Ambassador Kurt Volker on What It Will Take to Stop Putin

American Power

In this episode of American Power, hosts Nat Towson and Chad Scott discuss the geopolitical future of Ukraine with former Ambassador Kurt Vo

Key takeaways

• Vladimir Putin is driven by an ideology to rebuild the Russian Empire and is willing to sustain high monthly troop casualties.
• Ukraine is successfully targeting Russia's economic revenue by attacking oil and gas refining capabilities and export terminals.

Main topics

• Russia-Ukraine War
• NATO Security and Hybrid Warfare

Notable quotes

Putin has decided that he wants to rebuild the Russian Empire.

Conclusion

The episode underscores that maintaining strong, decisive alliances is

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:16) You're listening to American Power. I'm your host, Nat Towson, stand-up comedian, political speech writer, many other kinds of writer, and most likely to cause many important dignitaries to see the inside of my home office podcast host. Joining me, as always, is the panel of experts. However, we have some slightly scary but good news today on the podcast. Those of you who are fans will probably already know this, but some of our listeners might not. Over the weekend, we got the scary news that our co-host... Our energy expert, Matt Randolph himself, many people know him as Mr. Global. Matt suffered a heart attack over the weekend and is healthy and in good condition and recovering. But he will not be joining us today because obviously he has some more recovery to do. He is in good health and he has received an incredible amount of support from his fans and our fans. So we just want to thank everyone who has sent him a message already, who's kept him in their thoughts. and who has hounded him in the comments to take care of himself because he's already back to posting. And if you'd like to hear his fully detailed horror story, he's already sharing it on his personal social media. So if you want to hear more details about his adventure, head over to Mr. Global and his various social media platforms. But otherwise, just keep him in your thoughts. He will be back. We're very happy that he's healthy and safe. And keep, you know what? Keep him in your thoughts and prayers and or. advocate for an equitable health care system that will make sure that anyone this happens to is able to return to their families as well. Because I think that is also something that Matt is very passionate about, affordability for health care. Luckily, he had really good care and was able to be rushed to a hospital. So we're very happy he's healthy and safe. And Matt, we're thinking about you and we can't wait to have you back because I still have a lot of questions about how the Strategic Oil Reserve works. So on that note, we are going to have a slightly different episode today. I am joined as usual by my expert panelist on the military foreign policy, Chad Scott. Chad, thanks for waiting. How are you doing? Speaker 1 (2:17) No, it's well worth the wait. I miss you, Matt. Have a safe and fruitful recovery, but also really looking forward to this. Again, I'm a big... big transatlanticist. NATO is something that I've always been an advocate for. So very excited for our guest today and looking forward to the conversation. Speaker 3 (2:37) Me too. We do, as I mentioned, have a slightly different lineup today. We have a guest joining us. Very excited today on American Power. We're joined by Ambassador Kurt Volker, who is one of the most experienced American voices on NATO, Russia, Ukraine, and European security. He served as the United States ambassador to NATO. from 2008 to 2009, and then later worked as the U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations from 2017 to 2019, where he worked directly on U.S. diplomatic efforts involving Ukraine, Russia, and the Minsk peace process. He has more than 35 years experience in U.S. foreign policy and national security policy, and currently serves as a distinguished fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. Please welcome to the podcast. Ambassador Kurt Volker. Ambassador Volker, thank you so much for being here. Speaker 2 (3:27) Matt, thank you very much. And Chad, it's great to see you. And let me also join you in sending best wishes to Matt, wishing him a very speedy recovery and return to the podcast. Speaker 3 (3:40) Thank you, Ambassador. We'll be sure to pass that along as well. I'd like to dive right into our discussion, if that's all right. You've argued recently that Vladimir Putin still believes that time is on his side. I'm wondering what would actually change that calculation for Putin. Would it be battlefield losses, economic pressure, energy revenue? Or what would convince him that the Western support for Ukraine simply isn't going away? At what point would his calculation shift? Speaker 2 (4:07) Yeah, actually, you put your finger on the key factors. And so let me go through each one of those individually. Putin has decided that he wants to rebuild the Russian Empire. Speaker 3 (4:20) He Speaker 2 (4:21) thinks the czars were fools for letting it fall apart. He thinks the communists were fools for letting the Soviet Union fall apart. And he's going to be the great restorer of Russian lands. That's his ideology. And it is essential to him that Ukraine be folded back into that Russian empire. That's the number one thing. So he is not going to let go of this very easily. And he's going to, you know, push his people as hard as he can. They're losing 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers a month on the battlefield. He doesn't care. He's going to keep pushing them forward. They have really damaged their economy. Negative GDP, high inflation, high interest rates, the inability to borrow abroad, so they're printing money, so inflation is going to be getting worse. There are so many things that have... been pressure on the country. And yet he's determined to keep going. He thinks that they have bigger numbers, so he can outlast Ukraine that way. He thinks the West is weak and divided, so he can outlast Ukraine that way. And he is so far not showing any sign of backing off and not taking the idea of negotiations seriously. So that's where we are. Now, Ukraine has adopted a strategy of how to crack that, which is going after Russia's or the Kremlin's ability to make money. Most of the money that goes to the Kremlin comes from state-owned enterprises that sell oil and gas for export. And they are going after the oil and gas refining capability. They're going after the export terminals. and europe is going after the shadow fleet of vessels that transports it so this is having the effect of drying up the resources available to the kremlin they have burnt through their sovereign wealth fund in large measure burnt through all their foreign exchange reserves sold off half of their gold reserves so they are really gripping tight and hanging in there but they are losing a lot of money What Ukraine is doing by going after that source of revenue is working. It's just taking time. It's also showing the Russian people that they're in a war. Vladimir Putin called this a special military operation and wanted it to sound cost-free and rather antiseptic. Ukraine has broken that model. You now, if you're a Russian citizen, You know that Ukraine is fighting back. You know there are Ukrainian drones in Russian skies attacking military targets and strategic targets for Russia. So that's a second piece, is bringing the war to the Russian people. And then third, it is the war effort itself. Vladimir Putin has persisted in this concept that Russia has overwhelming numbers. And they're losing so many people on the battlefield that they can't replace them on a monthly basis. So they are getting squeezed more and more militarily. So those three factors, the finances, the economy and the politics and bringing it to the Russian people and the military are the three that I think will eventually cause Putin to say, OK, let's have a ceasefire. Now, what I'd like to see the United States and our European allies do. is adopt the same strategy go after those same three factors try to make it harder for putin to make money apply secondary sanctions on oil and gas and particularly the financial institutions that facilitate the transfer of funds to the kremlin go after those help Ukraine with long range strike capability to keep taking the fight to the Russian military. Those are things that I think we could be doing that would add on and that would speed up an end to the war. Speaker 3 (8:19) I'm curious just about one point that you said, and thank you for such a thorough explanation. Do you think, you know, many believe in a pretty popular opinion on this podcast, the U.S. is clearly overextending itself with this war in Iran really unnecessarily. And now with the Houthis taking more territory and essentially challenging uh conflict around the babel mendep strait and the just general ongoing overextension of u.s forces abroad uh is that emboldening putin initially you know is any of that overextension of his own uh lessened by the the sort of flailing of the u.s military in a more public sphere there's Speaker 2 (8:57) definitely a connection And I'll come back to talk about where we are with Iran in a bit. But just to stay focused on Ukraine for a second, Vladimir Putin knows that Ukraine has a shortage of anti-missile missiles, air defense missiles that knock out Russian missiles. So he has actually ramped up his air raids against Ukraine. over the past couple of months. They're no longer only at night. They're also during the daytime. There are more missiles in the mix rather than just drones. And among the drones, a larger number of them have now jet engines rather than propeller engines. So they move faster. And these are harder to shoot down as well. So he's taking advantage of the fact that Ukraine doesn't have enough air defense to really go after the civilian infrastructure and population in Ukraine. Now, we were in a position where we could sell Patriot missiles to Ukraine, paid for by the Ukrainians or by our European allies. Previously, we would have done that as assistance, but President Trump decided, OK, we're not going to do aid, but they can buy them. But now we're not selling because we feel we may need them in the Persian Gulf. And that is something Vladimir Putin is keenly aware of and pressing an advantage on right now. Now, for your listeners, I have to say, too, the fact that he can strike Ukrainian cities and irritate people and kill some of them almost every day, a person here, a person there, doesn't strategically change the war. He's not able to advance on the front lines. He is burning through his own resources. Ukraine has gotten stronger over four and a half years, while Russia has gotten weaker. So this is not going to cause a Russian victory. It is just causing more pain for the Ukrainian people in the near term and the medium term. Speaker 1 (10:49) It seems like there's this... disconnect between what, and this is kind of a personal belief, with what I think the broader American strategy, the broader American end state should be from the prospect of our own diplomacy, our own foreign policy benefits versus the Trump administration's personal views here. In your opinion, what should the American end state actually be in Ukraine? Is it just stopping the fighting along certain lines, kind of freezing the conflict? Are we trying to restore Ukrainian territory? And does that include Crimea? Or is it what Trump wants? And that's just kind of, we need to focus on the economics and the business of this to make sure everyone's going to make money again. Or do we make Ukraine stronger and help them completely defeat Russia by dominating them and kicking them out? Speaker 2 (11:44) Yeah. So there are several ways to answer that question. The one that I always come back to is as Americans, we, our lives, our country is founded on the idea of human rights and individual freedoms, that we are free people and we choose and change our governments. And we do not like it if someone attacks us and we will defend our homes and our. our families and our country, no matter what. And that is exactly what Ukraine is doing. They have been attacked by Russia and they are defending their homes, their families, their territory against an outside aggressor. So we should have complete sympathy and understanding with what the Ukrainians are going through, because we went through it 250 years ago. We broke away from an empire, the British Empire, and it was tough going. It lasted over five years of fighting from the Declaration of Independence to the surrender at Yorktown. And we had help from outside. We had help from the French. And we eventually made it. Ukraine is going through exactly that same thing, breaking away definitively from a Russian empire, reestablishing, asserting their independence. And they need some outside help as they go through that. And that should be our orientation. Now, that being said. Speaker 2 (13:11) Pushing Ukraine to fight, to take over every last inch of Ukrainian territory that Russia occupies, could very well be too difficult and too costly for Ukraine to execute. And so we have to be careful not to be telling them what they should do and what their interests are. We have to be supportive of their approach of defending their country. Most Ukrainians now would just like there to be a ceasefire. They look at the parts of Ukraine that have been occupied by Russia and see them as largely destroyed. And most of the Ukrainian population, the pro-Ukrainian population that had lived there has left because of the Russian occupation. So they would be prepared to have a ceasefire in place. However, they would not be prepared to recognize legally Russia's occupation as legitimate. to say that these are now Russian lands. They will contest that as a legal matter for decades and decades and decades. We should do the same. We should support the idea of a ceasefire, but we should never recognize these lands as Russian. They're not. Russia recognized them as Ukrainian from the beginning of Ukraine's renewed independence in 1991. right up until 2014 and 2015 when Russia made its first attacks, and then again after 22 when they continued those attacks. So we, as our viewers or listeners may not know this, we did not recognize Russia's occupation of the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all throughout the Cold War. Russia took them over when Hitler and Stalin divided up Eastern Europe. Russia took the Baltic states. We never accepted that as legitimate. And everyone thought it was kind of quirky and quaint. You'd have these captive nation parades in our hometowns where we had ethnic Estonians or Lithuanians. But sure enough, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart. And those countries got their independence back. And we had never parted with them. We never gave up on their right to independence. And that's the way we should look at occupied Ukraine as well. Speaker 1 (15:29) So against that, that kind of backdrop of American national security jiving with our, our moral code and things like that, do you believe that it is prudent that the United States may be considering reducing the 80,000 troops in Europe right now? Is it, do you, and kind of an, and a follow on to that is looking at the, the Greenland situation where it was, it seemed like it was a very vitriolic conversation that. It seems like it ended up going our way in the end with this new policy that was just, I haven't seen the documents officially, but based on the social media posts, our relationship for our national security interests versus European national security, where do you see that? Should we be drawing down? Should we be more forceful with our European partners? Speaker 2 (16:18) Well, the way the U.S. military goes about these things is to conduct a force posture review. And the basis of a force posture review is to say, what are the likely missions that our forces might be called upon to carry out? what's the force mix required to carry out those missions? And what's the optimum positioning of those forces? Where should they be stationed? So I'm all for a force posture review. And, you know, with some regularity, every few years we should do that because the world changes, the problem set changes, the missions change. So looking at that now, I would say, for example, you probably don't need as much infantry. as we might have thought, because everything is moving to drone warfare. You probably need more drone operators and more drones and counter drones and air defense and electronic warfare. So we should have a rethinking of our force mix. I would be in favor of more positioning forward. So Poland, Baltic states, Romania, because that's where the immediate threats will be less. It's not going to be as threatening for us and for our allies in Germany or Italy as some of those forward places. So I'm all for looking at the force posture. What I don't like is when people just come out with numbers. So, ah, we have too many. We're going to take 5,000 out, or we're not going to take those. We're going to reposition these 5,000, or we're going to go down from 80,000. Those are numbers pulled out of thin air. I would be much happier to hear the military go through the mission set and the force mix. and come up with numbers that are grounded in what we may actually have to do. And I'm for that. And that may result in a reduction of numbers, but I wouldn't want to prejudge what the numbers should be. So that's the forced posture question. Now, you also asked about Greenland. This was a completely unnecessary argument with one of our closest allies, Denmark. Denmark has been a model ally in so many ways. And out of the blue, we come up with this position that we have to take over part of their country. This is insane. And it was not supported by any of our NATO allies. It was not supported by the Greenlanders themselves. It was not supported by the American public. Only 4 % said this is a good idea. So this was a totally. Speaker 2 (19:00) unpopular, unnecessary position to take. And I say unnecessary because we already have a treaty with Denmark from 1951 that allows us to have any kind of military presence on Greenland that we feel we need for our security or North American security. And Denmark provides host nation support for that. We used to have thousands of troops and 17 military bases on Greenland throughout the Cold War. We chose to reduce that. It wasn't Denmark pressuring us to do that. We chose to reduce that. And we could have scaled back up again at any time. Now it appears that we have an agreement with Denmark and