Ukraine failures tarnish Putin’s aura of invincibility

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: Ukraine failures tarnish Putin’s aura of invincibility

Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times.

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not going as planned. A week into the conflict, Vladimir Putin’s forces had failed to win the quick victory he was hoping for. Russia’s been hit by unprecedented new economic sanctions, but Putin has also issued dark threats that he’s putting his nuclear forces on standby. To understand how the war in Ukraine may evolve, I’m joined this week by Sir Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London and author of books such as The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy and The Future of War. So what’s gone wrong with Russian strategy in Ukraine and how is Putin likely to react?

Vladimir Putin has made a series of bizarre television appearances from the Kremlin during the course of this crisis, but none were more chilling than when he released a film of him ordering Russia’s military leadership to put the country’s nuclear weapons on standby.

Vladimir Putin (via a translator)
I’m ordering the minister of defence and the chief of the general staff to put the strategic nuclear forces on special alert.

Gideon Rachman
The reaction from Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary-general, to Putin’s nuclear threats was firm.

Jens Stoltenberg
This is dangerous rhetoric. This is a behaviour which is irresponsible. And of course, if you combine this rhetoric with what they are doing on the ground in Ukraine, waging war against the independent sovereign nation, conducting full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, this adds to the seriousness of the situation.

Gideon Rachman
But how seriously should we take all this? Later in this podcast, Lawrence Freedman will give us his views on the dangers of nuclear escalation. But I started by asking him about his recent statement that the point about wars is that they rarely go according to plan.

Lawrence Freedman
Well, most wars don’t go to plan in that the initial campaign comes sometimes across unexpected opportunities, but more often against unexpected pitfalls. This one has gone spectacularly not to plan because it was based on some fundamental misconceptions right from the start. It’s a combination of Putin’s imagined Ukraine, which lacks a national identity, isn’t a real country, is ruled by, to use his phrase, drug addicts and Nazis, and a curious arrogance amongst the Russian high command. The belief that somehow the forces they were facing were quite weak, that they could not make this elementary military preparations, for example, by getting control of the skies and just charge off towards Ukraine and Kharkiv and other cities and take them with relatively light forces. So the adage that “No plan survives contact with the enemy” has been proved to be more true than ever in this case.

Gideon Rachman
And yet, possibly we’re still in the early stages of the war. I think most analysts I’ve seen still think that Russia will eventually achieve its basic goal: taking the major cities.

Lawrence Freedman
I think that’s in doubt now. I mean, you know, we have to be very careful. I don’t think it’s necessarily in the early days of the war. I don’t think this war can go on indefinitely from Putin’s point of view, especially given the economic sanctions. But you know, things have a habit of dragging out. And if we get into a sort of a lower level insurgency, it could go on for some time in that form. But I think he has real problems now taking the cities because even if you get people in them, as we’ve seen from a number of social media postings, that’s not the same as actually exercising control. So, you know, they’re not gonna be chased out of Ukraine. They’ve suffered enormous losses of equipment and people. Their advances have been stalled, but there’s a lot of military might there. But actually getting into the cities and having got in holding them, that’s still gonna be extremely difficult. And I think they’re starting to get some appreciation of that.

Gideon Rachman
Presumably because, you know, that stemmed from the initial miscalculation as well that the population would essentially either welcome or at least accept an occupation. And if you’re trying to occupy cities and the whole country long-run with only 200,000 people, a country known as the largest in Europe other than Russia itself, presumably, that sounds like an impossible task.

Lawrence Freedman
Yeah, they don’t have the numbers for a full occupation. The fighting for it are actually in territorial terms for a relatively small chunk of land at the moment. It’s critically important in some of the places it is and certainly the capital. The point about the initial days of the war is it allowed Zelensky the chance to mobilise his people, to provide extraordinary leadership. You now have a popular militia in place and ready to go and a really angry population. So all of this makes the tasks of occupation even harder. And you can see this in those towns where they have been able to go, where there hasn’t been serious military resistance. Civilians are shouting at them and they look extremely uncomfortable because these are, you know, youngsters who didn’t expect to be in this role, not quite sure what to do next, and it’s not clear the quality of the orders that they’ve been given.

Gideon Rachman
And this is a largely conscript army, isn’t it?

Lawrence Freedman
Conscript reservists, some really professional types as well. I mean, we assumed this was gonna be a very professional army. It turns out it’s not as professional as we thought it was.

Gideon Rachman
And yet there’s always been this fear, which maybe we’re beginning to see realised, that if frustrated, Putin would resort to very barbaric tactics. The kind of scorched earth tactics that were used in Grozny and Chechnya, in Aleppo, in Syria. Some people thought he would go for it immediately. Where do you think we stand on that? Is that horrible prospect still likely?

Lawrence Freedman
Well, first, I mean, clearly there have been some atrocious attacks on civilian areas. It’s not carpet bombing and it’s not scorched earth. And some of it has these sort of claims, which are sort of valid, about attacking administrative buildings. And so we don’t win wars by attacking administrative buildings. Did your paper, it’s got a good story about how the administration is going on without these buildings. I think that’s one of the issues that they’re wrestling with, themselves. I mean, the casualty levels are awful, but again, this isn’t a blitz. I think what you’re seeing most is a lot of improvisation and ad hocery varying from different cities. The Russians are in a better position in the south, although still not as good as many would have expected. So I think you’re gonna see a variety of different approaches. I don’t think they’ve got a clear enough strategy at about what they’re trying to do with this. I think one of the fears is that there essentially is gonna be a siege of some sort. So they’ll keep people cowering in shelters and bombardment while food and medicines without power goes. I mean, I think that’s possibly a bigger risk at the moment. But as I say, I think there’s something very ad hoc about Russian tactics at the moment.

Gideon Rachman
And how much aid do you think the west can plausibly get to Ukraine, particularly if they do settle into this kind of siege effort? You know, the west has already, even Germany is supplying weapons now. But they’ll also have to supply food, medicines. Do you think that kind of thing is possible?

Lawrence Freedman
Well, I think getting food and medicines in will be essential. I mean, the Ukrainians have got quite a bit of captured Russian equipment as well. But anti-tank weapons, air defence weapons in particular are going to be important. The issue is making sure they’re not interdicted by the Russians as they go from sort of the border with Nato to the main areas of fighting. And you also have to keep in mind that that area around Lviv, for example, isn’t particularly affected yet. There are places where the Ukrainian army could reform, and the western support and supplies can be important to sort of a reformed Ukrainian force that establishes itself closer to the Nato border, which is a good way to think of it, I think, and still poses a problems and challenges and difficulties of occupation for the Russians.

Gideon Rachman
Some of the military experts I spoke to before all this began, who were generally pretty gloomy about Ukraine’s ability to resist, placed great emphasis on the fact that the Russians would quickly secure control of the skies. Has that happened? And I suppose one indication that it might have, they have this huge column apparently outside Ukraine which is not being attacked from the air.

Lawrence Freedman
Yes, the lack of air war is one of the peculiarities of all of this. And it may be, you know, it uses up a lot of fuel to fly lots of sorties. They may just not have thought it was necessary. It may be part of the original arrogance. As we’ve seen, Ukrainians do have air defence weapons and they’ve used them. They don’t have a great air force themselves, but they seem to have dispersed a lot of their aircraft so that they weren’t caught on runways and so on. Some were. It’s a peculiarity of this campaign. If you look at the big American offensives, which you know, tended to get in trouble because of insurgencies, not because of the original offensive. There was sort of a methodical quality about them, about taking out the air defences and establishing control of the skies before you did much else. And this hasn’t been done. And it’s caused enormous problems.

Gideon Rachman
Now, obviously, Russia has a range of weapons, and President Putin referred to the most threatening of the lot quite early on when he made a pretty clear, if not explicit threat, that this could turn into nuclear war. How seriously should we be taking that?

Lawrence Freedman
Difficult to say. Given the way that Putin’s been behaving so far, I don’t think this is something to be trivialised at all. In some ways, this is one of the most dangerous situations we’ve faced, probably the most dangerous situation we’ve faced in Europe. In that respect of major wars since 1945, the wars of the former Yugoslavia were awful but they didn’t quite come into this category because you didn’t have a nuclear power fighting, drawing attention to its nuclear capability. That being said, I think it is largely deterrent to be referred to as deterrent forces. As it launched the invasion, he warned against foreign interference with the sort of hint of major war was what he was talking about in a nuclear sense. They’ve moved their alert status sort of up a notch, but they’re still not on a war footing. So I think it’s largely a deterrent to some extent, perhaps an indication of his frustration. But it is a warning, and it’s meant as a warning. You know, when people talk about sending in Nato aircraft to impose no-fly zones and so on, that’s in fact a declaration of war on Russia, and the consequences could be grim.

Gideon Rachman
The people I know who are worrying about this talk mainly about tactical nuclear weapons. I guess in the popular mind nuclear weapons are still bombs dropped on cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So explain to us what tactical nuclear weapons are and whether they fit into the way that Russia thinks about war and how they could feasibly be used.

Lawrence Freedman
So tactical nuclear weapons, which is a misnomer, they’re essentially nuclear weapons to be used in battle. And Russia has a lot of those. It takes quite seriously in their doctrine and military preparations for a major war with Nato, for example. It’s hard to see how they’re particularly useful in this situation, even if the Russians were so inclined. I mean, they’re not short of artillery. If they want to blast places, then that’s basically what they’re relying on in some ways at the moment. And you irradiate the areas you’re supposed to be liberating. So it’s not clear, and I don’t think that’s what Putin was referring to. I think what he was referring to was the more strategic role of deterrence, to remind Nato countries not to get actively engaged in the war.

Gideon Rachman
And yet, obviously, given the catastrophic nature of this, even if it’s a small chance, it’s something that western policymakers would have to think about. So how do you think they will be thinking about avoiding getting to the stage where we escalate to a potentially nuclear conflict?

Lawrence Freedman
I just don’t see it. Escalation to a nuclear conflict would require the risk of complete battlefield defeat by a masked Ukrainian army that was pushing against the Russians. That’s not gonna happen. I mean, the problems the Russian army is facing are of their own making, of running out of fuel, abandoned vehicles, soldiers surrendering and so on. I mean, that’s their problem. Not that the Ukrainian army is gonna push them back. So you don’t have the targets that would make it worthwhile. Nato has made it clear that they’re not actually gonna try to institute a no-fly zone, which incidentally would have made a marginal difference for the reasons we’ve discussed. A no-artillery zone would make a difference, but that’s not what they’re going to do. So I think it’s very hard actually to work out a pathway to escalation other than if, you know, people sort of imagine a crazed man. That’s a different prospect which none of us can work out. And I think even then, if one looks to the faces of the Russian defence minister and the head of their armed forces, as Putin made his sort of alert announcement, they’re not desperately keen on going in that direction.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe I’ve been speaking to too many catastrophists, but one of the people who does take this quite seriously said to me, we have to think about Putin’s mentality and the possibility that he believes what he says, that he believed that Ukraine was, you know, run by Nazis and that he believed what he says when he says that Nato is a threat to Russia, even though we, none of us really think that. And if he thinks that, then maybe it might justify him to escalate. And it reminded me of the early 1980s when there was the famous Able Archer incident when the west suddenly realised, based I think on intelligence, that the Russians really thought they might be about to be attacked themselves. Are those dangers a misperception then?

Lawrence Freedman
Look, they’re always there and you have to take account of them. And again, you know, one of the problems throughout this whole crisis, why some of us were amazed when Putin took this step, which was clearly not gonna end well for him even before he started, was the state of Putin’s mind. I mean, it’s very hard to work out. He does believe as far as one can work out that this is a country run, I mean, Nazis is an all-purpose term used by the Russians for anybody who they think is against them. So I don’t think he’s using it as a precise analytical category, but he certainly believes it’s been captured by the wrong sort of people and that Nato’s against and the Able Archer exercise you referred to was 1) was a result of President Reagan’s rhetoric, the Russian leadership at the time convinced themselves, or some did, particularly the KGB, that the next Nato exercise would be used to launch the real thing. And they had all their intelligence people looking for signs of it. But I think again, this is still a different situation. So of course, we should watch carefully. And, you know, I don’t think we should in effect declare war on Russia ourselves. But given the way things are going, I still find it hard to imagine that at the moment should be our prime concern.

Gideon Rachman
And I mean, you obviously, a large part of your career was during the Cold War, you studied all the nuclear deterrence back then. What lessons do you think we can learn from nuclear deterrence during the Cold War and are those lessons reassuring or not so reassuring given how close we came a couple of times?

Lawrence Freedman
Well, they’re basically reassuring because in the end we avoided nuclear war. And in the end, we avoided a clash between east and west. So in that sense, nuclear deterrence worked and the areas where it didn’t work or came close not to it, I think people worried about, were things like early warning systems malfunctioning so that you thought you were facing an incoming attack when you really weren’t and started to retaliate. You know, so Dr. Strangelove-type scenarios. But in the end, it depended on avoiding getting into a conventional war between east and west. And that we did. So, you know, the legacy of that, which I think is still pretty powerful, is when people think about war between major powers, they still think of an almost immediate escalation to nuclear use. And that itself has had a deterrent effect. It’s why people are cautious, why people before this conflict talked about a grey zone where cyber attacks and information campaigns and so on took the place of war because nobody wanted to get into too dangerous situations. So nuclear weapons still by and large make people cautious, and I don’t think we’ve reached a stage in this conflict with all the caveats about the state of Putin’s mind where that’s gonna change.

Gideon Rachman
So that’s an optimistic point, at least.

Lawrence Freedman
Well, it’s not a deeply pessimistic one. [laughs]

Gideon Rachman
Well, as far as worst-case scenarios go, you know, that’s a note of relative optimism about how high or low the risks of nuclear war are. And I mean obviously, one has to be careful about sounding optimistic amidst what is a horrible tragedy with a lot of suffering. But if we return to where we began, the idea that Putin has pretty well failed, that we can see that even now, do you think that the long run consequences of this conflict could be quite positive in the sense that Putinism fails and that could be good for Ukraine, could be good for Russia, even good for the world?

Lawrence Freedman
Well, I think the world would be a better place if Russia wasn’t ruled by Putin. One has to be very careful about getting ahead of ourselves. There’s still a long way to go before we know the actual outcome. It’s just not gonna be what Putin wanted at the start. I mean, I think this will most likely end after the ceasefire talks and there will be some document which will give some sort of assurances to Russia in return for them removing their forces. But it’s not hard for the Ukrainians to promise not to be Nazis or not to develop their own nuclear option, for example. But I think it is the case already that the sort of war of powers surrounding Putin has been badly dented. You know, it worked out quite well for Putin from the Second Chechen War, which in effect brought him to power and enabled him to win the presidency in 2000 to, I mean, in his belief, possibly the annexation of Crimea and the bloodying of Georgia in 2008, turning Russia into Middle Eastern power with Syria with the support of the Assad regime. He’s done OK out of military power, but has been used. But some of them have taken risks, but they seem pretty calculated risks, whereas this is a very poorly calculated risk. And once you lose this sort of aura seems to be the best word of competence and ruthlessness and effectiveness, then your position is in trouble and you know, the Russian economy is taking the most enormous hit. And it’s gonna take a long time while he is in power to recover from this. And the oligarchs and so on are well aware of that. So I would have thought his days in power will be numbered. But you know, you need a very good insight into the inner workings of the Russian elite to know quite how that will eventually work out. And I don’t think I quite have that.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Sir Lawrence Freedman in London ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening. I hope you’ll be able to join us again next week when, if I can, I’ll be taking a short holiday and a colleague will be standing in for me.

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