Q&A: A Conversation With Washington's Man in Moscow When Russia Invaded Ukraine

Former ambassador John Sullivan says Russia was engaged in "sham diplomacy" before the Ukraine war, and that Trump's bid to end the war in "24 hours" is a "fantasy."

John J. Sullivan (Credit: U.S. Department of State)

John J. Sullivan is an American attorney and government official whose career spans four decades in the public and private sectors. From 2019-2022, he served as U.S. ambassador to Russia under Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He is the author of a new book entitled Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia's War Against the West. In the book, Sullivan recounts his tenure in Moscow in the run-up to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as well as in the months following. Sullivan tells the story of how he and U.S. officials confronted Russian officials about their military buildup, while Moscow engaged in a process of what he calls "sham diplomacy." Before his post in Moscow, he served for almost three years as the U.S. deputy secretary of state. He is currently a distinguished fellow at Georgetown and Columbia Universities, and a partner in Mayer Brown LLP. Sullivan and I spoke recently over Zoom. Our conversation follows, condensed and edited for clarity.

Luke Johnson: Can you describe your day-to-day as U.S. ambassador, including the intense surveillance?

John Sullivan: If you have a conversation with a colleague at the embassy and you think it may be sensitive, you have to remember to stop and walk into a secure facility to continue the conversation. More broadly, everything an American says or does on the embassy compound is subject to scrutiny from the Russians. 

I asked my predecessor, Jon Huntsman, about [the surveillance]. Jon's answer to me was: you get used to it. It's true, but it's stressful. You get used to the stress, and it's only after leaving the country -- and particularly after leaving post for good -- that the strain of living that way really becomes apparent, because in the moment, people can get used to anything. 

We don't let people stay for lengthy tours at the embassy; the average tour is probably two years or less. It's not just that the Russians kick us out with frequency, but there is stress and the counterintelligence environment.

LJ: Can you explain how you got a new iPad?

JS: I had been warned that whatever electronics you bring to Moscow, you won't be able to bring home because the Russians will penetrate them. So I brought my old iPad, and it died about six or seven months into my tenure. The pandemic had started, and I couldn't just buy a new iPad on Amazon; it was difficult to get deliveries from the United States.

I went to a local electronics store unannounced on a Saturday morning, but I walked in with my bodyguards, which was a giveaway, and I don't speak Russian well enough to order an iPad. (In any event, the likelihood that the Russians knew in advance that I was coming was probably high.) 99.9% of people in Washington could not pick Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov out of a lineup. That was not so in Moscow, where the U.S. Ambassador -- no matter who that person is -- is known to the average Russian. 

I walked up to a stack of the latest iPads, and I said I wanted one. The store clerk came, took it and said, "We'll have it ready for you tomorrow." There were other people coming, picking iPads, and walking out with them. I said, "I want to do what those people did." He said, "No, no, for your iPad, it will be ready tomorrow." I said, "No, I want it now. Why can't I take it and pay now?" The clerk said, "Well, you can't."

It didn't take special training in counterintelligence to recognize that if I wanted an iPad, I had to wait for the Russian government to do whatever they wanted to do with it. The iPad was for my own personal use, so I could have Zoom calls with my wife and family, and watch sports and YouTube. If the Russian security services wanted to know that I liked watching videos on YouTube of Siberian Huskies -- I am a dog lover -- they were welcome to know that.

LJ: In your tenure, the Russians weren't willing to talk with you much at all about Ukraine. You describe a meeting in October 2021 in Washington, where you knew the invasion was going to happen. Why did you think that?

JS: I was home on leave; because of the pandemic, I was stuck in Moscow for 13 months and I couldn't see my family. Our Intelligence Community (IC) had come to a consensus that there was a massive buildup of forces in southwestern Russia and Crimea. There were actions that they hadn't taken the previous spring: they were making fuel and ammo dumps, and field hospitals signaled that [Putin] really was going to do it this time. At the end of October, it came out of the blue for me. There were serious meetings among principals in DC that I participated in with Secretary [of State Anthony] Blinken. The message that we got from the IC was [Putin] now has in place the troops and logistical hubs to do this. The assessment was, from all we have seen, he's going to do it this time. 

President Biden sent [CIA Director] Bill Burns to Moscow. Because I was home in Washington, I flew with him, and we left on Halloween night, October 31. Bill had a message from the president to deliver personally to Putin about what the intelligence community had now assessed: "We see what you're going to do, don't do it. The consequences for Russia are going to be catastrophic."

We thought the meeting was going to be with Putin in Moscow, but it became a video teleconference, because he was in Sochi. [There were in-person meetings with other Russian officials.] The consistent message from Putin and others was: "We have no plans to invade Ukraine. But if there's a problem in our neighborhood, we're strong enough now; our military has been rebuilt. We are as strong as you, the United States. So if there's a problem, we can handle it. Thank you for your concern, but butt out."

LJ: Was it strange being a diplomat in this march to war, when in your mind it's so clear what Russia is going to do, and here you are trying to engage in diplomacy to avoid war?

JS: What became clear to me at the time is that what the Russians were doing was what I call "sham diplomacy." They wanted to give the appearance that they were negotiating with the United States to try to resolve a problem that the Russians would say the United States had caused from the eastward expansion of NATO, and then threatening Russia through Ukraine.

It was clear to me that this was not diplomacy. These were not negotiations. The most obvious example is when I would engage with officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I would speak to them as I'm speaking to you now: I'd be well prepared, but I wouldn't speak from notes. 

My Russian counterparts had multiple notes in front of them. They would read their talking points. I would identify issues that they had said or issues that I wanted to raise. They would look down at their paper, and find the most relevant talking point and repeat it. They never varied from their talking points. There was no give and take. They had a message to convey. There was no negotiation. It was take it or leave it. Why did they do it? They wanted to be able to present to the rest of the world -- to India, Brazil, South Africa -- that they tried to negotiate. Well, I was there and they did not try to negotiate.

LJ: Can you explain what changed in your job after Russia invaded? 

JS: Before the invasion, there were a number of major work streams between the United States and Russia on cyber issues, climate change, wrongfully detained Americans, and Iran. All of those ended when the war started. The instruction was that there was no more business as usual with the Russians. They wouldn't be invited to official functions at any U.S. mission anywhere in the world. There would only be what was required to have the minimum of diplomatic relations concerning continuing operations of our embassy in Moscow and their embassy and two consulates in the United States.

Although the frequency of my engagements with the Russian government decreased substantially, they weren't really hostile, with one exception. The one exception was in the spring of 2022 where President Biden said he agreed with a reporter who said that Putin is a war criminal. I got summoned to the MFA and admonished that it was inappropriate for the President of the United States to call the President of the Russian Federation a war criminal. I enraged my hosts at the MFA when I said, "If your military stopped committing war crimes in Ukraine, the U.S. President wouldn't call your president that."

LJ: And what was the response?

JS: I thought my interlocutor was going to vault over the table and commit a war crime on me, but he composed himself. Things changed for my successor, Ambassador Lynne Tracy, when she arrived early 2023. On her first day at the embassy, she walked in and the power went out. The power was on everywhere else in Moscow. Later that day, she went to the MFA to present her credentials. There was a large organized mob chanting at her with painted signs saying: "The bloodthirsty U.S. is killing Russians and Ukrainians." 

The Russians never did that to me over my roughly three years as ambassador, but they did that to Ambassador Tracy because the tenor had changed. Putin could no longer say that the "special military operation" was going according to plan. They said with a straight face that they retreated from Kyiv because they wanted to give a good-faith gesture to encourage negotiations with the Ukrainians in Belarus and Turkey, which were in fact going on, to encourage a settlement.

LJ: Your tenure ends in September 2022; you paint a grim picture of the possibilities of diplomacy for negotiations with Russia. Donald Trump nominated you for deputy secretary of state and U.S. Ambassador to Russia. He has said that he has a "very good" relationship with Putin and he can end the war in "24 hours." Isn't your book saying, that's going to be really hard?

JS: It's more than really hard: it's a fantasy. It's similar to that long, beautiful wall on the southern border of the United States. It just didn't happen. The 2020 election was decided, and Biden became president, and Trump didn't win. However, under Trump's State Department [led by] Secretary [Mike] Pompeo, we were as tough on Russia as we could be. The Trump Administration provided Javelins and more military equipment to Ukraine than the Obama administration. 

I write in the book that it would have been news to Putin that the Trump administration was going easy on Russia, but the language from President Trump was not consistent with that. My hope is that if he's elected -- I will leave it to the American people to decide -- that it would be more like the Russia policy from secretaries of state [Rex] Tillerson and Pompeo than what he and Senator J.D. Vance are saying now. 

Senator Vance himself says he doesn't care about Ukraine. He cares more about the southern border of the United States than he does about Ukraine's borders. My response to that and all of my fellow Republicans is, "Let's stipulate you don't care about Ukraine. You want to cut support for Ukraine. Tell me your Russia policy?" 

"Do you think that Russia is not a threat to the United States? If that's the case, why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars to defend against an aggressive Russia? Is the only threat China? If you think that an aggressive Russia is a threat to the United States, then what could your policy conceivably be to address that threat by giving up in Ukraine?" it doesn't make any sense. Across the political spectrum, a lot of people don't realize how dangerous the world situation is.

LJ: You just made some criticisms about Trump and Vance. A lot of former national security officials are making statements about not supporting Trump this election. Are you doing anything like that? 

JS: No, no. I want to talk about the threat that Russia poses. There are criticisms of Vice President [Kamala] Harris and the Biden Administration's Russia policy, which I get into in the book, and broader criticisms of how the administration has handled the Middle East and China. I'm an equal-opportunity critic. When I start down that road, it's far afield from where I would hope I have some credibility.

LJ: If you were writing a memo to the incoming president-elect, what's the most important thing for them to know about the threat Russia poses?

JS: The most important thing is to recognize what the threat is, and then confronting it, now in Ukraine. The Russians are engaged in a hybrid war against us. They are murdering people in the streets of European capitals whom they consider opponents. I'm confident that they will eventually try to do the same in the United States. They are engaged in a cyber war against us. Russia is a permanent member of the UN Security Council with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, we have to come up with a better policy to confront and contain--

LJ: Do you have a policy suggestion?

JS: I'm a big fan of [George] Kennan, and his conclusion about containment of the Soviet Union was that it depended on the United States and our internal strength, and our ability to agree among ourselves about the challenge that we confronted. Kennan's prediction turned out to be true: there was no way the Soviet Union was going to survive against the united West. There's no way the Russian Federation prevails on Putin's plan for recreating a Russian Empire -- the foundation of which is Ukraine -- if the West is united. That depends on the United States being more united than it is today, and politicians recognizing the threat and not playing politics. 

I think we're asleep now, and eventually that sleep will be interrupted by something catastrophic, like the attack on Pearl Harbor. People will wake up and realize: "What the heck were we thinking?" My fear is that in the 21st century, Pearl Harbor might be more difficult for the United States to survive.