Editor's note: This is a transcription of Tangle Senior Editor Will Kaback's interview with Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
We previewed this interview — and shared a condensed version — in our October 17 Friday edition, which you can read here.
Will Kaback: Anne, thanks so much for joining us.
Anne Applebaum: Thanks for having me.
Will Kaback: [On September 24] you published a report in The Atlantic about drones and other military weapons that Ukraine is now producing in significant numbers, which are also doing extensive damage within Russia and along the front lines of the war, and allowing Ukraine to continue fighting even as U.S. support wavers.
One line that stuck out to me was, “Some Ukrainians believe they can do enough damage to force Russians to end the war.” What would be the clear signs that this bombing campaign is changing Russia’s calculus? And are those signs already apparent right now?
Anne Applebaum: So let me back up a bit because I think it’s important that people understand how dramatically different this war is from what most people think it is. It’s usually described as “a war of attrition” and “people are dying in large numbers on both sides,” and there’s some truth to that. But it’s also the most high-tech war on the planet, and it’s really like no other war that has ever been.
It's a drone war now. Tanks and artillery are useless — or not totally useless, but are not as useful as we thought they were going to be — and the Ukrainians have proven to be really technically competent at using these battlefield drones, underwater drones, and these long-range drones that can hit Russian targets from the air. In the past few months, they’ve started to have a lot of success hitting really big oil refineries, other targets in the oil industry — pipelines, objects connected to export — and so on.
We know already that it’s made a difference because the quantity of Russian oil imports has dropped. It's now at the lowest point that it’s been in the war. And we also know that there are fuel shortages all over Russia. We know they’re in central Russia, in eastern Russia, in Crimea. And recently they’ve been reported in the suburbs of Moscow and St. Petersburg, so much so that the Russian papers, even the state-owned newspapers, feel they have to report them now.
It’s very funny — I found an article in Izvestia, a Soviet-era paper, which said, “Oh yeah, there’s some fuel shortages, and it’s to do with high levels of tourism,” or something like that. But I think most Russians probably know what it is.
I don’t think that there’s a specific moment or point or thing that we can say will be the turning point. But there will be in this war, as in all colonial wars, some moment when the people of the colonial power and the colonial capital conclude that the war is no longer necessary or it's no longer useful to them. It’s not working. It’s a moment you had in the British occupation of India. It’s a moment you had in the French war against Algeria.
And when that moment comes, we will know it. I mean, you have already seen just in the last few days, actually, there have been a number of homicides — I mean, they’re described as suicides, but they’re really homicides — of very senior Russian political and business figures.
That’s an indication that there’s dissent. We can’t really do any polling in Russia, but there are a number of opposition groups who try to gauge the mood of the internet, and they’ve been saying for some time that most people want the war to end. So the mood both in the public and in the elite is for it to end, and it will just be a question of: At what point are the sacrifices the elite are being asked to make too big to sustain?
Will Kaback: To clarify, when you say “the people of the colonial empire,” is that in reference to Russian oligarchs, to people within the Kremlin, or are you talking larger scale?
Anne Applebaum: Russia is a colonial power. It thinks of itself as the colonial power in the region of Eastern Europe. It has a memory of its empire being larger. Putin himself has said, “Anywhere where there has ever been a Russian soldier could be Russia again.” And so that includes the Baltic States, it includes Poland, it includes Berlin, it includes eastern Germany, where he remembers in his lifetime that he was a Soviet apparatchik. He was in the KGB in eastern Germany. So [Putin] has a number of goals with this war, but one of them is to reestablish the Russian Empire.
They think of themselves as a colonial power, as a power that deserves to subjugate other countries and other nationalities. They think Ukraine is theirs because it was part of Russian empires in the past. Formally, the main reason, legitimation for the war — the reason why they say they’re fighting the war when they talk to other Russians — is that Ukraine is not a real country. It needs to be made part of Russia again. I think there are some other reasons as well, but they think very much in a colonial manner.
Will Kaback: I want to pivot to the U.S. because I know this has been a particularly newsworthy week relative to President Trump’s comments about the war. Coming out of his meeting with President Zelensky at the UN, he posted on Truth Social about how he believed Ukraine may be able to win the war and not cede any territory that Russia controls right now.
I think it’s easy to see those comments as a positive development. But I also know that there are lots of reporting and commentary out there that is suggesting that Trump is effectively ceding the ground to wipe his hands of the conflict and to put the blame onto Europe if Ukraine is to fail. I’m wondering how you see that dynamic and Trump’s evolving comments, and whether you share those concerns as well.
Anne Applebaum: I have trouble seeing that there’s any strategy towards Ukraine at all from the Trump administration.
