Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Couldn't be happier to welcome back to the show. The Editor-in-chief of Lawfare, senior fellow in

governance studies at Brookings. He also writes dog shirt daily on Substack. It is Benjamin

with us, of course. Hey, man, how's it been? How you been? I'm good, thanks. I've been out

of the country while they've been shooting people in the streets. And so, you know, I feel like I caught a

lucky break. Yeah. You know, with the lights that you're shining on the buildings in D.C.,

you never know what kind of mascoon might be coming for you these days. Just for listeners,

we were pre-taping this Tuesday evening, just in case, I don't know, Donald Trump

poops on something overnight or whatever.

This is my final podcast in this Godforsaken hotel room. We'll be seeing people in Minneapolis

next week, so I guess I'll be in another hotel room. Ben, you've been aforementioned out of the

country. You've been in Ukraine. And I got a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about

to just get an update on what things are

like on the ground there.

So why don't you just kick us off?

Why don't you cook a little bit on your top reactions and then we'll kind of go through the

elements?

Yeah.

So the first reaction is that, you know, the energy crisis situation there is much worse than has been depicted in the press here.

We've been understandably distracted by our own turmoil, and I certainly don't begrudge anybody

of focus on our own troubles right now. That situation is

quite dire. The temperatures are really, really low. And the average building in major cities

may have neither heat nor electricity nor running water. Because a lot of heating in Ukraine is piped in

...