Bulwark Takes - Chinese Soldiers Captured in Ukraine and The Future of Warfare | WTF 2.0 with Tim Mak

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

JVL is joined by Tim Mak of The Counteroffensive to discuss their reporting on the Chinese nationals captured on the battlefield by Ukraine, the use of drones in their war with Russia, the Trump administrations turn away from European allies and towards Russia and much more. Follow Tim Mak and The Counteroffensive on Susbtack.

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And just like what, a couple hours ago? Right, that's right, that there are two Chinese prisoners of war now in custody, in the custody of Ukrainian secret services, the SBU. the ways in which the Chinese are trying to assert themselves much more internationally, given all the kerfuffle that the Trump administration has created as a result of these totally unnecessary trade wars. But whether you're a friend or whether you're a foe, a lot of people are looking at the United States as an unreliable partner. China is trying to take advantage of that. Now, I think there are a lot of people who would say that China is not a reliable, and it's certainly less reliable than even a very unreliable Trump administration. But the Chinese have sought to take advantage of this moment in time by doing things like reportedly proposing to be a part of any sort of peacekeeping mission in a negotiated outcome in the Ukraine-Russia war.

So the events that were revealed today, that is the, that the Ukrainians have two Chinese nationals as prisoners of war, it really undercuts this effort by the Chinese to say, hey, we can be neutral arbiters. We can come in and be peacekeepers, even as they're trying to assert themselves much more assertively because of a vacuum left by American leadership. So what's going to happen here? You report that the Ukrainians are basically reaching out to the Chinese foreign ministry and saying, what's the story? Has there been any movement? Have you gotten any just in the hours since you published?

Any more details? This is very new. A couple of things. I do a lot of coverage of Ukrainian defense technology. I think it's really, really interesting because of battlefield integration and some of the most interesting, innovative technologies that are coming off the front lines are going to be so important to the way we think about war in the future. And so I pay a lot of attention to drone technologies and electronic warfare and all those things like that. And there's a big kind of concern in Ukraine and across Europe and in the United States too about this whole idea of a Chinese supply chain, right? Chinese components

with vulnerabilities in them that might weaken any efforts by the West, the United States, Ukraine, should the Chinese want to flip a switch. The thing is that the Zelensky administration has been very reluctant to push to alternatives like the Taiwanese for components, because they do still think in the back of their minds, there might be some hope for China as a partner, as someone to put pressure on the Russians. And so they've been fairly, you know, they've been using the kid gloves with China for a long time, despite very obvious concerns about the Chinese role in providing Russia with components for military weapons and other aid that probably leads to the death of Ukrainians across the country. Now this news comes out and it looks like Zelensky is really pushing back in a

very dramatic way because he didn't just say that, hey, there are these two prisoners of war. He also said, okay, we believe that there are more. They're unlikely to be the only ones. So what is going on here? Was this officially sanctioned? Was this just a series of Chinese nationals that became mercenaries in the Russian military? They demanded, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded that a top Chinese diplomat appear before them today to explain the latest situation. And that's the latest we have on what's happening. But it could really mark a moment where Chinese-Ukrainian relations take a dramatic turn. Yeah.

It seems pretty important to me, honestly. I just wrote today about a report which I saw over the weekend the North Korean government to fight on Russia's behalf. It is almost, I just wrote this a minute ago, almost cartoonishly evil. It doesn't sound like real life. novel where the North Korean government sends these people over to Russia to fight at Russia's direction. It then seems to sequester the families of these men and tell them that if they are captured alive, their families will be executed. And again's it sounds like something that isn't real it's so evil uh and but one of the things that was interesting to me is that the north koreans their troops started out really as just meat storm which is one of the things that uh i guess the ukrainians came up with that based on how russians would use prisoners when they would just send them in wave attacks um

yeah but that the north koreans have become much more elite and this speaks to your based on how Russians would use prisoners when they would just send them in wave attacks. Yeah. But that the North Koreans have become much more elite. And this speaks to your point about the evolution of warfare, and that all the military affairs guys I talk to say the same thing, which is that the Russo-Ukrainian War is an absolute watershed in warfighting and the art of war and that decades of progress are being made you know in in the space of like 36 months here in terms of how militaries are going to approach approach warfighting um is it possible that one of the things north korea is getting out of this is battle fluid experience to help like i mean yeah is that is that a absolutely, is that a thing? Absolutely.

One of the major benefits, and this is all public and publicly reported and verifiable, that one of the major things that North Korea is getting for this in exchange for providing humans for these meat assaults you referred to

is missile technology, other kinds of drone technology help, and then battle field experience. They're getting plenty of data about it. The thing is that the nature of warfare has dramatically changed in ways that if you're not paying super, super close attention, you might not notice. But it all comes down to the economics of warfare. If you can use a $1,500 drone and you can destroy a $3 million armored vehicle, the math doesn't make any sense at all anymore to start to produce on mass $3 million vehicles, right? It dramatically has shifted the power away from the complex and the expensive and the sophisticated towards the cheap and the easily

producible and the attritable, that is the kamikaze kind of drones. And so the nature of war itself has very dramatically changed. And so, you know, I look at what's happening here in Ukraine, and I see at a certain point, I was thinking about a bifurcation of world trade, right? That we see Russia and China and North Korea and Iran ganging up here. We talk about the baddies, right? These folks are very obviously the baddies. But more recently, with the Trump administration's move, you see it as a sort of kind of like the world is splitting into three, not into two. That the Trump administration, having seen the coalescing of this evil, I think it's fair to say, this evil that's brought by these autocracies, which have killed many, many people.

In Ukraine, where I am alone, have killed tens of thousands of people and wounded many tens of thousands more. The United States has decided to declare war in a trade sense on friend and foe alike. And by alienating the rest of the free world, it's created a trifurcation, if we can call it that, or it's created kind of three different coalitions around the world in ways that reduce all of our joint prosperity,

in ways that reduce all of our joint security at what is already a very dangerous time. You know, Tim, that might actually be the optimistic take. I had thought that Trump's election would bring into being a trifurcation. I worry that it's a bifurcation in that America has actually switched sides. It is now. I mean, we are now imposing 10% tariffs on Ukrainian goods, but 0% tariffs on Russian goods. I mean, that sounds like something you do when you see Russia as your ally. Not as a third party, but as a, like, yeah, we're basically on Russia's side.

We're going to get to the U.S. in a minute. I don't want to—the U.S. is important. It's vitally important, and it's important to our audience. But I also don't want to, like, this isn't about us. This is about Ukraine. Can you talk a little bit about—you started this, but I just want more—on the evolution of drone warfare and the extent to which it is supplanting artillery and the economics i mean i i saw a report somewhere that like 80 of battlefield casualties now are being driven by drones um i don't know if that's true or not it's in the near times but you know like these things

are hard to account for uh so what what is the what is that looking like? And this seems to be like mastering drone technology seems to be like mastering combined arms 40 years ago in terms of a thing which is absolutely critical to succeed as a first-ranked military force. You know, it used to be able to, you have to be able to do sea and land together and air. able to you have to be able to do sea and land together and air and now you have to be able to use drones um is that what does that look like i want to i want to like walk you through an anecdote so we broke we did the first ever story talking about combined arms we did the first ever story that laid out the full background of the first combined arms all-drone morning hours, dozens of land drones and aerial drones working together with no troops on the ground attacked an entrenched Russian position along a tree line in the Kharkiv region. And so this is a combination of surveillance drones and kamikaze aerial drones. There was even a flying drone with a rifle mounted on it, and this is combined with ground drones that work to do mining and demining as well as kamikaze efforts and mounted machine gun turrets on these drones. It was originally expected to fail but ultimately pushed the Russians out of their entrenched position because, as intercepted Russian communications showed, they were so confused that included both aerial and ground drones and then humans came in afterwards to occupy the position. happening in ukraine is not just a war but it's also a laboratory for the future nature of warfare

um that we're looking and realizing that war when it comes to near pure conflicts that is two countries that have similar capabilities to one another that it's going to be much much more about innovation and creating new types of technologies to wage war than merely to just produce things and then fight, right? So the United States over the global war on terror got very, very used to this idea of air superiority, controlling the skies, and got very used to this idea of total technological dominance against our adversary. That's not the case here in Ukraine, where there are extremely smart people innovating and creating things.

And what you see there is that in a near-peer conflict, both sides are constantly trying to climb up this ladder of innovation. And things that were super useful yesterday or a few weeks ago, tomorrow will be neutralized by the next invention. So over the last few years, we've had developments like just the use of commercial drones to the use of what are called FPV or first-person view drones. And then we have the deployment of electronic warfare to try to neutralize the usefulness of those drones and as a as a consequence of that we have drones that are that are um that are launched from uh from places with long 20 kilometer long fiber optic cables right so it can't be just right yeah it can't can't be disrupted by electron it's um and then from that we're seeing all sorts of really, really interesting creation of automated software in which drones cannot be blocked with electronic warfare because they're acting relatively autonomously. Autonomously, right? Yeah.

Right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I'm going into all of this to say, I worry that the United States is in a very poor position to to fight the next war, because we're still just so, so addicted to these extremely expensive, extremely complex, extremely large things, when we can see that if there is going to be a near-pure conflict, what you really want is to be able to produce a lot of something like a drone. So in the same way that we change cavalry from horses to helicopters, we need to change artillery to drone warfare. But if you look at the units in the American military, and I'm a former US Army medic and soldier, I'm not seeing a lot of units conducting a lot of training with drones on a regular basis. You see some special operations forces and things like

that doing that, but not your average units. And pretty much every unit in ukraine is uh is using drones and has a complement of people that's very proficient in drone warfare i worry we're falling behind the curve here yeah i mean i just assume we are and this this goes to in america so much of what we do is driven by procurement and so you know it's it's the services fighting against each other for budget pie and so uh you know like i don't like are we gonna do a sixth generation fighter plane is that like you know are we gonna spend 15 years and the the i don't know 20 billion dollars it would take to move up to the sixth generation fighter when well maybe the future is a billion cheap drones in the air, right, as a swarm? Like, I don't know. But it seems like that is where our armed services want to go,

because that's the administrative priorities, right? Well, again, this all comes down, in my view, to cost and effectiveness, right? So if you look at, so the F-16 is something that the Ukrainians have asked for from its Western allies for a long time. But if you ask a frontline commander, would you prefer one F-16 or 50,000 drones? And by the way, the F-16 takes a year to train a pilot up on, to, you know, minimum efficiency. And the drones, by the way, anyone who's ever played a video game can teach them in a weekend to operate a drone. Which one do you want? Do you want the F-16 or do you want 50,000 drones?

I'm struggling to think of a lot of commanders that would say we want the F-16. And by the way, we're willing to wait a year. And so what does that tell you about the changing nature of technology and its relationship to warfare? These things are cheap. They are easy to use, easy to learn. You can produce a ton of them. And they cause an immense amount of damage on the adversary. That's the real breakthrough here in technology in the Russo-Ukrainian war.

So let's talk a little bit about, God help us, America. I am still not over the meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office here, which is one of the most shameful moments in my lifetimes in America. Are Ukrainians over it? Do they, I mean, did they look at that with as much horror and disgust as I felt? Far more. Do they, like, not even care because they have, like, we're fighting a war. What the fuck, you know? On the one hand, on the other hand, right? Like, you know, you talk to Ukrainians about their history, and every chapter opens, every chapter in their history opens with, and then it got worse, right? Like the Ukrainian personality is very stoic, partly because of the need to keep a straight face and not kind of emote during the Soviet era and threats to the secret police. But also, it's

kind of in the nature of Ukrainians in general to have a stiff upper left. And so when it comes to what happened with the Oval Office, I think there was a tremendous amount of betrayal. And I don't think it's been, you know, I don't think it's been transmitted to Americans or Western readers, just how deep the feeling of betrayal, not only in Ukraine, but all across Europe. I mean, these terrorists are just the latest blow in what's been a months-long fiasco in which the United States has demonstrated repeatedly and offended its total lack of interest in Europe and repeated disrespect of Europe as a continent or a partner. Hostility too.

Tim, you read the internal slacks, right? Where the secretary of defense is talking about how he finds them loathsome. And so, I mean, it's, it really, it's astonishing and it does speak.

I'm sorry to interrupt you, but again, not as like America isolationism, but America switching sides is how it reads to me. Like this, this administration. It goes back to this administration prefers Putin and Russia. It goes back to your point about, hey, it's bifurcation, not trifurcation. Like we're not, but you know, the question is,

what do people in the free world, in democratic world do next? I mean, how do we stand up and actually push back? You know, I think the Ukrainians are showing in a very dramatic way what they can do. And if the Ukrainians can do it, then I'm sure your average American ought to feel some amount of responsibility and obligation to do something and push back against what is an encroachment on all of our rights. I feel very – I'm very tired, but I'm also very – I continue to be extremely motivated to write about the people in this war and how it is as it goes on. It's kind of become, you know, a central animating force in my life, you know, covering the war here in Ukraine. I remember leaving Ukraine once and was reassigned to Los Angeles and I was sitting on the beach. I love to surf.

Sitting on the beach, sunny. And I remember just thinking to myself how miserable I was not to be in Ukraine and enjoying myself and having a good time when my friends and colleagues were back in Ukraine covering the war and pushing through it. And so that was one of the reasons why you and I had that phone call, and I decided to leave my comfortable mainstream media job to go back

and take a chance and start the counteroffensive based in Kiev. And here we are. There's still so much work to do. In fact, it seems like there's more work to do now than a couple years ago. But the pushback against authoritarianism will take, will be probably a generation's worth of work. I was just going to say that. This is the generational struggle. This is great. This is our struggle. to me a little bit about what what the post-us order looks like over there just from a practical

like arms and armaments perspective so uh you had a story about uh the u.s shifting some forces in poland sort of away from the bases that are supplying ukrainians i assume this is Hegseth trying to make Ukraine's life harder. There was news yesterday, one of the German weapons companies bought a company that makes, what's the word for it? Something Seljum. It's basically gun cotton.

And so, you know, Germans are making like actual steps to rearm, which on one hand, great. On the other hand, like that makes me a little nervous historically, right? Like it's super important that Germany step into the breach. Also, it makes me want to like, you know, white knuckle. The Poles, by the way, the Polish have been very supportive of German rearmament, which indicates how dramatic the shifts have been over time. But what we're seeing – and this started with J.D. Vance's speech in Munich, has continued through the Zelensky-Trump Oval Office meeting, has pushed through this tariff situation that we're now unfortunate enough to live through. And what we're seeing is the Europeans realizing, OK, we can't rely on the United States anymore. Even if Trump is not – is done after four years and his party is voted out of office, we still can't rely on the United States anymore because the shifts back and forth, the Overton window now includes not caring about Europe, not caring about our allies in NATO.

That is a super concern for them, obviously. So as a result, you're seeing a huge amount of alarm and real money being spent on the concept of European technologicalization that is now occurring that will likely rise to more than a trillion dollars worth of spending and expenditure. And so that's a huge change in geopolitics, the idea that Europe is not going to be able to depend on the United States and will need to dramatically raise its national security spending. But what it also does is it creates an incredible amount of instability. I was doing an interview with a Canadian reporter

who's doing a podcast on the current state of tension between Canada and the United States, and the Canadians are thinking about developing, a lot of people are talking about in Canada, the prospect of developing a nuclear program. You have the same idea in Poland, and you have the same idea in Germany. Are we going to be a more safe world if the South Koreans and the Japanese develop nuclear weapons and the Poles and the Germans and the Canadians and maybe the Saudis? And then, of course, if the Saudis do it, the Qataris and so on and so forth. Are we going to have a safe – what the United States was doing in its leadership role around the world was tamping down a lot of the most militaristic instincts that countries have when they're on their own saying we got you we'll be part of these joint alliances so we can all be safer we all spend less money on our national defense and

trump's withdrawal from all of these of america alone means everyone's going to be less safe and less prosperous. And we're going to live through a terrible age of anxiety and possibly very, very possibly worse than anxiety of incredible violence in the years to come. Yeah, it's the human misery aspect of this is really it'll be a while before people start to understand. I think the rest of the world is actually ahead of Americans on this. I get the sense the rest of the world understands the implications of these things in a way that like your normal American person does not um talk to me about is europe going to be able to make up the weapons shortfall and keep basically keep the ukrainians armed enough that they have a chance at victory i mean it's just is that logistically possible in the short run like in the long run i think it's

probably pretty good chances europe is able to to get its its military industrial complex in a good way we use that phrase now yeah um moving and engaged in such a way that it can do it and it do it over the short run like the next 12 to 18 months look as trump is about to find out you can't just snap your fingers and say factories arise and think okay you know we have manufacturing capability whether it's toasters or patriot missile systems or anti-air you know anti-air defense systems right and so europe's desire to do this um their production capacity is going to dramatically lag behind their interest in doing it's going to take years it's going to take years. It's going to take years to devote to this area. Thankfully, because of what we were talking about earlier, there are ways to spend less,

but also have a huge impact on the battlefield. I know I've been talking up drones a lot. I just want to say I have no financial interest in any way in drone technology. No, it's so important. I have no drone stocks. Yeah. But, you know, there are some really innovative ways, really innovative technologies that are being developed in Ukraine that will, I hope, make up that shortfall. And what Ukrainians will tell you is that they fought without a lot of these things in the early days of the full-scale invasion, right? So there were Patriot missile systems in Kiev when the full-scale invasion started. There were no attackums.

There were no cluster munitions. They dramatically lacked the ability to use artillery in an effective way. But they still fought off the Russians in the battle for Kiev. And I think that what is maybe poorly understood in the United States is that the Ukrainians are going to fight on. I'd much rather see a future in which they're equipped to do so and a minimum number of people have to die.

But the Ukrainiansians they're you know they're not gonna just roll over and say okay we're willing to be subjugated um uh by russian control now not not after the kidnappings and the abuse and the war crimes you just won't see that yeah you know this is a if I could just bitch about the American people for a moment, there's a, the sentiment which I often seem expressed is that, well, the Ukrainians, you know, they just got to make peace. It's like the Russians kidnapped 20,000 Ukrainian children and spirited them away into the interior. And in Bukha, they were running slaughterhouses like something out of a horror movie. Imagine that this happened to America.

Do you think the American people would just accept whatever peace deal was thrown their way? No. And Ukraine is ultimately a democratic country. Like, Ukrainian people have to accept whatever the peace deal is, right? And I am sorry, but based on these atrocities that have been committed against them, and I mean, just the absolute moral abomination which they represent, let alone the promise of, like, future, this is, you know, like, oh, and if you roll over, you know, maybe Russia does this to you again. Like, it is unthinkable that the Ukrainian population would just say, yeah, okay, well,

I guess we'll do what you tell us to. I mean, that's not, it's not realistic. And Americans are not realistic about this. Sorry. It makes me angry. No, no, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm totally, I, I, I totally agree with you. And I think what the sort of Marco Rubio, JD Vance, Donald Trump perspective on this doesn't understand is that Zelensky is not putin he cannot just unilaterally right make a deal right and that he has incredible domestic pressure on him not to make a bad deal and you know the people that would be most most um against a bad deal would be the troops that are well armed and angry and would feel extremely betrayed by a deal that

puts Trump's desire to make a peace agreement ahead of Ukrainian sovereignty and the future of Ukraine. I just, you know, thinking that Trump can come in here and squeeze Zelensky into making some sort of deal within, you know, the first 30 or 90 or however many days of the Trump administration. It really misunderstands the nation of Ukraine in general and the politics of the country. Can you talk to me just briefly? I'm trying to be respectful of your time. I don't want to take up too much more of it. No, I'm happy to chat to you, JBL. The Russians and the American government seem to be bent on a policy of regime change in Ukraine and seem to believe that it is important that Zelensky be replaced as head of state. This is contrary to Ukrainian law in the middle of a war yes it is against the constitution to have elections during a period of martial law which we're currently in so what is can you just

talk to me from the is there any appetite internally for a change of government i don't i don't think so i think if, the Trump demands and the Trump bans, you know, Oval Office spat that occurred, it only drove Zelensky's popularity to new highs, right, to nearly 70%, which is unheard of in the American context. Yeah. I don't think there's a tremendous number of people who want an election right now. And they'll point out not only the legal issue, which is the constitutional prohibition on holding it during martial law, but also the incredible challenges that would be involved in making sure that refugees maintain the right to vote, making sure that people who are living in now Russian-occupied areas who are still as Ukrainian today

as the day they were occupied had the right to vote, that soldiers on the front lines had the right to vote, and that the vote could be provided in relative safety, could be carried out in relative safety. So you have the logistical challenge, the moral question of how to get the vote to Ukrainians in occupied territories.

You've got the problem of how to get foreign people who are in foreign countries to be able to vote, not even including the legal question of how to hold a vote during martial law. All of these combine to there not being a huge, huge appetite for that at this moment. I think we'll see in very quick order, should martial law end, should the war end in some way, that an election would take place. Yeah. And, you know, once that happens, I think the Brits threw Churchill out pretty fast

after the end of World War II, right? This is, you know, this is a great line about the aftermath of even successful wars is always ennui. And, you know, it isn't like that Vladimir Zelensky is perfect and, you know, should be president for forever. But you just can't do that in the middle of a war for all the logistical reasons you laid out, let alone the like the intelligence reasons about worrying about Russian influence on the elections. And also, I don't know, as a sovereign nation, you can't decide you're going to break your own constitution because the power which is invading your country demands it. Like, that's just, like, the moral hazard inherent in that. Like, just as a matter of principle, you can't agree to do that, it would seem to me.

Yeah. All right. Tim, thank you so much for this. Again, friends, if you're listening to this, please go and subscribe to The Counter-Infensive. I saw some people saying like, oh, I can't afford another sub stack. Here's the deal. If you are a subscriber to the Bulwark

and you are a Bulwark Plus member and you can't afford another subscription, cancel your Bulwark membership and give that money to Tim. Everybody should be able to afford both. I'm in perfect world, but I understand it's not like that. Tim is doing very important, courageous work, and he deserves your support. And if you've got to cut something to be able to do that, cut me. Cut the Bulwark out. Tim, thank you so much. Deeply, deeply grateful for your work.

Please keep doing it. Please stay safe. Thank you so much. Thank you. That's extraordinarily kind and I appreciate you very much. Take care, guys. Slava Ukraina.