Putin's Road to War: Julia Ioffe (interview) | FRONTLINE

so we were looking for a place to start the film and to keep the focus on putin and it seemed to us that one of the more insightful moments about who putin is in this uh in this war is that national security council meeting that he has about the um breakaway provinces can you describe we're going to have the footage of him walking in by himself being at the end of the room uh his advisors arrayed on the other side can you describe that moment what we're seeing [Music] yeah that security council meeting was so wild and the whole time i was watching it i kept thinking this is what a politburo meeting in 1939 must have looked like when everybody sitting in a cabinet minister's chair was the third replacement since 1937 and each person sitting in that chair knew what had happened to his predecessors and uh you know how many bullets they got in the back of the head in the basement of lubanka and i just figured this is how it must have gone down this is how it must have felt this is how these people must have spoken uh this is you know that fear that discomfort that they were clearly you know dancing bears performing for their uh master who is impossible to please what what else struck me about it was the distance between him and the people sitting in that room was so vast i mean from every angle you could see it another thing that stuck out to me was sergey narushkin the spy chief getting up there stumbling through his words getting a dressing down by vladimir putin who says no no speak clearly no speak clearly no that's not it say it again you know he he dressed him down like a like a schoolboy and this is one of the main silhouette he is the head of the svr the uh foreign spy service and what's fascinating is that that security council meeting was pre-taped it was shown on russian state tv as a live broadcast they told their viewers it was live but then russian journalists noticed that everybody's watches showed a different time so they taped that and they decided to show narushkin getting humiliated like that like a school master taking him to task so the fact that they chose to show that was really interesting and it made a lot of observers wonder if this was in retaliation or because putin suspected that the leaks were coming from nareshkin's people because everybody was wondering how did the americans have such good intelligence they knew each step of what putin was going to do i mean once the war started moving it was it all went as the white house had predicted it would and some people saw that scolding of narushkin as a kind of retaliation or a show of suspicion that you know he wasn't being careful enough in protecting the information there are a couple other things i want to say about that meeting because it was fascinating so while everybody noticed narushkin the person who really stuck out to me was zolatev the head of the of rosgovardia the national guard this unit was formed shortly after the approach of pro-democracy protests of 2011-2012 and after the anti-war protests of 2014 when russia first invaded ukraine putin started creating more and more security agencies and giving them more and more powers to stifle street protests and stifle descent there was even a law that was passed that allowed them to shoot live ammunition into crowds of unarmed protesters so to head up this new security agency called the roscovardia or the russian guard he picked victor zolotev who was his old bodyguard and this is you know this is a i want to say a mace in human form or you know a club in human form just completely loyal muscle and fists and what you saw in that meeting was he gets up there in his uniform with his striped uh military standard issue military undershirt ranting about the americans and how the ukrainians are just american puppets and of course at the same time his grandson lives in london you know um that was the thing about pretty much everybody in that meeting they were up there they went up there and dutifully said what the master wanted them to say both about the breakaway republics and about the west while all of them have relatives and property in the west the other person who really stuck out to me was valentino matvienka who is the speaker of the federation council which is the upper chamber of the russian parliament and i don't think i've ever seen anybody look more uncomfortable on camera it reminded me a little bit of the appearances we used to get in the first decade of putin's rule of ludmila putino who was then his wife who would periodically get trotted out who never looked happy to be there and just with vienko sitting there you could just she looked nauseous she looked queasy and uneasy and like as almost as if she was trying to avoid having to speak and the last thing i'll say about the security council meeting is we now know a week into the war more and more information is coming out of moscow about how shocked everybody is in the kremlin in the defense ministry in the foreign ministry nobody not even people pretty close to putin thought he would do this they thought he would recognize the breakaway republics maybe move some troops in and that would be the extent of it nobody expected this people in the kremlin and in the prime minister's office are telling journalists anonymously that they're absolutely stunned and they don't they kind of don't know what to do when they didn't expect this and they're just like shell-shocked people in the ministry of defense including pretty high-ranking members of the ministry of defense are just completely stunned and seem kind of um seem to have been completely caught off guard by putin's orders to launch a full-scale invasion you know i read those news stories about anonymous sources in the kremlin and in the prime minister's office and in the foreign ministry being against this and being shell-shocked and i think well why don't they all resign you know you can't arrest them all why don't they resign why don't they not follow these orders if they think that they're deranged which they clearly do i think back to that security council meeting and i realize how scared they must all be of him how they are all locked into this closed solar system with him as the center and they're all afraid of getting arrested or falling from grace they don't they have no life outside of this they can't exist outside of the government if you're not in if you get that high up and that close to putin if you fall you don't fall back to civilian life you go to jail you lose everything and they have been living and they also have clearly been living in this atmosphere of fear that they are also helping foment in the nation and spread in the country but they themselves are clearly scared but you see how this all went down or you're starting to see in retrospect how this all happened and how much of it was driven just by one man his deranged ideas and how every everybody around him thought it was a terrible idea but was too scared to say anything about it or to resist and it just makes me feel like oh i'm getting a sneak peek into how it worked in the 1930s is there any question about who is making the decisions in that room and who is making the decisions about leading the country into war oh no it was it was very clear and as we now know it's very clearly just putin's war the russian army is fighting it and you can tell they're doing it half-heartedly reluctantly poorly but it's his war that they're waging i think the security council meeting you know it's like a russian election did people vote for putin yes technically they did did most of the people who voted technically vote for putin yes they did did he technically win every election he's run in he absolutely did is he a democratically elected president of russia no he's not right because the elections weren't free and fair because the political system is absolutely rigged and monopolized by the kremlin and and so it is with the security council meeting did he ask everybody's opinion he yes he did did everybody volunteer themselves technically the idea that putin should recognize these breakaway republics they did was it done voluntarily do they really believe that that should have been done probably not we don't know but it's this very soviet obsession with bureaucracy and ticking the boxes and insisting on the form while completely abandoning or perverting the substance if that makes sense it does it does and it's very helpful we're probably going to follow follow that with the moment of him announcing what he he calls the special operation it's the war we're about to go and explore his life and what led him to that moment so when you see him lead russia into this war does it feel to you like a culmination of of a lifetime from the kgb from rising up that that this is a this is a seminal moment for him or something he's been building towards i think it's too pat to say that it's something he's building he's been building toward his whole life from his days in the kgb etc i think that's to pat a narrative i think he's clearly been building up to this for the last decade and definitely for the last few years that speech was really interesting because it was not about nato it wasn't even really about ukraine it was mostly about the us it was about this eschatological battle between russia and the u.s between washington and moscow whether it is soviet moscow and cold war era washington or their present day versions it almost didn't matter and it felt like he had this unfinished cold war business with the u.s like he wanted to finish the fight that had um you know ended in a draw almost in 1991. so in that sense i think it is a culmination of that kind of paranoiac cold war thinking that he absorbed in the kgb what i think is really important to convey to people who have never met somebody who used to work in the kgb or the fsb is that these people are incredibly paranoid they're incredibly conspirologically minded it's this kgb way of thinking that every door is a trap door every wall has you know uh some kind of secret hiding place behind it i don't know how to explain it right that everything is a false bottom that everybody has a puppeteer that um like in the cold war every war was a proxy between the soviet union and and the us so it is here and so if russia has designs on ukraine and the west is against it that must be because ukraine is a puppet of the us what was also interesting about that speech was you know the first it was about half an hour the first 15 minutes were about the u.s so we in the west have come to think of the cold war as a bad thing we celebrated its end we unanimously think that the end of the cold war is an unalloyed good putin does not agree and he first laid this out for the world in 2007 at the munich security conference when he said the cold war was good he said it was a bipolar world we one pull center of power was in washington and the other was in moscow and they balanced each other and they provided checks on each other and he said and this is a quote he said it provided for global security which of course ignores the fact that there were bloody proxy wars everywhere you know angola mozambique nicaragua ethiopia vietnam el salvador but but in his mind it was a good time russia was on top of the world russia was one of the two big guys calling the shots moscow's opinion always had to be taken into account moscow had to be asked for permission moscow could mess up washington's plans anywhere in the world and he would like to get back to that and the same way that in 2007 he laid at the us's doorstep all the faults and all the problems that had come out of this new unipolar world order as he called it with only the u.s calling the shots and i mean this was 2007 that was the height of the insurgency in iraq afghanistan was starting to go sideways bush's program of democracy promotion all over the world was bringing revolution to countries in russia's orbit former soviet republics and he said you know this unipolar world order what has it gotten it has gotten us blood and chaos in iraq in afghanistan and he reprised that theme again when he announced that he was invading ukraine he said again if this is this is not okay america can't call all the shots the cold war was good now that there's no balance no counterweight to the us we got iraq we got syria we got egypt we got libya we got afghanistan and i'm watching this and i'm thinking okay fair enough but what does that have to do with ukraine ukraine didn't do any of these things and then when he does get to talking about ukraine he talks about it first as uh first as a puppet of the us so still framing it in the co in the context of the u.s and then he represents another thing that he said many times which is that ukraine is not a real country ukrainians are basically russian ukrainians and russian are one russians are one people he said in in 2008 to george w bush at bucharest when george w bush and condoleezza rice pushed nato to open their doors to georgia and ukraine putin said to george bush then he said george you know ukraine is not a real country so what we're seeing now is not a new putin we're seeing a putin that is kind of distilled concentrated there is also been a lot of talk that this is the product of isolation the thing that's so interesting about it is that putin frames it in terms of strategic balance the nato and the threat to russia and usually we think about wars and international relations in terms of a balance of power and i think the question for you and the question we have in the film is like how much of this is that strategic balance between russia and nato and how much of this is the fears and the anxieties and things of one man that have built up over a lifetime i think it's a combination of things i think first he turns 70 in october he loves round dates or is that no that's i'm sorry that's a russianism what is that how do you say that like that means significant numbers like yeah like um you know like big anniversaries or um so the first thing that's important to notice he turns 70 in october he he puts a lot of stock in numbers and big important dates and anniversaries it's also an age to which most russian men never live he has outlived the vast majority of his of his cohort he is clearly thinking about his legacy and has been for some time uh i think ukraine was always a missing piece in the legacy um far smarter people than i have written about this but from the kremlin's point of view or from putin's point of view in the fall of 2021 he has vanquished the opposition i mean there's nobody left people are either dead in jail or in exile civil society has been eviscerated there's barely any independent media left the economy is doing pretty well it has survived the sanctions of the last few years he has squirreled away these massive reserves 600 something billion he has slowly built up russia's position in the world often by playing spoiler and often by taking the us down a few pegs he has kind of equalized or more has rebalanced the power dynamic between russia and the u.s he's built a good relationship with china he has filled the vacuum left in the middle east by the u.s withdrawal he has moved into parts of africa and latin america he has in his mind reestablished russia as a superpower on the world stage and all that's missing is ukraine which recall he does not believe is a real country which he believes historically is part of russia and which needs to be brought back into the fold so we're going to go back we'll have launched the war and we'll go back into his life as a kgb agent his rise his fears watching the color revolutions watching the arab spring watching uh ukraine and then having sent troops and captured crimea and will pick up sometime around then around 2015 as he's contemplating what he's going to do in the american election in in 2016. and who is putin at that moment as he's about to make this decision that he's going to interfere in the election he's about to do a bunch of other things that you've talked about become more and more aggressive who is he because we'll have watched him rise up to that point i mean get more and more fearful that the us is trying to overthrow him where does he see himself at that moment after crimea has happened i think in 2015 putin is riding high he managed to dupe the west and outfox them by quickly invading crimea and annexing it before anybody can really fully realize what's going on or stop him he starts this astroturf separatist war in the east all done under the cover of plausible deniability in the donbass there are volunteers in crimea they're little green men who just went to the army surplus store and got russian military fatigues and the us couldn't stop him and and they're you know wringing their hands and wondering if they should send lethal aid etc in the meantime he's getting everything he wanted he got a huge bump domestically by annex and crimea by bringing back a part of what is seen erroneously by russians as part of the russian heartland or historic heartland i mean his approval ratings go through the roof the u.s and the eu and several other countries have imposed sanctions on him but he has ridden them out fully he's fine the economy is fine it has managed to recover and start thriving even what else is happening he has managed to splinter europe he has managed to take oh take advantage of the obama administration's waffling on the middle east to get involved in syria and therefore make it even more impossible for the u.s to do anything so he has kind of drawn a line in the sand so that the u.s can't topple bashar al-assad he has become very close with the israeli government with bibi netanyahu uh you know muscling in on what is traditionally american geopolitical turf right there's the the uh the truism in washington is that america has no closer ally in the middle east than europe well suddenly the israeli prime minister is going to moscow more often than he's going to washington he's selling arms to american allies egypt and saudi arabia who are some of the biggest buyers of american arms and are seen as allies of of the us but he's very he's very confident in himself very comfortability too yeah he does take this risk in the in the election and it and he gets you know whether or not he had any influence on the outcome of the election he gets credit for it from a lot of people trump ends up winning there's some sanctions and some diplomats kicked out but what does he take out out from the end of that is he more even more emboldened at the end of um 2016 well first of all i don't think he expected trump to win so that was a huge bonus because at the time everybody in the kremlin and in russia thought well at the time everybody in in the kremlin and everybody was kremlin adjacent thought that trump was their greatest ally and that he would be there as one former kremlin advisor told me that he would be our wrecking ball inside america they didn't expect to get that lucky i don't think they expected americans to get so worked up and on one hand they didn't like it because it caused it brought about all these sanctions and a vilification of russia on the other hand now americans thought they were 12 feet tall and and perfect villains and i think the fact that we still don't know and we'll never be able to know whether putin and the russians influence the outcome of the elections is it's kind of part of the brilliance of the operation right they've gotten in our heads um and trump oh sorry no i was gonna say and then he ultimately he ultimately gets away with it you know trump is grateful because trump has been briefed that putin had tried to help him win trump is grateful he likes putin because he wants to be like putin it's the kind of guy he can understand and relate to because that's the kind of leader he wants to be and even though every once in a while trump's own administration and congress are rolling out sanctions against russia he's also constantly kneecapping nato he is undermining the eu at every turn he is exacerbating divisions inside the european union which is just you know music to putin's ears he's doing he's doing putin's work for him so even with the sanctions which were i think of minimal impact to the russian economy he i think he saw that as a win i think he clocked that as a win and that means it was a signal to keep going to take more risks one thing we may we may use is that meeting that they have in helsinki and oh god the two of them and i mean and what what must putin be thinking and what what lessons is he taking from trump um as he's as he's meeting him as he's watching him um just embodying trump's presidency sort of in that moment what is putin taking away from from that that he that's going to um shape the way he sees things going forward i think at that meeting when trump says in front of the world in front of the american press in front of everybody that he trusts putin more than he trusts the american intelligence community and the american political system i mean right you can roll the credits there that is such a win for putin it is such a you know it's like watching your enemy shoot himself in both feet both hands uh it's your enemy admitting that you are better that you are stronger that you are i mean it's everything he's ever wanted it's for the u.s to admit that the u.s is stupid and weak and bad and that russia is good and strong and powerful um he should he should have stopped there that was that was a big win trump is out he watches trump trump lose and biden comes in i think i think sorry i think one one crucial thing there is uh um what's it called the skripal the poisonings yes uh that means because he's also becoming more more active overseas than possible was that fall of 2018 was that after helsinki i can't remember i think so march of 2018 oh so before helsinki but i think that's part of the risk taking right he he's gotten away with everything so far so why not push it a little step further he's he has this guy he's been a thorn in his side for a long time he's a traitor and putin has said publicly that traitors belong dead in the or traitors will always end up dead in the ditch and he does something unthinkable he has people enter uk territory with military-grade nerve agent of course they mess it up and they don't you know they don't end up killing the guy but they kill a random british woman and what what could the west do they expelled some diplomats so russia expelled some diplomats too and whenever that happens because a lot of russia's diplomats aren't official russia wins even though it's like tit for tat and diplomat for diplomat when they expel them somehow russia always ends up having more diplomats when it's done right so like even after consequences were imposed they still they still won that round because that sent such a strong message to any potential defector to any potential critic that you're not safe anywhere you're not even safe in the west i think you're right that that's such an important moment trump comes out or is voted out of office and biden comes in somebody who's not as much of a supporter as trump was but he's watching america he's watching january 6 he's watching afghanistan what does putin see in america that might lead him to think that this is a moment when he could take ukraine i think he correctly sees america as a nation so divided that it's paralyzed that it is a nation at each other's throats that can't agree on anything and whatever one team says the other team will say just the opposite just because he sees a a president who on one hand he's dealt with before biden was put in charge of the ukraine portfolio in 2014 because obama had not enough time to deal with it and frankly i don't think cared that much about ukraine so on one hand he has uh he's dealing with a new president who is old who has been around who has putin's number who is surrounded by aids and advisors and people in the state department in the white house and then a pentagon who know putin well who know his tricks who see right through him but on the other hand he barely has control of congress he doesn't have the supreme court he doesn't have the american public and then afghanistan happens and the message that sends to putin and i think to the rest of the world is that america is done with its adventures abroad america is tired of it america is turning even more inward america has no more appetite for war it has expended all the energy it possibly had for war it's spent and if putin were to do something now america wouldn't retaliate because why and a long foreign war why take such a political hit because it's done so messily just to get your troops bogged down in another thing and i think that was a very accurate read of the of the situation something you were going to talk about before and i said we'd get to it later is these images of putin during the time of covid of video conferences being at the end of a long table really looking like somebody in their own world you know i physically isolated what do you make of those images that we that we've seen of putin over the last two years and and how has that played into this so in 2018 i went on a reporting trip to moscow and well actually in 2018 i went on a book research trip to moscow and i met up with one of my old friends who is a reporter in the kremlin press pool he's had that position forever he's really good he really understands the workings of the kremlin and we had dinner and i asked him you know the economy was not doing so well there was a lot of public discontent around the presidential elections around the fact that a lot of people had been arrested all over the country that alexei navalny was disqualified from running and he said you know everybody in the kremlin thinks everything is going great they are not getting good information and whatever information they have is not getting to the top and they have no idea what's happening they think everybody's happy that was 2018. then covet comes along and putin's paranoia kicks in his instinct for self-preservation kicks in and even though he tells the country after a brief lockdown he says look we can't shut down our economy we're not a rich western country he said we don't have a rich gram we don't have a rich auntie like america does we have to stay at work go to work meanwhile he retreats into total isolation for a while there was um there was this weird contraption that people had to walk through and get sprayed with this weird mist that was supposed to uh decontaminate them or something before meeting with putin then he started isolating and anybody who had to see who wanted to see him had to isolate quarantine for two weeks you know especially in a hotel set aside for that purpose staff bodyguards advisors the president of kazakhstan had to sit in a hotel room for two weeks and get meals brought to his door so that he could see putin people like andre kostin who's the head of vtb bank which is known as the wallet of the fsb which was just sanctioned had to quarantine for two weeks people who are tr were trusted close people had to quarantine and you can imagine what kind of isolation that breeds meanwhile you know russia ends up having one of the highest if not the highest per capita covet death rate so russians had to go to work and die of cova to keep up the russian economy i mean nothing changed people people partied people went to restaurants movies everything like rode the metro but putin stayed in isolation and there's reports trickling out again from the presidential administration from the defense ministry that a lot of his advisors think this is partly the product of isolation that he went a little batty in you know two years of basically self-imposed solitary confinement which as we know does very strange things to the bind i do think it's funny to think though that you know we all got cabin fever at some point during these coveted lockdowns and most people you know like baked bread or bought too much stuff on amazon and he's like i'll invade ukraine it's just um it's wild i mean it's also a physical manifestation of something that has been ratcheting up over his presidency which is taking out critics people who might threaten him people who disagree with him anybody who's outside of his own his own view of the world so i think this really started with 2014 before 2014 well started with 2012 2014 before the protests before the annexation of crimea putin had a pretty diverse circle of advisors they included the hawks the old his old kgb friends and um kgb alums the kind of silviki the men and then there were the so-called liberals the people who had economic fancy economics degrees who had worked in the banking sector who spent all their time courting western investors to come and invest in russia and who were trying to open russia more and more to the west and to integrate it into the global economy and there was always a tension between those two camps between the liberals and the sylviki and the seesaw went back and forth back and forth and then after the protests of 2012 when putin felt that the white collar urban upper middle class betrayed him when he had been so good to them in making them wealthy and in 2014 when a lot of those same liberals found the annexation of crimea to be anathema and came out and protested against him he basically cut out the liberals then because they were advising him not to do this not to go further in ukraine because there could be more and more sanctions they would be damaging to the russian economy that it's not worth it for a peninsula or not worth it there's a little bit of land in eastern ukraine and he responded by just shutting them out and so then after 2014 it was just a circle of the silviki and then even that circle got smaller and smaller and smaller over time and now as far as we know it's a circle of like two or three people who by the looks of things are even crazier than putin putin is like the moderating voice in that crew because he's thinking about invading ukraine does he understand the state of the russian military the views of the ukrainian people the approach of the west does he understand what is going on no i don't think putin understands i think he made a colossal miscalculation and we're seeing it on the ground every single day he thought ukrainians were russians that they agree with him that ukraine is basically just an outpost of russia and can be easily folded back into russia clearly ukrainians don't agree he thought russian troops would be greeted as liberators with flowers on the streets of ukraine instead they're greeting them with molotov cocktails they're trying to stop the tanks with their bare hands they're greeting them with javelins with signs that say russians off um they're fighting to the death because they don't want to be part of russia because they disagree and i don't think he understood or anticipated that that would happen even though everybody could see that that was what would happen because everything that putin has said he wanted to do in ukraine he has achieved the opposite of starting in 2014. before 2013 ukraine really was a nation divided there was the russian speaking east where a lot of the people who lived there were the descendants of ethnic russians who were brought in by the soviets to work in the mines and the factories they had no ukrainian identity they didn't speak ukrainian they didn't feel any kinship with the ukrainian west which had a slightly different version of christianity which spoke ukrainian and was culturally different and there was this constant seesaw one presidential election ukraine would elect somebody from the russian-speaking east that would be more friendly to the kremlin and then people wouldn't like that and then they would sweep them out of power and elect a kind of pro-western western ukrainian person and it went back and forth back and forth nato membership was not very popular ukraine wasn't really sure what it was as a nation was it part of the old russian-speaking former soviet universe was it part of the west was it a european country or a former soviet country and then putin invades in 2014 lops off a a very strategic part of ukraine a beloved part of ukraine where ukrainians love to vacation he starts a bloody conflict in the east which by the time of this current invasion had taken more than 13 000 lives and destroyed a lot of homes and infrastructure and all of this has had the effect of rallying ukrainians both in the east and the west around the ukrainian flag around the ukrainian language against russia so even people in the east who used to be pro-russian hate russia now even before this invasion they hated russia they didn't want to be a part of russia anymore you have ukrainian politicians saying the person who has formed our ukrainian identity the most is vladimir putin he gave us a national identity you know and and now everybody wants to again before the invasion even everybody wanted to join nato then he invades and finland wants to join nato finland which had been neutral forever sweden wants to join nato the eu which was waffling forever and dragging its feet on accepting ukraine which was one of the reasons um it was an eu ukrainian economic cooperation agreement one of the things that set off the maidan revolution in 2013 2014 now it looks like ukraine's going to get into the eu with a fast-track membership he wanted a stable economy he's destroyed that i mean he's just he's miscalculated on so many fronts and i think in part it's because he's so isolated and you know getting high on his own supply what are the consequences of that on the human side that putin can make this decision that is going to affect both of these countries in such a profound way i don't know i think i'm too close to it i personally find it nauseating i'm seeing in real time lives upended by it and not just the way people are seeing it you know on their screens of apartment buildings being bombed and a million refugees fleeing ukraine in just a week and that's you know a million stories a million heartbreaks it's not just these conscripts who have no idea what they're doing or why they're there it's not just the economic fallout in russia which we're just seeing the beginning of it's you know i have friends on both sides of the border and you there's nothing like watching people close to you as their future evaporates in front of them just all their plans all their hopes all their dreams not just for the next five years for the next week for the next month just gone in a day up in smoke and a total inability to help them to console them um watching my russian friends flee russia just with anything they whatever they have on their backs by you know of a friend who i hope she got across the border but was you know gunning on in her car to the border trying to get to latvia before putin declared martial law it's it's infuriating it's infuriating like for what for one man's mistaken reading of history for his own ego for his own warped understanding of legacy i know sparse situation for use but so thank you for talking about it and my last question is how dangerous is this moment right now and how dangerous is putin in this moment right now and there's obviously all these not veiled threats about nuclear weapons and there's talk of other countries being dragged in by mistake or on purpose um how dangerous is putin i think he's more dangerous than he's ever been at any point in the last 22 years i think he did not expect to lose in ukraine and therefore he will not lose he will grind the country down to a fine fine ash and it doesn't matter how many russian soldiers die in the process how many ukrainian soldiers and civilians die in the process he will not be humiliated by people he calls little russians what that means for europe you know if you just even if you set that tragedy aside or that you know blooming tragedy aside again a million people in a week fled to some of the most xenophobic countries in europe who right now are greeting them with open arms because a they're their neighbors and b they're white and christian and look like them but how long does that last how many more refugees can the west absorb we saw with the refugee flows from syria they gave us brexit they gave us the rise and the empowerment of the far right in germany in hungary in the czech republic in france is this going to keep emboldening the far right and when putin threatens the use of nuclear weapons he threatened it the first time when he declared war on thursday morning he threatened again three days into the war when he saw it wasn't going well he threatened it in 2018 when he went to that air show and he gave that crazy presentation about all the new nuclear weapons he had that could strike the us if people think that he won't use them i think they're mistaken everything putin has showed us at every step of the last 22 years is that every time he think he we think he won't go that far he does we think he won't come back for a third term he did he won't annex crimea he did he won't invade ukraine he did he won't try to kill navalny he did he won't try to subvert an american election he did and so why would we believe that this time he won't do what he says he'll do i mean it's unthinkable like that what he has opened up with this invasion is unthinkable and because he is losing and because the sanctions and the ukrainians are humiliating him because he is backed into a corner he is the most dangerous he has ever been because it is now existential for him and if you think he doesn't know that everybody in the world understands that the only way to end this is to put a bullet between his eyes he knows and that makes him also much more dangerous

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 4,347,816

Keywords:

Id: kSNo2FPQDQw

Length: 46min 48sec (2808 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/mangobattlefruit]

Watch the last 5 minutes to understand why the US and other NATO countries really do not want to directly engage in battle with Russia.

[u/XtrSpecialSnowflake]

Damn, that ending was just.. chilling.

[u/HummingbirdObsessed]

Thank you for sharing this! Unfortunately, I think she is spot on in her assessment of Putin’s current state.

[u/[deleted]]

Amazing interview. What is her background? Assuming she is a journalist?

[u/cyberodessa]

Perfectly described putin

[u/Cute-Republic2657]

Amazing insights from an amazing woman!

[u/izanaccount]

I guess I’m behind. Who is this woman? She mentioned a book, and after watching this I’m interested to look into it.

[u/alexalex99000]

Here’s an older video with her on the same topic. 4 years ago and still very accurate.

Link

[u/AssociateJaded3931]

If she's right we're looking at nuclear war soon if Putin isn't stopped.