Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily politics newsletter from Tara Palmeri, Tina Nguyen, Peter Hamby, and myself. Tonight, I’m focused on my frenetic weekend at the Munich Security Conference, the biggest to date. I’ll be discussing this story and more this Friday at 2 p.m. ET in a private call with Puck’s Inner Circle members—you can upgrade your subscription ahead of time to join. (Also, we’d love you to fill out our reader survey if you haven’t yet!)

But first…

It was meant as a powerful display of American solidarity and support for Ukraine and its president. As national security advisor Jake Sullivan pointed out on a call with reporters on Monday, the two presidents spoke a year ago as Russian troops surged across the Ukrainian border. Back then, Zelensky told Biden, “I’m not sure when we’re going to be able to speak again.”

Meanwhile, up north, Vladimir Putin gave a speech, too, a sort of state of the union that he skipped last December and delivered today instead. It was a mash-up of all his greatest, most paranoid hits: the West started this war by toppling a pro-Russian government in Kyiv in 2014; neo-Nazi Ukraine had bioterrorism labs; the West was using Ukraine to push queer values on Christian Russia. It stretched on for two hours and had even the loyalists nodding off on camera. (You try editing a dictator!) There was also an oddly high number of empty seats for such an anticipated address.

Putin made headlines in the West for saying he was going to suspend Russia’s participation in the New START treaty (a nuclear arms control treaty signed during the Obama administration). He also, rather puzzlingly, said that Russia would conduct a nuclear test—if America did. Was this more nuclear saber-rattling or a way to take a step back from the nuclear corner he’s painted himself into? Both?

I noticed something else, too. As Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, headed to Moscow to present an unspecified peace plan, the diplomatic solution to which he had alluded at the Munich Security Conference, Putin showed no signs of wanting one. In fact, he began his speech by referring to Ukraine as “our historical lands.” A fan of history, or the parts of it he can stretch to fit his narratives, Putin alluded to some vague 19th century conspiracy of the Austro-Hungarian empire “to tear away from our country these historical lands that are today called Ukraine.” That is, one year into the war, Putin does not seem to have scaled back his maximalist goals. He still does not believe that Ukraine is a real country that has a right to exist as a sovereign state, and he clearly still believes that its liquidation as such is the goal of the “special military operation.” And he swore to calmly carry out the goals of this operation, “step by step.”

A few hours later, President Biden delivered his oration from Warsaw. His speech was a mere 20 minutes (thank you, democracy!) but it was a direct rebuttal to Putin’s remarks. The war in Ukraine, Biden said, was not started by the West; it was Putin’s war of choice. “President Putin chose this war,” Biden said. “ Every day the war continues is his choice. He could end the war with a word.” He thanked the Polish people for taking in 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees (a welcome they did not extend to people fleeing the war in Syria). He also shouted out Moldovan president Maia Sandu, sitting in the audience, as well as “the freedom-loving people of Moldova.” This was notable given Sandu’s announcement last week that Russia was on the verge of staging a coup in Moldova.

Biden also echoed Kamala Harris’s words at Munich, accusing Russia of committing atrocities in Ukraine, adding that Russian troops were “using rape as a weapon of war.” Biden also talked about how badly Putin’s miscalculations have backfired, which, for those of you who have followed my decade of screaming into the void that “Putin is not a master strategist!” was especially satisfying. Europe and America were united, NATO was united, Ukraine was still standing, Biden proclaimed. And then he delivered a grandpa-esque groaner. “Putin wanted the Finlandization of NATO,” he said, before leaning into the mic for a delighted delivery, “but instead he got the NATOization of Finland.”

Biden promised, “NATO will not tire.” How true is that? More on that below.

Under his predecessor Angela Merkel, Germany had weaved a thick web of economic cooperation with Russia in the hopes of bringing the country into the Western community and away from its former Cold War antagonism. On February 24, 2022, that era had ended. Germany, after its horrifying crimes in World War II, had developed a healthy allergy for militarism and stubbornly resisted every American president’s efforts to get their country to spend two percent of their military budget on defense, as required by NATO. That era too had ended. Scholz, who in the run-up to the invasion had tried to help Vladimir Putin find a new off-ramp every time the Russian president blew past another one, was now on the side of arming Ukraine. A year after the Zeitenwende speech, Germany was sending Leopard tanks to Kyiv.

If that old era cooperation, however uneasy and fraught, was over, what had replaced it? The speeches and panels at this year’s conference insisted that it was trans-Atlantic unity and resolve. Speaker after speaker, from Scholz to Emmanuel Macron, Rishi Sunak, and Kamala Harris, pledged their country’s unwavering commitment to Ukraine in its struggle to defeat Russia. Some egged on their allies to do more, like the German defense minister, who said two percent should be not the ceiling but the floor for NATO countries’ military spending. If you listened to the official proceedings, either from the Hotel Bayerischer Hof or via the live stream, you would come away believing that Ukraine was in good hands and that the Western commitment to its victory was ironclad, even if the war dragged on for years, a possibility which the conference’s participants were now openly acknowledging.

But why come to Munich to listen to the speeches? The real talk happens elsewhere, at the myriad private breakfasts and lunches and dinners, at the afterparties in restaurants just outside the intense security perimeter or in the Hof’s baroque lobby bar, where you can catch Kyiv mayor and former professional boxer Vitali Klitschko talking shit about Volodymyr Zelensky (he is so obsessed with loyalty, Klitschko joked ruefully, that members of his team need to ask him permission to go out to dinner). It happens at Trader Vic’s, the tiki joint in the basement where Cindy McCain threw a party for the various CODELs (four of them this time!) and where I spotted Lindsey Graham holding court from an ornate wicker throne. That’s where people really say what’s on their minds—and it was hardly unity.

One evening at Schumann’s Bar, for instance, Mark Warner, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, got up on a chair to address a cocktail party that included a NATO undersecretary, various Europeans, and a handful of American senators, and tried to reassure “our European allies.” “Don’t worry,” he said, trying to make sure everyone could see and hear him. “The voices on the American right are very loud but they don’t set policy.” The center, he assured America’s European allies, would hold.

At a dinner later that night held under Chatham House rules, three Republican legislators swore to everyone at the table, which included several Ukrainians, that the members of their caucus who threatened to slash aid to Ukraine did not speak for their party—and they would not win. These three G.O.P. legislators, one after the other affirmed, getting red in the face or slamming a hand on the table, that they would do their all to help Ukraine and they would “die on this hill.”

Afterwards, I ran into one of the Ukrainians, Hanna Hopko, a former parliamentarian, at the Hof bar, where the night owls were still gossipping and talking shop. She was furious. Her country was in ruins. She had lost dozens of friends. She hadn’t seen her daughter more than a couple of times in the last year, but all the talk was of a long war in Ukraine. “A long war is a disaster for us!” Hopko nearly shouted. “A disaster!” How long could Ukraine survive much longer in a war that had destroyed its economy, killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced millions, and, as the Estonian minister of defense told me, racked up a quarter million dead and wounded soldiers? Sure, the Russians had similar numbers, but they had a far larger pool to draw from. Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament representing Odessa, told me grimly that Ukraine was facing a real manpower shortage. There were no more volunteers, he said. The ones who had joined up a year ago were dead, and there were no new ones queueing up to take their place.

At the bar, Hopko was equal parts furious and desperate. The security conference was all empty rhetoric, she said. It resulted in no new promises of military aid. Ukraine had been lobbying hard for jets, but every single Western leader gingerly sidestepped the issue. “They are giving us enough not to lose, but they are not giving us enough to win,” she said. And in a long war, that meant only one thing for Ukraine: defeat.

A few days before the conference, a senior administration official told the Washington Post that, given the political realities in D.C., more aid might be harder and harder to come by. The Boeberts and Greenes and Gaetzes in Congress aren’t just very loud, they have a fair bit of power in a House where their party has the slimmest of majorities. “‘As long as it takes’ pertains to the amount of conflict,” an anonymous White House official told the Post. “It doesn’t pertain to the amount of assistance.” The official stressed that, “We will continue to try to impress upon them that we can’t do anything and everything forever.”

In November, the White House had to publicly distance itself from Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley’s comments that, given the state of the battlefield, Ukraine was unlikely to achieve its aims—restoring its 1991 borders—militarily. It was time to start talking about talking. Now, three months later, it seems that the White House is starting to come around to Milley’s position, at least more publicly. And since we’re talking about big concepts that fit into one German word, there’s a fair bit of schadenfreude in the Milley camp, though I don’t know the German word for the bitterness they feel at being hung out to dry when they believe everyone basically agreed with Milley even then.

“Everyone here is talking about exit ramps, but very, very quietly, just nibbling around the edges,” one high-profile American conference attendee told me. “You’ll get slammed if you say anything publicly. You have to maintain a public front of unity.” But the talk of exit ramps was there, only one year in. I asked this attendee what was really happening under the happy talk of a unified front. “There’s a lot of uncertainty and a feeling that time is not on Ukraine’s side,” they responded, in part because of political uncertainty in the U.S. and the understanding that Europe still needed Washington to be its cat-herder. “Without the U.S., does the E.U. hold together on Ukraine? Yes, but not at the same levels. Does Ukraine collapse [if aid levels decrease without the U.S.]? Probably. And Putin knows that. He’s waiting us out.”

I could see why Hopko was so angry at the divergence between what Western leaders declared publicly and what they said privately. There were a couple off the record events I went to, so I can’t say who they were with, but the distinct sense I was starting to get from them and as I left Munich was that for all the talk of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” the West was fundamentally not comfortable helping Ukraine to win on Ukraine’s terms. There was a very realistic and accurate assessment that Putin’s nuclear threats were not empty and that he very well might act on them if the Russian military collapsed or if Ukrainians took Crimea. That is, Putin would go nuclear if Ukraine won the war.

Putin has made this war existential. He cannot lose it and survive as the leader of Russia. At that point, everything is on the table, and given my conversations with Moscow, that still very much includes a potential tactical nuclear strike on the battlefield. That, from everything I’ve heard in my conversations with people in the Biden administration, would force the United States to get directly involved. Does that mean that the U.S. and Europe can’t let Russia lose and Ukraine win?

We’re very far from that on the ground, where the fight is still very much a World War I-esque stalemate, but I’m not the only one in Washington asking this question: Does the Biden administration want Ukraine to win on Ukraine’s terms, and will it help Ukraine to do so? I don’t know that anyone, Ukrainians included, left Munich with a good answer. Nor do I know that, at the moment, the Biden administration has an answer to give. What I do know is that Putin is very well aware of that.

Good night, tomorrow will be worse,
Julia