THIS IS AN UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT
Hello, I'm John Milewski, and this is Wilson Center NOW, a production of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. My guest today is Michael Kimmage. Michael is director of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. He joins us on the same day that President Trump and President Putin held a phone call in response to the U.S. efforts to broker a ceasefire and perhaps a larger peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
Michael, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Great to be with you. So let's start with the readouts that we've seen from both the Kremlin and the White House. And we also had President Zelensky weighing in in the last 30 minutes. Tell us what your major takeaways are from what transpired today. There seem to be quite a significant conversation that went on for a fair amount of time.
You know, there is not a sense that anybody is walking away from these negotiations, which is itself also meaningful. It's at the same time, not some kind of dramatic breakthrough, although the messaging on this is a little bit even from from both sides, that it's not as if we now have a ironclad 30 day ceasefire, which had been the initial and the initial American hopes for this and something that the Ukrainians agreed to a couple of days ago.
It's more limited than that. And Russia is asking for certain conditions in return if it is to be absolute sort of across the board, a 30 day cease fire. So it's a step in the direction of something. Clearly, it's not a step backwards. It's a step forward. But you could characterize it, I think, soberly and correctly as a small step now, perhaps to be followed by other steps in the immediate future.
Before we began our discussion, I looked around headlines from around the world and coverage from around the world to see how this is being depicted. And, you know, one of the themes that emerged that you just said was no major breakthrough. Nothing particularly surprising. Another trend among reports was that some way the U.S. backed down, that after this agreement between Ukraine and U.S., that there would be a comprehensive ceasefire.
Now we have this proposal for a limited cease fire. Is that is that a fair interpretation of events? It's correct. What you saw in the first few weeks of the second Trump term is a sense that there would be peace around the corner. And that was message by, you know, the White House spokeswoman by the president himself and members of the president's staff.
And that sort of major steps were were being taken in that direction. And immediately before the phone call with the U.S. had been pressing for and I think I would underscore this adjective is an unconditional cease fire, and that's what the Ukrainians had agreed to. And what the White House will have to acknowledge under the circumstances is that they have certainly achieved something.
And the diplomacy is once again moving on the Ukraine war. But this is a conditional cease fire. If a cease fire is even the right term, what Russia has offered to do is not to make strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure and not to have the war extend into the Black Sea if Ukraine will do the same. So there are conditions and they are understandable Russian conditions because these are places energy infrastructure in the Black Sea where Russia has been taking hits from the Ukrainian military.
So it's an understandable position from the Russian side, but it's not everything that the White House was asking for by a long shot. There's also a discussion of a prisoner exchange to take place relatively soon. Is that a significant development? It could be. I mean, always has a symbolic quality, these prisoner exchanges. It symbolizes goodwill on both sides.
It's what won with a bit of jargon might refer to as a confidence building measure. It improves the political and diplomatic landscape. But there have been lots of prisoner exchanges already in this war. They've been ongoing since the start of the war. So it's not a huge novelty. This is not something the Trump administration arranged or negotiated for the first time.
It's on a continuum of prisoner exchanges. It's not bad news. It's potentially good news. But in context, again, nothing overly dramatic. There's one provision, at least from Moscow's perspective, that the Kremlin is demanding no more mobilization or rearmament for Ukraine, which sounds like something that Ukraine can easily say no to, because it would seem to put them. I'm not a military expert, Michael, but it would seem to put them in a vulnerable position.
Yeah, that's correct. I don't think over the short to medium term, Ukraine can fight this war without mobilization. And of course, the provision of weapons from the United States and from other outside powers is essential to the Ukrainian war effort. And we're not just talking about potential, a future Ukrainian offensives to regain territory that Russia has occupied since 2014 or in some instances, since 2022.
We're talking about Ukraine's capacity to defend itself from Russian attack. And so it's very hard for me to believe that Ukraine would agree to forego mobilization or that Ukraine would cut off incoming supplies of weapons, which again, are very important to the to the war effort for the sake of a 30 day peace fire with with Russia. So this is going to be have to be something that's worked out.
And it's hard for me to imagine that Ukraine will agree to those terms. Another fly in the ointment in this regard is that it's not just the U.S. who is providing armaments. And so Russia I mean. NAITO, non-NATO allies are not part of these negotiations. So this is essentially asking them to do something and they haven't even been asked to come to the table.
Yeah, there's a split screen quality to all of this. So today in Germany, it's not quite at the end of the story, but the German parliament voted for massive increases to defense spending in Germany. This is the agenda of likely incoming chancellor Friedrich Metz in Germany. And you've had that effort echoed in France and the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, that there's going to be a lot more defense spending.
This is defense spending for these countries, to be sure, but also for Ukraine. So European countries are building up the capacity to support Ukraine. And it's also the case that Ukraine itself has really improved in its defense industrial capacity. This is not something that's part of the negotiations, but it's part of the overall picture for Ukraine that if the United States were to pull out, and that's the biggest form of leverage that the United States has.
It is not in any case to be assumed that that support for Ukraine would dry up elsewhere. It might even increase. And Ukraine itself is becoming increasingly able to support itself militarily in terms of defense, industrial capacity. So this is another of the balls exactly as your question indicates, John. It's another of the balls that the White House has to juggle.
Michael, you mentioned that President Trump set expectations quite high for what impact he could have on these negotiations. And now, of course, we're not seeing that kind of progress or that kind of magical solution. So does what happened today change our expectations for how long this war can go on? Does it does it create more optimism that it could end more quickly or does it do the opposite?
I think it creates a modest degree of optimism. If we think back to where we were, let's say 3 to 6 months ago in the war, it was not a great picture for Ukraine. Russia has been making incremental gains over the course of the last year, and there really was no diplomacy to speak of. There was not, you know, many meetings.
There were certainly no presidential phone calls between Washington and Moscow 3 to 6 months ago. I think the last time that President Biden spoke with President Trump was was before the 2022 invasion, and there was almost no contact. There were various peace plans that countries had put forward to create itself, China and other countries. And those are part of the conversation.
But there was very little diplomacy. So I personally don't think it's a bad thing that there's now a flurry of diplomacy. There's sort of a push and an effort being made. We've seen that it hasn't fallen apart. There were disagreements, of course, between President Trump and President Zelensky in the Oval Office and a fair amount of back and forth, which is not atypical for, you know, big scale, difficult negotiations.
Positions are moving and shifting. That's also not atypical. The conversation is going forward. And I would say that that's to the credit of the Trump administration for pushing this agenda. But we are extremely far from any kind of genuine, lasting, enduring resolution to the crisis. And it's those two things that one has to distinguish. The diplomacy is moving again.
That's a big story that matters, but it has miles and miles to go. So I want to alert our viewers and listeners that, look, we're talking about something in real time that's in the breaking news category, and things could change by the minute even while we're here recording this discussion. So if you really want to keep up on this, as I'm sure those of you watching this are showing an interest, check out the Kennedy Institute.
And Michael and his colleagues will be continuing to be on top of this story as it develops with all kinds of useful information and analysis. Michael, stepping back from the news of the day, I want to ask you about the toll of war on both sides. We're very aware of what's happening on the Ukrainian side because it's an open country with real reporting and is a U.S. ally in this regard.
On the Russian side, not so much the idea of an open and free media in Russia is an artifact of the past no longer exists. So what do we know about the toll that this is taking on Russia, Russian society and how are the people of Russia dealing with this? It's a very important question, in part because, as your question suggests, it's a difficult one to answer with a lot of with a lot of data.
Let's go back to 2013 or rather 2023, when it seemed like the Russian population was in lockstep with the Kremlin. It seemed like people were very pro war survey data to that effect, the absence of a real anti-war movement. And in the summer of 2013, we had a mutiny in the Russian military led by a sort of perplexing figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, where he started to take troops and soldiers and to march them to Moscow.
The mutiny did not succeed. It was it was turned back. But what that told us is that below the surface, there was a huge amount of discontent with the military leadership, with the way that the troops were being treated. It handled with the difficulties of fighting the war in Ukraine. I don't think any of that has gotten better for Russia.
It's very hard to imagine that any of that has gotten better. We see that Russia has begun to import troops from North Korea. They played an important role in the military offensive Russia has been waging. And of course, province, which is a Russian province that Ukraine took a piece of in the summer of 2024. And we also see that the Russian economy is taking a lot of negative turns.
Inflation is on the rise. It's a very obviously wartime economy which is overheating, you know, hard to get labor and a lot of money going into military production. That's not going to create real value over time for the Russian economy. So we still have no antiwar movement. You can't look to the streets of Russia and see discontent. But I think the discontent is there.
It's percolating. It's there below the surface, and it's not going to be below the surface forever. So not today's news story, but quite possibly tomorrow's news story or the day after tomorrow. I want to ask you also, as we look forward to an eventual end of hostilities, whatever form that takes and however long it takes, what can we assume or what can we attempt to understand about Vladimir Putin's larger objectives?
You know, if you're a neighboring state and a former member of the Soviet Union, your fears are higher than perhaps some others. But clearly there's one school of thought that Putin is in an expansionist mode and this is just the beginning. So, you know, a couple of points that add up, I think, to a rather complicated picture. So one is that Russia has not just invaded Ukraine in 2014 and then again in 2022, but Russia also invaded Georgia and Russia has left soldiers.
They were Soviet soldiers. They became Russian soldiers after 1991 in in Moldova. So Russia is not shy about crossing its borders into other countries using military force and, you know, sort of doing so on its own agenda. Secondly, Russia has invested we sort of covered this point a moment ago in terms of Russia's economic difficulties, but Russia is investing huge amounts of its GDP in defense and Russia is now out producing collectively out producing Europe in terms of artillery shells and some forms of material.
And so that means that Russia is investing in its capacity to wage war in Ukraine, but potentially elsewhere. And that can't be ignored in the least. But the third point that I would make here, and this is very significant, I would say, for European policymakers, is that Russia is really struggling with the war in Ukraine. It's not succeeding.
It's not making rapid advances, incremental advances. Yes. But at the beginning of the war, Russia occupied around 11% of Ukraine's territory. This is back in February 2022. Now it's 19 20% of Ukraine's territory. A lot of what Russia occupies in Ukraine has been completely destroyed. And you have the city of Kharkiv in Ukraine, which is 30, 40 miles from the from the Russian border.
That remains very much on the Ukrainian side of the of the ledger. So Russia has shown itself as unable to take Ukraine's cities, for the most part, unable to make big strategic gains in the war. And that means for the Poland's of the world, for the Baltic republics, for other countries that worry about this kind of aggression coming their way, that Russia is not ten feet tall and has certain limits.
So the intent is there. That's clear. To revise the borders of Europe, the capacity is growing, but a lot of the ways that that capacity is implemented are inefficient and ineffective for Russia. And that's important to remember as well. And how bad are things in terms of the Russian economy? You know, even in an autocracy, a widespread discontent, whether it's over access to medical care or food prices or whatever it might be that affect the daily lives of millions and millions of people.
How much is that mounting in Russia as a problem for Vladimir Putin? It's mounting as a potential problem. So in no sense could you argue that Russia is where Imperial Germany was in 1917 when the economy, you know, sort of pushed Germany toward defeat in the First World War? That's not where Russia is. Or in some ways the economy pushes Russia toward revolution.
In 1917, also during the First World War. And that's that's that's not the framework for the present moment. What Putin has done cleverly is to insulate middle class Russians, urban Russians, people who are closer to the sources of political and other kinds of power in Russia. He's insulated them from the effects of the war. So if you're living in Moscow, if you're living in St Petersburg, it's not that life is so bad and it might be in terms of the economy that life is not that different from how it was a few years beforehand.
What Putin has done, and this is a long term structural thing is taken out of Russia. A lot of the sources of real growth, value, production, innovation, technological capacity. We have a million Russians that have left Russia since the start of the February 2022 war. These are often some of the best educated, most entrepreneurial people. So Putin has taken the sources of growth out or he's compromised them and he's bet the farm on military action in Ukraine and it's not going particularly well.
So the question is, when do Russians start to ask whether this war with Russia has been fighting for three years without much of an end result? Whether this war is worth it because it is taking an economic toll and Russia is not moving forward economically. And that's one of the real problems of Putinism. I again, wouldn't predict revolution or even street protests in the next couple of months, but it's as if Russia is a pressure cooker and the pressure is being ratcheted up through this economic mismanagement.
And if there was going to be a change in leadership through any kind of means, we wouldn't know about it in advance. Correct? That's true. I mean, I think it's the most opaque of political systems in that regard. There's certainly no constitution of a real kind in Russia. They're not they're not political parties anymore. Elections have become meaningless.
I think it's correct to refer to Russia now as a dictatorship. But Putin doesn't have, you know, sons or daughters who could take the reins. And, you know, it's it's not a governing structure that will have an easy time replicating itself. You would have to assume in the Russian case. And I think that this is probably difficult news in a sense, for policymakers in Washington and throughout Europe.
What you would have to assume that some version of Putin would come after Putin, that from the security services, from the military, that you would have a hardliner, somebody who's inclined toward a kind of militaristic nationalism, would probably be the successor to to Putin. But, you know, that's an area of Russian life. If you go back into Russian history, Soviet history, where predictions can be extremely tricky to make because it's a country of surprises.
On the other side of the border, the position of President Zelensky. What do we know about his popular support? How much the war fatigue is taking a hold in Ukraine and I guess we could be years away from elections. That is very true. It's important to emphasize that Ukraine is under martial law. So because it's under martial law, though, Ukraine is very much a democracy.
And for our viewers, Wolanski is the democratically elected president of Ukraine. Ukraine is not a country currently in the midst of elections. It's not holding elections because of the because of the war. I think the portrait is complex. I think on the fundamentals, Ukrainians do not want to surrender in this war. They certainly don't want to lose. They know what price they would pay.
They know the nature of the occupation and Ukrainian territory. And Ukrainians have sacrificed a lot. I don't think that they want to sacrifice a lot for a half victory. They want to sacrifice for the sake of eventual victory. So I don't think in terms of fighting the war, that patience itself has worn thin. But I do think that there are under the surface, lots of criticisms of the way that the war has been waged.
And, you know, Zelensky is brilliant on the international stage. He's brilliant at social media, is a great communicator. I don't know if Ukrainians think of him as necessarily a great wartime leader. Ukraine just had to roll up an operation in chorus that was supposed to be a bargaining chip for Ukraine diplomatically, and it's turned out to be a bit of a military misadventure.
So there are those kinds of complaints and questions. And then finally, you know what Ukraine has done. It's not entirely dissimilar from what Putin has done with his war effort, as Ukraine has put the war effort under older members of the country and at times on to poorer members of the country. So the Ukrainian military is often a military of men who are sort of 40 plus in age from the poorer parts of society.
And so I think those guys, especially veterans, are people in the midst of the war. They look to people in Kiev and Lviv and others who are leading relatively normal lives, and there's a bit of a divide or a tension emerging in Ukrainian society between those who are doing the active fighting and struggling with that and those who are back in the big cities and leading relatively normal lives.
That's not unusual for wartime. I don't think it's an unsustainable problem for Zelensky, but it's it's one of the political problems that he faces. Michael, my final question, I'll tell you upfront is unfair because it's so hard to judge this in real time, but I'll take I'll give you a stab at it anyway in a pilot with my apology upfront where it's very difficult to discern if what we're seeing here in terms of the European response, the vote in Germany today of whether we're seeing something that's transactional in the moment or something that's transformational for the way we view the world and the way we organize security for the long haul.
What is your sense of what we're living through right now in that regard? So I think that there's a lot of continuity when it comes to the war in Ukraine. And the story of journalism is always a story of change. And we can identify a number of changes in U.S. policy since January 2025. The way that President Trump speaks about the war is not the same as where the President Biden speaks about the war, the kind of in public conflict between Zelensky and Trump.
That's not what you would have expected a few months ago. It's a kind of new style. You know, obviously, the U.S. is much more comfortable now putting pressure on Ukraine. And we've already discussed these diplomatic overtures, which, again, are something new. That's all important. But there's a lot of continuity. The U.S. is still supporting Ukraine. You know, the U.S. is still at the center of the NATO alliance.
I see no indication that the United States wants Ukraine to lose the war. And that's a continuity of of of policy, Abe. And, you know, that's significant. And the United States is still working with its U.S., with its European partners and allies to see Ukraine through to a better place. So I don't want to exaggerate the degree of the change.
It's it's it's significant, but it's not necessarily transformative or revolutionary. On the other hand, in terms of what Europe is doing, and this is something that American presidents, long before President Trump have been pressuring Europeans to do is to take their defense and security more into their own hands. And that is a dramatic story that does depend on Germany, the biggest economy, the biggest country in Europe.
And you see a mentality shift, a willingness to undergo certain changes, not just defense spending, but the take on the challenges tackle the challenges of providing security in Germany and through the, you know, throughout Europe. And I think that that's going to have a lot of consequences for Ukraine. I don't think it's incompatible with the American view of the world.
Again, lots of American presidents have wanted to see a more robust Europe on the defense side. I think what it is, is basically good news for Ukraine that the more Europe spends on defense, the more Europe commits itself to Europe security, What it's doing really is making an investment in Ukraine's future. And that's so important for Europe that they're not going to leave it to other partners.
It's not just the U.S., it's a partner of Europe in Ukraine. It's also South Korea and Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. These are all parts of a coalition, including Canada, of countries that are supporting Ukraine. But I think Europe is for the first time making this a real priority. And the bottom line of that is that it's good news for Ukraine.
Michael, thank you. You know, this is the first time you and I have had an opportunity to speak in this context since you joined the center. Your addition has been really welcome. And it's great having you as a colleague. And I think our viewers and listeners will find out today why we're so thrilled to have you here. Thank you for joining us.
And you so much for having me, John. It's just such a pleasure. My guest is Michael Kimmage, director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Wilson Center now, and that you'll join us again soon. Until then, for all of us at the center, I'm John Milewski. Thanks for your time and interest.
