Shownotes Transcript
Welcome back. I'm Max Bergman, director of the Stuart Center and Europe-Russia-Eurasia program at CSIS. And I'm Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia. And you're listening to Russian Roulette, a podcast discussing all things Russia and Eurasia from the Center for Strategic International Studies.
Hello and welcome back to Russian Roulette. I am Max Bergman here with my co-host as always Maria Snegevaya and today we are welcoming back a good friend of the pod Michael Kaufman. Mike doesn't need much of an introduction but for those who need a refresher he's a senior fellow with the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here in DC across the street from us here at CSIS. Additionally he's a contributing
Additionally, he's a contributing editor at War on the Rocks, where he hosts the second best podcast on Russia in the Russian medium space, The Russia Contingency. It's a podcast on the Russian military and the war in Ukraine. Highly recommend everyone check it out. Mike is one of the leading military experts covering Russia today, and we're thrilled to have him back on the show. Mike, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me back, Max. Okay, Mike, we wanted to have you on the show to sort of
initially do a deep dive on kind of where are we in the current phase of this war. Last fall, I think the last time we talked, I think the last time we had you on this podcast, we talked about where the war was going. Things were looking pretty dire for Ukraine. The Russia was gaining territory at a rather worrying clip.
Ukraine had invaded, Russia had seized territory in Kursk. Now, you know, we're halfway through the year. It's June 2025. How have the first six months of this year gone? Where do we currently stand? What's the sort of overview that you have when looking at this conflict?
Yes, I think you have to take it a little bit back to the winter, right? So going into the winter, things looked quite tenuous. And then Russian offensive momentum really slowed down. Part of that was the weather. Part of that was exhaustion. The Russian side, they took pretty heavy casualties for the gains they were making in the fall.
But also the Ukrainian military and Ukrainian political leadership made a conscious choice, an adaptation to the way the Russian military was fighting in 2024. Russian forces generally eschewed any attempts at an operationally significant breakthrough after the Battle of Dnipro. They were essentially pressing their way through the front. And it was very slow going for them. But you could see over time it was starting to work once again until late summer. All right.
The Ukrainian military then invested heavily in expanding drone units, setting up independent drone regiments, even a drone brigade, and focusing on stabilizing the front to a combination of mines and traditional prepared defenses, drone units, trading Russian forces in this kind of
range of zero to 15 kilometers and traditional artillery fires. Okay. And that began to show benefits overall in helping stabilize the front. And that was an adaptation both to the way the Russian military was fighting and also to the challenges the Ukrainian military was having with manpower and the fact that, um,
Ukraine mobilization recruitment was insufficient to keep up with both combat casualties, the AWOL issue, and the need to kind of generate additional forces in order to try to rotate units. So there were a lot of challenges last year. And I think they started to get on top of some of these things once again to the winter. All right. Now fast forward to where we are today. That was a bit of a prologue, but it's important to have, I think, that context.
So coming out of the winter, you saw the intensity of Russian offensive effort pick up a bit in mid-February. And that was focused primarily on Kursk, but also other areas.
They were able to displace Ukrainian forces out of the Kerr salient come March. And then you saw a real increase in intensification of Russian offensive efforts around late March. And so we've been on a steady ramp up. So the folks who kind of ask, is the summer offensive happening? Has it started? And the honest answer is yes. There's not really going to be a discrete offensive.
What you see right now is the Russian military making increased gains again, akin to the way things were looking in August, September of last year, along a couple of axes. So first, if you sort of followed the war, you'll be very familiar with some of the long running battles in Donetsk. Russian forces right now are essentially trying to create two big pockets, one
around Konstantinovka, troops called Konstaha, and then around Pokrovsk. And they've been mostly advancing in between these two, cutting between the two of them. And then further southwest of Pokrovsk, past the area where they took Vidyaginovosilka and Byodoshny. Essentially, they're right on the border, the regional border of the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast. They're barely a couple of kilometers from it. Okay.
There's another push kind of north of Liman, and that's not time to create another axis that could threaten Slovyansk from the north. They're still kind of slow going fighting around Kupyansk that hasn't gotten very far. And one of the other, I think, particularly problematic axes, of which I really see two. The first one is the advance they've made between Pokrovsk and Konstantinovka, which essentially threatens to create two sizable pockets in that area.
But the second is a steady encroachment in Sumy and the fact that Russian airborne and naval infantry are focused there in establishing a buffer north of Sumy. There, the terrain of such that Sumy itself is kind of a bit in a valley. So now they're threatening northern Sumy and have forced an evacuation of the outer line parts of the region north of the city. That's quite problematic. Essentially, what was the Kursk operation has now ended up in a sort of Russian buffer or incursion in Sumy oblast.
Where we are today, the front is not collapsing, but you see Russian forces making increased gains from April to May. In May, it was over 500 square kilometers. That's not a lot, but a lot for me depends on what's kind of the three-month trend. If it continues to increase, if we're going into June and July, as Russian offensive effort intensifies, then that's a bit worrisome. But my general sense of it is that the front is neither stabilized on the key operational axes, nor
nor is it in a particularly dire condition either, right? Ukrainian forces are still holding Russia to fairly incremental gains. The last part, you see the Russian military constantly attempting to institute counter adaptations to the Ukrainian adaptations, which may be things that we can get into, which also to some extent are showing some results for them. But as they look at the way the Ukrainian military adapted the fight in 2024,
and stalled their offensive effort. So they are making investments to counter that.
Thank you very much, Mike. Can I ask specifically about the manpower situation in Ukraine? You talked about it already, but specifically in the winter 2024, this was the major issue. And just recently in Ukraine, with Rodzelensky allegedly hinting at the possibility of lowering the conscription age to 18 years old, what's your take on this? Is Ukraine able to solve it? And also, how about its domestic defense adaptation given the current situation?
So the manpower situation, from my point of view, has been one of the main issues since pretty much fall of 2023. And I haven't seen that change. It's the main issue last year. I think it's going to be the main issue this year. I was impressed by how well the Ukrainian military adapted to employ low density of forces to still hold the front line in the way they're fighting. But I
I think that manpower will continue to be a challenge for the Ukrainian military. The mobilization rate is simply too low for the force that needs to be sustained at the front. If you want to enable any kind of rotation, rather than exhausting the brigades that are there. The second problem was AWOLs. I think they've gotten much better in dealing with the AWOL issue, which was a big problem last year. This is absence without leave. And a lot of personnel would leave units they didn't like to go join units that they did like. But this is...
Not a rational way to manage the force. So this is just a challenge as well. It may seem like, okay, well, some percentage of these folks then went back to rejoin other units that they want to fight in. Yeah, but you can't manage a force that way. Like, that's a bit of a problem. So as far as lowering the age for recruitment, they launched several initiatives from every brigade trying to recruit personnel and advertise for volunteers to recruit
contract recruitment centers to an initiative to get younger folks to sign up under volunteer service contracts.
But the numbers they've gotten, in my view, are too low to address the overall problem. This mobilization still makes up the majority of the personnel that the military receives. And I don't think lower the conscription age, if they are even going to debate it. And Marie, I'll be very honest. I highly doubt that Zelensky will do this just based on everything I know and seen in Ukraine.
I don't think it'll solve the problem. First, a lot of younger people who wanted to go and fight have already done that. This is the fourth year of the war, not the fourth month. If people wanted to go and fight, they've had the opportunity to sign up and many of them have already gone and joined the military. Younger folks who wanted to join the military
can do that. There is a path for doing this as well. So I don't know who they really get. Lastly, a lot of the younger people in Ukraine are not necessarily seen as in any way, shape, or form a solution. And they are by far the thinnest demographic slice, if you look at Ukraine realistically. So the challenge Ukraine has is really one born of force management, insufficient mobilization of the manpower they do have, particularly in the 30, 40-year-old category. And some of these can be addressed.
You know, it's very hard to say, can any country just solve the manpower problem in the war? It's not something you solve. When you look at munitions, defense industrial mobilization and force issues like force generation and mobilization, these are treadmills you're constantly running on. They're not a thing you solve during a war, right?
The problem that I saw emerge starting from late 2023, but particularly last year, is that the Russian recruitment effort was working. They have been recruiting an average of 35,000 men per month, and they are still unfortunately doing reasonably well in recruitment early in 2025. So they're not only able to replace their high losses, they've consistently expanded the force. If you look at
the loss replacement versus generating additional formations, it's probably maybe a 70-30 split on their end, but they're recruiting at a monthly rate that exceeds their unrecoverable losses. So it's kind of the problem. And Ukraine's been offsetting the Russian manpower advantage by trying to find more tactically innovative ways of fighting through better integration, through better tactics, through better employment technology.
Manpower, I think, is going to remain an issue throughout the course of this war. That's just the way I see it. You can adapt to your disadvantages and emphasize your comparative advantages, but this is going to be a continued problem.
I want to ask about Russian adaptation in a second, but it does seem that there's maybe been a strategic shift in how Ukraine is thinking about fighting this war from last fall. It seemed last fall, at least before the US election, Ukrainians had this focus on training brigades to do offensive operations, the idea that they would at some point go back on the offensive, punch through in the war, take back territory.
Now it seems a bit of a shift where Ukraine is sort of hunkering down to just sort of be on the defensive. Do you is that how you see it? Is has there been a strategic shift in kind of how the Ukrainian military is now approaching this conflict to one where they're going to try to take advantage of being on the defensive?
let the Russians come at them, try to treat the Russians as much as possible that way, but focus less on building new brigades and units with that idea that they're going to be able to punch through, break through, and take the war back to the Russians. That's a good question. So I think earlier last year, when Sersky came in as the commander-in-chief, he sort of pursued a...
A strategy of active defense, which is, you know, in some areas positional defense, but where possible active defense where Ukrainian forces locally counterattack. And they have done that throughout the course of the last year, year and a half, particularly when Russian units are conducting rotation. It's a big point of vulnerability for Ukraine.
for both forces when they're doing rips and what have you. But beyond maintaining pressure and low-class counterattacks, the big question would be, is Ukraine going to attempt something like another Kursk operation or not? Kursk was a surprise for me. So if you had asked me this question last June, I would have answered to you faithfully to the best of my knowledge that, yes, Ukraine is largely going to pursue a defensive strategy of low-class counterattacks,
and work to exhaust Russian offensive potential while expanding its own strike capabilities to really kind of work the body, right? That is work critical infrastructure relevant to Russian economy or defense industrial production or rear support components, right, of the fight. And that would have been a very fair assessment, except it would have been wrong come August, right? So the best I can tell you is, yeah, I think so. I think...
So I don't know if what I learned from the Kursk operation is the same thing that Ukrainian leadership learned, though. And that's kind of a challenge. So you have to keep that in mind, that the people who make decisions on these things are not analysts. Sometimes I occasionally read like funny articles and reports by people who believe that analysts walk into a room and they tell policymakers what they think and policymakers listen and say, these are amazing ideas. We should do everything you want to do. Mike, Mike, shh.
That's how it works in Think Tank. Yeah. That's our input. This is, I think, what happens when you think that Tom Clancy films are documentaries and Jack Ryan just sort of tells people what they really should do in the meeting. And they're like, okay, that analyst who none of us know
We should, he's really on it. We should listen to him instead of just saying, don't invite that guy to the meeting again, which is more likely, which is the more likely thing to happen. Definitely more likely. What do you think happened? What's your take on the Kursk offensive? And now that we have some daylight between it and the Ukrainian withdrawal?
Yeah, you know, I was very much willing to kind of give it the benefit of the doubt early on when it happened. I thought that it would have been much more successful as a two-week raid. I thought tactically it was a success and it demonstrated that Ukraine still had offensive potential and could put the pieces together for some kind of offensive operation against a prepared defense, even if it wasn't, you know, the main part of the defensive line where Russian force were deployed.
I think the challenge, though, is that I didn't see it having the operational effects that they hoped for. It eventually shifted some Russian drone units from the Donetsk front to counter the Kursk salient, but then they shifted back. And like drone units are not mechanized divisions. Elite drone units can firefight and run from one part of the front to another. The problem was that the Ukrainian forces ended up kind of holding the salient.
And the geometry of a salient by definition is unfavorable. You're surrounded on three sides. Okay, that's just the both the geometry and the geography was not favorable either. So I thought it was actually quite impressive and surprising that the Ukrainian military held it for that long.
But it brought, it allowed Russia to use North Korean troops. They then expanded the use of fiber optic cable drones, eventually crimped the few ground lines of communication available. And then there was effectively a logistical collapse and the Ukrainian military was forced to withdraw. I think my bottom line is on it is that it could have gone a lot worse than it did.
But did the Kursk operation change the dynamic of this war? No. Did it have very significant positive operational effects? I'm not even going to use the word strategic because, you know, in our field, the word strategic gets abused for everything. It's debatable. My view of that is skeptical. It's not really. I think that...
I think probably in retrospect that operation would have gone better if it was two weeks long rather than the many months that they ended up holding in Kursk. And lastly, the downside, I mean, there are a couple, right? Everything comes with opportunity costs. There's no kind of free lunch in making decisions like this. Well, to some extent, a lot of equipment was used up in that operation. That's probably one of the few operations where
The loss ratio of equipment between Ukraine and Russia was one to one or worse. It's very rare in this whole war. Usually Ukraine's attrition ratio on equipment is sort of at least three to one in its favor in most cases. So when you're in a time period where you're not expecting a lot more equipment, a lot more support from the West,
You have to really manage your resources. You can't afford an operation that's kind of a bridge to nowhere where you're losing way too much equipment relative to what you're getting out of it. And so this is one example. But OK, the way I look at it, it could have gone a lot worse than it did. If you're asking me, do I think Ukraine should do another Kursk operation in the future or do the cross-border raids that I've seen in Belgrade and other places, these small scale attacks to try to
pin Russian forces there. Are they the best use of Ukrainian assault regiments and Ukrainian personnel and Ukraine equipment? No, but I'm on charge. I'm just an analyst. These are just my own views. You know, you take them for what they're worth.
And Michael, on the topic of the badass Ukrainian operations, what's your take on the recent spiders web attack? And for our listeners who may have missed it, this is an effort on the side of Ukrainian security services to secretly smuggle drones into Russia, launching them from the back of trucks and using them to destroy a significant number of Russian strategic bombers. So some analysts say that was cool, but it's not going to radically alter the situation on the front line.
But at the same time, others say that Russian strategic bomber is potentially a really useful resource for Russia and being hit is a really painful area where Russia was hit there. What's your take on it? Well, the words, it was cool, is definitely well-established terminology in military analysis. So I will fully support the sentiments of whoever said that. I too think it was cool. Yeah.
And with this sort of brilliant and kind of Eurodiet assessment, what I will add is I thought it was a very, very interesting and innovative attack. I know some details about it that I've gotten to know that are not fully public, which makes it even more kind of interesting to me. I'm not going to share them on the podcast, sorry. But what I will say is that that attack was,
dealt a fairly significant blow to Russian long-range aviation and to the park of Soviet aircraft, modernized Soviet aircraft that Russia had, which given the extent to which it degraded them, if you look at the impact that's maybe
10% of the overall fleet, but probably 20, 25% or more of the operationally ready fleet. If you assume an operational readiness rate of around 40% for Russian bombers, which is, I think fair, it could even be worse. So I did the numbers. I think I posted them on Twitter at some point. I don't want to go back to, um,
the kind of the counts people can look at, but I think the battle damage assessment on that has converged on a number of aircraft. So it depends on how many were damaged, but you're looking at a sizable impact. Is it going to halt Russian missile strikes?
Some of which are always delivered by Russian long-range aviation, you know, like Kh-101 cruise missiles. No, probably not. It will degrade kind of the max salvo capacity that the Russian aerospace forces have, but it's not enough to hold them. Is a significant impact, though, on fairly important assets to the Russian military? Yes. And actually, in some respects, it really damages Russian military power significantly.
when you think beyond Ukraine. Russian ability to reconstitute. In many of these cases, Russia will not be able to reconstitute the last two aircraft. It makes...
it doesn't make 295 MSs. And 222 M3s or Ts, at best, they recently restored the ability to make 2160, but artisanally. I mean, at a sort of rate that won't substitute for the losses they suffer. So this was a very, very dark day for Russian long-range aviation. And it actually, I think, showed that a lot more things are at risk in Russia than Russian leadership might suspect. Now, of course, like the bigger takeaway is that
The biggest screw up is obviously on the side of FSB. The fact that for a year and a half, multiple teams had put this in place, had developed a way to remotely operate these drones using Russian cell networks, et cetera, et cetera, and had been able to conduct a simultaneous attack on or attempt a simultaneous attack on five different targets. I think this is very impressive and very unimpressive performance by Russian FSB.
What else can I add to it? Now, yeah, but I don't think we should strawman things and say, hey, does this attack change the game or the dynamic in the war? No, it's not meant to. But it makes significant impact, right? It's very hard to think of any one attack that would do that. But this is notable. Like I said, if anything, it actually hurts Russia much more when it comes to Russian strategic operations and planning vis-a-vis NATO.
because they rely on large-scale employment of long-range precision-guided conventional weapons, and Russia's biggest limitation is not munitions. It's a means of delivery, platforms, okay? Because it limits your salvo size and what you can achieve. And when you start cutting considerably the number of operationally ready aircraft available, that is an impact, right? So in many ways, Ukraine is doing us a service, you know, even if that's a secondary positive effect.
Mike, let me ask you sort of a broader strategic question about what is sort of Russia's game plan here militarily. You know, the talks between Russia, Ukraine orchestrated by this administration don't really seem to be going anywhere. It never quite seemed like they were really, you know, gathered any significant momentum. I think it seemed to me that both sides
We're kind of wanting to just blame the other side for why the talks weren't going to be successful. But it also seemed to me that if you're Russia, if you're Putin, you sort of see that there's a light at the end of the tunnel now. U.S. support for Ukraine is likely in a glide path down. Weapons deliveries from the United States to Ukraine are continuing, but there's not going to be another supplemental. The Trump administration is not going to go to Congress, at least I don't expect it to, to ask for more funding. So that means, you know, all the money spent by the Biden administration is kind of
That's it. There's a lot of money. So there's a lot more stuff coming. But, you know, what is Russia's game plan here? Is it have their maximalist goals shifted? You know, if you're the Russian general staff and Putin calls you in and says, you know, what's our what's our theory of the case here? Are they just sort of we're just going to keep banging our head against this Ukrainian wall and hope that, you know, we break a hole at some point? What is the plan here? What is being told to Putin?
And what do you think is the kind of broader Russian military strategy looking out, not just over the next few months, but really over the next few years? Max, this is no easy question. Okay. So right up front, I don't know for a fact what the Russian plan is. And anyone who says they do is probably trying to sell you something. Moscow is full of people who will always tell you that they themselves know what the plan is. And then you quickly find out that they also didn't know what the plan was. And sometimes...
Sometimes they don't sometimes genuinely they don't know the plan because one person happens to decide the plan and he doesn't know what it is. Right. So it's not it's not always no, but we'll always get that someplace. If we look at what we can observe from behavior, right, we don't like we don't know the plan, but we can observe behavior first.
It's clear that the Russian military intends to keep pushing through 2025. The idea that there's going to be a summer offensive and then something happens after the summer and that's the window for negotiations, I think is quite wrong. In fact, I heard an argument like this last year that Russian military would be exhausted come summer and they weren't. The only thing that's going to really slow them down is once we get into the winter, we get into the summer. Second,
they are probably going to start reaching diminishing returns once we do get into the fall and the winter, right? Does that mean that Putin will decide that even though they do not hold the prospect of making significant gains on the battlefield, that they should give up and quit? Not necessarily. I think a lot depends actually on macroeconomic factors and these other inputs, these things on the other side of the ledger, which significantly affect political decision-making, um,
to what extent is the war sustainable? If it looks like the war is more or less sustainable to them, like they feel they can manage it into 2026, then likely they'll try to keep going. That's my assumption. That's always my assumption. The safer assumption is the war is going to keep going rather than they're going to make a deal. And everything I have observed so far, right, in the last couple of months, Max, I don't know if your opinion is different, has not disabused me of that base assumption. Well,
I think that's been my base assumption. I mean, especially if you look at it in the U.S., role is going to be less supportive than you. There's reason for hope on their side. So when it comes to the U.S. role, and also I think it's important to discuss,
What is the fighting really about? Because let's say over under Russian offensive takes some more territory in Donetsk, but the war doesn't get decided by who controls Prokofiev. I know this town. I've gotten to know it pretty well or Konstantinovka. Fine. But if Konstantinovka is lost, the war is not lost for Ukraine. So if the Russian military is able to, even if they take some advance from Donetsk, okay, and what? That's not really what the war is about.
What's really being tested in the fighting is the fighting provides information for negotiations about whose hand is really stronger. And what's being tested is the question of what is less sustainable, Russian offensive effort or Ukrainian defense?
That's the matter in question, because it informs negotiation and both these parties' expectations, but also the expectations of external actors for material parties to the war. Does that make sense? So us Europeans, whatnot. So that's what's being demonstrated over the course of these operations. And that's important to keep in mind, that really what we're looking at is how do we assess each other, our own respective expectations based on what we see happening in the battlefield. We are EU support.
Yeah, it's on a kind of declining glide path, but with a couple of big caveats. First, it's clear that we've been providing Ukraine with things that were actually programmed during the Biden administration. And those things are going to run out at some point, I think, after the summer. But there's still quite a bit that has been delivered together with European support and the prospect of Europe being able to buy munitions and other things from the United States. Ukraine can be sustained and that's fine. Second,
This administration is not out of presidential drawdown authority. They haven't really used it. They still have the original 3.8. But the fact that they haven't used it tells us that while they are not
I'm trying to find the right way to put this because I myself don't fully understand it. Why they are not walking away from Ukraine, or at least it seems like they're walking away from walking away right now. They are also not interested in owning the war in any way, shape, or form and keep framing it as the previous administration's war. So they don't want to authorize any new PDs for Ukraine, which is problematic.
Because they don't want this war to become their policy. Does that make sense? That's the way I interpret it. That's just my own view of it. But, you know, like I'm another person. She's just like you are. So this is my own point of view. On top of that, they still have billions of US funding they're chewing through, which is going to take quite a bit of time because it's things that get put on contract that have to be made. So it's playing more money kind of in the mix there than people think or know from my point of view.
Okay, next, they could actually go to Congress and ask for another billion or two, at least in replenishment funding for DOD. It's not going to dramatically change things, but a billion can go a pretty long way, and then try to use that under this administration to authorize some more presidential drawdowns. I don't know if they're going to do that. I'm just saying the option is there.
No, there's not going to be another major funding package or supplemental for Ukraine. That is very obvious, right? Fully agreed with you on that. But another billion, I think, could be in the offing. Lastly, so yeah, they're on a glide path, but...
Ukraine is increasingly more self-sufficient for day-to-day battlefield needs. It makes a lot. Europe's invested in Ukraine's defense sector. Europeans have picked up the slack significantly from the U.S. over the last two years. I used to gripe about them quite a bit, like, you know, kind of grudgingly and lovingly, like, hey, Europe, major conventional war in European theater, maybe you should really get on top of defense industrial production and issuing multi-year contracts for the thing that you say is existential for the security architecture of Europe. But
judging by your body language, you seem to be very late to your own rhetoric. But they got there, right? Not fully, let's say partially, okay? So where we are this year, I think, yeah, Ukraine can be sustained through 2025. I do see a lot of challenges in some areas later this year on munitions. And more importantly, big question remains whether or not
we are willing to keep selling key types of capabilities to Ukraine, right? Interceptors for Patriot, PAC-2, PAC-3, air and missile defense. Do we keep selling GMLRS for HIMARS? Do we keep providing certain types of munitions and parts? If we're willing to do that, then I don't think the situation is that bad for Ukraine. But you're also right in that
There is no major sustained U.S. investment in this war. There is no U.S. effort to enable Ukraine to achieve something in this war either that I can see. Ukraine is in many respects going to have to pursue this on its own with Europeans. And the most that right now it can hope for is just sustainment of current level support and steady decline of that support. I agree with you. That's kind of the pessimistic conclusion I've come to.
We're not in the worst case scenario, right? The worst case there was Trump administration in May saying, all right, timeline, you know, we ran out of time. We're walking away. We're halting any further additional program shipments. We're halting intelligence support. I know Europeans, we're not selling anything to you. Everything now is focused on the Indo-Pacific. Best of luck to you, you know, in the situation. That's not happening. So at least it's fair to say that we're very far from the worst case scenario.
We're also quite far from the best case scenario today, right? We are in that unhappy middle. And I know what wars look like when people are prosecuting unhappy middle. Actually, the U.S. is the master of that policy-wise. In my professional career, I have gotten to watch several conflicts that we were involved in where we were absolutely the master of the unhappy middle. I mean, it seems to me, just to sum up before turning over to Maria or –
I think on the Russian side, it strikes me that this war is sustainable. They're going to keep fighting it. Hopefully things start to go better for them. And, you know, there's some hope that Ukraine just sort of keeps getting hollowed out. The Europeans don't quite step up. Trump administration pulls back faster. And then 2026, you know,
You know, that's, you know, the Russians then just continue on and that the war has become sustainable in some ways, just like what a long war, you know, the US was fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan or Vietnam that you just keep going year by year. Now, all those conflicts ended up not going that well for us.
But they were sustainable until they weren't, until we just decided we were done with this. And that I think that kind of seems to me what the Russian strategy is. That there's a plan, there's a hope. Let's see if you can get there, keep attriting the Ukrainians, and then in a couple of years, maybe you'll actually get there. And if not, then you can sort of dial back, turn down, really ratchet up negotiations.
And may I just add to that, that maybe Putin has read Paul Kennedy, famous historian and political scientist who flagged that in the rise and fall of the great powers, his famous book, that historically speaking, victory has repeatedly gone to the side with a more flourishing productive base. So when the Russians basically look at the material side of things, they may be justified to believe that they hold an upper hand in this story.
Yeah, okay. There's another interesting point. I can only give you my perspective on which is that I think that both sides in this war, Russia and Ukraine, are right now holding on, hoping first that conditions shift to some extent in their favor, especially when it comes to their respective negotiating positions. Both sides are pinning hope that the other one
their war effort will have to collapse for reasons other than anything that can be observed in the battlefield. And I know historically plenty of wars like this, where the Russian leadership has been consistently telling itself something that observably isn't true. That Ukraine's on the verge of collapse, next offensive operation, the front will collapse if it's on the court because of all the problems, or that the West will abandon Ukraine. We're not, and Ukraine's not on the verge of collapse, and the front line's not about to collapse either.
So, reality is Ukraine has proven remarkably resilient and a lot of kind of worst-case scenarios haven't happened. And to some extent, I've seen this quite a bit in the West, especially earlier this year, I started to see a lot of just sort of wishful thinking about the Russian economy. And while the Russian economy may not be in a place that they can sustain this war for the next three years,
They seem okay through 2025 and well going into 2026. That's just the unfortunate reality. I hear a number of folks talking about some perfect storm on the Russian economy or other things that simply I can't see, certainly not this year, and hoping that this is going to deliver to them some kind of positive outcome. Or there's also always the belief that, hey, we have all these sanctions cards we're not playing, we're not using, which some we do, but I...
I'll put it this way. I'm a big believer in the impact of sanctions. I also believe that the sanctions community is by far the most optimistic policy community in Washington, D.C., about what their ideas and policies can achieve. Like there's in terms of expectations relative to performance, you know,
Just going off my own experience, I've always been skeptical of what I've told that we have these amazing sanctions cards to play that will substantially alter Russian calculations, particularly in the sufficient near term, right? Because you're looking at the next one, two years. You're not asking people, give me a slow poison that will suffocate the Russian economy over the course of a decade. I mean, that's great. But the problem one is the war.
So that's where I'm a lot more skeptical on how much impact they can have on a sufficiently relevant timeline. I think on our part of the challenge is that
Unless the front is to some extent effectively stabilized, right? The Russian leadership and Russian elites can continue telling them the story that you just need to give it more time and eventually something will crack, right? And to their advantage. And so as long as they're materially advantaged, even if the Russian military tactic was really underperforming relative to the advantages they have, I think it's very clear by Russian behavior and negotiations that they don't want to make a big compromise. They're not willing to accept something like an Istanbul Minus
And this goes back to kind of the very beginnings and the origins of the war. If you remember the original negotiations with Russia before the war began, Putin didn't want the deal. He wanted the war. I'm sorry. I've always been amongst those folks. Maria, Max, you will remember our conversations, you know, well before this, this, the full scale invasion began. And I was quite confident that they were going to do it. He didn't want the deal. He wanted the war.
And we're still in that place. He doesn't want the deal. He doesn't want anything approaching a reasonable compromise, despite the fact the Russian military performance on the ground can't achieve Putin's political aims. What he wants is either Ukrainian or Western capitulation. It looked for a couple months like he couldn't get Ukraine, but he might get the U.S.,
Now it's looking like maybe it's not going to get U.S., so he's going back to trying to get Ukraine's. And that, to me, explains a lot about Russia's negotiating position, right? And so from my point of view, that they retain fairly maximal scourgings.
Michael, to your point about Russian economic situation, we actually just released a report basically largely congruent with your assessment. So for once, we actually align on the sanctions economy topic. But yes, I was to mention that unfortunately for Ukraine, the situation in Russian economy is not great, but it's also not dire enough.
At the same time, our colleagues from Defense and Security Program released another brief just recently, also showing that the war is highly inefficient for Russia. That, just to give you some estimates, Russia has paid extraordinary blood price for sitting less than 1% of Ukraine territory since 2024 and suffered as many as five times the number of fatalities in Ukraine in just over three years than all countries.
Russian and Soviet wars combined since the end of the Second World War. That seems tremendous, enormous. Now, the economic situation is also not great, and they're losing a lot of weapons. So the question is, especially looking at the battlefield and the innovation, what do you think is the area that Russia could prioritize in terms of development of its weapons?
potentially drones or electronic warfare tech going forward? Maybe it's worth for Russia to substitute for the way it's fighting with something more innovative. Now, do you have a sense of what's the best approach that the Kremlin is going to choose now?
um so first look on the stats yeah but those statistics can give you cold comfort right i could show you world war one stats on number of manpower lost and munitions expended relative to territory gain and i can show you how world war one ended for germany so you need we need to be a bit careful on combat stats uh i just
On the one hand, that's all true, and the Russian results are very unimpressive for what they spent on it, especially given that in this war, one of their principal political aims is the acquisition of territory. On the other hand, their principal aim is Ukraine's capitulation and really destruction of Ukraine as a sustainable, independent state. When I look at, I think the results on their end are quite unimpressive.
But I don't think that that is their interpretation of it. And what matters is how the political leadership and the military leadership actually interprets this. They see this as a regional war. They see this as a war not just with Ukraine, but also as a conflict with NATO. And the way they frame it, and of course, I'm sure it's a rationalization on their part, but I think from the way they frame it, they're not just taking Ukraine on, they're taking on the United States and everybody else that support Ukraine. All right.
Regarding the way they're actually fighting. So they burned through a lot of Soviet equipment that they had in stocks. I think their biggest challenge moving forward is they're using up a lot of Soviet legacy. They still have quite a bit of it in the force. The depots are increasingly running empty, but there's quite a bit of equipment still yet to be processed.
Russian new production probably amounts for 20% or less of what they're currently getting when we look particularly at various types of major land warfare systems. But it is increasing. It visibly increased quite a bit. If you look at tank and infantry fighting vehicle production, it's well below what they need to replace the loss in this war, but it's quite above what they were producing in 2022 and 2021.
From a technology standpoint, they continue to online new types of drone systems, new types of ISR platforms, and new types of munitions, new types of electronic warfare capabilities. They had substantially expanded the use of fiber optic cable drones, and then those became much longer range systems, and it's starting to change the dynamic at the tactical level of the war. And I think people are missing this, particularly the last couple of months,
What's been happening is that Russian drone units are now employing fiber optic cable drones routinely at a distance of 20, 25 kilometers behind the forward line of troops for the max range of 50 kilometers. At least the spools go up to 50 km.
That then now has allowed them to attack a lot of the capabilities that are in the rear and close off ground lines of communication. And what they're investing heavily is still in the positional approach that's trying to displace Ukrainian forces by cutting off logistics and cutting off support to them. And this seemed to, I think, work for them in Kursk. And so they're now using this everywhere they can. Second, they have substantially expanded their drone component of the force.
following in Ukraine's footsteps and are actively trying to target Ukrainian drone teams because that's the part of the Ukrainian military that, for lack of a better word, is doing a lot of the lifting. If you look at where most Russian casualties are coming from or stopping Russian attacks, it's Ukrainian dronians, right? In combination with mines, with traditional artillery. But if we kind of look at what is the engine of that fight at the tactical level on the Ukrainian side, it's definitely drone formations. Russian military is very much trying to kind of have to them.
Some of their adaptations are negative adaptations. They're not impressive unless you really like the sport of motocross and you think that motorcycle and light ATV assaults are like the future of warfare. But for me, a very useful case study for the tanks or obsolete crowd, because I want them to take a good look at the last couple of months for all the people that want to get out of a tank and get on a motorcycle and try to assault that way. But
This is again an attempt to get past the defeat zone that Ukrainian units have established and the Ukrainian military actually is much more optimized to deal with mechanized assaults now than these types of attacks. We have a much longer conversation on kind of new technologies and things that Russia will be investing in, but in general,
You can see that they have substantially increased production of precision-guided weapons of different types, of drone systems, loitering munitions. And now you can see them employing a new light type of cruise missiles because it's one of the biggest gaps in everybody's arsenal today. Light, cheaper form of precision strike that can be used in much larger numbers.
And this is the direction I think the war is going to go. By late '25, I think you're going to see Ukraine have much greater strike capabilities beyond just drones, okay? And Russia trying to online larger numbers of cheaper strike systems that will allow basically much greater flexibility in how it employs the same strike capabilities. And it's a much longer conversation, but what I basically see on the Russian side
is both degradation in the force quality and how ground forces are being used and performing. And this essentially is one of the main problems, why they cannot execute any complex attacks at scale, and why Russian higher level commands keep planning operations that the force can't actually execute the tactical level, right? This is sort of, I will draw you red lines on a map,
But the force can't actually do those things. That's the problem. Once we get from army HQ to divisional HQ, but then you get into the battalion commander, the people that he has can't execute those tasks. This is problem one. Problem two is they don't have a lot of enablers and they're trying different ways to break through the way Ukraine's mounting a defense, but not that successfully.
On the other hand, they've got a lot better at dynamic targeting, precision strike, and integration, how they run the fight. So there are areas where they've improved and the areas where they've degraded significantly. I, too, am working on some written products in this area, as I'm sure you know. But for those who are interested, I had a report last year on Russian military adaptation looking at 2022 through about 2024. I think it's up on Carnegie's website.
Max, I very much look forward to reading your report on the Russian war economy and checking out the findings from that. Yeah, well, we'll definitely put a link to your report in the show notes as well as our Russian economy paper. I sort of imagine it that Putin has sort of just, you know, looked at the map and he's just sort of draws a red arrow towards Kyiv and says, go. And then the Russian forces and Russian generals say, OK, they salute them.
Ben Maga. Max, can I tell you a silly theory that I have? Because at some points I've seen Putin brief their gains in cities like Chasovia or other places or Volodar. And I think, don't quote me on this anyway, it's just a silly bar theory. What I think happens, I think Gerasimov shows up with a map
And the map is like really zoomed in. It's like really zoomed in on, you know, Konstantinovka or Prokhorovsk or some town. Okay. And the map is like barely scale, like 10 by 10 kilometers. And it's showing how much they've taken over the last month. He's like, look, we've taken, you know, 50% of this and it looks really impressive. Unless you zoom out to the entire front and then you see that on 1200 kilometer front, you know, they've taken like this, this small city that used to have 60,000 people living in it, Topps.
But the map as he presents it, it looks quite neat. Part of the reason I say that is because I've seen Putin publicly state stats that they now control like 30% or 50% or something. And I think like, wow, somebody must have shown him a map shaded in red and told him, look, we're making all this progress. Look how much we control this, you know, Velikin of a city. I know.
I mean, I think military officers, it doesn't matter the nationality, are quite good at sort of juking the stats and demonstrating. We did this in Vietnam and kill ratios and other things like that. You can find ways to sort of demonstrate progress, especially to a leader that is demanding it.
But Mike, we are going to have to leave it there. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining Russian Roulette. And as always, if you haven't, please be sure to subscribe to our show and give us a five-star rating. Additionally, if you haven't already, be sure to check out our sister podcast, The Europhile, wherever you get your podcasts. And also be sure to check out
Mike's podcast, The Russia Contingency, through the suite of War on the Rocks podcast. It's really excellent. And Mike, thanks again for joining us. Maria, thank you as always. And we will see you next time. You've been listening to Russian Roulette. We hope you enjoyed this episode and tune in again soon.
Russian Roulette releases new episodes every two weeks on Thursdays and is available wherever you get your podcasts. So please subscribe and share our episodes online. And be sure to check out all the latest analysis by the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at csis.org.