Serhii Plokhy: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do you think is important to understand about the KGB, if we want to also understand Vladimir Putin? Since he was a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years. From my research, including on Stashynsky, what I understand is that in KGB, and it was a powerful organization, again, less powerful in ’50s and ’60s, but still very powerful organization. There was on the one hand the understanding of the situation in the country and abroad that probably other organizations didn’t have. They had also first pick in terms of the select and cadres. The work in the KGB was well paid and considered to be very prestigious. So, that was part to a degree of the Soviet elite in terms of whom they recruited. And they had a resentment over the party leadership that didn’t allow them to do James Bond kind of things that they would want to do because there were political risks. After this scandal with Stashynsky, at least on many levels, the KGB stopped the practice of the assassinations, political assassinations abroad because it was considered politically to be extremely, extremely dangerous. The person who was in charge of the KGB at the time of Bandera assassination, Shelepin, was one of the candidates to replace Khrushchev and Brezhnev used against him that scandal abroad eventually to remove him from Politburo. So, the KGB was really looking at the party leadership as to a degree, an effective corrupt and who was on their way. And from what I understand, that’s exactly the attitudes that people like Putin and people of his circle brought to power in Kremlin. So, the methods that KGB use they can use now, and there is no party or no other institution actually stopping them from doing that. And they think about, my understanding, the operations abroad about foreign policy in general in terms of the KGB mindset of planning operations and executing particular operations and so on and so forth. I think a lot of culture that came into existence in the Soviet KGB now became part of the culture of the Russian establishment. You wrote the book, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Return of History, that gives the full context leading up to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February, 2022. Can you take me through the key moments in history that led up to this war? So, we’ll mention the collapse of the Soviet Union. We could probably go much farther back, but the collapse of the Soviet Union mentioned 2014. Maybe you can highlight key moments that led up to 2022.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.