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Donald Trump has always insisted that we get this extraordinary appointment, which is a mark of popularity.

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But I'll speak on the subject and I hope the research centre itself now.

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Oscar Johnson, thank you so much. I'm sorry about little preamble, the Russian or something.

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Well, thank you all very well. Thank you very much, Rob.

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And thank you all for coming. And I'm particularly happy to be here today.

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Changing character or programme.

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This is exactly what I've been researching in this book is how is the Russian understanding of the change in character work developing?

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So sometime around 2012,

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I started researching Russian military theory and I got struck about everybody saying stuff like the boundaries between war and peace,

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a blurring and non-military means of becoming something else.

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Are they okay that was there and that non-military military means are becoming more important than military?

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So this is really the start of my research. Why were they saying this and what is it mean?

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What is changing? What is blurring the boundaries between war and world peace and why?

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Our moment, I mean, is becoming more important. If you follow this topic closely.

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You kind of started to notice that the last years Western military leaders and political leaders have started saying the same things.

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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.

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But first of all, we need to start a little bit to establish the baseline here.

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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.

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Yes. As a war is the continuation of politics by mean of armed force.

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Lenin read Clausewitz and incorporated that that became the formal definition in the Soviet Union for

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how you understand more is taken from Marxism-Leninism on war and army is the authoritative textbook on

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the issue and energy state that the essence of war does not include in many other important ways security

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basically saying this war is armed violence and not non-military means definition to exclude it.

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How many of you guys know the guy on the left hand up now?

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I'm sorry. You all know pretty much no.

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Okay. What can I do? The Soviet Union. He was deputy chief of general staff as an active practitioner.

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And after that he's been president of the Royal Academy of War Sciences leading figure in Russia.

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Russian is here. Theory, fortunately passed away just after Christmas.

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But up until his death, 96, almost 97 years old, he was contributing to to military theory in holding important position.

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This is basically said to 2005 what else used to military force.

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Force has never been and he never can be. Okay, but that something happened.

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All of a sudden, all the leading Russian military theorists started talking like this.

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The definitions of the essence of war must to some extent be reviewed.

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The threat is connected with information and other subversive acts in the creation of controlled chaos, as we've seen in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine.

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This is the same guy who just said before to, you know, without the use of armed force.

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Worse can ever be. And that is us.

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We need to rethink what war fundamentally this and this has to do with information and the creation of controlled chaos,

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which is a concept that I would explain a little bit, but it will be read synonymously as colour revolutions.

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Another example. This guy has no grasp of your arsenal.

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Exactly is a colour. Revolutions are the main means of achieving their political ambitions, and by that he means the West.

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You say today it's obvious that the line between war and peace is blurring and

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that non-military means and forms of struggle have acquired violent nature.

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So means that we traditionally not thought violent today has crime.

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Violent nature. Bonus points. I get a copy to the wall against this guy.

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It's not that far off. Okay, good. But it's Deputy Defence Minister.

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Got the photo before that he was head of a western military district.

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He put it up. This a classical war of the 20th century consisted of 80% violence and 20% propaganda.

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New type of war consist of 80 to 90% propaganda and 10 to 20% violence.

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Okay, so this is just a brief overview. One of the leading figures saying how they changed the way they thinking about war.

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How many of you have seen this one? That's your Asimov's article?

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Yeah. This is from his January 2013 article.

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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.

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No military to military measures are 4 to 1.

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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.

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This has been kind of wrongly popularised is to the some of doctrine,

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because he was basically the only article that Western observers has read before Russia invaded Ukraine.

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And then it was took as a very neat and comfortable way to say, ha, this is how Russia this modern war.

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It's not wrong. But it was just it's been, let's say, overinterpreted from his January two, 2013, speech.

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This, I think, is probably the most crisp summary to see how Russia thinks about modern war and escalation.

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This is from a 2014 speech of you also what is basically lining up this.

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First of all, West will start with non-military means to provoke colour revolutions to get the way.

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So what are the colour revolutions? 2003 YO Rose Revolution in Georgia.

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2000 for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2005.

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The Toilet Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, even though it should definitely not included into this.

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So what happened in the Russian eyes?

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They saw that the West have been so effective through information inflows, ideological influence, diplomatic pressure, support to INGOs,

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and the use of intelligence services to basically brainwash the inhabitants of these countries to overthrow the corrupt autocratic rulers.

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And then off the were after them came notably more pro-Western leaders Saakashvili in Georgia and Yushchenko in Ukraine.

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This understanding of colour revolutions then expanded with Arab Spring, which was also in Russian, constructed to be part of colour revolutions.

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And of course, as probably all know, the 2013 2014 Euromaidan, 2015 Euromaidan, 2014 Euromaidan Revolution as well.

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This is all seen the way that the West would prefer to get their way in international relations.

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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,

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supporting armed opposition, using private nuclear security companies.

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Can anyone come up with examples when we the West have done this?

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Never got rid of Iraq.

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Afghanistan. Afghanistan started with liaison with the Northern Alliance making their way down to the north to overthrow the Taliban.

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I think Syria may be also be a good example.

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If that doesn't work, then would further escalate. Look for pretext to launch a military operation and then go for open military interference.

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Here I would put Libya. I think it's of the Libya, maybe Iraq.

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All of this, of course, aiming to get your political views across.

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So why are colour revolutions so feared?

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Well, today we think of Russia.

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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.

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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.

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And the instability just means that a couple of dates which emphasise how close it has been,

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the eighth, 1991, the other cancelled, the Soviet Union dissolving 91.

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You had the August put a coup attempt you had from 92 to 99.

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Russia wasn't even controlling its own territory with Chechnya being de facto independent.

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Can you imagine any other great power? You know, the US not controlling New Mexico or Arizona?

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93 You have the WHO recognises the picture.

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The White House. The White House.

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You had a standoff with the Speaker of the Duma and President Yeltsin to the point that Yeltsin bombed this on Parliament.

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That's how fragile the political situation with yet another financial crisis.

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Now, the second such a war and in 2005, you have the movements of another of a colour revolution in Russia.

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You have some of the key figures, Boris Nemtsov, you know, Yashin from the Russian opposition going to Maidan,

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protesting, participating in the Orange Revolution and trying to bring that important back to Moscow.

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So this is also one to get out of those pictures.

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This is for him showing where the west has attempted in yellow and succeeded in red with colour revolutions across across the globe.

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And if you really perceptive, you notice that there's some sloppy stuff officer translated to hide from Cyrillic.

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But that's besides the point. This is what.

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What's striking with this is this is some of the Russia's most important partners,

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neighbours states that have lost their leaders in colour revolutions.

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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?

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I'm arguing that a mediocre Russian intelligence analyst would quite quickly figure out that OC native does not have the force posture,

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the capabilities, the intentions, the exercises to invade Russia.

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Neither is not about to make Russia. I would argue that's not that hard to figure out.

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You can argue with me if you want, but rather every day you have people.

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You have the opposition in the streets challenging the legitimacy of the Russian leadership.

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And this is also sort of why the colour revolutions happen from the beginning.

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It's all mostly that unfortunate, sporadic events to be seen as purposeful warfare.

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Just one example of why this is not for the outlandish.

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I believe that these are spontaneous revolutions which was in response to their all the

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original ones was the fraudulent elections where the incumbents tried to steal the elections,

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but the people got the word and rose up. But is it not fully paranoia?

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You take one example such as Saakashvili in the spring of 2003.

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He goes to Serbia to receive non-violence training financed by the National Endowment for Democracy,

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the National Democratic Institute, an international Republican institute, the party foundations in the U.S. and then,

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less than six months later, he and his colleagues get this training, goes to Georgia and starts the Rose Revolutions,

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which was also relying on violent protest methods in Russian in the Russian eyes.

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Is this okay? Of course. Was the US CIA, the U.S. leadership created this?

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The second part of what the Russian leaders see, a changing war is information warfare.

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I'm showing you two quotes again, new types of weapons and information warfare will be as effective as nuclear weapons,

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but more acceptable from a political and military view, says Putin.

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Western countries are increasing the scale of the tough information war, at least against Russia.

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This get us. This is not just rhetoric.

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In June 2017, you have a poll. 69% of the Russians polled said that Russia was in an information war.

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Against what? So why is information warfare seen is so important?

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How many of you have read the book? First person? An astonishing frank supporter.

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So when Putin was appointed prime minister,

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it was something like the fifth prime minister in four years and he was completely unknown and he was going to run for president.

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So getting known to the wider public, they have some journalists doing marathon interviews with him that the then compiler wrote a book about.

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This book is called The First Person. This book is the source of a lot of the modern Putin ology,

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where people trying to get inside of Putin's brain and describe what his psychological traits are.

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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.

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It's quite a short book, but it's a very interesting account, too.

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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.

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The Chechen war was unpopular for the start, but this also, to a large degree was due to the fact that Russian journalist,

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Russian media was quite free back then, could fly down to Dagestan,

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jump in a cab, get to Chechnya, interview some warlords, get renumeration paid by the warlords,

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then fly back to Moscow to write a report that was critical to the war.

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Morale among the troops were also horrible. So what happened to the second Chechen war?

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Russia adopted a strategy they had only allowed for vetted journalists.

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They sense of what was being allowed to be broadcast, and they dispatched psychologists to the units to monitor all kinds of morale.

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However, what they didn't think about was the advent of Internet.

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So the Chechen side, which has gone from being a nationalist separatist struggle more and more to being a global jihadi struggle,

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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.

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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.

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And the Russian side was almost completely unprepared for using the Internet.

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And it was after this. You have moreover heard statements such as Internet.

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This is CIA project. After that, it picked up in intensity, which is still popular today.

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Another thing that just emphasises how important the information domain are is and how Putin learned it was 1996.

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In 95, Putin was going as our attention was coming for re-election and he was trailing in the polls.

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He was only the fifth most popular candidate. And the most popular one was Gennady Zyuganov, the communist leader.

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Then a couple of the key oligarchs who owned the media empire got together and said basically, Hey, maybe communism is not that good.

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We try that before and let's do something. And it's like, okay, maybe yes, it is better.

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So within a very short span of time, a lot of compromising material was being pumped out on Zyuganov.

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A lot of positive reporting was being pumped out on Yeltsin.

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Johnson managed to secure re-election by quite a narrow margin.

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What was the first thing Putin did when he came to power? He started very slowly, not making that much noise about it.

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But one thing he really did was kicking out Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky out of the country,

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taking control of their media empires, the key oligarchs that supported Yeltsin.

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So the first thing he knew from his coming to office was that the conflict in the media is is critical.

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Fast forward a little bit to the Georgian war.

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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.

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Why does global media hate us? Well, they came to realise that they need to get their own voice out there.

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Russia Today was created 2005. But after the Georgian war, its ambition ambitions notably increased.

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That's when they started. R.T. Arabic artist, Spanish. R.T. French.

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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.

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And I think all of you are kind of starting to see what I'm getting.

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What I'm telling the story is a lot of way the Russians, the Russian side has seen that they've been losing.

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It's where they've updated the strategy and tried to do something about it every time.

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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.

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And the Russian springs are what you call a modular phenomenon.

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It's phenomenon that inspires others. I mean, starts Anthony Shadid, goes to Libya, either goes to Egypt and also Syria.

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It's it's examples that that other follows.

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And it, of course, impacted Russia as well, what you call the Russian winter of the Russian autumn.

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We saw some of the biggest protests since the Soviet Union surrounding the Russian 2011, 2012 elections.

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And they were all too coordinated in social media. So after that, yet again, the Russian leadership updated their toolbox.

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The first reported, to my knowledge, citing of the what's today popularly called the Troll Factory.

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What's in 2013 was the Russian Journal of this Russia probe for Novaya Gazeta, who reported of this factory in in St Petersburg.

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But they were not spreading narratives that the whole West was decaying and and such.

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No, it was against them all. And it was for some gentlemen for the 2013 Moscow major elections.

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Similar to Ukraine, author of The New War in Ukraine.

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The Russian leadership drew out the founder of a contact who was just known as the Russian Face Facebook,

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which is more a common social network to use in Russia to take control of that.

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Widen the definition of what could be legal extremism in a Facebook post or retweeting something could be makes you liable for being charged,

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for promoting extremism. And these are all ways of seeing, okay, today,

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opinions and understandings of what's happening in the world and legitimacy is being formed in social media.

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What can we do to get there capable of as high as 1000 people to try to post comments and

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try to do it and let us be able to try to shut down people by laws that are doing it.

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And then, of course, the surveillance aspect.

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Russia demands all foreign tech firms to have servers based in Russia and they have there included in the surveillance network.

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So all of that, while the Internet is still quite free, everything is surveilled.

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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.

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Our US elections are not going to go too much in depth about this.

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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.

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How many have heard it? If so, it's about the same time as the revelations of the Mueller report.

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A number of accounts were exposed, taken down that was being driven from the Internet Research Agency in some Petoskey Petersburg.

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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.

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So 95% of the content posted was legitimate civil rights questions, but 5% of them were very, very clearly political targeted to the elections.

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And they were saying, don't go and vote and don't vote for Hillary.

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Hillary is not a candidate. And then you look this backwards saying, you know,

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the conventional wisdom that is that Barack Obama managed to win because he he mobilised the black vote to an unprecedented degree before.

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So, of course, this is the narrative, the strategic objective of disincentivizing them to vote.

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And this is graphic. This autumn, a couple of months ago,

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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?

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So graphic. I mean, the investigation, they found also the same thing,

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that they were being driven from St Petersburg and they saw they are building

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the infrastructure for influencing the 2020 election and the uniting threat.

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All the way from Black Lives Matters types of accounts to all tri types of accounts was anti by them.

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All of the accounts were attacking Biden. That was be what was had been identified.

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Looking forward a little bit now we get to the specifics.

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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

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by our own force date and its colour revolutions and information warfare that are the two most important factors driving this change.

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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.

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So I would say, Well, sure, but that's only a few loose quotes I actually counted in the book.

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I've gone through the work of around 140 Russian military theorists and political elites,

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and my argument is that kind of the mainstream of the debate has shifted in this issue and some of the most important people,

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not just some theorists, but that's all I'll say.

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Well, sure. But Russia's spending so much on this military. Yeah, they are.

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I don't think I've anything I've said is is is is against them.

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Rather, I would argue that an effective Russian military instrument is a key precondition for its offensive, non-military approach.

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But someone even more clever would say, sure, but Russia.

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Russia strategic culture has always had a wider notion of conflict. And I also think that's a very fair point.

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Thank you for asking it.

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I think the thing what I show in the book is really the movement in the way that the military theoretical debate is manifested.

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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.

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But that's also what the military says it fierce.

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And this, I find, is a very interesting puzzle, because why would the Russian armed forces who are in charge of external military.

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Violence say that their biggest threat is internal and non-military.

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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

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the political leaders that they cannot seem to afford not to respond to the demands of the political leadership.

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So they're saying something like, this is fantastic, super important, but give us money.

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I will go and buy cruise missiles.

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So wrapping up and moving on to conclusions, I think the Russian understanding of war derives from a very non sentimental impact assessment,

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basically sitting down and saying, okay, what's likely to affect us? Good.

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Okay, let's stop it. Doesn't think that much about it.

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Okay. Just our law prohibits us from doing this.

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It's rather how can we update our law to help us doing this?

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There is a genuine threat conviction in the Russian leadership, and that's also a question that people ask.

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You know, is this things they're just saying or do they really mean like almost exclusively

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you should take the Russian leadership by the word not when they say,

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okay, we're not in Crimea, but rather the way they're looking at the world.

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Just take one example. You have Western political leaders saying things like this.

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We don't think the sanctions will make Russia behave the way we want to,

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but maybe it will increase it will increase the conflict among the oligarchs and then they get rid of Putin.

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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.

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So we're saying a lot of go south to say, well, the west is trying to engineer regime change in Russia.

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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.

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Sometimes rather offensive approach is very often a reverse engineered from what threats it has perceived, plus a dash of paranoia.

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If, you know, if Russia has been hurting because they get a lot of bad international press,

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well, then they expand their international media operations.

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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.

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What does this mean? From the Russian side, the strategic deterrence, the subversion operation is already underway.

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The task of the military includes a wide range of military manoeuvres, military signalling, subversion, cooperation.

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Most are connected to our elections. Our hopes of de-escalation is most often misplaced and unlikely to produce lasting de-escalation.

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I would go so far to argue that Russian aggression is premised on the idea that us in the West

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are always predictable and always willing to come to the negotiating table in any given time.

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Given one example.

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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.

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And I think you want to be completely, completely correct, as the case was with Georgia,

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unless it was for the accidental downing of MH 17, which killed a lot of Dutch lives or some British lives.

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Up until that point, you had, you know, very symbolic sanctions, such as, you know, visa freezes,

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visa restrictions and asset freezes on symbolic figures of the Russian leadership's sort of call for the ghost of that type of people.

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But after the downing of MH 17,

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still the sanctions you have on sectoral sanctions was prohibiting export of certain technologies, dual use technologies.

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But the financial sector was still restricting Russian companies to take loans with a maturity longer than 30 days.

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So to put it in more clear terms, the sanctions did not say you're not allowed to operate in Western markets.

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It was saying the way you borrow, finance, your operations is a little bit shorter.

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I don't think this is the target. I'll put it straightforward.

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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.

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And that was also more luck than our having a very, very calculated deterrence approach.

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This also, of course, ties into French President Macron saying, okay,

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it's time to be friends with Russia again, even though especially since invasion of Crimea.

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Now, you know, constructive steps has been taken on the opposite.

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Yeah, wide scale interference in the US election. You have the use of chemical weapons on UK soil and other things.

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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.

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We'll wait them out and then come back to the negotiating table.

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So this leads me on to saying that our primary problem is not it's not about attribution.

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This is one of the most popular things to say about modern war, is that it's ambiguous.

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It's very hard to know who does what and when. Especially with cyber means or so.

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I don't think so. I think attribution is very doable.

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I don't think it's immediate, but I think it's very doable. If you look at the Mueller report,

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you see that the US knew and sanctioned a Russian intelligence officer down to individual case officer because they knew who pushed which button.

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Well, that's how good they were, knowing what the Russian intelligence services was doing.

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The big problem was that they could not deter it, not that they couldn't know about it.

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Attribution is especially possible if you have an intelligence asset in the

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Russian presidential administration that knows what Putin signs off or not.

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You can take the example with Iranian tools.

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It was a story about Russian hackers hacked Iranian hackers and used Iranian hackers tools to make it seem like Iranian hacking operations.

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Well, some might say, well, this underscores that it's hard to know who does what.

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Sure. But the story also got out, which means that attribution is possible.

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You take the little green men in Crimea, which is a derogatory term for for Russian special forces.

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The innovation with that was not that they took off a flag from the arm and said, haha, I wonder who this is.

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The innovation with that was that they looked at us, with us,

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them talking about the West and they said, You have no determination to stop us whatsoever.

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We will offer you a way out of this. And we took it.

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Yes. There's a Swedish book who analysed this, the Swedish media reporting on the first 24 hours.

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Swedish media said Russian forces.

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But then on the second day, they said unknown forces.

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And then there were unknown forces for one and a half weeks. And then it became Russian forces again.

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Our primary problem with contemporary warfare is not about law.

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I know Swedish law a lot better than no British law,

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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?

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It's actually fine. It's not a problem.

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Lawyers are not that word. They're always lawyers. So you see problems and there's always lawyers who see solutions.

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The lawyers who see solutions are the ones you should talk to.

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But it's not it's not we're not the legal problem. We're having a political problem of of lacking determination.

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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.

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However, deterrence is quite tricky. You cannot deter everything.

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Is it reasonable to think of deterring Sputnik Broadcasting lies or our two UK broadcasting lies?

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No, probably not. Is it reasonable to deter the use of chemical weapons on British soil?

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I think so. I think that necessitates a tough response.

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I think I just want to this is the last one.

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If you want to see someone to start thinking about this correctly,

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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.

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What I see when I read it, I think I see a recognition of most of the things they've been saying today.

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They have talking about how long the long term strategic competition,

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which is a phrase deriving from Andrew Marshall, the legendary founder of the office.

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And that assessment was one of the best goes to thinking about conflict between systems.

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It's a way of saying that if at Marshall writes for planning purposes the.

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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.

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This will go away. This was the major policy of the Obama administration.

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And I will actually just illustrated here.

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This is sets out the US way of looking at the future.

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They're looking at the Russian economy, looking at Russian demography, and they're saying Russia can ever be a long term problem.

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It's a temporary problem. And this is still a common idea among the American leadership.

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I think it's completely incorrect, both of them. Russian demography is not as bad as the general narrative is saying.

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Russian economy is only relevant to judge.

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Russia is Russia capabilities. Depending on how big of a priority is it for the political leadership?

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In other words, they don't need strong economic growth to be politically put to be a threat.

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They don't need strong economic growth for reaching a subordinate for its highest goals,

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which is ensuring the security regime and being a great power.

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Okay, I got sidetracked a little bit. They're also saying this, we need to be is this modern stuff.

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You know, the US needs to be strategically predictable, good, operationally unpredictable.

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This is a little bit what I was alluding to when I was saying that Russian

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aggression is premised on us being predictable with stop need to stop doing that.

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So I think I think in thought I think the Americans have come a bit of understanding

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is problems that we think to what to do about it but there's lot left to be done.

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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,

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he put it on his reading list and I don't know him, but I'm sure he has an excellent judgement.

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This is one way to find out how much of this is.