TOP

Yevgenia Albats

Chapters

The FRONTLINE Interviews

Yevgenia Albats

Russian Journalist

Yevgenia Albats is an investigative journalist and editor-in-chief of The New Times, a Moscow-based independent political weekly. She is the author of four books, including The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia—Past, Present and Future.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Michael Wiser for FRONTLINE on Sept. 29, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Putin and the Presidents

Text Interview:

Highlight text to share it

Putin’s “Special Military Operation” Speech

So I will go back, but before I do, I want to ask you one question about more recent times, and that’s the speech that [Vladimir] Putin gives on Feb. 24 as he’s launching the war.He calls it a “special military operation.”And the speech is known as the “empire of lies” speech because he talked about the West, but he talked specifically about America when he’s invading Ukraine.What does that reveal, that he’s launching this invasion and he spends the first third or more talking about the United States?

I think Putin’s speech on Feb. 24, as many before and some after, reveal one and the same mindset: It is that the United States of America, as it was in the Soviet times and remains in the current Russia, is the Enemy No. 1.It is written in the Russian national security doctrine: All our nukes are first and foremost oriented towards the United States.That was the policy adopted back in the Soviet times.

Then for a while, in the late years of perestroika and the early Yeltsin time, when Russia became an independent state and sort of proclaimed of going on the road of democracy, the United States became a Russian friend.Russia was deeply dependable [sic] upon help from the side of the United States.

However, the minute KGB was back in power—or you can call them FSB, whatever you like—the idea that United States is trying to destroy Russia, that United States is Enemy No. 1, got back again.It was almost from start.So there was a short period of time when Vladimir Putin just became president of Russia and George W. Bush younger was the president of the United States.Strangely enough, George Bush younger, managed to see a “soul,” to look into the soul of this KGB guy.In fact, it wasn’t just a joke that many of us laughed at, but it also demonstrated the inability on the part of the then-State Department and the White House to understand the nature of people who came into power after Boris Yeltsin resigned.

It was to say that people in the White House and in the American State Department didn’t realize that the most repressive institution of the Soviet Union — the KGB, under the different acronym — came into power and was slowly but surely creating the possibility of returning back to the Soviet-type politics.

It wasn’t just because Vladimir Putin, as any guy who was trained in the Secret Service—you may say the same about guys from CIA or Mossad or MI5, etc.—that he was trained not to reveal his, so to say, “soul,” if he has any or he had any.But it is that his whole job training, his education, his life experience didn’t allow him to reveal any inner him, any true him to any representative of the West.West, for him, West was and, as he time and again proved it over these 22 years of his rule, remains to be the enemy.And United States, as the leader of the West, is the Enemy No. 1.

Putin vs. the United States

… So I’d like to get your thoughts on where he is at each of these stages along the way, and the first is as a KGB agent during the Cold War watching the United States.It’s framed in the U.S. as an ideological conflict, and [Ronald] Reagan talks about the “evil empire,” and it’s a fight for freedom.How does Vladimir Putin see the conflict with the United States?Does he see it in those terms?

You know, I mean, we can guess, because obviously Vladimir Putin doesn’t reveal his real thoughts or understanding of the world, but I think that he sees United States of America as his personal enemy and as an enemy of the corporation that runs Russia.Given that he equalizes himself with Russia, United States is the Enemy No. 1 of the Russian Federation.That’s, I think, his way of thinking.

And does he believe, when American presidents talk about democracy and freedom, or does he think that that’s an American form of disinformation?

I doubt that he believes in anything said or done by the United States or any other Western country.His understanding of the world is that it is an existential war between Russia, Russian Empire, and the West; that the West would like to, if not physically but morally occupy Russia.Some of the people from his closest entourage, like head of his national security council Gen. [Nikolai] Patrushev, believes that United States is eager to occupy Siberia in order to extract Russian resources and to put control over Russian gas and oil resources.

But I think the major point is that Putin and his people from the KGB, from the graduates of the KGB, they believe that the West is trying to conquer Russian culture and Russian way of life and Russian understanding of the world, and to replace it with its pervasive, as they believe, culture. …

That Cold War that he was trained to fight as a KGB officer, he doesn’t see it ending when the Soviet Union collapses.

I don’t think he thinks in terms of the Cold War.I think that he thinks in terms of this existential war.I think that their conspiratorial minds are filled with this idea that the West has been trying time and again to put Russian Empire under control, to take Russian resources, to make Russians believe in the ways of life that are not inherited from the Russian past.

Basically, Putin and his guys, they lead with their head turned back—back, back in the centuries of the Russian history, where the Russian Empire was conquering all peoples around it, when there was absolute monarchy in the country, and all these pervasions, like nonbinary people, for instance, don’t exist, because, of course, nonbinary people existed in order to destroy the Russian psyche, in order to destroy the Russian way of life, to try to conquer and—even though there are plenty, of course, of gay people around Putin himself and among his closest entourage, there are plenty of gay people.But that’s the way of thinking, that anything that comes from the West is dangerous.

After all, United States has conglomeration of the best academic institutions in the world.You possess huge knowledge about cleavages that exist in any given society; about regimes; about why people elect autocrats or resist against autocrats.Anyway, you possess the kind of knowledge that is extremely dangerous to Putin, to Putin himself.

Therefore, in the last two years, Putin’s people basically eliminated political science from the Russian universities.It was replaced by some total nonsense.Sociology no longer existed.Polls and pollsters, real polls and real pollsters, no longer existed.

So basically, this whole idea that we sort of should have to shadow Russian people from this bad influence coming from the West, I think that’s what’s happening with them. …

They live in this zero-sum game, and you know—you cannot change their way of thinking; you can’t just kick them out, replace them with somebody more open to the world.Many people, many American journalists and European journalists, write that Putin’s such a European man; he speaks freely German; he was exposed to German culture.And as I was reading this, I’m thinking, really?How did you measure that?How do you know that?This guy spent years when he was in German Democratic Republic—you know, this totalitarian part of Germany existed before the reunification of Germany—he spent and said he’s in Rezidentura.He was busy conducting all kind of disinformation campaigns and following Western professors and businessmen in Dresden, where he was stationed.He was busy buying carpet in order to send it back to Russia and sell it and so to be better off when he was going to come back to Moscow.

He wasn’t really—he wasn’t exposed to any Western culture.Yes, he spoke fluent German.Sorry, it didn’t help.Hitler, for God’s sake, also spoke fluent German, and quite some other very bad guys spoke fluent German.So no, he wasn’t the European.He wasn’t the guy exposed to the West.He, in fact, he took a different idea from his time working in the Soviet Rezidentura in Dresden, that West is the threat.West destroyed his job, which existed in DDR and then back in Russia.Because of the West, he was unable to become a spy; he was unable to join the intelligence department of the KGB.And when he returned back from Germany, he got this meaningless job as somebody who has to keep an eye on foreign students in Leningrad State University.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, Putin always had this very, very KGB view of the world.And of course, those 22 years that he has been in power in Russia, he became even more claustrophobic.And so everything that has to do with the West, any ideology, anything except for your technologies and of course cheap money that Russian state-owned, state companies were able to borrow in the European countries and therefore that’s what contributed to Russian prosperity in the past decade, every what was coming from the West presented a danger to him personally, to his closest entourage and to his view of Russia, the way it existed in his head.

Putin’s View of Ukraine

Because we’re leading into Ukraine, what was his view of these countries that became called the “near abroad,” of Georgia, of Ukraine, as the Soviet Union is collapsing?How important was that loss on who he is?

Let me put it this way.His view of Ukraine has been different over the years.When Maidan happened, and Ukrainian people kicked out corrupted President Viktor Yanukovych out of the country, Ukraine was seen by Putin as a threat because Ukraine, people, half of the population spoke the same language as people in Russia, and the other half spoke the language that Russians pretty easily can understand, that Russians were going to sort of consume wrong ideas in way they should protest and the way they should deal with their own president, or the president.So for him, what happened to Yanukovych was an open threat.

Secondary, Putin doesn’t believe that ordinary people are capable to unite and kick out a tyrant.He just doesn’t—this kind of conception of individualistic will doesn’t exist in his head.For him, it wasn’t Ukrainians who kicked out their corrupted president; it was the United States of America who was standing behind those hundreds of thousands of people who were—who came to the main streets of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and argued against the corrupted government and finally managed, despite 100 people who were killed by the Ukrainian or Russian special forces, managed to kick out a guy who failed to meet their expectations and to elect another president, then another president.

He couldn’t believe in this.Ordinary people don’t do this, in Putin’s mind.Ordinary people aren’t able to unite.Ordinary people aren’t able to be smart enough to distinguish between good politician and bad politician, good president and bad president.It is the United States who did that.So that was the second problem for him with Ukraine.

Third problem—and of course, any success in Ukraine, success of its government, success of its development, was, in his, Putin’s totally sick mind, was a real threat to him personally.Democratic Ukraine was to present a very bad example to Russians, because Russians were watching Ukraine very attentively.Russians were stunned when, despite all this rhetoric that time and again they heard on Russian propaganda TV that there were Nazis who were controlling Ukraine, that Ukrainian fascists, all kind of these Ukrainian nationalists, right-wing radicals who were controlling the public and political sphere of that in Ukraine, all of a sudden they got to know that those same “Nazis” elected a Jewish president into the presidency, and more than 70% of those supposedly Nazi Ukrainians did that.At the same time, at the time when they elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy into presidency, prime minister of Ukraine was Mr. [Volodymyr] Groysman, himself also a Jew from Vinnytsia.

So this didn’t come along well.Wait a second: Either they’re fascists—and for Russians—fascists and Nazis, these were Germans who came in 1941, invaded Soviet Union, and Soviet Union lost 27 million people in this great patriotic war.For them, there was a clear-cut, when you say “Nazi,” any Russian immediately have this vision of Hitler and his SS troops who are burning alive people in the villages all across the former Soviet Union.

So that was something that didn’t come along well.“Wait a second.”And then they learned that in fact Ukrainian nationalists, they failed to get into Ukraine parliament, Rada.Apparently they didn’t get the threshold.And once again, wait a second: Each and every Russian TV channel kept telling Russians that Ukraine is being run by Ukrainian nationals, and now they failed to get into Rada.

So I’m telling you all that, that for Putin everything that was happening in Ukraine was a direct threat to his power, because his subjects were going to get the wrong message, the wrong example.And his subjects sooner or later were going to say, “Wait a second: Ukrainians got the right to elect their own president and their own parliament, and we Russians, what’s wrong about us that we couldn’t do this?And we had one and the same guy for the 22 years in a row.”

Third, Ukraine is a very different—the structure of Ukrainian society is very different from that in Russia.Ukraine has what we call in political science weak state/strong society.It’s totally different from what existed in Russia: extremely powerful and dangerous state, and nonexistent society.So this is also that, for Putin, it’s very difficult conception to comprehend.What does it mean, strong society?Why do they allow for weak government?

Anyway, so finally, Putin saw the territory of Ukraine as a prospective battlefield where Western powers were going to bring their troops.And Putin doesn’t believe that Ukraine possesses any sovereignty; that it has, you know, its independent will as a nation.He doesn’t buy this.For him Ukrainians are little brothers, the way they were treated in the 19th-century Russian Empire, when Ukrainian writers, such geniuses as Nikolai Gogol, were not allowed to write in Ukrainian, or the language was called Malorossiyan, you know, and Ukraine was called Malorossiya, Little Russia.

And so Ukraine language was forbidden, and anyway, anything that could manifest any sovereignty of Ukraine was forbidden under Tsar Alexander III, and Putin basically sees himself as somebody who inherited into the ideology, into the conception of the empire that was developed by Tsar Alexander III, one of the worst tsars ever existed. …Anyway, but he sees himself as somebody who’s protecting this conservative ideology of the Russian Empire, of the Russian monarchs.And this ideology, of course, doesn’t allow—this conservatism doesn’t allow neither for human rights nor for nonbinary rights nor for women’s rights.The strongman, macho man who’s running the country, and everybody else’s place is just to be subordinate to this strongman.

So for him, you have to understand, Ukraine is antithetical to Russia in each and every way.But for Putin, Ukraine was this Little Russia, and Ukrainians were Little Russians incapable of speaking proper Russian, and we have to teach those Little Russians how to run their own territory.

Thank you.That’s so helpful in understanding the background of him.

You have to understand, listen, I hate Putin.With every fiber of my being, I hate him, because even though as a journalist I’m supposed to be sort of neutral, I cannot, because he is the guy who, as we speak, is destroying two countries and imperiling the life of 190 million people, 145 million who live on the territory of the Russian Federation and 44 million who live on the territory of Ukraine.

He’s the 21st-century monster, and I’m terrified by the fact that you and I and the entire world along with us, at least on this continent, but also in Europe, we watch what’s happening.Right now, as we speak, in Ukraine we watch as Russia, as we speak, annexing about 20% of Ukraine territory, and there’s nothing we can do about that.We just talk about that.And, we just allow this Hitler of the 21st century to prevail.

And really, it makes me sick and sad, and I feel like something’s so wrong in our arrangement in the world.Time and again, good people, or at least people with some decency over the world are losing to those evils who see murder as the way of running domestic and foreign policy.And I keep asking myself, is it really 21st century?What in that respect, what has changed since Middle Ages, after everything Europe went through, two awful wars, Middle Ages, then two awful wars, and at the same time the Renaissance and Reformation, etc.?And it turns out that we didn’t learn any lessons!That truly makes me really, really sick.

It feels like a tragedy, and it feels like a tragedy that was a long time coming.

Listen, it was obvious that it was going to happen, absolutely obvious.It was obvious back in 2000, when Putin became the president of the country.It was dead obvious when Putin ran his five-day war against Georgia.And once again the entire world said, “OK, no, no, we’re going to be blind.We’re not going to see this.We’re not going to recognize this.”It was obvious when he crushed Russian democratic opposition in 2012, when he got in Kremlin once again.It was obvious when he rewrote constitution.It was absolutely obvious.

I just— One thing I don’t understand: If it was obvious for people like Alexei Navalny, Ilya Yashin and others, people of the Russian opposition, and me who was writing about this, why it wasn’t that obvious to the rest of the world?Why American politicians kept looking for some “reset,” for, you know, “Let us please Putin.No, no, no, let’s not go too far.After all, he’s not that bad guy, you know?No, no, he’s OK, he’s OK. Yeah, you know, he—But this ruler—in the country as unlawful and unruly as Russia, maybe it’s a good idea to have a strongman like Putin is.”Why everybody was so blind?Why did we get to the point when the first thing that we wake up with and we discuss through the day, whether it’s going to be the nuclear war or not?Are we facing a nuclear war or not?Are we going to survive or not?

… But by 2007, he goes to Munich, and he gives a speech that sets off alarm bells, maybe not loud enough alarm bells, about how he views the West and how he views the United States.What had happened between that time?There had been the invasion of Iraq and the color revolutions.What happened between him trying to win over George W. Bush in 2007 when he’s saying this—it sounds like the speech he gives before the invasion of Ukraine—the West is manipulating things, or America is manipulating things?What’s that progression?

As you remember in 2001, when Sept.11 happened in the United States, Putin was the first to call President Bush.For him, it was—he was giving a hand to somebody who got weaker because of what happened.And he was happy to say, “We’re with you,” just to pat you a little bit on your American shoulder and to say that “Russia is with you; we are going to help you, if you need this.”

However, after that, elections in Ukraine happened.Once again we’re going back to Ukraine.And Putin was trying to install his own puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, who later became the president.He was trying to install his puppet with Yanukovych.However, elections turned out to be very close, and as a result, Yanukovych lost to his opponent, who represented the democratic forces of and pro-Western forces of Ukraine.

And Putin saw this as an assault on him personally.So once again, for him, West got involved in the Ukraine elections on the side of enemies of Russia and Putin himself, and he saw this as United States and Western involvement in the sphere of Russian influence as he saw—Putin saw all the former republics of the Soviet Union as sphere of Russian influence, as if to say that he can do whatever he wants on the terms of the former Soviet republics.And neither Americans nor Europeans should try to install their bases or to install their control or influence in those parts of the former Soviet Union.

So he saw this loss in the presidential elections in Ukraine as his personal loss, as if he made a deal with Bush that Americans are not going to interfere in the sphere of Russian influences.At least that’s the way he saw his talks with George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice and etc. …

So that was the reason.So Putin saw these—what happened in Ukraine, in the Ukrainian elections, 2004 Ukrainian elections, as something, as violation of sort of unwritten rules of the game that he thought he managed to establish with the West and with the United States first and foremost.For him, it was a sign that the West is not capable to obey to these unwritten agreements, and so he was very angry.And the result of this was this Munich speech, where he was, by the way, very honest, very sincere, very explicit.He said it all.Just the problem on the part of the West [was] that the West was unable to understand all the consequences.But Putin warned you.Putin told you all back then.And unfortunately, neither your scholars nor your policymakers nor your politicians managed to listen to what he said and to understand what he did say.

Putin’s Invasion of Georgia and the U.S. Response

… Let me ask you about Georgia, because the U.S. makes signs about, they should come into NATO.There’s sort of a half-agreement.Condoleezza Rice says we stand by our friends.Is Vladimir Putin testing the United States?In that moment, is he sending a signal to the United States and the West in Georgia?

When Putin started war in Georgia back in August of 2008, he was just showing to the United States that Georgia, as any other republic of the former Soviet Union, except for Baltic republics, was a sphere of his interests, of Russian interests.And so all these pro-Western stances by the then-president of Georgia, [Mikheil] Saakashvili, and the presence of lots of foreign advisers on the territory of Georgia, was—he got very angry about that.He knew that American philanthropist and billionaire George Soros was financing Georgian bureaucracy.¹

Foreign Policy: Who's Afraid of George Soros?

That was one of the important ways, nicer ways to overcome the kind of elite corruption that existed in Georgia before Saakashvili.

So he saw all that as an attempt on the part of the United States to establish control in this part of the Caucasus.And he didn’t want that to happen.So thanks to the mistakes that were made by the Georgian side, Putin brought Russian troops to Georgia.In a matter of three days, he reached the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi, and just a lot of people in Moscow and Kremlin managed to convince them sort of to say, President [Dmitry] Medvedev, not to conquer Tbilisi.However, as a result of that war, five-day war, the United States imposed sanctions and gladly forgot about the sanctions three months after.That’s it.

The United States and the United States government told Putin, “Don’t worry.We have to calm down our opponents on the Democratic side or in the Congress.But don’t worry.Everything’s OK.Yeah, we understand. You want Georgia? Have Georgia.”

So three months later, they totally—the United States totally forgot the kind of sanctions that were imposed on Russia.That was a clear-cut signal to Putin.

And the next year Obama comes in.He’s seen Munich and Georgia, and at that time, led by Joe Biden— … He was the vice president at the time, and he announces in Munich in 2009 the reset.And the message from that?It’s yet again America moving on or ignoring the warning?

If I remember properly, wait a second—President Obama came to Moscow, and the then-Vice President Biden came to Moscow in 2000, I believe ’11.

He was trying to convince Putin not to run for the presidency again.And of course it was, once again, it was wishful thinking on the part of the current president and then-vice president.It was this American arrogance for some reason, some people in the White House believed that it was OK to tell Putin not to run and he was going to say, “Yes, sir.”Of course, you know, he did quite the opposite.He was very offended by all this talk, and he realized that U.S. government was going to be very hostile to him personally.

I hope you can find video of the then-Prime Minister Putin with the then-President of the United States Barack Obama and the kind of—the way Putin spoke to Obama, it was upside-down approach.It just—the United States managed not to notice that Putin is a racist.And for him, the African American president was—they never believed an African American was going to win presidency.I remember: I was in Russia back then, and each and every pal, of Putin’s pals and his propagandists on the state-owned channels, they kept saying, “No, no, no, Obama is not going to win presidential elections because America will never, would never vote a Black man into president.It’s not going to happen.”

And that was—this also was the approach of these KGB guys around Putin, because they are racist by training.So Putin didn’t want to take President Obama seriously.For him, it was like, “Wow, it shouldn’t have happened, and we’re not going to recognize that it happened.”

Anyway, he was very hostile.Therefore, when Donald Trump became the president, things got back to usual, to normal in the minds of the Putin elite.

Rich guy became a president.Rich, white guy became a president—great.That’s exactly the way they understand the United States: only rich, only guy, only white who would become the president, can become a president of the United States.

Putin and the Trump Administration

And Putin had been saying America is essentially an empire of lies; they’re hypocritical; they don’t believe the things that they say.And Donald Trump arrives, and his rhetoric describing America sounds very similar to what Putin had been saying.

Exactly.When Donald Trump arrived in the White House, things go back to normal in the mindsets of Putin’s elite.Now it was—everything was the way it was supposed to be.Perfect.And now—and they were able to tell Russians that, “Look, that’s what the real United States.Look at Trump.That’s what—he represents a real America, not Barack Obama or anybody else.”Yes, so it goes back to normal.

Back to more normal in the mindset of—in this perverse mindset of Putin’s officials.

Did he think that Trump was undermining America, undermining NATO?

No, Trump was doing exactly what Putin was hoping he was going to do.For Putin, it was extremely important to divide the European Union, because it is much easier for Russian military to fight with one European country rather than with big European Union.So Trump was doing the kind of job that Putin was just dreaming about.… When Trump said that NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was obsolete, it was just honey for Putin.He felt like finally, finally, there is some guy in the United States who understands, who’s capable to see things the way they should be.

So yes, he was very happy.

Putin and the Biden Administration

Before I ask you about Ukraine, let me ask you one more question about the Obama administration and Biden.There’s a period, when Biden comes in 2011, he speaks to students, and he says the importance of democracy, and you don’t have to have a Faustian bargain.²

The White House: Vice President Biden's Remarks at Moscow State University

Hillary Clinton comes.And we hear that Putin took personal offense to this, but he doesn’t seem to have been afraid of what they were saying because he cracks down after that in the face of protests.What was the effect of Americans coming and talking about democracy in Moscow, and how did Putin respond to that?

I think it wasn’t about Americans.It was about those protests, about those hundreds of thousands of people who were marching in the streets of Moscow and other cities of the Russian Federation and were shouting, “Down with Putin.”For him, it was like, “It couldn’t be so; it couldn’t happen.Russians couldn’t say this.Russians are in love with me, Vladimir Putin.I’m macho guy.Look at me, you know, with my naked torso.I’m a great guy.”He loves himself to death.And for him, those protests that existed in 2011-2012 in the Russian Federation, he couldn’t believe that it was Russians themselves who were against him.These were, of course, Americans—Hillary Clinton—who was supporting, who was inspiring Russian opposition to go against him.

So for him, in that respect, Hillary Clinton became a personal enemy.And especially when during her campaign, Hillary Clinton said time and again, she repeated that “Don’t forget we’re dealing with a KGB man; we cannot trust him; he’s a dangerous man,” I think—by the way, Bill Clinton also, when he met Putin in late 1999, he wrote back then that this guy’s going to be very dangerous.

So I think, you know, your power couple, Hillary and Bill Clinton, they did realize the danger that Putin presented to the world.But unfortunately, it was last days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and Hillary Clinton lost election to Donald Trump.

… When Joe Biden says to Vladimir Putin, “Do not invade Ukraine,” at the end of 2021 and early 2022, and he said, “There will be swift and severe consequences,” why doesn’t it dissuade Vladimir Putin from launching the invasion?

I think that Vladimir Putin knows or understands the Western ability to make decisive steps pretty well.He knew that when President Biden said, “Don’t do this, or there will be consequences,” he knew that there were not going to be any consequences.We see that.Where are the consequences?

By the time Putin already decided to start the war against Ukraine, he moved troops in the spring of 2021, and everybody thought that it was just a threat on part of that of Kremlin.However, it was the first stage of moving troops closer to the border with Ukraine.He already made the decision to start the war, and he was moving troops over there.

And he also knew that all this chitchat about “there will be consequences,” what kind of consequences?Sanctions?Yes, you did impose sanctions.Only you forgot to impose the most important ones.You didn’t introduce embargo against Russian oil and gas, and you didn’t cut off Russian banks from SWIFT.That’s exactly what Americans did in 2011 against Iran, and that’s what basically made Iran to give up, or least pretend to give up on its nuclear program.

But you didn’t impose those sanctions against Russia.Yes, there were a lot of—there were a lot of personal sanctions.But still, the most important thing, sanctions, you didn’t introduce until now as we speak.So that was really important.And Russia kept receiving $1 billion a month, and that’s how it managed to finance its military operation in Ukraine.So what kind of decisive steps are you talking about?

You allowed this to happen.I don’t want to say that you’re guilty.Please, don’t take me wrong.It’s our Russian guilt.We destroyed Ukraine.We started this war.We turned our nation into the nation of monsters.We became the threat to the whole entire world.This is all our guilt.And it is my guilt personally, because I was in the Russian opposition, and we lost.And I’m citizen of the Russian Federation, so I bear all responsibility for what was done by the Russian army and Russian government, even though I never voted for Putin in my entire life.And I was always, since day one, in opposition to President Putin.

However, it’s true, too, that all these, “Oh, we’re going to take decisive steps,” please!Please go and learn what decisive steps are all about!Putin showed, gives you examples time and again what decisive steps are all about.He said that he was going to start the war; he started the war.He said that he was going to destroy Ukraine; he is doing this.He stated that he’s not going to allow Ukraine to divorce from Russia, and that’s exactly what he’s doing.He said that he was going to annex territories of Ukraine, and that’s exactly what he’s doing.

That’s what his decisive steps are all about.And you just talk.

Once again, it’s your right not to endanger your own businesses or your own foreign policy, etc., etc., etc., etc.But just don’t tell me about decisive steps.You didn’t make any decisive steps.You allowed for my country, Russia, to destroy Ukraine, and you keep allowing this to happen as we speak.

What you’re saying throughout this interview is that it wasn’t just at that moment when the troops were on the border; it was lack of decisive steps, of taking the warnings all the way back since 2000.

Listen, Putin time and again gave lip service to all these proclamations of the American decisive steps.He gave lip service, because he knows very well that it’s just words.It’s just about talking, talking and talking.

Once again, I’m not here to blame American presidents or American people.It is your life, your comfort, your country.You built a great country, and it’s your decision and desire not to be involved in this European mess or in the mess that exists in Eastern Europe.You gave a lot of money and a lot of weapons to Ukraine, and thank you for doing this, even though your weapons are killing my soldiers of the Russian army.

However, it was very important, and it’s still very important that United States provided military support to Ukraine, and thank you for doing this.But please don’t talk about decisive steps.

So let me ask you to wrap this up.Where are we now?Vladimir Putin’s in trouble on the battlefield domestically.He’s ramping up mobilization.There’s more of a danger domestically for him.He’s talking about nuclear weapons.How dangerous is this moment?How dangerous is this man at this moment?

I really don’t know how to read the crystal ball; that’s not my job.I see that the situation is getting from bad to worse.

I doubt that Vladimir Putin is going to start a nuclear war.He has been—he and people around him has been—has been preparing for the comfortable retirement for the last 22 years.They were stealing whatever was possible to steal from Russian budget and from the Russian wealth which belongs to the entire nation.

So I don’t believe that this government of millionaires and billionaires are ready to perish and to turn their wealth into the nuclear waste.

However, I’m very much afraid that Putin is going to destroy whatever is left from Ukraine.

I hope that West does understand that if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he’s not going to stop.He does understand that Europe in general is not going to reinstate relationship with him or with Russia.He does understand that especially countries of Eastern Europe will remain hostile to him.Therefore, he will go further.

I don’t know whether he’s going to, you know, he will get into Moldova, or these are going to be Poland or Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.I don’t want really to gossip about that because I don’t know.But I’m absolutely aware that unless he‘s going to get stopped, he’s going to destroy Europe.Just the way Europe failed to stop Hitler in 1939 hoping that Hitler was going to get satisfied with Czechoslovakia and then Poland.And then Hitler turned Europe into debris.

So I basically think that it’s time for the Western public opinion and Americans, first and foremost, as you are the major supply of help to Ukraine, to realize that we’re dealing with somebody who is no better than Adolf Hitler, and the situation is as dangerous as it was back in Munich of 1938 or on September 1, 1939.These guys, they don’t stop until they destroy everything around them.

And I guess that’s what we’ve seen in the last two weeks, was that he made that decision; he’s not going to stop.

He’s not going to stop.If the United States, once again, will choose the policy of tempting the tiger in his cage, trying to pet the tiger, you know, then unfortunately we will see the repetition of history, maybe not at the scale that existed during the Second World War II, but pretty close to what happened to Europe back 70-plus years ago.

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.