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- [00:00]
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- [02:09]
Will Kaback
Hi everyone and welcome to the Tangle Friday Edition. My name is Will Kbach. I'm Tangle's senior editor. 1331 days have passed since Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine began and a resolution to the conflict seems as distant now as it did then. The war has spanned Democratic and Republican presidential administrations and neither has managed a breakthrough. Despite their sustained efforts here In Tangle, we've dedicated scores of additions to the topic since 2022, covering everything from Russian President Vladimir Putin's motivations to Ukraine's defensive and now offensive strategy to the Biden administration's military aid disbursements to the Trump administration's evolving posture toward Ukrain President Volodymyr Zelensky. We've also spoken to experts like the former US Ambassador to Russia who have shed light on the conflict's origins and the plausible paths to peace. All the while, little has changed on the ground. The two sides remain locked in a stalemate, though. Ukraine is now attacking deeper into Russia thanks to advanced drone capabilities, while Russia continues to bombard Ukrainian cities with its own drones and missiles. President Trump has had little success bringing President Putin to the negotiating table and has pivoted from friendly diplomatic overtures to increasingly hostile threats. And just this week, Trump spoke with Putin and said they will meet again, this time in Hungary. In the coming weeks, though, Trump also floated the possibility of the United States sending Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. After years of writing about a seemingly intractable conflict, it can start to feel hopeless. So today we're doing something a little different and sharing two unique perspectives from leading experts on the war. In late September, I spoke with two experts on Russia, Ukraine, and the war. The first was Richard Sakwa, a professor emeritus of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury and an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Now Sakwa has studied and written extensively on Russia and Vladimir Putin in particular, including his book Frontline Ukraine, about the origins of the current war. Then I spoke with Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at the Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Applebaum has also written several books on Russia and Ukraine and reported on the rise of autocracy and authoritarianism around the world. Both of these interviews focus on a couple of central questions. One, what is the outlook for the war? And two, what role should the US Play in an eventual resolution? Within these questions, I also asked both interviewees about the origins of the conflict, the animating issues for each side, and the differences between the Biden and Trump administrations approaches. As you'll see, Richard and Ann have fundamentally different views on these topics, and we hope that each of their arguments challenges your preconceptions, as they did for me. So, first off, here's my interview with Richard Sakwa, and we're going to post my Interview with Ann as a separate podcast episode that will be published at the same time. So you can just head on over to the Tangle podcast page to check that out after you listen to this one. Now, if you're a free subscriber to the Tangle podcast, you'll get a preview of each interview, but to listen to the full conversations, you'll need to upgrade your membership and, and we'll leave a link where you can do that in today's show. Notes. All right, without further ado, here is my conversation with Richard Sakwa. Richard, thanks so much for joining us.
- [06:00]
Richard Sakwa
My pleasure.
- [06:02]
Will Kaback
So I first encountered your writing fairly recently when I was reading about some different perspectives on the origins of the war in Ukraine. And I was particularly struck by your arguments about the role of Western nations and NATO in catalyzing the conflict, including the all out invasion in 2022, but also the conflicts that preceded it. So I would love to, just for our listeners who aren't familiar with your perspective on the war, to have you just lay out the basic guideposts of what you see as the roots of this conflict and the role or the degree to which the west played a role in forcing Putin's hand potentially to invade Ukraine. So I'll just open the floor to you to start there.
- [06:45]
Richard Sakwa
Thank you. Yeah, I'd say that first, before going on to the way I see things, we could say that there's two dominant visions of what it's all about, certainly in the West. The first one is that the war and the conflict in Ukraine is all about Russian imperial expansion, that basically the Putin's attempt to reestablish a Soviet Union, some sort of empire, that Putin is the Hitler of our days, and so on. So you then have this endless discussion that you cannot have negotiations because that will be appeasement. So we're back to 1938 and Munich. So that's the first. Well, a major one is that. And the second one which is tied to it is that. So it's a diversionary war that basically Russia has got so many internal complications and difficulties so that it lashes out and it tries to externalize. I think that neither of these versions are credible. Internally, the Putin regime is remarkably stable, as we've seen now, nearly four years of war. And the fact that the regime is still enjoying huge popularity, Amazing, Incredible even that it's well into the, well, top 70s, into the 80% popular support. Of course, in wartime it's difficult to get accurate opinion polls, but I think all the evidence suggests that. So if those don't really hold. So what are the causes? I would say they're fourfold. I won't go into any detail, but basically that in all four elements make this such a deeply intractable and almost solutionless conflict. The first one is the internal Ukrainian conflict. I've argued for many, many years that what we really did need to see within Ukraine is a pluralistic, multi confessional, multicultural, multilingual settlement, possibly including federalism. And this is quite clear that even when the Donbas rebellion began after the Maidan a coup, or call it revolution of February 2014, they weren't calling for independence initially. It was for what the Russians say. It's difficult to translate Samostratel nest, which could be autonomy, it could be something more than that, but certainly the basic view is it was for autonomy. So internally, the failure to reflect Ukraine's multicultural, well, complex internal, well, demographic, cultural, religious framework, giving it constitutional form, in other words, that people could be confident. The second element is the endless tensions between Russia and Ukraine. Now, this goes back indeed a thousand years of entwined history, both of antagonism and cooperation. Ukraine was one of the major republics in the Soviet Union. And after 1991, you had this very difficult relationship. It's an extreme version, even if you could say Ireland's relationship or the Republic's relationship with the United Kingdom, with England after, well, for a long time, certainly after independence, Ukrainian nationalism became exceptionally prickly, insecure, and that domestic insecurity was then projected outward in a particularly prickly relationship and antagonistic one, with Russia seen as the colonial, and therefore you need to decolonize and so on. The third level is the pan European one. If you remember, Gorbachev, during his perestroika in the late 1980s, called for a pan European home, common European home. And we failed to do that. And that takes us to the fourth level, and that is the US Russian relationship. I've argued also for a long time that after 1945 a political west took shape. You could call it the Euro Atlantic alliance system, whatever. I think it's more. It was political, it was cultural, it was all sorts of levels. And this fourth level, and after the end of the Cold War, 1989, 91, the United States insisted on maintaining its hegemony, its dominance, and that precluded allowing Europe to become more autonomous and indeed to allow Germany and Russia to come together with France, any other countries that couldn't be allowed. And we saw that in the Balkans and we saw that over Ukraine. And so these four levels are like a rubric's coup that they all interact with each other. And to solve the war, all four faces have to line up, which is going to be jolly difficult.
- [11:38]
Will Kaback
So where do you think we are now, I guess is the follow up question to that. We're about four years in. We have these four levels that you've just described. Have they changed? Have they evolved? In the nearly four years since this war escalated with the all out invasion.
- [11:52]
Richard Sakwa
Each one has become far, far worse, even more difficult to resolve. Internal conflict within Ukraine is far, far more bitter and polarized. The Europeans, as you know, are completely up a creek without a paddle, as it were, completely lost. And the coalition of the willing is a farce. And you remember the picture of the seven clowns, as we call them, or the seven dwarfs around Trump's table in the Oval Office in the White House. I mean, it really was one of the most shameful episodes in European history is that it really was shocking and it was just a reflection of our failure, I speak as a European, to establish this from Lisbon to Vladivostok idea. So everything has become far worse, far worse. Except and even when Trump tried to break the deadlock by meeting Putin in Alaska on 13 September, what happens? Europeans run over him, say, you can't make a deal with Russia, we've got to continue the war. What will the Europeans continue with? They don't have much industry left. They don't have major armies. So they want the United States to commit to this endless war. So where we are today, I've always said, and we've always said as peaceniks that there is no military solution. Sadly, it looks as if we're heading towards the only solution being a military one, which of course has the huge danger of a third world war and escalating. So we are perhaps in a bit of a lull at the moment, but possibly in a more dangerous moment than we've ever been before. We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [13:46]
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- [15:01]
Will Kaback
I want to tease out the the Trump aspect of this a little bit more because he's about eight months into his term and has taken, I would say in some ways a markedly different approach to the conflict than President Biden did. In other ways there have been similarities, I think, in how his administration has handled the war and working with European nations. But what do you see as the key differences between the Biden approach and the Trump approach? And are you more hopeful for a peaceful non military resolution with Trump now or do the concerns remain for you with how he's handling it?
- [15:35]
Richard Sakwa
At the beginning we did have a certain feeling that Trump had always said all the way back to 2016, if not earlier, that it makes sense to get on with Russia. His famous mayflower speech in April 2016. And so if he couldn't do it in his first term because of Russiagate and they said he had to prove that he wasn't in Putin's pocket, therefore he had to be act extra tough. We've seen in these last eight months a litany of failure. We now understand that he simply does not understand the deeper, what Putin would call the root causes. And so therefore he's a bit like a weather vane. The wind blows from Brussels, he goes that way, from Kiev, he goes that way. And from Moscow, which is very different from Biden. Biden had absolutely no contact with Moscow after the war began. And even the contacts before that were rather, you know, well, I'd say confused and, you know, really not diplomatic, just consisted of a series of threats. So it was very different. We expected it to be different. Again, I don't want to go into too long, but I'll just say that the Trump phenomenon is a complex one. And one reason why we did think that there would be a hope for a new type of approach was the fact that the Trump phenomenon in my view consists of at least four defections or leaving. The first defection is potentially from this political west, from this Euro Atlantic alliance. We know he's got nothing but contempt for the European Union. He even said earlier that NATO was obsolete. Well, he hasn't followed through on that at all. So we thought that would open up a potential for some sort of pan European, a new angle of approach. The second defection is from the, you know, if the first is from the political west, the second one is from the United nations based international system, that is the international law and all of that. As you know, Trump is very critical and he's not first, of course, highly critical of the United Nations. He's left the UN Human Rights Commission, World Health Organization for the second time and basically, as we know, contemptuous of international law and in fact, U.S. international treaties. The third defection is from the U.S. constitution domestically, where lawfare has taken well, again, continuing a Biden and earlier approaches. And the fourth defection is a Steve Bannon dismantling or deconstruction of the administrative state. Of course, that was Elon Musk has gone. But I think the deconstruction of doggy dogee, how do you pronounce it? Is continuing and of course you could say plenty of other defections from the international political economy as conducted largely since the Second World War. So in that package, there were some positives. Clearly, NATO is a dysfunctional organization internally and kett for Europe and global politics internationally, absolutely catastrophic. It keeps boasting with its 32 members the most successful military organization in history. It basically exists to sustain its own existence and therefore to do that, it has to foster and generate conflict. So it's worth, you could say it's the most disastrous military alliance in history. It should have gone after 1989 and the end of the first Cold War.
- [19:13]
Will Kaback
That's interesting. And it segues into another question that I wanted to ask you, which is this notion of Putin's imperial ambitions, his ambitions beyond Ukraine, which I think NATO members or NATO supporters would say is a reason that the alliance is necessary. Do you believe that Putin has imperial ambitions beyond Ukraine?
- [19:33]
Richard Sakwa
Absolutely not. This is a replay of the old Vietnam domino theory that the United States had to fight in Vietnam because otherwise then all of Southeast Asia and all of Asia would fall to communism, which failed fundamentally to understand what the Vietnam War was all about, which was a nationalist movement together with in a communist nationalist form. But it was for reunification, for the west to stick to what it promised, by the way, in the mid-1950s when there was the partition of Vietnam. And again, the west reneged on its own promises at that time. And so today the idea that Russian army, which is making heavy weather of taking over 20% of Ukraine is and of course Ukraine has got nearly a million men under arms, even though the quality may be difficult, but certainly it's putting up a stiff fight with the Western help, the idea that it will then roll forwards into the Baltic republics. Elsewhere, there is not a shred of evidence that the goal is to restore the Russian empire. The goal was always about security and in particular, for example, just before the war began in February 2022, there was much discussion and in fact, for some reason it's never mentioned in the Western media about the deployment of Tomahawk missiles in Ukraine. Now in the final talk on the telephone call, well, penultimate one, in late December 2021, this issue came up and Biden said, yeah, of course we'll take that into account. Even if Ukraine joins NATO, we won't deploy these missiles. Just a few weeks later, when the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov met Blinken, the US Secretary of State, Blinken said, no, not really. It's up to us. You can't tell us where to put our missiles effectively. And so the only thing we will discuss is how many missiles will be allowed to put there. And of course the flight time is less than 10 minutes from Ukraine, maybe even less to Moscow. So it was always about security and of course other issues, the domestic conflicts for the Russophone population within Ukraine, but it was always about security. And don't forget Gorbachev said the same thing about NATO enlargement, Yeltsin said the same thing and Putin and the person after Putin would say exactly the same thing. Putin, Schmutin or Tutin, it would always be that concern. We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [22:30]
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- [23:01]
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- [23:28]
Will Kaback
Can you explain a bit more what you mean by the security concerns that were had, I think, particularly for a Western audience and an audience that's not as familiar with Russia's history, those security concerns may not be immediately apparent compared to the imperial explanation.
- [23:45]
Richard Sakwa
Russia doesn't have defensible borders. Those in the United States are lucky. It's got basically two reasonably friendly neighbors, though not so friendly now, to the north and to the south, and of course, two vast oceans. Russia does not have defensible borders, and it's a vast country, but with almost very limited access to the open sea. Of course, maybe more now as the Arctic begins to melt. But nevertheless, there's always been security concerns and of course, a whole history of invasions, you know, all the way back from the Poles to the Swedes to the French to the Germans, twice with devastating consequences. And the Turks.
- [24:23]
Commercial Narrator 2
How many wars hey everybody, this is John, Executive Producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest interview. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription. Or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription, which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. I will join you for the daily podcast on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y'.
- [25:16]
Will Kaback
All.
- [25:19]
Commercial Narrator 2
Peace.
- [25:22]
Richard Sakwa
Our Executive Editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our Executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Wall. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will Kaback and Associate editors. Home Audrey Moorhead Bailey Saw Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75 and John Law. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@readtangle.com.
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