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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and for all the anticipation over what might happen in Ukraine, there does seem to be some breaking news from Ukraine this morning. The situation seems to be heating up to what a state department spokesperson called a crucial moment. We're joined now by Anton Troianovski, New York Times, Moscow bureau chief, and The New Yorkers International Affairs writer, Robin Wright, with the latest Anton and Robin. Thanks very much for coming on.

Robin Wright: Great to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: Anton, I'll start with you in Moscow. What can you tell us?

Anton Troianovski: Well, it is absolutely a very tense day. Another tense day in this crisis that's essentially gone on for two months or more now. I think I'd say the big thing that we're really seeing today is just the enormous gulf between the American portrayal of this crisis and the Russian one. As the US is saying an invasion could be imminent. The Russians actually published an official letter to the United States that said among other things that there was no invasion being planned. The Russian defense ministry continues to say that troops are being withdrawn away from the border area.

As you mentioned in Ukraine, there has been heightened shelling along the line of contact between Ukrainian government forces and the Russian-backed separatists. That's obviously very much short of the invasion that everyone is afraid of.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Robin, what's your best take on that shelling and how new and different it is. If this is the start of it if there's an it.

Robin Wright: Secretary of State Blinken spoke at the United Nations today and mentioned the shelling and said that this could be one of the false flag operations that the US has been warning about now for a couple of weeks. There's a concern that there will be a false provocation that will then allow the Russians to justify some kind of military action or cyber attack. Blinken was very specific in using the kind of language they've been using off the record or behind the scenes.

He even mentioned that the Russians may attempt a false flag operation involving chemical weapons, which is the first time we've heard language like that. President Biden spoke in Washington today just before leaving for Ohio. He again said he expects a military operation within the next several days. I did a briefing this morning with people of United Nations, and they said that all points are heading in one direction. There's a very grim sense in Washington that Russia has virtually made the decision and that this is something that could happen next week.

Remember on Sunday, we have the conclusion of three major events. One is the Olympics. The second are the operations that Russia is conducting jointly with Belarus. The third is the Munich security conference where you'll have more than three dozen heads of state, including the American vice president and the secretary of state. One last thing is that in his speech at the United Nation security council this

morning, Tony Blinken also said he had written, Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister today urging him to meet with Blinken in Europe sometime next week to talk through the US proposals and the Russian response which the United States only got today.

Brian Lehrer: Robin, let me stay with you since you brought up false flag operations, which of course would be something that is staged to look like the Ukrainians did it, but really the Russians did it. The Russians would have an excuse to say, "Look what the Ukrainians have done. What an atrocity, we have to go in as a defensive measure." There was some kind of artillery strike that damaged a kindergarten today in Ukraine. Are you aware of that and familiar with it enough to describe what happened?

Robin Wright: I know a little bit about it, but I think they're still looking at the specifics of it. There was shelling as there often is in Eastern Donbas and in the process a kindergarten was hit. Apparently, no one was injured, it hit a floor and the children were on a different floor, apparently having lunch or something. This is just the kind of humanitarian, tug at your heart incident that Russia appears to be trying to sell.

The Russians also released a report overnight, the joint investigation with RT, which is a Russian television channel and a propaganda outlet, that lists various accusations, dating back months of what it describes as genocide by Ukrainian forces against the separatist and so forth, including finding a mass-grave and various other things. This is part of a pattern Ukrainians, I think have their own version of events. The United States, as far as I know, has not given us a specific forensic of it.

Brian Lehrer: Anton Troianovski, New York Times Moscow bureau chief, I see from a Times story, Ukraine blames Russia backed Ukrainian separatists who want to join Russia, I guess, or make their own pro-Russia government for an artillery strike that damaged the kindergarten that New York Times headline, what can you tell us about it from your post in Moscow?

Anton Troianovski: Well, that's right. As Robin's said, there was a strike that hit a kindergarten in the government-controlled part of Eastern Ukraine wounding three people. What we're certainly fearing here is that this shooting and shelling that does occur, unfortunately, with some regularity in that region, that it could flare up into something broader. Of course, this all becomes more dangerous in a situation where you have 150,000 Russian troops masked around Ukraine.

The Russian have said, they're not planning to invade Ukraine, but they've also said as Robin noted that if there were to be a Ukrainian offensive against the Russian-back separatist in that region, that Russia would respond and that it would actually respond to such an extent that it would end Ukrainian statehood that's a term that they've used. This is also obviously all happening against the background of these very intense, fast, high stakes negotiations that Putin is pushing with the United States to redraw the whole security architecture of Eastern Europe. We can talk about that separately, but from Kremlin's perspective, this all isn't even just about Ukraine, it's about more than that.

Brian Lehrer: Russia, I see expelled, what's termed the second most senior diplomat from the US embassy in Moscow. Anton, I'll stay with you for that since you are in Moscow. Who is that and what is that a signal of?

Anton Troianovski: Well, that's the second-ranking diploma in the US, the deputy to the ambassador. We don't have all the details on the circumstances of the expulsion, why it happened. It does not, from what we can tell, appear to be directly connected to the Ukraine issue as you might know, the US and Russia. Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Go ahead.

Anton Troianovski: Yes. It's not directly connected to the Ukraine issue with the US and Russia have had now for several years back and forth about issues around visas and embassy staffing. The US, you might recall closed down the Russian consulate in San Francisco, Russia closed down the American consulate in Saint Petersburg. This seems to be part of that back and forth, but the timing is certainly quite notable here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for Anton Troianovski, New York Times, Moscow Bureau chief. You just have to call our little New York call-in line, and you could be talking to the Moscow Bureau chief in Moscow for the New York Times and Robin Wright, the international writer for The New Yorker, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer as we talk about these breaking developments from Ukraine.

Anton, you just mentioned the bigger picture there. I want to ask you about the bigger picture. What is Putin asking from the United States in terms of a larger security structure and why is the United States saying no?

Anton Troianovski: He has really massive demands that a year ago you couldn't even imagined anyone considering. He wants to basically roll back the presence of a NATO and the West in a broad swath of Eastern Europe. He basically wants to recreate some of that sphere of influence that Moscow had in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Ukraine is of course key to that. Ukraine has stated the aspiration to join NATO. NATO has said that Ukraine will join the NATO alliance, though they've also said it's not likely to happen anytime soon.

Russia wants the US to guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO, that other former Soviet countries that aren't part of the Alliance yet, like Georgia, would never join NATO. Beyond that, it also wants Western forces to leave countries that joined NATO after 1997, and that's a very explosive issue, because we're talking here about Poland, Romania, the Baltic states, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia. Basically, all countries that used to be either part of the Soviet Union or dominated by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and that see Russia as a major threat.

The Kremlin says, all of this is actually a security threat for Russia, and it all has to be changed, and so it's pursuing this intense diplomacy while backing it up on the ground with those threatening looks.

Brian Lehrer: Robin Wright, why would this be unacceptable to the United States? One could make a case that we don't need a bureaucracy, NATO, that necessarily in includes Ukraine on paper, in order to be ready to go into Ukraine militarily some day under the right circumstances, if there was really a need for it as perceived by the American public and other people in the West. We don't need Ukraine to be guaranteed permission to enter NATO if we ever wanted to be, and by the same token, the Cold War's been over for more than 30 years. Why should the US be stationing tens of thousands, maybe it's hundreds of thousands of troops all over Europe in 2022.

Robin Wright: One of the things we found over the last week that the Cold War may not in fact be over. That nationalist forces have left the issues of the Soviet Union and the last Cold War very much on the table. We're seeing this play out. Let's remember that the principle here is that NATO, United Nations andTribes, and it's Charter, that every government has the right to determine its own security.

In 2019, Ukraine passed a resolution that said it wants eventual membership in both the European Union and NATO. The reality is that this is all a canard. This is a manufactured crisis by Mr. Putin, because Ukraine is not eligible. There are issues such as a disputed border, that would have to be settled, a lot of political reforms that would have to take place. This whole idea that there's an imminent threat to Russia if Ukraine joins NATO, or the European Union, it's an illusion, and that's the tragedy, or the travesty of all of this.

It's the principle at stake, and the idea, as Blinken said, in the speech at the United Nations this morning, that no country can either change the borders of another country, or determine how it secures itself or where its alliances are. You can make the argument about is NATO relevant. The irony of Mr. Putin's challenge over Ukraine is that he's made NATO ever more relevant.

Last year at the Munich Security Conference, the theme was Westlessness. In other words, that the West didn't have the kind of purpose it did, and was it as relevant as it was in the past. I think this crisis has mobilized the Western alliance as nothing we've seen in at least three decades. This could in some ways backfire long term, but the stakes, I totally agree are so much bigger. They are about issues of democracy and freedom, and a country's right to determine its own future, rather than be forcibly absorbed or sucked into another country's sphere of influence.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from Bodan in Richmond, Virginia. He says he is Ukrainian. Bodan, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Bodan: Hello, yes, I'm a New Yorker, and we have to understand this crisis. First of all, there has been shelling across this line of contact since 2014. One has to understand that this has been created by the Kremlin. President Putin believes that Ukrainians do not deserve to have their own country, and he has stated that in an essay which has been translated, and you can go to his website and read it. He feels that he has the complete right to erase the country.

That seems improbable and it's not going to happen, but everything here depends

upon the thinking of an aging 69-year-old man who has been isolated because of COVID restrictions, and who is thinking of his legacy, because he's 69 years old, and he thinks of himself as Peter the Great and he wants to rebuild a Russian Empire.

Brian Lehrer: Hold on, Sir. I'm going to leave it there for time. Thank you very much. Anton Troianovski, New York Times Moscow bureau chief, how much is that analysis that you think the facts bear out?

Anton Troianovski: I think it's true that Putin is thinking about his legacy, and he did publish this 5000 word essay on the Kremlin website, last summer in Russian, Ukrainian and English, talking about Russians and Ukrainians being one people, claiming that the West is building up, "anti-Russia in Ukraine". That is basically using Ukraine as allegedly a platform to threaten Russia. The one thing though about Putin potentially erasing the country, I do want to point out and I point that out in my stories in The Times. Here in Moscow, if you ask analysts, both liberal pro-Kremlin, anti-Kremlin, really most people who have studied Putin and watched Putin closely over the last 20 years, they overwhelmingly believe that what we're seeing here is a bluff.

That Putin wouldn't actually launch a full invasion of Ukraine, because that would be just such an enormous departure from his behavior and his tactics over the last years.

If you take his other military interventions, Syria, Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea and that proxy war in eastern Ukraine, that we were just talking about, all of those things were basically done in a way that was really managing the risk, managing the downside, from the Russian perspective. Whereas this would be an enormous escalation, and so a lot of folks still see this as a negotiating tactic, as a way to get the West's attention, rather than Mr. Putin actually being ready to invade.

Brian Lehrer: Robin, we have about a minute left. How do you see the risk-benefit equation for Putin of actually invading Ukraine?

Robin Wright: US calculation is that Putin faces the same problem of the United States did in Iraq in 2003. What is the exit strategy? What is the long game? The US thought it could go in, change a government and withdraw. Putin may think that he can go as far as keys and ensure that there's a friendlier government in power and then pull out and the reality is, he could face a messy insurgency just as the US did.

One thing I had wanted to ask Anton, and we don't have time now, is that this week the Duma also passed a resolution urging Putin to recognize two regions of eastern Ukraine as independent countries. While they're moving aggressively on the ground, they're also moving aggressively politically. Putin has not done this. It may be all for show as well, but that would mean that there was no hope of going through the Minsk diplomatic process, because again, you have issues disputed borders.

Brian Lehrer: Anton, you can answer that in 20 seconds, if you can do it.

Anton Troianovski: That Duma Resolution is a great example of the many different ways that Putin is able to put pressure on Ukraine and on the international

community. With that Duma Resolution, he can say, "Look, I've always got this other approach I can take, I can just recognize those regions independent." He's using all kinds of needs to pressure the West and Ukraine into accepting his demands.

Brian Lehrer: Anton Troianovski is the New York Times Moscow bureau chief. Robin Wright is a staff writer at The New Yorker writing about global affairs. Thank you both so much for joining us on short notice to talk about the breaking events in Ukraine this morning.

Anton Troianovski: Thank you.

Robin Wright: Thank you.

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