The NPR Politics Podcast - In Moscow And Washington, European Leaders Attempt To Lower Tensions Around Ukraine

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is in Washington and French President Emmanuel Macron is in Moscow as the two leaders attempt to resolve tensions between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe. The leaders, whose countries have strong economic ties to Russia, have been more receptive than President Biden to Vladimir Putin's security concerns.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and Moscow correspondent Charles Maynes.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 Katherine Endermower. Given recent international political news, we've decided to name our new robot vacuum Vladimir Scootin'. This podcast was recorded at... It's 212 Eastern on Monday, February 7th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Okay, here's the show. That's pretty good. I wonder if the cat rides on top of it. Is the cat NATO then, Mara? I don't know.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And we've got NPR's Charles Baines with us from Moscow. Hi, Charles. Hi there. So that vacuum should listen in because today we are

going to focus on Ukraine. And we're going to do that because there's some high profile meetings happening, Charles, where you are in Moscow and where Mara and I are here in D.C. So in Moscow, French President Emmanuel Macron is there meeting with Vladimir Putin. And here in D.C., German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, brand new chancellor, took over from Angela Merkel earlier this year, is at the White House right now as we tape. He's in the Oval Office meeting with Joe Biden. And these meetings are all taking place amidst rising fears that Russia will invade Ukraine. Charles, we've been talking a lot about how the West has responded lately, particularly these thousands of American troops that President Biden is sending to Europe. How has Putin reacted to all of that? Well, he's not happy about it. I mean, you know, his spokesman said that this escalates already tense situation around Ukraine.

Russia has repeatedly accused the West of hyping the threat of a Russian invasion, including by sending these troops into Europe. They insist in Russia and Moscow that they have no intention to invade. And yet clearly Russia is using this buildup of its military and the credible threat of an invasion to negotiate these broader issues, what Russia is calling its security proposals. And that includes a ban on NATO membership for Ukraine and a rollback of the alliance from Eastern Europe completely, at least certainly the military installations. You know, the problem is that all these diplomatic meetings with the US and NATO over the past month have all stalled. They're really talking past one another, which was maybe the point. These were mostly non-starters and Moscow knew it.

Charles, if we assume that Putin hasn't quite decided yet whether he's going to mount a full-scale invasion or not. Among the things that the West has offered as possible off-ramps or concessions, are any of those, do you think, enough for Putin to say yes to and reverse? Possibly. I mean, these are things that Russia says it wanted, has said it wanted many times in recent years. The problem is that they've raised the stakes. So this is no longer just about renegotiating some lapsed nuclear missile treaty. These are things that Russia wanted, although the U.S. says that

they left these agreements because of Russian violations. But they're no longer the big ticket items. You know, what Russia is looking for is this rollback of NATO, this kind of renegotiating of the end of the Cold War. So for Russia, it's very much tied into this sense of deep humiliation from the 1990s, a sense that they were taken advantage of, whether that's legitimate or not. And that's essentially been the driving force behind these demands, including what they want to see happen with Ukraine. So Biden has said most of these demands are non-starters. That's generally been the view of much of NATO as well. What is there for Putin and Macron to talk about today? Well, you know, Macron comes in here presenting something of a third way. I mean, he's sort of

riding a very fine line between a certain degree of unity among Western nations about how to handle any potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, Macron is saying, you know, we can find ways to negotiate. So certainly as Macron comes in now, he's talking about trying to, he says that Russia has some legitimate security concerns. That's something that Putin hasn't been hearing from Washington. And he also comes in, of course, much more aware of the damage that sanctions or sanctions war

with Russia could do to Europe's economy. And Mara, we're talking right now, Biden and Schultz are meeting as we speak, but we're recording this before we hear from them in a joint press conference. But one interesting dynamic to all of this, you know, Biden has repeatedly stressed NATO is on the same page. But Germany is kind of an outlier. And it's a really important outlier because it's such an enormous part of the European coalition. What's the general way to explain why Germany has been more hesitant, some of these other countries, to aggressively push back against this Russian circling of Ukraine. Well, there are a couple reasons, and Charles can probably add some too, but Germany has tremendous economic ties with Russia.

You know, Nord Stream 2, this gas pipeline that hasn't quite gotten operational, but that sends Russian gas to Germany. And there are also, there's a longstanding sentiment inside Germany that while not, I wouldn't call it pro-Russian, is kind of Russian empathetic, you know, understanding and saying that Russia has interests too. Olaf Scholz is also from the more left-wing party than Angela Merkel. But I think Germany is really key here because if Putin is going to be successful at splitting the West, splitting the NATO allies, it certainly would happen. Germany would be taking the lead in that effort. I think part of it also is this debate,

you know, the U.S. has gone in with this position that there's an impending invasion. It's almost assumed that Russia will invade. The Germans and the French are not so sure. They think there's a lot of room here to negotiate. They think that, and certainly this raises questions of what say if Russia did take some action, but far short of an invasion of Ukraine, would that merit the same level of sanctions that the US is after?

That's the big question. I mean, the question number one is will Putin launch an invasion and will it be a huge mistake on his part or will he succeed in splitting the West? But the second question is, what if he does something less than a full-fledged invasion? The allies have never been clear on what kind of sanctions, what kind of measures they would take in that scenario. Yeah. And just one final point.

Macron came here today talking about a new European security order. Well, that's kind of what Putin is talking about when he has all these demands. What he's after is different, of course, but there's a sense that these two men have some sort of common ground that's missing in the conversations that have been going on between the US and Russia over these past, say, several weeks. And worth flagging here a couple things. First of all, we have had several colleagues in Ukraine covering this story the last few weeks really aggressively. You can find all of that coverage on NPR.org.

One of the storylines they've been really focusing in on is the fact that it's worth reminding everybody that Russia has been at war with Ukraine since 2014 when it invaded Crimea, when it began aggressively backing separatists in the eastern part of Ukraine. Parts of that country have been in war for years now. The question is not whether or not Russia will invade, but whether this will escalate to the largest European land war that we have seen in generations. And that is the key question going forward. We're going to take a quick break and talk more when we get back about how each country is viewing this just a little bit differently. So we are back in Mara. We've been talking about, you know, Germany's internal politics here. Let's

talk for a minute about the U.S. internal politics, because they're different than they would have been just a few years ago. By and large, the Republican Party is at a long track record of being a hawkish party that would be incredibly supportive of any sort of efforts to bolster Ukraine, deter Russian attacks on that country. That's the case with a lot of Republican lawmakers. But it's really not the case with big chunks of kind of the party as a whole and the activist types, the loud voices in right-wing politics right now. What's going on there? This is the lasting effect of Trump. Trump was a remarkably pro-Putin Republican president. He found Putin sympathetic. He praised him. He once said that he believed him

more than he believed his own intelligence agencies. He willingly took help from Putin. He said publicly he'd be happy to have help from Putin in the 2016 campaign. But I think what you see happening is that the Republican Party, the establishment, was all ready to accuse Joe Biden of not being tough enough on Russia when it came to Ukraine. But there are these loud voices from the grassroots and also from right-wing media like Tucker Carlson, who questioned why we would take the side of Ukraine instead of the side of Russia. You've got Josh Hawley, a sitting Republican senator, who said maybe it would be a good idea to say flat out that Ukraine had absolutely no possibility of ever joining NATO, which is,

of course, something that Joe Biden has completely ruled out. So the Republican Party is split. Charles, has that dynamic come up in Moscow as Russians try and weigh how the U.S. would respond? They're certainly promoting this idea in Russian media and certainly by the Kremlin that, you know, the West and Washington in particular is being hysterical about the threat, the possibility of a Russian invasion. Strangely enough, I think in some ways, we still don't know what Putin will do, but it does provide a certain out in the sense that if the argument here is from coming from the West is that Putin will,

it's all but certain that he's going into Ukraine, and then he doesn't, then they can always point to the U.S. as sort of being this kind of shrill, screaming, you know, child. And that's a media point that works really well here. So that's something that, you know, you might look at as we're looking for possible scenarios playing out. You know, and speaking of media coverage of this, you mentioned that several of our hosts have been to Ukraine. And the portrait that they've brought back is of a pro-Western country, an imperfect democracy for sure, but a pro-Western country getting ready for war, a war they don't want. Our hosts have not been going over there and finding a lot of Russian sympathetic voices. This is not Crimea or Donbass. So if you're talking about the principle of national sovereignty and self-determination, even if people don't really care much about Ukraine, this is supposed to be what NATO and the West stand for. Volodymyr Zelensky did, the Ukrainian president. This is because of Russia's own actions in Crimea in 2014, in the Donbass, where it's backing these separatists in this kind of proxy war.

If you go back to 2012, it was only about a quarter of Ukrainians who wanted to join NATO. And of course, now it's a majority. And Charles, last question for you. There's been this consensus that Putin would probably wait till after the Olympics ends, because first of all, that's what he did in 2014. Secondly, Xi Jinping is one of his few remaining close allies on the world stage. And the thinking is he wouldn't want to upstage this big show, this big moment for China. Given that, what are you looking for over this next week and a half or two weeks to give you an indication of which way this could go? Well, for one, we're looking at the media coverage. If you go back to 2014, there was this really intense campaign to paint Ukraine as a sort of a fascist junta and really appeal to

Russian sense of World War II of kind of, you know, rising up once again to prevent fascism from taking over the continent. I mean, it sounds over the top, but that's what was happening. And we don't see it this time. You know, Ukraine news is there, but it's about second, third item. So I'll be looking at the media. I'll be looking for more information about Russian volunteers and fighters going into the Donbass. I was just down in Rostov-on-Don. This is in southern Russia near the Ukrainian border,

talking to people that were part of this militia, this kind of Russian volunteer group that was intermingling with Russian mercenaries and Russian army units in East Ukraine in 2014. And they're telling me that some people are going back in now. I mean, the idea is that the Russian argument here is that it's Ukraine backed by Western arms that's now confident enough to try and retake these separatist territories. Whether true or not, that's certainly not the message you hear from Kiev.

But that might be the kind of thing that could set off a pretext for war or start off some kind of skirmish that could get out of control very quickly. Mara, what else could Joe Biden do over the next couple of weeks if this does escalate? Is there anything in particular you'll be looking for other than, you know, increased statements or speeches focused on this? Well, I think the biggest thing that he can do is keep the alliance together. This is what he said in a kind of impolitic moment in his second formal press conference where he said, if Russia does something less than a full-scale invasion, I don't know if I can keep everyone on board. But I think I'm just going to be watching for whether he can keep NATO and the U.S.

on the same page. NATO is the U.S. And in particular, what we're hearing is that in total contrast to the Trump years, the amount of communication and coordination that the Biden White House is doing with its European allies is extraordinary and unprecedented. And maybe that's one of the reasons why, at least so far, the West has seemed even more united than people expected it to be. Now, of course, it could all fall apart. If Russia does something less than a full invasion, then all the splits will be revealed. But right now, they look united, and I'll be watching to see if Joe Biden can keep it that way. All right. That is it for today. Charles Mainz, thanks for coming and talking to us. Happy to do it.

I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. We'll talk to you again tomorrow. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.