Michael Weiss: Trump's Ukraine Cluster**ck

A snarl in the woods. Ancient forest spirits nip at his heels. He can outrun a force of nature on foot. He needs an instant power machine built for the wild. The only escape is in. The Toyota BZ Woodland, off-road handling, all-electric power. Leave evil in the dust. John Joe stars in camping. Face to Wild, test drive Toyota's new all-electric family at your local dealer. Toyota, let's go places. Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back. One of our faves, a reporter for The Insider, which is a Russia-focused media outlet. He also writes on Substack at Foreign Office, co-author of a book called Isis. And supposedly he has another book coming out about the GRU, but I don't know. That's been in works for a while. It's Michael Bari Weiss. You might be too busy podcasting to be bookwriting. It's like a Robert Caro-S thing, you know. Another five years here, another six years there. Eventually we'll make it, though. Volume one. I look forward to that very much. Are the birds with us today? Or what do we think? Is it just going to be you and me? So I haven't slept very much in the last week for reasons I'm sure we'll get into on the show. But I was about to say the birds have been silenced, but that sounds way more menacing. than I meant. I just meant that I closed the door to my daughter's room. All right. Well, we get mixed reviews on the birds. So some people will be sad. Others will be joyish. I guess it just depends on how sensitive their audio is. We're going to spend, I think, probably the entire podcast on the crazy developments that are continuing every hour in the Russia-Ukraine negotiations, if you want to call them that. We had our newsletter that came out this morning from Bill Crystal and Andrew Eggar, our morning shots that I just feel compelled to mention. to everybody, because we're going into the holiday weekend. People need a little joy in their life. The subhead says this. The White House is in free fall. How long will last? And I do think in some ways this relates to our topic of the day on Russia, Ukraine, which is, like, Trump has really lost the rope on a lot of things domestically. And, like, there are a handful of things that he still feels like he has control over. I think the ICE operations and the CBP operations being one of them. and this self-delusion that he is a negotiator, a negotiator extraordinaire with foreign countries as the other. And in some ways, I think there's a little bit of relation between the series of elves that the White House has taken domestically and this rush to some Thanksgiving deal with Ukraine and Russia. So I want to get to the details first. What do you make about Trump's political standing right now? Yeah, I think he's very weak. He's vulnerable. He's... abstracted from a lot of things that you would expect the president to be well across, not really a details-oriented guy to begin with, but even now more kind of checked out. The fact that he lost a fight with his own party for the first time, really, over the Epstein stuff, I think is interesting because that directly impacts him. I mean, I was going to say, and his credibility, but he has no credibility. It just, it's something he didn't want to see come out there, right? Because it's embarrassing and compromising. He sort of rolled over on it. And I mean, the question I've been asking is,

They didn't like him, but they preferred him to the collapse of the regime. And we see that playing out very clearly now. I mean, they have actively tried to sabotage normalizations with the Ahmed al-Sharaa government. They don't like the fact that Ahmed al-Sharaa was in the White House, and they certainly don't like the fact that it looks like the U.S. is going to lift sanctions on Syria. Why? because Bashar al-Assad is sort of the devil we know, and they could play him. He was weak. He was easily manipulated. In fact, when his regime fell, we at New Lines, the other publication I write for, we did a story on documents that were retrieved showing that the Israelis were telling him all the time. Listen, you know, if you allow Iran to do X, Y, and Z, we're going to come and bomb these places. So he kind of, he would back off occasionally when given these sort of threatening overtures by the Israelis. So, yeah, using Epstein as a kind of connector or fixer for these purposes kind of makes sense it's a little confusing it's a little confusing what to me it makes sense only if he's just like blustering if he's like actually a you know non state like unofficial back channel actor i guess that raises a few questions about what uh you know who the russians were and why and and who the israelis were and why It may surprise sort of ordinary listeners, but I think this is kind of how the world works. You know, these horrific people, billionaires or multi-millionaires, but, you know, they worm their way into the corridors of power. They leverage their contacts and their friendships with people in positions of power to acquire more wealth or to acquire more contacts of other people, including, you know. potentates and dictators abroad, and they sort of connect people. Epstein was almost like his own private intel shop in addition to being... you know, a bond villain and a pedophile with an island. So QAnon was kind of on the right track. It's just their arrow was a little bit, a little bit off as far as my license concerns. Yeah. Well, it's, no, I wouldn't say QAW. I mean, there's a global group of a global potentate of a child sex trafficker connecting different intelligence agencies. It's not so far afield. He's also seems pretty chummy with Noam Chomsky. And, you know, people you wouldn't. ordinarily expect somebody of this sort of species to actually that's not true i mean again he's he was so kind of promiscuous in his dealings with everybody um for the sake of his own ego and his own self gratification that tracks you know i mean the guy was i would say he was a sociopath right sort of the classic mold of one of these international meta mystery leaving aside even the horrible things that he did that's just who he is The Russians deal with people like this all the time. I mean, they're either called oligarchs or syllaviki, you know, strong men in positions of power, usually who come from security services, who then go off and do things in private enterprise, and they end up acting as liaisons or plenty potentiaries, if you want to use a grandiose term for it, for the Kremlin, right? Dictatorships tend to spawn these kinds of creatures, so unfortunately the United States.

prior to becoming more authoritarian under Trump, but certainly it accelerates now. We have creatures like this. I mean, in fact, I wanted to talk to you about exactly that in the form of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. And Carol Demetriev. That's a great transition. Exactly. Good podcasting. A nice segue there, man. Wow, I didn't even see that one coming. Epstein to Ukraine. Let's start with a quick TikTok for people of what was happening. Because I have to tell you, for me, it was like hard to follow. Like who was pitching what and who was on what side and who had leaked one. And as I was starting to read up on it, there's much happening at a very busy week. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to have Michael Bari Weiss in the podcast next week. And he can explain it to me. So I don't have to read all the articles. You know, I'm at a remedial level here on what has happened. As best that I can tell, the Russians. sent a friend of Jared Kushner to meet with Steve Witkoff, and that began a series of events that included multiple competing drafts of a peace plan. But you explained it to me. So let's back up a little bit and sort of provide some context. So Trump had this ignominious summit with Vladimir Putin and Alaska. which did not go well. There was some sort of rhetorical framework for future discussions, meetings about meetings to take place in the future. But it was very clear, just looking at the optics of that thing, nothing was substantively agreed to. Why? Because Vladimir Putin left early. Like there was no lunch, no salmon or moldy tuna fish served, whatever it was. Halibate in Alaska, I think it would have been halibate in Alaska. And, you know, some of the reporting I've done since suggests that... Even in route to Anchorage, on Air Force One, Trump was shown by the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, that look here. I mean, this is the intelligence we have on the war. The Russians are kind of desperate. They're not doing well. They're losing X number of soldiers, you know, let's say 1,000 soldiers per square mile of territory that they take. And this kind of impressed Trump. Why? Not because he's pro-Ukraine. He hates Ukraine and he has a visceral dislike for Volodymyr Zelensky tied to his first term when Volodymyr Zelensky was, you know, found himself tangled up in his impeachment saga through no fault of his own, by the way. And he certainly wants to have a good relationship with Vladimir Putin. He likes Vladimir Putin. He can't understand why Vladimir Putin doesn't like him back in the way that, you know, he just thinks is natural. But one thing I think that that kind of gets lost in sort of this sort of black and white portrayal of the situation is Donald Trump also likes power. And he likes to see traditional or historical adversaries of the United States beaten and battered, right? Like, he can be friends with the worst people in the world, dictators, war criminals. But that doesn't come at the expense of we're number one, right? So when he sees Russia sort of getting hammered, when he sees a country that was meant to have been written off, Kiev in three days will fall, and two weeks, you know, Russian soldiers are at the Polish border, and they fight back and they fight back hard, or they fight like hell, as he's fond of saying. And they humiliate Russia. He kind of gets, you know.

It tickles his tummy, right? I mean, it's like we've discussed before. The Israelis did what they did in Iran for the space of, what, 10, 12 days, in order to show him, you know, come on in, the water's fine. This is easy. You can just drop a couple of bunker busters and then call it a day, and you can take credit for this. He doesn't like war, but he likes acts of war. He likes the spectacle of basically showing the world who's boss. So Ukraine has been able to kind of keep him somewhat tethered. by demonstrating this time and time again. It's Operation Spider-Web, and they launched drones from inside Russian territory, took out Russian strategic bombers on the tarmac, you know, thousands and thousands of miles apart. He got excited. Ukraine hammers the Russian energy economy on a nightly basis, launching drones and cruise missiles at oil export terminals and oil depots and all of that. He likes it, right? Because he keeps talking about Warren, the Europeans weaning themselves off Russian oil. I mean, he did sanctions on Roshenuf and Lukai. He wants Russia to suffer economically to such a point that they come begging him for some kind of deal, right? All of that to one side, nothing advanced from Alaska. And then Lavrov, he had this call with Vladimir Putin and said, oh, let's maybe do round two in Budapest. But before that, now knowing he didn't want to go into a situation where he would be embarrassed again, he dispatched Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, and acting national security advisor, to meet with Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, since 1483. I mean, this guy's like... you know, nosferatu. He literally looks the same as he did on the reset button picture with Hillary. He is like preserved in amber. But in a kind of orc-like way, right? Like not preserved well. He's preserved badly. Oh, no. He looked hideous then and he's hideous now, but it's the same. Right. So basically, they came together to kind of hammer out sort of the framework of going into another summit. And Marco Rubio, you know, he read the room. He's like, the Russians are still. They don't want to stop the war. They have maximalist demands. It's not just about Ukraine. It's about what they refer to as the root causes of the war, which is to say, you know, 40 years of, you know, NATO expansion and Pax Americana, or as they would put it, American hegemony, they want to end that. They want to, you know, relitigate everything from 1991 on. And we're not prepared to do that. Or at least Marco Rubio isn't prepared to do that because there's still vestiges of the kind of internationalist traditional Republican in him. So he went back and told Trump, there's no reason to go to Budapest and abase yourself again. Like this is just going to be the same thing. What Marco Rubio didn't know, what John Ratcliffe didn't know, what the State Department didn't know, what the National Security Council didn't know, and what much of the White House did not know, was that whilst this is going on. Kiddil Dmitriev, a very opportunistic, very wily figure in the Russian government. He's the head of their sovereign wealth fund. He was educated in the United States, degrees of Harvard and whatnot. So he understands. I googled him this morning. Stanford, Harvard, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, being a fascist killer's top industrialist. So Dmitriov comes to the United States, and he goes on a little propaganda tour. He meets with...

Representative Luna, you know, gives her a box of chocolates with Vladimir Putin's face on them and a book of quotations by Vladimir Putin and talks about peace. And, you know, he's doing the rounds. But he's also meeting with Steve Witkoff, you know, Trump's friend of many years, a strip mall developer from the Bronx. So, you know, Outerboro boys stick together. You know, I mean, that's how the Zohran Mamdani thing went down, by the way. I was just going to say. That was such a Queens thing. I was like, oh, my God. You know, you're a fascist, you're a communist. Like, yeah, that's about at 1 a.m. at the bar, you say that. By 3 a.m., you've got arms around each other. You're, like, smoking a J on Queens Boulevard. I mean, that's just how it goes. But anyway, so Steve Witkoff is kind of doing the dirty with Dmitriev. Jared Kushner gets involved naturally because Jared Kushner has known Dmitriev since 2015, right? He's in the Mueller report as having met Dmitriov back then. to try and hammer out some kind of normalization or reboot of U.S. Russian relations in the midst of the whole Russia gate counterintelligence investigation into Trump's campaigns ties to agents of the Kremlin. Anyway, so they sit around in Florida, and the reporting that has come out about this, and I think this is kind of important to emphasize here. Axios broke a story. I think, on the 18th, if I'm not mistaken, saying, oh, there's going to be, there's some deal being put together. Steve Witkoff is involved, and Kidil Demetriov is involved. And Demetriov is the only person quoted on the record in this story, although there's U.S. officials that are quoted, right? So, Demetriov is clearly providing some of the details and the kind of background to all of this. And what ends up happening is the deal that gets leaked eventually, these 28 points. They read like Russian fanfiction, right? They are written in a manner that is linguistically very, very Russian. Even Elon Musk AI Groch algorithm, if you put this thing in, they spit back and say, oh, this was written in Russian and translated to English, right? What are the points of this 28-point document? NATO will not expand and no Ukrainian membership. So again, not just what Ukraine cannot do join NATO, which has been a longstanding. demand of theirs or request. NATO cannot add any other countries. So again, we're getting into those root causes, as they put it, or the 1991 and on history. Ukraine must have a cap on its military. They don't go into specifics of do they mean the standing army or do they mean the standing army plus, you know, reservists and National Guard? It's tricky math. They just refer to personnel. They put it at 600,000. not so terrible, but also like, who are they to dictate to Ukraine? You know, what's the size of their military going to be, particularly when Ukraine wants to deter further Russian aggression. Then there's some stuff in there that looks like it was very, very tailor-made for a guy like Donald Trump. The EU will use frozen Russian assets in the hundreds of billions of dollars to both reconstruct Ukraine, but also to provide a 50% kickback. to the United States. Oh, yeah. Right. Oh, and then, by the way, the EU will spend $100 billion of its own money to rebuild cities and towns and villages in Ukraine that were destroyed by the Russians. So, like, this is a deal between not even the Russian government.

Kidil Demetriev, who is, it's not quite accurate to call him a freelancer. He's connected. He's married to a woman who is best friends with Vladimir Putin's daughter. So he's got a seat at sort of at the table. But he doesn't own Vladimir Putin. He isn't the only influencer. He isn't the only person whispering in Vladimir Putin's ear, right? A guy, an agent of the Russian government, hammering out a deal with not any sort of professional American diplomat. But Steve Witkoff, as I call him, Steve Witkoff, and Trump's very corrupt and creepy son-in-law, Jared Kushner, right? So two amateurs. And they're putting together this document, which, as Marco Rubio later said to a gaggle of senators, reads like a Russian wish list, which it is. This is exactly what the Russians want. Except it's written so poorly and so vaguely as to leave certain loopholes in there that even the Kremlin would not accept. What do I mean by that? There's a provision in there that says both sides will return civilian hostages, including children. Now, hang on a minute. The international criminal court indicted one Vladimir Putin for what crime, kidnapping Ukraine's children, right? Bringing them to Russia, essentially then brainwashing them. You're not Ukrainian. You don't have parents in Ukraine. You're Russian. And then, you know, basically auctioning them off to Russian parentage. This is the underlying offense for a war crimes indictment against Vladimir Putin. put in a document saying, oh, now we cop to it and we promise to return the kids, right? So, Camille Demetriev is not so incredibly savvy as he liked to think because he's actually admitting to Russian war crimes in this thing. And then there's like weird stuff, like Poland will park. European jets that belong to Ukraine's Air Force on their territory. So now we're telling the polls what they're going to do. The whole thing was just kind of... Well, you have to assume that part of this is all part of the corruption. I mean, Steve Witkoff has two sons. One of them runs Trump's crypto business. And then the other one runs the Steve Witkoff family real estate business that has deals with Qatar and other such countries. So like, who the hell knows? Krishna did like the largest leverage buyout with the Saudis on the back of the Gaza deal. Right. They're making money hand over fist in the Gulf. So who knows? And they're also trying to do deals in Serbia. My point is like, you know, you assume anything that's weird in there, you just assume it's because it's some kind of back channel deal. Right. One other thing when I was Googling and found out, Demetrov, I do have to ask you, because you're educating me, I want to quiz you on one thing. Do you know how old iskeur old Demetrov? I mean, not his exact age. I think he's in his 60s. He's 50. He's 50. He looks like he could be your father. This is the Russians. The Russians age differently. It's the vodka and the cold weather. It's important to get down to humidity. Yeah. And the trembling fear of doing the wrong thing.

So anyway, yeah, this guy is, when you look at him, it's like it's hard to imagine that he looks kind of a feat as well. It's kind of hard to imagine that this guy has navig—he seems like the kind of person that might get pushed out of a window, I guess, is all I'm going to say. You know, there, but for the fact, again, he's married to somebody who is, you know, considered very close to the Vladimir Putin family. But, yeah, I mean, one of the fun aspects of all of this is, you know, Dmitriov got so ahead of his skis. Dmitriev leaks this thing to Axios. which is a White House-friendly news organization. And there's sources. I mean, Barack Reveed's one of his biggest sources is Steve Witkoff, and that has been the case. Everyone knows that, right? And Jared Kushner, too. So he leaks this thing and sort of gives the details and makes it all seem very, like, imminent. Why? He's trying to force it into reality. He wants to make this deal manifest. And then the other optics or the other sort of, like, stuff that's happening in the background is it's not just Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Who else wants this deal? Who else wants a deal at whatever costs? However much it means. Let me guess, teacher. Can I guess? Yes, the guy on my screen, the only person in the classroom, please. Yeah, the vice president is the vice president, JD Vance. So JD Vance is desperate to, you know, ram this thing through. Fuck the Ukrainians. Let's give Trump a big win. He'll get his Nobel Prize. And ooh, ooh, ooh, he will anoint me, the successor. to Magaland and to be, you know, basically the heir apparent for 2028. But hang on. Hang on, kids. It gets better. So JD Vance is in competition, not so subtle competition with aforementioned Marco Rubio to be the heir apparent for 28, right? So you got Marco Rubio, the kind of internationalist Republican, albeit he takes the party line publicly. He says all the right things. You know, Donald Trump is a genius and no president has solved more. international conflicts than this guy, blah, blah, blah, but privately, you know, he's still trying to hold things together. He doesn't believe in forfeiting NATO. He doesn't have any illusions about who and what the Russians are. He's described them as gangsters. He's very hawkish on Russia. This is not a mystery. JD Vance is an isolationist, you know, very mobbed up with the Silicon Valley tech bros, Peter Thiel, the Koch brothers. And now, you know, if you kind of do the Kremlinology of the White House, what happens? In order to get the Ukrainians to bully them into submission to agreeing to this framework, this Russian authored framework, at least in principle, they dispatch Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, who has no business doing diplomacy, and he'll be the first to tell you that. So Dan Driscoll, I was briefed by the CIA on the 13th. Why? Because he was going to Ukraine not to do this. He was going to Ukraine to talk about military innovation and technology. He's a drone guy. Trump calls him the drone guy, right? Now, why was he going to Ukraine to talk about this? Because the Ukrainians are teaching us how to modernize our own army in Arsenal. Right? Because they've invented such cool, like, suicide drones and missile systems, seaborne drones. That's how they're hammering the Russians, both in their own territory and inside Russian territory. And we're like, ooh, this is cool. And we're so far behind that the U.S. Army Twitter account a few weeks ago tweeted, you've never seen a drone drop a grenade before. And the Ukrainians are watching this like, oh my God, America's fallen. Like, it's just embarrassing. So, I mean, this is the other kind of.

Subtext of this thing. JD Vance's guy is there to tell Ukrainians, here are the terms of your surrender. And, ooh, by the way, teach us how to fight war because we suck. Right? It's wild. Simultaneously, just as one of the other subtexts for listeners, I should just say, this is, Drisco was the guy that Bill Chris was mentioning yesterday. There's also tension inside the Pentagon between him and Pete Hegseth, because Pete Hegseth's looking over his shoulder. He's being room to take over. Right. So, you know, Marco Rubio had no idea about this deal until it leaked. Trump, according to the Washington Post, basically what Trump did was he said, Steve, Jared, yeah, good, great, go make peace. Could he name three of the 28 points in this thing? Of course not. He's not across it. I told you, like CIA briefed Driscoll. John Ratcliffe, from what I understand, had no knowledge of this. Now, it's very unusual if the Americans are doing a deal, especially these two Americans. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are talking to the Russians, that CIA wouldn't be involved, that there wouldn't be some interagency process to keep us from stepping on our own crank as a country and embarrassing ourselves. I'm surprised that John Ratcliffe isn't spying on Steve Witkoff or at this point. Hey, man. Honestly. It's a wild and woolly deep state. What can I tell you? Yeah, no. I mean, there's going to be probably all kinds of incidental collection, as it's called, because we'll be spying on the Russians hearing what the Americans are telling the Russians, right? Leave that all to one side. Everybody has written out of this equation. Seb Gorka was like, I can't believe we're doing something crazy like this. I mean, you know, he's an asshole, but he's not under any illusions about Russia because he comes from Hungary, right? He knows. Yeah. what's up everybody's written out of this except this small cadre of sort of agents of not even i mean yes donald trump but like they're in it for themselves too they want their side action and they want to give kickbacks to the boss so america has become we have devolved into an authoritarian regime in this respect it's all this sort of you know boyars and cronies doing the work of the czar and blah, blah, blah. I mean, we are like Russia in many respects. Anyway, it all goes sideways because it's, you know, the minute it gets leaks, people start reporting and litigating. Marco Rubio tries to sink it. He absolutely made that call to Coons and to King. Mike Rounds. Where were they there at some? They were in the Halifax Security Conference. And they're freaking out and hopping mad. So he gets on the phone with his former Senate colleagues. He's like, listen, this thing is Fugazi. It's a Russian wish list. It's not our official policy. I'm going to Geneva to kind of sort this out. And I mean, I've met Angus King. This is a very smart, savvy guy. He's not going to mishear or misinterpret what Marco Rubio said, right? The other ones I can't voucher. But the fact that they're all there saying the same thing. And none of them has disavowed. what he told them, even though Marco then tweeted, oh, this is a U.S. plan and all this. So, you know, he's very carefully trying to blow this thing up. Now, why was the deadline set as Thanksgiving? I mean, again, 40 years of Europe and its security architecture, that's all going to be done and dusted in six days. Just before the triptophan kicks in from your turkey, you know, extravaganza, we're going to decide the future of Europe and NATO. That's because nobody knew the minute this thing stepped into the light.

it's going to fall apart, which is exactly what's happened. So at Geneva, I know I'm going long here, but the details of this are at Geneva, Marco Rubio's there, Driscoll is there. Steve Witkoff is there. Jared Kushner is not. JD Vance is not. And they're sitting with the Ukrainians and basically the Ukrainian deputy foreign minister, who used to be their ambassador to the United Nations, a very smart guy. When he got wind of this plan leaking, he basically compared it to a Soviet active measure or a Russian info up, just to give you a sense of the Ukrainian perspective on it. He is now saying, All of that noise, all of that horrible stuff has been stripped away. 28 points pared down to 19. The clause about NATO and the future of NATO, including Ukraine's possible membership in it, that's been removed. Territorial concessions have been removed. That was the other point I should have made earlier. In the first document, it was Ukraine must give up Danyetsk, which it has fought. mightily to retain, at least the parts that it still has, and Donets under Ukrainian control. This is a succession of citadel cities. This is one of the most fortified places in the world. They must give that up to the Russians, which the Russians cannot take militarily. It would take them 80 years to conquer it all. And de facto recognition of all the stuff that... Russia is currently occupied. That's been stripped away of the new version. And we don't know. We haven't seen this 19-point document, but the Ukrainians are kind of breathing a sigh of relief. The polls, who I'm in touch with, were absolutely beside themselves freaking out, especially about, oh, Poland is going to be a parking lot for jets. I mean, nobody told us this. Donald Tus, the prime minister, he had tweeted, we'd like to know who authored this thing before we're getting involved. Warsaw is beginning to feel a little bit easier about it, which... is reassuring to myself anyway. So the Europeans kind of came in. They kind of worked with Marco Rubio and Finest and Massage. Basically, it's like the minerals deal. Something completely untenable and ridiculous has been lawyered to a pale shade of its former self, right? And now, if the U.S. and the Ukrainians agree, remember, this is not a negotiation that involves Russia or official Russia just yet. If the U.S. and the Ukrainians and the Europeans agree on something, and they go to the Kremlin, My guess is, and Catherine Belton did a very good piece in the Washington Post about this, the Russians are going to say, niet, we don't, this sucks. We want the original Dimitriov authored plan. And even that one had problems. And Vladimir Putin, by the way, he doesn't care. He's happy to keep fighting. He thinks he's winning the war. You know, he appeared on state television dressed in military fatigues the other day. Does that sound like somebody who's interested in peace? Or does that sound like, you know, Generalissimo Vladimir Putin? thinks he's going to take Kiev eventually. Forgive me if I feel like I'm updating the reference that everybody uses of Groundhog Day to the movie Palm Springs. It was a lesser watched movie, but I really enjoyed it. It is of the same premise of a man that wakes up in the same place every day. Forgive me if I'm feeling a Palm Springs flashback here right now. Have we not done this four times already where Trump or Trump's people get flattered by Vladimir Putin? They start to move towards the Vladimir Putin point of view, Europe, and...

Marco and a handful of people in the administration do rapid response and they assemble and they flatter Trump and they say and they present a different perspective and then Trump comes around to that point of view and then gets a little upset of Vladimir Putin for a couple days and then Vladimir Putin calls Melania and are we not just like what is anything actually changed I guess is my question? No, I don't think so. I mean, all that's changed is the Russians saw, well, one thing I forgot to mention, and I'll mention it now because it's important. One of the reasons Dmitriev, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and JD Vance thought that they could railroad the Ukrainians now. more easily than before, is Ukraine has two crises. One crisis is a corruption scandal that ain't going away that involves stealing from the energy industry in Ukraine, which is especially insulting to Ukrainians because this is a country suffering blackouts all the time, right? We're approaching winter. It's very cold, and people are stealing from the till to keep the lights on, right? So how... treacherous can you be, right? Yeah. And this corruption scandal, if you read the Ukrainian press or talk to Ukrainians, involves two people. Rustem Umerov, the former defense minister, who's now like the National Security Advisor to Volodymyr Zelensky, who was in Florida with Steve Witkoff and Dmitov, I'm sorry, not Dmitri of, but Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner looking at this plan in its sort of primordial form and apparently offering some kind of revisions or amendments to it. And Umerov's boss. or Krisha, as the Russians would call it, Andrei Yermak, who is Volodymyr Zelensky's chief of staff, a deeply, deeply controversial figure. And Yermak was in Geneva litigating this whole thing with Marco Rubio and the Americans and the Europeans. So the lead negotiated on Ukrainian side is in hot water. What's happening now? That seems like a real vulnerability. I started just to interject with a good for Volodymyr Zelensky, though. Yes. And Tucker Carlson is saying, oh, the Wall Street Journal is sitting on a big massive scoop about Yeromach being corrupt. Why aren't they releasing it? They're running interference for Yenemak. Where do you think Tucker Carlson is getting this? I assume JD Vance. You raise your hand before it had the right answer. I assume it's JD Vance again, who has Buckley Tucker Carlson on his staff. That's right. And JD Vance is trying to basically stab the Ukrainians in the back, in the front, in the head, every which way to convince his MAGA base, we need to drop this country like a hot potato, right? So Zalinski knows that he's vulnerable. The other crisis that he has is militarily, the Ukrainians are not doing so great. I mean, they're not on the verge of collapse, but they are losing in parts of Donbos, which again, that's where Vladimir Putin is the mainstay of his efforts militarily, in a place called Pekrosk. Pekrosk is being squeezed like a pimple. They're trying to cut it off. Now, this isn't the most strategic place in the world for the Ukrainians, but Russia has invested in an enormous amount of energy. They've lost thousands and...

probably tens and tens of thousands of soldiers trying to take this town. And there's a huge propaganda campaign because if they take it, they'll say, you see, you know, this is an inexorable process. We will eventually march on all of Ukraine. So the timing of this is quite bad. But JD Vance doesn't realize one thing. And this is kind of the paradox of Ukrainian politics here. Yaroslav Trimov at the Wall Street Journal, excuse me, did a very good piece saying, Ironically, Volodymyr Zelensky's weakness is also Ukraine's strength, because if Volodymyr Zelensky were to sign a surrender document now, at minimum, there would be another Medan revolution. Even in the midst of war, the people would turn out in the streets to denounce him. He would lose all legitimacy as present. At worst, there could be a civilian military crisis, right? The Russians like to tell you, in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky rejected the best offer he could ever get. known as the Steinmeyer formula, which would basically kind of recognize de facto control of these separatist republics, which they were at the time, or they were couched as at the time, because the far right in Ukraine, the Azov battalion, threatened him with a coup. That's not quite true. There was widespread opposition to the Steinmeier formula, including Poroshenko's party, the other parties, and the far right was an element of this, but by no means the driver of the car. Well, Azov... now has a core. It used to be the third assault brigade. Now it's a core. So imagine, imagine what the nationalists in Ukraine, armed to the teeth, even more battle-hardened than they were in 2019, will do if they feel like Volodymyr Zelensky is selling out the country. Right? So in his weakness is a kind of, you know, implicit strength. He can't do this deal, even if he wanted to. So then explain to me the element that's out this morning from CBS, which is that Ukraine is basically saying they're agreeing to the deal that was ironed out in Geneva, and that Volodymyr Zelensky is going to come to town. Who knows, maybe as soon as this weekend, Donald Trump doesn't like being with his family, so it gives him something to do on Thanksgiving weekend. Where is he going to go, Moralago? I mean, Trump's schedule doesn't seem to have much wiggle room for a meeting in D.C. Maybe he'll fly back for that. But my advice to Volodymyr Zelensky is... Stay the fuck away from Washington, D.C. You know, what do you think is waiting for you here? JD Vance is going to suddenly roll over and play nice. He's going to try and do exactly what he did in February in the Oval Office, precipitate a confrontation and get Donald Trump to, you know, Hulk out on Volodymyr Zelensky. That's the worst possible scenario. I think what needs to happen is, and I, you know, I argue about this all the time with my friends who think that the Europeans are. I mean, behaving like the gimp in pulp fiction. Like, why are you going to Trump? Why are you humiliating yourselves? Why are you doing the whole daddy finesse routine? The Europeans feel like they have to manage this crisis, again, as you say, again and again, it's Groundhog Day. Because there are certain things the United States still has and still provides that the Europeans cannot make up for or provide on their own. And Ukraine needs. Number one is a certain kind of intelligence, mostly battlefield, targeting packages. which I don't know why the Europeans can't source this themselves, but them's the brakes. Number two, and I've discussed this before with you, there are certain weapon systems that only we manufacture that the Europeans cannot, or they don't. Patriot missile systems, right? The Gimlers for High Mars, all of that fun stuff. What is happening now? And this is another point of kind of intrigue for Donald Trump. He makes a big deal of saying we're not giving anything to the Ukrainians for free. The Europeans are buying it, right?

NATO is buying our kit to donate to Ukraine. So the Europeans need to come to town, tell Trump, this deal is a pup, or at least it was, until we, you know, rewrote it. And even if the Ukrainians wanted to do this, they couldn't for the following reasons. We can't do the things that the Russians are demanding of us, and we won't, frankly. And oh, by the way, you know, if this is about a drug deal or you need to be bribed with something, let us announce a $50 billion investment into the pearl system that you have built with NATO. So we'll pay. We will enrich the military industrial complex. And then you want to take bribes from Lockheed Martin or Raytheon. That's your prerogative man. But we will give you the money that the Russians are offering and then some. And we'll do it kind of an aboveboard fashion, right? You're saying that's what should happen. I'm just sitting here reading my CBS, which says that Umarov on the Ukrainian side is saying that the plan is for Volodymyr Zelensky to come to D.C. soon. Don't say it and tell you so. I mean, you know, how many times do you, you know, Volodymyr Zelensky in the room with Trump never, at best it's not like. The last time was okay. The last time we talked him off the ledge. No, the last time is when Trump was like dangling tomahawks only to say, no, they're not getting him. Right. That was kind of a letdown. They came here to be told yes. So that was a humiliation. The time before that was okay. But again, why even risk is it going to be just okay or is it going to be taken to the tool shit? You don't need to go down that route. The things that need to be hammered out don't need a... sort of Rose Garden or Oval Office meeting to be hammered out. It's an email, not a meeting. You know what I mean? I wonder what you make of this, what you hear from folks who are obviously, I assume most people you're talking to are sympathetic to Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians on this is, man, humans are only built for so much, right? Volodymyr Zelensky has been in the shit now for... Half decade it feels like, I mean, forever. Like forever. Years upon years, a lot of pressure coming from a lot of different angles. I mean, he's shown just unbelievable. I think nobody could have imagined the strength that he has shown in the face of all this and the resilience. But like, you know, it's coming at him from all sides down. And you mentioned that you have the corruption scandal. You have the nationalists inside the country. You have just the weight of all of the death. and of your fellow countrymen that you're responsible for you have trump JD Vance fucking with you you got put right like is there not concern that a crack up is maybe coming it's a huge concern it's absolutely a huge concern i mean you know zalinski gets more popular when he gets bullied or pushed into a corner by anyone, but especially Trump. So in a way, like, every time there's a crisis like this, the Ukrainians sort of rally around the flag, but be under no illusions. There are a lot of Ukrainians you talk to. It's like, yeah, he was a great wartime president. He kind of rallied this Western coalition, but domestically, he has mismanaged things horribly. And he's protecting people like Yermak, who nobody likes and who has delusions of grandeur himself, political ambitions.

And also the commander-in-chief of the armed forces is somebody who has seen to be very Soviet-minded and willing to sacrifice, you know, the great and the good of Ukraine into these meat grinder campaigns that are subject to diminishing returns, you know, holding small pockets of territory that a lot of Ukrainians think we should have withdrawn, you know, tactically from here because the Jews ain't worth the squeeze. So there's a lot of stuff going on inside Ukraine that's not making it into the Western press as regularly as it probably should. Be under no illusions. Like, we don't need to romanticize any country or any government. However, and I emphasize this point, the reason that Ukraine will survive, the reason Ukraine has survived, the reason Ukraine has a struggle worth supporting, it's not about who's in the presidential administration or who's the defense minister or who's running the army. The country has a very vibrant civil society. It has a very strong kind of democratic instinct. When they feel like they're being railroaded or deceived or manipulated or stolen from, even in the midst of war, even when Shahid drones are raining down on them or contingent missiles are raining down on them and they have rolling blackouts and their kids have to study math by candlelight, they take to the streets and they tell their government, no. You know, this is not like Russia where, you know, that kind of happened in the last few years, but you notice we don't see anti-war demonstrations in Russia. We don't see people demanding Vladimir Putin stop. Russian sentiment of the war alternates between indifference and nationalistic patriotic fervor. Keep going. You know, the Ukrainians don't put up with shit this way. And that's the danger for Vladimir Putin. I want to just final point. It's not just a territorial conquest. It's not just this imperialist or revanchist campaign to. rebuild as much of the Soviet Union as he can. Ukraine and Russia, it's like a Pepsi challenge. If Ukraine can thrive and become a democracy with civil society the way it is, but with transparency, if it can rid itself of corruption, if it can integrate into Europe and become like a full-fledged Western country, and now, by orders of magnitude, the most capable battle. tested military in all of Europe, that is terrifying for Vladimir Putin because he thinks that that might happen here, meaning in Russia, right? Yeah. Even though I would submit that's probably a remote contingency. But that's one of the things that's motivating him. And that's why he ain't going to stop. Just for it's worth, I could pass the Pepsi channel just by a sniff. Pepsi is garbage. I wouldn't even have to put it into my mouth. I could just smell the cup and tell you if it's Pepsi or not. I want to just circle back to what I said at the top and kind of end with it through the context of JD Vance. He did a tweet yesterday that I think kind of encapsulates where he's trying to position himself with the problem that the administration isn't on this. I'm going to read it. It's a little long. He writes the long Bill Ackman style tweets now, which is really annoying. I try to stick to that. to the 280 myself, a classic, Coca-Cola classic over here. After four years of house prices doubling, many young people feel priced over the American dream of home ownership, a welfare fraud scandal of Minnesota reveals that large numbers of new arrivals aren't assimilating and funneling tax dollars to terrorist groups, an innocent woman was set on fire insurance.

The Obamacare insurance system is buckling under its own weight, and the country is $38 trillion in debt. Our administration is working hard on addressing all these problems, but you know it really fires out the Beltway GOP, not any of the above. Instead, the political class is really angry that the Trump administration may finally bring a four-year conflict in Eastern Europe to a close. This is JD Vance's attempt to kind of reframe everything in what he sees as the mega populist nationalist sense, where he is the true error. The problem with that is... The administration is doing basically nothing to solve any of those problems besides sending troops into the streets and doesn't really know how to solve the housing problem or the debt problem. And simultaneously, like his colleagues, including his boss, I think, are actually kind of more interested in solving the international wars so that he can win a Nobel Peace Prize. I think it leaves him in a position that might feel strong in the Twitter debates, but it feels very weak. in the political and geopolitical sense. JD Vance was absolutely detested by his colleagues in the Senate. They loathed him. Marco Rubio is different. Like, Marco Rubio had friends. He had colleagues. He worked very hard in Senate foreign relations. JD Vance, you know, strangely enough, had more influence in the House among the Maga Caucus there, like people like Matt Bill Gates, who are now sort of dwindling than he ever did in his own Congress. I read that tweet as... American carnage, you know, screw Ukraine, right? I also read that tweet as I tried to do the dirty and make an Enron around everybody, and I got caught, and now I'm losing, and we're going back into the same cycle of the Russians say no, and Trump gets angry and embarrassed, and uh-oh, who's holding the bag this time? It'll be JD, because Marco Rubio told Trump, don't do this again. The Russians aren't ready. You're going to waste your time. You're going to look stupid. And the one who made him waste his time and look stupid is the rival to Marco Rubio. Well, JD, and his son-in-law and Steve Witkoff. But the one thing JD has working in his disfavor on that is he's the only one in that little Troika who is not doing business with the Trump family. So that hurts. Yeah, man. Look, it's it, this is. As awful and malevolent and vicious, you have to also appreciate the level of dysfunction and incompetence. Right? Like the one thing, and I debate this all the time. A lot of people say, oh, Trump has got this master plan. He's Machiavellian. He's a strategist. The fix is in from day one. I said, master plan. The guy thinks he brought peace between Azerbaijan and Albania. You know? He looks like, you know, he looks like your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. And sounds like it, too. I don't know. She's a scarf phone. I know he's starting to look like a Upper West Side. My favorite tweet. Yeah, he looks like a gay on the Upper West Side who owns a gallery. I was like beautiful. That's exactly. God bless the person that sent that tweet. And what's that about? He fell in love with Zohran Mamdani. You know, the radical. jihadist communist is now like his best friend. Maybe Zohran Mamdani should be appointed Ukrainian foreign minister for like a couple of weeks and he can do business with Trump because it's all about personalities, right? Well, Mark Kelly, if you're listening, I wouldn't be shaking in your boots about this investigation after we've seen what happened to James Comey and Letitia James. I don't know that these guys are. You're wasting taxpayer dollars even to attempt any kind of process like this, like the James Comey in, you know, prosecution.

Totally frivolous and vengeful. But, okay, we all paid for it. Well, Michael, that's just how things are these days. If the worst thing that they can do is waste taxpayer dollars, that's pretty low on my concern list at this point. I mean, I'd rather them not. That's my money. But, you know, we've got bigger fish to fry at this point. Michael Bari Weiss, what are you doing for Thanksgiving, brother? I'm just staying here. My daughter's best friend's parents invited us to their house. So it's a very low-key Thanksgiving. It sounds nice. Are there going to be, is there any covert missions? Are there any international men of mystery going to be there? No international men of mystery as far as I know. No. Unless you count like a giant assortment of Lububoos because my daughter's best friend's father is like hawking Labuboos to the entire school. It's like this weird like, yeah. That's creepy. I know more about these like stuffed animals than I ever cared to or wanted to, including how to determine which ones are fake. My daughter is like, you know, CSI, New York on the looos and lafooos. Don't ask me, man. You get a 10-year-old kid in your house and this is the way your life shakes out. I think we're going to leave it there. Michael Bari Weiss, we'll be talking to you soon. Everybody else, I got one more podcast before Thanksgiving with another faith. We're playing the heads this week. So we'll see you all tomorrow. Peace. Yeah.

I wish I didn't sleep so late. The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brett.