Ep 119: Yaroslav Trofimov on the War of Ukraine
Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign-affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal and author of Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence
Aaron MacLean:
Some of the best work we've done on School of War so far, in my opinion, has been about the war in Ukraine. I think of Fred Kagan's first episode in early 2022, revisiting his pre-war analysis of Putin's intentions or Mark Galeotti on the post-Cold War Russian military or David Betts on the return of static warfare in the defense last year. This summer we'll be doing a miniseries focused on the war with contributors to a new volume called War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, edited by Hal Brands, who's also the editor of New Makers of Modern Strategy, by the way. And we have some all-star guests both returning and joining for those episodes. And today we'll be talking with a man who has more combat experience than the average Marine, Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign-affairs corresponded at the Wall Street Journal, about Putin's invasion and the first year of the war to which Yaroslav was an eyewitness. Let's go.
Aaron MacLean:
For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am joined today by Yaroslav Trofimov. He is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author most recently of Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence. Yaroslav, thank you so much for joining the show.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Thank you for having me.
Aaron MacLean:
I was wondering if we could start actually with your background and then with your work as a journalist before we get to the war in Ukraine. You grew up in Ukraine, is that the case? How do you go from a childhood in Ukraine to being chief foreign-affairs correspondent at the Wall Street Journal?
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Yeah, I was born in Ukraine. I grew up in Ukraine. I thought I'd be a painter, so I actually went to an art school, which was one of the few schools in Kiev at the time that used Ukrainian as a language of teaching, which is how I was exposed and looked more into this idea of Ukrainian identity, Ukrainian culture which was very much marginalized back in the Soviet times. And so when I was a student at university in 1989, 1990, I was actually quite active in this Ukrainian Renaissance and Ukrainian independence movement. But then I went off to the US to do my masters at New York, at New York University and then became a foreign correspondent all over the world. So I started off in Israel watching how Yasser Arafat arrived into Gaza. I was a few steps behind Yitzhak Rabin when he was shot in Tel Aviv.
And then after a few years working in Italy for Bloomberg and then for the Wall Street Journal, on 9/11, it turned out that very few people on the staff of the Wall Street Journal spoke any Arabic. And so there I was on a plane first to Cairo and then to the Gulf and then Afghanistan. I spent quite a bit of time in Iraq driving up from Kuwait in my rented Yukon SUV that I signed I will never take across the border, to Baghdad. We actually drove through a town that had not yet been taken over by the US military. And so all those guys in Iraq uniforms were looking at me strangely like, "Who is this guy in the car with our plates driving through our town?" And then I was living in Afghanistan as the bureau chief for the Journal for nearly five years from 2009 to 2014.
And so I didn't really cover much of Ukraine at that time. I did go once in a while. I went there for the 2004 revolution, which was a very peaceful process. And having just come off some of the bloodiest assignments in Iraq, it was really heartening for me to be in Ukraine. And I remember writing this article saying how proud I was of Ukraine being such a peaceful country where such momentous political change was achieved without a single window broken, without a single person injured, which was true at the time because it was a conflict between Ukrainians. Of course, things changed dramatically in 2014 when Russia invaded, and Russia brought in its intelligence personnel, its military personnel and the famous little green man. And then the war became bloody, and then blood was spilled. 14,000 people were killed in fighting in Donbas in Ukraine at the time and nobody really cared.
Aaron MacLean:
Can I ask you? This is off-topic, because I want to spend most of our time talking about Ukraine and talking about the book, but before we do, you were in Afghanistan at the same time that I was, although for longer than me, that's a full five years, which is remarkable and it's a reminder, I have a number of journalist friends, I have remind myself from time to time, that have actually seen more combat in a lot of cases than the median marine of that era. Were you surprised by the speed with which the collapse came in 2021, given your extensive experience on the ground there?
Yaroslav Trofimov:
No, no. People ask me to compare, quite often, Afghanistan and Ukraine, and I think my experience in Afghanistan was that everybody knew that this entire venture will collapse the moment the US leaves, and everybody behaved as a result of that with a timeline of very temporary time, short-term timeline. So everybody was stealing basically as much as they could in the government before the whole edifice crashed down. There was no expectation of permanence. And so when President Biden announced the pull-out from Afghanistan, I went back and I spent much of the second half of 2021 in Kabul and I watched how house of cards town after town, district after district were falling.
And I remember being in Kabul on August 14th watching President Ashraf Ghani inspect the troops at the edges of Kabul, pledge we'll fight, never surrender. And then the next morning, he was in a helicopter flying off to Abu Dhabi and the Taliban were in my hotel. I think being in Kiev in February 2022, so just a few months later, obviously I had... Not just me, but a lot of other people were expecting that the same story show will repeat itself in Ukraine, and President Zelensky will do Ghani and leave. And in fact, lots of Western leaders were urging him to do so. Boris Johnson told me that he had called him up and said, "Look, you need to take care of yourself and create a government in exile in London like the Polish government did in 1939." And he didn't. And that was the big difference, of course.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah, your view of Afghanistan was the same as mine and also the same as virtually every other Marine who I think served at the tactical or operational level. All of us were utterly unsurprised at the pace with which the collapse occurred. I think we all intuited one way or the other, whether we were seeing things on the ground in a place like Helmand or following politics in Kabul, or some combination of the two, that it would look more or less like what happened. And so it was just amazing to me at least the appearance, and I think the reality of surprise in Washington, not at the collapse necessarily, because everyone knew that that was obviously a risk, but that's how they would've put it. It's a risk, and they seemed to think it would take some time.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Right.
Aaron MacLean:
And do you have any insight on that? What were the... I remain mystified at their mystification, because to me, based on a limited experience 10 years earlier, it went down basically exactly as I would've predicted. And I'm not alone in that prediction.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
I think even the Taliban were mystified, because when the Taliban saw that the gates of Kabul are open, they actually called the Americans at the time and said, "Look, we had a deal. We'll not take over until you leave, da, da, da, what do we do?" And there was this negotiation with the US government, with Ambassador Khalilzad. And the US military that was in Kabul airfield said, "Well, we're not ready to take responsibility. So if the government vanished, we have no objection to you coming in." And leadership matters. Leadership matters a great deal in wars, and Ashraf Ghani was not a leader. He chose to flee. He chose to be a coward. And once he fled, the entire system collapsed. And we have the results of it now.
Things could have turned out differently in Ukraine as well. President Zelensky was facing grave danger, perhaps a greater danger than Ashraf Ghani was facing, and he chose to stay. And with him, much of the government machinery remained, and I remember the transformation in Kiev. So day one of the invasion there was chaos. Nobody knew who's on whose side, nobody knew who's betraying Ukraine and working with Russians. There were all these rumors of Russian special forces squads in the city, there were shootouts, there were lots of friendly fire because nobody knew who's what. The second day on Russian television, they were already broadcasting that Zelensky had fled, that he's in Poland in Europe. And he came out in a square after nightfall and recorded this famous video, we are all here with some of the top members of the government.
And I think this video really rallied the spirit, because the next morning I remember driving through Kiev and hundreds and hundreds of young men and women were coming out of the high rises and just lining up to pick up weapons and go to the front line. And they were telling us that the Russian missile hit the building next to ours, what are we going to do? We're not going to surrender. And this psychological break, I think it was very important, because obviously, as you well know, in wars, the will to fight is one of the most important and often hard to quantify ingredients.
Aaron MacLean:
Talk to us a bit about Zelensky, if you would. You've met him on several occasions, your book, which is really excellent, by the way, you call it... Towards the end of the book, you say it's a second draft of history. What you and others were writing in the papers as it was happening is the first draft. This is the second draft. And essentially sort of history of the first year of the war. Give us an assessment of Zelensky. He's generally lionized here in the West for his leadership, and then he has sort of hostile critics, people who tend to be hostile of American support for the war take a dimmer view. What's the reality?
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Right. Yeah. As to your point about the second draft of history, it is really a second draft because, as I was writing the book, I realized that I didn't know and see a lot of the things in real time. So going back to re-interview the participants to see what was going on was really important in establishing a much more accurate record. Obviously we cannot have a full record because the war is going on and lots of things remain classified. Now as for Zelensky, the fact that he stayed is a historical achievement. Lots of people in his shoes would not have stayed. He was about to be surrounded, and he knew full well. He was briefed by the director of the CIA who had flown to Kiev just weeks earlier that the Russians want to capture and execute him, as well as much of the Ukrainian leadership. The other thing that he really achieved is that it was probably the best moment for Ukrainian president to be a showman, to be somebody from showbiz, because he knew how to speak to audiences and convince them.
And he spoke over the heads of Western leaders to the electorates, to the public opinion in his public university commencements, rock festivals, small festivals. And he really made that moral case for Ukraine that drags reluctant governments in Europe and in the US into doing a lot more things for Ukraine than they initially planned to do. And I think that's also historic achievement. Now, as every leader has lots of flaws and clearly misjudged the severity of the Russian threat. Before the invasion, the country was not properly prepared. And again, you can argue that when the Ukrainians looked at the Russian war plan and looked at the number of troops that the Russians had on the Ukrainian borders, rationally, there was a point in shrugging and said, "There's not enough. There is no way they will succeed with this."
In fact, they did not succeed. The plan was premised on false beliefs that Putin had, that true Russians and the Ukrainians are one people, the Ukrainians will not fight, and most of them will switch sides and welcome the Russian military with flowers. So it was irrational, it was crazy, but that's what Putin believed. So since then, I think what struck me most in the front lines and in Ukraine is you hardly hear about Zelensky, you don't see his portraits, you don't see the troops talking about him. I saw one guy, a special forces Marine, wore a patch in his body armor saying, "I kill for Zelensky." And it was a joke, and it was kind of a meme, and he was actually deputy battalion commander.
So the thing is that Ukrainians know that they're not fighting for a particular politician. Some of the most dedicated soldiers and volunteer battalions come from political movements. They're very alien to Zelensky. And yet it doesn't matter because he is the elected president. He's the only legitimate head of the Ukrainian state, and there is no alternative for that. And so when he fired the head of the military General Zaluzhnyi, lots of people grumbled about it, but everybody knew that the worst thing they could do is to turn it into political conflict. And Zaluzhnyi himself accepted the resignation. He got a medal from Zelensky, they hugged each other, and for now he sort of went his own way waiting for a better time once the war is over.
Aaron MacLean:
This is kind of an impossible question to answer briskly, but nevertheless, as briskly as you think you can attempt, what does Zelensky represent in Ukrainian politics? Give us a bit of an overview. What does he stand for and what are these other disparate elements that have been united by Russia's invasion?
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Well, when Zelensky was elected, he came in as an outsider and he said, "I'm the man of peace. I will bring peace with Russia. There will no longer be..." As he said in his electoral manifesto, "The only sound of explosions you will ever hear in Ukraine is the fireworks for celebrations." And also he said, "I'm against corruption," so everybody in the party list that he brought to parliament was a new politician. And he tried. He talked with the Russians. The Russians were not interested in peace, they were interested in capitulation.
And so even someone like Zelensky, with his long connections to Russia, he was working in Moscow for Russian state television in 2014, realized that peace with Russia could not be had because Russia just didn't want to accept a Ukraine that is truly independent. And that was the shift of the political base as well, because the Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who used to be hoping for a rapporteur with Russia because so many of them have family across the border lived in towns that had historically a very tight business integration with companies across the border, they were the ones who bore the brunt of the invasion. They're the ones whose cities were flattened, relatives were killed, and they're the ones who are the most hostile to Russia today.
Aaron MacLean:
On the Russian side of things, here in Washington, I have several people whose work and insights I respect greatly who called the invasion wrong in the sense that they were quite confident up until middle, late February that Putin wasn't going to invade, despite obviously all the noise that indicated that he would. And in a couple of cases, one is Fred Kagan at AEI, who we've had on the show. It was one of the best episodes we ever did was after the fact, him dissecting his thinking on that. And if anyone wants a time capsule of that period, I commend people back to that episode.
But I mean, at core what had happened was he's a serious analyst of military affairs and he analyzed the order of battle on the Russian side and he says, "It's crazy. You can't do it. You don't have the capabilities it will take to actually seize Ukraine. And so obviously this is some kind of demonstration or bluff. There's no way, there's no way that this is serious." Of course, it turned out to be serious. You alluded pretty quickly to Putin's mistaken assumptions about Ukrainian politics. Say more. And you've no doubt... I don't know if you've been one-on-one with him, but please tell us if you have, but you've been in the room with Putin, presumably, at various points over the course of your career. Tell us about Putin and his worldview and how he got this so wrong.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Well, I mean, the only time I was in the room with Putin was when he was in the room when President Trump in Helsinki at their summit. But I've certainly read what he's been writing and saying, and he penned this very long essay that he had been writing during his COVID isolation. He spent a lot of time reading books on history, and it's called The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, and it's really a manifesto for the war. It was right out to every member of the Russian armed forces. And it posits that Ukraine is an artificial state, Ukrainians are Russians, and the Ukrainian identity had been invented by the Austro-Hungarian general, and lots some other crazy stuff, which he rehashed once again in the recent interview with Tucker Carlson. And first of all, it's completely misguided history, but also some of that may have been true 30 years ago, but he didn't realize how much Ukraine had changed in that time, because the very idea what is Ukrainian has been changed. Back in the Soviet times, Ukraine was an ethnicity in a very sort of folkloristic way.
If you ate borscht and danced the hopak and both your parents were Ukrainian, you were Ukrainian, and someone like Zelensky was not considered Ukrainian. And so when Ukraine became independent in 1991, it chose to become inclusive in the definition of what is Ukrainian. So anybody who lives in Ukraine and works for Ukraine is a Ukrainian with a difference of blood, religion, ethnicity, language. And that's why that became really the source of its resilience, because there was no cleavage along these lines once the war began. In fact, one would argue that the Russian-speaking Ukrainians were the most involved in the defense of Ukraine, because they came from cities that suffered the most. And that's why Ukraine today can have a president who happens to be Jewish, a secretary of defense who happens to be a Muslim, Crimean Tatar. And the head of the armed forces who happens to be born in Russia to Russian parents, but still is a [inaudible 00:18:21] of Ukraine after coming there as a young man.
And I think this sort of idea of Ukraine is very alien to Putin's very Soviet way of thinking and his ideas about national good and nationalism. And that was a mistake, and I think the same mistake was made in the West, because again, Ukraine was not really studied, not really known, and people still clung to these old ideas that became outmoded very quickly. And Russia, I think particularly as a state, has always had a blind spot by Ukraine, because if you think that they are the same as us, there is no need to study them. And so somebody was telling me the other day that Russia has more specialists in Swahili than in the Ukrainian, just because nations that are far away and recognized to be alien have the expertise, but nobody wanted to make a career out of studying a country that they didn't think really exists. And that was one of the reasons for this fatal misunderstanding and miscalculation once the invasion began.
Aaron MacLean:
You spent most of 2022, or at least a good chunk of 2022, moving around the battlefield, seeing different fights, places like Kharkiv, Kherson, Mariupol, all places you talk about in the book. Give us some impressions. What sticks with you in terms of your on-the-ground experience of the war as the shock of the initial invasion turned to the pendulum swinging really strongly against Russia that year? What are the experiences that most stick with you?
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Yeah, well, in the very beginning it was really touch and go. I mean, if you remember, the entire Russian war plan was pivoted. It was premised. The entire Russian war plan was premised in the idea of Russian forces, Russian airborne troops doing a helicopter assault on the airfield of Kostroma outside of Kiev, securing it, and then landing a whole bunch of troop carriers with their armored vehicles, then just drive several brigades into Kiev. And that almost happened. The reason it didn't happen is because the one national guard battalion that was defending the airfield was told that the Russian attack was imminent, and so they dispersed from the barracks. And an hour later, a Russian missile hit the barracks and would've killed pretty much everyone there. And so if these troops, a couple of hundred young men, mostly conscripts, were not there to shoot down some of the helicopters, to slow the advance and buy precious time for Ukrainian artillery, and then for airborne troops to arrive in the area and make the landing strip unusable, who knows what would've happened to Kiev.
I mean, the Russian troops could have entered Kiev on the first day, but obviously Russia didn't have plan B. And in coming days, it was striking to watch how much self-confidence the Ukrainians suddenly gained, because after the first few skirmishes, after being able to destroy the slow and prepared Russian tank and armor columns that were moving on paved roads because the fields were too soft because it was uncharacteristically warm and the snows had melted, and after all these images of burning Russian armor started spreading, suddenly they realized, oh, well, you know what? Look, we can actually fight these guys. They're not that great and they're not invincible. And obviously over time the Russians learned, Ukrainians also learned. There was a cycle of adaptation that goes on until now, as new weapon systems are introduced very slowly, as Russians find ways of dealing with it. In the meantime, lots of people get killed. The level of casualties on both sides is incomparable to any conflicts in the past generation or two, certainly not by a military like the US military probably since Korea.
Aaron MacLean:
The national unity you speak of, the resilience in the face of the Russian invasion is there for everyone to see, but you do address in the book, and it's obviously an issue, this question of those who stay and those who go in the fight. It's always jarring to me to see that the draft age in Ukraine is as high as it is, it's just different from my experience of the American military. And I know there's this debate right now, and perhaps it's actually been resolved, about lowering it. You can bring us up to date on that. If there are chinks in the armor here of national unity, where are they? What is the rationale behind young men in their late teens and early twenties not being drafted, which to me would seem like a first step, especially as things move into the obviously attritional phase that they're in. Tell us about that side of the story.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Yeah, obviously not everyone rallied for the cause. And there were traitors, especially in the south, where a lot of the local of official, including the former mayor of Kherson, had which sides to work with the Russians. Surprise is that it didn't happen in so many other places, because the Russians did have an extensive network of influence, agents and people that were on the payroll. They spent 30 years cultivating this. And sadly on D-Day, it truly turned out to be a dud except a few places. But on a system level, they couldn't count on that, and they didn't have much intelligence to go on once the war began. Now, as for the question of the draft, there is a bit of confusion because Ukraine has a draft, a national service, and so people are eligible for the draft until 27 under legislation that was just changed. And then you have the mobilization.
So once the war began, the draft, as it is, was suspended and there were still draftees in the military in the national guard. The guys fighting in Kostroma were draftees that were 19, 20 years old. And then the adults, people over 27, were mobilized as part of the war effort. And the reason for that is that, well, first of all, Ukraine doesn't have that many people in that age bracket, because this is the children of the '90s, which were in a very difficult period across former Eastern Soviet Union, across Eastern Europe. Economically, it's the most difficult times since World War II probably. So the birth rates are very low at the time. And second is that once Ukraine tried to form all those new brigades, what they need is people who had experience. So if you want to find people who know how to drive a tank, fire a Howitzer, you probably need to find someone who served in the Soviet army and learned how to do this during the two-year or three-year service in the Soviet military.
And that's why so many of the people who were recruited initially and later on were in the 40s and their 50s, sometimes in their 60s. And there was also a psychological issue, I think, because the idea was that this is an existential war. The Russians are trying to extinguish Ukraine's future as a country, and so it's better to spare the young who have yet to have children who have yet to raise families so at least the nation physically will not be extinguished. That was also quite a powerful argument, because I've heard it from lots of people, not saying people in their 50s saying, "I want to go and fight because I don't want my son to go and fight." And does it work? Well, it's an issue. Obviously if you're in the infantry, you need to be fit. And not a lot of people in Ukraine in their 50s are very fit.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, not just fit. I mean, there's something about youth. I mean, there's a reason why in the United States, I don't think it's just force of habit that the Marine Corps is a young service and that it is designed to turn over. It's designed to only retain a few Marines for long careers. Most Marines come through, spend a few years, and then go back out into the world, become citizens, go on with the rest of their lives. There's something about young men and the tasks of ground combat that to me naturally seems to go together, which was why to me this seems surprising that I take the argument you just laid out. You've seen a lot of war in various places, perhaps especially Afghanistan. What is happening on the battlefield that seems to you to be something new under the sun? How is war evolving in iterative fashion on the battlefields of Ukraine?
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Well, I think first of all, the war, even as it began in Ukraine, is incomparable to Iraq and Afghanistan just by the sheer scale of violence that's been inflicted. And obviously in Afghanistan and Iraq, I didn't have to worry about the other guys having Air Force cruise missiles or long-range artillery. I think the risks were much more manageable. At least you had the illusion of being able to manage them. The violence was on a much smaller scale. Now, I think what people are missing is also how much war has evolved in this two years and a few months now in Ukraine. The fact that drone warfare is now part of the doctrine on every level from squads all the way to brigades, and drones have become basically a form of artillery, visual artillery, where they have first-person view drones and the bigger kamikaze drones, they have become obviously a crucial ISR platform on all levels and how it's all integrated now on both sides in Russia and Ukraine, but more in Ukraine because of Starlink, because now it's every level down to platoon or squad.
They have their tablets in which it's kind of like an Uber for information for artillery, but people can pick and they can see the drone feeds from the area. If you're an artillery unit in the area, you can just tap in there and say, "Okay, well, I see a target. Permission to engage?" "Yes." So it's all something I have not seen in the US military. And I think the US military has maybe a lot of things to teach the Ukrainians, and obviously the Ukrainians have been going through training in Germany and other places, but also I think it has a tremendous amount to learn now because Russia and Ukraine are the only two countries with massive experience in this modern warfare that the US hasn't really engaged in since, I guess the near peer adversary since I would say Korea or maybe even before that.
Aaron MacLean:
And the superficial impression that I have from afar is that the precision that the proliferation of drones and the proliferation of sensors, many which are on drones, that precision has contributed to positional warfare coming back.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Oh, for sure.
Aaron MacLean:
I mean, we're back in a war that looks a lot more like France in 1916 than much that has happened between then and now. First of all, is that accurate? Second of all, is that going to be the outcome for the foreseeable future? Is there something that's going to break one of the two sides out of that?
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Well, it's hard to predict the future.
Aaron MacLean:
Unfair question. I'm in the habit. I ask a lot of unfair questions.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
No, I'll try to speculate. I'll address the first part of it. I think you're right about the proliferation of sensors and precision, cheap precision, because you know why.
Aaron MacLean:
Right.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
And a cheapy drone that costs $300 to make, $300, and it's one-third of the price of an artillery shell. Sorry, it's one-tenth of the price of an artillery shell that is not precise. And again, it could take out the tank that is worth millions of dollars, and it's happening every day in the battlefield on both sides. And so what we're seeing now is that the doctrine of combined armors maneuver, combined warfare is almost impossible because any attempt to amass armor, people gets discovered within minutes and they get destroyed within minutes. And we see proof of this every day. There are videos every day of the Russian columns trying to advance, and they just get taken out like sitting ducks.
And the same was happening with the Ukrainian columns trying to advance to the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive last year, last fall. And so what is the way out of it? Well, it depends how and when each of the sides learns how to deal with the drones, electronic warfare, other countermeasures. It's constantly evolving. The things that worked in the battlefield three months ago no longer work there. That's when the US-supplied drones were sent to Ukraine initially, the Switchblades that turned out to be useless because the Russians learned how to jam frequencies right away. And the Ukrainian military industries are now almost exclusively focused on how to make all these different kinds of drones, from the ones that can fly a thousand miles, hits Russian airfield, Russian refinery, to the tiny ones that every squad has.
Aaron MacLean:
You talk about rendering Switchblades useless because of jamming. Talk us through, if you would, the sort of cat and mouse game of countermeasures. What have you seen, what have been the themes there? What has been evolved? What has evolved in terms of counter-drone techniques on either side?
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Not just counter-drone, HAMMERs. HAMMERs was extremely efficient in the beginning, but the Russians learned how to play with GPS and rendered them a lot less precise. Same with the JDAMs, same with the Excalibur rounds, precision artillery rounds. I've been talking to Ukraine artillery guys that were saying we just can't use them anymore because the Russians have learned how to deal with that. And the problem with that is that all of these capabilities were introduced in very small capacities over a slow period of time that gave the Russians the opportunity to learn how to offset them. And that has been the feature of US assistant throughout the war.
A Ukrainian general was telling me that a very good analogy I think is we had a fire in Ukraine and we needed a bucket of water, and yes, we get enough water to fill a bucket, tens of billions of dollars of American aid, but it came in coffee cups, tiny coffee cups over the course of two years. And time matters. I mean, we see it now. The fact that the Ukrainians are outgunned once again, don't have the ammo, that was ground as a result of the rate at which the assistance is coming or not coming.
Aaron MacLean:
So it's just fair to say, just sticking with the tactical question for a second, because I'm kind of fascinated by it, and I haven't seen it with my own eyes, so I'm genuinely interested in these reports, so as a general rule when you're talking about these UAVs or guided munitions of any kind, it seems like, it's electronic warfare measures on the other side that are the most potent countermeasures. Would that be fair?
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Well, it is one of the things. Think about the artillery countermeasures. It also disables your own side. It's very hard to make it targeted. What also works for the Ukrainians when they fight against the Shahed drones, which the Iranian made drones that have been very effective at the beginning, still quite effective in destroying infrastructure targets with pretty big payloads, is just good old Maxim guns from the 19th century. They pair the two of them, have a guy with the night vision goggles, sorry, with the thermal goggles, and the thermals allow you to target it. And that seems to be working. I've seen positions, they sit on the top of high rises in Kiev, and these guys shoot them down every day or every few days. So there is no one solution. There's whole array of things that people have to do, especially as technology evolves on both sides. The Russians have been not very successful in stopping Ukrainian drones coming after their refineries and other economic targets.
Aaron MacLean:
Right. And then I guess the lowest tech solution I've seen at the very tactical level where you're talking about these little squad platoon-controlled suicide drones, it's just netting, just having netting up around your position is-
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Yeah, but it's also about the skill of the pilots. So some of them just fly under the net. There are also ways of blow up the net and go out of the net. So it's constantly evolving. But having spent time with the operational drones, what surprised me is how much reach they can get and how literally the Ukrainian countermeasures work in many cases. I've seen that by 20, 30 kilometers behind Russian lines unobstructed and being able to do things. Obviously GPS is all blocked, so you have to know how to do it. There's more and more use of artificial intelligence for targeting and for navigation. So the best brains of Ukraine are working on this, and in Russia.
Aaron MacLean:
You made reference to, you quote this very compelling analogy of we got enough water to put out the fire, but it came in tiny coffee cups. Give your own assessment of the Biden administration's support for Ukraine, such as it is, where it's been strong, where it's been weak, where you think things stand today.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Well, in the very beginning, the administration closed the embassy, walked away, gave Ukraine 90 Javelins, nine, zero, against thousands and thousands of tanks and fighting vehicles that raided the borders and basically said, "Good luck, have an insurgency Afghan style. We'll see what you reach after 20 years." Ukraine was written off. The Ukrainian foreign minister told me that when he went to the White House two days before the war began, he felt warm of handshakes from President Biden and the others, but it felt to him like he was basically being given a diagnosis of incurable stage four cancer. It was farewell for him and for the country. Then after Ukraine surprised everyone by beating back the Russians around Kiev in the first month of the war, then we changed and very reluctantly American weapons supplies began. And throughout this process, the overriding priority was not to cross the Russian red lines.
And President Putin made a very explicit threat on the morning of the invasion saying, "If you dare to interfere with my special material operation, you will see the consequences like you've never seen before." And so unfortunately, what has happened over these two years is that Putin didn't stop Western, he throttled it to levels and to speeds that allowed him to regroup, reconstitute, and now to fight back and launch this new offensive. He still has the same goals in the beginning of the war. He still wants to get Kiev, he still wants to get Odessa, Kharkiv, and extinguish Ukrainian statehood.,
Aaron MacLean:
So I attended the Halifax International Security Forum in the fall of 2022, and it was a really striking scene because at this point it was sort of peak, maybe slightly past peak, but near peak optimism about the state of the war. This is a period you cover in your book, and being slightly unfair, but only slightly, I would describe the spirit of the conference, which of course for anyone who doesn't know this is sort of the Munich Security Conference but without the bad guys, no Russians or Chinese, et cetera, invited. This is sort of the world's democracies/countries that are basically friendly to the world's democracies.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
And the Russian opposition.
Aaron MacLean:
And the Russian opposition, sure, convening to talk about security of the free world. And the spirit of the convening was very disorienting to me. It was Putin tried to take Kiev and he failed. So basically we're good, we're good. It turns out the arc of history continues to bend towards justice. I'm being unfair, but I was struck at the time at the optimism of things, even though the war was still raging and the prospects for its long-term resolution were murky at best. And then sometime in 2023, maybe earlier, you could probably pinpoint it better than I, the pendulum swung back and this kind of grimness set in almost universally.
It seems to me that the White House things, maybe they were always grim, but everyone sort of turned grim about the prospect of Ukrainian victory at some point in 2023, as we settled into what was clearly going to be a long attritional struggle and people had to wrestle with a kind of obvious concern that in these long attritional struggles, the country that has more that can be attrited is probably in a significant place of advantage. Where are you now, sitting here in April of 2024? What is your sense of things to come? What kind of resolutions do you think are within the realm of possibility? Just help us understand the possible futures that could manifest themselves.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Yeah, I mean, Jake Sullivan, when he came to Kiev just a few weeks ago also said Putin has already failed and patted himself on the back, and much to the horror of the Ukrainians or many Europeans, I would say. I think what we're seeing now is this really interesting split between the US and much of Europe. The Biden administration was sort of rallying everyone around in the beginning of the war. And many in Europe, especially France and Germany, were sort of looking for a way to negotiate it away. Now that US funding has dried up because of the Republican leadership in the house, and the administration doesn't seem to be doing much about it, arguably there are lots of other things they can do by executive power that they're not doing, and just sort of having this alibi of what Matt Johnson is doing in the house.
To America, it's understandable, war is far away. Ukraine is a political issue now, but it's also not seen by anybody on either side of the aisle as something that affects the security of the American homeland, and Ukrainians are sort of abstract. There's not a lot of Ukrainian refugees in America. Lots of people have never met a Ukrainian. In Europe, it's completely different. First of all, it's affected every country. Everybody knows Ukrainians, everybody knows somebody who hosts Ukrainians. There are millions of Ukrainians working in Europe, mostly women, young children. And the threat to members of the European Union, threat to members of NATO is perceived as actually a real possibility in the next few years. The invasion of Poland, the invasion of Estonia is no longer considered unthinkable, and so people like President Macron of France now say that the war in Ukraine is existential for the security of the European Union.
And you have a lot of words, but you also have action. The Germans have started ramping up defense production, and it will probably be enough to cover Ukraine's needs next year, but not right now. So we are now in this weird time where Ukraine is at its weakest because American support has ceased. European capacity is not there to make up for that, and Putin is pressing ahead trying to get as much as he can. So far, he hasn't been able to get that much, despite all his advantage in ammunition, which is 10 to one, probably, he could take one city so far, Avdiivka, which is a city of 30,000 people before the war, and lost tens of thousands of soldiers to do it. More than a thousand pieces of armored equipment, tanks, APCs, Howitzers.
And so there'll be a fight, there will be an attrition war. Is Russia really in a better position for an attritional fight as long as Western support continues? Not necessarily. There is one critical bottleneck there. Equipment. For every tank, APC, Howitzer, MLRS that Russia makes or refurbishes from its Soviet-age reserves, it loses two or three in the battlefield. And unlike Ukraine, it has nowhere else to get them from, nobody's going to send tanks to Russia. And so at some point in two, three years, they will just not be able to continue this pace or at all. And that's why while the short-term attrition prospects are terrible for Ukraine, over the longer term, especially as Europe is finally getting serious, it's actually not so bad. So the question is, which society will crack first from within? I think this is the real question. Like in World War I, it will not be won in the battlefield. It will be won in the capitals in the public mindset of the societies.
And again, it's really hard to say. Russia society famously, as the CIA likes to say, is hard but brittle, so looks invincible but actually, as we have seen last year with the precursion uprising, could crack at any time. And in Ukraine, because of the war, because of politics has been kind of suspended for now, it's also however we say. Nobody's openly saying, "Let's talk to Russia." Nobody's openly saying, "Let's surrender part of territory." In part because any politician who says that knows that they will face a massive backlash, but some people in the kitchens are saying that. And so measuring that is extremely difficult. How long will Ukraine's fighting spirit last?
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah, that's a totally fair point. And these things are so fluid and contingent that anytime somebody says something kind of like I did, make a blanket statement about who does better in attrition, or the thing that I hear that always rubs me the wrong way is this Russian pattern of warfare where things go badly at first and then they knuckle down and they overcome is like, well, that's true, I guess, unless it's 1917.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Exactly.
Aaron MacLean:
It collapsed pretty quickly after-
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Or 1905.
Aaron MacLean:
Indeed. Yeah, yeah.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
There's lots of wars that Russia has lost. And the war they launched against Finland in 1940, it was not a very successful war. Russia had nearly a million troops invading Finland, which had fewer than four million people at the time.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah. Last question for you. How do you assess the prospects of a second Trump administration affecting the war?
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Well, it's very hard to predict what Trump will do. He's saying he have a peace plan, but he also said, "If Putin doesn't accept my peace plan, I'll double down on aid for Ukraine." So Ukrainians are obviously afraid. They're also trying to work very hard with the Republican Party and with Trump himself to reach out across the aisle. And for Ukraine, it's a necessity to make people understand that Russia should not be a partisan issue. It's an issue of national security around the West. It's not something that only Democrats should care about.
I think the European governments are really, really, really worried. I've been talking to a lot of officials, and that's why people are even now talking about nuclear deterrent. Can France replace the US and provide nuclear umbrella to the rest of NATO? But I think the biggest question is what Putin thinks, because I mean, Trump may not withdraw from NATO. Trump may actually end up helping Ukraine, what they're always going to do. But if Putin thinks that Trump is going to give him an opening to do things, if Putin the Trump will allow him to take more risks and make more inconsiderate, ill-thought, very risky decisions like the original invasion of Ukraine, maybe he'll do it. And that's what freaks out people in Ukraine, and that's what freaks out even more people in the Baltic States, in Poland, even in Germany.
Aaron MacLean:
I should also say, in addition to your book, you had an excellent essay on extended deterrence in the journal. Was it just last week? This past week I read it.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Yeah.
Aaron MacLean:
Which readers should check out in addition to Yaroslav Trofimov's book, Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence. It's been a really fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for making the time, and good luck with the book.
Yaroslav Trofimov:
Thank you. Thank you. It'd be great.
Aaron MacLean:
This is a Nebulous Media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.
Cover Image: A Russia-backed rebel armored fighting vehicles convoy near Donetsk, Eastern Ukraine, May 30, 2015. A stencil on the front armor panel reads "С нами Бог" - "God is with us". Author: Mstyslav Chernov