Russia Dismisses U.S. Threat to Personally Sanction Putin as Bluster

Any U.S. sanctions levied personally against President Vladimir V. Putin would not affect Russia’s course of action on Ukraine, the Kremlin spokesman said on Wednesday, brushing off President Biden’s statement that he would be willing to impose such penalties if Russian forces invaded Ukraine.

Diplomatic talks to resolve the crisis have yielded nothing but promises to keep talking, and while all sides say they want de-escalation, the war of words between Washington and Moscow is intensifying.

In that context, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said personal sanctions would be counterproductive, while having little financial effect. “It wouldn’t be painful politically — it would be destructive,” he said.

For weeks, the Biden administration has warned Russia that it would impose punishing economic sanctions if it invaded Ukraine. In a brief White House appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Biden gave what appeared to be an off-the-cuff response to a shouted question from a reporter about whether those penalties could directly target Mr. Putin. “Yes, I would see that,” the president said. He did not elaborate.

It is not clear exactly what moves Mr. Biden is weighing, or whether sanctions against Mr. Putin are even being actively considered.

But American openness to targeting the leader of a world power directly reflects the administration’s intent to deter Russian aggression by conveying the high costs it would incur — both for the nation and for Mr. Putin individually.

Russia has said it has no intention of invading Ukraine, despite amassing forces along the country’s borders to the north, east and south. Mr. Putin has not commented publicly on the crisis since Dec. 23, silence that has kept Western leaders unsure about his next move.

The Obama administration debated sanctions against Mr. Putin, but decided against them.

At a news conference last week, Mr. Biden said he expected that Russia would ultimately invade Ukraine. But he acknowledged on Tuesday how hard it is to read the Russian leader.

“I’ll be completely honest with you: It’s a little bit like reading tea leaves,” he said, according to a White House transcript. “Ordinarily, if it were a different leader — the fact that he continues to build forces along Ukraine’s border from Belarus all the way around — you’d say, ‘Well, that means that he is looking like he’s going to do something.’ But then you look at what his past behavior is and what everyone is saying in his team, as well as everyone else, as to what is likely to happen: It all comes down to his — his decision.”

Britain’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, signaled on Wednesday that her government would also consider directly targeting Mr. Putin with sanctions. “We’re not ruling anything out,” she told Sky News.

Washington is expected to deliver a written response this week to Russian demands about NATO forces in Eastern Europe. But because Moscow has demanded that NATO forces essentially withdraw from the region — a request that American officials have described as a nonstarter — the path to a diplomatic solution is hard to see.

Both Russia and Western nations have stepped up military activity. Russia has held drills near the Ukrainian borders; the United States has placed 8,500 troops on high alert for deployment to Eastern Europe; NATO has increased deployments in the region; and some American allies have supplied weapons to the Ukrainian government.

On Wednesday, the diplomatic efforts shifted to Paris, where envoys of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France were expected to meet to set the groundwork for another meeting of the leaders of those nations. President Emmanuel Macron of France said he would speak to Mr. Putin by telephone on Friday.

In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky continued to urge the public to remain calm.

“Protect your body from viruses, your brain from lies, your brain from lies, your heart from panic,” he told the nation in a video message.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting.

President Biden and other Western leaders have already threatened Russia with harsh sanctions if President Vladmir V. Putin moves troops into Ukraine. As tensions escalated this week, Mr. Biden warned the Russian president he might personally target him with sanctions if Russian forces invaded.

But how personal is personal?

While it was unclear exactly what measures Mr. Biden was referring to, the administration can move to seize an individual’s assets and bar travel to the United States by adding the person to what is known as the Specially Designated Nationals list. But it is far from clear that such a move would matter to Mr. Putin.

The Obama administration weighed sanctioning Mr. Putin personally after the invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014 and interference in the U.S. presidential election in 2016. But the White House decided against it, in part to avoid the appearance of a direct clash between two presidents, which Mr. Putin might relish.

Although he is believed to have amassed a great deal of personal wealth, it’s highly unlikely that any of it is in the United States. And any wealth Mr. Putin has is not only well hidden from Americans but within Russia as well, said James Nixey, the director of the Russia-Eurasia program at the Chatham House, a research organization in London.

“A lot of his personal wealth seems owned or safeguarded by his cronies,” Mr. Nixey said. When a controversy erupted over a palatial estate on the Black Sea said to belong to Mr. Putin, for example, the Russian billionaire Arkady Rotenberg stepped up to say he was the owner.

In addition, U.S. officials say that Russians have become more adept at shielding their wealth from sanctions over the last several years.

A travel ban, experts said, would also have limited impact.

“They can stop Vladimir Putin from vacationing in Disneyland,” said Jeffrey Schott, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

“These types of actions have been taken in the past against leaders of second-, third- and fourth-rate powers, not generally against major adversaries, because you still have to deal with them,” Mr. Schott said. “This is not going to change anything.”

Experts said that personal sanctions on leaders like Mr. Putin are very difficult to implement. Mr. Nixey said that what would probably be more effective “is to target the people around him, the inner circle.”

Some of Putin’s inner circle, he said, clearly does have assets abroad, and they frequently travel, shop, send their children to school or live outside of Russia. “If his closest allies are not enjoying the type of life they want to lead,” Mr. Nixey said, that would put pressure on Mr. Putin over the longer run. But sanctions against members of this group have not been very harsh so far, he added.

“The West is playing a game of chicken right now,” Mr. Nixey said. “We’ve tried no sanctions, and fairly weak sanctions,” but not very tough ones.

Other penalties targeting Russia’s giant energy companies and banks would hurt more, but the pain could be felt even more sharply in Europe, which gets about a third of its natural gas from Russia.

“The question is whether the U.S. and Europe are ready to bear the cost of this,” said Marina Shagina, a visiting fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

MOSCOW — Amid all the fear and guesswork over the possibility that President Vladimir V. Putin could soon order an attack on Ukraine, one man has been conspicuously silent: Mr. Putin.

In November and December, Mr. Putin spoke out about Ukraine repeatedly, pairing Russia’s ominous military buildup with threatening rhetoric. At an end-of-the-year news conference on Dec. 23, Mr. Putin warned that Russia needed “guarantees” that Ukraine would never join the NATO alliance, “right away, right now.”

That news conference, more than a month ago, was the last time that Mr. Putin spoke out about the current crisis over Ukraine, or about Russia’s demands that NATO roll back its presence in Eastern Europe. Ever since — even as Russian and American diplomats sparred in Geneva, Ukraine received Western weapons deliveries and President Biden predicted Mr. Putin would mount an invasion — Mr. Putin has said nothing about the matter in public.

On Wednesday, Mr. Putin held a video conference with Italian executives about doing business in Russia. In his televised opening remarks, Mr. Putin discussed Moscow’s candidacy to host the Expo 2030 world’s fair and spoke at length about green-energy investment opportunities. He said nothing about the war fears and sanctions threats that have the Russian economy hanging in the balance.

“We’re in a suspended state,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Putin is laying low.”

As with all things when it comes to Mr. Putin’s foreign policy, the president’s remarkable silence in a high-stakes drama that revolves around him appeared designed, in part, to keep the West guessing at his intentions. It stood in contrast to the relentless speculation in Washington, where Mr. Biden has been asked repeatedly to render judgment on the likelihood of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. And it underscored the Kremlin’s discipline in controlling its message, with officials insisting that they would not make any decisions until the United States submits a written response to Russia’s demands to halt the expansion of NATO.

“Let’s first get the response,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said this week when asked about Russia’s stance. “Then the position will be formulated based on the conceptual guidelines provided by the head of state.”

Behind the scenes, in the Kremlin’s telling, Mr. Putin has been busy. In the last two weeks, Mr. Putin has spoken by phone with the leaders of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Israel, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Finland, Armenia and Cuba. He hosted the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, at the Kremlin. He has done on-camera events almost daily — the sorts of carefully stage-managed meetings often used by Mr. Putin to signal his position on sensitive matters.

But right now, it appears that the silence is the signal.

Ms. Stanovaya, who has studied Mr. Putin for years, said she saw three possible explanations for the president’s silence. Having laid out his hard-line stance demanding immediate concessions from the West late last year, Mr. Putin may see no point in repeating himself and is leaving the back-and-forth to his diplomats. It could also be that he sees a glimmer of hope for a possible deal, and wants to avoid saying anything about it for the moment. Or he may have already decided on a military course of action, and is preparing to implement it while awaiting a formal response.

“We will still hear from him,” Ms. Stanovaya said of Mr. Putin.

As part of the frenzied diplomatic effort to head off a conflagration in Ukraine, there has been a virtual summit between President Biden and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, as well as meetings between the top diplomats in Geneva, Brussels and Vienna.

On Wednesday, when envoys from France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine met in Paris, it marked a revival of something known as the Normandy Format, a diplomatic grouping that has gathered periodically since the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea.

The format has its advantages, according to some analysts. By excluding the United States, it keeps participants from getting bogged down in bilateral U.S.-Russia disputes. But France and Germany, as the European Union’s biggest powers and the ones with the most to lose economically through E.U. sanctions against Russia, wield enough political clout to conduct serious talks.

Expectations for Wednesday’s meeting were low partly because they included senior officials from the four nations, but not their leaders.

The group was created on June 6, 2014, when leaders of the four nations met on the sidelines of commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, France, during World War II. It was the first meeting between Mr. Putin and Petro O. Poroshenko, then the leader of Ukraine, since the Russian invasion.

The Normandy Format helped broker a cease-fire agreement, known as the Minsk accord, in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas, where Russia-backed separatists had seized government buildings. But Russia and Ukraine argued over other steps, including disengaging armed groups in the region, and the cease-fire has been violated repeatedly.

The Normandy grouping lay dormant from 2016 to 2019, when Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called for a renewed effort to resolve the conflict in the east. Mr. Zelensky has described the format as “the only platform for negotiations on a peaceful settlement in eastern Ukraine.”

The Biden administration announced on Tuesday that it was working with gas and crude oil suppliers from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia to bolster supplies to Europe in the coming weeks, in an effort to blunt the threat that Russia could cut off fuel shipments in the escalating conflict over Ukraine.

European allies have been cautious in public about how far they would go in placing severe sanctions on Moscow if it invades Ukraine. Germany has been especially wary; it has shuttered many of its nuclear plants, increasing its dependence on natural gas imports to generate electricity.

Many European officials have said they suspect President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia instigated the current crisis in the depths of winter for a reason, calculating that he has more leverage if he can threaten to turn off Russian fuel sales to Europe.

So in recent weeks, American officials have been planning an effort that has echoes of the Berlin airlift, the attempt to keep West Berlin supplied in the face of a Soviet blockade in 1948 and 1949. That event led to the creation of NATO, the defensive alliance that Mr. Putin is hoping to undercut by massing troops along the Ukrainian border, and by demanding that NATO pull back from what he has called Russia’s “sphere of influence.”

KYIV, Ukraine — Despite Russia’s military buildup at the Ukrainian border, NATO forces on alert and the United States warning that an attack could come imminently, Ukraine’s leadership is playing down the Russian threat.

That has left analysts guessing about the leadership’s motivation. Some say it is to keep the Ukrainian markets stable, prevent panic and avoid provoking Moscow, while others attribute it to the country’s uneasy acceptance that conflict with Russia is part of Ukraine’s daily existence.

Already this week, Ukraine’s defense minister asserted that there had been no change in the Russian forces compared with a buildup in the spring; the head of the national security council accused some Western countries and news media outlets of overstating the danger for geopolitical purposes; and a Foreign Ministry spokesman took a swipe at the United States and Britain for pulling families of diplomats from embassies in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.

This week’s proclamations came after an address to the nation last week by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he asked: “What’s new? Isn’t this the reality for eight years?”

How to interpret the threat from Russian troops and equipment massed at Ukraine’s border is a subject of intense debate. Ukraine’s own military intelligence service now says there are at least 127,000 troops on the border, significantly more than were deployed by Russia in the spring buildup.

That does not yet include the troops arriving in neighboring Belarus, a Russian ally, ahead of military exercises next month. The United States says those drills could be used as a pretext to place forces within striking distance of Kyiv.

Even so, in an interview on Monday with the Ukrainian television station ICTV, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, seemed to wonder what all the fuss was about.

“Today, at this very moment, not a single strike group of the Russian armed forces has been established, which attests to the fact that tomorrow they are not going to invade,” Mr. Reznikov said. “That is why I ask you to not spread panic.”

There are different reasons for the disconnect in messaging between Ukrainian officials and their American counterparts, analysts say. Mr. Zelensky must be deft in drafting a message that keeps Western aid flowing, does not provoke Russia and reassures the Ukrainian people.

And after eight years of war with Russia, experts say, Ukrainians simply calculate the threat differently than their Western allies.

As the United States issued warnings last month about the Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders and President Biden threatened President Vladimir V. Putin with sanctions if he launched an invasion, researchers noticed an uptick in social media posts accusing Ukraine of plotting a genocide against ethnic Russians.

In one example, an arm of the Moscow-controlled broadcaster RT circulated a clip of Mr. Putin saying that events in eastern Ukraine “resemble genocide.” News Front, which the State Department has called a disinformation outlet with ties to Russian security services, followed with an article on Dec. 13 that said the United States did not consider the massacres to be a genocide.

In the months since the Russian troop buildup began, Moscow and its online army of allies have pushed out old arguments about western Ukrainians being aligned with Nazism, have falsely accused the United States of using proxy forces to plot a chemical attack and have claimed that Russia’s planned military operations were intended to protect ethnic Russians or to pre-empt action by NATO, according to researchers.

American intelligence officials said Russia had produced a steady stream of disinformation about Ukraine since 2014. But they observed an uptick in December and January as Moscow increased pressure on the government in Kyiv.

In speeches, interviews and lengthy articles, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his close associates have telegraphed a singular fixation on Ukraine. The Kremlin thesis goes that Ukrainians are “one people” with Russians, living in a failing state controlled by Western forces determined to divide and conquer the post-Soviet world.

Ukrainians, who ousted a Russia-friendly president in 2014 and are increasingly in favor of binding their country to Western institutions, would largely beg to differ. But Mr. Putin’s conviction finds a receptive ear among many Russians, who see themselves as linked intimately with Ukraine by generations of linguistic, cultural, economic, political and family ties.

Russians often view Kyiv, now the Ukrainian capital and once the center of the medieval Kyivan Rus, as the birthplace of their nation. Well-known Russian-language writers, such as Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, came from Ukraine, as did the Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Ukrainian is Ukraine’s official language, but Russian — which is closely related — is still widely spoken. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, now speaks Ukrainian in public but first gained fame as a Russian-language comedian who performed across the former Soviet Union.

To Mr. Putin — and many other Russians — the conflict with Ukraine is about a hurt national psyche, a historical injustice to be set right. One of his former advisers, Gleb O. Pavlovsky, in an interview described the Kremlin’s view of Ukraine as a “trauma wrapped in a trauma” — the dissolution of the Soviet Union coupled with the separation of a nation Russians long viewed as simply an extension of their own.

transcript

transcript

Listen to ‘The Daily’: Why Ukraine Matters to Vladimir Putin

Amid fears that Moscow is preparing for an invasion, one thing is clear: The Russian president has a singular fixation on the former Soviet republic.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]

Today: Russia is making preparations for what many fear may be a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, prompting warnings from the U.S. of serious consequences if it does. I spoke to my colleague, Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski, about what Vladimir Putin wants from Ukraine and just how far he may go to get it.

It’s Wednesday, December 8.

Anton, describe the scene right now on the border between Ukraine and Russia. What does it look like? What exactly is happening there?

anton troianovski

Well, what you’re seeing on the Russian side of the border within 100 to 200 miles away is that thousands of Russian troops are on the move.

archived recording 1

A top military official says intelligence shows nearly 100,000 Russian troops —

archived recording 2

Russian troops have massed on the border of Ukraine.

archived recording 3

— troops on the border with Ukraine. And that’s prompted fears of an invasion early next year.

anton troianovski

We’re seeing a lot of social media footage of tanks and other military equipment on the move, on trains, in some cases, heading west toward the Ukraine border area from as far away as Siberia.

archived recording

Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have been building for some time in the wake of —

anton troianovski

These satellite images that we’re seeing show deployment areas around Ukraine that were empty as recently as June that are now full of military equipment-like tanks and armored personnel carriers.

archived recording

The U.S. called it unusual activity.

anton troianovski

And obviously, Russia moves its forces all the time. It does big military exercises, snap military exercises all the time, but what we’re being told is that these military movements are very unusual. Some of them are happening at night and, in other ways, seemingly designed to obfuscate where various units are going. And experts are saying we’re also seeing things like logistics and medical equipment being moved around, stuff that you really would see if there were real preparations being made for large-scale military action.

michael barbaro

So what’s happening in Russia is not just the movement of the troops that would perhaps carry out an invasion, but the kind of military personnel and equipment that would be required to deal with the repercussions of something like invading Ukraine?

anton troianovski

Yes. So American intelligence officials are seeing intelligence that shows Russia preparing for a military offensive involving an estimated 175,000 troops —

michael barbaro

Wow.

anton troianovski

— as soon as early next year.

michael barbaro

And Anton, is Ukraine preparing for what certainly looks, from what you just described, as a potential invasion?

anton troianovski

They’re in a really tough spot because no matter how much they prepare, their military would be utterly outgunned and outmatched. Ukraine doesn’t have the missile defense and air defense systems that could prevent a huge shock-and-awe campaign at the beginning of Russian military action.

They also don’t know, if and when an attack comes, which direction it might come from, because Russia could attack from any of three directions. So we’re not seeing a big mobilization in Ukraine right now, but our reporting on the ground there does show a grim and determined mood among the military. The soldiers on the border have made it clear that if it comes to it, they will be prepared to do what they can to make this as costly as possible for the other side.

michael barbaro

So I guess the question everyone has in this moment is why would Putin want to invade Ukraine right now and touch off what would no doubt be a major conflict, one in which, as you just said, Russia would have many advantages, but would nevertheless end up probably being a very deadly conflict?

anton troianovski

So obviously, we don’t yet know whether Putin has made the decision to invade. He’s clearly signaling he’s prepared to use military force. What we do know is that he has been extraordinarily fixated on the issue of Ukraine for years. But I think to really understand it, you have to look at three dates over the last 30 years that really show us why Ukraine matters so much to Putin.

michael barbaro

OK. So what’s the first date?

anton troianovski

The first one, 1991, almost exactly 30 years ago, the Soviet Union breaks up, and Ukraine becomes an independent country. For people of Putin’s generation, this was an incredibly shocking and even traumatic moment. Not only did they see and experience the collapse of an empire, of the country that they grew up in, that they worked in, that, in Putin’s case, the former K.G.B. officer that they served. But there was also a specific trauma of Ukraine breaking away. Ukraine, of all the former Soviet republics, was probably the one most valuable to Moscow.

It was a matter of history and identity with, in many ways, Russian statehood originating out of the medieval Kiev Rus civilization. There’s the matter of culture with so many Russian language writers like Gogol and Bulgakov coming from Ukraine. There was the matter of economics with Ukraine being an industrial and agricultural powerhouse during the Soviet Union, with many of the planes and missiles that the Soviets were most proud of coming from Ukraine.

michael barbaro

So there’s a sense that Ukraine is the cradle of Russian civilization, and to lose it is to lose a part of Russia itself.

anton troianovski

Yeah. And it’s a country of tens of millions of people that is also sandwiched between modern-day Russia and Western Europe. So the other issue is geopolitical, that Ukraine in that sort of Cold War security, East-versus-West mindset, Ukraine was a buffer between Moscow and the West. So 1991 was the year when that all fell apart.

And then by the time that Putin comes to power 10 years later, he’s already clearly thinking about how to reestablish Russian influence in that former Soviet space in Eastern Europe and in Ukraine in particular. We saw a lot of resources go in economically to try to bind Ukraine to Russia, whether it’s discounts on natural gas or other efforts by Russian companies, efforts to build ties to politicians and oligarchs in Ukraine. Really, a multipronged effort by Putin and the Kremlin to really gain as much influence as possible in that former Soviet space that they saw as being so key to Russia’s economic and security interests.

michael barbaro

Got it.

anton troianovski

And then fast forward to the second key date, 2014, which is the year it became clear that that strategy had failed.

archived recording

Now, to the growing unrest in Ukraine and the violent clashes between riot police and protesters.

michael barbaro

And why did that strategy fail in 2014?

anton troianovski

That was the year that Ukraine had its — what’s called its Maidan Revolution.

archived recording 1

The situation in Kiev has been very tense.

archived recording 2

Downtown Kiev has been turned into a charred battlefield following two straight nights of rioting.

anton troianovski

It’s a pro-Western revolution —

archived recording

They want nothing short of revolution, a new government and a new president.

anton troianovski

— that drove out a Russia-friendly president, that ushered in a pro-Western government, that made it its mission to reduce Ukraine’s ties with Russia and build its ties with the West.

archived recording

Ukrainians who want closer ties with the West are once again back in their thousands on Independence Square here in Kiev. They believe they —

michael barbaro

Hmm. And what was Putin’s response to that?

anton troianovski

Well, Putin didn’t even see it as a revolution. He saw it as a coup engineered by the C.I.A. and other Western intelligence agencies meant to drive Ukraine away from Russia. And —

archived recording

With stealth and mystery, Vladimir Putin made his move in Ukraine.

anton troianovski

— he used his military.

archived recording

At dawn, bands of armed men appeared at the two main airports in Crimea and seized control.

anton troianovski

He sent troops into Crimea, the Ukrainian Peninsula in the Black Sea that’s so dear to people across the former Soviet Union as kind of the warmest, most tropical place in a very cold part of the world.

archived recording

Tonight, Russian troops — hundreds, perhaps as many as 2,000, ferried in transport planes — have landed at the airports.

anton troianovski

He fomented a separatist war in Eastern Ukraine that by now has taken more than 10,000 lives and armed and backed pro-Russian separatists in that region. So that was the year 2014 when Russia’s earlier efforts to try to bind Ukraine to Moscow failed and when Russia started taking a much harder line.

michael barbaro

And this feels like a very pivotal moment because it shows Putin’s willingness to deploy the Russian military to strengthen the ties between Russia and Ukraine.

anton troianovski

Absolutely. Strengthened the ties or you can also say his efforts to enforce a Russian sphere of influence by military force. And it’s also the start of what we’ve been seeing ever since, which is Putin making it clear that he is willing to escalate, he is willing to raise the stakes and that he essentially cares more about the fate of Ukraine than the West does.

And that brings us to the third date I wanted to talk about, which is early this year, 2021, when we saw the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, really start taking a more aggressive anti-Russian and pro-Western tack. He cracked down on a pro-Russian oligarch and pro-Russian media. He continued with military exercises with American soldiers and with other Western forces.

He kept talking up the idea of Ukraine joining NATO. That’s the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Western military alliance. And in a sense, this is what Putin seems to fear the most, the idea of NATO becoming more entrenched in this region. So Putin made it clear that this was starting to cross what he describes as Russia’s red lines and that Russia was willing to take action to stop this.

michael barbaro

So to put this all together and understand why Putin is doing what he’s doing when it comes to Ukraine, we have as a backdrop here this fixation with Ukraine for historic, political, economic and cultural reasons. And what’s new and urgent here for Putin is his belief that Ukraine is on the verge of a major break with Russia and toward the West — in particular, a military alliance, NATO — and that he cannot tolerate. And so that brings us up to now and this very imminent and scary threat of a Russian invasion.

anton troianovski

That’s right, Michael. I spoke to a former advisor of Putin’s recently who described Ukraine as a trauma within a trauma for the Kremlin — so the trauma of the breakup of the Soviet Union plus the trauma of losing Ukraine specifically for all those reasons you mentioned. And the thing is it’s true.

Russia is losing Ukraine. I think objectively, though, you have to say it’s losing Ukraine in large part because of Putin’s policies, because of the aggressive actions he’s taken. And if you look at the polls before 2014, something like 12 percent of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. Now, it’s more than half.

michael barbaro

Wow.

anton troianovski

So you put all that together, Ukraine is indeed drifting toward the West. It does seem like Putin feels like he’s running out of time to stop this and that he’s willing to escalate, he’s willing to raise the stakes, to keep Ukraine out of the West. And what we’re seeing right now on the border is all that playing out.

[music]

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

So Anton, the question right now is will President Putin actually carry out an invasion of Ukraine? And how should we be thinking about that?

anton troianovski

Well, it’s quite perilous, of course, to try to get inside Putin’s head, but here’s the case for invading now. Number one: NATO and the United States have made it clear that they are not going to come to Ukraine’s defense, because Ukraine is not a member of the NATO alliance, and NATO’s mutual defense pact only extends to full-fledged members. And of course, I think, politically, Putin believes that neither in the U.S., nor in Western Europe, is there the will to see soldiers from those countries die fighting for Ukraine.

michael barbaro

Right. And President Biden has just very publicly pulled the United States out of the war in Afghanistan and more or less communicated that unless American national security interests are at play, he will not be dispatching troops anywhere.

anton troianovski

Exactly. So Putin saw that, and he sees that potentially things could change. If the West does have more of a military presence in Ukraine in the future, let alone if Ukraine were to become a member of NATO at some point — it’s not going to happen in the next few years, but perhaps at some point — then attacking Ukraine becomes a much more costly proposition. So it’s a matter of war now could be less costly to Russia than war later.

michael barbaro

Right. The geopolitics of this moment may work in favor of him doing it in a way that it might not in a year or two or three.

anton troianovski

Absolutely. And then there’s a couple of other reasons. There’s the fact that if we look at everything Putin has said and written over the last year, he really seems convinced that the West is pulling Ukraine away from Russia against the will of much of the Ukrainian people. Polling doesn’t really bear that out, but Putin really seems to be convinced of that. And so it seems like he may also be thinking that Ukrainians would welcome Russian forces as liberators from some kind of Western occupation.

And then third, there’s the economy. The West has already threatened severe sanctions against Russia were it to go ahead with military action, but Russia has been essentially sanctions-proofing its economy since at least 2014, which is when it took control of Crimea and was hit by all these sanctions from the U.S. and from the E.U. So Russia’s economy is still tied to the West.

It imports a lot of stuff from the West. But in many key areas, whether it’s technology or energy extraction or agriculture, Russia is becoming more self-sufficient. And it is building ties to other parts of the world — like China, India, et cetera — that could allow it to diversify and have basically an economic base even if an invasion leads to a major crisis in its financial and economic relationship with the West.

michael barbaro

Right. So this is the argument that Putin can live with the costs of the world reacting very negatively to this invasion?

anton troianovski

Exactly.

michael barbaro

OK. And what are the reasons why an invasion of Ukraine might not happen? What would be the case against it, if you were Vladimir Putin?

anton troianovski

Well, I mean, I have to say, talking to analysts, especially here in Russia, people are very skeptical that Putin would go ahead with an invasion. They point out that he is a careful tactician and that he doesn’t like making moves that are irreversible or that could have unpredictable consequences.

So if we even look at the military action he’s taken recently, the annexation of Crimea, there wasn’t a single shot fired in that. That was a very quick special-forces-type operation. What we’re talking about here, an invasion of Ukraine, would be just a massive escalation from anything Putin has done so far. We are talking about the biggest land war in Europe since World War II, most likely. And it would have all kinds of unpredictable consequences.

There’s also the domestic situation to keep in mind. Putin does still have approval ratings above 60 percent, but things are a bit shaky here, especially with Covid. And some analysts say that Putin wouldn’t want to usher in the kind of domestic unpredictability that could start with a major war with young men coming back in body bags.

And then finally, looking at Putin’s strategy and everything that he’s said, for all we know, he doesn’t really want to annex Ukraine. He wants influence over Ukraine. And the way he thinks he can do that is through negotiations with the United States.

And that’s where the last key point here comes in, which is Putin’s real conviction that it’s the U.S. pulling the strings here and that he can accomplish his goals by getting President Biden to sit down with him and hammering out a deal about the structure of security in Eastern Europe.

So in that sense, this whole troop build-up might not be about an impending invasion at all. It might just be about coercive diplomacy, getting the U.S. to the table, and getting them to hammer out an agreement that would somehow pledge to keep Ukraine out of NATO and pledge to keep Western military infrastructure out of Ukraine and parts of the Black Sea.

michael barbaro

Well in that sense, Anton, Putin may be getting what he wants, right? Because as we speak, President Putin and President Biden have just wrapped up a very closely watched phone call about all of this. So is it possible that that call produces a breakthrough and perhaps a breakthrough that goes Putin’s way?

anton troianovski

Well, that’s very hard to imagine. And that’s really what makes this situation so volatile and so dangerous, which is that what Putin wants, the West and President Biden can’t really give.

michael barbaro

Why not?

anton troianovski

Well, for instance, pledging to keep Ukraine out of NATO would violate the Western concept that every country should have the right to decide for itself what its alliances are. President Biden obviously has spent years, going back to when he was vice president, really speaking in favor of Ukrainian sovereignty and self-determination and trying to help Ukraine take a more Western path. So Biden suddenly turning on all of that and giving Putin what he wants here is hard to imagine.

michael barbaro

Right, because that would create a very slippery slope when it comes to any country that Russia wants to have influence over. It would then know that the right playbook would be to mass troops on the border and wait for negotiation with the U.S. and hope that the U.S. would basically sell those countries out. That’s probably not something you’re saying that President Biden would willingly do.

anton troianovski

Right. And then, of course, the other question is, well, if Russia doesn’t get what it wants, if Putin doesn’t get what he wants, then what does he do?

michael barbaro

So Anton, it’s tempting to think that this could all be what you just described as a coercive diplomatic bluff by Putin to extract what he wants from President Biden and from the West. But it feels like history has taught us that Putin is willing to invade Ukraine. He did it in 2014.

History has also taught us that he’s obsessed with Ukraine, dating back to 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union. And it feels like one of the ultimate lessons of history is that we have to judge leaders based on their actions. And his actions right now are putting 175,000 troops near the border with Ukraine. And so shouldn’t we conclude that it very much looks like Putin might carry out this invasion?

anton troianovski

Yes, that’s right. And of course, there are steps that Putin could take that would be short of a full-fledged invasion that could still be really destabilizing and damaging. Here in Moscow, I’ve heard analysts speculate about maybe pinpoint airstrikes against the Ukrainian targets, or a limited invasion perhaps just specifically in that area where Russian-backed separatists are fighting.

But even such steps could have really grave consequences. And that’s why if you combine what we’re seeing on the ground in Russia, near the border, and what we’ve been hearing from President Putin and other officials here in Moscow, that all tells us that the stakes here are really high.

michael barbaro

Well, Anton, thank you very much. We appreciate your time.

anton troianovski

Thanks for having me.

michael barbaro

On Tuesday afternoon, both the White House and the Kremlin released details about the call between Putin and Biden. The White House said that Biden warned Putin of severe economic sanctions if Russia invaded Ukraine. The Kremlin said that Putin repeated his demands that Ukraine not be allowed to join NATO and that Western weapons systems not be placed inside Ukraine. But Putin made no promises to remove Russian forces from the border.

[music]

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Tuesday night, top Democrats and Republicans said they had reached a deal to raise the country’s debt ceiling and avert the U.S. defaulting on its debt for the first time. The deal relies on a complicated one-time legislative maneuver that allows Democrats in the Senate to raise the debt ceiling without support from Republicans, since Republicans oppose raising the debt ceiling under President Biden. Without congressional action, the Treasury Department says it can no longer pay its bills after December 15.

Today’s episode was produced by Eric Krupke, Rachelle Bonja and Luke Vander Ploeg. It was edited by Michael Benoist, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

It is not the most important question regarding the international maelstrom currently brewing in Ukraine.

But it is a very common question, and one that carries what some may find an unexpectedly political answer: How do you pronounce the capital’s name, Kyiv?

Ukrainians have a preference — and it might not be the one most commonly heard or assumed. It sounds more similar to “keev” than the two-syllable “key-EV” favored by many Russian speakers, but that’s not exactly it, either.

Andrii Smytsniuk, a Ukrainian who teaches Ukrainian and Russian languages at the University of Cambridge, broke the word down letter by letter for English speakers in an interview on Tuesday. It’s a bit hard to describe.

The K sound is the same as in English.

The Y is similar to the I sounds in “little bit.”

The I is similar to the first part of “yeast.”

The V is a slightly shorter version of a W, as in “low,” or almost like the V in “love.”

Marta Jenkala, who teaches the Ukrainian language at University College London, endorsed the pronunciation seen in a video by Oleksandra Wallo, an assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas.

“It helps if you smile a little bit to say it, especially on the first syllable,” she said in the video.

In 2019, Yuri Shevchuk, a lecturer in Ukrainian at Columbia University, told The New York Times that native Ukrainians stress the first vowel, and pronounce it like the “i” in the word “kid” or “lid.” The second vowel is pronounced as a separate syllable, and sounds like the “ee” sound in “keel.” The V is also pronounced a bit differently, like the end of the word “low.”

One common pronunciation, “key-ev,” is the Russian form of saying it, and it is one Americans may tend to hear more often. Mr. Smytsniuk said he would argue for people pronouncing it the Ukrainian way “that is as close to the original as possible.”

“It is the same thing with names,” he said. “I think it makes sense to pronounce someone’s name the way the person would pronounce it.”

A discussion of the city name and pronunciation is the first thing he goes over in his Ukrainian language courses, he said, along with “Ukraine” versus “the Ukraine.” (When Ukraine became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, the preferred name became “Ukraine.”)

Most people are unaware of how to pronounce Kyiv, so he tries not to aggressively correct people, Mr. Smytsniuk said. But many people do take the issue seriously, he said.

“When I see American media, it’s always different, it’s always new, always a surprise,” he said.