How Ukraine Put Russia on the Backfoot

[Music] You are listening to The War on the Rocks Podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs. My name is Ryan Evans and I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, I speak with Mike Kaufman and Darimassiko both of the Carnegie Endowment on the Ukrainian battlefield. Specifically, we dig into how and why things are looking much better for Ukraine, or at least better than they have been for a while. This was recorded right before the Bruhaha over Zlensky firing, a very popular defense minister, but the good news is, we have some free content on that at War on the Rocks.com. It's a free edition of the Ukraine Compass, one of our members' only newsletters, which I think you'll enjoy. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Booz Allen, an advanced technology company that builds commercial-grade products and solutions for America's most critical defense civil and national security. There are also doing some exciting work in Europe, and I speak with Joe Bice, one of that company's most talented executives on exactly that, in a short conversation in the middle of this episode. You can learn more at warnerox.com/buzz Allen. That's B-O-O-Z-A-L-L-E-N. How would you describe the phase of the war that we're at? I think it was the debate whether or not this is an inflection point or a true turning point. To me, we are seeing a turning point. Ukraine is in the best position it's been in the war since summer of 2023. Before they're offensive? Yes, before the failed summer of 2023 offensive. The question is, has it established a lasting advantage or is this a temporary one pre-creating a window of opportunity? It's clear that the Russian offensive has floundered for whole host of reasons we've discussed them before in the podcast. Russians have had consecutive months of essentially making no gains or actually losing territorial control. Ukraine has the initiative to do the successful campaign targeting Russian logistics operational depth, isolated in Crimea, and Russia's focused primarily on the bombardment campaign in some ways to compensate for lack of progress for their forces on the ground. The big question is, is Ukraine setting the conditions for some kind of limited offensive operations? Is he simply trying to get leverage for negotiations that they're hoping to have ahead of the winter? Because they too are quite vulnerable. As you see, Ukraine is largely out of ammunition for Western provided missile defense. And when winter comes, there's a concern that the Russian hand might strengthen once again. Could you talk about the sources of some of the Ukrainian operational success and momentum that we're seeing now? Yeah, I think if we look at the Crimea operation in particular, I think we can say that there's been a sequencing and real thought to this campaign over the past six plus months. So there has been an attempt to first downgrade Russian air defenses in occupied Ukraine, near the land, land-bridge to Crimea. We are seeing a sustained priority against targeting logistics along that land route. Russia has had to compensate by moving counter drone teams like Rubicon and other elements like that from other parts of the front to cover down on that, which opens up opportunities for Ukraine elsewhere. We are also seeing a strike campaign on the electrical grid in Crimea. We are now seeing Russians trying to leave because there are gas shortages, food shortages, and people are really worried. I think we can say that Ukraine is really imposing different kinds of dilemmas on Moscow, mostly through the drone and growing intermediate strike campaigns that we're seeing. Crimea, homeland Russia, all of that. This campaign against Russian energy infrastructure has been particularly impressive, been Crimea and in actual Russia proper. And some of this relates to what we discussed Mike in terms of Ukraine filling the donut hole before they have this short-range drone capabilities FPVs on and around the front and then this long-range stuff. A lot of this energy infrastructure is not very far from the Ukrainian border, now that they've been striking. Some of it is further in the long range, but it's pretty remarkable what they've been able to accomplish. Yeah, I think that part of the campaign essentially the cumulative effect. They've been after a Russian energy infrastructure and fuel refining capacity for two years now. Some are months you get peak usage in Russia and they have pretty significant constraints in supply. And this year Ukraine has been able to generate a genuine fuel crisis, what they've been trying to do for the last two years, because they finally have the number of drones, they have the sortie rates, they have the range to hit most of the refineries for several thousand kilometers, and they've done enough cumulative damage to create a lot of this train on the system. Does this change at all the calculus as far as we can tell in Moscow, we've seen some weird theater from Putin in the last few days, in the last couple weeks. We did this stage to visit to the front that clearly looked like it was a sound stage, it was kind of embarrassing the poor production value that went into that. I feel like I could stage a better fit. It was poor as poor values. It was deeply disappointing. I could make a better fit. The Zero Star is awarded. The next Russia contingency episode, the fake command post. Then you had this weird Putin saying that they have seized this town and was once keeping it actually. You didn't. So it does seem like the Kremlin is struggling to find some sort of we're still winning narrative, but does this actually change the political calculus? I like to look for little quirks in the system when they're feeling strain and I'm seeing them. So if you flash back to the battle of Evdivka, I think that was that was a year, a year and a half ago. Things weren't going well in the Russian front at that point, and the only thing that they could really speak to was this small town of Evdivka. I remember that Putin was getting his briefings from his seniors and it was a blown up map of Evdivka. That was the only village that was on this map. They were like, look at all this progress we've made and we're really charging through and we're talking at 500 meters basically. We're seeing that again, but now it's just a different name. What does it matter how did these strikes put political pressure on Putin? I think the strike on Moscow, if we're just talking about pure political embarrassment, probably Moscow, because it is the most heavily defended city on Earth. I think we can make that claim. Between air defenses and drone defenses, it is very heavily defended and a lot of Ukrainian drones got through. And I think that's probably speaking to the sortie rate. Their Russians are intercepting them. Ukraine is putting a lot against this issue. I think we see the Russians typically retaliate against that. We see these strikes against Kiev that are moving away from purely defensive targets, although they're still hitting defense industry targets and the other hitting in the city center with. Yeah, back to hitting apartment blocks. Right. And it's skrimmingly. You think about it in the sense of, well, you know, I don't necessarily have the technical data to know what is an intercept that then crashed. Was it a deliberate hit on this suburb block? Was it jammed? I don't have that technical data. But I do know that whenever they do this, they tend to play it on Russian state media because they have to have something to show their population because they're embarrassed. Right. Like Moscow fuel tank blows up in this catastrophic way. And now we're going to show images of us striking back on these cities. That's the kind of behavior that we've seen when there's stalls on the ground. We're seeing it again. Yeah, I guess what's different about this phase and as Mike, you just said, Ukraine's been working at this for a couple years. So it's not a totally new thing. But what is newer is the effects of the war. Being extremely visible and visceral to ethnic Russians in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, which the Russian state made enormous effort to insulate ethnic Russians in the western part of Russia from the direct effects of war. People were living their lives as normal and buying luxury goods. And you know, they were smuggled in or from China. And now it's different now that people don't have fuel. They don't know when a drone is going to 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. And then it's time to start to bring the war to Russia. The challenge, politically, is that Putin doesn't really care much of what average Russian tank if he did he would have never started this war and we wouldn't be in it five years. He doesn't seem to care nearly as much with the Russian elite things either because they too have paid a significant price for this war. And most of them I don't think very much support or 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 the war. The big questions will will this really affect local calculus. My own view is that the real Chinese is for a long time. Here I agree with Darryl. Putin's been fed the sense by the Russian military that even though they're going much slower than they would like, their success is inevitable. They will eventually take to near. And it's clear to me that not only is that actually not going to happen, but it will probably take real reversals on the ground to change those impressions, the kind of things that the Russian military can't hide by producing bogus maps. And then the costs are stacking. They are, they are real. I mean, you see members of the technocrat elite that have the central bank and the blue line others who still seems to be disappeared last I read her she reappeared in public yet. She's around, but I think she's actually eventually going to retire and she's been a big part of what's kept that system going to some respects. I think you can hear him clearly sounding the alarm that this all of the fun spending is not sustainable and a structurally imbalancing for the economy. Like they are beginning to increasingly publicly talk about the issue of sustainability. And you know, this is something that Laurie Friedman and I spoke about on a previous episode is that who actually doesn't have a lot of alternative sources of information he gets briefed what he gets briefed. And we actually don't know how much he knows about what's really going on. Like this is a guy that as far as we know may have never used the internet before in his life like we just don't know what his other access to information is. How are the tactics on the ground evolving? I think we can say that the methods that the Russians have created are not really evolving that much in the last year. the infiltration tactics, they've got them to a point, and then that's where they are. And I just really haven't seen them introduce some new element into that process to change things. And the Ukrainians have figured out what they're going to do. They're going to use motorcycles, ground assaults, drones, waves of drones. I mean, it's a composite force, but again, there's not really a lot of new thought there. It's a very complicated battlefield. And I think that we're seeing the limits of Russia not really being able to come up with an operational or excuse me, a tactical solution to this problem. And so it's just the same idea applied 12 months. Mike, you and I, especially earlier in the war, talked about how Ukraine innovates faster, but Russia innovates better at scale. So once they adopt an innovation, they're better at fielding across the entire force. And you can go back and listen to older episodes about why that is. But what is stalling in the Russian system of innovation? Because I think she made a great point about that. It just doesn't seem to be existing anymore on the Russian side. The way I characterize it as on the one hand, you did see last year, Russia innovate considerably in drone employment. The expansion of rubber-connally drone formations, the experimentation with their own version of line of drones. And in a tug of war over who has advanced superiority in this sort of drone established kill zone, they did substantially degrade Ukraine's advantage. The problem they had is that the rest of the force couldn't take advantage of that or do anything with it for a very particular reason. They had made a conscious decision to focus on fighting to a perpetually regenerated, regenerating assault layer within the force, essentially grind their way through the front. And that meant that they spent years focusing on conducting small-scale combat operations across a very broad front instead of discrete offensive. You know, the kind of discrete offensive operations that we're used to in the conventional war. The advantage is that they just could sustain that and keep it going for a very long time. And I thought that eventually it would lead to a collapse of Ukrainian defense. The disadvantage is that it's very hard to achieve a breakthrough fighting that way. What I think happened to them last year is that they were steadily gaining more territory on paper if I showed you the numbers, they gained more territory in 2025 than 2024. And that they got fundamentally- That's a low bar, but yeah. But they are fundamentally lazy believing that, yes, even though they are taking higher losses, they're fighting less and less sufficiently, that eventually they are going to reshape objectives and they don't need to substantially change what they're doing. They can just keep fighting in this way. And Ukraine just kept optimizing and adapting for the way they were attacking. So when we got to 2026, the Russian offensive late March starts to open up again the exact same way they started things back in 2025. Not much change about Russian ground operations, but a few things were changing in Ukraine side because Ukraine actually spent 2025. Finally, reforming and going after big problems they've had in the force since 2022, things that we've talked about in this podcast for a long time. Things have been acknowledged throughout the Ukraine Armed Forces Ministry of Defense, and they actually spent 2025 trying to redress a number of these issues, stabilizing the manpower situation, taking the brigades and pulling them into cores, experimenting with ways to conduct localized counterattacks with drone-enabled formations. All these things essentially have combined, whereas the Russian problems grew, Ukraine started actually addressing some issues they've had for a while. I have one thing to add on to that. I think the new wave of technology that we were seeing the early signs of being implemented on the battlefield at scale last year was supposed to be Russian combat robotics. There were all these things in the pipeline because they had studied and observed what Ukraine was putting out in the field, and they were testing and they were getting ready to go and gear up and introduce these things large-scale. Two things happened. Russians got cut off from Starlink and a lot of those combat robotics that they were testing were built using covert or clandestine black Starlink. None of them worked anymore after they got cut off Starlink. Number two, there are multiple competing entities in Russia who want to be the lead for this, and there are a few corruption scandals in some of these combat robotic firms. I think that was a technology that was supposed to be introduced to help implement some changes on the ground, and then it failed for internal reasons. We are going to take a quick break from our conversation with Mike Endera to talk to my friend Joe Bice, who is a senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, and he is working on some pretty interesting stuff as far as European security is concerned. I started by asking him what exactly his job involves. We are one of the few companies that takes a holistic view of this space. In fact, I have to give credit to Horacee Orozansky, CEO who said to me six years ago, "You don't need to convince me that security cooperation is important. You need to tell me what we are going to do about it and how we can help the US government." It's a little bit of everything. If you look at the US's position on allies and partners, you hear a lot about America first, which does not mean America alone. If you don't believe that, you can look no further than the national defense strategy that was released where allies and partners were mentioned over 45 times. Look at the two executive orders on foreign military sales that are going to drive efficiency transparency and really just speed of getting this equipment and major platforms to allies and partners. We do have a global outlook on this, and we are focused on Europe because of all the security risks that are occurring right now in that part of the world. We've actually been working with the Air Force and developing something called Tactical Operations Light, or Tockel, and it's built from our modular detachment, Solutions Kit. And what it really is is a command and control solution that allows for warfighters to both connect sensors, decision makers, and weapons all the way to the edge. And right now we're deploying that in support of the US Air Force across Europe, and we see great applicability for that same product with allies and partners globally. You can learn more about Booz Allen Hamilton's exciting work in Europe by going to warntherocks.com/booz Allen B-O-O-Z-A-L-L-E-N. Now back to my conversation with Mike and Dara. Do we see any changes on Russian manpower efforts? There's two things I think we can probably be reasonably confident that Russia has been missing their recruiting targets for maybe two or three months at this point. They can recover from that, they've recovered from that kind of problem before. We just have to look at it in longer periods of time than month on month. If they miss it for six months then I start to wonder, "Okay, what is this going to mean on the ground?" But the bigger issue is that we are and we have been seeing this is a steady force degradation over time just in terms of the quality of people that they're getting in and also the quality of the officers that are coming into the force, right? So at the junior level, like your lieutenants and your captains are being either pulled from reserve and they're like 40-50, they haven't served in 20-plus years, or their cadets with very condensed education to try to get them to the field as fast as possible. So we're seeing that force decline, we're seeing a lot of violence really become systematic at this point. And I think that's having some effect. I wouldn't say the majority effect on Mike and I talk about this a lot, but it is a factor just the decline in discipline really across the front. We've seen a lot of speculation recently, some in the commentary, but also some from senior officials in NATO member states that Russia may seek to in response to its degrading position in the war escalate, either in Ukraine or somewhere against the NATO member state. What do you make of this talk? Where do you think it's coming from? Some of it seems like it might be based on intelligence based on who's saying it, but it's very hard for me to judge. We've talked about this a lot. I've read all those articles and I'm reading between the lines of them and I do think that some more specificity is needed in this conversation. There's different ways that Russia can escalate and I think we should talk about what we can feel confident in versus what is seems to be pure speculation at this point. So we'll Russia escalate against Ukraine if they're facing embarrassing setbacks at home and set back on the front. Yes, we've seen them do that many times in the course of this war. I think of this summer we should anticipate Russia testing and probing to see if the Patriot interceptor depletion is true or not. I don't think they're going to believe that at face value. They're going to test it to see. So I do think unfortunately what that means is more ballistic missile strikes damaging ones against Kiev in particular. So yes, I do think we can anticipate escalation against Ukraine. I do think we can anticipate some sort of escalation against NATO member states in the sense of sabotage operations. Those have been ongoing consistently for the past four years and majority of them are intercepted. I do think that we will see that. We'll see them getting sportier and testier over time. This is a process that's been ongoing for four years. What I don't think has had enough specificity in some of the conversations about Russian escalation right now is it seems to almost be vague like they're going to escalate militarily against NATO. And I find that impossible, not impossible, but not credible because with what, like with what Russian forces are you going to do this? They are like the land power is occupied right now in Ukraine. Like the Air Force is no, no. So I just I think that there's soft rates maybe. But to what end? I mean, if you're this is the question that no one can answer for me is if Putin feels like he's losing catastrophic control? Why would he attack NATO visibly? You would lose all control over the next steps. I agree. It'd be kind of crazy. And I'm just playing devil devil's advocate here. But one thing that Putin is exceptionally good at is misreading the psychology of Western leaders. He's made so many mistakes because of that. No, I agree. But I think there's still a distinction between this leaving your calling card. with assassinations or arson, you know, like this spy versus spy stuff, which he's good at and likes doing versus a suicide mission, which is an over military attack on NATO. I just think there needs to be a little bit more specificity in here, and the thing I would caution against because this happens, I find these escalation fears reemerging pretty consistently whenever Russia's doing bad on the front line. Let them do bad guys. Like we don't need to panic. We don't need to panic. We're losing in our psychology. Collective psychology. Yes, and I don't understand. And I would say we do not need to panic on behalf of the Kremlin. Just let them feel. I think I'm larger with darn us. I don't think Russia's greatest collational options against Ukraine to be honest. It has very few against NATO members. There's the unconventional campaign that they've been prosecuting throughout Europe, which has not gotten them much and actually gets detected and Jerry is not nearly that good at it. I think we know quite a bit about it. There's a potential for, you know, more drone sorties and penetrations of NATO member aerospace, like what happened with Poland? You could see that, but what are they going to get out of it under the day other than annoying the alliance and leading to more and more initiatives to essentially counter the Russian drone threat, which in some ways is actually very positive for NATO to get after this problem. Russia has really no prospects for military operation against NATO. And even if the war was over, we take quite some time for Russia to reconstitute sufficiently to pose a major threat in that way. So I see a lot of some realistic. Is there something that some of these escalation fears spread now? You could get them a bit maybe in 2022 when Russia was really losing. There was a bit of a nuclear crisis a few recall fall 2020, which Colin call just wrote a great piece on that I forget what publication, but I highly recommend if you search for Colin call nuclear crisis with Russia, you'll find it. But that's not the case now. Yes, we have a turning point in the war, but it's not the same situation was in 2022 where people thought that, you know, victory military victory was at hand that it might even be a short award. At least that was a sense in Ukraine back in 2022. Russian forces are not doing well, time is clearly not Russia side, but it's also not losing in the same way was it was seen to be losing back in 2022. So it's really getting no from my point of view, there's a strong basis for these fears. We got me it could be way off. But yeah, and then as before with the nuclear crisis like what would tactical nuclear use get Russia on the battlefield. They'd radiate an area that they would then seize that they want to be a part of Russia. I'm circling back to the common I made earlier. There's a tendency to perceive fear on behalf of the Kremlin and just don't do that. And I still think the 22 crisis was a misinterpretation of multiple things that led people to a conclusion. That Russia was considering the clear weapons and I get it. It was taking very seriously. It was taking it right again. You have to take it you have to take it seriously. But I would say that there's a duty to warn, but there's also a duty to provide reasoned judgment along with it. And I don't I don't think that that happened in in 22. I'm just just based on what I know that time period and so anyway, I just I would not want us to get into that loop again where it looks like Russia is stalling on the ground and Putin is getting cagey. We don't need to perceive escalation fears on behalf of the Kremlin. He'll create his own reality. Putin does have a pretty easy way out now at this point of work, which is just a grido ceasefire. Yeah, the Western position the Ukrainian position has narrowed so much that the demands not even really an unconditional ceasefire. It could even be a conditional ceasefire where Russia gets probably. And you're on style ceasefire. Yeah, there are no actual ceasing of the fire. Yeah, we're we're not we're not sure. But um, but mine is it's not 22 or 2023. Like if Putin wanted to, you could agree that ceasefire tomorrow and say, yeah, actually this is what want me to take. If you think there's anybody in Russia looking closely in the map and says, you know, actually the point of swore is to get from Constantinivka to Durskivka and then from Durskivka to Kramatorsk because that's where all the action really is. And until we get Kramatorsk and Slaveans, two cities I'm familiar with because I've been them probably, you know, several times a year until we get these cities, you know, we just can't we just can't consider the largest conventional war in Europe since what we're to be successful. Who are the groups in Russia right now where the ceasefire along the line of contact was declared who would oppose that would it be the people? No, they are checked out of this war. The elites know they're happy for relief like the only. Even the right wing Russian telegram. They're probably before they are increasingly asking a question like why are our tactics so bad like what is the plan? So look, most guys are all controlled anyway. They're going to get their new talking points from values of and they'll be fine or they won't be fine. They'll be in prison. Yeah, the person's authoritarian regime is not there's no shape of staying up at night worrying about where Russian bloggers think I think is a strongness reading of how authoritarian regime was. It's very it's very you know, it's something we're familiar with is in Washington a lot of our friends worry about with the administration will think about XYZ when the administration isn't paying attention to them at all. Think of it just think of it this way. Okay, so you know the Russian like Mill blogger space. It's like 50 or 60 mostly guys a few women they bring them in to the Ministry of Defense. You know what that means? I mean, they've got their phone numbers. They've got their phones tapped. They know where they live. Like if there's any problems this they you know what I mean? Like there's not like who these bloggers are going to lead the charge against the Kremlin like in the pregozion rebellion. No. This matters to Putin and the band of weirdos around him in the echo chamber and he is perceiving his wishes as the wishes of the state because for him they're the same thing I am the state Mike you sent me a piece by Zalusany and that was in the telegraph yesterday. Just to remind the audience Luzny was the lead commander of Ukrainian forces until he was austed by Zelensky and made the investor to the UK. But he issued what I think it's fair to describe as sort of a balancing correct him saying that yes Ukraine is doing better but let's stop this talk that Ukraine is inevitably going to win and that Russia is about to lose and let's let's be a little is that a fair characterization. Yes he issued a sobering correct of that I think overall was a decent depiction of where we are in the war right now granted his own local motivations because he's seen as the likely contender in the election to run against the Luzny and he naturally doesn't want it to be seen that Zaliansky is actually one or solve the war so I want to you know there's a political motivation I want to contextualize the writing in this way but nonetheless his overall assessment was Ukraine was doing well but position on the ground it's still closer to something like a still meet and not and that we have to be careful with freighting the smoke with expectations. I do appreciate that and I think I have a sense of why is writing it because it's commandering chief he himself was the victim the fact of overly freighted expectations for a summer 23 and three offensive based on how well they did in fall 22 and given what he had to work with that operation I mean you could say that we you know I've criticized it up and down I was there during that summer other people to and Zalusia himself was pretty frank I think about some things that went wrong but the bottom lines I think has a good point based on what happened in the first year and a half of the war to be careful not to replay this movie in 2026. Yeah I mean I'm sent a collapse of Russian forces it's very hard to see how Ukraine musters enough manpower material for real offensive against Russia the seas back territory they just don't have enough people still they can't make all of it robots even though the advances they've made with not just aerial drones but ground drones has been obviously impressive but it the offensive potential the Ukrainian military just doesn't seem like it's there to me. Ukraine will likely try something but it's important to separate a successful localized offensive somewhere with operation that can achieve something close to the size of military victory or fundamentally changes the dynamic in this war I personally do think that the one thing that can change Putin's mind is essentially reversal that the Russian military can't hide right. They lost a loss of currently occupied territory such as the Russian military can only put up an inaccurate map and say we are you know 30 kilometers forward of where we actually are because it's across every TV station and there's no way to hide us but not just a few hundred meters something right right but that said I think Zalusia's warning is is useful here not to take a force that isn't many ways exhausted after years of fighting and it's done a great job on the defense but nonetheless it's not the force that Ukraine was fighting within 2026. It's not the force you Korean had for the offensive in 2023 and afraid of the expectations of the size of military victory at this point in the war right and not to confuse what is a good turning point for victories around the corner because there's always been those voices that keep saying that three months from now will be in Crimea some of them are Western commentators too by the way most of them I think I would like to point out that the Ukrainians when they are not feeling that pressure from Western partners to do something they actually come up with the country. They come up with really good operations and they understand their opponent and I agree with Mike right now they're putting multiple dilemmas on the table but they're not being pressured to do this offensive and absorb that risk as the kids say let them cook. I think that's a great place to end the episode thank you both so much for joining me and we'll have you back on and I believe late July or early August again right sounds good thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of the War on the Rocks podcast check out our membership program at War on the Rocks dot com slash membership and thanks so much to our friends at Booz Allen learn more about the important work they're doing at War on the Rocks dot com slash Booz Allen that's B O O Z A L L E N