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OPINION:
I first set foot in Russia a couple of years after the presidents of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia signed a declaration in a Belarus forest, declaring that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Spending time in Moscow during the 1990s convinced me that the country was also spiraling along the same road to collapse and chaos.
While Russia was mired in an unpopular, bloody war in Chechnya, its failing economy reached rock bottom during the 1998 banking crisis, with a massive devaluation of the ruble and a humiliating default on the country’s sovereign debt.
Under the leadership of an increasingly incapacitated President Boris Yeltsin, Russian institutions were barely functioning. The only exceptions were the KGB’s successor agencies: Russia’s external intelligence service, which was still running high-profile sources inside the U.S. government, and the Federal Security Service, which was blanketing U.S. diplomats and businessmen in Russia with ubiquitous surveillance.
It was hardly unexpected among those of us intelligence professionals who had served in Russia and the region that a KGB operative such as Vladimir Putin, who directed Yeltsin’s FSB, would rise out of the ash heap of what a former boss of mine at the CIA called a “post-Soviet apocalyptic wasteland” to seize control of the Kremlin.
Mr. Putin established, over the ensuing decades, an authoritarian kleptocracy that denies the rule of law, freedom of speech and assembly, and freedom of the press. Relying on cloak-and-dagger espionage tactics to cement his grip on power while tolerating no dissent, Mr. Putin ruthlessly targets political opponents at home and abroad.
Mr. Putin’s iron grip has not solved his country’s deep-seated problems, including a demographic crisis, a massive brain drain, endemic corruption and an unbalanced economy overly dependent on the export of hydrocarbons. Russia’s annual inflation rate is nearly 10%, and interest rates have spiked to more than 20%.
It is hardly a model of good governance worth emulating.
As the Russians are fond of saying, “There is no such thing as a former spy.” Having perfected the art of obfuscation early in his intelligence career, Mr. Putin now wants the world to believe his twisted Potemkin village propaganda about Russian “might” while concealing the truth from his citizens and the rest of the world about the Kremlin’s many problems, not least of which is the cost of his barbaric war on Ukraine.
Good intelligence is, therefore, critical to uncloaking Mr. Putin’s true plans and his pain points, especially as the Trump administration reengages with Russia diplomatically. The White House should be leveling a host of requirements to the intelligence community, three of which should stand out.
First, honestly gauge the precariousness of Mr. Putin’s rule.
Consider: Ukraine has inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties on Russia, bravely defended its independence and awakened Europe from its post-Cold-War slumber. Finland and Sweden are now NATO members. Mr. Putin failed to accurately assess the will and capacity of Ukraine to fight, as well as the readiness of his armed forces.
The Russian leader stands accused of massive war crimes, kidnapping tens of thousands of Ukrainian children and barbarically targeting civilian Ukrainians in their homes, hospitals and maternity wards. Mr. Putin wants the world to believe that a Russian victory is inevitable. Still, he has failed to achieve the stated strategic objective of the war: toppling the Ukrainian government and installing a pro-Kremlin puppet regime. No one knows the cost of Mr. Putin’s war better than his security services and military, which have access to the truth.
Second, Mr. Putin and his KGB cronies have always regarded the U.S. as Russia’s “main enemy.” If the past is prologue, then Mr. Putin will want to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies, weaken the U.S. internally and undermine American soft power while making it appear that Russia is operating on a level playing field.
Third, Mr. Putin’s grand strategic objective is to make Ukraine a satellite state, just as Josef Stalin did to Eastern Europe’s Warsaw Pact members. We might find the death and destruction of the war abhorrent, but to paraphrase Stalin, those are just “statistics” to Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin might accept a ceasefire and seek considerable concessions in return, but only if he retains the capability through overt military and covert action to carry on his long strategy of destroying Ukraine as a state.
When he launched his not-so-special “special military operation” in 2022, Mr. Putin expected a quick victory akin to the lightning annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. However, wars end when one side wins or both sides are too exhausted to fight.
Despite the hundreds of thousands of dead or injured soldiers, Russia shows no sign of interest in a fair, peaceful settlement of the war it started. Now it’s up to CIA Director John Ratcliffe and his team to find evidence to the contrary, if any such evidence exists.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018.
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