Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Ukraine’s New Offensive Could Win the War Against Russia

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

We're in a new phase of the Ukraine-Russia war. Paul Poast of the University of Chicago returns to the podcast to break down Ukraine's extraordinary counteroffensive. He explains why this counterattack is reminiscent of D-Day, why President Vladimir Putin continues to struggle to achieve his objectives, and whether the end of the war could be within sight. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Paul Poast Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Matt Bellany, founding partner of Puck News, and I'm covering the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. With my new show, The Town, I'm going to take you inside Hollywood with exclusive insight on what people in show business are actually talking about. Multiple times a week, I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know, journalists, insiders, all of whom can break down the hottest topics in entertainment to tell you what's really going on. Listen now. Today, we return to Ukraine for the dawn. of a dramatic new phase in the war against Vladimir Putin's Russia. After months of bloody stalemate, a breakthrough for Ukraine. Over the last week, Ukraine has staged a lightning counteroffensive against Russia,

sweeping into the northeast of the country and liberating towns that Putin's military had controlled completely. Most importantly, Ukraine has captured the eastern city of Izzyam, a critical Russian stronghold, which now flies beneath Ukraine's yellow and blue flag. Global newspapers are announcing that this defeat for Russia is the most devastating blow to Putin since his retreat from Kiev. The Atlantic's Ann Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has appeared a couple times in this show,

wrote today that this masterstroke from Ukraine could be a fatal blow to Putin's illusion of strength. And just underneath that headline story, there is another story of technology and media that I found particularly compelling in this war. So earlier this year, the government of Russia embedded bloggers in the front line of their military to tell the story of how evil the Ukrainians were, which all these Russian soldiers were confronting.

But in the last few weeks, these bloggers, who were meant to be propagandists, started sounding an alarm. They started writing about these startling developments they were seeing on the front lines. Ukraine seemed to be building up a counteroffensive in the northeast, and Russians were not ready to stand.

of defense. Quote, hello, hello, anybody home? One of these bloggers asked, are we ready to fend off an attack in this direction? On August 30th, a Kremlin spokesperson told state journalists that the invasion of Ukraine was still going in accordance with the plans. But days later, Ukrainian forces smashed Russian defenses, and it was obvious the Kremlin had no idea what was happening on its front lines. Today, Russian citizens and government figures are reading those bloggers and these writers, again, embedded to be propagandists, are instead serving to chronicle the failure of Putin's military. Mark Bennett's, the Sunday Times foreign correspondent, wrote this weekend, quote, it is no exaggeration to say that the apparent scale of the collapse

of the Russian army poses potentially the biggest threat to Putin's rule since he came to power 22 years ago. Hardliners are furious, security chiefs unwilling to be made scapegoats. Next week could be very interesting. End quote. Today's guest is Professor Paul Post, a repeat guest of this podcast from the University of Chicago. He studies the history and strategy of war. And in this episode, we review the four phases of the Ukrainian-Russian War to date. We talk about why this Ukrainian counter-offensive is so important and so reminiscent of D-Day. And in keeping with Paul's specialty,

we lay out several ways the war could go from here. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Professor Paul Post, welcome back to the podcast. Great to be back. It's been a while since our last update. So I was wondering if you could help to reframe last week's developments in the broader story of this war.

How should we contextualize what just happened in the last week? Absolutely. And it makes sense that it's been a while since we've had an update because, to be honest, there hasn't been a lot over the past few months that's really changed. And so there wasn't really a lot to talk about. But obviously in the past, say, 72 hours, 96 hours, everybody has been talking about it. But to understand why, yes, I do think it's important to kind of recap, well, how do we get to this point? So remember that back in late February was when Russia launched this invasion, or excuse me, special military operation, as they're referring to it, into Ukraine.

And at that point, they were following what I've been referring to as a Crimea model. And what I mean by that is you go back to 2014 when Russia first took control the Crimean Peninsula. What they did was they sent in their troops rapidly, took control of the peninsula, took control of the peninsula, and basically did so without a shot being fired. And what you could tell was that in late February, when the invasion started, they tried to do that same thing, but at scale. They tried to take control of the entire country. They were using the roads.

And yes, there was fighting, but I think they believed that they could carry out kind of a lightning strike and be able to take control of the country, impose maybe regime change, that seemed to be an objective, take control of Kiev. That was what happened at first. And that was kind of phase one. But that soon bogged down, largely because I think the Russians were surprised by how fiercely incapable the Ukrainian forces were able to start fighting. Of course, this was very famously captured by the quote by President Zelensky of, I don't need a ride, I need ammo, right? The idea that they were going to try to get him into exile and he's like, no, I'm not leaving. And so that then set up the second phase of the war where you then had the Ukrainian forces

pushing back, starting to receive assistance from the West, largely NATO allies, and in particular the United States. That in turn led the Russians to shift their strategy. from this Crimea model to more of a Chechnya model. And what I mean by that is if you look at the years that Russia was carrying out military operations in its province of Chechnya, it was doing so in a very indiscriminate manner. It was targeting civilians. There wasn't a lot of strategy involved. It was very much based on punishment.

And you could see that that was what the Russian strategy was shifting towards, was that, okay, if we're not going to be able to take Kiev, if this is not going to be a lightning strike, then we're going to start punishing the Ukrainians. And then what that led to was as they were shifted to that, they also started to shift kind of the overall objective. It was clear they were no longer going to be able to take control of the entire country. So the Russian forces started to consolidate control in the eastern part in southern portions of the country,

which are contiguous with the Crimean Peninsula. And so that would make sense that this would be an area as well as the provinces, that are adjacent to Russia itself. And so that's where they started to consolidate their control. And what that has led to then is over the past several months, you have had the beginning of attritional warfare, meaning this is kind of the next phase of just the two sides, kind of slogging it out, the Ukrainians receiving weapons,

the Russians still using their weaponry, fighting in this manner, firing shots, maybe small attacks here and there, But there wasn't a lot of movement, and that was leading a lot of people observing it, myself included, to think that we were heading towards kind of a stalemate, long protracted conflict. I even was making comparisons that, depending on how things went, we could end up in a situation almost like the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. that was an eight-year war where basically after the first few months of fighting, it just became trench warfare and lasted for eight years like that, because neither side was backing away, neither side was being able to move.

Both sides were being supported by external powers, and that just led to massive deaths. You had over a million battlefield deaths in that war. And I was very much looking at that we could be heading in that direction. That now sets up what's happened over the past few weeks. And what's happened in the past few weeks is that the Ukrainian forces have been preparing to launch a counteroffensive. So rather than being content to just be in this kind of stasis, stalemate type situation, they've started preparing themselves to launch a counteroffensive.

And so they've been using a lot of this weaponry that's been provided by the West to just, for example, fire artillery shells and just start pounding the Russian positions. and pounding them and pounding them. They've also been amassing troops in the southern part of the country, as well as the northern part of the Russian-controlled part of the country. And so that is the cities basically the cities of Kersan, which is the city in the south, and then the city of Kharkiv, which is in the northern part of the Russian-controlled territory. And so that's where they start amassing forces. And then what they did was about 96 hours ago, they launched a counteroffensive where instead of actually attacking Keroson, which is where the Russians thought they were going to attack, they actually attacked in the northern part, Kharkiv, and made huge progress, stunning progress in terms of the amount of territory they were able to take.

They were able to acquire, the reports are somewhere in the neighborhood of over 3,000 square kilometers of territory. they've been able to retake in three days that Russia took them three months to be able to gain control of. And so that is the scale of what has happened, and that's where we are now, is watching this counteroffensive and seeing the Russian forces in that northern part of their controlled territory basically melt away. And this is now leading people to think, well, could this war be over sooner rather than later, and over in a way that's victorious for Ukraine. Thank you so much for that masterful synthesis. I want to talk about tactics.

I want to talk about strategy, and I want to talk about what could come next. But first, let's go a little bit deeper on this Ukrainian counterattack. As you said, Ukraine has reportedly recaptured more territory in three days than Russia captured in three months. John Spencer, the chair of the Urban Warfare Studies

at the War Institute, called this, quote, the greatest counteroffensive since World War II. said, Ukraine has regained, liberated over a thousand square kilometers of land and cities. I suppose that amount of land is now tripled. Ukraine is winning, he said. Ukraine is defeating Russia once thought to be the second most powerful military in the world. End quote.

Help me understand why is this counteroffensive and the recapture of Izzyam in particular so important. So the reason why this counteroffensive is so important is there's multiple reasons. So first of all, there's just the pure morale element to it, right? That this was something that by pulling this off, it is a way for the Ukrainians to be able to signal, not to the Russians that we mean business, but to the Western supporters that we mean business and that we can win. That's going to be extremely important because there's a lot of concern about waning interest in the West, especially as winter comes and you're going to have higher energy prices and then will they want to continue to have those sanctions and will they say, well, why are we doing this with Russia?

I mean, you know, they're just going to keep fighting and it's not going to end anytime soon. Why should we be going through this economic harm? Moreover, a lot of these governments have had to take certain political risks to be able to supply weapons to Ukraine. And so by carrying out this counteroffensive, regardless of where they carried it out. But by being able to carry out a successful counteroffensive, it is a way for them to signal that, look, we are capable of winning this. All we need is for you to keep supplying us. And if you do this, we can win. And so that is one of the main reasons why this counteroffensive is so important. Now, there's other reasons that even more practical of why this is important. So the area of Kharkiv, the northern part,

part of where Russia has control. That is an area that's kind of key for Russian supplies to be able to come through. And so that is very important. But this is actually why a lot of people thought that the offensive was going to be in Kersan, because that is in the southern part that's near the coast. That would be kind of a key port area. And so also from the standpoint of being import for supply, you would think that that would have been where they would have launched the attack. But they actually kind of deceive them by then launching it in the northern part. So there's also these kind of just practical reasons too. But for me, the most significant part of this is that, again, regardless of where they actually attacked is the fact that they've had this success and that

will give them momentum and that'll make it easier for, say, President Zelensky to be able to turn to the other leaders of NATO to say, just keep giving us the arms. We can win this. This is not going to be, if you will, good money after bad. One of the things that I love talking with you is your historical analogies, helping us to see what's happening right now by pointing to what's happened in the history of warfare. Tell me a little bit, first, tactically, what this reminds you of. So there's a couple famous counteroffensive that people will point to. Obviously, we just mentioned like World War II as some of these, and we'll come back to

that in a moment. Other folks have pointed to the Yon Kippur War, and in particular to Israel's response, the counterfeensive they launched. And that's a significant one because the Yon Kippur War, hence the reason why it's called the Yon Kippur War, is it was a surprise offensive, launched by Egypt and several other neighbors of Israel against Israel on Yon Kippur. Right? So they were totally caught off guard. Israeli forces then regrouped and then launched a massive counteroffensive and were able to quickly take territory. So that's why a lot of people were kind of pointing to that as being indicative of what we're just witnessing now Ukraine doing. But for me, the example I keep coming back to, the more and more that I'm learning about exactly what they did, I keep coming back to the Normandy invasion in 1944.

And the reason why is because there's a lot of parallels. Now, obviously, you know, the biggest not parallel here is, you know, there was an amphibious assault and that's not what's happening here. But there were a lot of similarities. First of all, one of the keys, and I already alluded to this a little bit, but one of the keys to this offensive working was deception. That they were using, they were attacking the southern portion of the Russian-controlled territory, and they were amassing troops there, making Russia think that's where they're going to launch the major offensive. And that actually led Russia to divert forces from the northern part to the southern part so that Kersan was heavily fortified. That meant there were now fewer forces in the north.

And then they came in and they launched the attack in the north. Now, they still had an attack going in the south. So it was actually a dual attack, but the main thrust was in the north. And this is very similar to what happened with the Normandy invasion, is that the key to the Normandy invasion was that everybody knew that the Americans, the British, and the Canadians were going to launch the second front, and they were going to go across the British Channel. The Germans knew this. Everybody knew it. The question was where? Where are they going to do this? And the Germans thought that it was going to be, the landing was going to be near Calais, because that's the shortest distance across the channel. And indeed, the British, Canadians, and American forces actually were amassing

troops there to make it look like they're preparing for it. I think at one point they even had, the British maybe had like a, someone who looked like General Montgomery, like actually hanging out there just to make it look like, you know, hey, we're going to, yes, there he is. They're preparing for this. And then, of course, they didn't do that. They launched it at Normandy. And so that's, first of all, the idea of deception. But the other part of it is that the way that Normandy was carried out, that's very different from, say, looking at what happened to Yon Kapoor, is, and I already talked about this, was that there were weeks and weeks of just pounding the Russian positions with artillery, artillery supplied by the West. And that's very similar to Normandy as well,

that it wasn't just a sudden invasion. They went for months just hitting the coast of France where all the German positions were trying to soften it up before they actually launched the attack. And so those reasons are, that's why the more I look at it, the more I see actually parallels with the Normandy invasion and how that was carried out. That's fascinating.

I had never thought of this being akin to Ukraine's D-Day, but hopefully by the end of this war, we'll be able to look back and say that it was as decisive toward the end of this conflict as D-Day was decisive in World War II. You also made this really interesting comment online where you contrasted this counter-offensive with the Russian response to the Nazi invasion in the 1940s, Operation Barbarossa. Tell me a little bit about that comparison as well.

Yeah, so in that particular instance, Operation Barbarossa was the largest land battle in history, largest offensive in history. So that was the offensive that the Nazi Germany launched June 22nd, 1941. Of course, they were allies with the Soviet Union. So this was a surprise attack. They launched the attack. Of course, how much of a surprise?

Apparently there were a lot of like Stalin's, you know, military officials trying to tell them, look, I think the Germans are going to do this, but he didn't necessarily listen to them. But regardless, you know, the Nazis come in and they're making big progress very quickly. eventually, you know, skip a lot of details here, but eventually the tide turns and the Russians, or excuse me, the Soviets are able to start pushing the Nazis back. Now, this takes time. This took even more time than what we're witnessing here. You know, it went into 1942. Really, the tide didn't turn until like 43 with this. But they were able, the tide was able to turn. not just because of bravery on the part of the Soviet fighters, though indeed they were, you know, they carried a huge burden in terms of trying to fight the Nazis.

But the biggest reason, one of the key factors was the armaments that they were receiving from the West and largely the United States, but also the British. And this was through the Len Lees program. So on the day that Operation Barbarossa started, the United States went ahead and made the Soviet Union part of Lenleese and said they were already starting to receive U.S. tanks, U.S. arms, weaponry, airplanes, so on and so forth. And this allowed them to have the weaponry they needed to be able to then carry out this counteroffensive against the Germans. And so in that sense, that's where I see the, what they call the great patriotic war, which is this war that's what's referred to in both Russia as well as in Ukraine and other countries that were part of the Soviet Union. But that's where I see the parallel is that they were able to launch this counteroffensive. They were able to push Nazi Germany back. But they did so because they had so much assistance from the United States, hence the whole.

the phrase, the arsenal of democracy, if you will. And so that's the parallel that I see with this offensive is that, and Ukrainian officials are more than willing to admit this. He said, look, this was possible because of the arms that were receiving from the West. And so that's where I see the parallel with what the Soviets did to the Nazis. And we've had episodes about that, too. Just the sheer amount of weaponry that the U.S. has supplied Ukraine, the ground to air missiles, the intelligence in terms of figuring out where the Russians might be relocating an enormous amount of investment and intelligence from the U.S. to Ukraine that has bolstered their incredible bravery in terms of this counteroffensive. I want to turn to Russia for a second,

contemporary Russia, not 1940 Soviet Union. I'm curious to know what you think this counteroffensive says about the state of Russian forces today. So this weekend, the New York Times reported that, quote, the Russian militaries collapsed that led to the loss of Isiam can largely be attributed to one simple fact. Russian forces left their flanks undefended, perhaps because of growing troop shortages, exhausted conscripts, and low morale.

End quote. Paul, why does Russia have a growing troop shortage? This is really a key problem for Russia. And they have this, they have this for a couple of reasons. First of all, there's the first and foremost, there is, and we're becoming more and more aware of the level of dysfunction within the Russian military. That it is not, it doesn't operate in the same efficient manner that we maybe are used to if we're thinking about how a lot of Western militaries run. Professionalism, so forth, there's a lot of corruption that's become evident. And so what that means is like, for example, under supply.

the Russian troops are like, well, wait, we're supposed to have medical supplies. Why don't we have medical supplies? I mean, these are things that are there. And it's like, well, the money's there, but it's not being brought in. So this is one issue. That's one part of why it's just really, I don't want to say it was a house of cards, but there was very much a perception that the Russian military was much stronger than what it actually is. And I think that that is kind of number one. But number two, and this is more, this is less of a structural factor, that's more of like a structural factor. The number two reason is more specific to this operation. And that is, well, that word operation. Remember, this is a special military operation. And because of that, and they've been very deliberate, by they, I should really mean Putin, it's been very deliberate in calling it that. Doesn't want to call it a war because he doesn't want to, and he doesn't want to have to run the

risk of calling up conscripts, mass mobilization for the war. He's been trying to carry out this operation, if you will, on the cheap, using the existing Russian forces rather than, say, declaring it a war to where you would mobilize, and then he could even conscript because he knows that doing that is probably going to lead to more unrest than what he's currently witnessing. And so that's a big, that is specific to this instance about why they're having this problem is they're not calling up people who could be called up because they don't want to call to war. Instead, they've been like relying on mercenaries. They've been trying to bring in people from other regions. It's just, but they're not doing the mass.

Let me pause you there. Let me pause you there, because I have a question. I remember when we first spoke back in the winter. And it seemed to me that the reason why Putin might be interested in a budget war was because he thought this was going to be easy. To your point, he was using the Crimean model of warfare, not the Chechnyan model of warfare. The we just roll the tanks down the streets model of warfare. But now it is six, seven months later. It's obvious that this isn't Crimea.

It's obvious this is going to be something more like Chechnya. why do you think Putin hasn't updated his own model and tried to conscript a little bit more, try to fight with more soldiers? Is there a shortage that I'm not seeing? What else might explain just the sheer lack of troops and equipment that we're seeing in the Northeast right now? First of all, it is still possible that Putin could call up. He could go ahead and declare this award. If you go back to May during Victory Day, people thought that that was maybe going to be something he was going to

do then, and then he ended up not doing it. And I think part of the reason why he didn't do it was because of things we were talking about earlier in this episode, about how the war had kind of just bogged down into the stasis, and it's like, well, we can sustain this, right? You know, there's no need for a mass mobilization.

We can sustain this with, you know, kind of the budget model of just, you know, bring in arms. Maybe we'll be able to get some assistance from China to be able to go with this. So I think up until a week ago, there was very much a perception that, you know what, if this is just a long-term drawn-out stasis, that's okay. We can sustain that. And we can sustain that relatively cheaply. What we've witnessed over the past week is significant because this could be an event

that leads Putin to start to update, to say, okay, no, if they're going to push, And to him, it's so important to be able to accomplish something with this. I think that's become very evident. He wants, it would be a disaster to him, not just politically, but I also think personally, if they lose everything, if they lose control of all that they have in Ukraine and even potentially the Crimean Peninsula, right? Because that's now become an objective for Ukraine is to actually recapture the Crimean Peninsula that they lost in 2014. So I think that seeing what happened here, if that were to continue, you could then see an update to where he says, nope, we've got to mobilize now. I'm calling up the troops and we're sending them in.

The other thing, though, is, and we've talked about this a little bit before on the podcast, is you've got to keep in mind that the Russian model has always been kind of just throw stuff at it, right? That's always been, you know, they are not. I mean, if you look at it historically, going back, even talking about the counteroffensive against the Nazis, it wasn't necessarily that it was carried out in a great strategic fashion. I mean, there was. There was definitely elements of it. There were strategically sound, but it was mostly just material, just throwing material at the problem. And that was what was accomplished. And it didn't matter if things broke down. It didn't matter who got killed. This is just the nature of Russian war fighting. And that was very, very, very important.

much what you saw even during the Soviet time was this approach. And we see that in other instances in which Russia has been carrying out military operations over the past few decades. So I think part of it is there's always been this perception that, you know, we don't have to have the most efficient distribution lines. We don't have to have the most efficient supply lines. We can always just kind of throw the resources at them. But again, the key is here. They've been reluctant. to call in all the resources because of the concern that of the potential domestic unrest that would result from doing that. You mentioned that the Russian war model has always been throw stuff at it.

It also seems important that due to Russian sanctions, they have less stuff. They have less access to German manufacturing. They're missing that part that is necessary to build a new plane. They're missing global material that they might otherwise rely on to wage a year-long war to conquer a determined foe. And so there's the sort of global economic story to add here in addition to all the domestic concerns that you're mentioning. Jump right in.

Yeah, absolutely. The one thing I would say is in that regard is that's going to come to start biting soon, right? That it's like when it comes to the economics of warfare, first of all, it takes a long time for you to mobilize to be able to have, say, convert, or, you know, the phrase that's use, turn your plow shares into swords, right? That takes time. So usually when you first carry out a war, you're operating with what you already have. You know, the famous phrase that Rumsfeld used regarding the Iraq war, you fight with the army you have, not the army you want, right? And that's what Russia did, was it's like, well, this is what we have, we can carry this out. And it goes back to

what we're just talking about. They thought they could do it quickly. Where these sanctions will start to matter is if this goes on many more months, because then that's where you could have started to say, well, now we need to start producing more weapons. We need to start producing more missiles. We can't produce more missiles, right? All our stockpiles are exhausted. And that exhaustion is that's going to start to bite pretty soon, right? Now, of course, at the same time, the Russians think that it's also going to bite for the other side, right? Because if they're cutting themselves off from energy coming from Russia, Russian gas, and the winter's coming, will the Western countries want to continue the sanctions? So there's kind of this like, you know, standoff of who's going to flinch first.

But that's the key thing that I think to emphasize with the sanctions is they've absolutely been having a bite on the Russian economy. But the, there is a lag from when that bite happens to where it translates into actual deterioration of military capability. The story behind the story right now, which is a tech and media story, and that's why I'm very interested in it, is that the Russian hawks on the front lines right now seem very outraged. These bloggers reporting from the front lines of the war are slamming the war effort across the board. They're pointing out the fact that these Russian soldiers don't have enough night vision goggles or flack jackets or first aid kits or drones. And I think this is so interesting that these bloggers that Russia purposely embedded with the military to advance the idea that Ukrainians are Nazis, are now reporting on facts on the ground,

and these facts are horrifically embarrassing to a Kremlin that has consistently tried to minimize setbacks by saying, whatever happened yesterday as a part of the plan, whatever happened last week is exactly what we intended to happen. There are some Western commentators, I named a few in our open, who are saying that the time has come for us to imagine

the idea that Ukrainian victory in the northeast and maybe also in the south could bring about the end of the Putin regime, that this is a domino set that could begin to click into itself where Ukrainians, Ukraine's successful D-Day, their successful counter-offensive,

could lead, I guess, metaphorically to the Hitler in the bunker moment. To what extent do you think this is a reasonable thing to look out for? The idea that Ukrainian victory right now could spell a significant downturn in Putin's, prospects in Russia. So there's two ways to look at this. One way that's in favor of this argument

that if this war goes south for Russia, it will lead to the downfall of Putin. And then there's a way to look at it say it won't. So the precedent for it to say that it could is another historical example that I've brought up, which is the 1904, 1905 Russo-Japanese War. Now, I won't go into the details of it, But basically what happened was, hence the name of it, it was a war between Imperial Russia and Japan. The perception was that Japan was inferior to Russia. This is going to be something Russia can win, and they didn't. They lost. And they lost at great cost of military.

And that's why some people have been pointing to that war saying, this seems kind of similar to what we're seeing now. And then that led in turn to a series of protests and uprisings in Russia in 1905, which, which is, you know, a lot of folks will talk about, you know, people always talk about the 1917 Russian Revolution, but there was first the 1905 Russian Revolution, and that was due to how poorly the Russo-Japanese War went for Russia. Now, the response wasn't that Tsar Nicholas II got deposed. That, of course, wouldn't happen until 1917. Instead, what he did was he implemented a whole series of reforms to try to, you know, tamp this down. Of course, they also use repressive measures and so forth, but it was, it was disruptive. That is both something that you could look to

to say, okay, well, could you see something similar, but he, but Putin doesn't survive. But I think number one is important to remember that Nicholas did survive. Number two is the conditions are very different. And it's for the reasons we've talked about before is that a lot of the key supporters of Putin. And a lot of times when you see leaders, autocratic leaders deposed, we often think about the protests in the streets and so forth and that's pretty. It's almost always done by the inner circle. It's almost always done by the inner circle. But Putin's inner circle is very tight to him. They're very reliance on him for their wealth, you know, these oligarchs, as people refer to him as. So that gives him a bit of a buffer when it comes to

carrying out whatever it is he wants to carry out, even if it's a bad idea. First of all, people may not tell him it's a bad idea. Probably they should have told him this was a bad idea, invading Ukraine. But secondly, it gives him some leeway that if it does turn out to be a bad idea, he's not as susceptible, he's not as vulnerable to being deposed. So I think that that's kind of the counter argument to this, is that, yes, there is some precedent for unrest due to wars going badly. but I think Putin is still relatively safe, even though it is the case that we're hearing people.

I think there was some signatures by certain political figures in Russia calling for him to resign and so forth. But I think by and large, he's not going to be going down due to this. Obviously, I want to know what comes next. Everyone listening wants to know what comes next. Is this D-Day or is it just another chapter in an endless saga that really ends up being more like, Like, as you said, the war between Iraq and Iran, which is just an eight-year war of bloody attrition, one thing that you're so good at is pointing out that it doesn't make so much sense to predict the future singular as to predict futures, plural. And rather than make a prediction here, I'd love you to draw out a few scenarios that you consider plausible.

What are some plausible paths forward from here? So I think there's several paths forward. And I think a good way to think about these paths is to also kind of, if you will, put some caveats into the enthusiasm, kind of tamped down the enthusiasm that people have had because of this offensive. People have looked at this and they've said, oh my goodness, Ukraine's going to win. This is like, wow, this is amazing. But folks are already starting to realize that, well, we got it. There's a need for some cautious optimism here. And I think that these point to kind of scenarios of how things could go. So first of all, Zelensky himself said on Saturday that the next 90 days, 9-0, are going to be critical. Not the next nine days. The next 90 days, next three months. That's a while. But the reason why is because even under the best case scenario, for Ukraine, which is that they can continue to just push basically this kind of blitzkrieg-type operation. Russia still has control of a lot of Ukrainian territory. You know, if you look at a map,

and there's all sorts of maps, one can find of how the operations look, but if you look at a map of Ukraine currently, and if it shows the control that Russia has, and it shows what this counterattack is taken care of, it's only reclaimed. like the top northern portion of all the territory that Russia has. So Russia still controls a lot of territory. And even if the Russian military continues to falter and the Ukrainian military continues to push, it would still take, hence Zelensky, it still take at least three months for this to play out. And that would be under the best case scenario, which I think is unlikely. So I don't think this war is going to be over in three months. But I think that that's kind of the idea of the best case

scenario. There's also, though, the other kind of, if you will, caveat that needs to be in here regarding all our enthusiasm for what we sold with this counteroffensive. The other one is that there's a lot of concern that this could turn out to be a catastrophic success for Ukraine. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of concern about overextension. There were some reports that some of the Ukrainian generals were like, we're losing track of where our forces are. They're moving so fast, right? And that's a situation where my understanding is that they were receiving a lot of advising, a lot of training, and planning help from American forces, from American personnel.

And they were warning them about going too fast, that if you go too fast, you could end up putting yourself in a situation where your supply lines get cut off. And even if you're a superior force, if you're surrounded and your supply lines are cut off, you're going to have to surrender. And so there's real concern that even if they were to continue to push, that they could leave themselves kind of vulnerable and have, again, kind of this idea of a catastrophic success. It is going so fast, so easily that you end up putting yourself in a situation where you get caught. You know, very similar to, you know, a boxer who's dominating a match and then suddenly just lost track of things and gets hit in the jaw and gets knocked out. That's it. It's very similar. So that could lead to a scenario,

where it still favors Russia. It still very much favors Russia. A third scenario is, and this one I think is the least likely, but it is a concern, is that Ukraine continues to push. They don't get caught. They don't overextend. They're not having a catastrophic success. They're being deliberate.

And Putin, because of reasons I talked about earlier, where he really feels strongly about this. He becomes desperate. And we've talked about this before on the podcast, this notion of gambling for resurrection, right? Could he turn to using tactical nukes as a way to try to stop the Ukrainian offensive? And this is something that is not an unprecedented idea. Back during the Korean War, when U.S. forces were being pushed back by Chinese forces invading from the north, General McArthur thought about

should we use nukes to try to stop that offensive? And the concern is now, of course, that was vetoed, that was not done, but it was something considered. There's concern that there's not going to be that same kind of break on someone like Putin, that if he wants to authorize something like that, that it could be done. And that's a scenario that's very scary. Now, of course, you would ask stuff, what would that even achieve?

Well, it could achieve a lot. It could lead to the Ukrainian forces to stop, right? I said, fine, we're going to stop. We're not going to keep advancing. So that's a third scenario. The final scenario, though, is, and all honesty, I think is one of the more realistic scenarios is that this offensive was amazing. It shows that Russia can't win, but that doesn't mean Russia will lose, if you will,

that we could end up still in kind of a stalemate. situation, right? And some of that could be contingent on, as we were just talking about, if Putin updates and he decides, you know what, I do need to call up, we are going to declare war, we're going to have conscripts now. That could lead to kind of this like continued stalemate, a continuation of what we saw in summer, and that would lead to, if not Iran-Iraq war level. It could lead to a drawn-out attritional type war. So those are kind of the scenarios where I see that this could go, Yes, it is possible that Ukraine could end this thing in the next three months, but it's also possible that we go back to kind of this stalemate war of attrition

that we've been witnessing the past three months. Right. Just to summarize, for my own benefit, number one is we're three months from the end of the war and Ukraine outright winning. Number two is this is a false dawn. Ukraine will have over-extended itself and achieved victory so quickly that they cut themselves off in their own supply lines and Russian. immediately retakes a lot of the land that Ukraine is now occupying or reoccupying. Number three, gambling for resurrection, the possible deployment of nukes, which, as you say, is, or tactical

nuclear weapons, which, as you say, is in the land of possibility, but not necessarily probable or remotely or closer probable. And then finally, that this is simply an incremental development in a broader war of attrition. Is that a fair way to sort of summarize the scenarios? Absolutely. One more, one more factor I would just want to insert, into this analysis is the fact of material. I'm thinking back to your analogy to Operation Barbarossa and the fact that Russians pushed the Nazis, excuse me, the Soviet army pushed the Nazis out

of the Soviet Union in part because they had all this help from the West. Right now, that help from the West is funneling toward Ukraine, not Russia. This winter, however, things could change. This winter could go very wrong for Europe. The Nord Stream pipeline shutting down could create or contribute to a multi-trillion dollar energy shock

to the European continent. There's a possibility of outright recession across Europe, which could change the calculus for supporting Ukraine. There's potential for Republicans to sweep in November and insist that the Biden administration cut off aid to Ukraine and try to, you know, clamp down on the purse. So maybe just finally before we go, talk about this, this key factor of material, because without the help of all of these countries, the incredible bravery of Ukraine is not going to have. the armaments that it needs to secure its endeavors. I really like this question because it gets into something that I've been thinking about quite a bit over the past few days, which is that up until a few days ago, this was a bilateral war between Ukraine and Russia where the West was assisting Ukraine, assisting them substantially, but assisting them. The way in which Ukraine carried out this counteroffensive, it's like at this point, this is truly now a proxy war between

the West and Russia. That it's like Ukraine was able, they are fighting, I mean, this is not to take away at all from what the Ukrainians are doing and their forces are doing. But again, they would even say, this is possible because of the weapons we have. And you know, and U.S. military

planners were assisting in the planning of these operations. Now, the final call was by the Ukrainians, but they're assisting the planning, providing the intelligence. They're doing everything but actually the fighting. That's what the Ukrainians are doing. And so what that means is that the stakes for what you're talking about are even higher now. Because now this is truly a war between the West and Russia. And if the West suddenly backs out because of the scenarios you're talking about,

that really puts Ukraine in a tough position because they're carrying this burden right now largely for themselves, but also they are, and this is something that political figures, Justin Trudeau talked about this, you know, that Ukraine is representing, you know, our values and so forth, but Ukraine is fighting on behalf of the West against Russia. And if those things start to happen that you just lay it out, that's going to put Ukraine in a very dire situation, which I think, and I've thought this from the beginning, that I think Putin is aware of. That's why I don't think the sanctions have concerned him as much, at least not yet, because I still think that he thinks the sanctions won't last because of the economic harm leading to political change, the hardships during the winter that could lead to political change within these countries. I think Putin thinks he has time on his side when it comes to the economics. I think we're going to learn a lot in the next few months about what. what price the West puts its values,

because those values of liberalism are going to get more and more expensive in the coming months. Professor Paul Post, thank you so, so much. Absolutely. It was my pleasure. I'm Derek Thompson. That was Plain English.

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