Global Affairs Expert Webinar: The War in Ukraine and U.S.-Russia Relations

Stephen Sestanovich, George F. Kennan senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at CFR and Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University, leads the conversation on the war in Ukraine and U.S.-Russia relations.

 

Speaker
Stephen Sestanovich
George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Council on Foreign Relations

Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations

 

Transcript

FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to today’s session of the Fall 2024 Global Affairs Expert Webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR.

Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on education.CFR.org, if you would like to share these resources with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

We are delighted to have Stephen Sestanovich with us to discuss the war in Ukraine and U.S.-Russia relations. Ambassador Sestanovich is the George F. Kennan senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis professor emeritus at Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs. From 1997 to 2001, he served as the U.S. State Department’s ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union. He also served as vice president for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, director of Soviet and East European studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and senior director for policy development at the National Security Council. He is the author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama.

So, Ambassador Sestanovich, thank you for being with us today. I thought we could begin if you could give us an overview of where things stand in Ukraine and U.S.-Russia relations.

SESTANOVICH: Great. Thank you, Irina. It’s a pleasure to do this. I thought the way I would proceed is by giving a kind of snapshot of the way the war looks from three—the three most important capitals, Kyiv, Moscow, and Washington, and then pose some big, imponderable question at the end—(laughs)—to stimulate discussion.

I know it’s not exactly how one should proceed in an academic setting, but I’m going to start with a personal anecdote. I was in Kyiv last month. And I can report that, despite how much you hear about how life there is so normal—the vibrant cafe society and so forth, actually what one encounters in Kyiv these days is a considerable weariness, borderline depression. I sat next to a woman at dinner who was describing to me her sister’s plight, living in a twenty-five-story apartment which has no elevator because there’s no electricity.

This is actually—and she said, my sister’s rather young. She doesn’t have children. Imagine if she had to carry them up twenty-five floors. If one goes out in Kyiv at night—this is a city of three million people—it’s almost completely dark. Rather unnerving, even shocking. It doesn’t mean that there’s a kind of loss of morale, but it does mean that as between national—the shifting balance between national determination and societal exhaustion, societal exhaustion is asserting itself.

Now let me say a bit about the policy aims of the Ukrainian government and how that looks to them at this point. They’ve had a series of questions over the past couple of months for Western governments concerning the military aid that the United States and its allies have provided, the economic support, and the future security arrangements between Ukraine and its supporters. It has wanted to get, needless to say, more aid with fewer restrictions. It has wanted an affirmation of economic support and has wanted more confidence about its future relationship with NATO.

The answers that it’s gotten from the United States and other NATO governments in the past few months has been mixed at best, and sometimes discouragingly negative. The Ukrainians have sought to get looser restrictions on the use of military equipment, in particular missiles with a 300-kilometer range that they want to use to hit Russian rear areas. These are sometimes called long-range missiles for deep strikes, but the truth is they’re not really long range or for deep strikes. They’re for attacking the Russian military operations. It is here that the United States has drawn the line, has not been willing to allow its weapons, or those of Britain and France which include American technology, or a slightly longer-range missile from Germany, to be exported.

On the economic front, the United States and its European allies, acting through the EU in this case, have agreed on big loans to Ukraine using Russian assets frozen in Western banks as collateral. But the process took a very long time. It hasn’t been completed yet. And it’s been paired with announcements by the German government that its own assistance will be reduced next year, and by signals from Congress that there may be no more economic assistance after this year.

And on NATO, this has been one of the high priorities of the Zelenskyy government. He’s put forward a so-called ‘victory plan,’ which—the first item of which is an invitation to join NATO. Zelenskyy has said he understands that’s not for now, but Western governments have been very standoffish on this. They treat—and have said as a group, Ukraine will eventually join NATO. But they won’t say when. Given all of this, Ukrainians describe a kind of lack of unity that isn’t just related to those—climbing up the steps to the twenty-fifth floor, but are connected to that. You know, a hard winter may be ahead, in which power sources will be hard to draw on. The front lines are moving against them.

And with that, I’m going to turn to the view from Moscow, especially the view from the Kremlin, and look at a few dimensions of the Russian view. Which I think one can paint in more optimistic terms these days, always recognizing problems in the Russian position. Last week was a great week for Vladimir Putin. He hosted the so-called BRICS summit. For a guy who doesn’t get to travel very much, you know, his big trips this year have been to Mongolia and North Korea—not his favorite destinations. But here, he welcomed dozens of international leaders to Russia and played their happy host.

There was no agreement here with the other countries, none of which really regard themselves as in an existential war with the West the way Putin says he is, but is a valuable symbol of Global South readiness to rally against the West. And this has been particularly relevant to sanctions evasion. You know, the U.S. government announced a couple of weeks ago that India is the second-biggest source of sensitive technology transfers to Russia.

How about the military outlook for the Russians? Their operations in eastern Ukraine are proceeding at a very heavy cost. September casualties were the highest ever. Two-thirds of Russian tanks that they had in their inventory at the beginning of the war have been destroyed. They’re pulling World War II equipment out of mothballs. But for all this, the lines are moving steadily eastward—westward in Ukraine. This is slow progress, but the pace has gotten a little quicker in the past few weeks. And the most careful analysts of this have summarized it that way.

It is possible that the Russians will take the two most important provinces that they’ve worked at conquering in eastern Ukraine this fall. Analysts differ to some extent about this, but that seems a realistic prospect. Now, this has been made possible only by a deep militarization of the economy, which is running very hot. Military spending is now more than half of the federal budget. And you see the signs of it in the economy at large—inflation, labor shortages, very high interest rates.

The Russian central bank increased its rate last week to 21 percent. Mortgages in Russia are now at 30 percent. Corporate lending, also at 30 percent. This is a very, very high burden for the private sector to bear. Next year, government spending will have to absorb another 25 percent increase in military spending. Russian economic officials, managers, you know, see this as a challenge, but they generally insist that this is a manageable one. And it has been so far.

Politically, you see something of the same weariness that you experience in Ukraine, but of course without the immediate—personal immediacy that the Ukrainians experience. The most reliable polls say almost half of Russians say the war is bad for Russia, a rather striking development. But only 31 percent accept the idea of a settlement involving territorial losses, given—in relation to what they now have. Politically, there’s been relatively little infighting. You have some nationalist bloggers who want Putin to be much more aggressive, but he doesn’t operate in a pluralist political environment. And he faces few political challenges. The mutiny of Mr. Prigozhin and his troops last summer was a real exception.

And this is striking because virtually no one favored this war at the outset, except Putin himself. But he has managed to consolidate opinion in favor of the war. And this frames a question. You know, has the West actually been much less successful than it thought in putting pressure on Putin and hampering the Russian military effort? That’s the sort of point at which we can pivot, I think, to the view from Washington because it is a question about the success of Western policy, which has been especially dominated by the approach of the United States.

What can one say about where American policy stands and where it’s headed? I will tell another anecdote from my visit to Kyiv. The chairman of the—of the Foreign Affairs Committee came up to me, chased me as I was getting into an elevator, and said he’d been reading my book. And his interpretation of my book is that Trump is going to win. I told him I didn’t think this was—(laughs)—I didn’t understand what he meant by this. It is extremely hard, of course, to predict what either administration, Trump or Harris, will do in relation to Ukraine and Russia, what the dynamics between the executive and legislative branches will be on these issues, where elite opinion is headed. Many different scenarios are very plausible.

So let me end by putting this in somewhat more strategic terms, not trying to figure out who’s going to be secretary of state and what the most likely line of—way of handling the Ukraine problem will be. Let’s compare it to the way this issue looked to the—to the political elite in Washington, both in the legislature and in the executive branch, a year and a half or two ago. I think this was a time where it seemed as though you’d had a striking assertion of Western unity in response to this Russian challenge and an outpouring of assistance, consensus with Western allies about economic sanctions, as well as a readiness to increase military spending and military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine.

This included a major diplomatic effort to isolate Russia. You had big votes in the UN General Assembly in which Russia was, you know, outvoted three, four to one with votes that condemned its aggression in Ukraine. And contrast that with what you see now. You have the prospect of really significant unraveling of policy, even of defeat, with consequences beyond the East European region. After all, you have the most—you had the most important concerted effort by the NATO alliance of the last thirty-plus years, and I would include what it did in Afghanistan and what it did in Kosovo. And that has some real risk of looking like a failure.

You have the likelihood of internal alliance discord. You have the prospect of a need for more, not less, attention to Europe by a new administration. There will be—already have been calls from European allies for more American troops in Europe to deal with what they see as an increased threat. You have—you will have anxiety about how this episode has been read by major adversaries. You’ll have a real challenge to bipartisanship in American foreign policy. The idea that American foreign policy is bipartisan is somewhat exaggerated, but now you will have a significant factionalization of the foreign policy debate.

I have written about the way in which past jolts have galvanized American foreign policy and crystallized a new consensus. And that could happen. But you also have the real prospect of a fractured consensus. In the worst case scenario that I’ve described, if that materializes we are looking ahead to a major debate about how to adjust to this new international environment and how to defend American interests and preserve—how to define American interests, and then defend them. And how to define and then uphold the American role in the world that emerges from this new debate. Russian-American relations will be one part of that debate, but by no means the only part of it.

Irina, with that let me stop and we can have a lively discussion, I hope.

FASKIANOS: That’s great. Thank you, Steve, really for setting the stage with that analysis.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

All right, so the first question—we’re going to take a raised hands from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. And you need to unmute yourself. There we go.

Q: (Off mic)—student from KFUPM, King Fahd University of Petroleum.

My question—

FASKIANOS: You’re a little far from the mic. I don’t know if you’re having trouble, Steve, to hear?

SESTANOVICH: I cannot hear the question.

FASKIANOS: Yeah, we can’t hear the question. So if you can get a little closer.

Q: OK. So is the military support for Ukraine aimed to stop Russian aggression, or is it about fulfilling geopolitical objectives and reshaping power dynamics in Europe?

SESTANOVICH: Irina, could you restate the question for me? Because I really couldn’t—in my speaker the speaker was breaking up.

FASKIANOS: Yeah, I also could not really get all of it. So if you can try and repeat it again, sorry.

Q: My question is the military support for Ukraine aimed to stop Russian aggression? Or is it about fulfilling geopolitical objectives and reshaping power dynamics in Europe? (Inaudible)—KFUPM.

SESTANOVICH: I think—

FASKIANOS: So it’s—yeah.

SESTANOVICH: If I could—

FASKIANOS: Go ahead.

SESTANOVICH: —pick out the first part of the question, which I heard better, has been aimed primarily at responding to this shock, to what Western officials see as the sort of elements of the international order that could guarantee a sort of peaceful set of relations among major powers. This is sometimes referred to as the rules-based international order. This is a term I actually hate, because it implies that there’s something—that somebody made up these rules, maybe especially the United States. Putin always responds to references to the rules-based international order by saying, who made these rules? But of course, that’s a ridiculous objection. The rules against aggression have been agreed by all major powers, including the Soviet Union, and then—and then Russia. And not just in the post-World War II period but before.

The real question is, of course, what constitutes aggression? And Putin has said, well, this isn’t aggression because the West is trying to destroy Russia. The West is actually supporting a neo-Nazi regime to undermine Russia. You know, if you believe that, I would say you’ve listened too much to Kremlin propaganda. What Putin does seem to be doing is kind of defining an ethnonationalist source of legitimacy for Russian foreign policy. I mean, in that respect I compare him most to Milošević, the Serbian leader of the 1990s, who also thought that his own political legitimacy and Serbia’s kind of post-Yugoslav existence depended on asserting its ethnic primacy among the peoples that used to make up Yugoslavia. And what Putin—the way Putin talks is very much the same.

I think this outlook has been a huge shock to other European powers but, frankly, I think a huge shock to almost all countries that have—that are not completely aligned with Moscow. And that’s why at the beginning you had a kind of recoiling in almost all international institutions. I mentioned in the United Nations, overwhelming votes condemning Russia. But that has now, as often happens in international relations, tended to subside. People get used to aggression. They sort of think, well, maybe there’s a way we can kind of split the difference and call this off and move on to other things. And at that point, you know the—some kind of new adjustment in which states rationalize the settlement that is worked out will be—will emerge.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’ll take the next question from Nicholas Rostow, who is at Yale.

Q: Thank you. Can you hear me OK?

FASKIANOS: We can.

SESTANOVICH: Perfectly. Hi. Nick.

Q: Hi, Steve. This is a wonderful series. And, Steve, you gave a wonderful presentation, as usual.

I have a question about evidence. You said that in September the Russians suffered the highest number of casualties so far in the war and then you subsequently referred to public opinion polls. And I just wondered, what’s the basis for the casualty calculations and for the opinion polls? Thank you.

SESTANOVICH: Yeah, it’s a—it’s a good question. And I should have—I should have had a hyperlink to the question—to the claim about September casualties. That’s now used by a lot of different analysts, including other governments. I believe the origin of it is, in part, from Western intelligence services. And you’re not cleared to know what their sources and methods are, Nick. (Laughs.) Nor am I. I’m believing—

Q: I have no clearances.

SESTANOVICH: I’m believing that—or, inclined to believe it because, A, it seems to be confirmed by what we are seeing at the front, by the way in which Russian military bloggers who talk about this on open channels and Telegram, their, you know, very interesting social media platform. And looking at that, you know, it seems to be a plausible trend. The precise numbers I wouldn’t vouch for.

As for the polls, there are different Russian polling organizations. As some of—you know, all of which operate in a more constrained environment than one would—one would want, but some of which have retained a certain kind of independence. And these numbers that I gave you came from the Levada Center, which has, for many years, been the most widely respected polling organization. You’ve got to question, and I suppose this is one thing on your mind, how it is that Russians—how freely they feel to answer the question, do you support President Putin. But, you know, a good number of them say they don’t.

And I think the fluctuations are important. These numbers have gone up and down in the course of the war. And the number now who say that the war is bad for Russia is at a—is the highest level since the since the war started, and just up—it’s just below 50 percent. It was at about 40 percent a few months ago. I think here too trends are valuable, even if one doesn’t take the exact number too seriously.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next question—a written question from Liudmila, who is from Russia and currently studying at the University of Maine on global policy. And the question is about the state of Russian opposition: Many opposition figures have not only moved abroad, mostly to Europe, but have become increasingly decentralized, especially following Aleksey Navalny’s death. This leaves over 50 percent of Russians without strong, unified representation. Do you believe the Russian opposition still plays a significant role in resisting Putin? Do they remain a credible force for European leaders to collaborate with? You know, we’ve seen key figures like Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza released, as well as Yulia Navalnaya emerging as Aleksey’s successor. Is this a sign for the opposition to collaborate?

SESTANOVICH: Look, the Russian opposition is in terrible shape. As the questioner, as Liudmila noted, a very large number of people left in the early days of the war, feeling that they had to protest what was happening, that their freedom was at risk. This involved people who were prominent in the political opposition as well as those—as just ordinary, you know, tech workers. This was, you know, a common profession among people who left and showed up in Poland, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Dubai, and so forth, Kazakhstan. And the result is—to which Russian opposition figures are very aware of—is to cut people off from their—from their constituents and supporters, to make it harder to talk to likeminded folk.

It’s not as though the opposition figures in exile are completely unaware of what’s going on. I talk to some of these people and they describe going to Istanbul for the weekend in order to connect with friends who were flying in from Moscow. This happens in other places on the—on the Russian periphery that have not cut off air connections to Moscow. It is possible for Russians inside Russia to get access to some exile media publications, Novaya Gazeta, Meduza in particular, TV Dozhd. And those organizations are still active, and they still have an audience in Russia. But it’s very hard to measure either the scale of that audience or the kind of impact that their reporting has.

One of the things that was most distinctive about Navalny as a political oppositionist is that his conviction was you can’t have any influence in Russia unless you’re in Russia. And that’s why he went back, even risking near certain arrest. And the opposition people that I talk to think that it’s their role to wait for the moment when they can return safely. You know, you may remember that Lenin spent most of World War I in exile, but then found an opportunity, with the help of the Germans in a sealed train, to return to Russia and to try to mobilize an opposition.

Exiled leaders these days imagine that that moment may come again, but they know that right now their ability to have any real political impact depends on some kind of crisis in the Putin regime that makes it possible for people with their views to return, to exist, and act and speak out safely in Russia. That may—that time may come soon. It may be a long time in coming. And we, of course, don’t know even what a post-Putin regime’s attitude would be toward welcoming others back.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next question from—a raised hand from Niyaz Najm Salih, who’s a graduate student at Wayne State University.

Q: Hi. Thank you, Irina. And thank you, Stephen, for the introduction. It’s a very interesting and controversial topic, I would say.

I have got two points on the topic. I think it would be important to mention the two sides, two parties—not political parties—the division among people in Ukraine, the pro-West and the pro-Russian people. And this—as we know, before Zelenskyy, the administration and Ukraine, it was very, very pro-Russian. And regarding the trade agreements with West and with Russia, they preferably favored Russia. And when Zelenskyy came to rule, his administration was pro-West. And there’s no doubt that West and Russia has spent a lot of money on this opposition, on NGOs or individuals to kind of reflect that division among Ukrainians. So what is our role as the West in breaking out the war in Ukraine, actually? It’s a very, very plausible question to ask. This is one point.

And the second point is the Trump administration and his views personally against NATO and against war in Ukraine, and not supporting them as the current administration is doing, what will be the effect of having Trump again back in the U.S. Oval Office? Thank you.

SESTANOVICH: Yeah. Look, the history of Ukrainian politics since the dissolution of the Soviet Union is extremely interesting and worth paying a lot of attention to, so as to understand the dynamics today. But they’re a little different from what you say. For example, before Zelenskyy you said there was pro-Russian government. Well, this is not true. Before Zelenskyy, the president of Russia (sic; Ukraine) was Poroshenko, who was elected after the 2014 upheaval and was seen as extremely anti-Russian. Many people in Russia thought Zelenskyy, being a native Russian speaker from a Russian area, would be more accommodating of Russian interests. But that turned out not to be the case because they didn’t offer him—they didn’t really show terribly much interest in working with him.

In Ukrainian politics since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, actually political power has tended to shift back and forth from west to east. The east being ethnically and linguistically more Russian, the west ethnically and linguistically more sort of what we would think of as kind of classic Ukrainian or even Polish. And the presidents of Ukraine have tended to come from one side or the other. But none of them was interested in subordinating Ukraine to Russia completely, much less, you know, ceding territory to Russia. In fact, they’re interested in different kinds of accommodation, but not subordination.

And what was distinctive about the way in which Putin broke with that record was to say, any government in Ukraine that doesn’t accept subordination from Russia, that doesn’t accept a loss of territory, is a Nazi regime, is a traitor to Russian tradition and identity. You know, a kind of wild talk that was quite contrary to anything that you heard in Ukrainian politics, whether leaders from the east or leaders from the west. Ukraine had managed a kind of pluralism with different languages, different religions, and a kind of incorporation and acceptance of minorities.

You know, when I was in Ukraine last month I was struck by the diversity of the Ukrainian elite now. You know, the head of the defense ministry is a Tatar, neither Ukrainian nor Russian and not a Christian. The head of the Ukrainian—of Zelenskyy’s faction in the—in the Rada is a Georgian. The governor of one of the largest provinces in Ukraine is of Korean extraction. Ukraine is a country that has actually, much more so than Russia, incorporated a kind of political pluralism not just into its personnel, but into its self-conception. And Putin has pushed back against that in Russia. And I think if you’re going to, you know, make sort of generalizations about the way in which different parts of the Ukrainian population have viewed Russia, you need to dig down a little more deeply into the political evolution, the personalities, the parties, the agendas of Ukraine in its political history over the past thirty-some years.

You asked about NATO and Trump. You know, there’s intense anxiety in most of NATO about Trump’s return, because they know that he said, you know, we might actually pull out of NATO. It can’t be done now easily because the Congress has said it requires a congressional vote. He’s disparaged Ukrainian—I mean, European defense spending, even though it’s way up since his administration. You know, under President Biden European defense spending has increased. It hardly happened under President Trump. But there’s still a kind of antagonism among many European leaders, anxiety about what living with a new President Trump would be like.

And they haven’t really figured that out, except that they know that the most successful allied governments in the previous Trump term were the ones that based their approach to him on sort of personal supplication, an attempt to create a sort of close personal bond. The Japanese Prime Minister gave Trump some very rare and expensive golf clubs. That kind of thing the Europeans think is the key to making relations with Trump work. To my mind, that’s not much of a strategy. And I think you’re going to have—you know, if the election produces a new Trump administration, you’re going to end up with much more allied disagreement about how to handle this new rogue United States.

FASKIANOS: Just staying on NATO, there’s a written question from Heidi Hardt, who’s a professor at UC Irvine: It sounded like in your earlier comments you inferred that following concerted efforts, NATO’s response is starting to look like a failure. What is your assessment of how the alliance has adapted, and maybe fundamentally changed vis-à-vis Ukraine since the invasion? And what are the roots of any failures that you mentioned?

SESTANOVICH: Well, there’s no doubt that the alliance has evolved significantly in the course of the war. It has, you know, set up a regular working group, a contact group that meets at Ramstein, the air base, in Germany regularly to—in order to deliberate about assistance to Ukraine. It has created new training centers outside Ukraine for Ukrainian military personnel. It has created new teams to be stationed on the front in countries that border Russia that are multilateral, not just the forces of the—of the individual countries.

And it has, as I mentioned earlier, you know, produced a significant increase in defense spending and begun to talk about the possible need to go beyond the 2 percent of GDP target for each country that had been agreed ten years ago, and to embrace, you know, a target perhaps as high as 3 percent. What the—what the alliance has not yet done is figured out—oh, and I should add one other thing. It has almost—I mean, a huge number—the overwhelming majority of alliance governments now have bilateral security agreements with Ukraine. So this—all of this involves a shift in resources, the creation of new organizational structures that are—you know, that embody a certain kind of strategic consensus.

What will happen to those efforts, though—and this is the question that I posed in my remarks—what will happen to those efforts if they’re seen to have failed in Ukraine, is an important question. The alliance has not yet really grappled with the issue of whether it is prepared to offer its own security guarantee to Ukraine, to the part of Ukraine that is not occupied by Russian forces. It has not addressed the question which more people are beginning to discuss, and some governments endorse, of actually having some kinds of NATO personnel present in Ukraine. And it hasn’t figured out what the—what mechanisms will exist before Ukraine actually becomes a member of NATO so as to make—to add to deterrence of Russian activity in the—in the future.

I think all of these things will be easier to do if there’s a kind of outcome in the next year or so that Western governments can say to themselves reflect a—you know, a good outcome in which they can still cooperate together. If the outcome is one that seems the result of something closer to a Russian victory, I think you’re going to get much more division within NATO, much less agreement on what the commitment of resources should be, less agreement on what relations with Moscow should be like going forward. And I think that will be—you know, that’s really uncharted territory for the NATO alliance. It hasn’t experienced anything like that kind of discord over its principal security challenge in its history.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

So we have a couple of questions about North Korea—from Dessie Zagorcheva, about the number of Korean military personnel who have arrived into Ukraine; and from Kaolyn Roberts at UT Austin, whether the number of North Korean troops will change U.S.-Russian and Russian-Ukraine dynamics on the international stage and the war front. So if you can talk about the numbers and how you’re thinking about what that will mean for the region.

SESTANOVICH: Yeah. Here’s where we need Nick Rostow to come back and ask us about—(laughs)—you know, what lies behind the numbers that people cite. We have had different statements from the South Korean government, relying on its own military intelligence services, from Western intelligence services. I believe there have been NATO statements as well. NATO spokesmen describing the arrival of North Korean troops. And I believe there have been Ukrainian government assessments of this.

FASKIANOS: Yeah. And Dessie cited the Institute for the Study of War.

SESTANOVICH: Yeah. Yeah.

FASKIANOS: Her stats are 12,000, including 500 officers, and three generals. And that’s from—

SESTANOVICH: Yeah, the numbers that you see vary a lot. And one of the reasons is they’re often describing something different. Some that have been—arrived in Russian territory, sometimes even in the Far East. Others that are in European Russia. And others that might be in Kursk, the area—the small area that—opposite the small area of Russian territory that Ukrainian forces have seized. You know, the important issue here is not just what the numbers are, although how many there are and what their mission is will, of course, be, you know, important to the impact that they have on the military situation. The fear has been that Putin has gotten them to—has gotten a commitment to throw North Korean units into the—into the fight to retake Kursk, because he doesn’t have his own trained units that are able to take on that assignment.

There are a lot of questions that have been raised about how effective North Korean units can be in unfamiliar terrain, in operating with Russian units that don’t share the same language. I don’t think you’ll find all that many North Korean soldiers who speak Russian. And so the operational implications of this are important. The, you know, second concern is that it represents a kind of consolidation of this so-called axis of upheaval, the bloc that—and that’s a name for the loose bloc of Russia, North Korea, Iran, China. And whether the North Koreans turn out to be an actually valuable tool, instrument of Russian policy, we don’t know.

One other thing we don’t know is, of course, whether the Russians have offered a lot in exchange for what the—what the North Koreans are doing for them. We’ll probably learn a little bit more about that. But the fact that the North Koreans are rumored to be planning a nuclear test now will definitely add to this anxiety—at the same time that the Russians have their own nuclear exercises that they just announced completing in the past few days—will increase anxiety that you’ve got a more usable military—set of military tools that the—that are available to Putin.

One thing that I think people haven’t talked about enough is what the response to this might be. I mean, for example, could one—what kind of significant campaign could there be to try to induce North Korean desertions? I’d be interested to know whether you could get a—you know, a quick rollout of a South Korean effort on the—on the other side of the front lines trying to draw people out of their units in western Russia. Telling them, you know, this is your golden opportunity. You can become citizens of Ukraine, citizens of the Baltic states, of Poland, and try to undermine the North Korean effort, in those terms.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to go next to Stockton University, raised hand.

Q: Hi.

What do you think about António Guterres visiting Russia and participating in the BRICS summit? Thank you.

SESTANOVICH: (Laughs.) I think it’s a reminder of what a terrible job it is to be secretary-general of the UN You—it’s sort of part of your job description to be nonaligned in conflicts among the great powers, and to offer yourself as a possible figure in diplomatic solutions. I’m sure that Guterres said to himself, well, you know, the BRICS summit had on its agenda significant issues of UN reform. And if this is an opportunity to talk to a large number of leaders on that question, particularly at a moment when the Russians seem to be embracing Security Council reform. They’re typically opposed to it. That could be interesting.

I think that’s probably mostly a cover for feeling that he needed to demonstrate that he’s not a, you know, Western foreign policy official. Remember, he’s the former prime minister and foreign minister, I think, of a NATO member. And this was a question raised when he was first appointed. I think he probably could have done a little better job by just saying, you know what? I’m sorry, I just can’t fit that into my schedule. But I was all in all heartened to see how relatively little prominence his role got in the overall coverage of the event, and how he didn’t have a starring walk-on role, that I was able to discern.

It may be that, you know, other members of the Security Council, Western ones in particular, are a little more unhappy with him and maybe wondering whether he’s their guy the next time his term is up. But, you know, all in all I think Guterres has been a pretty skillful politician in managing that job. And I don’t know whether it’s going to turn out that he’s really in big trouble. If he’s as good a politician as I think he is, he’s probably coming back and debriefing the Western governments in the Security Council on what he heard from Russians about their possible interest in a diplomatic off-ramp to the war. Probably making himself sound like a tough guy in these conversations. But that’s totally speculative. I know nothing about the aftermath of Guterres’s visit.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to try to squeeze in a last question, maybe I can get one more in, from Jill Dougherty, who’s an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Q: Oh, thank you very much. I hope this is brief enough. But, hello, Stephen.

I have a question for you. I’m in Tbilisi, Georgia. And they just had, of course, a difficult election. And there is concern here—

SESTANOVICH: Are you an observer there now?

Q: —that has to do with Ukraine.

No. No. I was doing some things for CNN.

And so the concern here is that if Ukraine loses—of course, you know the next line—that Russia would be emboldened to do something in Georgia, and we might as well add other places in the neighborhood—you know, Moldova, et cetera. I know it’s a big debate. We’ve discussed it probably for a long time. But with these elections it’s more immediate. So what is your—what’s your thought about that?

SESTANOVICH: You know, this is the kind of crystal ball gazing that all of us hate to do. Let me say that my general—(laughs)—view, when other countries on the Russian periphery worry about what Putin’s next move will be, I say to them: As long as he’s occupied in Ukraine, you don’t have—you don’t have a whole lot to worry about. You know, one question is, if he wins in Ukraine—and I think that’s definitely on the minds of a lot of Georgians and Baltic governments, you mentioned Moldova—does that embolden him or does that satisfy him for a little while?

He’s certainly got a lot of rebuilding to do. The licking of wounds phase could be kind of long. On the other hand, nothing succeeds like success, as the saying goes. And Putin’s theory of the case—that is, that the Russian Empire is a sort of historical frame of reference that he should think of himself as challenged to emulate—you know, that’s going to be a bad—will have a bad effect. One could make the argument, of course, that for Putin to be defeated in Ukraine will make the licking of wounds process different, maybe longer, but it might give him more of an interest in finding some other area for a cheap success.

Georgia certainly looks like one of those, although the government in Georgia has been doing its best to suggest that it’s on the same wavelength as Putin when it comes to Western interference, foreign agents, and so forth. We are going to be seeing Russian efforts to influence its neighbors for a good long time. Some of its neighbors will have been emboldened by the Ukraine war to assert their independence more effectively. I think you could argue that the Central Asian states are probably on alert and readier to show that they are not under Russian control than they were before the war. They’ve got a kind of clear message from Putin as to what he aims at. And they aim to digest—or incorporate that lesson in their policy.

Georgian political figures have been kowtowing to Putin, but they too want to defend their independence. I think Putin is unlikely to find any government on his periphery that is ready to roll over and let him assert control. They may have different strategies for resisting Putin’s efforts. And that will require a lot of subtlety among Western governments that want to try to support those governments and to try to make it harder for Putin to put the old empire back together again,

FASKIANOS: We are out of time, but I just wanted to ask one last question that came in from Dan Caldwell: Are you concerned—or, how concerned are you about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia?

SESTANOVICH: Look, I don’t think one should just pooh-pooh the nuclear weapons threat. I don’t see the ways in which the use of nuclear weapons would be advantageous for Putin. I think the threat of using nuclear weapons has, so far, been advantageous. And I’m a little surprised at how little pushback there has been from Western governments, in particular the Biden administration, against this latest round of Russian threats. You know, two years ago when Putin first started brandishing the nuclear weapons there were a lot of rather stiff American warnings to him. You know, you had a public statement by American officials that there would be catastrophic consequences of the use of nuclear weapons.

I think there—I’m surprised that there hasn’t been anything quite so robust this time. There’s been more sort of public agonizing about will he or won’t he and what should we do about it, but not a real challenge to the use of these threats. And that seems to me misguided. You know, when somebody like Putin starts talking about making as gigantic a mistake as this would be, you want to—you want to be saying out loud that it would be a gigantic mistake.

FASKIANOS: Great.

Well, thank you, Steve Sestanovich, for this terrific hour. My apologies for going over, and not getting—we didn’t get to all the questions. There were a lot of raised hands and written questions, so I’m sorry that we could not get through them all. But we’ll just have to have you back. So we appreciate your being with us.

The next Global Affairs Expert Webinar will be on Wednesday, November 13, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. And we will focus on nuclear arms control and disarmament with Nicole Grajewski from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And in the meantime I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/Careers. Follow us at @CFR_Education on X. You can visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. You will find more analysis from the ambassador here, so I encourage you to use that as a resource.

And again, thank you all for joining us. And thank you, Steve.

SESTANOVICH: Thanks, Irina.

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