Latest / Prof James Ker-Lindsay / 004. What Is Putin Really Trying To Tell Us?

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004. What Is Putin Really Trying To Tell Us? · Prof James Ker-Lindsay

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: You're listening to James Kerlinzi.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: In each episode, my guest and I take a deep dive into the nuanced world of international relations and geopolitical analysis to bring you balanced yet essential commentary.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, relations between Moscow and the West have fallen to their lowest point in decades.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yet while Western audiences regularly hear about what Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders say, we rarely listen to their speeches in full or consider how they explain Russia's actions to their own people and the wider world.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: So how does Russia actually see the international system?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: And what can the language of its leaders tell us about Moscow's understanding of its place within it?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: To explore this, I'm joined by Professor Michael Rossi, who's spent years translating speeches by Putin, Sergei Lavrov, and other senior Russian officials.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: What can these speeches tell us about Russia's worldview, its relationship with the West, and the war in Ukraine?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: And how can we understand Moscow's perspective without necessarily accepting its version of events?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, hi Mike.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's brilliant to be with you.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've we've worked together for a long time and we know each other well.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, really, what I want to do today is talk very much about this area of specialization that you have, where you you've spent a lot of time working on translating the speeches given by Russia's key foreign policy actors, whether that's Putin, whether it's Lavrov, whether it's Medvedev, others.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um having worked on all of this, what really stands out most to you about the way that Russian leaders um and the Russian foreign policy establishment talk about foreign policy?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first, it's great to see you once again, James.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a long time since we've done these uh videos together, but um I like how we just immediately jump right back in, is that we picked up where we left off here.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so the one thing that I can say, um, probably the big overarching thing about doing these translation videos is realizing that there is an overarching narrative that just threads with every single statement, uh, press release, press conference, and what have you.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that is ultimately that Russia's position in the current geopolitical world today is firmly ensconced within a multipolar framework.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: They mention multipolarism all the time.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is important to understand because what this does is it frames Russia's national security interests and its foreign policy strategies within a narrative, right?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And all countries, and Russia is not the only one that does this, but all countries frame their actions, their decisions, their responses within a particular narrative.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a way of making sense of things.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and just for the, you know, for the sake of the audience, you know, what do we understand a narrative to be?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because the the word is thrown around a lot.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to say that a narrative is inherently false or dubious, but it is, and this is a term that I have defined, I've used this as a definition over the years.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: A narrative is a conscious connection of previously unstructured and possibly even unrelated events, figures, and ideas into a seemingly implotted framework of logic and reference.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: In short, it's a story, right?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's a way of taking pieces of history, both long history, recent history, and making it a rationale.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Russia does this, the United States does this, the European Union does this.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so the narrative that Russia places itself in is that the world is becoming or it already is multipolar, of which Russia is a key player in that.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so what this what this implies is that Russia is not a country that is seeking world domination.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a country that is seeking to resurrect the Soviet Union, as we oftentimes get in Western media, but that it is working within a new multilateral cooperative framework with other countries, like the United States, China, India.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: These are the three big ones.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: We can maybe even throw in Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, for that matter.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And within that narrative, the multipolar narrative, every country except the United States is on board.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: So they are all part of this multipolar round table, of which there is a seat, an empty seat, waiting for the United States to finally realize that it is part of and join in this new great power cooperative framework.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's the one thing that I get across the, and this has been effectively the narrative since Putin gave his um speech, his famous speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: So let's start with Vladimir Putin.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: When he speaks about foreign policy, who is he generally talking to?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: Is it very clearly a Russian audience, or does he tend to have an eye on the internationals?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: And we can then move on to talk a little bit about Lavrov, but I think maybe sort of start with Putin.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Putin's main audience is primarily a Russian audience.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we see this for a couple of things.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, um some of the speeches that I have translated are internal speeches to his security council.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, others are to uh various members of Russia's civil society, from religious figures to educational groups.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is internal.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is primarily internal.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um and when he does give press conferences, whether it's in Russia or when he's abroad, like when he was in Bishkek for the Shanghai Cooperation Summit, and then New Delhi for the BRICS summit, the bulk of the media that interviews him and asks him questions are from Russian media.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, there's going to be some elements from China, you'll get, you know, Xinhua, you'll get TRT from Turkey, you'll get Al-Arabiyah from the Middle East, and you might get in a larger conference, you might get a token um journalist from BBC or NBC.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: They usually come towards the end.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: But primarily speaking, this is an internal matter as far as Putin is concerned.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so in that case, you know, you begin to wonder whether or not his message would resonate further around the world if it was made more globally accessible.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Social media has largely made these speeches accessible.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, efforts by myself, and now uh more recently, um AI, which has made this a lot easier to translate, has made it accessible on YouTube.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I think um Putin has understood that the West has largely cut Russia off.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: They've they've blocked Russian media, they have uh prohibited uh media outlets like um RT and Ithartas, among others, from uh posting on YouTube and other social media sites.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And rather than resist this, uh Putin has just simply said, okay, we're gonna make this an internal um thing, which, you know, in a way, uh he has to convince his internal audience that uh, you know, has been sacrificing and putting up with the realities of a war with Ukraine now for four years, why this is justified and why he has and why Russia has still taken the moral high ground.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I think then to compare with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who obviously is incredibly experienced and and um has for so long been the immediate face, if you like, of Russian foreign policy around the world.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how do you compare with the way that he speaks to foreign audiences?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and when you listen to Lavrov speaking, I mean, you know, Russia is obviously quite clearly reaching out to parts of the global south uh with China.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: How does he alter the message to different audiences?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, if he is visiting uh Africa or if he were to be visiting Asia, do you see variations in the way that he addresses foreign policy issues?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, variations, but still within the same non-negotiable truths of that narrative.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so in that case, Lavrov is one of the few people, one of the only people within Russia's inner political circle that's given the autonomy to speak freely on this.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that this has a lot to do with two things.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, Lavrov has um diplomatic immunity, so he can travel to places that are far uh easier than someone like Putin who cannot go.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, secondly, and he doesn't do this a lot, but Lavrov is fluent in English.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: And when he needs to, right, he will switch to English.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: There are times that he's given full interviews in English, but surprisingly, there are times when uh he will stick to Russian.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think that this has a lot to do, more so not just because he's more comfortable with Russian, but because he wants the audience to know that Russian is an important international language.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: It is a language that is recognized by the UN as one of the international languages.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's not going to switch to English, even though he has to.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is sort of a very subtle thing.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: When he's addressing um audiences in, let's say, Africa or the Middle East or Southeast Asia, he primarily stays in Russian.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: But his nuances on the narrative are going to focus on that larger region.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: So he's going to talk about how the global south is now a rising important factor in this new multipolar world or the global east, um, the rising um economic powers within BRICS.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: When it comes to Africa, he will bring up the idea that many of these new emerging countries are not directly um utilizing, but they're certainly banking off of anti-colonial sentiment, um, plus the understanding, and this is especially true in Western Africa, the understanding that for decades France has kept these countries economically tethered to their own uh larger economic system.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so this plays, there's a very populist element within this uh rhetoric.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Normally, what Lavrov does more than Putin is he will give somewhere between a 10 to 15 minute opening talk before uh the floor is opened to journalists.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And this sets the tone.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: It really starts out with noting the you know, the success, the recaps of whatever summit or conference or bilateral talks that were held between him and the respective country.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then um there is always this um nod to the idea that these countries are taking autonomous initiatives, right?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: They are uh they are claiming, they are reclaiming their sovereign decision-making rights to economically, politically, institutionally work with other countries within the global south, the global east, the you know, the expanding BRICS countries, as a way of not directly saying, but definitely implying that there are alternatives to becoming subjects of the West.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that sort of sets the tone for when the questions come in from the media.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: The media will usually start out by asking uh questions directly related to the specific summit or conference.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's always going to be something involving the current situation in Ukraine, uh, Russia's relation to Europe, but this is Africa.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about the European Union, or more specifically, we'll talk about um France, Russia's deepening relations with China and India, um, and then usually something involving um, you know, global security around the world.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Putin and Lavrov are definitely, you know, the key figures.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Are there any other figures?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we we hear these really odd and frankly quite disturbing comments from someone like Dmitry Medrede Medvedev at times.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: How does that play in?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because I mean, some of them are uh are really, really quite bizarre and disturbing.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um are those sanctioned?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Are those seen as a part of the foreign policy narrative that the the Russian government is trying to send out?
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's it's hard to say because um the only other person that might make some headway in social media, um somewhere in the press, is someone like Medvedev, who really does not have a lot of power in Russia.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: He is not an inner member of the Siloviki.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um and in that regard, I think he's lar I think he almost realizes what makes him popular, what makes him infamously famous in uh social media are his bombastic statements.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, Lavrov or more so Putin have not come out and openly condemned what he says.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: They just simply say, this is his opinions, and you can kind of take them however way that they are.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I just don't see any kind of traction coming from Medvedev.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's more so he's a entertaining figure more than anything else.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: The only other person that will speak to the press as openly as this is um the press secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And she is also fluent in English.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: She runs, you know, there there are videos where she just does um press briefings that last for two hours, three hours.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I have neither the time nor the resources to translate them all.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: I usually wait for you know Lavrov to uh you know to say something.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: But she'll she'll answer the day-to-day questions.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of these are because she is lower level, you know, she's she's lower level on the uh on the political chain.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: She can say things that are a bit more scathing and a bit more sarcastic.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I uh this is something that I want to emphasize.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: When Putin says something, it's probably the most um macroanalytical.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Lavrov will be a little bit more uh specific, and then we get to the red, you know, like day-to-day rhetoric from Zakharova and full-on polemics uh from Medvedev.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: But by the time you get to Medvedev, I think it's just mostly for entertainment, you know, you know, value as well.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: I I I I translated one video about a year or so ago uh by Medvedev.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um somebody on YouTube had asked me, can you can you do this one?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I had the time to do it.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was an interesting um interesting interview, and you know it it got some traction on YouTube because of the statements uh that were made.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: But um, other than that, you're not gonna hear anything else from any of the other members of Russia's inner political circle.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: They they don't give statements, they don't talk to the press, and mostly they're just not socially engaging.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: They're they're old school bureaucrats who just do things behind the scenes.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell So turning a little bit more to the substance of what they talk about.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you you've you've mentioned about you know this this idea of a multi- a multipolar world order, and I I mean, you know, the idea of a multipolar world order is one that, you know, is has been discussed in in various circles.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And in in fact, actually, what's quite interesting is within parts of the West, you now have talk about uh, you know, middle powers working with each other, which in in in a way I guess is is a variation of this as well.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: But what are the other themes that tend to come out in this Russian narrative?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: What what you know, so it can't all be just about we want a multipolar world order.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what what how do they envisage it?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: What's the place of international law in all of this?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the multipolar framework is where Russian foreign policy can safely ensconce itself, right?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is something that is more than just my country versus the West, but it is accepting the new reality that a multipolar world is not necessarily anti-Western, but it is largely non-Western.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that is where they frame much of their specific policies and grievances against the West.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: The other part of the narrative is that Russian foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and here we can um divide this between, let's say, 1991 to roughly the mid-2000s, um, 2007, the Munich Security Conference is, I think, uh, the, you know, the real turning point.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then 2008, a number of things happen.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Kosovo unilaterally declares independence.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: The Bucharest NATO summit um not openly offers membership to Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, but it leaves the door open.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have the war in Georgia, where Russia intervenes and uh captures uh two territories.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: Prior to 07, and this is the sort of the macro narrative in all of this, Russia, both under Yeltsin and then later under Putin, wanted to cooperate with the West.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: It saw the West as the key leader for global peace and security, but it wanted the West to treat Russia not as a supplicant, but as an equal partner.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is the this is the you can agree with this, you can disagree, but this is effectively what Russia has been saying.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you will find this in almost all of the opening talks and stories that Lavrov gives, Putin gives primarily Lavrov.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost as if like he's rehashing the same themes, right, all the time.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the story is that the West never took Russia seriously.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't take Russia seriously in the 90s.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: They saw Yeltsin as a far more cooperative partner than Putin, but they saw Yeltsin as this stumbling, bumbling, lovable, but all but altogether buffoonish character that needed Western help, needed Western money.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the one of two stereotypes that the West likes to portray Russia as.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: They're either falling apart and they need our help, or they are an existential threat to Western civilization, which changed, right?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: This attitude changed when Putin comes in.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: But for much of the 2000s, Putin had engaged in the same type of conciliatory approach to the West that Yeltsin had done.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: However, with one new caveat.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Putin is not somebody that is going to embarrass himself to the West.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: He is going to re-emphasize the rhetoric that Russia can be a key partner for peace with the West in general and the United States in specific.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: But Russia is no longer the basket case that it was in the 90s.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the sooner the West realizes, and this is where the Munich Security Conference speech comes in, as soon as the West realizes that Russia and China and India and other non-Western countries are coming into their own in this new global reality, the better it will be for everybody.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, in that sense, the multipolar framework that Russia constantly uses now is a way of saying the rest of the world has gotten this message.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: We are simply waiting for the United States to recognize this as well and to join.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the more you delay, the greater the security dilemmas are going to be in various hotspots, whether it's Iran or Ukraine or Central Asia or Africa or Southeast Asia or North Korea, you know, or you know, what have you here.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, in in this sense, um, Russia's position towards the West had, it's, I so almost look at it as a jilted lover, right?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody that had wanted to work and trusted the West, um, but had been burned, had been bluffed, had been ghosted for far too long.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this comes out rather clearly when the narrative focuses on the period in Ukraine between 2014 and the outbreak of the war in 2022.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: And both Putin and Lavrov will constantly mention how the Minsk II Accords were agreed upon and signed.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And at least symbolically ratified, but never implemented.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we find out afterwards that Potoshenko, the then president of Ukraine, was reassured by the French, the Germans, and the British.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry about implementing, just stall and use the time that's necessary to, this is the narrative, build up your army, take in foreign loans, and retake the Donbass region.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: Retake the disputed region by military force.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do to Donbas what Aliyev did to Nagorno-Karabakh, what Tujman did to Kraina in 1995.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: No disputed territory, no problem.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the big statements, one of the big arguments that Putin made at the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February of 22.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, this is the video that I had translated that kind of made my channel viral for a couple of years.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's got over 3 million views.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what Putin mentions within that video, this is literally at the outbreak of the war in February.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: He calls the United States at the time an empire of lies.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's a bold statement to make, and he hasn't used it since.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: But what he is effectively saying is that the West cannot be trusted.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: The America cannot be trusted with negotiated agreements.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: They renege on things that they sign.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the same thing happened about a month or so into the war when the Ukrainians and the Russians had agreed to meet in Istanbul to negotiate a ceasefire.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: And an agreement was reached.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Putin and Lavrov will say this again all the time as well.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: In steps, then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who tells Zelensky, don't sign anything.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: You're not in a position to sign.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: Keep fighting until you can regain some more leverage and be in a better position to hold Russia accountable.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the position that we're in right now.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the narrative, also beyond multipolarism, is that the biggest antagonists towards global peace and development is the West, which still thinks that it runs the world and it operates within this framework of ideological hubris and oriental dismissiveness towards Russia and other non-Western countries.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: This sort of brings to a really important point because you, you know, you clearly having worked on this, this is a message that you hear.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, viewed from a Western angle, it would, it would be regarded rather differently.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, they, you know, many Western countries would argue, well, look, you know, we have a normative program, you know, we want to, now I know there will be a lot of people who will be listening to this who will be sort of like smirky and, you know, that's not really the truth.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is that whether whether or not you believe it with the United States or with the European Union, there is very much a sense, certainly, of normative, or they at least used to be with the United States, that it's about, you know, trying to improve human rights records, trying to improve democracy, uh, that Western countries give a huge amount of aid to many of these countries in the global south.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how much do you think Russian leaders really believe all this, uh, this anti-Westernism when they say it?
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because, as I say, I mean, you know, again, there will be a lot of skepticism towards it.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: But even if you just take developmental aid, for example, it has been the West that has provided huge amounts.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, Russia provides remarkably little uh in terms of that sort of support.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: So when they say it, is it, you know, you mentioned about a jilted lover.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is this a bit of sour grapes really that's coming more from Moscow?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Or is there something that they genuinely believe, believe all this?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's hard to say.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: It really is hard to say because as I just mentioned before, most of the rhetoric, most of the statements that you hear are going to come out of two individuals, Russia's president and its foreign minister.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: As far as the other leaders are concerned, um I'm not exactly sure whether they really believe this, whether they really care.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you're absolutely right in saying that uh the West has been far more philanthropic in developmental aid than Russia has.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Russia's uh history has always been, if it's a great power, it's an introverted great power, right?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: It looks for finding and securing um, you know, buffer zones around its areas of interest and then just living its life and cultivating uh relations with now China and India, Central Asia and others, right?
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: If Europe wants to, you know, see Russia as this uh aggressive power, well then let them.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's nothing that you know that that that can really happen here.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: But as far as what they really feel about the West is concerned, is, you know, the narrative oftentimes is meant to do just that.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: It pushes a normative framework, a normative understanding of something that is much more subjective.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: So you rightly mentioned that the West operates under this normative principle of liberalism.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what it is.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, but normative normativity is what defines much of a country's foreign policy.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: American foreign policy is almost entirely predicated on normatism as opposed to empirical realities.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the United States still has far more of a positive global image around the world, even in spite of everything that Trump has done, than what, let's say, Russia has done.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the things that I've realized that feeds into support for Russia's policies, whether it's Ukraine or Syria or playing into the larger multipolar uh world or BRICS, is because it's predicated on a counter comparison to that of the West.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like you need the West, you need Western liberalism to do what it does in order for the Lavrovs and the Putins to say, you see, you see, you see, you see.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: Without that, Russia's foreign policy looks much more self-interested and much more prone to enhancing its own security.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm not the only one who has been saying this.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, some of the most prominent voices in the West that support this narrative, people like John Miersheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, um, you know, Glenn Deesson, among others, uh, they're widely popular uh on social media, they're widely popular within YouTube for pointing out what they feel are the hypocritical double standards of Western liberalism, which still believes, they still follow the brochure narrative that, you know, we are the good guys, the West, you know, we are the good guys, that we are the ones that help out um, you know, humanitarian crises when when uh when need be.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: The problem with liberalism as a foreign policy theory is that in order for it to work, two things have to happen.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: The first is all states need to follow the same rules.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the second is that humanitarian intervention and the normative framework of, for lack of better term, giving a damn about human rights violations needs to be universal and not selective.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: So when the West cares about Ukraine, but turns blind eye and deaf ear to genocide in Palestine, this is not something that Russia capitalizes on.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: But those that follow the narrative of Russian foreign policy are going to put their own puzzle pieces together and say, well, this is what we need in order to counter the reckless and oftentimes um aggressive foreign policies coming from the West, which are far more destructive than anything that Russia is doing.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what I find in not only the comment sections on my page, but the comment sections of all the other uh individuals that I've mentioned before.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I I think it's something that all of us who engage in social media see it very often.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it it you know, regardless of, you know, these sort of people who who who take that sort of view and and things like that.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I I think um, you know, I want to talk about Ukraine a little bit more in in a second.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: But one, you know, again, one of the ideas that I I find absolutely fascinating is the way that um Russia talks about imperialism and the legacy of colonialism amongst Western countries.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: And yet uh, you know, there is this very, very strong argument to say that, you know, Russia is no less an imperial power uh traditionally, historically, as the Western Europe, you know, the Western countries.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: It has built a massive empire, which in many ways sort of is is retained in place, and yet it goes to Africa and it goes to Asia and talks about Western imperialism as it has this huge land mass, which is essentially a colonial enterprise in its own right, and it never decolonized, unlike and again, I mean, how I'm just really fascinated how they can manage to get away with this, how they can say this with a straight face about Western imperialism, uh, given that this is the reality of how Russia has emerged as a country today.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and here is where the narrative begins to not fall apart, but you can definitely see, if not some holes, you can see some loose threads.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can definitely see some loose threads in all of this.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: The idea of was Russia an imperialist power is something that is widely debated in almost every post-Soviet country out there.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: I've, as you know, um I lived in Central Asia for more than four years.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I have been, I mean, I've been to um Uzbek, I lived in Uzbekistan, I've been to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Georgia.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it is something that you know, you get comfortable enough with the locals and you talk about the Soviet legacy, and this is where it gets um a bit debated.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: As far as Russia is concerned, again, take it however way that this, take it however way that you want.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Soviet Union was not a colonial entity as far as Russia was concerned.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was a shared entity that all people experienced both hardships, sacrifice, and benefits from.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this is seen not just within Russia, but it is seen among a large group of people within these former Soviet countries.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a lot of this is from the older generation that remembers the Soviet Union, and they remember it fondly when they compare with the last 35 years of post-Soviet independence.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can chalk a lot of this up to nostalgia.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: You can also compare it with the time of troubles that almost all these countries went through in the 1990s.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: So they will remember the Soviet Union in comparison to the present period, not out of any kind of communist conviction or they love imperialism, but that it was a time when, and I hear this all the time, I got this all the time, right?
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Housing was either unbelievably affordable or completely free.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: Healthcare was free, education was available to everybody.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was the greatest amount of socioeconomic um uplifting that you know people had seen in their, you know, in their lifetimes.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um when people remember the Soviet Union, they remember the Khrushchev periods, they remember Brezhnev, they don't remember Stalin um at all.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And even though there are monuments in many of these countries to the victims of repression, primarily under Stalin, these countries are very careful in making certain that these monuments, these memorials, are neither A, anti-Russian or B, anti-Soviet, because, first of all, Moscow is going to get wind of this and they're going to, you know, mention something.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: But two, what's also interesting to point out is that while some people may say, yes, we suffered in the 30s, the 20s, and the 30s, and you know, in Uzbekistan is a great example of all of this.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the idea that the Soviet Union under Lenin had sort of passively accepted the autonomy of the so-called Jadid movement.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, these were a bunch of religious scholars and intellectuals that somehow were trying to find a way of balancing um Islam with the egalitarianism of Islam, with the egalitarianism of communism, of Bolshevism.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then Lenin dies and Stalin comes in and just wipes everyone and everything out.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's going to be this memory of the repression under Stalin, and yet people will still remember the Soviet Union as more positive than negative.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is the narrative, right?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: Again, we're constantly circling back to this whole role of narrative, to which if there is any opportunity for Putin or more so Lavrov to say, well, how do you compare your own colonial history with that of the French or the um or the British?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: They will respond by saying, we were never exploitative, we never went into foreign countries and uh tried to convert the population.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: We never subjugated them to um any form of specific repression.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, there's going to be responses from various circles in Ukraine, in Georgia, um, in Central Asia of saying, well, this is that there is some heavy, heavy selective memory that comes out of this as well.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: One slight get out of jail card that's used to counter this narrative is that those that come up with the, you know, like the holodomor within Ukraine or the uh the suppression of the Basmachi uh rebellion in Central Asia are usually voiced and propagated by nationalists within the country who have you know dubious political alignments, are anti-Soviets, um, are anti-uh memory.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can kind of discredit it.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you can discredit the messenger, but the actual events are part of this larger Soviet history.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: But then again, this is why narrative is so important, because it takes selective elements from the past and creates a, you know, a coherent and convincing argument that people will follow.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: And look, James, most of the time when we talk about the role of narrative, this is what people will uh mistake history for.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes when people say, if you knew your history the right way, you would know this.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: More often than not, whenever I hear someone tell me if I knew my country's history, I'm like, all right, let me hear the narrative.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let me hear what you have to say.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, there's nothing inherently wrong with using a narrative.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a way for all of us to make sense of connecting the present to the past.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: But a narrative is going to invariably validate certain things that you want validated, downplay things that you don't want brought up, or completely invalidate the stuff that you want invalidated.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: That brings us very neatly on to the next part of the conversation, which would be to talk about Ukraine.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: And um we hear so much from the the Russian narrative uh that it was all about how uh NATO enlargement sort of led to all of this, and this uh, you know, this this comes out very strongly.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, one would argue that that's a very selective view of history.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you see that selectivity coming out?
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, are what are the elements that that Russian leadership conveniently forgets in how they tell the story of where we are now in Ukraine?
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'll point out the elements of the narrative that they have completely on their side.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then I'll point out the things where these validations fall short.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: The justification for intervening in Ukraine, and I want to use the word intervene right now before I say invade.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna just say intervene just to be deliberately neutral right now.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: The explanation is that Russia had attempted to negotiate with NATO for years, if not against NATO's continued existence, but against its continued expansion.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you will hear from both Putin and Lavrov when they ever whenever they have an opportunity, they will bring up this one scenario shortly around the time that the Soviet Union under Gorbachev agreed to the unification of Germany.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we're talking 1990.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the the story is that Gorbachev had conferred with then U.S.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: Secretary of State, James Baker, that Russia, Soviet Union, will agree to Germany's unification, which basically meant that the German Democratic Republic is null and void, and that the East German territories would not only become part of Germany, West Germany, whatever, but they would join the European Union, they would join NATO.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the sticking point was that the Soviet Union would agree to this if NATO agreed not to move, and this is the you know famous quote, not one inch further to the east.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Apparently, right, this was agreed upon by the United States, and apparently by some members of NATO, to which years later NATO expands, right?
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: It takes Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, then eventually the Baltic states, to which Russia replies and says, Well, wait a minute, wait a minute.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't you agree not to move one further inch to the East?
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: To which the Western response was a combination of either we never said that, to we left the text message on red.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we're just not going to respond to all of this.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: It took the Russian foreign ministry a couple of years to dig up the documents that ultimately said this, to which they now have, we have an agreement here with NATO not to expand eastward.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, right there is seen as a breach in trust and cooperation.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then a couple of years later, and this is on one of the videos that I translated, and it was something that almost came up unexpectedly.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: I forget when this was, but it was Putin talking about this.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: And whenever Putin says something to the effect of, he almost goes off cue and he says, I want to share something with you now that I haven't said beforehand.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know that this is going to be a hot take.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the story that he gives is it was December of 2000.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: So Putin had just become president within that year.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: And Clinton was, Bill Clinton was in really the twilight of his presidency.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I forget where exactly this was.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was, it could have been a it could have been a NATO summit, it could have been a secure, whatever it happened to have been.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Putin had said to Clinton, almost like uh ad hoc, he said, What do you think about Russia joining NATO?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: NATO's going to continue to expand.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why not include Russia?
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: We'd be happy to join NATO.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine the security organization that would form if we have everything from the United States all the way to Vladivostok?
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: And according to the story, Clinton was like, you know, it's interesting.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: Let me, you know, I can't give you an answer up or down now.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let me get back to you on that.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so he went to ostensibly confer with other, you know, Western heads of state and members of NATO, you know, administration.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and whether it was the same day or a couple of days later, the response back was NATO was like, no, we don't think that that's a good idea.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to do that.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: So what Russia gets from this interpretation is that NATO's NATO, according to NATO, NATO does not expand.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: NATO accepts membership of countries that want to join.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is the narrative, this is the rhetoric that is coming from NATO, right?
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: They will say we don't expand, we don't force membership on other countries, but we are not going to openly deny.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Membership to those countries in the east that want to join us.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: So hence the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: But for whatever strange reason, we stop at the Russian border.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll take we we will accept membership from everybody except Russia.
• 44:21
  unknown: Right?
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Ukraine?
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: Moldova?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: Georgia, no problem.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: Armenia, why not?
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if we're going to look at Armenia at some point, why not Azerbaijan?
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm fairly certain that there will be attempts at weaning Belarus away from Russia as soon as Lukashenko is out of power.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: But what this is seen by in Russia is an encirclement.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: And they're trying to tell NATO, again, believe it however way that you want, they've been trying to tell NATO that this creates a security dilemma for us.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: NATO's response is we have no intention of openly going to war with Russia.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: But if Russia sees us as a threat, we're going to see that perception as a threat.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like the equivalent of if I walk into a room with an audience and I start waving around a gun in my hand, and everybody starts getting really intimidated and uncomfortable.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I say to them, Well, what do you have to worry about?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: I have no I have no intention of shooting you, but I've got a gun in my hand, you know, so you're obviously going to get defensive.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: So Russia's response to NATO's, I have to say, quite careless uh take on all of this has contributed to this security dilemma, to which this is where Russia justifies its intervention in Ukraine, starting with 2014 and then leading up to the so-called special military operation.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, with all of that said, with all of that said, that still does not get Russia off the hook for not just invading another country, but the real sticking point is annexing territory from another country.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so all of the rhetoric, all of the arguments, all of the, you know, what ifs, and we didn't take this in, and we didn't take that in, is in the West out the door the minute that another country starts chipping away at the territory of another country.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because for us in the West, this is Hitler invades Poland, Hitler invades Czechoslovakia, take territory, annex it towards Russia, right?
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: And when Russia begins to not only seize territory, but annex parts of Ukraine that it has not yet controlled, then it is very easy in Western media to just simply look at Russia as saying, well, your rhetoric is one thing, but your actions are something entirely different.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so in this case, you're just nothing more than an expansionist state that is um doing, you know, doing what you're doing at the direct expense of another country.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: And who's to stop you from completely annexing Belarus once uh Lukashenko is out of power?
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the narratives just kind of write themselves.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, I before I before I turn it over to you, I'm like, in my opinion, right, I mean, you know, I can look at Russia's grievances against NATO and say they are completely justified.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: You can definitely look at it.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: But does that give you the green light to literally carve up another country?
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you really wanted to make your uh position on Ukraine with NATO known, there are far better ways of doing it than what you are currently doing.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I I mean, I think coming back to the central theme of our discussion of how Russians uh present foreign policy, I think this is incredibly important because uh clearly the idea of sovereignty uh is central in a multipolar world order.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's about saying countries need to have that sovereignty respected.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: And yet you can see very clearly how Ukraine and even the discussion about NATO enlargement fundamentally undermines that Russian argument about sovereignty.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, for example, um, you know, I I worked a lot on the Balkans, and you know, most Balkan states now are members of NATO.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, there are obvious examples that Bosnia can't get in because uh the divisions within the country, Serbia has very, very deep-rooted antipathy towards NATO because of 1999, Kosovo because of its disputed status amongst certain NATO members.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um but in having spoken over the years with policymakers, it's very clear that point that no one has ever said to me they felt pressured to join NATO.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think that this is an interesting argument that comes out.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, are Russian leaders ever put on the spot about this and sort of said, look, you know, this is ultimately a sovereign decision for these countries?
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: If they want to join, then surely they must be allowed to.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: And put that in a broader context.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, Russia has its own security network of states.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the argument is that if ever those countries have wanted to join and be closer to Moscow, then the West has simply sort of shrugged and said, okay, that's your choice to do so.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think the other argument, which is it would be interesting to hear how Russian leaders tend to respond, is the argument about.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: So what you will often hear from people is the idea that somehow because there was a Russian-speaking community in Ukraine, that they have a right of self-determination, and Russia obviously has a right to sort of step in to protect their interests.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: But then again, uh, you know, the counter-argument to that is, but what about the minorities in Russia that might not want to be part of Russia?
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: Do they have a right to self-determination to break away in the same way that you argue that Russians who aren't protected by home states have a right to do it?
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: Are Russian leaders ever put on the spot about these obvious contradictions to their arguments?
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: And if so, how how do they respond to this?
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: Lavrov is usually the one that takes most of the heat for this.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, Putin will insulate himself from this um or he'll deflect.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: But Lavrov is the one that offers, well, you can say that it's the most convincing.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: It he offers a response, right?
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: He offers a response.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, this question, this issue right here is enough for an entire video on its own.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, so let me uh uh sort of think here about, okay, so as far as NATO membership is concerned, um it's never put to a public referendum, right?
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is more or less a decision by political actors within the country.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the decision for much of Central Europe to join NATO in the 90s had a lot to do with the under, well, first of all, it's the 90s.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, where is Russia?
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: What is Russia?
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: The future is Europe.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's no question about that.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the second part is that Eastern Europe wants to join, wants to return to Europe.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what is Europe?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: At least institutionally, it's two things, the European Union and it's NATO.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: And while it is not a requirement to be a member of NATO in order to join the European Union, one can get into NATO easier and faster than the European Union.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's sort of seen as like a halfway mark.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you can get into NATO, you're already doing your job getting into the European Union.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: So why not?
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's a double layer of protection.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's security and it's economics.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's not considered to be anti-Russian or pro-Western.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's, I mean, for a country, for countries as small as the Baltics, it's strategic.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's absolutely necessary.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: For Poland, for Hungary, for Czechoslovakia, it's a sign of good branding because we are now part of the European community of states.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, for the most part, sure, Russia might grumble for NATO's expansion within Central Europe.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_00: But when it comes to countries of the former Soviet Union, this is where they draw the red line.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: And what has become more apparent, especially with, let's say, Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, is that the EU's luster has widely declined since the golden age of the 90s and the early 2000s.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: And NATO is now clearly seen as a pro-Western, anti-non-Western organization that if the population doesn't care, certain political opportunists within the country are going to want to be in power and make that decision to join NATO.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: How many Montenegrins really wanted to join NATO?
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: But Montenegro is a part of uh NATO.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_00: How many Montenegrins truly wanted to recognize the independence of Kosovo?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_00: Probably even less than joining NATO.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: But yet the decision was made.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: Montenegro recognizes Dukanovich recognizes Kosovo, and as a result, it gets his country far faster into NATO and probably is uh more likely to get into the EU before Serbia.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: That is, if the EU uh does it country, you know, by country.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: So in that sense, it is a decision, it's a sovereign decision-making um entity by these leaders.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: We see this also more recently with um Armenia's decision under Pashignan, very interesting character, to on one level first give up any and all claims to Nagono-Karabakh, recognizing that Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then after losing Karabakh, stating that Armenia wants to move away from Russia's sphere of influence, possibly leave CTSO, maybe join the European Union.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: Lavarov's statement on all of this at this point is, you know, UBU.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: You want to do that, go right ahead.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you're probably going to lose whatever elements of sovereign independence that you, you know, already have.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't see how EU membership can be offered to you before it's offered to Georgia.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't see how you're going to get into NATO, um, even though, you know, that's just you know popular.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't see how you're gonna get into the EU if Turkey hasn't gotten into the EU first.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: So on that level, when there's a bit more confidence that this is a pipe dream, they, you know, kind of step back.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the more interesting issue, and that's the issue of self-determination that Russia talks about, right?
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_00: And here is where I find the narrative falls apart the most.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't fall apart completely, but there's lots of caveats in all of this.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: Russia's position on the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine assumes that all Russian speakers in Ukraine, A, identify as Russian, and B, are more loyal to the Russian state than the Ukrainian state.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: Historically speaking, throughout most of Ukraine's post-Soviet 30 years, I mean, Ukraine has been a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic state in which the Russian language was more widely spoken than Ukrainian.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's a fact.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, every major city in Ukraine outside of Lviv had a Russian-speaking majority.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_00: But that does not make them Russian.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_00: There are a number of Ukrainians who speak Russian as their primary language, but they identify as Ukrainian.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: Ukraine is their home, regardless of where Crimea might have been in 1954 or not.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, there are those that speak Russian and identify as Russian.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to get more of those, you know, specifically in Crimea and within the Donbass region.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: But elsewhere, the identity is much more fluid.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: Putin has said repeatedly for years that one of the biggest tragedies of the collapse of the Soviet Union is that Russians find the 25 million Russians woke up and found themselves in a country that they didn't ask for.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that doesn't imply that they're being harassed.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't imply that they're being assimilated, but it shows that they are now minority communities in many of these countries.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as these countries, and this is key, as long as these countries, according to Russia, treat them as inclusive members of that state, if the Russian language is seen as, if not official, it is seen as one of the main languages of commerce, of education, of business, that's all fine and good.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: You want to get rid of your Lenin statues, you want to rename streets that were previously named after Stalin or Zhezinski, go ahead.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: But the minute that you start dismantling monuments to the Red Army or statues to Yuri Gagarin or Pushkin, this is now seen as an attempt at de-Russifying the country.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_00: So again, this is not a justification for intervening in Ukraine, but it's a way of explaining how Russia views itself as some kind of responsible caretaker for the Russian-speaking people within the former Soviet Union.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the question of self-determination, and this is a tricky one because they will make the argument that if the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine no longer wants to live in Ukraine, then by self-determination, by something written down in the UN Charter, which Lavrov will quote chapter and verse when he wants to.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_00: He will always point to, right?
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sort of this ambiguity of the UN Charter on one point talks about the sanctity of borders.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: We don't change borders around, but self-determination is also probably the one thing that might challenge the sanctity of those borders.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so if the state has proven itself to be unable, unwilling, or incapable of meeting the needs of those minorities, then they have a right to choose where they want to live.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine has been subjected to years of derusification, Ukrainianization, de-Sovietization, then if they feel like they are foreigners in their own country, well, then perhaps something needs to be done about that.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: To the question about minorities within Russia, okay?
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because this opens up, this is the thing.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: The minute you start talking about normative policies, someone's going to say, okay, let's not make this selective, let's make this universal.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_00: How many Tatars want to live in Russia?
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: How many Chechens want to live in Russia?
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: So they have to be very careful on this.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: And at least historically, at least rhetorically speaking, this is something that both Putin and Lavrov, but more so Putin, is limited.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: He cannot be pushing Russian ethno-nationalism in Russia.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: He can't.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's that that is that's suicide.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: You absolutely have to push the idea that Russia is multireligious, multi-linguistic, multicultural, and has a mixed history.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: And all of these groups share a couple of legs, one of which is the Soviet Union, which is why the Soviet Union is such an important symbol within that narrative.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter whether you're Russian or Tatar or Kalmyk or Siberian or Chechen or Dagestani, we share this narrative, the Soviet narrative.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as you are a as long as Russia lets them do their thing, worship in their places of worship, you know, have their local media in their own language, all is good.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: But that also raises another issue when it comes to the Balkans, because Russia will talk about Putin and Lavrov, will constantly talk about Kosovo.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: They will use Kosovo as a precedence.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a very strange precedent, a very, very strange precedent, because on one level, they will point out the hypocrisy of the West, condemning Russia for going in and changing around another country's border, whether it's Abkhazia, South Ossetia, the Donbass region, Crimea, to which they will say, Well, you did the same thing in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999, and you um allowed them to unilaterally declare independence in 2008.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_00: The next thing that they will say is that at least in Crimea and the four oblasts, Donbas, Lugansk, Zaporozhia, and um Herson, there was a referendum.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: There was a referendum that the people had voted on, and there was no referendum in Kosovo.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you and I, James, we both know that if there was a referendum on independence for Kosovo in 1999 and 2008, I mean, the Albanians would overwhelmingly vote for it.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's no question about that whatsoever.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: And more to the point, if there's going to be a referendum on secession, this is something that's not brought up by either the West or in Russia.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: The two countries that successfully broke away from a larger country, South Sudan in 2011 and Montenegro in 2005.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: In South Sudan, there was a referendum, and the host country recognized the results of that.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: The same thing with Montenegro.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: Belgrade recognized the validity of that referendum, which is why those two territorial entities got into the UN in less than a month after the referendum.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: So there's more to it than just simply having a referendum.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: There were referendums in Crimea, the other four, and Kiev said we will not recognize.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: There was a referendum on independence in Catalonia.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_00: You might remember this, right?
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: Catalonia tried to become independent and they lasted for about 72 hours, right?
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: No country recognized them.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: Madrid said we will absolutely not recognize the results of this.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so case closed.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you want to talk about international law.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: If the host country agrees with the results, so be it.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_00: But if not, the host country still retains the advantage of the, which is why Kosovo remains disputed even to this very day.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: Michael, I realize, you know, we're we're running out of time.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I think I've got two questions, one very specific and one a sort of broader question.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: The first is, um, given everything that's happened with Ukraine, given the way that relations uh between Russia and the West have so fundamentally broken down, um, is there where do you see Russian decision makers viewing the future of that relationship and on what terms?
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh do they see that there is a way back for a closer relationship with with the West, with Europe, uh, or do they feel that this is now there is a fundamental break in that relationship?
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it depends on what Mood Putin's in that day.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when he is more calm and collect, he will always say that Russia never expelled any European diplomatic attaches, they never uh revoked the licenses of any press, um, they can continue to report in Russia, unlike what Europe has done uh to you know their own Russian counterparts.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: Lavrov says the same thing.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: When Putin talks more and more about the constant betrayal that he feels that Europe has given Russia, or the idea that they, you know, were involved in blowing up Nord Stream or continues to um put sanctions on Russia, he kind of gets a bit more pessimistic and he says, I mean, I don't see any short-term solution to any of this.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes both will get even dismissive by saying, who cares?
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_00: Europe is irrelevant.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: Europe is now entering legacy, period.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_00: The only country that ultimately matters is the United States.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and if Europe wants to go along with it, we will certainly pick up the phone if they call.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: But we have more important things to do in the rest of Eurasia, uh, in Africa, and in the rest of the global south.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think as a final question, I mean, you you you've spent all this time looking at how Putin and Lavrov and certain other individuals from time to time frame Russian foreign policy.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_01: What would you say that having over the period that you've been doing this, uh what have you broadly come to understand about Russian foreign policy that perhaps you weren't quite as aware of uh when you started?
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the the tied to that, the other question is how do we it look, however one feels about what Russia has done, I think it's important to understand how.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: How it understands the world, because I I, you know, there's one very important dictum that I think we all need to bear in mind when doing any sort of analysis, policy analysis, especially foreign policy analysis, is that what people perceive to be real is real and its consequences, as they say, which means ultimately it's not objective reality that shapes how countries react.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's how they perceive that reality which drives their particular policies, the steps that they take.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to understand that worldview.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I think then, how do we navigate between understanding a Russian worldview and accepting a Russian framing of events?
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's it's it's a fundamental difference.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_01: We can say, listen, we need to understand how the Russians view this world, but we don't have to buy in to the way that they're ex their explanatory frameworks of what they've been doing, for example, in Ukraine.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think that Russia's biggest ace in the hole in this entire time has been that it is much more honest than dubious.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's much more honest.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_00: They will frame the the world, they will frame the what they feel is the double standards, the aggressive attitude by the West, the the Orientalist hubris uh that the West lends towards everybody outside the so-called garden, you know, in Europe.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they will play into, as far as their audience is concerned, they will play into preset grievances, prejudices, and um a sense of just feeling like they are less important.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_00: I want to bring this other thing up because I think that this feeds a lot into the sense of Russian public opinion, like actual, honest, normal Russian public opinion.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_00: When Putin announced a partial military mobilization a year within the launch of the war, I know so many people in Russia that were passive in all of this and decided they were going to buy themselves a one-way ticket out of the country.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_00: They did not want to get enlisted.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_00: They said they did not want to go and fight for another, they did not want to fight and die in another country.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_00: The biggest problem is that most of these Russians wanted to go to Europe and Europe rejected them.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_00: Europe rejected all, almost all of them.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_00: They rejected them simply because of their passports.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_00: So where did they go?
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_00: They went to Central Asia, they went to the Caucasus, they went to Belarus, they went wherever they could.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_00: They went to Serbia.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: Belgrade was one of the few places that actually welcomed them.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that the West this, I think the West completely squandered a golden opportunity of providing an alternative to the narrative that is coming from the Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the West is indifferent and anti-Russian, russophobic.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_00: They will bring any Ukrainian in, but leave every Russian out, um, adds to that sense of Russia being right.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because as I said before, their narrative is predicated on the West continuing to do what the West does best, and that is look at the non-West as either one of two things, either weak and incapable of doing anything, or an existential threat to world civilization.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_00: So, in that regard, the idea of being able to read Russia right is what we have discussed today.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_00: It, as I said, it doesn't get them off the hook and it doesn't make them morally correct in what they've done.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_00: But what it also shows us is that, and we had this conversation a number of months ago, where we guessed, is Russia a great power?
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Is Russia a great power?
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I had said, yes, I consider Russia to be a great power.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_00: You uh differed in all of that, in which I qualified my answer by saying, well, it's not a great, it's not as great of a power as the United States or China is.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_00: But a great power, by that definition, is one which operates foreign policy-wise, economic-wise, political-wise.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_00: They might have a rationale for doing what they're doing, but they also know that they're going to be um opposed, that they're not going to be seen as popular in some parts of the world.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: They don't care, right?
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_00: They don't care.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_00: They can get away with it.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Great powers can do things and get away with them and still remain great powers.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Smaller powers cannot afford to do that.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So if Putin decided in early 22 that a military intervention in Ukraine with full territorial capture and annexation was the best way forward, whether he, Lavrov, or anybody else thought that this would get wide scale, first of all, not only would this get wide-scale condemnation, but it would make a negotiated settlement with Ukraine all but impossible.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_00: All but impossible.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, I'm I'm no fan of EU's of the EU's leadership.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the one thing that I think drives them for what they are is that if they make a deal with Russia right now, they're going to have to recognize that Ukraine has lost 20% of its territory.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And if they agree to that, that opens up the floodgate to so many other uh potential scenarios.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Kosovo, notwithstanding, I mean, I really would not look at Kosovo as a as a positive example of what could be done.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um and maybe, just maybe, I don't have the answer to this.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe this was a way of making Ukraine a frozen conflict.
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because if, let's say, Putin had decided to send in the military to occupy the Donbass region that was in dispute and keep the full-on military there, which would force Zelensky to implement the Minsk II Accords, I'm fairly certain that a far larger number of European leaders would be pressuring Kiev to make that deal and say, you know what, give up Crimea.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's done, it's gone, you know, whatever.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And allow Donbass to have the autonomous status that it was, case closed, right?
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_00: But the minute that you start taking city after city, town after town, it may the West is in a position where they either A, realize that they were wrong and read Russia wrong, or B, continue this fight unless there is some Hail Mary movement where fortunes are reversed and somehow Ukraine regains the military initiative.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I just don't see that um anytime soon.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that this is the one thing that Putin knows is that he has the long-term advantage.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_00: And as far as he's concerned, let the criticism from the West continue.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_00: He's not going to pay attention.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as he has um two of, you know, two back doors open to China and to India, Russia will survive.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Michael, thank you very, very much.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I you know, I I think it's, you know, it's been a fascinating discussion on all sorts of levels.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think it is important to say that um to to understand the the what Russian world view without, as I say, accepting the Russian framing of events, because I I think it is clearly very, very problematic.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but I think it, you know, it's been fabulous talking to you.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you have done all this work to look into how Russian leaders uh talk about foreign policy, and I think it it is incredibly valuable.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, I'll put a link to your channel uh in in the description.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's always a pleasure, James.
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, let's do this uh more often.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for listening.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_01: If you've enjoyed this episode, I'd be grateful if you considered following, sharing, rating, or leaving a review wherever you get your podcasts.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_01: It makes a real difference and helps me to grow and invite new experts.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_01: And if you'd like to join a lively membership of international relations enthusiasts, head on over to my Patreon or YouTube channel where you'll find additional video essays, polls, monthly QA's, as well as thoughtful commentary that continues the conversation.
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'll put the links in the show notes below.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_01: Many thanks again for joining me and catch you in the next episode.