The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Weiss: Perp Walks and Counteroffensives

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

Even after winning the White House, Trump is still the consummate grifter who's got no time for political correctness or following the law—whether it's a parking ticket or a federal crime. Plus, the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the dam disaster. Michael Weiss joins Charlie Sykes today. show notes: https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1668358841895927813?s=20 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In my administration, I'm going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law. We also need to fight this battle by collecting intelligence and then protecting, protecting our classified secrets. We can't have someone in the Oval Office who doesn't understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified. One of the first things we must do is to enforce all classification rules and to enforce all laws relating to the handling of classified information. We also need the best protection of classified information. This is a person that's running for president?

Service members here in North Carolina have risked their lives to acquire classified intelligence to protect our country. That was Donald Trump in 2016. Words to keep in mind as he gets his second perp walk this afternoon in Miami. Good morning and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. We are joined by Michael Weiss, currently Senior Correspondent for Yahoo News and the host of the podcast Foreign Office, author of ISIS Inside the Army of Terror and a forthcoming history of the GRU, Russia's Military Intelligence Service. So first of all, welcome back to the podcast, Michael. Thanks for having me back, Charlie.

Well, I think that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I want to talk about what's going on in Ukraine, but obviously, as has so often been the truth over the last few years, Donald Trump is just sucking all the oxygen out of the room. This remarkable, remarkable scene that, could I just remind people that it is not normal to have a former president of the room, this remarkable, remarkable scene that, could I just remind people that it is not normal to have a former president of the United States charged with 37 felonies after being charged with 34 felonies, after being found liable for a sexual assault by a New York federal jury, and who is still running for president of the United States. This is just not usual. So, Michael, before we get into your expertise and the brilliant stuff you've been doing on Ukraine,

tell me about what you thought when you read the indictment that was unsealed on Friday night. So, I come from a family of lawyers. My dad's been practicing for, gosh, almost 60 years now. He's just turned 83. My brother's a lawyer. I have other lawyers in the family. And none of them has ever read a criminal indictment quite like this, in the sense that, you know, Jack Smith is a clever guy. And essentially, he not just puts forward the complaint and the evidence, but he hoists Donald Trump, the defendant, on his own petard, right? I mean, you just played this clip of Trump campaigning on the fact that Hillary Clinton

was sloppy with her emails and, you know, had secret or classified materials on her server, whatever, and that this was a huge problem in this country, and he's going to be the guy to fix it. And in the indictment, you know, there's extensive extracts to this effect. But then, I mean, you know, it's kind of extraordinary that this guy behaves in this manner after, A, coming down, you know, with all manner of scandals in the last several years, but then, you know, also suborns his own legal defense team into committing crimes, right? He's telling his lawyers, I mean, my favorite bit is where, you know, the complaint describes Trump using a plucking motion to indicate removal of any materials that might be of a criminal nature when presenting this stuff

to the FBI and then handing it over to NARA or whatever it was. It's weird. I've been watching Better Call Saul again, because I've run out of television, which is an amazing show. And I think this is something that Slip and Jimmy might have found a little, you know, bridge too far in terms of unethical legal practices or, you know, flagrant violations of law. I say all that whilst still maintaining, this isn't really all that surprising to us, right? See, I mean, that's the point, isn't it? Because it is consistent with everything Donald Trump is and everything we've known about him for years. Well, exactly. And, you know, look, Charlie, I live and have lived for most of my life in Queens,

New York, which is sad to say where Donald Trump comes from. His old high school is just down the road from where I am. And look, I understand the milieu and I understand sort of some of the more colorful culture that can create a creature like this. The consummate grifter, the fast talking sleaze merchant, the guy who, you know, he's got no time for political correctness. He's got no time for everything from parking violations to federal crimes. It's all a racket. It's all a big conspiracy, right? And I don't know. I mean, I just, in my mind, the headline for all of this is Queens man's arrested. You know, it will never change for me. The fact that this guy had control of nuclear weapons, the fact that this guy could command the world's largest military into action. He's still a guy from Queens. He's still a lowlife from Queens. You know,

that's his consummate character to me. And I think he's now really landed himself in the soup. I mean, you've seen his allies, Bill Barr came out and said he's toast. He said, I've defended the president on other things, including the Russiagate conspiracy and blah, blah, blah. But reading this indictment, I see no viable defense for him. The one question I would love to know from lawyers is, what are the odds that he beats every single one of them, right? You know, like if he was charged with five counts of something, I could see him being acquitted of all five, but 60 some, I mean, like, and counting, right? There are more investigations still pending. There's the probe into his Georgia election interference. There's the January 6th insurrection. I mean, the only

way he can do this apparently is to kick the can down the street, defer all of these criminal proceedings, then get elected and I guess pardon himself. Is that the kind of country we're in though now? Because that sounds to me, we're now grading beyond your classic definition of authoritarianism, right? This is entering into the theater of the absurd, right? What comes after banana republic? In a banana republic, you would like kill the prosecutor and the judges, right? He can't do that, even though he'd probably like to. So he's just going to, you know, muck up the legal system, slow down the process of all

of these criminal proceedings, then in his mind, hopefully get elected and then just exonerate himself with the full power and authority of the office of the presidency. And that seems to be his binary future. He either wins the presidency. And that seems to be his binary future. He either wins the presidency or he goes to jail. I mean, and think about how that raises the stakes for him, for his supporters, for the country, when you realize that the only way for him to save himself is to get back total power. His redemption is through the Oval Office. And by the way, I mean, there's so many

things to talk about. I do think that we shouldn't gloss over what he did yesterday. The reiteration of the I am your retribution. The problem, Michael, you know this, that in the Trump era, there are things that happen that would have dominated the news cycle for six weeks that now barely are mentioned. This bleep that he put out on True Social, where he rather explicitly vows to go after the Biden family in retaliation. He said, I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family, and all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, and country itself. So as the independent said, it's a stunning

declaration that throws the future for America's justice system into question. And such a move would wholly eliminate the independence and integrity of the Department of Justice, should he be successful. Well, no kidding. And you can't say we have not been warned at this point. No. And you also can't say that this guy isn't going to this time around appoint people who would know how to dismantle the institutions of checks and balances and try to get across the line that which he was held back initially in his first term for the simple fact that a lot of the people advising him and who he had appointed didn't know what the hell they were doing, right?

Don't discount the possibility that he might learn how to select more competent and more sinister characters for his second term, right? There is a learning curve here. And also, frankly, now he's really out for blood. The first time around, what? He decided to run for president because Barack Obama mocked him. Made fun of him. Yeah, made fun of him, right? So his amour-propre was wounded. Now, he's declaring war, essentially, on the United States government and half the country, which he sees as the enemy, right? That is incredibly, deeply worrying, as is the fact, frankly, that nothing that happens to this guy. There is no scandal that could befall him. I mean, he was found guilty in civil court

of sexual assault and then got up on stage in a town hall at CNN and basically said, I never met this woman. I didn't know this woman. And oh yeah, she tried to make out with me or confer sexual favors in a broom closet or something like that. And everyone laughed. It was a moment of tittering and celebration. So now, he has stolen classified materials, kept them on a ballroom stage in his private residence or his grand hotel, whatever it is, in a shower, in a bathroom, and is found to have essentially bragged about the fact that he had these materials and to have disclosed to vested interests, including political action committee operatives, that, oh yeah, by the

way, I could have declassified this stuff when I was commander-in-chief, but I didn't. Well, there's your crime right there, you know. And again, his poll numbers do not go down, and he is still very much the front runner. And will be, which goes to the question of, okay, in the second term, if he appointed all of these deplorables, would the Senate confirm them? And I guess you have to believe that somehow, you know, Republican elected officials would behave differently with him back in power than they have been with him out of power. It is interesting, and I think I'm going to write a piece about this, kind of the escalating demands on the base, all of which they've complied with. In 2016, Republican voters decided that, you know, grabbing women by the pussy was okay.

That was not disqualifying. Even after the shambolic first term and all the scandals and everything that happened in Charlottesville, Republican voters decided that, okay, we're going to give him a second term. But then think about what support for Trump is after that. I mean, it's one thing to have imagined that he was going to grow into the office before 2016. It's something else to think that he ought to be given another term after his first term.

But up until now, to support Trump is also to support someone post-January 6th who tried to overthrow the government, who incited a riot. I mean, think about that. And yet Republican voters went along with it. But as of today, Trump's support now is not only swallowing all of that, but to say, yeah, he might have stolen these documents and bragged about it and disseminated them. He might have committed felonies, but we don't regard that as disqualifying. In fact, we like him even more. Think about that. There have been some vibe shifts over the last 24 hours. I wouldn't read too much into it. Even Nikki Haley and Tim Scott are suggesting that, yeah, you know, reading the indictment, it is kind of serious. You do have Bill Barr out there saying that he's toast. But I think that Philip Bump in the Washington Post just kind of has this reality check. He said, look, there is no voice that could convince Trump's most energetic supporters of the idea that he willfully violated the law. There never has been anyone who tries to present the reality of the situation to his base, however close they were to Trump at the outset, is immediately exiled. The truth has no place

in Trumpism. So he just says, okay, just remember, there's no voice that's going to change this. Nobody from within the dark heart of Trumpism itself, even Bill Barr, is not going to make a difference here. And I think we ought to acknowledge that reality. We should. And, you know, I think his unique selling point, and I mean, dare I say, in this sort of strange, nihilistic postmodern era we inhabit, his talent is that he is without shame. He cannot be cowed. He cannot be scandalized. He takes, you know, sort of the momentum of the opposition and uses it against them, right? If you're a woman in particular, he'll call you nasty. He'll denigrate you in misogynistic terms. If you're any opponent facing him, whether it's

Chris Christie, who did a fairly okay job last night, as far as I can tell, or Nikki Haley, or, I mean, Ron DeSantis, Jesus Christ. I mean, he will steamroll every single one of them. And he has done. And, you know, again, this is how he builds his constituency. I am one of the world's most recognizable oligarchs. I have, you know, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. I live like a combination of Hugh Hefner and Augusto Pinochet, and you all envy me and would like to replicate my success, but I'm the perennial victim. I'm the victim of this vast conspiracy of CIA, State Department, Democratic Party operatives. Half the country is ranged against

me, and you, the other half, you need to carry me to victory by means licit or otherwise, right? Go line the streets, go set things on fire, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, go after the black prosecutor trying me in New York, mounted insurrection if you have to, but put me back in the Oval Office and I'll bring the country down to your level, which is what you've always wanted, right?

This cultural resentment that seems to be now almost a new ideology unto itself in American politics. You know, this is what Tucker Carlson taps into. I mean, used to tap into on a nightly basis and now on Twitter. And yeah, I mean, it's not something that I thought I would experience in my lifetime. And frankly, I travel a lot for my work, as you know, and I go to Europe a lot. And obviously, Europe has dealt with very successful and very lethal populist political movements throughout its history. And, you know, one of the old criticisms I remember hearing years ago, and this was like the George W. Bush, Barack Obama era was, well, you know, you Americans, what's to choose

left and right, Republican, Democrat, it's really all the same. You're going to all inhabit that, you know, sort of like one micrometer of the same piece of the spectrum of neoliberal, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like, at least in Europe, we've got real options. I said, yeah, yeah, you've got Stalinism, you've got Hitlerism. You have this sort of new wave of the neopopulist kind of Italian and Hungarian and French models. That's not something we want in America. And our consensus has sort of been our saving grace. Well, now look at that. I mean, the consensus is gone, isn't it?

You do have sort of mini-Hitlers and mini-Stalins inhabiting the political realm these days, even if they would absolutely deny being anything like that. And yeah, it's terrifying. I find myself reading a lot of Hannah Arendt lately. By the way, you mentioned you're watching Better Call Saul. I have a TV recommendation for you. You're probably way ahead of me on all of this, but you ever watch Babylon Berlin? No, but it has been recommended to me. It is fantastic. This is one of those shows, and I have a long track record of waiting many years and having people say it is outstanding and being skeptical about it, it to me. It is fantastic. This is one of those shows, and I have a long track record of waiting many years and having people say it is outstanding and being skeptical about it and then watching it. And of course, anything that takes place in 1929 Berlin, you just are thinking like,

it's not overtly political. Okay, that's all my recommendation. So what you're describing though, there is Trump, but there's also something that's happening to the country. And, and I understand that he's tapped into this anger and this resentment and this sense that they are, you know, people are being threatened and playing the victim card, which is very effective. And one of his most effective lines is they're not coming after me. They're coming after you. I'm, I'm the one standing in the way, which is a great line that he uses that plays to this. So people are angry. They're resentful, they're outraged, they feel threatened. But there's something also, and I think we ought to acknowledge this, there's something about Trump, his transgressiveness, his shamelessness, that is exciting to people. Basically, to be liberated from any sort of standard, to be able to indulge

that id, to let that freak flag fly, people do get a dopamine hit from watching. I think, you know, in the beginning, it was that people thought that some of his character traits were, well, people were supporting him in spite of that, because they liked the policies, you know, as opposed to the behavior. I think at this point, it's not about the policies anymore at all, is it, Michael? There are people who are just sort of excited by the raw bravado, the strength, the defiance, and the threats and that sense of strength and violence behind it. Yes, people are getting a tingle up their leg. And I think that's as worrying as any aspect of this. And there's always been a strain of that in sort of American culture. I mean, you mentioned Hannah Arendt,

I think another sort of lodestar here is Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. He was very excited in a negative way, that is, about some of the intellectual philosophical currents that had wafted over to the United States from the continent. I remember he has this long exegesis of the song Mack the Knife. Do you remember that in his book? And this is based on Machenesser, which is like a German, you know, kind of vaudeville song from Weimar, Germany, I believe, which is all about a serial killer. And he, how comes it that, you know, American popular music is extolling the lyrics that are based on murder, right? And this is something, you know, we all are titillated by, we all are drawn to in sort of through the dark recesses of our own psyche.

And, you know, it's funny you mentioned, I remember knowing when I was really, really worried about Trump. So when he was running for the nomination in 2016, and everyone, the conventional wisdom had it that, oh, yeah, great. Like the Republicans should nominate him. It'll be a complete rout. Hillary will be president. Fine.

And he was on stage with, at the time, it looked like what, a dozen or more than a dozen other candidates, including Mark Rubio and Jeb Bush and all the rest of it. And then the moderator asked him, you've said some horrible things about women. You've called them pigs. You've called them such and such. And his response was, only Rosie O'Donnell. And I remember watching TV and my wife is a dyed in the wool Chicago Democrat. She, you know, she met Barack Obama when he was a Senator from Illinois and it was the highlight of her life. She wanted to volunteer for Hillary Clinton and she detests Donald Trump,

but she was watching TV with me and she couldn't help but laugh. And it wasn't a laughter that was affirming, meaning that she agreed with him. It was a laughter of, you know, the excitement of being scandalized, the unbelievable-ness of what was just said. In a way, yeah, it's almost like watching a kind of burlesque unfold, except that this isn't a form of wicked entertainment, even though that's kind of how it's sold in American politics. This has real world consequences. And it's gotten darker over time. Exactly. That's what worries me is I think people are, whether they care to admit it or not, they are drawn to this in some way. It's a spectacle.

I don't think you can understand Donald Trump or what's happening right now without understanding his absolute fascination with some of the worst actors in the world, including Vladimir Putin. And one of the red lines of 2024 will be the question of will we continue to support Ukraine? Donald Trump has made it clear that he is going to side with Vladimir Putin, as he has done over and over and over again. And I have to tell you, Michael, you are one of my most important sources about what is fighting in Ukraine. So let's talk about that. What is happening right now? I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time, you know, talk about Donald Trump and his perp walk, but also talk about the sort of the front lines of the West right now. So let's talk about Ukraine and about the counteroffensive. And I want to start with this, though. Your thoughts on the dam that blew up,

who blew up the dam, and why? I literally have open on my screen a piece that James Rushton and I are writing now. And the tentative headline is how we know Russia blew up the Kakovka Dam. So there's a welter of evidence here, Charlie, that this was the Russians. One, I'll start from the more kind of abstract and conjectural and move down to the evidence base. One, the Russians have boasted about possibly doing this for quite a long time. In October, 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade, which was one of the units in control of the Kharkovka Dam. This is a dam in Kherson, which was occupied of the units in control of the Kharkovka Dam. This is a dam in

Kherson, which was occupied by the Russians in March of 2022. Half of Kherson was liberated in a counteroffensive last year, but the other half remains controlled by Russia, including the dam. In October, the 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade of Russia, one of the telegram channels they control, posted this long advisory, which said, we have begun mining and undermining the dam. And here's what residents of Kherson should do if the dam blows up, right? Meaning we're going to blow it. So that's interesting. And that was pointed out by Alexei Danilov, who's the chairman of the Ukrainian National Security Council as one of the indicators that this was Russia. Two, there's a Norwegian seismology firm called NOSAR, which indicated that they picked up large seismic activity at 2.54am on June 6th.

And all of their readouts suggest this was a big explosion. This wasn't something caused by Mother Nature. This wasn't, you know, perhaps the dam just deteriorating and collapsing. There was a bomb that went off. They also detected earlier than that, about 20 minutes earlier, lesser explosions. This conforms with what eyewitnesses told journalists and indeed posted of their own accord to social media around the same time. Big blasts have gone off. Now, residents of Hursan can tell the difference at this stage in the war between artillery shells, cruise missiles, and something new. They all indicated that what had gone off was something new.

You've got two New York Times articles I'll bring to your attention. One, querying structural engineers and people whose job it is to build dams who said this certainly looks like a bomb went off, not the result of what's known as overtopping where the water level gets too high and the pressure can basically bring the dam down. And then two, more significantly, U.S. spy satellites detected an explosion from inside the dam. Now, what boggles my mind about all of this is the U.S. has been very reluctant to come out and attribute culpability, right? John Kirby has said, including on Christian Amanpour's show, we don't know yet who did it. But really, we do. Because

if it was an explosion, and it was from inside the structure itself, there's only one party capable of doing that. The Ukrainians do not have access. So why the reluctance to say that? The reluctance, I believe, I spoke to a very senior European intelligence official two days ago, and I said, you've conferred with the Americans, yeah? He said, yes. I said, and whodunit? He's like, who do you think? I said, so the Russians, right. I said, why aren't the Americans saying anything? He's like, beats me. And then I posited, well, you know, the same day this happened, the Washington Post came out with this story based on the discord leaks, you know, the intelligence that 21 year old National Guard airman Jack Dexera posted the internet, indicating that the CIA had advanced warning that Ukrainian actors, including those who would be connected to Valery Zaluzhny, the commander in chief of

the Ukrainian armed forces were looking to blow up Nord Stream 2, the pipeline, the Russian pipeline, which indeed was blown up. And so the working hypothesis is my hypothesis, which this European intelligence source said sounded plausible. I think that the American IC has got a case of cold feet. They don't want to come right out and say the Russians did this because they're worried that, God forbid, their intelligence assessment is in copper bottom. And who knows, it was some mysterious group of Ukrainian rambos that managed to smuggle themselves in, you know, James Bond-like, sorry to mix my metaphors or pop culture references there, but you know what I mean? Like, I think they're a little bit nervous about assigning blame before they can. And another aspect of it or factor could

well be that, you know, as you know, in intelligence matters, declassifying things is tricky and complicated for the simple fact that you don't want to give away to the enemy how you know what you know, right? So if there's signals intercepts, if the US has human sources on the ground who have reliably told them it was the Russians, they don't want to burn those data collection methods. I'm just guessing as to why we haven't heard from Uncle Sam yet. But from what I gather, and I did talk to one U.S. diplomat and somebody very well up in the Biden administration who was like, yeah, you know, this isn't a mystery. You know, this source also could not understand the sluggishness of attribution. And unfortunately, that sluggishness has only

contributed to Russia's information operation about this, right? So if you look at the Russian response, which is itself indicative of Russia's own responsibility, it's been a combination of the Ukrainians did it and also ha ha ha, we did it and let's blow up another one, right? State media actually had a guy come up who seemed so befuddled. It was talking such nonsense that other propagandists told him to shut up. And they said, you know what, let's not rely on any official lines coming from Moscow. Let's just listen to what Tucker Carlson says. I'm not making that up, by the way. They're deferring to Tucker on this. Oh, for Christ's sake. So, you know, I would say there is an aggregate of evidence and information, both circumstantial and less circumstantial, including SBU intercepts of Russian soldiers

saying we blew up the dam, by the way. So let's accept that the Russians blew up the dam. Why? Why did they do it? What advantage did they get from doing it? Well, there's two hypotheses for that. Number one, they didn't mean to blow the whole thing. They wanted to blow part of it or conduct some kind of kinetic operation that they could then use to blame the Ukrainians for shelling the dam, or just use it to terrorize the population of Kherson. I'm actually less inclined to think that. I think they went full bore and they wanted to destroy the whole thing. Why? Well, flooding 80 plus

settlements in Kherson on both sides of the Dnipro has had a deleterious effect on Ukraine's ability to mount its counteroffensive. It has diverted resources away from the front. You've got Ukrainian rescue workers now working night and day to rescue man and beast alike. Those rescue workers are being shelled by Russian artillery, by the way, which is itself a war crime. pointed out in quite granular detail how this has allowed the Russians to redirect their military assets in Kherson to other positions along the contact line where Ukraine is pressing its counteroffensive. So in other words, it did have both a psychological and a military effect on Kiev, which, look, the Russians don't care about Ukrainian lives. They certainly don't care about critical infrastructure. They have blown dams in the past. They just blew another one, by the way, yesterday or the day before that, as part of their defensive campaign here. So yeah,

I heard a lot of theories, oh, they wouldn't do it, it doesn't behoove them. Nonsense, they would. So clearly, this is related then to the counteroffensive, which is apparently underway. So talk to me a little bit about how that counteroffensive is going and how you are watching it and how we evaluate whether or not it is a success. So, you know, the first day or couple of days became a sensationalistic headache because the Ukrainians lost a bunch of armor in Zaporizhia, including, I think it was two Leopard tanks provided either by Germany or other European countries, a bunch of infantry fighting vehicles, including Bradleys provided by us. And, you know, as is the want of people who are terminally online and who think that war can be measured in hours or days or even

weeks. You know, you saw a lot of hysteria and nervousness. It's over. Look, it's a complete rout. The Russians have dined out on this, right? Because destroying Western armor for them is great in itself, but also even better as a way to press their propaganda efforts to try and get the West to stop providing security assistance for Ukraine. So I've seen the same images of the same bits of kit, you know, circulated by Russian state accounts. But in the last several days, particularly starting at the weekend, I began to notice in southern Ukraine, both Zaporizhia and Donetsk areas that the counteroffensive was starting to pay dividends. Now, slowly, grudgingly, gradually, but dividends nonetheless. And at last count, I had seen yesterday,

Anamalia again, spokesman for the defense forces, said that seven settlements had been retaken. And I think the figure given was about 90 square kilometers. Now, that's pretty good. And I'm seeing even more tellingly than that, panic, and a great deal of discombobulation on Russian social media. You know, one of the key markers for understanding the war actually comes from the enemy, not the Russian government or the Ministry of Defense, but what are known as Russian military bloggers, who they don't really tell the truth, the full truth. But when shit hits the fan, if I may say, you know it, because they're the first ones to tell you things are going sideways, right? Despite what you hear from Moscow, you know, this settlement has not been defended, our counter counter offensive has not succeeded, blah, blah, blah. So right now, these guys seem quite nervous. And that betokens something good for the Ukrainians. And also, look, they're not quite yet at what's known as the Seroviykin line, which is going to be the main line of Russian defense. This is where the trenches and the minefields and the so-called dragon's teeth

impediments to stop Western armor. That's where all this stuff is. But they're inching closer to it all the time. And look, Charlie, they don't have to take all of southern Ukraine, they have to breach that line of defense. And if they do it in the direction, it looks like they're doing it, they could very well cut off the direct line of communication from Russian Federation territory to occupied Crimea. And I was in Kiev seven weeks ago now. And all of the juju I was getting from Ukrainian officials, including top intelligence officials, was Crimea is going to be a priority. Whether or not it's retaken with Ukrainian infantry, or it's just quote-unquote neutralized in the sense that the Russian military presence

there and the Black Sea Fleet presence at Sevastopol is spent or gone, or they have to skedaddle across the line through the Kerch Bridge. They see Crimea as a higher value to Ukraine right now than occupied Donbass. They also think they can take it a lot more easily than Donbass, which flips the script in terms of what you're getting from the American side, which is you'll never take Crimea and don't even try. That's Putin's final red line. If they do that, game over. Well, actually, it's game over if they do, because strategically, that will be a definitive defeat for Russia. Crimea was the prize in 2014. If Russia loses the prize, they've lost Ukraine. You've shared an assessment that right now, we're seeing the Ukrainians in a probing and shaping operations and that there's going to be a major attack in the next few days. So again, how will the rest of the world know that the main

counter offensive has begun? What should we be looking for? Well, I would say we're beyond probing attacks. I look, I'm not a military expert in these definitions. One thing seems to grade into another quite seamlessly because, you know, they're on the attack and I know where they're going. You can see the axes that are being, you know, sort of lit up at the moment. But I guess the definition for the main counteroffensive, and here I sort of lit up at the moment. But I guess the definition for the main counter offensive, and here I defer to General Ben Hodges, who wrote a very good analysis at SIPA the other day, wait for the big tanks to come in, right? Like two Leos, whatever, that's not, that's not something to write home about. But when you start seeing whole columns pushing in,

then you'll know. And by the way, on the Russian side, it must be said, they haven't committed the full brunt of their forces either. You know, I mean, the guys who are holding the line in these settlements, north of the Serovian line, they don't have reinforcements, they're not getting air support, whether because the Russians are holding back, or as was suggested the other day, the weather conditions are such that it's not possible to fly in clear skies and counterattack. So yeah, we haven't seen the full curtain rise, if you like, yet. But it's coming soon. And it's coming soon because you just have to read the way that the Ukrainians are talking about things, including Kirill

Budanov, who's the head of military intelligence, who did a video, what, yesterday, the day before, it was 30 seconds of him sitting in silence. One of the tropes is, our operational security is such, keep your damn mouth shut. Don't talk about what's happening. And that usually suggests something big is going to happen. Well, and we're not done providing aid. They're expecting a new package, maybe today, to provide up to $325 million in more military aid to Ukraine. You also shared very interesting footage of Vladimir Putin in a event in Moscow with his defense minister. And you pointed out the body language where Putin is deliberately turning his

back on Shoigu. So what's going on there? Why would Vladimir Putin go out of his way to humiliate his own defense minister, who's still in office in the middle of his foreign intelligence service, Sergei Naryshkin, and said, you know, remember, he barked at him, speak plainly, Sergei. So, you know, this is kind of a classic method of all czars, you know, you play one minister or boyar against the other. And, you know, the backdrop on the Russian side to what's taking place, particularly since their war went sideways, is a kind of war of clans or a war of various actors and interests. You know, on the one side, you've had Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is the financier and architect of the Wagner Group is a mercenary outfit, almost 10 years old, sanctioned by the United States, the EU, declared a transnational criminal organization, declared in non-binding resolutions across Europe as a terrorist organization.

But the Ukrainians will tell you, these guys fight well. And actually, these guys are the most formidable opponent we've got on the battlefield. Conventional Russian military, they don't really rank them highly, but Wagner, they rank highly. And Prigozhin has capitalized on this to seemingly declare a kind of future political project for himself. And depending on who you ask about this, he's looking to either become president himself or to overtake and annihilate other vested interests, such as Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov. He's denounced them by name. He recorded a video saying, Shoigu, Gerasimov, where's the FN ammunition? Showing a whole field of Wagner

operative corpses, right, in Bakhmut. So Putin, I mean, you know, here's the thing. Kremlinology is almost impossible to do. We're just all kind of grasping at light switches in the dark at the moment. But one thing that seems fairly obvious, fairly clear, is Putin is trying to play one side against another. He's not satisfied clearly with the direction this war has gone. He evidently is micromanaging a lot of the war. And the people who will take the blame, if this war is a complete failure, if it's a strategic loss, if Crimea is recaptured by Ukraine, the first people on the chopping block are going to be the defense minister and the chief of the general staff, right? The war cabinet. But Ergozhin, I mean,

he's doing some very bold and daring things. He's denouncing Putin, not by name, but in all but, right? Describing him as a befuddled grandpa figure and all this stuff. And yet, it's exaggerating the extent to which Wagner is not being supported by the Russian state. So it's not true that they're not being armed or given ammunition. They are. They are the vanguard paramilitary force of this war effort. I'm not sure exactly, you know, if this is kind of a bit of theatrical sort of exercise with, you know, almost prescripted, if you like, or people are just kind of winging it and trying to see who can get the attention of the boss. But yeah, that video, you don't need to be a body language expert to realize that there's quite a bit of daylight between Putin and his defense minister. And his defense minister, I should say, at one point,

not so long ago, was one of the most popular figures in all of Russia, right? He was the guy who was going to build this bright, shiny new army. He was, if anything, seen as just at the popular level in terms of his poll numbers, a potential successor to Putin. I think that ship has sailed. I think Shoigu's career is all but finished. So this is one of the most fascinating subtexts of the whole episode, what Prokofiev and the Wagner group are doing. Is it going too far to say that Vladimir Putin is afraid of Prokofiev or is concerned about Prokofiev? Why does he tolerate the kinds of things that he has been doing? Why doesn't he step in? Is he too valuable?

Does he in fact pose a long-term political threat to Putinism? Wagner is beyond just being a, I mean, psychopathic paramilitary organization. It's also a cult. The Ukrainians have been doing these sociological projects or exercises where they're querying people on the other side, including Wagner fighters. And one thing that's telling about almost all the Wagner fighters is they think that if you are a mobilized soldier or you're working for the Ministry of Defense as just a regular army grunt, that you're a mug, you're an idiot. You're fighting for no glory, certainly no fortune, because the pay is lousy. Whereas Wagner, pay is good. They're prepared to die in Ukraine on the battlefield and then have their families inherit the fortune.

There's all the glory in the world. And most important, they bow down before Batya, which is Russian for dad or father. And guess who dad and father is? Prigozhin. So Russia has allowed Prigozhin, and also Russia has, because Wagner, its connections to the Russian state, particularly the military industrial complex and the GRU I think are fairly well established these guys go around the world including Africa signing arms contracts with local governments right you can't do that unless you you have a buyer leave from Moscow but Wagner has turned into the sprawling apparatus of it's a mercenary corps on the one hand it's also a group of political technologists on the other.

You know, they're helping candidates in Mozambique and the Central African Republic and Libya run for office. They're doing consultancies. They're doing information operations and influence campaigns, including recruiting assets in Europe. In Germany, I've tracked their activities extensively. This is a monster that's been created. And the real question is, when these guys come home, assuming they survive, because a lot of

the conflict zones they're thrown into are meat grinders. When they come home, they are going to form a constituency, they're going to form a political movement unto themselves. And my friend and colleague, Kristo Grozev at Bellingcat, who has talked to Wagner directly for many years now, he was saying that these guys will tell you now that we outnumber the members of the FSO, which is Putin's presidential praetorian guard meant to protect him, right? This is a guy, Putin, who is fundamentally paranoid about one thing, assassination, right? He's got food testers, people have to provide fecal samples before they visit him. We've all seen the very long tables. He's a germaphobe, which has prompted all sorts of speculation, if not conspiracy theories about what kind of illnesses he's got, etc, etc. But

a guy who was actually an officer or captain in the FSO defected recently and described his daily routine as, you know, a cross between late Stalin and Howard Hughes, you know, self-isolation, armored train, transportation, just absolutely terrified of being taken out. Now, when you ask me, is he afraid of Prigozhin? Well, Prigozhin, the man, may not be the problem because, you know, you could remove Prigozhin, but the problem is you're still going to have Wagner and you're still going to have a bunch

of military aged males, many of them convicted criminals, many of them with a real taste for blood and sociopathic behavior. I mean, remember, Wagner punishes people who get captured by their ranks and then traded back by bludgeoning them with sledgehammers. The sledgehammers become the symbol of Wagner's supposed fortitude and machismo. All these guys are going to become real problems for the Russian Federation at the societal level, but also at the political level at some point. And I mean, I just published a report today for the Free Russia Foundation on the use of ultra-nationalists, neo-Nazis, fascists, and cultists in the spearheading of the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. So kind of a whole little Mos Eisley cantina scene of weird religious

eccentrics, millenarian nutbags, but also people who were formerly working for the KGB and fostered by the KGB as a kind of internal opposition in the late Soviet period. Wagner is that on steroids, right? And they're not the only game in town anymore. There are other private military companies, albeit none as prominent or as formidable as Wagner. But yeah, you know, this is, I think Putin has fashioned a rod for his own back. And if you know, the irony here is somebody who's that worried about being taken off the chessboard is basically, you know, positioning all the pieces there for exactly that contingency, right? And he's done it through his obsession with

taking over Ukraine going back now almost 10 years. It's all about Ukraine, I would say, the last 10 years of his presidency. Extraordinary. Michael Weiss is senior correspondent for Yahoo News, the host of the podcast Foreign Office, 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 coming back on the podcast on this extraordinary day. I appreciate it. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.