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Susan Glasser

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Susan Glasser

Columnist, The New Yorker

Susan Glasser is a columnist and staff writer at The New Yorker. She previously served as editor of Politico and editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine. She spent four years as a Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post and is the co-author, with Peter Baker, of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE's Mike Wiser on March 4, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Putin’s Road to War

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Putin’s Centralized Power

One of the things that stood out to us is that national Security Council meeting that [Putin] has right before the war begins.Have you seen all of the footage of it or the clips of it?

Yes, I've seen the whole thing.

You know, he walks in and—could you just, to start, could you just describe that moment that we’re seeing?

Well, you know, this is the Monday of probably the most dramatic week in certainly Europe and European security since the end of the Cold War, possibly even longer.And up until this moment, although many people had been quite clear on the threat posed by this 190,000-person army on the borders of Ukraine, there remained this question mark hanging over Vladimir Putin himself and what he was going to do.You know, he had been lying to the world, both directly and through his emissaries, saying: "No, no, our intention is not to invade.Oh, we're just having exercises in Belarus.We're going to go home."He was talking with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, again, you know, telling a lot of lies.

And so there remained this kind of fog around Russia's intentions until the world heard Vladimir Putin on that day with his national Security Council, and I think that was when the veil was ripped off.That was when there was no more uncertainty.People stopped talking about "Oh, was it our fault?" and NATO.They stopped talking about "Maybe it won't happen."And it was just this incredible sort of scary moment of clarity.

And so a lot of things became clear, I think, in that interaction.One of them was the extreme isolation of Vladimir Putin, truly not only a sole decider but a man alone.So you have him striding, you know, in his sort of cocky walk and sitting by himself.And his advisers, they don't even warrant the long table that Macron and others who had come to try to talk him out of it got; they're literally sitting like 30 feet away from Putin in this vast, high-ceilinged, ornate Kremlin hall, and they're sitting on very uncomfortable-looking chairs, and they look very uncomfortable.And it's clearly not about COVID; they're like 30, 40 feet away from the czar, not, you know, 6 feet or even 12 feet.

And so this sense of physical isolation of a man who is alone, the decider.It was a naked display of brute strength.And the fact that it was taped, I think, was something that eagle-eyed journalists figured out by examining the footage and realizing from the watches of several of the participants that it was, I think, five hours earlier when it had been recorded from when it was released.

It was a show.What was it designed to show about Putin and about his power?

Yeah, it was definitely a show and a naked display of who's in charge here.One of the things that we learned from living in Russia was that the point of a lot of public displays is to show not just a little dominance but total dominance.Strength is their political language.

And, you know, I remember once going and covering a very transparently rigged election in neighboring Azerbaijan, where the son of the Soviet-era dictator was being installed in power.And there were these Russian "election monitors," quote/unquote, who where there.And you know, it was just—the son was very unpopular, and yet they had a vote total that was in, I think it was the upper 80s.Just not even plausible.

And I said to this Russian election monitor, "Well, you know, it's not like—I mean, if they had done like 55% or something like that."And he said: "You Americans, you never understand.The point is to be over the top.It's to make people accept a brazen display of strength and power to do whatever we want."And I think that really always stuck with me.And that's Vladimir Putin's language.

And he also—he was so dismissive.It wasn't just his physical distance from his subordinates.There's this extraordinary moment where he reams out the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, a man, by the way, with whom he's worked for decades, a key member of the "siloviki."That's the power circle surrounding Vladimir Putin, former KGB agents like himself.So this isn't just some like, you know, young aide that he's upbraiding, right?This is like literally the head of Russia's foreign spy service.And he berates him over and over again.And he says, like, "Speak clearly"—"Govori pryama"—"Speak clearly, speak clearly," because he wanted him and all the other advisers basically to endorse in explicit terms this action that they were taking, of recognizing these fake statelets in the east of Ukraine, which was the pretext for then launching the invasion.And he didn't feel that Naryshkin had been clear enough about that.

And, you know, what I found remarkable was not only that Putin would speak that way, because we know that Putin speaks that way, but remember, they edited it; they taped it.He could have cut it out.He chose to show that to the Russian people.

So, you know, to me, that had a very, like, dictator vibe, and it really suggested an enormous kind of crackdown was coming.And of course there has been since then a huge amount of domestic repression to go along with the foreign aggression.And what I would say is, having looked at that scene that was reminiscent of, a Stalin-era, you know, theatrical play, that we could have known that was coming.

It is amazing footage.You watch him, too, and his body language, the way he's sitting there, sort of bored and playing with his watch and cleaning his fingernails.He's supposed to be getting briefed on this very important decision that's going to bring Russia to the brink of war.What does it say about who is making the decisions and the kind of advice that he's getting and what he's hearing?

Yeah, well, obviously it tells you that, you know, this was all—as if they were just marching down a checklist.It was all planned and choreographed in advance.There was no suspense.And it wasn't a real meeting, because in fact, actually, the Kremlin after that meeting then immediately shows the footage of Putin signing these sort of elaborate scrolls, documents, recognizing the independence of these statelets.And so it's all just pre-taped, right?Like the revolution, the war will be pre-taped. …

A few days later, he's going to make this announcement, this address that he's going to launch this special military operation, that he's going to launch a war.… Is this war, is this Vladimir Putin's war?Is this Russia's war?… Whose war is it?

Yeah, that's a great question.I think it's clear that it's Vladimir Putin's war.And what's kind of remarkable, actually, is that he had the power to do that and launch that himself.He didn't even try very much to prepare the Russian people.I mean, there's been years of propaganda, I would say, about delegitimizing Ukraine as an independent state, saying all sorts of farcical things about Nazis being in control there and the like.

But generally speaking, there was an incredible amount of shock, it seemed, among the Russian elite, Western journalists who were based in Moscow, everyday people.There wasn't this incredible drumbeat on television.Only in the few days leading up to the war did that become different.

But, you know, throughout the buildup of this invasion force, they weren't preparing the ground.And I think that tells you something about the military campaign that we then saw unfold, which is Putin's plan was not necessarily to have this grinding, brutal destruction of cities and civilians thathe—perhaps he lied to himself and believed it, as an isolated dictator.But he seemed to have a plan for a kind of a blitzkrieg, a lightning strike to get rid of the Ukrainian leadership, install perhaps his own puppet government and to march in almost as liberators, in the way that his propaganda suggested.And then you saw his military take actions that didn't succeed, but seemed like that was the plan.

So perhaps they knew that the war would be unpopular with the Russian people.Putin is in deep, kind of, "destroy the village in order to save it" mode, it seems to me.He has been proclaiming very clearly for years—and explicitly since last summer, when he wrote an essay to this effect—but he's been saying very clearly, well, Ukraine is not separate, in his view; that Ukraine doesn't have legitimacy as an independent country, and then, in fact, Ukrainians and Russians are one ethnic people.Well, how can he be treating his brothers this way, right?It's an extraordinary thing.

And so, it is true there's this enormous amount of cross-border connection between Russians and Ukrainians.You know, in the Soviet times, there was an enormous amount of Russians who lived and were born and grew up in Ukraine, and vice versa, Ukrainians in Russia.And many families have connections on both sides of the border, and they don't want to go to war with people who are, if not their brothers, at least their cousins.

And so I think Putin probably did anticipate that it would not be popular, and so it needed to be fast.And now he's got both things wrong.

What led to this moment?What led to this war?Was there a strategic threat?Was there a popular demand inside Russia, or was this really all something coming from inside Vladimir Putin?

Yeah, you know, I think that this was not the war of the Russian people against the Ukrainian people.This really is Vladimir Putin's war.I think it's important to understand that.You know, this was an artificially created crisis, and it seemed almost as if Putin had drawn up a plan a long time in advance, and now he had finally decided to execute it.

So, you know, you had the years' worth of propaganda, this sort of open sore of this ongoing fighting in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbas, the illegal annexation of Crimea from 2014 on.Last summer, Putin authored a 5,000-word article in which he made his historical case and his grievance against the idea of Ukraine as an independent country.

And, you know, I really, from last summer on, I have really taken the threat and the possibility of this very seriously because of that article.I am a believer that when Vladimir Putin tells you something like that, you need to listen.And a lot of people didn't want to listen.

And, you know, you can't negotiate with somebody who defines the problem in those terms.That's existential.You can't have a negotiation where Emmanuel Macron is going to negotiate Vladimir Putin out of thinking that Ukraine is not a real country.

And so that's what always scared me, was that it was a very maximalist interpretation.And then, when it was announced that they sent copies of that article to every single member of the Russian armed forces, I thought, wow, well, that's Putin's war that he's preparing.

And so I thought we had to take very seriously, when U.S. intelligence started warning, from literally the beginning of November, really a long time in the making, they were warning and saying, "This is different; this isn't exercises; this is something we haven't seen before."And I immediately connected that to Ukraine and to almost a, kind of, Vladimir Putin's version of a holy war to restore Russia's lost empire.

Putin’s Trajectory Toward War

… When you look at what happens in Ukraine, how important is it to understand Vladimir Putin's life, whether that was his plan from the beginning or not?But the trajectory of his life leading to this moment, is that something you need to understand, in order to understand what's going on?

Absolutely.When you see this Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin today, you know, the sort of aging, isolated dictator, there are so many throughlines.It's still in many ways—I hear in the language the same Vladimir Putin that we saw more than 20 years ago as an extremely unlikely new leader of Russia.

And I recall sitting in the Kremlin library at this first meeting with Western—with American correspondents that Putin had, and it was June of 2001, right after his famous first summit with George W. Bush, in which they looked into each other's eyes.

And so even though Putin was on good terms with the West, and he was much younger, still in his 40s, insecure about being plucked from obscurity, so he was kind of, very much, the KGB officer reading his briefing books, you know, trying to seem kind of modern and, like, that he knew what he was talking about.

But then we asked about the war in Chechnya, and the veil came off, and all of a sudden it was very much the guy you see today—you know, defensive, snappish, willing to use brutal means and willing to defend it.And, you know, one thing that you get from looking at the whole sweep of Putin's two decades in power is to understand that, for him, the use of military force has accompanied every step along the way of his journey to become Russia's longest-serving leader since Josef Stalin.

He came to power because of the war in Chechnya, inside Russia's own borders, just as brutal as the horrors that we're seeing in Ukraine today—again, against a part of his "own country."They are willing to destroy the village in order to save it, but in this case, modern cities with hundreds of thousands of people, destroying civilian apartment buildings, targeting civilian targets.And once they moved back in to occupy, absolute human rights catastrophe—I mean, literally throwing prisoners into pits in the ground, OK?

So that's how Vladimir Putin came to power.He consistently then showed a willingness to use force, to march into parts of the former Soviet Union: in Georgia in 2008; in Ukraine, the first time, in 2014.He even used Russian military force overseas to shore up the regime of [Bashar al-]Assad in Syria.And, you know, you look at the bombing of Kyiv today or Kharkiv, and it echoes the destruction of Aleppo that was carried out by Russian forces under the direction of Vladimir Putin.So this use of military force in extreme ways is a part and parcel of his tenure.

Interference in the U.S. Election

We’ll go back into the film … the story of Putin that you're familiar with, his watching the collapse of the Soviet Union; building his power in the post-Yeltsin years; starting slowly with crackdowns internally and growing distrustful of the West and the United States; watching Iraq; watching the color revolutions.In the film, it goes up through taking Crimea, and where we'll pick up is that moment, 2015-2016, as Putin seems like he's managed to take Crimea.… It seems like he's emboldened because he's about to launch an operation to interfere in an American election.Who is the Putin at that moment?How does he see the world?How does he see his own power and his own place in it?

After 2014 and Crimea, I think, amazingly enough, it wasn't so much Putin emboldened as Putin aggrieved.Interestingly, he was furious about Western sanctions, European sanctions and American sanctions on him.He perhaps miscalculated, actually, and felt that he would just be able to get away with Crimea, in the way that he had gotten away with his 2008 incursion into Georgia.And he continued to be furious that, at least on paper, this path to the West existed for Ukraine despite his efforts to stop it.There were these tough sanctions.

And so, as is now well documented, he launches essentially a revenge operation.So even though he was the aggressor in Ukraine, he's furious with the West, and specifically with the United States, for its efforts to counter his aggression.So you have to understand, I think, that 2016 attack on the U.S. presidential election as Putin's revenge and retaliation for what he considered to be, you know, essentially hostile acts by the West.

And so that's how you get into this cycle of escalation, right?You know, from the perspective of Washington or Brussels, they're responding to this illegal annexation of territory, really, for the first time since World War II.And yet to Putin, it's another item in his grievances and aggrievement, and that unfolds this remarkable series of events here inside the United States.

But, you know, if you read, actually, the Mueller report or look at the Senate Intelligence Committee report, you see quite clearly that it was 2014 and the sanctions that then caused Putin to begin this operation to attack the American political system, with results that probably even he could not have anticipated.

I never thought about it that way.And obviously there's a similar dynamic at play here.And we know inside the White House there was a big debate about: Do you send military aid or do you do sanctions?And they felt like it was the option that wasn't going to escalate things so dramatically.But for him, for him, was anything going to escalate?

Well, that's right.So that, I think, is a really important thing.As I'm thinking about what's happening right now—this may be off topic, but that's why I'm so worried right now, because if Putin thinks he's in World War III with us, that's what matters, as opposed to what we think we're doing with him.What matters is not just that, but what he thinks we're doing.

And the cycle of escalation and miscalculation is a part of why we are where we are.And I think that the record is quite clear that Putin launched this attack inside the United States as a response to our response in 2014.

And so, then, you have the Obama administration that was really conflicted.And you had, actually, Obama's most senior advisers really lobbying him pretty hard in the final year of his presidency to send weapons to Ukraine.But Obama resisted that, perhaps fearing a further cycle of escalation.But it also was happening at the exact same time that our U.S. intelligence system was blinking red lights—alert, alert, alert—you know, with these cyberattacks and the hacking.

I remember so vividly, you know, knowing many of the officials who worked on Russia in the Obama administration, and their concern in the last, say, six months of the administration was extremely high. And, as now well documented, they did understand that the U.S. system was under attack, but there was this extreme hesitancy on the part of Obama to do two things: one, to go public with that; and blaming Russia, in part out of concern of escalating with Russia, but also in part out of inflaming the Republicans and inflaming the political situation in the U.S.And so I think there was an incorrect calculation that Hillary Clinton was going to win, and, you know, you didn't want to question that victory in any way, and then not to inflame the situation further or to make it more partisan.

But the result, unfortunately, was, once again, you know, Putin gets away with doing something really, really outrageous.And then, all of a sudden, there's this president of the United States who is a Putin groupie. He's a Putin fanboy, and he has been for a long time, not just in the context of the 2016 campaign.

… Just to break it down, what is the lesson he takes?There's some sanctions, and some diplomats are expelled.And whether or not he had anything to do with the results of the election, people are crediting him with having influenced the election.What does Putin take from his experience in 2016?

Well, first of all, I think he understands, and this is a theme that runs through his rhetoric over the next few years, that America is very divided against itself; that there is, perhaps shocking to many people here in the United States, a large and growing faction of pro-Putin Republicans—it's not even just Donald Trump—and that he has succeeded beyond perhaps what he thought at using those divisions inside America to his own benefit.

And so this goes along with Putin's general view of the weakness of liberal democracy and the decline of the West.And you see him giving a number of what I would call triumphalist interviews and speeches over the subsequent few years.There's a remarkable conversation he has with Lionel Barber, at that time the editor of the Financial Times, midway through the Trump presidency, in which he basically says the era of liberal democracy is over, and we won, and, you know, now is the time of illiberal democracy, the new autocrats. …

And it's very clear from Putin's statements through the Trump presidency that he saw Trump's election and the internal division and discord in the United States as a significant geopolitical development that was to his advantage.

Trump and Putin

Because we're doing this film so quickly, we have to encompass the entire Trump presidency in one scene.The one that stands out is the Helsinki summit where Trump and Putin are together in this moment.And in that moment, what do you think Putin sees in Trump?What does he take from Trump, from who Trump is, from how Trump is behaving?

So I was there, and I remember so vividly that feeling of, as if someone kicked you in the stomach, this moment.It's actually 40 minutes into the joint press conference in Helsinki with Putin and Trump, and Trump is asked what should be a straightforward question, which is: "Can you just simply once and for all dismiss this idea, you know, that there's any question about Russia's election interference?And did you tell him to knock it off again?," basically.And that ought to be not a complicated question.And in a sort of several hundred words of basically gobbledygook and word salad, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, with Putin standing there looking at him, he gives this incredible mix of conspiracy theory.He starts talking about Ukraine and the DNC server and the Pakistani gentleman, and he says, basically: "Vladimir Putin tells me he didn't do it, you know.Dan Coats, my director of national intelligence, he says they did it, but Putin says they didn't do it.And you know, maybe he's right.He very strongly said that he didn't."

And it just was this amazing moment, to have the president of the United States saying he believes the leader of Russia over his own intelligence agencies.And I think, you know, it was just one of those you-can't-look-away-from-it moments.

Now, of course, many of Trump's supporters and partisans in the Republican Party, they were shocked in the moment and then worked really hard to forget about it, you know, ever afterward.But they were shocked in the moment. …

But there was this incredible question, because Donald Trump had insisted on meeting alone with Vladimir Putin for quite a long time, and there's no note takers.So the only person who's present in the room is the U.S. interpreter for the U.S. side.And there's this scene, you know—we're working on this book on the Trump presidency, and basically, the National Security Council aides who have accompanied the president to this Helsinki summit are frantic to find out, in the short break between the private meeting and the bigger lunch, what happened; what did they say?And they can't believe the account of the president of the United States.You know, they understand that he might not tell them what happened.

So they rush over to debrief the State Department interpreter, who's a woman who's actually multiple times interpreted for Putin.As someone said to me, she's probably the U.S. official who has been in the room with Putin more than any other U.S. official.And they're frantically cornering her, to try to find out what happened.

She tells them, according to John Bolton, who later writes about this—according to my reporting as well—that Vladimir Putin spoke for about 90% of the time in the private meeting.And that is credible, in the sense that many American officials have reported that that is Putin's behavior in private: long, grievance-filled, angry lectures, at which it's very hard to get a word in edgewise.And so, she claimed, essentially, that it really was one of those Putin rants and lectures.

The biggest commitment that worried his advisers was two things.One, he invited Putin to continue the conversation by coming to the United States, which his advisers were desperate to not make happen, and they did in the end make sure that that didn't happen.So that was number one.

And then number two was, he got played by Vladimir Putin, because Donald Trump didn't prepare really for anything, and he wasn't prepared for the Helsinki summit.His advisers had desperately tried to get him ready for it in advance, and he refused even the modest amount of prep that they had.

There's this one meeting in the Oval Office before Helsinki, where the U.S. ambassador to Russia at that time, John Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, happened to be in town.So the aides are like: "Oh, thank goodness.Maybe we can finally have a prep session about Russia and Helsinki with Huntsman here; that's a good excuse."

Huntsman goes into the Oval Office with the Russia experts from the NSC, and Donald Trump looks at him, and what does he think of?He thinks of Fox TV, where he's watching Fox News all the time, and Huntsman's daughter Abby was one of the hosts of the Fox & Friends Weekend morning show.So he says, "Let's call Abby Huntsman right now."And, you know, Huntsman can't say no.

It's crazy, right?You know, the president of the United States, he's got this incredibly important meeting with Vladimir Putin.Politically, it's like a disaster in the making, and he won't even have the discipline to sit down for a few minutes and talk about what he's going to say.

And so they call Abby Huntsman on the phone, and they never get back to it.

So in the moment, Trump is totally unprepared for this meeting with Putin.And Putin says: "Well, OK, fine.You know, you want to extradite these people who you allege, these Russian intelligence agents that you allege hacked the election?Fine.We'll just make it mutual. So you give me some people that I want to extradite, that we're investigating here in Russia, and then we'll send those Russians to you."

Well, of course, who were the people?He wants to take the former United States ambassador Mike McFaul, who is not being investigated for anything.And, as if the United States would just hand over our ambassador to Russia?It's—it's farcical and humiliating.

And to reinforce the embarrassment, not only does Trump in private clearly not understand what Putin is saying, but he starts talking in public about the quote/unquote "incredible offer" that Putin has just made.And, you know, his advisers are frantically trying to, like, signal to him, "No, no, don't talk about this!"

… I don't think we're going to have time to go into the first impeachment and into the phone call and all of that, but it is interesting that Putin must be watching—there’s this subtext of Ukraine that's going on throughout the Trump presidency.And what would he be seeing from the U.S. administration during that period?

Yeah, I think it's very important, actually, to understand that it wasn't just Donald Trump's generic admiration for Vladimir Putin as a strongman.You know, he did admire many autocrats, not just Putin: Xi Jinping, Erdogan in Turkey, [el-]Sisi in Egypt.He actually once called him "my favorite dictator."By the way, American presidents are not generally known for praising dictators and picking their favorites.

So it's important to understand, though, that Trump's admiration for Putin was not just generic admiration for a strongman, but also specific embrace of many important aspects of Putin's worldview. In particular, Vladimir Putin's view of Ukraine appears to have been the view of Ukraine that Donald Trump adopted.He created and believed a narrative in which Ukraine was both a corrupt country and a country that was, quote, "out to get me."

And that is a phrase that he told his advisers at a crucial meeting in the spring of 2019, after they'd just come back from the inauguration of a name that now every American knows very well but didn't at the time, which is President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine.And this American delegation has just gone to Zelenskyy's inauguration, and they've come back to try to persuade Donald Trump that he needs to be more committed to Ukraine, and he needs to have a meeting with this new young president who's just come in, and he needs to continue supporting Ukraine with military assistance.

And that wasn't going to happen.And this becomes clear to these American officials—again, Trump's own officials.They're in the Oval Office, and Donald Trump starts ranting about Ukraine, saying things that could have come out of the mouth of Vladimir Putin.And he says: "They're a terrible country.They're a corrupt country.And"—more importantly to Donald Trump—"they're out to get me.They're out to get me."

And this is all according to sworn testimony given under oath later in the impeachment proceedings.And Trump believed the Russian propaganda that had been put out since 2016, claiming that not only did Russia not interfere in the 2016 election, but actually it was Ukraine that did it.You know, an absurd and farcical notion, right?

And yet Donald Trump believed this Russian misinformation.He repeated it privately and publicly for years.His advisers going back to H. R. McMaster, his initial national security adviser after Michael Flynn was fired, McMaster says this happened even in 2017, that Donald Trump was repeating Russia's lies about Ukraine.He, Donald Trump, didn't believe that Crimea really was a part of Ukraine.He said publicly in the 2016 campaign and then after that that, "Well, you know, they probably should be a part of Russia, and they wanted to be there."He publicly talked about his desire to lift sanctions on Russia that we had imposed on them.

So it wasn't just Russia that Donald Trump and Putin was admiring of.He actually, from the beginning—there's this Ukraine thread that, you know, we Americans didn't focus as much on, because Ukraine was not the dominant foreign policy issue here in Washington.But for Vladimir Putin, that's his No. 1 issue, and he knew from the beginning that he had gotten Donald Trump to agree with him on it.

That's really amazing.And he also must have thought that Donald Trump's followers, that half of the country, would be following Trump, as he's later making a decision about what he's going to do.He must have seen that division and Trump's views on Ukraine.

Absolutely.I think that, you know, Putin and the Russian establishment would have been closely following the divisions inside the United States.And one of the things that they would have been following was the dramatic change in Republicans' attitudes towards Vladimir Putin.And, you know, Donald Trump took Republican voters very far away from the generally hawkish and suspicious attitude toward Russia that had been associated with the Republican Party ever since the Cold War.

And so, you see, I mean, you look at those polls, you literally see the line go like this.And the percentage goes way up of Republicans who have a better view of Vladimir Putin now.And on the eve of this crisis now, this war with Ukraine, it's really—it's shocking every time you think about it, but it really is true that Republican voters today, as we're having this conversation, have a less unfavorable view of Vladimir Putin than of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, and not just by a little—by about 20 points.

Putin’s Moves Inside Russia

During this period, we're going to summarize what Putin's been doing between 2018 and right up to Ukraine, and we're breaking it down on the two sides.The first is inside of Russia, inside the domestic side, where he's cracking down on protests; he's jailing opposition; he's changing the constitution.Can you help us understand what's going on?What is Putin doing inside Russia?How are things changing during that period?

Yeah. I think one thing that is very clear is that domestic repression and external aggression go hand in hand for Vladimir Putin.And so, in the last few years, we've seen him really crack down inside Russia, to a degree that goes far beyond what he did earlier in his long rule.And you know, that has accompanied his planning for this military takeover of Ukraine.

And so I think these are very much related.For many years, analysts here in Washington have viewed regime survival as Putin's top priority and the priority of those surrounding him.And so one of their explanations for his Ukraine obsession has been the idea that he believes revolution in Ukraine and looking to the West in Ukraine and breaking away from the Soviet sphere there would potentially be infectious, that it would lead to this kind of political movement inside Russia itself that he would have to stop at all costs.

And I think we have tended to underestimate the interconnectedness between Putin's external moves and his internal moves.And you see that right now very clearly, because what he's doing is removing the last vestiges of freedom of the press and freedom of speech inside Russia, eliminating human rights groups that have been around since the late Soviet era.

I think it was incredibly symbolic but not very covered here in the United States.On Dec. 25th, which was the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union—that was the end of the Soviet Union and the day that the Soviet flag came down from the Kremlin for the last time—well, that was also the day that Vladimir Putin chose to get rid of and shut down Memorial, Russia's longest and most venerable human rights group.That message, I think, was crystal clear, you know: We're back, and this is a different era, and we're done accepting the Cold War peace that we never wanted to have.

… He must have judged that he wasn't going to get the blowback from Trump or from Europe or other countries that he might have gotten if it was 2002.Is that part of what he's learned?

Well, you know, there is this Russian saying that I often think of when it comes to Putin: The appetite grows while eating.Well, Putin has been gobbling up, you know, parts of Ukraine, gobbling up Russian civil society for years.And he's been allowed to continue eating.

And, you know, not to overextend that metaphor, but I do think that, you know, we become used to things.We've seen that here inside the United States the last few years.Things that would have been mind-blowing, unthinkable and impossible in 2017, well, you know, look at the tragic ending of the Trump presidency and attacking and storming of our Capitol, and that, you know, a year after that, there would be a large percentage of Americans who either pretended that didn't happen or said it was no big deal.

So, you know, we've seen that phenomenon inside our own society, and that has been even more pronounced in Russia.The Russia that I first came to, a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, would not have accepted the things that Russian society today is forced to accept.The return of fear is a palpable and really sad thing.Russia is much less free today than it was, probably even when I was a kid growing up in the 1980s.

Putin’s Risks Abroad

And he's also becoming—taking greater risks, it seems, abroad; poisoning opponents in the U.K. or attempting to; becoming involved in Syria despite criticism. Doesn't seem to dissuade them.Is he taking more risks during this period?

You know, there's a real debate about this, and is it uncharacteristic of Vladimir Putin to sort of put all his chips in the pot like this with Ukraine?What I would say is that there are things that Putin has done for much longer.You know, our ability to forget Putin's misdeeds is extraordinary, because it's not just the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in the U.K. during the Trump administration.Vladimir Putin sent his agents to London to use polonium, a banned radioactive substance, to assassinate someone a decade and a half ago, so this isn't new behavior.

Vladimir Putin sent his agents to assassinate rivals in the Middle East two decades ago.He has acted with violence and murder and impunity on the world stage since he became the leader of Russia.We haven't known what to do about it.We've tried various approaches.Unfortunately, none of them have worked to stop us from getting to this moment.

But it is not correct to say, oh, my goodness, I can't believe that Vladimir Putin, you know, he's become out of control in recent years.He has used every single one of these methods—you know, to lesser degrees—but he's used every single one of these things over time before.There is nothing that I am seeing right now that some element did not appear at some previous point in Vladimir Putin's tenure, including invading other countries and using horrific violence and force on civilians.He has done all of those things before.

Biden and Trump

… What is Putin's understanding of the Biden presidency, of America at this moment leading up to Ukraine?

Yeah, I think that is—again, I think it's very clear from the record that Putin believes America to be divided against itself, weakened.Jan. 6 was a moment that should have been met with a unified response from our country's leaders, saying, "This is unacceptable," and it wasn't.And that weakened the country in the world, as well as at home.

I think that Biden also came into office with a flawed conception of his ability to manage the Russia problem.I think he understood the nature of Vladimir Putin, under no illusions about the man; under no illusions, perhaps, about the system that he created inside Russia; but definitely not correctly assessing the nature of the threat posed at this moment by Putin.

And so, he had this early summit meeting in Geneva, Biden and Putin, and that was really Biden's willingness to do that.There was some controversy and disagreement inside his administration, a sense that, you know, is this really a good idea?But Biden is a believer in face-to-face diplomacy.He's a believer in engagement.He's a believer in going the extra mile with your adversaries, whether they're Republicans on Capitol Hill or Russian dictators.And so this was very in keeping with Biden.

He comes out of it, and he says, "We want to have a, quote, 'stable and predictable' relationship with Russia," right?And he thinks, well, I'm resetting here.At least I'm not being rosy-eyed and unrealistic like Donald Trump.I'm not pretending, even like Barack Obama, that we can have some good, new reset in our relationship," right?

So I think from Biden's perspective and his administration, he's actually trying to be more realistic and say, "Listen, we just want things not to get worse."

But you can't put Vladimir Putin in a box, and I think the Biden administration wanted to put him in a box.They thought if you just gave him a bit of attention that that would be enough, and that was—that was a big misunderstanding.They, like previous administrations, Obama and Trump, they thought China is the greatest geopolitical challenge for the United States of the 21st century, and they were eager to pivot to dealing with that China problem.And it was—it was a misreading of where Putin was at.

Risks and Consequences

… What has Putin risked?Is this for Russia, for himself?Is this the greatest risk that he's taken of his career?

Absolutely.Vladimir Putin has, in the end, revealed himself fully, and he has put all of his chips on the table here, right now.There is no going back.You know, we are in a situation for Putin, for Russia, and I think for Europe.You know, there's no status quo ante that we can return to.It's not like there can be an end state that is sort of ugly, but, you know, paper it over; we move on.

The world of January of 2022 is gone—as gone as, you know, the world of September 1, 1939, was gone by September 30, 1939.You could never go back to that moment.And I think, for Vladimir Putin, he can never go back to what he was and what Russia was before.

When you see those images of Zelenskyy on the one side—Putin is choreographing one thing with his national Security Council meeting, and Zelenskyy, who comes out of television, has his own media moment.And for Putin, when he's watching this contrast, what does it represent to him?

I think he sees: This is an ant, and I'm going to squash him, you know?Who does he think he is?You know, that's an illegitimate president, and it's not a real country.And the dehumanizing rhetoric that we've heard from Putin and from the Kremlin is actually some of the most worrisome and almost explicit, purposeful echoes of the language of 20th-century totalitarianism, the language of genocide.When you say that your opponents, you know, are not real people and they're not in a real country, and they're Nazis that must be eliminated, and you're saying this about the first Jewish president of Ukraine, whose relatives died in the Holocaust, it's Orwellian; it's fascist; and it's very, very scary about what his intents are.

And the willingness of others to follow and amplify him in that language—we used to say: "Well, at least it's not the Soviet Union, Putin's dictatorship.There's not an ideology that goes along with it."Now I think you are seeing that there is an ideology of Putinism that the Russian people are being forced to accept and are going along with, and it includes dehumanizing opponents in ways that suggest their willingness to conduct mass slaughter.

Because it's a biography, we've been focusing on Putin and his decision and what led him to this, but there is a consequence to it.The amazing, horrible thing about this war is that one man makes a decision, but there are consequences for Ukraine, for Russia, for Europe.What is the human result of this decision that Putin has made?

You know, unfortunately, the 21st century has already had a lot of brutal killers.There have been a number of wars already in this century, and many, many hundreds of thousands have died as a result of those wars.But Vladimir Putin is going to rank up there as one of the worst and most brutal killers of the 21st century.And his career in power has been marked by a willingness to use extreme force and violence and war as a tool of his repression, internal and external.

And you know, the human toll I think, in some ways, really is magnified by this being a 21st-century, information-era, social-media-era war.We're all, in some ways, on the front lines of this war, in ways that were unimaginable even just a few years ago.And, you know, the death and destruction of Ukraine is being magnified by the world's experience of being able to see it in horrifying, excruciating detail, filmed on iPhones and sent out to the world in real time.

I mean, you can't pick up Twitter and not see piles of dead bodies and children weeping as they're ripped away from their fathers.I mean, this is a different experience.Like, imagine if World War II had been live-tweeted; that's what we're seeing here.

So it's kind of a massive, large-scale trauma, I think, that we have not seen before.

… How dangerous is Vladimir Putin at this point?There's talk of nuclear threat, not very veiled, that he's issued.He's brought war to Europe.Obviously it's not going as he expected, but they still have tremendous military power and nuclear power.How dangerous is Putin?

Vladimir Putin is the world's most dangerous man right now.I think there's no question about that.The more that he is pushed into a corner, his history suggests escalation.It suggests that signs of weakness must be met with signs of strength to counter that.And his response already has shown that he is reverting to that playbook.

When it comes to nuclear saber-rattling, it's not the first time that Putin has used that.Part of that comes from the post-Soviet complex of feeling like, "Hey, we're not being given our due; we're a nuclear power."And you've seen that, actually, from Putin and other Russians throughout the last 30 years, that they would often say: "Well, hey, wait a minute.You know, we've got nukes. Don't treat us like this."

So it's not the first time they've invoked it, but to do so in the middle of a live-action conflict is very worrisome, especially because the use of tactical nuclear weapons is actually a part of the Russian military doctrine.And they have tested—they have run exercises every year called the "Zapad" exercises. Zapad just means "West"; i.e., training for conflict with the West.And as part of those exercises, they have been including escalation scenarios that involve, ultimately, the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

So it's not some fantasy, alarmist thing that you're hearing from experts.It is: We have to look in a clear-eyed way at, well, what is the Russian military doctrine?What are the weapons they have now?You know, people who are better versed in this than I am have pointed out that those were virtual exercises; they didn't actually test that—that apparently these weapons are kept in a centralized storage and have been for three decades.So, it's not easy.It's not like they're in backpacks, as far as we know, of soldiers on the battlefield right now in Ukraine.It would be hard to use them.We're not anywhere near that point yet.

But the Russian doctrine would be to use those, if the regime is threatened.Now, in their scenario before this, that would be threatened by a NATO actual invasion of Russian territory—not just Ukrainian territory but Russian territory.

But what about the scenario where Putin's government is threatened externally and internally, or where he misreads what we're already doing to help Ukraine, as NATO coming in on the side of Ukraine?That's the scenario I'm most worried about right now—is simply that, no matter how much Joe Biden says, "Well, we're not fighting in Ukraine, and we don't want to have World War III," what if Vladimir Putin decides that we already are fighting for Ukraine because of the weapons that we're supplying and the economic war that we've waged on Russia?

And so, are we in World War III because he says we are, right?You don't necessarily have to have two-party consent and agreement on it.And so that's—that's a big fear.

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