--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram from there's been a lot of news out of Ukraine in the past few weeks.
--:-- [Discussion begins]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ukraine used a US missile system to strike deep into Russian territory for the first time on Tuesday. People in Dnipro saw the extraordinary scene on their skyline of that multi-warhead Russian missile experiment. Nuclear saber rattling from the Kremlin this morning with Vladimir Putin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I don't want to make it about us, but I couldn't help but wonder how much of it had to do with our recent election here in the United States, so I asked Josh Keating at Vox.
--:-- Josh Keating: I think it has a lot to do with the election. President Trump has come in, said he wants to push for negotiations to end the war. And I think what we see from both sides is an attempt to press their advantage before they're pushed by the new U.S. administration into some kind of talks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How two American presidents are shaping the future of the war in Ukraine at the same time coming up on the show today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies.
--:-- [Discussion continues]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: AI agents are getting pretty impressive. You might not even realize you're listening to one right now. We work 24-7 to resolve customer inquiries. No hold music, no canned answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're listening to Today Explained. Luke Harding at The Guardian has been covering the war in Ukraine since it started. We asked him what's changed in the past few weeks.
--:-- Luke Harding: Yeah, it's really been hotting up on several fronts, political, military, internationally. On the battlefield. I visited recently in the northeast Kharkiv region, a place called Kupinsk, and also another front line near Sumy, where Ukraine has, since August, occupied a chunk of territory inside Russia.
--:-- Luke Harding: At least 11 people, including two children, were killed by a Russian missile on Sunday night, Ukraine officials said. It hit a nine-story residential building in the northeastern region of Sumy. There is full-scale fighting going on. It's loud. A morning shattered by the eerie wail of air raid sirens. Then drones and missiles that were intercepted. And those that were not.
--:-- Luke Harding: In Kupinsk, where I was, the Russians were a couple of miles away. They are sending drones into the streets to chase and hunt civilians. And Russia is winning the war in the east of Ukraine purely because of mass. It's got more of everything. It's got more men. It's got more tanks. It's got more warplanes.
--:-- Luke Harding: And, you know, meanwhile, of course, the other big development is Donald Trump. I believe I will be able to make a deal between President Putin and President Zelensky quite quickly.
--:-- Luke Harding: What that means, Kiev, the presidential administration, of Volodymyr Zelenskyy is bracing for impact. I believe that the war will end, and it will not end in the abstract. The war will end faster with the policy of this team that will now lead the White House.
--:-- Luke Harding: And interestingly, opinion in Kiev about what Trump will mean for Ukraine is mixed. There's quite a strong faction, group of people who think that Trump might just be good news for Ukraine, that he might somehow bring about an end to the war.
--:-- Luke Harding: I will get it solved in rapid order, and it will take me no longer than one day. And managed to cut a deal with Vladimir Putin, because by now there was an enormous frustration with the Biden administration, with its policy of incrementalism, everything too little too late, with its caution, with the fact that it freaks out whenever Putin says the nuclear word.
--:-- Luke Harding: And some people think that Trump might just be the person to kind of change all this. There are other more cool-headed Ukrainians who think that Trump will be a disaster, that he will sell out Ukraine to Russia and essentially enforce a kind of capitulation light, some kind of deal where Ukraine gives up territory, makes a commitment not to join NATO, and so on.
--:-- Luke Harding: But, you know, the countdown is on until January the 20th. We don't really quite know what's going to happen. And in addition to the Trump development, we also have some Biden-related developments, namely Biden giving Zelensky permission to do things they haven't been able to do to this point.
--:-- Luke Harding: Can you tell us a bit about that?
--:-- Josh Keating: Yeah, there's been a long and difficult and contentious conversation that has been happening since really last year, or if not before, where Zelensky and his team have been asking the White House, the Biden White House, for permission to carry out deep strikes inside Russia using attackums, using long range American systems, which are highly effective and highly accurate.
--:-- Josh Keating: And Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, you know, Biden have basically said no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And to the point where really, I think, to some degree, you can say it's spoiled the relationship between Biden and Zelensky because it's become mistrustful.
--:-- Josh Keating: Various official, Pentagon officials, other officials complaining loudly about the Ukrainians, about their rudeness, about their military failings and so on. And the Ukrainians for whom this war is existential, you know, bear in mind that people are dying every night. Russian missiles are striking all the time, killing civilians, killing kids, killing families.
--:-- Josh Keating: They are saying, you know, just give us these tools. And finally, in the very twilight of his presidency, after Kamala Harris lost the election with Trump on the horizon, the White House has allowed these strikes and Ukraine has wasted no time in whacking strategic targets.
--:-- Josh Keating: So there a real sense that the tempo of war is stepping up not that it ever been slack. It always been pretty busy.
--:-- Luke Harding: Presumably the chief reason Biden wanted to give Ukraine the go ahead here is because he wanted to avoid escalating with Russia provoking Russia.
--:-- Luke Harding: How is Russia responding? Was Russia provoked?
--:-- Josh Keating: Yeah, I mean, the question is a fair one, but the paradigm is completely wrong. I mean, we just have to sort of go back to basics here.
--:-- Josh Keating: Russia invaded Ukraine more than 10 years ago when it annexed Crimea and started a kind of covert military operation in the east of the country and seized the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.
--:-- Josh Keating: Large groups of pro-Russia troops surrounding Ukrainian bases, ordering their forces off of them so they can occupy them. The international warning to Russia to end its invasion is being ignored.
--:-- Josh Keating: So Russia's been escalating all the way through. And then, of course, in February 2022, it launched the biggest war, land war in Europe since 1945, with shock and awe, with tank divisions trying to capture Kiev, with a multi-pronged invasion.
--:-- Josh Keating: They're being pushed to the limit by Russia's full-scale invasion with attacks across Ukraine from areas near those pro-Russian enclaves in the east to the capital Kiev in the west.
--:-- Josh Keating: Which the Ukrainians, really to the surprise of America and other allies, kind of batted back. Village by village, Ukrainian soldiers are pushing Russian troops away from Kharkiv and back towards the Russian border.
--:-- Josh Keating: And they've been, you know, trying to take back territory and really, you know, in the last year or so, just hold the front line with varying degrees of success.
--:-- Josh Keating: And during this period, there have been no nuclear strikes. You know, Putin has not nuked Texas, or London, or Paris, or indeed, Kiev or southern Ukraine.
--:-- Josh Keating: It's the most enormous bluff. And it's a sort of psychological operation designed to cow the democratic world and to make them afraid of supporting Ukraine.
--:-- Josh Keating: And also to promote the myth that Russia can't lose this war. And if I'm not mistaken, Russia is now increasing the threat of nuclear warfare.
--:-- Luke Harding: Is that right?
--:-- Josh Keating: No. No? Not really. Is it a myth? I mean, it's rhetorical. It's performative. It's ultimately fake.
--:-- Josh Keating: I mean, the threat of Russia launching a nuclear attack is no greater now than it was two years ago.
--:-- Josh Keating: The reality is that in any direct confrontation between Russia and the US and its allies, Russia would lose. I mean, America is a more formidable power. NATO is bigger and mightier.
--:-- Josh Keating: And it's just a tremendous bluff. I mean, I think it should be interpreted as an operational, informational game.
--:-- Josh Keating: I think what's a more realistic scenario is not the Russians launching nukes, is some kind of fuck-up.
--:-- Josh Keating: Bear in mind that Russia has occupied since spring 2022 the nuclear power station in Zaporizhia.
--:-- Josh Keating: It blew up the reservoir, which provided the cooling pond. It's been shelling from this nuclear facility across the river into Ukrainian settlements.
--:-- Josh Keating: I've seen them. I've been there. And I think some kind of Chernobyl-style, you know, mess-up, where Russia just gets it wrong, because it's not very good at these protocols, is more probable than a kind of calculated Russian military strike.
--:-- Josh Keating: I think that is just a kind of negotiating tactic ahead of some kind of possible deal in spring.
--:-- Josh Keating: And the ultimate audience for this is one Donald J. Trump, back in the White House, who could potentially portray himself as a peacemaker, the man who avoided nuclear war, and all of his flatterers and supporters can say, you know, Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize because, look, he's avoided World War III and he's brought peace to Ukraine, which, by the way, I don't think is going to be peace.
--:-- Josh Keating: Look at Russia's past record for deals. It breaks them and then it sort of continues doing what it wants to do.
--:-- Josh Keating: And I think, Sean, this is a fascist project. Putin believes that Ukraine does not exist. He thinks this is historical Russia. He wants to de-Ukrainize Ukraine and turn the whole country, its people, back into a Russian province. That's his goal.
--:-- Josh Keating: He thinks he can get there. And I think he thinks that Trump ultimately is someone that he can, if not exactly dupe, I would say outmaneuver.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Luke Harding, he's got a new book about Ukraine. It's called Invasion, Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival. Find this light holiday reading wherever you find your books.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Biden's in charge for the moment, but all eyes are on Trump. The trouble with two presidents when we're back on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards. These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head. Not anymore, says Built Rewards.
--:-- Josh Keating: Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent. By paying rent through Built, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more.
--:-- Josh Keating: Your home isn't just where you sleep, it's your community, and Built wants you to go out and do things in the community.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From Pushkin Industries, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and Heavyweight is back. The new season is bigger than ever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bigger hopes? I keep waiting for this moment when he says Mom I get it I sorry Bigger dreams Tom Hanks wants to meet with you This is a real chance And bigger heartbreaks I thought it would be my movie moment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And maybe he would even whisper in my ear, I've always been in love with you. Check out new episodes of Heavyweight on Apple Podcasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR.
--:-- Josh Keating: What's in your life kit? I'm asking. They didn't ask that.
--:-- Josh Keating: Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key.
--:-- Josh Keating: Instead, you can listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR. LifeKit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career.
--:-- Josh Keating: If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, LifeKit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change from fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout.
--:-- Josh Keating: Each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with.
--:-- Josh Keating: LifeKit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Enough from me. Go listen to the show Life Kit. It's a podcast from NPR.
--:-- Josh Keating: Josh Keating is a senior correspondent at Vox who writes about foreign policy. We asked him if the incoming Trump administration is at all miffed by how much action the outgoing Biden administration is taking on Ukraine.
--:-- Josh Keating: So the last tranche of Ukraine aid was allocated by Congress last April. After more than six months, a bill pledging further military aid for Ukraine finally passed.
--:-- Josh Keating: President Zelensky had personally met with U.S. lawmakers to lobby for support. That was $61 billion. And basically, they're trying to rush whatever they can out the door before Inauguration Day.
--:-- Josh Keating: So they're trying to get all these contracts in place, get as much aid moving to Ukraine now as they can. And the incoming Trump administration does seem to be sort of irritated by this.
--:-- Josh Keating: We saw Richard Grinnell, who was the former Trump administration ambassador to Germany, a real kind of like sharp elbowed, you know, you know, troll, basically a guy, a guy who talks a lot of smack on social media and did so even when he was a diplomat.
--:-- Josh Keating: You know, he's accused the Biden administration on Twitter of escalating the war before he leaves office. There's been some coverage that's mentioned him as potentially a candidate for the Trump administration's envoy to Ukraine.
--:-- Josh Keating: So he could be somebody who's like very closely involved in this.
--:-- Josh Keating: Right. It is plausible that Biden is trying to ramp up his support for Ukraine in advance of an administration coming in that has been less than totally sympathetic to Ukraine.
--:-- Josh Keating: Absolutely. And whenever you're in a negotiation, you want to be in the best position possible when you start from that negotiation. You don't have to have written the art of the deal to know that you want to move into talks from a position of strength.
--:-- Josh Keating: And I think that, you know, there's clearly a desire that if Ukraine and Russia are pressured into a position where they're talking about territorial concessions, you want Ukraine to be controlling as much territory as they can before those talks start.
--:-- Josh Keating: Have we seen something like this before? I mean, And certainly this isn't the first time a presidential transition is happening in the middle of a conflict abroad.
--:-- Josh Keating: Yeah, I mean, we're in this awkward period right now where there are basically two U.S. presidents. Foreign actors, international actors, have to deal with both of those realities.
--:-- Josh Keating: They have to get, you know, press their advantage as much as they can with the team that's there now and also position themselves for the one that's coming in.
--:-- Josh Keating: And we have seen this before, especially when one administration is handing off a war to the next one.
--:-- Josh Keating: One example you could look at is the transition from Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower when the Korean War was going on.
--:-- Josh Keating: UN forces recapture this South Korean capital. These are Marines and U.S. 7th Division troops. Dancing into Seoul under enemy fire.
--:-- Josh Keating: Eisenhower had promised to end the war, which by that point had become very unpopular. But he hadn't quite spelled out on the campaign trail how he was going to do it.
--:-- Josh Keating: And this really annoyed Truman, who had basically made the argument, hey, buddy, if you know how to end the war, could you please share that with us? We'd like to end the war before we leave office.
--:-- Josh Keating: And Eisenhower made this famous pledge. She said, I shall go to Korea to basically, you know, assess the situation on the ground and figure out how to end it.
--:-- Josh Keating: During his three-day stay in Korea, Ike is determined to meet as many veterans from the battlefront as he can. And from their experiences, plan a way of ending this bitter conflict.
--:-- Josh Keating: And he went and, you know, had a fact-finding mission and came to the conclusion the war wouldn't be winnable with, you know, another big offensive, which is what, you know, the South Koreans and what Hawks in the U.S. wanted.
--:-- Josh Keating: And he basically continued the armistice talks that Truman had started. And that helped a few months after he took office, that war did finally end.
--:-- Josh Keating: Tonight we greet, with prayers of thanksgiving, the official news that an armist was signed almost an hour ago in Korea.
--:-- Josh Keating: Sometimes we've seen the incoming administration actually kind of stymie or sabotage the efforts of the outgoing one.
--:-- Josh Keating: I pledge to you, we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.
--:-- Josh Keating: In 1968, the Nixon campaign basically reached out to the South Vietnamese negotiators and told them not to agree to a deal that would end the war in Vietnam and would presumably give the outgoing Johnson administration a big win and make the Democrats look good in that election.
--:-- Josh Keating: We have found that our friend the Republican nominee our California friend has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both.
--:-- Josh Keating: And so the war actually ended up continuing for another few years with, you know, a lot more casualties, Americans and Vietnamese.
--:-- Josh Keating: I came back from Vietnam in 1967, and here it is 1971. I still haven't seen the end of the war in sight yet.
--:-- Josh Keating: And then, you know, a final example we could talk to is a more recent one, is the war in Afghanistan.
--:-- Josh Keating: President Trump has just nine weeks left in his term. During that time, he's expected to sharply cut U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan and Iraq.
--:-- Josh Keating: Donald Trump agreed to the deal with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops, and the withdrawal actually began before the Biden administration came in.
--:-- Josh Keating: Two days ago, the United States signed a deal with the Taliban so that after 19 years of conflict and very close to 20, we can finally begin to bring our amazing troops back home.
--:-- Josh Keating: Biden probably would have wanted to get those troops out anyway, but I think would have preferred to negotiate it on his own terms.
--:-- Josh Keating: So we're left with a simple decision. Either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we weren't leaving and commit another tens of thousands more troops going back to war.
--:-- Josh Keating: And it's actually interesting if you look at how Trump talks about that now.
--:-- Josh Keating: He's criticized Biden quite a bit for how the withdrawal was handled, including, you know, the terrorist attack that could, you know, kill people, including a number of U.S. troops.
--:-- Josh Keating: Afghanistan, the most embarrassing day in the history of our country. And none of the generals got fired for the incompetence that they showed.
--:-- Josh Keating: But, you know, I think all these examples just go to show you can talk about, you know, conditions on the battlefield, the weapons each side has.
--:-- Josh Keating: But, you know, these U.S. elections are themselves kind of developments in the war and they affect the strategy that all sides in the conflict are pursuing.
--:-- Josh Keating: And do these examples, especially the last one you gave about Afghanistan, where it was the same two characters involved, tell us anything about what might shake out with this war in Ukraine in the coming months?
--:-- Josh Keating: Yeah, well, I'm going to steal an argument from Sam Green, a really smart Russia analyst.
--:-- Josh Keating: His basic point was that Putin up until this point has managed to use uncertainty to his advantage and use the fact that he's the most unpredictable character in this drama to his advantage.
--:-- Josh Keating: He's no longer the most unpredictable character. I'll keep you in suspense. You know, Trump's coming in and Putin may not be able to sort of leverage uncertainty about, you know, just how crazy he is, just how much he's willing to escalate this to his advantage to quite the same extent, because now there's somebody who prides himself on being, you know, the potentially craziest guy in the room.
--:-- Josh Keating: That's not me saying that. That's Trump has actually like talked about his approach and framed it that way.
--:-- Josh Keating: I think it's pretty clear that the Trump team is going to push for negotiations. Will that work, though?
--:-- Josh Keating: It's possible Russia may just say no. They may say we're winning on the battlefield. We're walking away from this.
--:-- Josh Keating: In which case, you know, Trump has said that he would tell Putin, like, he's just going to give Zelensky everything right now. He's going to send him all the weapons, let him do whatever he wants.
--:-- Josh Keating: So I don't think it's out of the question. This could actually end with the U.S. escalating its involvement in the war in Ukraine.
--:-- Josh Keating: And then there's the question, you know, what does a deal actually look like.
--:-- Josh Keating: You can say we want to freeze the lines in place. I think there is a consensus developing that this is going to end with some current internationally recognized Ukrainian territory held by Russia.
--:-- Josh Keating: But the Ukrainians are going to want security guarantees. They don't want a repeat of the deals they've made in the past where they've sort of agreed to ceasefires with Russia and then Russia's violated them.
--:-- Josh Keating: And so, you know, they say they want full membership in NATO. That to be honest seems unlikely but so then what do security guarantees look like?
--:-- Josh Keating: Is it basing western troops in Ukraine? Is it providing them with a lot more military aid if they don't get that?
--:-- Josh Keating: I could see the Ukrainians just walking away from the deal saying we're going to keep fighting with whatever we have. We shouldn't assume that this war is going to end just because Donald Trump wants it to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Josh Keating, Vox.com
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This episode of Today Explained was produced by Hadi Mawajdeh and Haleema Shah. They were edited by Jolie Myers. Fact-checked by Laura Bullard. And mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tomorrow on the show, we're going to talk about How you can make the world a better place. Thank you.
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