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the world continues to monitor the latest on the war in ukraine as russia's attacks escalate in some of ukraine's largest cities joining us now to break down the latest on the geopolitical situation is ian bremmer eurasia group founder and president ian thank you so
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much for your time this afternoon we're hearing now that russia's attacks in kiev and kharkiv have grown more brutal while russian forces have been met with increased resistance are you surprised and do you think russia is surprised with the scale of the response both
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within ukraine and from the rest of the world in response to this invasion i think they're very surprised by the response internationally uh it is clear that um the history of russian
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escalation has been met mostly with very limited and fragmented response think about when they took a piece of georgia in 2008 when they took two pieces of ukraine in 2014 when they intervened in the u.s elections in 2016 this time
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they've got biden focused on asia after afghanistan and then merkel's gone and macron's thinking strategic autonomy they had every reason to believe that the response this time around was going to be a lot weaker and it wasn't i
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mean this feels like a huge red line that they were that they crossed and suddenly everyone is piling on literally everyone i mean you've got the in monaco and switzerland you have them cutting off uh and freezing assets you've got
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luxembourg sending jeeps uh over and anti-tank missiles to the ukrainians i mean it's astonishing just how angry the advanced industrial economies are at
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russia right now and i think that putin clearly did not expect that his economy would be devastated as a consequence of his decision to invade ukraine
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and given these sanctions and the level of russian isolation that the rest of the world has really put russia under at this point how much economic strain can putin afford to withstand among the average russian people before he's
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forced to change course well i'm forced to change course is a pretty high bar this is probably gonna cost the russians some five to ten percent of gdp all in
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um on top of the underperformance from the sanctions that existed from 2014 which were pretty marginal but did matter um that's roughly equivalent to the sanctions that the americans and the europeans put on iran
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now it matters a lot more because russia's a much bigger economy it's interconnected with the world economy it has the potential to have a lehman brothers type moment spillover effect but in terms of the ability of the russians to survive this
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to live with the so-called resistance economy to say screw you to the united states and europe i i do believe the russians will have significant capacity to withstand it if they want to but the
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point is that if you combine the decoupling long-term of europe from russia i mean they're they're literally going to move their energy dependence away from russia that'll never come back
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combine that with the forward deployments of nato into the baltic states probably permanent basing agreements coming and poland and romania and bulgaria combine it with the finns
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now talking about wanting to join nato and once they go the swedes probably will as well combine it with the germans that are now announcing that they're going to send weapons to ukraine and they're going to spend two percent of their gdp on defense i mean you put
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those things together it is this is obviously and dramatically worse for russia's strategic position in europe which you'll remember is a big part of why putin started this to begin with
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then anything that he gains in the best possible scenario for putin and we're not there on the ground in ukraine and as you're mentioning with so many of these countries now getting in on the action in in their support of ukraine
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you've said that european governments now realize that their post-cold war decisions to increase the dependence on the russian economy was a strategic mistake and should be undone but when you are this closely connected in this
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highly of a globalized world what does that look like in real terms and what sort of economic fallout could there be then for these countries that do try and cut off russia or ease off their dependence on russia's economy well um this is less of an america
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problem it's less of a france problem which gets most of their energy from nuclear um plants and of course the germans should be doing that and they're not high-level german officials have told me
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very clearly that nordstrom 2 was a strategic mistake um the dependence they have on russian energy strategic mistake and they're going to undo it now there's a reason why the decisions
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to hit russia so hard with sanctions do include cutouts for the ability to pay for gas and oil coming to europe because it's still necessary for the european economies they want to even with their
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anger they'd like to still be able to keep their people warm right and so and the russians want to make that money but a lot of that pipeline system runs through ukraine so clearly there's a big war going on it's vulnerable to getting
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destroyed by either side frankly um and it's also vulnerable to the russians cutting it off in a fit of peak even if it means that they're going to take economic costs because they want the europeans to feel that pain now if that
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happens um there's no way the europeans can make up that gap with um gas from the us or japan or qatar or azerbaijan there just isn't enough that's unspoken
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for so prices would then go way up and you'd have to see rationing um across many european countries and and you're still in winter it's still fairly cold and people would be really angry you'd see demonstrations i have no doubt but i
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will tell you i mean you've got eighty percent german approval right now for spending two percent of gdp on defense that's astonishing i mean the anger of the german people at what the russians
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have done is so far beyond the imagination of where you could have been a couple weeks ago five months ago two years ago and i do think there's a greater willingness to take hardship what's basically happened and it's a very
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simple way of thinking about this when the soviet union collapsed we had a peace dividend the world benefited from not having to think so much about national security not have to
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pay so much about national security instead leading into globalization that peace dividend is gone and it's not just gone for a month it's gone for the foreseeable future and the europeans are
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the ones that are going to pay the most so then when you look at some of these strategic alliances whether it's china showing some support for russia and then you also see the west in their sanctions it's a question that you don't really want to know the answer but militarily
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how far do you think putin is willing to go if he's cornered enough well there's always the possibility that he climbs down i mean you'll remember when the iranians had been engaged in all sorts of malfeasance in their
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backyard uh including you know the attacks against the largest refinery in the world in saudi arabia the americans suddenly decided to assassinate the head of all of their defense capabilities and the iranians thought about retaliating
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and then said maybe we shouldn't do that so if putin is rational in the way that western leaders are rational you can see him climbing down when he sees he has no good alternatives
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so far that's not the way he behaved i mean a lot of people would have said there's no way he's going to do a full invasion into into ukraine and he did that and a lot of those same people are saying there's no way he'd ever consider using nuclear weapons when he rattles
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them i i wouldn't say never so i mean i think we have to be clear that the just how costly this is going to be for russia and and just how much danger that could
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pose to putin himself where losing power isn't getting voted out it's your debt we're playing with some fairly high stakes and that might well mean that putin is
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willing to directly threaten nato countries i saw this from former president medvedev the french government said that they're going to war economically against putin and medvedev who was you know a
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relatively soft-spoken guy said don't use those terms because an economic war can become something very different very very easily and lavrov has talked about the possibility of
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direct military um you know sort of impact if for the responsibility of all of those nato countries that are providing weapons that are being used against russian soldiers in ukraine right now the foreign ministry warned
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the finns and the swedes there would be military consequences if they tried to join nato putin himself has said that he's upping uh the the readiness of their nuclear forces their so-called deterrence forces so it's not just a
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one-off the russians are saber-rattling directly with nato on a number of occasions they want nato to see that they're prepared to go all
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in do i believe that not completely why would i believe anything that putin says at this point he lied directly to the face of every nato leader about his the fact that he wasn't going to invade so i don't put stock in what putin says but
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their capacity to escalate is real and they are getting cornered and so ian as you've mentioned here much of the end game it hinges around the mental state of russian president vladimir putin how large of a question
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mark does that remain to uh as the economic detriment has already started to be incurred and for whatever the economic detriment is that he is willing to take on for russia or on the other
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side of this embark on given the threat of cyber attacks that he's already kind of thrown out there on the table oh we're clearly going to see cyber attacks more broadly against nato not just against ukraine i i would be
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stunned i mean he stopped uh supporting the cyber attacks against critical infrastructure after biden asked him to when they met in geneva back in june that that's coming back there's no question um but might there be
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other sorts of of attacks that would be made might they cut off all the energy that goes into europe uh might there be incidents where they're harassing nato vessels in the black sea or aircraft for
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example around the baltics absolutely and this is a very dangerous environment so i mean again we have to think about what it means to have this level of confrontation with a country that has 5 000 nuclear weapons and a leader that
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feels uh increasingly cornered now president putin i mean he doesn't look like the same president that was you know giving these three-hour without notes state of the union speeches and taking questions from on every topic
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from all of these different journalists and citizens he doesn't have that level of coherence and the speeches that i've seen putin given the last few weeks do imply that he's lost a step or two i
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mean if he were the american president we'd already be saying his brain was oatmeal right i mean we we know what that's like but a lot of that is taken out of context too um and the fact remains that the ukrainian government is winning the war
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on information they're the ones with the millions and millions of twitter followers right now they're the ones with the leader who is considered a folk hero globally and they're the ones that are doing better in getting misinformation out to try to get people
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to be more sympathetic you saw the snake island 13 you know they said they told the russian warship to f off and they all got killed except they didn't get killed they all got captured but everybody believed that and they were sympathetic to ukraine now there's
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reasons to be sympathetic to ukraine don't get me wrong i'm simply saying that there's lots of misinformation out there that probably paints putin as an insane person and i would be careful uh
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before i took that at face value and so even if there was a puppet government installed in ukraine then what after that would there be any legitimacy to that no there's no legitimacy from the ukraine
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there's no legitimacy there's no legitimacy of course there's no legitimacy at this point there's no legitimacy of the russian government there's no legitimacy the belarusian government so i mean a puppet government you know of ukraine it's like double jeopardy no legitimacy what do you want
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me to say but the fact is there will be a ukrainian government in exile maybe in the western ukraine if the russians are incapable of taking it maybe in poland maybe in france every western government
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will recognize that ukrainian government they will provide them with aid they will provide them with weapons those weapons will be sent to partisans who are fighting against russians on the ground in ukraine i was talking to my friend dave petraeus the other day he
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said that putin has swallowed a porcupine in ukraine i think that's right i think that's right i i think that there is no scenario where the russians occupy ukraine and this goes well for them i mean frankly
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the russians should hope that their army loses in ukraine because that would be much better off for the russians economically and strategically in the long term
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