Month: August 2024

During the height of the Vietnam War, the top American general William Westmoreland famously reassured policymakers in Washington that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.”  But today, when it comes to another seemingly endless war, this one in Ukraine,  John Sullivan, who served both Presidents Trump and Biden as ambassador to Russia, sees no flicker of light at all—only pitch black darkness.

“This is gonna be a bloody sore on the face of Europe for a long time to come,” said Sullivan in an interview for the SpyTalk podcast when asked to assess the state of the conflict. 

Sullivan is the author of a fascinating new book, Midnight in Moscow, that recounts his experiences overseeing the U.S. Embassy in Russia—“behind enemy lines,” as he puts it—while Vladimir Putin launched a naked war of aggression aimed at toppling the Kyiv government of Volodymyr Zelensky and turning Ukraine into a Russian vassal state. 

It was a nail-biting experience, during which Sullivan was regularly piped into secure National Security Council conference calls as the Biden White House mobilized western support to punish Moscow with economic sanctions while rushing billions of dollars worth of military hardware to Ukraine to repel the Russian invaders. 

But more than two and half years after Russia’s invasion, the war has turned into a gruesome and protracted conflict with no clear path to victory for either side. In his book, Sullivan depressingly concludes that the Ukraine war could drag on for “decades” or, as in the case of Korea, never really end at all. 

To be sure, the recent Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region—during which Kyiv’s forces broke through thinly manned defenses and captured  dozens of towns and villages—has bolstered the country’s morale and given Zelensky’s government  new hope. Sullivan calls it “the biggest change on the battlefield” since 2022 and a huge “embarrassment” for Vladimir Putin. But, he also concedes, it will also likely only harden Russian resolve to win back its territory, even as the country’s military plows ahead in Ukraine itself, with punishing drone attacks on civilian infrastructure 

“The Russians will, as they’ve done throughout history, rally from the initial setback and swarm the invaders,” said Sullivan. “So maybe the Ukrainians get pushed back, but I don’t think there’s gonna be a big change between now and next spring.”

In short, the world may be looking at a stalemate—prolonged, costly and increasingly bloody with no indication either side is prepared to back down. 

“The  Ukrainians aren’t gonna forgive and forget,” he said. And “Putin is never going to surrender his objectives to ‘deNazify’ and ‘demilitarize’ Ukraine.”

If that is the case, doesn’t that strengthen the argument for a diplomatic “off-ramp,” a territorial compromise that ultimately recognizes the harsh reality on the ground that there may be no strategic path for the Ukrainians to expel the Russians from Donbas and Crimea?

Shades of 1939

Sullivan demurs. While he concedes that “it’s difficult to imagine at this point the Ukrainians pushing the Russians out,” he quickly adds: “When I hear my fellow Republicans, particularly members of Congress who say things like, ‘why are we defending Ukraine’s borders? I don’t care what happens to Ukraine,’ they’re focusing on the wrong thing. The most important thing for the United States is to oppose Russian aggression. 

“This is all about Russian aggression,” Sullivan continued. “It happens to be directed at Ukraine, which is why the point of the spear is sticking into Ukraine, but it won’t end there. And I draw the analogies, many analogies in the book, to the Second World War and the start of the war in the 1930s and the late 30s.

“I have to be careful because I’m not saying Putin is Hitler, and I’m not saying the Russian Federation is Nazi Germany. But there is a comparison to be made to an American saying in the summer of 1939, ‘Why do we care about Poland? All wars ended in negotiations. Stop the bloodshed, let’s negotiate.’ You got to be careful with historical analogies. It’s not perfect, [but] that’s the way I think of it.” 

Just as the United States and its allies stood fast against Hitler’s aggressive wars in Europe, so too must it stand up to Putin’s, he argues. “We’ve got to oppose Russian aggression all we can.” 

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The portrait of Putin in Sullivan’s book is a striking one. Far from the isolated, deluded ruler cut off from reality, as he is sometimes described in the West, Sullivan depicts Putin as a cocky, swaggering, “very savvy gangster, unbound by facts, law, morals or truth.” He  compares him at one point with Whitey Bulger, the late, legendary longtime crime boss in Sullivan’s native Boston. 

But the more important historical point is Putin quite openly sees himself as a “Chekist,” an heir to the notorious Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka,  which morphed over the decades into the KGB and later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the FSB. (When he became  chief of the FSB himself in 1998, Putin kept a statue of the Cheka’s founder, “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky on his desk.) As such, Sullivan suggests, Putin used his Chekist training in deception and misdirection to play the American government, masking his plans for invading Ukraine so well that the Biden White House was caught off guard until it was too late. 

“He’s got incredible self-discipline…and I mean down to his facial expressions,” said Sullivan, who met with Putin in Moscow and observed him at multiple international conferences. When Putin met with Biden in Geneva in 2021, “Putin was as relaxed as you can imagine. He was cracking jokes. He was very calm. 

“I look back on it now and I think, this was a guy who felt very confident in what he was about to do in June of ‘21 because months later, just months later, he’s going to launch the ‘special military operation,’ right? Based on his accusation that the United States has started a war against Russia in Ukraine. He has the opportunity to discuss this with the president of the United States, face to face in Geneva [and] never talks about it. He’s cracking jokes, putting everybody at ease. That’s a Chekist right there.”

 (As if to underscore the Cheka mentality that still thrives in Putin’s Russia, Sullivan says he was warned by Paul Nakasone, the former chief of the NSA, that the FSB would try to hack his laptop and get access to the manuscript of Midnight in Moscow before it was published. “They love it when government officials write books,” he says Nakasone told him. “The FSB wants to see it before it goes through the security review” by the State Department.) 

Although Putin looms large in Sullivan’s book, his portrayal of the two presidents he worked for may ultimately get more attention. He hits Biden hard for his disastrous pull-out from Afghanistan.

From Trump to Biden

“The blow to American credibility and standing was in some ways immeasurable,” he writes in his book, suggesting that, by projecting weakness, it played a role in Putin’s calculus to invade Ukraine. He chides the president for his verbal mishaps—stating at a press conference as Russian troops were massing on the border that the U.S. might not respond if there was only a “minor incursion.” (“We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations,” Zelensky tweeted in response.) And, most serious of all, he says the Biden administration was “slow and erratic” in providing Ukraine the offensive weapons—long range missiles, tanks and F-16’s—it needed to respond to the Russian attack. (Sullivan says Vice President Kamala Harris was in the National Security Council meetings on Ukraine he participated in but doesn’t remember any particular views she expressed.) 

But for all that, Trump comes off far worse. Sullivan, a lifelong Republican and lawyer—and the nephew of William Sullivan, the last American ambassador to Tehran before the 1979 revolution—had served in top legal jobs at the Defense and Commerce Departments under President George W. Bush. After Trump was elected, Sullivan—on the recommendation of the new Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis—was originally tapped to be his general counsel at the Pentagon. But he was quickly switched to deputy secretary of state under Trump’s first pick at Foggy Bottom, Rex Tillerson, placing him smack in the middle of the chaos that defined Trump’s foreign policy-making as president. 

Sullivan’s account of those days is withering, filled with references to the “disorder,” “stress,” and “unpredictability” of working for a volatile president with no experience in Washington. Trump blew up and nearly fired Sullivan after the new deputy secretary approved sanctions on Russia for its use of Novichok, a banned chemical nerve agent, in a bungled attempt to assassinate a defector, Sergei Skripal, on British soil. Trump also cut Tillerson out of his plans to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and then fired his secretary of state—who Sullivan viewed as “a model of strength, decorum and wisdom”—with a tweet.

Sullivan also recounts how he was forced to fire the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, even though she was serving admirably, because Rudy Giuliani had convinced the president to ax her (apparently because she was seen as an obstacle to a business deal being pursued by Giuliani’s dodgy associates.)  After two years on the job, Sullivan was burned out and preparing to resign when, with the resignation of U.S. ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, the post in Moscow opened up.  

Sullivan, who says he was fascinated by Russia since childhood, raised the idea of taking over the ambassadorship with his new boss, Mike Pompeo, and, upon learning of the White House’s approval, was eager to meet with Trump before flying off to Moscow as the president’s personal representative. But Trump blew him off because Chris Christie showed up at the White House that day and the president scuttled his schedule, chatting with his formal political rival for two hours while Sullivan was left “stewing in the reception area of the West Wing” for an audience that was never granted. 

“I marveled at the president’s lack of discipline, but I was not completely surprised,” Sullivan writes in his book. “It was just another reminder that Donald Trump had no interest in the ordinary duties of his office, like conferring with the ambassador he was sending to a challenging and critical post,” he writes. 

Given his rude treatment by the temperamental Trump and the faults he found with Biden’s policies,  I asked Sullivan in the podcast who he planned to vote for this fall.

He struggled a bit to come up with an answer. 

“I don’t support either candidate,” he said. “You know, it’s difficult for me. I’ve said it before that I’m a lifelong Republican and that’s always been my—I was about to say the word default, but that’s not the case. I was an enthusiastic voter for Republican presidents starting with Reagan in ‘80. If and when I vote for Trump in November of 2024, it’s only because I believe It’s my duty to vote and it’s a binary choice.” 

But that said, Sullivan says, it is Putin who may be the ultimate winner. 

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“You know what, Michael, my perspective on this is—and it’s something I talk about in the book—the type of political division we have in the United States today is as bad as it’s certainly been in my lifetime. That’s catnip to the Kremlin, the fact that we can’t have a civilized, even modest civilized political dialogue. I mean, in some sense, Putin really doesn’t care. Putin could care less about Trump or Harris, Republicans or Democrats. What he really thrives on is division in the United States. He wants to crush our hope in the future. He wants us to think, we Americans to think, we are as bad, we are the same as he.” 

In that sense, his sometimes setbacks on the battlefield notwithstanding, Sullivan suggests, the Russian leader has plenty to celebrate.

Sullivan also talks about his coded conversations with American Paul Whelan, wrongly jailed as a spy, in a Russian prison. Listen to the entire interview here on Simplecast, or via whatever platform you prefer. It’s everywhere.