2011–2013 Russian protests

Transcription

Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for coming. It's great to see a packed house. My name is Tony Levitas. I'm a Senior fellow at the Watson Institute, and it's my great pleasure and honor to welcome back to Brown Timothy Snyder. I say back to Brown because Professor Snyder received his B.A. from Brown some time ago, and has since gone on-- Not as long as you. --not so long ago. In fact, the room is filled with his mentors. Professor Snyder has gone on from graduating here to become one of the most eminent European historians of his generation. He received his Ph.D. from Oxford where he was also a Marshall Scholar and is currently the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University. He's been amazingly prolific and has written five award winning books, including the 2010 Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin which will be available for sale and a signing after the talk this afternoon. I'm not going to try and do justice to the work, but I will say that one of the signature features of his style is to address hugely important historical and historiographical issues and problems through the lives of individuals and in ways that make the books both extremely important and great reads. Over the last year, Professor Snyder has emerged as one of the leading public intellectuals on engaging with the Ukrainian crisis and what we've been calling here at Watson, the Ukrainian Crucible, in the hope of what might be forged in the future. Professor Snyder is a very busy man. Our ability to get him here was due in no small part to Patricia's Herlihy, who used all of her powers of persuasion and charm to get him to come-- [LAUGHTER] --and small threats to get him here. So without further ado, I will turn the floor over to that Professor Snyder who's talk today is Democracy On The Edge in the Ukraine. OK thank you very much. One thing about the introduction which was completely true was the last bit about Professor Hurlihy-- [LAUGHTER] --who taught me the second part of the European Survey around about 1989. It's a great pleasure to be at Brown, a great pleasure to be the Watson Institute which was my campus job. Sophomore, junior, and senior year, I was working at the Watson Institute, or what is now a part of it or what was then called the Center for Foreign Policy Development. I remember Artemis Joukowski as a great supporter of that initiative. It's wonderful to be in a room under his name. I'm going to start by justifying the subject. I want to start by defining Ukraine and Russia in a way which is maybe a bit unconventional. A lot of the way we start with this question is by asking is Ukraine real as Russia, in taking for granted that Russia is real. I want to put this into perspective. I want a to start by suggesting that this is a little bit like asking whether Canada's real, which admittedly we lose track of it. It doesn't appear very often in our news, but it's out there. It's out there, even though there's not a Canadian ethnicity, and there's not. You might think otherwise if you see a lot of Canadian games, but there is not a Canadian ethnicity. And there's not a Canadian language, either is there? I mean there is that interesting way they speak French, but there isn't a Canadian. Then, if you think another step back and you think about it, there's not an American ethnicity either, much as my WASP forebears might have proudly wished this to be the contrary. There isn't an American language either, and yet America's real, at least as real as things can be. So those are the sorts of premises that are the kinds of premises that I would start from when we ask about how Ukraine is real or how Russia is real, because Russia also doesn't have a language that's its own. It shares its language with other places, just like England does. No one has a history which is its own. All histories are shared across what are now political boundaries. There isn't any such thing-- I'm not breaking any news here I hope-- but there isn't any such thing as ethnicity in the political sense of some group which is destined to have its own state doesn't exist right. It's a retroactive category applied after things are over. So when we talk about history in Ukraine and Russia, we have to be open to the possibility-- which I think is not a possibility but a certainty-- that these are both societies that are in formation, whose leaders and whose experiences direct them back towards history in various ways, which doesn't mean that history is useless. In fact, it means you have to have some sense of history if you're going to have your own opinion about how history is used or not used. I want to begin with a few general historical observations-- which, again, I might be pitching in a way which is a little bit different than accustomed-- so a history of Russian Ukraine in four minutes or less. I think I can do it. I'm going to do this by way of dates. There are a certain set of dates that appear in both Russian and Ukrainian history, which all of us who have any kind of survey will be familiar with. 988, for example, the nominal date when Vladimir, or Volodymyr, or he actually was called something else, and in the Arabic sources, he's known by another name. Incidentally, in the Arabic sources, he was a Muslim. For any of us who want this to be a pure story about Slavs, he was a Muslim. 988 is the nominal year when Vladimir converted to Christianity. This is the year when the history of the people of Rus is thought to begin. 1241 is the year when-- again, as all of you will know-- a great part of the Mongol horde, led by the Batu Khan, was moving west and did away with what remained of the state of Rus, of Kiev in the Rus. By then, there wasn't much of Rus left because they had this problem. They couldn't decide who was going to inherit what. But we do we take 1241 as the end of the state of Rus and we blame the Mongols, which is kind of doubly unjust because, first of all, the main problem was that it was already fragmented. The second problem is the Mongols, they get a bad rep in this whole history. They were just trying to reestablish the East West trade route, and that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. That's all they were trying to do. People get in the way. Things get in the way. You have to move them out of the way, but all they were trying to do is establish a trade route, which brings you back to 988. and the important thing about 988. We would like, or some of us would like, for this to be some nice date when some ethnos was established. What happened in 988 with this conversion was that you had this mishmash of a community, which was established by Vikings. Again, Vikings like Mongols, bad reputation or good reputation, if you like carnage. They were trying to establish a North South trade route. That's what they were trying to do, Baltic Sea to Black Sea. Nothing could be more sensible in that. Kiev is on the way. If you've ever tried to establish a North South trade route yourself, you're aware that Kiev is conveniently located. It was a trading post. It was a city which was then more or less in the middle of a khanate, run by people called Khazars. Khazars had just converted as we now know-- this was actually in contention for centuries-- but as we now know to Judaism. Right after that they disappeared from history. Draw your own conclusions. But before they disappear from history, they engage with these Vikings. So the thing that we don't think about when we think about Kiev in the Rus is that this was one of those rare Viking Jewish consortia. So when the Russians and Ukrainians talk about Kiev in the Rus, they very rarely use the phrase a Viking Jewish consortia. But that's as good a description as any other. I stress this-- just like I stress the Mongols three centuries later, how it was already over-- just so we remember that history itself is a lot more flexible and complicated and of its own moment than it is in retrospect. It makes a kind of material for interpretation, but it's flexible. Next date, 1569. Now, here we might be moving a little bit out of the conventional dating of Russian history. Why is 1569 so important? 1569 is the moment of the establishment of something called the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. I pick it as just one date in the history of Ukraine which is a bit different from the normal chronology of the history of Russia. Why do I do this? Because after the breakup of Kiev in the Rus-- and I'm simplifying this a lot, but this is basically the story-- you have two different trajectories of the lands of Kiev in the Rus. Most of them fall under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which at its time was the largest state in Europe, a bit out of the mainstream. Fur clad pagans, so they don't fit very well into the French and German all those nice narratives. But they had the largest state of Europe in medieval period. It included all of what's now Belarus, most of what's now Ukraine. They considered themselves to be the heirs of all of Rus. They used the phrase, it was in their legitimation. They actually did inherit Rus in the sense of using the language of Rus as their language of law and state. Most of their population was Orthodox. So in those senses, they considered themselves and in fact were, the heir of Rus. The second trajectory is the trajectory of Muscovy, which, unlike these territories, remains under the horde, remains under the Mongols for quite a long time. Then, when Muscovy, in the famous cliche liberates itself from the Tartar yoke, it is becoming a successor state of the Tartars, which Ukraine isn't really. So that's a kind of fundamental difference in the histories. Now, this of course can be interpreted in lots of different ways, but it does mean that there's a kind of there's a different kind of foundation for Europeanizing myths in Russia and Ukraine. The Russian Europeanizing myth goes something like-- and there are many of you here, who I see who are better and can correct me about this-- but the Russian Europeanizing myth goes something like this. We can have it if we want to. If we choose to build Petersburg, we can be European. But then we can change our mind five years later and decide that we're Asian. This is kind of the pattern with Russia. We can take it or leave it. We're European and we want to be Europeans. Were better than you, but we don't have to be Europeans. We can be Asians too or Eurasians or something. The Ukrainian story, because it's chronological and boring, is much different than that. So in Ukraine, you actually have all the things that we were taught about in middle school. You actually have the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter Reformation, the stuff which doesn't happen in Russia. And because you have all those things and the architectural traces of them and the history of the book and all these things, because you have all of that you can't so easily say we are, we're not, we are not, we are, we're not, because the history is actually a much more conventional European one in that it has these stages and has these engagements. The next bit of history is the 20th century. Again, I'm going to sort of catapult us through it very quickly. Three dates, 1922 the formation of the Soviet Union, 1933, at the end of the Five Year Plan, 1945 the end of the Second World War. 1922 is obviously a moment in which Russian Ukrainian history have something in common. They're both most of what's now Ukraine, all of what's now Russia are part of the Soviet Union. 1933, at the end of the Five Year Plan is an important moment because as you know-- I'm sure most of you-- the attempt to industrialize the Soviet Union very quickly in the First Five Year Plan leads to famine, more or less throughout the Soviet Union, worst in Kazakhstan, very bad in southern Russia, and with the political coloration in the Ukrainian Republic. That is, there's a certain amount of political decision making in the Politburo by Stalin to confine starvation inside the Ukraine Republic. About three million people die there who don't have to. That matters in a kind of direct way from memory, because it's one of these things where if you're in Russia, you can decide whether or not that's going to be part of memory. Generally, the answer is it's not. Whereas if you're in the Ukraine, you generally can't decide. That is to say, if you are from a family which came from Ukraine, just like your family was from Bengal or a century ago from Ireland, you don't have the option of forgetting that grandmother was a cannibal or whatever it might have been. You don't have that option because it's simply too terrifying. The experience of mass starvation is a social experience and it's horrifying for those who survive in ways that are not easy to rub out. 1945 though is where I want to just pause for a minute, because in 1945 is where things are getting truly interesting in political myth. In a way, it brings us into our subject, because one of the features of our subject is that political myth and politics are running side by side. They're like two horses dragging the same carriage. 1945 was in general a myth that united Russians and Ukrainians until very recently. 1945 is the victory in the Great Fatherland War, that is the Soviet telling of the Second World War in which the Second World War begins not in 1939. Why not? Because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, we forgot about that. It begins in 1941 when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union. That is the common, in terms of social memory, the common experience of Ukrainians and Russians. It's a bit different of course because the war was actually fought in Ukraine and not really fought in Russia. 5% of Russia was occupied, 5%. Where as all of Ukraine was occupied for about two years of the War. But basically, the social memory is the same. We fought off the fascists and this was our great triumph. We saved Europe. We saved virtue. We saved the Soviet Union. That was basically in common until very recently. What has changed it, is the present and this is how things now are or fluid. This is my final answer and I hope an interesting one to the question, how are Ukrainians and Russians different. Occam's razor always tells you not to start with 988, but to start from now. If you're going to ask why two people, or two groups, or two nations are different, better to start from now than from 988 as a general rule. What's happening now, I think, is actually what's decisive. How do I mean that? Everyone who has been following this understands, knows, has seen that the way that Russia programs what it's doing in Ukraine, describes it, the discourse that describes it, has to do with 1945. From a Russian point of view if you watch a lot of Russian television-- which is one of my bad habits-- you see that what's happening is that fascism, anti-fascism, the political programming the Second World War has been transposed onto the war in Ukraine. In other words, whatever you think about that, that is the discourse that's being used. That is the program. those are the terms. Those are the tropes. And Ukraine that's just not true anymore. Why? Because the experience of having a revolution and then being invaded trumps grandma and grandpa basically. The actual experience of having revolution and then being invaded trumps even the most powerful myths of the Second World War. So we might have a tendency to look at Ukraine and say oh, Second World War. Russia certainly does. But the people who don't that much are Ukrainians. It's not that they don't talk about, not that they don't refer to it, not that the combatants don't talk about where their grandfathers served, because they certainly do. But I mean at the level of a coherent political myth, the coherent political myth in Ukraine insofar as there is one, is no longer about the Second World War. It's about 2013 to 2015. That is interesting in one of the things that makes Ukraine different from Russia, because Russians are seeing these and are being told to see in any event, these events in light of the myth which has been going on for 65, 70 years. That's not true in Ukraine. Ukrainians are actually living this as a kind of experience. Their myth has to do with living and dying now. That's I think a pretty substantial difference. Now that I've said that, let me say a word about the contemporary history, that is what has actually happened between 2013 and the present before I say a word about how I think it matters. Here, I want to start with Russia. I don't want to start with a Maidan. I'm going to start with Russia, because the events in Russian Ukraine were going in parallel. Things that happened in Russia before 2013 were quite important, just as things that were happening in Ukraine before 2013 were also important. They met at a certain point. The time they met was December. But those of you follow Russia will know what I'm going to say. The thing which happened in Russia before 2013 were the protests of late 2011 early 2012, very significant in Moscow and in Russia. I'm just going to read you a couple of things that were said at the time which I find striking. The Russian journalist, Yevgenia Albats, who I'm sure some of you know, talking about the protests said "Today we have just proved that civil society does exist in Russia, that the middle class does exist, that this country is not lost." president Putin the same day, "She, Hillary Clinton,"-- Oh and by the way, the whole gender issue would make for a great that's another subject like, Noonan, Katherine Ashton, Samantha Power, Angela Merkle, Hillary Clinton, all of these women on the Western side, no women on the Russian side. There's an awful lot to be done with that, and with the whole gay business. But that's not my subject for today. But I think there's something really interesting going on with gender in all this. Anyway, President Putin, "Hillary Clinton set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal. They heard the signal and with the support of the US State Department began active work." The protests are categorized as having been part of an American foreign policy. This is just a foreshadowing of things that are going to happen later. So the way that Russian policy turns after this is what interests us, because part of the larger case that I want to make is that the things that happen in Ukraine or the policy choices that Russia makes with respect to Ukraine are consistent with their trajectory which was already in motion. It's consistent with the turn against the European Union, which happened in 2012, 2013. So after the protests of 2011, 2012, you have the emergence of a new Russian foreign policy doctrine, which is really interesting called Eurasianism. Those of you who study Russian intellectual history will know all of the colorful resonances of that term, Eurasianism. Eurasianism involves a domestic turn against the middle classes, an embrace of what could be slightly euphemistically called conservatism, a rather in a rather intense form of conservatism, which some people might refer to as gay bashing. It involves in foreign policy, a turn against the European Union. The first time the European Union is defined as an adversary is in 2013, which is very important. Europe is defined, and this a key word in the whole thing, especially if you follow central European intellectual history, you'll see why it's a key word. Europe is defined as decadent. Why is decadent so bad? Now, because we are so decadent-- I've decided I agree with the Russians about this, we are decadent. Because we're so decadent, we think that decadence means that you're a fat Roman emperor and there are 17 women dropping grapes in your mouth. When I say decadence, that's what you think of. Decadence means decay. It means you're disintegrated. It means you're over. It means history has run through you. It means you're dying. That's what decadence actually means. It means you're not doing it beautifully. You're doing it the ugly disgusting way. This turn towards defining the European Union as decadent is quite significant, because it's saying we're the forces of life and you're the forces of death. I'm now quoting the Pope, but we're the forces of life, you are the forces of death. We preserve civilization, you perverted civilization. If civilization is going to be saved, it's going to be saved by us. That's the basic idea. The political program, as I'm sure all of you know, was for the time being a trade agreement, called the Eurasian Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan and some other countries and Ukraine, which as Foreign Minister Lavrov says "Eventually was to stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean." So the idea was that Eurasia was going to be the whole business. Now, meanwhile-- the meanwhile is very important-- meanwhile, there's a completely different conversation about Europe happening inside Ukraine itself. Ukraine under it's previous government, its previous not especially attractive, unbelievably oligarchy government, had decided that it was going to sign an association agreement with the European Union. I stress this, it's important that it was the previous slightly horrible, oligarchy, really disgusting in many ways, government, which had already decided that sometime in 2012 it was going to sign this association with the European Union. All the state propaganda had been pushing that direction. All the talk shows were going in that direction. Everyone knew in Ukraine the association agreement was going to be signed. The course was changed in November of 2013 after a meeting between Putin and President Yanukovych. We do not know what was said at that meeting, although my hunch, my very strong hunch is that what was said was if you sign, we're going to take Crimea. The reason that's my hunch is that there was clearly a plan already in place, an operational plan to take Crimea. At any event, at that point, one head of state dissuades another head of state, but the story's not over. I think the story was supposed to be over there. In a way, the whole history of these events is the story not ending when Putin thinks it's going to end. One whole reading of these events is Putin makes one mistake after another, which unfortunately isn't a good reading because like one reading of the Second World War is Hitler makes one mistake after another. But it still doesn't make things turn out well. So this is an error. If the idea was that this is going to end the protest, this was an error. What happens instead is that students, that is to say, university students, people like some of you. I noticed that the older generations have forced the younger generations to stand in the back, which is very impolite. The university students were the first protesters in late November, 2013. Why were they protesting? Why was it students? It's a very simple thing. The European Union means in Ukrainian context, it means the rule of law, because the main Ukrainian political and social problem then, now, hopefully not forever, but so long as there's been an independent Ukraine, has been oligarchy and corruption, which are the same thing. If economic power is only in a few hands, it's very hard for there to be the rule of law for everybody else. Everyone who tries, for example, to be a small or medium sized businessman or woman, ends up being blocked. So students are precisely the people who have the greatest stakes in there being fair rules of the game over the long term. Students were the ones who protested. They were then beaten quite badly on the night of November 29th to the 30th by the riot police. At which point, this became a mass protest. The idea was that we have to protect our children. So there's this touching notion, actually, that university students are the future of the country. Therefore, they shouldn't be hurt. So when people say our children, they didn't mean literally our children. They meant the next generation. But nashi diti, our children, was what people said. The group that came out to protect the students, or the children as they put it, interestingly, were largely veterans of the Afghan war, of the war in Afghanistan, Afghansi were the people who came out and protected them from the riot police. So immediately, you have quite a spread of the demography of the protests, because a lot of these guys were not themselves former university students to put it in a certain way. They were one or one and a half generations older, actually two, than the students. At this point, the protests spread out and begin to include members of basically all generations and all backgrounds. You know this already, but I'm going to press the point anyway. Ukraine is a multilingual society. The main language on the Maidan was actually Russian. The largest group of people at the beginning were students and then middle class Russian speakers, because the middle classes in Kiev speak Russian. There's going to be a Ukrainian here that is going to be annoyed at me, but this is basically right. Are you the one who's annoyed or are you -- yeah, OK. Good. [LAUGHTER] But the private language in the Maidan was basically Russian. In fact, there was very typical thing in which you get up, you give your speech in Ukrainian. Then, you go back to your friends and you say in Russian, how was that. They say it was great, because that is the way Kiev is. It's a bilingual capital, which we have trouble getting our minds around because we are monolingual. Nobody in the Western world except the Ukrainians has a bilingual capital. Both the Russians and we have trouble getting our minds around this. No, the Swiss do not have a bilingual. The Swiss are not as good as the Ukrainians. It's not the same phenomenon. The point I'm trying to make here is that there was no clear ethnic linguistic generational definition to this event. It came from all over society. Now, you see these two stories come together. And these events from the point of view the Putin regime in Moscow are going to be categorized as a threat, but not for the obvious reasons. I think the main reason why this is a threat is that if you are Moscow, it is convenient to have the main oligarch in charge of Ukraine. That's what Yanokovich was. He was trying to set himself up as the main oligarch. The Oligarch who was above all the other oligarchs. That is very convenient. If you're Russia, you can deal with one oligarch. What you don't want to deal with is a spontaneous, organized Ukrainian society. That's very awkward because first of all, it's always awkward. But secondly, it could prove to be a model for your society, especially because-- I'm now going to annoy my Ukrainian constituency-- especially because it's an east Slavic, post Soviet country where a lot of people speak Russian and a lot of the media is in Russian, including a lot of the best media is in Russian. So it looks like a bit of a threat. Now, to stress a point I've ready made, the Russian propaganda that comes in at this point is all civilizational. So I was following this day by day. It's all civilizational. It's about why would you go on the Maidan because it's just for Europe and Europe means pedophilia. So if there's a television program about how in Sweden it's mandatory to have sex with children, and on and on and on in this vein. The idea is that Europe is decadent. Why would you be associating yourself with Europe? So these the Maidan, was called Yevromaidan. It was called the Euromaidan this time around, which in Russian then became the Gay-- I'm not even going to try to do it-- the Gay Euromaidan. So everything European was gay, why would you be gay? Another one which-- I like this one. If you join the EU, you can have free movement within the EU. But first, you have to you have to have gay marriage. You're allowed to join the EU, but first you have to have gay marriage. The hard version of this is, if you want to have movement inside there, you personally have to marry a man and then it's OK. So they really, really pressed this. I'm from Ohio and it really reminded me of Ohio 20 years ago. Which in some sense, gives me optimism because we were really obsessed with gay marriage for while. It's just the most important thing in the world for 18 months and then we got over it. So maybe other people can get over it anyway. But the point here is that the whole push was about Europe. It had nothing to do with NATO or the Americans at this point, because Russian foreign policy was angled against Europe. This was categorize as being Europe, which it was. The mistake of Russian policy at this point, if you want to see it that way, was to pay off in late December the Ukrainian government to repress the protests. Then, the two measures which the Ukrainian government took, first passing a series of dictatorship laws in January, 2014, and then shooting from the rooftops protesters in February turned these protests into a revolutionary movement and led to the toppling of the government itself. Again, just to stress this point, I'm probably beating a dead horse at this point, but when the shootings came, when the mass violence came, the people who died reflected the complex ecumenical content of the movement itself. So the first two people who died in this Ukrainian revolution were a Belarusian and an Armenian. Over the course of the shootings, a Pol was killed. Russians were killed, not just Russian speakers that's a different thing, Russians were killed. Pols were killed. Five Jews were killed, victims of these repression. Simultaneously, more or less with repressions and the fall of the government, was a Russian invasion. So in the second part of this talk, I want to try to discuss what I think of the most interesting underlying structural realities of this invasion. I'm consciously separating it from discussion of the Maidan because I think it is something rather different. I don't think there is a story in which the Maidan automatically leads into an invasion. I think in retrospect, we're supposed to think that it does. But there's no particular reason why the Maidan story couldn't have ended with the Democratic presidential and parliamentary elections that then followed. That would be a perfectly normal revolutionary trajectory. You overthrow some government. You have some elections and then you make your own problems after that. That would be the natural Ukrainian ending. But that's not how this ends. This ends instead in a completely different way which is that Russia invades. So I want to now try to discuss the Russian invasion as a more or less distinct event, which I think it was, a distinct but be very interesting event. I'm going to try to break it down, not so much in terms of its chronology, but in terms of the way it's been prosecuted. I don't think that this war is chiefly about Crimea or Donetsk or Luhansk Oblast. I think this war is chiefly about Europe. This war is a continuation of the policy that was announced in 2013 of trying to supplant, to get under, get into, dissolve, overwhelm, over master, be better than somehow the European Union. The original version of that didn't work out so well. The Eurasian Union is now, not only is Ukraine not a member and never will be, but Belarus and Kazakhstan are having their hesitations. I don't know how many of you have been following Belarus, but it's really interesting the way the Belarusian policy has changed with Lukashenko becoming, if not Putin's most analytical critic, I think probably his funniest critic. If you haven't been following this, it's definitely worth going closer. I'm going to just pause. When the Russians invaded Crimea, which is where I'm going to go next, and gave the ethnic argument that it's a Russian territory, Lukashenko said well if that's true, it would make just as much sense to give Moscow to the Tartars as it does to give Crimea to the Russians. Because after all, all of Russian history came from Tartar history. So if we're going to follow this ethnic logic, why not give Russia to the Tartars rather than the other way around. It didn't get a lot of coverage in Russian press. [LAUGHTER] You have to look for Belarusian links to get the story. Anyway, to the original version, this Eurasian version doesn't work so well, but other things do work. I'm going to try to categorize them. The first is the level of tactics. So as I've said, I don't think the war is actually the main front. I think it's one front among many, but it is a revealing front. Of course, is a very significant front for Ukrainians who are living and dying there and for Russians who are dying there. What are the tactics on these territories? I would characterize the way that this war has been prosecuted as reverse asymmetry. So I'm now going all military on you. An asymmetric war is usually a set of tactics prosecuted by a weaker force against a stronger force, or a non-state actor against a state actor. What's interesting about the war in Crimea and southeastern Ukraine is that the Russian state, although it's clearly the stronger party in this war-- it has one of the best armies in the world-- is fighting as if it were the weaker side. That is, it's using techniques like not having insignia, mixing in with the civilian population, claiming it's not really there at all, human shields, drawing fire onto a large population centers in order to hurt, alienate civilians, things like this, which are classic partisan tactics and which work. But they don't work so well that the Russians don't have to invade with conventional troops. They do that in August. They do that in December. They do work to a fair degree. This is combined with a domestic politics of the Big Lie in which the war is characterized in Russia as a civil war where heroic anti-fascists inside Ukraine are fighting off a fascist junta, yada, yada. Meanwhile, the Russian technology is what actually changes the war. The Russian presence is what changes the war. It's Russian fighters and Russian aircraft which grounds the Ukrainian Air Force which is hugely significant, hugely significant. Admittedly, they shoot down a civilian airliner every now and then but the militarily they ground the Air Force. Russians are shelling from Russian territory Ukrainian troops. The Russian Air Force has engaged the Ukrainian Air Force. Things like this have really turned the tide. Of course, thousands of Russians have also died on Ukrainian territory. There's that was that little fact as well. But the interesting thing though is, as far as if I'm trying to make here, is that what Russia has done a spot a very unconventional war. I think the best way to talk about it is that they're using the weapons the weak even though they're the strong, which is kind of interesting in terms of Russian history. Usually, the Russians overdraw on the other side, like we're the great power. But, here they're not. Here, what they're doing is they're saying we're the small guys or maybe we're not even there and the people who are fighting are the underdogs. The extreme version is here you've got a bunch of pitchforks and they're fighting like the nuclear armed Americans. That's kind of the story that's being told, and that really is the point because part of the story is that these partisans are fighting an international fascist conspiracy backed by the United States of America. That is in a way the logic of the whole thing. If you think about it that way-- which I don't urge you to-- but if you think about it that way, then Russia really is the underdog. If this really were a conflict between Donetsk and the United States of America, OK Donetsk is then the underdog. There is a certain ideological consistency with this. Now, as this war has been prosecuted, there has been no lack of clarity about its goals. I think the way that the Russian leadership from President Putin to Ragozin, Glazyev, and then people are outside the regime, Dugin, the way they've talked about it has been in terms of ending the Ukrainian state. So all of these things which we've heard so many times, they sound familiar, even reasonable, like the ethnic rights of Russians or Russian speakers in Ukraine, the historical rights of Russia, the idea that Ukraine and Russia are one people, the idea that Vladimir converted cetera 988, the idea as Present Putin put it that Ukraine is a composite state. All states are composites states. There were no states created by God. I went back and read Genesis and checked. [LAUGHTER] They were all composite states. Anyway, all of these are ways of saying the Ukraine state is illegitimate. That it's exceptional. That it need not exist, at least in its present form, which brings us to the strategy. I think the best way of talking about the strategy is a kind of strategic relativism, because, as I said before, the original way of doing this didn't work. One of the things we have to remember when we think of Putin as a fantastic strategist-- which he's not-- is that this whole thing is a series of mistakes. When tyrants make mistakes, they almost never say oh yeah, made a mistake. That almost never happens. I mean this is something that Socrates noticed a long time ago or Plato. Tyrants have an information problem. They have a problem with denial. They make mistakes. It tends to be somebody else's fault, classic point in political thought. Everybody knows it. Anyway, a whole lot of predictions went wrong here. They thought they could they could stop Ukrainians from signing the agreement. They didn't. They thought that it would be good to pay to put down the protests. That didn't work so well. I think they thought in annexing Crimea that would make the Ukraine state fall apart, but it didn't. I think they then thought in supporting separatism a lot of people would come over to their side, which also didn't happen. So you have a whole lot of mistakes, which means the original vision didn't work out. The Eurasian Union doesn't work out. At this point nobody likes it. What do you then do? I think what you then do is something called strategic relativism. That is to say, you accept that you were weak, and here we have to grant a certain maturity in realism. You accept that you're weak and you ask how can you weaken the other side. So it's not about being strong. It's about making the other side weaker. This is operating at several levels. One is the transatlantic level. Very obviously, Russian policy is to separate the Europeans from the Americans. The nice telephone leaks that they issue of now and again are a good example of this. Most importantly though is the European Union itself. I'm going to stress this in front of this mostly American audience. We-- this is my American we-- would really like this for it to be about us, because one of the ways we're decadent is that we really like for things to be about us all the time. It's got to be about us, us, us, us, us. But sometimes, things aren't about us, and this one of those times. This is really about the European Union. The Russians are pursuing a very intelligent policy of weakening the European Union at four or five levels. One is cultivating client states who are member states, like Hungary. One is supporting separatism of any guise, any political coloration, so UKIP in England, but also the Scottish Referendum. The Scottish Referendum did not pass. There was one country which issued informal protest, which was Russia. Russia claimed that all the votes hadn't been counted and that Scotland actually had succeeded. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. When Sputnik, the new Russian propaganda carrier, was launched in the US, they announced-- you may not all been watching this with the same lividity that I was-- but they launched their year's coverage by saying 2015 was going to be the year of separatism. Texas, Florida Donetsk, it's all one big story, world separatism. The year is young. Sorry? The year is young. Right, we can always dream. I'm making fun, but this is a serious policy. You legitimate what's happening in Donetsk and Luhansk by saying well, separatism is just what happens around the world and it would be a good thing if the European Union fell apart. That's the underlying message. So they also support populism. Marine Le Pen and Vladimir Putin, in case you haven't noticed, have come very, very close friends. Recent reports are to the effect that the Front National, the big, ever bigger, successful, right wing Populist Party in France, gets a lot of loans from a country to the east whose name you know. Then, they also support-- and it gets worse-- they also support the fascist. They support the Nazis. There is no place where they will not stop. So the "referenda" in Crimea and then the ones in Donetsk and Luhansk to separate from Ukraine, the Russians invited observers. Who were these observers? With the exception of people from the German party, Die Linke-- which is a beautiful story in and of itself-- they were the European right, the far right, but also the fascist right, and also just the flat out Nazi right. These are the people who came in order to legitimate as it were this event. What is the underlying strategy here? Well, certainly the Russian regime has a basic existential interest in the preservation of energy markets remaining the way they are. It's much easier to deal with individual European nation states then it is to deal the whole European Union, which now that you've alienated it by invading Ukraine, has started to come up in energy policy, which is very bad for you. Little asterisk around Crimea, Crimea is a great example of how we let the Russian story become our story. So we think Crimea was always Russian. I was recently with a bunch of extremely rich and important Republicans-- because that's the kind of social life I have-- [LAUGHTER] --and they were saying but Crimean was always Russian. I thought OK, that's interesting. If there's anybody in America who I thought might be resisting this, it would have been these people. But no, they thought Crimea always-- of course, I mean nothing's always anything-- but I mean Crimea is many things. It's Greek. It's Turkish. It's been many different things. That always Russian is something that it's not. That they were buying into this. They didn't actually say [INAUDIBLE], but I was kind of expecting it. Of course, the significant thing about Crimea are the shale gas fields. The only place in the Black Sea where there's a lot shale gas it is within Ukrainian-- not Russian-- Ukrainian Maritime territory. Now, if you take Crimea, that is now part of Russia, which doesn't mean the Russians are going to use it. They're not. They don't need it, but they're keeping the Ukrainians from using it. They're keeping Europeans from having it. That's the most important thing about Crimea and taking Crimea. There's an attempt to make the European Union fall apart and it corresponds I think with a really interesting intellectual difference. Let's put that way, because I think there is a sincere difference about the way the politics work or should work. In the things that the Maidan does have in common with the European Union is a basic understanding about how politics works, which is you have to have civil society to have a state and you have to have a state to join Europe. That's the bedrock of the way the European system works. The European Union is a collection of states, but it's not a collection of any old states. It's a collection of functional states. We cannot form a state and join the European Union. We have to first show that we are very functional. Ukraine, to put it politely, has not met that standard. But the way to make the state functional is to demonstrate or to take part until it is. That is one model of way politics works. You try to make your state functional. Then your state can join the European Union. The European Union then reinforces ideas of rule of law. That's one idea of how politics works. There's another idea of how politics works, which is that that can be broken. You could intervene from the outside at the level of civil society, the level of the state, the level that you can break it. That's the Russian approach. It's perfectly intelligent. It's to be respected I think for its intelligence and it's working to a large extent. Now, this brings me to little point about civil society, which is a crucial concept here. The Maidan is clearly an example of civil society, in the East European sense of the word of something between the state and the individual, something which is spontaneous, something which is political in the sense that it's about changing the state-- although it doesn't come from the state. The legitimation of this kind of activity would be the Jeffersonian one from the Declaration of Independence. That is, if the state does not behave predictably, then society has the right to behave unpredictably as well. I'm paraphrasing Jefferson because I'm not an American historian, but that's the basic idea. If there's no rule of law in the state, then society has the right to insist upon it and to break certain rules itself. In the mainline Russian interpretation of the Maidan, that's not what happened. There can't be that thing. It doesn't exist. The civil side doesn't exist. There's no such thing. I think it's fair to say that not true. I think it's fair to say that civil society under some definition-- you might disagree with mine-- but under some definition it exists. What we're doing now where nobody paid you to come, with three exceptions that I know about-- [LAUGHTER] --nobody paid you to come and nobody paid me to be here, and so on and so forth, except Pat in affection. That's an example. These voluntary things do happen. They actually exist. Not everything is a result of conspiracy. But you can misunderstand civil society and destroy it by misunderstanding it. That's just a kind of East European historical lesson. If you don't believe in it, you can destroy it. By not believing in it, you can destroy it. If you treat it as a conspiracy, you can use that as a way to destroy it. That's how it's happened in the past. Which brings me to build the last point I want to make about all this, which is what's happening at the level of philosophy. The philosophy of this conflict on the Russian side is a kind of applied and now I'm at Brown. Well, I don't know what they teach at Brown. Maybe there's been some kind of revival of 18th century studies and I'm going to be surprised. That didn't get very many laughs. [LAUGHTER] OK, thank you. It's a kind of applied postmodernism. They've recycle a lot of things that I learned in the 1980s and they've used them to great effect. So I'm talking about the propaganda and the way the world has been present. Now, some of the propaganda is just traditional techniques but applied very intensively. For example, making things up that didn't happen. You construct an alternative universe in which there were certain things that happened, like the story of Ukrainian army crucifying a small boy. That simply did not happen, but it's a pretty big feature in the alternative universe. There's another sensation technique which they perfected, which is I would call-- I hope gracefully-- liberation from context. So anytime anybody says any sentence, there's the risk that that sentence will then be placed at some point and a half hour documentary in which you have all kinds of beautiful visuals which lead up to how awful the sentence is. So if you're President Obama, for example, and you say anything about how you're supporting Ukraine, then there will be a half hour documentary where they make fun of you for saying Ukrainians are making their own choices and they talk about how awful like the Maidan and then your little sound bite comes in at the end. By then, you look like a complete idiot and a loser. They're extremely good at that. Their interview technique is something called taped to live, which is really cool. So they do an interview with you and they tape it. Then, they like pick out the things they want to take out of context. Then, they invite other people to come in live and make fun of you. My American colleagues are going through this one after the other and saying oh yeah, that didn't seem fair. Did they do that just to me? No, this is what they do. This is their way. That's more or less traditional. What I'm interested in explaining here briefly are the things which are a little bit more intense. One of them is political marketing, which of course, we also know, but they, I think, have perfected, so telling stories along the lines of what people want to hear. The two main stories that have been told about the Maidan and the war are the fascist story and the geopolitics story. The fascist story is that, however you like, all the Ukrainians are fascists or the Ukraine revolutionaries are fascists or whatever. That story basically delayed anyone in the west from putting two synapses together for about 6 months. So it was pretty effective. Then, the one which is dominating now is the geopolitics story. There aren't really any Ukrainians They didn't really make any choices. There's not really a Ukraine. Forget about, Ukraine. It doesn't exist. What really matters America, America and Russia, the superpowers. It's all geopolitical. A lot of us go for this because, as I mentioned, we like stuff to be about us. A lot of our international relations theorists really like for stuff for us, because we're a power. It's all about power. But that's the story. The geopolitics thing is a shtick. It's a trope. It's a way of trapping you intellectually. That's basically cost us another 6 to 9 months. We're still in the middle of that one. We got over fascism one more or less, but the geopolitics one we're in the middle of still. Let me give you some more interesting examples of this. The point about marketing is you hit different people with different stories. Sot the fascism one is pretty good in Europe, because it splits, it detracts a lot of attention from the European left, including a lot of well meaning people who are of course against fascism, as you should be. But the geopolitics one works well in Europe too because what it says is, it's all the Americans. So it's all about these grand struggles, blah blah. So if you say it's all about the Americans, then Europeans will say either OK, well then let's the Americans deal with it, or they'll say it's the American's fault which prevents them from developing coherent policies even though it's really all about them. The marketing can get more interesting than that. Ukraine, there's one line which says the Ukrainians are all decadent and gay. Then, there's another line which says Ukrainians are all fascists. Those are targeted for different people. You tell the European Christian right that the Ukrainian Revolution is all about decadence and Sodom and so on. Then, you tell the European left that it's all about fascism. Sometimes you say it's about gay fascism, admittedly. You bring the two together. [LAUGHTER] You're laughing like you're hearing this for the first time, but I don't think you are. I think you've been living with it. I think this is a moment for you. But you see the point that you can market. You can hit people with different messages, even though they're contradictory. The most intense one is the Jewish one, where some people are told that Ukraine itself is an example of the international Jewish conspiracy. That is, anti-Semites are told that because there's a big anti-Semitic constituency out there. Then, other people are told that Ukrainians are all anti-Semites. Those probably are not both true. Maybe neither one of them is true, but they're probably not both true. The point is that this is marketed. It's targeted. But the really deep stuff and the really effective stuff, which is bring me to where I want to end, has to do with what I would think of as a kind of calculated cacophony. And again, this is a little bit familiar because we do this. Fox News definitely does this. I think of this as one big problem that we're having with the Russians rather than something that the Russians are doing to us, or that we've prepared ourselves for, prepare them for. I think it's one big conversation and we should see it that way. Anyway, calculated cacophony is when something happens that you can't control, you hit it with as many weird interpretations as you can so that the event is overwhelmed by the interpretations. So let's say, for example, that you accidentally shoot down a civilian airliner, not a good thing. The traditional old fashioned way to deal with this would be to deny it, but there's a better way to deal with that, and that is that you throw up truly weird interpretations of it. You say a Ukrainian fighter plane shot it down, even though that's technically impossible. Or you say, it was a natural disaster. Although, that's really unlikely. Or, my personal favorite, you say that the Malaysian airliner that went down over Ukraine was the same Malaysian airliner that disappeared over the Pacific which was meanwhile taken into possession by the CIA, filled up with corpses, launched from Amsterdam and then blown up by remote control over Ukraine to make it look like the Russians did it. Now, the point of the throwing all this stuff into the air is not that you're supposed to believe any one version. The point is to sideline the event itself, so you don't think about how horrible it is that 300 people just died and so that you don't think about the simplest explanation for what happened. What actually did happen is very simple, very simple in fact. So simple, it gets to the heart of why this is a problem for us and not just for the Ukrainians but for the Russians. What happened was very simple. The Russians shot it down. Not only do we know this, but in some sense we knew it in advance. This is the frightening part. What do I mean by that? How did MH17 go down? Well, there were Russian tank units in Ukraine. Russia had invaded Ukraine. Russian tank units are always accompanied by certain kinds of anti-aircraft capability because the great enemy of concentrated tanks are fighter planes. You have to be able to get them in advance at high altitudes. We knew, although we wouldn't say, we knew that Russia had invaded Ukraine. We knew that there were Russian tank units in Ukraine, and we knew that they never go anywhere unaccompanied buy BUKs, unaccompanied by this anti-aircraft capability. We also knew that their sensors distinguish friend and foe according to Russian fighters and everyone else. So we had the knowledge last summer when this all happened to reroute civilian airliners, but we didn't because it was too hard for us to say Russia had invaded Ukraine. If we say that simple thing, it follows logically that you have to get civilian airlines out. Of course, I mean the responsibility for shooting that airliner is a responsibility of the people who invaded Ukraine. But there's a sense in which we were brought into it in our inability to speak or think straight about what was actually happening. In that sense, this is the great difficulty. This is the great philosophical difficulty. So what I'm calling the philosophy is alss-- you could also flip my whole argument around and say this is the tactics. This is the day to day meat of what's happening. This is how we're being approached, how we're being changed. The philosophy is part of the tactics and the people literally live and die because we're unable to think straight, which is where I want to end this. I want to end this on a note of thinking about-- this is going to sound really old fashioned and you have to wait 20 years after you graduate from Brown to use this word that I'm about to use-- and the word is truth. [LAUGHTER] There is-- you guys were in 22 years ago. The thing that I just said about MH17 is about simple old fashioned Aristotelian truth, non-contradiction. If you know that there are Russian troops, if you know there are tanks, this all follows. It's just a logical chain. Logical consistency has been a big problem for us. Admittedly, we've had help but it's been a big problem. Think about some lines of propaganda which you have all heard and ask yourselves whether you have actually thought about the contradictory character. So if I say that there is no Ukrainian state, but I also say the Ukrainian state's repressive, If I say there's no Ukrainian nation, but I also say all Ukrainians are nationalists, if I say there's no Ukrainian language, but I also say Russians are being forced to speak the Ukrainian language, I'm contradicting myself. But not a whole lot of our response has been along those lines. It's more been hm, that's confusing or maybe that's right. The problem with accepting things that are contradictory as possibly right is that you can't possibly be thinking yourself when you do it. In a way, that's where this is all headed. It's not about you accepting this or that proposition. It's about getting inside your mind in preventing things from working. So that's the Aristotelian truth. There's a legal kind of truth which is at stake here as well, the connection between the individual and the state. The convention across much of the world, at least that much the Western world, much of the world, is that we have a legal relationship to the state called citizenship. The moment that we admit categories like Russki Mir civilization or ethnicity, we are accepting that that truth is at least as in competition with other kinds of truth, that that legal truth maybe be subject to challenge or even over. Another kind of truth which I think is at stake is what might be called existential truth. People did or didn't choose to go on the Maidan. They did or they didn't. They did so for their own reasons. They took risks. Many of them paid quite dearly. They define themselves by what they were doing. There's a sense in which that truth is being taken away. So if the Maidan itself is forgotten, or if Ukrainian choices, choices made by individual Ukrainians become part of some larger story about ethnicity or language or geopolitics or what have you, then that individual kind of truth that you're making yourself by the choices you make, the truths that you decide to uphold, that goes away. The most important kind though, and maybe the fundamental kind, and a kind that I hope we're in some sense now taking part in, is what you might call social truth, which depends upon trust. It's very hard to be right all by yourself. Usually, if we're right, it's because we're in some kind of conversation with other people, with other people who we trust either personally or some kind of institutional reason. A university is an example of this. You're in an institution where certain figures have some kind of authority. Your peers are in a certain kind of relationship to you. It's very hard to get to truth all by yourself as an alienated individual. It's actually very hard. This ultimately depends upon trust. I think civil society in this sense, as the basis for us believing in certain things, a plurality of things, not any one thing, but believing that some things are true, that that may be the ultimate stake in all of this, because if you can be brought to believe that it's all a matter of conspiracies and who really knows and you can't trust anybody, then you're in a world where you're all by yourself. If you're all by yourself, there's no truth. If there's no truth, then you're all by yourself. That, in the end, is the point and maybe the real danger of all of this. So I'm going to close there with renewed and repeated thanks for inviting me back into a place where I once had all kinds of groups who helped me to learn how to think and how to trust in thinking. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] You want to? Thanks. Yeah, I'm happy to take questions. If you don't mind just saying who you are and then asking your question the form of a question. [LAUGHTER] The East Europeans laugh, yes. Yes sir. I'm actually from Haren, a very decadent country in the Netherlands. But I'm not quite getting you NATO European Union divide, because in passing you said this is not about NATO, but you made clear that this is all about the European Union. Most European Union members are also NATO members. Indeed, northwestern European presidents made a big deal out of the Russian disagreement with NATO enlargement especially with Poland and the northern states. So how does it come into this? Because it seems that there's a bit more to it than you suggested at least in your lecture. Yeah, I think there's more and less. Thanks for that question, because I think this is a place where very traditional sort of old fashioned historical chronological arguments are really helpful. This is one of the places where I disagree with a lot of people, because I was following this day by day. Then, the NATO enlargement issue I've been following for the past 25 years. I don't think so and here's why. I wouldn't claim that the Russians are enchanted with NATO or NATO enlargement, but if you look at the chronology of NATO enlargement, the decision to admit Poland-- which is the most significant country in this context-- to NATO was taken in 1994, so 21 years ago. Ukraine was not about to be admitted NATO. That's a complete red herring. Ukrainian public opinion was solidly against NATO and I think for good reasons. I think that was completely sensible in the world before Russian invasion. I don't see why Ukrainians would want to be a NATO. Ironically, the only way you get a Ukrainian majority in favor of NATO is to be Russian to invade. Now, public opinion for the first time is in favor of joining NATO, which doesn't mean it's going to happen. It's still not going to happen. But my point about this is that, I don't see any chronological connection between anything NATO was doing and the Russian change in policy in 2013. It's true that NATO enlarged in 1999. The decision was made in 1994, but I don't see how that's connected. The Russians are certainly talking about a lot of stuff that did or didn't happen. There's this big push which some of the Western media have often picked up on that supposedly in 1990, Bush promised Gorbachev that NATO would never enlarge, which that did not actually happen. That simply did not happen nor could it have happened, because in 1990 the Soviet Union hadn't fallen apart yet. It's hard to imagine that-- again, this is like an being old fashioned dumb chronological historian-- but you can't make promises about countries that don't yet exist and what your policy is going to be to them. Not only is there no document in any archive, at least that anyone has found-- which suggests that this is true. I don't think logically it could've been true. Now the other chronologies is the chronology of 2013, where what happens-- I tried to stress in the talk-- is that the Russian reorientation of 2013 is not to say we don't like NATO. They don't like NATO. That's a constant. The reorientation is to say we don't like the European Union. That's what's new. Then when the Maidan comes, they don't hit with you guys are bunch of NATO spies. They hit with you guys don't understand you're letting yourselves in for pedophilia and so. They hit it, in other words, with the anti-EU propaganda which has already been in the works. The NATO stuff, crucially, comes in in full force after Russia invades Ukraine. That's when the NATO stuff starts. Now in retrospect, it gets all blurry because they've been hitting us now with the NATO stuff for a year. So we think OK, maybe it's been about NATO all along. But even following the chronology of their own propaganda, NATO only comes into it after they begin a war of aggression. So I'm not really buying it. So why are they talking about NATO so much? Because NATO works really well at two levels of propaganda. The first is it's much easier to rally Russian public opinion around NATO and the Americans than it is around the European Union. So it's true that Russians are less and less attracted to the European Union, just as Ukrainians are more and more, but it's much easier to design NATO and US as enemies than the Netherlands and EU. It just works much better. Then in Europe, it's much more divisive. Because if Russia flat out said hey, we're against the European Union, we don't like you having your visa-free Portuguese vacations or whatever, we're against that, we don't like your public health insurance, we don't like the fact that you're rich, people might eventually get it that Russia is against them. But if Russia says oh no, we're against Atlantacism, we're against America, we're against neoliberalism, we're against NATO, that has a lot more resonance in Europe. I realize I'm in the minority here, that most people are going for this realists thing. but I don't think NATO has anything to do with this actually. So we'll just go around like this. Yes, please. Somewhere I read that Ukraine gave up it's nuclear weapons after breaking with the Soviet Union, to Russia in exchange for a pledge that Russia would not breach Ukraine sovereignty. But subsequently, I actually read that those were actually Russian nukes and Russians simply repossessed them. It's sort of like ours having nukes in Turkey or Subic Bay. Which is true and do you have any more detail on that? That's a really nice game show question because it's like is it A or is it B? It's A. It's not B. They were not Russian. No, they were not Russian nuclear weapons based in Ukraine. What happened was that the Soviet Union fell apart and what had been the Soviet nuclear arsenal was distributed among the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. By the terms of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the states the Soviet Union inherited the military forces and capacities that were on their own sovereign territory. So those were Ukrainian nuclear weapons, just as they were Kazakh nuclear weapons. The Kazakhs did the same thing. In 1994-- I'm now just to develop version A, which is the correct one. In 1994, Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons. It was at that time, numerically at least I think, the third nuclear power in the world. They agreed to give up their nuclear weapons in exchange for some loans and in exchange for a promise from the Russian Federation, the United States and Great Britain. Not just that those countries wouldn't invade Ukraine, it was that these three countries would undertake to protect Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. That's the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. So it's not just that Russia promised not to invade, it's that Russia actually promised to help Ukraine protect its own territory. So this was a pretty flagrant violation. And incidentally, President Putin's response when this was pointed out to him was to say the Ukrainian state no longer exists. Therefore, our prior agreements with it no longer hold force, which is an extremely interesting doctrine. if you think about it. Now, what's really bad about all this doesn't have to do with Russia and Ukraine. It has to do with the rest the world. There's a whole version of this talk which is why Russian policy hurts Russia and this is a good example. Of one of the things the Russians like to talk about is-- not the Russians but-- Kiselyov Russian propaganda. Certain members of the Russian leadership like to talk about as how they could turn us all to ash. OK, they could turn us to ash. But the problem with breaking the Budapest Memorandum is that you're telling the whole world that you should really keep your nuclear weapons, or if you don't have them, you should develop them. This was probably the worst setback for nuclear nonproliferation in the history of nuclear nonproliferation, because a big country with nuclear weapons undertook not to invade or to protect a small country that got ride of nuclear weapons and then invaded it. It's a nightmare scenario for nonproliferation. And everyone is taking notes, including a lot of countries around Russia. So Russia has now made more likely a scenario in which it's going to be surrounded by more countries with nuclear weapons. Anyway, that's the story. I was going to go this way. So Professor Cook and then-- Thank you. So that was a great talk. I have a question though. You set the whole context for Russia's reaction to the Ukraine in terms of the Russian domestic and foreign policies of 2012, '13. But does the Russian behavior in Georgia in 2008, which also was in response to noises about Georgia moving westward, maybe joining the EU or NATO-- and I know that actually Russia did invade Georgia, but only briefly and then it kind of broke off those two pieces, Abkhazia and South Ossesia-- so is the logic and the drivers of the policy in Georgia different from those in Ukraine? And if so, why? I think something's are very similar, but there has been some change over time. I would more see it as the factors that were relevant in Georgia are still present, but other factors are present too. In Georgia, unlike in Ukraine, there was a very serious conversation about NATO. I agree with you that the Russian interest in Georgia has to do with that. They figured out then, if not earlier, that if you can invade a country before it joins NATO, you can make it hard for to join NATO. I don't think the Russian leadership in 2008 would have invaded Ukraine. It's the same people, I know. But I don't think they would have done it. I don't think in 2004 they would have done it. I think they've changed over time. The difference that I tried to stress is that they've categorized European Union enlargement as a problem, Which. For me is extremely significant. Now, I'm going to go back into my Russophile mode. NATO doesn't really matter for Russia one way or the other. It can enlarge. It can't enlarge. It's not going to invade Russia. It's really important in all kinds of propaganda ways, but it doesn't really matter for Russia. Russia's relations with the European Union, however, matter hugely for Russia because that's their biggest market. That's where they'd like to travel. That's what really matters to them. Also, it matters to them just-- if you're going to be a realist, as people like to be-- then what matters in Russia's power position in the world is the ability to balance between the European Union and China. It's two great neighbors, both of which are economically much bigger than it. So if you throw the European Union away, you're basically throwing yourself at the knees of China, which is kind of what's happening. Again, they're not stressing that. Their line is we're going to try and show the Europeans we have an alternative. But what they're really showing is they don't have an alternative, because the moment they have any kind of problem with Europe, they have to immediately go to China and sign a gas deal which is manifesting out on their own interests. I think that the significant thing here is the change in doctrine about Europe. But significant for Ukraine, for all the reasons we've talked about, but also significant for Russia because what Russia has done-- just putting Ukraine aside for a minute-- is making it much harder for it to get back to the position that it was in 2011 and '12 with respect to the EU. One way this could all end or could never have started, is that the European Union and Russia do some kind of deal which respects the interests of both sides. I mean if Putin had just said 2013, OK fine, Ukraine has an association agreement. What I want is an association agreement on much better terms. He would have gotten it. There would be to sanctions and Russians would be traveling. The Russia GP wouldn't have collapsed, et cetera, et cetera. Now, they're in a position where they have to really, really struggle to get back to where they were in 2013. Now again, this is all analysis, which is not filling the Russian airwaves, but I think this is more or less what's going on. Susan? Thank you for that talk which was wonderful. I have a question that's a little different from these others which is about the ways in which talking about policy and politics today, and talking about Ukraine have or have not affect your writing of history, because you're still an archival historian and someone who spends lot of time working in both primary documents and secondary sources and writing about parts of the 20th century and not the 21st century. So I was wondering the ways that doing this mode of being a public intellectual affected your scholarship. Yeah. I'm going to say something really simple and say I hope not at all. I hope it's the other way around. There's certain things that I do a historian which put me in a position to play defense. So for example, historians are natural defenders against myth, because first of all, we're aware of it as a kind of concept we can put it away from history. But also, we can say some of the things about it which make it seem less powerful or at least less true. If Vladimir-- of course that Russian pronunciation of his name didn't exist in 988-- but you know, if he indeed converted in 988, which is not at all certain right, he did so for totally strategic reasons weighing Western Christianity as well as East. He apparently converted at least twice to Eastern Christianity. According to the Arabic sources he was a Muslim. The state was a sort of Jewish, Viking conglomerate, blah, blah, blah. If you could, if you say these things. Sorry? The best kind by the way. Yeah, yeah. I'm not to say anything about that-- [LAUGHTER] --because I'm being recorded. It's amazing how much difference that makes. The point is though, that historians kind of surround myths by these kinds of tiresome facts. And then they can put the myths into context, which isn't just in a scholarly exercise, because if you actually do things. If Russian soldiers are dying because Vladimir supposedly converted to Christianity in 988, that is a tragedy in that. If we can put that into context, we might actually be helping in some sense. It helps you play defense. Also, you notice if other people are reading history. Putin is reading history. That's actually a demonstrable fact. He's not alone. In the Russian leadership, they're reading a lot of books now. They have reading circles up there. No, they do. They have reading circles. Unfortunately, there's not enough cross pollination with Californian suburban housewife reading circles. I think there should be some kind of exchange where like a California's urban housewives get to chose the books one week and Putin gets to choose the next week. I think that'd be good for everybody, honestly. You can almost tell what they're reading actually. They're reading exile interwar Russians. You see it in Putin's speeches, the way he's thinking about history and also the things he says about history. But I only know that because I have some sense of what Russian exile in the '20s and '30s, what that did, what the ideas were. It's also a demonstrable fact. Some of them talk about what they're reading, so I'm not just speculating here. Then, you can see where this takes them. As a historian, you can then maybe reacted a little bit and say OK, well this is one way of seeing things, but it's not just true. So when Putin talks to teachers of Russian history and says well, we all know this, that, the other thing, no, we don't all know what that's just like. That's the one book that you just read three weeks ago. But it's not just totally true. Beyond that, the you have certain kinds of intuition. As you know, the book that I've just finished that I've been obsessing about for last five years is about the Holocaust. What does that have to do with this? Well, for one thing, if you're trying to explain the Holocaust, you end up thinking about a whole lot of things which are not the same thing as the myths and the political exploitation of the Holocaust. The Russians go into Ukraine and they say, we're doing one of the things they say-- I didn't talk about this-- one thing they say is we're saving the world from another holocaust. OK, maybe that's just an abuse of a history, which is what it is. Maybe they're trivializing the memory of the Holocaust. That's fine, it does. But there's something else going on, which is that in order for the Holocaust to happen, the Germans first had to destroy the European system and get inside of and destroy individual European sovereign states. That's how it actually happened as a matter of historical fact. It's a long argument, but let's just assume that's the case. Because I think that, I'm much more alert to Munich and Anschluss and the begins of the end of the European system. So I don't look at the tragedy of the European Jews or the horrors of the Second World War from the back. I look at them from the front. What happened? What had to happen first? And so then, when Russian doctrine says things like we have their ethnic rights, not state rights. The conventional state no longer matters. Then, I think Karl Schmidt, and I think of Munich. I think of Anschluss. I think of the beginning of the end of the European system. One of the reasons why I think it's justified to think about that is that I think they are thinking about that too. I think I'm in this with them. I think they're thinking about it as well, just that they're thinking about it positively, as a lesson. So I think it's the other way around. I try very hard to make sure it's the other way around, that it's the stuff that I think I know that allows me to take other things apart and to play defense. I think if it's the other way around, then you have real problems. So I was going like, please. So Tim if you're [INAUDIBLE] yet, I really liked your idea about perversity symmetry. I guess my question is going to be a little bit about us, about the US since you didn't talk about us. And that is, we have in a sense a political constraint of the aftermath the Iraq war and the disaster that that was and the context any kind of very active and even sending weapons to other country as opposed to troops becomes kind of this aggressive foreign policy associated with John McCain and the political right. Then, the Europeans have that same frame where it's not about Ukraine, it's about Iraq, Libya, anything but Ukraine or Russia. I guess my question is, how does that political constraint inform what should be the appropriate policy response from the US and Europe, knowing this is a very real constraint? This isn't just about being confused by Russian propaganda. It's not that Obama and his team are watching too much Russian television. It's that they don't want to say these things and then take the consequences, because either they don't believe it's a good idea or they believe that the public won't support it because this is what they were elected to do, to end wars and to not get involved in a new one. The Germans are afraid of a war with Russia. How do you address that? It's sort of like you could agree with everything you said, and you could still say OK, that's really bad news for the Ukrainian. I'm really sorry that they're going to be stuck in this conflict, but the interests of the United States and Europe and the constraints politically that they suffer, they may not want to take those kinds of aggressive actions. OK. Well, taking the point of your question. I think that the way you phrase it has a couple of gaps. First, the alternatives are not take aggressive action and shrug your shoulders and say we can't do anything because there was an Iraq War or a Second World War. There's a whole big filing cabinet full of stuff that we can do short military intervention Iraq style and nothing. The second little gap is I don't think it's right to create an alternative between we're watching too much Russian TV and we just think what we do because of our constraints. That's a mutually reinforcing pattern, because the Russians are aware of are soft spots, because they understand us much better than we understand them. Everything they do is meant to get hold of our soft spots and just twist them a little bit so they feel a little bit softer than they actually are. That's what they're after. That's what they're trying to do. So with a question of arms, of course they give us a lot of stuff which suggests that it's going to be a horrible escalation, because they know it's a close debate in the US. If it wasn't a close debate, they wouldn't bother. So I don't actually think you can make separation between Russian propaganda and our, as you put it, objective historical constraints, because they're playing with our constraints all the time. They're playing on them beautifully. That's what they do. That's what they're good at. It's not Russian television. RT is the second largest English broadcaster in the world. There are all kinds of ways in which the American NGO sector and even American journalism are affected by Russian propaganda. Not to mention, our parliament is also affected. So it's not that Russia is over there and we're over here, it's one big discussion. Anyway, how to answer your question? The conclusion you draw-- I know you're doing this for the purposes of illustration-- but the conclusion that you draw oh this is too bad for the Ukrainians, but you know it's not real. That's what we're supposed to think. That's what we're supposed to think. And thinking that is supposed to be deadly for us. That's the thought which will kill us and it's meant to kill us because this is not about Ukraine. It's about us. Ukraine is a way of getting to us. And if we decide to support Ukraine, then the conclusion is oh, let's have another ceasefire in Minsk. Let's just keep having ceasefires in Minsk. OK, let's have one when the war is about the Lukansk. Then, let's have one when the war is about Debaltseve. Then, let's have one when the war's about Mariupol. Let's have another one when it's about Odessa. Let's keep having ceasefires at Minsk. The ceasefires at Minsk are consumer foreign policy. They're us telling ourselves that oh yes, this is a local problem in Ukraine and now we've solved it by flying to Minsk ans spending 18 hours. If this analysis is right and since in your question you said OK, let's assume it's all right. So let's assume it's all right. If this is all right, then if we do nothing, what happens is the progressive disintegration of the European Union and the transatlantic relationship. So what the answered to your question then is in terms of our policy, the whole question of arming Ukraine or not it is as I see it, is a kind of red herring. That's putting all the emphasis in the wrong place. If this analysis is correct, that means that what we need to be thinking about is how you secure a Ukrainian state on the principle that our system is composed of sovereign states. How does the European Union respond to this multi-dimensional challenge? How do you keep the EU American relationship going over the very, very, very long run? Let's assume this is going to last for 10 years, and not just think OK this is the little problem in Ukraine. We're going to solve it or not solve it. I actually see the whole arms debate as the triumph of Russian propaganda. That we've been put into this corner where it's like oh arms might be good, they might be bad. It wouldn't matter one way or the other I don't think that much. In the long run, the Ukrainians are going to lose unless we help their state and that includes helping their armed forces, but it's not limited to that. The European Union I think is going to fall apart unless positive feedback loops get established to match the negative ones that have been established so effectively in the last two years. I think the response has to be a full-on response. If as we're tentatively agreeing if this is right, then the response has to be one which says OK, there's this multi-dimensional problem. We're going to have a multi-dimensional response, which isn't just-- this is the kind of my whole point-- which isn't framed by the rhetoric that is being framed for us. Then, we've already lost. In fact, this is how we're losing. This is actually why we're losing. This is what the Russians have. It's the main thing they have. The main thing they have is they're outsmarting us. That's the main thing that have. Until we get that, The Russians export as much as the Netherlands. Their GDP is as big as France. Their economy is way over focused on hydrocarbons. They've got a lot of problems. They can't take that many military casualties, I don't think. They've got a lot of weaknesses. But so long as they're out thinking us 8 ways to Sunday, they're going to keep winning. That was a long answer, I'm sorry. All right, yes please. I just wanted to follow up on something. So how exactly do you counteract? They are sponsoring the far right parties in Europe. Do we sponsor far left parties? What are we supposed to do? Yeah. There's a certain place where I stop. I try to play. As I said in response to Susan Ferber's question, I try to use the things I think I understand as a way to play defense and conceptualise what I think is going on. I try not to be like real specific about policy advocacy. However, I would like to say that I don't think financing the far left-- [LAUGHTER] --is going to answer, partly because they're already there. The Russians also finance the far left. That's less historically significant, because the far left is less historically significant. Right now is a moment of the rise the far right in Europe. Yeah, I know but-- the Greek government, as you know, is a coalition of the far left the far right. The Russians have it covered on both sides. On both sides, they've got both sides on that one. Anyway, but no. I think very, very roughly you have to decide who you are. So a lot of Ukrainians come to me-- I'll rephrase your question-- and they say should we have propaganda the way the Russians have? The Ukrainians have this sort of they have an advantage over-- well, OK I'm talking to Ukrainians-- but they have the advantage over us that they understand all this stuff. All this stuff that take an hour, they more or less get it like that. None of this, I couldn't give this talk in Kiev because they'd be like come on, my six-year-old understands this. [LAUGHTER] So you can't give this talk in Ukraine, because the one people in the world who are not particularly moved buy this stuff are the Ukrainians. They're familiar with all these gimmicks. So a lot of the questions I get from them are from young Ukrainian journalists, should we have a TV sender which is like RT. Should we count the propaganda with our own? I always say no. Maybe, I'm naive and stupid and wrong, But I always think that's the whole point is that if that's if you do that, then they win. Not only because-- I don't even mean in just some dumb ethical way-- they're always going to be better at it then you are. Also, if I'm right-- in my deep normative Hannah Arendt moment at the end-- if it's all about thinking and thought at the end of the day, if it really is a clash between two different styles of politics, in which one is about making people fragmented and aliens that can't think, and one is about creating the possibility for some kind of discussions groups and so on so people can, if there really is that difference at the heart of this-- I think there is-- then if you partake in it with your own Ukrainian or your own American propaganda, for that matter, they're winning in some deep objective way. So I don't think you can fight fire with fire here. I think you have to recognize that the way to respond is by trying to figure out who you are. This is when I say that the Russians are right, that we're decadent. I'm not sure I'm joking, because I would've thought we would've responded better to this challenge than we have so far. By we, I mean everyone from Kiev to San Francisco. I would've thought we would have done better with this. When they started all this, I thought when I saw some American propped up with the Russian message, I thought OK, there's a problem here that has to be addressed. But I didn't realize that we were going to address it so badly and so slowly. Going this way, Michael. So Michael Kennedy, Sociology. Just taking the last things that you said to re-frame the question I had intended previously, that is I can't decide now whether the debate about how far Russia will go is a Russian debate or a Western debate. According to some of the things that you said, I could imagine that this is not ending in Ukraine. That in fact, it would make sense as Putin's lot gets worse and worse that it would make sense to go into Estonia, because if by going into Estonia, then you automatically trigger either the end to NATO or the American response because of NATO, and therefore confirm what Putin had originally said that this is a fight with America. So that issue, although it was beginning to be raised last spring by a variety of military strategists, is now almost a common sense anxiety among people in NATO that Putin's ultimate aim is not the destruction of EU-- although, I think you're right-- but that is the destruction of NATO, which is something that can be a victory for him. So is that a worthy or important debate for the West to be having now? Or is that a debate on Russian terms? The debate about what exactly? About whether we should be preparing. The debate is simply this I think, which is what NATO people say. When are we going to stop him? Are we going to wait until he invades Estonia through this reverse asymmetric warfare, or are we going to try to stop him in Ukraine? Because we can't rely on his exhaustion-- by virtue of your own analysis-- because his exhaustion will just lead to more and more destructive behavior which might in the end be self-destructive for Russia. But it's going to be destructive for a lot of others who are our allies now. Yeah, I don't have a clear answer for that because my gut conviction is that any calculation about the long term is not likely to be right. Some other stuff is going to intervene along the way. So for example, what's the biggest problem that Putin is having now. The biggest problem Putin is having now is that oil prices are down because Saudi Arabia has decided to hinder American investment in shale oil and shale gas extraction by dropping the price. It has nothing to do with Russia. Their propaganda is that we and Saudi's got together, but in fact a Saudi policy directed against the United States as it were is the thing which is hurting Russia more than anything else. Clausewitz said this a long time ago, but when you start wars what happens is all kinds of things you didn't expect to happen over the course of the war. I think there will be more things like this. If this goes on for long enough, I think the Chinese will stop might be a little bit less discreet than they're being now. The Russian army is already stretched to the point where young men are coming from the Far East. It's not a big army. It's big compared to the European Union Army, which is zero. [LAUGHTER] But the number of men who can actually fighting in the Russian armies is 50 to 70,000, which is big by European standards. But it's not huge, especially for some kind of long term campaign. I think it would be a mistake to follow either logic, that they're going to be exhausted, they're not going to be exhausted. I think what you have to do is secure, try to secure the things that you think really matter. I think about it that way. So if you think Article Five really matters, then you need to make it look like Article Five really matters. If you want to try to win in Ukraine, you have to think about how you're going to win in Ukraine using some kind of intelligent measure which isn't just dictated by the Russian debate. In the long run, Ukraine is completely winnable. I mean it's completely. The Russians are not in such a great position there. I think it's important not to follow the logic of if we do this, will this make them overreact, because we just do not know. If you follow that logic, then you could say, what if we gave Ukraine to Russia? What if we said right now, we have no-- like Eisenhower said about Korea-- we have no interest. We have no interest in this at all. Take it. We just do not care. What would happen then? Would that be good? I tend to think it wouldn't be. I don't believe that they're going to stop because they've got Ukraine, because I don't think it's about Ukraine. On the other hand, are they going to stop because they get stopped in Ukraine? No, I don't think that either. I don't think there's any story which leads to this ending except when Putin leaves power, which of course will happen because it will eventually happen one way or the other. There are two ways it can happen basically, neither of which is pretty. Until that happens nothing's going to happen. I think the real question is how do we secure what we think is important knowing that we don't know which narrative is true. I'm going to take the privilege of asking the last question. There's more. Two more? I'll be brief. I'm Gary [INAUDIBLE] student. I was wondering, you talked about the Budapest Memorandum not being honored by the Russians, decreasing credibility of nonproliferation. Do you think the West's part in that agreement is worth saving to any degree? Can you talk on that? I'll take even a step back from that. Although the Russian interpretations of international law has been innovative and curious, they are a reminder of how important international law is. And if you do draw that conclusion as at least I do, it then reminds you how you should take your own commitment seriously. That's sort of a general. So with Budapest, I think it would be a very good idea for the Americans and the British to talk about Budapest, whatever they do to help Ukraine, because they did oblige themselves in this very vulnerable moment, not only in Ukraine but in world history. Those states gave up their nuclear weapons in 1994. It was a very big deal for the world. It was part of a general push back against the spread of nuclear weapons and I think it was hugely important. The Americans and the British are in fact I think morally if not technically, legally obliged to help Ukraine. In whatever they do, I think they should talk about Budapest when they do it, if only to lift some of the shame of the absence of policy so far, but if only to try to slowly buildup the credibility of agreements like this in the future. Because we have to remember that nonproliferation isn't problem for the world, which is to go on and on regardless what happens in Ukraine. This has been a total disaster. Obviously, the Russians aren't say oh yeah, we woke up today we remembered Budapest. Sorry. That's not going to happen. So at least the Americans and the British could roll into the preambles of their agreements to help Ukraine. I think they should. Why do you think they're not? That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know. They're worried about everything which make it seems like they're obliged to help. I think that's been one of the problems. Rolling this back to a year ago, a year ago I wrote all kinds of things which basically said the same things that I'm saying now. One of them was about Budapest. What I said was not only is this bad, but we need to immediately put this into our language about why we're going to help. The sad thing is that I think they will now, but it's taken a year to do so. I think there was this whole year where we were trying to avoid this confrontation with what actually happened. In going back to your question it's partly real hesitation, real worries about war, which are serious and should be taken seriously and matter in domestic constituencies in Germany and the US in other places, but it's also partly being spun in a certain direction. Crimea itself, if you remember back to when it happened, it was presented as a maskirovka. It was presented as something that it wasn't. It was presented as some kind of mysterious local uprising, who knows. Who are these people in green uniforms? Then once it was all over, and Putin gave a speech he said oh yes, those people are Russian soldiers. It wasn't given to us straight and we chose not to take it straight. Since we chose not to take it straight, then we couldn't say OK, Budapest Memorandum was violated, because our line was waiting to see what's happening. Then, after a while, that gets embarrassing. So this is in a way why I concluded on this thought business, that if you're unable to define what's happening at the time, it's harder for you to keep your own obligations because you get into the psychological position where OK, I'm not sure this has been triggered. Then, you figure out six weeks for six months later that it has. Then it's kind of embarrassing in a way to do it. I don't have any better characterization for you than that. I wanted to ask, let's for a moment stipulation that we are in Kiev and we are the Ukrainian to understand all of this pretty much by nature, and that part of the propaganda is the Ukrainian state is a fiction. What is your advice to them about creating a narrative of a Ukrainian state or a reality of a Ukrainian state that's robust enough to withstand that discourse? I think the smaller problem is the narrative. The smaller problem is the narrative. I think by now people have generally moved forward to the point where they know that there is something called Ukraine. If you think back 12 months ago, 15 months ago, all the news stories, almost all of them, literally had like a map of Ukraine a line drawn through the middle of it. Do we remember this? We should be ashamed basically. It's like having a map of America with a line drawn through the middle of it like the red states are all here and the blue ones are all there. Don't you know that there's a line? It's called the Mason Dixon line and everyone down there is white. Everyone up there in black and they're also gay. [LAUGHTER] The idea of drawing a line through the middle of the country and saying oh these people like this, it's just totally absurd and we wouldn't do it if we didn't regard them. Anyone when you took seriously, you wouldn't do that to I think we have moved past that at least. You do still hear people say it's a divided country and so on, but even the war itself has disproven that because there's been so little support for actually moving away from Kiev. It's two Oblasts. Even there, the public opinion polls interestingly show the same thing that they've showed for the past 20 years, which is that very few people actually want to join Russia. They want they want more local authority. The narrative is less and less of a problem. I mean they could definitely do a better job in telling their own history. Here, you kind of interesting difference in, I think, something like political style, where the Ukrainians tend to communicate politically with pictures. If you look at the history of the Maidan, it's really a lot about images which worked well the time, but don't work well over time. Whereas the way the Russians handle politics is much less with pictures and much more with cliches. They'll hit you over and over again with cliches, like Crimea was ours, Ukraine is a divided country, over and over and over and over again and eventually that sinks in. I think it's actually just the kind of irreducible difference in style there which you can't really ask the Ukrainians to fix. With the state, here I think is the core of your question. I agree with you completely. Here, it's not about a narrative. it's about a reality of the state, because the Ukraine state is weak and that's the problem. It's weak in the basic sense that it can't provide day to day predictability for its citizens, which is what states are supposed to do. They're supposed to monopolize violence, which the state kind of does. And they're supposed to provide the rule of law or predictability, a baseline. That is absolutely what they need to do. You asked me and this is what I do tell them. This is, in an odd way, the key to the whole thing. I'm glad this is the last question, because it actually transcends almost everything that I've been talking about. The Maidan was about this. Ironically, the protests in Donetsk and Luhansk are also to a large measure about this, about this lack this feudal system which was slightly different there, but which is still a feudal system. The problems that Ukraine is having now in holding off the Russian military is also largely about this. The answer is ironically-- it's hard to think about them outside the context of the war-- but the answers have to do with the kinds of things you've been working on. The answers have to do with relocating public funds, with decentralizing, not because Ukraine is some kind of repressive centralized state or like the people in Kiev oppressed Donetsk or Luvil for that matter, but because the Ukrainian state is so weak you have to build up capacity somewhere. You have to actually create capacity where none exists. You have to create Ohio or Connecticut or Provin. You have to create municipalities, [INAUDIBLE], whatever. You have to create these units which don't exist and have them have some local control, not because the Russians want federalization. That's not relevant one way or the other, but because the Ukrainian state doesn't really exist at that level and has to be made to exist. That's the crucial thing. One of things that worries me about the war is the war becomes an argument against this, when in fact the war is an argument for this. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]