Ukraine holds the line

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 19th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up: high-level diplomacy. President Trump spent the day in Washington meeting first with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, followed by talks with leaders from the European Union and NATO.

President Trump signaled cautious optimism heading into a new round of talks.

TRUMP: We're gonna have a meeting. I think if everything works out well today, we'll have a trilat. And I think there will be a reasonable chance of ending the war when we do that.

EICHER: The president was referring to a possible three-way meeting with himself, Zelenskyy, and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

This latest diplomatic push comes on the heels of last week’s summit in Alaska, where the administration reported progress toward a peace deal.

To talk about what could happen next, we’re joined by George Barros, lead Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. He’s also a former adviser to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Russia and Ukraine.

REICHARD: George, good morning.

GEORGE BARROS: Hey, Mary, good morning. Thank you so much for having me.

REICHARD: How would you characterize the summit in Alaska on Friday and conversations yesterday at the White House?

BARROS: So last Friday's summit in Alaska was a big success for Russian President Vladimir Putin. He had an opportunity to legitimize himself, unisolate himself from the international community. And President Trump walked away from that meeting, I think, with some Russian amenable talking points and I think a misunderstanding of the Russian position.

For example, President Trump left last Friday—discussing about how the Russians were open to potentially Ukraine receiving some security guarantees, which candidly I found a little bewildering given that the Russians have been very clear that they are not open to Ukraine receiving any kinds of security guarantees. Now as for this most recent meeting in Washington yesterday, that one went quite well, I think. President Zelenskyy did not engage in any faux pas, he didn't step in any landmines. The meetings appeared to have gone well. The European leaders had some very strong statements about being unified against Russian aggression. And that most importantly, the White House and the Europeans agreed that they're not going to make any decisions without Ukraine and that they're going to have to go to the Russians and try to work out some sort of deal. But what we're seeing now is he appears to be a united Western front against Russia. And we will see how the Russians are going to react and, my assessment, likely reject the contours of this conflict termination agreement.

REICHARD: All right, let's talk more about that. Something that did come out of the Alaska meeting between Trump and Putin is a proposal to swap land. The details, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, is Ukraine would give Russia control of about 2,500 square miles. That's about 12 % of the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. And that includes land that Russia does not currently occupy. And so that would leave Russia about 440 square miles of territory in Sumi and Kharkiv.

Sounds uneven to my ears, and I understand you do think that's a bad idea for other reasons. Why so?

BARROS: Yeah, absolutely. So we have to be very clear here about what the Russians are asking for. This is not the land swap for conflict termination. The war doesn't end because of the land swap. This land swap is simply the prerequisite to get into the final negotiations so that we can then have conflict termination. So effectively, the Russians are asking for the Ukrainians to cede a tremendous amount of militarily strategically important territory to not even have a guarantee that the war will be over, just to talk about potentially ending the war. So this is a huge non-starter on that principle because it's a surrender of a lot of territory.

Number two, the territory in particular… really, really matters. When you're talking about specifically Ukraine's Eastern Donetsk province. It's where the Ukrainians have fortified and built a series of fortress cities, which are a series of four important cities which the Russians are very unlikely to seize militarily. Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhivka, Konstantinovka. These are massive cities that have been part of the 2014 defensive line, and it will take the Russian military in our assessment many years to actually fight their way and slog through all the war fighting and campaigns necessary to seize that land.

Now the territory further beyond those fortified cities further to the west, they're not nearly as defensible as those four fortress cities. The terrain is not as defensible. And so really, if you were going to give the Russians a launching point for where they can get into Ukraine's weak underbelly, getting beyond those fortress cities would be a massive concession.

And so for those reasons, the land swap is a bad deal, it's a bad idea, especially when it's not connected to some sort of robust security guarantee to ensure that wherever you draw the line, the line won't stop any further.

REICHARD: I think I know your answer to this next question, but what's the likelihood for a ceasefire in the near future from your perspective?

BARROS: Very low. I would be astonished if we get a ceasefire anytime in the next six months. Look, the Russians are making some tactical progress on the battlefield. They're advancing albeit quite slowly. They have no reason to want to stop right now. Stopping right now forgoes the additional battlefield gains so the Russians can continue to eke out with brute force. Stopping now also will create a series of problems for the Russian domestic economy which has been transitioned to a wartime economy. There are no jobs waiting for all the Russian soldiers at home that would be demobilized in the event of the war stopping. And for those reasons, I think it's very unlikely that Putin is uninterested in doing something that's going to really cause a lot of problems for him, and especially before he achieves his war goals. He defines them in terms of regime change in Kiev, in the maximalist sense. He also defines it in terms of an ultimatum on what the NATO alliance is allowed to do with its own countries, deploying certain kinds of forces within NATO itself near Russia.

At the lowest most end he demands that Ukraine cede over territory the Russians have not achieved. And it would be a massive blow to Putin's credibility if he doesn't at least walk away with some of those things.

REICHARD: George, you study war, history of war. How do these two nations move forward after such a costly conflict in terms of lives lost, resources spent, and so forth?

BARROS: So Russia and Ukraine are going to have generational enmity as a result of this war. This generation of Ukrainians and the next generation of Ukrainians are going to hate the Russians forever. This generation of Russians are going to hate the Ukrainians forever. This is not going to be something that they're going to be able to just get along with. It will take centuries for this to repair itself, and it might never will. Russia and Ukraine have always had a tenuous history going back to the 1700s, 1800s. This is probably one of the most difficult periods of the two nations' history, and it will continue to be going forward.

REICHARD: That's sobering. Last question: is there anything about this story that you think the general public may not understand or some aspect that isn't being talked about?

BARROS: I think a huge part of this has to do with the perception about the sustainability of Russia's war machine. It is not true that the Russians are the Soviet Union redux. It is not true that the contemporary Russian military is the Soviet Red Army. That is to say, it doesn't matter if you kill or wound a million Russians, they come back with two million more and you really cannot impose a military defeat on the Russian Federation. That's not true. Like all things, every resource is finite. People are finite. The Russians certainly have a lot more resources and more people, but that doesn't mean that you cannot defeat a numerically or conventionally more superior military with fewer people. Just because one side has more doesn't mean that it's just positive the outcome. And for those reasons, it's important to keep backing Ukraine. If we agree with the Russian premise that Russian victory is prima facie inevitable, then yes, the Ukrainians will lose.

REICHARD: George Barros is Russia team and Geospatial Intelligence Team Lead for the Institute for the Study of war. George, thanks so much!

BARROS: Of course, thank you for having me. Real pleasure.

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