because he wants to take more territory in ukraine. he s made it clear as day. no words are going to stop his tanks at this moment. wars tend to end in two ways, either one side wins or there s a stalemate on the battlefield, and right now we have neither of those conditions. it s just crystal clear to me. i watch russian television, read what he says, listen to his people pretty closely that they want to connect crimea to donbas and that s what this war is about, and maybe then, once they have achieved that they ll start talking. but until then, they ll keep fighting, and no amount of diplomats and third parties and the united nations will not change putin s fundamental calculation. well, he s committed war crimes. i m curious your reaction to reports he s awarded medals to troops that were accused of committing war crimes in bucha. doesn t that really reveal his mind-set in a way that any
false, grotesque analogies, so we won t spend time on that. we will talk, though, mr. ambassador, about the lack of discipline among the russian troops. could you ever have imagined it being this badsome. no, honestly not. i think it s a very important point. you were stalking about it with admiral stavridis before. you know, before this war, russia would rank third or fourth as one of the world s biggest, best armies. and if you look at the number of soldiers and the amount of money spent and the number of weapons, that s what it looked like on paper. but it sure doesn t look like that in reality. i think we also need to underscore the incredible will of the ukrainians to fight. so they look bad not just because they are bad but because the ukrainians are so good. and one last thing i think we need to underscore. putin doesn t care about the lives of his own soldiers. you know, he has no respect for their lives as well. that adds to just the incredible
they are on paper play out in actual wins and losses on the battlefield. let me ask you, ambassador, about conversation we had earlier this morning with a friend of ours, a friend of the show, dr. jeff see sax, obviously from columbian university. dr. sax suggested that the united states needed to do more in the area of diplomacy, that we re too focused on fighting this war, too focused on winning this war. and we asked how you negotiate with vladimir putin and said you can negotiate with third countries for the most part. what is your take on that? is there more we could be doing diplomatically? no. it takes two to tango. you can t have diplomacy if the side doesn t want to talk. i urge people to the last time vladimir putin spoke on camera about three or four days ago men said diplomacy is at a dead end
very much for being on as well. i just want to get some final thoughts from you, especially hearing from the prosecutor general and the painstaking task of trying to investigate war crimes while the war is still going on. well, two things. one about ukraine and one about russia. ukraine, it s fantastic she s doing this work now. yeah. sometimes, you know, the whole country is a crime scene, but when you re in a war, it s sometimes hard to gather this information to do prosecutions. i think it s extremely important they re doing it right now. but number two, let s think about putin. think about when they pull out of bucha. he could have tried to hide these bodies, right? he could have tried to do something to diminish the evidence, but he didn t. he did it on purpose as a way to terrorize the ukrainian, and i want to leave you with that thought. he s not apologizing, saying we made a mistake, some general did
let s give them credit. the s-300 system that they have from slovakia will help, but i m not an expert but i talk to ukrainian government officials every single day, and their attitude is thank you and now give us more. thank you, now do more. those are great sanctions, now do more. and they don t feel like they have the capabilities to do a no-fly zone now yet, but they want to get to that. with respect to the attrition war, that s a great question. i don t have a great answer. tragically, they could just keep fighting along some border. by the way, as they did, starting in 2014 until this moment. remember, the war started in 2014 and just kind of it s been grinding along until this escalation. tragically, that might be an outcome as well. mr. ambassador, we ve heard growing speculation in recent