Russia-Ukraine War: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump and the Future of Warfare | Lex Fridman Podcast #504

work for them, even if you tell them that it doesn't. And so it's unsurprising to see that Russia is now leaning heavily towards strategic bombardment as a key pillar of its strategy. I think it would also be nice to lay out the basics every time you bring them up. Maybe can you give a quick tangent of the 2023 offensive and then what strategic bombardment is as opposed to the other mechanisms of war? Sure. So in 2023, there were a series of fairly set-piece offensives and counter-offensives. After a partial mobilization with manpower replenished and some reserves established, Russia attempted a winter offensive, but its forces were unready. And so the winter campaign for Russia in 2023 was largely a failure, perhaps with the exception of the grinding battle over the city of Bakhmut.

Then Ukraine launched a much anticipated summer offensive using units that were freshly trained and equipped by Western countries. And there was a great deal of kind of hope and expectations that were placed upon this offensive, but it too failed. It lasted several months. I think in reality, it went from June 2023 till about November of 2023. And then Russia tried to seize the initiative again and started its own offensive and involved in 2023 with the Battle of Divka. But so summer of 2023 is one of the periods where we still see an exchange in terms of initiative between the two sides and fairly clear-cut major offensive operations and counter-offensive operations.

And in 2023, early on, you have a failed Russian winter. offensive. This is probably one of the worst points for the Russian military in the war, fall through winter, fall 2022 through winter of 2023. And then you have the Ukrainian summer 2023 offensive, where Ukraine does gain some ground, but it's not what people hoped for. And since then, for much of the war, you know, you see Russia trying to establish and having an advantage in manpower and material. And for March of 24 and 25, Russia actually tends to have the initiative, even though it's largely pursuing a grinding offensive on a very broad front.

And if I sort of fast forward and take us into 2026, you really start to see the inflection point probably around fall of 2025. And then in 2026, the Russian effort is floundering and Russian forces face significant reversals where the battle space is a lot more dynamic this year. Ukraine has two of its own localized defensives running. And you see there's actually much greater fluidity in 2026 on the battlefield, certainly at the tactical level, than you would in 25 or 24. There's often a perception that it's just a positional stalemate. But in fact, even more recently, some of Ukraine's offensive operations had gained more terrain than Ukrainian forces were able to do during the summer 2023 offensive, which was planned to be a much bigger operation. Also, it might be useful to kind of state perhaps the obvious, but the nature of this war. One of the things, especially as it evolved, the role of drones on the front. And maybe this is where you can loop in strategic bombardment as well. Like what are the main mechanisms of war here? So we look at this war beyond what's happening at the front line.

Russia has, from the very beginning of the war, had a series of strikes, an expansive strike campaign, but it really begins in fall of 2022, where they begin launching combination strikes of long-range airline cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles against Ukrainian critical infrastructure. And by critical infrastructure, I mean power plants, substations, various types of heating plants, things that a country needs in order to sustain the economy and the population. And over time, those targets expand, right? Russia targets various types of civilian infrastructure. And actually, at this point in 2026, we've seen that campaign really broaden to include warehouses, data centers, schools, medical facilities, malls, actually quite a few shopping malls in the last few months, trains.

So it's gone far beyond energy infrastructure to include a host of other civilian types of targets. And it changed over time from being primarily done with cruise missiles and ballistic missiles to being mostly conducted via saturation strikes using large numbers of one-way attack drones. And those drones themselves evolved in terms of the systems gone now from being largely done with cheaper, easier-to-shoot-down propeller-driven drones to ones that are jet-powered and are, in effect, light ground-launched cruise missiles and a much larger number of ballistic missiles, some which are more sophisticated.

And so Ukraine has been facing both large combination strikes, but also daily sustained pressure, constant attacks with jet-powered drones that generate alerts and disrupt economic life and try to exhaust Ukraine's air defense. By the way, I forgot to mention that I'm a big fan of both of yours. It's an honor to have the both of you here, Mike and Preston. Preston, I've been watching you for a long time, so thank you for being here. So, yes, to ask you to build on what Mike was saying, and maybe can you also speak to some of the geographic areas that are in question here that are most contested?

Yeah, absolutely, Lex. It's an honor to be here. Always a challenge to add anything. thing to what mike has to say we'll give it a shot here i think it's it's good to get an idea of the areas that we're going to be talking about in ukraine the fight still is predominantly in the east and the southeast so kiev kind of in the the middle of the country is not facing direct russian attacks in terms of of infantry uh and short-range drones they of course are on the receiving end daily of long-range drones and missile strikes but as you move through the border region starting in the north there are russian infiltrations in sumi uh there's also fighting in Ukrainian territory in Kharkiv. And then you get down into what's known as the Donbass, Luhansk, and Donetsk. And this is where some of the heaviest fighting throughout the war has taken place. And this is, I'm sure we'll get into it later, but an area referred to as the fortress belt. The Ukraine has turned into just an absolutely brutal area for Russia to try to advance through. It's costing Russia a lot of people day in and day out. Moving from there, We're into Zaporizhia, and then Kherson butts up against the Black Sea.

And some of the strategic bombardment that Mike was talking about. So that's beyond even these areas. So even Kiev is being hit. So a lot of the places throughout Ukraine is being hit. And some in the western portion of the country, not as frequently. Kiev is a focus. If you look along the front today, you have essentially some Russian border incursions trying to establish a small buffer across the border, which are lower-intensity areas of fighting in Sumi-Harkiv. You have an ongoing fighting around the city of Kupiansk and the Kharkiv region. And then you have the focus of Russian offensive efforts, Preston was saying, still trying to take the remainder of the Donbass.

And that fighting ranges all the way down from cities like areas like Liman all the way towards the main conglomeration of cities. And we should mention them now because I think they're going to come up, that are remaining in the Donetsk region, which are Slavyansk, Krematorsk, Dushkivka, and Konstantinovka, which troops all colloquially call Konstaha because its name's too long. And then further west of that is Dobrypylia, which is a main city now that's been essentially an anchor in Ukrainian defense west of that conglomeration with another chain of cities behind it. And if we add southwest, we get into the Dnieper region and then Zaporizhia.

And Zaporizhia is an interesting, fairly dynamic area because you have both Russian and Ukrainian forces on the offensive at the same time, where you have Russian forces trying to push west of Hulipuria, and you have northeast of that Ukrainian forces having had the initiative for much of the year, a tactical grouping of Ukrainian air assault brigades has been running kind of a creeping offensive there. This has been pretty successful in making gains. And the other area, which we might get into later around Liman, was Ukraine's third corps having conducted a successful offensive operation as well called Vivaldi. So those are two areas where Ukraine's not only contesting the initiative, but actually is liberating territory. And in many ways, wiping out Russian gains from 2025.

And that's what I meant when I was saying earlier, that there's a much more dynamic battle space than people think, in that territory is a lot more fluid. There's a vast gray zone, in fact, between the two lines. Ukraine does not hold cohesive defensive lines. It often has essentially pickets with small number of infantry that mark positions. but much of the territory is essentially contested such that in the battle space defined by dense control fire drones and a sort of a sizable engagement zone which varies from place to place but you might say roughly it might be 15 kilometers forward and back of the front line although in some areas it's more in other areas it's less it depends what happens is in reality that it becomes more of a gray zone.

And the president was saying Russian forces try to get past this drone engagement zone or defeat zone through infiltration. That's their main challenge, either through individual infantry, through light. motorized attacks on motorcycles and ATVs. And they tried to essentially get as far back past Ukrainian positions as they can, whereas Ukraine's largely defending with a combination of prepared defenses, minefields, and a large array of drones and drone units that are effectively engaging Russian forces before they get to even their own front line, their forward line of troops. And if they get past that point, they get past Ukrainian initial positions, then Ukrainian drone units essentially pick them up there.

So it's in many respects kind of a zonal defense, but we should unpack that a bit because people see this as a drone war and the statistics out there do show that Jones inflict 80% of losses. However, it is really a combination of things. And the dynamic is one that involves traditional defense on minefields that make it very hard for mechanized assaults or like motorized assaults to break through. Artillery, which still plays a role in the battlefield because it forces the enemy forces to disperse. It has a shaping dynamic. Even if you don't use it much, the fact that it's present, it makes it hard for troops to concentrate or suppresses them.

It slows them down in assault, making them easy targets for drones. And it's still relevant because drones also have their own limitations. And two periods of the war when they often have the limitations seasonally are spring and fall, again to winter, because the weather becomes poor. You get high wind, you get rain. Drones don't work nearly as effectively during poor weather. And so artillery is a very important backup. And if you just had drones, you didn't have anything else, no minefields, no artillery, I don't think Ukraine would be able to hold the terrain this effectively with a low density of forces, the men that they currently have deployed.

So it's important to describe as a combination of means, even if drones play such a central role that folks don't ignore the interaction of these different capabilities in Ukraine's approach. So sorry to linger on the basics, but can we like lay out, so artillery is big guns. What's the role of individual infantry? What's the role of tanks? What is this gray zone? What does it actually look like? How many drones are floating above? What does it look like, as Preston was saying, for an individual infantry soldier to run through that? Can you paint a picture of some of the basic things here? Not good to run through that.

It's terrifying. find there's there's constant eyes in the sky but to kind of walk this out a little bit artillery uh generally speaking 105 or 155 millimeter cannons that's what we use here in the united states it's primarily what ukraine has been using now is it kind of shifted over to a nato standard you're talking about 20 ish kilometer range which at a time was was big and there was a phase in this war where that was seemingly to determine the direction that it was going to go is who had more artillery who could mass fires in certain directions. It's just changed so drastically now to where the drone range has pushed those further and further back. So cannons are on the battlefield.

There are some that are dug in kind of in entrenched positions. Others are mobile on tracks or wheels because they got to get out of there. As soon as they fire, there's so many drones overhead watching them. When you get into the drones then on the battlefield, there's a number of them being utilized. Reconnaissance drones is kind of where everything starts. and those are just big fixed wing drones for the most part that they can stay airborne for quite a while they're generally low cost and that's been a dynamic that we've seen with both russia and ukraine in this war is they've gone from the very few but high cost maybe larger drones down to a ton of low cost borderline attributable they don't want to lose all these drones but it's not that big of a deal to lose one compared to say a u.s predator reaper that costs you know 20 plus million dollars so they've got these reconnaissance drones up constantly both have these up. When they spot something that is passed along to the appropriate drone unit and is engaged based off of what they have available to them. The, I would say, most common one that we see in terms of the media that has the most attention would be the FPV drones. Those are

small quadcopters. You see them flying 12 inches, 18 inches. I think they might get up to 20 inches at times. Generally, there's a munition attached to the end of that. They crash it into something and it detonates. They can swap that out for anti-personnel munitions or go after vehicles or fortifications. And they can do that on the spot. So there are mountains of these FPVs. There's a picture of Kim Jong-un, actually, North Korea, walking through a hallway of stacked FPVs. So these are the very small, low-cost, attritable drones. And they're being used. The numbers are... staggering. I'd say for FPVs, it's probably somewhere 8,000 to 10,000 per day, just those, not including other types of tactical drones. And that would be for one side of the war.

So to give you a sense that these are hundreds of thousands of these being employed per month, these trichetabilities exceed all the numbers of personnel and equipment on the battlefield by very substantial. And just to clarify, behind every FPV drone, there's a human being operating it. So there's also from the news or something, there's a sense that autonomy is being utilized. It is not. So this is something you guys talked about. There's usually humans behind the drones. So I'll be frank. Most of this war are systems that are remotely operated, but they are operated by people. It is actually quite manpower intensive. And in fact, it's in many cases, if you look at both Russian, Ukrainian military, they had to build out substantial numbers of drone units and channel manpower into the drone component of the fight.

It's not even a ratio of one-to-one, sort of one person-to-one drone. A typical drone team might require two or three people. You have a pilot, you have a co-pilot navigator. This is exhausting, tiring work. I'm not saying that other traditional missions are easy, but with a drone, you have to be looking at a screen the whole time, all day. You have to be flying and it's very intensive somebody else has to navigate another person might be the technician or the person who arms the system uh and so almost all the systems in this war are remotely operated whether they're flying drones one-way attack strike drones whether they're UGVs on crewed you know ground vehicles um and and they require considerable support at the end of the day these are physical objects that require equipping they require troubleshooting like most things in war, they don't even necessarily work well or right out of the box as well. It's what a lot of people don't necessarily appreciate about military affairs. A lot of things don't necessarily work as intent on the battlefield. Somebody's got to be there to fix it. They have to be there to check it. So the bottom line is that it is actually quite manpower intensive. There is a degree of

semi-autonomy, terminal guidance and targeting at the very last point. Or maybe the pilot can hit a box over a vehicle, and then the drone knows that that's what it should go after. These kind of moments. And ways that the drone can overcome enemy electronic warfare jamming with this kind of terminal guidance. But most of these use cases are a tiny percentage of the overall fight and the overall number of drones being employed in this war. I think in some ways, I hate to take away from the autonomy and artificial intelligence conversation, This war is testing that, and there are plenty of areas where I see it's being tested, but to some extent, it's been overhyped in terms of the percentage of the fight that's actually being run that way.

It is very much still a human-centric war with a lot of manpower involved, running, operating, and maintaining all of these capabilities. So one of the other novel aspects of this war is so much of it is televised so that you could see videos from the drone perspective on both sides of that drone killing another human being. It takes one drone to accomplish that task, and it actually takes a lot more. Can you speak to that in terms of the number of drones it takes to accomplish a particular task like to destroy a piece of technology or to, I don't know the right way of speaking about this, but to kill another person?

Yeah. Eliminate a target might be a cold way of saying that. We're in an interesting place where there's a lot of propaganda value in footage for anybody using it in any in any military right now in a way that we didn't have access to even just a few years ago. so there's a lot of interest in being able to show i mean we have seen now people will not take uh reports that something happened unless there is a video of it which is insane because that you know a few years ago you would never have expected to have video of a missile strike in crimea on a russian airfield now there's no video it's maybe it didn't even happen so the expectation is there and countries are meeting that by being able to say like look we penetrated your defenses look what we did or look at all the soldiers we killed as they were we were making this approach so it's out there there's only a tiny fraction that's made public in the first place uh and of those that's only a tiny fraction of what actually accomplishes the mission so drones the batteries run out they get jammed all of a sudden the screen just goes dark uh sometimes they impact and they don't detonate you know all sorts of little things like that that footage doesn't make it out it in

turn kind of creates this perception that one three hundred dollar drone or one five hundred drone is eliminating a tank and that's not happening. Maybe with the right munition and with a lucky shot and the tank isn't expecting it, maybe it's possible. Realistically, we're seeing 10, 20, I think upwards of 30 of these small drones at times being utilized to actually eliminate a tank. So we should be imagining a very large number of FPV drones just hunting humans and tanks and technology? The problem with understanding what the ratios are is the videos have a strong anchoring effect. And the videos are all videos of successes. There are no videos of misses. So unless you're actually there, you're able to collect the data, you don't know what percentage of hits or percentage of drones launched that really is. You might get easily the impression that 100% of the drones launch a hit. As Preston said, that's very far from the case. So you need quite a few drones for people even though on videos it looks like a one-to-one ratio it's often not i think it's often a lot closer to maybe five drones or something like that per person yeah in practice and i've seen i'll be frank i've myself seen videos that aren't public where in the

most extreme case i saw one on a field trip in july where it took 12 on tanks the most outside example i heard of a well-armored protected russian tank with electronic warfare one of these tanks that looks like a large barn, essentially. It's so heavily protected. Last year was 79. That's an extreme case, but most, as Preston said, is about 30 to 40. For an infantry fighting vehicle, about 15, maybe 15 to 20, depending, again. And you have some percentage of drones that are jammed, they'll make it to a target. You have some percentage of drones that may fail to detonate. So it's quite a few. And, you know, in talking to folks who are trying to return mobility and maneuver to the battlefield that specialize in drone-enabled mechanized assault, where they have both mechanized units and drone units supporting them, a company, the mechanized company that goes on attack now expects to take about close to 300 hits in that assault. They expect vehicles to take quite a few hits.

and most to be able to withstand them. So it does take quite a few drones. But the sheer saturation of numbers of drones out there is very difficult to overstate. So given that, what does the battle look like?

So I won't say that there's been one method, but different units experimenting with different ways of doing it. And on the Russian side, as Preston said, it's a combination of mechanized light motorized assault sometimes, but increasingly Russians are using mechanized assault simply to consume the attention of Ukrainian drone units to distract them or try to basically get them to focus on the mechanized assault so that light motorized assaults can get through, can get past their initial positions.

So all these soldiers on motorcycles and ATVs, and even, believe it or not, I've seen Lada's and things of that nature. For the infiltration side, like literally soldiers on motorcycles. Yes. Trying to gain position so they can then attack the supply chains to force Ukrainian forces to push back. Let me, maybe you can take one minute just to explain why that can be a challenge for Ukraine. Because it may sound to someone listening to this a bit preposterous, right? So let me offer why that can pose challenge. And sometimes light motorized attacks have proven more successful than traditional mechanized attacks.

Because mechanized attacks are a small number of vehicles. Typically, the leading vehicle has a big trawl to clear mines. You know, Ukrainian drones can easily gang up on it and then start isolating the comp. And light motorized attacks is a whole number of soldiers. It could be 100 motorcycles, could be more than 100 motorcycles who are trying to use speed to overcome this sort of engagement zone. And the reason why that can be an issue sometimes, even though most of them get taken out, I want to be clear, most of them are not successful. But Ukraine forward positions are often three-man posts.

They're not even really firing position or observation posts. They're essentially pickets with considerable separation between them of several hundred meters, right? So Ukraine might have three of these four kilometers. That means there's considerable space between them. So you could drive through. Then behind them, there might be secondary positions, but they're still pretty sparse in between. Most of the units involved in the fight are essentially supporting units, different type of fire support, drone support, traditional artillery fires, logistics, what have you. Many Ukrainian units don't really have the manpower to merely launch a counterattack if Russian forces break through.

Some do. Some have a quick reaction force ready. But for some, the manpower isn't necessarily there. So it can be a challenge if units do get through and they begin to accumulate. And what can happen, and this is how infiltration works for Russia, even though it's incredibly costly. You can imagine 10 soldiers going forward. and seven of them don't make it, but three do. And they found the path in between positions. So now the people that sent them know that this is the gap in Ukrainian positions, and they can then daisy change, send the next group down this path. Now, somewhere behind Ukrainian lines are now three Russian troops, but maybe it's five, six, seven. Now they're accumulating. Well, behind those positions, if you get three to five kilometers back, now you're reaching the first drone reconstitutes units that are flying Mavics.

they are not prepared to receive an enemy assault team they are flying drones okay so for them this is already an issue because if russian assault troops if only three or four or five of them are operating your depth and ukrainian units do try to hunt them down because if they let any number escape then they get to the drone units then you start losing your drone units your support personnel it is a real issue in in the battle space so that's essentially how infiltration works over time, although it's incredibly costly for Russia. It's a grim calculus. But it's a combination of that and also trying to fight for superiority in drone employment overall. Who has more drones? Who has more drone units in the fight? Who has more fire support?

Who's able to suppress? Who's drone units to then allow their offensive tactics to have some purchase and success? Quick pause. There's coffee downstairs for people just listening to this. this is late at night we're pushing through this is amazing okay we're back i i guess i should also ask what kind of drones are we talking about so i i just pulled out the um what is this the mini pro ggi drones uh five how many drones like this are there and also i should mention that some of them have a cable for them right fiber optic cable and uh i think preston you've talked about throughout throughout all this at first you were skeptical when you visited initially but then you kind of saw the the wisdom the effectiveness of the fiber optic uh drones the fiber optics are terrifying in a lot of ways but to answer your question mavics those are still utilized all things considered they're relatively expensive compared to some other systems that ukraine has and uh those are not manufactured in ukraine and a lot of what they're using right now they're building themselves. So FPVs are a bit bigger than that, but the term drone is so broad right now. I mean, all the way to describe effectively missiles that Russia is firing and Ukraine is

firing in Russia that are the size of cars. So we've got everything from very, very big to very small and everything in between. The fiber optic one is interesting. So one of the major defenses against drones, and we use it in the U.S. military, is jamming electronic warfare, making it to where these munitions or anything doesn't function in a certain area. And I think it was Russia originally that did it. Mike can correct me here, but they certainly rolled it out relatively quickly. And they attached a very thin fiber optic cable that spooled out of the drone back to the operator. And what that did then was it brought that signal internal and the jammer stopped working.

So all of the electronic warfare in the world isn't doing anything. that drone flies directly through it. Now, the limitations are that there's a cable behind this drone. As thin as it is, it does have some weight to it, which means a smaller payload or a smaller distance or shorter distance of the drone to fly. Those can get hung up at times. But we saw Russia roll that out. Ukraine quickly matched it. And that is a serious threat right now at longer and longer distances. I think we've seen them upwards of around 50 kilometers at this point. The first time I heard this, I thought it didn't compute in my head.

So you just said 50 kilometers. So that's a very long cable. It's a drone connected by a cable. It didn't make any sense to me. That could be a reality. Maybe this is a good place to kind of ask the nature of war, which is figuring out. out different technologies that are actually effective on the ground, like figuring out what's effective, even if it seems crazy. Yeah. I mean, as President said, this, Ukrainians initially experimented with them, didn't adopt them, but then Russia started adopting them pretty heavily after employing them in Kursk. When Ukraine had the Kursk offensive, that's when Russian units really started first using fiber optic cables.

They saw them as being effective. I'm demonstrating this as a case, as an example of the case, at least. and once they saw that it was quite effective impossible to jam right because you literally have a cable attached to a drone that the drone lays behind itself as it flies think of it like um a very thin fiber optic cable filament like on a fishing rod the reel that you would use about that width too it's very thin it's very thin and it's a spool like a reel on a fishing rod that's that's literally what the thing is on it it's a spool and it's just this cable's coming behind. You have to fly it carefully. You have to fly it slowly. You can't fly it like the drone you had here, this Mini Pro. You have to be more cautious because you have to think how the cable is being laid on trees, on roads, on other things. You have to remember that you have a cable, not a radio signal connecting yourself to it. But nonetheless, it's quite effective. And then it spread from the units using Nkursk because other units saw it as a successful practice. Once people see something that's effective, they say, I want to try that too. Then it spreads to other units.

Then, as Russians were using against Ukrainian units, Ukrainian units began adopting it as well. Not at the same rate. Fiber-optic cable drones are still a fairly small percentage of the overall tactical strike drones used. And I'm not sure, I hate to say I'm making this number up, but it's 15% or less, I think, overall. That said, they play a very important role because you can't jam them. And also, they're much more difficult to detect. Ukrainian units, everyone commonly has systems of detection, force drones, that are flown via an analog radio signal because it's open and it's easy to intercept.

So you often have a device, for example, it's nicknamed the Chuyka, one type of it. I've always had one in the vehicle and driving. There's three antennas coming out of it, which receive signal on three different frequency spectrums. And if there's a drone coming towards you, the way things work is once a drone that's using an analog radio signal is closer to you than to the operator, the signal strength can be stronger to you. So you can start to receive the signal from it. And you have like a little screen that you can see the video feed of an enemy drone coming. And with a fiber optic cable drone, you have nothing in terms of warning because you can't receive that signal.

But the way I look at it is that there's been about a three to four month cycle of evolution of technology and tactics. in this war between Russian and Ukrainian forces, and they iterate fairly quickly. So both sides have enough defense industrial capacity, enough capital, enough folks working on this, that if one side is using something and it's demonstrated to be effective, they assume and anticipate that the other side is going to begin to imitate them and adopt those technological capabilities. And usually the interaction between the two, and I'm very broad-brushingness. So, Ukraine has often led in terms of tactical development and bottom-up innovation because of the way Ukrainian units all experiment on their own and all have, they're kind of all defense startups. They all have kind of their own R&D section. They have their own defense shop or company that's building drones for them. So, technology tends to, you know, bloom I remember when EW was really exploding in 2023, 2024, and folks were calling it like an electronic warfare jungle because all these different systems were appearing.

And so Ukraine tended to innovate faster. Russian military was slower, but Russia had, in some way... more capacity intended to be better at scaling a solution once they identified it. And this was Ukraine's frustration, that once the Russian military identified something as effective and they saw that Ukraine is doing something well, they would then allocate capital, industrial capacity, skill deployed across the force in a standardized way a bit faster. If I can add something to this, Lex, because it's an aspect of this that we just kind of, and Mike did it here, and I do it all the time too, is you just rattle it off like it's normal and it's so far from normal the chuika drone detector what that means is it looks like an old game boy has a screen on it so you're driving down the road in ukraine watching the screen it turns on and it is the enemy's view of the drone is it your vehicle or is it a different vehicle and you will watch you can watch as the enemy drone comes in at you for soldiers in tree lines they might be watching and trying to decide does that drone see us do we to move it doesn't see us it's looking the other direction it's literally watching the feed of the russian soldiers that are hunting you that is just about everybody along the front has that right now

it's just a weird dynamic that brand new to war it beeps and uh when it picks up the signal and so when you're holding it the it's not a pleasant feeling for everybody else in the vehicle that you can see it's beeping it's picking up the signal on any drone and i have had times where folks see me looking at the screen it's a small screen looking at the screen the enemy drone and then looking you know like to your right kind of looking your surroundings to see is this you know is this like close to me is it kind of looking in the same area or not so it is it is exactly as Preston describes it so there's a surreal aspect to this it feels almost like video game like with real life life and death consequences the soldiers on both sides are looking at screens And then the whole world is looking at the screens of the soldiers filming the thing that just feels like the nature of war is completely different. Can you speak to the degree this war represents modern warfare and the future of modern warfare? And to what degree does it represent leftover from old way of fighting wars?

I think we're at a transition point right now. This war represents Russia and Ukraine. It is not representative of what every war in the world would look like should it spark today, tomorrow, or next year. There's just very unique aspects to this. The lack of air superiority on Russia's part plays a major role in how the battlefield looks today. that may or may not be the situation that the u.s military or nato per se would be in in another conflict maybe it would but there's a lot of dynamics at play here so it's we we haven't seen this in our lifetime where we have you know one of the one of the aspects of warfare is when people are fighting for their life day in and day out they tend to come up with really good ways to stay alive. And alternatively, really good ways to kill the enemy. Ways that you don't come up with when you're just between wars and thinking about what might be a good solution. So we are seeing rapid innovation in both Russia and Ukraine. And these are modern economies with modern technology. We haven't seen this in my lifetime, at least. You know, the Taliban were innovating. Al Qaeda was innovating. ISIS, they were innovating. The enemies that we fought were innovating, they didn't have this scale to do it. They didn't have this technology to do it. So

we, I think we jumped decades in terms of what warfare will be in a very short period of time because of where it's playing out. As a thought experiment, how would the United States military fight this differently? Say there was no nuclear weapons on the table. You said something air superiority. What does that mean? So air superiority is the ability to conduct operations in an air space pretty, pretty much at will. So very similar to, uh, Iraq and Afghanistan as we were fighting there with air power overhead. at all times. They were really at no risk of being shot down or even suppressed to the point of not being able to carry out operations. What you're seeing in Ukraine right now is air denial.

Neither side is flying aircraft into enemy territory. That's been the case for a long time. The U.S. military is very much built around air power and delivering long-range precision munitions and a lot of munitions from B-1 bombers, B-2 bombers, things like that, onto enemy positions. But by the way, small tangent, which branch of the military is responsible for drones? I would love to know, like you were at West Point, is there like a set of courses now on drones, on drone warfare? We're getting there. So is that part of the Air Force? Is that part of the air power? Does that count as air power or is that not?

We're figuring it out, I think is the best way to put it. And this is the thing that it's happening so fast, right? But they haven't had the opportunity to create new courses and put cadets through this for three or four years at a point because there's new technology right now that wasn't necessarily being utilized just 18 months ago. So the Pentagon is working on this. We've seen a lot of kind of press releases and positive statements about the direction we're headed. There's a drone dominance program right now that the military is spearheading, trying to identify small manufacturers that can be agile and come up with new solutions to field to the broader force.

We're trying to catch up in a lot of ways in terms of who owns it. I don't know that that answer is there yet. It seems like everybody's got a little piece of it, but that's part of it. We're trying to work our way through it right now. But the U.S. military is embracing this new small drone. To what degree is this an intermediate stage of having these kind of ad hoc drones? Is this an intermediate stage of something else that's coming? Or is this going to be the new way of fighting these kinds of wars? That's a good question. There's debate whether an analogy is maybe like aviation of World War I, where we see the Russia-Ukraine war as a transitional war, We present described it. It starts off as a actually fairly traditional 20th century war with two forces that are principally artillery armies that are both successor armies to the Soviet military, which was an artillery army. And much is decided in the war through their interaction, artillery, armor, anti-tank guided missiles, and a lot of modernized Soviet equipment.

If you were around in the 70s and 1980s, you would have recognized most of the things on the battlefield in 2022 through 2024. In fact, most of the equipment NATO sent was also what NATO had made all the way from 60s to, you know, the 90s. And then drones evolve quite rapidly and really start to mature over the course of this war. And the question is, are we close to this final stage of maturity? Or would we see a substantial reduction of how much manpower is involved? Would drones become much more autonomous to the benefit of both a different set of technology and artificial intelligence being used for navigation, guidance, what have you?

And how relevant is that to the wars we plan to fight and also the way we want to fight? Every military has its own conception of its contingencies, the scenarios that it has in mind, and also an idea of how it wants to fight. And here's the challenge, because first, how do we know when we're looking at a war that what we see is generalizable to other wars? Every war has its own context, right? This is a principle of land war with an air and a sea component. Second, there's always an issue of when you're looking at prolonged conventional war, what part of the war do you want to draw lessons from?

Because most wars of this type, they start out with this dynamic, intense phase, the clash of forces, reconciliation, military plans. But then they often do become positional, traditional in nature, right? Forces dig in. There's way more troops on the battlefield. Everything. mind. It's very hard to break through. And drones really came into their own more in these latter phases, right? So sometimes people make the mistake of they look at the latter phase, the late parts of a war, and think, okay, this is how the next war will start. But the next opening phase of a war is often different than kind of the middle phase where both sides enter this dynamic that they're trying to break out of. I think for the United States, part of the challenge is that we actually are tactically an incredibly skilled force, right? We spend a lot of money on our military, on the training for our military, and the quality of our personnel. And Preston's absolutely right. We spend a tremendous amount of funding on the expeditionary air component of our force because it's the best combination of ability firepower on the battlefield, which then enables the rest of the force to conduct combined arms maneuver. And what I mean by that is if you think

of the different combat arms, right? Infantry, armor, artillery. If you think of aviation in combination with that, that force works together, right? All those pieces are interacting with each other, supporting each other dynamically on the battlefield. And one of the big advantages of our force is not just technology, not just training personnel, but the fact that we can run a complex operation, have these pieces working together, at least ideally, and be able to achieve a much greater effect from the fact that these pieces are interacting, they're much better coordinated. And lastly, one of the biggest separators of modern militaries is whether or not you can do the things you're doing in exercise or in a small scenario against a permissive environment, like let's say you're fighting the Taliban. I'm not saying that wasn't challenge, but nonetheless, it's quite different having a fight like that than facing the largest conventional war Europe has seen since World War II, right? The ability to scale operations, complex operations, is a big limiter for other militaries. In fact, the Russian military really struggled with this extensively at the beginning of this war. To maybe make an analogy to folks

not in military affairs, it's one thing to run a business with, you know, 10 employees. It's another thing to run a corporation with 10 or 20,000, right? The complexity scales. And I don't know anything about running corporations, but I imagine there's a great deal more complexity to it than something like a small business, even though in principle you're still running a business operation. So I use this kind of analogy to explain that this is in some ways how the United States is very much advantage. But if you're interested, there are some open-ended questions based on what we saw in this war. If we need to adapt, if we need to change the way we operate, there is a degree of uncertainty if our traditional advantages will offer the same benefits in a future war if that war features this technology in the battlefield one thing we do know is that our opponents like russia do plan to fight in this way we already have a sense of how they plan to fight because we see how they're fighting in this war right you know that gibson used to say the future is already here it's not evenly distributed right so we already see that this you know this is already here on the battlefield in europe an absurdly large question but who is winning this

war right now? And maybe a better version of that question is, what is a good measure of how to score the war in terms of the military balance of power and effectiveness? So territory gain, casualties, quality of each army, maybe other measures. Who's winning this war right now? I'll tackle it. Honestly, Lex, it's a question I generally avoid. I understand where the question comes from. People want to have a very clear and concise, where do things stand right now? But the challenge is this isn't like a football game where both teams you're looking at the scoreboard who has more points at the end of 60 minutes and that's the winner you can say whoever has more points at 55 minutes they're that much closer because russia and ukraine in this case are fighting for different things they have different objectives You'd overly simplify it and say that Russia is trying to take Ukraine and that Ukraine is trying to maintain their sovereignty.

But then you just go down a rabbit hole of what is success or what is the fact that Ukraine still exists today to a degree is winning. But they have lost some territory that they don't appear on the verge of getting back. That is not winning. So it's difficult. The other thing I would say with that is when you look at historical conflicts, say World War II, Nazi Germany was winning that war for the majority of it until they weren't, and then they quickly lost. Imperial Japan was winning much of World War II in the Pacific. They were unstoppable. If you looked at it, if you took a snapshot in time, and then all of a sudden things turned, they were losing, and they lost.

So the winning, losing in the middle of a conflict, I feel like you could paint that honestly, something like this, in whichever direction you would prefer. Is it fair to say that either side can collapse quickly, so ties can turn dramatically? Historically, we have seen that. I don't know that there's a lot of evidence right now. I think there was a lot of expectations early on that Ukraine would be the country to collapse. And there's been countless analysts just, you know, they're on the verge. This winter is going to be it. This summer is going to be it. And they're still holding. There's no indications that either one is on the verge of collapse, but some sort of large change to dynamically shift the conflict.

Like, you know, the Purgosian-Wagner march on Moscow, there was the possibility there. Maybe that would have been the thing that would have brought about not necessarily a Russian collapse, but a Russian inability to continue to project power into Ukraine. Black Swan event is probably a little too much, but it's that type of thing that could precipitate a major change in the direction the war is going. Yeah, I don't see either side right now being able to impose the kind of collapse I think you're thinking of. And part of the reason is just the way they're fighting and interaction between the two forces isn't really conducive to producing that. It's very hard to generate the level of momentum and exploit battlefield conditions to really kind of force a collapse on the side.

although as i often say you know we have to be mindful wars unfold in phases right so these periods where one side has the initiative russia held the initiative for a long period of time now in 2026 we see actually ukraine increasingly has the initiative on parts of the front as imposing real challenges on the russian armed forces you could say that for a time ukraine has been advantaged this year on the battlefield the debate we have as analysts is is that going to be a lasting advantage, is that a secular trend, or is that a window of opportunity for Ukraine? Because just because your advantage, like Russia might have been in 24 and 25, it doesn't mean that that will hold, that will last.

You see that the way one side fights can reach diminishing returns and become cost and effective. That's what happened to Russia in 2025. You see much of it is an interaction between the two forces, adaptation, new technology comes along. Both sides are experimenting with different ways to fight. And so this is, you know, I think for neither of us, this is not a cop-out. I think as analysts, there is always a tendency to admire the problem. But if you say somebody's winning, it often sets for people and certainly any audience expectations. Most people think if you say someone's winning, that side's going to win.

And the conventional war, it's very hard to see things forward even a couple of months because so much is contingent that you can only say Ukraine's advantage on the ground right now. But Ukraine also faces This is a very, very significant challenge from the Russian strike campaign. None of us are sure how this winter is going to go. We're not sure how cold the winter is going to be. That's a big factor, too. And other factors are at play. What other wars will happen? The U.S. war with Iran had a material and political impact on this war. So we don't know what other things will take place around the world that may shape this war, because there are all sorts of countries that are de facto material parties to the war or very significantly engaged in supporting the countries fighting this war. So it's just a great deal of factors to consider.

when you analyze the war maybe you can speak to uh the levels of analysis that are most important to you that we should be thinking about so historians like james holland who analyzes for example world war ii the western front the eastern front and focus on the western front from all the different levels you know tactical strategic operational there's of course the political geopolitical there's you know the supply chain all this kind of down to geography and weather, like you mentioned, winter. So what are some of the levels of analysis that are important here in this particular war? I mean, I think for a military analyst, you know, there's at least three levels and then there's the central political level that's also essential to understand.

But the way I look at it first, tactical level of analysis, right? That's the nitty gritty battlefield details. What's happening on the ground in these specific fights? How are the two sides fighting at this tactical level? How are force employed? We covered quite a bit of that in the conversation already. How does infantry advance? How are drones being employed? You know, correlation of forces and day-to-day battlefield changes. They inform your understanding of how the war is being fought, and also they help set your expectations for what's likely to happen in the months ahead. But they're also relevant because even though the war is not going to be decided by who advances the next five or 10 kilometers, that this tactical level war very much informs the strategic.

Why? It sets expectations among military and political leaders for who has greater bargaining power, who has leverage, who is succeeding on the battlefield, provides information to the negotiations between the two sides as well. So to some extent, we can't overly fixate on the map, but the map is important. And you can see who is adapting, who is not adapting, and actually is increasingly suffering greater casualties than battlefield reversals, which in this case, 2026 is Russian. Let's take the operational level. And first, I'll say this is a thorny subject in military circles because I know plenty of people, military side, that don't think there's a discrete operational level of war.

They think that there's operational art, but there isn't such a thing as a separate operational level of war. We should not get into that discussion here. Also, you're saying that some people listening to this are very angry hearing you even say operational, like it's a discreet layer. I would not say they were angry, but I can imagine a host of Army majors getting ready to debate this as I bring the topic up. So let's just stop it and say, look, there are different ways of looking at operational of war, but there is such a thing as operations and the conduct of operations, right? Which is important.

And this is much more the organization of intelligence, logistics, fire support, the coordination of different units in a coherent action with a clear objective, right? And ideally, the operations then link what you're trying to achieve in terms of the objectives of the operations with the political goals of the actual war. Like, ideally, the military strategy takes the operations and connects them to the political goals of the war. So you're not just conducting successful military operations, but they have a clear purpose in terms of the political objectives you're trying to achieve. And operations are things that are phased, they are planned, they involve coordinating a whole host of units, but they have a clear objective behind them.

They have a sequencing, you know, they've thought through how they're going to set the conditions, how the breaching force is going on, who's the second echelon. If you meet with success, who's going to exploit that success? If you don't meet with success, what are the different alternative courses of actions you're going to take? And then ultimately, how are you going to consult it, right? So it has a lot of moving pieces. This is what staffs usually plan. And often they're looking at bigger size formations. If we were talking earlier about. about infantrymen, squads, platoons, companies. This is more at the size of armies, you know, or cores.

And then above that, we have military strategy. At its core level, it's a theory of success, right? There's some coherence to the logic of what you're doing, why you're doing it. There are choices being made. It reveals itself often best actually in what you're choosing not to do rather than what you're choosing to do. That's often the most interesting part for me as an analyst. There's some sequencing involved. You've thought through the sequencing of actions. And ideally, it links the actual operations you're doing and planning with the political goals of the war that you receive from your political leaders, right?

You know, Preston, you want to add a bit more to that. But military strategy to me is always one of the more interesting topics, at least intellectually. It's, and it's often kind of debated, you know, to what extent, what is the military strategy? How do you understand the military strategy? But this level is important too. So I always wonder at every layer, but the strategy layer, how much does strategy look like? I apologize, but pinky in the brain, there's that cartoon where, you know, what are we going to do today is we're going to take over the world. You kind of assume everything goes flawlessly, and it's kind of this dramatic picture of success versus how much planning is there for all the different contingencies, levels of including complete failure.

It's like how much of the different trajectories are considered. But strategy in theory, first, it's a plan that you're not going to change quickly or often because otherwise it's not much of a strategy. But any good strategy must have core planning assumptions. And if those assumptions are proven wrong, you should expect to adjust. Actually, a lot of times strategy goes poorly is when people are trying to execute a strategy, even though their assumptions are clearly wrong. I can think of some wars we've been in that looked a bit like that. um second the strategy is iterative so it's interacting with the strategy of your opponent right and so ideally you're iterating you're looking at what your opponent's strategy is how your strategy is performing against what they're trying to do and then you're changing it over time right but unlike tactics which change quickly and have to keep pace with technology and tactics inform strategy strategies divorce from tactics and it's a great staff planning exercises may be very well written, but the force can't execute that strategy, right? And alternatively, if you just have tactics, you're just fighting battles, then you don't have a campaign, okay? You have maybe good ways of fighting a war, but you haven't thought through

how you're going to win it. You don't have a campaign thought through. It's not obvious how the battles you're fighting are going to aggregate to military success.

from the things that, not from the things necessarily that got right, but from things that got wrong. I think you end up learning far more from what you get wrong professionally. What surprised you the most? What surprised me the most, first, how the Russians actually conceived of this operation, the fact that they had fairly leverage and fairly brittle force without any real plan B. There's no hedge in their invasion plan. Second, how poorly they performed at the tactical level, just in terms of capability, quality of the force.

And it's difficult to judge seeing a military going through a series of military forms of modernization, how they might perform in a large-scale conventional war if you haven't seen a large-scale conventional war. But I think there was definitely an intervening period where we overrated them, which is a tendency when looking at adversaries, because we tend to worst-case them, I'll be very honest. It's often a professional assumption that it's better to worst case and assume that adversaries can do the things they would like to do and the things they talk about doing and maybe get that wrong, in which case your own forces have a good day.

They perform much better than the opposite version, right? Strategic surprise, Pearl Harbor, where. you underestimate your opponent, and the result of you undermessing your opponent is disastrous, right? Yeah, and I guess there's a bunch of things when you're speaking to the reality of war just went wrong. Like, there's the columns of tanks going towards Kiev that weren't effective. When you take a military force and it connects with the reality of the geography, the situation, then you actually get to see which were the effective tactical decisions. And that was illustration of that? Well, ultimately, you have the interaction between the two forces and the decisions that both sides make. And I think that definitely the initial prediction that Russia would succeed in this conventional phase of the war because it looked like, you know, they had superiority in deployed forces. Ukrainian military was fairly late to mobilize.

And much of the Ukrainian military assumption seemed to be that the focus of the Russian invasion would come into Donbass, and that's where a lot of units were deployed. Many units were not there available to either defend in the south, to even check the Russian advance from Crimea, or in the north. In fact, there were almost no regular military units north of Kiev to stop the advance from Belarus. So it was difficult to assess the interaction of those plans. I look back on it, and I think I learned a tremendous amount, so did other analysts. And it's a case that I think we're going to continue to study. But this was just the very initial period of the war.

What's interesting is I think military analysis got much better in correcting expectations, and then predictions for follow-on offensives and counter-offensives became much more accurate once we saw the two forces in the fight. Preston, what surprised you most about the beginning of the war as you look back now, especially as that war has evolved? Well, there's something right out the gate, Lex, that I think is still there today, And it shows this difference between, we'll call it the Soviet military mindset and the Western mindset. And we hadn't really seen this in play. In my experience, again, fighting the global war on terror, it's not, you weren't running up against a conventional force that was operating in any way, similar to how we were.

we push authority down and allow junior leaders to make decisions in the moment. The whole idea is you have a commander's intent. This is what we're trying to accomplish and why, the task and purpose and all of that. And down the chain of command, the soldiers, the individuals have the authority to make a decision on the spot to decide I need to go left or I need to dig in or I need to call for reinforcements or I need to retrograde. That is pushed down to the lowest possible level to where we've got, you know, 18, 19 year old kids making these incredible decisions in combat. We should say for a little bit of context that you served in Afghanistan.

Yes. And maybe you can connect some of the experiences you remember from that. What things you've seen in terms of examples of how Western force operates? Well, that was very dispersed. We were spread across a lot of small bases in Afghanistan. understand. So you had captains and below sometimes 24, 25 year olds making daily life and death decisions for a lot of people. And we would push that down to 20 year old staff sergeants or sergeants that were making a decision that could cost the lives of their men. So you're saying like a 19 year old, 20 year old, if they have a good idea, if they have a good decision that has power. Yeah, there's a lot of leadership involved with that because you can't just grab a random guy and say, we're going to let you make whatever decision you want, but through the training and through the kind of briefings from the top down, from brigade to battalion to company level commanders to the squad leader, making sure that your people know this is what we're doing.

This is the mission and this is what we're trying to accomplish. So they have a full understanding. So then when something inevitably goes sideways, they're not stuck like the Russian army was trying to advance on Kyiv, where when they got stuck, they stopped. There was a shocking number of senior Russian officers killed in the opening few weeks of the war because they kept having to go closer. closer to the front to essentially move traffic jams because they didn't have the as they went down the ranks whereas we have and and you know again this was a ukrainian victory to be clear the u.s and nato had been doing some work in in training ukraine for some time and in some units it kind of instilled this idea of junior leadership and empowering your junior soldiers to where if they don't have an order they still know what the mission is and they're able to make the best decision on the spot. We didn't see that from Russia. And I would argue that we're still seeing that today. On the Ukrainian side, there is a crazy amount of innovation. I know we've talked about it with drones, but even the tactics on how they're going to advance in certain areas, it's different from one unit to the next. A lot of that is driven from the bottom up,

which is a very Western military type thing. Whereas on the Russian side, it's still, to today, is still top-down driven. They are given their orders. They are given their place on a map, go there. So that was surprising to see for me right out the gate. And I think it's pretty notable. I think as the war, you know, hopefully wraps up before too long here, I think that's going to be a big takeaway is that that method is preferred of pushing the authority as far down the chain of command as you possibly can. Yeah, absolutely. And that's both a conversation about leadership in the military culture. And I think in looking in the Russian military before this war, the gaps of knowledge we may have had on how they would fight were filled with what we knew about doctrine, operational concepts, and more should have been done to fill the gaps looking at military culture and some of the real deficits and shortcomings in terms of military culture and leadership style that's preferred in the Russian armed forces.

And one could easily say that when looking at the Ukrainian military, we could have done a much better job learning more about the Ukrainian forces before the war to get better estimation on how they would fight. But in many cases, talking to Ukrainian colleagues at the end of the day, you find that a lot of these battles, a lot of these interactions were the result of initiative of units of commanders in those early days. And it was quite chaotic. And the success of volunteers, of troops, and people who essentially mobilized themselves to fight and joined the forces and filled the ranks early on, swelled the ranks in order to muster that defense.

You've written about Purgosian's mutiny in 23. What does that teach us about the structure of the Russian military? And going to perplexity here, the Purgosian mutiny was a short-lived armed rebellion led by the Wagner mercenary chief, Yevgeny Purgosian, in Russia on June 23rd and 24th, 2023. Yeah, a well-known character from well before this war to people who followed Russia and particularly the role of Wagner in other wars like the Syrian Civil War and their deployments to Africa and parts of the Middle East. But Prigozhin rose to prominence, certainly amongst Western audience, from outspokenness and public criticism and the conflict that he developed with the Minister of Defense at the time, Sergei Shoigu, and the Chief of General Staff, Larry Gerasimov.

And maybe to quickly track at least how I remember the role of Wagner in this war, Wagner comes in early on in 2022. They get paired up with the Russian Airborne. They show some success in May of 2022 at a town of Battle called Papasom. They then are expanded in terms of the role in this war, and Pregozion's given... authority by the Russian government to go recruit from Russian prisons. He starts hiring convicts to build out special convict-staffed assault formations, assault groups within Wagner. So the size of Wagner grows in an assault force. And Wagner is thrown then into a fight for a city called Bakhmut and enters a grinding fight for the city. And I think you could periodize the battle. Technically, maybe it starts August or so, and it runs through fall of 2022, winter, all the way till May.

We should say that's one of the most important battles in the war. It is one of the most important battles, particularly in the early period of the war, certainly. Can you actually take a small tangent and just what are your memories of that? Can you describe what that battle was and what did it teach you about war? What did it teach you about this particular war? So the fight around Bakhmut was, in some respects, a siege, a classical siege, because you had both a battle for the city and you had a decisive battle around the city to try to control the roads, the ground lines of communications into the city. And what was happening to Bakhmut, the reason why at that time period, this is going back to February, March of 2023, the reason why Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut increasingly looked precarious, it wasn't the urban battle for the city. In the city, you had essentially a city that was divided by a small river running through it and there was a kind of residential eastern side to it and there's a more urban and industrial side to the city and let's see actually i want to be clear this is a nice city i have a friend who was in the peace corps in the city he knows it much better than i ever did but bakhmut is a sort of medium-sized city but not a known one ukraine

So you had industrial zones, you had nine-story apartment buildings, you know, those of us who originally were born or grew up in the Soviet Union can remember them well, and you had a kind of eastern residential area on the eastern side of the river. And then you had terrain that was raised above the city. The city itself was kind of on the punch bowl, it was on lower terrain. It was not an easy place to defend because the terrain was higher, both in front, east of it, and west of it, right? And so what happens, Russian force end up occupying the positions east of it. And then you have essentially two battles that take place.

One is for Bakhmud, as Russian force steadily enter Bakhmud from the eastern side, make progress from east to west. And the other one is a siege around the city. Because most seizures, if you want to take a city, you have to interdict, you have to control your enemy's ability to reinforce the city. And you have to take control of the logistics, right? Otherwise, they'll keep reinforcing it. And it's going to be a very long fight in a slog. And so Ukrainian forces were essentially fighting two battles. And in some ways, the more important one was the battle to prevent an encirclement of the city.

And at that time, very briefly, where I happened to be there with Ukrainian forces, Rosh Moldyar had gone around the northern side of the city and was really close to interdicting one of the main roads running down from Chasivyar, the Skromer Road, and in part because another town fell north of Bakhmun called Soledar. This smaller city had fallen, and so the flank, essentially the left flank, began to give, right, in this battle. And then the right flank slowly began to give as well, as Russian forces entered the eastern part and then the southeastern part. And the city, like many cities that face a battle like this, essentially saw systematic destruction.

This was still very much an artillery and infantry and tank fight. There were infantry fighting vehicles, BMP-2s directly firing 30-millimeter cannon in the city. There were tanks that came into the city, would be direct firing down the street at buildings and positions. And you had close quarters combat between infantry fighting from buildings to buildings. You could picture this as a fairly, in some ways, a traditional urban fight. But on top of that, you also had... drones. You had light bomber drones at this time. FPVs were just being experimented with in winter of 2023. You didn't really see them at this point of the fight. But the battle was a grinding fight. Wagner was throwing constant assault groups, exhausting the Ukrainian defense with convict infantry. And many of them would get killed, but Ukrainian units would get tired.

They'd run out of ammo. And then Wagner would send more experienced troops. And Russian airborne essentially secured the flanks and they were providing artillery support to them as well. So it wasn't just Wagner fighting, although Prigozhin liked to take all the credit for the fight. In reality, it was Wagner, a large amount of artillery support because the Russian military had a significant fire's advantage, artillery advantage in this fight as well. And this is what was leveling a lot of the city. And it also had elements of Russian airborne securing the flanks. That way Wagner could focus on the fight for the actual city itself. And it was a grinding battle. It was very much not a traditional battle. They ultimately saw the destruction of the city. By the time Russian forces took it, there was very little of the city left, if you see images of it now. I will say it's from my point of view, not only is it a tragedy, but this is the fate that many other cities have suffered in Ukraine. Essentially, in some ways, Russian forces at the end of the battle took nothing because there was very little of the city left to take. And you've referred to the Bakhmut Syndrome?

Before we return to Purgosian and Wagner and Purgosian's mutiny, Preston, what do you think about this, maybe even in the modern context, over fixation on particular symbolic regions to territories or cities versus the territorial gains in the broader context of the war. It's difficult. And I think it's case by case because as Mike mentioned, sometimes it gets this added value just because it's held for a period of time. And it was hard to take for a month and then two months and then three months. And all of a sudden it's this fortress city when maybe it shouldn't be that. But both sides, and that's exactly what we saw with Bakhmut, where it was on both sides. And you saw Russia was very hyper-focused on taking the town to where they had to. And if they weren't going to in a period of time, it was going to be a failure. And we started to see them claim ownership of the pretty early on. And they were maybe exaggerating their advances, but it showed just how important that was to Moscow. It made the same importance.

than inside of Ukraine. So beforehand, I don't think anybody would have expected that. Now, as Mike mentioned, looking back, there's some debate around it. But I think it's the kind of thing that just happens upon a country, happens upon a military. And there was a lot of criticism on some Ukrainian military leaders at the time. And we've seen that in a couple other areas as well. The Kursk offensive, Avdivka, I believe there was some debate around that as Well, right now, I think we're going to start seeing more around Konstantinivka. It's an area that it's starting to look like some of these other areas that got encircled.

And it's a big ask of the military leadership to be able to recognize that. Nobody wants to withdraw from that area, especially in Ukraine's position. They would be giving up terrain that is their country to the advancing Russian army. But at some point, it's no longer worth holding on and you're risking the troops that are forward. it's a very difficult decision to make and i think it is uh i think it's more emotional than we can recognize from the outside yeah and and that point is a judgment call when are you no longer exhausting your opponent with a very favorable attrition ratio in an urban fight because you're on the defense and they're on the offense and they're likely to take more casualties versus when are you facing potential encirclement there's a threat to your force The lines of communication are being interdicted, so you're losing personnel and equipment trying to sustain your positions.

And then lastly, usually when you can really see it, is when you're forced to counterattack in order to maintain your positions. Because now you're taking casualties because you're the one going on the offensive in order to try to even maintain the position. And we've seen that time and time again in a number of fights. In some cases, justifiable. In other cases, you can see it may be politically motivated. At the end of the day, military strategy flows from decisions of political leaders. Political decision-making holds supremacy. And they decide what is a critical objective and which battle to them is essential in the war.

Even if analysts or somebody else or planners looking at it might say, this is not a critical fight. That doesn't matter. When political leaders decide that it's a critical fight, and then when they raise political stakes and say that they're going to try to hold on to the city, then now it becomes important.

And you can study where the distortion is greatest, depending on the culture. Who is a soldier lying to their commander? Is it the general lying to the commander in chief? There's some distortion happening somewhere. So maybe can you speak to the distortions happening on both sides here? From what I can see, Ukraine is getting a much better picture of the current status along the front. Very hard to say where, and on both sides, very hard to say if and where there's a breakdown. And you're absolutely right. Commanders want to say that they're doing a good job. It takes a lot of integrity to say we lost positions. And we've seen that in the Ukrainian military where commanders have been relieved because they've not reported that up correctly. It seems to be much more, much more of a culture issue in the Russian military, top to bottom. But yeah, it's definitely happening on both sides. Definitely, definitely happening to a degree. Hard to tell where that line is.

I think it's worse on the Russian side. It's because of the military culture. First, there is a real lack of trust in the Russian military between soldiers and their commanders. And that breeds a lack of cohesion. Second, the military runs on a very coercive culture. So you expect that for any mistake, you're going to be punished, right? and so there's a strong incentive to to lie uh and and then lastly There is a centralization of command and control where rather than the junior officer who's actually at the position commanding the troops who has greater authority, it's the senior officer who has greater authority.

Because they decide everything and then they kind of give the scheme of maneuver, the orders for junior folks to execute. And for the Russian military, the effects are worse because the way they plan military decision making can often lead to, you know, what in data is called a garbage in, garbage out problem, where if the information on what's happening at the tactical level is not correct, it's false. and the planning is based on that and people are executing combat tasks on the basis of things that aren't true, then it's very problematic for that military, especially because they don't have the same culture of having freedom to adjust, adapt, make decisions at a more junior level on the ground, right? They're waiting for information to reach the senior commander.

I don't want to make it sound this kind of ridiculously regimented, but nonetheless, it's a bigger problem for the Russian military, as we see consistently, even though the Ukrainian forces have also had issues with falsification of information and commanders, planned commanders getting relieved, especially under the previous commander in chief, Sersky. And sometimes also because they were placed in an untenable position because they wouldn't have enough men. They had to defend the position. They too were told that they can't withdraw a position without approval from the general staff. And if they lost the position, they reported it, they would be told they had to take it back, but they didn't have the forces to take it back. And then a commander is sometimes faced with an ethical dilemma. Do I sacrifice men to take a position that I know is untenable or I can't take back? Or do I face the consequences of failing to report it, but I preserve my own men? What do I do? These are not the easiest choices. You know, it's not clean cut.

But it seems from my just observational history, there seems to be, especially like at the general level, a kind of optimism that there's a path towards winning this war at a strategic level soon. It seems like the United States and other nations have been engaged in, you know, in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, like something like forever wars. How does that, at which level of distortion of information do you keep going with this kind of momentum of a war going on for a prolonged period of time without any strategic victory?

Speaking of structure and hierarchy of the different organizations in the military, getting back to Purgosian. Yes, yes. We forgot about him. We talked about 17 hours ago. So what happened there? You talked about the Wagner group and Bakhmut. What was with the mutiny? What does it represent? What does it show about the Russian military? Okay, so Prigozhin had this ongoing conflict with Gerasimov Shug. Why? He was basically positioning Wagner as this more successful alternative, okay? And I think he was allowed to position Wagner in this way, and I think there were elites in Russia who were backing him as well.

So, in some extent, you had an internecine battle between different elite clans, one associated with the Ministry of Defense, the military, another one backing Prigozhin. And Prigozhin was given this leeway. He would be constantly complaining that he wasn't being given enough artillery ammo and so on and so forth. Even actually his effort was a priority effort and he was given a lot of artillery ammo to sustain it. And he was also building out this kind of popular following and to some extent trying to see if he could expand his political cachet. Ultimately, that competition between him and the military, which played out at the leadership level, does he He actively attacked the Minister of Defense and the Chief of General Staff, but also Wagner forces looked down on the regular Russian military, seeing them as incompetent and effective, and the regular Russian military looked down on Wagner forces, seeing them as either hired mercenaries or convicts, right?

So there was these clashes between them. And they competed with each other during the Battle of Bachmut because... Even in the fight for Soldar and later in the Battle of Bakhmut, Wagner and the Airborne competed for who would take credit, right? And later on in the battles, we got to April, May, Pergurion started saying the regular military has pulled artillery and fire support from him because they don't want Wagner to win. They want Wagner to lose more personnel, and then they want to come in at the end and take the credit. He basically advanced this conspiracy theory. But the mutiny really kicks off because at a certain point, the Russian military defenses had it. And Shoigu essentially, clearly a much more powerful player at the end of the day, has an ultimatum issued that after the Battle of Bukhmuz decided that all Wagner personnel have to sign contracts with the military, right?

For a long time, Wagner was essentially an autonomous force, supported by the Russian military, and generally integrated into an operational command, right, and logistically supported by the regular Russian armed forces, but with a huge amount of autonomy, where Prigozhin was essentially running his own army in his own fight, in coordination with the Russian airborne. And Shurgo's ultimatum Trapped Prigozhin And it put them in a position Wagner had withdrawn from Bakhmut And was replenishing personnel And was essentially In rest in Luhansk And Prigozhin sensed that he was trapped That either Shurgo was going to force The complete surrender of Wagner's autonomy And he would lose control Command and control of his personnel or he had to go on this reckless adventure.

And I think he may have conceived of this not as any attempted regime change, but some analysts that I know saw the mutiny as essentially a petition. He then tries to advance on Rostov in Russia, which is where the headquarters of the Russian military effort for the war is. Wagner, if you remember those scenes, the footage actually encircles and occupies the headquarters. There's a standoff. I mean, it does look from the outside as an attempt to take over power. Well, absolutely. It is a mutiny. It's a mutiny in the midst of a war. And he wants Shoryun Grosimov. He's essentially stuck, though, because they are not in the rest of headquarters.

And Putin comes out very vocally seeing this and declaring this as a betrayal in the midst of a war. and a whole set of Wagner columns there are two Wagner columns that are advancing pass for stuff down the road towards Moscow and by the way at the same time they're shooting down Russian helicopters they're shooting down Russian planes actually Wagner's mutiny is quite damaging for the Russian air force it kills a lot quite a few personnel and they're advancing towards Moscow there's some degree of panic because elites in Moscow themselves are not sure because all the Russian forces are deployed in and around Ukraine, and they're not prepared to face these Wagner troops, who are actually fairly experienced. And I want to be clear, they have tanks, they have air defense with them, they have armored fighting vehicles.

They brought a lot of equipment with them to the fight. I want to be clear, they're not advancing in trucks and pickups. This is actually a mechanized formation. So how close did that come to overthrowing power in Moscow? Oh, I don't think very close. I don't think that they had any chance of doing it. And Moscow's a massive city. So if they'd gotten in there, I don't know what they could have hoped to achieve. Was there some degree to which that was the goal? Look, I think what the goal was, once they got to Rostov and had no chance of either getting their hands on Shogin Gerasimov, and Putin had essentially ruled against them, their only leverage was the advance on Moscow. They used the advance on Moscow, Prigozhin used it, to then Negotiate a stand down.

and amnesty and then a handover of assets and control of Wagner operations over time. That's what happened. He used that as bargaining leverage. I think he also, early on, saw that he did not have support from the Russian elite. The Russian elite did not see him as an alternative to Putin. So there's no chance of success in regime change. And the reason for that is straightforward. short, in personalized authoritarian regimes, the first thing they do is eliminate alternatives. And most coups you never even hear of, they fail. They never take off the ground. This is even a rare case of a real mutiny that becomes this phenomenal 24-hour event. Most attempts at coups in personalized authoritarian regimes are stopped by intelligence. They never take off the ground. Because typically the number of elites and people you have to involve in organizing a coup makes it very difficult to keep it secret.

So if that authoritarian system is at all effective, it's going to discover it. But that's what I think ultimately happened. And of course, lastly, and I remember having these discussions at the time, folks thought that Prigozhin somehow got off easy because he negotiated a handoff or a sell-off of his assets. He was still alive after the coup. But it was clear to those of us who followed Russia that there was no way he was going to survive this. Speaking of which, going to perplexity, Evgeny Prigozhin died on August 23rd, 2023, aged 62, when his private jet crashed in Russia's Tver region while flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

Do you think he was killed? It exploded in midair. It was very obvious that he was killed, and he wasn't killed alone. He was killed alone with several senior commanders, but Wagner, and to me, the only explanation is this plane exploded in midair on video, it was clear that he was never going to survive this mutiny. And that very likely top folks involved in Wagner weren't going to survive it either. And he was killed very demonstratively as a demonstration to others. And so that outcome to me and many other folks who watched Russia for years was not surprising. This is a fascinating chapter in the war.

I mean, there was a period of time there, that 48, 72 hours, where it was unknown what was going to happen. There was a real consideration that this might be the end of the war. A funny aspect here is Prigozhin was one of his many companies, very wealthy, ran the Internet Research Agency, which is kind of the bot farms in Russia. And Prigozhin and Wagner were so popular at the time. As Mike was talking about, one of the issues here was they were the ones being celebrated. If you go back to this time period around Bakhmut, the biggest, most significant battle of the war likely to date, nobody can tell you the other Russian units that were operating anywhere else.

But people know Wagner. They know that name. They've probably seen pictures of Pergosian. He was becoming famous. So when this march happened, you had these bots. They didn't know which direction to go. Are they still on Team Wagner because Pergosian's their guy and he's capturing all of these cities? or, wait a minute, is he against Putin now? Should we sit this one out? And another interesting aspect here is this, in my opinion, was something that Russia was doing very well and it almost worked out too well and they didn't know how to kind of direct it in the right way. Wagner was a private military company, a private military group, kind of.

They were not really a part of the Russian government. This gave them this weird autonomy to operate in places like Syria. I mean, they went head-to-head. Wagner forces went head-to-head with the U.S. forces in Syria. It went very badly for them. Did not go well for Russia. I think it was 2018. It might have been February 2018 outside of Darazor. Yeah, but it gave Russia this ability to have deniability. Say, this is a private company. This isn't our military, but they effectively operate. I mean, they would fly in on Ministry of Defense aircraft. They would train at Ministry of Defense locations.

and it was all things considered a pretty effective mechanism of state power that russia had put together they were pretty innovative in the war the the concept of pulling these these convicts in which i just interviewed a soldier that fought in bakhmut talked to him a couple weeks ago and he talked about how exhausting it was that these guys just kept coming so one after the other after the other you couldn't you couldn't stop they were innovative in that sense But Wagner wasn't just prisoners. They had very lethal, well-trained assault groups that were kind of leading the way in some of these new tactics. Because in a sense, it was like this, again, privatized army.

for gosian was competing to try to make them better and i don't know the different directions that could have gone whether they branch out or became a a kind of elite assault force type thing but they became too popular uh and and for go and then uh shoigu and grass mob didn't really know it seems like there was a bit of a panic and just shut it shut it all down and now it doesn't exist They did. There's the Africa Corps is operating in Africa. It's got some of the old Wagner leadership, but they effectively did away with all of that private military stuff and said, we got to bring this all in-house. We can't do that again. But again, the interesting piece there is I do think Wagner was onto something. They were operating brutal, to be clear, incredibly brutal organization.

I mean, there was an awful video of one of their guys, I believe, surrendered and they got a hold of him or he wouldn't go on an assault or something. They smashed his head with a hammer against a center block, their own guy. So that's the group we're talking about, to be clear. But they were effective and Russia destroyed the organization.

I should mention for the listeners, for the audience, it is now past midnight, which is the only time we could do it. So there's two people in front of me. They're real warriors and just powering through. I really appreciate it, but quick bathroom break.

All right, we're back, trying to power through. This might be a good moment to ask about the very top, the leadership, the two commanders-in-chief, Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky. What are, from a military perspective, the strengths and weaknesses of the two in terms of their role as commander chief of their respective militaries? In my opinion, it appears as though Zelensky has offloaded a lot of the military responsibilities to the military, and he's not making tactical or operational level decisions. Generally speaking, that's a good thing. I don't think that that is happening in Russia.

It's harder to say based off of how Putin is reporting at times. It seems like he might be a little bit more involved than Zelensky. But I get the impression that he's pretty removed from the military decision making process, which is generally what you want to see. Historically, the more that a leader gets directly involved in that type of stuff, the messier it becomes in either direction. In terms of the negatives, I would say, well, they both have very different dynamics at play. is constantly appealing to an international audience trying to solicit support from around the world. That's not really something that Putin has to do. So Putin much more focused on, I'd say, domestic and then kind of presenting a strong picture to the world, that they're not on the verge of collapse, not on the verge of falling back anytime soon. Is Putin the same?

Does he have any direct input into the military operation at the strategic operational or tactical level, as you understand. At strategic, I'm sure it does not look like from what I've seen that he has much input at the tactical or operational level, but I'd be interested in Mike's thoughts there as well. I think there was a period early on in 2022 when things are going very badly for the Russian military that he was actually contacting commanders, which are still very senior commanders at the level of the grouping of troops, which is more the operational level formation above that of the Combined Arms Army. But neither leader, in my view, really micromanages the fight. I think Zelensky is getting a much fairer and more honest picture of the situation, has a much better assessment of Ukraine's position, and how Ukraine can best align its resources, can best advocate for resources with allies, and has more realistic goals, more importantly, more realistic goals for the military. If you look at Putin, Russian political goals, to me, not only seem difficult to achieve, but for a long time I had argued that Russia has a fundamental mismatch in this war between its political goals and the military

means available. And the fault of that lies squarely with Vladimir Putin, because he started the war and has the job of political leadership to see, and certainly if you can't see it four years in or five years in, should be asking hard questions of yourself. Can you speak to that mismatch? You can periodize this war in a number of ways. And I've done so in my own writing. You can look at different operations, offenses, whatnot, or you can periodize it. One big way, which is to say that you essentially have the first 30 days, this attempt to accrue to Maine that fails, the Russian attempt to take over Ukraine, to replace Ukraine's government with one imposed by Russia.

And this is really the contest for whether Ukraine will remain an independent state with its own national identity. And this invasion fails, this attempt fails decisively, and it cannot be recreated in the context of this war. And then everything else that follows, you know, and this I'm talking about from February 24th to March 25th, then everything else that follows is a war, you know, that is a difficult, a tragic, prolonged conventional war defined by attrition, defined by exhaustion. And this war will define potentially the borders of the independent Ukrainian state, what will be the economy, to what extent the state will be economically sustainable, and whether or not Ukraine will ultimately have to make any concessions in terms of its strategic orientation, what organizations it can join or not join, like NATO or the European Union.

But it's not a war to decide whether or not Ukraine will be independent or whether or not Ukraine will have its own national identity. That's already clear. That was the first 30 days. And so, to me, the war is in part Russia's attempt to impose its will on Ukraine, but it's become eminently clear for some time that Russia does not have the military means to achieve Putin's more maximalist objectives in this conflict. And if anything, in the past year, even if you don't agree with this assessment for the early years of this war, in the past year, it's become eminently clear that Russia is not coming closer to its goals.

In fact, its military performance is getting worse. And that's been going on for some time. I would say the inflection point in this war for Russia, certainly on the tactical level, was back in summer, fall of 2025. And so you can see that Ukraine had actually narrowed its position in negotiations fairly closely to its combat performance. Ukraine's political demands are ceasefire, along the line of control, repatriation of lost people and stolen children. but it's not these outsized demands that Russian political leadership is making. You see, Russian demands is not being tied to Russian military performance. They seem much more tied to aspirational performance than Russia wished it had in this war, but actually doesn't.

That's why they want Ukraine to concede the rest of Donbass, because they're not able to take it, and they're not on a path to taking it anytime soon. So even if we assess this war for most minimalist territorial war aims of Russia prioritizing the occupation of the rest of Donbass, the last remaining some 20 plus percent, we have no way to even predict if they are able to take it in this war, given how poorly the Russian military is performing right now. And so here I am kind of making a judgment because if you see a country prosecuting a war with a clear mismatch between military means available and the political goals of the war, and the leader of that country unwilling to revise down the political aims, willing to pay costs that would be ruinous for Russia.

I mean, this war will be seen as a strategic failure for Russia with generational knock-on effects. Whatever Russia takes will not be worth the cost. That's very clear at this point. It's very difficult to see how Vladimir Putin goes down in history from this war other than, you know, an ignominy. And then even this many years into it, you now clearly see that Russia is not attaining its military objectives on any reasonable timelines, is not revising the negotiating position, and there's not been a dramatic shift in how. Russia's forces are fighting the war either. Can you linger on what Vladimir Putin's maximalist objectives might be? Which territory is included in those maximalist objectives? Donbass?

Absolutely. Donbass. As much of Kharkiv, Sub-Phrasian, Dnipro-Blitz as they could potentially occupy. Because you don't see Russian forces advancing Donbass. You see them advancing on a broad 1,200-kilometer front. Donbass may be the priority effort, but there's ongoing offensive of operations by Russian troops. For a long time, they were taking territory where they could. And so they were actually advancing more in Zaporizhia and Dnipro Oblast last year because it was easier to advance there. Less urban terrain, fewer of the Ukrainian armies, better troops there since the rest were focused on defending the Donbass.

And also, obviously, seeking national concessions, right? Limits on the size of Ukrainian forces, Limits on what kind of capabilities Ukraine can have, limits on Ukraine's strategic orientation or ability to join NATO, limits on whether or not Western forces can be deployed or based in Ukraine, other national concessions dealing with the status of Russian language, maybe the status of the Russian Orthodox Church, and so on and so forth. Those are still there, you know, amongst Russian demands negotiations and also seeking recognition. To what extent they can get recognition for territory that they occupied and annexed.

So the reason I say all this is I think it is a fair criticism. I don't know how Preston sees this matter. I think that Ukrainian goals in this war are not only far more reasonable, but will construct at least tied to what the military can achieve. there's an observable strategy that integrates military operations, stabilizing the front line and liberating territory, trying to protect critical infrastructure, air and missile defense to reduce the impact of Russia's strike campaign and prevent the Russian leadership from thinking that they have the ability to somehow bomb Ukraine into conceding these demands. And the third one is exhausting the Russian effort by striking the key components of the Russian economy.

Energy export, refining capacity, other targets. Now, more lately, we have data centers, but essentially things that are relevant to the functioning of the Russian economy or the Russian government's ability to raise revenue. So is it fair to say that wars come to an end when both sides, their demands match their military performance? To put it simply, it's when both sides see that negotiations and the negotiated settlement is a better alternative to fighting than what they can hope to expect to gain on the battlefield. I think that's a good way of putting it, when military capabilities match what the political concessions are looking like. And I think that's exactly why a lot of folks are not very optimistic about an end to this war anytime soon. Because as Mike mentioned, the demands from Russia are largely unchanged from the beginning of the war. Just this past week, Putin talked about how Zelensky did not have the authority to talk about the future of Zaporizhia and Kherson, Donetsk and Lhansk. He said those are historic Russian lands. So it's not even up to Zelensky to talk about territorial concessions.

That's where Russia's mindset is, or Putin specifically, where his mindset is in the war is the territory that they haven't taken yet isn't even up for discussion. That's a foregone conclusion that they will own that. And as Mike mentioned, they are so far from taking that territory right now. I mean, part of that, they would have to cross. the Dnipro River. There's no one in the world that looks at this right now and thinks that Russia is anywhere near crossing a water feature to take Kherson City and the rest of that oblast, let alone the little portions of terrain in Luhansk and Donetsk. So given that if there's a mismatch between demands and military performance, there's other

And increasingly, you also see that Ukraine is subject to some extent to the mercurial nature or capricious nature of policy of some countries like the United States that we should speak frankly about it, right? There's genuine concern, I think, in Ukraine that folks here want to do business with Russia and they want to do it no matter the implications for the allies and no matter the implications for Ukraine and for this critical conflict that's going to shape future security in Europe.

How long can Ukraine last without U.S. support? We should mention that there's no direct financial aid, as I understand, from the United States. But there is, like you mentioned, intelligence and otherwise actual ammunition and weapons. The reality is the United States still provides considerable military equipment, ammunition, other things Ukraine needs. Just Europeans are paying for it. The United States is also offering quite a bit, again, through foreign military sales. Europeans are paying for that. There's a fair amount of intelligence support that I can't speak to, but you should consider it's probably still important to the effort.

So Ukraine may not be dependent nearly on the United States as it was earlier in the war, where we are providing not only a lot of the funding, but artillery, ammunition, equipment, what have you. But in key areas, it does still depend on the United States or depend on the United States, certainly not to try to hamper Ukraine's military effort, where the U.S. still has considerable power and influence. If you can evaluate, what has our commander-in-chief? To be blunt, I don't know that there's a lot that's been, from my opinion, that's been good so far. I think we have ceded our position in...

The world was looking to us, and I think still will in a lot of ways, should we take that mantle back up. I think the world is looking to us to take lead, to take point. That doesn't necessarily mean that we're shipping the most equipment or we're spending the most money, but kind of leading the process and what this will look like going forward. And I think we stepped away from that early in the administration. I get the impression that maybe the president thought this would be easier to resolve than it has been, maybe lost some focus. We've lost leverage over Ukraine as well, which is kind of a cold thing to say.

But when we were providing weapons to Ukraine, we had the ability to kind of, you know, navigate the peace process with more power, more leverage. We did away with that. That hurt Ukraine, but it also gave us less ability to kind of dictate the direction for things to go. We've not seen the sanctions layered on Russia that I think could have been. And unfortunately, I think there's been just some doubt thrown on the structure of the NATO alliance. Will the alliance hold? And I think there's probably just enough there for Putin to irrationally, but possibly still think that it would be worthwhile to poke and prod to see if there's an opening there.

So personally, I don't think there's been a lot of good. I think we've kicked the can down the road. I think we've seen we have we've opened the door for Europe to take lead here in some ways they've started to. There's still a lot to be done, but I'm not overly optimistic. I think we've we've made some mistakes here in ways that not just difficult for Ukraine, but I think for the United States. The engagement with it has been pretty fitful, Lex. They they seem to be coming back to it every three, four months. were heavily distracted by the Iran War. And it almost seems that the Trump administration had first settled on trying to curse Ukraine, seeing Ukraine as the problem, then began to recognize that Russia was the problem but doing nothing to compel Russia to change its negotiating position.

The meeting in Anchorage, Alaska seemed to begin to bring Russia out of the isolation that we and other Western countries had agreed on. and we can see the knock-on effects of that. And then more recently, we had gone back to trying to compel Ukraine once again. And I just don't think that the way we've engaged through this process is the right approach. I agree with Preston. The only thing I might say, because I think there needs to be a balance to do this, the only positive thing I would say, Is that even if it was probably for the wrong reasons, prioritizing attaining an end to the war and pushing all the parties involved towards making clear what their requirements are to end the war and some kind of process and essentially an alignment of positions on that topic was helpful.

because the previous administration had no plan. As long as it takes is a slogan, not a plan. If anyone knew what the Biden administration's plan was to either win the war or end the war, I don't know. And our European allies, well, they had the opportunity for quite a few years to come up with some kind of plan or negotiating process, and they did not. Their consensus of role was to support Ukraine, that was the common denominator, and to sustain the war. But given that this is a war principally fought in Europe, they too did not take lead on a peace plan for all those years until the Trump administration showed up.

And I'm using this as an opportunity, I think, for some constructive and hopefully polite criticism, that, of course, ideally, you should have an alignment of positions between the United States and European allies. in managing European security. However, it is not as though the Trump administration came into office and European allies had a plan or vision and the Trump administration had a worse one or threw that plan and vision out. So then European allies were forced to play catch up and maintain relevance and whatnot. Now, all that being said, I think the Trump administration's approach overall has not been a good one. They haven't done a great job consulting the key allies involved in this.

They've been capricious and in many ways unpredictable in their behavior both towards allies and towards Ukraine. It's clear that parts of the administration wants to normalize relations and do business with Russia and sees the whole war as kind of an impediment to that. So their motivations I think objectively or to some extent suspect. and the way they've engaged with it has been kind of from a let's make a deal without looking at does this deal make sense, and is this going to be a lasting agreement, or is it just going to be a piece of paper with a war ceasefire on it that won't, frankly, will not be worth the paper it's on. So there are real issues you can objectively take with the way negotiations been handled. One thing I would add there as well is I think it's important to look at all of this. We're Americans. It's important to look at this through the American lens, and it's not just a matter of were these decisions good or bad for Ukraine, because at the end of the day, we should be thinking about are they good or bad for the United States and our interests.

Ukraine has raised their hand a couple of times and said, how can we help, especially when it came to the war in Iran and some of these interceptors? There is so much opportunity there in terms of collaboration, joint production, standing up facilities. We don't have to give money to Ukraine. We don't have to give equipment to Ukraine. But there is a mutually beneficial relationship to be had there where we can help them produce and maybe we get some rights for development. because we need a lot of that stuff too. And I just feel like, again, I think the best way to put it is we've left a lot on the table.

And certainly not use our leverage and have been very, very resistant to using any of it to compel Russia. The approach has been unhelpful and hasn't really used the power in the world we have. And I think part of the problem was how we started it because when this began, as an FN Trump administration, for some reason they decided to immediately maneuver the United States out of the leading role of a coalition supporting Ukraine trying to achieve a favorable outcome in this war to a neutral party who will now referee and arbitrate the outcome and try to make a deal pretending as though the previous history of how this war began a whole role and it didn't happen.

And it was a very strange approach to take because it gave up our influence and leverage over both our European allies who didn't trust our intentions and could see that we basically were no longer on the same team. And our partner in Ukraine, who immediately began to think that we were about to sell them out because we turned around and abandoned our role, which was critical to supporting them, into one that now placed them on the equal footing with Russia. Which, to be clear, Russia even today laughs at the idea that we are trying to be this neutral party. They do not view us that way. They view us as firmly in Ukraine's camp. Understandably so.

So these moves to kind of separate, I understand on paper it may have been, well, now we're neutral and we're not directly aligned with one side or the other. That didn't go over in Russia. It didn't carry. At this late hour, this is the most challenging question. What are the possible paths to peace in the war in Ukraine? Can you speak to the different trajectories? What are the things you hope to see? I don't see a willingness on the Russian side right now to negotiate. There are negotiations taking place, and there's another push, another effort. Maybe some sort of partial compartmentalized ceasefire will be achieved.

For example, a ceasefire and energy strikes between the two sides. Or a ceasefire halting strikes against shipping in the Black Sea, which have escalated this year. I think that's possible. I think the problem we have is that the Russian position remains that fighting is their preferred alternative to negotiation and to a revision of their current demands. And I think from Putin's perspective, he is likely to wait to see the outcome of two things. The strike campaign over the course of the winter, and to see if that places Ukraine in a weaker bargaining position. Because Ukraine right now has considerable leverage.

Ukraine's done much better this year at the front line than Russia. And Russia does not have great prospects for advancing along pretty much any part of the front. Can you explain why that is? And why you've already mentioned a couple of times that winter is a very difficult time for Ukraine. The winter is the hardest not for troops at the front line, it's the hardest for the civilian population. But a country is not just the map or the front, it is the economy, it is the cities, the people, that's actually what you're fighting for, right? And so that's who the winter affects the most. The second thing Putin may be waiting for is the outcome of certain elections in Europe in the spring, like France's election, to see if the The overall situation could be more favorable to Russia.

Right now, I don't see any serious effort other than Ukraine strikes to compel Russia, right, or to meaningfully exhaust it economically. And so far, they have been infactful, but at the end of the day, it's clear that Russia still has the resources and the will to continue the war until 2027. And so does Ukraine. And Europeans, if they have to, are likely to come up with more funding for Ukraine next year. I think so. And we have not cut off military support. The things we are sending and providing that Ukraine depends on. We have made threats recently, unfortunately, to suspend it, but we haven't really cut these things off.

So even though negotiations continue As they did last year That's why I have a bit of a pessimistic feeling I could be wrong, I hope I'm wrong Those of us who have been working on this for a long time Would like to see it end in the right way Would like to see an acceptable outcome If not a favorable one to Ukraine And also a deal would like to end it in a way That it doesn't just lead to a third continuation war This is the pessimistic prospect I want to raise A lot of folks think of this as, let's just get to a deal, let's get to a ceasefire.

This war will leave lasting damage on Ukraine and on Russia. That's fundamentally a tragic war. And even though I think we will judge Ukraine ultimately as having been successful in defending its independence, the cost will be great. and i do imagine that better future because i do think that ultimately uh this will pass it's far from the first destructive european war and unfortunately in the history of ukraine and russia it's far from the first destructive war that's that's been visited on these countries and the people who live in them so in that regard it's it's doubly tragic and so many battles have been fought before in these same areas. It's a tragic history to see that in 2020s, we still have a large-scale conventional war taking place here. I think one of the outstanding questions, and to me, this is kind of an implied question on what you're asking about the future.

Is Ukraine going to be viable as a state and as a nation after this war? I think so. Obviously, depends somewhat on how the war ends, but more importantly, the kind of support Ukraine can hope to have from European countries. But if the rest of the nations in Europe, or at least the key ones, see Ukraine as European and as essential to European security and as a member of that community, they will see to it. They will work with Ukraine to ensure that it's successful. It will have to depend on them for some time. The question about Russia is a challenging one, because russia is not a problem of one person right russia is a large country with a lot of people in it um people matter because they make decisions vietnam putin cares far more about Ukraine than other Russian elites. In fact, many of them, I think, are mystified by this war that he's launched. But nonetheless, some percentage of the population supports it, acquiesce to it, and hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Russian men signed contracts to fight in it. This is the first large-scale conventional war that Russia has fought, where very few of the men were mobilized, and many essentially took money and contracts to fight. So it's not just Putin's war. The question we are in some respects dealing with is one

of Russia's failed imperial transition, right? And the fact that Russia has not become a post-imperial nation state in Europe. And I want to make a broader point here that to me, this is in some respects a war of, I hate to frame this way, but I think it's useful, Soviet succession because it's resultant of that history that goes back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which historians that I know argue was both an event, we remember it as happening and the dates it happened, but also a process. And that process is really one of imperial collapse, not just of the Soviet Union, but the Russian empire that lay under it as a foundation. And this is fundamentally an imperialistic war by a state and by an elite, by a leader that couldn't see another way of being and another vision for Russia.

And so one of the challenges we have is this failed transition from Russia. It's not just that Russia doesn't become democratic, it's that whatever the political system may be, that the state has not stopped being a revisionist, revanchist imperial state in Europe. But I don't see this as deterministic or something that is certain or forever. The truth is that Europe was filled with countries that were imperial powers that also did not surrender their empires very easily. Sherman famously said, war is hell. I'd like to talk to you about the nature of war, having studied it for so long. What do those words mean to you?

It feels like a sickness we can't kick for all the ways we've gotten better as people, as humans, throughout our evolution. The one thing we keep coming back to is we kill each other over disputes. And it's pretty crazy that we're still doing that when you really think about it. There's an aspect of war that's fascinating to me because it brings out the, along that worst, it brings out the best. And we see some wonderful stories. and we're seeing that right now in ukraine um but it is when you really when i really step back and think about it it is depressing that this is still the way that we resolve differences it's crazy that we get to a point of who can kill more people to uh to come to a conclusion so it's unfortunately no no end in sight i would say but it's a human condition what gives you hope for the future of human civilization we've been talking about some dark topics they were sit back look up at the sky both of you have families look up at the sky and say i think we're gonna be uh i think we're gonna be all right we're gonna make it as as a species i'll give you two real quick here we just my wife and i just watched the the stanford prison experiment on on netflix you know

i'm talking about the show that just came out and at the end of that at the end of it you've got all these people that had nothing in common and they just spent a bunch of time together kind of trapped they all became friends and they came out the other side and there was no political debates or anything like that it was just cool to see so many different americans in one spot come out the other side friendly having a good time that was great that was a pick-me-up In the context of what we've been talking about today with war and specifically in Ukraine, there's a new innovation on the robotics front that rolled out this past week where they saved a soldier with a drone flying 30 kilometers away.

So they put a soldier. It's a company called Skyfall. And they have essentially a casket underneath a drone. They flew this thing up to the front because they couldn't get this soldier out. There were two of them. they couldn't get them out any other way they couldn't walk them out they couldn't get the UGV ground robots in there to get them the regiment I mentioned earlier it's them and they're one of the most innovative units they flew these in on in one of them the guy's buddies brought them out packed them in and they flew out the other one the guy crawled into the the container himself and then once they are in that pod they have uh the ability to talk back with the crew so they're not alone. And they can, Hey, we're getting there. Just so you know, we're taking off. Here we go.

A few more minutes. You're doing great. Can't wait to see you. And they're talking to him the whole way back. And, uh, the final, the video they shared with it, one of the guys was in the hospital, uh, being treated the day after with his kid right there on his lap. And I thought that is so cool. So much money and technology and effort. And it wasn't just one drone went out and you push a button and it goes, there was shaping operations and coordination and infantry and armor and everything went into the role to get this one guy 24 year old i think just go get him loved it can i can i give you another another anecdote also from code 92 ironically the same unit um you asked me what gives me hope so spend a lot of time studying war dealing with war and so you get to see i think some of the worst of humanity and also some of the best humanity often in the same spaces and if you travel the front line you will see that right you will see basically the worst that humanity has to offer and the best sometimes on the same day. Another handle for Cool Night 2. You know, there's this fantastic video.

A challenging one, but a great one where they have two soldiers that are wounded. This is before Skyforger's system is available. This is someone's back. Two soldiers are wounded. They're being evacuated by UGV, an uncrewed ground vehicle. And the they're both in it kind of like a think of it as a it's like a small truck and it gets hit by a russian drone and it's disabled and they're stuck out there okay they're both wounded they're stuck in this ugv and the company commander without waiting see him on video in a pickup truck racing to them pulls up backs up to them gets out he's a really big guy you can see in the video not wearing any body armor didn't even bother to throw on his plate carrier goes and grabs one guy throws him in the pickup goes and grabs the second guy throws him in the pickup and speeds out of there and they all make it out obviously incredibly dangerous um there are many moments like this that you can see in a war that they do give you hope and also i mean i'll tell you the last part this may seem silly it's a grim enterprise the thing that gets everyone through it is a dark sense of humor which you need to have in this profession as well um people people who who have been fighting for a long time still you can see haven't lost their

humanity at every level yeah the humor the the rise smile yeah the ability to yeah show love towards each other it's great that's uh that's a man that's such a complicated thing about war it really does show some of the most beautiful aspects of human nature it does sometimes we need tragedy to like really bring out the best in us it's a STARK contrast when you see it right it's contrasted much it's in sharper relief than if you are going day-to-day in your normal life well uh preston first of all i want to say thank you you gave me this gift absolutely man about that i'm gonna i'm gonna have to drink soon and all of us like ships in the night or literally met at night and made this happen this is a huge honor to finally meet the both of you. Thank you so much for everything you do in the world. And thank you so much for this conversation. This was awesome. Thank you, Lex. It's been great. Thanks for hosting this and for inviting us. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Preston Stewart and Michael Kaufman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. Thank

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.