Transcribed excerpts from that conversation are below, edited for length and readability.
Ryan Lizza: There’s a famous memo that Mondale wrote about the vice presidency. I know Biden and Ron Klain, who’s a student of the vice presidency, often talk about this. Anyone who’s going to be vice president references back to the Mondale memo. Because Mondale’s advice for any incoming vice president was, “You don’t want to run anything. You just want to be an adviser to the president.” You want to be the last person in the room. You don’t want to be bogged down with bureaucratic bullshit of running White House you know… That’s what’s unique about your position.
As we get into the weeds on the Ukraine crisis, I wonder if one way to help us understand the perspective of you and Blinken is to take us through some of the major decisions that this administration has had to make since the start of the crisis. Maybe just start with saying what is the start of the crisis from your perspective. Is it when the first troops started going toward that border? Don’t take us back 100 years.
Counselor Derek Chollet: I vividly recall having a conversation with a colleague in October of last year that this could be a presidency-defining moment.
Lizza: October of 2021?
Chollet: October of 2021. That’s when we first started seeing indications of what the Russians were up to. And early on, none of this was public obviously and it wasn’t yet getting picked up by commercial imagery to see Russian troop deployments. We were picking up through intelligence —
Lizza: You guys weren’t talking about it at all?
Chollet: We weren’t talking about that yet at all. We started to talk about it in the end of October. In fact, it was at the G-20 Summit in Italy where Biden did a short meeting with the Chancellor of Germany, the Prime Minister of the U.K., the President of France, and it might have been the Italian Prime Minister. They talked about a variety of things but of them was these indications that we were starting to see.
So we were watching it then. Of course, there were all kinds of warning signs. Nothing was foreordained. So this got our attention and we started to watch it build. Starting at the end of October, we started to talk to allies and partners about what we were seeing and progressively share more and more information. It was then in mid-November. I remember this because I was in Brussels in mid-November after meetings in Bosnia and coincidentally that day, Avril Haines was briefing the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s governing body, on the intelligence. This is a long way of saying we understood early on that if what we were seeing turned out to be true, this would be a game changer.
Of course, we also understood that we needed to do everything we could to prevent that from happening. Part of the diplomatic effort and the time we were given by having this early heads-up, and as we watched the evidence continue to build of what Russia was doing, we used that time to try to find a diplomatic off ramp.
Blinken worked tirelessly with allies to try to engage the Russians in some meaningful way and really make it clear that we were trying our best to find some diplomatic way out and test whether the Russians were actually interested in any diplomacy. It turns out they weren’t. We had low expectations, whether they were, but we felt like we needed to get caught trying. Then in parallel, to make clear, that the consequences would be swift and severe if Russia were to act, and so to use that time to build up the coalition to impose sanctions if Russia were to act, to further their isolation. All of the things you’ve seen play out over the past several weeks were things that were put into train from November, December, January.
Lizza: When did you decide to go very public with the intelligence? A lot of the story of this conflict from the American side is very quick declassification of very sensitive…
Read More: The man in Blinken’s ear: State’s Derek Chollet on Ukraine