We did two podcasts this week (see the substack Dany didn’t send out properly summarizing the first pod this week); our second with AEI Critical Threats Program director Frederick Kagan. Together with the terrific Institute for the Study of War team, Fred has been tracking the Russian advance on Ukraine, the incredible Ukrainian resistance, and the Western response.
The subtext behind all those questions about Vladimir Putin’s mental state is not simply the decision to invade Ukraine at all, but the abominable Russian military performance: No logistical support, failure to take key cities, repeated failed efforts to surround Kyiv and more. And while those videos of Russian soldiers running out of gas are entertaining, they betray a deeper problem within the Russian military that should be — should be — a source of concern to the Russian dictator.
Will Ukraine win? Fred thinks it’s unlikely, though they’re putting up a valiant fight. Russia has the fire power and the man power, and we’re seeing it in action against Ukrainian civilians right now. But will Russia hold Ukraine? That’s another question, and we’re likely in for a sustained period of insurgency. So the question for NATO, and most importantly for the United States is… what are we going to do to support Ukraine’s fight? So far, the answer is: not enough. No fighter jets, not enough drones, limited real time intel sharing, and insufficiently tough sanctions.
We talk about all of it and more. Listen to the conversation, check out ISW’s incredible analysis, and let us know how we’re doing.
HIGHLIGHTS (yes, there are a lot)
FK: So they [the Ukrainians] have fought like lions, which doesn't surprise me, but has surprised some people. The thing that didn’t shock me, although the scale of it has surprised me, is that the Russians are really screwed up. And the Russian military is really screwed up.
FK: And one of the reasons I was wrong in the top line forecast is because it turns out that we were right in an underlying assessment, which is that the way the Russians had deployed themselves and prepared for the invasion was almost guaranteed to lead to a screwed up military operation. And boy did it lead to a screwed up military operation. I was just wrong because I figured he wouldn't order a screwed up military operation and someone would tell him. Apparently one of those two things was not true, and that was the surprising part.
FK: [Asked about Russian wars…] There was that little excursion into Afghanistan.
Dany: Right. They were not covered in glory there.
FK: No, not exactly. That was about 110,000 Russian troops at any given time were there. They took a total of about 11,000 dead in that war. By the way, they've probably taken upwards of 2000 dead in this war already… So they had a lot of experience fighting a certain kind of war that they got comfortable with, and I think they just really did not understand the differences in trying to do it at scale and in trying to do large scale maneuver warfare, which is very different from what they had been doing.
FK: [F]irst of all, we didn't want to believe that the Russians would invade, and of course, people like me who were wrong in that forecast, surely didn't help. But then, the administration had theories about escalation … Some of that was predictable. I mean, this crisis has been, if I can just say, like almost a pristine experiment in the plausibility of the thesis that you can use the threat of devastating economic sanctions and diplomatic coercion to deter military action, right? If this has been about as pure a test of that case, as you could ever hope to have, and I think we have this say that it's not looking good for that theory. I think that theory shaped a lot of what we were doing, and concomitant with that theory was the fear that we could trigger this invasion in some way, if we made it look like we were really making the Ukrainians look tough and stuff.
FK: Now there are things that we could have done that might have helped trigger [the conflict]. But I thought at the time we could have been doing more. I wasn't saying we should be giving them planes and stuff. Marc, let me be straight. Why wasn't I saying that? Because I figured the Russians would blow up all the planes on the ground, the minute this thing started. The fact that the Ukrainians are still flying anything in the air has most Russian military analysts on the floor.
Marc: Well, why didn't they?
FK: "How can that be?" I can only conclude that they can't. I have no other explanation except that the Russians somehow can't do that, and I can't tell you why that is.
Dany: Isn't the real problem with sanctions that in fact, they were only imposed after the invasion started?
FK: I don't think so, Dany. I mean, I wanted us to be doing some sanctioning. I wanted us to be imposing the cost on Putin for dragging out the crisis. We were not going to deter him from attacking whatever sanctions we did. We were bringing the sanctions to a gun fight. …[I]f Putin had decided to invade Ukraine, or if he was willing to invade Ukraine, if other efforts to achieve his aim failed. The threat of sanctions is not going to deter him. Because once he's at that level of thinking, he's on a whole other plane, that sanctions don't touch.
Frederick Kagan: So I don't think we could have deterred him with harsher sanctions in advance. I don't think that was the problem. I think we need to recognize that sometimes you have to actually bring a gun to a gun fight and you have to recognize when your enemy is actually determined to have a gun fight and not mistake it for a diplomatic conversation. I don't think that was the miscalculation on his side. I don't think he doubted that we would impose these sections. I really don't. I think he didn't care. I think first of all, this wasn't about us and we need to try to be less, classically solipsistic Americans, right?
FK: So the Russian main effort remains Kyiv, and they seem to have given up thinking that they can rush the city, and now they seem to be focusing on trying to envelope it, and that large armored column that came down from the north has been shifting around to the west, likely to try to encircle Kyiv and cut it off. Shockingly, to my surprise, the Ukrainians apparently have been able to battle with those Russian forces as they've been trying to encircle it. So now, I'm seeing initial indications that the Russians have actually sort of moving a little bit further west to try to get around and envelope Kyiv from that direction.
FK: So as it stands, now, the Russians are still working at this sort of envelopment and encirclement of the capital. I don't know whether they're going to be able to complete it or not, at the distance from the capital that they're operating. It would take a lot of combat power to complete the encirclement and then to hold it. I'm not sure that they have that. I don't know enough about what combat power they're bringing down from Belarus now to know if they can do that. But right now, they've been trying to encircle that and the Ukrainians have stopped them. That's the situation around Kyiv …I think they're also trying to intimidate the citizens of Kharkiv and use that as an example for other Ukrainian cities to try to persuade people to surrender. That's going to fail. So right now, Kharkiv is being destroyed, but the Russians have not been able to make real gains on the ground. The situation is different in the south for a variety of reasons. The Russians concentrated a lot of combat power in Crimea, drove north from there, and then went in three directions.
FK: This is one of the things that also sort of blows my mind. Because I was able to imagine Ukrainian defenders holding onto ground against Russian attackers. But it never occurred to me that we would see Ukrainian counter attacks repeatedly regain territory from Russian forces. And that's gone on in Kherson and elsewhere. And then the last drive from Crimea was straight north toward the lower bend of the Dnieper River, which was potentially worrisome and is potentially worrisome in a variety of ways, but seems to have stalled out for now. So that's kind of the battle space for now. And it's relatively static at the moment as the Russians try to do the encirclement of Kyiv and are trying to take Mariopol and Kherson. But it's static for the moment. I don't expect it to stay that way, but that's how it is right now.
Marc: Can the Ukrainians prevail?
FK: They might. I wouldn't have said that a week ago. And I don't know. [W]hen you just do this sort of raw net assessment and you look at their relative combat power measured in a straightforward tanks, men, airplanes, artillery pieces, whatever, your answer is no way. When you start looking at what's going on on the ground, then the answer becomes maybe. And here's the reason. One of the things that's hard about mechanized maneuver warfare is that you have a lot of moving pieces and the art is in part to concentrate a lot of different forces together at the right time and place to overwhelm defenders. The way to lose war generally is, but especially in this kind of warfare, is if you send your forces forward a few at a time and allow an outnumbered defender to fight them a few at a time. Then that's how you get Thermopylae.
So if the Russians could get their act together and actually begin conducting large scale maneuver operations where they bring a whole bunch of battalions to bear against much outnumbered Ukrainian defenders, you could start to see the Ukrainians unraveling quickly. But so far, the Russians haven't shown any ability to do that. And if the Russians can't do that and if they allow the Ukrainians to continue to fight them a bit at a time, it's not impossible at this point that the Ukrainians actually could beat them off
FK: [Regarding a future insurgency]… just the scale of the problem that the Russians face, I'm not going to try to do the math off the top of my head again, but do one to 50 on the population, which is your standard counter insurgency ratio on 44 million people. And I'll be generous, make it 30 million people. Okay? And tell me how many troops that works out to. That's your counter insurgent requirement. The Russians don't have that. And if they did, it would be their entire security service devoted to fighting an insurgency in Ukraine, which I think in the end they would not win. That's one optimistic note, but right now I'm not prepared to say that it will even get there because the Russians are going to have to show a lot more capability than they have so far if they're actually going to defeat the Ukrainians, even in this conventional phase of the fight.
FK: Ukraine has never been [Putin’s] end game. So there was always going to be another play or series of plays in his mind. I think he's probably a little busy right now and a little overcommitted on this particular task to decide that he's going to go after the Baltic states right at this moment, for example. But it can spread in other ways. And I think we need to be ready for that. And it can spread over time as well. And I think on the one hand, it's cheering to watch the incompetence and incapacity of the Russian military thus far. On the other hand, militaries learn and militaries adapt. And whatever the specific outcome of this, you can bet that the Russians will go to school on it and on what they got wrong here and start fixing it.
FK: And the size of the force that they've assembled would pose a very serious threat to Poland or Romania, let alone the Baltic states. Even apart from the air and missile threat that in principle they should theoretically be able to pose. Although again, I'm baffled by the fact that they haven't posed that kind of a threat to the Ukrainians. We need to take that seriously. And this is a case where I'm glad the administration has started to do some important things like moving troops into Poland and Romania. But we're going to need to do more than that. And we need to recognize that there is once again, a conventional threat to NATO's Eastern flank.
FK: First of all, I'm very enthusiastic about where the Ukrainians are right now, compared to where I expected them to be. This could all change tomorrow. And the reported words of Mao when asked about the French Revolution are ringing in my ears. It's too soon to tell what conclusions exactly to draw from this. If Xi is not a fool and if Xi is more in touch with reality than Putin, and I have no opinion about either one of propositions, then he will be looking hard at his generals and saying, "How would this go down if I ordered this? How confident are we that this would go down the way you guys say that it would?" That would be very much on my mind if I were in Xi's place, but I don't know remotely enough about Xi's way of thinking or how much people tell him to know if he's thinking that way, which he should be.
Find the full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
“Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 1,” (Institute for the Study of War, 3/1/22)
“Ukraine Conflict Update 11,” (Institute for the Study of War, 2/28/22)
“Conflict in Ukraine,” (Council on Foreign Relations)
“After a Fumbled Start, Russian Forces Hit Harder in Ukraine,” (NYT, 2/28/22)
“Russia Stumbles in Biggest Test of Its Military Force,” (WSJ, 2/27/22)