Samuel Charap, Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND, joins us to discuss US policy toward Russia since 2008, the war in Ukraine, and the prospects of a settlement. *The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
Samuel Charap, Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND, joins us to discuss US policy toward Russia since 2008, the war in Ukraine, and the prospects of a settlement.
*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Peter Slezkine: I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the U.S.-Russia-China Trialogue project at the Stimson Center. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of the Trialogue is to better understand this extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
My guest today is Sam Charap, Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND. Sam, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:39] Sam Charap: Thanks for having me, Peter.
[00:00:40] Peter Slezkine: So, let's start with a bit of background. How did you get into Russia international relations? Where'd you grow up? Where'd you go to School?
[00:00:49] Sam Charap: Well, I grew up in New York, went to Amherst College, then Oxford for my master's and PhD. I think I owe my interest in Russia or can blame my interest in Russia on none other than Fyodor Dostoevsky. Having read Russian literature, and particularly The Brothers Karamazov in high school, sort of, inspired me to get interested in the language.
[00:01:11] Peter Slezkine: Which brother did you identify with most?
[00:01:14] Sam Charap: None of the above, but I did, as a 17-year-old, find it quite beguiling. And I got the bug. And I haven't been able to kick in since. So, I started taking the language when I got to college, and lived there, and in Ukraine, at various periods in the intervening years. So, yeah.
[00:01:30] Peter Slezkine: Do you have any family connection to that region?
[00:01:33] Sam Charap: No immediate family connection, but I'm a Pale of Settlement Jew. So, in some sense, all my ancestors fled, or at least most of them, from what was the Russian Empire at one time, although the Charaps left when... the part they left from was Austria-Hungary, but that's a longer story.
[00:01:52] Peter Slezkine: So, you have been working on Russia in Washington for over 15 years.
[00:01:57] Sam Charap: That's right.
[00:01:59] Peter Slezkine: So, how have we gotten to this point? Give me a brief outline of that decade and a half.
[00:02:06] Sam Charap: So, interestingly, I arrived in D.C. in the summer of 2008 and was here for the Georgia War. So, that was a turning point, to some degree, and colored some of the events that occurred afterwards. But putting that to one side, I think, if we have to look back to key watershed moments, they all really revolve around the war in Ukraine in one form or another.
2014 was a key moment when things really fundamentally changed. And then they fundamentally changed again in 2022. And I really don't see us getting back to either the 2013 status quo ante or even the 2021, you know, even not-so-great status quo ante in my lifetime maybe.
But how we got there is a longer story, something I addressed in the book I co-wrote with Tim Colton, called Everyone Loses, that dealt with the origins of the 2014 war. And you know, a lot of this goes, essentially, back to a broader contestation over the countries along Russia's periphery between Russia and the West that descended into violence in 2014 in a way that was irreversible in its impact on U.S. and broader Western relations with Russia.
[00:03:22] Peter Slezkine: So, the events in 2014 were irreversible. Were they preventable? Are there other choices that Washington could have made? I won't ask about Moscow since you weren't among the decision makers there. What could the U.S. have done differently?
[00:03:36] Sam Charap: Counterfactuals, you know, are easy enough to do, I think, in looking back at this long sweep of history where there clearly were a number of miscalculations and decisions that even those taking them might have second thoughts about now.
You know, there are tactical things that might have changed events in 2014, like more direct outreach from Obama to Putin at the time immediately after they overthrow Yanukovych to try to cool things down, but, you know, I'm just thinking, strategically, you can go back to decisions that were made long before that. So, really, pick your time period. And I could always offer some sort of critique.
[00:04:13] Peter Slezkine: Well, instead of a concrete path not taken in counterfactuals, maybe you could identify one or two important misunderstandings in Washington that were enduring and counterproductive.
[00:04:28] Sam Charap: I think the significance of Ukraine for the Russian leadership and broader strategic community was not fully internalized by any means in the run up to the events of 2014. And only, I think, when the plans for the full-scale invasion became clear in 2021 did that become evident to those in government at the time.
I think the challenge was that, as far as I understand, for U.S. government officials, it wasn't something that was, like, on the agenda per se, and therefore, we're talking about the pre-2014 period, wasn't necessarily an issue that they thought of as being at the top of the agenda and particularly because the EU had the lead at the time in pursuing the deep and comprehensive free trade agreement with the Ukrainians and the U.S. was, sort of, letting the EU take that on without engaging much. I think, in retrospect, we did not understand, or many did not understand, that this could lead to the kind of explosion that would basically color everything else in the relationship.
[00:05:40] Peter Slezkine: So, you said that the importance of Ukraine to Russia was not internalized before 2014, although people like Bill Burns, Kennan, Huntington, all sorts of major figures had made this point before then, but they were lone voices despite being prominent voices.
[00:06:01] Sam Charap: Yeah. I mean, it has been extremely difficult for the United States and Russia to work out a modus operandi regarding other countries in Europe. It raises deep concerns both within the U.S. government about new Yaltas and among our allies and particularly in whatever third country we're talking about. And that dynamic has played itself out in various ways over the course of the post-Soviet period.
But I think recognizing the problem is one thing. And I have no doubt that someone like Bill Burns recognized the problem. He's on the record as having done so. But developing some sort of policy to mitigate the problem is another. And that was and remains extremely challenging given the way in which, at least when it comes to other countries in Europe, having dialogue with Russia about those countries has just been taboo.
[00:06:59] Peter Slezkine: So, I understand that, for the last several decades in Washington, there has clearly been a stance that spheres of influence are anathema, that sovereign states should determine their own futures, but to what extent was the Russian reaction predictable? So, maybe they shouldn't have a say, but they might try to, or was the assumption that, essentially, Russia wouldn't do anything because it shouldn't do anything?
[00:07:30] Sam Charap: No. I mean, the fear from very early on articulated most clearly in public by Zbig Brzezinski was that there would be some sort of reconstituted Soviet Union, I mean, not Soviet, but a Eurasian major power with a capital in Moscow that would essentially reabsorb some of the former Soviet republics and, particularly the biggest one by far, Ukraine.
And so, reinforcing the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of Russia's neighbors was part of the strategy from the beginning. And there was concern because there was revanchism in Russia from the very beginning, attempts to, for example, encourage Crimean Separatism in the early '90s, involvement in several of the wars that broke out on Russia's periphery.
That has always been there. In fact, I think it never completely faded away even when those initial concerns, which were related to the tenuousness of the independence of the, at that point, what were called the newly independent states were perhaps not as tenuous anymore by the time the 2000s came around. But I think, to answer your question, there was always concern about what Russia might do. It was just the principle that it shouldn't have a say. And the lack of any acceptable means of dealing with its concerns made it a problem that was festering and that had no channel for resolution.
[00:08:58] Peter Slezkine: But after Russia went into Georgia, there was already a demonstration that offering to extend the Western security umbrella to Russia's immediate periphery might provoke a reaction. Were lessons learned at that point? So, that doesn't mean that policy must necessarily change, but that the implications of NATO expansion were clear to those involved in it.
[00:09:29] Sam Charap: There were lessons learned based on Georgia for sure. And I think that the NATO Bucharest Summit Declaration of April 2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were... it was declared, "will become members of the Alliance," is probably universally regarded as a mistake, but...
[00:09:47] Peter Slezkine: And that partial or the promise of membership in the future is much worse than no membership or full membership.
[00:09:53] Sam Charap: The promise of membership without any actual intention or plan to make it a reality provided these countries with no additional security and created enough of a threat perception in Russia that it actually diminished their security over time. So, it didn't do anything for anyone really. And it's this historical legacy that, you know, we're, sort of, at least for now, stuck with. But, you know, take Obama.
Like, his view was that pursuing further Georgian and Ukrainian integration into the Alliance, particularly after Yanukovych became president in 2010 and basically says he's not interested in that, it was just not a priority. And he thought, because it wasn't something that he was, like, making a priority, that it should just go away.
The challenge has always been that even if you don't want to actively pursue it, it is, sort of, festering there, this issue of contestation over the countries of the former Soviet Union along Russia's periphery, festering in the background, and eventually explodes. And it's exploded multiple times. And that's the challenge. The Biden era is another interesting case in point of the same dynamic to a certain extent.
[00:11:05] Peter Slezkine: Before we get to Biden, let's just adjust to Europeans quickly. What was their role? So, after 2014, in the Minsk process, the Europeans, the Germans, and the French took the lead. Russians believed that Europeans were their natural partners as opposed to the meddling American imperialists from overseas. That clearly didn't work out. But what was the, sort of, European role in the developments of the last decade as Obama and others were pretending that this festering problem would go away if they didn't make it a priority?
[00:11:40] Sam Charap: Believing. I don't think it’s pretending.
[00:11:42] Peter Slezkine: Believing. Sorry.
[00:11:42] Sam Charap: Yeah. So, the Europeans have been central to this dynamic from when, in 2009, the EU adopted a concerted policy of integration and outreach to its non-member countries along its borders called the Eastern Partnership at the time and really, as I said, in the run up to 2014, was much more engaged with the Ukrainians because they were working on this deep and comprehensive free trade agreement and essentially was operating more or less without American involvement.
So, I think it's not accurate to say that, by the time even 2013 rolls around, that Russia viewed the Europeans as, sort of, a benign force in their shared neighborhood or common neighborhood as it was known. And then the French and the Germans took the lead in diplomacy following the outbreak of hostilities in the Donbas and were instrumental in the signing of the Minsk agreements in 2015 and led the failed diplomatic effort to implement them in the subsequent years. So, I'm not sure that the distinction between the meddling U.S. and partner Europeans really held up or has been valid for over a decade, frankly.
[00:12:58] Peter Slezkine: Although, my sense, in talking to Russians, is that it's only after 2022 that they have decided that the Europeans are a much bigger problem than the Americans, that, of course, the Europeans were part of an overarching issue for them, but in the, sort of, hierarchy of adversaries, the U.S. was assigned a great deal of responsibility and even EU partnerships were assumed to be somehow a concoction of the CIA at some basic level. And now, after 2022, they have hopes for relations with the U.S. still, but I think have at least publicly written off Europe for as long as this generation of leaders remains in power to more or less paraphrase their position.
[00:13:49] Sam Charap: Yeah. And I think that position is fundamentally schizophrenic in a way because it turns on its head the logic that one would hear from Russians immediately following 2022, which is that, essentially, the Europeans are American proxies. And if only they would come to their senses and recognize that they were being used as such to, you know, dismantle Russia or whatever that they could...
And if you look at even the rhetoric of Russia's leaders, it was, sort of, with more sorrow than anger that they talked about the dismantlement of the EU-Russia relationship in the immediate aftermath of 2022. What has changed, of course, is that Donald Trump became president of the United States in January 2025. And that seemed to fundamentally shift, at least for the moment, Russian attitudes towards these two key components of the West, right?
So, now, the Americans are the side that offers the potential for some reconciliation while the Europeans are the font of all evil. They're no longer American proxies. They're the, sort of, attack dogs of the West. And the U.S. is the more rational party. So, I don't think there's much coherence in these narratives, frankly, because of how frequently they've shifted over the years, but one can at least detect a consistent attempt to find a difference between the two sides of the Atlantic on the Russian part and to frame the narrative in that way.
[00:15:12] Peter Slezkine: Well, Russia's attitude towards Europe primarily has been one of great intimacy and antipathy in a, sort of, swinging pendulum over the last several centuries. So, we'll see where things go if they truly are able to blindly-
[00:15:28] Sam Charap: That's true.
[00:15:29] Peter Slezkine: ... ignore Europe going forward.
[00:15:30] Sam Charap: I'm struck by the speed in the shift in narrative from proxy to inveterate enemy seemingly overnight.
[00:15:41] Peter Slezkine: So, let's then get to February 2022. Russia launched a military operation that, I think, it assumed would go something along the Georgian-2008 model. And then things obviously didn't play out according to that script, a script that perhaps even the Americans believed in. How accurate is that representation? How did you see it at the time? And then how real was Russia's effort to disentangle itself from a special operation gone wrong, first, in conversations with Ukrainian counterparts in Belarus and then in Istanbul?
[00:16:21] Sam Charap: I think it's fair to say that the model for the initial invasion was the Thunder Run on Baghdad in 2003. In other words, a, sort of, lightning strike on the capitol where things are over in less than a week and the enemy regime is removed from power. It clearly did not go according to plan.
And that plan of regime change, which was clearly seen in the way they carried themselves both militarily and politically in the early weeks, was evidently over by March of 2022. And Russia seemed to have come to terms with that by the end of that month when they began to withdraw from around Kyiv and other major cities in the Northeast.
It's an interesting question as to whether there has really been a clear plan B as far as objectives go, but I think that if you're referring to the Istanbul talks, at that period, you know, whether it was a genuine attempt or not, since it didn't really reach the stage of where there was an agreed text on the table and one of the other side walked away, it's hard to know the extent to which they were really prepared to settle on those terms.
I mean, we do know from the Ukrainian negotiators at the time that they believed their Russian counterparts were negotiating seriously. And well, you know, the talks eventually fell apart for a number of reasons. And it's unclear whether the framework they had come up with was viable. I do think it was an attempt to extricate themselves in a way by getting their political terms without having to follow through on the regime change operation.
You know, what they've been after in the interim, as I said, is something less clear, and is thus subject to a wide range of interpretation, by the way, you know. You still hear many who assert that Russia's objective is to destroy Ukraine, annihilate Ukraine, or subjugate Ukraine completely. In my view, I think they've demonstrated that they're actually not capable of that.
Whether or not Putin would, in fact, want to in the abstract is another story, but I don't think they have the capacity to do that. And I think, to a certain extent, they've come to terms with that reality. But, you know, what it is that they want, I mean, we've seen articulated in recent leaks of their own proposals now that some sort of...
[00:18:32] Peter Slezkine: Well, before we get to the second Istanbul. Between Istanbul 1 and Istanbul 2, we have the American policy that you witnessed from much greater proximity. So, you said that Russians may not have had a plan B after their initial operation failed pretty dramatically. Did the Biden administration have a plan B?
So, they thought that the Russians would probably succeed quickly. And then an Afghan-style resistance might be the best the Ukrainians and the Americans could hope for. And then sanctions were threatened and then leveled in an, more or less, improvisational fashion over time. But then over the subsequent year or two and so on, was there a sense of an end game in Washington for this war?
[00:19:26] Sam Charap: I would argue that the lack of a specified end game was actually part of the policy. Obviously, in the run up to the war, the objective was preventing the war and/or ensuring that Russian objectives wouldn't succeed if... They were trying to prevent them from succeeding if it were to go ahead. And they failed to prevent it.
Arguably, they did quite successfully facilitate, the Ukraine is taking the most credit for this, of course, the failure of Russia's immediate war aims. The problem is specifying an objective after that was quite difficult because the situation was quite dynamic but also because, essentially, I mean, the U.S. was not belligerent and it did not want to take a stand on what, the Biden administration at least, the end game should be.
[00:20:11] Peter Slezkine: But what does it mean to say that the U.S. was not belligerent? Now, we've had this long New York Times article that talks about how American generals are providing Ukraine with targets directly. So, an American points, a Ukrainian fires, or a Russian general dies. That sounds quite a bit like belligerency to me and most of the world, I imagine.
[00:20:33] Sam Charap: Yeah. And I'm not an international lawyer, and there's a formal definition of a co-belligerent, but I think that we have quite good lawyers in the U.S. government, and I have to imagine that they have some legal justification as to why this doesn't count as co-belligerency. Although, I take your point that, from a, sort of, layman's perspective, it certainly looks something closer to that. My point being, if you compare the situation in Ukraine with that in Afghanistan where the U.S. was actually doing the fighting on the ground, we did have, to a significant degree, less agency.
Now, I would argue that we could have worked with the Ukrainians to come up with a shared idea about how it could and should end, but Biden era administration officials are on the record about this. They're saying that, essentially, we're going to look to the Ukrainians to determine what the concrete objectives are. And our strategy is to support them in their efforts. I think that was not an adequate policy. Although, I understand why it was pursued.
And it had not only to do with the fact that the U.S. wasn't there on the ground in the same way that we were in other conflicts where our military was fighting directly, but also because the Biden administration prized consensus among allies and kept the alliance, the transatlantic alliance, and more broadly, other U.S. allies throughout the world, including, in Asia, Japan, Australia, South Korea, even partners, non-allies like Singapore, in this broader coalition of supporting Ukraine.
And while everyone could agree on the project of the support, coming to some internal consensus on what the desired outcome should be would have essentially caused a disruption in the alliance. There was no consensus on that issue. So, avoiding the subject was a way of avoiding a break among allies who saw the objective of the policy of supporting Ukraine quite differently.
[00:22:28] Peter Slezkine: So, I can understand how the Biden administration would get into that gray zone immediately because, as you say, developments are dynamic, the Russian strategy is shifting, support for Ukraine is the priority, unity among allies, and so forth. And in terms of all these short-term priorities, the administration, on its own terms, was very successful.
But then, especially after Ukrainian counteroffensive fails, there must have been a realization that American resources are limited, that the war in Ukraine must come to some kind of conclusion at some point, and that the U.S. is not simply a bystander or one supporter among many but an absolutely key element in this conflict and therefore should probably have an opinion about how it continues. So, at what point was there a recognition that the U.S. had, sort of, lost its moorings and needed to find a direction, or did that ever come?
[00:23:33] Sam Charap: I think if you had a former Biden administration official on your podcast, Peter, he or she would disagree that they ever lost their moorings. And I think, you know, this is a genuine belief among many that they were pursuing a policy that eventually would have led to a negotiated outcome that would have been more beneficial to Ukraine and that each element of the policy was framed around some idea about leverage in the abstract.
And, you know, when it was the counteroffensive, it was about the territory retaken as being the leverage that could be used by Ukraine to whatever objective they wanted to pursue in a negotiation. So, I think that it was seen, to a certain extent, as something of a success, I guess.
[00:24:21] Peter Slezkine: But success according to what metrics? So, I understand that Ukraine can be supported for its leverage to increase, but leverage is then translated into successes at the negotiating table.
[00:24:35] Sam Charap: Indeed.
[00:24:36] Peter Slezkine: So, increasing Ukrainian leverage for what?
[00:24:39] Sam Charap: So, if you think about the objectives that, I think, Mark Milley, reportedly, at least, was told, were his top three, you know, avoid a Russian-NATO confrontation, avoid any nuclear use, and keep the alliance together. You know, these priorities were achieved. They just didn't have much to do with what the end game looked like in Ukraine.
And I think it just is an unfortunate reality that you can't give the U.S. military an objective in a war that it's not fighting directly, right? They're not going to understand what to do with that. And so, it would have had to have been specified on the political level. And the view was that, essentially, there would be this, sort of, unspecified future moment when the time would be right to pursue negotiations but now is not the time. And that refrain was one that you would hear from 2023 onwards, really.
[00:25:27] Peter Slezkine: But I'm putting you in the uncomfortable position of representing an administration that you publicly criticize. So, you were advocating at least an attempt to negotiate much earlier on. Given what has happened since, do you maintain that that was a path that should have been pursued even before the American election?
[00:25:50] Sam Charap: Absolutely. People conflate a negotiation that produces a, sort of, compromise that is seen as a sellout-type compromise as the same thing as negotiating. But really what the challenge was with the U.S. from the beginning of the war is that there was not even regular communication with the Russians on the questions of the end game about the war and what a political settlement might look like. So, we didn't even talk to them about that.
Even if it would have been impossible to get an acceptable deal, you still want to maintain channels of communication in that context and to encourage others to do the same. And that was not where we were. There were periodic principle-level engagements, but they were not about, really, as far as I understand, at least these issues surrounding a political settlement.
The Biden administration didn't really have a, sort of, joint game plan with the Ukrainians on what that might look like. It would have made sense to have those channels all along, and it would have made sense to test the proposition that there was a deal to be had at various points along the way. I mean, arguably, if you look back, Mark Milley famously called for negotiations in the late fall of 2022 when the Ukrainians had just had their two successful counter-offensives in Kherson and Kharkiv.
And, you know, that was one moment. You could have said that, actually, the point of maximum Ukrainian leverage was just before the counteroffensive because, you know, the Russians, I think, were genuinely worried about how it would turn out, and you could have exploited that potentially to get concessions, but we'll never know because there was not that process that you point to of deploying the leverage that you get through coercive means at the negotiating table or just the, kind of, regular channels of communication that could produce some insight into how the other side... you know, where they are, what they're thinking, and where you could see the potential Venn diagram.
[00:27:51] Peter Slezkine: Well, since Trump's election, the dynamic has obviously changed. Channels of communication have opened, although they are not at all regular. So, how would you evaluate the last four months? Talking of some kind has resumed. Are we any closer to a compromise?
[00:28:09] Sam Charap: I'm not sure I could say closer or farther away. What I can say is that we now have certain elements in place or at least that have emerged that are probably prerequisites for a process that does produce an outcome. The most significant one, of course, is the direct contact between the Russians and the Ukrainians at the political level. Now, of course, there had been contacts to facilitate POW exchanges before this and other matters like that, but they were all unacknowledged and essentially enclosed channels.
This was a, you know, publicly acknowledged negotiation, essentially, and the beginnings of the discussion of even political issues, which involved a few confidence building measures, most significantly, these very large-scale POW exchanges and exchanges of remains. So, I think that is important in itself, that the two sides are talking openly and talking about some of the key issues.
And it's important that the U.S. and Russia have some degree of more regular dialogue on this set of issues. I would say that, beyond that, and, you know, for a while at least, we had some degree of partial ceasefire as concerns energy infrastructure in the Black Sea. Now, that's gone in the last few weeks.
But we have not seen either more concrete steps towards a ceasefire or a process in place that could plausibly produce a political settlement in any sort of near-term timeframe. So, the farther or closer, the metaphor of distance, is a hard one here. The administration deserves credit for beginning this conversation and for getting the parties to the table, but I think there are a lot of more pieces that need to be in place for you to see the pathway to some sort of result.
[00:30:01] Peter Slezkine: So, I was just in Moscow. And I'm now in Berlin. And one potential path forward, it seems to me, at least a timeline seems imaginable, is that the first few months of the Trump administration were characterized by American efforts to normalize with Russia, settle in Ukraine, perhaps bracket out the Europeans. There were limits in all of these areas. The Russians were open to normalization but prioritized the war in Ukraine and were attempting to convince Trump that this would take longer than he liked.
The Europeans, meanwhile, were unsettled by the change in American policy and spent these first few months desperately trying to get the United States to rejoin the Western Coalition. It seems as if Trump has agreed with the Russians that this may take time, that the two kids in the playground need to fight it out for a little while longer, that the Ukrainians and the Russians are the only two parties that know the details of the conflict so they should talk directly.
And it seems as if the Europeans have probably realized that they will not be able to draw the United States back fully into the fold. The Russians, meanwhile, are waiting for the results of a summer offensive to demonstrate the military leverage that they believe they possess. So, now that we have the contact between the Russians and the Americans, the Russians and the Ukrainians, the process has started, is there a hope that there might be a payoff in the fall?
As the Europeans and Ukrainians adjust to the new American position, as the Russians demonstrate or fail to demonstrate the extent of their military leverage on the battlefield, and this then process of direct negotiations that, right now, is, in some sense, purely symbolic, does it become more substantive?
[00:32:03] Sam Charap: I hate to point to some future period when some difficult political decision or process will be easier than it is now. So, maybe, but maybe not. I would be pleasantly surprised, very surprised, if there were an actual settlement this year or even a ceasefire.
[00:32:26] Peter Slezkine: Well, I don't mean settlement, but that these talks would actually begin to seriously treat substantive matters.
[00:32:34] Sam Charap: It is possible that a serious process could begin this year. I don't know that we have to wait until the fall to begin it, but I am also not 100% confident that the dynamic that you describe will be the one that prevails in the fall. I'm not sure the Europeans have given up on getting the Americans on side, so to speak. I'm not sure that the Russians will feel like they've gotten all that they can get by the time the fall comes around. They might not be ready for that sort of thing. And I'm not sure that we've seen yet the, sort of, negotiation infrastructure being put together that could get us to a more credible process.
[00:33:16] Peter Slezkine: What would that infrastructure look like?
[00:33:17] Sam Charap: I mean, in my view, having these periodic visits to third countries with a press circus and instantaneous leaks of documents is not a sign of a process that could produce results. I mean, if you compare it to even just the Russia-Ukraine talks in 2022, when the documents, which eventually did leak out, but didn't leak out for months and months, and certainly not when the negotiations were ongoing, and that was instructive.
[00:33:50] Peter Slezkine: But I feel like that's an unfair point of comparison because, at that moment, there was a crisis for both sides. Russians had realized that their special operation had failed. The Ukrainians were under extraordinary stress at the beginning of the war. So, these talks were serious from the start. Right now, we are slowly reestablishing contact, and the public statement of official positions is nothing new in substance but is symbolically a new point of departure. So, I think the public aspect is a part of relaunching a negotiation process.
[00:34:29] Sam Charap: Making the documents public suggests that their audience is not each other, maybe their domestic politics, maybe the President of the United States, but if you want to have a process that produces an outcome, you don't leak your proposals like this. And I think that agreeing on modalities of a process is usually the first step in it.
And one of those is confidentiality. And it's great for researchers like me to have access to these documents even before the meeting starts, but it's not particularly useful for achieving a result. So, I don't know the extent to which they are, as of yet, actually, really negotiating in a way.
[00:35:11] Peter Slezkine: But as we said before, neither side had even publicly stated its war aims because the Ukrainian position is-
[00:35:19] Sam Charap: That is true.
[00:35:19] Peter Slezkine: ... we want to reclaim our entire national borders, which was obviously unrealistic. The American position is we do whatever the Ukrainians want, which is extraordinarily vague, and an application of responsibility in a situation where the U.S. is, in fact, involved. And the Russians repeat denazification, demilitarization over and over again, bringing us no closer to any sense of what they actually want.
So, having a set of bullet points that are, at the same moment of time, publicly shared, however maximalist and unreasonable and distant from one another, does seem to provide some specifics that we can build on going forward. And then setting up modalities, insisting on confidentiality, could follow.
[00:36:04] Sam Charap: Yeah. It's not too late, I think, but I'm just saying it's not necessarily a good sign even if it's useful for you and me. I don't know how we got down this road, but, again, I don't want to diminish the-
[00:36:14] Peter Slezkine: Are you talking about the war or the conversation?
[00:36:18] Sam Charap: ... significance of the first, you know, openly acknowledged direct contact in three years. It is important. Whether it goes anywhere is a different story. I think I could see the utility of more working-level U.S. involvement as well.
[00:36:32] Peter Slezkine: Well, so paint me the most positive picture possible of a process that might produce results over the course of the next two months.
[00:36:42] Sam Charap: Oh, right. I was trying to tell you what I think should be happening versus what is happening. So, you know, if we're going to have it in person, they should have delegations in a third country on a regular basis and not periodically flying in and out. So, you've got an actual negotiating team that is there, meeting with their counterparts on a regular basis.
I would actually split the operation in two and have a parallel discussion of phase ceasefire and modalities of moving towards a phase ceasefire on a separate track about the broader geopolitical issues so that you could move in parallel along those tracks because, you know, one side cares more about the political issues, arguably the Russians, and the other side is more interested in getting towards a ceasefire.
So, you know, the answer there is to have some way of moving ahead on both of those tracks simultaneously. I'd like to see greater involvement of the U.S. potentially in the talks themselves. So, I think that those are some of the elements that, you know, if I were running the show, I'd want to see in place.
[00:37:42] Peter Slezkine: What does Russia want that the U.S. is not willing to give? We can talk about Europe and Ukraine in a moment. But Russian language rights, Orthodox Church, denazification of some limited extents, prohibition on glorifying demonstrated members of ESS, none of this seems particularly problematic for the U.S.
Non-NATO status for Ukraine is something that the U.S. is almost as eager as the Russians to establish as long-term policy. And some sort of limitations on American advanced precision missile systems, I think the Americans would be happy to accept. So, where is there a substantial divergence at the moment between Russian demands and American positions?
[00:38:33] Sam Charap: I think the most significant one is the Russian demand for Ukrainian withdrawal from areas that Russia claims are part of Russia, that Russia has never controlled.
[00:38:42] Peter Slezkine: But that's in the part of the document that they don't mean to be taken seriously. This is, sort of, an established simple solution that appeals to their domestic public and reiterates their constitutional claim to these areas, and then they [crosstalk 00:38:56].
[00:38:57] Sam Charap: They might well be flexible on that, but if you want to ask which of the terms seems to have gotten people most convinced that the Russians are in no mood to compromise it is that one.
[00:39:06] Peter Slezkine: Okay. Well, from what I understood from the Russians is that that was not the point that anybody was supposed to take seriously. It was the second option that focused on some limitation of certain types of Ukrainian military potential and political rights for linguistic minorities, so the Russian language and the Orthodox Church. Obviously, no European troops on Ukrainian soil, which the U.S. would not like to provide a backstop for, so it also doesn't seem to be a massive point of contention.
[00:39:39] Sam Charap: I think that there are challenges with implementing even the things that, in principle, the Trump administration might have no objection to, like Ukraine not being a member of NATO. How are we going to get there? Is it going to be a... this administration pledges to veto any efforts to move to that outcome that we formally renounce the open door policy and the Bucharest declaration, which we referenced at the beginning of this discussion?
Is it the Ukrainians changing their constitution? How you do that is quite complicated. So, you know, just to say, we don't think this is a likely outcome or one that we're actively pursuing. I'm not sure that's going to be enough. And on assistance, I don't know that we have a practice of agreeing with a third country on what our bilateral assistance with another country is going to look like.
So, that will be a tough swallow, too, but again, I think that the question of the prerequisite of Ukrainian withdrawal from Ukrainian-held territory is the one that has at least caused many to believe that Russian objectives remain unreasonable and that more pressure needs to be applied to get them to come to the table in a serious way.
[00:40:44] Peter Slezkine: Do you think sticks would work in Russia?
[00:40:47] Sam Charap: I think if Russia had paid no cost, to use a counterfactual, for any of its actions, and that, you know, no leverage had been generated through sanctions and the military costs that Russia has incurred, that they would have far less incentive to settle this war.
So, I do think that coercive pressure is a key element of any policy if you want to engender a change in something that matters to another country that has significant capabilities or even one that doesn't. And that's true of Russia, too. I think the issue is what we have been doing to a significant extent with Russia is, sort of, whacking them on the head with whatever coercive measure we're trying to pursue, and then expecting that behavior to change because we just whacked them on the head. And that's not how Russians operate, right?
And so, you know, I think, as you said, leverage is what you, you know, use at the negotiating table to get a better outcome. And in that sense, if sticks are used to generate leverage, then they're important, but it cannot be just sticks alone, right? In fact, the dichotomy, kind of, breaks down when you start to think about coercive measures as leverage, the dichotomy between sticks and carrots, right? So, you impose sanctions, which is somehow a stick, but your leverage comes from the promise of relief, I guess a carrot, right?
And that's the same instrument. And so, we should be thinking about this as incentives to come to the table and settle on terms that, you know, Ukraine can live with and disincentives to pursue more maximalist aims or to break a ceasefire once it's agreed and so on. And, you know, every country responds to incentives and disincentives in one way or another. That, I think, is how we should be thinking about how to shape, as much as possible, Russian behavior going forward.
[00:42:37] Peter Slezkine: Well, sticks are probably the wrong analogy because it's a one-time whack on the head. This is more of a screw, at least the sanctions and the military support, the intelligence sharing, in that they have been tightened and remain tightened despite Trump's outward change of policy.
In my sense of the Russian side is that there is a split between those who truly see Trump as a window of opportunity and would like to settle the Ukraine war in the near future if they can get certain terms so that they can end up pursuing other priorities and those who think that Trump is an anomaly, epiphenomenal, just the same as before and the collective West is Russia's long-term strategic enemy and will take a further tightening of the screws as proof of their position and seek to convince Putin and the rest of the establishment to wage the war at a much more intense level.
Describe why U.S.-Russia normalization is necessary outside of the Ukraine war, if it is, what the U.S. might gain from it and how much it can get until Ukraine is successfully settled? Is U.S. Russia normalization something that can be pursued in parallel with the Ukraine war?
[00:44:01] Sam Charap: In parallel with the Ukraine War continuing or in parallel with...
[00:44:04] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. Well, there will be continued efforts to resolve the Ukraine war and ongoing efforts to normalize with Russia elsewhere.
[00:44:11] Sam Charap: It's unclear to me how serious those efforts are for the record. I haven't seen any indication of any movement towards real normalization even if there have been some negotiations and more dialogue. But the dysfunctionality of the U.S.-Russia relationship has consequences for U.S. interests, you know, on a whole range of issues from non-proliferation to the broader arms control regime to the functioning of international institutions, like the UN Security Council, to the nature of Russian efforts to both engage in this, sort of, shadow war in Europe and countering the U.S. in places like Africa.
We're at a place where both sides have been at least engaged in a lot of efforts to go out of their way to antagonize the other and cause the other problems. And Russia can cause the U.S. a lot of problems. So, even just having that dynamic cease. But in my view, you're not going to have any real substantive normalization of U.S.-Russia relations without a settlement of the war in Ukraine. I do think that there are benefits to the U.S. of some degree of a functional U.S.-Russia relationship. What normalization means in that context is a little bit fuzzy, but one where we can actually deal with them on issues of shared concern would be a significant step forward from where we are today.
[00:45:31] Peter Slezkine: Well, in the reestablishment of official context, consular relations, discussions about other issues, like Iran, can help create the channels and build the trust necessary, hopefully, to ultimately resolve the war in Ukraine. [crosstalk 00:45:45].
[00:45:45] Sam Charap: It might, but that's not enough of a carrot for the Russians to stop whenever...
[00:45:52] Peter Slezkine: Well, certainly not a carrot. It's setting the conditions.
[00:45:55] Sam Charap: I think it might enable more difficult conversations on other issues, but, you know, unless you actually find some common ground on the core divergence, getting back to where we started, about security architecture issues in, particularly, as regards Ukraine, but more broadly, in this post-Soviet Eurasia space, that you're going to not be able to sustain any functioning bilateral relationship.
I think that has been the true lesson of the last 10 years that, unless we get this come to some mutual understanding and not just some uneasy ceasefire, metaphorically speaking, it's just going to blow up at some point in the future and undermine any efforts at working on other issues that might have taken place.
[00:46:40] Peter Slezkine: All right. Well, let's end on that one true lesson. You were very careful in this conversation, for which I congratulate you. I was trying to draw you out and really get you swinging wildly, but you stayed very measured and wise. So, thank you for that.
[00:46:54] Sam Charap: I don't want to get fired.
[00:46:55] Peter Slezkine: See, that is wisdom.
[00:46:57] Sam Charap: Yeah.
[00:46:57] Peter Slezkine: All right. Thanks for listening to the Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss out on any episodes. The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.