What Russia's Defeats in Ukraine Reveal about Why Russia Made War

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the 

Center for European and Russian Studies. My  

name is Laurie Kain Hart and I'm Professor of 

Anthropology and Global Studies and Director of  

the Center. Thanks to our audience for joining us 

for this important presentation in our series on  

the current war in Ukraine. As is our custom here 

at UCLA, I begin this introduction with a reminder  

that we're here on the unceded territory 

of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples who are  

the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar, the 

Los Angeles basin and the South Channel Islands,  

and we pay our respects to those ancestors, 

elders, and relatives past, present and emerging.  

I want to express my thanks to our speakers today, 

both panelist and respondent, for joining us to  

continue this series of talks and symposia

on the war in Ukraine, and I also thank our  

Executive Director Liana Grancea and Program 

Director Lenka Unge for their tireless work  

in making these talks happen. So let me introduce 

our participants. Professor Richard Anderson is  

Professor Emeritus of Political Science at 

UCLA. He has focused widely on Soviet and  

Russian politics. Before joining the UCLA faculty 

in 1989, he had been an analyst for the CIA  

where he wrote a later declassified study of the 

Soviet military's worsening problems with morale  

and unit cohesion. He was a staff member of the 

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence  

specializing in the Soviet mobilizations 

and failures in the Afghan war and its planned

suppression of Poland's Solidarity movement.

In that role he also took part in converting  

the US Army and Marines to maneuver warfare, which 

the California National Guard has since taught to the  

Ukrainian armed forces. So we're grateful that 

he is sharing this expertise with us today.  

Michael Mann, our commentator, is Distinguished 

Research Professor of Sociology at UCLA,  

and Honorary Professor at Cambridge University, 

and a member of the American and British academies.  

He is an eminent social historian with past 

and current research on, among other things,  

wars, capitalism, fascism, and ethnic cleansing. 

His major publication project is the four volume  

"The Sources of Social Power," a history of 

power in human society, all published by Cambridge  

University Press. The titles of volumes that begin 

in 1760 and end in 2012 are in the bio on the  

Center webpage. They reflect the comprehensive 

and global scope of this important project.

He's currently finishing a book 

"On Wars," which will be published  

by Yale University Press. So thank 

you, Professor Mann, for joining us.

A quick reminder for the audience. Please write 

your questions in the Q&A box at any time during  

the discussion. The presenters will be able to see 

them and will be able to read them during the Q&A.  

The talk will be recorded for viewing afterwards

via Facebook and our website. So with  

that I turn the podium over to Professor Anderson 

for his talk “What Russia's Defeats in Ukraine  

Reveal about Why Russia Made War”. Thank you

very much. I want to thank you very much for this  

opportunity and I thank my colleague for being 

willing to provide comments on what I have to say.  

I want to start with one slide which is in some 

ways the most important thing I have to say.  

The New York Times published an article in December 

entitled "Putin's War," which I commend to everybody  

here. It's an excellent article. The only trouble 

with it is a very misleading headline. There are  

no wars that are ever any individual's war.

Wars are fought by collectivities, and that's the  

thing we have to look at. This sort of collective 

problem of warfare and how the Russians manage it.

Why is the Russian collectivity experiencing 

defeats? Well, if victory depended on weapons,

the Russians would defeat the Ukrainians 

in a rout. But it doesn't. It depends on  

unit cohesion, which means the 

willingness of soldiers to fight together.

It requires mutual trust and especially the 

troops must trust their commanders. For 45 years  

the US officials have known that Soviet and

now Russian military units lack mutual trust.

This is the copy of a declassified intelligence memorandum.

The little blue arrow at the bottom shows the date, which  

you may have a hard time seeing. It's April 1977,

so it's just 45 and a bit years ago.  

These are the conclusions of it. I'm not going 

to run through all of them, but the list at  

the top are individual problems of attitudes in 

subordination, drunkenness, desertion, suicides...

Things we found. The blue chevron on the left 

at the bottom is the general reason why there are  

so many of these individual problems. Black markets, 

corruption, thefts and abusive authority - what those  

things do is contribute to mutual trust among 

officers and enlisted men. The little slanted blue  

arrow redacts my name and some information 

about how then to get in touch with me. However,  

I did not write this report. No CIA report is written 

by any individual. I wrote a draft. And then what  

you do in the CIA is carry it around from relevant 

office to relevant office, asking people: well, 

what parts would you like to amend? And then you 

have to accept their amendments. Sometimes you can  

negotiate with them, but anything is the joint 

agency product, not the product of some person.

When I left the CIA, I joined the House 

Intelligence Committee. And when Ronald  

Reagan got elected and I got fired, you noticed 

that they now want to remove Adam Schiff and  

they did the same thing to the congressman 

that I worked for. I was free to help, since  

I was no longer employed in intelligence, 

I was free to help Andrew Cockburn write  

"The Threat". I provided him with some information 

and he did a lot of really excellent reporting,  

found out things that we didn't know. That 

book is now out of print but it's freely  

available from Amazon. You can get it for 

like five bucks. And if you're interested  

in what's going on in Vietnam, pardon me, 

in Ukraine, this is the book to read.

Well, there was continuing evidence of the 

morale problems that I found in 1977. Between 1979  

and 89 the Soviets tried to fight in Afghanistan, 

but one thing we noticed was that they wouldn't  

patrol, or that they were reluctant to patrol to leave 

their fortified bases and the Soviet military  

was actually arming the Afghan resistance by 

trading weapons for hashish and opium. In December  

plans to invade Poland. Poland then had this  

in Solidarity movement. The Soviets correctly

thought it was a real threat and they  

were going to crush it, but the reservists who were 

being called out to fill out the units didn't  

report. In August 1991, there was a coup against 

Gorbachev. It failed when the army commanders  

issued no ammunition to the troops that had been 

ordered to occupy Moscow. In October the 3rd and 4th  

two Russian army divisions, delayed their orders  

to suppress an armed coup attempted by a group 

of neo-Nazis. They obeyed those orders only when  

the leader of a ragtag militia threatened that 

otherwise his militia would arrest the generals.   

So the notion that you can suddenly mobilize

a crowd of people, men and women, many  

of the men veterans of the Afghan fighting, so they 

got some military training, but to mobilize his crowd,  

you know, threaten to arm it, they had some 

weapons, and then go out and put these two army  

divisions which have got tanks and artillery, and 

you can threaten their commanders, that's a problem.

In August 1996 the Russian commander

was compelled to negotiate a truce with  

Chechnya when Russian infantry refused to advance 

against the defenders of the capital city Grozny.

In August 1999, Putin ordered a new offensive 

but it was based on switching tactics. Instead of  

attacking the Chechens with infantry, the Russians 

switched the use of artillery missiles to simply  

flatten the city that the Chechens were trying 

to defend, drive the defenders out of the  

ruins where the artillery and missiles could be 

used to ambush them in open country. So you can see,  

you're just consistently seeing, there's something 

strange about this army. Well, what's the evidence  

from Ukraine about Russian corruption? Reportedly 

the Russian army cannot manage logistics. Logistics is the  

technical term for supply lines. And you see this 

over and over again in the US press coverage.

At the same time you see these repeated 

allegations that the Russian artillery is firing  

lines work fine to deliver artillery shells.

Well, the thing about artillery 

shells is there's no civilian market.

Instead, what can't be delivered is food, clothing, 

fuel, engine parts, and medicines, and medical  

supplies, all of which can be sold to civilian 

markets. So the supply lines have failed to  

deliver salable items. They failed to deliver them 

because these supplies either have been stolen  

for resale, or have never been bought because the 

funds were stolen. So you know, you get this story  

about the Russians. When I was in the US 

army briefly, we used to eat rations which  

came in cans. They were replaced, I don't know 

sometime in the 1980s or 90s, with MREs, which  

are Meals Ready to Eat, that come in little boxes.

So the Ukrainians captured some of these Russian  

Meals Ready to Eat and they had expiration dates 

of 2002. No new ones have been bought for  

allocated, it's because the money had been stolen.

Well, what does corruption do to warfare? 

This is the thing that CIA conclusion, you  

know, got people to agree. We can say that this 

contributes to mutual distrust, although it doesn't  

say it, there's a lot of mutual distrust.

It just says this is part of the problem.

But in 1993, why can the organizer of 

a ragtag militia threaten generals  

commanding two army divisions?

I call it a ragtag militia. 

Any militia with [. . .] in it can hardly 

be used to threaten army divisions.  

And in 1991, why did generals deny ammunition to 

the soldiers who were carrying out this military  

coup? And the answer is they've been stealing 

their rations and they don't trust the soldiers. 

And the soldiers really don't trust them. And in 

were sent to intimidate Yeltsin, the Russian 

president who was resisting the coup, turned their  

guns around to defend him instead. But they told 

Yeltsin this doesn't matter. We don't have any  

cannon shells, we don't have any machine gun 

ammunition, and we can't really defend you.

And you know, in Ukraine again we see the 

Russian force described as an artillery army.  

Well, there's a difference between infantry and 

artillery, and that difference is the difference  

between trust of the officers and their soldiers, 

and monitoring of the soldiers by the officers.  

Infantry soldiers must conceal themselves, which 

means that their officers cannot watch whether  

they're fighting. They must conceal themselves

because otherwise the enemy sees them.

You have to spread out and so you're hiding 

from the enemy, which means your commander can't  

see you. I had a marine colonel, who runs the 

naval ROTC come and talk to my class, and he  

said he was the commander of an armored cavalry, 

it's not infantry but the problems are the same,

a unit in Iraq which had 25 vehicles spread 

over 30 miles. He couldn't see anybody except  

for the guys in the armored vehicle that he was 

commanding. And so that's one sort of situation.

An artillery crew either shoots the gunner or 

it doesn't, and the officer commanding that  

artillery crew either sees where the gun goes off 

or it doesn't. So the artillery officer can watch  

and the crew doesn't hide, because usually, you know, 

until the Americans gave the Ukrainians these six  

HIMARS launchers that shoot these long-range 

rockets, the Russian artillery had more range  

than the Ukrainian artillery. So they could shoot 

outside the range and there was no danger to the  

artillery crews of counter-battery fire from the 

Ukrainians, so they don't have any desire to hide,  

they follow orders. And that means that 

in Ukraine, as in Chechnya, the Russians  

can basically only use artillery to fight.

That's why they're described as an artillery  

army. You know, in a country the size of Chechnya,

an attack by Russian artillery can win, sort of, 

an attack on a place the size of Ukraine, 

you just can't cover it with enough artillery.

Well, then there are the effects of corruption 

on operations. That's what's military analysts  

call defeats "in detail". In February 2022, more 

than 100 Russian battalion tactical groups,  

which I'm going to call BTG for short, 

assembled on the Ukrainian border.  

Each of these BTGs is said to number 

between 600-1,000 soldiers, but  

I think many of them are understrength anyway. 

Nevertheless it's, you know, it's a big force.  

Well, I do want to say the fragmentation of an army 

into units as small as battalions, I mean the US  

army fragments its forces into brigades, which 

are three times the size of a battalion usually,  

they could consist of two to five battalions, 

but it's also true that those brigades have  

higher headquarters. Divisions no longer fight, but 

cores and armies do. And if you're taking an army  

and dividing it up into these little tiny groups 

that itself is probably a sign of corruption.

If the Russians had managed to launch 

a coordinated defensive by all 100 BTG,  

they would have overwhelmed the outnumbered 

Ukrainian defenders. But few, if any Russian  

attacks, exceeded three BTG. So instead of 

fighting 100,000 Russians in any  

engagement, the Ukrainian forces found themselves 

fighting only 2,000-3,000 Russians. 

To coordinate attacks by all 100 of the BTG, the 

competing Russian generals would need to cooperate,

but generals competing for proceeds 

from corruption can expect to increase their  

shares if rival generals die in combat, 

or are dismissed when blamed for defeats.

So the Ukrainians end up winning a whole bunch of 

small battles when they would lose a bigger battle.

So that raises the other question I want 

to talk about. Why do the Russians attack?

I wrote this sentence, I may not 

have written the exact sentence but I  

managed to preserve the sentence for my 

draft: "Lapses in morale and discipline must  

make the Soviet leaders themselves uncertain 

about the reliability of their armed forces."  

And I was trying to say: Look, no leadership would 

risk starting a war with the military forces that  

are described in the CIA memorandum 

and in The Threat. But I was wrong.

So let's look at it. Could corruption also 

be a motive for the Russians to welcome  

an attack on Ukraine? When I 

say for Russians to welcome it, 

both Russian officials and the broader Russian 

public. Well, warfare is like any other public  

policy. It exists to perpetuate 

whatever coalition rules the state.

Putin's coalition consists of Russian state 

officials. Those officials empower Putin, because  

they expect that his leadership will enrich them. 

I actually stole this from "Social Power" by the  

way, Michael. Michael starts "Social Power, the four 

volumes, by saying: Look, you have got to talk about what  

people gain from social power, what it does for 

them. And so Putin tolerates and personifies  

their theft, embezzlement and extortion. Any 

official post in Russia is an entitlement to steal.

By the way, if you're an official in Russia and 

you're not willing to steal, other people pressure  

you to join in stealing, because you're supposed 

to generate a certain amount of proceeds, which  

will be passed to your boss. And then that 

proceed passes a share up and it keeps going up  

until it reaches Putin. I mean part of their 

share of it reaches Putin. So official posts in  

Russia are entitlements to steal and that affects 

the military, too. Any military rank from private  

to general is the title of an official post. And 

holding any Russian military rank entitles its  

barrier to steal. And we see this again in 

Ukraine. The soldiers, as they run away,  

they'll stop and go into Ukrainian homes and pick 

up flat screen televisions to carry with them back  

to Russia. The problem with that is, that means they 

can't run away fast enough and they get killed for  

the flat screen television. Have you ever 

noticed? It's hard to carry one. Russian  

officials' own corruption also affects how they 

interpret what's happened in Ukraine since 2014.

And we see Putin voicing the officials' fears. In 

March 2014, he's commenting about the Euromaidan  

protests in Kyiv that forced the flight to Russia 

in February 2014 of Ukraine's elected president.

Putin says in Russian: "I understand why 

people in Ukraine wanted changes. Their  

politicians have 'milked' Ukraine, (in Russian

to milk a cow), have milked Ukraine,

fought among themselves about power, 

appointments and financial flows."

But when Putin said that, he cannot not have 

known, I say knew, I don't know what he knew,  

but I can't believe he didn't know that he could 

have been talking about his own rule over Russia.

And Putin's audience saw Russia, or understood 

Russia, as potentially copying Ukraine.

A month before Putin spoke, both Putin's adherence 

and his loyal opposition had agreed with him.  

The fraction leader of Putin's party United 

Russia in the State Duma, the national legislature,  

the lower house, says: "Now people are asking 

questions, what is going on there [in Ukraine],  

and is something like this possible here?"

The loyal opposition is the fraction leader of  

the Communists in State Duma. Russia still has a 

Communist Party, but it no longer rules the state.  

He said the Euromaidan is "a political Chernobyl, 

much more dangerous than the nuclear one".  

The nuclear Chernobyl was the 1986 accident which, you 

know, not coincidentally in this context ignited  

popular protests against communist rule. "Vertical of 

power has wholly collapsed in Ukraine," he said.  

"Moth-eaten by corruption, bureaucratic infighting, 

familial clannishness and unlimited lust for  

profit at the expense of the people. You [meaning 

Putin's adherence in United Russia] are drawing  

near that very Maidan [the site of the  

Ukrainian protests], which is the worst of  

all, which is worse than the [hyperinflation 

of the early 1990s] that smashed our country."

There's a Russian name for the hyperinflation so 

to use that name. Well, so what does Putin do?

He sees the communists trying to take advantage 

and he sees that his own supporters are worried  

by the possibility that in fact the Euromaidan 

is going to repeat in Russia. Well, ever since 1992,  

Putin's communist rival has tried to assemble a 

coalition allying the communists with some people  

who Lenin once called "great Russian chauvinists". 

They're not calling themselves anymore, but there are  

these people who think that Russia should be this 

big dominant power. The communist assembles  

his coalition behind a program that includes 

recapturing Ukraine and other lost territories.

The communist is always talking about doing 

this by peaceful means, but he doesn't mean it.

He knows it can't be done that way. Facing an 

election in September 2021, Putin's adherents 

in United Russia broaden his own coalition 

while dividing the communist's coalition. They  

do this by changing their electoral list to add 

a symbolic figure. United Russia adds a Russian  

citizen who heads the League of Volunteers 

that fights for the pro-Russian separatists  

in the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and 

Luhansk. A man named Alexander Borodai.

Here's Borodai. I've labeled him 

so you can see which one he is.  

Notice the guy standing on his right,

my left as you look at it. That guy  

just brings out a visceral reaction in me, of you 

know, kind of fear and loving. I mean he's wearing  

this sort of combat suit and notice he's got 

military chevron symbols of ranked tattooed into  

his neck. And you know he's got all this stuff.

The rest of the guys look kind of fairly normal.

But you know, he's a symbol of something. Well 

there's a reason why you put that symbol in the  

picture. Now you say okay, I'm just overreacting.

And maybe that's just a personal overreaction. 

You know, people go around interpreting pictures 

and what else. You know, it's like a Russia test,

it could be anything. Here's what Borodai  

was quoted as saying. First, I should mention  

that Borodai has said previously that he fought 

alongside the Neo-Nazis when they used automatic  

rifles to try to overthrow Russia's democracy. Then 

it was still sort of democratic in October 1993.

I think, by the way, we've seen that democracies are 

really imperfect thing. And Russia's got elections.

I don't see why you should think they're sort 

of more imperfect than other democracies, but  

I don't see why you shouldn't think they're 

one today. Quite often voters want bad stuff.

And as I say this is not Putin's War. This is Putin 

and other Russians' war. Not all Russians, obviously.

Anyway, so Borodai is one of these Neo-Nazis 

who I resisted in 1993 and so I'm not surprised  

that he's acting the way he's acting now. And

here's what he says: "But there are territories that  

have remained occupied by our enemy. These are the 

territories of our Russian periphery, our Russian  

Ukraine." There is no Ukraine as far as this guy is 

concerned. "Even the city of Kiev," he doesn't call it  

the Ukrainian Kyiv, he calls it the Russian Kiev, 

"the mother of cities Russian," that's not a misprint  

by the way, "is also occupied by our enemy. This 

is our geopolitical enemy," Putin's favorite words,  

"against which we and our ancestors have 

fought over the course of many centuries,"

one continuous struggle since the 10th century, "for 

this reason, our common cause, our common victories  

are still ahead." This is the guy that Putin's 

followers are picking up in September 2021.  

I should point out the Russian word "periphery" is 

"okraina". The name of Ukraine is Ukraina. The O,

and the U are alternate prefixes that lend the 

same meaning to a verb, to a noun or verb,  

and so that resemblance, when he says it's a 

periphery, okraina, is a deliberate echo.

Well, if basically what Putin's doing is 

reacting to something that happened in  

The answer to that, I think, is that the bad  

news tears apart the coalitions that keep 

incumbents in power. Covid-19 is bad news  

that proposes the same threat to Putin as 

to Trump, or to other incumbents worldwide.

Putin's adherence among Russian officials tried 

to limit the damage from Covid-19 by concealing  

the spread of infections. Officials have been 

said by a Russian expert on infection rates  

to just draw a line by hand to flatten the 

curve of publicly announced infection rates.  

So the infection rates in

Russia seem much lower. 

Statistics declare that the infection rate is 

much lower than it actually is, but the problem  

is that death rates have been rising and as the 

death rates rise faster than the infection rates, 

officials fear that the Russian public may notice. 

They're fearful because long experiences taught  

the Russian public to distrust official statistics.

Things are different when you live in the United  

States and when you live in Russia, and especially 

in the Russia of the... A lot of Russians alive  

today grew up in the Soviet period and when they 

couldn't get any news. Well, when you can't get  

news because the state is carefully controlling 

the news, then you learn to pay really  

careful attention and to think about what things 

mean. When you're just blanketed by news from all  

kinds of sources, then of course people just 

say: Oh well, you know, I know what's going on.

And the Russians really have a quite different 

experience from the one that Americans are used to.

So here's a question. Does Putin decide 

the time the invasion of Ukraine  

to a release of information about 

a Covid surge? Well, you can see.

Either Russia has been really 

successful about avoiding Covid,  

since there's not as much traffic from the rest 

of the world through Russia as there is through  

the United States or Europe, Russia might  

have a little bit more success. On the other  

hand, they have a vaccine which doesn't work very 

well and very few people have gotten it. So they  

should have a little less success. Anyway, it's

all going along pretty flat and then bingo.   

Worldometer statistics are normally

just whatever some government is  

declaring the statistics to be. So if the curve is 

being flattened, Worldometer statistics are too  

low. Bingo, it charges up. The peak of that three-day 

moving average is February 12th or February 13th,  

so 11 days before the invasion starts. You notice 

apparently, making war in Ukraine is a really good way  

to cure Covid. By April the numbers have 

really fallen off. So there are different ways  

to interpret that curve and exactly what's going 

on there. Either Putin is trying to scare officials  

into supporting his war or the officials are 

trying to scare Putin into making war. It's a  

little hard to believe the second one because that 

would require a lot of coordination, but you know,  

quite possibly. Anyway, there's some kind of 

relationship there, or potential relationship there.

Well, how are Russians going to respond? You know, 

it's a good question that people ask. A really  

good question is: If Russians and Ukrainians are 

one people, why would the Russians, why would any  

Russians, officials or not, welcome a war that kills 

Ukrainians and ravages their territory? Well, the  

answer to that is, despite the quotes that you see, 

Putin has never said that Russians and Ukrainians  

are one people. Now, it's partly because he can't 

possibly have said that. He doesn't speak English and  

he speaks Russian, but also there's a real problem 

finding a Russian word that means one people.  

On July 12, 2021 in an article that started this, 

of course he didn't write the article, but he's the  

I and the first person in the article, he said: I said

that Russians and Ukrainians were one narod -   

a single whole. That's mistranslated "people" or "nation". 

Narod instead cues context. Words don't actually  

have meanings. Words remind you of context, in

which you've encountered them before. I don't  

want to go into that at length, but it's just 

a fact. And what narod does, is remind  

people of contexts that concern the shared 

experience of oppression. And it is true that  

Russians and Ukrainians as collectivities

still alive from the Soviet period,

and they've experienced oppression in 

both countries, and that is something they have in  

common. Their ancestors experienced the oppression 

of the Russian Empire and that's something they  

jointly remember that they have in common. But shared

oppression does not mean that you think you're  

a single group other than in your 

common experience of oppression.

Well, what might make many Russians, not by any 

means all Russians, we've seen lots of Russians  

fleeing the war, we've seen Russians bravely 

protesting it, we know there are Russians who  

are afraid to protest, they have good reason for 

being afraid to protest, but nevertheless there  

might also be many Russians who welcome a war 

with Ukraine. The officials backing Putin might  

help to deflect the Russians' concerns about the 

fact the officials are robbing them by exploiting  

many Russians' bigotry toward Ukraine. The marker 

of bigotry is a derogatory term in Russian for  

Ukrainians. This term "khokhol". Khokhol means topknot. Topknot

is a Mongol hair style mentioned in Russian by a Mongol  

word. The hairstyle was once enforced on 

men of low rank. So khokhol says something  

about that. Something on top of a Ukrainian,

this topknot, that's a sign of how low you are. 

And there's this famous 

painting by the Russian artist Repin.

It's a famous painting of the Zaporozh'e

Cossacks, who are sort of, the Ukrainians like  

to claim that they're progenitors and Putin likes 

to claim our faithful Russians. It includes a  

central figure wearing a topknot. So this khokhol. 

So whenever Russians think about Ukrainians,  

they're reminded of that picture. There's

the topknot that stands for Ukrainians.

It's not a positive term. The brief CIA report 

quotes a stereotyped expression of hostility  

toward Ukrainians. According to one source, 

Ukrainians did not like the Russians and  

Armenians did not like anyone. That's a

classic bigoted statement. It's stereotyped. 

Official discourse encourages bigotry by 

describing Ukrainians as Russians' younger  

brothers, and by using the term

little Russians, where there are

not even Russians there, the little citizens of 

the little Russian state, not great Russia's.

Well, there are political gains from encouraging 

bigotry. We in America, the United States, should  

be deeply, profoundly and recently familiar with 

the political gains of encouraging bigotry. You  

know, I forgot to introduce. You are seeing me, 

my head behind this map of Ukraine. I'm not  

a neutral in this conflict. I have a side and 

that's why I have it up. A flag to reflect that.  

There are political gains of encouraging 

bigotry. Officials stealing from Russians  

are worried that Russians resent being robbed.

You can't steal from somebody without thinking  

that that person thinks you've wronged them. 

The opportunity to rob Ukrainians instead, 

to have the Ukrainians be the ones who are robbed, 

offers those Russians, who succumb to bigotry, you are  

not forced to succumb to bigotry, a lot of people 

have the courage to refuse to succumb to bigotry.

I'm not claiming that Russians in general are 

unwilling to take a courageous stand against  

bigotry. I think a lot of them do. Nevertheless, 

some of them are going to succumb, and those  

people see a chance to belong to the group of 

robbers instead of taking the risk to join an  

unequal and unpromising fight against robbery. You 

know, the people who are willing to stand up to  

robbery, stand up to abuses, stand up to bigotry 

are few and far between, and it takes courage.

And so, if you had your choice of saying: Oh, I 

can be a robber too, as opposed to the amount  

of courage it takes to stand up to it, you know, you 

could see why for a number of people would make  

that choice. And you know, in some sense I think 

that's natural. It's not praiseworthy, but it is  

human. In Russia, the invasion of Ukraine both 

reassures fearful officials and it redirects  

popular hostility from the officials to Ukrainians.

I hope I haven't take any extra time.

Thank you very much, Richard. And let me turn 

to Michael for some responses to the presentation.

Thank you, Richard, for a wonderful talk. In a rather grim way,

it was even entertaining. There's a lot there  

that I didn't know beforehand and 

I'm grateful to you for pointing it out.

Let me interrupt just for one moment. Excuse me, Michael.

Richard, could you stop sharing your screen? Yes.

Thank you! So if I start at the beginning, and

I know that describing this war as Putin's war is  

an oversimplification, but I think there can also 

be another simplification in the other direction,

that is that it's common, especially in political 

science discussions of conflict relations,   

a tendency to rarefy states. The United States 

does this, Russia does that, the Russians do this,

Americans do that. We have to remember that wars 

are almost always decided on, as opposed to peace,  

by tiny handfuls of people. And that's 

as true, almost as true in the democracies as  

in the autocracies. But of course, in autocracies 

you have an added thing, which is that autocrats  

tend to choose as their advisors, their circle, 

people who either agree with them or who will  

do anything to please the autocrat 

and so earn gains for themselves. 

So there's a few people. And in many 

regimes it is the monarch, or the president, or the  

autocrat who decide on war rather than peace. Now, 

Richard has enabled us to modify that in terms of  

the alliances, but Putin comes across

as rather passive in this, rather than  

someone who can manipulate these groups and give 

them all the opportunity of being ins rather than  

outs which is the normal political struggle that 

goes on in a state. So that said, I didn't like  

the notion of the Russian collectivity. 

I think the notion is more appropriate to  

say Putin's regime, which means that it's more 

than just Putin. Okay, but that's a trivial point. 

Richard follows up by talking about unit 

cohesion in a very excellent way,

and he then goes on to talk about the defeats 

in detail, that is the unit, and he focuses on  

the battalion tactical groups and says that  

they're very small. I mean they're in fact, most of  

them, are not at the limit of a thousand but

closer to 600 probably. There are many problems  

with these today. They were introduced as a reform 

to add flexibility on the ground to Russian Armed  

Forces, which are about to be overcentralized,

but they don't do that because the Russian  

command remains highly centralized. So there's a 

contradiction in these battalions. And as  

often noted, Richard pointed out, they're short 

of infantry and they're also short of supplying  

troops who are normally very important, and there is 

supposedly a great shortage of supply troop in the  

Russian army now. It's possible. Richard 

has given us a new insight into that because  

supplies of cycling up before they get to the

front line, you don't need many supply  

troops, but that is a distinctive weakness of these 

groups. Of course we must always remember  

that when the Russian army invaded Ukraine, 

it was generally thought by them and by many  

people in the West that they would achieve a 

swift victory. And you saw the virtue of the  

battalion tactical group in one case of 

the seizure of the airport north of Kyiv, 

which was successful except that they couldn't get 

any troops up there to support them. And so they  

were defeated. So there are other vulnerabilities 

in relation to the invasion. One, it was the  

relative failure of the cyber war that they 

started at the beginning of the war. And another  

was the unexpected vulnerability of the Air Force.

So they didn't achieve a simple air superiority. 

So there are actually a lot of 

military factors involved in this.

I thought the slide on the 

artillery versus other supplies  

was just brilliant. And there is no 

civilian market for artillery shell.

And obviously there's an enormous 

emphasis in the paper on corruption.

And I don't know if he wants to support that 

further, but I found it rather convincing here.

The reliance on artillery, the relative success 

of their artillery. There's really three reasons,  

two of which Richard mentioned. The difficulty of 

being corrupt and of refusing to fire or just not  

firing for artillery as opposed to infantry 

who are dispersed across the battlefield. And the  

second one he also mentions, which is that officers can 

control a group of men mobilizing large cannons  

of one kind or another. But there is a third one 

as well, which is that the group is controlled by  

itself, by other soldiers. And if you don't fire, or 

don't contribute or share, those who are next  

to you will say: because of you we're having to 

do more and kill more people. And so there is a  

collective pressure by the group and not just by 

officers. And this is something that came out also  

in the American army and S.L.A. Marshall's 

studies of American troops in World War II, Korea,  

and Vietnam with his very dubious statistics, 

but what came out strongly and has never been  

challenged is that US artillery batteries 

fought harder, or at least complied with orders  

more than the infantry did. So this is something 

that is not a peculiar Russian thing.

Now in terms of the correlation with the Covid

surge, his explanation of this was actually  

quite sophisticated, which didn't appear in 

the simple presentation of the graph.  

And of course, official Covid statistics 

did show surge at exactly the moment of  

the invasion, beginning of February, 

but of course to assemble a hundred thousand  

troops on the borders with Ukraine and  

in Belarus takes longer, takes a lot longer.  

And the decision must have been made perhaps a 

year before. And if we think about the context,  

I think we have to think beyond just the Russian 

politics. We have to think about geopolitics and  

the international military situation. Now, there are 

two things here really to bear in mind. One is that  

Russian external military interventions have been 

increasingly successful. The second Chechnya   

war was a victory, Georgia was a little unclear, but 

the 2014 invasion took the Crimea with virtually  

no casualties and set off the

inconclusive struggle in eastern Ukraine.

And so in war in general, the most important 

cause of war is success in previous wars.  

You've done it before, so you'll do it 

again until you get your nose blooded.  

Now that's the external context. Sorry, that's 

the Russian context, the increasing success  

and therefore likelihood they can do it again.

The other Russian internal cause is, of course, 

this is a revisionist war, which is a 

very common type of modern war, which  

is a dispute about borders. Both sides claim 

the same territory. In the Russian case that  

appears the intention may well have led 

towards a more imperial conquest of the whole  

country, but certainly the struggle in the first 

place was about liberating our Russian speaking

Ukrainians.

So there is a widespread desire among Russian 

state elites for the restoration of a greater  

Russia, the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, not 

unique to Russia. Anyone thinks China exactly  

the same thing. All the conflicts that China

has engaged in are all about securing  

the full control, the full extent of the Imperial

Chinese Empire, including control of the  

South China Sea. Revisionist wars are very

dangerous, because their both sides  

think they're pursuing a high moral purpose. And 

that matters considerably. So those are the two  

Russian internal things really, but the external 

context is also important, because why in 2020, 2021,

early 2022? Why does Russia build up to a war?

Now who's the enemy? Well, the enemy is partly 

Ukraine, but the enemy is also the West. And  

there was provocation from NATO over the years 

before in terms of taking the borders of NATO  

right up to Russia in some cases. And so the 

Russian feeling of encirclement is there. It is  

also US military activity in Central Asia 

establishment. And this is something that,  

I'm not saying it justifies a war of 

aggression, but it's important in realizing

why the Russians think they're in the right. 

But in the two previous years,

what had happened? Well,

the gradual failure, the wars, and determination 

eventually of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 

the utter US failure in Syria, the 

unclear vacillating policies of Obama,

and the fawning of Trump on president Putin,

and the entry of Biden who doesn't seem like 

a warmonger. And so there's a sense of American  

weakness. If you're going to strike, do it now.

One should add that the two major  

military powers in Western Europe, Britain 

and France, were both withdrawing their  

troops from these countries, and at the same time 

France was withdrawing its troops from Africa.  

So these are signs of weakness. Now, Germany 

is of course the greatest economic power in Europe,  

but it is not a military power, even though it has a 

reasonable size armaments industry, but it's armed  

forces are not very formidable. And so this is a 

period where if you're going to strike against NATO 

strike now. But of course you also do need 

that contempt that Russian elites feel for Ukrainians.  

So the assumption was a very quick war. And we 

can see with hindsight that that was desperately  

wrong, but they thought they didn't

have to worry about the Russian military  

weaknesses because the Ukrainians would

not resist them, and they'd be in control.

So I think this is where I 

kind of most disagree with  

Richard. This area here, because

his paper is about Russian  

influences, he may agree with much of this.

It's just that it's not part of this paper.

One point on this. I don't know whether 

you would consider yourself to be a Ukrainian  

expert as well, but whatever happened to Ukrainian 

corruption, because this was a regime in the same  

league as Russia, perhaps not quite so extreme 

but nonetheless with the tremendous amount of  

corruption and the emergence of 

oligarchs just like in Russia.

So what happened? Did they

become virtuous or what?

I think that the argument about narod, pardon 

my Russian pronunciation, is a little...  

I don't see much difference between describing 

them as one people or as ordinary peasant  

people being exploited. I don't see all that 

much difference. And in this case it also makes  

the Russian attitude to Ukrainians seem a bit 

more respectable, because they deliberate  

them from oppression. Okay, but it doesn't

seem to me to be all that different.

Today Russian forces are 

reported to have taken Soledar  

and it does appear that they're fighting a 

lot harder now in the southern Donbas area.

And I wonder what difference, if any, this 

makes to the analysis. I mean it's  

possible that they are mobilizing much larger 

numbers of people as one unit. Maybe

that's what's going on, but if there is an 

improvement in the Russian forces on the ground,  

what would you attribute this to? And 

are they capable of internal reforms, 

which can improve the capacity of their 

regime, of their troops? So in conclusion  

I'd like to say that this is not untypical war. 

It's a war that maybe Western Europeans

thought was over, but which is not, and  

not elsewhere in the world. It's a revisionist, 

imperialist war, but after all, American  

imperialism is a real thing, too. And we prefer 

to fight through other people as we're doing in  

Ukraine, as well. And since being burnt in 

Vietnam and Iraq, we use others to fight for us.

So revisionist wars are still with us. They

can be solved in the right kind of context. Most  

Latin American wars used to be border conflict 

and they caused wars in the 19th century, when  

there was a few in the 20th century. But

increasingly the two sides, they don't have very  

effective militaries, decided that they would go 

to the International Court of Justice and seek  

arbitration. Now at this moment neither side is 

willing to do that. In any case, in Ukraine it would  

have to be direct Ukrainian-Russian negotiations.

But I think that this war is going to drag on for  

quite a time and I think we should learn lessons 

from it. And we should recognize the rise of China  

and not think that we can somehow stem the rise of 

Chinese power. We should be in general trying  

to make friends with people who are considered 

our rivals and agreements would even be made with  

Iran. It's better to make friends with the

enemies because that prevents war. Thank you.

Excuse me. Thank you so much, professor Mann. 

Professor Anderson, would you like to respond  

to any of the comments quickly before we turn 

to a few questions from our audience as well?  

I'm grateful to Michael for this thorough critique.

That's kind of the point of my paper to say  

that I vehemently disagree with most of it. I 

wrote a dissertation, which was about whether the  

Soviet dictatorship really had a different way of 

making foreign policy from the American democracy.

And so I tried to demonstrate 

pretty conclusively that it didn't.

I had some experience participating and 

making American foreign policy and I saw the  

same things going on in Russian foreign policy.

That dissertation, which I wrote after I had  

been in the US government, would certainly have 

prevented my ever being employed, if it  

hadn't happened for Gorbachev coming along 

and thoroughly discrediting the Soviet field. 

Now there were cartoons at that time. Russia 

expert will work for, you know, work for food. 

Just there was so much unemployment.  

I don't agree that they're different. I don't agree  

that there are differences between democracies 

and autocracies. I don't agree that autocracy is  

a meaningful term. It was invented by Peter the 

Great picking up an ancient Greek term, which was  

the emperor of Byzantium, the title of this emperor 

in Greek. And it is always a verbal paragraph.

We can go on and on, but I think it's really

great that the audience for this talk has  

had the opportunity to see somebody, who really 

is a distinguished scholar and really a major  

intellect, present an opposite point of view from 

the one that I presented. That's already good.  

Other than that, I'd really like not to take out 

time that people want to use to ask questions.

Thanks so much. We have several questions.

The first, I think was partially answered, which is  

the question about whether or not this is Putin's 

war or war of some larger collectivity, and of the  

sense that people have press coverage 

and so on that it is very much Putin's war.

I think that perhaps between Professor Mann 

and yourself you've kind of responded that

it is both in some sense. And the second question 

concerns in fact this argument about imperial  

China and our guest Perry Bloom asks: Wouldn't 

the full restoration of "Imperial China", if that 

in fact was President Xi's overall strategic 

objective, include lands taken by Czarist Russia  

in the 19th century? So whether or not there is 

Russian-Chinese competition involved here.

You know, I'm somebody who studied Russia 

carefully and I speak Russian. I mean I know  

Russian, don't really speak it. And I don't 

speak Chinese, although I've done a lot of work  

on traditional China and in the process picked 

up, you know, this character, that character.

But my basic position on China is, the Chinese 

have nowhere to go, right? And there's a little  

border territory north of them. It's a thin border. 

And then there's a long expanse of permafrost and  

that border is guarded by nuclear weapons.

Lots of them. And so I don't think they  

can go North. They can't go Southwest because the 

Himalayas are in the way, they can't go Northwest  

because the Taklamakan is in the way, they can't 

go out in the Pacific because the seventh fleet is  

in the way. The only way they can really go is South.

And people who try to go through Vietnam route

ever having tried. So the Chinese expansionism 

is not about adding territory to China. 

The word empire is misplaced in application 

to China. It's not a very good word in general.

Yes, when you say there's nowhere to go,

I know what you mean. And they  

don't want to go West because that only brings

more Muslims, they have difficulty with that,  

but they certainly want a complete control of the 

Muslims within China. And they see the

Qing Dynasty as having achieved that, but they 

can go East. They can go into the sea. 

And in historic times over a century, the Chinese 

navy was most important mainly in Asia.

And they are aggressively building

little islands, so the US is going  

to have a serious rival. And I do hope that

wiser heads can emerge who will propose  

a set of arrangements with China, rather 

than regarding China as the enemy, because that's  

what's been happening in the last few years, which 

is one of the most dangerous things in the world. 

Thank you. Let me read both a compliment

and a question from Robert English.

Kudos for the early and deep understanding of 

the deep corruption of the Soviet military, and  

for highlighting the Cockburn book, several 

chapters of which I still use in teaching  

and lessons reassessing the "Soviet Threat" of the 

early 1980s. All great points on the sapping of  

arms strength and coercion of discipline and morale.

But I want to consider the difference in morale  

between offensive and defensive wars. Stalin's 

army was corrupt and disorganized too, but it was  

able to regroup and motivate in defense of the 

motherland. Translating those deep lessons  

to Ukraine, could it be that Russian soldiers 

are deeply unmotivated in seeking to take Kyiv, but  

deeply motivated in defense of Crimea, which they 

see as legitimately Russian and will defend as  

if it were their homeland? Despite corruption and 

disorganization? So this is a great question and I  

think it also raises the question of the role 

of irredentism, or sort of the spread or the extent  

of irredentist sympathy within Russia itself on a 

broader base, so appreciate any responses to those.

Well, a fundamental problem of Ukrainian 

offensive to retake Crimea is that on  

the maps that you see, this is famous 

remark by, I think, Lord Acton about  

the misapprehensions created by the widespread 

use of maps on a small scale. And when you  

look at Crimea, it looks like it's a kind of 

wide peninsula attached to the mainland, but  

it's not. The actual attachments

are no wider than a narrow  

highway. And on the other end,

I think maybe like 500  

yards or a thousand yards wide. And everything 

north of Crimea is water. All the way across.  

And so it's very difficult to attack across water 

obstacles anyway. And the amphibious troops,  

as far as I know, the Ukrainians just don't have 

any. So the notion that they can actually recapture  

Crimea by force is, I think, far-fetched. And I don't 

think they would even try. I mean the marines  

might be able to do it. These days those World 

War II marine landings, you know, in the Pacific  

or D-Day done by the army, but across

the channel guided missiles have pretty  

much put those out of operation. The marines 

still have amphibious assault tactics, but  

even if you had the US Marine 

Corps to do it, I think it would be hard.

Yes, and it may be that the Ukrainian 

president is making a big deal of it because  

that's something that he will yield, right?

But I think there are patterns  

of defensive versus aggressive war, and if a 

supposedly stronger power invades a weaker power,  

if they don't rule them over in the first 

few days, which is what they expected,  

and very often defense is a motivating thing.

And also logistics, the more you invade, the  

longer your supply lines, the more difficult it is 

to keep going. In fact, I've made a kind of  

estimate of what percentage of aggressive wars 

result in victory and the answer is somewhere  

around 53%. So it's as likely that you will lose or 

fight a pointless, you know, mutually destructive  

war where nobody gains as you win it, which has 

something to do with the irrationality of human  

beings, and their leaders, and the pursuit 

of power, which kind of oversteps reason.

There are two final questions. We are about 

a minute away from the end, and so I just wanted  

to put them both. And the first one really is, 

you know, the ultimate question which is:  

What's the likelihood of a full and complete 

Ukrainian military victory, including perhaps  

recapturing Crimea? And then the other

question has to do with the  

degree of toleration of violence and including

sexual violence by Russian occupying  

forces, and how we see that in relationship 

to the tolerance of corruption in general.

The question is long and really interesting 

but I'll just summarize it in that sense.

Well, one thing that we should remember 

is that sexual violence is an inevitable  

concomitant of warfare. Another thing 

that we should remember is that,

you know, this Russian invasion is a vile

thing and so the Russians are being vilified.

And I have a side in this fight, but I'm not 

sure I necessarily believe all the reports of  

sexual violence. I'm sure there is a lot of it. 

Basically what combat is about is, you know, people  

have inhibitions about actually killing other people.

And combat is about freeing yourself of  

those inhibitions. And after you've been through 

a little bit of it, you tend to get really free  

of inhibitions. And so the usual things that make 

you think: okay, a woman is a human being, or another  

man is a human being and you won't engage in 

sexual violence against her or him, those things  

go away. I'm a sexual assault victim myself. And the 

circumstances, you could see exactly why the people  

were doing it. And they weren't doing it for sexual

pleasure, they just wanted to dehumanize me.

It wasn't very major and it hardly 

amounts to sexual assault, but anyway.  

So I think a lot of it is happening. Also,

the Russians routinely used torture and  

they think Ukrainians are inherently inferior

and should be welcoming them with open arms.   

They think it just means that a Ukrainian 

deserves what happens to him or her.  

I kind of hate to talk about this. It's a good 

question, it's got to be faced, but it's really  

a kind of a natural part, natural, disgusting, tragic 

part of this situation that we're seeing.

It's especially tragic thing. In modern

wars we diagnose things like  

post-war traumatic stress syndrome. And so we 

know what damage it does to the perpetrators too,  

or to the people who survived, people who killed 

rather than being killed. And indeed, many of  

them express guilt, a substantial amount of guilt 

for, you know, the atrocities that were either  

committed or more often that they saw and didn't 

intervene. So, it's damaging for both sides.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, both, for an amazingly

formative, and stimulating, and difficult 

conversation and presentation. I really appreciate  

your contributions to our understanding. I also 

want to thank our nearly 40 people, who came to  

join us in the audience, for your presence. Thank 

you so much! And just to give you a heads up, next  

week we will have two more events at the Center. 

The first is a book talk by Max Czollek called  

“De-integrate: German-Jewish Notes on the Present” 

that will be Tuesday at 12PM in Royce Hall in person.

Royce 236. It's on our website. Also a film screening

of the 2022 Ukrainian war drama "Klondike"

along discussion with the director next Tuesday 

evening at 7:30PM, so please check those out. So  

with that we wish you the best from rainy Southern 

California and thanks again to our speakers.  

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. 

Thank you, I really appreciate your comments.