CIA Director Visits Moscow As Ukraine Stares Down a Dangerous Winter

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1:19Personalized. Checkouts? Instant. Absolutely genius. Big League reliability for any business. That's genius. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. So, Mark, over the past few days, Russia has escalated its attacks on Ukraine. Last night was the sixth straight night of bombardments on Kyiv. Right.

1:46Marc Champion:It has been a pretty dark period now for the Ukrainians. It's only in the last year that they've actually had the capacity to strike back at Russia in the way that Russia is striking them. And so they've become really quite successful in hitting targets, embarrassing targets close to Moscow in a way that has forced Putin to rethink how he's going to execute the war going forward. and he has decided to escalate. And the other part is that the Russians are producing more ballistic missiles and more cruise missiles than at any time before during the war by multiples. And Ukrainians have run out of patriots, which are the only missiles that they have really that are capable of bringing down ballistic missiles.

2:33Marc Champion:So you have that advantage, which President Putin absolutely wants to exploit this winter. And at the same time, you have a decision in Moscow that the United States is not going to deliver Ukraine to them on a plate.

2:54I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Bloomberg Opinions Mark Champion joins me to unpack the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war. How Europe and the U.S. are positioning themselves as Russia escalates its attacks against a depleted Ukraine.

3:17What does this all, Russia's capabilities, Ukraine's dwindling defenses, suggest about the state of the conflict right now and where things could go from here?

3:28Marc Champion:The conflict has always had two theatres. There's the air war and there's the ground war. And the ground war, it's been a bad year for the Russians, a relatively good one for the Ukrainians. So the Russians have really been able to move at a rate much slower than the trench warfare of World War I. So it doesn't get much slower than that. They've also taken enormous casualties. The Ukrainians were able to deploy drones, new land drones, all kinds of new technologies that the Russians have taken time to catch up with. There's a cycle here. So eventually, the Russians do catch up and they have their own developments.

4:10Marc Champion:So it won't always look this good for the Ukrainians. And indeed, I think this winter is going to be pretty tough all the way across the board. Russians themselves, ordinary Russians, are now much more exposed to the war than before. They know it's a war, not a special military operation, as Putin called it. And at this point, as he escalates, Putin is considering, we don't know if he'll do it, but he is considering another major mobilization of forces towards the end of the year. That would get him to perhaps 300 ,000 extra troops by the spring. These are things that are quite worrying for the Ukrainians because they can't do that.

4:50So the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, paid a visit to Moscow last week. And the visit has been described as secretive, mysterious. This doesn't happen every day. What do we know about Ratcliffe's trip?

5:06Marc Champion:We don't know exactly what was talked about. There's been lots of different reports saying different things about whether he did or he didn't see Putin, etc. But from the response of the Baltic state, you know, he visited them as well. It seems pretty clear that he went to tell the Russians that you need to think really hard and long before you take on NATO. There's been a number of reports coming out of the CIA. You know, obviously, the CIA doesn't get on a pulpit and say this stuff. But there have been reports, you know, from sources within the CIA, basically saying that the Russians were contemplating some kind of test of NATO.

5:56And

5:56Marc Champion:that is very plausible because it's already happening in hybrid form. You know, increased numbers of airspace penetrations by Russian drones in Romania, Moldova, in Poland, and in other places in the Baltic states. And then also with a number of sabotage operations that have either taken place or have been foiled. One in particular in Germany, where an armed drone was found at the airport from which the planes leave from Germany to get weapons to Ukraine. And it's been very interesting listening to the Bolts, because on the one hand, they made it clear that those were the concerns. But they also said, this doesn't mean that anyone thinks that, you know, Putin's about to line up troops outside of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, wherever, and then march them across the border.

6:49Marc Champion:He's far too engaged in Ukraine to be able to do that. And he has many other tools with which to test NATO. So it's consistent with a lot of evidence that the Russians have decided that there is clearly a framework in Russia where it's now understood that Europe and within that the UK are now enemy number one, and that they need somehow to put pressure on the Europeans if they're going to end a war on their term. And so far, nothing has actually triggered the Joint Defense Pact of NATO nations. Have these nations come close? This entire question lives in the gray area, which is why, you know, we call it hybrid warfare on the part of the Russians.

7:35Marc Champion:But also, you know, there's a kind of hybrid response also, you know, the benefit of hybrid is that you don't have to go to all the way to the top of the escalation ladder right away, where you don't know if you have escalation dominance, especially with a nuclear power like Russia. You don't want to test it either. You know, it's not like NATO wants to be tested and wants to have the question of, will Donald Trump come to the aid of Estonia, is not a question you want to ask. The Europeans are in this sort of rather difficult position where, you know, there may be Russian drones that, you know, fly all over Poland, has happened, And the Poles then have to start shooting them down, you know, at enormous cost only to find out that they're decoy drones that cost, you know,$20 ,000, if that.

8:23Marc Champion:And they don't call for an Article 5, you know, violation or anything of that sort. And they don't even, you know, take any kind of retributive action against the Russians, precisely because they don't actually want to escalate. Obviously, some of the statements we've heard from the Kremlin are in response to Europe's continued funding and provisions of ammunition and weaponry to Ukraine. How strong is that support going into four and a half years of this war? From the Russian point of view, it's way too strong. From the Russian point of view, this has been an enormous frustration and surprise.

9:01Marc Champion:It's difficult to overestimate, you know, just how little the Russians think of Europe as a kind of cohesive geopolitical power. So the fact that the Europeans have been that strong and that united, that has been a huge frustration on the part of the Russians. But they still see it as the weak point for Ukraine. If they can only get that supply to dry up, then they will be able to make their sheer force of numbers and superior arms industry count on the battlefield and wrap this up, you know, on their terms and get Ukraine into the position it wants, which is essentially as a vassal state.

9:47More with Bloomberg Opinions Mark Champion after the break.

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12:47You know, you wrote recently, as fall and winter loom, the West is sorely underestimating both the threat approaching in Ukraine and the potential for it to spill across Europe's borders. I'm wondering if you could say more about why this winter is looking so vulnerable for Ukraine.

13:03Marc Champion:So on the one hand, as I was saying, the Ukrainians themselves, they have this, you know, I hate the word perfect storm, but they have this matching for the Russians, this moment at which they have an advantage, advantage which President Putin absolutely wants to exploit this winter. The Russians are feeling that they've got an opportunity to break the Ukrainian will, and that they now know that they need to go after the Europeans. And those two things meld in the form of refugees. So if you can freeze the Ukrainians to such an extent that you have, again, hundreds of thousands or even millions of Ukrainians crossing the border into Poland and to Eastern Europe, to Germany, to France, then you can sow dissent in Western Europe.

13:53Marc Champion:especially in a year when you've got a series of elections in which pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian, populist right parties look to be doing well in opinion polls. You raise the prospect that this is going to be a really rough winter for Ukraine, given Russia's military advantages at this juncture. What would have to happen in the next couple of weeks, months to change that? And how likely is that outcome? How likely is it that Ukraine will be able to get more patriots, sort of fend off these Russian attacks. Right. So it's a very binary equation. You have ballistic missiles coming at you, and you either have to destroy them at source or destroy them in the air when they're on the way.

14:42Marc Champion:So if a solution is going to be found for the Ukrainians and by the Ukrainians in time, then they will need to get the means to do those two things, both of them. And that means, you know, getting offensive weapons that have a long enough range, and they'll need a number of patriots in order to stop the ones that do get launched. And that's, you know, both are difficult propositions. You only have a few countries that have available stocks. And, the two obvious ones that have stocks and haven't really handed over a lot of them are Spain and Greece. Spain has provided some, but you'll need a lot of persuasion to provide more.

15:26Marc Champion:And Greece could, but Greece is always concerned about Turkey. And Ukraine is a long way away. You know, Greece is a fairly pro-Russian country in general. So it is a very difficult proposition to get. There just aren't very many patriots. And on the US side, you mentioned the Iran war, which has sort of both depleted the U.S.'s weapon capacity and also distracted the country, I think is fair to say. In the U.S., President Trump had campaigned on a vow to end the Russia-Ukraine war in a day. But more recently, the Trump administration has entertained a very Russia-friendly peace plan. I'm wondering how is Putin sort of looking at Trump in his last two years in office as Russia escalates these attacks?

16:14Marc Champion:Yeah, I think Ukraine for Trump has definitely slid down the list of priorities. He was never somebody who was interested intrinsically for either geopolitical or moral reasons in the defense of Ukraine. His interest was in ending the war and to have that kind of victory and to extract something from it, you know, from the Russians, from the Ukrainians, whether it's critical mineral deals or trade deals, special privileges and going back into Russia for American oil companies, those kinds of things. And those talks that were held, it's no coincidence that they were held by Steve Wyckoff, who's a real estate developer, Jared Kushner, who is Trump's son-in-law, but also a developer.

16:56Marc Champion:They were twin-track talks where there was the political talks about the Ukraine war, but in parallel with those, and sometimes in the same room, you also had, for example, the head of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund. So it was very much a deal in which the Americans would deliver Ukraine, and in exchange, the Americans would get some kind of economic deal out of it. So that has kind of fallen apart, and Trump wasn't able to make it happen. He hasn't completely walked away by, for example, ending intelligence sharing, which would be a real problem for Ukraine. But, you know, the Russians have correctly assessed that he is no longer committed enough.

17:37Marc Champion:If he ever could have delivered Ukraine, which is quite dubious, he isn't committed enough to do it now.

18:07Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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