The Dispatch Podcast - No Deal in Alaska | Interview: Tim Mak

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Tim Mak, Dispatch contributor and founder of The Counteroffensive, joins Kevin Williamson to discuss the details of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladamir Putin in Alaska. The Agenda:—Life in Kyiv amidst war—Analyzing the outcomes of the summit—Trump’s “diplomatic” approaches—The fragmentation of European unity—Mak’s reporting on human interest stories in Ukraine Show Notes: —Tim Mak's piece for The Dispatch on war machines The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. This is Kevin Williamson. Our guest today is Tim Mack of the counteroffensive. Tim has been on the ground in Ukraine since hours before the war began and consistently has been there for almost the entire course of hostilities. He has a lot of interesting insights and things to say. So I hope you enjoy the conversation. Jim Max and T. How is the weather? I trust it's not raining rockets right now. Well, it's sunny. It's mid-70s. It's a nice summer day. And, you know, you can see people walking around and joining their Saturdays as they might have before the war. The problem is that occasionally their day in the park is interrupted by air sirens. And just, you know, just over an hour ago, the air siren, the air alert was taken down. But this is how you live life. over the last couple of years here in Ukraine, is that you try your best to reach out and establish

some normalcy, and then when the war comes to you, you react to it the best you can. I was surprised when I was there to see how normal-seeming a city, Keith was 90% of the time. I mean, this was a couple years ago, so the war has picked up in intensity for Keith's instance. But, you know, shops and restaurants were open, people were going out, you know, drinking in bars and that kind of stuff. I suppose the curfew was noticeable difference, but it seemed almost uncanny how much of a normal European city it felt like. Well, Kiev is hundreds of miles from the physical front lines, but it's the target of many strikes. There's been this sort of in-joke among residents of Ukraine's capital city that there's the kind of daytime Keev and the nighttime

Keev. Day-time Keev is very much as you describe, which is restaurants and you leave a kind of almost pre-war life. And then the night falls and the attack start. And you hear these ominous buzzing sounds in the night, these Shahid kamikaze drones flying around the city. And you can't see them. So you just kind of wonder what direction might they be heading. And that's punctuated by anti-aircraft fire and explosions and air defense missiles being fired off. There's this whole symphony of kind of nightly events that leaves no doubt in the minds of anyone who lives here that there is a war going on and that it is affecting millions and millions of people. And of course, the outside kind of social view of, oh, well, hey, you know, there's a bar open, there are these bars

open, people are eating at restaurants that also really does hide a lot of the costs of mental trauma that's being, that's being experienced by millions of Ukrainians, as well as the many people who aren't on the street, the many people who aren't at the bars, many people who because they're injured or, sadly, dead because of the war, aren't part of those in the mix of what would otherwise be seen as normal life. And, of course, there's the element of economic disruption as well, which is more intense for some people than it is for others and much more intense for the Ukrainians than it is for visiting foreign journalists and other such people, which often gives us the distorted

view of things. Speaking of distorted views, segue, Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin. And did Trump get rolled? It looks to me like Trump got rolled. What do you think? I think that Trump's supporters may accuse you and I of being unhinged anti-Trump people. So let's take a step back and give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Let's merely assess what he said he wanted going into the meeting and what has come out of the meeting. So on his way to the meeting in Alaska, Donald Trump gave.

a sort of impromptu Q&A with the press in which he said that he was going to the meeting in order to establish a ceasefire and that he'd be very upset if he didn't get that. Okay. Summit has been completed. Let's look at the results. Did he get a ceasefire? No. In fact, not only did he not get a ceasefire, he is now seemingly abandoned the concept

of a ceasefire at all. He's bought into Vladimir Putin's general strategy and hope. I don't see how you can look at that. is anything other than him getting ruled. I don't see how thinking and logical person could see that and say, well, actually Trump got what he wanted. Yeah, I don't want to put you on the spot too much on the politics here, but I often find myself wondering how much of his incompetence vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine

is the fact that he's just not very good at this sort of thing, doesn't have any experience at it, and isn't very smart and isn't willing to do the homework to learn how to do these things. And how much of it is he's essentially on the other side, that his, you know, his sympathies are essentially with Putin and Putinism and the Putin way of doing things, whereas he thinks to the Ukrainians is somehow, you know, being a foreign country that is attached to the American Democratic Party in some way, which, of course, is silly, but it seems to be what he thinks. Without asking you to be entirely unhinged, I think of myself was a very hinged anti-Trump person, but not an unhinged one.

I got a lot of doors in my house. They're all on hinges. But what do you think, is he just bad at diplomacy and bad at negotiation, or is it the fact that the fact is I put it anyway, what I believe to be a fact, that his sympathies are just more strongly on the other side? I think it's the fundamental question, right? Not, you know, there are briefing books out there that could he, could he be bothered to read these books, he would otherwise be a competent diplomat? That's not it. I mean, I think fundamentally, Donald Trump, I don't think he thinks. in his mind, oh, I really love authoritarianism. In his mind, though, he has a sort of perverted view of what strength involves. He thinks that strength is about taking. He thinks that strength is about doing whatever it is that you please without major consequences. And in his eyes, Vladimir Putin is a very strong person, not because Vladimir Putin puts together coalitions or convinces large people, large groups of people to do the things that he wants, by

diplomacy or cajoling them or creating interests that are in line with them because Vladimir Putin is just able to take. That's the whole philosophy behind the invasion of Ukraine is that Vladimir Putin just wanted to take what he believed to be his. The people of Ukraine said no. And that's why we're in the situation that we're in. But Donald Trump sees this kind of confiscation and this sort of strong-arming as his version of what a good leader ought to be. It's totally wrong and at least to horrible consequences, particularly those that are governed by leaders like this. But that's the way he views the world. So it's not some sort of tactical level change that might make Donald Trump more aligned with Western values. It's a fundamental misunderstanding.

of what is strength. Yeah, I tend to agree largely with your analysis there. So Putin came in with a couple of goals, one supposes. I don't think he would have been particularly worried about the proposal for a ceasefire because all he has to do is say no to that. And he knew he could come in and say no and that Trump wouldn't know how to threaten cajole, strong arm, entice, or otherwise get him to change his mind on that. But the other thing that seems to me that was fairly obvious,

if you look at the way he talked before and after, that Putin's agenda here was to widen the gap between the Americans and the Europeans, which he seems to have done fairly successfully. So the Europeans were really prioritizing the idea of a ceasefire, and they got sort of blindsided on that when Trump just walked away from that proposal entirely and then changed his mind about it,

and then put them in the position of having to, in a diplomatic and politic kind of way, criticize the decision without being seen to criticize the decision, in the very gentle, like you're dealing with, you know, particularly sleep-deprived toddler way that people have to deal with Donald Trump for fear of setting off his delicate ego and making things that much worse. And then Putin comes out and he, you know, does some trash talk about the Europeans and suggest that they will try to torpedo, as he put at the negotiations toward a lasting peace and such.

And so it seems like he was probably successful in widening the gap. between the Trump administration, the U.S. government, the United States in general, and are put upon European allies? Yeah, I mean, it's in Vladimir Putin's interests as much as possible to create, you know, what is in the, from his perspective and from China's Xi's perspective, a, quote-unquote, multipolar world in which America no longer has singular prominent dominance in the world and in which there are many different spheres of influence in which countries with power can do whatever it is they please. What he's hoping is that the Western Alliance, NATO is split up. And so they're more easily, I guess, conquered. You know, you've got a lot

of countries on the eastern flank of NATO, the Lithuanians and the Estonia's of the world, that Vladimir Putin sees as, from his sort of perverted view, rightfully his, or rightfully imperial rushes. And so his kind of broader strategic mission here is to divide and conquer, to create as much dissent as possible, and to continue the war, which he believes he is winning. And as long as he can delay the process, as long as he can say we're in the middle of a peace process, which could take for all we know years to conduct and distract Donald Trump long enough. I mean, I suspect that the most likely outcome to this is going to be that Donald Trump gets frustrated with not making sufficient progress on this, and that he just walks away,

says, and you already see signs of this. You see Donald Trump saying, well, it's Zelensky's decision. You're going to ultimately, I think, ultimately going to see Donald Trump try to wash his hands of this and go on and make the business deals with Russia that he had always hoped to do all along. He just needs to dispatch with this inconvenient war that's occurring on European soil. Ultimately, the Ukrainians are going to have to pick up the pieces. Yeah, did you notice the thing about Labrov showing up wearing a CCCP shirt and serving chicken Kiev on the airplane to reporters who were accompanying there? This does not seem to be a communication from an administration in Russia that, no, he's not taking the prospect of peace seriously. It seems to be willing to advertise a certain degree of contempt for its relations with the United States, that they've got this well in hand, and they feel like they can lord this over the Trump administration a little bit.

It seems to me like a poor strategy given that Trump's vanity is one of the important variables here and one of the most important variables, probably a more important variable than American national interest, at least in terms of the way his administration makes decisions. For a country that launched a war that's going for much worse than it had hoped and that has cost the Russians much more than they expected it to cost and has been much more difficult for them to prosecute than they thought it would be, there is a strange tone of triumphal. don't you think? Yeah, I mean, I think the message of that CCCP t-shirt that is the Cyrillic for USSR is a message not only to the United States, but to the most vulnerable members of NATO's eastern flank. Imagine being Poland or Polish and reading that. Imagine being Estonian. Imagine being Lithuanian. Imagine being Finnish and seeing that. These are not, you know, idle historical concepts. These are concepts that in living memory, we have the scars of victims and trauma, generational trauma, of what the Soviet Union did to its neighbors.

And what is obvious is that Lavrov and Putin and the rest of their gang want to bring that all back. Believe that it is their birthright, Russia's birthright, believe that it belongs to them and they're simply retaking what they're owed. That is something that an American president typically would push back very forcefully against. But instead, it was embraced, the red carpet was rolled out, and a war criminal was given a friendly ride in the presidential limo, which is something that is not typically given to strategic adversaries of the United States and to war criminals. So the Russians and the Chinese, as you mentioned earlier, are very much looking forward to the process. of what you may euphemistically call a multipolar world, a world in which the United States is no longer the dominant and essentially unchallengeable power. The Europeans are less enthusiastic, I think, in many ways about that prospect, but they are having a multipolar world

foisted upon them in a way they're not entirely comfortable with. And for all this talk about strategic autonomy and the other things the Europeans say when they want to kid themselves into thinking that they've got a credible military and diplomatic and political block that can really project power on the world stage. They would prefer to see Washington leading in lots of ways, I think partly because Washington is able to lead in a way that the Europeans still aren't. But there are things that they could be doing that they aren't doing in terms of they can step up sanctions pressure, they can make more public commitments to long-term financial

support for the Ukrainian government. And there are the things they can do to inconvenience the Russians when it comes to things like visas for Russian citizens. They could seize Russian assets that are in Europe right now, of which there are a very substantial amount of Russian assets held in European banks. They could do that. So why do you think it is that the Europeans are not taking a stronger hand in playing such cards as they actually have in their deck? Well, I think the European problem is one of fragmentation. It's that there's that famous saying, if you want to call Europe, who do you call? Do you call the Germans?

You call the French. What do the Italians have to say? Poland has become an increasing power on the eastern frontier of Europe. And all of them have different interests and different strategies for how to counter the rise of authoritarianism and its threat towards Europe. All of them have different perceptions of threat. Spain feels a lot less threatened by Russia. Portugal feels a lot less threatened by Russia than does Poland. And so all these sort of misalignments and incentives and ideology and strategy has led to a less coherent strategy for what Europe will do going forward. And traditionally, as you've pointed out, the United States has been a leader

in pointing everyone in the right general direction, in leading militarily, in setting the standard for economic relations. Right now, though, I think what's really been undercover in American media is just how big the rift has become between the United States and Europe. I think it's been covered in very superficial terms, as if it's a sports match. You know, the American terrorist threats are issued one day and European revulsion is covered the next day. But underlying all of this is this sort of generational, this feeling of a generational backstab by the United States to what should be America's closest friends. And I don't think that's something that's been properly appreciated, that these are not normal discussions that

are happening right now between the United States and Europe. And Europe is feeling for the first time in living memory, at least living memory for many of us, the United States can't be counted on as a reliable partner. And so when you say that Europe is struggling with the stated goals of strategic autonomy, I think that's true. But it's because they've never, they have very little experience in actually building a coherent plan in the past. They've relied on the United States to set the general North Star. Now they have to figure it out on their own, a very fragmented political institution or set of political institutions. And they're struggling there. I wonder that this hasn't changed European politics more than it has. I mean, usually the

presence of a strong and aggressive common enemy tends to have a unifying, clarifying effect on allies and within countries as well. But that doesn't really seem to have been the case for the European Union, which, if anything, seems more divided and more fragmented now than it did, say, 10 years ago. Let's see. There was a former German ambassador who took a look at the meeting between Trump and Putin, and he said it was a clear one zero for Putin, no new sanctions, not even, you know, some kind of symbolic concession, anything like that. And Trump hates the feeling of losing. I mean, that's that's kind of. of one of his psychological tics.

If he feels like he's winning, he's happy with whatever the results are, whatever winning means in any particular situation. If he feels like he's not, if people are laughing at him, people are judging him poorly, then that gets his attention. It would be funny if it weren't my country, if it was someone else's country, it would be funny. But the fact that he apparently called up the Prime Minister of Norway before this meeting and said, hey, you know, Nobel Peace Prize, keep me in mind, because I'm going to go,

in peace here is just so ludicrous, but I wonder if there's anyone around him who can point out that this sort of thing makes him look extraordinarily weak, extraordinarily feckless, incompetent, at the one thing that he always insists that he's the world's greatest at, which is negotiation. I'm not sure how he's defended that reputation for so long of being great in negotiation because he's not negotiated anything, really, in his political career that would require some sort of deft hand at negotiation. On the other hand, if someone points that out, it just may make him, you know, that much more juvenile and angry at the Europeans for laughing at him when he certainly deserves to be laughed at, I think, in this matter.

We spoke earlier in the conversation about Trump's terrible misunderstanding of what strength and power involves. And here we're getting into Trump's misunderstanding of what leverage involves, He seems to think that politics is all about personal relationships among world leaders, personal direct feelings between one leader to another, as opposed to being about countries, what their strategic interests are, and if they're misaligned, how to align them in certain ways using deals and creative thinking. Donald Trump doesn't have the patience for that sort of creative thinking or getting into the detail is sufficient to find compromises and negotiate solutions. He's always felt that leverage is, what can I take? He's always looked at friendship and alliances as something that generates a debt to him personally, that shared sacrifices and shared values, close ties. friendships between the citizens of each of the countries actually is a debt that should accrue interest to him personally. And of course, that's a really sick way to view

friendship. And it's an absurd way to view leverage. In this case, Donald Trump has the opportunity to create leverage over Vladimir Putin and get Vladimir Putin to do what Donald Trump wants to accomplish, which is, as Trump has already stated, to effect a ceasefire in Ukraine. He could do that if he wanted to. He could do that by implementing additional sanctions on Russia, which, by the way, is one of the reasons we're having this meeting in the first place. He could do that by saying to his Republican colleagues in the Senate, hey, pass this sanctions package, which more than three quarters of the Senate, both Democrat and Republicans, support that would really affect Russia's economy. He doesn't really particularly either understand

that leverage or doesn't want that leverage. He thinks that by cajoling, by shaking hands, by smiling and laughing in the presidential limousine, they have some sort of understanding a relationship. And Vladimir Putin, I think, for all of his evil, is really adept and really smart at the world of diplomacy. And he understands exactly how to take advantage of a foolish man, which is what I think we're seeing. Yeah, I don't think you rise as high in the KGBs he did without some pretty good understanding of human psychology and how to exploit it. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can

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Russia seemed to have a much clearer understanding of Putin's threat than, say, you mentioned Portugal and Spain as examples of countries that are taking a more easygoing attitude toward this. And, of course, so I'm in my 50s. I was born in the 1970s. When I was born, Portugal and Spain were both under fascist dictatorship still. We still had the remnants of Francoism in Spain and in the military dictatorship in Portugal. And, of course, the Eastern countries were still under Soviet occupation until the 1990s.

That suggests to me that the Eastern countries, if we take this as precedent, may only be 15 to 20 years away from forgetting their historical experience as well and forgetting the lessons that were learned in a very painful and difficult and bloody way over all those years. You have been in Ukraine for all of this war. If I recall, you arrived maybe the day before the invasion. Just a few hours before the invasion began, yeah. A few hours before the invasion. So you've kind of been on the ground there in a very literal sense for the whole thing. Tell me what got you started doing that.

What made you say this is the story I want to cover? I'm going to take myself into this war zone or this thing that's about to be a war zone within a matter of a few hours. And now I'm going to camp out and stay here and see this thing through. That's a really interesting commitment to make. Well, like many good things in life, this was an accident. I was supposed to be in Ukraine for two weeks, and now I've been here for three and a half years. Originally, I set out, I was a correspondent for NPR and worked on investigations in Washington, D.C. But I also have a military background.

So I'm a former U.S. Army medic. At the time, you'll remember in 2022, the Biden administration was screaming from every hilltop that the Russian were going to invade. The Russians were going to invade. So by mid-February, NPR was putting together a plan on what will happen if the Russians invade. And partially due to my military and medical background, I was included in the team to cover a potential invasion. By the time the invasion actually started, I was very skeptical it would ever happen. And I think a lot of Ukrainians were also extreme, at the time, were extremely skeptical that a full-scale invasion like the kind we saw would actually ever occur.

Maybe there will be increased fighting in the east of Ukraine, but this idea of, you know, Putin trying to invade central Kyiv and shell the, you know, the suburbs of the city. And that was kind of unfathomable by the 23rd of February, which is the night of the invasion. Most people had kind of come to the conclusion that the invasion wouldn't happen. You might remember the Biden administration said it was likely to occur the week of the 16th February 2022. So a week later, it was kind of like, oh, well, these Americans are always

getting so upset about nothing. Actually, an interesting fact about that all is that the head of German intelligence was actually so caught off guard. He was in Kiev when the invasion occurred and had to be shuttled out of the country by land because he, too, was not prepared for. So this is all a kind of long story of how I ended up accidentally in key. And I spent the first year of the war, covering the conflict from pretty much every major city in this country, then went back to the States for a little bit and realized I want to keep writing about this. NPR also happened to be going through layoffs in 2023. And when a colleague and friend of mine was laid off, I just raised my hand and said, hey, I'll take her place in the layoffs.

I want to go back to Ukraine. And so I ended up doing that and starting the counteroffensive, which is our human interest publication based in Kiv. And so our philosophy is to try to tell the news, not by your typical format, which is this happened here and at this time, but instead to focus on the who, to focus on the human interest side of news storytelling,

and tell you about a person who went through the news. Go deep into their lives. and explain to you who they are as a person. You use that as a way to create a sense of connection between what's happening in here in Kyiv, what's happening in Taipei, what's happening in Syria, what's happening in Tbilisi, all these places that we've covered and make it feel a little bit more relatable to readers who are often many thousands and thousands of miles away. Our motto is empathy and authoritarianism can't mix, this idea that when you learn about the lives of these people and you, you connect and you relate to them, it inspires action and, in fact, demands that we do something about authoritarianism in the world. And that's our hope. We've now been going on for two and a half years. We've come the number one substack in the international category. And you can

check us out at www.counteroffensive.com. We also set up a trade publication covering Ukrainian defense technology. So all the latest battlefield innovations that are occurring here in the war, over at counteroffensive.pro. And so we've built out this team of Ukrainian reporters that are right now putting themselves in harm's way to get news of what's happening here out into the world. Well, tell me a story. Tell me what's been in your virtual pages recently

that you think would most interest our listeners. Well, here's the thing about it is that when we talked about this Trump-Puton summit, we didn't want to just talk about territory that was being demanded by Putin. We want to talk about the people who are in each of the territories that Putin is now demanding from Ukraine. And we also wanted to talk about how these are not empty territories devoid of merely people, but also they include really strategic assets. So our most recent story on Friday was about this fortress belt in Ukraine, these series of entrenchments and defensive positions that have been.

that have been built and held the front line for now more than a decade of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the people in particular, who is given sweat and blood to defend that line, to build that line, to reinforce that line. This fortress belt in eastern Ukraine is beyond the territory that Russia is demanding. So Russia is saying, hey, just give us this little bit

of territory and we'll stop fighting, we'll stop the war. What it would effectively mean, though, that territory was seated, is that Ukraine would have to give up its very strong, very well-in-placed defensive lines, such that should Russia decide to start another war? And there's no reason to believe that they won't start another war, that Russia would be able to start now on the other side of these defensive positions to a much more vulnerable Ukraine. These are the kinds of stories that we're trying to tell. The lives of the people who are building this fortress belt, or rather than tell you that a P.O.W. Exchange occurred, we went deep into the lives of

geneticists and folks who are working in morx to test DNA and try to match the DNA of missing Ukrainian soldiers to family members. We're doing stories about a Ukrainian soldier's last trip around the world. He was killed in action. He asked to be cremated and brought to more than a dozen places in the world. So his friends set out on an odyssey to bring him to the last places that he had hoped that he would go. These are the kinds of stories that we're trying to tell because we understand that the news is not just about events occurring or chess pieces moving on this giant geopolitical board, but about the people who are undergoing these events. That's our focus and that's our hope in the kinds of news and storytelling that journalism can be about.

Yeah, I think that's sort of, you know, kind of radical focus on people and that human interest way of going about storytelling can be really, really powerful and useful. But there are some things on the policy side, too, that I think require some attention, not necessarily from you, but I think from the broader conversation. One of the things that constantly surprises me is how difficult it is to get Americans to understand the American interest here. that this isn't just some crusade because we like Ukraine, we like Ukrainians, and we don't like the idea of Russians doing things we don't want to see Russians doing. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex.

Presale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at MX.ca. If you're explaining the case from an American interest point of view to someone who follows the news but doesn't follow it at the level you do, where do you start? What do you tell them? Let's imagine I'm talking to a MAGA voter and I'm trying to convince them that supporting Ukraine is in America's best interests. Let's start about what animates MAGA voters in general so that I can kind of get to their level and speak on their terms. Summer's here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by Almost? Well, you can't get a well-groom

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Alcohol and select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency App for details. Most of other voters are accused of being isolationist, but they're not really isolationist. They very much value America being seen as the primary power in the world. They very much value American strength. And I think that's where I'd start. I'd start with the idea that in order to be strong,

America needs friends. The world is a big place with a lot of different languages, cultures, and interests. And in order to be powerful, it needs to keep its word to its friends. And the United States has made a longstanding commitment to Ukraine, that it would help protect it and its territorial integrity. That's important. If America wants to be strong and needs to be trusted, it needs to be trusted. It needs to keep its word.

I think that's step one. Step two is that Russia wants to sideline the United States and the world. It wants its sphere of influence restored. In this sense, geopolitics is more of a zero-sum gain. It doesn't gain power without America ceding it. And what I think has Putin's gang wearing CCP sweaters is this notion that America's withdrawing in the world and that it can restore its old Soviet sphere of influence, where it can take as it pleases from these former terrorists.

territories of theirs. That's not in America's interests. And fundamentally, giving up on our friends, giving up on the democratic ideal around the world is going to weaken America to the point where we don't have friends. No one takes us at our word. We can't make genuine agreements of collaboration with people around the world. And that makes the world a much more dangerous place for Americans everywhere we go. I think we talked a little bit about how betrayed betrayed Europeans feel about the United States right now, not to the level where, you know, a random American is going to get attacked in the street. But the point is that America is when it's alone and when it's left to fend for itself, it has left fewer levers to pull

in order to get what it wants, diplomatically, economically. It can it can win in the short term through bullying and demands and kind of quasi extortion. But in the long term, the other people that you need to do business with, the other people you need to talk to, they're going to find ways around you. And when they find ways around you, you lose your influence and you lose your standing. And that's a terrible, terrible result for the United States of America.

My read on this is that the war will continue until Vladimir Putin decides that it's not in his interest for it to continue, either because he is won so much that he's satisfied or because he has lost so much that it's too painful to go on. The Europeans do not seem to be able to muster the will and the power and the resources to make this painful enough for him to want to stop any time in the near future. The Trump administration seems disinclined to do so. And as much as I dislike acknowledging this particular reality,

the Ukrainians seem to me to be very much effectively on their own, that this is still a fight that can really only be won by them and that they can depend at best on desultory, partial, halting support from the rest of the world. Is that I you see things or am I being too pessimistic? I thought I was pretty pessimistic, but I think... I'm very competitive that way. I think that's maybe one level more pessimistic than I. am. I think that Ukraine still has quite a number of assets on his side. I don't think that I don't think your view excludes that. I think that Europe still has, has some levers to pull, and Europe still is supportive economically and militarily for Ukraine. As much as I want,

no, but we can't discount that Europe has been a big supporter of Ukraine and is continuing to provide arms, military support, intelligence support, economic support, and diplomatic support. My pessimism is tempered a little bit by the fact that Ukraine has shown some real initiative in asymmetrical warfare and being able to do more with less to innovate where existing expensive solutions don't exist or aren't available to them. This whole rise in the creation and innovation cycles of drone technology and electronic warfare and autonomous ground vehicles, the ability to sideline or sink a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet, this coming from Ukraine, a country with no Navy prior to the full-scale invasion.

Ukraine has a lot more cards than, I think, most people realize. And it has a long kind of almost genetic instinct towards freedom, egalitarianism, innovation, this kind of stubbornness that emerges through hundreds of years of history living on this frontier plane between great powers. It's got this spirit of resistance that's kept the Ukrainian identity alive, despite many, many efforts to stuff it. When you look at its current diplomatic troubles in the context of the last millennia of history in the places that we now call Ukraine... been a lot worse, and the Ukrainians have endured much, much worse. And so it's from this context

that I and I think a lot of Ukrainians have a little bit more optimism than you. Maybe not a lot more optimism, but just slightly more. Oh, you have a great deal more experience in the country than I have, so I will defer to your relatively optimistic view. My own experience there was that the Ukrainians are smart and creative, that they are willing to fight hard, they're courageous, and they don't mind killing Russians, and that if anything saves them, that's going to be what saves them. Tim Mack, thank you so much for your time. I enjoy the conversation, and I hope we can do this again sometime. Thanks so much, Kevin. If anyone at the dispatch wants to check us out, we're at www.counteroffensive.com. Thank you.