--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I am feeling that I have to be here. War with Russia is my war also. It's been almost two years since Russia escalated its war with Ukraine. And two years in, Ukraine is desperate for military aid from the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your money is not charity. It's an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way. And it's not just Zelensky begging for money. It's Biden. Putin is banking on the United States failing to deliver for Ukraine. We must, we must, we must prove him wrong.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there are no signs that Congress is going to budge. And at present, they're not going to budge because of the U.S.-Mexico border, believe it or not. It's a big old mess, and we're going to try and make sense of it on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained. I was ready to go to the army because I have to do it. We got in touch with a Ukrainian soldier on the eastern front of this war this week.
--:-- Ukrainian Soldier: He wanted to remain anonymous to protect his safety if he were to get captured, but we verified his identity.
--:-- Ukrainian Soldier: Every day we laugh on each other, different jokes. You know, it's also because without jokes it's so, it's not so good. Without jokes it's so like gray day, dark day, you know, and a lot of brothers in arms, our brothers in arms were killed also, and civilian peoples were killed, but we need to support each other, and jokes, it's a good way.
--:-- Ukrainian Soldier: A good way, maybe coffee, maybe some sandwiches, maybe something sweet also support our blood and our soul. And we have to have this optimism, I mean, inside of us to do our tasks.
--:-- Ukrainian Soldier: And I try, I talk to myself that, okay, I have to be in good condition and my brain have to be cold and my heart have to be warm, hot, hot heart, you know.
--:-- Ukrainian Soldier: It's so difficult because now we don't have enough weapons, enough needed things, you know, to save our city, to save our people, like air defense, you know, like armed machines also like artillery things and others.
--:-- Ukrainian Soldier: So we have optimism inside of us, you know, but we need more, more, more military things to cope with this Russian army.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We wanted to hear what this war looks like as it approaches its two-year anniversary, So we got in touch with Luke Harding at The Guardian, who spends a lot of time on the ground in Ukraine.
--:-- Luke Harding: The situation on the ground is the Russians are slowly but surely moving forward. Now, last year, 2023, there were high hopes that the Ukrainians might be able to take back more territory, particularly in the south with a summer counteroffensive.
--:-- Luke Harding: Ukraine is finally on the march. Spring has become summer and defensive operations switched to offensive ones. Slow, slow, slow. I was there when it started and basically they ran into massive entrenched Russian fortifications, minefields, air defense and so on and that didn't work.
--:-- Luke Harding: And really I would say since kind of late autumn and winter that the Russians have been pushing, pushing, pushing with a series of assaults across the front line, which, by the way, is more than 600 miles long, but particularly in the east.
--:-- Luke Harding: So the whole idea is an attempt to cut off the land bridge between Russian-held territory and the Russian-held Crimean Peninsula.
--:-- Luke Harding: And what we're seeing is massive attacks involving infantry, tanks, armored vehicles, aviation, and with tens of thousands of Russian soldiers being killed.
--:-- Luke Harding: I mean, I was on the front line recently near a town called Avdievka, which the Russians have been trying to seize since last October. And I talked to one Ukrainian soldier who said, they come, we kill them, then more of them come.
--:-- Luke Harding: Close up, you see trenches. There are booms from outgoing artillery, whistles from incoming projectiles. There is mud. rats now frost, it's very cold in Ukraine, with glassy-looking trees and treacherous conditions everywhere in these kind of bare, frozen fields, but with the addition of drones.
--:-- Luke Harding: So it's this mash-up between First World War, early 20th century and 21st war, where both sides have got complete reconnaissance of the battlefield, and it's impossible to do anything but by stealth or by surprise.
--:-- Luke Harding: And you would have thought that these sort of tactics, where hundreds of Russian soldiers die every day, that they would change up but they not
--:-- Luke Harding: And the sort of Putin strategy is to overwhelm Ukraine to smother Ukraine to use Russia superior volumes of everything whether it's artillery or ballistic missiles or warplanes, and to grind out some kind of victory.
--:-- Luke Harding: It sounds like this counteroffensive has failed.
--:-- Luke Harding: Yeah, I mean, that's right. I mean, these things are always, Sean, they're always sort of perspectival.
--:-- Luke Harding: So if we were sitting here, let's say, two years ago, early 2022, before the full-scale evasion, and I said, well, at that point, the Pentagon and the US basically assumed that the Russians would overrule Ukraine, topple the government of Vladimir Zelensky, set up a puppet administration in Kiev, and fold Ukraine back into Russia.
--:-- Luke Harding: And that didn't happen. I mean, the Russians tried to take Kiev, but they failed. And actually, Ukraine's taken back quite a lot of territory.
--:-- Luke Harding: But the problem now is that their capacity to take more depends on the supply of weapons from the West and from the United States in particular.
--:-- Luke Harding: And what we know perfectly well is that this is being held up by Congress.
--:-- Luke Harding: It's become the subject of a bitter partisan debate. And this has a direct effect on the battlefield.
--:-- Luke Harding: You know, I talked to Ukrainian servicemen who say that they noticed a dip in the amount of munitions they were getting in about late summer of last year.
--:-- Luke Harding: And they're now just completely outgunned. And they say the problem isn't infantry. They don't mind that the Russians have got more people.
--:-- Luke Harding: It's a country of 140 million. The problem is it was Stalin who called artillery the god of war. And there's more god on the Russian side than on the Ukrainian side.
--:-- Luke Harding: Artillery is the god of war.
--:-- Luke Harding: What about manpower? Because Russia's got an advantage there too, right? There's the numerical advantage, of course. They've got more people.
--:-- Luke Harding: They've got about 300,000 plus soldiers in the Ukrainian theater, which is a huge army.
--:-- Luke Harding: Look, this is the biggest war in Europe. My continent since 1945. And actually, it quite looks like the Second World War for much of the time.
--:-- Luke Harding: These tank assaults we keep on seeing are reminiscent of Stalingrad or the Soviet push for Berlin.
--:-- Luke Harding: So they've got more, but it's not just that. It's also the fact that the Russians are prepared to squander lives in the way the Ukrainians are not.
--:-- Luke Harding: And their commanders, Ukrainian commanders, they don't send them in on impossible missions, whereas Russian officers will send 15 guys to their certain deaths across an icy field just to try and expose the Ukrainian firing position, knowing that they won't come back, knowing that they won't break through, just fodder.
--:-- Luke Harding: And there's a word in Russian, they call them meat assaults. Meat assaults.
--:-- Luke Harding: And we've seen meat assaults throughout, and they continue. They continue.
--:-- Luke Harding: It's as if there is no level of pain and loss, which is too high for the Russian state.
--:-- Luke Harding: Mid-war, you know, when they push a lot of people to kill that we kill them. But it's their tactic, it's their strategy, and sometimes it works for Russian army, you know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does the Ukrainian public feel about this conflict at this point? I mean, everybody's exhausted.
--:-- Luke Harding: I mean, I'm in Kiev every month. You know, I'll do a long stint there, then, you know, take a break and then go back again.
--:-- Luke Harding: And last year, you know, my Ukrainian friends, they all knew someone who was fighting. Now they all know someone who's been killed.
--:-- Luke Harding: I was sitting in a restaurant in December and got chatting to a guy and he said, 10 of my friends have been killed. 10 of my friends have been killed.
--:-- Luke Harding: And that's the problem. I mean, Kiev superficially looks like any successful European city.
--:-- Luke Harding: I mean, it's, Sean, it's rather beautiful. There are Art Deco buildings. There are golden couplers. There are cobbled streets that twist up and down.
--:-- Luke Harding: There's great coffee, by the way, and good pizza. You know, it's not some dreary Soviet backwater. I mean, it's a lively European city. It's a Berlin or a Prague.
--:-- Luke Harding: But under the surface, everybody is hurting because a brother or a husband or a cousin or a guy you played football with, you know, have been killed.
--:-- Luke Harding: And meanwhile Kiev is being hit by, it's being bombarded. There's a massive Russian air assault most nights.
--:-- Luke Harding: We just saw one in the last 24 hours with six cities being hit by ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, by everything missiles.
--:-- Luke Harding: Part of the problem is people are just very tired. I mean, I've been there when this happens.
--:-- Luke Harding: Your phone vibrates, you get an air alarm signal and then nothing happens for a bit and then you hear Ukrainian air defense engaging.
--:-- Luke Harding: There are flashes in the sky, booms. It's all very apocalyptic.
--:-- Luke Harding: And then when finally you get the all clear at about 4, 4.30 in the morning, you're so wired, you're buzzing, you can't sleep.
--:-- Luke Harding: Because how can you sleep after that? Your body just won't switch off. And then repeat, repeat, repeat.
--:-- Luke Harding: But there is a degree of bewilderment along the lines of what happened to the party of Ronald Reagan, right?
--:-- Luke Harding: The party that in the 1980s faced down the mighty Soviet empire and basically you could argue won the Cold War.
--:-- Luke Harding: I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
--:-- Luke Harding: Anau seems to think that Putin is a good guy when it's clear to everybody, everyone of sane mind, that he is a murderous psychopath whose armies plunder, rape, destroy, kill, enslave, abduct children, actually, and take them back to Russia to be made into good Russians.
--:-- Luke Harding: The Kremlin wants to basically exhaust the Ukrainian civilian population to kill them where it can, to destroy energy infrastructure, to make people freeze and immiserate them, to basically break Ukrainian will.
--:-- Luke Harding: And Putin thinks he's got time on his side. And meanwhile, he's looking eagerly to the US, to possible political developments there, which he thinks could well turn out to be favorable to him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Luke Harding, he's The Guardian's senior international correspondent and the author of Invasion, the inside story of Russia's bloody war and Ukraine's fight for survival, when we're back on today explained how and why Congress might be ghosting Ukraine right now.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not anymore, says Built Rewards. 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.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR. What's in your LifeKit? I'm asking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They didn't ask that. 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Instead, you can listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR. Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My name is Andrew Desiderio. I'm a senior congressional reporter for Punchbowl News.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And you know a little bit about this funding battle for the Ukraine war in Congress? A little bit, yeah.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: It's been my whole life for the past few months. Will Ukraine get the money? And if not, why not?
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Well, look, it's an open question at this point. Congress has tried many times over the last, I don't know, 12 months or so, to get more money to Ukraine, more funding authorities for the president to transfer weapons from U.S. stockpiles.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And at least three times they have failed to do so. And what's basically happened is each time they have been thwarted by the House Republicans.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: But right now, the big sort of hang up is that Republicans are demanding that any future aid for Ukraine be attached to legislation that imposes policy changes for the U.S.-Mexico border, which members of both parties agree is a problem that should be addressed for sure.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Where Democrats differ from Republicans on this is they don't believe that it should be tied to what is viewed as emergency spending for Ukraine, for Israel and for Taiwan.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: OK, a lot to process there. You got Ukraine funding, you've got border funding, you've got Taiwan, you've got Israel. Let's just focus on how it is that funding for the war in Ukraine got tied to the southern border.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Can you help us wrap our heads around that? Yeah.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: So, you know, a lot of progressives are frustrated with the White House right now because back in August, they actually included additional funding resources to help manage the crisis at the border as part of their request for money for Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And the thinking at the time was that this would be a way to sort of sweeten the deal for Republicans.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: It ended up backfiring and doing the exact opposite. Republicans saw that the White House asked for it and said, well, you're asking for it, so let's negotiate.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And what they did was they made a series of demands surrounding border security, policy changes, restrictions on the ability to seek asylum, restrictions on the ability of the administration to parole migrants who are processed into the United States from the southern border.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: We delivered common sense legislation that will secure our border. But it's been sitting on Chuck Schumer's desk for seven months.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: House Resolution 2 was our bill. And the time to act on it is yesterday.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And that is the standoff we're currently in right now, because this is really the third rail of American politics.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And the thinking is, if you're tying Ukraine aid to one of the most contentious, difficult issues Congress has ever had to address, then that doesn't fare well for Ukraine aid.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And that has unfortunately borne out to be true.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Which is to say that the Biden administration, whom we spoke with when they made this decision, miscalculated by tying border funding to the war in Ukraine.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: That is what a lot of progressives think. They think it gave Republicans an opening to demand these border policy changes as part of this supplemental funding request because, well, in their view, the White House put it on the table.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: So we're going to negotiate around that. Right.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: So, you know, you have Democrats and the White House kind of throwing shade at Republicans for tying these two issues together.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Extreme Republicans are playing chicken with our national security, holding Ukraine's funding hostages or extreme partisan border policies.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: But then Republicans are coming back at them and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, we didn't tie them together. You tied them together.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And they're technically correct when they say that.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Putting all the politics aside and, you know, the gamesmanship, what do Republicans actually think about this war in Ukraine?
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Are there Republicans who wouldn't support it even if it hadn't been tied to border funding? That's exactly the case.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: So you have Republicans like Mitch McConnell, who are the more traditional, neoconservative, hawkish Republicans who are going to support Ukraine no matter what.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: They're going to be tied to the hip with Democrats, with President Biden on that issue as they have been.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Contending our support for Ukraine is morally right, but it's not only that, it's also a direct investment in cold, hard American interests.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And then you have a very significant contingent, especially in the House, and a growing group at that that will not support Ukraine aid no matter what it tied to.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: I mean you could tie every border restriction under the sun that Stephen Miller and Donald Trump would love to have as part of this to Ukraine aid, and they still would not vote for it because of the Ukraine aid portion.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: They want to add a $100 billion supplemental of which $60 billion will go to Ukraine.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: So that is the way.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Why is it that some Republicans are so staunchly against funding this war? Well, that's a very complicated question.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: I would say that the influence of Donald Trump is definitely the biggest thing here.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Donald Trump, his whole foreign policy ethos was America first. This idea that we shouldn't be involved in foreign wars that don't have a direct bearing on the lives of Americans.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: It's more sort of non-interventionist, isolationist, if you want to call it.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And the issue of Ukraine has become so politically charged in the United States ever since Donald Trump was impeached the first time for his phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, in which he threatened to basically cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine unless they started an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: The White House has just released a transcript of President Trump's July 25th phone call with Ukraine's president.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: So after that exchange about U.S. help to Ukraine, Trump then says, I would like you to do us a favor.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: A whistleblower report related to that phone call led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to open a formal impeachment inquiry.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And at the time, that got a lot of Republicans angry at the idea that, oh, Donald Trump is being targeted for this stuff, right?
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And it made Ukraine a political issue and an issue that the Republican base in particular latched onto and said, hey, well, look at all this corruption in Ukraine. Donald Trump was right to do this.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And so when this issue comes up where they're basically under full-scale assault by the Russian army, you have Republicans who are thinking back to that episode and saying, huh, is it really worth us giving billions of dollars and a lot of our weapons to Ukraine to help them fight the Russians?
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: The infrastructure minister arrested for stealing $400,000. The deputy head of Zelensky's office can't explain where the sports cars came from, so he had to resign.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: But I think the main sort of reason why this has become so difficult for the Republican Party is politics.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And I talked to a Republican senator a few weeks ago who is in the McConnell crowd, very supportive of Ukraine.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And I asked him, I said, what do you think it is that ever since the war started, there's been the steep decline of support for Ukraine among members of your party.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And the senator said to me, you know, I have tried to get an intellectually honest answer out of the anti-Ukraine crowd as to why they don't support sending more money to Ukraine.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: I have not found one apart from domestic politics.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And that is really what it boils down to, is that Ukraine has become almost a domestic political issue in the United States, especially for people who are aligned with Donald Trump and people who have been the staunchest apologists for him, really, ever since he first came into office.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Which is to say, in, what is it, 10 months, 11 months, when there is an election, if Joe Biden loses to the former president, that might be the end of Ukraine funding forever.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Yeah, I think it's fair to say that.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And a lot of Democrats at the last midterm elections were warning that if Republicans took the House, which they did, that could be the end of Ukraine funding forever.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: And of course, Congress has not passed new Ukraine funding ever since the lame duck period right after that election.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: Even when it's been led by someone like Mitch McConnell, it's been a failure of an effort.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: You know, frankly, one of the arguments that Mitch McConnell makes, which I think is one of the strongest arguments in favor of Ukraine aid, is that America is not sending any troops.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: We're not spilling any blood to help the Ukrainians. And we are helping them degrade the Russian army.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: I mean, that is on its own a serious investment, a worthwhile investment in our national security.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: So, you know, to people like Mitch McConnell, this is a no brainer of an issue.
--:-- Andrew Desiderio: But in the Republican Party today, with Donald Trump's influence the way it is, that is no longer the case.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Andrew Desiderio reports on Congress for Punchbowl. Find his work at punchbowl.news.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our program today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain and Isabel Angell.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Patrick Boyd.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's today Explained.
--:-- Ukrainian Soldier: I don't know what will I do when this is over. I really hope that I can continue my own business.
--:-- Ukrainian Soldier: I really hope that I'm alive. I will be alive. I really hope.
--:-- Ukrainian Soldier: And I talk to God. Talk to God to support me in a different way.
--:-- Ukrainian Soldier: And I really want to be alive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show comes from Mercury. What if banking did more? Because to you, it's more than an invoice. It's your hard work becoming revenue.
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