Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2024

Front Burner Transcript for November 21, 2024

Host: Jayme Poisson

JAYME POISSON: Hi, I'm Jayme Poisson.

[Music: Theme]

JP: On Tuesday, the 1,000th day of the war in Ukraine, came two pivotal moves. Ukraine, after being greenlit by the Biden administration, sent U.S.-made ATACMS missiles into Russia for the first time...

SOUNDCLIP

[missiles launching]

JP: Causing a fire at a military facility in the Russian border region of Bryansk. This was a day after this warning from Zelenskyy.

SOUNDCLIP

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaking Ukrainian]

TRANSLATOR: Today, there's a lot of talk in the media about us receiving permission for respective actions. But strikes are not carried out with words. Such things are not announced. Missiles will speak for themselves. They certainly will.

JP: And the second move, in response, Russian President Putin signed a doctrine that lowered the threshold for using nuclear weapons. Following that, more escalations. Reports of U.K.-made missiles being used, Western embassies being closed, and the authorization of U.S. anti-personnel landmines too. David Sanger has been covering the White House, U.S. national security and superpower conflict for The New York Times for over four decades. Earlier this year, he came out with his latest bestseller, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. So who better to break down the situation, the machinations behind the decision that triggered it, and where this all could be headed.

[Music: Theme]

JP: David, hi. Thank you so much for coming on to Front Burner. It's a pleasure to have you.

DAVID SANGER: Jayme, great to be with you.

JP: So it has been just over a thousand days now since Russia invaded Ukraine. And before we get into the details from this week, how would you describe the state of the war right now?

DAVID SANGER: You know, the war has gone through, I would say, three distinct phases. And this may be, you know, a little bit of gross overstatement, but first came the initial invasion, for which the United States tried to provide early warning, hoping that it would embarrass Putin into not doing the invasion or prepare the Europeans to make threats.

SOUNDCLIP

SECRETARY OF STATE BLINKEN: We believe President Putin has made the decision, but until the tanks are actually rolling and the planes are flying, we will use every opportunity and every minute we have to see if diplomacy can still dissuade President Putin from carrying this forward.

DAVID SANGER: The Europeans saw the intelligence, didn't believe them, and that's a big part of the book that you just described -- how the decision came about to make public this very classified intelligence and how it didn't do much good. Then we went through the phase where the Russians tried to take Kyiv.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 1: This morning, Russian tanks and troops, artillery and aircraft are pummeling the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, as they lay siege to the city.

DAVID SANGER: And failed.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 2: All that's left of the Russian military around Kyiv are their wrecked vehicles, the damage they caused, and the casualties they inflicted. All Russian forces have pulled back from the capital.

DAVID SANGER: And the height of this came at the end of 2022, or the fall of 2022, just two years ago. And that was when we probably came closest to the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, when the U.S. picked up signs that the Russians were discussing setting off a tactical nuclear weapon. [JP: Mm-hmm.] And then we went into what I guess you could call the stalemate phase, which was much of 2023 into the beginning part of 2024. And actually, when you talk to U.S. officials who were deeply involved in Ukraine, or Europeans, they basically thought that by the... by about now through this coming summer, mid-2025, we would be in [an] essential stalemate where the lines didn't move very much. And instead, what's happened is that in just recent weeks, with the help of the North Korean troops...

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 3: According to the U.S., at least 3,000 troops were moved into Russia in mid-October. When asked about satellite images apparently showing North Korean troop movements, Putin said.

[Vladimir Putin speaking Russian]

TRANSLATOR: Images are a serious thing. If there are images, then they reflect something.

DAVID SANGER: Getting their act together with communications, with suppression of radio signals, which has enabled them to protect themselves against a lot of drone attacks and so forth, the Russians have actually begun taking significantly more territory. And that's come at just the wrong moment, because everybody suspects that Ukraine will be forced into a negotiation as soon as President Trump takes office.

[music]

JP: And then I guess that brings us to this week, right? And I should say, you and I are talking around 1 p.m. eastern on Wednesday. I just want to timestamp this conversation because there are some things that have been moving quite quickly this week. But on Monday, the Kremlin accused the U.S. of escalating the war in Ukraine, saying, quote, "It is clear that the outgoing administration in Washington intends to take steps to continue to add fuel to the fire and to further inflame tensions around this conflict." There had been much deliberation and debate over whether or not to allow Ukraine to use these missiles on Russia that they used this week. What's your understanding of how this decision was eventually reached?

DAVID SANGER: Well, let's back up, Jayme, for a moment and just describe to our listeners today what it is we're talking about, what kind of missiles and what's involved. So the missiles, they're called ATACMS. It is basically an acronym that people are describing in pure Pentagon fashion.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 4: The weapons have a maximum range of 300 km, meaning they could target more than a dozen airfields over the border. Ukraine has been pleading...

DAVID SANGER: This missile system was one of the many weapons systems that President Biden was initially reluctant to give to the Ukrainians at all, because he had two instructions to his staff. One was: Don't let the Russians win. And the second was: Don't get us into World War III. And his fear was that the use of advanced weapons -- like the ATACMS or F-16s or advanced tanks -- would cross some kind of invisible red line for Putin, and lead to a broader war involving NATO that the U.S. would have to come into with troops and all that. Over time, what they discovered was that Putin seemed less sensitive to what the U.S. was sending in than they thought initially. So they have sent in F-16s. Not to great effect, but they've done it. They did send in U.S. tanks, mostly as political cover for the Europeans to get their much lighter, more maneuverable tanks in. And ultimately, they did ship the ATACMS to Ukraine, and the British and French shipped a similar kind of weapon.

JP: Right.

DAVID SANGER: And they all had restrictions on it. And the restriction was: you can use this against Russians in your territory, but you cannot attack deep into Russia with it. And this came right out of President Biden's concern about escalating the war. And then a few months ago, they lifted that slightly when the Russians began firing from just inside their side of the border at Ukrainian troops that were in Ukraine. And it seemed ridiculous to have a rule that restrained the Ukrainians from taking out the artillery that was just over the border. So they said, that's okay. A few miles into the border, you know, if the Russians fire from there, they have it coming to them. But they refused to let President Zelenskyy use these weapons to go deep into Russian territory, say around Kursk, the area where Ukraine has gone into Russia and taken a fair bit of land. [JP: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.] And then something changed. And what changed was the Russian decision to bring in North Korean troops, thousands of North Korean troops to supplement their own. And the U.S. said, if you expand the war this way, you're going to pay a price for it. And the Russians said, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're providing lots of stuff to the Ukrainians. You know, who we choose to fight the war is up to us. And that's when President Biden made the decision to allow these ATACMS to be used in the Kursk environment.

SOUNDCLIP

SERGEY LAVROV: ATACMS...

REPORTER 5: The response from Russia's foreign minister.

[Sergey Lavrov speaking Russian]

REPORTER 5: Sergey Lavrov said the missile attack was a signal that the West wants to escalate the conflict.

SERGEY LAVROV: We will be taking this as a qualitatively new phase of the Western war against Russia, and we'll, we'll react accordingly.

DAVID SANGER: But the fact of the matter is, Jayme, that, you know, big deal as this sounds like it is, we don't have many ATACMS to give them. They cost a million dollars and above each, and our stockpile of them is just not that big. So it's not clear it's going to make that big a difference.

JP: Even if you include the missiles from Europe as well. There's the Storm Shadow ones, right? The long [indistinct].

DAVID SANGER: That's right. The Storm Shadow is the British version. There's a French version. They're essentially the same missile but under different names. The Germans also have a quite effective missile, but they have so far not wanted to send it at all. But yes, even if you combine all of those, you don't have anything that the Ukrainians could fire in large enough numbers to really turn the war.

JP: Right. Because I did see Ukraine fired six of these. I think it was on Tuesday, right? And five of them [DAVID: Yeah.] were also shot down, right?

DAVID SANGER: Well, the Russians said so. We are having a hard time confirming that.

JP: Got it. Okay.

DAVID SANGER: And they're not easy to shoot down, but, but it can be done. And as I said before, it's a lot of money per shot. So you want to make sure that you're getting the highest effectiveness out of them, especially if you don't have a very deep, deep arsenal. And the U.S. has stepped up production, but not fast enough to deal with the rate at which the Ukrainians would like to shoot them off.

JP: I also saw... in the news today, I believe that the U.S. has given Ukraine the permission to use their landmines. How significant is that?

DAVID SANGER: Well, it was a big debate inside the Biden administration for, actually for a few years. Because the United States is among the countries that's been trying to ban the use of landmines, although it has refused to sign the landmine treaty. But their concern about landmines in general is, you litter an area with landmines, sooner or later, the war ends, kids come back into the area, pick up a shiny object, and the predictable tragedies unfold. [JP: Right.] Why now? Because the Russians are making these rapid advances out of the territory that-- where the stalemate was, there is a sense that the Ukrainians need these desperately to stop that advance.

SOUNDCLIP

U.S. DEFENCE SECRETARY AUSTIN: The landmines that we would look to to provide them would be landmines that are not persistent. You know, we can control when they would self-activate, self-detonate, and that makes it, you know, far more safer, eventually, than the things that they are creating on their own.

[music]

JP: So the other significant thing that happened this week is that Putin signed a revised nuclear weapons doctrine that would interpret the use of U.S. missiles by Ukraine as not only an attack by Ukraine, but by America as well. And also, that Russia could now use nuclear weapons not just if its survival was threatened, but if an attack posed a, quote, "critical threat" to its sovereignty. And so the question of Putin's willingness to escalate the war has hung over every decision that Biden has made since the start of Russia's invasion in 2022, as you've just explained. Is this move by Putin to lower the threshold for a potential nuclear attack a step towards the worst-case scenario? How significant do you think this was?

DAVID SANGER: Well, it could be. I mean, its nuclear doctrine... and of course, while doctrine is very important and is used as a signaling function, and here Putin said as early as September, before the U.S. decision to allow the use of the ATACMS, that he was headed to changing the doctrine and loosening these restrictions. At the end of the day, a decision to use nuclear weapons has less to do with your doctrine than how well you're deterred by what price you might pay, in sanctions, in a counter-nuclear strike. And, you know, there has not been a use of a nuclear weapon in anger since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And so it would be a huge step, a huge step, for any country to decide to use a nuclear weapon in battle. That said, what Putin is trying to do is increase the ambiguity about when he would be tempted to use a nuclear weapon. And so if the old doctrine fundamentally said, you know, We would use a nuclear weapon if attacked with a nuclear weapon, or if our state was imperiled, the new one, as you quite rightly said, says, If a country poses a significant threat to Russia and is working in cooperation with a nuclear nation, we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons against the invading country -- Ukraine in this case -- or against the countries supporting them -- the United States. So it was Putin's sort of indirect way of saying, push this too far, and your own people and your own territory could be at risk.

JP: When you're speaking to experts, people who are very steeped in this, in the United States, like how worried are they about this doctrine change right now?

DAVID SANGER: They are not worried in the short term. They don't think that Putin is going to use a weapon in the short term. The Pentagon immediately came out and said, we’ve seen no change in their posture. And the U.S. has had no change in its posture. They were much more worried -- as I referred to at the beginning of our conversation -- in October of 2022, when they picked up conversation between several Russian generals that suggested that a weapon was being prepared or might be moved into place for use against a Ukrainian military base inside Ukraine. And that's when President Biden, attending a fundraiser in New York, started talking about the approach of Armageddon. He warned everybody that night -- it was a remarkable evening -- that we were closer to a nuclear detonation than we had been at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was 1962. So, you know, most of your listeners may not be remembering it all that vividly. So I think the experts who I talk to, the government officials I talk to, I've been covering nuclear strategy for more years than I would want to admit, um, are not that worried in the short term. They are worried in the long term. And their worry is this, Jayme. That throughout this war, we have seen a gradual loosening of nuclear taboos. Putin has at every couple of months threatened nuclear use in some form or another: in meetings with his national security staff that are broadcast on TV; in the kind of activity that I mentioned from October of 2022, which led the administration to think there was a 50% chance under some circumstances that Putin would use a nuclear weapon; now, loosening the doctrine. And this is not what this era was supposed to be about. This era was supposed to be about the post-Cold War denuclearization time, when nuclear weapons were reduced in their role in American national defences, when Russia and the United States were agreeing in a series of treaties to reduce the number of weapons that they had deployed. And it sure looks like we're about to head in the other direction.

[music]

JP: David, I just want to spend some time before you go today talking about how the next little while could play out here vis-a-vis Ukraine. So as you mentioned, Donald Trump is getting ready to take office. People around him were highly critical of the Biden administration's decision to allow Ukraine to use the ATACMS. Here's John Jr., for example, on X. Quote, "The military industrial complex seems to want to make sure they get World War III going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives." And I wonder if you could talk to me a bit about what you think is going to happen in the next couple of months and beyond that.

DAVID SANGER: First, let's talk about the very different worldviews on this of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Because these worldviews were basically on display during the campaign, but I'm not sure that Americans or Canadians or others who were watching sort of put them in these stark terms. To Joe Biden, the war in Ukraine is part of a bigger defence of emerging democracies -- even a corrupt democracy like Ukraine -- and about reinforcing the international norm that we don't just go over and take land from other countries. Right? That we don't just roll armies in. That the post-World War II order had established you don't do that. To President Trump, land his land. He's been in real estate his whole life. You swap some for others. And when he says he can get a deal done in 24 hours, what he seems to mean is he'd strike a deal in which Russia could occupy the 20% -- he hasn't quite said this -- the 20% of Ukraine that it's already basically in control of.

JP: Right. Just basically preserve the lines where they are, right?

DAVID SANGER: That's right. And in return, you know, Ukraine would say it would never join NATO, or it wouldn't join for 20 years or some period like that. And then they basically either have a peace agreement or more likely a Korea-like armistice where they just stop fighting and agree that they'll work out the border issues later on. And in Korea, of course, they've never worked them out. I mean, the war ended in 1953, and, you know, here we are still with some disputes. So, those are the two worldviews. Now, how could this play out? Couple of scenarios. One is, it might be difficult for Trump to then come in and say, I'm now stopping the Ukrainians from using the long-range missiles into Russian territory. Because within the Trump administration, there are some old neocons who are quite anti-Russia -- Marco Rubio, the new, or newly designated secretary of state among them -- who would have strong views on that. Or it could be that Joe Biden's doing Trump a favour and giving him some negotiating leverage here with the Russians: Well, if you don't pull back your troops, I can't pull back the Ukrainians from using these missiles into Russia. So, in other words, give him some bargaining chips. That would be a generous view of it. Third possibility is that the Biden team doesn't believe that any of this is going to make that much difference, but they want to leave office having given Zelenskyy everything he asked for, even if they gave it to him a bit later than he wanted it.

JP: And why would, why would that matter?

DAVID SANGER: The way history is written. That they think that, that at the end of the day, president-elect Trump is going to strike a deal that may sell out the Ukrainians. And if they do, they want to go down in history as having given the Ukrainians everything the Ukrainians asked for. Now, Presidents Zelenskyy would say, it's one thing to give me this, but it's another thing to give it to me when I actually need it. So, you know, handing me a hose after the house is burned down is not all that helpful.

JP: I did see a recent Gallup poll that suggested that there was a growing desire in Ukraine for a quickly negotiated end to the war, even with territorial concessions. People are tired; they've lost so much, right. And while the preference for most Ukrainians is for the EU or the U.K. to be at the reins, could there end up being more support for Trump in this than, than previously expected, or...?

DAVID SANGER: I think there could. Look, we're approaching year three, right? And year three is when you begin to understand the terrible cost of a war like this. Rebuilding Ukraine is going to cost untold tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. There are families that have lost fathers and sons and daughters, and they're never going to get them back. The Ukrainians are running out of people to recruit. And so if the option, if they went into this with great enthusiasm that they were going to win -- I don't know what quite winning [would] look like other than getting the Russians to pull back the February 22, 2022 borders. But if there was initial enthusiasm for that, they now may be comparing giving up 20% of the country with losing the whole country. And that's a different calculus.

JP: David, I want to thank you so much for this. I really, really appreciate you coming by.

DAVID SANGER: Great to talk to you, Jayme.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right, that is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

For more Front Burner transcripts, please click here.

For more episodes of this podcast, please visit this page.

Long-range missiles, nuclear fears in Ukraine - Transcript

Social Sharing