This week, International Horizons showcases an interview by RBI and EU Studies Center director John Torpey with political scientist Ivan Krastev about how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will affect the balance of power in Europe, transatlantic relations, and the future of democracy.  How does the war change existing political divisions, and what should the role of NATO of the U.S. government be?

This event took place on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, as the Otto and Fran Walter Memorial Lecture, organized by the EU Studies Center of the Ralph Bunche Institute and by Graduate Center Presents public programs. Ivan Krastev is chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, as well as an author and contributor to the NY Times Opinion page. 

You can listen to it on iTunes here, on Spotify here, or on Soundcloud below. You will also find a transcript of the episode below.

• Good afternoon. My name is John Torpey. I’m Director of the European Union Studies Center, and of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies of which it is a part. We are thrilled to present this year’s Otto and Fran Walter Memorial Lecture. I’d like to introduce Chip Griffin, who will first say a few words about the lecture on behalf of our sponsor, the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation. Chip.
• Thank you very much for the very nice introduction, and also for the opportunity to introduce your audience to Dr. Otto Walter, who was an incredible man. Otto Walter came of age at a time when totalitarianism was on the rise and the future of Europe was very much in doubt. In fact, Otto made the difficult decision to abandon his native country and his inheritance for the uncertainties of immigration in a foreign land where he had no language, no prospects, no job. If he were alive today, he would be extremely troubled by the aggression we have seen unleashed in Eastern Europe, highly interested to hear our speakers’ insights and perspectives on the topic, and deeply concerned for those who have been dispossessed of all they hold dear. Otto never looked back and he never publicly talked about the losses he sustained under Nazi barbarism. The focus of his life was always to build a better tomorrow and Otto and Fran Walter Foundation, which was the family foundation that he set up during his lifetime, and that I’ve had the privilege to help manage today. And this endeavor is just to do just that. That’s why we’ve been pleased to underwrite this lecture series for several decades and why I personally look forward to hearing Ivan Krastev’s insights on the current situation in Europe and what the coming months and years will bring. Thank you.
• Thanks so much, Chip Griffin. This year’s Otto and Fran Walter Foundation Memorial Lecture takes place at a moment of enormous consequence for Europe and the world. The Russian invasion of Ukraine presents both a tragedy of the kind we have not seen in Europe in 75 years, and a possible turning point in the global order more generally. We’re fortunate to have with us today a leading analyst of European and global affairs, Ivan Krastev. Mr. Krastev is chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. He’s a contributing opinion writer for “The New York Times” an author of five books including “Is it Tomorrow Yet?”, “How the Pandemic Changes Europe from 2020” and “The Light That Failed”, “Why the West is Losing the Fight for Democracy,” which he wrote with Stephen Holmes in 2019, and which won the 30th Annual Lionel Gelber Prize. Thanks so much for joining us today, Ivan Krastev.
• Thank you very much for the opportunity.
• Great to have you with us. Thanks so much. So we must begin, alas, with the tragic war in Ukraine. A number of explanations have been advanced to explain Russia’s invasion, not least Vladimir Putin’s longstanding opposition to the expansion of NATO, that is a geopolitical explanation. And also people have suggested this is really about Putin’s grievances against the West as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which one might describe as a more psychological explanation. How do you see the causes of this war?
• Listen, let’s start with something very basic, but at least for me, very fundamental. This war is changing a lot of things in Europe. In a certain way, the process that started with the unification of Germany in 1990 in a way is ending in front of our eyes with the possible partition of Ukraine. So this is an end of a period. So as a result of it, explanations goes at least on three level. When the communism ended, seen from outside, the disintegration of the Soviet Union looks a very natural outcome of the end of communism, but this is not how Russia and particularly some of the Russian elites were doing it. The idea that basically the Soviet Union should survive the end of communism was very much one of the reasons President Gorbachev decided to integrate Russia in the liberal order, because what he liked about the liberal order was a very strong continentalist positions, and he was very much fearing basically the anti-imperial noise coming from the republics back then. What happened was that even after the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Russian leadership never believed that the former Soviet republics, with the exception of the Baltics, could have a full sovereignty. So this goes beyond Putin. And from this point of view, of course, the enlargement of NATO was the way very many people basically were seeing the Russia’s position as vulnerable and the Russian said, if we are also victors in the Cold War, why you moving to our borders? But the most important thing behind the Russian behavior was that they believe that they were promised the sphere of the influence in the post war Europe space. So as a result of it, Ukraine cannot be a sovereign country in the way Poland could be. Belarus cannot be a sovereign country in the way Hungary could be. And this was going with the time and I do it from this point of view. This understanding, and this kind of a frustration was gaining shape. Probably the critical moment of change was the co-revolutions in the post war space in particular Ukraine, 2004, when suddenly basically the Russian leadership understood that this kind of understanding of the sphere of influence cannot be sustained. And also there is something that goes back to the political history of President Putin and the way he sees the world. So from this point view, obviously he went on a process of resurrecting, not Soviet Union, but the historical Russian empire. And from this point of view, Belarus and Ukraine were critical for him. For anybody who is interested to understand his thinking and normally analyst claim how deceptive he’s because he comes from the intelligence community and so on. In fact, recently he became very literal. If you’re going to read the essay that he himself wrote in July last year, why Russia and Ukraine are the same people, you’re going to understand what the Russian army is doing in Ukraine. He basically was trying to convince, and to basically recapture territory that he totally falsely claimed. He’s Russian and he claimed it falsely because Ukrainians did not feel Russians. And this is what we are seeing in front of this, every explanation for the military failure of the Russians and so on, he has one basic reasons. He went with the assumptions that the Ukrainians awaiting Russian army is greater. And basically there was a new Ukrainian nation being born. And this Ukrainian nations is fighting Putin in the way the Soviets have been fighting Nazi Germany in the World War II and demanded this is way it goes yes, Enlargement of NATO for sure made clear to Russia that it has lost its status of a great power. This is true. This is nervous. Yes. The nature of the political regime that Ukraine was more democratic than Russia was a factor, but honestly speaking, even if Ukraine was an authoritarian state, Putin was going to do the same, basically keep the fact to our next, in the very moment we are talking about. So you have a project of a kind colonization attempt that could been done by the Russian leadership and it is unfolding in front of our eyes.
• Right. And Putin’s plan seeming plan that this would all be over very quickly, has turned out obviously very differently. And there’s been a lot of successful resistance, seemingly successful resistance on the part of the Ukrainians. They have this heroic and charismatic leader who’s leading them in this battle, but there are lots of questions that relate, not least to the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons regarding how the West can really assist here. And I wonder whether you could comment on the question of how the West, how the United States led coalition can respond is, he’s been, that is Zelensky has been pleading for a no-fly zone. And of course, for more weaponry, the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense of the United States have just visited Kiev and President Zelensky. And it seems as though we’re kind of ramping up our assistance to the Ukrainian forces. I wonder whether you could comment on how good an idea you think that actually is.
• It’s of course, this is one of the first cases in history in which you have an asymmetrical war which goes wrong, for a nuclear power next to each borders, because it’s totally different. What’s happening to the Soviet during the Cold War Americans in Vietnam and Iraq, it was far away. And I’m saying this because one of the major stories, which in my view is to be remembered is that the American administration, and this is also very much so for the Europeans, they did almost everything possible to prevent this war from happening. On several levels. One was that basically, President Biden very early, made it clear that America is not going to intervene militarily, trying not to create basically the expectations also on the Ukrainian side, that the war can basically lead to NATO’s interference and going to bigger war. So he was very clear on this. I know that many people probably has been advising him to keep the ambiguity. This is what the diplomats like. And he knew that it is very risky when you have not simply nuclear power, but the nuclear power run by a president who is quite the cryptic mind, who believes that if he’s not going to achieve what he wants now, this is the end Russia. Secondly, the combination of making very early on what are going to be the economic sanctions that are going to be put on Russia. And secondly, very aggressive declassify the intelligence information to make Russians understand that the Americans know what Russia is planning to do. All this was for the idea to prevent the war. And it was also very clear that Americans are making clear to the Russians that Ukraine is not going to be part of NATO, but what they cannot do is to negotiate with the Russians at the back of the Ukrainians, because then it was depriving them of sovereignty. President Putin, in certain way, read it differently. He basically believed that Ukraine was more important for him than for the United States. And he basically had a very low view on the capability of Europeans. You respond. So as a result, everybody ended kind of surprised. We ended surprised that he went on Kyiv because even those of us who believe that there are going to be military intervention assumed that it is going to be very much in the Donbas area, most probably going to Mariupol and to Odessa. But at least I didn’t believe that Kiev can be the way that Russian troops are going to move. Probably, they’ll try to have a call or something like that. On the other side, at the moment when the Americas made clear that they’re not going to respond militarily, then you have two options. One was to try to signal to the Russians that the is not going to be tolerated. It’s not going to be like Crimea in 2014, it’s not going to be like Georgia in 2008. And it was at this moment that Europeans and Americas decided to sanction Russian currency reserves, which had been kept in American and European banks. In the financial world, basically this a nuclear option. You know, taking the money of the Russian state and saying, you cannot use this money. And we are talking about currently the billions of dollars. But then when you have done this, the only thing that you can do to Ukraine is to give them arms. And this is happening because the Ukrainians showed very high, first readiness to sacrifice, but also successes resisting. Ukraine is receiving arms now and they were not going to receive it two months ago, because two months ago, nobody knew are they ready to fight and how successfully they’re going to fight. And now they manage to convince their Western partners that it is worth doing this, that they can themselves. And this is what the West can do. Are there risks? There are risks on three level. One is on propaganda level, President Putin is insisting that he’s not fighting Ukrainians, he’s fighting the West. Because for those of you that’ve been both in Russia and Ukraine, this is a sinful war. Listen, you’re killing people who speak the same language, many of them, that you’ve been sharing a culture. You are starting a military campaign during the Easter Week, keeping in mind that two-thirds of the Orthodox Christians in Ukraine had been part of the Moscow patriarchy. So there is something really kind of the level of the moral outrage that was provoked is incredible. And secondly, the language. Listen, there was one thing that Russia shared with Europe over all those years, even during the Soviet period. And this was the common memories of the World War II, where of course the Soviet contribution to defeating Hitler was critical. And then suddenly President Putin on one level is bombing the Ukrainian citizen the way that had been bombed by the Nazi Germany, but on the other saying that he’s there to de-Nazify Ukraine. This is destroying the moral infrastructure on which post-war Europe is built. And this is a huge issue. And this is why for the West, there was no way to simply stay aside and tell to the Ukrainians, “Listen, we can do nothing here, you are simply going to be defeated.” And they needed these weapons. The major stories went to stop was this, because we are talking nuclear power. And I totally, from this point of view, this is quite important that while Ukraine is going to get certain type of heavy weapons, the West is also making very clear what it will not do. For example, these safe skies, which means that…
• No fly-zone.
• No-fly zone where you’re going to have an American or British or Polish planes in the contested Ukrainian space, where the risk of basically the American and the Russians’ planes to crash is very high. This is a kind of a balancing. Listen, nobody knows. The risk is not easy to be calculated. But I don’t believe that morally, after all these two months of a fight on the Ukrainian side, it was possible for the Europeans or for the Americans not to give the weapons. And in order to understand how big is the change, Germany is planning to give their tanks. Germany, a country, which normally not giving basically weapons to almost any conflict around the world was part of the German identity. So this is why, what people cannot probably see from outside is how incredibly shattering and disruptive this war is about Europe understanding who we are, what follows. This is an identity crisis, not only for Russia, not only for your Ukraine, but for Europe as a whole.
• Sure. This certainly seems like a turning point as Chancellor Olaf Schultz has referred to, and of course he was talking about his own posture and the change in the German defense and security posture. You know, the idea that they were gonna start giving weapons to a quasi ally and spending a lot more money on their own defense, you know, situation was obviously a big deal. How firm this change really is, I think is still a matter of some discussion and remains to be seen. But, you know, that said, I mean, we are talking generally speaking about a remarkable kind of Western response, a kind of unity that Joe Biden in many ways I think has, you know, put together, but it’s not universally the case around the world. You know, there was this effort to throw Russia out of the Human Rights Council and it got a kind of mixed vote. I mean, obviously Russia, China, and several other kind of dictatorships, North Korea, Syria voted against it. But the pro vote was about 93, I think it was. And I’ve forgotten the exact number of negative votes, but also a lot of abstentions. So I wonder what, you know, that tells us, the fact that this is not by any means been really universal. The condemnation of Russia has not been universal around the world. What does that tell us about the sort of global order that’s coming?
• This is a great, this is a great question because this war managed to consolidate and to unify the West to the extent I don’t believe it was unified at any moment in the last 20 years. But at the same time, it also shows to what extent basically many of the narratives that very easily kind of resonates with the Western public, a very different outsight. Just give you two figures. One is that one of the major narratives coming from the West about the wars, that this is a clash between democracy and totalitarianism. And this is true. And by the way, last two months, the transformation of the Russian regime from a kind of a relatively mild authoritarianism, mild for the Russian standards, to kind of a regime that starts to share some of the ugliest characteristics of the Stalinist period. People that can be sent to prison for 15 years just going with a no-war side. This is remarkable. And I do believe we should really try to pay much more attention what is happening in Russia itself. But secondly, out of these 111 countries that President Biden invited for the Summit of Democracy, the majorities do not sanction Russia. So this narrative does not work for several reasons. First, for us, part of the shock of this war was that it happened in Europe, and that it was possible in Europe. Don’t forget one of the most, in my view, probably the most brilliant history of Europe after 1942, Tony Judt’s history was called post-war. The very identity of Europe was post-war, and it was post-war in two different senses. That European project was born of the ruins of the World War II. But secondly, that Europe is a continent that cannot imagine a major war on it anymore. And then suddenly this happened. So for us, it was shocking. For many others, it was not so shocking. So basically the Middle Eastern countries said more people died in Syria than they are dying in Ukraine. Why we should care more? People in Africa said, “Listen, you’re talking you so much about this. What about our vaccines?” And China obviously decided to use the war and to make it sure that Russia is not going to be defeated because China sees this war very much in the frame of their confrontation with the United States. So suddenly our narrative did not work when it comes to democracy versus authoritarianism. The second narrative which is very kind of obvious for us is that it is a colonial war. You have an former empire, Russia, which is trying to recolonize very much it’s the newly independent state that came out of disintegration of the Soviet Union. So for us, it’s clear and particularly for East Europeans, this is not so much about democracy, it’s about sovereignty. The Baltic republics said, “Are we the next?” Poland said, “Are we the next?” But for many people in Africa and Asia, the story was, “Okay, this is anti colonial. But on the other side, is it not Putin a rebel against the Western hegemony?” So this type of the two different anti-imperial narrative clashes is very important because the narrative of Cold War, which is still very strong in the West is much weaker in non-Western countries where decolonization is perceived as the most important thing that has happened during the 20th century, because this is where their countries was built. And this is what happened, and this is why I do believe in the next two or three months, one of the major information war is going to be who to blame for the high energy prices, for the food crisis in the global south. We, and I do believe on this side, the West is right to say that Putin started the war, and this is why there is no Ukrainian grain going to Egypt, and this is why they’re going to be high energy prices. On the other side, Russia, but also China, and some others, are going to say, “No, no, it’s the Western sanctions.” And this is, this will continue. But then this is my last point. It’s also shows that this unified post Cold War world in which we’re pretending that we’re living is very much fragmented. The reason, for example, countries like India strongly ally with the United States, when it comes to Asian policy is their fear of China. But at the same time, this alliance does not go to Russian, because 50% of the armament of the Indian Army is coming from Russia. India used to have a historical relation with the Soviet Union. Totally different reasons, laws for the Saudis, for the south Africans and others. So probably this war is also helping the West to see not how much the world is going to change, but how much it has changed already.
• Interesting. So I guess I wanna explore this, the ramifications of the war a bit more in the European context. So Victor Orban recently got himself reelected for the fourth time in a row, and seems increasingly likely to be in power and hungry for a long time to come. Meanwhile, just the other day, Emmanuel Macron has won reelection as president of France, but not without improvement in the vote count for right-wing challenger, Marine Le Pen, and sort of many voices saying that, you know, the far-right is not going anywhere, it’s become mainstream in France. So, and in both cases, the sort of, shall we say, progressive forces seem to be concentrated among kind of cosmopolitan urban educated elites, whereas the more conservative forces tend to be rural, less educated and working class. And, you know, in this regard, Thomas Piketty, the famous author of “Capital” in the 21st century, Thomas Piketty and his colleagues have recently written about this constellation in terms of a kind of “Brahmin left”, what they call a “Brahmin left” and a “Merchant right”, vying for sort of power and dominance in our kinds of societies. I mean, does that make sense to you as an analysis of what’s going on?
• Some for sure. Like always, many of the explanations are much more contextual and local than just the general picture. But first the feeling that we are living like on a volcano and that everything is flying, and also the time in the wrong direction. This is the way many Europeans see what is going on. And you also very much write about France. If people older than 65 were not going to vote on the last French presidential elections, President Macron was not going to reach the second round. So what we have in Europe now very clearly almost everywhere is first the fading away of the consensual type of politics that was so typical for the late 1990s and the beginning of 2000. So you have a much more stronger, far-left and far-right. And secondly, basically you also have different divisions being much more visible than ever before. The biggest division in Europe is not between North and South, it’s not between East and West, this is between the big urban centers and the other parts of the country. Even Mr. Orban, who controls everything in Hungary. So even if he has lost the elections, it was going to be almost impossible to govern because he has privatized the state to the extent nobody believed that it can happen in a democracy. But even he lost big in Budapest. So from this point of view, you have a major divisions between the much more liberal attitudes of the big cities, in which you have a much more bigger kind of a constellations of people living, much more diversity is there, the way of life is different. And many people outside of the big cities that have the feeling that they’re totally forgotten. And there is several arguments, particularly for Eastern Europe that I have been studying much more carefully, they should be really taken into considerations. In 2019, the strongest vote on the European elections for the far-right, did not come from the areas where the income is lowest, but come from the areas which most people have left for the last 10 years. The demographic factor in a different way is very much shaping both the far-right and the far-left, because you have the aging, all population in areas many of them de-industrialized, where people are living. They’re exiting, they’re going to the big cities, and you have the feeling that nobody really cares about you. From this point of view, it’s not so different than many things that you see in the United States. This urban-rural divide is not only European. And on the other side, you can see that even the crisis that Europe went through was all the time pushing Europeans to reposition. I’m just going to give you one example. You can see this later crisis coming with the Russia invasion in Ukraine is the return of the three major crises that Europe faced for the last 10 years. First on economy. This is the return of the financial crisis of 2009. This time, very much the threat of the inflation, which is becoming big, which is creating problems, particularly for countries like Germany, because what old people really hate is inflation. These goals basically destroys their pensions, destroys their idea of certainty of life. And this injects a level of insecurity, which is critically important. Secondly, this is the return of the refugee crisis. Now, basically you have more refugees in Europe, almost two or three times more than during the refugee crisis of 2014/ 2015. But you’re going to see how different is the response. And this is not simply that countries like Poland, which was so strongly against getting even 10,000 Syrians in their countries back in 2015, but they very much identified with the Ukrainians. They very much stand behind them, but also in many countries like my own Bulgaria, people realize that all those Ukrainians coming to these depopulated, these European countries, this is a chance. This is a chance for better labor market, it is a chance for more economic development. So one of the major by the way, risk that Ukraine is facing is if we are going to see a prolonged war, so many people are going to leave the country, then reconstructing the country after that is not going to be easy. Because when people stayed for two, three years outside of their places, when they start the new life, when kids starts to go to school, this is not easy to come back. And the third crisis that is very much was the crisis about the role of the military power in 2014. Europeans decided that, of course, what Russia did in Crimea was bad, and of course what they did in Donbas was bad, but it’s separate things, they’re never going to develop. This was just kind of an accident. So as a result, for example, Germany, while being very unhappy with what Russians did, for the last seven years, increased their dependency on Russian gas from 39 to 55%, because still the idea was that economic interdependence is the best source of security. And suddenly you understand also that economic interdependence can be a major vulnerability, major vulnerability. And I do believe that this is why Europe is pushed to rethink basic assumptions on which European project is built. It’s not simply increasing military budgets. It’s not easy to become a military power. It’s not just about money, this also who want to go to the army. One of the great books written about Europe after the end of the World War is with the title “Where His All Soldiers Go”. And this was the European process. This was specification. This was very much understanding that the economies at the center of this, that military power does not pay us back. And from this point of Europeans, were quite happy to see that some of the American adventures with military power in the beginning of the century in Iraq and other places did not work, because this very much certifies European understanding that military does not buy much. And then you understand that military power matters and better have it, because otherwise you can really lose everything that you kind of dare about in life.
• Yes. Well, we’re sort of rediscovering this at, you know, when it’s staring us in the face and we have to deal with it. So that’s an interesting analysis. I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the coming world order. I mean, many people are sort of discussing, you know, who’s got the label for, you know, what’s coming our way. It’s finally the end of the end of history. Again, one might say, and maybe Samuel Huntington’s notion of the “Clash of Civilizations” is finally arrived. I mean, some people say that’s being demonstrated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Others say that precisely it falsifies that argument. And then there’s an argument that, you know, David Brooks, the “New York Times” columnist, has recently made kind of along the lines of what you were saying about the, you know, cosmopolitan urban versus rural kind of divide that is not just a European phenomenon, but as you say is also an American phenomenon. And suggesting that this is kind of the social basis, so to speak, for a kind of culture war type of politics. I mean, how do you see that? Or do you have your own label for what’s coming our way?
• Listen, I’ll try to skip the label because the labels can help you sell a book, but not always to understand what is going on. One of the most interest, after the end of the Cold War, several interesting books came into being, and of course, Fukuyama’s book was important, Huntington’s book is important, but there was a German writer at thesis, Martin Sensenberger, that wrote a book, which was called “Silly War”. And he was trying to put together, there was this then, the race riots in LA, the war in Yugoslavia and so on, and he said, “One of the things that basically has happened is that violence does not need ideology anymore to be justified.” And we became supposed to each other. And by the way, in the last years, we all live on a one click distance from each other. That what is the characteristics of this kind of a new war is that all of them are global. You can see, we all participate in way, in the Russia-Ukrainian war. And on the other side, all of them look like a civil war. So from this point of view, Huntington does not work well in the Russian-Ukrainian case. For him, the major definition of civilization was religion, and as you know, basically both Russia and Ukraine are East Orthodox countries. So what we think is something different, in my view. We see first, a world in which decolonization is ending. It started in Europe, with disintegration of the continental empires, the Ottomans, the , the Russians, and in a certain way, it ends here. People have not noticed that because of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, almost more than 20 new states have been born in Europe in the 1990s. So Europe in 1990s was like Africa in 1970s, a very high birth rates of states, not of kids, but of states. And I totally, this created a world which was very much more fragmented. The second important development is for the first time in history, more people were living in urban areas than in rural areas. This is a big change. But certainly that you have a much more regional economist and the problem is what is going to drive it. And many people believed that it is going to be the conflict between China and the United States, US and it’s allies, that is going to discipline it. And there is a part of truth in it, for sure. But my feeling is also that what we are seeing is the activism of the middle powers. Countries like Russia, like Turkey, like India, suddenly filling this kind of a vacuum of power and also very much fearing irrelevance, because they’re too big to stay passive and not big enough to shape the environment. So this is what I’m very much afraid is that we are going to have a period of a, turbulent period in which you can have series of local conflicts. You’re going to have a major disruption of the supply chains. People started in economy now to talk a lot about French voting. That you are going, you should keep your supply chains in a country that align with you politically. But how we know that somebody aligns with you politically? Particularly in the democratic countries where the change of a government can means basically the change of geopolitical orientation. So if we are going to talk about what is coming, it might be the next 10 years, we are going to see much more confusion and the world going in a different directions at the same time. I remember an old children’s book about some British ward who get out of the room, jump on the horse and start running in all directions at the same time. And my feeling is that it’s going to be this ward and this kind of a run that is going very much to define what we are going to have now.
• I see. Well, that may be tough to get a label for, but you’ll need one for your next book. But thank you for all these illuminating answers to these questions. The questions have been piling up in the Q&A, and I wanna invite people to add their questions if they have them to the Q&A. We have about 20 minutes or so left, so maybe we’ll turn to the questions that have begun to arrive already. So the first question goes back to the Russian invasion and it asks, you know, what about Anne Applebaum’s argument that Putin’s main motivation was to counter the threat to his autocracy, that democracy represented in Ukraine, that this was much more important than, you know, historical activism or the expansion of NATO.
• So I do believe, of course, part of it is there. President Putin is not known as the fan of democratic regimes. And in 2004, to a great extent, he was very, very much worried about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. But since then, two things happened that in my view explained better what he was doing. First Ukraine was not over performing, not economically, not politically. So if in the beginning, the fear of basically Putin was that his own citizens were going to ask for the freedoms that Ukrainians had. He also, thanks to his propaganda power, managed to convince Russians that they don’t want to be like Ukraine. You see what it means, weak power. They also have corruption and economic performance of Ukraine was not particularly strong. So from this point of view, you had this fear, but in my view, much more important was this kind of a ethnic turn in the mindset of Russian president. He started his term as a former Soviet Red Colonel. He was very solid in the way that basically going back and nostalgia here and there. If you’re going to listen carefully to the speech that he gave to the Russian people when he announced the recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk Republic, this was much more speech of a white general from the civil war. It was very much about Russian empire. It was very much about also demographic fears, that there are not enough Russians in the world. So this is why Ukrainian should be Russians. This was the idea that the world now is moving and consolidating. So this may give reunification of the Russian lent and Russian people, in my view was very strong in his motivation. So, well, I do believe Anne Applebaum knows by the way, Ukraine much better than me and she’s a absolutely fascinating that is right. But I do believe at the same time that this type of a Putin is a much more old empire builder, who believes that if he’s not going to do it now, in 10 years, Ukrainian is going to be better armed, and there are going to be less Ukrainians who speak Russian and so on. Probably this was maybe a stronger motive for what he did. So democracy authoritarianism is there, but it’s my view, even more stronger that he was trying to recreate the historic Russia in the way he believes it used to be.
• Well, thanks for that. I mean, I should perhaps add that Anne Applebaum is in fact one of your predecessors in giving this lecture. So we’ve had a long line of distinguished speakers, as you can see. You know, your comments on that last question raised a question that somebody has asked which has to do with, you know, what will Russia accept? I mean, what could bring this war to an end? I mean, it seems in some ways that we could have gotten to where Ukraine was prepared to go without any war, and yet we’ve had to endure it, the Ukrainians have had to endure it, but where do you think this is likely to end up, and how long is this gonna take to play out?
• There’s several possible outcomes. Listen, now, predicting is an interesting game, but I do believe also quite risky one. Obviously it didn’t work in the way the Russians imagine to go. When President Putin called this special operation, the reason is that he believed it’s going to be special operations. Something similar to what he did in Georgia in 2008, or even Crimea, his forces are coming and basically the Ukrainian Army is going to be totally in panic and they’re not going to fight back. Now it’s clear that this is not going to be the case. So you have three scenarios, which I found more realistic, and depending on which of them is going to be realized, we’re going to have a totally different situation. And by the way, totally different Europe. one most optimistic scenario from the point of view, basically of Kyiv is that the Russian war in Ukraine can end up like the Russian-Japanese war of 2005, 2007, where basically the Russian empire believed that they can easily deal with Japan and they lost. And if you’re going to read many of the books, particularly memoirs of donation, liberation leaders in the 20th century, you’re going to see that for people like Arthur Chu or for the Chinese leaders, this was the most important war of the 20th century, because for the first time non-white, non-imperial power has defeated one of the European empires. So this war can end up badly for Putin, and his army can be pushed out of the Ukrainian territory. And this is the most kind of a positive scenario. And then it means that the question is going to be what is going to happen in Russia next. And to be honest, this scenario also has a lot of risks. We are talking about the nuclear power, and we are talking to president who is really convinced that if there is no Putin, there is no Russia. Second scenario, which is, I found also much more realistic is the scenario of the Soviet-Finnish war of 1940, where the Soviet Union went on. Finland, by the way, in the beginning, they have been offering something very similar to what they were offering to Kyiv now, let’s exchange territories, let’s do this and that. And the Finnish fought heroically, in the way the Ukrainians are doing now. And then there was the World War II, and basically Russia’s got certain type of a territory, but the new Finnish identity and the Finland state was created. And as we see this Finland State achieved incredibly. So this responsibility Ukraine can lose certain territories while basically preserving its sovereignty and integrity, but it’s going to be very painful. And it’s going to be very painful exactly because people are fighting so strongly. And the third scenario, which in mind is the most realistic one is the Korean scenario. You’re going to have not a peace, but a ceasefire. You’re going to have a country that is going to be divided. I don’t know how much territory Russians can kept. I don’t know basically what is going to happen on the ground. But if you believe that in a certain way, they’re going to keep certain type of Ukrainian land, the Ukrainians are not going to recognize their legitimacy over the territory. And they’re going to wait for the moment when this is going to be over. And this means that you’re going to have a much more militarized relations between Russia and the West for time to come. So all this is there. And if in the beginning of the war, the story was, is Ukraine going to be a new Afghanistan? Which means that Russia is going to occupy the country and then basically going to have a partisan wars. Now, I don’t see the way that Russia is going to occupy the whole territory of Ukraine. I cannot see how they’re basically going to destroy the Ukrainian statehood. At least the military at this moment, with the current forces that are present in Ukraine, are even skeptical to what extent Russians could capture Odessa. But the level of destruction is incredible. At the moment, just for Ukraine to run. I mean, the parts that is controlled by the Ukrainian government, it needs support over 5 billion per month. And so when this is over and nevertheless, how this is over, first we are going to see the level of destruction. Also the level of human destruction, what Putin did to the relations between the ordinary Russians and Ukrainians, the hatred that came with this war, this is going to stay for a long period of time. And I do believe that if, I don’t know, is there Russian paradise? But if there is a Russian hell, President Putin easily can end up there.
• Indeed. So another question or asks about the refugee situation. This has been pointed to as something that could, you know, tend to crack the unity of the countries that have so far been, you know, working together to deal with this situation. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you know, what you think is gonna come of this refugee situation when a quarter of the Ukrainian population is either internally displaced, or is in more or less generally neighboring countries.
• It really very much depends how long the war will go, because there’s several countries starting with Poland, who basically are hosting the big majority of people coming. They’re almost 3 million people in Poland. The population of Warsaw went up by 30%. And people are treating the Ukrainians incredibly, of course, we’re talking mostly about women and kids. But you should imagine what kind of infrastructure challenge this is for the neighboring countries. The majority of the people who came from Ukraine now, in Poland are living in the private houses, they’re hosted by volunteers. Around 800 new schools should be created in order to get the kids that are now important in order to start school, for example, in Otyn. And this is not only the problem of money, this is the problem of infrastructure, of everything. And secondly, these people stay in Poland because they want to go back. But, and this is one of the major stories about Ukraine, if this war continues for one year, for two years, then people are going to adjust. They’re going to stay in these places, who is going to go back to Ukraine, which is going to be more and more destructed by the way. I don’t see any probability, if the Russians are going to control part of the Ukrainian territory, to have a major restructuring there, because it’s going to be expensive. Russian now is very much weakened by the financial sanctions, but also to a great extent, particularly now, the war in Ukraine for President Putin his punishment war. He’s punishing the Ukrainians war for what they did, and this also pedagogical with respect to the West, trying to convince the West that he’s ready to do anything that it takes to have his plans being achieved. So from this point of view, he’s ready for escalation. And while I’m of the people who don’t believe that the probability of using the tactical nuclear weapons is so high, I’m not going to exclude it. Because for him, this is not about that this is going to solve any issue on the ground, but it’s to make the point. And this is the other thing that has happened. Even during the late Soviet period, the nuclear weapons were there, but Soviets did not like talk about nuclears. You know, that we have them, you know what we can do with them, but we are not talking about them, because there was something kind of really disturbing about living in the world that, you know, can be destroyed in two minutes. What has changed dramatically with the current behavior of the Russian government is that they start talking about the nuclear in the way you are talking about the conventional weapons. And this has disturbed a lot, and particularly for the generation, I have a daughter who’s 21 studying in Netherlands. She, for the first time, discovered the problem of nuclear weapons. You have the whole generation for which the nukes was not part of, they’re kind of intellectual horizon. They knew that they’re there, they were not bothered about them. So from this point of view, all this is going to be, their refugees are going at some point, probably to become a political crisis, keeping in mind in different countries, how far-right and others are going to address this issue. But for the moment, this refugee crisis is different than the previous one, because Polski even, Pols were very much on the right share one thing with the Ukrainian refugees, and this is the common enemy.
• Right. So we have a question that is kind of general, but addresses, I think, a hugely important issue, which is the question of the impact of the explosion of information and information sources, and on the ability to control the information environment, what sort of the effect that has on the global changes that you envision. And I’m thinking about, in a more specific sense, you know, Tom Friedman’s column on the war early on, and sort of arguing that this was historically unprecedented, that we had the level of, you know, knowledge about what was going on, essentially on the battlefield in Ukraine and how this was, in that sense, a total different kind of situation. So maybe that’s a specific version of the more general question. And, I suppose, address whichever you would like.
• No, but this is an extremely important story because we are talking about what is happening to the borders. And one of the natural borders was the information borders. The governments have, in general, certain type of monopoly over the information space. And this was part of the definition of sovereignty, particularly by the way, in small countries with small languages. Because the best thing that is protecting Bulgarian information space is Bulgarian language. Before nobody’s going to put so much effort to learn it in order to influence the Bulgarian debate. Several things has happened. First is the spread of English language makes most of these wars kind of bilingual. Everybody in the information war is tweeting in his own language but also in English. And the incredible landscape effect on global politics where you have one person that was totally unknown two months ago, that basically has the power to shape opinion in foreign countries, to the extent that politicians in the West really, really fear what he’s going to say in their parliaments, what he’s going to tweet. This is an incredible reality. Secondly, comes the idea that you try to put control over your information space, in the case of Russia and China. Of course, it took a totally dramatic story. Basically what Russia did is that they cut all their population to the extent this is possible by any alternative source of information. They basically got any opposition media who was called foreign agent and basically have them closed. But even in our countries, we basically decided to close Russia today to do other things. This kind of attempt of the state to regain certain type of monopoly over the information is becoming critically important. So we are going to get these two things which go in a different directions. On one, ordinary people who are interested in in the war, basically asks first, does the president know what is happening on the ground? The major information advantage that people in power had that they know and we don’t know has disappeared. Now, everybody knows in real time what is happening, or at least the version of what is happening that works for them. But on the other, you have this information ghettos in which as if the world is much more transparent, but on the other, you basically have the Russians and Ukrainians having a totally different idea of what is happening. And I was talking very much to people that have relatives in Russia, Ukrainians. And they said that the most painful thing is not being bombed, but talking on telephone to their relatives that are living in Russia. And when basically they’re saying, listen, we are bombed this and that. And basically the person saying, “No, no, you’re just the victim of your propaganda.” The people say that I’m living in a country. I am bombed. I’m here, I’m seeing this. So suddenly you have a major expansion of information, but also get ghettorization. And this is at the same time and which of them is going to be more powerful politically still to be seen.
• Right. So I guess we have time for just one last question. And it’s from my colleague, Ellen Chesler at the Ralph Bunche Institute. So she asks most commentary on Putin’s motivations emphasize on the ideology but aren’t economic considerations fundamental. Russia’s economy is relatively small adding in Ukrainian energy, and agricultural, and tech sectors would be significant, except of course, for the fact that Putin has destroyed so much of it. But where does the economic dimension fit into what’s going on?
• Listen, economy is always there. But honestly speaking, I don’t believe that economic motivation was the leading one because he knew before he invaded that they’re going to be this big sanctions coming from the West that obviously was going to hurt his economy in a big way. One of the things that in my view makes so difficult for the West to be effective when it comes to Putin is that all the time the assumption was that nevertheless, he’s different. Nevertheless, a fall to return declines, basically he’s an economic man. And this was true very much following how he has been running the country in the first decade. And also here, our obsession with his corruption it might have contributed to this, because we have this kind of, in my view, illusion that because his war is going to hurt the bank accounts of some of his friends who are living in London and others, this is the way to stop the war. My feeling is that in the last years, and here the pandemic, according to many people, and I’m sharing this view, also had a very strong impact on Putin. He was quite isolated, quite radicalized. He’s thinking in terms of a history with a capital H. He’s talking about the future of Russia, that he should consolidate certain space, that he should consolidate certain demographic body politics. So, yes, for sure. This is a very, one of the best land in the world is in Ukraine. But don’t forget, Russia is not missing plan. Russia is not missing natural resources. In my view, he believes that Russia is missing two things. One is this great power scuttles which declined towards the end of the Soviet Union. And the other, the critical mass of people that can be competitive in the world that is becoming kind of a very competitive. So well, probably the economic considerations cannot be think sought marginal in his decision, still, I believe that probably this was not the most important decision that defined how he acted though.
• Right. Well, thank you for those informative answers to all these questions. But I’m afraid we’re out of time. I wanna thank Yvonne Crusta for taking the time to be with us today to address the future of Europe in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I’d especially like to thank the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation for their generous support of this annual lecture. I want to thank the CUNY Graduate Center’s public programs team, as well as the EU Study Center Assistant Director, Meryl Sovner for all of their help in making this possible. And the Trans-Atlantic Policy Center at American University for co-sponsoring the event. And finally, of course, I want to thank the audience for your participation and for your questions in the Q&A. This conversation will soon be posted to the Graduate Center’s YouTube channel, and will soon air as an episode of “International Horizons”, the weekly podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. Thanks to everyone for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you again soon.