Reflections on Ukraine After a Year of War

look back at the year and what may come. Return Mannie to a trusted voice that we have leaned on a lot over the past twelve months since that invasion. Delighted to have back with us. Angela Stent. She is Senior Adviser to the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies. Also served as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council and before that

served at the US Department of State. She's also written a book Putin's World, Russia Against the West End with the Rest. This is why we have leaned on her so much. She's with us once again from Washington, DC. Angela, thank you so much. I'm sure many people have been reaching out to you on this one year mark, and so delighted that you could be with us again one year in what occupies your mind, your thoughts when it comes to this war each day that it continues to

drag on. Well, thank you for having me back on the program. I would say that at the moment, what I'm focused on is this new Russian offensive which has already begun, the so called Spring Offensive. It's going to be a very tough next six months. The Russians are still trying to take more territory, the Ukrainians are pushing them back. There's been very, very fierce fighting in a town called Bahmut, which it's really like hand to hand combat,

and they've been large numbers of casualties. So I think we just have to watch that, and we have to see whether the Russians are more successful this time in this offensive than they've been in the past, and whether the U, the Ukrainian Army, with the equipment also from the NATO countries, can successfully push this Russian offensive back. Hey, Angela, I wonder if you can talk about the China situation,

because we're hearing mixed reports this week from them. CNN just issued a report that US intelligence shows that the Chinese government is considering providing Russia with drones and ammunition. What is your take on what Beijing is going to do and their role in the war effort for Russia. So last weekend I was at the Munich Security Conference.

There were no Russian officials there, but the Chinese Foreign Minister was there, and he made it clear again that from the Chinese point of view, the West is partly responsible for this war. He said there was going to be a Chinese peace plan, which in fact they have issued today. But at the same conference, Secretary of State Tony B. Lincoln gave an interview saying that the US has information that China is considering supplying lethal weapons to Ukraine,

the US and other native countries. A woman Chinese that they shouldn't do this. We've already had some evidence that they're electronic components which it can be used in weapons have been supplied to Russia. And so it's a little incongruous if the Chinese, on the one hand, say here's a peace planet, we can act as a mediator, and then they're actually supplying weapons to the Russians. But I think if our people say that they have the evidence

of this. We have to take this seriously. I do wonder and I'm forgive me, I'm trying to think whether it's a Bloomberg column that I read, but this whole idea that you know, where the US has maybe failed and maybe other countries in that we've spread capitalism, but we didn't spread democracy. And I wonder our guests said that earlier? This was it a guest? Was it? One

of our guests was that price brilliant? And so I wonder how much you think about that that you know, with people saying, well, the uses are fault, is there some truth to that in that, you know, whether it's China, whether it's other parts of the world spread of capitalism but not democracy. Well, it's easier to spread capitalism than it is democracy. I mean people, you know, people like capitalism, they can make money from it. It's a good system.

But it's very hard to influence another country's political system, and particularly a country like Russia or China. But let's take Russia, which has a centuries old tradition of autocratic rule and very little traditional other having had democratic rule. The US certainly tried, and other democratic countries tried in the nineteen nineties when Boris Yelton was president to encourage

the spread of democracy there. But we have to understand the limits of our own influence, particularly in a country where the leadership and many of the people are not used to living in a democracy, and particularly in Russia, where they associate the attempts to spread democracy in the nineteen nineties with a very difficult economic situation that they lived in, including a crash in nineteen ninety eight where most people lost their savings. So I think you can't

blame the United States for this. It's not within our power to impose a form of political governance on another country. Having said that, then do the allies, the Western Allies have no other choice but to support Ukraine in this Well, I mean at the moment, yes, if we don't want Russia to take over Ukraine and then threaten other countries because Putin's not going to stop there. I mean, he's made it clear that Russia wants to call an unquote

take back traditional lands that belong to Russia. And they've even mentioned Poland when they've talked about this. So this really is the only choice for the West is to support Ukraine, to give it the wherewithal to push back.

The Ukrainian army has done extremely well, much better than anyone thought it wore, including Vladimir Putin in this last year, because if we don't support, if we don't supply Ukraine, it'll be very hard for them to resist what the Russians are doing, and then you will just have a more aggressive Russia in Europe, Angela, can you talk a bit about Russia's strategy when it comes to those historic holding areas that you were talking about, specifically related to

how they're targeting, you know, museums in Ukraine and cultural historic centers, so they're really trying to erase any independent Ukrainian history. In twenty twenty one, Putin published a five thousand word essay where he claimed that there were no such things as Ukrainians, that Ukrainians, you know, don't have the right to a separate state, that Ukraine isn't a different a separate nationality, that they're brothers and sisters with Russia, and so they have been trying to eliminate some of

you know, Ukraine's culture. It's terrible at what they've done there, to the museums, to the libraries, to these vestiges or evidence of Ukrainian culture because of his claim that Ukraine belongs to Russia and that Ukraine isn't even a country. That's what he said to a president George W. Bush in two thousand and eight. He said to him, you have to understand, George, that Ukraine isn't even a country.

Part of it used to be in the Austro Hungarian Empire, and most of it, he said, was in the Russian Empire. So that's what his view is. Hey, Angela, what do you make of China's involvement at this point? In talking about brokering a piece They officially put out a plan or a paper, if you will, in terms of some kind of piece accord um. How does that kind of complicate the situation. Well, I've read the so called peace plan. It's rather general, i would say, and it really repeats

talking points that they've they've had before. I don't know how much of an impact this will have because none of you know, the NATO countries have already said that they don't this isn't a serious peace plan. The US has said that, other allies European Union is said back. I'm sure that some of the countries in the global South who haven't condemned Russian and han't sanctioned it, they will say, oh, look at the Chinese. You know, they're trying to put forward a peace plan and we shouldn't

negotiate seriously. But it's very hard to have a credible peace plan if China is really supporting Russia, it's supporting all the Russian narrative about the war. As I said that, it's supporting to some extent Russia with components for weapons. It's supplying technology to Russia which Russia can't get now from the West because of the Western sanctions. So it's

not a neutral party in this war. What do you think is the biggest misconception that we might have in the US about what motivates Putin most well, I think we have often thought about Putin either as a mass to strategist or as an excellent tactician, and I think this war has shown that probably neither of those are true anymore. Certainly not the strategist, but even the tactician.

And he started this war obviously misinformed about what was going on in Ukraine, and with lots of misconceptions about the strength of the Russian army and the weakness of the Ukrainian army and the weakness of the West. He thought that because of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, how that it played out, that the Biden administration was weak and it wouldn't respond. So I think we have to reassess, you know, how savvy he is in understanding really the

outside world. And I think a lot of people believe that the two years of Covid isolation, where he really didn't see any foreign leaders and was just surrounded by a small group of people who share his views and reinforce, if you like, his paranoia about the West really affected him in the run up to this war. A celebrity right there, just surrounds himself with people who just say yes, yes, yes,

or something to some extent. Yeah, he is. And certainly even his intelligence officials who were on the ground in Ukraine gave him force information about how the Ukrainians would respond. That's so, that's so fascinating. When do you think about his perspective on the US, would you say that Afghanistan

piece was the critical, maybe turning point for him. I think it was very important for him because I think he looked he saw what happened and the disarray there, and then of course he also realized that in the previous administration, US European relations had really sunk to a new low. So I think he probably thought that the Biden administration wouldn't have to resolve and certainly he didn't think that the Europeans would go along with the US

in presenting a united front in this war. It is pretty remarkable Angelo, when we think about the global stage and the big players that are out there, then you know the countries that are out there, that how much Vladimir Putin and Russia in particular has really dominated the conversation for a long time. Having said that, how do you strategize about kind of what's next here when it

involves Russia and Putin? So I think from you know, if I listened carefully to the speech he gave on Tuesday to his Federal Assembly, his State of the Union speech, and the message to the Russian people was, you know, the West is out to get us. This war is going to go on for as long as it takes. We will not be defeated on the battlefield. And basically, if you don't like it, it's too bad, because that's what's happening. So I think, as far as we can see, this war can go on for a long time. He

is determined to prevail. We don't quite know what he didn't tell us in this speech is actually what Russia's war aims are. How would they define victory? We don't know that, and he hasn't been explicit about it. It's possible that victory for him would be just quote unquote the control of the four territories, and he now claims Russia's annexed even though it doesn't fully control them, or still his sights might be on taking all of Ukraine and not deterred by the failure to do so until now.

So I think, I think we're in for a long war. And we talked a little bit about how Putin was able to re emerge after the previous economic crash in Russia. We've got news today on more sanctions. We're always getting news about more sanctions. Is there a point that Russia's economy gets to that Putin has trouble recovering from so so far the sanctions really haven't had the kind of impact on Russia that the US and its allies thought

they would. I mean Russia's economies actually forecast to grow this year, not by very much, but by some They've obviously been able. They're still reaping in the revenues from oil and gas sales, even if there's a price cap that they're still getting money from that, which is also helping to fuel their war machine. And the average Russian

has not felt the pinch yet. So the sanctions may bite more in twenty twenty three, particularly the export controls, the lack of semiconductors of spare parts, that may have more of an impact on on the economy, but it doesn't. You know, the Russia has a tradition of the being able to withstand these sanctions, and so far it's done. So, hey, Angela, I do wonder about you know, Putin, the individual who

invaded Ukraine one year ago. Is he the same individual leader who back in twenty fourteen invaded and subsequently annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine? Is he the same guy? Is he different? Emboldened? I don't know, how do you see it? Yeah? So, I think before this war began, most people thought of Putin as someone who wasn't a

huge risk taker. If you go back to two thousand and eight, when Russia invaded Georgia, instead of going all the way to the capital Tbilisi and removing the president Saash really whom Putin hated, that they stopped. There were two territories that they then declared were independent, and so Georgia was partly occupied by Russian troops, but they stopped there.

And in twenty fourteen, yesterday Anna's Crimea. They didn't have that much resistance then, and they did start the war in the don Bus, but then they stopped and that you know, there was a ceasefire and there was a peace agreement that was never fully implemented. I think the difference now is this was a huge risk, a full scale invasion of Ukraine with really not enough troops to do it. So he appears to be more of a risk taken out right. You know, maybe it's because he's

thinking about what his legacy is. Well, you wrote your book Russia against the West and with the Rest back in twenty nineteen, just thirty seconds you called it Putin's World. If you were writing a new book today, what would be the title, perhaps, well, it would be Putin's World to shrunk because his you know, the relationship with the West is so bad, but the relationship with the Global South and China, those relations remain pretty good. So Russia

is not isolated, all right? Is that a title? That's a long title, shrunk. I like that, Angela, thank you so much. I mean it sincerely. You have really given us a lot of time over the past year to myself and some of our Bloomberg colleagues with some really great insight, and it's been really so important to our audience. So thank you so much. Stay safe, be well, and I hope you have a good weekend. Angela Stent, Senior

fellow at Brookings. As we said, her book Putin's World rush against the West and with the rest joining us via zoom from Washington, DC, So very thoughtful conversation. On this Friday, you're listening and watching Bloomberg.