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Poor communication and vague pronouncements threaten to prolong the war. I recently spoke by phone with Angela Stent, an expert on U.S.-Russia relations who served in the Office of Policy Planning under multiple Administrations, and also on the National Intelligence Council. Stent is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; her most recent book is “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether Biden’s comment will affect Putin’s Ukraine strategy, what a plan for Ukrainian “neutrality” might look like in practice, and the biggest mistake in post-Cold War American policy toward Russia. You’ve written a lot about the ways Russia and the United States interact, or don’t interact. And there’s been a lot of angst about Biden’s comment. Very specifically, what is the problem with the comment? Why is it something that an American President should not say, if in fact you don’t think an American President should say it? Well, first of all, it was obviously from the heart. He’d spent the day partly with refugees, and I’m sure it was a very emotional day for him to be in Poland and see all of that. And he obviously meant what he said. The reason it’s problematic is that world leaders aren’t supposed to say things like that publicly. And I think people have been concerned because there’s a war going on, and the concern is that making a remark like that could make things worse. European leaders, particularly President Macron, of France, have complained and said that they are trying to negotiate with Putin, and that they are trying to end the war, and that comments like this aren’t helpful. All of those who are involved in these ongoing negotiations prefer some ambiguity here. And that’s why there have been concerns about this. But obviously there are people who think that he said what he felt and it was O.K. to say it. Just to nail down on what the concern is: Is the idea that Americans should not say things like this because it’s not our business who the leader of Russia is, or Putin will use it as propaganda, or this would change how Putin personally views the West or change what he’s able to convince his citizens about what the West wants? What do you think the heart of the concern is? Look, Putin has been saying for years that the United States wants regime change in Russia. He said that explicitly, that “they’re trying to defeat us, invade us, cut us up.” So the fact that this was said explicitly is not going to change his view of the United States, which is pretty bad, and he has already convinced himself that we want regime change. It’s not really going to change what the Russian population thinks, because Russia’s state-run media has been telling them for a long time that the United States is the enemy, and that it was going to use Ukraine as a way of invading Russia. I think it’s more that we officially, as the United States, don’t go around saying that we want regime change, and the line is that it’s up to the people of country X to decide who their ruler is. Sometimes we do go around saying that we want regime change and decide that for other countries, but, yes, go on. Yeah. Saddam Hussein, for example. But I think it’s partly because what we’re supposed to say, or what it’s politically correct to say, is that it’s up to the citizens of each country to elect their leader. But I think there is also, possibly, a concern not that Putin’s view of the United States has now changed but that Putin and the people around him can use what President Biden said as a way to justify an even harsher military onslaught in Ukraine, and maybe to prolong the war. I personally don’t really think that saying something like that is going to have an impact on what they actually do, but the concern is that they could use what he said to justify that. Right, but then it seems like everyone is playacting to some degree. Putin is pretending that he’s found something new out, his propaganda will say the same thing, and people in the West will say, “You shouldn’t have said this, because Putin’s going to use it.” Yeah. But I think the other thing is the European allies. Biden has worked very hard, and he’s been very successful in getting everyone on board with his policy. And I guess to say something like that, which is not what the other European leaders are going to say, could also cause some more ripples in trying to keep this coalition together. I was reading your most recent book, and one point you make is that it can be especially important to have communications between the American and Russian Presidents because there aren’t that many lower-level diplomatic communications, or as many cordial relationships between the two countries at many different levels as there are with American allies, and so on. Is that a fair characterization? Yes, and I would say it’s even more so now because of all the expulsions of diplomats and spies in the past few years. We have a skeleton staff at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. We do have the Ambassador, who is a holdover from the Trump Administration. He hasn’t gone, thank goodness. But there’s really very few channels for communication left anymore. And, whereas you do have European leaders who’ve met with Putin physically, or speak to him daily on the phone, apart from a couple of phone calls that President Biden had with Putin in the last month, as far as we know there has been no direct communication between them. Is that problematic? Do you think that the White House should take more of a proactive approach to talking with him? Yeah. I think a number of people have for the past month been saying, “If only there was someone, an American, who could go and have a private channel and talk to Putin.” Henry Kissinger used to meet regularly with Putin as a back channel. And now, again, as far as we know there is no one who is performing that function, and, in a way, it would be good if there could be someone who could meet with him. I don’t know what it would produce, but at least make the gesture of trying to figure out if there’s some other way of getting through to him. It’s very difficult to do that, but I think it would be better. I think the lack of communication at the top is something that has to worry us. There are channels of communication. We know that at lower levels, for instance, there are military channels still going on so that hopefully there won’t be any direct conflict between Russia and any NATO member. But that doesn’t seem to be happening too much at the higher levels. You’ve written extensively about the Russian-German relationship going back to the Cold War. There’s been a lot written in the West about how this has been a transformational moment for Germany in terms of its military, in terms of its energy supplies. But Volodymyr Zelensky has seemed, when he’s talked about it recently, more skeptical that Germany has completely gone in this direction, and moved away from Russia. What is your sense? Well, on the one hand, it is transformational, because in the February 27th speech that Chancellor Scholz made he jettisoned fifty years of Ostpolitik. And the premise of Germany’s Russia policy was that you always have to have good communication with Russia, that you’ve got to engage Russia, and that economic relations and importing Russian energy will have a beneficial effect on political relations. And then obviously the guilt for what happened in the Second World War. And so he threw that over. He said, “We’re going to supply the Ukrainians with lethal defensive weapons,” which Germany refused to do before. He said, “We’re going to spend more than two per cent of our G.D.P. on defense.” He said, “We won’t open the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.” And they have now said that they’re going to try and wean themselves off Russian gas. So, on the one hand, that is a major turnaround, but from Zelensky’s point of view it isn’t enough. I guess the Ukrainians are really trying to push the West to stop importing all Russian energy, because they claim, rightly, that as long as people are buying Russian energy it enables Russia to avoid the worst impact of the sanctions, and it fills the Russian state coffers. So he has been very critical of Germany, and of course he even talked about what the Germans did to Ukraine in the Second World War, probably to justify that. There has been a remarkable change in Germany, but I also would note that on Sunday there was a big demonstration in Bonn of solidarity with Russia. They were largely Russian-speaking Germans or Germans who have come from Russia, whose ancestors were living in Russia. So there is still sentiment in Germany on the right, as there is in the United States, that is more supportive of Putin. But I think in general it’s unlikely that the German government is going to move away from importing Russian fossil fuel for some time to come, because there have to be alternatives, and you can’t just flip that on and off. In terms of any possible endgame, Zelensky has made noises that he’s willing to accept certain things, but not other things, and it’s hard to know what’s a negotiating position and what are real red lines for him. But one thing that keeps getting discussed is this idea of Ukrainian “neutrality.” Can you explain what that might mean in practice? Sure. So, until fairly recently, the Ukrainian constitution said that Ukraine will be a neutral country, i.e., that it was not looking to join NATO, and there’s nothing else to join. In 2008, there was a NATO summit, in Bucharest, when the Bush Administration was pushing its allies to grant Ukraine and Georgia membership action plans—in other words, something that would give them a perspective to join NATO. And the allies balked at that. The Germans and French said, “No, we’re not going to do that, because this is going to provoke Russia.” So they came up with an unfortunate compromise, negotiated in all-night-long sessions, and said that Ukraine and Georgia will join NATO, without having any sense or commitment to what that meant. And there has never been, since 2008, any program to try and integrate Ukraine with NATO. Ukraine has its own special relationship with NATO. It meets regularly with NATO, but, in other words, nothing was ever done to advance Ukraine’s NATO membership. And then when you had the revolution after 2014 and the new government came in, the constitution was changed to say that actually Ukraine would like to join NATO. And that was obviously a result of Russia annexing Crimea, and starting a war in the Donbas, and they felt much more threatened by Russia. So, today, when Zelensky talks about neutrality he means Ukraine will reluctantly agree that it doesn’t have an aspiration to join NATO, because it knows that’s not happening. But, in return for that, what Zelensky wants—and this is where it gets problematic—are security guarantees. When you say security guarantees, are we saying guarantees from the West, that they will help out, or guarantees from Russia, that Ukraine will not be further attacked? What’s not clear here is exactly what he means by it. I’ll leave the Russian part out of this. What he wants are guarantees from the United States and certain Western countries that, if Ukraine were to be attacked, they would come to Ukraine’s defense. And the issue with that is, that’s exactly what NATO Article Five guarantees are. Ukraine won’t join NATO, but it wants guarantees that, if it is attacked, they’ll come to its assistance. And so that is going to be problematic. How would you negotiate that? And how far would the U.S. and other NATO countries be willing to go in order to guarantee this? Now, people have also thrown out the Austrian State Treaty from 1955 as a model, because, in 1955, the Soviet Union, and then the Western powers, agreed that it would withdraw their troops from Austria, and that it would remain neutral, and that was kind of guaranteed legally. But the point is that the Soviet Union didn’t have any designs on Austria at that point. It was willing to let Austria be neutral because it had the rest of the Eastern Bloc. So we’re really not in an analogous situation today, where Ukraine wants Russia to sign on to say that it guarantees Ukraine’s neutrality. How credible would that be? The fact that Ukraine is willing to give up its aspirations to join NATO does meet one of Russia’s demands. The Russians have demanded no NATO enlargement and no NATO membership for Ukraine. But the details would be difficult. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it means it would be problematic. I don’t know if this would be a good analogy or not, and it may not seem particularly heartening to the Ukrainians right now, but I think some people would say that American policy toward Taiwan in the past few decades has exhibited some of the benefits of fuzziness. Taiwan is obviously not part of NATO, and it’s not exactly clear what America would do if Taiwan were attacked. But there’s enough ambiguity in American-Taiwanese relations that Taiwan feels some sense of security. I think that is a useful analogy. The issue is: Would that be enough for Ukraine? We know that China’s ambition is to reabsorb Taiwan. There’s no question about that. The issue here is Russia’s intentions. I don’t know that there is an endgame; there are going to be a series of things that could happen. You could have a negotiated partial settlement, and there could be a lull in the fighting, and then things could pick up again. So you could have an arrangement where there was some ambiguity. And then you just have to hope that Russia didn’t kind of recoup and decide to go back in again, but that’s a possibility. That’s obviously not what Zelensky would like, but he may have to settle for something less than what he would want. How do the last few months make you reëvaluate the post-Cold War period in America-Russia relations? Do you think that there was anything that could have been done differently or should have been done differently? I do think a mistake was this Bucharest communiqué in 2008, because the fact that it’s in black and white there, that Ukraine will join NATO, even though there was no intention from the part of NATO to do anything about this for a long time, allowed the Russians to seize on this and use it as one of the main excuses for what they did. Having said that, Putin has never accepted that Ukraine is a separate country from Russia, and he probably always had designs on reincorporating Ukraine. It’s just that no one was quite sure what the timing was. And what about in terms of Putin? Has your view of him changed? I think what’s changed my view, or what I might not have predicted, were the risks that he’s taken. So if you look at the war in Georgia, in 2008, the Russians went in there, they defeated the Georgians, but they didn’t take the capital, Tbilisi. And they didn’t depose Mikheil Saakashvili, who was the President, whom they loathed. It was a limited incursion. They recognized these two entities as independent, and then they left. If you look at what they did in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea, there was no bloodshed. They started a war in the Donbas region, but they didn’t continue it. They sort of partially withdrew, even though the fighting continued. So it seems as if this whole-scale invasion of Ukraine and telegraphing it—I mean, we knew what they were doing, and we told them that we knew what they were doing—are not things I think that anyone would have predicted. And I think the other thing that maybe we overestimated was the extent to which Putin had rebuilt the Russian armed forces after the Georgia war, where they won, but they didn’t perform that well. And clearly the Russian military is not performing nearly well enough in Ukraine. And we see just the lack of preparation, the miscalculation about whether they would be welcomed with open arms, the fact that they didn’t even prepare these young soldiers to tell them what they were doing. But Putin has been pretty consistent all along in refusing to accept Ukraine as a separate country, and also in saying that Russia has a right to a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space. Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
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