No End in Sight? The Russo-Ukrainian War at the End of 2025

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 sat down with Derek Masiko and Mike Kaufman, both of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to talk about The War on Ukraine. We start with a conversation about diplomacy and finish with where things stand on the battlefield and how prepared each side is to stay in the fight. This episode is brought to you by Booz Allen. Did you know Booz Allen is the number one provider of AI services to the US federal government? They incorporate advanced automation, machine learning, and quantum information science to provide transformative technology solutions in national security. Booz Allen is an advanced technology company sitting at the center of an ecosystem of companies of all shapes and sizes. Later in the episode, I'll have a chat with a Booz Allen executive who's leading critical efforts on this front. To learn more about Booz Allen's work in this area, go to War on the Rocks.com/Booz Allen. That's B-O-O-Z-A-L-L-E-N. On to the show. So where do things stand with this? We were supposed to see some sort of the White House that they were going to try to force a deal before Thanksgiving. It's a little after Thanksgiving now. When they were said it was going to be by Christmas, Rubio said in his two-hour presser in which he was very animated that it might not happen now, it might be a few months, it might be longer than that. What's your perspective on where we stand with diplomacy to end the war or get some sort of a ceasefire? It's clear we're not going to get any kind of deal by Christmas, or this year. In fact, even looking at somewhat comments by Vance, it seems to be the more sober-minded comments where he doesn't think we're going to get to a deal in the near term, but I personally do think that in terms of negotiations, this is the beginning of the end, in the sense that we are on a path to some sort of ceasefire and negotiate settlement later in 2026, which is not going to be this round of conversations. If you look at what's been happening with all this kind of shuttle diplomacy, different meetings, you do have a series of deals. So we're actually not getting a deal, we're actually getting a series of deals. Something on security guarantees, or miraculously security commitments to Ukraine, but we'll see might be a some sort of functionally fairly robust, both executive and congressionally approved agreement. Some sort of deal regarding demobilization will draw from territory, although Ukraine made demand of our friend them on that. It's not clear how that's going to be executed. Some other set of arrangements regarding reconstruction, I'm sure Russians also want part of this deal to lift sanctions, restored diplomatic economic ties, and have the set of incentives for them. And of course, a big question of what do you do with all the national level concessions that they want from Ukraine, beyond territory and beyond these other points? Just to take one victory lap over a very tragic situation, I think what I predicted in my article a few weeks ago sort of came through is that it seems like the United States is developing some sort of attempted a consensus position with our European allies in Ukraine that Russia will probably reject. So to me, I think this whole exercise we're going through is almost pointless, and that neither sides ready for peace, mostly because we haven't as dare you've spoken about many times. We haven't really tried real compelence with Russia, and the conditions just aren't there, and that we really should be thinking about principles that both sides can accept before getting into the details of where the line's going to be and what a DMZ looks like and what guarantees look like. Well, I saw the energy coming into this most recent round of talks in Miami, where first it was Dimitriyev coming alone, and I thought, well, that's a pretty bad sign for the Russians not taking this seriously. And he was ultimately joined by, I think, it was Ushekov, and that was maybe about it. And the Russians, since the talks started, and most recently today have been putting out a series of cooling statements, you know, and things to the effect of, well, the modifications that the Americans and Europeans have made are making peace less likely. It's just, to me, I read it as stalling tactics, and that's what this has been, even though maybe these positions are getting closer together over time between Ukrainian, Russian, and American, European, there's still a lot of stalling behavior going on on the Russian side. I just don't see them really learning a lot of lessons from the diplomacy, and they're just stalling for time so they can continue to eke forward on the ground in Donetsk. There's no obvious reason for why Russians need to cease fire right now, I mean, they're not losing on the battlefield, they're not winning the size of the AI. Neither side really needs to cease fire right now. Yeah, as we talked in other podcasts, Ukraine is not desperate at this moment, and there's a good chance that Moscow will wait to see what the early offensive period looks like next year, once we get into February, March, and beyond, rather than necessarily agree to a deal. Yeah, they faced some economic woes to stagnation, but they have enough on the revenue side to keep this going for another year, most likely. And if you look at the sort of course a measure of threats, there isn't that much on the table. One of my concerns, though, is, isn't necessarily that there won't be a deal I agree that our Russians will probably reject whatever's here, and then there'll be another set of rounds and negotiations after some pause. But, well, if we do get to a point where they are willing to agree to a deal for the sake of a ceasefire, and the real challenge is that this is all going to fall apart in implementation. In fact, that is how the past Minsk agreements fell apart, too, because there will be a very big disagreement on sequencing of who does what first, and if you look currently at this deal, at some part of the deal, Ukraine would have to withdraw from the rest of Dinyyapsk. Well, we don't know, well, I think very likely the Russians will demand this. In fact, I don't see any agreement with it. Well, you're assuming there's a deal, and you're assuming that Ukraine would agree to that. Sure. So, there's a demilitarized zone. First one comes to territory, you know, somebody withdrawing, you know, somebody certifying that's demilitarized. The sequencing on that is going to be a big argument trap where Russians want Ukrainians to withdraw and give them Dinyyapsk, and then instead of demilitarizing it, they just take it because they have in the past, and everybody understands how it will play out. Second. On the other part of the agreement, is Ukraine wants security guarantees. That means the U.S. President has to agree Congress might have to vote to who does what first. Do we vote on that, or does Ukraine agree to this? Also, I think it's worth, we talked about this on the show before, but I think it's worth talking about again, because people, including some very experienced analysts and European security experts, really, I think Mr. Antriper, this, what security guarantees mean when we talk about it versus what Russia means when they use the term? Yes. Could you speak to that? Well, so as far as I understand, the security guarantees being offered in this current round are things like continuation of Intel support and planning support to the Ukrainians. What I have a lot of questions about are these Article 5-like guarantees? That is a very vague phrase to me, and I don't know what that means. What does that mean? Like a whole style cook, and then I can't. Yeah. It's like home style, new chicken noodle soup from Campbell's, like not quite the same. I don't know what that means. I don't know what the details are, details are scant on that. What is that actually commit us to and sign us up to? Does it sign us up to prepositioned equipment somewhere in Europe that can rapidly be surged into Ukraine? Does it commit us as far as I can tell, it commits us to no presence on the ground, at least, you know, uniformed boots on the ground, not at all for the Americans, although I believe that Europeans are talking about a limited contingent somewhere. There's just a lot of vagueness affiliated with this, and if it's not, it has to be something fairly robust to even get the Ukrainians to consider even a demilitarized zone, let alone relinquishing important territory. Can I jump around there? So, cheers as I have with the word article five style guarantees. First, article five style doesn't mean anything, because article five doesn't actually say much of anything. And, I mean, it basically means, I think that's an overstatement. It means something, but it's not automatic. It's a political choice, whether to, it doesn't commit anyone to doing anything specific and it only works because it's a commitment within an alliance of a large number of states. It would never work as a bilateral security agreement between two states, because it commits one state to provide something to the defense of the other, and that something can be as little sending them a postcard saying, "Sorry, you know, I wish this wasn't happening to you, all the way to a direct military intervention." So, what makes article five valid is that if people don't act on it, then you have the entire NATO alliance basically lose credibility, it was validity as an alliance to some extent, but as a bilateral security agreement, it would not work. If one state just made a commitment to another that actually was so vague and undefined, it wouldn't necessarily work that way. And the second issue with a sort of article five style being used as a term, I think it's very clear that a big part of the branding of these so-called security guarantees is just something that's enough for Zignanski to be able to sell the agreement and the concessions that Ukraine would have to make, and that's job one for the so-called security commitments. An important point is a lot of this is creating political trade space for Zignanski, and I think a lot of us forget here in the U.S. how dependent he still is, and I think politically afraid of the far right, which is what's scuppered his ability to meaningfully engage with any peace negotiations with Russia before the war, which was the platform that he was actually elected on. But I think it's worth also hitting home when Russia talks about security guarantees. They mean the Budapest memorandum in which they were a guarantor of Ukrainian security. They want a sort of concert where we're all guaranteeing Europe, they don't mean a mutual self-defense treaty. And they won't involve the West. They won't be able to veto an intervention as well. And shocking to me how many, I won't name them on Mike, we can name them after this show, but really experienced European security experts failed to understand this. Can I say, it's not a secret, it's what they proposed in Istanbul. That was their proposal, essentially a sort of guarantees where they along with other powers like to us would be guarantor states of the agreement, but they would also be able to veto any military intervention from the other guarantors. They would have to, the concert of states would have to agree. It's actually very much like a more classical European concert of powers type agreement to settle the war, but they're proposing. So a lot of the conversation focuses on what to do about Danyetsk, Russians want it, it's not theirs, but they feel entitled to it. I'll fight for it if I have to. It might be helpful to maybe visualize a little bit what it would mean for Kiev to agree to give that territory up, because it's politically poisonous for Kiev with a potentially quite a significant cascade effect that will ripple across Ukrainian society and why they're so resistant to this, just beyond, you know, it's just not right. So okay, so we're talking about a strip of land at this point, what's maybe 80 kilometers left. Would you guess that's not fully, I mean, from most point-score Russia, it's about 50 km to the edge of Danyetsk. Right. And then they have fire control and drone penetration of, up towards a 20 km. So it's not an area that's safe to live, a lot of it is depopulated already. But the thing to keep in mind, it is the location of a politically and militarily important fortress belt. Some people call it citadel. I don't know that that's maybe the right term either, but it is a very extensive network of defense positions. So you play this out, if Ukraine has to leave, not only do they have to back up, not only do the Russians get to fall in on those positions instead of fighting through them. You have to play the images in your mind of people being relocated on buses to the west. This is all very politically dangerous and it makes the soldiers who have been fighting, the Ukrainian soldiers fighting and dying for this area. What was it all for? And I think the other thing to consider is, because I've seen this out, the Russians have offered this and I've seen it echoed, is that, oh, well, this will be a demilitarized zone. Russia will have military police and national guard in there and they'll be responsible for security. And I don't think people here fully understand that that means military equipment. Both of those forces have tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, helicopters. It will look military because it is military. It's not cops on the street, there's some cops, but it's really heavy. They get up to the edge of it. There's no ability to control what's going on inside that space anymore. And then they get to put themselves in advantageous positions all along that border for round two. This feels, in some way. Tell me if I'm wrong. I'm sort of saying something that I'm not sure if it's correct, but it feels like this is a very familiar Russian playbook for freezing a conflict. It feels similar to what we saw in Georgia over the years and in other countries where Russia has sort of implemented a frozen conflict after some of their initial goals maybe fell short. Is that fair? Look, what they're proposing, whether it's a DMZ or de-escalation zone, like what these to propose all the time in Syria, where it basically allows them to consolidate control of our area and then continue the war, I think to me it's very obvious that if Ukraine withdraws, Russia will just take this territory. It won't be demilterized in any way, shape or form. And the big question for Ukraine is what will it get in exchange for that concession? Because. Mike, you've been in Washington too long. You didn't answer my question. I'm sorry, you're wrong. No, I'm wrong. I'm okay. I'm okay. No, I think you're generally right in your assessment, but okay. The big question was like, what does Ukraine get if it agrees to this? To me, the biggest issue is actually if there's a deal, like the Minsk agreements, but nothing gets implemented afterwards. Washington DC walks away with Trump saying that he made a deal to under war, so he's happy. Right. And then Ukraine is kind of stuck in limbo because done a lot of people in armed forces basically say, okay, so did we make a deal to under war? Can I leave the army now? Can I get demobilized or not? It creates a lot of political issues for Ukraine. And then Russians at any point in time can say, well, you know, the deal was made sure, but nobody's implementing it, so they renew the war within a year. And that's happened before in this conflict. If we're going back to historical examples, Georgia is an example where within a few weeks of the ceasefire agreement as it was, the Russians threw up a bunch of concertina wire and a border and everything else. But then over time, they started walking the border forward one meter at a time, hoping no one would notice or complain about it. So it's just, it's not like this isn't on the up and up. I think there's some, the other question I've heard about is how would this be monitored? How could you monitor it? You'd have to have some on the ground presence to do it. I think drones can actually help quite a lot compared to the last OSCE mission back in 2014. OSCE. I mean, Ukraine wouldn't accept them back, I think, after the OSCE SMM experience. Could you tell us what that was? So as part of the Minsk to agreement back in 2015, OSCE has a special monitoring mission to Ukraine that was made up of folks from different countries and they would sort of monitor ceasefire violations and also heavy weapons removal to a zone that was codified in the agreement. But Ukrainians were often very frustrated because they thought that the OSCE SMM servers would include folks that some folks were from Russia there might, you know, might not have been sufficiently objective enough. But bottom line, I think that OSCE did the best job they could. But ultimately, the ceasefire agreement failed and failed repeatedly. There were disagreements over sequencing, there were disagreements over implementation, and this is not the agreement, at least that I see being presented to begin with, which is the biggest problem is whole demilitarization discussions. Nobody even explains what that means. A DMC proposal makes no sense until you get into the specific. What equipment's not going to be there? How will it be monitored? What distance from the forward line of troops? There's no specific source proposal. That's the biggest problem with the agreements currently being presented that you know how to evaluate it. And look, the modern character of the swore is very different from what it was years ago. So we're not talking about artillery and tanks. We're talking about drone teams. I would love to see their proposal for how they will monitor the absence of drone teams that include three, four personal maxed, dispersed in an area. And that's where most of the fires coming from now. There I agree. I think that Ukraine can monitor it itself up to an area of 20, 25 kilometers forward, and you don't need anybody, especially doing it. But I'm confident that all they will find is sort of violations of the DMZ, and there'll be nobody there to do anything about it. So I'm skeptical that this DMZ will be anything other than just giving Russia Danielle's. Right. The question, you know, I knew people who were part of that monitoring team, and the Russians were bad faith actors back then. They were hiding things in buildings they weren't supposed to. They were shooting at drones. They were, you know, I don't think jamming was as advanced and intricate as it is now. But that was back then. So just imagine the types of behavior that would be underway. I mean, you have to start somewhere. But I just, it's, it's a bad faith actor. Yeah. I think that there's a deal, probably a lot of will collapse under disagreements over sequencing. But I want to get back to Ryan's that Ukraine to agree to any aspect of this, probably Zionsky will want to hold a referendum, okay? And then the challenge we'll get is that who does what first? As Ukraine first hold a referendum on us, do we have a vote here in Washington about some kind of security commitments to Ukraine? And then they hold a referendum, okay? Who draws from what first and how do we certify that? So this deal gets pretty complicated, pretty fast. And it's okay to do show diplomacy and talk about a set of agreements that have all these points on them. When you start thinking about the mechanics of execution, let's be honest, this administration is not very good in terms of process, technical staffing, and actually having people who know what they're doing working on these things, you're going to run to a lot of problems. We're going to take a quick break from our conversation to chat with Graham Gilmer, a senior leader in Booz Allen's Defense Technology Group leading artificial intelligence and defense partnerships for the company. He manages a 400-person team that delivers innovative AI capabilities for defense customers. That focus on how we work with other companies to build, partner, or even invest in these companies to deliver mission-ready tech to the warfighter. Four years ago we made a concerted effort and decision around how we change our partner strategy, putting our money where our mouth is, backing it with investments, picking winners in the emerging tech space, and trying to accelerate this purposefully towards mission needs that we saw out there. And is this tied to the tripling of the size of Booz Allen's Venture Fund, and I'm sure you work very closely with Brian McCarthy. Excited about that announcement that we're going bigger in this area. We started with a $100 million commitment over the first few years. We've now tripled that as of 2025 to a $300 million commitment to bringing mission-ready tech to bear in the defense tech ecosystem. If you're one of these companies and you got some great technology already, why not just go it alone, why work with Booz Allen? What Booz Allen brings to the table is knowledge of how to get through the hurdles of working with the government. We have engineers that are close to the mission problems who understand them deeply, but also the tech landscape of where these new emerging technologies are going to help solve and close mission gaps. So does that mean that for companies like this Booz Allen helps them sell into government, helps them build out their own technology stack, invest in them all three, just one of those sometimes? Absolutely. It's a commitment, and it's really a multi-pronged partnership with an investment where we start to focus on how can we help new companies move faster through the space based on our experience, our understanding how to navigate requirements around working with a regulated industry, like the department and also focus on the key bottlenecks of getting technology through the approval processes. What kind of other companies do you want to hear from? I think there's some that are out there that are known players in the spaces that we're moving faster with already because they're scaled and we just see opportunity to establish as the authoritative baseline. I'd point to Shield AI and their hive mind, which we view as the least standard for autonomous software. The role that we end up playing is accelerating them into real government experiments, test events. They apply to new mission sets that they aren't necessarily able to do from the lab. Having gotten to know your company pretty well since we started working together through Cogs of War, it's been very impressive how everyone from the leadership on down understands the urgency of the moment that we're in. It's exactly how we're approaching the problem set. With urgency, we have so many veterans, so many technologists across Booz Allen who are committed to solving these problems, working with companies, with partners, even competitors of pass to make sure that this is a whole-of-nation approach to get after the challenges that we're going to face this decade. And now, back to my conversation with Mike Kaufman and Darren Masiko. The only way this gets to a durable settlement where all these problems that you guys are raising don't happen as if Russia is forced to settle when it's on the back foot and that's just not what's happening in the administration doesn't seem interested in making that. That happened, unfortunately. Yeah. And lots of people have kind of hope that maybe the little price of will, for example, will lead Russia to have to make some kind of agreements or something else will happen. But look, I'll tell you the truth. The world's blend price dropped down to $34 a barrel. That's very low for Russia. Both have to stay there consistently on the average for six months or more for it to substantially affect the Russian budget and some people think more than six months. Not for a week. But what would you be advising Ukrainians to be doing right now? I know you love that question. I follow the tanks Ryan on a diplomat. Well, I think it's good dodge, he's not going to let me get away with it. So, I think they're doing the best they can by trying to seem agreeable. I think they're getting solid advice sometimes from members in Europe. But again, I look at this situation. The Russians are completely disagreeable. They're not really moving. They pay no penalty. So if you're a Ukraine, you're thinking, what do I get for this kind of good behavior? These are things that Ukraine can do. We're seeing a little bit of it right now. This is like the third general I think that's died in the car bomb this year, just happened today or yesterday. I mean, they can dial that part up. And there's things that I think that if we had an ever straining influence on them, we would lose that ability to do that moving forward. But again, I don't really see what else Ukraine could be doing right now. I mean, they're trying to be agreeable in a situation that's not good. One thing I would say is maybe there needs to be more public pushback on this notion that the Russians certainly are trying to push and they're trying to get it lodged into certain spaces of the media here in this country is that Ukraine is on the verge of collapse and they can't keep going and doing this anymore. It is a military that still functions. It does have those problems that we've always talked about, the manpower issues, the A-wall. That's happening. But it is still a functioning fighting force. It is not on the verge of collapse. And so to the extent possible, I think they need to push back on that Russian narrative. You know, which is narrative in some circles in Washington as well. Correct. I mean, this is another problem is, according to reports at least, Rubio keeps being surprised by what our favorite amateur diplomat, Steve Woodcoff, is doing, which is not good for policy. Yeah. And there was some public reference that they talked to experts on this war that kind of informed them. And their opinion was basically that Ukraine is immediately losing what's left of the Donbass. And that's just not true. And that's not a born-of-objective analysis or good intelligence either. So it's always a question mark would they actually take these inputs from? And it seems that if anything, because it became convenient for this diplomatic push, especially the first part of it, which we should involve pressuring Ukraine, to paint the picture that, yes, things are going very, very badly in Donyatsk, the administration essentially accepted a notion of proposition, I don't think matches reality very well. I mean, yeah, Russia is advancing slowly, but it will take him a long time to take even the rest of Donyatsk and at a very high price. They could easily take it tomorrow. It wouldn't be one of their principal demands in the negotiations. That's kind of my belief, like if they are on the cusp of seizing it, which they are not, then why do they want it so badly in the negotiations? This is something I brought up before, I think, with both of you, and I want to get your critical thoughts on it. And I think, given the direction of U.S. policy under this administration, the idea has only become better, although it's my idea, so maybe I'm just biased, but I think it's time for Europe to start thinking outside of the context of the United States and outside the context of NATO to get Ukraine the sort of security guarantees that can actually unlock this. I've proposed a sort of compact with Poland, the Baltic States, the Nordics, and the UK, so you have one nuclear power in there to provide security guarantees to Ukraine. And then obviously implicates NATO indirectly, but it doesn't need to, especially given the true nature of Article 5 that you explained, is it could actually be a meaningful military force that could give real security guarantees in terms of mutual defense guarantees to Ukraine. And I think that could be meaningful, and I think that Europe needs to start thinking more creatively along these rough lines. Now, hit that idea as hard as you can. Ryan, I like the Europe optimist, and I hope someday Europe can actually meaningfully make commitments like that, or coalition states in Europe could, to any other state in Europe. Can or willing to. Both. And also could credibly. I think that we need to get Europeans at least to a point where they could even finish putting together some kind of security assistance force to deploy to Ukraine because you can see it's a huge number. That will never happen. I think. Oh, you think that will never happen, but you believe that a set of European states could make a credible commitment to Ukraine. Yeah. I do. Okay. Well, we're going to have to need the same state. Oh, no. When I say that will never happen. The same states and what I mean is what I mean is what I mean is what I mean is as a part of a resolution to this conflict, like in the next year, I don't see that happening. Not because Europe is unwilling to, although that might be a part of the problem. It's just not something that I think is a realistic end to the war. All right. Well, let me give you my point of view, but be be vicious. Don't hold back. Don't hold back. No, Ryan. It's almost, it's holiday time. Okay. This is not. That you want to agree to. Well, if you want to, if you want to, we have the, the poll, what is the holiday? Yeah. That's the best poll in the next room. Yeah. Mike and I get that. That's what Mike and I are going to wrestle each other after this. All right. So let's talk about those just from a practical point of view. The first problem is it's very hard to get European states to put together something like a multinational division for Ukraine under whatever context you want to imagine. Because there's not enough capability and capacity in Europe to deploy those forces on rotation. Let's have a problem. Okay. So if you can't do that, everything else you're doing is kind of a fantasy football week where you just kind of imagining things as they're playing out, but look, Poland could do it. In theory, yes, and in practice, no, but guess what? I like that you believe that Poland could do it. And more importantly, the challenge you would get is you would need a command and control structure. You would need people signing up to different parts of that, providing organizational capacity, nail layers, you need countries that will serve as the integrator for that effort. There are efforts in Europe to develop that, like the joint expeditionary force that sort of brids are doing with Nordic countries and command control frameworks that don't depend on NATO. But this is not for large scale contingencies, which a few sure would be. And so the problem is that Europe has a long way to get to the ability to employ forces on any scale without the United States leading that fight, and we're just not there yet. And that's not just, it's not a matter of defense spending. It's, the core problem is there's nobody that sets common defense requirements in Europe and the only thing that does that even loosely are NATO regional defense plans, and they serve as guidelines and they'll envision a role for the United States that I'm not sure the US and this administration is necessarily even fully bought into. And Europe's going to have to get from where it is to the ability to do these things and countries picking up these different enablers serving as an integrate role before he can do that credibly. And this isn't the plan of whether there is any agreement that allows for security assistance force in the future or a coalition of states will make some commitment to Ukraine, that is meant to be meaningful military commitment. And that's the challenge. And that's why Ukraine is in every single discussion with us. I've said, yeah, it's really great that Europeans are part of this deal, but we only want security commitments from the United States. We don't want them from Poland. Also, Polish and Ukrainian relations aren't that great. Well, yeah, that sort of thing is used as Lensky won't even apologize for the, yeah, we let them know what their neighbors. Well, I recall again, if we're going back to the past, I recall again, the Georgians also wanted a US trip wire force in Georgia to be some kind of shield that would deter the Russians from coming forward in the administration at the time, 2008 was very reticent, like resistant to that plan. It was a non-starter. I certainly, I just don't see any appetite for that, to have any on country, or in country presence at all, even when it's to our benefit, actually, to have people there to be learning directly from Ukrainians, even when it's to our military's benefit, we won't consider it. Yes, but this is where I think the proposal, Mike, very, and I love the debate and appreciate all the points that both of you have made. This is where I think having the UK in there is a nuclear powers is, is if, maybe this is fantasy world, but if the UK is willing to extend nuclear deterrence to Ukraine, you don't need to send in 100,000 troops from these countries to hold the line. But maybe that's totally unrealistic. Interesting. Yeah. You certainly give me a pause for about two seconds. In the interest of maintaining good relationship with UK colleagues, I'll just say that that is an interesting proposal, Ryan. I'm not sure how credible the UK would be in doing that, extended deterrence isn't easy, but it's certainly worth exploring. Well, this goes back to my, everyone should just have nukes anyway. It's a famous argument between the Sagan and the Walpsons Sagan as book. I got in my shell somewhere. All right. We're done kicking the tar out of my idea for now, but it was a useful exchange. Maybe I am too much of an optimist, which is maybe the first time I've been accused of that. What's happening on the battlefield now? We're right before Christmas. Where do things stand? Okay. Briefly. The number compared to the previous months in terms of Russian advancing gains, but the fighting's been very intense. The bright-nosed scupians, Korean forces were able to contast and to retake parts of kupiansk and cut off Russian access to a northern part of the city. Oh, the things were stable there around October and November when I was by that area with my colleagues. Everywhere else, things are not that great. I would say severe seem to have been largely taken, Russian forces are advancing still in between Izul and Slagansk towards Sveta Hirsk, so there's a lot of issues up there. Around Pakrov's commune ride, Ukraine still holds the northern edge of Pakrov's commune ride is increasingly looking like it's enveloped. So it looks like eventually Ukrainian force will have to retrograde from those two cities. And then by Hulia Polia, the Ukrainian force were able to stabilize the situation there somewhat, but Russian military continues still advancing, meaning the localized breakthrough that happened over a month ago has been decelerated. But in general, I think you're going to see a slowing down of Russian advances going into January, February before things pick up again. So the situation sort of not terrible, not great. The other part of the challenge is you have electricity alleges and electricity shortages across Ukraine, so it's affecting a lot of folks day-to-day lives. Ukraine has expanded a strike campaign in Russia to what is now almost a full-blown tanker war. Any part of it is for that as they see the United States Europeans are simply not doing enough to affect Russian sources of income, and the shadow fleet is one of those principles source of income. So what was kind of a task understanding in the Black Sea for quite a while about not going after commercial tankers, vessels of various types between Russian and Ukraine? Fellow part, as everybody saw in November, and that's only accelerated. Now you have a tax, not just in the Black Sea, but in the Mediterranean as well, where Ukraine is trying to affect Russian sources of income, and Russia is also striking Ukrainian vessels. So I think that's probably the one aspect of this fight to watch. At the bottom line is that you see steady horizontal escalation from this war over the course of 2025, and that trend is going to continue into 2026. Could I ask you a question about there's some discussion out there on social media about a new capability that the Ukrainians have to target shahead drones in particular to shoot them down. Do you have anything you could add to that conversation and when that might be fielded? If you're talking about the various types of radar-guided interceptor drones, that's one. That's been the most common one that Ukraine has used, and that's really bloomed as a field of technology development over the course of this year. There's some other things that are coming online, and Russian militaries also deploying modifications to the shaheads with countermeasures. There's even a new shahead with an R-68 rear missile to try to tackle helicopters and the aircraft that take them down, and they fly at different altitudes at variable velocities, and they increasingly use Chinese mesh modem that creates a network that allows almost direct control via antennae over the course of several hundred kilometers, which allows Russian forces to employ them dynamically, even for strikes within a couple hundred camera range of launch. But Ukraine's very innovative, and they have a number of solutions to the shahead problem. The whole challenge for them has been scaling and deployment. I actually thought it would be further ahead than where we are now, to be honest. I thought that by end of 2025, we would see Ukraine shooting down shaheads in large numbers, with very cheap interceptors. It's only cost a thousand bucks a pop, but I think we're going to get there in 2026. Dare, what's happening on Russia's side in terms of sustaining the war, particularly when it comes to manpower and equipment? So you're seeing the Russians stretch out their timelines a little bit in terms of not only just sustaining the war on a near-term basis, but they're also starting to think more and more about that medium term for what they want the military to look like next. I think the big thing to look at, if we're talking about 2026, the next technology, I think that Russia will pick a winner and scale up is probably going to be the ground combat robotics, the UGV kind of issue. They've seen what the Ukrainians are doing in this space. They've been prototyping for the last six months or so. They'll probably make some selections and then start scaling up there to catch up and then take a lot of those on, and then Mike's talking about the Shahed modifications. Let me ask you about that real quick. What applications, what kinds of ground drones we're looking at? Is it mostly logistics? Is it mostly… Yeah, they're mostly logistics, but they can do things like case-fac, they can do logistics delivery, although Russians have so many FPVs, they use these drones and FPVs to deliver things and Mike has some interesting anecdotes about that, but I think they have applications they want to use them for in the future, like mining, demining, reconnaissance, sentry duties, those kind of things, but they're not there yet by any stretch. I think the other big thing is Russian announcements, investments in ballistic missiles, and I was worried that they would get there, and it seems like they have. They've announced that they're Russian, they've finally worked out some of the issues in the Russian, because it's going to go into production. How's that different from the ones they already have? I am not certain how many they actually had when they fired that Russian against Ukraine. I think they had very small numbers, like batch production level numbers, but now I think it's actually going into serial production. There are people who track developments at Russian defense industry factories across Russia, and there are some ballistic missile components factories that are building new additional buildings, which means a fairly large increase in production. It's not a surprise that the Russians would conclude at this point in the war four years in, that ballistic missiles are more successful for them. They're not bound by INF anymore. Their cruise missiles are intercepted at a pretty high rate. They think they're aware of most of that. Ballistic missile investment is not, I think, an area that we would want Russia to be moving ahead in, but nevertheless, that's where they're going. Extended range of scunders or Russian X don't love it, but that's the conclusion that they're coming to. Given that we're hearing anyway, that Russia's taking higher rates and higher and higher rates of losses of building action, moving into an action, are there any changes to personnel policy mobilization, anything, or are they just sort of going along as they have been the last couple of years? I don't really see any changes right now. I do think that they're not, I think the numbers are not breaking as even for them anymore as they were last year in terms of their monthly recruiting versus what they're losing, but it's important to note that even if that's the case, they are still not stopping or slowing down their activity in Donetsk because it is so important to the Kremlin and these videos that are coming out on telegram are pretty harrowing. I mean, there's Russian soldiers are stepping over dead bodies, they're told not to collect dog tags because there's too many to process. There are stacking issues, but again, it is so important to the Kremlin, you have Putin standing on the stage saying this area of territory will be ours, they're not stopping, but again, there's a trade space there. If they're surging in this one area, it means the other parts of their objectives, they're going to have to be postponing for quite some time. Russian force made a big trade off in terms of preservation of equipment versus manpower losses this year, and that led them to have to spend most of their monthly recruitment rate on loss replacement as opposed to force expansion. Both the past several years that Russia, that military expanded quite a bit probably for maybe 150K to 1.2 plus million, there's still a lot of equipment in the Russian forces. I agree with Dara, they made very large investments in expanding production capacity for various types of missiles, precision-gotten munitions, and they're substantially improved dynamic targeting the various things they couldn't do at the beginning of the war. Not only are they going to regenerate the magazine depth that they had, it's going to be substantially expanded with much more modernized capabilities. And more recently, part of the reason for the, I think, speed of new stories of the past a couple months about short-range ballistic missiles, for example, is because they found ways to get more capability or more accurately, better user employ more effectively the capability that they had in the ballistic missiles they were employing, and that's made it even more challenging to intercept them. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the War on the Rocks Podcast. If you're interested in the War on the Rocks membership program, I want to tell you something new. We actually have a tier focused on only Ukraine and Russia. You can find that information on a website or just Google, War on the Rocks, Ukraine, Russia, membership tier, and you'll find it right there. It's cheaper than our full-out Platinum membership and it includes just the Russia contingency with Michael Kaufman, as well as a new newsletter we have called Ukraine Outlook that focuses on the spectrum of opinion pieces across Ukrainian language media. I think you're really going to enjoy that. Thanks to Booz Allen for sponsoring this important episode. Stay safe, stay healthy, and have a safe holiday season.