As Ukraine considers the “politically loaded” question of whether to lower the age of military mobilization, Putin increasingly sees the war “not just as a land grab, but as a civilizational battle between Russia and the West,” says USIP’s Donald Jensen, adding: “We should not think that the war is anything close to being settled.”
U.S. Institute of Peace experts discuss the latest foreign policy issues from around the world in On Peace, a brief weekly collaboration with SiriusXM's POTUS Channel 124.
Transcript
Nayyera Haq: I’m joined now by Don Jensen of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He's a Russia and Europe senior advisor. Thank you for joining me, Don.
Donald Jensen: Thank you. Good morning and happy holidays.
Nayyera Haq: Oh, happy holidays. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, all of the things. Maybe we'll throw in a little Festivus this week as well. Putin has been certainly addressing, his own challenges with some spin. The Russian army at the moment, is largely conscripts. They've had to hire folks from North Korea to come in, many generals lost in this war, yet he continues. What is his incentive to continue the war in Ukraine when it is costing him so much domestically and globally?
Donald Jensen: That is the core question. His basic incentive is to stay in power, and, secondly, to make Russia a superpower which it thinks, a status it thinks has been snatched and stolen away from Russia by the West, and he is going to do anything he can to win, anything he can to achieve those goals. So, when people talk in Italy or Brussels wherever, about negotiations, we have to understand that Putin thinks of negotiations as many Russians do, in a very different way than we do in the West. This is what they call disinformation. This is an opportunity for the Kremlin to maneuver western public opinion to undercut the support that's been very impressive for Ukraine. So again, when you talk about negotiations and Putin gives mixed messages on it, this is not the way we think about those same processes. We have to keep that in mind, because it's very dangerous.
Nayyera Haq: And when you look at the engagement then with Ukraine, what? What does the continued U.S. financial support mean to the people of Ukraine.
Donald Jensen: Oh, it means a huge amount. The Ukrainians are grateful to the support that we've given. They're very grateful for the support that the European Union and NATO has given. But they are also dependent on it. They are now planning on developing their military arms industry and all these other responses that can help sustain the war effort, but they're running out of men. That's a country that's while large, is smaller than Russia, and a central issue now on the Ukrainian scene is, do we mobilize more young men to fight the war? And they’re talking about lowering the age boundary to 18 and so forth. But this is a very politically loaded question, because the Ukrainians have suffered so much. So Ukraine is going to go forward and frankly, in my own view, knowing a lot of Ukrainian officials, is that the people are going to fight no matter what the West does, and they're going to fight, whether it's guerrilla warfare, they're going to fight. Frankly, Zelenskyy has even talked about developing their own nuclear force. So we should not think, I firmly believe that the war is anything close to being settled. It might just evolve into different phases. I think that's the way we're really going to be headed the next year or two.
Nayyera Haq: Don talk to us about the challenge that we're seeing overall with, as you mentioned, dependency on the United States, certainly throughout the Middle East, and that was part of a U.S. strategy to maintain a foothold in the region. But once you maintain a foothold, you also maintain responsibility for what happens there.
Donald Jensen: You do. And I think the events, beginning with Afghanistan at the waning months of the Trump administration, and especially under Biden and all these other crises you correctly mentioned, are now piling up, whether it's Israel and Gaza, whether it's Iran. And what we're seeing, I think, is the shakiness of the international order that the U.S. and its Western allies have so carefully crafted since the end of World War II. The Russians, the Chinese routinely attacked the so-called rules-based international order, and when you chip away at it, wherever it might be, in South Asia or in Vietnam or in the Middle East, you're chipping away at that edifice and there's really nothing to replace it. It's the alternative to what we have, flawed as it is, it’s unknown and probably dangerous, and that seems to be where we're headed. And if I might add, it's driven by the so-called Axis of Upheaval, which is Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as you just mentioned, are increasingly working together to oppose the United States and the West. Frankly, because now Putin, especially Putin, sees the war in Ukraine, not just as a land grab by the Russian Empire. He sees it as a civilizational battle between Russia and the West, and he openly talks about destroying human rights wherever they are, wherever they occupy. And this is really a civilizational battle that far transcends really what's going on in Donbas or Kyiv or anyplace else in those war stories we see every day, tragic as they may be.