The Telugu... The Telugu... ...podcasts. I'm David Knowles, and this is Ukraine, the latest. Today, we bring you the latest updates from Ukraine and discuss the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the artillery war, and learnings from months of battles with analyst George Barros from the Institute for the Study of War. Pravery takes you through the most unimaginable hardships to finally reward you with victory. If we give President Zelensky the tools the Ukrainians will finish the job. Slava Ukraine!
We are the Ukrainians. We are strong. We are Ukrainians. Every week day after noon we sit down with leading journalists from the Celigrass London Newsroom and our teams reporting on the ground to bring you the latest news and analysis from the war in Ukraine. It's Wednesday, the 1st of November, one year and 249 days since the full-scale invasion began.
And joining me today are Assistant Comment Editor Francis Dernley, and our guest is Geospatial Intelligence Team Lead and Russia Analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, George Barros. I started by asking Francis for the latest news from Ukraine. Thanks David. I'm standing in for Dom in this segment as he's at the US Embassy to see Vice President Kamala Harris.
She's in London before traveling to the Global Artificial Intelligence Summit hosted at Bletchley Park, the top secret home of course of the World War II code breakers. I imagine Dom will be in his element. If you've never watched the intricate ballet of spinning gears as one of Turing's bomb machines cracks, an artsy enigma code, I highly recommend looking it up online. It is a marvel of mathematical precision, almost suggestive of music.
But turning to today's intelligence briefings, Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations near Bachmuth and in Western Zapparysia, Oblast according to the Institute for the Study of War, and we're delighted to have George from there with us today. The Ukrainian General Staff report that Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations in the militant direction. As Russia launches a score of drones and missile strikes overnight targeting military and critical infrastructure.
That's come from Ukraine's air forces and they've said that while regional officials said that the Kremlin shook oil refinery was not severely damaged, it does appear to have been hit. On Telegram the Air Force said the 18 of the 20 Russian-launch Kamakazish-ahead drones were destroyed before reaching their targets. They also said that a repeated target of earlier Russian attacks, that oil refinery was struck. But we've not been able to independently verify those numbers.
Speaking of Russian missile strikes, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has urged Russia to investigate the missile strike on Groza that killed 59 civilians in early October. It was one of the deadliest strikes of the war, killing 36 women, 22 men and an eight-year-old boy. The UN mission has said it has reasonable grounds to believe that a Russian-eskander missile, that's one of those short-range precision-guided ballistic ones, probably caused the blast.
Now I mention it because such incidents are often blamed on either side and by both sides, but people are actually trying to work out who is responsible for each of these attacks because of course it has major implications on war crimes trials in the future. So of course we will continue to monitor that.
Now turning to the political role, well we've spoken at length in the past fortnight about the ongoing debate within the US regarding combined and continued support to Ukraine in light of the developments in the Middle East. Well President Biden has of course sought to combine the two issues in that 105 billion dollar package we've discussed at length.
But that's much to the anger of some of the hard-line Republicans and as such the President has doubled down and said that he would veto a House of Representatives Republican bill to provide aid to Israel but not to Ukraine, were that bill that's been put forward to pass both chambers. So the White House have said in contrast to the President's National Security Package, this bill provides no aid whatsoever to Ukraine. That is an urgent requirement.
I'll come in a moment to the Time Magazine article which has been the sort of considerable comment and concern in the last 24 hours which also discusses in detail that matter of US support but will as I say continue to look at that. I'll just end this section with the news that the Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will visit South Korea next week for wind ranging discussions on issues including a nuclear armed North Korea.
So according to Seoul's Foreign Ministry Mr. Blinken will arrive next Wednesday for a two-day trip marking his first visit to the country since March 2021. It comes as Seoul and Washington ramp up defense cooperation in the face of a record-breaking series of weapons strikes pipe-jong this year and of course that delivery of weapons to Russia which we've discussed at length as well.
It speaks again I think to the evolving geopolitical picture as attention tilts to other fronts beyond Ukraine though not necessarily at its expense. Well thanks very much for all of that Francis. You mentioned the time op-ed just a moment ago there. As you said perhaps the most discussed article online for many months by Ukraine Watchers and Ukrainians. What's it all about? Why is it provoked such a reaction?
Sure well I think in part that reaction is because of where it is published the influential time magazine the timing of its publication at a delicate moment for Ukraine and its content. It is called nobody believes in our victory like I do inside of Vladimir Zelensky struggle to keep Ukraine in the fight. It is by Simon Schuster and in essence though I can't go into all of its nuances here I just would point listeners to read it.
It paints a very depressing picture of Ukraine's position in the war. It quote Zelensky quite extensively depicting him as defiant but deflated. The scariest thing is that part of the world got used to the war in Ukraine it quotes him as saying exhaustion with the war rolls along like a wave you see it in the United States you see it in Europe.
Schuster writes the usual sparkle of his optimism his sense of humour his tendency to live in up a meeting in the war room with a bit of banter or a baudi joke none of that has survived the second year of all out war. And advisor told me that Zelensky feels betrayed by his western allies they've left him without the means to win the war only the means to survive it.
Yet the piece also says that Zelensky's belief in Ukraine's ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisors. It has become immovable merging on the messianic he deludes himself one of his closest aides tells Schuster in frustration. We're out of options we're not winning but try telling him that. Faced with the alternative of freezing the war or losing it Zelensky sees no option but to press on throughout the winter and beyond.
The article also looks at his trip to the US as a failure it emphasizes skepticism within congress and looks at some of the damaging examples of alleged corruption within Ukraine. Baudi speaking for many it takes as a given the idea that Ukraine's position is crippled that Zelensky is wrong in his diagnoses of the war and the most Ukrainians and apparently close advisors want peace. These are of course huge assumptions to state as fact hence I think the anger from critics.
They say that the peace focuses far too much on Zelensky has far too many anonymous quotations from so-called advisors and too little about the Ukrainian people themselves who of course strongly back the definition of victory Zelensky is pushing for and are bleeding and dying for it.
They also say that it ignores the progress Ukraine has made to get to this point the fact that Zelensky was right at the beginning of the war the fact that Russia had fundamentally failed in its core war aims and that he's analysis has been right about so much including the dangers of violence being encouraged by the West's enemies around the world the longer the war in Ukraine was allowed to continue.
In short the critics argue they say this is an opinion peace masquerading as a portage pointing at the journalist articles written before the war like one which argued that sending weapons to Ukraine would be a disaster and instead that its conclusions are based on false premises.
Now I think it's important we could take the ideas rather than the man in Ukraine itself it has triggered heated discussions among politicians and experts most condemn the article in defense of Zelensky but there are others who say aspects of it do ring true.
My own perspective for its worth is that such bold assertions taken as fact really in the article require far more words than the peace was given and what I mean by that is it needs far more context into the counter offensive which as I say it only really paints as a failure. It needs far more nuance on the situation in America which is much more complicated than merely saying that America is losing interest in giving Ukraine weapons.
It also paints I think a very doom laden picture particularly when you look specifically at the Russian position which it doesn't really discuss at all and just sees us fixed and broadly unchanging with regard to its position on the war which I think is clearly in the war.
It is clearly incorrect or at least an oversimplification in the context of the Vagno mutiny it's severe military losses the scale of the defeat when measured by what its fundamental war aims were it doesn't mention the expansion of NATO at all. So many things are missed out that arguably are vital to provide an accurate contextual picture.
It's not really a long read it is a few thousand words and for a piece to have the front page to be mass well really portraying itself or being put as a definitive piece and a statement of this moment in the war I can understand why many people are are angered given the lack of detail on many elements of it.
And yet all of that said I think those you see it as pure nonsense pure fabrication need to reflect on the fact as to why they are so upset it riles at their at our insecurities and that's because I think we are in a difficult moment in the war it does capture that feeling I think one that is full of risk which is of course what makes the facts the context the details and the nuance all the more important.
And that is perhaps what people feel is really missing here that perhaps some of its interpretations its narratives have degrees of truth but in order to make those statements with confidence and assurredness and with factual accuracy one has to contextualize them in a much broader canvas and I don't think this piece really does that but nonetheless it is worth reading for some interesting insights I think from Zelensky and those who are clearly around him.
Well thank you very much Francis for sharing your thoughts there I'm sure we'll touch on some of the ideas and points raised by the timepiece with our guest George Barros George thank you so much for joining us today it's real pleasure to have you on the podcast having met you in Washington when we were over there could you just start by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your work over the past two years with the Institute for the study of war.
Good afternoon David and Francis thank you so much for bringing them to the podcast absolutely I work at the Institute for the study of war which is an open source intelligence policy research organization based in Washington DC I'm the lead of our geospatial intelligence team so that is to say we are the team that creates the maps that you're familiar with we collect data with remote sensing platforms spaceborne sensors and we perform geospatial analyses besides that I'm also a senior member of our Russia research team.
My professional training and area expertise is in Russian studies I've been working on three issues since 2014 and I've I've loved every minute. Well thank you for introducing yourself and let I mean we've been talking about the Africa assault by Russia intensely over the past few weeks we spoken to quite a few guests about this at the ISW and for you what stands out to you about this offensive how dangerous is this offensive to the Ukrainian forces in the region.
Well the deep cut offensive from the Russian perspective is very interesting to look at because so far it's it's been a catastrophic failure for the Russians the initial attacks began on October 10th were not small scale attacks we initially and by we I mean the Institute we initially assess them to be a smaller scale operation we revised assessment within about two or three days after observing more data.
This was a major combined arms offensive the objective of which was to envelop and capture of the of the Russian have sent significant forces there over the course of the last month of fighting the Russians have lost a confirmable 197 vehicles that's over a brigade's worth equipment lost in just a couple of short weeks and it's comparable with about 225 vehicles that Ukrainian forces have lost with the entirety of their five months of fighting.
In Zapparizia here we see a lot of Russian military forces operating we have elements of three combined arms army spiting the initial offensive were taken up by the net peoples Republic that is the Russian proxy force that's in the net's goldbloss has been there since 2014.
But so far it's been a pretty incoherent poorly coordinated offensive they run aground lost a tremendous amount of equipment and Russian sources within their own telegram spaces where they discuss their own operations have consistently complained about the lack of coordination between their own units and the inability to be able to move forward.
We do not forecast any immediate danger for the ukrainians losing of the of again the Russians have been reinforcing this potential avenue of attack so it is possible that the Russians might seek to a trade ukrainians over the long period sort of like how they did with their approach to capturing buck moot.
I mean I guess one question for you considering you look at this daily and you're working on the sort of the daily updates we often use that from the ISW did this assault surprise you did you see it building up or were you surprised when it starts.
I was the little surprise when it started because to be perfectly frank I hadn't been assessing that the Russians had this efficient manpower to be able to conduct a large scale offensive of that capacity so seeing them muster up the forces to do so was surprising. And it did it did check some assumptions that I had about the Russian available force at the time it was not surprising however to see the quality of the attack or rather the lack there of an a lack of coordination.
That was not surprising but really astonished me I think it was October 11 or 12 I saw this viral piece of combat footage that show the column of Russian vehicles advancing towards a deep because southern flank and one of the lead vehicles in this column you know if flipped over and fell into a reservoir which was kind of humorous but the column itself was very densely packed they didn't had they weren't spaced out very well and it wasn't a tactically sound doctrine for moving into contact with the
with the enemy force and it reminded me of the exact same columns that we saw also using tactically on the sound doctrine when they attempted to drive on key of and key of Eastern outskirts and over over eight back from early 2022 and it was interesting to see that over the course the last 19 20 months of the fighting.
It seems that there are certain Russian units that still have not been able to master or at least course correct from basic tactical mistakes which is which was surprising and I think it's a positive indicator that really the quality of the Russian troops is not improving so the key factor that they're trying to leverage is going to be replacement and mass.
That's a fascinating analysis thank you George let's zoom out then a little bit Francis in his profile if you like of the peace in time spoke a little bit about the counter offensive and the views on the counter offensive we've seen a sort of space of commentators over the past few weeks arguing that the Ukrainian counter offensive has failed certainly and it's certainly in its goal of liberating territory it's obviously incredibly nuanced and sort of difficult question to answer what are your thoughts as an analyst here.
Yeah, this is a very good question and it's a difficult one because the policy debates base is in a very fraught place as you know from our previous discussions you I sw as a matter of policy we don't assess Ukrainian operations out of their respect for operational security.
So I can't declare that you know you're not really the counter fence of this failed that said it's abundantly clear that the counter offensive has not been going well that they've hit many stumbling blocks of the course of its conduct but it's not count culminated yet Ukraine operations are still ongoing we can point to daily observe operations and that said this campaign like all campaigns will eventually culminate.
But even if this campaign ultimately fails to achieve its objectives it doesn't mean that the wars lost and it also number two we're very very far from a stalemate it's clear that the Ukraine counter offensive did not perform well and that's largely due to I think Ukraine and western planning assumptions about this campaign that they didn't pan out and they didn't survive first contact with with the enemy.
Myself included with having bad assumptions about how this would play out the doctrine that western trainers use to try to train Ukrainian forces over the course of last winter and spring going into this that doctrine also failed upon first contact with the enemy and the force the Ukrainians to change their tactics it assume that the Ukrainians had sufficient tactical air defense to defend their own forces it assumed that the Ukrainians would be able to do X Y and Z that would be a given any given NATO campaign but but they just a lot that they would be able to do.
They just thought that it would not be decisive factor here and so these are all various different reasons why it didn't pan out and we can talk about some of those in depth but as far as the big picture takeaways concerned I think the real question now is in retrospect looking at the some of the deficiencies of the way the campaign was planned and executed.
Do the policymakers now have an honest appraisal of the operational requirements and capability developments necessary for Ukraine to win not just lose but win and therefore how do we take the steps to get the Ukrainians there or do policymakers perhaps in bad faith argue that the Ukrainians though righteous their cause be they really can't pull this off and therefore we have to find some way to.
Offrand this conflict where we negotiate some kind of settlement and I think that's the real danger and I hope we end up going with the former because any negotiated settlement will not bring peace Putin maintains his is a maximal objectives for capturing all of Ukraine and just like how the the Kremlin managed to lock down the lines of control in 2014 2015 in order to ultimately go about and try again at a bigger operation the Russians will absolutely do the same with Ukraine now.
Thank you so much George I realize I've been asking this question quite a lot recently about the counter offensive I mean so let's flip it around slightly what are the positives that you can you can take out of the summer and what lessons do you think they can take for the future.
I think the big ones that the Ukrainians have is a word that had a lot of opportunities for introspective for figuring out what works and what doesn't work and it's actually not just the Ukrainians but the western planners and campaign advisors who have helped supply and support and plan these operations.
We know that the Ukrainians need to operate in the air domain we know that they have to have more air defense to protect their forces on the ground to have to be able to effectively do combined arms the attack on strike that targeted the Russian airfield and occupied bearded down get destroyed a number of Russian attack helicopters that only occurred in mid October that strike should have occurred on day one of the Ukrainian counter offensive better yet in a shaping operation prior to.
But the prerequisite policy decision to give the Ukrainians the attack comes occurred far far too late for the Ukrainians to be able to do that that was an easily available mistake another easily avoidable mistake was the policy decision to grant the Ukrainians cluster munitions.
If you recall the United States ended up giving Ukraine cluster munitions for 155 artillery well into when the counter offensive was underway kind of as a stopgap or a crutch because the Ukrainians were running low on conventional artillery ammunition and because the Ukrainian performance was poor ideally that policy decision would have been made several weeks earlier so that the Ukrainians could have employed those cluster munitions as part of their initial shaping.
We know that the Ukrainians need a more tactical air defense to protect their forces and so on and so forth we know that the Ukrainians now need more electronic warfare assets to be able to defend their forces from Russian FPV drones the first person viewer drones which is something that the West had never considered that have actually made the use of vehicles extremely lethal on the battlefield and southern Ukraine and Zapparicia so there's all these things that we've learned about and frankly it's actually quite good that we're going to be able to do that.
We've actually quite good that we've learned collectively a lot of these lessons now in year two of the of the war rather than later in the war because the Western defense industrial base we are spinning up a bunch of assets to support Ukraine in the long run the long term.
We've already been able to do that in the United States right now we produce 30,000 shells artillery 155 shells per month with the objective of getting up to 100,000 shells per month by 2025 and of the European defense industrial base has similar goals as well but these things take time and so on and so forth.
A couple of dreams tanks at the United States pledge they only arrived in Ukraine in late September they did not participate in the campaign F-16s are being trained Ukraine is training up 16s now and they will receive those aircraft in the near future. It's better that we learn all these mistakes and work out the kinks.
Now rather than later having spun all these things up and I think it's actually we learn the right lessons from what doesn't work and what does work in Ukraine and we can optimize the way that we plan these operations to reinforce, find those successes, reinforce them, find the mistakes and avoid stepping on those landmines literally again. That's a really, a really, really fascinating account there, George, could we speak a little bit more about the attackums provision?
I mean, you mentioned that the devastating impact it had on the Occupy Basin-Berdienzk. What's your forecast for how these weapons might be used and their impact in the war going forward? Yeah, attackums, I want to be very clear, they're not a silver bullet. No weapon system is, but at the same time, in order to do combined norms, you need to have all these capabilities. The attackums, they're just a long range precision ammunition.
They have the ability to strike a target at a farther operational area to be able to hit those sensitive objects that the Russians want to protect that are necessary for the Russian war effort. Previously, the Ukrainians were able to achieve that effect with other systems like the high mars, but ever since the Ukrainians received those in 2022, the Russians found mitigations to be able to offset those effects.
And they started deploying their equipment and their logistics and their command and control nodes and so on and so forth, just slightly further so that they're outside the effective operational range of the high mars.
So the provision of the attackums and the storm shadows and so on and so forth, that's all very important and necessary for the Ukrainians to be able to conduct persistent precision fire against objects that the Russians need that are necessary for the prosecution of the Russian war.
I think if Ukraine is able to receive sufficient ammunition to sustain their fires, it greatly increases the likelihood of them to be able to have operational success because it will force the Russians to have to deploy, again, their big ammunition depots,
their command and control nodes, their big assembly areas, their full, those sort of capabilities, it's gonna stress the Russian logistics and it's those marginal effects that drastically over time and combination with other effects, it also need to be undertaken that will increase the propensity for the Russian war machine to eventually break down and be degraded.
George, before I go to Francis, so I'm sure he's got some questions as well, could we speak a little more broadly about the artillery war? We've not spoken about it as much as maybe we should have done over the past year and a half. From your perspective, could you just describe to us, what is the artillery war in Ukraine? How does this mean that the conflict differs, the more differs from those NATO militaries usually trained to fight? And what are the facts on the ground?
What kind of equipment are we talking about? Ammo provision? Who's got the upper hand? Could you just give us your broad thoughts here? Sure, well, the Russians and Ukrainians refer to artillery as the God of War and they see artillery slightly differently than NATO or Western militaries do. No Western and NATO militaries generally look at artillery as a supporting service, as a supporting mechanism, which enables maneuver.
So you will conduct fires, it supports maneuver, but the key thing is really the God of War is maneuver. Right? The opposite is true for Russians and Ukrainians. The Russian military has always been very artillery heavy. The Ukrainians use artillery a lot and they fire in terms of density of fire, a tremendous amount. Because that's because the Russian philosophy of warfare is not really to use artillery as a means of supporting maneuver, but rather artillery is the means of enabling maneuver.
That is, most of your combat, most of your fighting, the destruction of the adversaries maneuver elements, that's done with indirect fire, that's done with artillery. And then at the end of the destruction of your adversaries or their significant degradation, you then send the maneuver units forward to be able to essentially go and pick up the clean up the few main pieces that the artillery has already destroyed.
And because of that, the Russian and Ukrainian consumption of artillery is just, it's voracious. The Ukrainians fire on average about 8,000 shells a day. Some estimates have it to be up to 10,000. The Russians even more so. And of course, it means that the Western defense industrial base, which frankly over the course of the last 20, 30 years, has atrophied because they're not prepared to be able to sustain that volume of fires against this style of warfare of the style of using artillery.
The Ukrainians are very good at using it as well. The Ukrainians have been very effective at doing counter-battery fire. That is, identifying where the enemy is using their artillery from what positions they're firing and then returning warheads to their foreheads before the Russians are able to relocate or move. So artillery is a very important part of this war. It's a very important style to the way that the Ukrainians and the Russians wage war.
And it's one of the key things, particularly with ammunition. It's one of the key things that is stressing the collective, Western defense, industrial base to be able to enable Ukraine to keep fighting. George, you've spoken about so much. This is absolutely fascinating. And there's a lot to get into, I think. Francis Dunley, can I turn to you? You've been listening to all of this. Where would you like to question and probe? Gosh, I mean, there's so many different angles we could talk about.
I think the first one that I would like to put to you, George, if I may, is about F-16s and modern fighter jets. Generally, many people have said that part of the reason the counter-offensive has not been as successful as hoped is due to their absence. Do you agree with that? And if we do begin to see next year and beyond those modern fighter jets coming into play for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, do you believe that they will be the game-changer that it seems Ukraine longs for?
That's a great question. To be perfectly frank, I'm going to give a, I'm going to give a quick straightforward answer, but then pack in a whole bunch of nuance. My take is straightforwardly no. The Ukrainians having been operational in the F-16 would not have necessarily been the break-it, make-it-a-break-it system that would made it the success. Like I said, there is no silver bullet and warfare, attack-combs are not a silver bullet, F-16s are not a silver bullet. Break-break, nuance-time.
That said, the ability to operate in the air domain and the ability to contest and defend the airspace and also conduct your own attacks, in coordination with the ability to conduct long-range deep strikes that the attack-combs and storms try to provide in conjunction with the ability of maneuver that armored personnel carriers and Western-provided tanks provide, in coordination with all these other factors.
That combination of capabilities is 100% required for successful combined arms and is required for Ukraine's counteroffensive to be a success. So I think if you were to say and do a thought experiment, say, oh, well, if the Ukrainians had XYZ sooner, I think the wrong conclusion is to say, if so a factor, they had it, they would have been successful.
Rather, the Ukrainians need all these things to be successful and it's difficult to say the Ukrainians, we should be surprised that the Ukrainians could not have been successful when they were deprived of many of the systems necessary. But not to say that receiving those systems are going to be sure approved that they're going to be good at it. Another key thing that's really important, I think, for the Ukrainians is the combined arms training.
Like, the Ukrainians have to get good at combined arms. I think they can do it. I think there's a lot of people that argue that the Ukrainians cannot do it, that the Ukrainians simply, they have a skill cap issue or the systems are too sophisticated for them to operate. And frankly, I find those arguments patronizing and ridiculous. The Ukrainians have demonstrated that they're actually quite technologically sophisticated soldiers. They're quite good soldiers.
And every time we've given them some form of sophisticated Western weaponry, they master it very quickly and employ it very, usually pretty well. We need to redefine our training and use the kind of training that actually works for the Ukrainians.
A lot of problems happen over the course of the spring and the summer with the Ukrainian forces that were training in Germany and other places where the NATO trainers and American trainers essentially tried to mirror image what NATO doctrine should be and what should look like in its ideal form and push it down onto the Ukrainians. Whereas the Ukrainians actually have more experience of what it's like to fight against a peer adversary, against Russia in particular.
And the NATO doctrine, it actually, when implemented, in part, it did not hold up against the Russian adversary and the Russian threat. And so the Ukrainians had to improvise and change. And so really what NATO needs to do is, and this is a difficult pill to swallow, but they need to swallow their pride and realize that, okay, the Ukrainians need these capabilities and we need to let the Ukrainians be able to operate the way that they know how to fight,
the way that is effect for them, and actually realize that we NATO have more to learn from the Ukrainians in terms of doctrine and best standard operating procedures, how to operate against Russian threats, than theoretically what our own textbooks teach us.
The second thing that I'll also add in conclusion is another key constraining factor that's really affecting the Ukrainians is not the fact that they don't have that 16s or they don't have an XYZ system, but the fact that the Ukrainians don't have the planning, the operational planning flexibility to be able to know that they can afford to lose equipment.
This is a really big deal, because right now, when the Ukrainians received X number of leopard tanks, X number of challenger tanks, X number of Abrams tanks, these have no guarantee that they're ever going to be replaced.
And so it's very difficult for the Ukrainian general staff to go into a campaign and say, it's okay if we lose 50 leopard tanks in this operation if we lose all 14 of the challenger tanks, because those are going to be replaced for the next phase of the operation in a couple of months. And that's okay. As far as they're aware, all that they have now is all that they can guarantee.
And so it leads to a kind of very conservative decision-making where you look at these assets that really aren't spectacular assets as a strategic resource because it's all you might ever perceive. And ironically, if you lose them in combat, it might influence the political perceptions from the Western backers and then decrease the likelihood that you're getting replacements again.
And so the Ukrainians are also constrained in their decision-making and the way that they can serve these systems precisely because we've not given them the flexibility to say, it's okay if you lose these vehicles, they're going to be replaced. And that of course also decreases their ability to plan for contingencies and branches and what level of losses are acceptable for these operations. So all of these things are constraints that have I think decreased Ukrainian effectiveness. Thank you.
I think you're very neatly bringing together many of the themes we've been discussing throughout this counteroffensive. So it's very interesting hearing your perspective sort of zoomed out on this. So training is vital, knowing that they're going to be having much more support in terms of consistently bringing in weapons, heavy munitions, et cetera, artillery, and also fighter jets.
Are there any other things that you think are missing from the Ukrainian stocks or in terms of training, et cetera that are now we can see going to be vital for the future of the war? Yeah, we need to, besides the training, which is a big one, they're going to need a lot of breach equipment. The Russian field fortifications are effective and the Ukrainians are going to need a lot of breach equipment. They're going to need the flexibility to know that what they lose will be replaced.
And I think one of the young foreseen things that has come to fruition in this campaign in particular is the electronic warfare component. I think the Ukrainians, I've watched hours of combat footage of Russian UAVs, commercially available UAVs and drones that both drop warheads directly onto Ukrainian forces from attack down positions. And then the first-person viewer drones that a pilot physically flies a kamikaze drone into a vehicle.
This has made it extremely difficult for the Ukrainians to operate the vehicles across the southern Ukrainian step in Zapparizia. And the answer to that is the Ukrainians need to have more electronic defensive electronic warfare systems to be able to protect their forces from those sorts of attacks. The Russians are investing in it and the Russians have better electronic warfare capabilities.
It's always been a system type that the Russians have pioneered that have been more effective at employing. So Western's backers and planners need to start just knowing that over two years ago, the proliferation of FPV drones as a means of targeting and plinking a vehicle that was not a capability, but it is now a Russian capability. And we need to develop countermeasures for it. Thank you.
And just turning then to the Russian armed forces, I said that one of the critiques that's being made of the timepiece is by being so specifically focused on the Ukrainian picture that it just assumes that the Russian army is strong, that it's continuing to mobilize forces and that it is in a sense unchanging in its military position. Where would you, how would you judge the state of the Russian armed forces at present? Do you think that they are perhaps more degraded than many people realize?
Because there does seem to be this assumption that's taken root in many Western capitals that the Russian armed forces are reliably in position. But that seems to be something that is being increasingly challenged. Yeah, the Russian military is not defeated. They've been crippled and they've been definitely degraded to a substantial effect. But they're far from defeated.
And I agree with the critique that the West has done enough to ensure that the blame for any hypothetical decisive Ukraine defeat cannot be pegged on any given Western capital or Western leader. But nobody's actually taken the subsequent steps to ensure that the Ukrainians can actually go ahead and win.
The Russian military, despite all of its problems, and it's very broken in a variety of ways that many people have written about, I will spare no more exceptional words there unless you want to get into it. But they still manage to be able to cobble together enough forces for more continued offensive operations like the one we saw in the beef cup through their national pseudo mobilization campaign.
The Russian defense industrial base continues to refurbish and produce tanks, though at a small number. They've managed to be able to use sanctions, evasion schemes, through their trading partners to be able to source the pieces and the parts required for actually restoring their pre-war missile and precision guided ammunition production. And they're on track to exceed it, moving forward into the next year.
They've managed to also find creative ways to be able to get access to ammunition in North Korean artillery shells with about half a million shells to the Russians at one such example. So the Russians remain a threat. And it's very likely, I think, that the Russians will probably Putin will probably declare a mobilization after the presidential election in March 2024. Because it's very clear the Russians need that, and they can do it.
I just think that politically Putin will save that off until after his election. That said, we need to be very serious about how we consider the Russian threat. They're not defeated. They're building up, they're bulking up. And the Russian strategy is predicated on time is on the Russian side. And that, frankly, that's true. They have a larger defense industrial base that can leverage against Ukraine. Their political will has not, I think, been decisively defeated. I don't think it will be.
The key thing is that the Ukrainians need to keep abilities to defeat the Russians and that they're the Russian, because the Russian intense not can never change. I'd also add that the Russians, they seek to rebuild a Soviet-style army. Back in January, the Defense Minister Sergei Shoyegu announced his intent to conduct reforms, which included creating 12 new Russian maneuver divisions, which is a substantial large force.
It's the kind of military structure that looks more like the red army of the 1980s than the contemporary Russian military of the 2010s that was redesigned to sort of be this lean, mean, highly professional, modern force that be able to respond effectively to crises and wars and Russia's periphery. The Russians have learned the lesson in Ukraine that actually that doesn't work. The effort to professionalize and have a small, but theoretically more efficient force doesn't work.
And so now they're going back to the tried-insured Russian model of more mass is really what's going to carry it today. Now, it's going to take many years for the Russians to rebuild that capability, which really I think should impress upon these policy makers on really number one, the opportunity now that the Ukrainians have to try to defeat the Russians before they spin these things up.
And number two, the danger that exists, that is if we're complacent with the Ukrainians having successfully so far defended their state and really if the current lines are locked down that that's not the end of the world, that's just that's very short-sighted. It kicks the can down the road. It's not going to provide any lasting peace, especially as the Russians revise, substantially the way that they see their military requirements to achieve their national objectives. Well, thank you, George.
Really interesting insights. One final question. I think many people expect as winter approaches that this is going to be, you know, a frozen conflict. You've already said that that is not the case and we shouldn't expect that to be the case. What do you think the next phase of the war is going to look like in the next few months? I think fighting is going to continue over the course of the winter. The weather is going to slow tempo of operations, but it's not going to stop.
I suspect that the Russians are going to continue attempting attacks against the Dvk. Kind of like how they perhaps as they might have done and begin to block with just shoveling more resources into it and trying to brute force tactical gains over the course of a long time.
I also am very concerned about a new potential major Russian offensive in a relatively underlook piece of the theater, which is northeast Ukraine, in the Harkiv-Luhansk area, heading towards the operational and significant town of Kupensk in northern Harkiv-Oblosk. The Russians have been deploying, reportedly deploying substantial forces to that sector and there have been some Russian military journalists who have referred to the town of Kupensk as their words that might be coming up, Bakmu 2.0.
Now, I don't know if it's going to come to fruition or not, especially depending on what executive decisions Russian general staff makes or what Putin does, but there might be I think a renewed Russian offensive after they try to push in that area as well. The Ukrainians of course are going to try to continue conducting their operations, unclear to me when their southern campaign they'll finally stop trying to conduct operations there. Hopefully they will not.
And it's too determined to see what kind of presence the Ukrainians can establish on the left bank of the Nipro river in Harsan, which is where there's an apparent Ukrainian river crossing after underway. Which, Roger, thank you so much for dealing with all of our questions. It's been really fascinating listening to you. Is there anything we haven't spoken about that you think is important for our listeners to hear?
Yeah, I think the key thing is, listen, Ukraine right now is still in just as much of an existential fight right now than as it was in February 2022.
The drama and the hysterics of there being Russian troops on the doorstep of Kiev is absent now, but the Russians I've tried quite successfully conducted an information operation to make it seem as if Ukraine is basically okay they're in a fine enough state that the Russians, if they capture what they have and lock down the lines and if there are peace talks like Lavrov hasn't tried to entice us with, then I'll be hunky-dory. And that's not the case.
The current war is not about who controls 17.8% of occupied Ukraine right now. It still will we allow the Russians to permanently use one-fifth of Ukraine as a permanent springboard from which it can continue to attempt to attack and undermine Ukraine and eventually finish what it started ultimately in 2014 and intensified in 2022.
I think that if we back down from this challenge now, the likelihood of the Russians being able to leverage their strategy of patience increases exponentially and therefore even though the going is tough right now and the situation doesn't seem that bad, it really actually is quite a dangerous moment and we need to be decisive in the way that we evaluate the requirements for support of Ukraine. Thank you so much George Barrett for joining us today.
We'll come back to you shortly for a quick final thought and maybe during that you can tell us a little bit about how listeners can follow your work and the work of the ISW as a whole. But for the very first final thought, can I go to Francis Sturley? Thanks David, just a very brief one from me. There is this prevailing narrative taken as a given one here's regularly that the world is switching off from Ukraine due to events taking place in the Middle East and elsewhere.
That may be true to a degree in the higher shulans of politics but as far as our listeners and readers are concerned, we've been crunching the numbers here and in reality, we've not seen any drop off, quite the opposite, our numbers continue to grow. Perhaps as war generally becomes a more pressing concern, more people are switching to geopolitics and if that's you, welcome.
But more broadly, I think there are so many people who are deeply invested in what is happening in Ukraine knowing its importance far beyond the confines of that country, they are not fickle, they're not switching off, they're not looking away and neither will we. So thank you for sticking with us and I just wanted to, I suppose, conclude today by questioning that prevailing narrative because I think that it has been one that is unquestioned and unscrupely and is actually untrue.
Thank you very much, Francis. George, as our guest, would you like the very final words? I think this is a decisive moment for times of choosing. I'm optimistic about Ukraine's prospects if the collective West decides to decisively back this. I know World War II analogies are perhaps a little, so perfluous right now, but I like to look back to the old adage that FDR had about America being the arsenal of democracy.
It took four years, really, between 1940 and 1944 for specifically America's defense industrial base to be able to spin up and make the US military into the, basically bring it from nothing and bring it into a, do become the predominant industrialized military force on the planet. But these things take time and to spin up time for these things, it cannot be done overnight.
And so having looked at us now and at the end of year two of this war, if we're serious about backing the Ukrainians and dealing with the defense industrial base problems and ensuring that the Ukrainians have all of the need to do the war, and we learn how to fix the kinks and learn the lessons from the counteroffensive of 2022, then I think that the Ukrainians will have a fair shot. I think the bad response, the bad take away is to say, ah, 2022 didn't pan out as we expected.
This is all lost cars and then throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is precisely the incorrect conclusion. We can also have a Ukraine Live block on our website where you can follow updates as they come in throughout the day, including insights from regular contributors to this podcast. You can listen to this conversation live and 1pm London time each week day on Twitter spaces. Follow the telegraph on Twitter so you don't miss it.
To our listeners on YouTube, please note that due to issues beyond our control, there is sometimes a delay between broadcast and upload. So if you want to hear Ukraine the latest as soon as it is released, do refer to the podcast apps. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Ukraine the latest on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it helps others find the show.
You can also get in touch directly to ask questions or give comments by emailing ukrainpodattelegraph.co.uk. We do read every message. And you can contact us directly on Twitter. You can find our Twitter handles in the description for this episode. As ever, we are especially interested to hear where you are listening from around the world. Produced today by Louise Wells.