The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Weiss: A Watershed Moment for Ukraine

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

It took a lot of arm-twisting, but the West has finally committed to arming Ukraine with battle tanks — not only to boost its defenses, but also to take the fight to the Russians. And Crimea is now in play. Michael Weiss joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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podcast Foreign Office, and one of the most reliable sources on what's happening and not actually happening in Ukraine. So welcome back, Michael. Thanks, Charlie. Happy to be here. Let's just start with the tanks, because we have had this very elaborate kabuki dance where the United States was saying, well, you know, we could give the tanks, but, you know, maybe we should keep them there. The Germans appear to be dragging their feet. Rather significant turnaround over the last 48 hours. So the Leopards are now released. The Abrams are on their way. You had a great story with your colleague, Jimmy Rushton, how the U.S. and its allies finessed, coaxed, and convinced the Germans to send the leopards

to Ukraine. So let's just walk through how that decision was made. I should preface this by saying that, you know, one of the sources for that story is a Bundestag member, and prior to that, a general staff officer in the German army, who's very well versed in German politics, much more so than myself. And I asked him essentially what you've just asked me. And the conversation lasted an hour and a half and went all the way back to Clausewitz and the Kaiser's sponsorship of Vladimir Lenin. A lot of this is to do, I think, with sort of a German sensibility about geopolitics and its place in Europe, meaning the country's place in Europe, and also the relationship with Russia. Olaf Scholz, who came to power in late 2021, so he's still a relatively new chancellor, comes from a tradition, the Social Democratic Party, which, I mean, his own youthful activism, and I didn't really get into

this in my story, but there's a good political Europe piece about it. He was a West German socialist, and essentially kind of a fellow traveler of the Soviet Union, very anti-imperialist, anti-American, traveled to East Germany several times, nine times, I think. And according to a Stasi file that had been compiled on him, the group that he traveled there with was so aggravated by American military presence and hegemony on his own side of the Iron Curtain that they were advocating that the Soviet Union park nukes, quote, on America's doorstep. This is not to say that Schultz hasn't evolved politically and matured since the 1980s. God knows we all have. But I think there is still a bit of a legacy there about, you know, whatever you would like to call it, Ostpolitik, or this sense that has endured actually across party lines, certainly under Angela Merkel and the Christian Democratic

Union, that the best course of action with Russia is transaction, right? You know, peace through trade, strengthening the relationship, bilateral relationship with gas and oil deals, cheap energy coming from Russia in exchange for exporting, you know, very fine German engineering and German products. And all of this has been rapidly torn asunder by a war that the Germans did not see coming and frankly did not think was going to happen. And I think what we've seen with this deal, and it was a very elaborate and complicated bit of statecraft, not just by the Biden White House, but by partner allied nations, particularly the Poles, the Estonians, and the Brits. Essentially what had happened is Schultz, who had kept saying no to everything at the start of the war.

Germany was, remember, sending 5,000 helmets as of February 2022. But actually, over the course of the last year, German materiel has increased so dramatically that depending on whom you ask or how you measure these things, I think in absolute terms, the Germans may have even sent more military hardware to Ukraine than even Great Britain at this point. Now, you wouldn't know that because they're so bad at advertising their magnanimity, right? The public diplomacy out of Berlin is terrible. And one of the reasons for that is, you know, Schultz is afraid of his own kind of quiet policy because this is very atypical for a German leader. So what's happened is, you know, the issue of whether or not to supply main battle tanks to Ukraine hinged on several things. Number

one, the Leopard 2 main battle tank, which is manufactured by the Germans and has been exported already to more than a dozen European militaries. There is a greater supply of these tanks. They are seen as more agile, easier to repair, easier to maintain in the field. And just, it's more of a lock and key thing with a foreign army than say the American M1 Abrams tank. And the Leopards are already there. I mean, they're there in Europe. Exactly. Right. I mean, we now have to transport across what, 8,000 kilometers in an ocean, you know, the 50 some odd, you know, tanks, which each one weighs how many tons and it's just a pain in the ass, right? So the Leopard 2s made

the most sense. And even if the Germans didn't want to send any themselves, as I said, you have more than a dozen countries, countries such as Spain, which has been sort of uncharacteristically hawkish on Russia since the outbreak of the war. Certainly Poland, the Norwegians, other countries had said, going back many months now, look, unleash the leopards, we'll send our own, just give us the authorization to do it. So, you know, because Germany exports these vehicles, there's an end user agreement or a re-export license there. So technically, you have to go to Berlin and say, are we allowed to send this to a third party? Schultz was Dr. Nine. Don't want to send tanks. Tanks could precipitate direct war with Russia, blah, blah, blah. Again, going back to sort of the pre-war German position

on this. And if you go back and read, I mean, there's a very good piece in December in the Washington Post about why the US is reluctant to supply M1 Abrams. There was an escalation issue at the time. We'll get into why that's no longer the case in a minute. But the real problem was these tanks are seen as very difficult to provide to a third party. Now, it's true the Iraqi army had them. I forget if we supplied it to the Afghan army or whatever remained of that. But when it comes to the logistics, keeping them operational in the field, they're gas guzzlers, right? So the administration line is they run on jet fuel. Well, actually they're a multifuel turbine engine, so they can technically run on

diesel. The problem is they don't get good mileage to the gallon, right? As compared with, again, the Leopard. So it just made more sense that the Ukrainians should get the Leopards. But ultimately what ended up happening was Schultz put out a series of conditions. He kept moving the goalposts. First, he said, we will only supply main battle tanks if one of our allied nation does it first. Well, then the Brits came out and said, okay, we'll supply 14 Challenger II tanks to Ukraine. Problem solved, right? Then he came out and said, no, no, no, I didn't mean that. I meant America has to supply tanks themselves. So then it became this, this Fandango where, you know, if the U.S. didn't sort of lead from the front and send its own tanks first, the Germans weren't going to send their own leopards, much less authorize other countries to send leopards. Why was that so important to him that we go first? I would say that, you know, at first glance, it's he doesn't want to be seen as the guy unilaterally sending main battle tanks to Ukraine because, you know, tanks are an integral part of combined arms warfare, right? For combined

arms warfare, you need infantry, you need artillery, which everyone is now given Ukraine, you need air force, which the Ukrainians are now asking for. They want F-16s now after they're getting their tanks and you need tanks, right? You need armor. So this would make Schultz essentially what Schultz had wanted to be for a very long time, albeit under different circumstances, which is a leader of Europe and European security. He wanted to hide under the American umbrella, which is very ironic because again, coming from his own ideological political background, this is a guy who did not like America's role in Europe and had wanted the American military occupation or American military presence to be lifted all throughout the 1980s and

the Cold War. All of a sudden, he's saying as a way to protect himself, to indemnify himself, and to lessen the blow or the heat from Moscow. If the Americans do it first, then I'll follow suit. So we've gone back to this position where, you know, it's always an ever mutable concept, European security, sovereignty, European security, hegemony, the Europeans need to take matters into their own hands, they can no longer rely on US leadership, and they have to be, you know, their own sort of equal partners in NATO. And yet, when push comes to shove, and there's an actual war that has broken out on European soil, the largest land war since World War Two, they come crawling back to Washington and begging us to

basically do everything for them, or at least to get the ball rolling on making sure that their own borders are protected, and so on. So essentially what has happened is Biden said, okay, I'm going to call your bluff. I'll send, I think it's now up to 50 Abrams tanks. It's going to take a while, several months, many more months than it would take to send Leopard 2s. I think it's about three months before the Ukrainians will be operational on them. But I'll do this as a way to basically sort of bust the dam or, you know, catalyze the seismic change in security policy. And symbolically, this is huge because, well, symbolically, it's huge because the US has now said they're going to do something that for a

long time said they would never do. Materially, it's also huge because, as I mentioned, the process that goes into the upkeep and delivery of Abrams means that America is now investing not just in Ukraine's short-term defense to fend off this war of conquest that Russia has launched to try and help it claw back territory. This is a very, very long-term investment. And you emphasize that in your piece because of all of that, that it is long term. It has to be long term because it has such a long tail because it is so complex. So this is what makes it a watershed, not just the fact that you're sending over a certain number of tanks, which may or may not be that significant in terms of the battle. The watershed moment is this long term commitment. Is that correct? Exactly. And it also bespeaks something else, which is we're not just talking about Ukraine defending itself or winning this war. We're

talking about essentially modernizing Ukraine's military capability such that when the war is over and there's peace, they become a bulwark of European military might. And frankly, I mean, if you want to speak in terms of real politic and be a little cynical, a great buffer nation against Russian aggression again. I mean, so this is to give Ukraine an offensive capability that heretofore, everybody's been reluctant to give them. I mean, I quote, Dr. Alex Crother, who was, I think, a special advisor to Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, strategic analyst on military affairs, former colonel in the US Army. And he said, if Ukraine manages to retake all of the territory it had lost, not just in February of last year, but since February of 2014, and we can talk about why Crimea is all of a sudden in play now.

If it manages to reestablish its sovereign independent borders as of 1991, there's a very good chance that it could be elevated in America's eyes to a major non-NATO ally. Several countries that come to mind in that category are Australia, Japan, and Israel. Now this is unheard of or unfathomable if you go back again, rewind the clock only to January of last year, where we were talking about Ukraine not existing in the space of 72 hours once Putin pulled the trigger. So already there's this, and I think this is a very positive thing. There is a strategic sort of forecasting about what Ukraine can and should be after the war. It is certainly

going to be a member of the European Union at some point, whether or not now it has any chance of joining NATO. I mean, in one way, I joke to my Ukrainian colleagues and sources, you don't have to worry about joining NATO. I mean, you've single-handedly done what NATO was founded to do collectively, right? And you're also getting a NATO army for free, which is kind of nice. I mean, when you hear Henry Kissinger, of all people, say that, oh, now it makes sense for Ukraine to be in NATO. Talk about another watershed moment. And, you know, the Germans, by the way, I didn't mention because I want to get into the weeds of German politics, but, you know, Olaf Scholz himself said three days after the invasion, this was February 27th, in a speech to the Bundestag, it's known as his Zeitentwende speech. Zeitentwende means

like time change, but really it's a turning point, right? And for Scholz, the turning point was, okay, now Russia is a revanchist imperialistic power. I mean, I could have told you that before, but fine. The Germans finally got religion after Ukraine. Germany needs to get its house in order. We need to increase defense spending to, I think, 3% of gross domestic product. Germany needs to become primus inter paris of security architecture in Europe. In his mind, that was taking into account that Ukraine would no longer exist. It would cease to exist as a nation and the Russian army would be that much closer to Germany's borders. Well, the real zeitgeist is Ukraine is fighting back ferociously, valiantly winning the war. And we're talking about a strategic defeat for Russia and another very powerful ally, security partner in Europe on the verge of joining institutions that had all but written off of them only a year ago.

Well, let's talk about also the evolution of the West and the Biden administration's attitude toward the kinds of weapons it's going to be providing, because for a long time they were making a distinction, which I never fully understood, between offensive and defensive weapons, saying, well, we will provide them with defensive weapons, but if we provide them with offensive weapons, that will escalate the fight. And as you point out, you know, the whole point of sending these tanks now is not just to fend off another large Russian attack, but to take the fight to the attacker, because as you and your colleague point out, main battle tanks are offensive, not defensive weapons. So that's kind of a sea change in our approach to arming the Ukrainians, isn't it? You have to get into the sort of gray area of military boffin studies to really argue the case between defensive and offensive weaponry. I mean,

you know, if I fire a Javelin anti-tank missile at your house, you're going to be pretty offended, right? Even though these things are meant to protect against armor from the other side. Churchill made ample satire with this distinction. But yes, so within the category of military kit and materiel, you know, tanks, main battle tanks are offensive weaponry. And I think what's happened is, you know, at the start of the war and onto, you know, I mean, well after the Battle of Kiev, after the counteroffensive in Kharkiv and Kherson, you still were hearing, and you will still hear to this day, murmurs and hiccups about, well, if we do X, Putin will do Y. Fear of escalation, fear of crossing the Russian quote unquote red lines. But I think what's happened, and there must be, in fact, I know that there is credible intelligence undergirding this assessment, is that, yes,

America says we're going to send a certain weapon system. The Russians thunder and grumble and say, it's going to be World War III. We're going to nuke you. We're going to do it. But then they don't do anything. And then the Ukrainians use those weapon systems to great effect. One example would be the HIMARS, the high mobility artillery systems, which is really the wonder weapon of the war thus far, if you talk to the Ukrainians. You know, there's other bits of evidence here. In August of

last year, the Ukrainians struck Saki Air Base deep in southern Crimea, using, according to Valery Zaluzhny, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, missiles. They weren't known to wield any long-range missiles of that nature. So I'm still curious as to what kind of munition they were able to fire. But anyway, within the space of an hour, they took out more than 50% of the Black Sea Fleet's Naval Aviation Group. That's pretty escalatory, especially because they're targeting a part of occupied Ukraine that they had been unable to hit as of, you know, February 24, 2021. What was the Russian response to this? Well, on the ground, so to speak, they relocated

the bulk of the Black Sea fleet out of Crimea back to mainland Russia. But officially, the line was, this was no attack, it was an industrial accident. You know, somebody smoking a cigarette too close to a fuel depot or whatever. So it was literally the, you know, the Eddie Murphy joke about, you know, the guy who cheats on his girlfriend. Wasn't me. You could catch the guy coming out of his mistress's house. Wasn't me. The Russian line is, wasn't me.

That didn't happen. So that's a very provocative and compelling data point that if you bloody their nose and you humiliate them in a certain way, they too have an incentive to de-escalate rather than escalate. You know, one reason being, if Putin said the Ukrainians struck us at Saki, then the ultras that he surrounds himself with, and certainly the Uber hawks that constitute the sort of military commentariat online, especially, would be demanding blood and be demanding not that he'd retaliate against Ukraine, but that he retaliate against NATO. And, you know,

Putin is many things, but he's not a blithering idiot. I mean, he knows that, especially he can't fight a war against Ukraine. He can certainly cannot go toe to toe with NATO. Well, obviously. With NATO. Yeah, obviously. So I think what's happening is broadly this. U.S. intelligence, other Western intelligence agencies have determined that there is a ladder that can be climbed. And there is a way of sending things that were seen to be far too provocative. Now I put it to this person, I said, you know, what about ATAKOMs? You know, the long range tactical missiles that can be fired from HIMARS that the Ukrainians have been asking for for months, even before they got HIMARS. And the president has been very adamant that, well, he's come up with excuses. They don't need ATAKOMs for their purposes. That's not true. They could very well benefit.

These are basically longer range. Longer range, I think, what is it, 150 kilometers, something like that. And the line now is, yeah, yeah, we're not worried about this being seen as too escalatory. So what's the issue? It's a supply chain problem, an inventory problem. When we gave the Ukrainians HIMARS and Gimlers, the ammunition, the munitions that they're using now, which has a much shorter range for the missile, you know, they were like kids in a candy store. They were firing these very expensive missiles at low value or mid value targets. So over time, and they've had HIMARS now since I believe the first platform arrived in July. So over the last

six months plus, they've learned to be more economical. And as a result, I mean, this is just par for the course, right? This is how military absorption works. You train a new army, or you train an old army, I should say, on a new weapon system. It's going to take them time to accommodate and to learn how to use it and to learn how to use it most effectively. So as time has gone on and they've proven to be much more discriminating in how they fire very expensive weapons, the argument has now increased to give them the

longer range stuff. So the question now is sourcing it. Where do we find it? And can we afford to deplete our stocks? And this source said to me, and I'll quote, I mean, I am very confident that Ukraine will eventually get attack attack from the United States. That wouldn't be another watershed. Well, this also raises the question that you addressed. I mean, you know, part of the the reluctance to move ahead on the tanks was, you know, the Biden administration saying that the Abrams was just too complicated to maintain, required too much for all of that, that sort of thing. Ukrainians obviously think they can handle that. But I was looking at a series of tweets by General, retired General Mark Hertling. He was tweeting about how tanks like aircraft are like a whole different ballgame because you can't drop technologically advanced equipment on the battlefield, expecting soldiers who don't know how to use it to just integrate it

into a combined arms team. So he said, you get a few things wrong, and it causes disaster and failure. I mean, so there is a downside to this. Is this one of the rationalizations for how slow the West has been in providing this kind of armament to the Ukrainians? And then how worried should we be about that? It's a cliche, but it's a cliche for valid reasons. You know, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. I mean, you know, security assistance, it's all well and good. And believe me, I am very sympathetic to the Ukrainian argument, which is an argument also made, frankly, by other retired generals, such as Mick Ryan, who I think is a three star from the Australian army, and also somebody who you should be following on Twitter and reading his analysis. He said to me

at one point, look, give the Ukrainians what you want to give them and they'll figure out how to use it eventually, because he's very impressed by the rate of military absorption and their adaptability. I totally appreciate General Hertling's commentary and I defer to him on how difficult these things are. I mean, he was commander of European forces and was in Iraq and certainly saw how Abrams were working and more to the point not working up close. But I do think that, look, now we're talking the space of several, I mean, really more like half a year before the first Abrams are going to'm in the Pentagon and I'm in charge of sending these tanks, I'm going to say we need to start training up not just the tank crew and the operators, but all the technicians, everything that goes into, you know, maintaining these things in the field. It's not just the

tanks we're sending, by the way, we're sending recovery vehicles, essentially big giant tow trucks for the Abrams. It's not like one piece of equipment goes in and that's it. It's operational immediately. It's a process. And I will say, I certainly rank the Ukrainian armed forces a lot higher than I ever did the Iraqi security forces or other militaries abroad that have been provided with Abrams tanks. And I think, you know, the proof is in, as I said earlier, just how fleet-footed they've been in learning how to use things that were completely foreign to them. And, you know, they're saying they want F-16s next, right? That'll be the next big push. Okay, this is what I want to get to, because, I mean, obviously all of this is focused on a counteroffensive by the Ukrainians,

which obviously, you know, requires this kind of armor. As you wrote, the combined arms warfare consists of three A's, right? Artillery, armor, air power. Well, they've gotten the artillery. Now they're getting the armor. And then the question is, are we going to give them the air power as well? So have we given them, and this is kind of an open-ended question, have we actually given them enough equipment to be able to mount a serious counteroffensive by next fall? I think so.

And I think, look, you know, you send one Abrams tank, you send one Leopard 2 tank. And the numbers, by the way, on how much armor they're getting are very hard to figure out because you see a lot of reporting. I'm confused. So I think the estimate is something like 100 Leopard 2s, right? And combined with 31 Abrams that the US is going to send. So 131 Western tanks in comparison to what the Ukrainians have, their own fleet of aging Soviet era T-72s and whatnot. Is it enough? It will be enough, I think, by the time they're ready to mount a major counteroffensive.

Is 100 tanks a lot of tanks? I was on a show with General Barry McCaffrey yesterday, and he was talking about the decision to send, I think at that time it was 31 Abrams tanks. He said, you know, this is insignificant in terms of, you know, actual strategy or tactics. I mean, it's obviously symbolic, but it raised the question, okay, so if 31 is insignificant, then what number becomes significant? What number is the oh shit number for the Russians? Oh shit, they're coming. I'll be very frank with you. I mean, I don't know. And I would certainly trust General McCaffrey and Mark Hurtling and McRyan to answer that question. So my reporting hasn't taken me that far, unfortunately. But look, I mean, you can almost gauge this by the Russian

response reaction, I should call it. It has been off the charts hysterical. You know, the Germans are Nazis. They're also Jews. You know, it's World War Three. War III. This is a major showdown. And it's funny to watch Russian propagandists and their useful idiots in the West, because on the one hand, they'll say, oh, no big deal. Here's an Abrams tank destroyed in Iraq. Yeah, it was destroyed by friendly fire, by the way. But these things are easy to take out. But on the other hand, they'll also say, without any hint of contradiction or irony, this is so escalatory as to merit the launching of tactical nuclear weapons, right? So which is it? The Ukrainians have not got more than at this point, at least as publicly confirmed, I'd have to check the exact number, but I don't think they've got more than 50

HIMARS in the field. And look what they managed to do with that. You know, as I said, Kharkiv and Kherson. Kherson was a war of corrosion, where basically they had so pounded Russian positions on the other side of the Dnieper River that the Russians really had no choice but to pull back. Otherwise, they were just going to continue to cook, right? So, I mean, what they can do with 100 plus, 130 tanks, and by the way, Charlie, I have to say, let's also factor in that the big announcement has been done, and here are the numbers kind of sort of that we have as of today. By the time the first tanks are ready to enter the field, that number may have increased, and it may have increased exponentially, right? So we could sit here in March when the first Leopard 2s are meant to be in play, and the

figure of 130 has now jumped to 250. You know, I mean, the Germans miraculously discovered this inventory of Leopard 2s that they said they simply didn't have, and that happened even before the announcement that they were going to directly send them. Other countries, Spain, for instance, their Leopard twos are in a state of disrepair, from what I understand. But now the Spanish are convinced that in the space of a few weeks, they can refurbish them. And they have quite a lot of them in stock. So again, I wouldn't get too hung up on the numbers just yet. They're going to get more as time goes on. And by the way, I

mean, when is the next counteroffensive going to be? I don't know. And I don't know for a very good reason, which is the Ukrainians are not telling me. And they're probably not also telling a lot of their allies. You know, the New York Times reported several months ago that, you know, the Ukrainian military command was sort of a black box in certain respects. Like we didn't know exactly what they were doing and when they were going to do it, even though a lot of these things had been war-gamed. There's a great deal of intelligence sharing. But operational security for the Ukrainians is paramount. So could they mount another counteroffensive tomorrow that nobody saw coming? For sure, because that's sort of their way of warfare. But this is a process. It does take time. Training up an army on combined arms

war with Western kit. And again, they have the artillery ready. They don't have the armor yet, but they're being trained now, I'm sure, in Germany, probably also in the United States, frankly. I know that they came here to be trained up on Patriot missile batteries to protect their skies, you know, major air defense system that they were told they'd never get. Now they have it. I would say you have to kind of wait and see here. Well, let's talk about the Russian responses. As you pointed out, they've responded to the news about the tanks with fury and grief and a lot of bombast. Talk about bombing, Dresden bombing,

Berlin. On unofficial channels, some of the pro-war analysts seem a little bit more nervous, admitting that these tanks are formidable and dangerous weapons. So I have to say, it got to a point in the war, I got lucky in that I listened very intently to what the Estonians were saying early days. And, you know, Estonia is a country that has one national security issue, just given it's the neck of the woods that it exists in and given its history. And they're very, very good at understanding Russia. And I dare say they're a lot better than we are. And they got the sort of pacing TikTok, I think, better than most American analysts, both in and out of government. But if you really want a sense of just

how dire things are on the Russian side, listen to the most hawkish, genocidal Vatniks on Telegram, the Russian military blogger community, and just others. I mean, Igor Girkin, who's a former FSB officer, now an indicted and convicted in absentia war criminal responsible for MH17. Horrible man, but not an idiot. And he has been a kind of Cassandra of this war, very critical of Putin. Well, not directly of Putin per se, but of the general staff, the Russian army's performance, and very, very confident that the Ukrainians are not only winning, but are going to win if things continue along the current path. And yes, when the announcement that they're getting heavy armor from the West, including Abrams, was made, you had state TV

propagandists, you know, Soloviov, who's one of the biggest mouthpieces on television. I think his show is last three hours a day. So somebody was joking, instead of two minutes of hate, it's three hours of hate every time, you know, he's on the air. It's really extraordinary. Yeah, he'll, you know, make claims like we're going to take Berlin and Dresden, even though it took them 11 months to take Soledar, which is this scruffy salt mining town. But the Russian military bloggers are very gimlet-eyed about this and realistic. And they say, you know, broadly speaking, we're screwed. So that should give you a sense too of how they rank Ukraine's adaptability to new kit and also their sheer will and capability as a defending army. Okay. So this comes back to the question of,

you know, what would escalate the war to dangerous levels? What is the red line for Vladimir Putin? And, you know, this has been the concern. If we give them this, you know, Putin will react with nukes or something. Tanks apparently do not appear to be the red line. That leads to the question about the air cover. This has been a chronic debate since the war began. The Ukrainians saying, you must give us air power. We must be able to defend our skies. We've seen what the tactics of the Russians are,

targeting missiles at civilian targets. And belatedly, we are now giving them Patriots. But as you pointed out earlier, now they're pushing for the F-16s. And so give me your sense, because they've been asking for this, asking for this, asking for this. And for most of the last year, that has been an absolute no-go zone. Is that going to change? And will that be a red line of some kind for the Russians? Certainly, there's a higher likelihood that we'll get to yes on F-16s now than six or eight months ago. They were asking for F-16s back then, by the way. The workaround solution was meant to be giving them MiG-29s, which is what they fly and fly well,

and which former Warsaw Pact countries have in abundance, namely the Poles and the Slovaks. So you remember that whole fandango with the Poles, are they going to provide MiG-29s? Joseph Borrell, the EU basically foreign minister, shot his mouth off and said, we're providing them with fighter jets. And everyone's like, wait a minute, what? It turned out, yeah, the Poles were going to clandestinely send a bunch of MiG-29s to Ukraine. That was scuppered for whatever reason, I don't know. Now, I think you're again hearing this sort of rumblings about MiG-29s. I would posit this. They're more likely to get MiG-29s to start because remember, before we started sending them Western main battle tanks,

other countries in the periphery, former Warsaw Pact countries, were loading them up on T-72s and all the Soviet era tanks that they had grown accustomed to using. So it's easier to exhaust the supply of the things that's already in their inventory, and it is to send them something new. But, and again, you know, I have one friend who's a lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force, who seems to think that F-16s are not out of the question in terms of capability and the amount of time it would take to train up a very seasoned fighter pilot who's familiar with the MiG-29 airframe to basically have him learn how to fly an F-16, right? It's not like teaching you or me how to fly an F-16 from scratch. Now, obviously, there's differences that have to be learned and adapted

to. But, you know, for instance, the Poles, I did a bit of reporting on this when I was looking into why that MiG-29 deal way back when didn't happen. There are Polish pilots who can fly both. And interestingly enough, one of the issues for the Poles is they prefer their MiG-29s and their technicians. And again, going back to the logistics of it, how to repair them, how to fix them, how to work out all the kinks. It's sort of like comfort food for them in terms of an airframe. They prefer them to F-16s, but they know how to fly both, right? So do I think that the Ukrainian Air Force could be au fait with F-16s much more quickly than perhaps is the on-paper estimate? Yes, I do. And there's reason to think that based on people who know this stuff far better than I.

Now, the question is, as you said at the start, would this be a red line for Putin? Well, let's put it this way. I mean, if Ukrainians decided, hey, let's fly a bunch of F-16s and bomb Moscow, yeah, I think we would be creeping up to, you know, a kind of danger zone, to quote Kenny Loggins there, you know. But remember, a lot of U.S. security assistance is predicated on, we'll give you this, but don't use it in Russia. Use it only in your own country. And even that, I have to say, that's been fudged. So for instance, we provided the Ukrainians covertly, or at least in an unannounced manner, with harm anti-radiation batteries, right? And these things were actually kitted out so that they could be fired from, I forget what airframe,

perhaps the MiG-29, perhaps others. Anyway, the debris or the remnants of harm missiles were found in Belgorod, which is just north of Kharkiv. That's Russian Federation territory. So in other words, the Ukrainians have started to use things, munitions that America's provided them inside Russia. Now, what's interesting about that is the Americans haven't said, well, that's it, game over, we're not sending any more. And the Russians haven't kicked up a fuss about it. Interesting. Coming back to my earlier argument that there's evidence, there are data points that suggest, you know, what may appear to be the no-goes for escalation based on Russian propaganda and what the Kremlin says turn out to be just nons, but by all means, don't start using them inside Russian airspace. And the Ukrainians saying you got it and abiding by that rule, because that is seen as too provocative. Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, it goes back to this idea that we're making a long term investment, not just in Ukraine as a defensive country. Ukraine no longer wants to

define itself in negative terms. It is not a victim. It is a victim in the sense that it is fending off genocide. It is fending off a war of conquest. But Ukraine has discovered a sense of nationhood, a sense of peoplehood, a distinct genre of its own culture and history, completely unmoored from great Russian chauvinist historiography, a language. I mean, I've been going to Ukraine at least, I mean, in the last year or two, much more frequently, but at least twice a year for eight years. A lot of the kind of nonsense mythology that was kicked up in 2014, oh, you know, it's all about language rights and the war against Russian speakers. Bullshit. You know, if you went to

Kiev after Crimea was taken, everybody you met spoke Russian. To this day, frankly, everybody can speak Russian. But the last time I was in Ukraine in June of this past year, all of a sudden, no, no, no, we're going to speak Ukrainian. And you know, if you spoke Russian, nobody's going to charge at you or be mortally offended. But the preference now is on our native tongue. So all of these things are combined to mean that, again, this is a country that is now desperate to be part of the European community, for lack of a better term, 100% committed to being a security partner, if not an ally to the United States. I mean, you talk to Ukrainians, and they say, we will never forget what America has done for us. And should America ever find itself, God forbid, in a situation like ours, or need our help, we'll be the first ones on the front line to defend. You cannot buy goodwill like that. It's kind of extraordinary. So I think in that sense, yeah, we are we're all in with Ukraine.

And there's there's no going back from this point. Well, OK, let's talk about the politics about. Yeah. So Donald Trump, he doesn't tweet anymore. You know, truth, social, all in caps, by the way. First come the tanks, then come the nukes. Get this crazy war ended now, all in caps. So easy to do, exclamation point. So how concerned aren't we to be that the leader of the Republican Party and clearly the people in Congress who have the whip hand like Marjorie Taylor Greene are basically all in, in wanting to abandon Ukraine, not one more nickel for Ukraine. And if you're Vladimir Putin, aren't you looking at this and thinking, okay,

time is on my side. If I can drag this out long enough, I can actually split the Western alliance, even though they've been pretty tough so far. And the United States, maybe these Republican, you know, America firsters are going to reverse the policy. I mean, that's got to be part of his thinking. Right. So how concerned should the Ukrainians be that this growing Republican opposition to supporting Ukraine might actually lead to a reversal in policy? They're concerned. The joke I heard in Kiev in April when I first visited after the war started, and this was just as the siege of Kiev had been lifted, was, you know, Michael, we watched the news and, you know, are you guys, is America going to be okay? You know, this is a nation at war asking about a superpower, whether or not it's going to devolve into civil war. Look, I remain cautiously optimistic for the following reasons. Number one, you have the leader of the Republican Party and now a candidate for president who doesn't seem to be doing nearly as well as he would like to or thought he was

going to by this point. And a lot can happen between now and the next election, obviously. I'm not ruling out the dire contingency in which Donald Trump finds himself reelected as president. But, you know, I think the likelihood of it is somewhat diminished. Certainly his favorability broadly across the nation, not just within the party, seems to be flagging. But yeah, look, this idea, tanks leads to nukes, actually he has it backwards, right? You know, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons as part of the Budapest memorandum in 1994. And if it hadn't done that, there would be no Russian tanks in Ukraine, right? You know, tanks are not going to lead to World War III. But that's the line that the Russians would have you believe, for the very reasons you were alluding to. Putin's strategy

is a waiting game, and also a total and utter indifference to the squandering of Russian lives. And just look at the people who've been called up in disproportionate number. They're not ethnic Russians. They're the ethnic minorities, right? They're Chechens, they're Buryats. I mean, he's relying on essentially the sort of colonized people in the Russian Federation territory. And before long, I mean, if he keeps this thing going, which I think he will, into the meat grinder is going to start to go people that he really doesn't feel he can afford to, or perhaps he does feel he can afford to, but he probably can't in the long term, antagonize or alienate the middle classes, the metropolitan elites, children of people who are very wealthy and well-connected politically.

I mean, right now, there was a piece in the New York Times today about the rise of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is the catering magnate turned mercenary financier, underwriter of the St. Petersburg Troll Farm, formerly known as the Internet Research Agency, had a hand in election interference, and is kind of running not just a mercenary outfit, but really a political technology company. I mean, governments in a box that have been exported all throughout, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, right? So, Yevgeny Prigozhin is positioning himself. I liken him to what Qasem Soleimani, before he, at the end of a hellfire missile in Baghdad International Airport, was doing. I mean, Prigozhin isn't a military commander, so it's not an exact analogy, but this is his sort of coming out party as a politician in the making. He is angling for something. And because if you look at who he's attacking, the defense minister, the chief of the general staff, the commanders in the field, he is being seen, he's being portrayed by a lot of these ultras as the patriot that Putin should be. Things are going to change in Moscow before long,

right? So when you say, you know, it is time on Russia's side here, I don't necessarily think it is. U.S. intelligence assessments, Wendy Sherman came out several weeks ago and said, you know, Putin claims he's going to mobilize X hundred thousand number of soldiers. He can't do it. He can throw raw meat into Ukraine. But you saw the first mobilization, I mean, was a complete and utter disaster. You know, I saw elderly men in uniforms that they probably once wore in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan being given, you know, rusty carbine rifles that looked like something out of World War I. I mean, we're all the accoutrement of warfare here, you know, down to boots and uniforms, to say nothing of tourniquets, medical

supplies, food, all the stuff he would need to keep his army going. It doesn't seem to be in abundance, or at least the U.S. doesn't seem to think it's going to be there. And again, U.S. intelligence on Russia, at least with respect to this war, has been superb. So I credit it highly. So far, we've crossed several rubricons here, right? Getting the Germans to yes on tanks is a major thing. And already I'm seeing a change in attitude, the new German defense minister sounding very Churchillian about Ukraine and the war. Emmanuel Macron. I should have mentioned this earlier when you asked me about what was going on in Germany with the tank situation. But the member of the Bundestag I interviewed said, it was very interesting. In early January, so this is only a few weeks ago, Macron comes out with a statement that puts an end to the

French position, which had hewed very closely to the German position. And that is to say, Ukraine must not lose and Russia must not win. But that's different from saying Ukraine has to win, right? The former formulation is more the language of armistice and ceasefires and Minsk Three Agreements. To say that Ukraine must win is a more robust point of view. Macron came out and basically said Ukraine must win. And that put a lot of pressure on Schultz because he was the lonely man of Europe. Germany was isolated in this respect. So now Schultz is, if not saying it, indeed making sure that Ukraine has at least has the capability of winning. So Putin's strategy to rent asunder the Western Alliance or the European coalition, I would say, as of today,

has failed. Now, whether or not it continues to fail going forward is the key question. There's been a kind of colonic happening at all levels here. The Germans have suddenly realized maybe it wasn't such a good idea to be so energy dependent on Russia. Energy independence in Europe is now going to be a fait accompli within a matter of months. The intelligence services of major European countries, which have been infiltrated by Russian moles for years, and this is widely known in American intelligence circles, certainly widely known in Eastern European circles, all of a sudden, these moles are being outed and arrested. There are scandals happening everywhere all across the board. You know, a lot that Putin has spent the last 20 years building up in terms of influencing,

bribery, infiltration, it's all falling apart. And that needs to be encouraged. We need to maintain that acceleration of his power projection problems, right? We probably should end on that optimistic note, because this has really been an extraordinary week and an extraordinary turnaround. My only frustration is that it has taken this long, but you've given me a little bit more optimism that, in fact, this turning point will be a real turning point on the war. Michael Weiss, senior correspondent for Yahoo News, host of the podcast Foreign Office. You can read his analysis of the tank deal on Yahoo News. He's also the author of ISIS Inside the Army of Terror and a Forthcoming History of the GRU, Russia's Military

Intelligence Service. Michael, thank you so much for being so generous with your time today. Sure, Charlie, anytime. All right. Thank you so much. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow. We will do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.