Lawrence Freedman: "Putin uses nuclear weapons as a deterrent to NATO"

 I would say that we have to go to the very beginning, to the origins. Was the Russian invasion in Ukraine inevitable? 

 I don't think the invasion was inevitable as it was decisions to be made and given how things have turned out. Perhaps if they'd thought further ahead they wouldn't have bothered because they would have seen that they were getting into a greater difficulty than they would have imagined. I think the problem lies in the difficulty of Putin thinking of Ukraine as an independent state with its own identity, with a strong government and a strong society that would not crumble at the first push. And the issue obviously goes back to 1991, to the break of the Soviet Union to the color revolutions and then to 2014. And I think once Russia had taken Crimea and sort of got away with it, it probably thought it could get away with similar things in the future. But I think part of the problem lay in the messy situations left in Donetsk and Luhansk which I and others thought were things that the Russians could live with almost indefinitely but Putin appears to have decided that he wanted to bring them to a head and saw them out once and for all. So it's a combination of an arrogance on Russia's part in terms of how they viewed Ukraine and Ukraine's ability to resist, which is key, combined with a frustration that he hadn't quite got his way in eastern Ukraine in 2014-15.

Putin made a lot of mistakes in Ukraine starting from February and  a lot of failures, and if he has learned from these mistakes, what can the battlefield look like in the coming weeks or months?

I think Putin and Russia's basic problem is that they lost the chance to win a regular war on the battlefield with different tactics. They might have been able to make the sort of gains thereafter now in the early weeks of the war but they tried to do too much and failed. Then they used to put an awful lot of men and equipment in the summer onto Donetsk and they just ran out of people. Essentially the mobilization provides only limited help on that. And they're having to use old stocks while Ukraine, as we know, has been strengthened, has a stronger motivation, because people understand why they're fighting and has been getting modern Western equipment that has made a real difference. So I think the stage we've reached is that Russia is rather desperate to hold the line, to hold back Ukrainian advances, enhance people and try to make some progress themselves in Donetsk. We know all that but this is now being combined with a rather ferocious campaign to undermine the will of the Ukrainian people by attacks on your infrastructure in residential areas and so on and this has been there right from the start again, as you all well know. But I think everything at the moment is more desperate from the Russian side and that means they're moving to more extreme measures trying  to change things around. I don't think they'll succeed in the sense that they want to succeed on either side but again I don't need to tell you that they can still cause a lot of pain in the process.

Do you see personally at least some logic in what Putin is doing right now in Ukraine?

There's a sort of logic. The most logical thing to do would be to accept that he's not going to be able to conquer Ukraine and

subjugate Ukraine because whatever happens now that's not possible, I mean the anger amongst the Ukrainian people and their willingness to resist is fair and very high, so he'd be looking for a way out. But that's obviously a big blow to him and he doesn't want to do it. I think he's thrown everything at the war over the last month, everything available, short of nuclear weapons. We have to realize what nuclear weapons allowed Putin to do was give him a sort of impunity to act below the nuclear threshold in the way that he's been acting. This is sort of logic in it, but it is based on a sort of bullying assumption that everybody can be coerced into giving up on things that matter to them if you hit them hard enough. That's what he's still trying to do.

Do you think he will be able to press the nuclear button someday?

 On the nuclear side, you have to realize that Putin uses nuclear weapons now. He uses it as a deterrent to NATO. So if we didn't have it refreshed, it wasn't a nuclear power, this could be like Iraq in 1991, when it invaded Kuwait and the US and its

allies immediately came in to defend Saudi Arabia that are meant to liberate Kuwait. And this could have happened this time but it didn't because the Western countries don't want a nuclear war. So Putin is using nuclear weapons in that way. He's done crazy things, so he may do crazy things in the future, which is why nobody quite goes to say there's no chance of nuclear weapons being used but they don't really help him at the moment. I think what's important to realize is that as things stand they give him a sort of cover while he follows the strategies that he's following. You don't need nuclear weapons to cause hurt, and they're actually quite difficult to use on the battlefield and the risk is of course as with other Russian equipment that it wouldn't turn out to be very good, that it would flop, that they wouldn't explode or Ukrainian forces would shoot them down and they'd land in the wrong place. Therefore, I don't think it works for Putin particularly well to use nuclear weapons, but it's Putin so nobody's going to say he definitely won't.

Well I hope he will not do it. We are hearing, Mr. Freedman, about Russian and Belorussian troops assembling in Belarus, not far from the Ukrainian border. Is an attack from Belarus still possible at this point of time? What do you think? 

It is but I'd be very surprised. I think the advantage for Russia in what we're doing in Belarus is to tie up Ukrainian forces so they have to be in the position just in case, and that suits them fine. I think for Belarus, for president Lukashenko it would be a big risk, it'd be very unpopular amongst his people, actually probably amongst his army as well. And they could soon get bogged down, especially if the weather gets more wet. So  I'd be surprised, I can see why, again in this basic spirit of Putin throwing everything he can at the problem, at the moment he might be tempted to do so but like so many of these moves, it could quite badly backfire.  Lukashenko knows that at the moment he's in a pretty vulnerable position and if he attaches himself even more to Putin, that vulnerability could grow. But it does keep Ukrainian forces having to be in position just in case.

Mr. Friedman, can Putin change the current world order right now? 

I think  the Russians are very keen that everybody sees them as a great power and that they act as a great power but they're not a great power anymore. They've got nuclear weapons, they've got a veto on the Security Council, but the net result of what's happened so far is they've diminished themselves militarily. Their army has been very badly mauled, they've lost a lot of their officer corps, as well as a lot of reputation, they've lost a lot of kids (Kit?)). So compared with China, which is very much a great power at the moment and poses real challenges to the West, Putin as I think turned Russia into an isolated pariah. It'll be economically weaker, so in that sense the world order just does change because Russia slides down. 

Has diplomacy any chance to work right now and to end this war? 

There'll be a lot of effort to make diplomacy work. There're lots of people who were talking about  being a would-be

mediator and so on. I find it difficult because Ukraine is clearly not going to concede any of its territory. And Putin is claiming for extra provinces that he doesn't even control all the territory on maps,  who actually wants Ukraine to give Russia a language and it's already liberated. There are issues that can be discussed. My own view is that there will come a point

if in the land war where the Russian military could well think its position is untenable. The approach I would take would be to encourage, not now but at a later date military to military talks to arrange a ceasefire but not a ceasefire that leaves Russian troops on Ukrainian territory,  it’s a ceasefire where Ukraine says we won't fire while you withdraw. And then later

on there's so many issues that will need to be addressed in a sort of proper peace conference, where you're offering Russia

easing economic sanctions but in return you've got to address issues like reparations, war crimes, all those have been abducted, neutrality and security guarantees, demarcating all the borders so that they're properly agreed in treaty language again. All of those things, I think it's just very complicated if you try to address all of those issues. The war will go on, because they'll just take a long time to implement. So you need to get Russian troops out of Ukraine first, and you can make that easier by offering ceasefires. I think more will have to happen on the ground. Before that happens, the issue of Crimea will loom large. I know the Ukrainian position and fully sympathize with it, and I think if Russia isn't able to make a serious offer on the rest of the fight, then Ukraine will have every incentive just to keep on pushing to take Crimea as well. As a matter of practice the Americans and others will be very worried about pushing too hard there. And it's difficult and it just militarily is much more difficult. I think Crimea could come into play but I can understand very well why encouraging that thought at the moment. 

 Putin is trying to do different things in Ukraine. As you've already mentioned about this but is this his strategy or he does not have any strategy at all?

I think he's throwing everything at the problem and that's his strategy. You name it, and he's done it in a way. He's now declared martial law, he's mobilized, he's made nuclear threats, he's attacking your infrastructure, attacking civilian populations. They're pushing men into the fight as much as they can to hold back Ukrainian advances. They just try to do everything at the moment. And there comes a point where that just hasn't worked. I'm worried as I'm sure you all are but by the sort of things that could be done with this person and so on, but I don't see any of this as a war-winning strategy. It's retributed  but it doesn't actually bring Ukraine to capitulate which is what a good strategy for him would mean.  And that's what he's trying to do, I don't think he will succeed.The question is at what point he realizes it's not likely to succeed and all people around him or people in a position to push him aside. That's what we keep on waiting for.

Will there be Putin in Russia after Ukraine wins this war?

I don't know, I think Putin has gambled enormously. The damage he's done to Russia is exactly the damage he's done to Ukraine. It's enormous. Russia hasn't had the same sort of attacks on its territory but it's lost tens and tens of thousands of people, its economy will be in a bad way and obviously Ukraine’s  too but Ukraine will have the chance to recover and reconstruct with external help. Nobody's going to particularly be helping Russia. And while Putin is there, he'll be a pariah. It’s very hard to repair relations with the rest of the world. So one would hope that he'll go. I know lots of Russian experts, none of them have got a clear scenario as to how this might happen and how it might be done. In our countries if you make mistakes like this, you would expect to be pushed out. The UK can be pushed out for far or less. But it is a dictatorship and he's got control of the security forces, so we'll see. I think it could be very convulsive for Russia. Lots of issues that have been

suppressed over the past decade or so could rush to the fore if Putin isn't careful, which is another reason why I think there'll be quite a lot of pressure on him to try to find a way out if the current measures don't succeed. 

Who is Putin?

Who? He's basically a spy, clearly he's not a military man. The things that he's done, people with who follow military strategy wouldn't do this. He's got a spy's view that you can manipulate people's perceptions and understanding of the world. That you can lie and everybody knows you're lying. He knows people know that he's lying but he feels he can get away with it. He’s somebody who's ideologically now quite driven. I don't mean this makes sense to the national issue that what he says about Ukraine and its proper links with Russia. And the history doesn't matter to him. It's a sort of ultranationalist agenda as well reinforced by the FSB people around him. It's a very dangerous ideology and it's bound up now with this conviction that he can always get his way, that his will will always prevail. He's shocked by finding a country that won't bend to his will. That's why I think he's struggling to find a way out. There are other people in his position that would be quite clever in declaring victory and walking away, but he doesn't even know how to do that. He’s somebody who's lived now for quite a long time in a world of his own construction, in  some make-believe world, which doesn't accurately reflect reality uh but leads him throughout the way that he does.