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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As you've probably been hearing in the news, more than six months into Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian forces have reclaimed large swaths of territory in the northeast Kharkiv region. According to the Kyiv Independent, the news source which Time Magazine has called the world's primary source for reliable English language journalism on the war in Ukraine, Ukraine's armed forces have liberated over 300 settlements since launching their counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region on September 6th.

Now, for their part, Russian military officials are calling this backtracking, I guess you could say they're doing, they're calling it a planned regrouping. Yes, right, according to most other people, shifting their efforts to the Donbas region.

According to US news, the press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on Monday, "The president is in constant," one might say, "round the clock communication with the minister of defense and with all military leaders, the special military operation," that's what they call it, the special military operation, "continues and will continue until all the goals that were originally set are achieved."

To that point, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who spoke with Putin on Tuesday, reported to the media, "Unfortunately, I can't tell you that he has now come to realize that it was a mistake to start this war and there is no indication that new attitudes are emerging," that from the German chancellor. Yet people are starting to ask whether Putin support in Russia is beginning to emerge because of all the deaths of Russian troops and other reasons despite the Russian media dominating public information on this through propaganda.

Joining me now to discuss the latest news as Russian forces withdraw from parts of Ukraine and how Russian politicians and media are spinning the retreat is Masha Gessen, The New Yorker staff writer and author of several books, including Surviving Autocracy. Marsha, always great to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Masha Gessen: Good to be here, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: As I mentioned in the intro, the withdrawal from the Kharkiv region is being referred to as a planned regrouping by Russian officials, what else is being said, and is anyone buying it?

Masha Gessen: What else is being said? At the beginning there was a bit of confusion. You even heard, and this was much circulated both in the Russian opposition circles and among journalists. One political pundit talked about how it was ridiculous to imagine that Russia could conquer Ukraine in a matter of days, and that the people who misinformed Putin about this should be punished.

Then the propaganda machine regrouped, and went back to basically what they had been doing the entire time, which is blaming Ukraine for the carnage, and calling for evermore brutality, and a scorched earth strategy. It's actually a mistake to think that that is something new, that in response to the forced retreat and the counter-offensive, they're calling for score short. They've been calling for and trying to outdo one another because it's a pretty large and competitive propaganda field, so they've been trying to outdo one another in calling for ever more punitive and brutal warfare. Now is anyone buying it? Yes, because-

Brian Lehrer: In Russia.

Masha Gessen: -Russians have no choice, because independent media have basically been snuffed out, forced into exile, their websites are blocked, their publications are banned. Several million brave rethinking Russians go through all sorts of contortions in order to be able to gain access to independent media, but most can't, and don't, and can't be bothered.

Brian Lehrer: People who've reported on the strategy this week were praising Ukraine and President Zelensky in particular, and I guess others from the leadership there, for pulling this sort of head fake on Russia, saying that they were going to be launching an offensive in one part of the country when they really were planning to launch an offensive in another part of the country, and so the Russians move their troops to the wrong place, and Ukraine was able to take back parts of the Kharkiv region. I know you're not a military analyst, but I wonder--

Masha Gessen: I was just going to say that.

Brian Lehrer: I wonder if you take this at all as an indication that Ukraine could really win this war and expel Russian troops and keep its full territory, or if this is just one chapter in a long complicated military struggle?

Masha Gessen: I think we have to ask a more basic question, which is what would winning this war look like? Because certainly for Ukrainians, ordinary Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian leadership, winning this war means liberating Crimea, which has been occupied by Russia for eight and a half years. It's not at all clear that the West supports Ukraine in this goal of liberating Crimea.

I think that it is entirely possible that as the possibility of Ukraine liberating Crimea becomes more real, that Western leaders will try to reason with Zelensky and talk him into giving Putin something, giving him Crimea. I think that would be a huge mistake and aside from the fact that it obviously sets horrible precedent that Russia has been able to occupy Ukrainian territory, basically within impunity for eight and a half years until launching the full-scale offensive.

Aside from the fact that it sets terrible precedent, it also would be strategically profoundly wrong because the only way to pierce the propaganda machine, to pierce Russia's propaganda bubble would be to liberate Crimea. The parts of eastern Ukraine that Russia has been occupying some for eight years, some for the last six months are isolated both from most of Ukraine and from Russia.

Russians have no way except through independent media to find out what's happening there. Crimea has a different story. Crimea has fully been annexed. It's been integrated into Russia, it's where Russian tourists go, especially now that they can't really go anywhere else outside the country, and there's no way that the propaganda machine could hide the liberation of Crimea from the Russian population. The way to actually counter not only the unjust war, but Russia's propaganda war, would be to support Ukraine in its efforts to liberate Crimea.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. It's interesting that you bring up this tension that Western leaders might be experiencing in their own heads or among each other regarding whether to pressure Zelensky to make some kind of territorial compromise. You probably know because it's been on this show, so it must have been at other places that some people who are not Russian apologists have been recommending some kind of compromise like that from the beginning to appease Russia just enough with areas in the Donbas region where there's some Russian population and Russian support, and that Putin was making the biggest deal about before the war, and otherwise, so many Ukrainians are going to die at the hands of the presumably more powerful Russian military.

Even the people who came on the show and proposed that said, "Look, we're not in Ukraine. We're not Ukrainians living in Kyiv, or currently being refugees, or whatever, and if the national will is that they're willing to sacrifice so many lives for a full territorial integrity, that's up to them." Is that kind of the tension here? Do you think that Western leaders are looking on and saying, "I can't believe there's so much will to fight there, so much will to lose loved ones in support of full victory?"

Masha Gessen: Again, if I can reframe the question.

Brian Lehrer: Please.

Masha Gessen: I think there are two sort of premises in this idea that you should negotiate with Putin and give him something to appease Russia-- him. It's not Russia, to appease him just enough, and I think both premises are wrong. One premise is that it is possible to negotiate with Putin and that there's an enough for Putin. There's no indication that that's the case.

Putin has never shown himself to be a reliable or even a willing negotiating partner. Any kind of negotiated piece would, by definition, be temporary and unreliable, and would basically be a way to suspend the conflict for a little while, probably only allowing Russian troops to actually regroup and launch another offensive, so just strategically, both politically and militarily, I think it's wrong. It's also wrong morally.

We know, at this point, we have ample information about what happens on the territories that are occupied by Russia. What happens is massive war crimes, it's summary executions, it's killings of civilians, it's basically genocidal strategies where people who are, for example, school teachers are specifically targeted. We know this now that school teachers from occupied territories have been deported to Russia and jailed there for the crime of teaching children in Ukrainian, for upholding Ukrainian culture, which Russia claims doesn't exist.

One of the biggest war crimes that has been vastly underreported is the forced transfer of people from occupied territories to Russian property. Forced transfer is a war crime. Russians themselves are saying that they have transferred 3.7 million people from occupied territories in Ukraine to Russia. That's what we're talking about.

Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] There's an under-report story.

Masha Gessen: We're talking about millions of human lives when we're talking about negotiating territory. Once you start thinking about it that way you realize that that's not even a conversation that you can humanly have.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I see that the defense reporter with the Kyiv Independent tweeted on Wednesday, "The sad side of what's happening now regarding this victory in Kharkiv is that over 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers had to die to prove that Ukraine can win and that the West must finally stop hesitating and send massive defense aid to help end this war." How do you see that as being received in the West and how much hesitation do you think is going on in Washington or elsewhere regarding sending more military aid of what size?

Masha Gessen: In addition to not being a military analyst, I'm also not a Washington reporter so I don't have firsthand information-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: They're obviously not satisfied in Kyiv.

Masha Gessen: Well, let's just boil this down to the simplest elements. The West, meaning NATO countries, meaning the United States, has had the military might sufficient to stop this war for six months and the war is still going on. As long as the war is going on, the West hasn't done enough and is doing what it's doing too slowly. That's just definition. We don't have to be experts in politics or military strategy in order to understand these simple facts.

We know the thinking that this is based on. The thinking that NATO doesn't want to be at war with Russia. Another way of phrasing that is saying it is okay for Russia to continue killing Ukrainians as long as it's not killing citizens of NATO countries. That's the position that Western countries, including the United States, have basically occupied for the last six months. It is a morally reprehensible position.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for Masha Gessen from the New Yorker and author of books including Surviving Autocracy, as we talk about Russia and Ukraine. 212-433-WNYC, anyone with ties to Ukraine right now who happen to be listening and want to help us report this story. What are your friends and family members over there telling you or anything else you want to share or ask? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for Masha Gessen.

Julia Davis, Masha, who's a columnist for the Daily Beast and creator of the Russian Media Monitor wrote on Wednesday, yesterday, "The humiliating defeats of Russia's armed forces in Ukraine are prompting the Kremlin's mouthpieces to propose increasingly violent tactics."

From what you've described, it's hard to imagine any more violent tactics than the ones they're already using, but Julia Davis writes, "Lobbying for a scorched earth policy on state television, Russian pundits and expert guests have been openly comparing the Ukrainian battleground to Chechnya, Syria, and even the infamous Beslan school massacre where Russian special forces killed many hostages along with their terrorist captors."

That is really scary to hear it being put like that in Russian media. Can you talk about how you take it, that they are so brazenly calling for a repeat of what you've referred to as war crimes?

Masha Gessen: They've actually been doing this for the last six months. The audience for Russian propaganda is an audience of one Vladimir Putin. They are all in a race to show him that they're loyal, that they support this war, which they're not allowed to call war, and that they hate Ukraine more than the next guy. I haven't seen a significant change in tenor or even what they're saying. They've been calling for ever more brutal tactics from starting the last week of February when the full-scale invasion began.

Some things have changed on the ground and Russians have in fact become even more brutal and have pulled out even more stops in the last week by hitting civilian infrastructure objects and cutting off electricity to the entire Kharkiv region. We've already seen similar things happen in places like Mariupol. Mariupol, which was under siege for two months. I hope that when Putin and his cronies are on trial somewhere in the world, they will be charged among other things with the crime of starvation, which they inflicted on Mariupol when it was under siege. Again, this is not new, but it is happening on an even larger scale and even more openly.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think Putin's own power is in danger at all? I don't know if you have a rough number on Russian losses, fatalities in the war, and if there's starting to be a meaningful backlash.

Masha Gessen: To have a meaningful backlash in response, even to large-scale military losses, you have to have some sort of public sphere. You basically have to have the possibility of people talking to each other and seeing that conversation reflected back to them. You need to not only say to women who live in neighboring houses, talking to each other about the fact that their sons were killed in this horrible, unprovoked war of aggression, you also need to have an understanding that it's happening on a large-scale, and for that, you need to have some sort of media, and that's the thing that doesn't exist.

It's always very risky to talk about a totalitarian country and say that we understand anything about whether somebody's power is threatened because we don't. It's always a black box, by definition. I think that the biggest threat to Putin is a failure of the propaganda machine or a crack in the propaganda machine. Again, that can only happen if something penetrates the public sphere. The most likely way that that could happen is if Ukraine were able to liberate Crimea.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC-FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at wnyc.org. About five minutes left with Masha Gessen from the New Yorker on Ukraine and Russia and Putin. Then Nina Totenberg will be our next guest. Of course, the NPR legal affairs correspondent. She's got a new book called Dinners With Ruth. If you don't already know, I think you can figure out who Ruth is. Nina Totenberg coming up next. Richard in Cold Spring, you're on WNYC with Masha Gessen. Hi, Richard.

Richard: Hi. A real brief, quick response to your guest's comment, which I thought was way overly reductive, favoring the well-being of NATO countries over the Ukraine. I think the central question here, and it's in everyone's mind, how quickly would a nuclear event happen if NATO stepped into this? That's at the core and how careful must we be to avoid a world-ending event? That's it, thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Masha.

Masha Gessen: I think that with the counteroffensive in Ukraine, the likelihood of Putin using nuclear weapons has gone up. I think that part of the reason that it has gone up is because there's enough fog to allow him to think that he could use a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukrainian territory without encountering a response.

The color is red. That's not a world-ending event. Is that an event that the world can live with? Is that a possibility that the world can live with that Putin is basically going to be allowed to annihilate a European country with 50 million citizens to save the rest of the world if you use that framing?

I also want to remind you that Putin has been weaponizing nuclear power stations both Chornobyl at the beginning of the war and then the largest nuclear power station in Europe in Zaporizhzhia for the last month, basically threatening the entire European continent with a nuclear disaster by turning that nuclear power plant into part of the theater of war. That also seems to be something that the West is willing to stand by and let happen because it will affect territory that is not protected in some of those very special agreements.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Actually, Reuters reported that Vladimir Putin's chief Envoy on Ukraine told the Russian leader as the war began that he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv that would satisfy Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO, but Putin rejected it and pressed ahead with his military campaign. Doesn't sound like you believe this was ever about NATO.

Masha Gessen: It was never about NATO. It's always been about Putin and that's one reason why the possibility of a negotiated peace is a red herring.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Jay in Yonkers, you're on WNYC with Masha Gessen. Hi, Jay.

Jay: Good morning. I'd like to know what efforts have been made for broadcasting actual reality news into Russia from the outside via radio and television broadcast.

Brian Lehrer: Or the web, for that matter, but that's a good question. Is there any way to counter the Russian government's dominance of media within the country from outside?

Masha Gessen: A number of Russian journalists, both in organizations and independently, are working from exile and creating content on the web, putting on YouTube, which is still not blocked in Russia. Some of the Western organizations such as Radio Liberty have dusted off their short wave radio transmitters, unfortunately, to get short wave radio, you have to possess a short wave radio, which is an exceedingly rare anti-gray object.

The problem with using the internet is that-- I think that the journalists working from exile are doing extremely important work. They are reaching those Russians who are still willing to listen, who nobody else is talking to. The problem with the internet is that you never get answers to questions you don't ask on the internet. People who are going to make the effort to get independent information can get it. People who are not going to make that increasingly labor-intensive effort are never even going to know it exists.

Brian Lehrer: Masha Gessen. New Yorker staff writer, and author of several books, including Surviving Autocracy and others. Masha, you are always appreciated. Thank you so much for your insights.

Masha Gessen: Thank you for having me.

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