Bulwark Takes - Putin Escalates His Cruel War Against Civilians | Command Post

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Mark Hertling and Bill Kristol discuss the war in Ukraine, including deliberate civilian targeting through winter blackouts, why U.S. disengagement is helping Putin more than any battlefield victory, and how infighting with NATO over Greenland is weakening the alliance from within. They also examine Europe’s response, the rise of the Nordic–Baltic security bloc, the global consequences of American strategic vacuums, the limits of military action in Iran, and risks around the Pentagon’s embrace of AI tools like Elon Musk's Grok.

The single best thing we could do to Kruh Putin is to help Ukraine. And this is just me as a civilian, you know, Kibbutzer speaking, how crazy it is to be not helping Ukraine and then obsessing over Greenland. But maybe am I missing? No, you're not missing a thing. It's insanity. Hey, everyone. I'm Bullwark contributor, Mark Hurtling.

I'm a retired soldier. I've got a bit of experience in military operations. And I'd like to welcome all of you to the second episode of something we're calling Command Post, which is a new edition of Bullwark Takes. Bill Crystal here, Editor at Large of the Bullwork, and I'm thrilled to be joining Mark on this second edition of Command Post. And Mark was modest. He said Mark was in charge of U.S. Army, Europe, a rather important position, and where he dealt a ton with Russia, with Ukraine, with NATO. So I thought maybe we just begin there, Mark. There's so much to talk about.

Obviously, we'll get to some other issues later. But you discussed this a little bit with Tim Miller last night on his podcast. But let's talk about Ukraine. It is this huge war that's been going for, God, it's hard to believe, isn't it, for four years, almost four years. The largest war, really, since World War II, certainly in Europe and maybe, I don't know, close in the world, almost, certainly the biggest conflict going out in the world now, conflict with the nuclear arms superpower. It's funny.

And there's so much other stuff going on that it's sort of number five in the list of issues that people talk about, you know, Venezuela, Iran and stuff. But let's talk about it for what's happening there and what its implications are. That's the thing, Bill. Ukraine and Russia conflict has almost completely fallen off the news chart with all the other things are going on, but I'm still watching it very closely. And I told Tim last night that I had a text from a good friend who's in Ukraine right now. And he was telling me, kind of giving me a situation on the ground, a sit rep, as we call it in the military. And what his emphasis was on was civilian targeting. We've been saying that Russia has been accused of over 12,000 war crimes.

but there's more to it as we get at our relationship in Europe overall. So I'd like to talk a little bit about that today and bring that back to the forefront. Yeah, let's begin with that. And then we can talk more broadly maybe about NATO and some of the Greenland and how that's affecting NATO and stuff. But what is the actual situation on the ground of Ukraine, both the civilian targeting? And obviously, I'd very much appreciate your broader perspective on, you know, where does the war stand? Yeah, well, I'll start off by just kind of summarizing. that text message I got that wasn't about lines on the map or how much ground each force is taken,

but it was about heat, light, and fear, which is an interesting thing to put in a sit-rep. Basically, to summarize, Russia hasn't gained much ground on the front line, and it hasn't consistently blacked out Ukraine across the entire width and breadth of the country, a country that's almost the size of Texas. But at the national level, Russia has adapted a new approach to drone and missile strikes. They're still conducting the mass drone waves that they've been conducting for a while to try and saturate Ukraine's defensive capabilities. But now they put ballistic missiles into this mix to punch through and hit the last mile of the energy infrastructure. So what they're targeting now, specifically, are local substations and distribution aid nodes throughout Ukraine.

So they're creating what they're calling now rolling collapse of power and heat for big population centers. And, you know, the recent reporting has described these large mixed drones ballistic missile attacks, intercontinental ballistic attacks, during the extreme cold that it, Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine are experiencing. It's, it's, I checked on my weather app today. It's five degrees in Ukraine right now. It's nine o'clock at night. And they're predicting a new Arctic blast that's expected in the next couple of days. So what that equates to is no power in the large cities.

And Kiev was knocked out completely a few nights ago. That equates to no heat, no water, no sanitation, no ability. no ability to cook food, and then it becomes not only horrid conditions, but it contributes to casualties and diseased. Yeah, we're speaking late Wednesday afternoon here, so that's why it's late evenings you say in Ukraine. We'll see what happens overnight, I suppose. We'll go up tomorrow morning with this podcast and video.

And what do you think and what are your people you're talking to in Ukraine, both in the military and civilians over there, Ukrainian? and Americans who are watching it closely, what do they think the effect of this could all be? Well, the first effect is Russia continues to lose forces because they continue to push soldiers into what they call the meat cannon or the meat grinder, as we call it. And they're suffering badly in terms of just casualty numbers. Ukraine is too. But it's Ukrainian citizens who are suffering the most because they're just experiencing this

horrid condition of a cold winter experience with no heat, no electricity. And, you know, when we take it to the higher level, it's affecting the will of the Ukrainian people. But what we're seeing in Russia is an increasing amount of, increasing number of signs that say their economy is in the toilet. It's decreasing incredibly. Declines are also. tied to the discounted crude oil. They're selling crude, from what I understand, at $25 a barrel, equivalent of $25 a barrel. But when you kind of take this together with what is happening with our distractions in the United States, we're seeing Europe step up. But a main partner that has been in existence since the beginning of the war, the United States, is not. And that will tend to make Putin

more, not less dangerous in the short run. And as a practical matter, if we're not really stepping up at all, and if you're doing maybe a little more than a lot of us thought they would, but still, it's, they don't have the capacities we have. Where does that leave Ukraine, do you think, for the next one, two, three months? Well, you know, there's, there's some other factors that are playing a role, and that's, the loan packages from the EU, $90 billion for 20, 2020, 2020, 6 through 20, 20, 6 through 27. That ain't enough. I mean, quite frankly, that's just not enough. It's a large amount,

but when you eliminate the U.S. contributions to that, it's relatively small. There are starting to be from reports I'm seeing European arguments about procurement of equipment. France is pushing to prioritize the European defense industry while others want Ukraine to retain their flexibility and go to anywhere they can get the equipment. But, you know, there are private sector campaigns in terms of money and what's being issued. There are public announcements. There was just another case of corruption inside Ukraine with another member of their parliament, which is going to be damaging for Zelensky.

But can Europe sustain the approach they're taking? I think they can, but it certainly would be helpful if the U.S. stepped into this, too. And we have the opportunity to do so. You know, there are links to this and what we're allowing to happen to the other things that the administration is doing, especially with what we're talking about in Greenland and how we're forcibly pushing our former allies to kind of reject anything the United States is doing. Let's talk about that. And it's related, as you say, since in Greenland we're threatening a NATO ally, which whereas we could be working with NATO allies to help Ukraine. And if I could just editorialize for 30 seconds, we're doing it partly to stop the Russia from doing terrible things in the Arctic,

supposedly. The single best thing we could do to Kruh Putin is to help Ukraine. I mean, that's what's so. I find that I can't even think of a good metaphor to explain, and this is just me as a civilian, you know, Kibbitzer speaking, how crazy it is to be not helping Ukraine and then obsessing over Greenland. But maybe am I missing? No, you're not missing a thing.

It's insanity. And one of the things at the very beginning of the war, when I was still working for CNN, I went on TV and listed what I thought were President Putin's strategic objectives. The first three of those strategic objectives of five had to do with what he wanted to do with Ukraine, take over the government, destroy the army, get the Black Sea fleets and all that other stuff. The fourth and fifth one had to do with further dividing NATO and further dividing the U.S. from supporting anything that was going on in Europe. Well, the first three, he has an achieve. The last two seems to be coming to fruition right now. And with President Trump continuing

to insist that the U.S. must control Greenland for security reasons, which, as you just pointed out, makes no sense whatsoever, it's triggered a sharper pushback from former allies, Denmark, that owns Greenland and a bigger concern across Europe writ large. So while Ukraine, is fighting for survival, we're fighting NATO, which is on fire from inside over Greenland. It just doesn't make any sense.

Is there any military rationale for what the administration sort of is saying about Greenland? I mean, we have a base there. I guess the Danes seem perfectly happy to, we'd be happy to have us have more bases there or something, but is there stuff that we

could or should be doing that we're not doing now because we don't own Greenland. No. And what I'll say, it's even going to put more pressure on us because truthfully, we have a limited capacity for Arctic operations. We've depended on allies to do that. And who are the two allies we've depended on? Denmark that owns Greenland and Canada that has access to the Arctic. And yet, it seems we're pushing both of those allies further away from us. I had two experiences of flying into Greenland during my military career. There used to be an air base called Tully Greenland.

It was a little place on the northeastern corner. You landed there for refueling or communication stops. And it has a terminal, or back then 20 years ago, it had a terminal with a candy machine and a coffee machine, and that was it. But we don't use that anymore because of transatlantic flights. But what they still use there is a space force base in that same tool. it's now called, I think the name of it is Pufunic or something like that. I can't pronounce the name.

And we do observations of cables coming out of Europe, you know, transatlantic cables, submarine warfare. We can use, and Denmark has said, you want more of Greenland, we'll rent it to you. You can renew your basey up there if you want to. So having the rumors that we're going to attack and occupy Greenland make no sense, not only from a pragmatic perspective, but it's also kind of putting us in the same position as Russia, invading another country with no real means or requirements other to gain more ground for a reason I don't understand. What is the strategy in doing this other than control of the Western Hemisphere writ large? Yeah, just increasing the size of the United States or something like that, or I suppose, rare earth materials when more of Greenland belts because of global warming? I don't know.

But again, there's no evidence that we couldn't get access to those in the current situation, right? Right. Exactly. You know, it's interesting. I didn't do this until recently, but I studied the history of Greenland. There are a couple of times during its history where the U.S. said, hey, let's trade an island chain somewhere for Greenland to give us more access to the North Sea.

But those were a long time ago. the last one was under the Eisenhower administration, where the military brought him a plan to expand their bases on Greenland. And Eisenhower said, why would we do that? So he was a whole lot smarter than we are today and asking the right questions. I mean, the whole point of NATO is that you don't have to do old-fashioned land acquisition, right? You have reliable allies who are happy to have you have bases on their land and do all kinds of reconnaissance and spying. and, you know, whatever, you know, military exercises from those bases and so forth. It is just kind of amazing.

How much damage is this doing? Do you really think to NATO? You've been, I think, on the slightly in the intramal work world. Some of us have been pretty hair on fire. You've been a little more grown up, I would say, come on, NATO's been around a long time, and there's a big infrastructure here, and no one's just going to walk away from it. But are you, how alarmed are you, that this really could be doing fundamental damage?

I'm increasingly alarmed. I am the eternal optimist, and I know the condition of NATO. It is a strong alliance. I was in the Nordic and the Baltic region just a few months ago. I got to talk at the Swedish Defense College, and boy, they had some great questions and really wanted to know what was going on. They're confused. They know who we are. They know what we do and what we don't do. And they're just aghast at some of the things that are occurring. But what you're seeing is actually some powerful things. I mentioned the Nord's and the Baltics. You know, they have created this consortium. They call it the Nordic Baltic 8. So it consists of the two new members, Sweden and Finland, along with Norway, Denmark, and the three Baltic countries. And they have become a powerhouse. In fact, one of the things that came out in the news the other day, reinforcing that comment was the defense minister of Sweden made a plea in an op-ed in one of their newspapers about how Sweden should pursue nuclear weapons again so they didn't have to depend on anybody else. Well, if we can get back to normal, and that's a big reach, if we can get back to normal soon,

we can counter the damage, I think, that has been done over the last couple of months. But, you know, it was interesting at the, I think I mentioned this once before, that at the, I heard reports from the Halifax Security Forum. And I think Sarah was there where there was a Canadian reporter who basically said, we can't trust the FN Americans anymore. And it's over. Well, that's one man's opinion. But I think our alliance is a whole lot stronger. And they know there's a rational approach to sort of rebuilding an act. And actually improving it based on what we've learned over the last couple of months and years. Let me say a word more about the Nord, Nord and the Nordic nations and the Baltic nations. I was in Europe a little bit in 2023 trying to just help out a little privately with some discussions with Europeans on Ukraine. And they're including Danes, who incidentally were very pro-American and very eager to their small country, obviously, but to do what they could. But I was very struck by the excitement, both of the Swedes and Finland, having just joined NATO, I think it was 23, 24.

I can't remember when they actually... 24, yeah. 24 came in, and that was a big deal, and these were advanced economies and high tech and so forth with, I guess, capable military forces. I'll let you explain that and discuss that. But it seems like at a moment of maximum opportunity, sort of opportunity, really, almost, for NATO, both in terms of its task, here we have Russia invading Ukraine, and also in terms of its capabilities, we're undercutting it.

Yeah, we most definitely are. What I'll tell you, I spent, I left Europe, I retired in 2013, and I spent a lot of time in Sweden, not so much in Finland, but also in the Baltic countries, because they're small, but they're mighty. And they, you know, Estonia has the NATO center, cyber center of excellence in their country. They are killing it in terms of cyber defense. And we, the United States could learn an awful lot from what they've done, because, of what occurred in Estonia in 2007, which most people don't know about, where the Russians came in and basically shut down all of their computer networks for over a month. And they've since hardened what they do. They have lessons to be learned about cyber. They now vote electronically.

Their financial system is protected more than you can imagine. And they basically recover. by saying what lessons did we learn when Russia shut us down for a ridiculous movement of a statue? And they are now training the rest of Europe from that center of excellence in Tallinn. But you talk about Finland and Sweden. I'll go back to them. They have completely adjusted the amount of money they're spending on defense, how they're partnering with other nations in that region around the Baltic Sea, what they're looking at because of what Russia has done in the policy,

Baltic and along the border with Finland, they realize that they're also in the crosshairs, and there's now a connective tissue between what is the new Nordic area, Nordic Baltic area, versus the proverbial old Europe linked to the proverbial New Europe in the east. And you're seeing countries like Romania and the Netherlands, Denmark, they're really doing some masterful things in terms of burden sharing and alliances. And it wasn't because President Trump forced them to pay 5% because he didn't. They did that on their own with the renewed threat from Russia. So it's once again a connection to Ukraine. Maybe one last thing on Europe. I saw someone the other day who does a lot of work with the defense and intelligence community. It was just come back from Europe.

He said, you know, we spent years trying to get the Europeans to tough it up on China. We were tougher on China earlier than they were. And actually, he said, they, you know, they've come around. I mean, it's very striking compared. He said, going to conferences five, seven, eight years ago, talking with people from the foreign and defense ministries, that they're, you know, they don't want, that they distrust China. They know that they're all kinds of things wrong with the regime and with their trade practices and so forth. But he said for the first time in his last trip there, he started to pick up from the Europeans a sentence. This fits of what you were quoting that fellow saying in Halifax, that was a Canadian, I guess, but that, you know, look, if we can't trust

the Americans, we've got to deal with someone, we have to buy things, we have to have trade relationships, we have to have even military acquisition relationships conceivably, with someone, we really don't want Russia. That, that I think they are. The Europeans are not changing their mind about that. And so maybe we need to be a little, you know, more open to China. I mean, do you worry about that a little bit, too? I do. Not only just in the continent of Europe, but also in Africa, you know, especially as the current administration didn't even mention Africa in its national security strategy. That is a signal to other countries. I mean, I don't remember who it was. I think it was Elliot Cohen that said no one reads the

national security strategy when the president puts it out. I'm not sure I agree with that, because I've seen other countries read it in detail and discuss it in their war colleges. and China is one that's reading it in detail for sure. So whenever they perceive an opening, they're going to go there. And that's what they've done in Latin America with the Belt and Road inside of Africa when we started saying we're going to pull forces out of there. And as there's been rumors by some in the Defense Department of pulling forces out of Europe, U.S. forces, they will replace them.

And that all started, by the way, in the early 2000, which was part of my time in Europe, when Secretary Rumsfeld said, hey, we've got this peace dividend from Russia. So let's take our forces in Europe from 110,000 down to 30,000, which we did over the next seven years. Well, if we want to take it beyond that 30,000, there are going to be other people that step in. I was in Georgia doing some training of forces that were going to go to support ISAF in Afghanistan, And it was at a time when President Obama announced the proverbial pivot to Asia. And I got a call from the Georgian White House, Shokashvili, wanted to talk to me because he didn't know what that meant. And it was soon after that that Russia invaded the northern part of Georgia as well and went into some other areas. So there are enemies that take advantage of any time you leave a vacuum in a space. I remember the pivot to Asia, and I remember someone here saying, some foreign policy analyst, that, you know, we can say we're pivoting to Asia,

but people in Europe see what's happening in Asia and vice versa and see what the U.S. is doing elsewhere. And so it's very hard to convince them that a pivot to Asia is not a pivot away from Europe. It's also hard to convince Putin, probably, that it's not a pivot away from Europe. It's sort of like non-intervention, the red line in Syria, you know. It's like, we thought that was about Syria. Putin, less than a year later, I think a year later, decided, well, maybe that says they're not that serious about helping Ukraine. And that was the first

invasion in 2014. That was the first step. And now we've got to pivot to South America and Latin America. And I'm sure people are reading those T-leys too. And we're already starting to see the dynamics of that if we talk about the recent news on Iran, you know, as much thunder and bluster is coming out of the administration about what we might do to help them, there's not a whole lot of forces there to do that. I mean, the entire Mediterranean fleet, the U.S. Navy, has moved off the coast of Venezuela, so there's fewer aircraft there and the news announcement on Wednesday about emptying some of the bases in Qatar of some of the airmen that are there. That's going to affect things. So these are the strategic opportunities that other countries are seeing when we start saying we're going to

move forces around the world in different places without a long-term strategy. Yeah, the world is. These parts of the world are connected. Say a word about Iran. It's been so much in the news. And as you say, just today on Wednesday, there's reports about us moving forces out of Qatar, which I take it. Some people think is a sign that we might do something and we're taking forces out of a little further from harm's way in terms of Iranian countermeasures. But do you think we are going to do something? I do. And what's the, and you wrote a good piece for us for the bulwark on this, but what's the rationale? I mean, I mean, I'm not. I loathe the Iranian regime and I have huge sympathy for the protesters, but I don't know what a few bombing missions changed things on the ground there. I don't know. Yeah, it was interesting. I was on MS Now last night with an expert on the IRGC. And I was on with another individual and we were talking about how you attempt to perhaps involve yourselves in a revolution of a very different nature. I mean, you know this. You're an expert in this area. But Iran has had periodic episodes of unrest. But it's normally about politics or theology or leadership. This one's about money. They are going broke. The people are starving. And there's everyone is involved. So when you say, how do you counter that? Well, some might say, well, you take away the ability for the IRGC and other forces to kill the protest. which they've been doing in bunches. But, you know, immediately some people's eyes will turn to, what do we target, you know, because the IRGC, unclassified accounts say they have about 200,000

soldiers. So you can't destroy all of those with just a couple of bombing missions. This is a long-term military campaign. And then you also have the Bajiz forces, which has about a half a million, more than the U.S. Army has. So you're talking about a big country with a lot of people under arms that put down any kind of revolution, and you're not going to solve that just by bombing different locations. It's got to be a whole-of-government approach with diplomacy and information and economics. And, you know, even if you pull one or two of those things out, the diplomacy piece doesn't seem to be that robust right now in terms of dealing with Iran. The information piece, Kerry Lake, is the new head of the messaging in Europe, has closed down radio-free Europe.

So any kind of information you would want to get into people in Tehran to help them along, as opposed to just saying help is on the way, which the president said a few days ago, I'm not sure what that means. What is the help that's on the way? Give us more on that particular strategy because he hasn't enunciated that. You know, contrary to the caricature of the military, always thinking that weapons. and solve everything that serious military people I've talked to over the years, very much including you, understand the importance of soft power of information, of soft, soft power, cultural, that kind of stuff, but also, let's call it in-between power, you know, information operations and so forth. And I do think, I mean, there I just, I don't know an expert on this, but it seems like the Trump

administration has cut back on a lot of that. As you say, Carrie Lake was sort of boasting almost about how she's stopping. Right. Was it stopping radio for Europe, radio, from broadcasting into Iran? Right. If you want to have, you know, a reasonable kind of regime change there, you'd think you'd want to be, we don't need to send troops to them. You'd think you'd want to have a lot of U.S. influence, perhaps, on what's happening there. One would think that there's more elements to national power than just the military. I'd tell you, Bill, I had a great lesson from my boss when I was about to take the first armored division into Iraq during the surge.

My boss came into my office, my four-star boss, and we had a long discussion at the end. He stood up and started to walk away and he said, Mark, remember, as you're going, into this environment, you can't kill your way out of it. You've got to use other methods. And that is most certainly true when you're talking about applying national power to crisis situations. Maybe close with, since we're speaking about a little more on things other than hard, hard power. Secretary Hankseth had an announcement about artificial intelligence at the Pentagon, and I didn't quite follow the details, but you know a lot about this, and obviously you followed this. And what do you make of that? Well, artificial intelligence is,

contributing to every organization, both private sector and the military. And certainly the Department of Defense needs AI to accelerate things like logistics and maintenance and planning support and intelligence triage and administrative workflows. But truthfully, Bill, I first heard the term artificial intelligence in 2007 from a special operator. And he was talking about how they were using it to improve and revolutionize their targeting processes against terrorism. and how they were using it in increasing or improving their mission planning. So the announcement by Secretary Hegzek yesterday that GROC was going to be the element of choice when right now if you go on Twitter, the main use of GROC is to take fully closed women and

put them in string bikinis. So this is an organization that doesn't have the credentials for being all that safe sound. But when you're talking about incorporating a system, one system that's managed by a guy that's suspect right now, and that's Elon Musk, across DOD, there are some, in my view, non-negotiables. Does the data and the classification control remain under someone that's understanding security clearances? Are you still using red teaming and bias error testing, which is part of use of AI. Is there human accountability? Can, you know, AI can assist decisions, but it doesn't own them. It's still someone, a human, a warm breathing human, who's

responsible for what happens. And then the last thing is there's something called vendor risk anytime you deal with, with artificial intelligence. How are they updating their models? How are they approaching their supply chains? Who's inside of their, you know, who could be an insider threat inside of their organizations. So there's also a tie-in when you say we're going to put this into the Department of Defense because then all our allies who are already a little bit suspect about intelligence sharing are saying, is my information going to go in this, what I feed the Department of Defense? And does that become part of the algorithm? And can my enemies use that against me when the U.S. uses it in their artificial intelligence?

Yikes. I'm concerned. It's all conversations been concerning, to be honest, but extremely thought-provoking and I'm really helpful, I think, in understanding these particular aspects, parts of the world, but also the interrelationships among them, which I think you've, so I really appreciate your allowing me to join you here on command post, Mark. Thanks for joining us, and I think we'll have another episode next week with likely all new topics because things are going to change. Absolutely.

Thanks, everybody, for joining us. and make sure, Bill, you can give the commercial about subscribing and all that, because I'm not savvy enough to do that with the bulwark. You should subscribe to everything on every podcast, every video. Wherever the bulwark is, you should watch it and enjoy it. Listen, watch and enjoy it. There you go.