thank you so much for being here. My name is Rhea and I am a member of this year's Epic Colloquium. On behalf of the Inquiry Committee I'm excited to welcome you all to the Institute of Global Leadership's 2022 Inquiry Program. I know we have schools from Massachusetts, Georgia, and New York here and I want to thank all of you for traveling to join us this weekend. I also want to recognize the hours of work all of you students have put in to understanding your delegation's positions and opinions on a ton of issues including climate change which is perhaps the ultimate problem without a passport and we are all very excited to see you in action over the next three days. Now a little bit about Inquiry it's basically an intensive academic global issue simulation program for secondary school students that was developed in 1991 by the Education for Public Inquiry will bring unique experiences, knowledge, and solutions to global issues. Throughout the weekend we will debate these problems, exchange ideas, and draft resolutions to address climate change and other issues fundamental to global peace and global security. This year the focus of Inquiry is Climate Change Code Red for Humanity which we will be focusing on tomorrow and Saturday. Alongside our coming discussions about the global effects of climate change however the Inquiry Committee also wanted to give you all the opportunity to learn more about the Ukraine-Russia conflict. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on the 24th of February this year triggering economic global sanctions, a humanitarian crisis, and so much more. Our speakers today will shed light on the past, present, and future characteristics of this crisis for all of you. Our first speaker is Ark Burakovsky who is the Assistant Director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy here at Tufts University. His research interests include the political role of international media, public and elite opinion, soft power, public diplomacy, and US-Russia relations. Today he will be speaking about the historical, geopolitical, and Ukrainian and Russian domestic political trends that led us to this war. Our second speaker is Alexandra Vakru who is the Executive Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. She's an academic expert on Russian and Eurasian policy issues and she teaches popular courses on the comparative politics of Eurasia and post-Soviet conflict. Today she will be speaking about the present and future of the crisis. After the speaker presentations we will transition into a Q&A type format where you will have the opportunity to ask questions about the crisis. For those of you in person you can ask questions through the mic up here and for those of you online you can ask questions through the Q&A feature on Zoom. After that we will divide up into groups and continue the discussions on this topic. Thank you so much and I will hand it off to Arik. Great, thank you so much. It's a pleasure for me to be here. I've been in some sense involved in one way or another with the Institute for Global Leadership since the beginning of my time at Fletcher back in 2014. So it's nice to be back here and it's nice to be on home turf. So let me say some words about the origins of this crisis. Why did Putin decide to invade Ukraine on February 14th of this year? Why did Russia launch what it calls a special military operation in Ukraine just last month? And so I'll go over six major trends that led us to where we are today. The first is a complex history of relations between Russia and Ukraine. There are three Vladimir's in this picture. The first is Grand Prince Vladimir who brought Christianity to the Kievan roots. It was a state that was formed in medieval times. It was conquered by the Vikings from the North and it was in the land of the Slavs. What is now Ukraine, Belarus, and Northwest Russia. On the bottom are Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, and Vladimir Zelensky, the current president of Ukraine. If you listen to Vladimir Putin, he believes that Ukraine is not a real country, that there is no such thing as Ukrainian entity, that Ukraine has always essentially been a part of Russia back during the Kievan roots, later during the Russian empire, and after that during the Soviet Union. However, if you listen to Vladimir Zelensky, he has a very different story. He believes that Ukraine and Russia are two independent nations, brotherly nations that have the same origins, but nonetheless they're not one people. Ukrainians sought independence in the 17th century with the Kozak uprising. They also continued to have a tradition of independence. Ukraine's national anthem, which was written during the 19th century, says Ukraine is not yet dead. And of course, in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine and Russia did become independent states. Vladimir Putin, in an essay that he wrote several months ago, expressed that Ukraine is not a real nation, it does not have a tradition of governance, and that the only tradition of governance that should be used is Russia's, which is azar, right? Imperial Russia. And so he has this kind of imperial nostalgia, and this war is about undoing Ukrainian nationhood. Speaking of Brzezinski, a national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter once said, Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine, suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire. So what is this war about fundamentally? Russia wants to return to its imperial past, and Ukraine is fighting for its independence. Another major story has to do with Russian NATO and the security dilemma, and I'll explain what that is. In 1990, when Germany was being reunified, Secretary of State at the time, James Baker, under President George H. W. Bush, promised to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand one inch eastward in terms of military infrastructure or in terms of new members. And for a long time, Russia and NATO had a collaborative relationship. Russia joined the NATO Partnership for Peace program. There was a NATO-Russia Founding Act on collaborative relations, and for a while they did cooperate on issues like counterterrorism in the war in Afghanistan. Things started to go sour around 1999 when Russia condemned NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, which was largely unilateral, not going through the United Nations Security Council as international law requires, and the beginning of NATO expansion. In 2008, NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO. And this was seen as unacceptable by Russia. Why? Because Ukraine and Georgia are part of what Russia considers to be its sphere of privileged interests. And we can argue about whether that's legitimate or not, but that was Russia's perception. I should say that it was not so long ago that the United States had something called the Monroe Doctrine, that great powers should not be involved in the Western Hemisphere other than the United States. And so this is how Russia saw it, that Russia is the only great power in the post-Soviet space. It does not want United States troops to be anywhere in its vicinity. And so in 2008, Russia intervened militarily in Georgia, and later in 2014 it intervened militarily in Ukraine. I don't have time to talk about the nuances of those conflicts, but I'm happy to answer questions about them. So NATO has enlarged five times since 1999, including to Poland, the Baltic countries, and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, most recently in 2020. And Russia feels encircled by NATO from both the East and the West, if we look at it from Russia's point of view. So Russia took over Apazia and South Asetia to ethnic minority enclaves within Georgia, and the idea was to create territorial disputes to make sure that Georgia would never join NATO. And similarly in Ukraine, in the Donbass, which is the separatist-controlled area where it engineered essentially a civil war, and Crimea, which it annexed. So in 2014, cooperation between NATO and Russia was formally discontinued, and what ensued was essentially an arms race. NATO began to move its military infrastructure eastward, initially on a rotating basis, and later on a more permanent basis. Russia and NATO began to conduct larger and more frequent military drills in the region, and tensions continued to arise. And the logic, the security dilemma is fairly simple. The weapons that I believe are defensive may be seen by my adversary as offensive. And NATO and Russia had reasons to distrust one another. Russia, of course, had invaded two of its neighbors. It had intervened militarily in Syria. But the United States and its Western allies had also acted unilaterally in places like Iraq and Libya and Syria. And so there was a gradual erosion of trust, and there was an erosion of the arms control framework, particularly when it came to missiles. And I can answer more questions about that. Another story I'd like to touch on briefly is Ukrainian domestic politics. So Russia gradually, as time went on, lost the battle with the West over hearts and minds in Ukraine. And the reason is quite simple. Particularly for young Ukrainians, Russia doesn't have all that much to offer compared to the West. The West is much more attractive in terms of its democracy, in terms of its way of life, in terms of economic prosperity. And so as hard as Russia tried to influence Ukraine, the West was winning. And by 2019, Ukraine's constitution was amended with a commitment to join NATO and the European Union. Ukrainian policymakers envisioned that they would be able to join by around 2030. We can talk about whether that timeline was accurate because there wasn't any indication from either the EU or NATO that that would happen. But nonetheless, that was the intention on the part of Ukrainian decision makers. In 2021, just last year, President Zelensky began disputes with a number of pro-Russian oligarchs. And on this picture is a close ally of Putin, Medvedchuk. Medvedchuk was put under house arrest around the time that Russia began its military buildup on Ukraine's border. And Putin was very personally offended by this because Putin saw that his grip on domestic politics in Ukraine was shrinking, that he was no longer able to exert any influence within Ukraine. And so late last year, Putin accused Ukraine of committing genocide. Of course, that's a very loaded term, and I completely disagree with him against Russian speakers in Ukraine over the last eight years. And he said that Zelensky was going to use military action to retake Donbass. So when Putin sells the invasion to Russians, he says that this is actually a pre-emptive war to stop Ukraine from acting militarily and from building up its military vis-à-vis the separatists. And you can see that over time, support in Ukraine for EU membership as well as NATO membership has gone up significantly. I will also briefly talk about Russian domestic politics. This picture is, of course, of Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned and then imprisoned in Russia just last year. We've seen an uptick in anti-corruption protests in Russian recent years. And Putin has built up a personalistic autocracy in Russia that are largely held together by two things. One is systemic corruption to make sure that everyone falls in line and collects state rents. Another is propaganda to persuade the Russian public. In 2020, Russia amended its constitution to ensure that Putin could stay in power for basically as long as he wants until 2036, but resetting his term limits. And Russia essentially became a full-fledged dictatorship. And Putin began to use greater repression to stifle internal dissent. There's a theory that as Ukraine became more democratic, that this threatens Putin's rule because Russian people see Ukraine as an example. And another reason why Putin may have invaded Ukraine is that war abroad temporarily diverts the attention of the Russian public from problems at home, like corruption, but they were protesting about, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. And in fact, we're seeing that to some extent right now. There's a kind of rally around the flag effect. More Russians now support Putin than they did before the war. And so you can see that in 2014, right after the annexation of Crimea, Putin's approval shot up to more than 80%. And today we're seeing a similar trend. But Russians are now four times more likely to protest than they were back in 2014. But we can also see that the propaganda is largely working. Most Russians believe that their greatest enemies are the United States and Ukraine, while their best friends are Belarus and China. And the two final stories, and I know I'm a little bit over my time, but I'll wrap up shortly, are the failure of diplomacy. So Russia's military buildup, as I said, began around March, April of last year. Then it was halted for a while. Nobody's entirely sure why. In October, it was resumed. And this was used in order to initiate a diplomatic process. Russia submitted two draft treaties to the United States and NATO in December, asking for a set of security guarantees. The idea was to make sure that NATO would never, ever expand to Ukraine, that it would cease any military activities in Central and Eastern Europe. And in February, the United States and NATO responded to Russia. They proposed some negotiations with regard to arms control, and we can talk about the details. But ultimately did not address Russia's core security concerns, including NATO's open door policy and its military activities. So in the end, Russia assembled 180, maybe 190,000 troops to invade Ukraine. And finally, you may ask, why did Putin make the decision if in retrospect we know that Russia's military has not done so well? Well, I think it's largely because he did not have great intelligence or he didn't listen to his intelligence. So Putin miscalculated. He overemphasized the economic and strategic benefits of invading Ukraine, including Ukraine's access to the Black Sea. Ukraine, of course, is a breadbasket for much of the world, including Southern and Eastern Ukraine, the industrial base in the Donbass. And he underestimated Ukrainian's ability to resist Russia's military advances and occupation. Putin has isolated himself over the last couple of years, in part because of COVID, but in part because he has grown fearful of possible palace coup. And you can see here he's at a long table with Sergey Shoygu, the Minister of Defense, and Gerasimov, the military leader. And he also has not gotten very good information about Ukraine. Many diplomats, many Russian diplomats who were serving in Ukraine didn't even know Ukrainian. Russia's intelligence networks in Ukraine were completely crumbled. And so I think they had gotten their hopes up. They thought that Russian soldiers would be greeted with open arms, that they would be seen as liberators, that they would be able to take Kiev within two days, and of course that hasn't happened. And Putin also assumed that Western sanctions and military assistance would be rather negligible, in part because he expected that Russia would take Ukraine within a matter of a few days. And he also did not foresee some of the tactical blunders that the Russian military encountered, including poor planning, poor logistics, and I would also say low morale. So that is the last piece of the puzzle. And with that, I will turn it over to Alexandra to talk about the present and the future. Thank you, Ark, for setting that up. I am going to talk about what's happened since February 24th and what we think the impact of the war is going to be. So let me start by showing you this map of what happened when Russia invaded. So this is late February. The Russian troops that Ark was talking about had masked on three sides of Ukraine in the north in Belarus, in the east, both in terms of northern Russia, and then southern Russia down through Crimea, which Russia had seized from 2014. So before the war started, they had 180,000 to 200,000 troops and equipment masked around three sides of Ukraine. And the idea was that they were going to move in so quickly that they were going to take Kiev in a couple days. They were so confident about this that the soldiers even had parade dress with them in their tanks, because they thought they were going to be having a triumphant parade within three days. Zelensky surprised them by proving to be an incredibly powerful wartime leader, even though he had been a comedian. He was totally underestimated by the Russians. And also the Ukrainian resolve to fight back and defend their territory also surprised the Russians. And this is in part because of what Ark mentioned, that the Russians were so sure that they understood Ukraine as being a lesser part of Russian territory that they had never really bothered to study Ukraine, to understand what was going on, and how things had changed on the ground since 2014 when the Russians invaded Crimea. So by the time they came in in February, they were not greeted with flowers and bread and salt, they were greeted as invaders, which was an enormous surprise. As of today, the situation has really changed. You can see that the troops have now shifted away from Kiev in the north, which they failed to take, down to the east and to the south. And if you look at Crimea, which is that peninsula in the south, and you look at the Donbass region, which was in a civil war and supported by Russia for the past eight years, you can see that what the Russian troops are trying to do now is to create a sort of land bridge between those two territories so that they could control that southern coast and also drive materiel and people and food and clean water into Crimea as opposed to having to use the bridge that they built from Kurch in southern Russia. So it's quite important for them as a military objective now to secure that land bridge between the territory that they had organized or that they had occupied in 2014. But I want to caution you from taking maps as an obvious indication of what's happening on the ground. Maps are great. They're very important in terms of understanding, but this kind of map leads you to believe that the Russians are consistently occupying and controlling that pink territory, right? That they have full control over that territory, when in fact the picture is more like this. I know that that's a little bit faint and this is from last week when they still had control over the north in some areas, but it's a very patchy system. And when we take a map that shows that the Russians are basically dominating the south in a way we're feeding into the Russian narrative that they have managed to accomplish certain military objectives when they are far from doing that. So we want to remember that just because it looks like Russia now has a dominant positions in the south, we shouldn't necessarily assume that it does. And of course maps don't tell us other important things. They don't tell us what it actually looks like on the ground. So we've all been seeing these terrible pictures coming out of Bucha and the northern suburbs around Kiev as the Russian troops have left. A lot of bodies, a lot of equipment, a lot of mines left behind so that the people that come and clean up and try and get back into their houses are booby trapped basically. Also the Russian troops have cleared out a lot of the electronics in people's houses and shipped them back to Russia. Some significant looting is happening. And that makes us understand that what's happening in the south, for example in Mariupol, which has been surrounded and besieged for almost a month, is probably unspeakably worse. And it also helps us understand that when we think, okay, so Zelensky is going to have to make some concessions at the negotiating table, right? He's just going to have to give up some of that territory, the Ukrainians, and now we really understand what that's going to mean. That you're basically condemning all of those Ukrainians that are going to stay in those occupied territories to the same kind of fate as the people in Bucha. So we really want to think that all of these negotiations, they're not just abstractions, they're really going to impact people that are on the ground. Those of us who've studied the Russians for many years and the Russian military are also afraid that what the Russians intend to do in Ukraine, in Mariupol, for example, is what they did in Grozny, which is Chechnya, part of Russia, which was essentially flattened in order to subdue the population that wanted to secede from Russia in the 90s. The Russians also did the same thing in Aleppo, in Syria. Like, this is the way they fight wars, and this is actually the way that they've been fighting in Ukraine and the way they will continue to fight. And the idea is that you make it so that the population feels that it has no choice but to surrender. So this is not as bad as it could get, right? We really cannot exclude the possibility that if Putin thinks that he needs to really shock the Ukrainians into surrendering, he might use chemical weapons or biological weapons or even a tactical nuclear weapon in order to show that he intends to win. We also need different maps if we want to understand the people who are not on the ground anymore. There's an enormous refugee crisis, the biggest since World War II in Europe. Four million Ukrainians have fled mostly to Poland, but also to Moldova, for example, the poorest country in Europe, right? So a massive state of Alabama, one of the poorest states in the U.S., getting 500,000 refugees in the course of a month, right? What do you do with them? How do you feed them? How do you shelter them? Most of these refugees are women and children. They're not going to be able to work very easily. It's an enormous kind of catastrophic problem. Not only for those people and not only for Ukraine, most of these families are separated because the men have to stay in Ukraine, so it's women and children leaving. And how are you going to take care of them until they can go back? That also doesn't tell you anything about the six million internally displaced Ukrainians. So people who left Kiev, for example, when they thought that Kiev was going to be attacked and are now someplace else, maybe with their friends, maybe with relatives, maybe with people they don't know, maybe sleeping in subway cars because they're being sheltered there from shelling, 10 million people, right? That is a lot of people. I don't know what, you're all from different states, but some states have fewer than 10 million people in them, okay?  They are not having a normal life anymore and probably won't for the foreseeable future. So I want to talk a little bit about climate because I know that that's the focus of what you've been studying and think about how the war is going to affect the environment and climate change. And the way I see it, there are three significant impacts that we already know about. The first is the direct risk of environmental danger. So many of you know that the Russians overran the Chernobyl nuclear plant because it's on the way from Belarus into Kiev. And the soldiers forced the Ukrainians to stay there for five weeks without a shift change, which is extremely stressful. And they also occupied the red forest, which is the most severely radiated part of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. It's the part where no one is allowed to go because there is so much radiation in the soil. So they drove through in their tanks and by walking and kicked up all of this red dust that they probably breathed in. And then they dug trenches in the red forest. And after three or four weeks, many of them have started suffering from radiation sickness and have been evacuated to Belarus. Now there's not really a risk of a meltdown at Chernobyl because the reactor has been deactivated for about 30 years now. And so it's not that hot. And you can continue cooling it basically by using a fire truck and filling the pond around it. The bigger problem is the other five power plants in Ukraine. Ukraine uses nuclear power to a great extent. And you might have noticed or you might have read that three weeks ago, the Russians were shelling the Zaporozhye plant, which is one of the largest in Europe. And they hid an administrative building and then took over the facilities. And then we started to realize that the real risk of an attack on a nuclear power plant isn't that you hit the reactor. It's that you cut off the electricity to the cooling system, the circulation of water. And then you can't cool the reactors and you have a meltdown. And it's pretty easy to cut electricity, right, by accident or on purpose. So that's a major risk that we're now facing. And the Russians, they have a pretty good understanding of how nuclear power works. But accidents can definitely happen, especially when you have this sort of indiscriminate shelling that the Russians are engaging in. The second important factor is that the war has really shifted political priorities away from climate change. So it's pretty incredible, but it was only four months ago that COP26 in Glasgow saw all sorts of international leaders sign on to reducing fossil fuels and meeting some important climate objectives. And the dangers of the warming planet are no less now than they were four months ago, but we've seen that there's a major shift in priorities from reducing fossil fuels and reducing global warming to energy security. So let's take the case of Germany. You probably know that after the 2011 meltdown in Japan at the Fukushima power plant, Germany decided that it was going to shut down all of its nuclear power plants and transition to non-nuclear fossil fuels and also more renewables. And they've been working on that, but the idea was that Russian gas was going to fill the gap that was left by turning down the nuclear power plants. And so two-thirds of the gas that Germany burned last year came from Russia. Like that seemed like a great idea until last year. Now it seems like a terrible idea. It also seems like an immoral idea. I don't know if you heard yesterday that the head of the EU, the EC foreign policy, Joseph Burrell, said that since the war started, the EU has given one billion euros worth of weapons to Ukraine. That's great. But they've also paid 35 billion euros to Russia for its natural gas. Sends a message, basically. They are fueling Russia's attacks on Ukraine. And what they're devoting to Ukraine is a significantly smaller proportion of that. The war has also led to higher energy prices, and this has a negative impact on what happens with fossil fuels. The way that fossil fuels work is that there's a lot of it in the ground, and it's only worth getting out of the ground if the price is high and you know that you can get back the amount that you invested in the drilling. Now that the energy prices are higher, there's going to be more drilling. There's going to be more exploration, because now it makes financial sense to frack shale, to drill more oil plants, to even turn back to coal plants. All of those prices are going up. And so the war is going to have a significantly dampening effect on our ability to fight climate change. The third thing that I wanted to mention is the effect on food supply. Now, I love pictures of Ukrainian tractors building Russian armed tanks as much as the next person, but like this is actually indicative of a problem, right? These tractors should be planting seeds right now. It's exactly the planting season. And instead, they're hauling military equipment off of the fields. And that's a problem because Russia and Ukraine together are 30% of global food exports, 30%. That food is not going to be going to Egypt and China and India and Africa. And we are going to see food shortages and famine in those countries as a result. The other impact is that both Russia and Ukraine and Belarus are exporters of fertilizer. And that fertilizer is now sanctioned. So it's not going to go to a lot of the countries that use it to grow their own food. And again, that's going to drive up food prices, which is going to increase global poverty. So there are lots of different ways in which this war is going to impact the environment, global economic well-being, and our ability to fight climate change. These are just three of them. Perhaps you have other ideas of what the impact might be, but we're happy to talk about them and also any of the points that both Arik and I raised. So let me turn it over to you for the Q&A. Thank you so much to our speakers for those insightful presentations. If you are in person, feel free to walk up to the mic, introduce yourself and ask a question right now. And if you are on Zoom, you can also use the Q&A feature on Zoom to ask a question. Yeah, walk up to the mic. Thank you. That was really interesting. Thanks for coming to speak to us. So in our class, we've been learning about this topic for a while now. And my question is just how, like I know that there's a lot of Russian support for Putin and there's kind of this misinformation campaign inside Russia from Putin to not show the Russians kind of what's actually happening on the ground. Do you think there's ever going to be a possibility when Russian citizens do see the reality of this and if their opinion towards Putin will change because of the war? So I would say the problem is even more serious, which is the Russians are seeing the same coverage that we're seeing, but they're being told that the Ukrainians are doing it to themselves. And it's the Nazis in Ukraine that are destroying Mariupol and leaving dead bodies on the streets. And that is actually much harder to fight that narrative. I don't know if you'd like to comment on it. You were talking about public opinion. Sure. Well, the narrative that Putin has sold to the Russian public is that this is a campaign to denazify Ukraine and to protect Russian speakers. Any time there are images of atrocities, Russia will say that these are fakes or that these were conducted by the Azov Battalion, which is a kind of right-wing group in Ukraine. And so that's what they're seeing on state television. Of course, some Russians are against the war. Some Russians get their news not from state television, but from independent media sources. But those opportunities to get independent media are shrinking. The last independent television station, Deutsche, was recently closed. The last independent radio station, Echomuskli, was recently closed. And a number of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, have been shut down. They can still use VPNs. They can still use an app called Telegram. YouTube. Google is still in Russia. But the options are shrinking. The other part of this, of course, is that it's human nature, unfortunately, to think only positively about your country and close your eyes to anything negative that's going on. Americans are similar in that sense, but we have a free press, at least. It matters. My question is about why has Russia specifically been more imperialist than its other post-Soviet neighbors? And why has the period that you mentioned after the end of the Cold War, when Russia seemingly was doing better, having ties with NATO, Yeltsin was elected, what happened to that period and why have we seen a return to this sort of imperialist state that Russia is now? So Russia has imperial nostalgia because Russia is the inheritor of the legacy of the Soviet Union. Russia has an imperial past, unlike the other post-Soviet countries. Russia remains a great power. It has nuclear weapons. It produces energy. 40% of Europe's natural gas comes from Russia. And unfortunately, while the 1990s was an optimistic period of democratization in Russia, when Putin took power on December 31st, 1999, gradually he started to revert back to authoritarianism. There are a variety of reasons why that happened, but in part it's because the state was taken over by the Siloviki, the security services, and the military, although the military is subservient to the security services. And so we see a process of transition from competitive authoritarianism, allowing candidates to run against Putin, allowing political parties to still contest the domestic political space, to essentially now what is a dictatorship. And Putin, in many ways, sees himself as a new tsar. Alexander, would you like to add something? I think you covered it. Hello, good evening. My name is Yu-Chiao Zou, and I'm a student from Columbia Prep once again. And I would like to ask about NATO and the NATO expansions that took place after the fall of the Soviet Union. From my understanding, NATO was primarily created as a security guarantee against the threat of the Soviet Union. So what exactly would be the purpose of NATO once the Soviet Union collapsed, and what was the continued incentive for the continual NATO expansion, even after NATO reached some sort of agreement with Russia in the corporations that you mentioned, for example, the Wurrentia. So essentially, what exactly is the continued purpose of NATO and what is the incentive behind the NATO expansion? Sure. So you're absolutely right. NATO was created as a Cold War block that was meant to defend Western Europe vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. In the early 1990s, policymakers in the West were not entirely sure about NATO's mission. In fact, there were some who thought that NATO was obsolete and that we need to look for a new European security architecture. And there were other international institutions that were designed to try to do that, like the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which Russia and many other countries in the region are a part of. But the OSCE works on a consensus basis. And the idea is something called the Indivisibility of Security, so my security should not come at the expense of your security. But as time went on, there was a reinterpretation of what NATO meant. And in part, that was driven by the new members, the countries that joined, like Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary. And they wanted protection, right? They have a history of fraught relations with Russia. And so they were able to convince NATO, primarily the United States, that they ought to be able to choose their own alliance. And this has been the basis for NATO's open door policy since 1999. Of course, NATO has conducted military operations. NATO is constantly working to expand its defense capabilities, right? And of course NATO held on to its fundamental principle in Article 5 that an attack against one NATO member is an attack on all. But you're right. There was a certain inertia that continued to make NATO expand. And I think in some sense, Western policymakers did not always question what the repercussions of the expansion would be. Thank you. My name is Alan. I'm from Moldenheim. So my question is, do you believe the EU now, especially with reports of the massacre in Boca, will actually cut Russian gas and oil imports, especially with nations like Germany and Hungary relying heavily on Russian imports of natural gases? Do you believe now is the time, well, now the EU actually will end up cutting off those avenues, those energy avenues? So there are two things to think about when you ask that question. The first is whether it's politically feasible for Europe to take that decision. And the problem with Viktor Orban in Hungary is that he is closer to Putin than he is to Europe. So he's unlikely to sign on to any measures like that. The other problem is that Europe, when we say that they're highly dependent on oil and gas, again, it's not an abstraction. It's what's keeping German houses warm. So in the summer, the Germans could afford to have less imports of oil and gas. They don't need it as much. You don't have heating issues, which is where most of the gas is going. But you would have a problem next winter. So we could say, you Germans and Europeans, it's time for you to get over this addiction to Russian gas. But that basically means that power is going to be rationed to German households. So people are going to be cold. And it's probably more the poor people than the rich people. The second thing is that you're going to have rationing of gas supplies to manufacturing in Germany. And the estimate is that doing that would lose, would cost Germany three to five percent of GDP. That's basically a recession. So Germany could take the decision to cut off the oil and gas. Gas is the particularly important one, because at least oil you can get from other places, but they don't have the capacity to reliquify or deliquify natural gas if they bought that from other places. So Germany would have to be willing to pay a pretty significant domestic price. And if you look in the U.S. how we freak out when the price of gas goes up by a dollar, right, the German politicians are asking themselves, like, can we survive a winter where people are cold and the GDP is shrinking and there are going to be economic costs across the population? And it's a legitimate question. I think it's going to take a long time for Europe to wean itself off of Russian gas. Germany has made statements that they're going to build these two new liquefied natural gas terminals. They're going to invest in so-called interconnectors across borders to ship natural gas to other countries. But this is much easier said than done. And so, you know, for Germany it might take a couple of years for countries like Bulgaria and Hungary it may take almost a decade. Yeah, it takes as long to build those kinds of facilities as it does to build the renewables, right, which they're interested in doing anyway. But it's not capacity that you can just turn on in a year. Hello, my name is Brandon. I'm from the Mullen High School. I was wondering with the large portion of the world's food production in materials for food production being centralized in Russia and Ukraine. I was wondering where do you think we would supposedly fill in that gap that is now being created due to the war? So the U.S. will probably export more, right? There's a debate right now. There's a significant amount of American agricultural land that is deliberately not planted in order to keep food prices at a certain level. So if those, I forget what the name is, like the crop reserve lands or something like that, if they're allowed to be planted then the U.S. could fill some of the gaps in the food supply. But there are still going to be shortages, again because it takes too long to compensate for, you know, a sudden drop in fertilizer or in planting. The other issue to think about is that Russia received all the seeds it needed to plant this year. So Russia's going to have probably a normal harvest. But the imports of seeds for next year are now under sanctions. So the real crisis will be felt after the next agricultural season. And the longer this goes on, the higher food prices will get. You know, the more shortage of food there will be because Ukrainians aren't planting right now, right? So with each passing week things will get more difficult. Right now the food supply is stable. But if the war goes on for another month and maybe another month then things will get very difficult. My name is Stephen from Malden High and I'd like to ask about post-war relations with Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the world after this. And especially how this new narrative about pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian, this, all right, how that will impact the future. So, you know, there is a wave of anti-Russian sentiment now, which is understandable. But the fact is that like this war will end in a negotiation the way all wars end. And it's going to be quite important that if that negotiation is seen as legitimate, if the Ukrainians are coming to the table and getting something from the negotiations and giving something to the negotiations. And there's a perception that they have been an equal partner in determining the end of the war. I think that will be the first step in terms of resuming, let's say, more normal relations. It's going to take a long time for people to get over what Russia has done. And calling the Russian president a war criminal while understandable probably doesn't help. If you think even during the Soviet period, the Soviet leaders and the American leaders met with each other, they didn't call each other names. And there were still negotiations on arms control. The fact is that there are a lot of topics on which we need to work with the Russians, like arms control, like COVID control, like counter-terrorism. And so it's in everyone's interest to have normalized relationships when Russia is no longer invading and fighting in Ukraine. But it's going to take a certain amount of diplomatic finesse to get to the point where that's a normal relationship. But I would also say that even while the war continues, if the West wants to try to win hearts and minds in Russia, then things like bullying of Russians in Europe and the United States are not particularly helpful, because Putin's propaganda machine clings on to every instance of what they call Russophobia. So for example, just a few days ago, Chanel announced that they would no longer allow people with Russian passports to buy handbags, no matter where they are. Not in Russia proper, but in the West too. And of course, this sparked outrage in Russia with people taking to social media to burn handbags. I think- Not that many probably were burned, it's my guess, yeah. But these kinds of things certainly are not helpful in terms of trying to build bridges and keep lines of communication open with Russians, many of whom do oppose the war. Thank you so much for speaking to us. My name is Jeremy, and I was wondering that with the crippling effect this war has had on the Russian economy, we've seen a huge drop in the stock market, we're expecting GDP to fall significantly. And even though the ruble's been stabilized, it was only after the Russian central bank raised rates, mandated exporters hold rubles instead of foreign currencies, and enacted strict currency controls. So I was curious, with all these terrible effects on the Russian economy, do you think Putin is a rational actor when he made the decision to invade Ukraine? And how do you think this will- his rationality or irrationality will affect future negotiations? I think Putin is entirely a rational actor if you put yourself in his place and take the information that he received. So if Putin was told that Russian soldiers would be greeted with open arms and seen as liberators and that Russian soldiers would be able to take Kiev in a couple of days, then it makes complete sense why he launched the invasion of Ukraine. With regard to sanctions, I think there are three possible goals of sanctions, but really only one of them is realistic. The first goal of sanctions is regime change, right, to make the Russian population suffer and to take to the streets and rise up and to oust Putin or to get the elites in Putin's circle to create a palace coup. I think that's unrealistic, and in part because actually the sanctions have created a kind of rally around the flag effect. Russians blame the West for sanctions. They buy into the narrative that Russia is a kind of besieged fortress fending off attacks from the West and that the West is trying to isolate Russia. The other potential goal is to change Russia's behavior, right, to compel Putin to remove Russian forces from Ukraine. And the promise is that if Russia removes its soldiers from Ukraine, that sanctions would be lifted. I think that's a difficult goal to realize in part because Putin has said that the sanctions are inevitable, that he does not see them being lifted anytime, and he thinks that the sanctions would have been imposed regardless of what Russia had done. The third goal, which I think is the most realistic and the one that the West is currently pursuing, is basically to squeeze Russia's war economy, to make it very difficult for Russia to sustain its military operation, to make it difficult for Russia to build weapons and to ship them to the front, to make it difficult for Russia to import certain technologies that are necessary for the war effort, and essentially to diminish Russia's power. And that, I think, is what we're seeing. The other important thing I would point out is that the Russians didn't anticipate that the sanctions would be so hard. So they thought, okay, what happened after Crimea wasn't that bad, we were able to live with it, so we'll get a little bit more of those Crimean type of sanctions. They underestimated the extent to which the US would take a forceful hand and also that the US would be able to rally the Europeans. They assumed that Europe would be fractured and that they wouldn't be able to unite. The other thing is that they thought that excluding Russia from Swift, which is like the messaging system for banks, that was the nuclear option. And it turns out the nuclear option was freezing the central bank's hard currency reserves, which had been built up. They had $640 billion. They thought that was kind of the war chest, so they could spend that down while they were cut off from the economy. And it turns out that they only have access to about $150 billion of that, and that was a huge blow. But it was really unanticipated, even among Western analysts who were thinking, like, ooh, you know, will Swift be the nuclear option? Like, nobody, I think, really anticipated that the West and Europe would go much further than that, much faster. Thank you. Hello. Thank you so much for your wonderful presentations today. My name is Okshay from Columbia Prep. And my question was in regards to standoffish nations, which have been kind of reluctant to join the global effort in squeezing Russia's economy, such as China, which has been, you know, distanced themselves from the effort, and India, which has accepted discounted oil. Do you think the failure of large economic players such as Russia, China, not sorry, not Russia, but China, India, among other nations, in joining the global effort of sanctioning Russia will lead to Russia having some opportunity to perhaps, you know, slow their economic decline and basically hinder the Western effort? So there's no doubt that having open lines of trade with China and India is good for Russia, right, and does to some extent mitigate the impact of sanctions. It doesn't completely eliminate the impact of sanctions. So for example, one of the things that the US has done is create an export ban on US technology, which basically covers all the avionics. So China refused to allow or to sell Russia the replacement parts that they would have gotten from the US. And that essentially means that the Russian entire fleet of planes is going to be grounded sooner or later when the spare parts run out and they can't cannibalize the planes. And there are some important ways in which China has refused to step in and support Russia. For example, they're not sending them the military equipment that they asked for, the MREs that they asked for. So China is trying to walk a fine line between openly supporting Putin and really alienating the West. And it's not been entirely successful, I think, with either side. But Putin is now greatly weakened and much more dependent on China than he was before. And this is really good for China because that natural gas that's not going to go to Europe anymore will eventually go to China once the new pipelines are built. And sold for a lot less. And sold for a lot less because the Chinese were able to negotiate a good discounted price. So those help Putin, they can allow the regime to survive, but they're not going to be able to fully compensate for the impact of the Western sanctions on growth and on manufacturing. A lot of Russian manufacturing is now at a standstill, not because they can't manufacture things, but because they can't get the spare parts that they need from the West. And China doesn't have those spare parts. Hi, I'm Margo Kramer. I'm from Columbia Prep. And I have another question about sanctions. Many have been put in place recently, as we've just discussed. But firstly, how economically feasible is it for the West to continue these sanctions? For instance, not just the U.S., but especially all of these countries that are dependent on Russian natural gas. It's not quite feasible for them now. Is there a point where it will be feasible for them beyond building a new pipeline? And also, second part of my question, at what point will it be politically and economically so impactful that Putin will be forced to give up the war? Will that be the final, the end of war in Ukraine for Putin, the impact of sanctions? Or will it be another factor? To my mind, sanctions will have no impact on Putin's military decisions. I mean, he's already decided that he's willing to pay the price in terms of the economy, potentially in terms of social support over the medium term. Whatever it is that the sanctions create, it's worth it in order to reclaim Russian greatness and those Ukrainian lands. In terms of whether the sanctions are sustainable, one of the things about sanctions is that you impose them, but you have to continually tighten them in order for them to work because you impose a sanction, somebody finds a workaround. You have to close that loophole or tighten it or sanction something else in order to keep the impact at the same level. And so it requires a continual political commitment to punish Russia and to bear whatever the economic price is. Now for the U.S., that's not very high because we had pretty minimal economic trade with Russia, but for Europe, it is a big deal. And a lot of that explains why Anthony Blinken is constantly in Europe, kind of keeping the Europeans together, why getting NATO and the EU on the same page so that they're fighting the war in Ukraine, parallel tracks that are trying to achieve the same objective. It's going to take a lot of work and the expectation is over time, the effectiveness of sanctions diminishes. But as Arik said, we have to ask what the goal of sanctions are. If their regime changed, they're not going to work anyway. If it's to incentivize Putin to pull out of Ukraine, they're not going to work either. But if it's eventually to cripple the Russian economy, a couple years of sanctions would probably do that. It's unclear if that actually stops the war or if it gets Putin to leave Ukraine, I would doubt it. But I think the other important thing to remember is that it's not that we have a Putin problem now. We do have a Putin problem, but we also have a Russia problem. So that even if Putin is replaced, he's probably going to be replaced by someone from the inner circle who's just as much a hardliner as he is. So I think sanctions are important because you have to do something, but they're not going to stop the war and they're not going to bring down Putin. But it is quite astonishing the extent to which the West as well as other allies in the Asia Pacific have unified around the sanctions. I mean, Japan, South Korea, even Singapore have gotten on board with the sanctions. I think a few years ago that would have been unheard of. But you're absolutely right. Sanctions are a double-edged sword. And while they may not necessarily hurt the United States directly, there are all sorts of knock-on effects, global supply chains that will be disrupted. Economists already predict that the world economy will lose somewhere between $400 billion and upward of $1 trillion this year. And that's going to affect us. That's going to affect us in terms of rising oil prices. That's going to affect us in terms of rising food prices. Semiconductors, right? Microchips, those are going to get more expensive too. Cars are going to get more expensive. So we've decided that the economic costs are worth it. And of course, Russia is going to suffer economically much more than we are. Comically tall for me. Hello. My name is Ray Honormann and I'm also from Columbia Prep. So this was touched on a little in both of your presentations, but Zelensky's kind of seen outside of Russia as the underdog war leader. And Putin is seen as a war criminal. So how are those two figures perceived within Russia? And is that impacting any of their actions? So Putin, of course, has, as I said, already built up this personalistic autocracy in Russia. He displays himself as a kind of strong man, charismatic leader. And many Russians buy into that. Putin has historically had support of around 70%. Now it may be upward of 80%. So I don't think Russians believe that he is a war criminal, right? Like the West is accusing him of being. In fact, the recent polling of Russians shows that most of them believe the United States is responsible for this crisis, not Russia. As for Zelensky, I think it's mixed. Many Russians fondly remember Zelensky as a comedian. He actually went on Russian television shows on occasion. He speaks Russian. So I think Russians are kind of unsure what to make of Zelensky. They think he's naive and that he's in the hands of the Nazis. And then when they listen to some of his speeches, Zelensky has made some speeches in Russian calling for Russians to go out and protest against the war. I think they don't take him very seriously. They think he's basically been co-opted by the Nazis who are truly in power. But that's the Russian narrative anyway. And the West, right? He's a puppet of the West. And the West. That's right. Thank you. Hello. Thank you for being here today. My name is William McMullen from Atlanta, Georgia at Pace Academy. I had a question about the cyber attacks in Ukraine. To my knowledge, there has not been any intrusive cyber attacks in Ukraine, although Russia has the ability to do so. What are the implications of a cyber attack and why have they not done something have not done so yet? So there have been some cyber attacks in Ukraine taking down official sites. But you're right that we expected a lot more attacks, not just in Ukraine, but possibly in the West. Everybody was getting their cash and filling their cars with gas. And I suspect that one of the things that is holding back these massive attacks that the Russians could certainly do if they wanted to is the fear that we don't know how to measure a cyber attack in terms of the ladder of escalation. So if there's an attack on Ukrainian infrastructure, let's say the grid, the power grid, and it accidentally takes out some power in Poland and power to a hospital is cut off and people die in Poland. Like is that a NATO, is that like an article five situation where NATO has to respond because Poland has been attacked by the Russians, right? It's just it's very difficult to control the effects of a cyber attack. And I suspect that the Russians, they're trying not to escalate. They don't want NATO to join the fight. And so there are reasons to be cautious about doing anything that would trigger a big response. Do you want to add anything? No, that makes sense. Thank you. My name is Eric Pan. I'm from Georgia as well. I'm also from Pace Academy. And I understand that Putin is an ex KGB officer. Do you think this helps him in office? And another thing I wanted to ask is, I understand that the Russians could use a tactical nuke on Ukraine. And like, how do you think the rest of the world would respond to this action? Yeah, well, I think Putin's training in the KGB allows him to be a good tactician. You often hear that that Putin is a good tactician, but he's not so much a good strategist. He when he has a goal, he works to execute it to the full extent that it's possible using every tool of statecraft at his disposal. And I think he also has a good command of Russia's security services, Russia's intelligence apparatus. With regard to tactical nuclear weapons, my view is that it's quite unlikely that Russia would use them in part because it still needs to keep up the narrative that Russia is not targeting civilians in Ukraine. And using a tactical nuclear weapon would cause enormous devastation. Some of the radiation fallout would even affect Russia proper. And I think that the narrative that Russia is protecting Russian speakers and denazifying Ukraine would completely crumble because a tactical nuclear weapon would cause severe devastation to the population of Ukraine broadly. But if something like that were to happen, I'm not entirely sure how the West would respond. I mean, would we respond by using nuclear weapons ourselves? I think that's highly unlikely. It's not entirely clear to me that there would be a Western response, unfortunately. So I have a slightly different opinion. Russia has between 1,200 and 5,000 tactical nuclear weapons. The U.S. has less than 200. It's never been part of the military strategy. And these tactical nuclear weapons, they're smaller in many cases than what was dropped on Hiroshima. So you think of the way that they're used in the battlefield. They're not used to take out a city. They're used for some military advantage on the battlefield. And that means that Russia wouldn't necessarily have to drop them on a NATO flotilla to make an impression. You could detonate a relatively small nuclear warhead over an abandoned forest, for example, where maybe a couple hundred people are killed, not millions. And the radioactive fallout is not so extreme. I agree that that's something that the Russians would be worried about. And then NATO has a question. So like, they didn't bomb the NATO flotilla, right? But that is definitely an escalation and definitely crossing, you know, kind of a red line or a taboo in terms of what's acceptable during war time. I think at that point NATO has to respond. Because if we don't, then Russia understands, okay, like maybe a little tactical nuclear weapon here or there is going to be okay, because NATO is so confident or so determined not to put boots on the ground and fight World War III, that they won't even respond in that case. And that will be a very difficult dilemma for NATO. Do you say, okay, that's it. Like if we don't step in now, he's just going to keep going? Or do you say, you know, we're not going to respond in kind, we're not going to fight back? And then potentially empower Putin to understand that there's not that much of a limit to what he can do on the ground. But the trouble is that Russia also does not want any kind of major escalation. That's why you see both NATO and Russia being very cautious about the escalation ladder. And there's already a dialogue between the US and the Russian military in terms of managing escalation risks, right? Neither side wants to see the use of a chemical or nuclear weapon. With chemical weapons, it's a little bit more nuanced because of the attribution issue. So Russia could use a chemical weapon and blame it on Ukraine or the West. That's right. But with nuclear weapons, I think it's highly unlikely that they would use. Thank you. We also have a question that just came in on the Zoom. This is a question from the DEA students, which is that if sanctions are the current and most frequent response by the US and EU to Russian actions in Ukraine but are also preventing food and fertilizer supplies from getting elsewhere and sanctions could increase production of fossil fuels, what are other responses or actions that countries and global institutions could take? So the other response is basically to continue providing weaponry to Ukraine so that they can fight back. But there's a pretty limited toolbox of responses. You know, once Russia has been cut off from even, I guess, the Human Rights Commission now, the UN Human Rights Commission, there just aren't that many tools in the toolbox to punish Russia. Thank you. Hi, my name is Brennan. I'm from the Malin High School. I have two questions. The first is why is there such a major difference in the treatment of African refugees and Ukrainian refugees by the Western powers? And the second is why is there such a massive disparity in attention from the Western powers towards the conflict between Palestine and Israel and a conflict between Ukraine and Russia? Yeah, I mean, I think you're pointing out an important hypocrisy in terms of how Western policymakers and Western media treat different conflicts around the world, right? Ukraine has been front-page news for the last five weeks, whereas conflicts in, say, Yemen or Ethiopia practically get, you know, don't get any coverage at all in the Western press. But also, Ukraine is a special case because it's a conflict that could escalate into a major great power war, and so I think it deserves some of the attention that it has gotten. But you're absolutely right. You know, sometimes I watch American media and, you know, with the 24-hour news cycle, you would think that there would be more than just one major story, and unfortunately, that's largely what we get, although in the last couple of weeks we've gotten some US domestic news, at least. Yeah, as for the treatment of refugees, again, I think some of that hypocrisy exists, but Ukraine is, of course, in close proximity with Europe. There are cultural ties between Ukraine and Poland, societal ties, economic ties, and so it makes sense that countries like Poland and Hungary and Romania are accepting Ukrainian refugees and welcoming them more so than, say, refugees from Syria and Libya. I think there's also a demographic factor. I mean, I agree with what Arik is saying, but most of the refugees are women and children, whereas most of the refugees from previous conflicts were men coming, and there was a lot of fear that they would be taking jobs, whereas I don't think that that's the kind of visceral reaction that people are having to the women and children. And the elderly. And the elderly. It's not a justification, but I think that definitely plays into the way that they've been received. But then what is with the massive disparity in the coverage and treatment between the Ukrainian and Russian conflict and the Israel and Palestinian conflict? Well, I mean, one thing is that Ukraine is an enormous country. It's 600 miles wide. If you put it on the US map, it spreads from Boston to Chicago and has 44 million people. So there's kind of a critical mass of people involved. I don't know what the cutoff is to make a crisis worth covering. It should be much lower. But I think that that's definitely playing a factor, in addition to the points that Arik raised about the potential for escalation here. Hi, my name is Allison from the Maldon High School. And I know we've touched upon this topic previously, but considering the reasoning behind native expansion and the origins behind the creation of NATO, I wanted to know your thoughts on the document of the project of the New American Century and the neo-conservative beliefs regarding the spread of liberalism and NATO expansion. Maybe you could say a little bit more about what doctrine you're talking about. Are the neocons responsible for it all? Yeah, I mean, look, there are people, particularly in the George W. Bush administration, who are responsible for many of the ills that the United States is experiencing today, right? They pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia unilaterally. They invaded Iraq in 2003 with no firm evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and also on a unilateral basis. They committed torture in Abu Ghraib and other black sites around the world in Guantanamo Bay. All of these things did a tremendous disservice for the United States in terms of living up to our values in terms of democracy and human rights. And I think we are still paying the price for all of those things. And when I talked about Americans closing their eyes to the negative and only focusing on the positive, that's true too. It took us about a decade to reconcile with some of those things. But the one good thing about democracy is that it's always a work in progress. And I think we try to improve ourselves as time goes on. And we learn from our mistakes. And most importantly, we have a free press to be able to discuss these issues freely. And we have a free academic space like this where we can say what we really think about those things. Hi, I'm Jeremy. I'm sorry to bother you guys with another question again. But Mr. Birakofsky, when we were discussing sanctions last, you mentioned that there were certain goals of them. But you were pretty quick to dismiss the idea that sanctions could lead to regime change. You know, we've seen this idea be upheld in Venezuela and Cuba. But in nations like South Africa, sanctions were relatively successful in leading to regime change. So I'm just wondering why do you believe that sanctions remain less effective or not particularly effective at leading to regime change? Well, South Africa is a unique case. And maybe one of the only success stories of sanctions leading to regime change. If you look at countries like Iran, for example, that have had sanctions in place for years, and actually the sanctions regime against Iran is even harsher than the one on Russia now. Yeah, we haven't seen any indications that the regime is unstable. And I think if you look at Russia, Putin has a very firm grip on power. He's been able to concentrate power in his hands in recent years. He calls all the shots. And so, you know, if there were to be regime change in Russia, it would likely come from one of his own, from the security services. It wouldn't come from the military because the military is subservient to the security services. It wouldn't come from the oligarchs, because they have agreed not to participate in politics. And for those oligarchs who run state companies in Russia, their fates are tied to Putin. They're in the positions that they hold precisely because of their connections with Putin. And when it comes to protests leading to some kind of regime change, well, that's very difficult to predict. But the more repressive Putin gets, the less likely Russians are to take to the streets when they know that they could face up to 15 years in prison for spreading fakes about the Russian military, right? That's the new law that Russia just imposed. So I really think it's anyone's guess, but I don't think that that should be the goal of sanctions because it's extremely difficult to predict. Thank you. Yeah, if I can just add something. I mean, what Ark is pointing to is that, like, you have to have some theory for how the sanctions would lead to regime change. Like, do you think that the sanctions are going to impoverish people and then they're going to be motivated to take to the street in order to turn over Putin? Well, probably not, right? Because mobilization seems to be a problem. Do you think that they're going to lead the oligarchs to withdraw their economic support from Putin and that's going to lead to regime change? Well, probably not because the oligarchs have either fallen in line, fled or are so dependent on him that they're not going to break from him. Do you think that it's that inner circle of security officials and the military that's going to think, like, this guy just made a colossal mistake, he shouldn't be in power anymore? You know, maybe that's probably the one possibility where there is a crack. And that's actually how authoritarian regimes usually fall, not from popular protests, but from cracks in the elite. But we haven't seen any signs of that yet. Well, there's one interesting example. In the first few days of the war, Putin put, supposedly, put under house arrest someone named Sergey Bezeda, who is the head of foreign intelligence for the FSB. This was the person who was tasked with laying the groundwork for a spy network in Ukraine and preparing for this special military operation. They spent billions of dollars, most of the money was stolen and there were indications that Putin was very frustrated with the FSB's work in Ukraine. So could there be tensions within Russian security services? Perhaps, but I don't think we have enough information about that. And it's a pretty blunt instrument, right? If you're trying to get, like, two or three people to break with Putin and you're kind of piling on these sanctions in the Russian economy, like, it doesn't seem like a super effective way to do that. Yep, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Also from Madan Hai, I have a quick question for you guys. Do you think that China is using the political focus on the Russia and Ukraine crisis occurring right now to quietly plan and proceed with its fight or acquiring of Taiwan? Well, I was on a panel with the guy who's a China expert, which I am not. I don't think you are either. Yeah. And I asked him this question and he said, you know, the Chinese are probably looking around and saying, wow, it turns out it's a lot harder to take over a country that doesn't want to be taken over than we thought. And like, forget about the fact that you have to do an amphibious landing to get there, right? So that's one thing. And the second thing is that they've probably also been taken aback by the unity of the economic response and the fact that the West has essentially shut down the 11th largest economy in the world. So even though it would be harder to do that with China because they're more extensive economic ties, I don't think they've been thinking that, you know, this is a great distraction. Now we'll go invade Taiwan. I think it's been pretty sobering. That's my guess. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think if anything, China has learned a lesson from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that it's not so simple to launch a special operation like this and be successful. And it's going to take some time for the balance of power, balance of military power between China and Taiwan to shift so dramatically that China would be able to take Taiwan. There are a number of reasons that this is complicated. The amphibious landing, the fact that Taiwan actually has a fairly strong military, I think it's pretty unrealistic. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Amin Yakin. I'm a history and philosophy teacher with my students here from Malden. I'd like to thank you very much for presenting this opportunity for our students. The world is not black and white, as we all know, especially in geopolitics. I also like to thank Ms. Berry in the back for all the work that she has done. She is amazing, really is. Here's my question, especially for Arik, who's a Russia expert and studied in Moscow and Poland. I was recently introduced to Alexander Dugan, and I just started reading his book, Putin Against Putin. I have yet to go to the fourth theory. Very interesting, although I disagree with him on his analysis on human rights and his critique that can be sometimes misguided on liberalism. God knows that liberals are sinners globally, but I personally believe that the future of the world is liberalism by universal liberalism, very different than the traditional one that we have. If Arik, and I believe so, I did more research, I read some more papers, I've listened to his lectures. If he's right, and the Russian leadership, not just President Putin, have made the decision for a Eurasian future, and we know that there are tectonic shifts as they go on forward, and the Western hegemony and Western power and domination for the last 400 years, what does that truly mean for the US as the supreme leader of the West and for its grand strategy to the future? You get the easy questions. Well, I think the United States will need to rethink its grand strategy if this is the permanent state of affairs. I mean, we talk about a new Cold War. If indeed the sanctions will be in place indefinitely, you'll see that Russia will completely decouple its economy from the West, and it will have to join China and reorient its economy toward Asia. With regard to Alexander Dugan, I'm a little bit skeptical. I speak with experts in Russia all the time, and I rarely hear Alexander Dugan's name. I know he was popular probably about a decade ago. He's written books. There are some Russian decision makers, including people like Medinsky, who was the former Minister of Culture, now is the negotiator with the Ukrainian government, who listened to Alexander Dugan. But I think on the whole, Dugan does not have very much influence with Putin and his inner circle. That said, there are ideas like Greater Eurasia that are promoted by Russian experts like Sergey Karaganov. He was the Dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at the Higher School of Economics. He is very close with Russia's security services. This I think is perhaps more in line with what the Russian leadership is thinking right now. But China has its own idea of what it wants in terms of the Belt and Road Initiative. It's kind of a hub and spokes model. It does not see Russia as part of its hub. It very much sees Russia as a spoke. And I think, as Alexander alluded to already, Russia is going to become increasingly dependent on China for de-dollarization and import substitution in terms of technology and so on. This may become very much a new cold war between the West and the West, but only time will tell. What do you say to American scholars and policymakers, including those who won the Cold War? Henry Kissinger, for example, who said that one of the aims of U.S. policy ought to split the Russian and the Chinese and win Russia over to the Western side. What do you say to that? And my last question to you is Sun Tzu in the out of war, in conducting war, one must allow for a golden bridge for the enemy to retreat and say, face, what's that bridge look like for Russia? Clearly, this has to be de-escalated. And we, you know, the suffering of human people, because when I think of war, I think of a child. I think of a mother. I think of a woman. I think of innocent people. That's totally absent largely from the geopolitical consideration. So from a moral perspective, war is a racket. But how we need to stop this as soon as possible. What is that bridge look like for the Russians, for the Ukrainians? The West is just basically watching at the moment. Those are both great questions. I think in terms of pulling Russia away from China's orbit, that's easier said than done. And, you know, in 2014, I was in Russia, actually 2013 was the first time I came to Russia. And when I spoke with experts about China, they didn't have very much to say in part because Russian scholars were not largely all that knowledgeable about China. That all changed in 2014 when Western sanctions were initially imposed and Russia decided to pivot to Asia for the first time. And now I think it's practically impossible to return Russia from China's orbit. Russia and China have a strategic partnership what essentially amounts to an alliance that's going to take a very long time. But if there were ever a clash between the United States and China, we know that Russia would be on China's side. As to giving Putin off-ramps, I'm all for that. One of them could be the lifting of sanctions. And there are already negotiations between the Ukrainian government and the Russian government to try to reach a cease-fire or ideally some kind of negotiated settlement over Ukraine. We're not entirely sure what that might look like, but some ideas include Ukraine pledging to a status of neutrality, so never to join NATO, but to join the EU eventually. Perhaps making some concessions with regard to the status of Crimea and Donbas. We don't know if Russia will have other demands. For example, to keep this coveted land bridge to Crimea, they that Putin may be interested in keeping some of the territorial gains that the Russian military has made, although it's not entirely clear how Russia will be able to occupy these territories given that much of the population is against Putin. But certainly there need to be off-ramps and there may need to be some concessions from Ukraine and the West in order to bring about peace. Thank you very much. I would like to thank you for giving this type of presentation. I also want to ask you on your thoughts of, with the way the Russian military has performed, still fielding firearms, vehicles, and planes that are 30, 40, 50 years old, with the cannibalizing their own security forces with information so poor they're digging trenches and radioactive forests. Do we really need NATO as this major defensive alliance of the best militaries in the world against a military that's still stuck in the Cold War with their technology-wise and with their logistics and information? Well, you know, I wouldn't discount the Russian military entirely based on their performance in Ukraine. Russia still is one of the most modernized militaries in the world. Russia has built up its military after 2014 considerably and the reaction from the West has been such that countries like Germany are stepping up and pledging to spend even more on defense. But you're absolutely right that Russia has encountered certain challenges in terms of inadequate planning, poor logistics, low morale of Russian troops, and those challenges have certainly affected Russia's performance on the battlefield. I'm not an expert on the Russian military per se, but I think Russia still has some tricks up its sleeves, if you will. Russia is retreated from northern Ukraine because it wasn't able to take Kiev and Kharkiv, but the troops are regrouping right now and we're likely to see another major offensive at some point in the Donbass. Putin is going to try to take Donetsk and Luhansk and they'll be digging in the south. While Ukraine has done quite well, and Ukraine, by the way, has home field advantage, urban warfare generally favors the defender, and of course, Ukrainians know exactly what they're fighting for, which is their independence. Russian troops, it's not so clear. I still think we need to keep things in proportion. The Russian military is clearly much more powerful than the Ukrainian military and that's part of the reason why we see countries giving Ukraine military assistance, most recently tanks to Ukraine. Previously that was unheard of and there are also talks about giving Ukraine fighter jets, so yes, I think that Russia is still a formidable adversary in terms of its military strength. Thank you very much. I'm Sebastian from Alden High and so I wanted to know what you thought about, so like since 2014, with the maiden event that happened in the change of government, the Ukrainian government officially recognized Stepan Bandera and other Nazi collaborators as heroes of Ukraine and they incorporated the openly neo-Nazi-Azov battalion into their National Guard. Do you think this is at all indicative of a deeper problem domestically and do you think that the war may drive further ultra-nationalist sentiments and anti-Russian sentiments which may lead to the growth of the far right? Well one of the things about Russian propaganda is that certain facts are cherry-picked and hyperbolized and oftentimes Russian state media picks up on certain kernels of truth, if you will, and blows them up and this is one that I think is important to highlight. Yes, absolutely it's true that there are Nazis in Ukraine. Yes, the Azov battalion exists. Yes, Stepan Bandera has a very complicated legacy. On the one hand, he fought for Ukraine's independence and is seen as a hero by Ukrainian nationalists. On the other hand, he was a collaborator with Nazi Germany and it's very difficult to square those things and I think that the Ukrainian government may have benefited from a little bit more sensitivity when it comes to addressing its Russian-speaking population that had qualms with these tendencies and with not giving Putin's propaganda machine more fodder. Other examples of this include things like banning Russian language from schools, right? Yes, the Ukrainian government has every right to declare Ukrainian as its national language but there is a Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine. There are many Russian speakers in Ukraine and I think they would have been wise to be sensitive to these kinds of issues in order to not create societal tensions. If I can just add something also. First of all, the Azov battalion and the Bandera, let's say supporters, like this idea of far-right nationalism is something that a lot of countries are struggling from including the US and there's no reason to think from election results that it's a bigger problem in Ukraine than it is in the US or France or Hungary. Even though there was a moment in the Maidan where there were far-right groups that were let's say overrepresented, they got less than 2% of the vote in the next elections. So the Russians have really amplified this as if it were the active political force running Ukraine and that's simply not true. In terms of Stepan Bandera and this whole legend, it's true that they collaborated with the Nazis. The reason they collaborated with the Nazis is because there was always a significant amount of Ukrainians in the West who did not want to be part of the Soviet Union and who basically fought an insurgent war from the time that the Soviet Union absorbed Ukraine in the early 1920s through the famine that was imposed by the Soviet Union in 1932-33 and then through the 50s. So by the time the Nazis arrived in Ukraine, there was a significant part of the population that greeted them as liberators from their Soviet oppressors. So I'm not justifying neo-Nazis in Ukraine, but it's a pretty complicated history and it's also part of the anti-Soviet history of Ukraine which Russia is keen to suppress. Yeah, that's right. I mean the right sector doesn't have any seats in the Ukrainian parliament so it's a complete myth that Nazis are in power in Ukraine. That's absolutely not true. They get very few votes in Ukrainian elections. Yeah, thank you for the response. I also wondered if you thought that with like the recent ban of several political parties that there's any kind of like if it's obvious that this isn't like the Ukrainian government isn't like a Nazi government but do you think that kind of like nationalism being stoked could lead to any further problems even after an invasion? I think, you know, as they say, all's fair in love and war. Unfortunately, you know, during the war you have to take certain precautions and these pro-Russian political parties are trying to exert influence even during the war. But you're absolutely right. This does again feed Russia's propaganda. It does ostracize those Ukrainians who support the pro-Russian political parties and I think in terms of any potential for long-term reconciliation between Ukraine and Russia this does make things very difficult. Thank you very much for your response. Hi, I'm Nick from Maldon High. I'd like to thank you for this. So I was wondering if the Soviet Union when it disbanded if NATO had disbanded as well would we still be like dealing with a similar problem with the Russia-Ukraine crisis considering like the Russia-Ukraine background or would it be completely different? Can you repeat the first part of your question? When the Soviet Union disbanded if NATO had disbanded as well would we still be kind of like dealing with the same Russia-Ukraine crisis today? Yeah, I don't know. You're asking about a completely different historical trajectory which is hard to say anything about. For a long time there were talks about a Euro-Atlantic security community from Vancouver to Vladivostok kind of bringing Russia into the European security architecture but I think that's counterfactual that we will never know about. Great. Well, thank you. Great, thank you so much. So those were all of our questions if we could give our speakers another round of applause. This has been a great discussion and I hope everyone has learned something today that they can hopefully take into the next coming days. Now we are going to be splitting into smaller groups for discussion and pizza I think. Every person should have picked a piece of paper upon coming in and there should be a specific color.