Season 2 Episode 4

Speakers: Jakub Parusinski & Sam Greene

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Jakub: Hello and welcome back to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World, a podcast from Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent. I'm Jakub Parusinski. Each week we're going to be analysing the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, bringing you analysis from across the globe to explain its context and consequences as the war continues.

And this week we're getting into the head of Ukraine's enemy, the force who has been occupying vast waves of Ukraine's territory since 2014. And whose disastrous invasion is the reason this podcast exists in the first place. I'm talking about Russia.

Russia has always been confusing for the West. In fact, it's now something of a cliche to call Russia an enigma, a mystery, to talk about the Russian soul. But what is clear is that for decades, if not centuries, Western analysts have struggled to properly analyse and understand Russia.

Why that is, is a complex question. There's issues of data. Russia is not the most transparent of places. There's also reasons that are more tied to where Russia is and where Russians are as a country and as individuals.

The U.S., Western Europe, while potentially declining, are still great powers and thriving countries. Russia has been on the decline for a long time now, and many individuals there are only looking to solve their own problems rather than those of society at large.

That changes the way a country works. And more recently, Russia is realising that its place on the global table is no longer secured. And as a player who's about to lose everything, well it's in its interest to turn the tables upside down.

And the way that Russia has been doing that is by attacking the geo-economic order in various ways. For example, payments, it struggles to get transfers in and out. It doesn't like Swift; it doesn't like Visa or MasterCard.

And for years it's been trying to build up its own system called Mir. Russia has sought to foment and increase global instability simply because it does not benefit from the current system. It feels like it is losing, and it is trying to break things apart.

Russia has found partners around the world that agree with its vision to a lesser or greater extent, China is one of them, but many African, Asian, and Latin American countries, especially the more authoritarian ones, also want to reverse the rules-based order and the American hegemony that follows.

While Russia might not have the capability to open new fronts all across the world, it does certainly encourage them, it benefits from the conflict between Israel and Gaza from instability across Africa, and potentially it would benefit from conflict in the South China Sea.

The West is currently feeling overwhelmed by all of this, but trying to create instability can be a dangerous game. Russia has recently seen that happen in its own regions.

So, is it really happy about what is happening in the world? Where does the road ahead lead us? To find out more, I got in touch with one of the West's leading analysts on Russia, Sam Greene.

Sam is the Director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis, as well as a professor of Russian politics at King's College London, where he founded and directed the King's Russia Institute for 10 years.

He spent plenty of time living and working in Moscow in the past and has written a number of seminal books on the country, including Putin versus the People from 2019. It's definitely worth a read if you haven't already.

I got in touch with Sam from his base in Washington to see if he could help us find out what is motivating the Russian government, how they're benefiting from global instability, and whether Putin will be in the position and interested to end this catastrophic war anytime soon.

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Sam, welcome to Power Lines.

Sam: Thank you. Great to be here.

Jakub: You've been studying Russia in various capacities for a long time now. Can you tell us a little bit about what you are currently focusing on and how you have seen your studies change since February 2022?

Sam: That's a big, big question. And I think that most of us who've been studying Russia, at least if we are studying it, not just from an academic perspective, but from a policy perspective, are having to ask ourselves and have been for the last 20 months or so, having to ask ourselves a lot of very difficult questions.

There are things that we misunderstood or that we got wrong. There are things that I think have challenged the assumptions that a lot of us had and maybe continue to have about how Russia works, how power functions, and about the roles of things including ideology, identity, history in shaping the decisions made by everybody from people like Vladimir Putin to ordinary Russian citizens.

And so, at the same time that we've been trying to understand where we are, what Russia is likely to try to do, how it's going to continue to prosecute its war against Ukraine, how it's going to cope with the challenges that that war creates for itself, and how it's going to respond to Western support for Ukraine, how it's going to behave around the world.

There's all of these policy questions we're grappling with very much in the minute. We're also trying to pull apart sort of the building blocks of our analysis of Russia going back over the last 20 or 30 years.

See what parts of those building blocks are still useful, which ones maybe not so much and put them back together in a way that allows us to focus not just on the moment, but allows us to think 6, 18, 24, 36 months down the road about where Russia is headed and what challenges that provides both for us as analysts, but for our audiences as policy makers.

Jakub: So, that's really fascinating and I guess we should get back to it in greater detail, but I'm just incredibly curious on a sort of macro level, looking back, which building blocks turned out to be robust and which ones really weren't so much so.

Sam: Well, I think that probably depends on who you ask. But since you're asking me, I had a piece, this is seared into my memory together with a co-author on the 19th, I believe it was, of December 2021, in which we argued not that a war was impossible. That would've been untenable given that there were 200,000 something troops parked along the Ukrainian border so we could all see what was going on.

But we said that we thought a war was unlikely because it didn't make a lot of sense. It didn't make a lot of sense because we thought that we had an idea of the cost benefit analysis from the Kremlin's point of view.

Not because we can get inside Putin's head. There's certain aspects of this that are always going to be a black box for us. But we've been observing Putin for the last 23 years or so, and we had come to what we thought of as an understanding about how he balances risks and rewards.

That he tries to maintain a certain kind of relationship with the Russian elite, a certain kind of relationship with the Russian public, and that he was actually to a degree risk averse.

He would sometimes do things that didn't make a lot of sense, but that he wasn't interested in upsetting the apple cart of his own power and fundamentally that he was interested in his own power.

Jakub: So, I'd like to explore the question of interpretation. I mean, it's now a subject that there have been tomes of cliches published about how difficult it is to understand the Russian psyche and so forth.

And while that's certainly true, I think what I'm trying to understand is a lot of commentary on why relations with Russia are so difficult come down to this question of interpretation, of being able to see things from a Russian perspective.

To what extent do you feel like that is actually one of the main reasons for this, I'd say consistent, difficult relationship over not just the past couple of years, but really decades or centuries, depending on how far you want to go back.

Sam: Well, I do, and I don't think that that's a problem. It is a problem to the extent that we were talking earlier about sort of cost benefit analysis and about the fact that I, and a lot of other people, I think sort of got our evaluation of Putin's and the Kremlin's cost benefit analysis wrong.

I think that that then often leads us to say, actually we're dealing with a fundamentally irrational actor, and that we can't, and probably shouldn't try to understand how the world works from that person's point of view. I think that's a mistake.

So, I have to come back to the assumption that he is rational, but I don't understand the basis of his rationality. And so, what I need to do as a researcher and as an analyst, as comfortable as it might be, is to pick myself up out of my shoes, put myself into his shoes, and begin to understand what, again, the risks and rewards, costs, and benefits, what the world looks like from his point of view.

The issue where I think it's a little bit more problematic to say that we don't really understand the Russians, is to assume that all the decisions that are being made in Russia, first of all, are being made by some monolithic Russia as a whole.

Russia is an authoritarian country that does create a degree of monolithic behaviour. It creates a lot of pressure for people to conform and not to step out of line, but that also gives a tremendous amount of autonomy to the state.

And we've seen that over the course of this war, that Putin has been able to do, in addition to a tremendous amount of violence to Ukraine. He's been able to do a tremendous amount of violence to his own society and to his own political system and not really pay a price for that.

So, I think there's a limited amount of benefit in looking at Russian culture, Russian history, trying to sort of figure out what it is that makes Russians different from the rest of us. If what we're trying to do at the end of the day is explain the behaviour of the political system.

Jakub: Turning to this question about points of view and maybe what is happening in the world the last couple of years from a Western perspective, it's very easy to become despondent. The last couple of years have not been easy.

Sam: No.

Jakub: Whether it's Trump in the U.S. or it's the challenge of the BRICS. It's the sort of economic model, the prosperity of the middle class. Take your pick. There's a lot of difficulties all over the place.

Russia's coming at it from a very different perspective, from challenging the status quo, trying to turn the table upside down. Have they looked at the past couple of years and said, well, this is fantastic. This is exactly the way ...

Aside from their, I would say humbling military performance in Ukraine, has the world more broadly gone along the lines of what Russia is hoping for, what the Kremlin is hoping for?

Sam: Again, I would put the caveat around this that I don't have access to the four inches between Vladimir Putin's ears. So, I don't really know how he's feeling.

It's hard for me to imagine that he's feeling very good about the way things have gone. You mentioned the humbling of the Russian military, again, it's possible to exaggerate that the reality is that they are not doing as poorly as many of us would like them to be doing.

But you're right. The war has not gone the way that he expected it to. And we I think could be fairly confident in that conclusion, he expected a much more rapid victory. I think those expectations were built to a certain extent on faulting intelligence.

The reality is that he had nobody in his system or anywhere in the Russian bureaucracy or anywhere in the Russian political leadership who was capable of explaining to him what he was going to be up against in Ukraine.

Mostly because there was nobody who actually knew, if you were coming up through the Russian sort of foreign policy establishment or intelligence establishment, you were never going to make your career by being a specialist on Ukraine.

If you were ambitious, you were a specialist on the U.S. or on Western Europe, or on China, or on the Middle East, but not on Ukraine, it was sort of assumed that they knew everything there was to know.

Again, because of this sort of imperialist and colonialist mentality, I think that they went to war on the basis, I think, at least in part of faulting intelligence and faulting assumptions. And they wouldn't be the first people in the world to do that.

But they're paying a price for it. I think they also did not anticipate the degree of the cohesiveness of the Western response both militarily in support of Ukraine and through sanctions and other things in resistance to Russia.

But I think the Kremlin has also found that it's not a catastrophic world from its perspective, that there are still opportunities. It may not be able to turn what Russia refers to as the global majority now against the U.S. and Europe and against Ukraine.

But it is able to drive enough of a wedge in that global system to give it some breathing space. It's hard to imagine, for example, that two years ago, Russia really wanted to be dependent for its military industrial complex on relations with Iran and North Korea.

But it is finding that actually it can make do that way. It's also hard to imagine that Russia really wanted to have its global hydrocarbons exports, limited to essentially India and China. It wanted to have much more liquidity and much more pricing power on the global market, and yet it's finding that it can make do with those arrangements.

So, Russia is willing to accept kind of a second or a third best scenario and willing to make do with the resources that are available to it. And in part because it doesn't have an option.

I think Putin looks at the situation and realises that capitulation would be catastrophic for his system of power and for his personal future. And that's not something he's willing to countenance.

And so, it's not that he looks at the world and thinks, well, okay, this isn't quite going the way I'd like to, maybe we can dial it back. That's not an option that he has. He is going to keep pushing for opportunities wherever he can find them, even if they're not really the opportunities he was hoping to see two years ago.

Jakub: So, not to take away from Ukraine as the key battleground, which I think it is very much right now. It nonetheless feels like for Russia, this is about more than Ukraine.

And I mean, a lot of commentators on the Russian side have stated both military ambitions that go beyond Ukraine, but also, I think a place in the world that looks beyond just sort of control of Ukraine, but Russia as a player in the sort of the global system.

And as you say in a lot of areas, it's clearly not succeeded with its sort of main objectives, but it is succeeding in other ways. What are the areas that Russia sees as opportunities, or what are elements of a kind of world order that Russia is looking to build? What does that look like?

Sam: So, look, I think that Russian foreign policy begins at home. That fundamentally is driven by the imperatives of domestic power for Putin. Putin has felt threatened for a very long time, really going back to the Orange Revolution in 2004, by developments in what the Russians refer to as the near abroad. By developments in the post-Soviet space.

And so, he's reacted poorly to democratic movements and to the fall of incumbent governments in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Kyrgyzstan, in the potential fall of authoritarian rulers and in Belarus and Kazakhstan more recently.

And that has led him to a policy that to a certain extent he inherited from Yeltsin, but that he consolidated of believing that Russia needs to be able to exercise veto power politically, economically and militarily throughout the post-Soviet space with the potential exception of the Baltics.

And that's something he began really building towards fairly early on in his brain. And he has tried to affect sometimes successfully, more often, not successfully throughout his time in office. He sees the rest of the world and the U.S. and Europe in particular as a threat to that ability to maintain dominance in the post-Soviet space.

And so, what he has begun to do over time is to try to undermine the West in general, the EU and the U.S. in particular. Maybe not even because he's fundamentally angry at them, or that he's pursuing some agenda of global domination, but because he wants to make the world safe for his brand of autocracy.

And for Russia's ambitions regionally, he pursues those ambitions regionally. He starts a war in Ukraine, for example, in 2014, and he faces sanctions. So, then the immediate problem that he has to deal with is the structural economic and political power of the West, of the U.S. dollar of the trading system that is dominated by the US and the European Union, of the soft power that the European Union exerts in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, where countries look to integrate economically into a certain extent politically with Europe rather than with Russia.

So, his objective becomes to break that down. He doesn't necessarily have to provide an alternative. He doesn't need to create an alternative global trading system.

But he does need to break down the dominance of the U.S. and Europe in the existing global trading system in order, for example, to make it possible for ghost fleets of ships to trade in Russian oil while evading sanctions and the G-7 Price cap.

So again, I think he's looking for opportunities to make do and to get something that's good enough but it doesn't have to be perfect from his point of view.

Jakub: So, from an eastern European perspective this desire to damage the … and whatever you want to call it, the rule-based order, the Washington Consensus, Liberal society, it feels like something that's detrimental to humanity overall. Because of I think, the aspirations of a lot of East Europeans to join that Western liberal rules-based order.

But it turns out that Vladimir Putin has found a lot of allies in his vision to sort of damage or replace the Western system across the global south. What is driving that? What are the big things that are really rallying people to his side?

Sam: Well, I think there are probably two parts to the answer to that question. One is that what we sometimes refer to as the global rules-based order, not my favourite phrase in the world, but what we sometimes talk about in that way feels differently to different people.

And the reality is whether we're looking within our own societies in the West, and we've seen growing inequality, for example, through the entirety of the period from the global financial crisis in 2007 through the pandemic just a couple of years ago.

And now, sort of the cost that, for example, rising energy prices are imposing on consumers, particularly in Europe, we see that reflected in our own politics. We see that contribute to a sort of anti-establishment mood in a lot of countries. And that gets in the way of consensus on things like Russia and Ukraine.

We see something very similar happening globally. The West, for example, made a lot of promises to the rest of the world, particularly Africa and Latin America on you know, delivering vaccines and aid as a result of the COVID pandemic.

Most of those promises, many of those promises were not kept. And that contributes to a certain amount of anti-establishment sentiment among populations and governments in what the U.S. often referred to as the global south, the Brits like to call it the middle ground. I think it's a somewhat better phrase. But in parts of the world, that are not western and not northern.

But the other part of the answer is that, look, these are not rich countries that we're talking about. These are countries that have very real social, economic and developmental problems that for example, are struggling to deal with their own issues with energy crisis, food price costs and that sort of thing in addition to climate change.

And they don't necessarily have the luxury of feeling like they can choose sides in this fight between the West and Russia and potentially China, depending on where things go. They certainly can't take an economic hit and a social hit just for rhetorical reasons.

And so, when the West says you should get on board and impose sanctions, what they're going up against is a Russia and a China that says, actually, let's keep trading and we'll provide you some trade facilitation and maybe we'll even provide you some discounts and we'll provide you with some loans and some infrastructure investments.

And if you happen to be an authoritarian regime, we can also provide you with Vagner to help put down your opposition and insurgencies. We can provide you with some technical support on propaganda. We can provide you cover in the United Nations and other international forums to make sure that nobody puts too much pressure on what you're trying to do.

And that kind of transactional is going to be welcomed by a certain number of governments. And again, Russia is not asking these countries to join with Russia. They're not even asking them necessarily to vote in favour of Russia in the United Nations.

They're simply asking them not to get fully on board with what the West is trying to do. And they're giving them material and transactional reasons not to do that. And that, for various reasons is a game that the West is at the moment not playing.

Jakub: It sounds like there's almost two elements here. One is the, I would say global discontents with, well, frankly, America. It's mostly people who don't like America, although depending on which part of the world you're talking about, you'll get France baked in there. You'll get the UK being baked in there, or various other European countries. And that is the reason that people cheer on for Russia on social media.

And then you've got the economic aspects, you mentioned the ghost fleet. So, this idea that you can sort of run global shipping without following the rules of global shipping. Various corrupt schemes around energy or just security service and things like that. And those are the sort of the tangible benefits that specifically rulers of various countries can leverage to enrich themselves or secure their position.

That has provided a lot of benefits, or I'd say tactical benefits for Russia around the world. What about internally? Is any of that sort of translating to a country that works that people are happy with?

I mean, recently we had, of course the sort of pogroms in Dagestan, which I think surprised a lot of people. The Vagner coup earlier this year, I wanted to say last year, but it's just because time has become something incredible these days. But how stable is it internally?

Sam: Yeah. So, look, I want to come back to something I said at the very beginning of this conversation about how we have to question some of our assumptions. I think that what we're seeing is evidence of the disconnect between how Russia is governed and how Russian citizens respond to governance.

So, let me explain what I mean. You are absolutely right that yes, while Russia has been able to sort of weather the storm and its economy hasn't collapsed, this war is not making many people richer. And that's true at the top and the bottom of the economy.

So, we can look at the oligarchs, the billionaire class in Russia, and they've lost since the war began something on the order of a hundred billion dollars in aggregate. But a lot of them are still getting rich, and a lot of them have had the opportunity to get even richer than they were before the war.

So, there's still something to play for. It's not as much as there was before, but it's there. They're not as autonomous as they used to be. They don't have access to the resources they used to have in the West. They don't have that degree of sort of fluidity and liquidity that allowed them to be more autonomous.

So, on that basis, the Russian economy as a whole has managed to make do. Russia as an economy is not able to invest the way it could before, it's becoming technologically more primitive. It's becoming much more highly dependent on China in particular both for imports and for exports.

So, economists believe, yes, they'll get through this period of time, but eventually there may be some kind of a breakdown and a crisis, but probably not as soon as most of us would like.

Now, I think ordinary Russians and elites look at that and see all of those things happening and are not terribly happy with them. And yet we see ordinary Russians and elites doing absolutely nothing about it. And that's the analytical conundrum.

Now, elites actually is probably a little bit easier to explain because they're under tremendous amount of pressure and surveillance from the security state. And again, they're not doing as well as they were doing before, but they're doing well enough that the incentive is to stay in the game.

For the public, I think it's a very different calculation. It has historically been true throughout Putin's time in office that Russians by and large understand that the country is poorly governed.

So, ordinary Russians tend to see whatever prosperity and security they have in their lives as the result of their own efforts, not things that the state has done for them, but what they primarily want from the state is just to get out of the way, not to be a problem, not to take things away from them and not to be predatory. Which obviously the Russian state at various levels is quite capable of being.

So, the problem, if what you want is political change in Russia is not to convince Russians that the state is poorly governed, they already understand that. They already know it's corrupt. They already know that Putin governs in the interest of the oligarchs and the elite, and not in the interest of the ordinary Russian citizen.

The challenge is to convince them that if you were to bring somebody else to power, I don’t know, Alexander … or somebody like that, that something would get better. And there is nothing in the living memory of Russians going back to the late Soviet period, that suggests that changes of leadership actually bring material benefits to citizens.

So, the incentive that people have, if they see a problem in the economy in the state, is not to look for a collective solution, not to look for a political solution, but to look for an individual solution.

To say, I'm going to find my own way out of this. I'm going to get a second job. I'm going to move to a different city. I might even leave the country. I'm going to rely on my friends, my relatives, whatever resources I have close at hand, and I'm going to solve this problem for myself. What I'm not going to do is look to the state for a solution, because anytime I look to the state for a solution, things just get worse.

Jakub: I think that's an accurate but quite a pessimistic perspective because it says that there isn't really much that you can do in order to kind of, let's say, nudge the Russian population to change the situation.

Sam: I find it difficult to come to a different conclusion. What I just described is the research perspective that I've developed over the last, I don't know, couple of decades, including a lot of time spent living and working and researching in Russia.

There's plenty of people out there who would disagree with me. But that's my analysis, within that struggle to see a scenario in which regime change, for example, starts from below.

Jakub: Turning back towards the world and the war in Ukraine, there's now more and more voices, I would say, quietly. I don't think there's a lot of people who are coming or a lot of new people who are coming on the record, but we do hear more voices about negotiations, about a ceasefire, about a peace deal.

To what extent is that something that could work in Russia's case? Is any peace deal going to be seen as something other than a temporary halt?

Sam: That's a very good question. It's a very difficult question, but I'm pretty pessimistic about the prospects of any kind of a negotiated ceasefire. Much less a peace agreement for a couple of reasons.

One, this war or some version of this war, both the local war in Ukraine and the geopolitical confrontation that Russia has with the West is now baked into the structure of Putin's power and legitimacy.

It focuses public attention and elite attention on him. It gives him much more power than he had previously. It justifies the degree of repression and control and nationalisation that we see in Russia.

It's beginning to create an ideological structure that is also guiding both mass and elite behaviour in ways that are supportive of the Kremlin. And I do not see a scenario in which Putin can pivot away from that.

So, I think that that is going to be there for as long as he is there. Now, at the same time, there are limitations. So, I think it's very clear that he's not going to go for a massive military mobilisation ahead of the presidential elections next year.

And I'm even sceptical that he would want to do that afterwards. The last one didn't go so well. It does provoke some unrest, mostly because it upends people's individual ability to go about their daily lives.

So, I think that he might be interested in a reduction in the temperature of the fighting. I think he's may have come to the conclusion that, look, if somebody handed him the entirety of Ukraine on his silver platter, he would very happily take it. But that nobody's planning on doing that, and he doesn't necessarily need it.

He can control what he currently controls or some version of it and spin that as enough of a victory to the Russian people. While still claiming that there's a lot more to fight for. And that allows him to maintain this sense of ongoing conflict and confrontation.

He needs to make sure that he, and not Ukraine and not the West, has the ability to control escalation. To decide whether or not there's going to be more fighting or less fighting tomorrow.

So, I think fundamentally, no, there's not a negotiating partner in Russia. Not for ideological reasons, maybe for ideological reasons too, but there's not a negotiating partner in Russia for purely pragmatic political reasons for as long as Putin is in the Kremlin.

Jakub: So, it looks like one of the things that is really weighing on the West's ability to maintain a cohesive and strong sustained level of support is the appearance of “new fronts.”

So, whether it's Israel and Gaza, potentially we've got Taiwan and who knows how many other new fronts across Africa and Asia could spark up.

It feels like from the Western perspective, that is overwhelming. Whereas from a Russian perspective, it's actually something that's quite desirable, as long as you can contain the level of violence and the level of resources that you commit to different fights.

Is it in Russia's interest to spark up additional hostility? Are they benefiting from the war in Israel and Gaza?

Sam: I think they're very clearly certainly hoping to benefit from the war in Israel and Gaza. It certainly helps their case or at least is seen to help their case in the global south.

But as we're seeing in Washington, the Biden Administration has made the argument to Congress and to the American people that what we see, in fact in the Middle East in Ukraine and in either the Taiwan Strait potentially is … nobody's making the argument that this is a coordinated alliance of Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Hamas.

But that it is a confluence of interest and challenge of forces, whether it's around Hamas, China or Russia that are interested in reducing American power. And so, if Americans think that American power is generally in the interest of America, that it supports our security and prosperity, then it is important that Russia lose in Ukraine.

Just as it could be important that that China lose if it were to try to take over Taiwan. And it's important that Iran lose in whatever it's trying to do vis-a-vis Hamas in Gaza.

So, from that perspective, I think it is useful from Putin's perspective that there are questions being raised in Washington and other places about the wisdom of that approach.

That there are some who were saying, look, we have limited defence industrial capacity, we are struggling to produce the number of arms that Ukraine needs to keep the fight going even at the current level, much less to be able to really put more pressure on Russia that potentially weakens our ability to support Israel, and that potentially weakens our ability to support Taiwan and thus that we need to prioritise.

That is a debate that the Kremlin, and I think probably Beijing very much want the West to have. It buys them time at the very least, and it potentially comes down on the side of the West having to make difficult choices about whom to support.

Now, the administration here, and I'm inclined to agree with, thinks that that's a false choice, that in fact if you abandon one front, what you end up doing is multiplying the pressure that you face on all the other fronts.

Jakub: I mean, that seems incredibly clear when you think about it, that right now if I am a authoritarian and I see the U.S. debate going, well, we feel overwhelmed by two fronts, I'm like, well, perfect. Now is the time to get yeah, whatever thing I wanted to do. Let's just sort of move it forward.

I mean, we saw that in Azerbaijan. I think Aliyev clearly taking advantage of the situation, who's going to stop him? And I know it's difficult for different but equally sort of serious reasons to get a read on China, but it feels like that's the same sort of feeling in Beijing. Like Moscow and Beijing are both benefiting from that instability.

Sam: To an extent. Look, I'm not a China specialist. But my sense is that there are some confluences of interest, but the Chinese and Russian interests are in some ways very different.

Russia benefits from hostilities in the Middle East because it raises the cost of oil. China does not benefit from increasing cost of oil.

Russia wants to alter the global trading system, and China does too, but China doesn't want to break the global trading system because it benefits from it. It profits in it.

And so, there are limits, I think, to the interests and the U.S. and the West could probably get a bit smarter about how to insert itself into some of those gaps. But to the extent that what's going on in the Middle East and thoughts about Taiwan make it more difficult for the U.S. to send the support to Ukraine, that Ukraine needs, yes, I think Beijing will take that as at least a short-term victory as obviously will Moscow.

And that is indeed what we're seeing right now on Capitol Hill where they're moving ahead with support for Israel, and they have for the moment parked support for Ukraine.

Jakub: We're running out of time, so one or two more questions. So, next year we've got elections, not just in the U.S. but we also have them in Russia. What are the chances of a surprise in Russian elections?

I know that probably wouldn't have seemed likely at all for the past 20 years. Is this time around different, given that we've had Vagner, we've had rumblings amongst the intelligence services, there seems to be a lot of discontent. Could it be the black swan event that everyone is hoping for?

Sam: Well, that's the thing about black swan events, is that they're fundamentally unpredictable. So, I mean, the short answer to your question is, yeah, sure. I mean, stranger things have happened.

I think the Kremlin is pretty savvy when it comes to managing elections. It understands that cheating and manipulation are very delicate things that yeah, you can tell people that 80% of the population voted for Putin, and that is the number that they seem to be aiming for.

But you could only do that if people look around them and see that at least kind of 6 out of 10 of the people that they know voted for Putin. If the reality is that kind of 3 out of 10 voted for Putin, and the government is telling you on television that it was 8 out of 10, then people begin to say, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense.

And then you end up in a situation like we saw in Belarus for example. They will be very careful to try to avoid that. So, the Kremlin usually aims for what they call the 70/70 target. Which means 70% of the vote for Putin on 70% turnout.

What we've been told is that they're now aiming looking to next year for 80/80. 80% for Putin, 80% turnout. To show that there's a rally around the flag and everybody's really supporting Putin in the context of this war.

But in order to make that happen, they've added a third 70. So, it's 80, 80, 70, the 70 being that none of the candidates on the ballot. And because it is an election, there have to be people running against Putin. None of them can be younger than 70-years-old because they don't want to make Putin look old.

They understand that the one objection that a lot of people in Russia do have to Putin is he's been around a long time, he's not young. And people might prefer somebody younger.

So, they want to make sure that there isn't a choice who's younger. We're seeing a lot of work being done already in preparing the ground for the electoral campaign.

I mean, even 2021, the parliamentary elections were pretty tightly controlled. And the opposition really was not allowed any breathing space. These elections will be much, much worse than that.

The media space has been eviscerated, the campaign space has been eviscerated, and he's not going to repeat the mistakes of Lukashenko, for example. Lukashenko allowed Tsikhanouski to run because he thought she would be an easy dragon to slay. Putin's not going to play that game.

Jakub: Alright, let's finish off with, so we had Trump won, which I think was a positive for Russia, certainly seems so publicly. How excited are they about the prospects of a Trump two?

Sam: I think potentially very excited for a couple of reasons. One, because they think they might be able to do a deal. And certainly, the Trump campaign has given them every reason to believe that that may be the case. At the very least, you would have an administration that has no love for the Ukrainians and for Zelenskyy in particular.

And so, the Kremlin will take that as a win. But I think, look, in the first Trump administration, the Trump team put political appointees in some places, but they also looked for people in the administration, in the state department, in the National Security Councils and other parts of the foreign policy apparatus who were professionals that were sort of ideologically not opposed to what Trump seemed likely to do.

And so, there were a lot of adults in the room. And that's actually one of the things that led to his first impeachment, for example, because he started doing things that people couldn't countenance.

He is not likely to want to make that mistake again. And if you look at the people that he's bringing into his campaign to support him in sort of his foreign policy team in the campaign, and a lot of those people are then likely to be part of the transition and part of the administration, if he wins, they're much more ideological, they are much less experienced, and they are committed to a very different kind of foreign policy.

They look at people like Orban, they look at people like Erdogan, they look to a certain extent, people like Netanyahu, and they see these authoritarian or semi-authoritarian leaders who have been able to weaponize foreign policy for domestic political purposes.

And to use it as a way of marginalising the opposition of gaining power, and in some cases becoming very wealthy through this sort of transactional relationships. And they would like to replicate that for American foreign policy, or they would like to see the U.S. as a result, withdraw from its institutional relationships.

So, it's long standing relationships with Europe, with NATO, to withdraw from its global alliances in order to give them the flexibility to have that much more transactional and much more politically motivated foreign policy.

And that, to a large extent is exactly the world that Vladimir Putin would like to live in.

Jakub: Well, that sounds absolutely terrifying. Sam Greene, thank you so much for joining us on Power Lines. It was a fascinating if somewhat worrying discussion. Thank you.

Sam: Thank you. Well, this is the world we live in, but it's not the world we have to live in. Thanks again for the conversation. Good luck. Stay safe.

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Jakub: Thanks so much for listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. And thank you also to Sam. Do keep an eye out for his writing and policy work on Russia. It's always worth reading.

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