Lynn Thoman

Ep 313: Putin’s Real Enemy Isn’t Ukraine

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Lynn Thoman: Most wars are mostly about territory. This one may not be. For four years we've measured this war by the miles gained, the cities captured, the missiles fired.

But what if we've been measuring the wrong thing?

Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Thoman and this is 3 Takeaways. On 3 Takeaways I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better.

Today I'm delighted to be with Anne Applebaum. Anne is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, writer at The Atlantic, and the author of Autocracy, Inc. For decades she has reported from Eastern Europe and studied Russia, Ukraine, and authoritarian regimes.

Anne, welcome to 3 Takeaways.

Anne Applebaum: Thanks for having me.

Lynn Thoman: Most people think that Putin invaded Ukraine to conquer territory. You've argued he wanted the territory but he was also trying to stop something much bigger. What was he really trying to prevent?

Anne Applebaum: I actually believe this is not really a war about territory at all. When Putin invaded Ukraine, he had at least two other motives. One of his motives was to assure his own place in history, to rebuild the Soviet Empire or the Russian Empire.

Ukraine had been at different times a part of both. He wanted to expand the borders of Russia and give it more geopolitical heft and thought that's how he would then be remembered in the centuries to come. I think he was also seeking to prevent the democratization of Russia following the same path as the democratization of Ukraine.

If you look at when this war really began, which is in 2014, it came right after a big series of demonstrations in Ukraine that resulted in the president fleeing the country and a change of government. You had a popular demonstration calling for anti-corruption, for an end to oligarchy, for more fair elections, for a more fair economy. That led to a really revolutionary change in the nature of the Ukrainian government.

This is exactly the kind of revolution that Putin is most afraid of at home. He's somebody who runs a profoundly corrupt political system. He controls the media.

He controls the courts. He controls, one way or another, much of the economy. He would be very much afraid that a grassroots, ground-up revolution, like the kind you saw in Ukraine, could affect Russia as well.

He thinks of this very much as re-establishing a Russian sphere of influence, a Russian Empire, but also re-establishing a realm of autocracy, a realm of dictatorship, and thereby ensuring his own power and his own political system.

Lynn Thoman: Putin and almost everyone else expected Kyiv to fall within days. Looking back, what was the single biggest thing we all misunderstood about Ukraine?

Anne Applebaum: People misunderstood the resilience of the Ukrainian military and of Ukrainian society. I think because Ukraine was for so many years part of the Soviet Union, in the living memory of many people, and of course many analysts and people who study that region, the differentness of Ukraine and the uniqueness of Ukraine was somehow hidden. There are people who went on believing the Ukrainians were just different Russians.

They were Russian, but somehow were spoken some kind of dialect. Actually, the Ukrainians have a clear sense of national identity. It's profoundly connected to the idea of democracy and of a grassroots kind of ground-up society as opposed to a top-down autocratic one.

And the Ukrainians were not willing to allow their country to be Russianized and therefore to become an autocracy like Russia. You had this whole-of-society response in the early days. I think in addition to that, people missed the fact that the Ukrainian army had been fighting Russia since 2014.

They were experienced. They knew how to maneuver and how to use weapons. They were good at improvisation, and they were able to very quickly defeat a Russian army that was also unprepared for the scale of battle in this kind of war.

Lynn Thoman: People often assume that dictatorships are stronger because one person can make decisions quickly. Has this war challenged that assumption?

Anne Applebaum: First of all, it's an incorrect assumption. Most dictatorships are much poorer than most democracies. The autocratic world is, with some exceptions, much poorer than the democratic world.

And autocracies that have done better in recent years are ones that allowed either their business community to have more freedom or are ones that take into account public opinion in different ways. It's true that dictators can make fast decisions, but they also make them without the consent of other groups, without building consensus, without bringing in society, without necessarily creating the momentum for real change. And so very often, dictators can make decisions, but in order for those decisions to be carried out and to have impact, you need a lot more than one person.

There is a myth that many of us have that if there was only a unified government or one person, that it would be a lot easier to run a war or run a society. But actually, both this war and the Second World War and many other wars in recent history show that that's not the case.

Lynn Thoman: Yeah, that's so interesting to me. Four years ago, many of the people building Ukraine's most advanced military technology were architects, software engineers, bankers, and entrepreneurs. And today, they're reinventing modern warfare.

How did that happen?

Anne Applebaum: This is a great story. I actually watched this happen because I've been going to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began in 2022. And I know some of those people who were doing other jobs and very quickly realized that in order to win this war, they would need to fight asymmetrically.

They also quickly saw that the quantity of stuff that the Russians had, artillery, ammunition, tanks, planes, was always going to be greater than the amount of weaponry they had and that they would be able to get pretty reluctant Americans and Europeans to give them. And this was true even in the phase when Americans believed they were doing so much to aid Ukraine. Actually, much of what they were doing was sending old weapons that the Ukrainians would then rework or rebuild and use in some other way.

Not to downplay the significance of that moment, because of course, particularly in the first year of the war, American help was very important. But Ukrainians pretty much quickly saw that that wasn't going to win the war and that in order to win the war, their technology was going to have to be better. And what they focused on was the creation of what we will now remember as modern drone warfare.

The use of drones for surveillance as kamikaze drones to attack other objects, as interceptor drones to take down Russian drones and Russian planes, as sea drones, drones that can hit ships. And essentially, they pushed the Russian Navy out of their part of the Black Sea altogether. And as I said, what they did was using drones, they substituted for the things that they didn't have, and they were able to counter Russia's greater technology.

And the lessons from this war are already being learned all over the war. We can already see them at work in the war in the Middle East, in the Gulf. We will eventually see this kind of warfare almost everywhere.

And so you had the proliferation of dozens and dozens of companies, some small, some are now quite big, making this new kind of equipment. It's changed this war, and it will change all wars.

Lynn Thoman: You've met soldiers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and ordinary families throughout Ukraine. Is there one person whose story captures what this war is really about?

Anne Applebaum: Maybe I'll mention a woman who was, before the war, an architect. She was actually, she had a small company that did casting for big architectural sculptures. She was interested in public monuments.

And she had learned about that, and that's what she was working on. And she's one of the people who, pretty soon after the invasion, asked herself, what am I doing here? Am I really Ukrainian?

Do I believe in this country? Am I going to stay here? And if I am going to stay here, what can I do?

And she began to work together with a couple of people she'd known before the war, and they converted her company into a drone production company. This is now one of the highest tech drone production companies in the country. It makes not just drones, but big drones.

I mean, they're the size of small airplanes that can fly quite far. These are the drones that are hitting oil refineries very deep into Russia. They've designed Ukraine's first cruise missiles, and they're in the course of creating Ukraine's first ballistic missiles.

I've heard her tell this story herself, who didn't take politics that seriously, wasn't especially patriotic, but was so moved by the scale of the invasion and the need to protect the culture that she had taken for granted that she shifted her career, and she remade herself, and she remade this factory into a cutting-edge, pretty extraordinary business. I was in it a few months ago. When you go through it, and you can be told at every step of the way, this is a brand new technology, we invented this, we're making our own electricity systems, and we're using Ukrainian manicurists because they're very good at manipulating small wires, then you have a sense of how much the country has changed and how many different people have been part of that change.

Lynn Thoman: That really gives a sense of what's happened in the country. That's a wonderful story. Headlines make wars look like a scoreboard.

You've said Russia isn't winning and Ukraine isn't losing. Explain what most of us are missing.

Anne Applebaum: I think from the beginning of the war, there has been this assumption all along that Russia would win because Russia is so much larger. And the Russians themselves have had that assumption. And this is, of course, what Putin has been telling his own people and telling his own security services.

Just hold on, we're going to win. We're now more than four and a half years into this conflict, and he's not winning. The front line is now essentially stalled.

The front line looks like a sort of 20 mile wide, maybe a bit longer, a bit wider zone in which everyone and everything that goes into it is instantly visible to drones. And so any Russian attack is very quickly stopped by Ukrainian drones because everything can be seen. They're long range drone program began to expand a few months ago, and Ukraine is now able to hit Russian oil refineries, Russian warehouses.

They're able to do real damage to the Russian economy. Russia is now importing diesel fuel, for example. Russia is not able to produce enough gasoline for people's cars inside Russia.

It's cut quite a lot of its exports. It's losing money, but the effects are also being felt by ordinary Russians in a way that they weren't earlier on in the war. All these things are shifting perceptions inside Russia and inside Europe and elsewhere.

And Ukraine is not winning in the sense that Ukraine is not taking back territory or not much. Sometimes they do take bits of land back, but they're not losing. You know, the society is not defeated.

The drone industry is stronger than ever. Actually, Ukrainian democracy even works in a strange way. I mean, they do have martial law and they have a wartime system and they can't hold elections normally because they don't have a technical way to do that during bombardments.

But the Ukrainians have managed to keep their country functioning and they do suffer from nighttime attacks on civilian targets. This is the big difference between the two sides. The Russians are hitting power plants and civilian infrastructure inside Ukraine.

Ukraine does lack anti-missile and air defense systems that would help defend against this. But nevertheless, the Russians haven't managed to create anything like a mood to surrender or anything like a sense of people giving up. Remember this war began in February of 2022.

You didn't have a quick fall of Ukraine, which is what the Russians predicted. But also you haven't had, even over the very long term, you haven't had the expected deterioration and decline and the automatic victory of the winner. So the war will definitely upend people's understanding of how wars are fought and how you estimate who is a stronger and who's a weaker partner.

So winning here is not just on the battlefield. Winning is not just on the battlefield. This is also a war of perceptions.

Remember that this is a war that is over when the Russians stop. The Russians could end the war tomorrow by saying we're going home or even we're freezing the war on the current lines. And the president of Ukraine has said multiple times that he would accept a ceasefire along the current lines.

And so the war is over when the Russians stop fighting. And what will convince them to stop fighting sooner or later is the understanding that they can't win. So this is in many senses a familiar kind of war.

It's a colonial war. It's a war of one country seeking to take back its former colony and the colony wanting to retain independence. Usually in colonial wars, there comes a point when people in the capital city say this just isn't worth it anymore.

You know, we don't need this extra country. We don't need this colony. The sooner we can get to that moment in Russia, then the sooner the war will be over.

What you're watching the Ukrainians do now is try to change perceptions of the war both outside the country, but also, of course, inside Russia. Inevitability, this idea that Russia will inevitably win. This is what the Ukrainians are chipping away at, both through drone warfare on the front line, but also through this campaign of hitting targets deep inside Russia.

Lynn Thoman: Putin has built much of his leadership around himself as a powerful leader and his talk about bringing back Russia's glory days. Yet this year, he sought a temporary ceasefire around Victory Day because Ukrainian drones threatened Moscow and his military parade. Tell us about that moment and what it revealed.

Anne Applebaum: It was a very shocking, strange moment. So this is a parade that Putin revived, which is a parade that celebrates the Russian victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War. And for this parade, they have soldiers marching in Soviet uniforms, carrying Soviet flags.

The parade is meant to evoke this nostalgia for the imperial moment, really, the moment when Stalin occupied half of Europe and Russia was one of the great victors in the Second World War. And the fact that this year they had to cut the parade, they made it much smaller than in the past. They didn't have a lot of weaponry available.

And Putin was clearly paranoid about the idea that the Ukrainians might disrupt the parade. Clearly, he knows that this is possible. Of course, the Ukrainians have struck targets in Moscow.

They struck refinery in Moscow and other targets. And so he was so paranoid about this that, as I said, he shrunk the size of the parade. He was clearly very nervous while it was going on.

And he asked for a temporary ceasefire during this parade, which the Ukrainians gave him. This is telegraphing a kind of weakness and a kind of panic that we hadn't seen him display in public anymore. So this felt to a lot of people like a turning point, at least inside Russia.

It's a moment when the propaganda of inevitability, of victory, and of course we'll win, we're bigger, we're stronger, we're powerful, we're an important country, Ukraine is nothing, all that language suddenly looked empty. And Russians could see that the stories that they'd been told over the last four years just weren't true. That's such a striking image that the stories he's been telling them are proven to be not true.

And I should add, when you look at the history of the Soviet Union and why the Soviet Union fell, the Soviet Union also fell because the propaganda of the system conflicted with reality. The propaganda of abundance and success and wealth conflicted with what Russians and others in the Soviet system were experiencing. So we know from the past that this is a way that dictatorships break, when people can see that the emperor has no clothes.

Lynn Thoman: You've spent decades studying authoritarian leaders. Has covering this war changed how you think about democracies?

Anne Applebaum: It shows both the power of Ukrainian democracy, which many doubted, and it also shows, as we've discussed, the ways in which a democratic system is more resilient. It's more flexible. This proliferation of small companies was made possible by the enthusiasm and participation of individual Ukrainians.

The growth of the drone industry was made possible by innovators inside the bureaucracy as well as in the technology. And all of those things have been enhanced and helped by this Ukrainian sense of itself as a democracy. As I said, sometimes it's not been a successful democracy.

But the initiative taken by individuals, you know, it's not a top-down society. It's not a society where the leader tells everyone what to do and there's a kind of hierarchy and everybody follows the rules. It's a society where people take their own initiative.

And those societies, in the end, are much more successful than we usually think.

Lynn Thoman: It's a remarkably positive story about democracy.

Anne, what are your three takeaways on the Russia-Ukraine war?

Anne Applebaum: I think, number one, this is a war that will determine the future of democracy in Europe. If Russia is able to win in the end, then the influence of Russia and its political system will spread in Europe and maybe around the world because this will re-empower the Russian system. If Ukraine wins, that will give a lot of impetus for people who want their countries to be organized in this more entrepreneurial, more open way.

Internationally, it will matter too. It's, in that sense, crucial, I think, to all of us. Secondly, this is a war that will define the future of military technology and it will lead the way and it will show us how wars will be fought in the future.

Thirdly, this is a war in which we see that a grassroots way of organizing society can win against an autocratic way of organizing society, that individual entrepreneurship is something that's very powerful and it can defeat even this allegedly more decisive, allegedly more streamlined autocratic political system. I love that.

Lynn Thoman: I love the idea that democracies are stronger and far more innovative than they appear on the surface.

Anne, thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation as well as your book, Autocracy, Inc.

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This transcript was auto-generated. Please forgive any errors.