Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Yevgeny Prigozhin falls from the sky

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Special episode with Dr. Fred Kagan on the Russia-Ukraine war (and Putin's hold on power). Fred is the Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also working closely with the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War. Fred is a former professor of military history at the US Military Academy at West Point. He completed his PhD in Soviet and Russian military history at Yale University. The Critical Threats Project – https://www.criticalthreats.org/ Institute for the Study of War – https://understandingwar.org/

In the immediate aftermath of the mutiny, Putin had a problem, which was that the Wagner fighters, who are some of the best fighters Russia has, were loyal to Prigozhin. Just killing Prigozhin, the natural replacement for Prigozhin and Wagner was Utkin. By killing both of them meant that it's not just that Prigozhin was publicly executed, but that Wagner was decapitated. And that was certainly one of the intents here. drop on Monday, where we'll be having a discussion on the state of the presidential race, specifically after the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night. But the reason we're dropping this special episode is because I was having a conversation with Fred Kagan, a frequent guest on this podcast for all things Russia, Ukraine. And I figured rather than just

having the conversation to check in with Fred, we should probably record it and share it with our listeners. Now, why was I checking with Fred? Well, that should be obvious. After the news of the death of Evgeny Progozhin, it seemed like a good time to check in about what the significance of that event was and where we are overall in the Russia-Ukraine war. As our listeners know, Fred Kagan is the director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. He's also working closely with the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War. We'll post links to both organizations in the show notes. Fred is a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy

at West Point. He completed his PhD in Soviet and Russian military history at Yale University. Fred is about as close as anyone I know to real-time battlefield developments in the Russia-Ukraine war and other theaters around the world. So it was good to call him and have him call me back and have a discussion at this inflection point. Is it an inflection point? When we last had Fred on, we talked about whether or not there were cracks in the Kremlin after the Progozhin mutiny. Well, are those cracks being sealed now

as a result of Putin's latest move? This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast on very short notice, my longtime friend, Fred Kagan, military historian, military analyst, former professor at West Point, now at the American Enterprise Institute at the Critical Threat Center, and our go-to expert on all military matters, especially as they relate to the Russia-Ukraine war. Fred, thanks for jumping on the call with us.

Great to be back with you, Dan. So Fred, first, before we get into analysis of what happened and what the significance is of what happened, can you just describe or tell us what you know so far as of when we are recording this? What actually happened to Evgeny Prigozhin? So Prigozhin, along with another founder of Wagner, Dmitry Utkin, and another senior Wagner associate, boarded a private jet owned by Protr Gozhin in Moscow,

and something like 15 minutes out of Moscow at high altitude, the plane detonated and crashed, killing all aboard. The Kremlin has confirmed that, the Kremlin has given us a passenger manifest, actually provided that manifest almost instantly. And since Putin has effectively just given an epitaph for Prigozhin, I think we can safely conclude that Prigozhin and all aboard are dead. So, and he gave that at, he was in some meeting that was being televised or something that was open to the press

where he said that Prigozhin had made some bad decisions. That's an understatement from Putin's perspective, had made some bad decisions in his life, but also had some accomplishments. I mean, he almost gave him like a, yeah, an epitaph or like a eulogy of sorts. A brief eulogy, yeah. It was interesting.

The team, the ISW team is going to be publishing about this this evening. And the ISW team, as our listeners know, is the Institute for the Study of War, which is led by Dr. Kim Kagan, and Fred is very involved with ISW. And I've included their link in our show notes in the past. They produced this very valuable, very timely analysis, intelligence analysis from their own sources, their own public sources on the battlefield in the Russia-Ukraine war. So when Fred says that's going to be available, we will post that in our show notes. Sorry, go ahead, Fred. Thanks, Dan. So, yeah, so Putin's eulogy was interesting because he made specific reference to the fact that Prigozhin,

that he'd known Prigozhin for a long time, and that Prigozhin made some bad mistakes, which is, you know, duh, an understatement of a century, but that he emphasized that Prigozhin had been doing things for him, Putin. And it seems to us that he was emphasizing Prigozhin's loyalty to him personally in a way that, and I am paraphrasing what we'll be writing later today. So credit where credit is due. This is the assessment of the team. But basically, the message that we think Putin was conveying is,

Prigozhin was loyal to Putin, which I think is true. I actually don't think that he was attempting to overthrow Putin with that armed rebellion, but that he made bad mistakes. And the larger message to the rest of the people in Putin's inner circle was loyalty is essential, but it is not enough. You can be loyal, but you can make bad enough mistakes that you end up having your aircraft explode at 28,000 feet. Well, bad enough. I mean, the mistake here was that he was ultimately very disloyal. So it wasn't like he was loyal to things. He was loyal and then he was disloyal. It's an interesting question. And I think that it's actually more nuanced than that, because we think that Prigozhin

was not trying to overthrow Putin. We think that he was trying to force Putin to fire Minister of Defense Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov, with whom Prigozhin has been at feud for a long time. And we think that Prigozhin actually probably thought that he was still being loyal to Putin. At any event, it's noteworthy that Putin didn't suggest that Prigozhin had stopped being loyal or betrayed him. He suggested that Brygoshin had made a bad mistake. And whatever Putin actually thinks about this, I think the message that was being conveyed is important because it's known within Putin's inner circle and generally beyond that, that Putin values loyalty and is loyal to those who are loyal to him, including Shoigu and Gerasimov, despite their horrific failures in this war.

But I think this message was meant to say loyalty isn't enough, and all of those of you who are loyal must also still be careful. Okay, I want to present two facts to you, or one fact and one image. Okay. The fact, the, the, the fact is June, the fact is June 23rd, 2023, which was the day of the, at least as we were seeing it, we would, we don't know what was going on behind the scenes, but the day of the formal commencement of the mutiny, which is, I think 60 days to the day of the plane falling out of the sky. So we should assume that the 60-day anniversary, I think, or I'm asking, should we assume that that anniversary was not a coincidence?

And B, the image of a plane falling out of the sky was also not a coincidence. There are a number of ways Putin could have taken care of Progozhin, and he chose this image. So the date and the optics of a plane falling from the sky, what are we to read into them? So I'm going to start by saying that the odds are that we'll never know for 100% sure exactly what happened and the Kremlin will work to make sure that we never know for 100% sure what exactly what happened but I am pretty confident in the following assessment. This was a deliberate assassination Putin probably regarded it as an execution of Pregozhin. The date was not a coincidence. And there was various staging around the incident that was also not a coincidence.

Putin was at a concert at the time that this happened for commemoration of the end of the Battle of Kursk from 1943. That was not, I i think accidental staging and as the kremlin would have it apropos of nothing the day that rigosian's plane is exploded the kremlin finally announces the replacement for uh sergey surovikin uh who had been the Aerospace Forces commander, was disappeared almost immediately after the mutiny, clearly hasn't been performing the duties of that office. No particular reason why anything should happen on any particular day, but on the same day that Bregosian's plane explodes,

we get the announcement of Surovikin's successor in that post. All of these things, this is all part of Kremlin staging. And so if we accept that, then we say the manner of the execution, this is the most public possible execution, right? This is literally thousands of people could see this execution carried out yep and yes the image of icarus if you'd like uh you know flying too close to the sun uh having his wings melt and then crashing to earth that's a nice image um there were reports that that was the plane was actually shot down by Russian air defenses. That's now being questioned, so I don't want to rely too heavily on that, but that would have been extraordinarily poetic, given that the Prigozhin-led mutineers had used their own air defense systems

to shoot down and kill a number of Russian pilots in the course of the mutiny, which infuriated, understandably, Russian military. If that isn't what happened, then some bomb was put on the plane to kill Prekoshen. But in any event, all of this was meant to be a very public execution. So I think we can ask a couple of questions. One is, why was it so important to Putin that it be such a public execution? And the other is, why did he wait this long? And then I've got a third question, but answer those two, and then I'll give you my third question. So whatever Putin thought he was doing with the armed rebellion, what he did do was humiliate Putin worse than Putin has

ever been humiliated by anyone in his inner circle. And you could see it on the day it was visible. Putin had to eat crap when Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, was preening about how he negotiated this deal. And then it is deal that ended the mutiny because Putin's own forces couldn't defeat, couldn't stop the Wagner guys from getting to Moscow. Every part of that was an unbearable humiliation for a guy whose mantra is that weakness is lethal and who lives by these sort of gangland mafia rules.

That humiliation couldn't stand. He needed to avenge himself and he needed to do it in spectacular fashion because the humiliation occurred in spectacular fashion. So the question is, why did he wait 60 days to do it? And the answer is, we'll never know. But the ISW team and I have been assessing that in the immediate aftermath of the mutiny, Putin had a problem, which was that the Wagner fighters, who are some of the best fighters Russia has, they're also war criminals, brutal, evil, and all like that, but they are good fighters, were loyal to Prigozhin. And the whole organization was loyal to Prigozhin. And we observed that Putin engaged in an information campaign, various other things to try to break up Wagner, to try to lure as many of these guys to fight for him instead of Prigozhin and to run down Prigozhin's reputation as much as he could as a way of separating Prigozhin

from his own fighters, preparatory to this execution. And so we think one possibility is that Putin had concluded that he had done that enough, that it was now safe to complete the execution. There are other various possibilities regarding the timing, but that's, I think, the likeliest explanation. And why on earth did Prigozhin get on that plane? Well, Prigozhin, okay, so what has Prigozhin been doing? He had been lying very low. He had not had a public presence, really. We had had a couple of audio recordings from him, but we had hardly had any video recordings of him, which may, by the way, well have been part of the deal that had been imposed on him.

But what was happening was that the Russian defense ministry has been working very aggressively to take all of Wagner's contracts in Africa away from Wagner and transfer them to Russian MOD-affiliated mercenary companies. This is devastating for Wagner because we already have reports that no one is paying the Wagner guys enough in Belarus. The Wagnerists start for cash. Prigozhin needed some kind of income. He needed not to lose all of his Africa contracts if he was going to have any hope of keeping his force together or any part of it. So when most recently a Russian military official was going around Africa working on taking away contracts, Prigozhin chased him. And Prigozhin flew to Africa, and then he released a video from somewhere in Africa, we're not sure, talking about how he was going to restore Wagner and how he was going to do great things and all of this kind of stuff. He did that a couple of days ago. And it's more or less flying back from that. But I think very likely as part of a

scramble that I think Prigozhin has been engaged in to try to salvage something for himself is he's been flying around trying to do that. What's more interesting to me is not that he flew, but that he and Utkin and this other guy chakalov were on the same plane together which is not normal because they because these guys understand the dangers of doing that they understand the risk of exactly this kind of thing happening and so they have made it a practice we are told of not doing this um and i do i would love to know how it was engineered that they were on the same plane together. But the fact that that plane was brought down meant that it's not just that Prigozhin was publicly executed, but that Wagner was decapitated. And that was certainly one of the intents here.

Because by removing, by killing, just killing Prigozhin, the natural replacement for Prigozhin and Wagner was Utkin. By killing both of them, it leaves Wagner headless. And that was certainly the other part of the intention here. Now, interestingly, this may actually come back to bite Putin, because Utkin will look like a straightforward martyr to the Wagner crowd. There are reports that he was involved in the mutiny, but he was never presented as a public face of the mutiny. He's very well thought of in that crowd. There had not been a campaign to destroy him. And we're already seeing in the pro-Wagner telegram channels and so forth a lot of enthusiasm for making of Utkin a martyr, which I'm sure that Putin did not intend to do. But all of that together, to me, the most interesting question is how it was so engineered that they were both on the plane together. Now, when we last spoke, Fred, you felt that, as you just said,

Prokofiev has been the only real leader that's been able to successfully, at least for some period, humiliate Putin. And that exposed cracks in Putin's grip on power. And that in turn would might encourage others or at least not discourage others from taking a risk given how far Prokofiev got. Do you think events of the last of the past couple of days changed that analysis of yours? Well, I think they show that Putin agreed with me and feared the same thing and desired to make it clear to anybody who might have such thoughts that it would be unwise to pursue them. Certainly in the short term, I imagine that anybody who is thinking any such thing will

not be pursuing it. I'm not sure what the long-term implications of this are um this is such a this is such a goon move if you think about it this was such a mafia move however the kremlin is going to try to spin into some kind of i'm sure we'll end up with some theory that this was a ukrainian plot right um we'll have some kind of they'll they'll spin some sort of nonsense to try to score off it in every direction but at the end of the day this this was a this was a sort of a low-class mafia hit done on a massive scale that's not really a good look for putin either and the fact that putin has had to resort to that, yes, it shows his strength for now, but it also shows a kind of a weakness that he had to do that. He felt the need to do that in the first place and to do it in such an ostentatious fashion.

And the other thing is, look, I mean, I think he has, in fact, created for himself a problem that will probably take a while to manifest if it ever does. But there are going to have been a lot of Wagner fighters who were very angry about this, and who will be permanently alienated from Putin by this. You know, that may not matter. But that's a collection of people that on balance, you know, would have been preferable not to, you know, not to turn permanently against you with a lot of anger in their hearts. So I think it's a, I think the jury's out on what the long term impact of this will actually be. But for now, I'm sure that anybody who was thinking about doing anything is not thinking about it anymore. So with that, let's now just kind of raise the lens here a little bit and talk about where we are more generally in this war.

So before the killing of Prigozhin and his top lieutenants, just snapshot, where did you think we were a couple days ago in this war? Well, we're in exactly the same place as we were because the killing of Prekosz and Anutkin has no effect on the trajectory of the war right now. The Ukrainians are making gains on the main line of the counter-offensive that they are pursuing from the city of Zaporizhia toward the city of Melitopol, which is the shortest route to cut the Russian lines of communication along the northern Serozov coast. And the Ukrainians have taken, have fought their way through the initial very dense, very deep Russian minefields and initial Russian positions and are now attacking toward the next Russian line of defenses. The Russian defenders have not, have fought well, but are largely the same guys who've been fighting all along. They've received some reinforcements, but the reinforcements themselves have been fighting for a while.

And they are clearly tiring and they're clearly having a hard time holding the Ukrainians back. So it's very hard to say. Well, the Ukrainians are about to come up against a major set of Russian fortified lines that are long lines of anti-tank trenches and dragon's teeth, anti-tank obstacles and stuff. And in my mind the main question is going to be how heavily are those lines held what kind of forces do the russians actually have in those lines to hold them and even more important in some respects how heavily are they mined um if they are very heavily held and or very heavily mined then i think we'll be in for another long slog as the Ukrainians have to fight through them.

If they're less heavily held or less heavily mined, we may see the Ukrainians continue to move a bit more rapidly. It's hard to tell. War, especially war like this, doesn't move in a linear fashion. It moves in starts and stops. The Ukrainians actually have been making pretty consistent gains on a daily basis for a number of days. And these gains matter. They look small on the map, but they're gains through a very, very, very tough part of the Russian defense.

And the Ukrainians do have reserves to commit to exploiting these gains and the russians are very hard put to find a lot of reserves to bring to this part of the front so i think things are going reasonably well for the ukrainians at the moment um in this area and we you know as always i have to end with and we'll have to see yeah but the the you know, as always, I have to end with and we'll have to see. Yeah, but the, you know, there's this ongoing debate here about whether or not the West, generally in the U.S. specifically, is doing enough to get the weapons and defense resources to Ukraine that they need, just basically arms transfers. And that the concern that, you know, West, even if the Biden administration wanted to do more than it's already doing, that it's that Western production limits are or Western production capabilities are being outstripped by Ukrainian needs, demands, requests. So how acute is that problem? That is to say, even if the Biden administration was ready to kind of go full speed ahead and getting the Ukrainians everything they need, there's just a

limit to what we can produce. And one stat that I was given is in some categories of munitions, the Ukrainian armed forces are using in one day, what it takes the United States production system about a month to produce. So that at some point, there's just no way we can keep up even if we want to. Right. And in some categories of munitions, that's true. And that's one of the reasons why we've shifted to giving the Ukrainians cluster munitions to offset some limitations we have on conventional artillery rounds. And sure. But those are only certain categories of munitions. There are no M1 tanks participating in this counteroffensive. We're told that M1s will turn up in Ukraine in the fall. It's baffling to me that we've spent so long

arguing with ourselves about whether or not we should be giving M1s to Ukraine. M1s would have been a very important contribution to the Ukrainian counter-offensive here. They're the heaviest tanks in the Western arsenal, which people have been using that as an argument for not using them. It doesn't make any sense because these are attacks cross-country. I'm not looking for bridges here. But these are the heaviest tanks in the arsenal. These are the tanks that are designed to deal precisely with Russian, you know, Soviet tanks and to survive direct hits from them and to conduct these penetrations. We haven't given the Ukrainians any of those for use in this counteroffensive. That makes no sense.

We have a lot of M1s. We have a lot of ammunition for M1s. It can't be used for anything else. And most of the M1s that we have are being reserved in case of war with Russia breaks out. So what are we doing? Why are we holding back? There are lots of things that we could be giving the Ukrainians. And I think just focusing

in on these, it's important not to let people who want to, who are sort of arguing that we can't do anymore, just to focus in on the number of particular systems and say, well, there's no more of this, there's nothing else we can do. It's not true. There are a lot of things that we can be doing. Some of them have no impact on anything except the future readiness of NATO to fight Russia. And we have not been rushing Ukraine, some categories of that equipment, which would have made a big difference and would make a big difference. And for which there's really no geostrategic costs that we would be paying here. There's a financial cost. There's no geostrategic costs that we'd be paying here. There's a financial cost. There's no geostrategic cost that we'd be paying for that. And so I think this is kind of a cherry picking of these things to say, well, we can't, you know, we don't have enough of this.

We don't have enough. Okay, fine. I understand that. But we have a lot of things in our arsenal. And we've selected some things to prioritize. But there are other things we could be doing. And we need to be doing everything we can right now. There's a – the way the press covers the counteroffensive, the Ukrainian counteroffensive, it's like it's either going well or it's not going well.

And by the way, the press coverage has been pretty downbeat recently. And I take your point that there is progress being made. It's just – it's sort of bit by bit and i do think there's a fundamental misunderstanding if you will based listening to you at least about the nature of this war this is not a war i think what you're saying that's going to have a clear like key battle that's going to end end the whole thing and bring it to a rapid conclusion at some point that this is a war of attrition and both sides are trying to wear each other down. At some point, one side is going to be more exhausted than the other, and it's just going to slowly wind down rather than decisively end, or have some kind of political process that will quickly bring it to an end. Do you agree with that characterization?

I don't. I don't think this is a war of attrition. I think that we Americans have lost what limited understanding we ever had of what large mechanized maneuver warfare actually is. This is a problem that I and others in and around the US military have been fighting ever since 1991 gave us the wrong impression, that there's a way to fight a war, you know, mechanized ground war, so that in 100 hours, you do a single maneuver and you destroy the entire enemy army and you're done. And the problem is that that is an N of one in military history. And that is not the way mechanized warfare works, certainly not against relatively evenly matched forces that are relatively competent. So when you actually look back in history and when you actually look at how mechanized warfare usually works, you realize that

there are periods of rapid movement that alternate with periods of what looks like stagnation on the front line. And that's not attritional, that's forces regrouping, preparing, setting conditions, doing various things, and then there's a period when the war moves more rapidly. That's not attrition warfare, that's just a phase in a normal maneuver war. So we Americans have gotten ourselves very confused about what successful mechanized operations look like.

And of course, the fact that the Ukrainians managed to do what they did in Kharkiv last year has created in our minds the notion that it's reasonable to expect them to do that again here, except that the circumstances are completely different. And so no, there was never, and this is one of the things that I'm seeing, I'm very alarmed about as I'm reading these critiques that, you know, anonymous U.S. military personnel are leaking to the press about the Ukrainians don't know what they're doing and they should just focus everything on a single mechanized drive toward Medleysopol and anything else is a distraction. Honestly, Dan, that alarms me a little bit about how our guys would fight a war if we were actually had to fight a war like this, because that's not best practice in this kind of war. Best practice is what the Ukrainians had been doing, which is you conduct, you have a main effort, and we can argue about whether the Ukrainians resourced their main effort enough or whether they diverted.

I mean, that's a fine argument to have, but you have a main effort, but then you need a bunch of supporting efforts that have the effect of preventing the enemy from concentrating all of his forces on stopping all of your forces. And that's what the Ukrainians had been doing, but apparently people are unhappy about that. And so we're yelling at the Ukrainians to stop doing what is in fact best practice in mechanized operation, and then created this very unrealistic expectation that somehow if the Ukrainians had only done what we'd said, even though we haven't given them enough equipment really to do it, that they could have just blitzed through defenses the Russians have been building for six months, gotten to Melitopol, and then something

magic happens. And then something magic happens that And it's the, and then something magic happens. That's really distressing to me because there was never a circumstance in my mind that was plausible in which the Ukrainians get to Malita pole in the war or at the war ends, they're going to need to be subsequent operations. However successful this one is, they're going to be need to be subsequent operations. And I'm personally becoming a little bit alarmed at what I'm hearing in these critiques about how seriously we Americans and we in the West have actually internalized the reality that if we're going to help Ukraine retake the strategically vital territory that it needs, and that it is in our interest for Ukraine to retake, we're going to have to equip it for

subsequent large-scale operations that are going to occur over time. I'm afraid that that's not what we're telling ourselves and that's not what we're thinking about. And that is, of all of the criticisms that I'm hearing, the most alarming to me. Last question. The major fighting season ends when? Around October? Doesn't work that way okay um we have this whole fighting seasons construct that is basically drawn from afghanistan when there was a fighting season and then it was winter and the snowed and the passes and they couldn't move and so there wasn't much

fighting okay ukraine doesn't work that way there are two seasons in uk Ukraine when it is very optimal to fight. One is now in the summer, and then at some point in the fall, it'll start to rain heavily, and it'll get very muddy, and then it's harder to fight. And then at some point, it'll stop raining so hard, and then it will freeze. And when it freezes, that is another optimal season for fighting in this part of the world. So can we just put, I know it's hard to be precise, but you're basically saying sometime between the first period. Sometime in October, November. Sometime in October, November, it'll be,

you know, the weather will probably turn and it'll start to get, it'll slow down. Now, both the Ukrainians and the Russians fought through both. But then it picks back up to your point. Then it could pick back up a couple months after that. And then it picks back up, yeah. Then there's another winter season. But it's not like the war stops when it rains. That just slows everything down.

I know that. Yeah, yeah. But so I guess my question is, to the extent that there's like this interregnum between or a soft pause, maybe that's even too strong a term. It's just a slow. It'll be a slowdown in operations. A slowdown. OK.

So let's say there's a slowdown kind of October, November. At that point, is that an opportunity to kind of take stock on where we're at? Do we know more by then? Well, we should certainly know more by then. I mean, yes, I think it will be clear by then how much this counteroffensive operation will have succeeded and what will be required. But we shouldn't be imagining that we're going to take stock then, because if we take stock then, it's too late then to do anything for the winter fighting season. So we need to be- We need to be planning now as though there's going to be a winter fighting season.

Yes, of course, because it's almost impossible to imagine a good resolution of this war that does not involve fighting over this winter and into 2024. It would be irresponsible planning not to assume that we're going to need to do that. And the right way to plan is to get ready to present, to give the Ukrainians what they will need to sustain this fight over the long term. And as soon as the war ends or it becomes clear it's not necessary we stop okay but but so then what you're saying is we should be planning now for this war to be fought well into 2024 yep and resourcing ukraine to do that and the first quarter of 2024 brings us to the second anniversary right of this war. So that'll be a milestone. Two years of war. We'll be in the middle of a presidential election here. Ukraine probably will not look like, I'm not being

critical, I'm just trying to forecast what the debate will look like. Ukraine will probably not look like a success for the Biden administration at that point. Like I said, we'll be in the throes of a presidential election. We already, we're going to have a vote on additional Ukrainian aid early this fall. We're already seeing talk from some political corners about, you know, increased opposition to additional support for Ukraine. I guess my question is, as this drags on, and I know in the scheme of things, and certainly when you look at historical comparisons,

dragging on is also too strong a phrase because it's not that long for this kind of war. But be that as it may, with the kind of attention deficit culture we have today, two years does seem like long to a lot of people uh are you worried that people in the west political leaders and their constituencies are just going to kind of lose interest in this war of course i'm always worried about that um i think having this war protract is not a good thing. And I think, unfortunately... But it's going to.

Well, yes, it is. I mean, listen to you. Yeah, no, look. So, yes, the short answer is yes. Of course, I'm alarmed about that. And I think that it's important that we continue to explain to the American people. It would be great if the president would explain to the American people why it is important for the U.S. to continue to stand firm here. I would like, it would be great to see some leadership, more leadership on the Republican side

about explaining why this war is in America's interest and this is not the issue on which to take on Biden, except in the sense of pressing him to help Ukraine more. I'd like to see all of that. But I think it's very important that we recognize that our actions are contributing to the protraction of this conflict and not just treat that as something that just happens. by limiting the amount of stuff we give the Ukrainians and the kind of stuff and dribbling it in has in fact protracted the war. And in my judgment, the protraction of the war

rather than the provision of any particular equipment or amount of equipment is what increases the escalation threat over time. And it also increases all of the other risks that you're talking about. It also increases the cost of the war. For people who are reasonably concerned about how much this war is costing, the longer the war goes on, the more it will cost. is to lean into giving Ukraine what it needs to win as decisively as it can, as rapidly as possible, and bring this war to an end on terms acceptable to us and the Ukrainians as quickly as we can.

That is the right thing to do from a standpoint of fiscal policy, from a standpoint of geostrategy, and from a standpoint of morality and ethics. And that's what we should commit ourselves to doing. There's a powerful statement. I couldn't agree with you more. Fred, I will leave it there. You've been generous with your time, especially on such short notice. So hopefully we'll have you back on soon for a longer debrief. But just given this news, I wanted to hop on the call and do a quick powwow on where things stand and where your head is at. So thank you for doing this. Thanks so much, Dan.

That's our show for today. To keep up with Fred, you can track his work down at the Critical Threats Project. That's criticalthreads.org. And also the daily analysis and research I highly recommend at the Institute for the Study of War. That's understandingwar.org. One word, understandingwar.org. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.