We're going to focus tonight on Ukraine, its struggle against Russia, its central place in the global struggle between democracies and autocracies, its battlefield difficulties, and its worry that President Trump, should he return to office, will abandon it to Vladimir Putin.
Joining me tonight in conversation are three great experts on the subject, Anne Applebaum, my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic, David Ignatius, a foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post, and Lara Seligman covers the Pentagon for Politico.
Thank you all for joining me.
Big topic, second anniversary, and things have changed somewhat dramatically in our perception of what's happening on the ground in Ukraine.
David, let me start with you, but I want all of you to answer this very simple question.
Is Russia winning?
DAVID IGNATIUS, FOREIGN AFFAIRS COLUMNIST, THE WASHINGTON POST: So, Russia certainly has the momentum after last weekend's Ukrainian evacuation of their position at Avdiivka in Eastern Ukraine.
There's a sense that the Russians are on a roll.
Putin's arrogance in the killing of Navalny reinforces this sense that it's Russia's time.
I have to remind myself, thinking back two years, to what Russia expected.
They thought they'd roll through Ukraine, take Kyiv in ten days.
Measured against that, you can't say that Russia is winning.
Russia is basically stuck.
It's gained four provinces of Ukraine, but has not achieved anything like what Putin's aims were.
And it has united NATO.
There are two new NATO members, Sweden and Finland.
Russia has bigger problems.
So, yes, they have the momentum now, but I don't feel as if this is a story about Putin winning.
It's a story about Putin having gained more than he had last year.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Anne?
ANNE APPLEBAUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: You know, you have to look at there's really more than one war going on here, right?
So, there's the war on the ground.
And David is right, the Russians made some gains recently, although not all across the country, not all across the frontline, just in one particular place.
But there's another war they're fighting, which is a psychological war.
They're hoping to win the war by dividing us, by dividing Europeans, by breaking up the NATO alliance, by preventing Ukraine from getting more weapons.
And, unfortunately, here, they are doing very well.
So, the fact that we're having this conversation, is Russia winning, the fact that we're talking about why is the president not able to carry out his own policy in Ukraine, the fact that a small minority in the House of Representatives can block the majority, when a majority of Americans, a majority of members of Congress, want to help Ukraine and want to continue the policy, means that, yes, there is -- at some level, Russia is convincing people that the war can't be won.
And I think it's very important that we understand that and work on overcoming it.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Russia is very, very good at outlasting its enemies or its adversaries, in part by throwing endless numbers of troops into the meat grinder.
Is that their hope that they're just going to keep going until we get, quote/unquote, tired?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: But they're going to keep throwing people at the front line.
But mostly what they're working on is trying to prevent us from helping, trying to prevent us from doing more, using various psychological games, using whether it's trolling or whether it's proxies here or inside Europe, their main goal is to stop us.
Because of course the West United, you know, the democratic world united, if you include, you know, Japan and South Korea and so on, easily defeats Russia in terms of industrial strength and everything else.
So, they need to convince us that the war can't be won.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Lara, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you for your own view, but since you're reporting in the Pentagon every day, I'm also interested in hearing what you understand to be maybe the consensus view, if there is one, among America's military leaders, how Ukraine is doing on the ground.
LARA SELIGMAN, PENTAGON REPORTER, POLITICO: Well, like, the situation on the battlefield right now is pretty dire for Ukraine.
Last year they had this failed counteroffensive that they talked up, and then it did not succeed.
And I think, at the time, leaders in the Pentagon thought that Ukraine did not really take their best military advice.
They had advised Ukraine to put all their forces, their infantry, and the western equipment that they had sent, the Abrams tanks, Leopard tanks, at one point on the frontline and get a breakthrough.
Ukraine did not do that.
Now, we can't really look back and say, oh, that was a mistake, because they were -- it's a 600-mile frontline, and they were really pressed along the entire time.
There are many, many miles' worth of mines and heavily fortified Russian positions.
And every time they tried to take a step forward, they would get pushed back.
So you could make the argument that mistakes were made.
Now, the situation is even more dire and Ukraine has two problems on the battlefield right now.
One is the lack of artillery ammunition.
And that's not going to be solved until the U.S. Congress passes the supplemental, allowing the Pentagon to send additional aid to Ukraine.
The second problem is manpower.
Russia has a population three times the size of Ukraine's.
They can, as Anne said, continue to throw people at the problem.
Ukraine can't necessarily do that.
And that's part of the reason why you saw they had to leave Avdiivka recently over the weekend.
So, one of those problems can be solved by the U.S. Congress.
The second problem can really only be solved by Ukraine itself.
And, unfortunately, we are looking at a situation where they may have to expand the draft.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
I want to come to that, and I also want to come to David to talk about Ukrainian strategy and Russian strategy.
But let me just jump to Anne quickly to ask, because, you know, it was about a year ago, maybe 11 months ago, we were in Ukraine together the last time.
And, obviously, there was a kind of, if not, a bullions, then there was a kind of bullishness in the air in Kyiv and down in Kherson and along that front that good things were going to happen.
How do you analyze what didn't happen, I guess, I would say?
Was it failure of Ukrainian strategy?
Was it the lack of munitions and arms, some combination of the two?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: So, their argument about the counteroffensive is very different from the Pentagon's argument.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The Ukrainian military commander.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: The Ukrainian military commander.
I saw the defense minister actually in December.
They feel that they didn't ever have dominance of the skies.
They didn't have the air support they needed.
They didn't have quite the quantity of equipment they needed.
They didn't have a long enough training period.
And they thought that the U.S. gave them advice that would apply to the U.S. Army, which would have had air dominance, and which would have had enough equipment and it didn't work on the ground in Ukraine.
They still have -- well, I should say there's two strategies for winning the war, more than two.
But one of them, the most important one, is mostly still to do with asymmetric warfare, which you and I also wrote about at the time, the use of drones, the use of electronic warfare.
I mean, the best example of that is their use of sea drones, which are these little cool boats.
I mean, they're like these little black -- you know, they look like paddle boats that have been painted black and have those -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Driverless drones, driverless boats, yes.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: They're driverless boats and they have all this cool equipment on them.
I've seen them.
I've seen where they're manufactured.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And they had a lot of success in the Black Sea.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: A huge amount of success.
So, Ukraine has no Navy and yet it has pushed the entire Black Sea Fleet out of the western part of the black -- out of the part of Western Crimea.
And they are they are now exporting grain.
They're not threatened by the Russian Navy anymore, which is kind of incredible.
I don't think we give enough credit to that, and we don't we don't focus enough on it.
And I think their longer-term strategy is not exactly that but to think along those lines along the entire frontline.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David, you've written very interestingly, not just about Ukrainian strategy, but Russian strategy, because to -- I don't want to speak for you, but for me, somewhat surprising, the Russians are innovating in ways that one doesn't associate with the meat grinder approach.
DAVID IGNATIUS: So, that's the thing that worries me looking forward.
It was always thought that Putin's advantage, where did he just keep throwing bodies, you know, pay the butcher's bill, the Russian dead and wounded are supposed to be, the latest U.S. estimate, 315,000, enormous number.
But it turns out that the Russians, after initially really bungling their strategy in the first year, being totally overmatched technologically by Ukraine plus the U.S., have gone into a learning phase, where they're experimenting with weapons, especially experimenting with drones and electronic warfare, learning, going through cycles of changing their equipment, changing their tactics.
They're a learning army now in a way that they haven't been, I think, in decades.
That's worrisome.
The Russian general, at the beginning of February, published an analysis of their lessons learned in this war after two years.
And their lessons learned are that the battlefield is completely different.
Tanks are essentially obsolete.
Traditional air power is essentially obsolete.
The future is unmanned systems and the E.W.
that's either going to block them or allow them to get in.
And, you know, they're on top of that at a time when I think the U.S. is lagging behind a little bit.
So, everybody should be concerned about that.
Like Anne, I was in Munich last weekend, and I think maybe we had a different takeaway.
I heard a lot of anxiety, angst about the possibility that Donald Trump could become president.
But I also heard a lot of fight from the Europeans.
They see what Putin is doing.
They see the advances.
They see the way this war is now switching.
They're nervous, and they're actually doing something about it.
They're providing more weapons.
They're upping their own defense spending and planning.
So, you know, that's the one positive thing I'd say.
