You use nuclear weapons when you're cornered like a rat. Putin thinks he's winning — Michael McFaul

Michael McFaul is a professor at Stanford University and an American diplomat. For five years, he's been working in the administration of Barack Obama. Initially, as a presidential assistant for national security affairs, and then from 2012 to 2014, as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia. By coincidence, he finished his work as ambassador in February 2014, the day Putin entered Crimea was the day he left Moscow. Michael McFaul believes that the right actions of the United States were when they tried for many years to engage with Russia to become a civilized state and to respect international rules and laws. "Our mistake was not this game. Our mistake was that we did not hedge our bets. What we should have done was to hedge our bets. What we should have done was to expand NATO as quickly and as far as possible when we had the opportunity to do so in the 1990s, and Russia couldn't do anything then," he is convinced.   One of his current areas of work is to reduce Putin's money for waging war in Ukraine. He coordinates an international group of independent experts proposing various sanctions against Russia. It is often called the "Yermak-McFaul group." He evaluates its work as excellent. However, the main problem is that the governments of other countries have not accepted all their ideas. If they had, Russia would now be in a much weaker position, McFaul believes.   Journalist Natalia Gumenyuk talks to Michael McFaul about the Biden administration and its work with Ukraine, American elections, what has changed in his attitude toward Russians, how sanctions reduce Putin's money, and why Barack Obama's voice is not heard now.