George Beebe on Ukraine's strategic collapse and the closing window for diplomacy
Glenn Diesen interviews George Beebe, former CIA Director of Russia Analysis and current Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute, on the deteriorating situation in Ukraine.
Summary
Glenn Diesen speaks with George Beebe about Russia's strategic air campaign against Ukraine, the closure of the Odessa port complex, and what Beebe describes as Ukraine's trajectory toward failed-state conditions. Beebe argues that Russia's systematic destruction of Ukraine's energy infrastructure, ports, and logistics networks is not merely a military tactic but a veto over any future Ukrainian economic reconstruction — making the "steel porcupine" scenario, in which Ukraine becomes a heavily armed deterrent state, effectively impossible. He warns that Ukraine's population has fallen from nearly 52 million at independence to somewhere between 22 and 25 million, a demographic collapse that makes sustained military resistance increasingly untenable. Beebe also argues that the window for a diplomatic settlement is closing, as Russia grows increasingly doubtful that the Trump administration has the political capacity to deliver meaningful concessions, and that the ongoing war with Iran has further weakened Trump's domestic standing and negotiating leverage.
Diesen closes the conversation by recounting his firsthand experience at the Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Sochi at the time of Trump's 2024 election victory, describing the optimism he observed among Kremlin figures — including Lavrov and Putin — who believed Trump's election represented a historic opportunity to reset relations with Washington. He notes that Russian officials were also quietly motivated by a desire to reduce excessive dependence on China, and that the Trump administration's handling of the Ukraine and Iran files has allowed that opportunity to slip away.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Russia's strategic air campaign and the closure of Odessa's ports
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Today is the 31st of August, 2026, and we are joined by George Beebe, the former Director for Russia Analysis at the CIA, now working as the Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute. Thank you for coming back on the program.
George Beebe: My pleasure. Thank you.
Glenn Diesen: I read your article about Russia shutting down Ukraine's ports and, well, de facto landlocking the country. I would advise everyone else to read it as well — I've left a link in the description. But this seems to be part of a wider challenge. There's a tendency to go up the escalation ladder against Russia without really critically assessing the possible consequences. What we saw in this forty-plus-day campaign of deep strikes into Russia — aimed to a large extent at targeting civilian infrastructure, including shipping — was initially celebrated as a game-changer, not just by Ukraine. Marco Rubio also referred to it, and the President of Finland was very open about why he considered it a good strategy, arguing that hitting civilian targets inside Russia would put pressure on the Kremlin to end the war. However, we also see that Russia has a lot more air power and Ukraine doesn't have much in the way of air defenses. Some of this should have been predictable, and yet it wasn't, it seems. We now see the Russians attacking pretty much everything and putting this naval blockade on Ukraine. I have two questions. Why wasn't this predicted? And in your article, you describe Russia landlocking the Odessa ports as potentially a grim turning point. What makes this moment different from the other developments throughout this war?
George Beebe: On the question of predictability — yes, it was predictable, and it was predicted. The problem is that the mainstream in the West, both here in the United States and in Europe, has essentially turned a blind eye to any development in this war that does not conform to its preferred narrative. The preferred narrative, of course, is that the Russians are losing and that this is a war Ukraine will ultimately prevail in. Every Ukrainian attack is celebrated and portrayed as confirmation that the war is going according to that preferred narrative. Russia's own activities — its advances on the battlefield, its strategic air strikes on Ukraine — are either ignored or underplayed. That means people who predict what's going on and warn about where all this could lead are essentially sidelined in the popular discussion.
I think that will ultimately prove quite tragic, because Ukraine is going to be left in a really abysmal condition, and people in the West are going to be surprised by how this war ultimately plays out. That can be dangerous. When you're confronted with a reality so sharply at variance with what you've been led to expect, people can react in ways that become quite dangerous. Washington and Europe can kick into what I would call "do something" mode in order to preclude the situation that has become apparent, and that's when people make dumb decisions. That's when things can escalate into direct military confrontations. So this was predictable, it was predicted, but those predictions were largely ignored — and that's a big problem.
The "steel porcupine" scenario and why it is no longer viable
George Beebe: When it comes to the broader implications of what the Russian strategic air campaign is doing to Ukraine, what it really is doing is eliminating the possibility of an outcome that many people in the West believe is both desirable and likely. I call it the steel porcupine scenario. These are people who say: okay, maybe Ukraine can't win the war outright, maybe it can't drive all of the Russian military off all occupied Ukrainian territory, but it can fight Russia to a stalemate. It can arm itself so heavily that Russia will be forever frustrated in its ability to bring this war to a decisive end. It will be the equivalent of Israel in Eastern Europe — a heavily militarized state that punches well above its weight class as a military power, can overcome the size advantages of a large and hostile neighbor, and can serve as the front line for Europe in counterbalancing and frustrating Russia's geopolitical ambitions, which are allegedly to dominate Europe and perhaps even inflict some sort of military defeat on a NATO ally.
What the Russian strategic air campaign is doing is actually precluding the possibility of that kind of outcome. Russia is making sure that Ukraine is not going to emerge from this war in any condition to become a steel porcupine. It will be a country that has not only lost a fair amount of territory, but also a country that can't rebuild itself economically, that can't be reconstructed by outside donors, whose infrastructure is so devastated that it can't heat itself, can't trade, can't bring economic goods to market, can't meet its own budgetary requirements, and is perpetually dependent on European cash flows simply to meet its budgetary needs. That's not a country that's going to be a steel porcupine. That's a country on a track to becoming a failed state.
That will be a tragedy for the people of Ukraine, but it will also be a tragedy for Europe, because it will leave Europe in a chronically unstable situation, perpetually prone to new crises and dealing with the repercussions of a Ukraine that can't effectively govern itself.
Ukraine's demographic collapse
George Beebe: I think the biggest threat that Ukraine faces over time is a demographic crisis — a country that is shrinking at alarming rates, whose birth rate is one of the lowest in the world, and that is hemorrhaging refugees. That is likely to get even worse this winter as Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure intensify and more and more people simply flee the country just to find warmth.
If you look at some of the numbers: the last Soviet census in 1989 put the population of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic at just under 52 million people. We've had Ukrainian officials in the last few months say publicly that they think the population of Ukraine, as it now stands, is somewhere between 22 and 25 million people — in other words, less than half of what it was when Ukraine gained its independence. And that number is going down at a fairly rapid rate. That's a real crisis. You're not going to sustain a large standing military with a population of that size. Half of the people that are left in the country right now are pensioners — people who are either of retirement age or are crippled by the war and dependent on state outlays. You can't build a large standing army and become this steel porcupine with that kind of population crisis on your hands.
So when you look at Odessa and the closure of those ports and the prospect of Ukraine becoming a landlocked state, that doesn't just deal a blow to Ukraine's current accounts, to its economy, to its ability to export agricultural goods and other things its economy depends on. I think it's even more significant as a blow to the future — to what Ukraine can become, to its ability to play the role that the current Ukrainian leadership aspires to and which Europe is essentially counting on. That means we're headed toward a real strategic problem both for the people of Ukraine and for European security at large. That's something of enormous significance that is getting far too little attention in the West, which is very much focused on the day-to-day conduct of this war and is not sufficiently thinking about what the aftermath of this fighting is going to look like and what the strategic implications of that are going to be.
Why Western miscalculation was predictable — and what comes next
Glenn Diesen: On the miscalculation — it shouldn't be that big a surprise that we're getting things wrong, because it feels like the political and media establishments have been quite limited in what they can say. In Europe, at least, if anyone makes the point that Russia appears to be winning — using objective indicators, noting that it can bring more pain, that it's much larger, that it has more firepower — this is considered a pro-Russian argument. If you say Russia is winning, that's pro-Russian. But no one explains why this has to be a pro-Russian argument as opposed to just an objective reality. It suggests that everyone has to organize around the consensus that Ukraine is winning, given that this is an official truth, and policies have to be built on that. It can also be applied to NATO's growing involvement — if you raise the risk of a direct war because we're becoming direct participants, arguing that NATO is becoming a direct participant is also considered a pro-Russian argument. There's nothing inherently pro-Russian about discussing the involvement, but it limits the policies. Where do you think all of this is taking the war now? The front lines are cracking, economic problems are building up, political problems are developing. If the Russians have a naval blockade, this could theoretically be lifted and we could go back to normal — but you focus a lot on how it's not going to be possible to rebuild, because they're not just blocking the ports, they're bombing and destroying them as well. How do you think this is going to affect the war moving forward?
George Beebe: What this tells me, first of all, is that Russia is going to be in a position to make sure that Ukraine is never reconstructed unless the Ukrainian government and the West agree to a diplomatic compromise that addresses key Russian concerns. The Russians essentially have shown they have a veto over Ukrainian economic reconstruction. That's the bigger significance of the closure of Ukraine's Odessa port complex. We can't change that situation. The Russians simply have too much ability to inflict damage through strategic air strikes for it to be otherwise. We can't provide the Ukrainians with sufficient air defense assets to shut down this air campaign. We don't have the capacity. We're seeing that right now with Patriot air interceptors. It's not a matter of political will. It's not a matter of budgetary allocations. We simply lack the capacity to manufacture enough Patriot missiles anywhere close to fast enough to meet Ukraine's needs. We're talking about many, many years down the road before we can manufacture the quantities of Patriots that the Ukrainians require. The Russians are building missiles, drones, and glide bombs at a far faster rate than we can build air defense interceptors.
What that means is not only can the Russians keep the Odessa port complex closed for years and years to come should they choose to, they can threaten any new economic reconstruction activity in Ukraine for as long as they want — even after major ground operations in Ukraine have ended. And when they do end, it will either be because we've reached a compromised diplomatic settlement or because the Russians have decided they don't want to continue to advance on the ground, that they've acquired all the territory they care to acquire. But one of those two things is going to happen. If it's the latter — if the Russians basically say, "Okay, we've got whatever territory we want" — they can simply keep the war unsettled for as long as they want by holding out the possibility of new air strikes to target any economic reconstruction activities, any production of military material going on inside Ukraine. This notion that we're going to build a Patriot factory to manufacture missiles on Ukrainian territory is a fantasy. We can't do it. The Russians will bomb that facility before the cornerstone is even laid.
So there are real limits to what can be achieved in Ukraine absent some sort of deal with the Russians. Over the shorter term, the Russians are strangling Ukraine's ability to manufacture, to export, to generate electricity and heat, to provide fuel for trucks and cars, to operate rail networks. All of this is putting Ukraine under severe strain. It's not as if it will cause the Ukrainian economy necessarily to collapse, at least not over the short term — the Europeans certainly have the capacity and the will to sustain the Ukrainian budget for quite some time to come. But this will have a big impact on Ukraine's ability to sustain the war over time, and that pressure is going to get worse, not better. There's very little that the United States or Europe can do to change that reality.
All of this should lead to some natural conclusions on the part of both Ukraine and the West. The biggest is that it's very much in our interest to find a way to settle this war at the negotiating table as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the media narrative is not pushing people in that direction — it's just the opposite. The media is basically saying, "Stay the course. We can keep this thing going. We can win." And I think that's both false and very tragic for all of the players involved.
The "drone wall" narrative and the logic of attritional warfare
Glenn Diesen: There's another media narrative — that the Russians can't advance anymore because of this huge drone wall, as they call it. And indeed it has changed things. I don't think we're going to see a lot of those massive big-arrow advancements of the Russian army. But that being said, the drones still need people to operate them. Along this huge front line, gaps are starting to appear all over, which the Russians can take advantage of — it's a lot of square kilometers and Ukraine simply can't fill it all. The Russians are also able to track where the drones are being sent from and returned to, and they can begin to take out these drone teams, which they have been doing. It does appear that all this wishful thinking and catchphrases about the drone wall and the steel porcupine are great for headlines, but they don't actually play out as hoped.
George Beebe: It's great for eliciting budgetary outlays, I would say. If you look at the correlation between the media narratives and the decision-making process in the West about what we're going to provide to the Ukrainians — how much money, what kind of weapon systems — there's a very close correlation between those decision points and the media narratives. Once those decision points have come and gone, suddenly you start to see more press articles: "Oh, maybe the Ukrainians aren't winning. Oh, maybe the Russians are advancing on the ground." Which was true all along, but not convenient for people making the budgetary arguments about what kind of aid we should be providing.
There's a fundamental misunderstanding about what kind of war the Russians have been waging since the first year of this contest. Early on, the Russians did approach this with a shock-and-awe blitzkrieg kind of rapid advance — an attempt to seize the airport outside of Kyiv and force regime change very quickly. But once that failed and the Russians settled into a new kind of war, it was no longer about big area movements. It was no longer about fundamental breakthroughs and rapid advances. It was a war of attrition. And wars of attrition tend to go slowly until they don't. You don't measure progress by looking at how rapidly the front lines are changing. You look at other metrics: manpower, military production, economic sustainability, infrastructure resilience. In all of those areas, which very few media figures in the West have been tracking, the Russians have enormous advantages and are making big progress. That attritional progress is cumulative. You reach a point where it goes very, very slowly and then suddenly it goes quickly. Unfortunately, I think we're on the cusp of that curve starting to steepen. The Russians are going to make some significant progress in that attritional area. We're already seeing it with the strategic air campaign, the closure of Odessa, the manpower problems that are obvious inside Ukraine as the controversies over so-called "busification" — forcible drafting of soldiers — are growing in intensity. That doesn't bode well for where Ukraine is going to wind up.
From military attrition to economic and social collapse
Glenn Diesen: Initially, for the first years, it looked as if the war of attrition was primarily focused on the military — just destroy all their military equipment, their military personnel. Very dark indicators of success, literally bleeding out the whole military. But it has shifted to a large extent now toward the economy — going after industries, logistics, ports, railroads, even down to petrol stations. Ukraine has about 7,000 or so, but the Russians are systematically going after them, starting in the strategic regions. You suggest this also manifests itself in social and political problems. When you say that Ukraine might be at a breaking point, what do you see possibly happening moving forward? Is it going to be the economy shutting down, too many people leaving? How close could we be?
George Beebe: Some of that depends on factors that aren't very predictable — how bad is the winter, and how much additional progress does Russia make in attacking Ukraine's energy infrastructure. The figures I've seen suggest that Ukraine had, prior to last winter, about five times the generating capacity that it has now, a year later. And the Russians are cranking up their attacks on Ukraine's electrical and power generation infrastructure, so that number is likely to get a lot worse. If the winter is also very cold, that could be absolutely catastrophic for the Ukrainian people.
Where do I think this is going to go? How quickly is Ukraine really going to crumble? Very hard to say. But you're seeing signs in all of these areas. You're seeing Ukrainian officials increasingly warning that they're going to have a very hard winter. You're seeing signs of growing public dissatisfaction with busification. You're seeing more candor on the part of Ukrainian officials acknowledging that they have manpower issues. You're seeing more and more Ukrainian political figures challenging Zelensky. That suggests there's a growing turbulence inside Ukraine socially and politically.
Where this goes, how quickly it goes, whether this leads to a crisis soon or later — you can't be at all precise about making predictions on that. But the trends don't bode well for Ukraine. The trends are all toward a country that is growing much more economically vulnerable, much more socially precarious, and much more politically turbulent than it has been. And that's generally how wars of attrition end — not in big breakthroughs on the front lines of the fighting, but in a country whose ability to sustain itself and sustain the war effort simply erodes and then ultimately collapses. When that point will be, I don't know. I wouldn't pretend to be precise in making that prediction. But I'm pretty confident it's not going to be five years from now. It's probably going to be a lot sooner than that.
The CIA director's visit to Moscow
Glenn Diesen: Some people are still trying to maintain optimism — or alternatively to keep the war going. General Keith Kellogg said that Ukraine is doing well and on the path to victory, but also that they have to start conscripting women. That doesn't seem quite consistent with what you would expect to see from success in a war of attrition. If you have to go after the youth and the women, it's not a good indicator. Given that things are going from bad to worse, is this why CIA Director John Ratcliffe went to Moscow? We keep being told this was nothing out of the ordinary, but I don't think a CIA director has been to Moscow since November of 2021. It is out of the ordinary — it's the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine. What do you make of this? These are your former colleagues, so to speak.
George Beebe: The first thing I'd have to say is I don't know — I can only speculate. That said, President Trump has said this was semi-routine, and my guess is that that's probably close to the mark. Not that this is an ordinary everyday kind of thing — obviously it's not. But when I say it was probably semi-routine, that suggests to me it was not about Ukraine, at least not primarily. It was probably about business between our respective intelligence agencies. One can only speculate about what that might be, but my guess is that you don't use John Ratcliffe to engage in high-level diplomacy over the Ukraine war. His counterparts are not the key decision makers and are not the means of addressing President Putin's decisions when it comes to this. If we want to make a deal with the Russians, if President Trump wants to have a summit meeting with President Putin and President Zelensky, for example, or send messages about NATO or further Russian aggression, the best way to do that is for the president to communicate that directly to President Putin — and he has the ability to do that, has had it all along, and has had many conversations directly with the Russian president. So it doesn't make sense from my point of view to send John Ratcliffe to send that kind of message.
This notion that you can present intelligence to the SVR or the FSB and that they in turn can persuade President Putin to take a different approach to the war — I think that's absurd. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of influence they have over President Putin and what kind of role they play in the system. If you just stop for a minute and ask yourself: can you imagine the Russian intelligence service director coming to Washington and meeting with Ratcliffe and saying, "We want to present you intelligence that shows President Trump is losing the war in Iran and needs to settle this war right away"? It's laughable to imagine that. And it's no less laughable from my point of view to imagine that we would try to do that with the Russians in that way. So my guess is that this visit was probably primarily about issues between the intelligence services and not about the Ukraine war.
The closing window for diplomacy
Glenn Diesen: A common theme here appears to be media narratives being very detached from reality, which also explains why politicians who act upon those narratives are making foolish mistakes. My last question is about the possibility of putting an end to this. You suggested you weren't optimistic about any diplomatic settlement. But given that the war is not going our way, that we are losing, and that in defeat the Russians can take a huge amount of strategic territory — we can end up with a broken Ukraine that will spread instability across Europe for decades to come — you would think there would be more motivation for an honest approach to diplomacy. But I now see that Foreign Minister Lavrov seemed very disinterested, saying, "We're done with all this deception" — that's how he framed all the diplomatic efforts coming out of the West. After the Alaska talks and the Europeans constantly asking for an unconditional ceasefire so they can pump weapons and troops into Ukraine, I can understand why this is considered deception. But what are the possible pathways here? If President Trump would pick up the phone and call you tomorrow, how can we put this to an end? Everyone has bet so much — the Europeans have bet their security, their political credibility, everything — on a victory. How can this be put to an end now?
George Beebe: That is a big question. I'll preface my answer by saying I think the window of opportunity for striking a diplomatic deal — a compromise to end the war — is closing. And I think it's closing in part because the Russians are beginning to conclude that the Trump administration simply does not have the ability to deliver a compromise on our end. There are too many people in the deep state, if you want to call it that, in Washington who don't want a normalization of relations with Russia. There are too many people who believe that whatever the Ukrainian government wants to do at any given time is exactly what we should be doing and enabling them to do, rather than beginning with what American interests actually are in all of this and what that leads us to decide.
If we were going to salvage this, I think we'd have to do a couple of things. One is — as I mentioned in an earlier discussion with you — we need to expand the agenda of discussions and talk to the Russians about this broader issue of European security, which I think is the most important strategic issue the Russians are facing here. It's something we haven't been willing to talk to them about, and it will be fundamental to any kind of compromise deal in Ukraine.
The second thing I think we have to do is wrap up this war with Iran, which has had a very deleterious impact on our ability to conduct diplomacy with the Russians on Ukraine and on lots of other things. It has undermined Trump's standing in the United States and contributed to a perception in Russia that Trump is simply not strong enough to deliver the kinds of things that are important to the Russians — like lifting or easing sanctions, like pushing a treaty ending NATO enlargement through the Senate. These are things that require somebody in the White House with sufficient political clout to deliver. And I think the Russians are having growing doubts that Trump can do that, in part because of the impact that the war in Iran has had on his political standing here in the United States.
How do you end that war in Iran? That's a different issue — a long discussion. But I would say that if we're going to do that, the fastest and best way is actually to work with Russia and China to bring that war to an end. They both have more influence over the Iranians than we do, and they have reasons of their own to want to see this war come to an end. I think the Russians see this as an obstacle to the kinds of strategic relations with the United States that are important to Russia. The Chinese don't want to see the world economy take a nosedive and the American economy suffer such damage that it brings China down — China is linked to the US economy in so many ways and will not escape damage if things really go poorly for us. So I think these countries have some incentives to work with us.
I think we have an incentive not just to end the war with Iran but also to move toward a new approach to managing the multipolar world that is emerging. That multipolar order, if it's going to be stable, is going to have to be built on a foundation of some great power understandings — an equilibrium of power, some shared perceptions among the great powers about what's in bounds and what's out of bounds. The sooner we start building those understandings and building that equilibrium of power — a balance in US relations with Russia and China, and not adopting policies that drive them artificially together — the more we advance our strategic interests in the world. There are a lot of reasons why we should be working with Russia and China to bring the war with Iran to a close as soon as possible. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of people in Washington thinking along those lines. So that leads me to be pessimistic about where this is going to go right now.
Glenn Diesen: I remember when the election results came in — when Trump won the second time around — and this was at the same time as the annual Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Sochi. I was there, and a lot of the people from the Kremlin were there — Lavrov, Putin, and many others. You could feel the optimism, because many people had listened and bought into Trump saying he wanted to have a different relationship with them, that he could end the war. Many thought this would be the historic opportunity to overcome a century of bad relations with the US, given that there are no inherent strategic reasons why these two countries have to continue to be at loggerheads. And also — what they didn't talk much about but I assume they were thinking — is that in this multipolar world, they don't want excessive dependence on China. China will always be stronger than Russia economically, but that's okay if the Russians can diversify and not put all their eggs in the Chinese basket. So the Trump administration kind of had that possibility too. It came with so much potential, but it all seems to be gone now. And I accept that it's a huge ask — a new security architecture for Europe, more or less replacing the old system, plus a security architecture in the Middle East to adjust to the multipolar world. There's a lot that has to be done. I just don't see it with our current leadership, in Europe especially. Do you have any final thoughts?
George Beebe: I agree. What I would say though is that even if we are going to go through the next few years without the kinds of diplomatic breakthroughs that I think we'll ultimately need, at least we should be working to keep the window open for that eventuality when it becomes politically possible. In other words, over the next two years, don't do things that provoke crises that make the possibility of a move in the direction we're talking about even less possible. Can we do that? Can we avoid spoiling the possibility of some sort of breakthrough two, three, four years from now? I think that's the challenge we're facing right now.
Glenn Diesen: Keeping the bar low — but that should possibly be the best option at the moment: not making matters worse. I always think as well about how the toppling of Yanukovych in 2014 and where that took us, and the inability to control that escalation ladder. I think it should also be a lesson for not starting anything more dramatic, because I don't think we can control any of this moving forward. Anyway, thank you very much. You probably have a busy day ahead of you, so I appreciate you taking the time.
George Beebe: Always a pleasure. Thank you.