C&B Take a Deep Dive Into What’s Happening in Ukraine

BUCK: Right now, on Ukraine, I just want to give you a few words of caution if you’re paying close attention, as many people are to this issue, if you are particularly transfixed as part of the news cycle on what’s happening over there. I started my career in the CIA Iraq office as an analyst, and what you may find noteworthy about the history of such a position is that that was also an office of the CIA that was certainly very much at the center of the storm around WMD in Iraq and those political debates and what was going to happen when we invaded Iraq, and will we be greeted as liberators and all the rest of it, right?

And here’s what I could tell you having spent time analyzing — years of my life analyzing and then even time in country about — Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s always a lot of stuff you can’t anticipate, a lot of stuff you don’t know, and many things that will come out of nowhere and surprise people — even those who think they are the most well informed, have access to the best information and so forth. I bring this up just because on this Ukraine conflict, it is very difficult right now to sift out what is meant for morale perhaps on one side of the other versus what is factual.

There are memes and deep fakes and all kinds of things flying around the internet. It turns out, for example, that the Snake Island sailors who had that very amusing and stirring line about , “Bleep you, Russian warship,” they surrendered and were taken into custody. I don’t even know if the audio is real of that. But the point is they surrendered, which I think was the right move under the circumstances too. I’ll just add that. They were completely outgunned on an island.

They can’t fight back. So what are they really going to do by fighting at that point? But, anyway, point being there’s a lot of information that’s reported on that is not true and that ends up being either put out intentionally by one side as fake or… Steven Seagal, for example, is not in fact fighting alongside Russians. Not that we ever said this, but he is not in fact fighting alongside the Russians, and this did get out there.

CLAY: That would be amazing, by the way, if he had been.

BUCK: His Aikido is pretty impressive, but I think he’s a little past his period for this kind of a fight. But, yeah, no, it would be amazing. It would be amazing. Point being, he’s not involved, so I just wanted to urge that note of caution. Clay, I want to turn this to you because people keep asking, “Where do I think this is going? What’s gonna happen?” No one knows, including Vladimir Putin, what this looks like in a week. So this is a highly dynamic situation.

There are arguments being made right now that the Ukrainians are just kicking Russian soldiers’ asses all over the country, fighting much better. That may entirely be true. I’m just urging hold and wait before you come to conclusions because the narrative also starts to push policy decision-making. The narrative starts to be, “Oh, well, if only we gave more munitions, or if only maybe we gave more training or did something else, we could push this thing to its terminus very quickly.”

There’s also the concern about Russian nuclear weapons. Clay, everyone needs to watch this with a very skeptical eye in terms of the reporting. I’m rooting for the Ukrainians to expel the Russians, obviously, people want Russia to stop this war of aggression. Fine. But there’s a lot of reporting out there that turns out to not be true.

CLAY: No doubt. Here’s what we know to be true. The Russian stock market is closed today. That’s significant because of all the pressure that is coming to bear on an economic level on Russia based on sanctions that are being put in place. The ruble, the Russian currency, was down 20% in trading today. Interest rates over doubled from 9% in Russia to 20%. And just in the last 30 minutes or so, the New York Times has reported that the World Cup, FIFA, is banning Russia from participating in the World Cup.

This is significant ’cause the World Cup is taking place in November of this year, and Russia was in the process of trying to qualify as a part of the European group and several of the other teams that they were scheduled to play against said, “We won’t play against Russia while this invasion is going on.” Okay. Big-picture question that I have for you, Buck. You’ve done so much of this game theory strategizing, sitting down and trying to analyze where things go.

If… If… Again, we stress “if.” If Russia is truly struggling, which there does seem to be evidence that they are, in their efforts to take over Ukraine — maybe more so than they anticipated, taking more losses, having heavier resistance than they would have anticipated — are you at all nervous that Vladimir Putin becomes enraged over being embarrassed and decides that he has to take this to the next level psychologically, trying to get into his head?

In other words, a lot of people out there have heard, just take it outside of Russia and Ukraine, it’s not uncommon, unfortunately. Two guys get in a fistfight. One guy gets his ass kicked. Sometimes that guy then decides to accelerate it by bringing a weapon, right — bringing a weapon, a knife or gun — to try to get back over the ass kicking that he took in that fight. Everybody has heard and or seen a situation like that.

Maybe you bring in other people to try to kick that guy’s butt because you’re embarrassed by what happened to you. You are the big bully, and the big bully gets whipped. Are you at all concerned that Vladimir Putin in that analogy could be the big bully that is starting to get his nose bloodied, and when that happens, that he decides to accelerate rather than dial back the levels of aggression that he’s committed so far?

BUCK: Yeah, I’m very concerned that what you’re going to see is the frustration of this Russian blitzkrieg — and we’ve been using that term on this show stretching back for weeks, and that is what we’ve seen. You could really call it a limited blitzkrieg. It was supposed to be very fast, overrun them using only a portion, though, of the Russian forces that had gathered around Ukraine’s borders, maybe about 20% or so, 10 to 20%.

And the frustration could become such that they decide to be much more severe. Right now, they’re pretty much going — and again I stress, we’re relying… There are some people we’re in contact with and we’re seeing reporting from in Ukraine which is very helpful. We’re relying on very imperfect information here. Ukraine’s a very large country; there’s fighting going on all over the country. So that’s why people that have… Avoid simplistic narratives about what’s going on with this.

That is really what I was trying to tell you, because I’ve seen this play out before in other connections. And it’s what I’m trying to tell everybody listening. And I would say there may be a massive escalation in his willingness to have civilian casualties. There’s already been dozens of them, civilians killed, that we know of. But this could rapidly escalate. He wanted to avoid that because I think the strategy was clearly overwhelm the armed forces, have them capitulate, have the Ukrainian government flee with its tail between its legs, install the puppet.

I believe the Donbas region is considered effectively, by Putin, considered Russian, that is Russian soil, they’ve given out Russian passports. Now, the internet can say no to that, but like at Crimea. We didn’t really do much about that. What about everything between the capital and the Donbas region? I think they’re hoping to seize critical infrastructure and create what they’ll call a “peacekeeping operation,” even after they’ve started the war or some kind of stability operation pending negotiations with the central government.

Where they have a gun to the head of the central government in Ukraine saying, “Agree to all these things while we have this area that’s under our de facto control.” That’s what I think happened. But, Clay, to your point, I’ve seen reports that there have been a few thousand Russian casualties. That seems very high to me. That seems not particularly credible at first glance. Again, I don’t know, I’m not there, and I don’t have access to the high side, the classified side anymore. So I’m just going to news reports like other people are.

But Putin on the caged or rather cornered Putin point — not caged, the opposite of caged. On the cornered Putin point, this is a vicious guy who if you see what he was willing to do in Chechnya and you see the lengths he was willing to go to against his enemies whether it’s dioxin poisoning against a Ukrainian politician about a decade ago, the polonium poisoning of the Russian defector in the U.K., there is a savagery that he will be willing to unleash here. I don’t think he goes nuclear, but he also knows that’s always in the back pocket, in the back of our minds.

I don’t think that will ever happen. I pray to God that will never happen. But a massive escalation of violence against civilians here to achieve his ends of control of Ukraine? That’s what I think we could see in the days and weeks ahead. And I don’t think everyone’s psychological prepared for that is watching this because right now it feels like the Ukrainians are just whooping the Russians. That’s the sense you get from the media.

CLAY: Another discussion I want to have — and I’ll tee us up when we come back on this Ukraine situation. Is it possible that Vladimir Putin is becoming so weakened — and again, based on the fact that certainly Russia has not been able to rapidly take control over Ukraine — that in his homeland, where there is a run going on right now on ATMs, where the ruble has collapsed by 20% overnight, where the stock market was not even able to open.

Is it possible that Vladimir Putin himself could be facing severe potential danger in his own country dealing with his own power? Could this blow up on him in a way that maybe most of us did not anticipate, because of the failures that he’s seeing in Ukraine and the uniform response that we are now seeing from the rest of the world, so to speak, as it pertains to economic restrictions, in particular, Buck, on all of these oligarchs who are billionaires who are suddenly afraid. “Uh-oh. People may be coming after our assets in some of these other countries.” How much pressure might we see there? I think that’s a really intriguing question too.