Newt's WorldNewt’s guest is Herman Pirchner, president of the American Foreign Policy Council. They discuss the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Pirchner shares his insights on Russian President Vladimir Putin's motivations and strategies, highlighting Putin's desire for territorial expansion and power. He also discusses the impact of the conflict on global geopolitics, particularly the potential implications for other countries if Putin is successful in Ukraine. He emphasizes the importance of providing Ukraine with adequate weapons and support to resist Russian aggression.
On this episode of News World, my guest and my very good personal friend is Hermann Pershner. He is the founding president of the American Foreign Policy Council, a nonprofit public policy organization headquartered in Washington, d c. His travels have taken him to most areas of the world, including more than sixty five trips to the former Soviet Union since nineteen eighty nine and more than thirty trips to China since nineteen ninety four and Kliston. I have had the pleasure in honor of traveling with him in both Russia and China, and he is remarkably knowledgeable, and in particular he has been writing consistently for over a decade about Putin and the nature of Putin's Russia. So I'm really pleased to welcome back my guest, Herman Parshner. He last joined me to talk about his book, which is very relevant at this moment post putin succession, stability in Russia's future, and I wanted to have him on again as we mark the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine. Permanent welcome and thank you for joining me again in the News World.
Thanks dude for having me on. It's always a great pleasure to be with you well.
And I have to say I was just citing an earlier book of yours about great Russian geographic expansion, which I think is about twenty fourteen, and it's amazing. You're very prescient, I think, because you go back to the historic nature of Russia and you don't seem to be particularly swayed by temporary things. So let me start there with your sense of what Putin really wants and what really motivates him off.
The Ford, Minister of Russia was asked who Pudens the Great advisors are on Ukraine and this war, and his answer was Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. Why because these are the three leaders from Moscow that expanded the territory of Russia. Russia under time of Ivan the Terrible was a little city state of Moscow and expanded to eleven time zones. And they measured their greatness by how much land they could take. When they're strong, they took land. When they needed to recharge their batteries or had a temporary defeat, they paused side of peace. When they're stronger, they'd attacked again. And this is his modus Operende thinking about grabbing up Kasia and Ascesia de facto right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as Transnistria, thinking invasion of Georgia two thousand and eight, the first invasion of Ukraine twenty fourteen, and now back again in twenty twenty two. For this intense war that's been going on for two years.
I'm really curious, even though Putin was a trained senior KGB officer, with all of the implications of that, both in terms of psychology and ideology and attitude towards killing people. In your mind, is Putin more a great Russian nationalist or somebody who aspires for the Soviet Union or the two synonymous.
I think the two are largely synonymous. But there's also another factor. It's about staying in power. If Putin cannot show victory however he's able to sell it to the Russian people, he's going to be out of power and likely debt. I think when he went into Crimea in twenty fourteen, it was in part because he was having internal difficulties, and this was viewed as a great victory inside of Russia, where it was generally popular. I think going into Ukraine this time, he thought he would have an easy victory and would buy him a more breathing room in Moscow. Among some people that were less than totally happy.
The American chair of the Joint Chiefs rely said at the time that he expected Russian forces to be in Kiev in three days. I suspect if Putin's generals had a similar attitude, this whole war must be an enormous shock. At one level.
Well, I think that's true, this misjudgment on the part of the Russians as a result of the system that Putin set up. For instance, he would say, General Gingrige, here is x number one hundreds of millions of dollars to refurbish the tanks, and you put half in your pocket, and you give a nice coat of paint to the tanks and send a good report. And that half that you put in your pocket starts to go up like an amy contract, some of it resting with Putin. So he was told he had an army that was stronger than it was, and he spent a lot of money inside of Ukraine for people to prepare the welcome. So they took the money. They said, mister putin the people Ukraine love you, be open arms, resistance will be token, and give me some more money and I'll make it even better. So I think he was a victim of that. The misjudgment on the American side is different and to my mind more serious, because I'm told that we did not have people in Ukraine with a mastery of the Ukrainian or Russian languages and therefore limited and how widely they could talk and circulate within Ukraine anybody that traveled in Ukraine a lot. And I had understood that the Ukrainian people were willing to fight, absolutely willing to fight. They would tell you, we know a lot of us will die, but we won't surrender the lives of our children and grandchildren to Moscow. And they had a plan, and they had javelins provided by the way by Donald Trump that could stop attack. So I think our failure of intelligence had to do with problems of our intelligence on the ground, our technical means intercepts and satellite pictures showing Russia preparing that turned out to be pretty accurate. But the ability of Ukraine to fight and the inability of Russia to fight, I think was a massive failure of intelligence and tied in no small part to lack of language capability.
And it strikes me that had we continued Obama's policy of not offering lethal weapons, that in fact Ukraine would have fled.
Absolutely. The javelins that turned back the tank columns approach and Kiev were decisive, along with other weaponry that came under Trump's role.
How do you measure where we are right now in terms of just Ukrainian war to start there?
Well, I just came back from Ukraine. I was there with a bi camera or bipartisan staff delegation that American Foreign Policy put together. This was the tail end of January, and at that point they were pretty blunt in Kiev that they're already rationing ambunition. They're not enough arms to go around, and if we don't get arms from the US, which is the only country that can supply them, we're going to start taking unnecessary casualties and we're going to begin to lose land. And that is happening now as we speak. People say the Ukrainian army should be bigger. It wouldn't be bigger if they had enough weapons to give them. But the political problem that he is if we institute a draft and send people to the front with no guns and no ambunition. We won't increase our work fighting capability and we'd have big bowback is.
In the next few weeks will pass this next transchav AID and open up the spigots again. I read one piece which you might comment on, that the Russian armament system has actually been rebuilt so that they now produce about thirty tanks a month, and the entire current British tank force is forty four tanks. It strikes me that because Russia is such a big country and has so many natural resources, people in the West tend to underestimate the resilience and the capability through brute tactics to generate power in a way that I think Westerners couldn't do because in part we lack the Russian cultural traditions and we don't appreciate that they're willing to profoundly shape their standard living around the needs of the national security system.
Well, I think, well that's correct, but before I get into it, a quick thing about AID passing commerce. I think it will too, but we don't have things in the pipeline, and they're expecting a very rough March in April before adequate weapons and ambunition reached the front, So we should be prepared for that and not surprised if there's bad news until weapons get and our ambunition gets where it needs to go. Yes, or Russia is building tanks, but the Ukrainians are knocking out more than is being built every week. They're doing it largely with drones, which are reshaping the nature of war, and not just with tanks. One third of the Russian's mighty Black sea fleet has been wiped out by sea drones. If this continues, they're going to have very difficult time resupplying the troops and occupied south of Ukraine, as well as in Crimea proper they are refurbishing tanks from World War Two, but some of them are subspadged shape. They're towed to the front and used basically as artillery, and this is one of the reasons I have a minority opinion that time favors Ukraine. If they're properly armed, there will begin to be an internal blowback inside of Russia. Putin survives by saying we can outlast the West, and there's a horrible cost, but as long as we're able to take ground, we'll rest and we'll take more. Because everybody understands the US and the West can't stay the course. They don't have the stomach to compete with us. We'll just be tougher. But if Ukraine has the weapons, takes back some land fights to stalemate, degrades the capability of Russia to produce and to transport weapons, it may be a time for reevaluation by the Moscow elite, who privately have turned against Putin not acting now. They're all afraid to stick their head up, but there'll come a time where it tips.
A couple things that came up. One is I saw a piece last week that the F sixteens are now beginning to go operational and that they really are a game changer in terms of Ukrainian capabilities. I mean, is that your assessment.
I'm not sure how soon they'll be flying. My best guess is to have significant numbers. Will be in the summer. But right now I saw statistics over the last week, and Russia's flying maybe one hundred and ten twenty shorties a day, Ukraine eight or ten. So the sort ratio is ten to one in favor of Russia. If that's changed because the F sixteen's it'll make a big difference.
The other thing I'd say those fascinating is probably not the title wrong, but the bridge that connects Crimea.
It's a kursed bridge. Ukraine has announced it has a capable ability to take it out at a time and place of its choosing. My guess is that will be when they further degrade the naval cape ability, for instance in the as of Sea using landing craft to bring weapons across the ASFC and being used in Black Sea as well. And there may be as few and as of C as two operational landing ships now and they're afraid to use them. They're trying to do it undercover. If ukrainex a few more of those out, I think they'll go after the curse bridge, and then Russia has a really big problem of how they maintain a supply chain into Crimea and into the southern part of Ukraine proper.
At the time that Putin took over Crimea, part of the armament was the Krushoffer made a mistake and giving chunks of Russian land to Ukraine. Partially, I think the argument was that his wife was Ukrainian, but at the time there was also in Crimea was overwhelmingly Russian. But I'm curious, having now experienced the Russian state for the last decade, how the sentiment of the people in Crimea would be today and whether or not in fact Putin could win a referendum.
Well, I've been in Crimea I think three times before Russia took over in twenty fourteen, and I came in knowledgeable in the referendums that had been held At the time of independence. Ukraine voted about ninety percent of the country for independence, and there was in eastern Ukraine in the eighties, so overwhelmingly Crimea was close I think it was fifty four forty six or some number close to that. So there was pro Russian set them there. It primarily was retired military people around Cevestopol and some of the lead that have vacation there. That was the retirement home. It would be the Sarasota Palm Beach for the Soviet Union. When I traveled in Crimea, though you would find a large number of Ukrainians Crimean Tartars maybe ten percent of the population, they absolutely were pro Ukraine. The demographics have shifted significantly now in that Ukrainians and Tartars have been forced out and put in jail, and Russians have been moved in to take a band under confiscated territory. So the demographics have shifted under their occupation of Russia since twenty fourteen, and I would think that maybe such that there may be a majority that would be pro Russian at this point, though it's hard to tell because it hasn't been very pleasant even for the ethnic Russians there because part of the deo Putin cut when they went in twenty fourteen, where the local mafia people and he gave them power in exchange for helping with the twenty fourteen transition, and they've wrote rough shot over a lot of people Russian and Ukrainian.
Which would also fit the degree to which Putin really had a kleptocratic.
State, absolutely clepthocratic.
And I think that's a little hard for Americans to fully understand that, in fact, this is a system which survives by fear and by corruption.
Yeah, and you know, they believe in taking care of the lead and they don't care about the people. Vasislaw Serkov who is a longtime top aid to Putin, and really if there was a putent brains. That's circof. He has written about Putinism, and part of that is is we have an historical destiny to conquer more lands. History demands of us, the chosen people, to conquer more lands. But also he poop pause any values of economic life for the people. The measure of state should be how strong your military is, how strong your forces are, and if the people have to live poorly to give you greatness through militarism, so be it. That's the attitude at the top.
Given all that, though, what struck me about the invasion of Ukraine, which I'm sure Putin thought would happen very fast and be over, but because it didn't get over in a sense strategically, and I want to get your reaction to this, but it strikes me that the decision of Finland and Sweden to join NATO is an enormous strategic setback for the Russians.
This operates at two levels. At the level you raised in indictment against Putin is very strong. Before he went in, NATO was smaller, less funded, and less unified. Before he went Inrussia had great influence, even dominance of the petroleum and gas markets. In Europe. Now that's gone, the political influence that went with his gone. The Russian army has become weakened enough that you can envision them pulling out of the war, having not the capability to do with civil wars inside of Russia. And remember Russia is still an empire. You have lots of minorities inside of Russia today that would like to be independent, people in Chetshny and Tartarstan and other places most Americans have not heard of. So indictment against Putin is strong, but he's hanging on to this idea that if he can outlast the West, if he can gain any territory, he can claim victory. We've taken twenty percent of Ukraine in the footsteps of my predecessors, will get stronger and then we'll take more. He may be able to keep in power doing that. What are the implications for the West If Putin is seen to be able to take territory from a peaceful country through nuclear intimidation, through the strategic use of war crimes, torture, rapes, murders, through taking kids from Ukrainian families and put in them in Russia. If he's seen to be successful in doing that, then there's no end to it. He will do it again. And what's more, it emboldens the Hawks in Beijing, in Tehran, and in other places that are not friends in the United States. That's why if you're in Taiwan or Vietnam, ra have been recently, or South Korea, their national security establishment wants RUSSA to lose because if they don't lose, they're all afraid that their enemies will try to do the same thing. If Putin can use nuclear blackmail to take territory, why can't we.
If they actually won, in the sense of Putin, like Hitler in nineteen forty, being able to go into Kiev and be seen marching over what he has conquered, the psychological impact I think would be far beyond any imagination in the West.
I think Kenny gotten in a key of that. Quickly. There would be fighting in Poland of the Baltic States.
Now, assuming we can get things through the Congress, there's a fairly realistic likelihood we'll have a new and dramatically tougher president in January. And it's clear that the Europeans are gradually steadily muscling and men becoming more engaged. Is the goal to actually fight back to the status quo three years ago with the Russian still in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, Or is the goal to actually drive them back to the Russian border. I mean, what would you say strategically the Allies should be trying to do.
We should try to go back to the two thousand and one borders, which are the borders when the Soviet Union collapse. Can that be done? I don't know, but we shouldn't give up without trying. And the Europeans have caught on to the fact that Russian's imperial ambitions go beyond Ukraine. This is why now I think we're maybe number fifteen in terms of the percent of GMP we give to Ukraine. It's why total aid from Europe now is larger than from the United States. It's why Finland and Sweden have join NATO. They're scared about further Russian ambitions, so it's costly for us to help, but be far more costly if we don't stop Russian nout.
I've been looking for years at Kaliningrad. Here you have this enclave between Poland and Lithuania, which I think putin recently. Actually visited there and they clearly have been putting very sophisticated weapons. They have nuclear weapons there, And it strikes me that he clearly, if he could win in Ukraine, he probably would pivot first to the three Baltic States.
Well, that's right, he does not have land access to Clintingrad now, but the thought was that he would go through part of Poland and maybe the Baltic States as well to give him land access. You know, this was Dan sick in World War Two, so he watched some equivalent of the Danstick cornder.
That whole nocean. Plus you can imagine that the Russian speaking parts of Estonia, Latfia, Lithuania will suddenly decide that they're being mistreated, precisely like the Sedate and Germans in nineteen thirty seven thirty eight. I mean, this is an old playbook.
It's the battle Plant. Absolutely.
How do we convince sort of skeptical conservatives that our interest in Putin being defeated is enormous and that secondary considerations can't allow him to win.
I think we need to improve the database of people that don't understand this on the right, and that's going to happen to large measure by travel to the extent that people can go more than a two hour photo op in Kiev, but to be there for at least a few days, to talk at different levels, and not just in Ukraine, but to go in Germany and Poland and the Baltic States, which are safer and you can stay longer. I think the more knowledgeable our conservative colleagues are, the better the policy will be. I think it's a fact deficit.
Somebody said to me that there's a proposal now in the House that's bipartisan that would provide all the defense A but not the economic aid, and so have several other steps. There's a very serious proposal to confiscate, for example, all of the Russian assets that are outside Russia, which is about three hundred billion dollars, and turn it over to Ukraine. So then the fact the Russian money would be helping fight the Russian attack. But it struck me when I talked to somebody who knows a great deal about the House, they said they thought, if this bill gets to the floor, it gets three hundred votes.
I'm hearing the three hundred vote number in the House for aid to Ukraine. I don't know about this specific bill, But what the United States uniquely could do is give them weapons. I think the dollar amount can be picked up either by Europe or through confiscation and Russian assets, and I'm in favor of both.
When you're faced with really a two front competition Russia on one front, China on the other, and North Korean and Iran is very real threats in the age of nuclear weapons, that we have to have defense industrial base that is first of all, dramatically more modern. The point you made, for example, about drones and the remarkable impact they're having, and we have to have a big enough and a modern enough defense industrial base to be able to compete both with China and with Russia simultaneously while blocking Iran and North Korea.
There was a wonderful study done early in the Trump administration on the weakness of our industrial base that should be dusted off and be part of the discussion.
Have you been mildly pleased by the degree to which the Europeans in fact are shifting as they better understand putin.
Yes, you know, going into Ukraine at the end of January, we stopped in Warsaw, and in conversations there we were told that the polls are taking some comfort that the rest of Europe is understanding there are arguments which been making for years about the danger of Russian imperialism. The polls privately will say that should Ukraine collapse, they're going to have to put several hundred thousand people on the Polish border to prevent a quick land grab by putin ahead of a frozen war. So the danger is being felt first by the countries that are closest to Russia, but is being felt by Germany and others as well. I think the UK understands it pretty well. Was there a few months ago?
Biden announces five hundred additional sanctions. I think we began the sanctions dance with the invasion of Crimea ten years ago. Do these things really bite? Do they have an effect?
I think it's a good press release. I think it helps marginally. But you can't equite sanctions with Hi mars. I understand there are almost one thousand high mars that were getting ready to destroy because they're old. But if they were shipped to Ukraine, they were still usable for a period of year. Why aren't we doing that?
But that's sort of typically the whole bureaucratic way we've approached this thing from day one. We have not had an aggressive effort to sort through all of our assets and put them on airplanes, which frankly drives me crazy. The other part of that is, it seems to me we have to recognize that there are times when hard power is the only thing that works. That if the other guy has mal once said, all power comes out of the end of a rifle, So we have to be prepared to win that fight, as well as to do all these various diplomatic dances. And I think that's still very hard, not just the American people. The American people probably are psychologically more aware of that, but our establishment seems amazingly averse to dealing with the reality of real power.
I think the Biden administration has been self detoring with regard to Russia. We have delayed sending weapons six months, eight months. A lot of it has been sent, and some creditors certainly due for sending those weapons, but we don't have a sense of urgency and time. A year ago I was talking to the National Security Advisor. There is and what's the hardest thing you have to explain to Americans? It said time time. We needed these things in time right.
And this is where Trump is so radically different from Biden and the Trump has an instinctive sense of the importance of decisive movement quickly and that you need the shock effect of it being very fast and often surgical. I want to thank you. I'm sure we're going to ask you again in the future to come back and share again. And knowing you, I'm sure you will have been in ten or twelve countries by the time we do it. Your commitment and frankly, the American Foreign Policy Council that you founded and have led do an amazing job. I read a lot of your documents. You've assembled a brilliant a team of younger analysts, and you have a great program of taking people around the world and trying to get them to learn personally. I really appreciate you taking the time to help us better understand what's at stake and what Pudent's strategic threat is to the lives of all of us.
Thank you, Newtics a great being with you, and we appreciate your kind words very much.
Thank you to my guest Terman Personner. You can learn more about the American Foreign Policy Council on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Gingrish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks the team at Gingrishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Nutsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of nuts World can sign up for my three free weekly columns at gingliswie sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Nutsworld.
