image missing
Date: 2024-09-27 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00022093
VLADIMIR PUTIN
PETER BAKER AND THE PUTIN FILES
A deep dive into the life and motivation of Vladimir Putin ... up to around 2017
Original article: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/peter-baker/
Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Baker (and his wife, Susan Glasser) have huge amount of knowledge about Putin and Russia. In my view they are impressive both as regards relevant history and current affairs.
I don't have anything like the in depth experience that these reporters have, but I have experienced some of what the former Soviet Union was like and then the way the collapse of the Soviet Union morphed into a new world order.
Reflecting on my own experiences, I am appalled at the way in which the failed Soviet Union was able to reconstitute itself in a manner that enabled the rise not only of someone like Vladimir Putin, but also the business oligarchs that surround him. This was enabled by Western leaders in the 1990s and a catastrophically simplified understanding of world affairs especially in the United States.
In 1995 I did consulting work in Kazakhstan (in connection with the World Bank and KPMG) and thinking back on that time, it is clear that the international consultants were ill-prepared for the work they needed to do. That probably applies also to myself, but my professional experience to do this type of work was substantially more than most of my colleagues. While in the middle of this assignment in Kazakhstan I was reassigned by KPMG because someone had objected to something I had been doing in Kazakhstan.
I was never told why in any specific way, and I assumed it was something to do with other consultants involved, but on later reflection I think it might well have come from some of the people who saw me, my accounting background and the way I was working as something that would get in the way of their gutting of the government treasury for their own benefit.
I will probably never know ... but the pieces fit !!!!!!!!!
Peter Burgess
WVIA Public Media ... FRONTLINE ... PETER BAKER ON VLADIMIR PUTIN

CHAPTERS
  1. Vladimir Putin's Early Life ... 1952-1991
  2. Putin's Political Rise ... 1991-1999
  3. Putin's Vision for Russia in his First Term ... 1999-2003
  4. Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term ... 2004-2008
  5. Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia ... 2007-2008
  6. Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term ... 2004-2008
  7. The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister ... 2008-2011
  8. Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown ... 2011-2012
  9. Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term ... 2012-2015
  10. Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term ... 2004-2008
  11. Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term ... 2012-2015
  12. The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister ... 2008-2011
  13. Intervention in the U.S. Election ... 2015-2016
  14. The U.S. Response to Russian Measures ... 2016
  15. Putin and Trump ... 2016-2017
  16. Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term ... 2012-2015
  17. Putin and Hybrid Warfare ... 2015-2016
  18. Intervention in the U.S. Election ... 2015-2016
  19. Putin and Trump ... 2016-2017
  20. The U.S. Response to Russian Measures ... 2016
  21. Putin and Trump ... 2016-2017
PUTIN'S ROAD TO WAR ... THE PUTIN FILES

Peter Baker ... The New York Times

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. Baker spent four years in Russia as The Washington Post's Moscow co-bureau chief and is the co-author (with his wife, journalist Susan Glasser) of Kremlin Rising.

This is the transcript of a two-part interview conducted by FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk on June 21, 2017 and Jim Gilmore on Sept. 5, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.

VIDEO INTERVIEW: The transcript below is interactive. Select any sentence to play the video. Highlight text to share it.

Vladimir Putin's Early Life 1952-1991

Let’s start with the man in Dresden. The Wall has come down. He’s far away from Russia, not exactly getting to perform his dream job. He's not James Bond; he’s not a spy. He’s something else. Who is that Vladimir Putin in Dresden?

Vladimir Putin in Dresden is actually a midlevel bureaucrat as much as anything else. I think we like to romanticize the idea of him as this swashbuckling spy, and he probably likes to romanticize that, too. But, in fact, he was in a second-tier post and a second-tier job at a middling career rank. [He's] out of the country when all these big changes are happening back home. He’s left feeling adrift. He’s not part of the movement that Gorbachev has put in place back in the Soviet Union. He's not witnessing some of the changes up close. Instead, he’s seeing the unraveling of the empire at its furthest frontier, and it's very disconcerting to him.

We've all heard the stories. I'm not sure whether he invented the stories or whether they actually happened, him stoking the furnace with documents and breaking it from the heat or standing out and stopping a mob from taking over KGB headquarters. How much of that is real, and how much of it is myth?

It's a great question. I think in some ways, it doesn’t even matter how real it is, because the myth itself informs our understanding of his view. It informs how he sees the world, and whether it happened precisely the way he described it or not, whether as part of his narrative that he created for the purposes of coming to power or to justify the things he would later do, it doesn’t really matter. It matters that he has presented this version of reality to the world because it tells you something about his psychology; it tells you something about his history; it tells you something about the way he sees the events that we saw in the West in very different terms.

Tell us what he wants us to know.

I think what he wants us to know is—I come back to the quote that he said once that was really so revealing, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. That's how he saw it. We didn't see it that way. In the United States, in the West, in Eastern Europe, certainly, the collapse of the Soviet Empire was a cause for joy. It was the end of the Cold War. It meant hundreds of millions of people had been liberated either because their countries were now independent, really, of the Soviet orbit or because people in Russia and the republics themselves now suddenly had a new chance at freedom.

That's not the way he saw it. He saw it as a collapse of empire; he saw it as a failure of will. He saw it as a plot by the West to undermine and defeat the Russian Empire, in effect. It was a loss of greatness that seared him, this derjobnost, this notion that Russia is this powerful historically important player in the world suddenly cut down at its knees by a perfidious West that was taking advantage of its moment of weakness. They did not see this as a moment of triumph.

Who was the little boy Vladimir Putin? What is the early formation? Is there a moment or two that you’ve discovered that is revealing about him?

Well, what's interesting is when he comes to power, he gives this series of interviews. I'm sure you've read them. They’ve become collected in the [book] First Person, and he tells stories about his own upbringing that no American politician would tell, right, because they are sort of raw, and they are at moments very human—again, if you credit them for being real. But this notion of a young Vladimir Putin, small, slight, not very strong, living in a pretty dingy part of St. Petersburg where rats were in the hallways and bullies were in the streets, it’s a very memorable idea of his origin.

Again, myth and reality tend to merge, but it does tell you something about this powerful need on his part to prove himself. He’s not a big guy, but he wants to be seen as a big guy, and that was true as a small child in the streets, where he would take on the biggest kid he could find and hit him in order to try to demonstrate his manhood, if you will. It’s true today on the geopolitical stage. He takes on the biggest kid on the block, and he punches him in the nose and sees if he can get away with it. That's the United States.

Again, the myth is he tries to sign up for the KGB when he’s 16. In fact, he signs up when he's 23. What does the KGB give young Vladimir Putin? What does it deliver for him in that society at that time?

Well, we see in the West the KGB as an ominous, dark force. We see it as the evil character in every Hollywood movie. In Russia, at that time, many if not most Russians saw the KGB as an institution of excellence, actually. It was seen as, in a way, as the Harvard of the Soviet Union. You got into the KGB because you were the best. They romanticized it.

It was a false image, of course, but one that was propagated by Soviet propaganda, one of which was this serial The Sword and the Shield, which Putin as a young man recalled watching, which tells the story of this Russian agent in Germany during World War II. It romanticizes the idea of the KGB as the defender of Russian national identity, and he buys into it, and that's what he wants to do at some point in his life.

It is important to understand his identity that way. What exactly he did in the KGB is still a matter of some debate, and we've never had a good, full forensic analysis of everything he did. But just the idea of it is so important to understand his thinking.

We talked to somebody who said his dad was in the KGB and nobody ever really talked about it, but they did have a telephone forever in their apartment. Did you ever hear this?

You know, there's always been—again, I've never spent a lot of time excavating that. But you have to understand his grandfather was a cook for Lenin, Stalin. I mean, it's not like they didn't have connections growing up. So part of the narrative of the young boy in the streets belies the connections that his family did have at some point. But I don't know a lot of the history. We know his father was a stern, harsh figure, and he was often seen as an important influence in young Putin's life—unforgiving, unloving, not particularly encouraging, and obviously some of that plays into who Vladimir Putin grows up to become. …

Putin's Political Rise 1991-1999

OK, so our man returns to a very different Russia than he left. He’s in Leningrad or St. Petersburg. How much matters about what he does working for [Mayor Anatoly] Sobchak? Why is it in any way interesting or important, if at all?

Anatoly Sobchak, of course, was the promise for the future. He was the new Russia, we hoped, we thought; a reformist, a believer in new system, the mayor of St. Petersburg who was going to help bring Russia into a new era. The idea that he would have as a deputy mayor, his number two guy, this man Vladimir Putin, I think a lot of people assume that he must share some of those convictions. I think that was clearly a misunderstanding. Putin was definitely in Sobchak’s inner circle, but he did not see the world in the same way. I think we might also be misjudging Sobchak and how much of a Westernizer and reformer he really was. But out of that comes this notion of Putin as a loyalist, which figures later into his ascension into power. Sobchak comes under fire; he’s facing investigations, and it’s Putin who gets him out of the country. It’s Putin who spirits him to, I think it's France.

It’s that loyalty that later impresses Boris Yeltsin and, importantly, people around Boris Yeltsin who worry about what comes next. When Yeltsin steps down, will the person who succeeds him stay loyal to him, or will he face some sort of retaliatory investigation or prosecution or what have you? So it’s that fierce devotion to Sobchak even if their own philosophical identities might be different that becomes critical to Putin's rise. …

The [Bill] Clinton-[Boris] Yeltsin relationship and the power of what Clinton and America wanted and what we were doing to Russia in the ’90s, that would eventually set the stage for many things Vladimir Putin as president doesn't like. Set me up for that.

Well, This is so critical to understand Putin today—to understand the ’90s, understand what happened after the end of the Soviet Union. There was this moment of obviously great optimism in Washington on the idea that we were now going to be friends with Russia; we were going to be partners. They were going to be part of our team, in effect, and no one encapsulated that better than Bill Clinton, who thought he could forge a personal relationship with Boris Yeltsin that would extend to their national interests as well.

There's no question they had a pretty close personal tie. If you talk to Bill Clinton even today, he speaks about Yeltsin with great fondness and nostalgia. They were both sort of pudgy kids who were larger than life, and they had a sort of real gregarious kind of political persona, and they bonded in a very real way.

But that only disguised the real issues that were going on, which was that the United States and Russia still had very different national interests in the world, and that manifested itself through things like NATO expansion, through the war in Yugoslavia and so on. And it masked the fact that Yeltsin at home was not the Lincoln of his country as Clinton wanted to see him. He was a much more complicated figure. He basically almost singlehandedly broke up the Soviet Union, arguably, and he did in fact, therefore, bring a new openness and freedom to Russia that it had never really experienced.

But it was a very flawed democracy. It was a democracy that was seen by Russians as chaotic, as corrupt, as very deeply flawed, one where friends of the president or connected oligarchs were able to fleece the state of these massive, lucrative assets while everyday Russians suddenly lost the social safety net that they had been used to; in some cases lost their life savings through the economic changes that were happening around them. Politics were played out literally at gunpoint when tanks were fired at the [Russian] White House during a fight between Yeltsin and the parliament, and there was mafia-style hits in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. So this was democracy as Russians experienced it. And, of course, they would look at that with a great deal of jaundice.

What happens under Yeltsin is that the promise of 1991 becomes the reality of 1999, and it’s messy; it's ugly; it’s a turnoff to many Russians. So when we arrive there at the end of 2000, and you ask Russians, “Well, what does democracy mean to you?,” it means dislocation; it means chaos; it means corruption. It did not mean a shining city on the hill.

So this period of Yeltsin and Clinton, as we look back on it today as kind of a moment of great harmony between our countries, really sets the stage for somebody like Vladimir Putin. …

Yeltsin had just had it. He’d lost the people; he felt he’d failed. And on that New Year’s Eve, what did he say when he went on television?

Well, Yeltsin by that point was a broken figure. The country was not in great shape. More importantly, his image with the country was not in great shape. He was drinking too much; he was physically weak. And he recognized that his time had run out. To his credit, he has arguably done something that almost no other Russian leader had done in history, which is to voluntarily give up power. That's an extraordinary thing. Gorbachev did, but really had no choice by the time he surrenders at the end of 1991. Yeltsin for the first time gives up power and sets up at least a semi-democratic process to replace him.

In that process, though, he needs to protect himself. There's not a lot of history of former Russian leaders living nice lives, and, given the sort of 'anything goes' kind of nature of Russian society at that time, he wanted guarantees that he—especially his family—would be protected. That's where Putin comes in. Putin is this functionary. He’s a nobody; he’s a bland figure. Nobody would say that he had any kind of political constituency outside of a very small orbit.

But the Yeltsin clan, his daughter and the people around him, decide that this is someone who can be trusted to take power. They're not looking for a democrat; they're not looking for somebody to really consolidate the advances that Yeltsin really had been responsible for. They're looking for somebody who would protect him and them.

So you have this situation where Yeltsin, the first real democrat, small “d,” of Russia, turns over power to somebody who is diametrically opposite him in almost every way.

Does he know that, or is his hope a strategy at this moment?

He clearly doesn't fully grasp that, because otherwise he would understand that his own legacy is in jeopardy by this decision he’s making. I think he saw Putin as a pragmatic figure who would probably make some compromises that Yeltsin wouldn’t make but would not radically change the course that he had set the country on.

It was a fundamental misjudgment, obviously. You could argue, basically—some people would argue that Putin's first months and maybe even years in office showed some promise of that. I think that was a misjudgment even then. I'm not one of those people who believes that Putin suddenly changed; he was this and then became that. I think he was who he is today from the beginning. There are stages where he becomes more so or less so, and he tacks this way or that way. But who he is today was fundamentally clear even at the time, if you chose to go and look at what he was doing and saying.

But he is a little bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing at that exact moment anyway. Even Clinton—Strobe [Talbott] told us the story yesterday of Clinton. They visited Yeltsin a little while later, and Clinton says to him: “You keep an eye on this guy. He’s not what he seems to be.”

Exactly. Clinton is put off by Putin partly because Putin figures Clinton's on the way out. Remember, he takes power at the end of 1999, beginning of 2000. Clinton's only got a year left in power. Putin doesn’t have much time for him. This is not what Clinton was used to when it came to Russia. He was used to having his way; he was used to having somebody he could relate to. Putin was a cold fish, and Clinton didn't respond well to him.

He did, in his own memoir, express optimism that Putin would be a solid leader, a tough leader but somebody who would mostly do the right thing, and that was a misjudgment. But I think he saw some of what was to come and recognized that Putin was not another Boris Yeltsin.

For those Kremlin watchers like yourself and others, when did it start, or what were the first signs that Vladimir Putin was not Boris Yeltsin?

I think it actually came before he became president, even. If you look back even in the very short time he’s prime minister under Yeltsin, he launches the Second Chechen War on pretty sketchy justification and uses this very bloody, very harsh military operation to vault himself to power. So you could argue even before he becomes president, basically he’s begun to show his stripes.

Very soon afterward, though, from the very beginning, he heads down this road of consolidation of power. He goes after two oligarchs that he perceived to be threats to him, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky. When we arrive in early 2000, end of 2000, early 2001, he’s in the midst of this broad campaign against Gusinsky’s media outfit, NTV, and the associated organizations with it because he needs to control power. He comes to power on the strength of controlled television, and he understands, therefore, it's going to be a threat to him to have television in anybody else’s hands while he’s in power.

The first thing he does is he goes after the independent, or at least independent-minded, media organizations in Russia. 1

I think even from the beginning, you could see the way he really saw the world and the way he was going to proceed.

Putin's Vision for Russia in his First Term ... 1999-2003

When he takes down the television and replaces it, there are some shows, I gather, that really get under his skin, [like] Kukly (Dolls).

Kukly was his bête noire. He hated Kukly. Kukly was this very funny satirical show on NTV that used puppets to represent public figures in Russia. It really isn't any different than what most Americans would recognize in our own late-night comedy. It satirized and ridiculed people in power, and it satirized and ridiculed Vladimir Putin. He didn't like that. He didn't believe in that kind of thing, and it really got under his skin, and I think that is one of the motivators for him for going after NTV. …

… Take me to what you can understand or what you perceive as [George W.] Bush and his White House’s perspective on what they needed from Putin, who Putin was, and where they thought they could go with Russia, if they cared about Russia very much at all at that time.

Bush saw the big geopolitical threat of his administration being China, so to him, Russia was important in a sense that we needed to be friends with them. If we were going to worry about China, we needed to be friends with Russia. It's an old dynamic in American foreign policy. When he meets Putin for the first time in June of 2001 in Slovenia, he’s very open to the idea of a new friendship. This, of course, is where he makes his famous comment about looking into Vladimir Putin's soul. …

As he [Putin] approaches the United States and the new president of the United States [George W. Bush], what is he hoping for, and what does he do to prepare to interact with the president of the United States?

Well, he’s playing a weak hand at this point. Putin is playing a weak hand. The country is 10 years into its new experiment and has an economy basically the size of Portugal and no hope, it seems, to restore itself. It’s laden with international debt; it has done nothing to diversify its economy. Oil prices have not begun to shoot up as they would later and that's the fundamental basis of their economic program. Little structural change has been made in things like property rights and a judicial code and the labor code. All these things are still under works.

So he’s playing a weak hand, and he sees the United States as the dominant player on the international stage, and he doesn't like it. He wants to be treated as an equal the way the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. There's this resentment, there's this grievance that's sort of eating away at him, and it's fundamental to his tenure, this sense of grievance.

So what does he do? He studies George W. Bush. 2

He spends time thinking about who this guy is, what motivates him, what works him. This is the old KGB officer whose job it is to basically turn people toward his interests, and he plays it that way. So when they sit down in Slovenia, he’s well-briefed. In fact, he makes some comment about Bush playing rugby or something like that in the old days, and Bush says, “You're very well-briefed.” I mean, Bush recognized it as a fellow politician when somebody’s been prepared for a meeting.

But Bush then says something to Putin about the story he had read or been told by his advisers about Putin's cross, the cross his mother had given him and how one time the dacha burned down, and the one thing that was saved from the burning building was this cross that Putin's mother had given him.

Putin instantly recognizes this as his lever in, and he tells the story with some relish and connects with Bush, who’s a very religious Christian on this level. Now, whether Putin himself is Christian or religious is, I think, up to debate, but he recognized as a political actor that it was a way to make a connection to a guy for whom this would be very important. Mind you, he wasn't wearing the cross that he was talking about with him at that time; he didn't have it with him. He later brings it to a different summit later on in Genoa later in the year to show Bush. “Hey, remember that cross? Here it is.” But he didn't have it with him at the time. It wasn't so important to him that he kept it with him at that moment.

But he recognized the opportunity to bond with Bush on a level that would work. And that's when President Bush comes out afterward and tells the press that he’s found somebody he can do business with; he's looked into his soul and vouches, in effect, for Putin in a way that would later come back to haunt him. …

The way they tell the story, 9/11 happens, and he’s the first phone call—at least he gets to Condi Rice in making an offer that—he knows it’s Afghanistan. I guess he figures out that’s where we're going to go and he makes an offer so that what? Why would he do that?

Well, this is a period where there's a genuine moment of Russian-American rapprochement or closeness. There's a debate even today as to whether or not it could have led to something more had it been handled differently. Did we blow it? But basically after 9/11, Vladimir Putin seizes an opportunity to join up with the West in what he sees as a great battle against Islamic extremism around the world. He's connecting it to Chechnya. He is seeing 9/11 and the World Trade Center and Al Qaeda in the lens of his war against Chechen rebels in the southern part of Russia.

Now, the difference, of course, is that the Chechen war did not start as an Islamic jihad. It started off as a nationalist aspiration, a territory that didn't want to be controlled by Moscow. It only became infused by religious extremism later when the Islamic radical world decided to adopt it as a cause celebre. But Putin wanted to link these two things.

Bush is wary about that. He basically saw that as a different kettle of fish, that what Al Qaeda had done to the United States and the threat that it posed to Europe and its allies was different than what was happening in Chechnya, and he was wary of getting too deep with Putin into that rat hole. In fact, there was a proposal at the time that the United States would actually help Russia fight the war in Chechnya, and Bush and a lot of people around him said that's not going to happen; that's not what we're going to do.

But there is a moment where Putin is cooperative. He basically opens up Central Asia to American troops to begin the war in Afghanistan. That's not a small thing. The idea that American troops could be located not on Russian territory but on territory that Russia considered to be part of its orbit, the former Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union is a big deal, and it's a deal that Putin doesn't find unanimity within his own circle about, either. His own security hawks were advising him against this, and they were aghast that Putin would agree to this American presence on their own southern flank. It goes against everything they had believed about their own security.

But, you know, Russia had been in Afghanistan. Russia knew the threat that the Taliban faced, and it had no interest in fighting the Taliban itself, so if America wanted to go into Afghanistan to fight the Taliban for it, that in Putin's mind was in Russia's interests, too. So there was this moment where interests converged a little bit, and it was a moment of interesting promise.

I was in Moscow on 9/11, and I'll never forget how much the Russian people really reached out to us as Americans in empathy and sympathy and solidarity. Outside the American Embassy the next day was this sea of flowers and crosses and icons and candles, and there were signs, and they said things that said, “We were together at Elbe, and we’ll be together again.” It was really a moment. I was stopped in the street by Russians who didn't know me but obviously figured out I was American, and they pulled out pictures of the World Trade Center and said: “I visited there. I was there. We are with you on this.” It was mind-blowing. So there was a sense that maybe Russian-American relations would be different after this.

And then we pull out of the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty; Iraq—one thing after another in lots of ways. It results in what Steve Hadley, I think, said, [that] we in Europe just threw Russia into the toilet or something.

Well, he says that later, though. He says that in 2008 after the Georgia war, just to be fair. But what happens is there is this implicit expectation by Putin of a trade-off. “I'm going to help you on your war on terror. I'm allowing you into Central Asia. I'm going to allow you to train troops in Georgia, by the way. And in return, I expect something. I expect a better trade deal. I expect you to get rid of Jackson-Vanik,” which is this old Cold War-era trade law that just really vexed the Russians, even though it didn't have much tangible effect. He expected to be consulted as a partner, as a full partner, and he didn't get what he thought he deserved in return for his cooperation on the war on terror. He was very disappointed and very upset about this.

I don't think the ABM Treaty was the big thing, but I do think the Iraq War at that point begins to consolidate this idea that we're on the opposite sides again. He saw the Iraq War as America's effort to control the Middle East, to assert itself and at Russia's expense. He works to undercut European support for the Iraq War. He goes to Germany and Paris and talks with [Chancellor Gerhard] Schröder and [President Jacques] Chirac at this time and thinks he can basically carve off America's traditional allies using the Iraq War. That’s sort of the end of the period of harmony and the beginning of a new period of estrangement.

… Somewhere in there, in the ‘04s and the ‘05s, he’s, I guess, that paranoia which will live and vibrantly drive everything he does, is at least under way?

… Most Americans won't remember it, but in the end of 2003, in the tiny former Soviet republic of Georgia, there comes this revolution against the entrenched leadership led by a dynamic, young, new, pro-Western 30-something-year-old opposition leader named Mikheil Saakashvili. This becomes known as the Rose Revolution because he comes into parliament bearing a rose.

To Putin, this is the height of CIA plot. This is American instigation. And, you know, it’s not hard to see how he comes to that conclusion. There are American NGOs there that are trying to teach Georgians and other former Soviet republics how to practice democracy and how to exhibit opposition to a government if they feel that way. They didn't create the Rose Revolution, but they certainly helped the opposition leaders figure out how to conduct it, in effect.

I was there. I remember that night in the streets, and the Georgians were just parading down the streets and honking their horns and flying their flags, and they had succeeded in taking over their country to restore it to a democracy and to bring it into the West. It was exhilarating for them, and it was exhilarating, by the way, for a lot of American policymakers in George Bush’s administration. But it was a threat to Vladimir Putin, and he saw that there on his southern flank as an American effort to undercut him. And if it could happen there, it could happen in Moscow.

Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term ... 2004-2008

Take me to the Munich speech. Seems like a really important declaration of something, especially if you—well, take me there.

Every year there's a security conference in Munich. It's a gathering point for important defense and intelligence and political figures from around the world, and here shows up Vladimir Putin to give a speech. In his speech, he compares the United States to the Third Reich, and it’s a real lightning blow to Washington. 3

It’s Vladimir Putin's declaration of independence. “I am through with your monopolization of the international stage. You can't just sit there and play God, telling the rest of the world what to do in Iraq, on these color revolutions,” on everything as he saw it, in Washington's agenda.

It comes against the backdrop of NATO expansion further into the eastern parts of Europe. The idea that perhaps even Ukraine and Georgia might be on a track to join, that's unthinkable to Vladimir Putin. The Munich speech is really kind of a wakeup call for the West. This guy is not one of us; he doesn't want to be one of us, and there's a real break here to contemplate.

Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia ... 2007-2008

It is followed two months later by the attack on Estonia.

Yeah, the cyberattack.

Yeah, maybe a first early kind of—but fairly sophisticated attack on the most cyber-connected country in that part of the world. What's he trying to do?

I think in hindsight, we probably should look back on Estonia as a more critical moment than we might have seen it at the time, because it was in fact a harbinger of what was to come. You had a resurgent Russia that was determined to assert itself on the international stage and willing to use different means to do it, not just simply military means, of which it still had considerable resources, but was not the giant it once was. Instead it goes after Estonia in the modern sense. It uses Estonia’s own strength, its own wiredness against it. 4

It’s a way of, somewhat surreptitiously, although everybody understood what was happening, making a point to the world: “We're still here, and this is our part of the world, and you’d better show us the respect we deserve.” …

Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term ... 2004-2008

By the end of the Bush administration, who is Putin, and what does the White House think of him and how they’ve handled it?

Bush grows progressively disillusioned with Putin over time. The early optimism fades by the end of the first term. He watches as Putin is throwing Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil baron, into prison. 5

He watches as Putin is more aggressive in the former Soviet space. And he talks about this privately with people like Tony Blair and other foreign leaders. He says to them things like: “You know, I think we've lost Putin. I think he’s no longer a democrat; he’s a czar.” And he gets into these fights with Putin behind the scenes in their various summit meetings about the nature of democracy, and Putin is having none of it. He doesn’t want to be lectured. He says things to Bush like, “How can you lecture me about a free press when you fired that reporter?” And Bush is scratching his head, “Well, what are you talking about?”

Finally he realizes that Putin is referring to Dan Rather, who gets pushed out of CBS after the fake report or the untrue report about Bush's military records. Putin is convinced that Bush is the one that fired him, because that's what would happen in Russia, and Bush has to explain to him: “You’d better not say that out in public because people will laugh at you. I don’t fire reporters. You know, I don’t like some of them, but I don’t get to fire them.”

But Putin won't believe that. So Bush tells Blair, and he tells some of these other leaders, he says, “It’s like arguing with an eighth grader who doesn't have the facts,” and he's frustrated with Putin.

And Putin—I'm sure somebody’s told you this story, but this is one of my favorite stories. Bush tells a story about the dog, right? Putin meets his dog, a little Scottish terrier, Barney, and says to him, “What, that's a dog?” And then a year later when Bush goes to visit Putin in Russia, he brings him out to the dacha and says, “Would you like to meet my dog?,” and Bush says, “Sure.” Then comes barreling out this sort of [dog] Bush describes as this big, massive hellhound. Thump, thump, thump. You have this image, from Bush's telling anyway, of Cerberus, dripping from the fangs or whatever. And Putin says to him, “This is my dog, bigger, stronger, faster than Barney.” It’s his moment of macho “My dog’s tougher than your dog” one-upmanship. Bush gets that, you know. I mean, Bush is a competitive guy. He understands what Putin is about is, “I'm a big dude, and you’d better respect me.”

By the end, he hasn’t given up on Putin. He never fully gives up on him, but he’s very disenchanted. He's very upset about it. They have this clash in Beijing after the Georgia war begins. He goes to him and says, “What are you doing? Why are you—” They're both there in Beijing for the Olympics, and Bush gets word that Russian troops are now entering Georgia. He’s sitting just a few [meters] away from Putin, and he goes up to Putin, and he basically says, “What's going on here?” And he says: “Well, it’s all Saakashvili. I warned you about Saakashvili. He’s a bad guy. I warned you he was hot-blooded.” So he’s blaming Georgia’s leader.

And Putin says, “Well, I'm hot-blooded, too.” And Bush says, “No, Vladimir, you're cold-blooded.” It's this sort of like this break. There's nothing left to be said at this point. …

The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister ... 2008-2011

Q: OK, Bush rides off into the sunset, and the change candidate comes in as president of the United States with a Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and it’s right at the right time for a change in the Russian government. And they decide to call—somehow, somebody, starts to call it the “reset.” Tell me the story of why the reset and the reset button and the change and the new view that Obama and Clinton bring to it. You should make sure to ask [Michael] McFaul about the origin of the reset, and particularly the button. 6

But Barack Obama comes to power at this moment of great tension between the United States and Russia. The Georgia war happened during the campaign. The two sides are basically not speaking at this point. They’ve torn up a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement. There's this very bad blood.

And as a new president coming to power, Obama makes a decision that it’s worth it to try to start again; let's put all this behind us and reset the relationship. The term that he uses on television, that Biden uses in a speech in Europe, and it becomes the term that basically defines a policy, a “reset,” a reboot, in effect. Let's turn the computer off and start it again and see if we can't get this better.

He has a thought that he’ll be able to work with Putin's designated successor. Dmitry Medvedev, a longtime lieutenant to Putin, had come to the presidency while Putin became prime minister. Everybody understood that Putin was still really running things, that he was still the real puppet master. But there was a thought in the White House that perhaps Obama can bond with Medvedev and work with him to build him up as a prominent world leader and that that would, in fact, elevate a younger, more progressively minded figure on the Russian stage, and it wouldn’t all be Putin.

Medvedev was closer to Obama's age. Like Obama, he was a lawyer. He was seemingly less entrenched in the old ways than Putin. It was a gamble. It was a gamble that they could make it work, and it was a gamble that underestimated how important Putin really was still to the system. And it overestimated their ability to influence Russia's internal dynamics.

And Putin sitting there as prime minister really creating a fiction here, really still running it? Any back-and-forth politics between he and Medvedev?

Putin as prime minister is, in theory, in charge of the economy, in charge of domestic affairs, while Medvedev as president is more the international figure. To some extent, Putin gives Medvedev some rope. He allows Medvedev to mainly handle some of these global issues and these relationships with other countries while Putin sits back in the prime minister’s office working on the country.

But it is a short rope. I mean, Medvedev is not free to do everything he wants, and Medvedev makes mistakes from Putin's point of view. …

Let's just back up for a minute and start [with] Arab Spring, OK? Arab Spring comes on, the democracy movements. The very thing that we've already said to each other Putin fears more than anything is the “spontaneous ejection of a despot.” [It’s] all starting to feel a little personal to him as it gets closer and closer to move across the region, and the Obama White House, at least in the beginning, seems to encourage and embrace the idea of these very things. And I'm sure Putin's sitting there says, “I wonder what role the United States is playing in all of this.”

Well, that's exactly right. Basically Obama sees the Arab Spring, the sort of rolling revolutions, as a repeat of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he wants to be on the right side of history. Vladimir Putin looks at what's happening in the Arab world, and he sees it as Dresden all over again. He sees it as the American meddling in other countries’ affairs to the detriment of Mother Russia. In his mind, the Arab Spring is a symbol of what could happen in Russia if he allows it to.

So when Medvedev basically goes along with Obama on Libya, that’s where Putin comes to the end of the line. Obama reluctantly agrees to a military campaign in Libya to protect civilians against Muammar el-Qaddafi, who threatens to wipe them out like cockroaches. Obama's not that interested, frankly, in getting involved militarily in Libya, but he’s persuaded to by Hillary Clinton and some other advisers who say: “Look, this is important. We can't stand by while some great slaughter happens.”

Medvedev is persuaded to abstain at the United Nations Security Council and therefore to allow this to happen. It's under the justification of protecting civilians, but later on it ends up becoming, to Putin anyway, regime change, because the same rebels who are protected by the NATO air forces end up toppling Qaddafi’s government and eventually catching him and executing him in a very brutal way.

So Putin blames Medvedev for letting this happen, and any chances Medvedev had of continuing as president after one term, if there really had been a chance of that, clearly were over at that point.

Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown ... 2011-2012

And how does Putin—there's a story of a great gathering at a stadium or something where people are waiting to see will Medvedev stay or go. …

Well, there had been the suspense, and it may have been manufactured, but there was a suspense about whether or not Putin would come back after one term. He only switched the prime ministership for one term in order to satisfy the constitution, which, in theory, says you can't have more than two consecutive terms. He didn't really want to give up power.

But there were people who thought, well, maybe he’ll use this as a way of riding off into the sunset, and he won't actually push Medvedev out. So there's this party conference, the United Russia Party, that has been a creation of Putin and his people from the beginning, and they're gathered in this hall and waiting for the word from the great one. And Medvedev looks distraught. He’s been told he’s out, basically, and he has to come out and basically announce his own execution and say, in fact, it’s better off for Russia if he were to step down and to return Vladimir Putin to the presidency.

He goes along with it, because what choice does he have? But it’s the mark of who really is in charge of Russia that is played out in this very orchestrated and very almost Soviet kind of way.

And the people hit the streets.

And the people hit the streets. And to Putin, this again is proof of American perfidy. This is the CIA stirring things up, trying to finally have that color revolution he’s always feared in the streets of Moscow. Never mind that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Russians may have genuinely disagreed with his coming back to power, that they may have genuinely wanted to take the country in a different way. It can't possibly be that Russians are opposed to him. It has to be the CIA; it has to be Obama; it has to be Hillary Clinton. He specifically singles out Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, for encouraging and, in his mind, mobilizing this opposition to him, and—

Why?

Well, she had said something publicly—I've forgotten exactly what she said—but she said something publicly basically embracing the aspirations of everyday Russians to express themselves or something relatively benign but typically American. But to him, that was proof that she was out there, actually the puppet master pulling the strings. How much he really believed that, how much of that was convenience for him to do what he would then do, is open to debate, I suppose.

But there's no question that he and Hillary Clinton didn't get along. He doesn't think much of strong women leaders, I think, to begin with. She definitely didn't think much of him. She went along with the reset, but she was one of the voices inside the Obama administration who were pretty skeptical of it from the beginning. She saw Putin as this kind of thuggish figure who she would mock him for sitting in meetings with his legs spread wide and trying to dominate the conversation, and she had seen men like that her whole life. So she didn't think much of him, and it was mutual.

So for him, Hillary Clinton was a convenient person to hold up as the enemy who was creating this trouble for him. It couldn’t possibly be his own people didn't want him; it had to be the result of the Americans.

Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term ... 2012-2015

When he wins re-election, and we've had people say a really much firmer, much stronger, much more authoritarian Vladimir Putin takes office in 2012.

Yeah, I think that's true, but I think it’s of a piece. It's not like suddenly he became authoritarian. It’s that he is in a stronger position, and in a stronger position he decided to keep moving down the path he had been moving on from the beginning. His economy was in better shape thanks to oil over the past decade. You know, they cast off all the old Soviet debt. They had gotten rid of a lot of the shackles that they had felt on the international stage, and he was ready at this point to reassert Russia as a global player in a way that he couldn’t do in his first term when he was consumed with simply trying to consolidate his own power and to lift the Russian economy up.

And in 2012, this longstanding feeling of inferiority to the United States of America is ameliorated somewhat? Or how’s he feeling about that struggle?

Well, I think he feels by that point that Russia is strong enough to prove itself again, that it’s shown that it was a big world player. He had this idea: They were going to host the Olympics; he was going to be the maestro on the stage, dozens of world leaders coming to him while he was showcasing Sochi, his resort city in the south. And he was ready. He was ready in his mind to take a more active role on the world stage, feeling that he had basically shown at home that he was the person in charge. …

Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term ... 2004-2008

If you don’t mind, step back into another period [September 2004], mostly because I'm interested in what it tells us about him, as Americans learning about him at that moment.

Well, in September of 2004, school opens all across Russia, and in a town called Beslan in the south, a group of mainly Chechen rebels seizes the local school, and for the next three days they hold it hostage while Vladimir Putin is left in Moscow to figure out what to do. Now, there's been more terrorism in Russia over the previous three or four years than anywhere in the world with the exception of 9/11. Most Americans don’t recognize that, but he had been fighting a war on terror of his own for years, bloody, terrible incidents in subways and hospitals and a theater in Moscow.

So when the school seizure happens, it captivates the world, and it brings home the horrific consequences of what had been happening in Russia these previous years. All these schoolchildren are basically held at gunpoint in an auditorium, in a gymnasium, as the government in Moscow tries to figure out what to do.

I'll never forget being down there and watching the terrible climax of this crisis, when the Russian troops basically fire on the school, and parents are rushing in to the gymnasium to try to rescue their kids, and it’s just bedlam. One hundred eighty children die, 300-and-some total people. As a reporter who’s been to Iraq and Afghanistan and Chechnya, it’s the worst thing I ever saw.

And it traumatized a nation, as you can imagine—schoolchildren held hostage, killed by a bloody battle between their government and terrorists. Why couldn’t they have solved it? Why couldn’t they have had a peaceful outcome? How did this happen? …

Is there a sort of behind-closed-doors fight about what to do before the assault, and is Putin—?

They sent a negotiator who had worked with Chechens in the past; they didn’t get anywhere. I mean, there was no deal, and Putin didn’t want to make a deal. You know, he’s a tough guy, stand up to terrorists. It was a standoff to no end, you know. And these parents are just surrounding the school for days trying to figure out what's happening, trying to get any information they could. And a tiny little town, everybody had a kid in that school or knew somebody who had a kid in that school. It was just the most horrifying thing you can imagine.

And out of this tragedy Vladimir Putin sees opportunity. He says the reason this happened is because we showed weakness. We showed weakness, and he was not going to allow that to happen again. He was not going to show weakness. He was going to show strength. And out of this, he decides to eliminate the election of all governors across Russia, all 89 regions and provinces of Russia. Their governors will now be appointed by Vladimir Putin and confirmed by local legislatures.

Why? I mean, why does the governor of Irkutsk out in Siberia need to be appointed by the president to fight terrorism in the Caucuses? He never explains. But it’s an opportunity for him to assert more power, to assert more control. And Russians more or less go along with it. One of the newspapers that publicized contrary information about this episode were punished. I remember there was a big debate about how many hostages were being held inside the school, and the government basically kept trying to downplay or even lie about how many were actually in there. At one point, you know, people would hold up signs behind television news cameras to get out the real information that there were like 1,200 people in that gymnasium or whatever, because the state-owned television wasn't telling the truth.

It’s an opportunity for Putin, again, to crack down: to crack down on the media; to crack down on independent voices; to crack down on democracy. And it’s not the first time in history that an autocratic leader has used a terrible event like terrorism to increase power, but this is a classic example of it.

From the American perspective, what did the Bush people think when they—about Putin? What did they learn about Putin from that event?

Well, I think by that point they were pretty cynical about him to begin with. They saw him more and more for what he was. Beslan was the latest in a string of episodes where Putin had basically demonstrated that he didn't much care for Western ideas of economic or political freedom; that for them, I think it just sort of reinforced this increasing concern on their part that Putin was drifting toward authoritarianism and away from the Yeltsin legacy he had inherited. …

Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term ... 2012-2015

… Tell us a little bit about why he was so willing to spend $51 billion, or whatever it was, to do [the Sochi Winter Olympics] and what had been going on the month prior to that starting in late November down in Kiev.

Well, the contrast between the Olympics and what happened in Ukraine is just stunning, right, because for Putin, hosting the Olympics is the crescendo of his campaign to revive Russian greatness; to show the world that Russia was a first-rate power, that Russia was capable of hosting an Olympics, and that it was to be respected and admired around the world. 7

He was going to have leaders from all corners of the globe descend on Sochi under his hospitality to watch the Olympics. And it was a big moment. He was willing to spend anything to make that happen. Sochi was a pretty down-and-out resort town before he started pouring tens of billions of dollars into it.

But, you know, in typical Russian fashion, people took their cut, and a lot of people got rich off of it. But it did transform Sochi into a very unlikely setting, by the way, for these Olympics into a venue that more or less worked. There was a lot of skepticism in the weeks leading up to it that the Russians could pull it off. But they did, and it was a pretty reasonable show. And there was Putin grinning and prideful and having accomplished what he wanted to accomplish.

But at the very same moment of his triumph is seeded this conflict that's about to start that would completely unravel everything he had just done. To the extent that he wanted to be the big player in the world, at that very moment there was a clash starting—not really starting, but climaxing in Ukraine that would undercut all $50 billion, basically, of free PR. Not free PR— It would basically undercut all $50 billion of PR in effect he had just bought.

For months, Ukraine had been talking with the European Union about a trade agreement that would basically further its economic ties with the West. This is a threat from Putin's point of view. This is more of the same as far as he’s concerned of the West trying to infiltrate his territory, and his mission is to stop this, and he basically counteroffers to the government of Ukraine: He’ll give them $25 billion worth of credit if they give up the EU agreement. And they agree because it’s a pro-Russian government in there to begin with, and Russia is—Putin is basically putting his foot down. “No, you can't do this. You're too central to who we are. It's one thing to let the Balts go away; they were never very Russian to begin with. Ukraine is at the heart of Russia's identity. It’s the heart of Russia's history. The idea that it’s going to drift off to Europe while we just sit there?” Unthinkable to Putin.

The phone call from Ambassador Nuland, or from Victoria Nuland, to the American ambassador in Ukraine, it is intercepted. Can you remember the meaning and the effect of this?

Yeah. 8

You have her telling the story?

Yes.

What's interesting about that, of course, is every American knows that these conversations are being intercepted. Russians are pretty good at that, and they recognize when they're outside of their secure environment that they're likely to be overheard.

What's different about this is for Russia to put it out there, for them to leak this conversation so that the world could hear. That was a little bit of a different thing for the Americans, and that, I think, woke them up a little bit to what Russia saw in this: The consequences were big; that they were going to play hard, and they were going to play on multiple levels, and they were going to do what they could to undercut the United States and Europe with at least the Russian sympathetic Ukrainian population.

You mean the playing back of it out loud, I mean, it’s espionage. It's espionage, but it’s when you reveal the espionage—

It’s when you reveal it, right. That's not usual. I mean, they tape Americans all the time, and Americans tape them all the time. It’s putting it out there. And that was a real shot across the bow. I think Toria Nuland took it that way; she understood it that way.

It's a new day in some way.

It's a new day, and we're going to play on multiple levels, you know? We're going to use all kinds of different tools to counter you. …

… The word from the people on the ground from the United States, State Department and other places, are saying: “We’ve got to do something about this. We've got to arm these people.” And a debate rages. It goes all the way up to the president of the United States. To the extent that you know very much about it, tell me what you know and what the sides of the debate are and what the result of the argument is.

Obama responds to Ukraine by imposing sanctions and by working closely with the Europeans to keep a unified front. They kick Russia out of the G-8. They suspend military cooperation with the Russian military. They suspend a bunch of different interactions. And they begin to penalize Russian businesses and Russian individuals that they blame for being part of this.

But what they will not do is send arms to the Ukrainians, and there are people inside his administration who want to do that. People like Toria Nuland, people like others who have been more hawkish inside the administration wanted to at least consider the idea of sending arms to the Ukrainians that would go beyond even the defensive equipment that Obama eventually did approve. And Obama didn’t want to do that. That wasn't his playbook.

He’s very wary, as president, of getting the United States more involved in military ventures overseas. 9

That’s a consequence, from his point of view, of what happened with Bush and what he saw as happening in Libya, which to him didn't work out well. So his view is that sending arms to Ukrainians isn't going to be enough to change the dynamics on the battlefield; that the Russians are always going to have stronger position in eastern Ukraine than the Americans will, and therefore it would only be provocative and potentially blow the situation up even worse than it already was.

Now, the people, the advocates inside the administration said: “You have to help these people. These people deserve to be able to defend themselves. How can you not support a friend who’s being attacked by an outside power? Don’t they have the right to defend themselves, and shouldn’t we do something about that?”

But Obama wouldn’t be moved. He was very strong on that. To him, the most important priority was keeping tight with the Europeans. There couldn’t be any daylight between the United States and Europe. While the United States could have imposed tougher sanctions or sent arms, he didn't want to get so far out in front of the Europeans that anybody could exploit that difference.

So in effect, it was always going to be a kind of common denominator policy. How far were the Germans willing to go? How far were the French willing to go? That's how far we’ll go.

Some of the people we talked to say: “Yeah, but you've got—what are you going to do about Putin? He's getting pretty big for his britches. Here, we really do have bully actions. Don’t you have to send a message to a guy like that, that this is the line in the sand?”

Certainly there are a lot of people in Washington who think that you need to punch a Putin in the nose in order to get his attention; that he’s a person who only understands strength; that he perceives weakness on the part of the United States; that he perceives weakness on the part of President Obama, and he’s going to continue to take advantage of that and push that as far as he can. 10

I think there's no question that Putin took his measure of Obama and decided Obama was not strong, that Obama was weak. That may not be fair, and it may not be true, but I do think that's what Putin saw, and that influenced his actions. That told him that he could do what he did in eastern Ukraine.

Now, I would say that you can make the argument that while the West did not roll back the Crimea annexation, the West perhaps did succeed in preventing Putin from going further in eastern Ukraine than he might have wanted to go. I think Putin was surprised by the fact that he did not actually meet with more success in eastern Ukraine than he thought he would; that in fact he really only had enough support among the local population to take a relatively small amount of the territory, not all of eastern Ukraine as he might have hoped for.

He became blocked, in effect, from going further but unwilling to retreat. And now he created this sort of frozen conflict where it just kind of remains at a standstill, and he has a small slice of eastern Ukraine. And he’s done it without feeling—without being punished, in his view. The sanctions became a mark of a badge of honor in his way. He turned that to his advantage domestically to say, “See, the West is out to get us.” But on the other hand, he did run up to a limit. There was a limit to how far he could or would go.

There are some people who say this is the moment where Putin can lean back and say: “Well, I have their full attention or almost full attention. I'm at least, if it’s not a bipolar or tripolar world, or whatever it is, here I am. Lot of people know about Russia now that didn't know or think—give a hoot for Russia 17 years ago or 16 years ago. Here I am.”

I think that's what Obama's playing to when he says while on a trip to Europe, “Well, Russia's just a regional power.” 11

He’s actually—

Tell me that story. Take me there for that.

In the very beginning of, well not the very—as Russia is intervening in Ukraine, President Obama goes to Europe and meets with other European leaders. He’s asked at a press conference about what's going on Ukraine, and he kind of dismisses it. He kind of says—he’s not dismissing the Russia intervention, but he’s dismissing Russia as a power. He said, “Well, it's a regional power.” And boy, that's just intended to drive Putin crazy, right? It's dismissive; it’s humiliating in some ways to Putin, the idea that they're just a regional power; they’re a small player on the world stage, and Obama represents the United States.

It's like his JV comment on ISIS, right?

Well, it’s interesting. So is it a miscalculation by Obama, an underestimation of what Putin really represents, or is it an attempt to control him? Is it an attempt to apply the shiv a little bit? But it certainly doesn't go over well in the Kremlin, and it’s certainly the kind of thing that Putin would get aggravated by.

And remember.

And remember. The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister ... 2008-2011

We had somebody, and he said that every meeting with Putin always starts with 25 to 45 minutes of grievances. You never get a chance to get a word in, right?

Exactly. Well, that was the first meeting they had, by the way, in 2009. So in July 2009, Obama goes to Moscow, and it’s part of the reset. 12

They come up with some things, by the way, that are important. There were some successes of the reset. It's easy to forget that now. They got a nuclear arms treaty. They got the right to transit American troops through Russian air space to Afghanistan to our bases north of Afghanistan. That's not a small thing.

They did get Russia into the WTO [World Trade Organization], which was an attempt to bring it more into the international set of rules. So there were moments early on where the reset did provide some successes. But this meeting in July 2009, I think, harbingers what's to come. President Obama makes his visit about meeting with Medvedev because he’s the president. We're going to talk president to president. But of course he has to also meet with Putin, who’s the prime minister at the time. They sit down for the first time as leader to leader to meet, and Obama makes some kind of comment to the effect of “I know you have some concerns about the way the United States has behaved in the past,” or something like that.

And it sets Putin off. He heads off to the races, 45, 60 minutes of complaining and grievance, and you did this, and you did that. That tells Obama everything he needs to know about Putin.

And what is that?

That this is somebody who is, in his mind, locked in the past, who is nursing resentment and who is going to never be a full partner of the United States. So Obama tries to marginalize him within Russia. It doesn't succeed, but he understands that Putin is never going to be a friend.

Intervention in the U.S. Election ... 2015-2016

It’s 2016, 2015 really, into ’16. Perhaps revenge gets initiated in some small way with [Fancy] Bear and Cozy Bear and hacking the DNC. The FBI is the first to pick it up. What is Putin doing then, do you think? Is Putin even doing it?

It's hard to imagine this is happening without Putin knowing about it and authorizing it. I think they're trying to stir the pot, you know. It’s not new, but what's new about it is the extent of it and the means through which they're able to use to do it. The Russians have always wanted to keep the West off balance. This is a way of doing it in a more sophisticated, 21st-century way. We're going to hack into your systems; we're going to find out your secrets; we're going to expose them to the world. I think he’s doing it to keep the United States off balance. I don't think he actually necessarily thinks he’s going to actually change the outcome of the election, but keeping the U.S. off balance is a pretty good goal, from his point of view anyway.

And you get into the DNC, and this satisfies a certain anti-Hillary motivational imperative, too.

Yeah, there's no question he’s looking at revenge at Hillary Clinton. There's no question that he sees Hillary Clinton as an adversary, as somebody who if got in office would be a problem for him. And he wanted to get her back. It’s not that he believed that she actually did have something to do with the protests in Moscow against him from a few years earlier; this is his opportunity to take a little bit of payback.

The U.S. Response to Russian Measures ... 2016

… Why, from what you can tell us, has the White House not fully engaged and bringing this either to the attention of the American people or fighting back?

Well, there are a couple of things going on in the White House at that time. First of all, Barack Obama is leery of looking like he’s trying to influence the election by complaining about the Russians too loudly. He thinks the election’s actually going his way anyway, right? Hillary Clinton seems to be ahead. She seems likely to win over this guy, Donald Trump. You know, why should they mess up things when things are heading in the right direction?

… There's also this concern at the White House at the time that the Russians had something bigger in mind; that it wasn't just about harvesting some emails and putting them out there and embarrassing candidates, but [that] they actually had something in mind on Election Day itself; that they would try to influence the machines, the voting process itself. They were focused on working with the states to prevent that. That was at the top of their head.

And publicizing it. They did publicize it to some extent. They would tell you they did. But they obviously didn't make it a big issue at the time. It didn't take retaliatory steps until after the election. And there was a big debate about that. There were people inside the administration, [Secretary of State] John Kerry and others, who were pushing to say let's get out there and make this a bigger issue. This is an attack on our democracy.

And Obama's cautious side prevailed. He was wary of something that would be provocative and that in his mind might boomerang.

Putin and Trump ... 2016-2017

And Donald Trump's response in the first moments when the word is out: “Hey, it seems to be Russia hacking our election”?

Right. His response is to invite them to do it more. He says, “Hey, Russia, if you're listening, maybe you can find those missing Hillary Clinton emails.” He doesn't see this as a fundamental attack by an adversary. He sees this as just part of the circus of American democracy, a part of the circus of an election process, and he’s playing to the circus. What his motivations are is still really the biggest mystery, I think, of this whole affair. What he’s really thinking, how much of it is thought through, how much of it is just gut instinct at any particular moment, it’s hard to say. But his comments about Putin, his comments about Russia from the beginning, are so drastically different than the bipartisan consensus in Washington that it has invited skepticism. It has invited suspicion about what he was thinking and why he was saying things like that.

From what you can tell, what does he think of Putin? What does he say about Putin?

Well, he seemed to admire Putin as a strong figure. He even said during the campaign that Putin's a stronger leader than President Obama. Now, part of that's a way of digging at Obama, but that's an extraordinary thing to say even against a president of another party, to hold up a strongman, authoritarian leader of Russia as a role model over the American leader. He seems to respect Putin as a figure of—that he sees being like him, you know, who doesn’t take guff from anybody, who is a dominant figure, who is everything that Obama's not.

There seemed to be an affinity there. He says at various points: “Well, I don't know him. I don’t really have a sense of him.” They actually have met more than he had let on or whatever. But largely, he seems to be taking on at least the public image of Putin as one that he finds admirable.

And Putin's thoughts about Trump at that moment? Does he really think he can win?

It would be easy to overestimate Russia's understanding of our political system, because they often have very, very distorted view of things. But it’s hard to imagine that many people in Moscow thought that Donald Trump was going to win since nobody else did, right? They read the same things that we read, and they see the same polls and the same pundits.

But it may not have mattered if he actually won. Again, I think part of the goal was really disruption, just sort of “We're screwing with you,” rather than actually necessarily dictating an outcome. But you can argue it didn't work for them, because certainly the way things have played out has not worked to Russia's benefit. It’s become such a big issue that their goal of getting sanctions lifted, their goal of undercutting American and European opposition to what they're doing in Ukraine, it’s been sabotaged to some extent by this very investigation. It’s politically impossible for Trump at this point to lift sanctions against Russia, even if he thought it was the right thing to do.

Just sort of telling the story, Trump wins. Suddenly all of his guys, [Gen. Michael] Flynn, even [Jared] Kushner, all through that period are having connections. Are they different than [what] happened to any other White House? …

Well, look, talking to Russia's ambassador is not by itself anything scandalous. That's what ambassadors do, and we even have a program to send ambassadors to the political conventions during election years so that they can understand our process and so forth.

What makes it odd and what's raised so many suspicions is the fact that there were so many of these contacts with so many different folks around President Trump and that they were not always disclosed. You know, it wasn't that the attorney general, [Jeff] Sessions, met with Ambassador [Sergey] when put that was the problem; it was the fact that he didn't disclose it that became such an issue.

What was said during these conversations is obviously important, too. I think you saw the Obama people at the end of their time growing increasingly alarmed at some of these contacts, not just because they were happening, but because there was a feeling that perhaps there was deal making going on before Trump even got into office. …

… It’s post-election, time for transition, time for Kerry to talk to [Rex] Tillerson, time for the people in the crash teams to talk to [the incoming members of the administration] and say, “Here's where the stove is hot,” and “Here's where…”—and pass off all the institutional knowledge. To a person, they sit in here, from [Ambassador] Toria [Nuland] to [John Kerry’s Chief of Staff Jon] Finer, say nobody ever came; nobody ever talked to us; nobody wanted to know anything about this. What does that say in the general, and in the specific, about Russia and Putin?

Every new administration comes in thinking they're hot stuff and they don’t need to talk to the old administration because they know better. They wouldn’t have been elected if they weren't so smart. But there did seem to be a sort of willful desire on the part of this administration not to talk to the Obama people about the very subject that was at the heart of this big controversy, which is Russia. Secretary of State Kerry did not get called by Rex Tillerson. He didn't talk—none of the national security people had significant conversations with their counterparts about this as far as we can tell. And it raises the question about why. Wouldn’t you at least want to understand what the old people had experienced before deciding what your policy was going to be coming in?

It suggests the new administration, a, didn't have much respect for the old one, and b, pretty much had in mind what it was going to do anyway and didn't see the need for contrary advice.

Does it tell us anything about how they want to approach Russia and Putin?

There's no question that President Trump came in intending to restore relations with President Putin and Russia. There's no question that he wanted from the very beginning to throw out a lot of the old baggage and start over again, in effect. It’s not that different than what President Clinton and President Bush and President Obama wanted to do, except that the context is so different and that President Trump's desire to do it is so maximal that he’s willing to overlook so many things that his predecessors wouldn’t have overlooked, even in their desire to improve relations.

For instance, when Bill O’Reilly asks President Trump, “Well, isn't Putin a killer?,” and Trump defends him and says, you know, “Not only is Putin OK, but hey, we’ve got nothing to talk about, too; we're killers, too,” that's so far beyond what previous presidents would ever have said, even desiring to create a new relationship with Russia.

That's why people are suspicious. Why would you go out of your way to defend Vladimir Putin in such an expansive way, rather than say something like, “Well, look, we don’t agree on some things, but it’s important for us to get along”? That would be the more traditional way a president, even a new president, would take to this kind of situation. Instead, Trump was embracing him; he was praising him; he was defending him against critics. And that's just got Republicans and Democrats both scratching their heads trying to figure out why.

Then President Obama throws out 35 Russian bureaucrats and closes down a couple of locations where apparently spying and other things were taking place. Michael Flynn picks up a phone and says what? What does he say to the Russian ambassador?

Well, he's talking with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, and they talk about sanctions. By his own account, they talk about throwing out the diplomats and these diplomatic properties. Now, he later says, “Well, I wasn't talking about sanctions; I was talking about these expulsions.” OK, that's a distinction that most people didn't draw. But the fact that he didn't disclose that that came up in the conversation right at the same time that the Obama administration was taking the action, that led to a lot of suspicion and concern, because what was he doing at that point interacting with the Russians at the same time the existing administration was penalizing it? It seemed designed to undercut it. It seemed designed to signal to the Russians that, “Don’t worry; we're going to be in office in a few weeks; everything will be OK.”

In fact, Vladimir Putin chooses not to retaliate for the expelled Russian diplomats or the closing down of these properties a day or two later, which surprises everybody. That's almost unheard of, clearly in his mind an expression of confidence that the next administration will make things better. …

This is the summary question. We've built this character, Vladimir Putin. What does he want? Why did he do this?

I think it comes back to where we started, you know. He picked the biggest kid on the block; he punched him in the nose to show that he can. And I think that he continues to want to punch us. I think he wants to show again Russian greatness. He wants to show again Russian importance. And you know what? In some ways, he’s succeeded. He is, in fact, a player on the world stage. He hasn't succeeded in the sense that Russia is genuinely a strong, prosperous member of the international community, which is what everybody had hoped for at the end of the Cold War, but he has succeeded in the sense that nobody can ignore him. And if you ask people around the world to name five world leaders, they’ll all know Trump's name, and they’ll all know Putin's name. I think that he’s shown that you can't basically ignore Vladimir Putin. …

Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term ... 2012-2015

Let’s talk a little bit about Ukraine. Why was it so important? What did it mean to Putin to lose Ukraine? …

Ukraine is part of Russia, as far as Putin is concerned. It’s in fact inimitable to the Russian identity of itself as a great empire. The idea that Ukraine was a separate country is always anathema to nationalists like Putin, so the idea that it would be part of the West was just too far removed. It’s one thing for the Baltics to go that way. They hated that, but they were never genuinely part of Russia as it saw itself. Ukraine is part and parcel of the Russian identity, in their view. They never considered it a legitimately separate country to begin with.

… When he took Crimea, … when there was little response to that, did it embolden him? Did it allow him to move into Donbas and to move into other parts of Ukraine?

I do think once he had Crimea so easily in his hands, it did embolden him. It did suggest to him that he could, in fact, snatch whole sections of eastern Ukraine. It was always the fear, Ukrainians of the west, that the country could be split apart. The Russian influence in the eastern part of Ukraine has been strong traditionally. [There are] more Russian speakers there than any other part of the country.

There was the idea, I think, in the Kremlin, that of course eastern Ukraine would want to be part of Russia, or at least under Russia’s umbrella. I think he ran into much more resistance than he expected. It actually turned out to be a gamble that was wrong, because in fact, when the Russians went into eastern Ukraine, they encountered a much different resistance than they had expected. If you look at the map today, the part of eastern Ukraine that they do exercise influence over, that did, in fact, go over to Russia in a sense, is much smaller than I think most people would have expected at that time.

The tactics used when he goes into eastern Ukraine, he uses some of the same tactics. Maybe you can clear this up for us. Is the use of “little green men” in eastern Ukraine correct, or is that actually incorrect?

It’s a phrase really thought of more for Crimea. In eastern Ukraine, what they do is they set up a proxy army, in effect, of Russians or Russian speakers who are doing the fighting for them. Russian soldiers are there, some of them on leave or on vacation as they say, but it’s not the same sort of special commando kind of operation that they pull off in Crimea.

… What was the reaction of the White House to what was going on? How were they, to some extent, stymied by the tactics used by Putin?

Tell me where you're talking about exactly.

We’re talking about during Crimea, the time of Crimea, what is taking place in Crimea.

The White House is basically flummoxed. They had the first territorial land grab in Europe since World War II by a big power. I think it stunned them. It left them off guard. I think that while it had always been on everybody’s list of terrible things that could happen, it really wasn’t something they had imagined really would. They were left trying to figure out what could they do. Obviously, there was not going to be a military intervention. This is not a situation where the United States was going to fly in the 82nd Airborne, but it couldn’t stand quietly while a sovereign country was almost essentially invaded by its neighbor.

Obama turned to Europe and said: “OK, this is your neighborhood. What are we going to do about this?” That was the crux of his strategy going forward, is it had to be locked arm in arm with Europe every step of the way. He wasn’t going to get further in front of them, and he didn’t want them to get further in front of him.

But here's Putin, the leader of Russia, is basically lying to him, and he knows he’s lying to him. But how does one deal with that?

I think he’s gotten used to the idea that Putin is not a truth teller. He’s gotten used to the idea that Putin’s version of reality is not the same that anybody in the West would have. So it’s not a surprise that Putin is lying, but it does make it more complicated, obviously, because you have to therefore establish on the ground facts that everybody else might understand, but Russia, in its disinformation, is trying to deny.

There becomes this game of showing satellite photos and trying to reveal some of the intelligence that the American agencies had without disclosing sources and methods that might be compromising, because the world is going to doubt American assertions if they're not backed up. That is part of the challenge for Obama going in, is how to simply establish the facts on the ground. We don’t have an embassy in Crimea. We don’t have American presence in Crimea of a substantial sort. There isn't a battery of television cameras pointed at men with uniforms that say Russia on it.

The success of the Russian operation was to at least give a plausible deniability that lasts only a couple weeks, frankly, but enough for them to take control and to establish new facts on the ground, and then to basically say to the rest of the world, “Fine, deal with it.”

The March 18 speech by Putin—

It’s the annexation speech?

Yeah, and how he basically goes after the West. What does it show in Putin at that point? Very emboldened by the situation? What message do we take from that?

… It shows an emboldened Putin, but it also shows an aggrieved Putin. 13

This is Putin at his most resentful, playing into his longstanding sense that the West has taken Russia for a ride, that the West has exploited Russian weakness, and they weren’t going to stand for it anymore. He goes through this long litany of complaints and examples where he thinks the West has done Russia wrong, and this is payback. We’re not putting up with it anymore. This is Russia standing up for itself. You can't push us around anymore.

Putin and Hybrid Warfare ... 2015-2016

One last thing about Ukraine is the MH17 [Malaysia Airlines] flight. Just describe the tactics used, the use of fake news, how it worked, and how it uses the tactics that he’s been honing for quite a while—denial, fake news— … and how it in some ways foreshadows what is to come in the United States.

… The shoot-down of the plane showed how Russia plays the game on a global level. They sow doubt. They sow disinformation in the broader information stream so that there's just enough for people to hang onto who don’t want to believe the West. He offers other explanations that may seem fanciful and far-fetched, ludicrous, really, to anybody in Washington or London or Berlin, but it’s just enough for people who don’t support the governments in those countries to say: “Well, maybe Russia is really being unfairly accused here. Maybe it’s really something else.” It’s full of conspiracy, and it’s full of paranoia. It’s full of Hollywood-level nonsensical narratives. “Aha, the Ukrainians are shooting down their own people in order to frame us.”

The real question is, how much does Putin understand that this is nonsense? How much does he believe it? There's always been this question on the part of American policymakers and presidents who have dealt with Putin how much he really understands that the stuff he spews is not related to facts and how much he actually is buying it himself. In Russia, there are enough conspiracies, there are enough shadowy explanations for strange events, that he sees things through that lens. It is possible he sees, Putin, dark shadows everywhere, because that’s the world he lives in, and he assumes that the rest of the world lives there and practices the same way he and his people do.

Of course he’s a KGB guy as well.

He’s a KGB guy, and he sees everything through that lens. Everything is part of somebody’s agenda, somebody’s subterranean operation, somebody’s three-part bank shot to make us look bad. Sometimes you actually think he believes it.

… So how does this foreshadow what's to come? We would never expect this kind of tactic being used against us. But lo and behold…

This is something that they fine-tuned in Ukraine and then take it on the road when the United States has its election in 2016. It uses all the tools at the Kremlin’s disposal: the state-sponsored television that it beams into the West, the proxy groups, the Web trolls and Twitter trolls, the cutouts and surrogates. They use all these tools in order to sow dissension, to sow disruption, to sow doubt in the American election system. It’s not clear that Russians initially thought they were going to necessarily change the outcome, But what they wanted to do, at the very least, was disrupt our democracy.

Intervention in the U.S. Election ... 2015-2016

So the election hack, let’s do the elections. … How much of this was an intelligence failure? How much of it was a disbelief that the Russians would be doing this or that maybe it was some espionage, but everybody does that? Just tell us—define those early days leading up to the DNC. What was going on?

That’s a good question. Clearly, in the early days and months, when American intelligence agencies are beginning to pick up on clues and signs, there is not the sense of urgency or the sense of alarm that would later come to flavor this particular issue. I think that they didn’t know 100 percent what they were dealing with. They didn’t have a full explanation early on of the extent of what Russia was trying to do, the purpose of what Russia was doing. And, you know, there's a lot going on at this time, in terms of both the government and in terms of the campaign. You're a campaign official, and you're worried about a million things. Do you have enough money to put on television ads in Michigan, and what's happening with your opponent in Florida, and so forth. Clearly, people did not take this seriously enough early on, didn’t have either enough information or didn’t have enough cognizance of the extent of what Russia was trying to do.

But eventually it becomes clear that what Putin is doing here is weaponizing the information that’s already been hacked. …

Russians have been spying on Americans and American political figures for decades, and vice versa. What they decided to do here was weaponize the information to make it part of the campaign, not just simply a monitoring effort by the Russians, but a concerted and willful effort to impact Americans’ view of their own system, to throw off the politicians, and to confuse and alienate the voters. That’s different. That’s different than what we’ve seen in the past.

Putin and Trump ...2016-2017

… The reaction that Trump had toward Putin throughout the campaign was supportive, was talking about how strong a leader he is, and never deriding him, it seems, in any way. How strange was that? What were the motivations behind it? And [tell me about] how it leads, to some extent, to the fact that people considered that there must be some conspiracy going on, because it just seems so unnatural for an American leader to be acting this way.

It was mystifying to listen to Donald Trump talk about Vladimir Putin. It wasn’t just that he was saying that America needs better relations with Russia. That’s something that many politicians might agree with. He was personally invested in the idea of Putin as a friend. He said, “Maybe he’ll be my BFF. Maybe—,” and praising him to the point where he would even defend Putin against anybody who said any negative things about him. When interviewers would say he was a killer, it was Trump leaping to his defense, saying: “Well, we all do that. Isn't that pretty normal for international leaders?”

No American politician in modern times—no major American politician hoping to win the White House, anyway—would embrace a person like Vladimir Putin so aggressively and so unreservedly. Even George W. Bush wanted to see into his soul and wanted to make friends with Vladimir Putin, but he was pretty realistic about who Putin was. He publicly said that “We have concerns and complaints about Russia, what Russia is doing, and this is not something we approve of” the entire time. Barack Obama has the reset. He wanted to start a new relationship with Russia, but he didn’t go out there and praise Putin in some fulsome way. That’s why people were confused. They didn’t understand why would somebody running for a major political office in America choose to embrace somebody like Vladimir Putin, and not only choose to embrace it, but see it as a political winner? The American system is automatically set up to reward politicians for being tough on Russia, not for being soft on Russia.

He was flying against every precept of normal campaigning. No matter how many times people tried to invite him to offer more measured appraisal of Putin, he declined. He stepped away from it. That’s what caused people to wonder. People were scratching their heads. Maybe there's something behind this. Maybe this is not just a guy having a judgment about another leader, but there's something we don’t understand.

… What's your take, overall, about the collusion question? Is this a case of the willingness among the campaign folks to play ball with the Russians? Is this more of the Russians using the Trump folks as unwilling dupes, but willing to go a certain distance down this road?

That’s the mystery, right, is that the innocent explanation is that the Trump people were naive and didn’t understand what they were doing. They were being either duped by the Russians or they just didn’t understand what was proper and what was normal or how it might look to the American public. Remember, of course, the president and the people around him were not very experienced in national politics or international affairs. The explanation on the part of their defenders today is: “Well, they were just doing what they thought was OK. They didn’t realize that this might cause the big stink that it later became.”

The more nefarious explanation, of course, is what Robert Mueller and the congressional committees are looking at. Is there something there? Is there some sort of cooperation? Is there some sort of a clandestine alliance? Are there financial ties? Why would a president of the United States or a person who wants to be president of the United States seem so wrapped up in working tightly with an adversary, a country that we have been sanctioning and isolating for the last several years?

… [Real estate developer] Felix Sater’s attempt to get the Trump Tower [in Moscow] job done, the fact that it is now obvious that this was happening during the campaign, that a letter of intent was signed by Donald Trump while he was running for the presidency, why is that story important? Why is it relevant? What does it say?

The story about the effort to put a Trump Tower in Moscow is important, in large part because President Trump has done so much to try to say, “I have nothing to do with business in Russia.” 14

His wording is sometimes careful, and it sometimes allows for the idea that this might have happened. In other words, he hasn’t 100 percent ruled out that he sought to do business there. Every interview, every press conference, he has addressed this, he has tried to give the idea that “I had nothing to do with Moscow. I had nothing to do with business in Russia, and anybody who’s trying to suggest otherwise is politically motivated.”

Well, we now learn that, in fact, a person representing him was dealing with the Russians, was at least trying to have a big business project there, as he’s running for president of the United States, something he did not disclose, something he did not say, “Yeah, I tried to do it, but it didn’t work out.” That would be one thing. He didn’t say that. He didn’t volunteer that. When you learn about these things after the fact, given all the smoke and given all the suspicion, it only adds to that concern. Why didn’t he tell us about it if in fact it didn’t mean anything? If in fact it’s not relevant, why was he hiding it?

The June 9 meeting at Trump Tower with [Jared] Kushner and Don[ald Trump] Jr. [Paul] Manafort, what does that show? And with the Russians, what does that show? Some people will look at it now and say there was a willingness to accept the help. What is the definition of “collusion” here? This one seemed pretty suspect.

The emails are very clear. There's nothing ambiguous about this. The emails say, “We would like to come in to give you incriminating information about your opponent, provided by the Russian government, which is supporting Mr. Trump’s campaign.” It’s there in black and white. That may not be what was discussed at the meeting. We don’t know. They have denied it. 15

But that was what was setup as the meeting. That was the predicate for the meeting. That was the understanding that Donald Jr. had when he accepted this meeting, which was that he was going to get, on behalf of his father, information provided by the Russians, as part of a Russian government effort to help Donald Trump become president.

So what's the problem? Everybody does that. All campaigns do that.

Well, they say everybody does that, but, in fact, I can't think of anybody who’s done that, not with an adversarial foreign government. It’s one thing to say, “OK, a Democrat is going to walk into my office and tell me something negative about a Democrat.” That’s an American-and-American thing. This is a foreign government that we are at odds with, that we have sanctioned repeatedly in the last several years, purporting to come in and offer information to tilt an election campaign. It’s not something everybody does, and it’s not something that happens every day. …

And the fact that Manafort and Kushner were in that meeting?

The fact that Manafort and Kushner are in that meeting means it’s not just the son. Manafort is the campaign chairman; Kushner is a de facto campaign manager. They may not have thought the meeting was worth very much. We don’t know for a fact that they read to the end of the emails. But it’s pretty extraordinary to take a meeting at that level, at the very moment that their candidate is wrapping up the Republican nomination and preparing for a general election campaign, to take any meeting with a stranger without knowing what it was about, without having some sense of what you're going to get from it.

Jared Kushner may be new at politics, and Donald Trump Jr. may be new at politics. Paul Manafort is not new at politics. He’s been doing this for 40 years. He understands both American politics and what the Russians and the Ukrainians were up to. For him to take a meeting with a Russian with this understanding can't be marked up to naivete. That’s somebody who’s been involved in politics at a high level since the ’70s.

But Trump says he knew nothing of it.

Trump says he knew nothing about it. But what's interesting is I asked him about this during an interview. We did an interview with Trump in July of this year, after the emails came out. 16

I asked him about this three times. I said, “This email says that the meeting was set up as part of an effort by the Russian government to help you.” “Well, I didn’t know about the meeting,” he says.” “OK, you didn’t know about it then. You know about it now. You’ve read that email now. What does that say to you? What does that tell you about what Russia was up to? Does that cause you any concern?” “Well, I didn’t need any negative information from the Russians,” he said. His answer was basically: “I already had more than enough negative information about Hillary Clinton. They couldn’t tell me anything that I wasn’t saying about her already. Maybe if they had told me that she had shot somebody in the back, that would have helped me. But otherwise I didn’t need their help,” which of course doesn’t really answer the question, which is, “Does it disturb you that the Russians were avowedly trying to help your campaign, and that your campaign would take a meeting with somebody advertising that as its purpose?” He didn’t answer that.

What does it say about him that that doesn’t seem to matter?

For him, all of these questions about Russia are an attack on his legitimacy. If we ask questions about what Russia was up to during last year’s election, it’s a way of saying, in his mind, that he shouldn’t have won—didn’t win outright, and it’s questioning his legitimacy as president. You can ask questions about the Russia interference in last year’s election without presuming that it would actually change the outcome or that it has anything to do with whether Donald Trump should have been or was correctly elected president. You could be concerned about Russia interference and our democracy simply because that’s something by itself, regardless of the outcome, that should concern us. That’s what we hear a lot from many Republicans as well as Democrats.

But for Trump, it’s an attack. It’s an attack on his legitimacy. He doesn’t entertain questions about it because he sees it as trumped-up, if you will, Democratic whining about an election they shouldn’t have lost.

Another event, the Dec. 1, 2016, meeting. Kushner, Flynn meet with Kislyak at Trump Tower. There's discussion about working with them on foreign affairs and Syria and such and a Russian back channel. They want to set up a back-channel way to discuss with the Russians these foreign affair issues while they're in transition, without the NSA, without the Americans listening in. Why is this a disturbing story? What does it say? What does it mean? Why did it get them in trouble? Why didn’t they understand?

It’s not especially surprising that a new team coming in would talk to foreign ambassadors. That’s what ambassadors do. What's surprising about it is this idea of a back channel. Back channels are not new. But this idea that we’re having a back channel that we are trying to specifically set up to avoid American agencies knowing what we’re doing, that’s what sounded off alarm bells for many people in Washington. What Jared Kushner was talking about doing was actually coming to the Russian Embassy and using their equipment to talk to Moscow. That’s pretty unheard of. A back channel is not unheard of, but using the Russian equipment to avoid detection by American agencies speaks to, at the very least, their own sense of suspicion and paranoia, perhaps, about being monitored, about being under surveillance, and suggests, of course, that there are things that they want to talk about that they don’t want anybody else to talk about.

Diplomacy is full of secrets and full of clandestine conversations. But these guys are not yet president of the United States; they're not yet in office. Usually these things wait until you get into office. Usually there is a process under which this happens that does not seem intended to shut out agencies of the American government. …

The signals being sent to Putin and the Kremlin by all these things—

Well—

—and how it can be used in their benefit, or how the Americans can possibly be more easily manipulated? I mean, how do you think the Russians or how do you think Putin is viewing this?

I think Putin is looking at a new group of people coming in who aren’t very experienced, who aren’t very seasoned, who he might be able to take advantage of. Putin is a master manipulator, and he’s a master at trying to take advantage of opportunities in front of him. Here he finds a group of people who haven't been on the world stage before and who seem willing to play ball as he defines the rules.

This looks like a win for him. This looks like a bonanza for him. Maybe he can get out from under these sanctions. Maybe he can split Europe and the United States away from each other, drive a wedge among the Western allies and get out from under this quasi-blockade, in effect, that the Western world has set up.

The last one of the collusion questions is, Kushner later meets with [Sergey] Gorkov, the head of the Russian bank, and they talk about, supposedly, U.S. sanctions. … What's your take on that meeting? Why is it relevant? Or isn't it relevant? What does it say again about the way this White House or to-be White House is doing business?

I think meeting with this banker is so much more interesting and important than meeting with the ambassador. The ambassador is paid to meet with American officials, even people who are on the way in. But the banker like this is under sanctions. It’s illegal for Americans to do business with this bank, somebody [who] is designated by the Treasury Department as an agent of the Russian government and subject to penalty under law for doing business with.

To then have a meeting with somebody like this, with no obvious purpose, raises a lot of red flags. What was that about? Why was this happening? What's going on here? At the very least, it seems unusual and raises questions. At the worst, it suggests some sort of deal making about sanctions after they take office. In fact, when President Trump takes office, there is an initial flurry about whether to go ahead and lift some of these sanctions that President Obama had imposed on Russia. In fact, there is talk day in and day out in the first few days that they're going to happen any day now. It’s basically stopped by Congress, which says, “Whoa, wait a second.” Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader of the Senate, says, “If they lift sanctions, I'm going to let a bill go to the floor that will impose sanctions legislatively over the president’s objections.” That stops the White House, at least temporarily.

What's the attitude of the Russians toward the fact that when Trump wins, they basically have this guy who’s basically talking about them wanting to get rid of sanctions? … Number one, what is that view? And number two is, how does that segue, when they start understanding that here is a president who is basically handcuffed because of the blowback from all these stories hitting, the reality of what Russia did during the election, and that Congress is very paranoid that this president might in fact give away the house here, and in fact comes down so hard on the sanctions?

You could argue that Putin overplayed his hand here. If the goal was to get an American administration that was friendlier to the Kremlin, that was willing to work with Russia on issues around the world, or let up the pressure on Ukraine to take off the sanctions, then it’s been a complete and abject failure, because the exact opposite has happened. The political environment in Washington is so toxic right now toward Russia, is so poisoned by this investigation, that even Trump himself, President Trump himself, said, “I'm not going to be able to get anything done with Russia because everybody will see it as a political payout of some sort.”

It had the opposite effect of what Putin presumably wanted. Not only are sanctions not being lifted, they’ve now been put into law by Congress, over the objection of the president of the United States, with veto-proof majorities. Those sanctions aren’t coming off any time soon now. It’s almost impossible for this president to strike up a friendlier relationship, even if it makes sense on policy level, because it will be seen in the context of this investigation. Now you have this tit-for-tat retaliation. The Russians ordered the United States to get rid of 750 members of the staff in Russia; the United States responded by ordering the closure of the consulate in San Francisco and a commensurate reduction of staff here. It’s now become even worse than it was before the election.

So the stance toward Russia now by this Trump administration is what?

… It’s still a very confused policy, because the administration took what other administrations might have done in terms of responding to the Russian diplomatic expulsion by saying: “Fine. We will meet your action with our action. We closed the consulate in San Francisco; we closed three other diplomatic annexes.” But you didn’t hear President Trump talk about that. President Trump didn’t come out and say, “The Russians have done us wrong by taking these actions, and I'm going to respond in kind.” Instead, the only time he’s commented on this was, he was asked during his vacation in Bedminster, N.J., about the Russian expulsions. He said: “I'm glad they did it, because then we don’t have to have as many staff there. We’re cutting our payroll and saving us money.” He can't bring himself to say a single critical word about President Putin. Again, this is what raises alarms and questions. Why is it that he can't simply say what every other American politician would say, which is that this is a provocative act by the Russians and we don’t approve of it? …

The U.S. Response to Russian Measures ... 2016

Let’s finish up a couple things on the Obama White House. Obama goes to Putin, who again rejects any involvement in the election whatsoever. And again—so he’s met with these denials. How does that affect him? … And the bigger question is, why does it seem that the White House, the Obama White House, was so reluctant to make a move before the election? Even after the election, it took two months before these toothless sanctions came out on Dec. 29.

I think leading up to the election, there's a big debate inside the Obama administration: What kind of actions should they take? How public should they be about raising the alarm? At least through a series of sort of half measures and half reactions. There was a statement put out on Oct. 7 by the leaders of the Intelligence Community saying, “We think the Russians are trying to interfere.” 17

It gets not buried, but it gets overwhelmed by the news later in the day of the Access Hollywood tape coming out about President Trump, or then-candidate Trump and his approach to women.

Inside the administration there are people who want to be more aggressive, who want to be more outspoken about what Russia is doing. Then there's the essential caution of President Obama. A couple of reasons. One, his candidate is winning. Hillary Clinton is ahead in the polls. Why do something to mess up that? The fear is that, if they go out there and say, “The Russians are trying to tilt the election,” that Donald Trump, as a candidate, would say, “Aha, they're trying to rig the election for Hillary Clinton,” because remember, he’s already started to talk about this idea that the election might be rigged, so the Obama people don’t want to play into that argument.

The other thing is, they're worried, at this point, about Russian hacking of election equipment. They're worried about the 50 states having their voter machines screwed around with. They're focused on working with the states to make sure that doesn’t happen. The other thing is, they can't get any buy-in from congressional Republicans. They go to Mitch McConnell. They go to the Hill, and they say, “Let’s come out together with a statement of concern.” The Republicans don’t want anything to do with this. Obama backs off rather than actually saying, “Fine, we’ll do it ourselves.”

There are a lot of people around President Obama who think that was a mistake, who think that they should have been more assertive and that they lost an opportunity to alert the country to what was happening.

There are suppositions and more and more news coming out about the election hacking into the states and that it seems to be more important than maybe the press understood. In China, when Obama talks to Putin, the thing that he’s focused on is hacking into the electoral process, the actual vote tallies and such. …

We don’t have any evidence that I'm aware of publicly right now that they succeeded at invading these state computers with any impact, but that was clearly a big concern at the time. The Obama administration was trying to work with the 50 states on that. What they got was some pushback. The states are very protective of their own sovereignty, of their own control over election equipment. They didn’t want the Feds coming in and telling them what to do and seeming to take control. Remember, again, Donald Trump was talking about a rigged election. That would play into that. So it was a sensitive issue, a politically dynamic issue, but one that was a big, big concern at the time, and maybe something that will continue to turn up new information that we don’t know about.

Obviously, hacking emails can have an impact, but a much bigger, much bigger worry is if they can actually mess around with voter registration rolls and change the very basis on which we have our elections.

One last thing on this and then we’ll move forward into the end stuff. The eventual sanctions in Hawaii: The president comes out, and he defines the sanctions that are being brought. A lot of people look back at this point and sort of say, basically, pretty toothless. …

President Obama is on the way out. He’s only got a few weeks left in office. He knows that anything he does can be reversed the second he’s gone. He’s trying to find what he thinks is the right response. One is to say, “Look, we know what you did, and we’re not going to sit by without taking action about it.” The flipside is, if he goes too far, in the view of some, he might then provoke a reaction by President-elect Trump. So he chooses a moderate, measured response in closing these two diplomatic facilities and kicking out 35 diplomats. It’s meant to send a message. It’s not meant to hurt Russia; it’s meant to send a message: “We know what you did. We’re not going to put up with it.”

What he hopes is that President-elect Trump will stand by that and agree to it. In fact, Vladimir Putin doesn’t retaliate, because he assumed President-elect Trump is going to reverse it the next day. So [Obama] actually doesn’t get the support from his successor that he had hoped for, and he isn't leaving office without having really done something significant about this, to the regret and the chagrin of many of the people around him.

A missed opportunity.

A missed opportunity, and the last opportunity, they felt, to really stand up to the Russians and say: “We caught you. Don’t do this. You can't do this without facing a punishment of some sort.” The punishment wasn’t, in the view of some, commensurate to the crime.

… The DNI report comes out on Jan. 6 or Jan. 5. On Jan. 6, the intelligence leaders [John] Brennan and [James] Comey and [James] Clapper go to Trump Tower. They brief the incoming president about what goes on. He then has a press conference a few days later, where he reluctantly admits that the Russians were possibly, probably involved, but then backtracks on that in later days, in many situations. …

Up until this point, President Trump, or President-elect Trump, has been saying, “We don’t know if the Russians did it.” He’s been throwing doubt on the intelligence. He’s been deflecting attention. Maybe it was a 400-pound guy in a basement or the Chinese or who knows? Intelligence guys come in. The agency directors come in. They present their evidence to him. 18

They say, “This is why we think, unanimously, that the Russians did this.” There is no dissent about this within the Intelligence Community. Not every intelligence agency looked at it, but those who looked at it all agree, this is an open-and-shut case.

At that point, the president-elect can't come out and then directly refute the people who have just told him this, so he says, grudgingly: “It looks like Russia did it. I accept that that’s what happened.” But he doesn’t stick to it. It’s just not a conclusion that will actually shape his thinking, because pretty soon afterward, he gets back to his: “Well, they probably did it. Maybe they didn’t do it. Somebody else could have done it. Remember, these are the guys who got the Iraq intelligence wrong on the weapons of mass destruction,” etc., casting doubt, clouding the issue, and never fully accepting what is the conclusion of the intelligence agency. By not accepting that conclusion, he doesn’t accept the need to do something about it. If we don’t really know for a fact that Russia did it, then he doesn’t have to respond. That leads to a policy in which Russia doesn’t pay another price by this president for what it did last year.

… The Russian story will not go away. It frustrates Trump tremendously. Talk a little bit about the fact that it would never go away, how it affected Trump, and how it affected his agenda, how important it has been.

This is a story that won't go away. It eats away at Trump. He watches TV; he sees it in the paper; he hears people talk about it; and it just gnaws at him. He’ll bring it up himself in circumstances where he doesn’t have to, because it sticks in his craw. It is an attack on his legitimacy, as he sees it. It is an excuse by Democrats for the fact that they lost. And everything in his mind is an attack on him.

So he attacks back. That’s his nature. If he feels attacked, he attacks back. Of course he then, in some ways, makes it worse by a, keeping the issue in front of the public and on days it might not have ever been discussed; and b, escalating it and alienating people who are actually investigating what's going on. Cardinal rule of thumb in Washington: If you're under investigation, you don’t tick off the people who are investigating you. You don’t question their motives unless you're planning to go on all-out war, like the Clintons did during the impeachment.

President Trump, it just consumes him. This is something he just can't stop talking about, stop thinking about. Every morning he brings it up; he talks about it with aides. He brings it up in interviews, even when he’s not asked about it at times. It feels manifestly unfair to him. It feels like a concerted effort by the people of Washington to reject his presidency, to hobble him from day one. He’s bristling and responding in kind.

And how does it lead to Comey’s firing? …

… This is the thing. His frustration makes the situation worse for him. 19

He thinks James Comey, the FBI director, should have his back. He thinks Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, should have his back. When they don’t, when they act in correspondence to their view of the duties of their jobs, he lashes out. He says: “Jim Comey should have told the public that I the president am not under investigation. Why won't he do that? He must not be doing that because he’s against me. He’s out of here. I'm firing him.” Well, that only adds to his trouble, because now suddenly there's this question of whether that act by itself constitutes obstruction of justice. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but that issue didn’t even exist before he fired James Comey. Now it does. … He does the same thing with Jeff Sessions. He comes out publicly and says, “Jeff Sessions should not have recused himself from managing this investigation,” meaning he wanted his attorney general to protect him from this investigation. Jeff Sessions, understanding that he had a conflict of interest, had recused himself and said: “I can't be the person to monitor this. It’s not politically correct. I should have somebody who’s not part of President Trump’s political circle manage this.” That’s the way things work in Washington. That’s not the way President Trump sees things working. By attacking Jeff Sessions, he then alienates the Senate Republicans, who are his [Sessions’] old colleagues. They stand up to him and say, “No, you cannot fire the attorney general, because if you fire him, we’re not going to confirm a successor.” They basically put an end to that. But his frustration is mounting, and it’s adding to his problems rather than making them go away.

And take us to the day after, May 10. He fires Comey. The meeting at the White House. Take us to that moment.

… You couldn’t script this to be any stranger. The day after he fires the FBI director, who’s leading an investigation into Russian meddling in the election, who does the president meet with? He meets with the Russian ambassador, who’s been part of this investigation in the first place, and the foreign minister. We know, now, from reporting by our paper and others, that they talked about this. They talked about firing the FBI director. President Trump told the Russians that firing James Comey would take some of the pressure off and make it easier for them to have a relationship.

As if that weren’t strange enough, the same day he ends up meeting with Henry Kissinger in his office, which just seems to reinforce the whole Nixon comparisons that are already happening, because he’s now fired the FBI director. As a matter of optics, if nothing else, it only feeds the fury; it feeds the fire; it feeds the suspicions. Rather than making his problems go away, he compounds them.

And a misunderstanding by the president that, in fact, that this would take the pressure off.

It’s hard to know whether he really believed this, but he said he thought Democrats would be happy that he had fired James Comey because they were so mad at the FBI director for his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails from the previous year. It’s true. The Democrats did not like James Comey. They thought he mishandled that investigation. They didn’t like the way he had performed the year before. But that didn’t mean that they were willing to have the President of the United States fire him at the same time he was leading an investigation into the Russian interference, and then openly admit that the Russian investigation was on his mind when he decided to fire him.

That moment when [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov was walking into the meeting and the press asked him about the firing was odd. [What's] your perspective on that?

Lavrov is a quirky fellow. He plays with the reporters: “Oh, I didn’t know that…” It’s—he’s teasing. You know, he’s having fun. He’s at the same time stoking the fire a little bit. It’s not to Trump’s benefit, but they're enjoying the discomfort in the American system. They're enjoying the fact that the Americans are at each other’s throat over this issue, and he’s having fun with it. …

… In the end, what does Putin get out of all this?

If you think that Putin had two goals here, he succeeded in one and failed in the other. The first is to create dissension, to create doubt, to disrupt the American democratic system, to make people wonder whether it really worked to have people at each other’s throats. In that he succeeded. But if the second goal was to put an administration in power in Washington that would lift the sanctions, that would stand by Russia rather than against Russia, that would ease the pressure that they had been feeling economically, internationally, diplomatically, then they failed; then Putin failed, because, in fact, it’s had the opposite effect. It’s now toxic in Washington. It’s impossible for any political figure in Washington to genuinely change the relationship with Russia for the better at the moment, because it would be seen in the context of this investigation. On the one hand, disruption, yes. On the other hand, a new relationship, no.

… How has it increased his power and his ability to control things back in Russia?

It’s put Russia back on the world stage. It’s made Russia a player. You cannot ignore Russia. That’s the thing that Putin hates the most. You can't just disregard what Russia thinks. Well, what are we doing here? We’re talking about Russia. We’re talking about Russia a lot. That to him is a win. It also allows him domestically to point to outside enemies. If the economy isn't doing well, it’s not because President Putin has done something wrong policy-wise; it’s because: “the rest of the world is out to get us. The rest of the world is lined up against us in an anti-Russian alliance. We have to stand together as Russians.” That, heading into the next election for President Putin, is a pretty important dynamic.

Now, he’s not likely to lose any election under any circumstance. But he really does want to have the support of the Russian people. Ginning up anti-American fervor, anti-Western fervor, is part of that.

He fears those folks out on the street. I mean, elections might not matter, but those people in the streets could bring him down as they brought down dictator—tyrant after tyrant.

He hates people in the streets, absolutely. He looks around him, and he sees these color revolutions in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Kyrgyzstan, in Serbia. He sees elections in which longtime entrenched leaders were taken down by popular demonstrations, fomented in his view, by the Americans. He does not look at the Russian intervention in last year’s election as an opening gun. He looks at it as a retaliation for what we, the Americans, have done in his backyard, and even in Moscow, in his view, over the years. We interfered in his country; he’ll interfere in ours. That’s the way he sees these things. So for him, this battle with the West, this battle with the United States is part and parcel of his appeal to his own public.

All politics is domestic politics.

All politics is domestic politics, yeah.

And in a way, for him, how important is that aspect of all this?

It’s important to remember, always, that, while he’s not a democratic leader in the traditional sense, he does want to keep control of a country where anything can happen. When he took over, Russia felt like it was falling apart. To him, it felt like there was chaos; there was lack of order. What he has spent these last 17 years trying to do is re-establish order, re-establish control, re-establish a system that marches to his tune. And last thing he wants to see is that fall apart.

Great. And we’re heading—

I mean, the risk for any Russian leader—you have very few examples in Russia’s history of leaders who leave office voluntarily and have a good life afterward. So he has to think about the rest of his life. The people around him are worried about what they have. If for some reason they were ever to lose power, the threat, the damage, the danger to them is very tangible, very real. Keeping control in Russia is imperative.
------------------------------------------------
Editorial Standards and Ethics

FRONTLINE Journalism Fund
  • Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
  • Koo and Patricia Yuen
  • PBS CPB Abrams Foundation MacArthur Foundation Park Foundation Heising-Simons Foundation
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; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Park Foundation; the Heising-Simons 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 ©1995-2022 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.

  1. 1 How Russia's Independent Media Was Dismantled Piece By Piece THE GUARDIAN | MAY 25, 2016
  2. 2 The Seduction of George W. Bush FOREIGN POLICY | NOV. 6, 2013
  3. 3 Watch: Vladimir Putin at the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy VIEW LINK
  4. 4 The FRONTLINE Interview: Toomas Hendrik Ilves FRONTLINE VIEW LINK
  5. 5 The Wrath of Putin VANITY FAIR | APRIL 2012 VIEW LINK
  6. 6 The FRONTLINE Interview: Michael McFaul FRONTLINE
  7. 7 Patriot Games THE NEW YORKER | MARCH 3, 2014
  8. 8 The FRONTLINE Interview: Victoria Nuland FRONTLINE VIEW LINK
  9. 9 Wary Stance From Obama on Ukraine THE NEW YORK TIMES | FEB. 24, 2014 VIEW LINK
  10. 10 The FRONTLINE Interview: John Brennan FRONTLINE VIEW LINK
  11. 11 Obama Answers Critics, Dismissing Russia as a ‘Regional Power’ THE NEW YORK TIMES | MARCH 25, 2014 VIEW LINK
  12. 12 Obama Resets Ties to Russia, but Work Remains THE NEW YORK TIMES | JULY 7, 2009 VIEW LINK
  13. 13 Crimea Crisis: Russian President Putin's Speech Annotated ... BBC NEWS |MARCH 19, 2014 VIEW LINK
  14. 14 Trump's Real-Estate Ambitions in Russia ... THE NEW YORKER | AUG. 29, 2017
  15. 15 Conspiracy or Coincidence? A Timeline Open to Interpretation THE NEW YORK TIMES | JULY 12, 2017
  16. 16 Excerpts From The Times’s Interview With Trump THE NEW YORK TIMES | JULY 19, 2017
  17. 17 Oct. 7, 2016: A government warning on 'election security'VIEW LINK
  18. 18 Jan. 6, 2017: An assessment on 'Russian activities' in the electionVIEW LINK
  19. 19 For Trump, the ‘Cloud’ Just Grew That Much Darker
THE NEW YORK TIMES | JUNE 8, 2017
SITE COUNT Amazing and shiny stats
Copyright © 2005-2021 Peter Burgess. All rights reserved. This material may only be used for limited low profit purposes: e.g. socio-enviro-economic performance analysis, education and training.