Where is the Russia-Ukraine Conflict Heading?: Ian Bremmer / Political Scientist/President, Eurasia Group

Hello and welcome to DEEPER LOOK from New York...

We're coming to you for the very first time from our NHK World Studios in New York....

I'm Del Irani, it's great to have your company.

In this special two-part series, we continue to bring you in-depth analysis and reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Now, the developments are happening thick and fast and here's the latest: So far, there have been huge casualties on both sides of the conflict...

Millions of civilians have fled Ukraine, mainly women and children - with the refugees spilling over into Europe.

And in their response to the crisis, the U.S. and NATO continue to project a united front against Russia.

But after weeks of fighting, there's still no end in sight...

So where do we go from here?

Joining me now to talk more about this is Ian Bremmer, he's the president and founder of Eurasia group, the world's leading political risk research and consulting firm.

- Welcome back to the program, Ian.
- And in person.

It's wonderful to have you here in person.

To what extent has this conflict weakened Russia's position in the world?

Immensely and permanently.

There is no circumstance under which Russia comes out of this crisis in anything but a vastly weaker position than where they were before Putin chose to invade an independent country of 44 million people.

And that's true economically, because they are cut off from Europe and the United States.

And again, I think that will be functionally permanent.

The Europeans will not be buying energy from Russia in three years-time and going forward.

Western companies are not going to be jumping in to invest in Russia.

Then also, you have the fact that inside Russia, a lot of Russian people are going to be angry with the fact that their economy is doing so badly and the war is not going so well.

And 1000s of Russians are coming back in body bags, right.

And the parents, the communities, same way in the United States after Afghanistan that made people really angry.

They've lost more soldiers in five weeks than the Americans lost in 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So that hurts him.

And then finally, his geostrategic position.

Remember, you know, this war was not supposed to be just about Ukraine.

Putin was saying this is because my position in Europe is unacceptable.

Well, your position in Europe has just gotten a lot more unacceptable. Why?

Because Finland and Sweden now want to join NATO, because the Baltic states want permanent NATO troops on their territory,

because the Germans are going to be spending over 2% of GDP on the military.

Something that the Americans have been trying to get them to do for decades, but Putin could get him to do it in four weeks.

How do you like that?

So, you've put that all together.

And what that tells you is that Putin's position has been destroyed, but he's probably still going to be there.

And frankly, that's one of the reasons that we should be the most pessimistic about where this is going.

Because we can get a freeze in the conflict in Ukraine.

Maybe we can get a ceasefire in the conflict Ukraine, maybe negotiations can move the two sides closer together.

Yeah.

But we can't do anything to get Russia back into the international community.

We can't do that with Putin in charge.

And that's a serious problem.

One thing you mentioned which was very interesting, was about this economic decoupling that we're seeing between the West and Russia.

You said that you think it's going to stay, it's irreversible?

Yes.

Tell us, I mean, how, why do you think that?

How lasting are these effects gonna be?

Well, number one, I think that because the overwhelmingly most important market for Russia is Europe.

That's where the infrastructure has been built.

That's where the population center is, it's where the energy goes, right?

Well, the Europeans all see their reliance on Russia as a strategic mistake.

And so, Nord Stream too is done.

The Germans, they're going to be buying their energy from Qatar, they're going to be getting LNG from the United States.

And once you make those decisions, they become path dependent.

They're expensive, making those decisions, undoing that relationship.

I think it's possible that we could unfreeze the central bank assets of Russia.

They can have access to that.

But the ongoing trade and business that really had brought Europe and Russia together, and the peace dividend that we all benefited from after the wall came down in 1989.

That said, you don't need to focus on defense, you can just do business.

It's globalization.

Globalization for Russia is over.

They can do business with China, they can do business with India, they can do business with Brazil.

They can't do business with the advanced industrial economies.

And by the way, that probably includes Japan.

In the middle of all of this, we have to talk about Ukraine, because of course, this is, as you know, this was a sovereign nation that the President Putin has invaded.

And still is.

And it still is.

Yes.

And I think one of the most remarkable things about it is that Ukraine is still very much in this fight.

How much of a role has the leader President Zelenskyy played in terms of his regular communications with the rest of the world, keeping all of us updated, even his appeals to NATO.

What role is he played in making sure that Ukraine is still standing its ground?

Zelenskyy's willingness to stay in Kyiv when his country was being attacked by Russia and when Kyiv itself was being bombed, so at risk to his own personal security, I think spoke volumes to the rest of the world.

The fact that he is a young, charismatic man that is out there with his soldiers, that's engaging with the rest of the world.

While Putin 70-years old, is like feeling like he's in a bunker and is 30 feet away, not just from world leaders, but even from his own members of cabinet when he's being briefed by them.

I mean, the difference could not be more dramatic.

And you know, the fact that Zelenskyy was directly addressing the Congress of the United States, the Knesset in Israel, Parliament the House of Commons in the UK, I mean, these were all historic speeches that he was giving.

And after each of these speeches, you were seeing that these governments were saying, we have to do more to support these Ukrainians.

And the support that they're getting, it's destroying the Russian economy, but it's also providing advanced military capabilities and real time intelligence on the disposition of Russian forces

that's letting the Ukrainians kill a lot more Russians in the field.

Yeah.

Just staying on the point of President Zelenskyy and, you know, the appeals that he's been making to world leaders, to NATO.

He's been making some pretty, he's been very persistent about some demands, you know, having 1% of military aircraft and tanks of NATO's.

Now these are demands that he very well knows NATO is not going to agree to because it would force their hand and get involved militarily.

There have been no boots on the ground.

Yeah.

There has been no, no-fly zone.

And that has meant that there has been no direct conflict between NATO troops and Russian troops.

Having said that, there's already been cyber-attacks by the Russians against NATO states.

There's been disinformation attacks against NATO states.

The fact... there is economic warfare that is going on.

It's hurting the Russians a lot more, but it's going both ways.

So, all I would say to that is yes, there is a there is a line between what NATO is prepared to do and what they're not.

And that line in NATO's view is we want to avoid World War III.

From the Russian perspective, that line does not exist.

Now, in terms of the tanks, so far, as Zelenskyy has asked for a bunch of tanks.

He hasn't gotten them.

But I will tell you that the Biden administration has also made clear, that if there are chemical weapons being used in the field.

And the Kremlin has talked all about fake information, Americans setting up biological weapons facilities in Ukraine - not true.

Potential for chemical weapons to be deployed to get deployed against Russia - not true.

But they've said that, and I absolutely believe that these further requests that Zelenskyy is making all of them are plausible if the Russians were to decide to use weapons of mass destruction against Ukraine in the worst-case scenario.

And we all have to understand that those are real possibilities right there.

I think that you would see tanks going in to Ukraine, so they'd get higher levels of military support, it is possible that the Americans would decide to directly get involved in the war at that point.

It is being discussed in the White House right now.

Now, the I guess the biggest victims of this military conflict have been a lot of civilians from Ukraine.

The UN is reported some three million refugees have now fled the country, a huge proportion of them are women and children.

How has this conflict destabilized the region?

And how is this sort of refugee influx affecting other European nations that are currently, you know, taking in millions of refugees?

Less than you would think.

Really? Ok.

I just spoke with the mayor of the core frontline town in Poland, who over a million Ukrainians have gone through his town of 60,000.

They're handling it shockingly well.

Almost four million Ukrainian refugees, most of which are going to Poland, almost all of which are going to Europe.

And they're being welcomed.

500 million Europeans see the Ukrainians as fellow Europeans, they're white, they're Christians.

They are together, in a way that when the Syrians or the Iraqis became refugees, it was not.

But the longer this goes on, the more of a strain it takes on a country's, you know, Poland and other nations, resources, all be it, limited resources.

Do you think at some point, it will have a knock-on effect, even if it's in economic terms?

I think that it will, I mean, clearly, there will be an enormous outpouring of international aid and support to ensure that these people are provided for.

By the way, in Poland, you're not talking about refugee camps.

These people are being welcomed in Polish homes, okay.

So, it's just... it's a very different circumstance.

The economic impact of this war is going to be a global economic impact, and it's going to be on energy prices, on food prices.

It's going to be on the world's poorest, who suddenly aren't going to have access to food, fertilizer.

I mean, this is a huge problem, and it's going to be over one, two, three years.

The refugee crisis, as spectacular as the numbers are, actually is a comparatively limited human suffering issue compared to everything else we're going to see.

There are lots of efforts right now to try and bring this conflict to an end, either as this ceasefire talks that are taking place, being brokered.

How much of these negotiations, do you think are in good faith?

I mean, do you realistically think that Russia and Ukraine can sit down and come to an agreement and in this without further bloodshed, and war?

None of the negotiations from the Russian side are in good faith.

But, the Russian military has been hit very hard on the ground, and they no longer have the capability to take Kyiv.

And Putin has not organized, he's not ordered a general mobilization.

So, they're not creating the conditions where they could take Kyiv.

So as a consequence, I think the reality on the ground is pushing the Russians into a political posture that makes negotiations more feasible, that makes a ceasefire more feasible.

Still, the second phase of the war, as defined by the Russians, is we must take all of the Donbass.

And they don't have all the Donbass right now.

So, I mean, I... one, I don't believe anything the Russians say, remember, Putin was asked for months about whether he had any intentions of invading Ukraine with 190,000 troops on the borders.

He said, absolutely not.

These are training and exercises.

That's the only reason.

He said that to the German chancellor, to the American President to the French president, I mean, across the board, and he lied through his teeth.

So, we should remember that as we are talking about negotiations.

But the Russians are losing on the ground.

And so, the potential for a ceasefire is higher.

The likelihood of escalation is greatest in terms of Russia just engaging in far more indiscriminate killing of Ukrainians in cities.

In other words, destroying major cities like we've seen the Russians do historically in Aleppo in Syria, like they've done historically in Grozny in Chechnya.

I think that the longer we go without a ceasefire, the greater the likelihood that what happened in Mariupol, a city of 430,000 Ukrainians that has been destroyed, clearly over 10,000 Ukrainian civilians dead.

That we could start seeing that in Kharkiv with one and a half million people, in Kyiv with four million people and with a lot of journalists that story gets out.

So, even if it's that and no chemical weapons, that is a major escalation.

What is the risk of this conflict right now to the rest of the world?

And what would be your advice to politicians, governments, business leaders out there about how they should be assessing this risk of the Russian Ukrainian conflict?

The best way to think about it, is that this is the end of 30 years of peace in Europe, which is the world's largest common market.

Going forward, these European countries will spend radically more on defense capabilities.

They will focus on national security as a top priority of policy.

They have not been doing that for 30 years, and their relationship with Russia will be almost completely severed economically.

That's the most significant risk.

The knock-on risks are supply chain risks, they're inflation risks, and they're also a question of whether or not China soon to be the largest economy in the world,

becomes caught up in any of this, something we haven't talked about yet.

Well, we're gonna talk about that next time.

Ian Bremmer, thank you so much for joining us on the program.

It's great to have you back again.

Now, it wasn't that long ago that we as an international community, experienced the shock of another global crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that we live in a global society.

What happens in one part of the world affects us all.

So, while this conflict in Ukraine may feel far away for now, its effects could reverberate around the world sooner than we may think.

I'm Dell Irani.

Thanks for your company.

I'll see you next time on DEEPER LOOK from New York.