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WILLIAM BURNS ON RUSSIA

January 14, 2021
Daniel Shapiro

This compilation of observations and policy ideas related to Russia by William
Burns is part of Russia Matters’ “Competing Views” rubric, where we share
prominent American thinkers’ takes on issues pertaining to Russia, U.S.-Russian
relations and broader U.S. policies affecting Russia.

On January 11, President-elect Joe Biden selected William Burns to serve as his
CIA director. Prior to his appointment, Burns served in the U.S. Foreign Service
for 33 years, including in such roles as Deputy Secretary of State and as U.S.
Ambassador to Russia. Following his retirement from the State Department in
2014, Burns was appointed president of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace. Burns is also the author of "The Back Channel: A Memoir of American
Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal," published in 2019.

This compilation is meant as a sampling of Burns’ views. All sections may be
updated with new or past statements. The quotes below are divided into
categories similar to those in Russia Matters’ news and analysis digests,
reflecting the most pertinent topic areas for U.S.-Russian relations broadly and
for drivers of the two countries’ policies toward one another.

 


I. U.S. AND RUSSIAN PRIORITIES FOR THE BILATERAL AGENDA


NUCLEAR SECURITY:

 * There was also shared interest in a variety of initiatives to ensure the
   safety and security of nuclear materials. Putin was eager to widen the lens
   and show cooperation in dealing with third-party challenges. We saw value in
   that too. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)


NORTH KOREA’S NUCLEAR AND MISSILE PROGRAMS:

 * We are not going to talk for the sake of talks or respond to North Korean
   provocations with inducements and concessions. While we will maintain our
   pressure on North Korea, we also continue testing the potential for
   diplomacy. Coordination with our allies, who share our deep concern about the
   growing North Korean threat, is a top priority. This is why the trilateral
   summit in The Hague with President Obama, President Park, and Prime Minister
   Abe was so important. It sent a clear message that we have a united approach
   toward North Korea, and that North Korea will not succeed in driving a wedge
   between us and our allies. Also central to our approach is active
   coordination with China – a country with significant political and economic
   influence over North Korea. Despite its concerns about Kim Jong Un, China
   remains reluctant to push North Korea too hard due to longstanding fears of
   possible instability. (Asia Society Policy Institute, 04.08.14)


IRAN AND ITS NUCLEAR PROGRAM:

 * The Trump administration … will continue to pretend that the United States
   can participate in only the punitive parts of the Iran nuclear deal that it
   likes and opt out of all the others. The U.S. tried—and spectacularly failed
   at—that strategy earlier this month, when it sought to trigger the nuclear
   agreement’s “snapback” of multilateral sanctions against Iran, despite having
   already abandoned the deal. That effort is not only silly, but guaranteed to
   further embarrass and isolate the U.S., further alienate our closest allies,
   and further risk collisions with Tehran. (Carnegie Endowment for
   International Peace, 08.29.20)
 * This month, six years ago, we were in the midst of secret talks with Iran
   that led to the comprehensive nuclear agreement. It was a moment when
   diplomacy carried considerable risk, and considerable promise. Today, the
   promise has faded, and the risk is accelerating. The consequences of the
   Trump administration’s foolish decision to abandon that nuclear deal last
   year, with no evidence of Iranian noncompliance, were predictable—and
   predicted. We are now at a very dangerous point. The story of how we got here
   is one of faulty expectations on both sides. (The New York Times, 10.14.19)
 * We’re isolating ourselves instead of isolating the Iranian regime. Withdrawal
   makes it harder, not easier, to deal with Iran’s threatening behavior
   throughout the Middle East, and it further erodes international confidence in
   America’s willingness to hold up our end of diplomatic bargains. It creates
   even more fissures in relations with our closest European allies—in effect
   doing Vladimir Putin’s work for him. (Interview with American Foreign Service
   Association, May 2019)
 * In Iran, for example, when Obama came into office at the beginning of 2009,
   Obama and Clinton recognized that if we were going to get anywhere in
   building leverage against the Iranians on the nuclear issue and building a
   solid international coalition in negotiations, we had to work with the
   Russians, because we could be pretty confident that we’d work well with the
   Germans, the French and the British. The Chinese weren't playing a
   particularly active role in that period. So the key was preventing the
   Iranians from driving a wedge between us and the Russians. (Interview with
   PBS, 06.14.17)
 * What was striking to me was the sense in which the P5+1 partners had a strong
   sense of shared purpose and a willingness to extend considerable effort—this
   despite pretty significant and serious differences among some of the P5+1,
   most notably with Russia over Ukraine. On the Iran issue, the Russians were
   constructive partners throughout. (Interview with Columbia University,
   06.06.16)
 * It would make no sense for a new U.S. president to walk away from the nuclear
   agreement. People forget that this is not an agreement between just the
   United States and Iran. If the United States had walked away from that
   agreement last summer or fall, we would have walked away alone, and you would
   likely have seen a disintegration of the international coalition that had so
   painstakingly been built up, and the disintegration of the sanctions regime,
   with an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program. (Interview with Columbia
   University, 06.06.16)


NEW COLD WAR/SABRE RATTLING:

 * I think there was a certain extent to which it was always going to be
   difficult for Russians, after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the
   Soviet Union, to accept what was, in effect, junior-partner status to a then
   singularly dominant United States. I think they were always going to chafe at
   that. … There was bound to be a time when they were going to push
   back. (Interview with The New Yorker, 03.19.19)
 * In the end, there proved to be no avoiding the sense of loss and humiliation
   that came with defeat in the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union,
   no matter how many times we and the Russians told each other that the outcome
   had no losers, only winners. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)


NATO-RUSSIA RELATIONS:

 * Stressing the attachment of Yeltsin and the country’s political elite to
   Russia’s sphere of influence in the former Soviet space, I emphasized
   mounting Russian concern about expansion of NATO. I noted that Yeltsin’s
   tough public statements in the fall of 1994 about NATO expansion “were an
   unsubtle reminder of Russian angst about neglect of its interests in the
   process of restructuring European security institutions.” … Before thinking
   seriously about extending offers of formal NATO membership to Poland and
   other Central European states, we recommended considering other forms of
   cooperation with former Warsaw Pact members, and perhaps a new “treaty
   relationship” between NATO and Russia. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * For the Russians, the war in Bosnia served as another painful reminder of
   their weakness. While often frustrated by the brutality and venality of the
   Serbian leadership, Yeltsin couldn’t ignore the natural affinity of Russians
   for Slavic kinsmen in Belgrade and among the Bosnian Serbs. As NATO stepped
   up its air campaign, and as Holbrooke accelerated American diplomacy, the
   Russians resented their secondary role. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * After his reelection in November 1996, Clinton followed through on NATO
   expansion … As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage,
   a gathering storm of “stab in the back” theories slowly swirled, leaving a
   mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades. (“The
   Back Channel,” 2019)
 * Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, it seemed to me that NATO
   expansion was premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst. (“The
   Back Channel,” 2019)


MISSILE DEFENSE:

 * Completing the trifecta of troubles was the vexing issue of missile defense.
   Anxious about American superiority in missile defense technology since the
   Soviet era, the Russians were always nervous that U.S. advances in the field,
   whatever their stated purposes, would put Moscow at a serious strategic
   disadvantage. … Their longer-term concern was not so much about the
   particular technologies that might be deployed in new NATO states in Central
   Europe as it was about what those technologies might mean as apart of a
   future, globalized American missile defense system. (“The Back Channel,”
   2019)
 * I knew how hard it was to break the post-Cold War habit of assuming that we
   could eventually maneuver over or around Moscow when it suited us, and I knew
   that was especially difficult as an administration looked to cement its
   legacy on issues like European security and missile defense. (“The Back
   Channel,” 2019)


ARMS CONTROL:

 * Extending the New START agreement with Russia, which is due to expire early
   next year, would be important. Without it, what remains of
   nuclear-arms-control architecture will collapse in a dangerous heap.
   (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 08.29.20)
 * However profound our differences … the United States and Russia have unique
   capabilities and unique responsibilities to reduce global nuclear threats.
   It’s cold-bloodedly in both our interests to do so, and certainly in the
   interests of the wider international community. Russia had been violating the
   INF Treaty for a number of years. We may ultimately have had no alternative
   but to leave the treaty; I just wish we had worked more creatively to lay out
   our case for Russian violations, reassure our allies and explore ways to fix
   the problem. My broader hope is that the collapse of INF doesn’t foreshadow
   the demise of what’s left of the U.S.-Russia arms control architecture. It
   would be especially dangerous to let the New START Treaty lapse in 2021. We
   ought to be engaging the Russians now on New START, and in serious strategic
   stability talks, particularly given the increasingly uncertain entanglement
   of nuclear systems with advanced conventional weaponry, missile defense and
   cyber tools. (Interview with American Foreign Service Association, 05.2019)
 * President Obama was also interested in trying to take nuclear arms reduction
   to another level. That was one of the big priorities in his campaign, and
   there again, Russia is the only nuclear power in the world comparable to the
   United States—had a both huge capacity and huge responsibility. (Interview
   with PBS, 06.14.17)


COUNTER-TERRORISM:

 * Putin … saw an opening through which Russia could become a partner in the
   Global War on Terrorism. He thought the war on terror would give Russia a
   better frame in which to operate than the “new world order” that had
   dominated U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War. The implicit terms of
   the deal Putin sought included a common front against terrorism, with Russia
   backing the United States against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan,
   and Washington backing Moscow’s tough tactics against Chechen rebels. (“The
   Back Channel,” 2019)
 * Russia does not consider the U.S. a friend in the Caucasus, and our capacity
   to influence Russia, whether by pressure, persuasion or assistance, is small.
   What we can do is continue to try to push the senior tier of Russian
   officials towards the realization that current policies are conducive to
   Jihadism, which threatens broader stability as well; and that shifting the
   responsibility for victimizing and looting the people from a corrupt, brutal
   military to corrupt, brutal locals is not a long-term solution. (U.S. Embassy
   Cable, 05.30.06)


CONFLICT IN SYRIA:

 * I think there are several motives which have animated President Putin in
   Syria recently. First and most straightforward was to bolster the Assad
   regime, which last August was losing altitude and losing ground. Second, it
   was to reassert Russia’s role as a significant international player in the
   Middle East and more broadly as a major power in the world. Third, I think it
   was to try to provide a counterpoint to what Putin often sees as a naïve
   American interest in regime change in the region which doesn’t take into
   account the second and third order consequences—a way to  assert a contrary
   Russian view. Fourth, I think he was certainly interested at the time in
   changing the subject a little bit from Ukraine, given the sanctions which had
   been enacted against Russia in the course of the Ukraine crisis. And fifth,
   but not least, it’s sometimes particularly satisfying to Putin and the
   Russian leadership to stick a thumb in the eyes of the Americans. (Interview
   with Columbia University, 06.06.16)
 * Obviously ISIS is a significant and serious threat. ISIS is only going to be
   marginalized—and defeated—through a combination of security and political
   means. The security steps are pretty obvious: you can punish ISIS from the
   air, but ultimately it’s going to be, in my view, local ground forces that
   are able to roll back its gains. You can see more clearly how to do that in
   Iraq with rebuilt Iraqi security forces than you can today in Syria, but
   ultimately that’s the challenge in Syria. But it’s got to be political as
   well in the sense that you’ve got to mobilize the 20 percent Sunni Arab
   minority in Iraq against ISIS, a Sunni extremist group, so that that 20
   percent minority feels a stake, a political future, in Iraq. In Syria, the
   challenge is to mobilize the 65 to 70 percent of the population that is Sunni
   Arab against ISIS, because that’s ultimately the only way to defeat them. And
   that has clear implications for the need for some form of political
   transition to new leadership in Syria as well. (Interview with Columbia
   University, 06.06.16)


CYBER SECURITY:

 * I was ambassador in Moscow when the cyber conflict that the Russians waged
   against Estonia was mounted. … You could see the Russians investing in this
   instrument of state power. It was, from their point of view, a perfect
   asymmetric tool, a way in which they couldn’t compete in terms of
   conventional military power or in many other measures of national power with
   the United States or NATO, but here was one area where they could punch above
   their weight and take advantage of the human capital in Russia. And you could
   see it building all the way through the Ukraine crisis, which came some years
   later. (Interview with PBS, 06.14.17)


ELECTIONS INTERFERENCE:

 * Having invited Vladimir Putin to undermine his last Democratic rival, Trump
   is entirely capable of doing it again—and incapable of the kind of firm,
   consistent approach, and careful coordination with allies, that could be
   essential to limiting Russian overreach in crises in Belarus or elsewhere.
   (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 08.29.20
 * For a number of years, Putin had challenged the West in places such as
   Georgia and Ukraine, where Russia had a meaningful stake and a high appetite
   for risk. In 2016, a year after I left government, he saw an opportunity for
   a more direct challenge to the West—an attack on the integrity of its
   democracies. (The Atlantic, April 2019)
 * He’s [Putin] demonstrated that even if you're, objectively speaking, a
   declining power, you can be quite disruptive, and you can sow chaos. I'm
   convinced that's exactly what he intended to do in the U.S. elections in 2016
   and has succeeded so far beyond his wildest imagination in sowing chaos, in
   some respects in making president Trump an instrument of that chaos.
   (Interview with PBS, 06.14.17)
 * I wasn’t entirely surprised because you had seen the Russians developing this
   capability for some years. I was a little bit surprised by the brazenness of
   it as well. Putin didn't go to great lengths to try to cover his tracks on
   this. And I was struck, like so many other Americans, by the seriousness of
   this—a direct challenge to the democratic system in the United States. I
   think that’s something that has to be taken really seriously. (Interview with
   PBS, 06.14.17)


ENERGY EXPORTS FROM CIS:

 * I think he missed the moment when he could have begun to diversify the
   economy beyond what comes out of the ground, beyond hydrocarbons, when he was
   surfing on a-hundred-and-thirty-dollar-a-barrel oil, and he missed because
   economic diversification took second place to political order. I think that’s
   going to make it increasingly hard for Russia to compete as a major power in
   a very competitive twenty-first century. (Interview with The New Yorker,
   03.19.19)


U.S.-RUSSIAN ECONOMIC TIES:

 * We continued to work hard to enlarge two-way trade and investment. I spent
   considerable time with American business representatives … trying to get a
   foothold in the elusive Russian market. Doing business in Russia was not for
   the fainthearted … Despite the risk, there were profits to be made and
   markets to be opened, and I lobbied everyone … on behalf of a level playing
   field for American companies. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * I think Putin was actually to some extent surprised by the solidarity of the
   U.S. and our principal European allies. I think he was surprised by the
   sharpness of the sanctions, especially after the first wave of sanctions, the
   next waves, and the impact that they had on the Russian elite, the people
   around him, and also Russia’s ability to access capital and to access the
   kind of technology that it needs in developing hydrocarbon reserves, too.
   (Interview with PBS, 06.14.17)


U.S.-RUSSIAN RELATIONS IN GENERAL:

 * With Medvedev in the Kremlin, Obama struggled to stay connected to Putin,
   whose suspicions never really eased, and who was still inclined to paint the
   U.S. as a threat in order to legitimize his repressive bent at home. We
   managed a string of tangible accomplishments: a new nuclear-arms-reduction
   treaty; a military transit agreement for Afghanistan; a partnership on the
   Iranian nuclear issue. (The Atlantic, April 2019)
 * Managing relations with Russia will be a long game, conducted within a
   relatively narrow band of possibilities. Navigating such a great-power
   rivalry requires tactful diplomacy—maneuvering in the gray area between peace
   and war; demonstrating a grasp of the limits of the possible; building
   leverage; exploring common ground where we can find it; and pushing back
   firmly and persistently where we can’t. The path ahead with Russia will get
   rockier before it gets easier. We ought to traverse it without illusions,
   mindful of Russia’s interests and sensibilities, unapologetic about our
   values and confident in our own enduring strengths. We should not give in to
   Putin—or give up on the Russia beyond him. (The Atlantic, April 2019)
 * The list of irritants between us continued to grow, but several stood out.
   One was Kosovo, where the United States had championed a UN-led process to
   organize Kosovar independence from Serbia. … For Putin, Kosovo’s independence
   brought back bad memories of Russian impotence, and loomed as a test of how
   different his Russia was from Yeltsin’s. He also had worries, not entirely
   unfounded, that Kosovo’s independence would set off a chain reaction of
   pressures. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * Surfing on historically high oil prices and nursing fifteen years of
   grievances, convinced that the United States had taken advantage of Russia’s
   moment of historical weakness and was bent on keeping it down, Putin was
   determined to show that he was making Russia great again and we better get
   used to it. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * The Orange Revolution in Ukraine … and the Rose Revolution in Georgia before
   that, led Putin to conclude that the Americans were not only undercutting
   Russia’s interest in its sphere of influence, but might eventually aim the
   same kind of color revolution at his regime. These disappointments were piled
   on top of his anger over the Iraq War, a symbol of America’s predilection for
   unilateral action in a unipolar world, and President Bush’s second inaugural
   address and its “freedom agenda”—which Putin believed included Russia near
   the top of the administration’s “to-do” list. Democracy promotion, in his
   eyes, was a Trojan horse designed to further American geopolitical interests
   at Russia’s expense, and ultimately to erode his grip on power in Russia
   itself. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * From the outset of my tenure as ambassador, I urged realism about the
   unlikely prospects for broad partnership with Putin’s Russia, and pragmatism
   in our strategy. Realism demanded that we come to terms with the fact that
   relations were going to be uneasy, at best, for some time to come. We should
   shed the illusions that had lingered since the end of the Cold War, recognize
   that we were bound to have significant differences with a resurgent Russia,
   and seek a durable mix of competition and cooperation in our relationship.
   (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * Despite the sustained efforts of Bill Clinton to cultivate relations with the
   new Russia and accommodate the post-traumatic stress of the post-Soviet
   world, the limitations of U.S.-Russian partnership were also laid bare. (“The
   Back Channel,” 2019)
 * I don't think Putin has had any great illusions about doing a grand bargain
   with the Trump administration. He tends to take a fairly cynical view of how
   you deal with the United States. But from his point of view, being able to
   sow chaos, being able to distract the United States, being able to, in his
   eyes, expose the hypocrisy of the American political system to the rest of
   the world is obviously a net plus that opens up a lot of room for maneuver in
   Russia and the world. (Interview with PBS, 06.14.17)


II. RUSSIA’S DOMESTIC POLICIES


DOMESTIC POLITICS, ECONOMY AND ENERGY:

 * When I left Moscow after my first tour in 1996, I was worried about the
   resurgence of a Russia at once cocky, cranky, aggrieved and insecure. I had
   no idea it would happen so quickly, or that Vladimir Putin would emerge over
   the next decade as the extreme embodiment of that peculiarly Russian
   combination of qualities. … Putin’s most striking characteristic was his
   passion for control—founded on an abiding distrust of most of those around
   him. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * Basically, we’re facing a Russia that’s too big a player on too many
   important issues to ignore. It’s a Russia whose backsliding on political
   modernization is likely to get worse before it gets better, and whose
   leadership is neither overly concerned about its image nor much inclined to
   explain itself to the outside world. It’s a Russia whose assertiveness in its
   neighborhood and interest in playing a distinctive Great Power role beyond it
   will sometimes cause significant problems. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * In his rivalry with Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin had been the heroic destroyer
   of the old, calcified Soviet system. But he faltered in the next phase, the
   construction of an open political and economic system out of the rubble of
   Communism. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * I always thought there was a very significant likelihood that Putin was
   coming back, and it was always clear that he was calling the shots on big
   issues. He would give Medvedev some room to maneuver on some issues; for
   example, on the Libya issue. But in most cases, he was calling the shots both
   strategically and tactically as well. (Interview with PBS, 06.14.17)
 * President Putin in his first two terms as president … had established a kind
   of rough social contract, where the deal was: I’ll ensure that economic
   growth picks up and standards of living rise if everyone else stays out of
   politics. I think that began to slow down, and then stagnate, as a result of
   everything from falling oil prices to corruption, to the sanctions that were
   produced by aggression in Ukraine. And so, in his third term he’s looked for
   a different way to mobilize people and nationalism was the answer. But not
   just any kind of nationalism, a chauvinism which is very much us against
   them, which has just gotten more and more aggravated and sharpened as a
   result of the war in Ukraine. And so you create an atmosphere … where that
   kind of unpredictability and violence becomes more and more common. And
   that’s a dangerous thing for Russia. (Interview with Politico, 03.15.15)
 * President Putin has pursued a two-pronged strategy to extricate Russia from
   the war in Chechnya and establish a viable long-term modus vivendi preserving
   Moscow's role as the ultimate arbiter of Chechen affairs. The first prong was
   to gain control of the Russian military deployed there, which had long
   operated without real central control and was intent on staying as long as
   its officers could profit from the war. The second prong was
   "Chechenization," which in effect means turning Chechnya over to former
   nationalist separatists willing to profess loyalty to Russia. (U.S. Embassy
   Cable, 05.30.06)


DEFENSE AND AEROSPACE:

 * It was no coincidence that Vladimir Putin would ride a ruthlessly successful
   prosecution of the second Chechen war several years alter to become Yeltsin’s
   unlikely successor. If you wanted to understand the grievances, mistrust, and
   smoldering aggressiveness of Putin’s Russia, you first had to appreciate the
   sense of humiliation, wounded pride, and disorder that was often inescapable
   in Yeltsin’s. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * Yeltsin was anxious for an opportunity to show people that he was still
   capable of decisive and effective action, a political step around which
   Russians could unite. Reasserting Moscow’s authority over Russia’s
   increasingly disconnected regions was one obvious possibility, and the most
   obstreperous and defiant region of all, Chechnya, was a tempting target. With
   a rebellious history and an especially dark and foreboding presence in the
   Russian psyche, Chechnya seemed to Yeltsin to be overdue for the application
   of a strong hand. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)


SECURITY, LAW-ENFORCEMENT AND JUSTICE:

 * Ahead of the uncertain 2008 transition … structural problems—corruption, the
   absence of institutionalized checks and balances, pressure on the media and
   civil society—were getting worse. … Murders of dissidents and prominent
   journalists were, sadly, not uncommon in Russia in this era. (“The Back
   Channel,” 2019)
 * Chechnya’s lawlessness differed only in degree from what was going on across
   much of Russia in the early 1990s. In many tangible respects, Chechnya
   remained a part of the Russian Federation, its borders open and its oil and
   gas flowing out of the republic, its meager pensions paid out of the Russian
   budget. Dudayev himself gradually lost popularity in Chechnya. While his
   thugs enriched themselves, local government services atrophied. (“The Back
   Channel,” 2019)


III. RUSSIA’S RELATIONS WITH OTHER COUNTRIES


RUSSIA’S GENERAL FOREIGN POLICY AND RELATIONS WITH “FAR ABROAD” COUNTRIES:

 * His [Putin’s] view was that Russia was entitled to a sphere of influence.
   That's what major powers got to assert, and other major powers should stay
   out of his business in Russia in terms of how the economic order and the
   political order was organized as well. He gradually came to the conviction,
   as he moved into his second term as president, that that wasn't going to
   work. (Interview with PBS, 06.14.17)
 * For Putin, the Arab Spring and the revolutions and upheavals that unfolded
   from the beginning of 2011 on were of a piece with the color revolutions in
   the former Soviet Union. He saw this, again, wrongly, as part of a pattern of
   American behavior in which what we were bound and determined to do was to
   undermine regimes that didn't fit our model of what government should look
   like in a U.S.-led international order. He thought that we were naive about
   the way the Middle East worked and that we didn't understand the consequences
   of contributing to the undermining of regimes, autocratic regimes that had
   been there for a long time. … From Putin’s point of view, this was all part
   of a pattern of undermining existing governments, usually authoritarian
   governments which bore some similarities to his own, and that ultimately that
   could threaten his own control in the Kremlin. (Interview with PBS, 06.14.17)
 * The Munich speech … was the self-absorbed product of fifteen years of
   accumulated Russian frustrations and grievances, amplified by Putin’s own
   sense that Russia’s concerns are still often taken for granted or ignored. …
   For Russians nothing is more satisfying than poking at Americans, with whom
   they have tried to compare themselves for so long. (Email to Condoleeza Rice,
   02.16.07)


CHINA-RUSSIA: ALLIED OR ALIGNED?

 * The overarching challenge for U.S. foreign policy today, it seems to me, is
   to adapt to an international landscape in which American dominance is fading.
   … We can’t turn the clock back to the post–Cold War unipolar moment. But over
   at least the next few decades, we can remain the world’s pivotal power—best
   placed among our friends and rivals to navigate a more crowded, complicated
   and competitive world. We still have a better hand to play than any of our
   main competitors, if we play it wisely. That means doing a better job
   managing the return of great power rivalry, as a rising China asserts itself
   and Russia continues to demonstrate that declining powers can be even more
   disruptive than rising ones. (Interview with American Foreign Service
   Association, May 2019)
 * Demographic decline was not an abstract problem if you were one of the lonely
   thirty million Russians east of the Urals—distributed sparsely over a vast
   swath of the earth, sitting on vast natural resources, and staring across a
   long border at nearly a billion and a half Chinese. (“The Back Channel,”
   2019)
 * If Putin’s goal, like lots of people in the Russian political elite, is to
   restore Russia as a major power, rebuild it after a period of historic
   weakness in the ’90s, there are at least two different ways of doing that. …
   The second alternative in an international order led by the United States is
   to chip away at the U.S. position in that order. Make common cause where you
   can, whether it’s with China or Iran in the Middle East or other places,
   other states that may not have an identical view of the world as Putin does,
   but where you can make common cause at chipping away at the American role.
   That's the path essentially that he’s chosen. (Interview with PBS, 06.14.17)


UKRAINE:

 * After the pro-Russian president of Ukraine fled during widespread protests,
   Putin annexed Crimea and invaded the Donbass, in eastern Ukraine. If he
   couldn’t have a deferential government in Kiev, he wanted to engineer the
   next best thing: a dysfunctional Ukraine. (The Atlantic, April 2019)
 * By swallowing up a couple of million Crimeans, he’s [Putin] insured that
   there are forty-two million other Ukrainians who never again want to accept a
   deferential role toward Russia. (Interview with The New Yorker, 03.19.19)
 * Where we made a serious strategic mistake … was in later letting inertia to
   drive us to push for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, despite
   Russia’s deep historical attachments to both states and even stronger
   protestations. That did indelible damage, and fed the appetite of a future
   Russian leadership for getting even. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * I think he [Putin] was surprised by the pace of events, the speed with which
   Yanukovych abandoned the scene. He responded in the only way I think that he
   knew how, and the only way he thought would work in support of Russia’s
   interests were, if you talk about Russia’s sphere of influence, Ukraine was
   the reddest of red lines from Putin’s point of view. I'm sure in the Kremlin,
   there were contingency plans that had already been developed for retaking
   Crimea. Not that I think Putin was planning on that happening at that moment
   in history, but you can see quickly how he came to the conclusion that Russia
   [should] attack decisively to assert its interests, and swallowing up Crimea
   in a blatant act of Russian aggression was the obvious conclusion for him.
   (Interview with PBS, 06.14.17)
 * Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has violated basic international norms and
   posed a direct challenge to the rules of the road which have shaped the
   global order. (Asia Society Policy Institute, 04.08.14)


RUSSIA'S OTHER POST-SOVIET NEIGHBORS:

 * Putin was determined to take Saakashvili down a peg, and perhaps also to
   show, in the wake of the Bucharest statement, that the Germans and French
   were right to see Georgia’s not-so-frozen conflicts as a long-term obstacle
   to NATO membership. He was clearly baiting the impulsive Georgian president,
   who may have wanted his own reasons after Bucharest to act in South Ossetia
   and force a resolution of the disputes there and in Abkhazia. (“The Back
   Channel,” 2019)
 * Yeltsin’s foreign policy sought to mask national weakness and reassert
   Russian prerogatives. … Assertive policies abroad had become one of the few
   themes that united Russians amid continued bickering over domestic issues.
   Yeltsin was determined to reaffirm Russia’s great power status and
   independent interests in Russia’s so-called Near Abroad, the neighboring
   post-Soviet republics of Eurasia. (“The Back Channel,” 2019)
 * On the military side, again, what shaped Putin’s view is the Russian military
   in the ’90s, particularly in the First Chechen War in ’94 to ’96. Here you
   had what was once the vaunted Red Army that was supposed to be able to reach
   the English Channel in 48 hours that proved entirely ineffective in trying to
   deal with a small rebellion of Chechen irregular forces as well. So he was
   convinced that you had to rebuild Russian military might. What the Georgia
   war in August of 2008 exposed was that they had made some progress toward
   restoring a more modern Russian military, but they still had a long way to go
   as well. (Interview with PBS, 06.14.17)
 * The charge is often made that Russia's motive for keeping the conflicts
   frozen is geostrategic, or "neo-imperialism," or fear of NATO, or revenge
   against Georgia and Moldova, or a quest to preserve leverage. Indeed, the
   continued deployments may satisfy those Russians who think in such terms, and
   expand the domestic consensus for sending troops throughout the CIS. However,
   while one or another of those factors may have been the original impulse,
   each of the conflicts has gone through phases in which the conflict's
   perceived uses for the Russian state have changed. No one of these factors
   has been continuous over the life of any of the conflicts. (U.S. Embassy
   Cable, 05.30.06)


IV: QUOTEWORTHY

“Managing relations with Russia will be a long game, conducted within a
relatively narrow band of possibilities. Navigating such a great-power rivalry
requires tactful diplomacy—maneuvering in the gray area between peace and war;
demonstrating a grasp of the limits of the possible; building leverage;
exploring common ground where we can find it; and pushing back firmly and
persistently where we can’t. The path ahead with Russia will get rockier before
it gets easier. We ought to traverse it without illusions, mindful of Russia’s
interests and sensibilities, unapologetic about our values and confident in our
own enduring strengths. We should not give in to Putin—or give up on the Russia
beyond him."







Photo by World Economic Forum/Ciaran McCrickard shared under a Creative Commons
license.

Author

DANIEL SHAPIRO

Daniel Shapiro is a recent graduate of Harvard University and a current
associate with Russia Matters.


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