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- [00:00]
Martin DeCaro
Subscribe today for early access to this and all future episodes. Early access is the latest benefit included in a History As It Happens premium subscription. Listen to new episodes a day or two ahead of everyone else, plus ad free listening and all our bonus content. Tap subscribe now in the Show Notes or go to historyasithappens.com. History as it happens February 24, 2026 Four years of war. The limits of history in Russia Today,
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Michael Kimmage
the clear winner of the Russian presidential
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Unidentified Commentator 1
election, Vladimir Putin, began to establish the Putin era. Cold War days are over.
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Michael Kimmage
The Cold War is over.
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Unidentified Commentator 1
The Cold War is over.
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Michael Kimmage
It has been six years since the establishment of the NATO Russia Council to to deal with issues NATO can do
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Mark Galeotti
for Europe's east what it did for Europe's West. Russian President Vladimir Putin has addressed a gathering in the Kremlin to announce the formal annexation of four Ukrainian regions.
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Unidentified Commentator 2
Russia is a regional power.
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Unidentified Commentator 1
Putin is the aggressor.
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Mark Galeotti
Putin chose this war with Russian strikes targeting critical energy infrastructure. Electricity has become sporadic as Ukraine experiences one of its harshest winters.
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Unidentified Commentator 1
I'm not aligned with Putin. I'm not aligned with anybody. I'm aligned with the United States, States
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Michael Kimmage
of America and for the good of the world.
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Martin DeCaro
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is now entering its fifth year, and little on the battlefield has changed since 2022. Even as the dead and wounded have surpassed a million men. The Trump administration's amateur diplomats have failed to broker a deal. Putin seems to believe time is on his side. Zelensky refuses to cede territory as he seeks security guarantees from reluctant allies. The war grinds on into history as a tragic and unnecessary conflict. That's next as we report History as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
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Michael Kimmage
And then Putin invaded Ukraine and destroyed
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Martin DeCaro
a significant chunk of the country.
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Michael Kimmage
The path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy.
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Mark Galeotti
Two exhausted boxers clinging to their respective sides of the ring every now and then coming out with a flurry of blows before returning to just sort of prop themselves up. Not a particularly elevating prospect because there will still be all this bad blood on both sides. But yeah, I think in that way, by changing the form of the conflict, unfortunately, depressingly, it becomes a lot easier for both sides. Well, not. Okay, maybe not a lot easier, but certainly easier for both sides to sustain it.
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Unidentified Commentator 1
These two nations inspired the world with their Rose and Orange revolutions, and now they're working to consolidate their.
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Martin DeCaro
It's early April 2008, the final year of George W. Bush's presidency, and the month before Vladimir Putin would leave the Russian presidency for Dmitry Medvedev. The scene is the NATO summit in Bucharest. As Philip Short writes in his biography of Putin, George Bush arrived in high spirits direct from a visit to Ukraine where he'd been given a hero's welcome and called on his colleagues to send a signal through the region and welcomed Georgia and Ukraine into the Membership Action Plan for NATO.
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Unidentified Commentator 1
Here in Bucharest, we must make clear that NATO welcomes the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine for their membership in NATO and offers them a clear path forward to meet that goal. So my country's position is clear. NATO should welcome Georgia and Ukraine into
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Martin DeCaro
the Membership Action Plan, as Shork goes on to say. After Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy had signaled disagreement with Bush, NATO's secretary general called an adjournment, whereupon the foreign ministers from the new member states, led by Poland, which were all in favor of the two countries admission referring to Ukraine and Georgia, went into a huddle at the back of the hall with Merkel and Condoleezza Rice to try to find a compromise. Short says when the summit reconvened the next morning, the compromise language was read out loud, but it proved to be very forward leaning. The document stated baldly, we agree today that these countries will become members of NATO. But Short says that was not at all what Merkel and Sarkozy had intended. They'd argued that Ukrainians were too divided over NATO membership to be granted map status and that Georgia's emission was rendered problematic by the Saakashvili government's repression of opposition movements and the frozen conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And of course, Putin was entirely against it. At a news conference in Bucharest, he was asked about the possibility of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO. He said the appearance on our borders of a powerful military bloc whose members actions are regulated by, Amongst others, Article 5 of the Washington agreement will be taken in Russia as a direct threat to the security of our country. Now, two months before Bush's colossal blunder, Ambassador William Burns had written to Condoleezza Rice, again citing Philip Short's Putin biography. Burns said Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin. In my more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics, Burns said, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russia's interests. At this stage, a membership action Plan offer would be seen not as a technical step, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today's Russia will respond, he warned. So I'm revisiting this important milestone on the road to war. Not because the 2008 NATO summit somehow made war between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and the west inevitable. It did not. We have to remember what happened in Ukraine in 2013. It was not a NATO issue, but a trade deal with the European Union, nixed at the last moment by Viktor Yanukovych that led to the Maidan Revolution, which was then followed by Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and then US sanctions.
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Unidentified Commentator 2
We're not going to go to war with Russia. The Ukrainians don't want that. We don't want that.
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Martin DeCaro
And now, more than a decade later, Today is the fourth anniversary of Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. February 24, 2022.
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Unidentified Commentator 1
Putin is the aggress. Putin chose this war and now he and his country will bear the consequences.
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Mark Galeotti
You declared the war.
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Michael Kimmage
It is the responsibility of this body to stop the war.
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Martin DeCaro
It started eight years after Russian backed separatists ignited a war in the Donbass.
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Unidentified Commentator 1
Today, tensions rose in the worst confrontation between Russia and the west since the Cold War. The Russian Foreign Minister accused Ukraine of breaking a peace agreement signed just last week. Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine's eastern border. Troops in unmarked uniforms have seized government buildings inside eastern Ukraine.
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Martin DeCaro
And violence as the opposing armies now suffer thousands of casualties, fighting over piles of rubble. All this history, the origins and the causes of the war, can fade from the front of our minds. Whatever caused the war, whatever principles are still at stake, Russian and Ukrainian youth continue to kill each other in big bloody batches for miniscule territorial gains. It can seem so pointless, although ultimately it is not pointless. The war's outcome matters. If history is any guide, this war will end in a negotiated settlement. If history is any guide, this war could drag on for many more years. If history is any guide, one or both of the warring states could be driven to the brink of political or economic collapse. History has so many lessons, it is hard to know which ones apply to this tragic and unnecessary war in Eastern Europe. Historian Michael Kimmage is the founding director of the Kennan Institute, which is now an independent organization. From 2014-16, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning staff at the U.S. state Department, where he held the Russia Ukraine portfolio. And he is the author of the War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability. Historian Mark Galeotti is an honorary professor at University College London, an expert on Russian military history and the author of many books, including Forged in A Military History of Russia from Its Beginnings to today, published in 2024. Our conversation next Tap. Subscribe now in the show Notes for early access to every episode, ad, free listening and all our bonus content, or sign up@historyasithappens.com Mark Galeotti, welcome back to the podcast.
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Mark Galeotti
It's good to be back.
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Martin DeCaro
Michael Kimmage, welcome back.
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Michael Kimmage
Happy to be here.
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Martin DeCaro
Great to see the Kennan Institute thriving in its latest iteration. Mark Galeotti, I'm going to begin with you. You've written a number of books on Russian military history. Does the following number carry any significance to you? 1,418 days. That is how many days it took for the red army after June 1941 to conquer Nazi Germany.
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Historical Newsreel Narrator
This is how Russia battered open the door of Berlin in the last weeks of April, the city's last days as the capital of Hitler's Reich.
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Martin DeCaro
Of course, the Red army was involved in World War II from September 1939, something that Putin doesn't like to talk about, the rape of Poland. But anyway, the Russian army now has yet to capture the Donbass and it's been more than 14, 18 days. In other words, it's taken longer for Russia to fight this war in eastern Ukraine than it took for the Red army to win on the Eastern front. Is there any significance to that in your view, especially when you consider how important World War II memory is to Vladimir Putin?
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Mark Galeotti
I mean, there's lots of things to unpack there, but it's worth noting. I mean, you think 1944, the Red army had about 7 million effectives that it was throwing into battle. Today's Russian military in Ukraine, it's probably around 700,000. We are talking about very, very different conflicts.
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Martin DeCaro
Absolutely.
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Mark Galeotti
The so called Great Patriotic War was indeed an existential struggle for survival and it was backed by all the coercion that the Stalinist regiment could muster. Whereas however truly horrific the war in Ukraine is from the Russians point of view, they are fighting it really on the cheap. They're not mobilizing, they're not throwing conscripts, they haven't militarized the entire economy. So I think we should be wary of these kind of comparisons. Certainly it is true that the Russian military has not performed anywhere near as well as was generally expected back in February 2022. But then again, Putin didn't anticipate that this was going to be a real war. He had this bizarre notion that he could Just sort of march in the Ukrainians would allow him to put in some kind of puppet proxy leader and that most of them would shrug and grumble but do little more than that. Clearly a huge misreading of the situation, but I think it really emphasises the degree to which Putin is a risk averse leader. As I say, who knows if he even would have invaded in February 22 if he had had any inkling of what was going to await him. And part of that risk averseness is also the degree to which he's not willing to go all in on his war, to the growing chagrin of an ultranationalist contingent of Russians who would normally have been anticipated. We would have thought of them as kind of natural Putin supporters, but who, precisely, surreal it sounds to us, are critiquing Putin for not being vicious enough in this conflict.
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Martin DeCaro
Well, yes, and Michael Kimmage, before you jump in, the Eastern front in World War II was the largest war ever fought. If none of the other theaters in World War II had taken place, it still would have been the largest war ever fought. That's how many men fought and died on the Eastern front. Yes, of course, Mark, the wars are dramatically different, but just for reasons of perspective, we're talking four years now and the Russian army is still stuck, if you will, in the Donbass. Michael Kimmage, any historical significance from your perspective there?
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Michael Kimmage
Well, everything is freighted with historical significance in this conflict, which has been waged with many different appeals to history and different historical templates that have been cycled in on the Russian side and in a different fashion on the Ukrainian side. But despite the propaganda value that the Kremlin believes the Second World War has and probably does have in the Russian context, I don't think that the timeline is hugely important. In other words, the Second World War timeline is hugely important because, well, exactly as Mark says, after Putin found himself in this long projected conflict, which is not what he hoped for and probably not what he would have signed on to if he had had a crystal ball. But once he did, I don't think that there's much turning back. The Russian economy is not doing well. Up to a million or perhaps more deaths and casualties. At least that number has been put out there. But, you know, I don't think Putin is going to change course. I don't think he's going to leave Ukraine or I don't think he's going to give up on some of the core ambitions he's had throughout this conflict, going back perhaps to 2014 or earlier. So, you know, I think if the conflict extends another four years, Putin may go that far and go the distance because of how he assesses the wars importance, which is heartbreaking, of course, to consider. But I suppose the bottom line is that whatever the Second World War was in terms of its timing, it's not a constraint on Putin.
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Martin DeCaro
Has he ruined World War II memory for ordinary Russians?
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Michael Kimmage
Well, that's hard for me to say. It's hard for me to say how everyday Russians really think on these issues. And as Russia has become progressively repressive, there's all the more incentive in Russia to kind of mimic and echo what the government says. On the other hand, I think a lot of what Putin does with the Second World War is something that's happening from the ground up. You know, these various processions and marches actually began spontaneously in post Soviet Russia commemorating the Second World War. And the Kremlin came and kind of co opted them and made them big official moments in Russian civic life. But yes, I guess it could answer the question this way, Martin. To the degree that Putin has linked the Second World War to the invasion of Ukraine, and really there's nothing similar or comparable in the two. In one, you know, the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany. In the other, Russia has invaded Ukraine. So they're almost symmetrically opposite. But to the degree to which Putin has connected the two and made it seem as if this is the natural progression from the heroism of the 1940s to the alleged heroism of the present day, that's certainly a corruption. You know, whether Russians believe that or not is again hard for me to say. But the impulse to corrupt or the will to corrupt is certainly there.
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Historical Newsreel Narrator
Newsreel pictures of the actual taking of Berlin have now been released. They show the climax of eight days fighting in the German capital. Now at last, the Red army battles through to the very heart of the city. Now at last, after all the ghastly years of toil, blood, tears and sweat, the climax of total German defeat is reached with the death of Berlin.
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Mark Galeotti
We got to realize that also there's an element in which it'll take time for Russians to metabolize the impact of this war. I mean, at present combination of, Michael, as you said so correctly, that this is a time of repression and therefore there are all kinds of things that you can't really talk about or talk about openly. There is the fact that this is a war and even Russians who were opposed to going into Ukraine in the first place and who would love to see a peace emerge when it comes down to it, odds are that if someone's got to win, they would rather their country win than lose. In that context, I wonder if, yes, there's this. All this Putinist propaganda that tries to evoke the positive memories of the Great Patriotic War without obviously admitting to that. The real parallel, which is actually, if there are parallels to be drawn, the Russians are in the role of the Germans in this particular case. You know, when the soldiers eventually come home, when a greater sense of quite what is going on currently in Ukraine, when you have a bit of breathing space. And I'm thinking back to Afghanistan, I mean, this is what I did my doctorate on, the impact of Afghanistan on the Soviet Union. And it was quite striking how in some ways, a judgment on Afghanistan amongst the population, which admittedly, Afghanistan, much, much smaller war from the Soviets point of view. In total, about a million Soviets over the course of 10 years cycled through Afghanistan out of a population of, what, 280 million or something. But nonetheless, it was amazing how two factors. One, the freedom to talk about it that came with Gorbachev's perestroika, and two, the return of a critical mass of veterans back into ordinary society in some ways unlocked that discussion. So I think that from Putin's point of view, that is still something that is going to come. And that is where I think, actually, yes, this may well end up undermining the Great Patriotic War and in the process, therefore, delegitimizing a state which increasingly has regarded the Great Patriotic War as in some ways, the sort of the final touchstone of what it means to
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Michael Kimmage
be Russian, even with the Second World War and the Soviet Union. And it was in so many obvious ways a heroic moment for the Soviet Union. You get movies after the fact. I think of Tarkovsky's movie Ivan's Childhood, which recounts the trauma of the Second World War. And then you have a novel that's not published until the 1980s, Vasily Grossman's life and Fate, which recounts many of the ways in which there were missteps and bad military decisions on the Soviet part and, you know, persecution of Soviet civilians by the Soviet government during the Second World War. So a memory of trauma. You know, you can analogize that to the Vietnam War in the United States, where, you know, after the fact, you get a cultural reckoning that's often quite critical and skeptical and searching. I would agree completely with Mark. That hasn't yet begun in Russia, but I think it's an inevitability that it will, because it's not a fact of The Ukraine war. It's a fact of every war that it brings horror and suffering and trauma in its wake, and cultures have to find a way of dealing with that.
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Martin DeCaro
It brings coffins home. Have either of you read Svetlana Alekseyevich's book Zinky Boys? It's a short oral history of Afghanistan. Mark, it sounds like you said you've read it. The zinc coffins, you couldn't see the body inside. And the Soviet authorities made the families hold their funerals at night so they wouldn't be seen during the day to try to pretend like the war really wasn't happening.
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Mark Galeotti
But even then, I mean, what in total, about 15 and a half thousand casualties over 10 years? I mean, yes, of course, the Soviet Union did do these rather inhuman things, especially in the sort of earlier years when, technically speaking, there wasn't even any admission that there was a war, a conflict going on there. But even then, I mean, this is the thing, the difference in scale between these two conflicts is just so quite extraordinary.
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Martin DeCaro
And not to go on about Afghanistan, but the conscripts didn't know where they were being sent. Zinke Boys by Svetlana Alekseyevich. A great book. So, Mark, a question for you. You mentioned how Putin is facing critics on his right who think he's not going far enough. You also mentioned that he has been more or less averse to risk taking, which might sound surprising to some because the war in Ukraine has been a debacle. It was a risk he need not take. He did. And now he's mired in a four year war of attrition. Well, of course, he didn't think it was going to be four years. He thought it would be four weeks. He had been shrewd in the past. This is something that Michael Kimmage and I have discussed on an episode titled the wars of Soviet Succession. He always knew when to stop, where not to go too far. But it does seems he has changed. If he's not going far enough, I do wonder what he's waiting for. So it must be because he believes he can achieve his aims in this war, even after four years of minuscule gains. What are those aims?
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Mark Galeotti
Yeah, this is always the problem that we have a tendency to assume that there's some kind of fixed, secret, real aims. And frankly, Russian rhetoric often actually almost encourages us to do so. With all this talk about harkening back to all the original, the root causes of the conflict, which is kind of code for the fact that Ukraine dared to believe it had genuine sovereignty and the opportunity to actually determine its own path rather than accept it was part of Russia's sphere of influence. But the thing is, my view is that Putin, who is after all a tactician, not a strategist, an opportunist to the core. What are his goals? Well, I mean, obviously his primary goal is survival for himself and his state, but primarily his goals will be the best he thinks he can get at the point when he feels he has to make a deal. So if all of a sudden, let's say, the Ukrainian lines in Donetsk region collapse, quite frankly, it's very hard in the current style of conflict to imagine that tactical breakthroughs lead to operational movements. But anyway, let's just say somehow he's able to conquer that remaining 20% of Donetsk that he's demanding. I think it's unlikely in those circumstances he would then say, well, actually I've now got what I need, so let's just fix this front line and call it quits. No, I mean, probably at that point he'd say, ah, but Odessa is historically part of Russia or whatever else, he would basically chance his arm. But on the other hand, if the economic impact of the continuing conflict, you know, the Russian economy is, after all already slid into stagnation, leads to protests on the streets that begin to look alarming, then maybe he would decide that he would magnanimously no longer demand that remaining part of Danyats region. I mean, ultimately, yes, he wants to ensure that Ukraine is, if not currently in Russia's sphere of influence, is sufficiently destabilized that it can be brought under a certain degree of pressure in the future. He wants to ensure that he has something that he can tell the Russian people is a triumph against the serried forces of NATO and their Ukrainian neo Nazi proxy state. But beyond that, the, the specifics and the modalities, I, I imagine. And look, you know, when it comes down to it, what do any of us really know about what goes on in those deep, dark recesses of Putin's brain? But I imagine that he's actually going to be fairly flexible and yes, probably going to push as far as he feels he possibly can get away with.
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Martin DeCaro
Well, Michael Kimage, in your excellent book Collisions, you look at the big picture. This is a war against the west, in Putin's view.
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Michael Kimmage
Well, that's true. It's become that. You know, I am convinced this is a war that occurs on four separate axes, which makes it often very difficult to analyze or just to get your head around. One is the Russia Ukraine axis. Another is the Russia Europe axis. A third is the Russia US Axis. And then there's also a kind of Russia global axis which matters. All of this has to sort of be factored in. But, yes, the framing of it as a war against the west is very significant. And there's a propaganda part of that, and there's a sense in which it's also true. You know, Ukraine has an array of Western allies that shape and affect the war effort, and Russia has created that relationship between Ukraine and its Western allies and is therefore enmeshed in a genuine conflict with the West. So it's propaganda and reality at the same time. But I want to go back for a moment, Martin, just for the sake of rounding out the conversation and provide a devil's advocate argument for how the Kremlin may see the war, which is not as a war of attrition that they backed into and that they're sort of gradually losing. I think that that's probably my own interpretation of the war. You know, I think in the Kremlin, and there's an element of wishful thinking in this way of looking at the war from their point of view. But they see something very different. You know, they see a West that is, yes, perhaps on some level, at war with Russia but unwilling to send troops to Ukraine. They see disjointed and in some cases, relatively low levels of financial and military commitment to Ukraine. They see a United States that has basically pulled back support from Ukraine in a lot of tangible ways over the last 13 months and endorsed elements of the Russian narrative when it comes to the origin and the course of the war. But most importantly, I think the standard line in the Kremlin, and I'm guessing here, but I feel like this is a reasonable guess, is that in a war of attrition, where Russia currently is, Russia has to prevail, right? It's the bigger economy. The war is not being fought on Russian soil. You know, Russia is going to have revenue from gas and oil for time immemorial. It can siphon off that money for the war effort. In some respects, Russia has been out producing the collective west in certain areas of the war. And Russia has eviscerated Ukraine's civilian infrastructure this year and will continue doing so next year to the extent that Ukraine may really start to falter in its capacity to fight the war. So it's a different version of what Mark is saying. You kind of wait opportunistically for the right moment. But I suspect that in the Kremlin at that point can be spun into a narrative where Russia really does prevail. I don't think it will play out that way, but I suspect that if you're working in the Kremlin, this is probably what you have to say. If it's what Putin truly believes, this I don't really know. But this I suspect is the climate of opinion in the Kremlin and very important to consider for any negotiated settlement to the war. If what I'm saying is true.
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Mark Galeotti
Yes. Can I just jump in there and say, absolutely, I agree. I mean, I think this is one of the problems we have with trying to assess the current peace talks is, again, there's his usual binary. Is Putin serious or is he not? From my perspective, look, if Putin is given the kind of peace deal that he would like to see through these talks, great, he'll take it. But on the other hand, and that seems exceedingly unlikely, on the other hand, Putin's perfectly willing to walk away from them, as you say. I think he ultimately believes that he is winning, will win, and can above all, sustain the war longer. Remember, he doesn't have to fight a forever war. He just needs to be able to fight for a week or a month longer than the Ukrainians and their now increasingly European backers can continue to maintain the struggle. So I think from his point of view, look, why not? He can send Modinsky. He doesn't need Medinsky around at the moment. Send him off to Geneva, see if this process gets anywhere. Expecting probably that it won't. And he's fine with that.
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Martin DeCaro
I'm not a Kremlinologist. I don't know what Putin's thinking every day when he wakes up. But just my speculation, based on my knowledge, if you will, of history. He does view himself as a historical actor on the historical stage. So, you know, a war of the west that's grandiose, just taking a strip of territory in the Donbass, you're not going to go down in the history books for that. Whether that matters at all here. I'm not sure if either of you want to pick away at what I just said. See, this is a democracy. You can. You can choose.
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Michael Kimmage
Happy to jump in there. I think it's a dilemma of the war effort. In fact, I think I can identify two dilemmas of the war effort on the Russian side, and one is media driven. At various moments, and this has happened a few times over the past two or so years, Russia implies, or the Russian government implies through the media structures that it has, that victory is around the Corner. So President Trump is elected in 2024. There's a kind of does seem to be a mood of celebration in Moscow. Okay, now we're going to be able to find a negotiated settlement to the conflict. There's a summit meeting in Alaska. Well, this is the sign that a settlement is imminent. And repeatedly, you get these claims that Ukraine is on the verge of collapse from Russian media. But it's a dilemma, because the more you say that and the more it doesn't happen. I think ordinary Russians can see that there's a disjunction between the promise of a war that's going to be over soon or the reality of an ongoing war. Here again, you could go back to the Vietnam War in the US and just think of the briefings that Westmoreland gave in the mid-1960s where it looked like victory was around the corner. And I think the Johnson administration actually believed that, but it wasn't true. And that became a huge dilemma for the US by the late 1960s. But the second dilemma goes more to the question that you're asking, Martin, which is that, in a way, the larger you claim the war aims to be, the less you're able to settle for something unspectacular. And I agree that Putin is an opportunist, and yes, he can sell the war in many different ways, and Russian media can come up with creative ways to call something that's not a victory a victory. But still, it's hard to deliver something small, given how big this war has been, both in the scale of the war effort and in the stated ambitions. Rewriting European security architecture, a kind of new international order. You get that from Moscow. Well, that's not congruent with just taking the city of Mariupol, funneling in Russians to kind of populate the city, rebuilding it and calling it a victory. It's much, much less than that. And I do think that that's a dilemma. I don't know if it's an entire insoluble dilemma for the Kremlin, but it's a dilemma. You sell the war big and you deliver small, and then Russians are going to ask. It goes back to Mark's point also, about the reckoning that comes with every war. But when you have that reckoning, what did these, you know, young men die for? If it is a strip of land, 11% of Ukraine's territory occupied in 2022, now it's 18, 19, 20%. Is that strip of land, you know, enough to merit all the sacrifices and the bloodshed?
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Martin DeCaro
A La, the US and Vietnam, you just try to muddle through. It's the path of least resistance, not for the people being killed and being bombed, but for the governments. You try to muddle through and hope at some point down the road there's a breakthrough that you can't see at the moment.
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Mark Galeotti
The interesting thing is, in some ways there's a division. I mean, on one level, I absolutely agree with you, Michael, about the fact that this is not in any way a victory that is commensurate with the appalling human costs and wide of cost in terms of the economy, in terms of what, you know, what according to Rostadt Financial, you know, Russians are spending on average 40% of their income on food, you know, all these various indications of pain. But on the other hand, I can't help but suspect that certainly in the initial moment in which some kind of a deal is made, if, if such a deal is made, and we'll assume that, let's say, you know, Putin gets his bits of Daniet's region and essentially calls it quits, there will be a kind of an Emperor's new clothes moment in that the overwhelming majority of society, including frankly, most within the elite, will just be relieved that the war is over. And therefore, at least superficially, they will all be willing to go along with the idea that this is a suitable victory just simply because they're glad. So they will all say that the emperor's robes are glittering and glorious, however much around the kitchen table they are willing to actually admit. And again, horrific thought of a nude Putin. But actually, then they will be willing to admit that it really isn't a victory that's worthwhile. So again, I think what we probably would see back to this business of how assessment can take time, that relief would in due course, I would think, give way to bitterness.
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Martin DeCaro
Something that hasn't happened is the regime being destabilized by the war. I mean, that has happened. If we look back to, say, the First World War, where we know from history, countries, combatants can press on past the point anyone thought possible, despite the loss of men, materiel, economic damage, national prestige, political damage. I mean, ultimately, in the First World War, how many empires fell as a result of that? Germany, the Tsarist empire, the Ottoman Empire. Right, we're not seeing that here. That's actually a segue. Don't comment on that yet. That segue to the next question, and I'll just stay with you, Mark, but I want to hear from both of you, and that is the limitations of historical thinking, which Limitations have arisen as a result of this war. The notion that no one would be dumb enough to start another European war, or that conventional firepower, conventional weapons are so lethal, so destructive, that one side would have won by now. What do you think of that? Limitations of historical thinking here?
- [32:50]
Mark Galeotti
The glib answer is that if history teaches anything, it is that history teaches us nothing. But, I mean, I wouldn't actually sustain that. I mean, I think it's more than. Unfortunately, we tend to be very good at working out the historical lessons after the event rather than anything else, if we're going to play the historical parallels. I mean, one of the things I would note is exactly that regimes have the capacity, states have the capacity to push themselves further than we really thought they could. But then the butcher's bill becomes due at a certain point. I mean, the irony is, for example, that actually at the beginning of 1917, the Russian Imperial military was looking in a better place than it had been, let's say, a year before. In purely military terms. The problem was that for a variety of reasons, there were mutinies that spread that were not sufficiently put down. And in many ways, that's what actually brought down the tsarist empire. It was military mutinies. And I think that's one of the reasons why that's something that the Russians are exceedingly aware of today. But on the other hand, it's something that I could see happen. But again, the thing is that actually was in some ways out of step with what we might think of as the objective historical realities of the Russian military position. There are other times when one would have thought, quote, unquote, logically, that the Russian army was more likely to disintegrate. This is the problem. And I say this breaks my heart because I'm a historian at heart, but, you know, I think one has to accept that the use of history as a predictive tool is a deeply flawed and dangerous thing.
- [34:29]
Martin DeCaro
Michael Kimmage, before you jump in, another one that gets a lot of play that I detest is the Munich stuff. But go ahead, Michael. Limitations of historical thinking here.
- [34:40]
Michael Kimmage
Well, the good and bad thing about history as a source of insight into the present and even more precariously into the future is that the number of possible analogies are infinite. Infinite. So I have no doubt that the historical record contains the perfect analogies for what's happening presently and would predict the future if we could settle on them. But we have no, no way of knowing in advance what they are. You know, you can easily go to the wrong analogies. And to the ones that will prove irrelevant. And it's a kind of endless, in a way, merry go round of thinking. But I think if you factor in sufficient modesty that these are not predictive models in a kind of social science sense, but they're guides to thinking, they're sort of frames to thinking. I will invert your question, Martin, and say that history remains quite helpful in all of this. And I think even in a policy sense, history is helpful in that history can help with the probability of certain assessments. Is it probable that Russia will surrender and crack up in the short term? And I think the answer to that is no. And I think that you can use history to talk about that. In a sense, we already have. Second World War is, you know, a massive invasion of the Russian mainland. In this war, the Russian mainland has been largely absent from the fighting. If you go back to Germany's collapse at the end of the First World War, Germany's economy, people were suffering from hunger, I think in some cases even starvation. There was a blockade. The German economy was in complete disarray. Russia just isn't there. And so I think you can do that to sort of talk about what's a probable outcome. But also finally, maybe this is just an atmospheric thing. It's not about prediction and model building. But I think history teaches us to be very aware of how unpredictable outcomes are and often how ironic outcomes are. Right. All these empires jump into the First World War and they self destruct. It's an ironic outcome. And I think there too we can get something of a feeling or a flavor for the current conflict if we are alert to that. Russia begins the war to a degree, claims to prevent NATO's expansion. Sweden and Finland join the alliance. There's sort of one ironic outcome. You know, Russia begins the war with the claim that Ukraine is this sort of dysfunctional state, you know, riven with division, Ukrainian speakers, Russian speakers. And up to a point, Putin has forged a much stronger Ukrainian nation than you had 20 years ago. And there are other ironies. You know, the west argues that Russia starts the war and isolates itself. In some ways, Russia has built new relationships to North Korea and to China and to India and to Brazil and to South Africa. And so the kind of new globalism in Russia, that's also a product of the war. That's maybe an irony that we don't like looking at the war, but it's an irony that's there. So I think if you're not too fanatical about the analogies, if you can Work with many of them if you can have a degree of intellectual humility, be alert to this sort of unpredictability and try to training yourself that skill to see the course of events not as teleological, but as ironic. I think history is useful in all those ways. So I've gotten back, Martin, not to the limits of historical analogy, but to the use usefulness of history. I can't get away from it.
- [37:36]
Martin DeCaro
While I'm with you there, I consult John Keegan's the First World War quite often, the very last few pages, where he goes over how each power, what it fought for and whether it was worth it and whether you can even answer that question. And when it came to France, and here the analogy would be with Ukraine, France fought for the principle of the defense of national territory. It eventually prevailed with the help of its allies. Was it worth it? How can you answer that question? Was it worth the lives of 2 million people and all the damage it did to everyone involved? No one won the First World War.
- [38:11]
Mark Galeotti
I think I keep going back to the point that Michael was making about the ironies of history, which I think is a very good point indeed. And the degree to which the true irony is exactly that Putin is the true state builder of Ukraine. After so many abortive efforts at building a Ukrainian nation, it took Putin to forge one in this crucible of invasion. But when it comes to ironies, I mean, I think that, and I'm thinking also of your Munich analogy point, that the other problem with history is that it is also a polemical tool that you pick the history that you want. You know, if you say this is a Munich moment, it's because you want to make Putin into Hitler. The irony is that what starts as a political instrument to try and persuade people too quickly does indeed become a kind of straitjacket that begins to shape our own thinking. It's quite hard for us to maintain that degree of cognitive dissonance that we say one thing and think another. And therefore, again, we go back to again, I'm just simply shamelessly piggybacking on Michael. I mean, this point about the humility that you have to have to maintain when using these parallels.
- [39:27]
Martin DeCaro
The conversation continues. Tap subscribe now in the show Notes for early access, ad free listening and all of our bonus content or go to historyasithappens.com. All right, a couple more things, fellas. As wars drag on, the causes or reasons why they started, even the origins, which are not the same as causes, they tend to recede in importance because the combatants simply must prevail or survive or pull something worthwhile from the ruins. Do you think that's happening here? I mean, do the causes even matter anymore? Yes, they do, but in maybe some sense they don't here.
- [40:15]
Michael Kimmage
There's a real disparity on the two different sides of the war. I'm not sure if on the Ukrainian side the causes matter all that much in a kind of intellectual sense, whether Putin did this because of NATO expansion or to destroy the Ukrainian nation or to go to war with the west or to hold on to his regime. We can come up with many different explanations as to why Putin did it. But the fact is on the Ukrainian side that he did do it, that it's an invasion from without. All of the facts of that invasion are, I think, as vivid to Ukrainians today as they were in February 2022. I don't think that the war has in that sense become cloudy or confusing or unclear. If anything, what Russia has done over the course of the last four years in ways that I think over the long term are going to be very detrimental to Russia's regional interests. But what Russia has done is widened the war against Ukraine's civilians. And so, yes, it's there at the beginning with the invasion that there are missile attacks on cities and assaults on civilian life, but it's become much more comprehensive and going after a country is energy grid in the midst of a cold winter as a way of inflicting suffering on everyone, which has very, very profound long term consequences. I would say in a sense, maybe the narrative of the war on the Ukrainian side has deepened or become more comprehensive about how pernicious and devastating this war is, but not more confusing. I think on the Russian side it is different. I mean, the military technical operation that it was supposed to be at the beginning, the kind of claims that were made, Russia's clear preparation for a quick war, that, you know, Russian soldiers go into Ukraine with parade uniforms. It's hard to recall that. It's certainly not something that Putin wants to recall, as is not uncommon with the country that makes the choice to invade. Sometimes the explanations shift, right? US with the Iraq war, you get shifting explanations as to why the US did it from the US Government. And that's been true on the Russian side. With the added complexity in Russia that I think a lot of Russians don't really know why their government invaded Ukraine. They can speculate in the way that we can speculate, but they're not aware. And I suspect Russia being Russia, that they probably don't buy the official explanations. And so on the front lines, I'm sure on the Russian side it's a battle to avenge the loss of lives of their comrades. That's the most typical reason for soldiers to fight elsewhere in Russia. I think people just don't know they want to over with. I totally agree with Mark that they don't want to lose. Anti, anti war sentiment is a very important dynamic in Russia and I'm sure still very strong. But why Russia is in it, what the government has said, what the explanations are there. The fog of war seems quite thick, almost impenetrable in Russia and is probably over time, you know, a bit of a problem for Putin.
- [42:47]
Martin DeCaro
Sure. Mark. Another way of posing my question is what the hell is going on here? You read articles about how Russian forces fight the Ukrainian defenders over a small town for weeks and weeks and weeks. Thousands and thousands of casualties. The town is reduced to rubble and the Russians finally inch forward on the front lines for what? To keep Ukraine out of NATO. It's like you had these major causes, major reasons and origins and the war is reduced to fighting over bits and pieces of a strip of territory in eastern Ukraine.
- [43:18]
Mark Galeotti
Yeah, I mean there's a wartime British song which had the refrain we're here because we're here because we're here because we're here. And I think there is an element of that. If you're a soldier in the front line line, you're not thinking about this, you're thinking about exactly revenging your, your fellows survival and just simply what your commanders are telling you you need to do next. Especially when you know you, you do have the risks of particularly inhuman treatment if you don't do what you're told to do. So yes you will, you will assault that village, you will try and sort of make your way through that ridge line hoping that a drone doesn't spot you and such like here's the problem with actually focusing too much on the territorial advances and how many square miles got seized this month compared with that month and so forth is look, that's not how wars are won. Wars are won by breaking the will and the capacity of the other side to resist. And that is why we're seeing this ghastly war on civilians and the shattering of Ukraine's energy infrastructure. It's in the hopes that it breaks the Ukrainians will.
- [44:26]
Martin DeCaro
That's a very hard thing to measure.
- [44:28]
Mark Galeotti
It is a very hard thing to measure. And it's something that aggressors so often, or actually no, both sides so often imagine they can do. There is always this assumption that we are astonishingly resolute, but they, they are people whose will we can break. And whether we're talking about The World War II blitz, the German air assaults on British cities, which again, was meant to essentially force Britain into surrender and it didn't, or whether we're talking about the current campaign. And indeed, in some ways, even on a much, much smaller level, if we look at some of the Ukrainian points, when the Ukrainians were, for example, hitting petrol refineries and so forth, there was a certain sense where actually it just simply annoyed people. Yes, they were frustrated, they were unhappy, but they weren't therefore saying, so maybe we should strike a deal. They were just saying, so why aren't we hitting back? Generally speaking, this is one of the pathologies of this kind of war fighting. We always have a tendency to overestimate the degree to which we can pummel the enemy into just giving up, and particularly when this has become such a bloody, such an existential struggle. I mean, not existential in the sense of there aren't going to be Russian tanks rolling through Kyiv, but existential in the sense of whether or not you actually have a properly sovereign, secure Ukraine that can chart its own course. You know, there's very little evidence to suggest that it's actually making people give up. But the point is, that's not something that the individual soldier shivering in a foxhole thinks about, but it is part of the calculation at the top of the military command structure.
- [46:05]
Martin DeCaro
You know, I think of Vietnam, the political will to continue. That war collapsed in the United States first, even though not a single Vietnamese bomb landed in the United States. But from the US Perspective, there was the notion that the Vietnamese could be bombed into surrendering, break their will. So my last question here, Michael Kimmage, I'll start with you because this is an impossible question to answer. I like to end my podcasts on those impossible questions, and that is, how much longer can this go on? I mean, there's a military part of that and a political part of that.
- [46:40]
Michael Kimmage
I'll try to answer your question in two ways. One is by asking a separate question. How quickly can it end? What would be the necessary ingredients for the war to end? And let's keep to the side. The scenario where Ukraine sort of collapses, World War I style, I don't think that's going to happen, although that's not impossible. But let's just sort of keep that off the table for purposes of argument. If Ukraine doesn't collapse, then Russia has to offer Ukraine terms that Ukraine is willing to accept. And, of course, there's lots of incentive on the Ukrainian side to end the war and who doesn't want to go back to peacetime and to normal life and, you know, being able to go and use commercial air travel and do. And do the kind of planning in life that you can do when it's not wartime and all of that, the bounty of normalcy. Everybody wants that all over the world, and certainly Ukrainians probably want that, you know, desperately at the moment. So Ukraine has incentives to come to the table and to end the war. But what would Russia have to offer Ukraine to do that? Probably it would be some granting of Ukraine a real autonomy to join Europe. I don't think war crimes and, you know, sort of war tribunals and all of that are something that Russia would agree to, but maybe a kind of going back to where the Russian military presence was before February 2022 or some, you know, sort of minimal version of a Russian presence in the Donbass. I don't think Crimea is the real sticking point. I just don't think that Russia is going to be willing to accept that for a long time to come. We're always discussing what Russia is willing to accept. When we talk about these negotiations, we need to talk equally about what Ukraine is willing to accept. And it just seems very, very far from where Russian motivations are and where Russian ambitions are. And so what would be the quickest possible scenario in that framework? 1 years, 2 years, 3 years, maybe then an end to the war becomes thinkable. But. But one can imagine the war extending beyond that, since we have granted that historical analogies have at least some currency. Right. We can think of the historical analogies of the wars that don't quite end. I think Korea would be one example of that. North and South Korea. It's hard to say that that war is really over. I mean, it's stalemated, but it's not over. Obviously, Arab Israeli conflict has been going on for almost 100 years, and it has periods where it's not that intense. And then the. The violence and the fighting returns. You know, India, Pakistan. It's not like this is a crisis or difficulty of new vintage. It's been something that you can trace back to partition and has decades of history behind it and is very, very difficult to resolve. So the answer to your question, Martin, let's just be blunt about it. Maybe the answer is never. Maybe it never ends. You know, maybe Russia never atones for what it's done and grants Ukraine its full sovereignty. And Ukraine is not going to, you know, sort of be passive in terms of the history that we've all seen in the last four years and this Russian denial of Ukrainian sovereignty, it's going to resist it. And so, in a sense, you have the ingredients, and it's nothing I say with any enthusiasm. I, like everyone, I think, would want to see the war over as quickly as possible, but we have the ingredients for, you know, alas, for generations of conflict because of the nature of the war and really because of the nature of the Russian position. Final point you can make is that the counter to my argument is that Russia might have the capacity to change fundamentally its leadership and its posture in the region, and then new possibilities become thinkable. But absent that, I do fear a kind of generation or even generations of conflict.
- [50:00]
Mark Galeotti
This allows me to sound a little bit more optimistic, even though I'm not especially optimistic. I mean, look, I think in part the basic question, obviously, because it's the Russians who are the aggressors and also the Russians who at present do have the initiative on the ground. I mean, the way I tend to think of this conflict is that both sides are losing, but I think the Ukrainians are losing slightly more quickly. Is that, well, do we really know quite what Putin wants? To loop this back to the earlier question. If Putin is actually genuinely willing to reach some kind of a deal, and the one that's often sort of formulated is this idea that with or without that rainbow of Donetsk region, you essentially fix the current front line, accept that and as a de facto border, allow Ukraine to go its own way, just not into NATO and not with NATO ground troops in peacetime on its soil. And Russia basically accepts that, for example, Ukraine will seek to join the European Union, which I think from the Russians point of view, they regard Ukraine as a Trojan horse that will help break the union, which is why they're so relatively, or at least they claim to be so relaxed about it. Well, if that is on the cards, that is something that is potentially achievable. But this is, I think, why these talks matter is it's only by testing the willingness to actually reach an agreement that you find out. And if actually this is all a pretense, or the Ukrainians are just not willing to allow anything of the sort, or Putin is harbouring secret thoughts that Odessa and Kherson and so forth all have to be Russian as well, then, yeah, we are in a situation in which this war will run and run. But the point I would add is not Necessarily in its current form. I mean, I don't feel that, for example, the Russians can maintain this tempo of operations for more than the current year with this mode of recruitment. I mean, at present they are offering impoverished Russians life changing sums of money to volunteer. And that's really important because unlike previous wars, unlike the Chechen, the Afghanistan and so forth, this is not being fought by conscripts or mobilized reservists after that abortive, unsuccessful and thoroughly disruptive attempt at a mobilization wave in autumn of 2022. Which is one of the reasons why there isn't a kind of a wider political backlash. Because there is a sense among many that these people are essentially playing a particularly blood soaked lottery, that they decided to take a chance. Either they survived the war and they are relatively now well rewarded, or they die and their families are relatively well rewarded. The point at which you actually have to start relying on people who are forced to go that I think very much changes how people will think politically about the war. And more to the point, there is a degree to which actually the Russians may well just simply not be able to afford what they're currently offering. So it could well be that the Russians are not going to be able to operate on the same scale, particularly of offensive operations. Yes, they can still slam the Ukrainians with drones and missiles, but nonetheless they'll have to change their mode. But at the same time, we talk a lot about precisely how many casualties the Russians have taken and we don't know for sure, but the estimates, you know, 1.2 million dead and sort of seriously wounded seems to be the current general sort of figure.
- [53:21]
Martin DeCaro
1.2 million dead and wounded. Wow.
- [53:24]
Michael Kimmage
Yeah.
- [53:24]
Mark Galeotti
And we don't know about the Ukrainians. And in part that's because again, the Ukrainians are very, very tight lipped about their actual casualties. Zelenskyy has given a few figures from time to time which are clearly frankly not credible. And those people who have a greater capacity to actually know how many casualties the Ukrainians have suffered are in many ways themselves also tight lipped because they don't want to challenge Ukrainian operational security. So we also don't know actually about the Ukrainian capacity to operate in at the same scale. So I can't help but feel exactly, either we see some kind of a peace agreed in the next year or so, or we will see a war which will not, alas, freeze, but will become much more sporadic episodic. It'll be two exhausted boxers clinging to their respective sides of the ring every now and then, coming out with a flurry of blows before returning to just a proposal themselves up. Not a particularly elevating prospect because there will still be all this bad blood on both sides. But yeah, I think in that way, by changing the form of the conflict, unfortunately, depressingly, it becomes a lot easier for both. Well, maybe not a lot easier, but certainly easier for both sides to sustain it.
- [54:45]
Unidentified Commentator 2
America's got a whole lot of challenges. Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength, but out of weakness. Ukraine has been a country in which Russia had enormous influence for decades, since the breakup of the Soviet Union. And we have considerable influence on our neighbors. We generally don't need to invade them in order to have a strong cooperative relationship with them. The fact that Russia felt compelled to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicates less influence, not more and more. And so my response then continues to be what I believe today, which is Russia's actions are a problem. They don't pose the number one national security threat to the United States. I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan, which is part the of. Of the reason why the United States, showing its continued international leadership, has organized a forum over the last several years that's been able to help eliminate that threat in a consistent way.
- [56:21]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History As It Happens, part two of this series marking the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our guest will be historian Anina Khrushcheva and the topic late Putinism. That's next. As we report History As It Happens, make sure to sign up for my weekly newsletter. It is free. Go to substack and search for History As It Happens.