Thank you for being a valued subscriber to The Washington Times. We appreciate your support for honest, in-depth journalism and hope you enjoy early access to our conversation with Daniel N. Hoffman.
I’m Guy Taylor, National Security Editor for The Washington Times, and I’m here with former CIA clandestine service officer Daniel Hoffman. Dan is a regular opinion columnist for the Times and a contributor to the newspaper’s Threat Status daily newsletter.
I’m also with Ben Wolfgang, the National Security Correspondent at the Times.
[TAYLOR] Dan, some argue that NATO expansion is what triggered the Ukraine war, specifically that after the fall of the Soviet Union, then-President George H.W. Bush assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand to reach Russia’s doorstep, only to have that promise broken by subsequent U.S. presidents. You regularly argue in your columns that it’s actually Russia that started the war in Ukraine. How do you respond to those who push this other narrative?
[HOFFMAN] Yeah, well, Vladimir Putin would like us to think that NATO is responsible for the war, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Look, NATO’s a defensive alliance that grew out of the Second World War because the Soviet Union projected a sphere of influence and dominated Eastern Europe and created the Warsaw Pact, and they would have expanded further had not NATO stopped them and deterred them. That’s what NATO does. They deter first the Soviet Union, now Russia, from launching attacks that could be devastating. The real reason Putin launched the attack on Ukraine is because what scares him the most is democracy. And everything that’s enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, liberty and freedom, the rule of law, if those things existed in Russia, then Vladimir Putin would be in jail at best.
And so he needs to create this atmosphere in his own country for his own citizens that Russia is at war with the West. He doesn’t want it to be so clear that he’s at war with freedom or liberty or democracy, things that actually Russians might like. He conjures up this vision of the enemy at the gates with tanks and weapons and harkens back to the days of Nazi invasion, which his family knew well in St. Petersburg.
But that’s just of Kremlin, KGB, Potemkin village propaganda.
[WOLFGANG] Dan, one of the major aspects of President Trump’s push for an end to the Ukraine war has been this elusive rare earth minerals extraction deal the White House says it’s pursuing in Ukraine. What do we need to know about the minerals extraction deal? And I’m curious, would it potentially involve minerals under the ground in Eastern Ukrainian territory that’s now controlled by Russian forces.
[HOFFMAN] Yeah, some of it I think is controlled by Russian forces. They’re, look, I’m not an expert excavator. You know, apparently from what I’ve been told, that’s pretty challenging to excavate those rare earth minerals. But it’s good for us to sign the deal. And it’s good for the United States to have economic skin in the game in Ukraine. And so I was a big proponent of that. I thought it made sense to do it, and I’m glad that we’re going to proceed with that deal.
It’s the start of potentially more along the lines of some post-war reconstruction plan for Ukraine. Billions and dollars worth of damage that Russia has caused to Ukraine’s infrastructure. Needless to say, they’ve killed tens of thousands of innocent Ukrainians and kidnapped roughly 20,000 more children. So there are other humanitarian issues, but how we build Ukraine back after the war is a big issue. This is a good start.
[TAYLOR] Dan, as President Trump continues to push for an end of this war, how likely is it that Russia gets to keep the eastern portion of Ukraine, that its forces cleaved off in the initial invasion, as well as the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014? Are those areas predominantly Russian-speaking and populated by Russian sympathizers, or is that a misinterpretation?
[HOFFMAN] Yeah, I think that certainly Putin’s goal is to cleave off those four territories over which he doesn’t have total control yet, but he’d like to negotiate a deal whereby he maybe takes them. He’s announced that they’re already part of Russia, even though he hasn’t conquered them yet. Ukraine had said that they wanted all of that back. It’s Ukraine’s territory. They wanted Crimea back. But the situation on the ground is such that I just don’t think that’s going to be in the offing. So it remains to be seen where we end up and where the battle lines are drawn. And the larger question is, does it look like East and West Germany when we’re finished? Where you’ve got some artificially demarcated border between Russian forces and Ukrainian forces and families are split, just like they were in Germany and how that all shakes out. I mean, this is extremely difficult and complicated, I think, to put together a negotiated settlement and what it looks like at the end. Good luck to the negotiators. They’re going to have a lot of work to do.
[TAYLOR] Thanks so much, guys. I’m Guy Taylor from Threat Status at The Washington Times.
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