The FRONTLINE Interviews

Molly McKew

Adviser to former president of Georgia

Molly McKew served as an adviser to then-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili from 2009 to 2013. She is a writer and expert in information warfare specializing in U.S.-Russia relations.

This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 13, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Putin’s Road to War

The Putin Files

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Putin's Political Rise

When we watch that Boris Yeltsin moment on New Year’s Eve in 1999, where he’s in front of the camera, and he’s got the Christmas tree in the background, and he’s essentially saying, “I failed, and here is your new president,” with Putin, describe that moment.When you watch it, what do you think is being signaled?What does it say about Russia? What does it say about Putin?

Well, it was an interesting moment.I was still in school then. It was my senior year at Stanford.Stanford was in the Rose Bowl that year, so I was in LA with the rest of Stanford getting ready for the Rose Bowl the next day.But I remember we came out of something, and that was what was on TV, was the Yeltsin speech and the bizarre transition. Nobody really knew who Putin was then.¹

Then there was this quick “Oh, well, maybe this could be interesting; maybe Russia does need this strongman,” the narrative that many Russians had tried to sell; that they needed consolidated, centralized power to fix the problems and move forward.I think you had a few years of that thinking, where Putin was introducing these ideas of, you know, Russia really needed a strong central figure; Russia needed to move further away from the Western advice and take its own course.

I think at first, when he moved into the presidential office and put the portrait of Peter the Great behind him, I think everybody was trying to interpret what that meant.²

I think ultimately it ended up meaning something very different than what everyone thought.

What did it mean?

Peter the Great was a very interesting figure. He was viewed as the Westernizer of Russia in history, but he was also very much an internal tyrant in terms of what [Westernizing] meant and what the rules meant and how they would be imposed and what [was] the new order that people must follow in terms of appearance and rules of the court and everything else.I think the legend, whether it be true or not, that he killed his own son to keep him from succeeding to the throne, because he didn’t think he was strong enough to rule Russia, I think that’s the kind of thinking that Putin really appreciates.I think it was a very interesting time period, this transition.

By the time you got to 2002-2003, there was this slow unraveling of the federal structure and the constitution.The decentralization of power was very slowly being undone in ways that people didn’t really question at first.But then they accelerated quick and quicker, and by the time you get to 2005-2006, you have new ideas of ideology, mostly tactical.I don’t think they were meant to be permanent, coming out of the Kremlin, coming out of the ideologues that were circulating around Putin.

After that, you saw the rapid progression toward the cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, the invasion of Georgia in 2008, and after that, rethinking of Russian military power, what the projection of Russian power in the world would look like, how Russia could hit above its weight in international affairs and in international military positioning.³

From there, there was the escalation to Crimea, which was the deployment of all of that new thinking and the new training and the new tools and tactics.Now we have the new Russia, which is the champion of the shadow war.

Vladimir Putin's Early Life

… Let’s go unpack that.First is a simple question: You said nobody ever heard of Putin when he came in.Who is Putin? Who was Putin that walked in that office?

Well, there was clearly some thinking behind who he was going to be as president, right?Right after he became president, there was this little book that came out that was called <i>First Person</i>.I think it was either an autobiography or the only authorized small biography of Putin that had some photos of him as a kid and, you know, the whole myth around him. Nobody knows how much of any of this is true. …But there was this whole very scripted narrative of Putin, of how he emerged, of why he was what he was coming out of the intelligence services, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union in the way that he did.There's this story that’s been sort of told over and over again of him being in Dresden when everything was falling apart.⁴

There was a big mob of people outside protesting, and he called back for orders … and kept calling and saying: “What do we do?What's the orders? Are we burning things? Are we shredding things? What's going on?”

Finally the guy just said, “We’re waiting on Moscow, and Moscow is silent.”I think for Putin, this was the true crime.It wasn’t losing control; it was the silence. It was the fact that whoever was in charge was not in charge at that moment.I think that very much informs the way that he has evolved as a leader, this idea of no matter how bad things get, whoever is in charge needs to be in charge, and there needs to be clear orders, clear structure, clear mandate.

Does he see that as a sort of outgrowth of the Russian ethos, the mentality?

I think that might be a part of it.I do think there's somewhat this thinking of Russia as a giant, vast—you know, frontiers on every side, a vast empire that’s hard to control, that’s sparsely populated, so it requires even more control.I do think there's something to that, but I also think this is not a historical idea for Putin.This is not some czarist notion or an empire notion or an orthodoxy notion.This is a very modern conception of an updated autocracy; that this is the way he believes the Russian security state, which is very much what he represents, should rule.

Now he comes out of the KGB, is shipwrecked after Dresden, and there's this sort of question that those KGB people all go away, or did they kind of reform, rename themselves, and coalesce or congeal during the end of the Yeltsin years?

I think that’s the fundamental point that’s very hard for us to understand in the West, is we viewed 1991 as the end and the beginning, and the transition from this to that.I think in the way that Putin thinks, it was just a pause, the Yeltsin years, the years that we viewed Russia as progressing toward the West, as making reforms, as transitioning toward democracy, the security apparatus underneath.At one point I was sitting with an Estonian friend of mine who was part of the counterintelligence structure, and telling stories about various things.But he mentioned officially, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there were 800,000 KGB officers, and those were just the ones on the books, not the undercover, not the anything else.So if you think about it, that’s 1 percent of the country, basically, [that] was in some way probably connected to the security apparatus.Their power and their position and their wealth entirely depended upon the continuation of that system.

While we thought of ’91 as the rise of a democratic Russia, they viewed it as the removal of the constraint on them potentially forever, if they got it right.

… By the time you get to Putin becoming president, everything was underneath him enough to begin in the direction that he has moved.There's this famous speech he gives to the FSB [Federal Security Service] for one of their anniversaries, you know, cheering themselves, in which he notes that it took us 10 years to do this, but we finally got to where we wanted to be.

This notion that the security state was planning this, that there was this idea that they needed to integrate into the political hierarchy, replace it and take it over, because this would remove those fops that had screwed up the country and lost control so many times, I think it was easy for them coming in after Yeltsin, where he had been such a powerful revolutionary figure, but had very quickly lost control of certain aspects.He was viewed as a drunk, and nobody really knew what was going on.I think that the transition from a Yeltsin figure to a Putin figure was one that was welcomed by many Russians, this idea of a stronger, more in-control leader.

Putin's Vision for Russia in his First Term

So when he assumes the presidency, he’s just kind of getting on his own feet when George W. Bush gets elected president.And 9/11 happens, this spectacular event.… He offers help and support [and] is I gather what, rebuffed or something by the president?

I think there was a lot of caution and nervousness about trying to work with Russia on counterterrorism at that time, one, because we just didn’t have a culture of cooperation, particularly not at the intelligence level, certainly not at the military level.There's just two very conflicting military cultures that would be very hard to integrate on a global counterterrorism operation.But also, this was coming out of the period where the Chechen wars were still very much on everybody’s mind.

Putin, as prime minister, had accelerated his rapid transition to the presidency with the sort of second scorched-earth, bloody Chechen war.And this was a very—I mean, if you looked at any of the reporting that was coming out of Chechnya, if you looked at any of the human rights reporting coming out of Chechnya, this was not the kind of counterterrorism operation the United States could mirror or use or integrate in Afghanistan or anywhere else.I think there was a lot of caution about that, because this seems to be culturally how the Russians understood counterterror, was really just kill anybody that you think might be involved and replace them with someone else later.

That was Putin.

Since you mentioned it, when the apartment buildings are bombed, how important is that to Putin’s rise, his response?

I think this was a very critical moment in the evolution of the Russian Federation.Certainly many investigative journalists more skilled than I have put together good documentation on this.Certainly the events seemed to have been planned by and executed by Russian security services as sort of a black-swan terror attack on their own people in order to create the narrative that you need this new war, which it very much sparked.

If you look back at that period, it was, I think, four apartment bombings over 10 days, so it wasn’t one event, but it was this progressive series of attacks.People were uncertain. They had no idea what was happening. Everybody was worried they would be next.⁵

Again, you have Putin coming and saying: “We’re going to do this. This is the plan.”There was a very quickly executed operational plan for Chechnya, again, very scorched-earth, very bloody, very brutal.But it was seen as a short, glorious, victorious war, right, and that was the basis that he used to justify him becoming president: “I bring something new to Russia.I bring you security; I bring you strength.”

Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia

OK.So that’s the guy that calls Bush and asks to help, maybe feels disrespected in the process, whatever it is.Who is he when the color revolutions start up? What are his responses initially?Then move through the progression of events as he accumulates a military and asymmetrical approach to it.

I think when what we now refer to as the color revolutions started forward, which was a wave of civil transitions through the region, replacing the postcommunist, stagnant, mostly very corrupt governments with some new [governments], particularly in Georgia, with the Rose Revolution in 2003-2004, and then later in Ukraine with the Orange Revolution, and then further into the region.

Given the consolidation that was happening in Russia, the reconsolidation of power, this rethinking of civil liberties, political liberties, power structures and everything else, part of that narrative was very much: “We need the central control.You have to put faith in us, the elite, however you want to define that, to govern you, to lead you, to move things forward.”The idea that you could have more fully independent democratic states around Russia, and very much in their sphere of influence, as they view it, very much places that they still viewed as needing to be brought back into the fold, however you want to define that, I think this was very much viewed as a threat.Putin doesn’t want counterexamples to his narrative of leadership and power in the immediate post-Soviet vicinity.

I think the one exception to that was the Baltics, just because they didn’t think they could probably stop that process.The Baltic states worked extremely hard on their own reform and integration programs into the West.It’s sort of funny.If you go out there now, and if you talk to especially the Estonians and the Lithuanians, they’ll tell you these great stories about how all of their very well-intentioned Western friends and advisers from the INF, from the U.S. government, from elsewhere, continually told them: “Just be patient.It’s going to take a really long time. You’ll get to the EU, and then you’ll get to NATO. You’ll get there, but it’s going to be at least two decades before you can do it.”

The Estonians and the Lithuanians smiled and [said], “OK, OK,” and then moved as fast as they could, because they all understood that if they didn’t have that security guarantee of NATO, which is what they moved for faster, knowing they needed that first before the EU would understand the integration aspect for the Baltic states, they pushed as hard as they could to get there.And they were not wrong to do that, because everybody subsequently has had a much harder hurdle to get over.

So if you're Putin, and you're sitting in the Kremlin, and you're watching this happen, and you're watching the evolution of NATO, and you watch your borders being encroached [upon], … what do you do?Let’s be specific.When he looks at Georgia, what does he see? And what do the people in Georgia worry that he might do or anticipate that he might do?

I think at the time, it was probably hard to understand what Putin was seeing.But I think if you juxtapose what they are still doing in Ukraine now, even after the Maidan, and you see the way that Russia is maneuvering, clearly what Putin wants is not—I mean, the war in Ukraine has hardened public opinion against Russia so much, the same way that the invasion of Georgia hardened Georgian public opinion against Russia.They're not trying to win the people.I still think Putin very much believes this concept of the people is crap. He doesn’t think it’s important. He doesn’t really get it. …

So the effort to clean it up, stop it, do whatever he was going to do, is there a military?Is there a cyber? Is there an information war component?And how are they employed?

I think there has always been intensive information and psychological operations coming from Russia, particularly from any of the security state stuff.But up through 2008-2009, this was still a fairly old-school, not necessarily very modern, means of conducting these things through newspapers and more state-controlled media and that kind of thing.But there was nothing really particularly new or sophisticated about it.

I think after 2005, 2006, 2007, you saw more experimentation with the idea of cyberattacks, which is separate from information. But it’s its own important tool.After that, you saw the merger of cyber and information and PSYOPs [psychological operations] into this new thing, which they started testing in 2008.Certainly the first wave of the invasion into South Ossetia, into Tskhinvali, in Georgia, was journalists.It was Russian journalists who were there, ready to project this narrative that they needed, of there has been an attack by Georgian forces on civilians in South Ossetia; thousands have been killed; that is why we are fighting; we must protect Russian civilians in this area, which was largely made up.But that was their justification for why they were there and why they pushed the war forward.

Made up and delivered by—

By their media, by these guys that they had pre-deployed to project this story, and prefilmed, in many cases.But that was the first time they were trying to use that kind of information that way.Then, because it was still the era of, you had to take a tape somewhere and transmit it somewhere, and the stories were very slow, and it was reporters on phones calling out to other studios, it was still a very clunky apparatus, and it was possible to push back.The Georgians were lucky to have a good, smart, sophisticated team that countered the narrative very quickly, which is what created the space for the cease-fire.Without that, there would have been no pressure against Russia to stop before they reached Tbilisi, in my opinion.

But then, by the time you moved through—I think there were two aspects that Putin learned from the Georgian war.While they did technically win the war—certainly no one stopped them militarily—it was not necessarily a military victory.I think they very much saw that their concept of their military might was very eroded, very outdated, no longer modern, no longer capable of projecting as quickly as they wanted, and there was a lot of thinking about: “how will we win the next war that we need? What does the force need to look like?”

From there you saw the evolution, a change in the defense minister, a change in the concept of Russian military power, and an evolution from the sort of conscript, clunky army model to, OK, we’re never going to fix these guys, but we’re going to build an 80,000-person special forces capacity and use those elite troops for pretty much everything, and many of them without any badges or labels.But the new sort of special forces were the ones that were deployed to Crimea.There are now many of them in Syria as well.

These are the “little green men”?

That was the little green men.⁶

But this, the evolution of this capacity of the new elite force, which was trained by Germans for the most part, was a key part of their military reform.There's many other aspects to it.But this, in terms of forced deployment, was critical.On the other side, you had this thinking of, you know, there's a tremendous cost.Even if they had won everything they wanted in that war, there was a tremendous cost to fighting a traditional war, to launching a traditional invasion.They didn’t really want to pay that again. The Georgian war was small and stupid. They didn’t really get that much out of it.I mean, they did in terms of strategy, but they didn’t really get that much out of it.And it is still a very expensive thing for them, the amount of money they have to pour into Abkhazia and South Ossetia to keep those places afloat.

So they started rethinking, well, how do we do this better? How do we do this more effectively?And you do that by not having a real war.You don’t declare war on a thing. You don’t invade a thing.You send your green men. You send your shadow army. You send terrorists.You send, you know, whoever.During that time period, you also saw a more Russian focus on political movements, on how do you operate—and this has always been a focus of the Kremlin, but how do you recruit and operationalize political allies in these countries to either create new political parties or back political parties you think would be more favorable to you?

I think there's been this evolution over time toward what we have now, which I think is the hardest thing for people to understand.Russia doesn’t really want necessarily hard-core pro-Russian Marine Le Pen-looking forces to win elections.It’s much easier for them to have these soft-on-Russia entities and coalitions.

In Georgia you now have the Georgian Dream Coalition, which is run by a Gazprom-created oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, obviously softer on Russia, more favorable toward Russia, despite making all the right noises about being pro-Western, which isn't really true.You have, certainly, many elite in Ukraine whose economic interests are entirely captured by Russian money, which affects their decision making.Moldova, at this point, is pretty much just a Russian vassal in terms of money and influence.

But across the region, there are oligarchs, not necessarily Russian, but who have made their money from Russian contracts, Russian interests, who are in politics, and who are slowly increasing their power in politics. And that’s for a reason.It’s having an impact on policy in the EU, policy across various regions, on energy and other issues.

The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister

So in ’08, whatever happened in Georgia happens.They're re-evaluating the war strategy.A new president comes to the United States, President Obama.A new secretary of state comes to the United States, Secretary [Hillary] Clinton.And they view Russia, they view Putin, they view what happened in Georgia, they view the potential of whatever is going to happen in that country the way they view it.How does Putin view the new president? How does it go in the early going?

I think the Obama administration came in the same way every American administration comes in, which is you get to the office, and you open the binder, and you read through the thing.It’s like: “Oh, well, this totally makes sense. Russia just needs to understand that if only they integrated into the West, they would have all these benefits, and things would be so much better for them. We just need to convince them that this is what they want.”

The Obama administration had a slightly different approach to this, which is, obviously, there are many things we’re not going to agree on right now, but there's all of these areas that we can work on together, including technology and green energy and whatever else it was.They very aggressively pushed forward these kind of offerings to Russia as ways to build relationships.I think that was such a critical misunderstanding of how the Kremlin thinks, how the Kremlin negotiates, what they really wanted from the United States, what they really thought of Obama, which you saw Obama realizing over time.But in the meantime, there was this period under the reset policy when the U.S. was more absent from Europe, when the U.S. was more absent from the space that Russia was focusing on.There was very much an empty battlefield that Putin walked into.

I think Putin will engage in a fight when he needs to. But, for the most part, he is a cautious military leader.Many of the things that Russia has gained in the last eight years have not been from fighting and conflict. It’s just been showing up when nobody else was there paying attention.That period of the vacuum in the Middle East, and certainly in the Russian periphery, whether it was an agreed-to thing with the Obama administration or not, it was the de facto reality that we just were not as engaged, and we were not pushing back as much.

We now have a much more entrenched and advanced Russian set of interests in the Middle East and Asia and Europe that will be much harder for us to deal with and manage, especially places where there are American men and forces deployed who are under attack.

This happened in a vacuum created by inattention, largely.

We got this idea that the U.S. should step back from the world, that there are regional powers who should oversee their own interests, and I don’t know what our region would be because we don’t really have one.But everybody needed to sort of be in control of their own little schoolyard, and our schoolyard was not the former Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Putin is sitting there saying, “Well, this is kind of”—

“This is great. There's so many places for us to go.”You saw that with the advance of influence of information of money.I think it was—again, none of this was happening in a vacuum. You had post-Iraq War, this intense anti-American sentiment growing in many places in the world, the sort of idea that the Pax Americana was over, that American power had become this ugly, dark thing. Putin really preyed on that.He still does, this narrative that Iraq and Libya and Kosovo were these grave crimes against the international order.It’s very much a narrative they repeat over and over and over again to justify their own position in the international order and their own sort of moral stature within that.

But I think that it really was just, you know, the Kremlin against nothing moves forward, and for a long time, there was nothing standing there.

Putin and Hybrid Warfare

<v Michael Kirk> Meanwhile, they're developing, I guess, but not amazingly yet, a kind of cyber capacity and a fake-news capacity and all the other things that grow out of that.

… For example, this idea of the Web and the West coming after him, the 2011 protests, his feeling that somehow this was a United States-initiated groundswell delivered by Facebook and other entities.I think you're right. I think there was this evolution over time.I think 2008 was an interesting moment for the Russians for many reasons.At the time of the U.S. election, they were a little distracted with the war, and they weren't really paying attention, but they looked back, and they sort of learned.They didn’t really understand how Obama had won. They paid attention to it.The Russians pay a lot of attention to American elections and American politics and the way in which we try to win and win elections and win voters and craft narrative.They pay a lot of attention to these things.

Obama was something very new.This use of social media, this sort of mobilization of mass movement through those tools, was something that they were very interested in.And you saw them looking at it and poking around sort of secondhand through other political movements or through Russian companies or oligarchs, hiring American political firms and pollsters and these digital media groups, many of whom had worked for Obama, never for very long periods of time, but it was clear that there were people looking at capacity and technology and trying to figure out what really worked and what didn’t.

In Georgia, in 2012, in the elections, the team that Bidzina Ivanishvili put together, many of them were Obama-related companies and groups and pollsters.⁷

He had a whole team of American political operatives working with him on “Get Out the Vote” campaigns and on a digital media campaign and on a social media campaign.That was the first time I saw Russian-backed interests using these tools and really testing them in new ways.

I think at the beginning, from in terms of how the Kremlin looked at it, you had these separate capacities.There was cyber, which was its own thing. Then there was information, where you saw the growth of state-backed media, and then RT [Russia Today], and then Sputnik, and then other things.⁸

Then you had the continuation of regular information operations and PSYOPs.

There was a point, before Crimea certainly, but that was the tactical deployment moment, when all of those things started coming together, when they understood the power of having these shady hacker tools and other capacity on the Internet, the ability to disable or enable certain things, to get information or use information or leave information in shady ways.

And then this incredible media apparatus, which, you know, the Russian part is just one thing which doesn’t really actually matter that much.What matters is the English-language capacity that the Kremlin has built.The number of people that use RT or that listen to RT in English, the reach of these stories into other sort of—their maximization of use of algorithms on news aggregators, so if you search for certain things, the first 10 stories that come will all be from Russian media sources.They really figured this stuff out pretty well.

But then, when you combine all of that with social media, which is this incredible, if you know how to use it, and if you know how to look at data and profile users, and if you know how to deploy it, the most incredible psychological warfare operations tools in the history of mankind.If you listen to some of the old interviews with KGB defectors, they’ll describe in great detail what subversion would look like for the United States.They’ll describe the phases and what it means and mention things like: “Yeah, yeah, OK. The left is fine. They’ve always had this softness on Russia because of communism. But we don’t really care about the left.What we care about is getting the right. Once we have conservative media on our side, it’s much more powerful.”And just these things that echo differently after 2016.But they’ll describe this whole thing as a 25-year process.It’s a generation that you would have needed to gain access to minds, promote a narrative, soften people to that narrative, and then start turning them against their own interests using that narrative.And they can do that with social media in four or five years. That shortening of time is so critical.

Is that built into what people come in here and talk about the Gerasimov strategy and all of that? Is that all part of a kind of toolkit of really military, war-making capacity?

The separation of these tools of war are not something hard and clear in the way that we view them. For Russia, it’s all just war at this point.If you look at the chart for the Gerasimov Doctrine, which is now quite famous, there are these different phases of war and this, that and the other thing.⁹

But the line that goes straight through, all the way across, is information operations. It’s the constant through every phase of conflict against your opponents, of which we are the number one.

The math that they use on military versus non-military means is four-to-one.If you even look at the way that Russia is deploying hard power in the world, the deployment of new battalions and entire military groups to their western frontier, the deployment of new groups to the eastern frontier, the deployment of new hardware and manpower to the eastern and southern Mediterranean, the deployment of new resources to the Caspian and to the Black Sea, the way that they're now running everything out of Crimea and sort of connecting all these pieces together, but even that, if you look at it, is pretty terrifying, because they are actually encircling NATO and not the other way around.But if you then do that math and say the way that they think about it is four-to-one, and this is the least important part of what they view as their projection of power, then it’s clear that we’re very behind in understanding the way that they're fighting this war.

And young Russian men and women are not dying in uniforms.

And young Russian men and women are not dying in uniforms.This is actually one of the greatest weaknesses for Putin.When they do, particularly the unlabeled guys that fall in Ukraine, this is a big weakness for him, and he knows it.Those groups of military mothers that are pressing for rights and transparency and knowledge are a big vulnerability, and how they deal with them will be critical.

But you're right that if you look at how they have reoriented in Ukraine, how they have reoriented in Syria, it’s the recruitment of other groups that can act as their land forces.In Syria, you have Iranian militias and Hezbollah and Hamas and these other groups to support the Syrian army while the Russians provide air support.But there are Russian troops there and special forces there training and doing other operations.But they're not, for the most part, the guys clearing houses and fighting the war.

In Ukraine, you have these informal separatist groups out front, some of whom are Russian, but not many, and this is going to be the new war.There was a new paper that came out recently from one of the sort of key Kremlin ideologues, one of the guys who kind of floats ideas to see what the response will be, in sort of these academic-y papers.It was very much the formalization of the idea of green men, both domestically and internationally, and the idea that you needed these informal shadow bridges of activists connected to the military apparatus, inside of Russia, that these would be the volunteer domestic defense forces, essentially.But their job very specifically would be to counter unrest and challenge specific activism and provide all of these functions in case of emergency or invasion.But mostly it was focused on domestic oppression.Then externally, it’s just sort of the loose details of, you will have units of guys, whether they be GRU [military intelligence] officially, or just guys that you’ve trained and mobilized, who will have access to military logistics, military intelligence, to the military command structure.But they are not military, but they're supplied by the Russian military to conduct operations in Europe and everywhere else.

The fact that they write this down and publish it and put it out and say, “We’re going to build militant cells in your countries to screw things up when we feel like,” and that we just kind of look at it and toss it in the drawer and don’t believe that it’s happening, when we already see it happening, in Europe in particular, is really dangerous.We need to pay attention to how they are using their assets much more clearly.

Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term

Let’s take ourselves to 2014.The Sochi Olympics happens. The world is watching. Russia looks like a new and shiny place.At the same time, Crimea is bubbling. He’s ready to unleash whatever it is. … So what happens?What was his goal with first Crimea, and then eastern Ukraine?

I think a lot of it was opportunistic in the sense that the Maidan provided this opportunity for refocus on Ukraine that he would not have otherwise had the justification to move forward with.But you have the Sochi Olympics and the masterful construction of security narrative around the Sochi Olympics, which the Russians worked on very clearly.¹⁰

Beforehand, you had what some really good Russian investigative journalists have documented as FSB efforts to round up jihadis and extremists from the North Caucasus and export them to Syria through Turkey.Many of those became leaders in ISIS and part of that first wave of Russian-speaking jihadis that made ISIS into what it is today.¹¹

So you have that happening, which is already something that’s reasonably troubling.

At the same time, you have this slow Russian narrative, which was surprising to many people, that because Sochi was meant to be the jewel of Putin’s new Russia, this new effort to show what Russia would be, but this narrative around it that there will be a tax; that there is a lot of insecurity; that we don’t know if we can secure things; the effort to recruit support from the international community.The U.S. was writing intelligence before Sochi. Other countries were as well.

But you had this whole narrative of bad security in the region, which the Russians used to move a tremendous amount of military capacity to the Black Sea, which, right after Sochi, just turned slightly to the side and went straight for Crimea.That’s easy to see afterward, but we didn’t see it before.It’s very much the same thing they had done before the Georgian invasion, when they used military exercises as a cover to move a tremendous amount of men and materiel to the Georgian border.Even though the Georgians were waving their arms around and pointing, everybody just said: “Well, it’s just this exercise. Let’s let it go.”

But there were similar signs that this was going to be a permanent forward deployment.The construction of new railway lines to move hardware faster, but the kind of building of infrastructure to support a forward deployment, now you can see it. At the time, nobody was really paying attention.

But I think this was, if you talked to [Georgian President Mikheil] Saakashvili, if you talked to former Moldovan Prime Minister Vlad Filat, all of them, all of the leaders from this region had these stories from Putin, starting as early as 2009, Putin saying, “No, Crimea is ours; we’re going to get that back,” sort of as a joke, but this was clearly something on his mind for some time.And maybe there was a soft plan. Maybe it evolved into a hard plan after the Maidan.But certainly this was something that they wanted for many reasons.

So what happens?… I mean, you don’t have to go into great detail, but they unleash it.

Yeah.I think in 2008 you have this amazing moment where somebody leans over at the opening ceremonies in Beijing and taps on President Bush’s shoulder and is like, “Russia is invading Georgia.”And the look on his face when he hears this.And again, the Olympics became this moment of, “Hey, there's crazy security things happening to do with Russia,” and I think Russia really enjoys that symmetry sometimes in terms of their own storytelling.

Looking back on it now, it’s very clear what was happening.But at the time that the green-man invasion was happening, the supposed uncertainty of the events in the international press and in how the international community was responding was really astonishing, just this “Oh, there's these guys with massive artillery and hardware and unlabeled uniforms that have shown up in Crimea and are taking it over. We don’t know what it is or what it stands for.”Everybody knew what it was and what it stood for, but nobody wanted to say it, because it means having to do something about it.

You mean by the other countries?

Yeah, absolutely.Nobody wanted to have to go fight a war for Ukraine. It wasn’t a thing until it was done. And then it was done.I think the purpose of the deployment and advance in eastern Ukraine, there certainly was opportunity that they were trying to advance.There were key pieces of industrial capacity that Russia needed, especially for their own defense industry, that I think they were interested in obtaining sole access to.But eastern Ukraine was very much about making sure nobody could question Crimea, and that’s very much the dynamic that they have managed to establish.Nobody is talking about giving Crimea back. Nobody is talking about how to undo the annexation.Everybody is only talking about, you know, which four feet should Russia move back from in eastern Ukraine.

At the same time, just as with the occupied regions in Georgia, just as with the conflict zones between Armenia and Azerbaijan, just as with Transnistria and Moldova, these uncertain areas are incredibly powerful tools for domestic control in these countries where Putin still wants access.It is still very much the thing they can use to take down the government in Kiev if they decide to do so.

And everything worked.

Absolutely.Very little pushback, very little response.

Why?

I think there's great unwillingness to accept what Russia has become.I think there's no stomach for fighting a land war against a serious, intense military power, let alone the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.I think there's many reasons, but it didn’t help that Ukraine had been a mess for so long. It makes it hard to fight for.

Yeah.The sanctions are the solution that was delivered. The effect on Putin?

I think since 1940 roughly, there's been this narrative that the Russian economy is about to collapse.While at various points it has gone through low periods, our understanding of what the Russian economy is is inadequate.I think our understanding of Putin’s control of the economy, I think the official number is something like, you know, 58 or 63 percent of the economy is now under state control; something like 40 percent of the Russian workforce is directly employed by state companies.

If you think about the tool that that is for control, and mobilization of resources when you need them, that’s really incredible.There's sort of this slow understanding that the kleptocratic state that the oligarch elite around Putin, that the stealing of money is not really just stealing.They're not exporting wealth to the West to buy yachts and real estate, although that is certainly a component of their lifestyle.The export of Russian money to the rest of the world has been about buying access, buying influence, buying assets, and it’s given them tremendous support and influence and access to elite and other things that none of us have paid attention to in a really long time.

You see this softening around the edges of different interests. We’re promoting different ideas of how to interact with Russia.You see the Russians recruiting different interest groups, closer to their narrative and sometimes in really nonsensical ways. But it’s a very powerful tool.All of this is fairly new. But we have not paid attention to it in the way we need to.

The lesson for Putin, he fools around in Estonia, messes around in Georgia; nobody really reacts.Nobody says, “Hey, stop it.” Now Crimea and Ukraine.Nobody says—not the United States, not Europe really: “Stop it. Stop it, or we’re going to stop you.”In fact, what lessons is he learning from that inaction?

That when you use military power, it works.Georgia and even [Dmitry] Medvedev, then-President Medvedev admitted this years later. Georgia was proof that the Russian military could stop the advance of NATO. They said that very openly.The point of the Georgian war was to prevent the expansion of NATO further into post-Soviet states.I think for Ukraine an underlying piece of that was the stopping the expansion of the EU, which they’ve also proven they can do.It’s these ideas of re-establishing spheres of power: “This is our space; that’s your space. We’re keeping what’s in our space. We might take little bits of your space, too.”This is very much how they operate.They think it’s very powerful.

So by 2014, an amazing speech that he gives on the 18th of March, I think.

Yeah, for the annexation of Crimea.

What is the power? What is the meaning? What can we extract from the text of that speech?

I think there were a lot of different aspects to that speech, but a core narrative that was really critical was this [is] the way that Putin has been recrafting Russian history, which is a key part of what he’s done, totally rewriting textbooks, changing the way they tell stories about themselves and their history and the czars and different personalities within that time period, but no more of this Stalinist-period, Soviet-period justification reaching back 1,000 years and making this new narrative of the great Russian history, this dark period of failure which is a small anomaly.¹²

The rest has been this glorious thing to which we are connected.

This has been a key part of the new historical narrative from Putin’s Kremlin.Sometimes you see it used in very funny and bizarre tactical ways.When he was recently doing his press conference with [French] President [Emmanuel] Macron, he had this clumsy reference to who he called Queen Anna of Russia or something, who had been a French queen, but she was from Kiev.And it was really before Muscovy even existed, so this idea that she was a Russian was sort of nuts.But he can just claim these historical ideas and try to rewrite them, and eventually people pick up on them and repeat it. That’s what Putin tries to do. For the most part, people don’t pay attention to it.

Certainly in the Baltics there has been an intense effort, through their Russian-language media and through other media, to change the views of recent history and much more further-reaching history.Nobody really spends time looking … at what they mean, at the specific points that those narratives are meant to challenge in terms of independence and identity and place in the world.All of this is a very key part of how the Kremlin thinks in terms of realignment.

Intervention in the U.S. Election

… What is President Putin in the end of 2014, that three-hour live press conference?¹³

What is he thinking about America and the America presidential election?And what about his capacities in the post-Ukraine, post-Crimea time period?

Russia is most dangerous, the Kremlin is most dangerous, when they are empowered and feeling successful.¹⁴

That’s when they take the biggest risks, when they feel like there's very little response to what they have done.I think this entire period since 2014 has been a period of cascading risks.I remember talking to people in 2015, when you saw this critical threat that Russia was representing, because the way they were thinking at the time, OK, 2015 is the year we can mess a lot of things up, advance as far as we can.Then 2016 will be quiet. You know, wait for the new U.S. election; there will be a new administration. We’ll start our new reset with them, then, you know, start a new relationship.

But the less response there was to what they were doing, the more that timeline expanded.Well, we can keep going in the first half of 2016. Well, we can keep going later on.I think as they saw how pieces of their narrative were being accepted in the U.S. political landscape, in the media landscape, as they saw that they were conducting some of these operations that were working, why would you stop?Nobody was paying attention to any of it, so they continued onward.

I think their success in 2016 was as big a surprise to them as to anyone else.You saw it in the four days after the election of President Trump, the Russian propaganda machine turned off. They weren't sure what to say, for there wasn’t a victorious parade the next day. There wasn’t any praise.I think it was until Friday when you finally had some sort of coherent statement coming out about what the election meant, because they had been constructing this narrative of, again, there are no people—America is a corrupt system like everywhere else.¹⁵

Clinton controls the entire oligarchy; the American oligarchy and the elite are all behind Clinton, and so she will win. This populist force will be defeated, and it’s proof that democracy is crap.

They had to rescript that completely, and that’s not simple for them to do, because they had invested a lot into it.Even now, you see these tentative realignments of narrative all the time, because they're still not really sure what to say about Trump.They're very uncertain about him. They're very uncertain about what he is and what he can do.But their goal—it’s always the goal of Kremlin narrative is to ensure that in any situation, you win.So they push in all directions and make sure they have an option out.

What do they want? What did he want?

In 2016?

Yeah.Well, in 2015, when he starts, what's the goal? What's the idea?

I think in 2015 it was, “Why not?”You had had seven years of what they viewed as a weakening America, as a president who didn’t use power well, as an America withdrawing from the world for very stupid reasons.You had this stepping back of America. We are one of many at the table, which is just something they viewed as completely illogical.But you had this empty space and political churn within the United States, a lot of uncertainty about what was next in the Republican caucus and Democratic caucus. That’s the kind of space that the Kremlin likes to play in.

I think when they began, and you heard recently in the various testimonies in the Senate, Intelligence Community leaders saying that summer of 2015 was the time period when these new intensive Russian active measures against the United States started.Some of it was hacking of a variety of organizations and election infrastructure and other things.Some of it was information operations.But this new combination of all of those tools together, that started 18 months before the election, for all intents and purposes.

I think they started it. They saw that it worked in various ways. They tested various things.I don’t know what will ultimately come out, but it certainly seems like there was a massive data effort underway that may or may not have been aligned with some of the Trump campaign’s data.This is something that we’re going to need to look at very closely.I don’t think anybody really wants to talk about it very much.But you had a political campaign possibly with the support of a foreign power knowingly or of their own volition conducting psychological operations against the American people, to change the way they thought, to change the way they would vote in the 2016 presidential election.

I think it was a lot more effective than anyone expected, because social media works better here.America is a much larger, cohesive information environment, which makes operations have an echo effect within that space, because there's a lot of us.You can't do the same thing in a country that has a million people.And English is the language of the Internet, so it’s much easier to use outside forces to inject things into our system in the same way they weren't successful doing in France or other places.

But I think the combination of those two things, with the incredible amount of money that was being poured into this effort, had an impact that no one was really expecting, but it was incredibly successful.

Because it disrupted and created chaos?

It disrupted many things in America.It definitely subverted key parts of America, this idea that we no longer understand what our own interests are, it’s much more about feelings and emotion and no longer about logic and truth and reason.But all of these things happened so quickly and in a way that, when you saw it happening in Georgia in 2013, this rise of political violence after the election, the release of political prisoners or supposed political prisoners that kind of became these political mobs, backlash of the traditionalists against LGBT rights groups and minorities and Muslims and others, because they finally felt that they had been freed from the repressive tolerance of Saakashvili’s era—that happened so fast in Georgia, and it was so terrifying to those of us that were there to watch it.

Seeing some of those same things happen in the United States of America, which is the longest-lasting, most developed democracy in the world, is pretty terrifying.Seeing elements of what can only be defined as institutional erosion and state capture being directed from the White House in very specific and tactical ways, it’s a hard period to understand.You have this very small group of people, especially in the media space, there's this really small group of journalists right now who spent some time in Russia.Some of them speak Russian, know Russian history, have covered things out of Moscow, scholars of authoritarianism, and people who know American politics really well.You have to have at least two of those pillars to be able to interpret what's happening now in a coherent way.[There’s] this very small group of people who can speak very articulately about what is happening in Washington.It’s very hard to see; it’s very hard to understand.

I think both political caucuses, both party caucuses have completely failed in transitioning into this period and responding to this period and protecting American values during this period.I think that that is the part that has been so surprising to our opponents and to our allies, the lack of defense of everything that we stand for as a nation, of the history that we present, in this time period, and how quickly we can lose that is amazing.

I gather, from things you’ve written, that you're worried—dramatically worried that what is happening with Trump and [FBI Director James] Comey and special counsels and others runs the risk of creating almost a sideshow to the deeper, most fundamental problems we’ve been talking about today.Am I right about that?

No, I think it’s true.And it’s not that I think any of those investigations are not critical.I think they're very important; I think they need to happen.I think that whoever it is that’s planning some of these things is also using those opportunities—when you have one big circus-like hearing happening on [Capitol] Hill used to pass the reversal of parts of Dodd-Frank, when you have another big circus hearing on the Hill used to push through a health care bill that is not in the interest of the U.S. people in terms of how many people read it, you have now this alignment of the circus with circus-like actions underneath.

Someone is thinking about these things.Someone is thinking about how to tactically use the chaos.That can be used for normal legislative things, changing the health law, whatever, health care laws, but it can also be used for much less honest things.And I think no one’s paying attention. …

My final question.And something I read this morning, essentially say Putin is leading an insurgency that there's a permanent war going on.They're not about winning and losing anymore; it’s about chaos, disruption, and making things more complicated. Explain.

I think for now that is the goal.I think that very much the calculation from this group in the Kremlin is, if you create a period of upheaval and disruption and chaos, they are more able to cut through the center of that to achieve what they want than other countries will be in this period.I think in many ways they’re right about that.They have something that democracies don’t have, which is that central apparatus of the war machine, of the guys who sit in the room and make decisions, that we do not have, the democratic countries can't have, because we can't operate with the same amount of control with six people making decisions for the entirety of the country. But they do.This allows them to coordinate their information war with their tactical war, with other deployments, with the money they pour into different causes and political movements, with the investments coming from Russian companies and banks, with the loans given to different individuals.All of this is behind one purpose and one war machine.We do not operate the same way, by any means.

I think when they say—when the thought from this group in the Kremlin is just tear up the order that exists now, push through the chaos, and be the first one thinking about what the other side looks like, they're not wrong to think that this would be a tremendous opportunity for them.I think if you look just in the last few weeks at some of the developments in the Middle East, Russia has been very aggressive in North Africa and the Middle East and the Gulf for the last, certainly during the Obama period, but particularly since 2011, when they really started engaging in the Syrian Civil War, and then 2015, when they officially started engaging in the Syrian Civil War.

But you have this, in many ways, and not in lateral movements, this realignment of the whole structure of the Middle East, where you have the empowerment of Iran, and Russia was very much pushing for the Iran deal from the United States for many reasons.But you have this re-emergence of Iran as an actor. You have the empowerment of Iran and Iraq and Syria.You have this empowerment and incorporation of terrorist groups into regular military and intelligence activities.… But they have completely realigned how the countries in the region operate with each other, how they view Russia, how they view the United States, in a period of five years. That’s the new Russia.

The U.S. Response to Russian Measures

Two things. Obama’s reaction to the hacking as it’s going on before the election and after the election: You write that it was a reaction to the 21st-century hybrid information warfare over the last centuries. Talk a little bit about that if you would.

I think so far there has been no reaction. That's the interesting point.If you see what the French did, where they're granted a much lower effort, but there was a lot of effort made to try to influence the French elections.But right before the election you had another hack and dump of data, targeted against now-President Macron.But the entire French government, all the political parties except Marine Le Pen, the entire French media came out and explained what was happening to the public, said: “This was from Russian intelligence. This is meant to change how you're thinking. Move forward and do whatever you were doing yesterday.”

I think sometimes we forget, because we've become a very cynical social media-empowered society, the importance of authority speaking to us.In France you had, very clearly, the government saying, “This is Russian intelligence trying to change how you think.”In the Netherlands you had a softer but a similar response saying, “This is Russian intelligence trying to change how you think.”And in the U.S. you had silence.You had the entire political class and many members of the media and the entire Intelligence Community, and leaders on the Hill that we usually count on to be these outside dissenting voices, the entire White House knowing what was happening, and no one talking about it, and no one giving the American public the tools and information they needed to make their own decisions about what was going on, until it was after the election, when obviously it was going to become such an incredibly polarizing and political topic, to be able to look at this.That is such a failure of the entire elite class of this country to the American people that I don’t really know how you begin to undo it.

Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia

Estonia, you danced around it a little bit. You didn’t get specific.What did they do there? Why were they doing it? Sort of experiments?What was happening in 2007 in Estonia?

2007 was very much a test operation for cyber capacity from Russia.I think Estonia was chosen because it’s a small target.It’s also a country that gets under Russia’s skin a lot.There had just been some local actions, [these] Bronze Night riots, when Estonia moved a Soviet World War II memorial and there were some uprisings around it.This was sort of a response to that.But they basically hacked the entire government and took it down, just to see what they could do.

I think now you see them testing that same kind of capacity when they're attacking parts of Ukraine’s electrical grid and other pieces of hard infrastructure in other countries.You know, taking down a government website is bad, but it’s not really that big of a deal, ultimately.It can paralyze a country, certainly.But the new tools that are being tested are much more scary.I think the idea that they could attack hard infrastructure, power grids and water systems and other things in the United States and elsewhere, transportation systems, just because they felt like it, is something we need to pay more attention to.

There was a story that came out in Politico, I think last week, about how during the Obama years, there had been an expansion of Russian intelligence activities in the United States that diplomats assigned to various consulates would suddenly be found wandering in the cornfields of Kansas, driving in circles, mapping out telecommunications and electrical infrastructure.¹⁶

But there have been serious efforts by the Russians to look for weaknesses in our infrastructure and other critical capacities.

I think there's many, because we’re a trust-based nation.We don’t expect there to be domestic attacks against us in that way.Until we start to see clearly the types of tools we know the Russians are developing, that they have used other places in small ways, and understanding that what they learned in 2016 was something you learned against Georgia, something you learned against Moldova, is something you can actually deploy against the United States of America, until we understand that they're doing that already, then we’re not taking the threat against us very seriously. …

Putin and Hybrid Warfare

For example, was the MH-17 [Malaysia Airlines Flight 17] aftermath, did they use these techniques to deny responsibility for it? What did they do?

If you look specifically at MH-17, where you had this passenger jet shot from the sky by Russian missiles, again, it’s the belief that if you deploy your lies fast enough, they become the truth.Then you back up the lies with enough more lies that it seems as if it must be the truth.And even if no one believes it’s the truth, they believe there's doubt and question about what actually happened.

MH-17 is a fantastic, small case study of this.You’ve had really good open-source intelligence [OSINT], also real intelligence, putting together the evidence and the pieces of what was happening before that episode, the movement of Russian missiles to the place, into Ukrainian territory, to the place where they were fired, back out of Ukraine, before anyone could see them.

… It’s a really good small case study, with terrible consequences for many families, of the way that Russia has weaponized information and just no longer even cares what is true or not.But they will tell a story and know that it creates a mark in the road that everybody else is going to have to keep referring to, even when they know it’s complete crap.

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