Is the US ghosting Ukraine?

00:00
Speaker 1
I am feeling that I have to be here. War with Russia is my war also.

00:11
Speaker 2
It's been almost two years since Russia escalated its war with Ukraine, and two years in Ukraine is desperate for military aid from the United States. Your money is not charity. It's an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way. And it's not just Zelensky begging for money, it's Biden.

00:36
Speaker 3
Putin is banking on the United States failing to deliver for Ukraine. We must prove him wrong.

00:46
Speaker 2
But there are no signs that Congress is going to budge, and at present, they're not going to budge because of the US Mexico border. Believe it or not, it's a big.

00:55
Speaker 4
Old mess, and we're gonna try and.

00:56
Speaker 2
Make sense of it. On today explained.

01:02
Speaker 5
This is today explained.

01:05
Speaker 1
I was ready to go to the army because I have to do it.

01:10
Speaker 2
We got in touch with a ukrainian soldier on the eastern front of this war this week. He wanted to remain anonymous to protect his safety if he were to get captured. But we verified his identity.

01:22
Speaker 1
Every day we laugh on each other, different jokes. It's also because without jokes, it's not so good. Without jokes, it's so like gray day, dark day, and a lot of brother in arms, our brother in arms were killed also, and civilian peoples were killed. But we need to support each other. And jokes, it's good way. Maybe coffee, maybe some sandwiches, maybe something. Sweets also support our blood and our soul. And we have to have this optimism, I mean, inside of us to do our tasks. And I try, I talk to myself that, okay, I have to be in good condition, and my brain have to be cold and my heart have to be warm, hot heart.

02:43
Speaker 1
It's so difficult because now we don't have enough weapons, enough needed things, you know, to save our city, to save our people, like air defense, like armed machines, also like artillery things and others. So we have optimism inside of us, but we need more military things to cope with this russian army.

03:30
Speaker 2
We wanted to hear what this war looks like as it approaches its two year anniversary. So we got in touch with Luke Harding at the guardian, who spends a lot of time on the ground in Ukraine.

03:41
Speaker 6
The situation on the ground is the Russians are slowly but surely moving forward now. Last year, 2023, there were high hopes that the Ukrainians might be able to take back more territory, particularly in the south. With a summer counteroffensive, Ukraine is finally on the march.

04:00
Speaker 7
Spring has become summer, and defensive operations switched to offensive ones.

04:08
Speaker 6
I was there when it started, and basically they ran into massive, entrenched russian fortifications, minefields, air defence and so on. And that didn't work. And really, I would say since kind of late autumn and winter, the Russians have been pushing, pushing with a series of assaults across the front line, which, by the way, is more than 600 miles long, but particularly in the east. So the whole idea is an attempt.

04:36
Speaker 2
To cut off the land bridge between russian held territory and the russian held crimean peninsula.

04:43
Speaker 6
And what we're seeing is massive attacks involving infantry, tanks, armored vehicles, aviation, and with tens of thousands of russian soldiers being killed. I mean, I was on the front line recently near a town called Avdievka, which the Russians have been trying to seize since last October. And I talked to one ukrainian soldier who said, they come, we kill them, then more of them come. Close up, you see trenches. There are booms from outgoing artillery, whistles from incoming projectiles. There is mud, rats. Now frost. It's very cold in Ukraine, with glassy looking trees and treacherous conditions everywhere in these kind of bare, frozen fields, but with the addition of drones.

05:32
Speaker 6
So it's this mashup between First World War, early 20th century and 21st war, where both sides have got complete reconnaissance of the battlefield, and it's impossible to do anything but by stealth or by surprise. And you would have thought that these sort of tactics where hundreds of russian soldiers die every day, that they would change up, but they're not. And the sort of Putin strategy is to overwhelm Ukraine, to smother Ukraine, to use Russia's superior volumes of everything, whether it's artillery or ballistic missiles or warplanes, and to grind out some kind of victory.

06:13
Speaker 2
It sounds like this counteroffensive has failed.

06:16
Speaker 6
Yeah, I mean, that's right. I mean, these things are always, sean, they're always sort of perspectival. So if were sitting here, let's say two years ago, early 2022, before the full scale invasion, and I said, well, at that point, the Pentagon, the US, basically assumed that the Russians would overrule Ukraine, topple the government of Vladimir Zelensky, set up a puppet administration in Kiev, and fold Ukraine back into Russia. And that didn't happen. I mean, the Russians tried to take Kiev, but they failed. And actually, Ukraine's taken back quite a lot of territory. But the problem now is that their capacity to take more depends on the supply of weapons from the west and from the United States in particular. And what we know perfectly well is that this is being held up by Congress. It's become the subject of a bitter partisan debate.

07:06
Speaker 6
And this has a direct effect on the battlefield. I talked to ukrainian servicemen who say that they noticed a dip in the amount of munitions they were getting in about late summer of last year, and they're now just completely outgunned. And they say the problem isn't infantry. They don't mind that the Russians have got more people. It's a country of 140,000,000. The problem is, it was Stalin who called artillery the God of war. And there's more God on the russian side than on the ukrainian side.

07:30
Speaker 4
Artillery is the God of war.

07:33
Speaker 2
What about manpower? Because Russia's got an advantage there, too, right?

07:37
Speaker 6
There's the numerical advantage. Of course they've got more people. They've got about 300,000 plus soldiers in the ukrainian theater, which is a huge army. Look, this is the biggest war in Europe, my continent, since 1945. And actually, it quite looks like the Second World War. For much of the time, these tank assaults we keep on seeing reminiscent of Stalingrad or the soviet push for Berlin. So they've got more. But it's not just that. It's also the fact that the Russians are prepared to squander lives in the way the Ukrainians are not. And their commanders, ukrainian commanders, they don't send them in on impossible missions, whereas Russian officers will send 15 guys to their certain deaths across an icy field just to try and expose the ukrainian firing position, knowing that they won't come back, knowing that they won't break through. Just fodder.

08:28
Speaker 6
And there's a word in Russian, they call them met assaults. Met assaults. And we've seen meta salts throughout. And they continue. They continue. It's as if there is no level of pain and loss, which is too high for the russian state.

08:42
Speaker 1
Mit war. When they push a lot of people to kill, that we kill them. But it's their tactic, it's their strategy, and sometimes it works for russian army.

09:01
Speaker 2
How does the ukrainian public feel about this conflict at this point?

09:05
Speaker 6
I mean, everybody's exhausted. I mean, I'm in Kiev every month. I'll do a long stint there, then take a break and then go back again. And last year, my ukrainian friends, they all knew someone who was fighting. Now they all know someone who's been killed. I was sitting in a restaurant in December and got chatting to a guy, and he said, ten of my friends have been killed. Ten of my friends have been killed. And that's the problem. Kiev superficially looks like any successful european city. I mean, Sean, it's rather beautiful. There are art deco buildings. There are golden couplers. There are cobbled streets that twist up and down. There's great coffee, by the way, and good pizza. It's not some dreary soviet bagwater. I mean, it's a lively european city. It's a Berlin or a prague.

09:53
Speaker 6
But under the surface, everybody is hurting because a brother or a husband or a cousin or a guy you played football with have been killed. And meanwhile, Kiev is being hit by. It's being bombarded. There's a massive russian air assault most nights. We just saw one in the last 24 hours with six cities being hit by ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, by everything missiles. Part of the problem is people are just very tired. I mean, I've been there when this happens. Your phone vibrates, you get an air alarm signal, and then nothing happens for a bit. And then you hear ukrainian air defense engaging. There are flashes in the sky. Booms. It's all very apocalyptic. And then when finally you get the all clear, at about 4430 in the morning, you're so wired, you're buzzing, you can't sleep because how can you sleep after that?

10:46
Speaker 6
Your body just won't switch off. And then repeat, repeat. But there is a degree of bewilderment along the lines of what happened to the party of Ronald Reagan, the party that in the 1980s faced down the mighty soviet empire and basically, you could argue, won the cold war.

11:03
Speaker 8
I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault. To ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and.

11:26
Speaker 6
Good and evil is now seems to think that Putin is a good guy when it's clear to everybody, pretty much everyone, of sane mind, that he is a murderous psychopath whose armies plunder, rape, destroy, kill, enslave, abduct children, actually, and take them back to Russia to be made into good Russians. The Kremlin wants to basically exhaust the ukrainian civilian population, to kill them where it can, to destroy energy infrastructure, to make people freeze and emiserate them, to basically break ukrainian will. And Putin thinks he's got time on his side, and meanwhile he's looking eagerly to the US, to possible political developments there, which he thinks could well turn out to be favorable to him.

12:22
Speaker 2
Luke Harding, he's the Guardian senior international correspondent and the author of Invasion, the inside story of Russia's bloody war and Ukraine's fight for survival. When we're back on today, explained how and why Congress might be ghosting Ukraine right now.

12:57
Speaker 4
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13:52
Speaker 4
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Speaker 5
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16:05
Speaker 6
Ukraine. Ukraine explained. It's Ukraine explained.

16:12
Speaker 9
My name is Andrew Desiderio. I'm a senior congressional reporter for Punchbull News.

16:16
Speaker 2
And you know a little bit about this funding battle for the Ukraine war in Congress.

16:21
Speaker 9
A little bit, yeah. It's been my whole life for the past few months.

16:26
Speaker 2
Will Ukraine get the money? And if not, why not?

16:30
Speaker 9
Well, look, it's an open question at this point. Congress has tried many times over the last, I don't know, twelve months or so to get more money to Ukraine, more funding authorities for the president to transfer weapons from us stockpiles, and at least three times they have failed to do so. And what's basically happened is each time they have been thwarted by the House Republicans. But right now the big sort of hangup is that Republicans are demanding that any future aid for Ukraine be attached to legislation that imposes policy changes for the US Mexico border, which members of both parties agree is a problem that should be addressed. For sure. Where Democrats differ from Republicans on this is they don't believe that it should be tied to what is viewed as emergency spending for Ukraine, for Israel, and for Taiwan.

17:21
Speaker 6
Okay.

17:21
Speaker 2
A lot to process there. You got Ukraine funding, you've got border funding, you've got Taiwan, you've got Israel. Let's just focus on how it is that funding for the war in Ukraine got tied to the southern border. Can you help us wrap our heads around?

17:37
Speaker 9
So, you know, a lot of progressives are frustrated with the White House right now because back in August they actually included additional funding resources to help manage the crisis at the border as part of their request for money for Ukraine, Israel and the Indo Pacific. And the thinking at the time was that this would be a way to sort of sweeten the deal for Republicans. It ended up backfiring and doing the exact opposite. Republicans saw that the White House asked for it and said, well, you're asking for it, so let's negotiate. And what they did was they made a series of demands surrounding border security policy changes, restrictions on the ability to seek asylum, restrictions on the ability of the administration to parole migrants who are processed into the United States from the southern border.

18:24
Speaker 9
We delivered common sense legislation that will secure our border. But it's been sitting on Chuck Schumer's desk for seven months. House resolution two was our bill, and the time to act on it is yesterday. And that is the standoff we're currently in right now because this is really the third rail of american politics. And the thinking is, if you're tying Ukraine aid to one of the most contentious, difficult issues Congress has ever had to address, then that doesn't fare well for Ukraine aid. And that has unfortunately borne out to.

18:56
Speaker 2
Be true, which is to say that the Biden administration, whom we spoke with when they made this decision, miscalculated by tying border funding to the war in Ukraine.

19:10
Speaker 9
That is what a lot of progressives think. They think it gave Republicans an opening to demand these border policy changes as part of this supplemental funding request because, well, in their view, the White House put it on the table. So we're going to negotiate around. So, you know, you have Democrats and the White House kind of throwing shade at Republicans for tying these two issues together.

19:32
Speaker 3
Extreme Republicans are playing chicken with our national security, holding Ukraine's funding hostage to their extreme partisan border policies.

19:40
Speaker 9
But then Republicans are coming back at them and saying, whoa, whoa. We didn'tie them together. You tied them together. And they're technically correct when they say.

19:48
Speaker 2
That putting all the politics aside and the gamesmanship, what do Republicans actually think about this war in Ukraine? Are there Republicans who wouldn't support it even if it hadn't been tied to border funding?

20:04
Speaker 9
That's exactly the case. So you have Republicans like Mitch McConnell, who are the more traditional, neoconservative, hawkish Republicans who are going to support Ukraine no matter what. They're going to be tied to the hip with Democrats, with President Biden on that issue, as they have been continuing.

20:19
Speaker 3
Our support for Ukraine is morally right. But it's not only that. It's also a direct investment in cold, hard american interests.

20:29
Speaker 9
And then you have a very significant contingent, especially in the House and a growing group at that will not support Ukraine aid no matter what it's tied to. I mean, you could know every border restriction under the sun that Stephen Miller and Donald Trump would love to have as part of this to Ukraine aid, and they still would not vote for it because of the Ukraine aid portion.

20:52
Speaker 4
They want to add a 100 billion dollar supplemental of which 60 billion will go to Ukraine.

21:00
Speaker 2
Why is it that some Republicans are so staunchly against funding this war?

21:06
Speaker 9
Well, that's a very complicated question. I would say that the influence of Donald Trump is definitely the biggest thing here. Donald Trump, his whole foreign policy ethos was America first. This idea that we shouldn't be involved in foreign wars that don't have a direct bearing on the lives of Americans. It's more sort of non interventionist, isolationist, if you want to call it. And the issue of Ukraine has become so politically charged in the United States ever since. Donald Trump was impeached the first time for his phone call with ukrainian President Zelensky in which he threatened to basically cut off us aid to Ukraine unless they started an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

21:48
Speaker 7
The White House has just released a transcript of President Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukraine's president. So after that exchange about us help to Ukraine, Trump then says, I would like you to do us a favor.

22:01
Speaker 1
A whistleblower report related to that phone call led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to open a formal impeachment inquiry.

22:09
Speaker 9
And at the time, that got a lot of Republicans angry at the idea that, oh, Donald Trump is being targeted for this stuff, right? And it made Ukraine a political issue and an issue that the republican base in particular latched onto and said, hey, well, look at all this corruption in Ukraine. Donald Trump was right to do this. And so when this issue comes up where know, basically under full scale assault by the russian army, you have Republicans who are thinking back to that episode and saying, is it really worth us giving billions of dollars and a lot of our weapons to Ukraine to help them fight the Russians?

22:45
Speaker 4
Infrastructure minister arrested for stealing $400,000 deputy head of Zelensky's office can't explain where the sports cars came from, so he had to resign.

22:53
Speaker 9
But I think the main sort of reason why this has become so difficult for the republican party is politics. And I talked to a republican senator a few weeks ago who is in the McConnell crowd, a very supportive of Ukraine. And I asked him, I said, what do you think it is that ever since the war started, there's been this steep decline of support for Ukraine among members of your party? And the senator said, to know, I have tried to get an intellectually honest answer out of the anti Ukraine crowd as to why they don't support sending more money to Ukraine. I have not found one apart from domestic politics.

23:30
Speaker 9
And that is really what it boils down to, is that Ukraine has become almost a domestic political issue in the United States, especially for people who are aligned with Donald Trump and people who have been the staunchest apologists for him, really, ever since he first came into.

23:48
Speaker 2
Office, which is to say in, what is it, ten months, eleven months, when there is an election, if Joe Biden loses to the former president, that might be the end of Ukraine funding forever.

24:05
Speaker 9
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that. And a lot of Democrats at the last midterm elections were warning that if Republicans took the House, which they did, that could be the end of Ukraine funding forever. And of course, Congress has not passed new Ukraine funding ever since the lame duck period right after that election. Even when it's been led by someone like Mitch McConnell, it's been a failure of an know. Frankly, one of the arguments that Mitch McConnell makes, which I think is one of the strongest arguments in favor of Ukraine aid, is that America is not sending any troops, we're not spilling any blood to help the Ukrainians, and we are helping them degrade the russian army. I mean, that is on its own, a serious investment, a worthwhile investment in our national security.

24:52
Speaker 9
So to people like Mitch McConnell, this is a no brainer of an issue. But in the republican party today, with Donald Trump's influence the way it is, that is no longer the case.

25:19
Speaker 2
Andrew Desiderio reports on Congress for Punchbowl. Find his work at Punchbowl News. Our program today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain and Isabel angel. We were edited by Amina al Sadi, fact checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Patrick Boyd. It's today explained.

25:47
Speaker 1
I don't know what will I do when this is over. I really hope that I can continue my own business. Yeah, I really hope that I alive. I will be alive. I really hope. And I talk to God to support me in different way. And I really want to be alive.