TYGODNIK TVP: Even before Russia attacked Ukraine, you had predicted that Vladimir Putin would start a war in Ukraine and that it would be suicidal for him. But your opinion was not taken seriously.

  YURI FELSHTINSKY: This forecast had been made in January, a month before the war broke out. Moreover, I also said that this conflict wouldn’t be just an internal Ukrainian affair, and that it would never be just a Russian-Ukrainian war involving tacit observation from the rest of the world. I always believed that such a war would involve the two opposite sides of today's world division: the West (NATO) and Russia with Belarus. I also assumed that it could turn into World War III, ending with the defeat of the Russian Federation as we know the country today. As we can see, everything is moving towards the realization of my predictions.

  Although, in my opinion, Western aid for Ukraine is still very limited, it plays an enormous role from a military point of view, as do the sanctions that have become quite serious. As a result, we can see that Putin is currently naked. He doesn’t have an army at present, since he lost it in Ukraine. His conventional armed forces have disappeared. They are incapable of taking Ukraine, let alone threaten Europe or NATO. From this point of view, Putin has already lost.

  What about his suicide strategy? Was it just some kind of metaphor or do you really think that the Kremlin incumbent will end up like so many other Russian leaders?

  I'll be honest and it may sound strange, but… who cares about Putin, especially now? Although we are stuck in this belief that Putin is important, I do not think that in Russia, with its current regime and foreign policy, Putin's departure would change anything. It really doesn't matter if he walks away, dies, or gets killed. We are dealing here with special services (FSB), which are the only authority in this country. They are the force behind Putin, such is the political nature of Russia.

  Unlike Lukashenko in Belarus, Putin does not rule Russia as a dictator. In Minsk, Lukashenko is the country's main problem. Had he gone, the situation there would have changed diametrically. Here in Russia, there is no chance of that, regardless of who the leader is. Russia must sort out the FSB as an institution. The problem in Russia is bigger for all of us than the one in Belarus because many people around Putin think like him and are ready to take his place. There are 200 Putins in Russia waiting to replace the current Putin.

  And where is this "club" of 200 "other" Putins, and who belongs to it?

  We need to understand the logic and character of the Russian state. In my book "From Red Terror to Mafia State", which has just been published in Polish, I describe in detail how the Federal Security Service in 2000 implemented the plan that Felix Dzerzhinsky [the Bolshevik leader who headed the first Soviet secret police organization] dreamt of in 1918 -- taking over the political power in the country. What he tried unsuccessfully to achieve immediately after the Revolution happened decades later.

  From the very beginning of the USSR, and even before that, this secret political police was the country's biggest problem. Moreover, the Cheka [the much-feared Bolshevik security agency, formed to identify and eradicate counter-revolutionary activity] was always an enemy of the Communist Party and the Red Army, eager to seize full power for itself whenever the opportunity presented itself. Today’s FSB [Federal Security Service] retains the same formation and is a continuation of the services established in December 1917.

  Worst of all, there is no opposition to the FSB on the Russian horizon. Even the army is unable to play such a role because in the history of both the USSR and that of Russia, unlike the situation in Latin American countries, the military have never attempted to seize power. The Russian army has never constituted a threat to the party and the KGB / FSB. Always it has been infiltrated and controlled by special services.

  The 200 Putins in waiting are people who are his potential successors. And, just like him, all of them follow the logic of force. They are not capable of building anything, only of destroying. And again I repeat, Putin is not a problem. He is not a dictator who forces everyone to obey. Decisions in Russia are made collectively by the secret services. As a result, we have the only large country in the world where the unprecedented has been brought about -- a state run by a secret police.

Soon there will be the 100th anniversary of the official establishment of the USSR [December 30, 1922], and yet, apart from its name, the country has not changed much.

  I am trying to show this in my book and I hope that I have succeeded. It all started from a bloody war between the communist party and the secret police that began in December 1917. Eventually, the secret service won and took power from the party. In 1991, when the USSR collapsed, the services needed only nine years to place their man in the presidential chair and take over full power in the Russian Federation. Since then, Russia has been a state ruled without any political control. Felix Dzerzhinsky's dream came true.

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       Today the former KGB [the USSR's main security agency between 1954 and 1991] resembles a well-organized Mafia in control of one of the largest countries in the world ...

  There are indeed some similarities between the FSB and the Mafia. First of all, the FSB is a secret organization. No one, apart from the leaders of course, knows who exactly belongs to it, or who doesn’t, much less how many people work for it. There is one important rule: when a person joins the KGB / FSB, he never leaves it. Its structure is huge and secret. There is a network of secret agents, but also so-called reservists employed in state and private companies, and state law protects them from disclosure, because they cooperate with the services.

  Just like the Mafia, this is an utterly ruthless organization. However, the Mafia, as we understand it traditionally, usually has links to political power. In the case of the security service in Russia, the Mafia is the power, and actually rules the country.

  But when you are in the Mafia, you want to be earning billions of dollars all the time, and Western sanctions are making that extremely difficult. Does the circle of former KGB-ists fully accept the course their leader took?

The topic you raised is important, but we need to understand it differently. This is not about the money lost as a result of the invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions that were introduced. The people of Russia are not rational in the Western sense. If it were just corruption, that would be the least of the problems. Russians, however, are not concerned about their own money but about the broader idea of destroying the enemy. And in this case the enemy comprises the West, the European Union and NATO. In the logic of Russia's leaders who recruit from the FSB, anyone who is not from the FSB is the enemy.

  After February 24, 2022, the world thought that financial sanctions would have had a quick impact and stopped the war. Everybody forgot that following the annexation of Crimea the value of the ruble fell by 50 per cent and nobody in Russia seemed to care. Of course, from an economic point of view, what Putin is doing is a disaster for the country, but it does not apply to him. He is telling himself: ‘there was a time of buying real estates in the West, sending kids to foreign collegese, making millions and spending millions on Western luxury. Now this time is over. Now it is show time. And Putin believes he will win.

  Is Putin a good chess player? What's the situation on the world’s chess board at the moment?

  Putin is not a chess player at all. Let us remember that he hadn’t even reached a higher officer rank in the KGB. Why should we consider him an outstanding personality? Besides, he does not believe in the strategy of the game, only in the arguments of force. He chooses to compete only when he is convinced that he is physically superior to his opponent. This is what his game looks like and it has nothing to do with the logic of chess, especially since it is just such a game that he has lost.

  His level of playing is such that he planned that Ukraine would surrender quickly -- and he lost. He thought that the West would not intervene -- he lost. He believed that his army would cope with the opponent -- he also lost. Even when he announced mobilization -- he also lost because every resourceful conscript fled the country. He lost his army without even sending it to war! The most interesting thing about all of this is that all surrounding him, including Putin himself, fail to see their own mistakes and wrong strategies in all of this.

But maybe the ragged Russian soldiers in Ukraine are just pawns to be devoured, and some other plan is about to come into play?

I do not think so. Let's have a look at another strategy and example. By starting the Second World War on September 1, 1939, Hitler achieved all his goals in international politics. He unified the nation around the idea of conquering its neighbors and achieved it without any major losses. Putin had tried to act similarly before February 24, 2022. He had attacked Georgia, taken control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, seized the Crimea and destabilized the eastern part of Ukraine.

One could assume this should have satisfied his appetite. But, just like Hitler, he was unable to stop. If someone asks me if there is anything that can stop Putin, I will answer: nothing -- only failure. No one can predict how long this war will last and where it will lead to.

I have to ask you about the nuclear weapons…

This is our common problem. The longer this war continues, the greater the risk of nuclear weapons being used. They are Putin's final argument. And now I come back to the words you started with: "suicide decision". The escalation of the conflict to a nuclear level would be suicide for Russia, but also a very costly matter for Europe. In my opinion, it is time to modify the strategy and win this war before Putin goes to this last resort.

Ukraine needs more support, an adequate number of weapons and the international community's consensus about the possibility of an attack on enemy territories, i.e. Russia and Belarus, where the Russian army is regrouping and rearming after the attacks that have already taken place. Otherwise, Ukraine has no chance of winning.

But such an attack might provoke the use of nuclear weapons ...

Not necessarily. If the international community does not accept the fact that Ukraine has the right to strike on the territory of the aggressors, i.e. Russia and Belarus, the war cannot end before Putin's further and final escalation. After yet another unsuccessful attempt to attack Kyiv, Putin knows that there is no other alternative but to intimidate everyone with the threat of using nuclear weapons.

However, the Russian president will not launch these weapons from his own territory because it would be an open declaration of war on NATO. What he can do is to use the territory of Belarus for this purpose and put everyone in a situation where this formally independent state becomes the place from where warheads are fired towards Ukraine or Lithuania, or maybe Poland. Therefore, in order to avoid this scenario, we should give Ukraine more freedom to deal with Belarus, also in terms of pre-emptive strikes.

Belarus is the weakest link in Putin's plan. Unlike Russia, the people in Belarus are opposed to the country’s dictator. I think Ukraine has an important role to play in restoring democracy in Belarus. This will ultimately weaken Putin and distance him from the border with Europe.

Let us remember that in Ukraine, Belarusian soldiers fight in the ranks of the defenders and that together they are repelling the invaders' attack. In Belarus, the opposition and the drive for democracy are stronger than in Russia. And most importantly, we do not know how the Belarusian army will behave in a conflict with Ukraine. Maybe it will turn against the dictator, maybe it will not want to be a tool in Putin's hands. I think Belarus is the key to ending this war.

Is the war in Ukraine becoming for Putin’s Russia what Afghanistan was for the USSR?

From the Western point of view, this is a similar scenario, especially in the context of the involvement of military aid from democratic countries. I expect the conflict to continue until Russia bleeds out and collapses in its present form, because that was the case with the USSR.

However, I do not believe that this conflict can last as long as the war in Afghanistan, that Ukraine's defenders will die for freedom for the next ten years, and that the West will be able to help Ukraine for so long. The way to resolve this conflict is to deliver valuable offensive weapons to Ukraine and bring about the collapse of the Lukashenko regime. This will weaken Putin and could cause his system to collapse as well.

You said earlier that Putin's fall would be useless. What will the collapse of the system bring if the Genghis Khan spirit is still present in Russian genes and they do not understand the values of freedom and democracy?

I don't know, I am not a genetics specialist (he laughs), but we must understand that there has never been a democracy in this country. Russia was a monarchy before 1917 and a communist dictatorship before 1991. Throughout the existence of Soviet Russia, the best people were eliminated. Anyone active, intelligent, independent or resourceful was a threat to the regime and disposed of. Those who survived learned that in order to survive, you had to get rid of the above-mentioned qualities, above all of the feeling of independence and honesty, because they are the most dangerous values. This, of course, has nothing to do with genetics, but more to do with an evolutionary adaptation to life under a dictatorship. After 1991, there was a chance for democracy in Russia, but only an illusory one, because the security service seized power long before that. When Putin came to power, this state was already entirely run by people from the KGB. Only the situation was that, apart from them, no one saw it.

So is it possible to free Russia from the claws of the KGB?

My book, "From Red Terror to Mafia State", was completed in 2021, and at that time I thought that the regime created by Putin would be very stable. He once promised to stay in power until 2036 (he is now 70 or 72 depending on which of his biographies we believe).

I argued that Putin would keep power until 2026 if he didn't start a major war. He did in February 2022, so now I think there is no chance Putin will survive until 2036 as president of Russia. This war will end both his reign and his regime. The question is when will Russia lose this war, and what price will the free world pay for its victory.

Freeing Russia from the claws of the KGB can only take place when Russia loses the war. It will not come with just Putin's disappearance.

–Interviewed by Cezary Korycki

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

  –Translated by Agnieszka Rakoczy

Dr. Yuri Felshtinsky : a historian, journalist and expert on Russia and the USSR. A co-author of the book "Blow up Russia", written together with Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who was poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in 2006. His book "From Red Terror to Mafia State", co-authored with Vladimir Popov, was published this year. Felshtinsky studied history at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. In 1978 he emigrated to the United States, where he continued his history studies, first at Brandeis University and then at Rutgers, where he earned his Ph.D. He was also a scholarship holder of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.