John Sullivan is a former US Ambassador to the Russian Federation and his book, Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia's War Against the West, was published in August. In this interview with Michael Maya, Director of the IBA’s North America Office, he discusses the war in Ukraine and diplomacy with Russia.

Michael Maya [MM]: Let’s start with the months and weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. There were frantic diplomatic efforts by you, the State Department and Western powers to try to avert war, while Putin was claiming there was an act of genocide underway in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. You write that Putin created a crisis-like atmosphere in the run-up to the Ukraine war, coupled with wildly unrealistic demands on the US and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation]. Do you think Putin thought there was a small chance the US and NATO would agree to foreclose Ukraine's future membership in NATO in order to avert a Russian invasion?

John Sullivan [JS]: Those negotiations were […] part of Putin’s messaging to the Global South, all of the other countries who aren’t members of NATO or partners of the US, [for Putin] to be able to say, ‘I tried. I wanted diplomacy to work’. It was sham diplomacy. So, no, I don’t think he had any expectation that the US was either going to make major changes to NATO, rewrite the Atlantic Charter so to remove the provision that provides for new membership applications or to completely cut off Ukraine from potentially joining NATO or the US providing support to NATO. It was all about an effort to create this illusion that he's reasonable, that it’s not an aggressive war, [that Russia tried] to give diplomacy a chance.

MM: Putin and his cronies have made numerous veiled threats about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If he became desperate, say, a year from now, because the war becomes deeply unpopular in Russia, how likely is it that he might resort to tactical nukes?

JS: I’m not a nuclear weapons expert, but I did spend a lot of time in Russia, observing Putin and his government and how they approach this war. And I also spoke to military experts in the US while I was Ambassador. The use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine isn’t in the interests of Russia. A tactical nuclear weapon destroys things. Putin would be destroying territory that he says is part of Russia.

The only time I thought he might use an unconventional weapon was in the spring of 2020 when you'll recall, the Russian military surrounded Mariupol, an important port. And there was a large Ukrainian military contingent in a large steel factory. They were dug in. The Russians had expended a huge amount of resources [and] personnel to try to crush the Ukrainian resistance. I thought Putin might use chemical weapons the way Assad used chemical weapons in Syria to kill those who were resisting so that he wouldn't have to spend the lives of as many Russians as it would take to ultimately dig out those Ukrainian resisters. Huge Russian casualties [and] even then, he didn’t use a nuclear weapon.

The way I think of it, Putin has to be threatened personally. And there was a moment last year with [former Wagner mercenary chief, Yevgeny] Prigozhin. Instead of it being Wagner, Russians who were committing what they characterised as a mutiny against the Minister of Defence […] imagine that’s the Ukrainian armed forces and they’re marching north toward Moscow, the capital of the Russian world. If Ukrainians were threatening that, that’s where I would not rule out the possibility that Putin would use or threaten in a much more overt, destabilising way – through a nuclear test, for example – nuclear weapons. But it would have to be a threat to his regime in the Kremlin, not battlefield losses in Ukraine or even public support starting to diminish in Russia.

MM: You write that Putin would describe himself in one word as a ‘Chekist’, a reference to the secret police who killed tens of thousands of Russians during the civil war period from 1917 to 1922. For foreign leaders, diplomats dealing with Putin, what are the implications of Putin seeing himself as a Chekist and surrounding himself with Chekists?

JS: Dealing with Putin, with the Russian government, is not dealing with an ordinary  government. There are no, what we Westerners consider, ‘ordinary negotiations’ with the Russians. It would be more like dealing with an organised crime family. A Chekist isn’t bound by law or by morals. A Chekist is only bound by his commitment to the leadership of Russia.

For the Chekists like Putin and the security services in Russia, they view Russia as Putin and Putin as Russia and what’s right for Putin and keeping Putin in power is the only thing [that matters]. They’re not democrats, they're not bound by the rule of law. It's dealing with a wholly different type of government, one from a prior century, which American diplomats in particular – current American diplomats – don't have a lot of experience dealing with. It can be challenging. We make mistakes because we think they’re like us and they’re not.

MM: Russia’s leadership today seems bizarrely stuck in the 1950s Cold War mentality. One big difference is that today’s leadership is far greedier than Soviet leaders. It’s inconceivable to me and probably you that a Soviet leader would build a $1.3bn palace of the sort that Putin built himself in Sochi. Do ordinary Russians hold that type of over-the-top lavishness against him, or is it similar to the tsar, where they might have a [little] grudge, but they understood that the tsar got to live in that way?

JS: The average Russian expects there to be corruption. They’ve grown up with corruption if they’re old enough in the Soviet system, and in the current Russian Federation today. They expect this. They’d be shocked if people didn’t live that way. What’s [Putin] doing there if he’s not living that way? So, no, it didn't affect his popularity in Russia.

You’ve drawn the right analogy between the tsars and Putin himself. Putin is not a fan of the communist system in the Soviet Union. When Putin talks about the demise of the Soviet Union as the great tragedy of the 20th century, it’s not because communism fell. It’s because the central control in Moscow over the vast expanse of the Soviet Union was greatly diminished because all of those republics that the Russian Federation was the centre of, when the Soviet Union fell, all those internal boundaries of the Soviet Union become international borders, which separated what in Putin’s view is the Russian world. And that’s what he laments.

A house burning following shelling in the city of Sievierodonetsk, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Manhai/Flickr.

MM: One of the most surprising aspects of your book was the enormous amount of time you devoted to dealing with improperly detained Americans in Russia. So, what, if anything, can be done to minimise what amounts to hostage-taking by the Russian government?

JS: It’s a problem not just in Russia; it’s a problem in China (the ‘PRC’), North Korea, Iran, Venezuela. What differentiates Russia, Iran and the PRC from other, smaller countries is that US sanctions don’t work. We've already sanctioned Russia and Iran to the hilt for a whole host of other national security or foreign policy reasons. And there have been cases where the threat of US sanctions over wrongfully detained Americans have induced a country that is concerned about the effect on its economy [to release prisoners]. Turkey is one of them.

We can’t impose sanctions sufficiently strong enough to influence Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine. There’s virtually nothing we can do to influence Russia detaining Americans wrongfully and the cases I was most involved with were egregious. These were Americans who had done nothing wrong. Why does Putin do this? Putin, in his hybrid war against the West, sends his spies, his security service officers, to not only commit espionage, but to commit murder. So, in Salisbury [in the UK], in Berlin, and there have been indications they may have tried in the past in the US, not against US citizens [but] Russian [opposition figures], people Putin would consider a traitor. He sends people abroad to commit crimes like that. They get arrested. [An example is Vadim] Krasikov, the former FSB colonel who committed murder in Berlin in 2019 and was arrested by the Germans. Putin wanted him back.

I don’t think that Putin thought through that there were going to be Americans that he had picked up, I’m not saying he knew in advance. But from his perspective, you never know when [you’ll] be able to trade these innocent Americans because the American president is going to be under a lot of pressure and want to get innocent Americans home. So there turned out to be a payoff and he got Krasikov and other Russian spies returned.

MM: You write that withdrawing support for Ukraine and failing to oppose Putin’s aggression would be an historic mistake. You also recognise US isolationism in the run-up to World War One and World War Two proved to be a terrible failure. Are there risks, especially under a Trump administration [if Trump wins the US presidential election], that we will make a [significant] mistake in pulling back support of Ukraine?

JS: My fear is of, in the most extreme case, a complete withdrawal of US support for Ukraine. But I’m also concerned and equally critical of the Biden administration for the slow provision of military equipment necessary to defend Ukraine. So the American election will have an effect on US policy toward Ukraine. How great an effect, I can’t say. It may be overstated to say that Trump wants to yank all support for Ukraine. Trump also doesn’t like to lose. In the first debate with [US President Joe] Biden, he was asked point blank, do you want to see Putin win in Ukraine? And without hesitation, he said no. He was then asked in his debate with [US Vice President Kamala] Harris recently, do you want to see Ukraine win? And he declined to answer. He said he would solve the sort of war in the time between being elected and being inaugurated. That couldn’t happen unless he was somehow willing to completely undermine Ukraine such that it couldn't defend itself.

So there’s a serious concern about what a President Trump would do with Ukraine. But having said that, he would make statements – not quite as bold as recently – but critical of NATO, critical of Ukraine. Yet the actions his administration took were stronger than the actions the Obama administration took in support of Ukraine and in opposition to Russia. I attribute that largely to the influence of Cabinet secretaries like Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, all of whom opposed Russian aggression and wanted to support Ukraine. I don’t believe we’re going to have those [type of people in the Cabinet] – Mike Pompeo potentially. He may be able to influence President Trump. But it’s going to be a little more challenging to convince President Trump in a second term to do what he did in his first.

MM: Let’s go back to 2014 when Russian soldiers occupied airports and strategic locations in the Crimea. In March 2014, Crimea held a referendum and agreed to join the Russian Federation. It’s probably fair to say it’s mostly accepted that the Obama administration mishandled the Crimea annexation. With hindsight, what should the Obama administration have done when Russia invaded and later annexed Crimea?

JS: It was a shock to many that Putin actually [invaded Crimea]. My understanding is that his own advisers warned him against it, but he did it anyway. They were expecting a much more significant response by the West with sanctions, export controls and earlier military support for Ukraine, etc. And the fact that the US didn’t do in 2014 what it wound up doing in 2022, I believe it emboldened Putin in 2022. And I draw this comparison to the interwar years in the 1930s, when [Adolf] Hitler militarised the Rhineland in contravention of the Versailles Treaty. The Germans thought that the French military would push them out. The French didn’t. The Anschluss with Austria and the Sudeten crisis, where Hitler’s given the Sudetenland: all of that prompted him to start the aggressive war in 1939.

I believe that the tepid response of the West to the seizure of Crimea and the sending of Russian troops into the Donbas emboldened Putin to do what he did in February 2022. He needed to prepare for that larger scale invasion. He was asked after the ‘special military operation’ began in 2022, ‘why didn’t we take back our Russian lands earlier’? His response was, ‘we weren’t ready’. Some people interpreted that as militarily. I also think he was getting the Russian economy ready for the shock of economic sanctions. Putin was planning this for a long time, in part based on the lack of a firm resolve by the West when he seized Crimea.

MM: You write that Putin craves legitimacy. You and others describe his outward demeanour as that of a very confident man. But is there a chance he’s actually a profoundly insecure man?

JS: He needs legitimacy because he doesn’t have communist ideology to provide backing for his administration. Authoritarians like Putin don’t like to compete. Putin was never willing to compete in Ukraine. Putin could never risk a real democratic election in Russia because he might lose. So they call [Russia] a ‘managed democracy’. But he craves that legitimacy because if the people really know that he’s just a dictator, he risks a rebellion that he wouldn’t be able to resist. So he wants to be able to tell the world, ‘the Russian people support me’. It helps him with foreign perceptions of Russia. So, just as we started off talking about diplomacy, did Putin really believe in diplomacy with the US? No. It’s all about messaging to other countries that he is not somebody who would want an aggressive war without first trying diplomacy.