Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Kimberly Marten:

Putin has been waiting for the opportunity to take his move, to show that you can’t ignore Russia, that Russia has power in its region, that Russia is a necessary player. I think we’ve seen this in Africa and the Middle East, too. And to make Putin go down in history as the man who made Russia great again.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Kimberly Marten. She’s a political science professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a close observer of Russian affairs for over 30 years. As tensions flare in Ukraine, and there’s much uncertainty about what’s to come, Marten joins me to help us get clarity on the big questions raised by the crisis. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Hey folks, before I get to your questions, I have a very exciting announcement, on Thursday evening, March 31st, we’re bringing Stay Tuned to New York City’s town hall, for our first in person show since before the pandemic. Yes, I said in person. I’ll be joined by actor, writer, producer and former White House aid, Kal Penn, who’ll speak with me about his new memoir, You Can’t Be Serious, and so much more. As always, I’ll be answering audience questions and relecting on the latest news making the headlines. You won’t want to miss it. Join me, Kal and your fellow fans, by heading to cafe.com/events to get your tickets. That’s cafe.com/events. I really hope to see you there. Now let’s get to your questions.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in an email from Juan who asks, what was your reaction to the verdict in the federal trial of the three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery? My first reaction was I was gratified. I thought it was a righteous case, I thought it was a good case, I thought the Department of Justice prosecutors did a good job. Of course, as everyone who listens to the show and follows the news knows, the three men who were accused in state court of causing the death of Ahmaud Arbery, were already convicted themselves and faced life in prison. So what’s the significance of the federal trial? Well, I think a few things, one, it’s basically a backup insurance conviction against the three men, Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan, so that if something still goes awry with the state court prosecution, there’s appeal and the appeal is successful and the verdicts are overturned, which I don’t think is likely, but is certainly, I guess, possible, even if it’s a remote possibility, those three men will not be going free because of the federal conviction.

Preet Bharara:

Second, I think the trial and the verdict is very important as an expression of the communities and the country’s feeling about hate crimes. We often talk about the purpose of the law and enforcing statutes and holding people accountable as a method of deterrence, but there are some kinds of things that we have in this country and I think hate crimes go to this point more aggressively than any kind of other prosecution. It expresses the distaste and dissatisfaction and derision of the community will respect to certain kinds of conduct. A murder is a murder, a robbery is a robbery, an assault is an assault, but we have decided in many states in the country and certainly at the federal level, that if you engage in that conduct because of racial hatred, racial animus, that’s a separate crime and a special crime, and the outrage of the community is expressed through that prosecution. So I think that’s important also.

Preet Bharara:

And then third, I think the case and the verdict is very important as an expression of the Justice Department’s renewed emphasis on, stress on an aggressiveness with respect to civil rights violations. We’re seeing that also in the case against the officers involved in the killing of George Floyd. For a long time, particularly under the last administration, it seems like civil rights enforcement was something of an afterthought, didn’t happen as much. So I think Merrick Garland and all the folks at the Department of Justice who cared about civil rights and cared enough to bring this case, should be commended for it. Now, my other reaction to the federal trial is how different it was in tone and substance from the state trial. You all may remember that not long ago, I had on the chief prosecutor in the case, Linda Dunikoski.

Preet Bharara:

And I asked her a few times about the reasoning behind her decision and the other prosecutor’s decisions not to emphasize race, even though, as everyone talked about it, as the media talked about it, and as we talked about it on the podcast, race was central. She decided, for various trial tactical reasons, not to emphasize it, in part because she said it was so obvious and you didn’t have to hit the jury over the head with it. And it was a successful strategy. The federal hate crimes trial, of course, was very different. And in fact, by definition, had to focus on race, had to focus on racial animus, had to focus on the racial epithets that all three men who were on trial were shown to have engaged in. In fact, the racism of the three men on trial was so irrefutable, that a lawyer for one of them referred to racism as quote, “among the lowest of human emotions.” So in the end, two very different trials with similar results, different but important, and I’m glad they both ended the way they did.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in an email from Melissa who asks, will DOJ investigate how classified documents ended up with Trump at Mar-a-Lago? That question of course, is generally prompted by the reporting and that statements by the National Archives, that classified material was indeed among the 15 boxes of stuff that the archives obtained from Mar-a-Lago, or is in the process of obtaining from Mar-a-Lago. But I imagine that the question is more specifically prompted by a reporter’s question to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Merrick Garland’s response. The reporter is Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post, who posted a tweet as follows. “I asked AG Garland if the Justice Department was investigating how classified material made its way to Mar-a-Lago, which the archives confirmed last week. He said the department would look at the facts and the law, but didn’t answer when I asked if that meant they were investigating.”

Preet Bharara:

The direct quote from Merrick Garland is this quote, “As the archivist said in the letter that was sent to the Congress, the National Archives has informed the Justice Department of this and communicated with it. And we will do what we always do under these circumstances, look at the facts and the law and take it from there.” Now, I think that’s a pretty decent sign that the matter will be investigated, mostly the matter is likely to be investigated because on its face, as Joyce Vance and I discussed on The Insider Podcast this week, it meets all the criteria for opening up an investigation. The fact that there was classified material that existed and was retained in a non-classified setting by a former government official, namely Donald Trump, is the kind of thing that the department generally investigates and investigates pretty thoroughly.

Preet Bharara:

There’s case, after case, after case, some examples include General Petraeus, former National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, and a host of others, who in similar circumstances were investigated. Attorney General Garland’s answer reminds me a little bit of Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco’s answer when asked the question about the fake electors that had been reported upon in recent weeks. When there was a referral, obviously the Justice Department is duty bound to take a look and take some steps, whether or not that’s a full blown investigation in every case is unclear. I think the answer that Merrick Garland gave was on the vague side, because that’s the way he operates, he doesn’t want to give too much, doesn’t want to show too much of the Department of Justice’s hand. But I think the underlying fact make it very clear that this is a thing that necessitates an investigation, whether or not the archives made such a referral.

Preet Bharara:

Stay tuned, there’s more coming up after this. President Biden announced sanctions on Russia in his address to the nation on Wednesday.

Joe Biden:

Over the last few days, we’ve seen much of the playbook that Secretary Lincoln laid out last week in the United Nation Security Council, come to pass. A major increase in military provocations and false flag events along the line of contacting the Dombass, dramatically staged conveniently on camera meeting of Putin’s security council, to grandstand for the Russian public. And now political provocation of recognizing sovereign Ukrainian territory as so called independent republics, in clear violation again, of international law.

Preet Bharara:

As the world watches Putin’s next moves in Ukraine, I am joined this week by international security specialist, Kimberly Marten. Among her many professional honors, from 2015, until 2019, she served as the founding director of the program on US Russia relations at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. In July, 2020, she testified before the House of Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, energy and the environment. Professor Kimberly Marten, thanks for joining the show.

Kimberly Marten:

Thank you for having me on.

Preet Bharara:

So as I was saying before we started taping, thanks for joining on short notice. There’s a lot of news this week with respect to Ukraine. I should point out to folks that events keep developing at a pretty fast pace, we are recording this on Wednesday February 23rd at lunchtime, depending on when you eat lunch, but it’s approaching the noon hour. So I don’t know how much will change by the time this episode drops, but I am very much hoping that you will help us understand a lot of the things that are in motion, how we got to this point and what we might expect in the future. Are you game for that?

Kimberly Marten:

I’ll do my best.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Let’s begin since we have some time, and we don’t always hear this on cable news with the background here, how did we get to this point? How is Putin’s activity, with respect to Ukraine, similar to or different from the annexation of Crimea in 2014 or what he did in Georgia in 2008? Is this completely different or is this something that we should have expected?

Kimberly Marten:

So there are a variety of different explanations for why Putin has chosen to do what he has chosen to do right now. The most important thing to keep in mind is that there was no nothing happening in the outside environment that should have provoked him to take this action at this particular time. So to answer that question, we really have to try to get inside Putin’s head.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s do that. Let’s do that.

Kimberly Marten:

Okay. So I think there are four possible explanations that are out there and I’ll tell you which ones I think are the most likely, but any of the four are possible. So the first possibility is that he’s truly a Russian ethnic nationalist. And he started talking in this way in July when he had this major article appear in a Russian newspaper that essentially said that Ukraine was a child of Russia, that Russia had created Ukraine, and that Ukraine did not have a separate ethnic identity from Russia. And we heard him repeat those statements when he was justifying what he was doing yesterday, and so it is possible that ethnic nationalism is what is motivating him, and that he honestly believes that Russia is the big brother to Ukraine, that Russia created Ukraine and that’s what’s motivating him.

Kimberly Marten:

I doubt that that’s correct for a couple reasons. First of all, the history is just false, he must know that he’s making it up, but secondly, it doesn’t fit his whole time in office. He’s been in office now for more than 20 years and ethnic nationalism doesn’t seem to be what has been driving him that whole time. Although, he did say something similar in 2014 when he was justifying his takeover of Crimea, so that’s possible.

Preet Bharara:

Can we just pause on that for one second because you said something interesting. You said for that to be the explanation, you don’t buy it necessarily because it’s not true, it’s a false narrative. Is that necessary to Putin’s conduct and belief system, does he have to believe in the truth of the things he says?

Kimberly Marten:

No. I mean, we have to remember that Putin is a former KGP operative. He has spent his entire life working in the intelligence services. He is very good at creating false narratives in all of his political interventions, in various places around the world, including the United States, and propaganda just comes second nature to him. So he certainly could be spouting this without believing a word of it.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. What’s the second possibility?

Kimberly Marten:

Second possibility is that people like John Mearsheimer are correct, and that Putin is really frightened about NATO enlargement and he felt that he had no option except to take this action to stop NATO enlargement from including Ukraine. There are a bunch of problems with that explanation. The first is that nobody thought that Ukraine was going to be in NATO anytime soon, if it ever is in NATO. And in fact, the last time that anybody who had any power in the west talked about this possibility, was in 2008 under the administration of George W. Bush. So there was nothing in the immediate environment that suggested that Ukraine was about to join NATO.

Kimberly Marten:

And even more than that, when we look back at the history of NATO enlargement that started in the early 1990s, we know that Russia was unhappy about NATO enlargement but the evidence doesn’t indicate that they thought that it was a military threat. And a couple of things to keep in mind about that, Russia has a huge number of nuclear weapons that could wipe out an American city in 30 minutes, if that’s what they wish to do. So nobody is ever going to invade Russian territory. And then in addition to that, throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, when NATO enlargement was happening bit by bit, we did not see any evidence of the Russian military repositioning itself close to its western borders, which is what we would’ve expected if they really believed that there was going to be a NATO invasion that was coming across their borders.

Preet Bharara:

So why then, can ask you this, explain to non diplomatic folks, if all this is true, what you’re saying, why wouldn’t NATO members just say forthrightly Ukraine membership in NATO is not on the table for the foreseeable future?

Kimberly Marten:

Well, that’s a good question, and I think we have to remember that in the original NATO founding document from the late 1940s, it says that people can join NATO in the future, states can join NATO in the future if they share NATO’s goals and are able to contribute to NATO’s defenses. And so from the beginning, there was never any belief that it would be limited to its original membership. It expanded during the cold war to include both Greece and Turkey, it included to expand Eastern Germany when West and East Germany unified. And so it’s not novel that NATO would enlarge, and in fact, in 1997, Russia signed off on a diplomatic arrangement, the NATO Russia founding agreement, that essentially recognized that NATO would be enlarging, and so they implicitly accepted it from their diplomatic status themselves.

Preet Bharara:

So why not take it off the table for now to take the talking point away from Putin and maybe take away some of his reasoning?

Kimberly Marten:

Well, I think there’s a couple reasons for that, the most important one is that I don’t think we want to give into Putin. I don’t think we want to send the message, by we, meaning the west and NATO, I don’t think that we want to send the message that if you bully us, we will give in because that just encourages him to engage in more bullying. And it’s a principle, once this is in place, NATO wants to allow anybody who truly has an institutionalized liberal democracy, and who has the ability economically and in terms of its defenses, to contribute to the Western Alliance, to be free to join. And that would include, by the way, Finland and Sweden, which have been talking more and more about the possibility of joining NATO, as they have watched Russian aggression happening, they’ve been completely neutral up until now, but they have not completely dismissed the idea.

Preet Bharara:

And it’s probably also true, is it not, that if we had taken the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO off the table, they wouldn’t have had any material effect on Putin’s actions because it’s a pretext?

Kimberly Marten:

Yeah, I think that’s true. I don’t think that this is what actually is motivating Putin. I really think it’s an excuse rather than-

Preet Bharara:

All right. So I can’t wait to hear what number three is.

Kimberly Marten:

Number three is the one that I think is most likely, which is that-

Preet Bharara:

So you’re going to put the most likely one third, not fourth?

Kimberly Marten:

Well the fourth one also contributes to it, but I think third is the most important. So Putin was a KGB operative in Eastern Germany at the time that German unification happened, and he really truly felt humiliated by the fact that the Soviet Union lost the cold war at that time, he felt humiliated when the Soviet Union fell apart. He was on record as having said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy. And he had spent his early life and the entire career believing that the United States and NATO were the greatest enemies. And then he watched in the 1990s in what we have sometimes called the US unipolar moment, while all of a sudden the United States was, without question, the most powerful country in the world, and it threw its weight around in terms of dominating United Nations peace operations in the Balkans, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in terms of the intervention in Afghanistan and the intervention in Iraq, in terms of what happened in Libya with the overthrow of Gaddafi.

Kimberly Marten:

And so Putin just was watching all of this, and I think you can make a really good argument that he was biding his time. He was building up the economic potential of Russia through his oil and natural gas sales abroad. We saw a spike in oil prices that really brought a lot of profit into the Russian state. And at that point, he paid off Russian debt to put the Russian economy in very good shape. And that allowed him, over the past 15 years, to really be concentrating on building up the Russian military and making it a very strong fighting force again, after the Russian military had also been in a collapsed state as the cold war had ended and independent Russia came into place. So I think the strongest argument is that Putin has been waiting for the opportunity to take his move, to show that you can’t ignore Russia, that Russia has power in its region, that Russia is a necessary player, I think we’ve seen this in Africa and the Middle East too, and to make Putin go down in history as the man who made Russia great again.

Kimberly Marten:

And so I really think that’s the most likely explanation., And it’s not opposed to the idea of ethnic nationalism, it’s not opposed to the idea of being against NATO enlargement, but it’s just the most likely explanation that fits everything that he’s done. And then the fourth explanation is what we might call diversionary warfare, which is that he’s trying to take domestic attention off of the problems that Russia is facing. Russia’s economy is not doing as well as he had hoped it would, that it was doing stay five or 10 years ago. Russia has been really badly hit by COVID, all the evidence indicates that the actual number of deaths from COVID may be as much as four or five times higher than Russia has admitted.

Kimberly Marten:

And so there is an argument to be made that he wants to take the Russian public’s attention off of his own domestic failures by once again, having this great foreign policy triumph that he can talk about. And some people have gone even further and argued that maybe what’s really happening is that he wants to have a greater degree of domestic crackdown, put more people in prison, prevent more protests, put more constraints on the Russian internet, for example, and that by having this excuse of a foreign enemy, it makes it easier for him to justify this to the Russian public.

Preet Bharara:

So let’s go back to explanation three and dig deeper in that for a couple of minutes. This idea of humiliation at the dismantling of the Soviet Union, how much of that sentiment is shared by the Russian people and has that evolved, and does it matter, does it matter to him?

Kimberly Marten:

So last question first, there are not free elections in Russia. He has demonstrated through his use of the intelligence and security forces, that he really controls the Russian domestic space. There’s been massive election fraud over and over again, so he doesn’t really have to worry about public opinion in the way that a Western democratic leader would have to worry about it. But he still has to worry about it in the sense that he has to make sure that he is irreplaceable, because you can bet that anytime there is an authoritarian system, there are people in the background saying, “Why is he in charge and not me?” And so he wants to make sure that he has a sufficient amount of public opinion, that he is still sufficiently popular, that nobody believes it’s a good time to try to move in and replace him.

Kimberly Marten:

So that’s the answer to your first question. In terms of how the Russian public feels, in the 1990s, there was lots of hope in Russia that there would be some new relationship between Russia and the west. And I think that there was general disappointment across the Russian public, that that didn’t come to be. And there is general sentiment across the Russian public that NATO enlargement was just not taking Russian interests into account, and that Russia has been sidelined in the international system. And we saw that in 2014, when Putin took over Crimea, which was part of Ukraine, and the movement in Russia was called [foreign language 00:21:39] Crimea is ours. Russia was getting back this piece of territory that had traditionally belonged to it. And I think a lot of the sentiment in the public at that time, was genuinely in favor of what Putin had accomplished by taking back Crimea for Russia.

Kimberly Marten:

So I don’t think that that has continued up until the current day, I think it’s always true that people care most about the economy, no matter what country they’re in, and that people care about their families and health issues have really big in Russia, even if they’re not really being publicly discussed as much as they would be, everybody knows the code.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but national pride is not nothing, right?

Kimberly Marten:

It’s not nothing, exactly.

Preet Bharara:

So fair to say, or do we know, to ask it another way, that Putin has substantial domestic support for his maneuvering in Ukraine?

Kimberly Marten:

He probably does not have substantial domestic support for what has happened so far, and there are a couple of things that differentiate this from what happened in Crimea. What happened in Crimea was almost bloodless. I think something like three people total were killed in the Russian takeover of Crimea. And if Putin chooses to have Russian military forces continue to participate in the conflict that’s happening in Eastern Ukraine, there will be Russian forces who are killed and people don’t want to see that. They are not interested in going to war and having their, especially sons, be killed over something that they don’t really see the importance of. And then the second thing that we have to keep in mind is that there’s still a lot of family connections and other kinds of network connections between people who live in Russia and people who live in Ukraine, and so people in Russia do not see Ukraine as an enemy. And I think Putin was going to have a difficult time if he moves further into Ukraine, in trying to justify what he’s doing to the Russian public.

Preet Bharara:

So I’m a little confused by that. If the goal, per explanation three, is that because of the humiliation, we want to rise up again and be back on the path to the power and stateliness and respect that the Soviet Union got, doesn’t that have to be the view of people beyond Putin himself? In other words, to be successful at that, for that gambit to make any sense, doesn’t it, by definition, need popular support?

Kimberly Marten:

So this is getting into a really interesting point that a lot of people have been raising. It’s not clear whether Putin, at the moment, is getting good information and intelligence about what it’s really happening in the world. Because of COVID, he has been even more cut off than he was earlier. He has always been somebody who has made decisions using a very small group of supporters. He said that publicly about his decision to take Crimea in 2014, we know, for example, that the finance ministry, economic consequences were not really considered by the group of security officials who took that decision in February, 2014.

Kimberly Marten:

What we have seen during COVID is that Putin seems to be even more cut off, even from his closest advisors. And so there has been information released, I don’t know how accurate it is, but a lot of people believe it, that before anybody has been allowed to even be in the same room as Putin, among his domestic advisors, they’ve had to go through a two week quarantine. And he’s been really terrified of electronic monitoring, and so he has not been using internet connections with people. And so the question is if he’s not seeing people in person because he’s afraid of COVID and he’s not using the internet, exactly what kind of information is he getting? And so I think it’s possible that he thinks he’s doing one thing, but he’s doing it without really adequate information to be making good decisions.

Preet Bharara:

Much is made of the question of whether or not various leaders, in this case we’re talking about Putin obviously, whether or not he’s acting rationally. And there’s a distinction that I think gets lost sometime times, and sometimes people will say someone is being irrational, what they really mean is they’re being unreasonable. And reasonableness has to do with fairness and has to do with proper conduct and mutual respect. What is rational can absolutely justify blood lust and war and lying and all sorts of other things. Is Putin either irrational or unreasonable or both?

Kimberly Marten:

So being rational means a couple of things in a social science typical definition of rationality, it means that you have goals and that you’re taking actions to get those goals met, whatever their goals may be, and that you’re doing it after having a complete search for information. And so if he’s not getting good information, he may think that he is taking rational action, goal oriented action and actually be making huge mistakes and huge miscalculations because he doesn’t have adequate information.

Kimberly Marten:

In terms of the reasonableness, I think what he’s doing is something that’s very hard to justify, both to the Russian public in terms of what it is actually going to accomplish, and then also just for the long term health of the Russian state, because he is really, and this gets into the question of sanctions, if he continues to move forward, he is going to face some really big economic problems. And we know that the sanctions that have already been in place against Russia, even if they’re not having immediate short-term effects that some people might have hoped that they were, have really put the long term Russian oil and natural gas industries in not good places in comparison to their Western counterparts. And so I think there are real questions about that.

Preet Bharara:

I heard somebody comment that what Putin really wants is not the resurrection of the old USSR Soviet Union, but return to the old Russian empire. Is that a silly observation or is there anything to that?

Kimberly Marten:

Well, it fits geographically and it fits a little bit about what we know about him, which is that he is a student of Russian history and he does not really see himself as acting in the Soviet tradition. So for example, when he talked about Ukraine having been artificially created by Russia, he said it was Lenin’s decision to do that. So he’s not see himself as acting in Lenin’s tradition. And so a lot of people have argued that he really sees himself as acting in a tzarist tradition and a 19th century tradition, and certainly large chunks of Ukraine were in the Russian empire although not all of Ukraine was, part of it was also in the Austro-Hungarian empire, in the Polish empire, but moving into Ukraine would indicate moving back towards where the Russian empire was.

Preet Bharara:

That’s interesting. So we spent some time in Putin’s brain and these explanations that you’ve ranked, that seems totally reasonable to me. My first question about how you deal with that is do you think that Joe Biden and the people around him, generally have the same sense of Putin’s brain and his motivations and intentions that you’ve just described?

Kimberly Marten:

I think they do, and I actually think that the decisions that Biden has taken so far in relationship to this crisis, are really good decisions, in terms of moving very slowly, in terms of making sure that there is strong support from US allies, not merely in Europe, but we saw today, including Japan and Australia, for whatever steps are taken, making sure that they’re moving in lockstep and they’re demonstrating to Putin that this isn’t just even the west, that it is the entire group of US allies that are acting in this way. And I think we can talk about sanctions if you like, I think that the-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, we’re going to talk about sanctions. We’re getting to that.

Kimberly Marten:

Okay. The way that he has been approaching sanctions, I think is a very good way of doing it.

Preet Bharara:

But if it’s true that they have a good handle on Putin’s brain and his motivations, is there some argument that there were things that they could have done earlier and that the NATO allies could have done earlier to prevent this situation from getting out of hand?

Kimberly Marten:

No. And I think that if this explanation is that Putin has just been waiting for the opportunity to do this, there’s nothing that the US could have done to prevent it because Russia has nuclear weapons, and so there is no way that the United States wants to get involved in a military confrontation with Russia. And I think when we’re talking about sanctions, in some of the mainstream US media, and also among Republicans in Congress, there’s been a misunderstanding of what sanctions are. So you’ve heard this argument, wouldn’t putting sanctions in place be a deterrent to Russia? And the answer is no. Once you put the sanctions in place, you’ve lost the deterrent value because what a deterrent is supposed to do is to provide a threat that if you take an action, here will be the consequences. If you put those consequences in place, then you have nothing to hold over Russia’s head.

Preet Bharara:

So that’s an argument for rolling sanctions, right?

Kimberly Marten:

Yes, exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Which is why President Biden announced this week, what he called the first tranche of sanctions. But it’s interesting because if you’re trying to prevent a full bore invasion, how do you think is the right way to think about the balance of how you front load the sanctions, versus how much you keep to the side, in your back pocket for after the full bore invasion happens? How do you think about that balance?

Kimberly Marten:

Right. And so the thing to keep in mind is that when you’re talking about putting sanctions policies in place, it’s not just trying to deter Russia, it’s also trying to get the allies behind you, which means that if you move too quickly and the allies aren’t moving with you, then you have this sense of a disconnect that Putin could exploit. If he sees fissures in the NATO alliance, for example, he could move in and try to use his own economic pressures against Western action. We have to remember that Europe in particular is much more tightly of connected to the Russian economy than the United States is. So that’s the first thing to keep in mind. The second thing is sanctions never go into place overnight, and so what we saw with the sanctions that were announced yesterday afternoon by Biden is that they will go into effect in 30 days or so.

Kimberly Marten:

And when we’re thinking about that, we don’t want to have too much harm come to Western economic interests that have been involved in Russia. So you want to give people warning time so that they can withdraw and put their own house in order, so that they don’t have too much blow back on Western economies. And one of the reasons to move in a step by step fashion is also to send a message to Western investors in Russia, which there have been up until the present time, that this is the first step and that things are going to get worse, to give them some warning time and to also convince them to pull out their resources because by pulling out their resources, they’re putting extra pressure on Russia, even without the official sanctions policy. So we saw that happen in 2014, when the sanctions started rolling forward a lot of Western investors changed their mind about what they were going to do in Russia, even before the sanctions went into place, because they were so afraid that the sanctions would be coming.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Kimberly Marten, after this. Do you have a view as to what the most effective types of sanctions are? I hear a lot of people talking about the oligarchs, hit the oligarchs and maybe even Putin’s own financial positions to the extent that they’re known or knowable, and what will really put pressure on Putin is if his cronies aren’t able to travel to the French Riviera or aren’t able to have access to their yachts, that kind of thing. Does that make any sense or not?

Kimberly Marten:

No, and I don’t think that’s the primary purpose for putting the pressure on the oligarchs, I think there was talk about that several years ago when the original pressure on some of the oligarchs came into being. But what we saw happen at that time in 2014, 2015, is that it actually pulled the oligarchs closer to Putin, because if you think about it, they get their money not because they are great capitalists of the world.

Preet Bharara:

They’re not?

Kimberly Marten:

They’re not, no, I think as you well know, from your previous work. They get their money because they have all kinds of illegal deals and kickbacks that are happening, they are part and parcel of the Russian state, giving them various advantages. And so they have no incentive to dessert Putin because if they do, they lose everything that they have. And so what we saw happen earlier in 2014, 2015, 2016, is that the oligarchs actually got closer to Putin as a result of the sanctions.

Kimberly Marten:

And yes, it means that they can’t travel to the Riviera. If it continued to go forward, it might mean that their children would have less opportunity as well. But what we’ve actually seen in recent years, especially the past couple of years, is that many of the children of Russian oligarchs that had been enrolled in Western educational institutions, for example, no longer are. So I think that they’ve been expecting the sanctions to happen, and so they’ve had time to prepare for it, and I don’t think that’s really the purpose-

Preet Bharara:

I’m sorry. So what better than going after the oligarchs?

Kimberly Marten:

Well, you can still go after the oligarchs, but for a different purpose. And so, especially if you’re able to go after the accounts that some of the oligarchs control, but that’s really Putin’s money, what you’re demonstrating is that you have information that might scare Putin about the level of information you have. And I think this is important to keep in mind about what the Biden administration has been doing recently in addition to the sanctions, they’ve been releasing all of this intelligence about what they know about what Russia is planning and what Russia is going to do next. And if you think about what that means, that’s sending the message to Russia, we are in your systems. And if you think about all the discussion that has been in place in the United States, about Russian intrusion into American cyber domains in recent years, there’s been this fear that if Russia can take our information, that means they can also put back doors into the system to change the information, to be engaged in sabotage.

Kimberly Marten:

And by saying, “We have this information, we have this information about what Russia’s going to do next, and potentially, we have this information about where Putin’s accounts are actually located and where he gets his money from.” That’s also a message that not only do we have information that comes from these electronic sources, but maybe we could engage in sabotage. And so I think we have to keep that in mind too, as something that might be part of what’s happening with the sanctions package.

Preet Bharara:

And do you think that actually gets into Putin’s head and causes him to rethink his course?

Kimberly Marten:

I don’t know. And there’s a danger in going too far in that, in that Russia could do a lot to harm the US economy and US people through its cyber actions. The US is in one sense, much more vulnerable to cyber reactions than Russia is because we have so much that is connected to cyber, much more than Russia does just because of the advanced technology that’s in the consumer economy of the United States. And so it’ll be interesting to see whether that goes forward, but I think it is sending a message and maybe causing Putin to rethink where the loyalty is among his people and how the US got this access

Preet Bharara:

Is one reason for not launching all the sanctions in a maximal front loaded way, not simply that you want to maintain some deterrence and leverage effect for later, but also a fear of massive cyber retaliation?

Kimberly Marten:

That is a reason to move slowly, But I think that there is also preparation in the United States and among our allies, for the probability that there will be an uptick in Russian cyber attacks. I mean, you’re right, that’s always something that is going to be a block on moving too far forward. And that was something that, for example, kept the Obama administration from putting stronger sanctions on Russia at the time of the original take over of Crimea and the starting of the war in Eastern Ukraine. But it looks like the Biden administration is more willing to take that risk than the Obama administration was.

Preet Bharara:

We’ve talked about Putin, we’ve talked about Biden, can we spend a couple of minutes talking about the “loyal opposition” in the United States? The kinds of things that I put that in quotes, and maybe you can address whether you think it’s loyal or not, statements by among other people, former president Trump, who seems to be marveling at the intellect and using his word, savvy of Putin and other folks who are saying really the fault is NATOs. I don’t know how loud those voices are and how wide spread that thinking is on the Republican side, but do you have a reaction to any of that?

Kimberly Marten:

I think there are more people than just Trump who have that belief. And I think one of the questions that is interesting is why in the world Putin didn’t take these actions under the time of the Trump administration, because Trump probably would’ve not have viewed it as a crisis the way the Biden administration is viewing it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, the reason for that, professor, obviously, if you pay attention, is that he was terrified, that Putin was terrified of Donald Trump, absolutely petrified, and that’s why no action was taken. Is that not a correct conclusion?

Kimberly Marten:

If you’re Trump, maybe that’s what you believe. Yes, I think that’s possible. But I think there’s another part of the loyal opposition that we need to keep in mind too, which is that there’s a widespread feeling among much of the American public, I don’t know if it’s a majority, but at least a significant minority of the American public who does not follow foreign affairs regularly saying, “Why should we care about Ukraine? If this is going to be harmful to the US economy, what are our interests here?”

Kimberly Marten:

And so I think one of the things that Biden has tried to do, and that I think is important in general to do, is to say that Ukraine is not alone. Ukraine is a liberal democracy that really has been making great strides forward in doing things that would make it part of the Western community. And if Putin succeeds here, it’s not going to stop with Ukraine. So this is not just about an attack on Ukraine, it’s also about an attack on the west more broadly. And part of Putin’s thinking that authoritarian states are in opposition to democratic states. And if he succeeds here, who knows what he might do next.

Preet Bharara:

There’s been reporting that Vladimir Putin has a kill list, a list of people in Ukraine who need to be assassinated and/or disappeared, and/or something else. And among other folks, activist Gary Kasparov says he believes that that’s true. Is there anything to that you think?

Kimberly Marten:

It’s a reasonable thing to believe might be the case. I mean, apparently that list was released by US intelligence agencies, so it’s coming from the US government, it’s not coming just from journalists.

Preet Bharara:

And that’s more trying to spook Putin?

Kimberly Marten:

It’s maybe more trying to spook Putin, but I think that there was also a sense, and there was one representative from the US government who said this, I think, that there was a sense of having a responsibility to protect these people and warn them that they were on that list. But it certainly fits the pattern of how the Putin administration has behaved in terms of having spectacular forms of assassination attempts against those who are against it, including in Western Europe. We saw that happen in the United Kingdom, for example, twice.

Preet Bharara:

We’ve talked about how much of this was foreseeable in understanding what Putin’s motivations are and whether or not we were caught flatfooted or not, but the Ukrainian people, I understand from reporting, and neither you nor I are on the ground there, but my understanding is that up until very, very recently, the general population of Ukraine didn’t really think this was a possibility. Can you explain that?

Kimberly Marten:

I think there’s still a sense among a significant number of Ukrainian observers that maybe all that’s going to happen is that Putin will stop with [inaudible 00:41:08]. And the evidence that we have available to us suggests that that’s not likely to happen, that he’s going to continue to move forward beyond that. But maybe it’s a sense of wishful thinking, maybe it’s a sense of having gotten used to warfare in Eastern Ukraine, and so nothing is really surprising to Ukrainians. But at the same time, there has been a lot of evidence that Ukrainians are signing up for self defense forces that are civilians, people who are in the professions, lawyers and doctors and teachers are learning how to use weapons and thinking about defense forces and thinking about what a resistance would look like. And so I think the feeling is mixed, but yeah, I think even as of yesterday, there was still some hope among some significant people in Ukraine, that Putin would stop at the breakaway areas and would not go further.

Preet Bharara:

And that hope you think is dwindling?

Kimberly Marten:

From all of the evidence that we have, from the way that the military forces are deployed, from the way that already yesterday Putin started off by saying that he was only interested it in supporting the areas where the [inaudible 00:42:17] people’s Republic so-called, actually had control over territory to then expanding it later in the evening, to say that it was the entire area that they claimed, which would go far beyond the area where the battle line currently is, by the statements that he’s made that Ukraine doesn’t have the right to be a sovereign independent state. All of that evidence indicates that he is likely to go further, and so I think we should be prepared for the probability that he will go further, even though who knows, I mean, he’s very good at playing tricks, he may decide to stop.

Preet Bharara:

Is it possible for Putin or does Putin still think it is possible, which is a different question, does he still think it’s possible to take over the whole of Ukraine bloodlessly?

Kimberly Marten:

So I think that what a lot of observers believe would be the maximum that Putin would do, would probably not try to take over all of Ukrainian territory, because he’d face very, very strong resistance in the Western parts of Ukraine in particular. But that it might be that his goal is to take over Kyiv, which may or may not involve having an actual military conventional force takeover of Kyiv, but do something to destabilize the government in Kyiv so that he could put in a Russian puppet who would actually lead Ukraine into the Russian orbit.

Preet Bharara:

But that’s effectively taking over all of Ukraine.

Kimberly Marten:

Yeah, it’s taking over all of Ukraine, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that he would have to take it over using conventional military forces. He could do it by a series of demonstration effects on cyber attacks against civilian installations, that might convince people to stop fighting, for example, we can think of all kinds of different ways that he might approach that.

Preet Bharara:

How do you assess the performance of the leader of Ukraine, Zelensky, in all this?

Kimberly Marten:

He’s been in a very difficult position because he had no political experience.

Preet Bharara:

His experience, remind people what his experience was.

Kimberly Marten:

He’s a comedian, that’s what he did for his entire career, that was his profession, he played the president in a comedy show. And so he really put himself in this position where he had no background to be able to address this. And many of the people that have been his advisors are people he took over from the television station where his comedy show was. And so they’ve been plunked down into this situation where they had no experience. And then to top it all off, he’s been trying to take on recently oligarchs who are extraordinarily powerful and that has put him in even weaker position. And then if you think about it, there are also a variety of very strongly nationalist militias in Ukraine, who are very much against any concessions to Russia, who have been banging at his heels, not allowing him to do a very good job of having freedom for negotiation.

Kimberly Marten:

And so he’s really been in an extraordinarily bad circumstance. And so I think if we start off by looking at that, by having some sympathy for him, that he put himself in this position, maybe he’s done better than people had expected. Although he probably made a major rhetorical blunder a couple of days ago, by saying he was going to rethink the Bucharest commitments that were from 1994, where Ukraine agreed to give up its ability to acquire nuclear weapons and join the nonproliferation treaty in response to security guarantees that came from the United States, the UK and Russia, because it just gave Putin and inroad to say, “Oh, Ukraine’s going to develop nuclear weapons now.”

Preet Bharara:

They have designs on affecting our security, exactly.

Kimberly Marten:

Yeah. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

So let’s say that Putin does that lesser of the two things we just discussed, not a full throated, full bore war and physical invasion to take over the whole of Ukraine, but basically the takeover of Kyiv and the installation of a puppet. What does Europe look like after that, if that comes to pass and the post world war II order that we’ve become familiar with?

Kimberly Marten:

Yeah. Well, I think when we talked earlier about whether Putin is rational and reasonable, the one thing that he seems not to have understood is that his actions would create a level of unity between the United States and Europe that we hadn’t seen up until that point. And I think the strongest evidence we have that’s going to hold was Germany saying it’s not going to approve the Nord Stream two pipeline. I think that came as a surprise to many people, given that in recent weeks, everybody’s tried to get Germany to say that, and they wouldn’t. And now with just the movement that Putin has made so far, they did come out and say that.

Kimberly Marten:

And so I think it might be a reestablishment of a cold war, just with different boundaries than it was before. It would be the most threatening to NATO members who are closest to Ukraine. I think one of the concerns we would have would be for the so-called Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, especially with what appears to be Russia’s military takeover of Belarus in recent weeks, that leaves them more vulnerable than they have been because of the difficulty of NATO moving forces and moving supplies into those territories, if Russia should decide to invade them next. So I think this has very serious security consequences for NATO, but I think it is unifying NATO in a way that Putin had not expected.

Preet Bharara:

Can you just explain briefly for folks, why it’s a big deal for Germany to have canceled Nord Stream two?

Kimberly Marten:

Yeah, so that has been in the works for many, many years. It’s a pipeline that would supplement an existing pipeline. The approval process has been going on for a very long time. It bypasses Ukraine, which means that Ukraine doesn’t get the taxes or the tariffs that it otherwise would get from natural gas going from Russia across to Europe, over Ukrainian territory. And Germany has been very firm, both under Chancellor Angela Merkel and now under Chancellor Schultz, that that was something that was continuing to go forward and that they would not come out and say that it was stopping.

Kimberly Marten:

If they actually were to end the pipeline, it would be essentially a seizure of private property. And so there is a series of legal maneuvering that Germany would have to go through to seize that pipeline by complete cutting it off. So all that has been said so far by Schultz is that he would not go ahead with the approval process, which I think does not yet cross that legal line. And that’s something that Constanze Stelzenmüller of the Brookings Institution has talked about. She’s a German attorney who’s at Brookings.

Preet Bharara:

So going back to the scenario in which Russia takes over at Kyiv and installs a puppet, what’s next on Putin’s list of countries to go into?

Kimberly Marten:

I think he would probably put into place a very strong economic and military alliance between Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, which may have been what his major goal was all along. It would be not expanding Russian territory, but really cementing Russian influence over those two Slavic countries that are very closely connected to Russia in terms of ethnicity and language and history. And so I think that’s probably what we would expect to see next.

Preet Bharara:

Not beyond that, not even further invasions or annexations?

Kimberly Marten:

It would take a lot of effort on Putin’s part to do any kind of annexation of anything further. If he wanted to go into another country that’s not part of NATO, Georgia is probably the next most obvious candidate. The Russian military is a lot stronger now than it was in 2008 when the original invasion of parts of recognized Georgian territory happened. Russia has military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which is on recognized Georgian territory, but Russia doesn’t recognize it. And so if he were to take another military action immediately, that might be where it would go. And as I said earlier, I think if he wanted to try to take on NATO directly, an attack on the Baltic states would be where he would go. But then at that point, he really is risking a full retaliation from NATO, including the US nuclear guarantee.

Preet Bharara:

I have a question which is maybe a silly question, and it is why is this stuff so difficult to analyze, even by very, very smart expert people. I’ll give you an example, and I’m not a foreign policy expert, but I’ve been trying to follow this very closely because I think it’s a big deal and very important to all Americans and people around the world. On Monday, Putin, dramatically announces through a vote, that the two regions in Ukraine, Donetsk and Lohansk were independent. And I immediately turned to see the statements of people who I respect and trust on these issues, and I begin seeing some people saying, which was my initial reaction, inexpert reaction, which is that’s the setting of a foundation for a pretext for an invasion. And then I saw other very, very smart people, and some people agreed with that, and I saw other very smart people say, “Oh, this is a great sign. This means that Putin is setting up an off-ramp, so he can deescalate.” Those are two very, very dramatically different reactions to a bit of news out of Russia. Do you have a reaction to that?

Kimberly Marten:

Yeah, it’s almost impossible to try to figure out what’s happening because all of this decision making is being made by Putin as an individual and perhaps a couple of very close people in his immediate network. It’s an authoritarian state, they don’t discuss anything before it actually happens. In the United States, we had so much advanced warning before, for example, the invasion of Iraq, you don’t see anything similar to that. So you have to watch what Russia is doing on the ground to try to predict what it’s going to do next.

Kimberly Marten:

But Putin’s also a very tricky actor, and as I said at the beginning, he’s a former KGB officer, and so he is very good at playing public opinion and putting forth false narratives to try to confuse people and at keeping people guessing. And he enjoys that, there’s a Russian word [foreign language 00:52:13] which is cunning, the underdog coming to the forefront through cunning and cleverness. And he sees himself as practicing [foreign language 00:52:22] and so he likes keeping us guessing. And unless there is intelligence information that we have not yet heard about, there’s no way of knowing exactly what he’s going to do next. He has set himself the opportunity to do a huge number of things if he wishes.

Preet Bharara:

Is one reason that it’s hard to figure out what he’s doing, that he himself has not figured out yet what he’s doing?

Kimberly Marten:

That’s possible. There have been some people who have a lot of experience working in Russia, who have said that Putin has a reputation for taking decisions at the very last minute, that he has a hard time making up his mind and that he keeps on weighing the pros and cons before he does something. So it is also possible that Putin doesn’t know what he’s going to do tomorrow.

Preet Bharara:

So before I let you go, it turns out, I’ve just realized, there’s one thing we haven’t talked about yet. You know what we haven’t talked about?

Kimberly Marten:

What’s that?

Preet Bharara:

We haven’t talked about China. So explain to folks how China figures into all of this. Most experts were predicting that no dramatic action would be taken until the Olympics were over. That happened Sunday.

Kimberly Marten:

They were right.

Preet Bharara:

They were right. Totally correct. How does China feel about this? How does Putin weigh his relationship with China, and does he worry about upsetting China going forward?

Kimberly Marten:

So the basic fact is that China matters a lot more to Russia than Russia does to China. China’s economic relationship with both the United States and the European Union is an order of magnitude greater than its economic relationship with Russia. But the same thing is not true in in counter for Russia. Russia needs China economically, especially if it’s facing more Western sanctions, China has therefore very mixed motives. It is very happy to take Russian natural resources, minerals, oil, and gas. It is very happy to have Russia essentially being a little lap dog that follows along behind China. China has a strong incentive to make the US look bad, to try to say that authoritarian regimes are the future of the world and not democracies. So in that sense, China’s happy that Russia is able to get one over on the United States, but at the same, and China has to be more guarded.

Kimberly Marten:

And what we’ve seen is China having really mixed messages. So in 2014, it did not come out in favor of the Russian takeover of Crimea. It has spoken out recently against NATO enlargement. It spoke out today once again, against sanctions, saying that sanctions are not a good idea, because it doesn’t like the idea of sanctions against it. But it also has said that it sees Ukraine as a sovereign state and that it supports the territorial integrity of sovereign states. And so it’s got a mixed message and it’s not likely to become the kind of ally that Putin would like it to become. Even though it’s probably very glad that Putin’s trying to give the west and the United States, a black eye.

Preet Bharara:

Is the relationship between Russia and China such, and I know it’s asymmetrical, but is it such that if China had determined or were to determine that it’s just not good in the long term for China, the takeover of Ukraine, that they would have the power and ability to turn Putin back?

Kimberly Marten:

Well, it would be on economics, and what we saw happen after the sanctions went into effect the last time around, is that the only Chinese entity that continued to support Russia and invest in Russia, was the Chinese Sovereign Wealth Fund, because it has no particular reason to fear Western sanctions, it doesn’t have dealings with the west. Whereas even state owned Chinese banks were significantly afraid of US banking sanctions in particular, that they did not go ahead with investments in Russia. So that’s already sending a message about where Chinese power lies and what the limits of Chinese power are. But yeah, I think you’re right, that if the Chinese Sovereign Bank had decided that it didn’t want anything more to do with Russia and that it was going to cut off its relationship with Russia, if China decided it was going to cut off, it gets a lot of weapons from Russia, if it decided to cut off those arm sales, then China could have had a big effect on making Putin think twice. I don’t think China did that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. It doesn’t look like they’re going to do it in the coming hours and days. I’m going to let you go because I know you’re in high demand as an expert on all these issues. But as we watch the news and see the developments over the coming days and weeks, what are the kinds of things that you think people who are watching should be looking for as clues to whether it’s going one way or another way?

Kimberly Marten:

The most important thing to watch is where those Russian troops go. And it’s been confusing up until now because the people who are the pro Russian fighters in Eastern Ukraine, have had Russian weaponry. And so you have to be a real military expert to be able to know whether a particular tank or armored personnel carrier actually belongs to Russia or actually has already been in Eastern Ukrainian territory up until now. But I think that’s the most important thing to watch, is how far forward the troops and the weapons that are definitely Russian troops and Russian weapons, how far they advance. And if they advance beyond the current line of control, beyond that current standoff line in the war that’s been happening in Eastern Ukraine since 2014, that’ll be a very strong sense that Putin is not going to stop.

Preet Bharara:

Got it. And do you, as a final question, care to weigh in on the domestic political environment and what the implications are for Biden, depending on how it goes in Ukraine?

Kimberly Marten:

I guess my sense is that this is far enough away, even from the midterm elections, and that people do not tend to vote on foreign policy issues, they tend to vote on economic and immediate family interest issues. I don’t think that this would cause people who are against Biden for other reasons, to turn around and support him. But I think what it might do if Biden is able to maintain this strength of the Western alliance and is able to show that this is a foreign policy win for him, not because it stops Russia, but just because the alliance holds and that this is an indication that the west is back again. I think it might undo some of the bad effects that the problems from the Afghanistan withdrawal had on people assessing his foreign policy legacy.

Preet Bharara:

I said, that was the last question, but I lied because your answered prompted just one more question. What would a political win look like, what would a reasonable and realistic political win in Ukraine look like for Biden going forward?

Kimberly Marten:

Oh, well, I mean a true win would be having Russia stop before it goes much further or stop at the Eastern Ukraine level without having to take over the capital of Ukraine, without taking over a Kyiv. I’m not sure that Biden actually has any control over that though, that’s really Putin’s decision.

Preet Bharara:

Right. But is anything beyond that a political loss?

Kimberly Marten:

It would be a terrible political loss if the European alliance doesn’t hold together in putting together sanctions, if Putin succeeds in convincing them that they need Russian natural gas so much that they do not hold together on their sanctions policy. We’ve seen threats of that coming from Russia, that Europe should be prepared for its gas prices to skyrocket. It’s still winter, the worst of winter is over, but there is still winter, it’s pretty clear that liquid natural gas can help with the gas supplies in Europe. But Cutter has said that it cannot possibly replace the Russian supplies if Russia should choose to cut off that pipeline. I don’t think it’s very likely that Russia would completely cut off the pipeline, because that would hurt Gazprom, it would hurt the Russian interest as much as it would hurt the European interest. But I think that’s the disaster scenario, that Russia convinces Europe not to hold together with the United States and Europe caves.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. I am now going to let you go. I release you professor.

Kimberly Marten:

Thank you so much, I really enjoyed this.

Preet Bharara:

Thank you so much for your voice and your analysis, and for making time at the last minute.

Kimberly Marten:

Thank you for inviting me.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll all be following it very closely. Professor Kimberly Marten, thanks for joining us.

Kimberly Marten:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Kimberly Marten. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice, tweet them to me @PreetBharara, with the hashtag ask Preet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338 that’s 669-247-7338, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Seper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. And the CAFE team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Chris Boylan, Sean Walsh and Namata Sha. Our music is by Andrew Doss. I’m your host Preet Bharara. Stay Tuned.