Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion 20240704

On cspan2. [inaudible conversations] good morning, everyone, welcome to csis, the center for strategic and international studies. Im delighted many of you are with us here in person and thank you for all of those joining us online for what i think will be a really interesting discussion. Were here to discuss a new Chatham House report. Chatham house, of course, is the famous think tank in the u. K. And here with me is giles to talk about the report. And its titled how to end russias war on ukraine, safeguarding europes future and the dangers of a false peace. Its written not just by kir, but many authors at Chatham House. Well discuss the potential for a peaceful settlement of this war. What are the promises and pitfalls that the report really outlines and what are some of the Lessons Learned in particular over the last eight years prior to the war where ukraine, in fact, and russia sat down at the peace table at the process to try to negotiate a settlement. Let me introduce our three panelists here and my job in this is basically to kick off the discussion and then get out of the way because we have three excellent panelists. So, kir giles is a senior fellow of the russia and eurasia program, and supported the institute in russiafocused Research Since 2013. And then to my far left is sam green, the director for the democracy, for the democratic resilience programs at the center for european policy analysis here in washington. Sam is also a professor of russian politics at Kings College london. And before joining, he founded the Kings Russia Institute for 10 years and sam is one of the people that i go to to try to when im trying to understand what is going on inside of russia. And then leona in the middle center fellow for europe at the council for foreign relations, an expert in european Foreign Policy and European Security transatlantic relations, russia and eastern europe. Has been a long time fixture in the russia expert space, particularly when she used to reside in berlin, but were delighted that both sam and leona are now here in washington. So, maybe well kick off the conversation by handing it off to kir to find of outline the report and maybe give us some of the highlights. Why did you all endeavor to write this report and what did you find . Thank you, thank very much for having us here and my colleagues. And apparently the first time ive been in this room since 2016 talking how russia was preparing for military adventures in europe and now were dealing with the results of it and thank you also for introducing the report, how to end russias war on ukraine. This is a plea for finding ways to a durable and viable peace in ukraine. As a result, you could probably retitle it how got to, and analyze some of the suggestions that we hear repeatedly how to draw the conflict to a close, all of which would be fraught with longer term problems that we would hope to avoid. So, in effect, its a breakdown of proposals for ending the war and why they wont work and lead to much worse situations for European Security not just for ukraine, but for europe as a whole and anybody else, there father, that has an interest in a secure and prosperous europe. There are 10 authors and nine of the topics broken down in that way, but theres a common theme to all the different topics we address, whether its a call for an immediate ceasefire, compromise, negotiated settlement, territorial concessions for ukraine and all the things put forward as routes to peace. And the common thing identified by the authors is that all of them display a greater fear of defeat of russia than of defeat of ukraine. And the consensus from all of the authors is that that needs to be reversed. On the basis of the combined decades and in fact centuries or experience of looking at russia that the authors bring to bear and it has to be said consistently right about russia and how to deal with the russia challenge and how not to, they arrive at the conclusion that actually defeat for ukraine is very much more dangerous than ukraine being assisted to victory. And another collective conclusion that comes out as a result of that finding, and unanimous, all of these authors that have been brought together for the project, the logical conclusion, is that aid to ukraine needs to be increased by a significant factor and as rapidly as possible. Now, this report has often been quoted as saying the time to increase for ukraine is now. The time to increase aid to ukraine was many months ago, but it looks at the effect of the political holdup, not the practical, logistical training, et cetera, holdups, all preventing ukraine from receiving the assistance that it has identified as being essential and says that those restrictions should be lifted because any other route is pernicious with longterm consequences that are going to be far, far worse. Now, since arriving in this town, weve heard some objections to doing that, some of which were expected and some of which were a little bit surprising. Weve heard a couple of times the idea that Everything Possible that could be done to assist ukraine has been done. Now, that sounds quite exotic if you float that idea in european capitals because despite the fact that aid, for example, from the United States has been enormously the greatest in terms of volume. People are measuring it in terms of capability and in terms of proportion. Where you see the distinguishing feature of the United States assistance by comparison with other countries is the reluctance to provide the capabilities which are seen as escalating and of course, now, ukraine is paying the price and that reluctance is repeated in the face of repeated demonstrations that this is not the case and ukraine can be aided to a greater extent without triggering the escalation that people fear and that escalation has largely come to be synonymous as a result of russian information campaigns with use of Nuclear Weapons. Which leads us to the second thing that we hear that sounds a little surprising if you look at it from outside this context, which is the calibration of aid to ukraine has been successful. But a successful balance has been found between the necessity of supporting ukraines victory and not provoking that same Nuclear Escalation. The problem is that seems to define success as no Nuclear Weapons being launched, which in turn relies on the assumption that they were going to be launched in the first place. But that whenever we hear people laying out their expectations for why that might be, does seem to be far more success of a longterm russian information and influence campaign. When i say longterm, i mean going back over decades, not just in the context of the current war, than an objective appraisal of the realistic risk of russia using Nuclear Weapons. We dont go into a great deal of detail how we arrive at that conclusion in this report because wed already covered that in a Previous Report in march, 2023 called Russian Nuclear intimidation, the subtitle being the important part, how russia uses Nuclear Threats to shape western responses to aggression and the answer to that question is very, very successfully. And finally, we hear the argument that it is hard to donate sufficient capabilities to ukraine to ensure a victory because they need to be concerned with the looming conflict with china, but here, too, we think that theres an argument for speeding up the resolution of the issue with russia in ukraine in order that the window is exploited for dealing with that problem while china is still a looming, not an immediate threat. We see this as one more reason to reduce the threat from russia in order to make europe more secure, to tackle the present and immediate issue while we can. So, all of these are the basic assumptions that are behind some of the proposals for bringing the war to ukraine, to an end. That we think will make things worse, not better, primarily because in order for ukraine to be secure, it needs to achieve a major strategic victory, but in order for russia to succeed, it just needs to carry on doing what its doing. It needs to sit in control of a certain amount of ukrainian territory and it needs to continue hammering the ukrainian economy to make it hard as a state and exploit the western partners to contribute fully to ukrainian success and it needs to wait. It needs to exploit the facts that there will be limited patience and political titles in its promissory western backers that will lead to russias advantage. So, once again, we say that this is an urgent problem, which means dealing with if we cant do it several months ago which would have been the best option, well deal with it as rapidly as possible and just finally, were towards the end of a long tour of capitals of n. A. T. O. Nations. The Chatham House team has arrived here after being in, for example, berlin, bud budape, and the size of the program, to try to get the message across about this report. Because the time to get the message across is violent and the time is now. This is precisely the window in which decisions can be made that will have a longterm, effect, a generational effect on ukrainians and europeans and Global Security and thats why were pulling out the stops to try to get this message about, out, and plead for mistakes not to be made. With that in mind, i thank everybody thats come to listen to this today and everybody online and thank you very much for your attention and hearing us and im greatly looking forward to see what colleagues think of the report. Great. Thank you, keir. I realize, when i ent duesed introduced the panel i forgot to introduce myself. Im max here at csis. On the question of Nuclear Escalation and signaling that it is oftentimes described that well, we the ideas could push harder and go further, and we could provide Weapons Systems that were not providing, long range strike, attack that have been infamous for the system that the Biden Administration seems