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00:00This week, a Ukrainian drone struck a port and oil depot in southern Russia.
00:04This came just days after a Russian drone hit a Romanian apartment building.
00:07We spoke to Bloomberg's chief European correspondent to talk about that strike
00:11as well as where things stand with this war.
00:14This happened in the dead of night on Thursday evening,
00:16and as you say, it's one drone we understand that crossed into Romanian airspace.
00:21This is really at the part of the sort of map where the south of Moldova, Ukraine, and Romania
00:27all meet and sort of cross about 10 miles in, hit an apartment building, started a fire, injured two people.
00:33It's sort of different from many of the other incursions or other scares that we've had with airspace
00:37because there have actually been casualties, two people who have been injured from this.
00:40We've heard from EU officials who've called this sort of an escalation.
00:44We've heard from the Romanians who say, you know, it's totally unacceptable.
00:47And, of course, there's going to be a big consultation process in terms of what to do next.
00:51And as you mentioned, I mean, I remember in the first year of the war,
00:53the first time we really had a story like this, it was a few missiles that had crossed into Polish
00:58territory,
00:58had actually blown up in Poland, and there was a real question of, does this trigger Article 5?
01:03Does this get into some very, very uncomfortable positions about a much larger-scale war?
01:08It turned out to be Ukrainian air defense that were trying to shoot out Russian munitions,
01:11but these are the kinds of conversations that are constantly ongoing.
01:14And as far as the Kremlin, you know, we know from Russian media,
01:17they say that Putin is aware of this, but that's the only comment we've heard from the Russians thus far.
01:21That's really interesting. I also wonder, you know, you have these remarks from Macron lately
01:25talking about using literally possibly the nuclear option to keep Russia at bay.
01:30Is that a result of, as these attacks start to encroach, as this war continues,
01:35and as the U.S. looks like a less reliable member,
01:39and questions arise about whether or not this president in the U.S. would really back an Article 5 action,
01:46Europe trying to find ways with the capacity they have right now to push back,
01:49should they need to, against Russia?
01:51Yeah, so it's very much about Donald Trump, his commitment to NATO,
01:55and really sort of getting through some sort of Plan B, some Plan B options,
01:58because the Europeans, broadly speaking, have all lived under the American nuclear umbrella
02:02for the last several decades.
02:04And the only sort of nation within Europe that really has a full, sovereign control
02:08over their nuclear arsenal is France.
02:10Of course, the U.K. has weapons.
02:12They're dependent on the United States in order to be able to deploy them.
02:15The French nuclear umbrella is really the only fully robust, sovereign European umbrella.
02:19So there have been some very, again, uncomfortable discussions.
02:22And this was after Macron gave this big speech in a big sort of hall with this nuclear submarine
02:27in the north of France.
02:28And there are now very active discussions between France and other neighboring countries in the EU
02:32about deploying potentially French nuclear weapons on a rotational basis with a number of different countries.
02:38So, of course, this is all about, you know, safeguarding European defense
02:42and trying to get that deterrence off, no one wants to talk about it as a sort of Plan B.
02:46They talk about it sort of in addition to the nuclear umbrella of the United States,
02:49because you don't want to scare off the United States.
02:51But this is the very present concern within the leaders of Europe.
02:54Were you surprised to see, I mean, to your point,
02:56it did seem like quite a few nations were willing to have that discussion with France,
03:01more than, frankly, I had expected.
03:03Were you surprised, or given where everything was, is that just the next natural step?
03:07As you're also seeing the U.S. kind of pull back these troop deployments,
03:10you've got the president talking about pulling troops out of Germany, possibly Poland,
03:14but then he seems to have done about face there.
03:15It's just really, really uncertain.
03:17And I know the Europeans are gearing up and trying to contribute more to their defense,
03:20but they're not there yet.
03:22And is that why this seems to be a viable, as you said, maybe not Plan B, but C and
03:26a backstop?
03:27I think that if you had asked them about a year ago, you know,
03:30in the early stages of the Trump presidency, they probably wouldn't have been able to sign up to it,
03:34wouldn't have done so publicly, wouldn't have talked as openly about it.
03:36But I think that after having been tested for a year and a half in terms of what this Trump
03:40foreign policy looks like,
03:42what it looks like when it comes to NATO, all the great discomfort we've had over the last year and
03:46a half
03:46over the question of Greenland, there has been basically no alternative.
03:49There needs to be a more open and frank discussion.
03:51And many of the people that you interview, many of the defense ministers I've spoken to,
03:55foreign ministers that I speak to, a lot of people don't want to say these parts out loud
03:59because, again, you don't want to upset the Trump administration.
04:02That's kind of the catch-22 they're in, but there's a certain point you just can't ignore it.
04:05And when it comes to defense and security, what is more important to that?
04:08And I think that that's the point that they got to, these European leaders,
04:12in having to face that reality finally.
04:14To that end, you also had Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky saying this week to the EU
04:19that half membership, partial membership is not enough,
04:22given how much Ukraine is contributing to the defense of Europe.
04:25How was that received?
04:27Yeah, so this is a really complex debate in terms of how Ukraine gets into the European Union.
04:31And there are so many layers of politics on this,
04:33because obviously there are other countries that are also in line ahead of Ukraine.
04:37Some member states of the European Union want them to be able to sort of leapfrog them
04:40and sort of get in there because there's much more urgency.
04:43Of course, there's some pushback then from others.
04:45Of course, bringing in a nation to the European Union that is currently actively at war
04:49comes with all of its other issues.
04:51So there were these sort of ideas of potentially associate membership,
04:54which would give you some of the privileges of being part of the EU.
04:56You would attend all of the sort of meetings.
04:58You could have access to some of the funding.
05:00Potentially, they can do something with the sort of single market
05:02to try to boost the Ukrainian economy.
05:04And there would obviously be some advantages to that.
05:06But what we've heard from President Zelensky is saying,
05:08listen, we don't want to do any half measures here.
05:10And you can get into some of the reasons of why that is.
05:13I think that one of the main ones, and this is sort of speculation on my part,
05:16but I think it's sort of sound in terms of the reasoning,
05:18is that he doesn't want to be stuck in this limbo,
05:21where you get this sort of Ukraine's partial membership.
05:23It stays like that for years and years and years.
05:25He said, listen, we've put all of this out here.
05:27The Europeans refer to us as the sort of steel porcupine
05:30that sits between Russia and the European Union.
05:32For him, he's thinking not just about the next couple of years
05:35and being able to conduct this war
05:36and the economic benefit of partial membership.
05:39He's thinking about the decades to come
05:40and which orbit the Ukrainians will set into the future.
05:43And I think he's willing to bet all of that in getting full EU membership.
05:46Yeah, I'd imagine especially his NATO membership looks more complicated
05:49because of those Article 5 complications,
05:50because it's hard enough to join the EU with the nation at war.
05:54But with Ukraine actively at war,
05:57even supporters of Ukraine are reticent to give them full membership in NATO at this moment.
06:02I do want to ask you about how the war is going.
06:04This is the first week I've seen multiple analysts, watchers of this conflict,
06:09start to say that it's possible Ukraine actually has the upper hands.
06:12I don't know if that's accurate,
06:14but I do want to play you some sound
06:15from our colleague David Gura's interview with David Petraeus.
06:18We have not remotely learned all the lessons we should have from the war in Ukraine.
06:24That is the future of war right now.
06:26It's a war in which one side alone, Ukraine, is using 10,000 drones a day.
06:3390% of the casualties on the Russian side are caused by drones.
06:39Tanks can't maneuver anymore.
06:40They can't survive armored vehicles.
06:42You can't even drive vehicles in the death zone,
06:45which is 35 kilometers on either side of the front lines,
06:49which aren't even lines anymore because drones can fly into trenches and can kill people.
06:54So I want to ask you, when it comes to Ukraine's drone technology
06:57and what they have been able to do in this conflict,
07:00is it a game changer?
07:01And is it a game changer when it comes to
07:03what the potential settlement will be at some point between these two nations?
07:09I mean, it's completely a game changer.
07:10I mean, it is the new face of warfare.
07:12And I think for all of the objections that the United States has in terms of supporting Ukraine
07:16and this, that, and the other,
07:17the United States obviously has been active in this conflict in some sort of more tacit ways.
07:22It certainly is gaining a huge amount of knowledge and data about what's going on on the ground.
07:26And of course, the future of warfare really is all about these drones and interconnected systems.
07:31So for the United States, it's also been sort of immensely valuable to learn all of those things.
07:35I think that in terms of the war and where we are right now,
07:38again, we sort of go from month to month, you know, where the Russians have initiative,
07:42the Ukrainians have some initiative.
07:44It does seem now that the Ukrainians have sort of regained some of the initiative on the battlefield.
07:48The question is, what will, what bearing will that have on sort of diplomacy?
07:51You've also seen the Ukrainians having a much more aggressive attack when it comes to striking within Russia,
07:57hitting oil refineries.
07:58You'll remember some of those attacks that came near and into Moscow.
08:01And again, this is a difficult thing for the Russians because it's very, very public
08:05when you can get that close to the capital of Moscow.
08:08And kind of this sort of tacit agreement between Putin and the elites is that, you know,
08:12you're not really going to be affected by this war.
08:14And when Zelensky sort of brings the war to the capital and to their front door,
08:17that makes things a lot more uncomfortable for Putin.
08:20And as a consequence, you see retaliation.
08:23You see a great deal of barrage by the Russians.
08:25And you have Zelensky saying that they're bracing for a massive attack from the Russians.
08:29But also at the same time, in the background, you're getting all of these conversations,
08:32strange conversations about possible diplomacy.
08:35Even Putin himself at some point was saying that, you know, maybe there could be a European envoy.
08:39It might be the former chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, who's really very Russian aligned.
08:43So it was sort of dismissed by the Europeans out of hand.
08:45But it's not a completely unserious suggestion.
08:48So you have some of these sort of conflicting things where on the one side,
08:51you do feel like the military side is ramping up.
08:53And yet in the background, you do have some of these conversations
08:55that could be interpreted as making sort of some kind of progress on the diplomatic front.
08:59Before I let you go quickly, what is the mood inside Russia?
09:03I am also reading and hearing more that, to your point, the elites,
09:06the people around Putin are starting to finally feel the repercussions of this war.
09:11At some point, does he feel this pressure?
09:13What is it like inside the Kremlin right now?
09:15I mean, here's the difficulty is that in this sort of realm, we go into a great deal of speculation.
09:20So, you know, I can't say with any great authority that I really know.
09:23There has been some reporting about some of the difficulties that there have been within Russia,
09:27particularly, and this is one thing that a lot of the people I speak to point to,
09:30was the sort of shutting off of the Internet that has happened periodically throughout Moscow.
09:35And one of the people I was speaking to actually today, who is a former journalist
09:39who spent a long time in Russia, a long time in Moscow,
09:42was saying that the Russians really enjoy their personal freedom
09:45and they've given up a lot of political freedom in order to enjoy that.
09:48And if you see that personal freedom starting to get restricted,
09:51then you maybe potentially see a little bit more pressure mounting within Russia.
09:54And even small business, I was reading, you know, you can't use WhatsApp,
09:57you can't sell your goods, you can't just, like, function in the city.
10:00I think it's going to be really interesting to watch,
10:02and hopefully you'll come back and tell us more about it.
10:03Oliver Crook, thank you so much for taking the time.
10:05Amen.
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