← Bulwark Takes
Bulwark Takes
U.S. Intelligence is Winning the War in Ukraine (w/ Michael Weiss & Marc Polymeropoulos)
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- [00:00]
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Michael Weiss
Hi, this is Michael Weiss. I'm the editor of the Insider, an independent Russian news outlet and a frequent guest on the Bulwark with Tim Miller. I was just on yesterday to talk about, among other things, the big beautiful memorandum of understanding signed between the United States and Iran. And today I'm hijacking Bulwark takes with my friend and co conspirator Mark Polymeropoulos, a veteran CIA officer, somebody I'm sure you've seen on Ms. Now he's a contributor there and he's also, I think, been on the Bulwark before. Is that right, Mark?
- [01:28]
Mark Polymeropoulos
That's right. I have. It's awesome to be with you. We're going to talk about some rather amazing things that happened today as we just watched the Trump presser. Also a bit about Ukraine. And if listeners are lucky, we could talk about our favorite dive bars. Because one thing that intelligence officers and journalists have in common is their love of going out to a good dive bar.
- [01:47]
Michael Weiss
That's right. Christopher Hitchens used to call it Mahogany Ridge, where all the best sources are made. We were actually going to just focus, focus exclusively on espionage and covert action, a subject I write about as a journalist, a subject Mark has practiced as a clandestine officer. But we can't move on to that before. You know, one of the things Mark and I do is talk to each other every day offline about the state of the world. And we both have backgrounds in the Middle east and Europe and Russia and Mark, I mean, this Iran thing. So as we sit here, it is now, Wednesday, June 17th, just after 1:00 clock in the afternoon. Trump is at the G7 in France in. He's just given a speech, a press conference at which he said, and I'm losing track now, but keep in mind, here are the things that I noted. Number one, the Iranian regime is no longer radical. It is rational. They're going to behave beautifully. We can make a deal with them. They've seen the error of their ways. This is going to be a new dawn of peaceful coexistence and equilibrium in the Middle East. Sounds to me rather darkly like what the right used to accuse the Obama administration of trying to do, normalize relations with Iran. But he also said, and this I think is kind of the marquee stuff, number one, Iran has every right to have ballistic missiles because Saudi Arabia has them. Like, one of the operational objectives going to war with Iran was to eliminate the missile program. Now they can have it. He also said they might be allowed to enrich uranium for civilian energy purposes. Last I checked, we were going in to get all of the, quote, nuclear dust, eliminating the nuclear program, another operational objective of this war. And then he also said, the money that will be released to them, it's not really our money, it's their money. It's just frozen and they're going to have to get it back in one form or another. I mean, these are all of the things that Donald Trump used to say was borderline treasonous. When the Democrats are doing, and now he's not only doing them, but he's actually saying out loud that which we used to think. Well, that could possibly be the COVID or the, the sort of the, the subtle policy, but he's, he's just coming out and saying everything. This is like if you're a, if you're a pro Israel hawk, if you're a fdd, if you're a Mark Thiessen, I mean, this is like you're fighting the tallest building in the world and you want to jump out of the tallest window. This is the guy who is going to like deliver justice for 50 odd years of Cold War with the Islamic. He was gonna do regime change and now he's acting as defense counsel for the Islamic Republic.
- [04:20]
Mark Polymeropoulos
It's almost as if Donald Trump is acting as a Democratic plant right now. I mean, that press conference was so out there. And you and I, of course, as we always do, and I think our respective wives, you know, consider us having A bit of a side affair going on because I think I talk to you more than I talk to my wife with our chats all day. But this, I think both of our phones exploded because, you know, he really, in one fell swoop, in a matter of minutes, throughout every kind of justification for the war. And of course, you had Marco Rubio standing right behind him wishing he was somewhere else. But a couple things here. One is, I think that, you know, Bibi, Prime Minister Netanyahu, plus all the Iran hawks, you know, you better watch out for the skyscrapers on Tel Aviv because they're going to all be hopping off. That was insane in particular, I think. And you know, forget the nuclear piece just for a moment, the idea of the missiles, ballistic missiles not being an issue. It was so fundamental to the Republican outrage over the jcpoa. It's also something that Israelis really care about because they were subject to ballistic missile attacks and by the way, the Gulf partners as well. So this was like peak, just insanity and crazy and in some ways, and I mean, this what I'm going to say because there's a part of me that sympathizes in any kind of effort to do something against the regime. I was at CIA for 26 years. I battled the Iranians and their proxies on the streets of the Middle East. When I think about friends, when I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraq in particular, friends who were killed by these explosively foreign projectiles, the EFPs, this is the Iranians supplying them to Iraqi Shia groups. You know, when, when I see Iranians taken out, when I see, you know, any president confront Iran in some fashion, there's a part of me that approves to it. Of course, the way they did this was rather insane and crazy. And now he's taken kind of all of this justifications for it and thrown it out. So let's go back to that notion. This is it's Democratic campaign fodder. I mean, I don't know how, if you're on Fox News trying to justify anything, if you're a Republican politician, how you're going to look at what we just saw several minutes ago and say, this is the man, this is the Messiah, or as the Israelis might consider it, this is someone who has taken on the regime when in fact he just basically wrote not only a surrender document with the mou, but a surrender speech right there in front of all of us to witness.
- [06:40]
Michael Weiss
Well, and one of the other things that we went to war for, supposedly stated by General Kaine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs was to eliminate Iran's support for terrorist proxies. What does this MOU do? And again, they haven't released it. The Americans haven't released it yet. Bloomberg put out the points. They say that this is the thing, and it's obviously being circulated at the G7. So I'm sure the Europeans have been leaking to the press. But you can tell based on the White House talking points, which were leaked to me yesterday or the day before, that one of the elements of the MOU is it's a ceasefire, not just with respect to Iran, but also with respect to Lebanon. And that means that not only are we have we abandoned an operational objective of get the Iranians to eliminate their support for groups like Hezbollah, we are now counting on Iran to control Hezbollah and rein them in in Lebanon. And we, in exchange for that, will do the same thing with respect to Israel. You know, for all of the kind of conspiratorial stuff we've been hearing the last few months. Oh, Bibi and the Israel lobby convinced Trump to go to war. And they, you know, Israel has stranglehold on the American body politics. Donald Trump is talking about the Israelis like a vassal state. They have no sovereignty. They have no autonomy. They don't have freedom of action. They can't retaliate to missile strikes without his by your leave. Right. He's saying Bibi can't lift a finger unless I tell him to do so. He's treating the Israelis the way that Iran treats groups like Hezbollah. This is an utter catastrophe for the Israelis.
- [08:02]
Mark Polymeropoulos
So, you know, you bring up a great point. And, you know, I have friends who are former Israeli intelligence officers. I worked with them. I still keep in touch with them. To say they're having an apocalyptic meltdown right now is an understatement. And, you know, when I worked with the Israelis for many years in the field, there was always something that just was kind of foundational, and that was the idea that they had autonomy to protect themselves, especially the border when it comes to Lebanon. Now, US Presidents over the years have objected to some things that they did. When the Israelis bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, President Reagan withheld some military equipment. So that was a bit of a kerfuffle. But I'll never forget. I'm going to just tell a quick story. I'll never forget. I was actually in Israel at the time with Israeli intelligence officers when one day we Woke up in 2007, and guess what wasn't there? What wasn't there was a nuclear reactor that North Korea was building in the Syrian desert, that we were working collectively on to try to figure out what to do about it. President Bush, in fact, told the Israelis, let's take care of this diplomatically. And they said, sure, sure, sure. And then one day, it wasn't there anymore, because that's what they do. They, you know, you know, America is a partner, but when it comes to Israel's defense, particularly on its borders, they don't mess around. And so, you know, I think maybe a lot of us are going to look at some of the other things that are, that are going on now, particularly the financial relief that this MOU apparently is going to give Iran right away. But for the Israelis, this is now an existential threat. This MOU is a, is a document which is causing just absolute heart palpitations. And I don't care what you say about, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu, whether you like him or not, I'm talking about kind of Israeli national security that is certainly at risk. And I think that's something that, that, you know, we should care about. And again, it's almost as if we're siding with Hezbollah on this. I mean, it's just amazing not allowing the Israelis, by the way, who were hit again today, five Israeli soldiers were killed by one of these first person FPV drones in southern Lebanon or were injured. Ordinarily, this would cause a significant reaction, but according to Trump, the Israelis can't hit Hezbollah, particularly in their stronghold in the southern suburbs, in the Dahya in Beirut. So this is just a mess all around, you know, top to bottom. And again, you know, if you want to torture yourself, watch the press conferences. But if you want to have some fun, pour yourself a drink, pop some popcorn, and watch Fox News tonight, because I want to see how they react to that press conference, which was absolutely insane.
- [10:26]
Michael Weiss
Yeah. Well, you've got Jack Keane, General, very pro Trump, and he just came out straight away and he said, everything I'm hearing sounds disastrous from my point of a complete reversal of all of the things we set out to accomplish with this Operation Epic Fury. But you raised an interesting point about how the Israelis often ask forgiveness rather than permission. So we tell them, don't do something, they go and do it. And they say, look, we had to. This is in our interest to do it. We took out Iraq's nuclear reactor, then we took out Syria. You know who else does the same kind of thing? The Ukrainians.
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Michael Weiss
And it's a very interesting and very similar relationship. And I want to talk about this because you and I talk about this all the time. We obviously have people that we know, former CIA officers who were integral in. I think the expression you use is putting in the plumbing in Ukraine going back now more than a decade, 2014, 2015, after the revolution of dignity, which basically ousted Viktor Yanukovych, technically, he fled the country and went to Russia along with some of his security chiefs, having stolen billions of dollars in Ukrainian taxpayer money. There was a real reluctance on the part of American intelligence to crawl into bed with the Ukrainians because we saw them as completely infiltrated by the Russians. And there's a great piece, we always come back to it. It's kind of a touchstone in this, in this sort of area by Adam Entus at the New York Times about the kind of spy wars, right, which delves into some of this history. And I wanted to talk a little bit about this because it's actually important. And it gets lost in the noise of how we're covering Ukraine right now, which is, in characteristic American fashion, in a very inter directed, you know, everything filtered through domestic politics. And Trump, right? So we all talk about Ukraine. Like Donald Trump has abandoned Ukraine. He has cut military aid to Ukraine by 99, according to the Keel Institute of World Economy, which is a German think tank. So now what we do is we sell weapons and ammunition to our European and North American allies like Canada, and in turn, they then donate the stuff to Ukraine. So Donald Trump says, we don't give anything away now. We sell it and they buy and they buy and they pay in full. Right. So we're not actually helping Ukraine gifting anything to them anymore. But another thing that has been a constant throughout this second term, and a constant very counterintuitively so, because you would think he would have severed this relationship. Intelligence sharing between CIA and the Ukrainian services, particularly their military intelligence service known as Gurgaon, has not only persisted, but has deepened and expanded. And that's something that you and I have both been able to confirm on the American side, but more importantly on the Ukrainian side. And I wanted to get into this with you because, you know, John Ratcliffe is somebody. I think we both have mixed feelings about you in particular because of his CIA's cover up of Havana syndrome, of which you were probably the most well known victim, the refusal to acknowledge this thing is real and the refusal to say the Russians are doing it, even though I think it's more than even an open secret now in the intelligence community that that's true. But one thing Ratcliffe has done very Expertly, I'd say is he's managed Donald Trump. And the way I'm told it goes is, you know, whenever Trump is feeling like he's ready to cut the ties with Ukraine, Ratcliffe goes and plays golf with him at the weekend and manages to has some kind of mesmeric hold on Donald Trump to say, actually, Mr. President, we need them, and what they're doing is pretty cool and the way it was described to me. And again, this is going to sound very paradoxical to listeners who just assume, and rightly so, Donald Trump has a real antipathy toward Ukraine and a particular dislike of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because I think he sees him as somebody who caused his first impeachment, even though that's not true for some reason. When Ratcliffe says to Donald Trump, this is how many Russians are being killed per month and we're helping the Ukrainians do it, Donald Trump's eyes widen. He gets excited by this. Right. He actually plumps to the idea of chopping the Russians down. And I think it's because he's desperate for a deal with Putin. He wants to be liked and respected by Putin, just like as we've just discussed. He wants to be liked and respected by all of our adversaries, including the Iranians that he went to war with. But he never wants to be the junior partner in that relationship. Right. He wants to show the other side who's boss. And I think the COVID aspects of our Ukraine assistance, which is ongoing, as I say, I mean, we still provide targeting packs to the Ukrainians, and not only to strike Russian troops inside occupied territory of Ukraine, but to strike Russians inside Russia. All the energy infrastructure, the oil terminals and refineries. I mean, that stuff is coming from us. I mean, so let's, let's talk about this, because this is sort of the unsung, I think, victory of whoever it is. You want to call it the deep state, or you want to call it the kind of quiet little cabal of pro Ukraine actors in this administration. Ratcliffe is one. Rubio is probably another. Alexis Grankevich, the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, is certainly another one. How is this working? Tell us a little bit about this relationship when it was built and why.
- [15:26]
Mark Polymeropoulos
Yes, I love this story, and I'll tell you a couple of reasons why. But let's also, I know we're going to give Adam and II some credit. That New York Times piece was, as I read it. I mean, he did it. I think he interviewed 200 plus officials, including a lot of former intelligence and perhaps even in current. So it does give kind of the idea and we'll go to that in a second. But I also want to give you some credit too because you have reported on this at the Insider and your substack and I think it's actually, it's a very important story because it also shows the nuance of foreign policy and of the intelligence world. But let's start off with though, just the notion why Ukraine is kind of an issue and a positive issue for U.S. intelligence officers. And I think it goes back to all of us spent years and years in the gwat. The global war on terrorism, which started out in my view as a righteous war, you know, the fight against Al Qaeda. And obviously we stayed very, very long, a long time in Afghanistan. I have friends who were killed. I was involved in operations which had tragic consequences. And so you leave there feeling kind of mixed. And again, this started after the events of September 11th. That's a hell of a long time ago. 2014, 2016 comes along and here's this conflict in Ukraine. And you know, I was involved in this only from the headquarters side as a senior officer. I was the deputy operations chief and then the acting operations chief, Europe and Eurasia. And so, and what we were doing at the time is exactly right. You're putting the plumbing in. So we're building capacity for the Ukrainian intelligence service in a really, I'm going to just say it like in a non sexy fashion. That's equipment, that's training, that's identifying officers who we know are, you know, are not subject to, you know, possible recruitment from, from the Russian side. Everything that you kind of would worry about. But there's, but on the, I would say emotional, even spiritual side. And this means something for people. This is a David versus Goliath story. And it started of course with, with, you know, not, not in the Russian invasion that we think of it, but when Russia kind of took the East. And so, you know, this is years prior. And so what you're doing is you're seeing this incredible kind of, you know, a band of Ukrainians fighting against the big evil, evil Russians. And that resonates with people like me in the CIA, especially after all the confusion of the gwad. So, okay, so this is a David versus Goliath story. We're building capacity and we're doing exactly what you said. We're putting in the plumbing. And again, it's the notion of, you know, at some point perhaps we will get an administration or something that will happen that's serious at first, as Adam and Tus and I have to be careful, expertly alludes to the idea of lethal assistance was, you know, caused this collective freakout. But ultimately, with the Russian invasion, things change. And of note, and I think, you know, there's a lot of us. I had nothing to do if I was retired at 2019. But I think that when you hear stories of the Ukrainian and Ukrainian intelligence saying that, you know, their frantic calls to CIA and CIA's communications with them really helped stem that initial Russian assault. You know, it was tenuous. I mean, the idea of kyiv falling in 72 hours, it was a stupid analytic call, but it's not totally unfounded because, you know, there was a massive army ascending on Ukraine. But when Ukrainians then say to Adam, entous to yourself and others, hey, that's CIA assistance, particularly on targeting, pinpointing where the Russians were going, were coming in, that really assisted. You know, there's a lot of pride there. So let's fast forward now to what you talked about, which the Trump administration, clearly, Trump does not like Zelensky, but behind the scenes, what is, what is abundantly clear. I'm retired, so this is based on the same kind of conversations I have. I just got back from Europe, and frankly, I was hearing the same thing. The intelligence support that we're giving them now is actually better than what was under the Biden administration. That doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's actually true. And so, you know, what we call balls and strikes, particularly, you know, you and I, when we're very critical of the Trump administration, you got to kind of give them credit for that, because this type of intelligence support is actually what the Ukrainians need right now. You have been one of the key figures who have talked about in the past under the Biden times that, you know, they, the Ukrainians needed attack on missiles, needed kit. Well, they have this kit, not necessarily from us, maybe through now, the Pearl program, where we're selling it to them, but really from the Europeans. But what the Ukrainians actually desperately still need is that, that intelligence support. And they're getting that. And on top of that, there is, again, it's counterintuitive, but the Trump administration, or perhaps Trump himself, doesn't seem to have that risk aversion. So the Ukrainians are hitting things with our technical targeting assistance inside Russia that they were not allowed to do before. Again, weird. You have a president who hates Zelensky. I think the way you describe what Ratcliffe has done, so, so brilliantly is that he also goes to Trump and he says, not directly, but if the insinuation is you want to back a winner, you don't like losers, guess what? Russ is fucking losing. And that's all he cares about. And so at the end of the day, I think that that resonated. And so, you know, is that the deep state? Well, I don't know. Is it, is it Ratcliffe being smart? Yes. And at the end of the day, though, let's just understand it's. This is still, this is the right thing. This is the David versus Goliath. The good guys have to come out on top. And if, you know, my old shop is doing some stuff like this. The key point though, and perhaps that you can kind of jump on now and what I was talking with European defense officials the last couple of days in Europe is if, you know, this is also, as with everything with Trump, it's tenuous. So this is great that's going on. But the key question then maybe Michael Few is can European intelligence services kind of replicate any of this or their efforts that they're doing right now to take up the slack? What is it that they can jump into the fray if the US at some point decides no more. Because we still got a lot of time left in the Trump administration and banking on this, we got a good thing going now. Banking on that for the next two and a half years. I don't know, Jake.
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- [22:31]
Mark Polymeropoulos
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- [22:36]
Michael Weiss
Well, you know, I mean, there are shortfalls from what I'm, from what I understand, satellite technology. We're kind of the four first and foremost on when it comes to signals intelligence, like collecting Russian chatter. There are a lot of countries that do that just as well, if not better. One of the ones I keep big upping whenever I'm asked or I have an opportunity are the Dutch AIVD. They, they truly belong as the 6i and 5 eyes sharing program that we have. And if you read the N2 speech, which I encourage everyone to do, you'll note that there was a kind of, I'm reluctant to call it like a fusion cell, but basically a coordination among several services. The Brits, which do excellent human intelligence or used to CIA, the Dutch and Gore and I know also the Estonians have had a hand in rehabilitating and professionalizing the Ukrainian services, particularly when it comes to counterintelligence, weeding out the Russian spies and so on. I don't think the Europeans are quite up to the challenge to inherit everything, which is why it's so critical to keep this intelligence sharing program in place. But one important point, you know, and I've told the Ukrainians this from the beginning, you're never going to get Trump on your side. You're never going to convert him to be pro. The best you can do is mitigate the damage he's prepared to do for some kind of phantom deal with the Russians and also show that you actually have value to contribute, that you have a. There's a utilitarian motive for supporting Ukraine rather than you're just a charity case. Right. And one of the ways that they've done that. Well, there's two first, coming back to this intelligence cooperation, people don't understand this was a two way street. In fact, it began as a one way street with the Ukrainians collecting on the Russians and giving it to CIA and saying here. And our analysts came out and said this is actually really good on Russian naval capacity. And you know, they speak the same language. And Valeri Kondrachuk, who was the head of military intelligence who really deserves all of the prizes, all of the medals. I've met this man. I went to his son's wedding. He's a true patriot and hero of Ukraine. One of the things he noted was that, you know, it's a lot easier for us to recruit Russians because a Ukrainian and a Russian sitting over a beer is very different from a Russian and American right. To betray your country for the main adversary of the United States, that is the height of treason. But the way the Russians see it, Ukraine is again, and this is part of their chauvinistic attitude about why they should conquer this country with one people. It's one in the same culture, so it's different. So the Ukrainians recruited Russian assets who provided, among other things, critical intelligence showing what the Russians were interfering in the 2016 presidential election. They actually drew a line between their cyber activities and so called Fancy Bear, you know, the GRU hacking unit that went into the DNC servers, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, John Podesta, exfiltrating all that information. So Ukrainians had already, before the full scale invasion, proven their worth as an intelligence service or a collection of intelligence services worth investing in. And now what are they doing? One of the things I advocated when I talked about weapons systems to Ukraine, there was never going to be, you know, a wunderwaffe of the war. There wasn't going to be one munition or one weapon system that was going to turn the tide, but it was never about that. It was knocking down Russian propaganda which said, if you provide HIMARS, if you provide ATACMS, if you provide F16s, it'll be World War III. Bullshit. We provided them. It not only wasn't World War III, but the Ukrainians used them to great effect. ATACMs were taking out air defense system systems in Crimea. And more to the point, every time they use an American weapon system designed to go to war with Russia, right? These are NATO systems. They use these systems against the Russians. It is a windfall of military intelligence for our side to see. This is how the Russians respond. This is how they adapt. This prepares the United States for any future confrontation with the Russians. I mean, throughout the Cold War, we built all these fancy weapon systems, you know, stealth bombers, artillery systems, rocket artillery. We never used them in a direct fight with the Russians. Right. The Ukrainians are using them and they're showing us this is how the Russians respond to it. This is invaluable stuff.
- [26:44]
Mark Polymeropoulos
There's something that. Let me just, let me just jump in because Actually, it just jogged my memory. When I was in the last position I had at CIA, again overseeing our operations in Europe, Eurasia. We were really focused on Russian active measures, disinformation campaigns in Europe. Europe was this horrible playground for Russian intelligence, including kinetic operations. I mean, so, but every once in a while I would get a visitor, let's just say a U.S. government, either intelligence or special operations officer who had come back from Ukraine. And he's used the same phrase for me each time. And again, this was the non sexy part of my job, which turns out to be really sexy now. He said, you know what, this is important that we're doing this because it's a lab experiment. It's a lab experiment on Russian EW electronic warfare and everything they're doing. And I'd be like, yeah, yeah, sure, sir, keep doing what you're doing. Not realizing how important that statement that back in 2017 really was. So, so I think you're 100% right there. I want to, there's, there's, there's something to be said, I think, when you, because with the two conflicts and you take a look at what we collectively, the United States government has done for Ukraine and, and, you know, let's, let's put the Biden administration, the Trump administration, but forget his craziness. We're talking about what CIA is doing. But it's the idea of, of what I think CIA is all about, not just recruiting a unilateral asset. That's a spy that you think of. That's where you, you, you get, you recruit someone to, you know, report on the plans and intentions of their government. It's what you, everyone kind of gets romanced by. But the other part of what CIA does is liaison operations. You know, national security is a team sport. And so think about what we've done with the Ukrainians. And it's a remarkable story. And that's why that Adam Entus piece, everything you've written about too, and talked about, it's a lot of pride within CIA. And by the way, half of our former my friends who are now your friends formers are in Ukraine right now still working on things such as, you know, the development of drones and things like that. So it really matters. It means something. I'm going to contrast that and I'm going to say I was, I was doing the math 155 days ago is when Donald Trump on January 13 said, quote, help is on its way to the Iranian people and we've done nothing. So that's the pride That I and others feel, and you as an American as well, feel towards what the US has done for the Ukrainians. We've done nothing for the Iranian people. We promise them that. And I think that to me, I mean, it's a perfect way to kind of encapsulate the two conflicts. One is which the US role has been extraordinary. Huge pride in Iran, not so much. And again, have we abandoned the Iranian people totally. And it drives me nuts. And if you want to kind of fuse the two together, let's not forget all the times that Zelensky and the Ukrainians have offered us and the Israelis assistance on drone warfare and we said no. Kind of crazy how it all kind of. There's that really. That thread that you can kind of wind through things.
- [29:34]
Michael Weiss
Yeah, I mean, you know, there are people who've said we would send certain pieces of kit to the Ukrainians. They would be like, actually this doesn't work very well against Russian ew. So they would MacGyver our own munitions and make them more lethal and more insusceptible to being, you know, interdicted by the Russian side. And you know, we're doing this now. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, has invested with the Ukrainians in the production of these Hornet medium range drones, which go farther, I'm told, than anyone even knows and carry a big wallop. I mean, this is the thing that's cutting the direct line of communication between Russia and occupied Crimea. And it's the reason that Ukraine is now talking about Crimea again as another area of operations that could be, you know, potentially drive the Russians out of or certainly make life very unpleasant there. So all of these things are interlinked and you know, the Trump kids are investing in drone companies here in the United States that are looking to acquire drone technology and licenses in Ukraine. And you know, Trump even today made some kind of muttering non committal comment about possibly allowing the Ukrainians licenses to produce air defense systems domestically in Ukraine. So with each passing day, the more Ukraine not only hangs on, but claws back territory makes life deeply unpleasant for the Russians. They're killing or taking or inflicting casualties in excess of 30,000 per month, which is more than the Russians can replenish their stocks with with raw manpower. The more they show that you're going to need us, meaning we will need the Ukrainians more than they need the West. And you know, I one of the people that we've been talking about or talking around who was integrally involved in helping build these Ukrainian services, that person told Me, you know, we look at the Ukrainians the way that, you know, we used to look at Cuban exiles after 1959. You know, we're going to use them as proxies. They're going to be operatives, I'm told we're going to send them to Taiwan because they're so good, you know, to, to, to basically help another underdog country should it be invaded or attacked by China. So this is a long term investment. It's already paid off, but it, it stands to pay off by orders of magnitude in the future.
- [31:40]
Mark Polymeropoulos
And, you know, you know, it's a perfect way to think of that. That, and I love that idea, by the way. If I was still in the service, using Ukrainians as surrogate forces, that gets me all fired up right now. That's the kind of stuff that I did in the past. But don't forget in the last dying, awful days of the Afghan withdrawal when we're seeing these awful videos and even US forces are on the aircraft and they've left. And you know where I'm going with this, Michael? What military, what special operations capable units were on the ground at Hamid Karzai airport helping the Afghan withdrawal? And you know what that is? It's the Ukrainians. Yeah, they were there for us at a time of total crisis in the US Government. I don't think this is talked about enough. And they were there when we left. And then of course, when you talk to Ukrainians, they will remind you. So, you know, look, at the end of the day, I totally agree. The Ukrainians are incredible allies. We certainly have joint interests in going after and going after the Russians, but they do it just as much or more for us as we've done from them. And that's what relationships in the national security space in my old world and intelligence are all about.
- [32:43]
Michael Weiss
And just as a kind of embodiment of this, you know, you mentioned the Afghan withdraw. So the, the Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail did a deep dive into this fantastic piece. I forget the author, but look it up or I'll, I'll put it out on Twitter after this episode. The guy who orchestrated that whole exfiltration campaign was Kirill Budanov, who was the former head of military intelligence in Ukraine. Now he's the chief of staff to Zelensky. Kirill Bodanov, before all of this was a paramilitary officer in Gore, Ukrainian military intelligence, who was actually slotted into a unit 2245 built by CIA ground branch in Ukraine to act as sort of the special forces of Ukraine. And I mean this guy is like the Jason Bourne of Ukraine. I mean, he's been into occupied Crimea. He killed the son of a FSB Vympel general, which is one of the reasons he's on the kill list. He's on the kill list many times over for all the shit he's done against the Russian side. This is a guy that was very close to the Americans. And when he comes here as part of any delegation led by Zelensky and, and he meets with CIA, he's an old friend.
- [33:48]
Mark Polymeropoulos
I mean, you know, I would say he's beloved.
- [33:51]
Michael Weiss
He's beloved, yes. Yes. And the fact that he's now in a political role in the presidential administration, not simply in an intelligence one. So he is going to be somebody who will be determining any future settlement of this war, inspires more confidence on the American side that we can trust the Ukrainians. And this is, this is one of our guys. This is somebody we know intimately. Well, for over a decade. Right.
- [34:13]
Mark Polymeropoulos
Personal relationships, you know, it's the nature of the old intelligence business. Always has. You know, when I, again, when I travel, I go see officers who I grew up with. This is, this is officers and other services I grew up with. As a junior officer, then you kind of rise up in the organization. Maybe you're at a senior level, maybe you retire. But those personal relationships are absolutely key because. What does that mean? And let's just, let's kind of. To bookend this. So with Budanov, who is in a, now in a mega political role, you can have difficult conversations with him because you've been through so much together, and that's really important. There still is a trust level that is, that has been developed over time. And, you know, that's. Again, I want to think back. That's the nature of what we did. It's sustaining those relationships, building them, talking about putting in the plumbing. And then when you're all kind of older and kind of gray hair and you're long in the tooth, you just have that ability to still work together. And so, you know, I don't know what the, what the meetings are like right now when he comes to the United States, but I can assure you he's going to see some old friends that he's known for a good decade.
- [35:14]
Michael Weiss
And so just to give a kind of lay of the land where we are in the, the Russia Ukraine war, you know, it's, it's all well and good to say that Ukraine is doing better on the battlefield. This is true. But the Russians haven't stopped committing atrocities I mean, just a few days ago, they bombed a UNESCO World Heritage site, a Eastern Orthodox monastery in Kiev. Fortunately, the damage wasn't too extensive, and it was the part that was. Was refurbished or even built more recently. I mean, this is hundreds of years old. You know, Russia portrays itself as this great bulwark of Christian civilization. It's brought all these Western useful idiots, including Candace Owens, most recently a MAGA podcaster, to come to St. Petersburg and Moscow and talk about how family values are somehow more codified in Russia, a country that has now made it illegal to criticize the Taliban, for fuck's sake, because they now have a relationship with the Islamist government in Afghanistan. So Russia is still committed to destroying Ukraine as an independent sovereign nation, whether by military conquest of the entire country or the capital or by other hegemonic means, cutting a deal with a pliable or amenable actor in the White House, for instance. But as time has gone on and the Russian economy is taking a bath, I mean, the chief of the Russian Central bank has been missing for three weeks, and this is a woman who was kind of threatening to resign her position because Russia's economy has plummeted, right? Like, we lifted some sanctions or we waived some sanctions on Russia. They took a bit of a shot in the arm because of the global oil prices, thanks to our war with Iran, those prices are now subsiding. But even that wasn't enough to prop up Russia's economy, which is now completely on a war footing. And everybody I talk to, Western intelligence analysts say the longer this goes on, actually, the worse it will be for Putin and for Russia. Because eventually what's going to happen is he's going to have to either cut some kind of dismal deal from his perspective, to at least pause hostilities, or he's going to have to do mass mobilization where the population will. That will then not necessarily rebel. But it starts to get very restive when he's. When he's going out into the cities and, you know, hitting the elites and saying, your kids have to be now be, you know, called up for service, doesn't want to do that. And right now, he's relied on ethnic minorities and people from the sticks to kind of provide his cannon fodder. He's relied on North Koreans, he's relied on Africans that he has hoodwinked into coming to Russia. They think they're going to be driving cabs or filling shampoo bottles, and they get sent to the front as cannon fodder, right? So this is a guy that time is not on Russia's side here. And I think what the Ukrainians are trying to do, again, not convert Donald Trump to their side, but manage the relationship such that Trump doesn't try to upend everything or he doesn't try to solve the problem by making things worse and by giving more concessions to the Russian side than they have any right to at this point. And I think the Europeans feel slightly emboldened because, number one, they pay the bills, right? They're financing Ukraine's defense. Number two, even Trump and Rubio, who is discreetly pro Ukraine, are alluding to the fact that the Europeans should be driving these negotiations now. I mean, Trump just said yesterday, nothing to do with us. This is thousands of miles away. And we don't give Ukraine anything. We just sell weapons now. Okay, great. So you've negotiated yourself out of the central position of chief arbiter, interlocutor for this war. Let the Europeans handle it.
- [38:31]
Mark Polymeropoulos
Now, again, just having returned and having met with some senior European defense officials as well as think tanks, academics, activists, that's the theme now, in fact, and I think you alluded to this several months ago, the sooner Trump gets bored, the sooner Trump moves on, and I think he'll probably move on. Perhaps our next episode can be on Cuba. The better it is for Ukraine and Europe. As long as Europe gets their shit together, and they are, this is a good thing. The less American attention to this issue. As long as the intelligence still flows, as long as occasionally, if we have any weapon stocks left, we can sell weapons to the Europeans, that's fine. But you know, what we're watching for is actually less attention, continued less attention from the president, and that should be celebrated. Little counterintuitive from where we were under the Biden administration where we were screaming for more. Now, the best thing would be nothing happened. Don't even think, don't even listen, don't even hear about Ukraine. And that's a good thing. Let the intel flow, right?
- [39:28]
Michael Weiss
It's the old Bill Buckley line. Don't just do something, stand there, you know, keep the status quo, keep it off the front page of the New York Times. The Ukrainians will be quite happy with that. Well, anyway, look, we could go on for hours about Iran, Ukraine. I definitely want to talk to you about Cuba in the near future, but I think we've eaten up enough of the bulwarks bandwidth, so I'm going to leave it there. Mark, we can follow your work at Ms. Now. You're on air all the time. You write occasionally for here there and everywhere. I write for the insider I conduct or I oversee some of the big investigations. And we're both on Twitter I think, right?
- [40:03]
Mark Polymeropoulos
Just a little bit.
- [40:04]
Michael Weiss
Follow us just a little bit.
- [40:05]
Mark Polymeropoulos
Just a little bit.
- [40:06]
Michael Weiss
And I have a substack called Foreign Office so you can follow my stuff there. But I want to thank the Bulwark for letting us hijack their feed for the last 45 minutes or so and hope to see you again soon.
- [40:18]
Mark Polymeropoulos
Thanks, Michael.
- [40:19]
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Mark Polymeropoulos
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