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David Remnick: The other week, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, was in the United States meeting at the United Nations and in Washington. Now, when he was last in this country in December, Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress. He was hailed as a hero with constant standing ovations. This time around, things were a little different. Kevin McCarthy said Congress was just too busy to assemble a joint session, too busy trying to avert a self-imposed shutdown, and much of conservative Washington is now balking at the price tag of military aid to Ukraine.

It's no longer a handful of Putin sympathizers on the far right. Even in Europe, Zelensky is now caught up in a diplomatic fight with one of his very closest allies, Poland. Since the war began, I've been speaking periodically with Stephen Kotkin. Kotkin is a historian, an expert on authoritarianism and Stalin, but he's also one of the best-informed people I know on the war that's going on right now in Ukraine. Stephen Kotkin, welcome back. This is our third conversation during this godforsaken war, and it's a very simple question that I have. Where are we now after a year and a half?

Stephen Kotkin: Ukraine is battling. The courage and the ingenuity are still there, but they're running out of people. They're running out of 18 to 30-year-olds. The average age of Ukrainian soldiers training in Europe at the bases in Germany or the UK is 35 or older. They're running out of ammunitions, They're running out of any aircraft missiles. That's a really big one too. You saw that Putin bombed several Ukrainian cities and not being able to defend the skies going forward when Russia has an intact air force. Enormous challenge.

David Remnick: It's obvious that losses on both sides are enormous, but what do we know about specific numbers? You speak to a lot of people in governments in Europe as well as in the United States, various agencies. What do we know about the numbers?

Stephen Kotkin: Losses are really high, tens of thousands just during the counter-offensive alone. Ukraine does not publicly release its casualty numbers, so we don't know the exact number, but here's your problem. The guy in the Kremlin doesn't care. Ukrainian soldiers die. They live in a democracy. Their leadership cares. They can't just sacrifice their people in big numbers. The guy in the Kremlin, he doesn't care, and so it's not just the numbers that are bad. It's the fact that one side can throw these bodies in, cannon fodder, and the other side just can't fight like that.

David Remnick: What's your understanding of the success or non-success of the Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russia?

Stephen Kotkin: Yes, it's like the stock market now. Everyone says they're long-term investor. They're trying to produce long-term value. Then the analyst comes along and says, "Well, did you make your quarterly numbers?" The Biden administration, our European partners, Ukrainians themselves talk about how they're in it for the long haul, they're in it for the long-term, and then they go to a press conference, and the first question is, "What are the quarterlies and how come you didn't meet your quarterly numbers? Why is the counter-offensive so slow and when are you going to win this thing?" People keep asking me how this is going to end, and I say, "Why do you think it's going to end?"

David Remnick: As a historian, what can it be compared to? When you talk about a war of that length, what kind of precedent is there for that?

Stephen Kotkin: I'm worried about a Tet Offensive. Tet Offensive, January '68, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese mounting an offensive. Everyone was saying that the war was going well. From our point of view, we're winning. The other side doesn't really have offensive capabilities. Then, boom, lo and behold, they mount a very significant offensive. Surprise in this Lunar New Year, we beat it back actually on the battlefield. It's a battlefield failure, but what happens is everyone is shocked that they could do this and that they did do it, and so Uncle Walter goes on TV.

David Remnick: Walter Cronkite of CBS News.

Stephen Kotkin: Uncle Walter says, "This war is not winnable."

Walter Cronkite: It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate, but it is increasingly clear to this report that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate not as victors but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

Stephen Kotkin: That was a pretty big moment. I'm looking at the battlefield here and I'm looking at the Ukrainians and they're on the offensive. Their offensive could work. They have made some progress. However, they could be surprised by a Russian counter-offensive, which doesn't have to succeed very much on the battlefield. It could be just like Tet, but it could send political shockwaves through Washington, DC, through European capitals, Tokyo. People could conclude that maybe this is not winnable. Maybe we shouldn't do this. Let's remember. Lyndon Johnson declared that he wouldn't run for re-election.

David Remnick: That's right. In March of 1968, LBJ quite unexpectedly stepped down. Do you really think that that could affect the US presidential race and Joe Biden's fate?

Stephen Kotkin: It could. His numbers, when did they crater? They crated with the Afghanistan pull-out. I observed the mishandled pull-out from Afghanistan hurt Joe Biden very, very significantly. I don't know the probability, but my view is, if it's possible, we got to be ready for this. We have to prepare the public. We have to prepare the battlefield. What I would be doing is I would be talking about this publicly.

I would be talking about the coming Russian counter-offensive and about how Putin is going to try to improvise a Tet Offensive-style, battlefield failure potentially but political triumphs, but we're ready for it. These are the measures that we're using to counter it. I'd get out front of this and make it more difficult to have that political effect and even make it more difficult to do it at all.

David Remnick: Do you think a Ukrainian victory is impossible in the foreseeable future?

Stephen Kotkin: Nothing's impossible, right? Here's your challenge, though. You take Tokmak. They're still far from it, but that's the next objective on their line of deepest penetration. It's on the road to Melitopol. That's on the road to the Sea of Azov, which is the Latourell, that land bridge that connects Crimea and Eastern Donbas that Putin has taken since February 2022. You take that, and then what? What's your next step? How do you then win the peace?

How do you then start rebuilding Ukraine? How do you get a Ukraine that is able to join the European Union over a period of time and transform its internal institutions as a result of the EU accession process? Where do you get the security guarantee from? I need some type of negotiated process here regardless. Every war ends with a negotiation. Even unconditional surrender produces a form of negotiation.

David Remnick: Now, President Zelensky was, last week, just in Washington to see Joe Biden and he was at the UN. He gave the kind of speeches we've grown accustomed to where he's both thanking the West for its aid but imploring for more and demanding constancy and the psychology that this is not just a war for Ukraine but for the Democratic West. I'm wondering if you proceed on the other side, on the listening side. Any change between now and when we last talked?

Stephen Kotkin: Here's your challenge. The idea is, this is the international order at stake. Nothing could be bigger than this, right? This is about deterring authoritarian powers or they'll do it again. This is about deterring China from Taiwan. This is about securing the rules-based order. This is about everything. There's nothing bigger than this, but we can't put American troops on the ground in Ukraine.

Those two statements cannot be true at the same time. You can't have everything at stake existential for the world order, peace, and prosperity, but it's not important enough to put American troops on the ground in Ukraine. That's our strategy. That's why Americans don't understand our strategy. That's why our political figures can't explain our strategy. Of course, in Kyiv, they got a different view about this.

For them, this is about their existence, their sovereignty, their independence as a nation, right? From the Ukrainian point of view, they have a maximalist understanding of what the peace is. It's about justice. It's about reparations. It's about war crimes tribunals. It's about stuff that they can't impose because they can't take Moscow. It's understandable. It's completely justified from a moral point of view, but you got to live in the world that you live in on the battlefield.

I'm arguing for bringing the rhetoric in line with the commitments. Otherwise, we don't understand the strategy. Otherwise, you can't support this over the long haul if people think that you're not telling them the truth or you're not being level with them completely. Already, we have now calls for putting American advisors on the ground. I just read a very interesting article in Foreign Affairs yesterday about the need to send American advisors to Ukraine.

David Remnick: That sounds very familiar from the early '60s or the late '50s even.

Stephen Kotkin: Then people say to me, "Oh, well, if you don't think it's existential, if you don't think we got to do everything necessary, put the boots on the ground. Start with the advisors. Get to the troops." Our commitments don't match the rhetoric. Either we go for the commitments that are necessary or we bring the rhetoric more in line. My view is political pressure.

The public discussion is, where are the tanks? We hem and haw and we say we can't do it and then we send the tanks. We don't get credit even though we sent the tanks because we hemmed and hawed. Then it's the airplanes, the F-16s, and we hem and haw. Finally, we agree and then it's too slow. It looks like it's our fault. My argument is we took regime change off the table. Through fear of escalation, we said, "We're not going to do covert operations political stuff to threaten your regime in Moscow."

That's so much bigger than the F-16s or the tanks or the long-range missiles because that's the variable. That's the key to forcing an armistice, to winning the peace conversation rather than just winning on the battlefield. When he's scared that his regime could go down, he'll cut and run. If he's not scared about his regime, he'll do the sanctions-busting. He'll do everything he's doing because it's with impunity.

David Remnick: In terms of Western policy, in terms of American policy, what are you suggesting going forward in order to bring Putin to the point of negotiation of any kind?

Stephen Kotkin: We need an armistice. We've gone down this road before you and I in the conversation, right? We need an armistice. We need a DMZ. We need the fighting to stop. We need the 18 to 30-year-old Ukrainians who are left not to die. We need the 35-and-above Ukrainians not to die. We need the Ukrainian kids going to school in Poland and Germany and elsewhere to come home and go to school in Ukrainian language and be the future of the country. We need them to invest and rebuild a new economy. We need them to start the EU accession process. We need them to get some type of security guarantee, which is about not just deterring Russia but enabling a successful society in Ukraine.

David Remnick: Stephen, you're describing terms for an armistice that would leave a lot of territory in the hands of Russia. You're saying Ukraine might agree to give up, let's say, Donbas and Crimea to the invading Russians in exchange for security guarantees. Now, that's an unacceptable view in Ukraine. When Ukraine became an independent nation in 1991, Crimea and Donbas were part of sovereign Ukraine.

Stephen Kotkin: Under international law, they are, but here's what you get if you take back Crimea. What do you do with the Russians? There were 2.3 million people in Crimea approximately before the war. Predominantly, ethnic Russian. Depends how you measure, but you can get as high as 90% ethnic Russian, and so you got a big population of Russians. What are you going to do? You're going to ethnically cleanse them? You're going to force them out of Crimea in the hundreds of thousands or more?

How's that going to work for your EU accession? Okay, how about if you forced the Russians to buy it, to pay for it so they don't get to annex it? They have to pay for it. You make it on the installment plan. A 5 or a 10 or a 15 or 25-year plan, at the end of it, after they pay the money, and if they behave in a way that doesn't threaten Ukrainian sovereignty during that period, we would internationally recognize it as Russian territory. Okay, so is that a good outcome? It's unsatisfactory. I get that.

If you can't march on Moscow, if you can't impose the peace that's morally just, if your partners won't put boots on the ground to impose that peace on with you, then what do you do in that situation? It's not something that I'm happy about, but I got to get to a Ukraine that's rebuilding, not being bombed and destroyed, and I'll take as much of that as Ukraine as I can get in the time being. If I don't get it all, I'm not going to acknowledge Russian occupation legally, unless there's a bargain that there's behavior modification on the Russian side or I'll wait it out like in the Korean peninsula.

David Remnick: In Poland, and it's election season in Poland, you're seeing the Poles decide to stop sending military equipment because they have to replenish their own stocks. Even more importantly, in American politics, you're starting to see many people in the Republican Party question aid to Ukraine completely, not least Donald Trump. I have to think that Zelensky on his trip last week to the United States was extremely anxious about these developments. I don't know that they're going to get any better in the near future.

Stephen Kotkin: This is not something that we're going to be able to succeed the next 20 years at $200 million a day from the US alone as well as our European partners. Once again, if the Russian army disintegrates in the field, we're good. If they don't, then what? What's the plan? To pretend that you're going to get $200 million a day for 20 more years or 10 more years or 5 more years or 3 more years, whatever it takes? I don't think that's a good strategy. Let's talk about EU accession. You did the Poland thing. Great example, right? The Poles, the biggest supporters of Ukraine, have stopped sending weapons in the past couple of weeks.

David Remnick: A country where there are thousands and thousands of refugees from Ukraine and children in Polish schools from Ukraine.

Stephen Kotkin: This is over a million Ukrainians, well over a million in Poland. They've been open-armed about taking the Ukrainians in and sending every weapon that they could and lobbying others to do the same. No bigger supporter than Poland. Then Ukraine is exporting grain. They can't export it all through the Black Sea because of the Black Sea as a war zone, export through Poland. Poland announces that they're not going to send the weapons. They've turned off the weapon supply for Ukraine.

This snafu or this brouhaha over Ukrainian agricultural exports competing with Polish farmers where there is an election just like you pointed out. They have a democracy and people have to campaign and compete and beat the rivals and farmers vote. Not just farmers, but farmers vote too. That's a really complicated process. Believe it or not, that's harder than taking Tokmak on the battlefield right now against those entrenched Russian defenses.

David Remnick: Steve, finally, we've seen an increasing evidence of a global realignment since the beginning of the second phase of the war against Ukraine that is since the full-scale invasion. That is Putin's effort to align North Korea, China, to some extent, India against the West. How successful has he been and how not successful?

Stephen Kotkin: Four big victories here that we've won with our Ukrainian courage and ingenuity. One is Ukraine kept its sovereignty, defended its capital, and kept its independent nation. No puppet regime in Kyiv. It's a huge victory. They won that. Second was just as big, if not bigger from a strategic point of view, the West got resuscitated. Unity, resolve, rediscovering that was a huge victory. The third was Russian humiliation. They're not 10 feet tall. Putin is not a genius. He's not even a tactician, let alone a strategist.

He's a murderer. He's troubled, but he's no genius. Fourth big victory, China losing its luster, right? China had a wedge between the US and Europe on China policy. Xi Jinping, by siding with Putin in this war, this criminal aggression against Ukraine, destroyed his own wedge between Europe and the US on China policy. Europe has come much closer to the US and understands that having your economy be dependent on an authoritarian regime like with Russian gas was not a good idea. Same thing vis-a-vis China.

Okay, so those are four big victories. If you won those victories, you'd want to take those off the table. You'd want to not keep those at risk. You wouldn't want to be in a situation where Kyiv could be at risk still, where the Western unity and resolve could be undermined because of a Tet Offensive or whatever. I want to grab Putin by the throat and I want to make life uncomfortable for him politically. We got defectors. We leave them inside so that they can leak to us.

Let them fly out to wherever, land in Warsaw or land in Helsinki, get them to the Hague, and have them stay in the Hague. I got the uniform on. I'm a Russian nationalist. I appeal to Putin's base. I'm not pro-NATO, but this war in Ukraine is hurting Russia. Let's get those men in uniform. Let's get those defectors. Let's pressure this regime. Let's push and push and push until he says, "Okay, you guys, take the pressure off of me. I get it. We'll do the armistice," or somebody on the inside will say things falling apart.

People are flying planes. They're giving speeches in Russian on TV and uniform in the Hague. That's what I want to see. I want to see that and I want to see it yesterday. That's how I'm going to get to a better outcome. If you don't agree, let's at least debate that. I want a fulsome debate about that, about why we're not doing it, and what might be the consequences if we do do it. Not just negative but also positive consequences because I want Ukraine to win.

David Remnick: Steve Kotkin, thank you as always and we'll talk again soon.

Stephen Kotkin: Okay, dude. Be well.

David Remnick: Stephen Kotkin is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

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