How Russians See Putin's War in Ukraine

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Coming up in the next two hours, our climate story of the week today, this time new tax credits you can get if you use certain forms of energy and a controversy over plastic packaging in the New York State budget negotiations now entering their final phase, that's coming up. We'll also have Mayor de Blasio's correction commissioner on how Mayor Adams commissioner is doing with the crisis on Rikers Island.

We will cover Mayor Adams's announcement scheduled for during our show today, exempting professional athletes and performers from the vaccine mandate that still applies to everyone else who works in person anywhere in the city. Good news for Kyrie Irving, Aaron Judge, and their fans, but why should they get special treatment? We'll see if we can go live to the mayor's announcement and then invite your reactions.

First, we'll get Masha Gessen's take now on the Ukraine war. The New Yorker correspondent's latest article is about Kharkiv, which has been one of the biggest targets of Vladimir Putin's scorched earth campaign against civilians. We will also ask Masha for their take on Putin becoming a hero to the global anti-LGBTQ right-wing. Here's a clip of Steve Bannon and private security company head, Erik Prince, on a radio show a few weeks ago as the invasion was looming seeming to really like Putin because he's anti-trans.

Steve Bannon: Putin ain't woke. He is anti woke.

Erik Prince: The Russian people still know which bathroom to use. How many genders are there in Russia?

Steve Bannon: Two.

Erik Prince: Okay. That's all sudden. They don't have the flags. They don't have the pride flags outside on their--

Speaker 2: They don't have boys swimming in girls' college swim meets up backward.

Brian Lehrer: That was from Bannon's own podcast, and that's horrifying enough. It was before the actual killing started taking place. We'll also ask Masha about one of her articles on how the Kosovo air war foreshadowed the crisis in Ukraine. Madeleine Albright, who died yesterday, the former Secretary of State, was very involved in President Bill Clinton's decision to bomb Kosovo when Serbian leaders were committing a genocide there against Muslims in Serbia in 1999. That genocide resulted in a war crimes conviction for their head of state, Slobodan Milošević. Could that be a precedent for putting Putin on trial?

Well, that's a lot. Let's see how much we can get to with New Yorker staff writer, Masha Gessen. Their own background as a Russian immigrant to the United States includes being fired as editor of a Russian Science Magazine for refusing to send a reporter to cover hang gliding, that is Putin hang gliding with Serbian cranes, and they won the National Book Award in 2017 for The Future is History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Masha, we always appreciate when you come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Masha Gessen: Thank you for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Well, not to bury the lead in terms of the impact on people's lives. Your new article is about the devastation in Kharkiv. You say Kharkiv is now unrecognizable. For Americans who never heard of that city until this war, can you tell us what kind of a place Kharkiv was or has been?

Masha Gessen: Kharkiv is the second-largest city in Ukraine. It's just 25 miles from the border with Russia. It's always been a gateway city and for some of it's existence, it was historically the gateway of the Russian Empire to the west. Then it became for the last eight years, it was the gateway for Ukrainians traveling to Russia, Russians traveling in and out of Ukraine. It was right next to the of the territories that were occupied by Russia from 2014 up through the present. People in Kharkiv were acutely aware that there was a war going on and there was a shooting war for eight years before the current invasion began.

Brian Lehrer: In the east, yes.

Masha Gessen: Well, I mean, right next door. Kharkiv is in the east.

Brian Lehrer: Exactly.

Masha Gessen: In fact, Russia's original ambition was very clearly in 2014 to include Kharkiv in occupied territories, which didn't work. Kharkiv was utterly brutally attacked In the last few weeks. Of course, we can say that about a lot of Ukrainian cities. One of the things about Kharkiv that I think is important and that people didn't understand, and certainly Russia didn't understand was that even though it's a traditionally Russian-speaking city, it is very much a Ukrainian city in the sense that there was a Ukrainian identity that was forged over the eight years of being right next to the occupation.

Knowing the misery and carnage that the occupation caused, which is something that I think the Kremlin was willfully blind to. The resistance that Russia has encountered in Ukraine begins with Kharkiv as a very Ukrainian-identified city, a city that's going to defend itself to the west.

Brian Lehrer: That was already suffering. You write about a voice message forwarded to you from Denys Kobzin if I'm saying that right, the director of the Kharkiv Institute for Social Research, which said in part, "It's the worst for vulnerable people. People who are ill elderly, bedridden. There is no hope for them. There is no medication left, no nursing care, no medical help, and no chance of leaving the city. Emergency services are working around the clock, but they don't have enough equipment or enough people," from that voice message.

Masha, that's consistent with other reporting I've been seeing about how it's largely senior citizens who Putin's bombs and missiles are killing because the younger women and children have fled in large part and the younger men are fighting in the war. Is Putin trying to bring Ukraine to its knees by killing sick and old people?

Masha Gessen: I think Putin is consistently and consciously creating humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine. You know that when residential neighborhoods when places like the theatre in Mariupol where people were sheltering in the basements are targeted or shelled, you know that the vulnerable civilians will be disproportionately affected. They're targeting civilians and those among the civilians who cannot make their way down to the bomb shelter, who cannot make their way out of the country, who cannot make their way out of the city. Those are the people who will be disproportionately affected. Yes, it's the weak, the ill, the elderly, who are completely helpless as one of the world's largest armies unleashes its fury on them.

Brian Lehrer: Just before the war really began, but the buildup is taking place of Russian troops near the border, one of your articles said both the Russian and Ukrainian Government's kept downplaying the probability of war and reprimanding journalists, for fanning the fear. Do you think President Zelenskyy and others in the Ukrainian government were genuinely surprised by the full-scale invasion Putin ordered, rather than containing it to the disputed eastern provinces?

Masha Gessen: I think it's hard for me to know what intelligence Zelenskyy had apparently from all available information, excellent intelligence and certainly, US intelligence continued to indicate that Putin was talking about a full-scale invasion. I think there's a difference between knowing and fully believing it. I still can't believe this is happening. This is unthinkable. It's unimaginable and it's happening before our eyes. Separately from that, the downplaying by the Ukrainian government just before the invasion was a very transparent strategy.

They didn't know whether the invasion was going to happen for sure. They didn't know when it was going to happen but talk of invasion was destroying the Ukrainian economy before there was any shooting. They were asking journalists to stop fanning the flames of panic, mostly in order to protect their economy.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Listeners, we invite your calls for Masha Gessen from The New Yorker on Ukraine, or Putin or Russia or anything related at 212-433 WNYC 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Masha, that quote that I just read was from your article. "How the Kosovo air war foreshadowed the war in Ukraine." Would you remind people what the Kosovo air war was and why it happened?

Masha Gessen: In 1999, a US-led NATO alliance launched a military campaign against Slobodan Milošević in Yugoslavia, which was pursuing policy of ethnic cleansing basically in the predominantly Albanian speaking Muslim province, of Kosovo. The war was undertaken without UN Security Council sanction and without an act of aggression against any NATO countries, so, on the face of it, it was illegal under international law. Most painfully for Russia, it was undertaken without any consultations with Russia.

In fact, explicitly, Russia was told that it would have no say in it. It's a real point of reference in Russian politics, and for Vladimir Putin in particular, because the way that that was read in Russia, and not without cause, was that the United States was sending the message that international law was for the weak and the strong were just going to do what they saw as necessary, because who was going to stop them. The message that Vladimir Putin keeps sending to the world now is, I'm going to do this because I'm strong and who's going to stop me.

Brian Lehrer: Madeleine Albright, who passed away yesterday, was Clinton's Secretary of State at the time. I know many Serbians despised her after that and would sometimes protest her in person when she traveled in Europe, for example. You write that Russia did not have a direct stake in Kosovo despite your premise that Putin has used that war as a grievance that Russia has against the West ever since.

I heard what you just said about, well, the United States said, "Who's going to stop me international law is for the weak, so I'm going to run by that premise too," but do the Russian people have this sense of grievance against the United States or NATO for the 1999 War in Kosovo? Has he ginned that up among the Russian population, and that's one of the reasons that he has whatever degree of popular support he has for this now?

Masha Gessen: It's very difficult to talk about popular support in a country where it's basically a totalitarian regime with all media controlled and prison sentences of up to 15 years for contradicting the official line. We can't talk about popular support in any meaningful way. What we can say is that, yes, the Kosovo war is still a talking point in, for example, the lesson plans that every single social studies teacher in every single school in Russia has to follow in talking about the war in Ukraine. They have to reference what the United States did because of Kosovo.

Brian, I also want to say that I wrote that piece before the full-scale invasion start. My point was that there's American responsibility for creating a world in which this is possible and which this is thinkable. At this point, comparing the Kosovo-era war to what Russia is doing in Ukraine, that's not right. As much of historical reference points, as I think it is and will be, we're talking about humanitarian catastrophe on such scale. We're talking about cruelty and brutality and just war crimes on such an incredible scale, that all comparisons, except for possibly World War II, fail.

Brian Lehrer: With Masha Gessen, New Yorker staff writer and Russian expat. Boris in Brighton Beach, you're on WNYC. Hi, Boris, thank you for calling in.

Boris: Hello, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Thank you.

Boris: Thank you for letting me speak. Well, I do believe that there is no winning this war for Russia because I think this war will start at the end of Putin's regime, because what's the possibility of winning this? He takes over the whole Ukraine, and now he has a bombed-out country that he has to rebuild, that's filled with people that hate him more than they love life. Also if he leaves Ukraine alone because he cannot take over this country, it will also serve the same purpose. He will choke up. I think ultimately, at the end of it all, we'll see the change of government in Russia.

Brian Lehrer: Boris, thank you. Masha, what do you think?

Masha Gessen: I think it's not an unreasonable position, but I don't know how this regime is going to fall. It's one thing to follow this logic of, "Oh, he's going to fail in Ukraine. There's no way he can win in Ukraine," which is absolutely true. There's no such thing as a successful Russian occupation of Ukraine, but I don't know how that brings down the Putin regime. It is a totalitarian regime, it completely controls the media.

It's also a mafia regime, which means that the possibility of a palace coup is vanishingly small, the possibility of popular protest is even smaller on any significant scale. How is that failure of regime actually going to happen? We have seen regimes like that in totalitarian countries, even regimes that cause unending suffering to their own people and the people around them last for decades and decades.

Brian Lehrer: There are reports of growing disenchantment with Putin at high levels of the government, even though he's seems to be in sole control of the government, for the most part, different people have said from the Soviet-era premiers who at least had a meaningful politburo to check them, but these reports of growing disenchantment with Putin at whatever high levels of the government they refer to since the war effort is failing to meet its original goals and looks so bad to the world. Do you have any way to judge whether Putin could lose his grip on power through any individuals you may be familiar with in the Russian hierarchy?

Masha Gessen: I don't think that the regime is vulnerable to displeasure among the elites. That is not the way it's structured. Basically, Putin is the pater of a mafia clan, where he's constantly distributing money and power to the people who surround him. The smaller this pie of money and power gets, the more they're pushing each other aside with their elbows there happens in order to get closer to Putin, in order to get whatever remains of this little tiny pie.

In that sense, the rhetoric behind Western sanctions that they're created to prompt the elites to rebel against Putin, I think it either reflects lazy thinking or more likely it's just quite insincere because US intelligence knows enough to know that the possibility of a palace coup in Russia is vanishing.

Brian Lehrer: That's going to be bad news to some of our listeners who may have been hanging on those reports as maybe the best hope. Here's a question from a listener via Twitter. It asks, "Why did Putin not do this when Trump was in office? I guess the implication there is, Trump would have been more sympathetic to it, and there wouldn't be this kind of NATO response."

Masha Gessen: The world does not revolve around the United States. [chuckles] I think the implication of that question is, "Oh, there must have had some arrangement or whatever." I have very little patience with thinking that turns us away from what's actually going on on the ground in Ukraine, and Russia, and looking for conspiracy theories in the US government. I don't know why he didn't do it while Trump was in office because he felt more stable while Trump was in office for Russian reasons that have nothing to do with Trump.

To any substance of the question, I would say that Putin certainly did not expect, A, that the war would drag on for so long. He clearly had faulty intelligence. His cronies promised him that they would be able to take Ukraine in a couple of days, or at least take Kyiv, the capital, in a couple of days. He didn't expect the devastating sanctions that have been imposed on Russia.

What he did expect was that there would be no NATO military response and there hasn't been. President Zelenskyy's pleas for a no-fly zone have gone on heated, and have even been treated with a dismissive irritation by Western leaders as though he were asking for something completely unreasonable when he's asking for Western help in protecting his people who are being pummeled by Russian artillery in aviation, as they try to hide inside their homes. He is asking for military intervention in the largest humanitarian catastrophe of our time. His requests are being treated as unrealistic and unreasonable.

Brian Lehrer: A question to that point, I think from Roger in Tamworth, New Hampshire. Roger, you're on WNYC with Masha Gessen from The New Yorker. Hello.

Roger: Oh, hello. I'm wondering if Masha thinks that Mr. Putin is trying to goad the west into a fight which he believes that he can win as a larger context?

Brian Lehrer: Impression, Masha.

Masha Gessen: It's a great question. Then the answer is I don't know. What I think is true is that Putin views himself as being at war with the West, and then, particularly with the United States. He also views sanctions as acts of war. We know this because he said so over and over again. He sees the war in Ukraine as a proxy war. As far as he's concerned, he's already in military conflicts with the United States.

Brian Lehrer: The premise of the US and NATO, not getting further involved, like with a no-fly zone that Zelenskyy wants or ways of sending MiG aircraft is it would invite Putin to launch a larger war against NATO, and then there will be a lot more suffering than there even is today. I wonder you're not a military reporter, but if you have an opinion about that. There are some people I guess, like the caller who think maybe Putin thinks it is in his interest to goad the west into a wider war. There are other people who say, he'd never crossed that line because it would be military suicide.

Masha Gessen: I definitely do not believe that he would never cross that line. The reason I don't believe that is because I listen to what he says. What he says over and over again is that, A, he sees himself as being already in conflict with the US, B, that he reserves the right to use nuclear weapons. If you listen to Russian television, you keep hearing them talking about the use of military airports in Poland to supply, A, to Ukraine. The message there is that Putin views those military reports as a legitimate military target. There's absolutely no indication that Putin sees that as a line that he can't cross.

Your right, I'm not a military expert. I'm not a military reporter. I certainly do not have a suggested solution to this. All I'm trying to say is that when we talk about not being pulled into a larger conflict, another way of saying that is, look, it is easier to tolerate Ukrainian civilians dying than to risk the death of NATO soldiers or to risk the deaths of people in NATO member countries. There's a hierarchy there, and that is increasingly morally problematic.

Brian Lehrer: A hierarchy of the value of different people's lives as perceived by the West, you're saying.

Masha Gessen: That is exactly what I'm saying.

Brian Lehrer: I also hear you saying, you listen to what Putin says, in calculating whether he could actually want a wider war against the West. It reminds me of the time you came on the show, just after Donald Trump was elected president. People were like, "Oh, well, now that he's in office, he's not going to do all these authoritarian things that he said on the campaign trail that he's going to do." You said, based on your experience in Russia, "When the authoritarian talks, believe him." I'm paraphrasing, but I think I have it close.

Masha Gessen: I think you do have it close.

Brian Lehrer: You're still listening to what Putin says and believing him?

Masha Gessen: It's a very simple reporting hack. Just listen to what they say. There's a lot of information contained in it.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Masha Gessen. We'll take more of your calls. I want to ask her why she thinks Putin when Russia used to be a country in contrast to the United States that had some sympathy on the global left now seems to have his biggest base of support on the global right. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Masha Gessen, New Yorker staff writer, whose latest article is about Putin's scorched earth campaign against civilians in Kharkiv, in particular, and a national book award-winning book in 2017 was, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Claimed Russia. Patty in Princeton Junction, you're on WNYC with Masha Gessen. Hi, Patty.

Patty: Hi, Brian. As an expat of Russia, I believe Masha would be aware of the very long-standing ties between India and Russia. India notably has not condemned Russia in this conflict. I see that China is not very willing if I believe the media reports, to bring about an end to the conflict by mediating. India, of course, I also hear is in talks with buying Russian oil on the cheap. I'm wondering, I've seen very little in the US media about India's position. India is the largest democracy so I would like to hear Masha's thoughts on all of this. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Patty. You know where I saw India referenced on the US media the other day, I'll throw this in with Patty's question, Masha, on Fox News. On Tucker Carlson, they had a fairly pro-Russia retired US military guy, saying basically these sanctions are going to fail because huge countries like India and China are not going along with the sanctions.

Even some major countries in Europe, like Germany, are not really going along with them all that much, therefore, the sanctions are going to fail. The US is just putting itself at risk by going down this road being soft on Putin by making that argument with Tucker Carlson, but India and China together have more than 2 billion people. What do you say to Patty's question plus maybe the context that I added?

Masha Gessen: I'm not sure I understand Patty's question. It was not a great connection.

Brian Lehrer: I think she wants to know, and Patty, you can reframe it if I don't have this basically right, just basically what you think about India, which has had ties with Russia but is basically a democracy, the position that it's in, and whether it's going to support Putin to a meaningful degree?

Masha Gessen: Well, I think at this point, it's somewhat problematic to call India a democracy. It certainly is a country that has been going in an anti-democratic direction for quite a long time. I think the larger point is that, when sitting here in the United States, we are likely to have the illusion that the whole world is condemning us for and is against Putin.

It's true that giant countries like India and China are not at all and in big swaths of Africa, are not at all jumping on the bandwagon of condemning Russia's war and perhaps have their own interests in the realignment of world powers that Vladimir Putin hopes to bring about.

As far as sanctions are concerned, the question about whether sanctions will fail or succeed, has to start with what is the goal of sanctions? What are they going to succeed or fail at? Sanctions are not going to bring down the Putin regime. Anybody who tells you that sanctions are imposed in order to get the elites to rebel or to get the masses to rise up is either lying or is a very lazy thinker.

Sanctions, I think serve, almost a hygienic purpose of keeping the west from participating in this war or from enabling this war. If that's the goal of sanctions then the first order of sanctions has to be in the energy sector. The United States has inched its way closer to imposing meaningful sanctions in the energy sector, and Western Europe is very very far from doing that. Basically, what we're seeing is [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Because they're so dependent on Russian energy exports, right?

Masha Gessen: They're so dependent on Russian energy exports. What we're seeing are sanctions that, as all sanctions do, disproportionately affect the poor. When I say poor in Russia, I'm talking about half the population. Half the population are people who spend most of their income on food, and they're already feeling extreme hardship. They're already encountering scarcity. They're already encountering out-of-control inflation in the stores while the lifeline of the regime, which is exports of gas and oil, continues more or less unabated, because Western Europe is dependent on Russian energy exports.

Let's put it another way. Western governments did not want to impose hardships on their own people but are willing to impose extreme hardship on Russian people who did not have a say in electing Vladimir Putin and many of whom have no part in enabling this war, while the regime to a large extent is still being spared.

Brian Lehrer: Depressing. Patty, did Masha address your question with respect to India? Is there anything else you wanted to say?

Patty: Yes. In fact, that's what I have been afraid of all this time. If the oil is still allowed to flow on the cheap, and that's very good incentive for countries like India to just stay neutral and not condemn anything, that's what I've been afraid of. Yes. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your call, Patty. Before we run out of time, I played a clip at the beginning of Steve Bannon and Erik Prince kind of joking, kind of not joking about Putin being a good guy for being anti-LGBTQ, anti-trans in particular in that clip. You've written about how you and your family left Russia in 2013 after the Russian parliament had voted unanimously to ban what it called propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations. Would you tell our listeners who may not know your story a little of it and where you think it fits into the larger arc of Putin's campaign against LGBT people?

Masha Gessen: Well, my family had to leave Russia because the government was specifically threatening us with taking my adopted son out of the family because he was being raised in a "perverted family". Anti-gay rhetoric has been a centerpiece of Putin's politics for a decade now, and it's very much a part of the anti-Western rhetoric that backs up the war. About a week ago when he was talking about people who leaving Russia and needing to ferret out traders within the ranks, he said these are people who can't live without foie gras, oysters, and gender freedom, which is very much his picture of the [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Did you say foie gras, oysters, and gender freedom?

Masha Gessen: That's exactly what I said, Foie gras, oysters, and gender freedom.

Brian Lehrer: Putting those three together as if they're of a set.

Masha Gessen: Yes. That's shorthand for the dying decadent west and which is a centerpiece of the pseudo traditionalist politics, which is of course where Vladimir Putin's regime meets the US and Western European far right.

Brian Lehrer: How do you see this war ending? Last question.

Masha Gessen: I have no idea. The best-case scenario is awful. The best-case scenario is that negotiations result in some kind of ceasefire or temporary peace treaty that gives Russia control over the Southeastern part of Ukraine. That is awful because it is rewarding this act of heinous aggression. It's also awful because it will be nothing but a temporary solution until Putin regroups and attacks again, and that's the best-case scenario.

Brian Lehrer: New Yorker staff writer, Masha Gessen. Their latest article is about Kharkiv, which has been one of the biggest targets of Vladimir Putin's scorched earth campaign against civilians. Masha, thank you very much.

Masha Gessen: Thank you, Brian.

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