The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence by Yaroslav Trofimov

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence by Yaroslav Trofimov https://amzn.to/43KnfUl “Our Enemies Will Vanish achieves the highest level of war reporting: a tough, detailed account that nevertheless reads like a great novel. One is reminded of Michael Herr's Dispatches . . . Frankly, it's what we have all aspired to. I did not really understand Ukraine until I read Trofimov's account.” —Sebastian Junger A revelatory eyewitness account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and heroism of the Ukrainian people in their resistance by Yaroslav Trofimov, the Ukrainian chief foreign-affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. In this authoritative account, he traces the war’s decisive moments—from the battle for Kyiv to more recently the gruelling and bloody arm wrestle involving the Wagner group over Bakhmut—to show how Ukraine and its allies have turned the tide against Russia, one of the world’s great military powers, in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath. Putin had intended to conquer and annex Ukraine with a vicious blitzkrieg, redrawing the map of Europe in a few short weeks with seismic geopolitical consequences. But in the face of this existential threat, the Ukrainian people fought back, turning what looked like certain defeat into a great moral victory, even as the territorial battle continues to seesaw to this day. This is the story of the epic bravery of the Ukrainian people—people Trofimov knows very well. For Trofimov, this war is deeply personal. He grew up in Kyiv and his family has lived there for generations. With deep empathy and local understanding, Trofimov tells the story of how everyday Ukrainian citizens—doctors, computer programmers, businesspeople, and schoolteachers—risked their lives and lost loved ones. He blends their brave and tragic stories with expert military analysis, providing unique insight into the thinking of Ukrainian leadership and mapping out the decisive stages of what has become a perilous war for Ukraine, the Putin regime, and indeed, the world. This brutal, catastrophic struggle is unfolding on another continent, but the United States and its NATO allies have become deeply implicated. As the war drags on, it threatens to engulf the world. We cannot look away. At once heart-breaking and inspiring, Our Enemies Will Vanish is a riveting, vivid, and first-hand account of the Ukrainian refusal to surrender. It is the story of ordinary people fighting not just for their homes and their families but for justice and democracy itself. Yaroslav Trofimov is a Ukrainian-born Italian author and journalist who serves as chief foreign-affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. Previously he wrote a weekly column on the Greater Middle East, "Middle East Crossroads," in The Wall Street Journal.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Moses Voss, here for thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. For 16 years, we've been bringing the smartest people, the CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the Pulitzer Prize winners,

the greatest authors who bring you their stories of fiction and nonfiction and their books and tales of their lives and their economies, their times, and everything else. I'd heard this young man on the Sam Harris podcast, and I was just floored. I highly recommend you go check it out. I think it's about two or three hours of some of the most extraordinary in-depth details of Ukraine, their history, Russia, et cetera, et cetera. And, of course, you can find it in his newest books.

January 9th, it came out, 2024, and I recommend everyone give it a read especially on the future of everything when it comes down to it really i think it's the linchpin to the to probably world war three for uh anyone who wants to check into it uh his newest book is out our enemies will vanish the russian invasion and ukraine's war of independence yaroslav tromovov that truff himov is on the show with us today. Did I get that right on the second time there, sir? Yes, you sure did.

There you go. PBS got me going a different direction on their video. So welcome to the show. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's very simple. It's yarotrov.com, Y-A-R-O-T-R-O-F.com.

There you go. It's got all my books and appearances of shows like yours. There you go. Now, you're the Chief Foreign Correspondent Affairs for Foreign Affairs with The Wall Street Journal. You're a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for two consecutive years. That's really great. 2022 and 2022. Three, and before covering the Russian war in Ukraine,

you reported on most major conflicts over two decades, serving as a journal's bureau chief in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and as a correspondent in Iraq. And you hold an MA from New York University, and you're the author of Faith at War and the Siege of Mecca. So your newest book, give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside. Well, it's really a book about the first decisive year of the war in Ukraine, the Russian war in Ukraine. So I was there for pretty much all of 2022 and a large part of 2023.

So the book starts the day before the full-scale invasion, February 23rd, 2022. And then I kind of go through the country to the front lines and talk to everyone from soldiers and trenches to civilians to people suffering under Russian bombardments, all the way up to the President Zelensky, to people suffering under Russian bombardments, and all the way up to the President Zelensky, to his generals, and also to leaders of Western nations and intelligence agencies and military that also played a pretty important role in how this war is unfolding. And the other bookend is the one-year anniversary of the invasion where Ukraine does survive the initial onslaught by Russia.

And where Zelensky holds his big press conference, about three and a half hours, and says, we've learned one big lesson. Nobody in the world likes losers. Yeah. Stay crazy, you're not losing. It's been an interesting thing to watch. You know, I think everybody was kind of like, I think we're done with all the wars now for a while and we live in a safe environment. And boy, that was, we were off on that.

Why you've covered a lot of wars for two decades as it's covered in your bio. What makes this coverage of this war different for you personally? I mean, for me, obviously, covering a war in a town where I was born, a rapid child, emotionally is a whole different game.

You know, wars are unpleasant business anywhere, and obviously you always have empathy with the innocent people who are always caught in this conflict. But in Ukraine, just walking the streets where every bit of geography had memories of my childhood, you know, every building, you know, had associations from what I was doing as a teenager or a child, felt like an insult.

And really, I was thinking, why? Why would somebody be dropping bombs on this town? Kiev, you know, the city that is, city that is more than 1,500 years old. Yeah. And a country that hasn't really done anything to provoke this because this war is really an imperial war of aggression by President Putin. And Russia just is reliving his imperial fantasies

and wants to go down in history books as the man who brought back together the lost imperial possessions, Russia. Yeah, the old USSR that he's been, I think he romanticized, is that correct? Not so bad. I mean, he compared himself to Peter the Great, the 18th century emperor who conquered a lot of lands that are now in Ukraine, for example, or in NATO, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. There you go. So we'll run back to the book. But one thing that was interesting, too, is where does the title come from? I was when I first saw the title, I was like, what does our enemies will vanish mean? Tell us the origin of that, if you would.

Yeah, so that is a line in the Ukrainian National Anthem. The anthem itself was written in the 1860s, at the time where not just the independent Ukraine didn't exist. Even speaking about it was a criminal offense in Russia. The Ukrainian language was banned. You couldn't print books in Russia. The Ukrainian language was banned, he couldn't print books in Ukrainian. And so this was a clandestine, really a clandestine book, sorry, a clandestine song that was banned for more than a century. And the line goes, our enemies will vanish like dew at sunrise, which is a very romantic way for the enemies to vanish. It's not a bloodbath and not some sort of martial music to it. It's just an expectation of Ukrainians that they want to be left alone.

I think this is what the war is about. Ukrainians just want to be left alone, to live the way they choose, and not be told by Russia what language to speak, where to go on vacation, with whom to trade, and which books to read. And that's really as basic as that. Yeah. The same sort of thing that started our country, the USA. People want freedom.

They want to live their life the way they want without tyranny and domination. Although, I don't know, some in America seem to think that's a great idea these days but we'll see hopefully we have better angels that will prevail in 2024 a democracy will continue but you know Ukraine you know this is the spirit of the this is the human spirit really when it comes down to it I think you know when think when the founders wrote our constitution, they acknowledged it with certain lines that spoke to the human nature, the human condition of wanting to be free,

to be wanting to be, to have enough freedom to be able to do whatever they wanted. And that's really important. Tell us a little bit about your journey and your history. Some of the, feel free to touch on some of the books. You were raised in Ukraine, I guess, and born there. Tell us about your upbringing and what shaped you into becoming a news journalist and finding that important and why it is that motivates you to chase these wars around.

I mean, it's dangerous business around the world. It's certainly dangerous business. I was born in Ukraine. But when I was only six years old, my parents went to Madagascar in Africa. My dad was a professor of statistics at the university. And so I kind of grew up partially in French-speaking Africa, which was very eye-opening and kind of gave me a whole new life experience. And then we went back to Ukraine, and then my parents ended up in New York. And, you know, I started covering conflicts around the world, you know,

at the end of last century, actually. And I was in Rome working for the Wall Street Journal as Italy correspondent covering fashion and beautiful things and you know The war of fashions

Exactly, on 9-11 and because I spoke some Arabic I got on a plane that evening and flew to Egypt and then the Gulf, and then was sort of covering what was known at the time as the global war on terror. So the invasion of Iraq and then Afghanistan. Well, first Afghanistan, then Iraq.

And I spent a lot of time in Baghdad, then in Kabul and Saudi Arabia. So I wrote the book about the siege of Mecca in 1979, which was really a pivotal moment in the history of the Muslim world where, you know, a hundred thousand hostages were taken in the Grand Mosque in Mecca by the Islamist extremists. That kind of were the precursors of today's Islamic State, ISIS. And kind of throughout all this career as a journalist, I really tried to stay away from Ukraine. And Ukraine, thankfully, didn't bring in

much coverage for a big stretch of that because it was a country of peace. I remember going there in 2004, where Ukraine had this orange revolution, and uprising against an attempt to steal a presidential election. And I came there from Baghdad after mayhem,

and my friends were kidnapped and killed, and I was quite traumatized. And so I remember coming to Ukraine and seeing how peaceful it all was and how all this change was achieved with not even a shop window broken, not a single person injured. I felt very proud about that. And that, of course, was a conflict within Ukraine, between Ukrainians, among Ukrainians.

But then things changed. In 2014, it was the beginning of the Russian invasion. We all sort of say the war began two years ago, but the war really began 10 years ago when Russia took over Crimea and then sparked a really violent conflict in the Donbass region. 14,000 people died at the time. And then, you know, I've loved studying history. Um, and what we do as America, I love the chessboard watching how one move affects another.

I mean, sometimes you don't really love the chessboard, but you know, our, our Americans ability to try and put our fingers on the scale and we end up making things completely worse, especially for us sometimes. You know, you look at how we funded Osama bin Laden for years with war and guns and stuff, and then he turns... Well, not him directly. I mean, the Mujahideen. Yeah, and then, you know, he turns on us, and, you know, we're always mucking around Cuba, you know, you name it.

I think we've screwed up most of South America over the decades. And, you know, watching the 2014 war, the Obama's red lines in Syria getting crossed, you know, seeing, you know, how this plays out and the moves that are made on the world stage has always has always interested to me me um one thing i was curious about is if i would have been biden and i remember thinking this uh to a week or two before the um the invasion when when uh it was clear that ukraine was surrounded by tanks and everything and i'm like if i were biden i just i just go land a whole mess of us military in in all their cities like i just put everybody in plane and do it and like block them as a chess piece but do it was it was it true that zielinski wasn't fully on board that he was really

going to get invaded that maybe they were playing bluff? Well, so I think Zelensky, until the very last moment, didn't really believe that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion. I mean, he believed the war was coming, but he thought it would be a war for Donbass for the East, not necessarily a war for Kiev. And there was a reason for them to disbelieve American intelligence warnings, because the Russian army that was all over the borders with Ukraine was quite small, about 200,000 soldiers, maybe less.

And it clearly wasn't enough to invade all of Ukraine, as events have actually turned to be. It only made sense if you believe that the Ukrainians will not resist, which is clearly what Putin did believe because he drank his own Kool-Aid and believed his own propaganda that the Ukrainians and the Russians are my people and his men will be greeted as liberators. But Zelensky did know that the Ukrainian army will fight. And so I don't think he imagined that Putin would be so

captive of his own illusions to launch a war with so little preparation. We'll be greeted as liberators. That line always worked out well. Maybe Putin should have called George Bush W. I actually drove

into Iraq in 2003 from Kuwait. American soldiers were greeted as liberators for about a week. Oh, really? For about a week? But occupations are nasty business, no matter how good the intentions are. You know, if you're in a foreign country, you don't know the culture, trample upon local customs unwittingly or wittingly. And obviously, it's much harder, you know, in a place that Ukraine but there was no nobody greeting them as liberators yeah who knew that we were gonna unleash the linchpin between the

Sunnis and the and the Shias I think and then of course you know he was holding Iran at bay with the Iran Iraq warraq war, Saddam was. I mean, technically, the guy was an evil, bad guy, but technically, things were kind of under control in that area. Really want to come down to it. And they didn't have WMDs either. I don't know. What's your thoughts on that? I think, well, I remember talking to a lot of Shias before that war,

and the war sort of, the regime was really brutal in Iraq, especially for Shias, or for the Kurds. And a lot of people are today happy that Saddam is gone, but obviously the horrors that the botched intervention and the botched occupation unleashed destroyed the entire generation of Iraqis. I mean, the same in Afghanistan. It's pretty hard, even with the best intentions,

to run a foreign country. It is. I've been trying to run Belize from Las Vegas for like two years, and it's not working out well. So one thing that was interesting to me in the book and sam harris discussion is your uh your education and your knowledge on russia and its historical sort of nature its defense and and how it looks at its borders as a ussr sort of borders its access points to defend itself in war its thought processes on on whether this was

inevitable or not uh if you want to speak to some of that or tease some of that out in the book i'd love to hear it because that really i think more people need to hear that and read your book because so they can understand the ukraine war and they can understand that once that domino falls if it falls uh it really becomes it really becomes a a nazi sort of you know well uh moldova and other countries can easily just fall and it can become a domino effect much like you saw with the nazis well i'll go more more in moldova i think you know i was just in in Estonia, and I spoke to people in Poland. And in all these countries, there is this dread that in a year or two, if Ukraine is allowed to collapse because of the cutoff in American funding,

war will come there. Young people are talking about shopping by house in Spain instead of having somewhere to flee. And that's the kind of threat in NATO of the NATO that the US is committed to defending possibly with nuclear weapons. You know, Putin's ambitions are very clear. You know, first of all, he wants all of Ukraine and he keeps saying that. And he has compared himself to Peter the Great, you know,

the collector of Russian lands. And he spoke of cities like Madova and Estonia as Russian soil. So if you remember what the Russians demanded from the U.S. before the invasion, in February, January 2022, they basically wanted NATO to be rolled back to the Cold War boundaries.

They wanted the U.S. to yield control of sovereign nations in Eastern and Central Europe back to Russia. So that is what the aim is. Obviously, it's really hard to achieve because right now it has taken Russia a year to take one town of 30,000 people in Ukraine. But if left unchecked, you know, and if Russia manages to gobble up Ukraine and use its resources, its men and its industries to be that its war machine, you know, the rest of Europe very wrathfully senses that it's in danger.

Yeah, especially if someone comes into office in 2024 who's more nationalist and doesn't really have a regard for globalism democracy and and uh nato of course seems to be very anti-nato and you know we're on the precipice of testing what is it like 70 years that we've had nato um in in place testing what that means if ukraine falls like it's a it's an important strategic point. And the amount of, I'm not sure if it was you or someone else, but someone said our defense budget for Ukraine that we've spent is maybe 1% of our whole national revenue or income or whatever the hell it is. It's a very small amount.

It hasn't cost us any American blood, at least not in soldiers that we've intentionally put on the ground, to my knowledge. Yeah, absolutely. Let's look at the facts. About half of Russia's military stockpile, its tanks, army personnel carriers, artillery pieces, have been destroyed

in this war at a cost of a fraction of the American defense budget, as you mentioned, and also the European ones because Europeans pay about half of the overall foreign military aid and zero lives lost on the part of the US military or other allied militaries. All the fighting, all the dying is done by Ukrainians and by a small number of foreign volunteers, including Americans, who come there to fight on their own volition because they empathize so much with the Ukrainian cause and, you know, they're horrified by the atrocities Russia has committed.

Yeah, it's a thing that, you know, I mentioned this to you in the green room before the show, where I remember watching the Russians, because I really love Churchill, and watching, not the Russians, but watching um england and the house of lords discuss uh go ahead and sell you know plain parts and engine parts to the nazi germany right pre-nazi germany or not nazis when they were running germany and and uh we're kind of down and out from the world war one and like what's the worst that could happen you know

they just had this lazy affair, sort of like, we'll make some money. And, you know, everyone's kind of making money off of Germany. And, you know, what's the worst that could happen? And then it just goes. And I seem to see a lot of echoes of that in the GOP house

and how they don't want to fund Ukraine. And, of course, they're doing all sorts of things. So they're hoodwinking with fascism, Viktor Orban, Hungary. They'll love a Russia if you understand what goes into that and the background of that and why they think it's a great country. It's really weird because I don't know about you, but I grew up cowering under the desk of my steel desk in my elementary school thinking it would protect me from nuclear bombs in the USSR. And to see where we're at in America now where we're just like, well, let's dance with Russia and pretend everything is fine and be friends, especially with Tucker Carlson going over there and towing the Republican line.

I'm just like, what an extraordinary place we've moved to as a country. It's really bizarre because what we have seen in the last few years is that in Europe, the European far right that used to be pro-Putin has moved away from Russia quite significantly. The Italian prime minister, you know, Giorgio Meloni,

is one of the fiercest supporters of Ukraine, and she runs a party with roots in Italian fascists, in the original fascist party. You know, in France, you know, the far right is not, you know, is saying that it condemns the war and it supports Ukraine. It's not voting necessarily the parliament that way, but at least it says the right things. And the same, you know he's saying that it condemns the world and it supports ukraine it's not voting in the secular parliament that way but at least it says the right things and the same in sweden and other

places in scandinavia and that's in europe that has really suffered economically because it had to cut off its dependence on russian gas and it's paying the price and still you have this swing of public opinion behind ukraine because because Ukraine is not something abstract. Everybody knows Ukraine refugees. There are millions and millions all over Europe, most of them are children. But in America somehow, which is not paying no economic price for this,

America didn't have much trade with Russia, didn't depend on gas. I mean, there's really no leverage except in the ideological space that Russia has over Americans. And yet you have this very strange wave of sympathy for

Putin and his goals in Ukraine and Russian talking points and big parotid all over the former Twitter, for example, including by Elon Musk. It's really strange to observe this from the outside. Yeah, he seems to be trying to play all the cards in his favor. And most, I mean, most millionaires do.

They love these countries that they can do whatever they want in, and they don't like the regulations that we have here. We've had a lot of authors on to discuss that. You talked about the refugees in Ukraine. You know, we've seen how the Syrian refugees really changed the map, changed nations' attitudes, made more nations kind of closed off. You know, there's the Brexit.

Even in America, we seem to have, we seem to turn towards our darker angels, if you can call them angels, darker demons. And with you, and those people don't appear to ever be going back to Syria, especially because what's-his-face is still in power. But is there a way that, let's just work from a perfect sort of, sort of the good beats evil. If Russia was ever to back off or maybe they'd have to settle on what they've grabbed so far,

or maybe they would settle with whatever they had in 2014, if somehow this ended positively in some manner for Ukrainians to still have their freedom in their country, do you see those people coming back, those refugees, or after two years and maybe still under the threat of Russia, people are just going to go, fuck it, we're just going to adopt a new country and move on? Or is there enough love of their country to come back? I think it's very different from the Syrian refugee wave. And there is one reason for that.

Men of military age, which is defined as men until the age of 60, cannot leave Ukraine normally. And so the vast majority of these refugees are women, children, and the elderly. So they all have

their loved ones back in Ukraine. And they're not building a new life abroad, in many cases without them. And so already, you know, millions of people who fled in the first weeks and months of the war came back. They came back to Ukraine. It's not hard, it's not far, and the dangers are there, but people have learned to live under this occasional missile strikes and drone strikes. And so I think the vast majority of the Ukrainians who are abroad will probably come back to Ukraine. And the reception in Europe has been very welcoming. It's very different from the receptions that unfortunately the Syrians have had. But also it's because Ukrainians

were not something new. I mean, even before the war, 2 million Ukrainians worked in Poland and the border was open. Ukrainians didn't need a visa to go to Europe. And it was just something normal for them to be in Germany, France or Poland. Definitely. And you mentioned that the Ukrainian war as a proxy war for the US, technically I guess, or a proxy draining of the of the uh of the russian inventory has done just extraordinary things for this is exposed you know we've had so many different military leaders who've written books on the show people who've you know run the aircraft carriers and

different things on the show um major admirals um you know the the the exposing that they have done and i think this has put china on its heels a little bit too is the exposing that the russian military was so corrupt was so you know i mean the the old the the kleptocracy that putin is and how you know there's just corruption and everything and stealing of money that probably was never going to the military by the heads of the military and stuff has just exposed all of that. I think a third of the ships in Russia's military, in fact, some of their most favored pieces,

have been sunk. In the Black Sea Fleet, yeah. Yeah, and I think the Black Sea Fleet, I just recently saw, has had to move back, hasn't it? Well, I'd have to move ships from the Crimean Peninsula to Novorossiysk further away. Yeah. I think in March they took out two ships, or maybe it's in the first quarter of 2024. I don't know.

There was a point where there was a ship every few days. Yeah. I mean, yeah. a ship every few days yeah i mean yeah we recently had uh the gentleman uh george takaku who put out cold war 2.0 artificial intelligence the new battle between china russian america and one of the most amazing things is seeing the ukrainians be so innovative and inventive i mean they've literally changed the face of war to just drones that you can buy off a shelf. I recently saw this thing where they're mounting the bombs to like mobile, you know, the Russians

have figured out the drone thing. And so now they've got like basically ground activated four wheel drones that will roll up to places. It's extraordinary to watch the videos of the drone boats going right up to which are basically like ski dues going up to take down giant ships and targeting them in the most you know where the fuel is and the armaments to to get the most maximum damage it's just extraordinary um any of your thoughts on that and and how that's really changed the future war can and also if i might follow that up too can the can the ukrainians sustain this do

they have enough manpower and bodies on the ground to to go through this and keep this up or or are they losing ground now i'll start with you with second question, which is easier to answer. Sure. I mean, the Ukrainians are losing ground slowly, not a lot of ground, one town since May last year. And they're losing ground because of the funding shortfalls, because the Congress hasn't moved to an aid request for Ukraine since, I think, November. And they just don't have enough ammunition, have enough shells. The Russians have a 6-to-1 advantage, maybe a 10-to-1 advantage, depending on the stretch of the front.

And that's the main reason. So do they have enough men? There are enough men in the country to keep fighting. And more importantly, what are the other options? Everybody knows that surrender is not an option because Ukraine has a deep historical memory of all the bad things that happened when they surrendered. And the Russians are very clear about their plans. They want to physically annihilate, execute the Ukrainian elites

and re-educate the children of Ukrainians to make them into Russians. Yeah, they've already sold a number of, a large number. Yeah, but they want to do it to everyone. So, they're pretty genocidal in their plans. Now, the change of the face of war, the drone revolution is really a big, big change. And I don't think the US military has internalized just how everything is different now yeah there are two countries in the world that are the cutting edge of joint technology it's ukraine and russia and uh just how it's transformed it is you know in every facet of of of military operations from you squad-level drone usage,

you can now fly these little $200 drones, the FPV, sort of first-person view drones, and destroy a tank that is worth millions of dollars. And for one-tenth of the price of one shell, that is nowhere near as accurate. And then, you know just just last few days you know the ukrainians flew a drone more than a thousand miles away uh to the outer reaches of Russia to hit oil refineries and you know a Russian military facility assembling drones

uh you know the strike drones that target Ukraine almost every night. So soon nowhere in Russia will be safe because of the reach of these drones, which is transformational because Ukraine is trying to achieve deterrence against Russian missile strikes using very cheap domestic-produced drones because let's not forget that none of the weapons that the U.S. has supplied to Ukraine are allowed to be used against targets inside Russia.

Do you think that we should be giving long-range airplanes to Ukraine? I assume the fear has been that they'll use them to fly into Russia. And then we kind of enter a war or we enter a nuclear situation. Tell us what you think there. I've watched the, it's been extraordinary to watch some of the videos of where I think the, I think the Ukrainians fly their old Russian helicopters down the highway, just barely above the traffic. I think they do that for cover, but watching some of that, it's just extraordinary. And, you know, I guess Ukrainians are like,

eh, whatever, it's just a copter going by three feet above our heads. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I mean, Ukraine has been pretty good at not using foreign weapons to strike Russia because a lot of the other kind of gear, except for Meheimar's multiple rocket launch systems that were supplied in July 2022, were given to Ukraine on condition

that it would be used against Russia. And it's not using them against Russia now. The US has been reluctant to give Ukraine cruise missiles because of the skills, but the French and the British did give Ukraine cruise missiles because of the skills, but the French and the British did give Ukraine cruise missiles, the Storm Shadows, which were used very efficiently to take out the ships in Crimea. But again, were not used to strike targets inside Russia. So Ukraine has kept its word on this.

And Ukraine is getting the F-16,, maybe the top of the line fighter jets, but certainly much better than what Ukraine has now. So Ukrainian pilots are currently training to fly them and the first batch should probably arrive in the next few months. And those jets are not provided by the US, they're provided by European partners, by countries like the Netherlands, like Denmark, that have F of F-16s that they're phasing out and replacing with more modern aircraft. And I think one of the other benefits to the U.S. of this war is, it's hard to say, well, there's a benefit to a war.

People are dying and there's human tragedy and suffrage and the horrors of this will, I'm sure, will be felt, the trauma will be felt for ages to come. But one of the other benefits that Americans need to look at is this has been cleaning up a lot of crap inventory the U.S. had and getting our updates.

And what I'm trying to say is when Americans think of the cost of this war, we're not sending them the latest, most expensive, newest shit we put out. This is some of the stuff that we've just been had laying around that probably needed to get updated. And some of it was probably redundant or, you know, getting aged. Uh, and so we're not, it's, it's just not costing us a lot to do this war and to help the ukrainians and for what it will cost us if ukraine falls most people i think of any sane mind or intelligence or studied history um and that's why i love your book and how it talks about the human or the russian and the

way they look at things and the way they the way their attitudes are towards this that just really alarmed me because i was like holy shit these guys are really fucking serious and they're going all the way but uh you know people just don't realize how cheap this war is especially when it comes to american lives when it comes to cost uh using it as a proxy war is probably more expensive than anything we've been up to in ukraine and afghanistan and other crazy places where we were doing a lot of stupid stuff. In Afghanistan, one US soldier cost $1 million a year.

Wow. Just one, one GI Joe. That was the cost of direct war. Astronomically expensive. And again, as you said no Americans

have to die for Ukraine Ukrainians are doing their own fighting Ukrainians now have the biggest army in Europe

and they are fighting very fully cognizant of the fact that you know if they were to lose

the war would come to their neighbors and neighboring countries know that too yeah there's a lot

of the reason why so many European countries are emptying out their stockpiles of weapons and ammunition and sending it to Ukraine is precisely that. Now as for the stuff that Ukraine is getting from the US, some is old, some is new. There are two different programs. One is the presidential drawdown authority where existing stocks are being uh handed over another one is this u.s uh usai initiative which creates jobs in american uh factories to make new stuff for you yeah and so a lot of a lot of that program is actually a job creation program in the u.s making making and supplying new armaments um now since you wrote your book just recently, a few weeks ago, there was the attack by ISIS-K

in Russia that killed, I think, 140 plus people. I guess it's turned out we actually, I guess I'd heard of our duty to warn, but it had been a long time since I've heard it. And we actually warned Putin three days before. We have some sort of duty to warn policy that even though they're enemies of ours i don't know i guess it's some nice thing that we do to say hey like some shit can go down your country eh and because it would kill people that are innocent um so good for us it's not probably a duty but it's a it was a conscious decision yeah so how do you see you know there's talk now that he he's

going to use that war to blame the ukrainians he's going to use that war to blame the Ukrainians. He's going to use that to pull up more conscripts and maybe pull up 100,000 to 200,000 Russian troops. How do you see that playing into the future of Ukraine war? Well, obviously, Putin has already blamed Ukraine, and that's supposed to be expected. You cannot spend two years saying that you're waging an existential war against an enemy that wants to destroy you and then be told you were fighting the wrong enemy and actually

it's not these guys, it's those guys who are blowing up your city and then killing 140 of your civilians in a concert hall. I don't think a lot of people in Russia believe that, but this is the talking point of the Russian regime. Now, the problem with mobilizing troops is that it's really hard for the Russians too. You know, last time they tried hundreds of, in

September, October 2022, several hundred thousand, maybe a million Russian citizens escaped the country because they didn't want to go and die in Ukraine. And then there's a question of, okay, well, you have the soldiers, but what are they going to drive? What weapons are they going to have? How are you going to train them? Who's going to train them

if most of the officer corps is either killed or injured or fighting in the trenches? So mobilization is difficult for Russia. If it had this magic wand and this ability to sort of mobilize its troops and send a million men army into Ukraine, it could have done it already. It wouldn't have been bogged down in this war that is now taking a toll, not just on its army, but also its economy, because Ukraine in the last few months has managed to destroy a significant part of the Russian oil refining capacity,

with its drone strikes, for example. Yeah. I mean, Russia is just a giant fucking gas station. I mean, that's really all it really is, is an oil gas station. And sadly, what was it? India just helped put a shot in their arm by buying a bunch of their gas, which is, thanks, India. Way to go.

Well, it's cheap. Why wouldn't they? Yeah. I guess if you need the gas, you're probably the future leading developing economic country in the world. It looks like China is faltering now, finally. We were talking again with the author, George Takak, of the Cold War 2.0. And what's interesting is how many of, even with the blockades and the embargoes,

how many of the parts around the world are finding their way into this drone strike battle? Yeah. And still into the Russian things. They're still able to get these parts. And evidently, from what we've talked to with these authors, is it's really hard to stop. You know, where it's easy to stop arms, we're like, hey, there's a whole ship full of tanks. Maybe we should stop that ship. It's really hard to stop these little parts and chips from getting to the Russians and helping them build.

And, of course, Iran's part of that as well. Right. And, you know, there's lots of Western companies making a lot of money on this. And there's been a surge in exports to the countries on Russia's periphery, you know, all the Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, all this world. And obviously it's very clear to everyone concerned that it's not for local consumption. It just gets smuggled to Russia.

But, you know, people are greedy. Yeah. Greed and war. Jeez. It's almost like Dick Cheney when he was president. And Halliburton. There was no big contracts. It was always weird how that worked out. But I guess that's the essence of the darkness of human nature. the book to get them to pick up or maybe to put thoughts in their minds about why this war is

important and and why ukraine really needs to be able to win this war well i think you know in the book i'm really telling the stories of the people who are fighting and you know it's not some sort of exotic conflict people like you and i uh people like people who listen to you who had the same aspirations the same desires same career path before they started you know going vacations you know some tropical country and one of the characters used to run a dive shop in phuket in thailand when the war began he came back became a commander was one of the leaders of the uh ukrainian forces in the siege of Mariupol, the deadliest episode of the war, when the Russians collapsed in the city, killed tens

of thousands of people there. And then I trace his story as he's fighting the final battles, suddenly 300 Spartans refused to surrender until they were ordered to do so by Zelensky, and then taken captive by the Russians, tortured in Russian prisons. And then after Ukraine launched this miracle offensive in September 2022 in Kharkiv and took a bunch of Russian officers captive, he was traded back and was freed in exchange for the Russians and is now leading the fight again. So these are the stories of these kind of people that are really inspirational but also unvarnished.

I tell it sort of words and all. I was just trying to humanize the narrative as much as possible so people could relate to it. It's not some sort of geopolitical game of risk. It's real people with real tragedies, real losses, but also real hopes and real successes and real traps. And doing sometimes

very inspiring and amazing things. And I think that is the strength of the book. Because I wasn't just being a pundit sitting in a nice office. I was to my knees in mud dodging shells and bullets being a pundit sitting in a nice office I was to my knees in mud you know dodging shells and bullets

what the action was yeah it's I was watching a video recently and I'm hoping that I don't know if this will change the front of the war but it was a Ukrainian soldier

and he was talking about how uh inept and uh un um untrained these conscripts are and he was telling he was basically telling the scenario of a battle they had i don't know if this is pr but it seemed like it seemed pretty real but he was telling us how the conscripts were, you know, these Russian soldiers that were, you know, just mucking it up in war and putting their whole troop into the firing line. By the way, they were mobilizing and moving towards the Ukrainians just ignorantly, end up getting a lot of them slaughtered. And is there a chance that Ukrainians can win this war just by attrition you know there's the joke i think that came out of the state department where you know we used to think the russians were the you know one of the top armies in the world now

we find out that the second best army in ukraine um yeah that's what we can say well i mean for a while it seemed to be true. I think the Russians are also learning their lessons, and the Russians are not stupid. And two years into the war, they've developed new approaches that are sometimes successful. I think Ukraine can win the war over Russia for the simple reason that Russia is running out of tanks, artillery pieces, and all kinds of other gear

at a rate faster than it can be built or repaired or refurbished. Ukraine has destroyed several dozen tanks every week, and it has nowhere else to get them from. So in two years, maybe, you know, one year, maybe in three years, depending on how the war goes, Russia will just not be able to sustain it anymore. Whereas Ukraine can rely on the industrial base of the West.

The Germans, if they really get their heads into it, can make a lot more tanks. And the French can make a lot more artillery pieces. So that's where we're at. Not this year, because this year is... The European industry is just starting to ramp up. But they are.

And the U.S. is frozen because of the inaction by the Republicans in the House. But if the stars align, Ukraine definitely has a chance to win this. So the EU and Europe may be able to close the gap for providing more armaments and stuff like that that may well they're certainly doing it now i mean the reason why ukraine is in the fight right now is because of the european initiatives you know the czech prime minister just you know scoured the markets on his own initiative and and found more than a million shells and then got all the rest of the europeans to put in money to buy them. So the Europeans are definitely standing in now because they know that for them, Ukraine

is a direct national security issue. It's not for America. I mean, for America, Russia taking over eastern Ukraine is not a threat to the American homeland today. It is a threat to America's global standing, to its ability to influence and benefit from the rules-based international order, to benefit from the dollar, to develop from the trade. And you know, the world system is stacked in America's favor and that could be under threat. But it's not the Russians are going to march into Pittsburgh tomorrow. But for the Europeans, there is a threat of the Russians marching into the EU and entering

direct conflict in the not too distant future. And so that's why the Europeans are as carried and are acting now, finally. One of the things we've talked to authors about too is the chip battle that went on and that goes on and so many different products that create the products that we like. And it's all internationally based. And if we lose Europe or key parts of Europe, that's going to affect our prices here at home. Everyone loves to complain about this here. Supply chain issues, all those sort of things. You know, we saw, um, we were, we were talking with an author about Europe and, and how much,

uh, that if, if it were to fall, it could imbalance, you know, our global supply, our trade supply can balance the unbalanced the whole world because we're so dependent upon these chips and this, and this stuff. And then the future of AI, of course, and in war, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, uh, it's quite extraordinary to see where we're at with America's attitudes of being lazy, fair, and just being like, oh, you know, whatever. And you're just like, holy crap. Like, do you understand how bad this can get?

I mean, I think I heard you speak on how Putin uses the threat, the extortion of nuclear war to advance his things. And if we keep falling back whenever he rattles that sword, he can do that all through taking over and attacking NATO, right? I mean, you spoke about the chips. Obviously, the biggest and most important producer of chips right now is Taiwan. And the fate of Taiwan is very much directly linked

I think to the fate of Ukraine. Because if America walks away from Ukraine, after making all its pledges and commitments to stay with it, stand with it for as long as it takes, what lesson will the Chinese government draw about

the Latin American reaction to taking over Taiwan? And also more importantly, what lesson will the Taiwanese draw? I think the lesson they will draw is that why resist? Might as well surrender to the Chinese government. And so that will have a direct impact

obviously on America standing in the world on its ability to uh you know maintain its industrial base and trade and the dominance of the dollar and you name it america is the biggest beneficiary of the current international system which is at risk and that system was based on america's commitment to defend its allies, which is now in question. Yeah. I mean, we lose Taiwan right now. We have a real problem with chips. I mean, I saw a lot of companies during COVID with the supply chain,

you know, just small companies that were, you know, manufacturing like little things here and little electronics things there. We did a lot of reviewing of products before COVID. And, you know, I had companies that were telling me, we can't get the chips, Chris. We're dead in the water right now because the supply chains can't get the chips to us. We lose like Taiwan. And, you know, if you're an American

complaining about prices or shit right now, you have no idea what sort of hell is going to rain down if we lose Ukraine if if we lose ukraine if we lose taiwan you know even like ukraine i had no idea that you know they provided so much sunflower seed to the world uh there's manure well it's not called manure fertilizer i suppose the better way of saying it uh you know they were they were leading um production for a lot of food in the world. Food? Yeah. Yeah.

And thanks to the drones, it's now exporting again because by singing the last of the fleet, the Ukrainians are now able to reopen its main port. There you go. Well, and they've exposed the Russian military as being just almost a stack of cards that fell. And they're doing such a great job with really changing the face of war. I mean, watching them drop bombs on those popcorn tanks where the turns fall off,

I mean, I wouldn't even want to be in a tank if I was a Russian soldier. I'm just like, that sounds like the worst place to be. Yeah, tanks are not having a good time in this war. And I think a very small percentage of tanks of either side are destroyed by the tanks. Yeah. The tanks were built for tank battles, and that doesn't exist anymore because they get taken out by drones now. Yeah, it's just crazy. Well, give us your final thoughts as we go out.

Tell people where to buy the book and the final pitch out, sir. Yeah, well, I mean, you can buy the book anywhere. Bookstores of choice, you know, Amazon, websites, other online retailers. And, you know, the book is really, you know, no matter how many feelings I may have myself, I'm just trying to take myself out as much as possible. I just need this sort of roving camera, seeing my very tech, if you will, just taking the reader to all these places,

letting the reader see with their own eyes and speak through me. To people actually doing things, you know, to see how the war looks, how it smells, it's really visual and descriptive. And this is the biggest war Europe has seen since 1945. It is a conflict that is really decisive, I think, to the future of our world. But it's also a war that has stories of people that really then need to be told. Yeah. The human element.

I mean, these are families. These are human people. These are people with dreams who want to, you know, do what we call happiness. Or people who thought until the last day that the world would never come to them. Because they didn't believe it could happen to them. And lots of other people in the world right now think it's gonna happen but it can't yeah and you know the human toll is extraordinary and not to minimize in any way shape or form but the beauty of ukraine and its centuries-old buildings and and architecture and seeing russia just basically do the syrian sort of thing of just leveling cities and destroying everything.

And of course, as you mentioned earlier in the show, they just want to do a genocide too, where they just want to wipe basically Ukraine off the map and make it Russian and probably put people into Uyghur type camps that they do in China to re-educate them. You know, we can't let this happen. And it's just so important. So I hope everyone reads your book. I hope everyone gets it. Have you thought about mailing it

to all the GOP members in the House? Well, we have given it to quite a few. Not just GOP. I think every Senate committee chair and ranking member has got it. Send him an autographed copy. Put a Bible on the cover and maybe

he'll read it, you know, in case it. So thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. Where do we want people to find you on the interwebs and follow you on social media? YarrowTrough.com There you we want people to find you on the interwebs and follow you on social media. Yarrotroff.com. There you go. Thank you very much, sir, for coming on the show.

Thanks for having us, for tuning in. Order the book wherever fine books are sold. Stay out of these alleyway bookstores because they're dangerous. I got mugged in one. His book is entitled Our Enemies Will Vanish, The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War on Independence, out January 9th, 2024. And I'm hoping the next time we have them on, we get to talk about Ukraine winning this war.

Or at least something to just stop the advance of Russia that works good for the Ukrainians. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.