Deep Dive
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Over 25 years ago, on September 29th, 1998, we watched a brainy girl with curly hair drop everything to follow a guy she only kind of knew all the way to college. And so began Felicity. My name is Juliette Littman, and I'm a Felicity superfan.
Join me, Amanda Foreman, who you may know better as Megan, the roommate, and Greg Grunberg, who you may also know as Sean Blundberg, as the three of us revisit our favorite moments from the show and talk to the people who helped shape it. Listen to Dear Felicity on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm
I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim-blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Dear listener, this episode of Conflicted is going to be a bit different. You see, it was always our plan to talk about Russia in this episode as a way of laying out some aspects, at least, of the geopolitics of the Cold War, which is what this season of Conflicted is all about.
When we recorded it four weeks ago, Russia had sent over 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian border, which we thought made the discussion especially topical. But we didn't know then that by the time this episode came out, President Putin would have ordered a full invasion of his neighbor and put his nuclear forces on high alert. Like a lot of people did four weeks ago, when Eamon and I discussed Vladimir Putin's aims and objectives, we did so under the assumption that Putin's sanity was basically intact.
After what's happened since, Putin's sanity can no longer be taken for granted. It looks like that old adage about absolute power corrupting absolutely has been proved true once again. As you can imagine, this is a busy time for a professional security analyst like Eamon. And so, though we considered re-recording this episode entirely in the light of recent events, we haven't been able to. Instead, I'm recording this new introduction, and at the end, I'll add some new thoughts as well.
As you listen, please bear in mind that we've tried to do what we always try to do. Tell the story as best we can, as objectively as we can. My worry is, by outlining the way Putin sees the world, you'll think we think his assault on Ukraine is justified. We do not.
Geopolitics is a diabolical game, hardly ever played by good guys against bad guys. But no one is ever forced to launch a war. And though every decision must be seen in context, Putin's decision to launch this war was his alone to make, and he alone bears responsibility for it and for its tragic consequences. Right, that's what I've got for you by way of introduction. I'll be back at the end for some final thoughts. Enjoy.
Welcome back, dear listeners, to Conflicted. You've reached episode four of series three. And as always, I'm joined by my right-hand man, the incomparable Eamon Dean. Or am I your right-hand man, Eamon? What do you think? Well, you know, the Dark Lord doesn't share power. Oh, so what you're saying is you're the master, I'm the apprentice. But you know what that means. One day I will rise up and slay you. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Oh, dear.
In the last episode, we talked about how the American half of the Cold War was established in Saudi Arabia. Today, we're shifting our focus to the other half of that epic conflict, the Soviet Union. What were the Soviet Union's designs on the Middle East? And now, as the specter of war between Russia and Ukraine hangs over Europe, to what extent can Soviet history, and indeed the earlier history of imperial Russia, help us to understand what's going on?
This episode can be considered a follow-up to the third episode of season two. So if you haven't listened to that or haven't since it came out, I recommend you go and listen to it now, then come back to us. It lays the foundation for much of what we're going to discuss today. The collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's quick descent into economic anarchy, the rise of Putin, the crushing of the Chechnyan jihad.
and Russia's return to the Middle East as an important player in the Syrian civil war, commanding its own armies of Sufi jihadist mercenaries. It was a great episode. At the end of the episode, I said this: There's obviously a lot more we could have talked about in this extremely complex episode of Conflicted. We could have talked about Russia's war in Georgia in 2008, or we could have gone into greater detail about the annexation of Crimea in 2014, or indeed about the ongoing Ukrainian civil war.
Well, at the time of this recording, Russia has massed 135,000 troops along the Ukrainian border, and everyone is wondering, what will happen? Will Russia invade? Will NATO defend Ukraine? Here on Conflicted, we don't forecast the future, and who knows, by the time this episode airs, the conflict may have completely gone away. But I doubt it. No, here on Conflicted, we talk about how the past sheds light on the present.
Beginning with the present then, Eamon, can you give us a quick update on Russia's position in the Middle East at the moment? Where are its Chechen mercenaries currently being deployed?
Well, they are deployed in Syria. Still in Syria? Yeah, four or five thousand of them. They are actually called or designated the Russian military police. Their mission is to patrol and to police so-called liberated areas, you know, which were under jihadist control in the past. Also, they are deployed in Libya.
And, you know, to some extent also they are deployed in Donbass, in the Ukraine, on the Eastern Front. Well, we'll get to that for sure. But what are they doing in Libya? What's their agenda there? Well, during the Libyan civil war, the recent one,
in 2020, 2021, they were siding with the forces of the infamous General Khalifa Haftar, a remnant of the old regime, someone basically who is a self-styled neo-Qaddafi, and
I'm funny enough, an American citizen. However, he got the backing of the Egyptians, the Russians, the Greeks even, and to some extent, the Saudis and the Emiratis.
So he is, you know, the person who wanted to rid Libya of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yeah, he's a sort of anti-Islamist general. Yeah, he is an anti-Islamist general. And then on the other hand, of course, although he has lots of Salafists fighting for him. You might be anti-Islamist, but you're never rid of Islamists. They're everywhere. So it's like, okay, these are Islamists, but I have my own Islamists, you know. I'm fighting Islamists with my own Islamists.
And then you have, so in Libya they were, you know, serving the foreign policy objectives of Putin in trying to restore Libya into a strong man republic, you know, similar to what Gaddafi used to do, although, like, I mean, with more sanity. Although, like, you know, basically no one can, you know, outdo Gaddafi when it comes to insanity. But nonetheless, you know, I remember...
I met a few Libyans in the airport in Beijing and they were asking me to help fill in their landing cards. And I said to them, guys, we have a saying in Arabic, don't get rid of your insane monkey. You might get even a more insane monkey. And so this is Gaddafi. I mean, they said yes, because with him in power, we had one insane monkey. Now we have an entire insane zoo.
- Competing. - It's the age old tension between authoritarianism and chaos. - Exactly. - Well, in this series of Conflicted, we're focusing on the Cold War in the Middle East
Do you know, Eamon, where the first recorded instance of the expression "a cold war" comes from? No, enlighten me. Here's the quote: "War that is very strong and very hot ends with either death or peace, whereas cold war neither brings peace nor gives honor to the one who makes it." Those are the words of Don Juan Manuel, an early 14th century Castilian nobleman in Spain, referring to the war between the Christians and the Muslims there.
Now, it's easy for a 14th century Spaniard to prefer hot to cold wars, but by the 20th century, developments in military technology made such a preference appear romantic in the extreme. We're talking about Russia and Ukraine today, and both trace their histories back to a state that formed in the late 9th century AD. A state, and this is key, that was situated in present-day Ukraine with the same capital city, Kiev.
This state, which is known as Kievan Rus, was actually founded by Scandinavians, by Vikings who were traveling up and down the Dnieper and Volga rivers, bringing furs and slaves to the great empires of Byzantium and the Abbasid Caliphate. The people living along the rivers were mainly Eastern Slavs, who in fact made up the bulk of those slaves. The English word slave comes from the word Slav.
But the ruling class were Norsemen, Germanic warriors with Germanic names like Oleg and Rurik, and even Vladimir, a Slavified form of the Norse name Valdemar. Kievan Rus converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988 and thus became part of what's known as the Byzantine Commonwealth. The Kievan state looked to Byzantium as a sort of cultural ideal, and this would characterize Russia later.
Kievan Rus eventually fragmented and weakened, succumbed to the Mongol invasions in the 1240s. It was incorporated into the realm of the Golden Horde, which in Russia is called the Tatar Yoke, and it lasted for 250 years. Eamon, how are the Mongols and their Turkic successors remembered by Middle Easterners? I mean, we Westerners have an almost totally negative view of them.
The Mongol invasion is remembered really negatively for lots of reasons. I mean, it is blamed partly for the collapse of the Islamic civilization, the sack of Baghdad, the burning of the House of Wisdom, you know, the biggest library in the world at that time, 5 million titles were lost.
So all of this means that to this day, the Arabs remember the Mongol invasion as the worst calamity to have ever befell the Middle East, worse than the Crusades. But because the Mongols and the Turks who followed after them eventually did convert to Islam and reestablished Islamic civilization in a way on new foundations almost, the Mongol heritage in the Middle East is perhaps remembered a little bit more
ambiguously at least, than in the West where they just were always the absolute worst. - Not by the Arabs though. And the reason is because even when the Turkic-Mongol conversion to Islam happened, they still had so many wars. Ibn Taymiyyah, the famous grandfather of Salafism,
He fought against King Qazan and the Al-Khanate Mongols and issued fatwas that they were not proper Muslims because they were incorporating parts of the Yasa, Genghis Khan law, into Islam. And so he declared them to be not proper Muslims. He excommunicated them and then he fought against them. He declared jihad against them.
So no, and even then when the Ottoman Empire was established, you know, on the back of the Mongol invasions, although they are Turkic rather than Mongol, still the Arabs were, you know, considered to be fourth or fifth class citizens. No, that era is never remembered fondly. Well, that's something that the Arabs have in common with the peoples of Kievan Rus, who languished under the Tartar yoke for 250 years.
The Mongols were eventually rolled back in waves by a number of rising Christian powers. The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania conquered much of the heartlands of what had been Kievan Rus', i.e. modern-day Ukraine, which they jointly ruled for centuries and which they called Ruthenia.
a Latinized form of Russia. This means that the word Russian has different meanings depending on when you're talking about. And one of those meanings is all the people who lived in Ruthenia, in Kievan Rus', which includes both modern Ukraine and modern Russia.
Ukraine means borderland, and indeed, that part of Ruthenia was torn between competing powers, including the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. But it was a new power to the northeast that started taking bigger and bigger chunks of it beginning in the 17th century that is most relevant today, the power of Muscovy.
The Grand Duchy of Moscow was a vassal of the Mongols until it threw them off in the mid-1300s. This Muscovite state was actually founded after the fall of Kievan Rus, but it believed that it was an heir to the tradition of that earlier state.
Wars of expansion characterized the Moscow state, which in 1547 became an empire proper when its infamous leader, Ivan the Terrible, was proclaimed Tsar, which is just the word for Caesar in Russian. The Tartar yoke left its mark in the Russian empire. It was part Byzantine, part Mongol in its statecraft, where the rule of law was always second to the iron rule of power. The empire was autocratic,
centralized, Orthodox Christian, and committed to territorial expansion. This it pursued with ruthless gusto, eventually swallowing up the entirety of Northern Eurasia, including most of what is now Ukraine, a monumental achievement. The Russian Empire was a behemoth. It haunted the dreams of Western imperial powers, especially Britain, whose global maritime empire was the exact opposite of the Tsar's transcontinental empire.
The long imperial conflict between them is called the Great Game, which we've discussed before on Conflicted. And if you're interested, check out our episodes on Afghanistan and Russia. You'll hear all about it. The First World War did not go well for the Russian Empire. It ended with revolution, the communist takeover, and a peace treaty with Germany that saw the empire's borders contract massively.
One territory it lost was Ukraine, which was itself plunged into chaos. Different Ukrainian nationalist groups competed for power, and Ukraine became a battlefield in the larger Russian Civil War, which included Western armies terrified of communism trying to restore the Tsar. In the end, the Bolsheviks won the field, and in 1922 the Soviet Union was founded, whose borders were basically the same as the Russian Empire's.
But Ukraine wasn't just a province as it had been. It was a proper constituent republic, an implicit acknowledgement of Ukraine's claims to statehood. Anyway, as we all know, though it haunted the dreams of America just as its imperial predecessor had haunted the dreams of the British, the USSR eventually fell apart.
Ukraine achieved its full independence in a referendum in 1991, and as capital of the newly formed Russian Federation, Moscow found itself ruling less territory than it had for centuries, a situation that in the eyes of Russian leaders was essentially untenable in the long run.
There's a reason for that, Russia's geography. I'm going to give a description of Russia's infamously porous borders, Ayman. What do you have to say in general about Russia's geographical position and how important is it to understand it, to understand what's going on? Well, Russia is extremely lucky and unlucky in its geography.
It is extremely lucky because of all the natural resources that they acquired unknowingly when they just expanded all the way to the east and to the wilderness of Siberia. Where the natural gas fields are vast and extremely lucrative. Absolutely. And the oil also. And the coal and many other minerals. The problem here is
You know, Russia is the biggest country in the world, yet ironically, you might as well consider it to be almost landlocked.
And the reason for that is because they don't have any warm water ports with the exception of the Black Sea. - The infamous warm water port problem of the Russians. - Exactly. - They've been pursuing warm water for longer than anyone remembers. Russia has 20,000 kilometers of borders, 20,000 kilometers of border to police. It borders 16 independent states. 12 used to be in the Soviet Union.
And all of that border territory is an immense liability. Just policing it, ensuring that no one invades is a huge cost to the exchequer. This vulnerability is deeply embedded in the Russian state's psyche. From the beginning, the Grand Duchy of Moscow was extremely vulnerable due to geography. It needed to
to expand. I mean, geography is destiny. Try to imagine Russia. Invasion from the north, it's basically impossible because of the Arctic waters. They're frozen most of the year. In the east, Russia's strategic control of the northeast Asian coastline down to Vladivostok, including the Kuril Islands, gives it the upper hand there.
Two mountain ranges north of Mongolia and China, the Stanavoy and the Sion ranges, give Russia some protection from invasion from that direction. But the European plain is like a flat funnel. It has a narrow mouth at the low countries of Belgium and the Netherlands, and then it just widens, expanding eastward. Its southern side wrapping along the Carpathians to the Black Sea, and its northern side along the Baltic Sea all the way to the Urals.
It's a vast, flat plain containing few natural, defensible barriers. Russia's western border snakes down the middle of it for 2,000 kilometers. There is no border like it in the world, no border as long or as exposed.
What adds to this geostrategic nightmare for Russia is what's called the Volgograd Gap. Eamon, tell us about the Volgograd Gap, a 750-kilometer stretch of flat land between the Sea of Azov to the northeast of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. How important is the Volgograd Gap? Well, of course, it is very important because Hitler wanted to go all the way through it, all the way to the oil fields in the Caspian Sea.
For him, he knew that this is a flat plane that is easily invadable, that you can just basically roll through the tanks, the panzers, all the way to the Caucasus. And that is why it is one of the biggest vulnerabilities of Russia as far as European powers are concerned, whether they are the French, Napoleon invaders,
And after that, Hitler tried again. And before Napoleon, the Poles invaded. Before that, the Swedes invaded. It was an endless succession of invaders from the West. Absolutely. But...
Uh, in a nonetheless, I think the particular invasion that will always live in the memories of all Russians will be the, uh, second world war or as they always call it the great patriotic war. Yes. During the second world war, Hitler's, uh, troops tried to control the Volgograd gap. And from Russia's point of view,
If a foreign power grabs control of this gap, which is, you know, it's flat. There's no easily defensible area there. If a foreign power controls it, it effectively cuts Russia off from access both to vital trade routes, to its only warm water access on the Black Sea. This is an existential threat to the Russian state. And incidentally, this goes some way towards explaining why Russia crushed Chechen separatism so mercilessly.
Moscow considers the North Caucasus region to be integral to its existence as a state. The Caucasus Mountains are Moscow's first line of defense against incursion from the south into the Volgograd Gap.
Now, Russia's southern Central Asian border is also vast, it is also flat, and it is also indefensible, which is why Russia needs to keep the Central Asian republics within its security fold. Central Asian republics now built on top of land that was conquered and pacified by the Tsars in their never-ending quest for security.
So that's the geopolitical geographic situation. And I think it's important sometimes at least, you know, imagine yourself in Vladimir Putin's shoes sitting on his throne there in Moscow looking out at the world. We're not trying to advocate or defend his perspective, but at least we can understand it. He rules this vast country with these three easily penetrable borderlands, enormous borderlands, and he's instinctively going to feel vulnerable.
And what makes him feel most vulnerable is NATO's expansion eastward. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO has continued to acquire or to add to its ranks new countries, countries that used to fall squarely within Moscow's sphere of influence. East Germany joined immediately upon reunion with West Germany in 1990.
In 1999, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic joined NATO. In 2004, Slovakia, the Baltic states, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria joined NATO. Now, Eamon, remind us, during this first wave of NATO expansion, Putin remained a potential partner to the West, but that relationship began to break down. Quickly remind us why. Well...
several things. The first thing is the Iraq war, because Putin didn't like the idea that the Americans are going to put their hand on the fourth largest oil reserves in the world in Iraq and threatening, you know, the second or the third largest oil reserves in the world, which is Iran next door. And also at the same time, from their position in Iraq, they can
have a hegemony on Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and Iran and Iraq, which basically will put them in charge of roughly about 60% of the world's hydrocarbon reserves. Meaning they could manipulate the oil price downward for American consumers. And Putin has an interest in keeping the price as high as possible. Absolutely. So here is the dynamics of the buyer and seller.
and each trying to influence the events to their advantage. Now, Putin already after 9-11 offered this, you know, olive branch saying, look, I've been fighting terrorism in Ukraine
Chechnya and the Caucasus. I've been succeeding in splitting the Wahhabis from the Sufis. I could help. I could lend intelligence, air bases, assets in order to assist the war on terrorism from the American side. The Americans brushed him aside and said, sorry, thank you. Russia is a broken country.
We have no interest in having help from you or anyone else. And then following the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, America reached out to partners throughout the Central Asian republics, established military footholds there. That was obviously very provocative to Putin. Exactly. The second thing that was provocative is, remember that the only warm water port that the Russians have is on the Black Sea.
So they already tolerated the fact that Turkey, which with a long coastline on the Black Sea, is a NATO ally, but also a NATO member, but it's been a NATO member since the 1950s. I mean, they are fine with that. Which was always threatening. I mean, that's an essential threat to Russia because Turkey being in NATO means NATO can close access to the Black Sea in the Sea of Marmara. Absolutely. In the Bosphorus. Absolutely. But then when Romania and Bulgaria, both are Black Sea nations, joined...
It's only a matter of time before the entire Black Sea almost becomes a NATO lake. So in essence, the Russians were viewing this NATO expansion with nervousness.
And they were thinking, ah, okay, who's next? When the Cold War was coming to an end, many people in Russia especially assumed that NATO would be disbanded as Russia was disbanding the Warsaw Pact. Because, you know, without the Soviet Union there to defend Europe from, what does NATO exist to achieve? Well, NATO exists to defend Europe from Russia. There is something essentially provocative there.
If the West is in a military alliance that says, you are our enemy, we are defending ourselves from you, it's already creating that kind of a dynamic. And then following the appearance of NATO troops in Central Asia, this is, again, from Putin's point of view, provocative. There's another side to Putin's perception that Western policy is threatening, and this is what he calls the US's support for democracy. This is extremely difficult, really, for Westerners, I think, or for people who have a commitment to democracy.
to liberal democracy to understand, but for autocrats, authoritarians like Putin, who actually believes that authoritarianism is the best thing for Russia. Now, we might be cynical about that, but he believes it. Putin sees liberal democracy as an essential threat to the authoritarian top-down style of leadership that he himself practices and supports.
We might think that this is the logic of a dictator seeking to retain power, and perhaps that is true, but this is certainly the way he sees it. And it is incontrovertibly true that the US, particularly from the late 90s onward, began, in the words of the Guardian newspaper at the time, who was a champion of this effort, began engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience. This is absolutely true, where
The Pentagon was trying to impose democracy, if you like, through the military in places like Iraq. The State Department, effectively the foreign ministry of the United States government, was trying to impose or at least encourage democracy by training peoples outside of America on how to mobilize democratically. In 2000, the State Department put a huge effort into influencing the presidential election in Serbia, and it succeeded, and Slobodan Milosevic was voted out of office.
In 2001, they tried again, this time in Belarus, and they failed. But in 2003, the State Department intervened in the elections in Georgia, where they again succeeded. So having succeeded in Georgia in 2003, we come to the Ukraine. And this is really what brings us up to the present. This is vital backstory to what's going on. So in 2004, the State Department and its NGO allies were involved in swaying the presidential elections in the Ukraine that year.
Initially, they failed and the Russian-backed candidate Yanukovych came to power. But immediately, a mass protest movement broke out, coordinated by this network of NGOs. And this would be called the Orange Revolution of 2004.
Eventually, this led to a rerun of the election and the pro-Western candidate, Yushchenko, came to power. Everything really can be traced back to this election in 2004. It showed Russia that the West was trying to install a pro-Western president in the Ukraine. Now, Russia was also manipulating the elections.
And he even attempted to assassinate Yushchenko, the pro-Western candidate, with dioxin poisoning. So, you know, we're not saying that Putin is a good guy here, a bit like our episode about Afghanistan. There are no good guys in this world. No. We're just talking about, you know, really bad guys with, you know, different levels of how bad they are.
It's important to remember that though Putin is anti-democracy, he's not anti-voting. He just sees voting as serving a different purpose from how voting is perceived in a liberal democracy. - Like Iran, for example. - Yes, like all these authoritarian places. They try to use elections as a way of controlling public perception and legitimizing authoritarian rule.
And so when Putin sees US-backed NGOs teaching political candidates in authoritarian countries how to mobilize the masses, how to campaign, how to use the media to achieve their communications objectives, and then when elections don't go the right way, how to really get mass protest movements moving. When he sees this going on, he obviously feels threatened. He feels angry. Let's take a quick break now.
Okay, Eamon, let's get back to our conversation.
The next big date in this backstory is on the 3rd of April, 2008. NATO held a summit in Bucharest. Putin was actually present. And it ends by welcoming Ukraine and Georgia's aspirations to join NATO.
At the time, Georgia and NATO were hoping that the summit would result in the beginning of a formal process for them to join NATO. And it didn't go as far as that, but it did officially welcome their aspirations. George W. Bush had wanted to start the joining process right away. George W. Bush, he was a big fan of exporting democracy. But Britain, France and Germany said that, no, we need to wait. Perhaps they recognized Russia's perspective. And Russia made that perspective immediately clear.
It was a huge strategic mistake, Russia said. It would destabilize European security. I think we know what that means. Exactly. And it said that Georgia and Ukraine's joining NATO was a, quote, direct threat to Russia. So Russia made its opinion absolutely clear. And a few months later, in August of 2008, Russia goes to war against China.
Georgia so Russia is showing that it is it is not kidding around now a man you were still spying for mi6 in August 2008 is that right or had you already left the service? No by that time I already left nonetheless in the years up to that point you were talking a lot with intelligence experts and analysts How are America's pro-democracy tactics perceived in that community and and tell us a little bit about that war with Georgia? Well, we have to understand that
Georgia, once it veered in 2003 towards the West, that actually had a negative impact on the Russian effort to pacify and subdue Chechnya and the other
Islamic militants in the Caucasus. There was an area just north of Tbilisi called the Pankisi Gorge. The Pankisi Gorge is important here because that is the place in which militants would use in order to
infiltrate into Chechnya. And, you know, the Russians prior to that, prior to 2003, were always relying on the Georgians sealing that gorge, making sure no weapons, munitions, logistics, and men were crossing. In fact, one of the people who wanted to cross the Pankisi Gorge and was turned away by the Georgians is none other than Abdulaziz al-Omari, one of the 9-11 hijackers. Wow.
In February 2000, he was about to cross the Pankisi Gorge and going to fight in Chechnya, but he was turned away by the Georgians and was deported to Turkey. And from there, he went to Afghanistan. So the reality is that the Georgians were really good at helping the Russians until 2003.
when a new pro-American government came to power, and that had a negative impact immediately on the amount of logistics and weapons and the traffic of fighters in and out of Chechnya using the Pankisi Gorge. So the Russians decided, okay, you give us a Pankisi Gorge, we're going to give you Southern Ossetia. So the Southern Ossetian Separatist Republic in Georgia.
So, and when the Jordans wanted to pacify southern Ossetia, the Russians used that as a pretext to invade. So the reality is that Putin realized that, okay, I offer to help you, you know, pacify Afghanistan. I offer to help you fight terrorism. He's talking to the United States here. Exactly. And now you come to my own backyard, my own backyard, the home of Stalin in Georgia, the home of Stalin. Yeah.
to turn it into not only a liberal democracy, but a liberal democracy that's giving aid and support to jihadists. Yeah, I can imagine Putin's not happy. Exactly. So he decided to do what Russians do best, send in the airplanes and the tanks. And the Russian army totally smashed Georgia. I mean, Georgia is still smarting today from that invasion. Absolutely.
But what about America's pro-democracy tactics in general, the ones that were coordinated through the State Department? Were intelligence analysts focused at all on this at the time and the potential for conflict as a result of those actions? Well, if you talk to those who were Russia desk analysts and officers in, you know, whether the British intelligence or the German intelligence or other services, they will tell you that
There is no need to antagonize Russia this way. I mean, after all, the specter of Al-Qaeda, the specter of the Taliban were still there. We're still fighting a war against terrorism. There are many Chechens who are using the Pankisi Gorge, then later would infiltrate into places like Afghanistan to kill Americans.
They would infiltrate into places like Iraq to kill Americans, and they will infiltrate into Syria later. So the reality is that while the State Department enabled
pro-democracy or pro-liberal democracy powers to reach governance in Georgia, that did not result in improved security for the West and for Western allies. Actually, it proved to be the opposite. I think Putin learned the lesson that if you see that effort to destabilize one of my buffer or satellite states,
Intervene immediately. Don't let it fester. Well, we would see that happen before too long in the Ukraine. So to return to the Ukraine and to its backstory in 2010, the Russian candidate Yanukovych came to power, but he began negotiating with the EU to form an association agreement, basically a step on the way to full membership of the EU.
Putin said immediately, this is unacceptable. The Ukraine cannot be in the EU because the EU and NATO, though they're separate institutions, they are both parts of the liberal democratic order, which Putin does not want to grow into his front yard. Instead, he suggested a separate arrangement involving the EU, but also Russia, the IMF, and the Ukraine. But this was rejected by the EU. And in the end, after putting a lot of pressure on him by Putin,
President Yanukovych rejects the EU deal. That took place on the 21st of November 2013. Yanukovych says no to the EU deal.
Only 10 days later, in December, large demonstrations break out in Independence Square in Kiev. This is the famous Maidan. And actually, interestingly, that word, Maidan, is a Turkic word, big public square. And that is an immediate echo of the Tatar Yoke, stretches right back to those 250 years when the area was ruled by the Turks.
So these big demonstrations break out in Independence Square in the Maidan. Protesters take over the city hall. Yanukovych reacts harshly. Actually, this is precisely what such protests want. They want the leader to react harshly, which will galvanize the protests further, which is indeed what happens.
Sixteen days later, as the country is politically in greater and greater degrees of chaos, Putin announces a $15 billion loan to the Ukraine to help them see through some economic difficulties they were going through. This, again, is proof to the protesters who are anti-Russia that Ukraine is moving too much in the direction of Russia.
In January and February of 2014, street clashes are becoming a very constant thing. 68 people are killed in the course of them. And the Ukrainian parliament is working with the president, is working with Germany, is working with Britain, is working with Russia to try to find some solution. Finally, on the 21st of February 2014, they do reach a deal to hold new elections by the end of that year.
which would mean that Yanukovych would remain in power until then. This was agreed by the Ukrainian parliament, but was rejected by the protesters in the Maidan, which by this point included far-right elements. There's no question there were neo-Nazi-style Ukrainian nationalists in amongst the protesters. Weapon stores had also been ransacked. So the situation was getting very violent.
And on the following day, the 22nd of February, Yanukovych flees to Russia and Parliament votes unanimously to remove him from power in a move that Russia calls a coup. What is interesting about this whole story in Kiev in 2014, Eamon, is that it has echoes of the Arab Spring.
Is that just a coincidence or can we see in this pattern the consequences of American pro-democracy initiatives? That there's a kind of rulebook that's being followed here and this rulebook is leading to strongmen being removed from power. Well, if you see that the American administration
learned a lot from the lessons of Tunisia, Egypt, and to some extent Yemen. They looked at, and Libya of course, they looked at the trajectory of each country and the power play in each country. And they decided that, okay, if we want to apply the same here in Ukraine, then we need to follow these steps carefully. You know, first of all, you have the, uh,
the pretext, from the pretext comes the protest, from the protest comes the provocation, from the provocation comes the reaction, from the reaction comes further provocation. And this is how you feed this narrative. And until the people are presented, or the people in power are presented with two choices really, civil war
or just escape the country. So what some people call it, that Yanukovych did a Ben Ali. Ben Ali, the president of Tunisia who just decided to leave. Well, some people say his security officers put him on a plane and sent him away. Yeah, actually, no, they told him that, oh, we have information that the protesters are about to storm the palace, you know, flee for your safety. So he fled. It's the same thing that happened with Yanukovych. He was told that
you know, if the protesters reach the palace, your guard will not protect you anymore. So he decided, you know what, I mean, I'm not going to end up like Gaddafi. So the specter of Gaddafi, you know, being knifed. The ghost of Gaddafi haunts every strongman. Exactly. I don't want to be Gaddafi. I don't want to be Saddam. So thank you so much, guys. I will do a bin Ali, you know, go into honorable, lucrative exile, comfortable one in
in Russia and that's it. - Whatever it was in fact, and it was probably a complex mix of many things, in Putin's eyes, this whole thing was a Western takeover of the Ukraine and a move to permanently detach Ukraine from Russia's sphere of influence.
So, Russian units began seizing checkpoints in the Crimea, which has a majority Russian-speaking population and, as you mentioned, Eamon, is home to Russia's vital Black Sea fleet at the important naval city of Sevastopol. And by the 18th of March 2014, after a referendum in the Crimea, Russia formally annexed the peninsula.
Two majority Russian-speaking provinces in eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, part of a larger Russian-speaking region known as the Donbas, declare their independence from Ukraine. And well, that's that. From then,
in summer 2014 to now, there's been a kind of ongoing civil war within eastern areas of Ukraine, aided by Russian troops, aided by Russian mercenaries, including all sorts of military adventurers. Zooming out a bit to go back to the entire geostrategic perspective, what does Russia actually want? First and foremost, respect. Don't interfere in my affairs, I'm not going to interfere in yours.
And that's why we have to understand that Russia is always defensive, whether in terms of geography or politics, they are defensive.
Putin would say to the West, please, please, please, please, you know, do not undermine the stability of the Central Asian republics, you know, the Stans, whether it's Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, you know, Turkmenistan, please do not destabilize these countries because I will pay the price if there is a jihadist
uprising in these countries, and there will be millions of refugees coming into my land from the civil wars that will erupt. Do not go into Ukraine and cause disturbances. Please do not go into the Caucasus and cause disturbances, because I will pay the price for all of this. Putin's belief in stability and his willingness to intervene in order to
protect stability was proved in January of this year when Kazakhstan suddenly erupted into increasingly chaotic and even violent protests as a result initially of a rise of gas prices first in West Kazakhstan which within they spread to Almaty which is the country's largest city and and they grew they grew into a large-scale looting violence in places the state responded with brutality and
to prevent this Arab Spring-style situation, Russia sent in troops to quell the protests. Absolutely. And they were extremely successful in pacifying the country. So from his point of view is that
The West is playing lots of games, but in his backyard, rather than he is playing his games in theirs. By the way, I'm not saying that Putin and, by extension, Putin's Russia are the victims here. We're just talking about the dynamics of the game and where the game is being played. Is it being played in America's backyard or is it being played in Russia's backyard? No, actually, it is in Russia's backyard right now.
Now, we've kind of talked mainly about how Putin sees the West as a threat, but of course, the West sees Russia as a threat as well. NATO has expanded throughout the last 30 years, largely because in the eyes of most American military policymakers, Russia is an enemy. And of course, if you want to spread liberal democracy, it is an enemy. But also, more recently, in March 2018, Putin announced a number of new super weapons.
These super weapons have been designed specifically to get around American defense systems, which clearly freaks out the Pentagon.
If you're Putin and you're looking at America's defense system, what are its weaknesses or how are you going to get around it? Well, Putin decided that he will avoid what bankrupted the Soviet Union. He learned the lessons of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union tried to match the American military power, submarine to submarine, aircraft carrier to aircraft carrier, bomber to bomber. He decided that, no, we can't match American power.
arms race financially. So you know what? Let them build aircraft carriers.
but we will build the anti-aircraft carrier weapon. So America's military might is founded on aircraft carriers. Is that right? Absolutely, because that's how you project power. It has air power, and every aircraft carrier group has submarines and Tomahawk missiles and cruise missiles and all of these things, as well as the aircrafts on top of the aircraft carrier. It's a huge power projection, powerful than many other. Each aircraft group
carries the power of a whole nation, of a whole nation. So that is why, as far as Putin is concerned, okay, I'm not going to match each aircraft carrier with an aircraft carrier of my own. I'm going to invent weapons that will sink them before even they come to me. And what are these weapons?
hypersonic cruise missiles. - Hypersonic cruise missiles, my goodness. This is something out of a 1950s pulp sort of comic book. A hypersonic cruise missile. What is that? I mean, that sounds like it moves very fast. - Absolutely. I mean, the American typical cruise missile, like the Tomahawk, for example, the speed is about 800 kilometers. But the speed of the Russian new hypersonic cruise missiles could reach anywhere between 3,500 to 5,000 kilometers per hour.
So it is really fast, and even the velocity of the impact could destroy the carrier without even having a warhead on it. Just the velocity. So hypersonic cruise missiles. What else? What other weapons are they developing? This is where we come to one of the scariest weapons ever created in human history. It's a
mini submarine, but it's a torpedo, but it's a nuclear torpedo with a nuclear warhead and a nuclear reactor to make it going. You know, basically, it is not propelled by diesel, you know, or any other fuel. It is propelled by a nuclear reactor inside it. It is a 24-meter tube that
shaped like a torpedo that can roam the oceans carrying a warhead that is, and prepare for this, it's a hundred megatons in terms of the power of the thermal weapon inside. Compare that to the nuclear bombs that America dropped on Japan, a hundred megatons. How much bigger are we talking about? Oh, goodness. I mean, okay, fine. The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons.
The Nagasaki bomb was 20 kilotons. This is 100 megatons. Well, I'm no mathematician, but that sounds like a lot bigger. Yeah. You know, basically, it's tens of thousands of times bigger, I mean, than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
So there's this underwater nuclear torpedo that is just kind of moving around and it can detonate at any time. The detonation underwater, obviously if you detonated it under a naval group, say goodbye to three or four aircraft carriers. But what happens if you like detonate it
by the land. I mean, that is a big explosion. And a big tsunami after that. You can destroy entire coastal cities. And so this is why the Russians call it the Doomsday Weapon. And the idea is that, okay, if for whatever reason our nuclear arsenal was destroyed, we were subject of a first strike by the enemy, we still have these weapons roaming the ocean that will take revenge.
in such case. Now, of course, you don't endear yourself to the West and to America by inventing a weapon like this that could destroy New York and Boston and other cities. No. I mean, clearly weapons like that justify any American kind of intervention. My goodness, that's terrifying. It is terrifying. I mean, so inventing a weapon like this, I mean, okay,
What are you trying to achieve here? Is it security for your country? Well, I mean, you are achieving the opposite. You know, people now will try to undermine you because you have now gone so far in threatening, you know, well, a global natural catastrophe on biblical scale.
And you have deployed quite a few of these weapons to the oceans. So this is not good as far as the image of Russia and the image of Putin is concerned. But I suppose Putin would say, look, we're not going to use these things, but this is an insurance policy.
We need an insurance policy. After all, America's military is much bigger than ours. It has more nuclear bombs than we have. It's not like America isn't developing weapons of its own. But Russia has an insurance policy. Well, the problem with this insurance policy, it might come at a huge premium to the natural order of the world. I mean, what if anything goes wrong with these? Because don't forget, they are unmanned. They are roaming around. What if...
one day you lose contact with them. You know, one day there is something going wrong with one of their nuclear reactors. Actually, there is a double, you know, risk here. You know, there is a risk of the, you know, warhead itself, you know, malfunctioning or the nuclear reactor on the damn thing, you know.
you know, malfunctioning. One way or another, if you put, you know, four or five or six of these in the ocean, you know, the chances of something going wrong, you know, is, you know, is quite big. And especially with the fact that sometimes, you know, over the past three years, there has been numerous accidents
with almost nuclear-like explosions in Russian military bases, well documented by videos. And this is the problem. So if anything goes wrong with these weapons, and there could be a possibility,
then we could say goodbye to the Seychelles, to the Maldives, to Bermuda, to whatever island chains or coastal cities that these weapons might find themselves in the vicinity of. My goodness. Well, America and Russia facing off over nuclear bombs. There's a reason why we're focusing on the Cold War in this series of Conflicted, because it seems to be back.
I think the main thing to take away about the Cold War, and I promise you, dear listener, from next episode onward, we're going to go deep into the Cold War in the Middle East, but we thought it would be good to establish the geographical, the geostrategic, and the ideological fault lines that resonate to the present day. The Cold War wasn't about imperial expansion in the old sense.
where an expansionist state sought to impose itself by force on another territory and rule it, ideally directly, but indirectly if required. In the Cold War, each of the two combatants were primarily trying to expand not its state so much as its ideological system, whether capitalist or communist. These two ideologies were different, incompatible views on the course modern life should and would take.
Ideology is a word ferociously difficult to define, and I'm not going to attempt a definition here. But what is key about the two warring Cold War ideologies is their universalist character. Each side believed its system, its way of life, its entire worldview was universally applicable. Americans believed that everyone would be happier, better off, more blessed really, to live in a liberal, democratic, capitalist system.
Soviets believed the same about their centrally planned, Marxist, highly bureaucratic system. And one way of understanding US-Russian relations today is that when the Cold War ended, Russia threw out its universalist ideology. And perhaps naively, it believed that the US would do the same. But the US did not.
To this day, the West is still animated by an ideological conviction that liberal democracy is the only morally and politically legitimate form of government. And that may be true, but not everyone agrees.
What's more, during the Cold War, both sides believed that its system was destined to triumph. There was an almost religious dimension to this belief in providential manifest destiny. In fact, because both liberalism and communism emerged from a Protestant Christian world under pressure from secularization, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution,
Liberalism and communism can be regarded, in my view, as something like Christian heresies, and therefore each bears a universalist, eschatological stamp just like Christianity. That returns us to the opening quote by Don Manuel about the medieval Cold War between Muslims and Christians.
If the Cold War, Ayman, was a battle between two heretical versions of Christianity trying to impose their debased religion on the world, have Islamists been right to oppose both in the name of a pan-Islamic solidarity? Well, Islamists are already divided over which vision of eschatology they will fight for. The Shias and the Sunnis have their own Cold War.
Oh, we're never going to get to the actual bottom of any of this. It's far too complicated. Okay, to throw forward now to our next episode, it's important to know that beginning in the 20s, Soviet strategists saw that what would eventually be called the third world, and
and the Middle East fell into that category, was ripe for revolutionary communist expansion. Especially as the old European empires collapsed, leaving new states in their wake, the question was always which system would the new states choose, communist or capitalist? A centrally controlled command economy or a more or less market economy, finance driven and governed by the law of supply and demand?
That's the Cold War Middle East that we're exploring in this series of Conflicted. In our next episode, we're going to discuss the very first Cold War fault line in the Middle East, with echoes down to the present day. That's right, Eamon. We're going back to one of your favorite countries, Iran. Well, dear listener, that was our best attempt four weeks ago at explaining the wider historical and geopolitical context for what's going on in Ukraine. I hope you found it at least somewhat insightful.
Given everything that's happened since, what would I say now? I don't quite know. Listen, unlike Eamon, I'm not a professional expert. I'm like you, an ordinary guy, trying to understand the world as best I can, relying on the expertise of others. And what's weird, in this current conflict, the one between Russia and Ukraine, between Russia and the West over the future of Ukraine, I find myself with skin in the game.
22 years ago, while living in a monastery in northern Greece, I converted to Orthodox Christianity. Like most Russians and Ukrainians, I am an Orthodox Christian. But I'm also from California, an American. And so whatever ideas I might entertain up here in my head, in my bones, I am a liberal in the broadest sense, a citizen of the West.
When President Biden or President Macron denounce Russian aggression, Russian authoritarianism, the age-old Russian behemoth, and affirm the primacy of Western liberal values, my eyes well up a little, and I feel a stirring inside, a patriotism, a pride. But when non-Western thinkers, Russian thinkers, including President Putin,
Denounce the West as a perfidious, sneaky, globalizing leviathan seeking to turn the whole world into one vast marketplace rigged in favor of Western corporate interests. I can't lie, that narrative resonates too. The conflict tearing Ukraine apart runs right through the middle of my own heart. The war itself is a monstrous, villainous, and probably ultimately very foolish crime.
And as I said before, Putin bears responsibility for it. But the history leading up to the war, stretching back months, years, decades, centuries, that history is impossible to reduce to easy black and white good versus evil categories. So what are we to think about it all? I don't know. I'm conflicted.
As always, we'd like to remind you to follow us on whichever social media platform you find least disturbing at MHConflicted. Over on Facebook, we have a fantastic community of fans having deep discussions on the topics we cover in these episodes. It's a great place to learn more and carry on the conversation. You can find that group by searching Conflicted Discussion Group.
Lastly, another reminder that completely ad-free episodes and generous helpings of exclusive bonus content can be had for just 99p on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify by searching for Conflicted Extra. We cannot wait for you to join us in two weeks' time for the next episode of Conflicted. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Rowan Bishop. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.