![]() the Berlin Wall coming down was such a moment.ĭAVID E. Here the feeling is the end of the Cold War is at hand.įor many people, there is a defining moment in their history when all things after that moment refer back to it in some way.įrom ABC, this is World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. will be a year remembered for communism’s loss of influence in the world. This protest movement may now be reaching a critical moment. While he was in East Germany, the Soviet Union would collapse. To Dresden, which is just such a backwater. And then he gets posted to East Germany, and not even to Berlin. He has wanted to be a secret agent all of his life, as long as he can remember. MASHA GESSEN, Author, The Man Without a Face: It was a disappointing but defining assignment. They thought he was better suited to counterintelligence.Īnd a counterintelligence officer is somebody for whom conspiracy theories and the enemy within are the job, and rooting those out and carrying that kind of paranoid "everyone might actually always be out to get us." Putin’s first assignment wasn’t undercover espionage. It was a monopoly that was responsible for political surveillance, on everyday basis, of Soviet citizens. The KGB was a monopoly that produced violence. Vladimir Putin’s road to war began decades earlier, as a young KGB officer trained to see enemies and threats to the empire that was the Soviet Union. signaling the beginning of what the world has been fearing for months.Ī huge Russian military offensive is underway, with attacks by land, air and sea. The biggest war in Europe since World War II. There are grave fears that this could be the beginning of the biggest land war here in Europe. It was a war he’d been building up to for years. This was not the war of the Russian people against the Ukrainian people. It seemed almost as if Putin had drawn up a plan a long time in advance, and now he had finally decided to execute it. How much of it was driven just by one man, his deranged ideas, and everybody around him was too scared to say anything about it or to resist. Respected colleagues, I have heard your opinions. It was such a strange and such an orchestrated performance that that’s the moment when I realized that Putin was actually going to attack Ukraine. He seemed to go off the rails, angry and berating his intelligence chief. “I will support” or “I support”? Speak plainly, Sergei. I will support the proposal to recognize. What does it mean, “Otherwise”? Are you suggesting we start negotiations? Otherwise, we must make the decision that we are discussing today. What was especially weird and creepy was the way he dressed down the head of his foreign intelligence service, Naryshkin. It just felt like they were dancing bears performing for their master who is impossible to please.ĭANIEL FRIED, Asst. I think back to that security council meeting and I realize how scared they must all be of him. They went up there and dutifully said what the master wanted them to say. JULIA IOFFE, Founding partner, Puck Media: This is the Americans’ border, because they are the masters in that country. Having his national security team, one by one, press him to invade Ukraine. ![]() KORI SCHAKE, Dir., American Enterprise Institute: But at the end of the day, we must decide what we will do next. This looked more like something you would see in a royal court than you would see in a modern government. They’re sitting in an array like schoolchildren. And his advisers, they’re literally sitting like 30 feet away from Putin. You have him striding his sort of cocky walk and sitting by himself. SUSAN GLASSER, Co-author, Kremlin Rising: It was three days before Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin will address his security council at a special session. Vladimir Putin is about to chair a meeting of the Russian Security Council.
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