(gentle music) - Hello and welcome to "The Journal."

I'm Steve Kendall.

It's been just over two months since Russia invaded Ukraine.

And what some thought could be a short fight has seemingly turned into a grinding war of attrition and atrocities.

Joining us to talk about where we are right now, two months into the invasion, from the BGSU Department of Political Science, are Dr. Neal Jesse and Dr. Marc Simon, the Chair and Professor in that department and from the Department of Media and Communications, Dr. Ellen Gorsevski.

I wanna welcome you all to "The Journal" again, and thanks for coming back.

We were here a month or so ago, about a month in, we're now two months in and Dr. Jesse, kind of bring us up to speed on what's happened in this last month from the last time we talked.

- Well, last time we talked, you know, the war was just beginning and Russia had some ambitious plans.

It appeared that they were bombarding major cities across Ukraine, they had troops entering from Belarus, troops entering from Cremia in Russia, and it appeared that they were trying to knock out the Ukrainian government.

They failed in this.

And as we all know, from watching the news, and now Russia is re-centering their efforts on the south and the east of Ukraine.

In particular, attempting to seize the Donbas region, which they had invaded in 2014 and trying to link up that territory with Cremia by basically taking the coast of Ukraine, down along the south, all the way to the Peninsula of Cremia.

So Russia now has more limited aims than they had before.

The Russian government understands that they really are not going to subdue all of Ukraine, that they're unlikely to take out the Ukrainian government.

And as such, Putin is attempting to find some way to portray this as a victory back in Russia.

And there are good strategic reasons for these particular aims.

You know, if you can link up Cremia with the Eastern part of Ukraine, which of course borders Russia, then, he will have gained territory that allows him to dominate the seas there and allows his military and particularly his navy to then operate freely.

The difficulty of course, is that the Ukrainian government and military has been rebuilding this entire time.

So we're likely to see a long war now in which Ukraine will find it very difficult to displace these Russian units, because unlike what happened to your Kyiv, where Russian units were a long ways away from their supply lines, you know, units operating in the east, units operating near Cremia are directly connected to Russian supply.

So the Russia can hold out in a defensive position for a very long time.

So we're probably entering a war of attrition at this point, in which the two may end up in a stale mate, similar to what happened after 2014.

But again, there's a lot of other scenarios that could happen as well.

- And as the Russian military, 'cause I know we talked the last time, their performance wasn't what we typically have perceived them to be.

Have they gotten, because they've now pulled back, is this because they haven't been successful, they've tried to regroup and limit their objectives now, is that really what's going on?

- That's exactly what has occurred.

Their infantry, their armor units, in particular, militarized battalions have been very ineffective on the attack and they're bombardment techniques though, which they use successfully in Gramsci before, they've used it in Syria, they used it here in Ukraine over and over are effective.

So they're able to hold defensive position and shell cities and reduce cities to the ground.

So what the gains that Russia has made in the east are likely to be defensible by the Russians.

But yeah, they're unlikely to go on any more offensives across Ukraine because the military is fairly ineffective at that.

And while they did a new conscription to get more units into the military and while they have reinforced a number of their battalions that are in the area, we shouldn't see any offensive action for Russia anymore.

- Yeah.

I wonder if I could jump into- - Sure.

Yeah.

- You know, one of the things we find in political science research is interesting, 'cause Neal's explaining why the Russian military performed way less effectively than we expected.

And it turns out that dictatorships often have this problem.

There's an old finding that democracies fight or tend to win the words they fight.

And part of that is because you know, and Russia is a perfect case of this, you know, it's really a corrupt dictatorship.

The corruption goes through the military.

And so you get things that, you know, for instance, people want to tell the leader what they wanna hear, but there's a lot of stealing going on.

So, you know, there were situations where trucks and artillery were offloaded onto Ukrainian territory and their tires didn't work and things just broke down.

So I think that what ended up happening to Russia partly is their failure was that they had a, what we call a ghost army, but good on paper.

But because there had been a lot of stealing going on and not a lot of honesty up the chain of the command, they weren't prepared for a real fight in Ukraine.

- Yeah, no, and the messaging, I know we talked the last time about Zelenskyy versus Putin.

Has that changed?

How is that playing out now, 30 days downstream from the last time we talked?

- Right.

Yeah.

Putin and the Russian media really have had a difficult time trying to catch up because Zelenskyy has this very charismatic star, charisma and appeal that really comes through on camera.

He comes across as very immediate, like you're FaceTiming with a friend, holding up his cell phone.

So he has just this great ability to emote and that has translated into great support for the Ukrainian people and for the Ukrainian military, now this past week, the US has approved billions of dollars worth of military aid.

And also there have been some major image events in terms of the Ukrainians being able to sink one of the pride jewels of the Russian warships, the Moskva, which the Ukrainians then very plucky, they created a stamp, a memorial commemorative stamp with a soldier flipping the bird to the sinking Moskva.

So they've done these sort of image events and harness this sort of younger millennial style, you know, gen Z style, social media campaign, which has been quite successful.

- Yeah.

And from their perspective too, they have the good message, they're defending their land, the Russians are the invaders- - They're the underdogs.

- So yeah.

But as you said, he's extremely good at at making sure that message gets through, and Putin on the other hand has struggled because of the failures of the military, because it wasn't a slam dunk, Hey, we're in, we're outta here and we accomplished what we wanted.

He hasn't been nearly as good at his message.

- No, he's come across as very stuffy and stodgy, you know, in these highly ornate, fancy, you know, Kremlin drawing rooms across these ridiculously long tables.

So it looks like a Saturday night live skit.

There have been memes poking fun at that.

So they did a sort of Ikea style called the Putin table, which is extremely, extremely long.

So he just really hasn't been able to compete in terms of messaging, despite the fact that the Russians have instituted and very heavily enforced this ban on talking about anything other than the peacekeeping operation that the Kremlin prefers to call this, or limited military operation, they have different euphemisms for it.

But yeah, his messaging has just not been successful.

- Okay.

Well, when we come back, obviously we've got a lot more to talk about and where we see this heading in the next, well, however long it's going to be.

Back in just a moment, we're talking about the situation in Ukraine with faculty members from Bowling Green State University, Neal Jesse from Political Science, Marc Simon, Political Science and Ellen Goservski from Media and Communications.

Back in just a moment on "The Journal".

Thank you for staying with us here on "The Journal", we're talking about Ukraine and our guests are Neal Jesse, Ellen Gorsevski and Marc Simon.

I know Marc, you wanted to kind of jump in at the end of that last segment, so pick up where we left off.

- Yeah.

Well, Ellen mentioned the sinking of this battleship, which I think I'm curious about the messaging from that as well, but militarily, this was a really badly handled situation, you know, while it's possible to sink a battleship with shoulder launch missiles and things like this, most countries have all kinds of precautions they take to keep that from happening.

And so Russia just didn't do a good job.

And then when they initially messaged it, I don't know, for me, that had echoes of the sort of cunningness like, you know, we had fire on ship, it was no missiles, no problem.

And then they have to admit later that, oh yeah, it was hit and it was sunk by these Neptune missiles.

- Yeah.

And they showed purportedly people from the ship in a row meeting with, I think it was Putin, was it?

And apparently that was footage that we later found out was lifted from an earlier event, so again, just very much a mismatch between reality and the portrayals of disinformation.

- And the actual sinking of the missile cruiser, Moskva, this should never have happened.

You know, this is another sign of the lack of preparation and training by the Russian navy.

By all indications, Ukraine and Western intelligence have been tracking it for two weeks.

They had been moving back and forth across the Sea of Azov, and the Black Sea unescorted.

And it's a primary missile defense and anti-aircraft defense of the Black Sea fleet.

And it's there to protect other ships from getting hit by these sorts of missiles.

And the Ukrainian sent out a number of drones, the Turkish drones, in order to draw the defenses away of the ship and then struck it with the Neptune missiles.

The thing is this would not happen to an American ship, right, it would have other ships around it to protect it from these sorts of attacks and that it was moving unescorted, it just shows that the Russian fleet is as lacking in its training, in its preparation, in its just basic operations as the rest of the military.

And so this was not only, you know, a symbolic Downy, but realistically the sinking of the Black Sea fleet because now the rest of the fleet is parking so far off the Ukrainian coast that they're ineffective.

And again shows, as Ellen and and Marc were talking about, the rots at the center of the Russian government leads to the rest of these problems.

This just this last couple weeks, the Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has gone missing.

Apparently he had a heart attack, he's been seen since, but he does not appear to be in complete control of his facilities.

Valery Gerasimov, he's the Head of the General Staff who came up with the Gerasimov doctrine, which was one of the strategic plans to invade Ukraine in 2014.

He is all of a sudden now sidelined.

And so one of the great difficulties Putin is having is not only is his messaging poor, but he's removing a good portion of the people who would actually be operationally in charge of this war.

And seeing him making replacements at the top level, this is only gonna make the matters worse for Russia.

It's similar to Stalin's purges and you're removing a lot of people who are capable of doing things on top of a military that's already fairly incapable.

We would likely not see the Russian military turn around in its operations and get more effective probably for at least another month or so as they tried to reorganize.

But yeah, the sinking of the Moskva is a good example of just how poor the Russian military really is.

- Well, I think you referred to it, Marc and you said, it reminds you of the old days of communism where the message can be totally unreflective of what really happened and yet they're gonna try and sell it.

And it's same thing with the purge, the Stalin purge of the Red Army before in the thirties, before World War II.

And then when the Germans arrived, there were people there who didn't really know how to operate a military operation.

- And an analogy for what's going on right now too, might be the 1905 Russo Japanese war, you know, where the Baltic fleet sailed all the way out of the Baltics across the Atlantic, underneath Africa, back through the Indian ocean, up through the Pacific into the sea of Japan, and then got sunk.

And realistically the Czar's army was about as ineffective as today's Russian army, very little has changed.

And as Marc Simon has said, a lot of the reasons for this is the Russians system of government is still just as corrupt.

- And yet Marc, the nuclear sabre rattling is very concerning and- - It is, it is, I wanna come to that, but I was gonna also mention that what's interesting is that the Russian government still is able to tell its own people what it them to hear.

And so the international messaging is really bad for Russia, but internally they still control things.

And that is part of the scary thing about any nuclear sabre rattling that's going on.

I mean, I think Putin is now in a point where he's not boxed in to the point where I was worried a month ago that he might actually use nuclear weapons to prevent embarrassing withdrawal from the key region and his broader aims.

But he's done that now and he's withdrawn from there and he's focusing on more, as Neal said, more limited aims.

So there's less need for him to cross that nuclear threshold, but he keeps reminding the West that they have nuclear weapons.

He launched a ballistic missile test.

That's just, again, remember, that we have these weapons.

The problem that we have to worry about with Putin is not just accidents, but when he gets in trouble, he really has nowhere else to go but escalation, and at some point there's enough Russian military doctrine about using, you know, what they would call small tactical nuclear weapons in limited strikes.

But once we cross that threshold, we don't know what can happen.

So I am concerned.

- Yeah, and it's interesting because yeah, once you open that door, okay, well, we've used a tactical nuclear- well, we might as well, then the next step is, well, that didn't work.

We gotta go bigger, we gotta keep going bigger and then eventually you might get some- - Well, but the outrage that that's going to create will there be a lot of pressure on the West, the United States mainly, but you know, NATO in general to retaliate with some kind of nuclear response.

And once we go there, no one ever figured this out, in the cold war, how to keep that limited, how to keep that from going to, you know, nuclear weapons being launched between the two continents and the US and Russian cities being destroyed.

So that's a really slippery slope or at least it's one we don't know how to navigate and I hope we don't go there.

But it does look to me like the fact that Russia limited the goals now means that they're less backed into a corner than they were.

- Okay.

When we come back, we can kind of pick it up.

And the other question I had, and we can think about this, once whatever line is, with the stop line is, whatever happens, how does Ukraine rebuild from all of this?

We come back 'cause there's some pretty devastating things that have gone on.

So back in just a moment, we're talking about Ukraine here on "The Journal", back in just a second.

Thanks for staying with us on "The Journal".

We're talking about Ukraine.

We talked with the group we have here today, Neal Jesse, Ellen Gorsevski and Marc Simon about a month ago and we're now another month into what some people thought would be a really short war.

I know, Ellen, you wanted to talk a little bit about, again, some of the imaging and the perceptions of things of that nature.

So why don't you lead off with that?

- Right.

So as if it weren't bad enough for the Russians that they had to completely give up on the Kyiv of region, now they're mounting mass graves and evidence of if not war crime then UN definitions of actions of aggression as sort of the slightly lesser war crimes of murdering civilians.

And so procedures from the United nations to the Hague are being put into place to begin to investigate those and prosecute those.

So the things just keep getting worse and worse for the Russians in terms of the Ukrainians looking like the belegaled underdogs and the Russians really looking awful and you know- - I don't want to denigrate or dismiss the idea that Russia is committed war crimes because it's obvious that they have and I think that's one of the benefits of what's been going on through the UN is at least they're doing some monitoring and gathering all that information.

But I do wanna mention it is war and they're atrocities on both sides- - From both sides, yes.

- And you're gonna hear that plate up every time Russia can.

Now there's a lot of conspiracy theories out there too, which Russia promotes to try to like this idea that somehow there's a chemical or biological weapons plant in Ukraine, that's gonna be used against Russia.

I mean, what Russia's incentive most aggressors do is they try to create this sense of victimhood, that somehow there's a big conspiracy that the West is really trying to use Ukraine to like dismantle Russia and take attack Russia with chemical weapons and all this.

But that's why we have a UN system and why we have an international criminal court and things like that.

So that there are organizations that can objectively collect a lot of evidence and get to the bottom of this, it's just hard to do during the war.

We find out a whole lot more after it all ends.

- Yeah.

Butcher is really what some believe to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems, agreed, including on both sides.

- And while we know that Putin may or may not be Stalin, I mean it is, but there are similarities to develop.

And of course, World War II, you had the mass killings of Polish army officers, which the Russians tried to pin on the Germans, the Germans tried to pin on the Russians and it turns out we knew it had been the Russians all along, but of course they were our ally at that point, so we couldn't say anything.

And the mention of the UN, is there a place for the UN to intervene on the ground there as maybe they did during the Balkan Wars in Serbia and Croatia, or is this is a totally different situation?

- Well, the United nations is designed so that the five veto powers in the security council, Russia, the US, Britain, France, and China have more power than everybody else.

And whenever those countries interests are not served by the UN, they will veto the security council resolution.

Therefore, the UN can't do much of anything as far as putting peacekeepers on the ground and things like that.

So it's only when those five countries can cooperate.

- And Zelenskyy has implored the UN to remove Russia, you know, if not permanently, at least temporarily, but realistically- - Well, in fact, that's the design of the United nations is for that very reason, we want it to be a universal organization.

The league of nations did not include all the major powers.

The United States being the obvious one.

The UN is going to include all the major powers and if we don't give them special privileges like this, they will leave, right?

I mean, if right now there wasn't a veto and the UN intervened in this conflict, Russia would probably leave the UN.

- Well, this is one of the interesting things about this conflict is we know that countries that were not part of NATO were invaded by Russia, Georgia, Ukraine.

It's one reason why Sweden, Finland and others are trying to get into NATO.

One reason why the Baltic nations got into NATO.

But we also see here as Ellen and Marc are talking about that Russia effectively is neutralized the United nations as a peacekeeping force, as a force that can intervene in this particular conflict.

And this isn't lost on Putin.

This is one reasons why Ukraine was particularly vulnerable and was such a target back in 2014 and also now is because there will be no intervention because they're not part of NATO, NATO will not intervene militarily, the UN cannot intervene.

So it really is a war between Russia and Ukraine that Russia is got the initiative on and continues to try and maintain the initiative.

But, you know, as you're saying, Zelensky is doing such a good job of trying to get the initiative and world attention on the Ukrainian plight and in some way, then that will be a way in which Ukraine can get international support along with the funding that they get for the military in order to take the initiative away from Putin and back him into a corner.

- Yeah, Zelensky just appeared, you know, yet again at the Venice BNL, their art major arts exhibition.

And so, he was imploring the world community to, they have a special exhibition on Ukrainian photography documenting the wars of the war.

So the PR offensive of Zelenskyy has just been really quite remarkable and unstoppable.

And media critics have noted the double standard in portrayals because the Rohingya or the Tigrayans in Ethiopia have not received the coverage that the Ukrainians have.

So there have been observations by media moguls like Saadi, a major media owner in Afghanistan has pointed out, he saw Charlie D'Agata on CBS saying, Oh, well, you know, unlike Afghanistan or Iraq, you know, this was a peaceful nation.

And the Afghani media person said, "No, we were peaceful too before the Soviets and then the Americans invaded."

So, there have been critics who have pointed that out as well.

- And it is a good point because, and at the same time, it's starting to drift back in the news cycle now a little bit, it's not one of the top three stories every night, it's fallen, unless something dramatic, the rest it's not all dramatic, unless something is really, really out of the ordinary now, the day to day grinding war doesn't attract the media's attention the way it did a month ago.

- And I hate to say though, is the way the Russian military performs and operates is that we're likely to see them doing a lot of damage to cities and basically even if they end up withdrawing and losing, leaving Ukraine as a pretty destroyed country.

And it's gonna look a lot like, you know, Germany after World War II, just lots of rubble.

And it's because that's what they can do, they can bomb from a distance, but they can't actually occupy and control that country.

They also wanna make sure that Ukraine doesn't ever look like a successful alternative to a Russian system.

I think that was one of the motives that Putin had from the very beginning was that, Hey, if Ukraine shifts more toward Europe, it becomes democratic and offers an alternative, then the Russian people might want that.

- I completely agree.

That was one of the motives in order- you know, one reason for this war was to create a more compliant country on the border with Russia and not let it turn Western and- - And be successful.

- Exactly.

And I agree that destruction of the economy of Ukraine is an aim of this particular war.

And for instance, what Russia gets out of this though is also quite as limited.

The amount of destruction that they've done in the Donbas region and around Mariupol and others means that what they're going to gain in that land bridge is based just a conduit to move troops into Cremia, but it's equally gonna be as destroyed.

So they're inflicting losses on themselves here as well with this strategy of aerial bombardment.

- Well, we're gonna have to, Ellen, you got 15 seconds, I know you wanna say something.

- Yeah, I just think that the continued optics are still in Ukraine's favor over Russia, despite sort of the Real politic is coming across quite differently to your average Western news observer.

- Okay.

We're gonna have to leave it there this time.

I know the last time we talked, we knew there were hours and hours about this we could go into, and we'll probably be back again in another four or five weeks to talk more about it.

I wanna thank you guys for being here again today.

I appreciate you coming on and lending your expertise about this and explore some of the things that may not get attention in the nightly newscast and be a little more in depth.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

Of course you can watch us every Thursday night at 8:00 PM on "The Journal".

We will see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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