Two years of war. Hundreds of thousands of Russians dead and wounded. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians too. But Yaroslav Trofimov, whom you’ve met before on these pages, and is the chief foreign affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, and the author of the acclaimed new book, Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence, has another way to think about this fight.
If Ukraine had lost to Russia in 2022, he says, it would have been a devastating loss, but it would have been Ukraine’s loss. Two years, hundreds of billions of dollars, and massive arms shipments later, a loss in Ukraine will be a loss for the United States, Europe, and NATO. The stakes are that high.
If you’re in the Tucker Carlson school of foreign policy, you probably think Ukraine doesn’t matter much in a world that counts the People’s Republic of China, the border, and Joe Biden among the greatest threats to America. But he’s wrong.
For some of us, the courage and resilience of the Ukrainians is incredible, and a critical element of a battle to defeat — let’s be honest — an enemy of the United States. (BTW, that whole Obama “the 80s are calling and they want their foreign policy back” view of Russia hasn’t aged well.)
But there is a potent realist argument that ought to rally the Tuckers of the world to Ukraine’s side. The issue at play here, if we’re being brutally honest/realist, is that Ukraine and Ukrainians are not what’s at stake. What’s at stake for the United States is Putin’s effort to reconstitute a Soviet empire. Putting that Humpty Dumpty back together again will require war with a number of countries, most of them in NATO. And sure, NATO blabla, but these are treaty obligations. And the reality is that, given our druthers, it would be better not to have to go to war with Russia. Sure, we would win, but it would be a major distraction and we have other enemies in the Pacific.
We could have, via the Ukrainians, dealt a swift blow to Putin and put paid to his plans for a neo-Stalinist era. We didn’t. And here you can’t blame Trump, Tucker, or the GOP. That failure, well documented by Yaro, was all on the Biden administration, which began transferring weapons needed in 2022 only in 2023. Indeed, Biden is still slow rolling much needed equipment to Ukraine. And as a result, a win, if possible, against Putin will be all the more difficult.
Yes, it’s really comfy for the MSM to hate on conservatives, and especially on Putin-loving twits who ought to know better. But losses in Ukraine aren’t on them. They aren’t even, to be totally fair, all on the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians have fought with incredible courage and lousy equipment. They’re now running low on bullets. You can’t lay that on Speaker Mike or anyone outside the White House. That’s all on Joe Biden. Remember that.
HIGHLIGHTS
What are your hopes for your enemies vanishing?
YT: I think the historic opportunity for a quick Ukrainian victory was lost in the summer and fall of 2022. And I talk about this a lot in the book, about how the Ukrainians were begging the Biden administration and other western alliances for tanks, more artillery, for planes, for more multiple launch rocket systems, and all of that was either supplied in a very small amount or denied outright as outlandish. The German said, "How can we give you German tanks? What will the Russians say, German tanks in the plains of Ukraine again?" And so when Russia was at its weakest in the summer of 2022, it had only about 100,000 troops, combat troops, in Ukraine, because Putin would not listen to his generals, would not mobilize reservists, because doing so would have meant acknowledging that his so-called special military operation was not going to plan.
Ukraine managed to break through. It broke through in Kharkiv, it broke through in Kherson, but it couldn't pursue its offensive because it had ran out of gear, and because Russia successfully used the nuclear blackmail to throttle western support, what people in Washington called "escalation management." The treaty was... The escalation management was managed by the Russians. Again and again, Putin's nuclear threats did not kill American support, but they curbed it to a point that the Russian army would survive, regroup, and now bank on outlasting the western will to fund Ukraine. We see what's happening in Congress with many Republicans opposed to continue fighting for Ukraine. And when all this mountain of steel actually was given to Ukraine the following year, in 2023, it was too late. The Russians had mobilized several hundred thousand reservists, filled the front line with men, built fortifications, laid minefields. And when the Ukrainians did launch this counteroffensive in the summer of 2023, it was just too hard. The situation had changed, and the historical opportunity was lost.
And so now we're facing a war with no end in sight. And certainly, President Putin has no incentive to end anything this year, because he hopes that if President Trump comes back to the White House, he could get a much better deal. And I think from what they say in Moscow, the aspirations are still the same. Any Ukrainian State isn't acceptable to them.
Can Ukraine do combined arms warfare at this point?
YT: Well, it's certain that one of the arms was missing in this combined arms warfare, there were no fighter jets. But if you look at what was given in 2023, if that had arrived in Ukraine a year earlier, it would've helped a great deal and could have possibly allowed the Ukrainians to break all the way through to the Azov Black Seas.
What about Ukrainian resolve? It looks like the White House wants to blame Kyiv for the failure to advance?
YT: I think you're right about the blame game, and it's quite unseemly that there's a lot of people in Washington trying to shift the blame onto Ukrainians. And let's face it, the Ukrainians are not perfect, and there were tactical mistakes made. And the Ukrainian military, facing a much more powerful foe, did not always act to the best practice. Also because there are objective issues. It's running out of manpower. They didn't have time to train all these new troops, because so many of the professional soldiers had been killed in the two years before. But also, it's very easy if you sit in Washington to be an armchair general, but nobody who was in charge of the US military now has ever seen combat against the near-peer enemy of the kind that the Ukrainian army has been fighting for nearly two years. And so a lot of the recipes, it didn't work, because they're just not actually working in the field.
Now, going back to sentiment in the Ukraine, there's magical thinking that, "Oh, well, if we just pressure the Ukrainians, if we just deprive them of weapons, they'll settle this war at the negotiating table and give up their ambitions." But the thing is that there is no one else on the other side of this table. What Russia wants is all of Ukraine. Putin just a few weeks ago said Odesa is a Russian city. President Medvedev, Putin's predecessor who is still the head of the ruling party in Russia, said in January, any Ukrainian State, no matter how friendly to Russia, is a mortal enemy to any Ukrainian, and Ukrainians have a choice, die or become Russians.
The ideological side to this fight?
YT: I think the core problem is that the views that Putin has on Ukraine are not an outlier. A great many Russians, we don't know if a majority or not, certainly before the war thought that Ukraine is not really a country, it's part of Russia historically. And you were talking about Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn acknowledged that Ukraine could exist, just minus half of it. And that, he said, belongs to Russia, like Odesa, Kharkiv, and Donbas. But Joseph Brodsky, the US Poet Laureate, also wrote a poem, "On Ukraine's Independence," saying, "I wish that Dnieper River would flow backwards, and I want to spit into it…How dare you.”
What about the pressure to settle with Russia? Does it hold any weight back home?
YT: So let me come back first to this issue of people underestimating Ukrainian patriotism, nationalism. I think it's not just underestimating, it's profoundly not understanding it. Because Ukraine has a history, a very dark history. Ukrainian nationalism, like many other ethnic nationalism in the '30s and the '40s, was very dark, and there were plenty of Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis, and the Holocaust had some of the darkest pages in Ukraine. And then Ukrainian nationalism was quite exclusionary in its nature, like most nationalism in the 1930s in Europe, especially Eastern Europe. And I think there was a great rethinking of what it means to be Ukrainian in the '70s and the '80s, in part because many of these Ukrainian nationalist dissidents were in prison camps in Siberia with the Jewish refuseniks, with Baltic dissidents. And the understanding was that a Ukrainian State would going to be possible if it's built in a whole new basis of inclusiveness.
What is Ukrainian is not based on blood, on religion or language, but on the idea of a Ukraine that is open and democratic. It's very similar to the American idea. It's a very not blood and soil nationalism. So this is why now Ukraine has a Jewish president, has a Muslim minister of defense, the head of the land forces happens to be born in Russia, come from Russia, and nobody cares. And I think if Ukraine had been built as an ethnic state in 1991, it would have collapsed. It would not have survived this war. And the Russian speakers of East and South Ukraine would have backed Putin, would not have backed the Ukrainian State. And I think this is something that Putin didn't realize. I think it's something that people in the West also didn't properly realize, just how much the society changed and the identity changed of the Ukraine.
Now, as for peace talks, everybody knows that, if there are no security guarantees, that any cease to the firing now will just allow Russia to regroup and to keep going and to grab more land and to kill more Ukrainians. And so what you hear from a lot of people is that, "I'd rather fight now than have my children fight in 10 years or in 5 years."
I don't think there is that much pressure to settle either from Washington or Berlin right now. I think there's an understanding that until the US presidential election, not much can happen, because Russia doesn't want to settle. And I think if anything, the fear of US walking away is forcing people in Europe to increase support for Ukraine. We've seen that Germany has increased the money and Spain, the UK certainly has, because it is an immediate national security risk to these countries in the way it isn't for the US, which has an ocean separating it from Russia.
And what about the spillover?
YT: I think it's clear that all these crises are interconnected, and people in Moscow and Beijing are looking at the US posture around the world and draw the conclusions. So what happened in 2014? Yes, there were the famous red lines that were ignored. And then when Russia invaded for the first time in Donbas... Sparking a war there, by the way, killed 14,000 people in a few months. It kind of went unnoticed, but it's a lot of people.
Well, in fact, everybody did shrug, and President Obama said in his interview with the Atlantic that there is nothing the US can do ever to prevent a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
You were in Afghanistan when the war began. And then the same in Kyiv.
YT: I was very much on the ground in Afghanistan, and I was in Kabul on August 15th, 2021. The previous night, President Ashraf Ghani had walked around the city, rallied the troops, said, "We will fight to the last soldier, we will never surrender," and by noon, he was in a helicopter flying to Abu Dhabi, and the Taliban were in my hotel. And by the end of the month, the American military had left Afghanistan and the Taliban were flying Black Hawks and driving Humvees and MRAPs and had this treasure trove of American weapons left to them. And I think those images, on one hand, inspired Russia. America is so weak, it's like, they're going to do anything to us. And on the other hand, they also tampered any support for Ukraine, because the thinking was, "Well, Ukraine is weak, Ukraine is going to collapse just like Afghanistan. Anything we give them will just end up the Russian hands. So why bother?"
And I was in Kyiv when the war began, and in the back of my mind I had this fear, "What if Zelensky does the same? What if he pulls an Ashraf Ghani?" Because he had done that, and he was urged to do that. Boris Johnson told me, the British Prime Minister, that... I called him and said, "Your survival is paramount. Why don't you move to London and we'll have a government exile like Poland did in 1939?"
And he was getting the same calls from other world leaders. But he didn't do that. He was defiant, he stayed. And I remember two days later just driving through Kyiv and seeing thousands of people just gathering at a stadium. I couldn't understand why. And it turns out it was just people from all their neighborhoods around just coming to get weapons and to face the Russian armies coming towards the city.
So there was this massive popular outpouring of defiance that also came in part from leadership, from Zelensky at the time. This is something nobody can ever take away from him, despite all the other flaws he may have.
The US is implicated in Ukraine’s victory, now more than ever?
YT: That defeat in 2022 would have been a tragedy for Ukraine, would have been a strategic victory for Russia, but would not have been an existential defeat of the US and the NATO alliance. Now, after hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons and other aid were sent to Ukraine, after all these high level commitments to stand until the very end, if Russia were to be successful in Ukraine now, no matter what they say in Washington, it's not our war. It would be seen as an American defeat everywhere in the world.
A new Cold War, a new Axis of Evil?
YT: Russia has a de facto military alliance with North Korea and Iran, which began with Iran and North Korea helping Russia with what it needs, Iran first with its drones that have proven highly effective actually in Ukraine, very, very effective. They're a key part of the Russian air campaign. And then North Korea supplied Russia with apparently almost a million artillery shells. That's three times more than the entire European Union managed to supply Ukraine in the year. And this is changing dynamics in the battlefield now because Ukraine is running out of ammo and North Korea is helping, is vital to Russia. And Russia has something it can give them, and it is giving them advanced technologies that could really change the balance of power in other areas of vital importance to the US, in the Middle East, and in East Asia, to the detriment of Japan, South Korea, and America's alliance in the Gulf, and Israel.
And so China, unlike North Korea, Iran, and Russia, has a global economy, so it's very careful with the overt military it provides, and it's also watching the Russians' adventures in Ukraine. And I think it had some chilling effect, to an extent, on its plans for Taiwan, not in the sense that we're not going to do it, in the sense that we have to prepare better, and we need more time maybe, and we should not repeat the Russian mistakes.
And is there any way that a negotiated peace with Ukraine decelerates this problem?
YT: Now, a negotiated settlement in Ukraine that lifts sanctions on Russia and that allows it to prepare for another round, I don't see why it would stop it from continuing cooperation in all those countries. It'll just pocket the gains and keep going.
Have we learned any lessons from history?
YT: I think what we are seeing now is that all these conflicts are becoming increasingly interconnected. And the war in Gaza has really helped Russia and helped China, for example. And certainly as far as Russia is concerned, it really lessened international pressure on Russia, which can now posture and claim higher moral ground. And with this Iran, Russia, North Korea alliance, you see the material element to it, not just the political and diplomatic, with the spread of new technologies undermining the US and its alliances across the world. The big question is, what will China do? And China, because it has a longer time horizon, may not necessarily try to upend the cart in the immediate future. But for these other regimes, it's going to existential. So I don't see any reason why they would stop trying to disrupt the international order together, just as the Western alliance seems to be more and more de-united.
Is it too late for a military victory for Ukraine?
YT: It's not too late, but it's just going to be much, much harder. And I think a lot now will depend on the internal cohesion of Ukraine and Russia. And we saw that Russia is a very brittle society, with the Prigozhin push last year that nobody saw coming. It came very close to really threatening the regime. We don't know what else is in store for Russia as these pressures from the sanctions and from the war continue. Hundreds of thousands of Russians died in this war. This will have repercussions at some point. And the Ukraine is also under strain, and Ukraine's internal stability, it depends also on Western funding to keep the country afloat. And so I think it's increasingly the battle of wills and the battle of the two societies, which one breaks first. And I think if a society in Russia breaks, then the frontline will break, too, and vice versa.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence
Did Ukraine Miss an Early Chance to Negotiate Peace With Russia? (WSJ, January 5 2023)
The War in Ukraine Has Created a New ‘Axis of Evil’ (WSJ, Trofimov, December 21 2023)
How the Israel-Hamas War Is Tilting the Global Power Balance in Favor of Russia, China (WSJ, Trofimov, October 16 2023)
It has been said America isn't a place, it's an idea. Same can be said for Ukraine, especially as the author said Ukrainian nationalism became inclusive. All of Ukraine voted for independence, including Russian speakers. That is part of the difference between Ukraine and our efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. When Assad was killing his people, the people fighting him were majority Jihadists. We didn't have enough to make a credible partnership. It would not have ended well. And it is these middle east failures that color everyone's view of American help for Ukraine. And Soviet era propaganda was and is effective when people accuse you of being in bed with defense contractors, Putin uses it to accuse us of aggression before and after he invaded Ukraine. You covered everything, Biden slow rolling out weapons, the Budapest memo, speaking of which Putin using nuclear threats to curb our help, the possibility of inaction making war more likely (I am reading "The Spectre of War--International Communism and the Origins of World War II" by J. Haslam. Also I like Cats but I don't like trolls.
Your claim " What’s at stake for the United States is Putin’s effort to reconstitute a Soviet empire."
Care to provide evidence that Putin wants to reconstitute a Soviet empire? If not, can you please stop making stuff up?