Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the opportunity, on short notice, to join you today.
I'm a military practitioner with strategic experience in NATO and with the CAF. I was involved in the writing of “Strong, Secure, Engaged” and was the chief of force development before my employment with NATO. I understand requirements, capability development and strategy. My comments and answers to questions will be addressed in that vein.
The writer's block analogy applies: If you've written yourself into a corner, you probably did it a couple of pages back. It's important to understand the context of how we got here as the basis to decide what we need to do about it.
The place to start is with Putin, who, most agree, is the decision-maker. His 16 years with the KGB, doing a lot of unsavoury dry work, turning people, etc., resulted, I think, in a person who perhaps has less regard for the human condition than the average. In 1991, on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he joined Yeltsin's camp, not Gorbachev's, which shows what he thinks of those decisions.
From 1999 to today, he has been the prime minister and president, in various capacities, of the Russian Federation. He put in a really significant and impactful early focus on reform and the economy, which had significant value for the Russian Federation's standard of living, etc. It also probably created a lens on how he thought Gorbachev should have solved the problem of the Soviet Union, rather than allowing it to fail.
Putin would have observed the Russian Federation's decline as a bipolar superpower with NATO expansion at the expense of the Russian Federation. In 1997, 2004, 2009, 2017 and 2020, 14 countries left the Russian Federation's sphere of influence and joined NATO. A person could understand how he blames the west for going back on words spoken, notwithstanding the actual words in the NATO-Russia founding act.
How would Putin decide he could stop that pattern of behaviour? Well, he could take a chunk of a [Technical difficulty—Editor] a border dispute. If you have a border dispute, you can't join NATO. It's what he did in Georgia in 2008 and again, arguably, what occurred in 2014.
The Russian Federation [Technical difficulty—Editor] that was why Putin fought to address that as prime minister—