 So, good morning, everyone. Welcome to the first workshop session of the 2022 Peace and War Summit, which focuses on deciphering the Russian Rital, National Interest, and Geopolitical Competitions. My name is Dr. Travis Morris, and I have the privilege and honor of being the director for North University's Peace and War Center. I would like to welcome our distinguished guests, both that are on the stage and also in the audience. We'd like to thank you in advance for your contributions to the summit this year. This event is, as you all know, incredibly timely. We could not be more fortunate to have a summit at this time and to be able to have our distinguished guests to add to the conversation to enlighten our understanding of what's going on with Russia and the Ukraine. The current war has eclipsed the media, it eclipsed government conversations, and hearts and minds all over the world. It's important to note that this venue is significant. So, North has produced leaders that have fought and engaged in America's security conflicts for over the past 200 years. Distinguished guests, the information from this summit is not static. Many in the room may find themselves using this information strategically and tactically in the near future and in their future careers. I would also like to welcome all of you that are joining us virtually. Thank you so much for attending and also a special welcome to our Canadian colleagues and officer cadets who are visiting from the Canadian Royal Military College, St. Jean. Welcome. So, before you on stage, we have an author that's joining us online. We have a distinguished panel for you and it is my pleasure to introduce them. Thomas Graham, Dr. Thomas Graham to the far left is a distinguished fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations. He's currently a senior advisor at Kissinger Associates. He's also a research fellow at the McMillian Center at Yale where he teaches a course on U.S.-Russian relations. He was a 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. Welcome, Dr. Graham. Dr. Peter Rutland is a professor of government at Wesleyan University and vice president of the Association for the Study of Nationalities. He works on nationalism and political economy in the post-Soviet space. His recent articles include Understanding Putin's Russia and Perspectives on Politics in 2021 and Nation Building in the Baltic States. Thirty Years of Independence in the Journal of Baltic Studies in 2021. Dr. Jessica Pisano who will be joining us online, she's an associate professor of politics at the New School for Social Research in New York City and is associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how economic change affects people's lives and how those affect translate into changes in local, national, and global politics. Dr. Michael Andrew will be our discussant for today's session. He joined the faculty at Norwich University in the Department of History and Political Science in 1993. He was named an associate professor in 2002 and he serves as program chair since 2015. He earned a B.A. and M.A. at Desalas University and his Ph.D. at State University of New York, Binghamton. Just a quick overview of how this session is going to run. Each scholar will give a 15 minute presentation which will be followed by Dr. Andrew's discussant comments. After his comments, the floor will be open for a Q&A session. You see you have mics to your left and to the right and we would encourage you to think of questions and we would love to have you engage our distinguished panel while we're here. Let's give them all a round of applause. And to start us off, Dr. Graham, the floor is yours, sir. Thank you very much for that kind introduction. And it is indeed a real pleasure to be here today. I want to thank the university for this, for the invitation for hosting this very important summit at this time. It is indeed a real pleasure to speak before an audience of future leaders. There are a lot of challenges coming down the road and I think it's a great time to be young. The world is changing in dramatic ways. I think we're at an inflection point in history and yours is a generation that has the opportunity to shape the world in ways that will work to our security and our prosperity for decades into the future. Now, at a conference like this, I always feel like an interloper of some sort because I'm not an academic. I'm not an academic by training. I'm not an academic by inclination. I've spent most of my professional life in the policy world. And in the policy world, more often than not, you find yourself acting under time pressure and the basis of incomplete information. And you have to live with the consequences and you have to hope that you guess right because the guesses that you make are based on the intellectual capital you've built over the years. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong. You hope that you're right more often than not. But a policy maker and a wise policy maker also reaches out to the academic community because these are the people, the individuals that had the chance to study issues in depth to provide a different type of perspective that can help a policy maker think through the challenges that he or she is going to face in the future and helps them make that right hunch when the time to act comes. Now, we're all appalled by the recent events, by the unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. We have seen the wrenching pictures of human death, physical destruction. I think we all have a sense of moral outrage at this point. But everybody who's worked in the policy community understands that moral outrage is not sufficient for developing a good policy and an effective policy. One of the key challenges for a policy maker is to understand the other side, be able to see the world through the eyes of the rival. And in this case, to be able to see the world through the eyes of Russia, more specifically the Kremlin, and to the extent possible Putin himself. Now, none of this is meant to be a justification for what Russia is doing. It's an act of strategic empathy, and what the goal is, is to develop a deeper understanding that allows you to develop the types of effective policies that will counter Russia when it acts in ways that are hostile to American interest. So that's what I want to try to do in the next few minutes. And I want to start by laying out what I think Russia sees and has historically seen as a great strategic challenge. And to put it in a sentence, that is, how do you defend a multi-ethnic country located on a vast territory with very few formidable physical barriers and a territory that abuts unsettled territory, unsettled lands, or powerful neighbors? And throughout history, for the past three, four, or five centuries, the answer that rushes a cub up with is strategic depth or building buffer zones, pushing the boundaries, the borders as far away from the strategic heartland as possible. Second, strict internal control over the population, and three, disruption of hostile alliances along your borders. And it's these three tasks that have guided Russia as it's developed its policies towards Europe, towards the West. From the moment Russia entered the European balance of power system in the early 18th century, the great czars of the 18th century, Peter and Catherine, put a great deal of time and effort into expanding Russia's borders westward into Europe. Catherine was the leader that brought much of the territory of current-day Ukraine, including Crimea, into the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century. We've also seen that throughout history, and certainly after Russia entered Europe, that there was an effort to limit the flow of Western ideas into Russia as a way of controlling the population. The challenge that they faced was to introduce those Western ideas that were critical to developing the type of industrial commercial power that they needed to generate the resources to fuel their grand, great power ambitions. But they wanted to limit the political values that came from the West because those are ones that challenged the fundamental structure of the Russian state. And finally, certainly after the humiliating defeat in the middle of the 19th century in the Crimean War when Britain and France floated, excuse me, fleets through the Turkish straits into the Black Sea and defeated Russia on its own territory, the Russians had a firm principle of trying to disrupt that Crimean coalition and preventing anything like that from reemerging in a way that would threaten Russia's future. Now, we see that these principles guided Soviet policy, probably taken to extreme. The Soviet Union developed probably Russia's largest buffer zone in Europe, extending it all the way to Eastern Germany during the Cold War. The Soviet Union certainly cracked down on domestic opposition limited to the extent possible any influx of Western values and Western ideas. And it certainly spent a great deal of time trying to disrupt alliances, particularly trying to disrupt the United States, NATO, and America's position throughout the world. This only changed for a brief moment in the very late Soviet period and the first decade of the post-Soviet Europe. Gorbachev was a unusual Soviet leader, an unusual Russian leader. He in fact gave up the Soviet buffer zone in Eastern Europe in the space of a couple of years. He welcomed the influx of Western ideas as he sought to reform the Soviet political system. And instead of trying to disrupt the creation of hostile alliances against Russia, he reached out and tried to form a partnership with the United States. President Yeltsin followed that path in the first decade after the breakup of the Soviet Union. And he came upon Putin to restore this traditional approach to Russian security, particularly vis-à-vis the West. And what we've seen over the past 20 years is a concerted effort by Putin to rebuild Russia as a great power to assert its prerogatives on the global stage. And in a sense to transform those three principles that I talked of into concrete tasks that Russia needs to achieve if it's going to maintain its position well into the future. Now, I would put these tasks the following way, five that I see, that is translating those three principles that I talked into to five for the current period. The first is to prevent the West from undermining Russia from within. And that means putting very strict controls on the flow of Western information. We've seen Putin over the past 15 to 20 years crackdown on any way that foreign influence could impact on Russia's domestic politics, cracking down on non-governmental organizations that received foreign funding, eventually passing what he calls a foreign agent law, a way of labeling those who have contacts with the outside world, particularly the Western world, propagate those types of views as foreign agents, which in Russian translates into spies, espionage, traitors of some sort. And we've seen certainly over the past three or four weeks in the wake of the conflict in Ukraine, a very concerted effort to block out the last independent media in Russia to control the narrative of the war in Ukraine. Second is that Putin has tried to create a buffer zone in the former Soviet space. He has put in place certain institutional practices that he thought would bring these countries together. He launched the so-called European Economic Community Union as a way of bringing Kazakhstan, Belarus, Russia, and hopefully other former Soviet states into some type of economic union that would also have a political dimension and would be dominated by Russia. Now, it's quite clear that all of Putin's efforts to rebuild his buffer zone hinged on Ukraine. Ukraine is the crux of the problem. You don't have a buffer zone unless you have Ukraine. Ukraine is that former Soviet state that after Russia itself has the greatest potential both economically and militarily. And we've seen some of that unfold over the past couple of couple of weeks and months. Third task is to impede the consolidation of Europe so that Europe doesn't dwarf Russia in economic, in wealth, in population and power potential, much the way the United States does today. A consolidated European Union would be an entity of over 400 million people, an economy of some $15 trillion, and technologically advanced economy. That would dwarf Russia, which has a population of 140 million, a GDP of about $1.8 trillion, and also a country that devotes precious little of its economic wealth to the research and development you need to succeed in developing the cutting edge technologies that are going to dominate the 21st century. So Russia, we've seen, has spent most of the past 15 to 20 years trying to drive wedges between European states, between the United States and Europe. It has funded populist movements on both the left and the right as a way of fostering unrest, discontent within these states. It has used its energy power to try to isolate countries from one another. The fourth task is to compel the United States to act like a normal great power. And what that means in the Russian sense is that the United States would give up what Russia sees as its ambitions to develop a unipolar world, to stop being a hegemonic power, or to be a country of great power that understands that it needs to take into account the interest of other great powers, principally Russia, if it's going to advance its own. And Putin has tried to do this in several ways over the past 20 years. He actually started by trying to build something like a partnership with the United States, trying to create a special relationship akin to the relationship that Great Britain has with the United States. On the assumption that if you had that type of relationship, you would have some influence over how the United States operated on the global stage. He quickly came to the conclusion that the United States was not interested in that type of arrangement, and moved to a posture that was much more controversial and confrontational, trying to build organizations that would challenge the United States in both the security realm, Shanghai cooperation organization, for example, with China and a number of Central Asian states, and in the economic realm, the BRICS, this union of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and later South Africa, that would act as a counterweight to the international financial institutions that are dominated by the United States on the global stage. And you've also seen Russia insist that big issues in global politics be discussed in forum and forum where Russia has a veto, the UN Security Council, the primary place where that is done, but also the organization for security and cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, also an organization that operates by consensus. And the final element of this policy, of this posture towards the West has been to build a strategic alignment with China, to build a strategic alignment with China, because China is that one country that can act as something of an economic counterweight to Europe, reduce Russia's over reliance on Europe as a trading partner, as a source of foreign direct investment, and also a country and probably the only other country in the world that can act as something of a strategic counterbalance to the United States, a peer competitor, a country that Russia would want to have very close relationship with. So we have these five tasks that Putin has set out, and he's pursued them, I think, with interlocking policies over the past 15 to 20 years. I think the question that we need to ask at this point is how successful has Putin been, and how successful can he be over the next several years if he remains in power that long. And I would argue that the success has been far from complete. We start with the former Soviet space. Ukraine is probably the best example now of how Putin has failed to create a genuine buffer zone. There's tremendous resistance to this in Ukraine, and we see Ukrainians prepared to fight to lay down their lives to preserve their independence and their freedoms. But it's not the only place where Russia's influence, I think, has waned or has been challenged in the past couple of years. Think of Belarus, a dictator that survives only at the grace of Putin at this point, doesn't enjoy much popular support. Think about the recent events in Kazakhstan that suggested elite and some popular resistance to a closer relationship with Russia. Think about the war and the caucuses between Armenia and Azerbaijan a year and a half ago, also challenging Russian influence in the former Soviet space. Europe, to be sure, had many different difficulties over the past decade, varying many issues that challenge the unity of Europe in the future. But almost all of those were due to domestic issues, domestic origin. They were not the result of Russian activities, and Russian activities to try to exacerbate those actually didn't have much influence. And what we've seen over the past month is how Putin, by launching this aggression against Ukraine, has unified the European Union in a way that very few people expected just three or four months ago. I think something similar can be said about the United States. Putin certainly thought that the United States would not be able to rally the West, would not be able to lead this very serious sanctions campaign against Russia that we've seen unfold over the past three or four weeks. And finally, China, he has built a closer strategic alignment with China. But the problem is that Putin doesn't have an answer for how this relationship is going to develop over the next 10 to 15 years. The asymmetry and growth rates is dramatically in favor of China to remain historical grievances that will reappear as China goes stronger. And already China is beginning to challenge Russia in a strategic backyard in Central Asia, in Ukraine, in Central Europe. And finally, there's a fundamental in hearing contradiction between what China wants to do on the global stage and what Russia wants to do. China wants to expand its economy and wants to expand into Europe economically and technologically. That requires stability. Capital, as we all know, is a coward. The Russians, to advance their goals at this point, need instability. And that is going to come to play, I would argue, in the next, in the not so distant future. So we have a Russia that has an historic challenge. It has had a set of principles that have guided it in trying to secure its country and its future. But as you can see, there are real problems with how you're going to implement that in today's world, given the values, given the leadership of the United States, and Russia still hasn't figured out how it is, in fact, going to reassert itself and maintain itself as a great power well into the 21st century. So let me end there. Dr. Graham, thank you for your illuminating remarks. So we're going to transition now to Dr. Rutland. Let me just get his PowerPoint ready. The floor is yours, sir. Well, it's a great honor to be here at Norwich University. It's a great institution. And without further ado, I will plunge into my PowerPoint. Now, I agree with most of what Dr. Graham said. I think there are some differences in my approach, and so it'll be interesting to see the audience questions and comments about our views. But I would take anything that Dr. Graham says very seriously. I first came across his name in 1995, when you wrote an article in the Russian press about the clans that were running the Kremlin. And that was the first time people talked about clans in the Kremlin, what later became known as the oligarchs. And it was a wake up call because we were being told, don't take the political institutions seriously, the formal elections and formal institutions of power look for the informal networks. And that's really been the pattern in Russian politics, domestic politics ever since. So these are two disturbing quotations showing just how bad things are. I think in Vladimir Putin's perception of the world, his place in it and Russia's place in it, and his threats, explicit threats to destroy that world if he doesn't get his way. So why did Putin start this war in Ukraine, which started of course in 2014, not three weeks ago? I see it, my main argument is these two trends heading in opposite directions. Putin's Russia was getting stronger and stronger, as Dr. Graham has explained over the past 20 years on the international stage. And Putin thought that the US was finished as a global power and needed taking down a peg or two. However, at the same time, at the regional level, specifically in the case of Ukraine, the trends were going against the Kremlin's interests. The consolidation of national identity in Ukraine and its deepening ties with Europe were pulling Ukraine further away from Russia. So we have these two trends heading in opposite directions. At the macro global scale, Russia is getting stronger, but locally, regionally on its borders, it seems to be getting weaker. So Putin decided after various other strategies had failed to use military intervention, to use war to solve, to close the gap between the power of Russia as he saw it and the local outcome within Ukraine. And why that effort to close the gap isn't working is because the Ukrainians are fighting back and are not cooperating and have agency of their own. And the fatal mistake in Putin's approach was not understanding the character of Ukrainian identity. I give him the benefit of the doubt. He probably understands Russian identity pretty well, but he does not understand Ukrainian identity. And Sun Tzu and other military scholars have always told us, know the enemy as well as knowing yourself. Why did Putin think he was in a strong position very quickly? Economics, Russia is earning $150 billion a year exporting oil and gas, even after the sanctions, they're continuing to go to earn that amount of money per year. So they have a flow of income which enables them to do whatever they want on the international stage. That's at least Putin's view of this. And Europe in particular, with 40% of its natural gas and 25% of its oil coming from Russia, Putin assumed, Europe can't do anything to stop us from doing what I want to do. On a global scale, President Biden was seen as weak. I'm not sure what the Russians made of President Trump by the end of his administration, but it was clear that the US was pivoting back to domestic politics. And if it was going to do anything internationally, it would be with China, at least that was what Putin thought. Militarily, the Russian army was on a roll. They won three wars in a row in their view. And so they thought that it's a no-brainer that any future military conflict will be in their favor. Finally, and this is the kind of joker in the pack is the identity politics. Putin complains a lot under Kremlin political analysts talk about identity politics in the West very dismissively, but the real driver in Russia is also identity politics and Putin's sense of humiliation and trying to recreate some kind of great Russian identity from the past. And part of that narrative we shockingly learned in his July 2021 article is to deny the existence of Ukraine, to say that Ukrainians are just Russians who don't realize that they're Russians kind of thing. And so if Ukraine doesn't exist as a nation, well then there's no problem invading it because you're not invading a nation. It's just like motoring from, you know, Connecticut to Vermont. It's just the same kind of operation except in tanks. Putting my academic hat on for a while. Three floors, I think, and this is obviously premature. It's only three weeks into the war, but my own interpretations of how the world works and how Russia works have changed radically. On February the 24th, and I realized a lot of what I thought about, Russia was just wrong or inadequate. So here are three points for discussion with my fellow academics. First of all, I think there's been overemphasis on NATO expansion that's dominated a lot of the debate about the strategy. And looking at General Widener here, I would ask, why do you need a buffer zone if you've got nuclear deterrence? I mean, we're not living in the 1850s here. We're not even living in the 1940s. So why does Russia see NATO as a threat? Under what kind of science fiction scenario would NATO be a military threat to Russia? So, but academics love to explain why World War I happened, the security dilemma. We don't spend that much time explaining why World War II happened. It's like that's not a problem because everybody realizes Hitler was insane and he had to be stopped. Point number two, a lot of political scientists study elections in Russia, talked about a hybrid regime, electoral autocracy. But it wasn't a hybrid regime. It was an authoritarian regime under Putin that's now becoming potentially a totalitarian regime. And elections in public opinion just don't matter. It's very hard to understand what does public opinion mean. What kind of telephone polls can you do when you just invaded another country and you're asking people, do you approve of this or not? What kind of response rate are you getting? And what kind of people are responding to those polls? So we just don't know what the public opinion really is. And it doesn't matter, at least in the short run, in this kind of regime. So I don't buy the diversionary theory argument that Putin went to war because he wanted to boost his opinion rating or to make sure he win the next election. That was never in doubt. The sanctions issue is more complicated. No problem to have time to go into all of the arguments around the sanctions. But briefly, the previous smart sanctions were kind of based on a hypothesis that oligarchs run Russia and the rich will go and complain to Putin and get him to change his behavior. But in fact, Russia is a personalistic dictatorship and not ruled by oligarchs. And so the sanctions this time around are hitting the entirety of Russian society and the state, not just the oligarchs. This is a Chinese cartoon. Unfortunately, this narrative of the wars caused by NATO expansion is very widely believed in the global south in China and even in India, which is a democracy, but it's kind of backing Russia in this one, which I think is very unfortunate. I'll skip through this material. This I've already talked about. Nuclear powers don't really need physical buffer zones. Ukraine was not a member of NATO anyway. We can run counterhistory and think if NATO had pledged never to invite Ukraine to join. Maybe this war could have been avoided, but we'll never know the answer to that question. I think the real issue is not NATO expansion. It's the resentment of the U.S. as a global power and the economic collapse of the 1990s was blamed on the West, although it was a result of the collapse of the Soviet Central Planning System, also pushed back against cultural imperialism, also resentment at America's military role in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo and Libya in the 1990s. Those were all reasons for Russia to become resentful and angry with the U.S. And NATO is just a kind of label for all of that resentment. What it is really about I think is more about Europe than about NATO. Recall that the Maidan revolution began because of the association agreement with the European Union, not NATO back in 2013. And why on earth would Ukraine want to join the EU? Well it's all in this table which shows the relative economic performance 1990 to 2020. And you can see that the countries on the left that joined the EU experienced like a doubling of GDP per capita measured relative to the EU average. So Poland is now 75, 80 percent of the EU up from 35 percent. And the countries on the right, the countries that did not join the EU. And you can see that Ukraine has performed very poorly economically since independence. And Russia has kept going by its oil and gas revenues. So Ukraine looking at Poland thinks if only we could get close economic ties to the EU we would become more prosperous. These these relationships that we have with Russia are just not developing our economy. Why did Putin oppose Ukraine joining the West? Russia had economic interests in Ukraine. It feared the example of Ukrainian democracy and other color revolutions in Georgia and elsewhere that could spread to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia itself. There's also a change in the political calculation that Putin thought in the 1990s and 2000s that Ukraine was serving as a kind of buffer state because Russia could control a lot of the Ukraine's politics through bribery and favoritism and oligarchs. But after the Maidan revolution that calculation shifted, and especially under President Zelensky, Putin felt that he'd lost those internal levers to control Ukraine. And finally, this question of identity politics, that it's not just about security. It's about how people interpret their place in the world and world history. I'm running out of time, I think. I'm not sure how much time I have left, one or two minutes. So I'll skip through important point about the Crimean precursor or start of the war is that the Nazi narrative was already there in 2014. This was on the day of the referendum and this billboard in Crimea said, choose, do you want a Nazi Crimea or a Russian Crimea? What was also there already in 2014 was this notorious TV statement on the night of the referendum on Russia's state TV. Dmitry Kisselov saying America should remember we can we can reduce you to radioactive dust. That's what those words say and a mushroom cloud in the background. So a lot of these themes that we're seeing now, the denazification narrative, the threats of nuclear war, they were already there in 2014. I'll skip through to the end. These are trends in Russia post the world favoring Russia since 2014. Weakening of the US joined the Trump presidency, weakening of the EU with the transition from Angela Merkel and also the experience of sanctions after Crimea, those sanctions were relatively ineffective. Then we had a series of build up in 2021. Looking back, we can see that Putin was preparing for this war for some time with the military exercises and then also with cutting back on natural gas deliveries to Europe, so that the storage facilities were only 25 percent capacity by August, so he was going to use the natural gas as a black male to get the Germans to approve Nord Stream 2 and this dialing down of the spot deliveries of spot sales of gas led to a price spike in December of 500 percent higher natural gas prices in the EU than a year earlier. So Putin clearly thought that this economic lever is going to force the Europeans to just basically accept whatever plans he had in mind for Ukraine. This is discussion of the diversionary politics argument. I summarized all this at the beginning because I knew I'd run out of time, so I've got the main points out there. First, the final slide is what next? Putin is trying to roll back history probably to around 1860 or so. I don't think this is going to work on. He's not able to win the war, but it's not clear that he's willing to admit defeat. So we may be looking at a continuing stalemate. The sanctions are amazingly powerful and effective. But the fact that Europe continues to need to buy Russian oil and gas means that Putin will continue to have a cash flow from Europe. He'll also be ramping up trade with China and India. So economically, he will have the resources to continue this stalemated war for as long as he likes or as long as he's in power. And this is this is terrible for Ukraine. It's also terrible for Russia, and it's it's not great for anybody, in fact. And so it's amazing how much damage this war has done. So I'll finish there. Thank you. So welcome, Dr. Bassano. You're on the screen and we're ready for your presentation. The floor is yours and welcome to Norwich University. Across Ukraine on targets, including maternity and pediatric hospitals, schools and kindergartens, theaters and libraries, among many others. But even in this context, and I think especially in this context, the identification of viable alternatives to Kremlin imaginaries remains a necessary step for Russian society. If Russians are ever to face, take charge of and transform the values of Russian world in their own country. So my analysis proceeds from the observation that much of what may look like enthusiastic mobilization for Putin's regime in Russia is window dressing. And that Russia is in reality far from a homogeneous society aligned behind the Putin's rule. So although some Western journalists appear to interpret their own recent discovery of Zelensky's wartime qualities as his emergence as a leader, Zelensky has long been known as such in Ukraine and in the post-Soviet world, including Russia, albeit in the realm of artistic rather than political performance. So no export of contemporary Western liberalism. Imaginary is homegrown, accessible in the Russian language and compatible with longstanding philosophical traditions in the region. That democratic imaginary is appealing for many Russians, which is why Vladimir Putin, who locates the source of his war not in his own choices, but in a new blood libel accusing Zelensky of Nazism correctly perceives that contemporary Ukraine, even under Smirchen Iskander, poses an existential threat to Putin's rule. So for two decades before his global fame as a wartime president, his bravado and need for a quote ammo not a ride accompanied by actual courage, Vladimir Zelensky was widely known in the Russian speaking world for his artistry, humor and moral leadership. If the Soviet period hadn't been distinguished for some above all by its budget list, its ruthlessness, its paylessness and in the 1990s by a mercilessness of a different sort, as a showman of Volodymyr Zelensky, Volodymyr Zelensky at the time had consistently embodied and articulated humanistic values, telling the truth about politics and everyday life, even when the stakes of doing so were quite high. So Zelensky has been compared with contemporary so-called populists. But although his empathy for people's struggles makes him sound that way, he does not appeal to ethnic constituencies within the demos. Instead, his imaginary is inclusive, civic and defined for by care for and life within the sovereign boundaries of a national state. It emphasizes not only freedoms but also responsibility. So this conceptual foundation of unity and diversity and this agreement distinguishes Zelensky's work from that of his neighbors to the West and North and it's a reason he has a following, not a cult. Now in the decades preceding its war on the entirety of Ukraine in 2022, Kremlin and Kremlin adjacent actors regularly had intervened in Ukrainian elections and Ukrainian public discourse, promoting the idea that Ukraine was a polarized society. Americans may recognize this. So on television, newspapers and street demonstrations, Russian politicians, journalists and other public figures repeated this key talking point that Ukraine was divided between East and West, the West liked Europe and the East was oriented toward Russia. Journalists and social scientists in North American Europe also absorbed this idea and regularly published articles that portrayed Ukraine as two societies. Now, over time, many Ukrainians internalized this narrative of two Ukrainians and some people saw evidence of division in their daily lives, especially in 2004 following the massive demonstrations in response to documented electoral fraud in Ukraine's orange revolution. Sometimes even members of the same family couldn't agree about whether protest was the right path to political change. So at that time, Ukraine seemed to lack a central national idea, a shared set of ideas beyond a belief in the Constitution. Politicians initially looked to ethnic identity as a salvo under Viktor Yushchenko, but the country's diversity meant that not all Ukrainians could embrace this approach. As others have noted, the Russian invasion of Crimea, support of armed proxies in the Donbas, and unsuccessful attempts to foment secession in Kharkiv and Mariupol in 2014 did much to unify Ukrainians turning Russian speakers in Ukraine into Russian speaking Ukrainian patriots. But there remained fracture lines as some people remained in epistemological silos whose boundaries were determined by media consumption or by their beliefs about the legitimacy of street demonstrations as a vehicle of redress amidst documented electoral manipulation. So at this point, Zelensky's intervention in Ukrainian popular culture as a showman played a key role in Ukrainian public discourse. The televised stage performances of Zelensky and his troop, Kvapdel 95, can be understood as a sort of quote unquote pre-political work that Czech playwright and president Vladislav Havel called quote the living hummus from which genuine political change usually springs unquote. So Zelensky and his troop responded to Kremlin led societal polarization with a multi-stage artistic operation. Rather than contributing to polarization by vilifying and pushing back against part of Ukrainian society, he and his troop executed two discursive moves that helped shift popular framings of Ukrainian politics. So first as a performer and then in the first year of his presidential administration, Zelensky worked to disaggregate the dual elements of the seemingly bipolar world of Ukrainian domestic politics. So through their lyrics and other elements of performance, his troop articulated ideas of Ukrainian identity that focused on a diversity of possible personal and group identities. These identities cohere not around language or region east, west, Russian, Russian speaking, Ukrainian speaking, but around everyday practices and individual beliefs. So I'll give you an example from Zelensky is New Year's Eve presidential greeting in 2020, which I think sums up this approach. So asking who am I? Zelensky give examples of who Ukrainians are, which cohere around things other than ethnicity and language. So he says quote, I am someone who learned Ukrainian because it's normal to know the state language. Someone who doesn't want to. Someone who pays her taxes. Someone who pays breaks the traffic laws. Someone who is a dog, a red head, a Muslim, someone who is hearing impaired, someone who hates olives, a liberal, an excellent student, someone who didn't watch Game of Thrones, a vegan, a Capricorn, Capricorn, someone who doesn't offer his seat in the subway, a blend winner, someone who refuses to use plastic. He went on to add, this is each of us Ukrainians as we are not ideal, not saints because we're just people, living people with our flaws and eccentricities. So second, having broken down the idea of two Ukrainians into many Ukrainians through individualization and recognition, Zelensky and his troops made a second discursive move that used two key focal points to gather individual Ukrainian identities into a coherent whole. These focal points were interlocking foils, the action of Ukraine's own oligarchic political class and Putin's political regime and its war in Ukraine's Donbas. So focusing on issues about which all Ukrainians of all political, linguistic and other stripes could agree, Zelensky's troops used each theme to create the idea of a united popular front. In artistic work that laid the ground for his presidential campaign, Zelensky and Kvartal 95 rallied Ukrainians behind Frank's speech about and criticism of the regional kleptocrats, whose assets and activities straddle the Ukraine-Russia border. This critique suffused their musical numbers and song lyrics describe Ukrainian oligarchs as divided between quote, a body in Ukraine and a soul offshore, unquote. Their musical numbers focusing on the war in the Donbas linked Ukrainians in a common frame, telling of the country's struggles to choose its own way, despite Putin's wishes. So Zelensky and Kvartal 95 offered an imaginary that broke through longstanding societal polarization and interference from Russia to create a space in which individual Ukrainians could find an idea of community, a mirror image to the robust civil society that had developed in Ukraine during the same period, parallel with Zelensky's move into institutional politics and unified opposition to Putinism. So eight years before Zelensky's leadership through Putin's current catastrophe in Ukraine, his troop had drawn Ukrainians together having, quote, from one of their songs, lit all of the candles in the church save one for the one who made Ukraine go to war, for the one about whom they sang in hark of football fan and songs, for the one who so generously handed out lead to our boys, unquote. So Zelensky's political imaginary offers a model for reframing politics, not only in Ukraine, but also elsewhere, including in Putin's Russia. His work abandoned the analytical categories that social science uses to sort people's identities, instead recognizing the possibility of unity by validating a great diversity of possible taxonomies, all of which could be used for thinking about belonging. In Zelensky's imaginary, that recognition of diversity also included in embrace of agonism, a radical acceptance of messiness and disagreement in democratic society, and a willingness to look with humor and understanding upon human frailty. Notwithstanding the intensification of authoritarian politics within Putin's Russia, Russian society has generated just such a cacophony with activists holding diverse points of view on a variety of issues for a parallel think of American society under the previous presidential administration. What many Russians may want now in the face of Kremlin attempts to impose a homogeneous unicity in support of a criminal war is not only dissent, but also a competing story, a narrative frame that can bring together and validate multiple voices and overlapping identities. Zelensky recognized that a social fabric woven of many different visible threads can be more flexible and resilient, more resistant to damage than an undifferentiated weft. Now the forced unicity Russian society nonetheless seems poised to accept may create an impression of homogeneity in Russian political viewpoints for a time. But in a connected world, even one segmented by new limits on free speech online and saturated with deliberate lies about the nature of the Kremlin's quote unquote special operation, observations about people's real lives move like water and state constructed dams only temporarily redirect the flow. A Russian national idea resilient enough to withstand the centrifugal forces produced by Putin's war on Ukraine and global responses to it needs to be capacious and flexible, accommodating of the multiplicity of identities, practices and dissenting voices that had developed within Russian society during and despite Putin's role. This is where Zelensky offers a model, an alternative, a genuine antipode of the fascism with which Zelensky's government has been libeled. So decades of decolonization and repression under Putin have made of much, much of Russia, a desert of political indifference and fear. But as the Russian expression goes, Svetomiy is the Putin Nebuvayet, a desirable place isn't empty for long. There is room for a new story. In this context, the work of Vladimir Zelensky, the artist whom Russians have known almost as long as they have known Putin may offer Russians an attractive, local ideological alternative if they can break through the society wide wall of denial about the facts of their country's war against Ukraine. Without such an effort to create a positive narrative that better reflects the diversity of Russian's experiences than the Kremlin versions. Russians describing their own country may soon find need to resurrect the second half of the saying that a desirable place does not remain empty for long, long fallen into disuse in contemporary language. A Pustani is the Nebuvayet sveta, but no one wants an empty place. I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Pisano. And I don't know if you can hear, but it's a resounding applause for you. So I'm going to turn the floor over to Dr. Andrew who's going to give us some comments and recollections and remarks. And then again, we'll have some time for a question and answer. So Dr. Andrew. Thank you, Dr. Morris. I'm going to radically edit some of my comments so we have enough time for question and answer, especially from from our students. But I want to say that the value of this kind of exercise is the opportunity to engage with scholars and practitioners. And it's also a great opportunity for our students to see what's happening in the real world, take their classroom experiences, because I just came from two sections of introduction to international relations. And I hope students can see how the ideas that they learn in class are being applied. And finally, this just reaffirms my faith in the significance and the importance of the social sciences and the humanities. Now, with respect to the different presentations, I'm going to start with Professor Graham. Russia's grand strategy towards the West. And when I when I read this, it reminded me of George Kennan's sources of Soviet conduct, because essentially what Kennan was arguing in the late 1940s, if you want to understand Soviet conduct after the Second World War, you need to understand Russian foreign policy, Russian attitudes towards security. And so what you find are ideas rooted in basic traditional realism for the most part, for instance, the idea of spheres of influence or a security buffer fragmenting hostile alliances sort of keeping your your adversaries off balance, frustrating hegemony preventing one state from dominating a particular region or the world. And of course, a partnership with with China, which is a balancer to US power, sort of creation of a multipolar world. One thing that falls outside of traditional realism is the role of identities and in particular, the Western identity and the desire of Russian leaders that are Putin in particular today to limit Western influence in in Russia. So in terms of of questions that I'm opposed to Professor Graham, do you think that John Meersheimer was right in arguing that NATO eastward expansion was an unnecessary provocation? He's argued this recently in past weeks and then just over the weekend in a commentary in the the economists he reiterated this this idea. And where do identities fit into that? Because I think we can understand why Russia might see eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union as a provocation. But how does the West and how does the United States see eastward expansion of NATO and and the European Union? Why is it that another question? Why is it that the the West is and has been perceived as a threat? And this is why it's important, why Professor Graham brought up the Napoleonic experience in the 19th century and how Russia fit into a traditional balance of power before the Napoleonic period and how those attitudes and security concerns changed after the Napoleonic wars. And finally, in terms of recommendations, how should the United States and the West respond to Russian security concerns? With respect to Professor Rutland, I see or I see Professor Graham as putting Russia's security concerns in a context. I see Professor Rutland's papers explaining why invade Ukraine now. And I think as Professor Rutland laid out, there's an opportunity. On the one hand, from a Russian perspective, the Crimean invasion didn't spark the pro-Russian response that it was supposed to was that was anticipated. There is concern that pro-Russian elites in Ukraine have been losing influence. The post-Crimean invasion encouraged Ukraine to begin an arms buildup. And there was concern that Ukraine might use these weapons and this new military power against Russia or against Russian minorities. The Trump administration weakened ties between the United States and its allies. And Vladimir Zelensky, even though he's portrayed as a hero now, had been losing popularity. He was considered a relatively unpopular leader in Ukraine. And so I think Putin and Professor Rutland laid out, Putin saw this as an opportunity. Now, I know that Professor Rutland has rejected the realist explanations in favor of a constructivist interpretation. And constructivism is an approach which would explain, this just sort of fits into Dr. Pizano's work also, how do Russians imagine themselves? What do they understand to be right and wrong behavior? But also, how does the United States imagine itself? And how does the United States imagine Russia? Because that helps us understand why or how we would predict the behavior of another state, of other actors. Constructivism also, and here I'm borrowing from Donald Kagan, military historian, Donald Kagan, author of On the Origins of War, the role of things like honor and prestige and reputation, these sort of old fashioned ideas, but they still influence behavior beyond just this sort of rational cost-benefit calculation. So that could explain why what seems to be irrational behavior is in fact rational, understanding behavior from the perspective of adversaries. I also thought about Stephen Waltz, distinction between balance of power and balance of threat. What decision makers do is they respond to what they perceive to be a threat, not just changes in balance. So why is it that the United States, for instance, is concerned with students in my IR classes, we're probably sick of hearing this. Why is it that the United States is concerned with nuclear weapons in Iran and North Korea, but we're not concerned about France and Britain having nuclear weapons? So how does it that Russia perceives its world and threats, not just from a pure power perspective? Professor Pizano, two most important ideas, concepts I took away from this, the idea of political imaginaries and agonism. Because political imaginaries fits into this idea of how we imagine ourselves to be and how we imagine others. So how has Vladimir Putin, for instance, imagined Russia? How has he imagined Ukraine? And what are the right and wrong behaviors based on those imaginations? And so what Putin has done is he's created an antagonistic imaginary, where an antagonistic imaginary is one where you accept conflict as natural, but you treat your opponents as your enemies. And so this contributes to a bipolarity and a reluctance to cooperate or make concessions with those who you see as your mortal enemies. An agonistic approach, which is what Zelensky has developed, is one that treats opponents, not as enemies, but as adversaries, as actors who have legitimate complaints, actors who have legitimate interests that you may not agree with, but you should tolerate and understand their perspectives. And that is why I think it's important that Professor Pozzano points out that what Zelensky did is he used satire as a way of appealing to the Ukrainian public. He used satire as a way of pointing out what was ridiculous and absurd in everyday life, something that has a very broad appeal, something that most people could identify with. And that is why Zelensky, using that approach, is a threat to Putin's regime because he offers a different narrative. And the question that I had was does this explain Putin's hostility to all of Ukraine? Because I think you make the case that maybe what Putin should have done is hive off the eastern provinces of Ukraine, declare victory and go home. Instead, he's launched his full scale invasion of Ukraine and does this idea of different narratives perhaps explain that? Has Putin perhaps personalized the conflict? So it's not just one between Russia and Ukraine, but it's between Putin and Vladimir Zelensky. Zelensky is the threat. I was also wondering with respect to this approach, how would you change the narrative in Russia? How is it possible to change the narrative in Russia? Because of course Zelensky was dealing with a much more permissive environment than currently exists in Russia. So what is the potential for an outsider, which Zelensky was, to make inroads into Russian politics and then change that narrative? Thank you. Dr. Andrew, thank you for your insightful remarks and solid questions. And if you just look at the time left, we have 10 minutes and the time is gonna evaporate quickly. I would like to give students the opportunity to ask a couple of questions. So if you have a question, please go ahead and move to the microphone and we'd like to field questions from you first. But certainly the questions that Dr. Andrew posed could fulfill another summit for another week in response, very deliberate questions, but very timely, very tactical, very strategic, and also very applied questions and from multiple different angles to understand currently what's going on. So if you could just state your name and then your question please and who you're directing your question to or the entire panel. Good afternoon, my name is Cadet Barnes and Professor Graham, you began your talk by saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, the decisions that we make are built upon our intellectual capital. So my question is, how do you recommend that we, the young, navigate this increasingly complex situation in this miasma of misinformation that we find ourselves in at the deficit of intellectual capital that comes with not having been around for very long? Absolutely, yes, please. The way you deal with it is through your studies. Your studies at this university are part of developing your intellectual capital. If you're thinking about a career in foreign policy, the recommendation first is history. History is critical to understanding where we are, but it's also critical because you develop your ability to see situations. You go back to the Second World War, the Napoleonic Wars, certain revolutions, see the types of challenges that statesmen faced at that time, how they thought through the problem, how they made the decisions, and then what the consequences of those decisions were. Now anyone will tell you that analogies are in perfect, you can't take one situation and apply it word for word today, but they help develop a critical process that helps you think through the issues, what the possibilities are and what the possible consequences are, and you develop political capital that way. The other thing you study is political philosophy, the great ideas that have shaped the way the modern world functions, the way we think about the relationship between the individual and the state, the state and society, the way we think about how countries interact and on the basis of what and so forth. So your four years here, this is where you begin to develop the intellectual capital, then you'll have your own experiences and hopefully during a career, whether it's in the military, the foreign service, you'll have time to spend a year or two to reflect on what you've learned and then apply that when you return to a position of power. One of the things that I have done, and I've been out of government now since 2007, is try to reflect on what happened during the 20 years I was in government, what I got right, what I got wrong, how I would have dealt with these issues if I knew what I do now back then when I was in the decision-making process. So again, education now and the constant process of education and reflecting on your own experience builds that political capital and intellectual capital that you're going to spend down when you're actually in the heat of battle and have to make decisions, press very much for time. Thank you, Dr. Graham. Let's go to the side, please. Forgers. I was wondering how a perceived threat of NATO expansion and operations in Eastern Europe is not particularly a real threat or that perceived threat is a flaw in the way that we think about it? Well, as I said in my talk, I don't understand why Russia sees those NATO presence in Poland or the Baltics as a threat to Russia because even though, as you say, it's been stepped up, it's not like NATO is going to attack Russia from Poland. So I think the answer is in the realm of identity politics rather than military calculation. And on the question of NATO expansion, I didn't get into it in detail, but I think the expansion to Poland and then later to the Baltics was, I think, legitimate and that did provide security to those countries and got them out of the grip of the Russians permanently. But it was kind of too late for Georgia and Ukraine. But that would be my position. Thank you very much. Over to you, please. So my question is for Professor Paisano. So how would you say we should observe social media's influence on the way it affects the Russian propaganda machine in relation to the comparison between President Zelensky and Putin? Can you hear me right? Your response? Absolutely, we can hear you. Perfect, all right. So thank you for that question about social media. I think that this is an incredibly important topic and thank you for raising it. I think that one way, there's a great deal to observe. One of the things that is worth remarking upon with respect to Ukrainians' response to the invasion of their country is that there has been really a proliferation of documentation of the facts on the ground but also of continuing satire by Ukrainian people about what is happening right now. And so it's possible to observe those comments as it's also possible to be exposed to Kremlin propaganda. Now, how is it possible to distinguish between the two? I think that may have been part of the question. The first is to come back to the first question to Dr. Graham is that informing yourself about what the Kremlin's stories are can help you be a smart consumer of online social media information. The second part is that interestingly, and I think this also speaks to the fact that there is still a great deal of heterogeneity in Russian society, the Kremlin-sponsored Mises on Sin, the dramatizations that are being promulgated by the Kremlin of soldiers going to liberate Ukrainians from supposedly Ukrainian oppression. These videos are very poorly produced. The acting is not in the best traditions of Russian stage practice. And they're actually quite easy to identify because frankly they're so bad. So that also tells us something about the enthusiasm of those who are participating in them. So those are its two elements I would highlight as we sort of try to make our way through this incredibly complex sea of differing narratives and stories about this war. Thank you very much. So we're about out of time, but we would certainly just like to hear your questions. So if you could just one at a time, just repeat your concise question and then we'll end the session and perhaps you can approach the panel and discuss your question with them. So go ahead, just read your question and then we'll just go left and right. It's kind of similar to what has been asked already. It's related to the issue of the excessive influence of NATO and Ukraine. You mentioned that Russia sees NATO as a threat, it's a flaw. However, I don't believe that Russia will have the capability of taking on all NATO powers if Ukraine becomes a NATO country and decide to invade Russia. I believe the worry over Ukraine becoming a NATO power is about leaving for Russia because of the current status of China and its neighboring countries. The U.S. currently has military bases and sending military support to South Korea and China and Japan, even Taiwan. If Ukraine becomes a NATO power, will U.S. send military support to this country to promote democratic influence? That's my question. Great question. Next question, please. My question was mainly on the renewed sense of Ukrainian identity that has come about because of this war and if that is more of a heat of the moment kind of agreement or some of the divides that we have kind of perceived in the past that were propagated from kind of like an east-west split are going to research as long as this conflict might drag out in two months or years. Thank you. Please. Hello, my question was just in regards to the policies Putin has instituted in order to make Russia more resistant to sanctions and whether or not you believe these policies, namely, I believe Fortress Russia, if you believe they've been effective and if you expect them to be effective going forward. Great, thank you. My question was about how with Russia's aggressive expansion, how the U.S. and NATO should go about dealing with the Arctic. Thank you, and our final two questions. One thing that definitely should not be overlooked is the fact that Russia is a petro state. Gas and oil make up a large part of its exports and the invasion of Crimea in 2014 happened just two years after offshore oil was discovered right off the coast of Crimea and in Eastern and Western Ukraine. Do you think that the discovery of these oil resources and the refinery treaties that the Ukrainian government signed with the Shell Corporation contributed to the annexation of Crimea? Thank you. And our final question for the session, please. Hello, this is a question for the entire panel. Why do you think Western public opinion and media overemphasized the threat of NATO and the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO to explain why the war began? Thank you very much. Let's give our panel and our students a round of applause, please. Thank all of you so very much for just advancing our understanding on the conflict. And if you could grab a program, if you haven't, the next session is at one o'clock and we look forward to seeing you then. Thank you for being such a great audience and thank you panelists.