Professor John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago talks 
with the American Committee for US-Russia Accord on War in Ukraine,
with Katrina vanden Heuvel, Ambassador Jack Matlock, Nicolai Petro, 
Marlene Laruelle and James W. Carden.
For more: https://usrussiaaccord.org
References:
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MearsheimerUkraine.html

thank you for joining us uh today uh for this what will be an important
conversation with professor john mirzheimer we meet uh at the most dangerous geopolitical
crisis moment in europe since world war ii i can't think of anyone who could
speak to that moment more effectively john mearsheimer is many things
on the zoom in these last weeks he's been receiving some 1 000
emails a day which i think speaks to the um
interest in perhaps not agreeing with professor mira scheimer but hearing a different point of view an alternative
point of view a counter to what we hear on our screens and uh
in on our computers so it's very important to have that debate i
want to just say that the group sponsoring this today is the american committee for east west accord
uh it was launched in the 70s at a time of dayton's strength parity
my late husband stephen cohen relaunched the committee in 2014
a perilous moment in ukrainian russian u.s relations nato
and i think that with a small team a very important board we've worked against headwinds
to fulfill a mandate of bill of at least building dialogue
restraint realism different point of view again that alternative point of view
which is missing in our media and politics and we believe our work even
against the headwinds and the brutality we witness is more important more important than
ever um i want to introduce briefly someone who doesn't need an introduction
professor miersheimer uh he's uh noted for his courageous book with steve
walt on the uh issues of american support for israel
uh he is the our wendell harrison distinguished service professor of political science at the university of
chicago where he's taught since 1982 graduated from west point phd in
political science from cornell university and has written extensively about security issues in international
politics uh distinguished scholar his principal work on ukraine
though i may be wrong it was a very important essay in september october foreign affairs
014 why the ukraine crisis is the west's fault
the video of that talk has been viewed more than 9 million times
again speaking to an interest in points of view that may not be popular but are important to hear as we try to find our
way out of this crisis so i thank you uh john and remember the traveling in germany where
you and steve took on joshua fisher and timothy gardnach
against a room of hostile bankers and you survived that so i'm grateful to you in this difficult time
uh this crisis time this geopolitical crisis time for joining us thank you
thank you katrina uh thank you very much for inviting me to be here and i recall our travels in germany
fondly uh especially when steve and i uh debated the uh ukraine issue
uh back then uh i agree with what you said by the way
katrina when you said that this is the most dangerous crisis since
the second world war i think it's actually more dangerous than the cuban missile crisis which is not to minimize
the danger of that crisis but i think basically what we have here
is a war between the united states and russia
and there's no end in sight i cannot think of how this can end
in the near future and i think there's a very dangerous
uh chance of escalation first of all escalation to where the united states is actually doing the
fighting uh against russia the two sides are clashing militarily which hasn't
happened so far and i think there's a serious danger of nuclear escalation here i'm not saying
that it's likely but i can tell stories on how it actually happens
so the question is how did we get into this mess you know so what caused it
and the reason it's very important to deal with that issue is it has all sorts of implications
for understanding russian thinking if you want to understand how the russians
think about this crisis you have to understand the causes
now the mainstream view which i of course reject is that vladimir putin is either a
congenital aggressor or uh he is just determined to recreate the
soviet union or some version of the soviet union he's an expansionist he's
an imperialist i think that argument is wrong and my view is that this is really all about
the west's efforts to turn ukraine into a western bulwark on russia's borders uh
and the key element in that strategy of course is nato expansion and in my story
it all goes back to the april 2008 decision at the nato summit
in bucharest where it was said that both georgia and ukraine would become part of nato
the russians made it manifestly clear at the time that this was unacceptable that
neither georgia nor ukraine were going to become part of nato and in fact the russians made it clear that they viewed
this as an existential threat very important to understand those words
from the russian point of view from the get-go this was perceived as an existential threat lots of people in the
west do not believe it is an existential threat to the russians but what they believe is
irrelevant because the only thing that matters is what putin and his fellow
russians think and they think it is an existential threat
now i think to be honest that the evidence is overwhelming that this is
not a case of putin acting as an imperialist and it is a case of nato expansion
if you look at his february 24th speech justifying why russia invaded ukraine it is all about
uh nato expansion and the fact that that is perceived to be by him
uh an existential threat to russia if you look at the deployment of forces in
ukraine it's hard to make the argument that the russians are bent on conquering
and occupying and integrating ukraine into a greater russia
if you listen to zelinski talk about a possible solution the first thing he goes to is talking about creating a
neutral ukraine that tells you that this is really all about nato expansion
and ukrainian neutrality furthermore there is no evidence of uh putin saying
that what he wants to do uh is actually
make ukraine part of russia there's no evidence of him saying that
this is feasible and that he intends to do it
there's no question in his heart he would like to see ukraine be part of russia
in his heart he would probably like to see the soviet union come back but as he has made manifestly clear that is not
possible and anybody who thinks that way is not thinking straight he has in fact
said that so i would like someone to point out to me the evidence where
he makes it clear that what he is actually doing in terms of formulating policy is
trying to create a greater russia or reconstitute the soviet union
all this is to say if you believe like i do that he is facing an existential
threat you're in effect saying he views this as a threat to russia's survival
and if he's in a situation like that he cannot lose when you face an existential threat you
don't lose you have no choice you have to win now this brings us to the american side
what are the americans doing what we're doing which is what we did
after the crisis broke out on february 22nd 2014 is we're doubling down
uh we have decided that what we're going to do is we are going to defeat russia
inside of ukraine we're going to deliver a decisive defeat against the russians
inside of ukraine and at the same time we're going to strangle their economy we're going to
put wicked sanctions on them and we're going to bring them to their knees
we in other words are going to win and they're going to lose
furthermore the biden administration and the president himself has gone to enormous
lengths to ramp up the rhetoric and portray the russians as the font of all
evil and to portray us as the good guys and to create the impression in people's
minds that this is a situation that doesn't lend itself to compromise because you can't compromise with the
devil in fact what has to be done here is we have to win
now you know that it would be a devastating defeat
for joe biden if the russians were to win this war and of course as i just
said to you from the russian point of view they have to win this war because this is an existential threat that they
are facing so the question you then want to ask yourself is where does that leave us
both sides have to win it's impossible for both sides to win
not when you think about the situation that we're facing here
so how do we get a negotiated settlement i i just don't see it happening i don't
see the russians giving any meaningful ground and i certainly don't see the americans given any meaningful ground
so what is likely to happen there's now talk on our side and even on
the russian side that this war is going to go on for years in other words we're going to have a war
between the united states and russia that goes on for years now i understand that we
are not involved in the fighting at this point but we're about as close as you can get to being involved
and then you start saying to yourself is it not possible that we will get dragged into
this one there's a huge amount of political pressure on the biden administration for
us you know to implement the no-fly zone to actually go in for humanitarian
purposes to ukraine and so forth and so on so far by so far biden has been able
to resist that pressure but will he be able to resist it forever and what if we have a military incident
that drags us into the fighting so we could very well end up in a situation where
the united states and russia are fighting against each other in ukraine
then we come to the issue of nuclear escalation i think first of all if the united
states gets dragged into a fight against russia and it's a conventional war in ukraine
or over ukraine in the air the united states will clobber the russians
if the ukrainians are doing so well against the russians militarily you can imagine how much better the americans
will do in air-to-air engagements and even on the ground right in that situation don't you think
it's possible that ukraine i mean excuse me that russia
would turn to nuclear weapons i think it's possible uh i've studied a lot of military
history i've studied the japanese decision to attack the united states at pearl harbor in 1941 i studied the
german decision um to launch world war one during the july crisis in 1914
i've looked at the egyptian decision to attack israel in 1973. these are all
cases where decision makers felt they were in a desperate situation and they all understood that in a very important
way they were rolling the dice they were pursuing an incredibly risky strategy
but they just felt they had no choice they felt that their survival was at stake
so what we're talking about here is taking a country like russia right that thinks it's
facing an existential threat that thinks that survival is at stake and we're pushing it to the limit we're talking
about breaking it we're talking about not only defeating it in ukraine but breaking it economically
this is a remarkably dangerous situation and i find it quite remarkable that we're approaching this whole
issue in such a cavalier way and by the way i think a lot of this has to do with the fact that so many people who are
involved in thinking about this problem today were raised during the unipolar moment and not
during the cold war during the cold war someone like jack can tell you even better than me we thought long and hard
about nuclear war we thought long and hard about u.s soviet relations and how that might lead to a nuclear war
people grew up in the unipolar moment are much more cavalier about these issues and i think this presents a very
dangerous situation now i would note that even if the russians
and the americans don't end up fighting each other but the ukrainians are able
to stagger the russians in ukraine and deliver significant defeats on them the russians
may still turn to nuclear weapons it's possible is it likely no but it's possible and that scares me greatly and
it should scare most americans and certainly most europeans so all this is to say when i look at the
u.s russia relationship today i think we're effectively at war with each other although again the americans are not
fighting against the russians on the battlefield but this is a very dangerous situation
now what about ukraine don't the ukrainians have any agency
i mean after all it's their country that's being destroyed one could make the argument that the west especially
the united states is willing to fight this war to the last ukrainian
and the end result is ukraine is in effect being wrecked as a country given
that they have agency is it not possible that the ukrainians themselves will say
enough is enough and put an end to this sadly i don't think that's the case and
i think the fact is that the united states will not allow
the ukrainians to cut a deal that the united states finds unacceptable the
washington post had a piece on monday that made it very clear that the administration and our nato allies are
very worried that the ukrainians are going to cut a deal with the russians that makes it look like the russians won
or that in fact concedes that the russians have won at least to some extent we do
not want that to happen as i said before the biden administration is out to inflict a decisive defeat on russia if
the ukrainians decide to cut a deal and allow russia to win in some meaningful sense
the americans are going to say that's unacceptable and the americans will work with the right-wing nationalists
in ukraine to undermine zelensky or his successor
so i see no way ukraine can stop step in and put a stop
to this crisis i just see it going on and on
let me conclude by saying that george kennon said
in the late 1990s that nato expansion was a tragic mistake
and that it would lead to the beginning of a new cold war at first it looked like he was wrong we
had the first tranche of expansion in 1999 and we got away with it we had the
second tranche of expansion in 2004 and we got away with that but then when the decision was made in
april 2008 for a third tranche which would include georgia and ukraine it's quite clear
that we had moved a bridge too far and the end result i'm sad to say is
that i think that kennen's prediction has proved true thank you
okay well um thank you professor timer for that um
rather alarming uh wake-up call um i hope some people in uh in positions of power here in washington uh are
listening um i'm going to introduce our esteemed accurate panel and after the panelists
make their remarks we'll circle back and begin the q a and hopefully begin a discussion among the panelists
and with those of you in the audience who have been kind enough to join us today
marlene laruel is director of the institute for european russian and eurasian studies at the
george washington university where she is research professor of international affairs she
like our other panelists is a prolific writer and lecturer and she has two books out over the past year memory
politics and the russian civil war and is russia fascist
unraveling propaganda east and west nikolai and petro is professor of
political science at the university of rhode island his scholarly awards include two
fulbrights one to russia and one to ukraine and numerous other awards
last year he was a visiting fellow at the institute of advanced studies at the university of bologna in italy uh today
at 4 30 streaming live on youtube he will be part of a discussion uh that
is discussing the ukraine crisis um as part of the watson institute at brown
and we've posted the details in the in the chat so we would urge people to go
and check that out uh and last but not least uh ambassador jack matlock uh he served as u.s
ambassador to the soviet union from 1987 to 1991
he was senior director for european and soviet affairs on president reagan's nsc staff and he
was ambassador to czechoslovakia from 1981 to 1980.
three he is the author of numerous articles and books including the superb and ever relevant superpower illusions
how myths and false ideologies led america astray and how to return
to reality uh so mr ambassador uh thanks for joining us and the floor is
yours well thanks very much i think we have heard from professor
mirzheimer a brilliant analysis of what the situation that we're in
and i agree totally with everything he has described and
i must say that in looking at things today i am
i cannot be optimistic um and first of all
i think that so it has made clear that whatever happens
in the future uh ukraine cannot be preserved as a
you might say a viable and successful state within those borders that it
inherited in 1991 and i say inherited because these borders were set
actually literally by communists and
they they include areas that had not been traditionally
part of ukraine and the tragedy of ukraine one of them has been that as they were
struggling as all the other ex-soviet states to throw off the shackles of
communism and all the irrationalities of that they were confronted
with a population that was deeply divided and they were also
subjected to a constitution which did not allow federalism a federal
system which would somehow give more local autonomy
to different groups so that you had a seesaw
elections uh where by slightly more than 50 percent the
presidency would be won by one side of the other and then that president would
name all the equivalent of the state governors the provincial leaders
that was a recipe for disaster and because there was no leader
coming forward that really defined a you might say a new sense of ukrainian
statehood which would be comfortable both to the ukrainian
speakers and the russian speakers so ukraine's problem
was internal now as we have gone forward in our policies
i think that as professor mirzheim made clear what we have to consider
is not our analysis of the way things are but what the russian perception is
uh after all people act on their perceptions and the russian perception is
that we have aggressively um uh attempted
uh to detach um both ukraine and georgia
uh from uh any substantial influence by russia
by the way if another country had done something similar to one of our neighbors
we would have reacted i believe perhaps even more forcefully
than president putin has so i think we have to bear that in mind
there's almost a hysteria today in condemning russia
as a uh as a unprovoked aggressor
yes russia has been an unprovoked aggressor but they had a precedent
what do you think the u.s attack on iraq was
a country nearly halfway across the world which did not threaten us and had not
threatened us we had attacked it invaded it
cheered for our technology that they enable them
no images of how this affected the people on the ground you know i'm ashamed to say that the
united states has given president putin every trick
in his playbook now that doesn't make it right what he has done
but we need to now this attempt in effect to wage a
virtually total war against russia um
i think is deeply and deeply misguided
we face so many threats
mutual threats we're not over the covert uh uh epidemic yet
uh this fighting and all of the refugees and so on
this almost certainly is going to make it worse uh and we have the whole
nuclear threat which uh professor mirzheimer has described very well
but and what about the long-term threats of global warming
uh how are we going to continue to deal with all these flows of refugees whether they be
economic or or what not we are simply undermining the real long-term interests
of our countries in getting into this sort of fight
and i'd also say those who think we're simply going to choke russia and bring it down
should understand that this is going to have a serious effect on many other people
uh in my day when i was in the soviet union the soviet union had to import
close to 30 million tons of grain a year just to survive
this was a tremendous uh liability and it's one that we were able to use to
pressure them in many ways right now both ukraine and
russia are a net and major grain exporters
it tells you what the new system is like and how different it is from the soviet
union by the way and this affects many countries you start cutting off
that trade and also the trade not only in
energy uh but also in precious metals and other things which are essential uh for much
of modern technology you know i think that uh we're going to see if we continue these policies and it
looks as if we're going to a real pushback by people who are not willing really
to take some of the cost to them uh for uh these sanctions because they
are there and finally i would say don't underestimate the russian ability
to over in a fairly short period of time to overcome some of the technological
problems i also think that the use of the of the dollar as a weapon which is what
we have been doing is going in the long run to undermine
our dominance of the world financial system that may take a decade or two
but i think there are very serious implications entirely a sign
from the nuclear threat which is very much there though i agree
with professor merzheimer it is not probable but it is possible
and we have to worry about that
okay thank you mr ambassador uh marlene you're up thank you so much everybody thank you
for inviting me um several points i wanted to make the first one is that i agree about the
shared responsibility of the west in the kind of strategy deadlock and the fact that russia is seeing nato expansion as
an existential threat but i would still dissociate the strategic deadlock
which is a shared responsibility from the decision to do war and to do that kind of war a full-scale
invasion targeting civilian and for me sorry this is russia's alone decision in
fact it's putin's alone decision taken against sorry the will of the majority of the
russian political establishment so i think there was other ways for russia to react than the war and the war is
weakening sorry russia's legitimacy on the long run
i have three key points i just wanted to make the first one is the question of avoidability the war was avoidable it
was not written in the putin's regime dna that they would invade there was
many other way they wanted to be influential and to keep spheres of influence and of course russia is a
former colonial imperial center it has disdain toward the new uh post-soviet
societies but that could have stayed only as a kind of cultural social aspect and that should may not have be
transformed into into a war and when i say that there are there are many ways of being a great power and i think
russia has genuinely tested several of them and really in the 2000 thoughts
that integrating into the world community into the world economy would make its
voice heard and its claims kind of partly recognized and it's only when
they realized that this integration strategy was not working that the kind of classical fashion fear
of influence mechanism was not working that they began looking to other strategies that were more related to
kind of maintaining keeping or provoking territory territorial instability in the
the the countries around so what i'm trying to say that they have been for me a shift from russia thinking it can keep ukraine
in a sphere of influence away from nato to moving to a strategy that is now
about territorial conquest to at least grab of land and i agree russia
and putin doesn't want to recreate the soviet union or the russian empire it's not a buddha it's using now grab of length as
a kind of solution to the failure of being respected as a great power and i think that's a that's a a a very
concerning uh a trend my second point is that professor schamer you were saying
about it's all about nato expansion for russia and i think it was the case until
now sure it is now anymore i think now unfortunately it has become much more complex on the russian side and i think
we have to recognize there has been a kind of crescendo a gradual move in the way
russia is framing the conflict that is of concern what we have now it's
narrative that are ambiguously either about the strategic concern of a ukrainian nato or that is about purely
denying legitimacy as a state and as a nation there have been really ambiguous
comments in uh putting a species and of uh several of other
official governments i mean there are real strategies of this statistician of ukraine that i found problematic i found
there are russian kind of schizophrenic narrative about ukrainians need to be told by force that they are a brotherly
nation with russia and all the narrative about the nazification i mean ukraine
has a far-right culture russia has won the us as one you have transnational far-right groups i don't think the way
it has been framed by russia is legitimate it's really and you may have seen the real novosti articles a few
days ago it's really calling for mass killing and of course it's free and obviously it's not an official statement
by putting our level off but it has been authorized so my what i'm trying to say now is that
it has become more complex on the russian side i think because of the failure of getting their great power
claim respected now they have moved to something that is much more complex and much more dangerous
and my third point is that the russians vision is not static and i think we have it's not written in stone as we have
seen it's evolving and i think we have to realize now that things are still evolving on the russian side because war
is a kind of revolutionary open-ended moment and so russia is still adjusting
its own vision its own narrative and its own capacities on the ground and all that is influx and i think it's
important for us to realize that you have all these contradictory narratives arriving from the russian side sometime
russia seems to say it's just about getting a friendly regime in keith and being sure that ukraine is natural
sometimes it seems to be saying like ukraine should be partitioned and eastern territories should join russia
or be a kind of buffer zone and sometimes it's about ukraine is not legitimate to exist at all
and i think we should realize this complexity because what is telling us it's telling us that there are tensions
at the kremlin the kremlin is not a unified uh system you have it's an ad
a construction and there is a party of war in russia that is pushing for the radicalization of narrative that is very
unhappy with the diplomatic talks going on now and i think it's really important for us to realize at least this three
language of russia on the war and the nato one is unfortunately not the only one now and we have to be sure we try to
invite russia to going back to discussing the neutrality issues which is the the easiest one in fact and
avoiding the russian uh policy moving toward really accusation of ukraine not
being a legitimate state because that would make the discussion relatively impossible to to
to finalize and i agree with you about the fact that i mean we need to fast to find
faith-saving solution for russia and we need to be sure that if ukraine is able to cut a deal with russia there is no
u.s kind of regime strategies or maintaining of sanctions that would of
course make things impossible on the russian side to be to be accepted so i'm just i will stop here but just to say
that i think things are still very much in flux that it's mostly a shared responsibilities but the war is putin's
responsibility largely against the will of his own governments and that's we have now worrisome narratives coming
from the russian side abuts ukraine legitimacy to exist that we should take into consideration and do our best to
try to push russia to go back we're just discussing the strategic aspect and and
stopping nato expansion and not moving to really narrative that are that are
disempowering the pure existence of of ukraine i will stop here thank you
okay thank you very much um nick it's all yours thank you

i have a few words to say about tragedy
and international relations theory tragedy in international relations
has certain general characteristics but each generation must also deal
with its own particular tragic demons i would
highlight three of those the loss of the ability to communicate
the loss of a common legal framework and the loss of shared values
the loss of the ability to communicate precludes dialogue indeed
many politicians and diplomats no longer understand what dialogue means
they think it means indicating that to one party what the other party wants
but that is essentially what a prison warden does to his inmates in fact the logos india logos
means to gather together and it is sometimes rendered as
relationship the famous opening line of the gospel according to saint john could thus be
read in the beginning was the relationship
the proper objective of dialogue is not a momentary accord
but a profound self-transformation that establishes a new relationship with
the enemy classical greek tragedy is thus quintessentially
a series of dialogues in which we expose our own tragic flaws
to ourselves this exposure is meant to bring about
catharsis a purging of the soul that restores
healthy perspective by removing hatred our reluctant willingness to sign
technical agreements with other countries while emphasizing at the same time our
values disagreements with them is thus the exact opposite of dialogue
our second tragedy is the loss of a common legal framework i refer here to the much discussed
distinction between an international legal order and a rules-based order
the west has in recent years worked hard to replace the former with the latter
while breezily suggesting that they are the same thing much of the rest of the world however
has said they are not and has suggested that what the west is really trying to do here
is to privatize the international legal order and to make it serve whatever rules the
west finds most beneficial our third tragedy has a rather long and
distinguished pedigree i'm referring here to the fruits of the poison tree of american exceptionalism
which causes many americans to emphasize the values that divide us from the rest
of the world rather than the many interests that we share
this is what has transformed us from a mere nation state into an all-judging nation church
that as andrew baseevich has pointed out unites primarily to worship at the altar
of american greatness since 2003
american officials have consistently chastised russia for her quote breach of
values end quote but make no mistake
other states are never far behind these three tragedies are mutual
reinforcing and they lead to a foreign policy that can be summarized in a single
phrase there can be no dialogue with the axis of evil
except about its terms of surrender to our rules
if one were to search for historical analogies i suspect that the world order that we
are headed toward will look a lot like the early 17th century
with its efforts to impose the one true faith during the 30 years war
we've been told that putin is trying to return us to the power politics of the 19th
century my greatest fear is that is that we may one day look back
on that with regret as an offer we should have taken thank you

katrina you need to um thank you for your all of you for your most sobering
cogent range of analyses of the situation we confront i want to turn it over to some of the q
a we have but before that if there's any discussion any question john you may
wish to reply uh or there may be questions from the panelists
or additional comments in light of your other panelists comments well i'd love to reply but i think it's
better if we go to q and a rather than have me talk again okay we
are going to do that um and there many
so this is a question i mean i think for
marlene and um
to what extent professor mearsheimer uh do you believe the ukrainian far
right stops the government and kiev from cutting a deal with the russians
i think that when zielenski ran for president he made it very clear
that he wanted to work out an arrangement with russia that ended the crisis in
ukraine and he won and what he then tried to do was move
toward implementing the mints ii agreement if you were going to shut down
the conflict in ukraine you had to implement mints too and mince
 meant giving the russian speaking and the ethnic russian
population in the easternmost part of ukraine the donbass region
a significant amount of autonomy and you had to make
you uh the russian language and official language of ukraine once again that had
to be done i think zelensky found out very quickly that because of the ukrainian right it
was impossible to implement mints too therefore even though the french and the
germans and of course the russians were very interested in making mints to work
because they wanted to shut down the crisis they couldn't do it in other words the ukrainian right was
able to stymie zelensky on that front now zielinski understands
that if he cuts a deal with russia today
he has to face the ukrainian right that's why zielinski
has said that any peace agreement has to be approved by the ukrainian public he's
going to ask for a referendum because zelinski understands that he cannot take
the ukrainian right on by himself so basically we have a situation where
zelensky is stymied now very importantly the americans will side with the
ukrainian right because the americans and the ukrainian right both do not want
zelinski cutting a deal with the russians that makes it look like the
russians won so this is the principal reason i'm very
pessimistic about ukraine's ability to help shut this one down
nikolai this is a question about it's really about language but it's something deeper than that
do you believe the ukrainian language and identity in the west around vive is going to become the predominant
cultural engine of the ukrainian idea identity and what effects will this war leave on majority russian-speaking
cities that is something
we can only speculate about on the one hand it uh looking at
historical examples of brutal invasions in the past the american seizure of
half of mexican territory in the mexican-american war and how relations have evolved since
then the um english conquest of ireland
which is still uh traumatic and and has a left um
a gash in in the territories of northern ireland um we can say
that uh there it engenders a period of great hostility
but that over time you know uh there there's a monument on
the battlefield of poltava that i visited in ukraine and it's in three languages and it says time heals all
wounds and i think in the long run there's nothing
there's no way to escape the destiny that ukraine and russia
must share together because those countries are not going anywhere and uh no matter what the current
generation thinks of the next generation thinks that is absolutely no predictor
of uh several generations down the road
could i add something at risk yeah i mean what we are seeing now is that
the russians speaking ukrainians are siding with ukraine largely the russian-speaking cities are largely on
the ukrainian side i mean you always have people who are on the russian side we there are some small flaws of
refugees going on the russian side because that's where they feel more comfortable the donbass population those
who were already secessionists are more on the russian side but i think we should realize that
the war is reshaping reshuffling the ukrainian identity and what you seems to have emerging now is a
largely more unified ukrainian identity in which russian-speaking ukrainians
feel good at home with ukraine so i think that is something that all the knowledge we had about all this kind of
regional division of ukraine culturally linguistically they will be totally transformed by the
war so i'm not sure we will have endless himself is not representing a kind of galicia western type
western ukraine type of identity is represented a much more kind of unified russian speaking ukrainian speaking at
the same time identity so i think many things are so much in flux that there will be a new ukrainian nation and many
of this question will kind of be totally transformed thank you um this is for ambassador
matlock um ambassador what insights do you have into the current state of u.s diplomacy
and its deficiencies it often seems that the idea of compromise is anathema to american
officials and americans and gov in general because issues are portrayed in terms of pure good and evil that only allows for
total victory and i was very interested in what professor mirsheimer alluded to
which is that the biden administration officials so many of them are of a different there they
grew up in the unipolar moment so they don't have the experience of uh the cold war and a duel
well i think one of the problems is that our diplomacy since the late 1990s
has been virtually the opposite of that which we used to in the cold war
um we had several i would say operational principles when
we began to negotiate it into the cold war we seem to be almost at its height
around 1983 1984 but we decided that we would start
first of all trying to look for areas of common interest
and concentrate more intention on them second to listen very carefully to what the
soviets were saying to stay always in communication and though president reagan for example
condemned the soviet union as an evil empire he never insulted any soviet leader
he treated them with respect and when he met them personally
his first words were usually we hold the peace in our hands
we must act responsibly and you know uh then
also issues like human rights and so on which were largely
comments on their internal affairs we begin to shift more to a private
conversation rather than public condemnations and public demands
which we understood would be you know tend to be rejected
and within about a three-year period we had found uh that since it was in the
interest of both countries to end the arms race to end the confrontation
we negotiated an end and it was not a defeat for the soviet union
uh now since then we have the idea that somehow we won the cold war in
in the sense that russia was defeated no the soviet union we ended it with the
soviet union two years before the soviet union broke up it broke up not because
of our pressure from the outside but because of problems inside
but you know beginning in the late 90s and the first such move
was the decision to start expanding nato and at first it was acceptable but it
should have been clear from the very beginning if we were going to expand nato we had
to stop at a certain point there was going to be a red line and i joined
uh you know i joined george cannon and others then testifying to the senate
that a decision to expand nato would be one of the worst
strategic decisions we could have made since the end of the cold war
but even so we could have gotten by with it if we had if it had just included a
few east european countries so it seems to me that then we started a
a policy of in effect treating russia as if it were a defeated
nation at the same time we interfered directly in their own
elections so we were very much involved in the 1996 election that uh
that re-elected uh boris uh then we and
also then we began to walk out of almost every arms control treaty which had been
the basis of our ending the cold war uh and then uh when
uh putin began to complain about some of the things we were doing
like uh about putting antiballistic missiles in eastern europe
we we simply ignored that we never addressed his complaints most of which i
would consider quite valid from a russian point of view it was not that necessarily all of them
were totally accurate but they were they represented perceptions which we should have dealt with
instead we increasingly not only the media the principal media but the
government began to personalize everything and i think that we played a role in
creating the vladimir putin that we see today including
giving him precedence for what he is doing and why we can't recognize that is beyond me
thank you ambassador matlock i um there are a set of questions here i'm just gonna this this one might be for
marlene is putin getting true and accurate information from his inner circle concerning the results in the war
on the battlefield um this is about putin's inner circle i might ask you marlene
you know there is an assessment that putin is unhinged talking about ambassador
matlock's personalization of the situation but i think people would be interested in a
brief sense of the circles inside moscow the war party but also the
roots that inform putin's thinking at this stage based on the speech he gave
a few weeks ago yeah it seems so all the information we have is telling us that putin was
largely misinformed he's still reading kind of old-fashioned reports giving to by to him by security services and it
seems they were painting an image that the war would be easy to win in ukraine that ukrainians will be receiving
russian as a liberator that keith would feel very rapidly that the lenski would flee that the ukrainian army wouldn't
resist that the russian army would make it very easily so i think that was there was a real kind of a
strategic mistake done by on the russian side is in in getting the accurate information
probably because it's difficult to approach uh putin we know he has been very
isolated during the pandemics and people wanted all these people around him wanted to give him the
most positive vision and that probably conducted to that decision and now we can see so we know that some services of
the fsb have been kind of fired or clean up after the the
the mistakes of their judgment was revealed and now we have a much more realistic if i miss a strategy
of russia in ukraine uh taking into consideration the what is happening on
the ground in trying just with quotation marks to take control of the as of c and the the large uh donbas
in term of what is really happening in putting inner circles is very difficult we know there is a circle of advisor or
circle of friends who are able to access him and who seems to be feeding him with with information and
interpretation but this inner circle is totally outside the government or even
the presidential administration purview and i think that's important to realize that because
when we do diplomatic talk or when the diplomatic stocks are going on we are the ukrainians are talking to official
figure of the government but no one is accessing this kind of private circle around putin that seems to be really uh
very influential so there is this kind of parallel two states the official one
and the informal one and we cannot access the informal one in trying to cut a deal and i think that's part of the
problem on on the way we we try to interpret what is happening on the on the russian side and then as i was
saying there is a party of war that we can have some element of id identification
we see some kind of tip of the iceberg and i was mentioning these three announced t articles a few days ago
really calling for mass killing in in in ukraine that i think is telling us that there are some patrons inside the
system that push for this kind of radical solution and we also know that many members of the government are
against the war i mean now they have to be consolidating around the leader but
we're surprised and shocked by the decision so i think we have to realize that there is no unity at the kremlin
it's it's a complex entity a complex black box with many different uh level
and groups and we want to try to speak to to to the more kind of rational one the one that consider that strategic
issues should be the key yeah of course and our obviously our behavior influences
in war parties around the world of course we have a war party here also
nick you wanted to say something and then i was thinking i would go to professor mirsheimer to say a few words
in response to some of the questions and comments from participants
nick sir yes in partial response to the question that
was asked about um the possibility of
eastern ukraine what i call russophile ukraine
being transformed into a more ukrainian uh pro-ukrainian
um community um yes as i said that was that was that's
something that uh is inevitable in the short run but as marlene was
commenting i was i remembered a quote that i read from ukraine
so this is march 24th of this year by mikhail dubinanski
who is a very well-known commentator and i just want to read it to you because
it hits at the heart of the issue which hasn't gone away
quote in ukraine there is also an alternative view to what is happening
the view that this big war in ukraine really hasn't changed much
forcing this war into the framework of our customary habits and prejudices
from this perspective february 24th 2022 looks not so much
like a magical gateway into a new world but more like a broken doorway
through which to drag all the baggage of the recent past all the old fixations insults and
recriminations that defined ukraine's public agenda before this full-scale invasion
it took but a moment for the front lines to stabilize before this traditional
internal hate re-emerged end quote thank you powerful
thank you um thank you for a brilliant analysis of
this perilous moment i wanted to go back to professor mirsheimer to comment
or to just speak in closing about um
the moment and what lies ahead thank you thank you katrina i mainly
wanted to respond to three sets of points that marlena made uh
first of all you talked about putin targeting civilians or the russians targeting
civilians it's obviously very hard to tell exactly what's happened here but with that
caveat in mind you want to remember that the americans have been pushing
to arm civilians in ukraine and to tell those civilians
to fight against the russians so by definition in lots of the fire
fights that are have taken place and will take place russians are going to be fighting
against civilians because those civilians are fighting against the russians
so just remember this is a very complicated business second point has to do with putin's
thinking and also your comments about the narratives that are taking place
inside russia the fact is we have no idea who putin is
talking to and we really have no idea exactly what
he's thinking these days there's just no way we could know that
and it is you use the term black box it's kind of a black box we can look at what
he said on february 24th or february 21st and so forth and so on but who knows for
sure what he's thinking uh when it comes to narratives
i've spent a lot of time thinking about how public discourse matches up with decision making in a
crisis if you go to a decision like the cuban missile crisis or the german decision to
invade france in 1940 basically you have a handful of policy makers in the room
who are making the decision to do something and what they think is what matters and the
narratives that are swirling around in the broader public really don't matter
uh so i understand that if you look at the narratives in russia today you can find
all sorts of evidence of people talking about doing x or doing y or doing z
in ukraine but in the end what really matters is what putin and his close
advisors are thinking and why exactly they decided on february 24th to invade
ukraine and we really don't have good information to analyze that situation at
this point in time my final set of comments excuse me have to do
with your point about russian interest in grabbing territory
in ukraine i actually think the russians had zero interest in grabbing territory in
ukraine and that includes eastern ukraine the main reason that the russians wanted
to implement the mints ii accords and wanted to work with zielinski to do
that is they wanted to shut down the problem in eastern ukraine they did not want to
conquer the donbass furthermore when things really began to
get bad in mid-february they recognized
those territories in the donbass as independent states they didn't move to
make them part of russia as they had done with ukraine
and with regard to the future it's not at all clear that russia will
move to take those parts of eastern ukraine that it's conquered and integrate them into a
greater russia i wouldn't be surprised if they created an independent state
simply because it's probably more trouble than it's worth to conquer that territory
so i don't think the russians contrary to the conventional wisdom in the united states have really had any interest in
conquering ukraine because as i said many years ago in the 2014 essay in foreign affairs that
katrina referenced in her introduction for
russia conquering ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine
thank you
you're muted katrina um i wanted to just say a few words
first of all this is an example it seems to me today of
the importance of public debate of informed debate of debate informed by an
understanding of history um we we meet in 2022 but as so many of you
know very well this is a situation which has long roots from our land way back
but i mean at least 2014 as john's essay reminds
uh but i just want to say briefly about the amer the american committee for east west accord
i mean it is shocking i know to ambassador matlock that we are at a moment where the embassies and consulates are shut down
you spent much of your time as ambassador i think trying to ensure that russians could travel
and that there would be access but from nuclear nonproliferation
to economics to energy uh these have been heedlessly dangerously discarded as
projects of cooperation um and we look back um we look at the
end of the soviet union but we also look today at 2014 where decisions were made
nato expansion was referenced different points of nato expansion but i i think i conclude with i don't
think there's ever been an absence of american discourse democratic discourse as such a faithful
but the ability to continue this discourse in the not you know the face of what
professor mearsheimer rightly referenced a frenzy a frenzy of
you know there is barbarity uh but there's also an understanding that
uh there's a need to end it and if we're gonna end it there has to be some sense of history so i just want to
thank you all uh for participating in this civil debate
and uh there's more to be done and i hope we will continue more of these and i thank you professor mirsheimer
it's i'm sure it's a very it's a very difficult uh you know obviously for ukrainians and for
this geopolitical crisis but to have a voice uh that is speaking
in the ways you are is important uh there is a lockdown of
information and analysis and history as you mentioned the narratives narratives are important
so um my view is you know we can't have a stable world until there's partnership if not
you know partnership between the u.s and russia uh it's going to be very hard to get to
uh we are working at the nation and that acura with people inside russia the independent
press and trying to uh ensure that my last point is that the demonization of
russians doesn't swallow up and can contribute to an enduring cold
war but thank you very much for all joining taking time out of your busy days and um
grateful to you professor mir shima my pleasure katrina
and please if you might people come to us russia accord.org if you seek um it's a site where we do
present alternative views in the belief that they are needed now more than ever thank you very much