Brian Taylor on the Campbell Conversations

Campbell Conversations

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22d ago 27:53

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Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Brian Taylor. He's a political science professor and director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. And he's an expert on Russia, particularly its leadership and its military. He's been on the program several times in the past to discuss the war in Ukraine. We brought him back to update us on that and also because he has a new book out. It's titled, “Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction.” It's part of a great series from Oxford University Press that I have frequently made use of myself. Brian, welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you again and congratulations on the book.

Brian Taylor: Thank you. Grant, Happy New Year.

GR: Yeah, Happy New Year. So, we'll say that to each other before we get into some pretty depressing topics (laughter) looking at the war in Ukraine. But before I ask you some questions about what the situation is in Ukraine, let me start with something else. It's just an impression of mine, and I wanted to know whether I was right or not. It's my impression that the war, it's not getting the same level of press attention that it once was. It's beginning, in the United States anyway in terms of its attention, to fade a little bit. Am I correct about that? Or is that just where I'm going for my media?

BT: I think that's probably true. And given the way the media works, I think in some sense it makes sense, right, that this war has been going for close to three years now. Day to day, the front lines don't change very much. So in that sense, for the average person, maybe nothing new is happening. But of course, it is still quite important, has important implications, not only for obviously Ukraine and Russia, but for the rest of the planet. So, it does still, you know, come in the news and that kind of thing. But it has, I think you're right, faded a bit given other topics that sort of jumped to prominence.

GR: And sort of building off of that then, what is the current situation in this war? Is it prolonged stalemate, where are we at right now?

BT: I suppose the answer to that question depends a bit on where you start. And it's probably helpful for, you know, most people just to think about where we were, you know, almost three years ago in February 2022 when Putin launched the invasion, which he didn't call a war, he called it a special military operation and he expected it to be over quite quickly. He thought Russian forces would seize the capital Kyiv, overthrow the Ukrainian government, put in place a pro-Russian government of some kind and establish control over Ukraine that way. Obviously, that didn't happen and the Ukrainians successfully bought back, kept control of the capital, kept control of other major cities, and eventually the war defaulted to a very grinding war of attrition in eastern Ukraine. And that's where we are today, and that's really where we've been, you know, since the spring of 2022. So if you look at the furthest extent of Russian control, sort of back to March 2022, they controlled roughly 30% of Ukrainian territory. Now they control, Russia controls about 21% of Ukrainian territory. And that really hasn't changed very much, you know, as I said that over the last couple of years. So that's the big picture, but if we look at more recently, say over the last six months, it's clear that Russia is making very slow but somewhat steady progress in this war of attrition because they have more personnel available to certain extent, they have more equipment available and the Ukrainians are feeling very stretched, especially on the personnel side. So I was in Washington recently and I heard someone say that Russia is on a roll. That's not really accurate. Russia is more on a crawl, but they are moving forward. And I guess the final thing I would say in terms of where we are, a lot of people in Ukraine and Russia, everywhere else, are looking to see what's going to happen with the change in American administration. Will U.S. policy change, can Trump follow through on his, you know, claim to want to be able to and to be able to settle the war quite quickly and those sorts of things. So everyone's sort of expecting something to shift in the coming weeks.

GR: Well, let me just ask you that, where you just left it. I mean, what do you think President-elect Trump has promised many times that he's going to end this conflict quickly? How likely is that?

BT: I think it's really not likely at all. And I think even yesterday you saw Trump walk that back a bit. During the campaign he was saying, I'll solve it in 24 hours just with a couple of phone calls. Yesterday, he said six months was his sort of time frame for getting something done. So already he's increased the time window by 180 times.

GR: (laughter)

BT: So, you know, and the reason I'm very skeptical is really because the two sides are still quite far apart. Putin wants to control Ukraine, he wants political control over Ukraine. He's not fighting over this or that village in eastern Ukraine. His ultimate objective is to bring Ukraine under Russian control, either de facto, probably more likely de facto is what he had in mind, and turn it away from Ukraine's desire to, you know, join Europe. That's how the Ukrainians would think of it, right? They were moving to the west. They were hoping to join the EU. They were hoping at some point to join NATO and become one of the stable, you know, economically prosperous democracies of Central Europe. So those are the two objectives. They're completely divergent and sides are willing to discuss maybe, you know, a cease-fire, but talking about a cease-fire without figuring out how you're going to resolve the very big difference and ultimate objectives means there are lots of tricky issues in terms of, you know, who has control, what security guarantees, if any, will Ukraine get? You know, is Russia willing to give up anything? Is Ukraine willing to give up anything? And so far, the answer to those questions is basically no. And maybe it's just negotiating bluster but I think just conceptually where Putin is, is very different from where Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people are.

GR: I should mention for our listeners that were speaking on Wednesday, January 8, you mentioned some things about Donald Trump speaking yesterday. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Syracuse University professor Brian Taylor, and we're discussing the war in Ukraine and also we'll get into some Russian politics here a bit later in the program. So I want to pick up on the thing that you said right before I put that break in there, which is this idea of what a future, “peace” would look like. And I've heard you speak in other venues where you've said something similar to what you just said, that you're really talking about perhaps a long-term cease-fire rather than anything that we would regard as real peace. Could you say a little bit more about that distinction? I mean, is that a way of saying this thing is likely really to never end absent one side completely winning?

BT: Yeah, so, maybe one analogy we could start with is the Korean War, which still technically, formally is not a settlement, right? There was a decision in 1953 to have a cease-fire and both sides stopped actively fighting. But the, you know, line of control is still heavily militarized. And both the South and the North still have the goal of unification in some fashion. But, you know, with a political system like the one that they have, this is what they're expecting. So you can have a cease-fire for a very long time that doesn't lead to a real state of peace. I'm not predicting that's what's going to happen with Russia and Ukraine, but it's easier to imagine a scenario in which both sides agree to temporarily stop fighting than it is to imagine a scenario in which they agree on the political destiny of Ukraine and what its formal legal territory is. So as I mentioned earlier, Russia currently controls roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory. They formally claim in their constitution, that is Russia, that these territories are Russian. The Ukrainians don't agree, and most of the world doesn't agree. They say these territories are Ukrainian. It's hard to imagine Putin or someone from Putin's close circle ever just stepping forward and saying, yeah, we didn't mean that we don't want that territory, you know, it's Ukraine, we recognize its legal territory. Which in fact Russia did recognize multiple times prior to the war, including Putin, but that's not where we are now. On the other side, Ukrainians are not likely to say, okay, you know, you can have this territory, it'll be Russia from now on, who cares what international law says? So that's just one big obstacle to a permanent peace. But then there's also the question of where is Ukraine's future? Is it allowed to choose its own political and military and economic destiny? Can it join the EU? Can it maybe join NATO at some point? If not, who protects Ukraine's security, given that we know that Russia invaded in 2014 when it annexed Crimea and invaded again in 2022 and is still invading? Ukraine is going to want some guarantee that this won't happen again. It's hard to see a guarantee that Ukraine finds meaningful coming out of Vladimir Putin's government. So that's why I think we're very far away from talking about a meaningful peace. And to the extent we have discussions under the new administration about some way to stop the killing, it's going to have to be in terms of a cease-fire. And even then I'm rather quite skeptical. Putin hasn't shown any sign that he wants to slow down. I think he thinks things are going his way, even though they've got lots of problems inside Russia. But for those reasons, you know, I sadly think this is likely to go on for a while.

GR: Well, you used the analogy of Korea. I wanted to throw a different one at you and see what you thought. To me, as you're describing this, I would say it sounds like what has happened is the Russians have created another hotspot in the world similar to the Middle East in a lot of ways, because that line in Korea, you're right. I mean, it's still heavily militarized and there are little tiny skirmishes and things sometimes we hear about and then other ones that, you know, are told to us years later after they've happened on the border. But it's been relatively peaceful. It seems like this is more of a recipe of something in the Middle East where you can almost count on, every so many years, something flaring up.

BT: That's right, I think that's right. I think until there's some settlement that involves an understanding of how Ukraine's security will be guaranteed, either by its own forces or by external actors assisting it, there will always be the concern that a Russian government will try again. That it won't allow Ukraine to be free and independent and make its own choices about its political orientation and those sorts of things. So, yeah, the way people in the post-Soviet space refer to these sorts of situation is frozen conflicts. And there actually have been several there was one between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan actually won a war against Armenia two years ago. Now that in some sense settled that, but not entirely. There's this situation between Russia and Georgia where 20% of Georgian territory is controlled by Russian proxy forces, basically. There's a situation in the East European country of Moldova where part of its territory is also not really under the central government's control. Everyone calls these frozen conflicts, and some of them have gone on for 30 years now. So we could imagine a scenario in which eastern Ukraine in some sense becomes a frozen conflict. But everyone's waiting to see, will Russia, you know, try and do something more at some point in the future, even if they agree to stop fighting temporarily.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Brian Taylor, the Syracuse University professor and director of the Moynihan Global Affairs Institute, has recently published a new book and it's titled, “Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction.” We've been discussing the war in Ukraine and we'll start discussing his book soon. But Brian, there was one more thing that you wanted to add about the war, and then we'll get into Russia itself. But go ahead, it's actually kind of a good segue way, I think, in talking about Russia. Go ahead and make that point.

BT: Sure. So we've been talking about the war in fairly abstract terms. But I think it's worth reminding everyone just how costly this war has been for both countries. On the Russian side, over 700,000 casualties, by the term casualties, I mean dead and wounded, but probably well over 150,000 dead already. An astonishing figure, really. And they have lost thousands of tanks, armored personnel carriers. They're pulling old equipment from the 50’s and 60’s out of storage and throwing it into the battle. They have to keep increasing the amount of money they're paying people to incentivize them to sign up for a war in which they're quite likely to get wounded and maybe killed, you know, offering people, you know, 10, 15, $20,000 just to sign up, which may not sound like that much to an American, but from someone from a poor rural region in Russia, that's, you know, more than multiple times an annual salary just for the sign-up bonus. So there's a lot of stress on the Russian economy, on parts of Russian society that are providing the soldiers and the military and its equipment. And we see similar problems on the Ukrainian side. We have less clarity on their number of casualties, but clearly well over 100,000 and probably well over 70,000 killed. They're having trouble recruiting people for the war. It's become a real manpower shortage problem on the Ukrainian side. And if the United States stops supplying military assistance, that will be a very heavy burden for Ukraine. Europe is doing a lot but can't replace some of the things the United States can do and, you know, some of the people around President-elect Trump have talked about cutting off aid. It's not clear there's appetite for another aid package. So it's worth just reminding everyone how bloody, how destructive this war has been and is and how much strain it's putting on both sides. And especially, I think on the Ukrainian side where the personnel problem is one they're going to have to try and find a solution for in the coming months.

GR: Now you mentioned 150,000 estimated dead on the Russian side, 70,000 on the Ukrainian side. It's worth remembering that United States lost about 55,000 people in Vietnam. And so that really puts it in perspective. So, well, let's turn to your book and I want to, O have so many questions about this, so I'm going to have to really limit myself. But let me start with kind of an odd question, but it came to me as I was looking through your book. What do you think is the most important aspect or thing about Russian culture that most Americans don't fully grasp, don't fully appreciate?

BT: That's an interesting one.

GR: (laughter)

BT: I guess I would say, and this ties into one of the themes of the book, that sort of, you know, reappears in various chapters is the historical primacy of the state in people's lives. And by the state, I just mean the sort of political, administrative apparatus that governs, you know, a country and its territory. And Russians both expect a sort of powerful state that can make, you know, demands on it and protect them. But they also are highly suspicious of that state and don't really trust it simultaneously. So it's this weird kind of expectation of state primacy while also sort of rebelling against the manifestations of that in their personal lives and not really expecting the state to perform the way they want it to, but still feeling the need to sort of give some authority to it, despite all their complaints about, you know, its inefficiencies and mistakes and that kind of thing. So it's this weird dual attitude about the state that persists across time in some sense and is something Russia will have to continue to wrestle with. And I think, you know, those of us who hope for a more open, you know, pluralistic Russia, at some point they need to recalibrate that balance and have a state that's not only something that rules over the people, but that treats its people not as subjects, but as citizens who deserve respect and deserve some say in what happens in the country.

GR: Yeah, that was one of the things that struck me when I was reading through your book. And the phrase that came to my mind was sort of, cynical dependence or something like that. But the other theme that I picked up was not just the state, but also authoritarianism. That in one way or another, these people have lived under authoritarian regimes pretty much, you know, for as long as they're going to be able to remember historically. Is that something else that's important for people to understand?

BT: That is certainly true. But I'm going to inject a political scientist cautionary note here.

GR: Okay. (laughter)

BT: I think people look at that and say, you know, they've always had authoritarian rulers, you know, Russians expect a czar with a strong hand kind of thing. And certainly historically, yes, that is the pattern. But it's worth noting that most of the planet for most of human history has not lived under democratic constitutional government.

GR: Right.

BT: And lots of places that 50, 70, you know 80 years ago didn't have democratic constitutional government, now have it. And I don't think there's anything about Russians per se that make them incapable of democratic governance any more than, you know, people used to say Germany was incapable of it. Or, you know, Latin America or you know various places around the world that have proven that they can have a functioning democracy. And in some respects, not in all respects, Russia has the kind of society that might succeed at democracy. It's heavily educated, it's relatively well-off, it's fairly urbanized and professionalized. Oftentimes, countries like that are able to establish stable democracy. So although obviously things like democratic, constitutional sort of pluralistic government look very far away from where Russia is now, that doesn't mean it can't happen at some point, just like it's happened in many other places around the world and maybe surprised observers that it happened so quickly and so successfully in these places.

GR: Yeah, it's important to remember that democracy is the exception, not the rule. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Brian Taylor, a professor at Syracuse University. So you're not going to like a lot of these questions because you put that political science caveat in there, but let me try this one. I want to take Lenin out of the picture and what I'm going to ask you. But after Lenin, if you had to pick what you think, who was the best leader of Russia in terms of making that nation better for the people who lived in it, who would it be?

BT: Well, my answer is going to be very different than the answer you might get from an average Russian. But my answer is going to be Mikhail Gorbachev because he took over the Soviet Union when it was one of the two superpowers. It bent under complete domination of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union since Lenin, right? Since, you know, shortly after 1917. And he grew up a believer in that system and yet his efforts to make it better led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Communist Party and the transition of all of the countries of the former Soviet Union, all 15, Russia, one of them, to new forms of government. And there's been lots of heartbreak and disappointment and so on in Russia and in other countries, but the Russia we see on the map today, you know, has only half the population of the Soviet Union. The rest of those people are now an independent countries and the amount of territory the Soviet Union lost is bigger than the European Union, right? So this was a world shaking event and ultimately it led to countries like Ukraine and Georgia and Estonia and others to having their independence. And also I think, this is maybe more controversial to some people, but it gave them a chance to develop further. The Soviet socialist economic model had run its course, it clearly was not going to provide a higher standard of living for all of its people going forward. They needed to, you know, change and adopt a capitalist system, hopefully one that has protections in terms of a welfare state and that sort of thing. But ultimately, getting rid of that economic system, I think, in the long run was necessary. And although Gorbachev didn't want or expect any of those things, the fact that he started the transformation and didn't use extreme violence to try and hold everything together, although he did use some violence, but for the most part, he decided the political outcome was one that was the one he could live with, and that was the best for the people of Russia in the Soviet Union. So he's my answer for number one.

GR: Well, you made me feel better because that was my answer in my head too. I find him a fascinating figure for the reasons that that you put out. We've only got about a couple of minutes left, but I want to make sure I can squeeze two questions in here. So, and again, they're going to be equally strange I think, to your political science ears. But let me say the first one is, and you have to do this really quick, and I'm sorry. Imagine that I am a Russian boy who is born into, say, a family in Russia with a median income right now. I'm smart, I do well in school, I have ambitions, I want to grow up to be well off, make something of myself. What do I do if I am that kid? What's my best path in this society? Is it joining the military, what is it?

BT: Interesting question. I mean, a lot is going to depend on where in the country you are because Russia is very unequal, sort of socioeconomically, depending on if you're born into a small village or born into Moscow or Saint Petersburg. But the recipe is not going to be that different than you would hear in almost any other country in the world, which is study hard, go to university, get a good education, you know, choose a career. Russia does have prospects for people growing up, you know, maybe not in the most privileged of circumstances, to do well in college and move on. So that's what I would advise and I would not advise joining the military, the risk to one's life is too high.

GR: Got it. And we've only got a few seconds left, but I want to put you on the spot here. This is a more personal question, if I may. Why did you ever decide to study Russia and make that your life's work? It seems like it's (a) depressing topic to me. I suppose one could say the same thing to me about American politics, but just in a couple of words, why are you so devoted to a Russian guy?

BT: I got into it as a college student, you know, in the 1980s, and I got into it because I was interested in nuclear weapons arms control and disarmament, and I didn't want to die in a nuclear war. And a professor said, well, maybe you should learn Russian if you're interested in nuclear weapons issues. And that started me down this path. So that's how I ended up here.

GR: Well, that sounds like one depressing thing lead to another, but I'll call it a serendipitous story. (laughter) That was Brian Taylor and again, his new book is titled, “Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction.” If you're looking to become an overnight expert on Russia, this book is your best bet, I highly recommend it. Brian thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

BT: Thank you. Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

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