Susan Glasser

winter on the ground in Ukraine.

And, you know, one of Putin's strategies here is to maximally increase the suffering on the population of Ukraine in order to force things on his term, in part, Tim, because actually the strategy of going on a fence in a more conventional way has not been very successful for Putin.

It has come at enormous cost in manpower, in the strength of his military, which has been decimated on the ground in Ukraine.

Basically, they fought on the offensive all summer long to gain minimal, minimal support.

In fact, I was really struck by a statistic cited by The Times in its story today about this Witkoff-Dmitriyev peace proposal that suggested a Ukrainian think tank has come up with a number of four years, which is how long they say it would take for Russia to...

to fight at the current rate and gain territory at the current rate to get just this additional portion of the Donbass that Steve Witkoff wants Ukraine to give away to Russia, even though Russia doesn't control it right now.

Four years just to get a part of one country.

Right.

You know, Western Ukraine and civilian populations in the country and also Ukraine itself has been striking increasingly at targets inside of Russia using its domestically manufactured drones and other long range weapons.

Was that the whiff of a little, you know, possibly irrational exuberance?

No, look, I actually did.

I want to ask you because I feel like you're a keener observer of the, you know, sort of the former limbs, you know, still maybe echo for you.

You know, my my take is definitely it was a huge embarrassment for Trump.

And if you can't get Lauren Boebert in the situation room to, you know, give you her vote when she owes her entire career to, you know, performative displays of support for you.

Right.

Like something something is off and capitulation is the right word.

They went to extreme lengths to.

This is Trump.

So it's like, you know, add some zeros to whatever you're doing here.

They went to extreme lengths, shutting down the U.S.