 Good afternoon. It's good to see you all. There's nowhere else that I'd rather be right now than listening to this panel of experts talk about a problem that is on all of our minds, and it's a great honor and privilege to be here listening to their remarks on Russia and Ukraine. My name is Dr. Daniel A. Morris, and I'll be the moderator for today. It's my job right now, and my pleasure to introduce our panel. And then after the panel we'll have remarks from our respondent and a time for questions and comments from the audience. So I will just begin by introducing the individuals that you see on the stage before you starting here to my immediate left with Dr. Nicholas K. Gvostev. Dr. Gvostev is professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He holds non-residential fellowships with the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs, and he's a member of the Loisach Group, which is a collaboration between the Munich Security Conference and the Marshall Center to enhance U.S. and Germany's security partnership. He's a contributing editor for the national interest, and he has taught at Baylor, Georgetown, George Washington, Harvard Extension, and Brown universities. Next we have Dr. Angela Kaczewski, who is an associate professor of political science at Arcadia University in suburban Philadelphia. Her research falls in the fields of conflict resolution and critical security studies, and she focuses on divided societies, identity boundaries, and Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Moldova. Next we have Dr. Lasha Chantarise, who is a professor and director of the graduate programs in diplomacy and international relations. He earned his PhD in international relations from Queens University of Kingston, Ontario, and his research interests are at the intersection of diplomacy and forced international politics, and his academic publications are in the areas of geopolitics, Russian foreign policy, Canadian foreign policy, the Arctic, the Black Sea Basin, and international politics in the Caucasus. And finally, to introduce our respondent for the afternoon, we have Dr. Lisa Chaldise, who has dedicated her work as a lawyer, educator, and author, and activist to the development of the rule of law, as well as the defense of human rights. And I'm very eager to hear from all of our presenters and also from our respondent and from you after their presentations have ended. So thank you all for coming, and I will now turn it over to our first speaker. Excellent. Hello, everybody. I'm really happy to be here. I'm happy to be back at Norwich. And delighted to speak with you today. My paper is going to consider this concept of Ukraine as a borderland. It's often been considered sort of between East and West, and I'm going to present some of my ideas about that. I'm going to focus, given what's going on with this war, and I think most of us are sort of shocked by the scale and the brutality of this conflict that is going on right now. And a lot has been written about NATO expansion, European Union enlargement, Ukrainian neutrality. I'm not denying at all that these things are important, although I don't think that this war is about Ukrainian neutrality or NATO expansion at all, and that's something maybe we can discuss later. I'm instead going to not deny that those things are important, but rather really focus on some of the important identity issues that I think give additional kind of context and perspective as to what's going on. So I'm going to focus on three main areas very quickly, given the constraints of time. I'm going to talk a little bit about two core concepts that are within the current Russian national identity building project, and that is the concept of the near abroad, which is a way to characterize neighboring states, and the more recent concept of the Russian world. I'm then going to look a little bit at the Eurasian Economic Union project that is led by Russia, and the European Union project, which obviously is happening in the same space. And then finally I'm going to look a little bit at some of the identity dynamics that we have seen particularly since 2014 with the annexation occupation of Crimea, particularly among Russian-speaking Ukrainians. And I want to say also, I think it's a very, very important point to underscore when we talk about Russian-speaking Ukrainians, we're not talking about Russians who happen to be living in Ukraine. We're talking about Ukrainians who, for various reasons of history, have over time Russian has become their native language, but they're not Russian, and I think that's an important point. So let's talk a little bit about how we got from the Soviet Union to the so-called Russian world. The Soviet Union, as Putin has sort of described as this enormous geopolitical catastrophe and tragedy for Russia, was actually led by Russia and some of the other states. So Boris Yeltsin as president of the Russian Federation, together with the presidents of Belarus and Ukraine, met together and dissolved the Soviet Union as a way to try to free up their republics to pursue the kinds of reforms that they wanted to pursue, and that they felt that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was holding them back for. However, the CIS, the Commonwealth of Independent States, which they created to sort of replace the Soviet Union, was really underspecified, very vague when it was agreed to as to how actually all of these things would operate in principle, but really in detailed practice. And so pretty close after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it became pretty clear that there would be really serious consequences for Russia for a number of reasons, strategic reasons, right? You've got bases that are now located in different states, and you've got different borders, you have all kinds of things that are happening. And so for this reason, I think it's not really surprising that Russia has defined the former Soviet republics as part of their special sphere of influence, and there's a good amount of evidence that Yeltsin sort of assumed or had a vision that the Commonwealth of Independent States would operate pretty much the same as the Soviet Union, they would just get rid of communism, but that the Commonwealth would be strong, there would be a common market, a common currency, sort of unified military structure, but none of the other republics of the Soviet Union were interested in that, and so the CIS being underspecified just never fulfilled that role. So Russia in response has tried to create sort of this sphere of influence within the neighboring states, and initially this wasn't such a big problem because Boris Yeltsin did respect the independence of neighboring states and followed a fairly liberal sort of rules-based foreign policy, but for a number of reasons, including perceived discrimination of Russian speakers abroad, particularly in the Baltic states, perceived sort of dismissal of Russia's national insecurity interest by the West, concerns about Russia being shut out of some kind of a European integration project, put a lot of pressure on Russia to turn to a more kind of nationalist-oriented foreign policy, and as the economic situation grew worse and the influence of this sort of liberal Western-oriented economist diminished this pressure to kind of have a more strong focus on Russia's national interest emerged. Therein we get this term called the near abroad, which emerged in mainstream discourse in 1993, when then Foreign Minister Andrei Kozarev laid out the tenets for a new Russian foreign policy concept. And the term in Russian, at least to my ear, has sort of a connotation where the word for near kind of connotates a feeling of closeness that in turn gives this sort of distinction between territory that is abroad out there that's a really truly sovereign state and these states that are kind of near us and they aren't therefore fully sovereign. So to be kind of the close abroad means, well, you're technically kind of a sovereign state, but not really, right? This is how at least it appears to my ear. So Russian policy has been to sort of assert a special role in this area has sort of asserted the right and the responsibility to exert special influence in these territories. And in fact, Russian policy has articulated the concept of compatriots as a category of non-citizens living outside of Russia who, nonetheless, do under a certain extent fall under Russian responsibility. And this is written into Russian law where they assert a special responsibility for these compatriots who are not living in Russia and are not Russian citizens. So even though this compatriot status may not be recognized and, frankly, isn't recognized by other states and is therefore pretty symbolic, it's pretty clear that this gives Russia a formal and systematic way to assert and potentially, as we see now, exert influence beyond its geographic boundaries. The compatriot policy also exists within this context of the Russian world, the Russian world concept, which posits Russia as a distinct civilization that transcends Russia's territorial borders. This Russian world asserts that Russian civilization is a naturally existing civilizational community. So Russia is not just Russian culture. Russian national identity is not part of European culture. It is a naturally separately existing civilizational identity. And it emphasizes the cultural basis of identity, which is rooted in Russian language and a shared Orthodox Christian faith. The civilization shares a common past and is currently, according to Putin, who's been quite explicit about this, wrongfully and even perversely divided into separate states, which he says has resulted in the greatest divided nation on Earth. So in this context, Ukraine and Belarus are seen not only as members of Russia's natural zone of special influence, but actually as integral pieces and integral parts of the Russian world based upon Eastern Slavic civilization and they are not separate nations. And I'll come back to talk about that in a bit. So this kind of view at this natural special role for Russia is obviously not shared by all states and certainly not by Ukraine, who has very consistently been very steadfast regardless of which political parties in power about Ukrainian sovereignty and independence. So let's talk a little bit about the European and Russian projects within this kind of what you might think of as the shared neighborhood. Russia and EU, and again, I'm focusing on identity issues today. This isn't to ignore or discount the other material interests in economic integration. I'm going to focus on the identity issues. Russia and the EU have each asserted and defined a special role for themselves in this region that goes beyond their boundaries, that is based upon both economic interests and shared cultural values. Okay, so they're both doing sort of the same thing. I'm not equating between the two projects obviously, but they're motivated by some of the same narratives. Each of these imagines a sort of normative cultural space that unifies populations beyond geographic borders and an economic zone that benefits from deeper economic integration. We have the European neighborhood policy, which was brought into place in 2004 because of an expansion of the European Union that required the European Union to start to think about making a formal relationship with states that now became on actual EU borders. And the idea behind the European or the European neighborhood policy was to include states from the former Soviet Union and also countries along the Mediterranean basis in a regional engagement and cooperation policy. In 2009, an actual specific policy called the Eastern Partnership was brought into place that had even more formal relations with the Eastern European states and were based upon three different objectives. First was to accelerate political association to create more formal and strong political relations. Second was to further economic integration through association memberships and other economic agreements. And third, for providing for citizen mobility. This would be in visa-free regimes and work permits. And again, an idea of creating greater contact between those areas. And I'm sorry, I went ahead too fast, but that's okay. We'll come back to this. The goal of this project was to build greater prosperity through interdependence and the creation of a free trade zone that requires Eastern European participating states to meet EU standards for business, finance, banking, and trade. And the idea was that strengthening governance and increasing prosperity in the neighborhood and deepening regional integration would lead to greater stability and prosperity in the region. The problem that we have, however, is that this comes into direct conflict with Putin's plans for economic integration in the same exact neighborhood, given that signing an association agreement with the European Union would preclude membership in the Eurasian Economic Union. And even if this was not the intention of the European Union, this was indeed seen by Moscow as a direct effort to try to isolate Russia from its neighbors. Okay, gotta go fast. All right, so we're gonna go beyond the European Union and I'll just jump in to talk a little bit about some of the identity issues. We have a lot of discussion about a so-called two-Ukrainian narrative, where the Eastern part of Ukraine, as Russian-speaking and sort of geopolitically oriented towards Russia, the Western part of Ukraine is Ukrainian-speaking and sort of geopolitically oriented towards the West. And there are a lot of reasons why this narrative may or may not have been a fruitful or valid way of thinking about Ukraine in the past. But certainly since independence, we've seen a very clear movement towards a civic model of national identity and not an ethnic model of national identity. We do have a little bit of a challenge because on the one hand, Ukraine has very clearly articulated a national polity that is multi-lingual and multi-ethnic and cultural, it's civic in nature, it's inclusive. But on the other hand, the nation-building project has been based upon promoting the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture. So we've got these two things happening at the same time. So we have seen some divisions since independence, but what we have seen since 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass is an increasing identity that is civic in nature based upon understanding Ukraine as a native language and identifying Ukraine as the homeland and accepting Ukrainian language as the mother tongue even if you don't speak the language. And this is a really important point. People will say, Ukrainian is my native language, whether or not they can speak Ukrainian and this is because it has become for them an identity marker. So I'm just gonna make three quick observations because it's a bit too early within this war. I'd like to think that the war will be over tomorrow and we can start to draw conclusions. But for now, I'd like to make three observations to toss out and maybe there might be a distance of discussion. The first is that I think that what we see with the incredible resistance that is happening in Ukraine today, where Russian speaking cities are being targeted ruthlessly. Kharkiv is a Russian speaking city. Mariupol is a Russian speaking city. Herson is a Russian speaking city. And they are resisting and they are saying, we are Ukrainian. So I think what we can see is that this whole Russian world concept is a complete and abject failure first in soft power and now in hard power because they are not winning the war. And I also observed that the two Ukraine's concept, if it ever had any validity, is completely dead because obviously we are all one Ukraine. And I'd like to posit that I think we can stop thinking about Ukraine as a borderland. If it ever was one, it certainly is not one any longer. So with that, I will finish. Thank you. So I'm speaking to you on the lessons that can be learned from Russia's intervention in Syria. Do I have a point? No, no PowerPoint. So I can go ahead and blank that one. There we are. Let me first offer the observation that this would be a different presentation or the presentation would be received differently if this was being presented to you prior to February 24th. And so I would echo the caution of Center for Naval Analysis expert Michael Kaufman who says prior to February 24th, we had a tendency to really overrate and over exaggerate the Russian military to say that they were 12 feet tall. And now because of the first three weeks of the campaign in Ukraine, he says we have a tendency now to go into an opposite direction which is equally unhelpful, which is to think of the Russians as two feet tall. And one of the questions that may come out in our discussion is why some of the lessons that the Russians demonstrated in Syria, they did not apply in Ukraine? And is that a policy failure, an intelligence failure? Is this just simply the bureaucratic reaction that most of the Russian military establishment that kind of pushed back against some of the innovative techniques that were being used in Syria and said we don't want to apply them anywhere else, I think is something that we're still waiting to get more information on. I'd like to offer what I would call a triple disclaimer in making my remarks. And the first of course, since my day job is to work for the U.S. Naval War College, I am presenting here in a personal capacity, I'm not speaking in any way on behalf of the U.S. Navy, representing a U.S. government position, or even for that matter relying on any U.S. government resources for my conclusions. Everything is based upon my own open source analysis. The second disclaimer is when you present on a topic like this and you say the lessons of Syria, I'm doing this as an analyst. We have a tendency now in the academic and scholarly worlds to confuse analysis and advocacy, or to confuse analysis with approval. That is to say if there are lessons to be learned from Syria then therefore you must be saying well what the Russians did is good or we should be, you're advocating for it and instead I simply want to look back, look at what the Russians have been doing since they intervened in Syria in 2015, as a basis for us to understand both is there a new paradigm for Russian intervention, are there lessons that the U.S. and allied militaries can learn, in some cases we cannot apply those lessons because of our own rules of engagement and traditions of war fighting, but there may be lessons that may be applicable to us. And the final disclaimer is in presenting this kind of 30 or 60,000 foot view, we can lose sight of the fact that in the end we're talking about human beings whether in Syria or in Ukraine, particularly who are on the receiving end of violence, and so again when we speak very analytically about it it may, we don't want to lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day this affects people directly in terms of being killed, being wounded, being driven from their homes, having their homes destroyed. So I just wanted to put that out there. All right, basically there are four lessons I think we should pull from the Russian intervention in Syria and I think that they are important particularly for the U.S. national security community because the U.S. national security community for the most part got the Russian intervention into Syria wrong. When the Russians announced in September of 2015 that they were going to directly enter into the Syrian civil war, the U.S. reaction first was to mirror image and to say well Russia's not going to succeed in Syria because the United States has had problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, we assume that the Russian intervention in Syria would mirror the type of interventions that the U.S. had been doing in the Middle East. We also mirror imaged and assumed that a Russian intervention in Syria was more or less going to be a smaller scale repeat of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. And so based on that analysis President Obama felt relatively confident in predicting in September of 2015 that the Russian intervention would fail, Russia would be bogged down in a quagmire, this would strain the Russian military, this would strain the Russian economy which already was under minor sanctions and you saw from the first panel perhaps not really impactful sanctions on the Russian economy. And instead we look at all the way to 2022 and the picture in Syria looked a lot different than it was being predicted. And then there are basically, so I want to go through what the four lessons were. The first is that the Russians had carefully studied U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense Minister, then Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov who was remarking this in 2006, 2007, that they were closely studying the kind of successes and failures of U.S. counterinsurgency in Iraq, what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan, trying to get a sense of what things were working and what things were not. And the Russians, not unlike many American journalists who were observing both the Iraq and Afghan efforts really picked up on the overreach of U.S. efforts, that the U.S. had established victory conditions in Afghanistan by the end of December 2001, had effectively established victory conditions in Iraq by the end of 2003, but the mission had expanded, the mission grew, lots new parameters came in, all the way down to the United States military trying to set up a stock exchange in Iraq, trying to set up media enterprises, teaching Afghans how to use PowerPoint, making sure that they were perfect PowerPoint rangers, and all of this kind of overreach developed and then prevented, in the rushing view, the U.S. from being able to establish conditions of victory on the ground militarily and then to use that to either push forward a political settlement at best or stalemate at worst. Instead, the Russians in Syria have relied on what they call as a strategy of, quote, limited action, that is to not let mission creep come in or to start defining new goals. They went into Syria with two very explicit goals. One was to prevent Bashar al-Assad from being overthrown, making sure that he was not driven out of Damascus, and the second was to ensure that he would remain a player in Syrian politics. Those were the goals, the mission was geared to meeting those goals, it was geared to ensuring that at the end of the day, Assad stayed in Damascus and that he would remain a player in Syrian politics and by extension a player in Middle Eastern politics. The idea that the regime would be, quote, stable enough, not perfect, not even necessarily having to control all of Syria, the extent to which Assad has regained control over Syria was not part of the original Russian mission set. It is a byproduct of the Russian intervention but wasn't their initial goal. And that meant you needed to secure the capital, you needed to secure certain lines of communications, you needed to secure strong points across the country, but you did not need to have a presence in every village in Hamlet and entity in Syria in order to be able to influence the process. Second, the Russian military in Syria once it intervened focused on destroying capabilities and fighting capacity of the opposition, not again to occupy territory. Occupying territory was secondary to drawing out the opposition, drawing out their military capabilities, drawing out their supply lines, and then using primarily air power with the judicious use of land power and some naval power to bring that about. And that again, very important not to occupy territory. Instead to use military force to isolate and diminish points of resistance. And the Russians were therefore happy to negotiate lots of local settlements, basically along the lines, as long as you're not actively opposing us and Assad we're not going to come in and really interfere with what you're doing. So ending up empowering a lot of local authorities, particularly in Sunni villages, and then of course the de facto relationship with the Kurds in Syria, where the Kurds effectively have had a, for the last six years have operated in a state of de facto truce with the Assad government. The third lesson was the Russians avoided the responsibilities of governance. This was something that they very much took from the US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. That once you begin to assume the responsibilities of governance, the mission expands and the ability for you to take on more actions where the probability of failure increases or people perceive that you have failed because you have not delivered on governance. Instead again, the Russians really pushed forward in sometimes even in opposition to people in the Assad government who very much wanted to restore as much Syrian government control over as much of Syria as possible, the Russians essentially saying that's not our job here and I'm probably gonna mangle the Arabic, but the Russians really pushed forward what were known as the Itifakwat al-Musalah, these kinds of reconciliation agreements, these deconfliction agreements, you go into a village, you meet the real power brokers as something else the Russians learned from our experience in Iraq that the official power holder may not in fact be the person who is really the mover and shaker. I think some of the people that I've talked to in the coalition provisional authority realized after some time in Iraq that politicians weren't really the movers, if they were Shia politicians it was the Shia clergy and that they were talking to the wrong people. They should have been talking to people in Najaf, not people who said well I represent this political party and so the Russians went in, they would identify and they did have some experience in this obviously in how Chechnya was pacified both by brutal tactics but also by identifying power brokers and deciding how you can leverage them in order to get them just simply to agree to stop fighting you. And again, not worrying about governance, not worrying about democracy, not worrying about can they operate PowerPoint or do they meet a whole list of criteria or standards. Finally, the Russians in Syria really focused on a light footprint in the sense of not sending in large amounts of ground forces, focusing primarily on air power, some maritime power, rotating land forces in, using Syria and this was one of the things that I think the US side did not pick up on was that essentially saying well instead of spending money from our exercise budget we will use Syria to exercise our forces and so interestingly enough and again what we've seen in Ukraine raises some questions but essentially by 2019, pretty much all of the regional commanders had rotated through Syria, a good chunk of the officer corps had rotated through Syria, almost all of the Russian air force pilots had gone through Syria at one point or another so there was this sense of but light footprint and never a large Russian contingent at any one point. Focusing on, as we've seen, use of a lot of indiscriminate firepower, right, not putting people on the ground but instead using air and artillery strikes to substitute for people and to use that as a strategy, the siege and starve strategy and some of the Russian generals are very explicit. We don't want to fight block for block in a place like Aleppo, we'd rather create conditions that make Aleppo unlivable so that the opposition leaves and then we can move in after. Finally and probably most critically, what we've seen in Syria is the use of militias and mercenaries which I think is really speaking to some changes that we may be seeing in mid 21st century warfare, recruitment, particularly from some of Russia's ethnic minorities to go into Syria, very effective Chechen and English units. Again, part of the reason that in some cases the these Russian Muslim nationality units were better at reaching these deals with Sunni leaders than Alawite army commanders in Syria or Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders because they could play on a common Sunni heritage but most importantly and critically has been the rise of the private military companies relying on private military companies both as a strategy for keeping down your uniformed casualties for fear that that might create problems at home, giving you a degree of plausible deniability to operate and to act and when necessary mercenary companies, if their actions become problematic they can be abandoned as we saw in 2018 where mercenary companies clashing with the US essentially were left to their own fate. So with that we have these lessons prior to the start of the invasion of Ukraine. There was a sense both in the Russian strategic community and also in the American strategic community that Syria was paving a way forward for how Russia would intervene. What we're now seeing in Ukraine is calling into question whether that is correct or not. So I think we'll still be debating the lessons of Syria but also determining whether or not this reflects a fundamental change in how the Russian government plans to use the military instrument of statecraft and how it links with its diplomatic and economic efforts. Good afternoon. The title of this presentation was offered to the organizers last fall, I think, because at that time I was expecting a war between Russia and Ukraine and I was thinking about writing something, presenting something to explain why war was likely between Russia and Ukraine. I've written about this since Russia's potential conflicts with Georgia and Ukraine since 2007, after Mr. Putin made a lengthy presentation at the Munich Security Conference in February of 2007 in which he pretty much outlined what he intended to do in coming decades. Was not taking seriously, that was an important watershed in Russia's foreign policy towards its neighbors and the next important event was the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state against Russian objections and following up to that, summer of 2008, Georgia and Ukraine were candidates of joining NATO, they themselves believed they were candidates, but NATO summit in Bucharest refused to grant them accession papers like a plan to become NATO members at some point in the near future, specifically because of German and French objections, even though the U.S. administration under Mr. Bush supported the plan and the U.K. supported it as well. And after that, this is August 2008 and Russia invades Georgia. Not gonna take much of your time, I can answer your questions if you have questions about this, my paper more extensive than my presentation, obviously, but the argument is very simple. The United States and Western allies have been pursuing policies of appeasement to Russia since 2007 and that is a direct cause of the war in Ukraine. Among other things such as the outdated state of American strategic arsenal and inability of Europeans to find the common ground when it comes to policies, to the Russian policies. So, general line of reasoning here is that neither Georgia or Ukraine represents a direct threat to Russia, they're smaller countries, they don't really pose any significant cultural or religious or any other economical or political security threats. Russian objective here is to defeat NATO. That's Mr. Putin's personal objective and the people who are around him helping him in this quest. So, the final, Ukraine is not the final step, the final step is attacking a NATO country, more or less a significant country. I don't want to speak in these kinds of terms but I want to communicate to you Russian thinking about this, a more marginal NATO member causing significant damage to the country and if NATO fails to respond, especially United States fails to respond in a decisive manner. And may I also mention that sanctions are not decisive in any significant way. In the Russian thinking sanctions are actually a sign of capitulation. Sanctions tell them we are not gonna fight, you can go ahead and do whatever, we are not gonna use force. That's how they hear this in Moscow. So, once Russia attacks, you pick a country on the periphery of NATO and NATO fails to respond, that's the end of NATO and that's the end of US influence and prestige and power in Europe and that the game is done. So, on this path and it's coming, Ukraine has been significant in this process because Ukraine has managed to make Russia stumble, which no one expected, including the American administration as if we are to believe what they're telling us from the screens of television. The Russian government didn't expect it either, invading, initially they deployed about 68 battalions into Ukraine and that number increased dramatically after a few days. So, they had fuel for about three days of operation. One battalion, Russian battalion, needs about two fuel trucks for operation per day and they didn't have enough fuel initially to sustain long-term operation, but that now has changed. So, here I am presenting a map of Georgia. Georgia is a small country. As the population is under four million, the size of Georgia, it's a smaller than state domain, it's not a large country. Russia is a northern neighbor, Turkey south, Azerbaijan and Ukraine southeast. In the west, what you see is the Black Sea and the Black Sea connects Georgia also with Ukraine and Russia and we are gonna come to that. I'm showing you a physical map of Georgia because physical geography, especially in warfare and also in diplomacy is very important. Normally, when they present you maps, they present you with a flat colored shapes that don't tell you much and then they can attach any information to it. They want you to believe. For instance, the idea that Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine could fall in three days. Now, if you were to imagine Kiev is larger than Chicago and even if no one resists surrounding and taking Chicago in three days, it's just an unbelievable idea. But a city that is well defended like Kiev is just crazy. If you imagine Kiev to be a little spot on the map, then you can imagine that. But if you realize how large the city is, it's quite difficult to understand why would someone tell you that. Now, that's the Caucasus mountains, geography. You see their elevation and the mountain, Mount Kosbegi, our Canadian friends will see this five kilometers. That's the border between Georgia and Russia. So the Russia to invade Georgia, it had two options, to cross the mountains, which you understand tall mountains are not easy to cross. Impossible to helicopters to fly over and invade from the sea. So the war started on, there is a dispute about this. August seven or eight, we are gonna come to that, why there is a discrepancy. But, excuse me, Russia invaded both from the north and from the sea. From the sea was significant because Russia had no coastal defense, none whatsoever. United States gave them rubber boats and some rifles to defend the coastline. And Georgia had no significant amount of air defenses, air force, artillery, no significant amount of anything to defend itself. Even though, as you heard from the ambassador this morning, Georgia was probably one of the most pro-American, still it remains one of the mostly American oriented states in the world. And there was a lot of talk and there is a lot of talk about strategic partnership between the United States and Georgia, but realistically, United States or anyone else didn't arm or help Georgia in any significant way, just like they didn't arm or help Ukraine in any significant way before the invasion. So there are two roads leading from Russia to Georgia that could be taken by any anyone, including the invading armed forces. And the battle that waged was north and central Georgia. The town is, there is called Skynvali. And the Georgian army resisted the invading Russian force as much as they could coming from the mountains. Black Sea Fleet was late joining the war. They came three days late and they landed on a post, amphibious assault on the Georgian coast. And once it is landed, it was useless to mount resistance anymore because the Georgian army risked to be surrounded. So the strength of the Russian army is on the flatlands. Once they are useless in the mountains, they have a hard time fighting in the mountains. But as you see the green shades, those are flatlands. Those could be transversed very quickly, very effectively by mechanized infantry. So Georgia asked for peace and a peace agreement was signed after five days of fighting. The number of factors contributed to that why war ended so quickly. Number one, Russian army wasn't ready. And the Russians realized it themselves because a couple of entrepreneurial Georgian artillery commanders engage Russian forces and did significant damage to them. Russian aircraft were shut down and they realized that the supply lines were not functioning. Historically, Russian army supply lines are in terrible shape anyway. So they were not ready and at the same time there was a forceful diplomatic intervention by United States. So appeasement is actually a theoretical concept in international relations. Most people who think about appeasement think about Chamberlain and the Hitler. It's not only that but Western governments have pursued appeasement policies towards North Korea for instance. US policy to Russia, appeasing policy actually had a name. It was called Reset and presented by Secretary Clinton to foreign minister Lavrov. Soon after the war was over. So this is a wider view of the region. The Russian objective here is to control the Black Sea. Why had they been obsessed with Crimea and Georgia? Sevastopol is the key for Russian control over the Black Sea and the Mediterranean access to Mediterranean sea. One of the key documents that allowed appeasement policy to proceed both by Europe and the United States was this report published by the European Union a year after the war ended and actually blamed Georgia for attacking Russia inside Georgia. And Georgia was blamed for opening of this war. One of the Russia's objective just like now was the militarization of Georgia and they have achieved this objective by non-allowing or lobbying Western powers not to rearm Georgia for self-defense. And one of the most outrageous steps was that Georgia resisted Russian accession to WTO, World Trade Organization and a Western partners press Georgia government to concede, to allow Russia to become a member of the WTO. If you imagine that, so the idea was that Georgia started the war and the Russian army in about 30,000 of them were passing by in the Caucasus mountains and just came across. The border is incredible claim, but that's what the European Union published in 2009. According to Russian sources, they were in Georgia in August the 7th of 2008 and other sources claim that to be in Georgia just after midnight, 2008, August 8th, 2008. So here are some of the pictures. This is a Russian accession to WTO. You see this gentleman there holding a shirt, mission accomplished, George Bush's favorite words. Here is Mr. Lavrov with Mrs. Clinton holding a reset button which was misnamed in Russian. In Russian actually it said overload instead of reset and that's why they're laughing. So Lavrov's surprise was what are we overloading and they said, well no, it's not overload, it's reset. Okay. And this is Mr. Medvedev and that was actually the caption you read, a successful reset button. So in short, reset policies started by outgoing Bush administration and continued by Clinton. Trump didn't care about either about Ukraine or Georgia and here we are. So the war with Ukraine, what changed? What changed was that I think European France finally realized that Russia is going west. Is it Georgia and Crimea, they're south? The west is different, right? West is Europe. So I think now they think themselves as the next target, which is gonna happen sooner or later. Thank you. Can you see the rhythms? The class rhythms. Hello, thank you all for being here. I see classes changing right about now. So we've heard some fascinating things today. I do have a few follow-up questions. If I could start please with Dr. Kaczewski. I noticed that in your talk, the identity issue was really sort of the core and what I'm wondering is, many years ago, back in 1979, I was in Kiev and then went outside the city to a rather eerie forest where people had remembered their loved ones. Roughly two million people had died in a famine engineered by Stalin, people in the Ukraine, I mean. And in this forest, even then, all those years later, you could see these rotting wooden boards nailed to trees with the name of a loved one on it. And it was quite ghostly, quite moving. What I'm wondering is your view on the extent to which historical memory in Ukraine either impacts or does not impact the question of Ukrainian identity and if so, the extent to which that is equally true in the Russian-speaking areas? Are we going to do one at a time? Is this on? Can you guys hear me? Okay, great. I'm writing a book on this, so I'll have to remember to send you a copy when I finally finish it. I think that historical memory is one of those key points on that kind of identity boundary that I have identified that is a sticking point with regional differences. It's very difficult, for example, and I'm talking before the war, I think now this is going to change. My hypothesis is, but that'll be a different book. I think that it is very difficult for anyone who is above, see the age of 30, 35, to accept that Bandera is a national hero in Harkiv. This was difficult. Younger people saying, okay, you renamed the war. It's no longer the Great Fatherland War. It didn't go from 1941 to 1945. It started in 1939, no problem. Western Ukraine was part of Poland then. This is all a misunderstanding. Let's be open to some different interpretations, but it's very difficult for people who have any historical connection to the war. My grandfather fought in the war. My grandfather fought to liberate, in the Red Army, to liberate us from the Nazis, and those guys out there were traitors, and I can't revisit that. So there were certain pieces, I think, of historical memory that are difficult to get agreement on, but that's not unique to Ukraine. I mean, we have regional differences in how we remember history in the United States as well. So I do think that conversations about history are difficult. The nation-building project that I touched on, which has focused very much on official interpretations of history, Ukrainian language, this, this, and this, has not necessarily fit closely, I think, with where a lot of people in Odessa, and particularly in Harkiv, where I did my studies, fit. I think now there might be an unwillingness to revisit some of those questions, because Bandera seems a lot less menacing to the Ukrainian nation, but definitely historical memory has been very, it hits people in their heart. It hits people where that is my family that you're talking about. If you're old enough to have a grandparent who was alive during the war, you still care about it. For sure, I don't know if that answers your question. No, it does. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And jumping now to Dr. Chantoridze. I have actually been to the refugee camp on the supposed new border within Georgia along the military line that is guarded by Russian military and also heavily landmined. This is after Russia grabbed Alpazia in South Aseria. And I use the word grab as not really a term of art, but you know what I mean. And again, like Ukraine, Georgians have a really intense national identity and in a culture that is truly ancient. So on a sort of similar note, I actually have two questions. One, given the strength of Georgian resolve and yet a sort of lack of Western resolve, if I might put it that way, when it comes to Georgia, my two questions are one, is how important is the invisible aspect of Georgian resolve and history? For example, even under Stalin, Georgia pushed back to preserve Georgian as the state language of Georgia, even when it was a Soviet Republic. So I'm wondering about the role of both Western and Georgian resolve and also in your remarks, if I understood correctly, you seemed to be attributing a rather high level of rationality to Putin wanting to defeat NATO and so forth. What I'm wondering is to what extent, if any, do you think that Putin's personality or ego might be playing a role here with the irrational goal of reinstituting the Russian Empire? Okay, so about Georgian resolve. Georgians have been around for a long time, as you well know. They, Tbilisi Capital City, Tbilisi was between the seventh and between the eighth and 11th century was held by the Arabs. So the Georgians slowly undermined their rule and finally expelled them in the 11th century. So 300 years and that was the 11th century. So they can wait and they can outlive the Russians. There is no question about it. They're not going anywhere. But in the immediate future, they will likely remain under Russian heel because Russia is not going anywhere next couple of decades. Sorry, what was your second question? The extent to which the personality or ego of Putin to want to reconstitute the Russian Empire? No, he doesn't want to reconstitute the Russian Empire. That's a misconception. He wants to get rid of NATO. He wants to get rid of the so-called unipolar world. And Putin's rise to power is starts from the war in Kosovo, NATO Yugoslavia war. When NATO attacked Yugoslavia, claimed there was a genocide, bombed Belgrade and other cities in Yugoslavia. And that's when Stalin, excuse me, President Yeltsin was given an ultimatum either to resign, find a replacement or face a coup by generals, specifically General Iwashov and his buddies who actually organized a special operation to rescue Pristina, Kosovo. So that's when Mr. Putin was found as a head of the FSB. He took, he's one of his goals from the very beginning was to push NATO back, to destroy NATO. Okay, thank you for that. I appreciate it. And finally, Dr. Gvozdev, a quick question. Do you see any role for nation building in American foreign policy? I think that it needs to rest first on a strong domestic foundation of support. I think that Americans have to be convinced that their own economic political or economic technological energy security rests upon the nation building enterprise. Obviously the United States has, since the end of the Cold War, been uninterested in nation building and large chunks of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and then in other places. I think that in the Middle East, there was a sense that this would be done relatively quickly and easily. And then Americans soured on that experience. And I think that's one reason why, up till now, this sense that the Russians were, quote, more successful in Syria was that they were explicitly not engaged in nation building. They were engaged in regime survival. Moving forward, your question also hits on something. We're talking a lot about Ukraine today and Ukraine resistance and you can't find in, we had the governor here this morning talking about it and all of that, that question is gonna be the American domestic will to fund Ukrainian reconstruction with the same degree of fervor as providing military aid to Ukraine because that's gonna be the critical question. I mean, even if the Russians leave tomorrow, the damage that's been done in Ukraine, the geo-economic damage alone is pretty considerable. And are you gonna see Americans saying, I'm happy to fund that? And I mentioned this in a class of mine and he's in the committee room and he's saying to everyone, I want 100 million for schools and the rest of the committee says, why do we wanna build schools in Afghanistan? He said, you were willing to do half a billion for military aid, but not to put that in. And so I think that will be, that's gonna be the real test because if we don't have that, your question will be answered next year when the Ukraine Freedom Reconstruction Act is stalled in committee and doesn't move. And Georgia has already experienced this. Poor Moldova, which got stuck under Jackson Vanick for 20 years and couldn't escape it because that bill could never leave committee. So I'd say the jury's out on that. Thank you very much. Thank you all for such a rich and thought-provoking conversation. I would like to now, we have about 10 minutes left and I'd like to invite anyone from the audience who'd like to ask a question of the panel, please come down to the microphones right here. And what we'll do is, given the short amount of time, I'd like to have maybe the first few people who can ask a question, ask a question. Panelists will think about it. We'll have, we'll field another couple of questions and then we'll, and then we'll let the panelists kind of tackle them all as a concluding comment on this session. So please come on down and feel free to ask a question of our panelists. And as we're waiting for that, I also just want to invite other panelists. So Professor Chaldise, thank you so much for just starting the conversation. And I want to invite our other panelists to answer questions that Professor Chaldise directed to others. So if you heard a question that she asked and you really want to take it up, please feel free. And you can think about that and let's start here and then we'll go here. This question is for Dr. Vozdev. You said that in Syria, the Russians were using a lot of militia, but the reason for that was to provide plausible deniability and to distance themselves from the inevitable casualties that did come. My question though, what did that actually look like in Russia when hundreds of Russian backed militias died? It was portrayed as this is the life they've chosen. This is the business they've chosen. They knew the risks. They took the job. It may be regrettable for the mothers and the families, but it was not seen as something where Russian honor had to be avenged if they had been with the patch and regular members that pressure might have been greater. That has been an important part when we see kind of the Wagner group, but with others is the public perception is dangerous work, heroic perhaps, but that's the profession that they've chosen and they knew the risks going in. So that's one reason we've seen now in Ukraine, the shift now towards moving back towards militias and mercenaries as opposed to certainly to conscripts as a basis for moving forward. Because there is, and by the way, we see that in the U.S. as well. We don't treat the deaths of contractors as the same level as members of the volunteer force, and I think the Russians internalize that. Can I ask a follow up? Could come over here first and then stay right there, please, thank you. Okay, go ahead. First of all, excuse my English and my mother's language, or excuse my English if it's wrong or anything. With the fall of the USSR, we've seen the fall also of the Warsaw Pact, and on the other side, NATO continued existing. Not only did it continue existing, but it kept expanding as the EU. So my question is, do you feel like we failed to understand a Russian perception of NATO as a threat, or as kind of a failed to understand their vital territory that they have to preserve, or that NATO is just for them not necessary for the defense or the international order? Yeah, I can take a stab at that. It's a long, complicated answer, so I'll be quick, right? I don't, I mean, we could talk for a long time. I think that the problem that we have is that from the Western perspective, NATO has written into the treaty this concept of an open door, which says European countries, if you want to join and you meet this criteria, this is a possibility, and to say that, oh, European countries, you can do that unless somebody else vetoes your sovereign decision, is sort of saying not everybody is sovereign, and that's against Western sort of, I think, value system, and so there's that from the one side. I think also from the Western perspective, we view NATO as a defensive alliance, and it's not at all designed or intending to attack Russia, and so therefore, there's no problem with enlargement. From the Russian side, however, it's quite different, and I think that part of the problem is, Russians really, really believe, and this may or may not be true because the Americans have denied it and denied it and denied it, but in the end, it doesn't matter if it's true or not, because everybody in Russia believes, it's, yeah, everybody in Russia believes that when Gorbachev agreed that a reunified Germany could remain in NATO, that they were promised NATO would not expand, so whether or not we made that promise and the Americans have sworn up and down that that's not true, it's not true, it's not true, the Russians think it's true, and the fact that they think it's true is that they believe that they have somehow been tricked or they made the mistake to agree about Germany, and therefore they've got very strong suspicions about NATO. The problem is how do you address Russian suspicions without violating the integrity of the principle of having a defensive alliance, right, and so I think that this is where we find ourselves, but certainly from the Russian perspective, this is very problematic, and the Baltic states more than ever, I don't know if you wanted to add. Just briefly, I mean, look, part of the problem with NATO enlargement, problem has been backed up, not a problem, one of the ways it was pitched, it was pitched differently to three different constituencies, so it was pitched to Western Europeans as this is no problem because Russia has either finished as a great power or it won't care. It was pitched to the American taxpayer as all these new members are gonna come in and America will pay less, and the countries coming into NATO said, we know our history, we know that there are cycles of rise and fall in the east and we wanna be on the right side because the line will come back again, and politically squaring that was the issue. By 2002, and this is the road not taken, we had both with NATO and the EU mechanisms for relationship with Russia, the NATO Russia Council, and then the EU wider neighborhood, the four common spaces with Russia. For a variety of reasons, the Russian intransigence in some areas, Europeans and Americans not taking it as seriously as they might have those roads for kind of squaring the circle were lost. I mean, I would argue in 2003, we had opportunities to perhaps move this in a different direction, and partly that had to do with the US decision to go into Iraq, which created rifts in the transatlantic relationship and distracted the US from European security because we said it's done, but again, this is all water under the bridge now, but for those who say this is inexorable because in the first panel, the Meersheimer question came up, which leaving that aside, the idea that this was inexorable from 1991, we could only get to where we are in 2022. No, we had many ways in which this could have handled, and some of it is, and the blame goes around. It's no, Moscow's unwillingness to accept post-imperial status as one and lack of attention in Washington as another, and Western European kind of indifference to some of these issues is a third, in my opinion. I just want to add one tiny thing. I know we're really short on time, and let's not forget that Kosovo, right? So we had the NATO-Russia Council, and then we decided to bomb Serbia without talking to Russia. So Russia's like, who cares about the NATO-Russia Council? I mean, honestly, if you're going to make strategic decisions without discussing it, right? Thank you. Let's come back here. On the Russian militia again, so how does the relationship look like between the Russian military leaders who are commanding the war and the employment of militias like the Wagner group? Well, in Syria, and one reason why the Russian military was willing to let Wagner get whacked the way that they did was that the general staff was really ticked off at some of the things Wagner was doing, and were happy to let the American Air Force teach Wagner a lesson, right? So you have those rivals. What we see today in Ukraine, if these reports are correct, that the rivalry between the FSB and Kadyrov's people, that the employment of the Chechen groups in Ukraine has led to a, and that if we take this report, that elements of the FSB tipped off Zelensky through their contacts in the SBU that a Chechen hit squad was coming for Zelensky and enabled that to be ambushed. Yeah, there is tension, right? Because this also reflects, we had Tom, Tom is the famous author of the clans, but within the security and military services, there are clans, there are rivalries, and they're not all necessarily one big happy family. So, yeah, Wagner and Pudagorshin's people, some people in the military said he's getting too big for his britches and he's trying to take control of some Syrian oil assets. So, no, we're gonna withdraw that protective air cover over him and let him take the 400 guys getting shwacked there in Eastern Syria. I wonder if we could, This is an official military term. We have about a minute left. I wonder if Professor Chandry say if we could get it, if you care to comment on any of those questions or conversations. Thank you, I appreciate that. My perspective is sort of different than the experts on the panel here. I look at things from a human rights point of view and I wonder to what extent the US may again step up and sort of actively, candidly profess to morality within its foreign policy. This is not really responsive to any particular question, but I do think it's relevant. I have been urging that the US once again take the position of defending the defenders, that is those people within countries who are risking death by torture every day for the greater good to defend the rights of others, the rights of strangers. Anna, for what it's worth basis, I predict that President Biden, perhaps quite soon, will in fact reincorporate that into American policy, which is something we haven't really seen since the 70s. On a final note, in regard to Ukraine, there are also many Russian refugees, hundreds of thousands at this point who are fleeing Russia because of the risk they are at. By the way, if you use the word war in relation to Ukraine within Russia, you can get up to a 15 year sentence for calling that nasty little conflict a war. So I would hope that people will also be alert to the impact within Russia of its own aggression against Ukraine. Thank you. Everyone, please join me in thanking our panelists for this wonderful conversation. Thank you all for coming.