Dara Massicot on Battlefield Developments in Ukraine and the Threat of Escalation
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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, everyone, and welcome back to Russian Roulette. We're back on the air after a brief hiatus for the Thanksgiving holiday. And joining us this week is Dara Masico. As many of you are probably aware, Dara is one of the leading experts writing about the Russian military today and is currently a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And Dara recently returned from a study trip to Ukraine with Michael Kaufman, also a friend of the pod and some other colleagues.

And so there's, I think, a lot to talk about. We just had an election here in the US changing dynamics on the battlefield, decisions from the Biden administration. So, Darrett, let's just jump right in. And maybe we'll start with kind of what was one of the big questions.

I would say of the day, but really of the last six months of the fall, when it came to whether the White House would authorize the use of U.S. weapons or weapons with U.S. content in them to be used to attack targets on Russian soil. The Biden administration has made that decision, has approved that. Do you think this is going to have any battlefield impact? Is this really going to help Ukraine? What are we seeing right now of the effects of that?

Thanks for having me back on the podcast. It's a really interesting and dynamic time and a time with a lot of tensions. If we talk about whether or not the ATAKOMs that we are providing to Ukraine at a longer range are going to be a game changer in the conflict, that depends on how many that we have to provide to them. And my understanding is that inventory is not particularly robust.

So far, we have seen these been authorized for strikes inside Russia. I believe an airfield was targeted, and it looked like from the video available that they were able to hit some pretty significant air defense systems. But what is interesting to me about it is the Russians are actually discussing their losses in great detail from attack inside Russia, and I view that as a communication issue.

In the past, when it's something they want to pin directly on the Ukrainians, they will obfuscate or be, you know, just not really upfront about losses. But this time, now that they think that the United States is directly involved in all of it, they're pointing the finger very directly.

So we have to see where it goes from here. In my perspective, there are several types of targets that could change the situation on the ground a little bit if they were to target ammunition depots, some of the more centralized ones that does have an impact.

on the artillery that Russia can bring to the frontline. And the Ukrainians have told us on our trip there that when they do target these facilities, they notice an impact on what the Russians are able to put against them. But I should caution everyone that the ATAKOMs that we have provided are not a game changer. The Russians are able to intercept some and they are able to jam others. So it's not a silver bullet and especially not with the way that it's been rolled out and leaked before it was even authorized.

I want to shift to the battlefield situation in a second, but to follow up on something you mentioned about the inadequacy of supply. And that strikes me as actually one of the critical issues that has been very rarely discussed by the Biden administration. But now that we're in kind of a lame duck period, the Biden administration trying to sort of get a lot of its Ukraine military support, whatever money that it has left to sort of spend that down before it walks out of the White House on January 20th.

that there's a lot of leaks coming from the Pentagon about concern over inadequacy of supply and whether this will impact U.S. force readiness. And I think this was sort of something that Biden administration knew about. We're very nervous that you would have Pentagon leaks coming out prior to the election about how Ukraine is weakening the U.S. force readiness and how that would hurt us vis-a-vis China.

What do you think of this kind of new line of defense for not sort of supporting Ukraine, at least coming out of the bureaucracy? Do you think this is a huge concern? Is this a real constraint on the U.S. and its ability to continue to supply Ukraine with a lot of advanced weaponry? I'm curious how you would assess that argument that we're now actually seeing percolating out from the Pentagon through stories in the Washington Post and other places.

This has been a concern for a long time since the war has started, and it's not been a conversation that's been a particularly public one for obvious reasons. You know, it's sensitive what we have inside our arsenal and the numbers of our stockpiles, and those are guarded pretty tightly.

The debate, I think, focused first publicly on the lack of adequate artillery shell production. The rate that we were able to produce at the start of the war was quite low, and we've made a lot of advancements in that area. But the United States does have global obligations, and for a long time, the math hasn't been working out on what those requirements are for different theaters, whether that's IndoPaycom or Ucom or CENTCOM.

And this war is a wake up call to our defense industrial base that the method of production and the rate of production is not adequate. I do think that, you know, looking back over the past now, we're approaching the three year mark of this phase of the war, that there hasn't been enough conversation about the impact of supporting Ukraine on our own stockpiles.

Maybe not to tip our hat to our adversaries or anything else, but I think what the result will be during the change in administration, the new team will come in and look at the cupboards and see that a lot of them are bare. And then a conversation is going to be held publicly. So I think that this administration has left themselves exposed to that kind of critique.

And we've seen public comments now from the head of Indo-PACOM that they feel like the war in Ukraine is diminishing their ability to do what they need to do. It is a real issue and it needs to be addressed structurally.

Do you think, Dara, if I may ask, the issue has a structural solution, such as, for example, increasing domestic production of weapons, creating new factories? I've overheard people talking about how there isn't enough professional labor that's needed for those sort of industries. Could you comment on that a little? Yes, it is both. It's a factory capacity issue.

And it is an expense issue. And it's also a labor shortage issue. And so this is, you know, putting on my Russia hat for a second, one of the lines of attacks that people make on the Russian industrial base is, well, everyone is aging, their average age is 50, 55. And, you know, there's vacancies. And the same exact thing can be said about ours, that the workforce is aging. It is predominantly workers.

male. They're not attracting women at the same rate. And it's very, very expensive and the outputs are slow. So I'm not a defense industrial specialist on our side. I am cognizant of this tension in this war that we never feel like we have enough or we can provide it at a rapid enough pace. That's a problem for Ukraine. It will be a problem if we are trying to honor our obligations to Israel or NATO or Taiwan. From the Russia hand, I'm saying that this is a huge structural issue that needs adjustment.

We should note one area where there has been real ramp up on production is actually 155 production. And I think they're planning or hoping to get to around producing 100,000 shells per month by early 2025. I think that if I have that number right, and I think it was around 10 to 20,000 per month that we were producing at the kind of outset of the war. What's interesting about this is actual 155 production is done through the U.S. Army, not really contracted out through one of the big primes.

And I think they, especially when it comes to the more advanced set of weaponry, the precision guided missiles and other things like that, there's just the production rates. We were living in a war on terror era where we weren't thinking about real conventional war. But Maria, sorry, I interjected. Well, yeah. And I guess, unfortunately, the sad irony is that we have something to learn from the way Putin is doing it these days. Dara, you, after your trip to Ukraine, talked a lot about the personnel sustainment issues.

And would you mind providing the description as to how the situation looks on both fronts? All right. We have the Ukrainian situation, but also we have the Russian situation with now North Korean troops joining. How much of a big change are they going to be? Sure. Yes. So I recently returned from a research trip to Ukraine. I went with Mike Hoffman, Rob Lee, Conrad Muzica and Franz Stefangetti.

And very, very informative. We spent a few days in Kiev and then we went out and visited with different parts of the frontline and met with different types of military units, territorial defense and National Guard units. And all of them are experiencing manpower shortages to various degrees. It is particularly acute within the territorial defense and some of the National Guard units. It's not good either in the military brigades, especially

Specifically, there is a shortage of infantry. And if you are mobilized today in Ukraine, we were told that those who are mobilized will try to do anything to avoid becoming frontline infantry because the casualty rate is high and they feel like there's no way out except for a serious injury or death.

They will try to change into becoming an engineer or a logistician or a medic or any other type of specialty. What the units are experiencing from the Russians is a significant amount of strain from Russian tactics. So the Russians are attacking them in very small groups all the time, day and night. It's death by a thousand cuts. It's very stressful to units who are undermanned. They are being asked to...

guard or hold a line for a unit that is completely manned, but they're maybe down to 60% or even less. It's very stressful. The mobilization system in Ukraine, I mean, they did drop the age down to 27, but it wasn't clear to us where all of those people are. The average age of new recruits that they are still getting today is in the 40s, 40-year-olds. So we're not really sure what's going on there.

The manpower is a big issue. And there's a few structural reasons for that. And it needs to be addressed. Also on the Russian side, when we were there, the North Koreans were on their way to Kursk. They had not yet come into contact yet. The opinion was that even if these North Korean troops are unskilled or maybe on par with Storm Z or maybe some Russian line units,

it would have added a bunch of strain to Kursk in a situation that is already very stressful for units up there. So it's just really an unhelpful time for that kind of introduction, even if the numbers are small. If they're applied in a very particular way in Kursk, it could be quite bad for the Ukrainians. And that's what they were thinking about before they got there. They have been there now for a month and it looks like they're using them.

Just a final point on the Russian situation. What we were told is that the Russian casualties are high. This is the highest they've ever been since 2022.

But that from their perspective on the front line, they don't see the attacks stopping. Even though they can see the casualties, they know they're inflicting them on the Russians, they just keep sending them. So the casualties are not causing a cessation of this tactic or these waves of attacks. I can imagine it can be quite exhausting psychologically, right? I think that's notorious. It's the anecdote from the Soviet times during the Second World War, the Soviet Union.

the same tactics with the Nazi, and it was kind of very overpowering to the other side. But having said that, we do see on the Russian side that the average price tag for a new so-called volunteer being recruited to the army keeps rising. Do you think it signals certain shortage on the Russian side as well? Do you think Russia also at some point will hit the wall? Or do they just keep going and they can continue this current strategy?

volunteering system almost indefinitely so it is i think a signpost that the russian population understands now the situation quite clearly and it costs a lot more to incentivize them to join that being said sitting and listening to the ukrainian units going up against them they understand that too they can see that process happening in russia but the concern that was relayed to us was

that the Ukrainian manpower needs are urgent on a shorter type timeline than when Russia might bottom out, whether that's next year in the summer, next year in the winter, whenever.

Ukrainian needs are more acute. So that's just to give that lens on it. It's really hard to describe this because it's not going well for the Russians either, but it's just not as acute the manpower shortages as they are for the Ukrainians. There's a phenomenon occurring inside Russia as these benefits go up and up and up, where the more they pay them and the more benefits they give them, the more that the Russian population starts to view these people as mercenaries, not as actual soldiers.

What that does is it makes them very calloused to their deaths. And because they are telling themselves now, well, you know what you were getting into. You're taking the money, aren't you? You're taking the benefits. So, you know, that's on you. Three years into this, you should know better kind of attitude.

And so what that does is it basically, it kind of insulates Russian society from these casualties. This is an old Soviet phenomenon. In the 1980s, when the United States was moving to a professional army, what they used to tell themselves in their society was,

These Americans are just mercenaries. They fight for money. And when it comes to a real war, they won't fight because they're only in it for money. Like this is an old school Soviet idea. And it's like reemerging in Russian society that now against their own. So it's very interesting.

I'll just jump in to comment that, you know, even after the partial mobilization, we did not exactly see a mass society, societal resistance to that. So they'll tell themselves whatever they need to tell, but it's not like they would be protesting otherwise either, right? They're just accepting this reality.

And they also feel like they're winning at this point. So it's easier, I think, to do it, even though I'm a skeptic of the 30,000 a month Russian recruit number. I think there's many entrance points in the recruiting cycle where those numbers get padded. I don't know what the precise number is, but I just I want to urge caution. I do not believe it's 30,000. Yeah, I also think there's some questions going forward of whether the Russian state can actually afford to

continue escalating how much it's paying people to go to the front. And there's some reports that the funding has been cut a bit. And then that also creates this kind of vicious cycle, at least inside of the Russian economy, where the Russian defense industry, desperate for labor, then has to increase their prices or their wages. And that then adds to kind of the broader inflationary effects that we're seeing in Russia. Let me ask about the North Koreans. Have there been reports of them in battle yet?

Are the Ukrainians currently fighting North Koreans? I mean, there were reports of this. I'm not sure if I've actually seen anything. What is the state of kind of North Korea's battlefield position right now? There have been some videos, I think, of some POWs that were taken a few weeks ago. My understanding is that they are not deployed inside Ukraine, that they are using them and integrating them within Russian units that are in Kursk, trying to push out Ukrainian positions from there.

There's not a lot of detail on their actual capabilities on the ground, but my understanding is they're still focused up there, which is an interesting signal from the Kremlin as well, that they're not using them so far inside Ukraine itself. And I do still think that the Kremlin does not want to do that because then they're worried that we could say, OK, OK.

You put foreign troops in Ukraine, I can put foreign troops in Ukraine. So let's just see how long that lasts though. I want to sort of get to the, what is Russia's sort of broader military strategy here? What are their kind of objectives? Because I think that's sort of a crucial question as we look at a Trump administration that is coming in saying, you know, on day one that they want to, you know, end the war, but at least enter into negotiations and talks. And I think there's this general sense that what we're seeing on the battlefield is a race disengagement.

to sort of gain position in territory prior to the Trump administration coming in. But that also then assumes that Russia is, you know, willing to sort of sit down and sort of good faith talks to sort of have a negotiated settlement. For me, it looks like they may think that they can win the war. I'm curious what you think right now, what is Russia trying to achieve militarily? Are we still, you know, the maximalist militia?

trying to take Kiev and turn Ukraine into a Russian satellite? Or are we talking about sort of more tactical battlefield gains before an obviously, you know, a negotiated settlement? Where do you think Russia's objectives are right now? Have they changed from the beginning of the war? Let me go from the ground up. And I agree with you. I think in the next

two months, they're going to push forward as much as they can. They're having a lot of success right now. The fastest gains that they've had in two years. This is the time that their system will tell them to keep going. I think they want to have the best possible position by January 21st.

And for them, that means trying to push all Ukrainian units out of Kursk to just take that completely off the negotiating table and not have it be a chess piece. The Ukrainians, of course, want to hold on to it for that exact reason. We'll watch that area very closely. The most unstable part of the front, in my opinion, is probably south of Donetsk.

They're very close to pushing around the southern side of that city. They've aborted the full direct-on attack, as they've done with other objectives recently, and they're flanking around it, which is very stressful for Ukrainian units. They didn't halt the missile campaign either. They just launched their largest missile attack on Ukraine since December of last year after the U.S. election. So if there was any thinking that Putin's going to stop and hold and wait for the new team, that's incorrect.

They have their objectives. They're going to push forward. I think that's going to continue after January as well, until there's a concrete offer on the table to have a discussion or a ceasefire or something like that. The new team should anticipate Russia will press forward to the maximum of its capabilities. Are they still capable of taking Kiev? They never were capable of taking Kiev. So I think that's out of the question right now.

Even if a ceasefire were declared or some kind of negotiated end to this war next year, and I don't know what's going to happen in that front, the new team coming in should understand Russia is going to use that time to regenerate its military. They're not going to sit around and embrace peace. No, they are already programmed and making preparations for a massive reconstitution effort of their military.

So there's basically nothing I can see in the future, even if peace breaks out, where we don't have to think about how to rearm Ukraine as well. And so you're not super concerned about a potential Russian breakout.

There's a great GIF map, or GIF map, whatever you want to call it, I've seen on social media, the World War I lines, you know, day by day, and it goes very quickly. This is on the Western Front. In the beginning of the invasion, of course, there's a lot of movement. It's then, things are basically stuck for three years. Then in 1918, you then see the lines suddenly move all over the place, and then the German collapse.

With what you're describing of the Ukrainian manpower challenges, of Russia continuing to push its advantage,

Are you worried at all that at some point there could be just a real break in the lines where the Russians can then punch through? Do they lack the kind of then capacity to sort of sustain a real ground offensive, rapid ground offensive? Is something related to the nature of Ukraine's drone usage and other things that would just prevent kind of a real breakthrough? How do you see the potential for a Russian breakthrough here?

So Ukraine is basically, they're using drones and FPV, first-person munitions, to hold the line where they can to try to compensate for a lack of manpower. And it's effective, but only to a point. There's only so much that you can hold back with what you have on hand. Do I worry about a collapse of the front in its entirety at this point? No. But there are weak parts of the front line where there's really not anything in reserve.

What they're doing now is they're doing something that we call firefighting, where a problematic area will emerge on the front. They'll strip units now off another line and put them there to try to firefight it and support it last minute. But what you do is you weaken the other parts of the line in that process.

The Russians, and this is what we were told by those that we met with, are very good now at identifying those weak parts, and they will rapidly go there and press. And they have the ability to rotate. The Russians have units in reserve inside occupied Ukraine and just across the border.

I do worry that if this manpower situation is not addressed, you could see this kind of push on various specific parts of the front and you could have serious gains in specific parts. My areas of concern probably the most just based on geography and where the Ukrainians are, are in southern Donetsk and Zaporizhia. And they're tracking that too. I mean, they're aware of these issues. It's just...

You need weapons, but you also need manpower, and the West cannot fix the manpower question. Maybe just to follow up on the manpower question, sort of the beginning of this year,

listening to military experts like you and Kaufman and Rob Lee, you know, the sense was, okay, 2023, the counteroffensive didn't go very well. Ukraine wasn't able to really uproot the Russians. 2024 is going to be a year where they're going to have to hold on, but then hopefully they can rebuild and transform their military so that 2025 perhaps is a year where they can, you know, maybe regain the offensive, or at least at that point, then the war is sort of at a stalemate.

It doesn't really seem like they've used 2024, they, the Ukrainians, to effectively mobilize their population. And, you know, if this is an existential war, it seems quite odd when you go to Kiev and, you know, I was in Odessa and other places in April, and you, you know, have this dissonance of seeing all these 20-somethings working in the economy, doing what 20-somethings should do. But there's a war on, and I'm curious if the Ukrainian rhetoric about this war, especially towards Western partners...

and how existential it is, it sometimes doesn't feel that way inside of Ukraine. Do you think Ukraine has sort of squandered this year and what do they need to do now to really mobilize their population or is that something that you see them doing?

I think there's blame to go around from multiple parties. And, you know, I want to be objective about that. A year ago, Rob and Mike and I wrote a piece called Hold, Build, Strike, which was kind of our recommendation for the year that for 2024, given where Ukraine was at, where Russian military was at, they should use the year to hold the position, not launch any offensives, build out their reserves, and

and then be in a position to strike. So hold, build, strike. But this year went hold slash strike at the same time, but like no build. And there were a few reasons for that. So like there's blame in multiple places. The United States was, what was it? Six months late with the supplemental. I think seven to eight. Seven to eight months late with the supplemental. That was terrible for Ukraine. Right now we were surging weapons in and they did not voice to us that they felt like shell hunger or anything like that.

But what that did was it's very hard to mobilize your population when you don't know if you're going to get more weapons or not. But at the same time, you can surge in artillery shells and plug them into an artillery gun. Okay. And that's just a fact or logistics. You cannot surge a trained soldier. And so when Ukraine didn't use that time to mobilize and train units as fast as they could in the rear so that they would be prepared and ready to relieve, that's why we're

On the manpower front, they are where they are right now. So again, the weapons shortage in 24 from the West's fault and Ukraine not using that time to get units ready, that's why we are here. There's still a way to move forward here. And to your point about the cognitive dissonance on the streets in Ukraine, I found it striking, not just in Kyiv, but pretty much everywhere we went. There are able-bodied men and women of all ages and people

I found the dissonance between the rhetoric of existential war versus life continuing on calmly, even very, very close to the front. I found it a bit jarring that not all units have manpower shortages. There are models within the Ukrainian military with effective commanders where they are empowered to do their own recruiting and they have a good reputation and battlefield success where they're meeting their mark.

It's not that the Ukrainians are unwilling to fight. They're just unwilling to go to a bad commander or a bad unit or be wasted. They're not willing to do that anymore. So there needs to be some trust rebuilt here between the population and the military strategy, just from my view on the ground of what we were told. Dara, you mentioned that the West cannot fix the manpower issue in Ukraine.

But we have heard some comments say from French President Emmanuel Macron that at some point he does not allow the possibility of sending troops.

on the ground in Ukraine. At the same time, there's also escalation unraveling. Putin, for example, sent the nuclear-capable Russian intermediate-range ballistic missile. And altogether, this whole dynamic starts showing and growing engagement of various countries, essentially prompting General Valery Zaluzhny, who now serves as Kiev ambassador in London, to say that we are on the verge of

in the World War III scenario. Can I ask what your take is on that? Is it indeed the case that steadily, maybe incrementally, we all find ourselves in this very gloomy new reality, or is it just still very much a regional war? And where essentially is this all going? That's a great question, and I thought about his words.

I think he has a very unique perspective when he looks out long range. And just to give an anecdote of how far off baseline I think we all have become, or at least I have, let me speak for myself.

I watched the images of the Ereshnik coming in on Nipro. I mean, this is an IRBM with multiple reentry vehicles. This is not something that people see every day. And it came in and the reaction, I think, in the media space and the sort of commentator world and analytic world is like, oh.

Yep, there goes one of those. I mean, this is a pretty big deal, but we are all so already tense and expecting these kind of things that it didn't make the splash we would have expected had this happened, you know, in the beginning of the war. So again, we're all off baseline here. So it's important to know that where you are on that.

So from Zaluzhni's perspective, if he's sitting and thinking about what's happening in his country, you have a coalition of people contributing capacity. And now with the North Koreans actual troops, whether that's Iranian Shahids, whether that's North Korean troops,

whether it's China's various types of support to Russia in this war. So he's feeling like we are fighting a coalition and on Ukraine's side is another coalition, right? So you have the West providing weapons and intel and every other type of support that they do. And it's all coming together on the battlefield in Ukraine. So for him,

Ukraine is the nexus of where these two coalitions are actively engaged in war. I don't know that I would call it World War III, or we don't know that we're in it. You know, I'm not trying to use euphemisms or talk in circles or anything, but we are at like the very upper bound of strategic competition. And there's not much more to go. We are pushing the threshold of proxy warfare and low intensity conflict.

We are right there. So this is a very tense moment. Like just today in Syria, you've got the Russian VKS Air Force, you know, bombing various groups that are trying to attack cities. And you've got coalition aircraft up in the air at the same time, bombing Iranian proxies trying to come in. We've been here before in the skies over Syria, but we're here again. And we're here again with the tensions in the Red Sea and Ukraine and everything else. We haven't even mentioned the sabotage in Europe.

So some people might call it a pre-war period. Maybe that's the right term. There's ways to turn this off. There's ways to turn it up. But we're right there. Yeah, I think one of the things that has struck me about the escalation debate is it's sort of all or nothing that when we provided attack for Ukraine to use on Russian soil, then they use them. And then everyone see, you know, Washington, D.C. has not been destroyed in a nuclear attack as

escalation wasn't a thing. And it's like, well, there's sort of the escalation horizontally, but also then how dangerous an environment we're in where there can be sort of miscalculation

And, you know, you mentioned Syria, and I want to maybe ask you about the Russian presence there. Obviously, you know, when Russia intervened in Syria, I was in the US government. It was a big shock to us at the time that they suddenly were intervening in that conflict. It led to the need to have de-confliction channels and other forms of communication to avoid miscalculation. Of course, there was an incident with Turkey and Russian fighter jets along the Turkish border where a Russian pilot was killed.

How do you see the current dynamics there? And it seems that Russia has sort of been caught flat footed in Syria. And have they been sort of overstretched by the fact that they're needed in Ukraine or around Ukraine? Is this putting additional strain on Russia's forces? How do you see the situation in Syria connected to Ukraine? The capabilities, there's not a direct overlap per

I mean, most of Russia's presence now in Syria is the Air Force, and the Russian Air Force is only around 10% committed to Ukraine. What it does mean, though, is that Russia doesn't have a lot of excess capacity for long-range strike, which they will use or that they have used in the past with LRA bombers or even naval assets.

to launch on parts of eastern Syria. So that's going to be a constraint now because they're using all of that capacity for Ukraine. Russia's ground game in Syria was heavily subsidized towards the end by Wagner, and Wagner has gone through a dramatic reorganization, let's call it. They've gone through some things. Some leadership changes at the top.

There's been critique in the last week that peeling Wagner out of Syria or how it was managed there and they were sent off to parts in Africa, parts of them are hanging out in Belarus or wherever they are.

It's left Russia with kind of a weakened ground game in Syria, and they're going to have to do some scrambling. I don't find that the Russians are overextended at this point, but I'll tell you my canary in the coal mine is if it's going really bad for Russia, I will know that because they will reanimate Suravikin out of his exile in Algeria.

He was credited with salvaging the operation in Syria when it wasn't going particularly well. And he has a lot of connections there. But of course, you know, he's in exile. He's on the naughty list. If we see him reanimate in some way, that to me is the real signpost that the Russians are very worried about Syria. And so far, they're not doing it. They popped in another commander who was relieved in Ukraine, and he's in Syria now, General Chaikov.

I don't want to get out ahead of rapidly unfolding events on the ground, but so far, I don't know that they were flat-footed. My experience is that the Russians always kind of had a head up. They had ground intel game there, and they always were maybe slightly ahead of us on developments on the ground. So I just want to caution, we don't know what we don't know yet. Darren, maybe a final question to sort of pivot to sort of looking ahead to 2025.

you mentioned the the piece that you wrote beginning of 2024 2023 about what ukraine should do next

What do you think Ukraine should do? What should their military strategy be as we look into 2025? I mean, it seems like we have another crucial question of whether U.S. security assistance will continue at all, if not at the same pace that it's been provided to this point. Whether there'll be another supplemental strikes me as another big X factor. It doesn't seem like Ukraine can just simply wait around for that. So what, you know, if you're writing that piece again, which I hope you're writing, what's

what's in it what do you think Ukraine should be doing as it looks ahead and how do you see 2025 playing out

They're doing the things that I would recommend on the weapons side of the house. So there's a lot of investment in drones and other capabilities, remote capabilities like that. They're moving forward with their own organic missile systems development. Those are the two things that I would have recommended and they're already doing them. I think the Department of Defense has also made an $800 million investment into Ukraine's drone industry to really bump up the production capacity. So that's the right move.

The manpower question, again, this is my opinion based on the things that we were told. There is a way to fix it, but the people are no longer interested in joining a war where they feel like they're just going to be sent into like a meat assault to the extent where there are commanders that have that reputation at any echelon that there really needs to be an adjustment there. I did not see a collapse in the will to fight, but there is a serious problem, um,

with just having enough of being given unworkable orders or holding something beyond their capacity, whether that's outright desertion or deserting to a better unit.

These are serious issues that need to be addressed. And that trust relationship between the people and the military, I think, does need some maintenance. But it is possible. I did not see anyone changing their mind about what the stakes of this war are. They know the stakes are very serious. There is a potential here. But I don't think at this point, based on what I heard on the manpower challenges, the command problems,

challenges, particularly at platoon, company and battalion, that they're really in a place to lead offensive operations right now. There's a lot of shoring up that they need to do just to hold. I think it seems like the difficulty that Ukraine has just listening to you is sort of the transition from going from a Soviet military to a small D democratic military where people want to fight but also need to be led and make sure that their lives aren't just being thrown away. So hopefully Ukraine can make that transition

Dara, we're gonna have to leave it there. This has been, as usual, a fantastic conversation. Thank you for joining us. And if you haven't already, to our listeners, please subscribe to our show and give us a five-star rating. Additionally, be sure to check out our sister podcast, The Eurofile, wherever you get your podcasts. Dara, thanks again for joining us, and we'll see you all next time. Thanks for having me. You've been listening to Russian Roulette. We hope you enjoyed this episode and tune in again soon.

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