Command and Politics in the War Between Moscow and Kyiv

you are listening to the war on the rocks podcast on strategy defense and foreign affairs my name is ryan evans i'm the founder of war on the rocks this episode is essential listening if you care about what's happening in the war between russia and ukraine we cover a lot of ground with our stellar guests dara massico and mike kaufman both of the carnegie endowment for international peace this episode is brought to you by nota the original platform and hardware agnostic autonomy orchestrator operationally deployed tactically trained and architecturally distinct from every other layer in the autonomy stack nota doesn't build platforms or their autonomy it puts them to work find out more at war on the rocks.com slash nota that's n-o-d-a in the middle of this episode i have a bit of a conversation that i think you'll really enjoy with nota's chief technology officer enjoy the show you guys came back from ukraine you know fairly recently a few weeks back have a great episode of the russian contingency that just came out that we'll run a clip from but overall what were your sort of big impressions and learning points if just very brief one minute answers basically i came back believing that overall ukraine's in the best position it's been in this war since 2023 things on the front in a lot of areas are stable except for the donbass on some areas the front's more dynamic where ukraine's actually prosecuting offensive operations kind of a swimming crawling offensive got some insights on the success of the middle strike campaign interdicting russian logistics and while it's definitely had a significant effect in suppressing russia's offensive potential i think it's also clear that by itself it's not going to stop the russian offensive or lead to some kind of collapses in russian lines either depending on how things go and whether it can be scaled up and i think lastly uh ukraine's main issue heading into the fall winter is not the situation at the front line although there's a couple months of intense fighting ahead it's the air and missile defense situation and the fact that the russian ballistic missile threat continues to grow and the deficit of interceptors for ukrainian missile defense is the leading problem and there's no obvious solution to it ahead of the winter that's the one thing ukraine has to deal with and for me i was just comparing the podcast that we did with you ryan about a month ago and some things that stood out to me that i i think we didn't get wrong but there's just additional details that give nuance to it was about russian combat effect i think it's really important to take into account the fact that the russians are using russia's air and missile defense as a means of countering the russian invasion of ukraine and i think it's important to take into account the fact that the russians are using russia's air and missile defense as a means of countering the russian invasion of ukraine and i think we had spoken about how their tactics really haven't changed but when you go there you see that they're constantly trying to adapt and come up with new ways to reintroduce armor into the battlefield and their new tactics don't necessarily succeed but that they're trying to learn secondly we had some you know seeing russian performance through the ukrainian eyes helps me understand how pervasive or not certain phenomenon is inside the russian military like the extent of hazing and what does it actually mean for battlefield outcomes you know the problem is present but it's not causing the russians to break down or lose the ability to fight and they push on the ukrainians every day so it's just really good to get additional nuance and perspective another week of the war in ukraine and claims from kiev and moscow about territory taken versus territory loss you know ukraine it seems taken some about 700 square kilometers of settlements back russia claims to have taken some territory back 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 it's fair to say i think it's important to address underlying dynamic which is first that ukraine this year has had a slow-moving also crawling offensive since early february in zap russian that zap russia is one region of ukraine with both russia and ukraine are prosecuting offensive operations second ukrainian forces under third course stabilized association around liman as well and so the difference between this year in 2025 and 2024 is actually the battlefield is more fluid rather than the common perception of it that is static and secondarily 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 agraria 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 100 square kilometers or 150 or barely 50. you know these are not small differences but the bottom line remains that this year ukraine is not just prosecuting a passive or active defense there are some areas where they do have slow-moving offensive movements and also that despite the common perception that this is a static battlefield it is not it's actually if anything becoming a bit more open for both sides that being said neither ukraine and russian force have found any way to attain operationally significant breakthroughs at least so far but you know there are there are a few problem spots too and when we're talking about the distances that are left in donetsk russia is clearly prioritizing that sector they always have but when we were there there has been a recent mutation of a significant number of russian combined arms army elements into that region to push hard drones have really surged in the last month on both sides but especially the russian sides is making things a little difficult and the distances that we're talking about right now the russians are getting closer to the main conglomeration at kramatorsk and sloviansk and what that means for those two cities is before they didn't necessarily have fiber optic drones patrolling the streets looking for targets and now that's happening in kramatorsk the russians think of it as the russians are like coming up a few critical roads and they're fighting in konstaka and drushkivka and then krematorsk is like the next one so you know there is a change i i would argue that it's worsened a bit since even we were there in some of those cities in donetsk but again there's there's a lot of defensive assets in that region and russia is not going to make their year-end goals or whatever goals they have for that region they just won't do it and of course each side is still trying to assault each other through the air ukraine launched one of the largest drone assaults in the history of the war from its side anyway i think it was over 600 drones at moscow region itself a couple hundred elsewhere and then of course mikey brought up their defense issue russia continues to pound ukraine with drones and cruise missiles and that might even get worse i think russia and ukraine both have slightly different strategies when it comes to the strategic strike campaigns they are prosecuting ukraine's been focused on working the russian economy targeting fuel refining to create a crisis in in terms of fuel access in russia this summer targeting energy export infrastructure to suppress russia's ability to export oil and targeting russia's defense industry keynotes when it comes to russian missile production on the russian side the russian campaign has you're right in part simply targets civilian infrastructure in order to create pressure and drive population out of cities but also seasonally in spring usually spring to summer goes after ukraine's defense industry and goes after ukraine's ports export ports odessa and the port yeah we'll talk we'll talk about that in a minute and then by end of summer as we just get into the fall switches to energy infrastructure electricity generation transmission gas for home heating and both sides have inflicted inflicted considerable amounts of cumulative damage on each other's now that's one of the challenges ukraine has is that the amount of damage was stacked from russia's strike campaigns on its energy sector lastly so for ukraine that strike campaign is one pillar of the strategy that the federal of the foreign ministry of defense had stabilize the ground fix air and missile defense situation inside the country and then work the russian economy in order to compel russia towards the end of the war so this is a really big challenge for russia and it's a really big challenge for russia and it's a really big challenge for russia and it's an element unacceptable term for russia increasingly the challenge they have is as the offensive and this is probably their worst offensive year since 2022 increasingly they are relying on the bombardment campaign and the challenge that you alluded to is that bombardment strike campaigns have a very poor track record of achieving any kind of maximalist wariums especially if you're not doing that well when it comes to ground operations as we ourselves recently found out in the iran war you can get some maximalist political wariums like you want somebody to give up territory for you you want them to make major national concessions the historical track record of just bombarding people into doing that is very poor so let's dig into this dueling campaign in the black sea we've seen ukraine successfully hitting oil export terminals in nova russia confess the audience i'm never going to get these pronunciations right not a part of the world whose languages i've ever studied and the only languages i have studied i've done so very poorly but anyway they've hit oil all three i believe uh shut down oil terminals there shut down temporarily at least for russia and then the russians of course are waging this brutal assault against black sea ports effects especially grain exports which as the latest figure is if you compare the first two weeks of august this year to last year down 76 percent their grain exports which is no small thing although it is just two weeks do you think that this tit for tat mutual hurting campaign in the black sea is worth the squeeze well if we do the chronology of this you know this is not the first time that this has happened but just to speak a little bit about this year remember the early black sea sea grain deal it feels like ages ago feels like 10 years ago i know so at first there were strikes on russian ships in the sea of azov because that's pretty much only russian maritime assets there and then it expanded to the black sea when it expanded the russians responded in kind by hitting odessa and i think if we were to explain this what's happening here there are many different actors in ukraine who are empowered to do strikes and one of the great things about the ukrainian system that is a big problem for the russians to deal with is how decentralized decision making is and people are empowered at different levels in different places And they launched these campaigns. Now, the flip side of that is, you know, usually at sort of a higher national level, you can make this kind of preparations for, well, if we're if we're going to start this campaign against Russian grain assets, there's a chance that they could retaliate. And Odessa is running low on cruise and ballistic missile defenses. So what are we going to do about this in advance? That I don't think what I think it was because of the decentralization that that maybe wasn't like layered together in the right way. But my philosophy is this, is that Russia has a target set, right? They're they're going to launch bombs and hurt Ukraine. It's just a matter of are we going to reallocate these targets now and retaliate against the grain ships? And the damage to Ukraine in the aggregate is the same. But now they've just reallocated against grain exports. And it is causing real economic damage. But I think I see some commentary sometimes that like, oh, the Ukrainians, they brought this damage on themselves by going after the Russians first. And it's like, well, the Russians are going to hurt them anyway. Yeah. You know, it's, you know, a target of opportunity. The Russians have a bumper crop this year of grain. And, you know, the Ukrainians are trying to knock that down to. And I believe the Ukrainians proposed a new sort of deal on Black Sea stuff that the Russians haven't responded to. So. Yeah, it's. Yeah. So, you know, we're in this cycle until it moves on to something else. Just to hit that point, because I think it's a really important one that you made about how horizontally organized they are. And it's one we've talked about since early in the war. I mean, just I'll tell a quick storytelling. First year of the war, Mike and I and Franz and a few other people went to Ukraine. It was your first field study. My last. I said, I'll go back when the victory parade happens. But it was fascinating. Mike, you'll remember talking to one of their lead special operators at the time about the early days in the war. And our listeners will remember how Russian forces got bogged down coming in from Belarus from the north, which is a very wet area of Ukraine. A lot of water obstacles, a lot of dams, a lot of bridges. And these special forces units took it upon themselves to blow up these dams. And bridges. They had no instructions. They had no orders to do so. And it ended up possibly saving Kyiv. So there are some great sides of this, but there are also some troubling sides of this when you're trying to actually do national strategy, which translates down and often oftentimes to the to the strike level. So what a lot of folks don't appreciate is that in Ukraine, the amount of operational fires that are found out the battalion level across different parts of the war, the force is immense. And in our system, that would be quite unusual where a core formation. The regiment will have battalions with operational depth fires. The brigade might be experimenting with it. Unmanned system force in Ukraine will have several regiments and units, all of them doing that as well. One battalion could be responsible for a lot of the anti-shipping strikes. And in fact, that is the case in one brigade and unmanned systems forces. And on top of that, all Ukrainian special forces are also engaging in these deep strike campaigns or in operational fires, whether it's HUR or SPU Alpha. And so the amount of coordination just required to try to pull that together is significant. Because in Western forces, you don't normally see a lot of regular formations of battalions having fires with that depth of reach and precision that you would have to coordinate and deconflict. We're going to take a quick break from this episode to talk about a company building mission command for autonomous forces, Noda AI. Before I turn it over to Ken Hampshire, my friend, who's the CTO of Noda, let me explain what that means. Mission command is when a commander tells the forces working under him or her, here's the mission. Here's what you need to accomplish. Now make it happen under these constraints. So keep the invasion fleet from reaching Taiwan's beaches for the next 18 hours. Stop those vehicles from crossing that bridge. Fort missile launches in this area. And then the commander sets constraints. Preserve enough combat power to do it again tomorrow. Don't hit targets in this other area. Protect these assets. Stay within these boundaries. Don't reveal these capabilities yet. Then the commander says go and the units underneath that commander figure out how. Adapting as circumstances change. Understanding the intent. Noda AI. Has built the software version of that for autonomous forces. So instead of thousands of machines carrying out disconnected tactical tasks, connected only to operators, they start behaving like an organization. They are autonomous. They serve the broader operation and strategy. That's the leap. You're not just commanding individual autonomous machines. You're exercising mission command over an autonomous force. And Ken is going to tell us how Noda AI has built this. So I think what makes us different is a very clear focus on baking in some of the doctrinal principles. That we know from experience that already work. So these are things like, of course, agentic AI and workflows and augmenting those things is becoming relatively easy to do in many contexts, but keeping a focus on implementing those things with forethought to commander's intent to not giving robots tasks or treating them as optimization problems, letting some of the underlying mechanisms do that, but focusing on the high level of achieving what I want through effects. A lot of that is baked into our product based upon our experience as joint terminal attack controllers and. So with Noda, what we're trying to do there then is to say, if the tank kind of came in World War One, but it wasn't used operationally because it maybe some of the technical innovations were there, it didn't have radio, there wasn't any coherent doctrine on how to achieve operational effects with it. I think it's a nice analogy because what we're essentially saying is we're not in the platform game. We're not in the hardware game. We're in the software game and we want to stitch all these autonomous systems together to do exactly that and achieve our operational effects and achieve breakthroughs and not focusing strictly on the tactical. When you. I've served as one of these fire controllers, and then you see the architecture and the principles baked into it. Like, oh, I understand this immediately. I understand this intuitively. I think you're building it from the beginning the right way and not having to change it after the fact. The relevance kind of focus on software and not building any hardware, I think really does unlock the vendor agnosticism tying it back to the Ukrainian example in the drone warfare there. There's this whole layer people are getting very good at vertical autonomy stacks, but who's moving across the vertical stacks and doing the horizontal autonomy. So stitching together the best of three, so to speak from C2 systems or mission autonomy stacks. And platform is synchronizing it all as desperately needed. And it's a familiar problem. Directionally, the technology that the company is building excited me as well. It's a very clear gap that will unlock linking the tactical to operational level effects. Thank you so much. And now back to the show. But check out warntherocks.com/noda, N-O-D-A to learn more. Next, I want to touch on politics. So we've talked before about the firing of Minister of Defense Fedorov, who was a very close to Lenski. He was a very close ally going back many years, widely viewed as extremely competent, butted heads with Sersky. But I think that was a good thing. I think there's very few people who admire Sersky for his leadership qualities and strategic thinking. His nickname among Ukrainian troops has always been the butcher, not because he kills lots of Russians, because he gets lots of Ukrainians killed. So Fedorov and Sersky didn't get along very well. To recap for our listeners, Zelensky fired Fedorov, claiming it was rooted in this issue of him not getting along well with Sersky. There were massive protests across the country. Fedorov was such a popular figure and remains a popular figure. Sersky gets fired due to the pressure. Fedorov does not get reappointed Minister of Defense. Someone else just did. Anyway, Fedorov came out and said that he thinks there should be elections sooner before the end of the war. He also attacked one of Zelensky's closest political allies, accusing him essentially of corruption in the defense space. And this seems to me another example of how bad Zelensky is at politics. There's a lot of things to admire about Zelensky, his decision and statement to say, I don't need a ride. I need munitions. Was one of the early in the war when he was offered a chance to leave when he was under assault was one of the most heroic and important things that happened in the war. And there's a lot I do admire about the guy, but he makes consistently bad political decisions, whether it was closing the anti-corruption offices. We all remember how that worked out, whether it was this and now he seems to create a massive political problem for himself by firing a popular minister. I think because someone close to Zelensky, Ryan's opinion, wasn't getting a taste of the corruption system. You guys don't need to comment on all this. I know that you guys have to maintain this. You guys have to maintain more relationships in Ukraine than I do, but what do you think about this in terms of how it affects the battlefield and national strategy for Ukraine? I mean, I think it's unfortunate and unnecessary and I thought that this decision, the only part aside from it is that the protests then forced Zelensky to fire Sersky and replace him with Mikhail Chapade, who I think would be a much better commander in chief. The ideal scenario would have been somebody like Chapade working together with Fedorov, I think a lot depends on whether Fedorov's team stays or doesn't. I think the ideal scenario would have been Fedorov, I think a lot depends on whether Fedorov's team stays or doesn't. I'm not sure what's going to happen now in Ukraine. I think the assumption that Zelensky had, the reason that this cabinet reshuffled, was that there would be no elections this year for sure. And if anything was going to happen, it might be next year. And I do agree with your role take. In fact, Ukrainska Pravda, which is often seen as having an opposing view to the presidential administration, had extensive coverage that a lot of this also had to do with contracting, with money, and with Fedorov overseeing the defense budget, particularly procurement, in a way that was inimical to vested interests. And that while he might have been fired, because of the conflict with Sersky as the proximate cause, it is not necessarily the primary cause for why he was removed. So I'll offer some reactions as an American in Kyiv, in other parts of Ukraine, while this was all going on. And I'm the foreigner at the table, and all of this is seeming confusing to me, right? Like the war is going well, Fedorov is getting things done, he's getting contracts through, he has a relationship with Elon Musk, which is critical in many operational strategic ways for the war and the use of Starlink. But that's the world we live in, but yes. I know, but it is a capability that has been very useful for Ukraine, and it was very useful for Russia to be removed from having that capacity. capacity. And, you know, so he's working that relationship, getting results. And then all of this happens, right? Like the Ukrainians and the Trump administration were probably in their best status that they've been in. Like, you know, and I'm sitting here as a foreigner, like this doesn't make any sense to me. And Mike understands perfectly because he's Ukrainian American. So when we're all at the table together and I'm the only foreigner, everyone is like, Dasha, you have to understand, OK, like we are not comfortable when things are going too well. And so then we have to like make problems for ourselves. And Mike understands as he's laughing along with them, you know, they're explaining to me, but there was a sense of disappointment. Yes, we expected better, but it turned out as usual, old saying. But I think where we go from here is the new team has to be empowered, right? Like Drapati has to be empowered. There's some chit chat here and there that maybe his personnel reshuffling is not going through on time, trying to sort through that. You know, it's just this is this is the fighting season in Ukraine. So for this to happen in the middle of the summer when the Russians are pushing as hard as possible, the timing is terrible. The timing is terrible to fire Fedorov and then send Zelenskyy two weeks later to Washington, D.C., to ask Elon Musk for Starlink over Russia when you've just eliminated the strongest link that you had. Just the timing is terrible. And it's it's domestic politics. And again, I am so thankful that I am a military expert because, you know, I can understand tanks and artillery. I don't understand human beings that operate at that level. So I think you're selling yourself a little short. No, you have to make it. You have to sort yourself into a bin like like Harry Potter. Like you have to sort yourself into a school. And I sorted into military stuff. I still refuse to read those books. Me, too. But in general, I have seen the movies. But still, yeah, very confusing time as a foreigner. So I'm glad that, you know, Mike was there to make the cultural bridge. I will say it is very Eastern European. Things are going too well. Something had to go wrong. You know, that's just kind of a cultural thing. I also thought things were going way too well this summer and I was wondering what's going to happen. And I think that all of this is a self-created. Problem. It is a completely unnecessary situation that has consumed Ukrainian politics. And I hope good will come out of it after a period of transition. Once Tripoli replaces Serbian general staff and other people, I hope that we're actually going to come out with still a better war effort overall in the medium term. Let's talk about Ukraine's new top commander. Who is he? What's his background? What has he been doing throughout the war? What was his military career like before the war? I'll tackle it briefly because I've known Mikhail Tripoli over the years. So he's a well-known commander. He was a young officer back when the war started in 2014. He's known for some feats during the initial fighting in 2014 and the battle around Mariupol. He has basically shown himself, I think, as a pretty good commander through the different positions he's had. If we fast forward to this war in 2022, Tripoli has done a pretty good job in some of the worst, most problematic parts of the front. He ended up taking over defense of Kharkiv during the Russian offensive in summer of 24 and then took over the entire command of the front in Khortytsia afterwards, which was most of the front line back in latter part 24. He also was land forces commander briefly and was supportive of some of the better initiatives like Lion and Jones, although not necessarily responsible for him. And in general, he is seen as someone who's decent, someone who has integrity, somebody who values peace. He's a very good commander. For lack of a better word, this is cliche, but Western approach to things in a sense that he believes in mission command. He believes in delegation. He believes in empowering subordinates rather than micromanagement and rather than telling everyone what to do and how to do it. It's a very different style personality wise. Well, but how does that track? It seems like that's intentional with what we talked about earlier is the horizontal organization of Ukraine. Wouldn't that inherently involve mission command? No. So here's the challenge. Unfortunately, Ukraine had inherited the system of just brigades, kind of useless operational commands above them. And then micromanagement by general staff on Sersky came in. And the joke used to be in Ukraine that Ukraine has a large force, but only one battalion commander full of its battalions and then Sersky because Sersky tried to micromanage the force at that level. And Drabaya's approach is very different, which is they built a decent core system. And the cores have actually really started to show themselves in the last six to eight months. And they've started to tie the fight together much more cohesively rather than just horizontal coordination amongst brigades. I think that's a very good point. Which are really divisional formations. And I think people like Drabaya are going to enable that. And I'm going to add a couple more points. First, totally different views when it comes to force generation. Sersky kept making new brigades for no reason, starving the rest of the force and funnily mobilized personnel to assault regiments, which were his personal operational reserve and nicknamed Sersky's armies. Second, totally different view of force management. Sersky would keep chipping pieces off of different units, providing them to brigades that were low on manpower. So it ended up being kind of a Frankenforce for a brigade commander who doesn't have enough people to hold their frontage. Instead of being replenished with personnel, they would get like two territorial defense battalions, a battalion tag group from another brigade they never heard of, some National Guard personnel, and have to fight with all these people. So units instead of individual replacements is what you're saying? Yeah, sort of like not a patchwork organization of defense, but something much more cohesive. And lastly, I think Drabaya is probably going to take a very different approach in general to some of the procurement priorities and to how people are managed. Sersky had a tendency to basically say, look, whatever happens, it's your fault as commander, I'm firing you and replacing you. That's not a good way to treat people and units. So I think in general, it's going to have a different attitude to how to manage the force. And also the force views Drabaya very differently from the way they view Sersky. And I remember back when I used to travel along the front, when he was appointed head of Osof Hordza, attitudes immediately changed just because he came in as that theater commander. And he immediately started calling brigade commanders, basically saying, hey, what do you need? What's going on? What are your problems? And just to briefly add on to that, I want to say a little bit about just the military cultural shift that's been ongoing in Ukraine since the war started. It's really accelerated to move away from this Soviet and post-Soviet style of command that Sersky was in that camp. And that was his educational background. That was his style of the micromanagement issues that Mike was talking about. Drabaya is not that. He still has that appreciation for the critical role that things like artillery and armor should be playing, but they can't right now because of the technical difficulties. And yet he also is very firmly rooted in the advances in drones and other tech that is a critical enabler. So he's balanced, I think, in where he should be because he's a soldier's soldier. He understands his battlefield intensely. The thing also about him is that he has an understanding that you can't lose trust and your subordinates have to trust you because they are having an AWOL problem. And it hasn't really gotten better. It's not deteriorating, but it hasn't really become a problem. They have to trust me that I'm not going to send them to die for no reason. And we're going to improve the mobilization process from when we get them in the door. We're going to envelop them in the family, all these things. And so I think it's not an immediate shift, but I think it is very personalistic in Ukraine right now. When you see brigades, the strong brigades, the brigades are advertising for themselves. They actually put the brigade commander on the poster in the commercial, like, you will fight with me for me. And that's really important. That the military sees someone like that as their leader, that they feel like he's not just going to waste my life. Well, I hope he's successful, but of course, the risk of him being too successful is Zelensky might fire him. Only one person can only do so much, right? And so without being empowered, then it's not going to go as well for him. And Mike knows him better than I do, of course, but he's not a political operator. He's a soldier's soldier. And that can be dangerous. All soldiers that become generals say that, though. They're not politicians, they're soldiers. But being a general involves being a politician to some extent. Does that make that transition better than others? I fear in Trapade's case, though, this may be an issue. As you remarked, Ryan, if you're very successful, like Fedorov was, you might actually end up with a shorter tenure than otherwise. One thing I just wanted to add there to just double tap what you were saying, we shouldn't oversell this. There are structural challenges that the Ukrainian military is dealing with in the fifth year of the war. Mobilization lows, AWOL being a significant percentage of a unit's losses, deficit of air and missile defense. Trapade, as somebody coming in as a change of leadership and change of command, can not single-handedly fix any of these issues. So we should also be appreciative of the fact that in some ways he inherits a good military position on the battlefield from Sersky, but also a huge mess in force generation, force management, distribution of mobilized personnel, and treatment of personnel that he's going to have to deal with, right? So the people who think that, well, the front line is relatively stable, so Trapade is coming in and inheriting a good thing. Yeah, but if you actually looked on the inside, Trapade is inheriting a lot of structural messes from the way Sersky and his general staff manage. One more issue before we turn to something else to close out. I talked about this on social media a bit, but there's this narrative that's been built in part because of journalists in the West, like Michael Weiss reporting in The Atlantic, that the only thing keeping Ukraine from being able to produce PAC-3 Patriot air defense missiles is Lockheed and the Trump administration stopping them from doing that. When the reality, in my view, is far more complex. I don't think Ukraine could produce these missiles. These are not like the missiles that Ukraine has been able to produce. They're completely different. They're far more advanced. It involves lots of different kinds of technologies operating at their edge and doing it perfectly. Agreeing that the air defense issue is critical. I think this is a narrative that needs to be corrected because Ukraine getting, being able to get more PAC-3s is a different problem from Ukraine being able to produce them. If Ukraine wants to be able to produce them, it will not necessarily result in them getting more faster. If you chat with the people in Ukraine who are working on these issues, or you read firsthand accounts, which there are some now of air defenders in Ukraine, you ask them, and this is out in the press now, there's one just dropped I think a few days ago where A air defender was like, this is an incredibly technically difficult system to produce. Like, you can't just wave your hands and say, well, we have this factory, we're going to crank them out. I mean, it's years of learning. And, you know, so they, I think, have a realistic viewpoint of the timelines in which that would benefit them. And it's not short. It's a longer-term timeline than their immediate need right now, which is, unfortunately, for the interceptors that are in shorter supply. I spent some time exploring this issue. Unfortunately, this is a magic wand theory of defense, industrial production, and tech transfer. There is no clear established facility, industrial capacity, technology, all these things that you'd have to establish in Ukraine. It's not clear if it's even intended to be made in Ukraine. Let's be clear. It took Lockheed Martin a couple of years, the contractor who makes this missile, to go from 500 to 650 annual production. Okay? Just them. They have several major subcontractors as well that are responsible for producing this. I am, on the one hand, positive on the fact that Ukraine can lock in an agreement for licensed production. Because, at the end of the day, what Ukraine really needs is a domestically produced missile defense interceptor with Western technology. And however it can get down that path. Which is different from producing the PAK-3. It is very different from producing the PAK-3. And it's not even clear that it's about producing the PAK-3. It may well be even a conversation on GMT for PAK-2. Which we're going to be making in Germany soon, I believe, right? Yes, which is different. Which is a different missile and a different system for PAK-2. I don't see prospects for production of PAK-3 MSC or CRI on any reasonable timeline. Or, to be honest, I'm skeptical it will happen in Ukraine. But maybe some alternative version, export version of this missile someday down the line. None of these are solutions to the immediate problems Ukraine has for this coming year or maybe even for the coming next year. And the belief that you can just snap your fingers, Lockheed Martin will somehow transfer this technology and tomorrow it will be assembled in Ukraine. I find that just deeply unrealistic. Closing question for you. Russian force management. There's a lot of talk about another mobilization. Where do we stand there? What do you think is actually going to happen? The last time we were on with you, I think we both expressed skepticism that there was a requirement for Russia to do that. And so I left the trip in Ukraine still feeling pretty skeptical that there is an operational requirement for Russia to mobilize. The numbers in terms of Russian KIA are bad. I mean, it's between 30 and I think upwards of 60. I think upwards of 40,000 in the last month. This is they're losing is the most people that they've ever lost. However, they're still recruiting about that number every month. Maybe they're slightly under, but it's not catastrophically under. So there's no operational requirement, but there's enough going on in Russia that it has my attention that the system is trying to do some investigations. Right. So little checkouts here and there. Can we pull this off? What are our requirements? Is everybody where they need to be? The thing that I was looking for just happened today, actually. There's been some reporting that people are starting to leave Russia again to go to Georgia and other parts in Central Asia. And usually that's like a leading indicator that the kitchen table talk is like this might happen. I have to keep it in my mind that it's a possibility and it would be a harmful one for Ukraine because it would mean that Russia was either opening up a new front or was trying to do something in a very specific way that I don't think I'm going to get into here. That would be really dangerous for Ukraine. So, yeah, I have to keep it on my mind. I don't think that they need. And, you know, Putin didn't want to do it before when he had to in 22. So, again, it's on my mind. I'm monitoring it at like level yellow right now and I'll keep watching it. But so far, I don't think that there's a gravitational pull towards it. I definitely think the odds of some kind of partial mobilization are a bit higher now than I thought before the trip. But nonetheless, it's too late to generate forces for this year. It would have to be for 2027. And it's an important thing to look to to determine whether Putin intends to keep prosecuting. All the way through 2027, it would be a major commitment on his end to conduct another partial mobilization. Lastly, mobilization never ended legally. It was authorized in September 2022 and it continues. OK, but the main challenge the Russian military has had in this war now is not just a deficit of people. The larger the Russian military is growing Ukraine, the less of it they've been able to use tactically. And another partial mobilization when it comes to seizing the rest of Donbass will not instantly solve this problem for the Russian military. Thank you for listening to this episode of The War on the Rocks. If you enjoyed this podcast, do not forget to check out our membership program at warontherocks.com/membership. And thanks to our friends at NODA AI for supporting this episode. They are building the kinds of technologies that America and its allies will need if we end up in an autonomous war like what Ukraine is now facing.