- For centuries, the Ukraine has been part
of what Russians call 'the Motherland.'
- 'Crowds below cheering as the blue and yellow
banner of independent Ukraine was hoisted.'
- I was there for Ukraine's first day of independence,
their (speaking Ukrainian)
or (speaking Russian) in Russian.
There was an extraordinary outburst of emotion
from Ukrainians and Russians, and Russian-Ukrainians,
half and half, that were out on the street,
and the flags being waved and the extraordinary feeling
that they were giving birth to an independent nation
that was rising from the ashes of a failed empire.
And now of course, these two peoples
are at war with each other, and that's where we are today.
And I think that the inability to bring this war to a close
anytime in the foreseeable future
is going to be driven in large part
by both the shared history and how closely connected
they were; leading to the war crimes
Ukraine is going through right now.
This is much deeper than just,
'Let's figure out how we can get both sides to get along.'
I'm Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group,
and I just wrote the book, "The Power of Crisis."
So I started my Ph.D. back in 1989.
And there's no question that if you were
thinking about the world as a political scientist,
you were thinking about the Soviet Union.
In the former Soviet Union,
there were 15 Soviet Socialist Republics.
And they all had political
and cultural and social institutions.
The Soviet Union was meant to be this crucible
of all of these national differences.
I referred to this as 'Matryoshka nationalism,'
the nesting dolls, where you have ethnic groups
and territories that are aligned with them
inside other ethnic groups and territories.
So you've got the Soviet Union, and inside the Soviet Union,
you have the 15 republics, then inside those republics,
you have autonomous regions and autonomous areas.
And so as a consequence, even though the Russians
and the Ukrainians felt very fraternal and connected,
there was a different Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
to the Russian Socialist Republic.
And interestingly, when Stalin
was the Commissar of Nationalities, he was very involved
in not only creating a lot of these territories,
but also moving people around.
This brought Russians into these territories
to ensure that if the Soviet Union ever fell apart,
that there were these tripwires
that would actually create massive confrontation
that would help to ensure that the Soviet Union
couldn't actually implode.
- 'Mr. Gorbachev wants to bring
the Communist party up to date.
Its old fashioned methods are blocking his reforms
at home and abroad.'
- When Gorbachev became General Secretary,
he fundamentally unwound the power
that connected these people in what Putin refers to as
'The Greatest Geopolitical Catastrophe of the 20th Century.'
There were three different manifestations:
First, 'Perestroika,' he said,
"I'm going to economically reform
so the money that you make isn't coming from the government.
You can have your own independent enterprises.
Secondly, we're going to have 'Glasnost.'
You're gonna be able to write and say what you want.
And then we're gonna do something called 'Khozraschyot,'
which is self-accounting."
And that is decentralization of power.
And what does that mean?
It means in very short order, the Soviet Union implodes,
but it implodes precisely
because of ethnic and national animus.
It's primarily 15 different nations
that want independence for their countries,
which already have the political
and the institutional framework ready-made.
All you needed to do was get rid of the top doll
in the Matryoshka, and the other Matryoshkas all pop up.
- 'Regimes in communist countries
have been quietly or not quietly,
like in Romania, washed out by the people—
we used so many times to say that power
is in the hands of the people.
When it finally happened, everybody is surprised.'
- 'The roadblock now sports Russian flags.
President Putin has said there should be no more violence,
but it feels as if Crimea is being annexed day by day.'
- The history of Russia, Crimea, Ukraine,
Russians in Ukraine, on the one hand,
wasn't such a big deal when the Soviet Union was together.
But when Ukraine became independent
and Russia became independent,
suddenly you did have
these historical claims on territory
that were going to become more challenging.
And as you see the Russians saying, "We want the Donbas!"
And "Acts of genocide are being committed against Russians."
Which is not actually happening, but was the justification
for them to make the invasion on February 24th.
You see so much
of these decades and centuries of history.
Eurasia Group puts top risks out every year
about what we think the things that are going to go
bump in the night will be over the course
of the coming 12 months.
We've done it for a long time,
we leave it on our homepage for the whole year.
At the beginning of 2022, we put this out,
and Russia is, I think, number five.
And that's because we are pretty convinced
that Russia is gonna head towards
greater conflict with Ukraine,
but it would've been number one, if I was convinced
that Putin was going to invade Ukraine fully,
and remove or attempt to remove
President Zelensky from power.
I did not believe that.
And I'll tell you one reason I didn't believe that
is because Putin only had 180,000 troops
that were arrayed on Ukraine's border.
And no, I didn't believe that this was only
a training exercise, you don't take the Russians
at face value when they say this sort of thing.
But it was also clear that a total number of 180,000 troops
is fewer than the Ukrainian army.
I mean that invasion is sort of 0.8 to 1.
Anybody that's ever played Risk understands
that you have an advantage holding territory.
But Putin instead decided, "No, I think that Biden's weak.
I think Macron is going his own way.
I know Merkel's gone.
And this new chancellor, Olaf Scholz,
from the Social Democratic Party,
those are the ones that like to work with the Russians.
It's wintertime, right? They all need my gas.
I've got maximum influence right now.
We saw what happened with Afghanistan.
When I met with Biden a year ago in Switzerland,
he didn't even bring up Ukraine.
It was all about cyber.
I told my guys to stop, so we're good over there.
They wanna pivot to Asia, they're focused on China,
meanwhile, Xi Jinping's just said I'm his best friend.
Friends without limits globally, it's all working.
So, I have a unique opportunity to invade Ukraine,
remove Zelensky, and furthermore,
I can actually undo the biggest humiliation
in Russian history.
I can recreate the Russian Empire:
Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia together."
That's what he believed.
And it was the single biggest geopolitical mistake
made by any leader on the global stage
since the Wall came down in 1989.
The misjudgment was massive.
The failure was immense and immediate,
and the consequences for Putin and for Russia
will be permanent.
- 'The sweeping Western sanctions
are designed to inflict maximum pain
on the country's economy by expelling it from global markets
and freezing assets around the world.'
- I think people aren't yet looking
at the level of degradation that the Russian economy
is going to experience for years.
Their infrastructure and their trade
has been built towards Europe.
So the fact that Europe is going away
as an interlocutor for Russia
is enormously important.
I mean, this year you'll see a 10 to 15% contraction
of the Russian GDP.
The investors from the West into Russia are gone,
they're not coming back.
Once the Europeans no longer need energy from Russia—
which is largely already true for coal—
it will be almost completely true of oil
by the end of 2022, this year.
It will be mostly true for gas by the end of 2023,
next year by winter.
That's not coming back.
And the Russians are going to be angry domestically.
But they're also gonna be angry externally.
And so far, most of our focus has been
the Russian war in Ukraine.
But going forward, we're gonna broaden that aperture.
We'll broaden the aperture because, of course,
it's going to affect global food prices and energy prices,
and people will suffer,
particularly, in the developing world.
But also we're gonna broaden the aperture
because that fight is going to be much more
about Russia versus NATO.
And so far, we have not seen much of that.
Nobody wants a global crisis,
and least of all the Ukrainians,
when we talk about this war.
We've discussed how devastating it has been, is,
and will be for the Ukrainian population, 44 million people.
Every one of them with multiple stories
of suffering and tragedy, every single one.
And yet, we in the West have watched for decades
as NATO has eroded to the point
that Trump could call it "obsolete,"
Macron could call it "brain-dead."
We have watched as the Europeans have been unwilling
to spend on national security to care
about their own defense.
We have watched as the Americans
have become more indifferent to the Transatlantic Alliance,
and instead, the pivot to Asia.
China is going be the largest economy in the world
likely by the end of this decade.
They are in no hurry.
The 21st century has had a geopolitical order
that has been increasingly failed.
The leadership has been fractious,
has not been trusted, has been polarized.
And as much as administrations
from Obama to Trump to Biden
have tried to address that, they have failed,
until Putin invaded Ukraine.
And that decision of Putin to create a global crisis
was precisely what was necessary to make NATO
an institution that could be reformed and revived.
It was precisely what was necessary to bring the Finns
and the Swedes into that organization—
something they never would've done
if it weren't for the invasions.
Precisely what was necessary to get the Germans to say,
"We're gonna spend 2% of our GDP on defense going forward,
and we're going to change the way we think about our polity,
so that yes, we will play a role in international leadership
to support the Ukrainians,
something we wouldn't have done before."
The Poles, who themselves were saying, "Well,
we're not so sure about this European Union."
Now they're hosting 3 million Ukrainian refugees,
they think Europe needs to be stronger,
they need common defense.
This is precisely the "kick in the ass"
that the West required to pay attention to the fact
that its institutions were becoming less relevant
and less effective for decades.
And what we learn in an environment
of what I call a 'geopolitical recession'—
in a world where institutions
are increasingly misaligned with the balance of power,
and no one's doing anything about it—
is that you require a crisis to create the seeds
for a new global order.
And from these crises, a new global order will emerge.