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00:00You were recently in Ukraine and I wanted to start there. What you observed on the ground,
00:03we're hearing a lot of folks saying contours of the war have changed, Ukraine has an upper hand.
00:08What did you witness as you were making your way around the country?
00:10So I've been to Ukraine several times since the start of the war, since 2022. This was my most
00:16recent trip. I'd actually been there just two weeks before that as well. What was different
00:19about this trip was for the first time I actually drove all the way across western Ukraine to Kyiv.
00:25We took kind of a southerly route going in and a northerly route going back out to Poland.
00:30Had a chance to drive through many Ukrainian villages, towns, small cities in western Ukraine
00:38and met with many local officials, community organizations, civil society while we were in
00:46the various locations. I have to say that going in I had the assumption that the Ukrainians were ready
00:54for a peace agreement. I actually am disabused of that notion. They're ready for an end to the
00:59fighting, but I don't think they're that ready for peace now. But ending the fighting would be an
01:06achievement in and of itself. Every town you visit across the breadth of Ukraine, in the town square,
01:13there is a monument with waving Ukrainian flags, with photos of fallen soldiers.
01:18We were in a relatively small town and there were hundreds of images of young men who had fallen
01:27in this war. The toll has been enormous. But the Ukrainians aren't even close to giving up. In fact,
01:35they know they're not losing. And for the Ukrainians, not losing is winning and they feel like they're
01:39winning. We're in the middle of this 40-day campaign, as President Zelensky puts it, and we've seen long-range
01:44drones trained on Moscow, St. Petersburg, Crimea as well. Your assessment of how well that's working
01:51out, it's clearly rankling President Putin. It's also causing a lot of difficulties for ordinary
01:56Russians who are now waiting in line to get gas, for instance. Yeah, so probably President Zelensky
02:01has framed this as a 40-day campaign just to highlight attention to it. But it's really been something
02:08that's been set in motion for the past six months. The Ukrainians are clearly prosecuting an advantage
02:12on the battlefield with superior drone technology and tactics that have largely neutralized Russia's
02:18advantages in military manpower and equipment. The drone war at this moment is going decidedly
02:26against Russia. And it's a vindication of the Ukrainian strategy to innovate, to connect the
02:34front line with the decision-making and what kind of equipment and tactics are developed in this fight.
02:39You know, as I said, for the Ukrainians, not losing is winning. But the inverse is true,
02:44too. For the Russians, not winning is losing. And I think the Russians feel like they're losing,
02:48David. Is it beginning to spread among the population more widely? President Putin was able
02:52to keep it at a remove for a long time here. I mentioned the gas lines a moment ago, but
02:56we've
02:56seen long-range drones in the Sea of Azar hitting ships, transporting goods. It seems like there's
03:01a vulnerability to that area that wasn't there before. Is that leading to actual pushback on
03:07on President Putin? Well, undeniably, there is an identifiable reduction in support for the war.
03:14In subtle ways, for example, Russian commentators, Russian bloggers, when they talk about the war,
03:20they no longer refer to it as Russia's war. They frequently refer to it as Putin's war.
03:24They're almost disowning the war that just a few years ago had much more popular support.
03:31One has to take with a grain of salt any public opinion data coming out of Russia. It's a closed
03:37society. It's an authoritarian government. The expectation that people could form independent
03:42views based upon a broad set of information, much less express those views freely, is highly
03:47suspect. But even in that context, Putin's popularity is shrinking, probably from some artificially
03:54inflated high. But for whatever reason, the Russians have allowed the publication of information that
04:00shows that his popularity is shrinking. He's found himself in a war that he can't win. And as I said,
04:07for Russia, not winning is losing. So Putin has some really tough choices to make here.
04:11And not all of them are risk-free for us. He's weaker, but he is also more dangerous.
04:16Talk a bit more about that. And I guess what you're getting at is, if this continues to go the
04:20way
04:20that it's going, he could be backed up against a wall, maybe do something that could be catastrophic.
04:26Yeah. So if you just pick it apart analytically, Putin has a handful of choices. He can continue
04:32to prosecute the war in its current form, but that's not working for him. He can sue for peace.
04:38He can agree to a ceasefire. I don't think there's going to be a peace agreement in this war,
04:42but he could agree to a ceasefire. He could escalate. He could change the current offensive tempo
04:49to escalate. Frequently, analysts describe it as horizontally, which means he opens up new
04:54geography, an attack from Belarus again, or some sort of direct or indirect attack on the Baltic
05:01states or Poland. All of these are very much in play and discussed now. That's the horizontal
05:06escalation. He could also escalate vertically. In the fall of 2022, Putin was really on the ropes
05:11after he first started this war. And he began, at first, quietly, some one-offs, some people close
05:17to the government, but not speaking for the government, beginning to introduce the question
05:21of the use of nuclear weapons. And that was a pretty alarming thing for most of us. I think
05:26it actually shaped President Biden's policies in the fall of 2022, when it seemed like the war could
05:33have been brought to an end, potentially on Ukraine's terms. I fully expect we're going to at least hear
05:38whispers of that, whether it's bluff and bluster or a real threat remains to be seen. But when any leader
05:44starts talking about nuclear weapons, you have to take it seriously. And that's what I mean by
05:49Putin finds himself in a weaker position, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's less dangerous.
05:53I'd value your observations of your former boss and how he's processing all of this. Yes,
05:58that threat that you just described, but also his attitude toward Ukraine, as we saw on full
06:02display. By my former boss. I've had a lot of former bosses. President Trump, I should say,
06:07when you worked for him in the first term. Right. So in the first term, I was President Trump's
06:10deputy secretary of state. I worked underneath Mike Pompeo and I worked on a lot of issues for
06:15the president, including Russia and Ukraine. In fact, I was probably the last Trump administration
06:19official to travel to Kiev to meet with President Zelensky in late 2020. The President Trump
06:31sincerely wants to end the bloodshed. He talks about this a lot. He's very public,
06:36very transparent in this respect. He sees war as a wasteful exercise. He also sees it as a failure
06:43of diplomacy, a failure of negotiation, very much in the context of how President Trump likes to
06:49approach global tensions like this. But he's got a bit of the conceit of the negotiator, too, which is
06:55I think he believes everything is negotiable. In this case, it's just not the case. Putin doesn't
07:00want a negotiation. Putin wants Ukraine and he wants all of it. President Trump also going all
07:07the way back to the 1980s, when I think he first began to think seriously about foreign policy and
07:12and see himself as a figure on the global stage. He's long prized a great power relationship with
07:20Russia. That's his aspiration has been normalization of relations with Russia. He felt he had a personal
07:26relationship with Putin that could help him achieve that. And, you know, he's not the first
07:31president to think that. President Obama sought to reset the relations. President Biden sought to find
07:37a bottom in the relationship in Geneva in June of June of 2021. President Bush looked into the soul
07:45of Vladimir Putin and and and thought he liked what he saw. My advice to him was next time,
07:51bring a flashlight. But so President Trump isn't unique in that either. The problem is that's not
07:57how Putin thinks. American presidents, President Trump and even to a greater extent, President Biden
08:04before him, wake up every morning and think, how do I avoid a direct war with Russia? But Vladimir
08:10Putin wakes up every morning and thinks, how do I win a war against America? And that's that. I think
08:16that mismatch is very much on display. No matter how much President Trump wants a peaceful end to this
08:21war, Vladimir Putin is not going to give it to him because peace is not his objective.
08:25Last question I want to ask you about North Korea. And you mentioned you have many bosses. One of
08:29your jobs is the special envoy for North Korea. Yeah. Customarily, when you look at history,
08:34when the world's attention is diverted to other places, be that Ukraine, the Middle East now,
08:39North Korean leadership sees that kind of opportunistically. And I'm curious, sort of,
08:43as we're paying attention to all these other conflicts and issues around the world,
08:46what's happening in North Korea? How worried are you about the state of play?
08:49Yeah. So it's not just that the North Koreans historically viewed it as opportunistically,
08:54David. The North Koreans have sought to provoke, in some way, the world's attention back on them.
09:01And in this case, I actually think circumstances are different. They're actually doing pretty well,
09:06unfortunately. They still have their nuclear weapons program intact. They're getting enormous
09:13amounts of economic and military assistance from Russia. China is seeking to normalize its ties
09:21with North Korea and Russia in particular, but China, to some extent, has made clear that the removal of
09:29North Korea's nuclear weapons program is no longer a priority for their foreign policies.
09:36And I suspect, well, the North Koreans, I know, the North Koreans have made that very clearly the price
09:42of admission for any future discussions with the United States, is that it's not going to be about
09:46their nuclear arsenal. It's a very challenging position to put us in. Once we let that genie out
09:52of the bottle, so to speak, once we accept the North Korean nuclear weapons program is a legitimate,
09:58albeit illegal international law capability, it's going to be a very hard job to contain
10:04other countries in East Asia, Japan, South Korea, perhaps others, from pursuing their own nuclear
10:11weapons programs. So we're in a real challenge that North Koreans feel like time is on their side.
10:16I don't see them making any moves to reopen dialogue with the United States of America.
10:22And again, under the Biden administration, there wasn't a single exchange for the entire
10:28four years of the Biden administration. And to my knowledge, there's been no exchanges
10:32in the first year and a half of President Trump's administration either. So we're getting five
10:36and a half years in which no official, no exchange, not even a wink across a room
10:42between two people sitting in the same meetings happened. And I don't expect it to happen anytime soon.
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