From an FT interview with Andrei Kozyrev, Russian foreign minister 1990-96, published on March 18 2022

Full interview here. It's ten weeks out of date and he is far away, in Miami, but interesting. He is quoted in The Times as saying failure in this war may lead to a Kremlin coup against Putin, which is obviously a possibility. But he does not expect nuclear war and thinks Putin's threats of one show Putin's weakness.

I ask if Russia’s invasion came as a shock to him. “Absolutely,” he says, even with all the US intelligence reports. “It was so brazen. So unthinkable . . . That’s why people think [Putin’s] crazy,” Kozyrev says. For his part, Kozyrev believes Putin still thinks he is acting rationally. Not reasonably, Kozyrev clarifies, but rationally. Authoritarian regimes “cannot be sustainable without these kinds of formal aggression. Because they are unstable inside,” Kozyrev argues. 

Moreover, he thinks Putin has come to believe that the Ukrainian people truly want to be liberated by Moscow. “He believes in all those lies which his propaganda feeds the Russian people.”  

Kozyrev is in awe of Volodymyr Zelensky — “He’s proven to be a real wartime president, more or less like Churchill” — but shares the Ukrainian president’s frustration with the EU, US and Nato, arguing that they are not doing enough to help Ukraine. 

 “They continue to treat him in a regular bureaucratic way,” he says, suggesting that the west had been too focused on Ukraine meeting a certain set of criteria, such as certain anti-corruption requirements, rather than recognising the extraordinary period of crisis that Kyiv was in.

“It was the same with us,” he says, referring to the US’s insistence in the early 1990s that Russia implement serious economic reforms at the same time as the oil price was cratering and ordinary Russians’ livelihoods were in freefall. “We needed money. We needed something like a Marshall Plan.” 

Kozyrev rejects the idea that Putin cannot reverse course in Ukraine. “I don’t buy all this talk that he cannot back down. For [Joe] Biden, [Boris] Johnson, the western politicians, backing down means you will lose public opinion.” Putin does not have this worry.