Ti Kosmos podcast

Michael C. Kimmage: War in Ukraine & the pattern of zero - sum competition

• Marilisa Anastasopoulou • Season 2 • Episode 3

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While Ukraine has managed to win this war in the “hearts and minds of the people” (predominantly of the West) analysts argue it’ s going to be a long war.

Michael C.  Kimmage, professor of History at the Catholic University of America, author of the book “The Abandonment of the West”, and regular contributor at the Foreign Affairs is our guest  in this “Ti kosmos” podcast.

 Issues discussed:

What are the scenarios for the end of the crisis? Will there be an escalation or a spill over in other countries? What are the tragedies associated with this war? What is “Wartime Putinism”? Can Russia be defeated? How the debate in the US regarding the support of the war will be shaped in the coming months? Does this war bring the US closer to Europe?

Today’s Ti kosmos podcast cooperates with the Institute of International Relations and is co-hosted by Marilisa Anastasopoulou and the executive director of IDIS, Ms. Ino Afentouli.

 Relevant Links

Voice of BBC News’s Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg

“It was a watershed moment when everything had changed, for Russia and Ukraine and in many ways for the world.”

 

Voice of President Biden / remarks in Ukraine during a surprise visit ahead of the anniversary of Russia's invasion

“You know, one year later Kiev stands, and Ukraine stands, democracy stands. The Americans stand with you and the world stands with you.”

 

Voice of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky / address to members of  US Congress on the 22nd of December  2022

“We have no fear, nor anyone in the world should have it. Ukrainians gained this victory and it gives us courage which inspires the entire world.”

 

Voice of hostess, Marilisa Anastasopoulou

Analysts argue it’s going to be a long war. Can Ukraine hold? Will the West continue to support Ukraine? What are the dangers if  the fighting drags on  for years? 

 

To discuss about this war, the relationship of Russia and the West and wartime Putinism we have invited Michael Kimmage, professor of History at the Catholic University of America, author of the book “The Abandonment of the West”,  and regular contributor at the Foreign Affairs.

 

Todays Ti kosmos podcast is in cooperation with the Institute of International Relations and with its executive director Ms. Ino Afentouli.I am Marilisa Anastasopoulou.


 


Ino Afentouli

Thank you very much for this opportunity to have you in Athens. Michael Kimmage it's a pleasure, I mean, to participate in this fantastic seminar that you organized with the Harvard Institute, and I'm glad that you find some time to talk about  issues of common concern with Marilisa Anastasopoulou. So let's start.I think that yesterday you had a seminar on the scenarios for the end of the crisis. So let's start our discussion with this.

 


Michael Kimmage

Well, first of all, thank you so much for hosting this discussion and also for hosting me in this extraordinary city. It's a great pleasure to be with you both, and it's a great pleasure to be here in Athens and in Greece. I think that the particulars of the end of the war are enormously difficult to predict, and I won't even try to predict the particulars of its conclusion. I think the one generalization one can make with confidence is that this is going to be a very long conflict and that even if there is a ceasefire or what we could describe as an armistice, as there was in Korea in the 1950s, I doubt that it will be a real end to the conflict. That as long as Putin stays in power in Russia and has the ambition to control Ukraine, that he will do so, he will try to do so, and that he will have the resources for a very long struggle and fight. And so I think, as a consequence, on our side and I have in mind here the government of Greece, the government of the United States, the European Union, the NATO alliance, the first virtue that we have to cultivate is patience.

 


Michael Kimmage

That if we assume a quick or a happy ending to the conflict, we will become frustrated and disappointed. I mean, the sort of the publics of our country's, public opinion and our objectives could be quite difficult to realize. But if we can maintain patience, I think a lot of the structural strengths are on the western side and on the Ukrainian side of the conflict. That begins with the resilience of Ukraine as a society, its growing military capacities, and the enormous economic resources of the Western and really the global alliance behind Ukraine. So I don't think that we will 100% defeat Russia and Ukraine. I think that Russia will probably maintain control over some portion of Ukrainian territory, Crimea, quite possibly, and and and even beyond Crimea. But I think beyond that we can push Russia back quite far and achieve something like containment during the Cold War and succeed through that method. But once again, I would emphasize the virtue of patience.

 


Marilisa Anastasopoulou

You mentioned that it's going to be a long war. I mean, everyone talks about that. However, how this war is going to affect the area. I mean, is it going to continue as a war between Ukraine and Russia with powers supporting them, or will we see a change, like, for example, NATO being involved, other countries supporting Russia more openly? How the geopolitical context will be shaped if we assume that this war will continue for a while?

 


Michael Kimmage

I think on the level of intentions, it's clear that NATO does not want to be directly involved in the conflict. It's now 13 months into the war. President Biden is absolutely clear about not sending uniformed American soldiers onto the territory of Ukraine and of not making NATO direct participant. I think it's also the case on the Russian side, even though Putin has been radical and highly aggressive, that he has limited himself, he has not bombed weapons supply routes into Ukraine from NATO member states, and he too has limits. So I think that on the level of intentions, I would not predict a conflict between NATO and Russia of a direct kind. There's, of course, the possibility of an accident that pushes us in that direction. And we've already had experiences of that missiles that have gone into Romania, a missile that went into Poland, and we at first thought that those were Russian missiles. Maybe they were not Russian missiles. It looks like some of those were perhaps Ukrainian. At any rate, that's how you could imagine the war spreading, even though neither side would wish it to become a NATO Russian confrontation. An accident could push us in that direction.

 


Michael Kimmage

But the final point I would make in this regard, if we can sort of survive without an accident, is that Russia's conventional military capacities are so much less than they were at the beginning of the war. So even though Russia might have dreams and fantasies of pushing Poland or Latvia or Lithuania in some military sense, it doesn't have the means to do so. In fact, Russia has been struggling to take the city of Bakhmut in Eastern Ukraine now for about four or five months. So if Russia is unable to take that city, or it takes it very, very slowly, forget military campaigns in the Baltic republics or in Poland. And I think that that's important to emphasize. Russia is a great threat, and it's a great challenge, but it has reduced itself in terms of conventional military power.

 


Ino Afentouli

Would you see a turning point in the conflict during the year, meaning we have seen up to now a rather steady path of the war? Would you see any upward and the escalation or de escalation of the wars?

 


Michael Kimmage

Well, I think that a great deal depends on the coming Ukrainian offensive. And if it's unbelievably successful, then some of the escalation concerns we've had at the beginning of the conflict about Russia perhaps considering a nuclear option, some of those will return. I don't think that that's the direction Russia is really going to go in, but the threats could return of that scenario. On the other hand, if the conflict becomes sort of less successful for Ukrainian terms, if the offensive doesn't go as far as one would wish it to go, I think that the element of political economy is going to come to the fore. It's already been very significant in this conflict. I think it's accurately described as a war of attrition. So in that sense, the escalatory options that Russia might pursue, and it's already pursuing these techniques, is to bomb the electrical supply of Ukraine, to bomb the water supply, to try to make Ukraine dysfunctional as a society. And that, of course, is potentially very dangerous or potentially disastrous if Russia would start to make advances there. So you have the change in the nature of the conflict that could go in a Ukrainian direction, which evokes certain escalatory risks on the Russian side.

 


Michael Kimmage

And then you have the Russian pursuit of devastating tactics and techniques against Ukrainian society, which, if they would start to succeed. I really worry about the electric grid of Ukraine in this respect. You could also see a dramatic change in the conflict. But my guess is that this kind of back and forth, you know, movement of the line of contact, 100 km to the east, 100 km to the west, that's probably more likely what we're going to see over the course of the next six or eight months.

 


Marilisa Anastasopoulou

But in the meantime, we see that there are some issues in the area, like with Moldova, this threat in Moldova, we see the protests there were in Georgia, how this will affect the area in general, not only the two countries, Ukraine and Russia.

 


Michael Kimmage

Well, there are many tragedies that I associate with the war. One is the transition of Russia into an outright dictatorship, which is the road that Russia has been traveling for a long time, but it got faster during the war. The most important tragedy of the war is the effect that it's had on the people of Ukraine. The incredible suffering, the refugees, the effect on children, et cetera. But there's a third tragedy that you could describe with the war, which is the nature of competition now between Russia and the west, or Russia and the world outside of its borders. That competition is also not new. It certainly goes back to 2014, in the case of Georgia, goes back to the war of 2008. But what we have now, given the nature of Western competition with Russia and Russian competition with the west, is something of a zero sum dynamic that, to me, reminds me of the Cold War. So Georgia is not just an issue for Russia in terms of where Georgia may go. Georgia is now part of this larger chess board of competition between Russia and the west. And that's true, I think, for Armenia, Azerbaijan, certainly for Moldova.

 


Michael Kimmage

As you mentioned, you could factor the Balkans into this equation. Wherever there is some degree of uncertainty, it will now be filtered through this very intensive competition. And it's clear that Russia will push as much as possible for adverse consequences for our side. And so we just have to, I suppose, accept and live with that reality. But it makes it a bit different from the situation in the past. I think in the past, you might say the problem of Moldova is the problem of Moldova. It's a discrete problem. Now it's part of this larger pattern. And that pattern is one of zero sum competition.

 


Ino Afentouli

Yes. I mean, Russia is trying to create black holes, lets say, in the European continent. Ukraine, of course, is the main theater. But as you said, Georgia and all the other countries around may be vulnerable, and they certainly are vulnerable. So how you anticipate the debate in US will evolve in the coming months regarding the support, because US is the main support, whatever we say, if it was not for US, Ukraine would be more exposed, let's say, to Russian aggression.

 


Michael Kimmage

I think one important element of the debate in the United States, and I wouldn't want to be too optimistic on this account, but one, one important element of the debate is to see how far the United States and its Western allies and partners have come since February 2022. When you look back to that moment, the realistic and acute fear was that Ukraine would fall, that it would be partitioned by Russia, and that the border of this conflict between Russia and the west would be very much on the doorstep of the NATO alliance. And that this would be potentially a direct war between Russia and NATO. That was not an unrealistic fear and concern in February 2022, at the beginning of the war. So I think, measured by that benchmark, what NATO and the United States have accomplished is really something very significant. They have helped Ukraine not to defeat Russia, but to set Russia back very considerably. And I think in terms of the defense of the NATO alliance, in the most important sense, the territorial defense of the NATO alliance, I think NATO has very little to worry about in the short to medium term.

 


Michael Kimmage

There's just nothing that Russia can do. And that's, of course, wonderful for the alliance. So it's important to acknowledge some of the successes as we look at concerns, fears, and worries about the future. But the challenge of those countries that are not in the NATO alliance., this would, of course, include Ukraine, but it would also include the Balkans and the South Caucasus. That's pretty formidable, and I suspect it can't be amalgamated into one single challenge. It does seem to vary quite a lot case by case. And so I would hope on the US side that there would just, again be the patience and the creativity to deal with it. And perhaps you could look at it this way, that what the United States should try to do is to build on the successes of NATO in the last 13 months and just expand the perimeter of that success to the degree possible. But the way I would frame it in the American context is with a degree of optimism about what can be achieved and what has been achieved. I worry a little bit sometimes about the rhetoric of crisis. We are in the midst of a very great crisis, European, world, historical, but not everything is to be determined by this atmosphere and aura of crisis.

 


Michael Kimmage

Some of it needs to be determined by sort of will and achievement and to a degree of optimism.

 


Marilisa Anastasopoulou

I would like you to tell us about “Wartime Putinism” that you have written about. What do you mean by that? Can you explain how the system works within Russia?

 


Michael Kimmage

Well, there have been two surprises to me when it comes to Russia during the war. The first is that there's not more of an antiwar movement, that was perhaps naive on my part to expect, but I did think in the first few weeks of the war that more Russians would would rise up. Of course, there are 20,000 Russians who have been imprisoned, and many have left the country, but there isn't a big antiwar movement to speak of, as far as I know. And the other surprise is that I had thought of Putin as a somewhat more cynical man than he may be. He is, of course, quite cynical, but I didn't see this ideological component. It seemed like the deal between the Russian people and the Russian government was the Russian government deals with politics, and Russians can kind of do what they want if they don't interfere with the political running of the country. And there seemed to be that distance. And so the way in which the war has mobilized Russian society and sort of incorporated Russian society has been something of a surprise to me. And so wartime Putinism is this, and I think it's a system of half steps and half measures.

 


Michael Kimmage

But the distance that Russians had from the government, that's sort of apolitical nature that has ended, and what Putin has done is not to put the country exactly on a wartime footing. It's not quite there, but very much to militarize Russian society and to make war, in some respects, the defining feature of the country's life, and at the same time, in the kind of tactical, clever way that Putin can be, is to insulate some Russian communities from the effects of the war. And I think he studied Russian history to the degree that he knows that he needs the loyalty of Moscow and St. Petersburg. So he insulates those cities from some of the effects of the war. Mobilization is among the poorer communities, more peripheral, more rural, and that, too, is what's making wartime Putinism function. Final point I would make about wartime Putinism is that the Russian population, as far as I know, is not strongly in favor of the war. It came as a shock to them. It was a surprise. It's still hard to understand what the war is really about, but they are anti antiwar. They want to win the war.

 


Michael Kimmage

It's a war that they don't want to lose. And Putin has really exploited that as the foundation for his approach.

 


Ino Afentouli

If we can envisage the end of the war with a solution, how can the west influence the course inside Russia? How we can help the Russian civil society to become more and more vocal?

 


Michael Kimmage

It's very, very limited. I think we have very little leverage over Russian society. We have less and less contact. And the war, and I think this is conscious on Putin's part, is putting a wall up between Russia and the west. I've heard that the Russian government is encouraging the canceling of English classes, is, in a way, trying to consciously trying to push Russian society away from the west. And there's probably not a great deal that we can do about it. The best approach I can think of, again, goes back to the first few years of the Cold War, that we can contain the spread of Russian military power. We can't defeat Russia. I think it's a nuclear power, and it's a large country. It's not really defeatable, but we can contain the spread of Russian nuclear power. And perhaps that will lead in Ukraine to a kind of not an end of the war exactly, but a sort of stabilization of the war, maybe a bit like the tensions that were there in Germany in the 1940s. You have the Berlin airlift in 1948. But after that, there is a moderation of that tension. And if there's a moderation of that tension, maybe that will introduce certain pressures within Russia that concern the domestic political situation and some of the damage that Putin has done with the war.

 


Michael Kimmage

and Russians will come to a conclusion that they perhaps need to go in a different direction. And if that's the case, we should be very welcoming and encouraging of that. But I don't think it begins with our agency. I think we need to pursue, first and foremost, the interest that we have, vis-à-vis Ukraine, the maximum degree of support and defense of its sovereignty, territorial integrity, perhaps a kind of stabilization of the conflict at a certain point, and then a wait and see attitude when it comes to the Russian the Russian population. But I myself regrettably entertain very little optimism about a changing course domestically in Russia in the next couple of years, or perhaps even a couple of decades.

 


Ino Afentouli

A final question, since you are the author of the book "The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy". With this was US is very present in Europe. Before the war, the whole discussion was turning around the US pivot to Asia. How do you think US will change after the war?

 


Michael Kimmage

I think that the war has reminded the United States of the fundamentals of its modern foreign policy, which is to say 20th century foreign policy. And despite the demographic and economic and other kinds of importance that the Indopacific holds, American foreign policy has always been framed around Europe. You could go back even to the 19th century and since we're in Greece, it is important to note that the first conflict, European conflict that comes to the sort of perception, the consciousness of Americans is in fact 1821. And the movement of Greece out of the out of the Ottoman Empire, which is enormously supported in the United States and was understood to be a kind of advance for, you know, certain liberal ideas in in Europe, in the first half of the 19th century, and that then intensifies quite a bit in the 20th century with the first and the second World Wars and the sort of role that the United States has played. And so the centrality of Europe is one point. And I think Biden has been reminded of that. And in a way he's embraced it perhaps as an old Cold warrior and somebody who has a long career before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

 


Michael Kimmage

It comes to a degree, naturally, to Biden. The point that I would make is that this needs to be an integrated approach for the United States where the security concerns are probably first and foremost. That's why the US gets involved, certainly why I got involved in the 20th century concerns about Germany and military balance of power in Europe. And that's not less true with Ukraine than it was in 1917 when the United States joined in the First World War or in 1941 when the United States entered the Second World War. But the way in which this has to be integrated is that there is also a cultural component. And although the United States is a multicultural immigrant society where people come from all over the world, this bond with Europe has a very strong cultural component. It's sort of where a lot of the intellectual orientation of the United States comes and its commitment to democracy and its commitment to certain liberal ideas does come from a European cultural inheritance. And so I think these two things need to be joined together still in the 21st century. And if you think of Ukraine, it does fit this narrative actually quite effectively because it is a democracy.

 


[00:19:27.410] - Michael Kimmage

It does see the war in 2022, I think, rightly in my point of view as about its democratic sort of soul as a nation. And so in this sense, a lot of things come full circle in the course of Ukraine. But the point just to emphasize that it's not merely a military project for the United States and it's certainly not just an economic project, but there is a cultural bond with Europe which is very important and it needs to be studied and sort of maintained, discussed and kept also in public consciousness as we sort of deal with the military elements of this struggle.

 


Marilisa Anastasopoulou

Thank you very much for your time and for being here with us today. We will keep it up to here, and we hope to have you again in the future with us.

 


Michael Kimmage

I would be delighted. Such a pleasure speaking with you both.

 


Ino Afentouli

Thank you. Thank you very much.