Biden understands Putin's weakness, fears provoking World War III - diplomat Bryza

The key story is the aftermath of the big summit in Vilnius. Why, in your opinion, did President Joseph Biden still not dare to put forward what is called a very clear pro-Ukrainian agenda, in particular, Ukraine's direct membership in NATO? Please decipher this extremely important strategic discussion and strategic implications not only for Ukraine, but for the security of the whole of Central Europe and beyond.

The strategic consequences are large and positive for Ukraine and for the NATO alliance. Thinking back to the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this outcome was not really imaginable. You'll recall how hesitant Ukraine's friends and future allies were to provide any substantial military assistance. Now, there's A the G7 pledge of substantial continued military assistance. And B there's the clear commitment by the unified NATO alliance to support Ukraine until it wins against Russia. But having said that and having been at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008, I think it's a disappointment that President Biden was allied with Olaf Scholz, the leader of Germany whose predecessor Angela Merkel blocked the membership action plan for Ukraine and for Georgia at Bucharest, and I think it's not positive that there are reports now that it was indeed the US together with Germany that was not agreeing to engage with other allies on a stronger bit of language that underscores that invitation will be forthcoming for Ukraine once the war is over. That was a strategic mistake that we should have learned from at the Bucharest Summit.

Putin has launched not just a local war, but an almost existential war, on which Ukraine's existence will depend, as well as the borders of the Western world in the east. How tough will President Joseph Biden be willing to play? For Ukraine, NATO membership is primarily about Article 5. We are currently receiving an analog, security guarantees. But security guarantees are not the same as Article 5.

First of all, ambiguity is always crucial in cases of security guarantees short of Article 5. It's difficult to predict and Biden would never tell us when the US would use force in the case of Ukraine. Ukraine's already under tremendous attack. Biden's committed from a strategic perspective. But he's deterring himself out of a fear of Putin provoking WWIII or Putin being able to claim that Russia is at war with NATO. Putin is already doing that. He's already threatening nuclear weapons, and we felt his bluff. He's already telling everybody again that Russia is not at war with Ukraine, it is at war with NATO. So I really don't know what President Biden is afraid of. He just has some emotional fear about getting into a nuclear conflict. National Security advisor Jake Sullivan is encouraging President Biden to move in that direction, but that's that. The military support the US has provided Ukraine is absolutely unprecedented, and the US has led the alliance together with the United Kingdom. The problem is that that fear or self deterrence or self deterrent fear of provoking direct conflict with Russia has allowed a lot of this substantial assistance to come too late to Ukraine. Had it all been provided to Ukraine from the very beginning, Ukraine would be in a much better place on the battlefield than it is today. And to press Ukraine to launch this counteroffensive without air cover strikes me as a really unwise decision from a military perspective, and it makes Ukraine's life much more difficult.

I don't want to be ungrateful, but we in Ukraine generally pay tribute to our friends, our Western partners. If it hadn't been for their timely help, most people would have been killed. There would have been a great exodus, the state would have been defeated, and many would have been shot, executed or hanged. We received help, but at the same time we realize that this help may not be enough. We also realize that in order to strategically decide the course of the campaign, we badly need those F-16s. To destroy enemy logistics centers, we need ATACMS systems. General Zaluzhnyi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukraine's Forces, speaks very clearly about this, in particular in his recent interviews published in the West. Both Pentagon and the White House understand what General Zaluzhnyi was talking about.

That's what I was just talking about. It's really unwise and reckless even for us in the US and across NATO to be pushing Ukraine or judging Ukraine on the speed of its counteroffensive as a way to justify further military support, when we're not providing the F-16s to allow for the air cover, that's so essential to a successful offensive or counteroffensive. So we're taking steps that are not really rational when it comes to military planning. And the ATACMS of course are necessary for longer range artillery delivery. We remember when to be able to target Russian high value targets that are threatening Ukraine, you remember how before the US provided HIMARS, Russian artillery was simply pummeling Ukrainian towns. And once the HIMARS were delivered, Russia had to stop that brutal war crime tactic. So the ATACMS are absolutely essential. To answer your question as to why they haven't been delivered, again I think this is a case of self-deterrence. The Biden Administration fears that if it provides F-16, Russia is going to claim that Russia is at war with NATO. Russia is going to escalate somehow. Russia has not done anything when the West has crossed all of its red lines on military support for Ukraine. As for ATACMS, the fear has been that the longer range could allow Ukraine to hit targets inside of Russia, which would then potentially widen the war again. That argument is a red herring A because Ukraine has promised not to do that. But B Because Ukraine is already targeting territory that Russia illegally claims to be Russian, whether it be in the four supposedly annexed provinces or in Crimea. So the arguments that the Biden Administration has used to convince itself not to provide this military assistance are counterproductive and simply do not make sense. 

Finally, I do understand that when it comes to NATO inviting Ukraine, to go back to our earlier question, to join as soon as the war is over, that would provide Putin maybe an excuse to keep the war going for as long as possible, but he's already decided to do that. So again that argument is also a red herring. We should have provided Ukraine greater clarity when it's going to be invited to NATO and we should definitely be providing F-16s and ATACMS and should have been doing it long before Ukraine began its counteroffensive.

Will Biden have the courage?

I think he understands Putin's calculus, is reviled by it, has called him a war criminal, which he is, and has led the alliance passed every single one of Putin's red lines even when Putin was suggesting he would use nuclear weapons. To my mind, Biden's got plenty of сourage overall, but I also think he's allowing himself to be self-deterred by Russia as I've been describing because he's trying to hold the NATO alliance together. He knows that Germany really doesn't want to go as far even as Biden wants to go. He knows that Poland and the Baltic states want to go much further in accelerating Ukraine's accession to NATO and delivering it the weapons it needs. He knows that what Putin is planning is to buy as much time as possible and hope the NATO alliance will split. So Biden is trying to keep the alliance together, even if his steps from my comfortable porch here in Istanbul don't go far enough.

You know how Russians work when it comes to negotiations. I would like to know about the dynamics: what Putin came up with at the beginning of the war, what proposals he had later on, and what they are now, how much Putin's appetites have changed. On the other hand, Ukraine has a very clear, transparent position: we demand the return of our lands and compensation for our losses.

Putin's objectives have changed from his really insane quest to foster regime change in Kyiv in just a few days and essentially eliminate Ukrainian nation - to one of simply hanging on and not having his military destroyed on the battlefield long enough until he believes that the US and its NATO allies and it's other friends around the world will just grow tired of providing assistance to Ukraine. Putin's goals have switched from as offensive and criminal as you could imagine, from genocidal basically, to wipe out the Ukrainian Nation, now to his personal survival. He was really deeply shaken by Prigozhin's mutiny. The morale of the Russian military is devastated. Imagine you're a frontline soldier fighting this brutal war, getting ripped apart by the Ukrainians and their friends in the West who are supplying them, and you see a group of your former comrades on the battlefield let's say in Bakhmut who do the most extreme thing you could ever do, as a soldier most extremely negative thing, which is treason, a try to overthrow the government, and they're pardoned. They're allowed to walk free. That's got to be devastating to the morale of the Russian military forces. There are many people around Putin who clearly want him gone. And so I think his goal now is simply survival. One thing that we don't appreciate enough about Ukraine's struggle against Russia here is how much it has done for us militarily. Timothy Ash, the brilliant analyst, both financial and strategic, made a comment at a meeting I was at a couple days ago. He said okay, the United States has invested 50 billion dollars in military support for Ukraine, but Ukrainian soldiers have destroyed so much more of Russian equipment and degraded Russia's military capability that is at a cost several times higher than the 50 billion dollars the US has provided Ukraine. So from a purely cold economic perspective, the US investment in Ukraine's military has been deeply in the US's self-interest and it's in our interest of course for Ukraine not only to survive but to win this war and then be in NATO.

We realize that we are in a state of extremely difficult war. And the West is trying not to get involved. But there is a feeling that Russia, strategically, can no longer offer anything to achieve any kind of victory. It can only drag out the war, but how long can it last? Putin is imitating a willingness to wage an almost century-long war against Ukraine and the West. The question is, of course, about resources. We understand that Russian and Ukrainian resources are one thing, but the resources of, for example, the Euro-Atlantic community and Putin's resources are incomparable. How long can Putin try to continue the war?

Putin himself is willing to wage it forever until someone stops him because he's not going to win this war. He can't, he's lost from a strategic perspective. He suffered the greatest defeat in Russia's history, certainly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he's got a border with NATO that's twice as long as it was before the war. And he's got Ukraine committed more strongly than it ever has been to join NATO and to be seen as a successful neighboring post-soviet state that provides an alternative to Putin's criminal kleptocratic regime. That is Putin's greatest fear - a successful, democratic, prosperous Ukraine eventually in NATO, and he is getting now and he cannot stop that. So he has to keep on fighting as long as possible until he hopes all of us, the United States and our allies in the West get tired, get Ukraine fatigue and no longer provide the support we've been providing. That's never going to happen. The Russian economy is already deteriorating rapidly. Its revenues from hydrocarbon sales was 47% lower in the first quarter of this year than last year. Budget deficit is growing, the ruble has plummeted in value, and around him, as we said, there's already one coup attempt and what else is out there. I think he's terrified. He's doing things like he's never done before, like trying to show the Russian people that he loves them, which was why he went to Derbent and even though his closest advisors who wanted to see him have to be quarantine for two weeks because he's so paranoid about disease, he was out there kissing people on the streets. Putin's afraid, he's rattled and he's gonna keep fighting until he can no longer do so. That time is coming soon and largely, of course, because of the amazing capacity and bravery of Ukrainian soldiers with the help from all of its tremendous friends and future NATO allies.

We should not be deterred by them. He likes to rattle the nuclear saber. He likes to say that he's like a rat when he's in a corner. He's going to fight like crazy. He was in a corner during the Prigozhin uprising and what did he do? He got frightened and he let Prigozhin go, and he apparently pardoned the soldiers. He gave in when he was cornered. So Putin's red lines are worth nothing.

In general, a scenario is being promoted in the morbid imagination of Putin and those historiosophists around him to repeat, as they would like, the Korean War of the 1950s. They would like to put up the "38th parallel" and try to freeze the conflict around it. Neither the West nor Ukraine agrees to this. At one time, in the 1950s, the Chinese were wiser than the Russians and began to radiate their willingness to negotiate. What scenarios do you think the Kremlin would like to play out now?

Ukraine should fight as long as it feels it needs to achieve its goals. If its goals are to recover all of its territory, so be it. That's up to Ukraine to decide. We should not be trying to persuade Ukraine to stop fighting anytime before the people of Ukraine have decided their war aims have been met as much as they can be. I was really disappointed by, but not surprised by, three of my former colleagues who apparently met with foreign minister Lavrov in recent days. One of them I used to work for, Thomas Graham, and they were apparently trying to figure out what would be the way our negotiated settlement, that maybe Ukraine should be pressed into accepting a meeting with Russian foreign minister Lavrov. And that totally violates President Biden's correct approach, which is nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. It's up to Ukraine to decide when it's ready for a negotiation with the Russians, but clearly now Ukraine's not yet ready because it's been so successful on the battlefield.

What are the best scenarios for security guarantees for Ukraine? I would not like to see the case of the Budapest Memorandum repeated again. What would be the best model and what should Ukraine watch most closely? After all, you can write a lot of different guarantees, but for some reason the Israeli model or the Taiwanese model is effective, while some other models may be useless.
I think short of Article 5 guarantee that is recognized as credible. No words matter. I mean at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter whether or not there was a clear timetable for Ukraine to join NATO that was laid out at the Summit. I understand why Ukraine and President Zelenskyy are upset. I'm upset as well because the failure to provide a clearer pathway for Ukraine and clear security guarantees looks like the West or NATO is being self-deterred by Putin. So that's an emotional response. From a rational perspective, as you said the Budapest Memorandum, none of those promises matter unless NATO and other friends of Ukraine have shown a credible willingness to provide Ukraine, whatever military support it needs, to prevent Russia from winning. What that is at this point so far has been unprecedented combat weaponry assistance. In the future it'll be different. There will be a web of political security ties with Ukraine, most importantly NATO membership that will make it unambiguously the case that an attack on Ukraine will be an attack on the rest of NATO. Until we get there, the key is for NATO and the US and their friends like Japanese and South Koreans to credibly demonstrate the possibility that if things keep going the way they are, there could be involvement by members of NATO, maybe by not NATO itself, but by willing countries and coalitions of the willing. There've been talk about some members of NATO providing boots on the ground. It's reported that when Putin was talking about or threatening to use nuclear weapons, Bill Burns, ahead of the CIA, traveled to Moscow and said if you do, the US will get involved militarily and will kill your soldiers, and will destroy your army conventionally. Those sorts of threats I think are credible. That's a security guarantee for Ukraine that if Putin were to use a tactical nuclear weapon, the US would destroy Russia's military. That is a security guarantee, that was considered apparently credible by President Putin and that's much more important than any words in a NATO communique or any memorandum.

Can we trust our American friends Jake Sullivan and William Burns? You know these people, could you please describe them.

Certainly, I worked for Bill Burns several times. He's one of the most brilliant, creative, humble, trustworthy diplomats or officials or people I've ever met. He's totally 100% trustworthy and so is Jake Sullivan. Jake is speaking clearly when everybody outside of the White House tries to pin him down and to say do you want Ukraine to win? He's very careful and consistent never to say that, which I think is a mistake, but what he always says is we want to strengthen Ukraine, so it's not defeated and it's strengthened for the moment when it will negotiate with Russia to end the war. So he's honest. He's trustworthy. I just think his strategic foundation is more prone to being able to be intimidated by Russia's and Putin's threats. Then that does not make me comfortable. I don't think he's learned the lessons of the history of Eastern Europe, meaning Ukraine, the Baltics states, Poland. He hasn't learned the history of what Professor Snyder calls the Bloodlands. If you don't have that understanding, you fail to learn the most important lesson, which is that a Soviet or a Russian leader, as several have told me, understands one thing - fear. If they can impose fear on you, they will keep pushing. If you can impose fear on them, they will stop. That's a lesson I think Jake hasn't absorbed. I think Bill Burns does know that though having worked with him. He was my boss in Moscow. I think he understands all that pretty well.

Jake Sullivan's position is somewhat different from the position that Colonel House had, for example, a hundred years ago. Such people are close to presidents, they influence foreign policy making, and they have the absolute, 99%, trust of their president. But some strange signals were heard, and at times it seemed that Jake Sullivan was rather slowing down certain initiatives from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and from the Secretary of Defense.

You need to understand how the US foreign policy making works at that level. I actually did spend four years on the staff of the National Security Council under President Bush and part of my daily job was to help the National Security advisor then Condoleezza Rice do her job. So the job of the National Security advisor is first and foremost to channel the thoughts of the president. It's to advise the president. Yes, but it's also to channel the thinking of the president throughout the bureaucracy. So it's possible for Secretary of State Blinken to have one view, Secretary of Defense Austin to have one view, CIA director Burns to have a view, Treasury Secretary Yellin to have a view, at the end of the day all of those views have to be coordinated and conformed to the views of the single decision maker and that is President Biden. So it is Jake Sullivan's job to coordinate all of the meetings, discussions, points of view, present them to President Biden, explain them, advise him to - he's a national security advisor - and then let the president decide and that's what is happening. And I think it is President Biden himself who fears provoking Putin too far, whatever that means, into WWIII, which is an ambiguous fear. Fears Putin will use nuclear weapons, which I think is a case of self-deterrence. Biden also fears giving Putin yet another excuse to blame NATO for being his opponent in this war rather than Ukraine, and finally Biden really fears being unable to hold the NATO alliance together over the issue of Ukraine. Fundamentally, he knows that NATO and other friends have been able to deliver such decisive assistance to Ukraine because NATO is maintained in solidarity and that in itself weakens Putin, and makes it clear that his fundamental aim for this war supposedly is a failure. He's gotten a stronger, more unified and bigger NATO with a Ukraine that's on the path to membership. And those are the last things he wanted. So Biden knows to achieve those goals I just mentioned at the end, he has to maintain NATO's unity, and so if he pushes too hard on measures that other NATO members think are too provocative, then he risks allowing all of NATO to fall apart and that then is really bad for Ukraine.