, the Wall Street Journal's chief foreign affairs correspondent, who is Ukrainian-born. The audio of the episode is at the link, 46 minutes long.
A Ukraine-born journalist on his country's 'battle for survival'
February 20, 2024
By Paige Sutherland and Deborah Becker
This week marks the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
For Wall Street Journal correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov, that means two years of stories of resilience and determination. He tells those stories in his new book "Our Enemies Will Vanish."
Today, On Point: A Ukraine-born journalist on his country's 'battle for survival.'
Guest
Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign-affairs correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. Author of "Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence."
Also Featured
Sergiy Stakhovsky, former professional tennis player from Ukraine.
Transcript
Part I
DEBORAH BECKER: This is On Point. I'm Deborah Becker in for Meghna Chakrabarti. It was two years ago this week that marked the start of Russia's war with Ukraine. That's when the world began to see more of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
He appeared outside the presidential headquarters in Ukraine shortly after Russia first attacked in February of 2022. In a 30-second selfie video posted on social media, Zelenskyy had a clear message.
VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY: [Tape] (SPEAKING UKRAINIAN)
BECKER: He's saying, "Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here. We're all here. We will defend our independence. That's how it will go. Glory to Ukraine." A few days later in his State of the Union address, President Biden pledged U.S. support to Ukraine.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: [Tape] Six days ago, Russia's Vladimir Putin sought to shake the very foundations of the free world, thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways. But he badly miscalculated. He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead, he met with a wall of strength he never anticipated or imagined. He met the Ukrainian people.
BECKER: Is that wall of strength still strong? And how has Ukraine been able to hold its own these past two years? What was predicted to be just a short battle where Russian military power would quickly overtake its smaller neighbor is now a two-year-long war that some worry could potentially threaten the globe.
Our guest this hour has a lot of knowledge about Ukraine, both professional and personal experience. The Wall Street Journal's chief foreign affairs correspondent and Ukrainian author Yaroslav Trofimov is with us. His latest book is titled Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence. Yaroslav, welcome to On Point.
YAROSLAV TROFIMOV: Great to be in the show.
BECKER: So we should start by saying your book is really about the first year of the war between Russia and Ukraine. And let's start where you begin the book, which is this conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which you say wasn't a 2022 conflict, but actually has very strong roots back in 2014. Can you explain?
TROFIMOV: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're now marking actually the 10th anniversary of the war because Russia interfered in Ukraine militarily in 2014 by invading Crimea and annexing that peninsula. But also by really sponsoring a really bloody conflict in the eastern Donbas region. 14,000 people died there in 2014 and 2015 and the rest of the world sort of looked at it and shrugged. They didn't really intervene.
And Ukraine was begging for weapons. It never received any. And that sense of impunity is probably what, uh, convinced President Putin that he could invade the entire country and again, nobody will do anything.
BECKER: Hmm. So here we are going from 2014 to 2022. There are certainly rumors of an impending Russian attack coming to Ukraine. Can you tell us what it was like at that time? What were you hearing from folks? Did many people flee? Like, describe what was happening just before the Russian attacks.
TROFIMOV: Well, it was more than rumors, you know, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bill Burns had flown to Kyiv to meet with President Zelenskyy and to warn him of very detailed intelligence that the Russians were planning to come in via Belarus to kill or capture him, to decapitate the government, to create filtration camps for the Ukrainian elite. So pretty much the entire Russian war plan. And these warnings were also public to a great extent.
BECKER: But no one knew exactly when, right? No one knew exactly when.
TROFIMOV: Right. There were dates that were being offered and then the invasion wouldn't happen on that date. And the Russians also kept delaying it in part because of the Olympics that were underway in China at the time.
And so really for me, having covered so many wars in my life, the signs were pretty clear. And so I had, I was in Kyiv for a whole month before the war began, really preparing for it. But for many people in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities who have never seen war, proper war in their own hometown, it was something unimaginable. It was unthinkable. And I think until the very last day, there was a sense of "This can't possibly happen." And there weren't people fleeing. There weren't people stocking up. There wasn't any run on banks or on cash machines. In fact, life was very, very normal up until the last day.
BECKER: And what were politicians saying? What were the country's leaders on both sides saying at that particular time? What were they telling the public? Was that contributing to this sort of, almost disbelief, if you will, or non-acceptance that it was going to happen anytime soon? What were the public statements like?
TROFIMOV: Well, President Zelenskyy was calling for calm and downplaying the risk of a full-scale invasion. But the Ukrainian military was preparing — secretly, in part because they didn't want the Russians to know that they're preparing. As General Zaluzhnyi, the commander of the Ukrainian forces at the time, said, you know, we wanted the Russians to think we're just checking out Facebook and smoking joints all the time.
And in fact, they were successful in saving the Ukrainian air defenses and much of the air force this way. As for me, the day before the invasion, I went to see the former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, who called me for an interview and then after that leaned towards me and said, "You know, tomorrow at 4 a.m., there will be war. You better go to the airport and get out of here if you want to leave." So clearly, if he knew, lots of other people in government also knew.
But I think the fact that Russia had massed a relatively small force around Ukraine, only about 200,000 people, 200,000 soldiers, to many Ukrainian leaders, it was a sign that it wouldn't go for Kyiv, it wouldn't go for the whole country. Because it was just too small. And it only made sense if you expected that the Ukrainian army wouldn't fight. Russia probably was, that probably was the expectation in Moscow. Because Russian officials were saying that Ukrainians and Russians are one people. Russian military analysts were predicting that Ukrainian officers will switch sides right away. And, in fact, Russian troops were carrying parade uniforms because they really expected to be in Kyiv in a couple of days
BECKER: And have a victory parade.
TROFIMOV: Absolutely. Absolutely.
BECKER: You wrote that there were documents that were found on Russian officers suggesting that this would take about 10 days in Ukraine.
TROFIMOV: Yeah. And it's not just the Russians who were expecting this, let's be frank. You know, the U.S. and other western governments had the very same expectations. The U.S. had closed down its embassy in Kyiv, withdrew diplomats, withdrew personnel, and gave only a symbolic amount of weapons to Ukraine. That was really, you know, ammunition for an insurgency, you know, some anti-tank missiles, but not really weaponry that is necessary for conventional war because the expectation was that the Ukrainian army will collapse.
BECKER: Hmm. And how did it stay afloat for the most part, would you say? Why didn't it collapse?
TROFIMOV: I think there are so many reasons. One of them is just how much Ukraine had changed since 2014. When this conflict first began, there wasn't really much hatred for Russia in the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine. Russia, for many, was a country with higher wages, better job opportunities. Zelenskyy himself at the time was working in Moscow. He hosted the New Year's Day show on Russian state television on January 1, 2014.
But then the Ukrainians saw what happens when the Russians come in, when the Russians seize their cities. And it was at this eight-year experience of Russia ruling Donetsk and Lugansk, you know, the two biggest series of the Donbas. And there, you know, the economy collapsed. It was basically gangster mob rule. And majority of the population escaped that. They voted with their feet and they fled to the rest of Ukraine, to the west, anywhere but not to live in that sort of the new "Russian world" promised by Putin.
And so everyone else in Ukraine saw that experience. And when I traveled in January to places like Kharkiv, you know, the biggest Russian speaking city in Ukraine. There were 100,000 refugees from Donbas there. And so everybody knew that life under the Russians would be infinitely worse than what they had now. And I think this spirit of resistance seeped through the entire society, and that's not something that the Russians realized and were counting on. So all these cleavages and divisions that Ukraine had in the past, over language, over relations with Russia, were no longer there by the time the Russian armies crossed the border and invaded.
BECKER: We'll talk about the Ukraine fighters in just a bit, but I kind of think we need to lay out what do you think Russia's main objective here is and what is Ukraine's? Can you tell us what's the ultimate goal of both of these countries here?
TROFIMOV: I think the Russian objective is very clear, and it hasn't changed since the beginning. The Russian objective is to wipe out Ukraine as a state, as a culture, and even as a language and any sort of viable separate entity. The former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, who is the leader of Russia's ruling party and often says what Putin thinks, just in January said that no Ukrainian state, no matter how friendly, will be acceptable to us. We'll wipe it out, you know, five or 10 years down the line. And Ukrainians have a choice to be Russians or to die.
And so I think the struggle is existential. It's not about territory. It's not about how much of Ukraine Russia will grab. I mean, the ultimate goal of Russia, of the Russian state, is to basically wipe out Ukraine.
BECKER: And does that go beyond Ukraine, do you think, for Russia? Because of course there are concerns among world leaders that it does and could. Do you think right now the intent on Russia's part is to go beyond Ukraine?
TROFIMOV: Well, I'll just quote President Putin. He himself last year said that he sees himself as continuing the work of Emperor Peter the Great in collecting "historical Russian lands," quote-unquote. And he named among them the town of Narva, which is in Estonia, a member of the European Union and a member of NATO. So clearly, you know, as the saying goes in Russia, wherever a Russian flag was once raised, it's Russia.
BECKER: And what about Ukraine? What do you think Ukraine's main goal is here? Is it to just survive? Or what is it?
TROFIMOV: Well, I mean, Ukraine's goal as enunciated by the government, and I think shared by the majority of Ukrainians, is to reclaim all of its land that is internationally recognized, including Crimea, including Donbas. Obviously, it's very hard. And we've seen that last year's counteroffensive didn't really bring much success, in part because the historical opportunity to do so was missed in 2022.
Part II
BECKER: I want to bring up now the story of Ukrainian professional tennis player-turned-soldier Sergiy Stakhovsky. He was with his family on vacation in Dubai when Russia invaded Ukraine. But then the 36-year-old returned to his home country to fight because he says for him, there just was no other option.
SERGIY STAKHOVSKY: It's not about obligation, about defending your country. It's about obligation of what's right and what's wrong. And what Russia did and what they still continue in doing on Ukrainian soil is not wrong. It's just immoral, unacceptable. I don't know even the words which we could describe what is happening and what they continue to do.
BECKER: And Stakhovsky says he plans to fight until his country is free again.
STAKHOVSKY: Ukrainians are not gonna live under rule of one person. They want their rights and they want their freedom. The only way Russia can take away these rights and this freedom, they have to kill us all.
BECKER: I'm wondering, Yaroslav, if you could tell us — that story that we just heard from Sergiy, is that sort of a common story that people in Ukraine are very motivated to fight? And we also should mention that Sergiy could have been exempted from fighting had he chosen to seek an exemption, but he didn't. There just seems to be so much motivation. Is that really what is fueling things in Ukraine so much and allowed it to fight off a much larger military power?
TROFIMOV: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And at the beginning of this show, you played this clip from President Zelenskyy when he came out and said, "We're all here." And I remember driving into Kyiv the next morning and hundreds and hundreds of men and women were coming out of high rises and heading to a stadium to pick up weapons and go to the front line right away. Because, they were telling me, you know, "What else are we going to do? Our city is being attacked. Somebody has to defend it."
And so I've spent some time with Sergiy on the front lines in Bakhmut, one of the probably bloodiest places during this war. And when he was crossing the border on foot into Ukraine in the first days of the war, he was crossing with another character in the book, a Ukrainian entrepreneur who was skiing in Austria and then rushed back and used his own funding and the money of other entrepreneurs to create an entire brigade that's fought on the Kharkiv front.
So it was really common to see as Ukrainian women and children were leaving the country towards Poland and the west, Ukrainian men were coming back from abroad to pick up weapons and fight.
BECKER: You know, it seems that there were so many volunteers on the Ukrainian side. There are many people on the Russian side: mercenaries, Chechen fighters. Did this change the tone of the war, do you think? Or from what you witnessed? I mean, how did it affect things to have very different groups of people fighting?
TROFIMOV: Well, on the Russian side, it wasn't just mercenaries. It was prisoners.
BECKER: Right.
TROFIMOV: And especially in the battle of Bakhmut, it was Russian murderers, rapists, you know, and other common criminals who had a choice. You either spend the rest of your life in prison camps or you go to Ukraine, and if you survive six months in the battlefield, which not many did, then you're free. And so it's these people who were thrown by the thousands and the thousands against Ukrainian volunteers who included people like Sergiy, who included Ukrainian singers, poets, you know, some of the cultural elite.
And Sergiy told me at the time in Bakhmut, you know, we are losing our best. Ukraine is losing their best and Russia is losing their worst in this war. And unfortunately, that's true because a great many of these volunteers have died in the last two years.
BECKER: Why was Bakhmut one of the bloodiest battles? Can you tell our listeners what happened there?
TROFIMOV: Well, Bakhmut is a city, was a city of about 70,000 people. And I remember going there before the war to taste the sparkling wines that it was famous for. It had this big méthode champenoise winery there. But that became the biggest battle of last year.
And it was because Wagner, a group led by Prigozhin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has since been mutinied and has since died in a plane crash, really made it their mission to seize it at any cost. And by Prigozhin's own reckoning, they lost 30,000 people dead for this little town. And Ukraine unfortunately also lost a great many soldiers there.
And once Russia finally captured it in May last year, there was not a single building standing there. It was a town with a population of zero. And that's unfortunately what it looks like when Russia takes Ukrainian cities. The city of Avdiivka that the Russians took just in recent days looks exactly the same. And the Russians pay the same price of tens of thousands of soldiers, hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers and fighting vehicles to just take smoldering ruins.
BECKER: Why do people stay in these communities? Or why did they, at least? You have a lot of anecdotes in your book that you've spoken with so many people who did stay during incredible, incredible violence. And, you know, I think at one point, I read that you, I had to really think about it when you said that so many people sometimes are self-delusional, right? They think they're going to be protected. It's almost like being a war correspondent. So why do so many people stay? Why didn't more people flee? Were they not able to?
TROFIMOV: Well, I think, first of all, I think if you look at cities other than Mariupol, which was encircled pretty quickly and people could not flee. And many, many people died there in the spring of 2022. Nobody knows how many, 10, 20, or 30, 40,000, nobody's been counting them.
So if you take this aside in all the other cities on the front lines, most people did flee at the end. And they did listen to Ukrainian authorities who organized evacuations. But many didn't. And I think you're right. First of all, for people who haven't lived through war, it's very hard to imagine that it would happen. And then, you know, motivations are really different. Some people think it will never happen to them. Others have relatives they have to take care of. Others are too sick, too old to leave. Some others just believe in fate. Others tell me that, well, you know, this apartment is all I have. And then, you know, a week later the apartment is in smithereens because it was killed by a shell.
There was also a small minority in some towns in Donbas that was there because they wanted the Russians to come and they were waiting for the Russians. That's also a fact.
BECKER: Hmm. Do — I know there are no real exact estimates from either side, but how many lives have been lost on both the Ukrainian side and the Russian side so far? And what are the estimates that you would consider reliable?
TROFIMOV: Right. So it's really hard to know. On the civilian side, the only numbers that we have are from the United Nations. That doesn't count anything it hasn't verified. And so it doesn't count, for example, the people who died in Mariupol because the U.S. has no access to any of the occupied cities.
So Ukrainian estimates are, you know, many tens of thousands of civilians died and tens of thousands of soldiers. And, you know, we have seen American estimates of how many Russian casualties there have been. They're in the hundreds of thousands.
BECKER: Far more than 2014.
TROFIMOV: Oh yeah, absolutely. Far, far, far more.
BECKER: Mm-hmm. And I think — I mean, as we said, you're a journalist, you work for the Wall Street Journal, but you're also Ukrainian. So I wonder what has it been like to cover this conflict when it's so personal?
TROFIMOV: I think on some level it's obviously much harder, especially, you know, I grew up in Kyiv and so every little piece of geography there has memories for me. Memories of my childhood of growing up, you know, place where I had my first kiss, place where my grandmother took me to check out my eyes. You know, the library, the movie theater where I saw Fellini movies as a teenager.
And so suddenly seeing these streets empty, dead. You know, everything's shuttered, people gone, cars gone. And the boom of artillery. It feels like a personal insult. And I did feel, you know, angry, enraged by this. And then what do you do? You know, you just have to keep working and telling the story.
And I think by traveling through all the front lines and by going to witness what was happening, in a way it's purifying. It makes it easier to handle the situation. But also it's, you know, I had a sense of mission. I probably took more risks in this war than I had taken in Iraq or in Afghanistan because of this sense of purpose. And through the book and through the articles that I was writing at the time, I just tell the stories of people. So, you know, I'm not writing about my own feelings. You know, I try not to. And just trying to kind of be this almost like a lens of a camera in the field, zooming in on what other people are doing, what they're saying, what they're feeling.
And people talk a lot in this circumstance. It was really interesting. Especially if you come to the areas that had been occupied by the Russians, every interview lasts hours because people just say all those things they couldn't tell you, they couldn't tell anyone while the Russians were there for the previous many months.
BECKER: Yeah. Some of the stories you told about the things that you went through, you know, going from building to building, seeking cover while shelling was taking place overhead — really dramatic, dangerous, dangerous circumstances that you wrote about in this book. I'm wondering: Weren't you frightened? And did that sense of purpose kind of just alleviate a lot of that fear and keep you going? Or what was that about?
TROFIMOV: Well, of course, you know, it's scary sometimes. It's usually scary afterwards once you realize what you've done. But I was blessed to work with a great photographer throughout this, the reporting in Ukraine, Manu Brabo. Spanish photographer, Pulitzer Prize winner, who's very courageous. And with great security advisors.
And obviously a lot of the war experience reporting that I had from previous wars didn't apply in Ukraine. You know, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, you don't have to fear enemy aircraft or long-range missiles hitting you. So you could estimate your risk profile in a way that you can't really in Ukraine. But again --
BECKER: So this was the most dangerous for you, would you say?
TROFIMOV: Oh, for sure, for sure. Absolutely.
BECKER: Go ahead. Were you gonna continue there?
TROFIMOV: Sure, yes. But again, you know, as a journalist, I could go and report and come and pull out and go somewhere relatively safer. Obviously, the civilians and the soldiers trapped in the cities could not.
BECKER: Mm-hmm. And you said you weren't supposed to write about your feelings, but there were times in the book where you did. You talked about being angry, not just — what was surprising to me was that it was not just about what was happening in Ukraine, but you were angry about Russian lives lost as well. Angry about all of this. Explain a little bit of that anger for us.
TROFIMOV: Yeah, so, you know, there was a very sort of foggy early morning and we decided to follow Ukrainian special forces just as the city of Lyman was being liberated from the Russians in October 2022. So the Russians had just left hours earlier, overnight.
And so we drove on this country road and suddenly stumbled upon this scene of death. Several smoldering vehicles and Russian soldiers lying on the asphalt dead. You know, some of them missing their limbs. They were cut down by shrapnel. And they were so recently killed that they seemed alive, kinda just resting.
And I remember walking past there, looking into the, into the young faces of these men and thinking, why on earth did you have to die? And you know, like one guy had his phone next to him and I was thinking, you know, his spouse or his mother is probably trying to text him right now and trying to figure out what's happening with him. And for what? For what possible purpose? This man had to travel thousands of miles to Ukraine just to die in that morning. Just because, you know, someone in the Kremlin decided he wants to relive his imperial dreams.
BECKER: That is traumatic, Yaroslav. Very traumatic. How do you heal from something like that?
TROFIMOV: Well by writing a book, you know, putting it on paper. I guess that's one way. And just by, you know, keep going, keep doing this. So I think, I think it's important, it goes back to this idea of a sense of purpose. Because too many people look at the war in Ukraine as sort of a geopolitical frame. Russia, America, West, NATO. I think what's really important is to tell the stories of people whose lives are altered by this conflict, sometimes altered forever. And I think the purpose of the book was that. Just to tell these stories.
BECKER: Mm-hmm. Now there have been some negotiations. Are you optimistic that talks can go on or at least maybe restart, so there might be an end to some of this?
TROFIMOV: I definitely don't think — and I think it's not just me, you know, anyone you ask in the U.S. government or in Western, European governments would tell you that they don't think — that any peace process is possible before the U.S elections for sure. Just because President Putin thinks he could get a much better deal from President Trump if he gets reelected to the White House.
But apart from that, I think the positions are just too far apart. Ukraine wants to remain independent. And Ukraine wants to regain its land. And Russia wants to eliminate Ukraine from the face of the earth, you know, from the map. So how can you negotiate with the government that still believes that it wants to exterminate you and it can exterminate you?
And the odds of that are improving because Ukraine right now is outgunned. Ukraine has a severe shortage of ammunition because Republicans in the House of Representatives for now four months have declined to vote for the military aid for Ukraine. And that is, you know, that is giving Putin new hopes that he can have it all.
BECKER: Yeah, we're gonna talk, I think, more about the U.S. and help that has assisted the Ukrainian effort throughout the two-year war.
Part III
BECKER: Yaroslav, before the break we were talking about help from the West. And we've heard a lot about this throughout the war. And your new book is about pretty much the first year of the war between Russia and Ukraine. And there's been a lot of piecemeal help from the West, particularly the U.S., in part because I think no one really understood that the war was going to go on this long, and people did think it was going to be over quickly.
But I'm wondering what you think about the comments that have been made since, particularly recent comments by Russian President Putin, that the reason this war has gone on so long is because of help from the West and without it perhaps there would've been some type of negotiated deal to end the fighting. What do you think of that?
TROFIMOV: Well, obviously if there hadn't been this help from the West, the war would've ended with the Russian flag raised over Kyiv. There is also a possibility and that's clearly what President Putin wants.
I think if we look at it historically the very first few month of resistance really occurred without much Western help in terms of weapons. The Ukrainians repelled the Russian armies from Kyiv using their own Soviet vintage weapons and ammunition. American artillery only started to arrive around July 2022. And then it was really piecemeal.
It was piecemeal for various reasons. One of them was this fear of Russian red lines, fear of provoking a possible nuclear response. And Moscow kept threatening. And, but every time these capabilities arrived, you know, there was no Russian red line, as it turned out. You know, Ukrainians compared this to extinguishing a fire. There was a fire and Ukraine needed a bucket of water, and it got a bucket of water, but in, you know, 20 little glasses. And so over time, the fire kept raging. If all of this help had arrived early on, the fire could have been extinguished.
BECKER: You think so? You think it could have been completely extinguished? This war would've been over, Ukraine would've been in control of its borders had the U.S. and other Western nations provided more military support from the get-go?
TROFIMOV: I think Ukraine would've been in a much better position. And the pivotal moment that I talk about a lot in the book was in September, October 2022, when Russia only had about 100,000 combat troops left in Ukraine. Its elite units were decimated. President Putin was refusing a call-up of reservists to the mobilization because doing so would've meant acknowledging that his so-called special military operation was not going to plan.
And Ukraine was asking for tanks, armored personnel carriers, fighting vehicles, more artillery, aircraft, battery missiles, and was turned down. Told it's impossible. We cannot possibly have American or German tanks in the fields of Ukraine. That's too provocative. And so when the Ukrainian troops attacked in the Kharkiv region and routed the Russian army and broke through the Russian lines and kept pressing into Kherson, into Lyman, that offensive eventually ran out of steam because Ukraine didn't have all this ammunition and all this equipment.
Then there was a long process of, you know, reconsidering. And the following year, last year, 2023, the so-called mountain of steel did arrive. So Ukraine got its Abrams and Leopard tanks and strikers and Bradleys and battery missiles and is getting F-16s now. But you know, by then Russia had mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops, spent the winter building fortifications, laying out minefields. And when the Ukrainian counter-offensive was finally launched with all this mountain of steel last year, it didn't achieve success because Russia was ready and prepared and strong in the way that it wasn't during that pivotal moment in September, October the previous year.
BECKER: And now of course, U.S. support is on hold, as you mentioned, because of what's happening in Congress here. But I wonder, you know, are you surprised, I guess, by the shift in attention to what's happening in Ukraine? And in the book at the end you do mention that there are other conflicts that have happened since the start of this war. There's a lot that's going on. I wonder if you're concerned that perhaps attention has shifted and what that might mean for Ukraine.
TROFIMOV: I think the concern is not that the attention has shifted. It's concern that you suddenly see a significant, I don't wanna say majority, but an important part of the Republican party in the U.S. embracing Russian narratives on Ukraine. And calling for pulling the plug on Ukraine at a time where, you know, the U.S. is really — Russia has no economic leverage over the U.S.
There's not much Russia can give the U.S. There's no economic pain inflicted on the U.S, unlike in Europe. Because Europe has had to make sacrifices. Europe has had to sever its dependence on Russian natural gas, and the European economies are actually paying the price for that. But yet in Europe you don't see this. Europe is ramping up its support.
In America, for reasons that are really hard to understand for Ukrainians or Europeans, suddenly there is a desire to see Ukraine lose.
BECKER: You think so?
TROFIMOV: Obviously this is not the entire Republican party. You know, we've seen that in the Senate there was a bipartisan agreement on aid for Ukraine. But the fact is that the House of Representatives hasn't considered aid for Ukraine for four months now.
BECKER: Hmm. So I wonder, does that make you, what does that make you feel in terms of what might happen next? I mean, I know it's really difficult to predict, but are you really concerned about what could happen next in Ukraine? Because I know in the book you say although this fighting continues, it's clear that Ukraine has won the war for its independence. I mean, has it? Or is that now under threat?
TROFIMOV: I mean, you know, it's impossible to predict the future with 100% certainty. But the fact is that Russia is also very exhausted. Now Russia has finally managed to seize for the first time a Ukrainian town, Avdiivka. The first --
BECKER: Just over the weekend. Yeah.
TROFIMOV: Yeah. The first gain it's made since May last year at the cost of tens of thousands of soldiers. And the U.S. accounts for only about half of aid to Ukraine. The Europeans account for the other half. And the European commitments are growing. But the fact is that because of this lag, you know, Ukraine is losing more people. Every day of delay is measured in more Ukrainian casualties. And so you create the price that Ukraine is paying for its independence is increasing.
BECKER: Well, there were some recent reports in the New York Times that Ukraine has actually been forcing men into the military. Do you think that Ukraine is going to need to do this? When you wrote about the fighters in Ukraine and many of the folks who were volunteering and motivated, you know, time has a way of changing things, as you just mentioned. And I wonder, does Ukraine need to take these kinds of steps to force people into military service so it has enough manpower to continue to fight?
TROFIMOV: Well, Ukraine has been mobilizing people, you know, since the very beginning of the full-scale invasion. It's not something new.
BECKER: But this is forcing people actually, according to the New York Times reports.
TROFIMOV: Well forcing as in, you know, like drafting, like, you know, like there was a draft in the U.S during the Vietnam war. Both Russia and Ukraine are, you know, have compulsory mobilization for certain kinds of people, especially people with military experience. Unfortunately, many of the volunteers have been killed or injured. And so, for the state to survive, it does need to draft young people to fight.
BECKER: And it — I mean, are there other ways for Ukraine to make sure that it has what is needed for it to continue in this fight? I mean, what do you think? If there's a stall in aid from the U.S. — and I know you, as you mentioned, it's 50% — but if there is some waning interest on the part of some international partners, and if there is concern about having enough manpower, what do you think or what do you expect Ukraine might do? Will it change its strategy or what could happen here?
TROFIMOV: Well, I think there isn't really a waning interest in Europe. I think in Europe there is a sense of unease and alarm and understanding that Europe needs to do more. And it is doing more. And in Germany, the UK, France have all just signed security agreements with Ukraine. They're ramping up their ammunition production. And the European Union just passed a $54 billion package of aid for Ukraine.
But as far as the Ukrainians are concerned, if the Russian goal is to destroy the country, the state, and take it all over, it's not like they can change that. So they have to fight even if, you know, the conditions are much less advantageous to them. There are some ways and some technologies, you know, Ukraine has been pioneering the usage of combat drones in revolutionary ways that have offset the shortage of artillery ammunition, for example. You know, this precision drone revolution is something that is unique to this battlefield. But you know, Ukraine on itself can only do so much. It does need help.
BECKER: Right. You know, a lot has happened since some of the events that you wrote about in this book. Certainly since the end of the first year of the war between Russia and Ukraine, there have been changes in the Ukrainian military leadership. You mentioned the plane crash that took the leader of Russia's mercenary forces.
Then there was the death last week of Alexei Navalny. And the major Russian victory in Ukraine over the weekend. A lot has been happening here. Do those events, do you think, if you could pick, say, two of them as the big influencers on what might happen here, which ones would you choose?
TROFIMOV: Well, first of all, I wouldn't describe the loss of Avdiivka as a major victory. It's a town of 30,000 people. You know, not even in the top 1,000, I think, towns in Ukraine. So as for the pivotal moments, I guess the disappearance of Wagner as a fighting force is pretty important. Because Wagner was the only Russian unit that was really capable of offensive operations in Ukraine.
And it was destroyed first in Bakhmut and then in this uprising by Prigozhin, which for the first time showed the cracks that this war has produced inside the Russian regime. Wonder what else is happening there under the surface, it's a hard but brittle society. And so the Russians are dying in large numbers in this war. And there will be repercussions at some point from that. I think that's something to keep in mind as we look forward, because Russia is not invincible. The victories that it has achieved came at a tremendous, tremendous cost. You know, Russia lost probably more people for Avdiivka than the Soviet Union lost in the entire war in Afghanistan.
BECKER: There was a lot of coverage in this country of the recent interview with Russia President Putin and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. And I'm wondering if you had a chance to see that? There were some — it was a lengthy interview, about two hours long. There was a lot of talk about Ukraine, the history of Ukraine, the Russian objective, and the Russian president saying that he did in fact want to have negotiations with Ukraine. I'm wondering what you thought of that interview.
TROFIMOV: Well, I think the very fact that he spent the first half an hour of it laying out all the reasons for why Ukraine doesn't really exist, shouldn't really exist, and Ukraine is a Russian land tells you all you need to know. I think the negotiations he was floating were negotiations with the U.S. about how the U.S. should hand over Ukraine to him, in his view. The Russian goals are the same. And I think negotiations for him is another way of saying capitulation by Ukraine.
BECKER: So how long, how much longer do you think it could go on? It's been two years almost. Just about. How much longer do you think this fighting will continue? Your book suggests that you think it might be some time.
TROFIMOV: Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, I certainly don't think it could end this year and it could go for longer. And it's hard to predict because now it's a war of attrition. It's a war of attrition that does favor the Ukrainians because the Russian military is losing more tanks, more howitzers, more personnel carriers than they can manufacture or repair. So at some point they will run out, like, say, two or three years down the line.
But ultimately it comes down to the resilience of the two societies, which society will crack first? For internal reasons, because of the pressures from the casualties, from the, you know, the economic impact of the war, the overall international environment. And we don't know that. It could be Russia, it could be Ukraine. And we've seen it in World War I when the front lines didn't move, didn't move for years and years, and then when they moved it was because of what was happening inside Russia or inside Germany.
And I think whether Ukraine is the one to crack first depends on international aid, American aid, and European aid, that is indispensable to keep it afloat.
BECKER: And I just want to make sure that folks know as we end this conversation in the last minute here, can you explain — the title of your book is Our Enemies Will Vanish. And that's a line from the Ukrainian National Anthem?
TROFIMOV: Absolutely. Well it goes, "Our enemies will vanish like dew at sunrise." It's sort of a very poetic, nonviolent way of vanishing, I guess. And, you know, it comes from the anthem that was written in the 19th century when Ukraine did not exist as a separate country. The language was banned. The culture was banned. This anthem was banned. And yet Ukraine found a way to be reborn again and again to achieve its independence more than 30 years ago. And now, you know, two years into the war, it's still standing, still fighting and refusing to give up.
BECKER: All right. Yaroslav Trofimov, chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent at the Wall Street Journal and author of our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence. Thanks so much for being with us.
TROFIMOV: Thank you. It was great.
This program aired on February 20, 2024.
) fears NATO encirclement
The same can be said for other Western nations- if the military aid dries up, Ukraine is on its own.
