Washington's Go-To Expert On Putin On What Motivates Russian President, China And The Next Big Attack

Finland’s former ambassador to Russia, Mikko Hautala, who was posted in Moscow during the years following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine, has met with the Russian leader on numerous occasions.

Now, as Finland’s ambassador to Washington, Hautala has become a go-to source for gaining insight into Putin’s character and ideologies in order to better understand what motivates the Russian president, with his office often visited by diplomats and U.S. government officials.

Finland, like Ukraine, shares a long border with Russia and the Sanna Marin-led country remembers its history, which includes invasions by its southern neighbor.

For the Finnish, the war in Ukraine is “a reminder of the Czars who dominated them from the time of Napoleon until the Russian Revolution, or Joseph Stalin who invaded their land or the Soviets who meddled in their affairs throughout the Cold War,” said Ryan Lizza on his podcast “Playbook Deep Dive” on Friday, where he interviewed Hautala.

Hautala on Understanding Putin

Putin’s “obsession with history and all this, these are symptoms, but the underlying conditional is, I will say, is a post-imperial syndrome,” Hautala said. The break-up of the Soviet Union, when Putin was in his late 30s, was the trigger, Hautala said, because it caused Putin to lose personal status, which he felt he needed to claw back.

But Putin wasn’t always so imperial and in his first terms as Russia's leader, he enacted some reforms that the West felt were positive steps, he told Lizzy. “Now we are dealing with a person and a regime, which is openly nationalistic, which is also openly imperial, because if you deny the existence of your neighboring U.N. chartered nation, then what is (that) if it's not imperial? And the actions speak louder than the words.”

Hautala on How the West Can Help Ukraine

“What I’m sometimes bothered by is the fact that quite often our media, also in my own country, is like people are looking for the silver bullet. Sometimes it's F-16s sometimes it's long-range HIMARS, I mean, it’s like some miraculous weapon could somehow change the situation and solve the problem. That’s not the right approach in my opinion,” Hautala said. “They (Ukrainians) need a number of current high-level capabilities, but they also need massive amounts of basic stuff,” he added, meaning that the Ukrainians require help to build up and sustain their defenses over a long period of time.

In terms of what needs to happen in Russia to end the aggression, Hautala said that “the majority must somehow conclude that the Ukrainians have a right to exist,”

Also Read: Audience Laughs At Russia's Top Diplomat Declaring Ukraine War Was 'Launched Against Us'

Hautala On Russian Sentiment Over the War

“I think most of the population of Russia –they support the war –what I mean by supporting is not that everybody’s equally, sort of, supportive or somehow enthusiastic, I think most of them are supporting the basic idea, some of them are ready to go along and they also, they are very good at kind of giving the responsibility to someone else. If the leader starts the war then he must know better,” he said.

Hautala doesn’t see the war ending anytime soon. When it comes to the most likely scenario for ending the conflict, Hautala said, "until the Russians, in some way or another, do kind of define their own policies like (they) are excluding this matter of dealing with (their neighbors), the potential remains, and we have to take it seriously."

Hautala doesn’t believe that the “big attack” in the current conflict has taken place, and believes that may come in the spring. Putin “concludes that (he) has more stamina and can stay in the game longer,” he said. Even if the Russians fail in their spring attack, Hautala said, it wouldn’t mean there would be any lasting peace.

Hautala on the Relationship Between Russia and China

“These countries are probably closer than we think,” he said. “They have a number of common fundamental ideas. One of them is that the world has to be moved polar, which means that they want to weaken the role of the West, the position of the West.”

Russia wants to dismantle the European security system and the obligations it has to the U.N. Charter and China isn’t ready to condemn Russia for that, Hautala said. While he was a diplomat in Russia, Hautala said Russian and Chinese top-level officials met on a monthly basis.

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