Brian Lehrer: Here, it's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We'll check on these developments around Ukraine to start off today. The Thursday summit with Vladimir Putin that President Biden has agreed to in principle, they say, as long as Russia hasn't invaded Ukraine by then. There's speculation about why either side would agree to this right now, is Putin just playing the West, as I heard someone suggest on TV this morning, while he provokes Ukraine into a pretext for an invasion or is he more for afraid than he admits of Western banking sanctions that would cut off Russian oligarch's money and turn them against Putin?

There's the chilling story first reported by Foreign Policy magazine that says Putin has a list of specific Ukrainians to kill, kidnap, torture or put in detention camps. After an invasion, the victims would reportedly include opponents of Russian domination, plus members of ethnic minorities and LGBTQ Ukrainians. The US has reportedly warned the UN high commissioner for human rights about that.

On the larger question of why this is happening at all, the analysis runs from: its defensive against NATO; how would we like it if a Russian military alliance wanted to include countries on our border?; to Anne Applebaum's provocative new article in The Atlantic. Have you seen this? That says, "The reason Putin is doing this is that he wants democracy to fail, and not just in his own country." Let's talk about this with someone with deep experience covering both the Washington and Moscow sides of it all, Susan Glasser, who writes about Washington for The New Yorker. She spent four years of Putin being an apologist...I should say, she spent the four years of Putin having an apologist in the White House, writing the letter from Trump's Washington column for The New Yorker and she spent four years covering Moscow for the Washington Post. Susan Glasser has also been editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine. That's obviously relevant, and is co-author of the books, The Man Who Ran Washington, about former Secretary of State James Baker, who was secretary at the end of the Cold War, and the book Kremlin Rising. Susan, always great to have you welcome back to WNYC.

Susan Glasser: Thank you so much, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: I see you tweeted out the Anne Applebaum article about it being democracy in Ukraine that threatens Putin. How much do you agree with her?

Susan Glasser: Very much. First of all, Anne is an important and very relevant historian of the region and of Ukraine. This obviously has long roots and resonates for a long time. Read her book on The Great Salmon created by Stalin in Ukraine and you'll see some of what she's written about the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II and its efforts to establish control and essentially dirty war-type takeovers of the countries in Eastern Europe after World War II. A lot of that playbook is still the playbook being used by Russia today and in recent years, so it's very relevant.

I think there's been a lot of misinformation, a lot of disinformation. You have political figures in the West, in the United States and in Europe on both the far right and the far left who have a real misconceptions about Vladimir Putin and have been amplifying and expanding on a lot of the untrue things that Putin has said about the reason for this manufactured crisis. Again, he created this crisis that we're seeing play out right now to the great tragedy, obviously, potentially of many, many people in Ukraine.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think an invasion that destroys democracy in Ukraine has implications for democracy in the US or anywhere else?

Susan Glasser: Absolutely. I think there have always been people who to put their heads in the sand at a moment like this. I understand that. In 1940, after Hitler invaded large swaths of Europe, only 7% of Americans wanted to have anything to do with the war. The America First Movement existed in one form then, obviously the last few years it's existed in a different form in the United States for some very good reasons.

This is a very ambitious effort not only to change the borders of his own country Russia and to take back over a country that has been independent for decades, but also an effort to revise the terms of global security in a way that suggests the US is no longer the paramount power or the guarantor of international stability.

Brian Lehrer: Is that a very 20th century analysis? Do you think or does anybody really think that Putin wants Russia to march through Europe like they did after World War II or like the Nazis did before World War II?

Susan Glasser: Honestly, Brian, I think that's part of our problem, is that we are so focused on there's either this or there's that. Either Putin is trying to restore the Soviet Union or he's just fine. We have so much evidence to suggest for two decades in power, Vladimir Putin has been systematically working, first, to eliminate a democracy inside Russia, and that's the part that I saw in the first four years of Putin's tenure, and then to revise the terms of the end of the Cold War, which he views as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century.

He's working in this century, he's working on hybrid warfare, whether Americans acknowledge it or not, Vladimir Putin has already attacked the United States. He did that in the 2016 election. In fact, if you go back and look at the Mueller report, what you see is a very interesting and important timetable that doesn't get a lot of attention, which is that was retaliation from Vladimir Putin for the United States and the Western response of sanctions in response to his first invasion of Ukraine and illegal annexation of territory in the Crimean Peninsula. The first such illegal annexation, really, since the end of the World War II era.

That's what happens when you leave a rampaging bully on the borders of Europe and there's no real resolve and no real sense of what to do about it. It's a huge, big problem and we let it essentially sit there and fester as an open wound.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your calls about the US, Russia, and Ukraine. Welcome here for Susan Glasser from The New Yorker at 212-433-WNYC. Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, Macron watchers from France, anyone at all you're welcome to call with a question or comment, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @brianlehrer. Susan, this development today of French President Macron apparently brokering this deal for a Biden-Putin summit on Thursday. Biden says, "It's a deal in principle as long as Russia doesn't invade Ukraine by then." Putin says, "The summit is not set in stone." What's the gamesmanship, or nicer word, diplomacy there from either side?

Susan Glasser: I think [inaudible 00:07:44] to call it a certain amount of gamesmanship. Certainly it's brinkmanship. We are really in the, I think the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called it the snake uncoiling here. The invasion force of something like 190,000 Russian troops, three sides of the Ukraine border beginning to move over the last few days into attack position. They are stationed literally in forward positions within kilometers of the Ukraine border, they are in forward camps that of be sustained for a long time. As the troops move into attack position, you're seeing a end stage public theater today.

Last night, basically, French President Emmanuel Macron played this shuttle diplomacy, talking to Putin then to Biden then to Putin again. In the middle of the night Russia time and Europe time, they announced that both sides had agreed in principle to possibly meet each other in person, Biden and Putin, barring an actual invasion. In principle, he's doing an incredible amount of work in that statement. I think today, what we're seeing, I'm following the reports right now of a televised, essentially, very theatrical Russian national Security Council meeting with Putin. I wouldn't bet even a dollar at this point on a boot Biden-Putin summit occurring.

Brian Lehrer: What's Macron's interest in that? Why is he in this story brokering this possible summit?

Susan Glasser: It's very interesting, the French historically, and that has proven true in this case as well, have taken their own view of foreign policy and going back to [unintelligible 00:09:38] and you see that with Emmanuel Macron as well, who by the way, is up for re-election this year and is playing a certain high-risk game actually by inserting himself in a crisis where he may or may not be able to effectuate any positive outcomes.

From the beginning, he has been focused on diplomacy with the Russians, flying just I think it was 10 days ago to Moscow for the first in-person meeting at the height of this crisis between Putin and the Western leader. Macron has really raised his hand to be the intermediary here, but in truth, what we're hearing from American diplomats is that there hasn't been much genuine diplomacy at all. Mostly, this has been a story of Putin creating the crisis and moving his invasion force into position. We'll see what he wants to do with it.

The demands that the Russians have laid down are essentially the type of non-negotiable demands that don't lend themselves to a diplomatic process. It's not the arms control treaty and they're just negotiating the terms back and forth, quite the contrary, there really has been a series of talking-past-each-other interactions that'd be part of a choreographed run-up, and because it's Vladimir Putin's play, we can't quite say what the [unintelligible 00:10:58] is meant to be.

Brian Lehrer: Well on the non-starter demands that you said Putin is making, if the West would just say they won't place Ukraine into NATO, theoretically, would this be over?

Susan Glasser: No. That's Russian propaganda. [chuckles] I'm sorry, but it's not about NATO. I can't say that enough. Vladimir Putin has made it very clear, including in writing, that he does not recognize the legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent state. He believes that it should be a part of Russia. You can't negotiate over that. That's a fundamental question. By the way, it's not up to the United States of America what course Ukraine takes. Right now it's enshrined Ukraine's constitution that this is a goal of theirs to look to the West.

We don't have the right to say, "Well, you can't do that." Part of the problem is that Putin has manufactured so successfully, he's gotten us to engage in the debate totally on his terms. I think it's really important to understand we were in Moscow in 2004, there was no Ukraine NATO membership on the table then, there was nothing like what we're talking about today. There was a revolution in 2004, the Orange Revolution that threw out fake election result of a pro-Russian candidate.

What did Vladimir Putin do? He poisoned the democratic [unintelligible 00:12:37] contender. He poisoned the contender. He intervened to stop the revolution. Since then he has enshrined the concept that this was US-sponsored revolutions designed to unsettle Ukraine first and then Russia into his entire way of thinking about the world. In fact, it was mentioned in the recent declaration of alliance that he made with Xi Jinping at the beginning of the Olympics, just a couple weeks ago, the Orange Revolution, there will be no color revolutions in the world controlled by Russia and China as they see it.

It's so important for people to understand that the NATO thing is a convenient pretext for Putin to be speaking about right now, but this is about Ukraine. He's not on the brink of invading NATO, he's on the brink of invading and dismantling the independence of Ukraine as an independent state.

Brian Lehrer: With Susan Glasser from The New Yorker. Sergey in West Hempstead, you're on WNYC. Hello, Sergey.

Sergey: Good morning, Brian. What I fear is, I have an uncle who lives in Latvia, my mother-in-law's in Belarus, and I have a third cousin in Russia. It's interesting to see the different viewpoints that each one expresses, but in particular, my mother-in-law cannot share, like, or retweet anything that I write for fear of arrest. What they fear is that this could be just resolved as a frozen conflict, agree to disagree, because Russia has been in Abkhazia since 2008, in Transnistria since the early '90s, in Crimea and Donbass and no resolution in sight.

We're very worried that the West might just leave Belarus the way it is and Ukraine might become another Finland, which is what we read from Macron, Finlandization. We're very afraid of that. I wanted to hear your guest's view on Finlandization and how that might be taken by the different sides.

Brian Lehrer: Susan, you want to talk to Sergey and maybe tell all our listeners what he means by Finlandization if they don't know that term?

Susan Glasser: Absolutely. Thank you, Sergey, so much for that perspective. I think it really is an important perspective. It's not one that gets enough attention here in the United States, where we tend to hear and to think it's, A, all about us, and B, all about NATO. Your comments suggest how much it's not. First of all, on the Belarus thing, I think it's important, again, for people to understand one of the things that's also happening right now that's very destabilizing to Europe is essentially the creeping annexation of Belarus, at least as a international entity.

Vladimir Putin has now stationed tens of thousands of troops there potentially positioned for this invasion of Ukraine because Belarus is much closer to the capital of Kyiv than the conflict zone in Eastern Ukraine is. In fact, those troops are only like two hours away from the capital of Kyiv.

To the bigger point about Finlandization is this worry that essentially the West will say, "Well, there's nothing we can do about it. Sorry, it's not our problem. Why don't you just become permanently neutral?" That's the concept of Finlandization, the idea that an independent state like Ukraine or Finland would renounce its right to participate in Western military alliances in order to be seen as a non-threatening presence on Russia's borders. Again, that is really not within Emmanuel Macron's ability to do.

The other thing is that Finland has been a reliable partner of the West for decades, and right now because of Russia's aggression toward Ukraine and other neighboring countries, there is much more active debate and discussion inside Finland about joining NATO than at any previous moment that I can recall. I was just on a show yesterday with the president of Finland, who acknowledged that this debate is now a live issue inside Finland because of Russia's aggression.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, there was a Washington Post headline yesterday, "Putin may go to war to capture Ukraine. With Belarus, he did it without firing a shot," by their Moscow bureau chief, Robyn Dixon. Sergey, anything you want to say before you go?

Sergey: No, just watching the news and I'm very thankful that even though in Belarus there's so much repression, people still have access to the internet, including WNYC, even though they're obviously not allowed to share comments or like what they're hearing. At least for that, we're still thankful.

Brian Lehrer: Sergey, thank you very much for your call. Jeff in Charleston, South Carolina, you're on WNYC with Susan Glasser from The New Yorker. Hi, Jeff.

Jeff: Oh, hi. This is me. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we got you.

Jeff: All right. Your guest's analysis of the situation is so succinct and unarguable. My question is more speculative, if she doesn't mind answering it. If Trump was in the White House this point, given his disinterest in statesmanship and the international affairs, and at the same time, given what people suspect is his [unintelligible 00:17:47] towards Putin, but still having a semi-functioning state department, what does she think would be happening now if Trump was in the White House as far as a reaction to this international situation?

Susan Glasser: This is a great question. I'm sitting here in my house working on this book about the Trump presidency with my husband, Peter Baker of the Times. We would just have been talking about that, as you might imagine, and wondering. First of all, I think it's important to point out that for the entire duration of the Trump presidency, you had one paper policy of the United States and of the State Department toward Russia and Ukraine, and then you had Donald Trump's policy, and they were almost always at odds with each other. The one place where I would say they could was in Donald Trump's desire to get NATO countries to spend more on defense. That certainly was also the official policy of the US.

Other than that, when it came to Russia itself and Ukraine, this is a theme that ran through the entire Trump presidency, was Trump actually has publicly agreed with Putin that he doesn't really accept the legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent country. He talked about that, "Crimea, they really wanted to be Russian anyways, why should we bother about that?"

When he came into office, he wanted to lift the sanctions that the US and NATO allies had imposed on Russia because of the annexation of Crimea. Of course, he was impeached over his desire at the very beginning of Zelensky's tenure to basically force Zelensky to undertake personal political investigations that would benefit Donald Trump at the expense of $400 million in US security assistance meant for [unintelligible 00:19:44] by the way, this exact scenario of a Russian invasion. I'm sure Trump would want in the one hand to be in the middle of the story, having dramatic last minute summits. On the other, there's an interesting school of thought that believes that one of the reasons that this is happening right now is that Vladimir Putin, while perhaps appreciating Trump's public compliments toward him, found Trump to be a very unpredictable and potentially dangerous partner in part because it was clear the US government the US Congress was not on board with Trump's plans for a pro-Russia accommodation. For Putin to really revise the international security order requires actually a more stable and predictable US government.

It's interesting to see this counterfactual argument, but I think it's hard to conceive that we did have a president of the United States who was a sycophant toward Vladimir Putin, but that's the reality.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let me ask you a follow-up, and Jeff, thanks for starting this thread from down there in Charleston. Our short memories may not remind us that Ukraine was headline news in this country just two years ago when President Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for threatening Ukraine with lack of military support if they didn't open a fake investigation into Joe Biden. Does anything having to do with that have anything to do with this?

Susan Glasser: Absolutely, and thank you, Brian, for that question because I think it's so important. Our narrative about this, Americans tends to look at foreign policy crises, to extent they pay attention at all, as a series of disconnected episodes and incidents. I think from Putin's perspective, this is one story, and he's been confronting the West [unintelligible 00:21:49] for decades, but certainly in an active way since 2014 and the takeover of Crimea. These are all just chapters and different steps along the way in that. I think if you look at this conflict right now as the culminating chapter as Putin sees it, it looks a lot differently.

From his narrative that he's constructed, it's about essentially the new president of Ukraine Zelensky coming to power in 2019, while Donald Trump is undertaking essentially a corrupt quid pro quo errand with Zelensky. Vladimir Putin sees Zelensky as coming saying he's going to sweep out corruption, that he's going to finally make peace with Russia and further pull Ukraine into the Western sphere. I think this is part of one continuous confrontation that Putin sees with the United States.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Susan Glasser from The New Yorker. Interesting and incisive as always. A lot more, so do stay with us. [music] Brian Lehrer, WNYC, and with the breaking Ukraine news today, including this possible Vladimir Putin-Joe Biden summit on Thursday, that my guest Susan Glasser thinks won't actually happen. We are talking with Susan Glasser who writes about Washington for The New Yorker.

Again, by way of background she spent the four years of Putin having that apologist in the White House we were just talking about, writing the letter from Trump's Washington column for The New Yorker, and she spent four years before that covering Moscow for the Washington Post, so she knows this from both sides. Susan Glasser has also been editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine and is co-author of the book Kremlin Rising from about 15 years ago, and we'll ask her in a few minutes to draw a through line from then to now.

Susan, you keep sounding really frustrated about Americans not caring about this enough. I guess I'd say and ask your take, the American public probably has no appetite for military involvement, and so that not on the table. I wonder if Americans are mostly tuning out all these Ukraine stories when we talk about them and when anybody else in the media does as feeling very remote to us now when so many things feel so immediate and close, from masking debates to inflation to racist book banning to crime. How much do you think anyone in this country even cares about this and if that's affecting the hand that Biden has to play?

Susan Glasser: Look, Brian, I think that's a good and very relevant observation. I think you're right that this is seen as a faraway conflict that doesn't concern most Americans. That's historically been true of how Americans have looked at conflicts in the rest of the world, really, across our political spectrum. I think you're right that that's the dynamic. That doesn't mean that it's not an enormous geopolitical crisis with huge implications, including implications for the world order that affect everything from, we talk about supply chains and things like that. The conflict will get very real potentially for Americans very quickly if it does things like lead to a spike in energy prices, which it is very likely to do, if it contributes further to inflation here at home, which it is very likely to do.

Again, we live in an interconnected world and I think there's also some antiquated notions of 20th century conflict that people have that suggests that, well, it's either not our business or we're going to send some massive army. Neither of those things is the case, but I do think it will get pretty real for Americans pretty quickly if, as we now expect, unfortunately, Putin goes through.

Brian Lehrer: Well about it getting real for Americans in terms of inflation pressures, a Washington Post headline yesterday was, "With or without war, Ukraine gives Biden a new lease on leadership." Again, I don't know if enough Americans care one way or another to bump Biden's approval [unintelligible 00:26:36] up very much for a diplomatic win over there, whatever counts as a diplomatic win. Maybe even it would go down if Russia does invade and we do play sanctions and that causes prices to rise in the United States and then people say, "Why do we care so much about that if it's hurting us?"

Susan Glasser: Well, you might be right. I think this is one of those problems with the intensive politicization of absolutely every aspect of American and international life. The bottom line is that it's not just about Biden's approval rating here, this is real stuff that's happening to real people and it has real consequences for Americans pocket books, for security in the world, for what Europe is going to be, and Europe is our closest not just security partner, but economic partner.

Again, I totally understand why it is that most people are not focused on this crisis, but the White House is correctly focused on this crisis. This is the biggest challenge that I have seen in three decades of covering Washington and national and international politics. This is it. This is the thing that we're talking about.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, this is the biggest crisis in three decades of covering DC? What about the Iraq War, foreign policy crisis?

Susan Glasser: This is the biggest crisis. This is potentially the biggest crisis since the end of the Cold War. This is potentially the largest war in Europe in this century. This is potentially not only a large war in which thousands would die, but one that would fundamentally revise the international system in which we live.

Brian Lehrer: Here's some skepticism-

Susan Glasser: It's that big of a deal, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: -from a listener on Twitter. It says, "Brian Lehrer, are you going to repeat every ridiculous unsubstantiated propaganda claim about Ukraine coming of the State Department? Funny how Biden's failures have fallen off the headlines." The story about Putin getting ready to kill and torture political opponents and LGBTQ people and members of ethnic minorities in Ukraine if he does invade, I am curious if that looks real or fake to you. That one reminds me of the James Baker era, the secretary of state who you wrote a book about from Bush 41. It has the ring of phony stories the US has told to justify past wars, like Iraqi troops pulling babies out-

Susan Glasser: Brian-

Brian Lehrer: Wait, I'll just finish the question, pulling babies out of incubators in Kuwait, which made useful headlines just before we went in there, but which I think was debunked. I'm not saying this is false, but I'm reading that tweet and saying I have a pretty substantial group of listeners who react to stories like that this way. Do anything about these new human rights warnings or how would you put that in context?

Susan Glasser: I think what your listeners need to understand is that these are not fanciful or academic questions about Vladimir Putin and how he has ruled, these are things that have happened. This is someone who's willing to poison, execute, and kill opponents, which he has systematically done not only inside the borders, but outside the borders of Russia.

You want to talk about LGBTQ, they don't exist inside Russia today, so why would they in exist inside of a new Russian territory in Ukraine? This is a country where extra judicial killings, where rounding up of opponents and the elimination of dissidents has occurred. This is not some fanciful notion. In fact, Russia is going to invade. Again, this idea that it's made up, I would think that the evidence before people's own eyes of a massive invasion force of 190,000 military troops with incredibly lethal 21st century capacities would be enough to prove to people. This is real.

It's been a very interesting aspect to observe how the US government has had a very different approach than it has to previous conflicts and disagreements with Putin, which is to say, being very real-time and transparent in releasing what they believe to be information, in part clearly to shape outcomes and to try to head off the war, or they may simply have believed that it was inevitable that the war was going to take place and therefore best to be clear along the way.

Does that mean that anybody knows with certainty what exactly is going to happen? Clearly not, but I do think it's very, very important to communicate that this is not like some fanciful story about Vladimir Putin and how he governs. There are 22 years of history well documented. I would point your readers to any of that to look at what the nature of the Russian regime has been for the last two decades.

Brian Lehrer: Can you tell us more about LGBTQ rights in Russia, which you mentioned in that last answer and which really never the news here very much and people might be interested in knowing about?

Susan Glasser: Well, absolutely. I would direct people to the extraordinary work Human Rights Watch and others have done. There are numerous reports well-documented online from human rights groups that look at the incredible crackdown on LGBTQ inside Russia over the last two decades. Vladimir Putin has then signed into law the idea that it's literally illegal to do things like to be a parent inside Russia today under those conditions.

Again, you can look at some really hair-raising and horrifying human rights documentation on what the state of all kinds of human rights is inside of Russia today. Again, for those who are skeptical, I would say, look at what the state of human rights is in Russia today after 20 years of Vladimir Putin's rule and then project that into a new territory of Ukraine, all are parts of which he appears to be on the brink of conquering. He's going to impose those same laws and rules inside Ukraine as he has inside of Russia.

Brian Lehrer: Last thing, Susan, we talked about US public opinion. Do you think ordinary Russians are engaged in this drama one way or another? Would capturing Ukraine help or hurt the Russian economy as it affects average Russians? Are most Russians invested, as Putin seems to be, in recapturing the glory of empire or do they roll their eyes and say, "Come on, just get me a good job and decent benefits and quality of life"? What's the engagement of ordinary Russians, if you can generalize in this story?

Susan Glasser: Brian, thank you for asking that question. I think it is a really good question. The problem is that, again, after two decades, you have a public media environment in which it's essentially purely propaganda that have been given to the Russian people. What's interesting is that it's really only in the last week we've seen this stepped up creation of the pretext and the narrative and the drum beat for war on those Russian propaganda outlets that the Russian people are hearing.

The narrative they're hearing is all about the United States and Ukraine provoking a conflict with Russia, as extraordinary as it might seem to people here in the United States, with the idea that there's, wait a minute, Putin sent this invasion force. The narrative in Moscow isn't about a hundred 90,000 troops on the Russian border, it's about that Ukrainians are actually somehow provoking Russia. That's first of all.

Second of all, there have been more than a decade of intensive propaganda on the Russian people on the idea that Ukraine and Russia are essentially brothers and never should have been separated in the first place, including the distribution to every member of the Russian military of a pamphlet that Vladimir Putin personally wrote and put his name to last summer in which he talks about-- basically goes back into a version of pseudo history to say that Ukraine doesn't really have the right to exist independently of Russia.

There's been intensive groundwork laid for this, but the United States and Western allies have promised to have very, very significant sanctions of a level and kind that have just never been imposed before if Russia goes ahead and does this. Obviously, that would create further hardship and difficulties for the Russian people. I think one of the worries is that it might, in a weird way, benefit Putin and the small number of regime insiders who might use that economic suffering of the Russian people to further consolidate their control and power over the country.

Brian Lehrer: Susan Glasser who writes about Washington for The New Yorker and is co-author of the books, The Man Who Ran Washington and Kremlin Rising. Susan, thank you so much.

Susan Glasser: Thank you, Brian. Really appreciate it.

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