A former CIA director on whether Russians are losing faith in Vladimir Putin

[00:00:00]Can I take you back to November 2021?

[00:00:02]Um, you are director of the agency. You have in your possession this exquisite intelligence showing Russian intentions towards Ukraine, the plans for invasion.

[00:00:12]And you're in Moscow. You're talking to Vladimir Putin over the phone. I understand not not face to face. And you've talked about it before. You've said, you know, he's unapologetic. He's he's got a good poker face, a good poker voice. Um, but tell me a bit more about the mood. But perhaps more importantly, with the benefit of hindsight, I'm really interested whether you wish you'd said anything differently, signaled anything differently, or whether it was a sense of inevitability about this in that moment by that point.

[00:00:41]>> In many ways, you know, I was quite troubled. I remember on that flight to Moscow, a flight I had made many times before and and even more troubled when I left because I had, you know, had a very strong feeling based not only on the precision of the intelligence we were collecting, not only about the military planning but also the political planning. In other words, at levels from the highest federal government levels all the way down to Bayer's offices, you know, the FSB was clearly thinking carefully about which tame Ukrainian officials they wanted to put where.

[00:01:15]>> And the FSB is Russia's domestic security service >> security services. And it's it's telling that, you know, it was the FSB, a domestic security service that had the lead on Ukraine and on the pre-invasion planning because from Putin's point of view and the point of view of the Russian political elite, this was essentially a domestic issue. And you know, Putin, in my experience, had always had a singular fixation on Ukraine. um his view I think was and I had heard him talk about this many times was that Russia couldn't be a great power he couldn't be a great Russian leader without controlling Ukraine in its choices so having had that sense of Putin and the precision the granularity of the intelligence we had collected um you know I was very strongly of the view going out there that this time he was likely to want to invade and as you mentioned I I did find him utterly unapologetic He made no effort to say, "There you go again. The CIA's gotten it wrong." His message in so many words was kind of, "So, what are you going to do about it?" Because I also laid out at at President Biden's direction, you know, uh, in a fair amount of detail what the consequences would be should the invasion move ahead. So, I don't know that there was much that could be said in those kind of conversations which would have changed Putin's fixation at that time. He had convinced himself that tactically there was a window here with the United States you know still recovering from COVID and you know the economic challenges that were connected with that you know after the withdrawal from Afghanistan European leaders that Putin tended to have a fairly dim view of at that time. He felt he had modernized the Russian military to the point where they would easily roll over the Ukrainians. And his view always was in my experience with him that Ukraine was not a real country as he used to put it to me. And he would treat me like a particularly dim elementary school student who didn't understand that you know Ukraine is weak and divided. Now he his assumptions turned out to be profoundly flawed. And the one thing I was convinced of and this was in part because as an agency CIA have been working very closely with the Ukrainian security services since 2014 and Putin's illegal annexation of Crimea. So I was convinced that the you know the Ukrainians were going to push back hard even in the face of what on paper was the military superiority of Russia. And um so it didn't surprise me a bit um that they stood their ground as effectively as they did. And in those conversations in Moscow, November 2021, I actually had that conversation with some of the people around Putin and in part of the conversation with Putin himself to say, you know, don't don't you understand that, you know, the Ukrainians are going to resist this as tenaciously as they possibly can and they'll have our full support.

[00:04:07]>> Take us to the present day. So, four years on, the war is rumbling on. It does feel like a moment of optimism for Ukraine relative to where we were if we'd had this conversation a year ago.

[00:04:19]The battlefield gains for Russia have slowed down enormously. Um we're seeing uh Russian >> in some cases been reversed >> in some cases reversed. We're seeing Russian casualties monthly now exceed mobilization and recruited Russians for a few months which is a major inflection point. And Ukrainian deep strikes are doing really heavy damage to Russian energy industry.

[00:04:41]Let's first of all look at the mood in Moscow. You know, my colleagues at the Economist ran an anonymous oped just a few weeks ago from a a very senior former Russian figure saying the mood in Moscow is changing. People are talking about a postputin future. They're talking about his war, not our war. Uh influencers are coming out and laying out grievances and on and on and on. We also don't want to be uh you know too optimistic or or see what we wish to see. What are you seeing in Moscow at the minute? How do you interpret all of these signals?

[00:05:14]>> I think the pressures are building, I think, and it's not surprising after well over four years of war, well over a million casualties killed and wounded for the Russians, uh Putin clearly has mortgaged the medium-term future of the Russian economy. He's gotten thrown a temporary lifeline with the war in Iran, you know, which has boosted energy revenues um for Russia and also diminished the inventory of, you know, US military systems that the Ukrainians desperately need, especially our defense interceptors. But that's temporary, I think. And I think those pressures are beginning to build. Not to the point, at least in my judgment, that it affects Putin's grip on that society. still pretty good at one thing, which is repressing people and discouraging anyone who might think otherwise. But whereas I think if we had had this conversation a year ago, my view would have been Putin's feeling entirely too cocky. The time is on his side. He can grind down the Ukrainians. Now, I think for, you know, a number of Russians in the elite and outside it, they're beginning to question that as well. They don't see any likely breakthroughs on the battlefield. I do think Putin and the people around him are beginning to feel some greater pressures to negotiate more seriously. Whether that's going to emerge, you know, next month or 6 months from now, it's hard to say, but I think in my view, it's an argument for keeping up the pressure on Putin both economically um and also in terms of support for the Ukrainians on the battlefield. I mean, he's, you know, very unscentimental person. That's the only thing that's going to drive him to negotiate more seriously.