Russia Is Stuck in Ukraine, but Still Has Room to Open a New Front Against NATO
Russia has not won in Ukraine, but attrition has forged the world's most advanced drone-infantry warfare experience; the guest argues it has ample capacity for a limited probe against NATO, and the window is the final phase of Trump's term.
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Trump's anti-Europe talk may be taken literally by Putin
Everyone is guessing whether John Ratcliffe's secret trip to Russia was there to negotiate terms. The guest's judgment is that the visit looks more like carrying a message from Trump to the Russian side: don't take those on-air remarks about ‘America not caring about Europe’ seriously — if Russia invades Lithuania, Estonia or Finland, the US will send troops. The reasoning is that Moscow is bogged down in a war of attrition in Ukraine and badly needs to cut off European support for Ukraine, so escalating with a probe against NATO is one option, while Trump's earlier statements that ‘Europe is a bunch of freeloaders’ gave Putin room to misread, hence the need for a special trip to make the red line clear. One caveat: the guest does not have intelligence from inside that room; he is explaining why the account ‘makes complete sense’, not confirming it.
— Yaroslav TrofimovRussia's army isn't exhausted — it can still open a limited front
Russia has been unable to take Ukraine for a long time — does that mean it cannot open another front? The guest's answer is blunt: it can absolutely open a ‘limited front’ — not tanks rolling across Poland all the way to Paris, but making trouble in the Baltic direction, for instance blockading the narrow land corridor of the Suwalki Gap. He says the Russian and Ukrainian armies are the only two in the world today that fight modern drone-infantry warfare as a daily routine. The story of a 20-man Ukrainian drone team crushing an entire traditional battalion is widely told, but the Russian military has the same technology in hand: 20 Russians can likewise wipe out a NATO battalion that has not trained against drones. Outsiders assume Russia grows weaker the longer it fights, and overlook that it is also one of the parties being tempered by this technological revolution.
— Yaroslav TrofimovNATO might not even save Lithuania from Poland
A war game designed to simulate a Russian invasion of Lithuania led the guest to a deeply unsettling conclusion: even Poland did not send troops to save Lithuania, let alone other allies. The reason is not a lack of military strength, but that Russian forces advance too fast and nuclear deterrence hangs over everything, so allies fall into hesitation over ‘whether to enter’, producing a chain of waiting and watching. The guest says Moscow factors exactly this into its options. He also cautions that this is not quite the same as before 2022 — back then, more than a hundred thousand Russian troops massing could be clearly seen on the German and Belarusian borders, and there is no such material preparation yet. So the most immediate escalation may not be a conventional invasion, but small, ambiguous attacks that can be denied (hitting a warehouse or a drone first).
— Yaroslav TrofimovRussia is already probing NATO's limits with drones
At this stage, with no sign of a massed army at the border, Russia still holds a set of low-cost, low-attribution options: a limited strike on a NATO warehouse near Poland or Romania, or using a captured Ukrainian drone modified to create an incident, then watching whether NATO splits and whether the US steps in. The guest points out that such probing is already underway — an armed drone attacked a Ukrainian aircraft parked at Leipzig airport in Germany, and only a drone malfunction prevented deaths; Russian risk-taking is rising steadily, and the West has so far given no serious response. The senior European officers he has spoken with all believe the most dangerous window is the next one to two years, roughly falling in the final phase of Trump's term — the Kremlin will want to act before the US might let go.
— Yaroslav TrofimovPutin wants Ukraine disarmed, not a ceasefire
Would Putin accept a decent ceasefire deal? The guest's view is that you only have to look at what is put on the table: Russia has consistently demanded not just territory, but a cap on the size of Ukraine's army, limits on the types of weapons it may hold, and a cutoff of Western military aid to Ukraine. In his words, the goal is to make Ukraine ‘lose the ability to defend itself’; not neutral, but ‘castrated’, so that it cannot rise again in the next stage of the war — a year, five years or ten years later. Putin signed Minsk-1 and Minsk-2, and violated both. So the guest quotes the summary of Ukraine's former foreign minister: this war will end in one of only two ways — the end of Ukraine, or the end of the Russian imperial project. Waiting for the other side to change its mind is not on the menu.
— Yaroslav TrofimovStreet protests can decide the fate of a wartime cabinet
Kyiv's recent personnel earthquake looks on the surface like an anti-corruption storm, but the key mechanism lies elsewhere: elections are frozen in wartime, and the president's legitimacy rests on a single ballast stone — ‘street support’. Zelensky initially fired Defense Minister Fedorov, who drove drone innovation, because he needed the backing of Commander-in-Chief Syrsky; after Fedorov was dismissed, Kyiv elites took to the streets, and the protests, small as they were, were enough to make the president reverse course — he removed Syrsky, brought in a younger general more popular at the front, and appointed a defense minister with a veteran intelligence background acceptable to all sides. Ukraine's independent anti-corruption bodies can still pursue people in the president's innermost circle, and when Zelensky tried to amend the law to absorb that body, he backed down within a week under street pressure. When elections are absent, the square equals the ballot box.
— Yaroslav TrofimovResistance comes from memory, not heroism
Summing up Ukrainian perseverance as patriotic heroism misses what actually drives them. The guest says that after Russian troops take a Ukrainian town, one of the first things they often do is send bulldozers to tear down monuments to the victims of the 1930s famine — what they want to delete is a memory. Russian state television talks about how to ‘re-educate’ Ukrainians, making them forget their language and culture and become Russians. Around World War II the Soviets carried out a systematic purge of Ukraine's cultural elite, and in the guest's childhood he had no idea those writers existed, because collective memory had been erased. Ukrainians today are almost all descendants of survivors of that meat grinder of history, carrying the trauma in their bodies; it is precisely the fear of ‘never again’ that makes them prefer to die on the battlefield rather than return to that life.
— Yaroslav TrofimovHalf a million veterans blocked the first wave of collapse
On the night of February 23, 2022, most people in Kyiv still did not believe there would be a war; the guest remembers knowing from his experience in Kabul and Baghdad that ‘impossible’ can flip overnight, but ordinary Ukrainians had no such reference point. What really kept the country from collapsing in the first days was eight years of war in the Donbas: that fighting was far from Kyiv, but it produced roughly 500,000 Ukrainians who had traded blows with the Russian army, and volunteer organizations evolved into a flexible, aggressive force. The psychological threshold had already been crossed in the Donbas — ‘we know what they look like, we know how to fight them’. Because of that experience, the swift collapse Putin expected did not happen, and the West's widespread expectations were wrong too.
— Yaroslav TrofimovIn their own words · checked verbatim
if you invade Lithuania or Estonia or Finland, the US will be there.
Yaroslav Trofimov19:16
it turned out that not even Poland sent troops to help Lithuania, let alone Germany
Yaroslav Trofimov21:27
this war will end either with the end of Ukraine or with the end of the Russian imperial project.
Yaroslav Trofimov26:51
Basically, they want to render Ukraine defenseless.
Yaroslav Trofimov27:53
you have this independent system that does not work for the president and goes after the people in the closest inner circle of the president and puts them in jail.
Yaroslav Trofimov37:35
one of the first things they do is they send a bulldozer to destroy the monument to the victims of this famine of the 1930s because they want to destroy the historical memory.
Yaroslav Trofimov38:37
And half a million Ukrainians had gone through this fighting with the Russians and had learned not to fear the Russians.
Yaroslav Trofimov45:59
Figures
| Current war death toll (guest's estimate) | Hundreds of thousands, possibly more | 39:40 |
| Deaths in the 1930s Ukrainian famine (guest's statement) | Millions | 38:37 |
| Age of dismissed Ukrainian Defense Minister Fedorov | In his 30s | 29:57 |
| Length of Ukraine's independence (guest's statement) | 35 years | 38:37 |
Glossary
- Article 5
- The core collective-defense clause of the NATO charter: an attack on any member is treated as an attack on all members.
- Suwalki Gap
- The narrow strip of land between Poland and Lithuania, the only land choke point for NATO to reinforce the Baltic states.
- Minsk-1 / Minsk-2
- Ceasefire agreements reached in 2014 and 2015 to end the fighting in the Donbas, both of which Russia failed to honor.
- Operation Spiderweb
- A Ukrainian intelligence operation against strategic targets inside Russia that destroyed Russian strategic bombers as far away as Siberia.
How to listen
People watching Eastern European geopolitics, energy and defense security, and foreign-policy readers trying to judge the real leverage in Russia-Ukraine negotiations.