He [Vladimir Putin] threatened me at one point, and he said, "Boris, I don't want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute" or something like that. Jolly.
But I think from the very relaxed tone that he was taking, the sort of air of detachment that he seemed to have, he was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate.

"If it works, he'll take the credit," Bokov warned once they were safely outside NKVD headquarters. "Oh, sure," Shteinberg agreed. "But he'd do that anyway." Bokov laughed, not that his superior was joking- or wrong.

I trusted Gorbachev. It seemed to me that an alliance with Gorbachev might become very important in stabilizing the situation both in the republics and in the country as a whole. And many people urged me on. Our joint work on the 500-day program brought the interests of a renewed union of republics and the center even closer together. Gorbachev had admitted publicly that the Shatalin-Iavlinskii program looked very interesting and promising to him. It seemed to me that all we had to do was take one more step, and we could walk together onto the road which would lead us out of the crisis. But that didn’t happen. He suddenly changed his position drastically, and the 500-day program collapsed, burying any hopes with it for a way out of the impasse. Instead of breaking with Gorbachev and firmly divorcing myself from the president’s policies of half steps, half measures, and half reforms, I fell prey to the illusion that we could still reach an agreement. But, as it turned out, it was impossible to make an agreement with a president who is simultaneously the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party and to whom the interests of the party caste and the party elite will always take precedence over any other interests. And so we lost four months. We didn’t get anywhere by supporting Moscow indirectly by our silence.

"I know what the two of you are here for," Vlasov rasped. "You're going to try and talk me into sucking the Americans' cocks." "No, Comrade General, no. Nothing like that," Shteinberg said soothingly. Yes, Comrade General, yes. Just like that, Vladimir Bokov thought fiercely. He wanted to watch Vlasov squirm. Maybe they could have kept the crash from happening if only the miserable bastard had put his ass in gear. "Don't bother buttering me up, zhid," Vlasov said. "Nothing but a waste of time." "However you please... sir." Moisei Shteinberg held his voice under tight control. "My next move, if you keep dicking around with us, is to write to Marshal Beria and let him know how you're obstructing the struggle against the Heydrichite bandits." "You wouldn't dare!" General Vlasov bellowed. "Yes, I would. I've already done it," Shteinberg said. "And if anything happens to me, the letter goes to Moscow anyway. I've taken care of that, too... sir." "Fuck your mother hard!" "Maybe my father did," Shteinberg answered calmly. "But at least I know who he was... sir." Could looks have killed, Yuri Vlasov would have shouted for men to come and drag two corpses out of his office.

At the time we didn’t make any satisfactory progress, but we at the Foreign Ministry, Interior Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office are in constant dialogue with Russia. The President and President Putin are also in regular phone contact. We’re in the kind of situation where things can’t continue or worsen. If we don’t go forward by negotiating then it will be time for harsher measures. There are human traffickers and people smugglers, organised activities. The President even spoke of escorts and queues. Everything suggests that it is illegal organised immigration and it should be stopped.

They told Gorbachev, ‘We promise if you agree to a reunited Germany in NATO, NATO will not move—this was Secretary of State James Baker—one inch to the east. In other words, NATO would not move from Germany toward Russia. And it did.

The crucial moment of the end of the Cold War for me was the meeting between Gorbachev and Honecker, tyrant of East Germany, and Honecker said to him, and I'm sure Gorbachev is accurately conveying it, Honecker said to him if you don't send the tanks, "If you don't let us send out the tanks, it will be the fall of communism", and Gorbachev said "I wont send out the tanks, you may not send out the tanks." and I believe in China they will send out the tanks.

The book recounts a tense phone call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart in October 2022.
"If you did this, all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine would be reconsidered," Austin said to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, according to Woodward. "This would isolate Russia on the world stage to a degree you Russians cannot fully appreciate."
"I don't take kindly to being threatened," Shoigu responded.
"Mr. Minister," Austin said, according to Woodward, "I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don't make threats."

"I said to Vladimir Putin, I said, 'Don't do it. You can't do it, Vladimir, you do it, it's going to be a bad day. You cannot do it.' And I told him things that what I do. And he said, 'No way.' And I said, 'way.' And, you know, it's the last time we ever had the conversation.

My idea of the manner of dealing with Russia is not to extract from her promises which she will not keep (cheers), but to say to her, "There is a point to which you shall not go (cheers), and if you go we will spare neither men nor money until you go back." (Loud cheers.)

Elliot,” the President pleaded with him as the Attorney General entered, “Brezhnev wouldn’t understand if I didn’t fire Cox after all this.” Nixon urged Richardson to delay.

Now, this was an act of war, pure and simple... against Germany. And... President Joseph Biden, at a press conference in the presence of the chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, said this is going to happen if Russia invaded Ukraine. And, of course, he was asked, well, how do you do this? I mean, how can you how can you be so confident that Nordstrom will be killed and Biden said, well, just, you know, trust me, it’s going to happen. <br \> And so she, bilingual, the Reuters reporter, turned to Scholz – and this is not widely available now for obvious reasons – and she said, well, I mean, do you agree with that? I mean, hello, how do you feel about this? And this hack, this political hack said: we do everything together. We do everything together. We will be together on this now. So... that interview is available in Germany.

Let me just start with Putin’s major address... It was really something. Not only did he advertise a whole new generation of strategic weaponry, which he claimed, and no one has disproved, would render the billions of dollars that we have wasted on antiballistic missile defenses useless. They’re useless to begin with, most scientists and engineers say, but these new weapons that he advertised, and some of which he said are operational, would upend that... he also said, Now, we tried to get you to listen to us. You wouldn’t listen to us. Now, hopefully, you will listen to us. Let’s get together at the appropriate time with experts and figure out how we address these problems, in other words, talks on arms control...

Sedov (Trotsky's son) spoke a lot about the necessity of the maximum, the closest possible connections with Tukhachevsky, inasmuch as, in Trotsky's opinion, Tukhachevsky and the military group were to be the decisive force of the counter-revolutionary action. During the conversation it was also revealed that Trotsky entertained fears regarding Tukhachevsky's Bonapartist tendencies. In the course of one conversation Sedov said that Trotsky in this respect even expressed the fear that if Tukhachevsky successfully accomplished a military coup, it was possible that he would not allow Trotsky into Moscow. . . . Trotsky therefore proposed that during the coup d'etat we should everywhere place our own people, people who would be faithful to Trotskyism and who could be relied upon as regards vigilance.