Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Julia Ioffe, here with your Wednesday foreign policy edition—we switched things up this week for Peter’s fantastic interview yesterday with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Before we get started, some news and notes…

• Shocking news out of Lithuania last night: Less than a month after Alexey Navalny’s death in a Russian penal colony, the opposition leader’s longtime right-hand man, Leonid Volkov, was attacked outside his home by an anonymous assailant wielding a hammer—actually, Volkov said it was a meat tenderizer (?!). The attacker struck Volkov repeatedly in the head and the leg and ended up breaking his arm. The Lithuanian foreign minister expressed alarm over the attack as soon as the news broke, but, given how tightly Lithuania and the other Baltic countries have restricted Russian immigration, it raises serious concerns about Vilnius’s ability to keep out Moscow’s agents. After all, it seems pretty clear what happened here: Vladimir Putin reached out past Russia’s borders to show members of Team Navalny that they are not safe, not even in exile.
• A massive, massive congratulations to Mstyslav Chernov and his team for winning an Oscar, Ukraine’s first, for their heart-rending documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol. “I wish I never made this film,” Chernov said in his acceptance speech. “I wish to be able to exchange this,” he went on, gesturing with his golden statuette, “to Russia never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities, to Russia not killing tens of thousands of my fellow Ukrainians.” It was an incredibly moving, severe speech. Here was a man who was telling a story out of sheer necessity, not because he was seduced by the glamor of Hollywood. (Weirdly, Disney cut the speech from its international rebroadcast of the Oscars. Following an outcry from Ukrainians, Disney defended its edit, saying the decisions about what to cut were made weeks in advance, before anyone knew the Ukrainian journalists would win.)

  In any case, I highly suggest watching the acceptance speech, as well as the documentary. You can also read my interview with Chernov here. Our conversation still sticks with me months later. “These are very hard stories,” Chernov told me at the time. “There were more children [that were killed] than you see in the film. This is not everything. There are more people who we just didn’t have time to show because we only had 95 minutes. And it’s not enough.”

• I’m late to this, but I just saw this circulating on Twitter (I refuse to call it that other thing!) and wanted to share it with you. It’s a clip from a French documentary film, from the summer of 2022, a behind-the-scenes look at the scramble in the Elysée to stop Putin’s armies from moving across the Ukrainian border. The video itself shows advisers monitoring a phone call between their boss, French president Emmanuel Macron, and Putin on February 20, 2022, just four days before the invasion. Putin, who makes it clear he’s taking this call from the gym, is sullen, petulant—and bent on war. Nothing Macron says to him seems to register; this is a man who has clearly made up his mind. Moreover, note that, during the entire call, the only person to mention NATO expansion—allegedly Putin’s entire reason for invading, at least according to the realists—was Macron, not Putin. Putin clearly doesn’t give a shit about NATO or any of it. He was ready to invade. Seriously, watch it. It’s a wild bit of tape.
• Finally, I just want to say that if you didn’t catch my girl Tara Palmeri on Real Time With Bill Maher on Friday, please fix that. She absolutely killed it. Here she is in the overtime segment.

• The MAGA SplitTok: It’s funny how so many Republican hardliners—including China hawks who’d decried TikTok as a Communist psyop—have suddenly become civil libertarians now that Congress is finally doing something about ByteDance, the app’s China-based parentco. In the end, 15 Republicans (and 50 Democrats) voted against the bill, raising the question: Which of the nays were actually limited-government types voting their principles, which were doing the bidding of the Club for Growth, and which were simply going along with Donald Trump?

  The C.F.G., the limited government, libertarian-leaning conservative activist group, was a staunch opponent of Trump in 2016, but on the TikTok issue they’ve been totally aligned. As my partner Teddy Schleifer has reported, one of the Club’s biggest donors is Jeff Yass, a billionaire investor whose fund has a massive stake in ByteDance. Over the past weeks, I’m told the group has been furiously whipping candidates they’ve backed in the past, such as Thomas Massie, Scott Perry, Greg Steube, Dan Bishop, Nancy Mace, David Schweikert, Barry Moore, Andy Biggs, Tom McClintock, and Warren Davidson, all of whom voted against the divestment bill. Some of them are ideologically aligned with C.F.G. (Massie, Mace, McClintock, and Bishop automatically passed the smell test). Then there are MAGA heads like Biggs, who previously introduced a resolution declaring China “the greatest foreign threat” and specifically cited their “access to the personal data of most citizens of the United States.” I guess he had a change of heart.

  Another key voice in the conservative split over TikTok has been FreedomWorks, one of Washington’s premier Tea Party-turned-populist interest groups, which declared its opposition to the bill on Monday. While they cited the same concerns as the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks gave additional MAGA air cover to sway populist members such as Clay Higgins and Marjorie Taylor Greene—members who were now leery of new government power that could force a sale of a foreign-owned company. The more influential voice, of course, has been Trump…

  Continue reading online…

• Impeachment off-ramps: If actions speak louder than words, the House G.O.P. effort to impeach Joe Biden appears to be winding down. Politico reports that Republicans are now eyeing face-saving legislation if they can’t move forward with impeachment, such as a bill that would “include tougher financial disclosure laws for family members of presidents and vice presidents, changes to foreign lobbying law, tougher ethics rules, and adjusting how classified documents are handled.”

  Obviously, strengthening ethics rules and disclosures for family members of presidents could be a sticking point for Trump (who could very well be president a year from now). But beyond those considerations, the approach is strangely reminiscent of the sort of legislative action that Congress used to take: recognize a problem, hold hearings and interview witnesses to learn how to fix it, then pass into law the prescribed remedies. Isn’t that what Washington is supposed to do?

• Dems on offense: After racking up a series of electoral wins, Democrats are growing more and more confident that they can take the House this fall. But at least some Democratic strategists are expressing concern that the party may be getting a bit too aggressive in its outlook. One of the consultants I spoke with agreed with something Republican operatives have been saying all cycle: Democrats have a whole slate of vulnerable districts on the map due to retirements and members running for higher office. Per the Cook Political Report, seven potentially competitive Democratic-held House seats will not feature an incumbent running for reelection, due to moves by Reps. Elissa Slotkin, Abigail Spanberger, Katie Porter, David Trone, and Andy Kim—all of whom launched statewide runs this term; along with seats held by Jennifer Wexton and Dan Kildee, who are retiring.

  In some ways, the fear is that this cycle could end up like 2020, when Democratic groups mounted a major offensive in Texas, only to lose seats elsewhere. This cycle, the en vogue offensive races are in New York and California. “If I get one more call from a donor about New York or California, I’m gonna lose my freakin’ mind,” the consultant told me. “We can’t take two steps forward if we take one step back.”

“When Russian troops advance and its guns fire, Ukraine does not have enough ammunition to fire back,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said yesterday as he announced $300 million in new Ukraine aid, which the Pentagon shook loose with some creative accounting. But he made sure to point out the obvious: “This ammunition will keep Ukraine’s guns firing for a period, but only a short period. It is nowhere near enough to meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs, and it will not prevent Ukraine from running out of ammunition in the weeks to come. It goes without saying, this package does not displace and should not delay the critical need to pass the bipartisan national security bill.” (Or as one senior administration official told me this week, “There’s no other supply of $60 billion.”)

It’s understandable that this is where Washington’s focus is: Military aid is vital, and it is something concrete that the Hill can do for Ukraine. But ammunition shortages aren’t Ukraine’s only problems.

“The main challenges Ukraine is dealing with are manpower, fortifications, and a deficit of ammunition,” Kofman told me. Ukraine, in other words, isn’t only running low on shells. It’s also running low on people to fire them, and the people to man the fortifications that it is only now starting to build to reinforce its positions on the front lines. So far, though, legislation to expand the draft is stuck in the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, and the country’s political leadership has punted on this difficult and unpopular measure. In fact, this is one of the reasons that president Volodymyr Zelensky fired his top commander, Valery Zaluzhny: Zaluzhny said Ukraine needed another half-million souls for the fight, but Zelensky didn’t want to do something so politically toxic. As the war drags on with no end in sight, Ukrainian casualties mount, and those who have already been mobilized haven’t been allowed to come home, there’s little stomach for proposals to send more people into the meat grinder.

It’s a problem that Russia, which doesn’t have real elections and doesn’t value the lives of its citizens, does not have to contend with. In fact, the Kremlin has been quite successful in recruiting tens of thousands of new soldiers using only the promise of money. “It’s hard to see how, without additional men, Ukraine can sustain this effort,” Kofman explained. And even though Russia currently has a six-to-one artillery advantage over Ukraine, “ammunition alone won’t solve it,” Kofman said, adding: “The trajectory that I see is a problematic one for a particular reason: Ukraine could manage with one problem, but right now, it’s dealing with three interrelated problems.”

When I asked him if he thinks Ukraine can hold the line, Kofman was of two minds. “It depends on whether they make the hard decisions on manpower and whether [the U.S.] comes through with aid,” he said. “But it’s possible for there to be a Russian breakthrough in the second half of the year if these problems aren’t addressed.” (The senior administration official that I consulted also expressed a worry that Russia’s incremental gains could add up to big territorial losses for Ukraine over the course of the year.)

On the other hand, Russia has been unable to turn its triumph at Avdiivka into any kind of real momentum. Its territorial gains have been minimal and piecemeal. In part, that’s because Russia lost so much equipment and so many men in taking what’s left of the Ukrainian town. It’s a costly strategy that the Kremlin also used in seizing Bakhmut. Russia has been steadily purchasing ammunition from Iran and North Korea, but, when it comes to equipment, it is still turning to old Soviet stockpiles. Even with its defense sector working at full tilt, it takes time to replace complex equipment lost in battle. “If the Russian military is going to lose an army’s worth of people and equipment in battles like Avdiivka, then it’s important to keep in mind that they can only generate a few armies per year in troops and equipment,” Kofman explained. “Consequently, they can only afford a few offensives like that per year.”

A lot can still change, including in Ukraine’s favor, and a lot of that also depends on Washington. “It is hard to say which way it’s going to go because we don’t know the choices people are going to make in D.C. and in Kyiv,” Kofman continued. “The war could take different trajectories from this point, but it’s clear that if these decisions are not made in the next several months, then the trajectory becomes more negative, and harder to change.”

Julia