Hello there, I'm Chuck Todd. I just got off the meat press set on Sunday wrapped up interviews

at the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, former Attorney General Bill Barr. We had

our unofficial war council of Maria Vanovic, the former ambassador to Ukraine, my

fall, former ambassador Russia, and James Tvertis, former native Supreme Allied commander.

Sitting here with Peter Baker, he's currently the Chief White House correspondent of the

New York Times, but you speak fluent Russian, you were stationed in Moscow. This is, if

there was another beat other than Washington that I think you owned in your day or certainly

worked a lot on it, it was the Moscow beat, particularly during the Yeltsin era, right?

Yeah, we got there at the end of 2000, right when Putin was coming in.

Oh, okay. So you were not there for Yeltsin?

Yeah, no. We got there. We got there. Justice Putin was coming in. We got four years

in Moscow that were Putin's rise in effect. And thinking back on it now, I think what's

remarkable is how much what happened then foreshadow is what's happening today. You saw

some of that beginning, right? Well, first of all, if you want to talk about the war

in Ukraine, if you spent time in Grozny as I did in the capital of Cheshire, which he

leveled to the ground in order to win popular favor, you see what he's capable. You see

the brutality and the willingness to go after civilians and the lack of limits, smaller

scale back then on a larger scale today. And so there's that, there's the crushing of

descent. There was the grievance filled politics that he talked about, the anger at the west

over the humiliation as he saw it of the Soviet Union and what had happened in 1991.

All that's playing out 20 years later on a very big stage.

It's remarkable his rise because it was the wealthiest oligarchs that picked Putin. And

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