David Satter, a leading commentator on Russia and the former Soviet Union, was a guest on the Lunch Hour with Federal Newswire podcast to discuss the current issues and challenges related to Russia's relationship with the United States and the West.

Satter is the author of five books on Russia. His most-recent book is “Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union.” Satter also is creator of a documentary film on the fall of the U.S.S.R. and has been a leading foreign policy intellectual at several prominent think tanks across the country.

“Well, it began really with [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin and the criminalization of Russia, the way in which Russia was really taken over by criminals after the fall of the Soviet Union, the way in which property was stolen, privatization was really massive theft and the disregard for human life, including the life of ordinary Russians,” Satter told Lunch Hour.

“All of this culminated in the apartment bombings of 1999, which brought [President Vladimir] Putin to power," Satter added. "All evidence, even at that time, showed that this was carried out by the Federal Security Service, the FSB, which is the successor organization to the KGB, in order specifically to bring Putin to power.”

Satter said the bombings caused the death of 300 random people, with numerous others seriously injured.

“These were people who simply happened to be living in the apartment block that was chosen at random to be blown up,” Satter said.

It was a grim scenario, all to mask massive fraud and criminality, Satter added.

Yeltsin’s family had monopolized power and privilege in Russia, and an oligarchy has been created, he said. This produced billions and billions of dollars of unearned wealth that could be threatened if a new president is elected who is determined to get to the bottom of the kind of theft that took place in Russia during the 1990s, according to Satter.

“Putin is nominated as prime minister. He is the former head of the FSB. Public opinion polls showed that his popularity rating, in the only polls that were conducted before the bombings was also 2%,” Satter said. “Now, it's important to bear in mind that sociologists consider that in any survey, 6% of the respondents don't understand the question. So this raises the question of as to whether anyone in Russia supported Yeltsin.”

President Bill Clinton and Yeltsin spoke on the phone Sept. 8, 1999, he said.

“The text has now been released by the Clinton Library, in which Yeltsin says, ‘The next president is going to be Vladimir Putin. You're going to like him. He's a very capable man. You'll work well with him,’” Satter said. “The question, which was logical at that time, was how Yeltsin, with a 2% popularity rating, could be sure that Putin, with a 2% popularity rating, was going to be the next president. Did he really think that he was in a position to recommend his successor, let alone guarantee it?”

The next day, the apartment building on Guryanova Street was blown up in the middle of the night, killing 100 people and wounding many hundreds of others. Several other apartment bombings followed, which Soviet leaders used to justify the Second Chechen War, despite a lack of public support, according to Satter.

“This is the same thing as the Nazis did at the beginning of the Second World War when they staged an attack on German territory from Poland,” Satter said during Lunch Hour.

The Russian people were wary of war and weary of carnage after the failed incursion into Afghanistan as well as the First Chechen War, which ended in defeat in 1995, Satter noted.

“But under those circumstances, you can imagine that they had no taste whatever in 1999 for a Second Chechen War, having experienced a bloody conflict in which thousands of people were killed,” Satter said. “In Moscow and other major cities, the streets began to fill up with invalids from the war who were begging for alms. They had no desire to launch yet another war."

Satter reported those bombings convinced the Russian people they were under attack.

“The authorities said that there was a Chechen trace. Just the wording was very strange because there was no proof,” he said. “But a trace? What do you mean by trace? In fact, no Chechen and has ever been connected to those bombings, and they've denied any participation.”

Satter was asked if anything could have been done differently to prevent such an unstable and dangerous scenario to develop.

“What Russia needed was the rule of law. That was the last thing they were concerned about,” Satter said. “They were concerned about transforming the economy from a state-run economy to an economy which was based on private ownership. That in itself is a worthy goal. They had to do that. They had to take the economic assets and the means of production away from the state, out of the hands of the state, and turn them over to responsible private owners. The word responsible is very important here.”

But, he said what actually happened was government officials handed out property indiscriminately in return for bribes. The only people with access to hard currency were the criminal elements, according to Satter.

Satter was asked if the failures of U.S. policy toward Russia were the same as the failures following the invasion of Iraq.

“Well, when we talk about democracy, we’re talking about the rule of law,” Satter said. “And by the way, when we talk about the market, we're talking about the rule of law. Adam Smith said that the market is equivalent exchange. But when we think about it and we understand the complexity of the market, we realize that that presupposes a certain framework of rules.

“You can't just take property and put it in the hands of criminal elements and assume that you’re going to have democracy,” Satter added. “What you'll have is a criminal takeover. And that's exactly what happened. Now, yes, we were in favor of democracy. We should have been in favor of democracy. We didn't know what democracy involved.”

This was especially problematic in a nation whose language, customs and culture was foreign to most Americans, Satter said.

“Russians for generations were not accustomed to property rights, even before the communist takeover,” he said. “But nonetheless, what you can do in countries in which we become involved is establish the authority of universal values rooted in a system of law. We were in a position, had we understood better what was at stake, had we understood the history and the culture and so on, we would've understood also why that was critical, why that was more important than, for example, propagandizing privatization, which we did without understanding what privatization was and what was taking place.”

Satter said cultural matters, such as the introduction of American blue jeans and rock music, do not alter people's minds or lead to significant change.

“Everything depends ultimately on values. If we take the communist period, what the communist regime was based on was the denial of the traditional moral values of the West and their replacement by what was called class values,” Satter said. “What needed to be done in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union was reestablishing the authority of universal values, the same values that come down to us from Plato, from the New Testament, from the Old Testament, from the foundations of Western thought and civilization.”

Satter said the Russians continue to attempt to weaken America by exacerbating our internal conflicts, which he described as a form of self-defense.

“They try to make them worse. It's interesting. During the period, for example, when we were talking about the Trump collusion, supposed collusion, there was no attention to the Moscow apartment bombings,” he said. “There was no attention to the Beslan school massacre. There was no attention to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London. There was no attention to many other things. The initial invasion of Ukraine. The destruction of the Malaysia airliner, MH17. It's wonderful to keep Americans busy with their own internal quarrels because then they won't have time to deal with what's really important.”

Satter said what people in America don't understand — and they need to understand — is that for Russia, war is an instrument of internal policy, and that it's used as a device to strengthen the hold on power of a kleptocratic group. A criminal gang runs the country and will do anything to stay in power, including manipulating the patriotic and nationalistic and chauvinistic feelings of the entire population, while treating them as absolutely expendable raw material in the achievement of their goals.

In addition, there's a tendency in Russia to always think that victory will be easy, he said.

“This was the case in the war against Finland. It was the case in the war against Japan, the Russo-Japanese War. They thought that, who are these Asians to resist us? We'll polish them off,” Satter said. “In fact, that was the first short victorious war that, and it ended up dooming the empire. Even in relation to Hitler, they were overconfident.

“So it's not at all surprising and it's not out of character that they went into the Ukrainian war with the assumption that it would be over quickly and that they would be victorious. It's amazing the degree to which history repeats itself,” he added. “Because in the case of the First Chechen War, they also told soldiers, ‘You'll be greeted with flowers. You'll be greeted as liberators.’ They begin to believe their own propaganda. I mean, it's a claustral world there, but the devices that they use to fool others end up fooling them.”

Some analysts accepted this Russian theory, but the Ukrainians had other ideas. They fought back hard, Satter noted.

“We have a lot of people pontificating, and very few of them have actual firsthand experience of Russia, who actually know the country. And that doesn't stop them, of course,” Satter said. “They speak with (a) great deal of confidence about a country they've never experienced.”

He said Presidents Trump and Biden deserve credit for their support for Ukraine, unlike the lack of military assistance from the Obama administration.

“For all of his mistakes, Trump had authorized those deliveries. And they were critical. The Javelins made all the difference in defending the capital,” Satter said. “But let's say that that hadn't happened. Let's say that Ukrainian resistance had collapsed. The mere fact that we had allowed it to happen would've so imperiled the NATO alliance that it's highly likely that many NATO members would have tried to reach accommodations with Russia, compromising our security.

“Or, failing that, that Russia would have then begun to intimidate the Baltic states,” he added. “They have an enormous strategic advantage vis-a-vis the Baltic states because of the small territory and the small populations. We would've been inviting a new and much less advantageous challenge, and we would've been undermining the principles on it, which all of world security rests. By the way, we would've issued a standing invitation to the Chinese to follow the Russian example.”

Satter said President Biden, for all of his mistakes regarding Afghanistan, deserves credit for his actions to rally support for Ukraine.

“There are people who argue that the support is not sufficient, that it's not timely enough,” he said. “But it's been pretty good. The administration has gone further than I would've imagined.”

What will happen in the coming months? Satter again turned to recent history as a guide.

He noted that Yelstin withdrew unconditionally from Chechnya in 1996 following 18 months of war. Once he was aware of the tremendous resistance of the Russian people, and the political and personal risk it posed to him, he ended the conflict. Putin, Satter said, will emulate that.

“Someone capable of committing the kind of atrocities against his own people that Putin has carried out, let alone the atrocities against the Syrians, against the Chechens, well, if you consider the Chechens to be different from Russians; against the Ukrainians, has a hypertrophic commitment to his own personal safety,” he said. “If that is threatened, he'll amaze the world with his readiness to pull back and describe what happened as a victory. But he has to understand that he has nothing to gain from aggression, that he's going to lose. The cost of defeat has to threaten him personally.”

Still, Satter warned, Putin remains extremely dangerous.

“But the thing for all of us to bear in mind is that he has no internal moral compass that would prevent him from doing anything,” Satter said. “But that's why it's so important that he understand that these actions, actions that cause catastrophic damage to Ukraine, to the West, to others, would have consequences for him personally.”

The Lunch Hour podcast is hosted by Andrew Langer.