Eric Ciaramella, Michael Kofman, Aaron David Miller, Alexandra Prokopenko, and Andrew S. Weiss
Aaron David Miller: If you were briefing [Trump administration officials], what do they need to know about Putin’s and Zelensky’s strategies and mindset as we enter the fourth year of the war?
Andrew Weiss: From my standpoint, the administration needs to understand that there are two big drivers of Russian actions in Ukraine.
At the time the war began, Putin was being an opportunist and really thought that he could replicate the Taliban’s success and engineer a takeover of Ukraine where the government would be decapitated, the military wouldn’t fight, and the world would have to adjust to new facts on the ground. That clearly didn’t happen. And since then, the Russians haven’t totally given up on those goals. But in the meantime, they’ve been trying to grind down Ukraine and wait out the United States and our Western partners.
And there’s been a sense of confidence on the Russian side for the past twelve-plus months that things are cutting their way. There’s been political transformation in the United States. There’s been questions of whether the war is sustainable for the United States and Europe, practically, in terms of the kinds of unbelievable military support we’ve provided to the Ukrainians, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. And there’s dynamics on the ground, where Russia, just by leveraging mass and singularity of purpose, has been able to show that time is not necessarily on Ukraine’s side.
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