Ben Wittes
speaker
379 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Ben Wittes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And so, you know, you can't get 1,100 people killed or wounded a month
as the Russians are doing at the front and not be able to replace them and continue military progress.
And so the Ukrainians have really done a good job in arresting and to some degree reversing the Russian military gains.
This has produced panic in Russian society, where it's hard to get a gallon of gasoline in a lot of areas now, and where the capacity to continue the military campaign has really been eroded.
And that's an incredible accomplishment.
And the Russian response to it is to bombard cities.
because that is something that is easy to do and it kills a lot of people and it demoralizes people, or at least they hope it does.
And so this is concurrent with a third development, which you just alluded to, which is that the Ukrainians have run out of Patriot interceptors and they're super low on other interceptors.
And so their air defenses are
against particularly ballistic missiles, but also some drones are less good than they were a few months ago.
And the result of that is that you have ballistics slamming into apartment buildings and killing a lot of people.
And the last week in Kiev has been awful.
And it's a direct result of the progress that the Ukrainians have had both at the front and in their medium and long range missile strikes into Russia.
So this has put a real premium on the question of whether they can get or make new interceptors.
And that has happened at exactly the moment where, as you also pointed out,
Trump has largely depleted our supply of patriots and put us actually in a really unfortunate military preparedness situation vis-a-vis our own missile defense.
And so the solution that the Ukrainians proposed, and to Trump's credit, he seems to have accepted, is that they want to make their own.
And Zelensky asked Trump for basically a license to produce missiles
patriots in Ukraine.
And Trump has, at least in principle, agreed to that.
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