Pod Save the World - Putin invades Ukraine

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Ben assesses the escalating situation in Ukraine, from Putin’s recognition of separatist regions and his deployment of troops as peacekeepers to the first wave of sanctions against Russia. Then, he chats with Max Seddon, bureau chief of The Financial Times in Moscow, about Putin’s state of mind and the current political mood in Russia. And USAID Administrator Samantha Power drops by to share her perspective on what’s at stake in Ukraine, as well as a few encouraging updates on the global COVID vaccination effort.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I am Ben Rhodes. It has only been three days since our emergency pod, and that feels like about three years because a lot of things have happened. We began Monday with a call for a potential summit between the president of Russia and President of the United States. And that feels like a really long time ago because we saw Vladimir Putin really cast the die yesterday. We saw him hold a Russian Security Council meeting with his top advisors. in which they each looking very threatened and uncomfortable endorsed the idea of recognizing the so-called People's Republic of Danyetsk and People's Republic of Le Honsk, the two Russian separatist controlled regions of Ukraine that we talked about on the last podcast. Then after that meeting came a very long and very troubling and rambling speech by Vladimir Putin in which he seemed to question Ukraine's very right to exist. And we get into that today in a very fascinating conversation that I have with Max Seddon, who's the FT Financial Times reporter in Moscow. Then on Tuesday, we saw Putin double down on his announcements for Monday as Russian lawmakers

gave him permission to use military force outside of Russia, to back the separatists, and to back the claim of the separatists to the entire Donbos region. And so you'll recall from our last podcast right now, the Russian-backed separatists only control a portion of that area. Russia is now authorized the use of military force to essentially claim the independence of the entire region of Donbos. And I think, based on Putin's rhetoric, there are obviously worries that he's going to go farther than just that. Putin also gave a list of three demands that had to be met by Ukraine and the West, international recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, an end to Ukraine's NATO membership bid, and a halt of all weapons shipments to Ukraine. So Putin continuing to set the diplomatic bar far above

where he knows the United States or the West is willing to go. And certainly the people of Ukraine have been willing to go. The world's leaders and diplomats have decried the situation. They've blasted Russia for violating Ukraine's sovereignty. And we've seen the beginning of some sanctions in response. This includes Germany's Chancellor Olaf Schultz announcing the suspension of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia into Germany. This is a major step that will impair Russia's capacity to export energy into Europe. We saw the UK sanctioning a number of Russian banks and three oligarchs in what was a less dramatic announcement, but nonetheless, the first step out of the UK. We saw the European Union's top diplomats say that a package of sanctions has been approved

by unanimity with member states that will hurt Russia and will hurt a lot. Then we saw President Biden today announcing the first wave of U.S. sanctions in response that also included a number of Russian banks and a wide net of Putin-associated oligarchs and cronies targeted with sanction while indicating that there be more. And I think this is just a first step out of the administration. I actually think that the most powerful statement in response to what Putin's been doing in Ukraine came from an unlikely source. And it was at a meeting, an emergency meeting of UN Security Council from the Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations, Martin Kamani. Here we have a brief clip.

Kenya in almost every African country was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Lisbon, with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart. Rather than form nations that looked ever backwards into history. with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known. We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.

So what does all this mean? I think we've been pretty clear the last few episodes that the assumption was Putin was going to do something, the nature of what we've seen in the last couple days is about as troubling a scenario as we could possibly face. Because in Putin's speech, he really wasn't focused principally on even questions about NATO or European security, despite the recognition of these two so-called people's republics that are basically invented by Russia. He wasn't even focused on that. He was focused on that. He was focused deep rooted historical grievance and a sense that not only has Russia been wronged, but that Ukraine itself should even really exist. He even cast the blame on Lenin, on the Soviets,

on the Bolsheviks for somehow creating Ukraine, which is not at all true. But this was the ideology of a man that does not seem like he's going to be content simply. recognizing a couple of invented people's republics in eastern Ukraine. It did feel like someone preparing the Russian people for a much more significant escalation. It didn't seem to be a man who gives a shit, frankly, about global condemnation, global sanctions, global efforts to call out what he's doing. It seemed like somebody who's been, frankly, waiting a long time, maybe his whole life for this particular moment. As you'll hear in our interview, it also seemed like a man who is deeply, deeply cut off from any voices, any advisors, any countervailing forces who might be urging

caution or restraint. If you look at that Security Council meeting, clearly Russia has become a place that is entirely a one-man, one-rule scenario in which it's terrifying to voice opposition to what the leader of Vladimir Putin is ordering. And even in the nature of his announced deployments into eastern Ukraine, we see all manner of pretext for escalation. So allegedly to Putin, these Russian troops are moving into eastern Ukraine to be so-called peacekeepers. That inevitably, combined with the fact that they're claiming the entire Dombos region will offer him plenty of opportunity to claim that somehow Ukraine has been the aggressor. And we continue to see propaganda, disinformation, and Russian media alleging all manner of Ukrainian

aggression against either Russian forces or Russian-backed separatist or ethnic Russians or Russian language speakers. So everything feels like it's coalescing behind a strategy. of continued escalation into Ukraine. I think it is notable that we saw such a swift announcement of sanctions, including, and probably most importantly, the cancellation of Nord Stream 2 pipeline, given that Germany had been seen as the most cautious and reticent to move to significant sanctions. But we should be clear that, you know, it's quite likely that sanctions don't really matter to Putin, that he's priced this in, that he thinks he can weather them, like he's weathered sanctions in the past. And the reality is he's got a lot of cash. He's got a big

rainy day fund there of over $600 billion, as we've talked about. And when you're talking about the short term, you know, he can weather it. I think the bigger question is, again, whether he is overreaching dramatically and whether the combination of Russian casualties in Ukraine and an economic hit to Russia and a direct hit potentially through these sanctions, if they're enforced robustly to his inner circle, can ultimately boomerang back on him. But that will take some time. And in the interim, we could be faced with a very damaging and destructive war in Ukraine. And we talk later on the show with Samantha Power about what the U.S. AID is doing to prepare for humanitarian contingencies, including masses of displaced people and refugees out of Ukraine.

So, you know, look, we're in a perilous moment here globally. We're in a perilous moment in terms of the risk of escalation because Putin could respond to our sanctions with cyber attacks or efforts to destabilize democracies to mess around on NATO's borders and other countries like Moldova to potentially even mess around in NATO itself. And today, the U.S. indicated that it's preparing to send troops to the, three Baltic countries, Estonia, Lithuanian, Latvia, as a part of that continued effort to reassure them. So this is going to be with us for some time now. I hope that the worst kind of escalation does not take place, that there can be some kind of off-ramp from this. But I think,

as you'll hear in our interviews today, we also have to be prepared for the possibility that we are dealing with a 69-year-old leader of a nuclear-armed country who has always been willing to be not just autocratic at home, but aggressive abroad, but who may be even in a different phase of his own life and his own leadership that can put a lot of people at risk. So with that, we're going to move after the break to my interview with Max Sedan, who is the FT reporter in Moscow. And then we will hear from Samantha Power about USCID's efforts to both respond to the situation in Ukraine, but also Sam walks us through the latest in terms of the effort to promote vaccination around the world to deal with COVID and ends on a bright spot. I hope you stick

around to the end because Samantha takes us around a tour of some of the bright spots of the work the USCID is doing around the world, but also some of the bright spots for democracy and some new strategies that have been embraced in combating autocracy and kleptocracy. So stick around for it. And after the break, we're here from Max Seventh. Okay, we are very pleased to be joined by Max Seddon, who is with the Financial Times in Moscow. He's been with the Financial Times since 2016 in their Moscow Bureau as a reporter. He was previously a foreign affairs reporter for BuzzFeed News, as well as a reporter for the Associated Press in Moscow. Max, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

So I just want to start, obviously, with Putin's speech and kind of very unusual televised National Security Council meeting yesterday. Was there a sense, there's been so much warning, obviously, out of the United States about this impending war, and Russia seems to have veered between ridiculing the warnings of war while kind of turning up the dial on their, you know, charges of Ukrainian ethnic cleansing or aggression in, particularly in the Donbos. Was there a sense yesterday that this is the ramp up to war? This is the kind of thing that Putin is going to do if he's really going to not just recognize these two Russian-invented republics, but actually go into Ukraine more significantly? Oh, absolutely. It was a completely shocking speech. I think I,

Even among everyone who's watched this troop buildup and saw motion over the last few months. So what was really taken aback by just how angry Putin was, the way that I'd never really seen before. He seemed almost personally affronted by the existence of Ukraine as a country in its current form. And he made it extremely clear hour-long speech. Doesn't really get into the whole Dombas issue in eastern Ukraine where the separatists are until about minute 45, 50. And you do not make a speech like that if all you are doing is just preparing to recognize these states. It's very clear this is something that's been on his mind that he is under this deep COVID isolation for almost two years now. He spent a lot of time reading some incorrect history books and talking to some people with some pretty, pretty bizarre ideas.

And this is the result. This is it. Yeah. Well, I wanted to, I'm glad you raised this. You know, Putin's obviously been in charge for a long time. My recollection, right, in 2009, when he was prime minister, when Obama comes at office, Medvedev is president, did feel like there was a kind of larger circle of people that at least had some input into what was going on. You could feel even by the end of the Obama years that that circle had kind of shrunk. And then we reached the point. yesterday where we watched really just a performance where these advisors were, you know, almost afraid that they were going to say the wrong thing, you know, and it feels like he's listening to nobody except the voices in his head. I mean, you've been in Moscow a while. What is the sense

of how big or small Putin's circle is and how that might be shaping what would be, you know, obviously the most consequential decision, even with all the things he's done, probably, of his presidency if he goes with a full invasion. I think that what we really saw was that there is no circle, circle of around Putin anymore. It's like Louis, I believe, the 14th of France. Don't check that. Le Ta Cé moi, I am the state. And this was really the defining moment in what you could call the third act of Putin,

where the circle of people around them has got smaller and smaller. And so as his worldview, I talked recently to former senior official in the Kremlin who said that it used to be that he sees everything in 360 degrees. Now it's more like 60 degrees. And so in terms of people who he talks to, the first 10, 12 years, maybe really up through to Crimea, that was the sort of the fake news era of what was called managed democracy, where they kept many of the outward trappings of democracy. but they governed not really through repression, but through fake news and manipulation, things like that. And the sort of clashes that were described were between the so-called Siliviki, these people with KGB backgrounds, many of them were actually in the KGB counterintelligence with Putin in Leningrad in 1970s, and they control pretty much all the security ministries, a lot of the state companies.

And on the other hand, you had these people who were called the systemic liberals who were more the ones that, you know, you would have been been dealing with. Yeah. And Putin was seen as almost this kind of King Solomon figure, like he was this arbiter between them. And then Crimea was the point where he broke with that definitively. And if I'm getting my facts, right, when he decided to do Crimea, he had a security council meeting that was inconclusive. And by his own recollection, he stayed up until 7 in the morning with four aides, the three security guys and Shogu, the defense minister, where they decided to do that. And what I thought was very symbolic about this meeting yesterday. It was in the same fancy room in the Kremlin where they had the ceremony to annex Crimea. And this show you how even compared to that, things have really shifted to the point.

where it's not that he's the sort of, you know, arbiter. It's not even that there's some sort of little Politburo. It's really he's become the czar. He's become the God emperor. And what was really remarkable to me was these people who, you know, your average armchair criminologists, and I absolutely put myself in that category, we were all writing articles, you know, really, you know, up to the minute that happened, saying, oh, you know, Putin, his circles getting.

smaller and smaller. He's only listening to these guys who say a lot of crazy things like the West is collapsing because of gay marriage and people want to have sex with animals. I'm not making this up. They had a security council. They all the time. Yeah, yeah. And they wanted to destroy Russia and and things like that. But then we got to see not live on TV because it was some sort of free package thing that they just put on TV without warning. But it, It was, you saw some of these same guys pretty much grilled by Putin to say what he wanted to hear. And I was wondering afterwards, what was the point of even doing this? If, you know, even during the meeting, Michoudin the prime minister, he said, you know,

we've been preparing for the economic consequences of doing this for a few months now. And obviously, the troops, you know, didn't arrive on the border yesterday. And you don't act like Putin did. you don't do this theater of saying, oh, I haven't discussed this with any of you guys. You know, I just really want to hear what you think. Like, oh, great, you all think the same thing. And then turn around a couple hours later, oh, by the way, here is my hour-long angry speech that I wrote myself as the crimely confirmed today after spending God knows how long pouring over these strange books that he reads and original historical documents as well. And I thought about this.

And the conclusion I come to, and this is just my speculation, but what it really felt to me was that it was some kind of loyalty ritual. There's a Russian expression at Krugavaya Paruka, which is a sort of mutual, not so much as responsibility as almost a kind of guilt. It was like he was trying to get them all to say, you know, this is where we're going. And I want you to all publicly say that you're going down with me because some of them did not look particularly thrilled. about having to do this. The prime minister, he basically tried to sneak out of there. And Putin was like, hey, where are you going? Oh, come on. Say, like, do you want to recognize the separatists or not?

And then there was this absolutely extraordinary scene. I nearly fell out of my chair watching this was you had Sergey and Erichkin, the head of foreign intelligence, one of the three people who go back to the very, very beginning with Putin in the KGB. And he's seen as most sophisticated of them because he was. seen as good enough a spy to serve in the West during the Cold War, we don't even really know what he did when he was there. And he went up there and both he and one of the other biggest, biggest hardliners, Nikolai Pottership, the head of Security Council, they both suggest that, oh, maybe we should just use

this as a threat to try the force Ukraine and the West to give us what we want in a matter of days. And then Putin started grilling him. He said, you know, Sergei, speaking. clearly, what do you want? And then Narishkin just starts, he looks really flustered, starts stumbling over his words. At the end, he says, oh, yes, I do support it. I support bringing

the Donbass into Russia. And Putin, that's saying, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about recognizing their independence that Nirishka's like, oh yeah, great, great, I'll do that. And that was it. Try to remember the right answer, yeah. Yeah, and I've just, I mean, obviously

it's a, you know, it's a highly stage managed, managed process. It was edited. There were some speeches that weren't shown on TV. We don't know what, what some of these people said. But at the same time, it's, it was this really unbelievable message, not just to the public and not just to the people in that room. But I think to, you know, everyone who's working in, in the Russian system is, you know, I am the arbiter. This is my decision. Only I decide. If, If I could do this to my closest allies, you know, just think what will happen to anyone else who steps out of the line. And there it goes. And the optics of it, of course, were just unbelievable because Shaw Walker for the Guardian made the point on Twitter that, you know, out of all the times, you know, that Putin actually needed a really big table because you had 22 people in the room with him.

He didn't use it. These, he's in this desk. And all these officials are just, just lined up on these chairs. It's about 20 feet from him. so they can't breathe on him, apparently. It seems these some sort of weird social distancing measures that aren't grounded in any recognizable science. And one by one, they're made to give these kind of school reports to the principal.

It was just absolutely stunning. Like, like, in the sort of thing, it's the czar's court, really, is what it reminded me of. Yeah, and quite worrying, too. I mean, it's never a good thing when leaders with some of his impulses become that isolated and have that degree of absolute power. think it's important for people to understand that you can be a, you know, a dictatorial, autocratic figure and not have kind of total control. But, but, you know, clearly the optic he's giving is that he has this kind of total control. I wanted to ask, you know, we've talked,

including on this podcast to, for instance, we had John and M. Sovon talking about, you know, the contrast with Crimea. In that case, you had this kind of patriotic euphoria. in Russia. A lot of Russians, you know, truly believe Crimea should be part of Russia. Alexei Navalny has said as much to me when I've talked to him about this. But you don't sense that now. You know, and it's hard, obviously, to get a sense of Russian broader public opinion. But what is your sense of the mood there? I imagine politics is not easy for people even just kind of ordinary people to talk about. But beyond underneath all this propaganda, you know, when do you get a sense of the Russian people's appetite for more war, more

escalation with the West, more sanctions coming their way? How firm is the support underneath all of the theatrics we watched yesterday? I think there actually is a little bit of polling on this. If you look at the Lavata Center, which is the only independent pollster that really operates in Russia and they've been under a lot of pressure from from from from the government uh they did the poll the end of last year showing that you know on the one hand the kremlin's messaging on what's happening and who is responsible it seems to be broadly working but at the same time people aren't really that interested in it and uh the the the denise volkov from from the from the center has as said that really this just isn't what it's what people are worried about because real real incomes are

are down something like 10% since the annexation of Crimea. That's actually not really much to do with the annexation of Crimea. The sanctions haven't really had that kind of effect. But people are worried about pocketbook issues. Inflation is rampant. What people are worried about are the prices of staple goods, what the mortgage rate is and things like that. And you couple that with the fact that the Donbaas,

Eastern Ukraine, unlike Crimea, there was never the same kind of sentimental attachment that even, even, you know, supposed liberals like Duvali have had with Crimea. The use of that back in 2014-15 and the propaganda, I think, was really more than anything else to make Crimea look good, because the message that it sends, and the last month to Crimea was in 2016, every single person And I spoke to said this so that absolutely work was, you know, oh, just, you don't want it to be to be like this, do you? And obviously, you know, people don't want their homes to be shelled with artillery. They don't want their friends and loved ones to die. It's a pretty simple and powerful message and one that they were quite successful in blaming on the West.

The problem now is that if, you know, the U.S. intelligence is correct, and we do see some sort of massive onslaught in which, you know, 50,000 people might die in a few days. That's a lot harder to sell. And I've had people, even in the round of the Kremlin, not just admit this to me, but insist it themselves, saying why the American reports are wrong, because they wouldn't be able to sell, you know, if the Ukraine. Iranians are a brotherly nation, then why are we killing them? And even if they could sell that, then if you really want to want the sack Kiev, a lot of Russians are going to die too. And you've removed the element of the kind of fig leaf of covert action that you had in 2014 when it was scarcely credible that they weren't heavily involved in and indeed directing the conflict. But it allow them to do things like minimize casualties. You had things like Wagner, the mercenaries

that were created basically as a sort of cannon fodder in places like Syria. When you have an open war, on the one hand, you can do a lot that you can do otherwise. Like, they could use air strikes to neutralize Ukraine's armed forces very effectively because Ukraine doesn't really have any air defenses. But at the same time, there is a big downside. And speaking of the And he just did this big post on Instagram today where he said that this could be, you know, in some ways, the beginning of the end. For Putin in the way that for Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, because you've got to the point, he said, where these guys, they think they're great players on as big Nip Prisinski's great chessboard. And they have gotten to something that they can't really. control that's going to have huge consequences for them and they can't really get out of.

Yeah. No, I mean, I saw that that was, you know, definitely seizing the moment from Navalny. I wanted to ask about those consequences. We've heard a lot about sanctions, right? So we've heard about export controls to deny inputs to the Russian economy. We've heard about sanctions on Russian banks. We've heard about efforts to go after the wealth of Putin cronies and oligarchs who have money in the West. Today, Germany canceled a put on hold, at least, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. What sanctions do you think the Russian government is most actually worried about? And what sanctions do you think would be most consequential, both to that inner circle and then more broadly to the Russian economy and public? I'm not sure any of them actually are.

are that effective? Because if what you're talking about is the goal of changing Russian policy, this is something that even Obama, when he was still in office, he admitted this, this had not happened. And there's a sort of tendency, you know, maybe, you know, I know, I know some people on the anti-clopocracy side in the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and U.K. will disagree with me. But there's this sort of tendency where it almost feels to me like, it's like people say about communism, you know, these anti-Clepticcratic sanctions, they've never been implemented properly. Whereas if you, if you follow it from here, what it looks like is you can have the effect. There are various studies of how many percentage points of GDP. Russia has lost because of

sanctions. Somewhere between one and a half and three, I remember off top man, World Bank and IMF done some studies on this. But in terms of the actual goal of imposing costs on Putin to get him to change his behavior, it really has the opposite effect. There's this kind of rally around the flag drive that you see where it becomes almost a kind of loyalty test much, much in the way that the Security Council hearing was. If you want to understand not just sanctions, but how Russia under Putin works, you only have to do one thing. You have to find that I think it's been translating in English. Novigizhita, the independent Russian newspaper, who's editor won a Nobel Prize last year. In 2014, they published the

the leaked transcript of the meeting of the owners of the Russian soccer league teams when they had this vote to decide whether to admit the Crimean teams into the league. And you have some people like Vladimir Yucunin, who's this ex-KGB guy who used to be very close to Putin, then was kicked out after one too many corruption scandals. He's saying, I'm already under sanctions because I'm a patriot. You must suffer too. And then you have this guy, Sergei Goletsky, who owns the biggest supermarket chain and in Russia and he says, you know, guys, you know, I am ready to suffer if that's what the president wants, but I'm the largest private employer in Russia. So I would like to know that this is actually what he, what he wants. And then someone says, well, why don't we call him and ask him

what he wants us to do? And everyone goes, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's terrifying. So going back to sanctions that could work now, I don't think it necessarily matters if you sanction, you know, whether it's three oligarchs like the UK did today or whether it's 300 oligarchs, they're not going. I think it's a fantasy to be, to be honest with you, that they're just going to go to Putin and say, hey, Vladimir Vardimovich, you need to get the tanks out of Ukraine. I'm about to lose my villa in Beirits. And the way that Putin thinks about this, I think, is also, it's changed and it's very hard. And he said, he said, said a few times recently, including in his pronouncements on recognizing the East Ukrainian separatists,

that doesn't matter what we do because they would find some sort of reason to sanction us anyway. He basically, he thinks that Russia. He probably believes that, too. I think absolutely he believes that. And not him, but some of his top people have set this many times for years now, that they think, that the U.S. is basically hell-bent on destroying Russia, breaking it up into bits, and using Ukraine as a tool to do that. In terms of what's on the table, I think Nord Stream 2, I think that is certainly a, that is a big deal. I was surprised that Schultz went that far, seeing as he's new to the job,

only been chancellor for a few months, and he comes from the SBD, which is a party of Gerhardt Schroeder, who is the godfather of Nord Stream and just joined the board of Gazprom. And I think that obviously long term, it does create a lot of problems for gas prom because they can't sell the gas. All you have to do is to look at the maps of where does the gas go. You know, gas is not like oil. You can't put it in a barrel and just ship it somewhere. You know, the pipelines, they go where they go.

And the gas fields that are in the European part of Russia, you can't just turn around send them to China either because the Euro Mountains are in the way. So it's something that's very difficult to do, and that is a big long-term problem for Russia, but also it's somewhere where Europe is going to suffer. This is a problem that's always been at the heart of sanctions policy, that it's very difficult to do anything really broad without punishing yourself. So if you look at banking sanctions, it's very difficult to completely cut the biggest Russian state banks out of the global financial system because either loophole so that Germany and Italy and other countries can pay for the gas. Look at titanium. Boeing got so much of its titanium from Vesnpio-Avisma in the

Urals. They can't really replace that. Of all, we saw this in 2018 when the U.S. had sanctions against Oleg Deripaska and Russel and then had to spend next nine months basically doing this kind of embarrassing climb down because it was so disrupted to global supply chains. And that is the irony if you know the globalized economy. Tom Friedman, he thought, oh, no two countries with McDonald's will ever ever go the war. Well, not only that, but actually this interdependence, it makes it more difficult to stop, to stop countries like Russia from ripping up the rulebook, as it were. It's interesting, you know, and you mentioned the kind of anti-cleptocracy crowd of which, you know, I guess I try to think of myself as part of that. But one of the things,

that has gotten less discussion is what Navalny does, right, which is essentially the publication of and spotlighting of the wealth and corruption, which you have to think at least if you look at their reaction to Navalny himself and his network, that does seem to make them uncomfortable, you know, because that's what he was doing and look where it got him. I mean, I guess to end the two-part question, And one is, do you think that's something that worries, if not maybe Putin, the people around him, a kind of relentless effort to expose the degree of wealth that has been accumulated? And then using that, what is your sense of the current state of Navalny, his trial, and how he might be impacted by an escalation?

Is there concerns that if there's a war and there's Western, responses that the already brutal crackdown there might get even worse and might kind of feel like Soviet days people disappearing and the like. So I'll start with the second question. So my wife is a reporter actually and just yesterday. She was in the prison where Navalny is being held because he is currently on a new trial that is going to keep him there for another 15 years at least. stand. He said himself that, you know, Mandela was in there for 30 years. They're just going to

keep tacking things on. I think it's very difficult to see circumstances under, under which he gets out of there while Putin is still alive, the way things are going. And he sounded very much his usual self. They sent this guy to testify against him who was some sort of plant who worked in some sort of minor role for a short period of time many years ago in one of his, in one of his offices. And then he's become this sort of professional Navalny hater. He has his own show on Rush Today, which

was co-hosted with Maria Butna, who you may remember for quite some time. And this is nothing but criticized Navalny. That's all that it does. And of course the show is at Russian, because that's in many ways, the real audience for a lot of the stuff is the people who are paying the bills

for things like Rush Today at the end of the day. And so he was very much enjoying just absolutely ripping this guy up on cross-examination and from, you know, my website from what I could see on Twitter and so on. It sounded like it was absolutely brutal. But at the same time, there were very few journalists even in there watching because Ukraine has really consumed the world's attention.

There was one point because they won't let reporters take electronic devices into the room and my wife was sort of in there with just him and the court personnel for a bit while the Security Council meeting was happening. She was like, say, did you know this is happening? He was like, what, no way, this is crazy. And I don't think it's not necessarily, you know, that everything boils down to Navalny. I think for Putin Navalny is, you know, a major irritant, but something that comes from a larger problem, which is what we talked about earlier, that he.

thinks the U.S. is trying to destroy him, and he said this many times, and he thinks Navalny is a CIA agent who's been sent to destroy Russia. But I think it's definitely very convenient timing for this trial that they've done it at the time when if you believe people like the Prime Minister or some people in the Russian Parliament whose remarks have come out recently that they've been preparing this for some time. I don't think that was an enormous coincidence. So they decided to do that. The problem with Navalny, who I've been following him for something like 10 years, I've interviewed him maybe a dozen times over that period. And he would have these sort of rises and falls of success and popularity. And there would be points where he'd do some really spectacular things.

Like five years ago, he did this video about Medvedev that was the cause for these huge protests. And I thought, oh, you're just never going to top that. That was just a really, really good video. Then it did the palace and the response to that was huge. But the problem is that if you are, you know, that kind of democratic opposition in Russia, you are really like the frog in boiling water where the temperature keeps rising and rising and rising. People on the outside are getting used to it. And there comes to a point where the pot actually is boiling and you boil.

to death. And I think it's also, and so the result of that is all these things, they, they just become normal very, very fast. I remember a year ago when they named the first journalist foreign agents, Sam, this was absolutely, you know, huge, huge scandal. Now it's got to the point where, you know, I have friends who are Russian reporters who, they, they check the, the justice ministry or upside every Friday, they see if they've been named foreign agents, and they haven't been named yet, so they go and get drunk when the list comes out, and they're not on it. It's become this kind of normal thing, and that is, I mean, it's not for nothing, like, that the title of the only's blog was the final battle between good and neutrality, because

in many ways, that's what he's had to overcome. And if you look at the video, it had something, the Putin's Palace video, had something like 125 million views on YouTube or something like that. But it just doesn't necessarily translate into people on the streets. And also not everyone who sees that video in Russia. This is the dynamic I think is underappreciated sometimes with a lot of this corruption stuff. It's a bit like truck where people don't think, oh, this is so corrupt. And why this Putin's toilet brush costs more than my monthly wage?

They think, wow, what a cool guy. I wish I could live like that respect. Some people, yeah. Yeah. I think I think that's like more and more widespread than a lot of people realize. Yeah. Well, look, this is, I mean, thanks for sharing. This is really good insight into kind of what's going on there. You know, I won't ask you to predict the events in Ukraine because it's happening by the day. But the main takeaways from me are, you know, the incredible kind of isolation and control that Putin has that kind of means that he almost doesn't need to. prepare the public as much as you might normally because he's the guy calling the shots and that's the main message that he's trying. I don't think he cares. If you want, I can quickly run through the

options. Yeah, yeah, go for it. Yeah. What do you think the options are for them? Yeah, they sort of range from grim to extremely grim with tens of thousands of people dying. So one thing is what we talked about earlier that you had some of his security fizzles suggesting that they use recognition as a kind of stick in some sort of negotiations with the West. I don't think that the Biden administration or the Europeans are much interested in having those kind of talks. But I talk to some people in around the Kremlin who seem to feel like this is it. This is where they're going to stop. They've sort of done it. And this is as far as they're going to go. Option number two is we still don't know, again, what the borders of the separatist states that Putin has recognized are supposed to be.

And remember, the ostensible pretext for this is that they are under Ukrainian attack. And they've been saying today that the Ukrainian attacks are not ceasing. So it's very easy to imagine Russia assigning some kind of pretext. And it's been striking that even compared to 2014, when it was pretty obvious to, you know, anyone who paid close enough attention that so much of this was fabricated. here it seems like they're not really trying. And you get this impression that a lot of the people in the system that they might not have even really known that this was coming. Just a week ago, when Putin said that they were going to withdraw some troops from the border, there was this two-day dunk-a-thon on state TV going, ha-ha, you guys predicted the invasion.

Yeah. It didn't happen. And then they started laying the groundwork for recognition on Thursday. So, yeah, I think it is very – Russia has already claimed that it was in some sort of direct firefight with Ukrainian saboteurs who made their way onto Russian territories. It's the first time they've ever acknowledged fighting any Ukrainians directly in the entire years of the conflict.

And it's very obvious to, it's very easy to imagine some sort of scenario where they claim that they've come under attack. And as Putin said, Ukraine will be held responsible for the ensuing bloodshed. which was the chilling note that he left us all on last night. Yeah. Let me let me just leave you with one more quote. I was speaking to one of the very few Russian commentators, analysts who saw this coming in some shape or form at the Tiana Sanobaya, who's a political consultant. And she says something at the end of our conversation that just made my hair stand on that.

And I just said, I, I don't know what to ask you after that, where she just said, you know, the goal is to end Ukraine's existence in its current form. No Ukraine, no problem. And that just stunned me into silence, basically. And if you, if you look at what Putin said, you know, he really just seems genuinely affronted by Ukraine existing. And he, the threats were not very veiled. He said, oh, you like decommunization?

well, we'll show you what real decommunization is. And if I were Ukrainian or even me, just myself, I think that's very worrying. Yeah, no, it's the, you know, throughout this ramp up to where we've gotten, the idea that, you know, he's just trying to control the politics in Ukraine. He's just trying to leverage it for negotiation or maybe he'll just bite off another chunk of the east. that doesn't feel like what's happening. Unfortunately, it feels like the more worst-case scenarios are unfolding.

But hey, look, where can people follow your work, you know, follow you on social media or watch for your articles? Yeah, so I'm Twitter at Mac Sutton, and I post pretty much everything I write at the FT. And, of course, we are at FD.com. This is not getting off our homepage or front page anytime soon. I don't think so. Yeah, no, that's right.

Well, you've been great to follow on this. stuff and I really appreciate you joining us here. All right. Thanks, very pleased to be joined by the USAID administrator and best friend of the pod, really. Samantha Power. Thanks so much for joining us, Sam. Thank you, Ben. So I want to start with this situation in Ukraine. And I guess just to situate our listeners, I want to ask you, what has been the nature of USAID's engagement inside of Ukraine. And I imagine that through that engagement, you know, you have both staff and kind of civil society contacts who are there. What are you hearing from them? Are you concerned about them? You know, what's the state of play for USAV right now? Well, it's a great question because

it's a great window into what Ukraine itself has made itself since 2014. And the last time We were in the midst of a crisis of this magnitude. Basically, USAID has worked since 1992, but really concentrated since 2014 to build a more resilient, democratic Ukraine. You know, the people spoke and wanted to integrate with Europe. They wanted to build a rule of law. You've met a lot of the young people who got involved in either civil society or really interestingly, unlike a lot of countries in the region, in politics. actually becoming MPs and becoming part of the scrum. And what has been amazing to me since I've come to USAID is to kind of unpack all that

the American people have done in support of that effort. So it's everything from what you'd expect, training of judges to try to strengthen the rule of law, anti-corruption mechanisms to make it easier to start a business in Ukraine because, of course, we want there to be economic opportunities as part of the democracy dividend that has been lacking so often when there's been a democratic opening. So a ton in the economic space. But as you as you know, a real emphasis on independent media on not just, again, the anti-corruption bodies and trying to make the government change and liberalize, but the oversight mechanisms outside, you know, whether it's the journalist doing the muckraking or we have

people also tracking disinformation, you know, partners of ours who we support as they prepare daily or weekly digest on just what the latest disinformation play is by the Russian Federation. Our partners do a lot near the line of conflict because we know that Vladimir Putin's number one goal is to convince people in Russian occupied territory that everything that happens on the Ukrainian government-held side of the line is hostile to them, is about denying them economic opportunities and other things. Again, part of this propaganda of these lies over so many years. And yet the best antidote to those lies is actual exposure and collaboration and cross-line work

and cross-line cultural and artistic projects and so forth. So it's one of our largest missions, the USA mission in Ukraine. And it's on everything from strengthening democratic institutions to strengthening democratic watchdogs to also working with the government on things like cybersecurity and energy diversification. So if you think about what is the toolkit that the government needs to move to the next phase of its journey, which is looking westward and giving its young people an opportunity to modernize and become part of the democratic world, that also includes making sure that the institutions are in place to protect against cyber attacks and to be able to be energy independent,

ultimately, which is something that the people in that country crave in light of the intimidation and bullying that has been such a feature of life in Putin's neighborhood for so long. Yeah. And now with the movement of the embassy from Kiev to Leviv in the West, and the kind of downsizing of it, what does that do to your presence? I mean, I'm presumably you're part of that discussion. Your people are moving to, obviously not the people who are grantees, but your staff. Do you still have a presence there? Yeah, let me say a few things about sort of what the recent weeks and months have entailed, because everything I've just described to you is our programming, building this new Ukraine, this democratic, and we hope more prosperous

and more independent Ukraine. Of course, as Putin has put his forces on a war footing and deployed, them and created the specter of mass violence in Ukraine, our emphasis has shifted a lot to humanitarian contingency operations and what that might look like. So thinking through the various scenarios, and we still, as we speak today, of course, don't know precisely what scenario we are likely to be operating under, but we want to be in a position to support Ukrainian people if they move in mass from the towns where they are currently living, if they come under shell or shell fire missile attack. We want to be able to ensure that the shelter provisions, you know, the cash that they might need if they've had to leave their homes in a hurry,

that all that is ready to. So, you know, starting really in October, November, December, we were calling up the Europeans, calling up the UN, trying to get people to focus in advance on what our intelligence and our messaging, you know, indicated was afoot, which is that Putin was moving toward doing something unprecedented even for Putin. And initially, honestly, Ben, it was hard to get people's attention. You know, people, all of us really have a hard time imagining things we have not yet seen. And so all people could really wrap their minds around was a slight escalation along the line of conflict or maybe even a significant escalation, but believing that the citizens,

systems that we've been drawing on since 2014 would be sufficient. And we were saying, no, look, there is a very significant possibility that this is going to be a much more extreme scenario with a mammoth invasion that moves people out of lands where they have been living, even as the conflict has occurred in the east. The situation elsewhere has been relatively stable. And it was hard to get people's attention. So what we have now, or we have our development partners, the ground, do the cybersecurity, the energy, the civil society, the journalism work. Those are run really on the ground by Ukrainians. And while there is, of course, an American presence and an expat presence and many of those individuals have left the country, heating the warnings by the

State Department and others, Ukrainians are still there saying, you know, we want to stay. We've lived under the specter of Russian violence for a long time, and they are not going to deter us from doing this work, from fighting misinformation, from strengthening the rule of law. I will say that's gotten harder the last few days as it starts to dawn on people, you know,

with 150 to 190,000 troops perched, you know, that they really, that that programming may be, maybe in jeopardy. And so now we're, we're working with them to make sure that they can telework if they need to, you know, that they need not necessarily work from the areas that they were working.

If they want to continue doing the work, even in this crisis mode, that they should put their personal safety and the safety of their families first. And Ben, as a person who runs USAID, I also must say that all the programming we've been doing in the country, the beating heart of USAID's work around the world is our local staff. Yeah. Of the 10,000 people who work for USA globally, 4,000 are local nationals of the countries in which we work. So a big area of focus for our team is also helping ensure that those individuals are looking out for their families and their loved ones and that we are supporting them.

And so most of them, too, though, have chosen to stay in Kiev. you know, more than 85% of USAID staff are staying right where they've lived, you know, for generations. Some have moved to Leviv. We, USAID, moved our mission director with the embassy to be in a position to continue that humanitarian planning and to be supporting our partners. But everybody else is still working for the USAID mission in Ukraine, just doing so remotely as the pandemic, of course, had forced us to do well before this crisis. And so looking, I mean, again, it appears like, you know, this could be the worst case scenario. But, you know, President Biden himself has referred to potential for an effort to take Keev.

So inhabiting a worst case scenario of a large-scale Russian military invasion, I imagine that you mentioned displaced peoples. There's the issue of internally displaced peoples that you kind of alluded to. there's also, I guess, potential for refugee flows. Have you talked to neighboring countries? Is there a plan for the potential of large numbers, if not millions of Ukrainians, being displaced inside the country or moving into neighboring states? And is that kind of the principal role that USCID would play in the event of significant escalation from here? I spoke today, in fact, with the Polish official.

tasked with figuring out how Poland would respond to a mass refugee flow. Yeah. And it was quite reassuring. I mean, again, those aren't happy conversations under any circumstances, but, you know, they are enlisting emergency preparedness, firefighters, others to be in a position if needed to build transit facilities. But the most important indication, of course, is how welcoming they are prepared to be to Ukrainians. So I think, you know, you would see a very, very open door and it's not as if Polish citizens need to be reminded of the specter of Russian repression or aggression.

So I think there are already an awful lot of family ties and work ties. There are more than a million Ukrainians live and work in Poland today already. And so the combination, I think, of humanitarian visas, work permits, asylum grants, I think there'll be a good welcome. And again, I think Poland's in a strong position to be able to welcome even the more extreme scenarios of numbers of Ukrainians coming across. inside Ukraine, again, for months, we've been trying to use the information that we had to ensure that there was multiple scenarios being taken into account and not just, again, a memory of what happened in 2014 or 2015 and an assumption that that would be more of the same. And just to give you one example of one of the outcomes of that, the World Food Program actually,

was involved in Ukraine in the immediate crisis of 2014, 2015, around then, and then pulled out a few years ago, believing that it kind of stabilized, and even though there's mass humanitarian need in the East still around the line of conflict, it was just different organizations that were meeting those needs. Well, the World Food Program, because of the appeals that we've been making to be ready for any scenarios is now back and positioned to be supportive of efforts to help internally displaced. Again, until we know precisely how Russian troops would enter and the particular vectors of displacement, what we have are kind of multiple playbooks, basically depending on these different scenarios. But I do feel like we've had several months to prepare. And hopefully,

there'll be chaos as always at the beginning, but we'll be in a position to meet the needs of these individuals who just don't deserve any of what's coming at them. Yeah. Well, we appreciate the work that, not only you, but as you said, your local staff and everybody's doing, it's so important and it's such a contrast to the kind of worldview that Vladimir Putin represents and he spoke about yesterday in that kind of unhinged rant. I wanted to ask you about COVID as well. Obviously, that's been a very strong focus of yours. Last time you were on, we talked about your kind of at that time, nascent efforts to begin to disseminate vaccines and deal with vaccine inequity around the world. We're now at this kind of strange phase of the virus where some countries are trying to go back to normal. We don't know if there's going to be a new variant. But what remains the case is that the best protection against even new variants, right, is the broadest possible vaccination of the global

public. What is your current focus? You know, I think people may see occasionally announcements of this many doses going to this country, but strategically, where do you see this effort going now? And what are you focused on in terms of the next phase of the COVID fight? Thank you for asking, because I do think there are some in the world who want to move on. And, you know, we really do believe until everybody's safe, nobody's safe. And while, you know, it's true that Amacron, which was so transmissive, mercifully proved far less deadly in part because so many people had been vaccinated, but also in part because it was a less deadly variant,

the next variant may not look like Amicron. And so we cannot take our feet off the gas as we think about the global effort to bring about mass vaccination. where we are now is that we are focused on the WHO target of getting 70% of the world vaccinated by the end of this year. Okay. And that's a target that President Biden embraced last September at a summit where he convened the world's leaders to kind of rally behind that target. And honestly, the gating issue that we talked about when we were last together, I think,

it was supply, supply, supply, right? That's where a lot of the equity questions were fairly raised about. how we and our families were able to get vaccinated well before a single vaccination might have reached a high-risk person in most developing countries. Well, President Biden, starting last June, began to lead the world by donating vaccines. And we now have commitments of 1.3 billion vaccines that we've made to distribute for free, no strings attached. That's a distinguishing feature of the U.S.'s so-called vaccine diplomacy. And again, we view it as both good for the countries that are receiving the vaccines and, of course, in our own public health interests, so very much something

we hope the American people can rally behind. The thing is, though, Ben, one of the things that we found as the vaccines really began to flow, and this was in kind of November, December, we, were talking about four million vaccines, you know, landing in a sub-Saharan African capital is that until the kind of water was flowing through the pipes, you know, until it was real, not an abstract, okay, we want our vaccines, here's our plan, but real flowing. It was only then that we could see the kind of holes in the pipes. Yeah, yeah. And it was the same in the United States.

So this isn't even an issue specific to developing countries. It just was that their vaccines were entering the pipeline far later than ours were. And so we got those startup costs. We bore early and off. And we have the health infrastructure, the tremendous health infrastructure that we have here. And most of these countries lack that. So what we did in the beginning of December is I launched something called Global Vax. And this is an effort to say, look, we're actually at a point now where the major gating issue is no longer supply.

That may be an issue down the line. We're going to have to boost the world. But the gating issue now is actually turning vaccines into vaccinations, getting those shots in arms, reaching that last. mile, making sure that we're hitting stadiums and places of worship and making vaccines accessible. Because for all the talk of misinformation and hesitancy, and believe me, that exists in South Saran Africa just as exists here in the United States, the number one impediment, particularly to getting up in the 50, 60, 70 percent is not even misinformation or hesitancy or resistance.

It's just that you got to take off work to schlep. Yeah, yeah. you know, 20 miles to get to a clinic. Yeah. Or maybe you don't have the coal chain storage that you need in order to be able to store Pfizer, yeah, which is the vaccine. You can't go down the street to CVS, you know. Yeah, exactly.

So what we're doing with Global Vax, which is building on the platforms that we have through PEPFAR, our HIV-AIDS program, which has been such a flagship success for so long and has such bipartisan support, is building on some of those platforms because those clinics, those health workers, you know, they can be trained as well to be. involved in this effort is to really focus on delivery. And I just offer, because it's a bit of a dark time on planet Earth, but offer some pretty inspiring facts and statistics here around this effort, basically in Zambia, for example, where there's a new reformist government, one of the great bright spots in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of governance. The government decided to launch a campaign

in December and just decided we're going to go all out for a month and see where we get to. And again, the number one issue, not hesitancy, but accessibility. In a single province called the Copper Belt province, they went from 12 to 22 percent vaccinated in just a single month. Just surging resources, surging public service announcements, getting sports figures and politicians and religious leaders onside to be helpful. In Uganda, it's even a more dramatic story where the country has gone for first doses. they went from 14% to 47% in just six weeks. So 14 to 47% of first doses. And once you've got for your first dose in, that's proof of concept, right?

Then it's easier to get people to come back. And five of the nine regions in Uganda are now over 55% for first doses. So again, there are legitimate. I mean, we will all go back over the last couple years and ask, what could we have done differently to get these vases? vaccination numbers up sooner. But by investing in the local plans, in the national health ministries, using our malaria, our TB, our HIV-AIDS, and our other public health partnerships that we at USAID and other government agencies like CDC, you know, have maintained for so long, I think we really

can surge these numbers and start to see a virtuous cycle so that even if we can't get all the way to 70% in every single country that we get the vast majority of developing countries across that threshold. Yeah. No, that's good to hear. And we want to keep people updated on this because it's, you know, as important as any story in the world doesn't get a time of tension. I wanted to ask you, you mentioned the bright spot of Zambia. And it kind of triggered in my mind, you know, if you and I were, you know, sitting around having a drink, one of the things that you are usually good at is kind of identifying that bright spot out there in the world, that that that that small country that is proving the haters wrong on a democratic transition or

people who are resisting an encroachment or you know an effort by Russia to interfere in their affairs I mean what what do you guys obviously do a lot of work on the nexus of democracy and development um it looks pretty dark out there right now you know Putin has seized the global conversation uh what where do you see green shoots of uh uh a uh a of stories that we have not, you know, fully matured, but that we need to get behind in terms of, you know, people out there fighting against the current in some cases. I mean, I'm offering you the chance to give our world those something to grab onto for some hope out there as an example of people. And you mean, because you'd mentioned when I saw you in Glasgow, Zambia, for example,

it could be one example, but what's out there that we should know about? Yeah. I've been giving Zambi a lot of airtime, no matter of whatever I can. But okay, let me give you, I'll give you a few examples of countries, but then just to pull it back a little bit, because I think the green shoot is also a little bit philosophical maybe. So in our own hemisphere, I'm, I'm really impressed with the Dominican Republic's efforts to combat corruption and to revamp their police force almost from scratch. And this is something we're in a strategic dialogue, strategic partnership with. them. So, you know, kind of wonky stuff that one doesn't pay that much attention to, but, you know, new procurement laws that just have much more transparency that sort of smokes out, a little bit like the open government partnership that we were involved in back in the Obama days and which is still thriving. I think there's a real opportunity there to back this reform effort. It's challenged, of course, by living next door to Haiti and all of the challenges that Haiti faces and the influx of Haitians who were living in such despair and lawlessness.

But you do see political will to build institutions and a real recognition, I think, on the part of the leadership to, again, President Obama's point back in that Ghana speech a long time ago, what the country needs is not a strong leader, a strong man, but strong institutions. And so more of an investment in that than I think we've seen in the neighborhood for for some time. You know, I work a lot and USA works a lot in the Northern Triangle countries because of, of course, we need to deal with root cause of migration and also because of the development support that those countries need. There is a new president in Honduras who has committed to reconstituting the UN structure to fight corruption in her country. She's the first female

head of state, you know, in the three Northern Triangle countries that we've had. And I got to travel with Kamala Harris down to be part of the inauguration. She has her work cut out for her and there's obviously a huge amount of political polarization in that country. But again, the more that we see leaders and it's not an accident that corruption is what is animating so much of the leadership,

you know, when there is a change in government, it's often the people speaking about how disgusted and fed up they are by what has come before. So, you know, when leadership bring in outside institutions recognizing, you know, the importance of independent rule of law. And again, the verdict is out as to whether that will stick and whether it will be truly independent rule of law. But I think that's something, again, that we want to work at the United Nations to support

as quickly as we can. Yeah. So that's in the hemisphere. I think the two best examples in Africa are Zambia, where the current president, I think he was arrested something like 18 times before he somehow managed to win. They basically the prior government, which was Chinese backed and did the worst deals for the future of the Zambian people with the Chinese government,

allowing the mineral riches of the country to be ravaged and accruing such debt. But they didn't even let the current president even campaign. And it was young people who just said enough. Like we don't, if our opposition candidate here can't campaign, we're going to campaign on his behalf. And so he was swept into office again,

when such a large share of your GDP goes to servicing debt, not of your making, you know, the odds are really tough. I mean, he's up against an awful lot. But, you know, as we see in the COVID vaccination drive, there is a commitment to good governance and to partnership and to shifting away from, you know, the kind of infrastructure arrangements that look so attractive to these countries in the short term. But in Zambi, all they saw was Chinese workers coming in and building the infrastructure. And then projects that had such large cost overruns and now debt, you know, that will take generations to pay off. So there's a lot of buyers remorse there. And what's really

important is that not only that USAID and other U.S. agencies are in there, but that we draw the private sector and other civil society actors and foundations. to these opportunities that exist in sub-zaharan Africa. I want just to pull back, though, if it could bend for a second, because I could give you a little isolated examples around the world. There aren't that many, unfortunately. But I did want to just talk for a second about what President Biden did in convening the world's leaders at the Democracy Summit in early December.

And I just feature – there were a couple features of that that I think are worth – underscoring first, we actually rolled out really interesting fresh democracy programming. And I'll just offer like a few examples from the USAID side of the house, which is, you know, one of the oligarchs and dictators tools that they have sort of brought online in recent years is basically to sue people who are uncovering their corrupt misdeeds. And one of my first meetings I had actually was with Ukrainian journalists and civil society members in my first week in the job. They were describing that, that the playing field was never level. But now it's even less level because, you know, these guys have a ton of money to throw at lawsuits.

And, you know, your plucky civil society or transparency international chapter, you know, are operating, you know, a little bit more hand to mouth. That happened, by the way, Sam, you mentioned Catherine Benton, who was on this program, who wrote Putin's people. that happened to her. All the oligarchs sued her for libel, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So this is like the autocrats playbook, right, which evolves. And so we have to watch how it evolves. And so what we've done is we've created a defamation fund, basically, where in a sense, it's like insurers aren't all that anxious necessarily to ensure those actors who are uncovering, you know, the Panama Papers or the Pandora papers or whatever, whatever is the local version of that in any particular country.

But if we can think about this as a collective, so we're now going to be contributing to this fund that we're helping design, bringing other donors, foundations to bear to try to insulate against these really important actors so that they're able to do their work without this specter of being shut down or jailed. So it's not a panacea.

Don't get me wrong, but it's an example, I think, of what are the tools we need for this moment, not the moment in the 1990s, when some of the democracy programming was first rolled out. The second thing relates to what you alluded to earlier, which is, is there a way when there's a democratic opening to channel not just more democracy assistance,

you know, not just more support for the civil society partner that's holding that government accountable or, you know, election integrity assistance, which, of course, we need to be doing as well, given Russia and China's, you know, interference in, in, you know, election campaigns and so forth. All that is incredibly important. But what a reformer most needs to show his or her people is that there is a dividend.

It's what President Biden talks about here domestically so much. And so another thing that we are doing at USA, to your point, is to try to marry our democratic opening with our development assistance and our development programming. And as USA administrator, I'm also the vice-a administrator. I'm also the vice chair of the Development Finance Corporation, which is run by Scott Nathan, and we're talking a lot to them about, okay, well, what does it mean to bring in development finance? You know, what about loan guarantees? How can we bring private sector delegations to places that are doing really hard things

so that it isn't just, again, that you have strengthened your election monitoring presence, right, your democracy programming, but that actually the people can see that there are more job opportunities or that the recovery from COVID happens at a more accelerated pace than it might have. So these are just a couple examples. If you look at him out of the Democracy Summit, I just really for the first time had a sense that we're, we're really freshening our way of thinking about what this fight is. The second thing I wanted to just mention about it is it really has had the effect of causing Russia and China to be just talking an awful lot about democracy. Yeah, I noticed. And, you know, I don't know if you can take it as exactly affirming,

but they do spend a lot of time, President Xi, President Putin, the ministers around them talking about how irrelevant the Democracy Summit was. And, you know, more on the defensive, it feels, in terms of messaging about the relative merits of different systems and even claiming the democracy mantle in China's case to an extent I think that we hadn't seen before. So again, it's all complicated to integrate human rights and democracy into American foreign policy in a consistent way. All your listeners know that better than I do. And so there are no panaceas, but I think that that summit, if we can actually act on what President Biden and the other leaders who gathered launch, which is a year of action,

where we take the commitments that various leaders made, whether to give democracy support to countries that needed, including subnational actors, not just leaders like we've been talking about, but also that there were countries that were sort of controversial even to be at the summit, some of them, and some just experiencing these openings like Moldova, Zambia, Dominican Republic, like we discussed, if we can throw our weight behind those reformist efforts,

I think it's really important because there's no better talking point or proof point of the merits of the democratic approach than a democratic reformer actually being able to deliver on the promises that they have made by creating a more welcoming business environment by, you know, creating economic opportunities because there's less corruption. You know, if we can have examples, we're doing the political reform and economic reform work translates into, results for citizens, it feels like that is going to be ultimately the greatest rebuttal to the Chinese effort, which is so well-resourced to create this kind of narrative of self-fulfilling prophecy of democracy's retreat. Well, look, it's a great note of, you know, maybe not optimism, but like get to work from you to end on, because, I mean, it ties together. Like, the thing about Ukraine and Putin is, you know, he wants this conversation to be in

about, you know, his view, dueling view of Ukraine and history and all the rest of it, NATO with ours, there's a much bigger contest out there between what Putin represents and what Xi Jinping represents and what people who want to have the capacity to control their own destiny, whether it's a country like Ukraine or whether it's an individual around the world. This is what's at stake. So it's not just sanctions that have to be the response to what's happening. it has to be an investment in the kind of approaches that you just talked about. Look, thanks for joining us. Howard Declan and Reind doing.

Some of our listeners may keep up with the Power Sunstein family. They're okay. You remember Declan's immortal line when he was six and I was an absent parent. Putin, Putin, Putin. Yeah, it was Putin, Putin, Putin, when is it ever going to be Declan, Declan, Declan? Now I think he's old enough to really see. the human stakes of this. So it's,

it's, uh, it's even more pronounced. I think the focus on, on, uh, on what's happening in the world, uh,

in our household. And like you, you know, we all struggle to, to talk to our kids in a manner that they can understand. I mean, on one level, Putin is the most understandable to kids who watch,

you know, superhero movies, right? Where there are archetypal, you know, villains who come in and take things from people that they, don't belong. So on one hand, it's, it seems so explicable, but then, uh, you know, our kids are growing up in a world that just has a, has a feel of volatility and major, uh, that, you know,

the last couple generations haven't, haven't had that same feeling. And so, um, hopefully, um, we, we can, we can enlist them in the, in the, in the cause of, of making our world and our society better and not, and not have them turn off from events that just seem bigger, bigger than them. But anyway, it's a parenting challenge that we all face. It is. It is a challenge. And, you know, I was hardened myself. I watched the Kenyan speech at the year old stombing arts at the UN.

And it's a reminder, though, that you have to remind your kids that most people are fundamentally decent, you know. And there's some bad leaders out there and some bad forces. but it's not a reason to give up in other people. But hey, Sam, thanks so much for joining us. It's great to catch up like this, and I hope to catch up with you in person soon. You too, Ben. Thank you. Thanks to Samantha Power, as always, for joining us and for her great work.

Thanks to Max Seddon as well for giving us that perspective from Moscow. Thanks to you for sticking with us through every step of this crisis. We will endeavor to keep you updated no matter what happens as we can. And we'll see you other next week. or if need be before. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.