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Timothy Snyder

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Timothy Snyder

Author, The Road to Unfreedom

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University. He is the author of The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Michael Wiser for FRONTLINE on Sept. 26, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Putin and the Presidents

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The Biden Administration and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

I just want to start at the moment right before the invasion of Ukraine, the end of 2021, Joe Biden’s being briefed.His intelligence is saying that Vladimir Putin is intending to go into Ukraine, that this is serious.Can you help us understand what the stakes are at that moment?What’s on the line for Joe Biden, for Putin, for democracy, for the world?

Well, in late 2021, the Biden administration was faced with this challenge they didn’t expect; namely, a major power is going to invade its neighbor—not just any major power, the Russian Federation, and not just any neighbor, Ukraine, which is on the border of NATO and the European Union.

What was at stake is the idea that countries shouldn’t destroy other countries for no reason in a war.What was at stake is the international legal framework which had been trying to keep going since the Second World War.And what was at stake more broadly, from the Biden administration’s point of view, is whether there can be a coherent American foreign policy which makes any difference.

And I think they’ve had a pretty good run at that, first by trying to persuade other people that the Russians were going to invade, which the Americans were right about; secondly, by being part of a coalition which has helped the Ukrainians with arms and in other ways; and third, by talking about what the war is all about, which is that if you let a country invade another country with the goal of exterminating its population, that’s not just a horror in and of itself, it’s a remaking of the world, which is going to continue in directions that you don’t want indefinitely.

So this is really a profound moment for the Biden administration, one that’s going to define who they are and really define his presidency.

I think in 100 years, historians will be writing about the war in Ukraine.I’m not sure there’s going to be any other event in the Biden administration about which that is true.A lot of the things that seem very important to us right now, like gas prices one summer or whether we’re wearing masks or not, that’s going to disappear into the mists of time.Whether Ukraine wins or loses, which is very much up to the United States, very much up to the Biden administration, is something that historians are going to be writing about in 100 years.

There’s this tremendous effort to try to dissuade Vladimir Putin.There’s a video call; there’s statements that Biden makes; there’s diplomatic missions going to Moscow, trying to convince them.There are warnings; there are threats.Why does it not dissuade Vladimir Putin from invading?

I believe that Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine on the basis of a systematically false understanding of what Russia is and what Ukraine is.Putin helps us understand him by publishing a 7,000-word essay about his own views about history, and in that essay he makes it clear that he doesn’t really believe that Ukraine has any kind of independent existence; there isn’t really a Ukrainian state; there isn’t really a Ukrainian nation.If you’re planning your war on that basis, you think it’s going to be all over before anybody else’s response really matters.

The Russians were planning for a three-day war.They were planning for a political war.They were thinking that there aren’t really that many Ukrainians in the sense of people who’d be willing to risk their lives for their country.And in this they were entirely wrong.I think what Putin was imagining is that this is all going to be over so quickly that anybody else’s reactions, be they sanctions, be they anything else, are going to look silly and aren’t really going to matter.

When he announces what he calls a “special military operation” but which is the war in Ukraine, if you go back and you look at that speech, one of the things that’s interesting about it, you know, the line that comes out of it is the “empire of lies,” and a lot of the speech is about the United States.It’s about Ukraine, but a lot of it is about the United States in particular.What do you make when you see him deliver that speech? …

Well, Putin is and he isn’t talking about America.This is not a man who really spends a lot of time in the rest of the world.Unlike all the foreign leaders with which he deals, he doesn’t know foreign languages.He doesn’t know a thing about Ukraine, which is interesting.He thinks he knows everything; he doesn’t know anything.And his understanding of Ukraine is based on the notion that it isn’t really a place, and if it seems to be a place, this is because of foreign conspiracies.And in a historical reasoning, those conspiracies have been, in the past, the Austrians, the Germans, the Poles, the Jews.Today it’s the European Union and the Americans.

So Putin’s worldview, which I think he really believes, is that Moscow and Kyiv are somehow organically together and always should be, and it’s only because of the outsiders that this isn’t true.

And so what he’s talking about is not America as it is; he’s talking about a fantasy of America, a fantasy of America that wants to do these insidious things like take Ukraine away from Russia.But that just shows, in my view anyway, a misunderstanding not only of America and Ukraine, but also of his own country.

How Russia Views America

… Before Ukraine, many Americans didn’t see themselves in a cold war with Russia, didn’t see Russia necessarily as a major enemy, but here he’s describing America as a major enemy.How important is it to understand the different worldviews of Americans and of Russians about what’s happening and how different they are?

Well, one thing that one has to understand is that the Russians are systematically wrong about how much attention Americans pay to Russia.The Russians think about America all the time.Americans only think about Russia when they have to.And that is not a reality which Russian leaders can afford to recognize or talk about because their power or their ideology of power rests on the idea that there are great powers in the world: Russia, America, China.Russia’s one of these great powers.

And so the basic reality that Americans actually don’t really like to think about Russia, they don’t think about Russia that much, would be something which is absolutely unacceptable.But that’s a fundamental difference in worldview.Russian leaders are thinking nothing about domestic politics, are thinking about foreign policy all the time, and foreign policy as a kind of duel of great powers.

American presidents, American public opinion, the American columnists, they’re not thinking that way.We only react to Russia when we absolutely have to.I mean, we reacted very, very late and very, very weak to the Russian intervention in the American election in 2016.When Mitt Romney said, when he was campaigning against Barack Obama, that Russia was a serious threat, everyone laughed at him except the Russians, who kind of liked to think that they were a serious threat.When Obama says that Russia doesn’t matter because it’s only a regional economy and so on, he’s saying something which to the Russians is absolutely incomprehensible; they think of themselves as a great power, and they want to prove that they’re a great power.

So the biggest difference is that Russians really like to think about America because American enmity, the idea that America’s trying to hurt Russia, gives Russia a sense of meaning, whereas Americans absolutely do not need Russia for their sense of themselves.That’s the basic difference.

… The last question on the end of the Cold War is these statements that you would hear— George H. W. Bush says, “It’s a victory for the moral force of our values”—that there’s a feeling at the end of the Cold War that it wasn’t just a collapse of the Soviet Union; that it represented something bigger, that democracy had triumphed.When you look back at that and the contrasting views between Biden and between Americans, was that a dangerous view that Americans adopted, that it was a sense of inevitability about what had happened?

I think it’s better to say that democracy is a better system than it is to say that it’s inevitable, because once you say that it’s inevitable, you’re forgetting all the things that you have to do or struggle for in order for democracy to come into being.And that applies not just to us—and our own democracy I think, arguably, is in a worse situation than it was in the late 1980s—it applies to everybody.The Russians, nobody in Eastern European was going to get democracy inevitably, and nobody was going to get it just because there was capitalism, which I think was our big, tremendous, stupid mistake at the time, relying on these larger structural forces, not paying attention to culture, not paying attention to ethics, and imagining that the economic transformation in the form of privatization was automatically going to bring about political changes.

That’s what we were thinking, and we were wrong about that.And Russians were also wrong about that.The Russians who were in charge, it was convenient for them to think that because the people around Yeltsin were making huge amounts of money at the time.But that was a big mistake, which we should recognize, that democracy is going to be inevitable because there are no alternatives, as people said; it’s going to be inevitable because capitalism’s going to bring it.These were all mistakes, and we can learn from these mistakes.

Russia, I think, is one consequence of believing in those mistakes.If you seriously believe that just privatizing things is going to lead to a good political system, then Russia should be a good political system, because they did privatize things.But in fact—this is a lesson for everybody—if too few people own too much of the stuff, and if too few people dominate the media, you’re not going to end up with a democracy, whether you’re America, whether you’re Russia, whether you’re anybody else.

And I imagine that the former KGB agent who you describe, the cynical Vladimir Putin, could see in American hubris about democracy some way that he can operate that we may not pay attention to until it’s almost too late.

Yeah.The idea that we have, that capitalism is eventually going to bring everybody around to some kind of reasonable form of politics, the idea that there’s no alternative, opens a huge window of opportunity for people who do represent alternatives, especially in capitalist countries, which Russia and China, by the way, are.We were very slow to pick up on the particular nature of the Putinist threat largely for this reason, because we thought well, because it’s capitalist, it will be OK, or we just measure its economic growth and we say it’s not very important.

But meanwhile, Putin can represent an alternative.He can come up with an ideology which draws people not only in Russia but in America.He can come up with a counter story about globalization.He can claim that he’s the one who embodies values because we’re not talking about values; we’re just talking about how this stuff is inevitable, which is not very attractive.He can make all those claims.And we’re very, very slow to pick up on it because we’re in this story about how history is on our side.

Putin and the Bush Administration

What do you make of that that famous meeting with George W. Bush, where he says he looks into Putin’s eyes and he sees his soul?Back then, did it matter?Did we not understand who Vladimir Putin was?Or was it not clear at that point who Vladimir Putin was?

I think that Vladimir Putin at that time is not the same person we’re dealing with now, but there is a constant thread which is in a way representative of Russia.The eyes-seeing-the-soul thing I don’t understand at all; I’ve never had that experience.But Putin did consistently say Ukraine is not a real country, and that has consistently been his view.And that’s a typical Russian view, that Ukraine is not really a country.And the idea that Ukraine is not really a country only becomes threatening when Ukraine in some ways starts to become a better country than Russia, according to measures which some Russians at least some of the time themselves accept, like Ukrainians can vote, or Ukrainians have had a peaceful change of president with an actual election, where the votes counted, which Russians have never had.Ukrainians are closer to Europe.Ukrainians are going to be able to travel in Europe.Those kinds of things suddenly turn Ukraine from being not a real place — a joke, which is Putin’s first idea — to being not a real place, therefore some kind of a concocted threat by the West.

But the common idea, which is not just Putin’s, that this is not a real country, that was actually there to hear way back when.

And what’s going on in that time? Putin, it seems like, is trying to win over Bush, but by the time you get to the famous speech in Munich, he’s describing America as a threat.What is it that turns him?Is it that rhetoric of the freedom agenda of Bush?Is it Iraq?Is it what’s going on in the “near abroad”?What’s the progression in those seven years?

Give me the chronology again.

Putin comes in in 2000.… And by the time you get to 2007, he gives a speech at the Munich Security Conference where he says the West is a threat.And we’ve talked to people who were there, and they said it was striking to see Putin describe, in rhetoric that’s very similar to what he was saying in 2022 about the West.What is his progression of coming to see America as a threat?

I guess it’s very important for us as Americans to recognize that the most important things that are happening in Russia are actually happening in Russia and that the things that Putin says about us are very rarely, and if so only distantly, connected to actual things that we do and say in our own country.The way to understand Putin, I think, is to follow the failure of his domestic policy.

Putin comes to power with the basic idea that Russia can be rigged up into some kind of rule-of-law state.“Dictatorship of the law” is the phrase that he uses.He quickly realizes that that’s not the case, or at least that he’s not the person to do it, and shifts gears to a different program of rule, which involves not getting rid of oligarchy, but being the top oligarch, which is a very fundamental difference.It might look the same because you’re rounding up people, putting them in jail, but becoming the top oligarch, becoming the boss of bosses, turning the state into the most important mafia clan, is very different than cleaning out the stables.

Once Putin makes that turn, that’s the important turn, because it means that there’s never going to be effective domestic policy.Russians are not going to get the things you’re going to get out of the rule of law, like social mobility, freedom; they’re not going to get that.What they’re going to have to get instead is a foreign policy of spectacle.

So we, the West, are the enemy of choice for Putin.And the reason why we’re the enemy of choice is that defining the West as the enemy feeds in to a very long tradition in Russia, a, and b, it’s also very safe because we’re not actually going to do anything aggressive with respect to Russia.

So the way to understand Putin’s turn against the United States is not to feel guilty about American policy; it’s not to imagine that we’re responsible for everything, because we’re not; it’s not to deny him or Russians agency, because they have agency.It’s to understand the failure of Putin’s domestic policy and his recognition that what he needs is a kind of permanent spectacle which comes out of foreign policy and that the Europeans and the Americans are always going to provide that.

Now, when I say that, I’m not saying that American foreign policy has been good.The Iraq War was an absolute disaster, and I said so at the time.And the Iraq War has played a later, indirect role in the Ukraine war, which maybe we can talk about.But what I am trying to say is that it’s very important as Americans not to think that everything that Putin does is because of some little thing that we did.The most likely explanation is that what Putin is doing in foreign policy has to do with his needs in domestic policy.

Putin and the Threat of Democracy

When Vladimir Putin says, “Look at the Americans. Look at Hillary Clinton talking about democracy in Russia,” or Victoria Nuland or Michael McFaul or whoever it is, that they are interfering, what is he doing there?Is that something he believes?Is that for show?What does Vladimir Putin see when he sees Americans coming to Russia, talking about democracy, talking to activists?

I think he sees a threat.I mean, the Putin system is based upon turning democracy into a ritual using what Russians call the administer of resource.Because there’s no alternative ideology to democracy, Putin only survives with the repeated legitimation that democratic theater acts, democratic performances provide him.So every so often, every six years, we’re going to have an election, and Putin’s going to win that election.And he has to win it by a lot, not because people actually believe in the results—they don’t—but because the election proves that he’s the one who’s in charge, because he’s the one who’s running the election.That’s how it works.

The idea that elections could be real, whether it’s Pompeo who’s saying it or Clinton who’s saying it, the idea that elections could be real is a threat.Putin needs Russians to believe that elections are always a circus, a farce and a fake, because if Russians believed that British elections and German elections and American elections are also fake, they’re not going to mind that their own elections are fake.

So when Americans come to Russia and talk about votes being counted, I think he authentically regards that a threat, and the way he expresses that sense of threat is to say, “Our democracy is real.Their democracy is fake.We care about ourselves.They only care about meddling in our politics,” and so on and so forth.

But I think the concern is that people in Russia might actually believe that there are places in the world where votes are counted.

Joe Biden goes there in March of 2011 and speaks to students and talks about democracy.Do you think that Biden or any of the Americans who go understand that—it’s so common in America to talk about democracy and talk about values.Do you think they understand how it’s seen by Putin or that it’s going to lead to that reaction from him?

I think that American policy, as I understand it, was based upon the assumption, which I think is sound, that we would be living in a more secure world, not just a freer world, if there were more democracies in it.Putin’s reaction is not to the Americans talking about democracy; Putin’s reaction is to the idea that there might be democracy in Russia, an idea which, by the way, is much more threatening when it comes from nearer neighbors like Ukraine, where Russians could actually see, “Aha, the system is actually working.”

I think in general, Americans are aware that Putin isn’t going to like them talking about democracy; I don’t think there’s any kind of surprise there.What I would caution against is the idea that Putin is reacting to the Americans.He’s not reacting to the Americans; he’s reacting to the threat of the idea that there might actually be democratic elections in Russia.It’s very convenient for him to frame this as great-power politics: The Americans are not talking about democracy; they’re talking about their own geopolitics, and they’re pretending to talk about democracy.That’s what he’s going to say.That’s very comfortable; that works very well.But he would be saying that regardless of what we were talking about, I think.

Putin and the Obama Administration

By the time we get into the Obama administration, we talked a little bit about that, how seriously do you take Russia?And there’s that famous moment, of course, that you mentioned between Romney and Barack Obama.Do you think that Barack Obama and the administration took Vladimir Putin and Russia seriously enough?

I think they didn’t understand the Russian state in the correct way.The Russian state is not about a creative project.If the Russian state were about a creative project, then in some sense, President Obama would have been right when he said, “No, no, it’s just a regional power,” because it’s correct.Russia doesn’t have big economy; it doesn’t really set an example for anyone else.So in that narrow sense, where you think economics and ideas that are familiar to us are all that matter, then maybe Russia doesn’t matter so much.

But that’s imposing our own criteria on the Putin regime.The Putin regime was never about creating things.The Putin regime is about removing alternatives.It’s about making the normality that is Russia—the corruption, the inequality, the spectacle, the constantly lying—seem normal.And the way you make it seem normal is by making it be normal, not just in your own country, but in other places.So what the Russians became very effective at doing, by way of their international propaganda and then later by interfering in elections, is messing things up, taking the worst of other societies and bringing the worst tendencies to the fore, finding, by digital means and otherwise, our weaknesses and making those weaknesses greater and greater.

So the Obama administration was totally blindsided when the Russians decided to try to alter our electoral outcomes, but it was totally consistent with the way Russia sees the rest of the world.Russia’s not trying to make America like Russia; Russia’s just trying to turn America into a total mess.That’s what they’re going for.And that’s a kind of power.

And it’s consistent, by the way, with a lot of Soviet history, that it’s not so much about necessarily making everybody believe your ideas.It’s more a matter of making sure that nobody else can mount a serious challenge to you, undermining everything else, making everything else a shambles.And then you may be shambolic, but provided that you’re no more shambolic than anybody else, you’re going to be OK.

Biden actually gives the speech about the “reset,” and Hillary Clinton gives them the button.Was that ever going to work, or has Vladimir Putin always needed the U.S. as an enemy, as somebody who’s interfering, as somebody who’s causing trouble?And was it by that point—was the reset ever going to work?Were things ever going to be put back as they were hoping early in the administration?

I think that we generally just don’t take Russian domestic politics seriously enough, and therefore we don’t take Putin’s position seriously enough.Of course the reset wasn’t going to work because there’s nothing that America did which was actually that important inside Russia.

I mean, I’m sorry if I’m undermining the whole premise of your program, but there’s literally nothing that we do which is that important inside Russia.American foreign policy does not matter that much in Russia.What matters in Russia is what happens in Russia.They have chosen to have us as their foreign policy enemy because that is convenient for them, and it works very well in domestic politics.There is nothing we can do to change that.We could all wear the Russian flag as t-shirts every day.We could get up in the morning and we could all sing the Russian national anthem.It wouldn’t change that.There’s nothing — the reset, nothing else that could have changed this because it’s a need which comes out of domestic politics: to have a convenient enemy of choice.

So no, I don’t think the reset ever could have worked, and I think it’s kind of one more expression of American vanity because the idea is that, well, we did something wrong, and so long as we have some kind of course correction and they have some kind of course correction, it’s all going to be OK.But the problem was just much deeper than that.

Yeah. I mean you’re not undermining the premise of what we’re trying to figure out because the question is, did we understand—on the American side; then I’ll ask you more about on the Russian side, too—did we understand who we were dealing with and what their actual worldview was, or were we projecting?In that case of the reset, I guess that’s the question.It was, did the Obama administration really understand Vladimir Putin, really understand Russia as they were trying to deal with them?

I think the answer to that is fundamentally no.The Obama administration, I think, misunderstood Russia and also misunderstood what it would take to reorient American foreign policy.The Obama administration thought that we can repair relations with China, and Russia will just somehow follow along one way or the other.

I don’t think you can treat it that way.I think Russia’s an independent issue, and you have to take Russia seriously, along with the Europeans, which is where the Obama administration also went wrong.We needed to be with the Europeans vis-à-vis Russia rather than imagining that we could go off and solve something with China, which we pretty much completely failed to do.

What we didn’t—fundamentally didn’t understand is that for the Russians, it’s not that there’s a foreign policy problem and they want to solve it.They don’t want to solve the foreign policy problem; they want to have the foreign policy problem in a form that they can handle.So for the Russians, the real foreign policy threat is not us; they’re not really afraid of us.They’re really afraid of China.But that fear is so deep and that geopolitical problem is so real that they prefer not to talk about it at all.

What they would rather do is have the Americans as the cartoon enemy, basically, because that works in domestic politics, and it’s not really risky because we’re not ever really going to do anything, is the basic idea.

So we can be more friendly or less friendly.We can turn the dial this way or that way, but it’s not going to change that basic reality.

In this period, too, is the Arab Spring, is Obama who comes in a little bit skeptical of the Freedom Agenda of the Bush administration and spreading democracy.By the time you get to the Arab Spring, the rhetoric at least is “Democracy is coming.”It looks like maybe Russia is part of it; maybe other countries as well.From the Obama administration, was there hubris about what was happening, about whether they had to do anything or they could just support it rhetorically?How do you see the Obama administration at that point in the rhetoric of democracy, especially in regards to Russia, but in that era after the Arab Spring?

I think the Obama administration was right to talk about democracy.I can’t imagine a coherent American foreign policy, honestly, which doesn’t talk about democracy.I think if we think our system is better, we should be advocating our system as being better.

The criticism I would have is that the hubris is more a matter of thinking that history is on your side, and history is never on your side.And as soon as you think that history is on your side, you’ve got to reevaluate your assumptions, because there’s no such thing as history which can be on your side.

And I think the whole arc of history bending towards justice, it’s a nice thing; one likes to believe things like that are true.But there’s no arc of history; it’s not bending in any particular direction.You can make democracies happen, but to make democracies happen, you have to first set a really good example yourself and, second, understand the countries that you’re dealing with.And in the case of the Obama administration, I think we dismissed Russia as weak rather than realizing that the people who run the Russian state are very intelligent, that they have no desire to have democracy at all, that they’re not just going to wait and let it happen to them, but instead, they’re going to go on the offensive and try to undermine it in other places.

This isn’t to say, though, that everything is our fault.When Putin looks at the Arab Spring, or when Putin looks at Qaddafi, it’s absolutely right that he thinks: they’re dictators, I’m a dictator; they’re tyrants, I’m a tyrant; they end up in a cage, I could end up in a cage.He certainly thinks that because that is the logic of being a tyrant.As we know from Plato to Shakespeare, the logic of being a tyrant is that you’re going to be afraid of ending that way.

In fairness to the Obama administration and everyone else, there is nothing that we could have done to stop that.When you are the boss of bosses, when you are the tyrant, you’re going to be afraid of ending up in a cage.What you’re going to want is to die peacefully in your bed, and that is a logic which is true and irresistible, regardless of what American foreign policy is going to be.

So he was going to look at the Arab Spring the way he looked at it, regardless of how we talked about it or what we did.

Putin Seizes Crimea

By the end of the administration, the Maidan, seizing Crimea, eventually there will be the war in the east.What was the message that Putin was sending in that, or what was the message we should have been receiving at that moment?

Well, the message Putin had been sending since 2008 in Georgia was that he was willing to intervene militarily in his neighbors if he could get away with it.And the “if he could get away with it” is really important, because what America thought or Americans thought or our administration at that time thought is that we are winning the war of ideas.We are winning the war of words.History, culture, all that stuff is on our side.

But that was wrong.What Russia was able to prove was that, no, as a matter of fact, we can invade a country, and we can make you think that it didn’t actually happen.Russia invaded Ukraine and basically persuaded us that it didn’t actually happen.While Russia was invading Ukraine, the most important thing that was happening in the minds of the West, not just Americans, were discussions about whether there’d been a coup in Ukraine or whether the Ukrainians are all Nazis, or maybe they’re all gay, or maybe they’re all Jews, depending on what social media you were following, right?

The Russians totally had our minds in a trap at that time, and we were totally unprepared for that, not just the Obama administration but American public life in general.They outsmarted us, they ran circles around us, and they did it by appealing to what they already knew about us because they were paying attention to us, at least in the negative sense of knowing what our vulnerabilities were on social media.

So when they invaded Ukraine, which they did in 2014, we were unable to talk about it that way.We couldn’t say “war”; we couldn’t say “invasion.”The basic realities of life we couldn’t talk about because we got ourselves all tied up in these discussions which the Russians invented for us.

So what we were not prepared for was the possibility that actually the ideas and the culture and the digital technology were not working for us.They were actually working for somebody else.We were totally unprepared for that.And I think to this day, we haven’t quite figured out how we got that wrong.And if anything, it’s the Ukrainians in 2022, with their own social media and the way they’re approaching it, which are kind of teaching us how you might deal with a situation like that.

We might have been unprepared before, but Vladimir Putin straight out lies to Barack Obama, says, “No, I don’t know anything about the little green men in Crimea.”What lesson—at that point, if we weren’t prepared for what was happening in the moment, as the dust cleared and it became very clear what had happened and then by then what’s going on in the east, what lesson did we take?What lesson should we have taken back then?

Yeah.I think—I just really wouldn’t want to underestimate how important Russian propaganda was at that time because it’s hard to take a lesson from something when you haven’t really understood that that something is happening.And in the American mind—if you go back and read the press from those weeks and months, this is very clear—it just wasn’t clear that an invasion of Ukraine was happening.I mean, if there had been a single-column story in the <i>New York Times</i> one day, which had just said “Russia Invades Ukraine,” that would have been so much more useful than the endless discussions we had about a whole bunch of things which either were irrelevant or weren’t happening.But we couldn’t get ourselves to the moment where we just had a single-column story saying “Russia Invades Ukraine.”

We can’t learn a lesson if we don’t know the thing is actually happening.The lesson that we should have learned in domestic politics is that the Russians have found techniques using social media to structure and frame what’s going on.They did that in 2014 when they invaded Ukraine, and then they did it in 2016, to great effect, when they intervened in our presidential elections using the same people, the same institutions and the same techniques.

So once we had been had in Ukraine in 2014, we should have been better prepared for being had in 2016.I made that connection at the time, and I tried to persuade other people that this was what was happening, but—so I remember this very vividly—nobody was going along with that.Nobody thought there was anything we needed to learn from 2014 because we hadn’t realized how much we’d been fooled in 2014. …

Let me ask you a different way, which is by the time you’re getting to the debate inside the administration, which is about do you send Javelins, do you send weapons to Ukraine, by that point, it is clear who is involved and what has happened.Was there a lesson by that point that wasn’t learned?It sounds like a lot of people inside the administration were advocating for it, and the president was really the one making the decision in that case.What do you think of that decision and whether they were really understanding what was going on?

Well, I think we were caught up in a world where fundamentally it was going to be ideas and economics, and they were fundamentally on our side.So therefore we make some public relations announcements and we have some sanctions, and our job is done, which was basically our policy.

I don’t think we were in a world where we were thinking the Ukrainians are real people and they might want to defend themselves.I think that’s fundamentally the problem, that Russia’s not an important country, and the countries next to it are even less important, and what are we really going to do here?What’s—you’re asking me to kind of decode what the president himself thought, and I don’t know; I can only talk about the kind of—the factors which were around it.

But I think the thing that we basically didn’t understand is that Ukraine could have defended itself.If we had done in 2014 more like what we’ve done in 2022, we never would have gotten to 2022.I think all the dancing around about whether we send Javelins or not was just bizarre and kind of a weird example of American vanity because —you’re not a party to war because you give weapons.If that were true, then every country in the world would be a party to every war which is going on because we’re constantly giving weapons and selling weapons. …

We went on for years with this debate about whether we should arm Ukrainians.It’s obvious that we should have armed Ukrainians.If we’d armed Ukrainians earlier and better, I think we’d be in a better world now.

Does Putin take a lesson from that?

Putin takes a lesson from Syria when we say there’s a red line and there’s not a red line.And Putin takes a lesson from Ukraine when he’s able to invade a country which is in seized territory, which is a fundamental violation of everything that we say is the basis of our legal order.The whole thing, the idea that one country does not invade another country, and annex territory, is the entire foundation of the United Nations and the Security Council of which Russia and America are members.And our reaction is minimal, right?

And so of course he takes a lesson from that.The lesson that he takes from that is that this kind of thing can work if we gin it up properly.And that’s not the message that we really wanted to be sending at the time.But I think the other lesson he took from that, totally understandably, is that if you can just get the Americans to talk about themselves, you can get away with a lot of stuff.We can’t separate out the propaganda from the war itself because the Russians won a propaganda war in a way which a propaganda war has rarely been won in this century, in the past century, in any other century.It is very rare that a country, Country A invades Country B, and Country C talks about other subjects entirely.

So one of the lessons he learned is that you can mess with the American political mind, which he then applies in 2016.If anything, in 2022, he thinks we’re too much of a pushover and he doesn’t work hard enough on the propaganda side because he just thinks we’re just complete idiots, but, you know, which we turn out fortunately not to be.

Is the conflict in Ukraine about democracy and about authoritarianism at that point?We talked about how we had this rhetoric about democracy and about the Arab Spring, and was that on the line then?Did the president realize that?Did we recognize it in those terms?

We didn’t take the Maidan and Ukraine seriously enough.So Russia invades Ukraine because it looks like Ukraine could become a functioning rule-of-law state which would join the European Union.It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with America.What it has to do with is the possibility that a post-Soviet country, next to Russia, where lots of people speak Russian, which is in some ways not so different from Russia, that that country could actually become a rule-of-law state, a democracy, and join the European Union.That is what Russia needed to prevent in 2013, and that’s what Russia needed to prevent in 2014 when it invaded.

That’s what was really going on.It was really about democracy.It wasn’t about American presidents talking about democracy—different subject.It was about actual democracy in Russia’s actual neighborhood, which is an actual threat to Putin.The European Union is also an actual threat to Putin, although they don’t like to see themselves that way, because the European Union shows that you can take flawed post-communist states and with a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of aid and some norms, you can make them into prosperous countries.That would be very bad for Putin if his people actually believed that.

So from Russia’s point of view, it was all about showing that Ukraine is actually a joke; it’s never going to join Europe.I don’t think we got any of that because we were taking neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians seriously enough.But that was a story about how Ukrainians had understood that for their country to have the rule of law and defeat—the protesters on the Maidan, the million people who came out of the Maidan, when they were polled, the thing they said was most important to them was the rule of law, not language or all the other things that we were obsessing about in the U.S.What they wanted was the rule of law.They wanted their country to be a normal country which could join Europe, and that’s what Russia needed to stop.That’s what it was all about.

And we—the Obama administration said very little, and what it said it said very late about the Maidan.It’s not something that we took very seriously, unfortunately.

Putin and the Trump Administration

As we get to the election interference, does Vladimir Putin– I mean, we talked about this idea that we thought democracy had triumphed in the post-Cold War and that it was going to go forward on its own.Does Vladimir Putin understand something about the weakness of America, of American democracy, that Americans don’t or didn’t understand at that time?

They always have the advantage of believing in the worst parts of human nature, and we are not better than anybody else.We may have better or worse institutions, but we’re not better than anyone else.And the KGB instinct, the Soviet instinct, that every psychology has a weakness and the way that you perform your work and you perform your life is to find that weakness and expand it and exploit it, that can work on us.That can work on American democracy.

So I’m not sure that they understand us, in the normal sense of the word “understand.”I think they have a protocol that they follow, that they use in interrogations, and that protocol they follow in interrogations, where they seek out weaknesses, also works on social media, because remember, the way they tried to throw the election doesn’t have to do with people in touch with people, not really.It has to do with the mechanical collection of data which reveals weaknesses.

So, do Russians understand American racism?No. But do they understand that people reveal their racism on Facebook?Yes.And so then they can appeal to racists on Facebook.Do they understand what it’s like to be an African American in the U.S.?Obviously not.Do they understand that African Americans might be sensitive to claims that Hillary Clinton is a racist?Yes, they get that.

And so what they’re doing is they’re following a protocol which says, look for the psychological weakness; expand it; exploit it; hit it; make everything about that.And they’re taking the data which social media provides to generate a coherent approach to try and affect an American election.I don’t think they understand us; I don’t think they have to in order to follow this protocol any more than a KGB interrogator really had to understand a dissident in order to try to hurt that person, exploit that person or turn that person.

… When suddenly you have a president who’s very different than all of the other presidents we’ve talked about, who talk about democracy and freedom, and going back to H. W, Bush and even to Reagan, somebody from a completely different tradition, what is the view, if not personally from Vladimir Putin, from the Kremlin, from Russia as they’re watching this new president come in?

So, I hesitate to answer the question of what Putin is thinking about Trump just because I think they’re thinking all kinds of things that we don’t know.I mean, I think they have their views about how this person is going to destabilize America, which are probably informed by data that we just don’t have, the things that—because they’ve obviously been paying attention to this man for a long time.So just how they see him I think is something we can’t quite get to the end of it.

It’s clear that Putin wanted Trump to win.He said as much.It’s clear that he applauded Trump’s idea that the European Union isn’t really a thing, that NATO should perhaps be weakened.That’s all clear because Putin has said so.That’s all absolutely clear.

In general, what Trump does for Putin is he normalizes the Russian way of doing politics.So Putin’s view that democracy is a joke, you can lie all the time, politics is fundamentally about some rich guy becoming richer, corruption is normal, right, that—Trump normalizes that for the whole world.So it’s a huge gift for Putin because the United States, although it doesn’t matter as much as it thinks it does, it does matter a lot.

And so what Trump did was he took Putin and he made Putin normal.He put Putin at the middle.Putin was now no longer something exceptional.Putin was now normal thanks to Donald Trump, and that had a tremendously negative effect on politics around the world, I think.

Was this something they were hoping to get from Trump?You talk about—is it destabilizing America?Is it destabilizing the Western alliance?What are their hopes for that Trump presidency?

Look, it was a bonanza for them, the way it actually turned out.So before we talk about what they were hoping, the Trump administration was just a feast for the Kremlin every day.Because what the Trump administration delivered every day in its outrageous rhetoric, in its disrespect for American institutions, and in the countless scandals was what Russian propaganda outlets dreamed of.They dream of this kind of raw material which proves that democracy is a joke.

Trump is there to tell you that democracy is a joke.That’s what he’s there to tell you.He’s there to tell you that the rules don’t apply to everyone equally; they don’t apply to him.He’s there to tell you that might makes right.He’s there to tell you that you can lie every day, not just in Russia but in America, which—that’s what he did.He lied every day, all the time, just like Putin.

So, they had other hopes, but Trump gave them the basic thing that they wanted, which was an American administration which was an embarrassment for everyone who cared about democracy, an American administration which showed that Russia was more normal, right, which—that’s what they crave.They crave the rest of the world, the democratic world to say, “Actually, Russia’s normal; the way things happen in Russia is the way things happen everywhere else.”Because if that’s what people believe, then there’s no threat to Putin and his regime.

So Trump did Putin a huge favor just by his existence and his everyday behavior.I think they wanted an America which would pull out of NATO, which they’ll likely get in a second Trump administration, if there is one, or at least an attempt in that direction.I think they wanted an America which would separate from the European Union, which they got to a considerable extent and which the Biden administration has had to work very hard to repair.And again, if there’s another Trump administration, I think we can probably say goodbye for quite a while to American-European cooperation.

And one thing which they wanted, which they got and which they celebrated was a coup attempt.They loved Jan. 6.Nobody loved Jan. 6 more than the Russians did.Jan. 6 showed that all this stuff about peaceful transitions of power and consensus and the American Constitution, they just loved it.They lapped it up.They reproduce it all the time.They talk about it all the time.That was—I mean, Trump gave them four years, which was one big gift, but Jan. 6 was like the wrapping, the beautiful wrapping, the package which they’ll just never forget.If he’s elected again—if he becomes president again, I should say, I’m sure he’ll come up with new things, but Jan. 6 was an extraordinary gift to Russia.

For Vladimir Putin, however he experienced it at the time, now talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union and what he saw in Germany as being such a searing time, to see something like that happening on the steps of the Capitol after watching the West celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall and here are images that are sort of reminiscent in America—how must he have taken that?

Well, I think he understands all of this in terms of vulnerability.So he doesn’t know why the Soviet Union fell apart.Putin has no idea why the Soviet Union fell apart.His whole story of why the Soviet Union fell apart is utter nonsense.The story that they tell is that the Americans wanted it to happen and therefore it happened, which a, we’re not that powerful, and b—and I was there at the time—our policy in 1991 was to keep the Soviet Union together; it wasn’t to make it fall apart.

But with the way he sees the world, it’s all just about power.It couldn’t have mattered that people in Lithuania or Ukraine had ideas about the Soviet Union.It couldn’t have mattered that there were legitimate disagreements inside Moscow.None of that matters.It’s just about power, and the Americans showed their power.

And so now he was showing his power.Now it looks like the Russians are powerful: “Look what we can do.We can make a mess inside American politics, which ends with bloodshed on the steps of the Capitol.And since we’ve shown that we’re powerful, what are we going to do next?We’re going to invade Ukraine, because obviously this crew of people who can just barely get Biden into office, this crew of people is not going to do anything about that.”

So Jan. 6, apart from anything else, leads directly to the war in Ukraine, because it looks like America is not just morally discredited; it looks like America is weak.

Democracy vs. Authoritarianism

Let’s just go back and pick up one thing about Ukraine, which is we were talking about Ukraine as, or you were talking about Ukraine as an example of this important conflict here between democracy and authoritarianism, and being an actual conflict, and not just rhetorical.And Trump’s approach to Ukraine, which we know he described as sort of a corrupt country; there’s obviously the famous phone call—what does Trump’s approach to Ukraine tell us?What does it tell us about democracy and authoritarianism and what would happen?

Well, Trump’s world is like Putin’s world.There are big guys; there are little guys; it’s all about force.You respect the person who can humble you; therefore he respects Putin, but he doesn’t respect other people.He respects Putin because he knows Putin helped him get to power.He thinks that Russia is a great power, and in this sense, as in so many others, his view of the world and Putin’s view of the world overlap.It’s very comfortable: Russia’s a great power; the countries around Russia are not real places.And of course, Trump doesn’t care at all about democracy.He doesn’t care about American democracy; he doesn’t care about anybody’s democracy.He’s a gift not to just Putin but to all dictators around the world, especially the ones who came out of a quasi-democratic background, because he seems to show you can start from democracy and end up in tyranny.That’s what Trump seems to show.That’s why he’s so beloved among a certain class of dictator.

So what Trump does with Russia and Ukraine is he personalizes all of it.It’s all about Putin.A lot of Americans have this problem: We just talk about Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin.But Trump really personalizes it.It’s all about Putin.Putin’s the one who really has power.The Ukrainians and Zelenskyy, who are those people?They don’t really matter.They’re just secondary.So might makes right.Naturally the Russians are going to do what they’re going to do.

And when it comes to the interaction between President Trump and President Zelenskyy, we see that the only thing which matters to Trump is staying in power personally, because of course he needs to avoid prosecution, and he needs to avoid challenges to his wealth, so he needs to stay in power.And in order to stay in power, he’s willing to try to blackmail Ukraine and its newly elected president by saying, “We’re going to take weapons away from you unless you pursue this basically insane investigation,” which by the way, all the Ukrainian investigative journalists know is bogus, “this insane investigation of the son of my rival.”

So he’s not taking Ukraine or Zelenskyy seriously as a country.They’re just there to help him in his reelection campaign; that’s it.

And those statements, that Ukraine is just a corrupt country.Obviously there is corruption in Ukraine, but that it’s just a corrupt country, how did that play into that perception, that conflict between democracy and authoritarianism?

It’s really important.So, all countries have problems, right?So America has a problem with racism.Are we just a racist country?It’s pretty fundamental, but we’re not just a racist country; other things are going on.All democracies have these issues.Is France a post-imperial country?Yes, it is, but there are other things going on in France that make France not a completely lost republic.Does Poland have a problem with its judiciary?Certainly it does.And so on and so forth.

Ukraine has a problem with corruption.Absolutely Ukraine has a problem with a corruption, but that became a sort of trope where, thanks in part to Russian propaganda, it was pushed to a degree where people would say, “Well, it’s not really a state; it’s a failed state,” which is something that Russians said over and over again.So what happens is that people use various things that are in some way or another kind of true about Ukraine in order to turn – in order to turn Ukraine into a place that doesn’t really exist.

So the language question is another issue.People in Ukraine speak two languages.What’s wrong with that?I think it’s kind of nice.I wish more of my students spoke two languages.But somehow speaking two languages becomes bad; it means you don’t really know who you are; it means they’re not really a people, and so on.

So these things which are kind of true in one way or another, like the corruption or like the languages, become an argument for saying Ukraine’s not really a place.And we are not really paying attention; we’re not really experts.The Russians are taking these themes, and they’re driving them home as seriously as they can, which leads us to this almost impossibly implausible situation of Donald Trump, who is like the walking embodiment of corruption, talking about how other people in other countries might be corrupt.

Putin and the Biden Administration

… What was Joe Biden’s approach?Was it different from other presidents’?

Well, I’m going to judge the Biden administration from how it reacted to a crisis, and the way they reacted to a crisis was to recognize that the crisis was real, and that I think does them credit.They were right that Russia was going to invade Ukraine.They were right to try to persuade other people that Russia was going to invade Ukraine.And where I think they stand out, both from not just other Democratic but all the previous administrations since 1989, is they were right to believe that they couldn’t handle the problem on their own, you know, that they weren’t going to be able to just say, “There’s a red line,” or they weren’t going to be able to just conjure up a coalition because they said so; that they were actually going to have to do the hard work of getting the coalition together.

So I think that the Biden administration recognized that something terrible was going to happen, and they scratched their way towards coming to some kind of coherent response to it.I think that’s all in their favor.

And I think the Biden administration reacted—they reacted quickly also in terms of the concepts that they were using.It was no longer about how Russia was a failed democratic project or Putin was someone we could do business with.It was more about just actually taking the data as it was on the ground and trying to respond to it.I think they did that pretty well.

When you look at it from a Western perspective, almost from everybody except for Russia, or at least Vladimir Putin’s perspective, it seems so illogical, the war.It seems so hard to understand why they would isolate, why the threats against them wouldn’t work, why he would risk so much, maybe even his life, on this invasion.And had Putin changed?Did we just never understand him, and it had always been there?How do you explain that?

I think it’s all the above.First of all, Ukraine changed.Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 saw a generational change in leadership where a lot of talented and interesting people actually came to power.Ukraine changed in the sense that 2014, the Maidan, the first war, opened up a period of cooperation in civil society and human networks which were going to prove to be very important in the 2022 war.

I think that we and the Russians were alike in the sense that we didn’t really understand how much Ukraine had changed and how much Ukraine would be an agent in this story of a war, how much this was not going to be a story of Russia humiliating America by invading Ukraine, how this was going to be a story of Russia humiliating itself because Ukrainians were going to fight back and win.

Number two, I think we always misunderstood Putin.And we always misunderstood him in the sense that we misunderstood Russia as a kind of failed transition to democracy.Russia wasn’t that.Russia was an alternative to democracy which pretended to be a democracy and which functioned in its foreign policy by trying to destroy the democracies which were more real than it was.

But that said, Putin also changed over time.The cynicism gave way also to a certain mysticism, a certain idea about Russia’s mission and his personal mission and how he would be remembered after he died.That did change.And if one follows his rhetoric in this last 10 years, it’s clear that he’s reaching a point where he actually believes that Russia and Ukraine are one country and that this means that Ukraine will collapse when he invades, but it also means that this is his opportunity to somehow make history right again, which is the kind of thinking which it’s understandable that democratically elected leaders are not going to really understand.

… Does Vladimir Putin understand Joe Biden?Does he understand what the American response will be?Does he also have an inability to understand what will happen if he invades Ukraine?

I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding on the Russian side, on Putin’s side, of people who are used to living in democracies, because in some ways he’s right: We are slow; we’re complicated; the various forces inside our countries end up canceling each other out.But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t points where a fundamental sense of decency is involved, and I think in, not just in American public opinion but in European public opinion, invading Ukraine crossed that line.It crossed that line for a lot of people.

And here you can take President Biden as a person, like other Americans, or like others who just thought, totally invading a country with the aim of wiping it out of existence is—crosses a line which is not a political line but was some kind of line of human decency.And I think it is a misunderstanding that Putin has about us, that we are just as cynical as he.I think that is a misunderstanding.I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding. …

When he said he’s a “murderous dictator,” “he’s a war criminal,” he should be gone, is this a real breaking point or a real turning point in—certainly in these presidents we’ve seen from George W. Bush, even before, up till now?How profound is that a break when Biden says that?

I think it’s kind of refreshing for us, honestly, to be using this language which is more straightforward.I think it’s important for Americans to be using a language which is more general and which is not of our own making, because in our language, there was ’89 and ’91 and democracy and it was inevitable, and then maybe some people were going astray.… But to flat out say that what’s happening in Ukraine is genocide, which it is, is to get out of our story of what’s been happening in the last 30 years and to bring in some more fundamental concepts, which I think Biden has been doing.

And I think that what that involves fundamentally is recognizing our own mistakes, that maybe more dramatic things have been happening that we have not quite been able to look at.And when we use the more dramatic language like war criminal, for example, we are recognizing our own mistakes.

It doesn’t really matter for Russia the way that people think it matters for Russia because the Putin regime is always saying that we say things like this.So when we actually do, it actually—they don’t actually cover it.So we assumed that when, for example, when Biden said that Putin had to go, that that would have huge ripples in the Russian media, and I’m here to tell you that it didn’t.I was following the Russian media after that.If anything, they tried to just kind of tuck it away on the side because it was a bit embarrassing.It’s much better for them to be in control of the story than it is for an American president to actually come out and say these things.

… How dangerous is this moment?How dangerous is it for Putin?How dangerous is he?

Well, I think he’s trapped in the conventional war that he’s fighting.So I think the chief danger of this war, we should remember, is for the Ukrainians who are under Russian occupation.The civilian deaths of Ukraine I think are the worst thing about this war and will likely remain the worst thing about this war.

I think he’s in a conventional war which he is going to lose, and I think the conventional war that he’s going to lose will likely have political ripples, already is having—has had for some time, political ripples inside the Russian Federation.And it may lead to his losing power.

I think it’s pretty important for us not to get too emotionally involved, as we have in the past, with individual Russian leaders.We wanted Gorbachev to stay; we wanted Yeltsin to stay.We don’t like Putin, but even so, we’re discomfited by the idea that Putin won’t be in power.They always fall from power.Dictators always fall from power.It always happens.And when it happens, it’s not something we should feel guilty or ashamed about.We should just be ready for it and be preparing our policy for the next person.

So obviously, the situation is very dangerous for Putin, and poetically, he’s created the situation which could bring him down, which didn’t have to happen.By mobilizing a million Russian soldiers to go fight a war which was utterly pointless in which many of them are going to die, he’s created the situation where he could fall.He’s gone back to a place like 1917 where a Russian government is fighting a war it probably shouldn’t have been fighting.He’s going back to the 1560s and Ivan the Terrible, fighting a war he shouldn’t have fought and creating domestic consequences which he may not be able to deal with.

That’s all on him, and I think it’s very important for the United States to recognize that these things have their own logic.And we should really do our very best to try to deter nuclear weapon use.We should do our very best to try to make this war in Ukraine end as quickly as possible, which means, to be clear, Ukrainians winning it as quickly as possible because that’s the only way it can end.

And how things turn out in Russia, we shouldn’t be talking about who we want to rule Russia; that’s not our business.We shouldn’t be talking about whether Russia should fall apart; that’s not our business.If the Russians start a war and they lose a war, let them figure out what happens next.Don’t talk too much about it.Just make sure that the right country wins the war, and then the rest is up to the Russians themselves.

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