The Latest on the Invasion of Ukraine

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Continuing our coverage of the invasion of Ukraine, consider this irony as tweeted by a journalist, Julia Ioffe. "As recently as December, 60% of both Russians and Ukrainians saw each other favorably. Putin is leading two populations that overwhelmingly like each other into war."

Or this Julia Ioffe tweet. "There's very strong isolationist strain in American politics both on the left and the right. There is no isolationist wing in Russian politics or even in Russian culture and society." Or this, "Sanctioning the children of members of Putin's inner circle, sanctioning the children, is unprecedented. Before, the US was always wary of sanctioning family members. This is a smart step and a recognition of reality. These children are now very powerful adults."

Finally, consider this question. "If Putin continues his advance into Ukraine and a full-scale war and an insurgency do break out, what will the world look like in a decade? Will it trigger massive refugee flows into Europe, further emboldening the far right?"

Those are all the words of our guests now, one of America's most respected and insightful reporters about Russia, the Moscow-born Julia Ioffe, who these days is founding partner and Washington correspondent for the website Puck News. Her latest article there is called Will Putin Get His World War III? Julia, I know you're very in-demand right now. Thanks for coming on with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Julia Ioffe: Thanks so much for having me. I got to say, given the context, I wish I were not in demand and that this were not the story that's happening.

Brian Lehrer: I hear you. To the title of your article, does Putin want a World War III?

Julia Ioffe: I don't know. I don't know that he knows. I don't know that he has thought through all the ways that this could go sideways. There is a part of me that wonders if he has made such a political and cultural cult around World War II, and it has served as a ideological glue for a country and a regime that has really no ideology other than nationalism.

People often get in trouble for saying anything remotely critical of World War II and how it was executed and how it was poorly planned and waged by Stalin and his regime. He's also using that cult in part. He has also restored the image of Stalin in Russia as a great general and somebody who led the country to victory despite all the hardships, despite all the death. I wonder if there's a part of him that wants his own victory in a war like that to be canonized in history as a great victor.

I don't know that's how he sees the conflict in Ukraine, but I do think that it's one of the many things that makes him far less scared to go to war than, say, Western leaders.

Brian Lehrer: A lot of what you just said in that answer surprised me. I thought you were going to say cult of glorification of the cold war, which of course was Russia against the United States and the west. Instead, you said World War II, in which Russia and the United States, and most of Western Europe fought side by side against the Nazis in Germany. You said Stalin. Well, so many millions of Russians today must be descended from family members who were slaughtered or had family members back then slaughtered by Stalin. Why World War II rather than the cold war? Why glorify Stalin of all people as if that's going to be popular or maybe it is?

Julia Ioffe: I don't know if it's so much glorifying Stalin as rehabilitating him. I'll get back to that in a second. I do want to express to your listeners how important World War II is to the Russian population and the population of the former Soviet republics.

I'm sure this is the case in Belarus and Ukraine as well because they were all one country at the time. In World War II, the Soviet Union lost some 27 million people. That's a rough estimate because it was very hard to count casualties, especially when they get up in that range.

Brian Lehrer: No country lost more than Russia, not even close.

Julia Ioffe: Well, no, not even close, but let me give you another statistic that will just send a chill up your spine. In those four years, the Soviet Union lost 15% of its population in four years. A lot of the fighting happened on Soviet soil. It wasn't just the loss of people, it was also the destruction of homes and the living under Nazi occupation. This was born especially brutally by Ukraine and Belarus. Then there were also the deportations of whole ethnoses, the Chechens, the Ingush who Stalin labeled as potential fifth columns and just deported an entire republic or ethnic group and just dumped them in fields in Siberia, where many of them died, a third to a half.

What that means is that, even though it's been almost 80 years since the end of the war, it has left a huge mark on every single post-Soviet family. It has certainly left on our mind. My generation, definitely, I'm not-- I think even the generation after me, grew up on the memories and the stories and the trauma of World War II. In a way, it's understandable that Putin would try to capitalize on this and use it as a social glue that doesn't otherwise exist.

Brian Lehrer: Social glue, with respect to the past, but wouldn't Russians say to each other, "We don't want to do that again unless something like being invaded by the Nazis again were to happen"?

Julia Ioffe: Yes. On one hand, the feeling that it fostered in-- I'm just going to speak for Russia here, is, as long as there's no war. That's a way to end a sentence about pretty much anything. The economy's bad but we can deal with it as long as there's no war.

On one hand, it has made Russians very scared of war. On the other hand, it's also been valorized so much that it makes them want to go to war, and less afraid of war, and see war as a purifying, nobilizing struggle, if that makes sense.

Getting back to your question about Stalin, I think he was rehabilitated by Putin. In the large part, the Stalin that he has re-introduced to the Russian public, especially the Russian youth, is one that is, in his words, an effective manager.

It's, I think, to get people used to the idea that authoritarianism is okay. In fact, it might be the better way to run a big complicated economy in a big complicated multiethnic, multiconfessional country that spans 11 time zones. Because otherwise it's chaotic and unruly. What I've heard young people say to me is-- This is clearly the product of their education in school, which is more and more tightly controlled by the government.

This is a literal quote. They'll say, "Well, yes, of course, there were excesses and he killed 5,000 people, but at least he brought electricity to the country." I was like, "5,000 people?"

That's how he has been reintroduced, as a proto-Putin and not as-- Putin is definitely not as bloody a dictator as Stalin and I think he's trying to create an equivalence in that way.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, just for a little numerical context, I think I have these numbers right. You said 27 million Russians died in World War II. It was about 400,000 Americans, so not even in the same league, not remotely. Of course, it was horrible in this country for all the loss, but that was 400,000 people. We've lost  900,000 people to COVID. 27 million Russians lost in World War II. This is such important cultural translation that you're doing for most of the Americans in our audience. You mentioned in your article on Puck News that Putin seems to be weirdly into numerology. Yesterday was 2/22/22. Why do you point out that date?

Julia Ioffe: That was the date in which he sent "peacekeepers" into, I hesitate to call them breakaway regions, because that makes it sound like they broke away on their own as opposed to Putin actively and violently prying them away from Ukraine. It was the exact anniversary of when Viktor Yanukovych, the Moscow-friendly president of Ukraine, fled to Russia in 2014 after opening fire. He didn't personally do it, but ordering his special police to open for on protestors in the Maidan, killing over 100 people.

I don't know if people remember the images from that day, but it was absolutely horrific. There were just snipers taking out people from rooftops. We all saw images of brains splattered on the pavement and people running for cover and getting picked off, just terrible, terrible stuff.

I remember arriving in Kiev that night, right after the shooting had started. I had been in Sochi covering the Olympics. We lost the Olympics too. There was a feeling that the next morning would be even worse and that there would be more violence. I remember being on the Maidan and people, they were like, it was so scary and sad. It was formations of young men with like sticks and bats marching and training for what they imagined would be hand-to-hand combat the next day, but then in the morning when we woke up, it was over, and Yanukovych had fled.

I think that was the day that, for Putin, things turned and he felt like he had to take back Ukraine and force it back into his orbit.

Brian Lehrer: The anniversary from 2/22/2014 to 2/22/22. No coincidence, apparently. Listeners, we will once again open up the phones for anyone with ties to Ukraine or Russia first priority, or anyone with ties to any of the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, or Estonia, or anyone with ties to other countries in Eastern or Western Europe that might feel effects, ripple effects, domino effects of this invasion. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692.

We'll take Americans on the phones too. There are US implications too, like potential energy price increases and the split in the Republican party between the Trump and Putin loving authoritarian right, and a more Reaganite "US should stand for freedom from Russian domination" wing. We'll get to that in this segment too. We invite our Europe-connected listeners to the head of the line if you're out there today, if you have something to say, or to ask Julia Ioffe from Puck News.

212-433-WNYC, 212-413-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Julia, since you're doing 20th-century Russian history, and in such a compelling way, you wrote in your article that Putin's speech the other night recognizing the so-called independence of two regions of Ukraine, was terrifying, and that he said Ukraine is not a real country but rather a fictitious country created by Vladimir Lenin. What is he referring to there about Lenin and Ukraine? Is that real on any level?

Julia Ioffe: It is not true. Ukraine existed as a different culture for hundreds of years. It produced writers and poets in the Ukrainian language, including ones that were then folded into the Russian can like Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov. They were Ukrainian writers and they wrote about Ukrainian themes. It has a different language, and one that is understandable to Russian speakers, but is heavily influenced by Polish and is just different. It's a different culture, it's a different place.

Obviously, very closely connected to Russia. There are a lot of Russians who are part Ukrainian, part Russian, and many Ukrainians who are part Russian part Ukrainian with a lot of other admixtures.

The Soviet Union and the Russian empire were these incredibly diverse multiethnic countries. It's not uncommon to meet a Ukrainian or a Russian who has some Tatar, Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, Kazakh ancestry, and it's all mixed up. Talking about things in these purely ethnic terms is terrifying for many reasons, but it's also strange because it's accurate.

Ukraine briefly had independence between World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. It was also briefly occupied by the German army when the new Bolshevik government pulled out of World War I at Brest. It briefly existed as an independent country and then was reconquered by the Bolsheviks in-- I'm going to say in 1921, but I might be wrong by a year. Ish. I think maybe what he's referring to is the policy of Korenizatsiya, which was an early Bolshevik attempt to-- They called the Russian empire, the prison of nations.

Initially, the Bolshevik movement tried to be very internationalist and class was more important than ethnicity or religion or nationality, but they also wanted to incorporate these republics into the larger project, and Korenizatsiya was a way, which is like rootification, like R-O-O-T. They put a lot of resources into helping these republics develop their own national cultures and their own languages. That was not just for the Ukrainians, but for the Kazakhs and for the Jews.

The Jews got-- Well, they already had [unintelligible 00:17:20] newspapers, but it was an effort to fold these cultures into a larger socialist project to show that all these ethnicities and religions, et cetera, could live peacefully under socialism.

I think maybe that's what he's referring to, but to totally erase a Ukrainian culture that was unique and different from Russia's, it's madness, and it's a cultural, ethnic cleansing that is deeply troubling. What he said in the speech, he's been saying for a time. He told George W. Bush, at Bucharest, that he didn't believe Ukraine was a real country. He wrote this op-ed last summer talking about how for the last thousand years, Russia and Ukraine were mutually unintelligible both to people on the inside and countries on the outside looking in, and that Ukrainians and Russians are one people, and they should be basically one country, which is a deeply ahistorical inaccurate, and I would say fascistic view.

Brian Lehrer: In Putin's world or for Putin's rhetorical purposes, Stalin good, Lenin bad?

Julia Ioffe: You'll find this surprising, they are not very logically consistent and they are not really good historical scholars. From what I can understand, Lenin is bad in that he destroyed the Russian empire and the Romanov dynasty, which had been going for 300 years. Putin sees him as a destroyer of empires, and that's bad.

On the other hand, he built a different empire, the Soviet Union and that's good, and it was the empire that produced Vladimir Putin, so that's good, but also bad because he killed the Romanov Tsar and his family. This is all just for propaganda purposes at home and to self-justify what he's doing. This has no real justification in history or internally consistent logic.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Deborah in Manhattan with roots in Estonia. Deborah, you're on WNYC with Julia Ioffe. Thank you so much for calling in.

Deborah: Julia, hi. It's a pleasure to meet you here.  Thank you for your cultural perspective, those numbers are important for Americans to hear. For example, 10% of the Estonia population was lost in a single evening, the deportation by the Russians. The scope of this, that's the equivalent of 30 million Americans disappearing overnight.

What my question is around language. I have heard from friends that now Ukrainian is being spoken exclusively and in certain circles. The Russian language, you speak Russian, you're getting the hairy eyeball. I noticed myself having a reaction to somebody speaking Russian on a train the other day and I had to check myself. In Estonia, we have a 30% population roughly that is ethnic Russian, and we've accommodated that for 30 years, but there has been debate about ending teaching Russian in the schools.

I'm curious what you see as the trajectory because the language is so central to maintaining the cultural identities of these next-in-line countries. What are your thoughts on that?

Julia Ioffe: Thank you so much for mentioning what happened to the Estonian population after they were annexed in 1939 by force. There are really soul-crushing testimonials from people in the Gulag, Soviets in the Gulag who then saw this sudden stream of Estonians and Latvians and Lithuanians after '39, wondering what they're doing there and how they didn't even speak the language. They were totally lost in the Gulag.

The Baltics are an interesting case. They were not part of the Soviet Union as long. They were forcibly added to it in 1939. Until their independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was like an active resistance and there is a hostility to Russians that I think remains to this day.

I'm not sure what the citizenship laws are in Estonia, but as far as I understand, it's the Baltic countries have hesitated in giving people of Russian descent citizenship, which has created a lot of tension in these countries. As for the language, I'm not sure what you mean about the language.

Deborah: I mean specifically the Estonian language. For example, we've got Russian minorities who've been in the country for three generations at this point, and they don't speak Estonian. For the passport-- It's my understanding, I'm not entirely clear on this, so I probably may need to be corrected. My understanding is you can't get full Estonian citizenship without passing a language requirement, unless you can prove that you were in the country prior to 1939, which is how I acquired it.

Julia Ioffe: Right. I'm not sure. I think, for a lot of questions-- Yes, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I was going to say we're getting a little bit into the weeds, even for us. I wanted to put this in a larger context, because I think Deborah's call is very important, but go ahead and finish the thought on language if you had one.

Julia Ioffe: I was going to say I think it's a difficult question, and it's part of this longer post-Soviet tale that we're still dealing with and that Putin is very urgently relitigating. I think that's part of what's happening today. In that space, for some countries, it was longer than 1917. For Estonia, it was 1939 to 1991 or 1990. Russian was the lingua franca of that space, and they didn't have to learn anything else, and now they do. I think, for older generations, people like Putin, for example, they still can't get used to the fact that-- and these are not my thoughts or words, but that this isn't ours anymore. That Estonia isn't part of Russia, that Kiev and Ukraine are not part of Russia, that Kyiv is not part of Russia.

They still, 30 years later, can't quite wrap their heads around it. I think language is part of that. As the younger generations in places like Georgia, for example, don't learn Russian. When you go to Tbilisi, the older generation will answer you in Russian, but the younger generation, they have no idea what you're saying. It's breaking up that space linguistically is I think part of the independence process, but also I think for Moscow's point of view, a loss of cultural influence and hegemony.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Deborah, thank you very much for that call. To the series of questions you pose in your article, then we're going to break and talk about the US side of all of this with Julia Ioffe. To the questions that you pose in your article in a frightening series, if Putin continues his advance into Ukraine and a full-scale war and an insurgency do break out, what will the world look like in a decade?

Then you do specifics, will it trigger massive refugee flows into Europe, further emboldening the far right? Will Putin provoke the Baltic states, which includes Estonia as well as Latvia and Lithuania dragging NATO into a direct military confrontation with Russia? Because they are NATO states? The Baltic republics?

Julia Ioffe: That's right, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Will Xi Jinping seize the opportunity to conquer Taiwan? The very fact that you're asking those questions, never mind the answers, seems intended to burst the bubble that Americans may be living in with respect to this crisis, that it's an isolated thing somewhere over there that we couldn't even probably pinpoint on a map, most people in this country, just between Russia and Ukraine, as opposed to a first domino of something like a world war. When you ask those questions, do you really think any of those are real possibilities, or are you just playing with extreme unlikely scenarios?

Julia Ioffe: Well, we don't know how likely or unlikely they are. For example, the question of Taiwan and China has cropped up immediately when talking about this crisis because it is a part of the world that China thinks is China. Taiwan obviously disagrees. It has been this long-simmering issue. I'm sure that Beijing is watching this to see how it will go.

If Putin is able to recon conquer Ukraine or to install a puppet regime there, I'm sure China will be watching and learning. I was just thinking through the possible scenarios. I think they are very possible. Unfortunately, in my years of observing and writing about and reporting about Russia, I've learned that usually, the worst-case scenario is the likeliest one.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, finish the thought. Sorry.

Julia Ioffe: I was going to say, Americans often get flustered by that, and they say, "You're so pessimistic, you're so dark." To me, it's an interesting cultural divide. It gets to your question about America not realizing maybe this might not be an isolated crisis. Syria could have been an isolated crisis. We didn't know--

Brian Lehrer: 2015.

Julia Ioffe: Well, no, 2011. We didn't know that when some peaceful protestors came out to rally against Bashar al-Assad, that it would end in massive refugee flows to Europe that would bring about the rise of the far-right all over Europe, that it would push Britain out of the EU and give EU its first major ding. It's hard to know when these things-- We didn't know when Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June of 1914, that there was a straight line from there to The Holocaust?

Brian Lehrer: We will continue on the US side of this with Julia Ioffe and more of your calls right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we continue with our amazing guest, one of America's most respected and insightful reporters about Russia, the Moscow-born Julia Ioffe. If you don't know her work, her last name is spelled I-O-F-F-E, Julia Ioffe, who, these days, is founding partner and Washington correspondent for the website, Puck News. That's Puck with a P like in Peter. I can say that on the radio. Her latest article there is called Will Putin Get His World War III? Let's turn--

Julia Ioffe: Puck, by the way, as in the Shakespearean character from Midsummer Night's Dream. I'm kidding.

Brian Lehrer: It's not a hockey reference.

Julia Ioffe: No, it's not.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about the Republican split. Here's the traditional line of GOP attack on Biden, not strong enough against Russia, Democrats as the party of the weak. Here's New York City Republican Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis speaking  a month ago on Fox.

Nicole Malliotakis: We need to be imposing sanctions. We need to be sending weapons to Ukraine so they could defend themselves. We need to be working with our allies, particularly in NATO, to provide support to Ukraine. All this needs to be on the front end, not after they do the invasion. We need to prevent this invasion. The only way we're going to do that is if we set a very strong tone with Putin.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole Malliotakis on January 22. Listen to this from yesterday, Donald Trump trying to play both sides in a radio interview. First, he lavishes praise on Putin, calls him a genius, and says we should be doing something similar. Listen.

Donald Trump: I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, "This is genius." Putin declares a big portion of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful. Putin is now saying it's independent, a large section of Ukraine. I said, "How smart is that?" He's going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That's the strongest piece for us. We could use that on our southern border.

Brian Lehrer: Then, Trump plays the invasion of Ukraine as a bad thing that's the fault of Joe Biden.

Donald Trump: By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I've been in office, not even thinkable, this would never have happened.

Brian Lehrer: Julia, can you put those Trump clips and that Malliotakis clip in the context of the GOP right now?

Julia Ioffe: I can try. The Malliotakis clip is crazy to me because everything she's describing as what we should be doing is what the Biden administration has been doing.

Brian Lehrer: Now?

Julia Ioffe: Not even now. They were doing it in November and December. They were working with allies. The US has been sending weapons to Ukraine for a long time. I think it was actually the Trump administration who sent them javelins. We're providing them with training. This has been going on for a long time. Talk about it as if she just had this brilliant idea and nobody in the Biden administration had thought of any of these things is just insane to me. Either she isn't aware of what's been going on in the White House, and the State Department, and the Defense Department, and in Congress actually, for the last few months, or she's more likely being willfully ignorant and using this to make political hay out of it.

As for Trump, it's just like him. He wants to have every issue of every which way. I remember analyzing his foreign policy speech, which he first gave in April 2016. If you looked at it carefully, every position was canceled out in the speech. He would stick out of position and then also stick out its exact opposite, so that he can never be wrong. He's right in every scenario.

In this case, I think he actually really admires Putin, wants to be like Putin, wanted to rule America the way Putin rules Russia. Remember he said about Kim Jong-un, "I really like the way this guy runs his country. When he speaks, people sit up and listen." It's like, yes, they will be killed if they don't. Let's hope you don't bring that kind of system here to the US.

As for it would have never happened under him, I think he's right that it wouldn't have because he would have handed Ukraine over on a silver platter with an apple in its mouth. If Putin had asked him to close NATO's door to Ukraine, is there any doubt that he wouldn't have done it in a heartbeat? He doesn't like NATO, to begin with. He was constantly kicking it, denigrating it, saying we don't need it, and then his best buddy Putin says, "Get rid of it," or "Don't allow Ukraine because it would piss me off."

I don't think there's a soul in America who doesn't believe that he wouldn't immediately hand it over.

Brian Lehrer: I can only imagine the tweets you must be getting based on your reporting from the Trump wing. Here's one that came in during our conversation so far that attacks me for having you. It says, "Ducking, Brian Lehrer having Julia Ioffe on. Classic. Have a single skeptic on, you coward. Someone not fully in-meshed with Western propaganda or not buddies with Richard Spencer." Richard Spencer, the famous racist, and anti-Semite." I don't actually understand that tweet. I'm not even sure if it's coming from the far-right or the far-left.

Julia Ioffe: That sounds like the far-left.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You did tweet yourself the other day that both left and right have an isolationist strain in the United States. I think we know that. What are you getting with the things you're saying throughout your day?

Julia Ioffe: I get it from the right and the left, although I think the right has largely given up on me. The left, what I'm getting is a strange accusation of warmongering, which is what they're generally accusing the Biden administration of. You hear this a lot from the American left that the Biden administration is beating the drums of war and pushing us into war, and the media is complicit and also loves war and is pushing us to war with Russia.

When I read those comments, or read those pieces, it feels so deeply strange to me because it's not at all what's happening. If anything, what's happening here in Washington is people with any control of the situation whatsoever, trying their hardest to avoid war. The thing they want to prevent is Russia further invading Ukraine, which would be war, and trying to prevent that from happening.

I think there's a fear and I understand it given America's history in Vietnam, which started with a few military advisors, then a few more, and then a few more, and then a few more. There's an understandable fear that the US will get sucked into this conflict further and further, and that we should be focusing on domestic issues and the well-being of our population. I totally get that, but I do think that, so far, a lot of what we've seen is hustling on the diplomatic front.

I don't understand why the US shouldn't help Ukraine diplomatically or shouldn't work with Russia diplomatically to try to avoid the worst-case scenario and to avoid a war in Europe and refugee flows and a lot of death and suffering. It's not like people in the State Department would be working on Medicare if they weren't working on this. We do have a diplomatic core, we do have people who work on foreign policy. We can't just isolate ourselves from the world, we have to engage with it.

So far, most in this conflict, we've been mostly doing it, not exclusively, but mostly doing it diplomatically. I'm not sure how that's warmongering, and I'm not sure what the alternative is. To just totally ignore it and let Russia overrun Ukraine? I'm not sure. I'm puzzled by that critique.

Brian Lehrer: Julia, you have a few more minutes. We have such interesting callers lined up. Who would you rather hear first? Someone saying the Kremlin is justified, somebody originally from France, or somebody in this country who says her niece is on a two-hour alert to be deployed to Europe.

Julia Ioffe: Your call.

Brian Lehrer: Bridgette, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Bridgette.

Bridgette: Yes, hi. Sorry, you misunderstood. I never said that Putin is justified. [unintelligible 00:38:55]

Brian Lehrer: That wasn't you. I wasn't referring to you. That's a different caller.

Bridgette: Oh, okay. Number one, I think Putin would stop-- That was not even my call with the caller. All Putin wants is to have Ukraine out of NATO, which Ukraine is not even ready to be in NATO, but he's afraid NATO's going to surround Russia. He is a dictator. He is certainly not a communist. He is not a socialist. He has no interest in humanitarian values. What I wanted to bring up, he's a dictator who's afraid that NATO is surrounding him and surrounding the Soviet Union. He is in need of power, just like Trump. That's why they get along. Trump and Putin, very much look alike to me.

Brian Lehrer: Bridgette, thank you very much. Julia, there is a fair amount of sympathy in this country, I think, for the view that Bridgette justexpressed. I also want you to say if you think there's more sympathy for this in Europe than there is here, which is that, after the cold war, we kept NATO in place anyway, and we are surrounding Russia with NATO. How would we like it if a Russian-centered military Alliance included Canada or Mexico? Is there something real there, in your view?

Julia Ioffe: I think there is. Again, if you read my work, we ran a very interesting interview with a member of the Russian foreign policy establishment, who laid out the Russian view on this very cogently and interestingly. I do think there's definitely something to that, but I would challenge it in a couple of ways. The first is that, until 2014, NATO didn't know what it was doing, it was this Alliance in search of a cause.

The only time Article 5, which is the mutual defense part of the NATO charter, the only time it was used was when America--

Brian Lehrer: Article 5, for people who don't know, every country in NATO, most of Western Europe, some of Eastern Europe and the United States, if any of those countries is attacked, the rest of Europe will come to their defense militarily. That's Article 5. I know the answer, the only time that it was ever actually invoked, Julia?

Julia Ioffe: Was after 9/11, and our allies came to our defense and went with the US into Afghanistan to go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban. As of 2014, that's pretty much all that NATO was doing. Although it also did joint military exercises with Russia, there was a NATO-Russian diplomatic channel that was quite active. Putin allowed actually a NATO base to be opened on Russian territory in Siberia to allow the movement of NATO troops and material into Afghanistan. This was pre-2014.

It wasn't a hostile Russia versus NATO standoff until 2014 when Putin and Russia invaded Ukraine, illegally annexed Crimea, started this bloody separatist war in the east, which has so far claimed over 13,000 lives. It suddenly gave NATO its old mission back, which was to counter Moscow. Until that moment, Moscow was not at all front and center. In fact, very far from it in the NATO mission.

The second thing I would say is that there was a lot of disagreement. Part of this is we're mopping up the mess that George W. Bush made in 2008 in Bucharest when he opened the door to NATO, to Georgia and Ukraine. There was quite a bit of dissent, including in the US government, about that move. There were people, at the time, who said, "This is not going to end well."

Brian Lehrer: Because that looked aggressive against Russia, expanding that clause.

Julia Ioffe: That's right. To these two former Soviet republics that, although culturally, linguistically different were so core to Russia's idea of itself, as I've pointed out, Georgia and Ukraine gave the Soviet Union its general secretary, its leader from 1928 to 1982, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev. These were seen, erroneously, I think, from Moscow as parts of Russia.

There was a lot of dissent when George W. Bush opened that door.

Brian Lehrer: So that started this conversation or gave Putin a reason to feel that way.

Julia Ioffe: The third thing I will say. Can I just say--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. The third thing.

Julia Ioffe: The third thing is if you listened to Putin's speech on Monday night, he basically said what we've known or we've suspected all along, which is that this isn't really about NATO. In an hour-long speech, he barely mentioned NATO. His beef was with Ukraine and it was with Ukraine being a separate country, with Ukraine, allegedly, oppressing ethnic Russians and Russian speakers, which sounded to a lot of both Russians and Ukrainians as Hitlerian, like a Hitler concord Central and Eastern Europe under the pretext of protecting the Volksdeutsche, the German speakers outside of Germany borders.

The speech was all about that. It was about historical grievance, about the end of the cold war, about Ukraine being a separate country and a fake country in his mind. NATO barely merited a mention. I think it proved what a lot of us have been suspecting, which is that NATO was just the pretext.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I don't know if the French New Yorker caller was expressing something particularly French or Western European, but I think it's right to say that usually, they're less hawkish over there on Russia than the US because their economies are more intertwined. I heard reporting that they are unusually united in opposing this invasion and being willing to suffer the domestic economic consequences of sanctions, like a loss of energy supplies from Russia and therefore higher gasoline prices. True, in your view? If so, why that European resolve this time?

Julia Ioffe: I'm not sure. I haven't reported extensively on the German or French mood or the European mood. I would say that the Brits are very much in lockstep with the US. I think the continental powers, especially Germany and France, are a little bit more dovish or trying to find another way out of this. It's also not just economic ties. I think it's important to understand the deep, deep historical, cultural ties between France and Russia.

The Russian aristocracy pretty much only spoke French from the 18th century on. Russian is full of French words. It's just like half of the French dictionary was just taken a dumped into the Russian language. With Germany, as well, even though-- Russia has fought bloody wars both with France and with Germany, both of which invaded Russia at different points, but Russia also has deep ties with Prussia and Germany.

The most Russian military words are German. The Russian military uniform, which was once the Soviet military uniform, was basically copy-pasted from the Prussian military. There are a lot of deep cultural ties between those three countries or between Germany and Russia, and France and Russia.

I can understand that, I think, people in Europe feel the threat more proximately. Ukraine is in Europe. Moscow and a big chunk of Russia is in Europe. A war in Europe is, I think, something Europeans would very much like to avoid because, like the Russians, it was fought on their land, they lost a lot more people than we in the US did and that trauma isn't too distant history.

The idea that there would be a massive land war again, one that could be the biggest one since World War II is obviously frightening and triggering for a lot of Europeans. I could see why they would be united in trying to avoid this or to at least deter the actor that's trying to cause this.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one last caller on. Lisa in Manhattan, who is going to tell us something about her niece who is in the military. Lisa, you're on WNYC. Hi, there. We've got about 30 seconds for you though. Hi.

Lisa: Yes, hi. My niece will be deploying shortly. I wasn't too worried about her being seriously in harm's way, but then the television commentators started talking about land bridges to Crimea and maybe Transnistria, and then whether they were practice runs for Kaliningrad. I was wondering, since you were talking about worst-case scenarios, how this might spin out of control and put my niece and soldiers like her in harm's way.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Lisa. Good luck to you and your niece. Julia, there's no way US troops are getting involved anytime soon, right? There's no appetite for war in this country?

Julia Ioffe: I don't think there's really any. I think the Bush administration vastly overestimated how much Americans wanted to fight wars abroad. After the pullout from Afghanistan, I can understand why this administration doesn't want to get stuck in another foreign quagmire. I think they're absolutely right. Lisa, I hope your niece is okay and stays okay. For what it's worth, TV commentary is supposed to raise your blood pressure and keep everybody at 11 and keep things at the most dramatic, terrifying level possible so you stay tuned in.

There was that old SNL sketch where they imitated a news anchor and they said, "This common domestic appliance that everybody has in their home might kill you. What is it? Right after the break." I think we're seeing a lot of that.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. If you put your brain directly into the mixmaster [chatters].

Julia Ioffe: I do think that there's no way that America-- If Putin goes further in Ukraine and tries to hack a land route to Crimea, there's no way that-- or at least in the proximate future, unless Biden administration does a 180, which I do not foresee them doing, especially not before the midterms. There won't be American troops on the ground there. The only way that American troops could possibly get involved is if Russia pulls in NATO and attacks a NATO member. I think we're still a long way off from that.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. As we were coming on, the BBC was reporting a massive cyber attack apparently by Russia against Ukrainian government websites. We're going to go next to New York guests on the mayor and governor of New York warning against Russian cyberattacks here related to the geopolitics of Ukraine. Do you have any reason, maybe this is outside the scope of your reporting, to think that's a real possibly, or is that just local politics piggybacking on something?

Julia Ioffe: I think it's both. I think it is a very real possibility and we've seen massive Russian cyberattacks on the US. Remember the pipeline attack that basically shut down gas supplies on the East Coast? I think it was a year ago. We've seen the solar winds hack. That was Russia. We saw them hack our elections. They hacked the DNC servers, dumped all those emails to scramble the Democratic primary as well as the 2016 election. It's not like it would be unprecedented.

Again, it's that kind of asymmetrical warfare that's great for a country like Russia that also doesn't want military confrontation with the US in the same way that the US does not want to fight Russia militarily, but you can still do a lot of damage by some people sitting at their computers and make it less traceable, make it harder to punish. That's why it's called asymmetric warfare.

Brian Lehrer: Julia Ioffe, now the founding partner and Washington correspondent for Puck News. Thank you so much. I think you had many, many, many people sitting on the edge of their seats this whole conversation. Thank you.

Julia Ioffe: Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

 

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