Ukraine Won’t Surrender

25:18I arrived the night the war started by total accident, nearly missed my flight into Kiev. What happened was I was a correspondent for NPR, and they wanted someone in Ukraine with a military background, medical background, both of which I have. And just by total accident, I land just a few hours before the invasion, and I've been here ever since. And two and a half years ago, I started the counteroffensive, and so now I live here. You named it for this spirit of optimism that existed in the spring and early summer of 2023, when it looked like my mistake, actually, my Freudian mistake of calling it the counterattack instead of the counterfessive may reflect the kind of sense of gloom that has descended on friends of Ukraine.

26:02Because we remember that mode where we thought this is the great pushback, the great counter blitzkrieg that is going to shove the Russians out of the country for good and all. There's been interruptions of the flow of American aid to Ukraine under President Trump. There have been interruptions in the flow of American information. How's the war, the military aspect of the war going? It's not going particularly well. The Ukrainians are on the defensive. They are outmanned. They are outgunned. It's a very regular, almost nightly circumstance in Ukrainian cities where there are explosions, anti-aircraft weapons firing.

26:35You can hear these drones in the night buzzing along. They're called mopeds. They're nicknamed mopeds now because you can hear them ominously circling the city. and then mobile fireteams trying to shoot them down, as well as many, many explosions. And that is the civilian view of the war. And on the battlefield, the Russians have expended tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives for very little territory. I mean, most of the action that has led to major changes in control of territory have taken place over very short periods of time. So we've had these bursts of control from the initial invasion to the liberation of the Kharkiv region.

27:18You've had these kind of bursts of where defensive lines collapsed. But we've seen the development of a new form of drone warfare that has really imposed incredible costs on advancing militaries. Basically, now it's very dangerous to concentrate military force in one location. They're trying to disperse military force, but that means a lot more risk for the soldiers. and it means far less territorial gains in small amounts of time. And the interruptions from the United States, what difference have they made? It's a morale issue in the short term. A is, are we on our own, is what a lot of Ukrainians are asking themselves.

27:58Secondly, it's kind of become an object of faith in Ukraine that the country is running out of air defense interceptors. And we see that in the number of explosions that are happening in the cities. There are no formal statistics on it because the government doesn't say where they're vulnerable or what they're lacking. But it's pretty obvious that people have died as a result of delays in shipment of defensive weaponry. The number of weapon systems that have been suggested by the Trump administration is woefully insufficient for the scale of hundreds and hundreds of attacks in a given night. And so that will continue for the time being.

28:36I just don't see the war ending on any short timeline. Adrian, you've been monitoring, I have a question for you. You've been monitoring the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship for a long time, and you know who the friends are and you know who the non-friends are. Do you take seriously at all this alleged pivot by President Trump toward greater support of Ukraine? We know he is chimerical. We know he is impulsive, and we know he is inconsistent. And this is a good thing in this particular case, because he had a consistent position of this bromance with Putin that seems to have attenuated in recent weeks.

29:15And I think we will see what happens at the, you know, 50 day deadline mark. But I think that the important policy decision that appears to have been taken is that Trump is willing to, in the absence of an agreement, willing to sell Ukraine weapons as long as they're not financed out of the U.S. budget or as long as they're not predominantly financed out of the U.S. budget. And Europe appears to be ready to step in to fill the breach. The delta between aid that the U.S. was providing and has stopped providing under Trump has in the first five months of this year been largely melt by European cash flows.

29:49They've increased their crediting to their own economies that would allow them to finance some of this. And then there's this, I believe, low-hanging fruit, and that is that Europe is sitting on$250 billion of Russian frozen assets that I believe should, in the event that their publics rebel against these substantial expenditures for Ukraine, could be used to sustain Ukraine. So I think we don't know where Trump is. He was with Putin. Then he became the arbiter between the two rather than a staunch ally of Ukraine. And now I think we have to wait until the 50th day. But I do think that the one thing that is there that is a positive development, and I think that that's been pretty consistent, that I think Trump and the United States will be willing to sell weapons, provided that Europe or someone else is willing to cover those costs.

30:39Let me push back on that and direct this to both of you. So the 50-day deadline, do we need 50 days to know what the Russians are about? That looks like it's playing for time. And the weapons that Trump is talking about are totally inadequate in number. This stunt of saying the United States doesn't have enough money to pay for this is such an outrageous misstatement, especially from this administration, which is so fiscally reckless and spends money on everything and is incurring debts never before seen. And anyway, the story the administration tells is the reason that they have constrained is not because we lack the physical hardware.

31:12And if that's true, then it doesn't matter who's financing the insufficient physical hardware. That was Pete Hegg's story. You can't send the missiles because the United States doesn't have enough to protect itself. Well, if that's true, it doesn't matter who's paying for it. And if it does matter who's paying for it, then the not enough physical inventory story is a lie, as it probably is. And this, to the less sympathetic guy, looks like playing for time. Now, I will add one more thing and then throw it back to you. One of the things that has been a little encouraging to me about the Trump-Russia-Ukraine story is that while J.D.

31:42Vance, the vice president and maybe future president, seems authentically and militantly anti-Ukraine, Trump seems more pro-Russian but indifferent to Ukraine. His attitude to Ukraine is a function of his enthusiasm for Russia. And if the enthusiasm for Russia dims at all, then there's no reason that he couldn't be a better friend to Ukraine in a way that J.D. Vance seems to have bought into Ukraine as the enemy to his vision of a Europe in which the right wing parties govern Germany, Italy and other countries. Yeah, I mean, look, there's so much disinformation coming from that. I believe there is an isolationist wing in the policy community.

32:17There's also the limits of power wing associated with Michael Anton and the pivot to China associated with Bridge Colby. There are a bunch of attitudes inside the administration that are saying Ukraine either isn't a priority or that we can't afford it or that this isn't, the United States should not be engaged in these kinds of far off conflicts. And I think that that remains a problem. A point that I made in a recent article is, however, if you look at the polling data, despite all of this counter propaganda by the blogosphere and, you know, all of the vice president and Pete Hexitt and so on, the Trump and the Republican electorate still broadly support Ukraine, admire its martial spirit.

33:00And this is after years of attacks on Ukraine by Tucker Carlson and his ilk. So it's all going to be on Trump. If Trump blinks or reverts back to a pro-Putin position after 50 days, as he very well may, you know, this will be on Europe and on Europe and Ukraine jointly to find ways of compensating for the absence of the United States. And here, I think there's a lot of good news about joint military production with the Ukrainians, that many European countries are now investing billions of dollars jointly with their resources to help Ukraine's relatively inexpensive way of building more modern weapons.

33:44Ukraine has the capability of self-producing long-range missiles. And as far as I understand, there is a commitment in the short term to provide more Patriot bases and Patriot missiles for those systems, presumably through the U.S. replenishing the reserves of some European countries that will hand that equipment over to Ukraine. Tim, you've been covering the hardware story very intensely. I think you're going to have a new special purpose publication devoted just to the hardware. What does Ukraine need to win the war? Do you have a sense of that? Do you have a sense of the technologies, the amounts?

34:21And are they available from the Western world? Winning the war isn't really a matter of technology. As you mentioned, I have a publication just devoted to Ukrainian defense tech. And so we cover the latest battlefield concepts. And that's over at Counteroffensive Pro. And Ukrainians have always spoken about, jokingly, about this kind of magic bullet technology that might be created and suddenly the whole country is liberated from Russian influence. The real problems exist in terms of manpower, the amount of people that they can field on the front lines, and then arming Ukraine to provide them necessary armored vehicles and air cover in order to make advances.

35:06But that's just so outside the realm of what is likely over the next couple of years that this war has kind of shifted into a stalemate slash defensive strategy. I mean, very few Ukrainians believe there will be some magic technology that develops that will let them take over all of the occupied territories in the immediate near term. The Ukrainians have invented quite a few new things that have been able to give them asymmetric advantages on the battlefield, without which they would have never been able to defend their country nearly as well as they have been. But it has served more of a defensive purpose and been able to allow them to hold off huge amounts of Russian advances.

35:50There is no solution in the immediate term for pushing them out. By the way, as to manpower, I just want to make one point. Ukraine does not conscript 18 to 24-year-olds. There are 200 ,000 males in that age cohort for each year. So there's roughly 1.2 million, and of course, probably 50 % of them or 60 % of them are not combat fit. But there is, within the broader population base, there are still substantial resources. More importantly, I do think that, you know, Tim is right for reclaiming territory. This is the kinds of weapons systems Ukraine has created will be very difficult. You know, to gain territory, you have to actually put people in to occupy that territory.

36:35But the fact that the Ukrainians have transformed this into a drone war, forcing Russia to change it into a war of attacking civilian targets, is a credit to innovation and entrepreneurship and this creative spirit. I mean, Ukraine has compensated for some of its manpower shortages, and that's what's really stymied the Russian advance. And Russia is roughly advancing at a little over a half percent of the territory of Ukraine over each of the last two years. Can Ukraine strike inside Russia at things that are important to Putin's power in ways that would make the Russians reconsider that this aggression may jeopardize their hold on their state?

37:17I mean, again and again, we've seen in the last century that dictatorships that gamble on aggression, if they lose, the Argentine agenda attacking Falklands, the Greek agenda attacking Cyprus, if they lose, that they can lose power. So the way, when I say win the war, I don't mean with this glorious advance and driving people out and flags flying. I mean that at some point the Russians decide we could lose things that we care about more by continuing with this aggression. We need to find some kind of negotiated settlement. Can they win it that way? Well, Russia is a very opaque society from the outside, right?

37:51And as you know, these dictatorships are very brittle structures. And when they bend, they snap. More people have died in Ukraine on the Russian side than have died over a decade of war when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. And that, as you know, was a contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union. And I want to point out that there's already been one internal military rebellion inside Russia. That's already happened. It's just very difficult to predict. Yes, Ukraine now has really interesting deep strike capability. We saw this in an operation called Operation Spiderweb, where they snuck drones across the border and had them fly and take up dozens of strategic bombers all across Russia, disguised inside of kind of motorhomes or sheds built on trucks.

38:37And it was a really interesting operation that showed how vulnerable every country, not just Russia, is to modern drone warfare. But whether or not that moves the needle on Putin's core power, we can't conduct a survey. We can't talk to ordinary Russians in any meaningful way to determine how close that is. What we do know is the economy is suffering. Inflation is extremely high. We talk about inflation in the United States. It's four or five times that in Russia. People are dying. They're coming back traumatized. They're coming back without limbs or they're not coming back at all. And that's going to have a long-term societal effect.

39:16We just aren't able to qualitative that. We're not able to describe that to you in ways that lead to easy predictions about the near term. There are going to be serious follow-on effects. I just can't predict what that will be. I want to ask you the contrary scenario. Supposing President Trump says, and may mean, that he wants to pressure Ukraine into forcing some kind of negotiated peace, which he insists is possible. It looks like any negotiated peace would be a peace more or less on Russian terms, at least if it were to be negotiated today. What would be the effect on Ukrainian society if the United States were to push Ukraine in that direction?

39:51Well, we already saw this effect because, you know, we had in the run up to the negotiations, we had the kind of the Steve Whitcoff declarations, which I think resonated fairly substantially in the Ukrainian opinion elites and within the Ukrainian public, where he basically surrendered many of these territories, said that they were traditionally Russian and so on. So I think Ukrainians are used to this. I think the most important thing was that around that whole misguided Witkoff diplomacy, Europe solidified. And I think the Ukrainians are ready to go with Europe. And I think Europe is at the moment ready to go.

40:29Democratic Europe is ready to go with Ukraine. And that has, I think, changed the calculus of Ukrainians. I don't think they feel, at least the policy, people feel that they're as vulnerable. And I think that the fact that Europe is stepping up with cash and with collaboration on potentially on weapons production, Ukraine has, as I say, been developing its long range missiles. I've always believed that the only way to get Russia to negotiate is to hit the Russian power grid in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg, which together represent 35 to 40 percent of the Russian GDP. If you can knock these things out for 5 % of the time, it's a huge impact, bigger impact than sanctions on Russian growth.

41:11And it brings the war in a more dramatic way. And it is a legitimate war target because there are many missile and military production facilities in the Moscow and St. Petersburg area. area. And I think that the reciprocity, the ability for Ukraine to respond would probably reduce the Russian attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine, which have really been scaled up in the last two months. Tim, what's your view of what happens if the United States is even somewhat successful in forcing some kind of unfavorable peace? I want to challenge the underlying assumption. I don't think that they're going to be able to force a peace on Russia's terms.

41:49I remember in the very first weeks of the war, I heard someone say that as long as there's a 12-year-old kid in Ukraine with a plastic fork, there's going to be resistance to Russia and Russian occupation. There is no appetite whatsoever in Ukraine for accepting a peace that would permit the takeover of additional territories simply through diplomacy. And that's what I think in the near term, a diplomatic outcome would look like. Ever since the Oval Office dust-up between Zelensky and Trump, I think that Ukrainians have increasingly, to Adrian's point, have increasingly adopted the view that they need to have a backup plan and that they need to be able to be more self-sufficient and less reliant, even psychically on American support for morale or equipment or whatever.

42:35And so I think over the last few months, those plans have been put in place. I don't think you'll see that Ukraine will accept just a dictated peace in which they have to give up huge amounts of sovereignty and territory and freedom of action in order to achieve a short-term peace, which, by the way, no Ukrainian believes, or very few Ukrainians believe, would be sustainable in the long term. They believe that this would just be the prelude to the next war, which is coming in a matter of a few years. Is there any voice, Adrian, you've chronicled the transformation of Ukraine from a culture and a people into a state.

43:13Is there any voice in the Ukrainian state system that would be willing to play ball with the Trump-Witkov vision of the Ukrainian future? No, I mean, I think, you know, there may be a residual 5 % of people with a kind of a Soviet mentality and maybe a few a few percent who feel comfortable being in Russia's Russia's embrace. But I would say the society is as consolidated as ever in Ukrainian in Ukrainian history. The culture is as dynamic as ever. This is like the high point of Ukrainian unity. And I think that that's actually a counterweight to the earlier part of our discussion. The Ukrainian people are united in the purpose of defending their way of life, their culture, to an extent their language, their civilization, which they see as a more open one than what Russia offers.

44:00And this unity is not going to be broken by disputes about anti-corruption policy or even some inordinate concentration of power by the president. That they will stick together, they will fight, and I think eventually they will resolve this in a way that defends the existence of a persistence of a sovereign state. There was this Politico story a few months ago about Trump administration or Trump orbit figures visiting Ukraine and meeting with Zelensky's opposition. That immediately led to huge blowback in Ukrainian domestic circles. Any politician that has in their mind, you know, professional survival would not want to associate with Trump.

44:43By the way, after the Oval Office meeting, you know, Zelensky's ratings were on the downward trend and he was losing a runoff election against General Zeluzny. In the aftermath of the Oval Office thing, the society consolidated against him, but he again became extremely popular. That effect wore off and now there are new polls that show Zeluzny again winning by 60 to 40 in the second round when there will be an election. But the point is that the Ukrainians, at a moment where there's only one leader at a time, we consolidate around that leader. We may not like some stuff. We're Ukrainians. We're going to criticize them if we want.

45:19But we know what we're doing. We need, you know, there's only one captain right now of this team, and we've got to go with it. This encapsulates the Ukrainian worldview, by the way. No one beats up on our president except us. Exactly. Last question for you both, and particularly for Adrian. you've been following the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship so long, and you know who the friends are. They seem very quiet. There are people in the Senate who, if you talk to them, you know, they're all Ukraine all the time when the cameras are off, and they feel there are no listening devices pointed in their direction.

45:51But the moment Trump turns his baleful glare upon them, they go quiet. What is your sense of the state of play in Washington to support and assist Ukraine? Yeah, I mean, I do think that, you know, the most important thing is I think the Republican electorate is there. I think it's a matter of cost. I think it's the shift. If Europe picks up a huge amount of that bill, I think you solve a lot of the problems with the MAGA voter electorate. But I think they're still afraid of challenging the president and of being primaried. You know, it's inexplicable for members of Congress who have a six-year window or members members of the Senate who have that longer, longer timeframe, who nevertheless are cowardly.

46:34But we see, you know, people like Tom Tillis who have some differences with the president, they understand that they cannot survive without being Trump adjacent. At the moment, it's a little easier for these guys to be Trump adjacent because Trump has said a few tougher words. But I think that's the problem. The problem is not so much that MAGA is against Ukraine. I don't think that's the case. I think it's the case that if the president turns against them. And I think that's the reason that they're circumspect. You know, the MAGA electorate will vote for the designated candidate of the president, no matter what.

47:10What about the Democrats? Do they remain solid? Or, I mean, we've noticed that in light of the Israel-Gaza war, that there has been a rise of the return of the isolationists is really the wrong word, but the nervous wing of the Democratic Party, they seem to be more vociferous than they used to be. Does any of that affect the Democratic Party's past support of Ukraine and threaten to limit it in the future? Well, I mean, you know, we've never had absolute, you know, whenever there was a quote, bipartisan foreign policy during the Cold War, it was usually, you know, 80 % of one party and 40 % of one party and it would, it would, of the other party.

47:47So we've never had that kind of absolute unity and there will be different, different tendencies. But I think the predominant tendency in the electorates, in both electorates, is to support Ukraine. And I think that in the Democratic, you know, congressional and Senate delegations, there is overwhelming, overwhelming support. And these are kind of minor, minor fringe, fringe tendencies. But even if we lose, you know, over time, Ukraine loses 10 or 15 or 20 percent of the Democratic congressional delegations, Ukraine cannot be sustained only by the support of the Democratic Party. It will need to have some substantial Republican support in the long term for legislation, especially if we get back to a government where you don't have a rubber stamp, like in Ukraine, a rubber stamp parliament.

48:35Last question for Tim. Tim, how sophisticated are Ukrainians, both politicians and everyday people, at reading the politics of the United States? Are they able to discern the difference between a Trump, a Vance, their coterie, and where most Americans are? I've often observed that Ukrainians are more adept at understanding American politics than Americans are. I mean, they're talking about subcommittee hearings in the Congress, and they're talking about, you know, the two-thirds majority for various changes that need to be adopted. I mean, Ukrainians, but like you can understand why they're so interested in American politics.

49:16Their lives depend on it. And you would pay attention to a foreign country's government a lot more closely if that was the difference between a drone flying near or at your building at night or not, right? So they're very much interested in the minutiae of American government, you know, they share the J.D. Vance memes. They are very much in touch with what's happening in the American political discourse in some ways more than your average American. So it's not impossible that someday they forgive us. It's not impossible. I would say that for now, there's a huge, huge grudge that will need to be overcome.

49:55But there's a lot of not forgiving. There's also not forgiving for some of the revelations about, you know, Biden administration thinking about not to give Ukraine, you know, too many weapons to prevail. So there will be a long attempt to chew through all this stuff and to kind of absorb it and to think about it. I mean, I don't think anti-Americanism has risen in any substantial way, but I think more of a kind of nationalism that, you know, we have to rely on ourselves. That is the main predominant trend, less of this kind of reliance on what the big powers will do. Thank you both so much for taking the time.

50:35And thank you for your years of work and expertise on this issue, which you have so generously shared today. Thank you, David. Thank you.

50:50Thank you so much to Tim Mack and Adrian Karatnicki for their candor. I want to salute in both of them their physical courage. Tim reports every day from Ukraine. Adrian is a frequent visitor, as we have seen from the terrible onslaught of July 31st. Everyone in Ukraine, everyone especially in the capital city of Kiev, is a potential target. Our two guests today have volunteered. Tim full-time, Adrian often to be targets of that potential retaliation. It takes a lot of courage to be in Ukraine. It takes a lot of courage to stand for Ukraine. And I thank them both for their candor and their courage.

51:23If you appreciate dialogues like this, I hope you will subscribe to, share, advance, promote this podcast on any platform that you like to use. Remember always that the best way to support the work of this podcast and all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I sincerely hope you will consider doing that. My thanks to you for watching, and I look forward to seeing you here again soon on The David Frum Show, whether you watch or whether you listen. Thank you so much. Goodbye.

52:13This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening.