Transcript from Q&A Zoom Event

My apologies for my silence this week. I had some travel and I’ve been working on a bigger piece about the full situation in Ukraine that I will be posting soon. This is a cleaned-up transcript from the Zoom event I held last week. I really enjoyed it and hope to have another one soon. I tried to edit for clarity to make it easier to read but I’m sure I missed things. I appreciated all the thoughtful questions! Also, I will be doing a Ukraine-specific event tomorrow (December 3rd) with Tim Mak and Ryan McBeth.

Question from Diane in Florida: She wants to know about what, if anything, can Europe and the U.S. do to bring the war in Ukraine to an end without ceding occupied territories?

So, this is this is a very interesting and live question. There was a recent article published by some think tank luminaries just within the past week that rekindled this call for negotiations and to hold the lines where they are right now. I think the problem with the idea of thinking about shifting to negotiations or ceding territory is that there's really no appetite from the Russian side. Vladimir Putin has not shifted his original calculus, which is subduing Ukraine. He has limited aims in the short term, meaning in the next several weeks, several months, next year, he thinks it might be enough to just making incremental gains, hold what they have, and hold their defensive lines.

What's going on is that the U.S. government — while this administration has done some pretty good things in general and I'm a big cheerleader for what they've done on the domestic policy and they did a lot somewhat early in the war by rallying all the allies together — they've not done enough in terms of forward-planning to make sure Ukraine was properly resourced for a full scale offensive and they haven’t provided for a sufficient length of time.

So, Ukraine basically has what they provided in 2023 and the administration thinks that's as much capability as they have to offer. Everything else is going to come in increments and therefore we're in a situation where Ukraine is actually realizing a reduction in the kind of support it enjoyed through 2023.

So we're going to be stuck in this really difficult situation through the coming months, probably through at least the middle of 2024, where nothing is going to fundamentally change.

There are some really difficult scenarios that could emerge. They're not entirely a high possibility, for instance there's a presidential election in Russia coming in March and I think after we get through that election there's a very good chance that Putin will feel very free to mobilize tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of troops and that could be a game-changer in the late summer early fall timeframe which could end up being a very, very difficult second half of the year for 2024.

We also have some, some good things happening, though. We have U.S. advanced fighter jets, F-16s, likely to arrive in the second half and there are other kinds of capabilities that are likely to emerge. We've seen token amounts of long-range strike missiles going in, these ATACMS.

I think that Crimea is a bridge too far for Ukraine to liberate. I think it's just a very, very difficult military problem so I think Crimea is going to be part of the settlement and part of the negotiations. It's possible that swathes of the Donbas that Russia has been occupying since 2014 will be part of the settlement, but I think there's still a reasonable chance that Ukraine could start to claw back some territory. If it's going to be from a settlement standpoint, it's going to be hard for Ukraine to accept a situation in which they grant Russia gains that they achieved since February 2022 politically, but that could be part of the solution also.

So not a particularly rosy picture. I tend to be pretty optimistic, but there’s not a lot to be optimistic about at the moment and certainly through much of 2024 just because we didn't do enough to plan for this war in the first place and then take the sufficient steps to provide enough support to Ukraine.

The next question is from Doris who asks: Are you aware of any way the US administration can provide more assistance to Ukraine in spite of the difficulties in the House of Representatives?

There are solutions that the executive branch can take and actually those don't require anything in the way of even additional funding. We have a lot of capacity for our troops in Europe.

There's a European command that is very, very well resourced to fight a war against Russia.

Just think about that: We designed a military formation in Europe to be able to fight a war against Russia. Part of it is kind of self-contained and the other part of it would have to come from stocks [of weapons] in the U.S. but there are plans on the shelf in the event we have to defend Europe against Russia. Because of this, there's all sorts of military hardware and ammunition that's stockpiled so we could dig into those resources.

And the reason that we could do that without really absorbing much in the way of risk is because Ukraine's fundamentally destroyed a large portion of the Russian military, and therefore a threat of Russia attacking NATO or Europe anytime soon is highly unrealistic so we're in a situation where we can take some risk. We could actually shift off some of those resources to Ukraine, which is fighting a war against Russia and this wouldn't really require much in the way of additional resources within the executive branch or within the Department of Defense.

What much of the funds provided to Ukraine and requested for the future fight in Ukraine do is the President can basically use his authority to deplete old mothballed equipment that's in depots, but in order to replace it, he needs additional funding. That's where Congress comes in to fund the replenishment of the military hardware and in that kind of scenario we are giving away our older stuff — things that, we've kind of shelved and put in reserve — and we get brand new things right off the production line. And that’s what Congress is holding up is this way to upgrade equipment. So instead of giving our troops the newest gear, they're still, fighting and training with somewhat antiquated gear.

What I think we're probably going to see in the next two weeks are some backroom deals where there was a continuing resolution passed to keep the government running all the way through the middle of January. And part of the deal was that Congress, the House in particular, would take up legislation. It Would Take Up Legislation on Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

And then about $40 billion for a combination of Israel and humanitarian aid to Palestine.

And then we'll see probably some tens of billions of dollars come through for appropriation for Taiwan to make sure that they look prickly enough to warn off Chinese adventurism.

So I think those things are likely to unfold before the end of the year.

So, yeah, if that A doesn't come through, I don't think there are a lot of good ideas on what to do next.

The next question is from the chat: Is Putin is the puppet master behind the Hamas October 7th attack?

I don't have access to information the way I used to so it would be just rampant speculation to say that Putin orchestrated the October 7 attack on Israel and I don’t like to speculate. What's clear to me, and what I can say with great confidence, is that there is an opportunism that our adversaries, particularly authoritarian regimes, seize on in chaos. And that chaos started at least in February 2022.

Clearly Vladimir Putin has been trying to exploit fissures and fractures within democracies — and not just in the U.S. but also Europe — for years and looking to exploit natural fissures to his own personal benefit. After February 2022, there has been a situation where there is a lot of instability. The U.S. was hyper-focused on the war in Ukraine. Even though we sometimes didn't do enough, it was still pretty darn focused on that war, focused on the Pacific and the simmering tensions between the U.S. and China and Taiwan and China. So I think that in that kind of opportunity, our adversaries look to exploit and see what they can gain.

There hadn’t been a major event perpetrated by Hamas in about 16 years since they took over Gaza in 2007 and it's hard to imagine a scenario in which Hamas would feel confident in conducting this kind of attack if there wasn't a war between Russia and Ukraine. So I think that's part of the equation and the other part of the equation is that Iran is also emboldened by their much closer relationship with Russia. And then there’s Iran’s strengthened position in the Middle East, do to the kind of support that Iran has enjoyed since the war in Syria started in 2015 with direct involvement from Russian and Iranian forces, enormous amount of collaboration.

This is not speculative. These two forces were working hand in glove since 2015.

That's apparent and it’s also worth noting that this conflict further distracts from the Russian war against Ukraine. So there's a motive, there are means, and there's an opportunity but we don't have sufficient evidence yet.

The other thing I'd mentioned about Hamas is that the internal turmoil in Israel was part of the formula here. Hamas exercised the opportunity presented by the factionalism within the Israeli government. I think it's clear that Hamas exploited the security vacuum created in and near the Gaza Strip as Netanyahu pulled troops from there based on the belief that there was a truce of sorts that had lasted for well over a decade. He then repositioned those forces towards the West Bank and to protect and secure the settlements. And I think Hamas seized that opportunity and conducted the worst attack against the Jewish people since World War II and the Holocaust.

I think those factors are pretty evident, but I don't have a smoking gun about Russia's involvement, but they’re certainly politically exploiting this moment. They're doing that by inviting talks with terrorist organizations, with Iran, Hamas and they did that before, October 7th.

Certainly, they're playing a role in these international venues like the UN.

Next question: What must change internally in Russia to cause them to quit Ukraine as they did in Afghanistan, any chance of a coup happening assassination of Putin?

Also, what will change in Russia based on who wins the 2024 presidential election?

Unfortunately, I'm not a believer in wishful thinking and there's a bit of wishful thinking around this idea. Maybe even I had some hopes that if the populations in Ukraine and in Russia would protest in much, much greater numbers to denounce the disastrous war _— both in terms of casualties and the economic impact of sanctions — it would push the Kremlin to change their calculus, but that has not happened. I think it's hard to imagine a scenario in which, after 21 months of war, people all of a sudden start to come out on the streets.

It's possible if we somehow went down the road of sanctioning Russian oil and gas that the Russian economy ground to a halt and if it got to the point where there just wasn't enough bread to feed the population, you could see something change but that does not look like it's going to happen. It looks like Russia's economy is chugging along, taking some hits, but still chugging along and providing sufficient resources for the population.

The coup scenario in June was interesting. I think the fact is that Prigozhin's insurrection certainly exposed some internal divisions within the ruling elites in Russia. Restricted travel is probably not the biggest factor, but the elite’s ability to access resources, plenty of folks have been sanctioned, I think that that's probably somewhere in the mix.

The biggest benefit for Putin, of course, would be if Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. That would be a scenario in which he believes the U.S. would cut off support to Ukraine and I think there's a good chance that would happen. In that kind of scenario, there would be enormous pressure on Ukraine to pursue a peace, closer to capitulation. And on that basis alone, I think he's going to stick around to 2024.

I think the fact is that it is a dangerous situation. I don't think Trump has done many favors to himself. He lost by seven million votes in the 2020 election and he lost by relatively wide margins in five battleground states. All that was before he incited an insurrection on January 6th and was facing multiple indictments so I think he's continued to slice off support. But still, the margins between, disaster and success are really, really narrow.

I think we're in a scenario where Putin thinks he might get Trump and from a strategic perspective it makes sense for him to want that and hope for it even though it’s probably not going to happen. I don't even want to think about a scenario in which we have a second Trump administration.

If Biden wins, we'll be in a scenario in which Putin recognizes that it will be four more years of Russia suffering significant losses and then we'll see some overtures for negotiations with the parameters being that Russia will try to lock in some of the gains it has made. It wants to lock in its hold over Crimea. It wants to lock in its hold over the Donbas. It wants to potentially lock in its hold over these four regions that it has annexed over the course of the war.

That’s just a negotiating starting point and I think the fact is the ultimate scenario is going to be significantly less than that but that's probably where the conversations will begin. But this will unfold after the 2024 presidential election, it's clear that Biden gets a second term.

The next question is from Lou: My question is related to what you just said.

My theory all along has been that Putin, once he committed himself, his only real game, if you will, was to play the information warfare angle and hope that Donald Trump got reelected.

And related to that, can you tell me what you think is going on with our press? Because honestly, I cannot believe what is happening with journalism, with democracy at stake and with the outright lies being told by Fox News and other outlets out there. And then with Elon Musk, running Twitter into or X into the ground and making it a tool for disinformation. It seems like the deck is really stacked against Joe Biden. I mean, there are a number of us who are paying attention, who are clued in and who see what's going on, but honestly, in my everyday experience, most Americans, sadly, are not that plugged in and if they're not being alerted regularly to what is really at stake in this next election.

So, is the deck stacked against Joe Biden? I don't know if I would describe it quite that way.

I think the deck is stacked against him because the narrative that's being sown by the Republicans is that he's old, he's over the hill. And unfortunately, that is a narrative that has stuck.

It's amazing how much the Biden administration has delivered on the domestic front, and how little credit it receives. It was basically handed, a pretty darn horrible deck of cards in 2020 in the midst of a global pandemic, a very sharp recession driven by the pandemic, and yet we are in a situation where we have an amazingly strong economy and in the last quarterly numbers, we had 5.2% economic growth, we have a 25 to $27 trillion economy, the massive inflation numbers have gone down.

I was watching the Virginia election closely because it's a bellwether. It's a weird off-cycle election, and I posted something about it. The thought was the Republicans were going to get control of the Virginia legislature and that would allow Governor Youngkin to overturn reproductive choice. That did not happen.

Not only did the Virginia Dems hang on to the Senate, they also picked up the House of Delegates to have control of the Virginia legislature. That is a pretty darn good bellwether.

In the midterms, if you recall, we did pretty well then also. We maintained control of the Senate and kept the margins in the House super tight, where the basket case of a Republican Party basically constantly shoots themselves in the foot, eliminating Speakers and tying themselves in knots.

So, what I guess I'm saying is that I think the general public, while it's not plugged into this election, has certainly started to vote on the topic of not just bread and butter issues but on democracy. The majority of Americans are saying with their votes that they want to see less chaos in Washington and I think it's going to carry through to 2024.

Now that's, on the political side. On your more kind of practical question about what is going on with our media I think the fact is that our media is in this massive upheaval trying to figure out how to compete in a rapidly changing media landscape. Twenty-five years ago we had a small cable footprint, the seized so much more market share and fractured network channels. Now we are seeing the same happen with social media doing the same to the cable networks. So now they are fighting and competing. It is like a bare-knuckle knockdown drag out for advertising dollars and that means that they have to go to a kind penny dreadful, sensational reporting in order to maintain market share in order to continue to garner advertising dollars. That is a recipe for disaster. That means the reporting standards suffer and stories don't get vetted. It's absolutely shocking what has happened with the reporting of the Israel-Hamas war. Now with X under Elon Musk, I mean, it is a free-for-all. I think that we're going to be in this very, very challenging environment through the presidential election. We're not going to have kind of a favorable turn of events in this area.

And one of the most important things I would encourage you to read is the piece I wrote on active measures, Russian active measures, just a couple weeks ago. Providing rapid accurate reporting is a very difficult thing to do. Trying to hold and fully develop a story on a day like October 7th, when you're just hearing reports of hundreds and hundreds of people being slaughtered is a huge challenge. The more niche outlets jump ahead with a story and the bigger outlets pick it up producing cyclical reporting creating viral but not vetted news stories. Then there’s disinformation and bot farms, an all of this other tech. But no systemic effort to fix it.

I think it's likely, maybe years down the road, if we get past MAGA, Congress could come together on something and, pass some criteria for social media to tether them to fact checking and things of that nature. Unfortunately, we're not going to see anything like that anytime soon. So I think the bottom line is, it's incumbent on individuals to be a little bit more media savvy and that's one of the reasons I started the Substack so I could talk to people on these issues.

The next question is from Joyce: The question is about neo-Nazis and the fact that there's enormous movements sympathetic to Nazism.

Of course, there was waves of nationalism with regards to the Civil Rights Movement.

And we saw that kind of beaten down in the more modern era and it became unacceptable. We're seeing a little bit of a resurgence now, I think, in general across Israel and this pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas narrative that's kind of seeped into especially the far-left side of the spectrum. I think there's a healthy dose of anti-Semitism in there, frankly, as well as ignorance. I do think we're seeing kind of a surge in those kinds of activities but it’s still by and large, I think, fringe. And, we're seeing because news travels at lightspeed. We're seeing kind of the most sensational activities surge up on TV or in social media.

With regards to the other part of this question and concerns within the military, I joined the military in 1999 and well before anything to do with Trump was even on the horizon. We had concerns about white nationalists as infiltrators and also with gang signs. I remember some of my senior NCOs constantly being vigilant for the presence of these kinds of soldiers in the ranks to make sure that we rooted them out and eliminated them from the force.

So I think the military is sensitive to this issue and is paying attention.

The next question is from Carol who asks: Okay, so it's about sending support to both Ukrainian military and civilians. Can we help the military control their airspace and rebuild and destroy damaged homes, civilians as they face winter?

Okay, so I think they are already in winter in Ukraine. There's already a blizzard coming. I think a lot of the work has already gone into trying to secure the energy infrastructure, trying to build some redundancies, trying to optimize for the fact that Russia is going to destroy portions of the Ukrainian infrastructure and Ukraine is going to very, very rapidly rebuild them. It is going to be a race between Russia's capacity to destroy and Ukraine's capacity to secure and rebuild. The West has played the most constructive role in terms of securing Ukraine's airspace.

We've fallen short on providing them heavy weapons and artillery, but we've done a pretty darn good job with providing them air defense capabilities. There are constantly new systems being added to the menu. U.S. advanced Patriot missile systems, German Iris-Ts, French systems, old kind of mothballed systems that are still effective against Russian technology and all of that is being poured in there. I think that it'll be a race and the margins are going to be pretty tight and Ukraine's grid is rather fragile from the damage it took last year.

It's pretty clear that we're going to have another winter and not just this winter that we're going to have to go through. We're going to have to go through at least part of the winter of 2024. Even if it looks a little bit different, maybe there'll be some negotiations that start, but still, we'll be in that period of time so I think that's important work that Western governments can do.

It's more basic, the kinds of support we need to provide. Some of the things we are doing is because the Ukrainian economy has taken such a blow.

I think the one place I've been wrong over 2023 is I thought that eventually our rhetoric around supporting Ukraine would converge with actions. We started with very flowery rhetoric about why it's so important to support Ukraine. I thought that eventually our actions would catch up.

I was wrong about that. We never did close that gap. That means that's a long war that, if Ukraine had a successful counter offensive, you could see negotiations possibly would have unfolded. That was the article I wrote, at the beginning of the year. That didn't happen.

So, we could hope for a better outcome next year on actions converging with rhetoric.

But there are a couple of things we can do. First, we have to win the 2024 election.

Even before we get there, there's a kind of a flurry of activity from former policymakers to try to encourage the administration to be a little bit more thoughtful about the opportunities it does have to shape an outcome for Ukraine. One of the biggest ones is going to be the Washington Summit of NATO, the 75th anniversary in this coming summer in 2024. It's hard to imagine that the administration is going to be quite as forward-leaning as I'd want it to be, but there is a press to have the U.S. lift its prohibitions on Ukraine joining NATO because a lot of other countries are already there. I'd say most of the countries are already there, but there are some holdouts with the U.S. and Germany as the two biggest ones. Lifting the prohibitions on offering membership to NATO is a critical step that we could take because as soon as Ukraine joins NATO, Russia will cease to attack them. Russia does not want to tangle with the U.S. directly. The equation is so lopsided, even though we're distracted and we haven't fully mobilized it, the economic power of the United States and the EU is 25 times larger than Russia’s and the industrial base is massive. The standing armies and the standing capacity is massive and Russia has been severely depleted so it's a definitely a scenario in which we shape an outcome.

We can do this in a careful way to mitigate the risk of a direct confrontation with Russia.

And the way we do this is we basically say: Ukraine, you're a member of NATO. Article 5, the security guarantees, extend to Ukrainian-controlled territory and whatever remains Russian-occupied, the Ukrainians still have to liberate. But, the parts that are under Ukrainian control are safe.

Under those conditions, actually, you could start to imagine a scenario in which we could certainly double down on resources, we double down on air defense systems, there would be no more kind of lethargic provision of air power. But we potentially can extend a no-fly zone even from NATO territory to cover large portions of Ukraine. So, I think that's a solution.

That's the part where I don't think there is any appetite from the Biden administration to step in with policing the airspace or something of that nature. But the reality is that providing Article 5 protections and NATO membership to Ukraine, we're in a scenario where Russia backs off. And I think we can provide some coverage and some of those collective defense guarantees we just do it on Ukrainian controlled territory.

Next question is a simple one: How's the mood in Ukraine?

And this is an important question. How's the mood and the resilience from the Ukrainian people?

Unfortunately, I think it's starting to trend downwards.

There was a big gap between the population and the military who is bearing the brunt of the suffering and the casualties. The military was far more cautious about what could be achieved and the civilian population was much more ambitious and enthusiastic and overly optimistic and that's starting to converge. It’s starting to converge because the military basically has gone public and said, we're in a situation where the war has become much more static and the population, which has had zero appetite for any kinds of negotiations, is seemingly starting to pivot to an open mindedness to thoughts of , “Well, maybe we should cede some territory in order to achieve peace.” I think that's kind of misplaced, but that's the way they're starting to feel.

I think it's an incredibly resilient population. They've been fighting a war for 10 years, just about, because the war started with for them in 2014. It was a war that was fought by a small sliver of the population at kind of the eastern most reaches but they've been fighting, and there's been a lot of folks rotating through the war and I think they've proven themselves to be amazingly resilient now. But I think it is, 21 months in and no prospect for an end of war anytime in the near future so I think some of that is going to start to sow some discord in the population.

So, to Jim's point and then we'll shift to Lou asking will Russia stop fighting: No, Russia won't stop fighting as much as it will stop fighting in areas where there's a risk of provoking a NATO reaction. They would still keep fighting along the front lines and that's a long front line, by the way, and we're talking about 700 plus kilometers. The fact is that when I think about this, there is a kind of a tactical operational edge to this, anything within 50 to 100 kilometers, is part of the actual fight so I think that's the zone that they'd still attempt to contest, launching rockets and missiles and things of that nature, but they wouldn't lash out at Kyiv if it became part of NATO. They would not, especially if the legitimate threat of provoking a NATO reaction was there, they just wouldn't risk it.

It's not even that, we would get to the point where — and we've seen this play out repeatedly over the course of this war — where Russia could be very provocative with rhetoric, but what it really is not looking to do is test NATO’s resolve directly, because that's just something that they can't contend with. So I don't think it would be the end of the war, it would just mean that it would be much more narrowly scoped.

You don't have to take my word for it because the former Secretary General of NATO also came out with this position so I'm not the only one. And there are literally dozens and dozens of senior policymakers, probably the best thinkers about what's going on and the folks that most understand Russia and the Russians best, who think similarly. We're not in any way provoking a situation that will start a spiral towards nuclear war. Nobody is interested in that. We just fully understand what the Russian interest and will is and the fact is they're not interested in provoking this kind of outcome.

Given the strategic value of Crimea and the fact that in almost all other scenarios, Ukraine is dependent upon external decisions from politicians that so far have not seemed to have embraced this crisis firmly enough do you think that Ukraine has the resources and or the capabilities to try to take Crimea this winter?

Yeah, so I think Crimea is out of the picture for this winter. I wrote about that when there was a high degree of optimism over Ukraine's counteroffensive which was an article in Foreign Affairs last January. And basically, I said that Crimea was out of picture back then and that was before counteroffensive that petered out. I think the picture might be more bleak than that now. The kinds of things that allowed Ukraine to be successful over much of the second half of 2022 and the first half of 2023 is that they were able to change the dynamics with regards to artillery and Russia's massive overmatch in artillery. They did that through having an advantage in drones.

The Russians have since produced large quantities of artillery and they're getting more artillery from North Korea. They've retooled their industrial base for drones and those numbers are shifting in Russia's direction. So, when I'm critical of the administration, it's not because I think that we're headed for just more of the same through 2024. I actually see a pretty bleak picture in which the Russians are able to gain a significant advantage and maybe regain the initiative in terms of offensive operations and that's what concerns me.

The industrial base is one part of that picture. The other part of that picture is a mass mobilization after March. That is what the Biden administration, I think, is missing.

They are wanting to just muddle through 2024 but it's not quite like that. I think it could be a much more difficult 2024.

We really just scratched the surface here, frankly. There's a lot of things we didn't get to.

I wrote my dissertation on U.S. Policy Towards Russia and Ukraine Since 1991, How We Got Into This War. It's going to be my next book and we didn't talk about the backstory here.

We also didn't talk about the broader geopolitical picture with regard to China and Chinese opportunism and we really only touched briefly the Middle East and Israel so all that is to tease the fact that we'll have more of these conversations and hopefully you enjoyed this one.

You can share that with your friends and I look forward to having more of these conversations in the future. Thank you. See you soon.