As Putin faces endgame in Ukraine, Kremlin planners look for new European targets | Keir Giles

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]There's a a curious feature of Russian statecraft where for all the illegal actions they undertake, there's an urge towards a legitimization and legalization of some of the things they do. For instance, after the war on Georgia in August 2008, uh the Russian parliament retrospectively passed a law to make it legal. So building the case and putting the paperwork in place and making sure that there is an excuse to do something is a major part of how Russia goes to war. So that's the kind of thing we want to watch for to see if there is going to be a change from words to action.

[00:00:33]>> And when you take into account that it's now widely regarded that the war is starting to turn in Ukraine's favor, um do you get a sense or do you know whether Putin will be informed about the reality of this situation?

[00:00:47]Well, we are consistently told uh sometimes through people who cannot possibly know this that Putin is getting an incomplete picture of the war and is only being brought good news and that's one of the reasons why the war continues despite it being so catastrophically damaging for Russia itself. We can't know that for certain. What we do know is that there is a pattern within Russia of believing Moscow's own propaganda and making disastrous mistakes as a result like the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the first place. going to war on false promise premises and then realizing that it is uh that you've blundered into an entirely different situation to what you were expecting.

[00:01:24]That in itself is a danger if Putin gets a false picture of what he might be able to achieve by offensive action whether against his neighbors or further a field and that this has a greater likelihood of success than it does in real life.

[00:01:37]That's a dangerous situation for anybody that might be in the path of Russian action. The NATO secretary general uh made comments about Europe's overd dependence on the US to defend against Russia ahead of the foreign minister's meeting and for the first time that's taking place in Sweden. Your book asks who will defend Europe. Is that exactly what Russia is trying to establish?

[00:01:59]Uh Russia will be watching very closely all of these moves by the United States to draw down its military presence in Europe to reduce the number of assets that it has across the continent to actually deter Russian from military action. We haven't had the wholesale withdrawal that President Trump seemed to be promising. But we have had a steady pattern of chipping away at the provisions for deterring Russia and keeping Russia out of Europe that the United States previously provided. And of course the there are two factors to that. There is the race between the United States drawing those capabilities down and European states being able to provide something that might replace them in terms of deterrence of Russia.

[00:02:38]Not just a like forlike replacement but other means of making sure that Russia understands it would be too costly to mount the kind of military adventure that they might be considering. Um, so looking forwards over over the next few months, what do you expect to or what will you be looking for uh with the war in Ukraine to get an idea of how you might think it might end?

[00:02:59]>> Well, whether the war on Ukraine will end at all, of course, is uh is the big question here. Um the ambition of Russia to extend its control, to extend its domination, not just over Ukraine, but over the other countries that it thinks rightfully should be governed from Moscow is not going to go away for as long as Russia exists in its current form. So in the broader sense, the war is going to continue. The bigger problem, of course, is that if there is a ceasefire in Ukraine and if there is an end to major combat operations there, that immediately makes Europe's situation more dangerous, not less dangerous as some people might hope. It immediately frees up Russia's forces, land forces, to do other things. It gives the impression across Europe that the the problem has gone away because the war is over, which is far from the case. There's a big difference between a ceasefire and an end to the conflict.

[00:03:52]And all of these things will put Russia in a better position to consider its next move. Whether that's resuming the war on Ukraine or actually looking around for another target within Europe to achieve that aim that it sees of reestablishing its dominance against the across the east of the continent.

[00:04:09]>> In the information sphere, um, President Zilinski is saying that Ukraine's longrange capabilities are significantly changing the situation and with it the world's perception of Russia's war. Is he right? And what difference?

[00:04:24]>> What difference does it make?

[00:04:25]>> Oh, well, there's there are a number of different ways in which this is working to Ukraine's advantage. First of all, worldwide now, the perception has finally sunk in that Ukraine not only is holding its own, but also can strike back and also as a center of expertise for dealing with the kind of warfare that Russia wages. We saw during the American war on Iran the way in which countries turned to Ukraine for the expertise in dealing with Iranian drones for example. We've also seen the way in which this message that uh that the war affects ordinary Russians is getting through to ordinary Russians across the country. And that was a key part of the the Ukrainian strategy really from the first year of the war. They knew that this would not come to an end for as long as the the great mass of Russians were wholly in support of the war because they thought it was somebody else's problem a long way away. But overall globally, Ukraine now is forcing through this impression that they are in fact holding the advantage that they are no longer on the back foot fighting an entirely defensive war. And that of course completely changes the perception that had driven some of these ceasefire negotiations. The idea that Russian victory is inevitable and therefore you want to get the war over with as quickly as possible to reduce the number of casualties has been fundamentally shaken by this new Ukrainian advantage.

[00:05:44]>> And are you already seeing moves by the Kremlin to try and counter that image?

[00:05:50]>> We don't see that so much. We it may be something that's fed into these uh these declarations by Putin and by his press secretary that perhaps the war is the end of the war is in sight. But of course there's a long way between that and actually taking any action about it and it's action that we need to watch for and that is not forthcoming as yet.

[00:06:08]>> What do you uh read into the uh unannounced uh reporting of the nuclear exercises? There were there were unannounced exercises involving tens of thousands of p personnel and according to the BBC's Russian service probably majority of its estimated roughly 320 nuclear capable capable intercontinental ballistic missiles. What what do you think is going on here?

[00:06:31]>> Russia does do this. It does practice using its ultimate weapons and sometimes this is a tool for indentidation and sometimes it's actually specifically designed to see if the system that they have to make sure that they do uh in the final in the final analysis and the final event actually have the capability to launch actually works. So as this is not something which was specifically deliberately tied to an effort at intimidation of the west as so many of the the nuclear uh the nuclear posturing was over previous years. This looks more like a technical exercise. This looks more like Russia making sure that what it has actually works.

[00:07:09]>> Okay. So nothing to read into it in ter I suppose that the planning of it would have had been what months in advance.

[00:07:15]>> Absolutely. This is not something that will come happen at the spur of the moment. In exactly the same way as when Russia presents things that it does to Ukraine as reprisals or retaliations for for something that Ukraine uh may have done some kind of battlefield reverse for Russia whereas in fact inevitably they were planned weeks or months in advance.

[00:07:33]>> What message do you think uh the Kremlin will be getting from Britain this week given it's granting uh licenses for Russian derived diesel and jet fuel?

[00:07:43]Well, it's a very long and complicated story. These uh these licenses and whether in fact sanctions on Russian energy products are getting stricter or looser. It's a it's a striking uh way in which the the British government seems to have comprehensively mishandled the communications on this that it was first presented as sanctions being eased and only later that they explained that actually no, this was a a greater restriction on Russian energy with with just some partial exemption. So, it's a thoroughly confusing picture, but of course, it is part of this this overall scenario where Russia is benefiting hugely from America's war on Iran, and it's forcing people to ease off on the the restrictions on how Russia would gain from energy revenues. Uh, in the most striking case, of course, it's the United States, which has eased a whole raft of sanctions designed to prevent Russia from selling its oil. But the UK too has been forced to join in. It feels as a result of the energy prices.