Title: The Trump Zelensky Meeting

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Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, the Russian American journalist and Russia-US relations expert, Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News. A lot of what she covers is on international affairs, so we'll get her take on all this theater about Russia's war in Ukraine and what's real here and who's just posturing for whom.

She also writes about the Middle East, and we'll also talk about her article called The Coming MAGA-Israel Battle. You may be surprised who, on the right in the MAGA coalition, has about had enough of Benjamin Netanyahu and some Israeli settlers at this point. Julia also has a forthcoming book called Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. Julia, always good of you to come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Julia: Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian: Can I just start with a few short clips from that pretty remarkable joint appearance yesterday by President Trump and the heads of state of France, Germany, Italy, the UK, all of those, and the European Commission? I guess this clip is the headline. Whether or not it's actually true, you'll tell me. Five seconds of President Trump.

President Trump: President Putin agreed that Russia would accept security guarantees for Ukraine.

Brian: Julia, did President Putin agree to security guarantees for Ukraine? Oh, we lost Julia's line. All right. We'll get her back in a second. Also at the White House, as we further set this up, the various European leaders tried to back up that idea of security guarantees for Ukraine. Here's UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer: When we talk about security, we're talking about the security not just of Ukraine. We're talking about the security of Europe and the United Kingdom as well.

Brian: That was really interesting because all the way that far west from Russia as the UK, he sees it as in their national security interest to participate in or have some kind of guarantees, Western guarantees of security that Putin would agree to for Ukraine. One more, here's Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president.

Ursula von der Leyen: Indeed, it's very good to hear that we're working on the security guarantees, Article 5-like security guarantees, so important.

Brian: She mentioned their Article 5-like security guarantees. We'll explain why bringing up Article 5 is kind of a hot button. Julia, on the Trump clip that we played at the top, did President Putin agree to security guarantees for Ukraine, as Trump said there?

Julia: We don't know that he has. We haven't really seen confirmation of that from the Russian side. If anything, a lot of what has been floated here in the West as potential security guarantees for Ukraine have already been shot down by Moscow as non-starters, which makes sense, because first of all, what is an Article 5-like guarantee? Article 5 is the collective defense part of the NATO treaty, and by the way, has only been invoked one time, when the US was attacked on 9/11.

Brian: Meaning that other countries in NATO, and people forget this, I think, provided some of the troops for the Iraq and Afghanistan war because they were obligated to under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, correct?

Julia: Yes, they provided quite a bit of blood and treasure to that war, as part of their obligations under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Now, this isn't just a broad 30,000-foot view security guarantee for NATO allies. There are a lot of details. From the Russian perspective, if one of the reasons that they invaded Ukraine first in 2014, and then again in 2022, was because they didn't want Ukraine joining NATO and didn't want to see it become a platform for Western military right on Russia's border, in a country that they see as basically Russia by another name, then how does it make any sense to do something that's just like NATO, but has a different name? Of course, Russia is most likely not going to have that.

By the way, Sergey Lavrov, today, the Russian foreign minister, already said that that's NATO or Western boots on the ground is a non-starter. Putin has also said that various figures in the Russian government have said Western boots on the ground in Ukraine is a non-starter for them.

Brian: I saw you on CNN yesterday, actually, just on that point, saying that Russia had already reacted to yesterday's White House events, saying that posting Western troops in Ukraine would unleash unlimited escalation. I think that was a quote.

Julia: That's right.

Brian: "Unleash unlimited escalation."

Julia: That's right. One of the key deliverables that the Trump administration believes it has, has already been shot down by Moscow. That's the first point. The second point is that Trump today, in a phone interview with Fox & Friends, shot down the other side of it, saying that he's not going to really provide any security guarantees either. He's not going to have US boots on the ground there in Ukraine either.

As some scholars of the region have pointed out, one of the reasons that Ukraine never got into NATO is because the West didn't want to provide these security guarantees. The West didn't want to put its money where its mouth is on Ukraine because George W Bush extended this, not quite invitation, dangled it in front of Ukraine in 2008, right before leaving office, and over the objections of some NATO allies like France and Germany, and Ukraine was left dangling in the wind. It provoked Putin, but then Ukraine didn't get the defense that NATO membership would have given it. So few concrete details have emerged from this. I still don't quite understand what it is we're talking about.

Brian: If you don't, hardly anybody does. Is there a possible negotiating process that's just taking place in public here that is aiming at something? Maybe Trump says no US boots on the ground. He's been saying all along. Ukraine is really Europe's responsibility because it's in Europe, and now we see all these European heads of state rallying around in the way that they are. Maybe they're heading toward that as part of the deal, where it's Europeans and not Americans who are stationed wherever somebody would be stationed.

Putin says, still no to joining NATO, no to Western troops in Ukraine, but maybe they'd be placed in Poland or somewhere near Ukraine, where they could respond if need be. You know what I mean? This could all be heading towards some kind of negotiation, where there's something real, but everybody has a little face-saving, or is that too optimistic?

Julia: Maybe. We can all hope that that happens, but I just knowing Vladimir Putin, knowing the Russian side, and knowing some of the core demands that they've been insisting on this whole time. When you talk about negotiations that are maybe leading to something, there were negotiations in December 2021, January 2022, the fall of 2022, as the war was already raging. Sometimes the process of negotiating isn't to actually get anywhere from the Russian perspective.

Brian: So they can keep [unintelligible 00:09:10].

Julia: No. It's all means to an end. If they can get the rest of the Donbas through negotiations, then negotiations are great. If they can't, then the war is great. I don't think that their mindset has really changed. They're still at war with the West. They still see Ukraine as fundamentally Russian.

Some of the things that are getting less notice as the Russians is insisting on Russian being codified as one of the official languages of Ukraine, the Russian Orthodox Church, getting absolutely free rein to function in Ukraine, even though Russian Orthodox priests were known to be stashing weapons for the Russian military, spreading Russian propaganda. A lot of this, it's not just about the security guarantees. It's about getting its tenterhooks into Ukraine by other ways.

Brian: Is the Russian Orthodox Church banned in Ukraine?

Julia: It's been severely restricted, and a lot of its clergy members have been arrested.

Brian: When you say Putin wants to get the rest of the Donbas, would you explain that to our US listeners to some degree? Because I think people, by and large, here don't have a sense of the map, don't have a sense of what that means geographically or in human terms. Who are the people who live there, and what's the implication if that becomes part of Russia as opposed to part of Ukraine?

Julia: Donbas is a Soviet acronym of sorts. It means the Donetsk River Basin, and it is heavily industrialized. It's where the Soviet Union built a lot of its coal mines, factories, steel mills, et cetera. It's the kind of rust belt industrial heartland of Ukraine, and therefore, was quite important to Ukraine as an economic center. The people who lived here were heavily Russian speaking, and many of them wanted to be part of Russia and missed being part of the Soviet Union because--

I think this is something that Americans can understand if you think about it as the Ukrainian rust belt. They felt left behind, that their better days were behind them, and those better days were associated with the Soviet Union, and the successor state is not Ukraine, but Russia. Then after the war started, I think a lot of people changed their minds, a lot of people fled, and other people who wanted to stay, who wanted to be part of Russia, did that.

I think what's important to emphasize when we're talking about-- I'm sure your listeners are hearing a lot about Russia's battlefield momentum and that Russia's winning. They are definitely doing better than Ukraine, but they're not doing great. When we talk about land swaps, what we're really talking about are not swaps, but concessions by Ukraine, territorial concessions. Russia now almost completely controls one of the two main regions that make up the Donetsk River Basin, the Donbas, the Luhansk region. They almost completely control that.

The other one, the Donetsk region, they do not fully control. The part that they don't control is this heavily fortified part of northern Donetsk. Russia has been trying to capture all of these two regions since 2014. It has not been able to, despite fighting for them actively on and off for 11 years, and now for the last 3 years, incredibly actively throwing all its resources into this. Russia says, "If you give us this land that we have been unable to capture, despite throwing everything at it, then we will give you back a couple slivers of land in the north of Ukraine that we just captured. We'll give you part of Ukraine back if you give us another part of Ukraine." These are not swaps. These are concessions.

Again, Russia is not doing great on the battlefield either. They have not been able to capture the territory they claim as theirs in over three years of fighting. Their recruitment is at its lowest point in the last two and a half years. Their economy is struggling despite all of the insane defense spending that Putin has unleashed in the last three and a half years. It's only growing by about 1.4%, 1.8%. Interest rates in Russia now are 21%. The population is shrinking because of all the fighting and dying that Russian men are doing. Russia's also not doing great.

Brian: Hundreds of thousands of Russian deaths from what I've read.

Julia: That's right. Russian deaths, but also hundreds of thousands more gravely injured Russians.

Brian: Yet with all that, Julia-- Go ahead.

Julia: Sorry, and Russian men coming back completely messed up by the war and committing incredible crimes. There are polls in Russia that, despite the censorship and the fear that Russians are feeling and the jingoistic kind of patriotism that's been imposed on them, that one of the things Russian people fear the most are returning Russian veterans returning from the front in Ukraine, because they've committed such horrific crimes on their return.

Brian: Yet I saw you say on CNN yesterday, if I got it right, that Putin sees the wind as being at his back. Does he?

Julia: Yes, because he is doing better than Ukraine. Ukraine has massive personnel shortages and issues. Their strategy has not been a great one. I think that's something that's not really talked about much in the West. The Russians have been touting this massive breakthrough in the front lines right before the Anchorage summit between Trump and Putin, but that it turned out was a small group of Russian soldiers who went through a hole in the defenses and weren't able to hold that territory.

The Ukrainian population is struggling. Their children are being killed in their beds. Their infrastructure has been pounded. There are not a lot of people left to fight or who are willing to fight because they fight without rest, and a lot of it is almost a certain death or life-altering injury. Ukrainians are exhausted, and it doesn't seem like there's a ton more Western aid coming the way it was at the beginning of the war. There isn't this stream of volunteers hungry to fight and defend Ukraine.

I think they're going to continue to fight, but they're exhausted. Both sides are not doing well, but Russia is doing better. Plus, Russia now has a president in the White House who clearly empathizes with him, with Putin as the stronger side. Even though he was much nicer to Zelensky and the Europeans yesterday, he broke up the meeting to call Vladimir Putin for 40 minutes. He's still much more deferential to Putin.

He even said yesterday, sitting there with Zelensky, that one of the reasons he doesn't want to cease fire or doesn't want to push for a ceasefire, which again, is the Russian position that he just flipped. Trump flipped on that in the span of a day on Friday in Anchorage. He said, we don't want to push for a ceasefire necessarily because that might disadvantage one of the sides, i.e., Russia. He seems quite empathetic and sympathetic to Russia. Russia, of course, feels like it's doing better both geopolitically than it was under Biden and militarily.

Brian: My guest for another few minutes is Julia Ioffe from Puck News, founding partner and Washington correspondent and US-Russia relations expert. We're also going to touch briefly on her article called The Coming MAGA-Israel Battle. We have time for a few questions for her. Text them is the best way to get them through at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can call us up and we'll see if we have time. Julia, what is Trump actually--

Julia: Sorry, Brian.

Brian: Please.

Julia: Sorry, can I just quickly correct something I said earlier?

Brian: Of course.

Julia: I said that Ukraine had severely restricted the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. That was incorrect. They have, in fact, banned it, and that was after the Russian Orthodox Church officially declared a holy war against Ukraine in the West.

Brian: Wow. What does Trump actually want here, as you see it? Why was he being so-- I watched that whole thing yesterday. He was being so effusively complimentary to these heads of state from Britain and France and Germany. The Italian head of state is maybe more on his wavelength. He usually disparages these people. What does Trump actually want here?

Julia: I think the other part of it was that the Europeans-- Trump doesn't much like the Europeans. He sees them as small, weak countries, as opposed to Russia, which is a big nuclear power. He does talk about that. I don't know if you heard him this morning on Fox News, saying Russia's a big place. It has 11 time zones. Oh my God. Wow. Welcome, Donald. The Europeans are small countries. They don't seem as strong and macho to Trump.

The other part of that meeting was that it wasn't Trump necessarily that was flattering them. It was them flattering Trump. Every single leader talked about how amazing Trump was, how wonderful he was. Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, said, "If it weren't for you, Donald, this would still be at a total impasse. You were the only one able to break through it." I think that's part of it is he wants to be seen as a peacemaker.

You see him retweeting his allies who are listing all the different "peace deals" he's reached in the six months he's been in office. He's made no secret of the fact that he really wants the Nobel Peace Prize because Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize. It's, I think, the same reason he wanted to be Times Man of the Year. He wants these kind of visual concrete symbols of I'm the best.

Brian: Trophies. Did you see that moment yesterday where he said he has settled six wars since he took office again in January, six wars. He mentioned one in the Congo, for example. Did Trump settle a war in the Congo or six wars?

Julia: His administration was able to get them to ceasefires, which he's now saying is not necessary. In that same statement, he said that he doesn't do ceasefires, but in a lot of these cases, they were ceasefires. Good for him. Give him credit where credit is due. You ended the fighting between Rwanda and DRC. If you talk to people, it's, oh, a lot of it isn't the fine print. Trump doesn't care about the fine print. He wants the trophy, he wants the points on the board, and he wants to move on to the next thing.

Brian: Listener asks in a text message, "If Trump isn't going to negotiate with Ukraine's interest at heart, why doesn't Zelensky ask European leaders to take the lead with negotiating with Putin? It appears Trump doesn't want to upset Putin by doing fair negotiations." What would you say to that listener?

Julia: I don't think Putin takes the European seriously either. Before Trump came into office, the narrative coming out of Moscow was that Russia is fighting the collective West. Now that Trump is in the office, it isn't the collective West. It's Trump is reasonable, wants peace, he's energetic, he's sincere, as Putin said the other day. It's the Europeans who are the party of war that they want this war to continue forever because they're asking for unreasonable things like Ukraine restoring its borders to 1991 borders.

The US is considering lifting sanctions on Russia, but Europe isn't. Putin sees Europe as the troublemakers. If you notice in Anchorage, he said, "Donald and I made significant progress. We talked about a lot of substantive things. We really hope that Ukraine and Europe don't ruin it with their intrigues." He literally said intrigue. In Russia's view, everything that happened yesterday was intrigue.

Also, one last thing I'll say is from the very beginning, if you go back to 2021, when there were also negotiations to try to get this war not to happen, and the US engaged in them, even though every US official I talked to said, "We don't think Putin is taking this seriously. This is just a box-checking exercise for him so he can invade and say, look, I tried." Even then, he was saying Europe doesn't need to be at the table, Ukraine doesn't need to be at the table. It should just be the big boys, the big nuclear powers kind of Cold War style, which Putin-

Brian: Him and Putin.

Julia: -back in Munich in 2007, said the Cold War was great because we had these two big superpowers in charge of mediating world conflicts. He always wanted to do it over the heads of Ukraine, over the heads of Europe, with the US directly.

Brian: Another listener text says, "The meeting in Alaska," that's Trump Putin, "had nothing to do with Ukraine. Trump is laying the groundwork for business in Moscow, and he sees this as a moment when Putin could be more receptive. Ukraine was a sideshow." I wonder what you think of that, and I want to add to that, that I saw one report this morning, that part of the deal, if there's going to be a deal that Trump is trying to move toward, involves Ukraine buying $100 billion worth of weapons from the United States, buying. We see all these trade deals that include that kind of thing, promises to buy US goods. How much of this is about business, if you think any of it is?

Julia: I think some of it definitely is. I think Trump can't turn that part of himself off, and I don't think he wants to. He thinks it is a useful rubric through which to see the world and geopolitics specifically. I think primarily he's doing it for his own personal glory as Donald Trump, the peacemaker and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. I think the business side of it is not unimportant, and the Russian government understands that, which is why Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund, is there.

It's why the Russians are constantly trying to dangle this business development carrot in front of Trump. Trump would be foolish to fall for it because even at its height, even at the height of the US-Russia relationship, which was under Barack Obama, there wasn't that much business being done between the two countries. The reason was not because there was a war on, but because it's really hard for a Western business to operate in Russia, and it's gotten significantly, exponentially harder.

American business people have been imprisoned, foreign companies' assets have been seized. This is a really, really difficult and dangerous place to do business. Sources I talked to in Moscow say if American businesses want to come do business in Russia, they'll have guarantees at the highest level in the Kremlin, but what if that highest level changes its mind? There's not exactly an independent court system that can protect their property rights.

Brian: Julia, we're coming to the end of our scheduled time. I wonder if you are available to stay until noon, in which case we could dig in some detail into your Coming MAGA-Israel Battle article, but I don't know your schedule. You tell me.

Julia: I actually have to bounce. It's been so wonderful to be on with you, Brian.

Brian: Can I ask you one question about that just on the stage?

Julia: Absolutely.

Brian: You wrote, the Democrats before them, the empowered MAGA movement finds itself fighting over US support for Israel, with some of its loudest voices questioning a once sacrosanct relationship. I'm thinking about the New York City mayoral race, where we may have seen, at least in the Democratic primary, where Mr. Mamdani's criticism of Israel was not so disqualifying for many voters as it would have been in the past, including a lot of Jewish voters, according to things that Andrew Cuomo himself has said.

Now we see the most notable part of your article to me was Mike Huckabee himself, Trump's ambassador to Israel, the evangelical Christian and usual supporter of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. You wrote that he visited a Christian village in the West Bank, a Christian village that had been attacked by Israeli settlers. Suddenly, he's "expressing solidarity." He said, "Express solidarity with the people who just want to live their lives in peace, to be able to go to their own land, to be able to go to their place of worship." That sounds more like Mamdani than Mike Huckabee. What's going on?

Julia: What's going on is that what Israel has been doing in Gaza and the West Bank has become exponentially more brutal and savage. It's impossible not to see that if you have eyes in your head. You can try to dismiss it as staged, but you still have to contend with it. I think for the MAGA base, if you're isolationist and you're fundamentally skeptical of messy alliances abroad that ask a lot of you about allies that just take, take, take, and drag you into conflict, then what is Israel, if not an ally who gets tens and tens of billions of US aid that has been trying and then successfully got the US involved in conflict with Iran. That doesn't look great if you're a MAGA person. If you're against supporting Ukraine, why are you for supporting Israel?

Some of it is also, frankly, quite antisemitic. If you look at what Marjorie Taylor Greene has said, what Tucker Carlson has said, there's a lot of, obviously, antisemitism on the American far right, just like there is on the American far left. I think some of it is the political horseshoe becoming a circle, but some of it is MAGA voters not understanding why some US allies are exempt from, if we see NATO as a racket, why isn't supporting Israel a racket?

They're starting to ask questions, and they're getting frustrated by the same thing people on the left have been getting frustrated about, which is that why can't we criticize Israel without being called antisemitic? The answer is it's a very fine line to walk and very hard to do. You can see Megyn Kelly and Charlie Kirk, who were before considered themselves steadfast allies of Israel, now getting incredibly frustrated that they're not being allowed to criticize Israel. They're like, "We have the political capital in the bank. We've been such good allies. Why can't we now criticize it without you calling us antisemitic?" It's like, "Welcome."

Brian: Maybe because they're associated with people like Tucker Carlson, who I didn't realize until your article said recently that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad spy. Since we can't top that, we will leave it here unless you want to say something quick about that.

Julia: Real quick. He also recently had on his show a nun who was, I would say Hamas sympathizer apologist, and he was very much leaning into that, even though students at US colleges and US colleges themselves have been attacked by the US administration for far, far less than that.

Brian: Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News. Among other things, she has a book soon to come out called Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. Please come back when the book is released, if not before. Thank you, Julia.

Julia: Thank you, Brian.

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