MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wants to use long-range weapons on targets inside Russia. He made that clear to the U.S. secretary of state and his British counterpart on their visit to Kyiv yesterday. So far, Ukraine has not been allowed to do that with weapons provided by the U.S. and Europe. To talk about U.S. policy in Ukraine, we've called Andrew Weiss with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Good morning.
ANDREW WEISS: Good morning.
MARTIN: So yesterday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hinted that the Biden administration is considering lifting the restrictions on U.S. weapons. What do you think would convince them to finally take that step?
WEISS: Well, the administration has been, throughout the war, providing the Ukrainians with increasingly important types of military assistance. And so we've seen things like Patriot missiles and F-16s arrive in Ukraine in recent months. But Russia has now been escalating. We saw, over the past six months, a campaign essentially to lay waste to Ukraine as a viable state economically. Half of the Ukrainian electricity generation capacity has been destroyed. So just this week, Secretary of State Blinken confirmed that Iran has sent surface-to-surface missiles that are going to substantially increase Russia's lethality. So it's Russia here that's escalating, and the United States and its allies are thinking about the best way to respond.
MARTIN: So obviously, Russia has nuclear weapons. That seems to be one of the inhibiting factors - or maybe even the main one - of why the Biden administration has hesitated to allow cross-border attacks so far. You know, and a couple weeks ago, we talked about this risk with Evelyn Farkas. She was the deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration. This is what she said.
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EVELYN FARKAS: I don't think there's a risk of Russia, you know, attacking Ukraine using nuclear weapons, because frankly, the fallout - pun intended - will also include Russian territory, Russian forces. I think most people understood all along that this was kind of extreme bluster.
MARTIN: Do you think that's true?
WEISS: There's, I think, a very serious issue that the president of the United States has to face up to - and he's been clear about this since the beginning of the war - which is we don't want this to escalate into a direct U.S.-Russia military confrontation. And we're seeing that, you know, Russia has options. There's been a campaign of sabotage attacks across Europe. The CIA director, Bill Burns, was talking about that just over the past weekend. So the president of the United States wants to move carefully and judiciously. The Ukrainians are in a genocidal war against a brutal invader, and I can understand why they're frustrated. And I can understand why, you know, they want everything yesterday.
MARTIN: Talk about the targets that Ukraine has struck inside Russia in recent weeks. Have those attacks shifted the war's dynamics in any way?
WEISS: So there's - it's a complicated battlefield, and given that it's a war, it's very unpredictable and very dynamic. About a month ago, the Ukrainians launched a surprise attack inside Russia itself that clearly took the Russians off guard. It was intended to pull Russian forces away from their main center of activity right now, which is in the Donbas region, and the Russians don't seem to have taken the bait. They're continuing to press on to a couple of strategically important objectives in the Donbas region, and that's going to be potentially very punishing for the Ukrainians. More broadly, the Ukrainians have started to conduct attacks against Russian critical infrastructure and against oil and gas targets. They're trying to throw as much sort of unpredictable and audacious stuff at the Russians and to make Vladimir Putin change his strategic calculus about the war. So far, that hasn't happened, unfortunately.
MARTIN: So before we let you go, I mean, this does seem to be kind of a race against time here. The Russian president's playbook seems to be that eventually, the U.S. is going to lose interest in Ukraine. Do you think that that's true?
WEISS: Well, we have a crucial election, obviously, in November, and people who watched the presidential debate this week saw that Donald Trump doesn't care about Ukraine. So Vladimir Putin's betting that, you know, he's got a decent chance of seeing Donald Trump back in the White House. And if Kamala Harris wins, the question is, how sustainable is the level of U.S. and European economic and military support for Ukraine?
MARTIN: OK.
WEISS: He's betting time is on his side.
MARTIN: All right. That is Andrew Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thank you so much.
WEISS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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