The Stakes in Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive, Stopping Mpox Spread, Nuclear Arms Race Returns, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Ukraine and Russia battle for control over Kursk and the Donbas. African countries remain on high alert over the mpox outbreak. And the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Soviets first atomic test reminds the world that the nuclear arms race is not over. It's August 29th, 2024 in time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Ann Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, let's get started with what's being known as increasingly a two-front Ukraine-Russia War, as in two different country war. Ukraine is continuing to push into the Kursk region of Russia where it has reportedly captured five hundred square miles, something like a hundred settlements and about six hundred Russian prisoners of war. Russia meanwhile is making a major drive in the Donbas region of Ukraine, closing in on Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian military transport hub. Is this what Kyiv was expecting when it launched its surprise attack on August 6th?

ROBBINS:
Who knows what Kyiv was expecting. And when we last discussed Ukraine on the show with our colleague Miriam Elder, we really weren't sure why Kyiv had even taken the risk and diverted so many forces for really that surprise and quite stunning invasion of Russian territory. And for the first time this week, Ukraine's President Zelenskyy is talking about eventual negotiations, and he suggested that Kursk was part of a plan. He described it to compel Russia to end the war diplomatically. He said he's going to share details of this plan with President Biden, Vice President Harris and former President Trump sometime in the fall. Who knows? Is there really a plan there? We'll have to see.

Kursk has allowed them to take out airfields and launch other attacks deeper into Russia. They say it's allowed them to establish a buffer zone and Ukraine may be planning to use the territory and the troops they've captured as bargaining chips if they can hold onto it. And that's a pretty big if. But what the incursion invasion has not achieved is relief on Ukraine's own battlefields. And that seemed to be a big part also of what they were driving toward. Moscow has not, as Kyiv apparently hoped, pulled back a significant number of frontline troops to try to retake this territory. And after several weeks of apparent confusion, they have begun to respond in Kursk, but they're not pulling out these frontline troops. Putin clearly has other priorities.

Russia has also stepped up attacks this week across Ukraine. It's sending hundreds of missiles and drones. They're targeting civilians, but the real action continues to be in the Donbas, as you said. And they are making a major, major drive there and that's Putin's priority. And if they hadn't sent those troops into Kursk, would they have done a better job of defending the Donbas? I don't know, but it was a very daring move and we will debate probably for a long time whether it was the right one to do. Maybe they'll have the bargaining chip if they can hold onto it, but right now they seem to be in danger of losing a pretty critical part of the Donbas.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. It was a daring move. It's one of these interesting daring moves that still needs to play out. We're seeing some initial reaction. Our colleague, Liana Fix mentioned on The President's Inbox podcast, also produced by CFR, that it was interesting to note that Ukraine did not alert the U.S. that it was doing this, its staunch backer, and that there were various audiences for this. Certainly Russia was sending a signal, trying to send a signal to, but also I think to its allies and its public that it's willing to take extraordinary steps to try to change the calculus on the battlefield. It feels a bit like an escalation moment, certainly in some of Russia's response since the invasion. Really heavy barrage across the country and into city centers. Again, really targeting indiscriminately or maybe on purpose civilian centers in particular, Carla.

ROBBINS:
I don't think there's any question that it's on purpose.

MCMAHON:
Yeah.

ROBBINS:
It's certainly indiscriminate, but it's intentionally indiscriminate. I mean, they're taking out the power grid.

MCMAHON:
Right. That's certainly intentional. Ukraine has been able to, for the first time, respond using some of its F-16's and shooting down some of the missiles. It has nothing like an Iron Dome to be truly extraordinarily effective. It does shoot down a lot of these projectiles, missiles, drones and whatever, but it's getting beaten up from these as well. From what I've seen in the reporting, Carla, it seems like Ukraine is also looking for more signals from its partners, its allies that it can project itself more into Russia, it wants to use more throw weight into Russia. And this whole issue of red lines has gotten very blurred. Putin has been even muted on that on his own, although his response has been to step up attacks in Ukraine, and maybe that's the way he wants it to be.

ROBBINS:
Several things there. One is that there's a report this morning, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal that I believe saying that one of the Western-supplied F-16's went down this week already, and it's a reminder that very expensive equipment, difficult to fly, can go down either because it's shot down or because for some other reason. Very expensive, very challenging, and very hard to keep this balance going here. That's one thing to consider.

Another issue, as you said, the red lines is really important. Part of this argument that Zelenskyy was making at this press conference is to keep up the pressure, whether he's pushing toward a diplomatic solution or pushing to destabilize Putin to be in his face, to bring the war home for all these reasons, and certainly to stop the current bombardments. He's arguing that they need more weapons with long-range capabilities and more than anything else, they need permission from the West to use them against airfields, against arms depots, against command and control centers. They've been able to attack some of those targets using Kursk as a staging area, but they want to be able to do it from Ukrainian territory. And we've talked about this before, that they do have some weaponry with more long range capability, but the United States in particular has put very clear limits saying, "You can hit Russian targets inside Ukrainian occupied territory, but you can't go very far inside of Russian territory" because of the fear of escalation. This is the self-deterrence that we've seen again and again and again.

MCMAHON:
Right.

ROBBINS:
Now there's nothing more escalatory than having Ukrainian troops inside of Russia. And there's a big debate among military experts about whether or not this really would change the balance. Zelenskyy and his generals are completely convinced it will change the balance and they're pushing hard, certainly taking out airfields, stopping those planes from taking off that are doing the glide bombs would make a difference and creating more of a buffer zone would make a difference. Whether it would change the balance in the war...I don't know, but they're pushing very hard and they have the Brits and French on their side.

MCMAHON:
And again, the other offensive that we've mentioned at the outset, which is this Russian push towards Pokrovsk and the Donbas would be really significant if they were able to seize that. This is not very far territorially from Bakhmut and other really grinding bloody battle that the Russians ended up coming out ahead on. It's in the orbit of Kharkiv, the second-biggest city in Ukraine. It's very significant if the Russians are able to make such an inroad. That's something to continue to watch and to see how much stamina Ukraine is going to have. We've talked before in the podcast, Carla, about their manpower or the personnel power that they have that is not getting any bigger and they've expanded the draft a bit to somewhat younger people, but these are extraordinarily older people in the field for long sustained tours of duty, and it's got to be taking a toll.

ROBBINS:
Ultimately, the Russians have more people to put into this grinding war, and they've been taking people out of jails, they've been pulling militia people, and interestingly, we do know that they are moving some troops. How many were not clear right now into Kursk because there've been some reports of up to thirty thousand, although there've been other people who say that that number's wrong. We'll see in the next few days. And then there's this interesting debate about exactly what troops they're moving in there. Putin's got a problem with that too. He clearly up until now hasn't been putting his frontline troops in there. He doesn't want to call up more people. He certainly doesn't want conscripts to die because he's got a political problem as well.

But ultimately the numbers are against Ukraine. Putin's got more people and seems to be able to control the political environment because Ukraine ultimately is a democracy, and Zelenskyy's got a bigger problem of fighting as a democracy. Right now it's remarkable how much the Ukrainians, but maybe not remarkable. They're fighting for the survival of their country, which is why ultimately we really got to root for them. But this is really a tough one.

Bob, let's turn our attention to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the return of mpox. On August 14th, the World Health Organization declared the spread of mpox was a public health emergency of international concern or a PHEIC. I don't understand why they don't change that term. mpox was rampant across Africa in 2022, and this recent outbreak is a new strain of the virus that appears to cause even more severe symptoms. And is frighteningly more transmissible to children. Are we any more prepared this time? And is the international community doing enough to stop this from turning into a full on pandemic?

MCMAHON:
From the latest reporting, not yet in terms of the international response, and I would note our colleagues that produce the Think Global Health website have put together a new tracker on the mpox response, which is really valuable. I think it's going to be really helpful to follow through them. And they note that as of this week, an appeal for about $245 million to address mpox across Africa is less than 10 percent funded. And that's according to Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And one of the things that the African CDC is trying to do is ramp up vaccines on the order of 10 million by next year.

Now, there are vaccines that have been used effectively against smallpox and other members of this family of diseases that are not necessarily targeted for this particular type of mpox, but have been shown to have some impact and some effect. Anything that can have an effect is welcome at this point. Testing is going on furiously. We're seeing ramp ups that are bringing to mind what happened in the early days of COVID. I think as people will recall though, there's a very deliberate approach and sometimes time-consuming approach to approving vaccines properly. And certainly you don't want to have a vaccine blowback, which we're already continuing to see with the COVID response in terms of some people do have an adverse response, but again, the COVID vaccines have been overwhelmingly effective. They want to have the same record for an mpox vaccine and they want to deal with it relatively quickly.

It's focused on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It's believed that since it wasn't really wiped out when it previously emerged, it's been able to gain traction in the eastern parts of the Congo, which continue to be war-torn and in some places just truly awful conditions for people. And the detection, the various healthcare responses that would normally apply when something like this is emerging just have not been available there. There's a M23 group, this pretty nasty arm group that's fighting in eastern Congo. They are not allowing much by the way of health treatment as well. And so it's now spread reportedly to several other neighboring countries, Central African Republic, Uganda, and Burundi among others. And there have been cases reported in Europe, individual cases.

Again, the vast majority in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's a particular variant that has been lethal. It's a pretty horrible condition to have that these festering sores that break out on your body when you get it. The latest variant is more deadly than previous variants as well. It is shown to be able to spread more wildly as well. Previously, cases of mpox have been associated with sexual transmission. Now there's other forms, and as you indicated, children are disproportionately seemingly affected and also vulnerable to fatalities in this. You're seeing agencies like UNICEF get heavily involved in this. You're seeing the various UN health apparatuses get involved, but the appeal has to be bigger. Japan, it seems to be in the forefront of promising vaccines at this point, more than three million at latest count.

And I'll just close with what the Economist notes in one of its leaders this past week about how the world really needs to respond. It basically says, "wealthy places have cash and medical muscle. Poor ones have local knowledge and data. If rich countries want this information, they should offer drugs and vaccines in return. Containing the spread of emerging diseases is a colossal, unambiguous public good because all countries stand to benefit, all should contribute what they can to organizing a swifter, more rational response." This is informed certainly by the COVID experience, but also the general pattern of public health responses if you really respond vigorously. And in the past, U.S. has been in the forefront of a lot of effective responses, Ebola, AIDS, HIV AIDS and so forth. This is another occasion where that has to happen I think.

ROBBINS:
One would think that that would be a lesson that we have written into stone at this point given our experience with COVID. Move quickly so it doesn't spread, move quickly so it doesn't come to our own shores. Issues of equity, but also issues of self-interest would all suggest move now. Is the U.S. taking a lead on this one as we played a key role in Ebola after the WHO drop the ball. Where are we on this?

MCMAHON:
There has been a U.S. response. It's not anything like a vigorous lead response at the moment. That doesn't mean it could not assume that. It's trying to provide its good offices to help guide some of the health resource. There's a token fifty to seventy-five thousand doses of the mpox vaccine have been pledged by the U.S., which is trails behind a good half dozen other countries at this point. It is ramping up the ability to provide surveillance in the transmission of the virus through things like wastewater testing. Again, something we saw a lot of with COVID and it was really effective. And there has been an ongoing allocation of health funding to parts of Africa affected by the U.S. of more than $2 billion.

It's not been insignificant, but the flood the zone response that's going to really snuff out the way it needs to be snuffed out has not happened yet, Carla. And I'm not sure as of yet whether that's been seized of as something priority for the U.S., which again, in a time in the world, and we've talked about it on this podcast where there are so many competing priorities, how much is mpox getting this? Certainly the WHO is trying to flag this. And there's meetings going on today as we're taping this podcast and tomorrow to further focus efforts in Africa about what is at stake here and what the world can do to help it.

ROBBINS:
Interesting test as well for the WHO, which did not come out looking particularly good after its early responses in COVID and also mixed responses in Ebola under different leadership. We'll also have to see whether the WHO has learned its lessons.

MCMAHON:
Exactly. Watch this space. We should also note that some of the African countries have performed quite well. Some did under COVID and some have some capabilities. Kenya has become a regional center for trying to develop vaccines, for example. South Africa has shown real capabilities in tracking such illnesses. They have capabilities and I think it's a really important time to try to improve their ability to deal with it on the front lines where again, the vast majority of these cases are.
Carla, I wish we could move on to something lighter, but we're going to talk nuclear.

ROBBINS:
Good. From pandemics to nuclear weapons. Yes.

MCMAHON:
From pandemics to nukes. Tomorrow marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first Soviet nuclear test. It also happens to be the UN International Day Against Nuclear Tests. And these have not necessarily focused international attention on encouraging the slowdown of nuclear arms or at least the slowdown in the development of nuclear arms. In fact, there are concerns that proliferation is continuing to tick up. Last week, the New York Times gained a lot of attention by reporting that President Biden had updated the U.S. nuclear employment guidance instructing the Pentagon to prepare for coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea. Are we entering a new nuclear arms race potentially?

ROBBINS:
I think we're unfortunately already in one, although this guidance is a puzzle to me, but we can get to that.

MCMAHON:
Okay.

ROBBINS:
You remember in the movie Oppenheimer how the father of the bomb, Oppie, went to the White House and wanted to discuss how to control the spread of nuclear technology. And President Truman blew him off and told him the Soviet Union would, "never develop a nuclear weapon." It took the Russians four years and seventy-five years later, we live in a world with nine nuclear arm states and one Iran that's on the verge. I think what's really most chilling about this is that after decades of arms control negotiations and reductions, if you look at the charts, they're really pretty extraordinary in 1986, there were more than seventy thousand weapons out there, nearly all of them in the hands of the U.S. and the Soviets. Today there are around twelve thousand. That's the good news, about only a third of those deployed on missiles and subs. But the whole nuclear taboo is wearing increasingly thin.

We've got Putin regularly blustering about aiming weapons at Europe or we're using them in Ukraine. Russians are supposedly developing a new space-based nuclear anti-satellite weapon. This is no longer a bipolar contest. China, which before just wanted to have what it referred to as a minimum deterrent under Xi is doing a major buildup to a thousand or more, which makes it a major player out there. Any serious arms negotiations going forward, and there's really only one treaty left, and that's New START. And the Russians have suspended participation in that. But any negotiations going forward are going to have to include the Chinese. That's a very complicated world in which you have three players and one who's never participated in any arms negotiations. And meanwhile, all these doubts about the reliability of the United States for its protection, we have this nuclear umbrella extended deterrence. And even close allies like South Korea could be tempted to build their own weapons.

And you recall that President Trump used to say to countries, "You don't want to pay your bills, go ahead and build your own nuclear weapons," and have referred to that with Japan, South Korea, the Saudis. If President Trump is elected again, or maybe if not, the temptation for even good friends have always imagined, "Can we really rely...Is the United States really willing to trade LA for Seoul? Maybe we should get into the business." As the taboo wears thin, the temptation and the more countries that have nuclear weapons, the more complicated it gets and the more possibility there is. It's not just the notion of more malign actors, which is pretty scary itself. Just the very fact of more actors makes this a much more complicated world and a world in which it is no longer unimaginable the notion of a potential nuclear conflict. It's a pretty scary world out there.

MCMAHON:
It is indeed. And I was looking for some kernel of traction that we can latch onto there, but as you indicated, Carla, there's really not. There's no talks, there's no effort right now going on. I think there's the recurring Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty event that the UN convenes every five years or whatever, but there is no process like had been a very productive process between the U.S. and Russians. And more actors now makes it more difficult. And I think something I think you'll certainly recall vividly is in the real what seemed to be the depths of the Cold War, there was an understanding that the nuclear arms control process was important and both sides wary as they were of each other got down to business. And this phrase, "trust but verify" came out and it was something you could hang your hat on and it worked.

And again, that also was, I think informed partly by the really alarming circumstances of 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis and not wanting to be in that situation again. But how many other crises are on the horizon if we have more states that want to brandish nuclear weapons for leverage? And as we've seen that nuclear weapons can get them leverage and North Korea is seen as a country you approach warily because it has nuclear capabilities.

ROBBINS:
And it's not just the trust but verify. Interestingly enough, we had gotten even to a further point when you had Obama and one who's running for president even had Henry Kissinger talking about imagining a world without nuclear weapons sometime potentially in the future. But that became increasingly the goal here was to moving potentially to zero or getting closer and closer to zero. Nobody is talking that way. In fact, you had Biden officials recently talking about the potential of having to increase the number of deployed weapons and President Biden is a committed arms controller, but potentially having to increase the number of nuclear weapons as our adversaries build up their arsenal. We're in a very different mindset now, which means that we do have to get back into the world of arms control and it's going to be a very different world of arms control because you've got more players potentially at the table.

The U.S. began or tried to begin a dialogue with the Chinese. It's not arms control negotiations. The Chinese are nowhere near close to it, in part because they don't have enough weapons deployed yet. Their argument had always been, "We have to build up before you can talk about us building down," but we really do have to think about arms control differently. But you got to recreate that taboo as well, this notion that it's not a good thing. And one more complexity, CNAS here in town, the Center for New American Security, did a tabletop exercise. I think the Economist reported on it.

MCMAHON:
Yeah.

ROBBINS:
In which they were imagining a very frightening conflict, a conventional conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan in which they were beginning to deplete their conventional weapons, and they began to employ theater nuclear weapons, these lower yield but proportional-level lower yield nuclear weapons. And the Economist began opining in this notion, the United States needs to have more tactical nukes because they were going to run out of them and that the Chinese came out ahead because they had more potential targets because the U.S. wouldn't want to hit anything on the Chinese mainland because that was too escalatory. You could then get it to the really big nukes, but the Chinese could take out U.S. bases like Guam or the Chinese could take out something smaller like an aircraft carrier.

I mean, this to me is so...both the notion that there's a prescription in the Economist that says we just have to build more of these things. We got to build more small ones because of their potential employability. You put that against imagining a war without nuclear weapons, which wasn't just a bunch of Kumbaya-lefties. We're talking Henry Kissinger used to talk that way. George Shultz used to talk that way. We're in a very different world here and one that I would prefer not going. And I don't think that I am by any stretch of the imagination a softie. I think I would rather us go back to a serious conversation about how we try to control this before we start pushing it forward.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. I'll just reference another term I know you're familiar with from the era of nuclear arms control, which is MAD, mutually assured destruction. I remember the first time I became aware of it, I was gobsmacked, but it made sense in its own weird way. Basically it means arming up to the point where the other side knows you can destroy each other. And so what are we talking about here? What gains do you have? How do you walk down from that and how do you get to a point where you're not in a position to destroy each other many times over, but in fact you're agreeing that these should never be used because their destructive capacity is so awful that humankind should not be dealing with them. That's what it's about. It's a psychology of escalatory arm up that we had come full circle from where we were in the 1980's when really arms control ramped up and it's really disturbing.

ROBBINS:
Finally, this Times report on this new nuclear guidance, I've always really been puzzled by this process of nuclear planning and targeting, mainly because after a serious exchange of more than a few weapons and the destruction they can wreak, I just can't get my brain around it. How do you plan beyond that?

MCMAHON:
Right.

ROBBINS:
And maybe it is the CNAS notion that you're talking about smaller exchanges and all of that gaming, and I suppose these people have to do things like that. And the next president is going to have a choice. New START runs out in 2026, and you don't want to let the last remaining arms control agreement go away, but you're going to have to have the Chinese at the table, and we're going to have to get the Iranians back to the table. And I don't know if anybody can pry nuclear weapons out of the hands of the North Koreans, but certainly if you don't want the South Koreans and the Japanese to rethink this, these are all major challenges that are going to have to be pressed ahead on it.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. I mean, it's really just recreating and reinforcing norms about what weapons should always be just off the table: biological, chemical, and nuclear. They should not be there, and there should be a shared understanding. And again, for the reasons you said, we're moving away from that.

ROBBINS:
Bob, it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week. This is a figure listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_orgs Instagram story. And this week, Bob, our audience selected, "Taliban Mutes Voices of 14 Million Women and Girls." God, don't we have anything happy this week? You went to the Fringe. That was happy. Bob went to the Fringe. Can we talk about that?

MCMAHON:
We'll do a separate podcast on that probably.

ROBBINS:
Okay. Forgive me, but isn't this a dog bites man story? U.S. troops pulled out three years ago and the Taliban returned to power, and since then they have denied women pretty much every basic right imaginable. They've banned them from attending schools, participating in paid employment, walking in parks, going to gyms and beauty salons. What more can they possibly take away from them?

MCMAHON:
Yeah. Again, this was widely telegraphed as going to happen if the Taliban took power, and as we were nearing this point almost exactly three years ago, there was a great deal of concern on what it meant for women's rights. And under twenty years of U.S.-led occupation Afghan women, or undeniably, their progress was something that you could point to as foremost as an advance for the country. They were mandated to serve in government and seats in parliament, for example. They were female news presenters on the Afghan media. They were doctors and professionals and had education rights that they hadn't had in a generation. It's all gone, Carla, and it was all predictable. And not only is it harkening back to the previous Taliban rule, it's worse.

The previous Taliban rule, there was a sense that certainly there were parts of Afghanistan where many Taliban officials looked the other way because women were needed in all sorts of different roles, whether it was healthcare or running bakeries or what have you. This comes from a different place, a darker place seemingly. I mean, if you just read some of the elements of the decree that was issued by the Taliban Justice Ministry: women are banned from showing any part of their body in public; sounds of their voices, including singing or reading aloud, even from within their house are not permitted. Women who do not comply with the new decrees will face detainment and punishment. This is part of a whole rundown of things that also include restrictions on music requirements involving shaving or not shaving, as the case may be with men, women can't travel alone. Taxi drivers, they will be punished severely if they pick up a woman by herself and take her someplace. Types of things that reading almost anywhere else in the world is just mind-boggling.

And so the question is, what is the rest of the world, writ large, going to do about such a thing? Because this should not stand in any country, and it's not a question of sovereignty of a country providing this. These are basic human rights. And so this is going to become a big challenge for the "international community" to try to stand up to at a time when the Taliban seemed to be impervious to any sanctions or punishments that can be doled out at them.

And that's our look at the turbulent world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on, Carla: Azerbaijan holds parliamentary elections; Pope Francis begins a trip to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea Timor-Leste and Singapore; and the European Union and the South American Bloc Mercosur meet in Brasilia for their first in-person talks on a trade deal that has proven elusive.

ROBBINS:
Well, somebody should be making trade deals.

MCMAHON:
Yes.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We really do appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode as well as the transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the host, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. And special thanks to Helena Kopans-Johnson and Kenadee Mangus for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. And this is Carla Robbins saying so long, and we'll try to be a little bit more upbeat next week.

MCMAHON:
This is Paul McMahon saying goodbye, and that's a promise.