Ted Audio Collective Welcome everyone, you're listening to a special episode of After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Mihir.
And we are so excited to have a special guest.
Ravi is with us tonight.
Ravi Abdilal, our old friend and a real expert on things going on in the world today, especially with respect to Russia and Ukraine.
We are delighted to have you back, Ravi.
I'm delighted to be back with you.
There's so much to discuss.
One question I have for you two is, have you seen the video that's been circulating with audio capture of a conversation between a Russian warship and 15 or so Ukrainian military officers whose job it is to defend this tiny little island called Snake Island.
And the audio capture has the commander of the Russian warship saying, this is Russian warship.
You must lay down your arms and surrender immediately or we will open fire.
And then you can hear two Ukrainian military officers speaking with each other sort of quietly.
And one of them says, well, I guess that's it then.
Because how are they going to defend themselves against a Russian warship?
And then one Ukrainian military officer says to the other, do you think I should tell him to f*** off?
And the second one says, yeah, I think so for good measure.
And so he says, which basically translates to Russian warship, go f*** yourself.
And that phrase is now everywhere in Ukraine.
The idea that these military officers were facing certain defeat, there's no way they could defend this island against a Russian warship, but they will not give up.
They will not surrender under any circumstances.
And so the Russian warship Idina Huy is a kind of rallying cry now in Ukraine.
Their expression of relentless defense of the Ukrainian homeland has become this kind of catchphrase for the war.
So when we come back, we'll try to figure all this stuff out, how we got here and how this situation is going to evolve.
Thank you for coming again.
Thank you for having me.
So Ravi, a million questions for you.
But maybe we can start by talking a little bit about how we got here.
What drove us to this point where almost inexplicably we have atrocities, we have a war, that frankly, up until the last minute, many experts didn't really expect to ever happen.
I don't know of very many people who thought even in the days before the war that it would really unfold this way, which also makes me think that it was avoidable.
Broadly, there are two theories.
One of them is that it's very specifically about Ukraine and about the Russian president's agreement and disappointment in how post -Soviet Ukraine developed, and in particular in the last few years.
And the other, to which I'm more sympathetic, is that this is a conversation that President Putin wanted to start with the West, broadly understood, to revisit the security architecture that unfolded in the 1990s and 2000s and change it.
In a sense, roll it back to a different moment and with a different organization.
So that in that sense, the conflict is yes, about Ukraine, but it is also about NATO expansion.
It's also about the broad contours of what the European security architecture is.
I think the first one's a little more straightforward, which is that, in fact, it's about Ukraine in some sense, and it's about Putin's ambition.
Tell us about that latter theory a little bit more.
He wants to roll back the clock and revisit everything.
Is that your way to think about it?
It goes back to the moments when NATO, the Western Security Alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, expanded in the late 1990s and 2000s in a way that very much alarmed the Russian political elite.
They couldn't really figure out why NATO still existed, frankly, since it was created to combat a Soviet threat.
And that's a country that doesn't exist anymore.
There was even a moment when President Putin proposed that Russia join NATO as well.
And we have this Lisbon to Vladivostok kind of security architecture.
And so in those moments when NATO was expanding ever closer to the borders of the Russian Federation, in those moments when even the Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which were parts of the Soviet Union, joined NATO, there was this growing fear of a kind of encirclement of Russia by this antagonistic
military alliance. So that part of the story is really about revisiting what it meant for Russia and for Europe, that NATO expanded so close to the Russian borders, and finally in the end potentially to Ukraine, which for the Russian president is absolutely a red line.
So from a Western perspective, we tend to think of NATO as purely defensive.
What role does the NATO involvement in the Yugoslavian war play?
Sort of this moment in time when all of a sudden, for the first time after the Second World War, you have NATO planes that are bombarding a country in Europe against Russian objections.
In fact, one of the bombardments without UN authorization is that the source of anxiety.
If I think, well, if you don't attack Western Europe, NATO shouldn't really matter to you, because it's just there to defend the West.
That's such a great question, Felix, in a couple of ways.
One of which is, when we think about military doctrine, it's often difficult to make a distinction between a defensive posture and an offensive posture, because the military weaponry can be used in a variety of ways.
What the Russians had been saying for a long, long time, which is that you're making us nervous, and we don't understand why you're making us nervous.
We know that you say it's defensive, but everything you have that could be defensive could also be offensive.
So you're threatening our core security interests.
But if you want to make the Russian political elite really annoyed, you talk about Yugoslavia, and you talk about the independence of Kosovo.
What they'll say exactly to your point, which is NATO decided to reorganize the boundaries of sovereign states by recognizing the independence of Kosovo.
What makes them a little bit crazy is this idea that it's up to NATO rather than the UN to redraw these boundaries.
Whenever these conversations come up with Russian colleagues, they'll say, what about Kosovo?
What about Yugoslavia?
You're so hypocritical.
You say that everything has to be the rule of law except for when you don't want to.
But the difficult thing, Rahi, about this narrative that I'm struggling with is it's about NATO and Russia.
But there are these countries like Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and Ukraine who wanted to express their will and join NATO, certainly the Baltic states.
And so when Russia says, well, why are you expanding and why are you coming towards us?
Isn't the right frame on this, well, you have people in these countries who are making a decision about what they want, which is a security pact.
I guess what I'm worried about is this narrative comes perilously close to kind of justifying a NATO versus Russia view of the world as opposed to a view of the world, which is there are peoples in the middle who are expressing their will, and it should be respected.
I mean, absolutely, Mehir, and that's always been the West's point of view, which is that these are sovereign states.
They make their choices.
We welcomed them into this alliance, and that should be respected.
I think that there are two problems with that.
One is it's so hard for us to try in the first place to demystify the conflict, to make sense of it, to understand the origins of it without in any way justifying the behavior of the Russian president or the Russian military.
So I definitely don't want to endorse the view that NATO caused this to happen and some sovereign states wanted to do this, but I think making sense of the Kremlin's perspective on this without justifying anything is essential for understanding first, how we got here, and second, how we might eventually
get out. And then the other part of it that's so complicated is that's just not how the Kremlin sees the world.
The Kremlin doesn't see a bunch of sovereign states next to it who should get to make those choices.
The Kremlin at the moment sees a bunch of little countries who should submit to the will of a larger country and a kind of theresimachian justice in which it is the stronger who determines what is right as opposed to some abstract principles.
And that's probably at the heart of the conflict how the West cannot ever agree to this particular perspective, because the causal complication aside, that's really not what we believe.
We think that countries should be able to make those choices and frankly, the more nervous you are, and the more you know that the big state essentially thinks it's up to the big state to decide what you can and what you cannot do, that speaks in favor of then taking on the defensive posture in the way
that we have seen. Yeah, absolutely.
So that's super interesting, Ravi, in terms of taking this back into that kind of mindset.
What about the weeks prior to the conflict?
You mentioned that there might have been an off -ramp that we missed.
What do you think happened in those last several weeks?
So I believe that there have been moments when the conflict could have been de -escalated.
And so the Russian president amassed 200 ,000 troops in Belarus and near Ukraine, and issued essentially a list of demands to NATO, to the West, in particular to the United States.
The demands included, we want reassurance that Ukraine will never be a part of NATO.
We want some scaling back of military hardware in central Europe, and we would like a written response to this list of demands.
With these 200 ,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine as a kind of signal that they're serious about other possibilities.
And for a moment, I thought maybe we have a chance to de -escalate this.
This is a negotiating tactic by President Putin.
Yeah, that was exactly my impression.
Yeah, exactly. And probably the Russian president didn't think that he would be able to get all of those demands met.
That's not how negotiations usually start.
More or less, the Secretary of State said, we're not negotiating on any of that.
All of it is non -negotiable, which I think was a mistake.
Not that we should have given away all of that at all, just that this was an opening salvo and a negotiation.
And at that point, when President Putin had 200 ,000 troops amassed near Ukraine, I think he had to achieve something.
He could not be told by the United States, none of that's negotiable.
We will give away nothing.
Would he be able at that point to just say, okay, fine, fair enough.
I'll bring everybody back.
Let's just all calm down.
I think at that point, the conflict became inevitable because the Russian president can't, for domestic political reasons, just back down and go home.
He has to achieve something.
Yeah. What about a longer -term perspective, though, that might help understand the US response?
That would say something like, every time Russia wants something, it will move its troops in some fashion that seems really threatening.
Exactly. And then we're back at the negotiating table, even if we don't really want to negotiate.
Maybe it would have been a mistake, but here's one thing that keeps me up at night, which is, did the American insistence that Ukraine should be able to choose its own path make it actually more likely that Ukraine would get invaded, because we were unwilling to talk about it?
Which is not to say, we should always negotiate with bullies.
Of course not, but that really keeps me up at night, the potential role that we played in the days and weeks before the invasion, that maybe there was something we could have done, and we chose not even to engage.
Yeah, and it's historically interesting, because when Ukraine expressed interest in joining the NATO for the very first time, remember the US president was all in favor.
Totally. And basically said, let's do it quickly.
And it was France and Germany at that point in time that said, well, not really.
Maybe we can talk about it at some point in time.
We should not take it off the table.
We should remain sort of interested, keeping the option alive.
But we shouldn't do it right now.
And that strikes me now, of course, with hindsight, which is really unfair, but that strikes me as deeply problematic, because it created an option that Russia really feared and found unacceptable without really giving the security to Ukraine that it would have gotten from a NATO membership.
We ended up, in a way, accidentally putting Ukraine in an impossible situation.
Which is that we are in the West, willing to cheerlead for them, but not willing actually to protect them, which is maybe the most dangerous place to be.
This is such an intimate military conflict for both Ukrainians and Russians.
There aren't any Ukrainians who don't have aunties and uncles and nephews and grandmas in Russia, and there aren't any Russians who don't have the same familial relations somewhere in Ukraine.
Across the border, it is a very intimate set of relationships that exist, which is, I think, one of the reasons this was so unthinkable, and one of the reasons as well that these tensions bubbled over in the way that they did.
And then, of course, one of the allegations that I never really understood, in particular, Ukraine having a Jewish president, is this allegation of Nazis running the country and...
...Russia having to come to the rescue?
What is that all about?
That seems so incredibly far -fetched.
It's a very old historical trope, and it comes to how Ukraine, as a country today, was pieced together over time.
The eastern part of Ukraine was incorporated into the Czarist Empire in the middle of the 17th century.
The central part of Ukraine at the end of the 18th century, with the second partition of Poland.
But the western part of Ukraine was incorporated into the Ukrainian Republic in the Soviet Union only in 1939.
Before that, it had never been ruled from Moscow.
It was part of interwar Poland between the wars.
Before that, it was part of the Habsburg Empire.
And so that forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union was resisted very strongly, because the West Ukrainians felt that they were being ripped out of the heart of Europe and brought into the east.
At that moment, the German military was coming eastward, the Soviet military was coming westward.
They basically met in Ukraine.
And there were some Ukrainians who were so desperate to resist incorporation into the Soviet Union that they worked with the German military against the Soviets.
And so when President Putin talks about denazification, it's a trope to try to remind everyone in Russia and in Ukraine that don't forget, there was a moment when the Ukrainian nationalists worked with the Nazis against the Soviets.
It's that Ukrainian nationalism, according to the Russian president, deep down has this anti -Russian, anti -Soviet, maybe Nazi sympathizing sentiment to it, which is of course not the right way to tell that story at all.
But that's what he's talking about.
That's why that language exists.
Yeah, I confess there's a sense in which this historical understanding of it is hugely interesting, but it's also kind of crazy.
There's a sense in which he's holding Ukraine close and claiming it is part of greater Russia, and then he's also villainizing them in this process, right?
And that contradiction also is weird.
It is a very weird contradiction.
Like, we love you so much, we don't want you to leave, and we will therefore bomb your cities into rubble.
That contradiction is transparent day by day.
And I think the other part of the contradiction, and maybe this is all the way to paradox, is that because of these disparate histories, Ukraine as a nation has struggled ever since 1991 to unify, to come to a kind of unified understanding of what it means to be Ukraine in the world.
And one result of this conflict is that President Putin will end up doing what no Ukrainian has ever been able to do, which is to unify the Ukrainian people.
Interesting. At a terrible cost.
At a terrible, terrible cost.
So the reaction to the invasion has been, in many ways, also unexpected.
The breadth of the sanctions, and the depth of the sanctions, and the unity that it has provoked in the West.
I'm curious what you make of that in the following sense.
Will it have any impact?
Will it change Putin's mind, or are these just enormous costs that we're going to make the Russian people bear, because we have to do something?
Right. Or can it be pivotal?
Can it actually move the needle, or are we just exerting a huge amount of muscle, because we have to do something?
So let's say sanctions exist on a spectrum of tools of statecraft.
One extreme is diplomacy, talking, the other extreme is military force, and in between is sanctions.
And boy, do we love to use sanctions when we get tired of talking, but we don't want to use our military.
If it had been clear to the Russian president just how thorough this sanctions regime would be, it would not have changed the outcome at all, I believe.
If there's anybody in Washington DC, or anywhere else, who believes that the sanctions regime, which is, by the way, the most thorough sanctions regime in the history of sanctions, we've never, ever seen anything like this.
If there's anybody who believes that this will change the behavior of the Russian president, I think that's utterly farfetched.
So President Putin could not have been deterred, and his calculus will not change as a result of sanctions, which means that the only purpose they can serve, which might be a totally fine purpose, is to signal our displeasure and to punish for the behavior without actually reasonably expecting we're
going to change the behavior.
Do you think that's true in a short -term sense, only as far as the invasion of Ukraine is involved?
Or is it, say, next time something happens in Georgia, or something happens somewhere else where Russia feels this is our sphere of influence, and we don't like what's happening?
Do you think the sanctions at least could have some influence when you think about attacking the next country?
So one of the horrible conclusions that I have reached is that the lesson the Russian government has learned.
And by the way, we should clearly distinguish between the Russian people and the Russian government.
These are not the same entities.
I think the lesson is clear, which is that we don't go to war with countries that are not in NATO.
And if we combine that with the fact that we're so good in the United States at putting sanctions on and so bad at taking them off, that this is a semi -permanent state of affairs, this sanctions regime.
And so all of our ability to change behavior by threatening sanctions is now dissipated because we could maybe do a little bit more the next time or threaten a little bit more the next time.
But it's so thorough and so far -reaching, including the central banks' foreign exchange reserves, that I don't see the usefulness later on.
If anything, the thoroughness of the sanctions regime has backed the Russian president into another corner and perhaps is inviting him to decide, well, I better just see this through, because there's no way that I'm going to get rid of the sanctions.
So I'm going to double down on the whole activity.
But is there a possibility, and I know this is going to be dismissed as fantastical thinking, but is there a sense in which these sanctions can lead to so much pain for the Russian economy and for Russian citizens that they rethink or that they protest in a way that is new, that creates enough pressure
on Putin, domestic pressure, that makes him rethink things?
Even as I say it, I think to myself, this is probably fantastical, but tell me, is there a mechanism where domestic accountability even matters to him?
I don't think it's fantastical.
I just think it's a longer -term process, which is to say, I think that this war, both in its military consequences, humanitarian consequences, and its economic consequences, is likely to be the beginning of the end of this regime.
And so I don't think that's fantastical at all, but it's not in a timeframe that's going to prevent further horrors in Ukraine.
This is not a week away.
This is not a month away.
This is not six months away.
But I do think that this combination of consequences is going to lead to a fundamental rethinking among the Russian people and especially among the Russian political elite about whether this path to becoming a pariah state was worth it.
One of the hardest things about this conflict, Raul, is to understand how it might evolve.
We've already referenced the fact that it feels like Putin is backed into a corner, which is very, very dangerous.
There are very few options for him.
It feels like for Ukraine, they've mounted such a heroic defense.
They too now are not going to back away.
So do you have any sense of how this ends up shaking out in the medium term?
Is there a settled outcome of this that's possible or is it just a brutal story for us?
I fear, let me hear, that this is just a brutal story for us and that things are going to get much worse before they get better.
At least in principle, the Russian government has issued a new list of demands to the Ukrainian government that would lead, they claim, the officials in the Kremlin to an immediate cessation of the conflict.
The government falls.
There's a constitutional change that prohibits Ukraine from joining NATO ever.
The independence of the Donbass is fully recognized and the annexation of Crimea is legally recognized as a fait accompli.
There's no way to tell whether agreeing to those terms would actually lead to a cessation of the conflict.
So there's this other theory that there's nothing short of the destruction of Ukraine that will dissuade the Russian president.
I'm more optimistic that there are still potential negotiated solutions out there and the question is whether the Ukrainian government can possibly agree to them or whether the West can possibly agree to them or encourage the Ukrainian government to agree to them either.
But these are very stringent demands that basically you demilitarize.
You no longer have a military.
You no longer try to join NATO and you disorganize the governance of the country in such a profound way that basically the country can never definitively go either East or West in geopolitical terms.
Can we talk a little bit more?
Rahi, you said this is the beginning of the end for this regime.
What does post -Putin Russia look like?
Does it look a lot like the Putin Russia or does it look like something different?
You know me here, this is one of the questions that also worries me, which is that we tend to personalize these politics in really profound ways and say to ourselves, well, if only not Putin then things would be okay.
Which is such an American way of seeing the world as though if only not Saddam Hussein then things would be different.
If only not Muammar Gaddafi then things would be different.
We have this way of personalizing these politics without understanding that there's a whole other set of political relationships that exist.
Putin's Russia is not about just President Putin.
Putin's Russia is about a collection of people around President Putin of whom he is the primary representative who share this worldview about Europe and NATO and the United States and the West.
And there are plenty of individuals who are part of that closely tied network who all have similar backgrounds, who are much more aggressive, much more anti -Western, much more anti -American than President Putin is.
And so we should also be careful what we wish for.
It could be that the post -Putin regime is a regime that's more complicated and more difficult.
We shouldn't expect that it should be friendlier.
And if anything, that's the lesson of American foreign policy over the last 25 years, is we think it's about one person, then it turns out it's not.
It's much more complicated.
It's not. That is fascinating.
And I think at that point in time, there's probably the question, how poor do we want Russia to be?
And I think going back to your earlier point that we now it turns out we're reasonably good at imposing sanctions.
We're not really great at ever taking them away.
But the severity of these sanctions, I think longer term, would lead to a Russian economy.
I mean, it's not a big economy.
It's roughly the size of Texas, I think, the same as the GDP.
So it's not a big economy to begin with, but it will be devastated in many ways.
And that I really don't think is in the interest of the West.
I don't think we want to see a country that has the resources to be important in a military sense, but to be really diminished in every other sense.
That's got to be a very dangerous recipe.
It's at least my intuition.
This is why I think I'm a little more optimistic compared to you that we will lift at least some of these sanctions simply because it will turn out we're choking the Russian economy.
Yeah. It's such a great point.
And I think it depends on our theory of Russian domestic politics, which is to say, do we think that the impoverishment of Russian citizens will make it more likely that they will rebel against the regime, or more likely that they will absorb the regime's narrative, which is to say, I told you the West
was out to get us, and you didn't believe me, and here's my proof that the West was out to get us.
And especially for the Russian citizens of whom there are many who are much more Western -oriented, let's say in Moscow and Petersburg, they're going to bear the brunt of these sanctions.
The lives of the 20 -somethings and the 30 -somethings, the professionals have been totally upended, and we have to ask ourselves, how will they react?
Will they be mad at the president or mad at us?
And then on this question of the removal of the sanctions, I think one of the reasons why it's so hard for us to remove sanctions is that some of them are executive orders and some of them are written into law.
So Congress passes a law with the sanctions.
And then when is the moment when there will be a member of Congress who wakes up one day and says, you know what, these sanctions on Russia, we should probably get rid of those.
And that's going to be my agenda for the day or the week or the month.
It's impossible, right?
And when is the moment an American president is going to say, you know, I feel like we've been too hard on the Russians.
I'm just going to go ahead and get rid of this executive order.
And so if we think about the domestic political challenges of dialing back sanctions, that's the logic that worries me.
That's really interesting and depressing at the same time.
Yeah. There's this weird little piece of history.
The Jackson -Vanik amendment to a trade policy that was put into legislation during the Soviet times to punish the Soviets for not allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate.
That piece of legislation lasted beyond the Soviet Union.
So we were still sanctioning the Soviet Union years after the country did not exist anymore.
Well, I mean, the only way I could see it happening, Raoui, is in the outcome where there's a brokered deal, part of the brokering would be the cessation of the sanctions.
Because otherwise, I think you're right.
It's very hard to remove them.
But in my fantastical outcome of a brokered deal, you could imagine them being gradually removed as Russia stepped back, as Ukraine made concessions, as part of that larger story.
I have an even more complicated question for you.
What do you think are the longer term geopolitical consequences?
Thinking about China, thinking about what happens next in Europe, defense spending, attitudes towards the East.
It feels like we're really at the brink of something new and different.
What do you think is going to happen?
I completely agree that this feels very much like we're moving more quickly than we had been into a new geopolitical order.
One way to think about that without talking yet about what comes next is to reflect on the timing of all of this.
Two events in 2021 that the world watched very carefully.
First, the insurrection at the Capitol on the eve of President Biden's inauguration, January 2021, and September 2021, the chaotic withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan.
I think that the Russian government and the Chinese government were paying very careful attention to what that means in terms of the unraveling of American hegemony in the world.
We are deeply divided, obsessed with our own domestic political divisions, less and less willing to support our non -treaty allies in the world.
I think that eventually when the history is written, there will be a direct straight line drawn between those events of 2021 and these events of 2022.
That this is a timing connected to this sense in the world that the centrality of the United States, the commitments of the United States abroad are so much weaker than they have been over the past 30, 40, 50 years.
And then in terms of what comes next, if those interpretations of the world are correct, and maybe they are, it's a very different order, maybe organized more by regions and neighborhoods than by a single system.
And so if there comes a time in the next two, three, five, ten years when China revisits the Taiwan question, I think the historians will one day draw the line from January 2021 to September 2021 to February 2022 to whenever that moment is, when it became clear that great powers have neighborhoods and spheres
of influence again, just like in the 19th century, and there's no single global order that exists.
And is it possible that that includes the resurgence of a unified West, where what we've seen in Germany and what we've seen in Europe and what we've seen in this kind of collective response, one could imagine this leading to more fragmentation, just as you suggested, or one could imagine this reviving
a sense of collective responsibility in the West about freedom.
Is that possible, or do you see it more as Balkanization in the world and power blocks, which feels a lot more uncertain and a lot more unsettled?
Yeah, it's such a good point because remember we were talking about the paradox of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, unifying Ukrainians in a way that they had been unable to do.
The sense of disunity within the West and within NATO, it is very possible that this military operation in Ukraine unites the West in a way that had been elusive for 20 years.
The one risk that goes in the other direction is about end games.
So one thing I don't understand is what the end game of the West is.
What do we think is a possible way out?
And another question is what the Russian president's end game is.
If it's true that this is more about the geopolitical order than it is about one country, what if the Russian president decides to test Article V of NATO?
What if there's an agenda beyond Ukraine and beyond non -NATO members of Central and Eastern Europe, but to find out whether it's really true that if there were some sort of military activity by Russian forces in, let's take for example, Lithuania, would the United States go to war with Russia over Lithuania?
I think that the Russian president thinks not.
That's a reckless gamble, risking World War III.
If the Russian president is right that NATO won't go to war over Lithuania, and by the way, I suspect that 90 % of Americans couldn't find Lithuania on a map and 99 % of Americans don't know Lithuania is in NATO and that we've promised to go to war with anybody who attacks Lithuania.
And so the biggest risk is that it becomes quite the contrary.
If there is that gamble, and if NATO does not come to the defense of Lithuania, and we do not in fact go to war with Russia over Lithuania, that's the end of Article V.
It's no longer a credible commitment.
And if President Putin is wrong that we will go to war with Russia over Lithuania, then that's World War III, neither of which is a super cheerful outcome.
My concern, Ravi, is we might get there in a more accidental way.
You framed it as a set of calculations by Putin, but in these highly uncertain situations with very few exit ramps, I almost worry less about those calculations as much as I worry about we just find ourselves stumbling into a situation, and Putin finds himself stumbling into a situation that he didn't
think he was going to get started on a month ago.
So it's not so much rational calculation as we just end up in a tragic place, which is what happens in war all the time.
That to me is even more worrisome, because I don't think he's doing those calculations, but I do think there's a significant probability of just mistakes.
I don't think that President Putin is crazy.
I think he's ruthless, and they're very different things.
And I think he is prone to taking risks.
And so exactly to your point, there are these risks out there that are not perhaps calculated correctly by the Russian president.
They're risks that he understands are risks, but he might not have the probabilities worked out correctly, which doesn't make him crazy.
It just makes him a gambler and ruthless.
And so this brings us to one possible example.
The Ukrainians have been desperate for NATO or the West or the United States to put in place a no -fly zone over Ukraine so that they can defend themselves from aerial bombardment, which I completely understand why they would want that.
What that means in practice is that there would be NATO fighter jets patrolling the airspace of Ukraine, telling Russian fighter jets that they're violating a no -fly zone and that they must leave.
Maybe they leave. Maybe they don't.
But on this sort of small risks emerging into catastrophic outcomes, boys, it's super dangerous to imagine a bunch of Russian fighter jets and a bunch of NATO fighter jets flying over the same airspace, telling each other to back down.
And it just takes one of them not to back down, and then we have calamity.
If you think back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in part, it was also driven by an inability to increase Russian incomes to build an economy that was seen as a model and successful and desirable.
And so I can always imagine that a small group of people, if you rob your country blind, there's almost always enough wealth to give you everything and more than you ever wanted.
But if you have any sort of broader sense of success and pride, I think the way you see it in many other countries, just the fact that you're incredibly rich and everyone around you basically lives the life of a third -class citizen on the planet, in particular in an environment where, say, the Chinese
middle class is really big and is sort of a model of what you can do if, in fact, you invest in your economy and you try to become competitive.
Isn't that sort of a long -run vision that maybe it's just not that appealing?
Can it really be the long -run ambition of the ruling clique in Russia to be in charge of a really poor country?
Before you answer that, Raul, can I just say something, Felix?
What you just articulated is a forward -looking logic.
What worries me the most about all this is this historic animus and this historic worldview of look at what happened 30 years ago, look at what happened 100 years ago, because your logic is very sturdy, right?
I mean, it would never lead you to take these steps, but if you are mired in the past in the glory of something else, then you don't think like, which you just articulated.
Anyway, sorry, Raul.
No, I think those are both great points, and they connect to the observation that you made, Felix, about which Russia is a more stable agent in the system, a poor Russia or a flourishing Russia.
And some of that is up to us, and some of that is up to the Russian political elite.
Insofar as some of it is up to us, I do worry very much that impoverishing Russia makes Russia much less a stable agent in the world.
And we should think about those consequences, too, about how much we are punishing the Russian people in addition to the Russian government.
To Mehere's point, one of the things we have to try to figure out, and it's so difficult to do from afar, is how does a man like President Putin imagine his legacy?
I think that the Russian president wants to be in textbooks 500 years from now, describing him as a figure who restored Russia to greatness and respect and dignity of a national kind in the world and showed the West what was what, even though they have an economy the size of Texas or Spain.
But they were able, under his leadership, to change the world.
And that's, I think, connected to Mehere's intuition about this sort of sweep of history for any of these regimes, thinking in century -long terms as opposed to decade -long terms.
But it's fundamentally backward -looking.
It was a part of me, Ravi, that thinks, fundamentally, Russia is an oil exporter.
Their economy is predicated on oil and energy.
It's a declining asset.
And this was, I think, in his calculation, as that asset declines over the next 30 years, there's like one or two chances left to make some hay until it dwindles into even more irrelevance, right?
And this was his opportunity to do that.
It's mind -boggling to think what a leader like this can do by looking backwards for some glory, what they can do in the world.
And in a way, when I think about all the companies in Ukraine that I'm familiar with that have real promise, that have, like, amazing engineers.
And you could really have seen how, I don't know how quickly, but how Ukraine would have become, really, an amazing place to go to, an amazing place to do business.
But I can't really imagine, yes, so then it's under Russian control.
But I can't really imagine the future that I saw for Ukraine the moment it's part of Russia.
And to me, it's such 19th century thinking, this equation that the mass of land that you have influence over, that it has to do with anything, really.
It's this really backward, strange view of what it means to be influential, what it means to somehow have standing in the world community.
And maybe that's just me because I'm from a small country myself, so land mass has never really been that great an appeal.
But I really don't get it.
Like, why do you want to be influential by controlling more square kilometers of economies that are not doing well?
On the point about the potential future, a bright one for Ukraine, that maybe felt more at hand before and feels more dire now, it is deeply tragic.
And I don't know if you've ever been to Ukraine?
I have, yeah. Kyiv is gorgeous.
Lviv is gorgeous. It's a wonderful country and fascinating history and culture and literature, so much human capital.
And so I worry very much about what that future looks like now.
I will say, not at all to defend the 19th century.
He's always been a little bit of a 19th century guy here.
When in the West, and in particular in the United States, we say like, oh, your thinking is so retro.
This whole spheres of influence, neighborhood thing, you're like stuck in the real politic of the 19th century.
Which is easy to say if you act as though the entire world is your sphere of influence, which is how everybody else experiences it.
Which is, we say to China, like, oh, the Asia Pacific's not your sphere of influence, because we're there.
Or we say to the Russians, no, central and eastern Europe are not your sphere of influence, because we're there.
And also, by the way, we'll take Latin America.
Maybe somebody else can have Africa because we don't care that much.
But the American appetite to treat the world as our universal sphere of influence, has I think kind of invited some of this 19th century thinking to say like, well, maybe you can't have the whole world.
Maybe we'll just keep our neighborhood.
So Raul, we have to say this has been amazing.
Many times over the last month, I have revisited our conversation from the fall about Russia on this podcast.
Yeah. And I have thought about what you said about how dangerous the declining state is.
And it struck me as prescient and fascinating at the time.
And unfortunately, we're living through some of the consequences of that foresight today.
But this was great.
I'm so happy to be back with the gang and spend some time with you talking about what is a horrific situation, but is important for all of us to try to understand what happened, why, and what comes next.
Yeah. Thank you for listening.
This was an after -hour special from the TED Audio Collective.
I hope you enjoyed this, and I hope you're enjoying it.
