Evening Edition: Data Cables Cut After Ukraine Allowed To Use Long Range Missiles
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It's really hard to believe this Russian invasion of Ukraine has lasted this long, but here we are. President Biden making a big move this past weekend when he authorized Ukraine to go ahead and use American-provided longer-range missiles against Russia. So how might President Vladimir Putin react? It's maybe counterintuitive to folks, but if you want to stop the war, you've got to stop the country that started it. That's Russia, not Ukraine. This is the Fox News Rundown, Evening Edition. ♪

I'm Dana Perino. This week on Perino on Politics, I'm joined by the co-founder of The Daily Wire and host of The Ben Shapiro Show, Ben Shapiro. Available now on FoxNewsPodcast.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Ukraine has a new weapon to use on the battlefield, long-range Atakums missiles, sent courtesy of Uncle Sam. The country's been after President Biden for a while now to authorize use of these weapons, but Russia's President Putin has issued some very stark warnings about doing so.

Well, authorizing Ukraine to use the long range artillery, which by the way, only has a range of 190 miles. So it's going to hit Russian military sites that, by the way, are indiscriminately targeting Ukrainian civilians. We're talking today with former CIA chief of station and current Fox News contributor Dan Hoffman. So that's a good thing. And it's maybe counterintuitive to folks. But if you want to stop the war, you've got to stop the country that started it. That's Russia, not Ukraine.

Okay, so Putin updated the Russian nuclear doctrine where he basically says if a nuclear power is providing these types of weapons to Ukraine to be used inside of Russia, they will treat that as a nuclear threat. Do you think this is grandstanding from Putin or do you actually think he might deploy some sort of tactical nuclear weapon as a response to back up his updated doctrine? So look, Russia suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties in the war.

Finland and Sweden are now NATO members. Russia suffered a brain drain of reportedly over a million people have fled the country. And a war that they were supposed to win in days and topple the government of Ukraine, it's utterly failed. The only thing Putin has succeeded at, you know, and it's not surprising he's the KGB operative in the Kremlin, has been to induce escalation paralysis in the Biden administration with these rhetorical nuclear brinkmanship.

And every time we do something to help Ukraine stay in the fight, which is what this is all about, Putin responds with nuclear threats. And let's be clear here. We have a trillion dollars worth of trade that we do with Europe. And the last thing we want is Russia imposing its own sphere of influence through conquest of a sovereign nation. That has a direct impact on our national security. My fault with the Biden administration lies in the fact that they

Their slogan for the war was as long as it takes, which sounds a lot like a forever war to us here in the United States, who have been through those in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though our soldiers weren't deployed to Ukraine. But still, the Biden administration didn't have unlimited indefinite time. They never gave Ukraine what they needed when they needed it. And now we're seeing the results of that. You know, they should have made this given these challenges.

attack them to Ukraine on day one and let Ukraine make the decision about where they fire them. They're not going to hit the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin's regime security is not at risk. Yevgeny Prigozhin made it farther than that in his failed mutiny a couple of summers ago.

Okay, so you mentioned soldiers on the battlefield. I think you made the point about American soldiers have not been on the battlefield, but now we are seeing reports of North Korean soldiers who are on the battlefield there, which is, to me, a pretty alarming escalation here of North Korea and Russia are teaming up. And North Korea is actually providing Russia with a key thing that it needs, manpower to fight the Ukrainians.

What's your take on the fact that North Korea has been getting involved in this all of a sudden? Yeah, it's a really interesting story for sure. And, you know, I just wrote an article about that in The Washington Times so folks can check that out. But North Korea gets a lot. They get a diplomatic lifeline. That's a good thing for Kim Jong-un's repressive hermit king regime.

that allows Kim Jong-un to pursue an increasingly aggressive and destabilizing foreign policy with nuclear threats. Of course, North Korea will get food and financial assistance, but they're also going to get technology. And remember that Kim Jong-un met last year with Putin at the Vostochny Space Launch Facility in Russia. Kim wants to improve North Korea's satellite technology, which is how they improve their missile delivery systems with

nuclear, miniature nuclear warheads. So that's of grave concern. If you want to drive a wedge between those dictatorships allied with one another, then make them fail in Ukraine. That's kind of how you do it. And some of those, the weapons that we're providing Ukraine, the Atakums, will reportedly be used

so that Ukraine might be able to hold that territory they took in Kursk. You've got 50,000, reportedly 50,000 Russian and North Korean soldiers there preparing to mount a counteroffensive.

Any chance the North Korean public might be sensitive, though, to casualties on the battlefield with a war that they seemingly really have no interest in other than this diplomatic effort? Or is Kim Jong-un just so strong over that country that people aren't going to say a damn thing? Yeah, no, public opinion doesn't play a role in Russia, North Korea, China and Iran. That's your modern day axis of tyranny. And the one thing they have in common is that they're at war with democracy and

liberty and freedom, everything that's enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. That's what they're at war with. That's the real meaning of the war, Russia's war against Ukraine. Putin will portray this as a war to defend Russia, the besieged fortress from NATO and all that. It's not true. What really scares Putin is democracy. He doesn't want Ukraine...

to build a vibrant economy linked with Western Europe and with all of the democratic freedoms that are denied to Putin's own citizens. That's not a good look for Vladimir Putin. He knows that the standard of living in the Baltic states right over the border from Russia is far superior to Putin's. And Putin's own citizens see that. And again, not a good look for him. He'll repress his own people. It's what he does. It's what Kim Jong-un does.

But in the long run, that's what makes those dictatorships brittle. Two communications cables which ran under the Baltic Sea between Finland and Germany and between Sweden and Lithuania suddenly don't work anymore. There is speculation Russia might have been behind this as some sort of act of sabotage, but why? All this as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has now lasted 1,000 very long and violent days.

We're talking about the latest developments in the war today with former CIA station chief and current Fox News contributor Dan Hoffman. We'll continue to pick his brain right after these words.

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Now, Dan, we heard this from Donald Trump a number of times on the campaign trail, ending this war on day one. What kind of leverage do you think the president-elect has to maybe get that goal done? Do you see that actually happening? I don't know. I think that's a big check to write. But at the same time, it's politics. It's the campaign. Lots of politicians say lots of things during the campaign campaign.

The president-elect needs to get his team together, his national security team together. He needs to read the intelligence and the diplomatic reporting. And then he needs to think about what strategy he's going to have. And he's going to need his national security advisor, Mike Walsh, to figure that out for him. So it's a little bit premature, I think, for all of us to start speculating about what the president-elect might be able to do. I would just say the pressure has to come on Russia since Russia was the one that started the war. It's Russia raining down hell on Russia.

on Ukraine indiscriminately with their long-range artillery. And I would just say, you know, remember President Reagan's Secretary of State George Shultz,

his admonition back in the day. He said that negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table. So you could argue that the Biden administration was wrong and too late when they gave Ukraine F-16s and ATAKMs and Javelin anti-tank weapons, all those things. But the fact that Ukraine has the ATAKMs now and the approval to use them allows them to cast

former Secretary of State Schultz's shadow of power when negotiations start. And it's very dynamic on the ground. So to say that you could stop the war in one day a month ago may not be true today. So we'll see what happens. I think we'd all like to see the war stop. But at the end of the day, you

You've got to induce Putin to stop the war. That's how this ends. Do you think there's at least a chance Trump's people are talking with Putin's people behind the scenes to try and get something done early on in Trump's administration, at least maybe the first hundred days? Is that a possibility at least? Yeah, I'm sure that they will do that. And I'm also sure, having been in Hanoi when President Trump walked away from a bad deal with Kim Jong-un,

I think President Trump realizes like this is his legacy and he needs a good deal a deal that preserves Ukraine's territorial integrity that protects Europe and our NATO partners as well as all of that trade I mentioned that matters to our economy uh that we've demonstrate to China that violence against your neighbors doesn't pay that's kind of important with the threats that they're making not just against Taiwan but against the Philippines and militarizing the South China Sea

Those things all matter. So it's over to the president to deliver a good deal. And that's what I think we'll all be looking for starting in January. Last thing for you, Dan. Interesting story to the Baltic Sea. A couple of communications cables have apparently been cut there. And there are a couple of countries, including Germany, who are speculating that maybe it was Russia who cut them. What would the Russian, I guess, reaction?

what upper hand might this give them? Why would Russia even want to do this? And what's your just take on the whole situation? Yeah, it's a great, great question to ask. And there's a lot of unknowns here, but these are undersea communications cables between Germany and Finland. So you got two NATO members there, 1200 kilometers fiber optic cable and cut early Monday morning in the Baltic sea close to Sweden. That's, you know, pretty big deal. And the Swedes,

The Finns and the Germans are saying it was an external force. So they look, if you think about enemies, it's either a terrorist or Russia, probably terrorists don't have the capability, the technology to do it. And so the,

the assessment, at least preliminary assessment, without any... I'm not hearing what the intelligence community is saying, although I think this is an important thing to raise. I wouldn't be surprised if it is raised at confirmation hearings for Trump officials. Was it Russia? And if so, what does it mean? My preliminary assessment is that Putin is delivering a message. This is a discoverable operation for Putin to demonstrate to Europe that there's a price to be paid for ongoing support to Ukraine, that if the Trump administration supports a deal...

and maybe europe doesn't like the deal and continues to give ukraine uh military and financial support remember europe's given ukraine just about the same amount of at least financially as we have in terms of humanitarian and military and financial aid so putin doesn't want europe to keep to do that and this is his way of demonstrating that there could be a price to pay um and it's his way of showing that that his military intelligence the gru likely responsible for this uh

uh, still has the capability to take the fight to their NATO enemy. So more to be, I think we're going to hear more about this one, uh, down the road. Um, and there's a lot more to be said about this, but we need some transparency, uh,

so that we can determine exactly what the threat is. And then those companies are going to have to have the capacity to detect these sorts of threats so we can preempt them before harm is caused. Former CIA chief of station, current Fox News contributor Dan Hoffman, we always appreciate your insight on these issues. Thank you so much for being with us again on the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition podcast. Always a pleasure. ♪

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