STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Twenty-five years ago today, on New Year's Eve, an event changed world history, although it was easy to miss the significance at the time. The president of Russia abruptly resigned and was replaced by a former intelligence officer named Vladimir Putin. Putin has remained in power ever since, usually as president, except for one period as prime minister. His actions have shaped events again and again, although not always in just the way he expected. The most notable event of recent times was his decision to attack Ukraine in 2022.
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PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: (Through interpreter) I have made the decision to launch a special military operation. Its primary objective is to protect people who, for the past eight years, have endured persecution and what we regard as genocide at the hands of the Kyiv regime.
INSKEEP: That democratically elected government remained in power and resisted. Putin is such a familiar figure and such a constant that it's easy to forget how much he altered Russia along the way. At the moment he took power 25 years ago, Russia was a flawed sort of democracy with competitive elections and independent media. So how has he endured so long, warping that system to his will? Russia expert Keir Giles, with the international think tank Chatham House, has identified for us three moments in Putin's rise, and he's here to talk about it. Good morning.
KEIR GILES: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK, so Putin takes power in 1999. He then later wins an election and has stayed in power ever since. What was a crucial moment for him in consolidating power?
GILES: Well, very soon after Putin took power, we have the Kursk submarine disaster in Russia, where a Russian submarine in a naval exercise explodes and sinks, killing 118 sailors. It's the response to that incident that really showed the West what kind of country they were dealing with and what kind of leader of it they were dealing with because it exploded a lot of the assumptions about where Russia was going. Suddenly, you had a confirmation that this was a country that had not changed as much as many people thought. You mentioned the faltering democracy, the free media. It showed very clearly that, scratch the surface, and underneath you still had the Soviet Union with a leader that behaved in a very Soviet manner - both the absolute callous disregard for the people that had died, the torrent of lies and obfuscation, the dragging out of grieving mothers being forcibly sedated when they tried to challenge Putin...
INSKEEP: Wow.
GILES: ...All of these were indications that Russia was still there and still unchanged. And, of course, it was the very start of Putin's crusade against those same independent media that he saw as conspiring against him by covering events.
INSKEEP: We have a little bit of sound of Putin talking at that time. Let's listen.
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PUTIN: (Through interpreter) The sailors are doing everything in their power to save their comrades. Sometimes, sadly, it is not we who shape the course of events, but the circumstances themselves.
INSKEEP: In effect, his government is dismissing any blame for this disaster. And you're saying that's representative of the way that he was going to shape the information environment in years to come?
GILES: That's exactly right. Now, later on, at that very same press conference, he was railing against the oligarchs that he said had taken control of Russia's information space, of all of the media, and promising, already then, to start the crackdown of that independent media space that we saw unfolding over the subsequent few years. And it was the way in which this press conference, this arrival of Putin to meet the grieving families, came several days after. It was already known that the disaster had happened - days of inaction and of refusing foreign help and pretending that everything was fine.
INSKEEP: I want to go forward now to the second moment you've identified for us. It's 2008 now, and Russia invaded the Republic of Georgia, which was a former member of the Soviet Union. Here's the Associated Press reporting on the day of that invasion.
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UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: But the country has since angered Russia by seeking NATO membership. It's a bid Moscow regards as part of a Western effort to weaken its influence in the region.
INSKEEP: Oh, wait a minute, 2008 - a former Soviet republic seeks NATO membership, Russia invades - this all sounds very familiar today.
GILES: It absolutely does, and we have much the same situation as we do with Ukraine. This followed NATO's summit in Bucharest in 2008, where there was decision that's been widely criticized afterwards to say, yes, Georgia and Ukraine can join NATO, but not yet. And that, of course, presents a challenge to Moscow, but also time in which to do something about it, after Moscow had said, we will never allow Georgia to join NATO. So Moscow acts on its promise and engineers a situation where they can roll tanks across their southern border and occupy 20% of Georgia, where they still remain to this day.
INSKEEP: And then you've identified a third moment in which Putin solidified his power and his influence in the world. What is that?
GILES: They're two linked events, and two which follow on, one from the other. First, Western airstrikes in Libya during the Libyan civil war in 2011 under a U.N. resolution from which Russia uncharacteristically helpfully abstained, and then Russia learning from this that it had to intervene in order to protect its friends around the world if they appeared to be under threat from Western intervention, as Moammar Gadhafi in Libya did.
Two years later, in Syria in 2013, there's a similar threat of airstrikes by, in this case the United States, and Russia steps in, engineers a diplomatic, not a military, solution to push the United States back from its preferred course of action and thereby proving to Putin that, actually, the U.S. can be outmaneuvered and Russia can exert the weight and the strength and the international power that it has to change U.S. policy. That sets Russia up in a much more confident space for later in the decade, when it moves against Ukraine and Crimea.
INSKEEP: That's really interesting - so it sets up the Ukraine invasion, although we now know of another consequence. Russia was acting to prop up a regime and protect a naval base, among other things, that it had in Syria. In the long term, that seems not to have worked out.
GILES: Right. Yes. Two years later, you have that direct Russian military intervention again, in this case, off the back of the Crimea operation, where Russia has been convinced, once again, after Georgia, after Crimea, that direct military intervention is a good way to get the geostrategic outcome that you want. And so why not proceed? Because the costs and consequences appear to be perfectly tolerable.
INSKEEP: If we can get a bottom line here, after 25 years of Russian rule, has Putin made Russia a stronger, better place?
GILES: Certainly, Russia thinks that Putin has made things better. Putin himself says he's pulled Russia back from the abyss. The key mistake is to assess success and failure by Western standards. That's not what Russia does, and Putin himself can pat himself on the back for delivering Russia the kind of place he wanted it to be.
INSKEEP: Thanks very much for your insights, Keir Giles of Chatham House and author of "Who Will Defend Europe? An Awakened Russia And A Sleeping Continent."
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