LEILA FADEL, HOST:
What does Vladimir Putin stand to gain when he meets with President Trump tomorrow in Alaska? New York Times opinion columnist Masha Gessen wrote this week that simply by having the meeting, Trump is handing the Russian leader a victory. I asked Gessen why.
MASHA GESSEN: Putin gets what he wants basically the moment he walks into the meeting in Alaska, because the two things that he has been trying to prove are that Russia is a superpower and has to be negotiated with directly and cannot be shunned, and the other is that the Russian-Ukrainian war is a war between Russia and the United States and Ukraine is merely a proxy. And so by meeting with Putin directly, A, and B, by excluding, at this point, Volodymyr Zelenskyy from this meeting, Trump is signaling that both of these things are true.
FADEL: What is Putin's ultimate goal in Ukraine?
GESSEN: We can only go on what he has said. He has been remarkably consistent. He wants guarantees that Ukraine will never join NATO, to annex at least part of Ukraine, and he wants a puppet regime in Ukraine. He does not recognize Volodymyr Zelenskyy's government as legitimate.
FADEL: Does Vladimir Putin have any incentive to end the war?
GESSEN: He has no incentive to end the war because there's no chance that he will be defeated. A lot of people have gotten this wrong. I mean, I think this is our human tendency to ascribe our rational understanding of the world to everyone else. So rationally, Putin is damaging his country's economy. He's making his people poor. A lot of his people have died. Shouldn't that mean that he needs an off-ramp from Ukraine? But these things don't matter to him. And I think what's most difficult for Trump to understand is that money doesn't matter as much to Putin as his idea of greatness, his aspiration to immortality, his desire to be remembered as the president who reclaimed Russia's colonies and Russia's place in the world.
FADEL: How does this summit play into this imperialist agenda that you describe?
GESSEN: For one thing, his - I don't know whose idea it was to meet in Alaska. But it's hard to explain just how alive this idea of Alaska as a formerly Russian property or maybe a Russian land by right is in Russia. There are pop songs about Russian Alaska.
FADEL: Oh.
GESSEN: There are billboards in various parts of Russia that paint Alaska the colors of the Russian flag and say, give it back. So not only does Putin, who's wanted by the International Criminal Court - not only does he get to visit the United States, but he gets to go to Alaska. And the one prediction that I will absolutely make is that Putin is going to say something about it. He's going to make a quip about how Alaska either was or, you might say, is still Russia.
FADEL: We'll see if that comes true tomorrow. And just a reminder for people who might not be aware of the history - the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million. Pretty good price.
How does President Trump's approach to Putin and to Russia differ from previous presidents - Biden specifically - if it does at all?
GESSEN: All of this is so messy and so loud and so different from the Biden administration that it's easy to miss the fact that it's actually more of the same. Basically, the United States has used economic sanctions as its primary foreign policy instrument in relationship to Russia going on 12 years. The Biden administration threatened devastating sanctions. They didn't devastate Russia. Now the Trump administration - it may be calling them tariffs. It may be calling them sanctions. But it's basically the same idea - that economic pressure will destabilize the regime or force him to change course. It doesn't work.
FADEL: So what does work?
GESSEN: We need to look at Putin's motivation. He has retooled the Russian economy and Russian politics and really the heart of his regime to being this country of war. That is his entire ideology, basically. Something needs to be big enough to counter that motivation. And the only thing that I can imagine that can do that is an actual real threat of military defeat. And that gets us to what the United States and NATO countries have been doing in relationship to Ukraine for 3 1/2 years. They have helped Ukraine, but they have not helped Ukraine to the extent that Russia actually has to fear military defeat. We know that NATO countries have the capacity to do that. The United States has the capacity to do that. But as long as it's only Ukrainians who are dying, there's no reason to do that.
FADEL: Masha Gessen is a Russian and American journalist and a columnist for The New York Times. Thank you for your time and your insights.
GESSEN: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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