TOP

Michael McFaul

Chapters

The FRONTLINE Interviews

Michael McFaul

U.S. ambassador to Russia, 2012-14

Michael McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore conducted on June 23, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Putin’s Road to War

The Putin Files

Text Interview:

Highlight text to share it

Intervention in the U.S. Election

… Starting with The Washington Post article, we now know that in early August, the White House knew that Putin was the one that had ordered things because he wanted to defeat Clinton and to help Trump.Why?

Well, with respect to why, I think it’s pretty clear.You just have to look at what candidate Trump was saying to understand why Putin would prefer him as the president of the United States compared to Secretary Clinton.He talked about, for instance, “I would look into recognizing Crimea as being part of Russia.”If you're Putin, that sounds pretty good.He talked about NATO being obsolete, another thing that Putin agrees with him on that.He talked about lifting sanctions, another thing that President Putin wants the United States to do.

And most outrageously, for me personally, was when candidate Trump compared our use of force with Russia’s use of force.He was on the Morning Joe television program in December 2015, and he was asked about killings in Russia, and he said something to the effect of “Well, we do a lot of killing too.”¹

And that moral equivalency is an argument that the Russians make all the time, the Russian officials.

So, from that very simple point of view, Putin looked at Trump and said, “This is better for me.”But there's one more piece of it, is that Clinton said exactly the opposite on all of this.She was for strengthening NATO.She was for keeping sanctions.She would never in a million years recognize Crimea as part of Russia.And therefore, just on those points alone, to me it’s pretty clear why Putin would support Trump over Clinton.

And your thoughts about the fact that the White House had this information for five months before any information came out, the fact that not more was said so that the public could understand what we knew?Your reaction to that?

The people working at the White House at the time are friends of mine, and they're friends of mine to this day.I don’t want to trivialize how difficult their decisions were.They did not have good choices.It’s not easy to say, “Oh, they should have just said everything so the American people would know,” because of course, politically, they would have been criticized by candidate Trump and all Republicans as politicizing the election.

My own view is that they should have said more.And maybe it was not even that they should have said more, but the way they said it might have been different.The one big statement they made in October, which I think was a very good statement, important statement, but it wasn’t rolled out in the way—I used to work at the White House.I worked at the White House for three years in the Obama administration, and when we wanted the press to see our news, we had rollout strategies.We got people on the television.We brought journalists in the night before to tell them about it.I think they could have done more to elevate the substance.The substance of what they said, I think, was correct.

Also, the reaction of what we did … Your quote in the Post is, “The punishment did not fit the crime.”²

What do you mean?

I think there should have been a bigger reaction in terms of sanctions, after the election, so it’s no more about politicizing things.But let’s be clear: The Russians violated the sovereignty of the United States of America.They violated our sovereignty over one of the most sacred things we do.We choose our leaders.That’s the most sacred thing you do as a democracy.And they meddled in that.

So to me, there needs to be a big response to that.How many people should be on the list or not, we could argue about, but I think they should have made it bigger and costly to those involved, including people close to President Putin.

And the reaction of the president—at that point candidate Trump becomes president, his reaction to all of this; his reaction to the fact that he, to this day, he seems to not believe that Russia was involved.What is your view of that? What are the consequences of that?

I fear that our president is mixing up politics with national security and that he somehow believes, by acknowledging the Russian interference in our election, that will lead to people claiming that he was illegitimately elected.I think he’s wrong about that.I don’t care if you're a Democrat or Republican, you should be outraged if a foreign government tries to influence the course of our sovereign ability, our sovereign right to choose our president.

And everybody agrees.Everybody in my world agrees.The entire intelligence community agrees.This is not an argument about facts anymore, in my mind, at all.I think it would be a much wiser strategy to say, “I respect the intelligence community’s assessment, and I want to make sure it never happens again.”I think then people would stop talking about whether we should have a rerun of the election.I don’t know if anybody’s serious saying that.

But he, by covering it up, by denying it, continues to fuel interest.And people saying, “Well, hey, why is he doing that?Why is he denying basic facts?,” that leads to people wanting further inquiries about what the Russians did and what the Russians may have done with people in the Trump campaign.

The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister

2009, let’s go through the chronology.So you’ve gotten the title of the “architect of the reset.”

I've got to live with that.

… What's the hope?What are the goals?And describe that moment of when you all went with the button and everything else, and sort of what was behind that.

I was intimately, deeply involved with the new policy formulation toward Russia, that’s true, including that word, the “reset.”In my interpretation of what we were doing—I’ll let other people speak for themselves—there was no hope involved; there were only goals involved.And I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions of what we were trying to do.When I first had the chance to talk substantively with my new boss, the president of the United States, I said that several times: We don’t want to change the mood music here.We want to get things done that are in America’s national interest.We want to get the START Treaty done and get rid of 30 percent, or our ceiling lowered at 30 percent, of nuclear weapons.We want to get sanctions on Iran.… We want to develop a supply route through Russia for our troops in Afghanistan so that we’re not dependent on Pakistan.We want to get Russia into the WTO [World Trade Organization] so that we can increase American trade and investment that will be good for American companies and workers.Those are the goals of the reset.And by the way, all of those goals I just mentioned, we got done.We got done more than probably any administration in the first term of interacting with the Russians or the Soviets.

The means to do it was engagement and engagement at the highest levels.The means was talk to [Dmitry] Medvedev, spend time with him.That was the essence of the reset.

Did we understand the relationship between Medvedev and Putin?Did we understand the actual power situation?Did we understand that to some extent, and the fact that we wanted to empower Medvedev?What was going on?Or were there hopes there?Was it naiveté?

If the “we” is me, absolutely.I can be criticized, and the president can be criticized about what we should or shouldn’t do in terms of policies.But you can see, by my emotion now, when people say that I am naive about the Russians, I've lived seven years of my life in Russia; I've written thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of words about Russia by now.I met Putin in 1991.We were not naive.We understood the relationship.So I would say—and I had the opportunity and privilege of briefing the president on all things Russia for three years at the White House—I would never describe his view toward Russia and the reset as naive.

What I think people don’t understand is you don’t get to choose who is the president and the prime minister.You don’t get to choose their configuration.You deal with, because of protocol, your interlocutor.President Obama’s interlocutor in Russia was President Medvedev, not Prime Minister Putin.If you show up at the G-20 or the G-8 or the U.N. General Assembly or APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation], those are the times that diplomacy gets done.President Medvedev is at all those meetings; Putin doesn’t show up.

Now, I’ll tell you honestly, we tried.They were my ideas.We tried to figure out interesting, creative ways to have more engagement with Putin.When we went to Moscow in July 2009, we had a three-hour meeting with Putin.That was, of course, we wanted to do that.We tried to set up a bilateral Presidential Commission that the vice president, Vice President Biden and Prime Minister Putin could chair to give us another shot to interact with them.The vice president said yes; the prime minister said no.

And even in one of my more creative schemes, I created an excuse one day to call Putin because we were talking about Olympics.That’s his area of expertise, right?And that was the excuse.President Obama called him, and we had a discussion about our failed bid to get the Olympics to Chicago.We came in fourth, I believe.It was a pretty bad outcome for us.They had a very nice chat about how to win bids.Putin is an expert at that, and he loved talking about that.And when the president, President Obama said, “Hey, by the way, I’d like to ask you a little bit about Iran,” he said: “That’s not my job; I'm not president.But I happen to have the president sitting right here.I’ll put him on the phone.”And that was a clear signal to us of who was in charge of foreign policy and who was not.So, you know, that was our fate.And then, obviously, down the road, those two gentlemen changed their job in Russia.

Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown

I'm going to ask you the hardest question I'm going to ask you.You knew him in 2001?

1991.

If I said 2001, I—

I think you said 1991.Who is he back when he comes in, in 2000, or really in power, in 1998-1999?And who he is when he comes back in the third term in 2012?How does he evolve, and why?

I think he did evolve.In my world, the Russia followers, Kremlinologists, this is a big debate.But my own view is that he changed rather dramatically in a couple of ways.He never was a fan of democracy, and he made that clear in the first six months of his time as president in 2000.But he did have an open mind about markets and dealing with the West, engaging with the West.Over time, he became more suspicious of markets and more suspicious of the West.

People forget that in February 2000, very famously in an interview, when asked about NATO, he said, “Well, maybe we should join.”That was Putin back in 2000.That was not Putin when he came back as president in 2012.

The other thing I would say is he became much more suspicious.He was always suspicious as a KGB officer of the United States of America.That he was trained to do, and we were the enemy.But I think he became more suspicious over time of what I would call popular movements, spontaneous popular movements, and what he would call CIA operations to overthrow regimes we don’t like.

And that fundamental difference, by the way, was the chief tension in Obama-Putin relations after Putin came back as president, because I lived through the Arab Spring at the White House.We had nothing to do with what happened in those countries.We reacted to them just like everybody else did.But when we sat down with Putin, he had a different theory.He thought that we fomented those revolutions to overthrow regimes we didn’t like.And then when demonstrations happened in his country, in the same year—you’ve got to remember, it starts in Tunisia, but then it’s Egypt, and then Syria, and then Libya—and in the same year, people are demonstrating against their leader on the streets of Moscow.He sees a pattern there, and he sees our hand behind it.And that was the central drama over which we could never recover our relationship.

And Libya, for instance, and his paranoia, it seems, over Libya, and the stories of him watching Qaddafi’s murder video over and over and over again, did we, our government, ever sit down with him and sort of help try to explain that we did not cause this?

Yes.

I mean, we tried to temper this paranoia?

Yes, of course we did.You know, the most important substantive conversation early on that the president really dug into that, we were in Los Cabos in Mexico.Again, it must have been a G-20, because that’s where presidents meet, right.So there they were.And that’s the summer of 2012.Putin—this is his first meeting with President Obama as President Putin.By the way, we tried to set up earlier meetings, and he refused our invitation.We invited him to come to the White House right after his election, and he didn’t come.He chose to send Prime Minister Medvedev to that G-8 summit.So this was our first big, substantive conversation of that.

The president explained to him, he said: “Look, we’re not behind this.I'm not a regime-change guy.We are responding to these events, and in our view, we’re better to engage, to try to push these things toward peaceful evolutionary change, because if we don’t, they’ll end up as violent revolutionary change.”And Putin’s pushback was: “You know, you don’t understand this part of the world.You don’t know what you're doing.You should have supported [Egypt’s Hosni] Mubarak, and just like I'm going to support [Syria’s Bashar al-]Assad, because strongmen is what you need to have change.”

Now, Putin has a theory of change himself.It should be clear; it should be admitted.I think he gets a bum rap sometimes on that.He thinks that societies need to modernize, and they need to change, but they need to do it with a strong leader to guide the masses in the right way, in an evolutionary, slow way.After all, I think that’s what he thinks he’s doing inside Russia.

2012, when you get there [to Moscow], the demonstrations have been going on.Secretary Clinton has said some things about the need for good elections after it was clear that parliamentary elections were certainly flawed.And certainly that’s what the demonstrators believed.

That was a statement Mr. Putin didn’t like.

Yeah. Explain that.But also explain why—I mean, you met with some opposition leaders when you got to town, which ambassadors always do, and immediately you're targeted as well.Explain his attitude, how he turns the blame for the demonstrations on you and Hillary Clinton.

Again, remember, Putin had been in power for eight years as president.Those were great years in terms of Russia’s economic development and stability after a decade of depression.They lifted themselves out of that.Whether or not Putin had much to do with that, that’s a different debate.But if it happens on your watch, if you're an American president or a Russian president, you get credit for it.And he most certainly had a fantastic run during that period.

When he came back and ran as president in 2010, and in the winter of 2011, he wasn’t greeted with a lot of enthusiasm.There were instances where he was even booed at different events, and that was very unsettling for him.Then, in the midst of all that, running for president as a third term, not the same enthusiasm as you had before, all of these demonstrations happened.First of all, he was very upset.He was pissed at these people for demonstrating.He was like, “I made you rich; now you're turning on me.”But his second reaction, he was nervous.Remember, this is the year of the Arab Spring.And remember, the last time that those numbers of people had demonstrated on the streets of Moscow was 1991, 20 years earlier, the year that the Soviet Union collapsed.So that was a very unnerving thing for them.

They needed a political strategy to win the election, but also a strategy to suppress and to contain these massive demonstrations.That’s when it became very convenient to say that these protesters are supported by the United States or supported by Barack Obama and, when I landed there in January 2012, supported directly by me; to portray them as traitors, as enemies, the fifth column, supported by the West as a way to bolster his electoral base and as a way to weaken and marginalize the opposition.

The same media was saying that you were giving opposition leaders their instructions.You were paying people.And it got people following you around.Just describe a little bit about the pressures that were put upon you.

Well, that was my fate, right.Correlation is not causation, as we like to say here at Stanford, and the fact that I arrived in the middle of that had to do with our long confirmation process in America.Nothing to do with Russian politics.But in Russia, that was not the way it was portrayed.In Russia, it was portrayed that I was sent deliberately by President Obama to lead the revolution.And given my background as an academic, I've written about the political transitions and democratization, that was a very easy story.If you control the press, that’s a very easy story to put together.In fact, one of the top Kremlin people that I've known for a long time said: “You know, Mike, you are like manna from heaven for our campaign.I mean, you just showed up, and this was so easy.And you look like an American, and you act like one.”He was like, “Thank you for showing up when you did, so that we can create this story.”

And you know, it was frustrating for me, of course, because I wasn’t sent there to foment revolution.I was sent there to continue the reset.I'm Mr. Reset, not Mr. Revolutionary.But no amount of tweeting and conversation—that was just too perfect story for them.And yeah, that was my fate.

And the hatred he seems to have toward Hillary Clinton, the sticking this also on her—a lot of people go back and see this and also Kosovo earlier on with [President Bill] Clinton’s administration, there seems to have been an aggression toward them, a need to hit back at some point, and therefore, leading up to the elections, to some extent.Tell us what you know about—was that real?Was that façade, the attitude toward Clinton?

I don’t believe it’s about the Clintons.I think it’s about a Clinton.In fact, President Clinton had a pretty good working relationship with Putin and would see him subsequently after that.They would meet.I think it was really about her.It was especially about the perception that they had that when she made that statement, criticizing that parliamentary election, Putin said it himself.He said that was a signal to the protesters to go out and demonstrate.Now, that is not true.I know the demonstrators, and I have analyzed the data about the demonstrators.They weren't waiting for Hillary Clinton to do what they did, but he thought that we were being supportive of them.

And partially, Putin is right about that.Let’s be clear.We did criticize the election.That was a choice we made.I was part of that decision-making process.The idea that Russia should be more democratic, that’s an idea that Secretary Clinton held.You can say it’s neutral, and we just are for the process; we don’t care about the outcome.But if you're Putin, running for re-election against these demonstrators, it doesn’t sound neutral; it sounds very partisan, and he resented her for that.

There were other things, too, by the way.There were other things that she said that annoyed them.She once called one of his most important foreign policy projects, it’s called the Eurasian Economic Union, she called it the re-Sovietization of that part of the world.They really didn’t like that comment.I was called in by the Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov after that comment, and they let it be known they did not appreciate that.But that, in particular the perception that we were meddling in their elections, I think created some incentives for him to meddle in ours.

And Mr. Putin seems to hold a grudge.

He holds grudges, yes.

The reset is at this point over?

Yes.

I mean, is that what the assumption is in the White House at that point?

Well, in 2012, we had a debate about it.The Obama administration were a deliberative group.My view, and I wrote this at the time, I thought the reset was over in 2012 and that we needed to have a different approach toward Russia.I wrote about it and argued about it.But there was inertia, because the president wanted another START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] agreement and lower numbers.If you work on arms control, you don’t want to abandon that.Others wanted to move forward on trade and investment issues, so we didn’t abandon it.Most centrally was our diplomacy around Syria, where many senior officials, including the new secretary [of state], Secretary [John] Kerry, thought that Russia had to be part of the solution.So they weren't ready to pivot entirely away from that.But analytically, from my point of view, I thought the reset ended in 2012.

… You’ve written that one of these conclusions that he comes to, at this point, is that he needs to have the United States as an enemy, which is a very difficult thing to therefore fight and to accomplish things.Just define that point of view that you have about that.

We became the enemy again in Russia when he was running for president in 2012.Now, I think it’s important for your viewers to remember that just two years earlier, 60 percent—and some polls are even higher—of Russians had a favorable attitude toward the United States of America.He changed that.We didn’t change our policy.We didn’t do anything different.He changed that for domestic, political reasons.He needed an enemy so that he could say he was the defender against the United States and their evil allies, including, later in the story, when we support alleged Nazis that overthrew the government in Ukraine in 2014.

I think he’s trapped by that narrative.I think it’s very hard to tell your electorate and your supporters that I'm the fighter, and I'm the champion against this evil empire and then one day wake up and say, “Oh, now we’re going to cooperate with them.”I think that’s part of the drama you see today in terms of the difficulty, despite what President Trump has said and what President Putin has said, of trying to do another reset or another détente.I know the president doesn’t like the word "reset," so let’s call it détente.I think that will be a constraint for President Putin.

Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term

Let’s talk about Ukraine, 2014.Take us to that moment.How are we viewing it?How surprising is it?What do we perceive our role to be?And when it all goes kablooey, when Yanukovych flees, what are you thinking?<V MICHAEL MCFAUL> … I just want to represent my views sitting in Moscow as a U.S. ambassador and to realize that I see it through a particular set of—what's the right—prism, or whatever the right metaphor is, because my job is to understand what the Russians are thinking.And it was my view, at the time of the negotiations, is that Yanukovych was in a bidding war between us, the Europeans and Putin, and once Putin won that bidding war, which I predicted he would do, Yanukovych would pull out, take the money, and use that money to run for re-election the following year.And, by the way, that’s a rational strategy.Whether it’s good or bad, that was definitely my view, talking to people in Moscow about what they did.In fact, I met a very senior Russian government official right after the deal was done who told me: “We wanted to pay $8 billion. We had to pay $15 billion.But the boss said to get this done, so we paid whatever price we had to.”Nothing of that was surprising to me at all.

What was surprising to me was the reaction inside Ukraine.I just assumed he wouldn’t sign today, but we’re diplomats, you know; let’s start a new negotiation.That’s what we do.He’ll sign next year, and we’ll have a process.And lots of the things that happen in the European Union, by the way, are about process.So I didn’t think it was a big deal that he didn’t sign on that particular day.We would just start it again.But that was not the view of Ukrainians, independent Ukrainians, by the way.It had nothing to do with us, who said—[the Ukrainian journalist] Mustafa Nayyem most famously said on Facebook, “I'm pissed off about this, and if, you know, whatever X amount”—I think 10,000 was his number—“if 10,000 of you like my Facebook statement here, then we’ll show up in Maidan.”That was surprising to me, and that turn of events I would not have predicted.

Then we worked—not me personally, but our government—to try to help negotiate a solution, a peaceful end to that standoff between President Yanukovych and the opposition.The vice president was deeply involved in this, calling both sides.Assistant Secretary [of State for European and Eurasian Affairs] Toria Nuland was deeply involved with both sides, talking to both sides, to try to make that deal.³

Most importantly, the Europeans were the ones leading that charge.We were kind of supporting that.

Feb. 22 was a great day.We thought we had a deal.We thought we had a way out.The opposition, three leaders of the opposition signed it.Yanukovych signed it.I was in Sochi at the time, at the Olympics, on my Blackberry, a lot of “Hooyahs” and “Booyahs” about a great achievement.Several hours later, Yanukovych fled.

Some people in our government thought that that was a good thing, and that this was another revolution like the Orange Revolution.I personally was nervous, because there was just no way that Putin was going to allow that to happen and not react with something.And the rest is history.He reacted very emotionally, reactively, first to take Crimea.And when that turned out to be pretty easy, relatively cost-free, he doubled down in his intervention in [Ukraine’s] Donbas.And the way he did it, part of what we’re doing is tracking sort of the growth of hybrid techniques.So what happens in Georgia?What happens in Estonia before that with the cyber?What happens then in Crimea, and the lies involved, and the misinformation, the fake news and the hacking?And then kinetic, as well, in Ukraine.Describe what we’re thinking, that our government is understanding about this.I mean, you can track it.You can see what's happened.But perhaps we didn’t.But Crimea and Ukraine, eastern Ukraine, it becomes apparent that there is a new way of warfare that he is using that is very difficult to deal with.

I’d say a couple things about that.One, we were tracking it, and in our various scenarios, the idea that we didn’t think about this, that just is not my perception from the debates.All of government is about different options, about predictions, from the least to the most egregious; in this case, annexation.But to say that we were analyzing it does not mean we had good options to respond to it.

And I remind people that every time the Russians used force in Eastern Europe, whether it’s 1956 or 1968 or 2008 in Georgia or 2014 in Ukraine, we don’t have great options as a government, or as an alliance, in terms of how to respond to that.That said, my own view was the initial response to annexation, I thought—I had left the government by then.Actually, I had left the government right then.The day he went in was the day I flew home.Didn’t invade on my watch.But I think initially, the response from Europe and the Obama administration could have been a little more robust.Annexation, after all, is—“Thou shall not annex territory of thy neighbor” should probably be up there in the top 10 commandments of how to behave as a civilized state.

But then, when he went in into Donbas, in that operation, I'm deeply impressed by what President Obama and Chancellor [Angela] Merkel did.No time in history have we ever put together such a comprehensive response of containment and punishment.The chief of staff of the Kremlin has never been on the sanctions list, on the American sanctions list, until they did that.And now the numbers are substantial and, I think, correct.By the way, it’s affected me personally.I'm also on the sanctions list.I'm part of the tit for tat, so I can't travel to Russia.But that was the correct response.

But as you know, there's a debate that’s going on in Washington, within the White House, within certainly State Department as well, over the fact of arming with defensive weapons to the Ukrainians, and that was the line that we needed to at least draw to slap back at Putin more heavily, to make them understand how important this was.And that does not happen.Some people, to this day, say that we didn’t do enough, that the sanctions did not do enough.Your overview of that?

In real time, when that debate was happening, both in interacting with my friends in the government and publicly, I supported lethal assistance.I was on the record on that.I think that was appropriate.I had a set of arguments about it at the time.I do not think it was the critical—had we done that, everything would have changed.No way.That’s naive.I appreciated the counterarguments from Obama administration officials that that might have escalated things and that that would have been difficult for us to win an escalatory game.

But let’s be clear.It wasn’t just sanctions.We did comprehensive sanctions against—we, the United States, not me personally, the EU and the United States—against the individuals and companies.We bolstered NATO for the first time since the end of the Cold War, rightly in my eyes, so we did many things to make the NATO commitment, especially in the Baltic states, stronger.That was the right thing to do.

Third, we assisted to the tune of multibillion dollars of assistance, the Ukrainian government, with the IMF, with the EU money, with American money, to try to make that—and I think, of all those things, that is the most important thing.The way to defeat Putin is to have Ukraine succeed.That’s a pretty comprehensive—I could go on.But I think those are very hard things to do in diplomacy, and I applaud the administration for doing it.

But I will play the devil’s advocate.They still have Ukraine, or they still have Crimea, and they're never going to give it back.And they are still fighting a war in eastern Ukraine.

Yep, they don’t have Odessa.They don’t have Novorossiya.Do you even remember that word, Novorossiya?I hope you forgot it, because that was the word that they were using at the time to say, in the same exact way, that Putin talked about Crimea: “Who gave away Crimea? Why did they do that? Khrushchev was an idiot. That’s always been our land.”After that, he started saying the same thing about Novorossiya.He said: “That wasn’t theirs. That was always part of the Russian Empire.Maybe we should do that.”

And the fact that we’re not talking about Novorossiya, neither us nor Putin, that, I think, is a sign of success, first and foremost of the Ukrainian military.I want to make sure I'm clear about that.They fought them to a standstill.They defended their sovereignty.But we helped them in that.That's a good outcome.So yes, Crimea, that’s a long-term thing, though never say never.Lots of people thought that Estonia would also be part of the Soviet Union forever.It took 50 years, but eventually that was reversed.It wasn’t the best outcome, but it wasn’t, most certainly, the worst outcome.

So, just to clean up: this argument that we didn’t act harshly enough in Estonia, we didn’t act harshly enough in Georgia, and when Ukraine and Crimea happened, we didn’t put the red line down so that he understood.So he came, and he got involved in our elections.Why not? …

I don’t see those things as related in that way.I think that he took Crimea, and he intervened in our election.I don’t see it that way.I see them as separate, different phases of a major conflict, a major confrontation, multifaceted confrontation that we are having with Russia and we’re going to have with Russia for years, if not decades, to come.In each place, we need to have the right response of offense and defense.Of course we need to do things differently to protect our elections moving forward, but I don’t think it’s the result of what happened in Ukraine.

Putin and Trump

So with President Trump, when President Trump is making statements like, in the election, that sanctions can be negotiated, when his people go to State Department after he is in office and start talking about the fact that “We need you people to start figuring out how we unwind the Ukrainian sanctions”—

Yeah.

—what are you thinking?

I'm 100 percent for lifting sanctions on Russia, provided they change their behavior for why the sanctions were put in place.It’s just that simple.I think that it was incredibly naive of candidate Trump and occasionally President Trump.It’s a bit confused right now what their policy is.But to say we should just lift sanctions so that we can get along with Russia, what kind of policy is that?That’s not a policy.I would say this about France and Germany, by the way.The policy of the United States of America should never be to have good relations.We should have objectives that we seek, that we should define, and then we should figure out the right strategies to achieve them.And with respect to sanctions, I think it’s clear.If Russia gets out of Ukraine, then we should lift sanctions.But we shouldn’t do it just so we can have a nice summit in Moscow.

Intervention in the U.S. Election

When you heard the first time about the Russian hacking, and the fact that it was tied to the Russians, what were you thinking?Were you surprised that all of a sudden he’s bringing these—more and more we understand, the level of the hybrid war that he brought to bear, not kinetic, but everything else in his tool bag.What did you think?Were you surprised?And how should we understand this?How should we view this?

I was initially surprised, because it was really audacious.It was a fundamental escalation.This has never happened before in our country.We’ve never done that in their country.Even though we have the capability to do that, we've never done that.And in particular, the stealing of the data and then publishing of the data, that’s a qualitatively new style.And that suggested to me that the things I had said before publicly, when I was criticized as being a cold warrior and "McFaul, because they hassled you as ambassador, you became too much of a hardliner," on one hand confirmed my assumptions about the Putin regime in general, but it also, he upped the ante with that.

The second thing that shocked me, I’ll tell you honestly, was how indifferent the American people were to it.I was on TV.I published an article in August 2016 in The Washington Post talking about it, why he would want to do it and what he’s been doing.I was frankly surprised even by our own press, how we just didn’t really think it was a big deal.Somebody more sophisticated needs to explain that.This was a violation of our sovereignty.It’s—thankfully, people didn’t die as they did in 1941 or Sept. 11, but it was a violation of our sovereignty.I was very surprised by the indifference to it here in our country.

Putin and Trump

Final question: So where are we now?Some people say that we are at war, that we are in a second Cold War.How do you see it, and how important is that for us to understand?

The analogies are tricky.Is it a Cold War or hot peaks?I like hot peaks, just so it has the same connotations, but it’s somewhat different.And that’s what it is.I think there are lots of parallels to the Cold War, but there are also differences, both in the ideological content and in the methods in which we’re fighting about what you and I have been talking about, right?

But let’s make no mistake that Putin sees us fundamentally as a competitor when he’s in a good mood, as an enemy when he’s in a bad mood.He defines the relationship in zero-sum terms.He has shown that the cards that he has, the instruments of power that he has are much weaker than ours, but he has demonstrated that he’s intent on playing them in a way that we feel much more reluctant to do.And I don’t see anything changing, fundamentally, in his calculation about Russia’s attitude toward the West and the United States.

For 30 years, since the end of the Cold War until 2012, the project with Russia from the West was a, to support markets and democracy internally, and b, to support the integration of Russia into the West.Those projects for Putin are over.He doesn’t want to join our clubs.He doesn’t want to be part of our clubs and accept our rules.What I don’t know: Have we as a country and we in the West fully understood how over that project is in Russia?That to me is the drama about foreign policy.That’s the drama that the Trump administration is fighting about right now.To me it’s pretty clear, but it’s still a debate within the West.

Great. Thank you very much.

Latest Interviews

Get our Newsletter

Stay Connected

Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation

Koo and Patricia Yuen

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.