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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axfiles, with your host David Axelrod.

I met many, many smart and interesting people during my years in politics and government, but Mike McFall is very much at the top of that list.

A Russia expert he served on the staff of the National Security Council under President Obama, and then as US Ambassador to Moscow, where he earned Vladimir Putin's iron by promoting democracy in civil society.

We explored that story on a previous episode of the Axfiles, but I wanted to reconnect with McFall, who's now back at Stanford, to tap his vast storehouse of knowledge and talk about this awful war that continues to rage in Ukraine.

Here's that conversation.

Mike McFall, it is so good to see you again. You're my go-to guy on all things Russia, Eastern Europe, and I've been thinking about you constantly and frankly seeing you constantly since this war broke out, so good to be with you.

Yeah, great to be back. You and I were on the same trip in 2009 to Russia, and one strong recollection I have was when the President Obama, you were working for the National Security Council, then I was the senior adviser of the President.

He went off to meet with Vladimir Putin, who was the Prime Minister at the time. He was taking a little hiatus from the presidency under their constitution, and he was supposed to have an hour meeting with Putin.

That meeting went two hours. I was the beneficiary because I got to sit with Gorbachev while we were waiting for it.

That's straight, of course. Right, we were late, and you're with Gorbachev, that'll remember that.

Yeah, so I'm grateful to Putin for that. I think you went three hours, actually.

Whatever it went, it went long. And when the President came back, he told me about the first hour, which was essentially a monologue on Putin's part.

And talk about that because it sounded like the precursor of the speech he made to the world when he started this war.

Well, that's a great connecting of the dots. You're absolutely right. And so we're out at his house, right? His dot-jarr or compound, whatever you call it,

we spend most of his time increasingly not interacting with other human beings. It's a bungalow, right? Yeah, it's like an hour out of town. A bunch of compounds. There's a meeting place where he always meets with people.

And you know, just a funny, you mentioned it because I was just talking to President Obama about this last week. We were also remembering that trip.

And not just the Putin part, but the civil society part that he did. We'll get back to that later. That was important to him.

Just a couple of, you know, color commentary things first. So I was pretty new to the government, right? So were you, but I was really new because you guys all worked together.

And I'd come in from California and I was just learning how to do this job. And that was my first assignment, David, as an SAO senior administrative official who's supposed to brief the

traveling press after the meeting. It was in a kitchen, you know, at Putin's place. And the meeting was scheduled for an hour, like you said. And we got to minute 58.

And our guy hadn't said a word.

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