On the menu today: The U.S. begins its meetings with Russia in Saudi Arabia, a visit to the smoothest-running border post connecting Poland and Ukraine, and calculating the odds of something heavy and Russian falling on my head sometime soon.
A New ‘Shuttle Diplomacy’
Kyiv, Ukraine — I’d like to say that a keen journalistic insight and instinct drive the timing of my trips to Ukraine, but it mostly happens when my crazy traveling buddies can arrange it and when there’s nothing on the home front I can’t miss.
But we may look back on late February 2025 as a pivotal moment in this conflict; while the war isn’t likely to truly end anytime soon, we may be entering the beginning of the final period. This week, approaching the three-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. national security adviser Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff are slated to travel to Saudi Arabia to start the talks with Russia over the fate of this beleaguered but indefatigable nation.
I can’t help but notice that Trump’s appointed special envoy to Russia and Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, is not yet among the administration officials playing a leading role in the talks, which feels like a strange omission. (I’ve seen some speculation that the Russians deemed the 80-year-old retired lieutenant general too much of a hawk, but Waltz doesn’t strike me as that ideologically different from Kellogg.)
Kellogg spoke at NATO headquarters yesterday and spoke at the Munich Security Conference last week. He characterized the negotiations as something akin to Henry Kissinger’s old “shuttle diplomacy” — the combatants are unlikely to make progress in direct negotiations, so the U.S. is playing intermediary.
President Trump inherited this war right now. But our philosophy is not to continue this war to the death of every last Ukrainian. The intent is to stop the carnage, stop the war. Make sure it’s reasonable, making sure the sovereignty stays intact. But we’re going to get to specifics about it — when you say sitting at the table, in all probability, there’s really going to be with — and the reason one of the reasons I’m here is for the input, obviously — but when you sit at the table, there’s really two protagonists when you look at it. And there’s one, hopefully, to be an intermediary. . . . You can have the Ukrainians, the Russians and clearly the Americans at the table talking.
Kellogg’s statement that he was there for “input” from the Europeans but that they would not be directly involved in the talks irked some U.S. allies, and he elaborated at NATO headquarters.
“If you believe there are going to be 33 people sitting at the same table — exactly the same table — during the discussion, in all probability, the answer is no, not at all,” Kellogg said. “If ‘at the table’ means that your views are heard, understood, transmitted, the answer is ‘absolutely.’”
NBC News reported, “Two U.S. officials confirmed that Ukraine was not invited to the talks in Saudi Arabia, but say the intention is for the U.S. to host a bilateral with Russia, then a bilateral with Ukraine, and then talks together.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is actually in Saudi Arabia this week for a previously planned meeting, but his team said they will not be participating in any meetings with Russia.
“We are going to get to a position where we can come out of this and ensure the sovereignty, the security of Ukraine, and actually achieve goals,” Kellogg said in Munich. “We’re not going to see a Minsk One, we’re not going to see a Minsk Two. You’re not going to get there; this has got to be a stable long-term environment.”
“Minsk One” and “Minsk Two” refer to a pair of agreements between Ukraine and Russia, signed in 2014, that forced Ukraine to grant “special status” (that is, autonomy with great powers) to the “people’s republics” in Donbas and Luhansk. Ukrainians saw the deal as significant concessions in exchange for promises from Vladimir Putin. (One of the Western leaders who helped pressure the Ukrainians into signing the Minsk agreements was . . . former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Hmmm.) In February 2022, Putin tossed aside the Minsk agreements, eventually declared the “independence of the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donbas People’s Republic,” and launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
This just handed to me: Sometimes Putin makes promises he doesn’t intend to keep — even peace treaties!
While speaking in Munich, Kellogg continued: “A long-term peace agreement isn’t going to be the real determinant of success. The real determinant of success will be the first time a cease-fire is broken. Then how do the national leaders of all these countries respond? Do you respond by saying, ‘Ah, that happens’? You know, as President Biden said on television and national audience, well a quote, ‘Minimal intervention by the Russians in Ukraine may be okay.’ He said that. His definition of minimal incursion for the Russians is significantly different than my minimal incursion.”
(I don’t begrudge any Trump official citing Biden’s idiotic “minor incursion” comments, but that was now roughly three years ago, and what we’re going to do here and now is the more important question.)
Kellogg argued, “When you look at Minsk, there was a lot of people at the table that really had no ability to execute some type of peace process, and it failed miserably. So, we’re not going to go down that path.”
Getting into Ukraine
This trip, I literally walked into Ukraine.
During my first trip, it seemed like everything that could go wrong while crossing the border did go wrong. During my second trip, we crossed on a bus, and the process ran smoother but still took a while.
The only place where you can cross the Polish–Ukrainian border on foot is the Shehyni–Medyka crossing; outside Medyka, old ladies and guys with a distinctly different sense of personal space are eager to sell you bottles of vodka and other alcohol. You drag your suitcase up the footpath, get to the Polish border control station, get your passport stamped, walk through that building, walk down the footpath a bit further, do the same in the Ukrainian border control building, and presto — you’re in Ukraine.
Apparently border posts are a hot spot for covert foreign surveillance, and it’s not exactly reassuring to hear the Financial Times report that for the European Union’s new electronic border system, “the French IT group Atos used staff in Russia to buy software in 2021 for the highly sensitive project, which aims to gather and store biometric data on all non-EU visitors to the EU.”
The Ukrainian Air Defense Wake-Up Call
At 4:29 a.m. this morning, the air raid alert on the hotel’s intercom woke me up. Those who recall my previous trips will remember that the air raids almost never turn out to mean anything dangerous in my immediate vicinity, which is not the same as never turning out to mean something dangerous. The last time I was here, my last night in Kyiv, I awoke to the sight of an orange glow through my hotel room curtains and a thunderous boom indicating that a Patriot missile had intercepted a Russian missile over my neighborhood of Podil.
Other parts of the country were not so lucky last night.
When you cross the border, the risk of something big and heavy and Russian falling on your head goes from zero to slightly above zero. The Center for Strategic and International Studies runs a pretty up-to-date database of known Russian aerial attacks and known interceptions here. Some days, you get 50-some, and a couple of days, you get more than 150. The Ukrainian air defense systems shoot down a lot of them, but not all.
The analysis, up until last fall:
From September 28, 2022, to September 1, 2024, Russia launched a total of 11,466 missiles. On average, 23.2 missiles were launched daily, with the median number of daily launches recorded at 17 missiles. This indicates that while the daily launch rate typically hovered around the mid-20s, there were numerous days with significantly higher activity. Notably, there were 17 days during the study period when missile launches exceeded 82 missiles in a single day. These high-intensity launch days correspond to specific military operations, strategic offensives, or responses to critical developments on the battlefield, reflecting moments of heightened conflict intensity.
The data reveals that the daily intercept rate averaged 83.5 percent, with the median intercept rate reaching 88.5 percent. This high level of intercept efficiency suggests the deployment of advanced missile defense technologies capable of neutralizing a substantial portion of incoming threats on most days. When evaluating the overall intercept rate across the entire study period, it stands at 79.8 percent. This aggregated figure, which is the total intercept rate of the launched missiles, while slightly lower than the daily averages, demonstrates that Ukraine has been successful at defending its skies, both due to Western support and indigenous programs like the acoustic air defense network.
The way I’ve told it to everybody worrying about me back home is that Ukraine is roughly the size of Texas. I’m going to go hide somewhere in Texas, you get 50 to 150 missiles to try to hit me, with a decent air defense system of Patriot missile batteries that on some days will shoot down 90 percent. Those are pretty good odds on my part.
But low risk is not no risk.
ADDENDUM: There are a lot of reasons why the U.S. should not sell out Ukraine in these negotiations with Russia. But how could we not want to stand by this country at the exact moment they have an egg surplus?
We give them more artillery shells, they give us more eggs in the shells — come on, Mr. President, this is the art of the deal right here!