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Who Can Stop a Dictator? Resistance to the War in Ukraine

PODCAST | ep13 | with Sasha de Vogel, Serhii Plokhy, and Alexandra Vacroux

When the Wagner mercenary group staged a near coup in Moscow in June, it was seen as the greatest challenge to Vladimir Putin’s regime in decades. Though it didn’t come to fruition, it nevertheless exposed some of the fissures in Putin’s ironclad control over the military and the course of the war on Ukraine. Could it be a harbinger of future revolts? How do Russian citizens feel about the continuation of the war? We speak with three scholars of history and political science to find out what this event might mean for Russia’s war machine and for Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

Epicenter graphic with head shots of the three episode guests.

Listen to episode #13 (53:04) by clicking the play button below:

[VIEW TRANSCRIPT]

The Wagner rebellion may open the possibility of future revolts, but only if Ukraine’s counteroffensive makes more progress, says Serhii Plokhy. He reminds us of Russia’s past defeats and its pattern of regime change linked to failures on the battlefield.

In spite of its grave losses, Ukrainian morale remains high, says Alexadra Vacroux. But the war is forcing the population to undergo a major demographic shift, which will have a profound impact on the country’s recovery.  

Sasha de Vogel gives insight into public opinion in Russia, the consequences for speaking out against the war, and why there is so little civil resistance. She dispels Western myths about the suppression and repression of Russian citizens and believes Putin will keep fighting this war until death.

Finally, the scholars share their opinions on what is needed to end this devastating war. 

This episode was produced in collaboration with the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Ukrainian Research Institute, both at Harvard University.

Host:
 

Erin Goodman, Executive Director; Director, Weatherhead Scholars Program, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Guests:
 

Sasha de Vogel, Postdoctoral Researcher, Authoritarian Politics Lab, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Former Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Scholars Program.

Serhii Plokhy, Faculty Associate. Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History, Department of History; Director, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.

Alexandra Vacroux, Executive Director, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. 

Producer/Director:


Michelle Nicholasen, Editor and Content Producer, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Related Links:
 

Transcript
 

Editorial note: This podcast was completed the day before the news of the plane crash on August 23, 2023, that allegedly killed Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

ERIN GOODMAN: Welcome to the Epicenter podcast of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I'm your host Erin Goodman, Executive Director of the Weatherhead Center. We present today’s episode in collaboration with the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Ukrainian Research Institute, both here at Harvard. 

Today we are going to explore the question of Russian resistance, or lack thereof, to the War in Ukraine. When the Wagner Group Militia Organization marched toward Moscow on June 24, we briefly thought we were witnessing the unthinkable-- a coup against Putin, or maybe even a civil war. The attempted mutiny against the Russian military may have failed, but it raised important questions about the role of resistance to the Putin regime, and it exposed the downside of Russia's reliance on mercenaries to fight its war. 

In the aftermath of the Wagner episode, will Ukraine be able to exploit fissures in the Russian military for its counteroffensive? What forms could resistance take, and why isn't there more of it? We've invited three scholars to share insights on these questions. 

Sasha de Vogel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Authoritarian Politics Lab at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2021 and was recently a Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center. 

Serhii Plokhy is a professor of history at Harvard and director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He is the author of many books, including most recently, The Frontline-- Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present, as well as Atoms and Ashes-- A Global History of Nuclear Disaster, and The Russo-Ukranian War: The Return of History. 

Alexandra Vacroux is the executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. Her scholarly work addresses Russian and Eurasian policy issues, including the war in Ukraine. She also directs the Davis Center's Scholars Without Borders Program that supports scholars from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. 

Let's start with whether or how this mutiny attempt changed the dynamics of the war. Serhii, let's start with you. 

SERHII PLOKHY: Well, you just mentioned that we were looking at that with a shock and disbelief. And this is exactly the way how describes the emotions that I had at that time. But also, I was as a historian thinking about historical parallels. And the closest to what I was watching were the Cossack revolts of the beginning of the 17th century. Of course, there are other parallels as well. 

But thinking about a more immediate context for that mutiny, for me, it's very clear that it's one of the outcomes of the Russian winter offensive, winter offensive of 2023 that went wrong with Wagner Group really losing tens of thousands of people killed, and even more of that wounded. And the attempts of the army to really integrate the Wagner Group into its ranks, that's what is the immediate context of that conflict, which to me suggested one thing-- that things were not really going well for the Russian army on the frontlines in Ukraine. 

And the second very important thing was that the mutiny opened, made visible to all of us, cracks within the edifice not just of the Russian Army-- because up to 10 top Russian generals are under investigation today-- but also cracks in the edifice of Putin's regime in Russia that till then, everyone believed that was unshakable, that was there almost forever. And now, the question that you hear most often is how long that regime would last. How serious was the blow? How weak is Putin as the result of this mutiny? 

And then apparent reluctance to punish the people whom he claimed to be traitors of Russia. So we are in many ways in a different world, at least when it comes to the sort of questions that we ask about this war, about the future of the Russian war effort, and the future of the current Russian regime. 

ERIN GOODMAN: Alexandra, would you like to add anything? 

ALEXANDRA VACROUX: Yes. I agree with Serhii in many ways. And I think that it's useful to separate the impact of the mutiny on the war, the way the war is being fought, and the way in which it might or might not have affected Putin's regime, which Serhii started to talk about. In terms of the direct impact on how the war is being fought, certainly the fact that Wagner is no longer going to be fighting as an independent mercenary group is going to be problematic for the Russian military. They were among the most effective fighters. 

And now, they've pulled, it appears, completely out of the Ukrainian front, although there are rumors that they might be amassing in Belarus and planning something-- either an attack from the north or possibly even on Poland as a distraction. So that will certainly come into the calculation of the actual military struggle on the ground. 

The second question, though, is whether there's an indirect impact on Putin's regime, or a direct impact on Putin's regime which then indirectly affects the war. And as Serhii said, we were very surprised to see that there are some apparent fissures that could be exploited if they continue to fester. So one of the strongest examples of that to my mind is the fact that during the mutiny, which was a long weekend, or let's say, a long day and a half, very few Russian elite figures came out in support of Putin. 

And one can only suspect that they were sitting back and waiting to see how things were going to shake out before taking sides. That suggests that even though everyone appears to be loyal to Putin in the elite, that behind the scenes, they might just be hedging their bets. And while they're not necessarily going to jump off the ship now, if there was an opportunity to have another leader that would be more effective, they might actually jump off very quickly. So that's something that we're watching. 

The second question is how it impacts civil military relations, right? Before the military was seen as more or less autonomous in fighting the war as more or less depoliticized, but as crucial to Putin's myth about the regime and about the importance of a strong state. And we've seen a lot of glorification of World War II.

And now all of a sudden because of Prigozhin's criticisms, there's the impression that perhaps the military isn't doing a great job on the ground, that perhaps they are part of political struggles or infighting around Putin. And also, that Putin is no longer the strongman who's able to hold the regime together. So all of these tensions or pressures on what's happening in the Kremlin may have an effect on the war in the medium term. 

ERIN GOODMAN: So that gives us a sense of potential fissures within the regime and also some disassociation or potential disassociation among elites. So now, if we could turn to the question of civilian resistance in Russia, what do people think on the ground? So we've seen a near mutiny within the ranks of mercenaries, but does this reflect the thoughts and opinions of ordinary Russians? Sasha, you've already studied collective action in Russia for several years. What have you found since the war began and what does resistance look like today? 

SASHA DE VOGEL: So when the war began in Russia, Russian society at that time was already pretty poorly positioned to resist something like this-- to try to organize a movement to impact what the regime wanted to do in terms of its foreign policy. The opposition leaders and organizations that could have organized a national resistance movement had already been essentially hobbled by the government, in some cases, for several years. 

And also, the regime works very hard to make sure that Russian society is depoliticized so that people really aren't invested in what-- they're not really paying attention, let's say, to what the government is doing, not really interested in holding it to represent their views. There's a strong tendency to just sort of let the people in charge do what they were put there to do. And they can run the country, and regular citizens don't need to worry about it. 

So still in the first few weeks after the invasion happened, we did see a number of anti-war protests around Russia. But these were sort of spontaneous or leaderless actions, although they were quite large in some of the major cities. 

However, after that, once the invasion started going rather badly, and it became apparent that they were not going to take Kyiv in just a few days, they started passing-- the Duma started passing laws to restrict the freedom of expression, restrict conversations about how the war was going. And that really rapidly escalated the consequences for expressing criticism of the war, even talking about the war, calling it a war in public. 

ERIN GOODMAN: Can you give examples of some of the consequences one could face for speaking out against the war? Can you give some examples of these consequences?

SASHA DE VOGEL: Right. So the main two laws that have been used to suppress Russians' ability to discuss the war in a negative way-- but in some cases, just purely to discuss it-- the first is often referred to as the law discrediting the military. So this makes it illegal to speak poorly of the military and its activities, and also includes groups like Wagner, actually. And the second is called the law on fakes, which prohibits the knowing spread of false information, of course, related to the war. 

So these are very broadly written laws that have resulted in thousands of Russians being charged with violations in some cases for things that one would not really think violate them. So recently, somebody was fined for carrying a copy of War and Peace, a journalist. So it's common to violate these laws by referring to what's happening in Ukraine as a war as opposed to as a special military operation. 

So a journalist was fined for using the word "frontline" when talking about the special military operation, because there are only frontlines in wars, not in special military operations. Someone was fined for saying publicly that he had a dream about Zelensky. It's very common for these violations to happen in the educational system, so teachers noticing that students have expressed something about the war and reporting them or students noticing that teachers have said something about the war and reporting them. 

And, of course, a lot of how these violations, let's say, are coming to the knowledge of the government is by Russians reporting on their friends, coworkers, neighbors, even their family members. There are tip lines that you can report these to, telegram channels that you can send tips to. There are celebrities that have set up their own portals to receive tips of people who are discrediting the military or spreading fake news. And a very common way that happens is on social media. So posting something, liking a post, commenting on a post, these are all things that people have been prosecuted for. 

And the consequences for these, if you're charged as an administrative offense, like as your first-time offense, it would be a fine. Since June-- excuse me, through the end of June this year, since the war started, Russians have paid 1.2 billion rubles, the equivalent of just over $14 million, in fines for just discrediting the military. So this is a very common problem now. 

Yeah, that's like the-- excuse me. What I was going to say is that so you have the fines. And then if you are prosecuted as a criminal offender under the criminal code for this, you can get it's usually five to seven years in prison. And that's if you've already had sort of your first offense, and you're kind of a known offender. And that is less common. There have only been only 90 cases since the war started through this year. But that's just an example of some of the repression that Russians are experiencing now. 

ERIN GOODMAN: Just to be clear, Russians still have access to social media, correct?

SASHA DE VOGEL: So Russians, I would say, generally speaking, Russians are a fairly tech-savvy population. So there are, of course, websites that are on the censor's blacklists. Recently, Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, was declared an extremist organization, so this gives it the same status basically as ISIS. However, with a VPN, you can easily navigate around those things. 

Channels like Telegram-- this is the most popular Russian social media site-- are completely available to them to use. And I also want to point out that when you install a VPN to access Instagram, you also have access to the entire world's internet, right? It's not just Instagram or Facebook that you've gained access to. You've gained access to all of the Western press coverage about the war, all of the Ukrainian contents about the war. 

So it's not as if Russians are sort of operating in this completely strangled media environment just because they don't have free media in their country. They do have the ability to gain information. Information is circulated comparatively freely on Telegram, so they do have access to it. It seems to be more that there is not an interest in consuming or thinking critically about that information. 

ALEXANDRA VACROUX: Can I ask Sasha a follow-up question? What are the polls of Russian citizens worth? Can we get any reliable information from polling data? 

SASHA DE VOGEL: Can we ever. [CHUCKLES] I mean, that's a really common question with polling all the time, right? How accurate are they? Of course, in authoritarian states like in Russia, we have always had these questions about how accurate is it really? Can we really say that Putin has an 80% approval rating? That seems impossible. 

All of the studies that we've done on that before the war suggest that Putin's approval rating is only usually inflated by about 5% to 10%, so it's still very high. There has not been a lot of fluctuation in his approval rating since the war has started, and it remains quite high. I looked at some data that is from a weekly poll that's done online of a smaller sample. So it's not as reliable as what a formal polling organization would do. But that puts his approval rating at around 75%. 

There's absolutely more incentive for Russians to lie or ignore polling groups when they try to ask them if they support Putin or they support the war. But the numbers are really quite high. They've always been high. So I think it wouldn't be appropriate to look at those polls and say like, oh, well, you know, they just can't really express themselves. Like, a good portion of those people are genuinely expressing themselves. So yes, we have to be skeptical of them. But they also do provide a data point that we can look at in line with other information that we're able to collect. 

ERIN GOODMAN: Is it fair to say the new laws have had their intended effect of dampening dissent? What do you see in Russia today?

SASHA DE VOGEL: Since spring 2022, we've seen very little organized protest, street protests, in resistance and opposition to the war. Instead, what we see are more individualized actions, things like graffiti, or hanging a banner, or standing on a street corner with a blank piece of paper. And these people do take a lot of risks to engage in those actions. They do face legal consequences for doing that. 

However, these are symbolic acts that really allow those people to express their opinions. They are not the foundation of a large-scale movement, a political movement that could affect the course of the war. And I think it's also important to remember that those actions are being undertaken by a minority of the population. 

So I think a lot of people in the West, we look at what's happening in Russia, and we want to assume that Russians are sort of Democratic citizens who are just forced to repress what they truly think because they're afraid of the government. And if they just didn't have these restrictions, they would stand up against the war. That's really not in line with what we see from opinion polling data, from field work that people do interviews they have with Russians. 

It seems that the majority of Russians are really largely apathetic or passively supportive when it comes to the war. So they're willing to go along with it now that it's happening. Maybe they wouldn't have chosen this path, but they've accepted it now that it's the course that the country is on. And then a good portion of them are actively supportive of it. 

And even when we see actions that look like they're opposition to us, people leaving the country, protests against the partial mobilization that happened in the fall where they forced men into military service, these are often actually grievances about how the war is affecting Russians, not about how the war is affecting Ukrainians. So they're not, like, principled moral opposition to the war. They're protests about how Russians are being affected by the war, which those are two distinct things. 

ERIN GOODMAN: So this gives us a good sense of the media coverage in Russia and the general opinion of people on the ground. I'm curious about in Ukraine, Alexandra, you were there recently. How would you describe the morale of Ukrainians at this point in the war? And Serhii, feel free to also jump in as well. 

ALEXANDRA VACROUX: Now, it was quite remarkable to spend a little bit of time in Ukraine about a month ago in July. Now, there's a feeling of solidarity and unity that you don't have in a country that has no reason to think that there's a common purpose. I found it quite striking compared to the United States, where we talk sometimes about being in a crisis of democracy, and that our government is at risk, or our way of life is at risk. 

And you realize how little power that has in the United States when you go to Ukraine and you realize that people believe that victory is possible, but it requires that everybody do their part… a sense of purpose that I have never experienced before. And even though people are conscious that it's dangerous, there's a lot of people walking around in military fatigues everywhere. There's security. You still get a sense that people know why they're fighting and they know that it's important. And at the moment, at least, that feeling seems very, very strong. 

ERIN GOODMAN: Serhii, would you agree with that also? Would you say that the media portrayal in Ukraine is in line with other Western media coverage? 

SERHII PLOKHY: Well, I'm going to be in Ukraine later in the month. But what I see in the media, what I see on the Facebook, Twitter certainly confirms what Alexandra just said. There is this level of unity and level of confidence in the ultimate victory that is truly surprising that was there even at the most difficult moments in the War one, two weeks after the all-out invasion by Russia. 

In March of 2022, still 70%, more than 70% of people polled in Ukraine believed in victory. And there is, as far as I understand, of course, growing fatigue. But somehow, this fatigue doesn't affect the determination of Ukrainians to fight back. And there is also a discussion going on about what victory would mean for Ukraine. And quite often, it is defined in terms of the territory, in terms of the borders, the borders of 2022, or the borders of 2015, to 1991. 

But overall, there is growing thinking about the victory as about the end of the war after which Russia would not be able, actually, to continue expansion in the near future. So they think also quite practical in terms of their neighborhood with Russia. And as long as Russia continues to be authoritarian, as long as Russia continues to be aggressive, as long as Russia has the ability, the resources to fight the war, Ukrainians certainly will not be safe. And whatever would be called victory probably would not be accepted by the people at large. And what we associate Ukraine with mostly here in the West is really remarkable performance by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And what sometimes is lost, that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is there to represent his people, to represent Ukraine. That what we hear from Zelenskyy, it very much echoes or maybe amplifies what Ukrainians on the street think and how they feel.

ERIN GOODMAN: And as we know, Ukrainians have also  suffered profound losses, major destruction. Millions have chosen to leave. I'm curious about how the demographics have changed and what impact this has on Ukraine's ability to defend itself or to rebuild in the future. Alexandra or Serhii, could you comment on the immediate and longer-term future for the country as the demographics shift? 

ALEXANDRA VACROUX: Serhii, you start. 

SERHII PLOKHY: Sure. We talk-- and for very good reason-- about this war as the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II. And I start thinking about it more and more as the largest military conflict in the world after the Second World War in terms of the Industrial warfare, in terms of the armies involved, in terms of the technologies that are on the battlefield. 

But this is also the largest conflict in Europe and one of the largest in the world when it comes to the suffering, when it comes to the number of refugees. The estimates are that today, up to 6 million people left Ukraine and are outside of the country. So it's a very particular type of immigration. Men have stayed, and it's almost exclusively women, children, and elderly who are in the neighboring countries of Central or East Central Europe. 

The Ukrainian refugees were really welcomed by the neighboring states, and that raised a lot of questions about treatment of other waves of refugees, in particular, from Middle East, in Europe. But it was also not only the reception was different. But also, the attitudes of the refugees themselves were different for a long period of time. Very few of them actually were thinking about immigrating. Very few of them were thinking about staying in those countries permanently. Part of that reason was that the family were divided. The man stayed in Ukraine. 

But the recent poll and the recent data shows that approximately half of those who stay in Ukraine-- sorry, who stayed outside of Ukraine, they're thinking about immigrating, about staying there permanently. So the longer the war goes, the bigger the chances are, the higher the chances are that Ukraine can lose part of its population. So that's a big issue that was not there one year ago, but is here today, and probably will become even more an issue if the war continues to go. 

Another big issue is, of course, not just the number of people killed-- and we don't know about that. There are estimates regarding the Russian army. The losses on the Ukrainian side are probably equally high, maybe a little bit less, as Ukrainians were on the defensive. But now that Ukraine tries to execute a major counteroffensive in the area, what we read is that for the first time, a number of people who were injured by mines-- and that also means the number of amputees-- is higher than the number of people who are injured by the artillery fire, which was the part of the story that characterized the earlier stages of the war. 

So it's enormous, enormous impact of the war on Ukrainian economy, Ukrainian infrastructure, on Ukrainian population, on numbers, on demography. It's almost, almost difficult to believe that against all that background, there is relatively little change to the Ukrainian morale. And people want to talk about the future of Ukraine after the war. So that's what maybe psychologically helps them to go through. 

So it is still an attitude overall, the public attitude tries to be positive despite all these losses. And it's not just the numbers. It's daily, daily alerts. It's daily attacks. It's the nights that people can't sleep in their own beds. So the situation in Ukraine on all these levels is, of course, very, very difficult. And the morale of the people is really amazing.

Ukraine fights this fight not just for Ukraine itself. And to end the war sooner, we have to help as much as we can, and not play games with these weapons are allowed, and those weapons are not allowed for no obvious reason at all. Not to raise your eyebrows about how come that Ukrainians are not effective in their current counter-offensive when neither United States nor any other country fought any war since 1945, at least, where there was no superiority in the air, and Ukrainians denied airplanes. And then the questions are asked, what is going wrong with the Ukrainian counteroffensive? So it's time to get really serious about helping Ukraine to end this war. 

ERIN GOODMAN: Alexandra?

ALEXANDRA VACROUX: If I could go back to the question of demographics just for a moment, Serhii alludes to the problems that Ukraine will face in reconstruction and in recovering from the war afterwards. And one of the things that people are most concerned about is that there are some of these demographic trends which potentially have very long tails or very lasting impacts. 

So there's not only the fact that women and children have left. And the longer they stay abroad, and get used to schools, and learn languages, the more difficult it is for them to return. But there's also the fact that the birth rate has dropped. So before the war, Ukraine was having about 23,000 babies a month. Now, it's down to 16,000 babies. And maybe some of those are being born abroad, but that's still a dramatic plunge in the birth rate. 

And also, there's a very real fear of brain drain-- of people deciding that it's going to be too difficult to pursue their professions or their careers in Ukraine, even after the war is over. And they'll try and find jobs abroad. And all of those factors are going to make it really important for Ukraine to have a plan for reconstruction and renewing itself when the war is over. Of course, the longer the war lasts, the more difficult that's going to be. 

ERIN GOODMAN: So even before these demographic shifts, Russia is still three times larger than Ukraine. So thinking towards the end of a war, it seems that resistance within Russia is a key factor. Do any of you see where might resistance emerge within Russia? Is it in the elites or the oligarchs? Is it possible or is it, again, paramilitary organization such as the Wagner Group? Or is it overly optimistic to think that there will be enough resistance to make a change? 

ERIN GOODMAN: Sasha, do you want to weigh in on that question?

SASHA DE VOGEL: I can talk about that. I think that, well, again, it would be, I think, a speedier end to the conflict. So it's a slightly optimistic view if there was a position emerging from within Russia, whether it's from the elite, or from the general population, or even from the military, that could some way hasten the end of this. Realistically speaking, we have no reason to believe that that is on the horizon. 

As I already discussed, it does not appear at this time that the general public is going to actively begin to resist the war. And even when that does occur, it takes quite a long time for an anti-popular anti-war movement to have the effect of ending a war. And oftentimes, it simply does not effectively end the war. 

When you look at the Russian elites, which we've already talked about, the elites are all very invested in the continuation of the Putin regime. They also all basically derive their power, and privilege, and their positions from their proximity to Putin. This makes it very difficult for anyone to have an incentive to act against him. But also, it makes it very difficult for the elites to collaborate with each other, which you need to, let's say, peaceably remove him from power. 

It's hard to imagine the elites in Russia right now agreeing on who might replace Putin because there would dramatically change sort of who's a winner and who's a loser among these very powerful people. It's hard to even imagine the elites agreeing to support the military in a coup, as we saw recently with the Prigozhin incident. It's not as if the elites were rushing to support the Russian military or Prigozhin. They were sort of hedging their bets as-- excuse me, as Alexandra pointed out. And that's partially because loyalty in Russia is essentially transactional. 

These elites are not supporting Putin because they love him personally, although some of them are his close friends. They're supporting him, they're loyal to him because it keeps them in power. It keeps them extracting money from Russia, extracting money from the war effort. It keeps them where they want to be. So I think it's very unlikely that at this time, they're going to act against Putin. 

And this, it is quite a serious problem when we look at how long this war might last and how it will continue to affect Ukraine, as we've just been discussing. Because Putin also really has no incentive to end this war right now. That could change. But over the last year and a half, the war effort has become an increasingly core part of the sense of ideology that the Putin regime has always lacked, or never really fully established. We've seen quite extensive changes to state society relations in Russia trying to convince people to serve in the military, to participate in this sort of fortress Russia propaganda, to passively support the war, by which I mean publicly going along with supporting the war, even if they privately don't. We've seen a slew of legal changes to ensure these things are happening. The transformation of the Russian economy, the transformation of its role in the world, these things are hard to reverse. 

And Putin, I think, will continue to prosecute this war until he-- I mean, until he dies, honestly. He can't accept defeat here. He is not going to accept sort of like a dismantling or a weakening of Russia. And he has extensive, extensive resources that he can continue to throw at this and extend it as long as he sees fit to pursue his goal of destroying Ukraine. 

SERHII PLOKHY: Now, if I may jump in, I certainly agree with Sasha that Putin will continue the war as long as he is in power. So Putin is war, war is Putin in this context. I also have difficulty imagining anyone replacing him continuing with the war, first of all, because it is so damaging for Russia, for Russian economy's standing in the world. 

And speaking historically about the stability of the regime that Prigozhin's mutiny showed is not as stable as we imagined before, I can say that the war that go wrong produce regime change in Russia and produce revolutions. This is the case of the revolution of 1905 that was triggered by the defeat in the Far East in the war between Russia and Japan. 

This is the story of the revolution of 1917 that starts with the refusal of the troops to go to the frontlines from Petrograd at that time, the capital of the country. And Afghan War that didn't go well was a contributing factor also to Gorbachev's reforms and the fall of the Soviet Union. In my reading, Prigozhin would not be there without the winter offensive this year for Russia not going wrong. So I very much link the future of regime in Russia to the successes on the front or failures on the front line in Ukraine.
 
If the current counteroffensive or any future counteroffensive succeeds, I certainly am prepared to be less surprised than I was in June of this year about another mutiny. What Prigozhin's mutiny exposed, the cracks within the military itself, not just among the mercenaries. And the ability of the regime to defend itself, we now know is quite, quite weak. 

When Prigozhin was moving to Moscow, there were no really armed units from the army from the frontlines, including Putin's National Guard eager to rush, and save regime, and save Putin. And as Alexandra Vacroux mentioned, people were sitting on the fence watching where it would go. So I am prepared to see change in Moscow in a relatively close or near future. But for that change to occur, there has to be a major defeat in Ukraine on the frontlines in Ukraine. If that defeat doesn't happen, if the stalemate continues, my bet is, as Sasha was saying, on the continuation of the regime for all the reasons that she described. 

SASHA DE VOGEL: I just want to add that one of the things that I think was particularly shocking about how the Prigozhin mutiny was handled was not that it showed these weaknesses within the various parts of the armed forces, the military, the private military groups. It was that Putin allowed this conflict to become so public and then handled it in a frankly incompetent way. 

Part of Putin's job, what many people see to be really one of his key roles, is that he's an arbiter of conflicts. He resolves conflicts before they become known to the public behind the scenes. He sort of balances all of these competing elite interests. He is sort of the center of that wheel. And what we saw happening between Wagner and the military playing out over the course of months, it was not an urgent sort of-- it wasn't just that weekend. It was the course of months trying to resolve the situation between them. It was Putin's failure to address that issue before something like this happened. 

I think that was very shocking that he has never let really-- I mean, sometimes, you see skirmishes between-- I mean, Prigozhin and the governor of Saint Petersburg had sort of a long-standing public dispute that also was quite shocking, surprising to people that Putin would allow that to play out in public. This situation was on a whole other level that really sort of causes you to doubt Putin's ability to play the same role in the regime that he has in the past. 

And then likewise, his reaction to the invasion-- or sorry, excuse me. His reaction to the mutiny while it was happening was, as I said, sort of strikingly incompetent that there was no effort to stop this convoy moving towards Moscow. You had governors sort of deciding to tear up the highway en route to Moscow to try to stop them because there was no military assistance coming. The sort of long span of silence from the Kremlin-- of course, Medvedev, and Putin, and some of the top officials immediately hopped in their planes and got out of town and towards safety. 

But this is really not what you expect from someone who is serving in that role. Even Prigozhin himself, I think, was quite shocked by how close he got to Moscow. It didn't appear that he was actually prepared to march on Moscow itself. He was more trying to draw attention to this issue and expected to be stopped far sooner than he was. 

ERIN GOODMAN: Let’s talk about other ways the war could shift, or evolve, barring a widespread resistance or another mutiny. Alexandra?

ALEXANDRA VACROUX: So I just wanted to come at this question of how the war might end from a different angle, which is the war termination literature. Professor Timothy Colton and Sam Charap had an interesting piece on the different ways in which wars end. And generally, there are three categories. One is totally victory by one of the sides, one is a negotiated settlement, and the third is protracted conflict. 

And if you look at what total victory would mean here, for Ukraine, it would mean expelling Russia from all of its territory, including Crimea and the Donbas. For Russia, it means total control of the government of Kyiv, probably through a puppet. Neither of those outcomes seems particularly likely at this point. And remember that people don’t change their goals in war usually. The sides don’t decide that actually, they don’t want to control Ukraine, or actually, they don’t want to keep their territory. 

What happens is that they get new information, usually on the battlefield, that they don’t have the capability to achieve their goals. And then they’re willing to consider that maybe their goal is out of reach, so they need to reach a negotiated settlement. And that’s when you would have sides that come to the table. The problem is that if neither side believes that it’s going to lose, and Ukraine believes that it will continue to have enough Western support to fight with Russia. Russia believes that the West is fickle, and therefore will eventually give up on Ukraine, and it’s just a waiting game. 

If both sides believe that time is on their side, no one has an incentive to come to the table and negotiate. And unfortunately, what we find is that a quarter of wars end in about a week. Another quarter end within a year. And the ones that don’t end within a year can go on for a very long time. And that’s the third scenario of protracted conflict, which unfortunately, we’re already in this war over a year.

ERIN GOODMAN: So far I haven’t heard anyone mention the prospect of escalation, whether that means other countries get involved in the war, or if Russia were to act on its threats to use tactical nuclear weapons. The rhetoric seems to have quieted lately and I’m wondering what this means.

SERHII PLOKHY: Well, the escalation is something that’s very much on the mind certainly of governments in the world, including the US government. The fear of escalation and imagining the red lines that exist or don’t exist in Putin’s mind, this is, it seems to me, the daily exercise of the White House. That’s also the reason, in my at least understanding, of why certain types of weapons are supplied and others are not supplied. So there is a concern about that. 

On the Russian side, there is a blackmail game about escalation in which Putin participates himself making all sorts of hints about strategic forces and nuclear arms. And the former Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, of course, made a career out of going out there publicly and threatening Armageddon, and doing that again and again. 

The Wagner Group, the moment it moved to Belarus, the things that we hear is about them recruiting people allegedly to go to Warsaw, which is a NATO country. And recently, apparently, two Belarusian helicopters crossed the Polish border. And Poles are bringing in troops to the Belarusian border. The idea of Russia or Belarus going to war with NATO is, of course, quite ridiculous, so it’s an example of blackmail. The use of the nuclear weapons, including tactical ones, also, those threats don’t look credible at this moment, given the position of a publicly expressed position of China. So Russia needs allies, but this blackmail or blackmail certainly still continues. 

So as I said before, the easiest, the simplest, and the safest way to end the war is to allow Ukrainians actually to win on the battlefield. The option of some sort of negotiated settlement is being discussed and is being discussed as reasonable. It is a highly unreasonable proposition when you look at that from the perspective of Ukraine, the country where the war started back in 2014, and where a settlement was reached to Minsk agreements back in 2014 and 2015, which gave Putin more time, actually, to get back to build stronger army, and then get back to the business of taking Kyiv under control. 

So for Ukrainians, it’s highly unreasonable to imagine that the new settlement would actually produce a different result, also somehow, will make Putin to reconsider his ultimate goal. So that is certainly something for anyone who is familiar with the history of the war and thinks that the war didn’t start in February of 2022, but started in 2014, is not an option. Escalation, whether it’s possible, everything is possible. Whether it’s likely at this point, I don’t think so—escalation meaning the war going beyond the borders of Ukraine. 

ERIN GOODMAN: Alexandra, what do you think?

ALEXANDRA VACROUX: Now, I’d like to jump in and just say that I agree with Serhii that at the moment, escalation, both in terms of spreading beyond the territory of Ukraine and in terms of ratcheting up the kinds of weaponry that’s being used, meaning the use of more chemical weapons or tactical nuclear weapons, seems unlikely. And that’s because both NATO, and the US, and Russia are treating this as a limited conflict. 

And so the United States has told Ukraine that it cannot use the weapons that it’s receiving to strike targets in Russia. Russia is not striking the supply lines that bring NATO weapons to Ukraine across the country, although they could. And so there’s an attempt on both sides to keep things confined to Ukraine, which, of course, is terrible for Ukraine itself, which as Serhii points out, has not been given enough weaponry to actually win the war—just to ensure a kind of stalemate, or possibly, ultimately, a counter-offensive. 

ALEXANDRA VACROUX: So that brings up a fundamental tension, which is that nobody apart from Ukraine has a clear idea of what it means to win this war. And if we believe that winning the war means that Ukraine has to be able to keep Russia from controlling part of its territory, then what we should do should be clear. We should be giving Ukraine what it needs to win. 

If we continue doing what we’re doing, and we prolong what we’re doing until the next presidential election, for example, or until the Russians are able to remobilize more people, we just prolong the conflict, the expense, the horror of what’s going on on the ground. So one of the issues that I think is only becoming more clear is that the United States has avoided clearly articulating what it wants from this conflict. 

If it believes that Russia must be stopped, then Russia must be stopped now. If it believes that this kind of stalemate can go on for a long time, as long as it’s contained in Ukraine, then we can continue what we’re doing. But that’s not what the Biden administration has been saying. Additional clarity about the goals and what we’re willing to do to achieve them is absolutely essential at this point.
 
ERIN GOODMAN: Sasha…your thoughts on this? 

SASHA DE VOGEL: If I can just add something to follow on what Alexandra said, I think that articulating, for the US to articulate what those goals are and properly communicate them to the American public would also be very important. As you might have surmised from several of my comments here, oftentimes, especially Americans look at Russia, including people who work in government and make some of these decisions with this sort of naive optimism that somehow, things are not the way they appear to be. And this is partially because, yes, Putin does lie all the time about do they want to use nuclear weapons, and things like that. 

But it's not as if he's going to suddenly change his mind. It's not as if he's going to suddenly withdraw from Crimea just because he wants to. It's not as if he's going to suddenly start caring about the value of human life. We know this, you know? Everything that we have seen him do over the last several years and over the course of his time in office, we understand what he wants and how he acts. We understand how Russians are going to respond to it. 

I feel like a lot of the reluctance for the US to really fully support Ukraine and for the general public to really grasp how serious this conflict is arises from this sort of like willful delusion, almost, that somehow, it's just not as bad as it really seems. But it is that bad. If we don't do something to help this conflict end, it could go on for an extremely long time at extraordinary cost to Ukrainians, who are already giving everything to stop it, just because we think that maybe it's Putin might one day accept a compromise. He won't, and we don't need to compromise with him. There are other ways to end this. 

ALEXANDRA VACROUX:. Yeah. But I think there is something. And it kind of ties into what Sasha said, is that like the US has not been clear. And I understand why. But it hasn't been clear, like, what does it want to get from Russia here? Does it want Russia to lose? Does it want Russia not to be able to invade its neighbors? Does it want Russia to understand that if it takes foreign territory, that it's going to pay a price? 

If that's the message that we're trying to convey, then there are things you need to do to support Ukraine in its fight to make sure that doesn't happen. And I think that is actually the American objective. But we don't want to say it out loud because then Russia might get upset or escalate, even though I think what we've seen so far is that all of these alleged threats to escalate are basically bluff, right? There's nothing that's going to happen that's kind of inconsistent with what's already happening on the battlefield. And the more Putin threatens to escalate and doesn't, the weaker the threats become. 

And another thing I want to say is there's a way in which people say, oh, Putin, you know? He's unhinged. He's crazy. He's sick. He's dying. And all of that actually serves the Russians. Because then if Putin is unhinged, we better be very careful, because we have no idea what's going to set him off. Like, maybe we send this weapon system, and that's what he decides is an existential threat to Russia. So we have to be very careful because he's that cornered rat and he could strike out at everybody. 

And, in fact, he's not unhinged, right? He's rational. He's making calculations and assumptions based on what he believes, which I agree with Sasha, is not what we believe. And to just dismiss him as a madman makes it seem as if we have to be extra careful, right? It kind of puts the brakes on what we would do if we weren't worried that he was crazy. 

SERHII PLOKHY: I think that whoever advised President Biden and put those words in his mouth was correct. And the words were that he is rational, but he miscalculated. 

ALEXANDRA VACROUX: I agree with that. 

SERHII PLOKHY: I certainly agree with that, yeah. 

ERIN GOODMAN: Let’s end on the concept of a rational dictator who has gravely miscalculated. Whether it’s a war of attrition or a war of exhaustion, the devastating cost of this so-called miscalculation is unconscionable to many.

I'd like to thank all three of our guests for this sobering inside view on resistance, determination, and the potential longevity of this very destructive war. This is Erin Goodman signing off from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. To hear more meaningful conversations like this one, Please follow Epicenter on your favorite listening platform.

 

See also: Civil Resistance, Putin, Russia, Ukraine, War, August 2023, Europe, East & Southeast Asia, Podcast