Hello everybody. I'm Michael Kimage, the director of the Kennan Institute. And this is another in our series of conversations about the origins of the war in Ukraine. And I'm thrilled today to have as a guest, interviewee, discussant, Dmitri Alperovitch, who's chairman of Silverado Policy, author of a really remarkable book titled World on the Brink, which we will get to toward the end of our conversation, and the host, I guess you could say, of a rival webinar podcast, Geopolitics Decanted.
Complimentary, not rival.
Complimentary. Exactly. Yes. The more the merrier, which explores questions related to Russia but also to many, many other parts of the world and many other themes. Dmitri, you know, welcome to the origins conversation. We're just delighted to have you.
It's great to be with you. Thanks so much, Michael.
Well, Dmitri, I'd like to begin as I often do with these conversations with a somewhat biographical or personal question. You know, you have deep ties to the region in question. And I just wanted to ask you, in effect, you know, so what's made you professionally interested in Russia, Ukraine? A bit of background and just the nature of your interest.
Absolutely. So obviously I was born in Russia. I was born in Moscow. Grew up there. Always interested in news, always interested in politics. So followed closely even after I immigrated in the early 90s what was still taking place in Russia. Followed Putin very closely and ended up being sort of confrontational with him on a number of occasions in the cyber domain, which was my first professional experience. I was founder of a company called CrowdStrike, a major cybersecurity company, and before that, major companies in the industry, and started encountering Russian intelligence operations in a number of areas, disruptive operations, operations that were targeting Ukraine after 2014. And that is what actually led me in 2021, about three months before the start of the war, to start really paying attention before there was even the enormous buildup of military forces on the borders of Ukraine. To start saying, 'Wait a second, what is happening here?' You're starting to see a dramatic change in how Russian intelligence operatives are conducting cyber operations within Ukraine. They're targeting police stations. They're targeting infrastructure that is not necessarily useful for just an intel collection purpose but seem to be having something else in mind. And I like to say that cyber is often the canary in the coal mine that allows you to understand adversarial intentions because it's one of those first tools in the toolbox that countries reach out for to project power because it's deniable. It's asymmetric and can give you a great sense of what they're up to if you're tracking them. And then obviously as the buildup started to take place, by sort of early December, I became fully convinced that this war unfortunately was going to happen. Made a public prediction at the time that sometime before the end of the winter he was going to invade, which unfortunately took place.
I'm very eager to pick your brain about 2021 and 2022. And it is of course extremely interesting to hear about cyber as you put it, the canary in the coal mine. It's the first time that's come up in these conversations and is I think a kind of new angle, a vision in a sense, a new database for thinking about the war. But I do want to go back to 2014 and to what you've already described as a moment that caught your attention and made you interested in, you know, sort of Russia's ambitions in Ukraine and perhaps more broadly. And this is not a personal or biographical question, but a question about how you see things now. What do you think changes in 2013, 2014? How dramatic is the rupture or the break in your estimation at that time? Of course, this is a question about the arc of development from 2014 to 2021, 2022, but I'm very curious how you see 2013, 2014 now as a somewhat accidental series of events, as something that was semi-inevitable, as the clash that was coming or the clash that sort of came almost by accident to Ukraine, Russia, to Europe and to the United States.
You know, Michael, you asked about what changed with regards to Russia. I think what really matters is what changed with regards to Putin, right? And with these countries, whether it's Russia, whether it's China, whether it's Iran, frankly, the person in power matters a great deal and matters more than what the society in large or even the elites might be thinking about. So the reason I became so convinced in 2021 that this was going to happen is because I was looking deeply at the evolution of Putin on this issue and what he started to say back in 2021 and then 2022 but even going much earlier. And I'll tell you, there's an incredible documentary that is on YouTube, in Russian unfortunately, that was taken in 1991, in the fall of 1991. So before the full collapse of the USSR, but obviously after the end of the Berlin Wall and after the failed putsch in August of 1991 in Moscow. And Putin at this time, he had just joined the Sobchak administration in Leningrad, the mayoral administration. He's not even a deputy mayor at this point. He's sort of an unnamed bureaucrat. And this documentary crew is doing an almost hour-long documentary about sort of life in Leningrad at this time and Putin is very prominently featured in it. And they interviewed him a bunch about a bunch of mundane topics but part of it is also on his geopolitical views, right? And it's really fascinating because at this time I'm sure he didn't have, you know, maybe in his deep dreams perhaps, but he didn't have any realistic expectations that he would become president of Russia. Russia as an independent state didn't even exist yet. So you're getting really the true Putin, you're getting his beliefs. And he says in there, there's a fascinating moment where they ask him, because this is a multi-day interview, that 'Hey, we were in here last week and we saw a statue of Lenin on your desk and now it's gone. Did you remove it? Why is it gone all of a sudden?' And he sort of dismisses it and says, 'Well, my staff must have done it. I don't really know anything about it, but let me tell you my views on Lenin, my views on the communist regime.' And he's like, 'You know, I'll admit that in prior life, I was fascinated by the Marxist-Leninist ideology, that I found it intriguing and believed in it. But nowadays I think it was a fiction. It was something that has to be absolutely resolutely abandoned. But let me tell you the biggest problem I have with Lenin and his crew,' and he often, we've heard him repeat this in later years after becoming president, he said 'they set a mine off. They buried a mine in the foundation of the Soviet Union that ensured its collapse by setting up these what he calls fake kingdoms within the Soviet Union Empire, right? The republics of the Soviet Union and giving them their own parliaments, giving them their own administrations that we're now witnessing the disaster of that decision because now you're creating these new nations out of one nation which was Russia.' Right? So even going back to 1991, 35 years ago, he never believed that any of these countries, Ukraine in particular, were independent nations, deserve to be independent. Now I do think that at the time and throughout the first decade or so in power, he wasn't really animated by this and there are lots of interviews that he's given of 'We're not going to go back on our relations with Ukraine. Ukraine is an independent nation. We accept their territorial integrity. We have no,' he even said this I think when he was running for president in 1999, 'we have no interest in taking over Crimea.' Right? And obviously all of that changes in 2014. And I think to understand why you have to understand his worldview. And that was that he doesn't think these are independent nations. He's never thought that. He was willing to accept their independent status though as long as they were within Russia's sphere of influence. Right? He didn't want to recreate the Soviet Union with all the baggage that comes with it. But as long as all these nations were friendly and tied to Russia politically, economically, through security arrangements, that was fine. That could be lived with, right? And slowly he saw the undermining of this idea starting with 2004 and the first Orange Revolution in Kiev when he tries to rig elections in favor of a pro-Russia candidate, Yanukovych, fails ultimately, has an election of a candidate that was seen at least at the time as a very pro-Western candidate, Yushchenko, and Yushchenko very suspiciously gets poisoned by some sort of chemical weapon in the midst of that Orange Revolution, widely believed to be Russian security forces. And of course we've seen later on Putin use chemical weapons and even plutonium against both political opponents and dissidents. So it wouldn't be at all surprising if he did it as far back as 2004, but being really animated of trying to keep Ukraine in Russia's sphere of influence, right? And then we get to 2007 and the infamous Munich speech and by that time already seeing what he views as Western encroachments not just in Ukraine but in Georgia, which triggers a war of course, his invasion in 2008. And then by the time Maidan comes around, he sort of got a little bit complacent, I think, when Yanukovych got back into power and defeated Yushchenko, thinking, 'Okay, Ukraine is back in our midst. I punished Georgia in 2008 with a brutal invasion. I've preserved all these countries within my sphere of influence.' And now 2014 comes along first with the association agreement with Europe and less even the association agreement but sort of the implicit rejection of the economic ties with Russia and the customs union that he was proposing between Russia and Ukraine that really sets him off. And I think at that point both seeing the opportunity to grab Crimea and stir up this fake insurgency in the Donbas that was largely led by the GRU, Russian intelligence services, he I think at that point does not think that he can take all of Ukraine, but he can grab whatever he can get like Crimea opportunistically, but also cause such unrest within Ukraine that he can somehow through influence operations bring it back into the fold, bring it back from the cold. And he tries to do that for a number of years through intelligence operations, through this insurgency that he funds and arms. And I think by the time he gets to 2022, he realizes that has been a failure, that it has not accomplished anything. He's eight years into it and it is time now for some drastic action which unfortunately he undertakes.
I want to switch focus for a moment to Europe, which you've invoked in the association agreement that Ukraine was on the verge of signing in November 2013 and in a dramatic twist when Yanukovych doesn't sign it, sparks a revolution in Ukraine and in a way the story that we're piecing together really begins to unfold. But I want to ask you since you do have not just expert experience in the region but private sector experience in the region, a question that touches on the world of business and commerce. And it was an expectation or a hope especially in Germany but broadly in Europe that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, you know, the German phrase is Wandel durch Handel, transformation through commercial exchange. And there are different degrees of optimism and enthusiasm about this project but it is a pretty broad European project after 1991 that if Russia is not to be made a member of NATO, which was never a probable outcome, and if Russia is not to be made a member of the European Union, which is also not a probable outcome, then trade and commerce could link Russia to Europe and Europe to Russia. And in the many Putins that are out there to interpret this is one of the possible Putins, right? The man who deals with business and contracts in the St. Petersburg mayor's office, the man who claims that he wants to modernize Russia when he becomes president in 2000 and the man who does jettison a lot of the Bolshevik legacy. Yeltsin had jettisoned much of it before him, but still, you know, Putin is not attached to the old economic forms. He is a kind of 21st-century economic actor. Can I ask why in your view, I mean this is a separate question but I think it feeds into other questions about Russia and Ukraine, why is it that this failed? That this project fails on its surface. To me, when I think back on it now, even though I know it failed, it doesn't seem like such a bad project.
Well, and by the way, this delusion that we can transform these authoritarian regimes through economic engagement is not just exclusive to Russia. We made the exact same mistake with China, thinking that economic ties will liberalize that country. And I think in both cases the prognosis is the same, is that economics is important, but it's not the most important issue. The most important issue for both nations is making their countries great again, to borrow another phrase, which is not just economic, right? And when Putin comes to power for the very first time, first as prime minister and then as president in '99, 2000, what does he do? He doesn't engage on some massive economic transformational project. He invades Chechnya, right? The very first act essentially as prime minister is to start another war, which by the way I think helps to explain Putin's risk-taking. Once again, there are a lot of people that don't understand why he gambled in such a big way with Russia, but he's always been a risk-taker. And think back to what '99 was like, right? You had just ended a very, very brutal war three years earlier in 1996 with Chechnya, which was extremely unpopular, caused lots of casualties, and literally as your first act essentially getting back into power, you're going to launch another invasion of Chechnya that has just failed in such a spectacular fashion that no one really wants. Now, obviously the backdrop to this was the terrorist attacks purportedly perpetrated by the Chechens, although there's a lot of murkiness about who was really responsible for these buildings in Moscow and all over Russia getting blown up with huge civilian casualties. But nevertheless, even though the population was getting really livid at these terrorist attacks and wanting revenge, to start a major invasion after the last one failed so spectacularly such a short time ago is almost unthinkable, right? Imagine us going back into Afghanistan, not even today but what we left in '21. So this would be the equivalent of 2024 saying, you know what, that wasn't such a great idea but we're going to go back in and punish the Taliban for whatever, right? Just it's hard to even imagine that. And yet he does it and has a success at it, very brutal war but one that he manages to essentially keep the population on his side and ultimately pacifies Chechnya. He does another adventure obviously in 2008 in Georgia. Syria was something that President Obama said would be a quagmire for him and ended up just fine and something that the cost of that campaign he was able to absorb. But these geopolitical interests have always been at the center of his personal ambitions and ambitions for his country and he was never really fundamentally that interested in economics. I don't think he understands economics very well. So he was fine engaging with the European Union, joining the WTO, helping build a prosperous Russia, which by the way was mostly done on the back of high oil prices that we had during that period of time, not through any significant economic policies. But that ambition that the country's greatness comes from its power projection, from its military power, from its control of the near abroad was always there even before he came to the presidency and obviously continued afterwards. So I think it was always a mistake to think that these economic ties can somehow change the geopolitical outlook of any of these people whether it's Putin or Xi Jinping. And there is a fascinating moment in 2014 that I was told by someone in the know that when he was considering the annexation of Crimea, his economic team at the time visited him and lobbied hard to not do it. And they said, 'If we go forward with this, this will be catastrophe. There will be huge Western sanctions on us. It will ruin our economy.' And his response to that was, 'Your job is to manage the economy. My job is to take Crimea. I'll do my job. You do yours.' Right? So even at that moment, he was not interested by the supposed cost of sanctions and the economic pain that he would suffer. So yes, always in favor of economic ties. Even today, he would love to sell gas to Europe and rebuild some of those economic ties, but he's not going to abandon his core objectives over it. And you see that even today when he's not interested in a trade of sort of ending the war in exchange for sanctions relief or anything else. He wants much more.
I want to turn now from Europe to China and you've written so extensively on China. It's a pleasure to ask you the question, but in a different iteration of this conversation with the historian Odd Arne Westad, we talked about the rise of China, which Professor Westad interprets as a key development in terms of the 2022 decision to invade. In other words, if you don't have the rise of a powerful China, if you don't have some degree of partnership between Xi Jinping and Putin, if you don't have a world order that is shifting to a degree because of the rise of China, you don't really have the preconditions for the Russian invasion in 2022. I suppose the implicit assumption is that the rise of China just diminishes Russia's dependence on the West in a large-scale structural way and that opens new options that Putin sort of explored or put into practice in 2022. I'm curious if you agree with that assumption and agree with that set of connections that the rise of China is not a direct catalyst of the Russian invasion of Ukraine but something of a necessary precondition.
Yeah, I absolutely do not agree with it. I think that's a misunderstanding of Putin and how Putin thinks about Russia, that Russia he views as a great power that is not dependent on anyone whether it's the West or China. You know, he likes a good partnership with China but he does not want to be a vassal state to China. There is absolutely anxiety about that among the Russian elites and Putin himself. And look, you know, I think the historical record is very clear. He has done ever since coming to power a number of things that are confrontational to the West. Chechnya being the very first one that was not popular in the West in the least bit, that he was endangering his burgeoning relationship with America and others by launching this campaign and conducting it in a very brutal fashion. Syria in 2015, obviously Crimea in 2014, Georgia in 2008, you name these moments, you know, before even the emergence of China as a huge power on the world stage that it is today, he was already willing to confront the West and prosecute in a very specific way, in a very risk-taking way what he thought were his interests even before China was in power. I mean, just think back to the 2000s when he used polonium in central London, right? An absolutely reckless, unprecedented, illegal, horrendous act that could have completely jeopardized and blown up the entire relationship with the West. And yet he did it because he thought he could get away with it, because he thought that Russia was a power to be reckoned with. That was long before China was able to do anything for him. So, no, I don't think that at all. I think that goes against how he views his country and his power.
Well, it's very good to hear that this series of explorations is nothing if not a set of messages to students and to scholars and to researchers and to journalists to explore the causes of this conflict. And so when there's a sort of explicit disagreement of this kind, I think it's a very helpful thing. The other thing on which there's explicit disagreement and I'll ask you about this a little bit later is the role that the US pullout from Afghanistan played in Russia's decision to invade where some people are quite confident that that played an important role and other people are quite confident that it did not play an important role. So we can look at that as another thing on which people deeply versed in these events can usefully disagree. I want to turn now. We've talked about Europe. We've talked a bit about Ukraine and which more soon. We've talked about China. But you know the US is an equally important part of the puzzle. I don't think that the US set of presumptions apart from sanctions policy was driven so much by economics. So I don't think Wandel durch Handel is a premise of the Obama administration or of the first Trump term or of the Biden administration. I don't think that's the case. I think that there was at least in the Obama administration a kind of integrationist view of Russia that over the long term maybe after Putin, maybe with Putin, Russia would somehow join the club, you know, various global clubs. Russia did of course join the G8 until 2014. But you know, the gravitational force of American power and what Europe and the United States and other partners had to offer would be so great that Russia might always be a bit different in places like Chechnya or in Georgia. It might diverge from what Washington wants. But the trend lines over the long term would be in the right direction. I'm just laying this out as I think a kind of basic assumption. Strong in the second Obama term, present if not quite strong in the first Trump term, and interestingly present for the first six, seven months of the Biden administration. Is this something that you would agree with? And if so, you know, what do you think of it? And how do you evaluate this as a trend line, as a part of the larger puzzle of this war?
I don't, look, I think that when Obama, first obviously it was present during largely George W. Bush's term when he famously looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul as he says and as he said at the time and I think has regretted ever since. I think he became more disillusioned with Putin after sort of 2007, 2008 time frame. But Obama came in not really with great expectations of Putin but having had just the election of Medvedev in Russia as the sort of caretaker president, but at the time we didn't know that he would be caretaker president, wanting to engage and wanting to see how much room Medvedev had to maneuver with Putin now as prime minister. And it turned out that there was actually room to maneuver, right? The most famous decision that Medvedev made which probably sealed his fate and prevented him from continuing on as Russian president after 2012 was a decision to not oppose the Libyan intervention by the Obama administration. Something that Putin vigorously opposed. And Medvedev decided to go along with and I think that was the moment when Putin realized that I got to get the reins back here and not allow this guy to continue to destroy Russia's influence in a key strategic area like the Middle East. But I think once he came back into power in 2012, I don't think there were a lot of illusions in the Obama administration about him and certainly with 2014 those ended completely. With Biden, I don't think there were many illusions either about who Putin was, but there was an attempt to sort of manage the relationship, right? There was a lot of talk about strategic stability in those first six months culminating in the Geneva summit that produced some tactical progress. I remember on some cyber issues, it was in the wake of a huge ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline that was orchestrated by this ransom group out of Russia that the Biden administration really pressed Putin to collaborate to investigate jointly some of these people to get some arrests done which they actually did make some progress on. Obviously all of that fell apart in 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine. But there was sort of an opportunity I think that they saw of well, let's set Ukraine aside. We're never going to agree on that. But on some of these other issues, whether it's the nuclear file and renewal of New START arms control agreements, whether it's on cyber and some other areas, maybe there's an opportunity to collaborate. And look, Putin was amenable to that. I think he would still love to have a conversation of you know, you acknowledge my interests in the near abroad, that this is my sphere of influence and on the basis of an equal I am absolutely willing to talk to you and have you make concessions and I'll make some concessions in return. Of course, we don't accept that premise and we don't accept his war on Ukraine and his destabilization actions all over the former Soviet Union states and beyond. But that is ultimately the type of relationship that he's always wanted to have with the West, right? I think that he genuinely wanted a good relationship and probably still would like one today. He just doesn't think it's realistic. But back, you know, when he was the first foreign leader to place a call into George W. Bush after 9/11, offering support, you know, we forget that now, but Russia did offer support. It provided maps of Afghanistan. Obviously, they had known that terrain well from fighting an eight-year war there in the '80s. Providing their approval for logistics route through Central Asia into Afghanistan, which was critical. In fact, the first CIA team that landed in October of 2001 in Afghanistan went through Central Asia with Putin's approval. Right? So he wanted that positive relationship. He wanted to be seen as an equal. But he started first expressing concerns about it and then turning absolutely antagonistic when he realized that the US was never going to accept this formula of good ties on the geopolitical stage but I can do whatever I want in my own backyard and non-interference from the US and what he saw as all these color revolutions starting with Ukraine in 2004. You know, that was when he started thinking, I don't think they understand the deal that I was offering them.
I do want to ask one further question about the United States and I'll urge our audience to send in questions to the Q&A function. I see that one has come in already and we'll get to them in about half an hour's time. But I do want to ask one other US-related question and this is the very fraught debate about NATO enlargement, NATO expansion. People sometimes quibble about what those two to me very similar words imply about this process. And there's a lot to ask about here. I want to break the question into two parts. First about the US and the NATO members after 1991 and in effect the practical wisdom of NATO expansion if you see it as being a wise set of policies and clearly it's all over the place in terms of Russian rhetoric about the war in 2022 and the story of Ukraine in 2014. I don't think anybody could argue that NATO is irrelevant to Russia and the question of which countries especially the further east you get which countries are members doesn't matter. It's clearly acutely relevant. But I'm also curious how you evaluate that argument that comes from the Kremlin. I certainly wouldn't and I doubt that you would take at face value much that's said. On the other hand there is an important story to be told with some of those turns of phrase and the way that Putin communicates this story to the world which is a NATO story often and I think China replicates that narrative and of course the way that Putin communicates this story to the Russian population which is also very much a NATO story. So the wisdom of the policy as such and the place of this in Putin's mind or in the mind of the Russian security elite.
