Ben Rhodes

I didn't hear anything in Munich that was optimistic at all about either the battlefield or the talks.

There's a feeling that the U.S.

isn't obviously providing the same kind of assistance that Biden administration did.

And, as you said, I was really struck, Eamon, that when you're in Europe, there are these Russian sabotage operations happening.

I mean, in Poland, the whole shopping mall was burned down by Russian agents.

And, yeah, I met with some Germans who were literally thinking that they're already in an asymmetric war with cyber attacks and sabotage.

I mean, you've been following Ukraine recently.

Where do you see this going?

I mean, do you have any hope for an end of the war in 2026?

I mean, how are you thinking about Ukraine these days?

Yeah.

I mean, it's actually, you know, you mentioned the precedent set by kind of validating the annexation of big chunks of Ukraine.

I mean, maybe that's a precedent for Greenland annexation by the U.S.

And look, one more thing.

Well, I'd also say, by the way, the defense spending thing that everybody was crowing about, it's going to take years for Europe to do that.

If they do, it's not going to be relevant to Ukraine.

But speaking of the future, one more thing from Munich I wanted to get to, which is that there were as many as eight annexations

potential 2028 Democrats, people who might run for president in 2020 who are at the conference.

There was a lot of buzz about this.

The Europeans were very curious about these people because they don't know all of them particularly well.