TOP
William Burns
Chapters
The FRONTLINE Interviews
William Burns
U.S. ambassador to Russia, 2005-08
William Burns served as United States ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008 and as Deputy Secretary of State from 2011 to 2014.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 14, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term
… Let's go to 2007 or so.Before the Munich speech, right in that time, how different is he?How different is that Vladimir Putin from the man who was handed the baton by Yeltsin back in ’99?
I think there was a considerable evolution in Putin in some ways over that period of time, particularly since the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, which I think Putin saw as a direct threat to his own control in Russia.The notion that regime change in what he always saw to be Russia’s sphere of influence was threatening to his interests, so there had been a gradual buildup of frustration and anger on his part at what he saw to be duplicitous behavior on the part of the West and United States.He always gave us more credit than we deserve for careful conspiracies.
But I think that was the lead-up to the Munich speech, which was a very pugnacious exclamation point on what was a gradually accumulating set of frustrations and grievances on his part.
I go back and I search the archives for quotes about him from Angela Merkel, everybody.They all say madman, lunatic, whatever.Was he that by then, if he’s that at all?
No. Putin I think is a very complicated personality.I think he lives in a world in which the tough get to set the rules and the weak get taken advantage of.He’s a cynic about people around him, and sometimes about his own population as well.Control is what he attaches the most importance to.He’s tactically very agile.He's quite capable of playing rough and taking calculated risks.
I don't think he’s a grand strategist, and if he is, he hasn’t been particularly successful in that in the sense that he’s still stuck with a one-dimensional economy way too dependent on hydrocarbons.If you look at the consequences strategically of his aggression against Ukraine, he’s managed to convince 42, 43 million Ukrainians that they need to sustain their independence and ensure that they're not in any way dependent on Russia in making their political and economic choices.But tactically, he's very agile as well.But he’s not a madman.Power does corrupt, and he’s been in power in Russia a long time, so he’s got his blind spots.But he's very carefully calculating about what he sees to be Russia’s interests and how best to pursue them.
Let’s talk about the Munich speech.Astonishing speech from what I can read and understand about it.At the time, how did it feel?
I really do think it was a pugnacious exclamation point on what you could see building over the couple of years before that, and particularly since the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia.Putin’s worldview is that major powers like Russia are entitled to spheres of influence.He believes that Russia was entitled to have a predominant influence in places like Ukraine, so he saw what was unfolding in Ukraine as a direct threat not only to that sphere of influence, but also to the durability of his own regime in Russia.
He saw this threat building, and he was trying to draw a very public and very pugnacious line at Munich.1He was also quite concerned about the potential for further expansion of NATO.But in his worldview, which is a very combustible combination of insecurity and grievance and ambition, and which in some ways is born of the sense of humiliation that lots of Russians felt amid all the democratic promise of the 1990s of Yeltsin’s Russia, it was that sense of humiliation which I think very much shaped Putin’s view of the world after he became president.
1
He started his relationship with George W. Bush with the famous Bush looking in his eyes and seeing his soul and the cross story and all those canards about how the relationship got started.By the time Munich happens, what is his perspective on Bush personally and the United States?
His personal relationship was always a fairly even-keeled one with President Bush 43, with George W. Bush—at least in my experience of watching them directly.2But he had come to the conviction by early 2007 on the Munich speech that American policy was essentially aimed at undermining him, no matter how cordial his personal interactions might be with President Bush.And that had built over a period of years.
2
When Putin became president, quite unexpectedly, I think he did begin with the notion that he could help engineer the restoration of Russia as a major power, as a kind of partner of the United States.But there was always, at least in my experience, a fairly fundamental disconnect in terms of his outlook and his view of Russia’s role in the world and the U.S. role in the world and that notion of equal partnership, which the power realities would never bear out.
His view was that Russia was entitled to a sphere of influence.That's what major powers got to assert, and other major powers should stay out of his business in Russia in terms of how the economic order and the political order was organized as well.He gradually came to the conviction, as he moved into his second term as president, that that wasn't going to work.
And his own frustration and sense of grievance built over that time, again, I think quite unjustifiably in terms of what American policy was about in those years.But that was his perception, and it was the perception of lots of people in the Russian political elite in the run-up to the Munich speech.
The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister
President Obama gets elected; Hillary Clinton becomes the secretary of state.It's reset time.Where does the idea, the notion, of reset come from, and what is the theory, the big idea?
As is often the case with policy directions, you’ve got to keep it simple, and in the wake of the Georgia war at the end of the summer of 2008, U.S.-Russian relations—Russian relations with the West had sunk to what was at least at that point an all-time low.
Cold-bloodedly, working with Russia on a number of issues served the interests of the United States, whether it was the Iran nuclear issue, which President Obama was quite focused on exploring, at least the potential for a diplomatic resolution; Afghanistan, where as President Obama began to think about the surge in Afghanistan, it carried with it all sorts of requirements in terms of logistical access and support, not just across Russia but across other former Soviet states where Russia had some influence, in Central Asia in particular.President Obama was also interested in trying to take nuclear arms reduction to another level.That was one of the big priorities in his campaign, and there again, Russia is the only nuclear power in the world comparable to the United States—had a both huge capacity and huge responsibility.So cold-bloodedly, there were reasons to explore whether or not, at least in those areas, you could build some hard-nosed form of partnership.
That was the backdrop to the reset.3It wasn’t, at least in my experience, born of some illusion that somehow we had missed this possibility for a grand partnership or a grand bargain with Russia.In my experience, Secretary Clinton and President Obama were quite realistic about what was possible and what wasn’t.The further complication was that you had a new president in Russia in Dmitry Medvedev, although it never seemed to me that Putin had left power.He was still obviously calling the shots, and Medvedev’s political influence was entirely derivative of Putin’s.But that complicated things, too, because it made it a little more difficult to engage directly with Putin since he was prime minister.
3
Well, that's what I was going to ask you.Hindsight certainly makes it obvious that this is a fiction in some ways.He’s doing this so that he can rerun again in four years or whatever it is.I assume that you all knew that as well, and it created complications.But maybe I'm misunderstanding?
You learn, at least my experience with Russia over the years, that there are few certainties.But I always thought there was a very significant likelihood that Putin was coming back, and it was always clear that he was calling the shots on big issues.He would give Medvedev some room to maneuver on some issues; for example, on the Libya issue.But in most cases, he was calling the shots both strategically and tactically as well.
But it made it awkward in the sense that from President Obama’s point of view, his natural counterpart was President Medvedev.From then-Prime Minister Putin’s point of view, he didn't see an American vice president as his equal or his counterpart, so when the president visited in the summer of 2009, he met with Putin as prime minister.When Hillary Clinton would visit as secretary, she met with Putin.So did Vice President Biden when he visited.But there wasn't that natural, regular channel to Putin in those years, which was a complication.
And then world events take place—Arab Spring; Libya obviously, the death of Qaddafi—the way Putin reacted to those events and the way he hoped Medvedev would respond.But he didn't respond exactly the way he wanted, and—well, tell me the story.
For Putin, the Arab Spring and the revolutions and upheavals that unfolded from the beginning of 2011 on were of a piece with the color revolutions in the former Soviet Union.He saw this, again, wrongly, as part of a pattern of American behavior in which what we were bound and determined to do was to undermine regimes that didn't fit our model of what government should look like in a U.S.-led international order.
He thought that we were naive about the way the Middle East worked and that we didn't understand the consequences of contributing to the undermining of regimes, autocratic regimes that had been there for a long time.He was not someone who understood that it was popular pressures that were producing these things.It wasn’t as if the United States threw Mubarak under the bus in Egypt; the bus was already halfway across Mubarak by the time President Obama said it was time for a change.But from Putin’s point of view, this was all part of a pattern of undermining existing governments, usually authoritarian governments which bore some similarities to his own, and that ultimately that could threaten his own control in the Kremlin.
Then you add to that his sense of naivete and recklessness, from his point of view, of American policy.I think he was particularly shaken by Qaddafi’s fate and the images of Qaddafi being killed when he was found in a drainage hole someplace.He was even more determined after that point to draw a line and find ways in which he could undermine the ability of the United States to pursue what he saw to be a mistaken policy line.
I suppose if you're a strongman and you see the United States take down Saddam Hussein, a strongman, even when it was not necessarily—especially when it was not in his best interests, and you watch the Arab Spring, and you watch it happening with strongmen everywhere in peril, then Qaddafi is the capper.The way people tell us, he’s literally watching it on video over and over again, right?
It’s very consistent with what I've always understood about Putin, and I think for someone whose prime focus is control and political order, authoritarian political order, because he’s a statist, he believes that's the only way in which you can hold Russia together and ensure Russia’s major power role in the world.Any kind of examples elsewhere in the world that undermine that kind of a concept are in some ways threatening to him.
Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia
… What happens in Georgia?What was at risk? What was at play?What was he trying to do, and what did he learn from at least the military failure?
I think there were several things first.On the military side, again, what shaped Putin’s view is the Russian military in the ’90s, particularly in the First Chechen War in ’94 to ’96.Here you had what was once the vaunted Red Army that was supposed to be able to reach the English Channel in 48 hours that proved entirely ineffective in trying to deal with a small rebellion of Chechen irregular forces as well.So he was convinced that you had to rebuild Russian military might.What the Georgia war in August of 2008 exposed was that they had made some progress toward restoring a more modern Russian military, but they still had a long way to go as well.
Then on the political side, again, it was Putin’s view that Russia was entitled to a sphere of influence.Georgia, especially under Mikheil Saakashvili, threatened that.Saakashvili in particular deeply irritated Putin because he saw him as an upstart and as someone who was trying to take advantage of Russia.
And Putin, as someone who had studied judo for many years, was a master, I think, at trying to bait his opponents into making a misstep, and then he could counter that very forcefully, so he did his best to set Saakashvili up over the course of the late spring and summer of 2008.
From Putin’s point of view, this wasn't just about Georgia.This was about Ukraine; this was about what he saw to be the West-centrist and eventual expansion of NATO potentially to include Ukraine and Georgia.This came against the backdrop, also, of U.S. plans to establish missile defense cooperation and missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, which he was also worried about.It came against the backdrop of the war in Kosovo in the late ’90s, and then the independence of Kosovo in the couple of years before the Georgia war.
From Putin’s point of view, this was all part of an encroachment on what he saw to be Russia’s interests and sphere of influence.And he saw an opportunity, both a challenge from Saakashvili in Georgia and then opportunity, to punch him back.
… As we try to pick up all the strands of things that are happening when you look at this cyber war, cyber information warfare and all of that, and its fledgling days in the Estonia attacks and how he keeps trying to add, or they keep trying to add, some components to it all the way along until you see what happens in Crimea and Ukraine, were you guys picking up on this as an element of what he was building in the tool box?
I was ambassador in Moscow when the cyber conflict that the Russians waged against Estonia was mounted.4The Estonian ambassador in Moscow was a good friend of mine, and she was tormented in a lot of different ways and held her own very well by the Russians in that period.
4
You could see the Russians investing in this instrument of state power.It was, from their point of view, a perfect asymmetric tool, a way in which they couldn’t compete in terms of conventional military power or in many other measures of national power with the United States or NATO, but here was one area where they could punch above their weight and take advantage of the human capital in Russia.And you could see it building all the way through the Ukraine crisis, which came some years later.
Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown
… When the word gets out that Putin is going to come back and the protests begin in Moscow for real, first let’s bring Hillary Clinton in and what she said and why he pointed the finger at her as part of the cause of what was happening.
I think first Putin was surprised by the breadth and the magnitude of the demonstrations, and surprised that this wasn’t just about Moscow and St. Petersburg, where typically you'd see some low-level opposition demonstrations.This was occurring in cities across Russia, so he was worried by that and, as I said, surprised.
And then Hillary Clinton spoke the truth in terms of what she had to say about the legitimate frustrations of Russians.Putin, partly because this is psychologically, I guess, projection, because this is how he would have done it, assumed that the United States was in some way complicit in encouraging those kinds of demonstrations, which wasn't the case at all.But it was also convenient for Putin to point to outsiders, especially the United States, because gradually, and especially in his second term as president, I think he had come to the conviction that there were two ways in which you could ensure Russia’s great power role in the world and ensure his continued control in the Kremlin.They were, first, to chip away at a U.S.-led international order to open up space for Russia, and second, to point to external threats to help justify a very repressive domestic system.So it suited him to point to Hillary Clinton and to the United States as the agitator, as the originator of those kind of demonstrations, which wasn't true.But it was convenient, and I think he was also convinced that the United States was encouraging those kind of demonstrations.
Were there conversations that you were privy to where she thought through what she was going to say, what she should say in a moment like that?Were you worried about if she spoke, or she wrote or she did anything, if the U.S. did anything in relation to these—?
No. I remember conversations during that period, and I think it’s important to be honest about events like that.I think what she had to say was fairly measured.It was an honest description of what was happening and an honest criticism of Putin’s reaction to that as well.And I think that's what you expect of an American secretary of state or an American president.
How did they get on, Putin and Clinton?
I think I was at each of the face-to-face meetings that they had.I remember the first one in Moscow where Putin, as was characteristic with him when the press came in at the beginning for an initial media availability, he was quite snarky, and so raised with the press following all this a few criticisms of American policy and second-guessing of the United States.She took this in stride and gave as good as she got, and you could almost see him taking his measure of her.
Then in the private conversation, which was similarly animated at times—but she didn't back down a bit, for which Putin developed a kind of grudging respect.But I think he felt threatened by her and by the fact that she clearly did not buy into this notion that Russia was entitled to a sphere of influence; that she did not buy into the notion that the United States should be mute about transgressions against human rights in Russia or anyplace else in the world.
He saw that as a threat against the backdrop of his growing concern about the role the United States was playing around the world, and particularly the ways in which his own grip and his own control might be threatened or undermined. …
<v Michael Kirk> NOTE chapter The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister // 2008-2011How did President Putin feel about President Obama?They never developed a lot of rapport.They're much different personalities.I remember their first meeting in July of 2009 at Putin’s dacha just outside Moscow.President Obama quite deliberately started the conversation by essentially giving Putin a chance to unburden himself a little bit about how he had seen relations with the United States over the last decade or more.His initial question, about 10 seconds, led to a 45-minute monologue by Putin, quite predictably.Putin unburdened himself about a lot of his concerns about how he thought the United States had—how its policies and approach to U.S.-Russian relations were unfair.Now, after that meeting, they didn't have that many opportunities to engage directly.There was never much direct rapport.Much different personalities.
He is, at that time and now, too, of course, is he viewed as a sort of lost cause in that sense, and you want to kind of keep the lid on?
Putin?
Yeah?
I think, just in my own experience over the last 25, 30 years dealing with Russia and particularly dealing with Putin’s Russia, that it’s a mistake to have illusions about grand bargains or great strategic partnerships.There's too much of a fundamental disconnect in terms of the way in which Putin looks at the world and Russia’s role and America’s role in the world and the way in which any American president, I think, is going to look at it as well.
But you don’t have the luxury of ignoring Russia either, and neglecting it, simply because on too many significant issues, they're a significant player.In Iran, for example, when Obama came into office at the beginning of 2009, Obama and Clinton recognized that if we were going to get anywhere in building leverage against the Iranians on the nuclear issue and building a solid international coalition in negotiations, we had to work with the Russians, because we could be pretty confident that we’d work well with the Germans, the French and the British.The Chinese weren't playing a particularly active role in that period.So the key was preventing the Iranians from driving a wedge between us and the Russians.
That was one of the reasons that President Obama wanted to explore the reset.And one of the reasons that the president was successful ultimately in reaching a negotiated agreement on the nuclear issue with the Iranians was because we had invested early on in cooperation on this one particular issue, cold-bloodedly in our interest as well as in Russian interest, in trying to build some form of U.S. cooperation at the core of that.We worked hard at that—Russians did as well—and it produced something.
It wasn't enough to make the reset a kind of enduring reality, because you didn't have any economic ballast in the relationship.There were just too many conflicting interests at stake.But on particular issues like that, you could make some progress.
Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term
Let’s go to 2014.If there was ever a year in President Putin’s life, if you could only make one film about Putin’s life, 2014’s a pretty good year when you think about what happens.You begin with Sochi, Crimea, Ukraine, all of it.It’s your last year there?
Right.
So take me there.Start with the Olympics, and tell me the arc of what you saw happen.
Putin had invested heavily in the Sochi Olympics.5I remember going back to the time when I was ambassador, and Russia was bidding to host the Olympics.Putin had thrown himself into this.He had polished his English so he could deliver the 10-minute speech, or whatever it was, to the International Olympic Committee in English.This was a big triumph personally for him, for Russia to be able to host.[They] put enormous amounts of money, tens of billions of dollars, much of which was wasted and went into the wrong pockets, in building a winter Olympic site in Sochi, which is a complicated thing to do since you've got mountains there, but you've also got palm trees by the Black Sea as well.It’s kind of an unusual place to do the Winter Olympics.
5
But he was heavily invested in this.I led the U.S. delegation to the closing ceremony at the Winter Olympics, and it was the kind of pageantry which Putin and Russians in general loved.He was riding very high.This was a moment of personal and national triumph from his point of view.
I think he was surprised when President [Viktor] Yanukovych in Ukraine fled the political landscape.He had always, in my experience, had a very dim view of Yanukovych.He thought he was a weakling, and his view of “Here's how you deal with demonstrators in the Maidan and Kiev; you shoot a few of them, and that's how you deter people,” he thought Yanukovych was not strong enough to cope with that.
I think he was surprised by the pace of events, the speed with which Yanukovych abandoned the scene.He responded in the only way I think that he knew how, and the only way he thought would work in support of Russia’s interests were, if you talk about Russia’s sphere of influence, Ukraine was the reddest of red lines from Putin’s point of view.
I'm sure in the Kremlin, there were contingency plans that had already been developed for retaking Crimea.Not that I think Putin was planning on that happening at that moment in history, but you can see quickly how he came to the conclusion that Russia [should] attack decisively to assert its interests, and swallowing up Crimea in a blatant act of Russian aggression was the obvious conclusion for him.
Were you surprised, not only at the speed but at the timing of when it happened?Or did you have an inkling?
I was not surprised that Putin responded very strongly, because I think given what he saw to be at stake in Ukraine and the impact that that would have on his own control in Russia, as he saw it, it was not a surprise at all that he responded quite forcefully.The way in which he went about it, the “little green men” and hybrid warfare and everything else, was kind of interesting to watch as well because it was very cleverly done.
Tell me about it. What happened?
What Putin was able to do was translate a big lie that Russia wasn’t behind any of this.But he was able to employ means, people who were I think obviously Russian service people, but [their uniforms] didn't bear any insignia or anything else.And he was able to camouflage that, at least in international public view, although it was obvious who was responsible for all this as well.
He was able to sow just enough confusion to get away with this in the short term.And for all the vulnerabilities of the Russian military, in that particular theater in Crimea, it was difficult to respond quickly against that for the Ukrainian military as well.He had a lot of advantages there.
So that in the southeastern parts of Ukraine, where they're [saying there are] not really Russian soldiers, but Facebook is delivering pictures of young Russians with guns saying, “Hey, Mom, look where I am,” right?
Right. And these are allegedly—the most that Putin would admit, as I recall in that period, was that they were Russian service people who took leave, patriotic leave, to go to the Donbas or go to Crimea, which was all BS.But it was part of a carefully calculated strategy to mask Russia’s continuing military weaknesses, even though they had significantly modernized their military; to take advantage of a variety of other means in which they could succeed, at least in those narrow terms.
On March 18, 2014, he delivers the stunning, almost declaration-of-war speech, take me there.6Tell me what it was about.What did you think when you heard and read it?
6
I think you have to draw a line back, again, in understanding Putin at least, almost a decade before, to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and Putin’s growing sense of, first, that the United States and the West was out to deny Russia what he saw to be its entitlement in terms of its sphere of influence; that the United States and the West was ultimately aiming at undermining his regime, his grip on power.Again, I think totally unjustifiably, but he gradually convinced himself of this.
Then you saw this period punctuated by the Munich speech in early 2007, and I think you can draw a straight line all the way through to that Crimea speech, which was his most animated, pugnacious declaration that Russia was going to push back.7It was no longer the 98-pound weakling of the 1990s in Yeltsin’s period, and it had means to protect what he saw to be its interests.It was defiant; it was unapologetic and really worrisome in a lot of ways, too, because it made clear the challenge that Putin’s Russia was posing.There was a lot at stake in that period, too, because one of the fundamental tenets of any international order is that big countries don’t get to swallow up parts of small countries just because they can.There was a lot at stake there as well.
7
At the State Department, take me there when this is happening.Are you in Washington when this happens, or are you--?
I was in Sochi first, and then I actually went and stopped in Kiev on the way back to Washington.This was partly to reassure the Ukrainian government, partly to reinforce the president’s message that the United States and our Western partners took this extremely seriously and we're going to push back, and we're certainly going to support the Ukrainians as they resisted this aggression.Then I came back to Washington.By that point, it was a couple of days after the annexation of Crimea.
And what's the vibe in Washington?How nervous are people about what he’s doing?
As I recall, the vibe was more one of determination, an appreciation, first, of what was at stake and the moment; that in some ways, as dangerous and reckless as Putin had been in swallowing up Crimea—and you could already see what he was at least flirting with in the Donbas in southeastern Ukraine, traditionally an area where there's a big ethnic Russian or Russian-speaking population.Clearly some of the people around Putin were flirting with the notion that there was a step beyond Crimea that you could take.It was the time when people in Moscow were talking about, I think, Novorossiya—you know, I forget the term; I'll come back to it—but that Crimea might not be the last stop.
So there was a real air of determination, as I recall it, a sense that the best way to push back against the Russians was to do it in strong alliance with our European partners, starting with the Germans and others; [a sense] that Russia had a lot of vulnerabilities, especially economically, and we had the means to target some of those vulnerabilities in response; that it was extremely important not only not to accept the annexation but to draw a fairly sharp line so that whatever notions some in the Kremlin may have had about the Donbas and extending Russian control even beyond the Crimea would be set aside.
As the fighting is continuing down in Ukraine, in eastern and southeastern sections, there's certainly arguments coming from people at the DoD [Department of Defense] that say we need more lethal—we need to supply the Ukrainians with weaponry and other things that can at least stop them from getting run over or slaughtered.Take me there to that debate.
I think there were a number of vulnerabilities that the Ukrainians faced.Some of them were economic, and we moved quickly along with European Union partners to help address some of those.Some were political, just to give Ukrainians a sense that the West was behind them in resisting Russian aggression.And some were military and security.
The Ukrainians, after some initial setbacks, because they were overwhelmed in some ways militarily, proved to be quite determined fighters and had begun to stabilize the front in southeastern Ukraine in that period.But there was a powerful argument for not just providing defensive weaponry, the sorts of things that we and others were providing the Ukrainians, but thinking about other kinds of weaponry, anti-tank weapons and others, that the Ukrainians might be able to employ even more effectively.
It’s a complicated calculation for President Obama in that period, first, because you didn't want to give the Russians any excuses to overreach even further than they already were; second, it was clear that some of our closest European allies had some misgivings about doing this then.I think the essence of what the president was trying to do was to ensure that this was a cohesive, unified transatlantic response to the Russians, so he understandably wanted to be careful about making decisions that might give Putin a chance to exploit differences between us and some of the Europeans.That was a factor as well.But there was a pretty compelling argument for trying to provide some of that kind of weaponry early on. …
Lessons learned by President Putin from what happened in Crimea and what is happening in Ukraine?
Well, first, from Putin’s point of view, the best thing is to have a deferential government in Kiev.If you can't have that, the next best thing is a dysfunctional Ukraine.That's what he’s been trying to do ever since the annexation of Crimea, is take advantage of vulnerabilities in Ukraine, and he knows where a lot of the skeletons are buried.
It’s extremely important, it seems to me, first to understand what his calculus is and then resist that first by helping the Ukrainians rebuild themselves economically and politically.I think what Putin has accomplished strategically is a net loss for Russia in the sense that he’s ensured that the vast majority of Ukrainians, even including lots of ethnic Russian Ukrainians, now have no interest in being a vassal state of Russia.Their commitment to a sovereign, independent Ukraine is stronger, certainly a lot stronger, than it was before 2014.
I think the broader lessons with Putin are, don’t underestimate him; that you have to be vigilant; that he understands firmness; that you have to anticipate sometimes where he might try to take advantage, because he’s constantly demonstrating that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising powers on the world.And again, going back to his judo training from when he was 11 or 12, one of the things he learned in judo is that you can take advantage of stronger opponents by waiting for them to make a misstep or seeing opportunities or seeing weaknesses.That's what he did in Ukraine after the crisis started.That's what he did in Syria, in roughly the same time period or a little bit later.That’s what he did in the U.S. elections as well.
And for him, it almost seems like, when you think about it, he doesn't need to win, whatever <i>win </i>means in any of these events, these wars.He just has to have chaos, disruption, keep everybody at bay in some other way.
I think that's right.You know, if Putin’s goal, like lots of people in the Russian political elite, is to restore Russia as a major power, rebuild it after a period of historic weakness in the ’90s, there are at least two different ways of doing that.One is to modernize your economy to build a strong state that relies not just on hydrocarbons but on the human capital in Russia, open up to the rest of the world.He’s chosen not to do that because that, in his judgment, would come at the expense of what matters most to him, which is political control.You open up the economy, you apply rule of law to the way in which your economy functions; ultimately that's going to affect your political system.It also means you'd have to fight corruption in a serious way, and corruption is what he uses to lubricate his political system.
The second alternative in an international order led by the United States is to chip away at the U.S. position in that order.Make common cause where you can, whether it’s with China or Iran in the Middle East or other places, other states that may not have an identical view of the world as Putin does, but where you can make common cause at chipping away at the American role.
That's the path essentially that he’s chosen.It’s convenient also because it enables him to point to external threats to Russia, real or imagined, and to demonstrate that he’s the Russian leader who can stand up effectively to those.He’s demonstrated that even if you're, objectively speaking, a declining power, you can be quite disruptive, and you can sow chaos.I'm convinced that's exactly what he intended to do in the U.S. elections in 2016 and has succeeded so far beyond his wildest imagination in sowing chaos, in some respects in making president Trump an instrument of that chaos.
I think his calculation, given his dim view of Hillary Clinton, was probably that she was going to win the election, but he wanted to hobble her if he could, so that she’d come into office, which he probably expected, but in a weaker position and distracted by continuing domestic debates and partisan debates.
I don't think Putin has had any great illusions about doing a grand bargain with the Trump administration.He tends to take a fairly cynical view of how you deal with the United States.But from his point of view, being able to sow chaos, being able to distract the United States, being able to, in his eyes, expose the hypocrisy of the American political system to the rest of the world is obviously a net plus that opens up a lot of room for maneuver in Russia and the world.
It is not a long-term prescription for sustaining Russia as a great power, as a major power, in part because he’s not invested in his economy in a way that's going to fuel that over time.But in the short term, it’s opened up a lot of possibilities for him.
Just fabulous.Let’s ask these guys what we missed.
After Ukraine, when the Western countries respond but maybe not as forcefully as they might have, not providing lethal weapons, does Putin learn something there that might embolden him later, that might make him think he can do something like intervene in an American election without serious consequences?
No. I mean, I think Putin was actually to some extent surprised by the solidarity of the U.S. and our principal European allies.I think he was surprised by the sharpness of the sanctions, especially after the first wave of sanctions, the next waves, and the impact that they had on the Russian elite, the people around him, and also Russia’s ability to access capital and to access the kind of technology that it needs in developing hydrocarbon reserves, too.
I think he underestimated what the backlash was going to be.I think he also underestimated the impact this was going to have on Ukraine over the medium-term, deepening a sense of solidarity on the part of Ukrainians as well.It didn't diminish his interest in looking for opportunities in other places, or vulnerabilities, whether it was Syria or in the U.S. elections.But I think he was going to try to take advantage of them anyway, notwithstanding the way in which Ukraine unfolded.
Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term
Did you ever hear from him personally about his theories about what the U.S. was doing in his sphere of influence or his description of the president or the secretary of state?
In the current administration?
No, when you were there.
I remember one conversation that Secretary [of State Condoleezza] Rice had with Putin, I think it was in the fall of 2006, so probably before the Munich speech, in which Putin got quite animated about his concerns about Ukraine and Georgia and the way in which he would respond if the Ukrainian and Georgian leaderships were, in his view, to push things too far.
I saw a number of instances where Putin was quite up-front and quite adamant about his positions in private, coupled with public expressions in Munich and elsewhere.He was not shy about expressing the depth of his concerns.
Putin's Political Rise
When you meet him first time in the 1990s, do you have a sense then of who he is?Or who’s the guy who you meet the very first time?
As I recall, I had two encounters in groups in which I was on the U.S. side and Putin was a part of the Russian group, both when he was working as the deputy mayor for Mayor [Anatoly] Sobchak in Leningrad and later St. Petersburg, one when I was working for Secretary [of State James] Baker, so it would have been ’91 or ’92, and then a second when I was the political counsel at our embassy in Moscow and had another encounter with Sobchak.But it was only later that I connected the dots.I wish I could say that I had the prescience to see that Putin was going to emerge as the Russian leader that he later emerged as.I remember being in the same meeting room, but I don't remember him saying anything.The encounters were not especially memorable.
But who was he then?He didn't seem like a guy who was going to be the next president.
No. I don't think that occurred to Putin, either, at that time.His rise was remarkable and in some ways a function of the chaos of Russia in the 1990s, and in Yeltin’s Russia.He had left the KGB, become vice mayor to Sobchak in Leningrad and then St. Petersburg, and then in a span of two or three years rose from being one of the deputy heads of administration in the Kremlin to becoming the head of the FSB [Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation], the successor to the KGB, prime minister and eventually the president of Russia, all in a very rapid period of time.
Why? What was it?
You know, I don't know.I think from the point of view of Yeltsin, who was rapidly declining in terms of his health and his political grip, and Yeltsin’s family and the people around him, they needed first and foremost to try to groom a successor who would protect them, who wasn't then going to unleash the instruments of the state against them.
I think they found Putin to be a reliable instrument.He wasn’t associated with one faction or another at that time, but it was quite remarkable how quickly he emerged in that period as from the sort of grayest of gray personalities to becoming the president of Russia. …
Intervention in the U.S. Election
When you hear that the Russian government—it was probably around the summer, late fall of 2016—that the Russian government was involved in hacking and releasing documents and seeming to influence an American election, how surprised were you?What was your response?How unprecedented was that?
I wasn’t entirely surprised because you had seen the Russians developing this capability for some years.I was a little bit surprised by the brazenness of it as well.Putin didn't go to great lengths to try to cover his tracks on this.And I was struck, like so many other Americans, by the seriousness of this—a direct challenge to the democratic system in the United States.I think that’s something that has to be taken really seriously.
And when you see candidate Trump respond in that moment?
I was appalled, first of all, by the unwillingness to appreciate what was at stake here; that this was a serious effort by Russia, by a foreign power, to interfere in our elections, which is as direct and severe a threat to American interests as you can imagine.His public efforts to be dismissive of that at best or to encourage it at worst, I think really were appalling.
Some people who have come in here and talked to us say you have to understand; he’s at war with us.It’s not a war like a shooting war, yet, but it’s a war, and it’s an ongoing war, and we have to acknowledge it.What do you think?
Well, I think certainly it’s an adversarial relationship, and I think Putin approaches that relationship in that way.8He is going to employ whatever means he can to undermine the United States.It doesn't mean he’s going to be oblivious to those few areas where we might be able to work together.He's capable of juggling apparent contradictions at the same time.But I think you do have to understand that this is, for some years to come, going to be largely an adversarial relationship.
8
Thank you very much.
Pleasure.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
