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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about the crumbling of U.S. support for Ukraine under President Donald Trump. He lays out how the Trump administration has slowed the flow of weapons to Ukraine, undermined sanctions on Russia, and made empty promises about future action while spending more money upgrading Trump’s private jet than aiding Ukraine’s defense.
Then David is joined by the journalist Tim Mak, reporting from Kyiv, and Adrian Karatnycky, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, for a conversation about Ukraine’s resilience in the face of U.S. abandonment. They discuss why the Ukrainian people remain united, how battlefield conditions have evolved, and why no politician—Ukrainian or American—can force a peace that rewards Russian aggression. They also talk about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s controversial anti-corruption reforms, the surge of youth-led protests, and whether Ukraine’s Western allies truly understand what’s at stake.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guests today will be Tim Mak and Adrian Karatnycky, two experts on Ukraine. Tim Mak, based in Ukraine; Adrian Karatnycky, a frequent visitor to Ukraine and adviser to Ukrainian governments past and present. But before we open our three-way dialogue about recent events in Ukraine, I want to open with some thoughts about more recent events that have occurred since our conversation was recorded.
Over the night of July 31, the city of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, was hit by one of the largest drone and missile attacks upon that city since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022. As I record on the 1st of August, we know that at least 27 locations were struck. Thirty-one people were killed. About 160 were injured. The second-single-deadliest day of civilian attack on Kyiv since the beginning of the full-scale war, in February 2022. The Ukrainian government has declared August 1x a day of mourning as Ukrainians dig out from this terrible, terrible attack intended to terrorize and harm civilians only.
President [Donald] Trump has reacted to the attack with a slight change of tone. At the beginning of his presidency, he blamed the Ukrainians for the war, which is a lie. They were, of course, invaded and attacked—invaded in 2014 and attacked again in 2022. And he has taken a fault on both sides, but mostly on the Ukrainian side. The sympathy of his government toward the Russian side was very evident, his vice president being perhaps even more extreme in opposition to Ukraine than the things the president said himself.
Now, we have heard in recent weeks about a so-called Trump pivot, where he now begins to say that the war is unfortunate, he expresses some condemnation of some of the things the Russians have done, and he promises some kind of increased American action at some point in the future. After this latest July 31 overnight attack on Kyiv, he has apparently said that he’s bringing forward the deadline for some of these things he might do in the future a few more days. So it may be that anytime soon that you’ll begin to see some economic sanctions on Russia. You can believe that or not.
But it is important to put all of this in a larger context about what is really going on here. Now, I understand that those of us in the media business must cover what the president says, and it’s probably necessary to cover that to give people the straight news, and to report what the president says as the president says it, and save the question marks and the quote marks and the necessary ironic eye rolls to a little deeper in the story. But it’s important that even as you report what the president says, you as the reporter understand whether or not you believe it, and you also help your reader to understand whether the reader should believe it or not.
At the same time as President Trump announced that he might bring forward the date on which sanctions are going to be applied to the Russian economy, that same day, he applied massive tariffs on so many of America’s friends and trading partners. Russia, to this day, remains uniquely exempt from the economic aggression that Trump has inflicted on Britain and Canada and Japan and South Korea and Australia and many, many, many friends. They receive his economic aggression. They are singled out for retaliation. Russia is exempt. Again, the president says he may change his mind at some time in the future, which is a departure from where he was earlier. But the future is still the future. It hasn’t happened yet. The other forms of economic aggression have happened. The economic retaliation against Russia has not.
And anyway, as I think by now most people understand, Russia is not very susceptible to American economic retaliation. Most of the things that the United States could do against the Russian economy were done by President [Joe] Biden. And many of those things have been undone by President Trump. The sanction structure on Russia is looser today than it was when President Trump came into office. And the main economic relationships that the Russians have—they sell oil to China and India, especially—they’re not highly susceptible to American pressure, those relationships in those countries. So the threat of economic retaliation, even if you believed it, would not be very meaningful.
The thing that America can do to help Ukraine is to speed the flow of weaponry to Ukraine. And on that—although there’s a lot of secrecy and uncertainty around this—on that, we can see pretty clearly that the flow of armaments to Ukraine since Donald Trump has taken power has slowed, and at regular intervals has been outright interrupted. The most recent of those interruptions happened in July. The story we’re told is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth acted at his own initiative. No one told him to do it. He just, for some unaccountable reason, took it into his head to stop a flow of important ammunition and weaponry to Ukraine. Believe that as you will. We’re told that that interruption has ended and that some flow of armaments has resumed but at an agonizingly slow pace.
Put this in some context. In the years from February ’22—when this latest round of Russian aggression, this intensified aggression, the lunge on the city of Kyiv began—to President Biden’s departure from office, the United States afforded Ukraine about $33 billion of military assistance. Now, contrary to what the MAGA people tell you, that is not a $33 billion check to the government of Ukraine. That is $33 billion worth of stuff that has flowed to Ukraine, much of it physical inventory from U.S. arsenals. The direct cash payments to the Ukrainian government have been comparatively small. Where cash has been spent, it has been spent inside the United States to load the equipment onto boats, to move the boats across the ocean, to disembark the boats, and then to pay Americans to show the Ukrainians how to use the weaponry the United States is sending. This also tends not to be state-of-the-art weaponry. This is often weaponry from inventory that would sooner or later have been taken out of inventory and dismantled in some way, and that needed to be replaced anyway by new inventory. So it’s not clear that the $33 billion measures something, but it gives you some idea of the scale of the project that happened under President Biden.
Now, that project was inadequate. President Biden did not send everything the Ukrainians needed. He didn’t send it fast enough. He tended to wait, oftentimes until it was almost too late. But $33 billion gives you a scope of the idea of what was sent in the Biden years.
There is now a bill moving through the U.S. Senate that would offer Ukraine in the next fiscal year $800 million of forward-looking military assistance—$33 billion over the Biden years; $800 million in the next year. So a pitiful fraction of what was sent before. Now, $800 million: Is that a lot of money for any individual human being? Obviously it is. For most human projects, it is. To build a high school, it is. But the gift jet that Trump extracted from Qatar, that gift jet—which is given temporarily to the U.S. government, then to the Trump library to be available for Trump’s use after he leaves the White House—it’s going to cost the U.S. taxpayer about $1 billion to upgrade that plane to the standards of an American Air Force One. So we’re spending $1 billion to make the Qatari government’s gift to Donald Trump and his postpresidential life workable, and we’re proposing to spend $800 million—less than that—for an entire year of Ukrainian self-defense. So what Ukraine needs: That is slowing and is subject to random and casual interruption.
It’s kind of an open question why Donald Trump is so hostile to Ukraine, why his administration is. And you’ll hear many speculations: Maybe it’s his past history of dealings with Russia. Maybe it’s his personal admiration for and affinity for Putin. Maybe it’s some kind of ideological sympathy for the Russian authoritarian regime. Maybe it’s just hatred of Europeans. And maybe it’s a rejection of a symbol of democracy fighting for its survival against reactionary dictatorship. In the end, it’s kind of a futile question because probably all of those ingredients and more go into the answer. There are others that we can speculate about.
But the why is less urgent than the question of what. As you hear all this talk of a pivot to Ukraine or a pivot away from Russia, let us not overlook the truth of what is actually happening, which is the United States—which gave Ukraine considerable, if not quite fully adequate, assistance to defend itself, protect its independence, protect its survival, under President Biden—has now turned that tap almost all of the way off and left Ukraine significantly at Russia’s mercy. And to the extent that aid continues to flow, it flows from European partners who Donald Trump is attacking with other forms of economic aggression. Yes, he says he’s willing to sell U.S. inventory to the Europeans if they pay for it and send it to Ukraine. It’s not clear that any of that has actually happened, and it’s not clear whether it will happen. There’s a lot of talk, but again, much of this is shrouded in secrecy. Let’s hope for the best.
But it’s not clear that any of that has happened, but the implacable—or the seemingly implacable—hostility to Ukraine: That seems a continuous theme of this administration’s policy. And the vibes reporting about changes in tone, changes in rhetoric, which is easy to do, misses the reality of what is actually happening.
I think there is a tendency, when we write about the Trump administration—we want so badly to believe that America will soon be again what it used to be, will soon stand again for what it used to stand for, will soon again be admired in the world in the way that it used to be. We want that so much to be true that we overinterpret any little hint that that might happen soon, and it comes from a good place, but it tends to make us marks—that all that has to happen is for a word of remark to be given to the press pool waiting to collect the president’s words, and that blinds us to the overwhelming reality of the hard fate that is being delivered to Ukraine under this administration’s watch, at this administration’s direction.
One more point before we turn to the discussion at hand. The discussion was recorded immediately after President [Volodymyr] Zelensky took an action to make Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions less independent of the president. We discussed in this dialogue the enormous furor that’s created within Ukraine, and I’m pleased to report to you that as of the time I record this, that President Zelensky has rescinded his action, and those anti-corruption institutions will retain their full independence to follow the truth wherever it is.
As you listen to the dialogue, understand that the thing we are worrying about and the trust and confidence we express in the Ukrainian people not to submit to greater official corruption, those hopes and those aspirations and those assumptions—they’ve all been validated. The Ukrainian people came through; the government yielded; and Ukraine remains, again, a place where official corruption will be intensely and independently prosecuted.
Would that were so for the United States of America as well. We seem to be doing here at home less well than the Ukrainians are doing within their home. And now my dialogue with Tim and Adrian. But first, a quick break.
[Music]
Frum: So I’m joined today on The David Frum Show by two old and cherished friends, Adrian and Tim. Adrian Karatnycky is a specialist on Ukraine at the Atlantic Council, no relationship to The Atlantic magazine. He was, for 11 years, president of Freedom House, which is America’s original institution to support democracy around the world. It publishes the annual review “Freedom in the World.” He’s the author of millions of words about Ukraine and the post-Soviet world, including three books, most recently Battleground Ukraine, which was published just in 2024. My relationship with Adrian goes back to the days when I used to edit his copy for The Wall Street Journal, in a day where copy was printed on paper. And so it was often my painful duty to say, Adrian, while every line is precious, we need to take out six, and that’s not your fault, it’s not my doing, but six lines have to go. (Laughs.)
Tim Mak, I have known not as long as Adrian—that’s a long time ago—but deeply and intimately for a long time. He was a writer for a website I used to run called Frum Forum. He went on to an amazing career at Politico and at National Public Radio. He’s now based in Ukraine, where he runs a proprietor website, The Counterattack, which I urge all—
Tim Mak: Counteroffensive.
Frum: Counteroffensive—I’m sorry. Senile lapse, Tim. I’m so sorry. Which I think I was the first subscriber to, or one of the early subscribers to, and I urge all of you to join, as well, and you’ll get an intimate feeling of what it is like to live in the war zone, as Tim has done. Tim is a former Army reservist. He knows war. He has seen it, and he’s now seen more of it than I think it is fit for any human being to see, and he reports on it beautifully.
So, gentlemen, thank you for joining me. Tim, I’m going to start with a question to you. The events of the past days—we are recording today on July 23. The events of the past days have been so dramatic in Ukraine. Tell us what you see, what you hear, what is happening.
Mak: Well, what we saw was a Ukrainian legislature, which in the middle of the war has many things on its mind—economic development, European integration, the situation on the battlefield. We saw the Ukrainian legislature, in a kind of sneaky way, pass new rules that defang the Ukrainian anti-corruption independent agencies. And this has led to a sudden surge of protests in this country, which we haven’t seen since the beginning of this full-scale invasion, of ordinary Ukrainians saying, We’re not going to accept that.
The Ukrainian government has said—and Zelensky has said—that the reason for this is because they believe that there’s Russian infiltration of the anti-corruption agencies in the Ukrainian government. They haven’t provided very much substantial evidence for that. And then they’ve kind of snuck this reform through the legislature. A very significant proportion of the Ukrainian members of Parliament were not present for the vote, and it just kind of appeared, was signed into legislation last night. And immediate protests were seen in Kyiv and in other cities in Ukraine.
Adrian Karatnycky: To put it in a slightly different perspective—I agree fully with Tim, how this was done. I wouldn’t say it erodes the power of these anti-corruption agencies, but it makes them the more directly controlled instrument of the president and of his office. And that, I think, is a worrying thing, because these were relatively independent agencies with their leadership created by boards that included both Western representation and NGO representation. And here you have their complete subordination to a political appointee.
And I think this is President Zelensky, who has a lot of—dare I say it—Trumpian characteristics at a time of war, which is to say he is at war with his immediate predecessors. He regards the entire past and the entire Ukrainian elite—both good and bad—as unworthy. He has complete control of the legislature at the time of war. He didn’t before this. And I think he believes, genuinely in this case, that he is the one who can orchestrate the war against corruption, and that the fact that these are not subordinated agencies is an obstacle to this.
On the other hand, the people who are inciting him to take this control are thinking more about the political calendar and their political futures, and they do not want what happened when President [Petro] Poroshenko faced President Zelensky: that these independent agencies unearthed a bunch of scandals and acts of corruption in the outer circle and inner circle of Poroshenko that partly cost him the election. So there’s also a political calculation about the future. And so there are two motives here: The motive of his inner circle, in my view, is to maintain political control and have political control over these processes. And the other is the ambition and the self-confidence and a kind of happy, a kind of a positive arrogance that Zelensky has that he can fix everything for Ukraine.
Mak: I want to take one step back here because what this really relates to is not only the specific legislation that passed. Because if we look at it that way, this is a kind of a relatively minor domestic Ukrainian story. In the global sense, what this really has to do with is: Why is Ukraine fighting a war to begin with? How can it detach itself from the Russian sphere and the Russian way of doing government, and more deeply integrate itself in the Western way of doing government, the Western style of democracy and Europe?
It’s notable that the anti-corruption agencies at issue here were created, were formed, were shaped by the Maidan Revolution, just over a decade ago, and have emerged and were put into place to create checks on the Ukrainian government, which are meant to ensure that the corruption of the post-Soviet area did not continue through to today.
And so this reversal is a very worrying sign for ordinary Ukrainians who not only want to stop corruption but believe that the underlying reason why there’s a war in their country, why they’re hiding in their basements every single night, is not just because Russia attacked this country, but because they want to find a non-Russian way of running their society, of finding a democratic way with less corrupt leaders.
Frum: I want to ask you how this dissension will affect Ukraine’s war-fighting capacity. Ukraine is a society that has, as Adrian has described in his books, great difficulty finding unity. In the past decade, it has discovered a new sense of national unity. There has been, it seems from an outside point of view, great cohesion that suddenly seems to be at risk.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has enemies abroad, as well as behind its back, as well as to its face, who are seizing on everything that goes wrong anywhere in the Ukrainian state as a reason to abandon Ukraine to its enemies. So there’s a threat at home from this corruption debate. There’s a threat inside the United States. This is the kind of weapon that a J. D. Vance would use to say that Ukraine is unworthy to live because it’s not wrapping up corruption, which is a pretty funny thing from inside the most corrupt American administration in American history, one of the most corrupt administrations in world history.
But any weapon is good to hand when you’re trying to do harm. How does this affect the war?
Karatnycky: I think that there is a kind of a discipline in civil society, an understanding that there is the active threat, the existential threat, and then there is the long-term developmental threat.
I believe that President Zelensky’s circle has made a calculation that because Ukraine and its survival is essential to Europe and that the U.S. doesn’t care about the agenda of reform and democracy as a policy, that it can get away with this kind of stuff, and maybe in the short term it can. But society knows how to balance these things. And the fact that these were peaceful demonstrations, this was very young people—it shows that the successor generation is completely on the side of a kind of European or a democratic future for Ukraine. All these kinds of things are very positive.
And the answer to the J. D. Vances is, if you really want, if you’re sort of saying that you’re fighting corruption, then Russia’s takeover of Ukraine will create the ultimate corrupt system. It’ll create a system where the state entirely adjudicates corruption and the state itself is the instrument of corruption, not the object of corrupt activities.
Frum: You have more contact with everyday Ukrainians than almost any reporter in the English-speaking world. What is your assessment of their confidence in their state as a just and fair institution?
Mak: Well, what’s important to note is it’s very hard to understate just how much protest, activism, and overthrowing one’s government is [a] central part of modern Ukrainian identity, right? Where you might see disunity, they see action and their birthright. They take it as a major point of pride that they overthrew a tyrant a decade ago. And when they look at Russia, one of the most frequent things that I hear from Ukrainians is, many Ukrainians view all Russians as complicit in the ongoing war. And one of the reasons they view it that way is because they ask, Why can’t they do what we did here in Ukraine? Why can’t they overthrow? We did that. Why can’t you do that?
And so among Ukrainians, disunity is something that you observe from the outside looking in. From here in Kyiv, what you see is people getting fired up. You see civic action getting rolled out. You see people who are already dealing with sleepless nights because of Russian attacks getting ready and packing up for the next demonstration. It’s a really interesting and inspiring sense of direct democracy that we’re seeing here.
I don’t see, in the short term—it really depends how the Zelensky government responds to these protests. I don’t see these, in the short term, in disrupting the war effort. If anything, I think it really does double down on the point: What is this war being fought for? It’s not being fought for Zelensky, not being fought for the current government or the legislature. It’s being fought for the sovereignty of Ukraine, and if it’s being fought for the sovereignty of Ukraine, what good is that sovereignty if they’re not going to fulfill the will of the people and move towards greater Euro integration and less corruption?
Karatnycky: Let me make a historical point and also a point about why this is a long-term problem for Zelensky. Keep in mind that the Ukrainian attitude to the state is the attitude of a stateless people under imperial rule or foreign rule. And so they’ve never had this kind of an intimate connection with the state. The state has always been seen as something outside.
In the early stages of the war, polling showed that Ukrainians were very interested in just having decisive action and a leader that would take them forward. But within a year, the component of Do we need more authoritarian rule, or do we need more top-down rule versus more democracy? shifted. And they reversed, reverted, to their previous stance of skepticism about the state.
There was an essay written by an important Ukrainian political journalist called “The Leviathan in Camouflage,” and it was about that the war was creating the first circumstances where the Ukrainians feel that the state is not only essential to their survival, but have this deep identification with the state. But these protests show that Ukrainians retain this huge spirit of democracy, this huge skepticism of the state. They agree with the consolidation of the state in its war against Russia, but on everything else, I think they retain their more liberal, democratic values.
Frum: Can I ask about the battlefield now? The actual literal battlefield. Tim, you spent a lot of time there. Remind me when you arrived in Ukraine. How deep into the war?
Mak: I arrived the night the war started by a total accident. Nearly missed my flight into Kyiv. What happened was, I was a correspondent for NPR, and they wanted someone in Ukraine with a military background, medical background, both of which I have. And just by total accident, I land just a few hours before the invasion, and I’ve been here ever since. And two and a half years ago, I started The Counteroffensive. And so now I live here.
Frum: You named it for this spirit of optimism that existed in the spring and early summer of 2023 when it looked like—and my mistake, actually, my Freudian mistake of calling it The Counterattack instead of The Counteroffensive may reflect the kind of sense of gloom that has descended on friends of Ukraine, because we remember that mode where we thought, This is the great pushback, the great counter-blitzkrieg that is going to shove the Russians out of the country for good and all.
There’s been interruptions of the flow of American aid to Ukraine under President Trump. There have been interruptions of the flow of American information. How’s the war, the military aspect of the war, going?
Mak: It’s not going particularly well. The Ukrainians are on the defensive. They are outmanned; they are outgunned. It’s a very regular, almost nightly circumstance in Ukrainian cities where there are explosions, anti-aircraft weapons firing. You can hear these drones in the night buzzing along. They’re called mopeds. They’re nicknamed mopeds now because you can hear them ominously circling the city and then mobile fire teams trying to shoot them down, as well as many, many explosions. And that is the civilian view of the war.
On the battlefield, the Russians have expended tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives, for very little territory. I mean, most of the action that has led to major changes in control of territory has taken place over very short periods of time. So we’ve had these bursts of control from the initial invasion to the liberation of the Kharkiv region. You’ve had these bursts of where defensive lines collapse. But we’ve seen the development of a new form of drone warfare that has really imposed incredible costs on advancing militaries. Basically, now it’s very dangerous to concentrate military force in one location. They’re trying to disperse military force, but that means a lot more risk for the soldiers, and it means far less territorial gains in small amounts of time.
Frum: And the interruptions from the United States, what difference have they made?
Mak: It’s a morale issue in the short term. Are we on our own? is what a lot of Ukrainians are asking themselves. Secondly, it’s kind of become an object of faith in Ukraine that the country is running out of air-defense interceptors, and we see that in the number of explosions that are happening in the cities. I mean, there are no formal statistics on it, because the government doesn’t say where they’re vulnerable or what they’re lacking, but it’s pretty obvious that people have died as a result of delays in shipments of defensive weaponry.
The number of weapons systems that have been suggested by the Trump administration is woefully insufficient for the scale of hundreds and hundreds of attacks in a given night. And so that that will continue for the time being. I just don’t see the war ending on any short timeline.
Frum: Adrian, I have a question for you. You’ve been monitoring the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship for a long time, and you know who the friends are and you know who the non-friends are. Do you take seriously at all this alleged pivot by President Trump toward greater support of Ukraine?
Karatnycky: We know he is chimerical, we know he is impulsive, and we know he is inconsistent. And this is a good thing in this particular case because he had a consistent position of this bromance with Putin that seems to have attenuated in recent weeks. And I think we will see what happens at the 50-day deadline mark.
But I think that the important policy decision that appears to have been taken is that Trump is willing to, in the absence of an agreement, sell Ukraine weapons as long as they’re not financed out of the U.S. budget, or as long as they’re not predominantly financed out of the U.S. budget. And Europe appears to be ready to step in to fill the breach. The delta between aid that the U.S. was providing and has stopped providing under Trump has, in the first five months of this year, been largely met by European cash flows. They’ve increased their crediting to their own economies that would allow them to finance some of this.
And then there’s this, I believe, low-hanging fruit, and that is that Europe is sitting on $250 billion of Russian frozen assets that I believe should—in the event that their publics rebel against these substantial expenditures for Ukraine—could be used to sustain Ukraine.
So I think we don’t know where Trump is. He was with Putin, then he became the arbiter between the two rather than a staunch ally of Ukraine. And now I think we have to wait until the 50th day. But I do think that the one thing that is there that is a positive development, and I think that that’s been pretty consistent, [is] that I think Trump and the United States will be willing to sell weapons, provided that Europe or someone else is willing to cover those costs.
Frum: Let me push back on that directly to both of you. So the 50-day deadline—do we need 50 days to know what the Russians are about? That looks like playing for time. The weapons that Trump is talking about are totally inadequate in number. This stunt of saying the United States doesn’t have enough money to pay for this is just such an outrageous misstatement, especially from this administration, which is so fiscally reckless and spends money on everything and is incurring debts never before seen. Anyway, the story the administration tells is: The reason that they have constrained is because we lack the physical hardware. And if that’s true, then it doesn’t matter who’s financing the insufficient physical hardware. That was Pete Hegseth’s story: You can’t send the missiles, because the United States doesn’t have enough to protect itself. Well, if that’s true, it doesn’t matter who’s paying for it. And if it does matter who’s paying for it, then the “not enough physical inventory” story is a lie, as it probably is, and to the less sympathetic guy looks like playing for time.
Now, I will add one more thing and then throw it back to you. One of the things that has been a little encouraging to me about the Trump-Russia-Ukraine story is that while J. D. Vance, the vice president and maybe future president, seems authentically and militantly anti-Ukraine, Trump seems more pro-Russian but indifferent to Ukraine. His attitude to Ukraine is a function of his enthusiasm for Russia. And if the enthusiasm for Russia dims at all, then there’s no reason that he couldn’t be a better friend to Ukraine in a way that J. D. Vance seems to have bought into Ukraine as the enemy to his vision of Europe in which the right-wing parties govern Germany, Italy, and other countries.
Karatnycky: Yeah, I mean, I look—there’s so much disinformation coming from that. I believe there is an isolationist wing in the policy community. There’s also the limits-of-power wing associated with Michael Anton and the pivot to China associated with Elbridge Colby. There are a bunch of attitudes inside the administration that are saying Ukraine either isn’t a priority or that we can’t afford it, or that the United States should not be engaged in these kinds of far-off conflicts. And I think that that remains a problem.
A point that I made in a recent article is, however, if you look at the polling data, despite all of this counterpropaganda by the blogosphere and the vice president and Pete Hegseth and so on, the Trump and the Republican electorate still broadly support Ukraine, admire its martial spirit. And this is after years of attacks on Ukraine by Tucker Carlson and his ilk.
So it’s all going to be on Trump. If Trump blinks or reverts back to a pro-Putin position after 50 days, as he very well may, this will be on Europe, and on Europe and Ukraine jointly, to find ways of compensating for the absence of the United States. And here, I think, there’s a lot of good news about joint military production with the Ukrainians, that many European countries are now investing billions of dollars jointly with their resources to help Ukraine’s relatively inexpensive way of building more-modern weapons. Ukraine has the capability of itself producing long-range missiles, and as far as I understand, there is a commitment in the short term to provide more Patriot bases and Patriot missiles for those systems, presumably through the U.S. replenishing the reserves of some European countries that will hand that equipment over to Ukraine.
Frum: Tim, you’ve been covering the hardware story very intensely. I think you’re going to have a new special-purpose publication devoted just to the hardware. What does Ukraine need to win the war? Do you have a sense of that? Do you have a sense of the technologies, the amounts? And are they available from the Western world?
Mak: Winning the war isn’t really a matter of technology. As you mentioned, I have a publication just devoted to Ukrainian defense tech, and so we cover the latest battlefield concepts, and that’s over at Counteroffensive Pro.
Ukrainians have always spoken jokingly about this kind of magic-bullet technology that might be created—and suddenly, the whole country is liberated from Russian influence. The real problems exist in terms of manpower, the amount of people that they can field on the front lines, and then arming Ukraine, to provide them necessary armored vehicles and air cover in order to make advances. But that’s just so outside the realm of what is likely over the next couple years that this war has kind of shifted into a stalemate-slash-defensive strategy.
I mean, very few Ukrainians believe that there will be some magic technology that develops, that will let them take over all of the occupied territories in the immediate near term. The Ukrainians have invented quite a few new things that have been able to give them asymmetric advantages on the battlefield, without which they would’ve never been able to defend their country nearly as well as they have been. But it has served more of a defensive purpose and been able to allow them to hold off huge amounts of Russian advances. There is no solution in the immediate term for pushing them out.
Karatnycky: By the way, as to manpower, I just want to make one point: Ukraine does not conscript 18- to 24-year-olds. There are 200,000 males in that age cohort for each year. So there’s roughly 1.2 million, and of course, probably 50 percent of them or 60 percent of them are not combat fit. But within the broader population base, there are still some substantial resources.
More importantly, I do think that Tim is right. For reclaiming territory, the kinds of weapons systems Ukraine has created will be very difficult. To gain territory, you have to actually put people in to occupy that territory. But the fact that the Ukrainians have transformed this into a drone war, forcing Russia to change it into a war of attacking civilian targets, is a credit to innovation and entrepreneurship and this creative spirit. I mean, Ukraine has compensated for some of its manpower shortages, and that’s what’s really stymied the Russian advance. And Russia is roughly advancing at a little over a half percent of the territory of Ukraine over each of the last two years.
Frum: Can Ukraine strike inside Russia at things that are important to Putin’s power in ways that would make the Russians reconsider that this aggression may jeopardize their hold on their state? Again and again, we’ve seen in the last century that dictatorships that gamble on aggression, if they lose—the Argentine junta attacking the Falklands, the Greek junta attacking Cyprus—if they lose, they can lose power. And so when I say, “win the war,” I don’t mean with this glorious advance and driving people out and flags flying. I mean that at some point, the Russians decide, We could lose things that we care about more by continuing with this aggression. We need to find some kind of negotiated settlement. Can they win it that way?
Mak: Well, Russia is a very opaque society from the outside, right? And as you know, these dictatorships are very brittle structures. And when they bend, they snap. More people have died in Ukraine on the Russian side than have died over a decade of war when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. And that, as you know, was a contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union. And I want to point out that there’s already been one internal military rebellion inside Russia that’s already happened. It’s just very difficult to predict.
Yes, Ukraine now has really interesting deep-strike capability. We saw this in an operation called Operation Spiderweb, where they snuck drones across the border and had them fly and take out dozens of strategic bombers all across Russia disguised inside of kind of motor homes or sheds built on trucks. And it was a really interesting operation that showed how vulnerable every country, not just Russia, is to modern drone warfare.
But whether or not that moves the needle on Putin’s core power, we can’t conduct a survey. We can’t talk to ordinary Russians in any meaningful way to determine how close that is. What we do know is the economy is suffering. Inflation is extremely high. We talk about inflation in the United States—it’s four or five times that in Russia. People are dying. They’re coming back traumatized, they’re coming back without limbs, or they’re not coming back at all. And that’s going to have a long-term societal effect. We just aren’t able to qualitate that. We’re not able to describe that to you in ways that lead to easy predictions about the near term. There are going to be serious follow-on effects. I just can’t predict what that will be.
Frum: I want to ask you the contrary scenario. Supposing President Trump says, and may mean, that he wants to pressure Ukraine into forcing some kind of negotiated peace, which he insists is possible. It looks like any negotiated peace would be a peace more or less on Russian terms, at least if it were to be negotiated today. What would be the effect on Ukrainian society if the United States were to push Ukraine in that direction?
Karatnycky: Well, we already saw this effect because we had in the run-up to the negotiations, we had the kind of the Steve Witkoff declarations, which I think resonated fairly substantially in the Ukrainian opinion elites and within the Ukrainian public, where he basically surrendered many of these territories, said that they were traditionally Russian, and so on.
So I think Ukrainians are used to this. I think the most important thing was that, around that whole misguided Witkoff diplomacy, Europe solidified, and I think the Ukrainians are ready to go with Europe. And I think Europe is, at the moment, ready to go—democratic Europe is ready to go with Ukraine, and that has, I think, changed the calculus of Ukrainians. I don’t think they feel, at least the policy people feel, that they’re as vulnerable. And I think that the fact that Europe is stepping up with cash and with collaboration on potentially on weapons production—Ukraine has, as I say, been developing its long-range missiles.
I’ve always believed that the only way to get Russia to negotiate is to hit the Russian power grid in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg, which together represent 35 to 40 percent of the Russian GDP. If you can knock these things out for 5 percent of the time, it’s a huge impact or, you know, bigger impact than sanctions on Russian growth, and it brings the war in a more dramatic way, and it is a legitimate war target because there are many missile- and military-production facilities in the Moscow and St. Petersburg areas. And I think that the reciprocity, the ability for Ukraine to respond, would probably reduce the Russian attacks on the civilian targets in Ukraine, which have really been scaled up in the last two months.
Frum: Tim, what’s your view of what happens if the United States is even somewhat successful in forcing some kind of unfavorable peace?
Mak: I want to challenge the underlying assumption. I don’t think that they’re going to be able to force a peace on Russia’s terms. I remember in the very first weeks of the war, I heard someone say that as long as there’s a 12-year-old kid in Ukraine with a plastic fork, there’s going to be resistance to Russia and Russian occupation. There is no appetite whatsoever in Ukraine for accepting a peace that would permit the takeover of additional territories simply through diplomacy. And that’s what, I think, in the near term, a diplomatic outcome would look like.
Ever since the Oval Office dustup between Zelensky and Trump, I think Ukrainians have increasingly, to Adrian’s point, adopted the view that they need to have a backup plan and that they need to be able to be more self-sufficient and less reliant, even psychically, on American support for morale or equipment or whatever.
And so I think over the last few months, those plans have been put in place. I don’t think you’ll see that Ukraine will accept just a dictated peace in which they have to give up huge amounts of sovereignty and territory and freedom of action in order to achieve a short-term peace—which, by the way, no Ukrainian believes, or very few Ukrainians believe, would be sustainable in the long term. They believe that this would just be the prelude to the next war, which is coming in a matter of a few years.
Frum: Is there any voice—Adrian, you’ve chronicled the transformation of Ukraine from a culture and a people into a state. Is there any voice in the Ukrainian state system that would be willing to play ball with the Trump-Witkoff vision of the Ukrainian future?
Karatnycky: No. I mean, I think there may be a residual 5 percent of people with a kind of Soviet mentality and maybe a few percent who feel comfortable being in Russia’s embrace. But I would say, the society is as consolidated as ever in Ukrainian history. The culture is as dynamic as ever. This is like the high point of Ukrainian unity, and I think that that’s actually a counterweight to the earlier part of our discussion.
The Ukrainian people are united in the purpose of defending their way of life, their culture, their—to an extent—language, their civilization, which they see as a more open one than what Russia offers. And this unity is not going to be broken by disputes about anti-corruption policy or even some inordinate concentration of power by the president. That they will stick together. They will fight. And I think eventually, they will resolve this in a way that defends the existence of a persistence of a sovereign state.
Mak: There was this Politico story a few months ago about Trump-administration or Trump-orbit figures visiting Ukraine and meeting with Zelensky’s opposition. That immediately led to huge blowback in Ukrainian domestic circles. Any politician that has in their mind professional survival would not want to associate with Trump or—
Karatnycky: By the way, actually, with the Oval Office meeting, Zelensky ratings were on the downward trend, and he was losing a runoff election against General [Valerii] Zaluzhnyi. In the aftermath of the Oval Office thing, the society consolidated against it, but he again became extremely popular. That effect wore off, and now there are new polls that show Zaluzhnyi again winning by 60 to 40 in the second round, when there will be an election.
But the point is that the Ukrainians, at a moment where—There’s only one leader at a time. We consolidate around that leader. We may not like some stuff. We’re Ukrainians—we’re going to criticize them if we want, but we know what we’re doing. There’s only one captain right now of this team, and we’ve got to go with it.
Mak: This encapsulates the Ukrainian worldview, by the way. No one beats up on our president except us. (Laughs.)
Karatnycky: Exactly.
Frum: Last question for you both, and particularly for Adrian: You’ve been following the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship so long, and you know who the friends are. They seem very quiet. There are people in the Senate who, if you talk to them, they’re all Ukraine all the time when the cameras are off and they feel there are no listening devices pointed in their direction. But the moment Trump turns his baleful glare upon them, they go quiet. What is your sense of the state of play in Washington to support and assist Ukraine?
Karatnycky: Yeah, I mean, I do think that the most important thing is: I think the Republican electorate is there. I think it’s a matter of cost. I think it’s the shift. If Europe picks up a huge amount of that bill, I think you solve a lot of the problems with the MAGA-voter electorate. But I think they’re still afraid of challenging the president and of being primaried. So it’s inexplicable for members of Congress who have a six-year window—or members of the Senate, who have that longer timeframe—who nevertheless are cowardly.
But we see people like Thom Tillis who have some differences with the president. They understand that they cannot survive without being Trump adjacent. At the moment, it’s a little easier for these guys to be Trump adjacent because Trump has said a few tougher words, but I think that’s the problem. The problem is not so much that MAGA is against Ukraine. I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s the case that if the president turns against them—and I think that’s the reason that they’re circumspect. You know, the MAGA electorate will vote for the designated candidate of the president, no matter what.
Frum: What about the Democrats? Do they remain solid? I mean, we’ve noticed that in light of the Israel-Gaza war, there has been a rise of the return of the—isolationist is really the wrong word, but the—nervous wing of the Democratic Party. They seem to be more vociferous than they used to be. Does any of that affect the Democratic Party’s past support of Ukraine and threaten to limit it in the future?
Karatnycky: Well, we’ve never had absolute—whenever there was a, quote, “bipartisan foreign policy” during the Cold War, it was usually 80 percent of one party and 40 percent of the other party. So we’ve never had that kind of absolute unity. And there will be different tendencies. But I think the predominant tendency in both electorates is to support Ukraine. And I think that in the Democratic congressional and Senate delegations, there is overwhelming support. And these are kind of minor, fringe tendencies.
But even if over time Ukraine loses 10 or 15 or 20 percent of the Democratic congressional delegations, Ukraine cannot be sustained only by the support of the Democratic Party. It will need to have some substantial Republican support in the long term for legislation, especially if we get back to a government where you don’t have, like in Ukraine, a rubber-stamp parliament.
Frum: Last question for Tim. Tim, how sophisticated are Ukrainians, both politicians and everyday people, at reading the politics of the United States? Are they able to discern the difference between a Trump, a Vance, their coterie, and where most Americans are?
Mak: I’ve often observed that Ukrainians are more adept at understanding American politics than Americans are.
Frum: (Laughs.)
Mak: I mean, they’re talking about subcommittee hearings in the Congress, and they’re talking about the two-thirds majority for various changes that need to be adopted. But, like, you can understand why they’re so interested in American politics. Their lives depend on it. And you would pay attention to a foreign country’s government a lot more closely if that was the difference between a drone flying near or at your building at night or not, right? So they’re very much interested in the minutiae of American government. They share the J. D. Vance memes. They are very much in touch with what’s happening in the American political discourse, in some ways more than your average American.
Frum: So it’s not impossible that someday they forgive us.
Mak: It’s not impossible. I would say that for now, there’s a huge, huge grudge that will need to be overcome.
Karatnycky: But there’s a lot of not forgiving. There’s also not forgiving for some of the revelations about the Biden administration thinking about not giving to Ukraine too many weapons to prevail. So there will be a long, long attempt to chew through all this stuff and to kind of absorb it and to think about it. I don’t think anti-Americanism has risen in any substantial way, but I think more of a kind of nationalism, that We have to rely on ourselves—that is the main, predominant trend, less of this kind of reliance on what the big powers will do.
Frum: Thank you both so much for taking the time, and thank you for your years of work and expertise on this issue, which you have so generously shared today. Bye-bye.
Mak: Thank you, David.
Karatnycky: Thank you.
[Music]
Frum: Thank you so much to Tim Mak and Adrian Karatnycky for their candor. I want to salute both of them in their physical courage. Tim reports every day from Ukraine; Adrian is a frequent visitor. As we have seen from the terrible onslaught of July 31, everyone in Ukraine, everyone especially in the capital city of Kyiv, is a potential target. Our two guests today have volunteered—Tim, full-time; Adrian, often—to be targets of that potential retaliation. It takes a lot of courage to be in Ukraine. It takes a lot of courage to stand for Ukraine, and I thank them both for their candor and their courage.
If you appreciate dialogues like this, I hope you’ll subscribe to, share, advance, promote this podcast on any platform that you’d like to use. Remember always that the best way to support the work of this podcast and all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I sincerely hope you’ll consider doing that.
My thanks to you for watching, and I look forward to seeing you here again soon on The David Frum Show, whether you watch or whether you listen.
Thank you so much. Goodbye.
[Music]
Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
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