said things that were so subversive and so dangerous that most people have not dared to even think them.
#
I have been thinking about this all along from February 2022 onwards.
#
There's a long history in Russia where you lose wars and then things fall apart.
#
There are revolutions, there are civil wars and so on.
#
Putin alluded to that explicitly. He said this is becoming like 1917 where Russia was losing the First World War
#
and it turned into rebellion and then it turned into a civil war.
#
And that's an absolutely scary analogy for anybody in the Russian state to be thinking about.
#
So that is the magnitude of what is going on.
#
I also want to conceptually say that Russia has had a comprehensive strategic defeat in its war on Ukraine.
#
As I described, a Russian defeat is not the same as a Ukrainian victory.
#
Whether Ukraine will win, we don't yet know.
#
Will they get back all their lands? We don't yet know.
#
But we know that Russia has lost. Russia has comprehensively lost.
#
You cannot think of a Russian objective that has been attained.
#
When these things happen in an authoritarian country, it damages the legitimacy of the state and it kicks off all these things.
#
And Putin's ways of creating and encouraging these multiple armies actually creates a raw material for the power conflict
#
in terms of a civil war either before or after Putin.
#
So I have a bunch of questions.
#
First one is this. Earlier in our conversation and the part recorded exactly a week ago,
#
you alluded to how what Putin has done is he's built these verticals within the state and they don't talk to each other
#
and that keeps him safe because it's very hard for the elites to therefore come together and plot against him.
#
But while from that point of view it's a feature, it might seem that it's a bug from another point of view
#
because you never know which vertical is going to rise up against you in this manner.
#
And the other verticals can't exactly come together to help you because they're not talking to each other.
#
For example, I'll quote Anton Gerashenko who made a long tweet and who often writes on Ukraine's side.
#
He's an analyst for them.
#
And he says, number one, no one in Russia feels safe anymore.
#
A vertical of power has collapsed. No one in Russia feels safe anymore.
#
Neither officials nor oligarchs nor FSB officials who used to think they were the rulers of life.
#
Putin stopped holding a monopoly on violence in Russia yesterday.
#
It was proven that factions with more weapons and determination decide everything.
#
Then he goes on to say how Russia might be facing a bloody war, not a civil war, but a war of clans, armed groups and private armies.
#
Chechens, Prigozhin supporters, armed mercenaries who will separate from Prigozhin or other PMCs
#
and be hired by local clans for protection from invading outsiders, large businesses, oligarchs like Gazprom has done
#
can also come up with private armies and conflicts and redistribution of property will be resolved by force.
#
It will be the new 1990s but far worse, resembling the Mad Max style and genre of an anti-utopia action movie.
#
And he goes on to say that, quote, the Russian army, it seems, has de facto ceased to exist as a united structure.
#
Soldiers and officers sitting in trenches in the massacre unleashed by Putin
#
probably finally realized yesterday the utter pointlessness of the war against Ukraine
#
against the background of the fact that a group of criminals in the rear can pass 600 kilometers in a day
#
sweeping away everything in their path and then be amnestied after killing pilots and civilians, stop quote.
#
So in a sense, A, what happens if a vertical kind of rises and this is really a vertical within a vertical.
#
If you think of the army and the defense as one vertical, this is one of the many verticals within that.
#
They rise up and suddenly all hell is unleashed.
#
And what's your thought on how this unique structure plays into this?
#
The text that you read out, at least today, seems a bit extreme to me.
#
It's a scenario for the future.
#
So let me talk about what I feel we are sure about today and then the way the scenario will unfold.
#
In an authoritarian state, everybody hates the regime, but everybody looks at each other and they say, wow, everybody supports the regime.
#
So then I stand up and act loyal.
#
Somebody's got to take the plunge and say, hey, we're going out and doing something against the government.
#
I think that's part of what Prigozhin did.
#
He said, here I am, 25,000 people, 30,000 people, some amount of equipment, come rally around me.
#
So I think one aspect of the negotiation was that he would, his people and he would have made 500 phone calls
#
to every other source of force and violence in Russia saying, come join us.
#
So maybe one division at a time, maybe one brigade at a time, people could choose to swing sides.
#
It may even be that in those 24 hours, not a lot moved.
#
And we know that Putin has bought him off.
#
So the question is how much force was willing to go against the establishment and what was the price of buying him out?
#
There are no secrets. In no time, all this will be known.
#
And then we could well be setting the stage for a next version of this.
#
And by the way, you say Mad Max scenario, I say Mad Max has nothing on the madness of the Russian Civil War.
#
It's not a story that has been widely read, but there are few things in this world crazier than what happened with the Russian Civil War.
#
Many, many Western armies tried with insufficient resourcing to invade Russia and put an end to the communists.
#
There were the Tsarist loyalists, which are called the White Russians, who ran armies there.
#
And there was the genius of Leon Trotsky, an armchair intellectual who was told by Lenin, go run an army,
#
who taught himself how to do military affairs.
#
And it was depravity and cruelty of an unbelievable nature.
#
So the Russian Civil War is the story to appeal to.
#
History does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.
#
And the song that's running in my head for a future Russian Civil War is the Russian Civil War with nukes.
#
Wow. So what you're basically saying is that Gerashenko and Gerashenko, of course, is very much on the Ukraine side and keeps ranting against the Russian thinkers.
#
But what you're saying is that this is perhaps at the moment an extreme scenario.
#
The center is still holding. Everything hasn't collapsed.
#
But if it collapsed, it can collapse really, really badly.
#
My other big question is actually about Wagner.
#
Wagner is, in a sense, like the tech giants.
#
In the sense, and I'll tell you what the difference is also, but the similarity is that it is like a transnational company,
#
which is operating across countries.
#
And it has a disproportionate amount of power, which a regular company doesn't and which can be a threat to any of those countries.
#
Now, obviously, precocious was Putin's caterer.
#
And then he got the chance to, you know, like you said, build a mercenary force.
#
And all across Africa, either states have hired them for use against the people or Putin has gotten them to ally with the Russian friendly warlord,
#
who's in rebellion against the state itself and so on and so forth.
#
But they are playing a part in many, many countries and they are playing a part in Russia at the same time.
#
And all over Africa, they are skimming resources, money.
#
So their revenue stream is state violence that grabs money from resource rich states in Africa.
#
So the difference between, say, a Google or a Facebook is a Google or a Facebook are, you know, built on the voluntary actions of individuals.
#
They're entirely ethical ways. You're providing a service, you're getting a customer for it and so on and so forth.
#
But Wagner, on the other hand, is doing deals with states where a state has a monopoly on violence,
#
but it may not have the state capacity to inflict that violence or use that violence.
#
So they hire Wagner or Russia will often send Wagner into various places.
#
So they have plausible deniability, but they are cutting into the state's monopoly of violence or that is being outsourced to them.
#
And then they are becoming a group which is using violence in, quote unquote, legitimate or illegitimate means across a bunch of countries,
#
which allows them to amass resources, experience, power and so on and so forth.
#
So when they do decide to turn the tables, sure, he didn't march to Moscow and unseat Putin,
#
but he could do that in any of these African nations either on his own or if Russia decides it's in their interest to do so.
#
So it is possible that they can run riot in Africa and make themselves a government of some places in Africa.
#
The analogy is limited in one respect. Ultimately, Wagner does not have behind it the military industrial complex.
#
So the richness of production, inventories, logistics, repair of equipment, re-barreling the guns, all these things are Russian army.
#
Wagner came up as plausible deniability for Putin. So it was really an arm of the Russian military,
#
which could run rogue in Africa while Putin would be able to say in diplomatic negotiations, who me? I had nothing to do with that.
#
If it actually comes to a confrontation between Wagner and the Russian state, they have very low abilities at a strategic scale.
#
They can play on a tactical scale. So they have a finite amount of equipment. They have a finite amount of ammo.
#
They'll steal some fuel along the way, unless significant surrenders or partnerships happen by existing Russian army divisions who come with their own stores.
#
Wagner is not capable of fighting an extended war in Russia, but they're strong enough to be disproportionately powerful elsewhere in the world.
#
What if, and this obviously hasn't happened and is not the scenario, but what if Ukraine was to go to Wagner and say that,
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OK, we and the NATO will help you, you become a covert action force and you go inside Russia and you do whatever you do?
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All in all, in the West, there are limits to what democracies do.
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So working with Wagner would be very difficult for any Western government. There are no secrets. In the long term, all these things come out.
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So the democratic limitations hold back Western governments from working with certain goons. I don't want to overstate it.
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OK, Patrice Lumumba was murdered by the CIA. Bin Laden was a creation of the Americans.
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The jihadis in Afghanistan were funded and armed by the West. But this is difficult in a steady state. Wagner is a Mad Max force.
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So it is straight out of a Mad Max movie in terms of the madness of what they do and their ultranationalism, their toxic hyper-masculinity,
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their theatre of making a video where somebody swings a hammer at the head of a person, things like that.
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So this is a really strange group and I would be surprised if any Western democracy would do business with them.
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Occasionally, there can be some covert action, but it's just too hard to do this in a democracy.
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I mean, you think of the level of oversight by the United States Congress over the working of the military and it's hard to do these things.
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Here's another question. And this really came about when I read Pregosian's personal history of being Putin's caterer.
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And then Putin says, hey, you know, he gets me good food. He's a reliable guy. He's a friend. I can trust him.
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Let me put him in charge of this mercenary army and blah, blah, blah. And it comes to this stage.
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And maybe they've done a grand deal and they remain friends.
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While you're on this, it is a Hindi movie. This is a guy who starts out as a chef and ends up mounting a rebellion. Like, wow. OK, what an amazing story.
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From Bawarchi to Bawarchi to what would be a Bawad? From Bawarchi to Bawla? No, whatever.
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So from Bawarchi to Barbarian. We've got a movie there.
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And I was just wondering that, you know, in a sense, like I thought of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto deciding that he wants a general in the army he can trust.
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And he gets Zia ul Haq and he supersedes certain other people and he makes Zia and then Zia eventually has him killed.
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And, you know, other examples come to mind, including possible local ones which may yet play out.
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And that's interesting. But the other thing that is also very interesting is a tweet today by Max Seddon, who is a Financial Times bureau chief in Moscow.
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And he posted a video of Pregosian driving away in an SUV.
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And the caption of his tweet basically reads, Pregosian driving away from his school in an SUV chased by a smattering of adoring fans.
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Like he just won the NBA Eastern Conference Finals or something, stop code.
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And what it speaks to is that same popular desire for strongmen that people like Putin and other leaders we can think of across the world actually play into this primal desire.
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You really love the strong mofo until the next strong mofo comes across and then he's the underdog and you're backing that strong mofo.
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And for us in India, we have not seen that. We've seen the appeal of strongmen.
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We have not seen this appeal of militarism play out in India.
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So Pregosian was largely behind the scenes. By the way, their plausible deniability was, oh, what is Wagner? I know nothing about it.
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Similarly, Internet Research Agency, one of the world's masters of information warfare,
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the organization that helped to tip the Brexit election and the 2016 United States presidential election was controlled by Pregosian.
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And he is a wanted man according to the FBI for those crimes.
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And it was all, oh, who me? I had nothing to do with it. I'm just a chef.
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What is interesting and remarkable linking up to the story that you just said is that first he came into the Ukraine War,
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then his first conflicts with the MoD surfaced and then he took to Telegram.
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And he started talking directly to millions of people on Telegram.
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And he struck this toxic mail pose that I am more violent than anything else that you have seen.
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I bring military power into the Ukraine War. Wagnerites have won this land. Wagnerites have won that land.
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There were conflicts for credit between Wagner and MoD.
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And Pregosian would be less than shy in terms of releasing videos and rants into his Telegram channel.
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And he built up a very big following by claiming that MoD doesn't know how to wage war or they are too nice to win.
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We are the bad guys. We have no compunctions. We will go bloody win.
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And that's how he built up a base. And then I'm reminded of some of the things you've said to me about worrying about India,
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that there is something deep in Russia in terms of people who have delusions of empire,
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who are fundamentally fascist in terms of nationalism and religion and the use of physical violence, the majoritarianism and imperialism.
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This entire package is actually deeply there in Russia. Russia never went through the truth and reconciliation of Germany.
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So that Nazi madness, the nationalist socialism of Germany polls at about 20% in Germany. It polls at much more in Russia.
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So if Putin ends his rule of Russia by any manner, we should not have illusions about the views in the Russian population
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and the kind of person that will replace him. The language of ultranationalism and empire and force and blessed by the Orthodox Catholic Church.
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All this is quite a potent force in Russia.
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So here's my final question to end this agenda to the episode and therefore to end the episode for a final time, unless something happens tonight.
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How does this impact the Ukraine-Russia war right now? Because at two levels.
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And one level is, of course, that the Wagner group was given credit or perhaps was taking credit,
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and we do not know to what extent this is true, but was taking credit for a lot of the Russian successes within Ukraine at the front lines.
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So that is one level, what is going to be their involvement now and how much will they be trusted.
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And the other level is, what does this do to the unity of the Russian armed forces and how motivated they are to fight
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and just the sense of uncertainty and chaos that must be prevailing right now.
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One of the reasons why Wagner exited from Bakhmut was that if a civil war is coming, you want to husband your resources.
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Why burn people fighting Ukraine when you're going to need manpower to fight the coming civil war?
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So in a way, every group that wields guns in Russia is thinking about their future and what happens at the end of this war.
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What happens after Putin dies? What happens after Putin is deposed?
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And they are all sharpening their knives to gain power there.
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So this accentuates that process and it makes leaders of armed forces less willing to die for the Ukraine war.
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So that is one part of it.
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The second and more important part of it is that at a strategic level, I think this has put an end to Putin's wildest dream.
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So when we spoke one week ago in the podcast recording, I said that Putin's theory of winning this war is that the West does not have the stomach to go through with it.
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So Putin believes there are enough nationalists in the West.
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That Trump and Tucker Carlson and the whole bunch of apologists in Germany and France will look at each other and say,
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let's not support Ukraine, we are spending too much money, we have enough problems at home and let's do business with Putin.
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After all, we are doing business with so many other odious dictators. What is so special about this one?
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That would have been Putin's biggest hope.
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Now, strategic defeat in a war always leads to crises for autocratic states.
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The coherence of Stalin's Russia is the exception that proves the rule.
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Normally, when you take a hammer and hit hard at an authoritarian state, the authoritarian state falls apart.
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They don't have the resilience of democracies.
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When the British lost in France in 1940 and evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, there was zero threat to the regime.
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Liberal democracy in the UK was 100% sound. There was no question of anybody mounting a rebellion.
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That's how democracies work, that losing wars is fine, it's a part of the game.
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When Rome first lost to Hannibal, they just went back and they regrouped because they were a republic.
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They were able to talk to each other, diagnose their sources of failure and come back.
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It is authoritarian regimes that are brittle and then losing wars creates stress on the regime.
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This episode is the biggest proof so far to every citizen in the West consuming their popcorn on the screen that Ukraine is winning.
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That the pressure brought to bear by Ukraine in this war is unbearable and the wheels are coming off the Russian state.
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I think that there will now be no turning back for Western support for Ukraine.
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They have now smelled victory and now it will just go through with ample aid to Ukraine.
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Now there is no space for a Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson position of supporting our good friend Putin who is a nationalist and a white racist just like us.
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Wonderful and that's a great note to sort of finally end the episode.
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I completely agree with you, all our best wishes are to Ukraine and to Russia's people.
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Because like you pointed out, we have to make a distinction between the people and the state.
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We hold the Russian state in very low regard but their people have been often very brave through all of this.
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Often taken great risks to speak out like their chess players did like I mentioned earlier in the conversation.
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Yeah, hopefully all of this gets resolved very soon but either way thank you for listening so far.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the production of this show?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
