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Friday, February 3, 2023
Best UPDATE to understand the true aggresors: Putin and the Presidents: Julia Ioffe (interview) | FRONTLINE
BloggersNote: with Transcript
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The last time we talked to you about that remarkable national security meeting that Putin had just as the war was being launched.
0:06
He also delivers a speech that day about what he called the “special military operation,” and it’s known as the “empire of lies” speech.
0:13
And it’s sort of remarkable looking back at it how much of it is about America and is about the West
0:19
when he’s talking about invading Ukraine. What do you take from his focus on the United States in that speech?
0:26
… His focus in that speech is mainly the U.S.; it’s NATO. It’s not Ukraine.
0:33
You come away from that speech thinking that Ukraine is just a proxy battlefield.
0:39
And in the months ahead of that speech, and as the war continues to play out,
0:46
Russian state TV, Kremlin state TV picks up that line and runs with it—not just the “empire of lies” line,
0:55
but the fact that Russia isn’t fighting Ukraine; Russia is fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Ukraine;
1:02
that Ukraine is just a puppet of the U.S. and NATO, and the war is really—Ukraine has nothing to do with anything,
1:11
that this war is really a war between Moscow and Washington and Moscow and Brussels.
1:17
That’s sort of amazing, that he sees it as a conflict with the United States. Actually, can I add something else?
1:24
Yeah, please. And in his most recent speech, in his speech ordering the partial mobilization of the Russian population,
1:34
a speech in which he calls up 300,000 men with some military experience on September 21, 2022,
1:43
a speech he makes because the Russian military is losing in Ukraine so badly, it’s losing so much territory
1:51
to the Ukrainian military, what he says is, actually we’re having great success in the backrooms,
1:59
in the corridors, around the conference tables of the negotiations with our Ukrainian counterparts.
2:07
We’ve reached a negotiated settlement with our Ukrainian partners,
2:12
but it is the Americans, their American puppet masters, who have told them, “No, rip up all these negotiations.
2:20
Rip up these settlements. We will not take this. You have to keep fighting.”
2:25
And this is the pretext he gives in the speech on Sept. 25 announcing the mobilization
2:32
that is the pretext for pushing further ahead with this war instead of seeking to sue for peace.
2:42
… Does he believe that he’s at war with the United States? I think he does believe that he’s at war with the United States,
2:48
and I think the U.S. believes that we’re at war with Russia here, too, right?
2:54
I think everybody here understands—I think all sides understand what is at stake in this conflict, right?
3:02
And what’s at stake is not allowing Russia to swallow up more of Ukraine,
3:08
not allowing Russia to topple the rules-based international order that has been in place in Europe
3:16
since the end of World War II, which is a regime that Putin has been seeking to topple.
3:23
And who is the guarantor of that order? It is the U.S. He has spoken about it openly.
3:29
He spoke about it at Munich in 2007. He has been speaking about it pretty much his entire presidency.
3:36
And so I would say that he does probably believe that he is fighting the U.S. on the ground in Ukraine.
3:46
Of course his soldiers are fighting U.S. missiles, U.S. equipment,
3:54
so it’s not such a far cry for him to make that argument. … When Putin invaded Ukraine, he was punished by the U.S. and by a coalition of countries
4:07
that were led by the U.S., that were kind of organized and spearheaded by the U.S.—
4:12
the NATO states, the countries in the Indo-Pacific that were American allies, right?
4:20
If Putin really were just—were not fighting the U.S., were only fighting Ukraine, that wouldn’t have happened.
4:27
Biden’s rhetoric about facing down dictatorship and defending democracy,
4:34
the warnings that the White House has issued to Putin before the war,
4:40
now in response to Putin’s invoking the nuclear threat again and saying, “I’m not bluffing,”
4:47
it is very clear that Moscow and Washington are in fact in conflict in Ukraine.
4:52
So let’s go back to the other conflict that he comes out of, which is the Cold War.
4:58
One of the things, because we’re interested in the American presidents, and when we go back and you look at the rhetoric of American presidents who frame the Cold War in very ideological terms—the “evil empire,” the “battle for freedom”—
5:08
for Vladimir Putin, who’s trained as a KGB agent, how is he seeing the Cold War?
5:14
How is he seeing the American talk of it being about freedom and good and evil, the type of rhetoric
5:20
that was coming from American presidents? … I think Vladimir Putin sees American talk of human rights, democracy, freedom
5:29
as a cynical fig leaf, something that the U.S. uses to cover itself as it cynically pursues its interests across the globe,
5:38
as it pushes its agenda across the globe, much the same way that Moscow, when it was first the capital of the Soviet Union and then Russia, did across the globe,
5:48
invoked the cause of socialism in pursuing its geopolitical interests.
5:54
Putin understands that that was a fig leaf and a lie and that it was just invoked to
6:00
cover some pretty kind of hard realpolitik considerations and calculations.
6:07
And there’s a lot of projection happening, much as there is on the American side, there’s a lot of projection happening in Putin’s mind, that if we were doing this, the Americans must be doing this, too,
6:18
and all of this stuff about democracy, freedom and human rights is just a veneer, is just a façade, to make
6:26
this kind of, these cold, cynical calculations more palatable to people around the globe and to the American public.
6:36
… In that speech in February, when he’s announcing the war, he looks back at the fall of the Soviet Union,
6:41
and he says, “We lost confidence for only one moment, but it was enough to disrupt the balance of forces in the world.”
6:47
As he’s watching Gorbachev and Yeltsin interacting with Americans, leading the country at that point,
6:54
what is he seeing about Russian greatness, about strength? How is he perceiving Yeltsin and Gorbachev?
7:01
I think he sees them as two different men. I think Gorbachev he perceives as a weak and naive man who pursued the wrong reforms.
7:15
… I think Putin doesn’t like liberal reformers. He doesn’t respect Russian Soviet leaders who have opened up Soviet society, both internally and to the world.
7:29
He doesn’t have a great deal of respect for Nikita Khrushchev. He has nothing but contempt for Mikhail Gorbachev; in fact, he didn’t go to his funeral when he died just recently.
7:43
He heaps scorn on Khrushchev for handing Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
7:51
He sees these leaders as naive and weak and giving in to basically what he sees as lies about the human condition, right.
8:01
And he thinks that these leaders fundamentally misread the Russian people.
8:11
He believes that the Russian people can only be led with an iron fist and through toughness
8:17
and that Russia can only be represented abroad through great strength and a projection of strength;
8:24
that if Russia presents itself with kindness and moderation and openness, that the West will take advantage of it;
8:36
that there has to be some kind of swagger, machismo, aggression, and that is the only thing
8:43
that the West understands, and that in some ways that’s the only thing that Russians internally understand.
8:48
So when he looks back at the leadership of Khrushchev, of Gorbachev, he sees people
8:55
who made fundamental miscalculations, and he sees Gorbachev as somebody who destroyed a great country,
9:05
and Khrushchev as somebody who nearly destroyed a great country but was prevented by doing so
9:11
by Leonid Brezhnev, who seized back the reins of control, a neo-Stalinist who cracked back down,
9:18
tightened back up, battened down the hatches and projected force and strength, both at home and abroad. …
9:28
With Gorbachev also, I think Putin believes that Gorbachev got rolled by the West,
9:34
and he has convinced himself of what we know is an absolute fiction. He truly believes that Gorbachev was promised by American and Western European leaders that NATO
9:48
would not expand, even though Gorbachev himself many times said, “I never asked for such a promise,
9:56
and I never received such a promise,” not from West German leaders, not from British leaders,
10:02
not from American leaders. But it is something that Putin keeps invoking; he has kept invoking throughout his presidency,
10:09
and he invoked many times in the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
10:16
He kept saying that, “We were promised— … Russia, represented by Mikhail Gorbachev,
10:24
were promised that NATO would not expand a single inch eastward, and basically we were lied to,
10:32
and that this is kind of the root of all of our discontent, the root of our feeling like we can’t trust the West.
10:40
This is basically the chickens coming home to roost, and this is the root of our argument that this is all created by NATO expansion.”
10:50
But again, no such promise was ever asked for or made.
10:55
But in his mind, that is the kind of quintessence of Gorbachev, that he was rolled by the West.
11:04
Again, Gorbachev was out there making treaties with the West
11:09
that Putin thinks were treaties made by a loser, right, because Putin doesn’t believe in win-win situations.
11:19
If the other side is winning at all, it means that you are losing by the exact margin that the other side is winning.
11:29
Gorbachev in the late ’80s, as the Soviet economy was collapsing and there were increasing shortages of goods, basic goods and food,
11:39
Gorbachev was begging the U.S. for economic aid just to kind of keep the country together and fed.
11:47
And I think Putin sees that as humiliating weakness, that you’re basically panhandling,
11:54
groveling in front of your enemies. The fact that Gorbachev allowed these princelings around him, the presidents of or the heads
12:05
of the republics of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, to get together behind his back and dismantle this great empire is,
12:15
to him, the ultimate weakness, and it is an inability to control your subordinates,
12:22
an inability to spy on them sufficiently and to control their movements and their, you know—what they do.
12:31
I think to him, Gorbachev was just one of the most despicable leaders of Russia,
12:38
and the fact that when Gorbachev died, he did not go to his funeral tells you everything you need to know.
12:44
There are these meetings where American presidents are trying to understand Vladimir Putin, and Bill Clinton is the first one, and George W. Bush famously says that he looks into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul.
12:56
… I mean, did we have any idea who Vladimir Putin was? Did American presidents have any idea of who Vladimir Putin was?
13:03
I don’t think Russians really knew who Vladimir Putin was. He was still a relatively unknown guy.
13:10
He, you know, was a pretty gray functionary who didn’t have much of a public footprint.
13:17
And the other thing about Vladimir Putin is, he actively shaped the impression he made on American presidents. …
13:30
On December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin nominates him to be his successor,
13:35
and then in March of 2000 he has to get elected president. … … Kremlin spin artists and political strategists have just three months to slap together a presidential campaign,
13:46
and they get these three hotshot political reporters who interview Vladimir Putin, his friends and relatives,
13:54
and they basically slap together this memoir, which is basically a long Q&A, and call it In the First Person [sic],
14:02
and they put it out there as a kind of introduction to the Russian people of who this man is. …
14:07
One of the people they interview is his childhood friend, the cellist who later becomes basically a Putin shell company.
14:17
But when Putin starts working in the KGB, this friend starts asking him, “But what is it you really do?
14:26
What is it you really do in the KGB?” And Putin tells him, “I’m a specialist in communicating with people.”
14:34
And this is something that this friend keeps repeating later; he says, “My friend is a specialist in communicating with people.”
14:43
And you see it later when Putin starts communicating with American presidents.
14:50
You can see how he shapes himself in accordance with whoever it is he’s talking to.
14:57
So when he meets George W. Bush, he knows that he’s talking to a born-again evangelical Christian who has had a literal come-to-Jesus moment.
15:09
And so, in one of his first meetings with George W. Bush, he brings this little cross that means a lot to him,
15:19
that his mother took to Jerusalem to have it sanctified in Jerusalem, that he used to wear all the time,
15:31
and happened to survive a fire at his family dacha, where everything, everything in his house burnt up;
15:40
he barely survived, he had to basically rappel out, down the house on a sheet, naked, in order to get out in time.
15:50
And one of the only things that survived this house fire was this little cross. And he brings it to his meeting with George W. Bush and tells him this story about how his mother,
16:00
who barely survived the siege of Leningrad, his mother, who lost one son to disease in infancy,
16:07
another son to hunger during the siege of Leningrad, who had him at an impossibly old age of 41,
16:14
had him secretly baptized in the Soviet Union, how much her faith meant to her, even in the godless Soviet Union,
16:22
that she gave him this cross and she then went and sanctified it in Jerusalem at the savior’s grave [Garden Tomb],
16:29
and that this cross then miraculously survived a massive house fire when nothing else did.
16:37
And it made a massive impression on George W. Bush. And after that is when George W. Bush says, “I looked into his eyes and I saw his soul,”
16:46
because he’s a specialist in communicating with people.
16:53
It’s amazing because he also—he often says the other signal, and we’ve heard people tell us about meetings that he had where, even in the same period, even in 2001,
17:01
with Americans where he is standoffish, and he does the famous Putin slouch, and he’s argumentative.
17:09
But it’s all part of him projecting power in one situation or trying to win somebody over. He’s that calculating in what he does.
17:16
Remember, for him, projecting strength is important. He grew up in a rough neighborhood.
17:23
He grew up on the streets. He was always very short, very slight in stature, which is a liability in the places he grew up.
17:34
And he talks about how he grew up on the rough streets, kind of scrabbling, that he was a punk,
17:41
that he didn’t get into the Pioneers because he was a punk, because he had so many disciplinary problems,
17:47
and that he then took up judo in order to compensate for this, right?
17:53
And so you have to constantly be projecting strength so that people don’t mess with you. And so he’s clearly trying, on one hand, to kind of get through the armor,
18:04
to endear himself to an American president, but also trying to project strength, right?
18:09
So don’t mess with me, but also you can trust me, but don’t mess with me. So he’s trying to do both.
18:15
And again, with George W. Bush, who was the very first world leader to call George W. Bush on Sept. 11, 2001?
18:25
It was Vladimir Putin. And what did he say when he called George W. Bush on Sept. 11?
18:32
He said, you know, “I’m so sorry,” etc., but he said, “We’ve been facing terrorism from radical Islamists for years now; now you know what we’ve been facing.
18:45
Let’s work together on this." And that’s where this counterterrorism cooperation between the U.S. and Russia grew out of,
18:54
and it was one of the very last things to go when Russia invaded Ukraine.
19:00
It was one of the only things to survive the invasion of Crimea in 2014; the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in 2018.
19:10
It survived all these things, including the meddling in the American election in 2016.
19:16
It started that day, on Sept. 11, when Putin called to say he was sorry, knowing that if he beat the crowd,
19:24
if he made it first, he would make a big impression on the American president, and that if he made himself relatable,
19:31
if he made the American president understand that the Russian people have also been dealing with terrorist threats
19:38
and terrorist attacks, tthat he could forge some kind of alliance between Russia and the U.S. and that it would
19:45
make them peers rather than make the American president look down on Russia, look down on the Russian president.
19:53
And yet we know that six years later in Munich, he’s going to give a speech that’s reminiscent of the one that he gives before Ukraine.
19:59
What happens in between? … I think first it’s Iraq. It’s the invasion of Iraq.
20:06
It’s the fact that Putin says, “Don’t do it,” and George W. Bush not only doesn’t listen to him
20:15
but completely evades one of the only international bodies where Russia still has a veto,
20:24
still has real geopolitical power, which is the U.N. Security Council. And the way in which the U.S. brushes Russia’s concerns off really drive home to Putin
20:36
that America doesn’t care about what Russia thinks.
20:41
It really drives home to Putin that Russian stature has not recovered from 1991,
20:49
that Russian opinion still doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t really count for anything in Washington,
20:55
that maybe if the Soviet Union had said, “If you invade Iraq, we’re going to do X, Y and Z,”
21:01
Washington would have stopped to think, but when a post-Soviet Russia says it,
21:08
it’s easy to just completely brush off, and I think that really stung. And then the color revolutions, where America says, “We’re spreading democracy, freedom, human rights,”
21:22
but really these are former Soviet republics, these are right on Russia’s borders,
21:28
and Putin sees them just as CIA-sponsored regime change.
21:33
He sees it as old Cold War games. He thinks, “You guys are still doing the same old stuff; you haven’t changed your stripes at all.
21:42
And you just toppled Saddam Hussein; now you’re toppling my guys in basically former Russian colonies,”
21:51
places that he still thinks are his, right, places that he still thinks belong to Russia.
21:59
And America is still running NGOs and helping democratic activists and the democratic press inside Russia,
22:13
and so he thinks, “Oh, they’re coming for me next.” And in 2007, at Munich, he gives a speech.
22:21
And we’ve talked to people who were there, and they say it was shocking, and it was head-snapping. Did we pay attention to it?
22:28
Did we understand the depth of what he was expressing there? I think people understood what he was saying, but I don’t think people took it seriously because Russia in 2007
22:41
was still poor, was still—still had a very weak military that still hadn’t rebuilt and modernized after the Soviet collapse.
22:55
It was still easy to dismiss Russia in 2007, and I think that only added to Putin’s fury,
23:03
the fact that he came out and said what he thought; he said, “I’m telling you, I am angry.
23:12
I am angry.” He mentioned Iraq numerous times in that speech. He said, “I warned you that exactly this would happen.
23:19
They’re going to lop off the head of the Iraqi government and that you would unleash chaos because you can’t just do that.
23:26
You can’t just topple a government and not replace it with anything”; that everywhere America goes,
23:33
it brings bloodshed and chaos; that it’s just imposing its will on other countries; that this has nothing to do with democracy; that America is hypocritical, etc.
23:43
Again, very reminiscent of the speech he gave in February of 2022.
23:48
But unlike in February ‘22, nobody took him seriously, because Russia in 2007
23:55
was just not a serious player on the global stage, and that only reinforced Putin’s drive to be taken seriously.
24:04
It’s so interesting because he perceives this threat. He perceives that America is a threat to Russia, is a threat to him,
24:12
that the U.S. is organizing demonstrations in other countries that are undermining his power.
24:17
And in America it seems like there’s not even a sense that Russia is a threat. Remember 2007, our obsession was terrorism; our obsession was the Middle East.
24:27
In every university, everybody was trying to learn Arabic. Everybody wanted to be a terrorism specialist and a Middle East specialist in Washington.
24:37
That was the focus of all of our foreign policy, all of our national security.
24:45
And nobody cared about Russia; Russia was a forgotten backwater.
24:51
It was a joke. If anybody said that Russia was a security threat, they would have been laughed at.
24:57
You know, I graduated college in 2005, four years after 9/11, which happened during my freshman orientation, and I chose to study Soviet history; I wanted to focus on Russia.
25:09
And I remember my parents saying, “Why? It’s an irrelevant country. It’s a country without a future.
25:15
You will find no work, ever, focusing on Russia.
25:20
That’s not where things are going in the world,” right? It’s amazing that inattention or not knowing what’s going on.
25:29
And at the very end of the Bush administration, the last real conflict and thing you could look back on
25:34
from trying to understand Ukraine is Georgia, and before that is this question about Georgia and Ukraine
25:41
and being admitted to NATO at this point where Bush has got his Freedom Agenda. And apparently inside the White House, there’s an argument about it, but he feels pretty strongly.
25:52
And Putin tells him in Bucharest exactly what he thinks, and what he thinks to this day.
25:59
He tells him, “George, what are you doing? Ukraine is not a real country.”
26:05
It is something he believed all along, and he believes it to this day.
26:10
You know, it is something that is now echoed across all of Russian propaganda, that there’s no such thing as Ukraine;
26:19
there’s no such thing as Ukrainian culture, as Ukrainian language; it was all just made up in the last 100 years or the last 20, 30 years.
26:27
And Putin was expressing it openly to George W. Bush in 2008 at Bucharest.
26:34
He said, “George, this is not a real country.” And how important was that decision?
26:39
We’ve talked to people, and there’s a debate on both sides about whether they should be admitted or not, but in the end it’s this compromise that they’re going to make a statement about it,
26:47
but they’re not going to be immediately part of the application process. How important is that decision?
26:53
I think it’s massively important in that this compromise was the worst of both worlds for both Georgia and Ukraine.
27:03
It left them both massively vulnerable to the invasions that would both come for both of them.
27:10
It basically waved the red flag in front of the bull. It was extremely provocative for Russia; Russia said it would be provocative.
27:19
It asked NATO to please not do this. NATO did this anyway under the leadership of George W. Bush.
27:26
It provoked Russia and made Russia angry, specifically at these two states.
27:33
But then NATO did not provide any protection for these two states, so then it left them basically twisting in the wind right in the path of this bull that it had just provoked.
27:47
And what ends up happening just a few months later is Putin invades Georgia, very quickly lops off 20%
27:56
of its territory, which it has still not gotten back, and the U.S., NATO, the West does absolutely nothing about it,
28:07
which then shows Putin that he can do the same thing in Ukraine, that he can do the same thing in his backyard.
28:16
It’s a re-assertion that this is his so-called near abroad, his backyard, the former Soviet colonies,
28:24
these places that he thinks still belong to him and to Russia; that he can get away with lopping off chunks of territory from them, and that when the U.S. says,
28:36
“We’d like them to join NATO, but not right now,” that means probably never, and they’ll probably never do anything.
28:45
It deepens this process that you see—that you see in Putin after this point, which is this quest
28:54
to show the hollowness of Western institutions, the hollowness of Western rhetoric, this idea that
29:01
the West is decadent and weak and lacks the manhood to back up its words with actions; that the West will threaten.
29:11
It will say, “We will do this, and we will do that,” but if Putin were to actually cross a certain line,
29:17
they’ll be too scared to do anything. And that’s why I think he’ll often now drop the nuclear threat, because he thinks it will, again,
29:27
get into Western heads, American heads and make them back down, because he believes Westerners are
29:35
cowards and feckless and again lacking in the manhood to do anything to back up their rhetoric.
29:44
I think that really makes it clear how important that moment was. It is remarkable how he, even with Condoleezza Rice saying, “We stand by our friends,” —
29:53
But they didn’t. How did they stand by our friends? How did America stand by its friends in Georgia?
29:59
What did they do when it happened? A whole bunch of nothing. It definitely sent a message.
30:04
So the next administration comes in. This is the Obama administration, and Joe Biden is playing a prominent role in shaping that policy.
30:13
… And he goes to Munich, and Biden lays out the Obama foreign policy, and part of it is the “reset” with Russia.
30:21
Having seen what we just saw in Georgia, did the reset implicitly moving on from that, not putting that on the top of the agenda, not responding to actions like that?
30:30
I think that’s exactly what the reset meant. I think the reset meant, OK, … that was the last guy, and we ran on being anti-last guy, right?
30:41
Obama ran on being the anti-Bush, on the idea that had he been president,
30:48
he wouldn’t have gotten into Iraq; he wouldn’t have made a lot of the aggressive foreign policy decisions that Bush had made.
30:57
And so let’s just take a step back, take a breather, and let’s reset our relationship with much of the world,
31:05
including with Russia. And so you have Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arriving in Moscow,
31:12
standing there with foreign minister Sergey Lavrov with this giant reset button
31:18
where, ironically, it says not “reset” in Russian, but “overload,” because they misspelled it.
31:27
It says peregruzka, which means “overload” rather than “reset.” And he, Lavrov, points it out to her, and they have a real, like a good laugh on camera, but they press it anyway.
31:39
And the idea, developed by Michael McFaul, who then becomes the ambassador to Russia for the
31:47
Obama administration a few years later, is that we can have dual-track engagement with the Russian government.
31:55
We can talk about, on one track, things that are our common interests—
32:01
counterterrorism, space, innovation, economic cooperation—and then on the second track,
32:11
the U.S. can also reach out to opposition activists, democratic activists, journalists,
32:18
and continue promoting and supporting people who align with the U.S. on not just American values
32:28
but what we believe are universal values, which of course the Kremlin thinks is bulls---.
32:36
Biden goes there in 2011, which is in the middle of that period, in the middle of Arab Spring,
32:42
before the protests happen in Moscow, and he meets with Vladimir Putin. And one of the stories that …
32:48
Which month was that? This was in March of 2011.
32:53
And there’s two stories that come out of it. But one that I’d like to ask you about is, Michael McFaul says that one of the things
32:59
that Putin tells Biden is, “We only look like you; that Russians may look the same,
33:05
but we don’t share your values, and you don’t understand us.” What would Putin be trying to convey in telling Biden that? …
33:11
This is a sentiment I have heard expressed by some Russians and actually some foreigners living in Russia
33:17
who said it would be easier to understand Russians if they were just purple,
33:23
because it was in fact confusing to Westerns, to Europeans and to Americans,
33:29
to deal with Russians who look European, who look white, and you expect them to act like Westerners,
33:36
like white Western Europeans, when in fact they are quite different and wired quite differently
33:41
and have quite different cultural expectations and wiring, and that … that created quite a few misunderstandings.
33:51
I lived in Russia at the time, and what I could never get across to Russians was that Americans really are that idealistic,
34:01
and they really believe what they’re saying about democracy, about freedom, about human rights;
34:08
that this isn’t just cynical lying; that this isn’t just a cynical fig leaf in trying to take over oil wells in the Middle East.
34:19
And Russians, even the most liberal Russians, often wouldn’t believe me.
34:26
They would think—they would equate idealism with stupidity, and this would fit their stereotype of Americans as stupid.
34:35
And then I would come back to the U.S., and Americans couldn’t understand how cynical Russians were;
34:43
that they really didn’t believe pretty much anything they said; that there was always a lot of machinations going on
34:51
and that there was just—that they really were that comfortable lying to you, to your face.
34:58
And no matter how long these parties dealt with each other—in government, through diplomacy—
35:07
they still never understood this fundamental thing about each other. The Russians thought the Americans were as cynical as they are,
35:15
and the Americans couldn’t understand that the Russians were always lying.
35:22
It’s fascinating, especially in that period where there’s all this talk about democracy, and it’s seen as such a threat by Putin.
35:28
And also, all this talk about cooperation. Remember, during this time, the State Department is organizing all of these trips to Russia, for example,
35:37
by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, to meet with tech entrepreneurs in Russia, for example.
35:45
They bring, they organize a trip for Dmitri Medvedev, who is then the president, to Silicon Valley,
35:52
and he goes to Twitter’s offices, and he starts a Twitter account, and he sends his very first tweet from Twitter’s offices, right?
36:00
And there’s all these—and Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the governor of California,
36:06
meets with Dmitri Medvedev, and there’s this whole sense of, “Oh, we’re actually going to be friends now.
36:14
We’re actually going to bury the hatchet”; that these two countries are actually going to finally start seeing eye to eye.
36:23
They’re going to bury their old suspicions; they’re going to start cooperating. Around this time, Russia and the U.S. start talking about NATO opening up an airbase,
36:36
like an actual, physical base on Russian territory to help transit NATO troops and materiel to Afghanistan.
36:45
There’s a lot of cooperation around space happening, around counterterrorism.
36:52
A lot of things are happening during this period that make you think that, “Oh, the reset is actually working.”
36:57
The new START treaty is signed; there’s a lot of disarmament talks.
37:03
So it does seem like there is a lot of cooperation between Moscow and Washington happening
37:09
and that the reset is actually successful. But by the time we get to Crimea, clearly that will be a final or penultimate breaking point.
37:19
What’s the calculation that Putin makes at that point about the American president and the response? …
37:24
… I think one of the things that’s worth noting is just how differently Putin saw Obama and how, to Putin,
37:35
Barack Obama was young and naive and Black, and all those three things were very important.
37:47
Putin is from a generation of Russians who are extremely racist, so there were a lot of—
37:55
there were a lot of lectures that Putin read to Barack Obama that staffers called the airing of grievances.
38:03
Pretty much every phone call between Putin and Obama began with like a 45-minute lecture
38:11
that basically didn’t happen once Joe Biden became president.
38:16
There was not a whole lot of respect that Putin, that Lavrov, that a lot of people in the Russian government and in Russian society had for Barack Obama because he’s Black.
38:28
There were a lot extremely racist memes going around Russia, amplifying Barack Obama’s Black heritage, equating
38:38
him to a monkey, showing him eating a banana, etc., just extremely vile racist memes that were echoed in the Kremlin.
38:47
The fact that he was also quite young and idealistic made Putin see him as kind of a Gorbachev type, somebody who
38:57
could be rolled, somebody who could be outmaneuvered quite easily, somebody who could be filibustered.
39:06
He didn’t have a whole lot of respect for Obama. He saw him as weak and as somebody he could make quick work of.
39:15
And you think that went into his calculation in deciding that he was going to seize Crimea, that he didn’t see Obama as a threat?
39:23
I’m sure he did. I’m sure he thought that given how Obama didn’t respond in Syria, the way that Obama didn’t enforce
39:37
his own red line in Syria, that Obama said, you know, Mubarak must go and then did nothing about it,
39:43
that Assad must go and then didn’t do anything about it, didn’t enforce the red line he drew in Syria,
39:49
I think he figured there wasn’t all that much he was going to do if he invaded Ukraine and snapped Crimea off.
39:59
There’s this phone call we had in the first film of Obama talking to Putin, and he just lied to him and said, “No, the little green men, they’re not ours.”
40:07
And Obama says, “Of course we know they’re yours.” Is that what explains why Putin would do something like that with Obama?
40:15
Yeah, he thought he was a young, stupid Black man.
40:20
It’s kind of the long and the short of it. And the response from the Obama administration to what happens in Crimea and to what happens in the east?
40:30
What lesson does Putin take from that? The lesson Putin takes from the sanctions and the pushback that he gets from Europe and America in 2014
40:43
is that these are sanctions that he can work around; that they’re painful, yes; they hurt his economy,
40:51
yes; they bog down his army or his kind of fake AstroTurf separatist army in the east,
41:00
yes; but they didn’t take Crimea back, and they didn’t completely shut Russia off from the world.
41:09
And so he can kind of—he can work within that framework. They hurt Russia, but they didn’t kill Russia.
41:18
And so, whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. And if anything, Russia can adjust.
41:24
Russia can—you know, you get these terms, importozameshcheniya—we can replace all the things
41:31
that we can now not import because of import bans, either our own or Western import bans;
41:38
we can replace with our own domestic goods. We can learn to make Italian burrata at home. We can make great wine in Crimea.
41:46
We can make fancy technology at home. And to some extent, they’re successful.
41:54
The Russian agricultural sector begins to boom. The Russian restaurant scene, for example, takes off because restaurateurs
42:04
have to make do with what they have and get creative with the produce they do have in Russia
42:10
because they can no longer import oysters from France, for example.
42:16
And people learn to live and Russia learns to live with the sanctions that were imposed in 2014.
42:24
And so, going into 2020, and by this point the Trump administration has imposed some sanctions,
42:32
sanctions that Putin has also learned to live with, the feeling in Moscow going into 2020 is,
42:39
“Look, they’re going to sanction us all the time anyway; we don’t really understand why,
42:44
and these sanctions are never going to be taken off. And we’ve seen that we can live with pretty much any sanctions,
42:51
so let’s just do what we’re going to do and factor in these sanctions as the cost of doing business
42:58
basically as overhead rather than deterrents, because we saw that in 2014.
43:05
They were painful, but not fatal. And that’s probably what’s going to happen again.”
43:10
They didn’t anticipate the sanctions being as severe and as swift and as unified and as crippling as they were in 2022.
43:20
… When Putin is watching Trump, especially on NATO to start, what is he seeing and how is he perceiving Trump?
43:26
… So Putin as somebody who is, again, a specialist in communicating with people, sees Trump as a very easy subject to manipulate, somebody who is vain,
43:37
somebody who is easily distracted, somebody who is quite stupid.
43:44
And he, I mean, he is constantly manipulating him. There are stories of Putin purposely bringing a young, beautiful woman as a translator with him
43:57
and then showing her off to Trump and saying, “See, look what—,” and Trump being completely distracted by this young, beautiful woman.
44:06
The fact that Trump speaks in short, simple, declarative sentences that Putin can understand,
44:13
that’s his level of English, that gives him extra time to speak and formulate his thoughts back to—
44:21
while the translators are working, that gives him extra time to formulate his thoughts back to Trump.
44:26
The vanity that he sees in Trump, that he can flatter him, that he can say,
44:33
“Oh, he’s a colorful person,” and that it gets mistranslated as “brilliant,” and then Trump thinks, “Oh, this strong leader of a superpower that has nuclear weapons thinks I’m brilliant.”
44:44
That just a couple compliments will go such a long way with this man that he can basically—
44:52
his security services can try to influence an election and that Trump is then—and influence it in Trump’s favor,
45:05
and that Trump is then told about it and Trump loves him forever as a result because he sees Putin as his ally, right?
45:15
All of this allows Putin to just constantly be eating his lunch, right?
45:23
And Putin knows this very well. And everybody who was in the room with them, ever, just saw how masterfully Putin manipulated Trump.
45:35
Trump always thought that, you know, they were two guys, two equals, two strongmen just gabbing it up and dividing the world and conquering it,
45:45
but everybody could see that Putin didn’t hold Trump in particularly high regard, that he saw him as gullible and stupid
45:54
and easily manipulatable and that he was just— the Russian expression, that he was just making ropes out of him, just braiding him like a braid.
46:05
Did he see Trump as weakening the United States, weakening NATO? Absolutely.
46:12
On the sidelines of the 2018 NATO summit, I ran into one of Dmitri Medvedev’s old advisers,
46:19
and I said, “How do you see Trump back in Moscow?” And he said, “To us he looks like a wrecking ball, our wrecking ball.”
46:31
They saw Trump as destroying the edifice of America and NATO
46:36
from the inside without Russia having to do a whole lot themselves, without Russia having to lift much of a finger.
46:44
And the other similarity, too, is the way that Trump talks about both America, talks about other countries in that very cynical manner that Putin had.
46:52
Right, Putin would basically plant talking points with him that Trump would echo. Trump would just say things that Putin told him later in public.
47:02
He would say, “Ukraine is a really corrupt country”; “Crimea is Russian;
47:08
everybody there speaks Russian and wants to be part of Russia.” Where did he hear these things? He heard them from Putin, and he would just echo them.
47:16
It was just too easy. And I think because it was so easy, Putin didn’t have a lot of respect for him.
47:23
He was not a worthy adversary for Putin. And then he watches Jan. 6 happen and Putin, who had been shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union
47:32
and who had watched, as you say in Libya, had watched other countries fall, is now watching the U.S. Capitol.
47:39
What would he be drawing from that? I imagine he was delighted to see Jan. 6.
47:45
I imagine that he saw a country on the brink of collapse, a country that was at war with itself,
47:55
again without Russia really having to do all that much; that, you know, if America was going to war with itself,
48:05
then Putin could have a free rein in Europe because America would be too consumed fighting with itself,
48:13
chasing its own tail, to do much about it because it had, it was so consumed with its own problems
48:20
and because it had come to think that the rest of the world was too much of a distraction because of everything Trump
48:28
had said about how alliances are actually financial burdens, about how NATO was an obsolete institution, etc., etc.
48:37
So I imagine—I don’t have any proof of this, but I imagine that Putin watching Jan. 6 happening
48:45
was basically for him a green light to, you know, start planning things in Europe.
48:54
… How does Biden come in and understand and approach Vladimir Putin as he begins his presidency?
49:01
So Biden comes into the White House having dealt with Putin already and having dealt with the issue of Ukraine and the war and the occupation of Ukraine already for the last two years of his vice presidency.
49:15
Not only that, he is a seasoned foreign policy, national security insider from his 30 years in the Senate, his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
49:27
He’s also bringing with him some of the best minds and the top practitioners of foreign policy in the Democratic Party.
49:35
He’s bringing with him Jake Sullivan and Toria Nuland and Tony Blinken and a lot of other kind of younger staffers that I think a lot of Americans have never heard of but who are really—
49:47
really know their stuff, really believe in their mission, and are really at the top of their game,
49:52
and really want to right this ship after four years of the basically damage that Trump has wrought to the ship of state.
50:01
… And because some of these people have already worked in the Obama administration, and Biden himself has already worked in the Obama administration, they understand that no reset is possible
50:12
with Putin; that every administration before this one has come in, trying to do some kind of reset by any other name,
50:24
some kind of restart of a relationship with Putin, and they understand that that’s not possible; that Putin is the same;
50:34
that Putin says what he wants; that he does not see a partnership with the U.S. as possible,
50:43
and that they have to take him at his word; and that the best they could hope for is essentially containing Russia
50:51
until Putin goes away and until there’s a new government, a new regime in place; that basically nothing constructive, nothing positive is possible while Putin is the president of Russia.
51:05
That is the mentality that Biden and his foreign policy staffers bring with them to the White House in January of 2021.
51:14
And then they get this briefing that the forces are massing, that it looks like an actual invasion of Ukraine could be being mounted.
51:22
What kind of alarm does that set off inside the White House? And what are the stakes at that moment for President Biden?
51:29
Well, you also have—I mean, before that you also have the Biden administration trying to maintain this relationship with Russia, right?
51:39
Throwing Putin enough bones, enough phone calls, enough summits, enough meetings to keep him happy,
51:47
to keep him feeling like, you know, Biden says Putin is a worthy adversary,
51:52
feed his ego just enough to keep him from doing anything crazy, but not actually do anything with him, right?
52:01
And at one point one of Biden’s advisers tells me, “Look, we’ll do a summit once a month if we have to to keep him from doing anything crazy.”
52:10
And as Angela Stent once said, they wanted to park Putin, but he didn’t want to be parked.
52:17
He wanted to be the No. 1 problem of everybody in the whole world,
52:22
but especially the No. 1 priority, the No. 1 threat, the No. 1 problem that the White House was dealing with.
52:29
So when they do have that summit in June, which was controversial apparently inside the administration, but the reason, as you understand it,
52:36
was to show a level of respect so that he doesn’t have to go and take a dramatic action to get attention.
52:42
Well, he did. He had this massive buildup of troops outside Ukraine, on the Ukrainian border that spring, in April.
52:52
And he only starts pulling those troops back once he gets a call from Biden
52:57
and once he gets the promise of a summit, right? And it’s seen as a kind of pacifying of Vladimir Putin: “OK, we’ll give him a summit.
53:08
Fine, if that keeps him from invading Ukraine, and if it gets him to draw down his forces, fine. What’s it to us?”
53:15
And there was a feeling in the fall that maybe he’ll take another summit; maybe we’ll do some more phone calls,
53:25
and maybe he’ll take something smaller, and he’ll draw down his forces again;
53:30
that maybe we can pull another kind of—another kind of Geneva and get him to back down again.
53:38
But very soon it becomes clear that this is different for Putin; that he’s not going to take any of the exit ramps that the Biden administration is putting out there for him;
53:49
that he’s blowing through every single exit ramp one by one, and that he’s just stepping on the gas harder and harder and harder.
53:57
And how big a moment is that for Joe Biden? He must be realizing that this could be one of the most significant moments of his presidency,
54:04
this question of whether Putin is going to invade or not. I think it’s a huge moment for Biden and his staffers.
54:11
I think it’s a massively frustrating one because this is not what they wanted to be dealing with.
54:17
They have domestic concerns that they want to deal with. There’s the pivot to Asia that every administration since Bush wants to do, right?
54:27
They want to get out of the Middle East. They want to stop dealing with Russia. There are other concerns. There’s a whole wide world out there, outside of the Middle East and outside of Russia,
54:36
that this White House wants to deal with. They don’t want to get stuck here.
54:42
And when they realize that this is going to be the thing that defines their presidency geopolitically,
54:50
there is a kind of frustration and anger that Putin has kind of trapped them into this, that they won’t be able
54:58
to focus on and accomplish all of these big, lofty things that they had been planning for for the first Biden term.
55:08
Why can’t they? He calls him on video conferences. There’s lots of shuttle diplomacy. There are public statements and warnings at press conferences.
55:16
Why can’t Biden, with all of the threats, with all of the rallying allies, why can’t they dissuade Putin
55:23
and show him that he shouldn’t take this course of action? Because Putin wants Ukraine.
55:28
Because it’s fundamentally an unbridgeable gap. Because this has nothing to do with NATO.
55:35
This has nothing to do with respect. This has nothing to do with the European—it has nothing to do with any of the things Putin is saying publicly.
55:46
Putin wants Ukraine. He wants this pan-Slavic super-state with Moscow as the capital
55:54
that basically folds Ukraine and Belarus into itself, whether officially or unofficially.
56:03
He wants Ukraine. He doesn’t think it’s a real country. I don’t know how you compromise with somebody who just wants Ukraine, right?
56:13
That’s not something you could build a bridge across. And after what’s happened with Georgia, with Crimea, he thinks he can get away with it?
56:22
It’s not that he thinks that he can get away with it; he thinks that he can manage the consequences. He thinks the consequences won’t be bad enough that he won’t be able to deal with them.
56:34
He thinks he’ll be able to manage the economic fallout. He thinks the war will be fast.
56:40
He believes the faulty intelligence he’s getting. He believes that Ukrainians will greet Russian soldiers with open arms and as liberators.
56:49
He believes that Ukrainians are basically just Russians who have been brainwashed to think that they’re Ukrainians.
56:57
He doesn’t understand that Ukraine has undergone a profound shift that he has started in 2014;
57:05
that before 2014 there was a significant chunk of the Ukrainian population that was nostalgic for the Soviet Union,
57:13
that was nostalgic for Russia, that did see themselves as more Russian than Ukrainian, that he,
57:19
by invading eastern Ukraine and taking Crimea, has set in motion a Ukrainianiazation of society that will greet him with fierce resistance in February of 2022.
57:33
He’s not getting this intelligence. And when he is, he doesn’t believe it. So he makes a series of miscalculations that lead him to believe that the war will be fast,
57:48
that he will conquer Ukraine very quickly and leave a little rump state around Lviv that he can just chuck to Poland
57:56
or to Europe and that whatever sanctions Biden will be able to cobble together with a divided NATO.
58:03
He also believes NATO is still very mad at Biden for pulling out of Afghanistan without giving them much notice.
58:10
He thinks NATO is very divided against itself; that America’s very divided against itself;
58:18
that they won’t be able to present a united front, and therefore, whatever sanctions they’ll be able to muster,
58:24
he’ll be able to weather them, much like he’s been able to weather every wave of previous sanctions.
58:30
He is shocked by the unity. He is shocked by the severity of the sanctions.
58:37
He is shocked by the resistance his army’s meeting on the ground. And he is shocked by his army’s performance.
58:42
I think he didn’t realize that the corruption that had eaten away at everything in Russian society had also
58:49
eaten away at the core of his army; that everybody had been stealing and lying inside the army and the FSB, too.
58:57
So I think he just thought the war would go differently and that the punishment would be less severe,
59:04
and that he’d be able to weather it because the war would end sooner. There’s a lot of miscalculations there with his own abilities and with what the response
59:13
would be from Ukraine and what the Ukrainian army would be capable of. Was he also underestimating the American president and the allies?
59:20
Absolutely. I think he also bought in to a lot of the talking points
59:27
that had been coming from the American right about Biden being old and sleepy and slow.
59:34
I think he saw how the withdrawal from Afghanistan was managed and made note of that.
59:41
It showed him an America that was weak, that was on the outs with its allies and not really communicating well with them, and that that had driven such a big wedge between America and its NATO allies
59:53
that they would never be able to get on board with America to implement sanctions about Ukraine.
1:00:01
He thought Europe was so dependent on Russia for its energy that they would never dare to sanction Russia the way they did.
1:00:13
He, again, he made a series of miscalculations that made him really overplay his hand
1:00:19
because the images that Europe saw, a land war of that size that looks just like World War II happening in Europe
1:00:30
where a lot of the most viscous fighting in World War II happened triggered a lot of trauma and memories
1:00:37
for Europeans that brought them together in a way that themselves didn’t anticipate
1:00:46
and made them react with a force they didn’t—and a resolution—a resoluteness that they didn’t anticipate.
1:00:54
And I suppose Joe Biden and those around him, he’d been on the one side of the Javelin debate after Crimea, the other side from Obama, and surrounded by Victoria Nuland and others.
1:01:05
I suppose that that response was informed by their experiences. And how important was that, the U.S. response and weapons and that kind of support to Ukraine?
1:01:14
Well, it is interesting that it was actually the Trump administration that gave Ukraine Javelins,
1:01:20
and that they proved so crucial in the first few weeks of the Russian invasion in stopping the attack, right?
1:01:28
You see Ukrainian soldiers dancing around with Javelins and just taking out Russian tank after Russian tank.
1:01:34
And it also showed, I think, the Biden administration that these weapons don’t escalate the fight; they stop the fight.
1:01:43
They bring the cost home to Russia and that if you give the Ukrainians enough weapons to win, they can win.
1:01:53
And once Russia has taken such a massive step and once the Ukrainians are winning and can show
1:02:03
what a paper tiger the Russian military is, it in and of itself reduces the threat to NATO, if that makes sense.
1:02:13
As we talked about at the beginning, just to come back, that now there is the conflict between the U.S. and Russia.
1:02:20
And is there an irony in the fact that Putin saw himself in this war with the United States when the U.S. wasn’t paying attention to him, and now he has the war that he had imagined?
1:02:30
He has the war that he has imagined, but he’s also mortally wounded by it.
1:02:36
He is no longer a strongman that seems completely invincible that everybody is terrified of.
1:02:43
There is this unmistakable stench of weakness about him. Before, everybody had to wait for him; it was his signature power play.
1:02:52
He made Queen Elizabeth II wait for him. He made the pope wait for him for 45 minutes.
1:02:57
Now he has to wait for the president of Kyrgyzstan. He has to wait for the president of Turkey.
1:03:04
He’s getting dressed down by the president of India. He is getting the cold shoulder from the president of China.
1:03:11
He looks incredibly weak. He looks like he’s losing control of his own population after announcing that he’s mobilizing just 300,000 people.
1:03:21
He looks incredibly weak. And there’s nothing worse for a strongman than looking weak.
1:03:31
He has literally nothing else. My last question, and then I’ll see if there’s any follow-ups or anything I missed,
1:03:37
but how dangerous does that make him? Because we talked to you about this last time. Now he’s weakened at home; he’s weak in Ukraine; he’s invoking the nuclear threat more than once.
1:03:48
How dangerous is he? How dangerous is this moment? I think the weaker he is and the worse he’s doing on the battlefield, the more he seems to be losing control
1:03:59
at home, the more likely it is that he is going to use some kind of nuclear weapon, tactical or otherwise,
1:04:09
because this is an existential fight, not for Russia, but for him.
1:04:15
If he loses the war, it’s over for him, and he does not want that to happen.
1:04:23
He doesn’t want an end like Muammar Qaddafi’s. And my worry is that he will literally do anything to prevent that from happening.
1:04:32
Thank you, I think. Michael? Could we get one answer from you so that we’re not just lionizing Joe Biden in this situation?
1:04:41
Maybe he deserves it, but are there things about Biden that are the bad news,
1:04:47
that suggest to you things that we should worry about in the watching of these moments, these critical moments?
1:04:54
My worry is that the Biden presidency ends before this war does and that there is a Trump presidency
1:05:03
or a Trump-like presidency or a Trump president or a Trump-like president in the White House before this war ends,
1:05:12
because I do think, for all its mistakes in Afghanistan and domestically,
1:05:18
I think the Biden administration has done a terrific job in managing this war,
1:05:24
and I worry about what a less resolute successor, one who’s worried about let’s say
1:05:37
a more isolationist contingency in their party, one who is more eager to please Vladimir Putin, would do.
1:05:45
Julia, do you really think it’s going to last two more years? … Not at this point, not at this point. But a few months ago I was worried.
1:05:51
But I think this is—I think this is going to be over real soon. One last question.
1:05:57
If Putin throws a nuclear weapon in one direction or another, even on an empty island just to show that he can, what should the American president do?
1:06:06
Does it force Biden’s hand? First of all, I don’t think he’s going to use a nuclear weapon on an empty island.
1:06:16
I think he’s going to use it on the battlefield. And yes, it absolutely forces the American president’s hand, and it has to because using a nuclear weapon
1:06:27
for the first time since World War II has to elicit some kind of response from the strongest, biggest military on earth.
1:06:38
And some kind of precedent has to be set because, as we saw with Putin, if he is not shown that this kind of behavior
1:06:48
will not stand, he will do it again, and he will do something far worse later, and if not him, then some other actor.
1:06:56
Something has to be done to show him or future actors considering such a move that it is absolutely unacceptable.
1:07:09
Otherwise, all our future wars will include tactical nukes on the battlefield.
1:07:15
Is there anybody close to him who can tell him to knock it off, to not do this,
1:07:20
that has that kind of throw weight with him? Maybe, but as we’ve seen in the last few months, that he was in many ways a moderating figure in his administration;
1:07:33
that there were people far, far to the right of him and far more extreme than him that he was kind of holding back.
1:07:42
He was resisting a mobilization for months, even though there were many people around him calling for it.
1:07:47
He was resisting having these referenda for months, even though there were people in his administration calling for it.
1:07:55
And there were people criticizing the way he was waging this war, openly,
1:08:00
hardliners that he was basically keeping in check. So I think Americans have this view that there are moderates around him that could restrain him.
1:08:09
And there are, but I think there are also people who are much crazier around him,
1:08:14
and they are, I think, much stronger than the moderates around him.
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