Russia’s war tactics in Ukraine are throwback to the Chechnyan war

Hari Sreenivasan:

The war in Ukraine is now entering its second month with no foreseeable end in sight. I recently spoke with Kimberly Marten, professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, about the current invasion and what can be gleaned from Russia's past aggressions.

Kimberly, are there some things maybe that we can learn from the past, let's start looking first at Chechnya and what happened there?

Kimberly Marten:

Well, in some sense, he's using some similar techniques in terms of targeting civilians. You know, what's really interesting is that Putin doesn't seem to have learned that targeting civilians doesn't work when you have a strong sense of nationalism. So that was certainly true in Afghanistan, right? It sort of caused people to really hate the invader.

And what really makes that surprising is that his own family went through the siege of Leningrad back in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. And so you would have thought that he would not have tried siege tactics himself in Ukraine, but we see that that's what he's doing.

Hari Sreenivasan:

What is the core difference between what happened in Crimea? I mean, in a way, it almost seems like he expected that to be what happened with Ukraine.

Kimberly Marten:

So Crimea was almost bloodless. There were a few people who were killed, but basically it was done sneakily by a small group of people. Russia did not admit to having done it at the time. At the time, they said, oh, it was just people defending their neighborhoods and they bought their army uniforms in surplus shops.

And then a couple of years later, Putin admitted that it was actually agents that came from the Russian military intelligence service. But it was a very different kind of operation than a full scale, full blown with hundreds of thousands of troops military invasion.

Hari Sreenivasan:

In Russia right now, there are still millions of people who stand with Putin, but there are, at least we are seeing indications of people on the streets protesting and saying, we're not for this war.

Kimberly Marten:

I think part of the reason is that there are long connections between the Russian people and the Ukrainian people. And so there's a sense of these are not our enemy, these are our brethren. What in the world are we doing here? There are family connections between the two. And the other thing is that there are Russian troops that are dying in the field and we don't have exact numbers, but we think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 troops that have died in the last month.

And you know, that's not going to affect every family, but it's going to affect a certain number of families, especially since many of those troops are conscripts. We're seeing a full scale war that's involving lots of Russian troops that are being killed and are being wounded. And so it's very different from what he's done before, except in Chechnya. I mean, it's similar to what he did in Chechnya.

Hari Sreenivasan:

On the one hand, he has managed to unite an enormous portion, the majority of the world against him. Yet India and China, who are not on board with what he's doing per se, but they're not standing strongly against him. And those are two very important countries with significant resources. Not that they might send troops and tanks to him, but that they might not ice him out.

Kimberly Marten:

You know what I would recommend that we do is rather than paying attention to what these countries say and the rhetoric that they use to pay attention to the actions that they take. And it will surprise me a lot if China goes against the sanctions regime because we know in 2014 they did not. Chinese state owned corporations and Chinese state owned banks rely so much on the Western market and on banks that have an influence coming from the U.S. banking system that they did not violate those sanctions.

So it will be a real surprise if even countries that do not say that they are observing the sanctions go against them because of that possibility of secondary sanctions and the strength of the U.S. banking system.

Hari Sreenivasan:

At the current pace, where do you see this going in a few weeks or a few months?

Kimberly Marten:

Unfortunately, where I think most experts see it heading is a stalemate, a very hurting stalemate. I don't think Putin can stand to lose. And so I don't think he can give up without having something that he can call a win.

And at this point, I don't think it's clear what any kind of a negotiated settlement would look like that would be politically possible for both sides to agree to. So unfortunately, it looks like a really bad situation going ahead for the foreseeable future.

Hari Sreenivasan:

Kimberly Marten, Professor of Political Science at Barnard College and Columbia University. Thanks so much for joining us.

Kimberly Marten:

Thank you, Hari.