Russian President Vladimir Putin believes it’s his destiny to recreate the Russian empire and won’t back down in Ukraine, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview with “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
Gates said Putin’s aims can be unclear, even in one-on-one meetings.
“I’m not sure even in a face to face that you can judge Putin’s intention,” said Gates, who served as defense secretary under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “My own view, having dealt with him and having spent most of my life working on Russia and the Soviet Union, is Putin feels that he has a destiny to recreate the Russian Empire. And as my old mentor, Zbigniew Brzezinski once said, without Ukraine, there can be no Russian Empire.”
While campaigning for a return to the White House, President Trump promised a swift end to the war that began three years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine. Now more than 100 days into Mr. Trump’s second term, talks to end the conflict have been inconsistent, with little sign an end to fighting is in sight.
“I think the president is — based on what I read — is getting the sense that, as he put it, that Putin is ‘tapping’ him along and … Putin hasn’t given up on any of his original goals in Ukraine,” Gates said, referring to an April 26 social media post.
In the post, Mr. Trump wrote of Putin, “maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war.”
Gates said Putin hasn’t shown a willingness to make any major concessions.
“He’s going to insist on occupying all four of the eastern provinces of the Donbas, perpetual recognition of Russian ownership of Crimea, a pro-Russian government in Kyiv and a Ukrainian military that looks a lot like an enhanced police force. And no membership in NATO and probably no membership in the EU,” Gates said.
President Trump said Friday he’s moving to set up direct talks with Putin as soon as he can. Talks with lower-level Ukrainian and Russian delegations took place in Istanbul Friday, but there was little concrete progress beyond an agreement to a major prisoner exchange in the coming days.
The conflict in Ukraine dates back to 2014, when Russian forces seized Crimea after protests in Ukraine led to the ousting of the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Gates believes Putin wants the Ukraine that existed before that uprising.
“He wants Ukraine, basically, to be a client state of Russia, and I don’t see what it would take to get him to walk away from any of those goals in the foreseeable future,” Gates said. “I mean, when you look at 900,000 or so Russian soldiers that have been killed or wounded, he’s paid a huge price – the Russian economy and so on.”
“It hasn’t deterred him in the slightest,” Gates said.