Vladimir Putin, Sverre Diesen | Butcher Putin’s enormous blunder: – Then we started to deceive

– The war in Ukraine is a reminder of how dangerous it is to be Russia’s neighbour, says Sverre Diesen in Nettavisen’s Ukrainapodden.

The former defense chief believes that we Norwegians tend to forget what the Russians are capable of.

– And that is because 15-20 years pass between each time Russia throws off its mask and shows its true face. We still think that they are becoming more like us, but I think we have something to learn from the Finns, says Diesen, who refers to our Finnish neighbors as the “ultimate realists when it comes to dealing with Russia”.

In the Ukrainapodden, Diesen brings up an anecdote from the post-war period as an example. Right after the Second World War, Finnish President Juho Paasikivi met the Norwegian Minister of Justice in the London government, Terje Wold.

Finland and the Soviet Union were then bitter enemies after the brutal winter war.

– And then the Norwegian minister, in a fit of post-war euphoria, is said to have said that in ten years, the Soviet Union would become a liberal democracy. The Finnish president is said to have chewed on this a bit, before he replied in Swedish-Finnish: “Now I think it will take a little longer”, says Diesen.

The meetings with the Russian defense chief

We have to go back in time to find the explanation for much of the difference between Russian and Western mentality, Diesen believes. Deep differences in security policy, diplomacy and culture stretch all the way back to Roman times, he discusses in the Ukrainapodden. While in the West people usually try to resolve disagreements around a table, it is brute force that the Russians have always entered into conflicts with, he believes.

– They think: “I am safe, to the extent that you are afraid of me”, says Diesen.

He has also experienced this personally, as Norway’s defense chief in talks with the Russian defense chief. These conversations always began with criticism from the Russian side, often aimed at one or another exercise the Norwegian defense had had, says Diesen.

– And if I then apologized, then he only became even angrier, and intensified the criticism, says Diesen in Ukrainapodden.

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As the Norwegian became more experienced, and opposed the criticism, the Russian always put the case aside.

– If the Russians meet firmness, they settle for it, at least until next time. If they meet concessions, they move the positions forward, says Diesen.

– The Russians are not interested in being understood. They are keen to be feared, or at least respected, he adds.

Listen to the whole episode here:

Butcher Putin’s giant blunder: – Then we started fooling around

In the podcast, Diesen also goes into one of the great surprises of the war, namely that Russia was so weak militarily that they were unable to take Ukraine within a few weeks.

The column towards Kyiv was beaten back in cash, but it is further east in Ukraine that the former defense chief really shakes his head at the Russians’ strategy.

At the beginning of May, after Russia had given up its push against Kyiv, they had at the same time penetrated far into eastern Ukraine, both in the north and in the south.

– All military personnel who are used to reading a situation map saw what the Russians were going to do, says Diesen.

This is how the situation looked on 5 May:

In the podcast, Diesen explains the “obvious” plan: All Western military leaders believed that Russia was going to attack with armored vehicles from both the north and the south. It was assumed that this would happen on the east side of the Dnipro River, so that the Russian forces would meet in the middle. Thus they would have trapped almost the entire Ukrainian army in a pocket in the far east of the country.

– Any student at a western military school would read that map like that, says Diesen.

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– But then we see that no, the Russians did not do that. Instead, there are a lot of more or less poorly coordinated small attacks all the way around this large pocket in Eastern Ukraine. It was probably the first time we began to wonder: Have we overestimated the Russians, when they apparently do not do what in our eyes would be a completely obvious course of action? says Diesen.

Later, the Norwegian military has also shown that they have overestimated the Russians’ ability to carry out military operations, he adds.

– The Russians are colossally underperforming in terms of what they themselves want to do and what we previously thought they were capable of, says Diesen.

Putin’s relationship with the West: Admiration, fear and contempt

Much of the reason why Putin does not give up the war, and simply pulls out of Ukraine, is because he thinks Ukraine and the West will give in first, says the former head of defense in the Ukrainapodden.

– The challenge, seen from the West’s side, is that Vladimir Putin does not believe that we will stand for it, says Diesen.

– And it’s not just because the Americans are hesitating about the support, it has to do with Putin and the Russian elite’s fundamental view, view of history and perception of the West. They see the West as a civilization in decline, he adds.

This is not the reality, says Diesen.

– The West is, of course, overwhelmingly superior to Russia, economically and industrially. If we want to put Ukraine in a position to win, we can. Russia has an economy the size of Italy, and has absolutely nothing to contend with if the West really mobilized its resources and deployed them so that the Russians would lose in Ukraine, says the former defense chief.

– When Putin and the Kremlin say that they are a wonderful country, and that the West is inferior: Do they believe it themselves, or is it just something they say because they know the Russians bite?

– The Russians’ relationship with the West is very special, and I don’t think Putin is an exception. They have three sets of feelings about the West. On the one hand, they probably admire the West in many ways, when it comes to technological superiority and economic success, Diesen begins.

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In addition to admiration, there is also a lot of Western fear in Russian society, says Diesen.

– They fear our liberalism, our individualism, our lack of respect for authority and our free spirit, which unfolds in many ways. Fear is also part of what motivates Putin today, i.e. the fear that Ukraine will become a west-facing, politically and economically successful national project, says Diesen.

The third set of emotions is contempt.

– The Russians despise weakness. And much of what they see in the West, they then perceive as an expression of weakness. Precisely, for example, this indulgence and what they perceive as an unwillingness to stand in a war that we don’t even have to fight ourselves. We don’t even have the nerve or character for that, says Diesen.

Listen to the whole episode here: