 Our next conversation is one of the lessons of the war in Ukraine, one lesson seems to be don't invade Ukraine. This panel showcases our partnership, the plus alliance between Arizona State, King's College London, University of New South Wales. The panel will be moderated by Peter Singer, PhD, Peter is a strategist and senior fellow at New America, professor of practice at Arizona State. Over to you Peter. Thank you Peter Bergen and very much also want to add my thanks to the organizers and everybody working the back end of this in particular want to thank them because I am someone who works in the what if and earlier today I posed on social media the question what if you could ask some of the world's leading experts in warfare about what is going on in Ukraine and I have that honor that ability to do that today and we've assembled just a fantastic panel we're joined first by Sir Lawrence Friedman he's emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London he's been described as the Dean of British Strategic Studies and he's the author of multiple renowned books including most relevant to our discussion his amazingly timed new book command the politics of military operations from Korea to Ukraine. I were also joined by David Cuckullen he's a professor of international and political studies at the University of New South Wales and also a fellow professor of practice at Arizona State University Dave is a Australian Army veteran he's a entrepreneur a business founder and he's the author of six books including my personal favorite the accidental gorilla. Next we've got Rob Lee Rob is a senior fellow in foreign policy research institute a former US Marine infantry officer he's a PhD student researching Russian defense policy at King's College London and the war studies department he also I would add runs one of the best open source intelligence trackers of the Ukraine conflict it is a must follow and we are to be joined by my other colleague Candice Rondo she's the director of the future front lines program at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State she was previously a reporter at the Washington Post she's done some amazing work on Ukraine from before the conflict some fantastic studies on for example the Wagner group and she is literally back last night from Kiev and so brings some great insights into this discussion so let's jump right in I'd like to ask all of you what is one key lesson that strategists should take away from the Ukraine war not including Peter Bergen's key lesson of don't invade Ukraine so what's another lesson that strategists should take Sir Lawrence why don't you go first I think the lessons are actually not new lessons they're pretty old lessons about not invading countries where you won't be welcome recognizing the pitfalls that all military operations have so don't expect everything to go to plan and that it's easier to start a war than to end one so there's three to be going on with I why don't we turn next to Dave Krokala thanks Peter and let me start by apologizing for my voice it's um early morning down here in Australia and I'm recovering from bronchitis um I think I have two to suggest first one is that what we think is rational for an adversary to do isn't necessarily how our adversary is going to see things if you look at most of the received wisdom about what Russia was likely to do immediately prior to the invasion it mostly turned out to be wrong and some people were left scratching their heads saying why are the Russians acting so rationally and I think that's a sign that you know we got it wrong not necessarily that you have to see things we the way we we might want them to see them and the second one to point to is that sanctions do not have the deterrent effect um that everybody including our own president and secretary of state seem to think they did until about five minutes before the invasion there's been a lot of retconning since saying oh we never expected the sanctions to deter um that that's not actually true um and I think we need to rethink from a strategy standpoint what we think the impact of sanctions are going to be on an adversary that's actually determined to engage in a conflict probably yeah so it kind of piggybacking on but what um with both Lawrence and and Dave just said um wars are unpredictable and it's hard to predict you know how they'll go because there's so many factors that that um you know important and kind of explain why things occur the way they do um one of the things you know I thought a war was going to happen in this case but um my view is that it would likely be something more like compelence that Russia would kind of attempt to achieve kind of more um uh you know more minimal kind of political goals because if you look at what russia's did previously under Putin in previous wars 2008 2014 that was more of a compelence kind of their explanation it fit better within the russian military strengths and weaknesses and it made more sense in a lot of regards and also it just it made more sense in terms of the likely amount of ukraine resistance and what was you know what surprised me so much that you know basically russia applied the 1968 Czechoslovakia invasion plan to ukraine conditions completely didn't make sense um and it very much shows I think in my view that that president Putin when he made this this plan that was developed by him and the fsp but it was such a compartmentalized decision-making process that it didn't bring in people who would say there are some issues with this and or you know members of the russian military senior officers were not in a position to push back and say you know you're telling us to to fight a war that in a way that can completely goes against our doctrine and everything kind of we do in training exercises and so from the outside just as someone who follows the russian military this is 100 not what i thought russia would do because this is not how the russian military fights or trains and it worked against their strengths so all these things were very surprising and you know not what i predicted and i honestly not just that i missed this but it feels like ukrainian intelligence didn't expect to rush to do this either and i think most elites in moscow people out to the kremlin did not think russia was going to apply this kind of playbook to it so it's surprising people everywhere not just kind of one particular particular and you know i think it was quite hard to predict that they would do this great points it's um in many ways you um same this facetiously i think if i had a lesson sorry i had a technical difficulty i was just going to say for um poor garasimov who is known for a doctrine that he didn't uh write totally but then they don't implement and so his doctrine takes ahead so can this um what what are key insights that you would take so i guess if i had one lesson um there's only one um the one is that the connection between the territorial integrity of a state uh and political sovereignty is and democracy is not an abstraction i think we've been hearing you know a lot from the biden administration over the last year or so just generally about this kind of global tussle between autocracies and democracies um and here we have a very concrete example of um you know the challenge of having a democracy actually work when a country is invaded by its neighbor um this is not an abstraction i think the other abstraction uh that has become a bit of a distraction is this question of strategic autonomy for europe i think we've now what we've learned is that that is a distant dream uh that in fact there's a great deal of importance uh still for the us to play in terms of um pushing nato uh and and all of the partner i think unfortunately we may have lost the feed from um kandace uh if she comes back online we'll um complete hearing from her but let's um uh move on uh so rob was very forthright about something that he thought would happen and uh didn't happen uh and that's part of the discussion um that's coming out right now not only among strategist community but also policy makers everywhere from ukraine to washington dc london to most definitely in moscow so um let's go back around the horn and and do a little bit of soul searching ourselves what is one thing that you got wrong on the conflict and why uh so sir larnes why don't you go first i'll put you on the hot seat no so it goes back to what david said um that uh i thought it was an irrational thing to do it wasn't a rational thing to do i mean you know this wasn't uh uh and so what i kicked myself afterwards was i mean i never i never said it was impossible but i was pretty skeptical because it was irrational um and i forgot that leaders do irrational things um and here they've done an irrational thing um on the other hand um to be frank uh i'm saying i've got nothing wrong sins but the reasons why i thought it would be irrational sort of guided me in my analysis uh as i think they did with robin others about what then happened because you could see uh why this was going to fail i think from from as soon as they didn't uh get zelenski as soon as they didn't get to key if you could see why this was going to fail um uh and it's gone in all sorts of different ways so um i i think like many people um i made i did make the mistake of assuming because something was pretty obviously irrational therefore this would uh be noted this put him would do something different even if he used force he wouldn't go the whole hall and he did um uh with the consequences we see Dave Krakalli so um this is an easy one for me because i was actually in the middle of teaching a class with a us army special operations uh group when the rush is invaded um and i had been in the middle of talking about the Crimea model uh increment incrementalism uh what i call liminal warfare the way they're going to ride the edge of detectability and not go straight for the drug juggler and my um my colleague was like uh Dave they just invaded and they stopped let's talk about tank warfare um and it took us a while because you've got a really question your priors right and um we had a team on the ground pretty quickly um in hostile looking at that first morning of the war um development and i think in in that period the best question was asked by a British general officer of my acquaintance who said um did the Russians watch us adapting to their grow zone methods and decide to go conventional instead as a reaction over time i think that's the answer that is actually no what they were trying to do was that same liminal warfare approach but on a massive scale they were trying to basically pull off at hostamel a repeat of what they achieved in the first four days of the seizure of Crimea but as rob said earlier they massively miscalculated the likely uh Ukrainian reaction um i think somebody might have been robbed earlier said that the Ukrainians might have miscalculated i thought that too but i'm not sure that's true because of the positioning of the Ukrainian SOF and territorial organizations around Kiev and around the western side of the river in particular they seem to have prepostured for something very similar to what vdv actually tried to pull off um at hostamel so i would say um i got it wrong i'm busily updating um what we thought we knew about how russians make decisions as we all are um but i don't think it suggests that they've gone away from that model in fact if anything the experience of the last six months has probably reconvinced everybody oh yeah that's right that's why we do it that way and we don't um try to pull off a sort of um Czechoslovakia on steroids um against our armed opposition as we saw here rob lee yes so i guess i got a lot of things wrong but um you know in addition to the kind of things i mentioned before um i thought if russia was going to invade the plan would be developed primarily by the russian military that basically they get tasking from the political leadership they develop plan and that plan would be in keeping with russian military doctrine with how they train with how they fight all those kind of things that didn't happen right it's pretty quick this is developed by pudin some very senior intelligence officers people did not have a military background do not understand that if you do a large-scale war especially with conventional units you have to give the morning if you don't give the morning they're going to do a very poor job um and you know i i didn't think we we'd see russian soldiers most russian soldiers who took part in the war found out you know the day off they're going to war and that has you know so many effects and you know the same thing your logistics officers always the kind of elements they had no preparation and so it's not surprising we immediately saw vehicles breaking down all these kind of you know mistakes i thought that they'd be smart enough to kind of think okay we need to think through these things we need to prepare for this and they didn't um so all that was kind of surprising but i guess my overall idea is just it because this is not by the russian military was planned by uh intelligence officers without military experience you know we saw a very different war than what someone who looks at russian military would have expected because the way we try and predict what the russian military do is by looking with how the russian military trains and fights and so on and none of that really mattered because the whole plan was developed by someone else and the russian military was basically given a plan and told the execute and one thing to keep in mind you know we will talk about how pudin is a former kgb officer and a lot is in a circle are former intelligence officers very few of them are former military officers very few fall in afghanistan the 80s show you a design military experience so basically if he's talking to close friends close associates who are not um you know senior leaders of motion military he's not getting that kind of feedback about what a military needs to to know what to do to be successful in war so kandace unfortunately we had some technical difficulties and lost um you and midstream yeah i guess i'd like to go back and um give you a chance one to um complete the answer to the question of key lesson uh to take away from this conflict but then also uh we're doing a little bit of soul searching and asking what is it that um we got wrong and why i think this uh i think the machine wants to do whatever it wants so i'll just not fight it i hope you can hear me okay yes we can hear you so um i guess i think the thing that i i got wrong or underestimated was the the centrality of logistics both civilian and military for um this kind of sort of land war and and how much it was going to affect um the lived experience of of ukrainians uh you know it takes three days to get inside the country from uh from over the border depending on where you're coming from at least from the united states and and that you know that has real effects on your ability to to move things and people in the right place at the right time but i think uh to daves point on the positioning of ukrainian forces uh and particularly around the key region i think he's he's correct that we um the the ukrainians actually seem to have anticipated quite a lot um somehow they seem to have managed to to hold at bay um the the pincher movement from from belarus uh which is fairly impressive but i think maybe if there was a miscalculation uh or sort of something that i also didn't really expect um or maybe got wrong it was also the the centrality of the abgeny percussion in who is of course uh the oligarch who is now i guess very much associated with the Wagner group in the overall mobilization process i had not expected to see this just mushrooming of recruitment uh efforts on the part of the Wagner group and its various financiers and facilitators at the at the scale that we've seen it's been pretty remarkable how much that the russian forces have had to rely on these auxiliaries and how important they have been to um that first you know month or two of the offensive and and how key they now are um to the future of the mobilization efforts for russia going forward great points um so let's move on to the next question and uh it's as follows and it's a topic that's very near to my heart um what technology do you think has been the most impactful in this conflict and um the answer tractor is taken off the uh the stage from you um but given our tech difficulties we're going to go in opposite order uh we've got kandace i don't want to lose or so um kandace why don't you go first on that yeah i i think there's not any question we can sort of say broadly that information technology has been critical you know for both sides uh but especially for the ukranians starlink satellite broadband was a lifesaver continues to be a lifesaver uh for the information environment for ukranians in general i can't really you can't overstate the importance of that sort of civilian capacity to continue to communicate with each other at a time when the entire country is under assault at a time when everything seems to be going wrong when so many people are displaced um it's really key uh and i i think that um you know along with that uh you know encrypted apps weirdly have been key threema signal these are really key for families members of the military uh for you know us and nato supporters to communicate freely relatively freely and openly with each other on what's needed in the field and i think that has been really very important and lastly i'll just say it is very obvious that drones are you know driving the day as far as um the ability of ukraine to sort of use persistent surveillance at small scale medium scale large scale versus the russians who now find themselves with their begging bowl out in tehran looking for uh the things that they don't have the kind of kit that they don't have a need in order to provide the kind of surveillance that they need for targeting uh at this level robley every day your feed is filled with images of a wide variety of technology um what's your answer for which has been the most impactful in this conflict so can you spend a lot of points i think starlink is a really interesting one that didn't expect before the war and one of the important points about that is the truth from mario pol and this you know potentially why mario pol held out as long as it did is the defenders there could connect to family to connect outside world they saw how important holding on mario pol was for the broader war um that i think was very important i think that was starlink that that really played a really key role and i think that was um unique um i think uavs are obviously playing a big role commercial uavs are playing a big role but one of the things we're seeing is we're seeing adaptations so they were very very important in may june and july mostly the facility artory but now both sides are using electronic warfare more effectively so we've seen a lot you know it's much more difficult to use commercial uavs to go beyond the kind of front lines um you really need military uavs to do that so we're seeing limitations there right and like anything any new tech will if anything develops we'll see a countermeasure that's always that kind of fight of you know what improves faster and so on um the big point i make is that a lot of the most important weapon systems are not new things right i think i think arguably the most important um development is war is that ukrain's air defense is held out and they continue to prevent russia russian air force from interdicting things beyond ukrainian front lines right so you know russia can't hit high mars they can't really target ukraine command and control very effectively they can't stop them from resupplying all these kind of things are really critical in the war in the gondola carvaca 2020 russia's failed to do that and you know the most important reason is probably things like a book in one or s 300 pts systems these are soviet systems they're not new they're not fancy not sexy but they play such an important role they've allowed you know more modern stuff like high mars play a very important role and so i guess my overview is that and we talk about combined arms if there's any weak link that can kind of the whole system can fail and so um you need everything to work even if one thing is in the most advanced you have to have all at a certain level or else this whole system won't won't function properly and that means all these kind of things are are are important dave corcoll so um i agree with pretty much everything that's just been said so i won't go over it again um just a couple of additional points um to reinforce what rob said what technology matters depends on what phase of the conflict you're talking about handheld infantry anti armor weapons were quite important in the first month to three months of the conflict much less so now um artillery is the uh the the old and most important weapon system that hasn't been front of mind for a lot of western operators because we've spent 20 years doing low intensity conflict this is an artillery war rocket and also tube artillery um arguably one of the most important technologies has been high mars in the recent ukrainian breakthrough um but i think i go back to the very first encounter said starlink satellite communications distributed low power low signature remote support communications technologies allowing people to operate in a stealthy modular way um without drawing a massive artillery sledgehammer in response have been super important what will be the most important technologies going forward liquid natural gas technologies uh pipelines and gas stoves and let's hope not wood stoves in europe will be the most important technologies going forward that's the critical um point of pressure uh strategically and it's not a military technology but it goes back to canisters point that logistics are critical and in a long war um industrial capacity economic capacity the ability of a civilian population in this case outside the war zone to accept very significant limitations to energy over you know the cold of winter that is i think going to be a critical factor going forward slides um i mean i think we have to be careful i mean just given the answers that we've got indicate there's an awful lot of things that have been important especially on the ukrainian side some of them like starlink's quite surprising i may come together uh and if you extract one then it may not work so well we haven't talked much about the russian side um because what's been striking is they're supposed to understand combined arms but they didn't do it uh i mean from day one it was clear they weren't doing it very well which meant that they were dependent on artillery so they were absolutely right this is an artillery war as most wars are of this sort and the russians have been totally dependent upon artillery um not i mean largely dependent upon artillery for their offensives of a very particular uh sword uh so they've made their sort of gains by grinding forward blasting who was in whatever's in front of them until they couldn't cope any longer but this was very attritional um so one of the limitations for the for the russians in this in the war is they didn't have a lot of the things that we now see the ukrainians having um and plus the fact uh when the uh ukrainians are able to move away from sort of warsaw packed era artillery to modern western artillery since moving from a 20th 20th century army to a 21st century army it's the precision that makes the difference which is something that the russians don't have anymore so uh you know firepower is an awful lot of war still all the information stuff and so on is incredibly important to say it all it all interacts but in the end it's about a applied firepower uh and the russians have been dependent on one particular sort of applied firepower without the additional sort we just assumed we're going to be there i mean i remember just conversation rob and i had on twitter before the war about the about likely russian air power um you know where was it uh and so um i think uh however much we we talked about the new technologies and as important as they are you know this war in the end is about killing people and breaking things uh and that's firepower uh and the russians have got a lot of a particular sort um but not much of more modern types so now for the question that um everyone uh wants to know which is what happens next so uh let's look into our crystal balls and project um what happens next in the days weeks months ahead uh and um sir larnes that we're going to go um in the reverse order this time putting you on the spot the russians are losing i mean i i don't think in that sense it's that difficult um now how they lose uh and over what time they lose depends on a number of things it depends on their ability to form new defensive lines and hold them uh it it seems to me if the uh rubble and counties will probably be more proud than i do but if the if the ukrainians can move into the donbass that undermines the whole rationale for the war in the first place um and adds to the pressures building up in russia which is becoming more evident i mean on a daily basis so i think we're i think we're in the end game now the the question i mean from this day one of this one from before the war we've been trying to work out what goes on in putin's mind um i'm still trying to work out what goes on in putin's mind including his ability to accept um that he's lost or whether he will try to do something big to um i'd like to make some sort of dramatic gesture or course ukraine and the west into making concessions but i think it's too late for that myself i think you these are things that you could have done earlier in the war it's too late for mobilization um possibly i mean i just never believed the tactical nuclear weapons scenario some people take it very seriously indeed so the question is uh in a sense going through the stages of grief you know that's going through denial uh and anger and the next step is bargaining uh and eventually you get to acceptance but my my my view is is that's where we're at with all the normal caveats is that war is an uncertain and unpredictable business and things can go wrong and you can get surprised so we have to always say that and prudence requires that we expect this thing to go on for some time but it doesn't mean to say you can't stop thinking about things moving much more quickly jeff kakal i i'm a lot less um positive about about that i i think that we don't know what happens on the battlefield we just spent uh however many minutes talking about all the things we got wrong um i think that in some ways uh this feels like a critical decision point for the russians um to step forward and fully mobilize and i agree with with larry and rob that there are limits to what the russians can do at this point um but you know the the korean war looked like it was going extraordinarily well for the united nations in about october of 1950 and it didn't result in a linear collapse of um 300 000 chinese around the corner absolutely but that's we're talking about ukraine that is fully mobilized and russia that is still running a peacetime military exercise with 50 000 troops on the other side of the country um so i i i'm just saying i think we should not be too hasty to write the russians off um but i i do know one thing with absolute certainty that's about to happen the weather is about to get bad we've got seven to ten days before um the the weather situation significantly deteriorates across the entire theater um so what i expect to see is is not rapid moving on the battlefield but rather affront that settles down or bogs down into the winter probably so i didn't interview the week prior to the harkiv offensive and and i was asked about this and her son and elsewhere and basically my view was that um one was was kind of what they were saying basically i don't know but i didn't have a great understanding of all the force ratios of you know what units you can immobilize how ready they were could they do an offensive you know i thought they had good prospects for over the medium term and that's kind of what i emphasized was that manpower wise russia's going to be in a lot of trouble um you know the longest war goes on and basically when um uh you know i wrote an article in june with mike colvin about this when russian the russian military invaded they invaded with eighty eighty five percent of their permanence readiness ground units dine attack the groups those units were significantly under strength partially because they they they lowered the to in the years prior but then they were only two thirds three quarters uh full and it's because they lacked enough privates they had enough officers but they didn't have enough contract privates and so that that force that the actual russian military that did most of the fighting the first month took very heavy casualties and so then the force composition changed it then became more aligned on mobilized ld and r are kind of separatist people in the russian occupied areas we did a lot of heavy fighting they took very heavy cows in the donbas the Wagner started playing a bigger role they started taking heavy casualties and he started a lot of seeing all these kind of volunteer units um so about a lot of these volunteer units were guys who had fought in donbas before took and it took back arms so they had some they had some training when get to the summer and that was enough in the late spring early early summer to provide a kind of manpower advantage in the donbas to to take back territory but at a high cost and then we look at what they're at now they deploy this this third army corps which is basically a bunch of regional battalions that are semi raised by the regional governments um they were deployed they did about a month of training in in Nizhnovgorod they received really good gear but they don't have good officers all the officers deployed they don't get NCOs um they're recruiting guys from you know basically 20 to like 50 years old they don't have no experience three weeks is not enough time to become an expert on weapons let alone the train as a kind of unit so that unit's not very good and all and the war increasingly now is being fought by volunteers and reservists and initially I wasn't sure which side had the upper hands now it's pretty clear that Ukraine does right not just in terms of quantity but in terms of quality morale so on and so a lot of these russian units they're signing three month or six month contracts well when those contracts ends how many of these guys are going to keep fighting given what we've seen of russian leadership in in ukraine you know the the the ends and means how they're doing I think a lot of them are not going to keep serving I think you know third army corps is deployed when when six month ends on those contracts that's in the middle of winter how many guys are going to want to sit in a trench in somewhere in ukraine in the winter when the goal of the war is basically you know who knows right is any you know zaparizia her son the areas that they control rush controls there's no real significant cultural kind of significance to most russians those areas strategic experience you know in programs isn't very clear either and so my kind of worldview is that the medium term um ukraine is a very clear goal right and they have a very clear kind of way of achieving it and they're very unified about that goal russian side the goals are not clear how russia you know can can enforce conflict determination is not clear and the means are getting worse because of the manpower issues are going to become worse and worse they've already recruited the guys who are most desperate for money or the most kind of ideologically supportive of the war they're going to start running low on that at some point and so I thought the medium term really favored ukraine wasn't sure when that would turn out but the fact that we just saw a very successful well-executed offensive operation by ukraine shows they're capable of doing this they're doing two offenses of two different regions that also kind of demonstrates manpower advantage they have and so and also meaning the russians uh it's pretty well known that that it was clear to build up what's happening in harkiv and that the russian command and control did not really take any precautions bear for that and again it's just a consistent theme russian leaders they've they've seen battle it's changing the battlefield things that are obviously a problem and they just don't respond until they get kind of smacked the mouth right and they happen in snake islands once ukraine got high moors once they got cesar artillery harpoons snake island was no longer defensible and yet russia kept this force there until they got pounded and it was just a complete waste of life and equipment so anyway long short short i think ukraine is a lot of advantageous here i think i didn't think they're going to have this much success in the short term the fact that they are i think indicates the war is going to be even more favorable for ukraine they i think it's very likely they're going to have to continue to have success because russia has pulled reserves from other parts of the front to plug in harkiv and that means other areas of donbass might be open and again you know i think right now if you look at the morale effect of this the russian side russian soldiers the morale is going to be hurt by this offensive and especially to trust the russian leadership whereas the ukrainian side always seen as very very competent effective ukrain military leadership very quick strategy and success they've seen we can do this we just need more equipment when they can achieve it so i i'm very bullish in ukraine's uh ukraine's this point i don't know very well i want to be sure to um get some time for others so kandis um i want to take advantage of uh the fact of your recent travels and actually ask you to respond to two questions the first is what are people saying that you were meeting with in kiv on what they believe will happen next and then there is the question that everybody else had which is what do you kandis believe will happen next so i'll i'll try and um i i think i i'm actually much more concerned about the political situation um because this you know while it's a military war at the end of the day there'll be political outcomes from whatever happens over the next several months um from the russia side of the picture i think we need to take seriously the fractionalization the political fractionalization we're beginning to see uh in terms of you know officials in st petersburg and moscow calling for putin's resignation whether you believe that's serious or not i think it's pretty serious it's a big risk for anybody to openly call on putin to do anything at a time when there are so many restrictions and arrests detentions going on i think that's a very bold gamble i think that the the rumblings that we're seeing online from the far right are representative of something new that i would not have expected to bubble up as quickly as it has and is a real sign that politically speaking putin does not have what he needs long term to prosecute this war for you know years in the running and i also think interestingly i was a bit surprised to find that there is this kind of safe haven situation that is uh beginning to kind of bubble up in ukraine that is to say there are bella russians there are georgians you know there are russian defectors who've gone into ukraine um and found a completely different life a completely um sort of almost bozarro world universe in which there is the ability to move around in the world freely to speak freely and um to live freely in many ways despite the fact that there's a war going on in ukraine and that is a force of mobilization that i think putin would not have anticipated and it will be troublesome going forward the ukrainians have apparently given some space to this national republican army whether anybody else takes it seriously or not i certainly do i think that they're real and i think that the existence of of that force um both on ukrainian territory and then inside russia is going to be really problematic for putin long term but on the flip side i'll say that ukraine and and the zelensky government in particular um is looking at some serious challenges from potential uh members of the opposition as you know the country is now still under marshal law uh that means you know parliamentarians the media they all have to kind of toe the line but of course there's a lot of recognition that a lot of losses that happen losses of human life you know political um you know dispensation and stability all came down to how zelensky responded to the threat from russia before the invasion started and i you know i think there was a lot of um talk on the ground about needing to kind of assess you know what what went wrong there and how much it costs and and what it will mean for reconstruction that's a battle that i don't expect to unfold fast but i do think as we get closer to the presidential election period and the elections are next scheduled for 2024 march of 2024 the closer rewind toward that and of course toward our own elections here in the united states we're going to see a change of dispensation in terms of support for the war overall both inside ukraine and outside ukraine that we have to be concerned about going forward but i don't think it's a it's a door that putin will be able to push on uh lightly and that it'll just sort of swing open for him uh the military losses are too much and i agree with uh that sir laurence that really uh russia is way too far behind now to catch up on anything whether mobilization or otherwise and the only option here is to look at um you know divergent movements perhaps you know in kaliningrad using that as a lever against the baltic states um to kind of open up some space or to to make it difficult to to move logistically things from poland into you know into ukraine so i mean if there is anything that we can expect from pudin it will be a sense of desperation i think come you know january of this of this new year thank you so we've got um just about five minutes left and i want to move to questions from the audience but uh to let our um other panelists know that we're limited in time so what i'd like to do is actually bundle a couple of questions and ask each of you you can choose to answer both or one of them but do be aware that there's a limited amount of time so two um i thought particularly interesting um questions uh one is to build upon what kansas uh what um kandace just said and it's from um ryan butler and he talks about the question of um what else gets added to the table as russia potentially becomes more desperate um the way i think about it is that authoritarian leaders um often think um escalate to de-escalate you know expand to try and resolve and so um kandace put one thing on the table what else should we be aware of there and then the other question is from um iran tamaru and it's um both the sort of what if but also a what next uh we talked about how poorly russia planned it i'm going to paraphrase what she has how poorly russia planned what if they had planned well or a different way of asking it that she's getting at is what are lessons that other adversary states are taking from this that they might apply against the united states and its allies so let's go back around the horn on those two questions um sir larks yeah um i mean it's very i'm not sure i want to encourage people to think about how they could have done it better next time um but uh you know i think there is a basic problem if you're occupying another person's country i mean we've learned this in a painful way um and now russia's learned this in a rather painful way uh so i i hope that i hope that's the the lesson that they they they keep on learning um what was the first question again uh about what might russia do to i mean i just want to make one point we we obviously think a lot about the russian means of escalation um we've also got to think what are going to be the issues if they do decide to negotiate um because if i was them i i would ask for a ceasefire i would ask for a ceasefire months ago but you know i'd ask for a ceasefire to which the ukrainian answer now could be sure as you withdraw but there's going to be issues of crimeer there's going to be issues of reparations there's going to be issues of sanctions there's issues of war crimes um the there's all of these things uh i'm not quite sure given the extent to which ukrainian russian relations now are so bitter and poor how they're going to be handled and i think one of the things i would hope the united states might think about this is the role that they might find themselves playing uh in managing what could be a very tricky transition so sure think about the escalatory things i think they're very limited that would do any good for the russians but you also need to think about the possibilities um at a time when the ukrainians do have the upper hand of bringing it to a more dignified conclusion for the russians than them just being chased out of the country deft kakala um i i agree i think that the russians have limited um uh vertical escalation options they do have some pretty significant horizontal escalation options as as kandace mentioned of spreading it to different geographies or different forms of conflict um but i think the the big uh play that that you might uh look and we may see this as soon as next week when zizian ping meets with um vladimir pudin in uzbekistan is an attempt to change the dynamic uh through uh china's reaction to what's going on here um i think the other thing i'd be looking for is doubling down on the energy weapon that the russians have actually found quite effective so far and that i think is a a reasonable weak point for particularly european nations going through winter and very rapidly dav what's um one lesson that beijing has taken from this conflict that it might apply against say the united states and its allies well there's been a very very active debate within the pl a about um the lessons of ukraine and one of the factions in that debate is suggesting that this is a reinforcement of the notion that you want to be gray zone you want to be asymmetric you do not want to commit to a conventional um style invasion and i i think uh that that uh that debate is is going to play out soon but um that's that's a keep out of it great robley so not sure how russia responds um i think as i said before the situation is likely only a worse russia so they need to do something mobilization comes a lot of risks there's no guarantee it will improve the situation um i i'm not exactly sure how russia respond because part of this comes back to you know what what information is pudin getting what does he kind of see of the war um you know i think he's bought into this propaganda feedback loop that he developed he designs he now kind of uh you know ingests some information which is not accurate which on russia news so it's hard to kind of see what he what he learns and what he thinks the best option would be because again he he's so misjudged ukraine resistance but also nato um the european countries the us all these countries he completely kind of misjudged and the street situation has gotten much worse sweden familiar joined nato all these are the kind of developments so i honestly don't know but the options are somewhat limited aside from what was already mentioned by by dave um and then in terms of well adversaries let's take away important to emphasize this isn't the war the us does not fight this war and so we're only seeing certain capabilities us has us a lot more capabilities so surely you know country to learn about the high and large are effective arguably the most most significant is that u.s intelligence um has proven to be extremely successful in this war both in terms of penetrating russia's decision-making process knowing about all these things which was playing months and months ahead of time before you know people like circuit lab role of new right the cia knew these details well ahead of time even though it's very compartmental as a operation so i'm going to intervene there because we're running out of time and so kandace you get the last word on both expansion and lessons learned in other adversary capitals boy lessons for adversaries i think we've already been over those i i agree with uh sir laurence that um if the u.s is not tasked some sort of task force within the nsc to start thinking about the negotiated endgame uh they need to do it now uh this kind of the challenge ahead is um unwinding this war and i don't think zeolinsky at any time will be in a position to be calling for a ceasefire or or walking to the table uh with an invitation to discuss a ceasefire that's political suicide for him uh and it would i think essentially unravel the morale of the ukrainian forces um the minute that that was sort of thrown out there so but key key will be reparations reconstruction war crimes how to deal with those uh and to to really think about what it will mean potentially uh if in fact um there is a tribunal for putin uh as some have called for uh that is a huge not it's not a u.s challenge it's not a nato challenge it's not a ukraine challenge the challenge ahead is justice for ukrainians um and stability for russians and that will be kind of the the song we're singing for the next five possibly you know seven years is how does this end uh in a way that those who are responsible for what happened in this first year or two year long war um are actually brought to account for for what they've done uh and how do we put crane back together and by the time we're having that conversation it is very very likely that we're going to see um the crumbling of the russian federation i really genuinely believe um that this is one of the most destabilizing events in russian history possibly since world war two maybe even since the bolshevik revolution and later we're going to be looking back at this time and thinking wow we just weren't ready for like the third collapse of the russian empire and we didn't have a plan for it i think if we if we do anything in the next six months or so from the us side and from the nato side it's thinking about what is the plan for uh the you know inevitable collapse of putin regime um but also the plan for putting that region back together um over time and and bringing justice to those who are accountable for these war crimes that open-ended question is a perfect ending to a fantastic conversation