On Tuesday evening, PBS will premiere Putin’s Road to War, a new FRONTLINE documentary that will “examine the events that shaped Russian leader [Vladimir Putin], the grievances that drive him, and how a growing conflict with the West exploded into war in Europe.” Ahead of its official debut, Frontline shared an in-depth conversation with Julia Ioffe, a founding partner and Washington correspondent for Puck News, and veteran of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Politico.
In it, Ioffe—an American journalist who was born in Russia—shares some fascinating insights into Putin’s state of mind, including why she believes that he, right now, is “more dangerous than he’s ever been at any point in the last 22 years.”
“What he has opened up with this invasion is unthinkable,” Ioffe told FRONTLINE. “And because he is losing and because the sanctions and the Ukrainians are humiliating him, because he is backed into a corner, he is the most dangerous he has ever been, because it is now existential for him.”
While many people seem to be downplaying Putin’s threats of nuclear war, Ioffe is sending up a warning signal that this is something we should all be taking very seriously:
“[W]hen Putin threatens the use of nuclear weapons—he threatened it the first time he declared war… He threatened again three days into the war when he saw it wasn’t going well. He threatened it in 2018, when he went to that air show and he gave that crazy presentation about all the new nuclear weapons he had that could strike the U.S. If people think that he won’t use them, I think they’re mistaken.
Everything Putin has showed us at every step of the last 22 years is that every time we think he won’t go that far, he does. We think he won’t come back for a third term, he did. He won’t annex Crimea; he did. He won’t invade Ukraine; he did. He won’t try to kill [Alexei] Navalny; he did. He won’t try to subvert an American election; he did. And so why would we believe that this time he won’t do what he says he’ll do?”
You can watch Ioffe’s full interview above (the referenced Putin conversation begins toward the end, around the 45:00 mark).
Putin’s Road to War premieres tonight on PBS.