Former U.S. ambassador to Russia John J. Sullivan has written a memoir about his time in Russia during the build-up and start of the invasion of Ukraine.
In "Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia's War Against the West," Ambassador Sullivan explains the context of the war and discusses the frustrations of dealing with Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
In a recent visit to Sacred Heart University, WSHU News Director Terry Sheridan spoke to John J. Sullivan about his experience.
TS: You were appointed by President Trump in 2019. You resigned the Deputy Secretary of State position to take the lower position of ambassador. You arrived in Moscow in January 2020 at the start of the pandemic, which brought challenges to an already challenging situation. We come out of the pandemic and soon afterwards, Russian troops start massing near the Ukrainian border, then the invasion, you knew it wasn't gonna be easy, but this had to take a toll on you. You went in with certain expectations, but they were thrown out the window.
JS: Well, that's certainly true. But I loved every minute of it, and that's why I went there. I got more than I bargained for, which was good for me. I left my position, and as you note it is a demotion in the bureaucracy from leaving the number two position in the department to being an ambassador. However, having served as the Deputy Secretary of State and knowing everyone from the Secretary of State on down and knowing the country to which I was ambassador to. There are two big posts: Russia and the People's Republic of China.
I went there for the challenge and the opportunity to work on those issues and to stand with and support my colleagues who were already serving there in a very, very challenging environment. So it was tough, but that's what made it attractive to me.
TS: Yeah, but you say that with the Russians, everything is difficult even when Americans and Russians want to do the same thing; it's not easy. You would think it would just be a handshake or something, but no, it's not.
JS: It's a lesson that American diplomats and Americans generally need to learn. The Russians are different. Russians are different from us. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, especially their approach to diplomacy, doing business with us, and life. We see this today in the aggressive war that Putin has started against Ukraine. He's emphasizing the differences between Russia and the West. I learned of them, some of them I celebrate, and they're pretty good at ice hockey.
They have different systems for developing players and styles of play. Some of the differences are good, and that’s what makes the world such a beautiful and diverse place. Some of them are bad, and a few of them are really evil.
TS: Now, talking about Russian President Vladimir Putin, he calls himself a Chekist. He's a product of the Security Service. You say it’s the most important lens in which to view Vladimir Putin. I was always struck by how a loyal Soviet KGB officer in the communist system could transform into someone in a capitalist system, a kleptocracy if you will, and continue to do what he was doing. That’s the lens through which you need to look at him through.
JS: You absolutely do because it extends back not only through the Soviet system but to the earliest days of the Russian Empire. The notorious KGB turned into today's FSB: the Federal Security Service. But the KGB roots go back to Ivan the Terrible. And I write about this in the book.
JS: This is a mindset and outlook on this small cabal that protects the czar in the case of Ivan, the Terrible, and his successors, or the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Lenin, and his successors, or now Putin himself. Putin, the career KGB officer, has now become, in effect, the 21st-century czar. Although he hates that term as applied to him. He said in an interview once after he was re-elected in March of 2018, When he was asked by state media who thought they were asking him a friendly question, “You've ruled us for so long, you're really like a czar,” and he objected. He said, no, I didn't inherit this. I built this, I earned this. I didn't inherit it from my father.
So he's an unusual world leader for American leaders to understand and grapple with. We can't approach him like he's the British Prime Minister or the Japanese Prime Minister or, in many ways, even President Xi, the leader of the People's Republic of China. What we have in the Kremlin today is what the US has faced over centuries: whether it was the czar, the leaders of the Communist Party are now the leader of the Russian Federation, a nationalist Russian who is looking to aggregate power to himself.
TS: Why does Putin think the situation in Ukraine is existential to Russia?
JS: Well, it's existential to his vision of a greater Russian empire. Ukraine and NATO are not an existential threat. It's not a threat at all to the Russian Federation. It is, however, inconsistent with Putin's idea of what greater Russia should be. Imagine an American president who said the United States is the pre-eminent power in North America. And we should do away with these boundaries to the north with Canada, and we've got a problematic border in the south with Mexico. We're really one big happy family. The president then says: “My vision is to create a United States of America that includes the Canadian provinces and Mexico”. That's basically what Putin has done.
Putin turns to history to rationalize this: Ukraine is part of an ancient Russian world, which he calls Russki Mir. It’s his vision, and it goes to a central part of who he is.
TS: You mentioned in the book that Putin and the Kremlin view the United States as an enemy. Not an adversary, not a rival, but an enemy. We have people here in the United States who tend to look to Russia as a friend. What does that mean for you?
JS:So I say this a lot in the book, and in fact, the subtitle of the book is Russia's war against the West. In Putin's mind, the United States is an enemy, and he says that publicly. It's not name-calling. I was at an event not that long ago. Someone in the audience says, well, Biden has described Russia and China as adversaries, he's called Putin a killer, a war criminal. I mean, that's name-calling. When I say enemy, this is now baked into Russian policy and doctrine. This is how the Russian State has oriented itself toward the West, toward us, the United States.
And it can be difficult at times for my colleagues in government, whether at the State Department or elsewhere, to wrap their heads around this. They think that we're dealing with a country, an unusual country, a large energy power, with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.
It’ss hard for them because they think that the Russians think the way we do and that Putin does and he doesn't. And we have to understand that he's different, he has different views and his views are very hostile toward the United States and the West.
TS: I know you said that he views the situation in Ukraine as not only a war against the neo-fascists but a war against the United States and the Western alliance. You also say there's no off-ramp for him. The war has exposed very serious deficiencies in Russian intelligence, Russian military planning, and the conduct of the war, which has been atrocious with human rights violations. So what happens now if he's not gonna quit?
JS: Well, there are two things to emphasize why I say there are no off-ramps. I think there are two fundamental parts to it. First for Putin, I'd like to draw comparisons to US History, including relatively recent U.S. history to try to bring it home for people.
Putin can't just declare victory because the Russian people would understand. The latest estimates are 600,000 Russian casualties in the so-called “special military operation.” Oil refineries, military bases being blown up around Russia by Ukrainian drones, the Russian people may be willing to tolerate a lot and to stick their heads in the sand when they're reluctant to criticize their leader, but if he were just to declare, we've accomplished what we needed to do or we can't continue anymore, and the American comparison I draw is 1968 after the Tet Offensive, our President Lyndon Johnson announces that he's no longer going to run for president. He needs to focus on the war and he will be done on January 20th,1969 and he retires to the BJ ranch, lets his hair grow long and he's consigned to history.
Putin can't do that. Why? Because he would not leave the Kremlin upright. If that happened, he would be removed and removed in a permanent way. He knows there's not an easy way to survive as a leader of Russia or the Soviet Union and come out with your head still on your shoulders. The second reason is he really believes this. He really believes that Ukraine is not an independent country. Ukraine is Russia, and this is the heart of what he wants to restore, which is the Russian Empire. It's not the USSR, and he doesn't care about it.
He's not a communist. He's been famously quoted and this is a common Russian expression, “If you don't have nostalgia for how we lived in Soviet days, you don't have a heart. But if you wanna return to communism, you don't have a brain.” He's not a communist, he has a billion dollar palace on the Black Sea, in Sochi. He's not a communist, but he is a Russian imperialist to his core and he'd never, never surrender his goals of subjugating Ukraine and his continued existence on God's green earth is dependent on that.
