 Good morning, everybody. Welcome to USIP. I'm Don Jensen, director of the Russia and Europe program here. It's a great pleasure to introduce a distinguished occasional colleague, a distinguished guest here this morning. Putin's defiance of the global world order has steadily grown more brazen over time, of course, beginning in Georgia, if not earlier, in 2008. Two rounds of the Kremlin War. And to everybody's surprise, maybe not our guest's surprise, it seemed to have run aground, unexpectedly, against the predictions of most Russian experts here and in Europe. And what that means in significance is something I want to sort out today, I hope, with our guests. But there are other issues at play here as well, the European security architecture, Russia's strategic thinking and view of the world, the implications of what's going on for the possible transition in Moscow. And to address these things, and he'll be, I'm sure, as comprehensive as ever. It's my great pleasure to introduce Mark Gagliotti, who I'm sure most of you see on, read on social media, see as many publications. I'm always having my breath taken away at how prolific he is. It's a great pleasure to see him after a couple of years again today. Mark, of course, is also affiliated with a number of prestigious institutions. He's a consultant. He's a media celebrity and someone, I think, who a lot of us read with great diligence and interest as often as we can. He's also the next book that's coming out next week. It's called Putin's Wars from Chechnya to Ukraine, coming out next week. And I encourage you all to take a look at it. So this morning, we're going to begin by having Mark, and mixing with Mark's. Then we're going to have a Q&A session. There's no fireplace, but it is a fireside job. And we encourage both the people online and also the people here in the hall to submit their questions. Our assistant will take them, field them, pass them to me, and I will present them to Mark for his discussion. So again, thank you all for watching online. Thank you to people here in the hall. And Mark, good to see you again. Good morning. Well, great to be here. And again, it's always difficult to know quite what to talk about in the sense that there is so much to talk about. And also, obviously, I could fill any amount of time at the sound of my own voice. So in order to try and kind of impose some discipline on myself, I really want to confine myself to three opening points. Putin and his thinking about war. Secondly, about what we've learned from what's happened in the war, and particularly the triumph of autocracy over technocracy. And thirdly, about trying to kind of look forward, after all, US Institute of Peace, and think about precisely the long-term potential outcomes. So let's start with Putin in war. It's easy to say, oh, Putin, he's a bad man. He is a bad man. He's a warmonger. Not so much. Putin does not engage in war for the sheer unbridled joy of it. He loves military, shall we say. This is not a man who can walk past a tank without being photographed, his head peeking out of the hatch. But nonetheless, it's more that he regards warfare as a perfectly acceptable instrument of international statecraft. And in this respect, there's so many others. I think he is a 19th century geopolitician. In many ways, what he does is something that the Bismarck's and the Napoleons of this world would find entirely understandable and recognizable. And I say 19th century rather than anyone else. Because 19th century is this time in which not only do you have a continuing, frankly, sort of notion that Mike makes right, but it's also the colonial era. An era in which there is a sort of a clear, if often implicit, demarcation of the world between those proper countries that have genuine sovereignty. And that basically means European countries and North America. And then the rest of the world that is, in a way, fair game. Its sovereignty is destined to be subordinate to those of the metropolis. And again, I think that's very much part of Putin's thinking. That there are proper countries and there are the others. Proper countries have to demonstrate their sovereignty by if need be imposing it. But you'd rather not. The same way as actually in my view, Putin does not assassinate people left, right, and center. But he has no problem doing so when he feels it is necessary or appropriate. For likewise invasions, he invades for a reason. And I think in that context, we need to appreciate that this is, in its own terms, and I would absolutely stress that, a rational process. Putin may well believe a lot of deeply problematic, deeply unpleasant things. And he clearly has also been dramatically misinformed by a system that in many ways he created to misinform him. And I'll come onto that in a moment. But nonetheless, there is a rationality at work. This is not a man who, despite some of the breathless accounts, always escalates when he's in a corner. Well, he doesn't, actually. As we've seen most recently with the grain deal, he pulls out, he says, no, no, it's not going to happen. He's put in a position in which, in effect, his bluff is called. He has to either use direct military force against the grain ships with the massive risks of escalation, as well as international reprogram. And at which point it's, no, no, no. When we said we were pulling out, we meant suspending. And we've had a look, and now we've got the guarantees and the suspensions over. Again, look, I mean, this is not in any way to defend him. But I think we have to recognize the degree to which this is a man who is willing to do extraordinarily unpleasant things when he thinks it's in his interests. He has no problem with that. But the point is, there is also, there is always a degree of calculus behind it. And this is a man who, after all, believes that Russia is defending itself. And again, I say this not in any way to espouse or support his perspective, but because we have to appreciate, understand where he's coming from, in order to try and understand where he may go next. This is a man who believes that, basically, Russia has been neglected and assailed. The 1990s, frankly, actually, Western policy towards Russia did make some astonishing blunders in the 1990s and helped contribute to the rise of not necessarily Putin, but someone like Putin. Nonetheless, the 1990s has been reinterpreted now as an era in which the West at best neglected Russia and at worst actively sought to plunder and demean it. Since then, essentially, in Putin's mind, all the times we've pushed back against human rights abuses, particularly ones in the context of war. If one looks at the Second Chechen War, for example, he more or less had assumed that he had carte blanche. It was, well, we're all involved in the global war on terror. You can have your war on terror, and I will have mine. And I think there was a genuine outrage on the part of Putin and others when we started saying, well, hang on, look at the appalling human rights abuses that have been carried out in the name of counterinsurgency in Chechnya. And his view was, but hang on, don't we have an understanding? We're not hassling you. Why are you hassling us? Very from this point onwards, he has seen the world through this prism of an essentially hostile conspiratorial West that is trying to do Russia down. And when you look for that, when that's what you're expecting to find, and if you look carefully, you can find, if not evidence, at least grounds to persuade yourself of that. And I do feel, obviously, we know quite a few issues. I mean, the things that are points like the Libyan bombings and so forth, which have become sort of core celebra. In many ways, I think actually the Balotnaya protests that greeted Putin on his return to power after his little sham period as prime minister, were again, I think for him, proof, quote, unquote, that the West was now coming for him. The West was now fermenting anti-government insurrection in Russia. So this is kind of the context. This is a man who believes that sometimes war is necessary and believes that he's fighting defensive wars to maintain Russia's status, its role, its sovereignty, its standing in the world. And that, I think, will help you to play the context where are. But the point is, it's also a man who has created an essentially autocratic political system over the years. And we've got to remember this. Putin and Putin as in 2022 vintage is not the same as year 2000. This has changed in many ways the systems ossified around Putin. This strange Putin-shaped bubble in the middle and bit by bit system is built around him. For years, his circle has been shrinking. Alternative voices, whether it's people like former finance minister Kudrin or others who actually were willing to stand up to him, have been marginalized. But in my opinion, even more importantly is what's happened to the bureaucratic process. I spoke to one person who had been involved. This was back in 2015 with the briefing process for Putin. And he was talking about the degree to which actually reports that were based on good intelligence and good analysis. But then in the next stage of the intelligence cycle, reports were then hurriedly rewritten. Briefers were actually very, very carefully coached to make sure that they didn't say anything that Putin wouldn't want to hear. Increasing the system told Putin what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to hear. And the system can go on quite a long time on that kind of a basis, cocooning the leader. Because there's a lot of smart people within the system who are still keeping the system going. We should never underestimate the difference. Just as we should never underestimate Russians to be a capacity to mess things up, we should also never underestimate the capacity of the Russians to manage in dysfunctional circumstances. But obviously then what happens is, and then at some point, it works fine, and then at some point it doesn't. And as we saw this with the actual invasion, the Russians have a very carefully structured sort of process for handling military operations. And in part, it's based on precisely an awareness of their own weaknesses. They still have not really got a culture of proper initiative at the lower levels of command. That there is corruption, that there is inefficiency, that a lot of the stuff's not going to work the way it's meant to, all that kind of thing. They're aware of that. There's, for me, it's quite a nice metaphor. In, I think, in Moscow, there are these centers, Moi Dokumenti, they're so-called multifunctional centers, where you go to basically have contact with representatives in a whole variety of different government departments. So you still have all kinds of stupid and pointless regulations, such as the one that often sort of caught me up was precisely the need to register if a foreigner is staying with you. You actually have to go and register. And that involves a huge amount of paperwork. I mean, if you're staying with a friend, the friend has to, amongst other things, present full document to prove that they actually own the property in which you're staying, all that kind of thing. So, on the one hand, ridiculously onerous and frankly, entirely pointless bureaucracy. But instead of just simply saying, let's not bother with this registration process, what they did is they created these multifunctional centers where you go along, you take a chip, you don't talk to someone, in this case, from the embadette, the Interior Ministry. And it actually gets handled pretty neatly and pretty easily by people who actually know it. So it's this kind of strange, very rush and way round things. You don't actually fix the dysfunction. You find ways of making it as least dysfunctional as possible. And in some ways, a lot of that with the military. I mean, I can go into detail with people who are more interested in the Q and A, but actually there's a whole military sort of superstructure of means, none of which was activated. I mean, the basic structure which would have managed the process of the war, made sure it had a proper, credible political objective, single unitary command, the forces it needed and perhaps most importantly of all the resources it needed. That was only stood up literally a day or so before the invasion. And these things take at least two weeks just a constition, let alone to actually do their job. There's all kinds of other examples of that. The degree to which actually a technocratic system which worked out really quite effective ways of getting around the dysfunctions of the system was just not activated. Instead, Putin had his war. His people probably the Security Council Secretariat would actually ended up planning a war for which they were not qualified or anything like that. And we see the disaster that follows. And so many of the kind of subsequent disasters are precisely because of the failures in that first week or two of the war. They burnt through their best soldiers. They burnt through the opportunity to strike with how the initiative and so forth. So in some ways, I mean, I say this with a certain degree of time in chief but actually Putin was in many ways Ukraine's best ally. And he continues to be as he continues to micromanage. But what does this mean for the future? At the moment we have the mantra that the war ends when Ukraine decides. I hope we all appreciate the degree to which that is rubbish. Not because in any way we actually want to undermine the Ukrainians and the Slytys but let's not pretend that there are a whole variety of interests at work. If the Ukrainians decide that war will only end when they have taken back historical lands of the Zaporizhian Cossacks or whatever else. Or that in fact, Bilgorod and Rostov-on-Don are historically part of the Ukrainian state. We would have something to say about that. At the moment though, unfortunately, I think we use this mantra both because it signals something that needs to be signaled which is precisely the degree to which we are supporting Ukraine in the full recovery of its sovereignty and its statehood. Which does need to be constantly reaffirmed. But also because we are avoiding the difficult debates about what the end looks like. And these are difficult enough by my reading in DC, let alone when you also start bringing in the whole of the NATO alliance and the European Union and such like. But we have to be thinking about them. And I think this for me is one of the big concerns I have about policy at the moment. That it's about how do we arm Ukraine adequately? And that is absolutely necessary in writing proper. It is about how we keep the Ukrainian economy afloat. Which in many ways I would say at least as if not more important than the issue at this stage, than the issue of military supply. We kind of need to talk about your reconstruction of Ukraine, sort of broadly, but no one really wants to start putting figures onto that. But nonetheless, at least we're aware that Ukraine will need to be rebuilt. And some kind of way of fitting it within Western political economic and needy security structures. But we're not thinking about Russia. And OK, it's easy to say that. Well, the Russians are the bad guys. They're the aggressors. Yes, they are. But when the war ends, there's still going to be 140 plus million of them. And Ukraine's long-term security cannot be guaranteed simply by arms or by membership of NATO, or especially by membership of the European Union. That's a little British observation. Ukraine's long-term future depends on some kind of modus vivendi with Russia. Ideally, a happy, prosperous, working, democratic Russia. Now however, at the moment implausible that sounds, I don't think it's impossible, but it certainly we're away from that. But nonetheless, in terms of long-term thinking, that is going to be Ukraine's best security guarantee. And I think at the moment, we have a problem thinking about what kind of relationship with Russia we want in any positive sense. We have a problem relating to the Russian people in any positive sense. My big concern is precisely that we are so concerned about supporting Ukraine rightly and properly. But we forget about the long-term relationship with Russia. If we start treating all Russians as if they are ardent supporters of the regime and of the war, then we will make them ardent supporters of the regime of the war because they will have nothing else. We do not want to repeat the treaty of their sigh, mistake of just impoverished but angry Russia, that in one year or five years or 10 years maybe back, quite possibly not in military terms. But there are ample ways that Russia can make life difficult for Ukraine in the future. So my closing point is I hope that we can begin to think more imaginatively about what kind of a future relationship we want with Russia. It's not going to be up to us to create Russia's future political system. Unless, I don't know, I can imagine if Putin does start using non-strategic nuclear weapons, then probably issues of regime change may well be back on the table under discussion. But we've shown that we're much better at changing regimes and managing what happens afterwards. So I don't think we've got a particularly impressive track record there. But nonetheless, we do need to be thinking about what we can do if nothing else in Hippocratic terms to do no harm, at least ensure that our policy does not actually drive Russia, whether it's into the hands of China or whether it's into the hands of extremists or just into an angry sluff of despond, which doesn't help anyone. Anyway, I'll stop there, my peroration. And I'd much rather throw that to a question. I want to remind the visitors at home, there is a chat box. If you want to ask, I'll ask some questions. But let me start with a question about how can you call it Putin's team. You and I have done work on strategic culture. To what extent is, I would say, the evident bubbling of some of the elements in the Kremlin around Putin about the war, or maybe even other things? What's going on here? Fine, well, it's a shame we won't have time for any more questions. That'll easily take the next 40 minutes to do properly. Now, I mean, joking apart, I am struck by the degree to which, if one looks at the people who are closest to Putin, the people he listens to the most, they're all aged between 68 and 74. Most of them are either ex-KGB or ex-Leningrad cronies. Also, though, most of them did not come from within the so-so hereditary Soviet elite. They were all first-generationers. They finally, this is it, they finally broken into the big time. They had joined the aristocracy that was the Communist Party, Nomenklatura. And then suddenly, all that went away. So, I mean, this, for me, it's the last true homosovieticus generation that we're dealing with, who are infused by this sense of, not just what do we lose, but when it metastasizes into, and who took it from us. So, I mean, there is a real emotional charge that, interestingly, I didn't find back when I was still allowed to travel to Russia. In my conversations, like with the 50-somethings and the early 60-somethings, the next political generation are waiting to take over. They are absolutely, they are kleptocrats. They are pragmatic opportunists. They are not necessarily nice people. But they do not seem to have this emotional commitment, shall we say, to the struggle against the West. I think that's one of the most disturbing elements of it. They don't really buy into that great Putin vision. In the main, I don't think so. I mean, are they patriots and or maybe even nationalists? Yeah, absolutely. But the point is, this is the interesting thing about Putin. I mean, he is devastating his country in the name of some kind of a cause, which is almost to teach the West a lesson. And I think this is the difference. The other generation of pragmatists, it's not that they want the West to do necessary a prosperous, they don't care as long as they get to buy their nice penthouses in London and steal at home and bank abroad. Good old days. But nor do they actively have a reason to sort of see the West damaged for the sake of it. So I think this is a problem. You've got a kind of a strategic culture, which I think we're both agreeing that Graham Hurd's recent book is very good at addressing, which is a kind of a wider Russian strategic culture that has been built up over years, decades, centuries, arguably, that talks about Russia's place in the world as a European and an Asian power and such like. But then it's put through this distorting lens by this particularly small generation of people who on the whole have very little, I mean firstly they have very little practical experience of the outside world, who are still infused with a lot of the Soviet era mentalities, but most importantly of all have this resentment of a post-imperial generation, which is always hard. Look, all empires have trouble coping with that, said the Brit. But the point is in Russia, it was an especially traumatic experience. Interesting. Okay, let's start with questions for Graham. Start with the room here, wait for the microphone to approach. Sir, when it arrives with you, please do it. Since we're in a small pause here, there's a lot of talk about Putin's personal characteristics whether he's rational or not, or he never backs down. Could you say something about whether he backs down and maybe the Green, the Green Dealers and Evans that he might. Yeah, I mean, Putin backs down all the time when he feels that that's the necessary thing to do. Think of his very first stab at Keith. You know, he, first of all, he had this bizarre notion that essentially because he knew that Ukraine was a failed state, that more or less he could just kind of send a few units of paratroopers motoring into the center of the capital to arrest the government. When that didn't happen, he steadily escalated the forces deployed. You had this huge, long, for a long time, immobile convoy of forces. But when it became clear that that wasn't gonna work, it's not like he said, well, then we're gonna mute Keith or anything like that. He decided, okay, so we pull those forces back, we reorient our strategy to Dumbass and the Crimean Corridor. So I think generally, we have to appreciate the degree to which, yes, this is not a person who wants to be seen as backing down, of course, because there's a whole kind of macho characteristic persona there. And there are gonna be some red lines. I don't like actually talk about red lines because most red lines are no more than pink. They are kind of, no, no, no, we really don't want this except if we really can't do anything about it. I think Crimea is the one thing that I think would be problematic for him for a whole variety of reasons to actually lose. But apart from that, he will make this, like the rest of us, he makes cost-benefit analysis. If he thinks he can escalate and get away with it, fine. But on the other hand, if he feels he has to cut his losses, he's demonstrated that he does that. Great, sure. And please identify yourself if you feel like it. Thank you so much for, it's interesting. I'm Lewis Wasser, I'm a researcher affiliate at Yale University and I'm actually a former USIP doctoral fellow, so. A little bit about trade-offs between military preparedness and coup-proofing, though how the internal tensions and the different security services make Russia more or less prepared for the war in Ukraine and the trade-offs between that and Putin staying in power. And just what you see is the necessary pillars of the regime on the security service side and beyond the security services if you have time. Obviously, there are probably other questions too, so. Okay, so I don't actually think there is necessarily a direct trade-off between military preparedness and coup-proofing. I mean, this is indeed a very kind of robust, carefully coup-proofed system. In many ways, actually, they're simply inheriting that from Soviet times when they're always very afraid of Bonapartism as they put it. So you have multiple military forces under different agencies. In Moscow, you have a constant sort of everyone watching everyone else kind of environment and such like. Yes, any kind of military coup will be very difficult. Military slash arms bearing services, coup is going to be very, very difficult in Russia. In some ways, though, rather than saying there's a sort of trade-off between that and military preparedness, in some ways I would say that actually what the war has demonstrated is that one of the biggest risks to this system is precisely by not following its own procedures. We have a war in which the military, to a slightly lesser extent, the National Guard are fighting, even though neither of those agencies had any real stake in how this war was prepared. Now, I follow a certain number of social media channels used by both soldiers, but also particularly the National Guard. And if one looks at the National Guard ones, my God, they are angry. I mean, they are absolutely furious as far as they're concerned. They were just thrown in there as cannon fodder. And frankly, they're right. They're not, they are public order troops. They're not trained or equipped to for a stand-up fight against mechanized troops. So they feel that they were neglected, that their commanders didn't back them up, et cetera, et cetera. And the point is, these are the guys who ultimately are also meant to be the first line of defense against crowds in the streets and so forth. Now, we've not really seen signs of any kind of systemic breakdown in discipline. Absolutely not. But one could imagine a scenario where, for example, there's major industrial closures, crowds on the streets because frankly, it's gonna be economic pressure rather than political pressure that actually sort of generates that kind of first wave of protest. And you might get the local Amon riot police who were sent to go and fight in Ukraine, thinking, well, do I really want to go and truncheon my next door neighbor and all the people I know and the people, the parents of my kids, schoolmates and everything else for a Kremlin that abandoned and abused us. And I think there's gonna be a problem there. Likewise, the military. The military is an interesting position because on the one hand, it gets all the flak for everything that goes wrong. But on the other hand, they can say, yeah, but this wasn't our war in the sense that this is not the way we, particularly the high command, will have that opportunity to say, this is not how we would have fought this war. If Putin had turned to us and said, we're gonna invade Ukraine, it would have been handled very, very differently. Which means that in some ways, actually what Putin has done is given some of the other force bearing agencies and above all, the ones with the largest number of men with guns are kind of political, get out of jail free card. That they don't have to say that they are entirely kind of compromised within this. Instead, Putin has put his faith in the intelligence and security community. And look, they have all kinds of strengths and so forth, but when it could be, you know, if we were ever in that situation of a real shooting on the streets thing, beyond the Kremlin Guard regiment of the Federal Protection Service, basically the National Guard and the military could control Moscow quite easily. The only people who could try and stop them would be the police and the police would, to be honest. So I think the interesting thing is that we have a system which is still very robust and relies on frankly the institutional paranoia of you never know who's listening, you never know who's tapping your phone and everything else. And if people started getting together in little cabals and chatting, then it would quite quickly sort of track someone's attention. But actually, I also think that a degree of disenchantment even within security apparatus is beginning to become evident. And I think that's one of the reasons why, even though the Federal Security Service was clearly massively negligent and culpable in how a brief Putin about, oh, we've got all these agents and they're all ready to basically paralyze the country and everything else, that they haven't actually experienced any kind of a backlash. Because, put it very bluntly, it's a limit to how many people Putin can afford to piss off. Thanks very much. I'm Lise Howard. I'm a professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University. And I'm very pleased to be on Don's team this year on the Russia Ukraine team as a senior fellow in residence. I have four questions for you, but I'm going to ask two in the interests of all of us. My first question is, I think a lot of what you said has held true since 2014 and even earlier. So why 2022? What changed and did COVID play a role in the outbreak of this war? Why did Putin choose this moment? First question, especially when things might have been riper earlier under a different president, for example, in the United States. Second question is, this one's a little more complicated, but I want to push you a little bit more about thinking about the post-conflict architecture. So, you know, Germany and France fought each other, killed millions and millions of each other's people over decades, and then finally decided, okay, we've had enough of this. We're going, you know, France, it was led by France, but really all the European powers around Germany were going to embrace Germany in this very tight institutional hug to make sure that this slaughter, the carnage doesn't continue. What kind of institutional arrangements do you think might be plausible for this 11-time zone Eurasian landmass? Like, what, the OSCE framework, partnership for peace, maybe? But what principles do you think that framework might undergird a kind of a new thinking of Eurasian security? Excellent questions. The first one, I mean, look, the interesting thing is this, that what I think is clear is that it's not as though Putin had a long-term, unswerving determination to physically and directly control Ukraine. If that had been the case, absolutely, 2014 would have been the time to have done it. When basically the Ukrainian security forces were in absolute disarray, you know, then he could have rolled in, if not in February right after the Crimea, but at some point that year. So clearly his views have indeed shifted over time. Not in the sense of, I mean, I think he absolutely considers Ukraine to be part of Russia's sphere of influence and indeed it's historic and cultural petrimony. The idea of a Ukraine that is totally separate from Russia, I think he regards as anathema. But I think his view was that one way or the other, through economic ties, through political pressure, through this, having quite what one calls the Donbass conflict, it was a bit of an intervention, it was a bit of a civil war, it was a bit of a just sort of anarchic rising or whatever, it was a kind of toxic mix of the whole lot of them. And it's very hard to kind of unpick what's what. But that would help give him pressure and leverage through Minsk and Minsk 2 and so forth. So I think there was a sense that he had alternative means of doing it and clearly something changed. And I think there's some things that have changed. First of all is actually the fact that it didn't work and that it was clear that Ukraine was not therefore going to bow into pressure. Secondly, I mean, again, it starts moving into the realms of kind of amateur psychology when we start talking about COVID and whether or not his period of isolation from most of his elite. Because the interesting thing is obviously even members of his elite had to isolate for two weeks before they could see him. And if one looks at who actually did this on a regular basis, the interesting thing is they tend to be the hawks. They're people like Pratyshev who basically had a two weeks on, two weeks off work cycle in that respect. Igor Sechin of Rosneft. People like Prime Minister Mishustin or whatever, they were actually busy administering the country. Yes, they obviously did get some face time, but nonetheless, much, much less. And although everyone had their video calls and so forth, we all know from our experiences, look, there is a certain importance to physicality. And I would say particularly in what is a sort of a semi-monarchical system whereby the boss and to have influence with the boss is arguably the most important political currency of all. And then we don't know how far the issue of his being isolated with Kovalchuk. This is the point that Mikhail Zegar has particularly presented that sort of the banker and long-term friend, Kovalchuk isolated with him and they spent the evenings fulminating about Ukraine and such like. Could well be true, which is very hard to actually back it up. But one way or the other, I mean, I think that sort of the COVID era did contribute to a certain sense that something has to be done. But even then, I don't think anything was actually sort of determined for absolute, because we had this, after in fact the arrest of Medvedch or the move against Medvedchuk, we had the start of the buildup on the Ukrainian border in spring of 2021. And the irony is this, that right up to the point when the first Russian troops across the border, Putin was winning. Ukrainian economy was going so spiraling downhill as who wanted to invest under the shadow of Russian guns. A stream of Western leaders were heading to Moscow to try and petition Putin not to start a war, giving him exactly that position of centrality that he clearly sort of craves, not just for personal reasons, but also in terms of, again, he emphasises this point that Russia is a serious player and certain European countries' leaderships were trying to put pressure to bear on Kiev to make concessions. You know, if he'd been really this three-dimensional geopolitical chess player, then he would have just basically let this continue. Why, when he did, I'll give you two answers. First is short and honest one, don't know. A slightly more long and speculative one is, I feel in part there was an element of just simply personal impatience. In part, there was a sense of a window of opportunity closing, a belief that, you know, again, from his point of view, the more the West was now stepping in to support Ukraine, the more he felt it was going to be incorporated. It's not that he was worried about NATO membership after all. If you look at his words, he always talks about the real threat being NATO strategic architecture on Ukrainian soil. You know, there would be NATO missiles that could hit Moscow in whenever it is, seven to 10 minutes or whatever. Militarily entirely illiterate because there's lots of other places that NATO could launch missiles against Moscow if that's what they wanted. But I think it speaks to his concern, that sense of a kind of a creeping integration. And finally, and this is entirely speculative, I wonder if it's about 2024 in the presidential elections. He seemed so fed up with so much of his job these days. And I wonder if he was looking at the thought of another election campaign, however phony, but nonetheless, you've got to go and campaign a bit. And a thought of, you know, another presidential term where you're not dealing with the fun stuff on the whole, you're dealing with diversification of the economy and dealing with the pensions overhang. That's not what he became president for. And I wonder if that sense, given that it is very difficult in a non-law based state like this to step down because then everything, your fate, your fortune, your family becomes dependent on the goodwill of your successor. I wonder if his thing was, remember, this is a man who believed it was gonna be two weeks and it was all gonna be over. But that was gonna be his capstone triumph. That then, you know, Bielerus is already pretty much dependent on Moscow. Now we put our own guys in charge in Ukraine. The three great Slavic nations have been regathered and he is, you know, clearly Vladimir the Great. He ascends into the pantheon of Russian state-building heroes. And he's pretty much safe that he can now pick his successor, step back, but essentially that he'll be bulletproof. I don't know if that's the case. But the point is that would make sense and sense of if you think of 2022 as the sort of capture and pacification year. Then 2023 is the year to build up the successor. And then you can sort of step away. Don't know. Second question, which I've totally forgotten. Please remind me, sorry. Oh, God, yeah. I think, yeah, I mean, here's the problem. Things like OSCE and such like. We're having a conversation about containment. There's still, we still have a hangover of containment. I mean, that is how Americans think. It's very hard for us to move out of the containment framework. But so I don't know. You're on the other side of the pond. What else is there? Look, I mean, containment is fine until containment breaks. I mean, that's what it is. It just simply pens it. It's basically causes either you hope that somehow organically what's being contained metamorphoses and suddenly it's a butterfly. Or you just think, well, look, at least it'll last until someone else is in charge. Neither of which really are good options. But I think the thing is, you mentioned things like OSCE, Partnership for Peace and so forth. These are all institutional moves that essentially are on a state level about trying to ensure that no one invades anyone else. And that's really important. But it's not the answer. If you look at what worked with Germany, it wasn't just simply membership of structures. It was the fact that there was a root and branch attempt to basically make Germans feel that they were Europeans. And it worked. So in this respect, I mean, we need, yes, of course we need all kinds of guarantees and such like, but we also need to do everything we can to love bomb the Russians, to make them feel that we actually, we regard them as Europeans. And that fundamental point, are Russians Europeans? A lot of countries now, you know, you go to Warsaw and you probably be tarred and feathered for suggesting this notion. But the Russians themselves, it doesn't matter if they're in Vladivostok or wherever, in some ways even more so in Vladivostok because they feel that much more conscious of the sort of the tides of Asia before them. But you know, Russians themselves regard themselves as Europeans. I was in Kazan a couple of years back. No, actually three years back. And the interesting thing was talking to a mixed group of people from Tatarstan, some of whom were ethnic Russians, some of whom were absolutely Tatars in terms of their outlook and they were proud of their faith, they were Muslim and so forth. But the interesting thing was there was a consensus amongst them all that we're a quarter of Europeans. Why is that an issue? So I think the thing is we need to, yes, fine, we'll create whatever kind of organizational superstructures would work. But we also actually need to just not think that that's the job done. That's just the first step. We also then need to work out how we integrate Russians into this. That's harder. Okay, I want to get some questions from the online audience in but two more before we do that, why? I will try and be more brief in my reply so we can. That's always a good one. So you haven't, have them. Hello, thank you so much. My name is Natya Chankotadze. I am a PhD candidate at George Mason University. And I'm also Georgian. I come from Tbilisi. So my comment and the question will be actually to bring one more layer in your analysis and in your discussion. And this is actually the reality of the post-Soviet countries and the reality of Eastern European countries because discussing Russia's or Putin's actions as self-defensive, it's a bit scary for us who live in the post-Soviet countries because before 2022 and before 2014, there was 2008. There was the war in Georgia. And before that, there was the Munich Security Conference when Putin was very loud and very clear actually about his intention. And he speaks again and again about the post, like Soviet Union and calls the breakup of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy. So I like for us basically, we may be pretty subjective in this because this is an existential threat for all of us, but we see that it's not necessarily teaching the lesson to the West because of the history, but it's the teaching lessons to those countries who actually dare to take slightly different paths and to not depend on Russia entirely. And we've seen this throughout the empire, throughout the Soviet Union and in the last 30 years as well. So I'm really wondering what is the place in your analysis why Russia is behaving or the Putin actually, because one of the first description of this war was the Putin's war, not Russia's war, but it's changed because of the support that the diaspora shows to these wars. I mean, Russians and because of some, not big of the resistance actually that we see among Russians, not only in Russia, but also abroad. In Russia, it makes sense because many of them are actually in the prison. So I was wondering what is the place of these countries, like the post-Soviet countries and their existential threat that these countries actually experience and is it really teaching the lesson to the West or it's actually continuous attempt of teaching lessons to those countries particularly? So that's my question for you. Thank you. Very fair point. I mean, look, again, there's part and parcel of Putin's 19th century approach to politics. Of course, great powers are marked by a sphere of influence. That's one of the things that makes them great powers. Russia deserves to be a great power. Russia is a great power and therefore, in part, that is manifest through a sphere of influence and if countries wish to break out of that, well, of course, that's a challenge to the power of the metropolis. I'm not in any way advocating that as an approach. I'm just saying that is, I think, how Putin sees it. And overlaying with that is this sense of competition with the West because when countries start to break away, it's not actually that we're talking about, you know, when we're talking about a country like Georgia, you know, at the time, Sukhashvili was making absolutely no secret of the fact that he wanted to be integrated with and close to the West. You know, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about him sending troops to fight in US-led overseas missions or anything else. Now, the point is, I think, to Putin, what was actually something that reflected a genuine national desire within the country, he automatically interprets as a kind of a hijack, an attempt by the West to steal one of his countries or one of Russia's countries. So I mean, I think this is sort of the fundamental problem but he has this very simplistic, Manichean countries are either subordinated or they are challenging. And if they are challenging, they need to be taught a lesson, kind of ways in which he thinks about it. So I think this is really the essence of the war in Georgia. It was an attempt to prove to the Georgians, no, you don't get to break away. It was an attempt to use Georgia as a sign to other post-Soviet states that no, no, no, you are part of this sphere of influence. And it was a rebuke as he saw it to the West. You think you're gonna try and leave some of these countries away from us? Not gonna happen. The one thing I would say is, I mean, let's go back to that comment of Putin's about collapse of the Soviet Union being one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes. We have to take that in context. He was talking very, very specifically about the way it's, as he says, it stranded Russian communities in the whole variety of new countries. He's also very explicitly said that, the phrase about anyone who doesn't miss the Soviet Union has no head, has no heart. Anyone who wants to reconstitute it has no head. I mean, this is not an attempt to rebuild the Soviet Union. He wants influence over these countries rather than actually direct absorption into the Russian Federation. Because certainly, I mean, never mind Georgia, the idea that Putin would like to see Tajikistan and Uzbekistan under his, you know, a part of the Russian Federation. No, I mean, it's not the case. So, I mean, I think, again, what it shows is, again, the automatic assumptions and the prejudices and the nationalism of that Homo Sovieticus generation, who absolutely, just so more or less, can't quite cope with the idea that countries like Georgia or indeed Ukraine or Moldova or whatever can have true agency and deserve to have autonomy and sovereignty. Let's take some questions from the audience and there are needy ones. Mark, you've referred to Putin's annexation of the four Ukrainian regions as a burning of boats moment. How does that affect it informs his willingness to use nuclear weapons? I start with the big one first. Yeah. I still think, and maybe I'm just simply sort of naively optimistic, that the chances of nuclear use is slender. Not entirely impossible, but slender. And in some ways, the more he talks about it, the more comfortable I feel. Because again, it says something about the degree to which he's trying to use this. He knows that there are constituencies within the West who are deeply scared by this thought of escalation. And the more he scares them, the more they start writing op-ed saying, this is the time to be making some kind of concessions to end this war before it becomes, escalates disastrously. In terms of the annexations, already if we take Putin at face value, we have seen Russian territory being occupied by those evil Ukrainians. And there has been no signs of great escalation. Again, this is the whole point about red lines and pink lines. In theory, he would have practical reasons why he wants to retain the land bridge to Crimea, for example. But I think really only Crimea truly, does he truly regard as Russian territory? This is a political gambit. Frankly, even the Lugansk and Donetsk People's Republics, I think that he would regard as eminently sacrificeable if he had to or whatever. So I think we're a long way from him feeling that kind of absolutely terrifying existential moment where he feels that it's worth just, one last throw of the dice. I promised you meet, so a two-parter here. The C word, what are the chances that the Putin regime will collapse? Probably hear that every day. And second, the future role of so-called liberals, so-called Vladimir Karamazan, Navalny and the others, given the situation they face right now. I mean, let me start with that one. And this is a really difficult one, because I am in awe of the courage, the integrity and the commitment that they've shown. But to be honest, in some ways, I think that if they have a role, it will be as a symptom of change that has happened, rather than actually in any way a cause. This regime is gonna keep them in prison so long as it feels that they're dangerous and worrisome. And in any case, I don't honestly think that even my most optimistic projections do not see this regime giving way to a democratic regime, as we would understand it. My view is that this regime will give way to a regime of pragmatic kleptocrats who have all kind of good reasons to improve relations with the West and even bring in a certain degree of rule of law in their own country, purely for their own interests. The point is that you can have rule of law without democracy, but you can't have democracy without rule of law. This was the mistake of the 1990s, frankly, in Russia. And so maybe, you might say, a kleptocrat generation perhaps will create the preconditions which might mean that the next political generation. So, I don't know, Navalny's grand kid for president. But in terms of regime collapse, there was an interesting recent David Treisman article in Foreign Affairs, which I think made a lot of very good points, that rather than coup, though, I couldn't totally rule out the kind of February 1917 moment where a collection of the sort of powerful, uniform figures get together and say, it's time you step down. But I think it's highly unlikely still. But I think, I'm not sure if I'd see kind of collapse in a sort of immediate disastrous thing. I actually see decay as being more likely. I mean, I think, you know, if one has to play out scenarios, my most likely scenario is basically Brezhnev 2.0, an increasingly gerontocratic regime presiding over an increasingly stagnant economy, spending far more than it can possibly afford on military adventures and its own security, in which the population is just more and more despondent, but can't organise, the elite is more and more cynical and corrupt, and look, at some point, that then becomes vulnerable to some kind of black swan event, whether it's a Gorbachev or whether it's economic collapse or whatever else, or Putin's illness. I mean, again, in a de-institutionalized system like this, there isn't a Communist Party equivalent. You know, if Putin gets seriously ill, there's no vice president, the Constitution has absolutely no terms for a temporary withdrawal from office, only just simply the president is not on with the president. So I think there could be crises down the line, but it's more than what I see is decay in capacity more than anything else. We have time for a couple more and I'll change the tone a little bit. One of the online viewers asked, is there any chance that leaders of, say, India, Brazil, or South Africa, maybe others, can weigh in effectively with him to get, Putin, to get him to change course. They didn't mention the Chinese, but you could throw that in there too. Exactly, I mean, I think change course is one thing. I mean, I think we have seen India and China, both overtly and particularly behind closed doors, pushing on the nuclear issue. I mean, it's very clear that China and in India do not want the nuclear taboo broken for their own reasons. And I think that actually probably will, if Putin were tempted to take that particular route, that would be one of the factors he would have to consider. More broadly, I think that, first of all, the amount of pressure that can be brought to bear by any country other than China is distinctly limited. Secondly, I'm not convinced that anyone really would want to. I mean, this is an inconvenient war for a lot of countries, China. Ukraine was its biggest import source of corn. There are actually substantial amounts of Chinese investment in Ukraine. But still, it's not important enough that it's worth breaking with a country which may well be on the way to becoming a vassal state in the next 10 years. So I think, sadly, could these countries have a role? Maybe, are they going to not accept those very, very narrow specifics of certain kind of policies related to the war that they don't like? And a final question from an audience, online audience member, gets to your book topic. Was there any hope to avoid this war in the first place? What could have been done a year ago, eight years ago, 15 years ago, or the 1990s? Yeah, this is a whole kind of time machine and killing Hitler sort of question. Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of things, but I think the trouble is, it's always implies a certain degree of kind of determinism that, oh, well, if you follow this track, then it creates a whole different sort of historical timeline. It's always very hard to track that. Sure, in the 1990s, we could have been much less cynical and much more supportive of Russia's democratic development. And yes, that might have meant sitting back and letting the communists win an election. Well, that's the thing about elections. Sometimes the guys you don't want win will. That might have made it less likely that there will be a Putin-type figure. Who knows? But more sort of broadly, I don't think this, frankly, I think even in that last week before the invasion, Putin was still havering. This is not a man who was, after all, actually tends to be decisive and daring in his moves. I think he was still havering between not invading, invading on a limited basis to basically just take the Donbass and what he ended up doing. And could things have gone other ways? Yeah, of course. Could we have influenced it? I have a problem with the Western approach of strategic ambiguity, which tends to come down to don't do this. We think you're gonna do this, don't do this. Bad things will happen. Trust us, bad things will happen if you do that. And that's fine up to a point, but I think he'd reached a stage where he thought that we were frankly flabby, lazy hypocrites who wouldn't have the capacity or the will to actually do anything about it. And let's be honest, we surprised ourselves by just how effective and unified the initial response both in terms of sanctions and support for Ukraine was. So in some ways, we maybe shouldn't have been surprised. I mean, going back to Georgia, I mean, the shockingly poor response to the invasion of Georgia in which we sort of wagged our fingers and then offered a reset. Or the very mild response to the annexation in 2014. It took, frankly, the shooting down of a civilian plane to actually create any kind of meaningful sanctions and even then not that meaningful. So we could have shown greater will beforehand, but also right up to that point, I think we should have abandoned strategic ambiguity. Behind closed doors, because there's no point making these a kind of open beating of the chest moment, but we should have been specific. We think, our intelligence shows that you're going to be doing X, Y and Z. And we want you to know that if you do that, this is what we're going to do. Not there will be bad consequences, but these very specific ones, because I think up to that point, Putin just did not believe that we were sincere. Great, Mark, this should go on for all day and I hope to have you back. Thank you so much. My pleasure. The book is Putin's Wars and what's the publisher? It's published by Osprey Bloomsbury. Okay, great, coming out next week. Thank you for coming. Thank you for our online participants. Again, thank you again, Mark.