Putin's Road to War: Susan Glasser (interview) | FRONTLINE

one of the things that stood out to us is that national security council meeting that he has right before the war begins and um have you seen all of the footage of it or the the clips of it yes you know he walks in and um could you just to start could you just describe that moment for us that we're seeing well you know this is the the monday of probably the most dramatic week in certainly europe and and european security since the end of the cold war possibly even longer and up until this moment although many people had been quite clear on the threat posed by this 190 000 person army on the borders of ukraine there there remained this question mark hanging over vladimir putin himself and what he was going to do uh you know he had been lying to the world both directly and through his emissaries saying no no our intention is is is not to invade oh we're just having exercises in belarus we're going to go home he was talking with the french president emmanuel macron again you know telling a lot of lies and so there remained this you know kind of fog around russia's intentions until the world heard vladimir putin on that day with his national security council and i think that was when the veil was ripped off that was when there was no more uncertainty people stopped talking about oh was it our fault and nato they stopped talking about you know maybe it won't happen and it was just this this incredible sort of scary moment of clarity and so a lot of things became clear i think in that interaction one of them was the extreme isolation of vladimir putin truly not only a sole decider but a man alone so you have him uh striding you know in his sort of cocky walk and sitting uh by himself and his advisors they don't even warrant the long table that macron and others who had come to try to talk him out of it got they're literally sitting like 30 feet away from putin in this vast high ceiling ornate kremlin hall and they're sitting on very uncomfortable looking chairs and they look very uncomfortable and it's clearly not about covid they're they're like 30 40 feet away from the czar not you know six feet or even 12 feet and uh so this sense of physical isolation of a man who is alone the decider it was a naked display of brute strength and the fact that it was taped i think was something that you know eagle-eyed journalists figured out by examining the footage and realizing from the watches of several of the participants that it was i think five hours earlier uh when it had been recorded from when it was released it was a show and it was what was it designed to show about putin and about his power yeah i mean it was uh definitely a show and a naked display of who's in charge here one of the things that we learned from living in russia was that the point of a lot of public displays is to show not just a little dominance but total dominance uh strength is their uh political language and you know i remember once going and covering a a very transparently rigged election in neighboring azerbaijan and where the the son of the soviet-era dictator was being installed in power and there were these russian election monitors quote unquote uh who were there and you know it was just the sun was very unpopular and yet they they had a vote total that was in the i think was the upper 80s uh it just not even plausible and i said to this russian uh election monitor well you know it's not like i mean if they had done like 55 or something like that and he said you americans you never understand the point is to be over the top it's to make people accept a brazen uh display of of strength and power to do whatever we want and i think that really always stuck with me and that's vladimir putin's language uh and he also he was so dismissive it wasn't just his physical distance from his subordinates there's this extraordinary moment where he reams out the head of the russian foreign intelligence service sergey narushkin a man by the way with whom he's worked for decades uh a key member of the uh sylviki that's the the power circle surrounding vladimir putin former kgb agents like himself so you know this isn't just some like you know young aid that he's upgrading right this is like literally the head of russia's foreign spy service and he berates him over and over again and he says like speak clearly speak clearly speak clearly because he wanted him and all the other advisers basically to endorse in explicit terms this action that they were taking of recognizing these fake statelets in the east of ukraine which was the pretext for then launching the invasion and he didn't feel that narushkin had been clear enough about that and you know what i found remarkable was not only that putin would speak that way because we know that putin speaks that way but remember they edited it they taped it he could have cut it out he chose to show that to the russian people so you know to me that had very like you know dictator vibe and it really suggested an enormous kind of crackdown was coming and of course there has been since then a huge amount of domestic repression to go along with the foreign aggression and what i would say is having looked at that scene that was reminiscent of a stalin-era you know theatrical play that we could have known that was coming it is amazing footage i mean you watch him too in his body language the way he's sitting there sort of bored and playing with his watch and cleaning his fingernails as the he's supposed to be getting briefed on this very important decision that's going to bring russia to the brink of war and what does it say about who is making the decisions and the kind of advice that he's getting and what he's hearing yeah well obviously it tells you that uh you know this was all as if they were just marching down a checklist it was all planned and choreographed in advance there was no suspense and it wasn't a real meeting because in fact actually the kremlin after that meeting then immediately shows the footage of putin signing these sort of elaborate you know scrolls uh documents recognizing the independence of these statelets uh uh and so it's all just pre-taped right like the the revolution the war will be pre-taped a few days later he's going to make this announcement that uh in this address that he's going to launch this special military operation that he's going to launch a war is this vladimir putin's war is this russia's war whose war is it yeah that's a great question i think it's clear that it's vladimir putin's war and what's kind of remarkable actually is that he had the power to to do that and and launch that himself he didn't even try very much to prepare the russian people i mean there's been years of propaganda i would say about uh delegitimizing ukraine uh as an independent state uh saying all sorts of farcical things about uh nazis being in control there and the like but but generally speaking there was an incredible amount of shock it seemed among the russian elite uh western journalists who were based in moscow uh everyday people there wasn't this incredible drum beat on television only in the few days leading up to the war what did that become different but you know throughout the build up of this invasion force they weren't preparing the ground and i think that tells you something about the military campaign that we then saw unfold which is putin's plan was not necessarily to have this grinding brutal destruction of cities and civilians that he perhaps he lied to himself and believed it as an isolated dictator but he seemed to have a plan for a kind of a blitzkrieg a lightning strike to uh you know get rid of the ukrainian leadership install perhaps his own puppet government and to march in almost as liberators in in in the way that his propaganda suggested and then you saw his military take actions that didn't succeed but seemed like that was the plan so perhaps they knew that the war would be unpopular with the russian people uh putin is is in deep kind of destroy the village in order to save it mode it seems to me uh he has been proclaiming uh very clearly for years and explicitly since last summer when he wrote an essay to this effect but he's been saying very clearly well ukraine is not separate in his view that ukraine doesn't have legitimacy as an independent country and then in fact ukrainians and russians are one ethnic people well how can he be treating his brothers this way right it's an extraordinary thing and so it is true there's this enormous amount of cross-border connection between russians and ukrainians there uh you know in the soviet times there was enormous amount of you know russians who lived and were born and grew up in ukraine and vice versa ukrainians in russia and many families have connections on both sides of the border and they don't want to go to war uh with people who are if not their brothers at least their cousins and uh so i think putin probably did anticipate that it would not be popular and so it needed to be fast and now he's got both things wrong was what led to this moment what led to this war was there a strategic threat was there a popular demand inside russia or was this really all something that's coming from inside vladimir putin yeah i you know i think that this was not uh the war of the russian people against the ukrainian people this really is vladimir putin's war i think it's important to understand that you know this was an artificially created crisis and it seemed almost as if putin had drawn up a plan a long time in advance and now he had finally decided to execute it so you know you had the years worth of propaganda this sort of open sore of uh this ongoing fighting in eastern ukraine and the donbass the illegal annexation of crimea from 2014 on last summer putin authored a 5 000 word article in which he made his historical case and his grievance against the idea of ukraine as an independent country and you know i really from last summer on i have really taken the the threat and the possibility of this very seriously because of that article i am a believer that when vladimir putin tells you something like that you need to listen and a lot of people didn't want to listen and you know you can't negotiate with somebody who defines the problem in those terms that's existential you can't have a negotiation where emmanuel macron is going to you know negotiate vladimir putin out of thinking that ukraine is not a real country and so that's what always scared me was it was a very maximalist interpretation and then when it was announced that they sent copies of that article to every single member of the russian armed forces you know i thought wow well that's putin's war that he's preparing and so i thought we had to take very seriously when u.s intelligence started warning from literally the beginning of november really a long time in the making they they were warning and saying this is different this isn't exercises this is something we haven't seen before and i immediately connected that to ukraine and to almost a kind of vladimir putin's version of a holy war to restore russia's lost empire when you look at what happens in ukraine you know how important is it to understand vladimir putin's life you know whether that was his plan from the beginning or not but but the trajectory of his life leading to this moment is that something you need to understand in order to understand what's going on absolutely when you see this vladimir putin in the kremlin today you know the sort of aging isolated dictator you know there are so many through lines it's still in many ways i hear in the language you know the same vladimir putin that we saw more than 20 years ago as an extremely unlikely new leader of russia and you know i i recall sitting in the kremlin library at this first meeting with western with american correspondents that putin had and it was june of 2001 right after his famous first summit with george w bush in which they looked into each other's eyes and you know so even though putin was on good terms with the west uh and you know he was much younger still in his 40s uh insecure about you know being plucked from obscurity so he was kind of very much a kgb officer reading his briefing books you know trying to seem kind of modern and you know like that he knew what he was talking about but then we asked about the war in chechnya and the veil came off and all of a sudden it was very much the guy you see today you know defensive snappish willing to use brutal means and willing to defend it and you know one thing that you get from looking at the whole sweep of putin's two decades in powers to understand that for him the use of military force has accompanied every step along the way of his journey to become russia's longest serving leader since joseph stalin he came to power uh because of the war in chechnya inside russia's own borders just as brutal as the horrors that we're seeing in ukraine today again against a part of his own country they are willing to destroy the village in order to save it but in this case modern cities with hundreds of thousands of people destroying civilian apartment buildings targeting civilian targets and once they moved back in to occupy absolute human rights catastrophing i mean literally throwing prisoners into pits in the ground okay so that's how vladimir putin came to power he consistently then showed a willingness to use force to march in to parts of the former soviet union in georgia uh in 2008 in ukraine the first time in 2014. he even used russian military force overseas to shore up the regime of assad in syria and you know you look at the bombing of kiev today or harkev and it echoes the the destruction of aleppo that was carried out by russian forces under the direction of vladimir putin so this use of military force in extreme ways is a part and parcel of his tenure we'll go back into the film the story of putin that you're familiar with his watching the collapse of the soviet union building his power in the post yeltsin years starting slowly with crackdowns internally and growing distrustful of the west in the united states watching a rock watching the color revolutions um in the film it goes up through taking crimea and where we'll we'll sort of pick up is that moment 2015 2016 as uh putin is seems like you know he's managed to take crimea he seems i mean it seems like he's emboldened because he's about to launch an operation to interfere in an american election who is putin at that moment how does he see the world how does he see his own power and his own place in it after 2014 and crimea uh you know i think amazingly enough it wasn't so much putin emboldened as putin aggrieved interestingly he was furious about western sanctions european sanctions and american sanctions on him he perhaps miscalculated actually and felt that he would just be able to get away with crimea in the way that he had gotten away with his 2008 incursion into georgia uh and he continued to be furious that at least on paper this path to the west existed for ukraine despite his efforts to stop it there were these tough sanctions and so as is now well documented he launches essentially a revenge operation so even though he was the aggressor in ukraine he's furious with the west and specifically with the united states for its efforts to counter his aggression so you have to understand i think that 2016 attack on the u.s presidential election as putin's revenge and retaliation for what he considered to be uh you know essentially hostile acts by the west and so you that's how you get into this cycle of escalation right you know from the perspective of washington or brussels they're responding to this illegal annexation of territory really for the first time since world war ii and yet to putin it's another item in his grievances and agreement and that unfolds this remarkable series of events here inside the united states but you know if you read actually the mueller report or look at the senate intelligence committee report you see quite clearly that it was 2014 and the sanctions that then caused putin to begin this operation to attack the american political system with results that probably even he could not have anticipated i never thought about it that way and obviously there's a similar dynamic at play here and and we know inside the white house there was a big debate about do you send military aid or do you do sanctions and and they felt like it was the option that that wasn't going to to escalate things so dramatically but for him anything was anything going to escalate well that's a rate so that i think is a really important thing as i'm thinking about what's happening right now maybe off topic but i'm that's why i'm so worried right now because if putin thinks he's in world war iii with us like that's what matters as opposed to what we think we're doing with him what matters is not just that but what he thinks we're doing and this cycle of escalation and miscalculation is a part of why we are where we are and i i think that the record is quite clear that putin launched this attack inside the united states as a response to our response in 2014 and so then you had the obama administration that was really conflicted and you had actually obama's most senior advisors really lobbying him pretty hard in the final year of his presidency to send weapons to ukraine but obama resisted that perhaps fearing a further cycle of escalation but it also was happening at the exact same time that our u.s intelligence system was blinking red lights alert alert alert you know with the cyber attacks and the hacking i remember so vividly you know knowing many of the officials who worked on russia in the obama administration and their concern in the last say six months of the administration was extremely high and is now well documented they did understand that the u.s system was under attack but there was this extreme hesitancy on the part of obama to do two things one to go public with that and blaming russia in part out of concern of escalating with russia but also in part out of inflaming the republicans and inflaming the political situation in the u.s and so i think there was an incorrect calculation that hillary clinton was going to win and you know you didn't want to question that victory in any way and then not to inflame the situation further or to make it more partisan but the result unfortunately was once again you know putin gets away with doing something really really outrageous and then all of a sudden there's this president of the united states who is a putin groupie he's a putin fanboy and he has been for a long time not just in the context of the 2016 campaign just to break it down what is the lesson that he takes there's some sanctions and some diplomats are expelled and you know whether or not he had anything to do with the result of the election people are crediting him with having influenced the election what does putin take from his experience in 2016 well first of all i think he understands and and this is a theme that runs through his rhetoric over the next few years that america is very divided against itself that there is perhaps shocking to many people here in the united states a large and growing faction of pro-putin republicans it's not even just donald trump and that uh he has succeeded beyond perhaps what he thought at using those divisions inside america to his own benefit and so this goes along with putin's general view of the weakness of liberal democracy and the decline of the west and you see him giving a number of what i would call triumphalist interviews and speeches over the subsequent few years there's a remarkable conversation he has with lionel barber at that time the editor of the financial times midway through the trump presidency in which he basically says the era of liberal democracy is over and we won and you know now is the time of illiberal democracy the the new autocrats and it's very clear from putin's statements throughout the trump presidency that he saw trump's election and the internal division and discord in the united states as a significant geopolitical development that was to his advantage because we're doing this film so quickly we have to sort of encompass the entire trump presidency sort of one scene and um the one that that stands out is that helsinki summit where trump and putin are together in this moment and and in that moment what do you think that putin sees in trump what does he take from trump from who trump is from how trump is behaving so you know i i mean i i was there and i remember so vividly that feeling of as if someone kicked you in the stomach this moment it's actually 40 minutes in to the joint press conference in helsinki with putin and trump and trump is asked what should be a straightforward question which is can you just simply once and for all dismiss this idea uh you know that uh there's any question about russia's election of interference and you know did you tell them to knock it off again basically and you know for that ought to be not a complicated question and in a sort of several hundred words of basically gobbledygook and word salad donald trump the president united states with putin standing there looking at him you know he gives this incredible mix of conspiracy theory he starts talking about ukraine and the dnc server and the pakistani gentleman and he says basically and you know vladimir putin tells me he didn't do it you know dan coats my director of national intelligence he says they did it but but putin says they didn't do it and you know maybe he's right he very strongly said they didn't and it just was this amazing moment to have the president of the united states saying he believes the leader of russia over his own intelligence agencies and i think you know it was just one of those you can't look away from it moments now of course many of trump's supporters and partisans in the republican party they were shocked in the moment and then worked really hard to forget about it you know ever afterwards but they were shocked in the moment but there was this incredible question because donald trump had insisted on meeting alone with vladimir putin for quite a long time so the and there's no no takers so the only person who's present in the room is the u.s interpreter for the u.s side and there's this scene you know for we're working on this book on the trump presidency and basically the national security council aides who have accompanied the president to this helsinki summit are frantic to find out in the short break between the private meeting and the bigger lunch what happened what did they say and they can't believe the account of the president united states they you know they understand that he might not tell them what happened so they rush over to debrief the state department interpreter who's a woman who's actually multiple times uh interpreted for putin as someone said to me she's probably the u.s official who's been in the room with putin more than any other u.s official and they're frantically cornering her to try to find out what happened she tells them according to john bolton who later writes about this according to my reporting as well that vladimir putin spoke for about 90 of the time in the private meeting uh and that is credible in in the sense that many american officials have reported that that is putin's behavior in private long grievance-filled angry lectures at which it's very hard to get a word in edgewise and so she claimed essentially that it really was one of those putin rants and lectures the biggest commitment that worried his advisors was two things one he invited putin to continue the conversation by coming to the united states uh which his advisors were desperate to not make happen and they they did in the end uh make sure that that didn't happen so that was number one and then number two was he got played by vladimir putin because donald trump you know didn't prepare really for anything and uh he wasn't prepared for the helsinki summit his advisors had desperately tried to get him ready for it in advance and he refused even the the modest amount of prep that they had uh there's this one meeting in the oval office before helsinki where uh the u.s ambassador russia at that time jon huntsman the former governor of utah happens to be in town so the aides are like oh thank goodness maybe we can finally have a prep session about russia and helsinki with huntsman here that's a good excuse huntsman goes into the oval office with the russia experts from the nsc and donald trump looks at him and what does he think of he thinks of fox tv where he's watching fox news all the time and huntsman's daughter abby was one of the hosts of the fox and friends weekend morning show so he says let's call a happy huntsman right now and you know huntsman can't say no and it's crazy right you know the president united states he's got this incredibly important meeting with vladimir putin politically it's like a disaster in the making and he won't even have the discipline to sit down for a few minutes and talk about what he's gonna say and so they call abby huntsman on the phone and they never get back to it so in the moment trump is totally unprepared for this meeting with putin and putin says well okay fine you know you want to extradite you know these people who you allege these russian intelligence agents that you allege hacked the election uh fine uh we'll just make it mutual so you give me you know some some people that i want to extradite that we're investigating here in russia and then we'll send those russians to you well of course who are the people he wants to take the former united states ambassador mike mcfaul who is not being investigated for anything and as if the united states would just hand over our ambassador to russia it's it's farcical and humiliating and to reinforce the embarrassment not only does trump in private clearly not understand what putin is saying but he starts talking in public about the quote unquote incredible offer that putin has just made and you know his advisors are frantically trying to like signal to him uh no no don't talk about this i don't think we're gonna have time to go into the first impeachment and into the into the phone call and all of that but but it is interesting that putin must be watching this there's this subtext of ukraine that's going on throughout the trump presidency and what would he be seeing from the u.s administration during that period yeah i think it's very important actually to understand that it wasn't just donald trump's generic admiration for vladimir putin as a strong man and you know he did admire many autocrats not just putin xi jinping erdogan in turkey sisi in egypt he actually once called him my favorite dictator uh by the way american president is not generally known for praising dictators and picking their favorites uh so it's important to understand though that trump's admiration for putin was not just generic admiration for a strong man but also specific embrace of many important aspects of putin's worldview in particular vladimir putin's view of ukraine appears to have been the view of ukraine that donald trump adopted he created and believed a narrative in which ukraine was both a corrupt country and a country that was quote out to get me and that is a phrase that he told his advisors at a crucial meeting in the spring of 2019 after they just come back from the inauguration of a name that now every american knows very well but didn't at the time which is president vladimir zelensky of ukraine and this american delegation has just gone to zielinski's inauguration and they've come back to try to persuade donald trump that he needs to be more committed to ukraine and he needs to have a meeting with this new young president who's just come in and he needs to continue supporting ukraine with military assistance and that wasn't going to happen and this becomes clear to these american officials again trump's own officials they're in the oval office and donald trump starts ranting about ukraine seeing things that could have come out of the mouth of vladimir putin and he says they're a terrible country they're a corrupt country and more importantly to donald trump they're out to get me they're out to get me and this is all according to sworn testimony given under oath later in the impeachment proceedings and trump believed the russian propaganda that had been put out since 2016 claiming that not only did russia not interfere in the 2016 election but actually it was ukraine that did it a you know an absurd and and farcical notion right and yet donald trump believed this russian misinformation he repeated it privately and publicly for years his advisers going back to h.r mcmaster his initial national security adviser after michael flynn was fired mcmaster says this happened even in 2017 that donald trump was repeating russia's lies about ukraine he donald trump didn't believe that crimea really was a part of ukraine he said publicly in the 2016 campaign and then after that that well you know they probably should be a part of russia they they wanted to be there uh he publicly talked about his desire to lift sanctions on russia that we had imposed on that so it wasn't just russia that donald trump uh and putin was admiring of he actually from the beginning there's this ukraine thread that you know we americans didn't focus as much on because ukraine was not the dominant foreign policy issue here in washington but for vladimir putin that's his number one issue and he knew from the beginning that he had gotten donald trump to agree with him on it that's really amazing and he also must have thought that donald trump's followers that half of the country would be following trump you know as he's later making a decision about what he's going to do he must have seen that division and and trump's views on ukraine absolutely i think that you know putin and the russian establishment would have been closely following the divisions inside the united states and one of the things that they would have been following was the dramatic change in republicans attitudes toward vladimir putin and you know donald trump took republican voters very far away from the generally hawkish and suspicious attitude toward russia that had been associated with the republican party ever since the cold war and so you see i mean you look at those polls you literally see the line go like this and the percentage goes way up of republicans who have a better view of vladimir putin now uh and on the eve of this crisis now this war with ukraine it's really it's shocking every time you think about it but it really is true that republican voters today as we're having this conversation have a less unfavorable view of vladimir putin than of the president of the united states joe biden and not just by a little by about 20 points during this period we're going to need to sort of summarize what putin's been doing between 2018 and running run up to ukraine and we're sort of breaking it down on the two sides and the first is inside of russia inside the domestic side where he's cracking down on protests he's jailing opposition he's changing the constitution can you help us understand what's going on what is putin doing inside russia how are things changing during that period yeah i think you know one thing that is very clear is that domestic repression and external aggression go hand in hand for vladimir putin and so in the last few years we've seen him uh really crack down inside russia to a degree that goes far beyond what he did earlier in his long rule and you know that has accompanied his planning for this military takeover of ukraine and so i think these are very much related uh for many years analysts here in washington have viewed regime survival as putin's top priority and the priority of those surrounding him and so one of their explanations for his ukraine obsession has been the idea that he believes revolution in ukraine and looking to the west in ukraine and breaking away from the soviet sphere there would potentially be infectious that it would lead to this kind of a political movement inside russia itself that he would have to stop at all costs and i think we have tended to underestimate the interconnectedness between putin's external moves and his internal moves and you see that right now very clearly because what he's doing is removing the last vestiges of freedom of the press and freedom of speech inside russia eliminating human rights groups that have been around since the late soviet era i think it was incredibly symbolic but not very covered here in the united states on december 25th which was the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the soviet union that was that was the end of the soviet union uh and the day that the soviet flag came down from the kremlin for the last time well that was also the day that vladimir putin chose to get rid of and shut down memorial russia's longest and most venerable human rights group that message i think was was crystal clear uh you know we're back and you know this is a different era and we're we're done accepting the cold war peace that we never wanted to have he must have judged that he wasn't going to get the blow back from trump or from europe or other countries that he might have done if it was 2002 is that part of what he's learned well you know there is this um russian saying that i often think of when it comes to putin the appetite grows while eating uh well putin has been gobbling up you know parts of ukraine gobbling up russian civil society for for years and uh he's been allowed to continue eating and you know not to overextend that metaphor but i do think that you know we become used to things we've seen that here inside the united states the last few years things that would have been mind-blowing unthinkable and impossible in 2017 well you know look at the tragic ending of the trump presidency and attacking and storming of our capital and that you know a year after that there would be a large percentage of americans who either pretended that didn't happen or said it was no big deal so you know we've seen that phenomenon inside our own society and that has been even more pronounced in russia the russia that i first came to a decade after the collapse of the soviet union would not have accepted the things that russian society today is forced to accept the the return of fear is is a palpable and really sad thing it russia is much less free today than it was probably even when i was a kid growing up in the 1980s and he's also taking greater risks it seems abroad poising opponent in the uk or attempting to becoming involved in in syria despite criticism doesn't seem to dissuade them i mean is he taking more risks uh during this period you know there's a real debate about you know this and you know is is it uncharacteristic of vladimir putin to you know sort of put all his chips you know in in the pot uh like this with ukraine what i would say is that there are things that putin has done for much longer you know our ability to forget putin's misdeeds is extraordinary because it's not just the poisoning of sergey skrupal in the uk during the trump administration vladimir putin sent his agents to london to use polonium a banned radioactive substance to assassinate someone a decade and a half ago so this isn't new behavior vladimir putin sent his agents to assassinate uh rivals uh in the middle east two decades ago uh he has acted with violence and murder and impunity on the world stage since he became the leader of russia we haven't known what to do about it we've tried various approaches unfortunately none of them have worked to stop us from getting to this moment but it is not correct to say oh my goodness i can't believe that vladimir putin you know he's become out of control in recent years he has used every single one of these methods you know to lesser degrees but he's used every single one of these things over time before there is nothing that i am seeing right now that some element did not appear at some previous point in vladimir putin's tenure including invading other countries and using horrific violence and force on civilians he has done all of those things before what is putin understanding of the biden presidency of america at this moment leading up to ukraine yeah i think that is again i think it's very clear from the record that putin believes america to be divided against itself uh weakened january 6 was a moment that uh should have been met with a unified response from our country's leaders saying this is unacceptable and it wasn't and that weakened the country in the world as well as at home uh i think that biden also came into office with a flawed conception of his ability to manage the russia problem i think he understood the nature of vladimir putin under no illusions about the man under no illusions perhaps about the system that he created inside russia but definitely not correctly assessing the nature of the threat posed at this moment by putin and so he had this early summit meeting in geneva by nim putin and that was really biden's willingness to do that there was some controversy and disagreement inside his administration a sense that uh you know is this really a good idea uh but you know biden is a believer in in face-to-face diplomacy he's a believer in engagement he's a believer in going the extra mile with your adversaries whether they're republicans on capitol hill or russian dictators and so this was very in keeping with biden he comes out of it and he says we want to have a quote stable and predictable relationship with russia right and he thinks well i'm resetting here at least i'm not being rosy-eyed and unrealistic like donald trump i'm not pretending even like barack obama that we can have some good new reset in our relationship right so i think from biden's perspective and his administration he's actually trying to be more realistic and say listen we just want things not to get worse but you can't put vladimir putin in a box and i think the buy administration wanted to put him in a box they thought if you just gave him a bit of attention that that would be enough and that was that was a big misunderstanding they like previous administrations obama and trump they thought china is the greatest geopolitical challenge for the united states of the 21st century and they were eager to pivot to dealing with that china problem and it was it was a misreading of where putin was at what has putin risked is this for russia for himself is this the greatest risk that he's taken of of his career absolutely vladimir putin has in the end revealed himself fully and he has put all of his chips on the table here right now uh there is no going back uh you know we are in a situation for putin for russia and i think for europe uh you know there's no status quo ante that we can return to it's not like there can be an end state that is sort of ugly but you know papered over we move on the world of january of 2022 is is gone as as gone as you know the world of september 1 1939 you know was gone by september 30th 1939 you could never go back to that moment and i think for vladimir putin he can never go back to what he was and what russia was before when you see those images of zielinski on the one side putin is choreographing one thing with his national security council meeting um zielinski who's a comes out of television has his own media moment and and for putin when he's watching this contrast what is it represented to him i think he sees this is an ant and i'm going to squash him you know who who does he think he is uh you know that's an illegitimate president and it's not a real country and the the dehumanizing rhetoric that we've heard from putin and from the kremlin is actually some of the most worrisome and almost you know explicit purposeful echoes of the language of 20th century totalitarianism the language of genocide when you say that your opponents uh you know are not real people and they're not in a real country and they're nazis that must be eliminated and you're seeing this about the first jewish president of ukraine whose relatives died in the holocaust uh it's it's orwellian it's fascist and it's very very scary about what his intents are and the willingness of others to follow and amplify him in that language we used to say well at least it's not the soviet union putin's dictatorship there's not an ideology that goes along with it now i think you are seeing that there is an ideology of putinism that the russian people are being forced to accept and are going along with and it includes dehumanizing opponents in ways that suggest their willingness to conduct mass slaughter because it's a biography we've been focusing on putin and about his decision and what led him to this but there is a consequence to it i mean and the amazing horrible thing about this war is that one man makes a decision but there are consequences for ukraine for russia for europe what's the human result of of of this decision that putin has made you know unfortunately the 21st century has already had a lot of brutal killers uh there have been a number of wars already in this century and and many many hundreds of thousands have died as a result of those wars but vladimir putin is going to rank up there uh as one of uh the worst and most brutal killers of the 21st century and his his career in power has been marked by a willingness to use extreme force and violence and war as a tool of his repression internal and external and you know the the human toll i think in some ways really is magnified by this being a 21st century information era social media era war we're all in some ways on the front lines of this war in ways that were unimaginable even just a few years ago and you know the the death and destruction of ukraine is being magnified by you know the world's experience of being able to see it you know in in horrifying excruciating detail filmed on iphones and and sent out to the world in real time i mean you know you you can't pick up twitter and and not see piles of dead bodies and you know children weeping as they're ripped away from their fathers i mean this is a different experience like imagine if world war ii had been live tweeted you know that's what we're seeing here so it's it's a kind of a massive large-scale trauma uh i think that that we have not seen before how dangerous is vladimir putin at this point there's talk of you know nuclear threat not very veiled that he's he's issued he's brought war to europe it's not going as as he expected um but they still have tremendous military power and nuclear power how dangerous is putin vladimir putin is the world's most dangerous man right now i think there's no question about that the more that he is pushed into a corner his history suggests escalation it suggests that signs of weakness must be met with signs of strength to counter that and his response already has has shown that he is reverting to that playbook when it comes to nuclear saber-rattling it's not the first time that putin has used that part of that comes from the post-soviet complex of feeling like hey we're not being given our due we're a nuclear power and you've seen that actually from putin and other uh russians throughout the last 30 years that they would often say well hey wait a minute you know we we've got nukes you know don't don't treat us like this so it's not the first time they've invoked it but to do so in the middle of a live-action conflict is very worrisome especially because the use of tactical nuclear weapons is actually a part of the russian military doctrine and they have tested uh they have run exercises every year called the zapid exercises zap it just means west i.e training for you know conflict with the west and as part of those exercises they have been including uh escalation scenarios that involve ultimately the use of tactical nuclear weapons so it's not some you know fantasy alarmist uh thing that you're hearing from experts it is we have to look in a clear-eyed way at well what is the russian military doctrine what are the weapons they have now you know people who are better versed in this than i am have pointed out that those were virtual exercises they didn't actually you know test that uh that apparently these weapons are kept in a centralized storage and have been for three decades so it's not easy it's not like you know they're in backpacks as far as we know of you know soldiers on the battlefield right now in ukraine it it would be hard to use them we're not anywhere near that point yet but the russian doctrine would be to use those if the regime is threatened now in their scenario before this that would be threatened by a nato actual invasion of russian territory not just ukrainian territory but russian territory but what about the scenario where putin's government is threatened externally and internally or where he misreads uh uh what we're already doing to help ukraine as nato coming in on the side of ukraine that's the scenario i'm most worried about right now is simply that no matter how much joe biden says well we're not fighting in ukraine and we don't want to have world war iii what if vladimir putin decides that we already are fighting for ukraine because of the weapons that we're supplying and the economic war that we've waged on russia and so are we in world war iii because he says we are right you know uh you don't necessarily have to have two-party consent uh and agreement on it and so that's that's a big fear

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 902,339

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Id: MV5aFnB-1ec

Length: 55min 17sec (3317 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022