A twenty eight to fifty five car see talk station. Happy Tuesday extra special always because you get to hear Daniel Davis with a Daniel Davis deep die from the former retired lieutenant colonel talking. Of course we'll talk to Ukraine and Russia. Welcome back to the program, my friend. It's always a pleasure to have you on the show. Always great to be here, Brian, looking forward to it. Another day, another missile strike. It's depending on which article
you read. Russian missile strike attack kills four in Kharkiv. And then there's another one says five killed, twenty four hospitalized, and the missile striker and Kharkiv again the fog of war. You never can't quite get a clue on how many people have been injured or killed or died. But another day, another missile strike. What's is the landscape changing since we talked last tesday? Daniel? Are we still where we were?
Well, there hasn't been a whole lot of ground action. There's just continue with the creeping a east or westward movement by the Russian forces that hasn't stopped. But Russia seems to be spending a lot more time hitting these these missile strikes deeper into the Ukraine heartland, especially in the u the Kharkivrea, as you mentioned, there going after energy and electric production facilities, which keeps on limiting their
economic capacity to sustain the war. But there's also been a recent upturn upturn in the use of specific drones deep inside of Ukraine, and that's been a bit of a change and we'll we'll have to wait to see what it portends, but they've been using a lot of these fiber optic drones deep inside behind the lines, which either implies that the range of these things has been significantly increased or that there are Russian partisans operating behind
the lines in larger numbers, and especially in two specific areas around the Kupiansk and in the Sumi region of Ukraine. It's just been devastating as you've spend one drone after another, and if you're not familiar with these fiber optic cables, they can't be jammed, so if they fly, they will kill something and so far the Ukraine doesn't have an answer to it, and the Russians are starting to use
more and more of them. And if you weaken the lines behind the lines, then that means that at some point you're going to weaken the fabric up at the front line.
Are you're talking about something along the lines of it. Used to be the tow missiles they had a.
Exactly the same Yeah, told me so, which has a tiny of like a hair fiber optic cable or the missile flew into it. Well, now they've used it the same technology.
In the drones. Wow, because obviously at least in the early days I think those came out well, like in the eighties or something like that. I mean, they're they were limited in terms of the distance because of course the limitations of having a fiber optic cable connected to the missile. That's exactly right.
Yeah, you have to have a spool that it unspools as it flies, and you can barely see it. I mean you can obviously you can see it when you're on there, but you know, I mean even ten feet away you have a hard time seeing it's that thin.
But it's enough to get the the signals so that the thing can be driving on target and you literally have something like HD video on the on the drivers i mean on the operators handle and obviously you know you have some issues obviously you can't fly around trees because then it gets tangled up, but you can get it on target. It's been very just devastating effective in the Sumi region especially now.
Are these and I'm sure everything has some sort of military target benefit like power plants and that I get all day long, But when you're hitting buildings with these where they just civilians are there, and coupled with the point that it's further and further inland within the interior of Ukraine, are these designed to be more of psychological winds, like you know, posing the the real genuine existential threat for the Ukrainians. And oh my god, the Russians really
are advancing. Look how far in they got with that most recent missile strike.
I don't think so, because Russia has a relatively I mean, they've ramped up production, but it's still comparatively limited, and so these things are very valuable and they don't just spend them for I think psychological effect very oftentimes, at least what the Russians are claiming, and there does seem to be some justification for it that some of these buildings they hit are where the Ukraine side is housing troops or where they were in some cases recently there's
been Western trainers and some of these Western people who have been fighting for Ukraine have been stationed where they think they've been safe in the rear to have this, you know, civilian buildings be used to house these people, and all of a sudden, Russia is saying, yeah, actually nothing's safe. And by the way, that's also another product of the growing number of Russian partisans on the rush
on the Ukraine side of the line of contact. And as I had on a show last week with a former NATO officer at Switzerland, he said that there is growing belief that there could be a rise of an actual partisan conflict in some of the rear cities like Odessa, like Kharkips City, and then other these areas in between,
like where some of these missile strikes are coming. So that's a big problem for the Ukraine side, and they've actually conducted a thousand raids to try to find some of these, but it's starting to be a real problem in the rear well.
If that is a growing concern and more and more folks are moving over and embracing sort of the Russian side of the equation, that presents a major intelligence problem. For the Ukrainians because someone's going to ferret out to the Russians where these soldiers are hiding.
Well, clearly, that's that's exactly what's going on right now. That's the only way you can get these even the drone strikes with the fiber optic tables deep behind Ukraine lines. Almost the only way you can do that is either have partisans tell you where they are, or you are the partisans themselves are operating the drones. So it's you're right, it's a real problem.
Well, also a corollary problem you and I talked and I have talked about before in the past, but I've just seen, you know, since our last comeration more reports Ukraine soldiers deserting their posts.
Yeah, and there's a new category also that was also revealed in since you and I have talk last, is that there are and the quote was, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men just refusing to fight. So when they say, hey, like we want to conduct this this defensive counter attack here against the Russians in the in the po Krowsk area, actually over the last twelve hours, many of them are just refusing. They're saying, no, we're just not going to go.
So it's just a compounding problem because listen, I mean, how are you going to be motivated to risk your life on an attack when you can see on your own news feed that Trump is aggressively trying to figure out how he's gonna end this war. Is he going to take the you know, as payment the rare earth minerals from the Ukraine side and all that. So you see used to get ready to talk to Vladimir Putin, you know that the war is effectively over. You're just
figured out how it's going to end. You don't want to be one of the last ones to die for a war that's already over and we're seeing the results of that battlefield.
Well, and isn't it an interesting reality that Donald Trump and the United States alone might have that impact. What about all of the other countries who have been pushing this, I mean, Britain was pushing arming Ukraine and the rest of the NATO country are the ones that were being so alarmist about the encroachment by the Russians And they're going to be in our back door and oh my god, this is an existential threat to the existence of the
European Union. Or whatever, and you and I have pointed out that that's just it's not within the realm of possibility, at least you and I perceive it to be that way. But where's everybody else? I'm sort of asking, well.
This I also yesterday afternoon you had to Keir Starmer meet with not just Deeltenberg, Mark Rutcha, the new NATO Secretary General, and they're still talking like it's the second or third month of the war. Yes, we're gonna uk said, We're going to give more support, ammunition, training, and everything else to Ukraine in twenty twenty five than in any other year of the war so far. And it just
boggles my mind. What are you trying to accomplish when you have Donald Trump sitting there saying we're doing the exact opposite, trying to wind it down, and you're talking about send it up now. If his thought is well, we'll just do this to keep the pressure on Putin so that he'll make a better deal. I mean, that train left the station a long time ago. That's not gonna happen. There's no pressure you can bring to Putin that's gonna bear, or it would already have been done.
And yet we seem disconnected at the highest levels in Europe, even from what Trump's doing much less battlefield reality.
Well, on the heels of our moments ago discussion about how the Ukrainian soldiers aren't even fighting and they can't replenish the front line troops. Who in the hell are they going to apply this training to? Daniel? I mean, who are you gonna train?
That's exactly the disconnect I'm talking about.
Oh my well, pivoting over Tulsa Gabbart, Cash, Mattel, where are you on these? And good, bad, indifferent? How are we looking on this?
Yeah, Tulsi Gabbert in particular is in my view, the best cabinet level pick that Trump has made, bar none,
and I mean all of them. And she's also facing the most fierce resistance of any of them, precisely because she's the most qualified, meaning that she will actually faithfully do the job, which she said in her inner statements that she's gonna faithfully tell the president what the intelligence assessments actually are, meaning she's not going to swear it and bend it because of a perceived bias that she wants or that the you know, the establishment in Washington,
which almost always reflectively wants whatever the d n I says to the President to be Yeah, we have to use military force here. That's what's happened quite frankly most of the time in the past, and what the industry in Washington really wants. And so they have just brought out the knobs against her. It doesn't look like it's
going to succeed. There's been a couple of key senators and just in the last twelve or twenty or eighteen hours that have come out and said out of the intel community, they're going to vote for her, because it's just it's an eight to nine vote just to get her out of committee, to get her into the the overall Senate vote, which apparently is supposed to happen today. If she gets through that, and then I think that it's likely that she's going to be confirmed, but it's
it's going to be a tight one. But it's one that I think Trump will will benefit from more than any other.
So what I'm hearing is then she is not someone like we've had before, married to the military industrial complex and seeking to perpetuate it.
She is an arms length distance from them because she doesn't want to be swayed by that her whole career. I mean, she she took all kinds of heat from the Democratic Party because also she is not anybody's tool. She's not anybody's puppet, as she said before, and that got her kicked out of the Democratic Party. She was a rising star in the Democratic Party, but she was also an honest broker. And they don't want an honest broker.
They want somebody who was going to play the game. Well, there's on the Republican side a similar kind of constitution. And see, they want someone who's good, but only if they can control them, and she can't be controlled, and so that scares a lot of them, so they don't want her in there. Uh. And that's why we need her in there, because she'll just tell the truth, even if it's if the truth is the intelligence says we
need to use military force, she'll tell him that. But if it says no, this won't succeed, and the intelligence says that this is not a good place to go, she'll tell him that too. That's what we need in that position, all right.
And pivoting over to cash Betel.
Honestly, I don't have a lot of knowledge about him. I I've got limited bandwidth, and I just haven't been able to focus much on that when I go there.
You know, that's quite all right. And I just got out on the heels of a conversation about our southern border and Pete Hegseeth is considering maybe launching military strikes against the cartels in Mexico, And you know, being the constitutionalist, I am uh and I I understand the value of easily eradicating evil actors in the world. But you know, if if an evil actor is in my country and some other kind of decides to start launching missiles into my country, as good intentions as that may be, I
might view it as an act of war. What's your take on doing that? Because we've you know, we've blown up targets literally in the four corners of the world with rockets and just sort of random attacks out of nowhere. I've always been sort of suspicious of our ability to actually do that.
Well, our ability to actually take out a target anywhere in the world is substantial, yes, and we can. We have the capabilities, We have the technical capabilities, intelligence capabilities and all that. But I am with you on this one, and I know that there's a lot of different views on Some of my close friends and colleagues have different views than I do. But I am a staunch defender of defending the border. Let's defend our border, let's prevent
anybody from coming in. If we have nefarious actors, we should use law enforcement or military whatever to take out that threat to our country in our country. But going into another country, I think is a legal issue. It's an international rules based situation because exactly what you said, I don't ever want a president where some China, Russia, any of other country can say, well, there was a bad actor of ours in your country, so we just took them out. We don't want that and we would
never tolerate it. So I don't think that. I think that we should not do that tier. But there's a bigger issue to me. You go after the cartails, you make it a war in the cartels, they will bring the war back to you. And as bad as a lot of the stuff is right now, it's not been open warfare. And just look in Mexico what the cartels can do when they get mad and they start trying to strike back. We don't want that to happen on our soil.
Well, and Lord knows what the open borders we've been dealing with, and the ten to fifteen million people, a lot of whom were members of various gangs. They're firmly entrenched in our country. They could start launching terrorist attacks, and you know, I can see the reprisals coming, and it does indeed concern me. Daniel Davis Deep Dive. Find him online. You'll find his podcasts and we'll always find it here in fifty five k see the talk talk
station every Tuesday beginning at eight thirty. Love the conversations, Daniel, I help you have a fantastic week, My friend.
Same to you and Lis see you next Tuesday.
Take care Brother eight forty two at fifty five KRC, the talk station. How he can stick around. Phone lines are open, feel free to call. We got a little bit of time between now and the end of the program to talk, so if you've got something you want to talk about, I'd love to hear from you. To be right back.
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