 Good afternoon. Welcome everybody. I'm Mary Glantz. I'm a senior advisor at USIP Center for Russia and Europe, and I'm pleased to introduce Dr. Andrew Monahan. Dr. Monahan's research interests include Russian grand strategy and ways in war. He founded the Russia Research Network in 2006 and continues as its director. He is also a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, a non-resident associate fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome, and a global fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute here in Washington D.C. Previously, he has directed research on Russia at Oxford's Changing Character of War Center and at the NATO Defense College. Additionally, he has worked at Chatham House in the UK's Defense Academy and been both an academic visitor at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, and a George F. Kennan fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. Dr. Monahan has widely published and his books include Power and Modern Russia, Strategy and Mobilization, Dealing with the Russians, and most recently, in what we're here to talk about, Russian grand strategy in their era of global power competition. Dr. Monahan is an expert, as I said, on Russia and we're very interested in his new book, Russian grand strategy, and what that might mean for the world, peace in the world, and of course, US policymakers. So thank you very much for being here with us. Thank you, Mary, for the invitation to join you and to be able to speak with the audience here and online. Of course, when we're speaking about Russia these days and the war that is underway, we have to be sensitive to the fact that the human situation is a very difficult one. The tragedy of war is right before us once again at such a scale. And so sometimes it feels a little bit odd to be thinking about strategy and intellectual questions, perhaps. But I think given the scale of the challenge and the length and longevity of the likely challenge to the Atlantic community that Moscow is going to pose, I think it's worth us trying to think through some of the implications of how Moscow is sought to shape an agenda and what that means for its implementation. So maybe if I may, a couple of words on why strategy and what do I mean by strategy. But really I'm trying to use strategy as an intellectual framework for thinking about how we analyse and think through Moscow's activity. Here the two most important words are trajectory first, trajectory, because we're really thinking continuity and change over quite some period. This didn't start in February 2022. We can trace that back actually to the 2000s and if you want to even further. But we're also looking at power and what does that mean? So context and applicability of power is characteristics and its problems. So really with this book I was trying to aim for something of a holistic view, trying to think through some of the internal mechanisms for the creation of power and how they link with Moscow's external and international activity. Strategy also helps us to ensure that our view of Russia is not an abstract one. It populates the discussion, it's not Putin's Russia. There's a chain of command, there are people and all the problems of organising that are involved. The chain of command is really where I like to try and focus. But it's also a tool for thinking through what's universal, what we can recognise in terms of strategy. What would a British or a US civil servant or politician recognise as being good or bad strategy? What are the characteristics and what are distinctively Russian activities? So it's deliberately a multidisciplinary book. We have a geographer in there, we have an economist, energy specialist, someone looking also at Russian strategic planning and chain of command. We have a maritime specialist. So the book tries to look at these questions from a slightly different angle and comes out of it with, I hope, some useful terms of reference. So not really thinking of Russia as a great power, which we can debate all afternoon or week really, the pros and cons of that. Thinking more in terms of a global or ubiquitous power as Moscow tries to position itself. Perhaps Moscow is a polar power. It's obvious that Russia is an Arctic state, but actually its interest in the north-south connection in Antarctica also helps us to think of Russia not just east-west but north-south. Thinking about mobilisation, a term that has become very familiar over the last few months. In fact, this is something that has been under way preparation for some years already. So we look at a power in mobilisation, so purpose in strength and weakness. How do they mitigate weaknesses if possible? How do they maximise strengths? And then perhaps most importantly we also want to think of Russia in terms of increasingly becoming a seafaring power. Whereas traditionally we might think of it as a land power or a continental power and we see the war being fought primarily on land in Ukraine. We also see the maritime implications of this for the Russian economy particularly but also for Russia's conventional forces. So really that's why I look at ground strategy in this way. It's probably worth being a Brit in a US audience speaking about Russia. It's worth maybe saying, if I may, what I mean by strategy. So it's really not a goal or a plan or foreign policy. This is the creation of power. Strategy is the creation of power. It is an executive process. It is of course the linking of ways and means to political ends. But it's a means of interpreting Russia's assumptions, on which they're foresight, on which they base their strategic planning and then their implementation. So we're looking at Moscow's priorities and the problems that it acknowledges it faces. We're looking at purpose. We're looking at the dynamism to a degree of policy and the nature of course that it's both competitive and as always as everyone who's tried to do strategy throughout history in any state is difficult. Making strategy is a very difficult process. So what we're looking at is hopefully we'll talk through some of this. We're looking at foresight, we're looking at planning processes, we're looking at the chain of command, the flaws in the chain of command and we're looking at mobilization. Great, thank you. And I should remind our viewers online especially that at the end of this we'll leave time for questions and we're going to encourage questions from those viewers online as well. So just send them in. So I was struck reading this book and your previous books on the importance of understanding how Russia thinks. As an observer of Russia for years and you probably hear this a lot, in fact you go to great length in the introduction to your book to explain why you think Russia actually has a grand strategy. You can sort of get the sense looking at Russia that they stumble into things and don't seem to really, they don't, if they do have a strategy, it doesn't seem they're carrying it out well and their performance doesn't always match that. So how do you respond to those people who say that, you know, Putin especially and his government are very ad hoc and they respond to things in an ad hoc manner unprepared for it? I think this is probably one of the most important questions in trying to interpret Russian activity and when we look at the war underway in Ukraine we see two things as far as strategy is concerned. First, I'll make this clear, as I said, strategy is difficult. So the war in Ukraine is demonstrating the difficulties of the process of strategy. I see a number of people in the room who know Russian history very well as well. I mean, the problems in the chain of command and command and control are nothing new to Russian strategy. The difficulties of logistics, nothing new to Russian strategy. This again, these demonstrate and illuminate the problems of making strategy. And of course, the corrective measures in inverted commas, how Moscow seeks to reshape the system. So the creation, for instance, of sort of super management bodies like the government coordination council for the armed forces. This is how Moscow responds to failing strategy. It intensifies activities here. So in one way Ukraine demonstrates the difficulties and the flaws of strategy, but I think in other ways it demonstrates the assumptions, the agenda, the strategic planning that Moscow talks to. So I don't think that this was stumbled into. They stumbled through it. But it's not the, which is a problem of strategy, but it wasn't stumbled into as something that was necessarily unexpected. So that brings up a good question. We had an opportunity to meet with you earlier and discuss this. And the question is, how does Ukraine fit into their grand strategy? Is this something that's hurting their grand strategy, which seems to have more of a global character? Or is this an integral part of their grand strategy? Now, this is always one of those questions where the world, as I understand it, looks very different from Moscow. So we're going to try and do a cultural leap and interpret how the Russian leadership sees the world. I suppose it goes without saying that a British civilian doesn't agree with that interpretation, but I'll say it anyway. The difference in our view of this is an important one to make explicit. I think sometimes in the UK particularly, but perhaps also in the US, we see this as a war being fought out, a local war being fought out between Russia and Ukraine in Eastern Ukraine with some substantial economic impact on Europe because of the sanctions countermeasures and so on, the economic ramifications, and some wider global effects, the grain question, for instance. I think in Moscow this is seen in completely different terms. I think this is seen as a global contest in which there is currently some fighting in Ukraine. I think this is seen as part of a decade-long... They're reasonably explicit about this in their speeches and documents and planning. This is part of a decade-long struggle to reshape international affairs. So Ukraine does fit into this, and I think we can look at it as part of geoeconomic competition where really we're trying to understand how Moscow seeks to command and control commodities, transit routes and access to markets. So if we're prepared to go through a couple of cultural leaps, we find a very different perspective about how this looks in Moscow. So what does that mean then in terms of... So what is their... I mean, you've said strategy is more like trajectory and power than it is certain policies. How do they see the trajectory and what is their end point for that trajectory look like? I think this is one of those questions where we have the scope for a whole series of lectures. That's the goal. So let us start with the first part of the original strategic agenda. The original strategic agenda set out in strategy 2020 and the May decrees of 2012 and then reinforced in 2018 were in many ways to modernise Russia, to administratively and domestically modernise and strengthen the Russian state. To prepare it for what they anticipated and were explicit about anticipating was a decade through the 2020s of substantive geo-economic competition. So we see two sets of goals in many ways. One is the strengthening of the state because war is seen in Klasovitsyn and others terms of war is a revolutionary test of society. And when this strategy was being initiated, Moscow was clearly not able to withstand that test as far as they were concerned. So building straight state resilience. But the second was also to pre-position Russia over the last decade or so, economically, diplomatically and to a degree militarily as a global, a state with global interests. And I think we've seen quite a lot of that and we see the results of that since the war has been underway, the diplomatic efforts that they're making, the economic resilience, the economic connections across different regions. So we do see, I think we probably tend to see such an awful war as a cut-off point from which things change dramatically. I'm not sure this is how Moscow sees this. I think Moscow sees some of the setbacks that it's faced as denting its agenda, undoubtedly denting it, but as a reason for accelerating it too. So we see intensified activity with diplomatic activity with China, with India, with a number of other states, as you'll be aware. We see the intensification of trying to develop economic relations also further with what Moscow calls the post-West world. So a number of setbacks have have dented Russian strategic approach, but they also enforce and oblige Moscow to accept that its original idea was right and we're going to have to accelerate it. We see this in the new foreign policy concept in some senses. So, you know, this is the US Institute of Peace and we're interested in preventing, mitigating, resolving conflict. And one of the things that we try to focus on in the Center for Russia and Europe is that Russia's role in stimulating conflict globally and how we can help prevent that as policymakers understand it to prevent it. Are you sort of saying that their trajectory has conflict with the West sort of baked into it? Yes. Never ask me that. I'm afraid the answer to that I think is yes and the difficult measure that one has to come to terms with here is that this is not simply going to go away with its own accord. The struggle in Ukraine, in and over and about and with Ukraine is a very important moment in European international, in history. But this is a deliberate also explicit statement by Moscow that it competes with and in many ways rejects the Euro-Atlantic value system. Many of our policies, this is not just about NATO enlargement at all. This is almost all of our policies and sees a very different world. So really strategy in some senses, the interesting bit I hope from this is to think about Moscow's foresight. And for years already it's four main scenarios have all been very pessimistic. All anticipating warfare and conflict in this decade. So for us, the first part is to start interpreting Moscow's foresight more effectively. It's really noticeable, if I may just add, it's really noticeable how differently our foresight projections look, US government and British government foresight projections out to 2030-2040 quite often seen no Russian role at all. And if they did, this was before the full scale invasion, but if they did see it, it was Moscow having a change of leader and acknowledging that it hadn't been right and therefore seeking reconciliation with the West. This was one out of the five scenarios. In others, Moscow, Russia didn't feature at all. In Russia you have four different scenarios. One of, I'll just mention two or three to illustrate, but one of which is a unipolar world, the US extravagantly and determinedly holding on to a unipolar moment. Another is the bipolar world, US-China. Another is the increasing regionalization of the world, all of which Moscow sees as difficult for Russia. So conflict with the West is indeed effectively baked into Russian strategic thinking. One of the other things I'm struck by, because right now we see it on the diplomatic level, playing out in the UN and in diplomatic meetings and things, this isn't just a conflict in Europe. This is a global conflict. Sort of like the old conflict between the West and the Soviet Union, at least in the geographic scale, if not ideologically. Can you talk about the role of the global south in Russia's global strategy or grand strategy? Yes, I might use one or two terms other than the global south, if I may. I think one of the most obvious aspects of Russian strategy, which we talk about in different ways through the book, is how over the last actually 15 to 20 years Moscow has sort of diversified its economic structure, both energy but also grain and other products. Reaching into this post-Western world, so developing economic relations with Indonesia, for instance, with Egypt, with India, but also trying to build through relationships with sub-Saharan African states. We see much activity, of course, economic and diplomatic in Africa. So really, it's actually Moscow's attempt to try and be globally present, not permanent positioning, but have global position, ubiquitous power, ubiquitous influence. That, for me, is one of the most important aspects of this question, is that it's a global contest where, indeed, Moscow seeks its support in Beijing, in Cairo, in Tehran. So the list could go on. So it's definitely a break from the trajectory of seeking relations with the Atlantic world and trying to improve them. So you've talked about how it's not Putin but the Putin system. Is this a break from the Yeltsin era or is this Russian state policy? I think by now we must call it Russian state policy. I mean, we can always find. It's sort of almost a parlor game now to try to find disputes within the Russian leadership or to call it Putin's Russia, Putin's isolators. But actually what we see, I think, is the ramifications of a leadership that has taken structure over 20 years and, in fact, longer than that. As we know, the first deputy of the presidential administration, Sergei Kirienko, was the prime minister who appointed Putin director of the FSB in the mid-to-late 1990s. Sergei Lavrov has been foreign minister since 2004. Sergei Shagou has been defence minister since 2012. This is longevity, certainly compared to British politics. And I think, therefore, we must look at that collective landscape. I would caution just to say it's not a static... It's not a static no-changing leadership. There is a process of a new generation emerging here. We see some quite young individuals being appointed some very high-pressured, prominent positions in the moment as the war is being fought and the operation is being conducted at home and the move onto a war footing. Young individuals are being pointed to serious positions. But they are being brought into that collective Putin in that sense. So I think we're looking at a collective leadership, yes. Evolving, new generation emerging, sure. Disputes within it, sure. Policy disagreements, sure. But it's a collective leadership. That's interesting and somewhat depressing. You've mentioned that Russian grand strategy is actually primarily focused on developing Russia domestically and internally. But for those of us who have looked at international politics or domestic politics, we tend to think of war as counterproductive for those goals. Because if you're spending money on weapons, you're not spending it on bread or butter. Is Russia's pursuit of this military conquering of its neighbors going to hurt its overall grand strategy? Or not? I must say that within a year of this, this is very difficult to tell. It's very easy to reach for a straw and hope that economically Russia is being devastated by this and it will just change and that Russia will go away with its own accord. I think we have to be quite cautious about this at the moment. I think Russian economic shift to sustain an income has been quite successful over the last year or so. We must also watch how strategy as a process is dynamic and interactive. And one of the things I would like to try to emphasise, I don't know how this will work, but when we impose sanctions on the Russian leadership, on the Russian economy, Russian defence industry, that's not an end to it. It's not, well, that's all sorted. Moscow will find ways of evading those or undermining them or diluting them or weakening them. And then there will be a response to them at some stage. One example being the sanctions we imposed in 2014. Within a five to six year period, despite numerous problems the Russian economy faced, the measures they put into developing agriculture meant that Russia became one of the world's leading agriculture and grain exporters. I don't know yet what the response will be, but how does Moscow respond in this way on this occasion to those dynamics? That's one of the things I want to emphasise with strategy. It's a dynamic process that's always evolutionary and interactive. And some of the measures that Moscow is imposing now will not work. Some of them will fail probably quite severely, but some of them also will not fail. And the Russian economy will evolve and shape in a way that we perhaps don't expect. It's also able to use its economy for benefiting and aiming at a political influence. That's one of the things that we explored in the book here is how economics is used to try and develop political connections as well to sustain that diplomacy. I think it's one of the things that we're seeing. Interesting. What should western policy makers who... I'm trying to freeze this question without setting up an answer, but at this point I'm becoming a little depressed and I would like to think about a world where possible... I mean, how can we prevent conflict with Russia? Is there a way to find some sort of accommodation or the two world views just so fundamentally different? Yeah. I'm sorry to have to say that there isn't, in my view at the moment, much good news or sunshine on the horizon here. For me, the Atlantic community, speaking as a Brit, I look at the UK-Russia relationship quite a lot, and I think we'd like to say it can't get any worse, but I suspect it could. I think the US and the UK are in slightly different positions, but of course the UK is seen as an ally of the US and so on. For me, it's going to require two things in terms of shaping our own approach to this challenge. A, understanding that it is a challenge. It is a competition. Moscow is explicit in this. It has been explicit for many years that it disagrees with US, UK and Euro-Atlantic liberalism. It disagrees with the idea of the US and its allies being global policemen. The policy disputes are significant, and they're, as I say, across the board. It's not about NATO enlargement. It's about a whole range of disputes. But it's noticeable also that the values... What was a values gap ten years ago is now a values clash, if not to say almost an ideological clash. And I think this is the first acknowledgement that has to be made because once it becomes set in values like this, it becomes very difficult to unwind. Where do we begin a discussion with Moscow? You'll emphasize deterrence and defence. I don't really speak dialogue. Any attempt to speak dialogue with Moscow will have to be aware of the long history of dialogue that we had between 1991 and, let's call it, 2022, which was replete with frustrations, disappointments, problems, arguments. We would have to know what that dialogue would look like. What would we want from it? What would Moscow want from it? I think an accommodation, I must say, I would hesitate, I'm being British at it, but I hope the message is clear. The second is to think through what Russian foresight is and where Moscow anticipates being in 2030. Again, so often I hear this is about a past question. It's reflecting to the past. No, I disagree very much. This is very much about the future. This is about 2030 and 2035 and how the world looks. Different world order. We have to look through this and one of the reasons I emphasise strategy in it not being ad hoc is if we think through this as ad hoc, we don't understand what Moscow understands by means by costs, how it views and evaluates costs. If something is merely an ad hoc response to it, then Moscow probably doesn't value it very much or it's localized or it's temporary or it's not invested in it. On the contrary, as we make clear, some of these moves are, Moscow is fully invested. Therefore, the costs that it will be willing to bear are much higher than we expect. Also, with the nature of the agenda, it will start to crop up in places we do not expect. I think really if you want to be looking ahead, you want to be looking at meeting Russian diplomats, economists, commercial entities, state entities in the Indian Ocean area, in Antarctica and in places that we hadn't been really focusing on for some time. So having that idea of where we think we're aiming at is going to be the first part of this. That's a very good point. So this is a thread that goes through all of your previous works is the importance of understanding how Russia is thinking and understanding how Russia is thinking and the tools that they're disposable and how they use those tools. I think at one point you said it's not sufficient to read their policy documents, but to understand the structures that they put in place in order to implement those policies. That brings us to a question. Wagner is getting a lot of attention. Is there a way to understand their use of Wagner and other private military companies as part of their grand strategy? Yes. Yes, there is. What I'd like to do probably is to try to contextualize that in the landscape, because one of the things that we notice when we look at the Russian political and strategic landscape or the political or policy landscape over the last decade is they produce a number of documents. They say this is our strategic agenda, and then they shift and evolve the strategic landscape. So they create new entities, the Narodny Front, the Popular Front, Rosgvardia, the National Guard, the National Defence Management Centre. So they actually try to align the policy-making landscape with their agenda. And then there are a number of processes within that that we would want to be aware of. Now, I think it's reasonably important, given what happened last year, we don't look at these in the right terms. So really this was a state preparing to move onto a war footing, and indeed moving onto a war footing. We didn't look at it in terms of mobilization until last year when a partial mobilization happened. This book that we've been talking about is really volume two. The one that it sort of builds on is the modern Russia, which informally was volume one, which talks about these processes of mobilization and that landscape reform. Then you start to see also the other bodies of where they fit into that, whether it's Rosneft, Rosatom, Gazprom. You could, I'm sure, all name your other institutions and organizations of import. This is where we find organizations like PMC Wagner, but others too, that fit in to serve particular parts of Moscow's strategic agenda, whether it's protecting economic interests, and I do think there is a geo-economic drive behind this, or whether it's providing political support for regimes that find themselves under duress or threat at home. So as one of the numerous tools, look, okay, the leader of Wagner fits our almost bond-villain-like approach. I'm a little bit wary of just pointing at Wagner and saying, look at PMC Wagner. Look at PMC Wagner, because we almost have this overemphasis on it and this overemphasis that we had if we're being honest about hybridity and measures short of war. And there's a bit of a danger that we look at Wagner as something very specific, and we can create color and vividity out of that. But actually what's important is the landscape and where it fits in and how it shapes within that. And as an important organization within the body politic as a whole, yes, it's very important. Sorry, a slightly long-winded answer, but... For me, Wagner is an important question, but it's not so easily wrapped up as way we did perhaps before this war. Right, but perhaps tracking where Wagner appears can help us understand where... Oh, yes. ...things are important for Russia. Absolutely. I mean, there are a number of ways we can do this, but you're absolutely right. I think if you were to look up a global map now and you see where... Let's call them... Public-private partnership entities turn up across the world. You have a very good idea of what the Russian interests are. And I think we end up seeing a deliberate effort to try to link... Let me call it security-defense-military aspects with economic interests. I think there's a deliberate effort to try to link these policies. Right. It's not always as immediately explicit as that or as simple as that, but it is a deliberate attempt to try to bring these two together. And so you see the Russian Navy being very prominent and present across different parts of the world. Not that it intends to go fleet against fleet action in these distant parts of the world, but to offer a presence and to offer some state support for economic interests. Like steamboat diplomacy. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah. I mean, so there's... This is how I look at the activities of organizations like that. Seeing where Russia's geo-economic interests... What are the statements? Essentially competition in the global commons. Look at choke points. Look at geo-economic points of import and that's where you'll find Russian interest. Great. Thank you. Do we have a microphone for questions from the audience? Does anybody have any questions? Thank you. I'm on advisory counsel at USIP. I'm not a Russian expert. But two questions. Was it a part of Russia's grand strategy to come into the Ukraine and destroy its infrastructure totally with a thought and knowledge that the U.S. and the Allies and NATO are going to come back in and fund the rebuilding so that they view all that money coming out and, you know, they basically weaken the Allies in terms of more money. So that's one question. Was that part of their strategy? And the second one is as the war proceeds and they figure out what the concession is that they want, how strong will the world be in standing up to the sanctions and literally cutting off Russia in the cultural exchanges like, you know, the games all over the world and the exchange of cultural figures. Those are two questions. Appreciate it. Thank you. Goodness. Thank you. I now need about half an hour to think through the answers to those. I think... Let me take the second one first, if I may. I think we're starting to see a little bit of an evolution about the policy of cutting off cultural or particularly sporting figures. This isn't particularly my area of reference. I mean, I do follow some of the sporting activities, but you'll recall there's been a bit of a long dispute with Wada and the drug agencies and so on about whether Russia and a number of other states can compete. So there's a bit of a longer history going on here. One example I would say is Wimbledon tennis did, I think, last year ban Russian and Belarusian players. If I'm right, and I must admit I may not be right on this, I think they're not banning them this year. I think also, and I speak as someone who, as a Brit, who spent quite a lot of time trying to study and learn about Russia but still a student of it, I think it would be difficult for our societies, our open societies, to cancel and cut cultural connections. Now, how one defines that is perhaps the question. Do we invite Russian state performers or state actors or whatever? That's a harder question. But within our own institutions, should we be learning about it? And the answer from my point of view is very much yes. So I would not be advocating that we never learn the language of Tolstoy because President Putin speaks it. In fact, we have to know this all the more because of the disputes and the disagreements. And if you were to read, for instance, Saltikov-Shidrin, you would also see how Russian administration and bureaucracy works. I'm being slightly offering a slight sort of shorthand to this, but I think it's important for us to understand that. So I would be a bit cautious about cutting all of that. I do think it's right to bear in mind the possibility that if Moscow was successful in its stated minimum aim of seizing Donetsk, I would expect an offer to be tabled. And I would want to know, I would want to see the unity of the alliance. I'm being British about it, but I'm sure that my message is clear. I don't know how that unity holds. And if one is then into a discussion about are we involved in a structural contest with Moscow, which I think, as I say, we are, do we want, if there is a ceasefire in Ukraine, do we want to intensify that between the Atlantic community and Moscow? Or do we want to see about maintaining some kind of control on it? And that's where negotiations about sanctions would be. But at the moment I see it very difficult to see how those sanctions would be lifted. There doesn't seem to be any, as far as I'm aware, any sense that sanctions would be lifted. First question. Sorry, I have to ask you to ask again. Apologies. Was that? It was it. Oh yes. The world, the US, NATO and allies, we come in and you go there. All that money, again, just being sucked out of the international treasury. So I think the answer to that is that the initial attempt was to try to seize and achieve its aims without widespread destruction. If I understand this, if I interpret this correctly, there was an attempt to a two-stage attempt. I think they did believe they would have to destroy the Ukrainian armed forces in the east. I think that's likely one of their assumptions. But yes, there was an attempt to try to do it without destroying widespread infrastructure to begin with, which indeed undermined their own military strategy. If I interpret Russian military strategy correctly, which would have been a form of Blitzkrieg, which would have been a form of surprise, speed and weight of blow. And the latter was not sufficient, I think. So then we are talking about Russian military strategy, and yes, Russian military strategy does envisage destroying critical infrastructure, yes. If we are now in the position also of saying that the first stage failed, which I think we are, then indeed there may be a question of Moscow holding important aspects of Ukraine as best it can, particularly the ports and the infrastructure there, and then saying, well, okay, you want to rebuild Ukraine, you rebuild Ukraine. I think this is, if we are looking at it from a Russian leadership point of view, I'm afraid we might be looking at something like that. Other question? Someone at the back, I think I see, yes. Yes, please, how will declining Russian demographics and emigration play into their grand strategy going forward? Two answers to that question is that first of all, sorry, I think you are sitting right in the light, so apologies for... I don't mean to peer at you. The first part is that the demographic question has been at the heart of Russian, one of the aspects that may decrease and so on for many years now. So a lot of effort has been expended and a lot of resources has been expended on trying to improve that situation. From my interpretation of this, the structural answer to your question is that the demographic situation in terms of ages, numbers of population in terms of age, was really only going to become a serious question for the state in the second half of the 1930s and into the 2040s. So in between then you have efforts to enhance the efficiency of labour through technological development, through the efficiency of conscription through digitisation, that kind of response to it. The war for me has shifted that question slightly, obviously for two reasons, as you say a large number of people have left the country. We must also acknowledge that a large number of people have been killed, not just those in Ukraine, the civilians and the military, but possibly a very large number of young Russian men, which will have substantive impacts on regional societies. I would point to you to a third, which maybe is a future question, which is why I think it's the grand strategy question, is that the societal impact of such war is definitely long term. So it's not just the loss of the young men to society, it's the loss of the young men to the economy, it's the loss of the young men in terms of culture. It's also not just those who are killed, but those who are maimed. How do you look after them? How do you cope with PTSD? I mean, if the war is, what we see of the war is an attritional war, how do you not have thousands and thousands of cases of PTSD? And alas, we know that from experiences other than Russia that when soldiers are demobilized, there are health questions, there are criminality questions, there are other questions which I won't go into, but we know that the health and care of soldiers after war is a very important one. I wonder whether there is going to be a slight intoxication of society that leads more towards patriotism in inverted commas underlined and embold, possibly even ideologization of society to cope with this. So two answers to your question, sorry, I'm feeling for it slightly, but two answers to your question is that the longer term aspect is out to 2035 and beyond, and the Russian state has put effort into that. The immediate one to 2028 and to 2030 is very deep societal questions that deal with society, with crime, with medication, with employment, all of these issues which may result in ideology evolving and possibly even violence in society too, yes. A deep-seated tragedy. Sorry, I should have warned at the beginning there aren't any good bits in this, or any... I think we're all picking up. Well, I mean, it's not all that easy. I actually spoke at the moment to speak about it, but... Yeah. That was a... Yes, please. Hi, my name is Alex Tierski. I work for the United States Health Synchee Commission. I was very particularly interested in the discussion of the Wagner Group. I work for a number of members of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives who are quite taken with trying to take this tool of malicious activity off the chessboard, as it were. And I take your point about not necessarily confining our actions to Wagner specifically, but I think having a strong... the strongest possible effect against Wagner is also sending a message that this type of activity really is not legitimate in the international system going forward. The people that I work for certainly don't want others to see Wagner as, boy, they seem to be doing a lot of good for the Kremlin. Why don't we have one of those? This is not actually the question I wanted to ask you. I'm surprised a little bit at how little China has been mentioned in the conversation. You talked about the four scenarios that the Russian chain of command had considered for the future. You mentioned one of those was a bipolar U.S.-China world. I just wonder if you could talk us through some of those scenarios and in particular China's role as seen from Moscow and maybe rank them from most to least desirable from Moscow's perspective. Thanks. Sure. You're quite right. There's a wealth of things that I haven't gone into in depth. Not that I want to draw you into buying the book or anything like that, where you'll find the answers to all of your questions and all of your dreams. Look, China is... I wanted to draw attention to some of the others because our media and our policy think tank discussion tends to talk about the Russo-China relationship. And I do want to emphasize this is not just about Moscow-Beijing. This is also about Russia and India or actually across many states in the Indian Ocean. It's about the developing relations with Egypt, with Algeria. And so I want us to make sure that we are... If we have, as we will do in just a second, this conversation about Russia and China, it's not that Russia is simply depending on China and it's only Russia and China we're thinking about. No, no, no. This is a ubiquitous attempt by Moscow to establish itself in strategic parts, the strategically important parts of the world, diplomatically, economically, primarily. But you're right about China. Now, this is a relationship that has been, I think, developed since... We can pretty take it right back to the early 2000s. Significant effort has been put in by Moscow to developing that relationship with China, attempt to resolve policy disputes, territory disputes, attempt to develop economic relations. The compound improvement and increase in economic and diplomatic relations between Moscow and between Russia and China more broadly, I think is a very substantive one that more or less year in, year out, I think of British and US observers have said, no, no, it can't last. Not only does it last, but it improves. That's not a determinist view that it's just going to continue on into the sunlit uplands of... But what has been quite interesting is to watch the Russo-Chinese relationship during COVID and now, and that period between them now, and I had a conversation, I was honored to have a conversation last year about this role of where China fits. It rolls in, when we talked about it last year, we just had the no limits discussion. I think this is a very useful way of framing the relationship because it doesn't call it an alliance. It doesn't call it a strategic partnership in that sense, but it does suggest that there is constant room for development and constant room for maneuver for both sides. Undoubtedly, there are parts of competition and disagreement between them. So, for instance, the northern sea route. But there's obviously a very strong economic and technical relationship that's likely to last for the foreseeable future for the next three, five years. Certainly the support that China has been giving Russia during the last year is not what we would have hoped for, and we keep saying that China is stopping Russia from doing things. You remember in Samarkand last year, the Chinese told the Russians off, well, okay, did they really? Is that why the Russians invoked partial mobilization just after the meeting? So we need to be a bit careful about how we want to see the Russo-Chinese relationship. For me, energy, economics, diplomacy tends to lead towards this sense of no-limits partnership that we would be, I think, wise to consider for the next three to five years as being the likely trend. From Moscow's point of view, it's certainly talked about one teaming with China and being on the same side as China in a bipolar world. We see Russian experts talking about this rather than on a Uralantic side. It's certainly, I think, a point of consensus in Moscow that by the middle of this century, China will be the world's leading power. Russia has a very extensive border with it, and therefore there's a serious effort to try and improve that relationship. So that's why you see the extensive activities in December and January this year, the substantial diplomatic and economic points of connection, trying to secure that relationship. No one would want to say in any of this that it is not without its difficulties. Of course there are disagreements. Of course there are structural problems, but I think we're looking at no-limits partnership for the next three years. Thank you so much for the excellent talk. I'm Zakul and I'm a senior analyst at Eurasia Group, and I was hoping to follow up on a point you made about Russia's global presence, in particular the emphasis you placed on Russia adapting to the landscape, the sudden creation or disillusion of various entities as the moment requires. And I wanted to press you a little bit about how substantive you really think those efforts are. I got the sense when you're talking about Wagner that there's a danger of overestimating, and it also seemed from your explanation that there's a sense of looking to meet unmet needs. But from the other side, how many countries are actually directly supporting Russia and its conflict, either in real terms or being willing to say so. So I was hoping if we're able to talk more just how successful that global engagement is, despite what appears to be a wide global presence. Sure, thank you. That's a very good question, a very important one, because one of the aspects of working on strategy is working through, as I said, the assumptions that policies are based on, the plans on which those assumptions are based, and then the implementation of that. And one of the most important aspects of strategy making is that large parts of it aren't successful, it's domestic in terms of even high priority questions, only 20% gets implemented, or other international efforts, where efforts are constantly made, but met with limited success. We might talk as an example, though, of this towing and healing effect, if we think of the driving metaphor, of trying to find a base in the Red Sea. The persistent effort to try and find a base there, sometimes it fails, but there's been that effort to try to get Sudan to agree. For me, this illustrates, I hope, answers in some sense is your question, that just because Russia does something, or just because it's in the Russian strategy, doesn't mean it's A, good, or B, works. This is the point of using strategy, is that large parts of it don't work. But then we see also the costs that Moscow is willing to bear, the persistence with which they're willing to pursue something. And the persistence is a good indication of the importance of that relationship. One that I think is worth looking at, and you and I can talk maybe afterwards about it in the details, I don't want to go too long, but it's the attempt to develop relations, develop upstream and downstream energy connections, and develop port infrastructure through energy, Rosneff's agreements in 2017. So this effort didn't start in, let's say, arbitrarily March or April 2022. A lot of what we see and what we track in the book is an effort, persistent effort over 15 or 20 years with persistent setbacks but persistent efforts to build this. Now one of the reasons that Moscow is able to conduct its economy the way it does is because it's built these connections, laid these foundations, these platforms on which to develop. So if you are wanting an overall success rate, internationally we might be looking at somewhere between 35 and 45% hit rate, but it still allows Moscow to project a global presence. It still allows Moscow to reach in and visit numerous African countries twice in a couple of months and set up the Russia-Africa Summit. It's still that question of Russo-Chinese relationships with this gentleman just asked. Keep looking up the Indian relationship. That keeps coming to the fore. So I absolutely agree with your point and the question and it's exactly the kind of thing I want to get into with the question of strategy because it tracks that trajectory and monitors which efforts to succeed and which don't and many of them don't. We can probably find examples but some do. Egypt is a good example. Iran is a good example, I think. We could probably name four or five others but I think those of India, Egypt and Tehran are probably pretty good illustrations of where this diplomacy and energy and geo-economic diplomacy has worked. How does the ideal UN framework look like for a Russian decision maker? Yeah, very good question. What do you think, Mary? They seem to be in their greatest foreign policy document. They seem to really be stressing the importance of the UN and going through the UN though they did not do that with Ukraine. The UN is pretty much always central in their foreign policy concepts and the UN is the document and so on, isn't it? Or the organization they keep using or they keep pointing to and then when they decide to go and do something it's used as maybe not used as it might be. Exactly. And when it is used, it's diplomatically used for people to try and... I think there's a... Someone might have seen this. Did you see this where the Brits prevented someone from speaking Russian webcast? Oh, no. So I have to be a bit cautious about this because I don't know the exact details but I think there was... I think the UK vetoed or objected to or blocked a Russian webcast on a particular subject which seems to me well, Moscow has already said well, if the UK is going to do it, then we'll do it. Oh, at the UN Security Council, you mean? Goodness. This is the book where you wish you could cheat and get your phone out and just check the detail. I think it was Human Rights. Oh, OK. Human Rights. So the UN is a primary part of Russian explicit diplomacy and of course their senior diplomats go through it. Lavrov was there, for instance. But it is a tool that is used when Moscow seeks to have its own advantage. And their main focus right now seems to be in previous iterations of the foreign policy concept they were concerned about expanding the Security Council in ways, obviously, that would probably hurt them. But their main focus this time seems to be criticizing economic sanctions that are done without the approval of the Security Council which is code for economic sanctions against Russia. Yeah. I mean, there's quite a... I know it's going to sound a little bit strange but particularly diplomatically and internationally legally the Russians will use international law in a very specific way to suit their own... No, let me rephrase that. They'll use international law. Full stop. I won't say any more than that. Yeah, it is interesting. We were debating earlier. They were also criticizing the concept of rules-based international order and how it undermines international law. And so there's a whole conglomeration of terms that is just confusing the way that Russia uses them and the way that we understand them. Semantics, just slightly off-question. But semantics here plays really an important role in trying to, I think, interpret Russian strategy, interpret Russian diplomacy, interpret Russian activity and spotting shifts in language and legal aspects and focus on the terms that are used is, I think, a rather important point. Yeah, thank you. So according to this clock that I'm looking at we have about one minute left. So if you want to say anything, I don't think that gives us time for questions but he'll be here afterwards so you can come up and mob him. Do you have anything you want to say to sort of wrap up any closing thoughts? Again, thank you, Mary, and thank you to USIP for the invitation. It's an honour to come to address you and thank you all for the questions. This is, I think this is one of the most pressing matters that we have to face over the next three, five, seven years. I think this is a strategic challenge. It's not just going to go away with its own accord. And I think we're going to have to start to think, to interpret this in 21st century terms. There are points of concern here about the evolution of Russian politics and society. And even when it looks like Russia is militarily and economically weak, I hear this sometimes from British and US politicians and policy makers. It doesn't matter that we can move on from Russia because Russia's destroyed its ground forces and it's lost economically. One and all, this is not just going to go away with its own accord. This is explicit. It is strategic and structural in its own character. Moscow frames this as a fatherland war type issue. And the analogy really to think through here is the 30 years war, not the Russo-Japanese war or Afghanistan. It's how Moscow sees this as being an international architecture shifting war. Now, whether that happens or not is a different matter, but that is the view from Moscow. And in order to cope with this, we're going to need a strategy. And it can't just be what happens. We work out how to defeat Russia in Ukraine. It has to be where is the world in 2027? Where is the world in 2030? And on that note, I really wish I could be more optimistic and come and speak about some of the things that we used to talk about in Russia studies 15 or 20 years ago. But these are difficult times and the tragedy of what's happening makes it hard to do so. So thank you for your attention. Thank you for your questions. And I look forward to continuing afterwards. Bless you. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. As you've stressed before, time and again, it's important to understand Russia so that you understand what it's doing and can advance your own agenda safely. Thank you.