Russia's Invasion of Ukraine: Tanks, Failures and Putin | Pekka Toveri

Summary

Pekka Toveri — Major General (ret.), former commander of the Armoured Brigade and Chief of Intelligence of the Finnish Defence Forces — analyses Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, recorded shortly after the February 2022 invasion. The conversation walks through Russian equipment (T-72, T-80 and T-90 tanks, the Pantsir S1 missile system and Iskander missiles), with Toveri calling the T-14 Armata ‘Putin’s wonder weapon’ that will certainly not be seen in Ukraine. Ukraine’s arsenal includes T-64B tanks alongside Western anti-tank weapons — Stinger, NLAW and Javelin — and Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones. Reading video footage of Ukraine’s successful counter-attacks and the heavy losses of Russian materiel, Toveri argues that Russia has failed not only in combat but in logistics, hybrid warfare and propaganda, with Putin making numerous mistakes, partly on catastrophically poor intelligence. Second-class equipment, third-class crews and a first-class opponent in Ukraine, he says, is an entirely different order of challenge. He considers why Putin launched such a failing war — and how the conquests of Syria, Chechnya and Crimea bred a false confidence in Russian military capability. The episode closes on NATO’s significance, Finland’s possible accession, and China’s awkward position as Russia’s unofficial partner.

Transcript

English transcript derived from validated English subtitles (WebVTT · SRT). Timestamps link to the original video.

00:00 With first-class equipment against second-class men and third-class opponents, you always win. And now what’s happened is second-class equipment, third-class crews, against first-class opponents — that goes a bit worse. Then it comes under some kind of fire. It’s hard to say whether that’s artillery or maybe anti-tank missile fire, because there are individual explosions there. With artillery you normally fire at minimum by battery. It would be, for the first time in a long while, a new member state that actually brings security, because it has capable armed forces — All the countries that have been brought in have been so pathetically weak that it’s really just widened the deficit. Alright, welcome to the Neuvottelija channel. My guest today is a much-requested one — Pekka Toveri, Major General (ret.). Welcome. Thank you. And you’ve had a really interesting career — you previously served as commander of the Armoured Brigade, and on top of that as the Finnish Defence Forces’ intelligence chief. Head of Intelligence at the Defence Command. Yeah, and both of those dimensions are interesting. I myself did my military service at Parola, so I’d like to use this chance to take a look at what kinds of tanks are being used in Ukraine right now.

01:13 Right at the start here there’s a video. So as we watch this — this is northeast of Kyiv, about 40 seconds in, and it starts rolling. So what is Russia doing here? Yeah, there’s some kind of battalion tactical group advancing toward Kyiv. They’ve come under fire, and then they bunch up on the road. You can see there’s one tank company, one mechanized infantry company equipped with BMPs, and another one apparently equipped with BTR-82s. And they drive right into a bunch there in the middle of the built-up area. Then it comes under some kind of fire. It’s hard to say whether that’s artillery or maybe anti-tank missile fire, because there are individual explosions from artillery there. Artillery is normally fired at minimum by battery, so that would mean at least four shells at once. But either way, they do pull out from there and leave a couple of burning vehicles behind. That’s exactly the point — you’d need to know you’re under air threat. Bayraktars have been operating in the area, Ukraine’s air force is degraded but has still managed to carry out isolated strikes with Su-25 aircraft, and yet they bunch the vehicles up together like that.

02:25 In that case you at least have mechanized infantry and the chance to dismount them and secure the flanks. There’s always a risk with buildings around that there’s an anti-tank team hiding somewhere, but at least you can protect yourself and spread the vehicles out. We would never, ever, even by accident, bunch vehicles up like that, because that’s exactly what makes you vulnerable to air strikes, vulnerable to artillery strikes, and other effects. You always have to keep the vehicles spread out. That’s why they’re on tracks — so they can move quickly from place to place and keep their distance, and then mass their effect when needed, at the point when they actually attack. So that action looks pretty chaotic and amateurish. Yeah, well, this is actually good news — that the Russians don’t know how to fight. But maybe this — this is apparently possibly even part of that famous 60-kilometer convoy. This is on the other side of the Dnieper. This isn’t part of that big free-for-all up in the northwest, which stretches for a good many kilometers — maybe even a thousand vehicles. It’s apparently gotten stuck in place, because roads and bridges have been cut, and then Ukraine has flooded that area.

03:28 I don’t know if that’s what’s happened. The Russians traditionally have a lot of engineer troops in their organization, more than Western armies do — but is that what’s happened? In the planning, the engineers ended up stuck at the tail end of the queue, which of course makes it a bit tricky to get through the traffic jam and forward in order to repair the roads, bridges, and so on, so the advance can continue. Right, so is this specifically an important part of the defense? Well, the Dnieper splits the whole of Ukraine in two, so it’s a significant spot in itself — of course a river obstacle is always an advantage for the defender, since the other side has to cross it under fire, which gives much better conditions for defending. Right. Now we could think about — the Russians use this T- type naming for their tanks. Where does that come from? Tank. Right, and then there’s a year number — is that the design year? Well, it varies a bit — usually it’s some year tied to when that model entered service, yes. Right, and my assumption would be that the numbers would be pretty high now, or maybe even low, since the newest tank type designed is the T-14 Armata — but at minimum you’d expect something like T-90s coming out. Is that actually the reality, though?

04:41 No — well, Russia’s main equipment is actually the T-72, and the newest versions have been modernized. There’s the T-72B3, or actually even a few B4s, and 3M versions, but as the footage shows, older versions have also turned up out there. Yeah, and then Ukraine, during the Soviet era — which Putin apparently wants back — also served as a tank production site, so the T-64B apparently sees fairly widespread use there. Yeah, and of course newer versions of it have been made, and the older equipment has been modernized. Right, but that sounds like a really old model year, however many upgrades it’s had inside — does that really work like that with tanks? Well, not exactly — steel doesn’t go bad that quickly, as long as you keep upgrading them and maintaining them. It’s worth remembering that the Leopard 2 was developed in the late ’70s and entered wider service in the ’80s. And it’s still rolling around the world — Europe’s common main battle tank. It’s been upgraded, maintained, so yes, it’s still a completely current, capable vehicle.

05:49 Yeah, we could actually jump ahead now — let’s get to the air weapons and armor defense after this. But let’s compare — I mentioned the T-14 Armata, and then Finland apparently has the German Leopard 2A6 — would that be the kind of tank battle we could see in Ukraine, or somewhere else, in your opinion? Well, no — the problem there is that the T-14 basically isn’t in service anywhere yet. I’d dare say it’s a bit of a Putin-style miracle-weapon gadget — they’ve taken a vehicle, it has a turret, the crew sits in the hull, and the turret is operated remotely, automatically. The concept is something the Americans experimented with too, on the research side, looking into whether something like this could be done. The technology used in it — all the armament and so on — is largely the same as before. It’s not that this technology didn’t exist, it’s just been repackaged. This Afganit active protection system, which is used to intercept missiles and other incoming rounds —

06:54 back in the late ’80s in Afghanistan they tested a similar system called the ‘Zor’ system. So it doesn’t actually bring anything all that new. Then it’s been wrapped in a ton of hype on top, announcing performance figures that almost certainly don’t hold up — for instance the radar supposedly detects dozens of flying targets at once, at 60-70, even up to 100 kilometers. There’s surely no way that vehicle has the processing power to do that, and it’s probably physically impossible with those antennas to get results like that. A lot of pure hot air. If they could get it to work, then sure, they might actually manage all right with the Armata, but there’s already the issue that the three crewmen sit side by side in the hull — so getting good situational awareness, having a sensible picture of what’s happening around you, the camera systems would probably need to be a bit more advanced than what they have.

07:54 For example, in the West there’s this ‘Google City’ system, and the vehicle commander, just like an F-35 pilot, can look all around, effectively seeing straight through the armor. So it’s seamless — that’s quite different from staring at some screen in front of you and trying to figure out what’s happening off to the right or left. So a lot of hype, not much substance. Well, we could take a quick look at the Leopard — let’s put up this video of it moving through Finnish terrain. It’s been developed — does it have things like these video capabilities, laser warning systems, and active protective armor in use? No, no. So what we have is the 2A6, which has extra armor added to the turret, extra protection fitted, and the 55-caliber gun, so the muzzle performance is a bit better and the rounds get a bit more speed. And then it’s been improved — the commander has a stabilized thermal camera up on the turret, so you can monitor 360 degrees around you better, and so on, things like that.

09:00 But still a perfectly good, current vehicle. And now, around the world, they’re already pushing hard for the A7 version, which has been developed even further again. Yeah. on social media, Russian tank crews complain a lot that it’s really unpleasant to work in there, since it’s so cramped, and the Russians apparently don’t have a word for ergonomics. It’s so awkward to operate in there that it wears you out quickly. That matters in combat — whether you can sit comfortably and function as the commander, or whether you’re stuck like this,

10:01 and trying to peer over there and get something done. Yeah, I remember those feelings from the T-72 and T-55, from my own driving days at Parola. But then we could move on to this — a bunch of these have been destroyed now, so here we’ve got missiles fired by a Turkish Bayraktar drone. So tell us what’s happening here. Yeah, there again it was the typical free-for-all — sitting there at the roadside, vehicles jammed side by side, not using the terrain, not keeping their distance, not dispersing the formation, not seeking cover in the terrain, although that’s not always easy in Ukraine either. And then apparently what got hit there looked like an anti-aircraft missile launcher vehicle. Yeah, so there are relatively few Bayraktars, but there are apparently still some — you can fit four missiles onto that drone, and they’ve been fired, but apparently Turkey, as a NATO country, has stepped in to provide equipment, which is surely being received with gratitude.

11:05 Right, so they’d made a deal before the war to sell 48 Bayraktars. Apparently only about half had been delivered before the war broke out. Can Turkey deliver more? Interesting to see. Russia has tried to strike the bases the Bayraktars have been operating from so far. And then they’ve also focused on training their own anti-aircraft units. They’ve taken into account how to counter the Bayraktars. Well, not all of them, though. Some have apparently been shot down, but they’re still able to operate there. But it’s still the case that the numbers are so small that they can’t be expected to change the course of the war. Right. Then from the Americans they’ve received these Javelins and Stingers. And then apparently from the Finns as well they’ve gotten some Kes anti-tank launchers over there. Yes, and there are others too — quite a few single-shot launchers have been supplied, and the German Panzerfaust, its own somewhat different anti-tank weapon, and so on. Yeah, and the Swedes have their Swedish models too.

12:07 Are there differences in effectiveness between these? Apparently what matters most on a tank is, being able to come in on a top-attack trajectory, hitting the top of the turret from above. Yes, there’s always an advantage in being able to punch through the roof armor, since that’s much thinner. The thing is, on the Russians’ newer, modernized vehicles, if they have reactive armor, that’s actually pretty good. From the front, straight on, there are quite a few layers to punch through to get a penetration, but the roof is still weak, even though there are some reactive armor elements up there too. Both the NLAW and the Javelin are then capable of those top-attack strikes. Right, but the Russian attack from the air looks surprisingly weak. There have apparently still been some Iskander missiles fired, and then for their own air defense they have the Pantsir S1. So how significant is that, and are these good weapons? Well, as a weapon the Iskander missile is good — it has long range, it can maneuver, it’s hard to intercept, and there are quite effective, different warhead options available.

13:16 But then firing missiles alone isn’t enough — you need your targeting process to be in order, you need to be able to find those targets already in peacetime, you need to know the enemy’s systems well enough that you know exactly what effect you’re having. If you try to shut down an airfield — American experience shows that even after 40 Tomahawks hit an air base, it’s still operational a week later. You need to find the spots where you get the most effect. Then you need to be able to check, right before the strike, that there’s actually activity there. so you’re not hitting an empty field or empty ground — and then afterward you need to be able to check, to do a BDA, a Battle Damage Assessment, to see whether you’ve gotten the effect, whether it needs to be repeated, and so on. And for that you need quite an extensive sensor network, which the Russians apparently don’t have. That requires training, which right now doesn’t seem to be all that polished for them, and so on. And on top of that you need quite a lot of those missiles. The Russians’ stockpiles of these longer-range precision missiles are fairly small compared to, say, the Americans’,

14:19 and according to one estimate, they’ve fired so far, according to American reports, at least around 700, and certain estimates say they had about 2,000 to start with. And I really don’t believe they’re going to fire more than half of that at Ukraine, because they still need to keep some in reserve just in case, something happens, and their industry can’t produce replacements the way America’s can. So in practice, over these two weeks of bombardment, some damage has probably been done, some depots have been destroyed and so on, but it hasn’t been enough to knock out Ukraine’s air— —air force and its command, and apparently not its logistics either, so it’s not like — the Russian army isn’t the American army. Well, that’s delightful news. Now we could think a bit about, since they’d been planning this for months and sort of went with a multi-front war, and probably in Putin’s fantasy it was meant to be some kind of blitzkrieg — one wave, since they already had Crimea, sort of a strong southern thrust, which actually — that seems to be the one making the most progress. And then of course the East, meaning from the Luhansk, Donbas area, sort of getting through, and then sort of trying to pull toward Kyiv from the north.

15:24 Do you see in these — well, at least that famous 60-kilometer convoy — you seem to be suggesting, that there might be mud season, or that weather conditions might partly explain this lack of success as well? Well yeah, before this whole mess started, I estimated that if — everything depends on the political leader giving the task to the military. Then the military does its situation assessment, and then decides how to carry it out so that the political leadership’s requirements are met. Well apparently the political leadership’s own assessment of the situation had a completely wrong picture of who the opponent actually was, which meant the military was probably also given a completely wrong picture of what they were going into. And if the assessment is that Ukraine’s leadership will flee to America on the first plane out, the armed forces won’t fight, and the population will just stand by and watch, then you can go for deep objectives — that becomes a well-considered, feasible mission. But if instead the assessment is that the leadership will stay put and rally the people, the armed forces will fight tenaciously, and the population will back them, then it would make sense to go with a somewhat more modest objective. And they went in with that optimistic picture, which is exactly why heads are currently rolling in the intelligence organizations back in Russia.

16:31 And with a completely wrong picture of the situation. And then they tried to ape the American way of waging war in Iraq. This is basically a repeat of Iraq 2003. Without air superiority. Right, precision strikes knock out the enemy’s air defense, air force, command, and logistics, and then after that you go in with armored forces without hesitation, driving straight to the objective. Just like the Americans did back in Baghdad in 2003 — that’s the Thunder Run, where battalion and brigade combat teams drove straight down the main roads right into the center of Baghdad, and the fighting broke out there. So that’s what they started doing, and the results speak for themselves. Battalion tactical groups get thrown in deep, and the Ukrainians start hitting them with ambushes from left and right. No support coming, logistics not working. This has been botched on so many levels that you could already write a book about it at this stage, even without the full picture of what’s happened. But a good example is logistics. There’s a lot of evidence that logistics hasn’t worked. Vehicles have been abandoned because they ran out of fuel. Troops are looting local grocery stores because they don’t have food.

17:44 combat rations that are 20 years old. The Russian armed forces’ logistics is based on railways. They have far fewer wheeled transport vehicles than Western militaries. Their carrying capacity is much smaller. A Russian brigade like this can maybe advance about 90 kilometers without resupply. That’s why they have railway troops — almost 30,000 soldiers — who are able to repair and even build railways. Their logistics runs on rail. Well, now, since they weren’t able to take these towns in a night or two — places like Kharkiv and so on — they decided to bypass them. In theory that’s a reasonable enough idea, but the problem is that all the railways run right through those towns. Kharkiv, for example, is a major railway junction. So the logistics simply couldn’t keep up behind them. And now they’re trying to clear out those towns so they can get their logistics working again. This has been a bit — it hasn’t quite gone as planned. In the south it’s gone better, partly because the rail network there doesn’t run through the big towns in the same way.

18:46 Plus they have naval superiority there, so they’re better able to handle logistics, maybe even by sea. Right, we could dig into that naval superiority — you’d sort of expect them to send an amphibious landing at Odesa, proper Normandy-style, but we haven’t seen that happen. Is that another case of it just being empty bluster? Well, that’s the same old story again — just before this war started, there was all this hype about four to six Russian landing ships moving around the Baltic. So what? That’s four to six landing ships, which might have some naval infantry inside and a few vehicles. To pull off an amphibious landing operation like that, you need air superiority there, you need continuous air support. You need a surface task force to cordon off the area and give you fire support, and so on. And a second echelon coming in behind — sure, you could throw a couple of battalions onto Gotland with those landing ships, but they’d be wiped out within a couple of days if you don’t have all the rest of it in place.

19:48 It’s the same story down south — sure, they’ve got several battalions of marines available and the sealift capacity for them, but they don’t have that large surface combat task group, and the air support, that would let them assault a defended shore. So they probably won’t even dare try it. What’s more likely is that if they get past the city of Mykolaiv and push on toward Odesa, and maybe even from the direction of Transnistria, where they have a couple of battalion tactical groups, then in connection with that — there are apparently some fairly favorable beaches east of Odesa, from what I’ve heard — where they might try to land. But going straight into Odesa itself, no way, that’s ruled out — it would end badly. Right, and even the capture of Kherson is going pretty slowly — that’s got to be painful for them. But from a Finnish point of view, is this just pure amateur-hour delight on land, at sea, and in the air, or is there anything here that could still salvage Putin’s honor?

20:48 Well, I’d say — you shouldn’t be too quick to declare that the Russian army is just a giant spinning its wheels in the mud. Their biggest problem has been the political leadership, which gave them an essentially impossible task given the resources available to the armed forces — and the armed forces then tried to proceed on the wrong assumptions. Apparently no one dared tell Putin that they couldn’t go for objectives that deep, that they’d get beaten badly. so then they set off on an impossible task. If they’d followed their own doctrine and fought the way the Russian army fights at its best, it would have gone much better. Fixing attacks from different directions, clearly pinning down the defender, concentrating force and fire at the point of main effort, moving with that combined fire and maneuver, and then going deep. then you could go for deeper objectives while also making sure logistics keeps up behind you — but that’s not what they did. Instead they set out to occupy, attacking from three directions along numerous different routes, with no main point of effort at all — and this is what happens. Right, well how would you look at this — Finland, fortunately, has kept its army strength and reserve high, but at this stage, hasn’t

21:59 the 200,000 soldiers that have been thrown in — are those from the professional army? Is there any sign of a second wave from the mobilized reserves? The Russians really do have that challenge — they’ve been trying for two decades to build a million-man professional armed force. And they haven’t managed it. That’s why they still rely on conscripts. They can’t recruit enough contract soldiers. So the majority — and the total strength of the ground forces was under 300,000, if I remember correctly. They clearly do have challenges. According to open sources, 75 percent of their operational combat forces are now concentrated in Ukraine. So there isn’t really much more manpower left to haul in from the far corners of the country. They can’t use conscripts anymore once it comes out that they’ve been sent in en masse, because there’s a law in Russia stating conscripts aren’t allowed to be used for combat duties. Then, they don’t have a proper mobilization system. For several years now they’ve been trying to develop some kind of contract-reservist system, but even though they have a theoretical reserve of millions of men, they don’t have a proper mobilization system that could actually form new units out of them.

23:14 According to some reports I’ve seen in open sources, around 3,000 reservists have been called up. They’re not forming any new combat units or, say, brigades — they’re apparently just being sent in individually as reservists to make up for the losses the units have already taken. That’s exactly why they’re dragging in Chechens, and why apparently they’re trying to recruit from Syria as well, plus these Wagner Group people — just to get some cannon fodder over there, because they’re basically about to run out. Right, you mentioned the Chechens and Syria — this ground has been well covered in your other interviews, but in a way — weren’t these Putin’s neighboring wars and the like also about domestic politics, and is there some kind of thread here, where success has effectively been rehearsed in these smaller countries? Well yeah, the old formula for victory is: with first-class equipment against second-class men and third-class opponents, you always win.

24:16 And now what’s happened is second-class equipment with third-class crews against a first-class opponent — that goes a bit worse. And that illusion — the Russians clearly believed it, since Crimea went as well as it did. That was carried out very professionally, but on the other hand there was no resistance at all, because they were already in Crimea. They had a large base there. Most of the commanders who were Ukrainian there were pro-Russian, so there was no resistance at all. Then maybe they got the wrong impression from that. They started looking down on the Ukrainians, thinking there’s nothing to them — which is odd, because Ukraine has actually kept fighting against them for eight years now. So they haven’t grasped that these people actually know how to fight too. Then there’s Syria too — that’s exactly it, certain units, certain parts have been used there to demonstrate capability. They’ve fired from far away — sorry, from the Caspian Sea — Kalibr cruise missiles at targets in Syria, and shown that they have a similar capability to the Americans. The air force has used a few precision-guided munitions, and that’s created the impression that the air force has real capabilities too,

25:19 but that’s partly an illusion — sending out two to four aircraft, dropping dumb bombs on a hospital somewhere in Aleppo, where there’s no air defense whatsoever, that’s not an air operation. That’s a war crime. And firing off a couple of precision missiles, maybe at some ISIS base somewhere, that’s not an air operation either. An air operation is when you have 60 to 80 aircraft, there’s an air-to-air element that cordons off the fight, provides protection. You’ve got electronic jamming supporting it. You’ve got SEAD aircraft that suppress the air defenses. You have air-to-ground strike aircraft that go in to destroy targets. And all of it is directed from radar aircraft. Western air forces — our own air force included — practice exactly this kind of thing. Those are air operations. What you’ve clearly seen in Ukraine is that Russia’s air force isn’t able to — — carry out air operations. Right. Now then, this total-war approach — in Chechnya, and in Syria too to some extent — they’d unhesitatingly send in aircraft against parts of a city, without any regard for civilian casualties.

26:29 Was this, in Putin’s mind, a winning approach that could maybe be applied here in Ukraine too? Well, no. Grozny, a city of half a million people, it got turned — barely one stone was left standing on another — in practice the whole city was destroyed. Tens of thousands of people died. Now it looks like, since there’s no other means — no well-trained infantry, no infantry trained in urban combat that could push into a built-up area, into a defended town, and fight there — they just use what they do know how to do. So they bring in the artillery, heavy rocket fire, and start blasting the place apart block by block, until the other side gets the message and surrenders. Right, and on top of that — even though the Russian-speaking minority varies from city to city, in the eastern cities in particular the population is largely Russian-speaking, so this is especially cruel, because it’s essentially the very people they claim to be liberating who are being killed. It’s worth remembering: in Grozny, for instance, from the Chechen war — it was specifically the Russians who lived in the better part of downtown Grozny, while the Chechens had been pushed out to the suburbs.

27:33 The Russians don’t seem to have any qualms — at least under Putin — about hitting Russian speakers, or even ethnic Russians, if they happen to get caught there under fire. Right, but thinking about it coldly, from Finland’s point of view it’s good that the Russian threat near our region is being ground down the whole time. On the other hand it’s obviously a human tragedy for Ukraine, but is a military-political vacuum forming here in our own neighboring region, since all their materiel and men are being sent there to die? Yes, the garrisons in this neighboring region have indeed been emptied of all their operational units. And here’s the absurdity of it — this drawn-up Russian narrative they tell their own people, that NATO was preparing to attack them. And yet all their other borders get stripped bare so they can go after Ukraine. They know perfectly well that NATO isn’t going to attack anywhere. The sheer amount of lying — and then somehow their own citizens buy it. Well, it’s worth remembering that Stalin was still extremely popular even though he killed two million Russians — it’s a bit the same thing, people just believe it all.

28:42 But this is definitely eating into Russia’s military strength. That’s a positive for us when it comes to any future war. But on the other hand, it’s worth remembering that armies which take a beating are the most dangerous ones, because they learn from it. Just like when the Germans, after the First World War, concluded, ‘the way we’re waging war — this isn’t working.’ And then they actively developed their interwar-period armored doctrine and warfare in general at the operational level. And then they thrashed everyone else pretty badly in the early stages of the war. And meanwhile the Western powers were like, well, we won the war, so there’s no need to develop anything. Let’s just carry on the same way. It’s a bit the same thing here — if they get badly beaten now and Putin doesn’t get removed, they’ll probably take quite significant measures to improve things, so that next time it goes a bit better. And next time Putin will hardly believe as naively the reports the FSB and others give him about how easy the opponent might turn out to be — whoever ends up being chosen as the opponent.

29:44 Yeah, or Putin’s successor probably, but yeah, you mentioned Nato — Zelensky’s tactic here of course has been that he’s had complete air superiority on the communications side, so that Ukraine gets everyone’s sympathy, and rightly so, while the Russians have at best done okay among their own, if even there, And their propaganda has really gone badly. Take this Z symbol, for instance — do you even understand what the point of that is? These are unit identification markings. They were used in the Second World War — during normal landing operations, aircraft were painted with clear markings so friendly air defense would recognize them and not shoot down their own. Here there’s a lot of the same equipment, the same type of equipment as the Ukrainians have, so they use different markings — the National Guard units have their own markings, special forces units have their own, and so on. Those are operation-specific equipment markings, identification marks. Yeah, but then this Russian Z — some people see it as almost a swastika-like symbol, since some athletes, for instance, use this Z to show support for Putin.

30:57 I think this propaganda is just pretty clumsy — even Russia’s propaganda has been fairly weak here, in my opinion. Yeah, it’s surprising really, when you think about how they’ve been running rings around the West for the last ten years, stirring up social media, setting Western countries at each other’s throats and all that, and now they’re getting roasted like this on this side. It’s a bit of a surprise. Yeah. As for Nato, you could think about how Zelensky has of course gotten support — financial support, and even weapons from Finland, genuinely significant weapons. And clearly these Western weapons are working really well in this defensive war, but they’re still at a technical disadvantage overall, so this war isn’t won yet from Ukraine’s side. Yeah, so Zelensky has been trying, I think, to provoke Nato into imposing a no-fly zone, but wouldn’t that in practice mean Nato would also have to enforce it — it’s not just a declaration, it would mean actually flying aircraft there and engaging if necessary.

32:03 Nato could easily carry that out, but it would at the same time be an act of war. And when you’re dealing with a country that has almost 6,000 nuclear warheads, of which just under 2,000 are at operational readiness, that’s not necessarily something Nato wants to do. Yeah, but is this — Zelensky surely knows this, but he keeps repeating it all the time — is there something behind it, or is it just about sympathy, wanting people to want it? Well yes, he probably wants to knock on the West’s conscience, showing that his people are being slaughtered here like cattle and that war crimes are being committed with no limits at all. And the West is just there saying, here’s some materiel for you, but they don’t dare do much more than that. And that’s somehow expressed even by the fact that Poland isn’t allowed to send its MiGs there — that seems a bit odd too, you’d think they could just put them on a train to the border and fly them in from there. But there’s clearly something sticking in Nato’s craw about breaching that air superiority, or rather about touching that airspace. Well, I know — they’re just weighing very carefully what the threshold is, how far we can go without testing that threshold of war.

33:16 Yeah. Do you think there’s guidance coming, sort of intelligence-support type of help? Absolutely, absolutely. The Ukrainians almost certainly have a much better situational picture of where the Russians are than the other way around. Yeah. Which of course is a huge asset and important support, because you can use your own limited forces much better when you know what the enemy is doing. Yeah. So let’s move on to some others. Russia has a few allies. My sense is that when the war started on February 24th, Belarus, as a brotherly nation, was about to join the attack too, but they didn’t really dare. Do you think Belarus will avoid becoming a party to this war? I tend to think Lukashenko probably wakes up every morning with soaked sheets from sweating and tossing all night, wondering how to get out of this, because they do have around 50,000 armed forces. At this stage Russia would certainly be happy to make use of extra forces. But it’s a conscript army, and there have been reports — scattered reports, not fully confirmed, but still — of refusals and resignations within the officer corps.

34:30 and things like that. Apparently they can’t rely on the fact that if they order troops to cross the border, that they would actually go. They have certain special units and a few other units that are professional soldiers, but those are quite small compared to the total force. The pressure is probably growing day by day. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. I also assumed they would take part. These sanctions have also been much more effective than I expected. At least back when Crimea was seized, nothing very significant happened — a few oligarchs got harassed a little, but that was about it. But if Belarus had to take on the same trash that’s now landing on Russia, that would be complete suicide for them. Yes, and this has clearly been a huge shock for Russia. That’s exactly the same thing — when you’ve been a dictator in a bubble for 20 years, everyone has just been saying yes, yes, yes. And you end up with a picture where, from 2014 onward, everything has gone perfectly for him. And the Western countries are weak and clowns.

35:32 You start believing your own propaganda. Then on top of that the French president and the German chancellor and everyone else come to plead and beg, asking him not to start a war. You get the feeling: these guys are nothing. And then when they’ve done everything and closed ranks, and now he’s getting hit on both cheeks, that’s clearly been quite a shock. This gives a good picture of it — almost half of the war chest, the currency reserves, was held in Western bonds and similar instruments, and now that’s been lost. It shows that this wasn’t planned down to the very last detail. Yeah, you mentioned Putin’s inner circle — what kind of matryoshka-doll structure is this, aren’t there terms like, besides oligarchs, the siloviki and others — so how does that apparatus around Putin actually work? Well, Putin is very skilled at maintaining that machinery. You’ve got the siloviki — these are mostly old KGB buddies. They’re all around the same age, all pushing toward 70, and all have a KGB background.

36:39 Or if they’re a bit younger, they still have that security-apparatus background — the foreign intelligence service, military intelligence, the FSB of course as the domestic service, the power ministries, and so on. And these guys are in his inner circle and they talk. And that’s the challenge — since they all share the same worldview, they were all trained by the KGB. The West is a huge threat, they’re trying to attack us and take us over. And now it’s become even more concrete, in that this Western way of thinking, ideology, democracy and so on — that’s actually the real threat, far more than any military threat. So that’s how he keeps them in line. It doesn’t really matter anymore. They’ve made their money with Putin’s blessing, and they know Putin can throw them in prison any time he wants and take that money away. That’s why they stay quiet — although a few have actually quite boldly condemned the war, which shows just how hard these sanctions are hitting them. But the siloviki crowd handles that side of things, and that’s exactly what’s interesting — what’s going to happen within that group, because these days they have a lot to lose.

37:46 They’ve all become multimillionaires, because — well, it’s one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And the higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more you can steal. Everyone has assets worth tens of millions. They have a lot to lose if this starts to go really badly. Yeah, so this siloviki crowd doesn’t get rich through old-style corruption exactly — they don’t need to take ownership of a state company or anything like that. Well, since Russia has spent hundreds of billions on arms procurement, probably tens of percent of that has gone into other people’s pockets. By the way, according to some estimates, Shoigu apparently has a dacha worth around twenty million euros near Moscow. That’s not exactly something you get on a defense minister’s salary. Yeah, and isn’t it the case that Shoigu himself isn’t even ethnically Russian? So how does that work — isn’t it actually a fairly ethnic-nationalist system there, so how has a guy like that been allowed to rise up? Well maybe precisely because of that — he’s a yes-man throughout, he’s no worse than a bit of corruption, or slightly bigger corruption, so he has no enemies, because he enables the stealing.

38:50 And then maybe precisely because he’s not ethnically Russian, Putin doesn’t see him as a threat, because whoever ends up being his successor, it’ll be a Russian anyway. Yeah, how paranoid do you think things are right now in Putin’s inner circle? I think — well, this is illustrated well by Martti Kari, the old intelligence veteran who has talked a lot about it. He mentioned that during that National Security Council meeting, where the recognition of the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics was decided, while he was speaking, sitting on the other side of the room, he grilled the head of the foreign intelligence service over his choice of words. He’s one of the four closest aides he discusses matters with. He publicly called out one of his most important aides on national television.

39:52 Who was still speaking the truth — that they were going to conquer Ukraine. Well, wasn’t he just talking about the fact that they should… That wasn’t actually related to that yet, but still it illustrates that even his closest aides didn’t really know what Putin was thinking. There’s probably a lot of paranoia there. The more these things have gone belly up, the more Putin probably starts thinking, wait a minute, these people are doing this on purpose. They’re trying to weaken his position by having lied to him. Heads are going to roll, and the atmosphere there in Kremlin meetings is probably not exactly relaxed right now. Yeah. So let’s move on now to this Nato situation. I’m personally pro-Nato, and I’d see a positive opportunity here, since Russia’s military threat is being tied down and actively destroyed right now. so go ahead and join Nato without security guarantees, or with whatever guarantees are available at that point.

40:52 The EU also has a small security dimension now that could be used during the application period. There were clearly some discussions held with the US about whether something could be found. Is this theory of mine plausible — that we just go for Nato and accept the security risk that comes during the application process, which is fairly small right now, since that equipment is tied up elsewhere. Do you see this as a kind of fast-track solution to Finland’s security gap? Yeah, well, of course. But if we conclude that rushing into it only gets you [unclear], so it might not necessarily be worth rushing into it too hastily. We should think things over a bit, but on the other hand we don’t need to think for too long either. This has been under consideration for a couple of decades now, and national security policy should be long-term. If we say now that, well, the situation is so bad, let’s look at it again in a couple of years — what do we know about the future other than that we don’t know anything about the future? The situation could be far worse in a couple of years.

41:57 At some point that risk needs to be taken, and how big is that risk really, when Russia is completely tied down in the south, and security guarantees would probably be possible to get, even just for the duration of the process, and so on. Yes, at some point it should be done, because right now we’re in this gray zone, and we’ve been in it for a decade now, and it just keeps going on. If we keep postponing the decision every time because the situation isn’t right, then when will it ever be right? There’s not going to be a moment where Russia’s leadership announces, sure, go ahead, be our guest. So you’ll be waiting for that forever. And now this is already starting to affect our investments — tourists don’t dare come to Finland because there’s a war going on and Finland isn’t in Nato, and so on. So it’s worth thinking about a bit. And then there are always people claiming, well, Nato surely isn’t going to go fight over some Baltic country or anything like that. but look at what we’ve seen in this situation — Nato acts. Troops are flowing in constantly around Ukraine and into the Nato countries on Russia’s borders

42:58 and the message is spelled out pretty clearly: step over that line, and you’re going to get smacked down. So Nato has clearly said that it’s not worth violating or attacking any Nato member’s territory, because then things will go badly. Let’s see what it is — probably an 800-million-person defense alliance, the most successful defense alliance there has ever been. There’s quite a lot of pressure on that system to succeed, because if it fails to defend even one of its smallest member states even once, it ceases to exist, because then no one can trust those security guarantees anymore. Yeah, Article Five works. You mentioned these security guarantees, or whatever the risk-reducing mechanisms for the transition period are called. In my opinion it’s some kind of risk either way, but it should be fairly short. Nato still has 30 members though, so do you think we need to warm each of them up a bit? Do we, for instance, need to buy Bayraktars from Turkey at inflated prices just to get them to say yes? Is that a reasonable read, in your opinion, that we need to warm up every one of those 30 Nato countries a little?

44:05 Well, I don’t quite believe that — maybe there are a few key Nato countries involved, but I don’t think the Turks, for instance, have anything seriously against us. The decision would probably come through fine — sure, some people further west are probably thinking, here’s a country with 1,300 kilometers of border, do we dare take it on, since it could get into friction with Russia. but for once, in a long time, it would be a new member country that actually brings security, because it has capable armed forces. Up to now, almost every country that’s been brought in has had such weak defense capability that they’ve actually widened the defense gap. Yeah, in fact probably — I talked with Vesa Kannias, and he said that we’d probably be politely asked, whether we could take main responsibility for defending that state. I think that would be a pretty sensible thing to do, since we now have, that kind of equipment, so that’s probably the right way to go about it. Well, I can’t quite bring myself to believe that we’d be told something like that,

45:06 because we’ve got a fairly big patch of our own to defend as it is. Pretty close to St. Petersburg and the Kola Peninsula. So it’s not really going to fall to us — ‘you go handle it, Nato.’ It’s plenty for us just to hold our own territory, since that in itself maintains and protects Nato’s northern flank. Right now we’re doing that for free, without security guarantees, which in my opinion isn’t very sensible for a Nato member, but of course if you start attacking the Baltic states, say with air strikes, then it’s a pretty risky game, if Finland’s air force belongs to the same alliance and sits right there on the other side of the narrow Gulf of Finland. Yeah, actually you mentioned Kola — the way I tend to think of it, that’s the St. Petersburg corridor over to Kaliningrad, which is an important strategic dimension for Russia, but is that as important as this northern dimension? Absolutely, because Russia is an Arctic power. It wants to be an Arctic great power. It wants to be the dominant military power there too. It’s invested a lot in the Arctic region. Kola, of course, is the central hub through which the Arctic is controlled.

46:15 That’s where two-thirds of the nuclear submarines are, nuclear submarines, and probably the bulk of the most important part of the nuclear triad. It’s definitely an important region. Good point. Let’s take one more topic, even though it’s speculative — these nuclear weapons: if, according to some reports, thermobaric weapons have already been used in Ukraine, and Iskander missiles too, which can do quite serious damage conventionally, then people have also speculated about whether this situation is now so unstable that even nuclear weapons could be used against Ukraine. Yeah, I don’t believe that. Of course a madman is a terrifying thing, you never know what’s going on in Putin’s head, but at that point, when you actually start down that road, there are of course many stages involved — if I remember correctly, Russia’s nuclear forces have four different readiness levels through which that alert status can be raised.

47:16 But clearly you can indeed do that, and at every stage you can threaten that it’s about to be used, it’s about to be used. If the other side calls the bluff, then you can do the demonstration — fire, say, a tactical nuclear weapon somewhere into a sparsely populated area, and show that now we have the capability — the next one goes to Kyiv. But if even that card gets called, or in general, if it’s even used just as a demonstration, even as a threat, against the territory of another, non-nuclear state, using a nuclear weapon, then, given that Putin has currently managed to turn Russia into a pariah state, he’s clearly so deep in that hole that it would be very hard to climb out of it, and I doubt they’d dare. At this point even the Chinese would probably take a fairly long, cold look at their Russian comrades and think, well, this has gone so far off the rails that it’s no longer worth even trying to negotiate with them. Yeah, that’s probably right. Let’s take China as the last topic then — my own theory was that they’d maybe agreed, during the Chinese Olympics, to postpone this attack, and then declared this kind of, what was the slogan again, a strong partnership or whatever it was.

48:21 And then the Chinese are sort of watching to see whether they can use it to their advantage with their banking system and energy policy, and use it a bit as a test bed for a takeover of Taiwan. Were these thoughts on your mind too, or how do you see the China dimension and what’s being considered there right now? Well, that’s the big fear, which is why the Americans always worry that China and Russia will form a strong bond. But it’s not that simple. One thing is that I don’t think the Russians fully trust the Chinese, because they’re afraid of them. You can push around Western countries, you can push around Western companies operating in Russia and seize their assets and so on, but you can’t do the same thing to Chinese companies, because the Chinese remember, and they take revenge. And the Chinese also have — yes, the Chinese also have a long memory. They definitely remember what happened in Manchuria and elsewhere during the wars, that territories were taken from them by the Soviet Union that actually belong to them. These are things that will still come up again at some point. Yeah, it’s a bit of a strategic alliance that’s fairly loose, and where China has the upper hand. I’d guess they’re looking at this thinking, good — the West gets tied up in a struggle with Russia, that gives them a bit more room.

49:42 And then when the West gradually stops buying gas and oil from Russia, we’ll be the customer. We just won’t pay anywhere near as high a price as the West does. As I understand it, these energy agreements are actually pretty weak financially compared to what the West pays for Russia’s hydrocarbons. So how do they benefit from this. Well, now that this situation has happened, they’re surely watching with interest how it can be exploited, and they’ve concluded: okay, the West is unpleasantly unified, and the sanctions policy is pretty tough. So the Chinese aren’t going to risk their business, for instance, by starting to run sanctions-evading trade with the Russians against the West’s sanctions, because they make far more money from the trade they do with the West. Financially it would be stupid to take on Western sanctions for the sake of Russian money, which is comparatively small. So they’re bound to keep some distance.

50:43 On the other hand, the more brutal this gets, the more civilians are killed by it, the more unpleasant a partner it becomes. Although for now some support has been shown toward it in some way, saying that they’re ready to act as a mediator in this and that a solution could be reached. So that China doesn’t throw itself onto the same sword Russia has now thrown itself on. Yeah, and China’s domestic propaganda has still stayed a bit on Russia’s side, mostly just to needle the West, but even that’s starting to crack a little, I think. And what’s interesting here is that now, as Russia is disconnecting itself from the internet, certain orders have apparently already been given that by tomorrow certain connections should be cut off, and so on. Some people have said there’s a risk here that they’ll cut themselves off from the internet, since it’s used as a platform for attack. That they’ll be protected themselves and go all in, so that in the worst case they even take down the internet. I can’t quite bring myself to believe that, because if they took down the internet, even for a few days, the economic losses for China would be massive.

51:46 And that’s something I can’t quite believe the Chinese would be happy to watch — like, oh great, thanks, our businesses went down the drain because you decided to take down the internet. There’s surely some cyber activity going on, but it’ll be more limited and more targeted — I don’t think they’d take the risk of bringing the whole world’s anger down on themselves. Yeah, and then one last thing — the Taiwan invasion issue. There’s American equipment there, and of course their security guarantees are pretty vague, but how do you see it — what kind of contest of strength would it be if China seriously went for a takeover of Taiwan? Well, actually the Americans have said fairly clearly that they’ll help Taiwan defend itself if China attacks it. China doesn’t yet have the kind of military capability that would make this anything other than a very high-risk undertaking. It would be a very high risk that it goes badly and results in massive losses, so they’re not ready for that yet. Yeah, and this probably shows that at least sanctions and similar measures would come out of this same playbook, on a similar scale,

52:50 so they’re not ready to take that risk. Whether it would come to that — hard to say. Well, there are degrees to this — Russia has been destroying and ravaging Syria for years, and in the West the reaction has just been, oh well, how unfortunate. Now that thing is much closer to home. In that case the reaction is completely different. As for Taiwan then, it’s pretty far from Europe, are Europeans ready to do the same kind of thing with China, which economically is actually probably far more significant than Russia. Yeah, but then of course there are American interests there too, and American prestige. Yeah, there are various economic factors that are probably significant. The United States’ great strength is that it has the world’s best alliance network, globally. If they can get it activated, and they have the ability to do that, it will have an impact. In this case too we’ve seen Japan and South Korea join in on the sanctions, a strict sanctions policy, along with all of America’s other close allies.

53:55 Thank you. My guest today has been Major General (ret.) Pekka Toveri, and we’ve discussed the situation in Ukraine, and especially — to my delight — this armored warfare angle. Thanks for coming. Thanks.