 Hello everyone, welcome to this webinar on the war on Ukraine explained more from our experts organized by the School of Security Studies of King's College London. We're going to discuss the latest developments about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Before we start, why more from our expert? I just wanted to remind you that this is the follow-up to a previous event at the School of Security Studies has organized very successfully that we held on March 8, two weeks into the war. At the time we were about, yes, about 16 days into the war and with some colleagues who are talking again on this panel today, we tried to address some very broad, very big question, especially because we still lack some important information at the time. Some of the questions addressed were whether Russia could achieve a military victory and what eventually would have also achieved a political victory, but also what could a political victory look like in the mind of Putin or from a Russian perspective. And other aspects such as was the role of China in this crisis and the reasons why Russia had invaded Ukraine. Perhaps this is a question that is still debatable today. And today we're going to answer a set, perhaps a set of more specific questions, although still very, very important questions, not less important than the ones we tried to answer more than a month ago. Yes, and I'm going to, I think I'm going to introduce my colleagues from the School of Security Studies. You're going to hear them in the following order. We will start from Dr. Christak, who is a reader in Strategic Studies, followed by Professor Tracy German, Reader in Conflict and Security, Dr. Ruth Dayermond, Senior Lecturer in Post-Soviet Security, followed by Philippa Lenzos, Senior Lecturer in Science and International Security, and also Co-Director of the Center for Science and Security Studies. Last but not least, we will hear from Dr. Maria Varaki, Lecturer in International Law. So I'd like to get going. We have a pretty busy agenda. We will spend the first about 40 minutes hearing from my colleagues. And then we will follow up with a Q&A. We have already received some very interesting questions that we will then throw at our speakers. That said, I'd like to hand it over to Dr. Christak. Chris, you have, like everyone, you have four to five minutes to discuss your takeaway points about the last few weeks about the war. Thanks very much, Sine. Yes, so I guess what interests me about the war in Ukraine amongst other things would be the extent to which the war that we've got isn't the war that was expected before it started. So the extent to which the war in Ukraine has undermined, I think, some of the assumptions about future war that were made prior to when the conflict started. So what's interesting, I think, from my perspective is that before the war started, dominant views on what future conventional war would look like were shaped by essentially net-centric perspectives. So if you look in the West, the United States, India, China, actually, also in Russia as well, the vision that was had a future war was a war that was essentially likely to be net-centric. In other words, it was a war that was likely to be rapid, decisive, fought by agile network militaries in a maneuverist fashion, one that would probably be resolved quickly and without a significant amount of protracted warfare and attrition. And of course, when you look at the conflict that we've got, that's not what we've had. What we've had is something that is slow, brutal, and very attritional. And in explaining why we've got that sort of war, and not the one that was expected by many experts, I think it's worth looking at just two explanations briefly as to why this might be, because it says something, I think, about the general problems of prediction and predicting future conflict. So the first, the ideas of Stephen Biddle in his book, Military Power. And in that book, what Biddle tries to do is to explain the key sources of military effectiveness. And his argument essentially is that military effectiveness isn't about technology, which is important, of course, because the Russians have invested heavily since 2008 in new kinds of technology. And it's not about numbers. It's about what he calls modern system force employment. His point is basically that, especially at the tactical level, military effectiveness is about your capacity to conduct, he calls it modern system warfare. It is that system which allows you to operate in the face of the lethality of modern firepower. So this includes things like combined arms, firing movement, infiltration tactics, dispersal, these kinds of things. And essentially, the better you are at that than your opponent, the more effective you are tactically, irrespective broadly of the sorts of technologies that you have. And so I suppose when you look at the way in which the crane conflict has progressed, what you see in terms of an explanation for the sort of war that we've got is the fact that the Russians have, despite their investment in high technology, have simply been very poor, surprisingly poor, at the basics of modern tactical land combat, combined arms, firing movement, dispersal, these kinds of things. So there is a basic and interesting, I think, explanation there for the character of the conflict we've had. And the second point I wanted to touch on is another explanation, which I think is relevant to the character of the conflict that we've seen. And that's Tony King's arguments about urban warfare. At his book, Urban Warfare in the 21st Century. And his point is that the future war, and I think Ukraine is a very interesting example of this, future war is likely to be highly urban in character. So arguments that the future war is likely to be maneuverist, quick, decisive. He argues that's mistaken. Maneuver warfare, in fact, he argues is dead. And his point is it's not based so much on demographics. It's not based so much on the idea that the more and more populations will live in urban areas. His point, which I think is particularly relevant to the Russian military, is simply that modern militaries are small, even the Russian military is small. You no longer have mass armies, like the Soviet army from the Second World War, where you had millions of troops and you could form continuous front. Instead, relatively small modern militaries do not have the manpower to occupy large areas of ground. So modern warfare, you have to focus your efforts. You have to focus on the key political and economic terrain, and that is cities. And that is the problem that the Russians have found themselves in. So they've been a, in some senses, a low competence military, tactically, but a military which has found itself of necessity, focused on one of the most demanding activities in land warfare, which is trying to take cities. And so I think both of these, both of these explanations, I think are useful in understanding how we've got the character of war that we've got. So it's interesting, Ukraine war is very different from the sort of war that was expected before this broke out. And I think as a war, it provides a lot of support for some of the key arguments for why these sort of net-centric approaches to thinking about the future are problematic. So I think I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you very much, Chris. I think it's very interesting, this tension that we often, in our job, come across between assumption and expectations on the one hand, when starting strategy, and on the other hand, the reality of war. And there seems to be, it seems to be one of the most important lessons so far in this conflict. Right, I'd like to hand it over to Professor Tracy German now. Tracy. Thanks, Zino. And thanks, Chris. I'm going to build perhaps on what Chris was talking about there and the unexpected nature of this war. And I think from a Russian perspective, it's been very unexpected. If you look at their writings on future war, the changing character of conflict, this is absolutely not the kind of conflict that they foresaw. And I think we saw in the initial days of this invasion when they sought to use missile strikes against Ukrainian cities, against critical military infrastructure backed up by a show of force. And the hope was that that would lead to a very swift Ukrainian surrender. Now, obviously, that's clearly not what's happened. And certainly hasn't gone the way that Putin would have hoped. We've seen, rather than the invasion triggering very swift capitulation in Ukraine and exposing divisions across NATO, it's had the completely opposite effect. And we've seen Moscow having to revise its strategic objectives on a number of occasions. I think there's a number of miscalculations the Russians made, particularly about the ability of Ukraine's defence, the ability of their military and how they would respond. This assumption that Moscow would not have to fight was clearly one of the underpinning assumptions, but also the expected Western response. I think that there was an assumption made that the West would respond in a similar way to how they responded in 2014 or even back in 2008. And I think the sinking of the Moscow couple of weeks ago, I think is highly symbolic really of the Russian military operation. The ship that was initially commissioned in the Soviet era as the Slava, the glory commissioned in the 1980s, refitted, recommissioned in 2000, so the same year that Putin came to power. And I think the fact that it was sunk apparently by Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles, which were specifically developed by Ukraine post 2014, I think it's all hugely symbolic and clearly a very big embarrassment both for the Russian military, but particularly for Putin. And we've seen reports in recent days that he's apparently lost interest in reaching any kind of diplomatic agreement and is now focused very much on seizing as much territory as possible. Now, there are some very big questions as to how achievable any of that is, particularly whether Russia has the manpower to achieve this. Manpower, not just in terms of numbers, but manpower that's capable, effective. Troop morale has been a very significant problem so far. And there have been reports over the last couple of weeks of some of the regions of Russia, places like Dagestan in the North Caucasus, where there have been a number of conscripts from that region killed, a very high number in Ukraine. And now Dagestan is starting to go, well actually, no, we don't want to be a part of this at all. And Moscow offering short-term contracts instead of conscripting people in that region. And I think this shows the impact that this is having within Russia. So there are some big question marks moving forwards about troop morale, the manpower and what Russia will be able to achieve. And whether they've solved some of these problems such as logistics. Now, logistics has been problematic for the Russian forces for years. We saw it in the Chechen wars in the 90s, Georgia 2008 as well, very similar problems to the things we're seeing now. And again, this speaks to Chris's point about this focus on technology, high technology, whilst kind of ignoring the fundamentals, the basics. And I think remains to be seen the changes that Russia seeks to make moving forwards in those areas. Certainly Lavrov's statement overnight appears to be seeking to deter the West from any further support of Ukraine. And perhaps suggests that Russia is finding itself in a very uncomfortable situation. But it felt very much like Lavrov's statement was an attempt to deter and pushing, link that with the strikes that we saw yesterday against railway hubs in western central Ukraine. I think you can see the slight shift in their approach. But as I said, many big questions about what they do moving forwards. I think I'll leave it there. Thank you, Tracy. And you just made me think of another big question which perhaps can discuss later thinking about that phrase, no plant survives the first contact with the enemy. So I wonder whether the Russians were really shocked by the challenge, the resistance that they encountered or whether if they have experienced military, they actually kept that phrase in mind. Hopefully, we will go back also to that in the meantime. We'll listen to Dr. Ruth Dayerman. Ruth. Okay, great. Can people hear me? Thank you. Yes, very well. That's good. So inevitably, I think, I'm going to end up saying many things that echo what Tracy has just said. But I think in terms of the war, the overriding headline statement, the takeaway is that this has been a catastrophe for Russia in really every conceivable way. I think I would slightly disagree that this wasn't the kind of war that we expected. I think once it became clear that Russia was planning to mount a full scale invasion of Ukraine, I think it was the direction of the war is very much as a number of us expected, because we didn't see how it would be feasible for Russia to achieve its goals. So I mean, just to touch on a few of the ways that Russia has experienced a catastrophic failure in Ukraine, clearly the losses of personnel and equipment that we've already talked about. But I mean, it's worth saying that Russia seems, from what we can tell, to have lost in two months, more men had experienced more fatalities in Ukraine than the Soviet Union did in almost a decade in Afghanistan. And of course, the war in Afghanistan was one of the many triggers for the collapse of the Soviet Union. So that clearly is going to be a concern, I think, at least in the long term, medium term, for the Russian government. But as well as just the facts, the scale of the losses, as Tracy was saying, the war in Ukraine has really exposed Russian military weakness, the failures of Russian military reform, in a way that even those of us who think about the Russian armed forces were surprised by. And the extent to which what we're seeing in Ukraine looks like a repetition of some of the most elementary mistakes in Chechnya in the mid-1990s is really quite startling. And on top of that, I think we can see the ways in which the war, because of the totally unrealistic plan to invade Ukraine in two to three days on top of the Zelensky government. Because of the way that played out, because of what it tells us about the phase of Russian military reform, really, I think the conflict has exposed the weakness of Putin's judgment and the judgment of people around him, both his judgments regarding military factors, but also political judgments. Because he entirely misjudged Ukraine, he misjudged Russian capabilities and deeply, as Tracy was just saying, misjudged the Western response. I want to just touch briefly on the consequences of this, because it seems to me that this is important, not just for Ukraine, but for the post-Soviet space more broadly. Because I think, I know there's a lot of discussion at the moment about what is or might be happening in Moldova. But the significant reduction of Russia's military capability in Ukraine and the impact on Russia's reputation as a significant military power, a power with coercive capability, I think this may well, in the longer term, actually reduce Russia's ability to coerce other states in the region, even though states in relation to which it has had coercive capability in the past. And in addition to the potential reduction in the ability to coerce states in the post-Soviet region, one of the consequences of the war so far has been the reduction of Russia's levers of influence over the rest of Europe, those that still remain. Obviously the ongoing shift, dramatic shift away from Russian energy supplies is a very significant element here. I think as well though, one of the striking things, and again to echo something that Tracy was just saying, is the way that Russia has attempted to contain Western support for Ukraine by threatening escalation or by suggesting that various Western activities imply escalation and therefore imply Russia's right to respond. And at the beginning of the war, I think we saw that having much more traction, it was causing Western states in some cases to be more cautious. For example, in relation to the original intention to transfer Polish planes to Ukraine. But in the last couple of weeks, I think that has seemed to be less effective. And actually, so one of the consequences I think is that the conflict are that Western states are simply less willing to take Russian threats of escalation seriously. I mean, not to totally disregard them, but they are becoming less effective. And the last thing I want to say very quickly before I hand on to my colleague is that I think one of the real problems for Russia in this conflict now is that one of the key determining factors is totally outside their control. And that is the level of Western military support for Ukraine. The levels of Western military support for Ukraine are absolutely staggering. The US in particular has donated or pledged billions of dollars of aid since the start of the conflict. And if Russia can do nothing to prevent that, it's very hard to see how Russia is actually going to be able to defeat Ukraine militarily as long as that supply keeps going. So I'll stop there. Thank you very much, Ruth. And listening to you and to what our colleagues discussed previously, one really wonders whether Russia is whether we're talking about a great power here. And in fact, later on in the Q&A, one of the questions that we're going to discuss is whether the West has overestimated Russia over the last 10 to 20 years. Nonetheless, Russia still has, I believe, some very important assets, both in terms of weapons and in terms of influence in international law. And this is something we're going to hear from the next two speakers, if not now, certainly in the Q&A. So I would like to hand it over to Dr. Philippa Lenzos. Philippa. Thank you so much. It's good to be with you. It's great to hear what colleagues have got to say. And it's great to have so many of you with us in the audience. I'm going to move our discussion a little bit from the big picture down to a smaller aspect of the war, essentially. I specialize in biological weapons and in biosecurity. And it won't have escaped anyone's notice that Russia accuses Ukraine of working on biological weapons supported by the United States and other countries. So my usually very, very niche area of expertise has recently gotten a fair amount of attention. And here, too, I would just say, you know, it's interesting that we've also here not got what we sort of expected. We've got some things we expected, but other things we haven't, and I might come into come on to those a little bit later on. But for the record, and as I told delegations to the Biological Weapons Convention at the UN in a King's led statement by international biosecurity experts a couple of weeks ago, there is no evidentiary basis to suggest that Ukraine's biological activities support anything other than peaceful purposes. Ukraine carries out biological research for legitimate public health and veterinary health purposes. And it does so transparently and in full compliance with its legal obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention. Now Russia's allegations about biological weapons labs on its borders tie into a long history of false claims and what have been called active measures, and that stretch back to, you know, decades to the very early years of the Cold War. And many of you will be, I can talk more about that, but many of you will be familiar with this story that HIV, which causes AIDS did not actually jump over to humans from nonhuman primates in Africa, but was in fact an American biological weapon developed in the labs at Fort Detrick. So that's one of the more well known Russian disinformation campaigns. And there have been many others, several of which involve biological labs. And there are lots of parallels between these past disinformation campaigns and the content and the tactics that we're seeing in Russia's current disinformation campaign about biological weapons. But there are also some significant differences. And key here is that the disinformation today is being delivered from the highest political levels. So you've got Putin saying this, you've got Lavrov saying this, you've got General Igor Kirill saying this, who's head of the Russian NBC, then Nuclear Biological and Chemical Specialist Forces saying this, you've got, you know, the Russian ambassador to the UN saying all of this. And in addition, you're also seeing the disinformation campaign being delivered to the highest international political level. So it's being put in front of the UN Security Council. It's being put in front of the UN General Assembly. It's not just as it was in the past being put out in obscure media outlets in the hope that it'll get picked up by the Western press. It's very front and center in the highest political fora that we have. We're also seeing, and this is another difference to what we've seen before, that the disinformation is being supported by far-right conspiracy theorists in the UK, which are providing this kind of immediate echo chamber on social media and enabling the disinformation to spread that much faster. So the disinformation is being spread incredibly quickly. And finally, a key difference today is that China is very much on board with this messaging. So China is reinforcing and amplifying the messaging or the disinformation about US overseas bioweapons facilities and activities. Yet despite their, you know, outrageous falsehoods, and this is another almost unexpected aspect of the disinformation campaign, the evidence that is being provided is complete rubbish. It's not going to convince anyone, you know, who is not going to convince anyone who isn't ready to be convinced by, you know, non-evidence basically. It's surprising how poor the stories are and how poor the evidence is. But despite their outrageous falsehoods, the unsupported allegations shouldn't be dismissed as inconsequential, because they muddy the waters, they make it harder for non-experts to distinguish between true and false narratives. The disinformation could also further escalate the war in Ukraine. We've already seen, just in the last few days, you know, threats of potentially other unconventional weapons, so nuclear strikes, for instance, this is in the last few days. And a little bit longer, you know, there's been this undercurrent of nuclear posturing. The disinformation could also create perceptions that the taboo against biological weapons no longer holds. We've got an international treaty that completely prohibits biological weapons. Pretty much all states in the world are signed up to this treaty. And biological weapons have never been used in war, but this disinformation could kind of normalize the idea of biological weapons. They could, we are talking, there's now so much talk about biological weapons. There are, we do run this risk that it becomes almost normalized, and people think that that is an acceptable form of warfare. And if unanswered, these false allegations can linger and they can take on malevolent life of their own that damages the international treaty regime that we have against biological weapons. So that's what I wanted to say. Just one final thing in terms of this expected and unexpected or just a couple of points that came to mind as my colleagues were speaking about this in my own niche area of biological weapons. And that is we've, in my own field of biological weapons, what we talk about a lot is what are developments in science and technology potentially enabling for biological weapons. And the policy gaze has been primarily focused on well, what do these advances enable? What kind of extremely sophisticated weaponry could be coming out? I think the war in Ukraine has been a little bit of a reality check that actually we might be looking at very, very low tech solutions. And again, we've had this when it comes to bioterrorism too. You know, it's very simplistic, very low tech weapons that eventually are used. It's not the very sophisticated gene edited, perfectly targeted, you know, sort of weapon that's coming out. So I think that's an interesting aspect that's unexpected. And the other is because of all of this disinformation, what we've seen is a new sort of strategy on the Western side from the G7 and from NATO around extreme transparency. So we've heard these expectations that there could be or warnings that there could be these false flag operations using unconventional weapons or chemical or biological weapons. And in an effort to increase the political costs of using these weapons, a lot more information has been shared about that potential. And so I think that's another sort of unexpected aspect from my side. All right, I'll leave it there for now. Thanks very much. And back over to you, Zino. Thank you, Philippa. And this is for me at least also a reminder of how many levels of analysis, many facets, many, yeah, how multifaceted this war and this war in particular and how many levers of power as well are involved in a war like this one. And as I said before, last but not least, we listened to Dr. Maria Baraki, who I forgot to mention before is also co-director of the World Crimes Research Group. Maria, over to you. Thank you very much, Zino. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be in this panel with other experts from other disciplines to talk about the current developments in Ukraine. Well, yes, you said I'm the international lawyer, so I'm the lawyer of the department. And I will try to provide you with my own takeaway from what's going on the last six weeks. So about two decades ago, a very famous female scholar of international law from Australia, Professor Hillary Childsworth, who happens to be now a judge before the ICJ, described international law as a discipline of crisis. She said that international lawyers, we need a crisis. We thrive in crisis because it's an ontological issue for us. If there's no crisis, what's the point of international law? So having said that, at the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, one of the questions among scholars and friends was, what does that mean for international law? Is that the death? You see, we're always overdramatic because we want to give a special importance to our discipline. Is it the death or is it the revival of international law? Having said that, I would like to say that after almost six weeks, I think the Russian invasion in Ukraine, despite all expectations and assumptions that go back to Chris' initial introduction, actually highlighted once more and reminded us of the limits and the prospects of international law. That international law does not operate in a vacuum and international law is very much interrelated with international politics, but still there are prospects, but we shouldn't forget its limits. Now, why all this fuss about international law? Because yes, it may sound very cliche, but the Russian invasion is the flagrant violation of international law. The gravity of the violation of international law of every aspect of international law I teach in the module, international law and war, is there. So from the prohibition of recourse to force, the initial one, to the content of hostilities, international humanitarian law and violations of international humanitarian law, to serious violations of human rights law. And I'm not talking about only the right to life or the right not to be tortured, but I'm talking also about social and economic rights. And this is something we shouldn't forget. We moved to international refugee law with a massive force displacement, the fastest exodus after World War II, at least on the European continent. And of course, at the end, last week, everybody asked me, what about international criminal law? Will Putin be prosecuted? When will he be brought before a court? Is that possible? When can we arrest them? Speaking of war crimes, who can forget or not be shocked with the images that we all show about a month ago come from Butcha and the images and the testimonies we have and the evidence we have every single day, every single day from areas where the Russian forces used to control and then they had to withdraw. So let me give you briefly my own take and I will say three points here. So the first one, one can observe a hyperactivity, first of international lawyers in the national institutions. It's unprecedented, I would say coordinated activity of every single forum, legal forum, or multilateral forum. So on the international legal front, we have the international court of justice being involved from the very first days of the conflict. We have the international criminal court immediately in opening the prosecutor opening investigation on the territory of Ukraine. We have the United Nations with the monitoring mission, the human rights monitoring mission already in Ukraine since 2014. We have the OIC, we have all the issues, all the bodies, all the organs of the UN from the security council to the secretary general and who can forget the general assembly with the uniting for peace resolution. So we have really something which is for me at least during the last conflicts we have experienced and I'm talking about after Iraq, I'm talking about Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, this is an unprecedented activity. So from one side we have a hyperaction among lawyers, diplomats, and international institution. From the other side, it's the first time I have heard so much an invocation of international law. Before that international law kind of didn't exist. Now every talks speaks about international law. Political leaders from the West, you know, they talk about the violation of international law. President Putin himself in his initial statement say, who are you to point the finger on me? You did the same thing not to forget Iraq. You violated international law. You cannot come back and tell me you cannot violate international law. And then after a couple of weeks we had invocation of war criminal. They call him a war criminal. President Biden call him a war criminal. People started talking about atrocities, atrocities that need to be investigated and people have to be prosecuted. And very recently we even had the word genocide by some political leaders. So we see it from one side hyperactivity of fora and actors. From the other side, a hyperinvocation of international law. Most of the time without actually knowing what they are talking about. Because, you know, when someone makes a reference to genocide, he needs some legal advisors to tell him, okay, you know, be a little bit careful what you talk about. And the third activity that we notice is that we go back and reopen and re-discuss things, you know, that we thought that would never be discussed again or it's a vicious circle, the veto. As we talk today at the General Assembly, there's a draft proposal about the veto power of the five permanent members of the Security Council. The draft proposal was endorsed by Liechtenstein, yes, okay, Liechtenstein and some other countries. The United States supported this. The US, the France, the UK supported this draft proposal. And the idea is that the five permanent members, when they exercise the veto power, they need to justify why they use the veto power. So, okay, it is a General Assembly. Most likely nothing will happen, but we shouldn't underestimate, you know, the semiotics, the symbolists, that we open the discussion and the conversation about things that we thought would never happen. So, to finish my last comment, I would say my take from these six weeks and more is that we see the language of international law to be used and abused, okay. This is not the first time that we see the language of international law to be used and abused, but also on a more positive note, I would say that, unfortunately, this conflict, this invasion, the invasion, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, reminded us that international law can be both a tool for facilitating the interests of powerful states, but at the same time can be a tool for accommodating the interests of the weak states and the weak ones and the vulnerable people. And I would like to say and I would like to hope that this time we will use some components of international law at least to help some of these people who found themselves in the conflict. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Maria, and thanks everyone. We have received a few questions ahead of these presentations and I've tried to organize them, to match them with the air of expertise of the speakers. Hopefully, by the time we finish this session today, over the next 45 minutes, I managed to ask a couple of these questions to each of you. We'll start from Maria who has some important commitments, so we'll leave us soon. There was a question, Maria, going back to this idea of the law being only for the week. I think it's interesting because we have been, it seems that from a military point of view, Russia hasn't really performed like a great power. That's what we've heard so far, but actually there's not just the military lever of power. There's many other levers as we also heard. So somebody's asking, is law only for the week and can a great power just take an action and so by taking that action set in a precedence and then they can get away with that. And somebody else is also asking, at the end of the day, law is heavily influenced by politics. Would you like to add anything in this regard, in addition to what you have already said? Yes, thank you very much. Well, I'm not a black letter lawyer far from that and law is very much influenced, law is shaped by international, by activities, interstate and human activities and shapes as well. Human activity is a social phenomenon. Law is not separate from other social phenomena, but I really think that there is something distinctive about law. Law is not the synonymous with international politics. At the end of the day, as I say, law is a language, is a language that communicates, that operates as a path of communication. And based on this path of communication, we can find some common points. Now we will see what we have seen is that no one wants to be considered a violator of international law. If law didn't matter at all, it's naming and shaming, they wouldn't even care. Russia tried to justify the initial invasion using some legal arguments. Of course, all of them do not, they failed, but they use a language of international law. And when they talk about genocide or war crimes, President Putin was very, very upset. You know, he denied that and the others, they say, we are not that. So having said that, also, we shouldn't forget, as I said before, that the indeterminacy of international law allow it to become a tool for bad and good purposes, you know. So we have situations where law can accommodate, as I said before, you know, the interests of the powerful, but can limit also the activity of the powerful. And one last second, the Russian invasion in Ukraine, because we have this, what about this argument, you know, you cannot point the finger to us. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a good reminder to many other states to reconsider the activity before they invade illegally countries, violating international law, because the more you violate a rule of international law, the more you contribute to the erosion of this rule. And I'm talking about the Iraq invasion of 2003 here. Thank you. Thank you. So as a follow up to that, following some of the questions we received, do you think there is enough, can Putin be put on trial for less war crimes? Well, it's not an unlikely scenario, but it's very difficult for the time being, under the current circumstances, we have to be realistic and honest, you know, unless there is a change of circumstances, and we all understand what is the change of circumstances, it's very unlikely. However, I believe that there will be a risk warrant against, a risk warrant against senior officials. And I think it will be very difficult for them to travel outside Russia. That's my take here. Thank you. Thank you, Maria. Before we let you go and perhaps we broaden the focus of the discussion again, there was, we received very specific questions, very interesting question. The person who sent it says, what do you think can be done to ensure that disabled people will be better protected and taken care of in similar situations? I don't want to occupy, I'm not saying that it's just because I have to catch a flight, and that's why I'm responding now. I don't want to be rude. That's okay. The international lawyer, you see, the international lawyer comes and kicks in and says, international law matters now. No, well, human rights law does not stop operating during war, during an armed conflict. So we have particular human rights provisions, apart from international humanitarian law that has particular provisions for protected people, you know, vulnerable people. Also, we have the UN Convention for the Rights of People with Disabilities. So we have the framework. The issue is not the framework. So when I hear people just talking about more law or more institutions, I say, no, the answer is not more law. The answer is, how do we use that? How do we apply the particular legal framework? We have provisions, unfortunately, from the reports we have on the ground, and I expect my colleagues to know more or more reports. There are reports that we have indications are very, very cautious, and I would say prima facie evidence of war crimes that definitely we have serious violations both of international humanitarian law and a human rights law from all sides. I would say from the Russian forces, far more. But for example, we have prisoners of war, we have things, ugly things taking place. The law is there, people can be protected, they are not protected. Simple like that, because they do not comply with the legal requirements. Maria, thank you very much for joining us. I can stay 10 more minutes. I'm curious about my colleagues, you know, so thank you very much, and I apologize for having to leave earlier. Thank you. And in fact, I was going to suggest that I'd like to ask Christak a question. However, if others in the panel feel that they have something to add, please to just open your microphone and intervene. Chris, I understand from what we've heard today that obviously Russia is struggling, but then somebody is asking, who is winning this war? Even if Russia was performing poorly, perhaps he's still winning the war, and does it matter that he's performing poorly towards the military victory? Who is he winning for you? That's the question. Yeah, no, that's an excellent question. So one of the interesting things about conflicts is the extent to which you make the decision to go to war, presumably because you think that going to war will help you achieve certain sets of political goals. You often find in conflicts that your goals have to change, because sometimes actually you achieve far more than you thought that you could. More becomes possible. Often, of course, it's the reverse, and that's a situation that they may put in finds himself in, but it is actually entirely possible for him to still win. It depends on the extent to which he can redefine the goals. So it's clear that he's done that, and picking up on points that both Tracy Ruth made, it is absolutely clear that he has adopted now a more limited set of political objectives surrounding occupying eastern Ukraine and areas around Kyrgyzstan. There are also other objectives, though, which he's trying to achieve. One of the things about going to war is it activates new objectives, latent objectives that you didn't think that you had, and the particular problem for Vladimir Putin is the extent to which the war has activated objectives surrounding the protection of his credibility and prestige and Russia's credibility and prestige. So it is entirely possible for Putin to fail in terms of not getting the initial objectives that he wanted, and I think that that's something that he's not going to get, but there are other objectives that he can achieve. So in terms of, I think this was Ruth's point about Russian prestige is a great power. You can reinforce that by persevering with military operations and demonstrating Russian resolve. In some senses, Putin has made redefining objectives and protecting his prestige and credibility slightly easier because, of course, he has framed the war in terms of a special military operation and not a war, and he has also set about trying to create and then control the particular narrative for the Russian population. So what this means is it is entirely possible for him to win. It's entirely possible, in fact, for both Ukraine and Russia in a sense to win. What you tend to find, I think, with conflicts, though, is that ultimately victory and defeat is a matter of perception, and what matters is do key constituencies that you rely on think that you have one, and in that sense, as long as Vladimir Putin can convince the Russian population that he has achieved his goals and the extent to which he can still, through a demonstrable commitment to seeing this operation through, no matter what the cost to a certain extent, he can demonstrate Russia's resolve. He can still win. Not his initial objectives, but the new objectives. Yes. Can I? Yes. Yeah, just to build on that. I mean, I do largely agree with Chris, but I would just like to add a couple of things, really, I suppose. Can he convince the Russian population that he's won, however, he chooses to define that? Well, yes, because, as Chris was saying, I mean, Russia, the Russian kind of narrative about the war is really entirely controlled by the Russian government at this stage, and alternative points if you can get you 15 years in prison. So domestically, I think, at least in the short to medium term as possible, but I think there is a question about how sustainable a victory narrative would be once 15,000 to 20,000 bodies come back. And however, many more soldiers, it turns out to come back with very significant injuries. And the disconnect between what the Russian government is saying about casualties and what people on the ground know to be true because their sons or their brothers or their husbands don't come back alive. That has an impact on domestic credibility. And again, this is something that we saw in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, very importantly, and also in Chechnya in the 1990s. But I do think that in terms of Russia's ability to kind of coerce other states in the post-Soviet space, I think whatever happens now, Russia's credibility has been significant weakened because this was supposed to be a quick decisive victory from what we can tell of the kinds that Russia experienced in 2014 in Crimea. And instead, they've walked into a disaster entirely of their own making. And the longer they go on, the more men they're going to lose, the more equipment they're going to lose, the weaker the Russian economy is going to become. And that's visible to everyone outside the kind of media bubble in Russia. And so that clearly has an effect. It's also significant as well, because in order to sustain some kind of degree of kind of fighting capability in Ukraine, Russia has been pulling troops out of other bits of the post-Soviet space out of South Ossetia and Armenia. And so as you know, as long as Russia is having to pull troops out of these other parts of the region in order to carry on fighting in Ukraine, that sends a clear signal that Russia is not succeeding, I think. But the last thing I wanted to say quickly is, I think, one of Russia's key aims. I mean, the discussion of what Russia's aims were is slightly complicated by the fact that Putin was denied that he was going to war in the first place. But one of the things that he said repeatedly in the run-up to the conflict was that the strategic map of Europe needed to be reset. And in particular, that NATO's false posture needed to be returned to what it was before the first wave of accession agreements in 1997. And indeed, the strategic map of Europe has been reset and is being reset, but not in the way that Putin wanted. And what we've seen instead is possible, perhaps even likely, accession to NATO by Finland and Sweden. We've seen a much greater degree of kind of coherence around standing up to Russia than we have seen before. So NATO in many ways seemed much stronger than it was before, and expanding rather than contracting. So I don't see any way that that key political objective is ever going to be achievable now. Thank you very much, both. I feel like we have a slightly more nuanced picture now compared to a few minutes ago. And so I wonder whether, actually, I think this leads naturally to a question that was asked by more people about whether in the West there has been an overestimation of Russian military power. I think it is a question that makes sense, especially as I assume in the United Kingdom, a substantial amount of money spent on our military forces is also driven by the threat of Russia. Again, I was wondering if I could ask that to Chris, but in reality it is a question that probably could, where most of you, or if not everyone of you, could jump in. Chris, do you want to go ahead and then anybody else would like to follow? You know, can I jump in? Because there was a couple of things that Ruth said as well that I wanted to jump in. But this issue of whether we've overestimated the Russian military is something that's come up time and again over decades, and whether we've got our assessments right, whether the assessments are right, and the narrative around the Russian military tends to be that either awful or they're awe-inspiring. And there doesn't tend to be any middle ground, and I think that's a problem. I think part of the problem is mirror imaging, and this assumption that the Russian military works in the same way that Western militaries do, and I think that's a real problem. And I think that's something that potentially needs to change. The issue of status is all about often a perception of others, and others' perception of you can grant you a status that you don't necessarily have or deserve. But if others believe, for example, you have a very powerful military and a great power, then, you know, that goes some way to making you such. Just link to what Ruth was talking about in the strategic map of Europe being reset, Finland, Sweden pushing potentially for NATO membership. Something that we've not really isn't really being talked about much, and I think is a really interesting aspect to this conflict, both prior to what happened in February and now is Belarus, and the integration that's going on there, because that's really shifting the map on Russia's Western flank, and could, you know, I think for NATO be very significant moving forward. Thank you, Tracy. Was there anybody else who wanted to come in on these issues of overestimating Russia? Yeah, just out of point, and I think it just supports Tracy's, I think. I think it's important to draw distinction, I think, between strategic performance and strategic effect in the sense, I think we can say that Russian military power has not been adequate in terms of achieving the goals that were set for it, at least the, you know, the initial goals. In that sense, you know, it's been a poor instrument, but it has done an extraordinary amount of damage to Ukraine. It is absolutely not the case that Russia is militarily weak. It's just that the instrument that they have created is clearly not as sophisticated, as agile, as flexible as we thought that it was, and I suppose that there are a whole variety of different kinds of war that one can fight, different contexts in which one might find that the capabilities of the Russian militaries it stands now might have performed better. So I think Tracy's right in trying to avoid that, you know, the extremes. It would be wrong, I think, to argue that the Russian military were hollow legions. You know, they have had, or exercise an extraordinary amount of military power. It just hasn't been capable of achieving all the goals that the Russian states set for it. Thank you, Chris. Given that NATO has been mentioned, and given that now we are about two months into the war, I was wondering, and that's a question I was wondering if I could ask both Tracy and Ruth, but as always, please do jump in if you want to contribute. Have we seen any development in terms of the sort of political resolve within NATO? Is NATO do you have any reason why the cohesiveness that we've seen within NATO in the early days of the war has eroded or on the other hand has strengthened? I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that. Well, I think Macron's reelection will potentially, you know, that's got rid of one potential real source of, it could have been a real friction point within NATO if we'd seen the Marine Le Pen getting victory. And I think, you know, we've still seen continued cohesion to a degree, certainly far more, I think, than Moscow expected. I think what will be very interesting is the question of Sweden and Finland moving forwards and what this means. And also, you know, if we see any movement down in the Balkans area, and, you know, these are all areas of potential weakness in terms of, you know, none of these are NATO members, this issue of potential friction there. So, yeah, I think there are some friction points moving forward. But I think we've all been quite surprised by the high levels of cohesion that continued. But I'm sure Ruth has a view on that. Yeah, I entirely agree with you. I think I just wanted to pick up on something that Tracy was saying about Putin's expectations, because I think it's, it seems relatively clear, I would say, that based on, and as others have said as well, you know, based on Western responses in the past that Putin was absolutely not expecting, anything like the Western response to the invasion of Ukraine, either from individual countries or, you know, from institutions from NATO, also from the EU. And I do wonder whether the, in the war against Ukraine would have gone ahead had Putin foreseen this. I mean, counterfactual, we don't know, but, you know, built into everything that he has said about the conflict in Ukraine, both, you know, before it and subsequently, is this idea of the West divided and weak? And this is central to the Russian governmental narrative about the emerging new world order, right, the way that the world is changing. There was, just after the start of the conflict, one of the Russian news agencies published accidentally, and then withdrew a very interesting article that had obviously been written in expectation of a quick victory. I think it was published two days or three days after the start of the conflict. And one of the major kind of areas of emphasis there was on how this demonstrated that the age of the West was over, right, and then the West had failed, it was in decline, and the balance of power in the world was shifting elsewhere. And so, you know, clearly that hasn't happened. Has NATO cohesion been perfect? Well, no, but that's not really surprising if you look at the number of states and the range of their different interests. Given that, it's done a, I think, a remarkable job of holding together at some kind of consensus, roughly, on the approach to Ukraine, and clearly totally at the expectations of the Russian government. I don't think there's any chance that they were expecting the level of cohesion in the response that we've seen. Thank you, Ruf. And I think this links well to how, you know, whether NATO is, what NATO can do to reach peace, to reach a ceasefire, whether it's adopting the best possible strategy. There was a question about whether progress has been made in peace negotiations and what NATO can do eventually. I would like to ask that question, and later on I want to follow it up with a question on the implication of providing weapons to Ukraine, and I want to perhaps address that to Philippa. But what the panel thinks about whether there's been any progress in terms of peace negotiations and whether NATO is, NATO is clearly trying to fight back Russia, but can anything else be done in that regard? No, but I don't think anyone really thinks that there have been serious peace negotiations to progress. There has been no serious engagement by the Russian government, as far as we can tell, with peace negotiations. So it's been the theater of negotiations designed to do various things, perhaps to create pauses while we deployments, reinforcements take place, or to shift the kind of international narrative about Russia's role in the war. But nothing that Russia has done or said suggests that it takes peace negotiations seriously. And indeed it's hard to see how they could, given that we're the conflict to stop now. It would be very, very hard for Russia to make any claims to victory, even domestically I think. So yeah, that really. But I wonder whether you all see this tension, I see this tension between realism and idealism, right? So where there's a more realistic pragmatic approach saying that I'm acknowledging that regardless of what we do, Russia won't walk away with empty hands from this. And from a pragmatic point of view, this needs to be taken into account. On the other hand, there's a more idealist perspective where Ukraine is seen as a frontier really to to stop the spread of authoritarianism. What do you think of this completing perspective in this context? Do you reject completely the pragmatic perspective or do you think there is value in that? Well, I wouldn't reject the pragmatic perspective. But if you look at this as in terms of kind of generic problems of war termination, one of the key difficulties is that you're not likely to have any serious negotiations until both sides essentially have agreed on what the outcome of the war is going to be, that one side is going to win and one's going to lose or that they both agree they're in kind of mutually hurting stalemate. And the problem that you have, I think at the moment, amongst other things, is that both sides think that continuing to fight will improve their position. So, I mean, picking up on Ruth's point, at least they are negotiating, even if it's not serious, because one of the obstacles you often have to termination processes is that is the government lock themselves into particular kinds of rhetorical traps. We will not negotiate with them, their terrorists, they'll be on the pale or what have you. So that obviously is a key obstacle. So at least you don't have that. But broadly speaking, until you have a situation where both sides conclude that continuing to fight won't help them, we're not there, where they can both see a peace settlement, where there's the kind of minimum expectations on outcomes overlap, where both sides, both leaderships are willing to cope with the costs of peace, what will the consequences of ending this war be politically, personally, psychologically. And where both sides, even if they decide they want to stop the war, can convince key constituencies they're beholden to that ending would be beneficial. Till you have those circumstances in place, you are unlikely to end a conflict. And I think looking at the situation in Ukraine, none of those criteria has been met thus far. Thank you, Chris. And so I wonder whether, well, it sounds like this is going to continue, even if Russia was to take some control of the Donbas by 9 of May as they wish. This is going to continue anyway by the sound of it. Again, through the lenses of that idealist versus realist sort of tension, there was a question which I think is relevant to this discussion and I wanted to address to Philippa. It was about whether with the mass proliferation of weapons, including complex weapon system in Ukraine since the invasion, what sort of potential blowback can we expect in the future as this issue being fought about by the nature of suppliers? So more broadly, what are the, are there any risks in flooding Ukraine with certain weapons and a certain amount of weapons? Thanks, you know, yeah. I mean, we've certainly heard from the Russian side that there would be implications of this and that, you know, there are threats to use unconventional weapons in response. You know, we've seen this nuclear posture in these tests. So there certainly is this kind of suggestion that there would be severe blowback as you phrased it. In terms of biological weapons, I think, you know, it's unlikely that we would see biological weapons used and there are some good reasons for that. The first is that, well, there is a strong social norm against the use of disease as a weapon, not that by itself that will hinder Russia from using biological weapons. But in addition to that, there is also a pretty strong legal norm that I also talked about, you know, that's very deep-seated and has been around for decades, this complete prohibition on biological weapons. But even more importantly than both the strong social norm against these kinds of weapons and the strong legal norm against these weapons is, I think, the kind of limited military utility of biological weapons, including in the sort of combat that we're seeing in Ukraine at the moment. So, you know, biological weapons are difficult to operationalize. There are challenges with scale-up, with storage, with transport. There are challenges with delivery. The military is not trained to use biological weapons. And really importantly, you know, the effects of biological weapons are generally delayed. They're generally, you know, you don't get sick for a while. And then you've got to connect the dots that, oh, this person's sick, and it's the same reason that this person is sick, for example. And the effects can be very unpredictable. So you could, you know, they could come back to your own forces. It could spread across international borders. You know, if you're using infectious agents, they could just keep on infecting. So, essentially, they're not very useful weapons. They're very useful to terrorize people with through disinformation campaigns. But on the ground, they're not very useful weapons. Chemical weapons are a little bit different. And there are different kinds of chemical weapons, some sophisticated. We've seen Novichok, for example, some very unsophisticated low-tech, like sarin, chlorine, rather, that we've seen continually being used in Syria. I would be, I would not expect chemical weapons to be used in Ukraine, but also I wouldn't be surprised if they were used in Ukraine. But I think you've got to see, you've got to put that estimate in, or that assessment, you know, in context. What would be the reason for doing that? So, and then you've got the whole question around nuclear weapons, right? And I think we've heard a lot of discussion around tactical nuclear weapons rather than strategic nuclear weapons. And I think, again, like I was saying with biological weapons, it's dangerous to get into that discussion because all of a sudden we're normalizing nuclear weapons. And that's absolutely not something that we would want to do. So, so yes, I think there are potential consequences. But equally, we can't just hype them too much either. We've got to look at this in specific contexts. I also wanted to pick up on something that was now a comment, if it was Ruth or Tracy, who said, but who talked about mirroring, when we're talking about overestimating the Russian military and mirroring. And often in the biological sphere, we think that others will act like we will, would act with these weapons. And we've seen actually historically that that is absolutely not the case. So the others will not necessarily think of using these weapons in the same way that we would use them or in the same context, etc. And so I think it's wise to be conscious of this tendency to mirror our own logic on onto others. I had another very quick comment as well. We talked so much about Western cohesion and NATO's cohesion and all of this. And in my own area, and what, you know, what you see at the UN Security Council is very strong pushback against the Russian disinformation rhetoric by Western countries, absolutely unified and onside. But there's this huge silent majority that's not mentioning the war in Ukraine that's going on as though the, you know, with business as normal. And I think it is worth reflecting a little bit on how that is now so different. With China pairing together with Russia, the influence the two of these states have in the global south, in Africa, where they have been very active, trying to capture hearts and minds and, you know, dominate in that space. And what that means in terms of the international community, because yes, there is the Western community, but that is by no means the entire international community. So I think that it's worth just making that point. Thanks so much. Thank you, Philippa. Absolutely. It seems that the West looks increasingly united, at least on this issue, but increasingly narrow as well as the sort of, it's the G7 really. And then there is the rest of the world, at least through the lenses from the perspective of this conflict. Right, so we got nine minutes before we go. And we received two perhaps interesting, given that we are academics, interesting questions about academic education and the war. I'd like to briefly pick your thoughts. And I think we can close with these two questions. So one question is asking whether the government, British government has made use, made full use of the academic resources and all the experience that it has available and that has been developing over the last two months. And the other question was about whether the resurgent, even though we could debate whether it's the emergence of Russia, but whether the emergence of Russia should lead to better education in terms of cyber, math, physics, especially with regard to certain weapons in the UK. So STEM education, basically. What are your thoughts on that if you could share those briefly? So on the one end is the government seeking help from academics? And on the other hand, should we improve the way we study STEM education? Zino, I'll have a quick, the STEM education question is something I think that the government has been making a push on for a number of years now. And I think it's something that you see in schools, a real focus on STEM, actually almost to the negative impact on things like humanities and languages. And I think it's probably important to ensure that we are providing a very rounded education. So I think, from a STEM perspective, there's been an ongoing push for a number of years now in that. And I would suggest that we also need to ensure languages and understanding of others is also very, very important here. And from a government perspective, I think they've been making certain attempts. Yes, I think they've been engaging with academia from my perspective, absolutely. Yep, if I could just compare this to a totally agree with JC. I mean, the government understood broadly, so not just the executive, but also the legislature was giving evidence to a joint select committee yesterday, for instance, and I know other people have been doing similar things as well. But yeah, I mean, on the education issue, and then in highly agree with Gracie, one of the real problems for the UK and the US in the last almost decade now, the last eight years since Russia annexed Ukraine is that these states have realized that they don't have enough experts, they don't have enough people who can speak Russian or let alone Ukrainian, let alone other post-soviet languages, they don't have enough people with any academic background or knowledge about the post-soviet space about contemporary Russia. And that has consequences for government decision making. And there has been an attempt to address that. I mean, again, Gracie and I have both been involved in training programs, I mean, obviously, it's central to what Gracie does in other areas as well. But I think at least as much as a focus on STEM, there has to be one of the lessons of this thing has to be that we need to have more investment in history, in languages, and in area studies as well. But I guess I would say that. Thank you, Gracie and Ruth. Is there any final thoughts from the rest of the panel? Sure, I'll jump in very quickly just on that last point about actually the importance of social sciences. In the MA that I'm directing, the science and international security, there is a very big emphasis on having, you know, both expertise from the natural sciences and the social sciences. And I think that's a really important message also to get out. You need to have people who are competent in speaking across both the natural and the social sciences, but also the academic community and the policy community. There are these different languages that you can use and you need to have these people that are able to to work across these boundaries. But also, you know, what we keep seeing on the, you know, in the on the biological side, what we keep seeing with disease outbreaks, for example, let's take Ebola and in Western Africa, some years ago, what you saw was a huge impact. It emphasis on, you know, medicine and science. But actually what was fundamental was anthropology and sociology have had behavior of people. And so I think just to echo what's already been said, you know, the importance of, you know, recognizing that all of the sciences, natural and social sciences have perspectives and contributions to make to these very big policy questions. Thank you. Thank you, Philippa. And thanks everyone. I think we are going to have to call it a day. I'd like to thank all the speakers. I know you have a lot of things that you would like to share. And so I appreciate that you've been quite constrained, but you've been very, you've been very disciplined. But at the same time, I feel like we managed to cover, to move on compared to the previous debate that we had a couple of months ago and to cover a broad set of questions, although there were more questions and we might have to leave it for the next time. And indeed, Chris, you said that perhaps this conflict might carry on as long as both Ukraine and Russia find perceived that they can get away with a reasonable outcome. And so I wonder whether we might have another follow up event at some point. And thank you very much. And also thanks to those who have been listening and also especially to those who have been sending their interesting questions. Certainly they've made my job much easier and also the conversation more interesting.