So a year-on-year increase in attacks on civilians and the death toll from those attacks was Why do you see Russia pursuing that strategy now, and do you think it will have the desired effect?

The strategic bombardment campaign, Russia's been prosecuting it from the very beginning, but it started in earnest in fall of 2022, if you all remember.

Back then, it looked differently, and the Russians, frankly, had neither the means nor the experience on how to execute a strike campaign of this type.

Unfortunately, over the last four years, Not only did they learn, but also they significantly ramped up production of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, new types of light cruise missiles, and one-way tag drones.

And one-way tag drone production went up exponentially.

And then this year, they shifted very rapidly.

And I will add...

Have they solved that problem? Or are there other choke points that each side should be concerned about when it comes to their military capacity?

But you have to do a lot of that over years to see how those moving pieces all fit together.

So first, in the context of Russian framework, it's clear that because mass precision has this effect on the battlefield, you need to have a clear-cut plan of how you're going to set the conditions for any kind of offensive ground operation.

And that means that You have to have thought through, how are you going to suppress enemy drone units? How are you going to penetrate far enough, fast enough, X number of kilometers to displace them? Because if you haven't displaced them, There is no way to sustain offensive operation.

Your force will not have control of anything on the ground through their presence.

They'll be hiding, trying to survive.

You will have very little prospect for logistically sustaining them.

They will close the corridor behind you, okay? And your offensive will basically be a crawl.

But

But you have to do a lot of that over years to see how those moving pieces all fit together.

So first, in the context of Russian framework, it's clear that because mass precision has this effect on the battlefield, you need to have a clear-cut plan of how you're going to set the conditions for any kind of offensive ground operation.

And that means that You have to have thought through, how are you going to suppress enemy drone units? How are you going to penetrate far enough, fast enough, X number of kilometers to displace them? Because if you haven't displaced them, There is no way to sustain offensive operation.

Your force will not have control of anything on the ground through their presence.

They'll be hiding, trying to survive.

You will have very little prospect for logistically sustaining them.

They will close the corridor behind you, okay? And your offensive will basically be a crawl.

But

So I want you, as from a perspective of an expert, if you could explain to average people, to what extent has our concept of warfare or how warfare is conducted changed from early 22 to today? What is it that's dramatically different and what is it that is not dramatically

different? Okay, so it's important to separate in this conversation what changed in a specific war that you're watching, like the Russia-Ukraine war, versus to what extent is the character of war changing, which is an open-ended question and often a debate.

Why? Every war has its own context.

Something that you may have seen perform really well in one war doesn't mean it's going to be a big factor in another one.

I'll give you an example, Nagorno-Karabakh 2020.

The Turkish Bayraktar TB2 combined with Israeli drones proved decisive in that war, right? That's a fair assessment.

Ukraine procured 48 TB2 Bayraktars.

And what does that mean that the war ends? What is it that they know that others wouldn't because of this experience? And how would they, is this, if let's say the war ends today, are there a greater military force or are they a lesser military force than they were then?

Does any of this really change the situation? I know it's not-- We've talked before many times about how this isn't just about territorial exchanges, but no breakthroughs here, no new axes, no new pockets, I'm, it's fair to say.

I think it's important to address the underlying dynamic, which is first that Ukraine this year has had a slow-moving, also crawling offensive since early February in Zaporizhzhia, and that Zaporizhzhia is one region of Ukraine where both Russia and Ukraine are prosecuting offensive operations.

Second, Ukrainian forces under Third Corps stabilized the situation around Lyman as well.

And so the difference between this year in twenty twenty-five and twenty twenty-four is actually the battlefield's more fluid rather than the common perception of it that is static.

And secondly, that both sides have been trying to find a way to break through, at least at a localized level, and to return some mobility to the battlefield.

Uh, lastly, that there aren't these big shifts, and territory is hard to count because how much territory you think Ukraine gained in this offensive really depends on whether or not you counted that territory as a gray area that nobody controlled or you gave it to the Russians.

You know, because a lot of times amongst analysts, we understand that presence doesn't confer control, and so even last month we were debating with colleagues, did Russia take one hundred square kilometers or one hundred and fifty or barely fifty? You know, these are narcissism small differences.

But what do you think about this in terms of how it affects the battlefield and national strategy for Ukraine?

[laughs]

Every three to four months, there is a consistent rate of tactical innovation and adaptation between the two sides in this war, and that cycle's around three to four months.

So what it's like actually changes at that rate.

If you follow this war, at the beginning, it was a classic conventional conflict being fought by two militaries that were a successor to the Soviet military, which was fundamentally an artillery army oriented around fires and strike capabilities.

And then that was made effective via drones, but decisive advantage in artillery was the driving factor through a lot of '22 and into 2023, and then became much less so.

And then over time, this became a war much more based around drone capabilities and the ability of drones themselves to deny mobility, deny maneuver, in combination with prepared defenses, with minefields, with traditional artillery.

And by 2024, you saw really drones emerge as the driving engine of the war and the main form of fire support.

In millions, in millions, you say?

Again, I don't see a military advantage in this other than terrorizing the Ukrainian population.

No, yeah, go on.

So let's unpack this a bit.

We talked about this back in the, if you recall, that one of the main issues that I was flagging then was my concern that Ukraine's main vulnerability was not what's happening at the front line.

It was critical infrastructure and the looming winter.

And the fact that the Russian strike campaign over the years had done cumulative damage, right, and folks have a tendency to have survivorship bias because Ukraine's very resilient.

And with Western, Hellop has kept adapting to Russian strikes.

And How have they affected the war's trajectory? And then following up on that, what kind of staying power do you expect them to have? Can we have Fedorovism without Fedorov?

So could you comment on both of those issues?

On the change in military leadership, so you had the dismissal of Fedorov as the Minister of Defense, which went very poorly, and Ukrainian public is still out protesting in the streets demanding his return.

Then the dismissal of the previous commander in chief, Syrskyi, and replacement of his by Mykhailo Drapaty.

I, I will offer just my own personal point of view.

First, um, Fedorov wasn't just a popular minister presiding over the last six months of success.

He was previously minister for, uh, digital transformation, which with, uh, an attendant team was responsible for many of key technologies, initiatives that I think, uh, helped enable Ukraine's success over the past several years.

I won't personally credit him with these things.

Um, I mean, do you agree with that observation?

Do you have any thoughts on that?

I do.

And I think, on the one hand, I don't like overly personalizing things where it's just dependent on Fedorov or it's just dependent on Sersky right there.

Any war is the work of many hands, right? There's lots of folks involved in this, whether it's in the Ukrainian military or the Ministry of Defense.

So I think it's personalized where we have a couple of people and we're focused on these personalities.

I do.

So I'll be very upfront.

Do you expect any change in terms of Ukrainian operational priorities or their strategy in and around the front with this? And again, understanding that it's going to be a couple weeks, maybe a few months before it all shakes out.

They don't know when a drone's gonna hit something.

For a long time, Russians have basically been able to largely ignore the war.

If you wanted to fight in this war, you could take a contract and sign up, and if you didn't, you didn't have to.

After the initial partial mobilization wave, pretty much everyone else was contracted, and most Russians could largely go on with their lives kind of generally annoyed but ignoring the war.

When Ukraine has started to bring the war to Russia, the challenge politically is that Putin doesn't really care much of what average Russians think.

If he did, he would have never started this war, and we wouldn't be in it five years in.

He doesn't seem to care nearly as much what the Russian elite thinks either because they too have paid a significant price for this war, and most of them I don't think very much support it, although they've adapted to making money one way or another off of defense spending and sort of have realigned their revenue streams over the course of this war.

But what is stalling in the Russian system of innovation? Because I think she made a great point about that there, it just doesn't seem to be existing anymore on the Russian side.

Do you think there's a public fear in Ukraine that the state may be backsliding, that it may be turning back into something that people hoped they had got away from, by which I mean basically a kind of an institutionalized and corrupt state?

I think there's always a concern in Ukraine that the Administration and political landscape might undergo a period of recidivism and, as you said, backslide.

That was the case last year that drew people out to protest the attempt to remove independence of the NABU court.

And I think while this is a different case, nonetheless, a very similar segment of the Ukrainian society is vested in seeing progress rather than seeing the administration and vested political interests essentially regress.

How might it change the future of the war?

I don't think there will be an immediate effect.

However, Fedorov had a clear vision and a theory of success.

He had made considerable investments in procurement of drones, in enabling key drone units, establishing performance metrics, and he was a big part of what had led Ukrainian forces to essentially turn the tide of the war over the last six months or so.

Windmill, modern air care, your room deserves.

What can I add? I think there's a couple areas where you see military developments creating friction for the cops based around speed.

Speed makes sense, right? Because as we talk about often on this podcast, we're very much bought into maneuver warfare and part of that is both displacement of enemy forces and cognitive displacement and to some extent overwhelming the opponent by speed of action and the fact that they have to react and essentially then can't manage the battle space.

I think technology has created friction for us at the tactical level when it comes to ground warfare.

First, mass precision has basically created such a saturation of sensors and strike capabilities on the battlefield that in the close-in fight, it is very difficult to achieve surprise.

It is difficult to mass forces.

It is difficult to advance with those forces without taking very high levels of attrition.

And I think we can have one that will, I think, be beneficial for both U.S. and Europe in terms of rebalancing the transatlantic relationship.

Is there any hopes that as, uh, the war in Middle East winds down, maybe there will be some kind of ceasefire or a peace treaty, that the West, particularly United States, could increase its pressure against Russia again?

Well, first, uh, I too am optimistic that we will actually get, uh, this deal locked in with Iran.

Um, I don't know if it'll settle issues in the region because it's one thing for the United States to make an agreement with Iran, it's another thing for the other Gulf countries and for Israel to, to make those deals and stick to it too.

But this is less my area of expertise.

I think the US has so far eased off the pressure for negotiations from both Russia and Ukraine.

It's not clear if there's going to be another, uh, round of political involvement from the United States over the course of the summer prior to our own midterm elections.

It's quite likely that we are going to get distracted by our own political processes come fall, and it's not immediately obvious that nes- that Ukrainians necessarily want it.

At this point when it ends, uh, will we see Russia with a stronger and more dangerous military force, or on the, on the contrary, with an army that will need years to rebuild itself?

That's the main point.

Yeah, I have it.

It showed up in your Madura's Dead book.

It showed up like two days ago at my house.

Okay, so what I was saying was Usually what happens, the military naturally finds Tukashevsky's ideas more attractive.

Very naturally, because it sounds like the way you want to fight.

It's sexy.

imagine.

Can you talk to us for a minute and, and tell our listeners how you operate and how that helps you understand what's actually happening, how you can develop the kind of judgment you just laid out?

The way I've been doing it is trying to go to Ukraine about every three, three and a half months because the, uh, situation, the dynamic between the Russian-Ukrainian forces, tactics, technology tend to evolve at that rate.

And so it's good to be there with some frequency so that you maintain currency on where the war is going, what's been happening, but also not going there too often either, because it takes time to collect information, to make sense of it, and so you don't want to be constantly present there either.

Plus, wars have a tendency to suck you in, so if you're there a lot, you start to kind of get drawn to the actual fieldwork and analysis even more, and it is quite dan- it is quite dangerous.

And it's only gotten more dangerous over time.

A lot of things I used to be able to do-22, 2023, 2024, you can't do now at the front lines.

The drone engagement zone has expanded so much that what would've been relatively safe or let's say slightly risky back then now is very dangerous in, along parts of the front.

Do you agree with that? Uh, do you think that the Russians actually are feeling a degree of pressure now that will lead them to change their view about what the out- an outcome of the war that they would agree to would look like?

What do you think are some of the key challenges, misconceptions that have driven some failure, not just in drone companies, but other, uh, other American companies trying to field and test useful kit in Ukraine?

It's a hard story.

And, and look, there are success stories there, right? And I do think there are plenty of companies that do actually go to Ukraine, test their kit, and try to work on ways to improve it, okay? But I, I would say there's probably three broad categories of, of challenges.

There's, you know, the inexperience problem, there's implementation, and then there's what I call failure by design.

The first is inexperienced folks show up to Ukraine.

They don't know who to work with as a local partner.

What unit do you give your kit to? How, okay, do you give it to them? Who do you work for? How to work the bureaucracy.

What do you think are the lessons of Ukraine that, that may not apply to what the contingencies we were looking at, and where do those industrial solutions differ?

And the reason this is so important is you don't just wanna be able to range troops at and near the front, but you wanna be able to hit their logistics nodes where their reserves are gathering, camps in the, in the rear area, and that's what filling that donut hole allows them to do.

Right.

Right.

The big challenge that Ukraine had is that Russian forces disperse at the front line.

So the, the amount of capabilities you expend to get at anything at the front line is very substantial.

A lot of people, I think, have the wrong impression.

They believe because they see on videos posted of drone strikes, one FPV, one first-person view drone hits a soldier and kills that soldier.

How will the war in Iran affect the Russia-Ukrainian war? How is it already happening? How do you expect that to continue to develop if the war with Iran drags on longer?

The Russian economy is stuck in what might be described as negative equilibrium, holding itself together while steadily destroying its own future capacity." She's essentially noting that Russia's growth i- is completely defense sector driven at this point, so what incentive, i- in your view, does Vladimir Putin have in ending this war i- if there will be severe repercussions in having to realign, uh, economic investments once the war ends?

So while the Russian economy and Russian elite have adapted to this war now since we're marking this grim four-year anniversary, or for many Ukrainians, a 12-year anniversary, the reality is that after the war, the Russian military is likely to continue to benefit from substantial defense spending.

Russia may pass a very large state arming program later this summer, and the Russian, uh, s- government is going to keep spending on its military, maybe not the same share of GDP and government spending that they do right now.

Currently, Russia spends almost 40% of the government budget on the military and maybe 8% of the GDP.

I do agree with Sasha Prokopenko, the Russian economy is currently facing economic stagnation, uh, a whole host of budget deficits across the regions, a growing deficit in the government, and low oil prices, and it has to offer substantial discounts for the sale of its oil due to pressure from sanctions.

And so most of the indicators for the Russian economy are negative.

That said, it's not clear that any of these effects are taking place fast enough for Ukraine.

Uh, how significant is that for him?

Because the training had gone so poorly, the perception was, in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Yeah, I think the view was that, you know, our advanced capabilities would take a long time for Ukraine to absorb, but the truth is that Ukrainian personnel, who already had fairly capable Soviet systems, were transitioning from, let's say, Soviet-type artillery or Soviet-type air defense to our type air defense, wouldn't take nearly as long.

This was an institutionalized military with folks that had a pretty good technical background and would be able to pick that up a lot faster than, than many people in the US military expected.

And, you know, but when you look at that back then, there were certain assumptions about it that was hard to argue because the practitioners, if they tell you it takes a certain amount of months to learn to use something, who are you to tell them that they're wrong and actually takes less time than the person using it thinks it will? Until you see that in practice, right? You, as an analyst, are not well positioned to go debate with a person who's actually, uh, practiced with it.

I do think that the main criticism you can levy the United States and other Western countries is that throughout the war, a number of capabilities we deployed-... first, not at scale where they could make their greatest impact, but essentially trickle onto the battlefield in smaller numbers.

And secondarily, often poorly timed with Ukrainian offensive and defensive operations, right? For example, attack capabilities were deployed after Ukraine's summer 2023 offensive instead of before it, so they could deploy it against Russian rotary aviation or other capabilities that Russia had that were relevant to that operation.

And so there are a number of these decisions that were made.

But as you look at the kind of territorial dimension of this, what do you see as the, the right things to focus on?

Can Russia keep going indefinitely, and could any military or economic, uh, pressure on Putin, uh, get him to change course?

So I think the first challenge for Russia is ultimately economic sustainability of the war, which is that Russian economy is facing a period of stagnation now.

Energy prices are low, and Russia faces increasing pressure from sanctions and constraints on shadow fleet of tankers that it uses to export its energy.

The second one is increasingly the Russian military effort is also reaching a degree of diminishing returns, right? They're taking heavy casualties relative to recruitment.

They are bombarding Ukraine heavily, and you see a strong focus on Ukraine's energy infrastructure this winter.

It's a particularly cold winter compared to the last two.

But if Ukrainian will doesn't break as we get into the spring, what next? The real challenge that Russia has, from my point of view-...

Mike Kofman, can Europe do this without US support? Does Europe have a choice?