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Eugene Robinson

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Eugene Robinson

Columnist, The Washington Post

Eugene Robinson is a columnist for The Washington Post, where he writes on politics and culture. He also serves as an MSNBC analyst.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Michael Wiser for FRONTLINE on Oct. 21, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Putin and the Presidents

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Putin’s War with the West

We may start the film with the events that happened at the end of September, which is when Vladimir Putin is doubling down.He’s announcing an annexation; he’s ordering a mobilization.And he comes out, and he gives this speech, and the speech is very much — though it’s about annexing Ukraine — he talks a lot about the West, and he talks a lot about the United States as an enemy that’s at play in Ukraine.What do you make of it, when you hear that language from Vladimir Putin at that moment?

When I hear Putin sort of drawing this line between Russian civilization and Western civilization, or Slavic civilization maybe you would think of it as, I wonder, actually, if this has always been his worldview, or has this hardened into a worldview of his over time?It seems to me that as he’s been in power for, what, these 20 years, he has more and more seen himself as czar as opposed to president or general secretary or whatever.He seems to have taken on this almost imperial sense of himself, sense of Russia and sense of his mission.

And so I don’t think it’s all just sort of put on for show or invented as a rationale for what he’s doing.I have to kind of take him seriously, that this is how he sees the world and how he sees himself.

And how dangerous is it, that here he is at this moment where they’re losing ground, and he’s announcing an annexation, announcing a mobilization, and talking about nuclear threat?

This is incredibly dangerous.I’ve heard very serious and senior people in the administration say that this is a really, really dangerous moment for the world, because Russia is Russia.Russia is a nuclear-armed state with vast resources, with an economy that is sort of warped and weak compared to the West, but still strong enough to produce a lot of weapons and a lot of munitions and to maintain a nuclear arsenal that’s the biggest in the world.And to have this sort of combination of paranoia, of grandeur and sense of mission being expressed by the unquestioned and unchallenged leader of this country, I think it’s a really, really dangerous moment.

He’s keeps doubling down, and at what point does he stop is the question.

… When you look back over the last two decades of Vladimir Putin and his interactions with the United States, do you think that there were clues there, there were things that we should have paid more attention to?

Sure.I think in retrospect, we should have paid a lot more attention to what he said and what he did.It was noted, for example, when it was first reported that Putin believed the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster in modern times and whatever it was he said.But we should have stayed a little more focused on that, I think, because step two of that is, OK, is there something to be done about it, and is that something essentially the reassembling of an empire, the reconquest of an empire?We should have paid more attention to that.

We should have paid more attention to things that he said over time about Ukraine and his sense of Ukraine as being part of Russia and in a sense, the historic sense, the beginnings of Russia.And again, there seemed, 10 years ago or whatever, no particular reason to think that had the meaning that it turns out to have.It wasn’t until 2014, with the invasion of Crimea, that that started really to come into focus.And again, we should have paid more attention then.We should have, in retrospect, we should have thought, well, maybe this isn’t where he intends to stop; maybe he wants all of Ukraine.And I think fundamentally that’s what he wants.

It’s interesting to go back and to look at Vladimir Putin, because the thing most people tell us that you have to understand about him is that he was a KGB officer.He’s trained to see the United States as an enemy, and he’s also trained to present himself in a certain way.And as he comes on the stage in the late ’90s, there was a lot of talk about Vladimir Putin as a modern man, who wears business suits, who speaks German.What was going on when we were perceiving Vladimir Putin in the late ’90s?

I think in the late ’90s, we assumed that Russia would have a certain evolution and that Putin might actually be a positive step along that evolution.I think we believed back then that Russia, over time, even given its very different history, and given the heritage of Soviet rule for all that time, that now that Russia was no longer a communist country, now that the Cold War was over, that Russia would in time evolve into something like a European country.I mean, not exactly.I think realists saw that Russia wasn’t going to be another Germany.It wasn’t going to even be another Poland, but that it would come closer to Europe and that it would evolve to be some sort of semblance of a functional democracy.

And there seemed no reason to believe that Putin, when he first came on the scene, would be the leader for 20 years, that he would become this sort of dictator and the one ruler of Russia.We—at least I thought at the time that Russia was on a path toward liberalization, toward at least more democracy, and maybe this guy, Putin, was a positive step rather than what he’s turned out to be.

Putin and the Clinton Administration

… The first president who meets with President Putin is Bill Clinton.… And what he said was this is a man who’s fully capable of building a prosperous, strong Russia, preserving freedom and plurality.And we’re trying to make sense of that.Like why, if somebody like Bill Clinton or the West had concerns about Putin, what was going on in the public presentation at a moment like that from Bill Clinton?

Well, I think certainly Clinton publicly would have wanted to encourage, and certainly the U.S. government would have wanted to encourage the kind of evolution we wanted to see in Russia.And saying it doesn’t make it so, but maybe it can help nudge it along.You would presume that someone in Putin’s situation would want cooperation from, support from the West, from the United States, would want to have a friendlier relationship so that Russia could become more prosperous.And I guess that was what many, probably in the administration and certainly many outside of it, assumed.And so why not extend a hand?Especially given that it seemed to make sense for Russia to also extend a hand, and to, you know, let’s lower the tension; let’s not be adversaries, or certainly let’s not be enemies, and let’s let everybody—let everybody prosper.I think that was the sentiment.

And it would be fascinating to sit down with Bill Clinton and hear what it was he saw at that moment in Putin.You know, George W. Bush saw something very different.He looked in his soul, and he saw something positive.Yet Clinton, that early, much earlier, saw something that disturbed him, and I’m curious as to what that is, but I don’t know what that is.

Yeah, it’s a fascinating moment in that I think you’re right, though, that that first meeting with Clinton, that one of the things you can make of it is that for Vladimir Putin, it seems like, all the way along, it is important to be meeting with an American president, to be sitting next to a president, somebody who feels that Russia was diminished, who feels his position is diminished, that there’s something important to him about that.

It is.I think it has always been important to Putin—this is very clear in retrospect—to have the West recognize Russia as a great nation, as a great power, to sit down with an American president as equals.He never wanted to sit down with an American president as a vassal or as a supplicant.I think that was very important to him.And I think presidents did see that this was important to him and in many ways tried to give him that respect, as if that was what he needed.

Putin and the Bush Administration

… And the Bush administration comes in and has a certain level of optimism about Putin.Why did they have optimism?Were they ignoring warning signs about what was going on domestically inside Russia?

Well, yeah, in retrospect, yes, clearly they were.Clearly they weren’t sufficiently cognizant of what was happening inside Russia.But at the same time, you come in, and you look at Russia, and you kind of say, OK, everything is relative.We know what Russia used to be like.We know what Russia was like under the Communist Party and under those leaders, and we know the degree to which anything resembling freedoms and liberties were not just restricted but extinguished.

And so given—if that’s your frame of reference, then you can look at Russia in those early years under Putin and say, OK, but compared to what it used to be, it’s still a lot better.And so maybe, you know, maybe Russia becomes a country that doesn’t have entirely what we would consider a free press.It doesn’t have entirely what we would look at as unfettered free markets.And by the way, maybe the way they have continued to privatize those state industries — I mean, truly, we saw that the kleptocratic tendency of Russia, that the privatizations were happening in a way that was benefiting friends of Putin, who then demanded loyalty and tribute from those people who were becoming billionaires.And we saw that process unfolding.

But you still compared it to the old days and said OK, what would you rather have?Would you rather have Russia under—you know, Moscow under Brezhnev, or would you rather have Moscow under Putin?And for a long time, the answer to that question, I think, was Moscow under Putin.

One of the other moments we’ve talked to people about is that moment where Bush says he looks into Putin’s soul.And a lot of them say that Putin understood Bush, understood his evangelicalism, that was part of why Bush connects with Putin.And I guess the question that I have for you is later, Putin is going to be very antagonistic towards the United States.Why, in that moment, do you think he wanted to win over somebody, a president like George W. Bush?

I think in some ways, the way Bush treated Putin flattered him.He saw Bush as treating him as, you know, as an important figure and Russia as an important nation and important power in the world.I think in some ways, Putin—again, in retrospect, in some ways, he was buying time.I think he was—I remember what Moscow looked like before the end of the Soviet Union and what it looks like now.There was a lot to do, right?There was a lot of development that had to happen, a lot of modernization.Markets, such as they are, had to be created and made to function.You know, stock exchanges and currency markets and all of that had to become something different from the communist state that it had been, and that required a lot of time, and it required a lot of capital.And it, I think from Putin’s standpoint, required not just non-interference, but a certain degree of cooperation and help and at least good will from the West, because, you know, he was looking for investment.He was looking for places to sell Russia’s resources.And, you know, the United States was an important player in that.If we had been in a sort of standoff and we had been talking about sanctions and all that sort of thing, that would have retarded, I think, Putin’s plans for the greatness of Russia.And I think that was always his aim—that Russia would be great.

… One of the breaking points seems to be—you were saying he wants this respect from Bush—it seems to be the Iraq War.Why would Putin care about the Iraq War?It's not close to Moscow.Why would he care about what Americans were doing in Iraq?

Well, I think, again, sometimes you take leaders at their word, and you listen to what they say, and when he talks about essentially interfering in the affairs of other countries and seeking regime change and that sort of thing, you know, I think he saw the West and the United States as attempting to establish, I guess “hegemony” would be the word, across the world.And there’s a sense, in Putin, I think, that Russia, as vast as it is, was in a sense being confined and being pressed from all sides by the West, and I think, so—an adventure like the Iraq War shows him that, look, they’ll just come in and they’ll just take out a government and think nothing of it.And that’s not the way he wanted the world to work.

Now, that’s ironic, given what he’s doing now, right, that he’s doing that with Ukraine, except I believe Putin would say that it’s completely different, because Ukraine is Russia and it is in fact the West that is pressing in on Russia’s western flank and trying to encircle it that way and using Ukraine as a sort of proxy to damage the interests of Russia and to threaten Russia.So he would say that’s completely different from what the United States did in Iraq.

And right after Iraq are the first of the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and right in this area that used to be the sphere of influence.And it’s the same time that Bush is talking now in these grandiose terms about the “Freedom Agenda,” and he has his second inaugural address.The color revolutions and what he’s seeing there, is that a turning point?

The color revolutions are a major turning point, because he sees—in what used to be the Soviet sphere, he sees, from his point of view, the West encouraging what he considers to be illegal coups and essentially displacing governments that were friendly to Moscow and gave him a certain sense of security.And all of a sudden, here the West is, at the very least, cheering on, and in his mind, I think, fomenting these revolutions, which he sees as pro-American, pro-Western, and therefore anti-Russia.

And I think he sees these exercises in attempted or achieved regime change as a very personal threat to him, because what’s the next domino, you know?What is the—you know, it all seems to be heading his way, and he’s having none of that.I think he sees that as aggression aimed less at Ukraine and the places where the color revolutions are happening, but aimed more at him.

Early Warnings from Putin

… And by 2007, he goes to Munich, and he gives this speech he sounds like that speech on Sept. 30 of this year, where he’s really attacking the U.S. on all of these things—on Iraq, on the color revolutions.What was the change in Vladimir Putin at that point?Why was he no longer afraid of the United States?Why was he going public?

I think by then he believed Russia was on a better footing to sort of stand up to the United States, stand up to the West.And I also think that what had happened over time was that he had consolidated his effective one-man rule in Russia to a greater and greater extent.And I think he felt very confident in power, in his own power, confident that internally it was not under challenge, confident that he was popular in Russia, that people liked him and liked what he was doing.

And I think this was an important point: increasingly isolated at the top.You know, one big difference between Putin’s Russia and the Communist leaders of Russia was that, you know, in 1962, when Khrushchev faced off against Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev was not acting alone, was not making decisions alone.There was the entire Soviet apparat around him.

So even though he [Khrushchev] was the general secretary and the leader and, you know, at the time the unchallenged leader, at the same time, there’s this whole bureaucracy that had to go along with him and that could have, you know, fired him basically at anytime had he—if he made the wrong step.Those Soviet leaders did not—they were not one-man rulers.They had, you know, politburo and the whole apparatus around them.

Putin, by 2007 and certainly even more today, doesn’t have that.He doesn’t—he’s not challenged in power.He is the man.And when leaders become increasingly isolated as they become increasingly powerful, that’s a very, very dangerous combination, because you become more detached, and you become—you’re able to be more reckless.You’re not constrained by voices in the room saying, “Hold on now.Why are we doing this?This could all go wrong for us.”When you get to the point where the people who are around you, and your shrinking inner circle can only remain there by essentially being yes-men and by saying, “You’re absolutely right, President Putin.This is what we need to do,” then that’s really dangerous.And he doesn’t seem to have any of those constraints now.

… It’s right after Munich, the first sort of clear warnings of what was going to come.Bush is talking about expanding NATO to Georgia and Ukraine, and there’s this moment where the two presidents are talking, where Putin says, you know, to Bush, says, “Ukraine is not a real country.”How much of a warning should that have been at that moment, and what was that a sign of?

Well, it should have been a huge warning, but none—I don’t think anybody understood it at the time, understood exactly what he was trying to say.Strange formulation, right?“Ukraine is not a real country.”Well, you know, it’s an independent state, recognized by the United Nations, and so it’s a real country.But in his mindset, Ukraine especially, of all the bits and pieces of the Soviet Union that fell away or tore away or ran away when the Soviet Union dissolved, we should have listened to his words, and we should have thought about what they might mean.And I don’t think we just fully understood that he was serious.He seriously believed that Ukraine was not a real country; that he seriously believed it was an integral part of Russia.And so with historical/spiritual ties to Kyiv that go back to, I don’t know, 600 A.D. or whatever, that this was something he actually believed as opposed to something he was saying as a debating point to try to argue against NATO expansion.

I mean, if you thought it was just a debating point, then what happens right after it, not in Ukraine but in Georgia they seize 20 percent of the country, but that actual act, that intervention, that seizing Georgian territory, what was that a warning about?How much attention did we pay to it, and how much should we have paid to it?

We paid attention to it.I think we felt there was nothing we could do about it.Again, 20/20 hindsight, that should have been sirens blaring and flashing red lights and immediate—our first thought should have been, “What about Ukraine?What about this place that he says is not a real country?What about this neighboring country that is”—you know, Ukraine is so much bigger.It’s so vast, and it was—and Ukraine was in the middle of its own sort of transitions, and so maybe we felt that Ukraine was still close enough to Russia that nothing like an invasion would happen.

But yes, in retrospect, we should have seen that shoring up the sort of eastern flank of NATO was something we really needed to do and that the question of Ukraine was going to loom large in some way, shape or form perhaps in the near future.But again, that’s retrospect.

Putin and Obama

… What was Putin’s approach to Barack Obama?Did he respect him?

Well, I think he obviously did not respect him.I think it surprised him that a Black man would be elected president of the United States.I think that was a surprise to him.I don’t think he quite understood that.And who knows?I think there well could be just an element of just flat-out racism there, that he somehow thought Obama was not his equal, that Obama did not deserve to be treated as his equal.Yet Obama was president of the United States, a richer, more powerful country than Russia in many ways.So Putin just seemed contemptuous of Obama in a lot of ways.And that, you know, you talk about that relationship; I just don’t think there was a relationship.I don’t think, you know, they got along at all.

And Obama was pretty dismissive of Putin and Russia.And, you know, of course, the debate, the 2012 debate when Mitt Romney said that, you know, Russia was the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States, and Obama, you know, snorted in laughter almost, I mean, just in derision of the idea that Russia, this—once a great power but now a sort of giant petrostate, was even serious competition for the United States.

And Obama obviously has a lot of other things on his plate as he’s coming into office; Russia is not at the top of it.And one of the people who does step up and take on sort of that portfolio is Joe Biden, the vice president at the time.Some people have told us that Joe Biden was an old cold warrior.How would Biden’s approach be different than a Bush, an Obama, somebody who came into foreign policy later?

Well, you know, Biden had been in the Senate since, what, 1973, at a time when the Cold War was still on.And so I think his mindset about Russia, you know, he first—it had been the Soviet Union, now it was Russia, but it was still Moscow.And he still had this sense of the Kremlin as a malevolent force in the world and as an adversary and competitor of the United States and as being bent on, whenever possible, humbling the United States.And so, you know, that’s the mindset he grew up with, as opposed to Obama, who was younger and was not in those kinds of positions during the Cold War and so didn’t have to make foreign policy decisions at a time when we were dealing with the USSR.

As the story is told by Joe Biden, and Secretary Blinken said that it happened, that Biden is more direct and skeptical of Putin; that they meet in 2011 in Moscow, and as Biden recounts, as he says in his book, you know, that “You don’t have a soul,” and Putin says to him, you know, “We understand each other.”How important is that meeting between those two, the future president of the United States and Vladimir Putin, and this sort of direct, if not warm, relationship they have all the way back then?

Yeah.Well, you know, at the time, it was less important, because Biden was not the president.Obama was, and Obama really didn’t want to focus that much on Russia, I think.But it makes a huge difference now because Biden brings not only the history of having dealt with the Soviet Union in those days, but a sense of Putin as being a bad actor, as being a bad guy, as being a dangerous guy.

It helped shape the kind of response that we’ve seen from the United States leading the West in fighting back against the invasion of Ukraine, the attempt to essentially invade and subjugate Ukraine.I think perhaps any other U.S. president would have done the same thing, but Biden was very quick to see that the West had to make a stand, was very quick to see that it was necessary, that this was a threat, in his view, to NATO and its cohesion, and that what he had to do was essentially a Putin judo move.He had to use his—not to weaken NATO, but to strengthen it, and in large measure, I think, you’d have to say he succeeded at that.

We’ve talked about the color revolutions during the Bush administration.And there seems like there’s a drumbeat going on during the Obama administration.There’s the Arab Spring.There’s mass protests inside of Moscow.I mean, we’re going to be leading up into Ukraine and into going into Crimea after the Maidan.Is there something happening that’s pushing Vladimir Putin into a direction of more—of taking more direct action, of confronting the West more directly?

Yeah.I think, again, I think that he saw the West and the United States as behind all of this, as behind the color revolutions, as inspiring them and directing them and of doing this not so much for the people in those countries, but as a way of using these revolutions as a sword against him, against Russia and against him, and against the way he was running Russia, and again—and thus against his legitimacy and his permanence, because he does seem to want permanence as a leader of Russia.

And so I think he did start to feel directly threatened and also angry about it.And again, with this increasing isolation, I think there were fewer and fewer people around him who would give him any sort of dissenting view, any sort of other way to interpret what was going on.There was a certain amount of paranoia in Vladimir Putin that the United States, the West want to punish Russia, want to diminish Russia, want to constrain Russia, want to keep Russia from the greatness that it deserves, the greatness that is its right.

And I think he, on some level, I think he really feels that.He really feels that it’s our fault rather than his.

Putin Takes Crimea

… It’s an audacious thing to go in, to seize Crimea, to spark a war in the east of Ukraine.What does it say about his reading of America, of the American president at the time?And does he get away with it?

Well, look, I think he felt emboldened and felt—you know, he felt he had been able to make his move in Georgia, and there was Western condemnation, but nobody tried to do anything about it.There was no active opposition or kinetic opposition from the West. …

You know, he has this thing about Crimea.He believes it’s historically and by right a part of Russia.It’s Russia’s access to the, you know, to the warm waters of the Black Sea, and now it’s been, as he keeps saying, you know, wrongly given to Ukraine, but it never should have been given to Ukraine in the first place.So even if there is this other thing called Ukraine, Crimea is not a part of it, as far as he’s concerned.

And so—so he moves in, and I think he gambles and is right at that time that the West isn’t really going to do anything about it, that the West is going to complain about it, they’re going to condemn him; maybe there will be some sanctions and this and that, but they’re not really going to do anything to stop him.And so he grabs Crimea.

And again—and then things sort of just go back to the way they were.He moves into eastern Ukraine, and again, you know, with the excuse that these are Russian-speaking areas and that Russian speakers are somehow being persecuted by Nazi Ukrainians.I mean, it’s—on one level it’s looney-tunes.On another level, a, he at least partly believes it, and b, he thinks he can get away with it.

Of all of the warnings, it’s probably the most amazing one.It was such an audacious move, and then for him to conclude at the end of the day, despite all the sanctions, despite everything else, that it was worth it for him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that it was worth it.It’s, again, you can look back and wonder what would have happened.If there had been a more muscular Western reaction to Georgia or certainly to Crimea, would we be where we are today?Would he have dared to attempt this invasion of Ukraine?I’m not sure of the answer there because it’s hard for me to imagine exactly what that different, more muscular response would have been back then. …

Putin and Trump

What must Vladimir Putin, who’s had this relationship that went south with Bush and Obama, and we talked about Vice President Biden, and here comes Donald Trump, who has said flattering things about him during the campaign—what does Vladimir Putin think?How does he approach his relationship with President Donald Trump?

So here’s where the former KGB officer comes out, right, because I think he was able to read Trump.I think he had a real, very good understanding of how to play Trump, how to flatter him, how to build him up.And I think that dovetailed with a worldview that Trump had, not just that, you know, he liked the tough leaders, and he liked Putin because he was tough, but on some level, I think Trump bought into the idea that Russia is some great power; we should deal with them on a respectful basis.Great powers have certain perquisites and privileges, and we need to be attentive to Putin’s needs just as he needs to be attentive to ours.That’s a very generous explanation of what might have been on Donald Trump’s mind.

I mean, a lot has been made about these meetings of these two men when they’re in private, and they go on for two hours, and then they come out to the press conference like in Helsinki.We have some clues of what they talked about, and it may not have been as some conspiracy theorists believed.But just based on how you see the two of them interacting in public, what would Putin take from a meeting with President Donald Trump when those two men go into the room, and the KGB agent is …

You know, Lord knows what he would take from that meeting, he might take, you know, some of the deepest, most closely held secrets of the United States for all I know, because he knew how to play Trump like a violin.He really did.And I suspect that he knew how to play on Trump’s delight at having information that nobody else had.Trump loves to know stuff that nobody else knows.But of course that’s only worthwhile to him if he can—you have to let people know that you know this secret stuff, right?

And so I imagine that Trump tried to impress him with his—with all that he knew, and I think Putin let him.I think Putin flattered him.I think he probably told him things like, “Finally, America gets a real president.You know, that Obama guy was awful.That Bush guy. (Grumbles.)Finally they get a real president who understands the world.”

He didn’t need the KGB’s psychological profilers to hand him a dossier on how to play Donald Trump.I think he figured that out.

I mean, and we know that at the end of the meeting, Trump comes out and says to the cameras, “I don’t know why they would have interfered in the election.Vladimir Putin gave a very strong denial of it” over his own intelligence agency.And Putin must be watching that—that moment, too, taking something from it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.Putin, he understood that Trump was—had no experience in government.He was an outsider.He was seen as this sort of alien figure who, you know, by much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, right, just thought that Trump was crazy and off the wall and didn’t know anything, didn’t know any history.And my guess is that Putin would have played off of that and encouraged this feeling that Trump already had, was that these, you know, “The deep state is trying to sabotage me and what I’m trying to do, and they think they know it all.”“But, Donald, you really understand the world really much better than they do.And yes, of course they’re trying to sabotage you, and that’s terrible, and you can’t”—you know, that sort of thing.I think he probably encouraged that in Trump.

And, yes, a lot of people in the foreign policy establishment were pushing back on everything Trump was trying to do, or a lot of things Trump was trying to do, and here was this other world leader, leader of a great power, who was, I suspect, encouraging him to hang tough and flattering him and telling him how right he was and how wise he was and —admiring how rich he was and all this sort of stuff.

And so, you know, with that groundwork, when Putin says, “It wasn’t me.I didn’t do, you know—I didn’t do anything”—well, you know, by the way, Trump is also predisposed to believe that there was no interference with our election because if he acknowledges that, then he casts doubt on his own legitimacy as president.

… We talked to John Bolton, who was the national security advisor, and who was saying that, behind the scenes, you know, Trump might—in public he might read the script about NATO, but behind the scenes he was talking about pulling out of NATO; he was talking about Ukraine as a corrupt country.There were reports that he said, you know, “Crimea, don’t they speak Russian there?”And this is being reported in real time in the press.I mean, as Putin is watching that, what is he thinking?How is he seeing the ground shifting?

Well, he sees that he has—that there’s a president in the White House now who basically accepts his view of the world, or at least his view of Ukraine, his view of the former Soviet sphere as still being part of the Russian sphere by all rights.And I think he, I think Putin is very happy that—to see that, finally there’s a U.S. president who’s going to not just allow him to try to reconquer some of the old Soviet territory, but who actually, on some levels, might approve of it and certainly would acquiesce.

I mean, Bolton told us that he thought that Putin was basically waiting for a second Trump term; that he thought that, if he was Putin, that that was sort of what Putin’s strategy would be.

I mean, that would have been a reasonable thing for Putin to wish for, because you look at NATO today, and NATO is like this iron alliance, and everybody is pulling together and da-da-da-da.The Trump years, I mean, NATO was really kind of a mess, I mean, it didn’t have that consistent strong U.S. leadership.In fact, it had a U.S. president who just doubted the very raison d’être of the institution and apparently came fairly close to trying to pull us out of NATO, I mean, which is sort of an amazing thing.He [Trump] didn’t see why we needed NATO again, thought the Europeans were a pain in the ass.You know, they looked down on him and snickered at him, and so why does he need these guys?Why do we need them?Why do we need those guys?Well, we know now why we need those guys, but that’s not the way Trump saw it.

And then the end of the Trump presidency, Vladimir Putin, who was in East Germany during the Berlin Wall coming down, who’s apparently scarred by the collapse of the Soviet Union, he’s watching images of Jan. 6, of the American Capitol being attacked.What would he be concluding about a moment like that?

He would be looking at the United States and seeing the United States as divided, bitterly divided, and therefore as weak.And I think he would have seen the United States as incapable of agreeing to mount a sort of serious resistance.So if he had in the back of his mind, you know, “Maybe—I really want to move on Ukraine,” he would have taken Jan. 6 as a green light and said—and even with Joe Biden in office, a man he knew would not want to just stand by and let the sort of invasion happen, I think he would look at Jan. 6 and doubt whether the United States could effectively respond.

… How was Putin evaluating Joe Biden?He’d met him before.He’s his fifth American president that he’s sat next to.How is he evaluating him at a moment like that?As you say, it’s just after Jan. 6, six months after Jan. 6.

Yeah.I think he’s looking at Biden and seeing someone, yes, who is going to be an adversary, who’s going to resist any sort of imperial claims or any sort of revanchist claims that Putin tries to enforce in Ukraine or elsewhere.But I think he sees Biden as not having really the support of the nation that he would need.And I also think he has a hard time imagining, “OK, well, exactly what is he going to—you know, what is he going to do?Because I’m going to be able to split the Europeans.The Poles are going to be intimidated, and the Baltics.And I’m going to split up the Italians because they need my gas too much.And I’m going to—so you’re going to have the French and the Germans making a lot of noise to the Brits, but it’s going to be mostly noise.And the Americans, they’ve got the power, but half the country—or not quite half, but a lot of the country doesn’t even believe Biden is the president, so why are they going to—so he’s not going to get the kind of support he needs.And he’s not going to be able to keep me from fracturing the alliance.”So I think he sees the invasion of Ukraine as not just a way to reconquer what he considers lost territory, but to weaken and potentially fracture NATO for good.

U.S. Intelligence and the Runup to War

And for Joe Biden, he gets briefed in October that this is real.They have intelligence inside the Kremlin.They have images of the troops built up on multiple borders.And for Joe Biden, the cold warrior who had interacted with him, who had been very involved in the debate over Crimea inside the Obama administration, who had seen Putin over all these years, how alarming must that have been, and how big a challenge to his presidency?How is Joe Biden feeling in that run-up to war?

… Well, first of all, U.S. intelligence from all sources is very early on saying, “This looks like—this is an invasion.This is an invasion force that he’s putting together.”And so very early on, the president accepts this analysis and tries to begin convincing the Europeans, and especially the Ukrainians, that no, this is serious, and this is going to happen.And even in a time when President Macron of France is trying to do this sort of shuttle diplomacy, and other European nations are preparing but not quite sure that this is going to happen, the Americans are a lone and consistent voice saying, “No, you really need to be ready for this.We really believe that he’s going to invade.”

One sort of striking thing, but it’s something I’ve heard consistently about the runup to the invasion, the one thing, you know, you can fault U.S. intelligence on many failures in the past, but they got this one right; they saw this one coming.

… Joe Biden, he has telephone calls with Putin.He has a video conference at one point to say to Putin, “Do not do this.There will be severe consequences.”And based on the story that we’ve been talking about, of his experience with American presidents, going back to Munich and Georgia, how would that have affected the way that Vladimir Putin views these warnings coming from Joe Biden?

He certainly would have understood at that point that the United States was really going to oppose him however it could if he went on and if he went into Ukraine; that I think he must have taken seriously what he was hearing from Biden, that “We know you’re going to do this.Don’t do it.”That’s a pretty unambiguous message.

I think he still believed, though, that in the end, he would be able to weaken NATO rather than strengthen it.I think he had—I don’t think he believed that the NATO allies all had the stomach for fighting, and I don’t think he fully imagined what the—what that fight might look like.I don’t think he fully imagined what would happen if large amounts of modern NATO armament began flowing into Ukraine and being deployed against his forces.

And I think he way, way underestimated the Ukrainians, and that’s maybe, you know, what his biggest mistake was.He just thought they would fold like a cheap suit.And, you know, quite the contrary.It’s dangerous to be surrounded by yes-men, right?And so it doesn’t appear there was anybody around him who was telling him, “You know, Mr. President, President Biden is reading back to you alarmingly accurate intelligence about where your forces are, and what they’re planning to do, so should you think about that in terms of what sort of role the U.S. and NATO might play if you go in?And, you know, should you think, for example, that maybe Kyiv will be ready for an attempted assault or more ready than you plan for them to be?And you won’t be able to take that airport, because they’ll be worried that that’s key to your whole plan of seizing the city and using that, you know, one rapid maneuver to essentially install a puppet government and win the war.”

And did nobody think and say, “Gee, if they know so much about what we’re doing and what we’re planning, maybe they know about that, too.And maybe—maybe this isn’t going to be the cakewalk that we think it’s going to be”?But he seems not to have—you know, he was a former KGB officer.He was not a former general; he was not a military strategist.And I think that’s pretty obvious.

Putin Miscalculates Ukraine and the West

I mean, the things that they miscalculate on, the Ukrainians, like … who the Ukrainians think that they are, the strength of the Russian military, how the Ukrainians respond, how the West is going to respond.But even putting all of those miscalculations aside, had the U.S. squandered its credibility in making threats to Putin in those years running up to that moment?

Well, in a sense, I think he could—I think he expected that yes, the U.S. has talked tough in the past, and they haven’t really done anything.So, you know, you could perhaps expect that.But at the same time, he did know he was dealing with a very different president, and he did know, at that point, that the Americans were watching what he was doing very, very carefully, with great specificity.And I think he just misjudged what leaders were thinking in other European capitals.He overestimated his ability to drive wedges in between the NATO nations.

And the question, who do the Ukrainians think they are?To stand up to us, well, he got the answer to that question wrong.I mean, who do they think they are?They think they’re Ukrainians.They don’t think they’re Russians.They think they’re Ukrainians who have a right to live in a sovereign Ukraine and who will die to defend their country.And I think that surprised him.I think he felt there would be a lot more support for effective Russian occupation inside Ukraine.

Yeah. I mean, it’s clear that when you look at why did the invasion go the way that it did that the Ukrainians get the primary credit for what happened.But how important was the response of Biden and the Americans in the war not going the way that Putin expected?

Oh, the response of President Biden and NATO was absolutely crucial in the fact that the war didn’t go the way Putin wanted it to go.And in fact, had there been no such response, Putin would win his war.I mean, he would.He—if it were just a matter of Putin versus the Ukrainians, without this constant resupply, without the intelligence help that we’re giving them on a day-to-day and minute-to-minute basis, he [Zelenskyy] would not have been able to stand up against just the brute might of the Russian army and navy and air force.He likely would have, you know, without the added air defense capabilities that the West and NATO have provided, likely the Russians would have been able, at some point, eventually, to establish air superiority.They’d be able to do highly effective combined operations around the air and sea, and they would—they would win.They would win.If the West were not backing Ukraine, I’m confident Russia would have won by now.

We’re back now where we started, which is that speech at the end of September, where he says he’s at war with the West, and he’s taking actions to make it so.He’s cutting off gas supplies to Europe.There’s talk about grain.There’s the nuclear threats.Is Vladimir Putin—and why—seemingly trying to broaden this, to make it not just a war about Ukraine, but a war with America, a war with the West?

I have no better idea than anybody else what Putin thinks his endgame is here.His sort of threatening and blustering hasn’t worked.It hasn’t scared anybody.It hasn’t made anybody back off.And it seems to me that widening the conflict is only going to make it tougher for him.But obviously he thinks otherwise.So he may have some strategy in mind.I can’t—I just can’t imagine what it is.He’s going to need some way out.Maybe he has not given up hope yet that somehow he’s going to pull this out and he’s going to be able to succeed.But from what you see on the ground, I mean, he seems to already have sort of cut back his ambitions to maybe holding a strip of eastern Ukraine, keeping what he has in Crimea, and otherwise just destroy a lot of infrastructure, and that’s the phase we’re in right now, which is tragic to watch, as he bombs infrastructure targets and civilian targets indiscriminately, which he can do for a long, long time.

The Danger of the Current Moment

… How consequential is this moment, as Vladimir Putin is doubling down, as the West is deciding how to respond as they’re looking towards the winter?How important a moment is this?

I think this is an incredibly important and dangerous moment.First of all, when the leaders speak, you have to pay attention to their words.And when Putin rattles the nuclear saber, you can’t ignore that.And you can’t look at this moment and say that it isn’t, at the very least, the most dangerous moment in terms of potential nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And there are those who will argue that this is more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis because, again, back in the Soviet days, decision was being made by committee in Moscow, as it was in Washington, and there were people surrounding Nikita Khrushchev who could offer differing views and could shape policy, whereas Putin is—does not have that sort of support and the check on his power.And that makes it really, really dangerous, I think.He’s not doing better on the ground.He just isn’t.He’s losing territory on the ground.

And at some point, understandably, the Ukrainians don’t just want him to fail in taking more of their territory; they want to take their territory back that he’s already taken.And as he sees that being threatened, and particularly if the Ukrainians get to a point where they’re doing operations in Crimea, which he cares about so deeply, and attacking targets in Crimea on a regular basis and really, like they did with the Kerch Bridge, his prized bridge between Russia and Crimea that the Ukrainians apparently blew up.Boy, if he starts losing more ground and Crimea looks threatened, I have no idea what he’s going to do, but it could be really bad.

That’s a scary, scary moment, especially, as you say, without any check

Yeah. Without any checks on him.I mean, this isolation I just think is really an important factor in all of this, because you don’t have to assume that Putin has gone—is mad, he’s crazy, and, you know, talks to the portrait of Peter the Great at night or something like that.You don’t have to think he’s bonkers.You just have to think that he’s in his own head, that he’s coming up with all of this, and that there are not people around him who can say, you know, “Vladimir, Vladimirovich, that’s a terrible idea.You know, this is not going to work over here, and here is why.”And that isolation is—makes this a more dangerous situation than we should be comfortable with, and we should be really worried about the next few months and years.

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