September 3, 2023 • 40 mins
On Wednesday, August 24th, the world watched as a plane fell out of the sky outside of Moscow. On board were ten people, including the leader of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin’s death was confirmed by Russian authorities the following Sunday after investigators used genetic testing to identify all the victims of the plane crash. The accident raised many questions about how the plane had crashed. For those who follow Putin, the answer seemed obvious. Newt’s guest is George Beebe, the Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
On this episode of News World on Wednesday, August twenty fourth,
the world watched as a plane fell out of the
sky outside of Moscow. On board were ten people, including
the leader of Russia's Wagner Mercenary Group off Guinea, Progosian.
Speculation followed the Progosian was on another plane and had
outsmarted Putin, but it turned out not to be the case.
(00:26):
Progosian's death was confirmed by Russian authorities the following Sunday
after investigators used genetic testing to identify all the victims
of the plane crash. The action raised many questions about
how the plane had crashed. For those who follow Putin,
the answer seemed obvious. Here to talk about Putin and
(00:47):
the death of Progosion, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
George bb, the director of Grand Strategy at Quincy Institute. George,
(01:07):
welcome and thank you for joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
My pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Can you talk about who yevget Any Progosion was and
what his relationship with Putin was like?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Well, Progosion was somebody that was more or less a
street thug during the Soviet period. He grew up in
Leningrad as it was called back in the Soviet days,
and was actually convicted of theft and served many years
in Soviet prison. When the Soviet Union broke up progosion,
(01:40):
Like a lot of people of his social standing, took
advantage of the lack of governance that ensued as Russia
more or less imploded during the nineteen nineties, drew upon
his criminal world connections and managed to start businesses. He
(02:01):
became a street vendor and then part oflaid that into
a catering business, and drew upon his connections in the
Saint Petersburg world where Putin had also grown up, to
get some contracts with the government, and ultimately signed some
very large catering contacts with the Kremlin and found himself.
(02:24):
I won't use the word self made millionaire, because he
didn't succeed on his intellectual talents. He succeeded on his
unscrupulous willingness to do whatever was necessary to make money,
and in the nineteen nineties in Russia there were a
lot of opportunities for people like that. When the Ukraine
(02:46):
Civil War broke out in twenty fourteen and parts of
Ukraine's eastern regions declared independence, the so called d Nietsk
People's Republic in Lugansk People's Republic, the Russians provided all
but over support to those movements. The Russians never formally
(03:09):
acknowledged they were providing actual military aid there, but in
fact Russian military commanders were helping the militias in that
part of Ukraine fight back against the Ukrainian government. And
that's where Wagner really got its start. Progosian managed to
win a contract with the Russian government to take a
(03:32):
private militia, which became known as the Wagner Group, and
provide military support and fighters to those self declared people's
republics in Ukraine. And he then parlayed that into contracts
in Syria, where Wagner had a very prominent role once
Russia intervened there militarily, and in Africa as well. So
(03:57):
ultimately Progosian and his company had a contract which the
Kremlin has said in retrospect was worth about a billion
dollars for all these kinds of services. Now he was
regarded as a friend of Putin. In retrospect, I think
one has to wonder just how close that personal relationship was.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I mean, my sense is that they operated in an
amazing number of countries and were a significant un official
arm of the Russian government.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, I think that's right. They had a lot of
contracts in a lot of places in the world to
perform various military and security functions. So they were operating
as palace guards, they were operating as private intelligence gathering organizations.
They were providing actual military fighters in many of these cases,
(04:51):
and in doing so they were getting paid not only
by the Russian government but also by the host governments.
In many cases, for example, in Libya, they were operating
on behalf of a rebel warlord, their hof Tar, and
the situation was so messy that it becomes quite difficult
to figure out who is officially whom there. Parts of
(05:12):
these contracts included the right to sell and exploit oil
or other natural resources that they managed to liberate quote unquote.
That was the case in Syria. They had some contracts
whereby if they could take control of oil fields that
the Assad government there did not control, that rebels control,
(05:34):
that they would gain to share the proceeds from whatever
was recovered.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
So, in your mind, were they an extension of Russian
power or are they sort of an private sector group
doing the most they can, but really driven by their
desire for profit rather than serving the Russian state.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Well, I think a little of both, and what's interesting
about the Wagner situation is that the line between those
two are very blurry. Clearly, I think the Russian government
saw that Wagner could perform some useful services for the state.
That was true in Ukraine, where last year in the war,
(06:16):
the Kremlin was actually quite dependent on Wagner and its
ability to bring tens of thousands of fighters to the
war and provide a lot of expertise in urban combat.
That essentially offloaded a good portion of the burden of
this war and the casualties that the war entailed onto
(06:40):
a private organization rather than on the regular Russian military
and on conscripts. I think Putin's hope was that by
outsourcing some of the burden of the war to Wagner,
he could avoid some of the political ramifications that might
have been more difficult for him with popular opinion in Russia.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Why were they more effective? What was there about the
Volguner group that made them more effective than most Russian units?
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Well, I think there were a couple of reasons. Number one,
a lot of the people that Pregosian recruited early in
the war in Ukraine got their start in military intelligence
and in special operations. So these were guys that had
seen combat before. They were highly trained, they were very good,
(07:33):
and they fought a style of war that was a
little different than the regular Russian military. The regular Russian
military is very hierarchical and very top down and is
designed to fight a war of attrition, essentially to take
advantage of Russia's comparative advantages, which are size and mass,
(07:54):
great industrial manufacturing capability. That's what won the war for
the Soviet military over Nazi Germany in World War Two.
You don't innovate a lot. You don't see it a
lot of initiative to local commanders. You keep everybody in line,
and you just wear down the other side over time.
(08:14):
That's not the way Russian Special Operations fights. They do
tricky things, sneaky things, and when you're in urban combat,
that can be useful. Now, the other thing that they
brought to the table was they recruited a lot of
people who we might call undesirables. Putin gave Pregosian permission
to recruit from Russian prisons, and to offer them amnesty
(08:37):
in return for fighting in Ukraine, and a lot of
these prisoners took that deal. This was a good deal
from their point of view, a path to freedom ultimately.
But this also meant that Wagner was willing to take
very high casualties because they viewed a number of their
rank and file fighters as expendable. So this was an
(08:57):
advantage too. The regular Russian military did not want to
sacrifice tens of thousands of people on the battlefield in
this war. They were happy to outsource that. So this
was why Wagner was useful, I think, to putin in Ukraine.
But I think he made a fundamental error. He assumed
(09:19):
that he could empower Progosion and Wagner with little danger
that they would become political actors in Russia in their
own right, and that proved to be an unwise gamble.
Progosion became an increasingly active political player in his own right,
and as we saw a few weeks ago, eventually challenged
(09:43):
the Russian government in Russian military directly.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
You know that to me was very strange, and that
you couldn't tell whether Progosion had sort of let all
this go to his head because He starts out by
publicly attacking Russian and Putin, saying that they weren't providing ammunition,
they were getting his guys killed, and then he mutinies
(10:08):
in effect, and then halfway through what looked like a
modernly successful mutiny, he caves in. Now shortly, given Putin's
general background, Pegoshian mostly realized that to give in after
you have risen in rebellion virtually guarantees you'll get killed.
(10:28):
What do you think his reasoning was.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Well proguosion gambled in part because he was increasingly panicking
over the situation that he and Wagner were finding themselves in.
Once they had taken the Ukrainian city of Bahmut, which
was a very long, very bloody battle on which Wagner
lost a lot of men, Wagner was no longer as
(10:53):
important to Putin in the Russian military as it had
been back in twenty twenty two. Putin had not yet
mobilized much of the Russian population for war. The Kremlin
was far more dependent on Wagner for manpower and fighting.
But after the Ukrainians succeeded with some of their offensive
(11:16):
actions last summer and early last fall, Putin bit the
bullet and announced what he called a partial mobilization, and
that brought several hundred thousand more Russian fighters to Ukraine.
Once that happened, Wagner was no longer as important to
the Russian military effort as it had been in twenty
(11:38):
twenty two. And then once bach mout ended successfully, once
Wagner had captured Bachmut, the Russians really didn't need Wagner,
and that meant that, with Putin's permission, the Russian Military
Command announced that Wagner fighters would be required to sign
contracts with the regular Russian military as of this past July.
(12:02):
First Well, that announcement, I think caused Progosion to panic
because he saw the gravy train coming to an end
for Wagner. Once you see your forces, your fighters being
forced to sign contracts with the regular Russian military, he realized, Okay,
(12:23):
my income is going to go down fairly dramatically. The
other part of this was a little bit of a
culture clash. A lot of Wagner's senior military commanders, guys
that came out of military intelligence and special operations, don't
like the regular Russian military. And this is not actually
unusual in any militaries in the world. There's a cultural
(12:45):
difference between your special ops people and your regular military people.
The special ops people think they're elite, they think they're better,
they're more courageous, they're better fighters, etc.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Etc.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
They fight a different style than the regular military, and
there's a lot of mutual disdain between those cultures. That
was certainly true in the Russian military as well. So
the prospect that the senior commanders in Wagner were looking
at was not only was their income going to take
a big hit, but suddenly they were going to have
(13:17):
to be put under the command of people that they
didn't respect and didn't want to fight for. So under
those circumstances, they faced an alternative. You either submit to
this directive or you say no. And a few thousand
of the Wagner group said no, and they decided they
(13:38):
were going to use the leverage that they had to
try to strike a better bargain to force the senior
military command and putin to change that order, and that
I think was ultimately the motivation for turning their forces
and marching on Moscow. Now they made a miscalculation. You
(14:00):
can't take four or five thousand fighters, which is I
think by most reports, what they had march up a
highway several hundred miles to Moscow with no air force
and no air cover, essentially and expect you're going to
take on the Russian military and win. The only way
that could have succeeded would have been if significant elements
(14:23):
of the Russian military itself defected and threw their weight
behind Progosion. Progosian must have believed that some of that
would have happened, but it turned out he was wrong.
No units defected, he got no support from anybody, and
he was left in a situation where he's got a
(14:44):
few thousand people on the outskirts of Moscow, much like
the proverbial dog that caught the car, right, what do
you do now? And he was left with a very
bad set of choices. He wasn't going to win now.
Putin also had an incentive to strike a deal too.
One of the worst outcomes of this for Putin would
(15:05):
have been some sort of prolonged urban clash between the
regular Russian military and Wagner. Urban fighting is difficult to do.
It's very bloody. You can't do it without a lot
of damage and a lot of civilian casualties, It would
have bogged the Russian military down internally and probably allowed
the Ukrainians to exploit that problem to make real gains
(15:31):
on the battlefield in Ukraine. So that was an outcome
that Putin really wanted to avoid, and so he had
a big incentive to strike a deal with Progosian as well,
which he did. Now in retrospect, whatever it was that
Putin agreed to and Progosian agreed to obviously didn't last
(15:51):
all that long. But I think Putin managed to avoid
the worst case outcomes in this uprising.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
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today at gingrishtree sixty dot com slash book. What would
you say are the odds that Putin was in some
direct way responsible for the plane going down?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
High. I don't think we're ever going to know definitively
what happened, but the circumstances are such that anybody would
have to be awfully suspicious that Putin was involved in
taking Progosion down in some way. This particular aircraft has
a sparkling safety record. These planes just don't go down,
(17:32):
particularly not in good weather conditions, which they were, and
it just so happened that not only Progosion but several
of his other senior commanders are on board this plane.
The chances that this was a coincidence or I think
infinitesimally low. Now I think we're probably going to wind
up with a situation where the Kremlin tries to blame
(17:55):
this crash on Ukraine or the United States or both.
Very few people are going to buy that there's absolutely
no benefit to Ukraine or the United States and taking
Progos out. Yes, he's somebody that had a lot of enemies. Absolutely,
that's correct, But I doubt anybody in Russia would act
against him without Putin's at least ascit blessing.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Well, and doesn't that sort of fit a Putent pattern
of cheerfully killing his opponents.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Well, certainly he has done that in a number of occasions.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yes, it's a very tough dictatorship.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Well, it is. You know, Russian politics is a full
contact sport. It's not for the faint of heart.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
And I guess I always has been.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
So maybe for three months in nineteen seventeen, Yes, now
turned out Kerensky was too Western to effectively govern Russia.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, well, it's a very difficult country to govern physically,
very large, and very difficult to enforce discipline. And anybody
that's read a lot of Russian literature realizes that Russian
bureaucrats are masters of the art of feigned compliance. So
it's not an easy place to run.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
No question. Do you agree with those who suggested we
shouldn't assume that Putin would be replaced by somebody better,
but then in fact he might be replaced by somebody
even more authoritarian and more anti Western.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yes, I think if Putin were replaced in some sort
of extra constitutional way. The chances that it would be
a liberal, Western loving Gorbachev type are very low. First
of all, many Russian still remember the nineteen nineties. They
have no fondness for what Russia went through during that time.
A lot of them blame Gorbachev for being naive, for
(19:45):
not understanding the West's bad intentions towards Russia as they
see them. So are there liberals in Russia? Are there
people that are pro Western?
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (19:56):
There are. Are they anywhere close to being a the
substantial political force in Russia right now? No, they're not.
Most of the dynamism on the Russian political spectrum is
on the right, nationalists and patriots who actually believe that
Putin has been too soft in dealing with the West,
(20:16):
too quick to want to strike compromises, naive in his
understanding of American, in German and French intentions. So it's
not impossible to imagine that we could get a more
moderate leader as a successor to Putin, But I don't
think that's the most likely scenario by a long shot
(20:37):
right now.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
I mean, isn't there a significant faction that actually thinks
they should use nuclear weapons and they should exert real force.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Well, certainly there is a large faction that believes that
Russia has not been decisive enough, has been too timid
in using the military capabilities that Russia has against Ukraine,
too wary of potential Western reactions. In fact, Sergei Karaganov
has been a long time, very prominent foreign policy intellectual
(21:12):
in Russia, published an article a couple of months ago
saying that Russia ought to use a tactical nuclear weapon
because the West has lost its fear of nuclear war,
and that loss of fear is actually a destabilizing factor
in the world. That the shared fear of nuclear war
(21:36):
actually was one of the primary stabilizing elements during the
Cold War, according to his argument, and I do have
some sympathy for that perspective. But today nobody believes that
nuclear war is possible anymore. Nobody fears it, and hence
they're willing to take risks and do things that nobody
(21:57):
would have done back in the Cold War days, like
trying to put NATO forces on Russia's border, as we
have been doing and from Russia's perspective, are continuing to
try to do in Ukraine. So the solution to this
is let's use a nukar restore the fear of nuclear war,
and that will ultimately not only in the war in Ukraine,
(22:18):
but usher back in an extended period of stability in
the world. Now, Karaganov's argument was refuted by a number
of other Russian foreign policy commentators in the aftermath of
this article, But the fact that he would write something
like this, I think is an indication that there are
(22:39):
substantial numbers of people in Russia that are arguing for
a much harder line approach.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
You're a real expert in this area. Are you surprised
at the course of the campaign in Ukraine?
Speaker 2 (23:08):
I would say I have been surprised tactically by some
of the twists and turns that the war has taken
over the last eighteen months, but not strategically. By that,
I mean I was not surprised that the Russians invaded.
In fact, I had been warning for quite some time
that something like this was coming. I've not been surprised
(23:30):
that the Russians have been unable to seize Ukraine as
a whole, to capture Kiev, to put in place a
pro Russian puppet government. Those were things that I thought
were beyond Russia's capabilities. But I have been surprised at
some of the ineptitude that the Russian military has shown,
(23:54):
some of the failures of intelligence that were glaringly obvious
early in the war. I had thought that the Russians
had a better intelligence handle on what was going on
in Ukraine and how the Ukrainians might respond to things
than they demonstrated early in the war. Some of the
tactical twists. The Russians made some glaring military errors. They
(24:16):
left large stretches of their front lines in twenty twenty
two pretty lightly defended, and the Ukrainians took advantage of
that quite impressively. Now I think the Russians have engaged
in some learning behavior. They've corrected some of these problems.
They've gotten their act together militarily to a much greater
degree than they had last year. But it's been a
(24:39):
painful process, and the degree of Russian ineptitude has surprised me.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Why do you think General Milly said publicly that they'd
be in Kiev in three days? I mean, was there
a serious American estimate of that? Oh?
Speaker 2 (24:53):
I doubt there was a serious American estimate of three days,
But I do think that most people looked at the
correlation of forces between Ukraine and Russia on paper and
thought that this was not going to be a close war.
I thought the Russians were going to be at the
Dannepper River, you know, within weeks or months, and you
(25:14):
know that obviously didn't happen, and they've got their hands
full right now.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Is that a function of their logistics system just being
so bad.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Well, that's part of it, Yeah, that's part of it.
Part of it is, though, that they found themselves facing
an opponent that had twenty four to seven real time
intelligence capabilities in battlefield awareness, which meant that the Ukrainians
were able to play defense against the Russians quite well.
(25:43):
They knew where they were, they knew what they were doing,
They were able to identify them and target them in
real time quite effectively. We've had a combination of traditional
satellite intelligence collection, which is more advanced than it used
to be back in the old days. The United States
began flying a Wax aircraft outside Ukrainian airspace, but close
(26:08):
enough that we had pretty full awareness of what the
Russian air assets were doing, and that really helped the
Ukrainians blunt what would otherwise have been quite significant Russian
air dominance, and I think one of the assumptions a
lot of people made was that the Russians would establish
(26:28):
air superiority pretty quickly and that would make it very
hard for the Ukrainians to defend against what the Russians
were doing, and that proved not to be the case.
The Russians did not establish air superiority, and even now,
although they think they've got much greater dominance of the
year than they did a year ago, they're still not
(26:49):
at the point where they can fly without real fear
of Ukrainian targeting, and that's a big factor in the war.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
If we had moved all of our assistance up by
a year and had done a year ago what we're
now doing, would that have made much of a difference.
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
One of the things that we have tried to do
from the start is strike a balance between giving the
Ukrainians what they need to defend themselves and not going
so far as to find ourselves in a direct military
conflict with the Russians, which I think nobody wants. Over time,
I think we have grown more confident that things that
(27:32):
we thought were Russian redlines, and by that I mean,
things that would cause the Russians to retaliate directly against
the United States or NATO were not as firm as
we had feared that they would be. So we've grown
more confident that we can provide more than we thought
we could without danger of crossing whatever that invisible line
(27:54):
is into conflict with Russia directly. The problem though, was, say, hey,
if giving them everything right away, really quickly, with automated difference,
well you don't know where that red line really would be.
Because I think it's a mistake to assume that these
red lines are permanent and fixed and that the Russians
themselves know where they are. I think they're highly circumstantial.
(28:16):
Things that the Russians might be willing to tolerate under
one set of circumstances might be very different than what
they'd be willing to tolerate under a different set of circumstances.
And for me, one of the variables that affects the
movement of that red line is are the Russians in
danger of really losing the war. If they're in danger
really losing the war, I think suddenly they start doing
(28:38):
things that are a lot riskier and a lot more
likely to lead to a direct conflict with the United
States and NATO than they would under conditions where they think, Okay,
you know, we don't like this, but can we win
the war despite this? And that's where I think the
Russians have been. They have settled on attrition strategy that
(29:02):
does not try to have sudden breakthroughs against the Ukrainians.
They're not trying to outflank them out and maneuver them.
They're trying to wear them down over time, to exhaust
their reserves of manpower, to undermine Ukraine's ability to supply
its forces, to generate new forces over time, wear down
(29:27):
Ukraine's resilience politically and economically, and exhaust the West patients.
That is, as far as I can tell, is Putin's
strategy for winning this war, and he thinks, I believe
that that's going fairly well right now, that there's no
reason to do anything that would risk a direct conflict
(29:49):
with NATO because that would itself change the contours of
this war and might wind up threatening Russia profoundly. So
why risk that now? The other factor in providing a
lot of stuff really quickly to the Ukrainians is they've
got to be able to absorb it. They've got to
be able to use it. They've got to be able
to be trained on it, they've got to maintain it.
(30:11):
And a lot of this weaponry is pretty complex. It
takes American forces a long time to master it. The
F sixteen, which has discussed a lot about it right now,
you know, let's provide them with F sixteen's and this
will give Ukraine a big advantage in the skyes blunt
(30:32):
the advantages that the Russians have had. That's an aircraft
that requires many, many, many hours of maintenance for every
hour of flight. It's a single engine fighter. It has
to take off from pristine airstrips, you know, in more
or less perfect conditions. They actually vacuum these airstrips that
(30:53):
the F sixteens take off from so that it doesn't
suck up debris and blow out an engine and you know,
wind up in the shop for repairs for many months.
That's not a description of Ukrainian airfields. You know, the
Ukraine flies off of, you know, Soviet era airstrips that
are in bad condition, and the Soviet planes that they've
(31:15):
been flying are adapted to those conditions pretty well. The
F sixteens aren't. So these are all complicating factors that
I think you have to take into account when you
try to answer that question. Couldn't we have just given
them a lot more, a lot sooner. It would have
that made a difference, I wonder. I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
I've been surprised at the Ukrainian ingenuity with drones, and
I was just reading this morning about this Australian made
cardboard drone which has apparently taken up for Russian airplanes.
The idea you're buying these like cardboard drones and they
can fly several thousand miles. This is a different world.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Well, it is warfare, drone technology, drone tactics. This war
is going to end up revolutionizing the way these things
are employed moving forward, and that's a fascinating part of
all of this.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
I don't know that they have any media except psychological,
but when you see them hit Moscow or an airfield
just outside of Petersburg, that's a penetration I suspect Putin
would have thought two years ago was impossible.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
No, Yeah, I think that's right. What impact that're we
have on the war itself is hard to say exactly.
These are I believe more psychologically damaging than militarily or
physically damaging. Part of the reason why the Ukrainians are
doing this, I think is as an element in the
information war, trying to show their backers in the West
(32:51):
that they're not losing. These still prospects they can reach
out and touch Putin and his cohort in Russia. The
effect that they're having on russia popular opinion also not
easy to gauge, but my suspicion, extrapolating from broader polling
data in Russia's that they're having an effect similar to
(33:12):
that of Russian airstrikes in Ukraine on Ukrainian opinion. Russian
strikes in Ukraine are not causing Ukrainians to say, oh, well,
this is just too hard, let's find a way out
of the war. It's in fact creating a rally around
the flag effect, stoking hatred against Russia, stoking Ukrainian resolve
(33:34):
in the broader public. And I think that's happening in Russia.
I think Russians are looking at this saying, hey, you know,
we're actually fighting the US and NATO, not just Ukraine.
Ukraine is the catspaw for Washington and Brussels. And all
of this, and they really do hate us. We really
do need to fight.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Do you think when Putin made the decision to go
into Ukraine in any notion that it would end up
leading Sweden and Finland to join NATO, which strikes me
as strategically a pretty big defeat.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Well, no, I don't think he expected that. I think
he was looking more narrowly at Ukraine. That said, I
think it's still early to draw conclusions about the strategic
impact of all of this. One of Pudin's big bets
in this war has been that the momentum in the
(34:31):
broader world has been shifting from the United States and
Europe to Asia and the Global South. He's making a
bet in this that the peak of American power, that
unipolar moment is someone once called it here in the
United States, is over. That the United States has become
(34:53):
a decadent power with big challenges internally, that Europe is stagnating,
and geostrategically, Russia is better off aligning itself with China
and Asia and the Global South. In that context, does
adding to countries to the NATO alliance really change the
(35:16):
big strategic picture for Putin? My guess is that it's
too soon to say now. What it does do, though,
for the Russian military is it complicates their threat planning.
They've got a lot more territory they've got to consider
in all of this, and it tilts the conventional balance
of power between Russia and NATO even further toward NATO. Now,
(35:41):
Russia can't hope to build a conventional military strong enough
to challenge the NATO Alliance. What it can do, and
what I expect that it will do, is increase its
reliance on its nuclear force. We're already seeing the first
steps toward that in Belarus. Both the Russians the Belarussians
have announced that the Russians have moved tactical nuclear forces
(36:05):
onto Belarussian territory. That to me is not surprising. They've
got to do something to compensate for their inability to
fight and win a conventional war against an enlarge NATO alliance.
But I think that's a very bad thing for Europe
and probably a very bad thing for the United States too,
to see Europe renuclearized, because we're probably going to be
(36:26):
in a situation like the early nineteen eighties when the
Soviet Union deployed SS twenty intermediate range missiles pointed at Europe.
The United States and NATO countered by bringing Pershing two
missiles into Germany and other parts of Europe, and we
found ourselves on a nuclear hair trigger in Europe. We
(36:46):
had warning times measured in a handful of minutes, highly unstable,
and I think that's where we're heading. We're heading toward
a renuclearized Europe with very very short warning times, but
one that unlike in the nineteen eighties, we have no
structure of arms control or any kind of dialogue to
try to mitigate the risks of all of this. So
(37:10):
I think we're headed toward a very dangerous outcome in
all of this. So, yeah, Putin got something he didn't
want in NATO enlargement, but I think the end result
is going to be bad for everybody, not just bad
for Russia.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
So in that context, don't you think they've already moved
tacto nukes into their enclave between Poland and Germany glenn Ingrid.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yes, well, they've had tactical nukes stored there for several decades.
It's a mile a mile probably the most nuclearized part
of the planet, which makes it fully dangerous.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
In my view, we're always in this sort of zero
one situation where if you cross over, you're in a
world so much more frightening and so much more violent
that even as violent as things look right now, they
would pale and insignificance compared to a real nuclear exchange.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Oh yeah, no, I think that's right. Unfortunately, I don't
think it's just going to be tactical nukes that the
Russians are going to be moving into the European theater.
I think they're going to be moving theater level nuclear
weapons like the SS twenties that can cover a lot
of distance in a big hurry and are very difficult
to contend with.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
I mean, it does become a balance of terror again.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
That's right, But the balance of was always mitigated by
an arms control component in which we were talking to
each other. And one of the most valuable things about
arms control in my view, was not the limits themselves,
but the dialogue that these arrangements required. We had to
(38:53):
meet with each other and talk to each other about implementation.
A lot of those discussions were quite contentious, you know, accusations,
counter accusations, etc.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Etc.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
But we were talking, and that I think was a
critical part of this. Right now we're not talking.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
We probably have less understanding of the decision process in
the Kremlin today than we did at any point during
the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
No, that's right. Our dialogue with Moscow today is far
less than it was at any point in the Cold War.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Now it's very sober and listen. I want to thank you.
I think as a citizen, taking your lifetime commitment to
understanding Russia, understanding the American security needs, and continuing to
work at it, you're an invaluable asset for those of
us who would like to have an intelligent, effective and
safe national security approach. So I really appreciate this has
(39:49):
been fascinating. It's great to talk to somebody with the
depth of knowledge you have. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Well, thank you, it's been my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Thank you to my guest, George BB. You can learn
more about the Death of Progotion on our show page
at Newtsworld dot com. News World is produced by Ganwish,
three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Slum.
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
(40:24):
at Gingridge three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
Newtworld can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at
ganwidsree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
(40:46):
is news World.
On this episode of News World on Wednesday, August twenty fourth,
the world watched as a plane fell out of the
sky outside of Moscow. On board were ten people, including
the leader of Russia's Wagner Mercenary Group off Guinea, Progosian.
Speculation followed the Progosian was on another plane and had
outsmarted Putin, but it turned out not to be the case.
(00:26):
Progosian's death was confirmed by Russian authorities the following Sunday
after investigators used genetic testing to identify all the victims
of the plane crash. The action raised many questions about
how the plane had crashed. For those who follow Putin,
the answer seemed obvious. Here to talk about Putin and
(00:47):
the death of Progosion, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
George bb, the director of Grand Strategy at Quincy Institute. George,
(01:07):
welcome and thank you for joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
My pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Can you talk about who yevget Any Progosion was and
what his relationship with Putin was like?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Well, Progosion was somebody that was more or less a
street thug during the Soviet period. He grew up in
Leningrad as it was called back in the Soviet days,
and was actually convicted of theft and served many years
in Soviet prison. When the Soviet Union broke up progosion,
(01:40):
Like a lot of people of his social standing, took
advantage of the lack of governance that ensued as Russia
more or less imploded during the nineteen nineties, drew upon
his criminal world connections and managed to start businesses. He
(02:01):
became a street vendor and then part oflaid that into
a catering business, and drew upon his connections in the
Saint Petersburg world where Putin had also grown up, to
get some contracts with the government, and ultimately signed some
very large catering contacts with the Kremlin and found himself.
(02:24):
I won't use the word self made millionaire, because he
didn't succeed on his intellectual talents. He succeeded on his
unscrupulous willingness to do whatever was necessary to make money,
and in the nineteen nineties in Russia there were a
lot of opportunities for people like that. When the Ukraine
(02:46):
Civil War broke out in twenty fourteen and parts of
Ukraine's eastern regions declared independence, the so called d Nietsk
People's Republic in Lugansk People's Republic, the Russians provided all
but over support to those movements. The Russians never formally
(03:09):
acknowledged they were providing actual military aid there, but in
fact Russian military commanders were helping the militias in that
part of Ukraine fight back against the Ukrainian government. And
that's where Wagner really got its start. Progosian managed to
win a contract with the Russian government to take a
(03:32):
private militia, which became known as the Wagner Group, and
provide military support and fighters to those self declared people's
republics in Ukraine. And he then parlayed that into contracts
in Syria, where Wagner had a very prominent role once
Russia intervened there militarily, and in Africa as well. So
(03:57):
ultimately Progosian and his company had a contract which the
Kremlin has said in retrospect was worth about a billion
dollars for all these kinds of services. Now he was
regarded as a friend of Putin. In retrospect, I think
one has to wonder just how close that personal relationship was.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I mean, my sense is that they operated in an
amazing number of countries and were a significant un official
arm of the Russian government.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, I think that's right. They had a lot of
contracts in a lot of places in the world to
perform various military and security functions. So they were operating
as palace guards, they were operating as private intelligence gathering organizations.
They were providing actual military fighters in many of these cases,
(04:51):
and in doing so they were getting paid not only
by the Russian government but also by the host governments.
In many cases, for example, in Libya, they were operating
on behalf of a rebel warlord, their hof Tar, and
the situation was so messy that it becomes quite difficult
to figure out who is officially whom there. Parts of
(05:12):
these contracts included the right to sell and exploit oil
or other natural resources that they managed to liberate quote unquote.
That was the case in Syria. They had some contracts
whereby if they could take control of oil fields that
the Assad government there did not control, that rebels control,
(05:34):
that they would gain to share the proceeds from whatever
was recovered.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
So, in your mind, were they an extension of Russian
power or are they sort of an private sector group
doing the most they can, but really driven by their
desire for profit rather than serving the Russian state.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Well, I think a little of both, and what's interesting
about the Wagner situation is that the line between those
two are very blurry. Clearly, I think the Russian government
saw that Wagner could perform some useful services for the state.
That was true in Ukraine, where last year in the war,
(06:16):
the Kremlin was actually quite dependent on Wagner and its
ability to bring tens of thousands of fighters to the
war and provide a lot of expertise in urban combat.
That essentially offloaded a good portion of the burden of
this war and the casualties that the war entailed onto
(06:40):
a private organization rather than on the regular Russian military
and on conscripts. I think Putin's hope was that by
outsourcing some of the burden of the war to Wagner,
he could avoid some of the political ramifications that might
have been more difficult for him with popular opinion in Russia.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Why were they more effective? What was there about the
Volguner group that made them more effective than most Russian units?
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Well, I think there were a couple of reasons. Number one,
a lot of the people that Pregosian recruited early in
the war in Ukraine got their start in military intelligence
and in special operations. So these were guys that had
seen combat before. They were highly trained, they were very good,
(07:33):
and they fought a style of war that was a
little different than the regular Russian military. The regular Russian
military is very hierarchical and very top down and is
designed to fight a war of attrition, essentially to take
advantage of Russia's comparative advantages, which are size and mass,
(07:54):
great industrial manufacturing capability. That's what won the war for
the Soviet military over Nazi Germany in World War Two.
You don't innovate a lot. You don't see it a
lot of initiative to local commanders. You keep everybody in line,
and you just wear down the other side over time.
(08:14):
That's not the way Russian Special Operations fights. They do
tricky things, sneaky things, and when you're in urban combat,
that can be useful. Now, the other thing that they
brought to the table was they recruited a lot of
people who we might call undesirables. Putin gave Pregosian permission
to recruit from Russian prisons, and to offer them amnesty
(08:37):
in return for fighting in Ukraine, and a lot of
these prisoners took that deal. This was a good deal
from their point of view, a path to freedom ultimately.
But this also meant that Wagner was willing to take
very high casualties because they viewed a number of their
rank and file fighters as expendable. So this was an
(08:57):
advantage too. The regular Russian military did not want to
sacrifice tens of thousands of people on the battlefield in
this war. They were happy to outsource that. So this
was why Wagner was useful, I think, to putin in Ukraine.
But I think he made a fundamental error. He assumed
(09:19):
that he could empower Progosion and Wagner with little danger
that they would become political actors in Russia in their
own right, and that proved to be an unwise gamble.
Progosion became an increasingly active political player in his own right,
and as we saw a few weeks ago, eventually challenged
(09:43):
the Russian government in Russian military directly.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
You know that to me was very strange, and that
you couldn't tell whether Progosion had sort of let all
this go to his head because He starts out by
publicly attacking Russian and Putin, saying that they weren't providing ammunition,
they were getting his guys killed, and then he mutinies
(10:08):
in effect, and then halfway through what looked like a
modernly successful mutiny, he caves in. Now shortly, given Putin's
general background, Pegoshian mostly realized that to give in after
you have risen in rebellion virtually guarantees you'll get killed.
(10:28):
What do you think his reasoning was.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Well proguosion gambled in part because he was increasingly panicking
over the situation that he and Wagner were finding themselves in.
Once they had taken the Ukrainian city of Bahmut, which
was a very long, very bloody battle on which Wagner
lost a lot of men, Wagner was no longer as
(10:53):
important to Putin in the Russian military as it had
been back in twenty twenty two. Putin had not yet
mobilized much of the Russian population for war. The Kremlin
was far more dependent on Wagner for manpower and fighting.
But after the Ukrainians succeeded with some of their offensive
(11:16):
actions last summer and early last fall, Putin bit the
bullet and announced what he called a partial mobilization, and
that brought several hundred thousand more Russian fighters to Ukraine.
Once that happened, Wagner was no longer as important to
the Russian military effort as it had been in twenty
(11:38):
twenty two. And then once bach mout ended successfully, once
Wagner had captured Bachmut, the Russians really didn't need Wagner,
and that meant that, with Putin's permission, the Russian Military
Command announced that Wagner fighters would be required to sign
contracts with the regular Russian military as of this past July.
(12:02):
First Well, that announcement, I think caused Progosion to panic
because he saw the gravy train coming to an end
for Wagner. Once you see your forces, your fighters being
forced to sign contracts with the regular Russian military, he realized, Okay,
(12:23):
my income is going to go down fairly dramatically. The
other part of this was a little bit of a
culture clash. A lot of Wagner's senior military commanders, guys
that came out of military intelligence and special operations, don't
like the regular Russian military. And this is not actually
unusual in any militaries in the world. There's a cultural
(12:45):
difference between your special ops people and your regular military people.
The special ops people think they're elite, they think they're better,
they're more courageous, they're better fighters, etc.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Etc.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
They fight a different style than the regular military, and
there's a lot of mutual disdain between those cultures. That
was certainly true in the Russian military as well. So
the prospect that the senior commanders in Wagner were looking
at was not only was their income going to take
a big hit, but suddenly they were going to have
(13:17):
to be put under the command of people that they
didn't respect and didn't want to fight for. So under
those circumstances, they faced an alternative. You either submit to
this directive or you say no. And a few thousand
of the Wagner group said no, and they decided they
(13:38):
were going to use the leverage that they had to
try to strike a better bargain to force the senior
military command and putin to change that order, and that
I think was ultimately the motivation for turning their forces
and marching on Moscow. Now they made a miscalculation. You
(14:00):
can't take four or five thousand fighters, which is I
think by most reports, what they had march up a
highway several hundred miles to Moscow with no air force
and no air cover, essentially and expect you're going to
take on the Russian military and win. The only way
that could have succeeded would have been if significant elements
(14:23):
of the Russian military itself defected and threw their weight
behind Progosion. Progosian must have believed that some of that
would have happened, but it turned out he was wrong.
No units defected, he got no support from anybody, and
he was left in a situation where he's got a
(14:44):
few thousand people on the outskirts of Moscow, much like
the proverbial dog that caught the car, right, what do
you do now? And he was left with a very
bad set of choices. He wasn't going to win now.
Putin also had an incentive to strike a deal too.
One of the worst outcomes of this for Putin would
(15:05):
have been some sort of prolonged urban clash between the
regular Russian military and Wagner. Urban fighting is difficult to do.
It's very bloody. You can't do it without a lot
of damage and a lot of civilian casualties, It would
have bogged the Russian military down internally and probably allowed
the Ukrainians to exploit that problem to make real gains
(15:31):
on the battlefield in Ukraine. So that was an outcome
that Putin really wanted to avoid, and so he had
a big incentive to strike a deal with Progosian as well,
which he did. Now in retrospect, whatever it was that
Putin agreed to and Progosian agreed to obviously didn't last
(15:51):
all that long. But I think Putin managed to avoid
the worst case outcomes in this uprising.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
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(16:51):
today at gingrishtree sixty dot com slash book. What would
you say are the odds that Putin was in some
direct way responsible for the plane going down?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
High. I don't think we're ever going to know definitively
what happened, but the circumstances are such that anybody would
have to be awfully suspicious that Putin was involved in
taking Progosion down in some way. This particular aircraft has
a sparkling safety record. These planes just don't go down,
(17:32):
particularly not in good weather conditions, which they were, and
it just so happened that not only Progosion but several
of his other senior commanders are on board this plane.
The chances that this was a coincidence or I think
infinitesimally low. Now I think we're probably going to wind
up with a situation where the Kremlin tries to blame
(17:55):
this crash on Ukraine or the United States or both.
Very few people are going to buy that there's absolutely
no benefit to Ukraine or the United States and taking
Progos out. Yes, he's somebody that had a lot of enemies. Absolutely,
that's correct, But I doubt anybody in Russia would act
against him without Putin's at least ascit blessing.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Well, and doesn't that sort of fit a Putent pattern
of cheerfully killing his opponents.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Well, certainly he has done that in a number of occasions.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yes, it's a very tough dictatorship.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Well, it is. You know, Russian politics is a full
contact sport. It's not for the faint of heart.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
And I guess I always has been.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
So maybe for three months in nineteen seventeen, Yes, now
turned out Kerensky was too Western to effectively govern Russia.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, well, it's a very difficult country to govern physically,
very large, and very difficult to enforce discipline. And anybody
that's read a lot of Russian literature realizes that Russian
bureaucrats are masters of the art of feigned compliance. So
it's not an easy place to run.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
No question. Do you agree with those who suggested we
shouldn't assume that Putin would be replaced by somebody better,
but then in fact he might be replaced by somebody
even more authoritarian and more anti Western.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yes, I think if Putin were replaced in some sort
of extra constitutional way. The chances that it would be
a liberal, Western loving Gorbachev type are very low. First
of all, many Russian still remember the nineteen nineties. They
have no fondness for what Russia went through during that time.
A lot of them blame Gorbachev for being naive, for
(19:45):
not understanding the West's bad intentions towards Russia as they
see them. So are there liberals in Russia? Are there
people that are pro Western?
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (19:56):
There are. Are they anywhere close to being a the
substantial political force in Russia right now? No, they're not.
Most of the dynamism on the Russian political spectrum is
on the right, nationalists and patriots who actually believe that
Putin has been too soft in dealing with the West,
(20:16):
too quick to want to strike compromises, naive in his
understanding of American, in German and French intentions. So it's
not impossible to imagine that we could get a more
moderate leader as a successor to Putin, But I don't
think that's the most likely scenario by a long shot
(20:37):
right now.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
I mean, isn't there a significant faction that actually thinks
they should use nuclear weapons and they should exert real force.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Well, certainly there is a large faction that believes that
Russia has not been decisive enough, has been too timid
in using the military capabilities that Russia has against Ukraine,
too wary of potential Western reactions. In fact, Sergei Karaganov
has been a long time, very prominent foreign policy intellectual
(21:12):
in Russia, published an article a couple of months ago
saying that Russia ought to use a tactical nuclear weapon
because the West has lost its fear of nuclear war,
and that loss of fear is actually a destabilizing factor
in the world. That the shared fear of nuclear war
(21:36):
actually was one of the primary stabilizing elements during the
Cold War, according to his argument, and I do have
some sympathy for that perspective. But today nobody believes that
nuclear war is possible anymore. Nobody fears it, and hence
they're willing to take risks and do things that nobody
(21:57):
would have done back in the Cold War days, like
trying to put NATO forces on Russia's border, as we
have been doing and from Russia's perspective, are continuing to
try to do in Ukraine. So the solution to this
is let's use a nukar restore the fear of nuclear war,
and that will ultimately not only in the war in Ukraine,
(22:18):
but usher back in an extended period of stability in
the world. Now, Karaganov's argument was refuted by a number
of other Russian foreign policy commentators in the aftermath of
this article, But the fact that he would write something
like this, I think is an indication that there are
(22:39):
substantial numbers of people in Russia that are arguing for
a much harder line approach.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
You're a real expert in this area. Are you surprised
at the course of the campaign in Ukraine?
Speaker 2 (23:08):
I would say I have been surprised tactically by some
of the twists and turns that the war has taken
over the last eighteen months, but not strategically. By that,
I mean I was not surprised that the Russians invaded.
In fact, I had been warning for quite some time
that something like this was coming. I've not been surprised
(23:30):
that the Russians have been unable to seize Ukraine as
a whole, to capture Kiev, to put in place a
pro Russian puppet government. Those were things that I thought
were beyond Russia's capabilities. But I have been surprised at
some of the ineptitude that the Russian military has shown,
(23:54):
some of the failures of intelligence that were glaringly obvious
early in the war. I had thought that the Russians
had a better intelligence handle on what was going on
in Ukraine and how the Ukrainians might respond to things
than they demonstrated early in the war. Some of the
tactical twists. The Russians made some glaring military errors. They
(24:16):
left large stretches of their front lines in twenty twenty
two pretty lightly defended, and the Ukrainians took advantage of
that quite impressively. Now I think the Russians have engaged
in some learning behavior. They've corrected some of these problems.
They've gotten their act together militarily to a much greater
degree than they had last year. But it's been a
(24:39):
painful process, and the degree of Russian ineptitude has surprised me.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Why do you think General Milly said publicly that they'd
be in Kiev in three days? I mean, was there
a serious American estimate of that? Oh?
Speaker 2 (24:53):
I doubt there was a serious American estimate of three days,
But I do think that most people looked at the
correlation of forces between Ukraine and Russia on paper and
thought that this was not going to be a close war.
I thought the Russians were going to be at the
Dannepper River, you know, within weeks or months, and you
(25:14):
know that obviously didn't happen, and they've got their hands
full right now.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Is that a function of their logistics system just being
so bad.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Well, that's part of it, Yeah, that's part of it.
Part of it is, though, that they found themselves facing
an opponent that had twenty four to seven real time
intelligence capabilities in battlefield awareness, which meant that the Ukrainians
were able to play defense against the Russians quite well.
(25:43):
They knew where they were, they knew what they were doing,
They were able to identify them and target them in
real time quite effectively. We've had a combination of traditional
satellite intelligence collection, which is more advanced than it used
to be back in the old days. The United States
began flying a Wax aircraft outside Ukrainian airspace, but close
(26:08):
enough that we had pretty full awareness of what the
Russian air assets were doing, and that really helped the
Ukrainians blunt what would otherwise have been quite significant Russian
air dominance, and I think one of the assumptions a
lot of people made was that the Russians would establish
(26:28):
air superiority pretty quickly and that would make it very
hard for the Ukrainians to defend against what the Russians
were doing, and that proved not to be the case.
The Russians did not establish air superiority, and even now,
although they think they've got much greater dominance of the
year than they did a year ago, they're still not
(26:49):
at the point where they can fly without real fear
of Ukrainian targeting, and that's a big factor in the war.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
If we had moved all of our assistance up by
a year and had done a year ago what we're
now doing, would that have made much of a difference.
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
One of the things that we have tried to do
from the start is strike a balance between giving the
Ukrainians what they need to defend themselves and not going
so far as to find ourselves in a direct military
conflict with the Russians, which I think nobody wants. Over time,
I think we have grown more confident that things that
(27:32):
we thought were Russian redlines, and by that I mean,
things that would cause the Russians to retaliate directly against
the United States or NATO were not as firm as
we had feared that they would be. So we've grown
more confident that we can provide more than we thought
we could without danger of crossing whatever that invisible line
(27:54):
is into conflict with Russia directly. The problem though, was, say, hey,
if giving them everything right away, really quickly, with automated difference,
well you don't know where that red line really would be.
Because I think it's a mistake to assume that these
red lines are permanent and fixed and that the Russians
themselves know where they are. I think they're highly circumstantial.
(28:16):
Things that the Russians might be willing to tolerate under
one set of circumstances might be very different than what
they'd be willing to tolerate under a different set of circumstances.
And for me, one of the variables that affects the
movement of that red line is are the Russians in
danger of really losing the war. If they're in danger
really losing the war, I think suddenly they start doing
(28:38):
things that are a lot riskier and a lot more
likely to lead to a direct conflict with the United
States and NATO than they would under conditions where they think, Okay,
you know, we don't like this, but can we win
the war despite this? And that's where I think the
Russians have been. They have settled on attrition strategy that
(29:02):
does not try to have sudden breakthroughs against the Ukrainians.
They're not trying to outflank them out and maneuver them.
They're trying to wear them down over time, to exhaust
their reserves of manpower, to undermine Ukraine's ability to supply
its forces, to generate new forces over time, wear down
(29:27):
Ukraine's resilience politically and economically, and exhaust the West patients.
That is, as far as I can tell, is Putin's
strategy for winning this war, and he thinks, I believe
that that's going fairly well right now, that there's no
reason to do anything that would risk a direct conflict
(29:49):
with NATO because that would itself change the contours of
this war and might wind up threatening Russia profoundly. So
why risk that now? The other factor in providing a
lot of stuff really quickly to the Ukrainians is they've
got to be able to absorb it. They've got to
be able to use it. They've got to be able
to be trained on it, they've got to maintain it.
(30:11):
And a lot of this weaponry is pretty complex. It
takes American forces a long time to master it. The
F sixteen, which has discussed a lot about it right now,
you know, let's provide them with F sixteen's and this
will give Ukraine a big advantage in the skyes blunt
(30:32):
the advantages that the Russians have had. That's an aircraft
that requires many, many, many hours of maintenance for every
hour of flight. It's a single engine fighter. It has
to take off from pristine airstrips, you know, in more
or less perfect conditions. They actually vacuum these airstrips that
(30:53):
the F sixteens take off from so that it doesn't
suck up debris and blow out an engine and you know,
wind up in the shop for repairs for many months.
That's not a description of Ukrainian airfields. You know, the
Ukraine flies off of, you know, Soviet era airstrips that
are in bad condition, and the Soviet planes that they've
(31:15):
been flying are adapted to those conditions pretty well. The
F sixteens aren't. So these are all complicating factors that
I think you have to take into account when you
try to answer that question. Couldn't we have just given
them a lot more, a lot sooner. It would have
that made a difference, I wonder. I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
I've been surprised at the Ukrainian ingenuity with drones, and
I was just reading this morning about this Australian made
cardboard drone which has apparently taken up for Russian airplanes.
The idea you're buying these like cardboard drones and they
can fly several thousand miles. This is a different world.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Well, it is warfare, drone technology, drone tactics. This war
is going to end up revolutionizing the way these things
are employed moving forward, and that's a fascinating part of
all of this.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
I don't know that they have any media except psychological,
but when you see them hit Moscow or an airfield
just outside of Petersburg, that's a penetration I suspect Putin
would have thought two years ago was impossible.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
No, Yeah, I think that's right. What impact that're we
have on the war itself is hard to say exactly.
These are I believe more psychologically damaging than militarily or
physically damaging. Part of the reason why the Ukrainians are
doing this, I think is as an element in the
information war, trying to show their backers in the West
(32:51):
that they're not losing. These still prospects they can reach
out and touch Putin and his cohort in Russia. The
effect that they're having on russia popular opinion also not
easy to gauge, but my suspicion, extrapolating from broader polling
data in Russia's that they're having an effect similar to
(33:12):
that of Russian airstrikes in Ukraine on Ukrainian opinion. Russian
strikes in Ukraine are not causing Ukrainians to say, oh, well,
this is just too hard, let's find a way out
of the war. It's in fact creating a rally around
the flag effect, stoking hatred against Russia, stoking Ukrainian resolve
(33:34):
in the broader public. And I think that's happening in Russia.
I think Russians are looking at this saying, hey, you know,
we're actually fighting the US and NATO, not just Ukraine.
Ukraine is the catspaw for Washington and Brussels. And all
of this, and they really do hate us. We really
do need to fight.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Do you think when Putin made the decision to go
into Ukraine in any notion that it would end up
leading Sweden and Finland to join NATO, which strikes me
as strategically a pretty big defeat.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Well, no, I don't think he expected that. I think
he was looking more narrowly at Ukraine. That said, I
think it's still early to draw conclusions about the strategic
impact of all of this. One of Pudin's big bets
in this war has been that the momentum in the
(34:31):
broader world has been shifting from the United States and
Europe to Asia and the Global South. He's making a
bet in this that the peak of American power, that
unipolar moment is someone once called it here in the
United States, is over. That the United States has become
(34:53):
a decadent power with big challenges internally, that Europe is stagnating,
and geostrategically, Russia is better off aligning itself with China
and Asia and the Global South. In that context, does
adding to countries to the NATO alliance really change the
(35:16):
big strategic picture for Putin? My guess is that it's
too soon to say now. What it does do, though,
for the Russian military is it complicates their threat planning.
They've got a lot more territory they've got to consider
in all of this, and it tilts the conventional balance
of power between Russia and NATO even further toward NATO. Now,
(35:41):
Russia can't hope to build a conventional military strong enough
to challenge the NATO Alliance. What it can do, and
what I expect that it will do, is increase its
reliance on its nuclear force. We're already seeing the first
steps toward that in Belarus. Both the Russians the Belarussians
have announced that the Russians have moved tactical nuclear forces
(36:05):
onto Belarussian territory. That to me is not surprising. They've
got to do something to compensate for their inability to
fight and win a conventional war against an enlarge NATO alliance.
But I think that's a very bad thing for Europe
and probably a very bad thing for the United States too,
to see Europe renuclearized, because we're probably going to be
(36:26):
in a situation like the early nineteen eighties when the
Soviet Union deployed SS twenty intermediate range missiles pointed at Europe.
The United States and NATO countered by bringing Pershing two
missiles into Germany and other parts of Europe, and we
found ourselves on a nuclear hair trigger in Europe. We
(36:46):
had warning times measured in a handful of minutes, highly unstable,
and I think that's where we're heading. We're heading toward
a renuclearized Europe with very very short warning times, but
one that unlike in the nineteen eighties, we have no
structure of arms control or any kind of dialogue to
try to mitigate the risks of all of this. So
(37:10):
I think we're headed toward a very dangerous outcome in
all of this. So, yeah, Putin got something he didn't
want in NATO enlargement, but I think the end result
is going to be bad for everybody, not just bad
for Russia.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
So in that context, don't you think they've already moved
tacto nukes into their enclave between Poland and Germany glenn Ingrid.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yes, well, they've had tactical nukes stored there for several decades.
It's a mile a mile probably the most nuclearized part
of the planet, which makes it fully dangerous.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
In my view, we're always in this sort of zero
one situation where if you cross over, you're in a
world so much more frightening and so much more violent
that even as violent as things look right now, they
would pale and insignificance compared to a real nuclear exchange.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Oh yeah, no, I think that's right. Unfortunately, I don't
think it's just going to be tactical nukes that the
Russians are going to be moving into the European theater.
I think they're going to be moving theater level nuclear
weapons like the SS twenties that can cover a lot
of distance in a big hurry and are very difficult
to contend with.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
I mean, it does become a balance of terror again.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
That's right, But the balance of was always mitigated by
an arms control component in which we were talking to
each other. And one of the most valuable things about
arms control in my view, was not the limits themselves,
but the dialogue that these arrangements required. We had to
(38:53):
meet with each other and talk to each other about implementation.
A lot of those discussions were quite contentious, you know, accusations,
counter accusations, etc.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Etc.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
But we were talking, and that I think was a
critical part of this. Right now we're not talking.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
We probably have less understanding of the decision process in
the Kremlin today than we did at any point during
the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
No, that's right. Our dialogue with Moscow today is far
less than it was at any point in the Cold War.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Now it's very sober and listen. I want to thank you.
I think as a citizen, taking your lifetime commitment to
understanding Russia, understanding the American security needs, and continuing to
work at it, you're an invaluable asset for those of
us who would like to have an intelligent, effective and
safe national security approach. So I really appreciate this has
(39:49):
been fascinating. It's great to talk to somebody with the
depth of knowledge you have. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Well, thank you, it's been my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Thank you to my guest, George BB. You can learn
more about the Death of Progotion on our show page
at Newtsworld dot com. News World is produced by Ganwish,
three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Slum.
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
(40:24):
at Gingridge three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
Newtworld can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at
ganwidsree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
(40:46):
is news World.
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