Handing off a war
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This is Today Explained, I'm Sean Ramos from there's been a lot of news out of Ukraine in the past few weeks. "Ukraine used a US missile system to strike deep into Russian territory for the first time on Tuesday." "People in the Dnipro saw the extraordinary scene on their skyline.

of that multi-warhead Russian missile experiment. - Nuclear saber rattling from the Kremlin this morning with Vladimir Putin. - And I don't wanna make it about us, but I couldn't help but wonder how much of it had to do with our recent election here in the United States. So I asked Josh Keating at Vox. - I think it has a lot to do with the election.

President Trump has come in, said he wants to push for negotiations to end the war. And I think what we see from both sides is an attempt to press their advantage before they're pushed by the new U.S. administration into some kind of talks. How two American presidents are shaping the future of the war in Ukraine at the same time coming up on the show today.

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You're listening to Today Explained. Luke Harding at The Guardian has been covering the war in Ukraine since it started. We asked him what's changed in the past few weeks. Yeah, it's really been hotting up on several fronts, political, military, internationally, on the battlefield. ♪

I visited recently in the northeast Kharkiv region a place called Kupinsk and also another front line near Sumy where Ukraine has since August occupied a chunk of territory inside Russia. At least 11 people, including two children, were killed by a Russian missile on Sunday night, Ukraine officials said. It hit a nine-story residential building in the northeastern region of Sumy. There is full-scale fighting going on. It's...

loud. A morning shattered by the eerie wail of air raid sirens, then drones and missiles that were intercepted, and those that were not. In Kupinsk, where I was, the Russians were a couple of miles away. They are sending drones into the streets to chase and hunt civilians. And Russia is winning the war in the east of Ukraine.

purely because of mass. It's got more of everything. It's got more men. It's got more tanks. It's got more warplanes. And, you know, meanwhile, of course, the other big development is Donald Trump. I believe I will be able to make a deal between President Putin and President Zelensky quite quickly. What that means, Kiev, the presidential administration of Volodymyr Zelensky, is bracing for impact

I believe that the war will end, and it will not end in the abstract. The war will end faster with the policy of the team that will now lead the White House. And interestingly, opinion in Kiev about what Trump will mean for Ukraine is mixed. There's quite a strong...

faction, group of people who think that Trump might just be good news for Ukraine, that he might somehow bring about an end to the war. I will get it solved in rapid order.

And it will take me no longer than one day. And managed to cut a deal with Vladimir Putin because by now there was an enormous frustration with the Biden administration, with its policy of incrementalism, everything too little too late, with its caution, with the fact that it freaks out whenever Putin says the nuclear word.

And some people think that Trump might just be the person to kind of change all this. There are other more cool-headed Ukrainians who think that Trump will be a disaster, that he will sell out Ukraine to Russia and essentially enforce...

kind of capitulation light, some kind of deal where Ukraine gives up territory, makes a commitment not to join NATO, and so on. But the countdown is on until January the 20th. We don't really quite know what's going to happen. And in addition to the Trump development, we also have

some Biden-related developments, namely Biden giving Zelensky permission to do things they haven't been able to do to this point. Can you tell us a bit about that? Yeah, there's been a long and difficult and contentious conversation that has been happening since really last year, or if not before, where Zelensky and his team have been asking the White House, the Biden White House, for permission to carry out

deep strikes inside Russia using attackams, using long-range American systems which are highly effective and highly accurate. And Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Biden, have basically said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And to the point where really I think

To some degree, you can say it's spoiled the relationship between Biden and Zelensky because it's become mistrustful. Various official, Pentagon officials, other officials, complaining loudly about the Ukrainians, about their rudeness, about their...

military failings and so on. And the Ukrainians for whom this war is existential, bear in mind that people are dying every night. Russian missiles are striking all the time, killing civilians, killing kids, killing families. They are saying, just give us these tools. And finally, in the very twilight of his presidency, after Kamala Harris lost the election with Trump

on the horizon, the White House has allowed these strikes and Ukraine has wasted no time in whacking strategic targets. So there's a real sense that the tempo of war is stepping up, not that it's ever been slack. It's always been pretty busy. Presumably the chief reason Biden didn't want to give Ukraine the go-ahead here is because he wanted to avoid

Escalating with Russia, provoking Russia. How is Russia responding? Was Russia provoked? Yeah, I mean, the question is a fair one, but the paradigm is completely wrong. I mean, we just have to sort of go back to basics here. Russia invaded Ukraine more than 10 years ago when an ex-Crimean started a kind of covert

military operation in the east of the country and seize the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. Large groups of pro-Russia troops surrounding Ukrainian bases, ordering their forces off of them so they can occupy them. The international warning to Russia to end its invasion is being ignored. So Russia's been escalating all the way through. And then, of course, in February 2022, it launched the biggest war, land war in Europe since 1945 with

shock and awe with tank divisions trying to capture Kiev with a multi-pronged invasion. They're being pushed to the limit by Russia's full-scale invasion with attacks across Ukraine from areas near those pro-Russian enclaves in the east to the capital Kiev in the west. Which

the Ukrainians, really to the surprise of America and other allies, kind of batted back. Village by village, Ukrainian soldiers are pushing Russian troops away from Kharkiv and back towards the Russian border. And they've been, you know, trying to take back territory and really, you know, in the last year or so, just hold the front line with varying degrees of success. And...

During this period, there have been no nuclear strikes. You know, Putin has not nuked Texas or London or Paris or indeed Kiev or southern Ukraine. It's the most enormous bluff.

And it's a sort of psychological operation designed to cow the democratic world and to make them afraid of supporting Ukraine. And also to promote the myth that Russia can't lose this war. And if I'm not mistaken, Russia is now increasing the threat of...

Of nuclear warfare, is that right? No. No? Not really. Is it a myth? I mean, it's rhetorical. It's performative. It's ultimately fake. I mean, the threat of Russia launching a nuclear attack is no greater now than it was...

two years ago. The reality is that in any direct confrontation between Russia and the US and its allies, Russia would lose. I mean, America is a more formidable power. NATO is bigger and mightier. And it's just a sort of tremendous bluff. I mean, I think it should be interpreted as an operational, informational game.

I think what's a more realistic scenario is not the Russians launching nukes, is some kind of fuck-up. Bear in mind that Russia has occupied since spring 2022 the nuclear power station in Zaporizhia. It blew up the reservoir which provided the cooling pond. It's been shelling from this nuclear facility across the river into Ukrainian settlements. I've seen them. I've been there. And I think some kind of Chernobyl-style...

you know, mess up, where Russia just gets it wrong because it's not very good at these protocols, is more probable than a kind of calculated Russian military strike. I think that is just a kind of negotiating tactic ahead of some kind of possible deal in spring. And the ultimate strategy

audience for this is one Donald J. Trump, back in the White House, who could potentially portray himself as a peacemaker, the man who avoided nuclear war, and all of his flatterers and supporters can say, you know, Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize because, look, he's avoided World War Three and he's brought peace to Ukraine, which, by the way, I don't think is going to be peace.

Look at Russia's past record for deals. It breaks them. And then it sort of continues doing what it wants to do. And I think, Sean, this is a fascist project. Putin believes that Ukraine does not exist. He thinks this is historical Russia. He wants to de-Ukrainize Ukraine and turn the whole country, its people, back into a Russian province. That's his goal. He thinks he can get there. And I think he thinks that Trump ultimately is someone that he can...

if not exactly dupe, I would say outmaneuver. Luke Harding, he's got a new book about Ukraine. It's called Invasion, Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival. Find this light holiday reading wherever you find your books. Biden's in charge for the moment, but all eyes are on Trump. The trouble with two presidents when we're back on Today Explained.

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Josh Keating is a senior correspondent at Vox who writes about foreign policy. We asked him if the incoming Trump administration is at all miffed by how much action the outgoing Biden administration is taking on Ukraine. So the last tranche of Ukraine aid was allocated by Congress last April. After more than six months, a bill pledging further military aid for Ukraine finally passed. President Zelensky, how is your meeting going?

President Zelensky had personally met with U.S. lawmakers to lobby for support. That was $61 billion. And basically they're trying to rush whatever they can out the door before Inauguration Day. So they're trying to, like, get all these contracts in place, get as much aid moving to Ukraine now as they can. The incoming Trump administration does seem to be sort of irritated by this situation.

We saw Richard Grenell, who was the former Trump administration ambassador to Germany, a real kind of like sharp elbowed, you know, you know,

Troll, basically, a guy who talks a lot of smack on social media and did so even when he was a diplomat. He's accused the Biden administration on Twitter of escalating the war before he leaves office. There's been some coverage that's mentioned him as potentially a candidate for the Trump administration's envoy to Ukraine. So he could be somebody who's like very closely involved in this. Right. It is fascinating.

plausible that Biden is trying to ramp up his support for Ukraine in advance of an administration coming in that has been less than totally sympathetic to Ukraine? Absolutely. And whenever you're in a negotiation, you want to be in the best position possible when you start from that negotiation. You don't have to have written the art of the deal to know that you want to move into talks from a position of strength.

And I think that, you know, there's clearly a desire that if

Ukraine and Russia are pressured into a position where they're talking about territorial concessions. You want Ukraine to be controlling as much territory as they can before those talks start. Have we seen something like this before? I mean, certainly this isn't the first time a presidential transition is happening in the middle of a conflict abroad. Yeah, I mean, we're in this...

awkward period right now where there are basically two U.S. presidents, four

foreign actors, international actors, have to deal with both of those realities. They have to press their advantage as much as they can with the team that's there now and also position themselves for the one that's coming in. And we have seen this before, especially when one administration is handing off a war to the next one. One example you could look at is the

transition from Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower when the Korean War was going on. Eisenhower had promised to end the war, which by that point had become very unpopular, but he hadn't quite spelled out on the campaign trail how he was going to do it. And this

really annoyed Truman, who had basically made the argument, hey, buddy, if you know how to end the war, could you please share that with us? We'd like to end the war before we leave office.

And Eisenhower made this famous pledge. He said, I shall go to Korea to basically, you know, assess the situation on the ground and figure out how to end it. During his three-day stay in Korea, Ike is determined to meet as many veterans from the battlefront as he can and from their experiences plan a way of ending this bitter conflict.

And he went and had a fact-finding mission and came to the conclusion the war wouldn't be winnable with another big offensive, which is what the South Koreans and what hawks in the U.S. wanted. And he basically continued the armistice talks that Truman had started. And a few months after he took office, that war did finally end. Tonight we greet with prayers of thanksgiving.

The official news that an armistice was signed almost an hour ago in Korea. Sometimes we've seen the incoming administration actually kind of stymie or sabotage the efforts of the outgoing one. I pledge to you, we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.

In 1968, the Nixon campaign basically reached out to the South Vietnamese negotiators and told them not to agree to a deal that would end the war in Vietnam and would presumably give the outgoing Johnson administration a big win and make the Democrats look good in that election.

We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on this outskirts with our enemies and our friends both.

And so the war actually ended up continuing for another few years with, you know, a lot more casualties, Americans and Vietnamese. I came back from Vietnam in 1967, and here it is 1971. I still haven't seen the end of the war in sight yet.

And then, you know, a final example we could talk to is a more recent one, is the war in Afghanistan. President Trump has just nine weeks left in his term. During that time, he's expected to sharply cut U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan and Iraq. Donald Trump agreed to the deal with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. And the withdrawal actually began before the Biden administration came in.

Two days ago, the United States signed a deal with the Taliban so that after 19 years of conflict and very close to 20, we can finally begin to bring our amazing troops back home. Biden probably would have wanted to get those troops out anyway, but I think would have preferred to negotiate it on his own terms. So we're left with a simple decision. Either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan,

or say we weren't leaving and commit another tens of thousands more troops going back to war. And it's actually interesting if you look at how Trump talks about that now. He's criticized Biden quite a bit for how the withdrawal was handled, including, you know, the terrorist attack that could, you know, kill people, including a number of U.S. troops. Afghanistan, the most embarrassing day in the history of our country.

And none of the generals got fired for the incompetence that they showed. But, you know, I think all these examples just go to show you can talk about, you know, conditions on the battlefield, the weapons each side has. But, you know, these U.S. elections are themselves kind of developments in the war and they affect the strategy that all sides in the conflict are pursuing. And do these examples...

Especially the last one you gave about Afghanistan, where it was the same two characters involved. Tell us anything about what might shake out with this war in Ukraine in the coming months. Yeah, well, I'm going to steal an argument from Sam Green, a really smart Russia analyst, who his basic point was that

Putin, up until this point, has managed to use uncertainty to his advantage and use the fact that he's the most unpredictable character in this drama to his advantage. He's no longer the most unpredictable character. I'll keep you in suspense. You know, Trump's coming in and Putin may not be able to sort of leverage uncertainty about, you know, just how crazy he is, just how much he's willing to escalate this to his advantage to quite the same extent because now...

Now there's somebody who prides himself on being, you know, the potentially craziest guy in the room. That's not me saying that. That's Trump has actually, like, talked about his approach and framed it that way. I think it's pretty clear that the Trump team is going to push for negotiations. Will that work, though? It's possible Russia may just say no. They may say, we're winning on the battlefield. We're walking away from this.

In which case, you know, Trump has said that he would tell Putin like he's just going to give Zelensky everything right now. He's going to send him all the weapons, let him do whatever he wants. So I don't think it's out of the question. This could actually end with the U.S. escalating its involvement in the war in Ukraine.

And then there's the question, you know, what does a deal actually look like? You can say we want to freeze the lines in place. I think there is a consensus developing that this is going to end with some current

internationally recognized Ukrainian territory held by Russia. But the Ukrainians are going to want security guarantees. They don't want a repeat of the deals they've made in the past where they've sort of agreed to ceasefires with Russia and then Russia's violated them. And so, you know, they say they want full membership in NATO. That, to be honest, seems unlikely. But so then what does security guarantees look like? You know, is it

basing Western troops in Ukraine? Is it, you know, providing them with a lot more military aid? If they don't get that, I could see the Ukrainians just walking away from the deal saying, we're going to keep fighting with whatever we have. We shouldn't assume that, you know, this war is going to end just because Donald Trump wants it to.

Josh Keating, Vox.com. This episode of Today Explained was produced by Hadi Mawagdi and Halima Shah. They were edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir. Tomorrow on the show, we're going to talk about how you can make the world a better place.

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