University Place  Yoshiko Hererra, et al Ukraine, Russia and the International Response  March 10, 2014 UP993   cc >> My name is Yoshiko Herrera. I'm the director of the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia here at UW Madison, and I'm very delighted to have a faculty panel of experts drawing on our expertise on campus from a number of different departments. So what we're going to do is have each speaker speak for about 10 minutes, and then we'll have plenty of time for discussion afterward. I'll introduce all the speakers now but also individually by name before they speak. So just to my right here is Professor Ted Gerber from the sociology department, Professor Dave McDonald from the history department, Professor Scott Gehlbach from political science, and also Professor Andrew Kydd from political science. We're going to start with some history, so we'll start with Professor Dave McDonald from the history department. Thank you. >> Thank you, Yo, and thank you, everybody, for coming out. It's been a long time since our field was acutely relevant. [LAUGHTER] Now, I have the unenviable grief of talking about the historical framing of the current situation in Ukraine, Crimea, Russia in 10 minutes, which this is a 350-year-old story so instead of taking you blow by blow through this story, let me talk about some ways of understanding how this society is held, I'm going to be talking primarily about Ukraine, how this society is held together and the forces that are creating the fissures that we're seeing played out on the streets not only in Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kiev but also in cities all around, especially the south and east of the country. 

And what I would suggest is one way of thinking of about it is in 1991, in late fall, is probably the coup de grace for the old USSR, Ukraine, then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, holds a referendum on whether or not the citizens in the republic want to remain part of the USSR. 84% of the eligible electorate turns out to vote, and 91% votes in support of Ukraine going its own way. A vote that was upwards of 70% in the so-called Russian south and eastern provinces and verging towards near anonymity in the far west. Over the last two weeks, and including during the events on the Maidan, we have actually heard the articulation of, I could name 10 or 12 understandings of Ukraine is, what the nation is, what its historical destiny is, and I think we've got to keep in mind these deep divisions within the society as we try to explain to ourselves or understand what could be happening going forward. So the two ways I'm going to ask you to think about it is in terms of two axes of historical experience and tradition. And one of these is vertical, which tends to divide the country or the society regionally. The other, however, is horizontal and is generational, and this explains why we see such surprising, in some contexts, demonstrations of pro-Ukrainian support in places like Poltava and Kharkiv and even Donetsk. What are these vertical experiences that I'm talking about? Ukraine as an entity didn't really come into stable existence until the end of the empire, the early 1920s, and its stable existence is really as a result of an act by what became the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And even that Ukraine was only about two-thirds of the Ukraine that we see up here on the map. And territories we call Ukraine came under Russian orbit starting 360 years ago in a variety of chunks. 

The central provinces around Kiev entered Muscovy in 1654. The south and the west traditionally was piecemeal into the empire in the 17th and 18th centuries. Crimea only in the 18th century, and the far west, those provinces that look very beige, those provinces were part of Poland and then part of the Austrian Empire from the 1770s until 1939 to 1941 when they became part of the Soviet Union as one of the consequences of the Nazi-Soviet pact and then the Nazi-Soviet conflict during World War II. Each of these areas had a very different experience in terms of the ethnicity of the elites that were indigenous, the nobilities for a large part, the dominant religion. The provinces in the beige part tend to adhere to a form of Catholicism that honors Slavonic liturgy, whereas the other provinces tend to be Orthodox. Also, the very different experience of Soviet rule and of Russian rule. The western provinces had not really existed as part of a Russian or Soviet polity since the 1770s and a much different experience of the rule of law of the participation of the state, which was only partial as well. But there's one group we don't see represented here that is also very important and has not received a lot of coverage, and that's a huge diaspora. A diaspora which is of Ukrainians who kept alive an idea of the nation in exile. It actually goes in stages from the early 18th century to the DPs after World War II. 

I'm from part of Canada, for instance, where in my province the population traces their grandparents to these western provinces. And these people also have played a very important role in defining a certain vision of Ukraine and Ukrainian --. So that's very quickly the vertical axis. The horizontal, the generational one, really depends on what and when did you experience Soviet rule and under what circumstances. People, from the polls that I've seen, people in their 20s to their mid-30s tend to have, or mid-20s to 40s, have a much more positive association with Ukraine than they do with the old Soviet Union. Older people tend to be nostalgic for what they will call the order of Soviet life. One might say predictability. It's a nostalgia that's colored, as nostalgia is, by a filtered sense of experience. Now, all of these differences have been filtered and turned through the last 20 years by the experience of a frail to nonexistent state. A state that really became a battleground or a trough contested over by intending cliques of people who we've come to call oligarchs. 

Some leftover from the old party elite, some who made quick fortunes in the equally, how can I put it, predatory privatization of the 1990s. And they have played their own role in mobilizing their own constituencies in the street but also in the government, but there really doesn't seem to be a functional state now, of course, above all in this fragile post-revolutionary situation. The Ukraine also seems to lack any unifying or universally compelling symbols of nationhood and statehood. The constitution has been amended and altered, what, three times since 1991, and everybody alters as it will including the people that came in power after the Orange Revolution. And so this is seen, there's an old Russian proverb: the law is like a yoke, like an oxen's yoke, you steer it in the direction you'd like it to go. So there's sense of inter mentality that even the most politically cynical in more traditionally constitutional countries seem reluctant to tread. You don't have a strong culture of compromise. What we see are these very harshly contending visions of nationhood framed at different times under different circumstances, whether in the 19th century, in exile in the 1930s, in immigration in the 1960s, a lot of this content seems to be mutually exclusive. And in terms of the state, we don't seem to have an administrative elite with the skills and the political acumen to operate professionally. We don't have an elite that does not trace its experience to service in the old party state. 

Now, for better or worse, underlying all of this and inflecting all understandings of the nation, of civil society, of the state, is each group's understanding of the dominate relationship in the Ukrainian experience is what is Ukraine to Russia and what's Russia to Ukraine. It's a highly, what people would call a highly relational concept of what the nation is, and it's probably national identity articulation that you can recognize in a lot of what I call cadet or sub-altered states. Ukraine to Russia, Belgium to the Netherlands, Norway to Sweden or Denmark, Canada towards the United States, and New Zealand towards Australia just to name the most obvious. And this is a really central issue that is running like a red thread through all of Ukrainian politics right now. What we do have, interestingly, and it's a problem, I study the late empire, it's a problem that a lot of the intellectuals who interest me recognize in late imperial Russian society was you have a vibrant civil society, which we've seen now twice in action in Ukraine, in the Orange Revolution in 2004 and then in the events of the last three months, a flourishing or vital if not an always focused civil society that seems unable to negotiate either the existence of its own state or relationship with the existing state that would domesticate it and make it accurately reflect, to use their terminology, the will of the people. We also have, undercutting this, whole Soviet critical notions about the state as an enterprise. That the state is still seen by these people as something exogenous to them, something that acts on them. And therefore, as we move ahead, right now we're really preoccupied by the showdown over Crimea, and I'm happy to talk about that in the discussion part of it, but really to my mind what's the critical problem as events develop is what kind of Ukraine is going to emerge out of this. Okay, 11 minutes. Sorry, Yo. 

>> Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. So next we have Professor Scott Gehlbach from political science. >> Okay, thanks. We have slides that we're going to put up on the screen here. Can you press control L?  Okay, so what I want to focus my remarks on is the political context in which the events in Ukraine are playing out, and in particular the divided society or diverse, let's say, society in Ukraine, which David has spoken to a bit already, and the way that that impacts governance given the existing constitutional structure in Ukraine, which I'll argue is very poorly suited for dealing with problems of governance in a country as diverse as Ukraine is and also has some other pathologies which I will discuss. So if we take a look at the slide up here, David has already walked us through briefly the evolution of Ukraine as an entity. One consequence of the fact that Ukraine is essentially cobbled together from pieces of territory with different historical trajectories is that you have very different identifications in different parts of the country with respect to whether people call themselves Ukrainian or call themselves Russian. So, generally speaking, the further east you go or the further south you go, the more likely people are to self-identify as Russian. So these are data from the 2000 Ukrainian census. 

We see really only in Crimea do a majority of respondents in that census self-identify as Russian. So even in other parts, even in eastern Ukraine, which has been much of the focus of potential secessionist pressure, possibly Russian military activity, even there you don't see a majority of respondents self-identifying as Russian. If you take a look, however, at the proportion of individuals who describe Russian as their mother tongue, there we see substantially large percentage of respondents in the east who fall into that category. So clear majorities not only in Crimea but also in Donetsk, Lugansk, and some other parts of eastern Ukraine. And so one consequence of this divide which is reflected in people's self-identified ethnicity and reflected in their language practices is a difference across regions in Ukraine in fundamental political attitudes and how those play out in terms of political behavior. Just take a look at voting in the 2004 presidential election, for example. We see Yanukovych receiving clear majority of the vote in the eastern part of the country, very little of the vote in the western parts of the country. We compare, for example, the Galatian regions in the far west. So these were the regions that did not become part of the Ukraine until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. Yanukovych is receiving well under 10% of the vote in those regions and in excess of 90% of the vote in eastern Ukraine and in Crimea. 

And this is a political gradient that persists over time. You take a look at the 2010 presidential election, you see a very similar geographic distribution of votes. There's other work that's been done, quite interesting work, for example, by Leonid Peisakhin who is a PhD student at Yale who's currently at the Juan March Institute in Madrid. Leonid surveyed individuals on either side of the border that formally ran between the Habsburg Empire and the Russian Empire, individuals who live in villages literally just 30 kilometers apart from each other, and finds that these individuals have fundamentally different attitudes with respect to the Soviet paths, with respect to contemporary political preferences. Individuals who have lived in the same country for decades and yet are separated by a culture that has its roots in the fact that these were different entities, these were part of different entities up until the very recent past. So the bottom line is this is a very diverse, one might say divided, society, and what we might expect in a democracy with that sort of diversity would be a highly decentralized governance structure. So that is in fact what we see in many democracies in the world that exhibit this sort of diversity in terms of cultural backgrounds, political attitudes, but that's not what we see in Ukraine. So Ukraine, in contrast, has a highly centralized governance structure, governors are appointed by the president. They are routinely replaced any time a new president comes to power. Imagine, if you will, that if Obama, upon being elected president in 2008, had replaced every single one of the governors in all 50 states with democratic appointees, and then imagine, if you will, that Mitt Romney had won in 2012 and had replaced all 50 of those governors with republican appointees. 

This is what happens in Ukraine every time the presidency changes hands. So as a consequence, what you have is a winner takes all system in which it's difficult not to commit to take advantage of power once it's seized at the federal level. That whether somebody representing the west of the country or the east of the country is in power is enormously consequential for public policy as it's experienced at the local level. So this then creates pressure for secession. It allows for the pretense that Russia needs to intervene militarily on the principle that the current government in Kiev is not able to commit to the language rights and other interests of those in the eastern part of Ukraine. This is one major pathology of Ukraine's constitutional structure. There's another which is perhaps at least as important, which is that the fact that governors are directly appointed by the president rather than elected by voters means that they do not, the governorship does not serve as a springboard to national office the way that it does in countries where governors are directly elected. So governors are essentially politically appointed bureaucrats rather than politicians, and as such they do not become national candidates in the obvious way that popularly elected governors do. So, by way of example, just think about how many US cabinet secretaries are candidates for the presidency in either the democratic or the republican party in 2016. It's only one that I can think of. 

Sort of the exception that proves the rule, Hillary Clinton is a contender precisely because she was not only Secretary of State but because prior to that she'd been a popularly elected senator with a reputation for constituency service. So what this implies then is that Ukraine has a pool of national candidates today that looks very similar to the pool of national candidates 10 years ago. So Yanukovych was elected in 2010 even though everybody knew that he was a crook precisely because he was the only logical competitor to a candidate, Yulia Tymoshenko, who represented the west of the country. There was no new blood in the political elite from which to draw as an alternative to Tymoshenko or to Yanukovych. And if you take a look at the protests on the Maidan over the past few months, what you saw was essentially a leaderless movement in which there was nobody with national political authority who was able to grab the mantle of this movement and use it to steer things in a responsible direction. And so this then opens the door to demagogues who are worse. It creates the possibility that presidential elections later this year, parliamentary elections whenever they next happen to take place, will bring to power somebody who represents the worst impulses of Ukrainian political culture, which in turn then could create further pressure to secede by some regions in the country. So the bottom line is the constitutional structure in Ukraine is really poorly suited to the challenges that Ukraine faces. A very diverse country, a governance system that desperately needs new blood but that isn't creating it. Some sort of decentralized uniform has to be part of the solution. 

The question is really whether or not the genie is out of the bottle at this point. With Russian troops on the ground in Crimea, it's going to be possible to alter the constitutional structure in such a way as to allow for some better constitutional, some better system of governance that can properly decentralize authority to the local level and ensure the replacement of elites at the federal level. >> Thank you, Scott. We're going to turn now to my colleague and friend Ted Gerber from the sociology department, who's going to speak about the Russian domestic political context. We're moving from history of Ukraine, Ukrainian political context, Russian political context, and we'll end with the geopolitical context. >> Okay, thank you. So I will address the Russian domestic political context, in particular one might wonder, thinking about all this and thinking about the recent Russian actions of sending troops in aggressively to Crimea and making noises elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, what is motivating Vladimir Putin, what is motivating the Russian leadership to take such actions, particularly coming on the heels of a remarkably, and I would even say surprisingly, successful Olympics which really was something that the Russian government spent tremendous resources in order to build the reputation of Russia. Russia is back was clearly the message of the Olympics. They wanted the whole world to see how Russia was now a modern, successful, energetic state. And why throw that international glow, that international halo from the Olympics, why throw that away or at least risk it by this action which Putin had to know would lead to criticism from most corners of the international community. 

To understand why Putin would be so motivated, it's important to keep in mind that really his primary concern is not so much what he's thought of in the United States, in the EU, in Japan, China. His main concern is his domestic political standing, and he's really oriented towards the domestic political situation. And for quite some time, Putin has very successfully made the argument that Russians, so there are several reasons why Russians should support him and his regime. One is the successful economic growth, which Russia has enjoyed since he came to power in 2000. But another important, perhaps even more important trope or idea that Putin has put forth is that Russia is surrounded by enemies, and Russia has always been surrounded by enemies who are seeking to undermine Russia, and Putin's way of understanding and way of communicating about the situation that Russia finds itself in, vis a vis the west, is one where the west, which includes the United States but also the United States' allies in Europe, really is seeking to undermine Russia, to weaken Russia. The west wants Russia's oil. The west is afraid of Russia's global stature because the United States, in particular, wants to be the global hegemon, and Russia is the only country, not the only one but certainly a major one standing in the United States' way. So Putin has argued to the Russian public that he and his policies represent the best counter towards western aggression towards Russia. So many of the activities of the United States government and its allies across the world that in America we perceive, we have our own criticism of the United States government policy, but you wouldn't think that the reason why the United States invaded Iraq is to undermine Russia. The reason that the United States bombed Kosovo or bombed Serbia in 1999 as a result of the Kosovo conflict was to undermine Russia. 

That the reason why the United States opposes Assad and Syria is because we wanted weaken Russia. Well, this is sort of how these kinds of events are portrayed to the Russian public. Putin has been calculating that whatever happens with the economy, whatever happens with the political forms, the military forms, Russia has a lot of problems right now in terms of the economy, in terms of the dysfunction, the corruption in government circles, and Putin essentially has stoked fears of the west, on could say to put it crudely, in order to sort of distract the Russian public from those problems that they face in their daily lives and instead let them focus on the success of Putin and his colleagues in projecting more power and more strength against this apparent western encroachment. This strategy has worked, that there is a fair amount of evidence that Putin is quite popular. The opinion polls you hear about are not misleading. If you go to Russia to talk to people, there are a great many Russians who really do think highly of Putin. And I myself over the years have tried to understand what is it that makes Putin so popular to Russians. I do surveys but I've also done a lot of focus groups. The focus groups consistently, this particular theme, that Putin is a strong leader. He is capable to standing up to the west. 

Unlike Yeltsin, who sort of sold the store to these western governments and weakened our country, Putin is a force to be reckoned with, and he's going to show the west that Russia is indeed back on the world stage. So, fast forward then to the whole Maidan uprising or revolution or whatever you want to call it. So, Putin could not afford not to respond in some way given this rhetoric, given this idea that he's been cultivating for over a decade now, in fact, that the west is encroaching upon Russia. When you have this popular uprising that overthrows the Russian allied government of Yanukovych, this of course is the type of action that Putin, for his rhetoric, his own worldview, his own statements that he's made over the years suggests cannot be allowed to stand without some kind of response. So I think for Putin the only course of action, really, was to make a dramatic response to the popular uprising, and sending troops into Crimea was clearly the first, and hopefully the last but we don't know yet, there are many different scenarios that could play out, something we could probably discuss in the Q&A, but it was simply a response which make perfect logical sense from his perspective. Now I'm not saying that he had this all planned out. I think in all likelihood he was responding to events as they transpired. Maybe he hoped that Yanukovych would be able to control the situation. But once it became clear that that wasn't going to happen, if you sit in Putin's shoes and you think of it from his perspective, sending troops into Crimea is a rational and perfectly understandable response. There are other aspects of this as well. 

So Putin has been troubled with this pesky opposition which was embolden by the protest movement following the reports of fraud after the 2011 Duma elections and surrounding then the 2012 presidential elections. So there was a slight movement prior to the Olympics, as one would expect, of loosening of the screws so to speak, where some political prisoners were freed, where there was happy talk about human rights. Well, all that is going to come to an end and this campaign in Crimea over in Ukraine with the Russian actions, whatever you want to call it, I'm not even sure how we can talk about it in a way that's not going to piss somebody off... [LAUGHTER] But he's certainly already using this as a pretext. Not just him but other forces in Russian society who are the law and order types who like to continue the crackdown on civil society, continue the crackdown on the free media, and in fact extend the crackdown. For a great personal concern of mine and I'm sure my colleagues, it looks like there's a lot of evidence that in the recent days the attack on NGOs and so forth who are deemed to be traitors or undermine the Russian government's security interests, this has spread to academics. And now there's been a series of papers or reports produced by government sponsored think tanks in Russia, there have been Russian websites that have come up with lists of traitors, talking about the traitors' organizations who are betraying the national interest, and some of the very institutions which provide some of us with a lot of hope, among whom we have colleagues working in Russia who are struggling to develop an independent academic tradition of social science research, historical research, political research, they find themselves now under severe attack. And one of my concerns about this whole situation, of course I'm concerned about what's going to happen in Ukraine, I have plenty of friends and colleagues and contacts there too, but I think that the consequences for the Russian domestic political situation are also quite frightening and chilling. And we probably will see an escalation of the crackdown on civil society, on academics, on free media that is part and parcel of this whole one might say securitization of Russian government policy. Will this work, is sort of the question. 

This kind of strategy, using foreign threat, using foreign conflict as a way to sort of distract populations from domestic problems, and there are, Russian economy's growth is anemic, it's, what, under 2% in the last year, Scott? There's no real signs of reform. None of the Russian economists have any ideas. They can't even make up scenarios where it's going to get better. Everyone knows it's going to worsen. The political situation remains bad in the sense that the government institutions are quite dysfunctional, people are unhappy, there's widespread perceptions of corruption. So will this strategy actually work of diverting attention from the problems within Russia to sort of stoke this nationalist pride, stoke this fear of the west? So far the initial survey results are somewhat mixed. It does seem to be, my reading of the various polls that come out is that by and large the Russian public does tend to support Russia's incursion, if you will, into Ukraine. There is sort of a rally behind the flag effect. But these types of effects, they don't tend to last for very long. So right now the Russians may feel great, I'm speaking in sweeping terms here, there's a lot of diversity of opinion within Russia as well, but many Russians, I think, feel great about the fact that their government has shown itself to be strong, has shown it's not going to let the US sneak up right to its backyard without taking considerate action. 

But that's going to wear off after a few months, and so Putin is going to find himself again, I would predict, in a situation where he's going to worry that people are again focusing on the domestic issues which are going to be more painful for them, and I won't speak as well to his leadership. So the risk is that he'll have an incentive to escalate the crisis. That he'll find, it will end up in a dynamic where only further escalation, further confrontation, further turning of the screw at home, turning up the screws on the civil society at home, further conflict in international sphere will feed this cycle that he's invested in. So I am quite concerned that the domestic logic, the domestic political logic does not dictate for a quick solution to the international crisis that this has produced. And so I unfortunately have a rather grim mind and not very optimistic about developments in Russia. >> Great. Thank you, Ted. And finally, last but not least, Professor Andrew Kydd from political science. >> Thanks. I'm going to talk about the international aspect of things here. 

So Russia has invaded Ukraine and appears to be about to annex Crimea, at least that's what they seem to be getting prepared for with this referendum in Crimea. That's a violation of the UN Charter. That's because every member of the United Nations has the right to have its territorial integrity respected. And the Ukraine, interestingly, has been a member of the UN since 1945. Stalin saw to that. He wanted to get all of the 12 Soviet Socialist Republics as members of the UN, but we bargained him down to four, I think, and Ukraine is one of them. It's also a violation of the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons that it inherited when the Soviet Union split. It gave up its nuclear weapons to Russia for dismantling, and Russia, at that point, along with the other states, including the United States, pledged to honor Ukraine's territorial integrity. So that's obviously a violation there as well. It's unclear whether they've got plans for eastern Ukraine as well. 

Putin seems to be attempting to at least test the waters about whether there's any support for Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine. So, question number one is why invade, and question number two is what should the west do about it. So in terms of question number one, why did he do it, and we've already heard some analysis there in terms of Putin's domestic considerations. And I want to sort of build on that and also something that Scott said in terms of the domestic situation in the Ukraine. I think these things combined together to present what's called the window of opportunity. And windows of opportunity can be powerful forces in driving states to launch aggressive actions. If you look at Ukraine, Ukraine alternated back and forth between pro-western and pro-Russian forces ever since independence in 1991. The Orange Revolution in 2004 tilted the balance towards the west for a while. The election of Yanukovych in 2010 tilted it back towards the east or towards Russia for a while. And the 2014 uprising that overthrew Yanukovych promising to tilt Ukraine back to the west, and very sharply in this case, because Yanukovych, for all his faults, wasn't elected in an election that was not contested at the time, unlike the one that preceded the Orange Revolution. 

So it can be characterized and certainly has been characterized by the Russians quite loudly as anti-constitutional, as undemocratic, as overthrowing a democratically elected leader. And so that makes it look as if the western oriented Ukrainians are not respecting democratic procedures and not respecting the rights of the voters who voted for Yanukovych in the first place. So Putin faced this eminent prospect of losing influence in Ukraine. The Ukraine could move, and I'm speaking mostly on the international realm, we've already heard about the domestic ramifications for Putin, but internationally Ukraine could move towards the EU, which was the spark of the whole Maidan protest movement that Yanukovych refused to sign this agreement with the EU. Not a membership by any means but it's just leaning towards the EU. NATO in 2008 said that Ukraine could eventually join NATO. Western oriented Ukraine would probably want to head in that direction as well. For Putin, these would be very serious losses on the geopolitical stage. He views the struggle with the west as essentially zero sum or quite close to it. He views 1991 as a disaster which was brought about by weakness and naivete on the part of Russian leaders, particularly Gorbachev and Yeltsin. 

And he views his own rule as the savior of Russia and the rebuilder of Russia. The anti-Yeltsin, the anti-Gorbachev. The strong leader who will stand up to the west and is not hesitant, most particularly, to use force in order to stop adverse geopolitical events that benefit the west and harm Russia and his definition of Russian interests. And his definition of Russian interests encompasses maintaining what they call the -- within the Russian sphere of interest. That being the remnants of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, other than the Baltic states which had already gone to NATO. So clearly he's got to do something. He can't just take this lying down, right? So what is he going to do? One thing he could do is simply threaten to use force in order to negotiate some sort of deal with the Ukrainians. But we've already heard reason why that strategy doesn't work very well or why he might doubt the ability to use that strategy in this case. And this gets to the window of opportunity logic. That is, if you say we'll use force now to threaten the current Ukrainian leadership in Kiev, cut a deal with us so that you do not join NATO, you promised not to join NATO, you promised not to do other geopolitical things that we don't want, perhaps join the EU, remain within the western folds and in exchange we will let you keep your country essentially. 

The Ukrainians might temporarily sign up to that. They might buy that now because they're facing a moment of weakness. But the reality is that eventually this leadership in Ukraine, this regime in Ukraine based on the support of the western Ukrainians is going to consolidate its strength. In the near term it's going to consolidate its strength domestically by having more elections. In the long term it could consolidate its strength internationally by, again, moving towards the EU, moving towards the west, and possibly even moving into NATO. So any deal that's cut today in a moment of weakness with the Ukrainian regime, 10 years, even 20 years down the road is in danger of being overthrown by that regime or disregarded or reneged upon once they're in a position of strength and are able to do so. And Putin can see this. This is very clear. This is what happened to the other post-Soviet Republics in terms of the Baltic states. So you cannot negotiate with a regime that is going to grow stronger if you think that they are going to renege on that regime. 

It's much less valuable to do so. Hence, there is this incentive to try to salvage the situation in some other way, simply to act, simply to invade and seize what you want because you view that negotiations, even if they were successful in the short term, would ultimately lead you to lose the stakes that you have in situation because your adversary is going to grow stronger and eventually renege on the deal. So this may be part of what's driving Putin, giving him an incentive to act now rather than to be a bit more reasonable and rational and talk about it. So what should the west do? Oddly enough, before the intervention it's probably safe to say that most people didn't really know much about whether Crimea belonged to Ukraine or Russia or care much about whether Crimea belonged to Ukraine or Russia. If they had negotiated some sort of peaceful transfer, that probably would have been fine with most people. But now you can argue we've got a clear interest in preventing success of an outright act of aggression. Right? This harks back, of course, to 1938 and Hitler's effort to get land from Czechoslovakia, an act of aggression on the part of Germany that many people argue emboldened Germany and led to World War II. Now of course in this case Putin does not have plans for world conquest. Putin does not have the military or economic base to make a bid for world conquest. So, thankfully, we're in a much safer situation than we were in 1938. 

However, in 1990-1991 we stopped Saddam Hussein from annexing Kuwait. We tended to take a dim view of outright naked territorial aggression and conquest. And this is clearly a case of that. So if you believe in international order, if you believe the United States should support that, we should probably do something about this. What could the Ukrainians do? There has been a lot of analysis publicly that I've seen about Ukrainian military action. But Ukraine has an army. They have military forces. They've got roughly 180,000 men under arms. They've got three air mobile brigades. Now, the problem about Crimea is that Crimea is connected to Ukraine by two narrow causeways that go across these narrow isthmuses. 

It's basically almost an isolated island. So actually that's good for the Russians because they could probably hold those causeways with relatively little numbers of troops against much larger forces. And the Ukrainians don't have much larger forces. So it's actually good for the Russians in that regard. Nonetheless, the Ukrainians could conceivably contest that militarily. They have air mobile brigades. They have an airborne brigade. They could land paratroopers behind it like Operation Market Garden in World War II or like Inchon in Korea or something like that. They could make a try. They might not win, but they would turn it into a war and they would probably get the support of the international community and Russia would not have it. 

The United States, we've sent a destroyer into the Black Sea as sort of a token of our concern. We've got aircraft carrier battle group in the Mediterranean, but nobody is proposing outright military action. Not even Obama's more hawkish opponents in congress. What about insurgency? Here is another interesting field for analysis. Could we mount an insurgency to try to contest the Russian control over Crimea? Crimea is relatively unfavorable terrain for insurgency. One, because of the large preponderance of Russian speakers. However, you've got about 30% of the population that's either ethnic Crimean or Crimean Tatars who are not necessarily pro-Russian. In fact, they may be quite anti-Russian. 30% of the population would be enough for an insurgency in a place which was conducive geographically to insurgency. A place with mountains, a place with wide open spaces, a place with jungles. 

But Crimea is a very small place so you could probably get an urban guerrilla movement going. It's hard to say you could get a real insurgent group. If Putin were so foolish as to invade eastern Ukraine, then insurgency would come into play in a big way because there you've got wide open spaces and, you don't see it in this map, but from some of the maps that I've seen the Russian speaking population and the ethnic Russian population is located in the cities and not in the countryside. And if that's true, that means the countryside can be quite difficult for the Russians to hold if they were determine insurgency, Ukrainian insurgency in the countryside. So you can see shades of parts and warfare in World War II. And again, those insurgents would probably be smart, unlike the Chechens, and they would not kill western journalists. They would actually invite them in and show them all the bad things the Russians were doing. And so they would get international support as well, given the violation of sovereignty. So that would be a much more favorable terrain for insurgency. Presumably Putin is aware of that and is factoring that into his calculations. 

But that leaves us to the real money question which is economic sanctions. That's really what we're talking about. Economic sanctions of some sort. That's where most of the discussion is focused. And I think Russia is about to be reminded about what life was like in the Cold War. They've all gotten used to a life of economic integration with the west, and this is going to hurt the wealthy in a big way. And they depend upon ties with the west. They depend upon energy exports. They depend upon all kinds of ties with the west. Certainly for their consumption as well as for the source of their income. 

This could send the Russian economy not into low growth but into quite sharply negative growth, and then it's unclear to my mind how long Putin is going to survive. If you look comparatively, where have sanctions worked, where have they not worked? Well, the Soviet Union you could say was a 70-year experiment in defying international sanctions. [LAUGHTER] So it worked for 70 years, but then it stopped working after a while. North Korea is about a 60-year experiment in defying international sanctions, and they're still there. So that's not a good case. Iraq was about a 10-year case of defying international sanctions, and then when he was overthrown. So that certainly wasn't a success for sanctions. You could look at South Korea, Libya, and Iran. South Korea eventually succumbed, one could argue, to international sanctions and abandoned apartheid. Libya, a lesser known case, eventually began... 

>> South Africa. >> What's that? >> South Africa, not Korea. >> What did I say? Oh, South Africa. Sorry! [LAUGHTER] South Africa. So Libya eventually abandoned their chemical and nuclear weapons programs under sanctions. Of course Gaddafi got overthrown anyway. Iran appears heretofore to be negotiating under pressure of sanctions to get rid of their nuclear weapons program. It will be interesting to see, another interesting side debate here is Ukraine, of course, had nuclear weapons, would Russia had invaded them if they had kept those nuclear weapons? The Iranians may be thinking very carefully about this right now. So the question is, is the current Putin regime more like the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Iraq or more like South Korea, Libya, and Iran. And I want to argue that Putin probably is a very, he's a unified leader but his hold on power is not the same, it's not as strong as Saddam Hussein's or the Iranians. 

And so there is room for hope there in some sense. He cannot be impervious to the condition of the economy. He cannot be impervious to the interests of the wealthy around him. So I would say there's a much more optimistic case that sanctions could work in this case than in some of the cases where they clearly did not work. >> Okay, great. Thanks. That was a very good set of comments. We're going to open it up to questions. I just want to add a couple more things. One thing I want to note is that if you read the commentary about this crisis, one thing that we did not bring up on this panel is the issue of fascism in Ukraine. 

And I just want to bring that up because this is a central argument the Putin-controlled press is making in Russia. That Ukraine has been taken over by fascists. These are fascists who have ties to previous collaborators with the Nazi regime, and in order to stop this fascist onslaught Russia needs to step in. And this rhetoric about fascism is not getting very much play so much in America because people just shake their heads, like what are you talking about. But I just want to note that that is powerful rhetoric that is going on in Russia. Please join me in thanking our panelists. [applause]