The FRONTLINE Interviews
Steven Pifer
U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, 1998-2000
Steven Pifer worked in the U.S. State Department with a focus on relations with the Soviet Union and later Russia for more than 25 years. He served as ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000 and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs from 2001 to 2004.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 15, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity.
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Putin's Political Rise
Vladimir Putin is elevated to the presidency in that first moment after Boris Yeltsin, on New Year’s Eve, says, “He’s the man.”Who was that Vladimir Putin?
Well, that was something that people were trying to still figure out.He’d only been prime minister for a short period of time, and before that he had been a relatively unknown person in the KGB, so there was that kind of scramble.I was actually in Ukraine at the American Embassy at the time, and it was interesting talking to the Ukrainians, because they were also trying to figure out in the early months of 2000, who is Mr. Putin?
My sense is they were probably a little bit more concerned about him than we in Washington were.They said, “Well, he has some elements of old think.”The Ukrainian concern was, in part, the comparison of Mr. Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, because while Yeltsin had his flaws, from the Ukrainian point of view on the key issue, which was recognition of Ukrainian independence and territorial integrity, including Crimea as part of Ukraine, Yeltsin was on the right line in that.They were less certain about Mr. Putin.
Why?I mean, why did Putin have the “old think,” do you think?What did they chalk it up to?
Well, part of it may have been just his experience.Remember, when new thinking under Gorbachev was sweeping through the Soviet Union, he was based at a KGB outpost in Dresden in [East] Germany, so he kind of missed all of that.
What would the effect of being in Dresden have had on him, do you think?
My guess is it was fairly isolated. I mean, it certainly wasn’t Berlin.He’s sort of cut off there, and he is seeing things happening, including basically the Wall begin to erode between [East] and West Germany.But he’s not in Russia; he’s not in the Soviet Union at the time that Gorbachev is trying to really shake things up.
Putin's Vision for Russia in his First Term
And if he was in Moscow, … and experiencing glasnost and perestroika, how would it have changed, do you think, Putin the man in 1999 that takes over?
… My sense is actually that Putin saw a need for change.Certainly if you go back and look at his early years as president, he was actually doing some fairly impressive things in terms of economic reform.What then happened was by 2003, so by his third year in the presidency, the price of oil was going up, and that released some of the pressure to do economic reforms, and you then saw that pace of economic reform begin to slow down.
A logical choice.Politicians don’t like to make economic reform decisions that are difficult, and when the pressure goes off, they back away from them.
You mean he had enough oil that it was going to float all the boats?
You had basically the price of oil going up through all of the early 2000s, and the Russian economy was growing at the rate of probably about 7 percent per year between 2000 and 2008.When you would talk to Russians, it was interesting.What they would say is they’d say Mr. Putin has this informal social compact with me, the Russian people, in which he says, in essence, you're not going to have a political voice, but you will have economic security, a growing economy and you're going to see your living standards rise.In those first two terms as president, from 2000 to 2008, Mr. Putin delivered big time on that.
Let’s talk a little bit about the relationship to the United States of America.When he first gets the job, how did he evaluate Russia and the United States in terms of power, on almost any dimension you want to talk about?
I think it’s important to bear in mind that for Russia, the 1990s were a period of chaos and economic dislocation.Most Russians who went through that period look on it in a very negative light.One of the reasons I think today the word “democracy” plays poorly with a lot of Russians is because they think about that that was the 1990s, and that was the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then Russia experienced what every other post-Soviet state experienced, and all the former Warsaw Pact states experienced, which is when you're moving from a command economy to more of a market economy, you're not going to go from point A to point B.You're first going to take a huge economic hit.And that had an impact.I think he came to power understanding that there was a significant difference in power relations.
But it was interesting watching President Putin and President Clinton during the last year of the Clinton term.I was watching this from Kiev, but the interesting issue that seemed to me was the question of missile defense, which is something that Mr. Putin regularly raises as a problem with the United States.But in 2000, the Clinton administration wanted to keep the Anti-Ballistic Missile [ABM] Treaty, which limited each side but wanted to make some amendments to it.That would have allowed a more robust missile defense, but certainly the one that would not have threatened Russia.
President Clinton went to Moscow, raised this directly with President Putin, and President Putin essentially said no, and what you heard was, “I'm going to wait for the next guy.”But the next guy was George W. Bush, and within a year of assuming the White House, he had withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, or had given notice that the United States would withdraw. …
George W. Bush and Putin, it’s the “I looked into his eyes and saw his soul” moment.But it’s also more than that.It’s Putin also talking a little bit about the story of the cross and all that.Tell me what you have heard about that, what you think about that?
Well, first of all, I actually think that there was something of a personal connection there, which is odd when you think [this is] a conservative governor from Texas and a former officer of the Soviet KGB.Now, part of this also was one of the things that you learn in the KGB is how do you make connections with people, connections that you hope later to be able to exploit.
To some extent, my guess is Mr. Putin was working President Bush in those first meetings.1But there seemed to be initially a sense that OK, we can make some things happen; we can talk about some issues.But what really clicked that relationship was the immediate aftermath of 9/11, where President Putin was one of the first to call President Bush.At that time, the Russians had a military exercise scheduled, and they basically said, “We think you Americans may be doing some stuff; we don’t want to be in your way,” and they canceled the exercise.
1
Probably about nine or 10 days after 9/11 was a fairly major breakthrough, and something of a surprise to [those of] us who were watching, because at that point in time, it looked like the U.S. military was getting ready to take action against Afghanistan, and we all assumed it was going to begin with their operations.But one of the things the U.S. military wanted to have was basically a search-and-rescue capability deployed somewhere close in case they lost planes and they lost pilots.
The logical place to put this would have been somewhere in what had been former Soviet Central Asia, looking at places like, for example, Kyrgyzstan.So there was talk already: Could the Americans have some kind of a base there?We were reading commentary in the Russian press saying, “No, no, this is a bad idea,” and Putin basically overruled that and called the president and said, “I won't object.”That actually probably made things easier in terms of getting American boots on the ground in Kyrgyzstan to support the operations against Afghanistan.
I think from that moment on, that sort of clicked and gave something to that relationship.Within the next couple of months, you had President Putin come to Washington and then they went down to President Bush’s ranch in Texas.It was kind of interesting.Originally, the plan was to host President Putin just in Texas, and for some reason, which I never figured out, the Russians somehow thought that was a slight.And we're telling them, “No, no, the White House meeting is one thing, but when the president takes you to his home, that's a big deal.”But in any case, to meet the Russian protocol needs they met briefly in Washington at the White House, but then flew down and then had their main discussions at Waco, Texas.
With cowboy hats on.
Right.I'm not sure whether Mr. Putin actually put a cowboy hat on, but certainly it was an opportunity for him to meet something of what the Texas lifestyle looks like.
So what did he want, and I understand the ABM, the missile issue.But what did Putin, on behalf of Russia and on behalf of himself, want from George W. Bush and America?
Putin was looking for things, I think in part, were motivated by his desire to maintain Moscow as a great power On the world stage.For example, he made very clear that the Russians did want to preserve the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.It was also at a time where the U.S. government had just completed its Nuclear Posture Review [NPR].The conclusion was we can get by on the American side with maybe 1,700 to 2,200 deployed strategic nuclear weapons.The original American proposal to the Russians was: “Well, we don’t need a treaty. The relationship is different; we're no longer Cold War adversaries, so let's just do this.President Bush is going to go out and say, ‘We took a look at our nuclear requirements, and we need 1,700 to 2,200 warheads.’”Then President Putin can say, “And we've done our homework, and we need X,” and you can fill in whatever X it was.
That was not comforting to the Russians.The Russians pushed hard, and President Putin pushed very hard with President Bush to get a treaty, a legally binding treaty.In the end—I think this actually goes back to the Russian response on 9/11—President Bush agreed. So there was the negotiation of a “treaty.”I say “treaty” in quotation marks because it was only about a page and a half long, and it lacked what you would normally have in an arms control treaty.There were no redefinitions; there were no counting rules; there were no verification measures.
But it gave President Putin what he needed to say, “Look, we're still a superpower in the nuclear sphere on par with the United States. We're the only ones that they have this kind of treaty with.”
Was that for him domestically or internationally for Putin?
Both.So the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), which was signed in Moscow in May of 2002, that gave them an agreement.And again, at the same time, you still had an earlier agreement in force which had all sorts of verification measures in place.But I think from the point of view of the image that Putin wanted to project for Moscow—“We're still a country that counts”—having that treaty was important.
It's about respect.
It's about respect.It’s about respect, but it’s also about an American acknowledgment that Russia is on par with the United States when it comes to the ultimate instruments of military power, which are nuclear weapons.
Then it sours over time, over years.A lot of people who have come in this room said the first stumble was Putin felt slightly ignored over some period of months, but really it was Iraq.
I'd make one comment about in the May 2002 meeting in Moscow, they did a joint statement which outlined the framework for U.S.-Russia relations.Had we managed to pull that framework in, it would have been a very different relationship.But I believe what happens in 2003, President Bush got distracted with Iraq; President Putin became more focused on his domestic situation.You lost that attention at the top, and there was perhaps a period of drift.
The question of Iraq was interesting. From my perspective, it almost seemed like the Russians did not want to be separate from the West on Iraq.But on Iraq, the Western countries themselves divided. The United States and Britain were for using military force; France and Germany were opposed.And in the end, Russia sided with France and Germany, but I didn't have the feeling that the Russians were wholly comfortable with that situation.I think they would have preferred actually a more unified stance that they could have aligned with.
But really, after that period, you see a certain amount of drift.And the U.S.-Russia relationship was one that absent really high-level attention, drift normally goes in the wrong direction.
Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term
Well, especially if one of the parties, Putin, the way people tell us, is extremely uneasy about the idea of regime change in a country that has a single strongman.It looks a little familiar to him, and his pattern has been to be anxious about such things.NATO continues to encircle.
… Mr. Putin definitely has his narrative on NATO, which is that in the early 1990s in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and given Russian weakness, the United States, Britain and Germany decided to enlarge NATO to hem in Russian power, bring military force to Russia’s borders.He really believes that.I think his narrative has no basis in history.I worked at the Clinton White House back in the 1990s, and President Clinton wanted to enlarge NATO, but he was also very mindful of the Russia connection.Basically, Boris Yeltsin heard directly from President Clinton probably 12 to 18 months in advance of every major move that NATO’s going to make on the enlargement path.
For example, in 1994-95, President Clinton was telling President Yeltsin: “Look, Boris, don’t worry about the question of who’s going to join or when. That won't happen—discussion won't even begin until the fall of 1996.”It was not a coincidence that actually pushed the issue past the 1996 presidential election in Russia.
… Before enlarging, NATO declared the three nos: there's no intention, no plan, no requirement to put nuclear weapons on the territory of new member states.NATO also said that there was no requirement for permanent stationing of substantial combat forces on the territory of new member states.So the idea was NATO’s going to enlarge, but you weren’t going to see a lot of NATO military infrastructure move in the direction of Russia.
That really only happened in 2014, after Russia’s seizure of Crimea and then the Russian involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.You also had the NATO-Russia relationship, [NATO-Russia Founding Act], established in 1997, and the idea there was to build a cooperative relationship between NATO and Russia that would be so positive the Russians wouldn’t see NATO as an adversary.
Looking back on it now, my guess is we underestimated just how much antipathy there was in Moscow toward the very idea of NATO.We also underestimated our ability to use things like the NATO-Russia relationship to try to meet and address Russian concerns.Of course in 1999, you had the NATO conflict with Serbia.That derailed things, and then President Bush and NATO tried to put it back on track.There was a new NATO-Russia relationship [NATO-Russia Council], where it was re-established in 2002.But again, I don't think we've ever been able to change that narrative in Putin’s mind yet, which is that “NATO’s coming to get me.”
… He has a built-in KGB penchant for worrying about conspiracy, sees the democracy movement infiltrating all of these places as well.I can well imagine that this guy in ’03 and ’04 and having certain amounts of unrest in his own country, that you could imagine this guy being anxious about this.
I think you have the parallel to his narrative about NATO enlargement is the whole thing about these color revolutions, is that he looks at what happened in Georgia in 2003 and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, the Tulip Revolution that followed in Kyrgyzstan and the Maidan revolution.2He doesn't see those as manifestations of public discontent with stolen elections or authoritarian governance, but he sees those as really organized by the CIA and British intelligence and German intelligence, and they're all test cases for Russia.
2
Were the CIA half as effective as he seems to think, we’d run the world.… But the ability, for example, in the Maidan revolution, at one point there were estimates of 300,000 to 700,000 people on the streets of Kiev, a city of less than 3 million.You don’t organize that from outside.That's because there really is a sentiment that those people feel.It doesn't look like to me that Mr. Putin’s ever understood that.
… Ukraine was always sort of seen by the Russians as the closest republic.Russians talk about Ukraine as the same people; Mr. Putin does this.In his last visit to Kiev before the Maidan revolution, it was in the summer of 2013.He went to Ukraine to mark the 1,025th anniversary of Kievan Rus, which both Ukraine and Russia claim as their starting point.… He gives a speech where he talks about we're all one people; Russians and Ukrainians, it’s all a single people.
You didn't have to have deep knowledge to know that that was going to offend a large segment of the Ukrainian population, who heard that speech as saying, “You denied my language, my culture, my history.”There have just been little mistakes like that.My sense is if you look at what's happened in Ukraine in the last three years, I remember talking to a Ukrainian in the fall of 2014, so after Russia’s seizure of Crimea and after the conflict in the Donbas had broken out, and he made the observation: “Vladimir Putin has succeeded where centuries of Ukrainian nationalists have failed.He’s actually brought the Ukrainian people together and really imbued them with a sense of national identity.”I think that's true, and it’s an identity that has a very strong anti-Russian tone to it.
That's not healthy, because Russians and Ukrainians, the geography is such that they're going to have to live side by side.But I think Mr. Putin’s actions over the last three years have led to a generation of Ukrainians who are going to detest Russia, and that's going to make the reconciliation that ultimately has to come very, very hard to do.
Can we go backward to 2007 when he gives the speech in Munich and really—how would you characterize that speech and what he was trying to say?
That speech was really the culmination of Vladimir Putin concluding that “I can't work with the Americans in the way I hoped to.”3It was issues where, again, his unhappiness about NATO enlargement, questions such as missile defense, the Bush administration plans to put 10 missile interceptors in Poland and radar in the Czech Republic, and just the sense the relationship wasn’t making progress.
3
I recall in my last year, or actually my second to last year in the State Department, in 2003, is we worked out what we called the Action Checklist, and we actually persuaded the Russians, “Let’s do this instead of a joint statement,” because joint statements have a half-life of maybe 30 seconds, but the idea was to say: “Let’s identify 25 problems between Washington and Moscow.Let’s figure out a timeline. When should they be solved, and then who should solve them?,” and then put them in there by name.
So I could call somebody on the phone and say: “OK, I'm looking at the Action Checklist. Next month, you have this deadline and you're on the hook to do this.”Those of us who worked at the State Department thought this was a great device because it would allow us to push the bureaucracies on both sides to get things done.
My sense was neither on the American side nor on the Russian side was there much effort to fulfill that.So there's a framework outlined, but by 2004 neither side seems to be doing much to fulfill that.So you don’t have anything positive going [on] in the relationship.And then you have the buildup of irritants, the question about missile defense, the question about NATO enlargement.At that point, there's a discussion going on: Well, what about a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty [START] that was due to expire in 2009?The sides have very different approaches to that.
So there was a sense by 2006, 2007 that we're not making any progress, and the numbers of difficult issues were beginning to grow.
Did it feel to you—you know the region; you know the people—did it feel to you like, “Uh-oh, we need to watch this closely?This is a fire waiting to be lit,” or, you know, par for the course?
I think that was a mark or signs are definitely changing.Then, of course, we saw other signs within the next year.For example, in 2008, Ukraine just declared that it wanted to have a Membership Action Plan [MAP] with NATO.A month later, President [Viktor] Yushchenko of Ukraine is in Moscow meeting with President Putin, and at the press conference afterward, Putin looks at him and says, “It’s going to be a real shame that I have to target my missiles at you.”That was really beginning to suggest that there really are some bumpy questions coming up.
And then, of course, several months later you had the conflict between Georgia and Russia, although I didn't really share the U.S. government’s narratives to what happened in August of 2008.
What do you think happened?
My sense is that the Russians were prepared, and perhaps even eager, for a conflict with Georgia.Part of that was motivated by we're going to show the Georgians that getting too close to NATO has a price.But I believe the reason that war broke out on the night of Aug. 7, 2008, was because the Georgian president, Mr. [Mikheil] Saakashvili, made a really stupid decision, which was to send his army into South Ossetia, and even had they been tactically successful, had they taken South Ossetia, had they closed off the tunnel to Russia, there was no chance the Russians weren't going to sit back and say, “OK, you got us.”The Russians were going to come back and extract their pound of flesh.
Now, I'm not saying there might not have been a war a month later provoked by the Russians, but if you go back and look at the history, it was the decision, I believe, by Mr. Saakashvili to go into South Ossetia to trigger that conflict at that particular date.
Why?
I wish I knew.I don’t really understand it.I had a chance to ask some officials in the Georgian government a month or two later, “Why did you do that?” I didn't feel that they had a good answer.My question was, “Even if you succeeded at the tactical level, [and] you'd been able to sort of take back the province, did you think the Russians were going to sit back?”
The only thing I can think of is they thought somehow some outside power, even the United States, would step in. And if that was the case, they badly misread where Washington was.I was told both by Georgians in the summer and also by Americans in June and July that some pretty clear messages had been sent to Tbilisi; that if you end up in a shooting war with Russians, don’t look to the United States for military help.
For those of us who then step up to 20,000 feet and look at 2007 and the Munich speech, we're also watching on a parallel track inside this film the use and development of information warfare.You see February, late February, the speech in Munich; you see in May Estonia happen.
Right, first the cyberattacks.
You begin to see cyber and hard power in Georgia and then Ukraine.It’s almost like he’s practicing; in addition to everything else, that there was a little saber rattling, and then he decides, OK, I'm going to prepare in some way.
This is where I think things were made more difficult by the perception that President Putin has, which is the color revolutions aren’t generated domestically, but they're organized from the outside.He looks at that, and he looks at American democracy promotion programs.We did a lot of that when I was in Ukraine.We tried, and I believe we were successful, in keeping the programs nonpartisan.But the way the Russian president looks at those things—again, “It’s designed to infiltrate and weaken my society.”To the extent that he believes that, he may well conclude that the sorts of things he’s doing against the West, including the cyber hacking and interfering in elections, is justified.I'm not quite sure how we're going to straighten that one out.
Putin and Hybrid Warfare
Were you paying attention in any way, even though you were out, for the development of his military toolkit, the Gerasimov strategy that people talk about and all of that?
The Gerasimov strategy, it talked about this what you’d refer to as left of launch.4His [Gen. Valery Gerasimov’s] idea is basically in a way to prepare the battlefield, and of course, the idea was if you do that successfully, you don’t actually have to go to war.So I think you've seen those tools develop.To some extent, it probably made sense for the Russians, who still saw their situation, and I believe today still feel that in some categories of military force they lag significantly behind the West and the Chinese.Although the situation is much improved, beginning probably about 2005, 2006, you begin to see significant amounts of money flow into the Russian defense budget.
4
They begin doing things that they hadn’t done in 15 years.I remember getting an excited call to come down and do an interview about the fact that Russian bear bombers had flown near Alaska.Really the only exciting thing about that was it hadn’t happened for 10 or 15 years.My conclusion was, well, the air force of Russia finally has enough money to buy the fuel and do the sorts of flights they would have liked to have done, but they couldn't do it for economic reasons.
Well, the fact is, he is prepping. I mean, he is improving.He was spending money on, he was getting ready for something, whatever it is, even if it’s just to be able to say: “Look, I'm as big as you are. At least I may not be as big as you are, but you need to pay attention to me.”
Part of that is, well, at least with Georgia and Ukraine, there is on the desire of the Russians really to have this sphere of influence, which includes Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova.The three Baltic states are probably safely out.They're anchored in NATO; they're anchored in the European Union.I don't believe that Mr. Putin wants to recreate the Soviet Union, in part because that would mean the Russian economy has to subsidize the other republics that are less well off, and they don’t want to do that, but what they do want in this sphere of influence is basically to have deference from their neighbors to Moscow on issues that the Russians decide are central to Russia interests.That certainly means how close to get to NATO or how close you get to the European Union.That's one aspect of it, and that's a big focus.
But on top of that, there is this desire on the part of the Kremlin to play a global role, to be seen as a superpower.That is probably a part of the reason why they're in Syria, is to basically say yes, we can reach out and do things outside our region to support our allies.Russia doesn't have very many allies, but there's that ability to show that they can be a player in the Middle East, and that's something that they probably couldn’t have done 10 or 15 years ago.
Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term
Let’s take ourselves to 2014, Crimea and Ukraine.He has in the span from ’07 to ’14 improved his military throw weight; he’s certainly got that.He’s practiced in Georgia and Ukraine once and [in] Estonia with the cyber.He seems to have a kind of full complement ready.He has the Sochi Olympics, but he’s also got a lot of stuff going on in Kiev in the months before.Tell me that story; create the scene.What actually happens that causes Vladimir Putin to go in, and how does he go in, and what does he employ, and what's new about what he does?
I would actually think that story begins probably in the spring of 2013, when you first see the Russians really come up on the net against the idea of an association agreement between the European Union and Ukraine, whereas before they'd been silent about it.From the outside trying to figure it out, it may be that somebody actually sat down in Moscow and read the association agreement.What that agreement is, if Ukraine actually implements everything in that agreement, Ukraine is fundamentally changed forever, and it will never be in the Russian orbit.
I think they read to that conclusion, and then you begin to see in the summer of 2013 the threats of economic consequences, negative consequences for Ukraine to join the European Union.You see a push to try to pull Ukraine into the Eurasian Economic Union, which is the Moscow-led alternative.Then you see in November-December the Russians being prepared to offer huge loans, up to $15 billion, to help President [Viktor] Yanukovych in Ukraine.That's that effort, but things in Kiev from their perspective were out of control, and you have the Maidan revolution.
Very quickly, you have the very violent three days in Kiev, a very brief effort led by the Germans and the French and the Poles and the Russians were there as well to see if they could broker a settlement between Yanukovych and the opposition leaders.My guess is—and they did succeed.They worked out an arrangement for a power sharing in elections and such.My guess is that the oppositionists never could have sold that to the people on the streets of Kiev because there was so much anger about the deaths of near over 100 protesters.
Yanukovych signs this thing, though, and he disappears.… So the next day, the Ukrainian parliament votes to elect an acting president, and the acting president and the acting prime minister make very clear their number one goal is to go and sign that association agreement with the European Union.
To my mind, that's what probably triggers things in Moscow.President Putin in a documentary in 2015 said it was really over that night that he makes the decision.
… Now, Crimea was actually a fairly easy place for the Russians to act, because by agreement with Ukraine, there was already probably 10,000 to 15,000 Russian service personnel in Crimea.The Ukrainians agreed to allow the Black Sea fleet to be based there in supporting units, so there was a lot of military infrastructure the Russians already had on the ground.And Crimea was one part of Ukraine where ethnic Russians were a majority, about 60 percent of the population, so that was a fairly easy place for them to act, and they acted quite quickly.
They moved in with what the Ukrainians called “little green men.”These were people, and they were clearly, by the way they handled themselves and their weapons, professional military, wearing Russian-style combat uniforms but no insignia.
I guess it was about a week later at a press conference, a journalist asked President Putin, said, “Mr. President, aren’t those soldiers down there, aren’t they Russian soldiers?”He says, “No, no, they're just local defense guys.”And the reporter says, “But they're wearing Russian-style combat fatigues.”And he says, “Well, you can get those at any army surplus store anywhere in the post-Soviet space.”The reporter didn't think to ask the follow-up question, which was, “Well, do they get those tanks and armed personnel carriers at that same store?”
But within a month after that, or six weeks after that, Putin had admitted they were Russian troops.He had had their commanders to the Kremlin for an award ceremony, and the Russian Ministry of Defense had put out a medallion commemorating the return of Crimea.
So you had that very quick action.Once the Russians had seized Crimea and had cut it off from the Ukrainian mainland, they then had a vote in the parliament of Crimea.A number of people who might have voted in a negative way were not allowed access to the vote, but they declared independence, and they said, “We're going to have this basically put to a referendum.”The referendum gave you two choices.Choice number one was to join Russia.Choice number two was to stay independent as Crimea, but go back to a 1994 constitution which basically was rejected back in 1995 because it, in effect, made Crimea all but independent.
Now, if you were in Crimea and you wanted to stay in Crimea as a part of Ukraine under the then-existing Ukrainian constitutional arrangement, you had no box to check.So the referendum that was conducted has a typical Soviet-reported 97-plus vote to join Russia.Then within four days or five days later, a treaty of joining Russia, Russia in effect annexes Crimea.
And then?
The interesting thing is I think if the Russians had stopped at that point, they might have gotten away with it.If you look at the sanctions that were applied by the West in the immediate aftermath of the Russian seizure of Crimea, they were relatively minor.My guess is in the West, there would have been a certain sympathy for the Russians saying we have a historical case for Crimea, which the Russians do have a historical case for Crimea.
Sevastopol, the major city, was founded by the Russians to be the home port for the Black Sea fleet.However, in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the agreement was when you recognize the states in their current borders, and at that point Crimea was a part of Ukraine.And then there were multiple documents thereafter where Russia agreed to recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.So had they stopped there, though, I think they might have been able to get away with [it].
What happened instead, though, was you saw separatism in eastern Ukraine, particularly in the Oblast, or the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, and you saw the similar appearance of these little green men.5
5
When I was posted in Ukraine in the late 1990s, I traveled quite a bit to the east.I was in Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and my sense is that had the Russians not gotten involved, you wouldn’t have had a three-year-long conflict there, and you wouldn’t have had 10,000 dead; they would have worked it out.But I see this conflict as really sort of engineered by the Russians, funded by the Russians.Certainly if you look at the amount of weapons that are now in Donetsk and Luhansk, these are coming in from Russia.Occasionally you get pictures, sometimes unwittingly provided by the Russians themselves, that show military equipment that the people and the occupiers cannot claim they seized from the Ukrainians because it’s tanks that were of a kind never in the Ukrainian inventory; they’ve only been in the Russian inventory.
Then in several cases, in August of 2014 and then again in February of 2015, there's strong evidence that the Russian help included regiments of the Russian army actually entering Ukraine to support the separatists.
When all of this is happening, there's a controversy in the United States, of course, about lethal weapons to help the Ukrainians.Help me understand that debate.
That debate really came to a head in February of 2015.I was part of a group that wrote a paper proposing a fairly significant increase in American military assistance to Ukraine.We had, I believe, seven specific recommendations, one of which was for an item of lethal military assistance, which was manned portable anti-armor weapons.Things like javelin anti-tank missiles.That came because several of us had traveled to Kiev and then we actually went out to Kramatorsk, the field headquarters for Ukrainian military operations, in the Donbas area, Donetsk and Luhansk.
That was the one niche that they said really needed filled.The Soviet-era anti-tank weapons they had simply didn't work, and they were seeing increasing numbers of tanks and armed personnel carriers coming from Russia into the hands of the “separatists,” which I use in quotation marks.
I think that was the debate then.It was interesting. When we talked to people both in Kiev but also the field commanders, I didn't find anybody, or I didn't hear anybody saying, “Give us these weapons, and we’ll drive the Russians and the separatists out of Ukraine.”They were realistic. They understood that they could not beat the Russian army.But what they were saying is, “Give us these weapons, and that allows us to solidify our defense and to make it more costly for the Russians and the separatists to try to push further into Ukrainian-held territory.”The idea was take away easy military options from the Russians and the separatists, and maybe that helps steer the path more toward a negotiated solution.
How badly were they getting beaten?
In 2014, really badly beaten.We were told that in mid-August of 2014, the Ukrainian military was actually having some success.They had significantly compressed the territory held by the separatists, and people were even thinking by the end of August of 2014 or September, they may have completely restored control of the territory.And then on or about probably August 20 or 23, you had, I believe, regiments of the Russian army entered and several really nasty days.We were told that probably 50 to 70 percent of the armor that the Ukrainians had in that part of the country were destroyed just within a week, so it was a huge setback for the Ukrainians.
You were a supporter of the idea of at least helping them build a defensive wall against the Russians?
Right.We weren't talking about giving them F-16s or M1 tanks, and we certainly were not talking about providing U.S. troops.In fact, we actually said in our recommendation that whatever you provide the Ukrainians, the Ukrainians should be capable of operating themselves.You don’t want to have American advisers or anything like that.But it was designed to help them deter against further Russian attacks.
And it came at a time, there was a debate going on here. There was a lot of interest in Congress.We briefed the report at the Defense Department, the State Department, senior officials at the White House.Everybody understood this was going to be a presidential decision, so nobody that you were talking to is going to come out and say, “Yes, I agree with you.”But we felt from the body language that most of our interlocutors within the U.S. government agreed it was time to provide Ukraine with weapons.I had the sense that we had persuaded pretty much about everybody, with the exception of a couple of people, but one of the people that we had not persuaded was Barack Obama.
At that time, I think he was naturally cautious about this, and I think his concern was does this lead into escalation, which is a reasonable concern.We thought we had some good answers when some of his people asked us about that.But then within about a week after that report came out, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, came to talk to President Obama.This was when she was getting ready to gear up with the president of France to try to broker a solution.
My understanding is when she saw him she said: “Please don’t provide weapons. This is not going to help my negotiating effort.”My guess is that that reinforced the president’s caution, because he didn't want to upset the apple cart.
Now, I believe, or at least I hope, that when Chancellor Merkel was then seeing Putin, she used that and said: “Look, the Americans are about ready to make this decision to give weapons. We've got to come to a settlement.”She was able to broker a settlement which we refer to as the Minsk II agreement, the problem being, though, that the Russians have never really implemented it.
When you say she could have threatened that the Americans were ready to go, were the Americans really ready to go?
I'm not totally sure.The U.S. Congress was certainly ready to go.My guess is that the majority of folks at the State Department and Defense Department were ready to go.The president probably was not.But to the extent that the—if you go back and watch the press conference that took place at the White House, I thought there was a pretty good good cop/bad cop between the chancellor and the president, and that was designed to send a message.
… There are people we've talked to who said Obama absolutely, positively, and maybe Merkel, too, should have stepped up and stopped this guy once and for all, or at least sent him a very strong message that if you're going to have these adventures, you're going to pay a price for it that's more than sanctions.What do you think about that argument?
I think the West could have sent a sharper message.I favored and would have liked to have seen stronger economic sanctions.I would have liked to have seen more military assistance to Ukraine.I would have liked to have seen provision of some types of lethal assistance.I would draw the line; I would not say, “Send the 82nd Airborne.”I mean, the fact of the matter is, we don’t have a security guarantee to Ukraine.I think we have an obligation to help them in part because, at our request back in the 1990s, they gave up 2,000 nuclear weapons that were designed to strike the United States.
But in that negotiation 20 years ago, we were fairly clear with the Ukrainians: We're prepared to do things, but we're not prepared to give you the same kind of guarantee that we give a NATO ally.So I think we could have done more; we should have done more.Whether it would have changed the game with Putin, I'm not sure.
But there have been some successes, and this is where—economic sanctions, for example, have failed to date in the sense that they haven’t caused the Russians to say, “OK, we're going to do full implementation of Minsk II, and we're going to leave eastern Ukraine.”But they may well have succeeded in preventing the Russians from trying to do more.
I go back to the spring of 2014 where you saw this talk in Munich, this term <i>Novorossiya</i>, which is a term that applies to probably about 40 percent of Ukraine in the east and the south.There was this idea, I believe for a time in the Kremlin—it probably only lasted for a couple of months—that a good part of Ukraine would rise up against Kiev and say, “We want to be independent, or we want to join Russia,” and then Kharkiv and Odessa and Mariupol.And this talk goes on in Russia for maybe two or three months.President Putin sometimes uses the term <i>Novorossiya</i>, and then he stops using it probably around September, October of 2014.To my mind, that's probably when it dawned on him [that] you're not going to see a mass uprising of Ukrainians that want to join Russia, that there isn't that sentiment there. …
Intervention in the U.S. Election
When he unleashes in ’15, the—I guess there's no question that he unleashes the cyberattacks on the United States, the election process.
2016?
But really in ’15, there's a little bit of [it], too, but by ’16 he’s in full operation.Were you at all surprised to know that Russia and Putin were behind what was happening?
Maybe a little bit at first, but then no.This actually sort of fits in the pattern.Again, I can see Putin justifying this in saying, “Well, look at the Maidan revolution,” which was in his view clearly orchestrated by the Americans.For years, they were doing democracy-promotion programs here.He seemed to take particular umbrage at Secretary [Hillary] Clinton and comments that she had made in 2011 when, in the aftermath of a Russian parliamentary election, you had significant protests in Moscow about the way that election was conducted, and those protests were understandable.6I mean, you had lots of YouTube pictures posted by Russian citizens showing people stuffing ballots and things like that.
6
But he seemed to have almost that personal antipathy toward Secretary Clinton because of that.7So, if you take all that together, he may think that he’s perfectly justified to do this.
7
Some people we've talked to said this is war.
I think it’s an attack on a core element of American democracy, and I am disappointed that the United States has not responded in a more forceful way.I'm not talking about military strikes on Russia, but are there things that we could do?I assume we have information, for example, about the people close to the Kremlin who are corrupt, and [we could] begin to put some of that—we should be doing things to signal back to the Russians that this is not a game that you want to play; that there will be consequences.What I find frustrating is the Trump administration or the president doesn't seem to want to recognize this.But he has no guarantee that in two years or four years the Russians might not use it against him.This is something we need to find a way to make clear with the Russians is out of bounds.
As the intelligence agencies were discovering, first [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, then NSA, then FBI eventually, in the summer of ’16 and on into the fall, what should Obama have done?8Yes, he picked up the red phone or the red line at one moment, and yes, he pulled him aside and said, “Knock it off,” at another time.But what should they have done, and why didn't they?
8
I mean, a cyber response which might have been tit-for-tat is one that my guess is on the American side they probably would have been cautious about, in part because we're probably more vulnerable to cyberattack than Russia is.But I guess what I would have liked to have seen, again, is there information?I think there has to be information, for example, when you look at the people around President Putin, when you look about their individual wealth.I mean, you have government officials who also have day jobs as chairmen of the boards of large parastatal companies, you know, putting some of that information out, because I think that does actually anger the average Russian.The message should be to the Russians, “We can play this game, too.”9The idea is to set up a mutual assured-destruction-type relationship and say, “If you don’t do it, we won't do it.”
9
But it’s important that we find some way to make the Russians understand that this will, if repeated, will only be repeated at a significant cost to the Russians, because if not, the Russians have no incentive not to do it again. …10
10
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