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Kori Schake
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Kori Schake
American Enterprise Institute
Kori Schake is the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Schake previously served at the U.S. State Department, the Department of Defense and the National Security Council. She is the author of several books, most recently America vs the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved?
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE's Mike Wiser on March 4, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Putin’s Centralized Power
So, as I said, we're interested in Putin's role in this and who he is in the war.And we were looking for a place to start the film that might be revealing into him, and it seemed to us like one of those revealing moments recently was the national Security Council meeting that he had with his top advisers arrayed around one side of the room, and he is at the other, calling them up and interrogating them.If you've seen that footage or know about it, can you help us understand what's going on inside that moment?
I did see the footage.And it was the moment I changed my view from thinking that Putin was shrewdly using a demonstrative coalescing of his military into believing that he was actually going to pull the trigger and attack Ukraine, because it was unhinged.You know, having his national security team sit all the way across the room from him, and one by one, making them, you know, press him to invade Ukraine, as though he were being pushed along by the momentum of everyone else, and when his—one of his intelligence advisers seemed skeptical of the undertaking, he humiliates the guy.
So first of all, this isn't an actual conversation. It's making everyone in the leadership guilty, along with him, for what he's doing.And second thing that was incredibly strange about it was it was apparently pre-recorded, you know.Bellingcat and other open-source information agencies have shown that the watches on Gen. [Sergei] Shoigu and others weren't the time that the meeting was supposedly taking place and were actually all synchronized at the same time, so it wasn't just one guy mis-setting his watch. And Putin, wearing the exact same outfit ostensibly the next day, when he was giving his speech justifying the invasion of Ukraine.It was such an elaborate set piece and so designed to make Putin seem like he was being stampeded into this decision by his own Cabinet.And when the cracks in the facade showed, he—he seemed to go off the rails, angry and berating his intelligence chief.It was such a strange and such an orchestrated performance that that's the moment when I realized that Putin was actually going to attack Ukraine.
… He has this display, and he's at the one end of the room, and they're there.He's sort of calling them up, you know, like a teacher calling up students, to talk to him. …What does it tell you about Putin inside the decision-making process, inside the kind of information he's getting?Does he give you a clue into him and into where he is at that moment?
Well, you know, one of the vulnerabilities of authoritarian rulers, especially in the late stages of their rule, is that they have so disincentivized people telling them the truth that they very often aren't getting good information, and the dynamic of that national security meeting surely doesn't suggest that people feel free to tell Putin what they're hearing, what they're experiencing, because they're so fearful of his violence against them.
A few days later, he makes the announcement that they're beginning—he doesn't call it a war; he calls it a special operation.But he is bringing Russia to war.And one of the things that's striking about it, especially because we're focusing on Putin as a biography, is that he's making this announcement. …So that's my question: Is this Putin's war?Is this Russia's war?Whose war is it that he's initiating when he makes that announcement?
Information has been controlled inside Russia for such a long time that it would be a surprise if the Russian people were actually enthusiastically behind this war.Many of the soldiers sent to fight it are evidently surprised that they're at war with Ukraine.And you see in the levels of desertions that that they are not particularly committed to the undertaking.So it wouldn't be a surprise if Russians—Russian civilians were likewise surprised by what's happening.
But Putin has conditioned the information space within Russia.And since the war began, he's been shutting down every independent outlet—not just foreign broadcasters, like the BBC and Voice of America, but Russian stations as well—shut down the last independent media in Russia during the war.So he clearly doesn't think he's succeeding at shaping Russian attitudes.Otherwise, he wouldn't feel the need to shut down even Russian stations that have already been censored.
That's really interesting.But it's not like there's a demand from the Russian people to invade Ukraine or that there's an imminent threat.Is he responsible for this?
You're quite right.There have been scores of protests by Russians against the war since it began, and that's an incredibly beautiful thing, given the dangers people run in Russia for expressing dissent against the government.I mean, over 7,000 Russians have already been arrested by their government, and yet protests in St. Petersburg and other places continue to be large.And that's incredibly courageous of Russians to protest their government in that way, and it suggests that there isn't widespread support for the invasion, and that in fact Putin runs the risk of significant erosion of public support for him because of this.
Putin’s Motivations
So our project is trying to understand what brings him into that moment.And it's a biography, and we're going to go back and look at his life.And so I'd be curious: Do you think that you can understand this moment by looking at Putin's past and where he came from and what he's been doing, especially over the last 20 years, since he's been in power? …
Yes, I think you can, you know.In 2007, he gives a remarkable speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he describes the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, which is not how most people, even most people who were citizens of the Soviet Union, view its collapse.And the nostalgia he has for recreating a sort of Russocentric imperium, as though he's Peter the Great, really is increasingly palpable in the last 10 years.
… We're going to go back with some of the material that we have and the parts of his life that you're probably familiar with and that I mentioned.… And so I'd like to just break down some of those moments along the way.And so the first one is 2015-2016.Crimea has happened.He's gone into Ukraine, and he's about to make a decision to interfere in the American election.And who is Putin at that point?How does he see America?How does he see the West? …
After the cascade of "color revolutions," where peoples of the former Soviet Union wanted representative governments, wanted an end to lawlessness and corruption, which contrasts so strongly with what Putin has been trying to create on Russia's periphery, which is a satellite belt of impoverished, destabilized countries, because sickeningly, that somehow makes his Russia feel more secure.
After the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Putin gets even more paranoid and starts blaming the United States, and in particular Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton for her support for that revolution.And the other thing that happens about the same time is a consortium of journalists and newspapers around the world release the Panama Papers, which make clear the level of corruption and theft going on by Vladimir Putin from the Russian people and by other oligarchs and the complicity of Western shell companies in helping hide that money.1All of a sudden that becomes transparent.
And that's a real threat to Putin's domestic control, because he's trying to portray himself as Peter the Great, as a great leader of a unified Russian people, and in fact he's a mafia boss: stealing; running corrupt operations in Russia and outside of it; and laundering the money through, you know, Western shell companies.And those two things look to me like the motivating forces for Putin to try and strike at the United States, because, remember, authoritarians rarely understand civil society.They rarely understand that the Nobel Committee isn't under the control of the Norwegian government and that newspapers in free societies do as they please under constitutional protections.And so authoritarian governments, like Putin's Russia, tend to try and blame governments for any action of free society.And the Russians were early movers to try and use the openness of American and other free societies as weapons to damage them.
It's interesting, because I hadn't really thought about it that way, but if he's afraid of democracy—I mean, we call it interference in the election, but to some extent, what it was was making everybody else look corrupt.Here's these documents that make Clinton look corrupt, in some way of sullying democracy.
Yeah.
Was that part of the point?
Disinformation campaigns don't need to persuade people of what they're arguing.They just try and muddy the waters enough that you don't believe anything, and you believe that, for example, an election in the West is no freer or fairer than an election in an authoritarian country.They don't have to win the argument; they just have to muddy the waters enough that it challenges the faith of people in what they believe they know.
What does it say about him at that moment that he takes this?It seems like a big risk to insert yourself in a way that will be found out eventually in an American election.
I think there are two possible explanations.One is that he intended to get caught, right?This was designed for us to understand what Russia was doing as a threat to free societies, right?That he wanted us to understand what he was doing as a way to show our vulnerabilities and his risk tolerance to interfere in the domestic activities of the United States.
A second possibility is he thought the Russian intelligence services were elegant enough to do this without being caught, right? That they knew the American electoral system well enough to penetrate, you know, 50 different states' election systems and not get caught, and was surprised to be found out.I don't know which is true.I see evidence, actually, for both of those things.
… But does he seem chastened by it, by the American response to the election?
No, he does not.
Trump and Putin
… We want to understand … the relationship between Trump and Putin, in particular from Putin's perspective, as he's watching it.And we won't have time to do all of the back-and-forth, but we may do that meeting in Helsinki, where the two presidents are meeting with the press.And I was wondering if you could help us there, with understanding what is that dynamic? And what is Putin seeing when he has a private meeting with Trump, when he's standing next to him at that press conference? …
I don't know what he sees, but it would be plausible—you know, Putin is an intelligence agent at his core, and so he was probably trying to take the measure of this new American president.And President Trump's own recklessness and flighty unsoundness probably looked really promising to Vladimir Putin.
And what do you see when you watch that, as far as the signal that's being sent?If you don't want to be in Putin's mind, when you were watching that relationship, when you're watching Trump and the way he talks about Putin, what signal do you see being sent?
That President Trump is clearly in way over his head and probably a danger to the security of the United States.
One of the things Trump comes back to, again and again during his presidency, is NATO, is the role of the alliance, is the relationship with Europe.You know that I want to know what Putin thinks about it, but what signal is being sent during those years, and what happens to that alliance and that relationship?
The things President Trump said about, you know, his admiration for Vladimir Putin and his lack of admiration for the leaders of free societies; the way he called NATO's mutual defense pledge into question; the way he denigrated the defense efforts of the alliance and of free societies; the way he threatened to withdraw troops from Japan, South Korea, Germany, other longstanding and stabilizing defense relationships must have seemed like an amazing gift to Vladimir Putin, because the very strength of the Western alliance was what President Trump was damaging, and Putin didn't even have to prompt him to do it.He did it all on his own accord.And it was both disgraceful but also endangering the security of the United States and its allies.
Putin’s Moves Inside Russia
… During this period that we're looking to understand, which is the lead-up to Ukraine, so 2018 until now, there's sort of two parts we're looking at, and one of them is inside of Russia, where there's cracking down on protesters; there's jailing of the opposition; there's a new constitution.Can you help us understand what Putin is doing in those years inside Russia?
He is slowly strangling free expression and civil society.He's slowly strangling the ability of Russians to get information and share information with each other, to express their political views.And he's doing it in insidious ways to avoid political accountability for the actions that he's taking.
What do you mean by that?
I mean assassinating political opponents instead of either winning the argument or canceling elections.Instead of holding elections that he would lose, he's trying to assassinate political opposition so that there's nobody to stand in opposition to him.
Is there pushback, either inside Russian society or from the international community, too, as he's making these moves inside of Russia?
Yeah. Civil society groups in and outside of Russia are drawing attention to it.Journalists are covering these issues inside Russia and outside Russia.The problem is that either Vladimir Putin is not deterrable, or we haven't done enough to stay his hand in those actions.And again, it's not clear to me which of those two things it is.
I mean, at the same time during those years, some of the crackdown on domestic opposition is happening inside the United Kingdom; he becomes involved in Syria.What is his stance overseas during that period, looking outward?And do you think he's taking more risks during that time?
He is absolutely taking more risks at that time: intervening in the war in Syria, trying to position Russia as the kingmaker of security in the Middle East, even risking direct confrontation with American military forces a couple of times in skirmishes in Syria.And in each of those skirmishes in Syria, the United States very quickly braces up Russian forces, and Russia backs off.But the risk tolerance to engage American military forces was an enormous increase in risk tolerance by Vladimir Putin's Russia.
And it's interesting the way you described it.He's escalating.And then the U.S. responds.And they back down.Is he, in that period, testing limits and seeing what he can get away with, and just how far he can go?
Possibly.He's possibly using the battlefields of Syria as ways to improve his own military's operational performance, to show that Russia is a kingmaker, beyond Russia's so-called near-abroad in Central Asia.Maybe he's trying to show the value of Russia as an ally, as an alternative to the United States and NATO countries.There are lots of possible things he could be attempting to do there.But all of them are challenges to an America-friendly international order.
Biden and Putin
… It's interesting, because you mentioned something which was a question that we have, too, which is like, why, under the Biden administration versus the Trump administration, is this happening now?And what is he watching that might give him a sense that this was something that the U.S. would respond to?And I guess the obvious events would be watching Jan. 6 and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. …
Well, America's adversaries portrayed Jan. 6 as a cautionary tale: This is what democracy produces—instability, domestic political violence, the clawing away of legitimacy from democratic institutions—and you shouldn't want this.You should want the stability and the predictability of a repressive society.That's how America's adversaries try and portray Jan. 6.They don't draw attention to 740-some arrests by the Justice Department and by state governments, and effective counters by the FBI.So they don't show a free society's tools of law and order succeeding.They show democracy and law and order failing, as a way to suggest that the only successful system of government is repression.And of course that's not true.
It's so interesting in those terms, because you mentioned other instances where it seems like there's this confrontation between an authoritarian view and democracy, and that often people say about Putin, like, there's not an ideology; it's not an ideological conflict.
There's absolutely an ideology.This is about—you know, this is about freedom versus repression, and Putin and other enemies of freedom attempting to legitimate repression as the only way societies can be stable and can be legally controlled, which is, of course, nonsense, right?And we should take that as an incredible compliment of the vitality of freedom and the universal nature of the truths that we hold to be self-evident, because we sometimes lose confidence that our values are universal.The people who believe our values are universal are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, because they are working very hard to build repressive states, where people don't have a choice over the kind of government they have.
And Afghanistan, because I asked about that as well.How is that seen in Russia, the withdrawal?
As an incredibly satisfying humbling of the United States; that they spent 20 years and couldn't achieve it and finally had to flee the country under duress.That's how it's being portrayed in Russian state media.
Putin’s Isolation
We've been trying to understand Putin, and it is hard, because you've got the public statements, but you don't see what's going on behind the scenes.And during the period leading up to this, during the COVID period, you see him with video screens doing teleconference, away from everybody.And then you see these images of him at the table, you know, 20 feet away from his top advisers.When you're watching that, what are you seeing in those images and in him at that time?
He's clearly fearful of something.Whether it's infection or assassination, I can't say.But it is incredibly odd the way he has structured that much physical distance between himself and the other people ostensibly in his inner circle of governance.I noticed that the admirable president of Ukraine tweets out pictures of himself with his arm around his defense secretary every time Putin has one of those crazy scenes with his defense leadership 20 feet away from him down a table, because it's not only—you know, it speaks to trust.It speaks to confidence of being in control.And Putin is clearly fearful of something.
… Have you noticed a change in him as you've been observing him, obviously, from afar?But does it seem like he's more of who he is, that the paranoia is deeper?
Yes, it does seem like an increasing paranoia and a decreasing rationality in his judgments.You know, the speech that he gave attempting to justify the invasion of Ukraine, you know, wildly claiming that the country was run by Nazis and that the entire country had to be disarmed, first of all, is wildly untrue.But second of all, those kinds of expansive war aims aren't things you can achieve with the use of an invasion force of 190,000 troops.
So the decreasing connection between his political objectives and the political, economic and military levers he's using to achieve them, those things are no longer connected in time.And instead of reining in his objectives, he is expanding them, and that does speak to decreasing rationality.
Also in that speech, this idea of invoking Russian history and the czarism, going back even before the Soviet Union.
Not invoking.
What is going on?
He's not invoking Russian history. He's rewriting Russian history in an attempt to rationalize his choices, right?The Russian history that Putin is attempting to tell would puzzle Russian historians. What he is doing is propagandizing Russian history in an attempt to justify and support his own choices.
… Watching everything that has happened over the last six months, leading up to this moment, is this war something that happened that was a moment of opportunity that he seized, or was this something he had been plotting towards?
Well, he'd at least been plotting towards it for the six months before he commanded those 190,000 Russian troops to invade Ukraine, because the buildup was long, visible and slow-moving.So yes, of course it was planned, and the Biden administration and other free governments admirably attempted to make clear what Russia was doing and to try and deter it by very clearly and very publicly stating that there would be major consequences, economic and political isolation and damage, based on Russia invading Ukraine.
But he does it anyway.
Yes.
Even with being told.And then that's the question—
Which either means it—
—that you raised.
It either means those measures were inadequate to deter him, or he is undeterrable.And we don't as yet know which of those two things prevail.
Putin’s Understanding of Ukraine
And it also raises the question of how much he understands, which you raised before, like, how much he understands what's going on: the capabilities of the Russian military, the attitude of the Ukrainian people, what the West is going to do.When he makes that decision, does it seem like he understands what's going on? …
No.… He clearly miscalculated the capabilities of the Russian military, the capabilities of the Ukrainian military, the willingness of the Ukrainian people to fight for their independence, the willingness of free societies to shoulder burdens in defense of their interests and in support of the people of Ukraine.This was a miscalculation of Napoleonic magnitude, and one of the things we should be worried about now is Vladimir Putin being a rat trapped in a corner and willing to do lots of damage to everything else on his way to failure.
The Stakes
… How much has Putin risked?How much has he gambled on this for himself, for Russia?How big a gamble was this?
It's an enormous gamble.It's pushing all of your chips into the pot, and that should worry us about both his willingness to take de-escalatory steps in this crisis, and also whether there's anything plausible that he can be offered, short of Ukraine's capitulation, that he will accept.It's incredibly dangerous that Vladimir Putin is willing to destroy Russia's economy; to make Russia an international pariah; to see the complete isolation of his country and the destruction of much of the Russian military by Ukrainian forces in this invasion, in order to prevent a country on Russia's periphery from becoming stable, democratic and prosperous.
… My last question is, given all of that, he's still saying: “We're proceeding.We're going to achieve the goals.”There are threats.They're not veiled threats about nuclear weapons.How dangerous is Vladimir Putin at this moment?
I think he's incredibly dangerous, because exactly as you said, he's willing to make incredibly reckless threats of nuclear war, not just verbal threats, but also claiming that he's raising the nuclear alert rate on Russian nuclear forces.Those are very dangerous and destabilizing moves, and he is making them in order to try and prevent the West from assisting Ukraine to defend itself.That's a very reckless set of moves by Vladimir Putin.
And yet the West continues to take a partisan side in favor of the people of Ukraine, in favor of their independence, in admiration of their willingness to fight for their country.And so we are delivering weapons to the Ukrainians.We're delivering intelligence to the Ukrainians.And if Russia continues to fail to win in Ukraine, the likelihood is pretty high that Russia will begin to target those weapons deliveries.There are a lot of ways Western countries could still be dragged into a war against Russia, even though that's clearly not what we want.
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