Anne Applebaum: Putin 'Is Really Destroying Modern Russia'

Anne Applebaum is a U.S. Pulitzer-Prize winning author who has written several books on Russia and the Soviet Union, including Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine.

In a recent interview with RFE/RL’s Georgian Service, Applebaum said Western resolve to aid Ukraine in its battle against invading Russian forces remains strong and said the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has “adopted a mindset that it will be a long war.” Applebaum also predicted that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be remembered for “destroying modern Russia.”

RFE/RL: How united does the West remain in the face of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russian leader’s refusal to blink first. Is the dreaded war fatigue creeping in?

Anne Applebaum: So, much to my surprise, I would not describe the situation right now as war fatigue. We are lucky in that all of the most important European countries and both North American countries who are part of NATO remain committed to winning the war. And that wasn't something anybody predicted 18 months ago. Within each country, there are opponents of the war, and sometimes they're very loud.

But if you look at Germany, France, Italy, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Britain, Poland, Romania, Spain, you look down the list and what you see are all of the leaders of those countries are still supporting the war, and you don't hear any major cracks. There are no major breaks. It's true that, as I said, you know, inside French politics, inside German politics, inside U.S. politics, there are opponents. And there is a danger that if any of them were to win an election, then the situation could change. But right now -- the next really important election is the U.S. one next year -- right now, it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

It's true that, in Poland, we have a very transactional government running the country, and one that's very worried that it's going to lose the next elections — and Polish elections are in October. And although the winner will still support aid to Ukraine, because all major political parties in Poland do, the ruling party is a nationalist party and it has some voters who are skeptical of Ukraine. There is quite a lot of propaganda around old Polish-Ukrainian conflicts. And there is some fatigue with Ukrainian refugees. I mean, some of that is being pumped up on social media, I suspect by the Russians but maybe by others inside Polish politics as well.

So, yes, there is some friction in the Polish-Ukrainian relationship. But I don't think it's changed the overall picture. I don't think it alters Polish support for Ukraine, which is still absolutely in Poland the majority point of view.

RFE/RL: Putin seems to believe that it will be a long war. And the Ukrainians seem very willing to fight for as long as it takes to free their country. But has the West also come to terms with what could be a long war and adopted a similar mindset?

Applebaum: You could see the Americans have adopted a mindset that it will be a long war because they've been very slow about providing advanced weapons to Ukraine, and they seem willing only to do it at each stage when they think the Ukrainians are ready, when they're persuaded that it will be useful. I mean, it always feels to people on the ground like it's a few months too late. If the Ukrainians had F-16s (U.S. fighter jets) now and not a year from now or six months from now, it would make a really big difference in this summer’s counteroffensive. But I don't feel in the Biden administration any doubt that they're going to continue going. And, as I said, there is a threat that the U.S. election campaign could complicate this. There is a part of the Republican Party in the United States which is not in favor of the war and which may well campaign against the war. I don’t know if this will be a major issue in the campaign, but it could be. But I think we're still six months to a year away from that, and that's really a long time in this campaign.

RFE/RL: If Ukraine’s counteroffensive doesn’t end up being a resounding success that Western politicians can tout to their voters, what do you see as some of the possible scenarios playing out?

Applebaum: I'm not going to predict what will happen on the ground in Ukraine because there's too much that isn't known. You know, the Ukrainians who I talked to feel confident that they are successfully destroying enormous quantities of Russian weaponry. And that they've broken through some of the first layers of defense in a few places. I think the mining of massive amounts of territory in Ukraine was more than they expected. And that means they need more demining equipment; they don't have enough. And what the West was training them to do -- the combined arms operations -- that had assumed that mines would be gone. You can't bring massive numbers of tanks over fields that are full of explosive devices. So, I don't think it's being fought the way they expected it to be fought, but they seem to have some confidence that they're making progress.

RFE/RL: Before the counteroffensive you wrote in your column in The Atlantic that the Ukrainian counteroffensive needed to convince the Russians that the war is not worth fighting. How far do you think the Russians are from that realization?

Applebaum: The rebellion led by [former Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny] Prigozhin was an interesting indication that some part of the Russian security apparatus already feels the war isn't worth fighting. So, if you remember what Prigozhin said -- right before he made his quixotic trip from Rostov then more than halfway to Moscow -- what he said was, this war is being fought on false pretenses. It's a war for corruption. Russian oligarchs wanted it because they're greedy, and they wanted to steal Ukrainian companies and make money off of it. And that's not a war, you know, it's not worth people dying for something like that. So, if he said it, that means that others surely think it.

So, there is clearly a part of, as I said, the elite, the security apparatus, whatever you want to call it, who already think the war was a waste of time and a distraction. The question is, when does that number become sufficient to bring the war to a halt? When does it become possible to put pressure on Putin?

Again, there's so much that we can't see that I'm reluctant to make a prediction. I mean, it's something that could happen tomorrow, or it could happen in three months, or it could happen in six months.

I'm pretty confident that it will happen because you know, of course, it is a huge burden on Ukraine to continue fighting the war and a huge burden on Ukraine's allies, but it's also a huge burden on Russia. Some huge proportion of Russian resources are now being spent on the military. I mean, it's almost like Soviet days. And I'm convinced that there is a part of the country that doesn’t want that, doesn’t care about it, doesn’t need it and will want to bring it to an end.

RFE/RL: I think it’s safe to say that you are not a fan of making predictions, but I’m going to nevertheless ask you to make one about the future of Prigozhin. How crazy would you say I am if I were to say I see him running in presidential elections?

Applebaum: Oh, I think Prigozhin thinks of himself as a future leader of Russia. There's no question. I also think that Prigozhin’s career is not over. It turns out that the Wagner Group is crucial to Russian foreign policy, especially in Africa, but not only. There may also be financial reasons why Prigozhin has support inside Moscow, inside the Kremlin even.

Remember that part of his activities in Africa involve exploiting mines and other natural resources. There may be direct lines of funding going from Africa to Moscow that people don't want to see eliminated. It's clear that he has some kind of loyalty and some kind of support or he wouldn't still be alive. So, I don't think it's wrong to guess that he might continue to play a role in Russia's future.

Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin (file photo)

RFE/RL: Let me ask you, what does peace in Ukraine look like now? And let's look at it from three vantage points: one from Kyiv, one from Moscow, and one from the West. What does peace look like for each of them?

Applebaum: My problem is that I can really only envision peace in one way: It has to reflect a political change in Russia. In other words, the Russians have to understand that the war was a mistake, understand that Ukraine is a separate country. It's not going to be part of Russia, not now and not ever. And then they have to withdraw from all or most of Ukrainian territory that they've occupied.

I mean, I'm not going to have an argument here about what the final border of Ukraine will look like. But, you know, the Ukrainian position is that Ukraine has only one set of borders, and those are the international borders agreed to in 1991. Therefore, the Russians will have to leave, and we'll have to perhaps find there has to be a way for them to make amends or make up for the damage they've caused.

Any other scenario, you know, any kind of cease-fire or temporary cease-fire or anything that leaves the situation as it is now, is not a recipe for permanent peace. It's a recipe for a future war, which is what happened after 2014.

In other words, there was a line drawn, there was a negotiation, but the Russians didn't really ever say, “Right, that's it. This is all the territory we want and we're going home.”

If you had had a moment like that, if you'd had a real a moment of reflection and reckoning, then the war might have been over. So, until that happens, the war is not over.

RFE/RL: When Russians say we've had enough? And if they say we’ve had enough but we’re keeping what we’ve taken?

Applebaum: No, they can't keep what they've taken so far, because what they've taken is disputed, including by the people who are living there. So, no, it will have to involve withdrawal from all or most of the territory, as I said, and an acknowledgement that Ukraine is an independent country with a right to exist and that it's not Russia.

RFE/RL: Let’s talk a bit more in depth about the person who’d be vehemently opposed to everything that you just described. And let me ask you this question as not only to a journalist, but as a historian: the way things are going, what place do you think will Putin win in the history books? Its widely believed he covets one, but what will the chapter look like, both in Russian and Western editions?

Applebaum: Some of that depends on who wins the war, because history is written by the victors, as we know. But I don't think there's any question that Putin will be remembered as the man who really set out to destroy his own country. And apart from what he did to Ukraine, apart from what he did to Georgia, apart from what he did to Chechnya, apart from what he did to Syria, you know, this is somebody who has worsened the living standards, and freedom, and culture of Russia itself. He doesn't seem to care about the well-being or prosperity of ordinary Russians. They're just cannon fodder to him.

He's not interested in, you know, Russian achievements in infrastructure or art or in literature and in anything else. He has impoverished Russians. And he's also brought back a form of dictatorship that I think most Russians had thought they'd left behind. Remember the Putin regime for the first decade that Putin was president had elements of freedom in it. It wasn’t a totalitarian state. There was no thought police, no thought control of the kind people had known from the Soviet era. He is now slowly bringing that back. So, this is a crushing not just of dissent but a crushing of all politics, all imagination, all culture, all activity, anything independent. What he's really doing is really destroying modern Russia. And I think that's what he'll be remembered for overall.

RFE/RL: So no place for him in history books as the great modern-day tsar?

Applebaum: I think so, no, not certainly in the ones that are written with any kind of perspective.

RFE/RL: Let's move on to Georgia, as recently the 15th anniversary of the 2008 war with Russia was marked. What do you think is the legacy of that war and how significant?

Applebaum: I think it's got different legacies in different places. But clearly, in the Western world, it was a kind of warning shot, it was the first indication that Putin was not the democrat he pretended to be. And I actually recently had spent some time looking up things that he said in the first few years when he was in power. Also, when he was made the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, he talked a lot about democracy and freedom and rule of law. And he fooled a lot of people.

American and naturalized Polish journalist and historian Anne Applebaum (file photo)

And I think the invasion of Georgia was a kind of wake-up call. That was the moment when people realized that he's not going to be an easy neighbor that so many hoped. We let him get away with mass murder in Chechnya, that was seen as -- wrongly probably -- but it was seen as some kind of internal affair, not the business of the outside world. But clearly the invasion of Georgia was an aggressive act towards a sovereign neighbor. And I think that was the moment when perceptions of Putin really began to change. This is when people began to suddenly see Putin as a real problem.

RFE/RL: Was that a wake-up call loud enough for the West to properly wake up, or did it continue to sleep?

Applebaum: It began to change attitudes; it began to change the way that people saw Russia. But the implication of your question is right, it wasn't sufficient. It wasn't really until 2014 that people understood the degree to which Western financial institutions, Western companies, and Western trade was enabling this kind of aggression. That people began to understand that there was going to have to be a security shift, even a military shift in Europe.

Notably, it was after 2014, that [former U.S. President Barack] Obama, who got a lot of things wrong about Russia — but Obama first put American troops in Central Europe; there had been none up till then. And 2014 was the moment when suddenly people began to think maybe, you know, the Central European members of NATO aren't as safe as we thought they were. So, 2008 was the beginning of the awareness. And I think 2014 was when it really began to change. And then obviously, 2022 is the moment when Russia was excluded from European civilization.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.