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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
N. Rodgers: Good morning, Judy. Good morning, Aughie.
J. Twigg: Morning.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning.
N. Rodgers: How are you all today?
J. Aughenbaugh: Good. Though with a little bit of sobriety. Because this is an anniversary, is it not, Judy?
J. Twigg: It is the first anniversary of Russia's escalated. War in Ukraine.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, and kids. I've been sleeping too well lately, so we've asked Judy back to help me remember why I shouldn't be getting too comfortable. Actually, because in the news, not only is this the anniversary, but we just had President Putin stand up in front of everybody and say, we don't want your stupid START treating anymore go away. I thought, there's got to be meaning there, and you know who we should ask? We should ask Judy Twig because she will know the answer. What's up with that? Is that a thing that should keep us up at night?
J. Twigg: In the grand scheme of things keep me up at night, that one is actually fairly far down on the list.
N. Rodgers: Good.
J. Twigg: It's significant. But it's not significant compared to much else that's going on in the level strategic landscape and with regard to Russia. Here's the deal with START. Strategic nuclear arms control between the United States and what was the Soviet Union and what is now Russia goes back decades. The first treaties were put in place back in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Those were important, robust, life-altering Treaties. Although it's interesting that if you look at the title of the first set of treaties, they were called SALT, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Those talks back then, which were landmark, were mind-bogglingly important. But they didn't even pretend to reduce the number of existing nuclear warheads or delivery vehicles. They just put a cap on future numbers of warheads and delivery vehicles that can be developed. That's how bad the relationship was back then. But how important it was to put some boundaries on what strategic weapons development and deployment could look like. That having said the numbers that we were talking about, then, we're literally tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles enough to ship those warheads. At a moment's notice from one country's territory across the planet to the other countries' territory. That's what made them strategic, is that one, these weapons could travel halfway around the world. Washington could hit Moscow and vice versa directly.
N. Rodgers: The United States and Russia were the first two countries to be able to do that, to reach each other from across the world.
J. Twigg: That is correct.
N. Rodgers: Okay. Hence why it is so important for those two countries to come to some understanding about the non exploding us of the other one.
J. Twigg: Right. Those two countries were the entire ballgame back that. It was the United States and the Soviet Union that were locked in this bipolar global, international competition. They were the world's major diplomatic, economic, military powers. Yes, that's why it was important for arms control to be conducted bilaterally between those two countries.
J. Aughenbaugh: START was negotiated in which presidential administration Judy?
J. Twigg: START goes back to when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed. We have these new rounds of SART, Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and Strategic Arms Reduction treaties here. We're actually decreasing the number of warheads. There were under the first President Bush and subsequent presidents to make that happen, and that involved processes of literal physical dismantling of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles. In some ways, the capacity to construct those things. There's some pretty intrusive verification measures that are required to make sure that you trust that the other guy is actually living up to the terms of the agreement. There are two keys to these agreements. Always remember President Reagan said trust but verify. [inaudible] in Russian. The verification part is key. Because if you're going to be talking about destroying weapons, you need to get in there and make sure that the other side really is doing the destruction part of the equation. It's extraordinary what we've been able to do. We got tens of thousands of nuclear warheads on each side. The current START treating that President Putin has now said he will no longer abide by. He hasn't said he'll withdraw from it. He's not going to adhere to its provisions anymore. So there's a legal technical difference there. It takes both sides down to 1,550 nuclear warheads and nuclear bombs. We're talking an order of magnitude reduction from where we were 30, 40 years ago, and 700 delivery vehicles. That's 700, either intercontinental ballistic missiles or submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or long-range strategic bombers. That's your land, sea, and air. Your three legs of the nuclear strategic triad.
N. Rodgers: Seven hundred total not 700 in each?
J. Twigg: Right, 700 total delivery vehicles.
N. Rodgers: When President Putin said, we're not going to abide by this, does that mean he's tomorrow going to go out and build a gazillion nuclear bombs?
J. Twigg: No. This is I think major concerns about President and pollutants announcement the other day that he was no longer going to abide by the terms of this treaty are a little bit overblown because the verification part of this treaty, which as we've already said is key, we haven't had verification inspection missions for over three years, they got suspended because of COVID. Then they remain suspended because Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia didn't want Americans poking around Russian military installations when we are essentially at proxy war with one another. Putin making a big political fussy show over, no longer abiding by the provisions of this treaty is code. I am not going to entertain a conversation that lets you think for a moment that we're going to have American military inspectors over here crawling around our military bases at a time when we are for all intents and purposes outward.
N. Rodgers: But it's not a real change.
J. Twigg: Correct.
J. Aughenbaugh: Judy, just a few moments ago, you went ahead and mentioned the word that Putin use was suspend, which in international law, correct me if I'm wrong, when you have a treaty, one side saying that they are suspending participation does not have the same weight as one side of a treaty saying we are withdrawing. Because withdrawing basically means you're ending the contract. I hate to put it in such legal terms.
J. Twigg: But it matters.
J. Aughenbaugh: But it does matter. That was one of the reasons why in part, I wanted you to come to onto the podcast episode because I was just like, so he's saved suspending. The media is talking about how this is a really big deal. But the old international law geek in me is just like suspending? That's not usually one of the options with these multi-nation agreements. It struck me as he was trying to score points perhaps domestically at home.
J. Twigg: Yes, that's exactly right.
N. Rodgers: That speech was a whole lot about the Russian people and him saying we're not going to be taken advantage of. This is not okay, and that sort of thing.
J. Twigg: It was just one element in a speech that was just over the top in its nationalistic war monitoring propaganda.
N. Rodgers: I was going to ask you that speech went on for quite a while, didn't it?
J. Twigg: He does that.
N. Rodgers: But people who say that he's gravely ill, I don't know that he's gravely ill. He talked for an hour-and-a-half, he didn't stop for anything to drink or to go to the bathroom he just kept going.
J. Twigg: These rumors have been coming up for 15 years in various forms, he's gravely ill with back problems, various cancers, but it does look like his face has been Botoxed.
N. Rodgers: Well, maybe he just wants to look youthful.
J. Twigg: He's obsessed with looking youthful.
N. Rodgers: His girlfriend's about 20, so she's a lovely ballerina, I think.
J. Twigg: Rhythmic gymnast.
N. Rodgers: My bad.
J. Twigg: Olympic caliber, rhythmic gymnastic, yes.
N. Rodgers: It's good to be the dictator.
J. Twigg: [inaudible] in that regard.
N. Rodgers: But you don't think that he is also immediately dying. This is just a part of the rumor thing that goes around. He is long lived for a for a Russian male, is he not? Because he abstains from alcohol, he abstains from smoking, the two major killers of Russian males, I think. Is that correct?
J. Twigg: He exercises as well.
N. Rodgers: He wrestles bears and does judo. How's the war going for him?
J. Twigg: Certainly not as he had planned. One year ago on this date, it's pretty clear that he thought he would take Kyiv within a couple of days, a week tops, get rid of Zelenskyy government, put in a puppet government controlled by Moscow, and at best we would have a rump Ukrainian state based in some of the far western regions of what on the map is Ukraine. We'd probably have a Zelenskyy led government in exile based somewhere in the Baltics, something like that. That could have happened, on that very first day, our NATO allies went to Zelenskyy and said, let us get you out of there, let's keep you safe. That famous, incredibly brave inspirational line from Zelenskyy, I don't need a ride, I need ammunition. I don't want to give Zelenskyy full credit for this, that set the tone for the entire Ukrainian people's response to this, which has been, get off my land and don't ever come back. That's been the response, in broad brush terms, Moscow didn't take Kyiv right off the bat, but it did take a pretty good chunk of Ukrainian territory as we went into the spring of 2022 and Ukraine turned around with counter offensives that have retaken much of that territory. Now we have about a 600 kilometer line in the eastern part of the country. That to be honest, looks a whole lot like World War I. It is miserable, slow moving, literal trench warfare that's costing an unbelievable amount in lives and in treasure. The quicker we can get the advanced weapons there that we're increasingly promising to Ukraine that will let them move that line further back, the better-off Ukraine will be. There's a lot of talk about a renewed Russian offensive this spring when the weather gets better, questions about whether or not Russia will have learned from the many strategic and tactical military errors it's made over the last year, questions about whether a newly mobilized Russian conscripts will be able to turn that battlefield tide, and I'll just pause and do a little tangent here. Russia has literally been going around to prisons and telling prisoners all across the country, you want to get out of here, come be our cannon fodder. They've been taking prisoners, and literally they've been plucking military age men off the streets. They've been disproportionately doing this with non-ethnic Russian men throughout the territory of the Russian Federation, and there are a lot of those, so there's a heavy most of imperialist racism involved in how this is going. They are counting on winning this war by doing what Russian militaries have done since the beginning of time, which is replace technology with manpower. They don't have the technology and so they're hoping they can just use their overwhelming advantage with just numbers of men that they're willing to send to slaughter and that that will turn the tides. We need to have the best technology in Ukraine's hands because the number of people Ukraine has to bring to bear on this conflict is limited. We need to give Ukraine the technology it needs to be able to overcome that willingness, or Russia to send tens of thousands. Now I think we're into hundreds of thousands of young Russian men to their desk.
N. Rodgers: I have a question about that. Really what it's coming down to in terms of Ukraine needs to be able to kill thousands and thousands and thousands of Russian men, and they need weapons that allow them to do that mass destruction, which is what the West is trying to give them. But they also have to be trained to use those weapons, so that's where you're getting the lag time of you can't just hand somebody a weapon and say tada. If you just handed me a bazooka, I would shoot myself in the face with it, let's be honest. I wouldn't hurt anybody else, I would hurt myself because I don't know how to do anything like that. That's the lag time, is there enough time to teach Ukraine to use those military weapons before the Russians get enough people on the line to push forward just with sheer numbers? Is there enough time? Or is it going to be really close? Is it going to be one of those nail-biting things?
J. Twigg: It already is. Great question. Although the argument that we can't send them these advanced weapons systems until we've trained them and therefore, there's a built-in substantial lag time, argument is that there's a pretty hefty BS factor built into that. Because Ukraine has a NATO allies right across the border, so while we're having all of the political back-and-forth about whether or not to send these weapons systems to Ukraine, we're sending Ukrainian troops into Poland to get them trained on the weapons systems.
J. Twigg: The whole they need to be trained thing is a nice cover. But these are political decisions, political debates that are being had about the extent to which the Western alliance is willing to spend the money and the hardware. Because we are having to replace the staff that we're sending to Ukraine in our own arsenals then. When we empty out our warehouses to send staff to Ukraine, we have to refill those warehouses so that we have the staff we need as well. It's a money thing, and to President Biden's credit, he has been just gobs Mac by how effective he and his team have been at pulling some of the more reluctant European allies along with it.
N. Rodgers: Can I just say by the way, that I would not want to be on the team where the president turns to you and says, "Hey, tomorrow I'd like to be in Ukraine, make it happen." Because, I'm sorry, you want to go where, sir, you want to do what? I think this is a terrible idea except it seemed to work out.
J. Twigg: Hey, Biden likes trains, so he got a great 10 hour train.
N. Rodgers: That's true, he was known for that, isn't he?
J. Twigg: That trip was in the planning for months, and the moment he said I'm going to Poland, everybody knew he was to go.
N. Rodgers: Got you.
J. Aughenbaugh: One last question, Judy, before we end this episode, I wanted to ask you your thoughts about both the president and the vice president making the accusation that Russia has committed crimes against humanity, which caught at least some observers a little off when within a one-week period, I think it was just a couple of days, they both went ahead and said that, could you possibly explain for our listeners, what is the basis of their claim that Russia has committed crimes against humanity?
J. Twigg: Great question. A couple of things about that. One is that the President of the United States does not use that language without it being a very carefully considered deliberate choice. There were endless meetings and debates and decisions within the administration about whether or not he and Vice President, Harris, would use that language. There is a growing body of evidence indicating that Russia has committed what by any reasonable definition are war crimes. Therefore are crimes against humanity, prosecutable in international tribunals. Ukrainians would like to also have them prosecuted in Ukrainian courts. We started to see the accumulation of that evidence when we liberated Boucher and when Ukraine liberated Boucher and some other suburban towns around Kyiv, just a couple of months into the conflict last spring, we saw evidence of executions of unarmed persons. We saw evidence of torture of both civilian and military personnel in Ukraine. I'm actually appearing in about an hour on a 24-hour Ukraine upon, a 24-hour series of conversations and broadcasts and presentations and art displays and musical performances by people in and working on Ukraine. Where I'm interviewing a guy who is a former deputy health minister of Ukraine, who now runs a foundation called the Ukrainian Health Care Foundation and for the last year, it's work has been documenting Russia's deliberate military attacks on Ukrainian health care facilities. Gathering the evidence, documenting it so that the evidence will be there when the criminal cases happen later, and he has shared with me that there is evidenced that these attacks have been systematic and deliberate and you're into war crimes territory there. Hats off to the President and the Vice President for having what took some political courage to use that language in referring to what's happening.
N. Rodgers: Judy, can I ask one more question?
J. Twigg: Sure.
N. Rodgers: I'll be very brief. Is this Russia's last war? Because Medvedev, the previous president, was like, if this doesn't go, we crumble as a country or something like that. I'm sure he said it much more carefully than that, but it's what it sounded like to me that's what he was saying. Is that accurate?
J. Twigg: What a great question. We, as observers, as analysts, it's very easy for us to get caught up into wishful thinking. Ways of approaching an issue like this. Russia is a huge country. Enormous GDP, 11 time zones worth of territory. It is whipping itself into this frenzy, so when you say Majid have said, this is it, "We live or die by whether or not we emerge on the other side of this war victorious." They are painting themselves into that rhetorical corner in a big way. The Ukrainians right now understandably are not willing to entertain the notion that there could be some negotiated settlement that involves anything other than moving Russia back to its pre 2014 borders. Which means pushing Russia not only out of the Eastern parts of occupied Ukraine, but also out of the Crimean peninsula. That is a very difficult proposition for Russia, again, given the way that Russia has framed the conflict politically. Taking Crimea back in 2014 was an enormously politically popular move inside Russia. Overwhelming support for it, genuine support for it in public opinion polls. So it's hard to imagine Putin's regime surviving military defeat by the Ukrainians. But when we talk about the wishful thinking aspect of this, we get into the next logical corollary of the old sayings which is be careful what you wish for, because what comes after Putin could be even worse than what we have now. There's lots of talk now about splits within the Russian security apparatus leadership. I know we want to wrap up here, but maybe for our future podcast, The Wagner group, Russia's independent paramilitary forces headed by a guy named Prigozhin, who's very close friends with Putin. They're off the range right now. They're doing their own thing. Prigozhin, called the Defense Minister a traitor the other day for not having prosecuted the war adequately, successfully. Listservs I'm on, there's lots of chatter about whether or not we're heading to Civil War in Russia. That opens up that possibility that we could have new leadership that is even more hostile to the west than Putin is, where all of the restraining bolts are off, or where there's just total chaos in this very large nuclear armed country.
N. Rodgers: Well, so that's the takeaway for me not to sleep at night.
J. Twigg: I told you that new start wasn't the thing you should do.
N. Rodgers: I know that. With nuclear power, thank you, that's going to keep me up.
J. Twigg: Just real briefly to bring us back to the global health hat that I wear most of the time. When you're staying up at night, let's have a podcast episode soon where we talk about the outbreak of bird flu in Cambodia.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: What I just heard Aughie is that duty just invited herself back for two podcast episodes most of my time to hear about. She is now committed and that means that we get time on her schedule, which I am really happy about because it is hard to get on your schedule. You're a very busy woman and lots of people want your time and we really appreciate you giving it to us.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Thank you, Judy.
N. Rodgers: This has been a discussion in my office and I know it's been a discussion with Aughie's students. So thank you for helping us put various parts of this in perspective and on this one-year anniversary and we will be back with you soon because you committed, and we will take advantage. Thank you, Judy.
J. Twigg: It's a deal. Thanks, guys. Bye.
J. Aughenbaugh: Bye.