Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome back to the latest episode of Battleground Ukraine with me, Patrick Bishop, and Saul David. The fact that things are moving at a slower pace on the battlefield, or perhaps that information about what's happening on the eastern and southern fronts is getting harder to come by, has meant that we've been turning our thoughts to the long-term consequences of the war and what it means for the world, the West, and for Ukraine itself.
To help us understand, we've been talking to someone with profound knowledge of the situation. Owen Matthews is half Russian. He's lived in and reported on Russia at key moments in its recent history over the last 30 years. And he's the author of several highly acclaimed and very successful books.
The latest, just out, is called Overreach, the inside story of Putin's war with Ukraine, and it's an absolute must-read if you want to understand what's going on. It's a brilliant analysis of how we got to where we are and what's likely to happen next. So rather than cut a word of it,
we've decided to run it in its entirety, which means our news roundup will be rather truncated this week. Well, Saul, for me, this standout event of the last few days is the Russian decision. Not very surprising, it must be said.
to pull out of the UN-brokered deal to allow Ukraine to export its grain via the Black Sea. And they're citing recent drone attacks on their fleet at Sevastopol, apparently by Ukraine, as justification. And they're saying, quote, they can't guarantee the safety of any further sailings.
Yeah, it's very concerning, isn't it? I mean, if we just go back to the attack for a minute, it was extraordinary ingenuity that seems to have been used both surface, that is vessels, unmanned drones heading on the water, but also in the air attacking the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, as you say, Patrick. Yeah.
The threat from Russia is very concerning, isn't it, given the consequences? I suppose the good news is that ships have sailed nonetheless, with 15 leaving on Monday and Tuesday after Ukraine, backed by Turkey, which of course is crucial in all this, as is the UN, gave the go-ahead. None have sailed today, and so far nothing has happened. But the situation is, of course, very ominous, and the US has accused Russia of weaponising food.
Just to go back to those attacks, they are, as you say, it looks like quite an impressive effort on the part of Ukraine, if we assume it is Ukraine, it must be Ukraine, really. But of course, there have been accusations that we were involved in some way. Yes, there has. Not just in the attacks on the Black Sea fleet, which in my view are credible. And when I say involved, I would suggest some of our forces, possibly the SBS, have been advising on the use of these drones.
But a much less credible accusation has also been made by Russia that the British Navy, and again, the implication is that it's our naval special forces, the SBS, were responsible. This isn't just a suggestion. They're actually making a direct accusation
for destroying the Nord Stream underwater gas pipelines. And here's the quote from Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman. There is evidence that Britain is involved in sabotage, a terrorist act against vital energy infrastructure. Now, interestingly enough, Patrick, he goes on to say, well, there is evidence, but we're not going to give it to you. And you're going to have to take it as read that our defence ministry deserves trust. Well, clearly, it does not deserve trust.
So just to go back to my point, yes, the SBS or some form of British involvement could easily be part of the attack on the Black Sea Fleet. But the Nord Stream pipelines, no, not a bit of it. And of course, the Ministry of Defence has denied any involvement and has basically just said this is Russia detracting from its disastrous handling of the illegal invasion of Ukraine. Now, going back to last week, Patrick, when some of our listeners suggested that it may have
not been Russia, and it could have been the US that attacked the pipelines. I didn't buy that, and I'm not buying any British involvement either. Yeah. Stepping back from all this, what I see here is that this is all implied threat that they're going to shut down the grain exports from the Black Sea. It seems to me to be part of the Russian strategy of ensuring that whatever happens on the battlefield...
The end result will be that they succeed in another way, which is by undermining or even destroying Ukraine's long-term viability as a country by way of the damage they've done to the infrastructure, already massive damage, and also the undermining of the foundation's
of the economy of which grain and not just grain, lots of agricultural exports are a large part. Ukraine is huge in the world food supply chain. It supplies 40% of sunflower oil and nearly 19% of the world's wheat and barley. Now, this is vital for poor countries. Ethiopia really is very reliant on grain from Ukraine. Putin here is really, really playing with the prospect of famine in
poor African countries if he goes down that track. There's a question that often comes up, why can't they just take out the grain by train or truck through the Western borders?
The answer is that there aren't any facilities there to store it. So without those, you can't really have a sort of reliable exit route via land. Now, the West, I know, is currently looking at building facilities at crossing points. But of course, that's going to take time. And it also provides a big, juicy target for Russian long-range missiles. Well, it's an interesting point you make, Patrick. And it's something that is going to be addressed by Owen Matthews, our guest today, as we will hear in a moment.
What we're really talking about here are other elements of, you know, the so-called hybrid warfare that Russia is exercising. It's not winning on the battlefield. So it's trying to destroy infrastructure. And as you say, more importantly, the long term viability of Ukraine itself.
effectively as an independent country. So the question rises, you know, is it better to get out with a bit of the country intact? And of course, that would require negotiations, as we're going to hear. We've been concentrating, of course, over the last month or so on advances on the battlefield, which might have led some of our listeners and ourselves to believe that ultimate victory for the Ukrainians was possible. But you have to ask what they'll be left with, as you quite rightly do there.
We've lost sight of, with the concentration on kind of military advances of September, et cetera, of the bigger picture, which is rather black. I mean, battlefield victory doesn't really necessarily pay the way to a rosy future if the country you inherit is in ruins. So Ukraine will survive, I'm sure, but it may be that the Ukrainians inherit a wasteland
There's nothing, there's all these refugees who are still, you know, biding their time, looking for an opportunity to come back, but there may be nothing very much for them to come back to. And this talk of a Marshall Plan, which is coming out of Europe, I think that's pretty optimistic. The EU isn't really in a position to pay for it.
We heard from Max that last week that the Americans are not necessarily going to pay for it either. Who knows who will be in power in a few years' time? I mean, very possibly a Republican who's maybe Trump or a sort of pseudo-Trump candidate.
He'll be banging the quasi-isolationist America First Trump agenda. So, you know, I think you've got to always keep your eyes fixed on what comes down the line. And it's not necessarily a very happy picture.
No, we should not get too depressed on this show, Patrick. There's a little chink of good news as far as the war on energy prices, which of course is another arrow in the quiver of Russia. And that news is, this comes from Goldman Sachs, who estimate that natural gas wholesale prices are about to come down by about 30%. And given that they've already been falling, this genuinely is good news. I mean, benchmark prices are
currently at about 120 points.
per megawatt and they feel they'll come down to 85 they were as high as 340 dollars per megawatt hour in august so that's all good news in the sense that we feel that there won't be a huge pressure on european countries to uh you know to relinquish their support for ukraine well i'm sorry sort of counter with some bad news but there's uh some breaking news coming up now that uh
American officials are saying, clearly based on intelligence intercepts, that there is a serious conversation going on among Russian military leaders about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. Now, we kind of thought that that was perhaps slipping off the table, but it looks like it's back again.
Our understanding of what's going on in Russia is pretty imprecise, isn't it? And I'm thinking here not just of what's going on in the Kremlin, but also what's going on in the minds of ordinary Russians who seem to be at the very least reacting only passively to what's going on in Ukraine.
Well, there's one way of informing yourself is to watch a brilliant documentary, which you can get on YouTube called Broken Ties by a Russian filmmaker, Andrei Loshak. And it tells the story of a number of families who've been ripped apart when family members have fallen out over their conflicting attitudes to the war. So you've got mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, even husbands and wives. It's fascinating, very, very revealing stories.
And what it tells you is how successful the authorities have been in creating or rather reinforcing a belief that the West has always been hostile to Russia, coveting its natural resources and envying its deep spirituality and its essential goodness of heart. This is how the Russians see themselves.
And the narrative that they've woven about Russia's part in the Second World War, it's a deeply distorted one, it must be said, is central to all this. And so you come away from the film feeling not anger so much as just sorrow at how ordinary people have been duped by their cynical masters at every stage of the game.
Great stuff, Patrick. Fascinating. But let's hear more about all of this and some other stuff from our brilliant guest, Owen Matthews, who we've just spoken to. This is what he told us.
Congratulations on the book. It's a wonderful read. I suspect this is going to do very well sales-wise. You attempt very ambitiously, I feel, to answer two interrelated questions, which you point out at the beginning of the book. How did the idea of violently carving out a greater Russia, backed up by mystical orthodox nationalism, travel from the marginal fringes of Russian politics to become official Kremlin policy? And interrelated to
to that. How and why did Putin decide to throw decades of carefully constructed macroeconomics and diplomacy out of the window and launch this reckless war? So not easy to answer that, I know. But can you try and give us some sort of background to all of this, Owen, and your part in all of this?
Well, thank you first for having me on. It's a great pleasure and privilege. The question is, I think we can begin to answer the question of why Putin did this simply because he had done it before. I think that's one of the things that is really underappreciated in science.
general sort of consideration of what happened in the run-up to the war is that from the point of view of Putin, it was actually not nearly as reckless from the inside as it seems from the outside. And that's for three reasons. One, he had spent his entire career winning wars.
He came to power after the Second Chechen War in 1999. He successfully bit off a bit of Georgia in 2008. He annexed Crimea in 2014, and he staged a very successful military intervention in Syria in 2015. So he's won five wars. And for the war, unfinished war, that he continues basically in 2022. It's a continuation of what happens in 2014. In 2014, he
Many of the things that he thought remained true in 2022 were true in 2014. Specifically, there was genuinely, I was there, I reported on it, quite strong pro-Russian feeling in the Russian speaking parts of Ukraine in 2014. There were pro-Russian demonstrations, large ones in Kharkiv, in Dnipropetrovsk, in Odessa and so on.
And in Donbass, where I also reported quite extensively in the summer of 2014, there was actually quite a strong feeling that the Kiev government was not the government of those Russian-speaking people in the aftermath of the Maidan, which overthrew the Russian-supported president.
Viktor Yanukovych, there was a very large alienated pro-Russian speaking population in 2014. Now, that situation had actually changed very radically by 2022 after eight years of war. But Putin didn't realise that. So in many ways, the real issue is that Putin was operating, as many dictators do, autocrats do, in a bubble of misinformation.
And that's really crucial to understanding that his decision making, because not only do you have the sort of mystical, nationalistic, irrational, ideological part, which I think we'll obviously come to and discuss in more detail later, but just on an operational, practical level, he's being told all sorts of things which are not true.
by his intelligence services, by his military and so on. Why are they lying to him? Partly because, particularly, I mean, crucially, the FSB, there's a very key senior FSB officer, Colonel General Sergei Byseda, who ran the department that was in charge of subverting Ukrainian politicians and senior officers.
And Bysieda was reporting the success of his subversion operations throughout 2020 and 2021. And we now know that, in fact, he had been paying very large sums of money, tens of millions of dollars to various Ukrainian officials. But also, I think it's very likely that he and his people were pocketing quite a lot of it. So it's a question of sort of corruption on the ground. People were reporting that military reform again,
Hundreds, hundreds, billions of dollars being put into that. You know, the Ukrainian, the Russian military saluting, saying everything is going swimmingly. Our army is now twice as powerful or however much as powerful as it was 10 years ago. But actually pocketing the money and the army is rotten. Same with the subversion campaign.
The FSB tells Putin everything's hunky-dory, you know, the Ukrainian officials are all bribed, they're all ready to sort of roll over and run up the Russian trickle as soon as we show up. None of that was true, as was very painfully and tragically demonstrated in the first weeks of the war.
There's a fascinating chapter, if we go back into the little bit of the historical background to all of this, Owen, called Poisoned Roots. You explode pretty effectively, I feel, Putin's claim that Russia somehow has a historical right to govern Ukraine. I mean, it's long and involved, we know, and we've already spoken to other historians about this. But can you sort of give us the pre-see, really, of the historical background and the legitimacy, frankly, of Ukraine to feel that it must run its own affairs now?
Well, let's start with something that is perhaps a little bit controversial. Let's start with what Putin is right about.
So Putin writes in the summer of 2021, in July 2021, a very long, apparently self-penned essay, which it's on which he'd spent several senior sources concur on this. He wrote it himself, supposedly. I mean, he had other historians feeding him material and so on. But he became an amateur historian in lockdown. He spent weeks and months researching his big essay. And the thesis of which is that Russia and Ukraine are basically one country.
And very simply, he's right about two things, is that the modern Ukraine does not have the same borders as historic Ukraine. Now, historic Ukraine, actually, the borders of that country, since it's very rarely actually been a country in the early modern or modern period, have been variable. But let's say at least the most simple way to define it is just linguistically.
in modern Ukraine is at least 40% non-Ukrainian speaking. And the great seesaw, the great debate, the great sort of culture war within Ukraine ever since independence in 1991 has been how to accommodate that Ukrainian identity, which is felt very strongly by the populations of central and western Ukraine and the rights of a minority, which are basically Russian speaking.
And what Putin was wrong about was that language is destiny or that language equates to political identity. And in that sense, he was actually fundamentally wrong because his thesis was that the Russian speakers of Western Ukraine continue to feel themselves closer to Russia than they did to Ukraine.
And that may have been true at a certain point in Ukraine's history. It was the flashpoint that actually caused the rebellion or was fueled the rebellion of 2014 when those two republics, small republics in the east of Ukraine, broke away with Russian, strong Russian support.
But in terms of Putin's historical thesis, he believed that there was a fundamental disconnect between the Ukrainian state and the reality of Ukraine. And he believed that that necessarily meant that Ukraine could not exist within its current borders.
The irony was that actually it was the invasion that really finally, after 30 years of independence, it was actually Putin's invasion that created Ukraine really properly as a historical policy. And furthermore,
Vladimir Zelensky, who is in fact himself a Russian speaker, he speaks to all of his inner circle in Russian. He speaks to his children in Russian. He's a Russian speaker. Zelensky came to power in 2019 with the express intention of defusing that culture war. And his message, which he made in several speeches before the war even, was Russian is not just the language of Russia.
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are Ukrainians. They are heroic defenders of our Ukrainian motherland. You don't have to be a Ukrainian speaker to be a Ukrainian hero. He said that very explicitly. And in fact, the aftermath of what's been very clear in conversations with people and certainly on a political level, but just most strikingly in my conversations with dozens of private citizens, Russian speakers who have fled the Russian invasion
is that they identify themselves as culturally Russian, but politically Ukrainian. So just to repeat, Putin actually created for the first time a strong sense of Ukrainian political identity independent of just the Ukrainian language. Well, we're going to take a break now and join us in the second half of the episode for the rest of our interview with Owen.
Welcome back to part two of our interview. We were obviously interested to know what Owen thought of what was currently going on inside the Kremlin as Putin tries to deal with a blowback from Russian failures on the battlefield. And this is what he told us.
Owen, can I ask you, what do you think is going on inside the Russian elites right now? It's very hard for us looking from the outside to get any idea of the kind of political dynamics of the Kremlin. What are your thoughts on that? It's very interesting to see how various Kremlin loyalists have been positioning themselves or have been criticizing the military campaign as it's being waged on the ground. So, yeah,
From the widest possible focus, nobody inside the Kremlin has as yet dared to criticize Putin. But there have been plenty of people close to the Kremlin who have criticized the Russian army and specifically personally criticized the defense minister, Sergei Shoigu. And those people most notably are Ramzan Kadyrov, who is the president of Chechnya. He is a passionate, fanatical Putin loyalist.
He himself has sent a lot of troops to fight in Ukraine. They've been some of the most savage, in fact, and they've been accused of lots of war crimes. But Kadyrov has been very active in bashing the performance of the general staff and of Shoigu. And more intriguingly and more worryingly...
There's a man called Evgeny Prigozhin, who is a St. Petersburg billionaire. He's, in fact, a caterer, but he made his millions, some of his millions, in supplying supply contracts to the Russian army. He's a former convict, by the way, and was instrumental in forming a private military company, in other words, a mercenary army known as the Wagner Group.
In 2015, it fought in Syria, it fought in Central African Republic, and the Wagner Group have actually taken a very important role on the ground in the Ukraine conflict. So Prigozhin, the head of a private army that's been contracted by the Russian state to fight on the ground, he's been very active in recruiting prisoners, literal prisoners out of prisons. At least 11,000 of them have been recruited by Prigozhin with the blessing of the government.
But Prigozhin has emerged as one of the fiercest critics of Shoigu as well. So to answer your question, what's happening inside the Kremlin? We have a situation which I think is fairly standard for Russian history, is you have the good czar and the bad advisers.
So it's okay to criticize the bad advisors of the Tsar, but not the Tsar himself. Now, I think this is not necessarily a sign that Putin is weak. In fact, I think it's just a sign of more or less business as usual, because Putin has always throughout his career utilized that basic technique of deflection.
You know, he's just scapegoating. And it's even possible that Shoigu may fall. And the people who criticize Shoigu are not criticizing the war in itself. They're criticizing the war effort and how it's being prosecuted. And they themselves, I think, are not in any way against the Kremlin. They're jockeying for position within the Kremlin. Nonetheless, I think it's really...
I think it's fair to say that a large section of the Russian elite who include basically business people who have something to lose, who basically have been robbed of their future, mid to high level bureaucrats who also enjoyed a Western lifestyle. They enjoyed traveling. Their children were educated abroad. A large swathe of Russia's elite is dismayed, horrified, appalled by this war.
The crucial point is that they are not the inner circle of the Kremlin. They're not the decision makers at the top of the Kremlin. And furthermore, they still have too much to lose to Trump.
actually create any kind of revolutionary situation or attempt to overthrow the powers that be. Because I think they realize, and this is a very important point to consider whenever one discusses Russia, is that when foreigners and Russians debate Russia, whatever the metric of the conversation is, the fundamental underlying fact will be that the foreigners will commonly argue that Russia could be so much better. And the Russians will always argue that Russia can be so much worse.
And in fact, both parties will be entirely right. So lots of Russian elite, including officials, are horrified, but they just think that, you know, they're on the train, derailing it is not going to improve their lives or get them to a different place. And can I just follow up with something that's equally difficult to gauge, which is mass opinion in Russia. Again, you know, it's such a big place with so many people, I think it's a bit facile to talk about
kind of massive changes of attitude or opinion. But do you get any sense at all that the sort of thing that happened in Afghanistan, which, you know, went on for a long time, nearly a decade, battlefield defeat translated to political pressure and indeed change at home? Do you see any signs of something like that happening in the current situation?
Well, the short answer is no, because I think for several reasons, but mostly and most importantly, is that I think I mean, I've been in Russia three times since the beginning of the war, and most recently, the end of September, beginning of October. And the thing that was most striking to me, so I was there just actually during, you know, before and immediately after the partial mobilization was announced on September 21st.
And the most striking thing was the extent to which the war, before the mobilization, the war was totally invisible, like 99.5% invisible. You had to look out very carefully for any sign that you were in the capital of a country that is fighting the most major war of the 21st century. It was quite extraordinary.
And deliberate, by the way, entirely deliberate. The city authorities in the first few days, the first few weeks, because I was also there in the first few weeks of the war, you know, there were big posters with a Z, which has become the sign of the mobilization, and patriotic posters and so on. Now, I mean, there were a few patriotic posters up. All the Z signs were gone. Z sign, no one, I didn't see a single car with a Z sign on it. You know, I've tuned in to a million conversations in bars and restaurants and clubs, all completely packed full, by the way.
Nobody was talking about the war. So there was a very strong and actually sort of officially encouraged wall of silence. It's just, it's something that's like the weather. It's happening somewhere else. It's not a very urgent part of Muscovites' lives. Then came the mobilization. And I think that got people's attention in a bad way for the Kremlin. Suddenly, actually, people realized that this was actually something that could affect their lives.
But again, the mobilization is now officially over, by the way. They've announced that they've got enough people. There were some sort of flashpoints of resistance to the mobilization, particularly in Dagestan, places that have not hitherto really been famous for opposition to the Kremlin. But there was people protesting in Dagestan and so on. The little tiny protest in Moscow, I was there by coincidence, like 200 people completely under the radar screen.
So if you're talking about the war or opposition creating any kind of revolutionary situation or any kind of mass resistance in Russia, absolutely not. No.
Not at all. Nor is there really any visible impact from sanctions. Although, in fact, we know macroeconomically sanctions are terribly damaging to the Russian economy. But again, we're not talking about 1917. There's not bread riots. There's no shortages of anything. People's incomes are suffering. Inflation is going up. People's purchasing power is going down. People are losing their jobs. All those things are happening. But it's not critical.
It's not anything like, doesn't have anything like the momentum or the observable momentum of mass protests.
For instance, that I observed in St. Petersburg in 1991, because I was actually also there, you know, coincidentally witnessed the history. I was there in August 1991 as a student in Leningrad, and there was massive anger. And there was an enormous upswell and palpable, I mean, it was that, you know, it was sort of powder keg levels of tension there.
Now, Moscow, nothing. Nada. It's just, it's not even close to an emergency or a revolutionary situation.
Returning a second to Putin's motivation and the origins of the war, Owen, you describe the conflict as the final bloody act of the collapse of the Soviet Union and that in some ways this is Putin's revenge. Can you give us a little bit more detail on that? Well, I think it's Putin's revenge insofar as he... It's very important to...
I think, pars what Putin really thinks and says about the end of the Soviet Union. Because that most famous quote that everyone knows, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. That's Putin's number one most famous quote. He made it in his address to the Federal, to the Houses of Parliament in November 2005. But everyone forgets the first part of the quote. The first part of the quote is, "'For the millions of Russians who found themselves stranded outside the borders of their motherland.'"
the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest strategic tragedy of the 20th century. So why is that important? Why is that sort of little piece of ancient history important to us now today? Because the big debate and the historical debate, but also it has a strategic impact today in terms of decision making, is whether Putin is an imperialist that wants to recreate the Soviet Union. Is he a nostalgist that actually wants to recreate the Russian Empire?
As people like Radek Sikorski, I debated Radek a few months ago about this. You know, Radoslav Sikorski is the former defense minister of Poland, and he's always been a Russia hawk. He's always said that Putin is an imperialist.
I actually disagree quite fundamentally. And I think if you read Putin's interviews and indeed his interminable historical essays, which I read, so you don't have to. But if you actually sort of pick those apart very carefully, you realize that he's actually an ethno-nationalist.
Now, so what's the difference between an imperialist and ethno-nationalist functionally? You know, it still means that you invade your neighbor's countries. That's true. But in fact, sometimes dictatorships, in fact, more often than one might imagine, dictatorships and dictators say what they tell the truth. They say what they mean more often than you might imagine. So in fact, like the slogan behind this invasion was, we do not abandon our own.
And the whole messaging was, you know, our people, our Russian people are being oppressed and sort of genocided by these Ukrainian fascists. We need to save them.
And so it's not really about conquering Ukraine and subjecting it to Russian imperial rule. I really don't think they're actually very interested in, Putin is not interested particularly in conquering or annexing non-Russian parts of the empire. He has not annexed Abkhazia, he's not annexed South Ossetia.
They were independent since 2008. He's had no interest in annexing them. I mean, now maybe he will. But the point is that it's all about sort of reuniting the gathering the Russian peoples, as defined by, you know, Putin's sort of rather expansive and sort of essentially imperialistic view. But it's an imperialistic view, which applies really only to Russians that have found themselves
sort of by happenstance, beyond the borders of Russia. And that includes Russian-speaking Belarusians, all Belarusians, which he thinks are not really a people, and Russian-speaking Ukrainians too. The other day I was watching Broken Ties. No doubt you've seen it. It's a very good documentary by Andrei Loshak, which I think, for me anyway, gave an insight into the way that ordinary Russians feel, which is quite a hard thing to obtain. What it told me was, or rather it reinforced something that I
probably basically knew anyway, which was the degree of a sense of victimhood that seems to run right through Russian society and which is very closely linked to the World War II experience. So the narrative of World War II is very present in the way that Russian patriotism is expressed and encouraged to be expressed by the authorities themselves.
And that sort of led me to think, what happens if Russia is defeated? This is something we talked about with Max Hastings last week. Is that going to bring about any fundamental change in the way the Russians see themselves and the way they see the world? Or is it just going to reinforce this tension?
sense this sort of victim delusion. Well, you're very right, Patrick, that in fact, the memory of World War Two has always been a touchstone of Soviet, now Russian, modern Russian culture. And the reason is that it's more or less the last truly great thing that Russia ever did. It's that and Yuri Gagarin.
Post Yuri Gagarin, it's extremely difficult to think of a single heroic moment that all Russians can point to where they were unequivocally right and heroic and on the side of the angels. Everything else has been so-so. I mean, the point is that that memory has been used very cynically and very systematically by the Kremlin spin doctors to sort of create...
This notion, first, of what they used to call sovereign democracy. But essentially, it's about putting together a Russian identity around which Russians can unite. And all the language that surrounds this campaign in Ukraine is completely taken from the propagandistic language of Soviet war films and of the Second World War itself.
Starting with this crazy, I mean, it seems to us from the outside, completely mad narrative that the leadership of the Ukrainian government are literal Nazis. I mean, that's inconceivable to us. I've met them. They are not Nazis for the record.
But this is just something for internal consumption. And the whole structure of the ideological structure of this, you know, we are fighting fascism. Europe has gone fascist. We are on the side of the angels. So the ideological underpinning of this whole war. And if you ask what happens if they lose...
I think that's an extraordinarily dangerous situation, not just for Russia, but for Ukraine and for the world. And I'll explain why. Because the only thing that can really disrupt, that can really throw the Kremlin out of kilter and undermine this
sort of cast iron propaganda machine that they've built underneath themselves, which seems to be holding up with remarkable degree of success, even after nine months of, frankly, not very successful campaigning on the ground. The only thing that can really undermine that is full scale campaigns.
battlefield defeat. And then I think you get into a situation where firstly, you have people within the Kremlin, certainly around the Securocrats, who are Putin's closest allies,
notably the current head of the FSB, the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB, who is called Alexander Botnikov, and his predecessor as head of the FSB, who is called Nikolai Patrushev. And Putin himself was a former head of the FSB. So you have a Russia that's headed by three current or former heads of the FSB. That's the decision-making inner circle. And you're going to be looking at inner circles just trying to save its influence, right?
Its property, I mean, its commercial interests and its lives. And the only way that they could possibly go, if we're looking at a sort of Nikita Khrushchev type situation where you have Putin sort of replaced from within, is to be more aggressive and more nationalist.
And that's the biggest threat, I think, to Russia's future is the idea of a battlefield defeat leading to a Versailles-style humiliation.
And that humiliation leading to something much worse. And in that analogy, I mean, as a historian myself, I'm very wary of historical analogies. But in this analogy, Putin is not Hitler. Putin is Kaiser Wilhelm II, you know, the fool that led his country into a disastrous and humiliating defeat. And what comes after is national humiliation and something far worse.
And if you're looking for other threats from outside the Kremlin,
You have a whole plethora of extraordinarily dangerous and volatile people whose ideas, as we said at the beginning of this program, the ideological godfathers of this orthodox, mystical, ultra-nationalism, aggressive imperialist fantasy, who are philosophers like Alexander Dugin, whose daughter, Darya, was blown up in Moscow in a car bomb a few weeks ago.
And you have Father Tikhon Shevchunov, who is a sort of orthodox monk, who's a sort of media superstar. You have people like Igor Gyrkin, who was a former military re-enactor who became the defense minister of one of the rebel republics in 2014. You have all these, frankly, crazy people who find themselves now, today...
in ideological lockstep with the Kremlin because the Kremlin has sort of come around to their point of view. But these people have spent their political careers in opposition to the Kremlin. They are the nationalist opposition to the Kremlin who became loyalists when the Kremlin's policy started to coincide with their own.
What these people are going to do next in the case of a military collapse, these are the people we need to be scared about because they're not the indifferent masses who are just sort of easily bamboozled, you know, by Kremlin propaganda. These are armed, angry, highly motivated people.
And the Kremlin itself, I think, is very concerned about what you do with, you know, not just those politicians in Moscow, but the hundreds of thousands of military veterans on the ground who are going to come home. The people who did the Butcher massacre, they're out there somewhere. They're going to come home. They're going to come back to a defeated Russia.
What are they going to do? They're just going to roll over and say, yes, sorry, we were wrong. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. And certainly I don't see any kind of pro-Western or anything like it success at government to Putin. Everything that comes after Putin is much more scary and dangerous.
which is a long-winded way of saying that actually we should be rather careful of what we wish for in the endgame of this war. And the awful truth is what Emmanuel Macron has said and got a lot of political flack for, but Macron has said, like, you know, we shouldn't humiliate Putin. That's really dangerous to humiliate Putin. I mean, it's appalling to have to admit that.
Because we want the good guys to triumph and we want evil to be defeated. But the problem is that defeating evil in this case actually involves getting ourselves into a whole different ballpark of much more lethal and scary political eventualities.
Owen, continuing that thought, you quote one source in the book who tells you real victory for Ukraine is not a matter of territory. The best victory is to be prosperous and free, a country that Russians will envy. Do you agree with that? I mean, is this what ultimately is likely that eventually Ukraine will have to negotiate a peace and it won't be a return to all their territory?
Well, yes, I do agree strongly. And unfortunately, the question arises, how politically feasible is that for any Ukrainian leader to admit that? Because actually, the future for Ukraine is...
is not a forever war with Russia, you know, going backwards and forwards, shelling each other's territory, blowing up each other's infrastructure. The path to the future for Ukraine basically involves, you know, cutting off this gangrenous limb, which is the frankly devastated Donbass, you know, just surrounding it with a barbed wire fence and just sort of saying, you know, goodbye.
you know, Russian world. We're sailing off to the West. We're going to put our country back together and, you know, you can get lost forever and, you know, good luck with the Kremlin. Unfortunately, you have what happens in every conflict in the world is you have, once blood is spilled, you have
you know, angry people, not only people who have fought themselves and died, his colleagues have died, you have the people who have been exiled from those Russian speaking areas who are now all over Ukraine. You know, what are you going to say? Are you going to look, you know, the people who fled Mariupol in the face and say, like, I'm sorry, we're not going to fight for your city anymore. We're just going to let it go. It becomes in a democracy, an enormous problem. And it becomes a more or less insurmountable problem.
So just to sort of recap and summarize, indeed, actually, I think the only, the quickest point to a sort of prosperous and stable future for Ukraine is to just cut off the areas which they have at the end of the war, which no longer are feasibly recoverable, whether that includes
I think the Ukrainians are very likely to recapture Hefson, for instance, I think. But are they really, is there really a feasible chance that they're going to recapture the rebel republics of Donbass, Lugansk and Donetsk in their entirety? I don't think so. And furthermore, and very importantly, those areas have already been subject to de facto ethnic cleansing, both voluntary and involuntary.
So the point is about the rebel republics, the LNR and DNR, and also the areas around them that have been occupied by Russia, is that everyone who is pro-Kiev has already left. They fled, they've been forced to leave, they've been deported. The people who are there, who remain there, are pro-Russian by definition. That's just how occupations work.
So you're faced with a situation, potentially, I mean, let's say, you know, let's fast forward to next spring, where you're asking, you know, Ukrainian lads to fight and die, using Western weapons to occupy parts of Ukraine that actually don't want to be Ukrainian anymore.
And, you know, you can debate the equity of that, you know, whether that's good and right and proper. But the practicalities of it are that Russia is moving very fast to essentially, you know, a eliminate and liquidate and expel all the anti-Russian elements and to incorporate those areas by hook or by crook into Russia.
And I think inevitably there's going to be a point where the front lines stop moving and the question will arise, you know, how much more blood and treasure are we prepared to spill for the prospect of making, you know, Mariupol Ukrainian or Russian? And that actually becomes a proper serious debate because it's really between, you know, peace and justice.
And at a certain point, a responsible leader, I think, has to decide that, you know, peace is more important than justice because justice is unachievable.
Well, that's fascinating stuff, isn't it, Patrick? A pretty grim listening, I have to say, but interesting nonetheless. And, you know, so many interesting points he makes, most of them pretty pessimistic, frankly, if you're a supporter of Ukraine, which, of course, we all are. His points about, you know, the likelihood of Putin being ejected
by other members of the elite. I mean, he doesn't rule it out, of course, but he's saying there's no real sign that that's likely to happen anytime soon. No change in public opinion either, really, or no big change in public opinion. You know, we're not talking about 1917, as he put it, or even, you know, his experience on the ground in St. Petersburg in 1991, when he could feel, you know, kind of visceral feel that change was in the air. So, you know, nothing...
likely to remove Putin anytime soon, certainly while the war is underway. Defeat doesn't seem to really change anything in his prediction. And he paints this, like you say, 1917 in Petersburg in one breath, but also reminds me of 1918 in Berlin. He does make this parallel with German post-war defeat, where in his brilliant comparison, Putin isn't Hitler. Putin is Kaiser Bill.
And, you know, it's not hard to see that actually happening.
being highly plausible. You've got defeated Russian troops, traumatized, brutalized by the war, coming back, no jobs to go to. And so, you know, you're reminded of the Freikorps, these German troops who have made life in German cities very dangerous. They're angry, they're bitter. And of course, they're the foundation, really, they're the foundation human resource for
that Nazism is built upon. I think the expression he used, Patrick, was be careful of what you wish for. He mentioned Macron, who got a lot of criticism for making the point you shouldn't humiliate Putin, but Owen has made that exact same point. His overall view, the best case scenario, as he effectively put it, is a negotiated piece. He's talking about the sort of thing that
You know, as he says, no Ukrainian politician can admit at the moment, which is maybe it would be better to cut off what he describes as the gangrenous limb that is the Donbass and forge ahead with what you have left. Turn it into a Western style country. Make the best of a bad job. Join NATO and allow the Russians to look over their new border at what you've become. You know, so there is a little bit of hope there, actually, Patrick. It's not all depression.
Yeah, we've sort of come full circle on this, haven't we? At the beginning of the conflict, I thought that was probably the way to go. I mean, who wants this, you know, quite blighted eastern chunk of the country? It's full of sort of Rust Belt industries and all the rest of it. And as he says, everyone who's there now wants to be there. You're not going to win their hearts and minds. So in the interests of peace rather than the interests of justice, why not let it go? I must admit, I found that rather...
persuasive. Right. Well, let's move on now to listeners' questions, because this is going to be quite a long episode. And we need to rattle through these reasonably swiftly if we can, Patrick, otherwise we're going to lose the attention of our listeners. So let's kick off with Jack Price. He says, found your comments and mind reading of how President Trump may have reacted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine surprising. It seems it would have been fair to also conjecture that without the disastrous Biden evacuation of Afghanistan,
Putin also may not have attempted such a gamble or tested the unpredictable nature of Trump's character if he had won a second term. What's your feeling about that?
Well, fair enough. I think on that, probably Putin was encouraged by what happened in Afghanistan. And there is, you know, one thinks when he talks about the unpredictable nature of Trump's character, one was reminded of the old Nixon madman theory. Do you remember this? Or when he sort of encouraged he and the people around him, encouraged communist bloc leaders to think that he was crazy and irrational and capable of absolutely anything.
I don't think when he talks about us reading Trump's mind, I think there's plenty of evidence that Trump would have been an unreliable ally in this war. I mean, two months after the war began, he was still bragging about his special relationship with Putin. And he's always been going on about Europe's reluctance.
It's good reason, it has to be said, for failing to put their hands in their pockets to pay for their own defences. So I think he might have carried on feeling he had to make a point. Well, I'm just thankful that he's not in power now, so we don't have to find out. Yeah. Well, let's move on to Jason Becker. He writes, Hi there. After hearing the episode with Janine DiGiovanni, I was wondering if
is an official part of the Russian government. If not, would that have any impact on holding them accountable for war crimes? For example, would it be easier to arrest the individuals if they visited a neutral country? And he goes on to say, love your show. I really appreciated the episode with Antony Beaver that gave some great insight into the Russian army's treatment of soldiers.
Well, the position of Wagner is very interesting, isn't it? There's been some more information about Wagner this week, actually, from Khodorkovsky, this sort of exiled and recently jailed businessman who is very anti-Putin now for obvious reasons. And he points out that Wagner play a very important but, you know, double facing role. So technically in Russia today to run a an army of mercenaries is illegal, right?
And yet, of course, this is being sanctioned by Putin because it's very useful for him to actually wage war with. So could you call Wagner an official part of the Russian government? Certainly not. Could it be held accountable for its crimes? Almost certainly. But we get...
back to a broader issue here, Patrick, which is the difficulty of holding people to account, even after the event, even in the event of Russia losing this war. And we'll come on to that with a final comment that's made by one of our listeners in a minute. But, you know, do you have any feeling about whether or not there's a good chance of Wagner being held to account?
I'm afraid I'm quite pessimistic about that just for, I mean, just look at everything we know about prosecuting war criminals in modern times. A tiny proportion of those responsible ever have any sort of justice applied to them. And then it's usually the foot soldiers. It's not the people who are actually directing the war crimes themselves. So I'm afraid that's,
Not. Now, we've got another one here from someone asking us actually a question we often ask ourselves, which is how long do you anticipate producing the podcast relating to the Ukrainian war? If, as Max Hastings said last week, it may go on for months, if not years, I'm beginning to think it's more likely to be years than months. How long are we going to carry on covering it?
Well, war weariness may set in. It's a brilliant question, Richard. We can't answer it because we don't know what's going to happen. But if you were to absolutely pin us down and say, can you imagine doing this in a year's time? Probably not, actually. I mean, after all, the whole principle behind the Battleground podcast was that it was going to look at modern wars and not be fixated on any particular war. Of course, the Ukraine war is an obvious one for us to address because it's unfolding in a
unbelievably fascinating and gruesome way in front of our eyes. But nevertheless, I feel we would have to move on. Have you got any kind of feeling about how much longer we could keep going, Patrick? I think at least six months if necessary, but probably not longer. Yeah, but I think that as long as we're getting great responses and people seem really engaged and we feel we're providing solutions
some kind of a service. So as long as people like it, I'm inclined to keep going. Yeah, he goes on to say, Richard, what's the possibility of finding out what life is like right now in the countries directly in Russia's path and who might feel they are next? Well, actually, we've got a question about that in a second. So we hope that will answer that bit for you, Richard.
And thirdly, Richard asked, what preparation, if any, is underway within the British military to prepare to deploy troops to participate in the NATO war? Well, that is, you know, as far as I'm aware, Patrick, that is currently undergoing. Now, what we're really hoping is that this conflict will encourage the British military or at least encourage the British government to spend more money on its military because clearly it needs more money spent there.
There are preparations underway to participate in a NATO war. There's no question about that. The British military is very effective at planning ahead. But of course, the cuts have not helped. And the fact that another question that's come to us is why have troops recently been pulled out of one of the Baltic countries or one of the Scandinavian countries? You know, is this sending all the wrong signals? That's presumably redeployment because we don't have enough troops to provide all over the place. Right.
Well, I think the answer to what people on the front line actually feel is that they feel very uncomfortable. We got this directly from one of our correspondents, Ivaros from Lithuania, who was in touch last week. And he's saying precisely that if NATO is dangerously and slowly heading into a direct conflict with Russia, they are going to be in the firing line. And that is something that no one feels very happy about.
Yeah, I mean, he makes the point that makes me feel uncomfortable. So that's what they're feeling. And more NATO support for all the frontline countries is clearly something that needs to happen. Having said all of that, the key point to all of this, and this relates to another question we've had, is that NATO will defend those countries. There is no doubt about that. So, you know, I hope that brings some solace to people on the frontline, because if you're already a NATO member, you are going to be defended.
Well, let's move on to, you're running out of time. So we're going to move on to our final fascinating email, quite a detailed email from a former army major called Robert Campbell. And he writes to us, I listened with interest about the Reckoning Project. That's the gathering of evidence for war crimes set up by Janine DiGiovanni, which we mentioned a few programs ago. But he says that the project didn't really address the realities of war crimes, investigations and prosecutions. He's actually someone who's been through the mangle, as he put it, accused of war crimes.
later exonerated, and we should stress that. And he writes, I can tell you from firsthand experience that the road from accusation to conviction is long, slow, and not completely fair. So he's not entirely convinced that the right people are going to be accused of war crimes, are going to be convicted of war crimes. And of course, sometimes the wrong people can get drawn in there.
He also makes a really interesting point about a topic that was very much in the air last week, dirty bombs. He's a decorated explosive ordnance disposal officer, and he regards the talk as being rather absurd, with Russia claiming that
of course, that Ukraine was in the final stages of constructing a dirty bomb. He says, I could build a dirty bomb in around 10 minutes. It's not some black art that requires intricate technology or even stages to complete. So he found the accusations very, very implausible. Apart from the ease with which a dirty bomb can be made, all the radioactive material, including the waste products, are highly regulated and catalogued.
So the idea that some evil boffins are cobbling this together and no one notices the material is missing is a bit silly. Also, the idea that the Russian intelligence services managed to detect this plot but failed to notice three Ukrainian brigades swarming around Kharkiv back in September. He thinks that makes the story more interesting.
even less credible. Well, I think that's all we've got time for this week. Join us next week when we hope to be speaking on the subject of President Zelensky, his role in the whole thing. And we're talking to someone who knows him very well. That is Yulia Mendel, who served as his chief communications officer for several key years. That's going to be fascinating. Do join us for that.