Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Let’s look at an update of the Ukraine war.
Remember, it’s now gone on for over three years. And we had pretty much discussed the contours of the fight. Russia has now controlled about 20% of Ukrainian territory. And it’s using its enormous advantage in manpower, gross domestic product—10 times the GDP, four times the manpower, 30 times the territory—to grind down the Ukrainians, which have been slowly withdrawing net withdrawals. This is in addition to Crimea and Donbas that the Russians already had annexed.
The general consensus was that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was being unrealistic. He was counting on more than the $400 billion from the EU and the United States and NATO powers to continue the fight with the express purpose of gaining not just territory taken by Russia in 2022, but also what was taken during the Obama administration, the entire Donbas and the entire Crimea.
And the Trump administration had said: This is unrealistic. This is $1.5 million dead and wounded. It’s Stalingrad. It’s the Somme. It’s Verdun. We have to have some kind of peace to stop this slaughter, this cauldron of death, on the doorstep of Europe.
Ukraine has pretty much given up the idea that it can win a slugfest with Russia on the ground. Its army is pretty much static. The average age is up into the 30s of recruits. About 10 to 12 million people have left Ukraine. So, its problem is not technology. It’s not weaponry. It’s not money. It’s manpower. So that was pretty much what we saw.
And the Trump administration was basically saying what the world did to Gen. Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, the heroic Fin, in 1939 that withstood a Soviet invasion that wanted to absorb 10% to 15% of Finland. He fought for four months. And then finally, Mannerheim said, “I can’t resist this juggernaut. I’ll cut a deal with Stalin. Give him 11%. Promise not to use Finland to launch attacks in the future on Russia.” And he saved modern-day Finland for what it is now.
So people had sort of said that paradigm might work, that Zelenskyy could get real and give up the idea of getting back the Donbas and the Crimea, not get into NATO, and you might have a deal.
But the problem was President Donald Trump, who pursued that line of peace negotiations, found out that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot take that back, apparently, after he started this insane war and tell the oligarchs, “I reified the fact that we have Donbas and Crimea. I went in a few miles into Ukraine. I expanded on it. Maybe we now have 20% of Ukraine. And they won’t be in NATO. And we’re going to have a ceasefire.” They said, “You did—that’s all you got? And you lost a million Russians, dead, wounded? No. No.”
So then we were in a stalemate. And Trump sort of pivoted and said now not Zelenskyy was unwilling to make a deal, but actually it was Putin.
And then something happened this week. Two things happened. A brilliant Ukrainian strategy of bringing by truck, stealthily, drones into the remote parts of Russia. Some of them are 2,500 miles away. Arctic bases, strategic bases that Russia counts on for the delivery of nuclear weapons and cruise missiles. And they have been used against Ukraine. Tupolev bombers.
And lo and behold, they launched this stealthy raid by drones. And we’ve never seen anything like it in military history. It destroyed 30% to 35% of the Russian strategic bomber fleet—$7 billion, 41 of these huge planes, some of them were sort of intelligence planes as well.
And then following up, there was a drone attack on the Kerch Bridge, that only link, really, that’s accessible for easy transport from mainland Russia into the Crimea. It’s essential. Now, the bridge will probably be repaired, but what am I getting at?
It shows you that Ukraine is now kind of having a turtle strategy. It’s not going to waste its limited manpower slugging it out. But it’s going to use drones and it’s going to make over a million of them. And they are the cutting edge of inexpensive, effective drone fabricators, producers in the world. They’re going to attack targets deep in Russia.
Is that going to bring Putin to the table? I don’t know. Strategically, it’s justified to show Putin he could lose all of his bomber fleet because it’s not just that they destroyed 41 bombers, but there is no deterrent. So, Putin and the Russian military are thinking: If they destroyed a third, what’s stopping two-thirds or the whole thing? How do we stop this? And who got them that close to be launched? And do we have enemies in our military? What’s going on?
So it was very effective. But the point I’m making is there’s going to be a retaliation. And there were certain rules in the Cold War that the two superpower rivals that were nuclear did not use a proxy to attack the homeland of another. So, imagine if during this Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro launched missiles that took out a third of our B-52 fleet. We wouldn’t just go after Castro. We would say to the Russians, “You broke the rules. You are attacking the American homeland using a proxy.”
I don’t know if that rule still applies, but what I’m getting at is while we all applaud Ukraine for doing something that was strategically necessary, geostrategically, it opens a new phase of the war. And Russia’s going to retaliate. And it’s talking about a type of retaliation we haven’t seen before. I’ll leave it at that.
But just when we thought the war might have some type of conciliation or armistice, Ukraine struck in a way that it had never done before and it was very effective. And we applaud that. But it’s going to earn a counterresponse that could lead to a cycle of escalation that could be very dangerous not just for Ukraine, but for NATO in general and the United States in particular.
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