WAR : Is World War III Coming? | Bob Woodward | Audiobook 1

Prologue.

One evening in February 1989, my Watergate reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, bumped into Donald Trump at a dinner party in New York City. "Why don't you come on up?" urged me on the phone from the party, hosted by Armit Tigan, the Turkish-American socialite and record executive, in his Upper East Side townhouse. "Everybody's having a good time," he said. "Trump is here. It's really interesting. I've been talking to him."

Bernstein was fascinated with Trump's book, *The Art of the Deal*. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to join him, in large part, as Carl often reminds me, because I needed the key to his apartment where I was staying at the time. "I'll be there soon," I told him. It had been 17 years since Carl and I first collaborated on stories about the Watergate burglary, June 17th, 1972.

Trump took a look at us standing together, then age 45, and he came over. "Wouldn't it be amazing if Woodward Bernstein interviewed Donald Trump?" he said. Carl and I looked at each other. "Sure," Carl said. "How about tomorrow?" "Yeah," Trump said. "Come to my office at Trump Tower."

"This guy is interesting," Carl assured me, "but not in politics." I said I was immediately intrigued by Trump, a hustler, entrepreneur, and his unique, carefully nurtured, and cultivated persona, designed even then to manipulate others with precision and a touch of ruthlessness.

The Trump interview, taped on a micro cassette and transcribed with a typewriter, was deposited into a manila envelope with a copy of Trump's book and eventually lost in piles and piles of records, interview notes, and news clippings. "I am a pack rat," for over 30 years, Carl and I looked for it. I joked with President Trump about the lost interview when I interviewed him in the Oval Office in December 2019 for the second of my three books on his presidency, *Rage*.

We sat at a table and we talked. "Trump recalled, 'I remember it well,'" he said. "I should try to find it because he believed it was a great interview." Last year, 2023, I went to a facility where my records are stored and sifted through hundreds of boxes of old files. In a box of miscellaneous news clippings from the 1980s, I noticed a plain, slightly battered envelope.

"The interview," it's a portrait of the young Trump at age 42, focused exclusively on his real estate deals, on making money, and his celebrity status. But he was hazy about his future. "I'm really looking to make the greatest hotel," Trump told us in 1989. "That's why I'm doing suites on top. I'm building great suites."

"You ask me where I'm going, and I don't think I could tell you at all," Trump said. "If everything stayed the way it is right now, I could probably tell you pretty well where I'm going to be." But he emphasized the world changes. He believed that was the only certainty. He also spoke about how he behaved differently depending on who he was with.

"If I'm with fellas, meaning contractors and this and that, I react one way," Trump said, and then gestured to us. "If I know I have the two pros of all time sitting there with me with tape recorders on, you naturally act differently." "Much more interesting would be the real act, as opposed to the facade," Trump said about himself. I wondered about the real act. "It's much more interesting. It's an act that hasn't been caught," Trump added. He was constantly performing, and that day, we were the recipients of his full-on charm offensive. "It's never the same when there's somebody sitting with you and literally taking notes. You know you're on your good behavior, and frankly, it's not nearly as interesting as the real screaming, shouting."

Trump also appeared preoccupied with looking tough, strong. "The worst part about the television stuff, when we do it, is they put the makeup all over you," Trump said. "This morning, I did something, and they put the makeup all over your face, and so do you go up and take a shower and clean it off, or do you leave it? And in the construction business, you don't wear makeup. You got problems if you wear makeup."

We asked Trump to take us through the steps of one of his real estate deals. "How are they done?" "Instinctively," he said. "Immediately. I cannot tell you what it is, you understand, because instinct is far more important than any other ingredient. If you have the right instincts, and the worst deals I've made have been deals where I didn't follow my instinct. The best deals I've made have been deals where I followed my instinct and wouldn't listen to all of the people that said, 'There's no way it works.'"

"Very few people have proper instincts," he said. "But I've seen people with proper instincts do things that other people just can't do." "Is there a master plan?" "I don't think I could define what the great master plan is," he said, referring to his life. "You understand that, but it somehow fits together in an instinctual way. I'll tell you what, if you find out, let me know. I'd be interested. I might be actually interested."

I asked about his social conscience. "Could it lead you into politics or some public role?" "Well, you know, to me, it's all very interesting," he said. "The other week, I was watching a boxing match in Atlantic City, and these are rough guys, you know, physically rough guys, and mentally tough in a sense, okay? I mean, they're not going to write books, but mentally tough in a certain sense. And the champion lost, and he was defeated by somebody who's a very good fighter, but who wasn't expected to win. And they interviewed the boxer after the match, and they said, 'How'd you do this? How'd you win?' And he said, 'I just, just went with the punches, man. I just went with the punches.' I thought it was a great expression," Trump said, "because it's about life, just as much as it is about boxing or anything else. You go with the punches."

To look back over Trump's life now: his real estate deals, his presidency, impeachments, investigations, civil and criminal trials, a conviction, attempted assassination, campaign for reelection. It is exactly what he has done: "Roll with the punches."

"Anybody that says where they're going to be in 10 years is a schmuck," Trump added. "The world changes. You'll have depressions, you'll have recessions, you'll have upswings, you'll have downswings, you'll have wars, things that are beyond your control, or in most cases, beyond people's control. So you really do have to go with the punches, and it's bad to predict too far out in advance, you know, where you're going to be at the time."

He was almost obsessed with critical news headlines about him losing deals. "You make more money as a seller than you do as a buyer," Trump explained. "I found that to be a seller today is to be a loser psychologically, and that's wrong. I'll tell you what, I beat the [ __ ] out of a guy named M.V. Griffin," Trump said. Griffin was a television talk show host and media mogul. "Just beat him. And you know, he came in, you talk about makeup, he came in with makeup, and he was on television. You know, he comes into my office. He made a deal to buy everything I didn't want in Resorts International," Trump said. "I kept telling him, 'No, no, no, no,' and he kept raising the price, raising the price, raising the price. All of a sudden, it turns out to be an incredible deal for me, an unbelievable deal. Plus," Trump added, "I got the Taj Mahal, which is the absolute crown jewel of the world." He was referring to the Taj Mahal Atlantic City casino, not the sacred mosque in India. "The point is that people thought I lost," he said. "So what's happened is there's a mood in the world for the last 5 years that if you're a seller, you're a loser, even if you're a seller at a huge profit."

I asked Trump, "When you get up in the morning, what do you read? Who do you talk to? What information sources do you trust?" "Much of it is very basic," Trump said. "I read the *Wall Street Journal* and the *New York Times*. I read the *Post* and the *News*, not so much for business, just a sort of, I live in the city, and you know, it's reporting on the city." The *New York Post* was a tabloid that covered Trump almost obsessively. "I rely less on people than I do just this general flow of information," he said. "I also speak to cab drivers. I go to cities and say, 'What do you think of this?' That's how I bought Mar-a-Lago, talking to a cab driver and asking him, 'What's hot in Florida? What's the greatest house in Palm Beach?' 'Oh, the greatest house is Mar-a-Lago,' the cab driver said. I said, 'Where is it? Take me over.'" Trump then added, "I was in Palm Beach, I was at The Breakers, and I was bored stiff." Trump eventually bought Mar-a-Lago for $7 million.

"I talk to anybody," he said. "I always call it my poll." "People jokingly tell me, you know, that Trump will speak with anybody, and I do. I speak to the construction workers and the cab drivers, and those are the people I get along with best, anyway, in many respects. I speak to everybody," Trump claimed.

He bought 9.9% of a casino company, Bally Manufacturing, and in a short period of time, made $32 million. He then said he spent close to $100 million on buying stocks in Bally, which led to a lawsuit against him. "The lawyers for the other side wanted Trump's records. They were trying to prove that I did this tremendous research on the company, that I spent weeks and months analyzing the company," Trump said. "And they figured I'd have files that would be up to the ceiling. So they subpoenaed everything, and I ended up giving them no papers. There were virtually no files."

"So I'm being grilled by one of their high-priced lawyers," Trump impersonated the lawyer. "'How long did you know about this, Mr. Trump? And when?' In other words, they're trying to say, like, this is this great plot." Trump said, "I said, 'I don't know. I just started thinking about it the day I bought it.'" The lawyer was incredulous. "'Well, how many reports did you do?' 'Well, I really didn't. I just had a feeling.'"

"They didn't believe that somebody would take $100 million bucks and put it into a company with no real research," Trump said. "Now, I had research in my head, but beyond that, you know, they just had not thought that happens. And the corporate mind and the corporate mentality doesn't think that happens. Those are my best deals."

Carl asked Trump if he ever sees himself in a public service role. "I don't think so, but I'm not sure," Trump said. "I'm young, in theory. Statistically, I have a long time left. I've seen people give so much away that they don't have anything when bad times come." He said he was setting up a Donald J. Trump Foundation. "When I kick the bucket, as the expression goes, I want to leave a tremendous amount of money to that Foundation, some to my family, and some to the Foundation. You have an obligation to your family." Trump spoke about bad times as if they were inevitable. "I always like to sort of prepare for the worst, and it doesn't sound like a very particularly nice statement," he said. "I know times will get bad. It's just a question when."

He brought up his private 282-foot yacht that he bought from the wealthy Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Trump had renamed it *Trump Princess*. "To build new today would cost $150 to $200 million. If you guys want, we'll go on it or something. It's phenomenal. If you read *Time* magazine, I do nothing but float around on this boat all day long. It's not the way it is."

"Who is your best friend?" I asked. He listed some names of businessmen and investors, people who worked for him that neither Carl nor I recognized, and his brother Robert. "I guess in all cases, business-related," he said. "Only because that's the people I deal with. But friendship is a strange thing, you know. I'm always concerned with friendship. Sometimes you like to test people. Right now, everybody wants to be my friend for whatever reason, okay? For the obvious reasons. Sometimes you'd like to test and say, 'One day, just for a period of a week, that Trump blew it,' and then go back and call them up and invite them for dinner and see whether they show up. I've often wanted to do that. Take a period of a month and let the world think that I blew it, just to test whether or not, in fact, the friends were friends."

"I'm a great loyalist. I believe in loyalty to people. I believe in having great friends and great enemies. I've seen people who were on top who didn't stay on top, and all of a sudden, the same people who were kissing their ass are gone. I mean, like gone." One example was a bank. "He was really a great banker for one of the big banks, Citibank, and he was in charge of huge loans to very substantial people. He made a lot of people rich loaning money. And he called me, like, two years after the fact. He said, 'You know, it's incredible. The same people that were my best friends, that were calling me up all the time and kissing my ass in every way, I can't even get through to them on the telephone anymore.'" When he left the bank, they wouldn't take his calls anymore.

I would. Trump described his strategy of refusing to pay the property violations he received from inspectors until they disappeared or forgot about them. "From day one, I said, '[ __ ] them,'" Trump said of the inspectors. "When I was in Brooklyn, inspectors would come around, and they'd give me a violation on buildings that were absolutely perfect," Trump recalled. "I'd say, '[ __ ] you,' and they'd give me more violations and more. And for one month, it was miserable. I had more violations, and they were unfounded violations, but they give it because what they wanted was, if you ever paid them off, they'd always come back. So what happened to me in one month, they just said, '[ __ ] this guy, he's a piece of [ __ ],' and they'd go to somebody else."

"The point is, if you fold, it causes you much more trouble than it's worth," Trump said. "You can say the same thing with the mob. If you agree to do business with them, they'll always come back. If you tell them to go [ __ ] themselves, in that case, perhaps in a nicer way, but if you tell them, 'Forget it, man, forget it, nothing's worth it,' they might try and put pressure on you at the beginning, but in the end, they're going to find an easier mark because it's too tough for them." Inspectors, mobs, unions.

"Okay," Carl asked, "this was Trump's basic philosophy. Who are your greatest enemies?" "Well, I hate to say, because then you're just going to go and interview for me. I hate playing the role of a critic." Trump, in fact, loved it. "The obvious one is Ed Koch," he said. Ed Koch was the worst mayor in the history of New York City.

35 years later, Trump still criticizes opponents with the same exaggerated effect. "Joe Biden is the worst president in the history of the United States," he said. After President Biden announced in July 2024 that he would not be seeking reelection.

Even in 1989, Trump's character was focused on winning, fighting, and surviving. "And the only way you do that," he said, "is instinct. If people know you're a folder, he said, if people know that you're going to be weak, they're going to go after you." Trump said, "It was a whole presentation. It's a way of presenting. You've got to know your audience. And by the way, for some people, be a killer. For some people, be all candy. For some people, be different. For some people, both killer, candy, or both." That's Donald Trump.

What a remarkable time capsule from 1989, a full psychological study of a man then, a 42-year-old man, Manhattan real estate king. I never expected Donald Trump to become president or a defining political figure of our time. The same instincts I reported on during his presidency are just as much a trademark of his character back then. Here, in this interview 35 years ago, we see the origin of Trumpism in the words of Trump himself.

1. 35 years later, as rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, President Donald Trump watched on television from his private dining room next to the Oval Office. His supporters climbed the walls of the historic building, shattered windows, and attempted to force the front doors open with a battering ram. "Gallows were being set up outside. Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!" Trump's supporters called for the Vice President, who had refused to overthrow the certification of Biden's 2020 election win.

"Where is the president?" Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was calling the White House, asking aides to connect him with Trump. McCarthy's office was being vandalized. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was being ransacked. Supporters took pictures with their feet on her desk. They left a note on her keyboard: "We will not back down." Congressional leaders, including McCarthy and Pelosi, had been rushed out by Capitol Security and driven to a secure location, Fort McNair, a U.S. Army Post a few blocks from the Washington Nationals baseball stadium. But their staff was still in there, hiding in various offices with the lights switched off, desks barricading the doors.

President Trump finally got on the phone. "You've got to get out and tell these people to stop," McCarthy said. He was intense. "Someone just got shot." At 2:44 p.m., Air Force veteran Ashley Babbitt was shot and killed by a police officer inside the Capitol as she and others tried to breach a door near lawmakers. Among the rioters were leaders of pro-Trump far-right militia groups, the Oathkeepers and the Proud Boys, as well as conspiracy theorists from groups like QAnon. What began as a Trump rally had escalated into a violent attack on the Constitutional order of the United States.

"I'll put a tweet out or something," Trump replied. "They've taken over the Capitol!" McCarthy yelled at him. "You've got to tell them to stop! You've got to get them out of here! Get them out of here now!" The President seemed not to grasp the gravity of the situation. "Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are," Trump said.

The FBI later estimated that over 2,000 people entered the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Five people died, 172 police officers were injured, and more than 500 were arrested. The cost of the damage to the historic Capitol building exceeded $2.7 million. It took President Trump 187 minutes to post a tweet telling his supporters to go home.

Two months earlier, Donald Trump had lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, but he rejected the loss. Instead, he said it was rigged, a fraud on the American public, and stolen. Even now, 35 years after our interview, Trump was convinced any loss, even a presidential election loss, could be brushed aside if he simply didn't fold. At Trump's Save America rally on January 6th, he urged his supporters to fight like hell. "We won this election, and we won it by a landslide. We will never give up. We will never concede. We are going to the Capitol."

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack later concluded that Trump engaged in a successful but fraudulent effort to persuade tens of millions of Americans that the election was stolen from him. Garrett Miller, a Trump supporter who brought a gun to the Capitol on January 6th, said, "I believed I was following the instructions of former President Trump." Another supporter, Louis Kwell, testified that he had watched President Trump on TV telling the world the election was stolen. "What else would I believe as a patriotic American who voted for him?" Steven Ames, who also stormed the Capitol that day, said he was hanging on every word Trump was saying. Ames had posted on social media that civil war would ensue if Trump did not stay in power for a second term.

"You need to call Joe Biden, and you need to do it today," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Trump shortly after the attack. "No," Trump said. He claimed Biden only won because of fraud. "Stop saying that," McCarthy said. "Just stop saying that. You need to leave Joe Biden a letter in the desk, a tradition." "Well, I haven't decided," Trump said.

McCarthy was emotional and exhausted. "The violence on January 6th carried a shocking, traumatizing weight. Your legacies will be different now because of that day," McCarthy warned him. "Call Joe Biden." "No," Trump said. McCarthy told him it was important for the country for some sort of conversation between the outgoing and incoming leader to take place. "A president should acknowledge his successor." "Okay, okay, okay," Trump finally said. He wanted off the call with McCarthy, but McCarthy stayed on. "What do you think your grandchildren are going to think of you if you don't do this?" McCarthy said. "Okay, okay," Trump repeated.

The phone call to Biden never happened. But on his last night in the Oval Office, January 19th, 2021, Trump hand-wrote a two-page letter to Joe Biden. He finished it at 10:00 p.m., signed it, "Donald J. Trump," and placed it inside the desk. Biden would later tell his White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, it was "shockingly gracious."

Trump, with First Lady Melania, left the White House early on January 20th, 2021, for their club in Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago. On board Air Force One, Trump took a call from Republican National Committee Chairperson Ronna McDaniel. It was a farewell message on behalf of the committee. "I'm done," Trump said, cutting her off. "I'm starting my own party." McDaniel balked. "You cannot do that," McDaniel implored Trump on the phone. "If you do, we will lose forever. This isn't their Republican party anymore. This is Donald Trump's Republican party." Trump's eldest son, Don Jr., had declared on stage at the Save America rally on January 6th, "Exactly. You lose forever without me."

"Trump snapped at McDaniel. 'This is what Republicans deserve for not sticking with me. He wanted to take down the Republican Party.'" The Republican National Committee leadership would later make clear to Trump's advisers that the former president's lust for revenge would hurt not only his legacy but his finances. The Republican Party threatened to cease paying Trump's legal bills and destroy the value of his campaign's email list, which contained 40 million Trump voters. Trump had been selling the list to other Republican candidates. If he tried to use it, they would give it away for free. Trump backed down. He later denied to ABC News journalist Jonathan Karl that he'd ever even thought about starting his own party. "Oh, that is [ __ ]. It never happened," Trump said. Carl later released the tape of his interview with McDaniel, recounting Trump's threat on Air Force One.

The Trump family sat at the front of the plane, a bunch of his closest senior and junior staff at the back. "They never came back," a Trump aide said. Not the president, nor any of his family. Even among his closest aides, there was a sense of almost overwhelming shell shock. Many did not have a plan for what they would do next. Some didn't know where they would live. Usually, staff had about two and a half months from the election to January 20th to prepare for life after the White House. "For a lot of people, that was compressed into 13 days," an aide said, because it wasn't clear to them that Trump would leave the White House until after January 6th.

At 11:59 a.m., January 20th, Trump was in his cavernous apartment at Mar-a-Lago. No tweets, no speeches. At 12:01 p.m., as Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States, Secret Service agents began shrinking the fortified security setup around Trump's estate. Trump didn't like it. He stayed in his quarters the rest of the day.

"Hey, it's your all-time favorite President," Trump said on the phone to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy a few days later. "Look, I want to talk," he said. "I'm down in Florida." McCarthy had said on the House floor on January 13th that Trump bears responsibility for the Capitol riot and called on him to accept his share of responsibility. Trump exploded with anger when he saw the TV replay but appeared to have gotten over it. "I'll stop by," McCarthy said. He didn't tell anyone he was going, not even his staff. McCarthy knew Trump had not been seeing many Republicans. He was moping. The media spotlight had dimmed over Mar-a-Lago. Republican strategist Ed Rollins once said of Trump, "There's only one thing you need to know about him: He watches television all day, and then at night, goes on television." Trump was now fighting for attention. He no longer had his Twitter feed or Facebook, having been kicked off the sites after his torrent of election lies. He began making surprise appearances at wedding receptions at Mar-a-Lago.

President Trump, in a dark suit and yellow tie, was grinning as McCarthy walked into Mar-a-Lago on January 28th. "You know, Melania said this has more press than when I met Putin," he said. "There are four TV helicopters outside." McCarthy's visit to the former president was all over the news. Having the top House Republican come for lunch showed Trump was still in control of the Republican party. "You know, it's good for you and me, right?" "All right," McCarthy said. Whatever. McCarthy came with the hope of keeping Trump involved with the House GOP so Republicans could retake the majority in 2022. He needed to steer Trump away from stoking unnecessary primary fights and to lend his name to winnable seats. They sat down for lunch.

"You know, being off Twitter has kind of helped me," Trump said. "Oh, really?" "Yeah, a lot of people would say they liked my policy, didn't like my tweets." "Yeah, like everybody. My numbers have kind of gone up." Trump asked about his upcoming Senate impeachment trial. He was charged with inciting an insurrection. "I don't think it's going anywhere," McCarthy said. It didn't. On February 13th, 2021, Trump was acquitted. While a majority of senators, including seven Republicans, voted to convict the former president, they failed to reach the two-thirds needed for conviction. It was merely symbolic since Trump was no longer president.

President Biden's Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, 59, with dark brown hair and a friendly, high-charging demeanor, had counseled Biden for more than 20 years. When Biden decided to run for president, he called Klain up to his home in Wilmington in early March 2019. "I just feel like I have to do this," Biden said. "Trump represents something fundamentally different and wrong about politics." Biden's next words would stick forever with Klain: "This guy just isn't really an American president."

On the campaign trail, Biden had gone after Trump's character and policies relentlessly. From his first day in the White House, Biden barely mentioned Trump's name, referring to him in public as "my predecessor" and often in private as "that [ __ ] [ __ ]." Biden told his advisers he wanted his own presidency. Trump's four years, his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the January 6th insurrection, were a trauma on the presidency. The mission now, as Klain saw it, was to fix what Trump broke and move the country forward.

"We, as a country, still need to process this Trump thing a bit," Klain said. "The way we're doing it is by showing the American people that the presidency can work again, that they can have a decent person in the White House." "In the end, Donald Trump lost because he didn't control the pandemic and the economy. Notwithstanding the stock market, the real economy where people live got worse on his watch. Obviously, there are some hardcore Trump supporters that are what they are, and they're not going to go away, and that's part of our country," Klain said. "But Biden was elected to move this country forward, post-Trump, and that's what he's doing. That's his mission."

"Donald Trump can stand in as many arenas as he wants, raise his arms as loudly as he wants," Klain declared. He believed Trump's early attempts at a shadow presidency would die out. "By the fall of 2021, Donald Trump will be a sideshow," Klain said confidently.

2. "See, Hov's gun," was National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan's immediate thought as he reviewed overhead satellite photos that showed an unprecedented 110,000 Russian troops massing on the border of Ukraine. "If a pistol appears conspicuously in the first act of a play, it is there for a reason and will be fired at some point," the 19th-century playwright Anton Chekhov had famously written. It was April 2021, only the third month of Biden's presidency. Sullivan had barely settled into his new office in the White House West Wing. At 44, Sullivan, thin and fair-haired, was the youngest National Security Adviser since Henry Kissinger. With the discipline of a former marathon runner, Sullivan was the operational coordinator of Biden's foreign policy. When Biden appointed him, Biden called Sullivan, a former Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School honors graduate, a "once-in-a-lifetime intellect" and had entrusted him with extraordinary decision-making authority.

The intelligence also showed Russian naval forces were actively deploying to the Black Sea, a vast inland body of water bordered by Ukraine and Russia. Flatbed trucks could be seen hauling huge rocket launchers and old Soviet armored personnel carriers. More satellite photos showed Russian tanks, artillery, missiles, and naval landing craft being moved into Crimea, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, and along the 1,200-mile land border between Russia and Ukraine. According to the latest CIA psychological profile, Vladimir Putin, the autocratic Russian leader, was defined by his extreme insecurity and imperial ambition. Putin was convinced that he was the only person that could restore Russia to the old Russian Empire. He was fixated on Ukraine.

"What was Putin doing?" Sullivan wondered. "Was this just an exercise? A war game? Was it purely coercive to gain leverage on Ukraine or to force the United States and Europe to back off any talk that Ukraine might eventually join NATO, the world's most powerful military and diplomatic alliance?" It was also possible, Sullivan thought, that Putin was planning to use the troops to seize more territory in the Donbas. Russia and Ukraine had been fighting in the Donbas, a region in the east with sizable coal reserves, since 2014, when Russia seized neighboring Crimea and control of about a third of the Donbas. Nearly 14,000 people had been killed on both sides. There had been 29 ceasefires, all of which had failed, a sign of festering instability.

Sullivan worked in a state of near constant intellectual anxiety. "And yet, he couldn't look past the obvious. You don't move that amount of men or material to another country's border if you are not at least thinking about using them." Was Putin hanging his pistol on the wall?

President Biden and Sullivan had debated what the administration's Russia policy should look like. "I'm not looking for a reset," Biden said during his first weeks as president. "I'm not looking for some kind of good relationship, but I want to find a stable and predictable way forward with Putin." But so far, the relationship with Russia was neither good, stable, nor predictable. From their first days in office, Biden and Sullivan had been responding to various acts of Russian aggression: the near-fatal poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Russian interference in the 2020 U.S. elections, suggestions that Russians may have paid the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan, and the massive SolarWinds cyber attack on more than 16,000 computer systems worldwide, including U.S. government departments and key private industries. It was one of the worst data breaches in U.S. history.

Biden has also upped the tension. In an ABC television interview on March 16th, when he was asked if he thought Putin was a killer, "I do," Biden said. The Kremlin had called the insult unprecedented. Putin withdrew the Russian ambassador from Washington in a show of displeasure. Now Putin was undertaking some grandiose movement of his military.

"Is it actually possible to have a stable and predictable relationship with Russia?" Sullivan asked Deputy National Security Adviser John Finer. With slight exasperation, standing in the cramped National Security Suite, Finer, 45, with cropped light brown hair, a half beard and mustache, was low on the Washington visibility pecking order but central to the White House National Security strategy. Finer had worked as Chief of Staff to Secretary of State John Kerry and previously spent three years embedded as a *Washington Post* journalist during the 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation. Like Sullivan, Finer was also a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate.

"The odds are awaited against success," Finer said candidly, but agreed they ought to keep trying. U.S. intelligence indicated that Russia had not as yet signaled an intention to use the forces to invade Ukraine, but their purpose remained unclear. While it could just be a pressure tactic, they couldn't be sure. "Putin cares a lot about dignity and respect," Sullivan mused. A summit meeting would be on-brand for Biden, who placed great value in personal relationships. Sullivan went down the hall to the Oval Office to discuss the idea with the president.

"He wants to be a big player on the big stage," Biden said of Putin. "This is what this guy is all about." Sullivan suggested Biden meet with Putin in person. He knew that President preferred to meet face-to-face with everyone, especially world leaders. Biden agreed instantly. "I know people are going to criticize me and say, 'If you meet with Putin, you're elevating him, you're legitimizing him,'" he said. "But this guy has been a major figure on the global scene for two decades. Me meeting with him is not transforming him into something he's not. Look, I'm not going to sweet-talk this guy out of this or that, but maybe you can change the dynamic of it," Biden said.

But when to meet? "If we make the offer to meet for June, two months away," Biden said, "it gives Putin some incentive to say, 'Hey, what have the Americans got?' You know, that might lead Putin to reduce pressure on Ukraine's border and deter the likelihood of a potential military operation in the spring."

Ukraine played a dramatic, outsized role in American politics. During a phone call with newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in September 2019, then-President Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, in exchange for security aid from the United States. A transcript of the call was released, and Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives. He was later acquitted in the Senate. Republicans, however, continued to press for an investigation into Biden, who was in charge of the Ukraine portfolio during the Obama administration and had been particularly engaged.

Dr. Colin Kahl, an academic and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's Under Secretary for Defense Policy at the Pentagon, had been Vice President Biden's National Security Advisor from 2014 to 2017. Intensely cerebral, he had his own distinctive intellectual flare, often adding bright red-framed glasses, a patent tie, or colorful socks to his daily wardrobe. Kahl remembered Biden working the Ukraine account for the Obama administration with relish and visiting Kyiv, the capital, four times during his vice presidency.

"Hey, Petro," Biden said in one call to then-President Petro Poroshenko. Ukraine's fledgling democracy was particularly fragile, and large portions of its governance system remained rotten and corrupt. "I know this is hard," Biden said sympathetically. "I know that your politics is a den of vipers over there. I get it. I know this is hard, and I have confidence in you doing the right thing. But I'm telling you, it's going to be really hard for us to maintain the confidence of the West, who don't want to give you the benefit of the doubt. You've got to help me help you by doing the right things," Biden said to Poroshenko, urging him to act to address corruption. That could be reforms on procurement, it could be reforms on the banking system, it could be setting up new anti-corruption entities, it could be pushing the prosecutor general to be more aggressive. "If you don't do these things," Biden emphasized, "it's going to be hard for you to maintain the support of our Congress, of our President, of the Europeans, and the Russians are going to eat you for lunch." Biden said his goal was to keep Ukraine's leadership moving on the path of democratization, precisely what Putin didn't want.

"I sat in the room with Joe Biden every single day, and he called the Ukrainians probably once or twice a week as Vice President," Kahl recalled, "just to do marriage counseling between President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or whoever happened to be prime minister at the time. And there was never a call where he did not push the Ukrainians beyond their comfort zone on anti-corruption issues." "Biden's approach to Ukraine was big hugs, little punches," Kahl said.

Now, on April 13th, 2021, as President Biden phoned President Putin, "I upset you?" called me a killer?" Putin said almost immediately. "I was asked a question. I gave an answer. It was an interview on a totally different topic, and it was not something premeditated," Biden said, as if that negated his killer remark. U.S. intelligence analysts who profiled Putin had listed among the Russian leader's main character traits that he was thin-skinned, extremely insecure, and even sadistic.

During the call, Putin flatly denied the accusations on election interference, the poisoning of Navalny, and Russia's cyber attacks. Biden reminded Putin of the United States' unwavering commitment to Ukraine's sovereignty and warned Putin not to start a new military incursion into Ukraine. "You're wrong about everything," Putin said matter-of-factly. "You have no evidence. We didn't interfere in your election. We didn't do any of these things." Biden dismissed the denials. "I'm warning you. We are coming at you with these responses." He then described to Putin the series of costs that would be imposed on Russia, including formally naming the Russian foreign intelligence service, SVR, as the perpetrator of the SolarWinds attack. He would also be expelling 10 Russian diplomats from Washington and placing a series of economic sanctions on Russia for its 2020 election interference and ongoing occupation of Crimea. "They will happen this week, and I want you to hear it from me directly, and it's because of the specific things you've done. I've said I would respond, and I'm responding."

Biden switched gears. "Let's meet," Biden said, trying to cut through the tense atmosphere and shift his tone. "Let's you and I sit down. You bring your concerns, and I will bring mine," Biden said, "on any and all topics, and we'll sit face-to-face, and we'll talk about all of it." "Let me get this straight," Putin said, a note of astonishment in his voice. "You want to meet and talk about all the issues in our relationship, all of them?"

Sullivan, who was listening on the call, thought Putin, always suspicious, wanted to make sure it was not some kind of trap. Biden assured Putin it would be an open dialogue. He knew Putin realized a meeting on the global stage would show he was respected by the American president. They had met in person once before, a decade earlier, in 2011, when Biden was Vice President and Putin was temporarily serving as Prime Minister. Biden had later claimed during that meeting, "I said to Putin, 'I'm looking into your eyes, and I don't think you have a soul.'" Putin smiled and told Biden, through an interpreter, "We understand one another."

For Biden, it was standard for an American president to meet with a Russian leader, as his predecessors had. Though a declining economic power with less than 10% of the U.S. GDP, Russia had more than 4,400 nuclear warheads, the largest arsenal in the world. "Okay," Putin finally replied. "I would like to have the summit. Also, let's have our teams work on it."

Biden knew he needed to be prepared. Vladimir Putin, a 68-year-old former KGB spy who had led Russia as president or prime minister for more than two decades, was a master at using big public events as a stage to play games or seize the upper hand with the leaders of Western countries. In 2007, during a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at his palatial home in Sochi on the Black Sea, the Russian president called his large black Labrador, Connie, into the room in front of journalists and cameras. Merkel had a well-known terror of dogs. As the dog sauntered over to sniff the German Chancellor, she froze in her chair, lips pursed, and one ankle tucked tightly behind the other. Watching her unease, Putin leaned back in his chair, his legs sprawled, comfort in front of him. "I'm sure it will behave itself," he said with a smirk. "It doesn't eat journalists, after all." Merkel said, not missing a beat, "I understand why he has to do this, to prove he's a man. He's afraid of his own weaknesses. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this."

American Presidents had also been a target of Putin's theatrics. In 2018, a week before then-President Trump's summit with Putin in Helsinki, 12 Russian military intelligence agents were indicted in the U.S. for hacking the presidential campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in her race against Trump. In a joint press conference following the summit, Putin played to Trump's ego, flattering him. When Trump was asked about Russian interference in the 2016 election, Putin was rewarded with one of the most extraordinary statements by an American president: "He just said it's not Russia," Trump said. "I don't see any reason why it would be." Standing side by side, Trump appeared to strongly defend the Russian president and wave off the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies, which had unanimously determined that Russia had interfered. Condemnation was swift. Some senior Trump advisers still recoil at the memory of the president siding with Putin over the American intelligence agencies. Putin had again won the moment. Trump's carelessness was on full display. After returning to the U.S., Trump tweeted, trying to fix the blunder: "I have great confidence in my intelligence people."

Trump's unwillingness to criticize Putin was not a one-off incident but a consistent character trait. "I want Putin to respect our country, okay?" Trump told me during an interview with him before the 2016 election. "What would he respect?" I asked. "Well, first of all, it's sort of interesting," he said. "Very good things about me," Trump said. "He said Trump is brilliant, and Trump is going to be the new leader, and all that. And some of these clowns said, 'You should repudiate Putin.' I said, 'Why would I repudiate him?'"

No adviser felt the sting of Helsinki more than Dr. Fiona Hill, a former intelligence analyst specializing in Russian affairs for Presidents Bush and Obama, the co-author of the book *Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin*. She had served on the National Security Council under President Trump and was his chief Russia expert. Backstage at Helsinki, Hill had watched with dismay as Trump walked right into Putin's trap. She even contemplated pulling the fire alarm at the venue. Hill would later testify against Trump in his first impeachment trial. She said there was no doubt that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. "President Putin and the Russian Security Services," she testified, "operate like a super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives." Trump idolized Putin, Hill believed, and that made him extremely vulnerable to manipulation. "He had a very fragile ego," Hill said of Trump. "When you're the President of the United States, it becomes a fatal flaw because President Trump couldn't disassociate or disentangle himself from many of the issues that were the critical ones to address. So when people were concerned about Russian influence in the United States election, he only thought about how that affected him."

Hill was walking her dog in the park when President Biden called her out of the blue. She was surprised at the informality. The president said he wanted to talk about Putin and get a feel for the Russians' thinking. Soon after the call, the president gathered a group of Russia experts, including Hill, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Biden had entered presidential office with more than three decades of foreign policy experience, having chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2001 to 2003 and then again from 2007 to 2009. He had met three Soviet leaders and two Russian presidents. As Vice President, Biden had spoken with Putin in person and by phone. He felt he had a good sense of the man but wanted a gut check and to debate his view of Putin's intentions. He asked the group, "Have I got it wrong? I haven't seen this guy in a while. Does my assessment of him still hold true? What am I missing?" If there was something really wrong with Biden's assessment of Putin, the president wanted to know.

Hill found Biden's approach refreshing. Usually, consulting an expert was a paint-by-numbers exercise for most presidents, a formality without real purpose other than so the president could say they had talked to experts. Hill had plenty of times experienced the "I'll take that under advisement," when in reality, a president had already made up their mind. But here, Biden had gathered together a group of experts with very different views on Russia. He wanted a debate. The last time she had been in the Roosevelt Room, President Trump had spent the entire briefing glowering at a picture of Teddy Roosevelt's Nobel Peace Prize on display, unable to concentrate. Trump hated it, Hill thought. Did he think it was unfair? Did he think he deserved his own?

Biden posed more questions to the group: "What should this summit be about? Should the agenda be the U.S. bilateral relationship with Russia, strategic stability, and arms control, or is there something else going on? Why does Putin have 110,000 troops massed on Ukraine's border? Is he?"

Going to back off, Biden asked. He’s not is he? Putin is probing, Hill said. He is probing to see if he can negotiate with you. He wants you to negotiate away Ukraine, essentially abandon Western support for Ukraine so Russia can take control of it.

Putin, Hill believed, was watching Biden closely. The domestic issues in the US and the plans for a full US withdrawal from Afghanistan negotiated by Trump, and trying to figure out, is Biden someone who will put Ukraine to one side and move on?

Several of the experts around the table agreed. The Russian leader was looking for a big strategic negotiation about Ukraine and the future of European security. Putin had been fixated for years on Ukraine, which he claimed was part of Russia. But Biden told the group he wasn't about to let Russia just swallow up an independent country.

Biden also worried aloud that deep political divisions in the United States meant there was now little consensus on anything, not even on matters of foreign policy. In the past, a president could go abroad and meet with adversaries knowing the other political party would back him and his predecessor wouldn't meddle. No more. Putin knew that and would use it to Russia's advantage to deflect criticism. Part of Putin's disinformation game was to stoke divisions in the United States.

Given the troops on Ukraine's border, Hill was struck that President Biden's biggest concern was not that Russia might be about to invade Ukraine, but that the disunity in the United States would weaken his influence with Putin. Putin would try to exploit it. Hill agreed. That's exactly what Putin would do.

Russian troops continued to move in plain sight, covering extraordinary distances across the country. From Siberia and the Ural in the west to the Ukraine border, air defense systems, train loads of military vehicles, and heavy artillery moved into Crimea. Field hospitals were being built. Russian drones glided into Ukraine at night, dropping landmines. Russians were digging new trenches, and Russian amphibious assault ships were spotted surveiling the coast.

Four. Putin gave his annual State of the Nation address on April 21st. Twenty-one thousand Russians had gathered along Tverskaya Street, a main road leading to the Kremlin, shouting chants of freedom for Navalny. Putin is a thief, former Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had been poisoned in August 2020 with a Soviet-style Novichok nerve agent. Navalny blamed Putin for the attempted assassination. After Navalny received life-saving medical treatment in Berlin, he had returned to Russia in January, only to be imprisoned. He was on the third week of a hunger strike as Putin delivered his address to the Russian Nation.

On foreign policy, Putin was combative. "Some countries have taken up an unseemly routine where they pick on Russia for any reason, most often for no reason at all," Putin said. "We behave in an extremely restrained manner, I would even say modestly, and I am saying this without irony. As I said, every now and then they are picking on Russia for no reason, and of course, all sorts of petty tabaki are running around them like tabaki ran around Sher Khan," Putin said, referring to Rudyard Kipling's *The Jungle Book*, where tabaki, male jackals, lived in the jungle and fed on scraps from Tiger Shere Khan.

"In this case, the United States. Everything is like in Kipling's book," Putin said. "Howling along in order to make their sovereign happy. Those behind provocations that threaten the core interests of our security will regret what they have done in a way they have not regretted anything for a long time," he warned. "But I hope that no one will think about crossing the red line with regard to Russia," he said. "We ourselves will determine in each specific case where it will be drawn."

The next day, a week after Biden and Putin's phone call, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced that Russian troop units would withdraw from the Ukraine border by May 1st. Russian media, however, reported that weapons and equipment, including tanks, artillery, trucks, and armored vehicles, would remain at training grounds along the land border with Ukraine in preparation for the joint Russian-Belarusian Zapad 2021 exercise scheduled for the coming fall. Russia also permanently relocated large troop units to Crimea, meaning that tens of thousands of troops would not withdraw at all.

By mid-May, there were still at least 880,000 troops near the border. Ukraine's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, warned publicly that Russia's so-called withdrawal was not what it seemed. "What is happening cannot be called a withdrawal of troops," Kuleba said publicly. "The threat has not passed. What we are seeing today is the withdrawal of troops without a withdrawal of troops," Kuleba said.

NATO Special Operations advisor to Ukraine, US Major General Michael Repass, was also wary of the supposed withdrawal. "They have retained a rather lethal force in the region and have only pulled back some forces," Repass said. "That tells me they may want to come back later when timing and circumstances are more advantageous to Russia," he said. "This will happen again."

Ukraine's President Zelensky invited Putin to meet in the Donbas region of Ukraine to discuss peace. Putin responded that Zelensky ought to come to Moscow.

Five. Our retired Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, a loyal Trump advisor and National Security Adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, had left the White House on January 20th, 2021, and not lost any sleep over Ukraine. "When we left the administration, Ukraine was not on the real problem list," Kellogg said. "You had Iran, which was on the problem list. You still had North Korea. You had China because of what had happened with COVID, but Ukraine wasn't there."

Putin, Kellogg believed, had been far too concerned about the coronavirus, about contracting it himself, and about his small circle of loyalist advisors contracting it. President Trump had secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott point-of-care COVID test machines for his personal use as the virus spread rapidly through Russia. "Please don't tell anybody you sent these to me," Putin said to Trump. "I don't care," Trump replied. "Fine. No, no," Putin said. "I don't want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don't care about me." Ukraine wasn't on the top of his hit list at all, Kellogg repeated. Trump's National Security advisers had seen no indications that Russia was preparing for aggression in Ukraine. Zelensky, who became president in 2019, was a new guy on the political scene. Trump was still trying to feel Zelensky out, so was Putin. Kellogg believed to him, Putin, Trump was an unknown. "Hell, we didn't know how Trump would react at times. Trump was basically Jackal and Hyde."

Six. President Biden and President Putin met at Villa La Grange, an 18th-century French-style manor house on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland on June 16th, 2021. "Mr. President, I'd like to thank you for your initiative to meet today," Putin said to Biden as they took their assigned seats in the library, in front of floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with leather-bound books. A large globe stood prominently between them. "It's always better to meet face to face," Biden said. He was surprised and pleased that Putin, who usually liked to make world leaders wait, had arrived on time. Putin had been 45 minutes late to his first formal meeting with Trump.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov joined the two leaders. Trump had not allowed advisers to be in the room during his meeting with Putin in Helsinki, only their interpreters. On another occasion, Trump even insisted on confiscating his interpreters' notes after a meeting with Putin in Germany. Unlike Trump's secretive, freewheeling discussions with the Russian President, Biden's meeting with Putin was highly scripted.

Top of Biden's agenda was cybersecurity. A recent attack by Russian cybercriminals on Colonial Pipeline had disrupted the fuel supply to almost half of the East Coast. Another attack had temporarily shut down JBS, America's biggest meat supplier, until JBS paid a $1 million ransom. "Put yourself in my shoes," Biden said. "I mean, with the attacks on our infrastructure, imagine if something happened to your oil infrastructure. It would matter," Putin replied. "Why did you leave Afghanistan?" Putin, the black-belt Judo master, asked Biden in an attempt to unbalance him. Trump had promised the Taliban all US troops would withdraw by May 1st. "Why did you leave?" Biden taunted back, a reference to the Soviet Union's embarrassing withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 after 10 years of occupation. "Afghanistan," Biden said, "is the graveyard of empires."

Curiously, Ukraine was barely a footnote in the conversation. Later, some would wonder if the failure to focus on it was a colossal mistake. The conversation about Ukraine was like dozens before: talking points versus Russian talking points. Presidents Putin and Biden agreed to hold separate press conferences after the meeting, the approach recommended by Biden's National Security advisers and Russia experts, who wanted to see what Putin had to say before Biden responded. Trump's advisers had made a similar recommendation, but Trump had disregarded it.

Secretary Blinken and State Department spokesperson Ned Price watched Putin's press conference from Blinken's hotel room suite at the InterContinental in Geneva. Price, a former CIA analyst, had left the CIA in 2017 because he did not want to work for Trump. Putin, who rarely traveled beyond Russia's borders, especially since the coronavirus pandemic, stood at a podium adorned with the Russian crest in a nondescript conference room. This was his first international trip in 17 months, since January 2020. Even more unusual was the Russian president appearing before Western journalists. Sitting at a distance from Putin in spaced-out chairs, nearly all the journalists wore masks, making it clear the coronavirus was still a top concern for the Russian president.

"Did you commit in these meetings to stop threatening Ukraine?" a reporter asked the Russian President. Putin gave an accusatory answer, couching Russia's buildup of 100,000 troops as regular military exercises. "We are not bringing our equipment and personnel closer to the state borders of the United States of America when we conduct our exercises. Unfortunately, this is what our US partners are doing. So the Russian side, not the American side, should be concerned about this," Putin said. NATO had conducted annual military exercises in May involving some 28,000 personnel from 26 countries. The exercises were spread across a dozen European countries.

Putin took another jab. "People, including leaders of various organizations, are killed in American cities every day," he said. "You can barely say a word there before you are shot in the face or the back, regardless of who is nearby, children or other adults. The CIA prisons that were opened in many countries, including Europe, where they subjected people to torture. What is this? Is this respect for human rights? I don't think so. Do you?"

"The US concerns regarding militarization are absolutely groundless," Putin said. It was the classic deflection tactic that Biden had been wary of. When asked about Biden, the Russian president unleashed a carefully calibrated charm offensive. "He recalled some things about his family," Putin said of Biden. Then, gently sticking the knife in, "They do not seem to be directly related to the subject, but they still show the level and quality of his moral values. That was quite endearing, and I did feel like we generally spoke the same language. This does not mean we have to peek into each other's souls, look into each other's eyes, and swear eternal love and friendship. Not at all. We defend the interests of our countries, our peoples, and our relations are always primarily pragmatic in nature."

Another reporter asked, "Do you consider it possible at this stage to reach a new phase in bilateral relations?" "You know," Putin said, "Leo Tolstoy said once, 'There is no happiness in life, only flashes of it. Cherish them.' I believe there cannot be family trust in this situation, but I think we have seen flashes of it."

The Russian president's press conference had run for just under an hour. Blinken and Ned Price were surprised that Putin didn't come out swinging. He sounded many of the right tones, all the sorts of things that Biden wanted to hear. He was smooth, relaxed, articulate, and conveying astonishing self-confidence. "Putin gave the impression that maybe the Russians are seeking to do what we are seeking to do," Price said, "build a relationship that is stable and predictable."

"Let's see how this plays out," Blinken said. "This is about testing the proposition. We won't know the results of that test for six months or a year because it's not so much what's said in the moment, but how it's acted upon. Too soon to tell," Blinken said, quoting, as he often did, what Henry Kissinger was told about the French Revolution by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.

Biden followed with his own press conference, outdoors, the sun shining on Lake Geneva in the background. "I communicated the United States' unwavering commitment to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine," Biden said. "I think the last thing he wants now is a Cold War," Biden said of Putin. "He still, I believe, is concerned about being 'encircled.' He is still concerned that we, in fact, are looking to take him down, etc. He still has those concerns, but I don't think they are the driving force as to the kind of relationship he's looking for with the United States."

On the plane, Biden told Blinken he came away with a better understanding of Putin. This was a man Biden had known for a long time from a distance, but who he had not spent much time in a room with. Biden's sense of the relationship was measured. He was not optimistic Putin would change his behavior or Russia's. "This is going to be hard," Biden concluded.

On Fox News, Trump declared that Biden's summit with Putin was a good day for Russia. "I don't see what we got out of it," Trump said to Fox News anchor Sean Hannity. "We didn't get anything. We gave a very big stage to Russia, and we got nothing."

In the White House, the mood had lifted. There was a sense they had dodged a bullet from Russia on Ukraine. "Whatever Putin was thinking in April about Ukraine, he's at least for sometime set it aside," Sullivan said. As Russia's aggressive rhetoric tamped down, Sullivan and his deputy, Finer, turned their focus to other things, namely the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But for Sullivan, a central question remained: was "Kof's Guns still on the wall?"

Seven. Six months into Biden's presidency, Trump continued to claim that the 2020 election had been rigged and stolen from him. There was zero credible evidence to support this claim, but Trump only needed people to believe him. Polls showed that 53% of Republicans believe Trump to be the true president, even though Biden sat in the Oval Office.

"During my interview with Trump before the 2016 election, he told me real power is... I don't even want to use the word 'fear' now." Trump had tapped into another real power: instilling doubt. "I wouldn't be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes," Trump yelled to a crowd at Mar-a-Lago, his lavish estate in Palm Beach, Florida. "This was a rigged election, everybody knows it."

Once audits of the election counts were completed in key states like Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona this summer, Trump said he would make his return to the Oval Office. He believed if he could get a swing state to find that he had actually won the state, then all the other states he lost would have to begin probes. "If a thief robs a jewelry store of all of its diamonds, the diamonds must be returned," Trump said in a statement in May, referring to the 2020 election. But more than 60 court cases, dozens of investigations, audits, and ballot recounts in numerous states found no evidence of widespread fraud. Again and again, the validity of the 2020 election result was upheld. Trump ignored the findings and claimed massive fraud would materialize. Prominent Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsburg later testified to the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol that in no instance did a court find that Trump's allegations of fraud were real.

Senator Lindsey Graham blamed Mar-a-Lago for Trump's inability to put the results of 2020 behind him. "It's just... it's the culture," Graham told colleagues. "It's the attitude down in Mar-a-Lago. Of all the people that go, you know, all the people he hangs around with down there, they constantly feed this narrative. He keeps talking about Arizona," Graham said, "where an audit was still underway. You know, he lost Arizona because he beat on John McCain and just went too far." The late Senator John McCain of Arizona had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam and Republican nominee for president in the 2008 election. "He thinks he lost because of all these bizarre conspiracies," Graham said. "He didn't. Biden won fair and square," Graham added. "Trump doesn't like to hear that."

Graham was focused on the 2022 political races, where Republicans needed to put their best candidates forward to take back the House and Senate majorities. "There are very few Republicans that can get out of the whirlwind of dealing with Trump to think ahead," Graham said. "Wishing Donald Trump away is not a viable strategy. Donald Trump's not going away. There are millions of people in the Republican Party who believe in him, and the goal is to try to take the magic he has with our base and make it Trump plus. Once you get in a general election, if you repeat some of the things that the president is saying, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell," Graham said. "Some of our candidates are going to have to break from Trump on certain issues to get the 'plus' part."

Graham rejected the notion that Trump was a wound that could not heal in the Republican Party. "Trump represents a real part of the American family," Graham said. "It's not a wound, it's part of who we are." But Trump would not, or could not, let his stolen election mantra go. In June 2021, the former president pushed Republicans to support reinstating him as president. He told his aides he would move back into the White House by August, a date QAnon conspiracy theorists had latched on to in online forums. "He had an army, an army for Trump. He wants that back," Brad Pascal, Trump's former campaign manager, said privately in July. "I don't think he sees it as a comeback. He sees it as vengeance."

Trump phoned Republican Representative for Alabama Mo Brooks, a staunch Trump supporter, and asked him to publicly call for a special election to reinstate him as president. Brooks, who had supported the plan by Trump and conservative lawyer John Eastman to challenge the certification of Biden's win, pointed out that Joe Biden was president. Brooks said Biden's victory had been certified, and there was no legal pathway for Trump to rescind it. The Constitution provided no mechanism to reinstate a president. Trump was enraged. He later withdrew his endorsement of Brooks in the Alabama Senate race. Brooks lost in the Republican primary.

In the 2020 election, Trump received 74 million votes, more than any presidential candidate in history, with the exception of Joe Biden, who won 81 million votes. Biden secured the Electoral College with 306 votes to Trump's 232. Biden won the 2020 election, but six months in, he was still in a battle for his own presidency.

Eight. A month after the Geneva Summit, Putin placed another gun on the table. In a stark, personal, and bellicose 5,000-word diatribe published on July 12th, 2021, Putin argued Ukraine had never existed as an independent country. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan read the Russian president's manifesto as a declaration of the inner Putin, who he was and what he wanted to do.

"Russians and Ukrainians are one people, a single whole," Putin began. "Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe." And since the 9th century, he continued, Kyiv was considered the mother of all Russian cities. "The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state," Putin said, "is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us." His tone self-righteous and academic, Putin erased the existence of Ukraine as a separate country, a people with their own history, beliefs, culture, and language. "Therefore, modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era. We know and remember well that it was shaped for a significant part on the lands of historical Russia," Putin said. "Russia was robbed."

When Sullivan read through Putin's manifesto, his first thought was COVID. US intelligence reporting showed that during the pandemic, Putin had been changed by intense and prolonged isolation. He had surrounded himself with a small coterie of trusted people of similar nationalistic views, who became almost a feedback loop. Those who wanted to see him in person had to quarantine for weeks. He was physically and metaphorically separated from Russian society for nearly three years.

One of the central figures in Putin's inner circle was Yuri Kovalchuk, a Russian billionaire reputed to be Putin's personal banker. He had known Putin since the 1990s and appeared to share the messianic worldview that Putin espoused in his manifesto. Another Putin confidant was Father Tikhon, an Orthodox priest with a similarly imperialistic view of Russia. Then there were the Rotenberg billionaire brothers, Arkady Rotenberg and Boris Rotenberg, who owned the largest construction company for gas pipelines in Russia.

"Other people learned Irish step dancing in quarantine," Jake Sullivan joked, "but Putin went deep into Russian history." Sullivan had heard that during a phone call between Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin said, "You wouldn't believe the stuff that I've been finding in the Russian archives." It was clear to Merkel that Putin had spent a lot of his time in isolation just digging around in the archives, taking things out, studying ancient maps. Taking Ukraine had become kind of a fever dream during his COVID isolation, but the fever didn't pass. It didn't break.

Sullivan and his deputy, John Finer, took the manifesto seriously, but it didn't strike them as an alarm bell or a declaration of war. More than anything, they viewed it as typical Putin. The Russian leader was known for his long philosophical rants, historical fabrications, an absolute refusal to acknowledge Ukraine's independent existence, but still, it was puzzling and unsettling for its intensity, a topic of curiosity and even disgust. Sullivan had spent the last year reading up on Russian history and trying to understand Putin's almost neurotic obsession with Ukraine: the formation of Russia, the deeply rooted grievances, the chip on Putin's shoulder, the relationship with Europe, with NATO, the sense of needing central control, the Mongols taking Moscow in the mid-13th century, Putin's desire to be a messiah in Russian history like Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, all of it.

After reading Putin's manifesto, National Security Council Russia director Eric Green found it unusual for a sitting Russian president to go into such depth. Was Putin just trying to get something off his chest? Was this something he wanted to use as an exercise or a way of explaining Russia's view of things? Or would Putin's essay actually inform Russia's actions? "I think it speaks to Putin's disillusionment with the Ukrainian government and his attempt to start to delegitimize it," Green said.

Putin wants his prophecy about Ukraine being a failed state, he wants that to come true. "Ukraine used to possess great potential," Putin said in his essay. "Step by step, Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia, the biggest country in Europe. Ukraine was also an important buffer between Russia and Europe." Putin called Ukraine's leaders neo-Nazis. President Zelensky was Jewish and leveled a long list of accusations against them and the West for pursuing an anti-Russia project. "We will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia," Putin warned. "And to those who will undertake such an attempt, I would like to say this: way, they will destroy their own country."

For CIA Director Bill Burns, who had served as ambassador to Moscow from 2005 to 2008, the manifesto was reminiscent of many of his conversations with Putin over the years. There was nothing really new in it, Burns believed. "Some of it is dressing up a conviction which is mostly at its core about power and what Russia believes it is entitled to do," he said. "Then you dress it up with a lot of history, selectively."

Over in the Pentagon, Under Secretary for Defense Colin Kahl had read intelligence that Putin actually believed the things he had written: that Ukraine is not a real country and Ukrainians are all just Russians. Putin was not a fan of the Soviet Union, Kahl said, but he still saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as the biggest crime of the 20th century and believed that the Russians had been severely stabbed in the back since then. Kahl saw the essay as another showcase of Putin's imperial ambition. "He dreams of reconstituting a Russian Empire, and there is no Russian Empire that doesn't include Ukraine," he said. "It's always weird to read things like that as an American," Kahl added, "because our history doesn't go back very far. So the notion that countries would give a [expletive] about what happened 9,000 years ago or whatever, or you know, 2,000 years ago or 1,000. Americans don't think like that."

Nine. In Washington, Biden was also preoccupied with an increasingly tenuous withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, a fulfillment of Biden's campaign promise to end the 20-year war. It was a cornerstone belief of Biden's foreign policy that America's presence in Afghanistan was a classic case of mission creep: too many troops for an unclear purpose. A decade earlier, while Vice President, Biden had urged President Obama not to add another 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan despite US military insistence. Biden had cut short his family vacation in Nantucket to plead his case to Obama directly. "Listen to me, boss," Biden said. "Maybe I've been around this town too long, but one thing I know is when these generals are trying to box in a new president," he leaned in toward Obama and stage-whispered, "don't let them jam you." Obama had been rolled and fed [expletive] by his military generals, who, in Biden's view, had executed a tragic power play against a young, inexperienced president.

The initial US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had been intended to destroy Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terrorist group, responsible for the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington D.C. But once Al-Qaeda had effectively been driven from Afghanistan, the mission had expanded into nation-building. Mission creep, Biden said, and [expletive] illogical. Biden's primary argument was that the mission had shifted from its original intent, and it was unclear what the US mission was now.

Also hanging over Biden was a deal Trump had signed with the Taliban in February 2020, promising to withdraw American troops by May 2021. The Taliban agreed not to attack American forces if they withdrew by May 1st, 2021. In his first months as President, Biden directed Sullivan to run a full, uh, interagency review on withdrawing from Afghanistan. "I absolutely, absolutely want to hear arguments to the contrary," Biden told Sullivan, "and I'm going to keep an open mind about this, because if there is a compelling reason to stay, I will certainly consider it and listen to it."

A presidential promise of open-mindedness was often thwarted by presidential will. The options presented to Biden were to execute a full, orderly withdrawal of all remaining troops as quickly and safely as possible; undertake a slow-gated withdrawal in three or four stages to allow time and space for political negotiations; or approve an indefinite US troop presence in Afghanistan. If the US stayed, the intelligence forecast was that the Taliban would resume their attacks. Should that happen, Biden reasoned that he inevitably would be asked to send more troops. "If we have 3,000 troops there and they're attacked, you guys," he appointed to Defense Secretary Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, "will come in and say, 'Okay, we need 5,000 more,' and they would be off to the races." Biden knew a troop presence became a magnet for more troops because the military leaders naturally would want to protect their own force. The president was clear: he wanted out. "Don't compare me to the Almighty," Biden said to Blinken, "compare me to the alternative."

Sullivan did not think Biden anguished over the decision. The president seemed at peace with his choice. President Biden had given a 16-minute address to the nation on April 14th. Instead of the high drama of an evening Oval Office address, he spoke from the Treaty Room in the afternoon, the same setting President George W. Bush had used in 2001 to launch the US military operation in Afghanistan. "I'm now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans, two Democrats," he said. "I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth."

"For the past 12 years, ever since I became Vice President, I've carried with me a card that reminds me of the exact number of American troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan as of this day. Two thousand, four hundred and forty-eight US troops and personnel have died in our Afghanistan conflicts. Twenty thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two have been wounded. It's time to end the forever war," he said. In an unusual public display, Biden then visited Arlington National Cemetery and walked alone through Section 60, where the dead from Afghanistan and Iraq are buried.

"I have trouble these days even showing up at a cemetery and not thinking of my son, Beau," Biden said of his oldest son, who had died of a brain tumor in 2015 at the age of 46. Beau, an Army officer and lawyer, had received a Bronze Star for his military service in Iraq and served two terms as Delaware's attorney general. The son who had been following his father's path into politics. Biden turned to the hundreds of white tombstones, extended his arms, and said, "Look at them all."

Biden was immediately blasted for the decision to withdraw. He had not expected to see on television and in the newspapers so much critical commentary. People who had been clamoring to end the longest war were now fixated on the future of various groups in Afghanistan, including women and girls. "I do expect a civil war that will be brutal, bloody, and have all the terrible manifestations of civil war," retired General David Petraeus said publicly. Petraeus had commanded US forces in Afghanistan and been the modern architect of the counterinsurgency strategy Biden loathed. "We have an administration that talks about bringing back support for democracy and human rights. Well, so much for that," Petraeus said.

Former President George W. Bush, in a rare public comment, said Biden's decision to withdraw was a mistake. "I'm afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm." Biden was standing by the Resolute Desk, taking in the avalanche of criticism. Blinken could see that the president was stung by it. The president lightly tapped the desk. "Yeah," Biden said, "the buck really does stop here."

The troop withdrawal was one of the rare agreements between Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, who continued to claim the election was stolen. In Wellington, Ohio, on June 26th, 2021, at his first campaign rally since leaving office, Trump gloated that he was responsible for bringing the American troops home because Biden could not stop the process he had started through his deal with the Taliban. "All the troops are coming back home," Trump said. "They, the Biden administration, couldn't stop the process. Twenty-one years is enough, don't we think? Twenty-one years. It's a shame," Trump said. "Twenty-one years by a government that wouldn't last. The only way they last is if we're there. What are we going to say? We'll stay for another 21 years, then we'll stay for another 50. The whole thing is ridiculous. We're bringing troops back home from Afghanistan."

Despite more than 50 planning meetings, the Biden administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan spiraled into devastating chaos. They had failed to anticipate contingencies and plan for the worst-case scenarios. When they did plan, it was too late. On July 6th, the remaining US forces secretly withdrew in the dark of night from Bagram Airbase, an hour from Kabul and the largest airstrip in Afghanistan. Bagram, at one time, had hosted up to 100,000 US soldiers. This left the American Embassy in Kabul still operating with more than 1,400 Americans protected by just 650 Marines and soldiers. If Kabul fell to the Taliban, the exit from Bagram shut off the only avenue for a possible evacuation of non-combatants, many of whom the US promised to protect after years of service.

On July 23rd, Biden spoke to Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani about the rapidly deteriorating situation and pressed him to change the worldwide perception that the fight against the Taliban was going poorly. "You clearly have the best military. You have 300,000 well-armed forces versus 70, 80,000 Taliban, and they're clearly capable of fighting well," Biden said. "Mr. President," Ghani said, "we are facing a full-scale invasion composed of Taliban, full Pakistani planning and logistical support, and at least 10, 15,000 international terrorists."

The Taliban surge swept through the country like a tidal wave, with district after district falling with shocking speed, taking Biden and his administration by surprise. Afghan forces offered little resistance, and in some instances, simply laid down their weapons. As the Taliban besieged Kabul, Secretary of State Blinken spoke to President Ghani on the phone on August 14th. Ghani declared defiantly that he would defend Afghanistan until the end. The next day, Ghani was in the United Arab Emirates. He had fled. Kabul fell swiftly and spectacularly. Taliban fighters took control of the presidential palace and posed for photographs around Ghani's desk, holding rifles. Thousands of desperate Afghan civilians swarmed the tarmac at Kabul International Airport. People climbed onto the wings of US evacuation planes as they took off, some tumbling to their deaths.

In an about-face, Trump called on Biden to resign in disgrace for what he had allowed to happen in Afghanistan and criticized Biden for his handling of COVID, the southern border, and the economy. "It shouldn't be a big deal because he wasn't elected legitimately in the first place," Trump added, persisting with his unsupported mantra that the election had been stolen from him.

President Biden blamed the Afghan government for the situation. In a speech on August 16th from the East Room, Biden said, "I do not regret my decision to end America's war fighting in Afghanistan." "The truth is," he said, "this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision," Biden added.

Ten days later, on August 26th, an Islamic State (ISIS) suicide bombing at Abbey Gate on the outskirts of the airport killed more than 170 people, including 13 American service members, marking it one of the deadliest days for US forces in the last decade of the 20-year war. On August 29th, the US conducted a drone strike in Kabul targeting a suspected ISIS operative with a car full of explosives. Instead, in another tragic mistake, they killed 10 civilians, including a longtime aid worker for the United States and seven children. After evacuating more than 120,000 people in the final few days, on August 31st, 2021, Biden announced the end of the longest war in American history. His speech, which hailed the extraordinary success of this mission, fell flat. No language could disguise or dress up the failure of the withdrawal. Kabul had fallen in 11 days to the Taliban. 13 American soldiers had been killed.

"There are those who would say we should have stayed indefinitely for years on end," Biden said. "Why don't we just keep doing what we were doing? Why did we have to change anything?" Biden shifted blame onto Trump. "The fact is, everything had changed. My predecessor had made a deal with the Taliban. When I came into office, we faced a deadline, May 1. The Taliban onslaught was coming." To those asking for a third decade of war in Afghanistan, I ask, "What is the vital national interest?" "In my view, we only have one: to make sure Afghanistan can never be used again to launch an attack on our homeland. The fundamental obligation of a president, in my opinion, is to defend and protect America, not against threats of 2001, but against threats of 2021 and tomorrow. I give you my word," Biden concluded, "with all of my heart, I believe this is the right decision, a wise decision, and the best decision for America."

The calamitous withdrawal hammered Biden and his principal advisers. Critics in op-ed pieces and on television leveled blame on National Security Adviser Sullivan, calling for his resignation, and this time it wasn't just coming from Republicans. "The National Security Advisor has two jobs. As the name suggests, they are the last and, ideologically, closest counselor to the president in the Situation Room," former Obama adviser Brett Bruen said in USA Today. "Their second duty is to translate the commander-in-chief's decisions and direction into practical policies. Sometimes that requires speaking truth to power. On all of these scores, the current occupant of the office appears to have failed."

"President Biden needs to fire his National Security advisor and several other senior leaders who oversaw the botched execution of our withdrawal from Afghanistan," Ruan said. Sullivan, who was accustomed to laudatory reviews of his competence and performance, was shell-shocked. "All of our nerves had been exposed to sunlight and frayed and raw and burned," he said, "especially his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and Vice Admiral Frankie Whitworth." A three-star career Navy intelligence official and Milley's J2, the top military intelligence adviser in the Pentagon, pored over the second-order and third-order effects of the withdrawal to see what threats could be ahead. Milley and Whitworth were close. They had served together in Afghanistan. When Trump appointed General Milley to be his next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Whitworth had spent every day in the run-up briefing Milley to take over the role. When Admiral Whitworth was ready to move from his two-star role into a three-star position, Milley stepped in and personally petitioned the Pentagon to make the J2 intelligence post into a three-star role so General Milley could keep Whitworth alongside him. Now, both felt the sting of Kahl's swift fall. For months, they had chewed on tabletop exercises, tweaking preparations, and been briefed on the latest intelligence. They had seen a degradation in the ability of the Afghans to defend themselves, but not how swiftly the collapse would be. "To me, it was a cascading event that was much faster than I had anticipated," Whitworth said. Frankly, he had been on a family holiday in Hawaii when the first province fell to the Taliban, another province an hour later, and then a third. "I could see what was happening," he said. He wasn't in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) but sent a note to the Pentagon: "Get our folks to safety." They needed to speed up the withdrawal. His holiday was over. Admiral Whitworth was in Washington D.C., standing beside Chairman Milley and Defense Secretary Austin, when the last plane left Afghanistan, a trio who had served together in Afghanistan all those years before. "I'll treasure forever our being there together as we finally got our last people out," Admiral Whitworth has said. Speed is what keeps Americans alive, and so speed had to be employed. He believed the military had done the best job they could in a worst-case scenario. "I don't think anyone in uniform in the intelligence community could say we knew it was going to fall in 10 to 14 days," Admiral Whitworth lamented. "I personally think corruption and the power of social media are the two biggest X factors." The real culprit was the untamed, impulsive desire to insert US troops into a foreign country, believing they were a fix, and ignoring the lessons of Vietnam.

Ten. Maidan Square at the center of Ukraine's capital, Kyiv. British Navy Admiral Tim Woods held his 2-year-old daughter up to see the Ukrainian jets flying low overhead. It was August 24th, 2021, the 30th anniversary of Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union. President Zelensky, who previously had criticized military parades, decided it was time to send Putin a message. The parade displayed Ukraine's growing military power. Upgraded battle tanks, missiles, and air defense systems rolled through the main street. Appearing near the end of the parade was the centerpiece: their new Bayraktar TB2, a sophisticated attack drone with a four-lane-wide wingspan, unlike any in the Russian arsenal, recently purchased from Turkey. Ukrainian soldiers marched in uniform. Army representatives from partner countries like the United States, Great Britain, and Poland also joined the parade. An emotional President Zelensky had tears in his eyes as he addressed the crowd in a speech that celebrated the power of Ukraine's independence and promised an independent future. "New tanks and helicopters with Ukrainian blades are being built for the Army this year," Zelensky said. He said Ukraine was reviving its naval fleet, naval bases, and adopting a missile program. "For 10 years, such a country becomes a NATO partner with enhanced opportunities." Zelensky promised his people NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line for Russia, with its vast 1,200-mile land border. As Ukraine celebrated its independence and its military advancement, Woods believed Putin saw a country moving further away from Russia's imperial grip. "Putin does his numbers," Woods said. He saw a closing window. A fluent Russian speaker, Rear Admiral Woods had been part of the United Kingdom's military training mission in Ukraine since 2018, helping to transition Ukraine's military into a NATO-standard force and address corruption in Ukraine's Ministry of Defense. He lived in Kyiv with his wife, a British intelligence officer who was working to strengthen Ukraine's ability to defend against Russian hybrid or gray zone warfare, including cyber disinformation, Russian bribery, and psychological warfare. His family were intimately familiar with the Russian intelligence service's psychological games. On a number of occasions, they had uninvited guests at their apartment in Kyiv. One evening, their young daughter had strewn big pieces of a children's floor puzzle across the floor of their playroom. His wife, exhausted, had left the mess and gone to bed. The next morning, she came out to find the puzzle, about 30 pieces, had been beautifully completed. "Pretty standard of Russian intelligence services," Woods said. "They want to scare you. We can do this anytime we want." There were other occasions; they found candelabras turned upside down. "We weren't phased by it," Woods said. "We were quite amused." A friend of theirs had left boots out one night, and the next morning, all of the laces had been strung the opposite way around so the laces were coming out the bottom of the boots. "We just assumed, as well, that the apartment was wired for sound and video, and that any conversation there was recorded," Woods said. Woods had traveled out to the border with Ukrainian colleagues to see the Russian buildup in March 2021. While Russian Defense Minister Shoigu had withdrawn the troops, the Russian equipment, the kit, had remained sitting there. Now, in late August, Woods noticed the kit was starting to build up again.

Eleven. "See Herman, you're not going to believe what I'm about to show you," said Admiral Frank Whitworth, bursting into General Milley's office one morning, a few weeks after the Afghanistan withdrawal. "I think we've got some indications that that could change the rest of, certainly, your chairmanship," he said. New pieces of intelligence were coming in that suggested Russia was planning a large-scale military attack on Ukraine. The warning was not singular but multifaceted. "Millie and Whitworth were thunderstruck. And by a nuclear nation?" Admiral Whitworth said. "You're talking about a bionuclear nation conquest? A bionuclear nation?"

In the President's Daily Brief every morning, Biden was presented with an extraordinary intelligence trove on what the Russians were visibly doing with their military forces, but also what the Russians were talking and thinking about doing with those forces. Putin's ultimate intentions remained unclear. There was an unsettling sense of déjà vu. Biden had been Vice President and Blinken was President Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser when Russian forces swiftly annexed Crimea in southern Ukraine and seized a portion of the Donbas in 2014. Obama and their team had failed to spot Putin's brazen land grab for what it was and adequately push back on it in time. It had been an easy win for Putin with few lasting negative ramifications for Russia.

Tony Blinken, 5'10" with a neat wave of once brown but now gray hair, had been Biden's trusted foreign policy adviser and close friend for 20 years. They had spent countless hours workshopping foreign policy in the Senate, on international trips, in the Vice President's office, in the White House Situation Room, and over joint family dinners, forming a genuine bond. Blinken did not want to believe what the Russians were contemplating could be serious, but Biden did not want to be surprised by Putin again. Surprise was a weapon that gave an immediate battlefield advantage to the aggressor. The president didn't want to start out on the back foot this time. Biden told his principals, including Sullivan, Blinken, Austin, and Milley, that his first priority was avoiding a direct conflict with Russia. Their strategy, he said, would have two prongs: "Work overtime to try to prevent some sort of Russian invasion of Ukraine. Work equally hard to prepare for it." He told them, "Their task was: prepare us, prepare Ukraine, and prepare the Allies. What does Ukraine need to defend itself?" He did not want anything that might be a replay of the Afghanistan disaster. Biden was clear that whatever the US did for Ukraine, it would do bilaterally with Ukraine, not through NATO. Putin saw NATO as an absolute direct threat to Russia. Ukraine's desire to join, enshrined in its Constitution, was a constant threat to Putin. The US had to be careful to not antagonize tensions and speed up Putin's preparations to attack Ukraine.

Less than two weeks after the fall of Kabul, on August 27th, Biden authorized an additional $60 million defense package for Ukraine. Biden, Sullivan, and Blinken wanted to get weapons delivered to Ukraine quickly and as quietly as possible. They did not make a big fuss about it; they didn't want headlines to play into Putin's propaganda machine. Putin was continuing to slander Ukraine's President Zelensky as a Nazi and continued to claim that Russia was being threatened by NATO. The package included Javelins, the world's best shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles.

Armor missile that automatically guides itself to the target after launch, allowing a gunner to take cover. Called a fire-and-forget weapon, it can be operated by a single person and destroy tanks and other battle armor. The Javelin, configured with a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) Warhead, has a range of 1 to 2 miles and climbs high over a target enemy tank and dives down to strike where the armor is weakest.

Each Javelin launch system with one missile costs about $200,000, which the Pentagon helpfully noted is about the cost of a Ferrari Roma automobile. In a brief notification to Congress, the Biden administration said the security assistance package for Ukraine was necessary because of a major increase in Russian military activity along its border and because of mortar attacks, ceasefire violations, and other provocations.

On September 1st, 2021, President Biden welcomed Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the White House for the first time. Zelenskyy, formerly an actor and comedian, had won Ukraine's 2019 presidential election in a historic landslide over incumbent President and billionaire Petro Poroshenko, whom Biden had counseled when he was Vice President. Zelenskyy won a crushing 73.17% of the vote compared with 24.5% for Poroshenko. Elected at age 41, Zelenskyy came into office with no political experience, the complete contrast to Joe Biden.

Zelenskyy had owned a successful television production company, Kvartal 95, and become a household celebrity playing the fictional president of Ukraine in a hugely popular television series, *Servant of the People*. A political satire that aired from 2015 to 2019, in the TV show, Zelenskyy's character, a high school history teacher, is accidentally elected president after his rant about government corruption goes viral on the internet. His approval ratings as the actual president, however, had sunk to an abysmal 38%.

Zelenskyy's surprising arrival on the political stage, in many ways, mirrored that of his fictional character. Zelenskyy was an outsider with no political acumen, but he embodied the role of an everyman. In a dark, slim-fitted suit and polished shoes, Zelenskyy had walked to the Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament building in Kyiv, on May 20th, 2019, waving, shaking hands, and taking selfies with supporters before being sworn in as president.

"Dear Ukrainians," Zelenskyy said in his inauguration address, "after my election win, my six-year-old son said, 'Dad, they say on TV that Zelenskyy is the president, so it means that I am the president too.' At the time, it sounded funny, but later I realized that it was true because each of us is the president. From now on, each of us is responsible for the country that we leave to our children."

"Each of us, in his place, can do everything for the prosperity of Ukraine," Zelenskyy said. He raised his first priority: a ceasefire in the Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces had been fighting since Putin's 2014 invasion. "I have been often asked, 'What price are you ready to pay for the ceasefire?' It's a strange question," Zelenskyy said. "What price are you ready to pay for the lives of your loved ones? I can assure that I'm ready to pay any price to stop the deaths of our heroes. I'm definitely not afraid to make difficult decisions and I'm ready to lose my fame, my ratings, and, if need be, without any hesitation, my position to bring peace, as long as we do not give up our territories."

"History is unfair," Zelenskyy added. "We are not the ones who have started this war, but we are the ones who have to finish it. I really do not want you to hang my portraits on your office walls because a president is not an icon and not an idol. A president is not a portrait. Hang pictures of your children. And before you make any decision, look into their eyes," he said.

And finally, Zelenskyy concluded, "All my life, I tried to do all I could so that Ukrainians laughed. That was my mission. Now, I will do all I can so that Ukrainians at least do not cry anymore."

In Washington D.C., however, Zelenskyy was not known for being the TV star who became president, but for the controversy surrounding President Trump's first impeachment trial. During a July 25th, 2019, call, President Zelenskyy asked to purchase more Javelin anti-tank missiles from the United States. Trump replied, "I would like you to do us a favor though, because our country has been through a lot." Trump then asked Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, saying, "Whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great."

When I interviewed Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on December 30th, 2019, about his impeachment, Trump said, "There's nobody that's tougher than me. Nobody's tougher than me. You asked me about impeachment. I'm under impeachment, and you said, 'You just act like you just won the [expletive] race.' Nixon was in a corner with his thumb in his mouth. Bill Clinton took it very, very hard. I just do things, okay? I do what I want."

I asked Trump if he thought the call with Zelenskyy had given his political opposition a sword. "It's a perfect phone call," Trump said. "I didn't give them a sword." The phone call, Trump said, "talked about us, it talked about help us, comma, the country, our country. And then I talked about, see the attorney general."

"Let me just tell you about Zelenskyy," Trump added. "They never in a million years thought I was going to release the call. Number one. Number two, they never in a million years thought that we had it transcribed. I want my calls transcribed."

Zelenskyy later told *Time* magazine journalist Simon Schuster that Trump had indeed blindsided him with the release of the transcript and it had destroyed his trust in Ukraine's allies. "On the question of who I trust," Zelenskyy said to Schuster for his book *The Showman*, "I told you honestly, no one."

Zelenskyy told Schuster he felt like a pawn trying to avoid Ukraine getting crushed by great powers. "I would never want Ukraine to be a piece on the map on the chessboard of big global players, so that someone could toss us around, use us as cover, as part of some bargain," Zelenskyy said. Trump's repeated claim that Ukraine was corrupt had also been a slap to Ukraine's reputation and economy, as investors hesitated or pulled out.

"When we're giving vast amounts of money to a country, I think you have to say, 'If they're corrupt, where is this money coming from?'" Trump said during my interview with him in December 2019 about U.S. aid to Ukraine. "Why is it that there's such corruption when we're giving it? And you know, there's another thing that I also talk about, and I talk about, why isn't Germany, France, the European nations, who are much more affected by Ukraine than us? Because Ukraine is like a massive wall. Think of it as a wall between Russia and Europe, okay?" Trump continued. "I said, why isn't Germany, why isn't France, why aren't these other countries putting up money? Why is it always the foolish United States?"

Zelenskyy was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not invited to the Trump White House. When Zelenskyy visited President Biden at the White House, he pressed Biden to help Ukraine get NATO membership, something Biden was not prepared to push in the short term. Bill Burns, Biden's CIA director, had worked actively for years to tamp down any U.S. efforts to push Ukraine along a path to NATO. When Burns was U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 2008, he had sent then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a long personal email, via secure channels: "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin. In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. Even preliminary steps would be seen as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Burns said, 'Today's Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze. I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.'"

In October 2021, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes and CIA Director Bill Burns presented to President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their principal cabinet advisors top-secret U.S. intelligence showing conclusively that President Putin had developed a war plan to invade Ukraine with 175,000 troops. It was an astonishing intelligence coup from the crown jewels of U.S. intelligence, including a human source inside the Kremlin. "It is the intelligence community's unanimous conclusion that Putin plans to invade Ukraine," Director Burns said.

Burns and Haynes shared exacting details of how Russia planned to conquer certain cities and then divide responsibilities within Russia's military and security services to maintain control of them. It was as if they had secretly entered the enemy commander's tent and were hunched over the maps, examining the number and movement of brigades and the entire planned sequence of the multi-front invasion. Secretary of State Tony Blinken was stunned by the level of the intelligence detail they now had. The new breadth and specificity of Russia's war plan for territorial conquest was alarming. A global disruptive event.

Russia's war plan was to take control of the entire country of Ukraine, eliminate Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, and control the capital, Kyiv. They could see the choreography, the preparation of Russian forces, and how they would use them to attack and conquer Ukraine. Most importantly, they had information from inside the Kremlin that Putin actually intended to do it. "This isn't just a contingency plan in an abundance of caution," thought John Finer, the Deputy National Security Advisor. "This is something that Russia is looking to do."

Despite the compelling evidence, the plan was confounding. If Putin followed through with the boldest attempt at territorial conquest since World War II, it would obliterate Russia's economic and diplomatic relationship with the United States and Europe, and maybe even China and India. Biden's principals in the room struggled to see Putin's logic. "Why would he go through with this?" "There was really nothing leading into October other than Putin's manifesto," Sullivan said, "that led us to think, 'Okay, something has really swerved here.'" Putin's war plans were not being reflected in Russia's public posture or rhetoric. There was no preparation of Russia's public for war. "Something had changed dramatically," Sullivan realized. "But all is quiet." "All is quiet," it was more perplexing than comforting.

Putin was about to attempt to forcibly take another sovereign country and make it part of Russia. "When we put our frame of reference on it, our logic on it, it sounds crazy," Blinken said to Biden. "If you put yourself in Putin's mindset, maybe not so much." And there's a fairly consistent line, Blinken said, if you read and take some of his speeches at face value, Putin's profound philosophical conviction or theological conviction is that Ukraine needs to be erased from the map and subsumed into Russia. Blinken said, thinking of Putin's manifesto. Biden agreed. "You read these things, he's telling you why he's doing what he's doing," Biden said.

John Finer wondered, "Did Putin comprehend the obstacles?" Ukraine was not about to just relinquish sovereignty and let Putin take over. That was certain. Ukraine had declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Putin's invasion of Crimea in 2014 had hardened Ukrainian sentiment against Russia and contributed to the creation of a stronger Ukrainian national identity. Prior to 2014, only 20% to 30% of Ukrainians favored joining NATO. In 2019, a constitutional amendment committed Ukraine to pursuing NATO membership. In 2021, before Putin's first spring troop buildup, support for NATO membership had risen to 56%.

"Putin was creating his own problems," let's just say. "Putin wins comfortably and easily at what he views as an acceptable cost," Finer reasoned. "Then he is occupying this enormous country with a relatively small number of troops for the geography." Ukraine, which covers nearly the land area of Texas, is the second-largest country in Europe after Russia and has a population of about 44 million, 14 million more than Texas does. "He just think the Ukrainians are going to acquiesce to that? That there won't be some sort of insurgency? There would be violent uprisings, rebellions, and years of ongoing conflict," Finer said.

The intelligence seemed, on the one hand, to be of such tectonic significance, Finer thought, but on the other hand, so illogical. Despite the uncertainty, the President and his cabinet unanimously agreed Russia's war plan was dead serious. "It's very highly developed. The actual decision to pull the trigger hasn't been made, but is primed," Blinken said. A plan, however, is not a decision. They could see a very serious consideration by Russia, but not a decision. That was an important distinction. It was also Putin's style, CIA Director Burns noted. He likes to keep his options open.

"What are the alternative explanations for all this intelligence other than just the straightforward interpretation?" President Biden asked. "Is this a war game? Is this an option? Are we meant to be seeing this so that it scares us into doing something?" Burns said there were no alternate explanations. The intelligence was conclusive. Avril Haynes, who as Director of National Intelligence oversaw all the U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, had a trove of intelligence about Putin's reasoning and walked them through the new data points they had collected.

"Insecurity and confidence are two sides of the same coin with Putin," Haynes said. "He can be insecure. He can also be somebody who believes that he's the only person that can restore Russia to its former glory." Putin had long lamented the breakup of the Soviet Union, which he called the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. Ukraine's lands, Putin believed, were the cradle of Russia. "He believes that Ukraine has to come back to Russia, and that has to trump everything else," Haynes said. There was an absolute assumption of ownership, yet Ukraine was clearly distancing itself from Russia while deepening its engagement with the West and NATO. The Ukrainian military was getting stronger and better with assistance from the West. The longer Putin waited to invade, the more formidable the Ukrainian pushback would be. Putin's assessment was that military action would be the best option to prevent Ukraine from integrating more with the West. This was something Putin believed he had to stop at all costs. "For Putin, losing Ukraine is, in effect, an existential threat," Haynes said. By his calculations, an invasion would be successful and quick, bringing Ukraine once again under Russian control. Haynes had a frankness and intensity when she spoke that held the room's attention.

"His war plan sounds crazy if you are thinking about what makes sense for the Russian people," Haynes said. "But Putin prioritizes his vision well over the health and wealth of the Russian people." Putin believed that Russia would be welcomed by most Ukrainians, Director Haynes summarized. "He sees Ukrainians as lesser people than Russian people. He is one of the most racist leaders that we have." The Russian president reasoned that any consequences for his country would be short-lived. Economic sanctions from the West would be mitigated by Russia's strong National Wealth Fund and favorable economic indicators in the next few years before Putin would face his next election. Current high energy prices would make it difficult for Europe to join the United States in issuing significant economic sanctions that would hurt European domestic economies. European and U.S. resolve would weaken with time, and with worsening food shortages, inflation, and energy shortages, Russia would be better at maintaining resolve. And Putin's judgment was that time was on his side. At least, that was what the U.S. intelligence showed.

"This is what Putin plans to do," Burns repeated. It was unusual for intelligence agencies to be so definitive. "This would be so crazy, but," Biden said, "I know leaders. Leaders tend to think a lot more about downside risk than upside gain. And Putin is opportunistic, but pretty risk-averse. He's only at the lower, narrow end of risk acceptance. This is so radically different from what I know about him," Biden said. "And also, for a leader to decide to do this without a particular match lighting the fuse, it would be crazy. I see the Intel," Biden added. The President was not disbelieving of it. The sense of incredulousness and destiny hung in the room. "Jesus Christ," Biden finally said. "Now I've got to deal with Russia swallowing Ukraine." He had just had the Afghanistan ordeal, now this. Finer could see this would transform Biden's presidency, the administration's goals, and global stability. "This is going to be the next year of our lives, if not the rest of this term," Finer said. "This is going to be the thing that animates it, dominates it."

"Continue looking at the situation from 360 degrees," Biden directed. "Think of every possible angle," Biden repeated. His main charge: "Number one, prevent it. But," he added starkly, "our ability to prevent this is limited, and the aggressor willing to launch an invasion had a substantial initial advantage." This was the reality of global disruption they might face. Nonetheless, Biden's directive was: "Try. We'll run a play and see." "Number two, full preparation. If it happens," Biden said, "we need to be positioned as effectively as possible so that our response enhances rather than depletes our interests." They wanted to avoid the scramble of paperwork and months of bureaucratic delays on funding and weapons delivery after Putin invaded. Sullivan could see how Biden was applying his decades of foreign policy experience. The President had spent a considerable amount of time thinking about alliances, NATO, U.S.-Russia relations, great power politics.

Sullivan kept in regular communication with Fred Kagan, an expert on military history and strategy, who wrote regularly for the Institute for the Study of War, an independent think tank considered the gold standard for providing independent assessments of the strategic landscape of conflicts around the world. "He's not going to do a big invasion," Kagan said flatly to Sullivan. He sounded certain. ISW was counting the Russian brigades and monitoring Russia's military buildup. "It's War 101," Kagan said. "You need to prepare the public ground for war, and there's none of that. None of it."

Kagan's point gave Sullivan pause. In their never-ending talks, Sullivan and Finer debated whether Putin could be engaging in some kind of mental experiment. "If the expectation is for a massive invasion and only a more minor one occurs, Putin might be banking on less U.S. and European pushback. So you scare people about the big thing to negotiate the grabbing of a smaller thing," Finer said. The biggest problem with that theory was it did not match the intelligence, which showed Putin's plan was to fully invade. Hanging over the intelligence was the fallout from Biden's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was an area Putin only saw weaknesses in Biden and his administration, according to intelligence of conversations inside the Kremlin. That weakness suggested Biden would not know what to do when Putin invaded.

President George W. Bush, who had ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003 in part because the CIA had said the intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a slam dunk, sympathized with Biden's Afghanistan fiasco. During a phone call after the Afghanistan withdrawal, Bush said to Biden, "Oh boy, I can understand what you're going through. I got [expletive] by my Intel people too."

"We have to consider the human psychology at play here," Defense Secretary Austin's principal advisor, Colin Kahl, said. His team at the Pentagon was tracking the substantial Russian troop movements and preparations along Ukraine's border. "This is more than just a bluff," Kahl said. As they studied the intelligence, it seemed remarkable in its depth and clarity, but what it suggested seemed insane. "We are not going to compound what happened in Afghanistan with us not being on the ball on this crisis," Kahl directed. Since Afghanistan was a NATO mission, not just a U.S. one, the chaotic withdrawal had also created turbulence among NATO allies, who were critical of the U.S. execution. "Seeing this intelligence, we have to work overtime," Kahl said, "to get the allies on side, to get them to trust in the intelligence, to see the oncoming train that we are seeing and get ready to respond."

"This was the crown jewels of U.S. intelligence," Carl said. "They had to find a way to share it with allies." Blinken began right away to build an international coalition to support Ukraine and impose costs on Russia through sanctions and export controls. For Blinken, the political implications were far bigger than Ukraine. If Putin could get away with naked aggression against another country, redrawing another country's borders by force, Blinken believed the peace and stability in Europe and around the world that grew out of the ashes of World War II would be obliterated. He worried about the risk of potential reverberations in the Indo-Pacific, where China was threatening Taiwan. If Russia simply got away with this, other more powerful countries could take it as a green light to redraw their own borders by force. After initial outreach, Blinken updated President Biden and Sullivan. "Most of the allies really think this is unlikely," Blinken said. He had heard a lot of skepticism, some outright denied the U.S. analysis. Sullivan and Finer also started approaching allies, including the Ukrainians, to gauge how others responded to the idea that Russia was seriously preparing to invade Ukraine. "We just had to really pressure the theory before we were comfortable believing it," Finer said. "I mean, even we, the ones who were out beating the drum the loudest inside our government with our partners that this was going to happen, I think even in the back of our minds on some level, up until the end, it seemed so crazy that there at least felt like there was a chance that Putin wouldn't go through with it. Even with all the information staring us in the face, we were full speed ahead starting in the early fall period, but it just never made sense."

On the sidelines of the G20 in Rome on October 30th and 31st, President Biden chaired a private meeting with a small group of world leaders. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel sat around a small table with President Biden in a conference room. Merkel also brought her soon-to-be successor, Olaf Scholz. On chairs behind each leader were their foreign minister and national security adviser. Blinken and Sullivan sat behind Biden. The room was swept to ensure the 12 people in the room were not being covertly listened to.

"We've all seen that the Russians have massed forces on the border, as they did in April," Biden said. "We now have information about what they are actually thinking, planning, and plotting. What we don't know is whether they've actually decided to pull the trigger," Biden said. "But the gun is cocked." This was the first time Biden had directly engaged the core European partners on what Russia was planning to do in Ukraine. French President Macron and the two German leaders voiced skepticism. It didn't seem Putin was that crazy. Maybe the Russian leader was seeking to gain leverage. Boris Johnson found the intelligence that Putin was going to invade Ukraine completely credible. MI6 and Defense Minister Ben Wallace had been providing Johnson with a similarly worrying portrait of Putin's war plans. Perhaps it was Putin's bluff, but Johnson believed Putin was monstrous to even be thinking about it.

In a phone call, Johnson confronted Putin. "You have no reason to invade Ukraine," Johnson said. "There is no way Ukraine would be joining NATO anytime soon." "Putin said, 'What do you mean by anytime soon? When is that?'" "Next month?" "No," Johnson said. "Look, I mean, the reality is Ukraine is not going to join in the foreseeable future." Johnson believed that Putin knew that it was nonsense. Johnson felt this was Putin's paranoia about NATO. It was also a game for Putin. The Russian leader wanted to goad Johnson and other Western leaders into saying publicly, "There is no way Ukraine will join NATO." He has us in a trap, Johnson thought with frustration. Johnson couldn't say it publicly because that would have contradicted NATO's open-door policy and seemed like Putin had imposed a Russian veto on a sovereign country's decision to apply for NATO membership. It would be a massive concession and an admission of defeat, a surrender to Putin's pressure, and quite wrong, Johnson believed. Johnson, a member of the British Conservative Party and the product of prestigious Eton and Oxford, found the conversation with Putin very creepy, later confiding to an associate that the Russian autocrat was a "small-ish low life."

In several close-hold meetings in the second half of October, Biden, Sullivan, and Burns weighed how best to confront Putin with the intelligence the U.S. had collected to credibly and unambiguously send the message, "We know," and in similarly direct terms, to lay out the consequences for Russia. They decided to hold the President in reserve. Should the President personally travel to Russia to warn Putin and try to talk him out of it, and Putin went ahead and invaded, Biden would be seen to have failed and look weak. Confronted with the possibility of a war that could threaten the entire international order, Biden could have met the moment and delivered the warning to President Putin in person himself. The Russian autocrat wanted the respect of world leaders; anyone else was an underling, a bureaucrat. The only messenger from the United States with the weight and influence to stop Putin was the President. When President Reagan wanted to warn Russian leader Gorbachev about the isolation of Berlin, he did not send a top official from his administration; he went himself, against advice from some of his staff who said it would be too provocative. Standing at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on June 12th, 1987, Reagan said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." It was Reagan's most memorable statement. Two years later, the Berlin Wall fell. Leaders have to risk looking weak, especially in efforts to stop war. Often, these are remembered in history as great strengths. Maybe Putin was immovable, but it would have been worth trying. Leadership is often about making risky, big plays.

President Biden decided to send the person who arguably had more experience with Putin than anyone in the U.S. government. Biden called Bill Burns his "Putin list" and believed he was the natural choice for the mission. Burns, a trim, straight-laced 65-year-old with snowy hair and a mustache, had served 32 years in the Foreign Service, including as ambassador to Moscow. He knew Putin. Burns was in his seventh year as head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace when Biden called and asked him to be his CIA director. He was both flawed and thrilled at the chance to return to government, especially in the high-profile and coveted post no career diplomat had ever been appointed CIA director.

President Biden said he would send Burns to Moscow to meet with Putin, but Biden was not going to stand completely in reserve. Burns would carry a private letter from Biden to Putin. The letter matched closely with what Burns would say to Putin. Each point had been crafted carefully by the NSC in collaboration with the intelligence agencies to send the message, "We know," without disclosing everything or how they knew it. The CIA director was acutely aware of the importance of protecting their intelligence sources and methods, which had produced such exquisite insight into Putin's planning. He had not only a sharp, detailed picture of Russia's military plans but Putin's preparations for political control of Ukraine as well.

Burns traveled from Joint Base Andrews on a military 737 plane to Moscow on Tuesday, November 2nd. Eric Green, the NSC Russia director, and Karen Donfried from the State Department accompanied him, along with a small team from the CIA. When they arrived 12 hours later, a thick fog had descended on Moscow, so their plane spent another 2 hours circling the city's three principal airports, looking unsuccessfully for an opening. At 2 a.m., they landed in Ryazan, 500 miles from Moscow. Burns slept for 2 hours before the plane was in the air again, arriving finally in Moscow later that morning.

Burns first went to the Kremlin to meet with the Secretary of the Kremlin Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, a close Putin ally going back to their days in Russia's Security Service, the KGB, in St. Petersburg. He was also the former head of the FSB, Russia's internal security and counterintelligence service. Patrushev, hardline and hawkish, looked like a balding European businessman, but he is the most powerful figure among the intelligence officials in Putin's inner circle. For practical purposes, and given the importance of the intelligence portfolio in Putin's Russia, Patrushev was the equivalent to a national security advisor, overall master coordinator for policy. Burns found him to be a dour character.

The CIA director confronted Patrushev about Russia's war plans. He appeared both surprised and irritated. Burns had not given the Russians a heads-up about his message for Putin. Patrushev believed Burns was visiting to begin preparations for another meeting between Biden and Putin. Patrushev was not in any way apologetic or defensive and made no effort to rebut the points Burns made. The CIA director noted that Patrushev was defiant but did not tell him he was wrong. U.S. intelligence indicated that the number of people around Putin who were involved in his decision-making for a war was extremely small. Burns knew Patrushev was one of the people in that inner circle. "Well," Patrushev said, "you know, we Russians may not be able to compete economically with the United States, but don't underestimate our military modernization. We have modernized our military over the last two decades. We can compete militarily."

"I would not underestimate the seriousness of the message that I'm conveying," Burns said. He was not about to get into a tit-for-tat over whose military was superior. Another wave of the coronavirus had just hit Moscow, which was under a strict curfew. Putin, described by U.S. Intel as fearful and almost paranoid about contracting the virus, was isolating in his high-security palace complex in Sochi, on the coast of the Black Sea, about 1,000 miles south of Moscow. Putin, Burns was told, would speak with him by phone.

Putin's Chief Foreign Policy Advisor, Yuri Ushakov, met him in his office adjacent to the Kremlin. Ushakov left Burns alone in the room. The phone rang. Burns recognized Putin's voice instantly. Putin recalled when Burns had been ambassador to Moscow 14 years earlier and then appeared to wait for Burns to deliver his message. He almost certainly had been tipped off by Patrushev about what was coming.

Burns wanted to be straightforward with the Russian president. "We are alarmed that you are seriously contemplating a major invasion of Ukraine," Burns said. "That would be a mistake. If you do that, this is what we will do," Burns continued, laying out, as the President had directed him to do, what they were seeing and the severe actions Biden would take in response. Putin didn't interrupt. He seemed to listen carefully as Burns laid out the consequences. "We are going to rally the West. We are going to impose severe economic penalties, crushing economic sanctions," Burns said. "Ukraine is a sovereign state. We would continue to support Ukraine. We would adjust our force posture in Europe. I'm not threatening you, I'm just saying this is what we will do in response, and you need to know that."

"The types of consequences you faced in 2014 will be nothing compared to what we are prepared to do now," Burns said. In 2014, when Putin invaded Crimea, the West's response was slow, weak, and divided. The intelligence indicated Putin was expecting much the same this time. "The United States will make sure that the whole Russian banking system is removed from SWIFT," Burns continued, referring to the global communications system used by banks for the smooth, secure, coded, rapid transfer of money. SWIFT sends about 40 million messages a day as trillions of dollars are transferred reliably among thousands of banks. Removal from the SWIFT system would harm Russian banks severely because they'd have to develop their own banking communications system, a laborious and almost impossible task. "We're going to isolate you diplomatically, and we're going to help Ukraine defend itself," Burns said.

Putin's side of the conversation was fairly lengthy and, to Burns, a familiar recitation of Putin's convictions about Ukraine and his cockiness about Russia's ability to enforce its will on Ukraine. Ukraine is weak and divided, Putin argued, not a real country. Russia's interests require us to control Ukraine's choices. Putin completely dismissed Zelenskyy as a political leader and repeated his usual complaints about the illegitimacy of the Ukrainian government and possible NATO expansion. He argued that ethnic Russians in Ukraine were being discriminated against and persecuted. The Russian president's tone wasn't defensive or apologetic. Putin also made no effort to take issue with the CIA director's description of Russia's preparations for the conflict. It seemed to Burns as though Putin really believed everything he said about Ukraine and that his risk appetite had grown.

Burns asked Putin, "With a force of 180,000 to 190,000, how are you going to control a country of 44 million that doesn't want to be controlled by Russia? How are you going to deal with that?" Putin did not answer. Burns had always found with Putin a fixation on controlling Ukraine. Putin seemed to not believe he could be a great Russian leader unless he made Ukraine part of Russia.

In Moscow, Burns also met with Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, who intelligence showed was intimately involved in the decision-making for a war. He also appeared unmoved by U.S. clarity about their war plans. Others Burns met with, like Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, appeared not to know about Russia's invasion plans. Eric Green and Karen Donfried, who attended some of the meetings with Burns, picked up a sense that the Russians were feeling kind of full of themselves after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. "I think it reinforced Putin's conceptions about how easy it would be," Green noted. "The Fiasco of the U.S. withdrawal was a centerpiece of Putin's disdain. Here's a military force that's been supported by the U.S. for decades; at that stage, they just collapsed. The Americans didn't back them up."

Burns stayed one night at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador's large yellow house in Moscow, where Burns had lived for three years. He left Russia the next day feeling even more troubled than when he arrived. On the plane, he sent a highly classified text to President Biden: "I came away with a very strong impression that Putin has just about made up his mind to go to war," Burns reported. The CIA director said that this was both because of what he could see in the hard intelligence in terms of Russia's preparations for war and his own sense of Putin's absolute conviction that without controlling Ukraine's choices, Russia can't function as a great power. Burns believed Putin had come to the conclusion that strategically, his window of opportunity to exert control over Ukraine was closing. The winter of 2021-2022 provided a favorable landscape. Putin believed Europe was distracted. The French had elections coming up in early 2022. Chancellor Merkel was about to be succeeded by Olaf Scholz as the new German leader. Also, Burns noted, Putin seemed convinced that he had modernized the Russian military to the point that they would not face much of a challenge in Ukraine. Putin saw President Zelenskyy as weak and thought the Ukrainians would roll over. Putin expressed almost a sense of entitlement for dominance over Ukraine, Burns said. None of that was new, Burns added, but there was a purpose, purposefulness, brutish as it was in a lot of ways, that he was unmistakable in what he was saying. Nothing Burns had heard from Putin or the people around him suggested to him that the Russians were looking for a way out of war. The CIA director concluded, "It is shaping up to be the biggest ground war in Europe since World War I."

Burns called Jake Sullivan on a secure line and summarized his text to the President. He also called President Zelenskyy and laid out exactly what he had conveyed to Putin and what the Russian leader had said in return. Burns's to-do list was headed by his insistence that the Ukrainians understand what was coming. While Burns was in Moscow, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and his Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Tom Sullivan (brother of Jake Sullivan), were in Glasgow, Scotland, on the sidelines of the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Blinken met with Zelenskyy to convey a warning from President Biden. "The President asked me to share this with you," Blinken said to Zelenskyy. They sat almost knee-to-knee, facing each other. Zelenskyy showed no indication that he knew what the U.S. Secretary of State was about to say.

"We all know, and you know better than anyone, the Russians have their forces massed on your border," Blinken said. "But we have information in great detail about what they are actually planning to do with those forces. We have the plans, the preparations, all the stuff that's not visible. And we believe there is a very high risk that the Russians will reinvade your country." Zelenskyy listened carefully. "We're going to link you up with our intelligence people," Blinken said. "They'll give you chapter and verse about what we know and what we don't know. But I wanted you to hear it from me, on behalf of the President. This is what we're concerned about and what we're seeing happen."

Zelenskyy was skeptical. The Ukrainian president called in a few of his close senior advisors and asked Blinken to repeat the message so they could hear directly. A buildup of Russian forces did not necessarily mean that the Russians were coming in, the Ukrainians said. Zelenskyy was doubtful the Russians would pull the trigger. "Look," Blinken said, "none of us want to believe that they would do something that foolhardy, but we see this as dead serious." He hedged, "If not a certainty, a probability. You need to be prepared, and we're getting prepared."

Blinken said the Pentagon's grim calculation was that if Putin invaded Ukraine with its far larger, superior military, Ukrainian territory would quickly fall to the Russians. "We're going to be by your side," Blinken added. "We are going to be with you in the coming months, whatever is to come. We are going to do everything we can to deter this, and we're going to do everything we can to support you." "Thank you for letting me know," Zelenskyy said.

Eric Green and Karen Donfried flew from Moscow to Kyiv to share intelligence with Zelenskyy's Chief of Staff, Andriy Yermak, and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dmytro Kuleba. Their reception was polite but restrained. Green sensed suspicion on the part of the Ukrainians, an element of, "Hello, yes, the Russians are out to get us. We know that. We live that reality, or what else?"

Finally, it was Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin's turn to bang the drum. Austin, aged 68, a retired Army General, was America's first African-American Secretary of Defense. He had graduated from West Point in 1975, on the heels of a humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, and served more than four decades in the Army, unmatched war-fighting experience for a Secretary of Defense. He was the only Defense Secretary to have held combat commands in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the 1, 2, 3, and 4-star levels. He was a soldier's soldier and had known Biden for more than a decade. During the Obama years, Austin had been Director of the Joint Staff, one of the most important stepping stones in the military, and later had been sent to Iraq as the Commanding General of U.S. forces. Biden's eldest son, the late Major Beau Biden, was a lawyer on Austin's staff, and they had developed a strong relationship.

Austin met with Ukraine's Defense Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, in Washington to go over the latest Russian troop movements along Ukraine's borders. Just like Zelenskyy, Reznikov was dubious that Russia would actually invade. Putin, he reminded Austin, had sent the same number of troops to their border in the spring, and what did Putin get? Reznikov said, "He got two phone calls with Biden and a personal meeting in Geneva." The Ukrainian defense minister was convinced Putin was merely trying to get more attention and concessions from Biden and NATO.

Austin set up a battle rhythm of 8:00 a.m. meetings a few times a week. The Pentagon needed to be prepared for an invasion, even if Putin bluffed. "They were in a period of ambiguous warning. This is one of the dilemmas that the principals faced, and that the President faced," Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl said. "If Putin hasn't made the final decision, could we inadvertently make him do things that provoke him?" It was a classic foreign policy and military dilemma: in trying to deter a bad thing from happening, you inadvertently create the conditions for an adverse move against you, bringing about the thing you were working so hard to avoid. Kahl likened the daily meetings to the old television show *Hollywood Squares*. Around the virtual table, filling the squares on his large screen, was the senior military and civilian leadership of the Pentagon, along with his commanders across the world. Austin began each meeting by reviewing the North Stars: their overall objectives: bolster Ukraine to defend itself; be prepared with forces on alert; reinforce NATO to make sure any conflict in Ukraine does not spill over; keep the allies united; and avoid steps that would lead to a direct conflict with Russia. If it happens, prevent a military conflict from becoming World War II.

Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Paris to repair White House relations with French President Emmanuel Macron, who was still seething after a U.S. deal with Australia for nuclear-powered submarines stripped France of its $6 billion submarine contract with Australia. Macron had recalled the French ambassador from Washington in a dramatic display of displeasure. France's foreign minister said publicly they had been "stabbed in the back." Biden also gave his Vice President a second assignment: brief Macron on the latest U.S. intelligence about Russia's war plans. "Be clear with Macron that this is going to happen," Biden told her. "We need a plan, and we need alliance solidarity. We are highly confident that Russia is going to do this."

"Vice President Harris said to French President Macron at the Élysée Palace during their two-hour meeting on November 10th, 'Putin sees the Europeans as weak. He believes Europe doesn't want to deal with a conflict, is divided, and doesn't have confidence in United States leadership. Putin believes Europe will just swallow this.'" Harris appealed to Macron to lead the European charge. "Putin viewed France differently to other European allies," she said, "because the French had not always been aligned with the U.S. on transatlantic and NATO issues." "Bring the other Europeans on board," Harris urged, "and show Putin that NATO will be united and that there will be severe economic costs if he invades." With German Chancellor Angela Merkel stepping down, it was no secret that the French President aspired to be the next great leader of Europe, the powerhouse at the center of European decision-making and foreign policy. This was a tantalizing opportunity. Macron took up the mantle. He would order the French military to reinforce Eastern European allies, send strike brigades to Romania, and boost forces in Poland. "France is prepared to impose costs," Macron assured Harris. "I'm on board for that." He would also personally confront Putin. "If there is a country that might be a risk to alliance unity, it is not France," Macron said adamantly. He pointed to Germany's Nord Stream 2 pipeline project and their reliance on Russian oil and gas. "France is not the weak link in the alliance," he repeated. "If there was a weak link, it would be Germany."

While the discussion was serious, the tone of the meeting was good-natured. That evening, the French President escorted the Vice President to dinner, where she was given the seat of honor. When Harris delivered her address at the Paris Peace Forum the next day, Macron sat in the front row, a strong public signal that while the U.S. and France could have their disputes, even fiery ones, the two countries remained firm, committed allies. On foreign trips, the Vice President would send her own reports to President Biden, often including Sullivan and Blinken in the secure email exchange. As she departed Paris, Harris reported that she felt good about the meeting with Macron. There had been no lingering acrimony over the AUKUS submarine deal; the French President did not even bring it up.

Blinken flew to Stockholm, Sweden, for the December 2nd, 2021, meeting of the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. It operated as the world's largest forum for cooperation on regional security, which included the United States and Russia as members. He watched Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, whom he had known for years, address the ministerial council in the flag-lined auditorium. Ned Price, his top aide, was sitting next to him. "Lavrov is highly intelligent," Blinken said to Price. "He is a great sophist. He is extremely good at whataboutism, in that you'll go down one path, and he says, 'Well, what about when you did this or did that?'" Sergey, as Blinken called him, was a 6'2", 71-year-old career diplomat and Russia's longest-serving foreign minister since the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin had personally appointed him in 2004. Lavrov spoke multiple languages fluently, including English, French, and Swahili, and had served for a decade as Russia's ambassador to the United Nations. With perfectly fitted suits and thin rimless glasses that punctuated his stern, inquisitorial gaze, Lavrov was careful to maintain a public presence manicured to Putin's liking. He smoked regularly and could be quite cunning.

"The OSCE is in a depressing state today," Lavrov said to the OSCE ministerial council. "It has become hostage to the bloc-based discipline within the European Union and NATO and is mired in petty agendas. Our Western partners seek to replace international law with a rules-based order, which they themselves are establishing on the basis of their own exceptionalism," Lavrov said. "Liberal values are being instrumentalized for shameless interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states." Russia's accusations were familiar to Blinken, but with up to 100,000 Russian troops congregating on Ukraine's borders, the Russia.

Is the victim card seemed phonier than usual? Still, Lincoln listened carefully for anything that hinted at a legitimate security concern or opening for real negotiation.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War War and the cessation of the struggle between two systems. Lavrov continued dramatically, "Now, new walls are being erected by those who proclaim themselves civilized democracies and consider it their mission to contain authoritarian regimes." He moved on to directly accuse NATO of threatening Russia. "The alliance's military infrastructure is being irresponsibly moved closer to Russia's border, and anti-missile defense systems that could be used for missile strikes are being deployed in Romania and Poland. U.S. medium-range missiles can appear any day now on European territory."

Blinken knew this was not true. Europe remains silent. Ukraine is being pumped up militarily, which fuels the Ukrainian government's desire to sabotage the Minsk agreements—the security agreements negotiated and originally signed by Russia, Ukraine, and the OSCE after Putin's 2014 invasion—and fosters the illusion that the conflict can be resolved by force. The Minsk agreements had failed to stop ongoing military clashes between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbas since 2014. Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for the failure of the agreements.

"The decision of the NATO Bucharest Summit of April 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO was like a landmine placed beneath the very foundations of the European security architecture," Lavrov said. "It is already exploded once in August 2008 when Mikheil Saakashvili, euphoric about the prospect of joining NATO, took a gamble that had dire consequences for Georgia itself and brought the security situation in Europe to a knife's edge."

Blinken blanched. This was a loosely veiled reminder that Russia had successfully invaded Georgia in 2008 to prevent it from pursuing a path to joining NATO, and Saakashvili, Georgia's former president who had put the country on a democratic reform agenda toward EU and NATO membership, was now wasting away in a Georgian prison cell. "Third countries, meaning the United States, have no right to go express their position on the issue of NATO enlargement and are playing with fire," he warned. "I am convinced that they cannot be unaware of this."

When it was Blinken's turn to speak, he addressed Russia's aggression in a cool, comfortably diplomatic tone. "The seizure by force of Crimea has brought relentless abuses against Crimean Tatars, ethnic Ukrainians, and others who peacefully oppose this occupation," Blinken said. "And as I said yesterday at the NATO foreign ministers meeting, we are deeply concerned by evidence that Russia has made plans for further significant aggression against Ukraine. And so, we call on Russia to respect Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, to de-escalate, reverse the recent troop buildup, return forces to normal peaceful positions, and to implement the Minsk commitments."

Blinken cornered Lavrov for a private talk on the sidelines of the forum. "Tony, Russia's foreign minister," he said, "do you really think we're going to invade? Are you really serious with this stuff? We have no plans to invade Ukraine, and we're not trying to threaten K." Lavrov said NATO was continuing to build up a security threat to Russia. He said the real threat is directed at Russia, not directed at Ukraine. He argued Kiev is placing advanced weapons in Ukraine close to Russia's borders that they could use to strike deep within Russia in a matter of minutes. "He said, 'Sergey, that's not true,'" Blinken said. "And you know it's not true. So unless you are being misinformed by your own people, you have to know that that's not true." President Zelensky had been careful not to place weapons close to the border out of fear of giving Russia an excuse to attack Ukraine.

Lavrov then segued their conversation to alleged persecution of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers inside Ukraine. "As best I can tell," Blinken said, "the rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine are greater than the rights of ethnic Russians in Russia." Lincoln could see Lavrov didn't appreciate the comment. Tony Lavrov scoffed, "You know that's not true."

They went back and forth on the Minsk agreements. The Russians had an entire narrative about the Minsk process that was basically Alice in Wonderland, Blinken thought, a fantasy. Blinken conveyed President Biden's deterrence message, warning that the U.S. and allies would impose severe costs and consequences on Russia if it takes further aggressive action against Ukraine, including high-impact economic measures that we've refrained from taking in the past. "The strategy was still to hold President Biden in reserve," Lavrov replied with Russia's own threats, drawing Ukraine into the geopolitical games of the United States. "He said, 'Will have the most serious consequences.'"

Lincoln left the meeting convinced that his Russian counterpart was not fully aware of the extent of Putin's war plans. He had a sliver of sympathy for how far outside Putin's confidence Lavrov was. "First of all, I think we had pretty good information that this invasion plan was extremely closely held among Putin and a very small handful of people, three to four people," Blinken said, not to include Lavrov. Second, Blinken said, "To some extent, his declarations in these meetings were mostly bluster, but it's also entirely possible that we knew more about the war plan than he did. I actually believe that we did."

At the official dinner that evening, the 57 foreign ministers and Kim secretaries of State sat at one of the biggest dining tables Blinken had ever seen. He was seated next to Ukraine's foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, and directly across from him was Lavrov. Lavrov lost no time launching into a dire tirade about the origins of 2014, claiming there had been a coup perpetrated by the United States and others in Ukraine that caused the rightly elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to be deposed. Having lived through that period himself, Lincoln felt he had to correct Lavrov as he attempted once again to replace history with the Putin-preferred narrative.

"That's not what happened," Blinken interjected. "And you know it, and everyone at this table knows it." Blinken went through the litany of what actually had happened in 2014. Lavrov, unfazed, raised the Minsk process. "Blinken interjected again, 'Sergey, we can talk about the Minsk process here.'" Blinken held a piece of paper in his hand. "Here are the requirements that Russia had under the Minsk process: immediate and full ceasefire in particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine and its strict fulfillment as of 00:00 midnight Kyiv time on Feb. 15, 2015. You didn't do it," Lincoln said. "Withdrawal of all heavy weapons. You didn't do it," Blink said. "Allow OSCE monitoring. You didn't do it," Blink said. "All for all political prisoner exchange. You didn't do it. Ensure delivery of humanitarian assistance. You didn't do it. Restore control of the state border to the Ukrainian government in the whole conflict zone. You didn't do it," Lincoln said. "I could go on. I think you get the point."

Lavrov responded with bluster, flagrant denials, and condescension. But he sounded convincing. That was the problem with Lavrov. In these large meetings, he was a showman, and he had an attentive audience. "The conviction when he speaks," Blinken said afterward to Ned Price, "if you are uninformed or weren't participating in something, you might actually say, 'Oh, maybe this is accurate.'"

While in Stockholm, the Secretary of State also met with Swedish intelligence officials to deliver the U.S. warning about Ukraine. By now, Blinken had delivered his presentation so many times he had it down pat. "We have information dating back several weeks now that President Putin has ambitions to undertake an invasion of Ukraine," Blinken said. "He is mobilizing forces to position them to be able to launch a large-scale invasion of Ukraine at his order. We don't know precisely when this will take place, but our intelligence officials are confident that he is putting himself in a position to be able to do this in the relatively near term."

The Swedish intelligence lead was puzzled. "We've seen nothing to corroborate that type of information, and you know, we have a close relationship, but we just don't have anything that speaks to the concern that you all are putting forward." Blinken understood the skepticism. Putin's plan wasn't logical, and even the Secretary of State carried a lagging sense of disbelief. "Look," Lincoln said, "we need to make sure that you're seeing what we're seeing and that you have what we have. Our Intel officials are competent in what they assess," Blinken added, "but we need to make sure that our intelligence services are linked up so that we're dealing with the same set of information." Part of diplomacy had become covert salesmanship.

"We have got to get the Allies on board because we can't do this effectively alone," Biden urged his top advisers and the Vice President during a President's Daily Brief. Despite the efforts to ring the alarm bell on Russia's plans, the Allies remained deeply skeptical of the U.S. warnings and intel assessments. "We've seen how Putin has been capable of just lying, bold-faced lying," Director of National Intelligence Haynes said, "to presidents. He's lying to people on a very consistent basis." Haynes added, "That is hard for Western leaders to absorb."

Sullivan and his Deputy, John Finer, suggested they take a more dramatic approach to intelligence sharing, almost a Madison Avenue marketing campaign. Quiet intelligence sharing was not proving persuasive, and that was dangerous when faced with an adversary like Russia that was so highly skilled in the art of disinformation. It gave Putin an opportunity to divide public opinion, using carefully crafted pretexts and lies to explain away an invasion. Russian media outlets were already full of propaganda suggesting that Ukraine was a neo-Nazi state and that NATO was using Ukraine to threaten Russia. Doubt among allies, the public, and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.

"Letting someone in on something private or even top secret is a tension-grabbing," John Finer said, drawing on his prior experience as a Washington Post reporter. "People are much more interested in the accounts of things that normally are only available to people inside the room." He added, "Let's declassify some of the intelligence on Russia's war planning and strategically share it. In short, dominate the information space so that Putin would lose the element of surprise."

Initially, the intelligence community was reluctant, maddeningly cautious, according to Sullivan. But after several more meetings with CIA Director Burns and his deputy, and DNI Haynes and her deputy, they developed a new approach, which they called a "strategic downgrade." It was an unfortunate label. "Downgrade" suggested that the information was somehow less, almost fire-sale material. It was anything but. Biden directed Haynes to start sharing downgraded intelligence with allies and partners on a weekly, even daily basis, an unprecedented pace of intelligence sharing. Haynes traveled to brief the North Atlantic Council more than half a dozen times. The intelligence agencies built technology that made it easier to share the information quickly. It was an in-your-face, all-out bulletin focused on Russia.

The next step was a public warning. The Washington Post headline on December 3rd, 2021, read: "Russia Planning Massive Military Offensive Against Ukraine Involving 175,000 Troops, US Intelligence Warns." The front page of the paper prominently displayed a large map of Russia and Ukraine superimposed with satellite photographs that showed Russia's buildup along Ukraine's border. It was the National Security Council's first public downgrade. Instead of using highly classified government satellite images, the NSC's Director for Intelligence Programs, Maha B., pulled commercial satellite photos that showed the exact same formations of 70,000 Russian troops massed in four locations near Russia's border with Ukraine, as well as newly arrived tanks and artillery in Crimea.

Putin continued to publicly dismiss the notion he intended to invade Ukraine with the troops on the border, but there was little sign that Russia was pulling back. The story noted that Russia's war plans indicated that the 70,000 troops pictured on November 9th, 2021, could increase to 175,000 by as soon as early 2022, a signal to allies and media outlets around the world to watch for further buildup. It was intended to be a Cuban Missile Crisis-style lay down, similar to the dramatic visual presentation made by United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson in 1962 to show the Soviets were lying when they said they had not placed missiles in Cuba. In televised hearings at the United Nations, watched by millions, Stevenson displayed satellite photos on easels.

The Russians brushed off the Washington Post story as nonsense, claiming the troops were there for routine training exercises. But inside the White House and U.S. intelligence agencies, quiet whoops were shared. They had broken from outdated, rigid intelligence-sharing procedures and created a new mode of informational warfare intended to beat Putin at his own game. But making public what Putin knew already to be true was not going to deter him.

"If you do this, there are going to be enormous costs to Russia," President Biden said to Putin during a video conference at 10:00 a.m. on December 7th, 2021. "We're going to ensure that Putin flatly denied Russia had any plans to invade Ukraine. He demanded security guarantees to rule out NATO's Eastward expansion. 'We have a team,' Biden said. 'They've prepared documents. We're ready to discuss them with you. They go to broader questions of European security, not just Ukraine.'" Biden was searching to see if there were real Russian security concerns they could negotiate, or was all this just cover.

"You know, you've asked for things that we don't think are totally beyond the pale," Biden said. "Like no long-range weapons systems being placed inside Ukraine. We think these are things we can negotiate and discuss. You, you say that you're worried about a NATO combat presence inside Ukraine. There is no plan for a NATO or U.S. combat presence in Ukraine," Biden underscored. "We do this training mission. It's way over in Western Ukraine, not up against your border, not a threat to you," he said.

Similar to his conversation with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Putin wanted the United States to prevent further NATO enlargement, close the open-door policy, in other words, guarantee that Ukraine would never be a part of NATO. Putin's requests were maximalist, and he appeared disinterested in negotiating any practical security arrangements like weapons placements. So Biden tried turning to shared history and reminded Putin that during the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet Union had a special responsibility for ensuring security in the world. Their predecessors had avoided direct war between their two countries.

Sullivan and Finer listened in on the call. What surprised Finer was that he always thought of Putin as a thug, but his demeanor with Biden was calm, more in the mode of a lawyer arguing a case for why Russia was the aggrieved party and why the U.S. and Europe needed to address his grievances. "His presentation is not forceful; it is casual," Finer said. "He doesn't shout; he doesn't use harsh language; it's very matter-of-fact." "How ordinary it seemed. It was tonally not a conversation that you would imagine befitting of this seminal moment," Finer said.

U.S. Intel still persuasively indicated Putin would invade no matter what the U.S. did to try to deter him. Just the air of tension was diminished by the way Putin operates, the way he presents, Finer said. But at the same time, it was quite clear he was not backing off, not all that interested in a diplomatic off-ramp, and that he heard very clearly what the President said. Biden left the call convinced the invasion was coming. A diplomatic off-ramp had no appeal with Putin; he was on a war path. Strangely, it was not as much from what Putin said, but from all he had not said. Sometimes more truth could be found in Putin's silences than in his rhetoric.

During an interview with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago a year earlier, Trump had told me about his relationship with President Putin. "Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing," all right, "especially because they have 1,332 nuclear [expletive] warheads," Trump said. "And they work. Nobody ever has been tougher on Russia than me," Trump added. "Putin respects me, and I respect Putin. I, I think Putin likes me. I think I like him. I do like him," Trump concluded.

Trump's National Security Adviser, Robert O'Brien, had given me a different assessment. "I told Trump, O'Brien says, 'We can't have good relations with Russia if they are invading the neighbors like Ukraine, Georgia.' Well, I don't like that," no, "Trump said. "But if you look at, because of us, they just did a big prison swap with Ukraine. A lot of things are happening, Bob. A lot of things. Take a look at all the things that I've done," Trump declared. "Obama sent them pillows. I sent them tank busters." President Obama had provided Ukraine with more than $120 million in security assistance but refused to send lethal weapons. Trump was the first president to approve the sale of U.S. lethal weapons to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-tank missiles.

"I am not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine," Biden said to Sullivan as the two sat alone in the Oval Office, and this was his firm position, his red line not to be crossed. No American troops. U.S. troops in Vietnam had led to catastrophe, the same problem in Afghanistan when Biden, as Vice President, had unsuccessfully opposed adding 30,000 troops. So Biden and Sullivan decided to ask the intelligence leaders what they thought. Should Biden leave open the possibility that the U.S. would send troops? The intelligence community, Sullivan reported, came as close as the intelligence community comes in writing to, "Are you [expletive] crazy? If you threaten to use U.S. troops in Ukraine, Putin will go faster and bigger, not back off. Putin would move before the U.S. could be prepared to deploy."

CIA Director Bill Burns strongly agreed with this assessment. Burns's view, Sullivan said, was that saying the United States is going to send troops to Ukraine to defend Ukraine would have hastened the invasion, not forestalled it, because Putin would have wanted to move before we could be prepared to mobilize. Burns also said it would complicate the U.S. effort to build a coalition of countries to support Ukraine, since many countries would be deeply uneasy if the U.S. started talking about putting boots on the ground in Ukraine.

Biden knew it was a matter of time before he was asked the question by a reporter and wanted to debate his response with Sullivan. For years, Biden had always said, "Great powers don't bluff." Sullivan had heard it many times. "So, Biden wanted his policy position to be clear, not ambiguous. Let's look at the other side," Sullivan said. "Was there strategic value in bluffing? Could bluffing work? Churchill, for one, bluffed all the time. You have the big stack of chips, you have huge room to bluff," Sullivan said. As in poker, the U.S. had the biggest stack of chips, given its military and economic preeminence. "If you have the big stack, you can afford to lose some chips and not be out of the game. If you've got the big stack, yeah, you can bluff all the time."

Sullivan thought there could be a deterrent value in keeping the possibility of U.S. troop involvement unknown. But a bluff, whether you're caught at it or not, Biden said, would impact overall U.S. credibility. "If you're a big country with interests everywhere and you bluff here," Biden said, "it has an impact, say, on how the Japanese look at you over there with respect to China. The bleeding of credibility would not be limited to one circumstance." Bluffing was off the table, Biden said. Since he knew he wasn't going to send U.S. troops, he thought he ought to say so publicly.

For Sullivan, it was a difficult 51/49 call whether to say publicly and categorically that the U.S. was not going to send troops to fight in Ukraine. Sullivan still leaned toward using the large stack of chips they had. "Bluffing was an available tool in the national security policy bag. Why not try?" Biden remained firm. No bluffing, even about U.S. troops, was the biggest strategic disagreement between the President and Sullivan. In a national security crisis or when an issue came up, presidents often, even routinely, said publicly, "All options are on the table." Such a stance sounded tough and even threatening, and it gave them much more flexibility. But it wasn't Sullivan's call to make. Biden wanted clarity.

On December 8th, a day after Biden's two-hour secure video call with Putin, Biden answered questions from reporters as he walked across the White House lawn to Marine 1. "I made it very clear: if, in fact, he invades Ukraine, there will be severe consequences," Biden said of his meeting with Putin. Biden then repeated to reporters what he had said privately to Sullivan. He would not send U.S. troops to Ukraine. "That is not on the table," Biden said categorically. "We have a moral obligation and a legal obligation to our NATO allies if they were to come under attack under Article 5. It's a sacred obligation. That obligation does not extend to Ukraine, which was not a member of NATO."

Fred Kagan, who was tracking Russia's military buildup with the Institute for the Study of War, called Sullivan in disbelief. "You guys shouldn't take troops off the table," Kagan said. Ambiguity could be a deterrent. Why answer a hypothetical? It was standard doctrine in intense diplomatic and military relations to keep all options available for discussion and negotiation. "We had this exact debate," Sullivan said, "and it's legitimate. The problem is," Sullivan said, "if you keep open, 'Will we send your troops?' Well, 'We'll see.' And the war starts, the pressure on you to send U.S. troops is through the roof, and not sending them is basically like abandoning the country in their moment of need. So being clear," Sullivan added, "about what you're prepared to do and not do upfront changes it from Biden whiff to wow."

Biden's response was quite robust. Deputy National Security Adviser John Finer was surprised by how directly Biden answered the question, but later told others he thought the President had made the right call. "I felt like it was a relief and the right thing," Finer said. "It made the Ukrainians realize that they were going to have to do this themselves," he said, "with a ton of support, but there was no cavalry coming to rescue them." The remaining question, not immediately answered, was: Had this statement of no U.S. troops encouraged or even given Putin a green light, believing that he would not directly or in any way face the largest and most experienced military force in the world?

Biden, however, told Sullivan and Finer that he would send American weapons to Ukraine. He would support Ukraine's military to defend itself. Since 2014, the United States had committed more than $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, including specialized training by U.S. and U.K. forces. But Biden drew the line on the kinds of weapons he was prepared to send. He would not go too big or too powerful. If Russia invaded and Ukraine fell in three to five days, the President did not want top-of-the-line American military technology falling into Russian hands.

After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the images of the Taliban brandishing U.S. weapons and equipment provided to the Afghan military still burned. Former President Trump called retired Lieutenant General Kellogg, his former National Security Adviser, in December. "There's a lot of chatter that Putin is going to go in," Trump said. "Why would he do that?" "If you want the truth, sir," Kellogg said, "it's because he sees weakness. He sees presidential weakness in decision-making as a result of what happened in Afghanistan." "[Expletive] debacle," Trump said, referring to the Biden administration's messy withdrawal. "It was really [expletive] up. It's going to actually embolden other leaders out there," Kellogg said. "Yeah, it was really [expletive] up. Trump said, 'Biden's [expletive] us up. He's a weak leader.'" "You think he'll go in?" Trump asked of Putin. "No, he's not going to go," Kellogg said. "I don't think he has intent or the troops to do it. They're not postured right to do it. It's going to take a major effort." Kellogg was convinced the Russians were not prepared enough to invade Ukraine. "Okay, okay," Trump said.

Biden was at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, on December 30th when he picked up the phone on his desk to take another swing of the bat at Putin. It was a hot, 50-minute call and one of their most acrimonious exchanges. Putin was furious about the economic sanctions Biden was threatening and warned it could result in a complete rupture in relations between the U.S. and Russia. Putin continued to claim he had no plans to attack Ukraine and that he could move his troops on Russia's territory as he pleased. He accused the U.S. and NATO of planning to place nuclear weapons near Russia's border. Biden assured Putin there were no such plans. It got so heated that at one point Putin raised the risk of nuclear war in a threatening way. Biden responded by reminding Putin that it's impossible to win a nuclear war.

"They [expletive] up in 2014," President Biden said to a close friend, reflecting his frustration with the Obama administration's inadequate response to Putin's previous invasion of Ukraine. "That's why we are here. We [expletive] it up," Biden said. "Barack never took Putin seriously in 2014." Putin invaded Crimea with swift, calculated precision. Little Green Men, soldiers without any insignia identifying them as Russian, occupied Ukrainian Parliament buildings by force, raised Russian flags, and annexed Crimea as a so-called act of self-determination. Putin took Crimea and a section of the Donbas in less than a month with few consequences for Russia. "You know, we never should have let Putin just walk in there and take the Donbas in 2014. We did nothing," Biden said. "We gave Putin a license to continue." Biden was very angry, a characteristic he avoided displaying in public. "Well, I'm revoking his [expletive] license," Biden said. Biden's friend could hear the president's fixation on preventing Putin from doing it again. "He's not going to let it go. Ukraine is the whole ball game for his presidency."

In mid-January 2022, Biden sent Burns to secretly meet with Ukrainian President Zelensky. "Convince Zelensky: This is going to happen," Biden said. The intelligence now showed a sharper picture of what the Russians were going to attempt to do militarily. Burns met with Zelensky in Kyiv. "There is going to be a significant invasion of your country, including your capital," the CIA director said to President Zelensky. "Russian special forces are trying to assassinate you. They are coming for you personally. Russian forces will come straight across the Belarus frontier and try to take Kyiv, decapitate your regime, and establish a pro-Russian government," Burns said. That was the spear of Russia's attack. "Russia plans to seize Hostomel," Burns continued, referring to the main cargo airport northwest of Kyiv, "and then use it as a platform to bring in airborne forces to take control of Ukraine's capital. From what we can see in the intelligence, this is coming in a matter of weeks," Burns said, and advised Zelensky to look closely at his personal security detail. There were also concerns of a Russian penetration of the Ukrainian Services.

"Thank you for your information," Zelensky said, "but please stop going out publicly and saying this because it's hurting my economy." Zelensky remained doubtful that Russia could be planning a full takeover of a country of 44 million people. "The U.S. was focused in on the most aggressive and least likely option," Zelensky said. European leaders had told him the American forecasts were exaggerated, and that Putin had insisted in private conversations with them and publicly that he wasn't invading. But Zelensky nonetheless appeared to take seriously the CIA director's warning that an invasion was coming. Burns could see that the Ukrainian president was reluctant to go to full mobilization of his military because Putin then could seize upon that and allege Ukrainian provocation. "Zelensky said, 'Putin would claim, look, the Ukrainians are getting ready for war, we're just responding to them.'" Burns also believed the Ukrainian intelligence services were very good, and they were also keeping close tabs on the massive numbers of Russian troops on the Ukraine border. It was a serious conversation. Burns felt both emotionally and personally this was devastating news for the young Ukrainian leader who was listening but not entirely believing, facing an unimaginable political and strategic crisis.

One of the more novel sets of challenges for CIA Director Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes was Putin's false flag operations—staged events that looked like ethnic Russians had been killed by Ukrainians as a pretext for conflict. They could see Putin and the people around him preparing these operations in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. Burns, Haynes, and Sullivan debated extensively how to carefully declassify and share some of the intelligence, hoping to checkmate the Russians. In the White House, Director for Intelligence Programs Maha B. reviewed Intel reports that Russia planned to stage an explosion in eastern Ukraine and claim Ukraine was responsible. Russia would say the Ukrainian government had killed ethnic Russians and then move into Ukraine under the false pretext of rescuing them. The Russian plot even talked about hiring actors who could play mourners at a funeral. Russian media was also running stories about the deterioration of human rights in Ukraine and portraying Ukraine's leaders as a violent junta. "Without getting into too much detail," Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said in a public briefing on January 14th, "we do have information that indicates that Russia is already working actively to create a pretext for a potential invasion. We've seen this kind of thing before out of Russia," Kirby said. "When there isn't an actual crisis to suit their needs, they'll make one up."

On January 19th, 2022, Biden declared in a rambling press conference that Putin was likely to move in on Ukraine. "I'm not sure he is certain what he's going to do," Biden said. "My guess is he will move in." Then came the raw, unvarnished aside from Biden: "I think what you're going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades, and it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion, and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, etc. But if they actually do what they are capable of doing with the forces amassed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia. If there's something where there's Russian forces crossing the border, killing Ukrainian fighters, etc., I think that changes everything," Biden said. "But it depends on what he does to what extent we're going to be able to get total unity on the NATO front."

That message was not on his note cards. Without seeming to know it, Biden had just totally undermined the idea that the U.S. was seriously committed to Ukraine's sovereignty and instead he gave weight to the idea that, like 2014, any U.S. and Allied response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be impeded by debate and division. The blunder echoed Biden's long history of gaffes. President Zelensky responded in a tweet: "We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations, just as there are no minor casualties and little grief from the loss of loved ones. I say this as the president of a great power." Was the United States changing its position on Ukraine? Biden's unscripted remarks caused confusion among allies and unease about the president's ability to articulate clear red lines to Russia. Sullivan had phone calls with counterparts in nine NATO Eastern flank countries, as well as Japan, to contain the damage and provide reassurance that the U.S. had not changed its position.

"Biden said, 'If there's a 1% chance, a 0.1% chance to still deter this,' President Biden said to Blinken. 'Go see if Russia has any practical security concerns we can address.' But Biden was still seeking a compromise."

It was a clear, sunny day in Geneva on January 21st, 2022, but especially windy. Lake Geneva was a swirl of white caps. "I don't know if you've looked at the lake today, but there are turbulent waters," Lincoln said to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. "It's our chore to see if we can't restore some calm and to see if we can avert what would ultimately be a disaster. We are confident that you are preparing to mount an all-out invasion of Ukraine," Blinken said. "You tell us you have security concerns. We are prepared to work with you on these."

Ukraine was Russia's buffer, separating it from NATO, which had expanded over the last three decades to include over a dozen former Soviet and Soviet-aligned republics. Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union when it collapsed and was dissolved in 1991, said years later that the United States had a dangerous "winner's mentality." The Russians, Blinken believed, legitimately worried about the deployment of nuclear or long-range offensive weapons on or near the Russian border. Blinken wanted to lower the temperature and avoid an appearance of smugness or winner's arrogance. Like Putin, Lavrov had always had a flare for the dramatic. He was not averse to staging a public put-down or walk-out on a Western counterpart. But in private, Blinken hoped Lavrov would drop the performance.

"Look, it's just us," Lincoln said to Lavrov in the privacy of the room. "What is going on here? Tell me, what's really going on here?" Lavrov was silent. "Is this practical? In other words, is this about your actual concerns about Russia's security? If so, we can talk about that. We can talk about the placement of offensive missiles, we can talk about stability mechanisms and confidence-building measures that would alleviate any real security concerns that you have," Lincoln said. "We are not seeking to pose a threat to you," Blinken assured him. "NATO is not a threat to you. So let's work on this. If this is, you know, practical. But if this is theological, if this is born of the conviction that Ukraine as an independent sovereign state cannot exist, if this is predicated on the idea that Ukraine and its people belong to Mother Russia, then there's nothing to talk about."

Lavrov denied any invasion was planned. The U.S. intelligence later found that Lavrov still was not fully informed of what Putin had in store. Blink almost felt sorry for Lavrov. He had become a mouthpiece. It was sad. Someone so senior and with such longevity was not clued in, making the attempt at diplomacy pointless.

In later January, Trump had started to throw around the idea of making another run for the presidency. "You know, Jack Nicklaus was pretty famous for letting people collapse and just hanging around," Trump mused to Senator Lindsey Graham over lunch at Mar-a-Lago, referring to the legendary American golfer. "Trump said that should be his strategy with Biden. When Nicklaus was behind in a tournament, he'd always say, 'Well, what are you going to do? I'm just going to hang around and see what happens.' That's how he won the Masters in '86. You know, you have two good holes and people start beginning to fall apart. Well," Trump said, "I'm just going to be hanging around."

Along Ukraine's borders, Russian field hospitals were being visibly constructed. Blood banks were transported in, along with more military equipment and mobile morgues for expected dead. U.S. intelligence agencies were reporting to the White House that Putin's order to invade Ukraine could come in a matter of weeks, days, or hours. Still mindful of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, when 53 Americans were held hostage for 444 days during the Jimmy Carter presidency, Sullivan went to the podium on February 11th. He had a steady, accommodating manner, treating all questions as reasonable.

"We are continuing to reduce the size of our Embassy footprint in Kyiv," Sullivan said. "We encourage all American citizens who remain in Ukraine to depart immediately. Any American in Ukraine should leave as soon as possible and, in any event, in the next 24 to 48 hours. The President will not be putting the lives of our men and women in uniform at risk by sending them into a war zone to rescue people who could have left now but chose not to," Sullivan said. They did not want a repeat of Afghanistan. "We are not going to war in Ukraine," Sullivan said. "American forces are not going to war with Russia."

French President Emmanuel Macron was calling Putin almost every day. He was convinced he could talk sense into the Russian leader. Macron called President Biden before and after many of his talks with Putin. "I think it was a good conversation," Macron reported on one call to Biden. "Putin gave me his word that he is not going to invade." "If you're having this conversation, that's a good thing," Biden said. "I'm very open to more conversations with Putin if you think we can dissuade him." Personally, Biden added, "I think he's already decided to invade."

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin were actively refuting Russia's claims that this was a military exercise. "Russian troops had been massing on Ukraine's border since September 2021. No one exercises that long," Millie said. "What kind of exercise is that?" As Austin's motorcade drove through Poland on February 18th, he placed a call to Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. The U.S. Secretary of Defense rolled in a pretty significant motorcade overseas. It wasn't as large as a presidential motorcade, but depending on the country, could be relatively close. "I know exactly what you're doing," Austin said to Shoigu. "I can see what you're doing with your troop buildup along the border." "It's just an exercise," Shoigu said. "It's just a military exercise."

Austin's motorcade had reached their next destination but continued to drive in loops around town so he could finish the call. "Well, if it's an exercise, when is it going to end?" Austin pressed. Shoigu tried to dodge the question with bluster. "We know exactly what you're doing," Austin injected. "Don't do it."

The next day, Austin traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, to reassure Baltic allies that the United States and NATO would support and defend them. Countries like Estonia, with small militaries, were extremely worried that if Ukraine fell to Russia, they were next on Putin's menu. No one expected Ukraine to last long against Russia's military. The Secretary's top advisers, who traveled with him and attended many of his meetings, reported a common theme: Former President Trump's Article 5 saber-rattling over four years was causing many NATO allies to question if the U.S. would actually show up when it mattered. The nervousness in the room was palpable. "When the time comes, we'll have your back," Austin said to Estonia's Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur. "You'll open up the windows and be able to smell the jet fuel. That's how quickly the U.S. military would move in." Austin, a towering presence at over six feet tall and 250 pounds, delivered the emphatic assurance in a cool, matter-of-fact tone. "We are going to be here," he said. "We will stand by Article 5."

"People don't make good decisions when they're nervous and skittish," Austin told his advisers afterwards. "If Putin does this, it could create the largest land war in Europe since the end of World War II." They needed calm along the Eastern flank. As a final diplomatic push for deterrence, President Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris to Germany for the Munich Security Conference on February 19th, 2022. He wanted the United States represented at the highest levels, and the Vice President was tradition. Biden had attended as Vice President, and even the Trump administration had kept the tradition going. So Harris was up. Biden said he needed her to convince Zelensky that they were now in the days and possibly moments before Russia invaded his country. The intelligence had crystallized. Zelensky needed to accept this was happening. Harris was also given a recovery mission after Biden's bruising slip-up about a "minor incursion." She needed to demonstrate unified United States and NATO support for Ukraine's sovereignty.

"Not since the end of the Cold War has this forum convened under such dire circumstances," Vice President Harris said, addressing world leaders at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich. "Today, as we are well aware, the foundation of European security is under direct threat in Ukraine." In what is widely considered the best speech of her vice presidency, Harris succeeded in showcasing U.S. commitment to Ukraine, to NATO Article 5, and to peace. Instead of warning Putin, typical of Biden's approach, she called out Russia for pleading ignorance and innocence. "As we have seen all along, there is a playbook of Russian aggression," she said. "We see Russia spreading disinformation, lies, and propaganda. We will target those who are complicit and those who aid and abet this unprovoked invasion," she warned. "Make no mistake." And she drew a sharp distinction between the Biden-Harris view of America's leadership role in the world and in NATO, and the Trump administration's isolationist "America First" approach. "The theme of this conference two years ago questioned the staying power of the West," she said, "whether or not the transatlantic community was losing its cohesion, its influence, its appeal. So I will answer the skeptics and those seeking to test us today: The United States, our allies, and our partners are closer together today. We are clear in our purpose. Our strength must not be underestimated," she said. "As we have always shown, it takes a lot more strength to build something up than it takes to tear something down."

After her speech, in a private room in the Commerce Bank across from the Bayerischer Hof, Vice President Harris pulled out a chair and sat down opposite Ukrainian President Zelensky. Her National Security Adviser, Philip Gordon, sat alongside her. Zelensky brought his principal advisor, Andriy Yermak, and Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. Germany had COVID protocols in place, so Harris and Gordon wore masks. They did not shake hands with the Ukrainians. It disgruntled Zelensky; it felt like he was about to be reprimanded. "Two sides supposedly on the same team facing off."

"You need to take seriously the likelihood that any day the Russians will invade your country," Harris told him forcefully. Her manner and communication style was often criticized for being overly adversarial. It was a trait hammered almost into her DNA by her years as a prosecutor and attorney general in California. "We just don't think they're going to invade," Zelensky pushed back. "Yes, they're threatening us, they're bullying us. That's what they do." Harris began to read out the latest troop numbers. "The Russians have 200,000 troops devoted to this operation, including about 40,000 in Belarus." "There are fewer than 10,000 troops in Belarus," Defense Minister Reznikov interjected. "That's not at all consistent with our information," Harris said. "The Belarusians won't be supportive," Reznikov said. "They won't join in the fighting." Harris's National Security Adviser, Phil Gordon, told him the U.S. intel was good. This was not U.S. analysis or an ambiguous assessment; this was raw data. Satellite photographs. Gordon wasn't sure who the Ukrainians thought they were fooling by denying the Russian threat.

"Look," Harris said to Zelensky, "our teams will share more specific information with you, but we are telling you that your numbers are wrong. You really face a potentially imminent invasion." Zelensky was all denial. Harris sounded more and more like a prosecutor. They went back and forth. Zelensky reiterated that he took seriously the situation on his borders. "We do clearly understand what is going on," Zelensky said. "This is our land, and the only thing we want is to have peace. Bring the peace back to our country. End the fighting in eastern Ukraine." The psychological dynamic in play was that Zelensky did not want to signal that a full Russian invasion was going to happen because it would create a self-fulfilling prophecy of the Ukrainian economy and potentially the government collapsing.

Finally, Zelensky looked Harris directly in the eye and said, "What do you want me to do?" The silence between them stretched awkwardly. "What will that give you?" Zelensky said. "If I acknowledge it here in this conversation, will you impose sanctions? Close ports to Russian ships? Give us Stinger and Javelin missiles? Warplanes?" Harris said the U.S. would not impose sanctions on Russia yet. "The punishment can only come after the crime." That seemed like a cop-out to the Ukrainians. Russia had been committing crimes against Ukrainians in the Donbas since 2014. Reznikov wondered, what did the United States think Ukraine was supposed to do? Surrender? Acknowledge that they would not win if Putin launched a full invasion? Concede to more Kremlin demands? Sign more peace accords that Russia would violate? Start thinking about things like having a succession plan in place to run the country if you're captured or killed or cannot govern, Harris suggested. "Have an escape plan so that you won't be captured or killed. Possibly mobilize more Ukrainian troops. Have a plan for continued governance. But you can't decide the right things to do if you're just going to pretend that this isn't happening," Harris urged him. "If they do this, they're coming to Kyiv. We're with you," she added, trying to soften her tone. She assured him Russia would face consequences, but as Harris looked at Zelensky, she couldn't help but wonder if the U.S. had done enough.

After the meeting, Gordon turned to the Vice President. "They're crazy not to have a plan to escape and go somewhere to hide," he said. Zelensky was clear: he would be staying in Kyiv. "We might never see him again," Harris replied.

On Monday, February 21st, President Putin officially put Russia on the public path to war. In a lengthy televised Russian Security Council meeting in the Kremlin, Putin aggressively polled his top officials on the question of whether to recognize the independence of two Russian-backed separatist regions in the east of Ukraine: Donetsk and Luhansk. The Russian leader sat alone at a desk in a vast, white-columned oval room and faced his advisers, who perched nervously in flimsy chairs at least 30 feet away from him. Putin called them one by one to elect turn to state their opinion, drumming his fingers impatiently. Foreign Minister Lavrov, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, and Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin dutifully gave Putin the endorsements he wanted to hear. Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service Sergey Naryshkin faltered, tripping over his prepared lines. Putin's jaw clenched. "Speak plainly," Putin ordered with unmistakable pleasure as Naryshkin squirmed. Naryshkin tried again to find the words the president wanted. "I would support the proposal for recognition." "Would support or do support?" Putin snapped, now visibly irritated. "Speak plainly, Sergey. I support the proposal," Naryshkin said with as much

Assertiveness as he could muster but unable to hide his humiliation. "Just say yes or no," Putin said icily. "Yes, I support the proposal to admit the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics into the Russian Federation," Nishin said.

Putin laughed, shaking his head. "That's not what we're talking about. We're discussing whether to recognize their independence." Nishin's hands shook as he looked almost pleadingly to Putin, who was leaning forward over the microphone on his desk, his hands clasped in front of him as if he were enjoying himself immensely. "Yes," Nishin said. "I support the proposal to recognize their independence."

"You can take your seat," Putin said dismissively and leaned back comfortably in his chair.

President Biden immediately issued an executive order that blocked all economic activity in Donetsk and Luhansk. Germany announced its $11 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project with Russia would not go forward. Russian forces took up tactical positions on the border. Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine had begun to force Ukrainian civilians to leave their homes and to conscript Ukrainian men and boys into Russia's military.

"This is genius," Trump said during an interview on a conservative radio show the next day, February 22nd, at Mar-a-Lago, praising Putin's move to declare certain Ukrainian regions independent. "So Putin is now saying it's independent, a large section of Ukraine. I said, 'How smart is that?' And he's going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That's the strongest peace force. We could use that on our Southern border. That's the strongest peace force I've ever seen. There were more army tanks than I've ever seen. They're going to keep the peace."

"All right, no, but think of it. Here's a guy who's very savvy. I know him very well, very, very well," Trump said gleefully. "I knew that he always wanted Ukraine," Trump said. "I used to talk to him about it. I said, 'You can't do it. You're not going to do it.' But I could see that he wanted it."

27 9:15 a.m. on February 23rd. Sullivan was holding his Ukraine meeting in his West Wing office when the door opened and CIA Director Bill Burns walked in, holding a piece of paper. "The CIA director had never crashed a meeting," Hey Bill, Sullivan said. Burns looked around as if to check who was in the room. "He said he was on his way to the Oval Office."

"Is it happening?" senior director for Europe Amanda Slo asked Burns. They were all waiting on edge for the signal that Putin had given the order for Russian forces to invade. "It's happening," Burns said.

Before sunrise in Moscow on Thursday, February 24th, Putin appeared on television. He sat at a desk in the Kremlin, flanked by Russian flags. "I have decided to conduct a special military operation in Ukraine," Putin said. "Whoever tries to hinder us," Putin continued, "and even more so to create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia's response will be immediate, and it will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history. Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states," he threatened.

Thunderous blasts were reported in Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, the second-largest city. Ukraine's Interior Ministry said Russian troops had landed in Odessa in the South and were crossing the border. The sun was not yet up. President Zelenskyy raced in his motorcade through the dark streets of Kyiv, passing cars packed full of people fleeing in the opposite direction. It was still dark out. He thought about the rockets flying toward his children, all of Ukraine's children, and struggled to come to terms with the enormous scale of Russia's attack. All he could think was, "A huge number of deaths."

Zelenskyy's phone rang. It was his minister of internal affairs, Denys Monastyrsky, who oversaw the country's police and border guard. "Where are the Russians coming from?" Zelenskyy asked. "What direction? The North, East, or South?" He wanted to know exactly what axis Putin had chosen to invade Ukraine. "All of them," Monastyrsky said.

Bruno Kahl, the head of the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence service, was in Kyiv the morning of the invasion. Up until the first Russian missiles launched, he was convinced it wasn't going to happen, despite all the U.S. and British intelligence assessments. The Poles, rivals of Germany, enjoyed telling the story of how the BND chief had to be driven out of Ukraine by special forces because, once the Russians started invading, he couldn't take his plane.

In Washington D.C., 8 hours behind Moscow, it was just after 9:30 p.m. in the evening on February 23rd. Biden's principals gathered in the Situation Room. The president was connected by secure phone from the residence. Chairman Millie and Secretary of Defense Austin said Putin had mobilized 123 Russian Battalion Tactical Groups with between 175,000 and 190,000 soldiers. Russian forces were invading along multiple axes: Belarus in the North, Russian-occupied Donbas in the East, and Crimea in the South. There were two lines of Russian forces heading directly for Kyiv to decapitate the government and install their own. Some Pentagon assessments projected that Kyiv would fall within the first 72 to 96 hours. Other intelligence assessments projected it would take several weeks. Russia had a far superior military force in every measurable respect.

Biden authorized Austin and Millie to move U.S. ground and air forces already stationed in Europe to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania, near the Ukraine borders, to remind Putin that the United States would defend every inch of NATO territory.

"He is pretty smart," Trump said of Putin during a Florida fundraiser that evening, assessing the invasion like a real estate deal rather than a former president. "He's taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions," Trump said. "Really, a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in."

At the presidential compound in Kyiv, Zelenskyy turned to what he did best: communicate. He called first British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, one of his strongest supporters. "We will fight, Boris," Zelenskyy told him. "We are not going to give up." Zelenskyy also called French President Emmanuel Macron, who had been so intensely engaged with Putin to try to personally deter him from invading. "It's very important, Emanuel, for you to speak with Putin," said Zelenskyy. "We are sure that European leaders and Biden can connect. If they call him and say stop, he will stop. He will listen."

"I want to talk to President Zelenskyy," Biden said to Sullivan and John Finer. It was now late in the evening in Washington. Biden was very concerned about Zelenskyy's personal safety. "What can I do for you? How can I be of help?" Biden asked.

"Gather the leaders of the world," Zelenskyy said. "Ask them to support Ukraine." Sullivan and Finer, who were listening in, could tell Zelenskyy was frightened. The Ukrainian president's usual "cowboy rhetoric" on phone calls with Biden was gone.

"We're going to be with you," President Biden said. "You should always tell us what you need." He offered to help get Zelenskyy out and set up a temporary Ukrainian government in exile in Poland. Zelenskyy declined. He was staying. He asked Biden to set up a no-fly zone around Ukraine. "We need to close the skies," Zelenskyy said. Ukraine was getting hammered from the air. Biden said no. Enforcing a no-fly zone would require U.S. or NATO planes to shoot down Russian aircraft, an impossible escalation for Biden.

"I don't know when I will be able to talk to you again," Zelenskyy said at the end of the call. The comment seemed to hang in the air. "If you ever want to talk to me, I'm here," President Biden reassured Zelenskyy.

A few hours later, around 11:20 a.m., Zelenskyy addressed his nation by video in Kyiv, saying anyone who wanted an assault rifle could get one from distribution centers that had been set up around the city. Powerful images shared through social media showed Ukrainian people picking up a gun, many for the first time, as the Russian brigades advanced toward Kyiv. Ukrainians took to the streets, yelling at approaching troops to "fuck off and leave." Others helped guide Ukraine's military to Russian targets.

At Snake Island, a tiny Ukrainian outpost on the Black Sea, two Russian warships ordered the 13 Ukrainian border guards stationed there to surrender. One guard picked up the transmitter and responded, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself." Russia captured Snake Island, but the defiance of the Ukrainians was played on media outlets all over the world, becoming a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.

Later that day, rumors circulated that Zelenskyy and his team had fled Ukraine. So Zelenskyy filmed a video of himself walking through the heart of Kyiv with his team of advisers, including his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. "We are all here," Zelenskyy declared, "defending our independence, our state, and it will remain so. Glory to our women defenders! Glory to Ukraine!"

Watching this, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley said Zelenskyy was a master, and still is a master, of the airwaves. CIA Director Burns was also impressed with Zelenskyy's leadership in those first 48 to 72 hours. "He stayed. He took the best punch the Russians could provide. He was still standing, and I think he brought the whole country along with him."

In the early hours of the war, as predicted by U.S. intelligence, Russian forces tried to capture Hostomel Airport, a big cargo airfield located less than 10 miles from Kyiv. The world's largest aircraft, the Mriya, was hangared at Hostomel. The airport had enormous strategic value for the Russians, who planned to use it as an airbridge to land big Il-76 military transport planes packed with armored vehicles and airborne battalions to take control of Kyiv. Already, the Russians had loads of Il-76 planes in the air, ready to land. The Ukrainians had made a tactical mistake in sending their most combat-ready brigades to the East, but the attack on the airport did not go as Russia planned. The Ukrainian troops encircled Russian forces inside the airport before they had a chance to bring in reinforcements. It was the first big battle of the war. Ukrainian troops fought back with such ferocity that Russia could not land its planes. While Russia eventually won control of the airport, the Ukrainians had inflicted so much damage to it with bombings and artillery that the Russians could not use it to resupply.

"Military theory does not account for regular dudes with track pants and hunting rifles," said General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the so-called "Iron General," the commander-in-chief of Ukraine's military. In the first wave, Russian forces also seized the nuclear power plant Chernobyl but again made fatal errors, driving tanks and armored vehicles through the Red Forest, the most toxic area. Chernobyl employees reported the Russians said it was suicide for those who inhaled the radioactive dust.

Burns had seen in the intelligence that the spear of Russia's invasion was going to be straight south from Belarus and aimed at Ukraine, which, without a lot of traffic, is a 2.5-hour drive. The aim was to strike fast at Kyiv. It was to decapitate the regime. Another surprise was the Russian helicopter pilots did not like to fly at night. The key time for American pilots in the day, they made themselves easy targets for Ukrainian fire. Ukrainian forces were also executing complex ground operations, using the cover of darkness to push back the Russians.

By the fifth day of the invasion, February 28th, a 40-mile convoy of 15,000 Russian troops, tanks, supply trucks, weapons, and artillery was stalled in a massive traffic jam, a clear Russian tactical error. "It wasn't rocket science what the Ukrainians did," Burns said. "They pretty methodically took out the first and last vehicles in the convoy, and then they went after each of the fuel trucks. Pretty soon, they were stuck." Russia's tanks were stopped in the mud, out of fuel, and some were simply misdirected away from Kyiv after Ukrainians switched up street signs. A Ukrainian sniper killed a Russian Major General who ventured out in front of the stalled vehicles. The Russian convoy had brought food and water for only 3 days. Video footage of burned-out Russian tanks and vehicles also showed the soldiers had brought their parade uniforms, expecting a victory celebration. "They thought they would drive easily all the way from Belarus to Kyiv, and they all were preparing for the parade," Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova said, as she watched the column from Belarus head towards her hometown, Vinnytsia.

The sheer incompetence of the Russian military operation became clear. Burns believed, as he watched it unfold, "Part of this was because the decision-making circle was so tight that the Russian military had levels beneath the senior general officer and the defense minister who really were kind of catching up to this as they went along. Commanders of units didn't really understand what their goals were," Burns said. "Their logistics and their generalship were pretty screwed up." The Russian military, unlike the U.S. military, was a very top-down driven system. There was little initiative at the field grade or lower officer ranks, so Russian troops waited for directions from headquarters rather than adapt and improvise.

Burns had anticipated the Russian military would make the obvious move. "According to military doctrine, we expected them to do exactly what the U.S. military would have done, which is spend the first 24 hours taking out the command and control system and taking out the air defense system. They didn't do that." The CIA director consulted his intelligence analysts. "Why didn't Russia do the obvious?" "Part of it was hubris. They were so convinced the Ukrainians were just going to roll over. Why destroy all these systems and then have to rebuild them later on?"

The battle for Kyiv lasted less than 5 weeks. The Russian Ministry of Defense, not Putin, announced it was withdrawing Russian troops from the capital. At least 35,000 Russian troops had participated in the failed march on Kyiv. By NATO calculations, at least 10,000 Russians had been killed. The Ukrainians had forced the second most powerful military in the world to retreat, shattering the image of Russia as a fiercely capable fighting force.

Over at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Austin was constantly assessing the battlefield in Ukraine. "I don't think he really made the final decision to invade until pretty late in the game," Austin told his close advisers about Putin. "His troops were not as prepared as they should have been. Troops will do in combat exactly what they've been trained to do. And if they believe in their leaders, if they trust their leaders, they will go above and beyond any expectation. If they don't, then it's difficult to get things done," Austin said.

When the Russians pulled back from the battle for Kyiv, they left in their wake evidence of horrific war crimes: mass graves of hundreds of civilians, bodies mutilated by torture, and others subjected to sexual violence. U.S. intelligence showed that Russia planned to create concentration camps in the Ukrainian cities and towns it occupied to filter out civilians who would not succumb to Russian rule.

Inside the National Security Council, Sullivan, Finer, and their staff reflected on all that had transpired so far. "We got one thing absolutely right, which was what they were going to do, where they were going to do it, and when they were going to do it," Director for Strategic Planning on the National Security Council Alex Bick said. "Everything else we got wrong." He said, "We underestimated the European response." For months, it had felt like they were dragging their European partners along like a heavy sled up a steep hill. But after Russia invaded, the Europeans moved quickly and decisively. "We underestimated the Ukrainians' resolve badly, and we overestimated the Russian military," Bick concluded. "All three of those things broke in our favor," he said.

"We executed the best possible strategy we could have," John Finer said. "But you look at the outcome, and it's hard to feel good about it. It's still a horrible war."

28 EST. Steve Bannon, the shaggy, gray-haired far-right strategist and long-standing Trump advisor, had been watching what was happening between Russia and Ukraine with fervor. "Putin ain't woke," Bannon said on his podcast, War Room. "This is going to be old-school, Original Gangster." "Ukraine," Bannon said, "is kind of a concept. It's not even a country." As soon as Russia invaded, Bannon called for Biden to be impeached, claiming the president was more interested in protecting Ukraine's borders than the U.S. Southern border. "He's getting impeached. We're impeaching him. Is Hunter Biden over there with his business partners? Is he sitting there with the Ukrainian flag? Where is Hunter? Is he in his art gallery? Is he with more strippers? Is he smoking more crack?" Bannon heckled.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson was also stoking the culture wars and asking Americans to rethink any criticism of Putin. He framed the Russian leader's brutal attempt at territorial conquest as a mere border dispute with Ukraine. He told viewers to ask themselves: "Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for agreeing with him? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?"

29 "He'd [expletive] Putin," President Biden said furiously to his advisers in the privacy of the Oval Office. He was on fire about the Russian president. "Can you imagine if we hadn't done what we've done, for Christ's sake?" he yelled. "I mean, he'd be going after Estonia, he'd be going after the Baltics. He's the most surprised human being on the face of the Earth because of the opposition that faces now. He's fighting for his survival," Biden said. Biden was disgusted at the reports and images he was shown daily of Russia's attempt to gobble up Ukraine. "Putin is evil. We are dealing with the epitome of evil," Biden said with almost religious fervor. Biden said Putin was controlled by his lust to be seen and to be remembered in Russian history as the leader of a great power, a global leader equal in status to Chinese President Xi Jinping and the President of the United States. "It's a fantasy," Biden said. "We have to stop him." Putin would not stop at Ukraine, Biden was convinced of that. The Ukraine war was now a fight for freedom and freedom-loving nations everywhere. Russia had displayed shocking ineptitude in the opening hours and days of the war, piercing the mythology that the Russian Army was a formidable, super-capable fighting force. Ukraine had fought the David and Goliath of battles and held Russia off against all of their expectations. But U.S. Intel reports to Biden showed that Putin believed time and the size of Russia's Army were on his side.

President Biden said he wanted to make sure Putin's invasion was a massive strategic failure for Russia. He wanted a clear, unmistakable blow to Putin. The president called his National Security Experts on Russia and Ukraine to the White House residence late one evening to workshop ideas. Sullivan and Finer, who led the discussion, pointed out that Putin invaded, at least in part, to keep one country, Ukraine, out of NATO and to deter others from aspiring to join by showing the alliance as crumbling, weak, divided, and fragile. "Suppose they added more countries to the NATO alliance? The exact opposite of what Putin wanted. It would be a huge strategic blow to Putin and a powerful public statement of NATO unity if it could be done right."

Finland and Sweden had historically maintained military non-alignment as a core tenant of their foreign policies, but Russia's invasion had clearly shaken them. Public polling in Finland and Sweden, Finer noted, showed that Russia's invasion of Ukraine had prompted new interest in joining NATO. Finland declared independence from Russia in 1917 and shares an 832-mile border with Russia. Suppose Finland joined NATO. Before the invasion, polls indicated only about 25% of Finland's population favored joining NATO. The new polls were recording an astonishing 76% of Finns in support, and Sweden, for the first time, had recorded 51% of Swedes in favor of NATO membership, up from 42% in January, before the invasion. "Schiff's politicians would have to take seriously," Finer said. For the Finns, especially, the Ukrainians' fight was hauntingly familiar. Russia invaded Finland in 1939 during World War II. Despite being vastly outnumbered, the Finns fought off Soviet occupation in what was later known as the Winter War but lost a 10% chunk of their Eastern province, Karelia, which still today remains part of Russia.

Biden saw an opportunity. The two Nordic countries were strong democracies with developed economies and established militaries. Finland has a wartime military strength of 280,000 personnel. Sweden's is much smaller at around 46,000, but its investment in its military grew after Putin invaded Crimea in 2014. If Finland joined NATO, it would effectively double NATO's frontier facing Moscow and give the alliance strategic dominance in the Baltic Sea, where Sweden also had a maritime border with Russia. "You've basically given the middle finger to Russia," Fina said. Amanda Slo, senior director for Europe on the National Security Council, pushed for Biden to meet with President Sauli Niinistö to get Niinistö's perspective on Putin. "The Finnish watch Putin more closely than almost anybody else in Europe," Slo said. "Niinistö is really a longtime observer of Russia." Niinistö had spoken to Putin on numerous occasions. "I mean, their countries have fishing disputes and other things they have to sort out," Slo added.

"Let's explore this and see what's possible," Biden said. On March 4th, 10 days after Putin's invasion, President Biden met with Finnish President Niinistö in the White House to talk about Finland's path to NATO. Niinistö said he had known Putin for a long time. He used to play hockey with him sometimes, but Putin never lost anything. "You need from us to be able to make this any easier for you? Let us know," Biden said. Niinistö said he was worried about the gap in time between when they might announce Finland's intention to join NATO and when they were actually admitted into the alliance, gaining Article 5 protection. The gap was too long and uncertain, potentially leaving them vulnerable. Putin might take advantage of that interregnum and try to force Finland to reverse their decision. Niinistö didn't want Finland to be the next Ukraine. Biden told Sullivan and Finer to look at options to manage risk during that period. Could they increase the pace of joint exercises with Finland and Sweden? What strong declaratory messages could they send to discourage Russia from trying anything? What security guarantees could be given?

"There's not much Russia can do," Finer said to Sullivan. "Probably 50 or 60% of Russian combat power and capability is pointed South in Ukraine. The last thing Russia can actually afford is another front of some kind." Dimitri Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia's Security Council, warned that if Sweden and Finland joined NATO, Russia would deploy nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles to Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. "There can be no more talk of any nuclear-free status for the Baltic. The balance must be restored," said Medvedev.

In early May, Sweden confirmed publicly that it had received security guarantees from the United States, the United Kingdom, as well as other NATO nations. "Russia can be clear that if they direct any kind of negative activities against Sweden, which they have threatened, it would not be something that the U.S. would just allow to happen without a response," Sweden's Foreign Minister Ann Linde said on Swedish TV after a meeting with Blinken in Washington. NATO countries Norway, Denmark, and Iceland released a joint statement that pledged to provide support in the event of Russian retaliation should Finland or Sweden be victims of aggression on their territory before obtaining NATO membership. "We will assist Finland and Sweden by all means necessary," UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was far more public with his offer of security guarantees, traveling to both Sweden and Finland to sign mutual security agreements that said if either country faced an attack or disaster, they would assist each other in a variety of ways, which might include military means.

At a press conference held at the presidential palace in Helsinki after the signing, Niinistö was asked about Russian retaliation if Finland joins NATO. "If that would be the case, then my response would be, 'You caused this. Look in the mirror,'" Niinistö said, directing his response at Putin, his old friend.

When Finland's President Niinistö and Prime Minister Sanna Marin announced on May 12th that Finland would officially seek to join NATO, the Kremlin immediately accused Finland of turning its territory into a new line of military confrontation with Russia. "Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature, in order to stop the threats to its national security," the Russian Foreign Ministry warned. "Helsinki must be aware of the responsibility and consequences of such a move."

Two days later, Niinistö called Putin and broke the news directly. Finland was joining NATO. Putin was calm, surprisingly muted in his objection. He said it was a mistake. Niinistö reported that Finland was not under any threat.

Like clockwork, Sweden then announced publicly its intention to join NATO, breaking its 73-year policy of military non-alignment. On the same day, NATO launched one of its largest military exercises in the Baltic region, involving some 15,000 troops from 10 countries, eight NATO countries and Sweden and Finland. The exercise, called Hedgehog, took place in Estonia, 40 miles from Russia's nearest military base, and simulated a Russian attack on that nation. "Getting into Putin's face dramatically." Meanwhile, across Europe, from the North to the Balkans, NATO exercises kicked into gear with 18,000 troops in Poland, helicopter exercises in North Macedonia, and 3,000 Allied troops and 1,000 vehicles, including German Leopard 2 tanks, in Lithuania. The message to Putin was clear.

Finland formally became a member of NATO with Article 5 protection on April 4th, 2023, adding 832 miles to Russia's border with NATO. It was a momentous transformation in Finland's foreign and security policy. Turkey and Hungary initially blocked Sweden's accession to NATO, but on March 7th, 2024, Sweden also finally became a full member.

30. Only a weekend after the invasion, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was at Mar-a-Lago to play golf and have dinner with Trump. "Going to Mar-a-Lago is a little bit like going to North Korea," Graham said. "Everybody stands up and claps every time Trump comes in. So I come in behind him, and I get a standing ovation," Graham said. He assumed it was for his comments about Putin. "I've been saying, get rid of Putin. If you have to kill him, kill him," he said in a March 4th interview on Fox News. Graham had declared that Russians should assassinate President Putin. He followed it with a post on social media: "The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country and the world a great service," Graham said. The comments caused a brief firestorm. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was quick to clarify this was not the position of the United States government. Kremlin Press Secretary Dimitri Peskov hit back by suggesting Graham was insane. "Unfortunately, in such an extremely tense atmosphere, there is a hysterical escalation of Russophobia these days. Not everyone manages to maintain sobriety. I would even say sanity, and many lose their mind." Graham downplayed his comments to others at Mar-a-Lago. "I don't think it's fascinating," Graham said. "I mean, would anybody doubt that they'd have been better off if the Germans had gotten rid of Hitler?" During dinner that evening, Trump and Graham talked about the threat of Putin using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. "We can't let him get away with that," Trump said. "We've got a bigger military. We've got deadly submarines. I would have submarines going up and down the coast of Russia saying, 'We're watching you.'" "Why can't we get involved?" Trump asked Graham. "Why do we let the planes fly?" Graham realized Trump was wondering about why the U.S. hadn't set up a no-fly zone to stop Russian planes from entering Ukraine's airspace. Zelenskyy was pleading for Biden to close the skies. Biden had repeatedly refused. He did not want a situation where U.S. or NATO forces would have to take out Russian planes that could too quickly escalate into World War I. "Everybody felt the Russians would roll through Ukraine in about a week and do some kind of peace deal, and that would be that," Graham said. "Well, the Ukrainians are fighting like tigers. Zelenskyy has become the Churchill of his time, and the Russians are in a world of hurt. They actually could lose this. They could actually lose this military engagement. If we could do better in the air..." The next morning, Graham played nine holes with Trump, who was now golfing five times a week. Some of the caddies came up and asked for a photo, not with Trump, but with Graham. "The caddies want to get rid of Putin too," Graham joked to Trump. But the former president was no longer paying attention. He was fixated on the caddies, as if suddenly realizing being tough with Putin was popular.

On March 5th, during a fundraiser in New Orleans with top GOP donors, Trump suggested that the U.S. should label its F-22 planes with the Chinese flag and then bomb the [expletive] out of Russia. "And then we say, 'China did it. We didn't do it. China did it.' And then they start fighting with each other, and we sit back and watch," he said, almost gleefully. The crowd laughed.

31. In Poland, surrounded by huge crates of humanitarian aid for Ukraine, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asked about America's goals for the war. "We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine," Austin said, adding that Russia has already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly. A signal that America's goalposts had shifted beyond helping Ukraine defend itself. Biden now wanted to decisively blunt Russia's ability to threaten Europe.

Two days later, on April 26th, Austin convened a Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Defense ministers from 40 countries debated what assistance, training, and advice should be provided to Ukraine. What should NATO's involvement look like? Ukraine's Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov was energized by the meeting and updated Zelenskyy of a tectonic philosophical shift in NATO's approach to Ukraine. NATO membership was not a consideration, but the alliance had committed to supply Ukraine's military with NATO weapons, training, and intelligence, as if they were a team. By invading Ukraine, Putin had massively accelerated precisely what he feared: Ukraine would become a highly capable, NATO-standard fighting force, backed by the most powerful military alliance in the world.

32. On an evening that spring, Biden was having dinner with a friend at the sum White House when Hunter Biden wandered in, pulled up a chair, and sat down at the table. First Lady Jill Biden was out of town. Interrupting the conversation, Hunter started talking about why he was the person who had the most to lose from the outcome of the midterm elections. If Republicans won control of both the House and Senate, they would continue to try to investigate everything about him. Hunter rambled on about his personal crisis. President Biden leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and sighed. It was almost a trance that continued for some time. "None of us can really measure the toll the burden that Hunter is on him," his friend said later.

After dinner, Biden gave his friend a tour of the White House residence. "I want to show you where my grandchildren come and sleep in the White House," Biden said, walking into a bedroom in the back of the residence. Along the bureau was a clutter of framed pictures that displayed Biden's family at different ages and walks of life, smiling, embracing. At the end was a picture of a young man dressed up in a suit and tie. Biden picked it up and showed it to his friend. "That's my dad," Biden said. "Quite a man." He went into his characteristic storytelling mode. "Once when I was young, I was going out at night, and my dad said to me, 'Joey, don't go out. I'm going to take you to New York City to a fancy restaurant. I'm going to show you how to deal with a maître d.'" The friend realized that Biden's dad most likely had no idea how to deal with a maître d, but might have thought it was important that his son learned. The president got out his wallet and pulled out a picture. "This is my daughter," Biden said, as he started to tear up. It was a picture of Naomi Biden, who was killed in a car accident along with his first wife, Neilia, and Hunter Biden in 1972. Neilia had been out shopping for a Christmas tree with their three children before the crash. Their two sons, Hunter and Beau, had survived. Biden was sworn in as a senator the next month. It was as if Biden were in an emotional trance as he picked up and put down the photographs he had probably seen a thousand times. There was something ordinary and familiar about it, the friend thought. Biden continued to talk about the past and his family like a comforting bedtime story.

33. During a windy round of golf at Bedminster, Trump's golf club just outside New York City, Senator Lindsey Graham urged Trump to run for president again. On the green with them was Jay Clayton, Trump's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman. "I'm going to do it," Trump told them. He didn't need to be drafted, he said. He would jump into the race whenever he wanted. Trump added that he was 90% there. "It was a business decision for him too," he said. "I had to think about my finances, my houses, what can he do as a candidate versus not being a candidate."

"If you compare what you did as president to what they're doing, you've got a good chance of winning," Graham told him. "If you ask the Republican Party, 'Do you think Trump should run again, or is it time for somebody new?' it's about 60/40 right now. If you run again and win, then January 6th won't be your obituary," Graham said. "If you don't run, then time marches on. The next Republican nominee will try to be different from you. Personally, I like Trump's policies. I just don't like Trump. If you run and win, then it's the biggest second act in the history of American politics," Graham said. "Then you have four years to rewrite your legacy and make Trumpism a more sustainable movement. It becomes something you can pass to the next generation." Trump's attention seemed to latch on to Graham. He liked that a lot. After a moment, Trump said, "What does that mean?"

"Second acts are hard to get in politics, Mr. President," Graham said. "If you get a second act, use it." Graham wanted Trump to think big: bring the country together on immigration, entitlement reform, on energy, he said. But Trump wanted to keep going over the 2020 election result, which he still refused to accept. "He had lost, Mr. President. The 20% of people who want to keep talking about 2020 is not going to get you elected," Graham said. Trump didn't buy it. "Republicans are ready to move on from 2020, I promise you," Graham implored him. When Trump went to bed each night, did he truly believe the election was stolen? Graham couldn't be sure, but it was the narrative Trump would never give up. "They want you to run again. They thought you were a good president," Graham said. "But if they believe you can't win, they will throw you over. Winning is more important than anything to Republicans right now," Graham added. From his conversations with colleagues, Graham believed he had a very accurate read on the Republican Party. "There's 50% of people that would follow Trump off a cliff in the Republican primary. There are 20% that would push him off a cliff, and 30% are just waiting for the wind. You've got to convince them that you can win, and winning means 2024, not 2020." Graham finished. He had likely lost Trump's attention long ago.

A few days later, Graham called Trump to tell him that the Israeli government had dissolved. "Yeah, Lapid is going to be the new prime minister. They're going to have an election in October, and there's a 40% chance Bibi Netanyahu could come back," Graham said. It would be Israel's fifth election in 3 years. Trump was still furious that Netanyahu called Biden to congratulate him on winning the 2020 election. "Bibi will probably try to call you to get you to endorse him," Graham said. "Just stay out of it. You don't need to get involved in all that." "I gave a speech today, and I only mentioned the 2020 election twice," Trump said, as if it had shown maximum restraint.

In May, Congress passed a $40 billion emergency Ukraine aid package that included $19 billion in military funding. Many Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, accused the Biden administration and the Pentagon of slow-walking the military assistance. Russia had lost 30,000 troops, but the Ukrainians desperately needed more weapons to hold off the seemingly endless flow of Russian soldiers. "They're in an artillery battle, and they're outgunned 10 to 1," Graham said. "If they blink, they'll get creamed. The way you usually win wars is they run out of people, they run out of money, they run out of weapons," Graham said. "So who's going to run out of people, money, and weapons first? Obviously, Ukraine," Graham argued. "If we can get through the next five or six months, and if the Europeans begin to actually move away from Russian gas and oil, Putin's in a world of hurt," Graham said. "Because that's the only thing keeps him going. As long as we keep the weapons flowing and the economy supported, this is a war of attrition." While the aid bill was supported by a majority of House Republicans, passing 378-57, Trump lambasted Democrats for sending billions to Ukraine. "The Democrats are sending another $40 billion to Ukraine, yet America's parents are struggling to even feed their children," Trump said, claiming that no one is talking about the baby formula shortage in the United States. There's always been isolationist voices in the Republican Party. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said it won't be a problem.

34. On late June 2022, Secretary of State Tony Blinken sat next to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the bar in Schloss Elmau, a beautiful palatial resort nestled in the Bavarian Alps. They were unwinding after a full day of G7 meetings. The G7 is an informal, powerful group of the advanced democracies: the United States, France, Germany, UK, Italy, Canada, and Japan. It was a chance to share some deeper, private worries over a drink. "It's extraordinary what you've done," Blinken said to the Chancellor in moving Germany to play such a strong leading role in defense, not only of Ukraine but reorienting the country's posture in Europe. Scholz had announced that Germany would increase its defense budget by 3%, while the overall budget was being substantially cut. It was a historic change from Germany's post-World War II anti-militarism. "I feel strongly about it," Scholz said. "I'm worried about it, too." "What do you mean, Chancellor?" Blinken asked. "People are applauding this now," Scholz said. "I'm not sure how they're going to feel in a few years' time as we make good on this, when Germany is once again the leading military power in Europe. I'm not so sure people are going to like that," the Chancellor explained. "I have the weight of history on my mind, so this is not easy. And it's so important that Germany, deeply embedded as a European country, retain that, and people may not be so enthusiastic about this."

"I think it's admirable that you're also putting this in a historical frame," Blinken said. "Ultimately, from my perspective, you're doing the right and important thing because, actually, the best way to uphold peace, to avoid another global conflagration, is for the countries that can play leadership roles in upholding the order to do that, and Germany, under you, is doing that." But Blinken could see the decision weighed on the Chancellor. "Being clear-eyed about a nation's history is central to moving forward, and that was as hard for Germany as perhaps any country."

Months later, Blinken was reminded of this moment during a conversation with Germany's Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a Green Party leader who was one of the most ardent, vocal supporters of Ukraine in Germany's Parliament. Blinken had been talking regularly with Baerbock in an effort to get Germany to provide Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, or at least allow third countries to transfer the tanks. The German-manufactured 62-ton battle tanks had a massive turret and gun barrel. The earth literally shook when they moved. They were a fierce instrument of war, a mainstay of ground combat, and psychologically and physically a key measure of strength and combat seriousness. Opponents take notice when they move. The Leopard 2 has a range of about 300 miles and is equipped with specialized night vision capability and a laser rangefinder that would also enable the Ukrainians to better hit moving targets. Ukraine had been requesting tanks to help them defend against and push back on Russia's increasing artillery firepower. Importantly, more than a dozen European countries used Leopard 2 tanks. Availability, readiness, logistics, and maintenance were already in Europe. But as with all sorts of weapons, countries who buy them must seek permission from the manufacturing country to give them to another country. With Germany's go-ahead, European allies could contribute tanks, training, or spare parts to Ukraine. Baerbock told Blinken she was advocating for the provision of Leopard 2 tanks in the German government, but the Chancellor is not enthusiastic, she said. "He said in one of our meetings, 'Can you imagine the images of German tanks sweeping over Europe? How are people going to react to that?'" a vivid reminder of German aggression in both World War I and World War II.

"Look, Blinken said, "I get it. I really do." He recounted to Baerbock the conversation he'd had previously with Scholz at that bar in the Alps. This was—it wasn't that Scholz didn't want to provide the tanks to Ukraine. Blinken believed it really was about the weight and imagery of history that could not be dismissed. "He was very, very concerned about what this would say to people about Germany," Blinken said.

"What will the Americans do?" Baerbock asked Blinken. "Will you provide Abrams?" The U.S. M1 Abrams tanks are the heavy American-produced battle tanks that have been used by American forces in combat in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. "Look, I think our military sees this as apples and oranges," Blinken said. "Because the tanks you have are something the Ukrainians can use right away. The Abrams is a totally different system. It's going to take a while to get Ukraine trained on it. It's tougher to maintain. So I don't think there's an equivalence between the two."

"I just don't know if we can move the Chancellor on this," Baerbock said. The Pentagon was also arguing against providing Ukraine with Abrams, given the long lead times and difficult logistics. "The Abrams tank is a very complicated piece of equipment," Under Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl told reporters in January 2023. "We should not be providing the Ukrainian systems they can't repair, they can't sustain, and that they over the long term can't afford, because it's not helpful."

President Zelenskyy joined a summit in Davos by video link and complained about the delays and overthinking. Ukraine needed tanks. "Act now," he said urgently. "The time the free world uses to think is used by the terrorist state to kill," he said.

Soon after, President Biden sat at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and reached Scholz by phone. He put the German Chancellor on speakerphone so Blinken and Sullivan could hear the exchange. After greetings and routine best wishes, Scholz turned to business. "Are you doing the Abrams?" Schultz asked. Biden repeated the reasoning why he didn't plan to. Ultimately, it didn't make sense. There was a long lead time. It would take a while to train the Ukrainians to use the U.S. tanks. They would be difficult to maintain and resupply, and they wouldn't be immediately useful to them on the battlefield. "But your tanks really would be useful to them now," Biden said. "Can they—we get them the tanks?" "Well, what about your tanks?" Schulz repeated.

Blinken and Sullivan listened as the two leaders went back and forth a few times. "Joe, you know, if you're not moving on this, it's really hard for me to do this," Schultz said, haunted by the image of how German tanks once again rolling across Europe could be perceived. "I don't think I can do this," he said.

"Okay," Biden said. "I hear what you're saying, but let's keep talking about this. I think it's really important that we get there. I'll have our teams follow up." Biden ended the call and looked at Sullivan and Blinken. "I think we've got a dead end here," Biden said. "A brick wall."

"Mr. President, I think there's actually a way of squaring the circle," Blinken said. "You're 100% right that we can't get the Ukrainians Abrams in time for them to be useful, probably in this immediate counteroffensive. But if we're going to eventually do it anyway, because we've been talking about Ukraine's force of the future and they need a strong ground defense, why not say we're doing it and give the Germans cover to move forward with their tanks, even if our tanks are not going to arrive for another year? As long as we announce it," Blinken added, "that might give Scholz what he needs—political cover." Was an ally in the decision, as it was in most.

"That's a good idea," Biden said. "Let's pursue it." Blinken and the State Department tested out the proposition through back channels with the Germans. The response was: "Okay, we'll do it. You commit to providing the Abrams in principle, we'll commit to providing Leopards on a nearer-term basis."

Later on January 25th, 2023, in the Roosevelt Room, President Biden would announce that the U.S. was sending 31 Abrams Tanks to Ukraine, the most capable tanks in the world. "There is no offensive threat to Russia," Biden said. "If Russian troops return to Russia, where they belong, this war would be over today."

35. On late September 2022, Jake Sullivan sat alone at his desk in the West Wing of the White House, thumbing through the Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TSCI) which showed the extraordinary depth of U.S. intelligence penetration all over the world, particularly inside countries like Russia. Sullivan stared at the new intelligence in front of him with dread. The U.S. intelligence agencies were reporting new, highly sensitive.

Credible conversations inside the Kremlin showing Russian President Vladimir Putin was seriously considering using a tactical nuclear weapon in the Russia-Ukraine war. Putin, the agencies reported, was showing increasing signs of desperation over Russia's recent battlefield failures. The Ukrainians, supported with large amounts of US and European weaponry, had just pulled off a breathtaking counter-offensive in the Northeast, breaking through Russian lines with surprising speed and pushing Russian forces out of cities and towns in the entire region of Kharkiv, situated just 35 miles from the Russian border.

US intelligence reported it was a humiliating defeat for Putin. Russian soldiers had fled in any way they could, including on stolen bicycles and by disguising themselves as locals. The collapse of fortified Russian lines, up to 70 km (43 mi) in some places, and loss of more than 1,000 miles of territory sent shockwaves through Moscow. The Ukrainians had recaptured more territory in 5 days than the Russian forces had taken in their entire operation.

Now, with Ukrainian flags flying in Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces had pivoted to the south in an effort to liberate the city of Kherson on the west bank of the Dnipro River. Putin had about 30,000 troops stationed in Kherson. The intelligence agencies assessed that if Russian troops were encircled by Ukrainian forces in Kherson, there was a 50% chance Putin would order the use of tactical nuclear weapons to avoid such a catastrophic battlefield loss.

Kherson was of enormous strategic importance for Moscow. Control of Kherson gave Russia a land bridge to the Black Sea peninsula and access to the Dnipro River's freshwater supplies, which Ukraine had blocked from flowing into Crimea after Russia had forcefully seized it in 2014. CIA Director Burns reported that the intelligence showed some of Putin's generals were finally telling him to withdraw across the river to a more defensible position. But if Kherson fell, it was at least conceivable that the Russian military could crack and that Putin's grip on Crimea would be threatened.

Burns said under Russian nuclear doctrine, a potential catastrophic battlefield loss or existential threat to Russia could permit Putin to resort to nuclear use, the first use since 1945, when American forces in World War II dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. "The thing about Crimea," Burns reported, "in many ways, that was existential for Putin because if he lost Crimea, his whole reason to be as Russian president, in his eyes, would be challenged."

Putin announced on September 21st that he would mobilize 300,000 Russian troops and annex four Ukrainian provinces, including Kherson, declaring them part of Russia. "If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people. This is not a bluff," Putin warned in his address. The intel reports were deemed "exquisite," meaning derived from the best sources and methods. This was the most alarming and deeply unnerving assessment of Putin's intentions since the start of the war in February 2022.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes was more concerned than she had ever been about the potential for Putin to "stick his toe in the water and break the seal on nuclear weapons." There was enough data coming in that suggested enough people within Russia's system were talking about it, Haynes reported. Among the other troubling indicators was intelligence that Putin had also loosened operational controls to make it easier to order the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in the war.

President Biden ordered Sullivan, "On all channels, get on the line with the Russians. Tell them what we will do in response. Find language that is threatening without being directly threatening. Too strong, and it might trigger exactly the response we are trying to avoid." Biden had seen enough unintentional mistakes and did not want the use of any nuclear weapon, no matter how low the yield. Total nuclear weapon deterrence had maintained great power peace and stability since World War II. Any use would shatter the fragile norm and could set off an unpredictable escalation ladder that would be very difficult to control. Sullivan calculated no matter what else happened during Biden's presidency, it would mark a failure that would live in history as a damning legacy.

"Second," Biden told Sullivan, "let's send Bill to talk to his counterpart." That was CIA Director Bill Burns, who knew all the main Russian players, especially Putin. "We need to open up a channel," Biden said, "not on negotiating Ukraine, but on the United States and Russia avoiding a cataclysm." The president then communicated with Putin directly. He sent him a message to emphasize the seriousness of this and the catastrophic consequences if Russia were to deploy a nuclear weapon. The message also said, "I want to send someone to talk to someone from your side in more detail about our concerns." The president named Bill Burns. Putin responded to Biden and said he would send Naryshkin, the head of their foreign intelligence service, to meet with Burns on September 30th.

Putin held a signing ceremony at the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow for the annexed regions and promised to protect the lands "with all the forces and means at our disposal." "I want the civilized authorities and their real masters in the West to hear me so they remember this," Putin said. "People living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are becoming our citizens forever." "The United States is the only country in the world that has twice used nuclear weapons," Putin added, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and setting a precedent.

The following week, on October 6th, Biden delivered a blunt warning during remarks at a private fundraiser at James Murdoch's home in New York. James is the younger, more liberal son of Rupert Murdoch, the founder of News Corp and Fox, who built a publishing empire worldwide. "We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis," Biden said. "We've got a guy I know fairly well, his name is Vladimir Putin. I spent a fair amount of time with him. He is not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical and nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons." "We have some real difficult decisions to make," Biden added. "We're trying to figure out what is Putin's off-ramp."

At the Pentagon, on the third floor in the outer e-ring, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin gazed down at the carefully tailored talking points he had directed his closest adviser, Colin Kahl, to prepare. Austin was not known for eloquence or crispness at public briefings or interviews. His uneasy public delivery had sidelined him as a public spokesman for the administration, but in private conversations, he carried himself with a genuineness and seriousness that gave him particular gravitas. Austin knew President Biden was absolutely determined not to let the Ukraine war become World War III, and he shared that determination.

Putin had expected his forces would have a lightning victory in Ukraine, invade, chop the head off the snake, and put a new Russian head on it within days of their invasion. He had failed miserably. Austin believed that Putin's new theory of victory was to simply outlast the West's support of Ukraine. He could see from the intelligence that Russia's army was highly demoralized, struggling to resupply, and its leadership disorganized. Russian forces were folding like a cheap suit. Was Putin desperate enough that he would be willing to use battlefield nuclear weapons to stop a Ukrainian advance? Kahl recalled a scene in The Lord of the Rings where Gandalf slams his staff into the ground and declares, "You shall not pass!" Was there a version of that where Putin used a dozen tactical nuclear weapons in southern Ukraine to obliterate Ukrainian forces charging toward Kherson and ultimately Crimea?

Austin was now preparing to speak to Russia's Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, a hardliner and close ally of Putin. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, Austin had spoken with Shoigu only once, in May 2022. Even during the Cold War, military counterparts spoke via back channels, but the Russian defense minister had been unreachable and frustratingly closed off. Shoigu, short and grim-faced, was part of Putin's most loyal inner circle, having known and worked with him for three decades. In 2012, Putin appointed Shoigu as his defense minister, and Shoigu had helped plan Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. In his first year as defense minister, Shoigu had directed commanders to begin every day in the barracks with a rendition of the Russian anthem. Praise and adherence to Putin and Russia never slackened. Shoigu was a classic Russian "apparatchik hardass," dutiful and subservient. Russian media for years was filled with photographs of Putin and Shoigu together in matching outfits, hunting, fishing, dying in, and camping in the Siberian wilderness. It was a strange pairing.

On Friday, October 21st, Austin finally got through to Shoigu. "We know you are contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine," Austin said bluntly in his deep baritone voice. "Let me tell you a few things about that. First," he said, "any use of nuclear weapons on any scale against anybody would be seen by the United States and the world as a world-changing event. There is no scale of nuclear weapons that we could overlook or that the world could overlook."

"Any use of nuclear weapons anywhere would implicate the vital national interests of the United States," Austin said. "Why? Because we cannot live in a world where nuclear powers use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers with impunity. We can't live in that world. So you may believe that Ukraine matters more to you than us, but in this circumstance, this matters just as much to us as it matters to you. It wouldn't matter how small the nuclear weapon is," Austin said. Shoigu just listened. Despite being heralded a general with a Soviet uniform adorned with medals, Shoigu had never served in the military before Putin appointed him as defense minister.

"If you do this," Austin said, "it would be the first use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world in 3/4 of a century, and it could set in motion events that you cannot control and we cannot control. Our leaders and your leaders have repeatedly said a nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought. This could put us on the path of a confrontation that would have existential implications for you and for us. Don't step on that slippery slope," Austin said.

Austin moved to his next point. "If you did this, all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine would be reconsidered," he said. "We have taken care not to do certain things. There are certain things we haven't provided the Ukrainians. There are certain restrictions we've put on how they can use the stuff we've given them, and we have not directly intervened in the conflict against your forces. If you did this, all of those constraints, all of those restraints we have imposed on ourselves, would be reconsidered." The message of direct retaliation could not be more starkly presented.

Austin delivered his final point. "All these actors in the world that you think are your friends or who are looking aside would all turn against Russia in this scenario: the Chinese, the Indians, the Turks, the Israelis," he said. "This would isolate Russia on the world stage to a degree you Russians cannot fully appreciate."

"I don't take kindly to being threatened," Shoigu finally responded. "Mr. Minister," Austin said bluntly, with not a hint of anger, "I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don't make threats."

At the Pentagon, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley also had a secure phone call with his counterpart in Russia, General Valery Gerasimov. "General Gerasimov," Milley began, "some of your political leaders are rattling the nuclear saber and they're talking about the use of nuclear weapons. That has a lot of people's attention. So I need you to tell me, under what conditions would you use nuclear weapons?" Milley was blunt. He had known Gerasimov for years. In the room with Milley were people from the intelligence community listening in on the call.

"You already know under what conditions," Gerasimov said. "You have our manuals and our doctrine." He cited a page number. "Well, I appreciate that," Milley said. "I don't have the manual in front of me. I need you to tell me under what conditions you're going to use nuclear weapons." He wanted to hear them from the Russian general directly.

"Okay," Gerasimov replied. "It's public, by the way. You can look up the conditions." But he recited Russia's nuclear doctrine. "If there's an attack on Russia that threatens the stability of the regime," Gerasimov said, "condition one." Milley knew that could be interpreted as a threat to the Russian government or to Putin himself. "Second," Gerasimov said, "is if a foreign power attacks Russia with a weapon of mass destruction, so that's chemical, biological, or nuclear. Third," Gerasimov recited, "Russia reserves the right to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of catastrophic battlefield loss. Those are the conditions under which we will do it," he added.

"Well, that's good," Milley said. "Because none of those conditions are going to obtain. So I guess you're not going to use nuclear weapons because nobody is going to attack you with a weapon of mass destruction, no one is doing any kind of regime change, and my analysis of the battlefield is, I don't think you're going to be suffering a catastrophic loss like losing your entire army." So Milley was satisfied Gerasimov had conveyed and agreed to the established conditions in Russia's nuclear doctrine. "Nothing had changed there, at least," great. Milley said. "I'll pass what you said on to my government." "Okay, thanks," Gerasimov replied.

At the White House, Jake Sullivan and John Finer were in overdrive. The key piece of the intelligence assessment was the 50% chance Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon. The assessment had gone from around a 5% chance to a 10% chance to now a coin flip. Finer felt a gut-wrenching foreboding, while Sullivan often found a false precision in the intelligence, especially with regard to numbers. The 50% assessment could not be dismissed. Even before this intel assessment, he carried the worry that at some moment during the war, Putin would resort to nuclear use.

"All the people who wave it off are fundamentally just, in a way, naive," Sullivan said. After the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Biden administration was hyper-focused on preparing to deal with the possibility of really bad things happening. Back in May, only 3 months after the Ukraine War began, Sullivan had stood up a tiger team to analyze and prepare for low-probability, high-impact events in the war, including Russia's use of a nuclear weapon. The tiger team had produced a playbook on nuclear response options. Suddenly, the playbook was no longer abstract and had to be carried out in the greatest secrecy.

Sullivan met at the Pentagon with Austin, Chairman Mark Milley, and their teams of nuclear experts to map out and analyze the various possible nuclear scenarios, moves, countermoves, military response options that would be triggered if Putin used nuclear weapons. Austin and Milley showed Sullivan how they were gaming it out from a military perspective. "Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon. That's the first move. Second move, US responds. Then the Russians take a turn, then the US, and it was off to the races. It was classic war gaming, but alarmingly real." At each of the turns, Austin and Milley prepared for the president what his options were in escalating order of magnitude. With Sullivan, they examined how each option mapped onto an expected response by Russia. "And so it becomes a very complex algorithm of choices for the president," Sullivan said.

A single nuclear detonation would trigger the highest stakes of brinkmanship possible. Sullivan, Austin, and Milley talked through each of the options with Biden in excruciating detail to get his guidance about how the president would respond. At no point was Biden supposed to make a final decision and lock himself into a response. Instead, he retained discretion, keeping the options open. Biden had said privately that if Putin used a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine, the US would not respond with nuclear weapons. "I'm not going to have a nuclear response to battlefield use in Ukraine," Biden said to his advisers. But the reality was, and everyone in the room knew it, nuclear weapons were always a possibility once escalation began. Nuclear weapons were the silent shadow present in all their deliberations. Response options ranged from a warning shot that didn't kill anyone to a US military strike inside Russia with conventional forces, also a nightmare scenario for the president.

Biden and Sullivan believed that an armed clash between US and Russian forces at any level could too easily lead to World War III. It was alarmingly obvious they were in a completely new world. There was no good option in a direct conflict between the US and Russia. US declaratory policy was that the US would only use nuclear weapons to respond to a nuclear attack or existential threat. The World War III escalation path would become extremely pressurized and harder and harder to find an off-ramp if nuclear use started. What were the signposts, the clues to what Putin would do next? How real was this threat?

Biden's National Security Council and State Department had become accustomed to living in two contradictory worlds. Ever since US intelligence had obtained Putin's invasion plan in excruciating detail 5 months in advance of the invasion, it had not been clear precisely when he would invade, but all the evidence indicated the invasion was coming. The National Security team had lived in this world and tried to deter Putin. In the other world, Putin's plan seemed so irrational and self-defeating that the Russian leader could not possibly go through with it. But Putin invaded, launching a global crisis. Now Sullivan and the president were locked into the world of uncertainty and doubt once again. Would Putin undertake another irrational and self-defeating step?

"We have to stay one step ahead of Putin," Sullivan instructed his NSC staff many times. "We have to," he questioned them. "What economic options do we have? What diplomatic options do we have? What does the US do militarily? Do you take military action or not? If you do take military action, where do you take military action? Inside Ukraine? Inside Russia? Inside occupied parts of Ukraine?" But as an unpredictable aggressor, Putin had the upper hand. As the all-powerful Russian autocrat, he was the one who decided Russia's actions and red lines. Sullivan tried to get in Putin's head, asking, "How do I, Vladimir Putin, avoid ignominious defeat?" What was Putin planning? Ordering the use of tactical nuclear weapons to avert a catastrophic battlefield loss is something he is prepared to do, Sullivan believed. "I think he is worried about using nukes, drawing us directly into the conflict," Sullivan said. "But at some level, he's not going to care about what we think or do." Making Ukraine part of Russia had become an absolute, single-minded need for Putin.

For Deputy National Security Advisor John Finer, the notion that such a world-changing event, actually using nuclear weapons, rested on a coin flip was beyond imagination, and the implications extended well beyond the war in Ukraine. The detonation of a single tactical nuclear weapon would destroy the world order erected after World War II, which was predicated on never again using nuclear weapons. The Pentagon had an entire series of contingency war plans for using nuclear weapons called the 5000 series. For example, OPLAN 500027 covered plans made by the US and South Korea for a response to North Korean nuclear weapons use. Thorough contingency plans existed if Russia attacked the US first. Now, the NSC and Pentagon were having meetings to update and synchronize contingency plans for a nuclear war, in the same way, Finer realized, as his predecessors would have done during the Cold War or 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, more than half a century ago.

Finer was also tasked with running a very quiet, very small series of meetings at the deputies level and with core US allies in the Euro Quad (Germany, France, and the UK) to come up with allied contingency plans for the various scenarios. "As with the invasion itself, we also have to be ready for the possibility that this won't work," Finer said. It was all too possible that deterring Putin from using a tactical nuclear weapon could fail.

Russia then, in 2022, had an arsenal of about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, 10 times the number in the US arsenal. The Russian tactical nuclear weapons ranged in explosive power from 0.3 kiloton (a fraction of a kiloton) to 50 or more kilotons, meaning today a nuclear weapon could take the form of a warhead small enough for one person to deploy or be so large to require deployment from a submarine, bomber, or intercontinental ballistic missile. Putin's arsenal gave him an extraordinary number of options along the nuclear scale. He could unleash a single low-yield tactical nuclear weapon or strike with a large number. In 1945, President Truman ordered the only use of atomic bombs to end World War II: a 15-kiloton atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and a 21-kiloton bomb on Nagasaki.

The nuclear scenarios being practiced in tabletop exercises included Putin ordering a test nuclear detonation over the Black Sea to intimidate Ukraine into surrendering territory or deploying a tactical nuclear weapon against a Ukrainian military base that would render the land around it uninhabitable for years because of radiation contamination.