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William Taylor

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William Taylor

Fmr. U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine

William Taylor served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009 under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In 2019, he served as chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv under President Donald Trump. He is currently the vice president for strategic stability and security at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Michael Wiser for FRONTLINE on Sept. 29, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Putin and the Presidents

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Putin’s 2022 Invasion of Ukraine

I’m going to take you way back to the early days, but before I do, I want to just start with something that’s a little bit more recent, which is the moment when President [Joe] Biden is briefed that it looks like an invasion of Ukraine is serious and the intelligence agencies are saying that this is going to happen, or it’s very, very likely that it’s going to happen.What are the stakes at that moment?How important a moment is that for President Biden, for the United States, for the world?

So I think that was a key moment.As you say, that briefing probably was more definitive than President Biden had heard, certainly than the rest of the world had heard before.And when he was briefed that this could happen soon—so now we’re probably talking about, you know, January or even December of last year, January of 2022, when it was clearer and clearer to our intelligence agencies that the capability was there.The Russian capability to invade Ukraine was there, and the key question is always intent.The key question is, he’s got the capability; will he do it?And in order to answer that question, one has to—and the intelligence community tries to—get in the head of the one person that it depends on, and that’s [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.

So when President Biden is getting this briefing several days, probably weeks, before it actually happened on the 24th of February, when the intelligence community was surer and surer, more and more certain that this could really happen, President Biden had to think through all that he knew about both Russia, but in particular about Ukraine.And President Biden, as we know, knew a lot about Ukraine.As vice president, he had been to Ukraine many times.He knew the personalities.He knew the politics.And the important part there is I think President Biden understood, in ways that many people didn’t, the importance of Ukrainian independence.… He knew the history, that Ukraine had been under the thumb of Russia for 300 years.And for the past 30 years, it was independent; it was free.And he saw—President Biden saw on every visit how important that was to Ukrainians.So he understood better than most the significance of the threat that President Putin posed to an independent Ukraine.So that briefing undoubtedly troubled him a lot, because he knew the importance of Ukraine as well or better than most.

And he then launches a furious period of trying to convince Putin not to do it.There’s video conferences, phone calls, shuttle diplomacy.There are public warnings; there is rallying; there’s releasing intelligence.And yet it doesn’t dissuade Vladimir Putin.What was Biden trying to do, and why did it not work?

Well, you know, at one point actually, it seemed to work.At one point in the spring of 2021, there was this buildup, this initial buildup of Russian forces around Ukraine which caused a lot of concern on the part of the United States government and on the part of the Ukrainian government and on the part of European governments.And President Biden surprised a lot of people by placing a phone call to President Putin.Again, this is the spring of 2021.There was a threat—not as big as the subsequent threat that we now focus on—but this phone call that President Biden put in had three components, had three messages.First message was, “Back off of Ukraine; do not invade Ukraine; stop the threat to Ukraine that is posed by your forces, Mr. Putin.”

The second message—and again, we remember that this was shortly after President Biden was in office.So this was—I think this was in, like, March.[He’d] been inaugurated in January, so he hadn’t been in office more than a couple months.So for him to call Putin and tell him, “Back off of Ukraine,” and to tell President Putin that “The United States is going to put sanctions on you for what you did during the election, in our election, and those sanctions are coming”—President Biden told President Putin in this phone call.

The third thing he said was, “And I’m willing to meet you.I’m willing to have a meeting, a summit, to talk these things through.”So he had both—threatened is too strong, but had warned President Putin not to invade.He had told President Putin he was going to put sanctions on.And it turns out, two days later after that phone call, sure enough, those sanctions were imposed, announced and imposed.And then he also said, “But I’m willing to talk.”

So President Biden did go out of his way.He got some criticism for this.He got some criticism for talking to President Putin, but in particular for offering to sit down and talk with him person-to-person, face-to-face.But he did it anyway, President Biden.And it turned out, interestingly, that President Putin did, to some degree, back down from Ukraine.We should be clear: He didn’t pull all those forces back from around the borders of Ukraine, but he did pull a lot of the soldiers, those Russian soldiers, back off of that equipment.He left a lot of the equipment on the border with Ukraine, but he pulled a lot of the soldiers back, so it was less of a threat.It was a backdown in some real sense.

And as we remember, they did have that meeting in Geneva.Didn’t go particularly well, but it didn’t go terribly.They agreed to a couple of interesting things.They agreed—President Biden, President Putin agreed in Geneva in about, this must have been about June now of 2021.They agreed to have their experts get together and talk about an issue that was important, <i>is </i>important, to both countries, and that’s strategic stability.So these are the so-called strategic stability talks.And strategic stability is what the experts refer to—how the experts refer to discussions about nuclear arms control.It’s broader than just nuclear arms because it includes some of these new weapons.It includes cyber.It includes hypersonics.It recognizes that there are other things going on in the world that affect strategic stability, like the rise of China, for example.

So these strategic stability talks are broader than just nuclear arms control, but they focus on nuclear arms control.There’s no doubt about it.And the two presidents agree to have their experts sit down and do that. And it turns out over the next, about six months, so last fall, a year ago, the Russian and American experts did get together, I think three times, and had these conversations about nuclear arms control.

There’s an issue there that is important for the United States, important for Russia, important for the rest of the world indeed.That is the New START treaty, which President Biden extended as soon as he was in office.Expires in five years.And so the question for the Russians and the Americans and the strategic stability expert community is what happens after the New START treaty expires?Is there something to follow on?Is there something to expand?Is there something to continue?Do the Chinese play?These questions are really important ones for the big issues of nuclear stability, strategic stability.

And so at that meeting in Geneva, prompted by President Biden’s phone call that got President Putin to pull back from Ukraine, warned him about the sanctions but also agreed to talk, these strategic stability talks got underway.So there was some hope that the conversation, that the attempts by President Biden to deal with President Putin, could lead to some kind of results.All that said, later on in the fall—so a year ago now—so in the fall of 2021, sure enough, these Russian forces start moving back towards Ukraine’s borders, and not just the eastern border, but no, all three borders: the Ukraine border with Belarus; Ukraine border with Russia; Ukraine border with occupied Crimea; even the Ukraine border with Russian forces that are still in Moldova in Ukraine’s southwest.

So these forces started to menace Ukraine again even while these other conversations were going on.This is all to say that there was some progress in attempting to defuse the situation early that gave some reason to think that this could happen.So going back to your question about the briefing, that hope that had been generated by some series of conversations about other things—when President Biden heard from his intelligence community that there was a strong likelihood of an invasion of Ukraine [it] must have come as a disappointment.Surprise is probably not it.Probably not surprised because he had seen the buildup.But he had gone out of his way—you mentioned other phone calls.There was another phone call that President Biden put in to President Putin in, what, December of 2021 in order to lay out in some detail what would happen if President Putin followed through on what the intelligence community was telling President Biden that Russia was going to do.

And President Biden laid out for President Putin in some specificity the kinds of sanctions that he would put on.What he told the world was, “These sanctions are going to be unlike anything you’ve ever seen.They'll be harsher than any sanctions that have been put on any other nation,” and I’m sure he told President Putin more detail than that—exactly what to expect.So President Biden had gone to some length, both in the previous spring and in the winter and even into January, to try to convince President Putin that it wasn’t worth it.President Biden knew the importance of Ukraine.He went to great lengths to try to deter President Putin from an invasion.In the end, we know that failed.

Putin vs. the United States

And on Feb. 24, Vladimir Putin comes out and he gives a speech.And one of the remarkable [things]—looking back at that speech, which is sometimes called the “empire of lies” speech—is that the first, I don’t know, first third, first half is about the United States, and he’s invading Ukraine.He’s announcing a war that he calls a “special military operation,” and yet his speech is about the United States.What does that reveal?

So President Putin thinks that the United States is behind all his problems, is the cause of all his problems.So President Putin thinks, apparently, that the United States sponsored Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian opposition to Russia.He goes back to 2014 when the pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, decides to crack down on innocent protesters, peaceful protesters, and tried to clear the streets of Kyiv of these protesters.And that generated what we now know as the Revolution of Dignity, Euromaidan in Ukraine.This was this great outpouring of Ukrainian outrage at the insult to their dignity represented by their president, Viktor Yanukovych, being so beholden to Putin.And the Ukrainian people ran this president out of the country, and President Putin was sure that the Americans were behind that.

He didn’t give—President Putin didn’t give the credit to the Ukrainian people.He didn’t think the Ukrainian people would do that.This is going to be a common theme of Putin’s misunderstanding, colossal misunderstanding of Ukraine, of Ukrainian people, of Ukrainian history, of Ukrainian determination to maintain their independence from Russia.President Putin doesn’t get that, still doesn’t get that, and that is manifest in this horrible war that he is convinced the Americans have put the Ukrainians up to, because the Ukrainians, in President Putin’s mind: not really a country, not really a nation, not really a people.They’re really just part of Russia.They’re “Little Russians,” and if it weren’t for the Americans, then they would be part of Russia.

I mean, somebody told us in a way, it’s a war against the United States; that Ukraine, he doesn’t see as a real country, and his real enemy here is the United States.Do you think that’s overstating?

President Putin wants to make the case to the Russian people that this war—as you say, “special military operation”—is really against the West.It’s really against the Americans; it’s against NATO; it’s against the West; that Russia is under siege from these Western forces, these liberal forces, these anti-family forces.President Putin wants to make the case it’s not just against Ukraine; it’s against this broader cultural, historical wrong that the Americans and others have foisted on Ukraine and indeed is affecting Russia.

So that allows him to say to the Russian people, “We need to reabsorb Ukraine.We need to pull Ukraine back into the fold, where they really want to be anyway, so this shouldn’t be hard,” he will say.“We need—the Ukrainians are straying from the motherland, and they’re being pulled away from the Russian motherland by the Americans, and so we need to take military action.”President Putin has convinced himself, is trying to convince the Russians, so far unsuccessfully, that this military action is necessary in order to confront that battle, confront that battle with the West.And Ukraine is key to that battle.

Ukraine, Georgia and NATO

So let’s go back for a second to that period when the Soviet Union is falling apart and these countries—Ukraine, Georgia, the “near abroad”—are going out on their own.Was that a searing experience for Vladimir Putin?How did he see that, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in particular, these countries going out and becoming independent?

So he famously said that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the previous century.We can think of some pretty bad geopolitical catastrophes in the previous century, but he would pick out the fall of the Soviet Union for that category.So, he sees that as an injustice, indeed as an insult.As we know, he was in Germany at the time.He saw the threats to Soviet officials, again, as an insult to the great Soviet—and he would say now Russian—Empire.So he saw this as a catastrophe, and he’s making it clear that he wants to reassemble that.He wants to bring those nations back, starting with Ukraine, but really with the attempt in smaller ways in other countries earlier on.

You mentioned Georgia, where he invaded in 2008.He got the Georgians to take the bait, to be provoked, if you will, and then Putin took advantage of that provocation to invade Georgia.And that was in 2008, a couple of months after Ukraine and Georgia applied to NATO for membership, and this must have horrified President Putin.It was one thing to have the Soviet Union dissolved and these 15 nations that were part of the Soviet Union to emerge as independent nations going their own way.President Putin liked to think that they would be going their own way, but they would be going in concert with Russia.Russia would maintain some leadership role.Well, that didn’t happen.The Georgians did not want to see the Russians in a leadership role.The Ukrainians didn’t want to see Russians in leadership.They wanted to be independent.

And when Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 applied to NATO at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, that was a threat to President Putin that he couldn’t abide.Unfortunately, in my view, NATO said no to both Georgia and Ukraine at that time.Said, “No, you can’t start the process of joining NATO.”There’s something called a Membership Action Plan that the Georgians and Ukrainians had proposed to the NATO leaders to start the process toward membership.And in particular, the Europeans said no.President Bush was in favor.And the U.S. government was in favor of saying yes to Ukraine and Georgia to begin the process of joining NATO.

President Bush in particular wanted to be able to make a convincing case to his European leader colleagues when he got to Bucharest that Ukraine was worthy of membership.Ukraine wanted membership.Ukraine would do what was necessary to join the alliance and would bring capabilities to the alliance that would make the alliance stronger.So President Bush, on his way to the summit, visited Kyiv.I was there at the time.Anytime a president visits the country where you’re the ambassador, it’s a big deal.It is a big deal—and for President Bush and his whole entourage to land at Kyiv, to sit down with the president, sit down with all the leaders, sit down with the military, sit down with civilians, civil society, a big part of Ukrainian culture, and sit down and talk to Ukrainians about their future and about what they wanted in terms of their independence in particular from Russia. And the way Ukrainians thought they could keep that independence, that security, that sovereignty was by joining NATO.

They made that case to President Bush.President Bush was there to hear that case.He went on to Bucharest to the summit, where he tried to make that case on Ukrainian behalf, and Georgian.And again, several of the European nations said no.Some of the Western European nations said no.There were, as you would imagine, some nations in Eastern Europe that were already members of NATO who were strongly supportive of Ukraine joining because that would make them more secure.So this was something that—President Putin was horrified.And he invaded Georgia a couple of months later, and a couple years later, he invaded Ukraine.

“We will have you eventually but without a commitment.”What did you think of that at the time?What do you think of that now?

So at the time, I thought it was a compromise that at least gave a nod to the Ukrainians’ and the Georgians’ aspirations to join NATO.It was probably the best that President Bush and other East European leaders could have gotten out of the West European leaders.And the language was basically, “We’re not giving you this Membership Action Plan approval today, but you will be in NATO.”They didn’t say when.They didn’t say how this exactly would happen.But they made the statement that Ukraine and Georgia will be in NATO.

Now, at the time, as I say, sounded like a compromise, sounded like the best you could get.It was a little bit of a kind of throwaway just to make it clear that there was a respect for Ukraine and Georgia and their desires.However, Ukrainians didn’t forget that.Ukrainians remembered that promise.But also, President Putin remembered that promise.President Putin heard that.And again, for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO would mean that his plan to reabsorb Ukraine and Georgia would fail, would be impossible.If Ukraine were in NATO, then President Putin could not reabsorb Ukraine into a revised and expanded Russian Empire.It couldn’t.Ukraine would be able to defend itself with all the support of the other NATO nations.So President Putin listened.He heard that promise, and he worried about it.The Ukrainians heard that promise, and they kept that hope alive.

But they’ve made Putin worried, and they haven’t given a guarantee.As you say, it’s only months later that he invades Georgia.So in that sense, was it a mistake to not go one way or the other on NATO?

I think it was a mistake.I think that decision in Bucharest by the NATO heads of state—and again, NATO is a consensus organization.You have to have everybody agree to a big decision, big policy change or a policy decision.So if there were a couple nations—as there were Western European nations who said no—then that meant that the NATO summit could not invite Ukraine and Georgia to start the process, and I think that was a mistake.Fact is, I would say—we’ll never know this—but if the decision had been to start the process of joining NATO, Putin was not in the position at that time—he wasn’t strong enough at that time to do what he is now doing in terms of the invasion of Ukraine.And we wouldn’t be fighting today.My bet is, the Ukrainians wouldn’t be fighting with our support against the Russian army had they been offered the Membership Action Plan in 2008.

So what Putin learned in his invasion of Georgia in August of 2008—so a couple months after the Bucharest summit—his military was not in very good shape.He had to struggle against Georgia.So Georgia probably has 5 million people.Russia has 140 million people.Ukraine has 40 million people.So Ukraine is much, much larger than Georgia.Russia is much, much larger than either Ukraine or Georgia.And his military had a struggle in Georgia.They eventually pulled back.They didn’t go all the way to Tbilisi.They eventually occupied 20% of Georgian territory, where they still are.They continue to occupy Abkhazia and North Ossetia.They’re a part of Georgia.

But President Putin realized that his military was not in good shape, and that prompted an enormous military buildup on the part of the Russians.He said, “We are going—we need to have a strong military.If we are going to have to use military force to bring the Georgians or eventually the Ukrainians back into the empire, we’re going to need a bigger, stronger military.”And so he spent a lot of money, many rubles, on that military.

… [Former Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice famously says, “We stand by our friends.”Yet he goes into Georgia.And what happens?Was it a test of America?

So the response to the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 was outrage.Europeans were outraged.The French president got involved in some of the discussions.The United States put some sanctions on the Georgians—this was in 2008.United States made some show of force in terms of naval presence in the Black Sea and of humanitarian supplies being flown into Georgia in support of the Georgians.But it was not the response that would have sent the message to President Putin that the West was going to do anything really serious about his invasion.And, as we know, there was an election in 2008 in the United States.President Obama came into office.We remember now—looking back on what we now see as probably a mistake—that President Obama decided he was going to have a “reset” with President Putin and Russia; that these arguments even about such a thing as Georgian sovereignty were something that we could overlook in some sense.

And this reset, to its credit, got a couple of good things done.There were some agreements with the Russians that probably would not have been possible without a reset.The Russians agreed to allow supplies, military supplies to go into Afghanistan, which of course, we needed, the United States needed.We were having some difficulty over land supplies to Afghanistan through Pakistan.So the reset had a couple of successes.However, it didn’t address the real problem.And the real problem that we probably should have seen was President Putin’s determination to dominate those nations, now independent, that used to be part of the Soviet Union, in particular, Ukraine.

Ukraine was always the jewel in the crown for President Putin.And when the United States pushed back a little bit after the invasion of Georgia, but then with a new administration decided to proceed with a reset, that suggested to President Putin that he didn’t have to worry that much about the American reaction; that he could do what he eventually did in 2014, [which] was invade his neighbor.He invaded Crimea in 2014, and again, at that point, not a big reaction.He went further, invaded Donbas a little bit later in 2014.That started to prompt some real concerns which then built up, because by that time, based on that action, the United States took seriously the fact that President Putin is ready to overturn a rules-based order that had kept the peace for so long by invading its neighbor.So that invasion made it crystal clear where President Putin was going.

… Let me ask one last question about the NATO expansion, because I know you were an advocate of it.You were the ambassador from Ukraine.But it was controversial inside the administration.… Looking back on it, what was that debate like?What were the warnings?Why did you feel the way you did?

The debate about admitting Georgia and Ukraine within the administration was a lively one.As I say, President Bush was clear that he supported it.His security council, his secretary of state—so Condi Rice, Steve Hadley, the Pentagon, strong supporters of this.There were other voices, though—you’re exactly right—that said both within the administration but more outside of the administration, that this is going to be intolerable for President Putin and that if we wanted to try to get things done, we wanted to have a relationship, we wanted to have arms control treatment, we want to have other kinds of interactions with the Russians, then we should be careful not to provoke.But the debate about Georgia and Ukraine, President Bush was very clear about the importance of sovereignty and the importance of Ukraine for NATO security and thus for United States security.

We talked earlier about how later, President Biden would have gone through the same thought process of the importance of Ukraine.So when the discussion, in 2008, about admitting Georgia and Ukraine, the government was united.The government was united that despite concerns, some voices from Moscow, both from the embassy and other places, that the Russians would not be happy.Nonetheless, President Bush moved forward on this attempt.

Putin and the Bush Administration

My one other question about the Bush administration is it starts out, and as it’s known, Bush says he looks into Putin’s eyes and he sees his soul.And we know that Putin calls Bush after 9/11 and offers to help.After Iraq happens, after the color revolutions happen, by the time you get to 2007, there’s this famous speech in Munich which sounds so much like the speech he gives in Feb. 24 of this year [2022].What happens to those early hopes or whatever they were between those two time periods?

There always is a hope, an interest.You could probably find a rationale for trying to have better relations with the Russians if possible.And so, as you say, one president looks into the eyes, finds the soul.Another president goes for a reset.Nonetheless, as you say, President Putin was pretty clear in Munich in 2007.His actions in 2008 both at that summit and with the invasion of Georgia—so at that NATO summit in Bucharest in the spring of 2008, where the Ukrainians and Georgians applied for membership, President Putin visited.He was a guest at one part of that summit, and he famously leaned over to President Bush at that summit and said, “George, you know, Ukraine’s not really a country.”That was clear to President Bush.It was clear to the administration what President Putin really thought about Ukraine.

That was one of the reasons that President Bush felt strongly about Ukraine in NATO.And so that was in the spring of 2008.And then we know what happened in August of 2008 with the invasion of Georgia, and then we know what happened in 2014.So you’re right: There were signals.There were indications from President Putin of his anger, maybe even humiliation, his conviction that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the previous century.This all came out.It came out in 2007.Came out in actions in 2008.It reinforced itself, of course, in 2014.And you’re right: It was the driver in February of this year, of 2022, where he, in an angry speech before invading Ukraine, made it clear his views about Ukraine, same views he expressed to President Bush in 2008 when he leaned over and said, “It’s not a real country.”

He had no respect for the sovereignty of Ukrainian people.So you’re right: We should have seen it earlier, and it was at that time in the 2007-2008 timeframe that it was clear if we wanted to see it—maybe we didn’t want to see it, but it was clear if we had wanted to see it—the direction that President Putin was going.

Why didn’t we take it more seriously?We talked to people who were there in Munich, and the reaction was shocked, startled.They did one of those “I remember where I was when it happened” moments.It was shocking, but did we take it seriously?Did we take Russia seriously?

Not seriously enough.We didn’t take Russia seriously enough at that time.This was a surprise.It was a shock.I was not in Munich, but I read the same accounts.And to hear from President Putin this belligerent statement about where he intended to go and how he felt aggrieved by the treatment of Russia, how aggrieved he was that the West had treated Russia so badly and disrespected this great nation of his and that anger, and the intention of moving in the direction that he did, and we didn’t want to see it.And again, we were in—there was a political process here, of course, and there was an election.And the new administration, as you’ve pointed out, like other administrations, wants to see if maybe they can do it better.Maybe it’s possible to get along with Russia.Turned out not.

Putin and the Obama Administration

So the Obama administration comes in.They do the reset, which we’ve talked about.And there’s also a public side of how Barack Obama talks about Russia, as a regional power.He famously said to Mitt Romney, “The 1980s called, and they want their foreign policy back.”What’s represented in those comments about how President Obama was dealing with Russia?

So President Obama’s comment that Russia was a problem, but not a big problem.It’s a regional power; it’s not a superpower.It has nuclear weapons, he, of course, acknowledged.But it had nothing really—Russia had nothing really else going for it.Didn’t have a political model, an economic model.It didn’t have any soft power that would attract other nations to ally with it.And President Obama, like other presidents, saw Asia as a problem that needed attention.And so he didn’t focus on Russia as he probably should have.And it was clear by 2014 the problem that the world had with President Putin.President Putin invaded his neighbor in 2014.First time since World War II that one nation in Europe had invaded another and tried to change borders.Just a direct violation of the principles that had kept the peace to a great extent, certainly among big powers in Europe.And President Putin violated all of those.And President Obama belatedly recognized the problem.

But at that time, there’s a lot of confusion about what’s going on.I don’t know what was known by the intelligence agencies, but at the time, there’s a lot of confusion about the little green men and what exactly is going on and how are we going to respond to this?Did that complicate the response?There’s a moment that we’ve heard that Putin lied to Obama, who’d been told these were Russian soldiers.And he said, “You’ve got your guys in Crimea,” and Putin just lied to him.Did that complicate the situation?

Of course it did.And that invasion, sending these little green men, sending these Russian soldiers without insignia into a neighboring country, into Crimea, was such a shock.Again, this hadn’t happened since World War II.So it was such a shock.The Ukrainians were not in a position to expel these Russian soldiers.They were not in a position to use force of arms of their military to defend Crimea from this invasion.President Yanukovych, the kind of Russia-leaning president of Ukraine at that time, had allowed the Ukrainian army to deteriorate, to be hollowed out, to be corrupted, and was unable to mount any kind of a defense.And again, he was run out of the country.

But even the new president, President [Petro] Poroshenko, when he came into office, was not able militarily at that time to push the Russians out of Crimea or Donbas at that time.And the suddenness with which—the shock of the invasion of Crimea meant that the West was not prepared.The West had not made contingency plans for this.So the Obama administration had to make it up on the fly.And they knew they had to press back; they knew they had to resist.And they began that process in 2014.It took some time to build up the ability and the support from Europeans as well as in the United States to mount a pressure campaign, sanctions, new weapons, new support for the Ukrainian military that would eventually allow them, the Ukrainian military, to begin the defense, begin to push the Russians back out of their country.

But that took time.It was slow in starting.The Obama administration with Vice President Biden, to its credit, began this effort to bring the Europeans onboard.You need to have an international effort to impose sanctions on a nation.Individual—just U.S.-Russia sanctions: That’s not going to work.You need to have the Europeans; you need to have the Japanese; you need to have South Koreans, the Australians.You need to have the Canadians.You need an international effort.And to the Obama administration’s credit, they cranked up that effort.It took, however, the Russians shooting down a civilian airline, the Malaysia airline, that killed 298 civilians—it took that massacre, it took that Russian action to kill mostly Europeans over occupied, Russian-occupied territory for the Europeans to come onboard with these sanctions.But they did.

And they came onboard with these sanctions in a strong way.Europeans responded.The United States pushed hard.The sanctions went into place and then were re-imposed, re-upped, if you will, every six months on the part of the Europeans.They had to unanimously agree to keep these sanctions in place every six months.Hard to do, but the Europeans did it.So it took some time.The world was not ready for this invasion.The Europeans were not ready.The Americans were not ready.The Ukrainians were not ready.And it took time to develop the mechanisms, the tools, the weapons to push back.And it gradually built.

And it did help to rebuild the Ukrainian army.But at the same time, people have told us that one of the things Putin learned was sanctions are a cost of doing business.We can build up, you know, as he’s going to be contemplating further action.And at that time, there’s a debate inside the administration.You’re not in the administration, but I think you are feeding into this debate about Javelins, about what kind of weapons are being provided.What was that debate about?What were you pushing for?

There was a debate within the Obama administration about what kinds of weapons to provide to the Ukrainians.And there were a range of weapons that were being discussed.The Javelin anti-tank weapon, shoulder-fired, individual-soldier-fired, was kind of the main issue, was the highlighted issue.But the antiaircraft Stingers were also part of this.As you say, I was not in the administration.But two friends of mine, former ambassadors to NATO and I, were convinced that in order for the Ukrainians to prevail, they needed these Javelins and Stingers.And so we made the case to the Obama administration from the outside as former officials, not current officials, for these weapons.

There was a debate within the Obama administration, and the concern was that if we provide these weapons, somehow the Russians would be provoked, and they might do things that we didn’t want them to do, was the argument from the Obama administration.I say the Obama administration, but it really was—it was really opposed—the provision of Javelins was opposed at the top.

The State Department—when we went in to see officials at the State Department, we went in to see officials in the Defense Department, we went in to see officials at the National Security Council, and these officials supported the provision of Javelins, but they said the argument had not succeeded at the very top of the administration.Not just the president, but the very top officials, national security officials in the White House were not convinced that it was worth providing these Javelins.So the Obama administration, to the end of that administration, did not provide Javelins to the Ukrainians.

I mean, we now know that then-Vice President Biden says that he was advocating for Javelins inside that administration, and it was a pretty strong argument for it.

There was a very strong argument, we thought.And again, it was—this argument was shared by many in the Congress, by many in the State Department, Defense Department, National Security Council, apparently including Vice President Biden, that these would be—these weapons would enable the Ukrainians to push the Russians back.And the Russians had tanks.Ukrainians had some tanks, but not the same quality.They had old tanks, old Soviet tanks.These weapons would enable the Ukrainians to push the Russians back.So it was a strong debate.It was a lively debate in the administration.I remember having conversations with very senior officials where they asked us—there were a couple of people in the senior official’s office having this conversation, and they asked, “What do you think about Javelins?”And we told them.And they kind of agreed, but they couldn’t bring the decision to the end.

You’ve talked about the military reality on the battlefield, but what about the other part of it, which is how Vladimir Putin perceives it and how Vladimir Putin perceives what he can get away with?Because in our story, we’ve had now the talk of Georgia-Ukraine entering NATO.He invades Georgia and practically blocks them from joining NATO.Now he’s doing this in Ukraine.What is he learning by this point?What is he testing?And what is he concluding?

So Putin has seen that there is a wavering or a debate or uncertainty about how strong the United States should push back against him.… When President Putin saw how the United States ended its involvement in Afghanistan under the Biden administration, President Putin probably thought that the United States was not willing to stand up to challenges on the international stage that they might have in the past.That is, President Putin probably thought, based on the withdrawal of Afghanistan—from Afghanistan by the United States, that the U.S. government, and maybe even the American people, didn’t have the stomach to resist him.

And he may have thought that the withdrawal demonstrated that the Americans would not support their allies, would not support nations like Afghanistan, maybe like Ukraine; that the United States had indicated we’re important allies, we’re important partners.And President Putin could have taken that withdrawal as an indication that he could get away with something in Ukraine.This may have encouraged him, may have emboldened him to make this fateful step that he then took in February of 2022.

Putin and the Trump Administration

There’s one more president before we get to Biden that you experienced firsthand, and that’s Donald Trump.And when he’s elected, first, how is Putin perceiving the election of Donald Trump and what it does to his relationship with America?

So it’s a very good question.I don’t have any particular insights into what President Putin thought about President Trump.We all know the statements that President Trump made.We all know the assertions that President Trump made, that he could both deal with President Putin and indeed might even be friendly with President Putin.He famously said, “Why not have good relations with the Russians?That’s a good thing.”So President Putin probably thought that he would not encounter resistance to this effort that was clearly still in his mind from 2007, the speech in Munich: the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

All that indicated where President Putin wanted to go.He must have concluded that he would not get resistance from President Trump to that plan to reabsorb first Ukraine and then other nations that had become independent.President Putin had the domination of Ukraine in mind all along, and he undoubtedly had conversations with President Trump about this goal and must have concluded that the Americans would not oppose this.

There are reports that Donald Trump would mirror some of the comments, even about Crimea: Doesn’t everybody speak Russian in Crimea; that it’s a corrupt country.I mean, was he mirroring a view of—whether he even knew it or not himself—a view of Ukraine that was Vladimir Putin’s?

President Trump did have this view of Ukraine that was not true to reality, but that he heard from some of his own political advisers, but he also heard it from [Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán in Hungary.Viktor Orbán was in President Trump’s office and told President Trump exactly the Putin line; that is, Ukraine is not really a nation; it’s corrupt; it can’t resist.So President Trump had this in his mind.His domestic advisers had told him some stories about how Ukraine had opposed him during his election in 2016.Again, totally incorrect, but that was in President Trump’s mind, apparently.So when Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo asked me to go out to Ukraine in 2019 after he had pulled Ambassador [Marie] Yovanovitch out of Kyiv—she was our ambassador there, and President Trump had indicated to Secretary Pompeo that he wanted her out.And Secretary Pompeo, to his credit, resisted that for sometime, but in the end succumbed and pulled Ambassador Yovanovitch out of Kyiv.

And they wanted someone to go back out there because they needed the American voice in this new administration, this new Zelenskyy administration.And they needed someone to kind of steady the embassy that had been rocked by this withdrawal of a great ambassador for no reason that the embassy could understand.Secretary Pompeo asked me to go out and be the acting ambassador after Ambassador Yovanovitch.When he asked me that, I told him I was probably not inclined to say yes, and he asked me why, and I said, “Mr. Secretary, your boss does not like Ukraine.”And I expected that to end the interview.It didn’t.

Secretary Pompeo said, “You know, Bill, you’re right.He doesn’t like Ukraine.But it’s my job as secretary of state to change that.”And I said, “The reason I’m not inclined to accept your request to go out to Kyiv is that since your boss does not like Ukraine, the strong support for Ukraine which had characterized every administration since Ukrainian independence, but in particular during the time from 2014 to 2019 when the Russians had invaded, that strong support was bipartisan, was administration after administration.The strong support for Ukraine was there, was established, was supported by the Congress, by the State Department, by the Defense Department, but was not supported by the president.”And so I said I was worried—the reason I was not inclined to go out there is because I thought the president might change that support, might reduce that, might change the policy of strong support, and in which case I was not the person they wanted out there; I would not do it in that case.

So Secretary Pompeo said, “I will change his mind.”And I believe Secretary Pompeo thought he could do that.And he took a couple of steps that indicated that he would be able to do that.He got President Trump to sign a letter to the newly inaugurated Ukrainian president, which President Trump had refused to do earlier, and so I took that as a reason to indicate that Secretary Pompeo could indeed turn President Trump around and that he would continue to support Ukraine.

And I agreed to go out there.But I told him if that support for Ukraine, if that strong support for Ukraine changes because of President Trump or whatever, for whatever reason, I would have to resign.And Secretary Pompeo understood that.And he endeavored, I believe, to keep that support for Ukraine going.

Did you ever talk to Trump directly?

I didn’t.

How big did you, at that point, see the stakes?I mean, now people talk about Ukraine as being on the front line of democracy and the world order and all of these things.At that point, how big did the stakes seem to be in Ukraine?

So for many of us who had studied and worked in Ukraine, had contributed to U.S. policy toward that part of the world and to Ukraine in particular, it was very important.And as I say, the support for Ukraine since independence, since 1991, but in particular since 2014, had been bipartisan.But it was kind of a narrow bipartisanship.There were Republicans and Democrats who cared about Ukraine, like the other community—you know, the diplomats and the think-tankers and the policy community that recognized the importance of Ukraine for the reasons that you said—that is, how important it is to the rules-based order or for security of Europe because of its location, because of its strategic value.But that was not a broad understanding of the importance of Ukraine in 2014 or even into 2019.

That understanding was clear to many of us, but not clear as broadly as it is today.Today we understand that.Today, we now see that Ukraine is a linchpin in this order and that if the Russians are allowed to stay in Ukraine, that that order that kept the peace and allowed for prosperity over many, many years after World War II—the only way to reestablish that is for the Russians to get out of Ukraine.So people began to understand the importance of Ukraine for U.S. policy and for international security. And then, reinforced by the atrocities that the Russians perpetrated in Ukraine, the war crimes just appealed to a much broader sense than just the policy community.

It appealed to people’s humanity.It appealed to humanitarian instincts, not just of Americans but of Europeans, of people around the world, to see what the Russians were doing to Ukraine.So the combination of the understanding of the strategic value, the strategic importance of Ukraine to international security, to European security, to U.S. security, there was that. But then there was the emotional response to support Ukraine as a democracy—people who were willing to fight and indeed die in incredible numbers for values that we hold dear, values that we haven’t had to fight for in a long time—and the Ukrainians were fighting for these.So that emotional response has translated into a political support for Ukraine that is broad, that is deep, that is shared by the Congress, the administration, but more importantly by the American people.And we have seen how that has translated into unprecedented support for this country.

Trump and Ukraine

So let’s go back, though, to 2019.Were the Ukrainians nervous about the Trump presidency, about the support that they were getting?I mean, they must be hearing the same things.This is even before—well, we’ll ask you about the aid in a second.But were they nervous about Donald Trump and the messages he’d be sending to Putin?

So the Ukrainians were uncertain.The Ukrainians were kind of confused.So the Ukrainians—what we’re talking about here now is the government, so we’re talking about President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and his administration.And here they’d been fighting—in 2019, they’d been fighting the Russians for five years in Donbas.They’d lost 14,000 Ukrainians already in that fight, so it was a serious fight between the Russians and Ukraine.Ukraine’s defending their own territory from a Russian invasion.And a new administration comes into Kyiv, President Zelenskyy.He knew, and his team knew, that in order to prevail against the Russians, to get the Russians out of their country, they needed the United States.And they knew that there was a president in Washington that was influential and that they needed the president of the United States to support them.

And so they tried to figure out a way to make their case to President Trump.And so they were asked to do various things.As we know, President Trump asked them to pursue some investigations, political investigations.That—the Ukrainians didn’t understand that.They didn’t want to understand that, and they didn’t understand what they were being asked to do, or why.The Ukrainians knew they needed support from the Americans.They needed military support; they needed political support; they needed financial support.They needed support in the U.N.; they needed support with Europe.They needed the Americans.And so when they got these odd requests to do some things unrelated to their political situation, their military situation, they were uncertain, confused by this, and they did not want to jeopardize this bipartisan support that they knew was important for them.

The bipartisan support in Washington for Ukraine was as valuable as any asset they had anywhere.That was what they needed.And they needed the president; they needed the Congress; they needed the American people.They needed to have the support of the Americans, so they went out of their way to try to figure out how to get that support.And it was confusing.

Let me just break down what happened there.First, how important was the aid?We’ve been told there was also a deadline involved with allocating the aid.How important was what was going to be held up?How important was that aid to Ukraine?

So it was very important.As I say, in 2019, the Ukrainians had been fighting the Russians for five years.By this time, to the Trump administration’s credit, they have approved the provision of Javelins, which the Obama administration never did.So the Trump administration finally agreed with the State Department and Defense Department and the National Security Council and provided these weapons.So the Ukrainians were appreciative of this kind of support.They knew that they needed that support to continue.They knew that this was going to be important for them to be able to succeed against the Russians.Again, the requests and the different signals coming from different parts of Washington confused them.

I’ve talked about the regular channel and the irregular channel.The regular channel is the State Department and the embassy and the Defense Department, security, and the policies put forward by the Congress and by the administration.That’s the regular—that’s how foreign policy is made.And they heard that from me as the acting ambassador out there; they heard it from Ambassador Yovanovitch, my predecessor.They knew the regular channel.But they were hearing something else.They were hearing from the irregular channel.They were hearing from Rudy Giuliani, and Rudy Giuliani was able to talk to the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff.And so the Ukrainians, again, were getting these mixed signals.

On the one hand, in the regular channel, there’s this strong support for Ukraine, bipartisan support in Washington.Weapons are coming; other support, training, intelligence support.This is coming in this regular channel which is to support them against the Russians.But then they hear this other voice, the other voices coming from outside the regular channel.And it was a confusing one.And since some of the people in this irregular channel were close to the president, the Ukrainians felt like they had to at least listen to this.They needed support from the American president.

How do you learn that aid is being conditioned, and what is your reaction when you learn that?

So the military assistance that is now flowing—the Congress has appropriated ever larger volumes, ever more money for Ukrainian military assistance, and it’s flowing well in 2019.

… There was a normal meeting of the National Security Council staff, which other participants, of course—state, defense, NSC, embassy—normal agenda.At the end of this meeting, mid-July 2019, a person from the Office of Management and Budget in the White House offices raised her hand and said, “I’ve been told that the security assistance to Ukraine should be put on hold.”Now, this was a shock.This was in answer to your question about how did you hear about it.No one could believe what they heard.No one where I was in Kyiv—we were watching this on the screen from Washington—could believe it.No one in Washington who was there in person could believe it.It was out of the blue.It was not the result of any decision that anybody had heard of, and so this caused great confusion.

And this security assistance was coming to Ukraine when they were fighting the Russians, so this was important for the Ukrainians.So we knew how important this decision was.We knew how important it was for that security assistance to continue.And when this staffer from the Office of Management and Budget said that the chief of staff of the White House, on orders of the president, has said that this assistance has to be paused, it was a shock.We thought it must be a mistake.We thought there must be—it must be a garble.Someone was not understanding what they were actually saying or what they were actually doing.So this led to a series of meetings at ever higher levels within the U.S. government chaired by the National Security Council at, again, higher levels, higher levels all the way up to the principals meeting, which means the secretary of state and secretary of defense and the national security advisor and the director of the CIA were in these meetings.

And there was consensus at every level up to that level of the principals that this assistance should be provided, should not be paused, should not be on hold.… Where was this decision coming from?And we never got an answer.We continued to believe out in Kyiv that it was a mistake, that someone just didn’t understand how important this assistance was.So that’s where we were in July and August of 2019.In the end, as we know, in September 2019, a whistleblower finally came forward with an account of the phone call between President Trump and President Zelenskyy back in July when President Trump asked President Zelenskyy to do a political investigation that would help President Trump in his election campaign.

And that whistleblower opened up the discussion and opened up the issue to people like senators who were, again, very supportive of providing these weapons to the Ukrainians.And they got on the phone to President Trump.And in the end, President Trump allowed the assistance to go forward.While it was on hold, I was very concerned that the very thing that I said might happen had been happening—did happen.

That is, I was concerned that the strong support for Ukraine would be reversed, changed by a decision from President Trump.I was worried that that’s what had happened, and I told Secretary Pompeo and I told National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was visiting Kyiv, that I would have to resign, that I would have to come back to Washington.I would have to quit because I couldn’t go along with that change of strong support.And in the end, a week later, the whistleblower a week after that, pressure on President Trump, and he allowed the assistance to go forward.

But you didn’t know until the transcript was released.

So the transcript was not—exactly right.The transcript of that July phone call between President Trump and President Zelenskyy, that transcript was released during—right at the end of September during the United Nations General Assembly meetings.And President Zelenskyy finally had a meeting in New York—not in the Oval Office, as promised—with President Trump.And President Trump said, “I’m going to release the transcript of that phone call.”And that’s when we all—it was the first time that we all saw what had been discussed in that phone call.

You read that transcript, and what does it reveal that the president had done?

So the transcript—and again, this was what the whistleblower had objected to.This was what the whistleblower had blown the whistle on, was when President Trump, when he was talking with President Zelenskyy about these weapons—indeed, about Javelins—President Zelenskyy had raised and had thanked President Trump for providing these Javelins in this phone call.And that allowed President Trump to say, “Yes, but we need you to do us a favor,” in the context of these weapons.And the favor, of course, was to do a political investigation of what would turn out to be President Trump’s rival in the upcoming election.So that’s what the whistleblower heard at the time in July.But the world, including the embassy in Kyiv and myself, didn’t hear about that until the end of September.

And as it becomes public, the consequence—I mean, American presidents had been talking about democracy and about independence and all of these high ideals.And Putin had been saying it’s all just talk, and Ukraine’s not even a country.And here, in black and white, is this description—is Trump really just using it as a tool for a political end?I mean, what’s the foreign policy impact of that?What’s the impact on the world?

Fortunately, the regular channel—the establishment of U.S. foreign policy that is created and executed by the State Department, by the Defense Department, governed by laws passed by the Congress, supported by the American people—that foreign policy, that regular channel prevailed in the end.In the end, it got a bad decision overturned, a political decision overturned.So in the end, the Ukrainians got the assistance; the Ukrainians did not succumb to that illegitimate request; the Ukrainians were reassured that the U.S. system worked, and they got the assistance, and they were able to move forward.So it shook a lot of people’s confidence.I’m sure it shook a lot of Ukrainian confidence, but they were reassured in the end that the U.S. system was able to continue the strong support, which is what they needed.

I mean, they got the support, but did America’s moral authority take a hit?

The Ukrainians need the United States to support them.Other nations need the United States to support them as well.And nations—other nations, international actors—evaluate U.S. government daily, all the time and constantly.And they understand that things can go wrong.They understand that there are decisions sometimes made by the United States or by individuals in the U.S. government that are at odds with the thrust, with the basic rightness of U.S. policy.And the basic support for these nations—Ukraine, but not just Ukraine, for European nations in NATO who count on U.S. support if the Russians were to challenge them, to invade them or to threaten them—European nations, Asian nations look to the United States for support.

So they all recognize the importance of having a strong ally in the United States.And by and large, they see the United States as a reliable ally.This probably caused some problems in these nations’ capitals thinking about, what’s going on there?What’s going on?But in the end, the United States righted itself, did the right thing, provided the weapons, continued to support Ukraine against the Russians, and move forward.

Putin’s Decision to Invade and Biden’s Response

… At the start of the interview, we went up to the Feb. 24, to the speech that Putin makes.And he decides, despite the warnings from Biden, that he’s going to launch this war.Do you think that he had an understanding about how the West, about how Biden would respond?Did he have a misconception about what that response would be?

Again, who knows what’s in his head or what was in his head?He had seen Afghanistan and President Biden’s withdrawal, decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.However, he also had had a couple of phone calls with this new president, President Biden, fresh in office, where President Biden was pretty clear apparently, very specific about what kinds of actions the United States would take, what kind of support the United States would provide to the Ukrainians in terms of weapons, in terms of financial support, in terms of political support.So President Putin disregarded that, or was not convinced for some reason that he would pay a price for invading Ukraine.So despite the warnings, despite the phone calls, despite the announcements both public and despite the messages in private, President Putin decided to go ahead with that invasion.

How do you evaluate the Biden administration’s response?

I think they’ve done a very good job.I think they have mobilized the international community—certainly the West—in three ways: certainly on the military side.The amount of support, military support to Ukraine from the United States and from NATO nations has been extraordinary, and I give the Biden administration credit for that push, for that amazing support.The second thing that they did well, which is hard to do, and that is get agreement on sanctions, get international agreement on economic sanctions, international agreement to cut off supplies of components, electronic components, microchips to the Russians, which can only be done effectively if it’s done by most of the international community.And the Biden administration did that, both the sanctions and the export bans.So that’s a second major accomplishment.

The third is rallying the international community in places like the U.N., places like the G-7.The political support for Ukraine, the condemnation of the Russian invasion was as concentrated a diplomatic and international effort as most people in the State Department or in the U.S. government have seen probably since the Gulf Wars.But this was an extraordinary effort on the part of the administration to mount a military, economic and political campaign to support the Ukrainians and to oppose the Russians.So I give them credit.

Most recently, the administration has made it clear that they will not be cowed by irresponsible talk coming from Moscow about nuclear weapons.They will not be cowed by irresponsible talk coming from Moscow about how after these sham referenda that the Russians have conducted in parts of Ukraine that now give, as the Russians say, the ability, the right for them to use all weapons at their disposal to defend Russian land.No.These Ukrainian territories are Ukrainian.Everybody in the world except the Russians recognizes these are Ukrainian territories.

So the Biden administration has not been cowed.The Biden administration has made it clear to the Russians coming from the national security advisor that if the Russians were to take any action along the lines of these threats that there would be catastrophic response.“Catastrophic response” is the word that Jake Sullivan used to indicate to the Russians the kind of response to the use of these weapons, no matter what the Russians say about Russian territory inside of Ukraine based on these fake referenda.We’re not buying it, and we’re telling the Russians that we will respond.

What is this conflict that we’re in now?There was the Cold War.There was the speech in Munich where Putin says, “America is the enemy, and they’re after us,” and America’s like, “Really?We’ve got other things to worry about.”But where are we now?I mean, are we in a conflict with Russia in a very direct way?

We are supporting the Ukrainians in their conflict with Russia; there’s no doubt about that.We’ve made it very clear that we think the Ukrainians must win, must defeat the Russians.We’ve made it clear that the Russian violation of any notion of a rules-based order, any notion of principles of sovereignty that have guided international relations since World War II—that the Russians’ shredding of those principles is a challenge to the United States, and it’s a challenge to the West.It’s a challenge to international security.It’s a challenge to the U.N. and the U.N. system.So yes, we are definitely in a conflict with that Russia that has overturned these principles and that is fighting a horrible fight, a horrible battle in Ukraine with tens of thousands of civilians killed, tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers killed, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers being killed.

Why?Because of one man’s desire to go down in Russian history as a great leader.President Putin is failing in that.But President Putin has challenged Ukraine, challenged Europe and challenged the United States.We are defending the system that has kept the peace and that has been important for international security.So yes, we are in a war that the Russians have started in Ukraine, and we’re supporting the Ukrainians.

And my last question is Vladimir Putin.Now, he started this war.He’s now facing losses in the battlefield and domestic consequences at home.He’s mobilizing.He’s threatening nuclear weapons.I mean, based on how he has responded to what’s happened and based on what you know about him, I mean, how dangerous is this moment?How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

It’s undoubtedly a dangerous moment, and it undoubtedly depends on what’s in President Putin’s mind.Throughout our whole conversation, we’ve been trying to figure out what is in President Putin’s mind.We don’t know, and we won’t know, but what we do know is what we have to do.What we do know is we have to oppose him trying to impose his will on Ukraine and on Europe.We have to oppose that.We have to support the Ukrainians when they fight against that.President Putin will decide whether to use nuclear weapons.President Putin will decide whether to ramp up the fight against the Ukrainians with this partial mobilization that he has called.We don’t know what he’s going to do.

What we do know is we can’t be cowed by what he says he might do.We have to do what we have to do, and that is oppose him, support the Ukrainians.The Ukrainians are trying to push the Russians back out of their country.We support that.That will reestablish this rules-based order that we can use to go forward.

We can’t figure out what’s in his head.We do know what we have to do in order to support the Ukrainians.We do know that we have to be able to respond with catastrophic consequences to the Russians no matter what they do.If they take some decision to use some of these weapons, they’ve been told they will bear catastrophic consequences, and the United States is ready to do that in whatever way.

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