Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - What Does Putin Want Now? - with Fred Kagan

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

What are his objectives at this point in his war against Ukraine? And what are Ukraine’s objectives? What are US objectives? After all, the goals of different leaders in wartime often evolve based on battlefield developments. Are objectives shifting right now before our eyes…for Putin, Zelensky, and the US and NATO? And has the likelihood that Putin would use a limited nuclear strike changed as his objectives have evolved? To help us think all this through, military analyst and historian Fred Kagan returns to the podcast. Fred is the director of the American Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute and a former professor of military history at West Point, where he taught for ten years. His books include Lessons for a Long War and End of the Old Order: Napoleon and Europe, 1801-1805. He also regularly briefs and advises senior US military commanders. Fred earned his PhD in Russian and Soviet military history at Yale University. He is fluent in Russian. To follow Fred Kagan’s work, the easiest way to do that is to go to AEI.org And the report we discuss on this episode – “Russian General Officer Guide” can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/3e8bzrex

A scenario that I am concerned about is that he will annex large portions of Ukraine, announce that Russian nuclear doctrine, you know, supporting the use of nuclear weapons in defensive attacks on Russian territory applies to the annexed terrain, and then either therefore say explicitly or imply that continued counteroffensives will trigger a nuclear attack, hoping to stop continued counteroffensives. That's the likeliest scenario that I see right now for what would be a threat followed possibly by actual use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. And it worries me a lot. What does Putin want now? What are his objectives at this point in his war against Ukraine? And what are Ukraine's objectives?

And what are the objectives of the United States and Europe? After all, the goals of different leaders in wartime often evolved based on battlefield developments. In 1939, Britain went to war to defend Polish independence from Nazi aggression. But the objective changed. Among other things, it became a war to topple Hitler and bring down the Nazi regime. Or consider how much America's war objectives in that war had changed from 1941, retaliating for Pearl Harbor and trying to contain Japan's expansionism in Asia. But by 1945, America's objectives in World War II had changed a lot. Are objectives shifting

right now before our eyes for Putin, Zelensky, and the U.S. and NATO? And has the likelihood that Putin would use a limited nuclear strike changed as these objectives have evolved? To help us think through all of this is military analyst and historian Fred Kagan. Fred is the director of the American Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute and a former professor of military history at West Point, where he taught for 10 years. His books include Lessons for a Long War and End of the Old Order, Napoleon in Europe, 1801 to 1805. Fred also regularly briefs and advises senior U.S. military commanders. He earned his Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet military history at Yale University. He's fluent in Russian. This is Call Me Back.

And I'm pleased to welcome fan favorite of this podcast, Fred Kagan, back to the conversation. Hey, Fred. Hey, Dan. It's great to be back with you good to be back with you as I was just telling you I was I was earlier this week with a few of a few friends who are listeners of this podcast who who approached me and said we need an update on Russia and Ukraine and I mentioned that you were actually coming on the conversation that you and I had just exchanged messages and you'd agreed to come on and they were thrilled.

Further reaffirming my view that there will be, sadly, always a market for Fred Kagan because the world is a mess. So, Fred, but actually the reason I was initially interested in having you back on, other than it's, you know, I always look for opportunities to connect with you, is when the war started, I pegged it about, that there would be about four weeks of intense coverage and interest in Russia's war with Ukraine. That's what typically captivates, you know,

the U.S. mindshare for about four weeks. That's what we saw after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. People were horrified, shocked. A few weeks later, they moved on. Russia invades Ukraine on February 24th. Everybody seems to be focused on it. It's the topic of every conversation. And then about four weeks later, almost to the day, what I peg it at is the Oscars. Will Smithgate at the Academy Awards, when the conversation completely changed for the first time to something else about a month later. But now we're about three months in. And interestingly, public support, if you look at the polling, including among Republicans and Democrats, remains high for the cause of Ukraine and for helping Ukraine defend against Russian aggression.

So public support remains high, and yet it seems like we're becoming increasingly disconnected from the day-to-day, minute-to-minute developments that are shaping headlines. So I just, before we get into the main topic of today's conversation, I just want to get a sense from you. Three months in, where are we in this? And I guess I'll pivot off just a couple days ago, May 9th, President Putin held his annual, it was the annual parade in Russia to mark victory over the Nazis in World War II. As you pointed out to me offline, not just the Soviets' victory, actually, it's everyone's victory, but, it's everyone's

victory, but they're the ones who really honor it with a full-on parade. And Putin gave an important speech in that parade that many people like you are trying to read between the lines on. So what exactly did Putin say in Russian people was, you're doing your part in this new fictional fight that I've manufactured against the hallucinogenic world in which you can have a Jewish Nazi as president of Ukraine. And I, Tsar Putin, am not going to make further dramatic demands of you because you're doing your part. And I took that to mean, I and the ISW team took that to mean, no, he's not going to order a general mobilization and a huge conscript call-up or reserve call-up, probably because he has decided that it would pose risks to the stability of his regime at this point if he were to call up tens or hundreds of thousands of new Russian conscripts with the promise of hurling them into this war. So we took that as a kind of a placatory message to Russians to say,

you're doing your part and there's not going to be a lot more demanded of you. Now, it's probably not true. He probably will do more conscription and more other things, but he will not do it. It appears overtly and ostentatiously in the way that some people had thought that he might before the speech. And in terms of a battlefield assessment of where we are now three months in, and I know there's a lot of work that you're involved with at the Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threat Center at AEI, so can you just give us a basic assessment of where things stand now? So the Ukrainians have been, are in the midst of a large-scale counteroffensive

around the city of Kharkiv, sort of Ukraine's second city, and ironically a city that was supposed to be Russia-friendly with a large concentration of Russian speakers, but that greeted the Russian liberators with hails of bullets when they approached in the initial invasion, held out, and the Ukrainians are now pushing the Russians away from it rapidly. So today, I think, was the first day in a long time when there were no artillery attacks on the city of Kharkiv itself, in part because the Ukrainians have pushed the Russians far enough away from the city that they're out of range of large parts of it and in part because the Ukrainians have given them a whole other set of problems to worry about and things to

use their artillery on which involve maintaining any presence there at all so So that's a big deal because getting Kharkiv secure will take a lot of pressure off of Ukrainian defenders and allow people there to start rebuilding their wrecked lives and cities. So we think, and our update today will capture this, that the Russians may be scaling down their military objective even further to focus on just trying to encircle the cities of Siverodonetsk and Lysychansk and then presumably try to force them to capitulate. And candidly, Dan, first of all,

I'm not sure that the Russians are going to succeed even in that lesser objective. Talk about downgraded objectives if they don't even succeed at that. Yeah, that's right. Even if they do manage to complete that encirclement, I'm skeptical that they would be able to hold it for long enough against Ukrainian counterattacks, actually to force those cities to surrender or to storm them. So it's possible that the Russians will end up taking Sivertoy Tanyetsk and Lysachansk, but I'm skeptical.

Our current running assessment is that that is probably going to be about it for what the Russians are going to be able to do in terms of offensive operations, unless something changes really dramatically. In terms of how do we quantify where things are? What do we know? What information is publicly available? Obviously, again, the Institute for the Study of War is doing a lot of important research, information collecting from public sources and analysis. What do we know about Russian casualties and Ukrainian casualties? So I don't know anything about Ukrainian casualties because we don't track that. On Russian casualties, I think I've seen Ukrainian numbers that are as high as 23,000 killed. At this point...

Ukrainian sources. Ukrainian sources saying that there are as many as 23,000 Russians killed. I would be prepared to buy upwards of 20,000 dead Russians at this point. And let's just contextualize that in two ways for a minute. The Russians lost about 14,000 total in the Afghan war. The Soviets did in 10 years. So that would be 20,000 in three months. With a much bigger population.

Right, yes. Because there's the whole Soviet Union. Yeah, the Russian population was twice as large as Russia's now. So it's staggering. By contrast, I think the U.S. lost 55,000 total dead in the whole Vietnam War. So it's a staggering loss rate, especially for a supposedly modern army and modern warfare. But then there's a normal, pretty reliable rule of thumb about injured in relation to dead in these kinds of wars. And it's usually you have about a three to one ratio of serious, of injured badly enough not to be able to return to duty which is the standard um is usually about three times as many uh as there were dead so if

there were 20 000 dead and that ratio holds then there should be about another 60 000 injured severely enough not to return to duty and you know some of that probably a sizable proportion of that is going to be you know life-changing injuries, amputations, serious just really— So not just injured badly enough not to return to the military, but their lives are permanently altered, if not ruined. Right. I mean, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's going to be not insignificant. So that's, you know, if you want to cut it down and say, even all in, it's only 60,000 killed and injured. The Russian starting invasion force was estimated to be about 190,000. So you're coming up on 33% casualties,

which is just catastrophic. It's catastrophic. Yeah. And in terms of, is there any way to quantify, you know, assets, major military assets destroyed? There are people, people have done it. We don't. There's a category of Russian equipment loss that has unfortunately been shrinking, which

is that the Russians, Russian troops had in around Kiev, donated a lot of equipment to the Ukrainians. And that had been a major source of resupply to the Ukrainians, was equipment that the Russians just ran away from. That phenomenon has diminished, but the Ukrainians are still destroying a lot of Russian kit. I don't know what the numbers are but they're high okay so now i want to talk about objectives which is what i'm what i'm most interested in for purposes of this conversation and that is to say we we all have a theory about what every party's objectives are when when a war begins and then our our theory about those objectives may change and which is very common and i guess before before we talk about what all the players what all the party's objectives were

in this war can you just just because you're a historian spend a minute just explaining why it is common throughout military history for countries to get into a war with one set of objectives and then it's not like necessarily the objectives shape battlefield decisions there's developments on the battlefield that shape the objectives actually can usually more often than not works in the reverse direction look it's usually it's it's i don't say usually it's often interactive that you go to war for the purpose of achieving a specific set of objectives. And you think that you are going to have to pay a particular set of prices in order to achieve those objectives. You get into the war and any of several things can happen. You discover that if you want to achieve those objectives, you're actually going to have to pay a much higher price.

And so you might decide that actually, okay, okay well I don't want to pay a higher price so I'll accept a lesser objective you might get into the war and discover that actually you pay a much lower price and then you might ask yourself you might either say okay great I'll take that objective at a lower price or you might say hmm well if I'm only going to pay a low price then maybe I want more and maybe I'll pay what I was prepared to pay and try to get more for it so your objectives can grow. That also happens. Opportunities emerge. You know, when you enter a war, it may look like there was no chance that you were going to be able

to do something and you discover you can and then you discover you want to. That's a normal human phenomenon as well. And then alternatively, opportunities close. You get into a war and you think you can do something, and then you discover you can't. You may still want to, but you realize that you can't, and then you have to go for something else. Now, there's another dynamic that sometimes happens, which I have been worried about and I'm still a little bit worried about every time we talk about Putin announcing full mobilization

or making more demand to the Russian people, which is a phenomenon that occurred particularly in Germany in 1918, when you get stopped short of your initial objectives, it becomes apparent that you can't achieve your initial objectives. And that, in fact, you have to demand more and more of your people just in order to keep yourself in the game. But in return for that, you start promising your people more and more because you're demanding more from them. And that's what happened in Germany in 1918. So as the German offensive stalled, as it became apparent that the Germans were not going to achieve really any of their major objectives, or well, that there were many that they were not going to achieve, instead of bringing those objectives into consonance with reality, they actually started

promising and claiming they were going to go after even more. And I have been worried, I'm a little less worried now, but not unworried, that if Putin feels the need to make higher demands of his people for this war he may then also feel the need to promise them more and He can get into a cycle where the whole discussion of objectives becomes completely divorced from reality And that is going to end really badly for somebody Hmm if it happens, but so far it hasn't. Okay, so now we've talked quite a bit on this podcast with you and others like Richard Fontaine and Mike Gallagher and others about what Putin's objectives were, say, on February 23rd,

the day before he launched the war. What would you assess Ukraine's objectives to be back then, when they knew Russia was going in and the war was starting? What was the Ukrainian government's objective in the months that were to follow? Look, I think the initial Ukrainian objective was survive. And I doubt that... Survive meaning, though, not have mass casualties,

Zelensky not being overthrown. Like, how do you define... There's a number of ways to define survive. Their border on the east not being moved too far west. I really would be surprised if the Ukrainian government had formulated any clear notion

other than survive. Because that was not clear that they were going to be able to. And in fact, we, you know, the West had largely written that off as an option. So I, look, the Ukrainian, as I said, as I've said many times, it's, it is noteworthy, not surprising to me, it was surprising to some people, and very surprising to the Russians. When the Russians invaded, the Ukrainians didn't do a whole lot of thinking except about how they were going to kill russians efficiently and how they were going to try to hold as much ground as they could i doubt that they were thinking about what their war objectives were that's a luxury that you have when you're not being invaded and fighting

for your life in front of your capital so i think that was the first aim was survive as best we can try to hold the country together and try to, you know, not let the Russians get certainly not let the Russians take key if that was obviously top priority. Certainly keep Zelensky alive and keep the Ukrainian government in place. That was another top priority. defend Kharkiv defend major cities prevent the Russians from taking those and do and do what you can elsewhere, seems to have been the approach the Ukrainians took quite sensibly. And what do you think Ukraine's objectives are now? Because they've exceeded expectations, perhaps even their own. Yeah. Once the Ukrainians defeated the Russians in the Battle of Kiev, I think that they were in a

position to sort of formulate a little bit more clearly what their objectives actually are. And Zelensky has been clear about this, which is at a minimum, the restoration of full control over Ukrainian territory up to the pre-invasion lines. So up to the February 23rd line. I'm not sure that the Ukrainians have made up their minds about whether they would push forward of those lines to recapture the Russian-occupied portions of Donetsk and Luhansk if they could. Formally, they will never recognize that those are not part of Ukraine. In practice, I'm not sure that they have or have not decided that they would fight to take them now in the circumstance. That's one possible change in objectives. I would be very surprised if the Ukrainians imagine that they can get Crimea back at this point. And earlier on in the war, Zelensky was pretty clear that although they were never going to recognize the Russian seizure, neither did they think they were going to get back. I don't really see how they can, honestly,

because the geography is just so unfavorable to Ukraine. So basically Zelensky calculates that the Russian invasion that took Crimea just created a new fact that is unchangeable. Look, I don't think he or any Ukrainian government that is not a Russian puppet would ever recognize the annexation. But if you spend five minutes trying to formulate a coherent military plan for how you're going to invade Russian-held Crimea from Ukraine, it's kind of crazy. So it is, I think, a reality unless somehow the Russians and Crimea collapse completely, and I don't really see how that happens.

What about political objectives as it relates to Ukraine maintaining the freedom to join the European Union or even the possibility of joining NATO as part of any settlement? Right. So Zelensky's been very clear, and the Ukrainian government's very clear, that Ukraine still intends to join the EU. And the Russians weirdly have been less vocal in objecting to that than one might have expected. So I don't see the Ukrainians dropping that desire or demand or stopping pursuing it. Zelensky has also sort of conceded that NATO accession is extremely unlikely, and he's floated the idea of taking that off the table in return for bilateral security commitments to Ukrainian

defense from individual NATO states, not all of them, you know, the US, Britain, Germany, and so on. I think that Zelensky and any Ukrainian government is very much going to want to have security guarantees from the West. And I doubt, I don't think that a Ukrainian government would promise the Russians or sign any treaty barring Ukraine from seeking such agreements. And at this point, candidly, I'm not, I don't think it's likely that the Ukrainians will change their constitutional commitment to joining NATO either. That was looking like, you know, it might be on the table when things were going much worse and his government, occupying all of eastern Ukraine, possibly occupying all of Ukraine, and basically just reducing the country to a client state, like it's Russia's relationship with Belarus. Where do you see Russia's objectives now relative to February 23rd, 24th? Well, look, let's start, Dan, by saying there is no such thing as Russia's objectives. There's Putin's objectives. Fair enough.

Putin's objectives are unchanged. Even in this? Absolutely. Okay, explain. Putin's objectives are unchanged. Even in this? Absolutely. Okay, explain. Putin's objectives are unchanged. Putin has articulated the strategic, the theological, the historical, the emotional, the every other adjective you could imagine explanation for why Ukraine as a whole must be part of Russia and cannot exist as an independent state. The art of being Vladimir Putin is never walking back from a statement, a series of statements as dispositive as that.

The fact that the Ukrainians are humiliating him will only be increasing his determination to redress and avenge that humiliation at some point in the future. And we need to get this through our heads. There is no negotiating with Putin at the end of the day about his objectives over Ukraine. This is for him at most a temporary setback. But he will never give up the objective of gaining full control over Ukraine. And in fact, after this humiliation, he will be more determined than ever to avenge it over time or to ensure that his successor can avenge it. That's not going to change.

Well, okay, but there are new facts on the ground as far as for him to consider, not the least of which is the robust Western economic response, right? So certainly one of his objectives now is for relief from trading and financial and economic sanctions. So he may have to give in order to get that relief, and seeking that relief was unlikely one of his objectives when all of this started. Sure. He now has a bunch of additional objectives having to do with additional problems

that he's created for himself. But when we talk about what does he have to give, he doesn't actually have to give a change in his objectives. He has to give a change in what he says his objectives are. In other words, he has to persuade us that he's changed his mind and that he's changed his objectives. And that's why I go straight to the heart of the matter upfront and say, he's never going to change his objectives. He might change what he says if he thinks that he can snow us again. And if he thinks that he can persuade us that, no, no, no, no, no, he's serious.

This time he really does mean to ought to keep his word when he never has in the past. And we might be foolish enough to go for that. And it's a danger that I think we really need to guard against. But in terms of, you know, what, ask yourself this question. So Putin gets up tomorrow, and he declares a halt to the war. And he says, Okay, I'm good, I'm going to withdraw. I'm never going to attack Ukraine again. I'll make a solemn oath on the Bible in the, you know, in the holiestiest church in Moscow that I'll never do this again. And so you should lift all the sanctions tomorrow. Would you trust him?

Right. Of course not. No, it's a temporary. It's a pause. Yeah, exactly. So we just need to understand. He has an ideology here. He has preached it for 20 years

It's gotten really shrill in the lead-up to this war all of his people repeat it You know and back in back in the old Cold War days, you know We used to have these arguments about the Soviets really believe in communism to which I always responded with two answers. One is, does it matter? And two is, how long do you really think that as a human being you could go on saying something over and over and over again and never believe it? Right. So, right, it's like, take these leaders at their word.

Okay, so what are, in light of what you're saying, what should U.S. objectives be? So U.S. objectives have clearly changed. And U.S. objectives initially were to deter Putin, at which we clearly failed. Secondarily, to strip him of the informational cover and diplomatic cover that he was trying to create at which we succeeded uh tremendously with with very important consequences uh to try to keep the nato alliance together or get it together at which we've succeeded really pretty well although i I think Putin's been tremendously

helpful in that regard, but I'll give the administration credit for accomplishing something it set out to do, more or less, rallying the world around Ukraine. But initially, it's very clear that the U.S. intelligence thought the Ukrainians were going to get rolled over in a few days, and then it was going to be a matter of supporting an insurgency, which I think we were preparing to do, which would have been the right thing to do if that had happened. But then it became apparent that the Ukrainians were not going to be rolled over and that we were in a different place, whereupon our objectives shifted from preparing to support an insurgency to trying to help the Ukrainians actually hold off the conventional invasion and have then shifted

again to try to help the Ukrainians actually reverse the Russian gains and have then shifted again to try to help the ukrainians actually reverse uh the russian gains and conduct their counter-offensive and at the moment as near as i can make out because i don't think we've ever quite stated this as dispositively as we should our object our objectives are to help the ukrainians conduct counter-offensive operation to liberate all of the territory back to the pre-invasion lines in other words i think that our formal objectives are aligned with what the ukrainian formal objectives are as well um that's vis-a-vis ukraine now we have another you know we have other objectives now that have gone to expanding nato to include sweden and finland uh which i think is very good um and you think will happen yeah sure and and and and thank you vulva i mean thank you putin that's um

vulva's the diminutive nickname um you know thank thank you vulva for that because that would never have happened without the russian invasion in this way um uh I think, yes, it will happen. So NATO will gain two new members and very important ones. And the alliance is stronger and more cohesive than it has been for a long time. And I think that the US has, involving consolidating that cohesiveness, which is going to be incredibly challenging. And, you know, keeping pressure on Putin in various ways for various reasons. It's a little bit less clear to me what the administration thinks the end state is that all of that is driving toward. And what about the, you said that we completely, our intelligence completely underestimated the Ukrainian response or the robustness of the Ukrainian military response.

Why did we get that so wrong? Why did we completely underestimate Zelensky and the Ukrainian military's ability to defend its country? Well, if I said that we underestimated the Ukrainians, that's, that's, that our intelligence underestimated the Ukrainians. I didn't mean to say that, because I don't know what our intelligence estimates of the Ukrainians were. It's very clear that our intelligence wildly overestimated what Russian capabilities were. Now, we at ISW also overestimated Russian capabilities, but not as badly. We thought the Russians were going to have a very hard time of it. We never accepted that they were going to be in Kiev in two to five days.

But we didn't think that the Ukrainians would be able to just stop the invasion. And the real issue there was, look it turns out that russia had a potemkin military and we the scale and the magnitude of that um was just not not visible uh it certainly wasn't visible to us and apparently it wasn't fully visible to the intelligence community either why hasn't russia been i mean community either. Why hasn't Russia been able, I mean, in that vein, why hasn't Russia been able to maintain a campaign to gain air superiority over Ukraine? I mean, it's like...

I'm dead. I've got to laugh every time I ask this question because I can't explain it. There is no straightforward, rational explanation for this. Meaning, going into this, you would have thought that Russia's Air Force leadership would have figured out a way to gain total air superiority over Ukraine. Yeah. Okay, so

come on. Give me something. Bring it. Okay, so look, I think it's It's baffling. Look, it is completely baffling. I mean, I think it turns out that Russian pilots aren't very good, or at least that the stock of good Russian pilots is low, that the Ukrainians were very skillful at handling the small numbers of high-end anti-aircraft systems they had, like the S-300s they started off with and the books and other things that ukrainian pilots were good

um because they did at least periodically win dog fights over kiev and and elsewhere with russian uh fighters and you know that's got to be skill that's not you know there's a limit to the degree to which motivation and enthusiasm is going to win dog fights you know that's that's like actual skill and i think it it turns out that the Ukrainians were more skillful than the Russians in some, in some important ways. I think Russian technology has been overrated in, you know, in many respects. I mean, sort of it supposedly advanced aircraft that the Russians have turned out not to be, not to provide them with significant advantages. The SU-34s and SU-35s are just not, don't seem to be that big a deal

in the face of other systems and like that. Let me just step back for a minute though and give you probably what I think is the larger explanation. When you look at a country like Russia, and especially when the US looks like a supposedly great power like Russia, we expect them to be able to do something that we can do, which is to function coherently as a

system. So we have aircraft in the air, we have attack aircraft in the air, we have AWACS, air control aircraft in the air. Air defense capabilities. Air defense capabilities. We've got ground-based air defense. We've got satellites feeding all kinds of information. Everything is networked together. Everybody can communicate with everybody in theory and usually in practice. And we present a series of multiple dilemmas to any enemy simultaneously. So that even if you actually could defeat our F-15s one-on-one, which isn't necessarily that hard to do in the modern era, that doesn't help you. Because, okay, you've defeated the F-15s, you can't handle the F-35s, or you defeated the F-15s, it doesn't help you against the other missile systems that we have.

Or you've blinded these radars, but that doesn't help you with the AWACS. We have a lot of overlapping capabilities that make sort of unpeeling at the American onion almost impossible. One assumed going into this that the Russians would be able to operate similarly as a system, even if on a smaller scale. And what is apparent is that they can't. And I think, I suspect, I don't have evidence for this, I suspect that one of the problems is that the Russians never really did resolve problems about how do they fly aircraft in the sky and also shoot ground-based air defense systems

and not have fratricide, which may or may not be complexified by the fact that both sides were flying Russian-type aircraft, although there are technical solutions for that which should have dealt with it, but okay. And even if they were technically capable of it, and I suspect that this is even more the answer, because I've seen this even within you with with u.s forces you know they probably are technically capable of shooting s400 missiles with russian aircraft in the sky and have the missiles not hit the aircraft because all the systems are designed

to work that way it doesn't follow that the pilots in those russian planes feel good about that and so you can get into a situation where they either refuse to fly if the missiles are going to be used, or they demand that the missiles not be used if they're flying, various other kinds of breakdowns like that, that involve really sort of the trust of individual operators in each other, in a system which doesn't engender trust or confidence. This is all a hypothesis, and I'm reaching here because I find it, just on the face of it, almost impossible to explain. There's been a lot of press coverage and commentary about the number of Russian generals that have been killed in action. You hear the numbers, eight generals, ten generals, fourteen generals.

I mean, I can't even keep track, and I don't even know how accurate or current the numbers are. But I guess the bigger question is, how significant is it? And, well, let me ask you that question first, and I'll ask you my second question. How significant is it, if you believe any of the estimates? Well, I don't have to believe the estimates. We know who was killed, and we know which one's the Russian. And, in fact, ISW just published the day before yesterday, I think, the fantastic laydown of the Russian command.

Which prompted this question, which we will put in our show notes, by the way. Thank you. It's an amazing piece of work that the team did. And it lists all of the generals that we know who were killed, that were reported killed. And also, by the way, those who were arrested, which is a not insignificant number.

So we know a lot of this is well established. And I don't know the numbers offhand, but it's significant. And it is significant. So look, on the one hand, you know, it's the Russian officer corps has become a great opportunity for upward mobility. You know, I mean, really, it's as this career advancement for mid-level officers is, you know, prospects are pretty good. It's a very flat hierarchy in a sense. It's a very, it's getting flatter every day. It's like Silicon Valley. Right.

Right. Silicon Valley in a Mad Max kind of world. Right. You know, is it significant? Yes, it is. It is significant. Anytime you have the death of a senior officer, it's traumatic for the unit. Anytime you have somebody else have to step up into that role, it's traumatic and disruptive. And it's hugely demoralizing when you're losing officers that senior. It's an indication that something is badly wrong, especially when you're losing them in large numbers, as the Russians have been. So now, I've also seen people rightly quip that the Ukrainians might be doing the Russians a favor in a Darwinian sense, since the Russian commanders were evidently so incompetent that they got into this position in the first place.

The upward mobility might not be a bad thing for the quality of the Russian army over time. So the Ukrainians are hoping to upgrade the quality of the command right okay if you think that the guys who are replacing them are any better which is which is an open question debatable right um but i think i suspect what your second question would be is what is this what is this a symptom of right right yeah and it's it's a symptom of a number of phenomena i think one is that um you know the ukrainians uh early on in the war took to using the lord of the rings reference to describe russian soldiers as orcs one of the great moments of ukrainian quippery in this war i really enjoyed was after the battle of kiev they described the mopping up process as chasing after lost orcs because

the Russians had left soldiers behind. Well, orcs don't have a whole lot of independent initiative and judgment, and neither do Russian soldiers, it appears. So if you want to get Russian soldiers to do anything that's hard and complicated and increasingly to get them to do anything that's risky like actually try to fight this war, you kind of have to stand on their heads. And that requirement to actually like be in forward headquarters telling subordinates precisely what to do if you wanted to and watching them do it if you wanted any of that to happen, is one of the things that drew Russian officers forward so that they couldn't just sit back in rear headquarters. They actually had to be there watching their probably brigade commanders actually issue orders and make sure that they were followed out because it wasn't happening otherwise. There are technical issues here, too, which is that there was supposed to be this super-duper high-tech encrypted satellite radio communication system that the Russian command was supposed to use. Well, it either wasn't delivered, didn't work, or was stolen, or some combination of all of those. And as a result, the Russians did not have any super-duper high-tech

communication system, but were relying on actual radios and other things, which had two effects. And cell phones, weren't they really? And cell phones, yes. All modern armies rely on cell phones. All modern, not fully professional armies rely on cell phones, and that's a problem for them it's an advantage for us that we don't have to do that and and it helped may help explain why they have been reticent to engage in full-scale cyber attacks because it's possible communications inside ukraine it is possible although i mean that's a whole other conversation right uh about that and probably other people than i can speak more intelligently to it. But the use of radios has two effects. One is that

you have to come into radio range. You actually, it means that, you know, those are not, if you're not communicating by satellite, then distance of signal actually matters. And so the Russians were clearly drawn onto the battlefield also, the commanders, so that they could be in radio range of their forward units. But the other thing is that if you're on the radio a lot and the enemy has any kind of remotely effective electronic warfare capabilities, which the Ukrainians have, it makes it a lot that the odds go up a lot that the adversary that the adversary in this case the Ukrainians will figure out where your command posts are and the Ukrainians were able to do that and so they were able to identify where the command posts were and because they were so far forward they were also

able to hit them and to do it while Russian commanders were there so I mean it's it's just it is symptomatic of multiple systematic breakdowns of multiple systems in a really catastrophic way. Last question before we let you go. One step, major step, not a decision without enormous risk that Putin could take if he really wants to change the trajectory of this war is to use a limited nuclear strike in a Ukrainian city or use chemical, deploy chemical weapons. My first question is, what is the likelihood of each of those scenarios? And then how do you think Putin calculates the risk-reward on using those tools? The likelihood is not remotely low enough. Both of those scenarios are far too probable for my taste or anyone's.

And I think that we need to get very serious about how we would respond to the threat of a nuclear strike or to the conduct of a nuclear strike. What would Putin... Can I just pause you right there? Because this is obviously a very big topic. It sounds to me like you're saying that you don't think it's out as improbable as you may have earlier in the conflict?

Like, is your thinking on likelihood changed a little bit? I'm not saying you're like leaning into it, but I'm just saying that... Yes, no, look, the more that it becomes apparent to Putin, as it must eventually over time, that his conventional army is being expended and cannot be rapidly replenished, and that it's not going to be able to achieve his objectives, the likelier it is that he turns to weapons of mass destruction to offset conventional weaknesses, which is one of the things that

weapons of mass destruction do. So the dynamics of the Russian defeat increase the likelihood of the use of weapons of mass destruction, whether chemical or nuclear. But then you do have to ask yourself the next question, which is, under what circumstances would it make sense for Putin to do that? And there, I think, there would probably need to be some series of calculations in his head that might or might not be grounded in reality, in which on the one hand, he would be pretty confident that if he used them, he would get what he wanted, whatever that is. And on the other hand, that he would not pay too high a price, whatever he regards too high a price as. And the problem is those are two huge variables.

So if he thought that he was going to nuke a village in Ukraine and then the Ukrainian government was going to surrender completely and just hand the reins over to him, I'm personally confident that that's extraordinarily unlikely. I don't think he's so delusional that he imagines that that would happen, because I think if he thought that that would happen, he probably would have done it already. But he might persuade himself in theory that that could happen. Now, a scenario that I am concerned about, and the ISW will publish a paper on this, I think, tomorrow, is that he will annex large portions

of Ukraine, announce that Russian nuclear doctrine, you know, supporting the use of nuclear weapons and defensive attacks on Russian territory applies to the annexed terrain, and then either therefore say explicitly or imply that continued counteroffensives will trigger a nuclear attack, hoping to stop continued counteroffensives. That's the likeliest scenario that I see right now for what would be a threat followed possibly by actual use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. And it worries me a lot. And you, if you're advising the U.S. government, what is your advice and how to anticipate that and be prepared to respond to it? I think, first of all, we need to examine, if we feel that we are not confident about this, our assumptions about nuclear deterrence writ large. So do we or do we not think that Putin will be deterred, as all of his Russian and Soviet predecessors were, from engaging in a nuclear war with NATO because nuclear deterrence holds? Personally, I have not seen any reason to re-evaluate the

validity of nuclear deterrence in that level, which tells me that the odds of getting onto a path that leads to some kind of nuclear exchanges between NATO and Russia is very low. But if the administration thinks otherwise, then there's a whole other large, very large conversation that we need to have. And Ukraine is a small part of that problem, frankly. So if you take that off the table then you say well what you know what could we do well the answer is that we have withheld from doing something that should be terrifying

to putin which would be using our conventional military capabilities simply to finish the job of destroying his conventional military capabilities, which it is apparent that we could do with relatively little difficulty and at relatively low cost to ourselves. So at the moment, my sense is that the wisest thing that we could do would be to say privately, and I don't know whether we are saying this or not, to Putin, first privately and then publicly if necessary, listen, if you use a nuclear weapon of any variety or conduct a large-scale chemical attack, we will enter the war. We will not nuke you. We do not need to nuke you. We will enter the war and we will destroy your entire military in Ukraine, probably will also

destroy your entire military in Syria also. If you continue to escalate after that, we'll move on and we'll destroy your entire military in Belarus. Okay? Because we can dismantle and destroy the entire Russian conventional military effectively. He can't afford to let that happen. Now that's a very dangerous path for us all to be on and I understand very much why everybody would be reluctant and reticent to get into any such conversation. But we have to flip this around and face up to the other side of the dilemma, which is if we allow Putin to establish that the threat or use of a tactical nuclear weapon in a third country is sufficient to deter us from defending that country, is sufficient to force that country to capitulate, then we have established a new rule in international order, which is everybody better get themselves a nuclear weapon and everybody better be willing to use it.

And even if they're going to use it against a country that is under the protection, even if unofficial, of a nuclear power, it'll be fine because the nuclear power is not going to risk getting into a confrontation. That is an absolutely terrifying world and a terrifying precedent to set. And so before we just go to... And again, I really understand the instinct to do this. We can't risk getting into a nuclear war at all. We have to understand what the consequence of that would be in this

circumstance and what a terrible future that would be creating for ourselves. All right, we will leave it there. On that happy note yeah uh yeah that uh that that moment of uh of quite a lot of darkness and doom but um but that's okay because we'll have you back and at some point we're going to get you on a much more upbeat note but uh fred thank you for uh like i said number of people were asking for for us to return to this topic and one i care a lot about and they specifically wanted you they want more fred so we're going to be calling on you again well thank you very much dan listen on an upbeat note ukraine is still free and a free

people is defeating the military of a much stronger, larger, and wealthier state because it is free. And that is an upbeat note on which I can say happily, Slava Ukraini! Glory to Ukraine! Fred, thanks a lot. We'll see you soon. Thank you, Dan. That's our show for today. To follow Fred Kagan's work, the easiest way to do that is to go to AEI.org. On this podcast, we also mentioned the Institute for the Study of War. I highly recommend going to their site, understandingwar.org. It's an extraordinary resource.

We discussed a new report that ISW, the Institute for the Study of War, just issued, which we'll post in the show notes. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.