Focus on Eurasia: Russia's war against Ukraine: Will it lead to crisis in Moscow?

Well, that's the ultimate question, isn't it, Elizabeth? [LAUGHS] I guess we'll be in for a lot more surprises along the way along the lines that you've just laid out here because it's very difficult to balance out those sets of issues. That's not something that we normally have to feature in these kinds of situations of war and peace. Business is usually something that is discussed at a different point, usually at a different stage, when one thinks about reconstruction or the kind of postwar elements.

But there is this kind of sense, this thread that's been going through so much of the discussions around this conflict for some time now that a lot of places, a lot of countries and the Trump administration would like to somehow get back to a business-as-usual sense of interactions with Russia. And of course, there is no business-as-usual because we've been in this state of affairs now with a major shift and a major rupture in European security since 2014 and Russia's annexation of Crimea. We have to remember that's really the opening salvo in this conflict, in this war that we now find ourselves in. So we've been in really a state of war, I would say, since 2014, so for a considerable period of time at this point, going back over a decade.

And that leads or should lead to the contemplation of this broader set of issues that you've laid out there about the substance of national security and the way that we might find some kind of longer-term resolution to this problem, which, as the Ukrainians have rightly pointed out, is not really about real estate. It's about the future of Ukraine as a sovereign and independent country, the configuration of Ukraine's borders, which—let's just put that on the marker now—have been recognized by every country globally, including Russia, for more than three decades at this point. There was never previously any kind of claim that was lodged by Russians against Ukraine and its borders and its territory at any point prior to 2014, and of course all the other countries that became independent more than, again, three decades ago as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but have the same questions then about the sanctity of their borders, their sovereignty, and independence under the idea that we would be trivializing, in some respects, Ukraine's hold on its own territory.

The other element beyond Ukraine and Ukraine's future as an independent, sovereign country is obviously the future of European security because this is the third major land war in Europe in a century. So this is a continuation, in many respects, of World War I, and I think that's really the frame that we need to think about this again. And we didn't resolve World War I through a whole series of business deals, or even World War II. The Marshall Plan that came in with the reconstruction of Europe was—of course business was involved in that down the line, but that wasn't the major framing. And we're talking about something consequential, something colossal, something that's going to be shifting the whole future of European security, so it's not going to be something that can be solved through a business deal.

Well, I think, Carol, as you've laid it out, it obviously is a period of acute weakness, which, again, presents an opportunity, obviously, to Moscow to try to press an advantage here. We've got to remember—and many of the people, I'm sure, on this participant list are quite familiar with Putin and the way that he operates, and the fact that Putin himself is a master of judo, and he always looks for a point in which he can leverage his opponent and take them to the mat. And this is an obvious one where they've lost their footing in a literal sense. Zelenskyy is on the back foot. Zelenskyy is having all kinds of problems politically, and I'm picking on Zelenskyy here because you see both Putin and Trump honing in on Zelenskyy, seeing him as the person with the weakest hand. Trump has literally said that. Trump—it's always hard to talk about him without thinking of a pack of cards, and he himself has raised that multiple times, Trump, by telling Zelenskyy that he has no cards to play, that he has a weak hand.

This obviously isn't judo. We're now talking about poker and all kinds of other games, but there is a gamble, a gambit—let's put it that way—going on right now, particularly from Moscow but also, frankly, from Washington, DC, that this is the moment to push through, getting back to Elizabeth's question, some kind of deal that basically gets Ukraine off this war footing and gets this war into a different phase entirely. And I would just say that it is not just Russia that's trying to go in at this particular moment of vulnerability for Ukraine, but also for the United States. It's no secret, and Trump makes it no secret, that he's fed up of this war. He wants it to end. And famously said he wanted to end it within 24 hours of coming into office. He thought it would be easy.

Every different juncture, the course of negotiations or the course of discussions around this war, all of the spectacles we've seen have been driven over, by a large part, by Trump's desires to have some symbolic date or some symbolic event to drive a peace process, or at least a ceasefire or whatever it is that he thinks he's wanting to have a deal to be made. The latest one, of course, was Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving, which isn't celebrated anywhere other than in America, but Trump obviously wanted to have that as a symbolic date for him. And of course, many people are uncharitably saying—but he himself is alluding to this—that he would like to get something in under the wire so he can be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. And those [INAUDIBLE] deadlines are coming up in January. So sad to say, all of this is being driven by other considerations which are not the considerations on the battlefield.

And it's now—look, we can look at the battlefield, I think, also in multiple ways. I'm sure lots of people are thinking about that. There's the actual battlefield on the front lines, where Russia does make incremental progress but at enormous cost, enormous cost to Russia. That's why we have the title of this discussion, as we were talking about it previously, that it's not that Russia is doing this cost-free. The losses in terms of manpower and equipment material are enormous, but it's a price that Putin is willing to pay because Putin is pretty confident that he's eventually going to have success. But for Ukraine, it isn't holding the lines in the way that it was before, but there's no sign of an imminent collapse of Ukraine on the battlefield. This isn't like the collapse of the lines in World War I, for example. Yes, it's a grind, and it's pretty terrible, very terrible for Ukraine in terms of the front lines and the civilian losses and the damage to its critical national infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera.

But I've just talked this morning to a colleague that would know. He has just returned from a period in Kyiv and said there's no sense there that they're ready to give up, give up the ghost. They accept that this is a really tough situation, but the political battlefield is a different matter from the actual front line right now, yes. Again, we've said moment of weakness, but the political battlefield extends beyond Kyiv. It's also in Europe. And another sense of vulnerability—Elizabeth, you mentioned all the different places that people are right now. Putin has just today excoriated the Europeans, saying they're feckless, they're trying to destroy this peace process, they have no role to play despite the fact that it's all about European security. They're just trying to bring down this peace agreement, this deal between Russia and the United States. They're in favor of war because this is also, again, a period of acute vulnerability for the Europeans.

It's interesting that Zelenskyy is in Ireland of all places. Ireland doesn't have a military, and Ireland is famous for its neutrality. But this is also a period where the Irish, the Swiss, all kinds of other countries that are famously neutral—and the Swiss are different from the Irish, obviously, because they actually do have a rather sizable military and a significant defense industry. But they're all thinking about neutrality cannot mean passivity, that this is a real challenge to the whole of Europe and to that whole post-World War II and post-Cold War sets of arrangements that seem to be guaranteeing stability, certainty, prosperity, and a benign security environment for Europe. And it's anything but that. And the Irish are perhaps not deciding to arm themselves again, but I think they're starting to also think about whether they should be playing a more assertive, diplomatic role at this point.

But the whole debate in Europe is very hot at this moment, and I think Putin is desperately trying to—perhaps not so desperately, but in a very deliberate fashion, let's say, deliberately trying to intimidate Europeans to push them back, get them on the back foot as well, get them down on the mat, and try to stop them from playing any kind of assertive role in this process. And related to that, we've also got the propaganda and informational battlefield, and frankly, Putin wins that hands down all the time. The framing for all of this, the questions about the future of Ukraine, the questions about corruption in Kyiv, the questions about Ukraine on the battlefield—they're all framed by Russia and Russian propaganda. There's no corruption in Russia? Really? Excuse me? What about all of the scandals that used to be revealed there all the time? Of course, one of the people who was always revealing those, Alexei Navalny, has been very conveniently killed by the system, for example.

We get very little out about the kinds of scandals that we know are there because Putin prosecutes people who have obviously been helping themselves a little bit too generously to all of the various finances, but Putin is also playing very heavily into corruption here in the United States. The peace plan, all of the discussions are involving business people and many people who would at some point stand to benefit in many different ways from the reconstruction of either the ruined parts of Ukraine that Russia has absorbed and is hoping to get recognition of, or future reconstruction in Ukraine. The 28-point peace plan that sent everybody's minds whirring was very clear that there was going to be a sharing of the spoils between—there's the business deal for you, Elizabeth—that is attempting to frame this between a coterie of American business people and their counterparts in Russia.

So we've got a lot going on here, financial games, economic games, battlefields. They're trying to incentivize people, sweeten the pot for people to get involved. But propaganda and information is pretty important as well because we're not asking, although we did in this title of this talk, about really what's going on in Russia and elsewhere. It's all about how Ukraine is about to lose all the time, even though, again, there have been colossal losses for Russia, not just, again, in the battlefield but also in terms of its reputation, in terms of its inability to prosecute what Putin wanted to be a special military operation that was also going to be over in days. Trump wanted to solve the war in 24 hours. Putin thought he would have Kyiv and Ukraine under control in a bit more time than that, but certainly, perhaps, 24 days, certainly not months and years and creating the largest war in Europe since World War II.

Yeah, well, just talking about Europe is already the problem. [INAUDIBLE] about Eurasia, which is also one of those slightly amorphous and sometimes ill-defined regions. And Europe—we know what it is geographically, and Ukraine is definitely part of Europe. And so is Russia, at least not just geographically but also politically. But institutional Europe is all over the place. We have the European Union, and there's all this discussion about Ukraine joining the European Union as part of any kind of settlement and Europeans taking some responsibility in a major way, through the European Union, for the reconstruction and longer-term health of what Ukraine looks like at the end of this. It's hard, again, to see where that end might be. But the European Union is not a security provider.

Yes, within the European Union articles of association there are security provisions, but they're all linked one way or another to NATO or to other entities. And the European security provisions usually towards confidence and security building focused on disasters or disaster management or intervention in conflicts, which are not at this scale, not full-scale war management. They were thinking, obviously, in the wake of what happened in former Yugoslavia and of European intervention in conflicts globally, about something quite different, confidence, peace building, et cetera. This is, again, the realm that would fit the other institution, of course, which is NATO, and this is where we get to the crux of a set of other problems that, Carol, you probably would have got to but weren't quite there in that question because I think it's become apparent now that the United States doesn't think of itself as part of NATO. At least Trump doesn't.

And Witkoff and others in the 28-point plan had this rather surprising line about the United States mediating between Russia and NATO. Now, we've got, of course, what we saw theoretically at the NATO-Russia Council, but it wasn't mediated by the United States between NATO and Russia. It was with the United States as firmly part of NATO at that particular point, going back to that period in the 1990s when there wasn't a question that the US was part of NATO. But now Trump seems to be—when he's talking about an Article 5 guarantee, it's not clear what he means. He's talking about the nuclear guarantee, the ultimate nuclear umbrella, the provision of tactical nuclear weapons, the dual-capable aircraft that the Europeans have that the US provides nuclear missiles for. Of course, we have France and Britain having nuclear arsenals, but they're a fraction of the US capability.

And Trump hasn't said that he's pulled away the nuclear guarantee from Europe, but he's certainly raised questions about everything else. Now, does he still think of Canada as part of NATO is another question as well, given all of the discussions about Canada by Trump as part of the United States, a 51st state, and all these other rather shocking overtures that he's made towards Canada. So it may be that he doesn't think of NATO as including Canada, so that the North Atlantic part of it is that North Atlantic portion that obviously wouldn't include Greenland either but would be north of the United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway, et cetera, et cetera. But he's making it very clear that he thinks that NATO is really Europe and Europe's capacity.

And we remember—and I think that unfortunately be also another signal that we get from Rubio not going to NATO, as Elizabeth has pointed out, to the meeting—the last NATO meeting was all about Europe stepping up. Article 5 became Article 5%. You don't get defense or collective defense unless you're paying 5%. 1.5% of that 5% is supposed to be for resilience, for building up the wherewithal for Europe to defend itself and to withstand all of the challenges that they have coming down the pike. But there was an understanding that Europe was going to be taking charge of European security.

Now, we all know—and many people—I looked on the participant list here as well. We all know about these debates. This is the kind of thing that MIT Security Studies students would have been learning—I certainly did back in the day—that for decades, including after the beginning of the Cold War, the 1950s and '60s onwards, there's been this debate about how much Europe should have been doing and whether it was still the right response to have the United States footing, basically, the bill in many respects on so many different fronts and also bearing the largest share of the burden for European security. This is obviously the artifact and the consequence of Europe being bailed out from World War I and then World War II, and it is a really good question as to whether 100 years on the United States should still be bailing Europe out of European security.

But the dilemma that we have here is, of course, getting back to your question, Carol—is that the United States has taken it upon itself and Trump has taken it upon himself to basically be the decider, the deal-maker in this conflict. At the same time, he's actually also saying that it's Europe's responsibility for its own security. So those two things don't square at all. If you're making a deal between the United States and Russia, which is frankly what this is, and you're telling Europeans that they need to stand up and take responsibility for European security, as they, frankly, should have been the past 30-odd years, not just cashing into the peace dividend and letting all of the investment in at least their defensive posture and their deterrence decline to really drastic, drastic levels, then you've got to have Europe taking the ball forward, frankly, on these questions about the future of security for Ukraine, not just for Europe when we move forward here.

And again, who should be doing this? And that's again where we get back to these problems of what is Europe, who is Europe. We've got a coalition of countries. We're calling it right now the E3, which is the classic UK, Germany, and France, which are playing a key role. But we've got loads of other European countries that have got a vested interest in this from the Baltic states to Poland, which is very close to spending right now 5%—it have even hit 5% of GDP in its defense. We've obviously got the Scandinavian countries. We have the Joint Expeditionary Force that the UK was leading, which includes all of the Scandinavian and the Baltic countries that have been playing a very active role in Ukraine. We've got Italy, which has been playing a rather surprisingly forceful role at times on the issue of Ukraine. And of course, then we've got other countries, Slovakia, Hungary, and others, which is not so much, or the Spanish, who don't really see this as the threat to their security that others do.

So we're looking here at a dilemma because Europe should be, ought to be, and must be taking more responsibility here. They can't leave it. They can't afford to leave it to a US-Russia deal, which, frankly, isn't taking their interests into consideration. And we've got a bit of a problem as to where is the right locus for this initiative. We've got Ursula von der Leyen in the mix from the EU perspective. We've got Mark Rutte as the general secretary of NATO, and then we've got a kind of constellation of people like the president of Finland, Alexander Stubb, who comes in extremely handy because he's got a mean game of golf and can engage with Trump on numerous occasions, has been deployed with golf clubs quite frequently to try to turn the course of events. We've got Giorgia Meloni in Italy, as I've kind of mentioned here.

But what we really haven't got is real serious leadership, and that's also a consequence in part of the very troubled relationship that all of Europe, frankly, now has with the United States apart from Viktor Orbán, who's always sucking up to Trump, frankly. Let's just put it as honestly as that. But everybody else has either been tariffed or excoriated or criticized for their politics, and the people around the Trump administration and Trump himself at times are interfering directly in European politics and supporting populist leaders and parties. And of course, all the tariffs and all the economic pressure that's been put on Europe is making it extraordinarily difficult for Europeans to get their act together. So, in short, this is a mess. [LAUGHTER]

That's a succinct answer, is it? It's a mess, and there's no kind of clear way out of this, because we're really lacking in a really well-structured leadership on the part of Europeans rather than Europe per se.

Yeah, all of these are interrelated. The problem is about the table. It's Trump's table. He set it. And, again, it's for his—it's for his deadlines, and that's part of the problem that we keep having to deal with here. So we're getting an agenda set by someone who really isn't interested in Ukraine's perspective and is, frankly, again, looking at it from a totally different vantage point. He's looking at it for a deal. He's looking from a businessman's perspective. He sees Ukraine as a losing proposition because it's a losing proposition for him from his perspective of the US, although that's not a view that's necessarily shared by the whole of the United States. Let's be honest about this. There's 330 million people—we've all got views—and members of Congress and the Senate. And different people around his administration have different views as well. We see all of that playing out. But it's Trump's table, and everybody's being pushed to come to it and to try to see if they can shift the menu around. So there's that problem.

Now, I want to flip this a little bit and to thinking about Russia first because Russia is, as we all know, never as weak as it appears, never as strong as it appears. But it's incredibly durable. Russia is—it's never collapsed, has it, really? Let's think about it. It still remains the largest country on Earth. It's gone through different forms. We've still got vestiges of Russian Empire there, the Soviet Union. And I remember back in the day when I was at Harvard, Carol, when you were there and we were at the Davis Center, I took many people, Adam Ulam's course about continuity in Russian politics and history and all the rest of it. And I think all of us would admit that Russia has got persistence. It's got staying power. It expands. It shrinks a bit. It expands again. As Putin's saying, when he always talks about Russia's borders, he's getting at that essence of this point that Russia is always there somewhere.

And it's always kind of menacing. It's mostly in its sort of history—the bits of it that we all focus on are the bits where it's really expanding, really, rather than contracting. But Russia is always in a state of some degree of crisis. Even at calm times there's always something going on beneath the surface. It's a big place to keep together. And Putin, getting back to what we said before—he thought he was going to have not perhaps a cakewalk, but he thought he was going to be repeating some of the episodes, the more promising episodes of Russia's conquering past. And he saw that Kyiv and Ukraine were extremely vulnerable. Look, when I was in government, I never really got briefings about the state of the Ukrainian military, only about the state of the Russian military, and I doubt greatly that Putin got any briefings about the state of the Ukrainian military. And if he did, they would obviously

be all highlighting the vulnerabilities and the weaknesses, not the inherent strengths. And we've got to remember that the Ukrainian military is built up on the basis also of the Soviet military, just like Russia is.

Now, Carol, you probably remember and others who are on this participant list might remember, when I was back in the 1990s working at the Kennedy School and also at the Davis Center in Ukrainian Research Institute, we had Kostyantyn Morozov, Russian-speaking, Ukrainian, formerly part of the Soviet military. And he became the first defense minister--

--of Ukraine. And he was a Russian speaker. And I spent a lot of time with him, as many others did. I think you did as well, Carol. And he was trying to build up a Ukrainian army. They know the Russian army inside out. There were so many people who were Ukrainian, of Ukrainian heritage-- they might have been Russian speakers but Ukrainian heritage-- who had, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a sense that they were going to build up their own military. They already had capacities and capabilities. Russia was relying on a lot of their heavy lift for a long period of time as Russia was building up its own forces. You think about the Mir, that huge, huge Ukrainian aircraft, which was one of the first things that the Russians took out when they attacked Ukraine in February of 2022. Their intention was to take over again that military capability and capacity of Ukraine. It wasn't to destroy everything, which is what they're doing now.

And so we have, I think, right fundamentally from the very beginning, made, as George Bush would have said, a misunderestimation of Ukrainian potential capacity based on the fact that we saw Russia as a successor state from the Soviet Union, forgot that the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before it was an agglomeration, an aggregate of all of these other parts. And Ukrainians, like Armenians and Kazakhs and Georgians, were all, actually, fairly well integrated into the Soviet armed forces, and many of them were the leaders. And they've got, basically, capacities as well. And Ukraine was the arsenal in many respects of the Soviet armed forces.

And now-- this is what I want to get to as well-- Ukraine and Ukrainians are one of the best equipped, best trained, and most formidable armies in Europe. The Turks and the Finns have got their own capacities as well because of wartime, and Turkey's always maintained a pretty large military. And remember, it's part of NATO even if we're not thinking about this in European context. And Carol, you've worked on Turkey in the past and the Middle East to a very large extent, so I think you would agree with me there that Turkey is a substantial military force still and has obviously been in action, although we kind of-- not probably highlighted in this way in places like Syria and elsewhere and its concerns about what's going on more broadly. The Finns never let their guard down after the Winter War and always made sure that they had the reserve force and were always trained, and you could say the same for the Swedes and the Norwegians, too-- a lesser extent to the Finns, of course. But while everybody else was cashing in on the peace dividend and allowing the militaries to atrophy, which is pretty much everywhere else, including the Poles, the Finns, as I said, and the Turks and others weren't doing that.

And Ukrainians have had to build up over the last four years now a pretty formidable fighting force, and they're at the front lines of innovation. So they've not got those giant heavy-lift aircraft anymore. They've moved into the world of drones. We've moved beyond tanks, perhaps, and aircraft carriers. And the Ukrainians have been able to take out about a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet using autonomous maritime drones, submersibles. They're constantly innovating on the battlefield. Yes, the Russians have caught up, but we've got to remember, again, that Ukraine and the Ukrainian military-- these are European-- it's a European country and a European fighting force. It would be foolish for the Europeans to want to see Ukraine basically diminished, demilitarized, and neutered at the end of all this because Ukraine is the only-- it's way ahead of the United States as well, frankly. There are a lot of US defense-- look, and I'm not saying this as a warmonger, just to be very clear, for anybody who's going to start weighing in on all of this.

The reality is that as a result of this battle, just like in World War II, when the United States-- it wasn't particularly innovative in World War I, by the way. It just came in as a fresh military force literally with its cavalry and all the rest of it. But in World War II, that arsenal of World War II was all in Detroit. It was in the Midwest. Remember, there's that great book about the arsenal of democracy. And the United States' innovation came as a result of its participation in World War II, and the United States maintained that edge after that. Well, Ukraine is doing that now. It's not the United States. It's Ukraine because Ukraine is being forged horribly in battle. And so that's something we have to bear in mind here, and that's something that the Ukrainians can do and others can do is to point that out, that Ukraine is fighting here-- and Ukrainians will say that-- for the future of Europe and European security.

That's absolutely right. I mean, remember that World War I-- it wasn't fought in Germany. It wasn't fought in the United Kingdom. It had crippling effects on both the United Kingdom and Germany. Germany is the loser, and the UK ostensibly is the victor. But it was the beginning of the end or really the end, the real end of the British Empire and all the other empires around Europe. But World War II was a totally different game. It really shifted, as I said, all of that focus to the United States also in European security, and Ukraine is the battlefield, like World War I again, for the next phase of European security, sadly. And that's where Russia has proven to be vulnerable. Russia didn't kick Ukraine's ass as it thought it would. There were some people, like Ben Hodges and others, who said that it wouldn't be that easy for Russia and that Ukraine would fight back and that Ukraine would prove many of the naysayers wrong, and it's not the case that it's just because of US support. And of course, that has been consequential, and European support, but the rate of innovation and the innovation is all happening in Ukraine itself. Again, war is not to be celebrated, but I'm just pointing out here that there is something fundamental taking place. And I think that that's another reason why Putin wants this to end, and that's not being seen strategically, certainly not from the United States and the White House but perhaps also not by Europe, although you want to ask why the Italians are interested.

Well, it's not just Giorgia Meloni. Italy has one of the largest defense industries in Europe. So do the Swiss. Leonardo, famously named after, I presume, Leonardo da Vinci, are very interested in what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. You're seeing defense contractors and defense industry from around Europe and the United States paying attention even if at the strategic level some of the governments are not paying attention to this. And again, this is kind part of the problem we're facing, and the other vulnerability then adding this into Russia is Russia's been trying to keep pace with Ukraine and has caught up in many respects. Remember, at the beginning of the war, it had to rely on Iran for Shaheed drones, and it was very much dependent on China and still is for certain parts and things like this on the battlefield, bringing in North Korea, North Koreans to help fight, especially in Kursk. Russia has turned a bulk of its economy now to basically feed the war, and one of the big vulnerabilities for Russia down the line is, how do you reverse that? Do you want to reverse that? And Russia arms sales was a big portion of Russia's foreign exchange beyond oil and gas, but right now it's been consuming all of that arms production. So is Russia going to be then the arms purveyor to the world at the end of this war? What does it do with all the demobilized soldiers? What does it do with that massive defense industry that it's built up? It had a hard enough time going from making tanks to washing machines in the 1990s, in fact, never really succeeded there, and the Ukrainians are giving Russia a run for its money in terms of innovation and not from the state level, because the Ukrainians are doing this on the battlefield. And we have seen Russia, under Belousov as the minister of defense, taking a businessman's view on this and pushing innovation. But Russia's going to be very vulnerable beyond the war in terms of its economy because everything has been pushed towards this.

That was a long answer, but I think there was a lot packed into what you were saying there. And I think often we look at this from a specific sets of angles, and we're kind of forgetting that 28-point plan. Remember, originally Russia wanted the military of Ukraine to be brought down to, what was it, under 100,000? The British--

--armed forces is only 76,000 in terms of on the army, the land army. You've got a lot more in other forces. But Ukraine's got almost-- what is it now? It's more than 800,000, which was in the 28-point peace plan. Russia's army is, on paper, what, a million-plus? But we know that in real life they're not always to that extent. But Ukraine's got more people under arms, and I say people because not just men-- it's also women, and it's one of a whole of society impact-- than any other European country.

It has the potential to keep on going based on everything that I've said absent some major shift. Now, we've seen a major shift, which is the reelection of Trump. For Putin, my God, what a payday because it's given him the kind of opportunity to really manipulate on the propaganda, political, and information battlefield in ways that he hasn't had before. Other major shifts-- politics in Europe, for example, the weakness, let's just be honest, of the main European players, perhaps not so much in the Scandinavian countries or the Baltic states, but real political weakness in the UK, in Germany, absolutely in France, where Macron can't get another term. And we've got so much questions about where the future of France will be, but also Poland, where you still got that standoff between the right and the left. Politics in Europe gives an awful lot of potential for everything to basically fall apart here from the support for Ukraine. So that's, obviously, what Putin's gambling on. He's feeling that he can keep this going on his side for as long as possible. He keeps saying it. Look, he says it openly that he doesn't have to go for peace right now. He's really the big obstacle here because everybody says he could stop it if he wanted to, but I'm not sure that he wants to because of some of these other issues that I've said here, the demobilization, the demilitarization of the Russian economy. At this point, lots the incentives to do that. And he's hoping for that major shift on the politics, if not on the battlefield, where we can see that over a longer period of time at the rate that Russia's moving now it can take more and more territory, but it's still far short of the kind of mythical annexation of all the territory that Russia has already made, the Declaration that all of the Donbas, Donetsk, and Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, in addition to Crimea, are part of the Russian Federation. That doesn't stand up to scrutiny. But Putin is hoping that politically that will come to pass because of changes elsewhere. So if those changes prove to be catastrophic for support for Ukraine and there's more problems in Ukraine itself, yeah, absolutely. Things could keep on shifting in Putin's direction. And Trump will keep on pressing that Ukraine for him is a losing proposition, and if Europeans are not able to step up, then we see more likely on the trajectory that we're on that Ukraine will find it very difficult to resist basically giving up territory.

And then we still have this problem of who's going to give Ukraine security guarantees. I think there's one important element here that a colleague arose with me this morning, that they pointed out that-- it's obvious to all of us, but it hasn't been pointed out. But this is really kind of unique in Russian history and probably in the history of most countries that Russia is paying its soldiers enormous amounts to fight this war. If we think back as historians to previous wars, you always get conscripts, volunteers. They're not being paid as contractors or as mercenaries to fight in the war. And that's essentially what we're seeing in Russia. Putin is basically gambling that he has enough money to keep on paying people to go to the front, and that's taking the edge off social discontent until the war ends because then people can still get those payments coming back home again. So war has become lucrative not just for the people who profit from it, the defense sector or skim money off-- and we're seeing all of that in Ukraine-- but for those people who go to die at the front. For Ukraine, it's an existential, literally existential question about going to fight at the front. But for Russians, it's now an issue of pay. And I think part of that is because Putin himself is a fairly astute historian of Russia and previous wars. World War II was an existential fight because that's the fight that came to Russia-- the Soviet Union, rather, to all of Ukraine and Kazakhstan and Armenia and everywhere else. But World War I wasn't fought, really, in Russia. It was fought on the margins, but it was fought in other places. And at that point, you had an army of people who were forced into the army for a 25-year period, and it was pretty awful. And that was the essence of the Revolution. You're not getting people now baying for peace in Russia, bread for the peasants and peace for the soldiers and-- well, land for the peasants and bread for the workers. You're not getting those kinds of slogans because Putin's taking the edge off. Particularly if you're in Moscow, it still is looking pretty nice, and out there in the provinces, you've got all this money from payments from the front, blood money, that's kind of sloshing around there for now. Yes, we're hearing stories that some of this is becoming more difficult to make, but Putin's betting that he can do this for the next one and a half, two, three years, Carol, that you're laying out there. So I think that's kind of why we're seeing Putin playing along or playing Trump jump along and playing all of these politics as much as you possibly can. He can keep paying for this. He'd probably prefer not to. But he also now has that dilemma about what does he do when he doesn't pay for this anymore. There is, again, this, can Putin afford peace? For now he thinks he can afford war, but can he afford peace? And that becomes all of the questions about, do Europeans want to basically start trading with Russia again? Are they going to be forced to? Is there going to be some paying Russia for devastating Europe? We had the Marshall Plan. We rebuilt Germany but were occupying Germany. No one's going to be occupying Russia. And same with Japan-- could we look for a kind of a durable peace there if you think about-- Japan still doesn't have a peace treaty with Russia since World War II, by the way. There was never the conclusion of a peace between the Soviet Union and Japan, and then there wasn't a peace between Russia and Japan, even though one was supposed to be drawn up by the year 2000 by Yeltsin. That never happened. Could we end up in a state of peace and war or peace, not war, rather, of a kind of Japan-Russia state? But of course Japan was heavily invested in-- the US has still got military installations in Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan. It's just kind of hard to see how we make all of this work under these circumstances, again, as I said, without some major change, which Putin's hoping is going to be in his favor, or just some really, really hard work and a lot of commitment on the part of Europeans, not just the United States. And right now, the politics within European countries are pretty weak. You'd really need to have somebody basically take up the mantle here, maybe Alexander Stubb with his golf clubs turned into something else, but somebody who really can come forward on some real leadership here to get some change. And you've really got to constrain Putin's ability to basically keep having these funds to pay for war because Putin is paying for this war because it's worth it to him, and it seems to be not really worth it to everybody else to pay in different ways to stop him from being able to keep on pushing forward.