Robert: Yes, thank you very much for having me. It is my pleasure to welcome Professor Robert Orttung here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. He previously worked at the Open Media Research Institute, the East-West Institute, and American University’s Transnational Crime and Corruption Center. He’s currently a faculty member of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, and also a visiting fellow at the Center for Security Studies of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Robert is a research professor of International Affairs and Director of Research at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. We’re going to talk about all of this with my guest today, Robert Orttung. Ukraine, however, showed that there may be another way, not just with respect to politics or democracy, but with respect to economics and innovation. They’ve been told that as Russians, they’re somehow different from the rest of the world, that they have to accept this fate for Mother Russia. For years Russians have seemingly accepted this fate. But unlike the US, or China or Israel or Taiwan or Japan, the country is on the cutting edge of nothing: extracting oil and gas from the ground seems to be its entire reason for being.Īdd to this that when those fossil fuels become obsolete, and they will, it will further enhance Russia’s status as a failed or failing state. Russia gets painted as a superpower because it has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
What perhaps is lacking, at least in depth, is an understanding of Russia today as an economy, as a nation, and with its own very real internal politics and social struggles. Today though, through cable news, and Twitter and Telegram, it feels like we’ve all become subject experts, as a result of stories that focus on how the war on Ukraine is playing out in our domestic politics and European politics, with respect to China oil geopolitics, and the psychoanalyzing of Vladimir Putin. Russia’s unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine is unparalleled in Europe since 1945. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.) We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. (As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. If Orttung is correct, the war in Ukraine may be the ultimate wag-the-dog story. He looks at the role of RT (Russia Today) outside Russia and how TikTok is playing a major role, not just in reporting on the “operation” in Ukraine but in the way it’s being used inside Russia as another Putin propaganda tool. He also talks about Russia’s “old school” approach to propaganda. After all, Orttung reminds us, this is a country that has had no economic reform for the last 15 years. Yet the broad sanctions against the Russian financial system may very well make Russia a failed state in six to 14 months. On the economic front, Orttung thinks the sanctions against the oligarchs, who enable and profit from Putin’s rule, will not save Ukraine from devastation. Further, he sees that the country’s lack of premier academic institutions and media freedom make any kind of brainpower, tech, or creative economy impossible. Orttung argues that Russia is a declining power, that it suffers from what he calls “the resource curse,” and that its days are numbered as an extraction economy. This is the view of our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Robert Orttung, research professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. But the timing of this war and Putin’s expectation of a quick victory may be rooted in his own domestic political failures. Did Russia’s President Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine to distract attention from his own political weakness at home? Sure, he was unhappy about NATO and obsessed with restoring the glory of the Russian empire.