Assessing Ukraine's Prospects in 2025
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You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans, and I'm sitting here with Michael Kaufman of the Carnegie Endowment on International Peace. Mike, thanks for joining the show. It's been a while since we've had you on. Thanks for having me back. So a lot's happened in Ukraine. I think we've all been caught up in Washington on change of our government, change of president, and

new Congress, all that stuff. And there's a lot to talk about there. But while this has all been happening, there's been things happening in Ukraine. So let's talk about what's happened on the battlefield in the last four weeks or so. So I think what's been happening for at least the last four to six weeks is that Russian offensive operations began to visibly slow down in December. And I think we debate why that is. It's because of bad weather. For example, we know that weather grounded aircraft and that led to a significant reduction in Gleimbaum strikes. But

But there was a big trend from July to December where Russian forces kept increasing the rate of gain. And that started to slow down in December. And the question is, is that going to continue? Meaning, are we going to see a slowdown in Russian gains? Are they going to pick back up now? There was some fighting in Kursk. We saw North Korean troops employed around the middle of December and some pretty heavy fighting with North Koreans. And the way that shook out, as best I can tell, is that...

North Korean forces have taken pretty significant losses to that initial 10,000 men that were deployed, but they've also been making gains. They made a dent in sort of the Western or left side of the Kursk salient. Ukrainian force had a small operation in Kursk because maybe battalion size or so, and it seemed to be a pocket overall unsuccessful. Russia's taken a bit more. Yeah, there was kind of dueling offensives in Kursk by both Ukraine and Russia. Simultaneous. So it seemed that Russian military at least anticipated a

a very small Ukraine offensive operation, which wasn't really an operation, it was just to gain better positions, at the same time conduct an attack on the left side of the Plakhet and probably took maybe another 80 square kilometers of it. So Ukrainian forces are still holding a chunk of Kursk, but it's probably well less than 40% of what it was originally. The Russian forces are still making gains around Kupyansk and are now kind of on the western side of the Oskil River north of the city of Kupyansk.

And have steadily made gains, abiding Chalsevyar, Taratsk, and have kind of wrapped around Pokrovsk. And now the big question is, at least from my point of view, is the Russian military going to try to sever all the ground lines communication to Pokrovsk? It's clear that they are, but are they going to try to push a bit further north? Or are they going to focus on pushing west, coming over the top of defense and Zaporizhia? Why? Because there aren't a lot of towns. There are natural barriers.

And most of Ukrainian defenses in the south are aimed to block a south-north advance, not an east-west one, right? So the big question is, is the Russian military going to enter Dnipro Oblast, they're only a couple kilometers from that, and try to push over the top of those defenses? Or are they going to focus on taking the rest of Donetsk? And we're going to find out the answer to that in the coming days and weeks. So those Russian forces along that southern front, more in Zaporizhia, are they mostly fixed?

where they are? They're mostly fixed where they are, right? And so Ukrainian defenses are holding around Arikiv. But the challenge is that the Prokhorovsk push is not only going to isolate Prokhorovsk very soon, but also it's going to give Russia the opportunity to push further west if they want to. And it's just not clear what their priority is yet. Do you think it's more likely that they'll push further west or focused on charging closer towards Kramatorsk?

It's clear that taking the rest of Donetsk is their priority, right? They've been after this for pretty much the bulk of the war. And they're actually not that close to taking Kramatorsk or Savansk either. It's been very slow going for them, particularly over the past year. But in 2024, Ukraine lost some very important anchors in the defense. Avdiivka fell. After Avdiivka, there was a steady push along the railroad line northwest. Then around Pokrovsk, they...

took Kurokhova and Vuklidar. And so the main anchors of what you could see as particularly with Vuklidar, we could see as anchors of defense in the Dnyats one by one been falling. And sort of each of those might've had operational significance, but when you start to add them up, it then makes it much harder to sustain defense in the region. So I'm not sure if they're going to still prioritize taking the rest of the Dnyats. They clearly are, but they know now also have created an opportunity for themselves to push west and to try to see if they can make accelerated gains.

given that Ukraine's still dealing with a lot of issues in terms of manpower over the last four to six weeks, the scandal with Ukraine's 155th Brigade, the French trade brigade, where a lot of the people in that brigade deserted. But more about that, because a lot of our listeners won't have heard anything about that. So in the last couple of months, and our discussions are probably the better part of last year, I've been talking about that not only has Ukraine had manpower challenges,

But also that creating new brigades was really exacerbating the challenge because they were taking newly mobilized people and instead of replacing losses at the front, letting experienced brigades get attrited and trying to create new brigades, which for lack of a better word, are combat worthless because these are mobilized people with officers handed down to the unit. It takes many months to turn a newly trained brigade into something that you can use effectively on the offense or the defense.

So out of these brigades, maybe about seven were ultimately created, although you can debate how many of them were really, really staffed up and properly manned. But one of the last ones, 155th Brigade, for which France provided equipment and the training, arrived in France with about 2,000 people, maybe less than half the brigade. It was meant to be the core of the brigade. But there are a lot of things with that brigade that kind of went wrong. And I don't, there's plenty of this written by Ukrainian experts and analysts for folks who are interested in it. And then when this brigade was going to be deployed, a lot of folks deserted from it.

Or left it and it became a big scandal. And I think although it's not been officially confirmed, there are a lot of rumors that Zelensky has finally, as the past few weeks, suspended the creation of new brigades, which has not made a lot of sense until they address the manning issues across the force. Which people have been calling for, for at least, I don't know, a year and a half, somewhere around there, like a long time. It's like, why keep forming these new brigades instead of replacing losses? Right.

Right. And this was a host of both mobilization challenges, force management issues, and they've all come to the fore. And Ukrainians, Ukrainian analysts, Ukrainian journalists have been talking about them very openly for the last six, seven months. I'll just comment on this. I've noticed an increasing kind of dissonance between some of the commentary in Western circles and how, frankly, Ukrainians are talking about their issue. It reminds me a little bit of what Israel, at least before October 7th, is. In Israel, there was a much more contested conversation.

about policies towards the Palestinians, all sorts of things, than was typically allowed in the Overton window in US policy circles. And you sort of see this happening with Ukraine as well, is that they're actually in Ukraine having a much more robust debate about the Ukrainian state's failure to do mobilization the right way and train the right way than apparently a lot of think tank experts in the West would like us to have. Yeah. And just sort of my own comment on this from

experience working in the field, and I'm sure you have your own, I still see a sort of degree of pathological optimism in parts of our community. And to me, this maybe just watching the Iraq-Afghanistan war of folks who have a tendency to talk in very rosy ways about the situation and not wanting to be frank about the challenges and the problems. And it's also not hard to keep track of

conversations in the Ukrainian press and media about this. I don't speak any Ukrainian, but there are these amazing translation tools out there. So you can actually basically read these publications no matter who you are. And I can't count the number of times where I'll be in a private conversation having a friendly argument with someone who disagrees with me. And I'll say, well, did you read this? Did you read this? Like, no, I didn't know that happened. And it's like, well, it's reported in the Ukrainian press two weeks ago. Like, you know, this isn't secret information here.

Yeah, and the conversation in Ukraine is actually very healthy. I'll be honest, from what I see in the last year, there are some things that we can learn as a defense community from how they are discussing their problems and challenges that they're having at this point in the war. And maybe if we were having more of those conversations in some of our wars...

We could have addressed issues or even gotten out of them sooner. One of those conversations, of course, is mobilization age, which, as you know, I got into a discussion, debate in social media over mobilization age and how Ukraine, even though they dropped the draft law to mobilize down to 25, they still aren't sending people 25 to 27 into combat units. And there's this whole debate about whether the Ukrainian demography supports mobilizing more people below the age of 25, between 18 and 25.

It seems like there's just a failure to do basic math by a lot of the people debating on social media about it. But then when you read the Ukrainian press, when you look at what some Ukrainian retired generals have said lately about how we need to actually mobilize more of society, including young people, it seems to be an argument that's actually moving forward finally in Ukraine. And most recently, the Trump administration criticized them for this. And...

They are making concerted efforts. As of the other day, there was this big announcement about a campaign to try to recruit many more people between 18 and 25 with more clear communication. I think that's a step in the right direction. It's not where they need to end up, but it's a step in the right direction. Yeah. So the way I look at it is abortion is a complex issue, and it got subsumed into the blame game at the tail end of the Biden administration between Kiev and Washington, D.C.,

With folks in Kiev saying, you're not giving us enough equipment. Ukraine could use enough equipment, but it's very clear from what's happening in the force that equipment is not the number one or really the number two problem there. And folks in D.C. saying, well, you need to mobilize people who are 18 to 25. You're not doing enough on the force generation manpower issue.

To me, there are two big problems here. One is force management, what you're doing with the resources you have, which is the bigger problem. And the other one is mobilization. It's not an either or, it is both. Mobilization ultimately failed and is not delivering enough people given the loss rate, given the rate of non-combat losses to desertion last year.

And what you would need literally in just having people on hand to consider any kind of force expansion, right? The second one is force management. What are you doing with them? The choice to create new brigades instead of replacing your losses. The fact that they're not getting enough of people in any age category. We can even put 18 to 25 roles aside. And the fact of how the force is actually being managed, when you look at it,

that folks actually, from my point of view, need not argue with each other. These are all problems that need to be addressed. Training needs to be addressed and hopefully will now because there's new people in place like Drapada and Apostol

New individuals are actually very capable. They've taken over land forces command aspects of training. Mobilization needs to be addressed. And the problem with mobilization isn't just an age issue. It's a whole process issue. But lastly, force management, what they've been doing with it and some of the unforced errors last year, they're all part of the challenges in there to relate. I think there are three legs of a stool. You can't just do one. You can't just do two. You have to do all three. Yeah, absolutely. And-

Part of the reason why folks might want to fight, because keep in mind, like as we said before, Ukraine has plenty of men and Ukrainian casualties as a percentage of male population are not that high. It's not an issue that Ukraine's out of men.

And there are plenty of people that want to fight, but they don't want to be in infantry combat MOS. And there are clear reasons for that. And if they saw that these things were being addressed, if they saw that they would be used and employed correctly, if they saw exchanges to how the force is being managed and trained, the desire to serve in those roles would, I think, increase significantly.

Yeah, it's fundamentally not a discourse problem, although it manifests as a discourse problem. It's a leadership problem. But it is worth saying also that leadership has not done a particularly great job of mobilizing society, explaining what the theory of success is and what the way forward is in the war. And I think that's pretty important, too.

As we've talked about on the show many times, I think Zelensky in particular has not invested enough political capital and invested enough of his talented communication skills into explaining this to his own people and mobilizing his own people behind the right policies.

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Let's move on to Russia's own force management and manpower challenges. The stories I see on the Russian side, on the one hand, we've seen them take very significant casualties for those increased gains. So the fall and through December were very bloody months for the Russian military. The bloodiest since the very early period of the war. On the other hand, recruitment really began to increase late summer because of the amount of money they were offering. The payouts were massive and they were getting far more people than they were before.

It's not enough to allow the Russian military to keep expanding. This is just my own view of it. Keep in mind, there's a big cone of uncertainty over this, but they're able to sustain these losses. Even the way the Russian military is fighting, they're not able to achieve kind of an operationally significant breakthrough. They can't exploit breakthroughs, but they've been steadily pressing through the front. And I think that they're essentially making a trade-off. So my own hypothesis is that they're fighting in a way such that they cannot make big gains. They cannot break out, let's say, even the way Ukrainians did in Kursk.

But they are able to sustain combat rotations at the level of regiments and keep feeding men into the front. And they're able to sustain the pressure and they have been able to do throughout 2024 and they might be able to sustain it for much of 2025 the way they are going now. And we're going to find out in the coming month or two if we're going to see a slowdown on their end. Preston Pysh: We already saw a bit of a slowdown, you said in December.

We have, but that's one month and there's a lot of factors that can go into that. You want to see more of a trend. Do you think one of those factors, we talked about weather as one of the explanatory factors, but is it also that, I agree with everything you just said, but they've been taking huge losses, the Russians. And do you think part of that slowdown was recognition that they need to conserve their forces more? I think part of the slowdown is that Ukraine is starting to address some of the issues that they're having in cohesion of forces so steadily. And

You mean in how different units operate with each other on the operational level? And substantially expanding the drone component of the force, which is the big force multiplier. And so part of it's Ukraine is slowing down the Russian advance. And there could be issues on the Russian end, although it's a bit early to tell. They're not out of equipment, although they're trying to manage equipment losses. They are facing material constraints, particularly as we get later into 2025, looking at the rate of loss.

To me, it seems like they're making a trade-off to try to sustain pressure. And so they're making incremental gains at a fairly high price. But at the same time, they've so far, all the claims that Russians are culminating, and sometimes folks say, well, they should have culminated and they're operating past that. And I don't think that's a thing. I think that just basically suggests to you that the assumptions were wrong. But it seems like they are able to sustain the pressure, at least for now. The big question is,

can they retain the same monthly replacement rate of manpower? Because at a certain point, no amount of money will be enough, given the labor shortages and fairly low unemployment in the Russian economy. And this gets us kind of to a latter point. The emerging debate that's emerged is, even though war's been on a negative trajectory, and as I said before, the front's not been imploding, it's not a catastrophic situation, but it's not stable either. And it's not going to be stable until either the Russian momentum's exhausted or the

which will be a prerequisite for that. Ukraine actually stabilizes the manpower situation and addresses these core issues. The conversation increasingly has turned to folks discussing the Russian economy and hoping that this will prove to be a decisive constraint. Yeah, and I want to talk about that. And we should preface this by saying neither of us are economists nor experts on sanctions, although I do want to share a joke.

After alchemy came chemistry, after astrology came astronomy, we'll see what comes after economics. But there is this debate that's been unfolding in lots of forums, including War on the Rocks, but also others on if Russia is basically on this path to bankruptcy and insolvency and whether that will render them unable to sustain this war effort.

And I feel like this is, it's hard for me to tell. I think it's hard for a lot of non-experts to tell whether the wish is the father of the thought or if this is actually happening in reality. What's your take on the debate? So first, I think that looking at the Russian economy going to 2025, that is one of the biggest challenges that the Russian state has to deal with because the economy had been overheating. They have a huge inflation problem, a lot of government spending on the war. At the same time, I see that they are trying to balance an equation

that is ultimately not a sustainable one. And one part of the state is pouring fuel onto the fire in terms of defense spending, and the other part is trying to raise interest rates to contain inflation. They might end up in a stagflation situation. But still, most of this, to me, doesn't seem as deterministic for 2025. And there are increasingly arguments out there, and a debate has emerged of folks who think that actually the Russian state has spent much more on defense, that they might face a financial crisis.

And that the Russian economy is, quote unquote, a house of cards. I am deeply skeptical. I've been listening to these kind of discussions, expectations on the Russian economy for, I think, much of my professional career. And the last wave was early 2022 when the war first started. And the Russian recession was quite mild by comparison. The sanctions regime was also not nearly as aggressive as it could have been. And that's still the case. It wasn't.

But actually, at each point, Russia was adapting to it. Sanctions had a significant effect, but I won't get into the conversation on kind of expectation. I think folks tend to have always outsized expectations of what sanctions are going to achieve and how fast they're going to do it. But yeah, increasingly, the latest sanctions packages are pretty problematic for Russia in terms of their impact for Russian revenue. You mean the ones that Biden rolled out in like the last week of his administration? Yes, those. Sanctions that they didn't want to roll out ahead of the election because it might impact energy prices and other things. But

Turned out that wouldn't be such a big factor after all. So the way I look at it is it's a debate that's worth having. I am probably myself more leaning to the side of that the war is not sustainable for Russia, but most of the economic trends, as best one can tell, not being able to predict the oil prices here, are not going to be as deterministic as people think for 2025. They will be if Russia is still kind of dragging the war into 2026.

I think the situation for us economically looks pretty bad, but they could sustain us for some time and we should assume that they will rather than engaging in wishful thinking or what folks online like to call hopium and assuming that something's going to happen to the Russian economy, they'll solve this problem for us. Well, then there's also the threats of President Trump who recently said that if Putin doesn't work with him seriously on stopping this war, that the United States will take actions that will devastate the Russian economy somehow.

So there's quite a bit more that the United States and other countries can do on sanctions. And it's difficult to predict necessarily what the impact will be. So that is an area of vulnerability. I

I think that the ultimate kind of theory of success here makes sense, which is of the pressure points available to the United States, threatening sanctions in an effort to coerce Russia to come to the negotiating table, given the current military balance and battlefield conditions, makes logical sense. But it will probably not be enough by itself. Ukraine will have to stabilize the front line. The military cost to Russia's standing campaign will have to go up.

And this will have to be part of the package. And Russians will have to believe credibly that we are going to do it rather than this is just one of the many threats that have been rolled out in one week amongst dozens. As we've talked about on the show before, negotiations between belligerents in a war can't really happen until their minimal goals are at least within sight of each other or one is decisively defeated or on the verge of being defeated. Or you need to have a mutually hurting stalemate, which you don't.

The front's not imploding, but the situation for Ukraine has been trending negatively for some time, and that trend has not changed in the last four weeks. Everyone knows, Mike, that you go to Ukraine quarterly usually for field studies without saying when your next one is. What are some of the unanswered questions, the big indicators you're going to be looking for, the issues you really want to dig into on this next trip? For me, the most interesting questions are what's happening with the forces, right? What are we not seeing? Because a lot you don't see.

I'm always interested in sort of adaptation on both sides, either learning between them. There's some narrow band questions such as how are North Koreans fighting? I saw people laughing at them, but Ukrainian colleagues I talked to, despite the loss North Koreans have suffered, don't think that the North Koreans are a joke on the battlefield. And I think that's just interesting. And we're trying to figure out what's been happening in Kursk over the last month and a half, because Russia may get access to a lot more North Korean troops. We don't know. And we need to keep

our imagination open for the world North Korea might have. And as always, there are factors that sort of favor and encourage continuity as you would have in any war, but wars unfold in phases. And so not to fall into the trap of extrapolating from where you are and trying to figure out what might lead to change, what's going to surprise us, right? Ukraine can still stabilize the front. The war is not necessarily lost for Ukraine. What are the trends on defense industrial production? What are the trends on big change in force that we need to account for?

And what are Ukrainians seeing in terms of changes in the Russian forces and their tactics as well? Because there's a big lag effect between what happens at the front and information that ultimately kind of trickles up to our conversations here. Thank you for listening to this episode of the War on the Rocks podcast. Mike, of course, hosts a show for members only called the Russia Contingency. Sign up at warontherocks.com slash membership. Stay safe, stay healthy.