Since I'm working here at the Royal Military College Saint-Jean, I've been in contact with some of our officers, who have been training many thousands of Ukrainians for the past year. I wish I could say we've been providing helpful training to them.
I would pretty much also like to point out the fact that the Russian military, the guys who were there for two months, freezing, at the border in Belarus, thinking they were on a military exercise, at the very last moment were informed that they must accomplish this military operation, as they call it in Russia. I think there is a lot of evidence of low morale of the troops.
They were not angry at the Ukrainians. They didn't understand exactly what they were doing there. They were probably extremely surprised by the lack of enthusiasm of the Ukrainians. They were told this was about getting rid of a pro-western, bad Nazi government, and they were expecting some of the population to welcome their arrival, which was not the case.
I think for military analysts for years to come, in terms of the logistical failure and communication problem.... The support of the population for their fighters on the ground has been higher than expected, and the motivation of the Russians lower than expected.
I was among those who were predicting a three-day victory and Zelenskyy leaving Kyiv. I turned out to be absolutely wrong about it. Still, some further analysis will be necessary down the line to explain that military surprise we're witnessing on the ground. Even if my heart is with the battle the Ukrainians are fighting, it makes me dreadfully fearful of what is coming next, because if the conventional Russian forces cannot cope with Mr. Zelenskyy, they are in a very bad situation.
Their allies—China, India, Iran and others—support Russia because they thought they would give a humility lesson to the west by showing the limits of the western sphere of influence. Now that they are failing in that, there is a temptation to move further down the road of de-escalation, and the only playground where there is a strategic balance is in nuclear and the prospect of a full-fledged nuclear war. This is the only type of confrontation in which Russia can expect to find some balance and renegotiate a power relation with the west.
What I see now in the strategy the Russians have been carrying on for a few weeks is the increased intensity of the horror, the human rights violations and so forth. We think he is mad enough that he could possibly eventually consider using a nuke. A nuclear weapon is a weapon of dissuasion, but it has a dissuasive effect only if you think the guy who controls the button is crazy enough to use it. When Mr. Yeltsin was threatening us with a nuke in 1999, because he disagreed with the illegal NATO aggression against a country called Yugoslavia, everyone was laughing at him. “Come on, Boris,” they said, “You're not going to really think about using these types of weapons.”
Now, the persona that Putin is creating for himself is demonstrating that he's crazy enough, so he could possibly think about losing. He sent a Kinzhal missile. This is a new type of hypersonic weapon. It travels at 15 times the speed of sound. He used it to bomb the city of Lutsk, where the foreign military are training and rolling.... Of course, there were no nuclear warheads on this missile, but it could be used to carry nuclear weapons.
You see talk inside the Russian media on different types of low-yield nuclear weapons—tactical, strategic, etc. This is becoming part of the language we're using. This is the direction. Russia has no choice now but to move down that path, because it's the only way for them to achieve what they are aiming for, which is to challenge the unipolar moment.