 You're all very welcome. My name is Pardig Marfi. You will no doubt wish to be reminded, if you need to be reminded, to turn your phones to silent or switch them off. We're very fortunate today to have Professor Mark Kellyati to speak to us on Russia and the West moving beyond the hybrid war illusion. Myself, I've often wondered what hybrid war exactly was. And I talk the tactic in the Trojan War of introducing the horse was perhaps the first recorded instance of hybrid war. And perhaps there has not been a war since that has not been hybrid in that regard. Anyway, Professor Kellyati is going to challenge the prevailing view on this question of hybrid war. He has a lot of experience in Russia, having lived and worked in Russia. He is now a senior non-resident research fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague. And I understand we'll certainly be returning to London where he will take up an important position there. He is the author of a number of works, including We Need to Talk About Putin, as indeed we constantly do. And a more recent one also is the Vori, Russia's super mafia, which I think had quite a reverberation. So Mark, you're very welcome. We look forward to hearing what you have to say. Well, super. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Thank you for talking with me. I'll carry on sitting, if that's fine with you. Delighted to be here. So thank you very much indeed to the Institute. Not least, because this is my very first time in Dublin. So very pleased to be here. So let's talk about hybrid war, which apparently is this fearsome new way of war that we all face, that the Russians have invented some new way of blending military force, threat, subterfuge, disinformation, you name it. Maybe even it's part of the gerassim of doctrine named after the current Russian chief of the general staff. There's one small problem with all this. In my opinion, hybrid war does not exist, first of all, exactly as we've heard. As far as I'm concerned, no war in history has ever not been hybrid, has ever not been marked by a combination of military means and non-military means. There is no such thing as a magic Russian new way of war. Doesn't mean to say that we don't face the challenge from Russia. Of course we do. But I think it's important to actually try and unpick what the nature of that challenge is, because that's the only way in which we can work out quite what to do about it in an effective way. And to that end, I think we need to understand two things. One is, what actually is Putin after? Because no conflict can ever be unpicked from the goals of the participants. And then secondly, we talk about hybrid war. Well, in so far as that term, and unfortunately, because NATO uses it and so forth, we are stuck with it as a term of art. But in so far as there is this hybrid war, I would suggest there is not a hybrid war. There are, in a way, three that we need to understand. Three separate different perspectives. So let's start with this, what does Putin want? He does not, in my opinion, have any territorial ambitions beyond Crimea, which pretty much every Russian anyway thinks is absolutely rightfully part of Russia anyway. He has political ambitions. What are his political ambitions? To coin a phrase, it's to make Russia great again. I think that the Putin we are seeing at the moment is one who is absolutely consumed by thoughts of his own political legacy. Like all leaders, especially autocratic leaders, he changes over time. I was going to say it evolves, but that has a certain positive implication. The Putin who came to power in 2000 talked tough about nationalism, but was actually strikingly pragmatic. This is also the Putin, after all, who talked about the potential in the future of Russia being part of NATO. However surreal that may seem now. And frankly, a non-starter would have been even then. But it said something. It wasn't just purely a spoiler or a bit of rhetoric. This is a Putin who did not in any way want Russia to become a Western-style democracy, but who believed that Russia's future lay in some kind of positive relationship with the West, a modus vivendi. And he thought that that was possible. Now, without apportioning blame, because it lies on both sides, it very much became clear that Putin's notion of a relationship with the West is not one with which we were comfortable. Not least at the time he was fighting his brutal, almost genocidal war in Chechnya. And he almost felt, well, let's quit pro quo. We're supporting the Americans following 9-11. We're providing sort of roots and logistical support for their activities in Afghanistan. So surely you can't really have a problem with our own anti-terrorist war, even if it means that Chechen cities are being consumed by fireballs of thermobaric munitions, and Chechen civilians are being treated as basically combatants. And he became angry. And over time, actually there's been this quite quick disillusion that Putin felt with the West. A sense on his part that the West was not being fair to Russia. Now, look, I'm not saying this to say that we should feel sorry for that poor Mr. Putin. Or, indeed, necessarily for Russia. Or that we actually have to accept his view of the world. But what we have to do is accept that he has a view of the world. To understand quite how the world looks through the Kremlin windows. So over time he became more and more disillusioned. His notorious 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference very much marked a kind of a key right of passage, as he's very much turned to, he regarded that above all the United States was this dangerous force that the real challenge to the world was the so-called unipolarity, in other words American domination of it, and that America was basically using its hyper-power, its military and economic strength to basically bully anyone who didn't fall into line. That was in many ways a political evolution of his view of the outside world. The bottom line was he did not realise that, however imperfectly, in the West we do strive to have value-based foreign policies. As said, I mean, if we're honest it is very, very imperfect. But nonetheless, there is that intent, and that we could not, therefore, just simply sit back and watch all kinds of human rights abuses take place in Russia, in Russian territories, without saying something, without pushing back against it, which he regarded as interference. But then there was a period in which he took a backseat, sort of, kind of. Because of constitutional requirements he stepped down as president because he could not stand for a third presidential term in succession. He became the notional Prime Minister to his former Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev. Now look, in practice, of course, he was still running the show. Dmitry Medvedev was his, basically, his soft puppet president. But nonetheless, it meant he had a period in which he was no longer at least kind of formally behind the big table in the Kremlin. And in that period, and this is kind of the crassest form of pop psychology, but nonetheless there does seem to have been an evolution in his thinking about what he stood for. And when he came back, after his time, not exactly in the wilderness, but in the office next door, to his next presidential term, not only did he come back to mass public protests, which he felt had been assisted and encouraged by the West, if not actually orchestrated by the West, but also, too, I think, a new sense of what he was about. It's interesting, talking to some friends who are historians at Moscow State University, saying that it's all kinds of sort of presidential awards and such, like, and usually Putin staffs out those events. But if it's given them historians, we know the history is one of the few things Putin reads, then Putin actually tends to do it himself. And he invariably asks the same question of people he's awarding. In a hundred years' time, how will they be writing about the need? Well, first of all, what an uncomfortable question to be asked by the virtual despot of your country. But secondly, again, it does give us some sense of where his head is at. I think he is now looking much more at this issue of legacy, and his legacy is clearly that he is the man who will actually bring Russia back to where it was. His first two presidential terms were about restoring central power to a country that was coming dangerously close to him, if not being a failed state, now it is about restoring Russia's position in the world outside. And that means, basically, demonstrating that Russia is a great power. Of course, Russia is not a great power in any of the objective standards. This is a country with, depending on how you count it, an economy somewhere between the size of Italy and Spain. Speaking as a half Italian, I think it's fair to say that perhaps with the exception of the French at the moment, no one really cares too much about Rome's position on all the major global issues. But that doesn't matter. Militarily, Russia has modernized its forces quite effectively. But we should remember that European NATO has more ground troops than the Russians do, even without factoring in the Americans and the Canadians. Now, again, they're not all sitting on the border, they're not all necessarily configured for the right kind of operations, but nor are the Russian forces. You know, I'm not trying to say that the Russians are inconsequential, but I'm saying they are not a great power. Soft power, likewise. There are many would-be strongmen around the world who want to be more like Putin. But there's not many countries where people are sitting there thinking, our country will be so much better if it was more like the Russian Federation. On all of these indices, Russia is not a great power. But as far as Putin is concerned, I think this reflects the fact that Putin is not just, in some ways, the last proper generation of Homo sovieticus, someone who really had sort of formative times in Soviet era, but he's also that kind of immediate post-imperial. Which, again, I say this is someone with a British passport. It seems to take quite a while for a country to get over the fact that it's no longer a great world spanning empire. We shouldn't be surprised if actually Russia's still having trouble coming to terms with it. So Putin wants the world to accept that Russia is a great power. Because remember, politics is all about perception. You are a great power because people treat you and regard you as a great power. But his notion of great power is a very 19th century one, I would say. It's not about dynamic technology and interconnection and soft power and so forth. A great power has a sphere of influence, which I think he regards as basically the other post-Soviet revolution of the Baltic states. A great power has a voice and that means a veto in all of the major issues facing the world. And ultimately a great power has a kind of get out of jail free card. He doesn't want to see international structures and norms necessarily destroyed. But he feels that when Russia wants to, it can ignore those rules and norms. Why? Because he feels that's what America does. And he feels, well, that is his model of how great power is. Now, obviously the only way he can get these things is if he manages to persuade us to allow him that. And therefore I think this is the nature of the struggle. This is not him, this is a very post-ideological struggle. This is not someone who is thinking, oh, I need to spread my message. He does not want to see, I don't know, Russian orthodoxy extended to the French. He does not care about what social models of organisation are applied in Scandinavia, in and of themselves. Instead, he is trying to find ways of persuading forcing us to treat Russia in that light. Or at the very least to ensure that we cannot prevent him from asserting Russia's great power status. So, the three hybrid wars that I want to talk about. First of all, when we talk about hybrid war in the West, we tend to think of this terrible thing that the Russians have created, and Crimea was the first expression of that. Well, it's quite interesting that what is the Russian phrase for hybrid war? It is, They just simply translated it across. Why? Because as far as they're concerned, hybrid war was a Western invention that they face. They look at the Arab spring risings. They look at the coloured revolutions that took place in post-soviet space. They look at what happened in Ukraine with the Maidan. And instead of seeing these as the upwellings of public resistance and often repulsion about corrupt, inefficient and unresponsive or autocratic regimes, they see the dread hand of Langley. They see these as essentially run operations. Now, obviously, they're wrong. I mean, I'm not saying that the Americans didn't often give some of these helping hands and very much encourage them. But the idea that actually the Americans can generate these mass popular uprisings is nonsense. But let's be honest, it's a very human thing. We always have a tendency to assume the other side is that much bigger, tougher, smarter and better sort of able to manage things than we are. We know our own flaws. The tendency to think of Putin is this master geopolitical strategist continually looking at the global chessboard and running things. So too, the Russians actually have a sense of the West and above all, the Americans are like that. So their notion is actually that hybrid war is something that they face the risk of. And that's one of the reasons why they are so paranoid about any expression of political opposition. Why they were so concerned about the public protests that took place when Putin came back to the presidency. Not just simply because they saw this as signs of the Russian people or elements of the Russian population being fed up, but because they regarded this as some kind of evidence of regime change plots from the West. So, I could go on about that, but I'll leave it there. So first of all, the Russians believe that they face this threat. What are the consequences? If we look at what the military look at. The military, like militaries all over the world, are basically looking at how in the modern era you can support the activities of your warfighters with all kinds of non-military means. Propaganda and information operations, cyber attacks and such like, again, this is not anything special to the Russians. They might have their own particular twist on how they would do it, but if you look at, for example, take a look at Desert Storm, the invasion of Iraq, that had a massive information operations component to try and get Iraqi soldiers to defect or surrender or just simply keep their heads down and so forth. Of course, it's how you find wars these days, just as you always have. Now, we know a lot about what the Russian military is doing because they have a tradition of relatively open discussion within their own press. When you have a military structure which is over a million men and a few women strong, when you have about 40 different academies and other education institutions you can't keep all your discussions behind closed doors, tank top secret and so forth because this is going to drive your doctrine, your procurement, your training, everything. So we look at that and we see what the military are planning and we think, okay, that's it. But also, the military is looking at these kind of operations because they think they're going to face them. There was a particular sort of notorious now article in a Russian military publication called the Military Industrial Courier which, trust me, is as exciting a page turner as it sounds in which the chief of the general staff, Gadassimov or more likely the people in his team who actually write these things had this article based on a speech he'd given about non-military means and just how powerful we are in the modern world. And we, of course, jumped on that as a ha Gadassimov is saying this is what the West does, but probably this means this is what the Russians will do. Well, no, actually this is a military man who's trying to reassure the Kremlin. Remember, if you're the chief of the general staff, you're not the foremost soldier. You are also the military's main political advocate. You are constantly struggling for budgets and purpose and so forth. And this is the time when the Kremlin was getting worried about the thought that it would face Gibridnaya Voina from the West. And so, Gadassimov was writing and talking about this because he was trying to say, don't worry guys, we've got a plan. I mean, it's a very Russian plan. It basically involves once anyone tries to do this we will blow the hell out of them. But the point is it means that that's why he was talking about it. He was talking about it because his political masters were worried and he didn't want then thinking that the military could not handle this particular potential threat. So in other words, this was his way of saying, we've got a plan, so keep spending the money on us so we can buy all our shiny new toys. Which is after all what all generals, all good generals want. But the trouble is we focused on that in the West. And we focused on the model of Crimea, particularly. So whenever we see all these non-military disinformation and information operations and espionage and subterfusion and such like, it's always with the, okay, when do the troops come though? This is surely just about preparing the battlefield to the inevitable day when the little green men, remember those commandos without the insignia come over the border. Well, I don't think the little green men are ever going to come. And the reason for that is the third hybrid war. This is what I want to end with. The military is subordinated to the civil authorities. True in almost every country. But actually Russia has a particularly strong tradition of that. You know, the Communist Party was very, very keenly aware of the need to control the military. And we see that still today. It's much, much harder to tease out the views, but if you look at the national security establishment, particularly within the apparatus of the Security Council, the Presidential Administration, which are the most powerful institutions in Putin's Russia, because basically they are Putin's personal chancellery. There's a very different debate. There they say, look, in the modern world war has become incredibly expensive. And not just in terms of cash, though obviously modern weapons are ridiculously expensive, but also politically. Doesn't matter if you're in Russia or in the West, we have become very casualty averse. And that's a good thing, I think. The days when you think, well, we'll have a war and we'll say, okay, we'll lose a few thousand soldiers, but it's all right, they're all working class boys and there's always more of them breeding in the cities. We've gone beyond that. A single casualty, a single reversal can actually turn the whole nature of the political debate about a military operation. But also we live in an interconnected world, increasingly so. Global supply chains, ownership chains, as well as the effect of the internet and so forth. And so what the national security establishment in Russia is thinking is, look, we can use these non-military means not to prepare the battlefield for when we send in the soldiers, but as an alternative. But actually we can get at political gains through using these means. And what do they want? They want to divide us. They want to ensure that within countries and between countries that we are so divided that we cannot muster the kind of unity and the cohesion that is needed to challenge what Russia is doing. They want to distract us. There is a sense, looking not without reason, the western democracies are essentially attention deficit disorder societies. But today we're really concerned about this issue and we think it's really important that, oh, shame! Something else crops up and distracts us and the whole sort of political debate has moved. It's one of the things that they've won, and they're very, very keen to push the whole issue of migrants to say, no, no, no, the real threat to Europe comes from the south, it comes from the Middle East. Russia and then nothing going on there, really. And the third thing they want to do is to demoralise us to make us feel that either Russia is too dangerous, too worrisome, too unpredictable and that therefore rather than making a stand against Moscow we need to be making a deal with the Russians. Because this is how the Russians are going to get what they want, by convincing us that we need to basically give them something in order to reduce the challenge. So, in conclusion, this for me is actually the threat we face. Not that the Russians are ever going to roll their tanks into the Swalki Gap and, you know, this is not going to be a re-run of kind of NATO nightmares. Nor that the Russians are going to try and reshape our political systems or whatever. They don't really care about how they are going to go except when it comes to Russia. What we will see is a multi-vector campaign without any real clear central guidance, without any sort of message except just simply to find any opportunities in order to distract, divide and demoralise us. In the hope that either exactly we will basically become so confused that we are not able to do anything about what Putin is doing for us close at home, such as in Ukraine, or that we will actually feel that we need to have some kind of Yalta 2.0, some kind of deal that basically tells him, you can have what you want, just stop bothering us, in which case I think he will be delighted. Anyway, I will stop there and then throw it open.