Angela Stent Talks Ukraine/Russia War

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
Hey, earlier this morning, this is something we've been talking about a lot here at Bloomberg, what's been going on in the NATO Summit, comments by President Trump. President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had a short and what was described as spontaneous meeting at the NATO Summit in Turkey.
And we are assuming they talked about this more than four-year-old war between the two, but we don't know for sure. The two then met a joint gathering with reporters. The president said he will allow Ukraine to manufacture a Patriot missile interceptor, sending another signal of his shifting approach toward Russia's war.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:42)
Just a little birdie told me this, about the fact that we'll give them the right to make Patriots. We'll show them how to do it. It's very complex, actually, but it's you'll figure out the complexity quickly. So one of the things we're going to be talking about is we're going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That's pretty cool, right?
This way you can't complain that we're not giving them enough. I'd say make them yourself.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:09)
All right, that of course is President Trump earlier from the NATO Summit in Turkey. Hey, great to have back with us. We did want to talk to Angela Stent about where we are in this war between Ukraine and Russia. She is Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, author of Putin's World Russia Against the West, and with the rest, former National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. She served in the Office of Policy Planning at the US Department of State, and she joins us from Nantucket on this Wednesday. Angela, it is good to have you here with Bailey and me.
I'm kind of shocked. We are all shocked that we're still talking about this war despite all the destruction, the deaths, the global impact. Why are these two countries back at war, are still at war?

**Angela Stent** (1:51)
Because Vladimir Putin still believes he can win the war, even though the tide, if it hasn't resolutely turned, it's certainly turning in Ukraine's favor with all of the drones that they're using that strikes into Russia. But Putin still believes he can wear the Ukrainians down. And we've seen that with these massive barrage of ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv and other cities.
So escalating from the Russian point of view. That's why the war is going on. I mean, President Zelensky would be willing to agree to a ceasefire and then, obviously, more negotiations on how this comes to an end. But it's Putin that's keeping it going.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:29)
Well, Angela, on that note, is it all optics and ego that Putin can't walk back or live with the view that forever we would remember they weren't successful in this war?

**Angela Stent** (2:40)
So he's now state this. He thinks that not only is his regime survival dependent on winning this war, but his own personal survival. This is how he's defined it. As far as we understand, it's quite possible that the people around him, this is a very authoritarian country, are giving him the news that he wants to hear. He may not fully understand what's happening on the battlefield in Ukraine, but he is just digging his heels in, and he's presenting it to his population that this is just like World War II, and just like we beat the Nazis, we're going to beat the Nazi Ukrainians.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:15)
How stressed are the people, though, in Russia and economically because of this war? Does that really matter to President Putin?

**Angela Stent** (3:22)
Well, so they are feeling the stress much more. There are gasoline shortages in Russia, which is the third largest producer of oil in the world. There are food shortages, for instance, in Crimea where the Ukrainians have been hitting very hard. People are trying to leave the island now because they just can't survive on what they have. People are feeling it, but it's very hard to convey this or to just to have an actual impact on what the Kremlin does. Because whenever you try and criticize it, at least publicly, or you protest publicly, you can be arrested, you can be jailed. So there is somewhat more kind of nuanced criticism that one hears about, well, maybe it's really time to end the war. Also from the business community, never criticizing, of course, the president himself.
But it's very hard to make an impression on the Kremlin itself, just because there's more grumbling among the population.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:21)
And Trump saying that Zelensky has done an amazing job, which is quite the turn from where the two's relationship had been. What does that mean for Russia if Trump seemingly is fully in Ukraine's corner? And what are the other countries around the world thinking about and how has that evolved?