Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. I had an important conversation yesterday with Anne Applebaum about Russia’s war on Ukraine and that conflict as a laboratory for 21st century warfare. For those who prefer to read, the edited transcript of the conversation is below, with subheadings about when people stop believing propaganda, how cronyism (Kushner and Witkoff as negotiators) has prolonged the war, and the sources of Ukrainian ingenuity on and off the battlefield.
It is long but very worth your time, and it’s the Lucid weekend read. I’ll be back early next week with a follow-up essay about what North Korea and other autocracies are learning from this conflict that blends cutting-edge technologies with older practices such as the capture of large numbers of POWs.
From our discussion of the differing stakes of the conflict for Russians and Ukrainians: “If the Russians end the war, if the Russians stop fighting, the war is over. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, Ukraine is over.”
Anne is a historian and journalist and a staff writer at the Atlantic. She is the author of Gulag, a history of the Soviet concentration camps; Iron Curtain, a history of the Sovietization of central Europe; and Red Famine, a history of the Ukrainian famine. Her more recent books, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy Inc., look at how leaders of the autocratic world cooperate to undermine democracies and promote their interests. She publishes the Open Letters newsletter.
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Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I’m Ruth Ben-Ghiat, publisher of Lucid. You’ve got two historians here today. I’m here with Anne Applebaum.
Anne Applebaum: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be with you again transatlantically, if not in real life.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: You have observed that Vladimir Putin has been bringing back certain features of the Soviet age: habits, imperialism, types of repression. Putin has established a Stalin Studies Center, has erected Stalin statues here and there in Russia, and the numbers of political prisoners are going up, and many of them are in gulags and camps that date from the Soviet age. Alexei Navalny died in what had been a Stalinist-era gulag in Siberia. So I thought we could start by talking about that.
Anne Applebaum: One thing to understand about Russia is that after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a limited attempt to reckon with the communist past. There were a few things that were done, but the system itself never really confronted what had happened under Stalin. So much so that these prisons you were rightly speaking about remained. I actually was in one of those prisons, in Arkhangelsk, well after the fall of the Soviet Union. It had been a Soviet-era prison, and it looked exactly like the prisons I read about in memoirs of the Gulag.
So there are elements of the old system that never went away and were never successfully removed. And there are many people who believe that that’s part of Russia’s problem, that literal KGB playbooks are still being deployed.
The Russian occupation of Ukraine, starting with Crimea, but including now the territories of eastern Ukraine, looks exactly, I mean, down to the last detail, like the Sovietization of Poland and eastern Hungary and so on at the very end of the Second World War. How you occupy and Sovietize or Russify a country. This is exactly what he’s doing.
The use of old symbols, for example, this annual victory parade where they celebrate Stalin’s victory over Hitler, is also designed deliberately to intimidate people and remind them of Stalinism so that people remain afraid. As in, we all remember how bad that was, or our grandparents told us how bad that was, and now we’re prepared to be afraid again. So some of it is him reestablishing a system in which there won’t be objectors and there won’t be dissenters, or at least they’ll be limited to really tiny numbers.
When Propaganda and Reality Collide
Anne Applebaum: The interesting thing that’s happening now is that some of that is now beginning to confront reality. So this year when they had their annual victory parade, they had to cut it short. The Russians didn’t put big pieces of tanks and military equipment on the streets of Moscow because they were afraid of Ukrainian drones hitting them. There was a kind of panic in Moscow about hidden Ukrainians, and they were looking in sewers and manholes and there was panic about security in the city in the weekdays before the parade.
So you’re beginning to see rhetoric run into reality as Russians can see now that Ukrainian guns can hit Moscow and St. Petersburg and many other cities. And they’re especially experiencing these attacks on their oil refineries, but also now on the Russian equivalent of Amazon, these huge warehouses. And the Ukrainians have started hitting those, arguing that they’re a legitimate military target because it’s a system that’s used to also fund soldiers at the front. But you have these billions of dollars of commerce mostly affecting small businesses going up in smoke.
And so you’re beginning to have people feel, OK, we have this language of great power, triumph and success. And yet we can see that we have fuel shortages and my business is going back as the Ukrainian drones hit the warehouse. And so we’re now we’re approaching in the next weeks and you’ll see it in the next two months or three months or the other, a real crisis. It might take the form of a Russian attempt to accelerate. But a feeling of crisis is growing.
I mean, it’s partly a reflection of Ukrainian success at hitting these Russian targets. The Ukrainian success with drone technology has really prevented the Russians from moving forward. They have gained really no significant territory. So the system is running into reality, which interestingly is how the Soviet Union finally broke down. Conflicted reality and then nobody believed the propaganda anymore.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: That’s also how fascism started deteriorating inside Italy and Germany, when Allied bombs and wartime shortages and losses made people realize the hollowness of Hitler and Mussolini’s claims of infallibility. War is often a moment when propaganda contrasts with the reality of people’s everyday experiences.
Your point about business losses is also important. Businesses are always one of the pillars of autocratic regimes, and they often are given goodies by the leader in return for supporting the regime no matter what. Their loyalty is more absurd in the Russian case because so many private businesses have been plundered and harassed by the state. But when they start to wake up and see their profits affected is when disaffection can spread.
I wonder if the attitudes of young people, who have more information today because of digital media and transnational networks that form on social media, will accelerate that process.
Anne Applebaum: Yes, but Putin has really specialized in learning how to make the internet work for him. And, of course, many of the tactics that he invented we see in use in many other countries, including the United States. And so rather than presenting Russians with a single line, you know, here’s one narrative and you see it in all the same newspapers and all the television stations, he will present many conflicting narratives all at once.
This is a difference from Stalinism, to make people see so many different explanations and so much information that they say, right, I have no idea what’s happening. I don’t know what’s true. I don’t believe in anything. I’m staying home. And so the purpose of Russian propaganda nowadays, and this is also true of other autocratic states as well as would-be autocrats in democracies, is to confuse people and make them nihilistic and make them apathetic. And so his goal is to prevent people from wanting to become dissidents or wanting to really do anything or participate in politics at all.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: This reminds me that in my book, Strongmen, I observed that in 1939, Mussolini, the old-school dictator, who had been a journalist, and micromanaged the press to a crazy degree, forbid the use of question marks in newspaper article titles. Because then propaganda was about establishing (fake) certainties. I contrasted this with Putin, who raises question marks about everything. So that’s one of the differences between the old and the new.
The Toll of the Personalization of U.S. Foreign Policy
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: So how would you characterize the state of U.S. policy toward Ukraine? Speaking of confusing people, it seems difficult to get a handle on the Trump administration’s stances, and part of that’s by design. I also want to mention to everyone that we are seeing a big change in how policy is implemented and negotiated. We’re seeing a partial privatization of foreign policy, when a few people, who have no expertise in the region, they’re not professional diplomats, are making policy. They usually include family members, cronies: so here we have two real estate executives, Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, representing the U.S. on Ukraine and Iran. The sidelining of experts cuts into competence, and we see mistakes and impasses during which more lives are lost needlessly.
Anne Applebaum: You’re absolutely right that the use of Witkoff and Kushner has had a pretty profound effect on how negotiations have been conducted. And it’s not positive. It’s my view that they prolonged the war. Because their attitude was, we’re going to Moscow. We’re going to do deals with Russian companies. And of course, the Russians were delighted by this. And we know that they were offering them stuff in the Arctic and minerals and so on. This has been in the newspapers. It’s not a secret anymore. And so they gave the Russians the impression that the Americans were on their side and that the Russians could somehow buy the Trump administration and that they would eventually defeat Ukraine with the help of the United States.
Kushner and Witkoff were people who didn’t understand Putin. They seemed at one point have misunderstood something Putin was offering them to be some kind of land swap deal, which apparently was not on offer. They don’t really know the geography of Ukraine. They don’t know what we’re talking about when we talk about this part of Donbas or that part of Crimea. And so they were seen by the Russians and really by everybody as incompetents who were bumbling along. The Russians thought, well, we can rip these people off.
This matters because the war will end when the Russians stop fighting, when the Russians say we can’t defeat Ukraine, Ukraine’s not going to become part of Russia. And we stop fighting and then we have a ceasefire. We begin to negotiate. Instead, the Americans put new life in the belief that the Russians would win the war militarily.
Drones, and a Secret of Ukrainian Resilience
Anne Applebaum: Russia has not won this war, mostly because of Ukrainian ingenuity, which is reinventing modern warfare by using drones in new ways and using them even to substitute for other kinds of weapons. European countries, I think against many expectations, have also stepped up to the plate and began funding the Ukrainian war effort and the Ukrainian economy. So you have now this so-called Coalition of the Willing, which does not really include the United States anymore, but includes most countries in Europe, plus Australia, South Korea, and others. And they have kept the Ukrainians fighting.
The Ukrainians have been holding the line for some months now, and there is some grudging recognition by President Trump that Zelensky represents a country that’s very talented and has new assets. You know, it has this new kind of warfare that other people want, including people in the Gulf and elsewhere in the world. Remember, Trump’s sons now have big investments in drone companies. I don’t know whether that’s a factor, but it could be something that he’s aware of.
And so he now grudgingly sees Zelensky as not a loser, and Trump likes to be on the side of whoever wins. That hasn’t stopped him from saying contradictory things. He says he will help the Ukrainians have access to more anti-ballistic, anti-missile technology one day, and then the next day he says that he won’t. Trump continually says contradictory things in public. He’s warmer about Zelensky than he was, but not warm enough to actually do much that makes a difference.
And so you have this situation of general confusion, which works to Putin’s advantage because Putin still thinks that he can outlast the Ukrainians and that he can break up Europe and that his propaganda will help get pro-Russian political parties elected in Europe and he can still win that way.
If Trump would say, I’m going to help Ukraine. I’ll make sure they don’t lose, that might be the thing that would convince the Russians to stop the war. Instead he says things like, well, Zelensky has to end the war or something. Zelensky can’t.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Well we all know why Trump will never help Russia be defeated, and will never do anything that could seriously destabilize Putin’s power. In fact, he and MAGA often parrot Kremlin talking points about Zelensky having started the war!
You will remember early on in the war, people who didn’t understand Putin’s autocratic psychology or strategy kept saying that if we just give Putin an off-ramp, he’ll stop. I was like, no, that’s not how autocrats roll.
The other thing to understand is that for Russia this is not just a war about territory. It’s a mission to obliterate Ukraine as an independent, sovereign culture and nation. I’ll repeat a bleak thought I had a few years ago: in a conflict aiming at such annihilation, every day that Russians stay in the war, killing Ukrainians, is a victory for Putin. I also want to mention the Russification of over ten thousand kidnapped Ukrainian children. And so there are larger cultural and ideological reasons to keep on fighting.
Anne Applebaum: It’s important that you pointed exactly to the difference. If the Russians end the war, if the Russians stop fighting, the war is over. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, Ukraine is over. Ukraine doesn’t exist anymore. Their country will be occupied and terrorized. They will lose their state. They will lose their language. The current leaders will be murdered. So they have no choice but to fight. They have to continue to fight to defend their country.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I wanted to talk about how this war has become a laboratory for new kinds of weapons, new kinds of strategies. Ukrainian ingenuity was seen early on with urban warfare and the battle for the cities. And then we have, of course, drones and electronic warfare.
Anne Applebaum: I’ve written several times about Ukraine and drones (you can find my articles in the Atlantic or on my Substack), and I’ve spent a lot of time both with people who build them and with people who are learning how to use them. My most recent trip was a couple of months ago where I watched people who used drone interceptors. So the Ukrainians have created a kind of drone that intercepts other drones. When the war in Iran broke out, this is why the leaders of other Gulf states were all very interested in meeting with Ukrainians to understand this technology, And the Ukrainians are world leaders in this innovative use of drones.
But It’s important to understand that this success also comes from the nature of Ukrainian society. Ukraine is a ground-up society for historical reasons. They’ve been a colony of Russia. Before that, they were part of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It’s a nation that is used to organizing itself at the ground level. They’re not so good at building state structures, but they’re very good at grassroots movements and always have been.
And the drone revolution is coming very much from there. It’s lots and lots of small companies. It’s lots of individual initiatives. It’s lots of people who used to do something else, like they were architects or working in some other industry. I was in one drone factory, one of the most successful, the last time I was there. And the guy who runs it did make drones before the war, but they were agricultural drones. And he quickly reset what he was doing, and now he’s one of the most cutting-edge manufacturers there.
There are a lot of stories like that: people who changed their lives after the war began in order to begin to make this new technology. And it wasn’t something that people were ordered to do, or there was a procurement process whereby a guy at the top told everybody what to do. It was rather small companies, very often working directly with battalions or with army units. You know, each army unit would have their relationship with a drone manufacturer or producer. It doesn’t function the way we think of armies functioning, in a top-down fashion.
And that’s really a reflection of how Ukrainian society works. So this transformation is deeply connected to, as I say, these grassroots structures and to the Ukrainian democratic urge or the democratic spirit, whatever language you want to use. This remains a country where people are very independent, where they believe in freedom, where they believe in self-organization. So they decide what they’re going to do and how they’re going to help their country. And that’s been true since the beginning of the war. And it’s maybe the one real advantage that Ukraine has over Russia.
And I think it was the thing that wasn’t seen by anybody else. It was very hard to guess that this is what was going to happen. But it’s a really important lesson because it tells you, you know, where does innovation come from? Where does creativity come from? And Ukraine, despite everything and despite its bad luck in history and despite a lot of bad governments and bad leaders, still has this.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: That’s a good ending point, and it’s very moving. It’s about resilience. It’s a good ending to pay tribute to this nation that has gone through so much and continues to go through much and yet is able to innovate and build. I thank you so much, Anne. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, and thanks to everyone for listening!
Anne Applebaum: Thank you, Ruth, and pleasure talking to you as well. So I hope to see you in real life soon.
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