Russia Is Stuck in Ukraine but Still Has the Strength to Open a New Front Against NATO
Russian forces have not won in Ukraine, but the war of attrition has produced the world's most advanced drone-infantry combat experience; the guest argues Russia is fully capable of launching a limited probe against NATO, and the window is in the final stretch of Trump's term.
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Trump's abandonment rhetoric may be taken seriously by Putin
Everyone is speculating whether John Ratcliffe's secret visit to Russia was about negotiating terms. The guest's judgment is that the visit was more like delivering a message on Trump's behalf: don't take the TV talk about 'America not caring about Europe' literally—if Russia invades Lithuania, Estonia, or Finland, the U.S. will send troops. The reasoning is that Moscow is bogged down in a war of attrition in Ukraine and urgently needs to cut off European support for Kyiv; escalating to probe NATO is one option, and Trump's earlier statements like 'Europe is a bunch of freeloaders' give Putin room for misreading, hence the need for a dedicated trip to clarify the red lines. To be clear: the guest does not have intelligence from that room; he is explaining why this account 'makes complete sense,' not confirming it.
— Yaroslav TrofimovThe Russian military is not exhausted and can still open a limited front
Is Russia, having failed to take Ukraine by force, incapable of opening another front? The guest's answer is blunt: it absolutely can fight a 'limited front'—not tanks rolling across Poland to Paris, but making trouble in the Baltic direction, such as sealing the Suwalki Gap, that narrow land corridor. He says the Russian and Ukrainian militaries are the only two in the world that have turned modern drone-infantry warfare into a daily routine. Stories of a 20-person Ukrainian drone squad destroying an entire traditional battalion are widely told, but the Russian side has the same technology: 20 Russians could equally destroy a NATO battalion that has not been trained against drones. The outside world thinks Russia is weakening with each battle, but it overlooks that Russia is also the side being tempered in this technological revolution.
— Yaroslav TrofimovNATO might not even get Poland to save Lithuania
A war game simulating 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 insufficient military strength, but that Russian forces advance too quickly, and with the nuclear deterrent looming, allies would hesitate over whether to 'enter the fray,' creating a chain of inaction. The guest says Moscow has factored this into its options. He also reminds that this is different from before 2022—then, one could clearly see over a hundred thousand Russian troops massing on the German-Belarusian border; now there is no such physical preparation. Therefore, the most direct escalation may not be a conventional invasion, but rather small, ambiguous, deniable attacks (first hitting warehouses or drones).
— Yaroslav TrofimovRussia is probing NATO's limits with drones
In the current phase, with no signs of a massed army, Russia still holds a set of low-cost, low-attribution options: launching a limited strike on a NATO warehouse near Poland or Romania, or using captured and modified Ukrainian drones to create an incident, then watching whether NATO splits and whether the U.S. steps in. The guest points out that such probing is already underway—an armed drone struck a Ukrainian aircraft parked at Leipzig Airport in Germany, and only a drone malfunction prevented casualties; Russia's risk-taking behavior is steadily rising, and the West has yet to give a serious response. The senior European officers he has spoken with all believe the most dangerous time window is the next one to two years, roughly falling in the final stretch of Trump's term—the Kremlin will want to act before the U.S. might let go.
— Yaroslav TrofimovPutin wants Ukraine disarmed, not a ceasefire
Would Putin accept a dignified ceasefire agreement? The guest's view is that just looking at what is on the negotiating table makes it clear: Russia's demands have always included not just territory, but also setting limits on the size of Ukraine's military, restricting weapons types, and cutting off Western military aid. In his words, it is to make Ukraine 'lose its ability to defend itself'; not neutrality, but 'castration,' so that it cannot resist again in the next phase of war—a year, five years, or ten years later. Putin signed Minsk-1 and Minsk-2, and violated both. So the guest quotes a former Ukrainian foreign minister's summary: this war will end in only one of two outcomes—the end of Ukraine, or the end of the Russian imperial project. Waiting for the other side to come around is not an option.
— Yaroslav TrofimovStreet protests can decide the fate of a wartime cabinet
Kyiv's recent personnel earthquake appears on the surface to be an anti-corruption campaign, but the key mechanism lies elsewhere: wartime has frozen elections, and the president's legitimacy now rests on only one ballast stone—'street support.' Zelensky initially fired Defense Minister Fedorov, who championed drone innovation, because he needed the support of Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi; after Fedorov was dismissed, Kyiv's elite took to the streets in protest, small in scale but enough to make the president reverse course—he removed Syrskyi, replaced him with a younger general more popular at the front, and appointed a defense minister with an intelligence background acceptable to all sides. Ukraine's independent anti-corruption agency can still investigate people in the president's inner circle; Zelensky once tried to amend the law to bring the agency under his control, and within a week he backed down under street pressure. When elections are absent, the square becomes the election.
— Yaroslav TrofimovResistance stems from memory, not heroism
To reduce Ukrainians' perseverance to patriotic heroism misses what truly drives them. The guest says that when Russian forces take a Ukrainian town, one of the first things they often do is use bulldozers to demolish monuments to the victims of the 1930s Holodomor—they want to erase a memory. Russian state television, meanwhile, talks about how to 're-educate' Ukrainians, making them forget their language and culture and become Russians. Around World War II, the Soviet Union carried out systematic purges of Ukraine's cultural elite; the guest, as a child, had no idea those writers existed because the collective memory had been wiped out. Today's Ukrainians are almost all descendants of survivors of that meat-grinder history, carrying trauma in their bodies; it is the fear of 'never again' that makes them prefer to die on the battlefield than return to those days.
— Yaroslav TrofimovHalf a million veterans held the first wave of collapse
On the night of February 23, 2022, most people in Kyiv did not believe war would come; the guest remembers that his experience in Kabul and Baghdad taught him that 'impossible' can flip overnight, but ordinary Ukrainians had no such reference. What truly kept the country from collapsing in the first days was the eight-year war in Donbas: that fighting was far from Kyiv, but it trained roughly 500,000 Ukrainians who had fought against Russian forces, and volunteer organizations evolved into a flexible, daring force. The psychological threshold had already been crossed in Donbas—'we know what they look like, we know how to fight.' Because of that experience, Putin's expected quick collapse did not happen, and the West's expectations were also broadly wrong.
— 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 estimate) | Hundreds of thousands, possibly more | 39:40 |
| 1930s Ukrainian famine death toll (guest statement) | Millions | 38:37 |
| Age of dismissed Ukrainian Defense Minister Fedorov | 30s | 29:57 |
| Length of Ukraine's independence (guest statement) | 35 years | 38:37 |
Glossary
- Article 5
- The core collective defense clause of the NATO charter: an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.
- Suwalki Gap
- The narrow land corridor between Poland and Lithuania, the only land route for NATO to reinforce the Baltic states.
- Minsk-1 / Minsk-2
- Ceasefire agreements reached in 2014 and 2015 to end the fighting in Donbas, both of which Russia failed to honor.
- Operation Spiderweb
- A Ukrainian intelligence operation targeting strategic sites inside Russia, which has destroyed Russian strategic bombers as far away as Siberia.
How to listen
Those following Eastern European geopolitics, energy, and defense security, as well as foreign-policy readers trying to gauge the real leverage in Russia-Ukraine negotiations.