Sam Greene on the state of the war in Ukraine
Sam Greene is a well-known scholar of Russian politics. He’s a a Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London and the Director of Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, DC. Sam is the co-author of the excellent book, Putin vs. The People, with Professor Graeme Robertson (a UNC colleague and friend). Sam has also developed a substantial following on Twitter, noted for his ability to breakdown the complexities of Russian politics into digestible Twitter threads. For my money, he’s one of the very best Russia analysts out there. His substack about Russian politics, TL;DRussia is consistently edifying and incisive.
Sam graciously agreed to answer some questions I had as the Russian invasion of Ukraine passed the one-year anniversary. I’d say if there was one thing I was groping for while posing my questions to Sam, it wasn’t so much whether there is any light at the end of the tunnel, as it was how to think about the factors that might move us closer to a plausible and palatable end to the carnage. That’s a tall order and Sam is too thoughtful and careful to pretend to know something none of us can know.
In any event, as always, I learned from how Sam tries to think about things.
This is the (very lightly edited) exchange.
JW: Last year, you wrote that for Russia, victory is "whatever Russia can claim on the day that it decides to stop fighting, provided - and this is key - that it stops fighting of its own volition." A year into the war, Ukraine seems more firmly resolved than ever that its war aims will not be achieved until Russia is expelled from all Ukrainian territory, including the Crimea. I read this to mean that the kinds of face-saving scenarios for Putin that might be tolerable to the Ukrainians no longer exist (if they ever did). What are your thoughts about that?
SG: This is a critical question, because it gets at a key analytical challenge, at least for me. I would stand by my earlier argument that Putin can claim just about everything short of catastrophic defeat as a victory, and that he'll be able to take the bulk of his population with him on that, at least for a while. But you're right, I think, that Ukrainian public opinion -- to which Zelensky is ultimately and utterly beholden -- is not inclined to accept anything short of an outright victory (nor should they be). On one level, these two phenomena -- Putin's thought process, and Ukrainian public opinion -- are independent of one another, to the extent that Putin's views are formed in a conversation with himself (and maybe a few others), and Ukrainian opinion is formed (rightly) within Ukraine, and without reference to anything that Putin may think or want (again, rightly). And yet on another level, the two must somehow be linked. Putin must be looking at Ukraine and making some judgment about what might or might not be available to him. Putin's behavior and rhetoric inevitably feeds into Ukrainian conversations. The result for the moment, I think, is that both sides are incentivized to keep fighting. I suppose that could change at some point, but the question for me -- to which I don't really have an answer -- is what happens if it changes for one side before it changes for the other. That, I think, is your question: what happens if Putin is ready to quit and Ukraine isn't ready to let him? This has been a long way of saying "I don't know."
JW: You are, among other things, an expert in the study of Russian public opinion. You and your collaborator Graeme Robertson have written very carefully about the meaning and limits of understanding it in the context of an authoritarian regime. Do you think differently now about what public opinion can tell us about Russian politics? If so, how?
SG: Yes and no. Fundamentally, I have always been skeptical about public opinion -- measured through surveys -- as a reflection of what people are actually thinking. That's in part because individual opinion itself is a complex phenomenon: our opinions change over time, and depending on who is asking, in what context, how hard we're pressed, etc. Public opinion is even more complex. But it's also because surveys don't actually measure opinions: they measure expressed opinions, and the process that leads from opinion formation to expression is at least as complex as the process that leads to the formation of opinions in the first place. So I have always argued for seeing survey results as the aggregate of individual opinions and attitudes, but as a reflection of social processes. As a result, I'm more interested in the relationships between variables in survey data, and in change over time (time also being a variable), than I am in absolute values. The war and the increase in authoritarian coercion haven't changed that, and I think we are still able to do that kind of research. That's the "no" answer to the question of whether I think differently now. The "yes" part is that where I might once have been inclined to take the nominal levels of sentiment in a survey at least semi-seriously -- i.e., the percentage of people who say they support Putin -- my skepticism about that sort of thing has now doubled or tripled. The problem, for me, is not really one of preference falsification (partly because of the way I tend to interpret expressed preferences, as described earlier), but that the evidence on declining response rates makes me wonder about the representativeness of survey samples.
JW. Recently, in the New Yorker, the political analyst Alexander Baunov (who has now left the country) was quoted as saying that, prior to the invasion, Putin "had been running a relatively restrained dictatorship?" but that it is now a much more harshly repressive regime. In that context, Baunov describes what happened last year as a kind of coup, in which Putin overthrew one kind of internal order for another? Is that a useful way to think about what has happened? And what are its implications?
I agree with Sasha and I don't. Russia is now much more repressive than it was before the war, the red lines of authoritarian control are much more vivid and much more vividly enforced, and ideology plays a much more central role in structuring political behavior. But where I disagree is on the war as a causal factor here. Russia has been on this trajectory of increased coercion for a long time. It was in January 2021 that the Kremlin declared any and all organized opposition to be "extremist", essentially outlawing it altogether. The September 2021 Duma elections were conducted under a degree of control Russia hadn't seen since before Gorbachev came to power. But even that was built on the back of harsh crackdowns on opposition mobilization in 2019, and in 2017 before that. I tend to see 2017 as the turning point, when the regime abandoned the "softly softly" approach it had taken (mostly) to the "Bolotnaya" opposition that emerged in 2011-12 and decided to go hard. But you could argue that even that shift was the inevitable consequence of decisions made in 2004-5, as Putin began to hedge against a possible "Orange Revolution" in Russia. So, I don't love seeing this as a coup. But if you look, for example, at the ideal-typical "symptoms" that Guriev and Treisman lay out to differentiate "spin dictatorships" from "fear dictatorships" in their recent book, it is clear that Russia now ticks more of the boxes in the fear column, if not most. And so there is a strong argument to be made that Russia has tipped into a different kind of relationship between the Kremlin and the masses, a different mode of procuring compliance. The consequences of that remain to be seen, but at the very least I would expect it to lead to more polarization and an erosion of the middle ground that had allowed even Russians who weren't terribly happy with Putin to remain in the mainstream. In the short term, this probably redounds to Putin's benefit, as people rush to be on the right side of things. In the longer run, though, he may find that increasing portions of the population are hardened against him.
JW. Last year, you also wrote that the end of this war must "give rise to a renewed commitment to multilateralism, empowering the UN to ensure that the US, too, is deterred from adventurism" and you expressed confidence that a system that can be trusted to bind Washington is also one that can be trusted to bind Moscow and Beijing." Do you still believe this is plausible?
SG: I'm not sure I ever thought this was plausible, but I continue to think it's necessary. Friday's decision by the ICC in the Hague do indict Putin on war crimes makes this even clearer: How can the US justify not being part of the Rome Statute? There is an opportunity here for Washington to meet the severity of the challenge Putin has posed by rising to the occasion and proposing a genuine recommitment to the ideals and institutions of the UN Charter. Joining the ICC would be a start. Resetting relations with Cuba and Venezuela, maybe even Iran, would be equally huge. Someone who actually studies this stuff would have better ideas, I'm sure, but even so, I have little faith that this will happen, unfortunately. Certainly not before November 2024.