 Good morning everyone, welcome to join the second day of Norwich University's 2022 Peace and World Summit that deals with the topic of Russia in person or virtually. My name is Yang Mokoo, Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of Peace and World Center at Norwich University. I am extremely honored to serve as Executive Director for this year's summit. Yesterday, Governor Phil Scott and two keynote speakers, 11 scholars and three Norwich and UVM students, they addressed many different dimensions of the Russian and international issues. Through those summit sessions, we could promote our understanding of the current global order seriously disrupted by Russia's provocative acts. Today, we will have two other roundtable discussions which focus on Russian domestic politics and foreign policy as well as US strategy toward Russia. I hope these sessions will help current world leaders and future leaders here to find peaceful and reasonable solutions to extremely tough global challenges we are currently facing. Thank you so much for participating in this year's summit. I hope that you have an enlightening and memorable experience at Norwich. Right now, I would like to introduce the chair of the first roundtable discussion, Dr. Esther Senis. Dr. Senis is Mary Curry, Action Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria. She is currently hosted by the Peace and World Center as a visiting scholar and is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Resilience and Security at Norwich University. She holds PhD in Systemic Functional Linguistics from the University of Sydney. Now, I turn it over to Dr. Senis. Let's give a round of applause. Thank you, Dr. Koo and good morning, everybody. It is my honor and privilege to moderate the first panel discussion today that concerns Russia's domestic politics and foreign policy. Yesterday, we attended excellent presentations on very timely topics concerning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, its previous invasions of Georgia and Syria, Russian's response to Western sanctions, its growing alliance with China, and its information warfare and disinformation campaigns. Today, in this roundtable discussion, we'll have more time to dive into these issues in more detail. So before we start, just some housekeeping notes. I will first introduce our distinguished panelists, and then we'll have about 30 minutes to discuss some follow-up questions on yesterday's presentations. Since we have lots of students and especially high school students attending, welcome. I will provide the context for each question very briefly, and after this 30-minute discussion, we'll open the floor for question and answers. So please allow me to introduce our panelists. Starting from the far end of the table, Peter Rutland is a professor of government at Wesleyan University and vice president of the Association for Study of Nationalities. He works on nationalism and political economy in the post-Soviet space. His recent article is included Understanding Putin's Russia in Perspectives on Politics 2021 and Nation Building in the Baltic States, 30 Years of Independence in the Journal of Baltic Studies 2021. Professor Angela Kaczyewski is associate professor of political science at Arcadia University in suburban Philadelphia. She specializes in conflict resolution, security studies, minority rights, and divided societies with a particular focus on conflict involving Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Moldova. She was a Fulbright scholar in Ukraine in spring 2018, teaching at Karazin National University and began field research in Kharkiv and Odessa. She is currently working on a book on shifting identity borders among Russian-speaking Ukrainians based upon extensive fieldwork conducted in 2019 and 2020. Our next panelist, Professor Vitaly Kozrev, is an expert in comparative politics, strategic studies, and foreign policy in Eurasia. His major interest is great power politics, east-west relations, international conflict, and the political economy of regionalism and regional integration. From 2014 to 2019, he was an Asia Studies Fellow at the East-West Center, Washington, and a senior fellow at National University of Singapore, and served as a senior fellow at the Davis Center of Russian and Eurasian Studies Harvard University. He was a visiting professor at the European Studies Council at Yale University's Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies. At present, he is professor of political science and international studies at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts. He is also affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University as associate in research. Professor Thomas Graham, sitting next to me, is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also currently a senior advisor at the Kissinger Associates, where he focuses on Russian and Eurasian affairs. He is co-founder of Russian, East-European, and Eurasian Studies program at Yale University and sits on its faculty steering committee. He is also a research fellow at the Macmillan Center at Yale, where he teaches a course on U.S.-Russian relations. Graham was special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007, during which he managed a White House Kremlin strategic dialogue. He was director for Russian affairs on the staff from 2002 and 2004. So please join me in welcoming our distinguished panelists. Thank you all for being here. So our first question today, I'm going to address this to everybody in the panel. Concerns, of course, the award in Ukraine. So after threatening to invade Ukraine for the past several months, Russia did eventually invade, we've now seen horrific images of the war bombing and shelling of civilian targets, residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and maternity wards, theaters, cities reduced to rubble, and a nuclear power plant on fire. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said last Sunday that approximately 10 million people have been displaced so far, including the 3.5 million refugees who have fled Ukraine already. So after a series of failed diplomatic meetings and negotiations between the Kremlin, Ukraine, and the West, violations of ceasefire, escalating tension and threats, where do things stand at the moment, and how long do you think this war will last? Where do you want to start? I'll take a stab at that and then my co-panelist can correct my mistakes and add, and I think first it's clear that this conflict has lasted much longer than President Putin expected it would. He miscalculated the strength of the Ukrainian resistance, he miscalculated the unity of the West in living sanctions, and he miscalculated the strength of his own military. He thought he would be in Kiev in one to two, maybe maximum three or four days. This conflict would largely be over. We're now entering the fifth week of the conflict. Russia has changed its tactics. It is clearly aimed at terrorizing the civilian population at this point. We've seen the horrific pictures of the destruction of cities, countryside, and Ukraine over the past several weeks. It's very difficult, I think, at this point to judge how long this conflict might last. Putin is certainly in no mood to back down at this point. It's not only from his standpoint the future of Russia that is at stake, but probably more important is the future of President Putin himself that is at stake in this conflict. And it's very difficult for him to accept anything that he can't sell as a win to the Russian population. By the same token, it's quite clear that the Ukrainians are determined to defend their sovereignty, their independence, their freedoms, and they are perceiving sufficient provisions from the West in order to continue this resistance for many, many weeks. So we're far from a point, I think, where we've reached a military stalemate that would lead both sides in the conflict to the conclusion that it's time to sit down and try to negotiate a settlement to this conflict. So I expect that we're going to see this conflict continue for weeks and months and possibly even longer than that. Thank you, Professor Graham. Professor Rutland? Yeah, it's an interesting question to ask when did this war begin because it did not begin on 24 February 2022. It began on 22 February 2014 when Russia sent troops to occupy Crimea and it's only in retrospect that we see now that the war began then and the war has been fought continually since then in the Donbass with shelling and sniping that's killed around 15,000 people. And it's the same in a historical context if you ask when did World War Two start, right? For Americans it was December the 7th 1941. For Russians it was 22nd of June 1941. For most of Europe it was September 1939. For China it was 1937 or maybe 1931 when Japan occupied Manchuria, a province of China. So this war has already been going on basically for eight years and it's lucky to continue I would say for another seven or eight years because Putin's not going to give up. He's going to partition Ukraine. The Ukrainians won't accept the partition and it will drag on for years I'm afraid. That's a gloomy prognosis but as a way of getting the conversation going that's that's what I'm putting on the table. Thank you Professor Rutland. Who would like to jump in? Angela? I guess I would tackle sort of the two pieces of the question the first the first piece being sort of about NATO and what kind of motivated this war to start to begin with. I agree completely that nothing would make Putin happier than to cause the collapse of American leadership in Europe by weakening or completely destroying the credibility of the NATO alliance and dividing the European Union and sort of eliminating American leadership in Europe but I don't really think that that's what started this current phase of the war which I agree started in 2014 and has been ongoing since and the Ukrainians have repeatedly said that hey guys we've been at war already eight years so don't forget about that. You know I think if we think about what is often cited particularly in the West that really if we could just get Ukraine to agree that they're not going into NATO and we could just get Ukraine to accept some sort of neutral status none of this would happen and I just don't think we've got evidence of that right? I mean there's no evidence that Ukraine was on any kind of an even medium term track to get into NATO. They have been you know sort of promised in 2008 that the door wasn't closed and then given a whole laundry list of things that they had to do and the goalposts keep changing and meanwhile you know small countries without the modern army that Ukraine was told was a prerequisite such as you know Montenegro or Macedonia are admitted to the alliance so I don't think anyone really thought that it was realistic that Ukraine was going to be in NATO anytime soon and if what Putin wanted was a neutral Ukraine or a Ukraine outside of NATO he could have sent troops into Donbass and that would have achieved both of those aims and it would have been over that's not what he did he launched an incredibly broad-scale massive brutal invasion of the entire country and you can't explain NATO or neutrality I think NATO or neutrality doesn't explain the kind of massive onslaught and I think it's also important to keep in mind that the cities that Putin is targeting ruthlessly and shelling into rubble are Russian speaking cities and one has to wonder if this might not be some sort of punishment for Kharkiv you know a Russian speaking city 25 miles from the border for daring to be determined to to to protect their Ukrainianness right for not falling along in line that hey this is the Russian spring we're here to liberate you they say no thank you we don't want to be liberated and I think he's incredibly furious that there is such resistance in these Russian speaking cities so the ones being reduced to rubble are Russian speaking and I think that's important to note so that's a very important point to make thank you professor Katryapsky professor all right my take on this is that Putin since his first years as president had a dream the dream of being part of the overall like you know as Gorbachev used to say the European house the common European house so he expressed many times when he became president that yes we have the bad west and the good west the bad west is the United States and the good west is Europe so what would like to actually be a kind of Eurocentric exercise some Eurocentric you know policies to get integrated with Europe but his idea was to get integrated with Europe as the already kind of Eurasian Union and Eurasian Union is because of the economy of scale and because of competitiveness he believed that because of the previous economic ties between Russia and other post the other post-Soviet republics he believed that it could have been a kind of integration process but obviously with Russia with Ukraine Belarus and Kazakhstan like as the major economies within this Eurasian Union but he is he failed to actually understand that Ukraine was actually Belarus as well were building their own identity and if we remember I recall actually President Kuchma's 2003 book Ukraine is not Russia it was like a long time ago so I would say that war started a long time ago with the this identity crisis and with the lack of understanding misunderstanding between the Ukrainian Ukrainian people and including elite and including the people the ordinary people and the Russians for just one simple reason just Russia couldn't bring up any you know a good model of governance effective governance and modernization should Russia have established some sort of like good example for other post-Soviet states everybody would gravitate to Russia but Russia on the contrary had established the authoritarian regime with oligarchy actually economy as my some of my colleagues say in Russia the new enforcement elites Putin's friends privatized the state and they looked at the national interest from the perspective of their own group interest so that actually how they actually try to court Ukraine by establishing ties with oligarchs by paying you know like involving them into different economic projects which actually never brought any good results in terms of economic livelihood and economic effectiveness for the ordinary people in Ukraine so Ukrainians actually didn't see Russia as a potential partner in this integration that therefore they just started calling especially younger generation calling for an alliance with Europe obviously because Europe European Union was a good example is implied by example and the European Union could have brought like huge and you know like boost and results in terms of economic modernization of Ukraine so I think that the reason was based the cause of this war and the kind of the long term actually tensions between Ukraine and Russia could explain this the outburst of this current current conflict and second part of this is the attitude toward NATO for the west NATO enlargement was seen as the actually the establishment of the democratic liberal regimes so it was like the spread of democratic institutions so you could become a member of the NATO if you modernize your political institutions and political system and for the west it for many many years until the actually 2014 NATO expansion enlargement was seen as and for those countries who actually joined the NATO as a part of the you know kind of political modernization state making nation making right process for the Russians actually they tolerated this for a long time but then they realized that the NATO enlargement was probably part of the American hegemonic mission and so they started looking at NATO from the perspective of perspective of security dilemma and then finally when someone said here that it was not about the like the membership of I think Angela said this about the membership the real membership of Ukraine in NATO but as Putin and his you know planners were saying that Ukraine had become in de facto NATO lie just when arming Ukraine and just training Ukraine they've trained you know like 7 000 snipers 25 000 specialists on like especially in a city warfare guerrilla warfare so that's that's has become a big a matter of concern so Putin decided that to attack now because he's he was afraid that in five years it will be no way for the Russian troops actually to intervene and to fight against Ukraine because we're much more stronger and could have been a much more modernized Ukraine thank you professor Kostrov so your points actually are a great segue to Arda's question that concerns Russia's domestic politics and looking at Putin at home and how the war impacts his popularity so regarding the domestic political climate while pushing attempts to undermine the democratic values and ideals of western liberal democracies at home in Russia he actively crushes them in the past few years new laws have systematically restricted basic human rights and freedoms repression of civil society attacks on human rights activists and assassinations of opposition politicians and journalists have been rampant Alexei Navalny the leader of the opposition was poisoned by the regime and is currently in jail and just this morning he was found guilty of large-scale fraud and could spend many more years in jail in the last three weeks we've also seen thousands of Russians protest against the war risking arrest and Putin's new fake news law could send people speaking out against the war to prison for up to 15 years so the question is how is the current war impacting Putin's popularity at home and will he be able to prevent the spread of democratic and anti-authoritarian values and ideas in the long run professor rothland would you like to go first okay thanks yeah well i'm afraid liberals in russia have always had a hard time starting with the 1825 decemberist rebellion it's been kind of downhill all the way for liberals since then so brave and heroic as his alexei nabalny and his followers supporters and protesters i'm afraid they're not going to be a source of change in russia in the near term what brings down authoritarian regimes as erica chanoweth's work has shown is is a defection of security elites at some point the the military the police that decided they don't want to shoot people on the street anymore so the key question for me is well what's going on in the mind of the russian security forces which is very difficult to find out however there was an interesting development just a few weeks before the the invasion there were two articles that appeared well one petition and one article in the russian press for michael hodrenok on february the third and from leonid ivash ivashko on january the 31st and they are both senior officials formerly in the general staff retired one a general one a colonel retired both of them well known as being far right nationalists and they both published items in the russian press saying the forthcoming war with ukraine is a disaster it's a really really bad idea we're going to lose you don't understand the ukrainians this will be terrible for the russian army don't do it i wrote an article about that called breaking ranks on february the 14th and we don't know is that the tip of an iceberg or is that just an ice cube we don't know how common are those views in the russian military but i think putin if anything is going to stop this war it's going to be basically a kind of mutiny in the upper ranks of the russian military so putin has nothing to fear from the liberal some afraid he has a lot to fear from the nationalist right who we can see that this war is terrible for russia itself even a russian nationalist can see that and so that that's that's my my contribution to this question thank you professor rothland who would like to go first yeah my belief is that it's it's the clash of civilizations so because for those in who actually established the new putin's vertical including putin himself the events in the in russia in the 90s were associated with the so-called barbarization of the state and barbarization of the state was actually being associated with the spread of liberal democracy so they believed that the liberal democracy and how it was implemented in russia was absolutely devastating for russia because russia lost within the decade 40 percent of its previous GDP from starting 1991 until 2000 and they believed that was a disaster and there was a chaos wild west a liberalization didn't work it enriched only certain western oriented elites and with with the help of different actual advisors from the west so i thought that probably putin's revolt was the an attempt by the former enforcement actually groups related with the xkgb who considered themselves as you know a nationalistic to kind of revive revive the national spirit of russia so they started like establishing a very top-down regime with based on authoritarianism and these processes will yesterday we mentioned this associated with the so-called perception of the cultural security in china so and by the way both china and russia have adopted some laws and regulations about cultural security as part of their national security what is cultural security is the attempt by the western forces actually by the western powers to actually get down to this russian society or chinese society and no wonder hillary clinton developed the perception of the 21st century statecraft was her like baby the economic statecraft and 21st century statecraft which was diplomacy for the united states during actually the obama administration times was considered to be a part of the reach out through social media and other means other means of communication reach out to hearts and minds of the population in population in different countries avoiding governance so they just was a kind of revolution and diplomacy and therefore russia in china was unacceptable they believed that was a kind of attempt to obtain support of the united states in the west and western values just avoiding just traditional diplomacy channels and reaching out to the people and actually stirring those color revolutions so which actually they also considered both china and russia considered as part of the actually democratic offensive by the west so as a result we had the rise of we have seen the rise of authoritarianism and toughening of the rules and regulations in both china and russia they learned from each other even the the title of the laws and regulations they adopt are similar right and finally they have actually even started to promote the idea of alternative democracy and in the recent actually joint statement on february 4th the the statement starts with the idea that russia and china are the advocates of real democracy just not liberal democracy which actually enriches the only the oligarchs in the west but this real democracy which they which in china for example they associate with the role of the state and in russia they associate with the role of the indispensable leader right and finally sergey karaganov who is very uh is known as the very close advisor to the kremlin actually published a few years ago an interesting article about the actually the victorious march of authoritarianism in the world especially in the context of the many multiple publications in the west about the crisis of legitimacy in the west especially when donald trump came to power so everybody expected that uh in the world and especially in russia and china that that is the case that donald trump represents this very trend of the actually advent of authoritarianism in the world so because in the era of globalization you cannot compete just by being liberal democracy because it's the process of decision making too slow the societies to open economies are to open so you want in order to save your national identity and national sovereignty it's all about sovereignty it's all about the challenges of post sovereign world and you have to actually become more authoritarian you know one that they just said oh trump this is so good i see that represents even america is becoming authoritarian so i would recommend you to go to find this karaganov's article and look at how he tries to justify the worldwide spread of authoritarianism he said that yeah some countries might be depending on their cultural background authoritarian democracies some countries might become democratic authoritarianism so probably russia in in our cases like democratic authoritarianism so i think that's that's the point and the reason why actually the prudence regime as well as she's administration have really tightened their grip on human rights democracy and freedom of press and as a freedom of assembly and other basic political rights which we have here in the west professor kosarov thank you professor patryevsky since you research identity i would be really interested in here in european i i'd first like to kind of circle back to the question about nato but i promise to be super quick and um i think a lot of people talk about the special partnership between russia and nato and how that hasn't really worked out and we've got this nato russia council and it never seems to work um in terms of trying to integrate russia but often we forget that nato also has a special treaty and a special um sort of relationship with ukraine it's not just this country out there that we're going to cooperate with they have a very strong partnership and for ukraine that's never been considered de facto membership for nato but i can totally see why it would be by the russians so i just want to say thank you for that perspective um you know for ukraine if you don't have full membership you don't have article five this other stuff is not that important but i can see why the russians would see that differently um i think uh you know peter's point about the military i think is spot on because the liberals have never had that much influence in russia outside of of mosco and st petersburg um in terms of popular mass uh mass kind of potential for mobilization um and one can only imagine that any kind of threat to to putans regime is going to have to come from the military and it's one thing to talk about we're a great power we're restoring our great power status this is great how wonderful is russia that can keep the military happy but they can't at all possibly be happy with how things are going in ukraine so i agree that this war in ukraine is going to go on for a long time um the ukrainians know very well that the alternative to fighting is to live under putans type of regime that you will have authoritarianism you will have the intellectuals locked up you will have no human rights they know this very well and they're not going to give up and there are 43 million of them um so i think until russia is defeated and expelled or all of the ukrainians are killed this war is going to go on unfortunately and that cannot bode well for morale in the um in the russian military so i would think to my mind that would probably yes be the best source um identity i don't know what else could i say about identity in russia i'm sorry i was focusing on the other thing did i address everything or ester i suppose so yeah oh the end of democracy in russia when did we have democracy in russia um i think that there was a little experiment you know in the early early 90s and i say this with a lot of pain in my heart and this is something that mary and i have talked about we worked as um just fresh out of college on democratization projects in in russia where we really had such incredible high hopes for the future of democracy um and the ability of russia to sort of integrate with the rest of the world and you know the the end of the soviet union was driven by a lot of factors but one big huge factor was a democratic revolution type movement in russia that boris yeltsin stood up and got millions of people to come together and get out on the street and you can argue whether or not he actually was a real democrat and in the end he didn't turn out to be one but there was a lot of hope in the early 90s there was a free press people could make fun of the the president on tv with comedy shows you know the these kind of dolls going around making everyone um look silly and you know but that was a short-lived unfortunately experiment and even already in 1993 there was a lot of pressure to um to lower uh the the the power of the western leaning liberals because the economic policies were a disaster um and you know and and there was a perception of of you know russian national interest not really being respected so for me it's sad to say but i've only seen things go downhill since 1992 sorry i can't be more positive can i thank you thank you professor kachievsky yeah professor graham they're just to pick up on a couple of points that have been made um you know i agree with peter uh that uh it's the military that probably probably opposes the the greatest threat to putin or uh the the group that would undermine him in his current position the liberals as has been noted have been uh fairly ineffectual throughout russian history and certainly since the breakup of the soviet union but that sort of begs the question as to why the kremlin has cracked down so hard on nevalny nevalny's organization other dissonant movements in russia uh clearly they're afraid of something and so i think we need to ask the question what in particular now there are a couple of answers to this i think you know first i think russia uh the kremlin putin himself have looked at the color revolutions these were also directed against in many cases authoritarian regimes where you would have thought the security forces would have played the lead role in undermining a political leader not and yet it was the street that did it and a fairly small element of the population that in effect produced the the change in in regime in georgia uh ukraine twice in 2004 and in 2014 in kyrgyzstan and i know from my personal experience that the the russians were quite concerned about the orange revolution in ukraine in 2004 and i had a conversation with a fairly senior kremlin official at that point responsible for domestic politics and he was organizing youth groups at that point why was he organizing youth youth groups at that point because as he told me because we're not going to lose the battle in the streets if you try to do a color revolution in russia we are going to have the bustle to put on the streets to beat that back that's the second reason they're concerned because they don't believe it's an indigenous movement they believe that the the dissident movement in in russia the the movement led by nevalny is actually something that is funded by the united states it's pushed by the united states and it's part of a larger u.s. effort to undermine the russian regime this is what they call hybrid warfare right looking at the color revolutions and seeing this as a tool of american foreign policy so this is not about dissent inside russia this is about the united states instigating dissent in russia as a way of effectuating regime change at some point so that i think is one one reason why we see this concern about what is a fairly small slice of russian society let me make one final point about about democracy i would actually argue that russia is most democratic in the very late soviet period the freest and fairest elections in russia in my mind occurred in 1989 and 1990 under the soviet period during the soviet period uh where there were many different points of view that were expressed uh the the votes were actually counted properly throughout the country uh and they led to very surprising results results that ultimately uh brought down the soviet union uh one could one could argue every election that occurred in post-soviet russia has been less free and fair than the elections in 1990 inside russia and again for various reasons the so-called democrats were more than happy to violate all the the rules of an open and free fair election in 1996 to ensure that president yeltsin was reelected and that a communist party leader did not did not gain power at that point and he did that with the backing of the united states the other problem for democracy in russia something that angela alluded to and that is that the period that we consider to be most free and fair in russia also coincided with the deepest socioeconomic crisis that russia has faced in many many decades and so while you had a very liberal part of society moskow and st petersburg that were advocating freedom were actually living much much better much to the rest of the country uh was sinking into poverty uh the the ruble became worthless um they had very great difficulty getting education health care and so forth uh and that uh quite naturally turned much of the population against a western view of democracy and that is something that putin has played on uh since 2000 or since he rose to power at the very end of 1999 so part of the the challenge for people who want to introduce uh democracy into russia is breaking that connection between the democratic rule and socioeconomic crisis to overcome the 1990s to present a different narrative to the russian population um and we haven't seen anybody that's capable of doing that up to this point of course um when i when i was working um straight out of college in the early 1990s in russia what i was working on were student exchanges right so these were programs that were funded um through the state department to bring young russians at well all over the former soviet space but i was working out of moskow to come live in an american family and study in american school for a year and i worked on these programs um years ago putin decided to end russian participation in these programs so we no longer have russian students coming and living in american families so there were generations of young russians who had their own experience of what the united states was like because they'd gone to high school or they'd gone to college and they lived in a family um and that proved to be a bit too dangerous i think for some of the reasons that that tom was pointing to so i just wanted to say that got that got um you know we still have them in georgia we still have them in ukraine but uh russian students no longer participate thank you for making them point that actually that's really important especially because it kind of segues into my next question so we've talked about authoritarianism in russia at home and now i want to move on to talking about exporting authoritarianism and you mentioned how russian students are were coming into the united states but that was the same situation with central european university that was founded in 1990 after the war came down and they were based in budapest hungary for almost 30 years until the hungarian government forced them to relocate to vienna for exactly one of the and one of the reasons were that too many students who graduated from central european university were returning to russia and the post um soviet sphere and making trouble being too liberal etc etc so uh that's a very important point so this question concerns um the kremlin strengthening its ties with especially far right european parties through political visits financial support state media support to overcome its isolation after the annexation of the crime year in 2014 and to enhance its legitimacy to russia's anti european union anti nato and anti western rhetoric converges with the european far right zero skepticism and its rhetoric that opposes democratic european values in central and eastern europe especially russia has been successful in inflating its authoritarian superpower image creating what peter cracker the director of the independent research center political capital cause an exaggerated view of russia's economic and military power so the question is basically how is the war in ukraine expected to shape or reshape the stability of ukraine and the regions of eastern and central europe where there has already been an authoritarian turn and what would the long-term implications be for western democracies professor katiavsky i would like you to respond first there's a lot there so i'll just tackle one tiny bit which i think i think that the war in ukraine and of course it is my area of study so i i'm open to maybe this is it true but it seems to me that the war in ukraine is going to have a massive impact and change on all of that right so if anybody is pitting up sort of the soft power of russia and hey look how how great we are and be more like us versus what we've seen from the ukrainian people which is frankly even for people who love ukraine rather rather remarkable to watch i think it's going to be very difficult to say you know we don't want to follow the democratic model after what we've seen unfolding in ukraine thank you the professor rothland yeah well the radio driving up this morning um there was a report on the french presidential election okay let's just turn it on let's turn that one on try that one okay yeah so the the french presidential election campaign on the report it was explaining that eric zemur who is a far-right candidate um who was kind of threatening to to eat uh to take the far-right position away from uh marine marie lapin um has his campaign has collapsed because for the past few months he's been praising putin as a strong leader and the the the whole election campaign in france has been transformed because macron is now sure of re-election because he's the wartime president standing up against putin so that that's one very specific example of how this strategy of putins of trying to bolster the far right in europe has just just disintegrated and it's going to be very difficult poland as well is very strongly supportive of ukraine although poland was one of the the bad boys of drifting into authoritarianism and so putin's strategy in europe has totally failed now and uh who are his friends in the world you know what are the countries that voted for for russia at the un um general assembly it's you know syria north korea eritrea well good good luck with those those folks as political and economic partners in the future i agree with this this idea that has collapsed in europe but i think it's also collapsed in the united states because it's becoming increasingly difficult to say anything positive about putin these days here let me add just a counterpoint to that we focused on russia's support for authoritarian populist elements uh in europe and in the united states and it's indeed part of it um but russia was a an equal opportunity supplier for anybody who was a dissonant voice uh in in the western world uh on the left as well as on the right we tend to focus on the right because of what we see happening in russia but the goal was to disrupt european political systems uh and if some force on the left was capable of doing that russia moscow is more than happy to support a left wing force um if you thought that you wanted to maintain uh germany uh as a as an energy partner then quite frankly you could support greens um close down the nuclear reactors that makes russia germany much more dependent on russian oil and gas um so the goal for russia is to destabilize european countries to destabilize the united states uh their forces across the political spectrum that that can do that so we shouldn't focus simply on the authoritarian uh element of events yeah i would agree with the here comes my turn i agree with the statement that uh with this assumption that uh that uh yes the outcome of this is being the up an absolutely unprecedented in uh consolidation of europe the european so i i have some doubts about the previously uh like pronounced thesis about the uh putin's ultimate goal is to weaken the west i think that as a result of this of this crisis uh the west has become much more consolidated some people even joke saying that the nato has to probably erect one monument for putin in front of this uh in brussels in front of the headquarters uh because he really just uh made uh it just this situation has really uh shifted uh the attitudes in uh both europe and united states as the west as the russians are saying collective west has become absolutely much more uh consolidated and uh all attempts now to talk about uh like like interest-based negotiations to kind of to you know uh you know compromise or cooperate in terms of on the interest on the interest on the some sort of shared interest uh like being kind of ostracized by the west because the west cannot now talk with russia based on purely interest the west has to talk and it's being driven very very much by values so that's all like about all like american foreign policy we'll talk about american foreign policy strategy in the in about an hour and this is all about interests of values right so we have the absolutely and i kind of like uh we used to have some sort of equilibrium in terms of interest and values and now we have absolutely uh prevailed uh interest driven strategies in the west versus the interest values based interest strategies in the west versus interest based strategies in russia and china by the way so uh that is the point and i think that's uh the ukraine might end up being fragmented which is a sad probably would be a sad outcome of this because it's very it will be very hard to control and secure some sort of identity change in the whole of ukraine and i actually make a contrary point to that i think there's a real danger to extrapolating from the past four weeks and think that everything's over uh yes i mean the west has demonstrated unity that we hadn't expected um but the fundamental problems that led to disunity in the west haven't disappeared the fundamental problems that polarize american society and american politics haven't disappeared even if there you see republicans and democrats in washington rallying around uh around support for ukraine at this point take a look at the hearings that are now underway for the next supreme court justice and ask yourself whether that is evidence that americans realize that they need to come together in order to deal with this threat to freedom and democracy around the world same thing in europe there are host of problems uh that remained uh unresolved uh as this conflict continues as the strains and stresses uh on european society they come from refugees that come from inflation that come from supply chains to the extent that the sacrifice is not distributed evenly across europe you're going to see cracks begin to break in european unity so uh yes there's an opportunity now to unite the west to overcome polarization in countries like the united states in european countries that that depends on political leadership it depends on making sure that the sacrifice that we will endure in order to support ukraine is distributed seem to be distributed equitably across society uh and and and among countries in europe so we have an opportunity to change the trajectory but the trajectory hasn't changed at this point i think that's something important that we need to keep in mind where how we will think about this event a year from now could be radically different from the way we think about it today thank you professor graham um i could ask another 10 questions and we could sit here for another week discussing these topics so i think i'm going to turn it over to the audience now so thank you all very much for your very insightful and uh informative comments i'm sure we have all learned a lot so i would like to invite the audience and encourage especially our students to ask questions please line up at the microphones on two sides of the auditorium and please introduce yourselves and then ask your question so we have about 25 minutes left is this on okay uh my name is cadet cobra walker and i had a question for the entire panel um can you speak to the effects of the budapest memorandum has had on the current state of your crane just a relationship um for the years prior i'll give a stab at that um if anyone doesn't know the budapest memorandum was um it's my turn i guess uh budapest memorandum was a security guarantee signed by the united states the uk i don't remember if germany signed it in russia basically guaranteeing um ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty in exchange for them giving up the nuclear weapons that were on their soil right so the soviet union falls apart some countries that are newly independent had um soviet nuclear arsenal i think it's had a big impact on um on ukraine to the extent that actually they were talking about it today saying you know if we had article five and then you know guarantee it with nato this never would have happened and i don't know if that's true or not but certainly within ukraine um the failure of the signatories to guarantee their sovereignty and their territorial integrity based upon a signature on a piece of paper has made it less likely that they will accept those kinds of guarantees in the future i just had a point uh to that uh the budapest memorandum actually didn't provide security guarantees it provided security assurances assurances which was the the term and and there's a difference uh basically the three um powers that signed to uk united states and russia so that they would respect ukrainian sovereignty they would respect ukrainian um territorial integrity they would not use the threat or use of force in dealing with uh uh with ukraine but there was nothing in the budapest memorandum that required any three of those major powers to do anything if ukraine's security uh an independence came under threat um so where that has led us is that the ukrainians uh want a a firmer sort of commitment real security guarantees so that if they're uh if their independence is threatened in the future the united states or nato country would be obliged to undertake activities to defend defend ukraine not the current situation that they had before the recent conflict thank you we'll take a question from this side thank you is this on it is okay i'm tall so i'm going to squat down my name is a cadet first sergeant smith um it's my question stems from the discussion of a possible regime change in russia a lot of authoritarian leaders utilize fear to try to manipulate their citizens to follow whatever they want um and i feel that what putin's doing right now is a form of fear and the discussion earlier of nationalists uh being his number one problem if he uses so much fear do you think that there's a possibility that even the nationalists will succumb to what he wants uh continuing with his regime and not seeing a change in the near future yeah yes i think the the putin regime is very durable and so i'm not really um betting any money on regime change in the immediate future so i was just kind of speculating a one scenario of a revolt from the right that could bring him down but i think uh it it it's basically a stable regime and the invasion of of ukraine is destabilizing it because things are happening on the ground in the war which is which is a change factor from outside um which which uh may may result in change but i'm not very optimistic that uh because the fear and the control um does work and we will talk later on i think about disinformation and social media and that that is that a game changer or not um but i'm i'm not very optimistic so um i think we're we're stuck with this regime for some time and also doubling down on the pessimism the structures in place i think we we can imagine that the successor to putin is not going to be that different from putin it's not like he's he or she is going to um reinvent the system it'll be great if that happens but i think it's a structural problem it's not just that putin is crazy or he's getting old or whatever it's structures of power that have been built up for the past 25 years and we're seeing the consequences of that that regime in action um uh richard hailey published an article about the service class revolution uh and the tradition in russia uh explaining that all all time every time there's a kind of the establishment of an authoritarian regime starting from even the terrible right until uh today has been actually the outcome the result of this so-called uh foreign threat perception based service class revolution so i believe i would agree with uh professor ruttland uh that the regime is durable and uh it's not only fear fear is too many stuff right so when you cannot just like wear any like other colors rather than white or green or build a house and other colors rather than white right so you just this is fear right but in russia it's not fear the especially young generation they kind of very um you know i'd say fluid and and i think it's all not only fear it's propaganda it's propaganda it's the establishment of the atmosphere of the kind of uh you know fortress russia uh in circle meant by the uh aggressive uh organizing west and that's why actually kind of mobilization type of the i would compare this with post-totalitarian soviet union like just with some elements of mobilization so it's it's it's less fear more mobilization more propaganda indoctrination of like different patriotic and nationalistic ideology and also some ideas of uh no wonder monarchists are so popular now like the putin is a new tsar so right that's actually explains a lot of things and probably he himself i heard opposes this he doesn't like the idea of being crowned but probably might happen in any future thank you please go ahead hi uh officer cadet bonanie soprano from our nc saint i do have a question about a subject that we didn't really uh talk about uh since the two days so we didn't really talk about refugees and immigration during like a conflict and especially a war and i think that's something we can really uh talk about right now since it is important so uh knowing the situation that happened with syrian like syrian refugees in 2000 like since 2011 how can we say the international community is actually ready for another refugee crisis in regards of ukraine and russian conflicts right now the short answer that question is that um we're probably not all that prepared again i think you need to remember that the the syrian refugee crisis is somewhat different from the ukrainian crisis at this point in part because the syrians it was middle eastern somewhat if i can put it this way alien to the dominant culture in europe at this point the ukrainians are europeans to some extent and so i they're more readily accepted in in europe than than syrian refugees would have been uh you know we've seen a lot of the refugees flow into poland um in part because there was a significant ukrainian diaspora in poland before the conflict and there's a certain affinity between uh poles and uh ukrainians at this point not necessarily historically but at this point there has been i think the real issue here is the dimensions of it um we already have about three and a half million ukrainians who have fled ukraine i think the un has just to say that there are 10 million people have been displaced by that so that includes six and a half million inside of ukraine itself as this conflict uh continues you're going to see more and more uh people uh move westward and the question is whether countries like poland like romania like maldova hungry and silvakia really had the infrastructure to absorb that that number of ukrainian refugees and still maintain the type of political social economic stability that they need so this was getting at something that i was referring to before if we're going to maintain western unity then the dealing with the refugee crisis has to be seen as spread across the countries of europe that has to be equitable everybody is sharing in and helping ukrainians the united states has a role to play at this point ukrainians are not um accepted into the united states as refugees in the numbers that they would needed to deal with this crisis and that's a an issue in american politics and and legislation and so forth so um this is a major uh crisis the numbers are numbers that we haven't seen in decades and how the west is going to deal with this over the long run is going to be a real test of the unity of western society and our ability to be resilient in the face of these disruptive types of activities that the russians are are creating in ukraine just let me highlight one aspect of this here is uh i've seen some publications saying that uh actually for europe which faces the demographic demographic crisis and may might really anticipate the influx of you know many refugees from the middle east north africa the invitation of those like maybe 10 million or 15 million of ukrainians who are very hardworking people smart hardworking people is not so bad it's uh the orthodox is a christian population and lots of people say that maybe it might be good for a european union i mean for to get like more workforce rather than inviting accepting more refugees from uh yemen for example or north africa which is also part of the european policy and immigration policies doubling the court but probably it might be also from the economic standpoint uh might be more beneficial for the european union unfortunately out of this war but uh i believe that europe might be better prepared for like accepting refugees even than russia if russia has to accept some refugees it will be probably more problematic i just i want to add real quick excuse me i also think it's important to to keep in mind that at this moment the refugees are all women and children because men of fighting age over age of 18 up to 60 are not allowed to leave the country so we're really looking i think at a special kind of set of circumstances where it's much more compelling and the immediate sort of let's take in what i think most people at this point think is probably temporary because they're leaving their husbands and sons behind um and they want to go home so if the war should um not go on forever then i think that this would be more of a temporary situation if we get to the point where its entire families and you're thinking do we have enough open jobs how are we going to take care of these families for a longer kind of resettlement rather than temporary shelter i think then that's when these bigger questions come up because at this point it's not really for resettlement yeah so following on from that i think 75 80 percent of the 2015 refugees were men typically young men because it was very difficult to get all the way from afghanistan syria and there was the problem is that islamist terrorism that was that wasn't his number one security challenge in europe and there's no terrorism factor in the ukrainian refugees it's just not not an issue thank you go ahead please thank you good morning my name is cadet fockler and with all the eyes on putin right now would you be able to discuss the impact of worldwide sanctions on his popularity and how he'll be able to keep this war effort going in ukraine um yeah these are unprecedented sanctions um and there are lots of talks now and debates within russia about the mobilization economy uh and whether russia has prepared itself for sanctions my understanding is that russia since 2014 has been preparing for this war and has made lots of you know measures to you know better prepare for for the like those like really kind of sanctions from hell uh there are some industries which really suffer the banking uh but the sanctions are not total i mean these even these sanctions that america has actually imposed in the west even european union has imposed even tougher sanctions than united states in some some industries in some areas uh so i think that it might really hit hard the russian economy but there is a big question now whether the russian establishment and the people will be society will be able to actually make this turn toward a more kind of mobilization type of the economy i'm very doubtful because the population people today is not the people under the Stalinist you know in the 1927 or the 1930s 35 uh the huge big uh gigantic industrial uh you know like you know construction projects it's very hard to mobilize people now you have to have a lot of investment and incentivize the young people to go uh some of the industries might work better uh some and the import substitution might be uh really accelerated but for example russians do not have any planes now to fly because they forgot how to make planes you know except for the fighter jets so maybe we'll travel fight across the country on the fighter jets i remember when there was a iraq was sanctioned uh my friends used to fly to speak with uh the tarik aziz who was prime minister of iraq using the su 29 so that's okay there is no way we have to fly this way so i think that it's it's tough it's a big question it's a great question by the way it's like what will happen what extent the government and the elite is ready and mobilized we given the fact that we have the the russian we have the medium level and low level elite is very and not not very competent uh lots of nepotism and you know the not very efficient governance system so i'm it's very tough to ask i'm not very optimistic about this but they have to have to do something to uh that's why to kind of modernize or remodernize russia and that's why we've spoke spoken with professor golstein yes about the cooperation with china so probably we the russians hope that maybe chinese could help them establish some production lines and we have already some examples of successful uh for example production of man machinery near moscow so with the help of chinese so chinese had invested they set up they they provide some technologies that might be the option for russia you know one of the ironies of the sanctions that we've leveled uh is that the group that they hit most uh hard in in russia at this point it's not the oligarchs the oligarchs will survive they're all they have billions of dollars it's not the vast majority of russians who um quite frankly don't live that well to begin with in any event the group that's going to be at hardest by this uh are urban young professionals uh people will work for western companies who have lost their jobs uh or will soon lose their jobs uh people whose credit cards won't work outside of russia any any longer and therefore and because of travel travel restrictions won't be able to take their vacations in europe won't be able to travel to the united states uh people who won't be able to import goods from uh from outside and in part because the the rising prices um you know many russians consider them luxury goods we would consider them uh sort of everyday staples a lot of electronic equipment for example um beauty products um the cat food and dog food for for example and the irony of this is that we're hitting our sanctions are hitting hardest against that stratum in russian society that is most inclined to be cooperative with the west most western in its orientation uh and in fact the group that we would like to see expanded in russia uh because that would provide for we think a better future and better and more constructive relations between our countries one of the consequences of this um and the response that you've gotten from the kremlin which is much more repressive and repression is that thousands of these i think that the figure i've seen is 250 000 have already left the country the best and the brightest in russia and this is going to have a long-term impact on russia's ability to build a competitive economy in the in the 21st century so while uh you know i think we all understand the urge to do something uh in order to punish uh pooten for his uh for his acts of aggression uh we have this collateral damage that we're doing uh that is actually going to to lead to a russia that is perhaps less um uh less disposed to work constructively with the united states in the west and in the future uh once this conflicts winds down as all conflicts eventually do i don't know what the answer to it is but i hope that someone in washington someone in european capitals is thinking about how do we save this very important stratum of russian society as critical to russia's future is critical to improve relations between the west and russia i have just a small point thanks professor graham it's a great point uh i would like to quote professor vakru from the davis center at harvard who just she had an interview with the national uh national public public radio probably a couple of weeks ago and she said yes we just need to exert pressure on russia but not too much because there is another danger here it's like if you sanction too much you just hey you alienate the middle class which is not so huge in china middle class is 250 million probably right in russia it's like how many many what's the size of middle class in russia 20 million all right so uh you don't want to alienate the middle class uh and you don't want to actually suppress too much because they might be the best condition for uh even toughening the regime and they may maybe will see the muslimi regime in the near future i mean because of the uh overwhelmingly tough sanctions on russia so it should be a very it's a very tiny process i think that hope that the west understands this thank you so i think we're running out of time so we might have time for one or two final questions go ahead morning i'm cadet jacob randolph i was actually going to ask about sanctions as well so with the rapid increase in energy prices following a breakout of the war in ukraine how long do you believe the west can last with these sanctions and what are some of our options for alternatives for energy and can you provide brief answers to this question please professor there's a big difference between the u.s and european position because the u.s is an energy exporter so if the prices of oil and gas go up um u.s producers benefit i mean u.s consumers don't don't um the real crunches in europe where they're extremely dependent on the russian imports and it's the it's a question of money right they're going to pay more for their energy they're going to have to invest in alternative sources and the german government is on this right before february 24th they were still equivocating still closing down the nuclear stations investigating renewables but not enough to wean themselves off russian oil and gas and the german government has done 180 degree turn and that's a very efficient society government when they have a program they will execute it and they're willing to pay the cost as in the earlier con the conversation over time that political consensus may erode but i think it also fits in with the general uh desire to tackle climate change and to get away from fossil fuels anyway which as a as a as a global community we we have to do that with the next 10 15 years anyway so this russian incident is the kind of wake-up call that the age of oil and gas is over yeah of course the problem is those are all long-term medium-term types of programs the price of gas is rising now the price of gas will continue to rise as we deal with the the consequences and spillover effects of this crisis and i think you've asked a very good question which is how long will we maintain western unity in the face of rising gas prices gasoline prices again it comes to the question the equitable distribution of sacrifice yes the united states is better positioned to deal with this than europe is at this point we are a net exporter of oil and gas but of course we're not producing as much as we could because of political concerns in the united states right so we're going to countries like saudi arabia the UAE that we've talked to the venezuelans there's some thought that will cut a deal with the iranian so they can bring gas onto the market because we don't want to bring it onto the market because we don't want to produce more in the united states for domestic political reasons so again they're all sorts we've got a near-term challenge that we have to master if we're going to maintain unity why we think about how we develop our medium and long-term positions so that we don't face this challenge the type of challenge from russia again whether we'll be able to navigate this politically i think is one of the big questions of the next several months and we'll have an answer to that to some extent in november of this year in the united states thank you so we'll take one final question please go ahead good morning everyone my name is karatoka and my question is like especially with in a situation with russia to my knowledge there's going to be an election in two years the sanctions are really cracking down on as you said average russian civilians especially those with professional jobs so with all that being said my question was what was putans objective in ukraine to risk so much is for effectively what is in my opinion ding just further hold down in russia like what did he want there that he was willing to sacrifice pretty much everything from average russian from russian soldiers to the russian economy itself so can you please try to give like a 30 second response to this final question yeah i think i think you saw a window of opportunity and a danger coming which is that ukraine was rearming with drones with anti-tank missiles and putin was afraid ukraine would use those weapons to try and retake the donbas and in november last year ukraine did use one of the turkish drones to destroy a howitzer in donbas so i think putin was thinking if we wait another six months ukraine will be much stronger militarily and they'll try to recapture those secessionist territories in the donbas so i think that was the time frame it was a military technology driven decision but i agree it's been a disastrous decision professor then putin didn't think he was running great risks as part of the problem he thought this would be over by now if he had taken kiev in five days if ukrainians he had displaced the government if ukraine had surrendered we wouldn't be having this conversation today he miscalculated so he didn't understand the risk that he was running that's why he ran the risk that he did thank you very much so this concludes our first round table discussion this morning thank you all for being here in person and also to those of you who have been following us online please join me in thanking our experts for their invaluable insights and for taking the time to travel here thank you again we have uh last summit round table discussions in 10 minutes so starting at 10 50 so we will have second discussion panel here so thank you thank you