Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Ukraine Wins

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Derek talks to The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum about Zelensky’s global appeal, the roots of Putin's lust for empire, and Ukraine’s prospects for victory. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Anne Applebaum Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joanna, do you ever wish you could definitively prove that you have the right opinions about movies? Uh, yeah, Neil, because I do have the right opinions about movies and television, right, Dave? No, because I'm more right about those things, and I demand trial by content. Oh, boy, what is trial by content? Each week, we'll take on a huge question. Each of us will bring a choice and combine with listener submissions and your votes, we will come to a decision. It's trial by content every Tuesday on Spotify, the ringer.com, wherever you're listening right now. Don't let Neil win.

Don't let Dave win. Today's episode is about how Ukraine wins. No big windup from me today. Today's guest is Anne Applebaum, Anne is the best-selling author of several books about Ukraine and Russia and authoritarianism. She is the author of several cover stories for The Atlantic Magazine about Russia and authoritarianism. Anne was on the show last winter where she told us that we should be careful about the rising threat from authoritarian, like Putin, against democracies.

Not even two months later, Vladimir Putin waged all-out war against a democratic neighbor. So I would say that's a pretty prescient call that serves as fantastic evidence that Anne is someone to pay very close attention to and to take very, very seriously when it comes to the psychological origins of this war,

the off-ramps from this war, and the prospects for Ukraine actually winning this war. in this interview and answers pretty much an outstanding question that I have about this conflict. Why did Putin invade? Why is Ukraine fighting so surprisingly hard and so surprisingly well? What is it that makes Zelensky so special not only to his countrymen, but also to the world? And how could Ukraine actually pull off an upset victory here? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Anne Applebaum, welcome back to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. I want to talk about this war, but first, I want to talk about history and psychology, specifically the history of Ukraine and the psychology of Russian imperialism. You are the author of the book, Red Famine, about the period of time in the early 1930s when nearly 4 million or more than 4 million Ukrainians died of starvation, having been deliberately deprived of food by Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what we ought to know about this period of history, the Ukrainian famine, and how that history might shape our present understanding of this crisis?

So thank you. It's a great question. If you want an explanation for why the Ukrainians are fighting as hard as they are, and also if you want an explanation for why Putin is so bothered and irritated by Ukraine, then the history of the famine helps to explain it. It's a story that actually goes pretty deep. back into history, the Russian feeling that Ukraine was a part of, was a natural part of Russia, that it was a kind of, you know, a peasant colony of Russia. But really, this feeling that Ukraine should be loyal to Russia and that if it's not loyal to Russia, that's a problem, does begin

to peak in Russia at the time of the revolution and just afterwards. At that time, Ukraine did try to create a separate state in 1918. They failed. They were defeated by the Red Army, but nevertheless, they became a kind of republic within the Soviet Union. Stalin was, however, so bothered by the strength of the Ukrainian resistance to the Bolsheviks. And then later by the Ukrainian rebellions at the time when he was Sovietizing the country when he was collectivizing agriculture, that he began to fear the Ukrainians. And there are some memos he writes in the early 1930s where he says, you know, we have to do something about Ukraine. Ukraine is a problem for us. And that's a little bit the way that Putin sees Ukraine. Putin sees,

you know, sees this language of democracy that the Ukrainians use and the adoption of democratic systems and the rule of law and the desire to be part of Europe, whether it's the European Union or NATO or any other European institutions. He sees that as a personal threat to him, that that's his, you know, they're challenging the Russian autocracy and in particular his power. And so he sees Ukraine as challenge to him. And of course, Stalin's reaction to that was this orchestrated artificial famine in which almost four million people died. Every Ukrainian knows the story of the famine. They all know how it happened. They all know that it was because of an occupation from Moscow. It wasn't a Russian occupation. It was a Soviet occupation. But it's still, it's remembered as one of the worst periods

in Ukrainian history. So if you want to understand why are Ukrainians fighting so hard, Why are they resisting Russian occupation? That's why. I mean, they are, they are afraid of that genocidal language that Putin is using, where he talks about Ukraine not being a country. It doesn't durderve to exist. It, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't, it's, it's, it's a fiction. All of that sounds echoes in their heads, and it sounds to them like the past. You know, they've heard, they've had, they've had leaders in Moscow try to wipe them out as a nation before. And so that is, that's a, it's a big part of the background to this war. Moving from the 1930s to the 2020s, what is it that Putin wants today? And how do you think

the West misunderstands what Putin wants? I mean, I don't think what Putin wants is that hard to understand. I mean, Putin wants to remain in power forever. He wants there to be no challenge to him from, from any Democratic activists in Russia. or a democratic activist in Ukraine, whom the Russians could imitate. And he wants Ukraine to be a part of Russia. He wants to reunite Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine under some joint, you know, in some joint project. And he wants, once again, for Russia to play the role that he thinks Russia should play as one of the dominant European powers with an ability to affect politics in Europe.

Remember that he spent his younger years as a KGB officer in Dresden in East Germany. And so he remembers when the Soviet Union was the occupying power in Eastern Germany. And the fall of that power and the end of that power was this great trauma for him as a young KGB officer. He's written about that and spoken about that before. And so he is looking to recreate some version of the Soviet Union with himself. as the kleptocrat as the autocrat in charge. And not only that I should say, he's been saying this and he's been telling us this for a decade. He's been organizing his society, you know, to prepare for war.

He has been arming his soldiers. He has been buying and developing new weapons. He has been preparing the propaganda. He's been, you know, told us over and over again that this is what he wants to do. Our problem was that we didn't want to hear it. We wanted Russia to be our trading partner. We wanted them to be part of the international community. We wanted them to be, you know, selling us oil and gas.

We wanted them to be taking part in the G20. We wanted them to be, you know, an ordinary post-war power. They did not want to be that. They wanted something bigger. They wanted a bigger role. Or they, I shouldn't say they. I should say Putin and the people around him. I'm not sure it's true of every Russian.

I want to read you a quote that I think very nicely dovetails with how you describe Putin's motivations and the ways in which the West might have misunderstood them. It's a quote from Timothy Snyder, who is also a writer on Ukraine and Russia on the Ezra Klein Show. He said, quote, in the case of Mr. Putin, he doesn't care about the things we think people ought to care about. He doesn't care about the Russian economy. I don't think he even cares about Russian interests, but he does care about other things, and he's been very clear about those things. He cares about how he's going to be remembered after he's dead. He cares about an image of an eternal Russia.

He cares about these things which are out of our normal field of view. But that doesn't mean, that doesn't make them either rational or irrational. It just means they are different values, end quote. I find this idea illuminating very much in line with what you've said, but also troubling, because many of our attempts to punish Putin so far have focused on things that by this account, he doesn't care as much about in terms of our trying to punish his economy, our trying to punish the ruble. It's as if you're trying to get a bully to stop attacking you and you say, well, I'll tell the teachers and get you expelled from school. And the bully's like,

so what? I don't even like school. Like, obviously in the non-metaphor world, our sanctions are also targeting his capacity to finance the war. But I wonder whether you think our provosting profound misunderstanding of Putin is a major element in how we ended up here. Yes, I do think it's a major element. In particular, you're right to focus on the economy. You know, for the last several decades, we have assumed that the purpose of politics is prosperity, that we, and we elect or don't elect political leaders based on whether their economic ideas are better. And most of our arguments, I would say, even up until the 2016 election, were about, you know, the size of the state and the, you know, health care and welfare and is it good or is it bad. And that was the stuff

of not just American, but really most European election campaigns. Starting about five years ago, we began to see different kinds of campaigns in which different issues were present that were, in which we realize that there's another sphere of human values that people care enough about. And one of them was nationalism, tribalism, and in the case of Putin, an idea about Russian greatness or about personal greatness that mattered to him more than the prosperity of Russia. So you're exactly right, that this is not a, Putin is not, his concern is not the prosperity of ordinary Russians, which was the concern, as I say, of most of our politicians. for the last several decades.

So, yes, that is true. I mean, the sanctions, as I understand them, are intended to do several things. One, you're right, they're intended to harm the Russian economy, and in that they will probably fail. They won't matter. Two, they're intended to bother particular powerful people, so particular oligarchs. I'm not sure, in that sense, I'm not sure they've gone far enough. I think there are, you know, they're making a list of the top 10,000 Russians and denying them visas to any European country or all of North America would be more effective than targeting, you know, I don't know, Abramovich or one of the others.

I think they could go farther in naming and identifying and targeting the Russians to be punished, but or to be to be banned anyway from travel. And that might make more difference than seizing people's yachts. It's very satisfying to seize people's yachts, but it's not, I don't know how effective it is. So that's the second thing. The third thing, possibly more interesting, is that the sanctions are also intended to make it very difficult for Putin to keep fighting this war. And here, I think the central bank sanctions, which have blocked him from getting his foreign reserves are quite important. And I am told that some of the export and trade sanctions will make it very, very difficult. difficult for him to continue manufacturing weapons. So, and so that is good. The only problem with

those is that those are long-term, you know, that won't hit, you know, those are, there's kind of cyclical, it'll be a big problem for him in three months if he wants to build more tanks. And they aren't immediate enough. I mean, the one sanctions that could begin to have some more immediate effect would be those on oil and gas and coal. I mean, if we, if we were not paying for their oil, gas, and coal, then they would have no hard currency. And of course, there's an enormous price that Europe would have to pay for that in particular, but I'm hoping we might be getting close to that. Let's move to talking about where exactly we stand in this war.

Russia has clearly made progress in its attempt to conquer Ukraine and move toward Kiev. It has made inroads from the south and the east. It's captured several cities, especially in the south and the east. But there are now reports that its advance has basically stalled, especially around the capital. And there are even some rumors of retreat. in some places. So I wonder, Anne, who you think is winning this war right now? Given what the Russian goals were, and we know what they were, the goal was to take Kiev in three or four days and then to advance through the country in four to six weeks, including Western Ukraine,

all the way to the Polish border, given that those were the war aims, the war is going very badly, and the Ukrainians are winning. They have prevented the assault on the capital, even the cities that the Russians have captured or destroyed, they don't fully control in the sense that they have not created successful military regimes. I mean, there's some places that we don't know much about because they're cut off now. But none of the larger cities are under full Russian control, not Marialpul, not Harkev, not Herzl. So they have not succeeded in doing really any of the basic things they said they would do. So in that sense, yes, the Ukrainians are wind. the Ukrainians have taken an extraordinary number of, you know, sorry, they've caused an extraordinary number of Russian casualties, very high, given the length of the war. They have destroyed an enormous amount of Russian equipment. I mean, the numbers are hard to, you know, the Ukrainian numbers and U.S. numbers and Russian numbers are also different. I wouldn't want to give one right now, but it's much higher than anybody expected. And so in the sense of having control of the situation and having

having momentum, I think the Ukrainians are right now winning. Yeah, it's really remarkable. There was recently, as you probably saw, a leaked report on Pravda, on a Russian propaganda site that indicated that Russia's already lost about 10,000 soldiers in this war, which is basically only lasted as of today a month. That is already two-thirds of the entire number of Russian casualties in the whole Soviet-Afghan war, which was a 10-year occupation or a 10-year conflict. that ultimately resulted, of course, in the Soviets pulling out.

So as you said, it's remarkable the degree to which Russia seems to be losing so many people and so much equipment as well. Do you have a strongly held theory about why Russia's initial thrust was so catastrophic? Like, if Putin had been planning this war for years, and if the people around Putin had been planning this war for years, why was their theory of the first, chapter of this invasion so exploded in the first few weeks. I think there are two reasons that are most important. Number one, Putin knew nothing about Ukraine. He has not been to Ukraine. He knows no Ukrainians. He's surrounded by people. I mean, this is almost a, it's almost a Shakespearean,

you know, or a kind of biblical situation. I mean, he really is an isolated aging dictator surrounded by yes men. And when he said Ukraine is a fake country and they won't fight back. because they have nothing to fight for, everybody around him nodded and said, yes, Mr. President. And nobody told him that Ukraine is a real country, that Ukrainians remember their history and their 20th century history, that they don't want to be occupied, that they feel genuinely strongly about their democracy and about their prospects for being part of Europe, and they will not allow this to happen. And he didn't have anyone telling him that. And I think that's a, it's a classic story of somebody who didn't have the right information because he didn't read the right

things and wasn't surrounded by people who were telling him the truth. I think that's one reason. People who know the Russian military situation well also tell me that a big part of the story is corruption. So the leaders of the Russian military were stealing. So they, rather than paying their troops, they were offering fictitious numbers of people who were in the field. it was pretty clear right in the first days of the war that these were not, the people who were being sent across the border were not hardened veterans or not all of them were. They were instead conscripts, some of whom didn't know where they were going or what they were fighting for. And that's an indication that the, you know, the troop numbers that Putin thought he had were fake. So somebody was giving him false numbers.

You know, we have 150,000 troops. Well, no, you have 100,000 plus 50 conscripts who've never fought in. anything and don't know why they're there. I mean, I'm making up those numbers. I don't know those exact proportions, but he was, he was lied to, I think, by his general staff, and he was lied to by the, by the, by the defense bureaucracy. And I think that is because they were making money on the side. Yeah, so it seems like he was basically surrounded by a sea of disinformation, his own disinformation and the disinformation of his military advisors. It was like, it was all yes men and con men. I think it's really remarkable,

degree to which, you know, if you look at these pictures on Twitter of Putin sitting at these 20-foot-long tables or 20-yard-long tables where he's, you know, he's miles away from his nearest advisors in these really, really bizarre rooms, it's a fantastic metaphor for his psychological situation, for his political situation. He is entirely isolated. There was no one close to him. There's no one to tell him this is the truth. You are wrong about Ukraine. You're wildly optimistic about the number of days it's going to take for us to besiege or even get to the Ukrainian capital. I think it's amazing that, like, even for someone who's sort of a casual observer of photos of Putin's situation, they are looking at a kind of perfect metaphor of his intellectual climate.

I wanted to ask you about the other protagonist of this war, which is Zelensky. I wonder what you think is his most important contribution so far. You know, people talk about his media savvy, his bravery. simply to remain in Kiev, the substance of his appeals to the West, invoking World War II, the long war against authoritarianism. What do you see as the most important contribution of Zelensky so far in this war? The most important contribution of Zelensky, and this is, he may or may not understand this, is that he ends our cultural war. In other words, we've had a cultural war in the West, particularly in the U.S., but also in many European countries for the last decade, between sort of

liberal open society on the one hand, democracy, you know, and kind of muscular nationalism on the other hand, as if those are two things that can't exist within the same society. And so now we have Zelensky, who is a muscular nationalist patriotic defender of a liberal open society. He is a Russian-speaking Jewish leader of a bilingual country. He is perfectly able to make the same kind of appeal to the Israeli Knesset as to the German Bundestag, as to the American Congress, as to the British House of Commons by appealing to all of their liberal values. And that has made him wildly popular. The idea that someone is willing, personally willing to die for democracy, for a political system that a lot of us take for granted

and don't invest in as we should and don't respect as we should, I think, has really moved people. And it works both because he's good at TV. Remember, most of the people who work for him, including his chief of staff, whom I've met, are television producers. So before he was president, he was a comedian,

but he also ran this very popular and successful television production company. And so he is surrounded by people, who understand that very well. But that's not the only reason it works. It also works because it's authentic. So it works because he really is brave and he really is staying there and his family is there. And he, you know, when when he speaks, he speaks with authority because it's true. And so, so I think he's, he's very uniquely able to appeal to a very broad spectrum of Western public opinion. That's really interesting to say that. One of the best ways

it was explained to me is that someone I saw was responding to the accusation that Zelensky is essentially running a reality show. And they said, yes, it is a reality show. And the reality is that he is in Kiev. That is the reality that matters. And so being surrounded by this phalanx of TV producers who, you know, understand audiences and understand messaging and emotional appeals, that's all very important. But what's most important in this show is the reality. He's not leaving. He's telling people he's not leaving. And he's making appeals. to the global case for liberalism from an office, from a capital that is under siege. I think that's a pretty important thing.

I want to talk about your most recent article in the Atlantic, which is run under the headline, Ukraine must win. You write, quote, the goal should not be a truce or a muddle or a decision to maintain some kind of Ukrainian resistance over the next decade or a vow to, quote, bleed Russia dry or anything else that will prolong the fighting and the instability. The goal should be a Ukrainian victory, end quote. And what does Ukrainian victory look like to you? Ukrainian victory is not hard to imagine.

Ukrainian victory means Ukraine remains a sovereign democracy. It gets to choose its own government. Zelensky for now, but at the next elections, it might be someone else. It means that it gets to have its own foreign policy. and it gets to decide to be part of Europe if it wants to be part of Europe. Around the edges, there might be some conversation,

there might be border changes, there might be promises the Ukrainians make, but that's up to the Ukrainians. You know, there might be, there could be some deal that ends the war if they want to make that deal, that's their decision. In the last few weeks,

I feel like there's been a slow, creeping realization that Russia isn't just failing its initial objective, but that Ukraine might actually win this war in a meaningful way. Why did you think it was important to call for outright Ukrainian victory here? Mainly I wrote that article because I felt like in Washington, there had been this feeling, you know, certainly up until the last week or so, that, you know, well, that this one way or another, this is going to end badly. And, okay, we might, we're talking about supporting a Ukrainian resistance for the next decade,

something like that. the idea that Ukraine might actually win, that the Russians might actually withdraw, and they might actually keep their country and keep their government is only just now beginning to dawn on people. And I wanted to drive home that point. And not only that, to make the point that it is really very much in our interests for that to happen. Let me offer a scenario, Anne, and you tell me if you would define this scenario as Ukrainian victory. So right now, Russia has clearly made inroads in the south and the east. It has captured several cities. It has destroyed several cities like Mariupil, and it has arguably increased its

holdings in these areas. If Ukraine essentially fights Russia to a standstill around Kiev, the capital, and essentially allows Russia to exert control over a little bit more area in the east and a little bit more area in the south, is that a victory that Putin could sell back home? even though it's a total miss, a total width on his initial objective to change the regime in Kiev and to even conquer the entire country of Ukraine? So I worry that allowing Putin any victory from this war will go down very badly in Ukraine, that it will be very difficult for Zelensky to sell that version of events to Ukrainians. The other piece of it to take into consideration is that is to look at,

look at what the Russians are doing in the areas that they occupy. So here's another piece of history for you. When the Soviet Union came into Eastern Europe in 1945, you know, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, the Baltic states and so on, what did they do? They decapitated the society. They arrested the leaders, the mayors, the police chiefs, the head of the local high school, intellectuals. They arrested them and they sent them to the Gulag or they killed them.

then they unleashed kind of random terror on the population so that people would be afraid. That is exactly what they're doing right now in eastern Ukraine. We don't have full information from everywhere, but we know about mayors being kidnapped. We know about people being arrested. In one case, a Crimean Tardar, who's the head of a museum, has disappeared in one of the eastern cities. So we know that that's what they're going to do. It's going to be extremely brutal and extremely ugly, just as it was in. in 1945, that seems to be the playbook. And so it's going to be very hard for Ukraine and for the

rest of the world to stand by and watch that happen. You know, really, I don't want to put any words in Zelensky's mouth and I don't want to tell the Ukrainians what to do. I can imagine that there are territorial concessions they could make in order to end the war in order for Putin to be able to go home and say, look, I got recognition of Crimea, something like that. Right. One word that's appearing in a lot of war commentary right now is off-ramp. The idea being that we have to give Putin an option that he wants to take in order for this war to end. I wonder if you agree with that off-ramp framing, like, is the best outcome here for Ukrainians, for Zelensky, for the world, nested inside of a diplomatic solution that gives Putin something that he can sell to Russia as a victory? So remember that Putin controls the entire narrative in Russia.

So he hasn't even told the Russians that this war is happening. You know, he calls it a special military operation. Russians don't know they're bombarding, you know, Harheave and Hearsan, which, by the way, are all Russian-speaking cities, 95% Russian-speaking. And this is a leader who once said he wanted to create a, you know, he talked at Ruskimir, you know, the Russian world. You know, he wanted to reunite it. So they don't know they're doing that.

And so he is still in a position where he could go back to Russia and said, well, really, it was all about. securing the borders of the territory we control in Donbos, and now we won that, and the war is over. So he can do that. I mean, I think the difficulty and the thing that lots of Western commentators find hard to accept is that the only person who can design that off-ramp, if that's what we want to call it, is Putin. So it is he who can design it and sell it to the Russians. It is not something that can be created by, you know, some Swiss negotiator or, you know,

Erdogan or whoever it is who's being the go-between or Naftali Bennett. So he would have to find a formula that he could sell to the Russians. And it would also have to be something that the Ukrainians can accept. But yes, I can imagine that as an end to the war, some version of that. There are also some people saying that right now, the best way for the United States to guarantee in the very, very short term, in the narrow short term, a win for Ukraine is for the U.S. to essentially enter the war, not just by selling arms to Ukraine, the way we helped the British in 1939, 1940, but to establish no-fly zone, to clear the skies, to engage Russia. And that obviously would mean direct hot warfare between nuclear powers, which is one reason why I think the Biden

administration seems so strongly against it. How do you feel about the U.S. or NATO directly engaging in this way? I understand why they feel that. And I'm not in the camp of people who think it's not because they're cowardly. You know, I'm in the camp of people who think that it's, it's a, it is a genuine anxiety about the use of nuclear weapons. And so I, I see why Biden doesn't want to that. If it were me, I wouldn't have said to Putin at the start, we will never intervene in Ukraine, because he should at least have been worried about that. I also think there is more we could do. I think we could do a no-fly zone over Western Ukraine. I think we could do, you know, humanitarian airlifts of the, you know, like in Berlin in the 1940s to some of the eastern cities,

I think we could be supplying them with more powerful weapons, either via proxies or straight to, you know, straight to Ukraine. I, you know, as I said, I wrote my article, you know, we should win and Ukraine must win because I want this, the conversation in Washington to turn from, you know, how do we make this the least harmful conflict possible to how do we win? And I am not a military strategist. I can't tell you, I hear a lot of we should be using this weapon or that weapon. I don't think that's my area of expertise, but I do think that if we think about it, if we think about what can be used, how can we stop the bombing campaigns, you know,

what are the anti-aircraft weapons that are necessary or the anti-missile defense systems that are needed? I think we could do more, and I think we could do a lot more. I, you know, I didn't, if we would like to go on not engaging Russians directly, you know, I see, I do understand why that is, but I also think we could, we could press it a little bit harder. I did a recent podcast episode weighing the reasons for and against a no-fly zone, both a no-fly zone over the entire country and a more limited no-fly zone. It seems to me like a potentially dangerous option in large part because of this calculation about Putin's potential to use nuclear weapons. As someone who understands Ukrainian history, Russian history, the psychology of Vladimir Putin, how do you think, how do you think about Putin's potential of using nuclear weapons in this conflict? So I think most of the Russian conversation about nuclear weapons is intended to scare us.

And by the way, they've been doing it for several years. This is not new. It's just that nobody's been paying that much attention to them. But they've been talking about nuclear weapons on Russian television. they, when they conduct their big regular military exercises, they practice the use of nuclear weapons. They've done a simulated attack on Warsaw. They've also practiced releasing a nuclear weapon, I think, into the air or into the Arctic, just to scare everybody.

So we know they've been thinking about it, and not only that, they've been telling us. That's why they do these exercises. And so that has been a long-planned tactic to prevent us from being involved in this war, or indeed any of the other wars in Georgia or elsewhere. You know, my instinct is that Putin is not suicidal. Nobody who sits at a long table, you know, 10 meters away from his defense minister because he's either scared of assassination or of COVID, you know, is keen on dying. And so my guess is that he is not suicidal and that he can be also spooked by the use of these

weapons. So, I mean, there's a delicate game here, which was always the delicate game of nuclear weapons, which was, you know, deterrence works only when you believe your opponent, or you make your opponent believe that you might use them to. And the U.S. has gone out of its way to make everyone understand that we won't use them. So it's not to baroque them. But we also need to be messaging somehow that if they do use it, there would be some kind of proportionate response. And I don't know if that's happening behind the scenes. I assume some version of it is. But we should be doing that in order to make the Russians think twice. If not Putin, then whoever gives the order to load the weapon onto the airplane. So my instinct is they probably wouldn't do it.

They aren't suicidal, but I wouldn't totally exclude it. One other point that you've made a lot is that there are many dictators around the world who are watching this episode closely to see if Putin gets away with what he's doing. And when you put it all together, the fact that there's this audience of authoritarian and the fact that there's this risk of nuclear war, it seems to me that, you know, our actions could trigger a domino effect in three separate directions. Like I'm seeing like sort of three different domino sets, aligned with each other. If we're too soft, we potentially encourage other authoritarian to violate

national borders. One classic example being maybe China, potentially invading Taiwan, too strong, too aggressive, and we potentially expand the scope of this conflict. We either walk to the brink of nuclear war or extend the conflict potentially by directly engaging Russia too dramatically. And then there's this sort of center path that you seem to be carving out, sort of this just-right Goldilocks strategy, where we act in a way that discourages other authoritarians while also constraining the scope of this war. If we're going to find that middle path, what do you want to see the Biden administration doing in the next, let's say, two weeks? I would like to see the Biden administration engaging much more directly in arming Ukraine. I would like Ukraine to have all of the anti-web

aircraft and anti-web, anti-tank missiles and anti-missile technology that it needs, I would like that to be doubled and tripled and quadrupled, you know, in the next days. And this is stuff that can be flown there very fast. So it's not, there's no, there's no special time constraint. I would also like the humanitarian aid to be stepped up in a more visible way. You know, we are helping with the UN and, you know, so on. But I, would like a big U.S. Western European presence in Ukraine distributing aid. I would like to see, you know, even including Americans on the ground, not as soldiers, but as, you know, aid givers to show that we're there and that we care what happens to people. So I would think those two things

right now, I might change my mind in a week and something more or something less. But, I mean, look, the other thing is, you know, you can talk to me or you can talk to Gary Kasparov, who has a different view, or you can talk to, you know, Tom Nichols, who has even a different view. And none of us has, there is, you know, there is no rule about who's right. There, you know, there is no completely right answer to these questions. You know, we're dealing with the psychology of a very strange, very isolated man. We're dealing with a, you know, hierarchical, you know, sclerotic political system, you know, where public opinion doesn't travel to the top. And and where, you know, there are these unclear, you know, non-institutional links between people.

It's very hard to know who's influential, really, and who's not. Just having a title doesn't mean you matter there. And so there are really no right answers. And so I would, you know, that gives me some sense of sympathy, actually, for people in the Biden inspiration because these are very hard choices. I don't, I'm not saying there's some obvious path they should be taking that they aren't taking. I mean, there are things I would have liked them to do differently, but I don't feel that, you know, it's hard to criticize from the outside. And very last question, what are you looking for in terms of military developments in the next week?

Like, precisely because the stakes are so high, it seems to me that the next few weeks could be extremely dangerous as Russia seemingly shifts from a ground war invasion strategy toward a just bomb the hell out of. a bunch of cities strategy. What are you looking for in terms of developments just the next few days? I would watch these Ukrainian pushback. So are the Ukrainians taking territory back from the Russians? We know they have done it, by the way, north of Kiev. And if they begin to do it in the south and the east, that will be very important. I think that's a really, that's the important next issue. Great. And thank you so so much. Thank you. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi.

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