TOP
Evelyn Farkas
Chapters
The FRONTLINE Interviews
Evelyn Farkas
Defense Department, 2009-15
Evelyn Farkas was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia from 2012 to 2015. After leaving the Defense Department, Farkas volunteered for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, where she became the subject of false news accounts suggesting that she leaked confirmation that President Barack Obama spied on Donald Trump.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 13, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term
As you take your new job [as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia], what do you understand the state of play is in Russia with President Putin [around 2012]?
It was very interesting, because when I started the job, the people who were working in the office, they were trying very hard to come up with new initiatives to cooperate with Russia.We had this bi-presidential [U.S.-Russia] Binational Presidential Commission which was set up across the government.DoD [Department of Defense] was paired with the Russian Ministry of Defense.In my new office, all these people were working on interesting initiatives to cooperate further with the Russian Ministry of Defense, and also the armed forces.
But they were coming in my office saying, “The Russians say they want to cooperate, but we can't get them to set up the next meeting or to actually sign an agreement on intelligence sharing, or to actually really cooperate.”At the same time, the next person who would run into my office, would be an intelligence officer briefing me on what the Russians were doing to modernize their military.I had, at that point, almost 20 years—more than 20 years, actually—in the national security establishment.I knew that when you look at threats, you look at capabilities and intent.
The intent picture looked kind of fuzzy, because it looked like they wanted to cooperate, but at the same time, we were at loggerheads with them still on the issue of Georgia.They were still occupying 20 percent of Georgia’s territory.There were a number of other issues where we knew we weren’t in agreement with the Russians.So there was a question about intent.On the capabilities side, things were starting to look a little bit uncomfortable for the United States in the sense that the Russians were developing certain capabilities that could actually deter us, deter our allies, could be used against us.
Like what?
Well, I can't get into too much detail, but even just modernizing their missiles, reorganizing, exercising a lot more frequently and with little notice.As you may know, in the 2008 Georgia war, the way that the war was initiated actually came out of a "snap exercise."So the Russians were exercising, and out of the exercise they invaded Georgia.
It ended up being the same tactic they used when they invaded Ukraine and attempted to illegally annex Crimea, and then later they fomented in Donbas the ongoing military war there.
But that snap exercise, all of the exercises that were occurring, there were nuclear exercises in addition to conventional.That was not abnormal in the Cold War era, but we were not used to seeing it.Suddenly we were seeing that again, and we were also seeing some of the long-range aviation flights closer to the United States territory, also close to Japan.They were flexing their muscle.They were telling us, “We’re back,” in essence.
For those of us sitting in the Pentagon who worried about the worst-case scenario—I mean, that was our job—[it was] a little bit discomfiting.For the White House and others, people doing diplomacy and other things, they could easily dismiss the signs that the Russians were kind of on the move, if you will, but we couldn’t.
Cyber?Was it in the kit bag?
Cyber we started seeing develop later, or at least I didn’t notice it.I don’t recall noticing it so clearly originally in 2012.We knew it was always an issue, the cyber offensive denial of capabilities or operations, so-called DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] operations.We knew that the Russians used them whenever they were conducting military operations.In the case of Georgia they used cyber operations.They also used it when they were protesting the Estonians taking down the statue in 2006, the old Soviet statue.There were instances we knew that they were using that either to military or political effect, the Russians were.What happened later is that they progressed a lot further in their use of cyber, in terms of their doctrine, and then of course in their actual execution of operations, political and military.
We’ll get there.OK. You're in a classic “where there's smoke, there's fire” kind of moment.
I wouldn’t put it quite so clearly, because that’s where we are now in the United States with their attack on us.But I would say I became uncomfortable.I saw that things might not add up the way we wanted them to add up.We were trying to cooperate, but yet there was no real cooperation occurring.At the same time, we were watching the military modernization and the exercises.It was clear, you know: What other adversary could the Russians have except NATO?They were outspoken against NATO.They were accusing NATO of being a threat to Russia, encircling Russia.
So we started to think, OK, maybe they really don’t see us as a potential partner, if you will, because within the context of our diplomacy with Russia, both sides were saying, “Yes, we want to be partners.”But we started to see, in the Pentagon, well, perhaps they're not so fully engaged in being our partner.
It took some time before we got to the [realization that] they're actually an adversary.That happened, though, relatively quickly in my office, once we started really doing a deep dive, after Putin came [back] into office, I would say.
This is my next question.I know he’s slightly above your pay grade in terms of what you watch, but you know about Putin.You know who he is; you know what his history is.
Oh, no, he is not above my pay grade.That was my job to watch that guy.
Really?
Well, sure. I mean, I read all the open-source things I could read.And of course there was intelligence on the Russian president, the Russian president’s plans, etc.
What can you tell us about him that you knew then?
Well, I think a lot of it is things that the public knows now.We started to see that he was quite angry at the United States for a whole host of things, which I'm sure you cover in your program, but certainly the Iraq War, the military interventions that we had conducted, that the Russian government thought were either not justified or counter to their interests or both.We noticed that there was an uptick in that rhetoric, certainly starting even in 2007, before the reset.That was something that the Obama administration preferred to put to the side, and they could put to the side, as long as Medvedev was there, because Medvedev had a different approach.
When Putin came back in, first of all, he was, as I mentioned, mad about the previous interventions.That was already going back a decade.But on top of that, we had the protests that, in 2011-2012, that accompanied the parliamentary elections and his coming back into power.Those were those protests that he blamed on Hillary Clinton, because she was critical of the Russian elections.The OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] also put out, I believe, a critical report on them as well.He felt that the United States was meddling in Russia’s internal affairs, and also behaving like a bully internationally.
So this man, freshly back, has a new ideology people see in him.There's something new about him now that he’s back in the hot seat.What is it? Do you know?
I think it was more that he was not afraid to come out and verbally challenge the United States, NATO, the international community.I think that took a while to sink in for some people.It took even longer for us to understand that he was not only speaking out against the international order and international institutions and the status quo, but that he was going to act against it.That, I think, really we only came to terms with, with the Crimea invasion.In my office, that last piece—and, frankly speaking, we felt that some others in the government, it took them even longer than us—it took after Crimea, the actual reality that in Donbas, for example, the Russians continued fighting, they continued to be unable and unwilling to make peace there.For the American public, I would say it may still be an ongoing process.
Yeah.So we’re watching the Sochi Olympics.We think it’s wonderful.Gee, Russia looks so clean and happy, and everything’s together.You may know something else is cooking at that very time in the war rooms in the Kremlin and other places, the Russian military and the president have another plan for.
Well, what we knew was that, at the—the Sochi Olympics occurred, you're correct.And I've said elsewhere that we were disappointed, because it was another opportunity for a potential cooperation on counterterrorism, on keeping all of our athletes and citizens safe.The Russians were not terribly interested.They really did the bare minimum in terms of cooperation there.That was another sign for us that this was not the partnership that we had hoped it would be.
At the same time, we were watching very closely what was happening in Ukraine.We knew that the Russians were not happy with the Maidan revolution, uprising if you will, the demonstrations.Of course then, when we saw what the response of the Russian—I'm sorry, the Ukrainian government, and the fact that they shot at their people, then the Russians were very much involved in that diplomacy.They were trying to help broker, together with the United States, a face-saving compromise between the demonstrators and President [Viktor] Yanukovych, who was still at that time very much in office.
They did manage to actually broker a compromise.But Yanukovych lost his nerve and fled, and we believe actually, probably, that President Putin wasn’t quite happy with that either.But nevertheless he ended up in Russia, and the Russian president was probably quite angry.He certainly used the opportunity to make a swift military intervention into Crimea first, seized Crimea, not overnight but within a matter of days.
…<v Michael Kirk> Taking Crimea was more than just hard military action.There was also cyber in there.There was information warfare strategies, other things.Explain what was in play in Crimea and what it seems like they learned from that experience.They actually learned from Georgia.They didn’t do very well militarily in Georgia.They got as far as Tbilisi; they got to the capital.But they had a lot of problems militarily, and they learned from that experience.And in the case of Ukraine—
What did they learn from Georgia?
They had terrible command and control on their ground forces.The cyber operations, I think those were probably OK, denial of capability.I think mainly it was the poor command and control.Their equipment, their readiness was still pretty poor.By the time they got to Ukraine, they had worked out all the kinks.They had practiced this kind of swift operation, using not your conventional military forces, so they learned this, too, but using their special forces, without insignia, contrary to the Geneva Conventions.Of course, in a way that was deniable.In fact, the Russian government and the Russian president denied, for about a week or two, that they had actually conducted that military incursion.Remember that when Putin lies to us next time.He often denies it, but then later he’ll admit it.He did the same thing in the east with Donbas, where he said, “There are no Russian soldiers.”And then later on, months later, he said, “Well, OK, there are some, but they're volunteering.”
So anyway, going back to Crimea, it was just a quick action.They surrounded all the military bases.In essence, if the Ukrainian soldiers and sailors had wanted to fight, they could have fought.But they knew that the Russians had backup, and they would have been slaughtered.I went to bed on more than a few nights—I don’t remember how many nights this went on, but it was more than one or two—literally praying for the lives of those Ukrainian soldiers and sailors and marines.
And in the United States, in your office and at the White House and other places, what was the reaction?
We were obviously surprised.We weren’t expecting the Russians to invade another neighboring country.We knew that Putin was a bit of a different interlocutor than Medvedev and that he was unhappy with us.But still, we were in reset.We were trying to cooperate with Russia.So I think the government, as a whole, was quite shocked.It wasn’t a welcome challenge.Like any crisis, it’s not a welcome challenge.
We had to figure out how to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty, or the modicum of sovereignty, help them also economically and politically, help them make this transition that had been brokered, and then work with our NATO allies, especially in the east and the southeast, who now felt threatened by Russia, because really, since 2000 and since 2003, when the Baltic states came into NATO, they had been telling us that they still viewed Russia as a threat.We had done a lot of what we called reassurance.“Don’t worry.The Russians are not out to get you.And by the way, we’re strong.We’re NATO.They can't anyway.”But we focused more on the reassurance than actually deterring the Russians.So we were more focused on telling our allies, “It’s going to be OK,” and we didn’t pay as much attention to deterring the Russians and making sure they understood, “No way, Jose; don’t even think about it.”
Why not?
Because I think we believed it would be insane.Why would the Russians invade a NATO ally?Why would they take territory?We didn’t even conceive of the not unconventional “little green men,” at least not as a realistic option for the Russians.Of course any military planner would come up with various options.Knowing the Russians, that’s always an option for them.But it wasn’t something that any of us working on Russia policy saw as something Putin would want to employ, because he still seemed to be wanting to operate according to the international law and upholding the status quo international organizations and legal structure.
…<v Michael Kirk> As time goes on, help me with people in the administration’s positions about what kind of aid to deliver to Ukraine.Where is [then-Defense Secretary Chuck] Hagel on that?I can't tell you exactly where he was personally.I have to let him speak for himself.I will say that our office recommended a pretty robust assistance package to Ukraine.Then the office that dealt with NATO, they had their own recommendations for NATO allies that were vulnerable.On the Ukraine package, we recommended not only training, but equipment.… It’s important to note that what the previous government had done, what the Ukrainian government had done under Yanukovych was basically strip the larder, strip the warehouses.The Ukrainian military was in a horrible state of readiness.They didn’t have equipment that was ready.People made fun of the Obama administration for giving blankets to the Ukrainians when they needed bullets.Well, they needed blankets and bullets.They needed MREs [Meals, Ready-to-Eat].They didn’t have those things, and they were deploying out to the east to fight in Donbas.
So there was a reality that they needed those things.But we also asked for them to get anti-tank weapons, launchers, so—
You wanted lethal stuff.
We wanted defensive lethal weapons to go to the Ukrainians, and what we found was we wanted to find the right balance between letting the Ukrainians defend themselves and not fueling a war.We wanted to create the right incentives for both sides to make peace.
…<v Michael Kirk> There was of course a robust debate inside the administration about whether to do it or not to do what you wanted to do.Correct, yeah.
Take me there.Explain to me what the debate was about. Who was on what side?
… There were those of us in the Pentagon, for example, in my office, starting in my office, and then we worked to persuade up the chain, who argued that the best way to deter Russia from ongoing and increased military action—and remember, we were very much afraid that they would push from the areas they controlled in eastern Ukraine all the way to Kiev, the capital—also pronounced “Kiev” in American English—that we were worried that they would go all the way to Kiev, and perhaps even take Ukraine.We didn’t know where the Russian government would stop, where the Russian military would stop.Did they want to control all of Ukrainian territory?
We decided that we had to deter Russia.The most important thing we could do was to deter Russia in the Pentagon, we believed.And the best way to do that, we thought in my office, was to make the Russians afraid that they would have to pay a higher price for their military intervention.The higher price would be a price in Russian lives; that if we had anti-tank weapons, the Russian tanks coming at the Ukrainians would get hit, and Russian soldiers would die, and only that would make the Russian military command and the Russian political leadership stop and think twice about whether they should be invading their neighbors.
And why didn’t that happen?
On the other side, you had other people in the administration saying that perhaps this would increase the fighting; perhaps it wasn’t enough to deter Russia; or perhaps it was so much that it would make Russia angry that they would go further.There were a whole number of other counterarguments that were made.The most cautious approach—I think the consensus was the most cautious approach—was to do only that which we thought was required to keep the conflict at the lowest possible boiling point.
How did you feel about that?
Not very happy.But you know, I always felt that when I made recommendations, they were listened to, and most of the recommendations that my office made were either eventually entirely adopted or at least partially adopted.For example, with the lethal defensive, where OK, we didn’t get the whole package, but there were a lot of things in that package which we received—the multiple rocket launchers, we also wanted those.The Ukrainians figured out how to use them a little bit defensively, not necessarily lethally, but they could be coupled with their existing lethal means.The technology could be tinkered with, we found out later.
But the main point was that we were less cautious.We felt that a stronger approach was necessary with the Kremlin to deter them.
Was this the president that finally announced it, finally decided it?
Well, everything is ultimately the president’s decision.
Well, then what did you do?Eventually you leave, yes?
Eventually I left.I left, though, not because of the specific policy with regard to Russia or Ukraine.I had spent three years in the administration, initially fighting very hard for relevance on Russia, because as I mentioned earlier, we were very concerned in my office that Russia looked like a potential threat.We wanted more attention to be paid to Russia, more intelligence, resources to be applied to Russia.We argued in the Quadrennial Defense Review, for example, that Russia should be given higher consideration.
We were always arguing for more attention to be paid to Russia, and it was exhausting.Then once everybody realized, OK, Russia is a threat, Russia is a problem, then we were arguing for a more robust policy toward Russia.So either way, we were arguing.It was a very exhausting job, especially once we had Russia invading Ukraine, because while I mentioned those two countries, we had 14 countries total in the office, plus conventional arms control, which meant we were the main interlocutor with the OSCE.That mattered for the conventional treaties we had going, and it mattered because I was on the plane all the time dealing with these countries, going to various meetings.It really falls to the deputy assistant secretary level, generally speaking, to manage these bilateral relationships.So it was an intense job.There were months where I was on the road three out of four weeks, and it was tiring.
It was psychologically, physically, emotionally exhausting.My immediate superiors, the ones who had hired me, brought me in, they had left.So it really was time for me.By all accounts, it was time for me to go.I was tired, and I wasn’t working for the people. I wasn’t working in the team that I had started with. …
Intervention in the U.S. Election
… Okay.But you do join the Clinton campaign.
I joined the Clinton campaign as an adviser, not formally.They never authorized me or anybody else to say that I was advising her.I can only say I volunteered so that she doesn’t have to deal with being associated with me; I will absolve her of that.But I had the honor of contributing.I raised some money for her as well.And I volunteered for her out on the stump, if you will, out in Pennsylvania in particular, after the [FBI Director James] Comey speech.
During [the election of] 2016, it becomes increasingly clear to the Intelligence Community and others that Russia is playing a game with hacking stuff.When you become aware of that, tell me how you become aware and what your response was.
I became aware, like every other citizen, reading the newspaper.My response was, “Oh, my God,” because I knew that we had good intelligence on Russia.I knew that if the Intelligence Community was seeing this, that they had good cause to see it.… So I knew it was a big deal when the entire Intelligence Community said, with high confidence, a foreign government was directed by their president to attack our elections.And I was shocked when I read that.… But putting together, piecing together the dots, I was very worried.It was mainly the media.I should say, at the same time, I had reporters calling me saying: “I'm hearing X, Y and Z, you know.Can you help us get more information?”I basically said: “No, because it sounds like you're looking for something classified.I will not encourage anyone to divulge classified information.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is saying: “Nothing to this. This is ridiculous.”What did you think?
… Anyone who’s running to be the president of our country should be concerned if the Intelligence Community is telling all of us that we’re being attacked; that we’re being, at the minimum, that we’ve been hacked by the Russians, and that they took this, and that somehow this information ended up with WikiLeaks and then was publicized.
And the Russians were not really denying it.This is classic Russian tactic.It’s deniability. There's a veneer of deniability.That way, the people who don’t want to confront Russia—some of them are allies at the time—don’t have to.They can sit on the sidelines and do business with Russia and do diplomacy with Russia, but at the same time, the Russians are telegraphing with a wink, “We’ll see what we can do.”
… There were those in the Clinton [campaign] we talked to who said they were begging the Obama administration: “Please come out.Say it. Say it’s happening.Be more forceful about it than you're being.”Were you in that camp?Did you feel that way?
I felt that way.I didn’t—again, I didn’t approach—
Say which way you felt.
I felt that if there was something there, the Obama administration should come out more clearly, say what it was, take some action to deter further action.It’s similar, in a sense, to the dynamic we had with Ukraine, where someone like me might say, “We need to be tough; we need to take a stand and tell the Russians, ‘No more.Otherwise, if you do more, we’ll do X, Y or Z,” whereas there were others who said, “If we take a tough stand, they might actually up the ante and escalate.”So I'm guessing, but there probably was that sort of discussion inside the White House.
But they kept coming, and nobody’s stopped them, right?
Right.
It just kept happening.
I am a co-author of a report put out by Third Way, the NGO, essentially outlining what we think the U.S. government response should be specifically to the information operation against our elections.It includes a whole host of things, including tightening up the law against money laundering, so transparency, because all of these cyberhackers and cybercriminals and the spies in Russia who were working with them used our lack of transparency in certain areas.We also need to get better at enforcement.We need to have public-private partnerships with the companies, the social media companies like Twitter and Facebook, to cut down, again, on the trolling and the fake news, because what the Russians did was not just steal information from the campaigns and turn it over to WikiLeaks; they were even more sophisticated.They took information, fake news, and targeted the people in target states, we believe, and a lot of other things that I probably don’t even know about.But it looks like it was very sophisticated.They were using our openness, our transparency, our democracy against us.We need to actually take some action specifically to deter and defend ourselves against further Russian action.
Former Director Comey would say, “The Russians will be back.”Every time I hear that, I raise my hand and say: “No, no, no, no, they never left.They never left.Don’t think they left.”There was a fake news story about me.I don’t know where it originated.I am fairly confident, or I mean, I'm speculating, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kremlin didn’t have a hand in it, because it would be great to discredit anyone who comes out and speaks strongly and clearly about what the Russians are up to.
… What did Putin want?Why did this happen?Why the hacks? Why the fake news?What was it about?
Putin wants Russia to have the greatest latitude possible to achieve its objectives.What are those objectives?To keep Putin in power, to demonstrate that Russia is great again.And that includes having a sphere of influence around Central and Eastern Europe, around their periphery.They don’t have to invade all the territory, but they need to control it politically and economically.
Then third, Putin wants to push back on the international order, the international law if you will, and say: “No more right to protect.No more going, intervening militarily, to save innocent civilians who are being slaughtered by their brutal dictators.The dictators can stay.”That is something in the international legal order, that we've over time come to accept and appreciate.The Russian government is pushing back against that.
The only country that can stand up to Russia when it comes to those issues is the United States government.Now, in and of itself, we wouldn’t mind if Putin stays in the Kremlin forever and if Russia is great again.But the problem is, the means that they’ve taken to achieve those objectives, plus what they're doing on the third front, is too much for us to take.We believe in the right [of] peoples to take their own sovereign decision, to become democracies, for example, in Ukraine.So if the Ukrainian people want a democratic government, that’s their right.We believe that the Ukrainian government, whatever kind of government it is, has the right to the sanctity of its borders.
The Russian government came in, and for the first time, in 2014, altered borders by force, the first time since World War II.If you start doing that and accepting it, if a country can do that and it gets accepted by the international order, forget about it, starting with Europe.You already heard in the aftermath of that—I'm Hungarian-American—the Hungarian president was talking about Hungarian minorities in Eastern Europe and their rights.You know, that just sounds an awful lot like the kind of talk we heard in the ’20s and ’30s that led to revisionist, revanchist policies and altering of borders by force.
He’s at war with us?
…The Kremlin believes they're at war with us.But right now it’s a war without bullets.It’s a non-kinetic war, thank God.They don’t want a kinetic war with us.They don’t even want a proxy war with us, although we’re getting awfully close in Syria.… The American people still don’t appreciate how much of an adversarial stance Russia has taken toward us, and unfortunately, our president also doesn’t seem to understand this, is resisting this reality.I think that’s dangerous.
Thank you.
During the election, are you talking to people inside the Clinton campaign as the documents are being leaked to help them understand what's going on?Do you know what the feeling was inside the campaigns?
I didn’t know anything about leaking.… But some of the things that the journalists were telling me based on leaks they had received were alarming.That’s when I realized, one, that somebody in the Clinton campaign needed to know something; then, of course, more importantly, that Capitol Hill—I had worked almost a decade in the legislative branch—I realized that they needed to know.They needed all the data.Only they could get information without leaking, meaning classified information can be passed from the executive branch to the legislative branch.
Not only that, but it appeared to me, just based on what was being said on the Hill, that the people on the Hill weren’t being briefed regularly by the White House.I was alarmed at that as well, because I thought it was the duty of the White House to keep the Congress in the loop on this.… There was an urgency there, because the Obama administration was leaving.With their departure would go all of this knowledge, all of the data, whatever data they had.Then if God forbid there was some kind of nefarious complicity, there was the possibility that our sources and methods, vis-á-vis Russia, could disappear.That was also alarming.I thought that was also something that at least the few people who might have been cleared to understand on the Hill, that they should know. …
Putin and Trump
My last question, just following up, is, did you feel like the incoming administration had a sufficient understanding of the threat that you saw in Russia?
Not at all, not at all.I mean, they were denying that there was a threat.The incoming president, when he was a candidate campaigning, actually called out from the podium, through the television, to the Russian government to leak more things, to reveal Hillary Clinton’s email if they could get them.I was actually shocked, because it was almost like they were calling out to the Russians to help them and to hurt Hillary Clinton.
… I was also appalled that President Trump was going beyond not taking the Russia threat seriously.He was actually praising President Putin, things that were unfathomable.
Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term
When you listened to Putin’s Crimea speech on March 18, pretty amazing speech, what did you hear?What was surprising, and what was not so surprising because of what the intelligence was that you had received? …
… I think what changed with Crimea and with that speech was the recognition that Russia was now no longer willing to be bound by international law and that Russia was willing, in fact, to cast aside international law and international institutions to achieve those objectives, to achieve those neo-imperial objectives, that sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.I think that was the part that was surprising to us.We knew there was a different vision operating, but we didn’t know how serious it was.We didn’t know that they would actually try to implement this vision, that they would try to make it a reality.
David, do you have anything?
Putin and Hybrid Warfare
Just one question.The Russians had boasted some about how they're prepared for hybrid war in the 21st century.A lot of people looked at Ukraine and said, “See? They can do it.”What does that mean to you?Did you see it?Did you talk about it that way, when it was unfolding?Was it different than what we'd seen in the past?
My definition of hybrid war means it’s a combination of conventional war, unconventional war, asymmetric means.And the Russians did employ that in Ukraine.… They did it through the little green men, the use of cyber ops, to cripple the infrastructure there in Crimea.Then they came in with the conventional forces.So that was the hybrid nature.They came in with conventional forces after the unconventional and asymmetric means were employed.
In Donbas, it was also hybrid, but in a different way.What they did was they had these separatist forces.They gave them weapons.They made them seem as if they were independent of the Russian military, but they actually weren’t.… The border was porous, so they would send tanks across the border.They had old tanks that were common to the Ukrainian inventory, and they would pretend that the separatists had seized these tanks from the Ukrainian military when in fact they had received them from the Russian military.
So they were blurring the lines left, right and center, and they knew that it was hard for us in the West to counter, because number one, we counter with the truth.You have to actually go about affirming the truth.And that takes some time.And again, they didn’t even care sometimes if they were caught in the lie, if they could have this veneer of deniability.
Done. That’s it. That's it.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
