Buck’s CIA-Style Analysis of the Situation in Ukraine

CLAY: First of all, I want to ask you two questions because you’ve had a lot of experience in international politics and international affairs of this nature. One, what would Putin get by going basically all the way to the edge of invading Ukraine and not do it? In other words, what could his motive be to make us all think that he’s going to do that and then not do it? That’s one.

Two, how much do you think the failure of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has enabled and emboldened many of our adversaries around the world because it sent the message of American militaristic incompetence? Is that part of the fact analysis here if you are Russia and certainly if you’re China as well?

BUCK: Yeah, let me take these in reverse order. This is a remarkable — ’cause, Clay, when you talk about law school, for example, in CIA training there’s some of the training we do that involves stuff that you have to know for the field — driving cars, shooting guns, all that stuff — and then there’s analytic training. One of the things you go through is looking at a situation just like this. Is this a war? Is this a feint? Is this an incursion?

So, this is obviously not a drill, this is real, but it does bring back a lot of the analytic tradecraft that would have been applied in those situations to try to get people to be able to at least anticipate most of the enemy’s possible movements here. On your second point first, look, all you have to do is look at a timeline of when do the Russians get really aggressive — and I know it’s counterintuitive because we had Russia, Russia, Russia talk. “Trump was a Putin puppet.” All lies. It was all nonsense as we know.

CLAY: Russia took no aggressive actions, by and large, while Trump was in office.

BUCK: We had U.S. forces blow up 200 Russian paramilitaries in the desert in Syria for threatening our Kurdish allies, and we also sent Javelin anti-tank missiles and Dragunov sniper rifles to the Ukrainian national army specifically to create a greater hostile response if the Russians invade, which the Obama National Security Council refused to do because it was “too provocative.” So that’s the reality of the Trump era.

But go back to Obama, what happened with the Crimea referendum and the start of the war in Donbas and now the possibility here. You have a Democrat president; Russia gets aggressive in Ukraine. Another Democrat president, Russia gets aggressive in Ukraine. You can’t ignore these things. That’s to your question, Clay. You’re asking ’cause you can see it too. It’s clearly there.

On the first part of this, what does Putin get? There’s the nuts and bolts of will there be some kind of concessions? How does this deal with NATO membership? Nord Stream 2 pipeline issues, future pipeline issues. There’s a lot of how Russia could try to view this as an opportunity to expand its influence and essentially get concessions through diplomatic means. By the way, that is the hope right now.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I don’t think that’s actually what’s going on here but that would be for a lot of reasons the best possible scenario, I think, but then it’s gonna be what else could he be gaining from this if he were to go in, now you’re looking at more Russia irredentism. Russia wanting the lost land, so to speak, of the Soviet Union. Russia thinks that it needs to be the grand player on the world stage in this region, a leader in Eurasia. Uniting the Russian-speaking peoples.

You get, Clay, more into almost Russian national and spiritual narrative. Now, whether the Russian people feel or agree with that or not, that’s the way Putin frames it. Essentially, for Putin this is about strategic depth, if he goes in and reestablishing — as horrific as this is to say and sound, in Putin’s mind. I think it’s meant to be reestablishing Russian greatness in the region. That’s you how you do that, by invading a friendly neighboring country? Yes. That’s his mind-set.

CLAY: And do you know whose mind-set that sounds like? Sounds like Germany in World War II, because the historical relevance there is Germany got its ass kicked in World War I, and the German people were humiliated. Hitler rose to power on the idea of, “I’m going to restore German excellence,” right, “I’m going to bring back that dominance that we used to have,” and that was the undergirding appeal of Hitler’s rise.

And certainly, you could analogize the collapse of Russia under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, eventually Putin coming to power as the Russian equivalent of World War I and now going into Crimea and going into Ukraine is an element of that, right? It’s about establishing Russian nationalistic dominance and making the people of Russia feel good about Mother Russia again in a way that they have not since they were humiliated on the global stage with collapse of the Cold War.

BUCK: That’s one thing, Clay. That’s a critical point. That’s one thing that people that I know who are Russian and I’ve spoken with over the years about the situation of Russia, not just in, of course, the Trump collusion lies around the election but more generally about what is Putin…? “What does Putin want?” is the question a lot of people ask.

There’s been some fascinating reporting on how this is a guy who wakes up every day with his Cheerios, so to speak, or whatever the Russian equivalent is. He is reading the newspapers of the common man. He tries to have a very good… He reads the kind of populist news, so to speak, in Russia. He tries to have an understanding of what the general opinion within his country may be.

In the West, we’re always focused on human rights and democracy activists like Navalny, and with good reason. But Putin actually presided over the creation of a Russian middle class. People forget this. He does actually have support within his own country. We view him as almost like a comic book villain the way we look at Kim Jong-un or we look at the ayatollahs.

But in Russia, there is real support for him, not just from within the institutions of power, but from some of the common men on the street. So we may be misreading, at some level, the Russian people’s appetite for this military intervention, you know what I mean? This is a part of it that people don’t think about very much ’cause it doesn’t get reported here.

By the way, I’m putting out… Now that we’re looking at this, I’m putting out feelers to my people. I’m reaching out to former intel people. We gotta get the folks that can bring us… Hopefully Nolan Peterson will join us tomorrow. We need ground truth, and we need people that are granular. You know, I was granular on Iraq. I was granular on Afghanistan back in the day. We need people that are granular on Ukraine ’cause I think this is about to pop off.

CLAY: And it may be happening tomorrow while we’re live on the air. It may be happening Wednesday. You never actually know. This is going to be a tinderbox-type moment.