So today I would like to use the smart guy, Aussie, who is CEO of the consultancy Market Intelligence,
as well as an honorary professor at UCLA's School Ceramics and East European Studies.
He's also a senior research associate at. Also the National Jewish Strategy Institute of International Relations in Prague.
He works in modern Russia with a particular focus on security related topics, including organised crime,
the intelligence services, the military and the politics of national security guards.
He read history at Robinson College Cambridge and took a doctorate in politics of the NSC, is head of history at Keele University,
professor of global affairs at New York University and a fellow at the European University Institute and a senior research fellow of the FCO.
Self-esteem Visiting the Centre boasts rookies New York and the US,
Charles University in Prague and Moscow State Institute for International Relations.
He has also advised and given evidence to avoid the boys from the House of Commons,
Foreign Affairs Committee and the Parliamentary Assembly to each pole and shape is, of course, a prolific author.
Recent books include The Weaponization of Everything from the A Short History of Russia.
Last year, Russian political warfare moving beyond the hybrid election to 2020.
We need to talk about Putin with also he in 2019. He writes regularly in the press, most recently in Moscow Sunday Times,
and he was originally when we were arranging his talks for us to speak of more of us as
conflict changing Russian perceptions between the military and civilian security services,
but thinks they might be a bit of a change. Welcome to.
Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here, even if in the most terrible of circumstances,
it's quite a difficult thing to try to talk about war and conflict in abstract when it is being played out for two wheels in Ukraine at the moment.
And also, this is a conflict which actually breaks the rules, not the terms of international law and so forth.
I gather that one, but also the rules of actually how the Russian state thinks and thought about war and about conflict.
So what I'm going to do is, and to an extent, this is a this is sort of not together on the fly, so it may well be less coherent, but more timely.
That's a trade off that I might otherwise have hoped for.
What I want to do is talk about precisely the the way that both the military and
the civilian slash super national security establishment think about conflict and
then talk about precisely how what's what's striking to me is the degree to which
the Ukraine example demonstrates actually how little real impact that has when.
And this is sort of strap line I was thinking of. Yeah, autocracy meets technocracy.
It's all very well having all kinds of splendid theories and deeply reasoned arguments in the military,
doctrinal press and round tables within the confines of Security Council secretariat
about the best way to manage conflicts if the boss doesn't want to listen.
And so in some ways, that's going to be who I think the sort of the closing leitmotif.
It's a little bit about the two approaches.
First of all, military action, there is no such thing as the overarching doctrines that will be an albatross around my head,
around my neck for a long time. There's a lot of nonsense that in the past has been written by some about how the Russians
think about conflict and particularly the role of non-kinetic instruments in that conflict.
And it's certainly true that that the Russian military, which does have a very,
very intellectual approach to how it thinks about war fighting the power structures itself.
In that line, I must remember the doctrine in Russian terms is not just a word.
A military doctrine is not a document,
which is an absolutely foundational one from which all kinds of other decisions from procurement personnel, all of those flowed.
Military doctrine is a very serious thing within the context of military doctrine.
The Russian military identified a series of types of conflict all the way from essentially what you might think of as potentialities,
which can be dealt with by a variety of different instruments,
whether it's diplomatic or political or indeed military show of force and such like all the way through to major all our conflicts between Box.
But again, they they take care to consider these and consider these as distinct phenomena, each of which has to be approached in a different way.
Since then, I mean as. They have time to think about how they can wolf fight in the modern age.
We have indeed seen an increasing interest in the use of non-military means and with it a slight blurring as to
quite what war means because as soon as you stop thinking of non-military means as a core part of your arsenal,
you start to raise complex philosophical questions, which of course, as we all know,
generals love conflicts with some of the questions about why what is a war?
What point is a cyber attack? An act of war?
What point is, for example, massing large numbers of troops on another country's borders tantamount to an act of war?
Now, obviously, the Russians have done these things,
but the Russians have also been trying to answer for themselves questions of what would they consider an act of war?
Would they consider it in a what would they consider it if, let's say, almost a natural massed forces?
This is a kind of fantasy show that could last forces the nature of Putin's nightmares.
You know, if that massed forces on Russian borders were supporters, where would that fit in this chain of conflict type situations?
And if so, what does that actually unlock in terms of a Russian approach?
So that happened thinking in all these terms and particularly they have begun to develop beyond the
notions of what do we have sort of a lottery think a cool jet ski check-up calls non-contact war,
which is basically the idea that future warfare is increasingly going to be fought not by close quarter battle,
but by long range precision guided munitions in the way in which actually enemy forces may well never even need visual contact of each other.
Well, what we found is actually non-military means being increasingly blurred even with that.
There are different ways of reaching out and remotely bringing havoc to your enemy than just simply launching missiles and such like.
You can also use other means.
So we have seen a certain element of the Russians beginning to kind of try and cope with the notion of how wars can be fought by non-military means,
but only up to a point when it comes down to it ultimately.
And for all the talk about hybrid warfare chicken above bear mind,
no war history has not been Typekit for all about that sort of talk when it comes down to it,
the Russian military trains arms prepares to fight proper shooting wars and actually the conventional peer to peer ones.
More often than not, yes, would comfortable with training and preparing for intervention operations and such like they
can send their paratroopers into Kazakhstan at 24 hours notice or less than 24 hours notice.
Under the terms of the Cousteau's, they did.
They can seise the peninsula when no one's watching which they did, but they still regard their primary mission as being a proper war.
And for that,
and I'll explain quite why I'm dwelling on this in a moment so that they actually have a very clear structure of how this is meant to be managed.
They have this shiny, fancy new national military command centre in the basements of basement of the Defence Ministry Building in Civil War,
which is exactly what you'd expect if you've seen any films rooms full of huge screens where you have banks on banks,
people behind computer desks and suchlike, all kinds of things going on in the heart of any militaries, autocrat or nine year old boy.
But the point is that centre, which was first, properly stood up to coordinate the Crimea operation.
Music isn't just a set of rules, isn't just the one of the fastest supercomputers military supercomputers in the world.
It represented a particular kind of command philosophy because the point is this centre is a way of stopping.
A fusion centre is built on the site in Western terms that it brings together.
First of all, information from all over they can tap into anything from a helmet camera of a special forces operator
in the field all the way through to real time representations of how cyber attacks are processing.
I have no idea how to put that into a visual form, but apparently they do.
But it's also a way of coordinating different arms of the Russian government.
One of the one of the particular conceptual problems we the West have in understanding the Russians often is a degree to which we are much,
much more siloed. We have a much sharper distinction between peace and war.
We have a much sharper distinction between chasing government and military, public and private.
All of these kind of. They are.
Not necessarily immaterial to the Russians, but they are certainly much fuzzier and much, much more porous, particularly since 2013 2014.
Putin's Russia has been a warfighting state. It has run on the principle that Russia is at war with an aggressive, hostile West.
Believe it or not, Putin and Co. They are the defenders.
They thought as much for years as they watched things like the Arab Spring risings,
the colour revolutions within post-Soviet Eurasia, which of course,
just in case irony is now present, which of course were not natural organic risings by populations unhappy with corrupt and unresponsive regimes.
No, of course not. They were managed following the real essence of hybrid war hybrid.
Presumably not is actually as far as the Russians are concerned.
We do it. We are the people who have these arcane measures, secret arms that can bring down governments.
That can mean this is how irrational for a friend it in this.
Now this article is in the military industrial courier that within a matter of days,
a perfectly functioning society can be brought into a state of chaos.
No, that was bad enough. But when we did that crime, that was a point when Putin knew we were coming for him.
Ukraine matters to the Russians, have a lot of Ukraine's to as we use governance as their discovery.
But I think the point of view of someone like Putin, it is part of Russia's historical and cultural trinity.
It is not a truly independent state.
Kiev is the mother of Russian cities, doesn't stop showing half, but nonetheless there still is a motorcycle tendency crime.
But generally speaking, you know, Kiev matters, and the idea is that Kiev is being taken by the West.
They have toppled democratically elected leader in a coup and installed one that was willing to basically make over Ukraine a forward base for nature.
And it's quite interesting that we focus very much on NATO's membership as being
so nice to have a centre that wants more dramatic roles from later membership,
which clearly Russia. Putin is just not there, but quite often I will fall into the habit of talking about Russia.
We must remember this is Putin's war, not the Russians war.
And it's not just about the thousands of great Russians who have been protesting against this war,
despite the fact they know who will be arrested quite possibly give a damn good beating in the after corner or the police station.
But many, many others are not aware of this is there from Putin's point of view.
This was a regime toppled by a coup. And it's not that he's so concerned about NATO membership.
As such, he was concerned about the presence of mix forces.
Time again, these various intemperate speeches, he talked about the presence of NATO forces,
nature, missiles and hockey that could hit Russian soil x number of minutes and so forth.
His view was this was basically Ukraine being prepared to become Airstrip one, a forward base to make necessary in the bosom of Mother Russia.
All I should stress, or ninety nine percent paranoid, conspiratorial nonsense.
However, I think it's fair to say he genuinely believed paranoid, conspiratorial nonsense.
So, I mean, in that context, what's happening in Ukraine matters.
And that's why Russia has become a warfighting state in which basically every element of
the state apparatus and indeed society as a whole can be conscripted is the best way.
This is not a totalitarianism that thinks that every element of society ought to be controlled by the state,
but it does believe, as frankly most societies do when they feel they're in a tug of war.
It does believe that any company, any individual or any agency can be tapped on the shoulder and be told we need,
you know, the state needs to do something and you do it. And again,
this this National Centre is a way of managing that kind of a war because it brings
in representatives from a whole variety of other agencies the intelligence services,
the National Guard, which provides a sort of parallel internal security army within within Russia.
And you know, all of the elements know ministries doesn't matter who they are.
Their representatives can be brought out the dentistry.
He said that if it really matters, to actually have real time understanding of how many people are taking which train on the Moscow metro,
that's actually a specific example, by the way, they can plug into that should they need it.
So it's all about coordination control. What happens is when there's a crisis that they feel may well involve the use of military force.
They said, Let's call together you, which is a combat management centre, a group product.
There is a point on it, a little bit tedious as we start moving into the bureaucracy of a military national.
There is a point anyway. This is basically responsible for someone essentially bringing together the task force that is needed,
whatever is involved, making sure that task force has the resources that it needs, setting these specific objectives,
but not actually running the operation that is in the hands of the operational commanders,
which if it's on Russia's borders or within Russia, it would be actually coming to the military district of Seoul Operations Army Group.
And if it's outside of Russia, Syria,
they set up a group of forces command all very clear or sensible or very rational or very bureaucratic over military bureaucracies.
These days, you need to because of all the necessary elements.
It's not just about simply putting all your troops in the direction. You have to make sure all the logistics are ready.
Nothing else. As near as I can tell, and this is very, very early days,
and these are distinctly difficult environments to actually get any kind of news from people in Moscow as near as I can tell,
the new Ukrainian operation was not set up until after the fateful Security Council meeting,
at which Putin bullied and badgered his senior security officials into rubber, stamping his plan to recognise the People's Republic's madness.
According to the way that the Russians rumblings that they really should have been stood up as soon as there was the possibility.
So in other words, it should have been actually at the start of the troop build up a year ago.
Come back to that in a moment. Quantum making is this is this is a very rational, thoughtful, thoughtful thinking about things, Robin.
Consider it armed forces structure who have built a whole process of warfighting precisely to address problems that they normally tend to have,
which is frankly in some capitals that the Russian military is much more teeth than tail,
that they're much more about warfighting capabilities than making sure they're
all in the right place and they get fed and they have the mission of fuel. We understand that.
And so they trying to address it. So this is the kind of nature of how they were thinking about warfighting.
And when they do fight a war, they would anticipate starting it with a morale amassed rocket,
an air strike and which there was kind of it wasn't massed.
It was slightly halfhearted. In Ukraine, there is terrible, but not not anything like what the Russians would normally put out.
And the key point is, in some ways,
what in the West which saw course commander's intent people do is the generals expect to be able to fight the war the way they want to fight the war,
the way they trained to fight the war. There's been a long tradition that the role of the boss is to say, you have a quote from Marshall Connue.
If my money was actually the better of the Russian marshals in World War Two, even though it's the glory of God who gets all the credit.
But anyway, Marshall Cronin,
this is the commander in chief and the guard co-opting the high command sets the target and we soldiers must divine the best means to hit it.
Now he was watching that just after the end of World War Two.
And the interesting thing is, I mean, this will actually get to notes I took when I was at a meeting someone I knew who is that just this is 2016,
who was a retired army officer, colonel who had been in the General Staff Operations Directorate,
which is his main thinking and commanding sort of element.
And what he said is the Kremlin understands that the professionals we can achieve our goals if we are allowed to do so.
Now he was talking about Syria, which the Russians definitely felt. Syria was a pretty good example of what we can do.
The boss just told us to make sure that Assad doesn't fall.
Make sure you push back. I just make damn sure the Americans have anything to crow about and the military, to be honest, we should do that very well.
So they know how to fight wars. We think about it.
They have a clear sense of hierarchy in different wars, and how to distinguish between them will come to at the end.
None of those elements have we seen in the Ukraine conflict.
Let's talk about leaving the civilian national security establishment, even though some have General Rex the spooks as well.
They have a rather different. But I would say,
quite complementary approach to to war fighting for the military or that all the non-kinetic stuff is really part of what in the West,
we might consider shaping operations and ways of making the battlefield the most convenient for your operations.
On the other hand, what we have seen emerging, particularly within the Secretariat of the Security Council, is a real different notion of warfighting,
one that actually anything for my money echoes what George said veteran American
diplomat and architect of American Cold War strategy described as political war.
In other words, the use of all means at the nation's disposal illegal and illegal,
overt and covert economic or whatever to achieve national goals short of war does get very, very broad concept.
And this is inevitably a place. Into the legacy of the KGB version of what we call active measures.
In other words, direct political operations to change the situation on the ground.
Again, it reflects the way that the Russian intelligence services have never considered themselves just intelligence services.
The way we think of them as first and foremost about providing intelligence, providing best truth to the political leadership.
And even before Putin went on the offensive, they considered themselves to be executive bodies whose job is not just to gather intelligence,
but to formulate policy, to advocate for that policy within government circles.
And then, if need be to execute that policy and individuals sometimes.
And in this context, you know, we we have a tendency to draw sweeping parallels take to sample the SVR Foreign Intelligence Service.
It is primarily a human intelligence service, increasingly with a bit of cyber attached, which one could say, well, it kind of maps roughly across.
So I guess my sex thing is again, these don't bear in mind the difference between a war fighting beside me.
That better parallels what we think about the other sense and the certainly in World War Two agencies.
That was specifically as much, if not more, about sabotage and destruction as it were just about finding out what the [INAUDIBLE] is going on.
And this constituency is very heavily represented within the Security Council secretariat,
which until about 2008 was a very boring and banal administrative unit.
The Security Council is the body which brings together all the key security related figures.
Officials within the Russian government. I remember, is very kind of rapacious in how the Russians think of it,
but I would say everything from obviously people like the prime minister and so forth.
There is some of the general staff, his intelligence agencies, that kind of thing,
but also involving the deputy prime minister in charge of defence industrial complex in that kind of thing.
The Security Council has never been a decision making body. It is a bit a bit about allowing these sort of individuals to express their views.
It's also a lot about finding a body which can resolve interagency disputes, things like that.
That doesn't in some way necessarily seem to take a lot of administrative back up.
So until 2008, Security Council secretariat was as much as anything else a place for superannuated ex-military and spook types to retire.
It's kind of a semi-autonomous place. You go there, but a few years up your pension, you get to feel important.
You wear a suit to a set of uniform or nice.
Then 2008, a new Security Council secretary, Nikolai Patricia.
If my money is the most dangerous man in Russia, and that's up against some pretty stiff competition.
You said Nikolai Panopto, chef, the hawk. Yes, of course he is.
Ex KGB then continued on within the sort of successor agencies headed the FSB, his economic crime directorate, which so what?
Everyone who has actually become director of the FSB has served as head of the economic directorate.
Why? Because that's where you make money. That's what you find out with all the bodies are buried.
But it really is the one where, you know, that's that's if that's the the perfect blackmailers position anyway.
So I he it's clear that he actually believes a lot of the most crazy branches and that we sometimes get hung up on credit.
I've been trying to work for some years on the secretariat because I thought it was important and interesting,
very hard to get people to find something that actually works specifically in Secretariat.
It's technically part of the wider presidential administration, even though in practise it's semi-autonomous body 2018.
So offices, different cars, you know, presidential administration of Kabul Security Council offices, but vice versa.
Well, things like that. But no, it's not. Over the years, I've been able to speak to some former people within the Security Council,
Secretariat or Moscow Secretariat or who work closely with them and so forth.
And one of the questions I always ask them is the partnership. Does he really believe all this stuff?
I want to say, what do I mean by all this stuff? Well, let me just to.
I mean, I could spend the next hour coming up with that, but I will spare you that it must give one track.
It's really the doozy. There is this notion that the Russians have identified for certain that America has a long term plan.
I mean, long term, I never was, you know, gun crossed. Different parties,
different presidents and a long term plan to dismember the Russian Federation in order to gain access to all the raw materials of Siberia.
Now how do they know that once you track back, where did this come from?
This came from the claim of a Russian psychic who said he had gone into Madeleine Albright,
former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, dreams and from those dreams, divine this mystic and blind plan against Russia.
This must go. We now have Patricia essentially endorsing that view, even though people know where that came from.
So I ask people, do you think he really believes that? And more often than not, the response I will get is, yes, I think he really does.
The problem with Patricia is not that he's OK. The problem is he's a smart, ascetic, working poor.
This is not a man who's aiming to make himself rich. I mean, you make damn sure his son gets rich, but that's just what a good father does.
Also, I thought, but you know, he himself, you know, he is.
He's much more like actually like a former KGB chief in the DMZ for Union Grove.
You know, he is. He's a hardworking zealot. And he has consistently been essentially the voice in Putin's ear cups and pushing him in
that direction when there were others who tried to sort of put looking the other way.
Yet, I mean, I don't want to in any way exonerate him, anything that's happened.
But I think, you know, we must appreciate the sense with partnership is clearly been what we would think of as a radicalising agent in this.
But also, partnership completely changed the role of the secretariat from being an essentially sort of sleepy,
tedious, little bureaucratic backwater and turning it into a real powerhouse.
How? By making sure that it was the secretariat that actually got to dominate the bureaucracy of the security detail again,
because bureaucracy is intrinsically fairly dull. But it means that almost all of the almost all the paperwork, the reports, the briefings,
any materials relating to anything to do with security will be routed through the secretariat.
And it's a pretty open secret that it is. It will be winnowed to make sure that the right message goes through.
And what's happened is that the secretariat has begun to become the place to
key documents like the military doctrine and so forth where they are brokered.
It has become a place where the key briefings happen.
It's become a place where key institutions resolve their disputes through
meetings in the secretariat offices presided over by secretariat individuals.
In some ways, it's the National Intelligence Council in the States or the Cabinet Office in the UK on steroids and with a very,
very clear political agenda, and that's been absolutely crucial.
And what has emerged from this, the secretariat is again this kind of political war notion.
Interestingly enough, one of the sort of key intellectual Welshman's behind it as well is actually the name
of getting my who was a white Russian immigrant who was actually writing in the 1930s.
He wrote on his notion his his big thing was mutation envoy to subversion.
And let me just give a quote from one of his his pieces. Yiddish review is ongoing subversion in the name of the Third World War.
Future War will not be fought on the front lines, but throughout the territories of both opponents, because behind the front lines, political,
social and economic fronts will appear be before in a four dimensional space
where the psyche of the combatant nations will serve as the fourth dimension.
On one level, this is a spokesman on functions in Mexico, but written in the 1930s.
On one level, this is nothing new. The idea that war is actually fought in the overall population and that's that's been around since whatever.
And even more recently on Julian Douanes notions about strategic bombardment as a way of marking the will of the enemy and so forth,
but particularly this idea of subversion. It's actually that you fight your war by subversion.
And this, I think, crystallised the thinking within the secretariat because it brings together several themes.
First of all, it's it's about how a relatively weak country and the Russians are aware that compared to the West,
when the West is united, that they are relatively weak on all the conventional indices of power.
There's a way in which the rescue people can fight back asymmetrically, shift the conflict to where it is stronger.
And it also has all important in Putin's Kremlin a nationalist angle because Russia came up with this sounds silly, but actually,
these things do matter when you're talking about a very small leadership,
which increasingly nationalism is what counts as an ideology cohering them together.
So I think you know what? What's happened is partition has become the the advocate of this, and with it,
this notion that essentially Russia is in a constant and conspiratorial struggle, that this is a war that is forever undeclared is obvious.
If you look hard enough, which is the classic sort of thing,
you don't see it because you're not looking hard enough and it blends with how Typekit services tend to look at it.
And this is what I'm going to cordon off. Who is the chair of the Russian Defence Council?
The liberal academic, but with very, very strong government connexions to the Foreign Ministry.
And in 2018, he said, it seems that we all in Eastern Voice are beginning to live according to the rules of war time, when all means of good.
And as a result, for example, a very important red line between politics and a special operation is practically erased.
In other words, from proprietorships point of view, they're all special, but they're all special operations.
In other words, intelligence operations that aggressive, high tempo, subversive operations or how war is to be fought.
And that's very much the Security Council's lie, and they have pushed effort and resources into ensuring Russia has these capabilities.
And time and time again, when we look at a whole variety of operations, many of which it's worth noting actually,
but deeply counterproductive, whether it's interference in political elections or whatever else,
that actually one can track back and see that either they initiated their initiative in the Security Council Secretariat or,
most crucially, they the secretariat was the midwife was the agency that took someone who had some quote unquote right.
I'm deeply stupid, but nonetheless appealing idea and brought that person's ideas to the boss where it could be greenlighted.
So two very different senses of morphing warfare, one that is essentially the war is something that is precisely clear sport,
and it follows a very clearly defined bureaucratised pattern.
Another that says the war actually is constant, sneaky and opportunistic,
but it always stays short of kinetic clocks gunning down the old Chechen Berlin or whatever.
Let me ask you now the interesting thing about Ukraine is that it started in many ways as a classic political war operation.
I mean, think about it up to that point when the Russians actually crossed the border across the border more than they already had to.
Frankly, the Russians were winning, they have a huge force in me, which frankly, they could maintain, yeah,
there was a cost for the kind of authoritarian regimes is they can choose to spend money on things that that certainly wasn't
liquidity cost to keep that force and what it was like one hundred and fifty thousand seven hundred thousand troops around it.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian economy was tanking under the fear of pressure that it was a very, very effective economic warfare instrument.
I won't name which, but certain Western governments were getting more and more rattled.
We're actually beginning to put pressure on the ANC. To make concessions to the Russians is actually a very useful political weapon.
And meanwhile, not only who the Russians and the Russians unleashed the whole panoply of other non-kinetic weapons against Ukraine.
Cyberattacks attacks essentially what it calls terrorism, subversion, disinformation,
etc. But there was such a maniacal fascination and obsession with what was going on in Ukraine that in fact,
the Russians have pretty much free hand elsewhere. You know what,
the group mercenaries going into Mali after the French should withdraw from their
whole variety of quite questionable other economic moves been made so-called.
It was brilliant up to that point.
And then, of course, the decision was made to to to actually invade.
And to be honest, I still don't think we can be absolutely sure that Putin hundred percent intended to invade all along.
I don't know. I like most political analysts.
I didn't think he was going like I thought the odds were actually against him. I thought 30 to 40 percent chance of escalation.
But majority wasn't because that's what consensus common sense does.
Isn't always the best guide to what what's going on. And we can talk in the Q&A one to one.
Why did you decide that you have to do that?
But is it clear, though, that the final decision was, if not made, at least communicated in very short order?
And the thing that strikes me is one of the reasons why this war is going so badly for Russia, and we shouldn't assume it is over.
Wars take a long time at lunchtime.
I think nowadays we are in the age in which we expect everything to play out like a TV series we binge watch on Netflix.
We don't bother watching, watching each week and so forth.
Actually, the first two weeks of the war are not necessarily enough to tell us for certain what has been planned.
But still, it is absolutely clear that the Russians have not had the result they intended.
It seems to have been that the expectation was Kiev would fall in two days and the operation will be over in two weeks.
The question Why is this? And I think the answer is actually that precisely that Putin himself increasingly insulated from policy process,
the nuts and bolts of it increasingly unwilling to listen to alternative perspectives surrounded by people who are increasingly feared.
And frankly, that extraordinary televised Security Council meeting at which he was openly let just wasn't just that he was bullying his SVR chief.
It's that he was smirking as he did so. And it transpired that this was not being televised live, but those speeches were not included,
so a decision was actually made to broadcast him pulling his intelligence chief.
I mean, what kind of petty sociopath?
So actually, I think Putin made two crucial decisions.
One is the issue of secrecy so obsessed with he apparently with operational secrecy about not being willing to actually let anyone in on the planet,
except maybe a handful of very senior figures until the very last minute.
Which is ironic, given that Western intelligence services seem to have no problems. And yet this is going to happen.
This can happen. And Morris was suggesting dates for it. But what it did mean was precisely that the Russian forces themselves were wholly unprepared
for what they they've been through unprepared in terms of maintenance and logistics,
as we discovered, but also at least as importantly, psychologically,
most Russians do not regard Ukrainians as neo Nazis slavering enemies quite the opposite.
These are their brothers and cousins,
and they go in there and suddenly you find yourself in a situation where you have grannies will be berating you in the town square,
not what you expected to be doing. We've heard from OK, this is we have to have some cautions about this,
but we've heard from prisoners of war and people who just surrendered defected won't say that again.
They thought they were just down on military exercise. Nothing.
So psychologically on intent terms, the Russian forces were not ready for that operation.
But I would say even more crucially, it was the extent to which Putin's own political assumptions and prejudices overlaid the entire operation.
This is a man who makes no bones of the fact that as far as he's concerned, Ukraine does not exist as a.
It has no legitimacy, it has no identity. There is no such thing as the Ukrainian people.
They are a hodgepodge of Russians and Poles and whatever else.
He clearly genuinely believed that this government regime, he would put it, would topple at the slightest faintest first push,
and that helps explain certain decisions that militarily make no sense at all.
The fact that there wasn't this huge initial barrage the morale, because if you think, anyway, look,
you're going to change this country anyway, you're going to be imposing some kind of new puppet regime.
You genuinely believe that the last portion of Ukraine's state apparatus will be willing, will be willing to obey that, that puppet government.
Well, mass deaths might well get in the way of building that kind of consensus.
And maybe there's also concern about how the West would think about it and also how Russians would think about it.
You know, the site, as the case of Russians shelling the mother of Russian cities itself was problematic enough.
But more to the point, it also helps explain the otherwise quite insane example to think that a couple of
companies of paratroopers just motor into the central Kiev take over the government.
Now, if you genuinely believe that basically the whole thing will collapse, then that makes sense.
I do not see any evidence that either the sort of the military, nor actually the spooks genuinely thought about what's going to happen.
But what do you do in that kind of situation? What do you do with someone who spent 22 years in power,
has isolated them more and more and is only willing to listen to a very limited range of people and a very limited range of views?
Sometime back, I was talking to a couple of Russian oil companies, exactly pretty story, and I'm terrible with dates.
And you know, there was the usual first bit of the kind of dance around there thinking,
what the [INAUDIBLE] is it a Westerner asking us about military stuff and Typekit?
But offset, you know, with the usual key research to say alcohol.
Once those we get get beyond that. And it was really quite interesting.
Getting their perspective on Putin will handle one well.
One of the questions about this one was absolutely what we might think of the Putin essence
as we felt the Putin has saved the country from anarchy and irrelevance in the 1990s.
On the other hand, what was quite interesting was both of them were uncomfortable with the kind of the macho culture Putin, the, you know,
I mean, a particular example of pointing out that there was a Canada in a lot when it comes to the picture of love and then a tank firing gun.
But you do all these kind of macho and verbal military things and all those guys who did his minimal basic research reserve officer training.
What is the. He ends up graduating as a junior lieutenant in the artillery,
but because he then joined the KGB, that actually meant he didn't have to do any more training.
He didn't have to do is refreshing training on the level that he could have had he chosen to do so, but he chose not to.
Who wants to be a soldier when you're KGB?
And I guess they didn't like the idea that they weren't aware of the fact that actually Putin doesn't doesn't have any military experience or that.
And yet he's the commander in chief, and he talks very bullish for military things.
And one of them in a phrase that I think is more illustrative than the end of it, he said.
I wouldn't want a virgin telling me what to do on my wedding night.
And in some ways, this is precisely what's happening and the kind of closing point I would make us.
I mean, I think in part,
this is this is my own personal journey to try to understand how a bunch of people think so carefully about conflict can screw up so monumentally so.
I apologise for a lot of policies of my life, but I have to think of the parallels in,
to not least because that's the metaphor to which Putin constantly returns.
But Stalin and Hitler had no qualms about overruling the generals and the disastrous initial performance of the Soviets.
How do we have a global operation?
Barbarossa essentially reflected that Stalin was absolutely certain that there wasn't an invasion yet until the next spring,
and that therefore all this intelligence, he was getting all his guidance, even people just deserting from the German line to cross the border.
This was all actually a plot to try and basically get the Soviets to act first and use the brakes anyway.
We are. It's not. We actually find that. Is there someone who still thinks we matter?
The Russians still have that. We are their most subtle and sophisticated antagonists.
It's really very heartening. But anyway, you know, so, so Stalin made a colossal blunder there, and it was almost a fatal blunder,
and he disappeared from the site thereafter, though he learnt his lesson.
Yes, he obviously political guiding input, political control and decision making to use it was his job.
But precisely his generals marshals got to decide actually how the war was fought.
Hitler never learnt that lesson.
Hitler continued to micromanage whenever he felt like it to intervene in political, economic and obscene battlefield decision making.
One of them ended up one of the great world leaders, the head of a superpower.
The other one ended up in the bunker. I don't think it's going to be that dramatic either way, Putin.
But it will be interesting as to whether or not he's willing to accept there might have been a mistake made and learn from it or not.
I have a feeling not that that's just my guess.
OK, I finished rambling on. I would much rather than sort of open to comments questions, furious rebuttals.
Well,
so much that we all heard so much that I think I'm just going to set the context with already our discussion of the national security decision making,
the infrastructure that got there and then brought up to the present day with the intensification of the war to create,
as well as some of the misguided assumptions underpinning the decision making that is really going to hold only a cursory glance unit,
which is very impressive. So kudos that you mentioned at the beginning of the spill.
Slightly odd to be discussing this topic in sunny Oxford while war rages and military grade.
But now, I suppose, is exactly the time for us to be understanding really about this issue.
We're really grateful just coming here today and sharing your insights. Thank you so much.