MICHAEL KIRK - … Give us a sense of what
the state of play was with NATO just in advance of the Munich speech. VICTORIA NULAND - I want to roll back, if
I may, a little bit earlier. One little known bit of history is that in
the early Yeltsin years, 1993, 1994, [then-U.S. Deputy Secretary of State] Strobe Talbott
and I think Bill Clinton actually had a conversation with Yeltsin in the context of our walking
up to the first enlargements of NATO, the first post-Cold War enlargements of NATO,
about Russia’s future with NATO and about whether Yeltsin could ever see a future for
Russia where it would change enough and NATO would change enough that Russia could be a
NATO member. Yeltsin was actually, in 1993 and 1994, a
little bit interested in that. So we were thinking initially strategically
that NATO could become this broad pan-European security organization in the context of a
Russia that was really getting democratic, was really willing to live within the Helsinki
rules and values. But then, by 1995, I don't know whether it
was internal pressure or whether Yeltsin just began to get more traditional in his views,
he at one point said: “Russia’s too big for NATO. We would swamp you.” Then by the time you get Putin in the picture
in 1998, there's this perception that any enlargement can only be seen in zero-sum terms. I think Putin comes into office with that;
that he never gets over that Soviet view of NATO, that it was founded to oppose us. There was no way we could be friendly with
it, etc. Remember that we had two rounds of trying
to create a relationship between NATO and Russia. The first was in 1997-98 when we created the
permanent joint council, where it was the members of NATO and Russia meeting bilaterally. That didn't really work, and the Russians
claimed that they weren't treated like a member of NATO; they were treated like the opposition
bilateral force on the other side of the table. Then when Bush 43 comes into office, we try
to reconfigure it. This was in the context of trying to reset
the relationship then. We create the NATO-Russia Council, which I
worked on—I worked on both of them, in fact—where we agreed to treat the Russians like a member
of the alliance in that context, and they actually sat in alphabetical order like a
NATO member. But again, it didn't work because not only
Putin but everybody in the bureaucracy in Russia couldn’t get past this zero-sum sense
that if something was good for the West, good for NATO, then it had to be bad for Russia. And, of course, the Balkan wars were part
and parcel of that, even though we did end up working together in Bosnia; we did end
up working together in Kosovo. The stage is set as we start to take new NATO
members, first in the Clinton administration and then more in Bush 43, that this is a physical
encroachment, that this is a loss for Russia rather than Russia seizing the opportunity,
even as NATO was moving toward it, to also move toward NATO. It also suited Putin’s narrative of grievance,
I would say, his rallying cry to rule Russia the way he increasingly wanted to and to close
down some of the democratic institutions. Remember that in 2004 he goes after the Russian
press; he takes down most of the independent television stations, starts going after the
newspapers. 2004 is also when he starts going after oligarchs
who don’t toe the line, big Russian businessmen. Your choice is either to collaborate with
the Kremlin or end up on the wrong side of a tax investigation and end up in exile like
[Boris] Berezovsky or in prison like [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky. Putin is really beginning to re-autocracize,
if you will, the Russian state, and part of his reason for doing that, part of his explanation
to the Russian people, is that there are enemies abroad. So the NATO enlargement piece is very convenient. By 2006, NATO has expanded significantly on
his watch, and he sees what's left of the former Soviet republics in his mind. By then we've admitted the Baltic states,
but Georgia and Ukraine both looking for a closer NATO relationship. I think that he perceived that as a threat
to his leadership model, and he was bound and determined to stop it. … MICHAEL KIRK - OK, so in a way, he’s using
NATO to help him domestically as he heads to a statement in Munich to the world about
other things. Take me to the Munich speech. Walk me in. Who’s there? What's it about? What do you think it’s about? What do you think he’s going to say? Why are you there, etc.? VICTORIA NULAND - The Munich Security Conference
for 30, 40 years has been the Super Bowl of transatlantic security conversations. It starts the winter semester of diplomacy. Everybody’s coming out of Christmas and
thinking about what we can and should be doing together, both in terms of European security
but also in terms of working together globally. So everybody is there. There are foreign ministers from countries
from the United States and Canada all the way to Russia, but now increasingly there's
a global footprint as well. Chinese are there; Iranians are there; and
Indians are there. A lot of media attention. Traditionally world leaders who are new to
office come and make a sort of inaugural statement about how they want to work together. That was done by the Bush 43 Cabinet when
they came in. It was done by Vice President Biden when President
Obama came into office. Putin, the Russians had traditionally come,
but they’d come at the level of foreign minister. I don't think we’d ever had a Russian leader
at Munich. That may be wrong. Maybe Yeltsin came, but I don't remember. And when a world leader gives a speech on
the opening day of the Munich Security Conference, it is generally seen as a statement of how
they perceive their country’s relationship with the rest of the European and transatlantic
family, as well as an ideological statement about what can and can't be done together. I think there was perhaps still a little naivete
in 2007 that if we just found the right projects of collaboration with the Russians, that Putin
would continue to evolve; that we could reverse some of the domestic crackdown that had happened;
that there was still a chance to integrate Russia as a democratic, peaceful European
state that wanted to collaborate with the European family, the transatlantic family,
on global issues. When Putin comes in and gives his view of
the world, and it is not only completely zero-sum, your model is expansionist and aggressive
vis-à-vis Russia and vis-à-vis states like ours, but also indicting of this notion of
a big community of democratic states, and goes back to a definition of multipolarity
that was really very 19th-century checks and balances, if you will—“I'm going to check
your power because otherwise you're going to roll over us”—I think that was “the
end of dreams,” as somebody I'm close to coined for something else. MICHAEL KIRK - And your reaction at the moment? I mean, is it a jaw dropper, head shaker? What is it? VICTORIA NULAND - I was sitting in the audience. I was the U.S. ambassador to NATO at the time,
so NATO ambassadors would always go. I think I was four rows back, and you could
almost feel the humidity from the spittle that was spewing. I think that, yeah, it was pretty shocking,
because it was pretty aggressive at a time when we were still hoping to reel in a better
relationship. MICHAEL KIRK - I don't know how to ask this. So that's basically the end of Bush, that's
really—yeah? VICTORIA NULAND - Just to also remind that
it was only three years after, or two and a half years after we had reconfigured the
NATO-Russia relationship to try to include Russia more, to try to work more together,
to try to manage this anxiety about NATO enlargement by having more of the global projects done
together in the NATO-Russia forum. Clearly that hadn’t worked. MICHAEL KIRK - Was it clear when you all got
up and left and walked out of there, and you called Washington or something, what does
one say in a moment like that? “Hey, this is over”? VICTORIA NULAND - You know, I don't think
that you ever give up, nor should we give up at this moment in having a better relationship
with Russia, 140 million people who I am personally confident would like to live in a freer, more
open, more prosperous society and would like to do more with us. So you don’t give up. You just say to yourself, wow, that guy is
living in a place where his view of us has gotten really hard, really paranoid, really
negative, and it takes a professional diplomat anyway to a place where you say: “We’d
better see him more. We’d better engage with him more. We’d better give him more information than
he’s getting in this increasingly closed society and increasingly closed circle of
advisers that he finds himself in.” MICHAEL KIRK - … Putin is done with Bush,
and Bush is definitely done with Putin. Is that the state of play at the end of the
Bush administration, and does it matter? VICTORIA NULAND - I think there was distrust
and disappointment on both sides. That's also true at the end of the Obama administration. Now, might it have been possible to work more
intensively with Putin in 2003-2004 and satisfy enough of his needs so he would have seen
things in a less zero-sum way? Maybe, but I'm not sure, because his view
of the world fundamentally was so Soviet, and it didn't evolve the way the view of others
in his generation evolved. Now, I agree with those who say that the first
disappointment was that he thought after Sept. 11 that the U.S. and Russia together would
be holy warriors against this evil of Al Qaeda. But we were also disappointed because we didn't
feel that the Russian intelligence services, after we were quite forthcoming about what
we were seeing, shared much. [We felt] that we were always in relationship
deficit. We were trying to give them more to elicit
more, and they were very cagey. Now, whether that was masking the fact that
they actually didn't know very much, perhaps Putin thought that they knew more, or whether
that fundamental distrust was never going to be overcome, but that was part of the problem,
and it went both ways. MICHAEL KIRK - Zoom ahead in the fast-forward
machine to 2011. He's running again, if running is what he
does. There are protests in the streets. Describe the nature of the protests. Describe what you think, what you saw, as
the impetus behind the anger and the unrest in Russia at the time. VICTORIA NULAND - One thing to remember about
this period was that partly as a result of high oil prices, largely as a result of high
energy prices, but also as a result of some normalizing of the economy, some early, better
management of the economy after the wild Wild West days of the early post-Soviet period,
most Russians are getting richer during the aught years [2000s], and life is better, and
middle-class Russians are beginning to be able to travel. People are starting small businesses; there
are imported goods and imported films and all of this. Traditionally, when you have a more open and
democratic society, when you have more prosperity, populations begin to want more of a say in
how they're governed as well. They want more choice; they want local candidates
who they know. They don’t want to be told, “This is a
selection, not an election.” I think that there was pent-up demand for
more political choice. You see people on the street asking for better
candidates, taking issue with the fact that Putin had by then perfected this strategy
of neutralizing anybody who might be a significant political opponent. I mean, the reason he goes after Khodorkovsky
in 2004 is not because Khodorkovsky was so rich or had so much ability to be prosperous
and to employ people; it was because that wealth was beginning to buy him influence
in the Russian Duma in a way that Putin couldn’t control. Putin wanted to control politics, and people
increasingly wanted more choice, so they went out in support of candidates who were alternatives. MICHAEL KIRK - The way the story gets told
now, he gets angry about Secretary Clinton’s statements all the way to some people saying
it’s a motivation for the attack on America in 2016. Tell me about that. Did you draft that statement? Did I read that right? VICTORIA NULAND - He’s angry well before
that. He’s angry throughout the campaign, because
we are doing what we do in 100 developing countries around the world and what we had
been doing in Russia since 1993—which was through the International Republican Institute
and the National Endowment for Democracy and NDI, the National Democratic Institute. We had been offering political training to
every political party in Russia, to Putin’s own party, to the Communists, but also to
Putin’s opponents. Our embassy was offering things like how do
you use political polling, how do you campaign better, how do you tap into the population. And that was in the interest, in our view,
of helping create a diverse democratic opportunity for anybody who wanted to run. But for Putin, it was seen as a challenge. Now, I think that at the time he was less
worried about that than he was in remembering it later, when he talked about it later. I remember being in a meeting between him
and Secretary [of State John] Kerry in which he talked about that period as the U.S. Embassy
running oppositional candidates out of the embassy, which was, of course, ludicrous. We wouldn’t do that; we can't do that. But that was his later perception of what
was going on. In his narrative of grievance, we had put
our thumb on the scale in favor of his opponents; we had sided with the Bolotnaya protesters. We, of course, never choose candidates in
any country, but what we do do in countries that proclaim to be democracies is we offer
the opportunity for candidates of all kinds to learn how to put themselves forward to
best effect. And we always support the right of peaceful
political protest in any country as long as it doesn't become violent. So to him, this was all a challenge to his
autocratic desire to control the situation. Now, as you know, we're members of the Organization
of Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is the successor organization to the Helsinki
Conference that was founded in 1975, and that Russia is also a member of, which has a number
of basic democratic tenets as its covenant: that elections should be free; that press
should be free; that individual human rights should be respected; that courts should be
impartial—all of those kinds of things. The OSCE offers a service in all of its 57
member countries, including Russia and including the United States, which is that it audits
the freeness and fairness of elections. It brings monitors, and it gives a report
at the end. In fact, they monitored the U.S. 2012 elections
and the U.S. 2016 elections. What happened in 2011 was that the OSCE gave
the [Russian] election a very bad report card. They said that the conditions for the balloting
were not free and fair, that the conditions for the pre-electoral campaign were not fair,
that access to media was not free and fair. Now traditionally, every secretary of state
and every president, in making a statement after an election anywhere in the OSCE area,
leans heavily on that statement. So when Secretary Clinton made her statement
after the election, we, as we always do, congratulate the Russian people on coming out, but we directly
quoted the OSCE’s report card that the election was flawed. He obviously didn't like the fact that Secretary
Clinton elevated that judgment. But it was no different than anything any
U.S. administration had done since monitoring of Russian elections began in 1993 or that
we did after. MICHAEL KIRK - Sounds like a red flag to a
bull, though, knowing who he is and how sensitive he is to just exactly that kind of thing. VICTORIA NULAND - Yes, but if you profess
to be a democracy and if you stay in an organization like the OSCE, which has democratic standards
as the basic tenets of membership, and you don’t meet those standards, then the organization
will call you out. He was trying to have the benefits of membership,
the legitimacy of membership, without taking responsibility for what that means. MICHAEL KIRK - It's amazing that the guy carries
a grudge like that really across time. If he’s still, if that's what he’s on
about, it's sort of remarkable. VICTORIA NULAND - I think, having watched
him over two decades, he collects pieces of string to help weave this narrative of grievance
that is useful for him politically to maintain his governance structure and to maintain his
control in Russia. At the time, this event or that event might
not be that impactful, but by the time he’s done weaving his story about how he’s the
victim, Russia’s the victim, Russia tried and was rebuffed or its good nature was abused
or its outstretched hand was bitten, all of these pieces of string are useful, and they
get elevated, and they get highlighted in this narrative, which also helps him to maintain
power within Russia, because there's no other counterperspective that gets through. MICHAEL KIRK - Let’s talk about the year
2014, which I think of as, if you were Putin and you made a film about one year of somebody’s
life, 2014 would be a pretty wild year to make it. You’ve got the Sochi Olympics; you've got
Crimea and Ukraine; you’ve got the March 18 speech. You've got a lot of stuff that happens during
that time. Let's walk through it a little bit. The Sochi Olympics, why [was that] important
to him? Why did he spend $51 billion or whatever it
was for it? What was going on with that? VICTORIA NULAND - This is a very Soviet impulse
layered over with Putin’s own life experience. Olympics for any country, winter or summer,
why do you want to have the Olympics? Olympics showcase your country to the world. You want to put your best foot forward. You want to get from it a pride of place on
the global stage. You also want to get tourism and interest
and business investment, all those kinds of things. So you want a successful games. That is a natural thing. Putin himself is a big sportsman—his judo
and his hockey and all those kinds of things—so he values sport. But there's also his Soviet upbringing, where
this thing was a very, very big deal for showcasing his Russia, where he had been the boss for
two decades. And frankly, the process of getting there
had been very difficult. The building of the village and huge amounts
of government resources having to go into preparing the thing and the timing comes at
a very difficult time. Before you get to that, the story of Ukraine
starts in 2013. Arguably, it starts well before then, and
this is a continuation, his reaction is a continuation, of what we saw at Munich in
2007 and reacting with the invasion of Georgia in 2008. And all of that happens when he thinks that
both Ukraine and Georgia are moving toward NATO. Very quietly, in 2010, 2011, the European
Union offers to all of the countries on Russia’s periphery who are not already EU members or
EU candidates the opportunity for a closer relationship, including a complete free-trade
relationship and visa-free travel and all these kinds of things to try to open them,
to try to help them democratize, help them be more prosperous, etc. Nobody pays much attention. We don’t pay much attention, and frankly
Putin doesn’t pay much attention until 2013, when you're actually in the endgame of Ukraine,
Georgia and Moldova signing association agreements with the European Union. I think Putin wakes up around the same time
we wake up, which is in the fall of 2013. We realize what a great opportunity this is
going to be in terms of need for countries like Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine to have more
markets that they were going to get in Europe, for their people to become more comfortable
with democratic processes and with the West through more travel, that sort of knitting
together this EU association offers. For Putin, it’s a direct challenge by them
to his leadership model, because these countries were looking for increasingly competitive
relationships, competitive elections. They were looking for markets other than Russia,
both energy markets but also markets for their finished products and produce, etc. And if the result that the EU desired, namely
that these countries began to look more like Germany, came to be, then countries like Ukraine
and Georgia would be a direct rebuke to the fact that Russia actually wasn’t getting
richer. People weren't able to travel; they weren't
having multiple-candidate elections. So he gets worried. He gets worried, and he starts putting serious
pressure on [Viktor] Yanukovych, who’s then the president of Ukraine and a guy he had
created, not to make that choice. And that's what leads to Maidan and later
what leads to Crimea. MICHAEL KIRK - So as the world is watching
slalom skiing and ski jumping and ice skating, the president of Ukraine is fleeing, and what
is Putin doing? VICTORIA NULAND - Just to roll it back a little
bit, Yanukovych wanted to associate with the European Union, and he wanted to have that
free trade and visa-free, but he also wanted to maintain a strong relationship with Russia,
and he said that. We said that we thought both ought to be possible,
and the European Union said they thought both ought to be possible. But here again, Putin’s zero-sum mindset,
which always causes him to take the position that you're either on my team or the other
team; you can't be on both teams; we can't be on the same team. As we got close to that actual signature date
for the EU association with Ukraine, the Ukrainian economy was in serious trouble. While the EU was working on association, we
were working on trying to help Ukraine get into an IMF program, International Monetary
Fund program, so that they would have more economic stability as they made this transition;
so that they could navigate a good, but changed, relationship with Russia and a good relationship
with the EU. But it was going to require Yanukovych doing
business differently and not stealing so much, opening his books, etc. Putin comes along and finds the perfect way
to help Yanukovych out of that choice, which is a massive $3 billion loan if he doesn’t
take the EU path and instead stays with Russia. Now, for Yanukovych that meant that he didn't
have to open his books; he didn't have to stop his kleptocratic way of his business
model; he didn't have to balance the budget; he didn't have to show his people how money
was being spent. And I think it didn’t occur to him that
he wouldn’t be able to get Europe, too. He takes the short-term way out, and then
the 250,000 Ukrainians hit the street all over the country, including in Kiev. And that's how Maidan starts, because they
want Europe, and they don’t want further dependency on Russia, which this loan was
going to create. Putin's created a zero-sum choice. Yanukovych falls into that trap, and the Ukrainian
people say no, much like the Russian people, or at least some of them, had said in 2011:
“We want more choice.” Putin has basically said, “We're going to
stay the way we were; you're not going to improve your relationship with Europe,”
and Europe is saying and we're saying, “You don’t have the right to choose for Ukraine." And we have this crisis on the street. At that point, in December, January, even
early February, Yanukovych is in this frozen trap where he can't figure out how to satisfy
his people and Putin and Europe and the West all at the same time. We and the Europeans began working on some
kind of a transitional government where some of the opposition and some of the Yanukovychites
would work together, or a technical government to try to navigate through this and to try
to buy time as well to work with Russia and to say: “This doesn't have to be zero-sum. Maybe we can improve relations both ways. Maybe Ukraine can be a bridge between Europe
and Russia. Maybe Russia can get some benefits out of
this in terms of its trade with us, its trade with Europe.” But Putin wasn’t having any of it, and he
exploited the situation to jump into Crimea, even though Secretary Kerry did four rounds
of intensive diplomacy with Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov to at least try to buy time
and say: “Don’t make that choice. Let us try to work through this.” But he chose not to do that. And he did all of it in the context of the
Olympics. He was sort of challenging the world to legitimize
his regime and his choices, which included denying the choices of his neighbors through
the Olympics, and we just couldn’t do that. MICHAEL KIRK - Tell me about your phone call
and the implications of— VICTORIA NULAND - Ah, the famous barnyard
epithet, yeah. MICHAEL KIRK - Right. VICTORIA NULAND - You had had upward of 200,000
Ukrainians on the street in the center of Kiev during this Maidan crisis week on week
from the end of November well into January throughout the Christmas period. Yanukovych was being pressured by Moscow to
crack down violently and dispel the protesters. We, meanwhile, were trying to keep the protesters
in a nonviolent mode and to create some kind of a negotiation between Yanukovych and the
Maidan opposition. One of the things that we had been pushing
on Yanukovych was either to create a technical government that could try to navigate through
this and answer the grievances of the street, get him back on track with Europe, get him
out of the trap that Putin had put him in, make it less zero-sum, or a sharing of power
between the Yanukovych team and the opposition. There was a very bad, violent set of incidents
early in January where Yanukovych tried to institute changes to the constitution that
would have made it very Putinesque. There was a violent reaction on the street;
there was bloodshed. I think he got scared, and he finally started
to listen [to] this idea of sharing power with the opposition, at least to get through
this period to new elections. And he, on the day of the famous phone call,
which was Jan. 27, he had just proposed to the opposition that they take the prime ministership
and one other ministry in the government, so the opposition had come to our ambassador
in Kiev to say: “We're interested in this idea. We want to have negotiations about it, but
we have conditions in terms of balanced budget and a democratic process and that we won't
be used as pawns, so we need somebody in the international community to be the observer
and help midwife these negotiations.” We had been trying to get the EU to be the
midwife of the negotiations for weeks and weeks, and they were cautious about it. So we had been planning another alternative,
which was the U.N. The phone call is about the ambassador saying
to me: “OK, we finally have a break. Yanukovych has made this offer of a couple
of jobs to the opposition, but we need a moderator, a moderating force for these negotiations. Do you think the EU will play?’ And I say: “OK, eff the EU. We need to move on to the U.N. because we
don’t have any time, and the EU had three weeks to make this decision.” So that's what that was about. It was not about a cosmic judgment about the
EU. It was a tactical, urgent decision to try
to get people off the street, get a peaceful government solution. Ultimately, a lot of the things that we were
trying to negotiate at the end of January were in the European agreement that Yanukovych
signed three weeks later. But then, when it actually came time to make
the democratic changes that he had agreed to, and take that into the parliament, rather
than do that, he chose to flee. The Russians were extremely angry and played
it as if neither we nor the opposition had ever intended to live up to that agreement,
which simply wasn’t true. MICHAEL KIRK - What are the implications of
them releasing the phone call, the wiretap? VICTORIA NULAND - Well, it was interesting— MICHAEL KIRK - And how did you hear about
it, and what happened as a result? Because it feels to me like maybe it’s the
first public example of dirty tricks in the new dimension or something. VICTORIA NULAND - It was amazing in a certain
sense. At that point I had been working with Russians
on Russia for 30 years. I knew when we were having the phone call
on an open line that Russian intelligence was likely listening. I actually considered that a good thing because
it created a certain amount of transparency in terms of what we were trying to do. We were trying to help Yanukovych out of his
corner. We were trying to create a win-win. We were trying to create a government that
could maybe resolve this thing in everybody’s interest. So I didn't have a problem with the fact that
they were listening; I expected it, and I, frankly, would have briefed them myself if
they had asked. But they hadn’t put a phone call on the
street publicly in 25 years when they did that. Clearly they were looking to discredit me
personally as the main negotiator at that time to thereby reduce U.S. influence. They were looking to hurt me with the democratic
opposition, to hurt me with the Europeans, to get President Obama perhaps to fire me
or do less, get out of the way on Ukraine. And none of it worked. I heard about it—I was actually on the ground
in Ukraine when it went live, and we immediately called all of the Ukrainians who were the
subject of the tape and took a photo of all of us together laughing at this audio file. I, of course, had to publicly apologize and
privately apologize to key EU and European nation-state leaders, which I did, and apologized
to the president. But the president, President Obama, was enormously
supportive and saw it for what it was, which was an effort by Russia to push the United
States out of the diplomacy business and regain pride of place in the Soviet Union. MICHAEL KIRK - What was the impact? They release it and—? VICTORIA NULAND - They release it, and, you
know, I think there was a period of turbulence among us. The Europeans then instantly became more active
in the diplomacy. That was actually helpful, because then that
agreement of Feb. 21 was midwived by the Europeans between Russia and Ukraine, something that
we had wanted them to do for many weeks. So I think from that perspective, it was good. From my personal perspective, it made me a
little bit infamous, which also had its advantages. MICHAEL KIRK - Not toxic? VICTORIA NULAND - I was lucky that the president
and the secretary that I served saw it for what it was and supported me. That didn't have to go that way. MICHAEL KIRK - And it didn’t feel like here's
the U.S. proposing candidates in the middle of all of this fooling around and in a funny
way feeding the Putin narrative. VICTORIA NULAND - Putin is very, very good
at picking up on little incidents like this and weaving a narrative that suits his larger
political purpose. In this case, our ambassador in Ukraine was
calling me because the opposition was asking us who should serve in these posts. So we were not injecting ourselves. We were not, in fact, imposing any decision. He and I were brainstorming the various qualities,
who could best survive this very difficult situation of serving in the Yanukovych government. MICHAEL KIRK - But of course Putin can see
that and say, “Ah, there it is.” VICTORIA NULAND - Putin knew exactly what
we were doing because he had watched this whole thing, and he had heard the whole phone
call. But it was later very useful for him to make
me and us the poster child for interference in another country’s affairs when, in fact,
we’d been invited. MICHAEL KIRK - Thank you. It happens, Crimea, southeastern and eastern
Ukraine. There's a struggle in Washington about lethal
means, about arming the Ukrainians against Russian soldiers, the Russian military. Take me to that argument. Where are you on the scale of “Should we?/Shouldn’t
we?,” and how intense was it all? VICTORIA NULAND - First of all, I would say
that Putin played a weak hand enormously skillfully in the sense that he didn't march into Ukraine
after Crimea. Crimea he just took, the whole stealth and
deniable strategy of the “little green men,” which we hadn’t really seen before and we
weren't prepared for, at the same time that he’s denying any activity at all. So we had a massive information gap. We didn't have the kind of intelligence assets
where we could prove that he was lying about Russian involvement. We knew internally, we knew as a matter of
policy debate, but we weren’t doing well in the court of public opinion, let's put
it that way—not in Russia, because we didn't have pictures of the little green men ourselves;
we didn't have enough Ukrainians getting pictures, this kind of thing. The first thing that we wanted, those of us
who wanted to support Ukraine more, was to get more intelligence assets out there—maybe
use U.S. drones, maybe use NATO AWACs [airborne early warning and control aircraft], which
fly very high. But there was a very strong and successful
strain in the interagency debate at that point that even if we just did that, without getting
into the arming piece, that would make us co-combatants on the Ukrainian side, and it
would just draw more from Putin. There was also an argument that Ukraine meant
more to Putin than it did to us, and that he would therefore have escalation dominance
if we ended up that we weren't prepared for a U.S.-Russia land war over Ukraine. That's a different matter than later when
it was obvious that the Russians were rolling troops and tanks and equipment of their own
and trainers into Ukraine. We could have given more defensive weapons
to raise the cost for them. So I advocated internally things like Javelin
anti-tank systems, those kinds of things that you can't use to advance militarily, but you
can use to stop the other guy's roll across your territory. MICHAEL KIRK - And? VICTORIA NULAND - The concern was
that we should use nonmilitary means to put pressure on Putin to stop, because he would
be able to successfully argue that any weapons provision, defensive or nondefensive, made
us co-combatants and that it would become a proxy war with us and/or give Putin an excuse
to go further, and that he had already proven himself to be relatively reckless and that
he might be extremely reckless in that situation. MICHAEL KIRK - Of course there's another argument
that some people have come in here and said, which is you don’t stop Putin there, where
do you stop Putin, when do you stop Putin; that that's the moment. VICTORIA NULAND - Well, that was the argument
that those of us favoring at least defensive lethal systems made, was that if he really
wanted it he would be in Kiev, and then the next thing you knew, he would be in Warsaw
if we weren't careful, and that he had to know. That takes you to the sanctions policy, because
at the time, remember, we didn't have a lot of confidence whether sanctions would have
an impact and how quickly they would have an impact, so simultaneously making the argument
for defensive lethal [systems] or for better intelligence assets or both, and training
for the Ukrainians, which we ultimately did, but it was very late in the game. We don’t begin training the Ukrainians until
late in 2015 to be better. We began working on the sanctions packages
with an escalatory effect. We’d never done partial sanctions before,
targeted sanctions. We’d always done, turn off all trade with
Iran, turn off all trade with Cuba, which is a relatively blunt instrument. This was pretty complicated to ensure that
what we were doing would have an immediate impact on Russia and Putin, so that it would
raise the cost and affect his thinking but also wouldn’t overly hurt us or our European
allies. It had to be quite subtle. That was a place where we had full support
from President Obama and the team to work it through, because it was a pretty complicated
instrument. MICHAEL KIRK - Hard for you to lose that argument? VICTORIA NULAND - Very hard. MICHAEL KIRK - Personally? VICTORIA NULAND - Very hard. Because people were dying. I knew that they were fighting on their own
soil for their own choices and that the war in eastern Ukraine was completely artificial
and Russia-created; that if, in fact, there were grievances, political and economic grievances
of the people of the east of Ukraine, that those grievances could/should have been addressed
politically in the context of the new government that emerged. In fact, that government was ready to address
them, was ready to give a lot of political autonomy and decentralization to that part
of Ukraine without people having to die. MICHAEL KIRK - … There's some people who
tell the story that this is the proof to him that you don’t have to win, whatever win
means. You can just create chaos; you can just deplete
us in some way; you can have us arguing inside our government about what should we do, … and
that it leads to, eventually, the incursions into our Internet systems into the Cozy Bear,
Fancy Bear, all those attacks, because he feels emboldened by, in essence, the success
of those measures in his sphere and the potential success of them to cause at least disruption
and chaos, maybe not elect a new president, a different president, but certainly to send
a message to us that there's a new kind of war being fought. VICTORIA NULAND - I think there are two things. First, Putin perceives us as weak, feckless,
indecisive, slow to respond. Generally when you raise the cost for him,
he backs off. But it often takes us so long to do that because
our process is democratic, our process is consensual, our process often requires agreement
with allies, whereas he has none of that. He can wake up and order X or Y or Z. I think certainly the fact that we didn't
do more about cyber after Estonia allows him to keep probing. The fact that we were very slow to understand
all kinds and forms of malign influence in the European theater emboldens him. The fact that he thinks that our system is
fundamentally weak because it requires everybody to agree offers opportunities for exploitation. But more importantly, I think that he successfully
calculated that the hammer would not come down on him in a critically painful way if
he did things deniably, stealthily, if he probed and if he boiled the frog hotter and
hotter and hotter rather than attacking directly, and he was right. MICHAEL KIRK - So you find yourself in the
summer, let’s say, of 2016. The intelligence agencies, certainly [Director
of National Intelligence James] Clapper and [National Security Agency Director and USCYBERCOM
Commander Adm. Michael] Rogers, sensing, knowing that there were probes. They were in the DNC [Democratic National
Committee]. They were there. Somebody was there, and certainly by summer,
they feel pretty certain that it’s Russia. When you hear about this, are you pretty certain
that it’s Russia? VICTORIA NULAND - Remember that we have a
lot of experience, right? We have the Estonian incursion in 2010. We have aggressive use of cyber in many forms
throughout the Ukraine conflict. We have the attack on the State Department
in the fall of 2015, which was up close and personal for me. I won't go any further than that. So it was not surprising to me. I learned, in the winter of—before Christmas
of 2015, that the Russians were into the DNC, or at least that the DNC had been hacked,
and it bore a lot of the fingerprints of Russia. Remember that the intelligence community doesn't
publicly certify that the Russians helped WikiLeaks acquire the emails until July of
2016, even though the U.S. private cyber community is well along in saying that by the spring. And more importantly for the way we responded,
the U.S. intelligence community does not publicly certify that Russian intelligence was part
[of] and facilitated the leaking of the stuff back into the U.S., that they were behind
Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, until October. So you have this big delta between the time
that large parts of the intelligence community and the private hacker community know it,
but we can actually use it in policy. … MICHAEL KIRK - What did you think was happening? VICTORIA NULAND - Based on what we had seen
in other places, based on what we’d seen over time, I didn't have any doubt that Russian
intelligence had played a role in the hacking. I think the question that all of us had throughout
the spring and into the summer was what were they going to use it for? Were they just trying to gain compromising
information so that later after the elections they would have a way to pressure the incumbent? We also weren't sure whether it was just one
team or whether in fact they also had the other team so that they were hedging their
bets, or whether they would do what they ultimately did, and what we had seen in other places,
which was to participate in pushing the information back in and as a way of influencing. And if they did do that, was their intention
just to discredit the system, make democratic elections look bad and messed up and dirty
as a way of speaking to their own and saying, “You know, they hold themselves up as this
beacon of democracy, but look, it’s just as dirty and slimy as anything else, so they
shouldn’t be lecturing to us, and you shouldn’t think that you have it worse than them or
that democracy would be so great”? Or were they actually going to have the temerity
to try to put their thumb on the scale of a U.S. election? MICHAEL KIRK - What constrained the president
of the United States from being more aggressive in terms of telling the American people, in
terms of going to Putin and doing more than saying, “Knock it off,” whatever he did
face-to-face? Were there constraints that you knew about
or that you could perceive that he must have been operating under that kept him from being
more forceful at a time when some people say he should have been? VICTORIA NULAND - I want to be careful here
not to speak for the president, but my perception was that there were three major reasons why
more of this didn't come to light in July and August, then later came to light when
the intelligence community put out its report. First of all, in July, the intelligence community
was ready to certify that the Russians had facilitated the leaking, the pulling of the
information out of the U.S., but they were not ready to certify that Russia was behind
the reinsertion of the information back into the U.S. body politic behind Guccifer 2.0
or DCLeaks. They didn't do that until October. So the president at that moment was not standing
on a firm intelligence community assessment that Russia was going to use this to try to
influence the election. That was one thing. But the second thing was I think there was
concern that to put this into the electoral conversation in July and August would be to
play into a narrative that candidate Trump was already putting out there on the street;
that the White House would try to influence the outcome, that the White House would itself
put its finger on the scale, that it would cheat or steal in some manner. So if, in fact, you couldn’t prove it in
July and August but you asserted it, and if you didn't have a firm IC [U.S. Intelligence
Community] assessment, you could fall into this trap that was being set potentially,
that you yourself had manipulated an election. I think the last thing—at least my perception
was that the last thing the president wanted to be accused of was in any way influencing
the American people’s choice. MICHAEL KIRK - Yes. VICTORIA NULAND - Very clever on Putin’s
part as well, because President Obama conceivably could have been accused of doing the very
thing that Putin himself was doing, and therefore contributing to the discrediting of the election. MICHAEL KIRK - … President Obama announces
a set of sanctions that throws 35 people out of the country and other things, and Mike
Flynn picks up a phone and apparently calls—or we know this—and calls [Ambassador Sergey]
Kislyak and says, “Don’t overreact.” What's your response to that? What does it tell you? VICTORIA NULAND - I think for those of us
in the professional service and those of us who had worked in an interagency way to assemble
as much information as we could about what had happened, to put it out in that report
both unclassified and classified, our hope and expectation was that when the incoming
team was briefed, President-elect Trump and his team, that it would sober them about the
challenges ahead with President Putin and with Russia, and we would begin a conversation
in a transition way about what the options were to deter this kind of activity in the
future, because you can't roll back the clock. You can't change history. If he’s done it in 2016, he’ll do it in
2018 and 2020. And as [former FBI Director James] Comey said,
we had the same thought at the time: This is a nonpartisan issue. Putin is an equal opportunity influencer. So I think what was disappointing was that
when the incoming team was briefed, they didn't seem to grab this as a serious strategic threat
to the United States and a challenge that needed to be dealt with. I don't know what was said in those phone
calls. It’s absolutely normal for Russia, anyway,
to reach out to a new incoming team. They do it every time. They always want a special channel; they always
want to get going early. So I wasn't surprised that Kislyak was trying
to get to Flynn. I think what we were concerned about was whether
in those conversations before the inauguration had even happened there were policy commitments
being made which were being made on the fly without full consideration, etc. I think that would have been irresponsible. MICHAEL KIRK - And when a team rolls into
the State Department and when the word is out that the sanctions in Ukraine and other
things are up for negotiation, we're going to throw some of this stuff [out], what is
that like for you to see that happening? VICTORIA NULAND - As a career professional
who served five presidents of both parties and went through transitions, both same party
coming in or other party coming in, we always cherished that transition period between the
election and the inauguration as a chance to begin a policy conversation with the new
team and to begin to explain why some of the things were done and what the impact would
be. And there was no such conversation. So I think we were concerned that decisions
were being made or leaned toward without a full appreciation of either the history of
how we got there, the danger of trading off Ukraine for Syria in terms of how it might
embolden Putin to push into somewhere else, or giving up America’s leverage for free. A lot of us were prepared to have a businessman
as president and even thought playing Let’s Make a Deal with Russia could serve the larger
free-world interest, but not to give stuff up for nothing when a whole country and a
whole set of democratic choices by the Ukrainian people were being traded off about them, without
them. … MIKE WISER -> What do you know about what
the administration does do in response to the growing evidence that Russia’s involved
in interfering with the election? What did the president do, and are there other
things that happened in that fall? VICTORIA NULAND - We had certified from the
IC that Russia had been responsible for the leaks as early as July, but we didn't clearly
have their hand in the leaking of the stuff back into the U.S. But that evidence begins to build through
the summer and particularly the way it’s happening, and the IC is getting closer to
certifying what the private community has already certified and what most of us who
have watched Russia for a long time suspect. Throughout August, the case is getting stronger
and stronger that Russia is interfering. What becomes evident in August is this information
that we now know and we knew then, that Russian intelligence was also interested in getting
into the voter rolls at the state level and getting into the company that serviced a lot
of the voting machines. There was extreme concern as to what their
capability might be in August. This is when Homeland Security gets into it
with the FBI, and the president asks Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to mentor the
various states about the risks and to offer cybersecurity training for all of the states. By August, when [then-CIA Director] John Brennan
goes public that this is serious, we already know not only that they’ve stolen emails
but that they are using those emails to influence or disrupt the conversation and that they
are trying to get into voting machines, but we don’t know at that point how capable
they will be in that regard. By the time the president has his, I think
it’s his last meeting with Putin, which is at the G-20 meeting in Hangzhou, China,
in early September, there is real concern at the White House that not only are they
seeking to influence the election, but that they might actually have some of the capabilities
that they have in their own country to change votes between the time they're cast and the
time they're counted. That turned out not to be the case, but the
president concludes that it’s time for a very stern warning to President Putin, which
he gives one-on-one at the beginning of September. MIKE WISER -> In that fall, as you're seeing
these leaks come out, there's also other things going on with social media that are apparently
linked to Russia. You’ve seen this in Ukraine and elsewhere. Does it feel familiar? And how serious does the situation seem as
you're watching it? Does it seem like the American public understands
the nature of what's going on? VICTORIA NULAND - As we are watching what's
happening, those of us who have seen this movie before, whether it was in Estonia or
Ukraine, it seems absolutely familiar. And in fact, I think there's some concern
and some fear that we’ll see more of the truly malign techniques than we actually saw. For example, in Ukraine and inside Russia,
and sometimes in Europe, Russian intelligence has been known to doctor emails to make them
look even worse than they were originally. What happens in that situation is that the
public believes it, and it’s very hard to disprove and takes time to disprove. I think there was concern about just how much
they would try to do. There was also a lot of concern about the
extreme sophistication of what they were leaking, when they were leaking it vis-à-vis one candidate. Clearly by the fall, it was evident that they
were not going to be equal opportunity disrupters, that they had a horse in the race. MIKE WISER -> And was it at all frustrating
that this wasn't the top story at the time? Did it seem like the press and the public
understood what was going on? VICTORIA NULAND - I think it was getting a
good amount of play. The fact that there was a Russia connection
maybe wasn't getting as much play as it could have. Whether that would have affected things, how
much this was affecting voter attitudes, was very, very hard to measure in October. In October, you could argue based on the polling
data in early October and the middle of October that in fact it wasn't being very successful
and was perhaps hurting the candidate that it was trying to help. But ultimately, we’ll never know. MIKE WISER -> My last question is, did you
ever have a chance to make the case to the incoming Trump administration for sanctions,
for your understanding of Russia, or you were never talked to? VICTORIA NULAND - I had one meeting with the
landing party that came to the State Department. I think it was in December. Each of the assistant secretaries had an hour
to brief them on all of the issues that we were dealing with. But I never spoke to Secretary [of State Rex]
Tillerson or anybody on the team that's serving there, and certainly not to anybody in the
White House. I wasn't invited to before I chose to retire
on Jan. 19. MICHAEL KIRK - That's kind of amazing, isn't
it? VICTORIA NULAND - Traditionally—and as I
said, I've served five presidents and seen 12 secretary of state transitions and worked
on some of them—the protocol before then had always been for the incumbent secretary
of state, once he or she has been nominated, to come sit in the State Department to prepare
for their Senate hearings, to hear from all of us, to get whatever briefings are required. But that didn’t happen in this case. … DAVID HOFFMAN - … Through this whole narrative
all these years, American diplomats and experts and people and yourself keep saying Putin
believes CIA runs the world. He has a paranoia impression of the United
States and his power. … Did we ever try and talk him out of it,
or do you think it was just impossible? VICTORIA NULAND - Absolutely. He, again, with Secretary Kerry in July, insists
that the U.S. tried to defeat him in 2011 and that Secretary Clinton was the architect
of that. And Secretary Kerry again, face-to-face with
President Putin, explains to him that to the degree that we offered election training in
Russia, we offered it to every single party, including his. United Russia, his political party, was one
of the biggest users of U.S. electoral training. But it doesn't suit his view of the world;
it doesn't fit into his narrative. I do think that he mirror-images. He relies heavily on his own intelligence
services as a tool of policy, and he insists that we must obviously do the same thing. MICHAEL KIRK - My last question. What do you think Putin wants? Why the hacking? Why the intrusion into our democratic process? VICTORIA NULAND - I think that he has a need
now because of the way he’s governing in Russia, which is increasingly autocratic and
destructive of basic democratic institutions. He has a need to discredit the democratic
model, and he has a need to create a certain moral equivalency: “Our system is dirty
and messy, but theirs is really corrupt. Look at what was happening inside the Democratic
Party with them favoring one primary candidate or another. Look at how dirty this politics is.” He has a need to do that first for his own
people, to discredit our system so that the Russian people don’t want it or want it
less than they naturally would, but also to create this moral equivalency globally: “Why
should the democracies run the world? They don’t do it any better than we do. Let’s go back to a balance-of-power world.” MICHAEL KIRK - Thank you very much. VICTORIA NULAND - Thank you. Fun.
