 Hello everybody. I'll just allow everybody to find their chairs. I'm very welcome. My name is Barry Colfer and I'm the Director of Research here at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin. I'm really pleased to welcome you back for this IIA event and we're truly delighted to be joined today by Konstantin Egert, who will reflect on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the implications this has for Russia. Konstantin will speak for about 20 minutes before going to Q&A with our audience in the usual format. Just a very quick note that Konstantin's connection has been coming and going a little bit, so if there's a little bit of drop off over the course of his remarks, don't worry, he'll be back. As ever, during the Q&A portion of our session, please feel free to send in your questions throughout the session using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screen, and we welcome all your questions. We'd ask that you give your name and include any affiliations that you might have that are necessary and to be clear and concise as possible as you can manage with your questions. A reminder, finally, that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record and you can join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIA. I'll now formally introduce Konstantin and hand over to him. Konstantin Egart, also known as Konstantin von Egart, is an independent journalist, political analyst, and communications consultant, and both estates correspondent and commentator on Russian's affairs for Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster. From 1998 until 2009, Konstantin was senior correspondent, then editor-in-chief of the BBC Russian Service Moscow Bureau. In 2008, Mr. Egart was honored with an MBE by Queen Lizard II for his services rendered to the BBC. He was also awarded with the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of Lithuania by President Valdis Adankus. Mr. Egart, it's a real pleasure to have you here to talk about something so important and the floor is now yours. Bari, thank you very much for the introduction. And ladies and gentlemen, thanks a million for gathering here in front of your screens to listen to me again, thanks to the Institute for the Invitation. I'm honored to speak to an Irish audience and hope that we'll all work out well. Just one brief sort of note before I start speaking. Everything I say is purely a personal reflection on the Russian-Ukrainian war, on Russia's aggression against Ukraine, to be more precise. I do not speak for Deutsche Welle, I do not speak for anyone apart from myself. And so, controversial. Then it's only the controversies that I generate. And you are your most welcome to challenge me on things. And I hope I will say something that will probably sort of highlight my personal experience. I just returned from Ukraine, I returned this night traveling from Kiev to Vilnius via Moldova and I spent a week there. So that's my second trip in four months to Ukraine. I also have some impressions from that. But let's go back to the main topic, which is Russia. Now, first and foremost, what I want to say is a purely sort of military conflict that Russia wages to achieve to attain some kind of specific goals. It is, first and foremost, Putin's war for his historical legacy. And because of that, essentially the war machine and everything that happens on the front depends very, very strongly on Putin himself and his perception of how this conflict, how this aggression goes. Personally, I think that it is going to continue for as long as Putin is in the Kremlin. And actually, asking this question, what are Putin's goals? What does he want? Does he want to take Kherson or does he want to expand the corridor to Mariupol that essentially secondary to understanding that this is, for him, a war for Russia he sees as his Russia? And why so? We can discuss for a long time whether it's his KGB background, whether it's the fact that he really overread on Ivan Ilyin, Russian sort of proto-fascist 20th century philosopher, whether it's his, what I call the medieval court around him, convincing him that he is the one for Russia. But I'm absolutely certain that he's going to continue this aggression, this war until he is satisfied that Ukraine is within his grasp. Whether puppet government or totally destroyed or whatever, anything in between, but definitely until he is satisfied. And I think that here we can go to switch to or move to basically the methods. What does he hope for 18 plus months after launching the full scale invasion? And here I think we need to remember that indeed the war started in February 2014, not now. And for him, it is a continuation of plans for Putin and his regime. It's a continuation of plans they laid down long time ago. They've been probably adapting them and upgrading them, but it is a long story. We did not start on February 24th, 2022. And I think that there is definitely one calculation which the Russians had all along. And that is the demographic advantage that they have over Ukraine. We do not go, we won't go back now. I don't want to go back now to discussing why Putin didn't take Kievan in three days as he planned and what happened then. I think that these plans were already sort of upgraded and he's continuing his war of attrition against Ukraine because he counts on essentially the Russia being full times bigger in terms of population. And I think this is his main hope. And I suppose that this is something that adds up to his political considerations and his political considerations are such that he also counts on Western fatigue. He also counts on India, China and the rest of the so-called global south buying enough commodities from him to sustain his secret police, to sustain the army, to basically sustain his regime. And he also I think counts on very significant traits of the Russian society today. And I think his calculations are not, they are not silly, they are not stupid, they are reasonable. Putin presides over a society that he continuously formed in his image or rather in the image he wanted for 23 years and this shows. I know that public opinion polls in Russia are pretty risky thing to discuss but if you rely on say the Levada Center which is well I mean reasonably good even in current circumstances. Then you see very interesting trends. About six weeks ago their measurements show that about 60 percent of the population actually say they do not follow the wall. Probably 63 or something like that. And then about a month ago, three weeks ago, there is a new poll saying that I think 48 percent if not 52 percent of Russians support the wall and 20 rather supported than do not support. So it comes up to nearly 70 percent of those who in this or that way support the wall. And a normal Western mind thinks this must be some kind of contradiction. Yeah, there is not. Um, Russia society is completely depoliticized, completely atomized and when people say they do not follow the wall, it is the equivalent of saying we do not want to follow the wall because we know we can do nothing about it and because we rely on the government to tell us what to do because that's the way we are, that's the way we want to proceed with our lives. And once we are in this mode, we, you know, watch mushroom conservation videos on on YouTube or we go and, you know, to barbecue in the park or whatever, or we drink ourselves to death. But I mean, essentially we, we the Russians isolate ourselves from the reality. Of course, when the reality knocks on us with either televisions, which done in our kitchen, or an upholster calling us on the phone, we say what the government, we think the government wants us to say. And we know what the government wants us to say because we watch television, because we use Russian social media. It's not only, you know, propaganda for the old, it's not only TV that Russians consume. I mean, they consume Russian social media, which is very popular, the Russian networks, the Russian social media, like Vkontakte and Nakhlasniki and stuff like that. So telegram channels, which the Kremlin uses amazingly well to inform those who are interested in what goes on. So there is a menu for those who are interested, those who really support the wall. So such a society is easy to manipulate. I would claim, I would venture that Putin is not interested in major patriotic mobilization, because major patriotic mobilization is, as let's say the history of the great war, as well war shows in Russia, quickly turns into its opposite when bodies start to arrive on mass. And then people start asking questions, especially if they start arriving in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, places where you have enough of intelligency, enough of people who use other types of social media, places where people know how to protest. So Putin is not interested in that. He's interested in exactly the kind of society he has today. He's not going to move it right or left. You will ask, well, what about new recruits? Well, he has enough for now. He still has a significant prison population. He still has significant numbers of people in small provincial Russian towns and cities. Small in Russia is anything under 300, 250,000 people. That's usually a jump downwards in terms of quality of life, education, economic status, and so on and so forth. So he still has enough people there to learn to this war, to command to go to this war, and frankly speaking, because in Russia there is no law to speak about. He can go for a surreptitious mobilization without calling it mobilization. And I think that this is a huge element of support he has. Another thing that he has. By printing money and by using income from the export of commodities to Mr. Modi, Mr. Xi and Lula and the rest of the crew, he's basically, he's reinvented. I mean, he and his very able economic advisors reinvented Russian economy as a militarized economy. And militarized economy, let's remember the U.S. in World War II, is booming. If you look at the convoys, at figures that, okay, Russia statistics are not reliable, but they will not lie to such an extent to say it's, if it's a minus, it's not a plus. I mean, so what this data shows is that there are more jobs for people that produce this kind of rough missiles, hello, Hezbollah, drones from Papier Mashay, you know, shoelaces, movable kitchens, whatever the army needs. They're working three shifts a day. They're getting money. They're very glad. And another thing, those who go to the front, especially from these sort of this depressed regions, okay, their return in Zinkboxes, Ghrusdvesti in Russian military parlance, when they return a body. But this Ghrusdvesti returns with a bonus. The wife, the missus gets three million rubles, whatever, 100,000 euros. The sons go to the Yikaterinburg State Agricultural University, although they would never even dream of going to the local technical school. The family gets a new flat. And all the neighbors say, oh, great, Ivan Petrovich died, but remember, they see how his wife lives now. Maybe we should think about that. This is another contrast that Putin struck with the masses, and I think that that's going to hold for quite some time. This is something that will change only on two conditions in my view. Either Russia suffers catastrophic defeat, which is visible. For that, Ukraine has to take Donetsk, Luhansk, or both, or probably reconquer the Crimea. Or alternatively, you have such economic downturn because of the sanctions, because of the, let's say, sharp fall in the price of oil and gas that Putin will not be able to sustain the regime longer, which is a long shot. Now, can there be, and there's a question always, can there be some kind of internal rebellion and pre-Goshen's rebellion comes to mind? I want to stay here for a minute, too. Anyone who says Putin is sick with cancer, or Putin is going to live for another 100 years. There are five plots against Putin that are no plots. No one actually knows. Anyone who says it is either a provocateur or a retention seeker, or both. But what we do know from preGoshen's undertaking is that it did make Putin look weak. He was dithering. He appeared on television late. He delivered the rambling speech, which was five minutes of synopsis of Solzhenitsyn's The Red Will before he really switched to being Commander-in-Chief and President. Seven hours later, the same people that were ordered to arrest preGoshen and the rebellion in the body were told, well, the way we fixed everything with Lukashenko. For the regime, and by regime, I understand not Putin's close entourage, but hundreds of thousands, millions of civil servants, vice governors, vice ministers, regional FSB directors that run the country for Putin. For them, it was very clear that the man is not grasping it, and they will not forget it. In spite of the fact that preGoshen was liquidated, we don't know by whom, but the perception, general perception societies that it was Putin, the liquidation of preGoshen, I don't think it really compensated for Putin being irresolute on the day of the rebellion. Moreover, the grotesque wave liquidating 10 people with what seems to be like an army surface-to-surface missile, all in to the smarter ones, shows that the man is so desperate to look strong that probably we should suspect that in fact he's weak. You know, as Margaret Thatcher, not a very favorite person in Ireland, I know, once said, if you have to say you're a lady, you're not. So that's exactly the thing I think was put, and his vengeance, if it was his vengeance, on preGoshen. But I think it is perceived that it was him who killed preGoshen and punished him. Now that may turn off potential mutineers, but if there is some kind of anti-Putin uprising in the future, in three years, five years, tomorrow, I think that those people who go for it learn the lesson. You go all the way and never believe put, because Putin basically will lie to you. And I suppose that in terms of the future, but that's an important thing, but we're talking about today. Now, another calculation, and that is something that I bring from talking to my diplomatic sources and not only in Europe, I think another Putin's calculation is that he needs to hold on until the American elections, because no matter which administration comes after that, it will overturn the current policy of support for Europe. And I suppose that what I keep hearing since covering the NATO summit here in Vilnius is that this may come quite soon, if Joe Biden, and I keep hearing it all the time from different people in different capitals. If the current administration decides to lean on President Zelensky and force him into some kind of quote-unquote peace, or armistice, or whatever you call it, ceasefire probably the best way to call it. We can discuss it later. I do not think there is any kind of quid pro quo that Ukraine can get in such circumstances that will not satisfy Putin. Putin will satisfy with that, because he will just get time to replenish resources, to reignite or re-create maybe his networks across the globe, including here in the EU, and eventually relaunch on his quest for subjugating Ukraine. Ukrainians, and there's much talk recently, and I'm trying to come to the conclusion, that everyone's talking about Ukraine is tired, Ukraine and the Ukrainian counter-offensive is not as effective as we all expected it to be. Now, I'm not a military expert. My military experience is limited to being first lieutenant for three years during my national service. But what I can say is that I think that people in Kiev, and I understood it on my recent visit, understand perfectly well what Putin counts on, and that's demographic advantage. So I think that this use, increased use of high-tech weaponry to offset the mass, if you wish, of Russians that are taking Ukraine. I think it shows to be pretty effective. That's number one. At least it seems to be the main idea. Another thing is striking Russian mainland. I think that is a very smart move too. And the more of that, the better it is for Ukraine, because that strikes at the heart of those people, those FSB directors, those vice-governors, and so on so full that I described previously, those who are the bedrock of regime, because they have to deal with the consequences on the ground. And this is something they do not want to do. So I think that that brings the war to the attention of exactly the people that needs to be paying attention to the war, and that is the Russian bureaucracy. If the Russian bureaucracy starts sabotaging this wall, it will not be such a success. It probably will not last for long. Another thing that goes for Ukraine is, of course, motivation. Ukraine forces are better motivated to defend their motherland. However, that I can say with sort of a bit of my military experience, of course, that changes over time. As we know, even Russians that fight at the front, if they survive, of course, those who continue fighting very frequently as in other armies in history, they start fighting not so much for an idea or even for money, but for a friend, for example, that was killed or maimed. And this is a motivation at least for some. So I think that this conflict will also be won on the superiority of morale. We should not forget that. That is an important part of warfare. And I think that in this respect, to come to the conclusion, what we are looking at is essentially, and I'm not saying anything new, a competition of wills, a competition of political system that's also important. It is an open political system, maybe not a perfect one, but open political system in Ukraine in which the society is part, in many ways, of the decision making process. And a society where everything is subjugated, everything works towards the goals of the state. And the best thing you can hope for is such a level of indifference that Putin will not be able to cope with it, but we're still far away from that. I suppose that the last thing I want to say, I suppose that this is an important moment for the West in this conflict, because it is decision time, really, whether this is about international law, about the future of borders in Europe, about the future of the European Union and NATO, or whether it is only about containing Russia and making it safer for the rest of the world, i.e., okay, let's not be very harsh, Putin has nukes, so we shouldn't be too tough on him. Let us go for some kind of compromise. I think, I can imagine, and we can discuss it, arguments for this latter position, but I think Putin proved many times that he cannot be trusted. So I do not think that this kind of old ideas from 1991 about Russia should be, they should be remembered, but I think they should not be used automatically today. It's a different Russia, it's a different regime, it's very different from the Soviet regime, and we can discuss it later. So, you know, do think twice, it's not all right. Thank you very much.