Vladislav Davidzon joins us to discuss his latest article in Tablet.
Ukraine defies the US to launch a showy offensive into Russia: Observing Israel’s moves in the Middle East, Kyiv gambles on an American power vacuum:
… What changed in July is that the Ukrainians, like other embattled US allies, were faced with a new opportunity in Washington: The cognitively impaired president had been forced out of his reelection bid in favor of his vice president, who was now out on the campaign trail, three months before the election. With this emergent power vacuum at the White House, the Ukrainians decided to bypass both the deposed occupant of the White House as well as the staff of his hypercautious National Security Council, instead of slowly bleeding to death under rules guaranteed to produce slow-motion defeat. …
Kyiv observed carefully how Israel conducted its strikes immediately after Prime Minister Netanyahu returned from a triumphant speech before the US Congress. In fact, earlier this week the chair of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense, Roman Kostenko, explicitly referenced the Israeli example in a televised interview. “So Israel announced that they would take the advice of their partners very seriously but would afterward make their own decisions in the best interest of their own national security. I think that we can simply mirror that approach in our own case.”
If you’re in a hurry, here’s a transcript:
Claire: Hi, it’s Claire Berlinski, and you’re back in the Elephant Cage with my guest, Vladislav Davidson. Vladislav, let’s talk about your big scoop.
Vladislav: Hi, Claire. Thank you for having me on. I have a big piece out in Tablet Magazine, and a lot of other people seemed to have missed the obvious. On August 6th, the Ukrainians began their long-awaited mechanized invasion of Russia’s Kursk Oblast. The Ukrainians had been preparing for their annual counter offensive for a long time and picking their target of convenience. And they chose to go all in into Kursk because they saw that it was very weakly protected, and it turned out to be a very good decision. A lot of the Russian border guards and conscripts just gave up as soon as they saw Ukrainian mechanized forces and combat-ready, battle-hardened divisions. A lot of those guys just ran, to a point where the Ukrainians seemed to be taking between 100 and 200 Russian POWs a day, and times10, 12 days. They already seemed to have taken two divisions worth of Russian POW conscripts, thus refurbishing their exchange fund to the point where the Russians have, according to Ukrainian sources, initiated a POW exchange for the first time in two years.
Claire: Yeah, I saw that. It’s actually quite amazing. I’ve been seeing a lot of photos and a lot of videos of Russians surrendering en masse. I have not been sure whether those photos are real, but it sounds like they are.
Vladislav: I think they are real. I’ve seen a lot of those videos. Those are hard to stage. And a lot of those guys are 19, 18-year-old conscripts who are technically not supposed to be fighting outside of Russia, but they’re fully usable to defend the Russian border so the Russians throw them at the Ukrainians to stop them while they bring in better forces, Interior Ministry troops, fast response guys, national guard, hardened, battle-tested troops from inside Ukraine. While they’re trading land for time, as one does in that situation, they’re throwing conscripts with four or five, six months of training under their belts directly at these really excellent Ukrainian airborne troops. It’s Soviet, Ukrainian, and Russian doctrinal policy to use airborne troops for raids. This is a textbook raid, which was transformed into a territory holding situation. The incursion is being done with the best troops, airborne troops.
Claire: Tell us how the Ukrainians decided to do this. Obviously, they’d been planning this for at least three to six months. But they decided to go all in after they saw the Israelis do what they wanted to do, after Netanyahu returned from Washington, DC. On July 30th and 31st, the Israelis carried out assassinations against two high-value targets, one in Beirut, one in Tehran. These assassinations were carried out immediately upon Prime Minister Netanyahu returning from his trip to Washington, DC, where he addressed Israel, Congress, and where he had private meetings with whoever was in the White House. And he saw Harris in the White House and he saw the national security people of the Biden administration. And he nodded politely to the finger wagging that he received. And immediately upon returning to Jerusalem, he launched assassinations against high-value Hamas and Hezbollah operatives. And it was obvious that he was told to do one thing by the White House, and he did quite another thing.
Claire: I don’t think that’s obvious, actually. There’s been a lot of speculation that he cleared that with the White House before doing it.
Vladislav: I’m not sure he did. Why would he do this right as the Democratic Party is having its convention today?
Claire: They’d do it because Haniyeh was only going to be in Iran for those days.
Vladislav: And he’s not there all the time. He was there for the swearing in of a new Persian president. And he was a target of opportunity. They obviously used a lot of effort and regional resources, operatives to get that bomb smuggled into that house. And it’s not every day that you get a chance to take him out. And they had the opportunity and they took it.
Claire: But what about that makes you think that he didn’t clear the White House beforehand? I don’t know whether he did or not. I’ve just seen speculation that he did. And as for Fuad Shukr, of course, we would have said, yeah, take him out. He’s responsible for the death of 242 Marines.
Vladislav: Yeah, but he’d been operating for decades in Beirut.
Claire: I’ve been wondering about that myself, but I just cannot imagine the Americans saying to Netanyahu, “Don’t do that.”
Vladislav: Really? Just the opposite. I can’t imagine them saying, “Do it” in this situation. This is a very delicate time, and it’s a very complex situation in terms of the Americans’ internal interests, which is, obviously, this administration is carrying on the Obama-era foreign policy of normalizing relations with Tehran. They hate the Israelis. And they hate the Israelis complicating their regional foreign policy pivot, which is obviously not something the Sunni Arabs or the Israelis want.
Claire: I’ve seen no evidence that the administration hates the Israelis. Biden likes the Israelis, he just doesn’t like Netanyahu.
Vladislav: They see them as a problem, the thorn in their side for their big foreign policy shift.
Claire: No more than every other administration always has.
Vladislav: This is a really big difference. This is a continuation of Obama-era foreign policy with a lot of the same people in charge of Middle East foreign policy, people like Blinken, people like Sullivan.
Claire: I don’t believe that the Biden administration is more vexed by Israel than almost every previous administration has been. Because our interest in Israeli security has always been at odds with our other interests in the region.
Vladislav: There’s always been a contradiction. It’s true. But with the Obama foreign policy, there is a direct contradiction between the historical American foreign policy and what the Israelis see as their existential interests in the region of keeping Tehran boxed in. And the Obama foreign policy is to normalize Iran and bring them into the Middle East security architecture as the Americans are trying to leave the Middle East. So, this is a completely radically new situation.
Claire: The radical situation is Iran’s approaching a deployable nuclear weapon. That creates all kinds of problems without easy solutions.
Vladislav: Correct. That’s true.
Claire: So tell me about how the Ukrainians reacted to this.
Vladislav: The Ukrainians spent a few days observing the American response to the move. That is obviously not a happy situation for the White House and the National Security Council led by Mr. Jake Sullivan. The State Department under Blinken does not love it. And they made the decision that they too could run their own foreign policy, independent of their American allies’ scolding and red lines of constraint. They saw the Israelis getting away with it. Act first and apologize later, which is one of the quotes from a high level source in the Zelensky team in my piece.
Claire: The people who spoke to you, they must want the administration to know what they’re thinking?
Vladislav: After I reported the piece, a gentleman who is head of the Defense Intelligence and Security Committee inside the Rada went on TV and said, look, the Israelis listened very carefully, very politely, very generously, to the advice of their allies. And they said, we will act first in our own interests, and then we will answer our allies’ concerns afterwards. He said this openly. The head of a national security committee in the Ukrainian parliament, who’s one of the very few MPs inside Ukraine who knows what’s going on in terms of defense, because even Ukrainian MPs don’t know very much about operational stuff, because the army is keeping the Ukrainian parliament in the dark, most of them.
Claire: Tell me how they understand what’s going on in America right now.
Vladislav: They see a zombie regime in the White House and they see an overcautious National Security Council administration infrastructure, which is fulfilling the orders of a zombie regime. They see a gentleman in the White House who has Parkinson’s or dementia or Alzheimer’s or whatever, and who is no longer fulfilling the president’s duties, who has given a policy to his State Department, to his Pentagon, and to his National Security Council, but is no longer making radical decisions.
Claire: Is this based on their meetings with him or publicly available information?
Vladislav: Why do you have to meet with them?
Claire: I’m just trying to figure out where they got their information, whether they specifically met with him and came to the conclusion this guy’s not in charge anymore, or are they just reading the reporting. Have they had a personal experience with him?
Vladislav: I don’t think that they’ve had a personal experience with him and they’ve had a lot less time with him because he did a lot fewer meetings. I’m not sure who the last Ukrainian to have a one-on-one with him was that the Ukrainian government decided this is a zombie situation.
Claire: But this is a really important thing to know. Because we want a sense of whether other governments are likely to have decided that this is a zombie situation, therefore we’re just going to do whatever we feel like.
Vladislav: But isn’t it the case that the entire world has access to this information?
Claire: The entire world has a strong suspicion of it.
Vladislav: But the Democratic Party made him step down from running for a second term because it’s obvious, after the debate, that he’s no longer the man that he was. Isn’t it obvious to everybody?
Claire: But it’s unclear to what extent he’s capable of discharging his duties when the spotlight is not on him. For five hours a day, or whatever.
Vladislav: Absolutely right. This is a very serious thing. The lame duck situation plus the fact that he’s no longer running and that Harris is trying to establish her own foreign policy credentials while getting the campaign into high gear has created a space of opportunity for American allies to no longer be constrained by American red lines.
Claire: Yes, and American enemies as well.
Vladislav: Yeah, American enemies and American allies, yeah. And this is a testing of red lines set forth by both Moscow and Washington, DC, one; two, this is a declaration of independence; and three, the Ukrainians know full well that they got away with it because two or three days after the start of the Kursk offensive, the Americans delivered the next tranche of US$125 million worth of previously promised assistance.
Claire: And all Biden has said about it is, “Gee, that must be a very difficult situation for the Russians.”
Vladislav: That legitimizes the act of crossing the border on August 6th. The fact that the Pentagon said, “Yeah, this is what we agreed to previously.” And yet, the new tranche is not being held up. The Pentagon did not stop aid on the eighth or ninth when they greenlit the next trench, which means—
Claire: But Biden is still saying no use to the long-range missiles in Russian territory, right?
Vladislav: Yeah. Correct. And the new reporting as of today, and today being Monday, 19th of August, shows that the Biden administration is still telling the Brits to not allow the use of long-range British rockets.
Claire: But the British have actually said, go ahead.
Vladislav: With some kinds of rockets, yes. With other kinds of rockets, no. And the Americans are telling them no. So the zombie policy set by the zombie president is still being carried out by the Pentagon, the State Department, National Security Council. It’s just that they really cant say no to the Ukrainians because the Ukrainians are all in and they’re winning. And everyone loves a winner. You know that.
Claire: Yes, of course. Everyone loves a winner. Were the Ukrainians at all concerned that they would trigger Russia’s nuclear defense doctrine in doing this?
Vladislav: This has been a concern for some time, but every time the Ukrainians go against Russian red lines, Moscow turns out to not have any red lines. First, it was bombing anything inside Russia. They did nothing. Then it was bombing inside Crimea. They did nothing. Then it was bombing the Russian Black Sea fleet inside Sevastopol dry docks. The Russians did nothing with nuclear missiles. Then it was Ukrainian troops inside Russia, which is why the Ukrainians used exiled troops, Russian proxies. Last time they did it with raids, last year, the Russians did nothing. Then this, they did nothing. Every time the Ukrainians or the Americans actually scratch the surface of these red lines, nothing happens.
Claire: Do you know anything about how the Americans have really reacted? Have you heard anything about what they’re saying to each other?
Vladislav: I don’t know for a fact, but they can’t be happy.
Claire: I wonder. Biden has now been liberated from having to seek re-election.
Vladislav: It’s interesting what he actually thinks. He has not doubled or tripled down on helping the Ukrainians, despite the fact that he is not seeking re-election, as you say. He’s not jettisoned the Sullivan Doctrine, whatever you want to call it. They’re just doing what they’ve been doing.
Claire: So do you think that the Biden administration is assuming that Kamala will win and therefore they don’t need to do anything now to ensure Ukraine’s victory before Trump gets in office?
Vladislav: I just think that they have, as one of my sources in the piece says, no serious policy. They’re just trying to pocket their gains. They have had gains because Ukrainians have outperformed all expectations, but they don’t have a policy and they’re just trying to muddle through and keep the Ukrainians from losing big time while also keeping the Russians from losing the war, which isn’t much of a policy at all. The Ukrainians saw that this attritional thing was not working and they decided to completely change the narrative and they did. And what’s interesting about this is they did so based on what they understood Israel was doing.
Claire: Have they had any contacts with the Israelis?
Vladislav: Yeah, the Israelis and the Ukrainians have a very complex and interesting relationship, which I write a lot about. Relations are closer and closer, more warm and more interesting than they have been. The Ukrainians have tried to shame the Israelis into supporting them. They’ve not been able to do that because of Netanyahu’s personal relationship with Putin and the Israelis’ calculation that they don’t need to do any more in order to look good or they don’t need to isolate themselves from the Russians and create problems.
Claire: Evidence of Netanyahu’s inability to grasp the big picture. Obviously, Russia is a problem for Israel. They’re Iran’s closest ally.
Vladislav: Correct. Yeah. And so he’s playing this kind of balancing game where he has input on being allowed to bomb in Syria and he has the safety of Russian Jews, their property, agreed to, but nothing much else. The Russians are making pro- two-state solution comments. They’re meeting with Hamas and Hezbollah delegations. They’re involved with the war in Ukraine, and with Iran, having closer and closer relations.
Claire: If he had any kind of vision, he would be fully supporting Ukraine.
Vladislav: I’m one of the people who's been saying that and pushing for that. I’m one of the people who has really wanted that to happen. But Netanyahu’s policy is what it is, and he doesn’t see any need to change it.
Claire: But do you know if Ukrainians were actually speaking to Israelis? Were the Israelis saying, “Hey, you can just do what you want and ask for permission afterwards?” Or was this completely based on their interpretation from open sources of how this had gone down?
Vladislav: Interpretation. I don’t think the Ukrainians trust Israeli intelligence and Israeli politics, especially with so many Russian Jews having portfolios in the Israeli government and Israeli intelligence circles. You have to remember, last summer, everybody knew about the Ukrainian offensive, and that went badly because they told everybody. So they made a decision not to tell anybody. The number of people who knew about this is very small, including a lot of my own friends in the Ukrainian parliament.
Claire: In your article, you alluded to this, and you made it sound as if the Ukrainians think that something is leaking from Washington back to Russia. Is that what you meant to suggest?
Vladislav: It’s leaking from everywhere. They just did not give information to anybody. Their own frontline troops have to be kept in the dark about this, let alone Washington, DC.
Claire: Do they think, though, that there’s something in Washington that is leaking back to Russia?
Vladislav: I asked that question and I was given no good answer, to be honest.
Claire: Right.
Vladislav: I just think they don’t trust anybody after what happened last time. “Stop telegraphing your intentions.” And that turned out to be the correct insight for this one.
Claire: Yes, certainly. They really maintained tight security on this. Came as a total surprise to everyone.
Vladislav: Including the Russians. The Russians really screwed up. Russian intelligence services had inklings of this. Some people in Russian intelligence figured it out and sent it up the pole, obviously. And the Russian command didn’t figure it out.
Claire: So what do Ukrainians say is the strategic goal of this operation?
They’re not. They’re not saying what the strategic goal of this operation is for all sorts of reasons, including operational reasons. They’re going to see what sticks, and then they’re going to explain what happened based on what succeeded afterwards.
Claire: Is your intuition that this is an operation aimed more at Russia or at the United States?
Vladislav: Both. And also, as a couple of my sources said, they really needed a peremoha. They really were starting to lose nerve, and this is the best situation in terms of morale inside Ukraine since the war started. People are over the moon. People are happy. This is really gaining another year or two of good morale for the Ukrainians. They really needed a victory.
Claire: Are you in touch with people close to the Trump camp? Do you know how they’re reacting to this?
Vladislav: I am in touch with Trump people. They’re obviously calculating, and Trump is obviously watching this very closely. I don’t think he himself knows what he’s going to do, but obviously this is a big issue for him. He’s stepped back from criticizing the Ukrainians in order to have more leeway for whatever he’s going to do when he comes to power. He’s obviously going to try to make a deal, but it’s not apparent whether that deal will be very good for Ukraine or very bad. It could go either way. It’s a radical situation with Trump. You can’t know what’s going to happen. He’s obviously observing. He obviously likes winners. He’s going to say whatever he needs to say in order to make this administration in the White House look bad.
Claire: Yeah, I noticed that a lot of ultra-vatniks like David Sacks, the lamentable David Sacks, have been extremely quiet since this began.
Vladislav: 100 percent. And that is policy in the Trump camp. The Trump people have been talking to a lot of European conservatives who’ve been making nice little trips to Mar-a-Lago. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, Orban, Lord Cameron.
Claire: Tusk and Orban are going to come with very different messages.
Vladislav: Correct. But he’s talking to every single European conservative. Lord Cameron went down there and he spent hours talking to him. And it seemed to me, based on my relationships with British diplomats and intelligence people, it was a very fruitful discussion. Trump does listen, weirdly enough. He’s a politician. He takes stock of the water and the polls, and he follows his instincts, which are politically pretty good. And he’s stopped attacking the Ukrainians because he sees that he could get more mileage out of making a deal when he comes to power, if he comes to power.
Claire: Changing the subject a little bit, what should we make of these stories about Nord Stream? Is there anything to them? I don’t think we know what actually happened. Mr. Pancevski of the Wall Street Journal had a scoop, reported a thesis on what happened. I don’t believe that is the case. I still think that the Russians did this. I don't think that the sitting ambassador to the United Kingdom of Ukraine, the former head of the armed services of Ukraine, did this, that they felt they could get away with this. I don’t believe that the Ukrainians did this. But the Germans do now, and they asked for extradition of a Ukrainian serviceman, intelligence agent, which the Polish president and prime minister denied. I don’t know if you saw Donald Tusk’s tweet from yesterday. Donald Tusk’s excellent tweet was: “To all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2, the only thing you should do today about it is apologize and keep quiet.” The Poles are neither extraditing people nor are they backing down from their narrative. The prime minister of Poland didn’t necessarily need to tweet that himself, but he did.
Claire: Okay, back to Kursk. I’m trying to understand the Ukrainian endgame here, what they’re hoping for.
Vladislav: The endgame is the collapse of the Russian Federation and Putin being in The Hague, that’s the best case outcome. But there is a hierarchy of outcomes, right? They are not telegraphing what their endgame is. So we can speculate and I can give you all sorts of very clever answers and I can go through different outcomes from best to worst. But ultimately, no one knows yet because the Ukrainians are keeping their cards very tight to their chest.
Claire: I don’t know if you saw it: I responded to something that Garry Kasparov said yesterday on Twitter, where he was stating that the only possible explanation or at least one possible explanation that he favored for the Biden administration’s timidity and caution was they had some kind of backroom deal with Russia. And I responded that I just didn’t think that was the conclusion to which Occam’s razor would lead you. I think the Biden administration is just an exceptionally timid administration when it comes to foreign policy. What do you think?
Vladislav: I agree with you. I think he was just mouthing off on Twitter. That’s just how Russian elites talk at the bar.
Claire: How are Americans reacting to this? Are they even hearing the news? Because all I find in the US news, anytime I look, is the election. I never find any news of this.
Vladislav: I’m hoping that my reporting will have a sobering effect.
Claire: Why sobering?
Vladislav: Is it good that American allies are ignoring us?
Claire: Who are you hoping to sober?
Vladislav: I’m hoping to sober up large swaths of the American public who should understand that American allies are just ignoring American foreign policy edicts because they’re stupid. I’d like to sober up the National Security Council, but they’re going to be out in a couple of months anyway. They could do a lot of damage in those couple of months. It’s the American public that should be sobered up, American elites.
Claire: I’m not sure they’re going to take that message from it.
Vladislav: Really?
Claire: Yeah.
Vladislav: What would they take from this?
Claire: It depends where they’re already ideologically inclined. Someone like, in worst case scenario, David Sacks is going to say, “Look, these Ukrainians are risking nuclear war without our permission, using our weapons.”
Vladislav: Right.
Claire: And someone who’s pro-Ukraine is going to say, “Good for the Ukrainians,” but it doesn’t necessarily mean you think a different way than the way you already think. Except the one thing I take away from it is that it’s an incredibly dangerous situation to have the world wondering whether the President is compos mentis or paying attention to anything
Vladislav: Yeah, it is audacious, and it’s taking advantage of the fact that there’s a gentleman in the White House who should not be in the White House. If you’re actually a proceduralist, just resign. He should not have been president for already two years or 18 months, obviously, depending on how long he’s been this out of it.
Claire: It should lead the White House to be on the phone with people who can communicate to our adversaries that there’s enough intelligence at the top of the food chain in the US that we would notice if they tried to do something.
Vladislav: If our allies are going against our will, why won’t China or Iran?
Claire: Exactly, exactly. But they seem to be doing a reasonably good job somehow of deterring Hezbollah in Iran right now.
Vladislav: They don’t actually want a full-on war because that would be very bloody for everybody. I don’t think that either the Ayatollahs, having been embarrassed not being able to protect their own guests, nor the Hezbollah brass actually want a full-on war right now. So, you know, when the Americans bring in their aircraft carriers into the Gulf and into the—
Claire: That’s exactly what I mean. They don’t want to go to war because they’d be up against us. So we must have convinced them that we would be serious about using those aircraft carriers.
Vladislav: It’s interesting that we’ve been able to constrain them, but maybe it wouldn’t even take that much to constrain them. Maybe they just don’t want a full-on war with the Israelis. I wouldn’t if I was them.
Claire: All right. Anything else you would like to say about this remarkable story?
Vladislav: I believe this is an opportunity for course correction in Washington, DC. I think they should stop constraining American allies.
Claire: We should actually support our allies instead of indulging in this pathological fear of escalation.
Vladislav: Correct. Correct. So thank you, my dear Claire. I will see you in a couple of weeks in Paris.
Claire: Are you going to be here?
Vladislav: I’m passing through in a couple of weeks on the way to Tunisia, on the way back to Ukraine.
Claire: Where are you going in Tunisia and why?
Vladislav: I’m going to a Berber Jewish wedding in Djerba.
Claire: Oh, how nice.
Vladislav: Yes. I’m taking my mother to the Middle East. Her last vacation to Israel on October 5th of ‘23, where she went down to visit her relations in Ashkelon and got on a bus on the morning of October 7th in Sderot, did not go so well.
Claire: Yeah, no kidding.
Vladislav: She randomly survived an attack on her bus. She got off the bus, and 30 minutes later, all other 15 people on the bus except the bus driver were executed. Okay. Thank you, Claire. I’ll see you in a bit.
Claire: Thanks very much.
Vladislav: Bye-bye.
Why Ukraine staged the Kursk offensive now