Lawfare Daily: The Fate of Ukraine

[Intro]

Fiona Hill: In fact, what we're still in the middle of is the wars of the Soviet succession. And so this is kind of like 1812. It's, you know, kind of the whole uproar all over again, because Ukraine had been independent, you know, for 30 plus years by the time Russia tries to kind of take it back in the fold again.

Tyler McBrien: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Tyler McBrien, Managing Editor of Lawfare, with Brookings Institution senior fellows Fiona Hill and Constanze Stelzenmuller, Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina, and Lawfare editor in chief, Benjamin Wittes.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: There is no going back for my generation, right, to a comfy relationship with Russia that goes over the head of a country that has been attacked and is attacked every day. I want to make that very clear.

Tyler McBrien: Today, we're bringing you a discussion called “Trump's Return and the Fate of Ukraine,” recorded in front of a live audience at the Brookings Institution on Feb. 24.

[Main podcast]

Benjamin Wittes: I can't think of a more unpleasant occasion on which to gather here. This is, as you know, the third anniversary of the beginning of the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and we are here to talk about a variety of matters related to that and related as well to an immense ongoing change of U.S. policy with respect to the war.

We are also here to introduce a project that we have been working at on, at Lawfare for the last year or so, which we will talk about and introduce, which is a project that we've done with our colleagues at Goat Rodeo on the history of U.S.-Ukrainian relations in the post-Soviet period vis-a-vis Russia. So if that sounds well timed to the moment, perhaps it is.

We arranged this event when there was one major government change that was affecting Western policy toward Ukraine. That was the transition from the Biden administration to the Trump administration and the shock therapy maybe that that is applying to the situation.

There is now a second one which is that we did have elections in Germany yesterday and these produced something of a mixed message with respect to Ukraine policy, and so I wanted to ask Constanze to get us started and give us a sense of what happened in Germany yesterday, how we should understand it vis-a-vis Ukraine, and how we should understand it vis-a-vis the American shift in policy ongoing with respect to Ukraine.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: So thank you very much. It is a distinct pleasure to co-host this with you because the Center on the U.S. and Europe has taken the, the changes wrought on Europe and on the transatlantic relationship by the Russians full scale invasion extremely seriously.

It has literally reconfigured the way we work, in every possible way, and I couldn't think of a better thing to do today with a better group of people. So, thank you.

Benjamin Wittes: Well, thank you.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: As for the German election, oy, I'm still processing this, but it was—to those of you who occasionally follow the news, it will not have escaped you that the incoming chancellor, new chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, has made some newsworthy comments, both yesterday and in previous days, on Europe's need for nuclear weapons, on what seems to him like the end of transatlantic relations and so on.

Suffice it to say that this is a chancellor who, in all fairness, like his predecessor Olaf Scholz, is deeply committed to Europe and also to the transatlantic relationship and the friendship with America, except that he is committed to the old transatlantic relationship and the America that he grew up with. So the current shifts in Washington are, I think, going to make that slightly difficult for him.

Now, I don't want to joke about what is a deeply serious situation. I have just come back from three weeks in Europe, and the real turmoil in the transatlantic relationship started with J.D. Vance's, the vice president's, speech in Munich on Valentine's Day, Feb. 14, I was in the overflow of the overflow of the overflow room listening to it because every single participant of the Munich Security Conference wanted to hear it, and Fiona was there as well.

And, and I think it is fair to say that Europeans were profoundly shocked by it. I have been making the rounds in Europe, not just in, in Germany, but also I'm coming from, from Stockholm and the Swedes who thought they had joined NATO just in time are now finding that they are joining a slightly different NATO than they thought they joined.

So there is tumult or turmoil everywhere and people processing things everywhere, but let me, let me give you a capsule version of what I think happened last night in Germany.

We always knew that the Conservatives were going to win this election. They polled at double the, the, the polling levels of the governing SPD. The question was how many parties would Friedrich Merz have to govern with? And that was settled very late last night with a real nail biter of a, of a counting of, of votes. BSW, the, the extreme left party, led by the firebrand Sahra Wagenknecht, missed entry into the parliament, missed the 5 percent threshold by 13,000 and something votes. It will not surprise you to learn that they are going to go to the courts over this and demanding a recount, which is unusual in Germany. But there we are. I think we're catching up with, with other countries.

So Friedrich Merz, based on that result—and unless it is overturned by the courts, which I have a hard time seeing because we all use paper ballots, it's slightly more difficult to sort of fake results there—it is that Friedrich Merz is going to govern in a grand coalition with the Social Democrats.

And I don't think that he will have any compunction in supporting Ukraine. I think he intends to be a strong player in Europe. My—the reservations I have about that is that last night also saw a doubling of the AFD seats in parliament, nearly a doubling of its vote share with extremely high shares in eastern Germany of up to 37 percent in total.

Benjamin Wittes: The AFD just for the-

Constanze Stelzenmüller: hard extreme right

Benjamin Wittes: -they’re neo-Nazi

Constanze Stelzenmüller: No, they're not neo-Nazi that's not precise.

Benjamin Wittes: Okay.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: They, they are good friends with neo-Nazi groupings, but they are not, they are not by definition neo-Nazi, and I think that is an important thing to say. They—the German domestic intelligence service have determined them to be in part or in some of the state level organizations, fully extremist, right wing extremist, but they have been very careful in avoiding, except for some, you know, French figures, and one or two of their leaders, in avoiding actual Nazi language.

Also, well, forgive me, I say that because it is one of the, they are doing this very deliberately and strategically, and it is one of the things that makes it difficult, for example, to outright ban them, which German law would allow, which I'm sure no doubt the Vice President of the United States would consider yet another suppression of free speech and democracy, if that was attempted.

But that is where we are. I think Friedrich Merz will be quite constrained by an opposition headed by an extreme right wing party that will be out to hunt him and that will out, will be out to split his party. I think he will try to reach out to Europe, he will try to reach out to NATO, but I am going to put out there that ultimately I think he may end up being a transitional figure in what is going to be an even an ever more fragmenting German political landscape and I'll leave it at that.

Benjamin Wittes: All right. Fiona, you were also at Munich. Give us a sense of your impressions of where the United States is right now, with respect to Ukraine and with respect to European interactions on that subject.

Fiona Hill: Well, thanks very much. And I would say it's great to be here today, but I guess for all of us, it isn't really, is it. It's quite a depressing, as you said at the very beginning, anniversary and commemoration, especially for Anastasiia and others who are from Ukraine itself.

And I think before we you know, start to do this analysis, we just want to fully process, you know, what Ukrainians have been through during this last three years. And I mean, this is an absolute tragedy for Ukrainians. I mean, it's one of the reasons that Anastasiia and others are here. And we have to always remember the human side of this.

And I just wanted to say that I listened to Vice President Vance's speech standing next to Arseniy Yatsenyuk the former prime minister of Ukraine, who I happened to meet as I went into the overflow room of the overflow room. I was not quite sure which overflow room I was in, but there were many.

And I did actually try to attempt to intercede on his behalf with people who were guarding the main room to see if he could enter. I tried the old former prime minister of Ukraine routine for him, but it didn't work. So he was stuck standing next to me. And he literally turned to me and said he thought he was going to cry after hearing the speech. And this is obviously a kind of a man who's been through, you know, quite a lot. So that will just, you know, put things into perspective. There is a human side to all of this that we must not forget.

And I want to, in a way, I'm going to answer your question, but I'm going to kind of flip it around a little bit because it's what has the United States done to itself in the eyes of Europeans which was really depressing to, you know, listen to.  So I came to the United States in 1989, you know, when there was a complete shift in the Cold War, and I came here with, I guess, starry rosy eyes. I became a U.S. citizen. I never thought that I would find myself in a position where I was listening to Europeans—and the U.K. used to be part of Europe, remember, before Brexit—and also, you know, U.K. and other politicians talk about the United States as an adversary.

And that was exactly what started to happen after the vice president's speech, because suddenly it was as if a switch had been flipped. I was also standing next to a prominent member of the German Green Party, whose family were refugees from the former Soviet Union who's extraordinarily well known. He said he was sick to his stomach. He never expected that the beacon, you know, kind of a freedom and opportunity that everybody had looked towards from the kind of Cold War onwards was suddenly you know, basically lecturing Europeans about free speech, and also openly siding with, as Constanze has discussed, an extreme right wing party. It was not something that anybody in that hall could have fully processed.

Now the Europeans also know that they have themselves, and this is kind of, writ large, something to blame for this predicament in this state of affairs. So, like Constanze, I've been spending a lot of time going around Europe. Two years ago, I lived in Germany for five or six months just after the so called Zeitenwende, the period when the previous Chancellor Scholz realized that the world had changed rather dramatically after Russia's invasion.

And it was also very sobering to see that there was a kind of sense of helplessness and paralysis in Germany over this, which, you know, kind of. Merz is obviously the response to, in some respect, to those, Constanze says, a very fractured electorate.

I've been spending a lot of time in the United Kingdom ,my home, birthplace—I still remain a dual citizen there. I've also just been in Paris coincidentally at the same time that many of the European leaders showed up for a kind of an emergency meeting in the wake of the Vance speech, and like Constanze, Scandinavia and all kinds of, you know, other countries in between.

And there's a real fear that the Europeans really mismanaged and wasted, not just the last several years after the invasion of Ukraine, but you know, the last decade plus since the Wales summit where President Obama basically exhorted all of them to think about taking their own defense more into consideration and to all reach 2 percent spending of GDP. So that was 2014. That was coterminous with the first invasion of Ukraine and the seizing of Crimea. And now the realization has set in, in the kind of 10 years, that they're 10 years behind being really serious about their own defense.

So that was also that moment where it became obvious that basically farming out your security to the U.S. was no longer an option. And they've been told that nicely for quite some time; now they were told in a rather brutal fashion. Not just by Vice President Vance, but also by new Secretary of Defense Hegseth that Europe is no longer a priority for the United States.

And we've always thought when we're looking at Ukraine, getting back to your initial question, as we got into a war of attrition—and some of you will remember this from earlier discussions we've had here at Brookings and all kinds of, you know, writings that various people have had—that the one way that you get a shift in a war of attrition is where the external environment has a major change.

And this has been the major change. Not, as many might have hoped, a shift in the dynamics inside of Russia which has been a bit of a solid rock for the last 25 years and remains so. Putin hasn't really budged in terms of his world view. But the shift has been here in the United States.

The United States, as we all know, because we've been living in it, has been in a, in a process of constant change for the last 25 years, going back to 9/11, the interventions in Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq, etc, etc. And we have been literally all over the place. And finally, it's the United States that has changed. And in Moscow, the feeling is the United States has converged with Russia and with Russian views. And that's what shifted the entire dynamic.

And so that's actually where we are now with Ukraine. The United States has shifted, and Europe has realized that if it wants to be serious about its own security and also about long term settlement for Ukraine, which is essential to European security, then they need to change as well. And that's gonna be the big question as we look ahead, we have President Macron of France coming into town today. He may already be here. He's not joining us, as I learned, you know, for our, for our session.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, he's welcome on the stage if you—, add a chair.

Fiona Hill: Yeah, it would be great to hear from him. Probably she will be hearing plenty from him.

And we've got Prime Minister Starmer of the U.K. coming in on Thursday and, you know, the writing is very much on the wall for everybody that Ukraine's future is also the future of European security. And the Finns and the Swedes who did join NATO also joined precisely because they realized that you need to have a new look at European security.

And the Finns, let's just you know remind ourselves, are actually all ready to go. They're probably you know, one of the best equipped most battle ready at all times militias because they had the Ukraine experience back in the beginning of World War 2 when they were invaded also by the Soviet Union and had to fight them off all on their own. And they've never, you know, basically lost that dynamic and that importance. So I think, but it's a really consequential time today where every chicken has come home to roost.

Benjamin Wittes: Yes, I want to pick up on something you said at the beginning, which is that we have to not forget the personal tragedy and experience of Ukrainians in this conversation.

And so, Nastya, I want to ask you to tell us two stories. The first is what were the circumstances in which you learned about the American change in policy? You literally were on your way from Kyiv to here to do this event and to launch this podcast when all of a sudden the United States switched sides. So first of all, I want you to just tell us about that experience.

And then secondly in the back although she may not, oh, she may be here is your one-year-old daughter, and I want you to tell us the circumstances of Ava's birth.

Anastasiia Lapatina: It will be relevant, I promise.

Benjamin Wittes: The details are, may, may not be important.

Anastasiia Lapatina: We'll omit the gruesomeness of it all. But, thank you. And thank you for arranging all of this. It's amazing to have an opportunity to speak about it all.

So yes, when Trump, I don't think Trump decided to flip a switch—when a bunch of Ukrainians realized who he actually is, that's more like it—I was somewhere between the three trains and two planes and the four day long travel from Ukraine to here. And I couldn't help but think that like my whole life I've had an image of the U.S. as this kind of, you know, standard of what is right and what is good.

And when the revolution of dignity happened in Ukraine, I was, I was tiny. I was 12 or 13 and since, and that's sort of like, since then I have conscious memory of my life and, and what's right, and what are my values.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: It's 2014.

Anastasiia Lapatina: Yes. And since then, I've always known that, like, this is who we are as Ukrainians. We align ourselves with the West. We look to the U.S. for guidance. We look to Europe for guidance. This is what's right. And what's on the East is very, very wrong, and we never look there.

And so I'd always joke that, like, we don't mind American meddling, you know, when some of my more leftist leaning friends, you know, would accused the U.S. of neocolonialism or something when it comes to Ukraine, I'd be like, we actually love it. Like, please come and clean up, clean everything up, like get rid of corruption, like get involved.

And, and many people would joke about this because, you know, the, the alternative for us has always been Russia, right, because the geography really messed us up. We're really stuck in there in between two sides.

And so this whole image of the U.S. as this barometer of what's good and bad—it really shattered for me in the last week. And I, I keep hearing people say that there is no going back, that this damage that Trump has done is kind of irreversible. And you will explain to me later whether that's true. You know better than I do.

But that's just like really depressing because now I feel like, you know, the U.S. is sort of gone and doing whatever it is that it's doing. Europe isn't really doing anything. And as one friend of mine put it, it would be nice if Europe was a thing like that would be helpful. So that's certainly how Ukrainians view it because Ukrainians and we'll get to that, have had bad experiences with the U.S. over history and with Europe as well.

And so we now really feel like we're once again just like left on our own, and it's really not a position that anyone should be in. And we now don't even have like a standard like of institutionalism or of values and liberty, like we're now being accused of being a dictatorship, which is laughable, right? And, and so there is this just like prevailing feeling of disappointment that everything I've always thought of as right and good connected to the U.S., like it's all shattering kind of in front of my eyes and it affects the entire country. So that's just really depressing.

So the spicier story about Ava’s birth. So my daughter—she's sleeping, thank God, she's very much cooperating with this event and I'm grateful for it. She was born on Dec. 31 in 2023. And, you know, that's already crazy enough. The whole thing is crazy enough. What's even crazier is that the next day after that, Russia launched one of its biggest ever aerial attacks against Ukraine. I think it was Jan. 1 or Jan. 2.

So at the time that, you know, we were still at the hospital, we haven't checked out and left home yet. At 5 a.m., at some point, there is this massive attack. I mean, it's like almost 1,000 drones or something. I may be exaggerating, but it was really big at that point. It was called one of the biggest attacks in years. And so it was just incredible, right? Because you and I, I mean, we were fine.

We were all taken to this underground shelter with dozens of very pregnant women. And I was only like, very thankful that I've already, you know, got her out. So I don't have to go through that experience in a bunker. So, you know, that was helpful.

But I distinctly remember the feeling that me and people around me, other moms with like one year old babies, we weren't scared because we've been at this for years at that point. And we've lived there since the very beginning. We were just very annoyed. There was this like frustration that we really shouldn't be dealing with this, like, in any circumstance, but especially right now.

And I really didn't spot fear in people's eyes. It was more of like, okay, like, when is this going to be over? Like, can we just go and, like, have a life and, and, you know, and take care of our babies. And, and I think it's so tragic that those were the emotions that we're feeling because that means that, like, we're all, not all—I can't speak for all, but a lot of us—are pretty much numb at this point, because we, we see this gruesomeness and this tragedy every single day.

And at some point, unfortunately, even though I'd prefer that we kept feeling, you know, the strongest empathy and the strongest sense of loss at some point, something in your body on a biological level, just adapt. And that just becomes a part of your life. And you end up being in interviews with Iranian drones flying around you, and you're not going anywhere because God bless American air defense, you know, and, and, you know, you'll be fine most likely.

And you just keep on living with it and people tell you, you know, stay safe and you don't even know what that means anymore because you've, that's just your reality.

And so it's just—the fact that we've been at it for three years is insane to me, because I remember having a conversation with a friend in April, early April 2022, so just around a month since the full scale invasion started, after the full scale invasion started. And I was in Lviv at the time, a city in eastern Ukraine, and I wanted some of my friends to come stay with me.

And they fully seriously told me that they don't want to leave Kyiv because they want to be there for Victory Day. And so my friends didn't come because they were, they had this distinct feeling that they were on the precipice of this historic moment, right? They were ready to march through Khreschatyk with their, in their vyshvankas and flags and celebrate it.

But now it's three years later and I'm, you know, sitting here and we're going to talk about how our biggest ally is turning into something of an enemy. And so, you know, that's, I guess, is where we're at.

Benjamin Wittes: So I just want to say if that sounds dramatic, Nastya is actually understating it. I woke up that morning to a set of texts from her, which I think I still have that—this was Jan. 1, 2024. And the first one said, the good news is I have a beautiful baby girl. The bad news is I'm in a bomb shelter under the, under the hospital with a whole bunch of laboring moms.

Anastasiia Lapatina: And you don't know what to think because on one hand it's a hospital, no one targets a hospital, but then you're like, no, that's, they're Russians, they actually might deliberately target a maternity hospital.

Benjamin Wittes: There was an attack on a maternity hospital at one point.

Anastasiia Lapatina: Yes.

Benjamin Wittes: All right, well, I don't mean to be glib, but the good news is we got a rip roaring podcast out of it. So Tyler,

Tyler McBrien: You're going to set this one up?

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, no, I mean,

Anastasiia Lapatina: Smooth, Ben, thank you.

Benjamin Wittes: You got, you got to, you got to take lines where they present themselves.

So, Tyler, tell us a little bit of the story of Escalation and how this project had its genesis and where it came from. Give us a little bit of the sort of institutional history of the project we're releasing today.

Tyler McBrien: Yes, thanks, Ben. And thanks to everyone. I'm honored to be up here with, with this panel.

I think the past three weeks especially have been a bit of a proof of concept for Escalation to say the least. This podcast started, I mean, I guess, three years ago, you could say, with, with the full scale invasion. And about a year in maybe, I had joined Lawfare as managing editor, the biggest story in foreign policy and the world at the time and in many ways still is Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

So it just seemed like, on the one hand, an obvious choice to, to think about how we could tell the history of the U.S. and Ukraine, and, and, and how to explain what we were seeing. I am certainly no Russia expert, I'm no Ukraine expert, so it's, it's not surprising that I was surprised at the full scale invasion. But it was, I got the sense that even people who have been watching this closely were also surprised, so we wanted to answer that question.

Around that time, I believe Nastya was, had been doing amazing reporting for the Kyiv Independent and Ben was hosting a show called Live from Ukraine and, and Nastya had joined one of those, those episodes, and what was really important, I think, of that show was to get a sense of what it was like for Ukrainians in Ukraine at the time.

I think this conflict, especially, has been the victim of a lot of misinformation and revisionism. And so, a podcast that really lays out the history of the U.S. Ukraine relationship, we felt was so important to set the record straight.

And I'll just say one more thing that, that working with Nastya over the past year, I think you got a good sense of how it was a really healthy dose of perspective. Every time I was maybe feeling tired and trying to finish up an edit or something, and it was quite humbling then to have someone on the other end of Zoom who is eight years younger than I am, has an infant, is under bombardment, is in a, in an air raid shelter. And I, I think that's also what we're trying to do with this podcast is, is really drive home what this experience is like and what the stakes are.

Benjamin Wittes: One of the key voices, perhaps the key voice in the first episode is Fiona who tells this incredible story that I think most Americans have, if they ever knew of, and I certainly did at one point because I lived through it, but I had completely forgotten about it, which is how reticent the United States administration was about the idea of Ukrainian independence to begin with.

And one of the themes that we've been exploring in the podcast is this recurrent cycle of American policymakers not being as fully on board for the idea of an independent Ukraine as they later imagined themselves to have been. And a lot of these episodes seem to involve European cities that begin with ‘Bu’.

But this one actually involved the president going to Kyiv and making a speech not quite against Ukrainian independence, but almost against–

Anastasiia Lapatina: I'd say it was against, just saying.

Benjamin Wittes: It was certainly not for.

And so Fiona, take us back. You have this incredible line in the first episode where you say, you know, I graduated from my master's program and then the field that I was in went out of existence a few months ago, later. But tell us the story of President Bush and his speech to the Ukrainian Parliament.

Fiona Hill: You know, I'm catching the eye here of an old colleague of mine, Marsha McGraw Olive, who will remember all of this very well. We worked together at the Eurasia Foundation, you know, back in the early 1990s. It kind of kicked off thinking about this new transformed landscape after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But yes, I did masters in Soviet Studies, which soon became history, and I did a PhD in history afterwards thinking I needed to rapidly retool after I got my degree in the June of 1991. At the same time as Eduard Shevardnadze, the last foreign minister of the Soviet Union, was getting an honorary degree at the same ceremony and was looking very perplexed, you know, sort of sitting on the on the stage. And he was soon to be the first president of an independent Georgia.

So this is taking us back, you know, a long time to 1991, because by the end of that year, the Soviet Union had, hadn't really collapsed, actually—and that's actually something that's also very important to remember—that it got picked apart by some of the elites at the top, including Boris Yeltsin, the first president of an independent Russia because they wanted to get rid of Mikhail Gorbachev because they, they needed a reconstitution, a reform, a revamping of—sounds a little familiar about where we're sitting at the moment—of the Soviet system. And the heads of the republics of Russia, Belarus, Belarusia, and Ukraine got together to basically dismantle the Soviet Union, intending to keep together in some part.

But before that, as this starts to kind of move through the whole system towards this amazing and really kind of dramatic set of events, George H.W. Bush indeed goes off to Kyiv and starts to make an appeal for, you know, the guys to keep the band together.

And, I mean, it's very interesting to think back on this. Next year, of course, is our 250th anniversary of the U.S. 's own independence, sloughing off the mad King George and the United Kingdom. And it's quite remarkable to think, well, we've come in 250 years, we start to think about what that anniversary's gonna look like next year.

And yet we've had a hard time, despite the fact of being a revolutionary power, a power that's fought for its independence, of really kind of going along with others when they've come to that moment as well. And I think that's because in the meantime, the United States started to become something of an imperial power itself over time.

After being helped by the French to keep the Brits you know, kind of, out of the picture again, you know, during the whole period of 1812, etc., you know, after that we kind of moved on, you know, pretty much doing the same thing as other great world powers were doing at the time too, expanding our territory, etc., etc.

And so George H. W. Bush is feeling very uncomfortable at the idea of a really, kind of what he fears will be, and he was quite right in many respects, a chaotic coming apart of the Soviet Union. We've always told ourselves that it, in fact, it was almost violence and conflict free, and that was not the case at all. And in fact, what we're still in the middle of is the wars of the Soviet succession.

And so this is kind of like 1812. It's, you know, kind of the whole uproar all over again, because Ukraine had been independent, you know, for 30 plus years by the time Russia tries to kind of take it back in the fold again. And in some respects, remember that George H.W. Bush had been the head of the CIA at one point, he might not have been far wrong in thinking that we were heading, you know, to some kind of disastrous outcome down the line if all of this kind of came to pass.

Benjamin Wittes: It's an extremely powerful little story that I think represents something larger, both in Ukraine's relationship with the United States, which is the subject of the podcast, but also Constanze, in Ukraine's relationship with Europe. Because you have this moment where Ukraine becomes independent, but everybody continues to look at Ukraine through the lens of Russia, and that includes particularly European countries who see Ukraine with some degree as a transit situation for Russian natural, natural gas.

And I guess, you know, there's this, we, we clearly see from the Trump administration that this has not changed in the case of the United States; we are, we are back to thinking of Ukraine as something that you negotiate directly with Moscow about, maybe, without even having Ukrainians at the table.

Has Europe learned the lesson that we clearly have not learned?

Constanze Stelzenmüller: I knew when I signed up for this that I was going to be the damn European on this panel.

Benjamin Wittes: No, you're the blessed European on this panel. Are you kidding?

Constanze Stelzenmüller: That's all right. That's all good.

Look, I think there is a lot of fair criticism to lob at Europe and at Germany over its behavior in the past ten years, including the, the fears of the Scholz-led coalition of escalation, right? That said, I do think that circumstances have changed completely. The other place I went to before the Munich Security Conference was, was Brussels. I spent three days running around NATO, the European External Action Service, and the European Commission.

And I think, you know—well, before I get to that, I, I want to, I want to perhaps say something slightly more personal because Anastasia, like you, I was a reporter for a long time. And my, my, my time as a reporter began in the years after the fall of the wall. But because I had trained as a lawyer and as a human rights lawyer, my paper said human rights stories, human rights stories, Rwanda, the Balkans, Afghanistan. So I spent a lot of time covering war crimes and finally war crimes tribunals.

And I am angry every time I read about Russian bombardments of Ukraine. I wake up angry every bloody morning and I go to bed angry about this, right? This is not, this is not okay, right? And I think I can tell you that many of my fellow Europeans and people in my field feel the same way: a visceral, profound anger at Russia. There is no going back for my generation, right, to a comfy relationship with Russia that goes over the head of a country that has been attacked and is attacked every day. I want to make that very clear. Okay.

I also want to say, Anastasiia, that if we are completely fair, some of those air defenses that are protecting Kyiv right now are Danish and German.

Anastasiia Lapatina: Yes. And Norwegian.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: Right. And, and so, and if you look at the numbers, we, we have the president of the United States currently telling us that we don't do anything for Ukraine financially or with military support. I think we all know that if we look at the numbers, those tell another story.

Benjamin Wittes: And Sweden just made a major commitment over the weekend.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: Yeah, and the Danes and so on.

And I will say the other thing here, that's operating here—apart from profound anger, right, about what is being done to Ukraine, and the lies being told about that in Moscow and elsewhere—the other thing that, of course, is motivating Europeans is a very real, very visceral fear about the degree of Russian disinformation and sabotage in, in Europe and in Germany.

There was especially an amount of meddling in the German election that we have not seen, I think, since the Cold War, and maybe not even then. And the intelligence services across Europe, but also in Germany —even in Germany, I should say, because they were long very reticent about this, have been extremely forthright in calling this out and attributing it immediately. And I think the Russians have stopped bothering trying to, trying to hide their signatures.

The people I met in Brussels were working day and night. We're working day and night to cobble together support for Ukraine. We're working day and night to cobble together additional money for European defense. And we're working day and night. And literally, I mean, one of my meetings started at a quarter of nine in the evening, not in the morning.

And I admit, let me maybe perhaps end on a point that it is easy to, I mean, it's easy to say that this is all performative. But the entire European Commission and its leadership and the leader of the Council, and 13 heads of state are today in Kyiv to mark the anniversary. That has to turn into policy, right? That has to turn into money. That has to turn into more weapons. But I, I think it would not be quite fair to say that that's not meaningful, right.

I, all the people that I met meant it deeply. And I think my generation knows that this is the conflict of our lifetime and that the future of Europe depends on its resolution in favor of Ukraine.

Fiona Hill: I just like to add something important to what Constanze said here, because although it might not feel it from the United States and the further, obviously you get away from Washington, D.C., it definitely doesn't feel it. And over the last three years, I've spent a lot of time going all the way around the country talking to audiences about why Ukraine actually is relevant for the United States not just because of Ukrainian-Americans but you know because of actually the dependence that America has had on the larger international system that was really rooted in the transatlantic alliance and how we've actually prospered from it over this.

Time and again, we've kind of forgotten all of this as time has gone on—I mean in the UK they forgot about why Europe was relevant and you know, very Blithely voted for Brexit, you know, for example, so it's not unheard of to kind of, you know, lose the, lose the plot over time and forget about where things are.

But in Europe right now, people know that they're under siege from Russia all the time. So as we're sitting here talking, an inquest has been going on in London about the death of Dawn Sturgess, which is not probably a household name here, but I'm sure that some of you know who she is.

She is the woman who very unfortunately was killed by Novichok from the bottle of perfume that the Russian GRU, the military intelligence, discarded in a charity donation bin that her partner found and brought home, and they spread this perfume on each other, discovering in fact that it was a deadly weapons grade nerve agent that had just been used to poison a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the town of Salisbury.

Now, the only reason this was uncovered is because the UK has a facility near Salisbury, Porton Down, where they you know, a bit like we have in Frederick, Maryland where they can do testing for nerve agents, biological and chemical weapons. So, only eight countries knew that this Novichok even existed. So it was by chance that this you know, actually happened there, and it was able to, to be revealed.

And this is only one, of course, of assassinations that have taken place on British soil. There was Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned by polonium, again a radiological agent. So the first dirty bomb that was used on British soil and also spread polonium all the way around the United Kingdom.

There's lots of evidence of intervention in pretty much every European election. Constant assassinations in the Tiergarten and of course, constant attacks on critical national infrastructure through cyber attacks. In fact, the biggest threat to Europe today is critical national infrastructure and pipelines and cables under the Baltic Sea, the Estonians, the Swedes and others.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: That's a bigger threat than the threats to our freedom and democracy, etc.

Fiona Hill: And so all of this is real in Europe. So Europeans know that what Ukraine has experienced—the destruction of its critical national infrastructure, all of the interventions that have been made in Ukraine's politics before—is what they're facing as well. So although, again, we may be remote here, it doesn't feel remote in the U.S.

And I would say, if you look actually now in polling that I saw like last week in the U.K. for example—where of course the relationship with the United States is extraordinarily important—48 percent of people said in a poll that it was more important to stick by Ukraine that it was to improve the relationship with the United States at this point, 48 percent. In terms of favoring sticking by the United States, it was in the 20s, 20 percent. There was a lot of people said they didn't know because it's a hard, you know, point to be put.

But we're seeing really a shift here where people in Europe now see that their situation is on the line. So again that rupture that we mentioned before is real and it's, it's a really sobering thought. And again as I said before chickens have come home to roost; a lot more should have been done. Many of us have been putting this, you know on the agenda for Europe for a long time. But it is real, the security threat is in Europe. It's not just imagined. It's not just disinformation And it's now viscerally real.

Benjamin Wittes: So Tyler, I want to ask you—I referred earlier to this cycle that began with what came to be called George H.W. Bush's Chicken Kyiv speech, so named by the columnist William Sapphire, in which you know, sort of Ukrainians expect American backing and they don't get it at the level that they expected or that we promise it.

And this is a—we may be going through what I think is the sort of fourth and most dramatic cycle of that, where we actually side with the Russians. But all of these episodes have to do with Ukraine's relationship with Russia, and one of the roles that you play in the podcast is kind of as the sort of naive American who's kind of never–

Tyler McBrien: It came pretty naturally.

Benjamin Wittes: It's a persona because Tyler is anything but naïve. But you're the guy who's like, gee, I didn't know this happened.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I mean, it's a good point. And to any, any other naive Americans listening, or younger listeners, Chicken Kyiv is used pejoratively, which is, you may not know because it's a delicious dish and it's a...

But, no, I mean, you're absolutely right. The history of the U.S. and Ukraine since independence in 1991 has been one of misunderstandings and betrayals and one of our episodes is called ‘The Worst of Both Worlds’ because–

Benjamin Wittes: Also features Fiona.

Tyler McBrien: Exactly, right?

Benjamin Wittes: In one of her prior lives.

Tyler McBrien: The New York Times had an editorial, I believe, over the weekend in which it condemns what they called a complete 180 in U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine, and I was thinking that that's not maybe absolutely true.

You know, it's, you mentioned that the U.S. has viewed Ukraine for a long time through Russian lenses, through a Russian lens. There was a Ukrainian diplomat named Borys Tarasyuk, who we speak to on the podcast, who said the very same thing. He says that the U.S. always looks at Ukraine through Russian glasses and sort of plays by their terms. And so, it seems that the Trump administration is looking at this history and picking the worst lessons and accelerating them and acting on that.

I will say, though, that there was reporting, I believe, this morning out in Bloomberg that the U.S. may commit to a sovereign Ukraine and in the negotiations, which is heartening—whether or not they listened to the first episode of Escalation. I'm not sure. I can't confirm or deny that—but it just seems like that's obviously the bare minimum.

Benjamin Wittes: Can I just point out that we've done that before? Like, that's the Budapest Memo, right?

Anastasiia Lapatina: Yeah.

Tyler McBrien: Exactly.

Benjamin Wittes: So walk us through a couple of those cycles because there are, as I joked earlier, they do tend to be named for cities in Europe that start with ‘Bu’.

The first cycle is the independence of Ukraine itself, right? The Chicken Kyiv speech. The second cycle comes only a few years later. What happens?

Tyler McBrien: Right. So I believe referring to the Budapest Memorandum, which I think maybe a few years ago, you ask Americans who even Americans who are very well versed in foreign policy and in U.S. foreign policy history, may not, it's not a household name, let's put it, but in Ukraine, it very much is.

Benjamin Wittes: And by the way, the only moment of true comedy in the entire podcast is at the beginning of the second episode where our producer, Max, who's sitting here in the front row asks a young Ukrainian activist who is sitting back there Maria Hlyten, what do you think of the Budapest memo? And she exclaims, oh my God, it's a total fail.

And, and you know, this is something that is not in the consciousness of the average American, but you ask a Ukrainian about the Budapest Memo, this is fresh in the front of their mind.

Anastasiia Lapatina: You have to hear how she said it though, for full drama. So make sure to listen to that.

Tyler McBrien: So to catch us up to speed in broad strokes after the fall of the Soviet Union, a large part of the nuclear arsenal left by the Soviets actually was in Ukraine. They couldn't really operate it, a lot of the command and control was, was back in Moscow, it was very expensive to maintain, but nuclear weapons comes with some degree of security.

But the, the deal that was struck was that Ukraine would give up the nuclear weapons for financial incentives, as well as, from the American perspective, assurances of of Ukrainian security from the Ukrainian perspective. I think there was an understanding that it was more of a guarantee there was two different translations, actually, and I think this is emblematic of the relationship. The U.S. wanted some sort of ambiguity to give it more room to maneuver. But that maneuvering or that that room only left room for, for Russia to take advantage of the ambiguity, basically.

And I'll also just end by saying in learning about this, I think it was very important to for Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons, Nastya disagreed. And we sort of had this thing come where it was a microcosm of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship every time we would argue about an episode in the narrative arc and everything. But I think the Budapest Memo is, is a great example.

Benjamin Wittes: One of the striking things about that story when we talked to diplomats at the very senior levels when we talked to people who were literally, in one case, my sister's college roommate who was a 22 year old diplomat at U.S., at Embassy Kyiv at this time, is how guilty they feel about the Budapest Memorandum. And you know, there's actually sound from Bill Clinton talking about how much he regrets it. It's a, it's a remarkable thing that I learned from the reporting of this, which is just how many people have regrets about what, what we did in that context.

Fiona, there's another city in Europe that begins with ‘Bu’, another European capital that where there was an understanding reached that you played a substantial role in a number of years later, that also shows up as one of these kind of recurrent cycles of are not being able to kind of form a coherent policy.

Tell us about what happened in Bucharest.

Fiona Hill: Yes. And I just wanted to quickly add on the Budapest Memorandum. I'd mentioned Eduard Shevardnadze before.

Eduard Shevardnadze, when he was president of Georgia had actually told his Ukrainian counterpart, see if you can keep one or two of the nuclear weapons when they were giving them up around the time of the Budapest Memorandum. They were like, what do we do, stick them in a closet?

You know, kind of, because he basically, he had been of course the Soviet foreign minister and he said he'd seen documents about what would happen if any of, republics had tried to secede. And he said you might find that they might come in handy later. Which of course, if Ukraine had still been a nuclear state, and had, and Belarus had been as well—Belarus has been pretty much swallowed up by Russia—Ukraine probably wouldn't have been invaded.

And the nonproliferation consequences of all of this are real too. Because Constanze and, and others have been noting that in Germany and in many other places now there's talking about Europe needing to have a bomb. And, you know, what's the, also the message to Japan, South Korea, you know, other countries who feel threatened.

And Bucharest, just so we can get back to this point as well, becomes important in that context because it's another effort to give Ukraine and Georgia at the time, you know, some kinds of guarantees for their future security.

Now Bucharest was actually more about Georgia than it was about Ukraine at the time. And this is where, you know, the reference to a worst of both worlds comes. In Ukraine, at the time of the Bucharest NATO summit, which was in 2008, there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm for joining NATO at that point.

So we have to remember, the Ukrainians, you know, the, the politics in Ukraine have taken all kinds of twists and turns. The Ukrainians are kind of aware that and this was at the, at the popular level of the, the population, there wasn't a great overarching support for going into to NATO. I mean, it was more of a kind of an elite project thinking around the Ukrainian president.

But in Georgia, there was a full throated desire at the popular and elite level to become part of part of NATO. And George had been supporting the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was pushing for a membership action plan to NATO. And it was thought—and I'm still trying to, I'm still years later trying to piece together who thought this, because it seems to have been a whole collection of people from all kinds of different backgrounds—that Georgia's case would be strengthened if Ukraine joined in as well.

And so this was the kind of fateful decision a letter was written to George W. Bush asking for Bush's support. President Bush being a good Texan—this is W rather than HW—was more enthusiastic about supporting the feisty countries of Georgia and Ukraine. This was of course after the United States had well and truly waded into Iraq and was trying to pursue the freedom agenda. Bush thought that Ukraine and Georgia and their freedom should also be supported.

I mean, I know this because I did a deep dive, a series of them, for the president. These were the kinds of things that he said. And he said that if they made an appeal, and that on military terms, they looked like they had the wherewithal to contribute to NATO—and Georgia already was, and Ukraine at that time, as we now know, actually still had a sizable and capable army, and certainly in terms of being able to, as we've seen over these last years, keep the Russians somewhat at bay—then he would support the membership action plan.

Problem is, nobody else really supported it elsewhere in Europe. Partly this was to do with Mikhail Saakashvili and perceptions of him and his role. Others knew that, you know, Ukraine wasn't, you know, fully on board at this particular point and there was a lot of resistance.

And so what happened, although we briefed the president and others that this wasn't likely to happen—we actually briefed against it because we think that under the idea that if you push for something you can't get, it's not a great idea because it just sort of shows up weaknesses and all the kind of like divisions

Once President Bush decided to go ahead there was at Bucharest, as we now know, we've heard from Chancellor Merkel's memoirs. It was Chancellor Merkel herself who kind of opined trying to find some kind of solution to some of her Eastern European counterparts at the side table. Well, one day they'll get into NATO.

And that kind of rather casual aside of one day that they might get into NATO was pounced on by many of the East Europeans at the table who were quite supportive, a handful of them who were supportive of pushing for Ukraine's membership action plan as well as Georgia's, yet that was kind of turned into the text of the Bucharest Memorandum.

And why it was the worst of both worlds, that one day they will get into NATO, was it wasn't really a promise. It was a kind of an open door and Putin, of course, wanted to slam that door and jam everyone's foot in it and bash the door off, in you know, Ukraine and Georgia's face. And, of course, in August of 2008, Russia does invade Georgia at the, at a pretext over, you know, basically  exchanges with peacekeepers in South Ossetia—which, frankly, myself and other colleagues have been warning for some kind of flashpoint in Georgia for a good year before that. There were certainly, you know, tensions building up between Georgia and Russia.

And Ukraine realizes at that point that it's completely and utterly exposed in terms of security. Membership action plan is not Article 5; it doesn't, you know, bring you any security at all. And the big flaw in all of NATO, as far as Russia was concerned, was it was backstopped by the United States. Because at this point, Europe hasn't really been contributing, as we all know, you know, to the extent in which it was required.

So all of this comes down to a single point of failure in NATO at this point, which is the United States’s willingness, you know, to kind of really backstop Article 5. And from then on, Putin's trying to test whether the United States is actually willing to, in fact, defend any of its allies, because it knows, and finds out pretty quickly, certainly not Georgia, and later on in 2014, certainly not, not Ukraine.

Constanze Stelzenmüller: I just wanted to point out, since Fiona mentioned proliferation, there's been a, in my view, intellectually, rather academic debate, about nuclear weapons, you know, just in case the Americans, for one reason or another, decided to pivot to Asia.

And that academic debate has just gone live, with comments by the incoming chancellor before the election, saying that we, that in response to the speeches by Secretary of Defense Hegseth at NATO and at the NATO Ministerial in Brussels, and then by Vice President Vance in Munich, that Europe was going to have to develop its own nuclear deterrent. That would mean that the French and the British deterrent, which is per se not enough to replace the American deterrent, would have to be expanded and Germany would have to somehow join in that.

I cannot overemphasize what kind of a sea change that is in the politics of my country, right? That used to be an absolute and complete taboo. And we are in fact signatories, right, of the nonproliferation treaty. But I, I think that what we are seeing here coming out of this White House is taking the lid off of many things, including of proliferation worldwide, right.

And I do not need to describe to anyone the escalation risk inherent in that, right? We have similar debates in Asia, namely in Japan and in South Korea.  And I will say that I, I was at a dinner at NATO, before the Munich Security Conference, where an Eastern European said, well, we'll, we're going to have to get nuclear weapons too. That is where we are. And that's not a good thing.

And I, let me, let me end this by, by saying I personally feel not only do I think that that is ill advised. But it is a, it's a clear, it is of course a response to the fact that, that Russia has successfully employed the threats of nuclear weapons use in this, in its invasion of Ukraine. And that that has served as a significant deterrent against escalation by both the Biden White House and the Scholz chancellery.

So, you can understand the, the political mechanics of this, but the truth is that discussing a European nuclear deterrent is in many ways a, a distraction from a much more urgent issue, which is our conventional deterrent deficiencies and the need to, to dramatically increase our defense industrial production and defense spending.

So there are, there—I just want to point out that there is a NATO summit in the Hague this summer, and there are a lot of extremely urgent questions hanging over that summit. And you can see from the calendar of EU emergency summits that is now beginning on March 6, the Council, then a European Union summit in the third week of March. I think you will see a ticking up of news out of Brussels and out of Europe on developing an independent deterrent of whatever kind.

Benjamin Wittes: I want to ask Nastya one more question, which is in this conversation, we have focused a great deal on American follies and betrayals. But, you know, in the podcast, we actually spend a bit of time on some Ukrainian follies, and Fiona alluded earlier to the politics of Ukraine being a little bit all over the place.

So as a Ukrainian who was not born when any of that happened,

Anastasiia Lapatina: Some of it, not all.

Benjamin Wittes: Some of it, yeah, some of it was more recent. Tell us a little bit about the experience of looking back on Ukrainian history in the course of doing this work.

Anastasiia Lapatina: That was actually extremely fascinating for me, because, as you said, a lot of it I haven't lived through.

I was walking into this show with, you know, being aware of the responsibility of, you know, spreading Ukraine's message. And that's why we have an American co-host and a Ukrainian co-host. You know, I had to make sure that Ukraine's history was written right and given justice. So, we covered a lot of extremely important topics that are underreported or that Western audiences don't understand. Like, for example, we spent a great deal of talking about language politics because everyone is utterly confused about it. So we had to explain it.

But yeah, there were moments where it was very uncomfortable for me and also quite eye opening that actually it's not just evil Americans who messed it all up. And I mean, I'm exaggerating, of course, I always knew that's not the case. But it was very interesting to see that Americans and Europeans had their great deal of problems, but also very often the Ukrainian government has messed up badly again and again. And we really made ourselves look unreliable, corrupt, and often a lot like Russia as well.

And so it was very important for me to, of course, be as objective and as truthful as possible, you know, and to put my Ukrainian hat off and my journalist hat on, and I'm proud of all of the work that we've done. And I think it's going to be amazing to see each issue that we've covered, each summit, each city, each event, has these two distinct viewpoints of it and, and kind of two roots from the American and Ukrainian point of view. So I really hope all of you enjoy it.

Benjamin Wittes: We are going to leave it there. Thank you to Constanze, Tyler, Nastya, and Fiona.

Tyler McBrien: The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare material supporter at our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters.

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