While the West considers itself much economically stronger than Russia, Moscow measures power differently. Seeing the Western hesitancy, Putin’s regime may even see the cost of escalation as acceptable. “This is part of their national story – we lose everything, we rebuild it later. But victory is everything,” James Sherr, a British security analyst, said in an interview with LRT.lt.
Sherr is a former head of the UK’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and an associate fellow at Chatham House and the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) in Tallinn.
Were you surprised or impressed by how successful the Ukrainians are in their advance, most recently in liberating Cherson?
Let’s go back to February. I expected that Russians would be very surprised by Ukraine’s performance because, for historical and psychological reasons, Russians have never taken Ukraine seriously, they’ve never recognised Ukrainians as a people in their own right, and they’ve had no respect for their military capability, which means they have also ignored some of the experience of 2014.
When the war started in 2014, on the Russian side, it was a war largely of irregular forces and militias, but with Russian commanders and weaponry. The Ukrainian state in 2014 was shattered, it was not functioning properly when the war began. But the Ukrainians rallied not only the army but also volunteers. And they swiftly encircled the militia forces and almost had them extinguished. Then, the Russians had to throw in major combined arms formations to defeat them.
They [Russians] should have remembered this experience. It demonstrated that Ukraine pulls together in a time of war. [...] Yet, the belief system in Russia is so entrenched, they are so dismissive of Ukraine as a nation, that they assumed this time they would collapse in a few days or weeks. And it’s a separate subject as to why many so-called experts in the West believed the same thing.
I expected that the Russians would end up with a conflict much bigger than they thought. But even I was surprised by how deficient their own forces were. I knew that so many of the capabilities that were attributed to them by Western military specialists were exaggerated. [...] But I have to say I was surprised to see just how deficient their capabilities were.
One could intelligently assume that with all the resources devoted to the armed forces, they would have insulated themselves to a large degree from the worst features of the evolving Putin system. And then we discovered they hadn’t – [in the Russian army there is] the same venality, corruption, mendacity, servility, the same lack of initiative, and corruption in areas that someone who is not an expert would not expect. Even the weapon systems put in storage are not fit for purpose because they’ve already been catalogued, cannibalised, and sold illicitly.
So yes, I was less surprised than most people, but I was a bit surprised.
What has the war revealed about the Putin regime?
It has demonstrated two things about Putin and the top people in Russia that the West continues to underestimate. First, they [Russians] think in asymmetrical terms. When the Ukrainians defeat the first offensive, a lot of people think that maybe it’s over, and now, we can talk about an off-ramp for Putin. No. They [Russians] then adopt a different strategy. And when you defeat that, they’ll adopt the third strategy. Every time they lose a game, they start another game that you’re not expecting.
The last two of these games have involved, first, the shift to attacks on critical infrastructure, particularly energy infrastructure [...]. Then, this is just beginning but very serious – Iran’s entry into the fighting. It looks as if it will now be followed by the deployment and employment of Iranian ballistic missiles, against which Ukrainians do not appear to have any and even NATO has limited defences.
This is the first thing. But the second thing is [Ukrainian’s] refusal to give up, their complete tenacity, which surprised many people. The result has been that some people in the West have exaggerated Ukrainian success. What was reassuring about my last visit to Ukraine is that the Ukrainian military was not exaggerating this success. They were very sober about what they were dealing with and felt the war was going to continue for a very long time. Russians have not yet exhausted all their resources. They will keep fighting until they no longer have anything to fight with.
This raises the question – will the West continue to support Ukraine until the Russians no longer have anything to fight with? Ukraine will never stop fighting. But we fear that the West will make Ukraine stop fighting because Ukraine is very dependent not just on Western military equipment, which gets exhausted very quickly in a war, but also on money – to keep the economy working and later reconstruct the country.
So, apart from some people in the West who rejoice too much when it comes to the Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv or Kherson, there is the weight of very influential people in the West, particularly in the US, who have always been convinced that this war will end in a negotiated territorial compromise.
And this is the greatest political problem that Ukraine faces – the threat posed by the influence of these people, who either don’t understand or don’t care about the historical record. The first historical record is that any territory ceded to Russia is kept by Russia. They don’t return it no matter what agreements are signed. The second is that no frozen conflict stays frozen. [...]
No agreement signed by them [Russians] is honoured in their terms. The Russians fight very hard over the agreements, over every word, every comma. And the best you can expect once an agreement is concluded after this arduous process is that they will be scrupulous in honouring their interpretation of what it says. [...]
But they simply come to us and say that the situation has changed. They’ve been doing this about matters great and small since 1991. When this war began, they suddenly said the Budapest memorandum is no longer valid.
So, for as long as we’re dealing with Russian leadership, which operates on the basis of current assumptions, this conflict will not end, it will only change.
What is, on the other hand, very feasible, and this is the good news, is that it is possible that over time the Russians will lose the capability to do the things they want if we remain committed to maintaining Ukraine. Then, they can continue to believe that Ukrainians are not real people, that Ukraine is an artificial state, but we won’t recognise this.
As in the Cold War, when we created the whole defence and security system of NATO, when we established and developed the European Union out of the European Coal and Steel Community, nobody asked Stalin or Khrushchev whether they liked it. At the time, there were crises over Berlin, over many things, but we didn’t seek their consent for doing anything because we wouldn’t have had it. We had a security threat, and we did what was necessary to protect our own security.
The same applies here. We can do the same thing, but we have to be committed to doing that. And we have to be prepared for the fact that there will be risks, threats, and real risks of escalation.
I’m not sure that the West of the 21st century is prepared for all of that. If we are, then we could be optimistic about the future.
Do you see signs that some leaders would not be committed to this?
Yes, because almost from the beginning [of the war], Biden and some of his top advisers were saying that the whole purpose of this is to get to a stage where we have a negotiation and a compromise. If you understand the situation, you know that the negotiation is not going to lead to any kind of compromise that would be safe for Ukraine to accept.
Some people say that even if Russia wins, they would be so weakened that we could worry less about them. It’s not true. If Russia is seen to win this war, Russians, Ukrainians, and bordering countries, such as Lithuania and the Baltic neighbours, will see that Russia and the Putin regime will be stronger. They will be vindicated. They will not see the damages and costs they’ve suffered as a weakness but will be very proud of these things. In the past, they suffered far greater losses, and this is part of their pride. This is part of their national story – we lose everything, we rebuild it later. But victory is everything.
And if we allow Russia to achieve what they regard as a victory, our problems will only worsen.
So, is it possible for Russia to coexist with Europe?
Coexist, yes. But that’s very different from having a settlement with Russia. We can have a settlement; we can have a much better relationship with Russia. When and if the current decision-making elites are replaced by some others, who are willing to operate on different assumptions about their own interests, we will even have a safer relationship.
But this is only if Putin is removed by some of those around him because the removal of Putin will itself make Russia’s own internal stability an immediate and urgent concern. Therefore, for anyone who replaces him, whatever they think about Ukraine or the Baltic states’ membership in NATO, the urgent concern is going to be the stability of Russia. And they will want to end the war in Ukraine as quickly as possible.
Now, there is a lot of talk that the siloviki faction is getting stronger in the Kremlin, that the nationalist voices are getting louder...
But these are different sets of people. The senior-level siloviki, such as Nikolai Patrushev [secretary of the Russian Security Council], are very professional, intelligent people. Of course, in terms of what they think, we could call them hawkish, anti-Western, but they are professionals. I think that if we have a group of the siloviki remove Putin, they will put a stop to the war. That’s not going to end our problems, but we will be in a better place than we are now.
The people who are called “the war party”, including [Chechen leader Ramzan] Kadyrov and [owner of the Wagner Mercenary Group Yevgeny] Prigozhin, have no wish to remove Putin. They know that they have no ability to run the country. They don’t know anything about what’s required to run any country. They are basically a collection of ideologues, criminals, and gangsters.
What they want is for Putin to listen to them. They’re as ugly, as murderous as they are. They’re a pressure group. They don’t want Putin removed. If people like Patrushev remove Putin, they will get rid of these people.
Where do you think the threats about using nuclear weapons are coming from?
I will not make a prediction about whether and under what conditions Russia will use nuclear weapons. But we could say two things about the historical experience.
First, since Tsarist times, intimidation has been a very important instrument of Russian policy. They’re expert at it and they see that we are afraid of nuclear escalation, so they intimidate us. They tell us that it’s very real, the danger has never been higher. What do you expect them to say?
Second, the Russians have never attacked an opponent they regard as stronger. The bad news is they don’t measure strength the way we do. Early in 2014, I was having lunch with the senior-level people of the NATO intelligence establishment. One of them said – what are we worried about? Our GDP is 16 times greater than theirs. I told him that wars are not won by GDP ratios.
They [Russians] measure strength differently. The main thing for them is the opponent’s force of will – are they cohesive? Do they know what they’re doing? Are they competent? Are they single-minded and purposeful? Are they willing to accept the risk? Are they willing to make sacrifices? Do they hold together under pressure, or do they start to fragment and fall apart?
These are the factors that, in Russia’s mind, decide who wins and who loses a war. [...] That’s also the way they assess the West. So, even though we’re vastly stronger than they are, if they see that we’re apprehensive, that we’re fearful, that we’re afraid of them, then I think the dangers of escalation are considerable. Therefore, our efforts to avoid escalation make the real risk of it worse.
Before attacking Ukraine, Moscow presented the West with a list of demands, including the withdrawal of NATO forces from the Baltic states. You wrote in one of your pieces that if Ukraine had fallen as quickly as Moscow anticipated, the West would have been forced to negotiate on those demands that Putin gave prior to the war.
That was the Russian assumption. But the immediate response to these Russian demands on the part of the West missed the point.
The immediate reaction was shock and saying that we’re not going to accept this. And we haven’t accepted it. But the Russians didn’t expect the West to accept it. By then, the Russians had already decided upon the war, and this was the casus belli. Their thinking was that after they win the war, the West will have to come and talk to them on their terms.
Do you think the Russians were surprised by the West’s reaction to the war?
Somewhat, yes. But not sufficiently to conclude that they made a fundamental mistake
The Russians see the West as something that is not cohesive by definition, it’s fragmented into different states with different capabilities, different cultures, mindsets, histories. So far, it’s held together fairly well. But they keep finding weaknesses and exploiting them. They keep finding weak people. Lenin in the very early 1920s, just after the Russian Civil War, said the following: “Who but a fool would believe that we could have won that conflict if it weren’t for our allies in the enemy's camp.”
This is the theory. When they think of an ally in the West, they’re thinking about what they call conditional and situational allies. They’re not just thinking about those who have been paid or people who are ideologically sympathetic. They’re thinking about those people who objectively advance their aim and weaken the pursuit of our aims, including all those people who are saying: you can’t win this war, the European public won’t support this war, we better negotiate today because tomorrow it gets worse.
Today, these people are allies of Russia, as the Russians understand this term, because their views are helping Russia advance their objectives and making it much more difficult for important people in the West to advance a different set of objectives that are damaging to Russia.
The Russians have this faith that we will fall apart.
Some very high US officials and other Western leaders are saying that Ukraine should be open to negotiations to end the war. Do you think that any kind of negotiation is possible with Russia?
The situation’s a little better than it was recently. For example, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, who from the beginning didn’t want the Ukrainians to receive unconditional support, has become a lot tougher because the situation has made him tougher. But some other people are not like that.
So, it’s very much in the balance. Even in Biden’s administration, there are different forces pushing in different directions. The same is true in Europe.
I’m not so concerned with what some of these people believe today. The question is how effectively their arguments are answered. [...]
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