Steve Hayes
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I’m Steve Hayes. On today’s roundtable, we’ll look at the latest developments in the Ukraine-Russia war and how the battlefield may be shifting in Kyiv’s favor. And we’ll spend a moment on the allegedly imminent deal with Iran. Then we’ll spend a few minutes on toxic partisanship and the frustrating red-blue cheerleading for moral cretins like Ken Paxton and Graham Platinum. And finally, not worth your time, Donald Trump, the UFC, Milli Vanilli, the Freedom two fifty celebration, and despite all of that, the continued greatness of America. I’m joined today by my Dispatch colleague, Jonah Goldberg, and Dispatch contributors David French and Mike Nelson. Let’s dive right in. [upbeat music] Mike, I want to start with you and start with some good news for a change. We have been seeing persistent reports on the Russia-Ukraine war, both in the popular press and also from military analysts, such as your former colleagues at the Institute for the Study of War, that the war is turning or maybe even has turned, that Ukraine has gained battlefield advantages, that Ukraine has built momentum, that Russia is increasingly struggling. There was a UK intel assessment last week that Russia had lost five hundred thousand soldiers, which is much higher than we had heard before. There’s a Financial Times piece out today looking at Vladimir Putin and his standing with Russians, and the headline is “Putin could pay a personal price for failure in Ukraine” and sort of bullish on what’s happening in Ukraine. Can you tell us, Mike, if you believe these assessments, has there been some kind of a turn? Does Ukraine, in fact, have momentum, number one? And number two, if so, what does that mean? And what, if anything, can the United States do to boost Ukraine’s prospects of bringing this war to an end?
Mike Nelson
Well, I think one of the common threads throughout the war was that, you know, reports of Ukraine’s demise have been grossly exaggerated, right? Every month or every couple weeks, we hear Doug McGregor and others around him saying, you know, “The collapse of Kyiv is imminent, and it’s about to happen.” That’s never been the case. From the earliest days of the war, from the initial strikes of the Russian invasion, there was a period of time, a period of weeks where the Ukrainians were on the ropes, and they were very, very realistically facing complete Russian conquest. And through a series of, number one, horrible decisions by the Russians, both tactical and operational, but also through the grit and determination of the Ukrainian fighting forces and their political leadership, they repelled that and kind of blunted the offensive and ground things to kind of a standstill. We had, you know, certain grinding campaigns like Mariupol and other places where it was ground at the lines that we’ve seen largely stagnant over the last couple years. But as you’ve mentioned, you know, as reported by, uh, ISW, who’s from the beginning of the war been the greatest source of objective information about where things are, and this latest report, which is just the latest reflection of great work from George Barros and Kateryna Stepanenko, who kind of run the Russia team there and have from the beginning of the war, we see that for the first time since twenty twenty-three, Ukraine is starting to take back more territory than they’re losing. So in aggregate, they are on the offensive. And what we’ve seen is Ukraine has not only through that same grit and determination and will to maintain their independence that they’ve demonstrated throughout, they’ve also out-innovated the Russians. They’ve not only led the way, as we’ve seen, a- as the world’s leader on drone technology and integration into tactical operations, but also started to be able to mass forces in a way that nobody has. Because of the use of drones and the inability of Russians and Ukrainians to some extent to mass forces in preparation for an offensive, we’ve seen most of the Russian offensive operations have been very small at the platoon level, you know, raids through small objectives. And what we’re seeing is the Ukrainians are starting to be able to integrate in conjunction with their drone deep strikes against both ground lines of communications, C2 nodes, massing staging areas. They’ve been able to start integrating some more armor and mechanized offensives. So they’re, like I said, out-innovating the Russians. And if this trend continues, you know, there’s hopeful, cautious optimism. If this trend continues, I think that what we’re gonna see is, you know, continued Ukrainian progress. Now, your question about what we can do to support the Ukrainians, I think it’s important to point out that despite what many of the isolationist Ukraine haters have pointed out, we largely have not been supporting Ukraine for a period of time now. As the vice president famously said, it’s his greatest accomplishment that we withdrew support from them. So the Europeans are buying American weapons to provide to the Ukrainians, but we could restart a great deal of our support, which would– could help make the difference in this offensive.
Steve Hayes
I mean, Mike, just one thing on that. We are still providing intelligence, right? Which is, like, important.
Mike Nelson
Correct. Yes. Yeah. So we– And we are still– Some of the weapon systems that were– that have been either provided before or that the Ukrainians or the Europeans purchased on behalf of the Ukrainians still require US integration so that those systems are operable. So we haven’t, like, cut off support, but we also turned off the spigot of financial support or direct military aid, which we could restart.
Steve Hayes
Yeah. David, is there any chance of the United States doing that? I would think this would be a time when sort of Ukraine supporters among Republicans in the Senate in particular, but in Congress, might take their case to the White House, to President Trump and say, “Look, this is an opportunity here.” If you believe this ISW report that we’ve been talking about, they write at the end of their summary, “Ukraine likely has a unique and time-constrained opportunity to exploit its current initiative while Russian forces remain vulnerable. Ukraine’s partners should expand their support to these Ukrainian efforts at a moment when Russia is reeling from both battlefield setbacks and Ukraine’s deep strike campaign with the aim of forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to reevaluate his approach.”To this contract. It feels like a moment.