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Well, let's get to one of our most read stories on the Bloomberg Today.
Jpust Cross.
Last night.
First of all, we were on air actually when headlines started, oh really in terms of some financial message.
I saw this late yesterday and then you know, three minutes later, Talia sends the email too, because she's on top of it.
Because she I don't know how she does it. I feel like Bloomberg goes right to her brain.
It's wired in, it is wired in.
It is one of our most read stories. Though on this Tuesday, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Diamond, we're talking about him fierce competition across the financial industry. He said he's starting to see parallels to the era before the two thousand and eight financial crisis, when a rush, as you know, to make loans ended disastrously. We don't need to remind you how rough that was. Jamie Diamond made the comments yesterday at JP Morgan's investor Day right here in New York City.
Unfortunately, we did see this in five and six and seven, almost the same thing, the rising tires lifts in all boats. Everyone was making a lot of money. I don't know how long it's going to be great for everybody. I see a couple of people doing some dumb things. You know, they're just doing dumb things to create ANII or or say they're you know, winning in the markets business or something like that.
All right, that of course JP Morgan Chase CEO, Jamie Diamond, yesterday's investor Day here in New York City. Look in Rev Cash.
I was going to say, a little different look than we usually see. Yeah, but you know what, it was a lot of snow yesterday.
Yeah. I don't know everybody like I felt like we all had our bootstools.
We did Investor Day though.
Yeah, they did, they did. They carried through all right. This comment's definitely getting our attention to get even Tim who was home getting locked into what he had to say. Let's get more though on it. Kat Dougherty's with us. She's Blomberg News finance reporter right here in studio Kat. Whether it's cockroaches or he's making a weather forecast. When Jamie says something, it gets our attention. Tell us about the meeting and some of the things that stand out.
You're right, but this stood out more so than the cockroaches comments. He's made those types of jabs at the private credit industry specifically before, and yes it's gotten attention,
but not in the same way that Tim's right. When this headline crossed last night, I think a lot of folks were clicking through, and you can see in the interest even today, it's just continuing on and it's generating a lot of talk amongst banking colleagues that are really kind of diving into the parallels that Diamond is drawing today. And he's saying that he's seen a lot of his words, dumb things going on from his competitors across the street.
He's not necessarily calling out the other banks, He's calling out the Apollos, the Blue Owls, these firms that have really generated and not just attention, but the money that they are handling that is outside of the banks. That is what Diamond is drawing attention to, saying that a lot of what you saw with the two thousand and eight financial crisis was the money that was being handled that at the end of the day, that was with the banks. So now that the money has moved away
from the banks, it's behind the scenes. He's saying that if the cracks start to emerge and you have the cockroaches that again he has called out before, that's not a new comment, but he's saying that that's where the underlying stresses and he doesn't know when he didn't make a call yesterday. I think that's important to note yea of when this might actually come through. But he's saying it's a matter of the question being the timing, but he's thinking that it's going to happen at some point.
I know, you want to talk a little bit about the history and what JP Morgan and what Jamie Diamond has seen because he's, you know, one of the people who was there through the financial crisis at the helm of the big bank.
He's the only one that's the only point is the o man standing right among those big banks that.
Said, and you touched on this a little bit Kat with what you said about you mentioned Apoulo for example, what are the specific that, if any, that he called out or that we can infer from the quote unquote dumb things like what is he seeing.
He's referencing lending lending practices that if you are going to affirm, let's keep with Apolo. But there's so many others that we could use as examples. The pricing on these loans is so much different than let's say, how you price Apple's stock. It's not as liquid and so there might be underlying stress, but the price doesn't reflect that. But if there gets to a point like we seen with some of the cockroach examples, where at the end of the day there's massive selling and then the price
does have to reflect the underlying stresses. That's when if those things start to pile up, you could it's a snowball effect. And you had boas Weinstein today, he's down in Miami and he made very similar comments. He was saying that it is something that builds on itself, and you don't need too much of these specific instances that some are calling just one offs and saying that it's
not representative of the entire industry. But if you start to see those one offs become two, three, four, and all of a sudden, it does be building and the stress can turn into something much bigger. That's what Diamond is calling out.
Bo As Weinstein say, a capital management founder, you're right saying all you need is a snowball to start going down the hill, and it started blue ouls right in the middle of that. I think we are in the super early innings of the wheels coming off the car. I mean, this cat. This gets to the lack of transparency, especially when it comes to the private markets. We keep talking about this, and so I'm not going to ask you Essa go into a premo on the private markets world,
but that's part of what we're getting to. The banks are highly regulated, A lot of investment firms are highly regulated, right, oversight and transparency in what is kind of on their balance sheet.
That's right.
But when we're talking about these loans that are outside of the banks, the mark to market. You might be able to hold a loan and say that it is worth let's say, ninety cents on the dollar, but the stress that's underlying might if it does eventually trade trade down to sixty. Now that's going to be a lot different in the private credit market than it is with the banks, especially if the banks are the ones that
are holding these loans. They have to disclose and the pricing is a little bit more transparent.
But there are parallels.
And what's also.
Interesting is that the banks too are getting into private credit. They're setting aside their own balance sheet for some of these deals. So it's an interesting dichotomy when this is business for them and they're losing some of the business if it is going to firms outside of the banking system.
So they want to be in the game. They want to put their money towards some of these lending opportunities, but that competition might end up growing the market even more because you have the firms that want to get in and they want to really put their money to work.
Yeah, and like there's been such a push right when it comes to the private market world to get into things like for a one ks and so on and so forth, And this is why stuff like this has even more important.
Sure should they Yeah, I'm not even gonna ask not ask.
Not, but we should.
But I'm just saying, you know, full disclosure. You need to know, right, especially when you're talking about people's retirements and all that good stuff. God, thank you so much. Kat. Already she's Bloomberg News Finance reporter joining us right here in studio, and as we've met, this is one of the most read stories. I feel like it's already a very big theme and big story this year. It is blue owl, one canary in the private market coal mine?
Or is it the beginning like boas Weinstein seems to say, the beginning of an undoing.
And I think fair to put Jamie Diamond in the category of concern.
Yeah, exactly right. It's a big, big thing, all right. Our thanks to Kat once more, stay with us.
More from Bloomberg Business Week Daily coming up after this.
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Now we want to get to some of today's trade economic fundamentals behind it all. There's a lot going on, you know, things like that little thing called inflation.
I think it will be addressed tonight in the State of the Union.
It will right now, affordability at large.
Oh, no question. I think many people argue though it's still a problem. The FED largely reminds us, yes, it is, and yet there are those that are concerned about the slowing US labor market. Earlier today, at the twenty twenty six National Association of Business Economics Policy meeting underway in Washington, DC, Bloomberg's Mike McKee caught up with Fed Bank Reserve President of Chicago Austin Goolsby to talk about the Supreme Court's ruling and how it could impact US inflation.
When the part of inflation that has come from tariffs is supposed to go away, is supposed to be transittory, and when you see things like the forecasts say inflation's going to peak out and then start falling by the end of twenty twenty five, and then that moves the goalpost, well maybe it'll be the first quarter of twenty six, and now they're saying, well, maybe it will be the second quarter of twenty six. That's not a great sign. We need to see what we should see, especially on
the good side. If the tariff inflation is transitory, it's supposed to start going away.
That's what we were Mike McKee cott it catching up with the feder Reserve Bank of Chicago. President Austin Goulesby a little earlier today.
Well, and this is kind of the predicament we are when we see that Friday decision, Supreme Court decision when it comes to tariffs, what does that mean do we take away inflationary pressures?
Right?
When it comes to costs? This is something we've talked about that ultimately the consumer is going to pay a higher cost. Some companies have been eating that higher cost because of tariffs, but eventually, you know, we're seeing things
already being passed on to consumers. And Austin Goolsby kind of getting to this point like where are we Like it's a kind of a moving goalpost, Like, all right, a big decision on Friday, but then we have the president over the weekend, and we talked about this a lot yesterday of imposing his own kind of across the board tariffs, and so we're trying to figure out if tariff inflation is transitory. He said, you know, it's supposed
to start going away. And that's kind of like the question in predicament we're in.
Well, let's get that question over to Lauren Goodwin. She's economist and chief market Strategies at New York Life Investments. She joins us here in the studio. So, following that Supreme Court decision, do we have a clear view on where inflation goes from here?
I don't think we were ever going to be super clear on the impact that tariffs have directly to inflation. When you're looking at an inflation forecast, you can certainly look at which types of goods are receiving tariffs how that might roll into the total number. But keep in mind there is a bigger geopolitical context that's changing as well with respect to how goods are sourced, where supply chains are moving. That started during the pandemic, if not before.
And so I think the conversation around tariff's and uncertainty and what it means certainly for the deficit is very reasonable. But the specific pass through to consumers, I don't know that we were ever really going to have a great number on that.
So in terms of the deficit, you're saying, this is revenue that maybe is going away could have helped to cut back the US deficit.
That's no or yes, that's well, that's the concern over the last couple of days. To be honest with ourselves and really any investor that I've been speaking to, most folks range of average effective tariff rate was somewhere between between ten and twelve and fifteen and sixteen percent, And it looks like that's where we're likely to net out,
regardless of the authority used for those tariffs. And so that likely means we don't have a huge change in deficit assumptions really, and the activity we've seen on the curve I think suggests that the market agrees with that.
What about other inflationary pressures in terms of the president's big spending bill that he sent, you know, that was passed last year. So is that kind of tailwind for the economy and that's inflationary you know, in the long reul tell us about kind of how you're gaming out inflation for this year.
Yeah, that's really where the rub is. As if you look at the broader economy picture, you have, of course tariffs and that tax on the concer again difficult to handicap, but we know it's there. Same is true of global supply chains and geopolitical challenges, and certainly these fiscal tailwinds that we see supporting the consumer likely mean that prices
are going to continue moving higher. Now, it's my view, and we've talked about this a bit before, that a strong inflation print a couple times in a row is probably one of the more disruptive events for this market pricing that we could see. However, it's not clear to me that that's going to be the mechanism that disrupts the market here in the next couple of months. I'm watching for it, but it's not in our base case.
What I think though, that that affordability challenge creates talk a lot about how we don't really see that in the market. I don't know that I agree because a lot of the spending and more i'll call it populist leaning policies from both sides of the aisle that we see are a reflection of knowing that the average American is struggling with affordability.
What I just we only have a minute, I know, two minutes left, and there's a lot that we want to get to. Yeah, okay, so I want to get to a little bit of your view on AI and productivity. We don't have time to play the sound, but there's a lot of people talking about this right now, and I mean yesterday IBM was the latest example of what happens to a stock that people think is under threat from AI. The productivity side of this, how do we look at that?
So here's here's the real answer. None of us know, certainly, none of.
Us, none of us in Max World Company saying.
Certainly, none of us in macro world.
Note.
Look, the way that productivity will be garnered from this technology is much more closely in the hands of the technology actors than in the macro and investment space. And so what we're all doing is crafting our scenarios. And one thing I'll say about our high uptake, medium, uptake,
low and take scenarios. They're all disruptive. And so I think what we need to focus on instead of the specific winners and losers, which I think are too early to identify, it's how do you get more accust them to that disruptive market where leadership is changing the way it has been pretty regularly.
It's I think it's tough, and I think you know the caveat is and you are not alone, you know, Lauren. Everybody says it's early on. We don't really know, and that even the report, the research report that came out yesterday, that it's just too soon to kind of figure out winners and losers and the impact. I mean, we did FED Governor Chris Waller talking today about the US Central Bank moving towards a system wide deployment of AI across
regional banks and it's DC headquarters. But that's again, it's a tool that everybody's playing with.
Yeah, we should. We should hope that they are right. Everyone. The more we use AI, the more unfireable.
I watch that.
But the matter it is for us.
Your job is safe for today.
Someone in the world said, if you're not using it, you've just got to start otherwise you're behind already. Lauren Goodwin, you rock. Thank you so much.
Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Business Week Daily coming up after this.
Listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Daily podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five e's during this listen on Applecarplay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
So among our most read stories on the Bloomberg Today, Charlie just mentioned it has to do with meta platforms doing a mega deal with advanced micro devices. It's a blockbuster one that marks a win for chip maker's attempts to catch up and video. So let's get right to it with us his Bloomberg Tech co host ed Ludlow, airing every Monday through Friday eleven am Wall Street Time
on Bloomberg Television. Ed out there in our San Francisco News bureau ed walk us through the particulars of I'm not sure what to call it, arrangement, partnership, deal, what do you want to call it?
Well, it's a deal, for sure, it's a deal, and I'm sure the inkstra on it. But you know, it's six gigawats of capacity. That's like the equivalent of the output of six nuclear reactors power millions and millions of homes.
With that, because I want to see the power head.
Well, it's you know, people have been posing really good questions, which is like a very simple question is why do we talk about data cent capacity in terms of gigawatts and not like in dollars or a.
Number of chips?
And the reality is like at a base level, data is transferred within the server inside the data center using electrons and it requires electricity to power it, you know, and that that's why we measure it that way. But for AMD it's important, right because it represents tens of billions of dollars of revenue over that period, and it's a kind of vote of confidence from a very large data center operator on their latest technology, which starts with four fifty and then the roadmap goes from that.
So much more powerful to say how much power will be created or how much data center capacity versus saying we're going to buy a jillion chips from you.
Yeah.
Well, there are loads of reasons for that, in part because like AMD's story is now mirroring what Nvidia when through, which is we used to talk about in video is just having a great chip single GPU, as if it was something you could sort of hold up in your hand, and it doesn't really work like that, you know. AMD does the whole design of the server, and the server is power hungry, you know, and it puts a burden
on the grid. But that's why we talk about it in those terms in common pilance in gigawatts because it explains the scale of the compute, right and this is massive, massive scale. The average size of a data center right now, is like three hundred to five hundred megawatts. So the fact that these two are committing to six gigawats over time,
it is really big. But note that, like metas talked about all of this, you know, by the end of this decade having tens of gigawatts online and beyond that hundreds of gigawatts you know, for what they want to achieve in AI.
So ed, let's talk about the financing of this, and yes, and whether or not they're like, explain the equity involvement, because as part of the arrangement, Meta will receive warrants to buy one hundred and sixty million AMD shares in stag. Does that mean that, yeah, that let's say AMD's price doesn't go up to you know, six hundred dollars per share, which is in the agreement. Does does that mean that Meta won't own that that portion of AMD stock. Yeah.
So they are mandatory and they are operational and financial goals. So in one scenario, which I think is the final tranch of how it's structured, AMD share price would need to hit six hundred dollars a share. And let me just look down on my screen. Two thirty now two thirteen, Well, there's some way to go right and so, but it works in both directions. This in terms of what AMD gets. AMD will book revenue on this, Meta will pay AMD for the server designs and computers, and so there are
operational milestones. In other words, Meta has the right to act on those warrants if it actually builds these data centers and actually you know, deploys.
Them as of now and in the near future, Meta won't necessarily be a shareholder of AMD as a result.
Yeah, this deal, Yeah, it is structured at different prices, and you know what's interesting about it is like it's almost identical to what AMD did with open Ai. Open ai was also offered warrants for one hundred and sixty million dollars one hundred and sixty million shares apologies, but they were set against very clearly structured operational goals. In other words, until somebody has dug up the ground, put the data center in, and switched on the computer, nothing happens.
And you know, open ai is still a little ways off from that happening too.
Okay, is anyone getting pushed out or left out in the AI race by this deal being done? Like, is anybody like saying wait a minute, what are they doing.
The other way to look at it is like through metas lens, Like Meta literally just did a similar deal with Nvidia. And what's so interesting, right, is that they framed that deal in the millions of chips and you know, going back to what I was saying about a moment ago about gigawatts, but it's a similar arrangement. And so Meta is doing three things. It is a massive buyer of Nvidia Gear, it's a massive buyer of AMD gear. But it also deploys like a lot of resources internally
to develop its own custom accelerators. And you know, you either accept or don't the base position that all of these companies that are working on AIA supply constrained. In other words, they don't have access currently to enough compute to achieve the things that they want to do, and so to de risk that they are diversifying the sources of that compute in different ways. You know.
Listening to that a and it makes me think about talking to people in the world of power generation and just saying how a lot of the hyperscalers were doing deals with a lot of different utilities just to make sure that they're covered and that all those contracts or initial maybe conversations weren't going to all pan out. And I guess that's what I'm trying to when I hear this. You know, it sounds like Meta being smart, making sure it's supply chain is robust internally externally as much as
it can. But it also makes me think a lot of this sounds like insurance policies, and if the demand ultimately isn't there, or it doesn't the ROI isn't there, this starts to come undone, right, is that the big question?
There's an element of future proofing. So the way that Mark Zuckerberg explains it is, remember he sat next to the president and promised to invest six hundred billion dollars, and more recently he's talked about the risk of miss spending about two hundred billion dollars. And to Mark Zuckerberg, the greater risk is to not spend it, because then you won't know if you'll have the tools available to you to develop the AI models that you think are
unnecessary at the time. It's also another reason why we track that PGM data. I think we've on Business Sweet talks about this before. So PGM is like the biggest utility basically on the Eastern seaboard, and they actually revised down their peak demand on forecast because to your point, lots of things get announced on paper, they sit on electricity demands, they never build the things, and so we try to understand what's really being built on the ground.
And I guess too, like if we think about how fast this stuff has just accelerated in recent years, ED, you know, maybe things could get more efficient, maybe not as much electricity will be in demand, as some analysts have said, I don't know, I want to. We are speaking with that lud though he's the coast of Bloomberg Tech on Bloomberg TV. He joins us from our San Francisco bureau. Ed a real feather in the cap for AMD, and Lisa sue, right.
Yeah, you know, they have tried to differentiate themselves in any given quarter. At the moment, AMD will book ten billion dollars of revenue for absolutely everything it does. In Nvidia's just data center business is fifty billion dollars a quarter, and so you know that shows you where they are right now.
Now.
Their pitch has been an engineering focus pitch, where particularly in inference, in other words, running them mode, not training them, is where that their technology performs best, and like that was a big part of this to say, like, one of the reasons Meta is doing this with us is that they will co engineer those later generations of data
center to use AMD's technology. Right, They'll work together the different engineering teams to make them work as efficiently as possible in a world where right now, like in Vidia dominates largely for training but dominates generally in data center, and then you have Google's TPU, its own custom chip, which is good at both training and inference, and so like again this is about Meta saying like what are
our options here? AMD is a good option for that bucket, which is like specialized inference as far as we can tell.
Yeah, And it's also just kind of interesting looking at it from a stock perspective perspective. I mean, AMD is storing in today's session, you know that, you know, we're not up about nine percent, but AMD is little change down the year, and videos little change down the year after you know, strong runs last year. I mean investors, are you know, still being kind of cautious right when it comes to this group.
Ed Yeah, I mean I think back to October, Yeah, when AMD did the deal with open Ai and the stock jump twenty five percent or whatever it was. So people have short memories, like your partnerships are relative in the eyes of the market. This was a multi year thing going into the start twenty twenty six, right, So yeah, like in videos up modestly, but it had grown triple digits in the past whatever years, and you know it's now trading it relatively low multiple based on its forward earnings.
So people kind of like, Okay, let's cool it a bit.
Hey, we've got about a couple of minutes left. I want to ask you about Anthropic also on our radar stocks. Actually, the market overall kind of rebounding, as they said it was expanding the reach of its Claude Chapbot to build partnerships in the software and services sectors. And we know this has been a space that keeps getting beat up by the AI scare that AI is going to kind
of take away all their business. I'm trying to underst stand AI working with software firms, or AI a threat, or we don't really know yet.
So I'll try and summarize all of it. Because there are several, say a dozen stocks that moved through the upside based on this partnership with Anthropic. Athropic has a very competent model. Claud Historically it is focused on coding and making coding more efficient and getting rid of backlogs. All it's basically now saying is that they have an agentic platform that is a platform instead of being a
standalone tool. You basically go to any given software company, look at the thing they already do, and say, wouldn't it be great if Claude just worked within that. Into It is a good example. People will use into it for their tax returns as consumers and small medium businesses will as well. Imagine if you actually went onto that platform and there was an agent, and by agent we mean you know, an AI that's authorized to do something. That's what they came out and said today.
Ed Ludlove, of course, co host a Bloomberg Tech on Bloomberg TV Ketch at eleven am Wall Street Time on Bloomberg Television.
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Well, President Trump's efforts to end Russia's invasion of Ukraine are stalling, with peace talks deadlocked and the fighting large. They had a stealemate after four years of war.
It's like, it's hard to get my head around because I remember our first conversations when this broke out, and it was like, can this end within the year, And it's like, well.
The first conversations, well, correctly, everybody thought Ukraine would fall within three or four days.
And look at like, here we are and the fighting continues. But it's not without its costs on so many different levels, in first and format, most of course the loss of just human lives. But there's just so much that has really hurt, certainly Ukraine in a big way at least.
Giuliano is Senior Lecture and Political Science. It's at Columbia University. She's also director of graduate Studies at Columbia's harrim An Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Study. She's also director the Program on US Russian Relation. She joins US from New York. Professor always good to have you on the program. If we think back to just four years ago, and I mean, it seems it's just remarkable to realize that that time has passed and what people thought in
the beginning of what people are thinking right now. President Trump making it a priority at least during the election in his first year in office to end the war in your view, is the end of the war in site.
The end of the war unfortunately is not in sight.
And I think the most sober minded view about this is the view of Ukrainians who understand that at this point President Trump thought he could. I think he said, end the war in a few days, and he thought it would be a simple task. But the youth sides remained very far apart. And the reason for this really is the intransigence of the Russian side of Putin, who really has not moved off of his initial goals in undertaking the invasion four years ago.
Yeah, that's where I wanted to go. I mean, this is really I feel like the ball is in his court and unless he gives up the land grab and some other condition, I mean, what do we need to see from President Putin for this to happen.
Well, the negotiations that are ongoing are really focusing and talking about Territoryeh, but this just makes it sound like a big game of risk. But what Putin wanted when he went into Ukraine four years ago was to have Ukraine in Russia's orbit in a kind of nineteenth century great powers way where a great power has should believe that it has sovereignty or control over its neighbors. So
I don't think he's moved off of that goal. If you remember, the initial invasion was to directly toward Kiev, to overthrow the government of you and to put in place a puppet or kind of pro Russian puppet regime.
That was a huge failure.
And so now we're talking about territory and there's a stalemate on the line of contact in the east and south. However, Putin does not seem to and the negotiations do not really seem to meet in the middle, because this is not about territory for Russia, at least for Putin and for Ukraine, this is about the viability, the sovereignty, the very existence of their state.
If it's not about territory for Vladimir Putin, what is it about.
It's about having Ukraine in Russian's orbit. So whether that means keeping Ukraine out of Europe, out of NATO, out of an alliance with the West, with the US, that's what it's about. So if you know, if they do come to a ceasefire and they settle this kind of sticky point about territory, the problem is that what the Russian side is asking for is that Ukraine cannot give, which is one territory all of don boss including territory
that Russia does not control right terrily. And if they if they win that, if they get that, then they could be well positioned to mount another invasion or.
Another war in a short period of time.
Whereas Ukraine wants security guarantees, and it wants those security guarantees from the West and from Europe, and that is exactly what Russia does not want.
It does not want Europe involved.
So there you see the kind of fundamental conflict between the two sides.
Yeah, you know, European Commissioned President Ursula vonder Lyon said that the BLOCK will deliver on it's one hundred and six billion dollar loan package to Ukraine one way or another. Her words, As you know, we continue to see this go on and we're looking at Ukraine maybe running out of funds in just a matter of weeks. Why can't we have more of a packing for Ukraine? Or is that then a major shift in geopolitical alliances? Why not can't the world the United States get more? Why can't
Ukraine be in NATO? Like, what message would that send to the rest of the world. It certainly would send a strong message to Russia, but it would also mean the potential for everybody else to get involved in that conflict, right, NATO allies?
Okay, well, there's a few things there, I mean Ukraine.
The hesitance of the US and Europe to place Ukraine and NATO is because NATO is a military alliance and then Europe and the US might possibly be engaged in war with the nuclear power Russia. So that's been the kind of hesitancy on the part of both Biden and
Trump administration welcoming Ukraine into NATO. However, that doesn't mean that once the ceasefire is achieved that Europe cannot help to secure the point of contact and provides security guarantees to Ukraine something short of NATO membership, And that's what they're kind of working on and that's the direction that
the EU is moving in. But in terms of the short term kinds of problems, you have Hungary very much of Russian puppet well not fully of puppet state, but aligned with Russia, kind of acting as a spoiler within the EU. So the EU is a complicated actor in and of itself.
At least over the last four years, there have been different moments where we've learned about what's happening inside of Russia, what's happening inside of Ukraine, especially with regard to people who've lost their lives as a result of this conflict. On the Russian side, I'm curious about support for the war and where Vladimir Putin finds the people to do the fighting, because that was a concern a couple of years ago.
Yeah, certainly we do not see Russians signing up in droves to fight this war. There isn't even a kind of understanding among many Russians of why Russia is fighting this war, and so where Putin finds the Russians willing to fight is in mainly the rural areas of Russia, the very poor areas of Russia, and they are paid huge amounts to go to the front, and these amounts are life changing for some of the families in these
rural areas. And so you know, basically a lot of people are calling Russian army a mercenary army.
At this point.
And that's an important point because if Russia's economy is doing so poorly, which it is especially lately, is it going to have enough money to continue essentially hiring its own citizens, paying them these high salaries and payouts and death payouts. If the economy is really suffering.
Alice, if there's an agreement where Ukraine gives up territory, then what's to stop Russia in Putin from doing this again? He's already this is his second would be his second land grab, certainly when it comes to Ukraine. If he if he does walk away with land, if there is some kind of resolution, I mean, does it then kind of just say to him, well, keep going, like should we assume that he will keep going? Like is that crucial that he gets no land out of this? Right?
So that's the fear of Ukraine, and that's the fear of the EU. And you know many European states and formerly under the previous administration, is it a.
Right fear though, is it accurate? Is it the right fear to have?
You know, so, you know, if Pujin is in power, it to me, as long as he remains in power, and as long as he has this kind of obsession with Ukraine and with the kind of ideas that he's been articulating all along since you know, the past four years, then it seems to me that he will not give up on the goal of, as I said at the beginning, taking control of Ukraine, and how in Ukraine as as a neighboring state that's basically under the sovereignty of Russia.
And so yeah, this is the this is the fear.
You have Russian troops positioned very much inside some of the areas of Ukraine that would allow them if there were eastfire, that would allow them to restart the war again, you know, in six months, in a year, in a few years.
Is there anything in your view that the US could or should be doing in order to hasten an end to the conflict?
H well, sure, I mean, the US has a lot of the strong is the strongest state in the world. It has a lot of tools, you could say, it's tools of state craft that it could use, and is not using. First of all, let's be aware of the fact that the US has cut off aid, military aid, and assistance to Ukraine under the Trump administration.
Cut off right, So now.
The the it's the europe who purchases bins from the US and provides aid and assistance to Ukraine. So financially, that's one thing, but especially you know, there could be further sanctions, there could be better enforcement of sanctions, and there could be threats of military force by sending those weapons to Ukraine, so there could be much stronger military
support for Ukraine is a threat. Look, the US is doing it right now with Iran, with the traditional tools of diplomacy, the threat of the use of force to compel another state to engage in the policy or political outcome that the US wants. And the US is not doing this.
It's just taking a backseat.
And it's really not clear that the negotiations are bringing the great power to bear on Russia that that we could be bringing.
All right, we're going.
To leave it there, but Alice, always appreciate your insight and thoughts on all of this as this war between the two entering its fifth year. Thanks to Alish, Juliana She's a senior lecturer in political science at Columbia University, also Director of Graduate Studies at Columbias Herriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, Director Program on US Russian Relations.
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