Donald Trump has always insisted that we get this extraordinary appointment, which is a mark of popularity.
But I'll speak on the subject and I hope the research centre itself now.
Oscar Johnson, thank you so much. I'm sorry about little preamble, the Russian or something.
Well, thank you all very well. Thank you very much, Rob.
And thank you all for coming. And I'm particularly happy to be here today.
Changing character or programme.
This is exactly what I've been researching in this book is how is the Russian understanding of the change in character work developing?
So sometime around 2012,
I started researching Russian military theory and I got struck about everybody saying stuff like the boundaries between war and peace,
a blurring and non-military means of becoming something else.
Are they okay that was there and that non-military military means are becoming more important than military?
So this is really the start of my research. Why were they saying this and what is it mean?
What is changing? What is blurring the boundaries between war and world peace and why?
Our moment, I mean, is becoming more important. If you follow this topic closely.
You kind of started to notice that the last years Western military leaders and political leaders have started saying the same things.
But it was a significant time, like in maybe about five years, where I think the Russians were pioneering this quite a lot as well.
But first of all, we need to start a little bit to establish the baseline here.
Well, what is how do we think war and this has been the orthodoxy both in Russia and in the West is the way of thinking of.
Yes. As a war is the continuation of politics by mean of armed force.
Lenin read Clausewitz and incorporated that that became the formal definition in the Soviet Union for
how you understand more is taken from Marxism-Leninism on war and army is the authoritative textbook on
the issue and energy state that the essence of war does not include in many other important ways security
basically saying this war is armed violence and not non-military means definition to exclude it.
How many of you guys know the guy on the left hand up now?
I'm sorry. You all know pretty much no.
Okay. What can I do? The Soviet Union. He was deputy chief of general staff as an active practitioner.
And after that he's been president of the Royal Academy of War Sciences leading figure in Russia.
Russian is here. Theory, fortunately passed away just after Christmas.
But up until his death, 96, almost 97 years old, he was contributing to to military theory in holding important position.
This is basically said to 2005 what else used to military force.
Force has never been and he never can be. Okay, but that something happened.
All of a sudden, all the leading Russian military theorists started talking like this.
The definitions of the essence of war must to some extent be reviewed.
The threat is connected with information and other subversive acts in the creation of controlled chaos, as we've seen in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine.
This is the same guy who just said before to, you know, without the use of armed force.
Worse can ever be. And that is us.
We need to rethink what war fundamentally this and this has to do with information and the creation of controlled chaos,
which is a concept that I would explain a little bit, but it will be read synonymously as colour revolutions.
Another example. This guy has no grasp of your arsenal.
Exactly is a colour. Revolutions are the main means of achieving their political ambitions, and by that he means the West.
You say today it's obvious that the line between war and peace is blurring and
that non-military means and forms of struggle have acquired violent nature.
So means that we traditionally not thought violent today has crime.
Violent nature. Bonus points. I get a copy to the wall against this guy.
It's not that far off. Okay, good. But it's Deputy Defence Minister.
Got the photo before that he was head of a western military district.
He put it up. This a classical war of the 20th century consisted of 80% violence and 20% propaganda.
New type of war consist of 80 to 90% propaganda and 10 to 20% violence.
Okay, so this is just a brief overview. One of the leading figures saying how they changed the way they thinking about war.
How many of you have seen this one? That's your Asimov's article?
Yeah. This is from his January 2013 article.
And you're not supposed to see all of it. But the only key part that got a lot of attention is this one correlation.
No military to military measures are 4 to 1.
That is to say that non-military means are four times as important as nuclear, and this is supposed to represent a schematic view of conflict.
This has been kind of wrongly popularised is to the some of doctrine,
because he was basically the only article that Western observers has read before Russia invaded Ukraine.
And then it was took as a very neat and comfortable way to say, ha, this is how Russia this modern war.
It's not wrong. But it was just it's been, let's say, overinterpreted from his January two, 2013, speech.
This, I think, is probably the most crisp summary to see how Russia thinks about modern war and escalation.
This is from a 2014 speech of you also what is basically lining up this.
First of all, West will start with non-military means to provoke colour revolutions to get the way.
So what are the colour revolutions? 2003 YO Rose Revolution in Georgia.
2000 for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2005.
The Toilet Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, even though it should definitely not included into this.
So what happened in the Russian eyes?
They saw that the West have been so effective through information inflows, ideological influence, diplomatic pressure, support to INGOs,
and the use of intelligence services to basically brainwash the inhabitants of these countries to overthrow the corrupt autocratic rulers.
And then off the were after them came notably more pro-Western leaders Saakashvili in Georgia and Yushchenko in Ukraine.
This understanding of colour revolutions then expanded with Arab Spring, which was also in Russian, constructed to be part of colour revolutions.
And of course, as probably all know, the 2013 2014 Euromaidan, 2015 Euromaidan, 2014 Euromaidan Revolution as well.
This is all seen the way that the West would prefer to get their way in international relations.
I will talk a little bit more about that. If that doesn't work, then will escalate to conceal the use of force using special forces,
supporting armed opposition, using private nuclear security companies.
Can anyone come up with examples when we the West have done this?
Never got rid of Iraq.
Afghanistan. Afghanistan started with liaison with the Northern Alliance making their way down to the north to overthrow the Taliban.
I think Syria may be also be a good example.
If that doesn't work, then would further escalate. Look for pretext to launch a military operation and then go for open military interference.
Here I would put Libya. I think it's of the Libya, maybe Iraq.
All of this, of course, aiming to get your political views across.
So why are colour revolutions so feared?
Well, today we think of Russia.
We think of it as a great power who managed to impact elections across the globe, who has their finger in and everything bad it happens.
Who can conduct military operations in the Middle East. But if you look at in modern history, it's a it's a story of fragility.
And the instability just means that a couple of dates which emphasise how close it has been,
the eighth, 1991, the other cancelled, the Soviet Union dissolving 91.
You had the August put a coup attempt you had from 92 to 99.
Russia wasn't even controlling its own territory with Chechnya being de facto independent.
Can you imagine any other great power? You know, the US not controlling New Mexico or Arizona?
93 You have the WHO recognises the picture.
The White House. The White House.
You had a standoff with the Speaker of the Duma and President Yeltsin to the point that Yeltsin bombed this on Parliament.
That's how fragile the political situation with yet another financial crisis.
Now, the second such a war and in 2005, you have the movements of another of a colour revolution in Russia.
You have some of the key figures, Boris Nemtsov, you know, Yashin from the Russian opposition going to Maidan,
protesting, participating in the Orange Revolution and trying to bring that important back to Moscow.
So this is also one to get out of those pictures.
This is for him showing where the west has attempted in yellow and succeeded in red with colour revolutions across across the globe.
And if you really perceptive, you notice that there's some sloppy stuff officer translated to hide from Cyrillic.
But that's besides the point. This is what.
What's striking with this is this is some of the Russia's most important partners,
neighbours states that have lost their leaders in colour revolutions.
Ukraine is the most obvious example, of course. So my argument is really this if you're if you're sitting in the Crimea, what worries you the most?
I'm arguing that a mediocre Russian intelligence analyst would quite quickly figure out that OC native does not have the force posture,
the capabilities, the intentions, the exercises to invade Russia.
Neither is not about to make Russia. I would argue that's not that hard to figure out.
You can argue with me if you want, but rather every day you have people.
You have the opposition in the streets challenging the legitimacy of the Russian leadership.
And this is also sort of why the colour revolutions happen from the beginning.
It's all mostly that unfortunate, sporadic events to be seen as purposeful warfare.
Just one example of why this is not for the outlandish.
I believe that these are spontaneous revolutions which was in response to their all the
original ones was the fraudulent elections where the incumbents tried to steal the elections,
but the people got the word and rose up. But is it not fully paranoia?
You take one example such as Saakashvili in the spring of 2003.
He goes to Serbia to receive non-violence training financed by the National Endowment for Democracy,
the National Democratic Institute, an international Republican institute, the party foundations in the U.S. and then,
less than six months later, he and his colleagues get this training, goes to Georgia and starts the Rose Revolutions,
which was also relying on violent protest methods in Russian in the Russian eyes.
Is this okay? Of course. Was the US CIA, the U.S. leadership created this?
The second part of what the Russian leaders see, a changing war is information warfare.
I'm showing you two quotes again, new types of weapons and information warfare will be as effective as nuclear weapons,
but more acceptable from a political and military view, says Putin.
Western countries are increasing the scale of the tough information war, at least against Russia.
This get us. This is not just rhetoric.
In June 2017, you have a poll. 69% of the Russians polled said that Russia was in an information war.
Against what? So why is information warfare seen is so important?
How many of you have read the book? First person? An astonishing frank supporter.
So when Putin was appointed prime minister,
it was something like the fifth prime minister in four years and he was completely unknown and he was going to run for president.
So getting known to the wider public, they have some journalists doing marathon interviews with him that the then compiler wrote a book about.
This book is called The First Person. This book is the source of a lot of the modern Putin ology,
where people trying to get inside of Putin's brain and describe what his psychological traits are.
This is one this kind of the main source for that. It is it talks about a lot of things, and I recommend all of you to read it.
It's quite a short book, but it's a very interesting account, too.
Who is before he was who he became, and it's just as we lost the first Chechen war due to lack of we're out of this.
The Chechen war was unpopular for the start, but this also, to a large degree was due to the fact that Russian journalist,
Russian media was quite free back then, could fly down to Dagestan,
jump in a cab, get to Chechnya, interview some warlords, get renumeration paid by the warlords,
then fly back to Moscow to write a report that was critical to the war.
Morale among the troops were also horrible. So what happened to the second Chechen war?
Russia adopted a strategy they had only allowed for vetted journalists.
They sense of what was being allowed to be broadcast, and they dispatched psychologists to the units to monitor all kinds of morale.
However, what they didn't think about was the advent of Internet.
So the Chechen side, which has gone from being a nationalist separatist struggle more and more to being a global jihadi struggle,
it was basically where you went. If you were a global global jihadi back in 99, something like Syria was a couple of years ago.
I don't think that many people want to go to Syria now. They managed to use the Internet to rally recruits, to spread their deeds, to rally finance.
And the Russian side was almost completely unprepared for using the Internet.
And it was after this. You have moreover heard statements such as Internet.
This is CIA project. After that, it picked up in intensity, which is still popular today.
Another thing that just emphasises how important the information domain are is and how Putin learned it was 1996.
In 95, Putin was going as our attention was coming for re-election and he was trailing in the polls.
He was only the fifth most popular candidate. And the most popular one was Gennady Zyuganov, the communist leader.
Then a couple of the key oligarchs who owned the media empire got together and said basically, Hey, maybe communism is not that good.
We try that before and let's do something. And it's like, okay, maybe yes, it is better.
So within a very short span of time, a lot of compromising material was being pumped out on Zyuganov.
A lot of positive reporting was being pumped out on Yeltsin.
Johnson managed to secure re-election by quite a narrow margin.
What was the first thing Putin did when he came to power? He started very slowly, not making that much noise about it.
But one thing he really did was kicking out Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky out of the country,
taking control of their media empires, the key oligarchs that supported Yeltsin.
So the first thing he knew from his coming to office was that the conflict in the media is is critical.
Fast forward a little bit to the Georgian war.
After it, the Russian Russian regime took an after action review and sat and said, hey, we managed to get the Georgians to fire first.
Why does global media hate us? Well, they came to realise that they need to get their own voice out there.
Russia Today was created 2005. But after the Georgian war, its ambition ambitions notably increased.
That's when they started. R.T. Arabic artist, Spanish. R.T. French.
R.T., U.S. or the U.K.? It really seeing we're loosing in the national media arena, we need to update our strategy and combat it.
And I think all of you are kind of starting to see what I'm getting.
What I'm telling the story is a lot of way the Russians, the Russian side has seen that they've been losing.
It's where they've updated the strategy and tried to do something about it every time.
Same as with the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring. The conventional wisdom of the Arab Spring is that is is the revolutions created by social media.
And the Russian springs are what you call a modular phenomenon.
It's phenomenon that inspires others. I mean, starts Anthony Shadid, goes to Libya, either goes to Egypt and also Syria.
It's it's examples that that other follows.
And it, of course, impacted Russia as well, what you call the Russian winter of the Russian autumn.
We saw some of the biggest protests since the Soviet Union surrounding the Russian 2011, 2012 elections.
And they were all too coordinated in social media. So after that, yet again, the Russian leadership updated their toolbox.
The first reported, to my knowledge, citing of the what's today popularly called the Troll Factory.
What's in 2013 was the Russian Journal of this Russia probe for Novaya Gazeta, who reported of this factory in in St Petersburg.
But they were not spreading narratives that the whole West was decaying and and such.
No, it was against them all. And it was for some gentlemen for the 2013 Moscow major elections.
Similar to Ukraine, author of The New War in Ukraine.
The Russian leadership drew out the founder of a contact who was just known as the Russian Face Facebook,
which is more a common social network to use in Russia to take control of that.
Widen the definition of what could be legal extremism in a Facebook post or retweeting something could be makes you liable for being charged,
for promoting extremism. And these are all ways of seeing, okay, today,
opinions and understandings of what's happening in the world and legitimacy is being formed in social media.
What can we do to get there capable of as high as 1000 people to try to post comments and
try to do it and let us be able to try to shut down people by laws that are doing it.
And then, of course, the surveillance aspect.
Russia demands all foreign tech firms to have servers based in Russia and they have there included in the surveillance network.
So all of that, while the Internet is still quite free, everything is surveilled.
And tech companies are, of course, happy to oblige with the Russian state government and put their servers in Russia, which I think is wrong.
Our US elections are not going to go too much in depth about this.
But I think one of the things that interesting me the most when reading about even close in the US elections is the story of Baxter Graham.
How many have heard it? If so, it's about the same time as the revelations of the Mueller report.
A number of accounts were exposed, taken down that was being driven from the Internet Research Agency in some Petoskey Petersburg.
Most of them were quite inconsequential in size. The one of the biggest ones was Baxter Graham, and that's something like 130,000 followers.
So 95% of the content posted was legitimate civil rights questions, but 5% of them were very, very clearly political targeted to the elections.
And they were saying, don't go and vote and don't vote for Hillary.
Hillary is not a candidate. And then you look this backwards saying, you know,
the conventional wisdom that is that Barack Obama managed to win because he he mobilised the black vote to an unprecedented degree before.
So, of course, this is the narrative, the strategic objective of disincentivizing them to vote.
And this is graphic. This autumn, a couple of months ago,
Facebook released a number of suspected accounts that a social media analysis company graphic up and they said, hey, what's going on with these?
So graphic. I mean, the investigation, they found also the same thing,
that they were being driven from St Petersburg and they saw they are building
the infrastructure for influencing the 2020 election and the uniting threat.
All the way from Black Lives Matters types of accounts to all tri types of accounts was anti by them.
All of the accounts were attacking Biden. That was be what was had been identified.
Looking forward a little bit now we get to the specifics.
The more theoretical argument that I'm making in the book is that the Russian understanding of the nature of war cannot solely be defined
by our own force date and its colour revolutions and information warfare that are the two most important factors driving this change.
But then I know there's a lot of clever people here in the room, so I'm going to help you out a little bit.
So I would say, Well, sure, but that's only a few loose quotes I actually counted in the book.
I've gone through the work of around 140 Russian military theorists and political elites,
and my argument is that kind of the mainstream of the debate has shifted in this issue and some of the most important people,
not just some theorists, but that's all I'll say.
Well, sure. But Russia's spending so much on this military. Yeah, they are.
I don't think I've anything I've said is is is is against them.
Rather, I would argue that an effective Russian military instrument is a key precondition for its offensive, non-military approach.
But someone even more clever would say, sure, but Russia.
Russia strategic culture has always had a wider notion of conflict. And I also think that's a very fair point.
Thank you for asking it.
I think the thing what I show in the book is really the movement in the way that the military theoretical debate is manifested.
So it is a clear movement and it's a clear shift that has been done and taken and then lost this almost as well.
But that's also what the military says it fierce.
And this, I find, is a very interesting puzzle, because why would the Russian armed forces who are in charge of external military.
Violence say that their biggest threat is internal and non-military.
Doesn't make any sense to me. I think the best answer I have to that question is really that they see these types of threats as so important for
the political leaders that they cannot seem to afford not to respond to the demands of the political leadership.
So they're saying something like, this is fantastic, super important, but give us money.
I will go and buy cruise missiles.
So wrapping up and moving on to conclusions, I think the Russian understanding of war derives from a very non sentimental impact assessment,
basically sitting down and saying, okay, what's likely to affect us? Good.
Okay, let's stop it. Doesn't think that much about it.
Okay. Just our law prohibits us from doing this.
It's rather how can we update our law to help us doing this?
There is a genuine threat conviction in the Russian leadership, and that's also a question that people ask.
You know, is this things they're just saying or do they really mean like almost exclusively
you should take the Russian leadership by the word not when they say,
okay, we're not in Crimea, but rather the way they're looking at the world.
Just take one example. You have Western political leaders saying things like this.
We don't think the sanctions will make Russia behave the way we want to,
but maybe it will increase it will increase the conflict among the oligarchs and then they get rid of Putin.
Maybe that's a fair assessment. I don't know. But what we're saying straight out is we're hoping for regime change in Russia.
So we're saying a lot of go south to say, well, the west is trying to engineer regime change in Russia.
He might not necessarily be wrong. I don't think we are. I just think we're very bad of understanding of the consequences of what we're saying.
Sometimes rather offensive approach is very often a reverse engineered from what threats it has perceived, plus a dash of paranoia.
If, you know, if Russia has been hurting because they get a lot of bad international press,
well, then they expand their international media operations.
If perceptions of world perceptions of legitimacy are being shaped in social media, of course they're going to expand their work into social media.
What does this mean? From the Russian side, the strategic deterrence, the subversion operation is already underway.
The task of the military includes a wide range of military manoeuvres, military signalling, subversion, cooperation.
Most are connected to our elections. Our hopes of de-escalation is most often misplaced and unlikely to produce lasting de-escalation.
I would go so far to argue that Russian aggression is premised on the idea that us in the West
are always predictable and always willing to come to the negotiating table in any given time.
Given one example.
After the invasion of Ukraine, Sergey Lavrov said, You guys are screaming a lot, but in half a year you will have forgotten about this.
And I think you want to be completely, completely correct, as the case was with Georgia,
unless it was for the accidental downing of MH 17, which killed a lot of Dutch lives or some British lives.
Up until that point, you had, you know, very symbolic sanctions, such as, you know, visa freezes,
visa restrictions and asset freezes on symbolic figures of the Russian leadership's sort of call for the ghost of that type of people.
But after the downing of MH 17,
still the sanctions you have on sectoral sanctions was prohibiting export of certain technologies, dual use technologies.
But the financial sector was still restricting Russian companies to take loans with a maturity longer than 30 days.
So to put it in more clear terms, the sanctions did not say you're not allowed to operate in Western markets.
It was saying the way you borrow, finance, your operations is a little bit shorter.
I don't think this is the target. I'll put it straightforward.
The bottom line upfront and the only reason that the sanctions reach some effect was because the oil price went down by 50% during late 2014.
And that was also more luck than our having a very, very calculated deterrence approach.
This also, of course, ties into French President Macron saying, okay,
it's time to be friends with Russia again, even though especially since invasion of Crimea.
Now, you know, constructive steps has been taken on the opposite.
Yeah, wide scale interference in the US election. You have the use of chemical weapons on UK soil and other things.
I argue that Macron is playing right into the Russian leadership calculus being the Western US feel that it's uncomfortable with being in a conflict.
We'll wait them out and then come back to the negotiating table.
So this leads me on to saying that our primary problem is not it's not about attribution.
This is one of the most popular things to say about modern war, is that it's ambiguous.
It's very hard to know who does what and when. Especially with cyber means or so.
I don't think so. I think attribution is very doable.
I don't think it's immediate, but I think it's very doable. If you look at the Mueller report,
you see that the US knew and sanctioned a Russian intelligence officer down to individual case officer because they knew who pushed which button.
Well, that's how good they were, knowing what the Russian intelligence services was doing.
The big problem was that they could not deter it, not that they couldn't know about it.
Attribution is especially possible if you have an intelligence asset in the
Russian presidential administration that knows what Putin signs off or not.
You can take the example with Iranian tools.
It was a story about Russian hackers hacked Iranian hackers and used Iranian hackers tools to make it seem like Iranian hacking operations.
Well, some might say, well, this underscores that it's hard to know who does what.
Sure. But the story also got out, which means that attribution is possible.
You take the little green men in Crimea, which is a derogatory term for for Russian special forces.
The innovation with that was not that they took off a flag from the arm and said, haha, I wonder who this is.
The innovation with that was that they looked at us, with us,
them talking about the West and they said, You have no determination to stop us whatsoever.
We will offer you a way out of this. And we took it.
Yes. There's a Swedish book who analysed this, the Swedish media reporting on the first 24 hours.
Swedish media said Russian forces.
But then on the second day, they said unknown forces.
And then there were unknown forces for one and a half weeks. And then it became Russian forces again.
Our primary problem with contemporary warfare is not about law.
I know Swedish law a lot better than no British law,
but every time you talk to a good lawyer and you look at what are the legal spaces for the armed forces and other agencies to counter modern warfare?
It's actually fine. It's not a problem.
Lawyers are not that word. They're always lawyers. So you see problems and there's always lawyers who see solutions.
The lawyers who see solutions are the ones you should talk to.
But it's not it's not we're not the legal problem. We're having a political problem of of lacking determination.
Our main problem is about deterrence. We have a quite fair idea what's going on, but we don't have the will to to counter it.
However, deterrence is quite tricky. You cannot deter everything.
Is it reasonable to think of deterring Sputnik Broadcasting lies or our two UK broadcasting lies?
No, probably not. Is it reasonable to deter the use of chemical weapons on British soil?
I think so. I think that necessitates a tough response.
I think I just want to this is the last one.
If you want to see someone to start thinking about this correctly,
I would I would say look at the US National Defence Strategy 2018 signed by Mattis and worked out by some really good people around it.
What I see when I read it, I think I see a recognition of most of the things they've been saying today.
They have talking about how long the long term strategic competition,
which is a phrase deriving from Andrew Marshall, the legendary founder of the office.
And that assessment was one of the best goes to thinking about conflict between systems.
It's a way of saying that if at Marshall writes for planning purposes the.
Competition is the confrontation is endless, which means we cannot have the attitude that we're having today, that all this is a temporary problem.
This will go away. This was the major policy of the Obama administration.
And I will actually just illustrated here.
This is sets out the US way of looking at the future.
They're looking at the Russian economy, looking at Russian demography, and they're saying Russia can ever be a long term problem.
It's a temporary problem. And this is still a common idea among the American leadership.
I think it's completely incorrect, both of them. Russian demography is not as bad as the general narrative is saying.
Russian economy is only relevant to judge.
Russia is Russia capabilities. Depending on how big of a priority is it for the political leadership?
In other words, they don't need strong economic growth to be politically put to be a threat.
They don't need strong economic growth for reaching a subordinate for its highest goals,
which is ensuring the security regime and being a great power.
Okay, I got sidetracked a little bit. They're also saying this, we need to be is this modern stuff.
You know, the US needs to be strategically predictable, good, operationally unpredictable.
This is a little bit what I was alluding to when I was saying that Russian
aggression is premised on us being predictable with stop need to stop doing that.
So I think I think in thought I think the Americans have come a bit of understanding
is problems that we think to what to do about it but there's lot left to be done.
I think I've got to stop there. I'm not going to be so cheeky to tell you to buy my book, but the commander of the US Special Forces,
he put it on his reading list and I don't know him, but I'm sure he has an excellent judgement.
This is one way to find out how much of this is.