Russia's defeat should be clear and catastrophic – Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist and director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He has written numerous scientific works on international politics, economic development, and democracy. His research focuses on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union states. Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Fukuyama has been closely following and commenting on the causes and possible consequences of this war for the world.

In his opinion, Ukraine can win by the end of this winter, and Russia will have a chance to change only if it suffers a crushing defeat.

We are speaking the day after a large-scale Russian attack on Ukraine's energy infrastructure. Francis Fukuyama starts the conversation with a question about the mass missile strike and asks if it has affected us.

In this interview, we talk about why Russia is losing and whether it has future prospects, what will happen if Vladimir Putin uses nuclear weapons, and what challenges post-war Ukraine will face.

If NATO gets into the fight, Russia is going to be devastated

LIGA.net: Why do you think Putin went for this escalation at this exact moment? He himself explained that it was in reaction to the explosion on the Crimean bridge. But Ukrainian special services reported that this particular attack on the energy infrastructure had been planned for a long time.

Fukuyama: There's been a lot of evidence of disagreement within elite circles in Moscow and there's been a lot of criticism from hardliners of Putin. So he's got a lot of people that have attacked his management of the war and said that they should be doing things like attacking Ukrainian infrastructure, some of them had suggested.

I think even Kadyrov was saying that he should use nuclear weapons. And so obviously Putin is feeling a lot of pressure from hyper-nationalists in Russia to look like he's doing something more. I don't think that he actually wants to use nuclear weapons.

The consequences of that for him are just going to be terrible. And so he needs to satisfy these people in some way. So these indiscriminate strikes on civilians in Ukraine are just about the only method he has for lashing out. They're terrible in their effects on the civilian population, but they don't actually affect the military balance in the war and he's going to continue losing in the military struggle regardless of what happens. And I think, one thing that's been clearly demonstrated is that this kind of terror attack. does not deter Ukraine from proceeding. Ukrainians are not scared by it. Obviously, they're personally scared, but politically it doesn't make them say "oh yes, we need to back down and talk to the Russians". I think it does the opposite. I think it's been increasing Ukraine's determination to continue. I guess the last thing I would say is that.

These hardliners are increasingly talking about all these terrible things that they think Russia should do to Ukraine. But the truth of the matter is that they don't have the means to do it any longer because Ukraine has destroyed so much of Russia's army and capacity. I think that, for example, they're running out of rockets. They don't have a sufficient number of precision-guided rockets to actually hit the targets that they're aiming at and so. I think that altogether, they're demonstrating weakness on so many different fronts that in the end, Ukraine will still come out on top.

You have mentioned nuclear weapons. There is an opinion that Putin may resort to it if he realizes that he stands no chance to win this war. Can we be sure that he will not press the button?

Well, no, I'm not sure. And I think that everybody has to worry about this. Anytime you get into a conflict with a nuclear superpower like Russia, you have to worry. However, if you think about the consequences of Russia using nuclear weapons, they all end up being very bad for Russia and actually very bad for Putin personally.

I do not think the United States and NATO will just stand by if Russia uses nuclear weapons. They're not going to back down either. And in fact, I think that this will draw NATO into the war with Russia directly. For example, the U.S. has resisted Ukrainian requests for a no-fly zone up till now because they don't want to actually be fighting Russia directly.

But I think if the Russians use nuclear weapons, then that's one of the first things that will happen. The United States will impose a no-fly zone over the whole area. They'll start shooting down Russian airplanes. They'll go after the bases from which a lot of the rockets are being launched. They could sink most of the Black Sea fleet, Russia's Black Sea fleet and do that relatively quickly. And so there are all sorts of overwhelming retaliations using conventional weapons that NATO has available. And given how weak the Russian position is fighting just Ukraine, if NATO gets into the fight they're going to be devastated. And so I think that they probably understand this. This really could risk bringing about a complete collapse of Russia's military. So that's why I think it's not rational for them to do this.

Now, this gets into a psychological question about Putin himself. He's always been a risk taker and maybe he will take this ultimate risk. But if you think about it from his standpoint, even his ability to survive this big mistake he made will be compromised, I think, if he goes this route because it's going to isolate Russia so completely from India, from China, from those countries that have shown him any degree of support and it's going to affect the Russian population as well.

So for all of those reasons, I think if he has a minimal amount of rationality left, he's going to see that it doesn't benefit him to do this kind of escalation.

Putin should suffer a crushing defeat

In early September, Putin declared the so-called partial mobilization. Although we all understand that it is general. Do you think it can affect the course of the war?

There are two things to be said about the mobilization. First, what is its impact on the military conflict going to be? And here I think it's not going to be that great because they've not been able to mobilize that many people and they're not going to be able to train or equip them sufficiently to have them make a big difference in the outcome of the war.

I really think that Ukraine is likely to be able to defeat Russia by the end of the winter, and you're simply not going to get that many new people into position with equipment, with food, with supplies before then.

But the second thing is that the fact that so many Russians left the country, many more Russians leaving the country than actually were mobilized, indicates how Russian society doesn't like this war. They're not opposed in principle, but they personally don't have any stake in it and they certainly don't want to lose their lives fighting for a cause that they don't believe in.

And so now you know what are they estimating? 700,000 Russians have left Russia since the mobilization was announced, which is many more than they've been able to mobilize. I think it indicates the real weakness of popular support for Putin, as long as the war didn't cost people anything. They were willing to say that they supported it, but the moment it affected them personally, then their support goes away.

So I think between the military effect and the societal effect, it's not going to change the outcome of the war in the end.

Everyone hoped that the mobilization would trigger some irreversible processes in Russia – collapse, resistance, mass protests. Why did this not materialize?

Well, I think it's hard to do that. First of all, there is this exit option. So a lot of Russians personally decided to go to Kazakhstan or Georgia or some other place rather than protest. And I think that protest has been made very difficult because of the repression by the security forces in Russia. So I think a combination of those things deterred people from going out into the streets.

I have a lot of Ukrainian friends that have argued that nobody should let these Russians in, forcing them to stay in Russia so that they will have no option but to protest. Maybe that’s right. But at this point, it's too late to make that decision.

How can Ukrainians who suffered from Russian shelling and who fled the war to save their children, coexist with Russians in Europe, Turkey, Georgia? They meet on the streets, in shops. Their children study in the same schools.

It's going to be very difficult. There have already been a lot of incidents fights and bitter arguments between Russians and Ukrainians outside of Russia.

I think that the thing that really needs to happen is for Russia to lose the war in such a clear and catastrophic way that everybody has to admit that it was a big mistake. They can't pretend to themselves that it was actually a good policy but just badly executed. And that they'll have an opportunity to go back and try it again at a later point. They really have to see that Putin was responsible for one of the biggest disasters in Russian history, comparable to let's say the 1905 defeat by Japan that then will have consequences internally for Russia.

And may signal the end of the Putin regime. And if that happens and there's a new regime in Moscow, maybe that will open up the possibility for some kind of long-term change in the nature of Russian politics itself. And people will be able to go back. However, I don't really expect that to happen in any short period of time.

And so I think there is going to be this difficult period where Russians and Ukrainians and other people are just going to have to learn to coexist.

The other thing is that I think that a lot of the countries that accepted Russians in the last few weeks are probably going to get tired of them at some point and may decide to change policies and start pushing them back into Russia. It's interesting. I was speaking last night to a woman from Kazakhstan who said that especially applies to younger Kazakhs. The government has been fairly accommodating of the Russians that have come in. But she said that younger Kazakhs had become increasingly anti-Russian as time has gone on and that they've been putting a lot of pressure on the government not to take as many. And I think at a certain point the sympathy for Russians is going to disappear and you may get a different policy that will really try to push them back into Russia so that's another thing that may happen.

The next question is from our reader. Is there a scenario in which Russia will remain within its internationally recognized borders with nuclear weapons but will never be a permanent threat to Ukraine or the entire democratic world?

I can imagine the possibility of that happening. But it's going to take a while to get there. We've been having this big argument about whether a more liberal Russia is possible. That would be a normal country that wouldn't have this national identity that depended on empire and continual expansion.

And right now that's not the mindset of most Russians in or out of Russia. So again, I think it would take a catastrophic defeat really to start convincing people that they need an alternative relationship with the outside world.

Somebody pointed out to me that Germany, before the defeat of Hitler, was regarded very similarly to the way we regard Russia. It was a militaristic, expansionist, aggressive country. But after their defeat in 1945, they underwent a big cultural change where the conscience of ordinary Germans was really changed to a more tolerant, liberal one.

That's lasted really ever since the end of the war. So it's possible in the very long run that something like this might happen. And I don't want to personally give up on the possibility of a better Russia, but I do think it's going to be a very long struggle and it really will depend on Russia being defeated decisively.

Support for Ukraine won't end this winter

In one of your interviews, you accused the West of not responding to a series of aggressions and invasions. Has the West changed in its determination to respond? If so, to what extent?

I think there's no question. This whole attitude of Gerhard Schroeder, the former Chancellor of Germany who was the biggest backer of Nord Stream 2. That's completely gone – that point of view that you could somehow work with Russia and incorporate it into a broad European security framework. I think nobody believes that anymore.

And I think everybody realizes that you can't live with Russia like a normal country and therefore you need to invest more in defense and for the long term be warier of Russian intentions. It's going to have a huge effect on economics because Europe is heading to a complete cutoff of energy purchases from Russia.

And so there's going to be a big detachment of Russia's economy from that of Europe. So I think in all these respects, we're never going to go back to the kind of attitudes that we had earlier, 10 years ago, say.

And despite this, some countries are still encouraging Ukraine to negotiate and settle peacefully.

You know that's true in the United States also. You have these populists that support Donald Trump who actually are more pro-Russian than pro-Ukrainian. And there are also people on the extreme left that want to blame the United States for everything, and so they want to excuse Russian behavior. So those people exist.

But I've been impressed especially in the last couple of months, ever since Ukraine started making progress on the battlefield that this opinion has gotten weaker. You know the level of support for Ukraine has increased.

I think the most dangerous thing for Ukraine is a stalemate. If you had a military stalemate where neither Russia nor Ukraine looked like they could make much progress. That would indicate to people that we have another frozen conflict and that would increase pressure for a negotiated solution that would ultimately reward Russia.

And that's why it was extremely important and good that the Ukrainian military made the breakthrough that they did in Kharkiv. Now, you know, in the rest of Donbas and in Kherson. And as long as they keep doing that, I think that these voices calling for a ceasefire or negotiations are not going to be dominant. I think people can see that their support of Ukraine is actually leading to the Ukrainian victory.

How long do you think Europe and the United States can support Ukraine? We see that many people are outraged by the prolonged support – people are tired of high gas prices abd want their comfortable lives back. Therefore, they begin to put pressure on their governments.

I don't think that's going to happen this winter. The Germans and others that depend on Russian gas have stored quite a lot of gas for the winter. I was just in Germany this past week and in the Netherlands, and there's no question that prices are going up and there's a lot of unhappiness about having to pay that much more for energy. The businesses are hurting as a result. But there's really been very little change in the attitude to support Ukraine as a result, because I think everybody now has the idea that we're going to have one really tough winter, but next year things are going to be different because we're going to be much less dependent on Russian energy.

And in any case, the conflict is moving in the right direction. The Ukrainians are winning, and therefore there's going to be some resolution to this problem, and I think that's the attitude of the majority of people in Europe, despite the fact that you do have these populist parties that are pushing a different line.

What about populists like Viktor Orban, as well as others in Serbia, France, Italy. Can the European Union somehow influence them?

Europe has had the ability to sanction Hungary for a long time. Something like 3% of Hungary's GDP is the result of these subsidies that Hungary gets from the European Union. And they've never been willing to cut those subsidies off because of Hungary's behavior. But they're slowly moving towards that.

It's taken much longer than necessary, but politically, I think now a lot of European countries realize that Hungary is a kind of Trojan horse on Russia's behalf. I think that in the case of Serbia this idea that somehow Serbia will get into the European Union at some point is kind of ridiculous given Aleksandar Vučić and his pro-Russian policies. So I do think that Europe should be able to stand up for its own democratic principles. It's too bad they haven't done this yet, but they do have the power to do this.

Will Belarus enter an open war, given Lukashenko's recent statements and actions?

It's possible, but if this were something that was actually a feasible option, you have to ask why they didn't do it already. Why didn't Belarus participate in the invasion right from the start? And I think the answer is that Lukashenko realizes that he really doesn't have any support in doing this, that the army, could revolt and refuse to move.

You've already had the case where railway workers in Belarus were sabotaging the movement of supplies to the Russian army in Ukraine and there's a pretty active resistance to Russia. And I think that if they try to participate more actively in the invasion, Lukashenko risks a revolt of mutiny in his own army, when they refuse to actually fight. And that may lead to his downfall because once the military decides that they don't want any of his policies, that may be the end of his regime.

So I think that's probably the consideration that's deterring him from full participation in this war.

My last question is about the future of Ukraine. What should be the first steps after the victory to rebuild a truly strong successful democratic European country?

That's such a large question. I'm not sure I could answer that very effectively because there are many things that would need to be done. I think on the political side the kind of oligarch-dominated economy and political system needs to change. It's already changed in many ways, but that needs to happen.

In terms of economic rebuilding, I think Ukraine's former dependence on early 20th-century industries like coal and steel, fertilizer and so forth needs to shift to more modern types of industries. And I think there is a certain danger that Zelenskyy and the current government have so much prestige and popularity that it may be hard for them to give up some of their powers if the war ends and you want to then go back to a more normal democratic system.

And I think it's important that people realize that war is one thing, but normal democracy involves real decentralization of power and real constraints on what presidents can do. So all of these things are things that Ukrainians need to think about. Because I do think that they're going to be in a position where they can remake their society in a very positive way in the future.

Do you think that Zelenskyy should retire after the victory?

To comment on that, that's the choice that he and the Ukrainian people will have to make.