Ukraine-Russia Debate
(Herman Pirchner and Dr. Stephen Bryen)
Transcript available below
Transcript
Robert R. Reilly:
Hello and welcome to the Westminster Institute. I am Robert Reilly, its director. Some ten months ago, we sponsored a program on the future of Ukraine in the form of a debate with two very distinguished foreign policy experts who hold markedly different perspectives on Ukraine, on the cause of the war, the conduct of the war, and its likely outcome. A lot has happened in the last ten months in Ukraine and Russia, so I am delighted that these two gentlemen agreed to return to do another program on this subject. As that show we taped more than ten months ago is very lively, I have every expectation that our program today will be quite lively as well.
About the speakers
One of our guests is Herman Pirchner. He is the president of the American Foreign Policy Council, which was founded back in 1982 in Washington to provide some well thought out perspectives on foreign policy questions. In 1982, Herman was the president of the American Foreign Policy Council, and today more than forty years later he remains as the president of this important and distinguished group.
Now, Herman has held other significant positions as well, senior Senate staff, and as director of the national security team advising former presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The AFPC, the American Foreign Policy Council, also publishes a great deal of material from is senior fellows and senior management in the form of monographs and books and shorter papers for briefings.
Herman has hosted hundreds of delegations from foreign countries to come to the United States to meet senior American political leaders. And likewise, he has sent these senior American political leaders to foreign countries to meet with their peers. He did this for quite a few years in China, and likewise in Russia, and has done it for the last 10 years in Ukraine, a country with which he is very familiar, and to which he has traveled often.
Herman has also written a good deal, and there are two of his books I would like to mention that particularly pertain to the topic we are covering today. One was a work in 2004, which shows the kind of prescience that Herman exercises or possesses, Reviving Greater Russia: The Future of Russia’s Borders with Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Ukraine. He is also the author of Post Putin: Succession, Stability, and Russia’s Future, which is also available in Russian and Ukrainian.
Our second guest is Stephen Bryen. He has also held senior Senate staff positions, including for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he has excelled in both the private sector and the government sector. For many years he was one of the senior civilian employees at the Department of Defense, a position in which he gained the highest award given by the Department of Defense to civilians, not once but twice. I am speaking of the Distinguished Service Medal.
Now, Dr. Bryen is particularly expert on technology and strategy, and as such has been contributing to other Westminster shows on China, Japan, Taiwan, as well as on Russia and Ukraine. I should also mention that he was the executive director of a grassroots political organization, the head of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and in the Pentagon he served as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Trade Security Policy.
Dr. Bryen is also a frequent contributor on foreign policy matters in his own column, which appears usually a couple of times weekly, in which he gives his sometimes unique perspective on the burning questions of the day, including Russia and Ukraine, so we are delighted he is also back here with us to further debate the future of Ukraine. Gentlemen, welcome to the program.
Introduction
Now, there have been some very interesting changes. Of course, the Kursk invasion by Ukraine is one of the ones that is highlighted by many people, and of course a lot of journalists, but other things have happened, including, very significantly, the steady advance of Russian forces on the eastern border of Ukraine, getting them further along to their dream of taking all of Donbas and Luhansk.
So let us start, Herman Pirchner, with you. I neglected to mention how many times you have been to Ukraine. And before that, of course, you were in Russia very frequently, and you have brought Ukrainian delegations to the United States. You were there recently, and I know you are very well informed on the situation. Let us have your perspective on this issue and ask you if you have been able to maintain any optimism in terms of a favorable outcome for Ukraine.
Herman Pirchner:
Thanks, Bob, it is a pleasure to be back with you and I look forward to hearing Steve’s views and how they may or may not have evolved given the circumstances. The central strategic question to my mind is this: if Russia is permitted to use nuclear blackmail, to use the repeated use of war crimes to take land from a peaceful country, then it is only a matter of time before that lesson is repeated, not just by Russia when they gain strength enough to attack again but also by China, Iran, and others. I mean, it is no big secret why South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan favor a Russian defeat, because if Russia is seen to succeed with this nuclear blackmail and other tactics, it strengthens the hawks in Beijing, and you can say the same about Tehran.
You know, Russia has a history of imperialism that dates back a long time. Between 1450 and 1900, Russia gained an average of 50 square miles per day, added it to its territory. That figure was computed by Orlando Figes, and you can see a detailed description of that. And they did it by attacking when they were strong, resting, and attacking again. We see this repeated somehow in the current era with 2008 into Georgia, 2014 in Ukraine, 2022 in Ukraine, and if you want to go back a little bit, you can talk about the repeated invasions of Poland, 1772, 1793, 1795, 1920, 1938, and so forth.
So when you talk about helping Ukraine, you are also talking about helping others that may be threatened. It is not an accident that Sweden and Finland have chosen to join NATO, because they had to take Russian claims on their territory seriously. It is not an accident that the Baltic states and Poland wanted to be part of NATO, because they had no way to defend themselves without help, and those claims go further.
Russia has great claims, for instance, against Denmark, I think something like 80,000 square miles of Arctic Ocean. But of course, having ambitions and being able to carry them out are very different things, and we are seeing this in Ukraine, to come to the current times. When Russia first invaded in ’22, everybody thought that in three days they would take Kiev. They did not. Then there was an ambition to take maybe just Novorossiya, which is the southern part of Russia, maybe going to Odessa, maybe connecting with Transnistria and Moldova. That did not work. And then there is the ambition to take all of Donbas and Luhansk. That has not happened.
Now, the most recent pronouncement by Putin is that by October 1 they will be able to take a city in Donbas of about 30,000 people pre-war population. In fact, in the last day or two things have bogged down for Russia on the eastern front, and I see no gains in the last 24 hours by Russia along that front and the number of attacks is down dramatically. In fact, since January 1 the total number of square kilometers taken by Ukraine, primarily in Donbas though not entirely because Ukraine has made modest gains on the eastern front, but they have taken roughly the same amount of territory that Russia has taken from Ukraine during that period. In other words, there is a net close to zero in terms of total land conquered.
Now, does this suggest a stalemate?
I think stalemate may be too broad a term. I would say it suggests a military stalemate, but a military stalemate does not mean a defeat for Ukraine or victory for Russia. You remember that the U.S. was not known for losing battles in Vietnam, but we lost the war. We pulled out for domestic reasons, for the same reason China did several times, for the same reason the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan, and I think the evidence of problems building up inside of Russia, evidence that the elite in Russia are starting to see that the interests of Russia are not the same interests of Putin, have to give rise to the possibility that Putin may not survive and that Russia may finally have to withdraw.
Now, that is certainly not a given. We do not know how the military question will play out, but I think it is important to think about the weaknesses that Russia has exhibited, and that is not discussed so much. For instance, you remember a year ago Prigozhin, the commander of Wagner, took a march on Moscow. No military units rose to stop his march. They sat on their toughs, and he did this not criticizing Putin, but in the last weeks the commander of Paladin, another mercenary force of Russia that operates in Congo and other places in the world, has issued a stinging denunciation of Putin, talking about all the failures of the war and blaming it on that great Russian leader, Putin.
Now, why does a man that has great connections to the Russian army, has great connections to Russian intelligence services, and knowing the example of Prigozhin suddenly choose this moment to publicly denounce Putin, and on Telegraph and other things? This has been broadcast all over Russia. And it is probably because he is sensing some support for this position within the military, some support for this position within the intelligence services.
Maybe he is looking at the damage being done to the Russian economy. We know three or four days ago Russia stopped publishing figures of the export of petroleum products because their production is down and that is a danger. It may be because he is looking at reports on the study of social media inside of Russia to indicate growing opposition to the war. Anyway, there are many other reasons that Russia is having internal problems, including the inability to produce certain weapons. They are being known as a 440 country because of their primitive nature. Bottom line: it is not a given that if we support Ukraine with arms, they win, but it is the best course of action, and they have a path to victory.
Robert R. Reilly:
Thank you, Herman. Steve?
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Well, we have a different perspective than Herman’s, and different news services, I think, too. My assessment is quite radically different from Herman’s. I think Ukraine is losing the war. Let us start there. I think its army is getting beat up very badly, especially in southern Donetsk right now. The Russians are adding square kilometers every day to their takings in that area. Pokrovsk, which is the emerging big battle, has not concluded yet by any means, but it is certainly being surrounded by the Russians, and I think that is their next target, so operationally I think they are doing very well.
Kursk is a separate matter, I think. I think it is a foolish move by the Ukrainians, by Zelenskyy, actually, because I think he is promoting it, because it has drawn off some of their better forces from being able to defend key areas in Donetsk, which is more wax strategically important, so most of the evidence (and it is not all conclusive by any means, and we lack a lot of information), but most of the evidence shows that the Ukrainian military is starting to be ground down.
I think they have been tenacious. They have fought very hard, for sure, but there is simply a limit to how long they can go on, and you know it is very hard to tell where the breaking point is. I think I understand the short-term Russian strategy. I do not pretend to understand the long term, but the short term is to try and create a cauldron, they call it a cauldron or a pincer, around the main units of the Ukrainian Army and trap them, and that is why places like Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar and other locations, which are not over with by any means yet, but which are indicative, I think, of what the Russian strategy militarily is.
Now, that does not necessarily translate to what their strategic objectives are in Ukraine, and I think Herman is quite right, that that is a major issue, and I do not think there are good answers to that because we do not know yet. If I were betting, and I do not like to bet because I usually lose, but if I were betting, I think that what the Russians are going to want is a change of Ukrainian government, for sure, that is more favorable to Russia, and the removal of NATO forces and NATO influence in Ukraine. I think that is their key objective, and I think it has been all along.
We can go back and review the whole history of the war. I think it was a very unprepared Russian military that invaded. They did not expect to actually have to do it. I think they were caught by surprise, they were not prepared, and they were under very bad leadership, but a lot of that has changed over time as they reshuffled their leadership. They have improved their tactics and their operations, and now that is showing very vividly in the actual conduct of the war.
The bigger question, I suppose, is what will happen with Ukraine and how soon will it happen? And there are different estimates on that. I do not think it is going to last too much longer, frankly, because I do not think the Ukrainians can sustain it too much longer in terms of casualties, in terms of their fighting ability, and a morale which is starting to crack in some places, and what follows from that is the other question, the bigger one, which is how does that impact Europe, how does it impact NATO, how does it impact American strategy?
I mean, one of the features of this war that is not often talked about enough is that we have plowed in an awful lot of equipment into the war, into the Ukraine war, mainly, in fact almost exclusively, tactical military equipment, leaving ourselves with some big absences in terms of inventory of weapons and capabilities that we might need in the Pacific and other places, and the Middle East for that matter, so that arm sales for Taiwan have been held up, arm sales for Israel have been held up, not only because of politics.
Some of it was politics in the case of Israel, but some of was just they did not have it. They do not have the supplies. 155-millimeter ammo is a great example. We just do not have any, and what we had we shipped to Ukraine, so that leaves our forces in a kind of quandary if another war would break out elsewhere. And of course, I worry about China a great deal because I think they are a growing threat in the Pacific, and from a strategic point of view it is far more important than Ukraine, in my estimate.
I think Ukraine was a mistake from the get-go. We should have found some way to work a deal when we could have, but that is water over the dam, of course. Whether we could have or could not have is academic now. The Ukrainians did not want to, Washington did not want to, NATO did not want to, the Russians did not want to, nobody wanted to, and so you end up in a war.
I am not sure about Herman’s terminology, nuclear blackmail. Russia is certainly a nuclear power, but so is China, and pretty soon Iran will be. Is that nuclear blackmail? I think that, so far, thank God, it has been a conventional fight with largely conventional weapons on both sides, and there have been some very interesting developments of how new types of weapons, like drones, are playing an increasingly important role in combat, which we are now learning, and I think we will learn a lot, but the Russians are also learning a lot because we are pushing some of our best weapons (HIMARS is just one example. ATACMS is another example) into the fight, and they are learning how to counter them, so it is also helping them understand how to deal with us.
There is no doubt, and I want to make it very clear I think Herman and I would agree on this. There is no doubt there is a really significant competition between Russia on the one side and its bloc of not very savory bunch of characters, and the Western world. That fight is absolutely on. The question of Ukraine is not about, in my opinion, is: yes, you can try to hold Ukraine, but you are going to pay a high cost, you are going to deplete your arsenals, and you may lose. That is my opinion, so I will stop there and we can go on from there.
Robert R. Reilly:
Let me ask you both about the significance of the cabinet changes in both Ukraine and Russia. Zelenskyy has made a pretty clean sweep. Putin seems to be more selective in the changes he has made in the cabinet, one of the most interesting of which is to remove a military figure as Minister of Defense and install an accountant.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Well, he is not really a military figure. He wears a military uniform, but he is not a combat guy. I think the problem in Russia, which is an endemic problem in Russia across the board, is corruption, and the problem in the military was delivering goods to the soldiers even down to simple things like rations that were substandard, poor, where they were charging high fees, you know, it is a racket.
Putin did not like it, not that he has much room to talk about it, but he did not like it. The troops did not like it. Some of the commanders hated it, and so they are cleaning house. They have made a number of arrests of senior military figures. They have not gone to jail yet, but they have been arrested, and it is all about corruption. Herman can talk about the Ukrainian side, but that is what I know about the Russian side.
Herman Pirchner:
You know, there is so much corruption in Russia, if you want to charge somebody with corruption, just figure out who your enemy is and go after him. Everybody is guilty. And you have the same thing in China and other places. One point I want to respond to is when I was in Ukraine in January, you hear the same story over and over again: many more of us are going to die, but we do not want to surrender the lives of our children and grandchildren to Moscow rule. If you are looking at the polling, more than 70% of the Ukrainian population is not willing to give up land for peace. They are going to continue to fight, and there is a lot of commentary about the manpower, but you know, they had an electric sign-up for draft, and over two million Ukrainians signed up.
The problem is at least as much in terms of training capability and equipment.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Where are those two million people, Herman? They do not have two million people signed up. Where did you get that number?
Herman Pirchner:
It is just a public figure.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
No, it is not. There is no such thing.
Herman Pirchner:
I am happy to show you the [source].
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
They have not recruited two million people into the army, not yesterday.
Herman Pirchner:
No, no, they signed up to register. They are not into the army. They are signed up. No, they are not in the army.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Fair enough.
Herman Pirchner:
Yeah, so I think you are going to have Ukraine continuing to fight, and I do not think the will to fight is going to stay there with Russia, which is why I am more optimistic than Steve is about the outcome of the war.
Now, the changing of personnel, in part, I think, is burnout. I think it is in part consolidation of power by Zelenskyy, who has internal politics to worry about. Do I think it will affect the outcome of the war? I think not too much.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
I agree with that. I do not think it has any impact at all. I think for Zelenskyy this is not the first shakeup he has done. This is like the third. He does it all the time, but it seems the biggest one is [Dmytro] Kuleba, who is the foreign minister who apparently was fired, but the Verkhovna Rada, the legislature there, has not approved his firing, so there may be a political struggle here that we are not so aware of.
Zelenskyy has named his Deputy, [Andrii Sybiha], as foreign minister. And I agree with Steve, it is not clear how that will play out, but as has been done with other people there will be another job for him in the administration.
Robert R. Reilly:
Are you at all surprised that these significant changes have been made, including in Russia, in the middle of a war at a particularly intense time? That is usually not looked upon as a good time to make changes of this importance.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Well, that is not exactly right because we changed commanders in wartime in many wars. They certainly did it in World War II.
Herman Pirchner:
…or the civil war.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
…the Civil War, for sure. I mean, it happens. You generally weed out the bad eggs and go with the ones that are effective. In Russia, I think what has happened is that they want to jack up their whole military industrial complex (let us call it that, Eisenhower’s famous terminology), and they want higher production of weapons and new weapons, and there was a great concern that they were not getting there because of the corruption and the lack of what we can call modern management, and that is why you put a new defense minister in who has that specialty. He is not a defense guy, he is an industrial, economic guy.
Herman Pirchner:
There is also a struggle going on between the intelligence services and the military, which is why you have a disproportionate intelligence presence in Kursk as opposed to clear military command there, so [there are] internal battles inside of Russia.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
I do not know if it is a battle, or whether that is how they do things.
Herman Pirchner:
When one have those two organizations gotten along ever?
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Well, in any country. Try it out. Try out any others you like, you know, it goes on. I mean, I do not think that is very significant. I think the significant question for the Russians right now is how much force they want to bring to bear in this war. They have been, it seems to me, they have been fairly insistent in not jacking up the number of troops too high. They have a huge reserve, and they are following a steady program. You do not have to agree with it, but it is a steady program of trying to take more of the Donbas and to trap the Ukrainian Army, which is their goal.
Herman Pirchner:
Well, they have, but they simply have not taken very much territory since January 1 of this year. It is roughly equal to the number of square kilometers Ukraine has taken in Kursk.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Yeah, but there is nothing out there.
Herman Pirchner:
[There is] a 650-mile front.Dr. Stephen Bryen:
It is not even comparable.
Herman Pirchner:
[In] how many spaces have Russians taken more than a couple kilometers? Not many. There are only a couple places.Dr. Stephen Bryen:
[They have taken] tens of kilometers, and in critical towns. I mean, come on. Let us be honest.Herman Pirchner:
Ten kilometers is six miles, and with the number of losses, the British think the Russians have been losing more than a thousand a day over a period of months.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Who is losing a thousand a day? That is a British number?
Herman Pirchner:
[It is a] British number, yeah.Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Yeah, I do not believe it. I do not know what it is, by the way.
Herman Pirchner:
Well, I do not know what it is either, but it is a lot.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
There are no reliable numbers in this war from either side, and I would not believe a single, single one of them because they are all fake. I mean, the question is: are the Ukrainians able to hold these strongholds which they built? Consider Pokrovsk, which is a stronghold town. I mean, it is highly fortified. And can they, you know, like Avdiivka was, like Bakhmut was, and can they hold it? Well, those two they did not hold, and it looks like they are going to lose Pokrovsk over time. How soon?
Herman Pirchner:
Well, it is possible. There have been no gains in the last three days, and the defenses on the edge of the town are substantial. We will see. I agree. I do not know how it will turn out.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
…like in other villages, but I think the important thing here is that the Ukrainians are on their backs in these places, and they are having difficulty, serious difficulty, and they are saying so. They are open about that. They are not lying.
Herman Pirchner:
Is it more significant than territory lost in Kursk?
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Well, Kursk is nothing. I mean, it is an empty area. It is mostly small.
Herman Pirchner:
It is a big shock wave inside of Moscow and destabilizing to the Putin regime.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
It is not destabilizing anything. Where do you see that?
Herman Pirchner:
Well, we will see.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Where is your evidence? There is no evidence of any destabilization. I think they are annoyed. They are pissed off that they were not prepared for that move, and they were got caught with their pants down, no doubt about that. Otherwise, they would have had it fortified and they would have blocked it right away, but it is not strategic territory because it does not mean anything. You cannot go anywhere from there.
Herman Pirchner:
No, it has to do with internal Russian politics.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
But I do not think it does. I mean, that is where we would differ because I do not see any evidence that there is any fall off in Putin’s leadership there at all. I know there is a wishful thinking on the Western part that somehow we can overturn Putin, get rid of Putin and everything will be okay.
Herman Pirchner:
Well, we cannot get rid of Putin.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
We are not going to get rid of Putin.
Herman Pirchner:
Russians in general can, and after all, this is how people go out. We did a study of 120 post-World War II dictatorships of 10 million people or more. What happens to them? 42 percent by coups, 20% by assassination.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
It is a bad business. You do not want to be a dictator. There are some exceptions to the rule.
Herman Pirchner:
Castro made it to the end.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
…Franco. I mean, you can find examples of both.
Herman Pirchner:
Yeah, but think about the big case against Putin. If he says I am scared of NATO, is NATO bigger now or smaller? Is it more unified or less unified? Is it better funded or less funded? What about the strategic advantage in oil and petroleum sales in Europe? That is gone. What about the political influence that comes from that? Is that gone? What about the intellectual flight of the best and brightest young technical people? They have left Russia, not to come back. What about the degradation of the Russian army that may even have trouble at some point with civil wars in the northern Caucasus, the Chechens and so forth. You can go on and on about Putin’s misjudgments, and I think it does not take a lot of imagination to understand that some people are not happy and ambitious people are looking for opportunities. The man is not all powerful.
And going back to Georgy Zakrevsky’s condemnation of Putin, there is a reason for that. It is a serious guy making condemnations, and others are doing it too. Look at the former Kremlin Chief of Staff saying no Russian leader has caused more damage to Russian interest than Putin.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
I do not have any brief for Putin. All I am saying is if you base American policy on the myth that somehow Russia is going to turn over its leadership, you are making a big mistake. It is a bad strategy. If it happens, great, but it is not going to happen, in my opinion, anytime soon. But if it happens, it happens. To try and base your national strategy on something as chimerical as that seems to me foolish.
Herman Pirchner:
I do not think you bet your strategy on it, but I think you monitor it and certainly you base your strategy on not letting Russian aggression, using war crimes and nuclear blackmail, which they do, do.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
That is where you started, but I do not necessarily disagree with any of that. That is not my point. You are not listening. Listen to what I am saying. If you base your national strategy that somehow Russia is going to turn over its leadership and become peaceful and happy, you are dreaming.
Herman Pirchner:
No, they will not. I mean, I wrote a whole book about this in 2019.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
No, of course not. You might get a national leader that is ten times worse than Putin, rattling his nuclear weapons, you know, or using the goddamn things. I think this is a crazy kind of thinking that is going on in the West right now. It is all over the place, that somehow, you know, that we just have to hang on until Putin disappears.
Herman Pirchner:
Well, at some point [he will].
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
Well, he will eventually.
Herman Pirchner:
At some point the Soviets quit Afghanistan. At some point the United States left Vietnam. And what is the alternative? The alternative is to let Putin grab territory, rest, and then grab more territory and more territory. You cannot permit that model of success.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
The Russians killed my good friend Adolph Dubs in Afghanistan. I never forgot it. He was a very good friend. I did not like what they did there. It was horrible. They are good at [being] horrible, okay, [but] that is not what you base your policy on. The Chinese are good at [being] horrible too. I mean, you do not base your policy on that. You base your policy on how to deal with the threat in a practical way, and if you squander all your resources in this adventure in Ukraine such that you weaken our defenses elsewhere and you risk even Europe, it is a crazy way to go about it. That is my opinion. Now, not everybody shares it, I know that.
Herman Pirchner:
The countries most threatened by China (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan) are rooting for Russia to be defeated.
Dr. Stephen Bryen:
They are rooting for the United States, actually, because they depend on the United States for their security. Japan has a tiny army. It is not able to fight at all. Taiwan is a poor island with 28 million people against a billion Chinese, you know, the numbers are very demonstrative. These are countries that are hoping that we will make the difference for their survival, so if we risk that because we do not have HIMARS, we gave them all to Ukraine, or we do not want have 155 millimeter ammo, or we do not have TOW missiles, or you name it, go on down the list, Javelins, then they are left naked and alone, so no one has considered that carefully.