Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Cathy Young: Thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure.
Young: Well, the attacks have been growing in intensity for, I think, the past month. It’s just been a series of relentless attacks, including on Kyiv, where for a period of time Russia was not attacking. I think part of it is that Russia has stepped up its drone capacities. They’re now able to strike targets at a long distance better than they were able to. It should also be noted, by the way, that while Ukraine is also making drone strikes in Russia and and I think may still be somewhat ahead of drone capacity, Ukraine is striking military and military-related targets. Russia has been.... The most recent one is that they struck a bomb shelter, which is really unconscionable. They’re striking schools, they’re striking restaurants. Last month, I think they struck a playground where a number of children were killed.
Young: It’s been this ridiculous two-step dance really where the pattern is that the U.S. makes a proposal, Russia basically shoots it down—no pun intended—and comes out with a very unsatisfactory counter proposal, which the U.S. actually acknowledges as unsatisfactory. After the initial conflicted relationship between Trump and Zelenskiy, Ukraine has actually got along with the U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire. And then Russia has been essentially saying, Well, no, no, no, we don’t really want a ceasefire unless Ukraine also agrees to give us these four provinces that we annexed in September of 2022, most of which Russia doesn’t even control. This is territory that Ukraine actually sacrificed lives and spent a great deal of effort reconquering, and now Russia is saying, No, you’ve got to give it back to us as a condition for even talking about a ceasefire. Then the U.S. makes noises about how unsatisfactory Russian behavior is, and then it’s back to square one and then new attempts to negotiate.
Young: I honestly don’t even think that this is a reflection of being privy to some sort of intelligence. Isn’t it basically the Trump MO? Like everything bad that happened during the years of the Biden administration happened because Trump wasn’t president. And then of course, everything that happens now, Well, if it weren’t for me, it would be a lot worse. So I don’t even know if it’s very productive to look for some factual underpinning to this. It’s just Trump being Trump, right? That’s my reading.
Young: They would have sent more weapons to Ukraine. They would have.... I don’t know, maybe sanctions would have been stepped up.
Young: Nukes? Yeah, right. Right. Which makes a lot of sense. And I think a lot of this is really Trump trying to cover up the fact that he’s been completely ineffective when it comes to—well, many things, but with Russia-Ukraine, it’s especially stark. I was listening to a really colorful Russian expatriate commentator this morning, Alexander Nevzorov, and his comment was, Well, Trump, on his return to the White House, burst onto the scene boasting about the size of his manhood, and now he’s demonstrated that he’s actually completely impotent.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Yeah, I’ll give you an update. I’m not happy with what Putin’s doing. He’s killing a lot of people, and I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin. I’ve known him a long time, always gotten along with him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people and I don’t like it at all. OK? We’re in the middle of talking and he’s shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities. I don’t like it at all.
Young: Yeah.
Young: Well, he wants to eradicate Ukrainian identity. I don’t know that he actually wants to kill every single—
Young: Yeah, and Putin and other high-level Russian officials are basically saying quite straightforwardly that they believe a sovereign and independent Ukraine is incompatible with Russian statehood as they see it. And they have this idea—it’s about rebuilding the empire in some sense.
Young: Right. There is a view, which I think is fairly convincing to me, that at least when Putin was starting out as the Russian leader, he didn’t necessarily have an ideology beyond self-enrichment and the magnification of his own power. But he’s been using this Russian imperial ideology as a cover for his actions because he has to justify his autocracy somehow. And I think it’s entirely possible.... I can’t get inside his head—and it’s not a particularly pleasant place to be, I’m sure—but I think it’s entirely possible that he has gotten into the role to such an extent that he really is buying into [it himself]. Like, what’s the expression, huffing his own supply, right? That’s entirely possible. I think at this point, he really is serious about the ideology.
Sargent: Well, we’ve got Republicans in Congress—a small group of them anyway—that are now pressing to escalate pressure on Russia, really breaking with Trump. Trump has made noises about maybe he’ll entertain sanctions, but it seems to me that Trump has basically always been either entirely indifferent to the fate of Ukraine or actively rooting for Russia to win. So how much longer can Trump disguise his actual position here? He’s got Republicans saying that it’s time to escalate the sanctions. Trump himself is admitting, without meaning to, that his efforts have failed. Russia’s doing what he has told them not to do, right? So Trump is failing according to his own account. So how much longer can Trump sustain this position where he’s essentially admitting that he’s not getting his way but saying, I’m going to walk away, as his people are saying? Where does this go from here? Trump clearly doesn’t want to be seen failing. This is why he’s raging so furiously at Putin right now. Yet he also says, I’m going to walk away, which he thinks, I believe, that he could wash his hands of this and somehow not be perceived to have failed—but everybody would know that he failed. So where does this go? It just seems like a deeply contradictory position.
So I think he’s in a bit of a bind there. And part of the reason he’s raging, I think, is that he’s flailing trying to decide which course of action is going to make him look least inept and least weak, really, because that’s really his preoccupation. So I think it’s possible.... It also depends on who is going to be influencing him, because Trump is, and I’m sure we all know this, susceptible to the last person he spoke to to a remarkable degree. Remember after he played golf with the Finnish president, he suddenly came out with this tough talk about Putin and then there was more backsliding two days later? I’ve joked that maybe the best option for Ukraine is for Zelenskiy to learn how to play golf. Spend a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago and maybe then everything would be fine. So I don’t know, maybe someone can talk him into getting behind the Republican sanctions.
Sargent: So where do we see this ultimately going? You don’t think Putin is really winning to the degree he thinks he is. It doesn’t look like Ukrainians are being terrorized by the attacks on civilians. Do you have a general sense of what we may see over the next year or two, and where does Trump fit into all this?
I think the Russian forces really cannot achieve any breakthrough unless they hugely increase their manpower. And I think Putin is actually afraid to do another large-scale mobilization because the last time he did that, which was really almost two years ago, there really was a lot of discontent, especially when it starts affecting the population in the large urban centers. So far, the conduct of this war has been really to use primarily people who are either marginal like convicts, or people from small towns where poverty is so high that people are willing to risk their lives for the higher pay that is offered by the army, or the places populated by ethnic minorities, which also tend to be very poor. They’re not mobilizing people in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other larger urban centers like that. So if it gets to the point where the average Russian starts feeling affected by the war, which he or she is already, to some extent.... You have drone attacks on Moscow airports. I think people really are feeling the pinch, so to speak. And I think there is growing discontent.
Sargent: Well, unfortunately, Trump’s motives and his understanding of strategy are really impossible to read. I’m not sure if he knows what he thinks about all this. Cathy Young, thanks so much for coming on with us today.
Sargent: Absolutely.
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