SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Ukraine hit more than 40 Russian bombers with drones across multiple airfields in Russia today. That's according to a top Ukrainian official. The attack took place as Russia launched more than 470 drones at Ukraine. All of this just before the latest round of ceasefire talks are set to begin tomorrow. At the heart of the talks is a big question - what does Russian President Vladimir Putin want? He's talking to President Donald Trump about peace talks but also ordering the most widespread, violent and aerial attacks on Ukraine in years. And that and other things has led Trump to criticize Putin more and more in public, a step that has been rare over the course of Trump's two terms in office. To sort this all out ahead of this latest round of talks, we called up an expert - Angela Stent. She studied Putin and Russia extensively. She's a professor emeritus at Georgetown University and author of the book "Putin's World: Russia Against The West And With The Rest." Welcome back.
ANGELA STENT: Thank you. Good to be on your show.
DETROW: Let's go back to 2014 here at first and that initial invasion of Crimea. What were Vladimir Putin's goals then, and how have they changed over the years?
STENT: So his goals then were certainly to take back Crimea. He claimed it was because he was concerned about, quote-unquote, "NATO ships" appearing in Crimea. Even though NATO had - in 2008 had said that one day Ukraine would join, it had made absolutely no progress in doing that. So it was to take over Crimea and then destabilize Ukraine. And then, of course, we get the full-scale invasion in February of 2022.
DETROW: And as that war has continued and become this strange mix of an old-fashioned trench war and a futuristic drone war, we are continuing to try to figure out what Putin wants out of this. What do you think here in 2025 he's after? Is this all about NATO and NATO borders?
STENT: No, that's just a subterfuge.
DETROW: Yeah?
STENT: I mean, he - you know, he didn't object to NATO enlargement when it happened in 2004. He doesn't like NATO because if Ukraine were in NATO, Russia couldn't control it, and he wants to be able to control and absorb Ukraine. So what he's after is he still thinks he can win the war. He wants a Ukraine that's smaller, that's weaker, that's demilitarized, that will have to promise never to join NATO, and he wants regime change. He wants President Zelenskyy to go, and they would prefer to have someone in power in Kyiv that's more pro-Russian. But given what's happened in Ukraine in the last three years, that's going to be impossible to find.
DETROW: You're - I mean, it seems like you're kind of dismissing a lot of the things that Putin at least, again, says - and says is different than actual view. He wants out of this war. Despite President Trump's scolding on social media in recent weeks, he still seems to by and large support a lot of Russia's end goals suddenly. What is the strongest card that Ukraine has at this point, or is Russia in a position to really dictate the endgame of this war at this point?
STENT: Well, it's not that it's not in a position to dictate the endgame, but Ukraine is in a weaker position in as much as the United States is now not supporting Ukraine as the previous administration did. But the Europeans are stepping up. I mean, it'll take a lot more, but they do support Ukraine. And they believe that if Russia wins this war, then Europe itself will be threatened, and the likelihood of a wider war is there. So I think that's what they're trying to do. And you said in the beginning, this is, on the one hand, very old-fashioned trench warfare, but it's also very 21st century electronic warfare, cyber warfare, things like that. And the Ukrainians are getting pretty good. They're building their own drones. They're getting help with electronic warfare. So they may, going forward, be able to push the Russians back more than they are at the moment.
DETROW: What do you think Putin wants out of the United States?
STENT: So there are two sets of negotiations going on. What Putin wants from the United States is the bilateral reset. I mean, President Trump has offered him something that no U.S. president really since the collapse of the Soviet Union has. They all tried resets, but they failed. But President Trump is saying we can have a fantastic economic relationship. We can end your isolation from the West. You can come back to all of these global fora. So - and we will lift the sanctions. So those are the things that Putin wants. And I think he still believes he may be able to get this without making any real concessions on the Ukraine war but stringing this along and having perpetual negotiations. There will be some more negotiations on Monday. Let's see what happens there. The Russians are being very evasive about what it is they're going to present. But that's what he wants. He wants the reestablishment of U.S.-Russian relations in a way that they haven't been since the '90s.
DETROW: And stringing along or, as Trump memorably put it on social media, tapping him along, does that benefit Russia at this point, to you?
STENT: So I think the Russians are a little perplexed now because if you look at some of the sort of propagandists in the media, they're now criticizing President Trump for being emotional, for being volatile and things like that. So they're concerned about what's happening, and that's why they keep dangling things like - OK, let's sit down and negotiate - to prevent him from, in fact, either imposing sanctions - and there's a very tough sanctions bill in Congress. They don't want that sanctions bill. So they're trying to prevent that.
DETROW: What's the best way to think about sanctions from your point of view? Have they worked? Have they weakened Russia? - because this is - what? - three years in of sanctions, and the war is continuing at the same pace it always has.
STENT: Well, they certainly haven't worked if they were supposed to change Putin's calculus. They have imposed costs on the Russian economy. But actually, the most severe costs are happening now with low oil prices. And if the low oil prices continue, and Russia's, you know, major revenue is from the sale of hydrocarbons, that would be much more serious. The problem is that there's been huge sanctions evasion. So part of this Senate bill that might be passed next week - it's veto-proof; I think it has 81 members supporting it - would be to punish countries that are still trading and buying Russian oil and to punish the people who helped the sanctions evasion. But that's all - it's very tricky, and that's the reason really why they haven't worked the way they were supposed to is because so many countries are helping Russia evade them.
DETROW: Like you said, peace talks are allegedly supposed to resume in Istanbul this upcoming week. Whether it's this round or the next round, what are the big questions you have? What will you be looking for to get a sense of whether Russia is serious in any way about these talks?
STENT: Well, I'd be looking at - what are the Russian demands? Are they changing, or are they still the maximum demands? They were supposed to present their memorandum of terms before the meeting. That hasn't happened. The Ukrainians, in fact, have presented theirs. So it's whether Russia is willing to make any modification to its maximum demands and then, of course, whether the Ukrainians are willing to do that, too, because obviously, they've rejected most of what Russia has suggested. Although it's quite possible that Ukraine might accept some kind of a territorial compromise for the moment, but as long as they can continue to control those areas in the four so-called annexed territories that Ukraine, in fact, still controls.
DETROW: Why do you think - from the American point of view, many presidents have tried wildly different approaches with Vladimir Putin over the last two decades. None of them seem to have really worked. Why do you think it's been so hard for any American president to rein in Vladimir Putin?
STENT: Because what Putin wants is a recognition by the United States that Russia has a right to a sphere of influence, both in the post-Soviet space but now in the former Warsaw Pact countries. In December of '21, two treaties were presented to the U.S. and to NATO in the run-up to the war, and they essentially demanded that NATO return to the borders it had before the first enlargement when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined. And that's what Putin has always wanted. He's wanted, in the words of one Russian expert, an equal partnership of unequals, and he hasn't gotten that.
DETROW: Angela Stent is a professor emeritus at Georgetown and author of the book "Putin's World: Russia Against The West And With The Rest." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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