>> The objective of sanctions is to end the war in Ukraine.

Not everybody agrees with that.

Some think the intention should be to destroy Russia, to foment revolution.

I disagree with that.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine approaches its third month, can Western nations check Russia's aggression without sparking global conflict?

Putin made clear in his May 9th Victory Day speech that he has no plans of backing down.

But with heavy troop casualties mounting on both sides, what would a diplomatic resolution even look like?

I speak with former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Mike McFaul.

Then many Western leaders have framed the war in Ukraine as a global fight for democracy.

But do all democracies agree?

And of course, I've got your "Puppet Regime."

>> Well, like Russian novel, it looks like it will be depressing and long.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... [ Fanfare plays ] >> Even before V-E Day itself, Victory in Europe was hailed in Moscow's Red Square by the first May Day parade to be held for four years.

By the toil and devotion of our people and the genius of Joseph Stalin, the red star of Soviet Russia has risen to a great and lasting triumph.

[ Tape fast-forwarding ] >> On May 9, 2022, Russian tanks and troops rolled through Russian cities and towns commemorating the 77th anniversary of the country's victory day over the Nazis.

Also on May 9, 2022, Russian tanks and troops rolled through Ukrainian cities and towns, leaving death and destruction in their wake.

President Vladimir Putin showed no discomfort at all in celebrating the patriotic holiday during his country's ongoing invasion of a sovereign neighbor.

The timing was, in fact, the point.

>> Interpreter: You are fighting for the motherland, for its future, so that lessons of World War II are not forgotten, so that there is no place in history for the punitive divisions of Nazis.

>> This delusion of an ongoing Nazi threat is both central to Putin's justification for invading Ukraine and to his conception of modern Russia's role in the world today.

The legacy of World War II looms large in Russian consciousness.

And as Finland's former prime minister Alex Stubb explained on my show a few weeks ago, Russian patriotism has long relied on an us-versus-them mentality.

>> So the narrative in Russian history has always been that "the rest of the world is out to get us," so that the Russia, the biggest country in the world geographically, is somehow surrounded by enemies.

>> But the thing about prophecies is they can become self-fulfilling.

NATO is about to become bigger with Stubb's Finland and Sweden entering the fold, and the West's response has been unprecedented in its swiftness and scope, with billions of dollars in weaponry flowing into Ukraine and billions of dollars in sanctions being levied against Russia.

And with it, the rhetoric from key Western leaders has gone beyond simply advocating that Russia withdraw troops from Ukraine.

>> We want to see Russia weakened.

>> The war in Ukraine is our war.

>> I have so much admiration for our brave Ukrainian friends fighting against this.

They are fighting our war.

>> Russian state media is in overdrive, pushing the idea that the country is under attack by the West, calling for strikes on NATO countries and even glorifying nuclear annihilation.

Here's the danger of the West's shift in policy.

The goal cannot and should not be the destruction of Russia's military, because that's not going to happen without risking world war.

Despite its many failures in Ukraine, Russia remains a nuclear superpower, with a military 10 times greater than Ukraine's in all sorts of advanced military capabilities to destabilize not just Ukraine, but NATO countries.

How can Western leaders adequately respond to Russian aggression without setting off global conflict?

We're joined now by former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Mike McFaul, and here's our conversation.

Mike McFaul, welcome to "GZERO World."

>> Glad to be back.

>> So let me start.

There's so much to talk to you about.

And Russia is not only a little in the news these days.

I want to start with the Victory Day speech earlier this week.

What did and did not surprise you?

How do you relate to the way Putin decided to present to his country and the world on this very important day?

>> You know, I had a bunch of different reactions to it.

The first one was tragedy, Ian.

This is a really important day in the history of Russia, the history of Ukraine, history of all countries that fought that are now independent, that used to be part of the Soviet Union to defeat fascism.

I attended that event as ambassador a couple of times, and one of the best parts of my job as ambassador was meeting veterans that fought against fascism and that he used such a sacred day to tie it to this horrible war in Ukraine and tie them all together, I just found to be really unbecoming.

That's the first thing.

Second, it was a nothing burger as a speech.

That was my main, you know -- All this build, oh, my goodness.

Another big play on the chessboard for Putin, mobilization, and it was nothing.

It was just the same old stuff, you know, couple of lies.

He always has to, you know, do that as a way to make his argument.

But it was really underwhelming to me as a speech.

Esthetically as a speech, it was not one of his best speeches.

Again, esthetically I said.

I disagree with almost all of Putin's speeches, but some have been well-constructed.

This was not that.

And it makes me think that maybe he's just run out of steam and ideas in terms of this war that he's conducting in Ukraine.

>> Does it make you think that he's trying to keep his options open?

He's not actually sure which way the war is going to play out for himself at this point?

>> Great point.

I think that's exactly right.

He couldn't declare victory on Victory Day because that would sound silly.

Even to Russians, it would sound silly, by the way.

So he couldn't do that.

You know, he's changed the war objectives very clearly.

Right?

So if we were talking two months ago, he had a really big agenda.

Ukrainians are just Russians with accents, according to Putin.

They were supposed to be swallowed back in.

That didn't work.

He was supposed to de-Nazify Ukraine.

That failed.

Demilitarize Ukraine.

That failed.

He didn't seize the major cities, including Kyiv.

He lost the battle of Kyiv.

I think that will be a historic event in Ukrainian nationhood.

And when you read history books 50 years from now, that's going to be a big moment.

He lost that.

So now he had to change it to "special military operation."

Zashchita Donbassa, right?

"In the defense of Donbass."

That is not the phraseology that he used two months ago, and even there, to your point, I don't think he knows if he can prevail in Donbass, and that's why I think he had to hedge his bets in the speech this week.

>> Now, he did say that in the Donbass that the Russians are defending their territory.

Belongs to them.

So do you get the sense that kind of baseline table stakes, irrespective of what else he may want, is that he intends to take/annex/not give up all that land, which is a lot more than where he was before February 24th, before the tanks started rolling?

>> Yes, that actually was the most important phraseology of that speech, because that was the first time to my mind, where he very deliberately talked about parts of Ukraine that formerly we thought were either contested parts or not contested parts as being part of Russian territory.

That suggests that that is his strategy, that he is going to annex those territories and then try to hold them.

And that is new.

That is something qualitatively different than the way he's been speaking about the war so far.

>> Now, beyond Donbass itself, where we now have this special military operation is focused, we're still seeing significant amount of Russian shelling.

What's your read on what all of that means as connected to what Putin is trying to accomplish?

>> I think it's part of just, you know, the terrorism that has been part of his military strategy throughout this war.

And it's deliberate.

He is terrorizing these populations, killing civilians as a way to try to compel Zelensky to negotiate.

And, you know, I've talked to Zelensky a couple of times during this war, and I think it's important for people to understand that when you're the leader of a country, the democratic leader of a country, and you can't defend your people, and you have to sit there and watch because you don't have defenses against that, it does weigh on him.

I think it's a hard thing and it is part of his strategy to keep the pressure on Zelensky for one day when, you know, I think he will try to say, "I've seized this territory and now we need to negotiate."

He wants to keep that pressure on Zelensky and his armed forces.

>> Now, when you talk to Zelensky, I'm interested in how he thinks about the future of the war.

Is he -- Do you get a sense that he would welcome a restart of negotiations at this point, or, given that he's done so well, do you get the sense of "No, I want to actually have the opportunity to retake this territory first"?

>> A month ago, talking to him and others around him, they were talking very soberly about a peace settlement that would trade Ukrainian neutrality for some security guarantee from the West, that would agree to disagree about where the borders are, but agree to not take them through military force.

And they were even negotiating about the size of the Ukrainian military in the negotiations.

Right?

That was a month ago.

All of those issues, I think, are now frozen.

I think their objectives have changed.

They feel like that time is on their side, that they -- And whether they're right or wrong about that, I'm not a military expert enough to know in terms of which artilleries are going to prevail in Donbass.

But I think Putin may have missed an opportunity to get an agreement a month ago that I do not think is -- well, I know is not on the table today and may not be on the table, you know, four or six or eight weeks from now.

>> Now, I want to turn a little bit to U.S. policy.

You've been very outspoken from the beginning, to be fair, that the West needs to do a lot more in terms of the sanctions against Russia, in terms of the military support that they're providing Ukraine.

But we've now seen over the course of almost three months that the trajectory of the West has been in that direction that you have been arguing for.

Is the West, broadly speaking, now where you think they should be in terms of Russia and Ukraine policy?

>> On bolstering NATO, I think yes.

I'm very impressed with what they've done there.

On weapons, almost yes.

And you're right, their policy changed.

I think publics were ahead of the governments, by the way, on not only in the United States, but talking to colleagues of mine throughout Europe.

I think that was true there.

I think they moved pretty far on arms, not quite as far as I would have liked, not as fast, but they've moved pretty far.

I think on sanctions, they're behind still.

I think there's a lot more that could be done and should be done.

But I applaud, you know, the -- As I say, when I talk to my government friends here in the United States, you've got to keep ratcheting up and particularly on sanctions.

I think conceptually there are some changes that need to be done.

Number one, you know, I think about it like parking tickets, Ian, like if you park in the wrong place here at Stanford, you get a parking ticket for the day you parked your car in the wrong place.

But if you leave it there, you get another parking ticket the next day and you pile them up.

>> And then they boot your car.

Then you can't drive anymore, man.

>> I think I got up to four or five one time when I forgot where I parked.

And I think that ratcheting is a conceptual change that needs to take place with sanctions.

Right?

As long as Putin's army is parked, to stretch the metaphor, in Ukraine, there's got to be a ratcheting.

I also think conceptually on individual sanctions, they need to rethink some things, sanction the position, not the individual.

So sanction everybody who's a deputy minister and above in the government, sanction everybody who's on the board of Rosneft.

The idea there is two things.

One, then you give some agency to those people, because right now, once you're on the list, you're stuck and you're going to be there forever.

There's no way to get off the list.

But then two, you can sanction not just several hundred people, but thousands of people.

So those are just two examples of where things can change.

And of course, as you know better than I, you know, there are, I think, some creative ideas about energy sanctions.

I applaud what is being discussed, and I think there's a lot more that can be done there as well.

>> I mean, if the West had the capacity to literally destroy the Russian economy, should that be the intention?

>> Well, I strongly believe that the intention, the objective of sanctions is to end the war in Ukraine.

Not everybody agrees with that.

Some think the intention should be to destroy Russia, to foment revolution.

I disagree with that.

I think the sanctions should be tied to a very concrete foreign policy objective, which is to end the war in Ukraine.

Now, sanctions are sticky, as you know as well as I do.

It's easy to say that.

It's harder to lift them.

But I think conceptually that's what one should do.

>> There's, of course, been a really big flurry of stories around this New York Times piece that said that the United States was providing intelligence that helped the Ukrainians target Russian generals and also target the Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea fleet.

Walked back by the Pentagon itself.

But should the -- In your view, should the United States be in the business of doing that?

>> First of all, I don't know that it's true.

Ukrainian government officials I talked to say it's not true.

So they're contending the very validity of this -- these leaks.

Number two, I believe that we should share intelligence with the Ukrainians.

I'm not against that as a policy matter, but I'm militantly against talking about it.

I think it's just stupid.

You know, Ian, I used to read secret materials every day for five years in the Obama administration.

I'm sure it would have been fun for us to meet and have a drink and talk about that.

But that's not -- "A," I think it's illegal.

Two, it doesn't serve our national security interests because think about what's happened here as a result of that.

One, it feeds Putin's narrative that he's fighting NATO and the United States and Ukraine, not the Ukrainians.

That's exactly what he wants his people to believe.

So we're helping him with that.

Number two, think how it feels for the Ukrainians.

It makes them look weak, like they can't do this on their own.

That's not their view, and that didn't serve anybody's -- I don't think that it serves our security objectives in terms of our partnership with the Ukrainians.

>> So before we go, I want to ask you just a little bit about Russia itself.

What surprises you from what you're hearing from Russia today?

>> So, I do talk to Russians every single day.

Just minutes ago, in fact, somebody in Moscow.

I talk to Russians that have left the country and, you know, political people as well as economic people.

And, you know, I would say a couple of things.

One, and I'm just reporting what one of my long-term colleagues said, not an opposition figure.

Somebody who worked in the government for many, many years.

He said to me, "Mike, this is a war that there's no winners from inside Russia.

Literally not a single person."

So he started with Putin.

Does Putin -- Is he stronger or weaker as a result of this war?

Domestically, he's weaker.

Reputationally around the world, he's much weaker.

So he's a loser.

The military guys, the generals, obviously, this is a disaster for them.

And there's a lot of finger pointing going on with the intelligence services that they believe that the intelligence people dragged them into this war with bad information.

And then the intelligence folks, you know, the people close to Putin, he's a former intelligence officer, a KGB guy.

They look bad because they miscalculated on how the Ukrainians were going to fight.

They miscalculated on who was going to support them inside Ukraine.

They grossly miscalculated their assessments of the Biden administration in the West.

They look bad.

Oligarchs -- This is horrible.

You know, there is not a single economic actor in Russia that thinks this is good.

This is a complete disaster for them.

The middle class, you know, in the major cities, this is horrible for them.

So maybe, you know, the babushkas in Siberia that are believing Putin's propaganda, you know, they're getting a bit of a charge about this that "we're back in the fight."

But my sense is that this is a pretty catastrophic failure that most people think in those terms.

And the question is, you know, how long will it remain this catastrophic event?

>> As long as Putin is there, is there, in your view, any way out of this for the Russians?

>> Yeah, I think Putin can sue for peace.

He gets to define victory whatever way he wants.

He could agree to some kind of partition of Ukraine.

Whether the Ukrainians will agree to it anymore, as we talked earlier, I'm not so sure.

I think he can do that.

But then he's just kind of a lame duck.

I've known Putin for a long time.

We met in 1991.

I wrote my first piece warning the West about his autocratic ways in March of 2000.

So my views on Putin are pretty clear.

They have been for decades.

But I think you have to say fairly that before this war, he might have been remembered as the Russian leader that restored Russia as a great power.

Russians before this war were richer than maybe any time in their history, by the way.

And he kind of restored that, you know, stability inside the country.

And I really think he threw it away in this war.

I just don't think he will be remembered that way ever again.

And I don't think he'll ever get back, you know, that kind of support he had domestically.

And, you know, I could be wrong about this part.

You know, it's a conversation for another time, Ian, about what it means for his reputation internationally.

But, you know, I speak to Chinese and Indians and people from Africa and Middle East pretty regular basis like you do.

I haven't found many people that think, "Oh, my gosh, you know, doesn't Putin look like some greats?

He's a really great, strong leader.

Look at what he's done in Ukraine.

He's a guy I want to stand next to.

He's a guy I want to be allied with."

I don't feel that.

I see a lot of neutral space.

Right?

"We don't want to be part of this war."

Indians, people from the Middle East, Africa, but not many people thinking, "Oh, my goodness, Putin, he's a great strategic genius.

I want to be closer to him."

That's not a sentiment I encounter very often.

>> Ambassador Mike McFaul, always good to see you, my friend.

>> Thanks for having me.

♪♪ >> One thing I didn't have a chance to get into with Mike is this notion that the world's democracies are united in their opposition to Putin.

Are they really?

It's true that when Russia invaded Ukraine last February, Western leaders across North America and Europe spoke in unison of a battle for democracy itself.

>> Russia has managed to cause something I'm sure he never intended.

The democracies of the world are revitalized with purpose and unity found in months that we've once taken years to accomplish.

>> France's president, Emmanuel Macron, has said that democracy is being challenged before our very eyes.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow.

But the world's largest democracy, India, abstained in three U.N. resolutions denouncing Russia's invasion, and its leader, Narendra Modi, has refused to condemn Putin while he's buying a lot more Russian oil.

His reluctance to condemn the Russian president no doubt stems from the fact that India is Russia's top arms buyer, obtaining two thirds of all its weapons from Russia.

Brazil, Latin America's largest democracy, has declared a stance of impartiality in the conflict.

President Jair Bolsonaro visited Putin in Moscow shortly before the invasion.

He went so far as to declare that he was "in solidarity with Russia."

Not to be outdone, Lula da Silva, the leftist presidential front-runner likely to succeed Bolsonaro in elections later this year, said that Ukrainian President Zelensky was, and I quote, "as responsible as Putin for the war."

One reason for these gestures of support -- Brazil's economy depends heavily on Russia for fertilizer imports.

Nearly half of all African countries abstained or didn't vote at all in U.N. resolutions demanding a Russian cease-fire in Ukraine.

>> The meeting is adjourned.

>> South Africa, a key democratic member of the BRICS group of emerging economies, has notably refrained from criticizing Russia.

The fact that many African nations depend on Russian grain exports no doubt factor into their diplomatic responses.

So while it might feel convenient to paint Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a fight between the world's autocracies and democracies, reality is a lot more complicated.

♪♪ And now I've got your "Puppet Regime."

♪♪ [ Telephone rings ] >> Hello.

Modiji here.

>> Narendra, it's me, Vladimir.

Namaste, old comrade.

>> Namaste, my friend.

How is your day going?

>> Well, like Russian novel, it looks like it will be depressing and long.

>> Aha, you mean like "War and --" >> You mean special operation and peace.

There is no war, Modi.

Anyway, I want to invite you on summer vacation.

>> Very kind of you.

But it is legislation season.

>> Ugh, parliaments.

What is the point?

But look, just steal away to Black Sea with me.

It's lovely now.

Russian coastline keeps getting longer.

>> What you do with that coastline is your business.

But I will not go with you.

Good luck to you.

♪♪ [ Telephone rings ] [ Sighs ] Vladimir, I already told you that -- >> Vlad who?

No, it's me, Joe Biden.

>> Oh, hello, Mr. President.

What do you want?

>> Now, look here, pal.

I want to invite you over for a little summer holiday.

We can hit the Delaware Beach spot and get some beers and burgers.

>> But, Joe, I do not eat cows.

>> Okay, I'll take you to Hollywood.

We can hang out with Sean Penn.

That'll be something special for ya.

>> We already have a Bollywood.

Plus, we can watch Johnny Depp and Amber from here.

>> Fine.

How about Texas?

We can get you some Texas oil out there.

>> But, Joe, I can now get very cheap oil from Russia.

>> You better cut that out, Narendra.

You cut that out right now, you hear me?

America said so.

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you see, you're just worried where the war is going next, what else might be happening in the world, you know where to go.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...