Nataliya Gumenyuk and Peter Pomerantsev Get Inside Putin’s Mind

Peter Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

“What the West Will Never Understand About Putin's Ukraine Obsession” (Peter Pomersantev, Time, January 22, 2022)
“In Kyiv, we remain fearless. But war is becoming a backdrop to everyday life” (Nataliya Gumenyuk, The Guardian, February 18, 2022)

Archival:

No signs of Russia pullout from Ukraine as tensions increase | WNT (ABC News, February 16, 2022)
Biden cautions Russia against Ukraine invasion (ABC News, February 16, 2022)
Russia Announces Nuclear Drills As Tensions With Ukraine Intensify (TODAY, February 18, 2022)
Putin: Ukrainians, Russian One People, One Ethnic Group (Bloomberg Quicktakes, June 19, 2015)
Putin: Russia regained 'historic roots' with Crimea annexation (euronews, March 18, 2015)

Transcript:

PETER POMERANTSEV: Of course Russia deserves security interests, and that's fine. And so does Ukraine, and so does everybody else. And we can sit down and hammer those out and try to find a way to solve them and treaties and guarantees and all those things. But that's not what we're dealing with here. We're really dealing with a very, very, very sick regime powered by hundreds of years of a lack of coming to terms with itself.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast by the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Last month, I spoke with Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon, who discussed what the United States and Russia could do to negotiate an end to the Ukraine crisis. Now the crisis has, in the words of the United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “reached a moment of peril.”

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: How did we get here? To get a better sense of Russia's and Ukraine's intertwined history and the motivation driving Russian President Vladimir Putin, I spoke with journalists Nataliya Gumenyuk and Peter Pomerantsev.

We'll begin our conversation with Nataliya, a Ukrainian-based journalist and the founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab. So, Nataliya, I want to start with some context here. The conflict didn't emerge from nowhere, right? It comes from this kind of complicated, contentious history between Russia and Ukraine. So, for an outsider, what are some of the key pieces of history we should understand which help us kind of comprehend what we're seeing today?

NATALIYA GUMENYUK: What I think is important for the audience to know is that though after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independent republics were developed in a different way. We understand there was an endemic corruption, but not all of those countries have become democratic. So, it was like a big—let's say—fight in every society. And somehow, Ukraine managed within these thirty years—thanks to a number of popular uprisings—to become a pluralistic democracy, and Russia became a really authoritarian state, trying to bring back a revisionist Stalinist history. And that's where we are thirty years after. So, within these thirty years, there were not that contentious relations, but Ukrainians break away more or less, not from Russia, but from its sphere of influence in 2004, when there were popular anti-corruption uprisings and the Russian-backed president didn't win the elections. He wanted to rig the elections. And later in 2014, when there was another uprising, we had an authoritarian government, and the president was incredibly kleptocratic but also controlled by Moscow. Ukrainians also went to the streets. The government used force. So, the regime had fallen, and the president escaped to Russia. And that was a vulnerable moment when the Russian state, already run by Vladimir Putin—whose politics have become more and more authoritarian—use this vulnerable moment in Ukrainian history to occupy Crimea and then later create the conflict—more or less artificially—in the Ukrainian Donbas—in that part of the territory. It was actual, active hot conflict for the first two years. In the last years it was calmer, but the conflict was still there. Ukraine had no access to a couple of parts of its land. And now, yeah, we are where we are. Among Ukrainian society, Russia, from just another dominant power, has become an adversary which occupied the part of the land. So, a lot of Ukrainians felt betrayed, and they feel under threat. And Russia is a formidable force. So, that's probably how I would explain the conflict.

HANNAH: Now that takes us to Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, where he directs an initiative that explores twenty-first century propaganda and what we can do about it.

We asked Peter for his take on the man at the center of this crisis, Vladimir Putin.

POMERANTSEV: Well, listen, I'm not a psychoanalyst, but what I do think a lot about is language and political language and propaganda and what it says about things. So, let's take the way Putin and Russian culture generally talks about Ukraine.

Interlude featuring archival audio

POMERANTSEV: One moment Putin is deifying Ukraine as the mother of all Russian cities, which is the sort of trope in Russian culture—that the meaning of Russia, its destiny as a unique messianic empire stems from the true Orthodox faith flowing from Constantinople, from Byzantium through intermarriages to Kievan Ruse’ and from there to Moscow in the late Middle Ages. It's a completely mythical history, but it ties the meaning and the purpose of Russia and its identity to Kyiv, which is called the mother of all Russian cities. He keeps on talking about it like that, and he keeps on talking about how Ukraine and Russia are one people, one indivisible, this sort of mother and child which can't be parted. And then whenever Ukraine goes and does something independent, it all switches, and suddenly Ukraine is the prostitute who sold herself to the West. How dare she left the unique, wonderful, screaming infant on their own?

This comes out even in bizarre situations. When, I think, Macron was there, Putin made a necrophiliac rape joke about Ukraine. He was quoting a dirty joke where Sleeping Beauty gets raped. And he talks basically about Ukraine having to admit to the terms Russia wants to force onto it. He basically said, “You can sleep, my darling, but you still have to put up with it.” So, the language seethes with this bizarre misogyny, mother, or rape motifs, which already makes you think there’s something weird going on there beyond just security concerns.

HANNAH: And this kind of condescending dynamic—which you write about—isn't something Putin himself created. It's something leaders in Russia have used since even before the Russian Revolution. But as you have argued, Peter, this myth is kind of an essential part of Putin's successful propaganda that he uses to suppress Ukraine's autonomy today and which gives him some level of credibility, some level of legitimacy, within Russia today, right?

POMERANTSEV: It's definitely then taken advantage of and pushed further by the propaganda. Of course, it exists in culture. No propaganda can work against culture. It always works with culture and exploits it in various ways. But Putin has tied his political system to the idea of Russia as an empire. There was a very clear choice in 2011 and ‘12: Can Russia become a normal nation which gets along with its neighbors, which respects the rights of its neighbors? And that's often the language that was used: “A normal European nation,” which would also mean modernized system—a system that's based on actually keeping its citizens free and happy Or—and this was Putin's take: “No, we don't want any of those reforms. We don't want any of that destiny. We want the destiny of ourselves, an empire.” So, it's a political choice to play this up. A lot of countries have had empires and weird relationships with bits of that empire that want to be independent. Think of England and Ireland. So, there's all those complications that come from being colonies that live next to the colonizer. But it's always been a colonizing project. And certainly the Kremlin always saw the Ukrainians as a threat—as a threat to the empire, as something that has to be crushed or contained or co-opted—but they certainly thought of it as a separate thing they needed to control.

HANNAH: Let me ask you: Is Putin a true believer in this mythology that he's drawing upon? I mean, the ultimate question is: What does Vladimir Putin want? It's almost cliché to ask this, but in all seriousness, underneath all the posturing, what is President Putin's true objective?

POMERANTSEV: I mean, is a bit of a mug's game working out what he wants. Yes, he wants status and attention. But what does that mean? What is that? But also, very simply, he wants to humiliate Ukraine, divide the West, and embarrass America. I mean, that's kind of what it always is. That's what he always wants. And through all that, yes, to return Russia's status as a great power. The question is not so much that. That's always been transparent. The question is: What are his risk calculations? That's what we can't work out. Putin of old was actually daring but risk averse, as in he'd always try to—even when he did a huge gamble like Crimea, he did it at a very, very opportunistic moment. He didn't go that far into Ukraine. He could have gone much further in 2014. He could have taken Kyiv easily, but he didn't because it would have meant condemnation, sanctions, etc.

So, the question is: Is he now a man who doesn't care about risks anymore? Is he now a man who was possessed with imperial fantasies? Is he a man who has maybe completely lost a sense of reality? Is he a man in a self-destructive spiral? Is he a man who knows death is approaching, and therefore that's changing his calculus? So, when we talk about what he wants, we're actually talking about that. Or is he still the Putin that we've always known, in which case it would be unlikely for him to go for the raid on Kyiv at this point after he's been called out? That, I suppose, is the big question. And I suppose that really becomes a question about attitudes and behaviors. Yes, Putin would like an empire. Yes, he doesn't believe Ukraine is a real country. Yes, he would like to humiliate it. However, all that might be true is that's what he then bases his behavior on. You can think all those things, but that doesn't mean that's what dictates behavior.

HANNAH: Putin is perceived as a staunch realist who is coldly calculating every move. I wonder whether Putin actually thinks that because he's going to be in power in perpetuity as a kind of autocratic-esque figure, maybe his calculus has actually changed. To some extent he's not thinking, potentially, in terms of the geopolitics of the moment, but rather perhaps his legacy in the long term—how the history books 200 years from now will remember him.

POMERANTSEV: Exactly. So, that's one argument. One argument is he’s thinking that—he's thinking legacy. He's thinking of upending the world order, geopolitics, history, all that stuff. And that's sort of the take in DC There is always a risk of people who study international relations and history thinking that's how the world works. Well, the people in DC, the analyst class, tend to be academics or people from think tanks who themselves have done international relations PhDs, or they've done history PhDs. And then they kind of assume that's how the world works, that people are driven by these great ideas and that people think geopolitically, that they get up in the morning going, “Oh, I want to upend the world order.” While the Putin we know might think about these things—he might enjoy sort of like scribbling things on maps. But behavior in the Kremlin is really impelled by something else, and that's the fear of the palace coup and staying in power. That's how change happens in Russia. Historically, the vast majority of change in Russia happens by a palace coups. And then you want some public support for the palace coup. So, it's a little bit of the people, but really the palace coup.

Putin trusts six or seven people who are his team from the 1990s. He's never left that circle. It's very noticeable. It's the same people who he knew before his rise. He doesn't trust anybody else. He's very, very paranoid. He's probably become more paranoid over COVID-19. So, does this person who's obsessed with palace coups, who thinks there are enemies everywhere around him, suddenly start taking crazy gambles that enable the plots he sees around him? If you're thinking about it from a Moscow perspective, and you see the world that way, impelled not even by domestic politics but by court politics, then taking crazy gambles in the name of something as abstract as legacy and history when there's a knife hovering over your back at any moment seems different to the Putin that we've known so far.

So, that's really the debate, I think. It's not about Putin—what does he want? It's about what compels his behavior and what his state of mind is in terms of risks. That's the debate that we're having.

HANNAH: So, what about the people in Ukraine? What do they think about all of this? And have American media outlets gotten this part of the story right?

GUMENYUK: I think the biggest discrepancy—I would use this term—between the coverage of the international media and how Ukrainians feel—because they were speaking about this dire day when they could be attacked on Kyiv, and Ukrainians remain calm. There is no panic. There is fear, but there is no panic. Shops are open. Restaurants are there. People are not moving. They live their life as usual. However, of course, the military is on alert. The civilian defense is about to be prepared. People are thinking about contingency plans. But it's not really because Ukrainians are careless or they—let's say—don't trust the West with the intelligence. I myself, as a journalist, talked to numerous sources internationally, and the people I really trust are the people to whom we talk for years. I understand there is a credible data, and we do have—if we had 100,000 Russian troops in November, we have 150,000 Russian troops, and if it was said there would be a cyber-attack, the cyber-attack happens. But it's not about the day for us, because we understand, first of all, that this threat could last for a long time. So, this kind of dire day could be postponed for quite a reasonable period of time. So, you really need to pursue and go on. Therefore, people opt to preserve normality for as long as it's possible but having somewhere in their minds what could happen next.

HANNAH: What is the popular support within Ukraine for joining NATO? Is this what Ukraine wants despite Putin's resistance and aggression? Or maybe because of it?

GUMENYUK: It’s growing. The support is growing. Ukraine, for a long time, kind of remained neutral. It was also not very much ready to prepare. It actually had this Soviet-type army. But the point is very clear—the support for NATO is growing. Every single poll shows that. One reason for the lack of support in the early ‘90s was the Soviet propaganda was very strong. But that's a different story. After the occupation of Crimea and the attack on the Donbas, it was quite—and especially now—it's clear that the fact that Ukraine isn't a member of any alliance makes it vulnerable. Living so close to such neighbors who are constantly threatening, we see that's probably the only way. So, people who didn't care about NATO, who really felt like, “OK…” Now they think differently. The problem is that modern security architecture is not designed in a way to protect the countries who are small. So, if you are not really there—if you didn't join the NATO in a different time—you are out. There is the UN But unfortunately, I'm just following the recent UN Security Council meeting over the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and to be honest, it could be as useless as we can imagine, having Russia and China in Security Council. It's like it’s not there. There is nothing about the UN. So, we see there is something wrong, and we should look at the alliances in a different way.

HANNAH: What about everyday Russians, though? Is claiming Ukraine something they actually care about, something they think about in their daily lives or something they even want? Obviously, Putin is not as sensitive to those feelings as a democratic leader might be. But does he have the will of the Russian public behind him, or is this something they feel they're kind of being dragged into?

POMERANTSEV: There was genuine celebration of Crimea. I was there at the time—genuine because it was elegant. That was a huge part of it. That's an esthetic people enjoyed, like we did it without any blood. Also, Crimea is an association for people with childhood. Crimea is—I don't know what the equivalent is in America. Crimea equals happy childhood in the Russian head. Even without the empire stuff, there is a symbolic thing about Crimea. No one goes there. No one’s gone there since then; they all go to Turkey. Crimea was always the island of utopia. In Russian kid stories, you're on your way to Crimea. In Russian movies, you're going to Crimea. And that's where you'll have your lovely summer holiday and romance. Crimea symbolizes almost childhood utopia and fantasy. It has a very, very deep symbolism inside Russian culture. It has always had this real power. So, Crimea is like, “We got our childhood back.” And so, Crimea was different.

Ukraine? No, I don't think anybody does. I don’t think anybody gets any kind of happiness out of: “We took Kharkov,” or even Odessa. I think for the Kremlin, though, there's something about status, and having Ukraine under control is very important. Also maybe in terms of history, if they look at their history, it’s more the leadership. They'll look at the way, in 1917 and ‘18, there were peasant revolts that started in Ukraine and headed up to Russia. So, status and maybe some ideas of historical security are associated with Ukraine as well. Ordinary people, no. There's no polling to show they particularly care or that it's particularly important to them. There's nothing—there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that.

But it's not about—again, I don't think it's about geopolitics. Putin's popularity with Russians—and it's very hard to gauge that because polling is so skewed in a dictatorship—but he's not an accidental figure. It’s really based on this old Freudian concept of identification. Putin is paranoid, full of grievances, full of misogynistic anger, full of conspiratorial vengeance, and that's very common in Russia. That's very, very common.

HANNAH: Yeah, Putin famously said that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the biggest tragedy, and it's no secret that he longs for the era of the Soviet Union. The sentiment seems to be shared by young, everyday Russians who feel NATO expansion eastward has been provocative and a threat to Russian sovereignty and security. And Putin himself exploits this to further his own his own objectives, right? So, is this a correct reading of what's going on that I'm laying out here? That Putin exploits the grievances of ordinary Russians, because Russia lost the Cold War?

POMERANTSEV: I don't think that's how grievance works. Grievance works because of the social psychology of the state, because of the inner dynamics based on humiliation, based on maybe unhealthy family dynamics, but definitely unhealthy dynamics between the leadership and its citizens, which are abusive and full of quite overt metaphors of parental abuse. And then once you have that grievance, you find an object to place it on. It can be about NATO, which acts as—I don't know—both the thing you want attention from and the thing you sublimate your aggression towards. Russia isn’t a country that's been able to cope or even start to talk through the ritual abuse of the Kremlin of its own people over hundreds of years. It didn't even have a chance to mourn the civil war in 1917, let alone—there are no statues or museums to the gulag. It’s a country trapped an endless cycle of abuse, which is what every day is full of—humiliations and resentments, which need an outlet, and the outlet becomes—it doesn't matter—the elites, NATO, the Jews, gays, women a lot of the time. One of the highlights of Russian lawmaking has been to legitimize violence against women in law over the last few years. So, that's how it works. That's how grievance works generally.

And the relationships with the West are very schizophrenic. It's what you want to be part of, and then you get offended by it. And then you want its attention, and it's this psychodrama that goes on and on. So, I think that's kind of what's really going on. I don’t think grievance works from the outside. Grievance works from the inside and then looks for things to project itself onto.

Let's take something like the idea of a sphere of influence, which is the main phrase that's used all the time. Russia deserves a sphere of influence. What we're really talking about is a weird sort of psychological sense that you deserve stuff. Something has been taken away from you, and you deserve stuff, which when we’re talking about genuine Russian security interest, we could sit down and hammer them out in a new Helsinki: “Yeah, they were based on rational self-interest and realpolitik.” They're not based on that. The Russian idea of a sphere of influence is like a rhetorical fluid thing that can sort of warp from being everything from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic—Zhirinovsky talked about it that way. Or it could be some mystical idea of the Russian sphere, the Russian lands, the Russian language. Or it could be the former Soviet states. Again, it's very interesting listening to Lavrov, the foreign minister, talking about how, at the end of the Soviet Union, all the former Soviet states and Central European countries were “orphaned” and that they yearn again for “big daddy Moscow.” I mean, the whole thing is just wrapped up in these really, really warped dynamics.

So, look, of course Russia deserves security interests, and that's fine. And so does Ukraine, and so does everybody else. And we can sit down and hammer those out and try to find a way to solve them and treaties and guarantees and all of those things. But that's not what we're dealing with here. We're really dealing with a very, very, very sick regime powered by hundreds of years of a lack of coming to terms with itself.

HANNAH: So, considering what the United States has at its disposal—and it doesn't have a chaise lounge or a fainting couch here—how does the United States respond to Russia's incursions into Ukraine? The United States isn't good at psychoanalysis, right? It has guns and tanks and treaties, and it has considerable economic influence. What would you advise the American president to do in the situation?

POMERANTSEV: Firstly, we do have things like on the couch. It's called cultural diplomacy and public diplomacy, and Germany especially, I think, has a huge role in the long term to play to get Russia to work through its problems. And then we can think about investing in universities—Russian language universities—and making films. There's a lot of cultural stuff we can do that would help this process. We're talking about a long process, but you're talking about diplomacy now. Look, I'm not a clever geopolitical guy, but the best idea I've heard of has come from Mike McFaul, who's a former ambassador to Moscow and now a professor at Stanford. And he's like: You know, we do need a conversation about a new security arrangement. It's not one of Moscow's times. It's one that also includes the rights of Ukraine and Georgia and all these other countries. But we do need—he calls it—a Helsinki 2.0. Yes, we do need a series of new guarantees.

I have got a huge sympathy for Ukraine. I'm British, but my roots are Ukrainian and Russian a little bit as well. And the desire to be in NATO is about choice. Ukraine can say, “I want to be in NATO.” Everybody knows it's not getting in anytime soon, certainly not within my lifetime. Maybe within Putin's lifetime. Who knows how long they can keep him going? But I would like to see Ukraine have real security guarantees. I'd like to go back to 1994 and the Budapest memorandum. I'd like to see Russia sign real security guarantees, which carry huge punishments if they default on those guarantees. So, we do want to guide it towards that rational conversation. We do want to sublimate this into a conversation, but it can't be a conversation on the crazy guy's terms. We can't just say, “Oh, we fold. We fold. You can eat up anything.” That's terrible. You don't let that happen. I do think there is a productive conversation to be held, to be had, which does play to the rational side in Russia's system and Russia's nature and even in Putin. Because at the same time, while persuaded by all his demons, he is also the rational head of a head of a state.

HANNAH: So, given how potentially outlandish or fanciful Putin's thinking might be in this moment, given that at a minimum, his calculations might be driven by factors beyond power politics, how does the United States make progress?

POMERANTSEV: You welcome a conversation with the Russian side, because it is, at the same time, for all these tempestuous, aggressive—I think—very irrational things, there were also lots of Russian people in the system. And there's also lots of rationality even in these guys. I'm often asked, “what do they really believe—the people running Russia?” And in my experience, it’s the wrong question to ask. They can believe lots of things. If you grow up in a system like the Soviet Union, where you have to live through double and triple think, where you pretend to believe in communism, then don't believe in it in the evening, you've learned to almost have these different ways of being—these different masks that you put on, and every one of those masks is genuine.

So, clearly Putin wants status, and you have to sort of try to coax that into a productive mode. And it's a rational mode and one that respects the rights of everybody. I guess the way you bring somebody back to rationality is by sticking reality in their face, by getting out of all this talk of spheres of influence and one people and the mother of Russian cities and all this nonsense, and actually saying, “Here's how much it'll cost you. Do you really want this? Let's sit down like rational realists and find a way through this.” You return reality by really being quite tough, I think. Maybe this is the problem. We want to say we have reality, that we want to bring reality, and maybe at a certain level Putin thinks we can't—that all our threats of sanctions are empty, and we're living in delusions. And maybe he thinks we're the ones who are delusional. And it's a dark, new world, and he can break through those.

So, that's kind of where we are. We don't know. And maybe he thinks different things. He strikes me as somebody very nervous at the moment, very jumpy, going round in circles, changing his mind, very erratic in his public talks. He strikes me as all those voices we just mentioned—the rational one, the aggrieved one, the one that thinks there's a weird new future around the corner if he just bursts through the illusion of our sanctions. All of those things are in his head all the time.

HANNAH: While on one hand, the crisis we're watching unfold is about spheres of influence and power balances. On the other hand, countries are also run by people, like Vladimir Putin, who are driven by a host of factors from concerns with their political legacy to thirst for revenge and the myths they might tell themselves.

I want to give a big thank you to both of our guests, Nataliya and Peter.

I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Special thanks go out to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Our producer is Caroline Gray. Our associate producer and editor is Luke Taylor. Thanks also to Lucas Robinson for his support in the research and writing. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, shoot us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thank you for joining us. Stay safe. Catch you next time.

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