The NPR Politics Podcast - As Putin Threatens Ukraine, Biden Weighs Increasing Military Presence In Europe

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

8,500 U.S. troops are on heightened alert for deployment to Europe after Russia stationed more than 100,000 military personnel on its border with Ukraine. Europe's considerable economic links to Russia have complicated the response to the Kremlin's threats against Ukraine.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Scott Detrow, and international affairs correspondent Jackie Northam.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Kelly. I'm currently at Miami International Airport and I'm headed to Friesen, New York for my last semester of college. This podcast was recorded at 2.19 p.m. on Monday, the 24th of January. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully I will be back in my toasty apartment getting ready for my last first day of undergrad. Okay, here's the show. Ah, last first day. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. Russia denies any plans to invade Ukraine, but it has amassed more than 100,000 troops at the country's border. The U.S. is preparing for a possible incursion by reducing staff levels at its embassy there. Jackie Northam covers all of this and more at NPR's international desk. Hey, Jackie. Hi, Tam. Hello. So here we are. And I'm hoping that you can start us out with something really straightforward, which is why would Russia want to invade Ukraine?

What's the point? You know, anybody who's studied Russian President Vladimir Putin says this has been his mission for decades, ever since the Soviet Union imploded in the early 90s. He thinks that Ukraine is part of Russia. You know, this is a huge swath of land, a lot of resources, and he wants it back. And that became really more important to him as the Ukraine became more aligned with the West to the point where there was, you know, there's talk of it

becoming part of NATO, which Putin sees as an extension or a tool of the U.S. In, you know, 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. It started a proxy war in the Donbass in the southeast of Ukraine. And there wasn't any real recourse. You know, NATO didn't respond militarily. Russia seems to have withstood sanctions that have been imposed since then. So that may have emboldened him now. You know, there is some speculation about why he's doing this now. One of it is, you know, this is his 30th anniversary of the breakup of the Soviet Union. The other thing, though, is that he could be using Ukraine to get onto something bigger, you know, getting the U.S. and NATO out of Eastern Europe completely. But

again, that's speculation. We don't really know what Putin's thinking at this point. Yeah. And I guess this would be a good place, Scott, if you can jump in and help here. But to explain that being a member of NATO comes with responsibilities and benefits. But the big thing is this idea of mutual aid, where if one NATO member, yeah, help me here. Yeah, the basic premise of the organization, which of course was founded and existed because of the Cold War, was that if you attack one NATO country, every other NATO country will view it as an attack on itself. And it was deterrence for the Soviet Union to not move further into Western Europe. And since the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO crept eastward in the 90s and the early 2000s. That's something that was a major grievance for Vladimir Putin.

It's something he talks a lot about, obsesses a lot about. Interestingly, NATO often responds with this kind of hands-off, we'll take a close look at some point response to Ukraine. But as Putin has listed all of these demands, as he almost holds Ukraine hostage right now, you know, making all of these requests to NATO, one thing he wants is assurance that that Ukraine would never join NATO. And Secretary of State Blinken, President Biden and other NATO members say that's for us to decide, not for you to decide. Putin has also pushed with, as Jackie noted, trying to scale back that Easter-growing NATO presence. So what Biden and the Biden administration have done as response is send Secretary of State Blinken to meet with Sergei Lavrov, his counterpart with Russia, over and over again in recent weeks. They're listening to these demands, but they're making it clear that they're not saying, oh, you're right, we'll take a few steps back. Sorry about that.

And if anything, in the last week or so, the U.S. has gotten a lot more aggressive about its response and attempts to deter Russia from invading, including recent news that the U.S. is considering moving more soldiers to Eastern Europe. Right. Let's talk about that. This is something that we learned over the weekend that President Biden has been seriously considering.

He was at Camp David, met with advisers over the weekend. The White House says, oh, well, we've been thinking about, talking about, discussing this for a long time. But what is actually on the table here? Well, actually, there's the US is talking about sending up to 5000 US troops and as well as warships and aircraft. And that would be, you know, to pull into the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, as well. So there's time. And again, this is only we're at the point where the administration is considering it has not been made official yet. We're also seeing other NATO countries come in and start increasing their contributions as well, whether it be forces or equipment.

The administration has tried to work this out diplomatically, and I think they walked away thinking they were kind of getting played by Russia. They talk about invoking sanctions, really serious sanctions that could undermine Russia's economy. But obviously, they think they need to do more. So they're going to have to try and have a military component in here as well. But, you know, if you've got 100,000 Russian troops and more forces in Belarus facing Ukraine. I'm not sure how much 5,000, you know, soldiers from the U.S. will make a difference. I mean, this is the thing. Is this just sort of a token gesture or what? I'm just not sure about that yet. Yeah. And I think part of this here is that Ukraine is not helpless. They aren't helpless

now. They weren't helpless in 2014, but they've been getting a lot of assistance, lethal assistance from the United States and NATO for years now. And the US is, it turns out, I don't think actually interested in getting involved in a ground war with Russia. Right, and this is just the latest example of a problem that, you know, Biden has repeatedly faced,

but in different ways. I think Donald Trump faced, I think Barack Obama faced. It's an example of a global problem right now that kind of falls into that middle ground. The U.S. has an interest in an outcome, right? The U.S. does not want Russia to invade Ukraine, but the U.S. is not committed enough to put the full force behind that threat, right? Like, the U.S. has made it pretty clear it's not going to send U.S. forces in and fight a war with Russia over Ukraine. If this was a NATO country, it would probably be a different conversation, but Ukraine is not in NATO. And I think there are so many examples of when that is the case, the US response is kind of limited. Biden has talked about amping up sanctions to a whole new level that have never been seen before. Obama was really criticized for only sticking to sanctions when Russia first went

into Crimea in 2014. The sanctions really did harm Russia's economy. But as we've seen, they did not work when it came to the key thing of deterring Putin from doing something similar. So it's kind of a trap that Biden finds himself in. Can we talk about American domestic politics just a little bit here? That's what we do. That is what we do. This is the NPR Politics Podcast. What does this mean for President Biden right now at this moment in his presidency? I think it's unclear right now. And certainly what happened in Afghanistan last summer and how that kind of began the process of Biden really kind of losing his stride and facing a ton of struggles is that things like this can escalate really quickly and jump to the front of mind for American voters. Typically, foreign policy is not that. But I think this does fit into this broader pattern of there are so many challenges right now where the Biden White House is trying to deal with them, but it's largely out

of control, right? Out of their control. Just add this to the list, a massive foreign policy crisis that the U.S. has limited tools to try and manage. All right. I want to take a quick break. And when we get back, more on what this means for the relationship between the US and Europe. And we're back. And in his press conference last week, President Biden sort of hinted at the idea that maybe some of America's NATO allies in Europe weren't as on board with the most stringent response possible, or that there was some light between the US and our European allies. So, Jackie, where is Europe on what's going on here? And is there separation between the at least the public posture of the US and some European leaders? Right. I think everybody came out pretty quick and tried to paper over those cracks. President Biden had exposed, certainly. But, you know, this is not a unified

group by any means. There's a number of factors. One is that a lot of European countries have business dealings with Russia, and they don't want to walk into a war, you know, or it's something to do with a war in Ukraine. It's not really in their interest. They don't want to put troops on the ground if they don't have to. But the other thing, though, is can you let Putin just get away with something like this? It sets a precedent. Look at Crimea, look at the Donbass. There was no repercussions, like I had said earlier. And so if he takes that, what can he do here? So there is that concern. Ultimately, you know, there are some ways around it. They can try and impose sanctions without doing anything militarily in that. But there are

divisions right now. And the thing is, they're going to have to try and corral everybody together and go in as one. Otherwise, you know, you just don't have that force in numbers that you would if everybody's divided. So when you say that Europeans have business interests with Russia and relationships, you have to talk about natural gas. You have to talk about fuel, and we're in the middle of winter. Yeah, that's a huge thing. One of the things that the U.S. and the Allies can do is stop. They can pressure Germany to not open the Nord Stream 2 gas line. And you have to consider Germany gets more than half of its gas from Russia.

And a lot of the other European nations do as well. And what's gone wrong is that the Europeans after Crimea, after, you know, 2014, everything else like that, they did not set up their own system so they could get gas from somewhere else besides Russia in a big way. They didn't create LNG terminals, everything else. So they are dependent on Russia. If Russia wants to turn off the gas, then it could. But the problem is this goes both ways. Russia needs that money. Energy is the cash cow for Russia. That's what is propping up its economy. So in some ways, US and the allies have some leverage there. If they want to say,

we're not opening up the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, that's going to create a lot of hardship in Russia. So they've got that. There are other ways that they can sanction that are going to hurt Russia. But at the same time, Russia is sitting on a lot of cash reserves right now, $630 billion worth. They can withstand any of these sanctions impact. There's already a scarcity and a really high increased cost to the global energy market right now. So any, you know, the worst case scenario of totally shutting off the gas supply to Europe, which would be catastrophic, and patchwork liquid natural gas deliveries would try to fix. But there's also smaller degrees, just an even higher increase.

We have talked in so many different ways about the precarious economy all over the world right now, and that would certainly make it a lot worse. So that's a scenario that nobody wants to see. So before I let you go, Jackie, do you have any sense of how quickly this is headed somewhere? Is this something that could happen any minute? Or is this something that could never happen? I think the answer to that is both. We just don't know. The intelligence in Moscow is that not even Putin's inner circle knows. Putin knows and maybe he doesn't even know.

We could be sitting here having this conversation six months from now. But, of course, there's an immediacy. You're feeling it because the troops just keep coming. As you say, there's 100,000 on the border with Ukraine. Russians are putting in more forces in Belarus. These are just four exercises that we're doing in that. So they're really increasing the pressure. But when something's going to happen, if something's going to happen, we just don't know. All right, let's leave it there for

today. And we will obviously keep watching this. Jackie Northam, thanks so much for coming on the pod. Thank you. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.