School of War - Ep 202: Fred Kagan on Ukraine’s Attack and the Future of War

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

Fred Kagan, senior fellow and the director of the Critical Threats Project at AEI, joins the show to discuss Ukraine’s drone operation targeting Russia’s strategic air assets.  ▪️ Times      •      01:46 Introduction     •      02:25 What just happened?        •      07:48 Escalation risk      •      10:20 Control     •      12:39 Implications           •      21:10 Stratagems     •      24:04 Effects           •      30:40 Economic pressure        •      37:20 Continuing operations  Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

The images out of Russia this weekend were spectacular. From the Arctic Circle in Mermansk to the far reaches of the Eurasian steppe along the Mongolian border, fiery explosions and clouds of black smoke, spewing from Russian nuclear bombers, attacked by swarms of Ukrainian FPV drones. What does it mean? What's going to happen next? We welcome back to the show Fred Kagan to discuss. Let's get into it.

It is a prescription for war just the Iraqi and things. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in the ground. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. and feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Fred Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute and the Critical Threats Project. The Critical Threats Project also partners with an organization called the Institute for the Study of War, which has been putting out daily reports on the war in Ukraine's kicked off, and which are, frankly, essential reading for anyone who wants to understand.

what's going on with this conflict. And for those you were following it in the press, you should know that a lot of what you're reading in the press originates as a CTP ISW product. And we have the man himself here with us again today. Fred, thank you so much for joining. Thanks, Aaron. It's great to be with you. So the occasion, obviously, is this, I'll just say spectacular raid by the Ukrainians targeting Russian strategic air assets over the weekend. There's a lot else that's going on. And even if we assess that this attack is important. We would still need to put it in the broader context of other operational lengths in the strategic context. There's negotiations going on in Turkey, I think as we speak, etc. But let's do the opposite of what I was taught to do in officer training,

which was to go big to small. Let's actually go small to big. What happened on Sunday? What just happened? Well, the Ukrainians pulled off an incredibly impressive operation. using small first-person view drones that they had smuggled in somehow to Russia in containers and gotten the container trucks near to Russian Stratagia bomber and other aircraft bases in the Russian far east near the Mongolian border in Mortemansk all the way up in the Arctic Circle and then a couple closer to home. They had set these things up so that this The containers automatic were opened on signal. Drones took off were flown to the bases where the bombers were at.

Struck the bombers. Maintained surveillance to observe the battle damage, which the Ukrainian officials were apparently able to see. We have some of the footage, and they clearly destroyed a number of extremely expensive and at the moment irreplaceable Russian strategic assets. And they're saying, I mean, the number that I've seen reported, which seems to come from them. And that's how you, in the CTPSW reporting, how you characterize it. Something in the vicinity of 40 aircraft, correct me if I'm wrong here, but that would be something like a third of Russia's strategic error capability. And what we mean by strategic, to be clear, is nuclear, nuclear capable.

These are also the bombers that are deterrence, you know, against NATO, the United States, etc. but it also, to be clear, been used to hit Ukraine directly, right? Yeah, so there's a couple of things to unpack here, Aaron. One is, yes, we only have the Ukrainian reporting about exactly how many they hit. We have open source analysts have been able to confirm a small percentage of what the Ukrainians claim. For my part, I don't really doubt the Ukrainian number because the Ukrainians are likely reporting on what they saw. And they, you know, we see, we see what the reconnaissance drone footage was.

So all this tells me is that they haven't released all the footage that they actually have. Satellite, or cloud cover has been dense in Russia over the last 24 hours. So it's been hard to get good, clear satellite imagery. Some people have used more advanced satellite imagery to do some accounts. We'll see over time what exactly. what can be confirmed independently, but I'm not prepared right now to cast out on the Ukrainian number. I do think that we need to be careful talking about the effect of this on the Russian nuclear triad. People are making a lot of that. And I understand it, yes, these are nuclear

capable bombers. Now, to be perfectly clear, there are very few bombers in the sky these days in the hands of nuclear powers that are not nuclear capable. And most of the planes that we're talking about here are TU95 bear turboprops. I'm not really sure who has been thinking that the Russians were going to fly bears over North America in the teeth of U.S. air defenses and so on, and somehow get them through to penetrate. Maybe, maybe, maybe they thought they were going to do that. But the primary Russian nuclear deterrent is the Russian ballistic submarine fleet. And of course, the ICBMs, and this just didn't touch that at all. So in terms of the nuclear balance issue, I think this, you can easily, one can easily exaggerate the effect of that. The key thing is

your point. The Russians have been using elements of their strategic triad to conduct attacks against Ukraine, and the Ukrainians have struck back on that. That's, that's the risk that you take when you use those kinds of assets and more. Well, we've discussed this issue on the show before, especially in the early days of the war when there was much concern about nuclear escalation from Putin. I mean, formally speaking, that concern can never really go away. And we could discuss, you know, where the line are that would make us uncomfortable. I also, you know, was struck by the vehemence of some voices in the aftermath of the attacks of accusing the Ukrainians of engaging in destabilizing actions that are counterproductive, which, you know, I don't know

you would agree with this, Fred, but it sort of occurred to me that, you know, if the Ukrainians had struck a bunch of Russian ICBM silos, I could, I could find that argument more plausible. Granted, the Russians do launch ballistic missiles at the Ukrainians from time to time, but what if they, you know, going after weapons that were clearly there to provide a strategic deterrent against, you know, us and that were not being used against the Ukrainians, you know, could I, could I make it open for it? I could. Could I also make the case that it would be destabilizing in dangers? I definitely could. But to argue that they shouldn't attack the very assets that were launching cruise missiles at them because that's escalatory, well, that to me seems to be identical to the argument that self-defense is escalatory. And if we think that self-defense is escalator in our actual position is they should surrender.

No, listen, Aaron, I agree with you. I mean, I've spoke with Ukrainians early on in the war about this escalation, And their point was, look, we accepted the risk that the Russians would use nuclear weapons against us the minute we started fighting against them. That's what happens if you choose to defend yourself against nuclear armed power. You're running a risk of a nuclear attack on your territory. They know that. But I think you're right. It's really important to understand that this is not the part of the Russian nuclear triad that is the key Russian deterrent.

that is and remains the Russian nuclear ballistic missile submarines. Ukrainians have not shot at those, and they're not going to. And the Russians are not using those to attack Ukraine, nor are the Russians using their ICBNs to attack Ukraine. They are using nuclear-capable ballistic missiles that are truck-launched, you know, Descandars and so on, and the Ukrainians are shooting at those. And look, if you are a nuclear power and you engage in a war and you use assets that are dual-use assets, those assets become fair game.

We flew B-52s, which were a big part of our nuclear triad over Vietnam. The Vietnamese tried hard to shoot them down. Would it have been escalatory if they had? No. That's, again, when you use particular assets in war, if nothing else, those assets become fair game. And to say that they're escalatory, well, if you were going to view it that way, then you shouldn't have put them, you should have been using them to begin with. So a couple questions on the mechanics attack itself, and you may not, the information here may just not be public. But I am curious about the question of control of these drones.

You know, when you watch the videos that have been released, it looks just like the videos that you get from the front lines in Ukraine itself, which is to say these FPV drones and they sort of look like somebody's flying them. It's not clear that that's the case, though. It's not clear. I saw some reports that there was some degree of quote unquote AI involved. I have no idea what that means. What is your sense of, okay, so they position these trucks pretty close to the air bases. The trucks, you know, presto open at the top, like a Tom Clancy novel, the drones fly out.

And it's literally like a Tom Clancy. Isn't this in Reds? It is. It is. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. The drones fly out or distance to go. Do you think, what do you, how do you think control worked at that point?

I mean, look, I don't, I don't know. What is clear? look, what is clear is that the Ukrainians were getting video back from these drones. And what that means is that they were in communication with the drones. If they were in communication with the drones, then they could have been controlling them remote. Okay. So the question is, how were they in communication with the drones? We don't know.

I'm sure. I doubt the Ukrainians are going to say, my hunch is that the Ukrainians were probably, We had put, fitted some of these drones with Russian SIM cards and reusing Russian mobile systems. Both sides have been doing that in this war. And in fact, the Russians had been testing the capability to turn off their mobile networks. We, the ISW reported some time ago, in part, rethink to be able to stop the Ukrainians from trying to use their mobile networks. That's one, you know, low technology, no difficult explanation required way that this, could have gone down. The Russians were expecting this. They didn't know that this was in place,

so they obviously had turned off their own communication systems. That's one way. Other people are talking about it had to be satellites. Well, I mean, it didn't have to be satellites. It could have been. But, you know, we don't know. But what we do know is that the drones were providing feed. And if they were providing feed, then they could have been remotely controlled. There's sort of two obvious places we can go from here in the conversation. I want to do both. Both one is, what does this mean for the war in Ukraine? I mean, what is, what does it actually matter? And then the other one is, what does it mean for war?

And maybe let's, let's start with that, actually. So as we just reflected on, the notion that something like this could happen is decades old. Tom Clancy was writing about it in, I guess that was the 80s. Is that Red Storm Rising? Yeah. Thereabouts. And, you know, there are smart analysts who we both know, who have been painting sort of terrifying pictures, at least to me, of, you know, what could happen in places like Norfolk Naval Base on the opening stages of a war with China.

We're containerized, you know, last drone assault suddenly launched like this. And now it actually happened. It was actually done. Say more about that. Say what you've learned about this in terms of the continuities and the evolutionary war. It's illustrating or for that matter, anything new that you see. Look, Aaron, I've had this. I've had the same thought that I think you refer to, which is we just watched a bunch of

Russian strategic bombers go up in flames at the hands of a bunch of very inexpensive FPV drones flying out of containers. Could those have been B-2s at the hands of Iranian drones flying out of containers, let alone Chinese? Well, question, are the B-2s in actual revetments, or are they sitting out in the open? If they're sitting out in the open, what are the counter-drone systems that we've got in place? I have a feeling I'm not going to like the answer to those questions. So I do think that one of the one of the things this should prompt is an urgent reevaluation of the threat, the kind of threat that these systems can pose to our very expensive bombers, some of which are actually for us at least critical elements of our

nuclear triad and things on which we would absolutely rely in a war with China or with Russia, for that matter. I think we should be alarmed. I think we should have been. being alarmed for a long time. But I think this is as a clear wake-up call as we're going to get. And it should prompt a lot of action. Some of that action is going to be hard to take quickly. You know, constructing stuff is not easy or fast. Some of it should be things that we undertake pretty rapidly to, you know, set up at least electronic warfare and such counter drone defenses as we can in the vicinity of strategic basis. Look, the good news is that a lot of these systems are not all that expensive, but buying enough of them to cover your, you know, your strategic footprint in the

United States and abroad is going to cost a lot of money and take a bunch of time and concentration. I hope this is something that Department of Defense will focus on urgently after this. And there's, you know, a couple ways to think about countermeasures here. One is hardening the targets, as you were just talking about. The other is, you know, the obvious desperate need around the world for some sort of cost. effective defense system that can target drones in a, you know, in a cost effective way. You know, the microwave systems are the ones that we even discussed here on the show. I'm not expert enough to say how cost effective they are or how realistic it is. There are some people who are

who are selling them, who believe passionately that they are. I don't know how closely you followed that or what your thoughts are on this question of countermeasures to cheat drones. Nobody's investing enough in this with enough urgency is my basic. thought on it. That includes the Ukrainians, actually. We've been going through a period where people who were really imagining that electronic warfare was going to be the solution. And what we're seeing is that that's just, that's not the case. First of all, there are things like fiber optic drones that are basically immune to electronic warfare. And second of all, even actually just trying to jam all of the frequencies that tactical drones can operate is beyond what is

feasible to undertake on a modern battlefield. And we're seeing that now because both the Russians, Ukrainians are still able to operate radio-controlled drones, even in the most densely covered electronic warfare environments. And there's just been a lot of innovations with frequency hopping, with accessing frequencies that are difficult to jam and various other technological innovations. So electronic warfare is not going to be the solution here. In terms of the directed energy systems of whatever variety or microwave systems. Yes, I think that that's going to be part of the solution, particularly for point defense of strategic targets far to the rear.

We need, though, what I'm called using too much jargon, kinetic counter drone defenses. Basically, you need defenses that can inexpensively shoot drones out of the sky because, and you need them to be small and portable. what we're learning from the battlefield in Ukraine is that, you know, people present these microwave systems or other sorts of systems and talk about how, you know, mobile they are and they're the size of a small truck. The problem, and that's very mobile by traditional military standards. The problem is that on the battlefield in Ukraine with the millions of tactical drones that are operating, anything that's the size of a truck that's a valuable target gets killed. And you can overwhelm any defensive system. And we know that because the Ukrainians have

killed very high-end Russian electronic warfare systems. They've killed very high-end Russian air defense systems that are supposed to go shoot them down. I'm skeptical about the survivability of systems like that on the battlefield. And you also run into questions about power supply and where you're going to get enough electricity for them on the battlefield because then your generators and you fuel supply and other things become major targets for drones. It's just, it's very complicated. So I don't think that those are a magic bullet, but I think they're part of the solution. What we need are the not magic bullets. And I was reading an article today. I've forgotten where about a startup that is working on the AI directed Gatling gun that can shoot down

tactical drones. We're going to need systems like that, and we're going to need those systems that can be vehicle mounted. Candidly, we're going to need systems that can be carried by soldiers to keep squads alive in the face of these drums, this is going to be essential because otherwise you're not going to be able to survive and maneuver on the battlefield. So I encourage everybody who's working on counterdron of whatever variety to keep doing that,

but I would like to see more investment and more concerted investment in kinetic counter drone systems and particularly very portable ones. You know, the thing that struck me, I think most of all about this attack, Fred was the role of surprise, which seems like obvious observation than it is, but it's worth sort of saying out loud, and I'm curious your reflections on that. I mean, so there's this

desperate need for countermeasures at some point, hopefully soon enough to keep our feet out of the fire, America's feet out of the fire. It will happen. And then that will just reset the table. And, you know, this will continue to evolve, this thing being war will continue to evolve in iterative fashion is I do not need to explain to Fred Kagan. You know, I've heard people say in the last few years that the nature of the battlefield is such the battlefield, paradigmatically speaking, in 2024, 2025 is such that, you know, motion is so easily detected. The maneuver is just very hard.

It favors the defense. You know, you can eke some movement out through grinding attritional means, but the days of maneuver are essentially over for now. And like on some level, that certainly there seems to be a lot to be said for that. It's not exactly false. And yet, there are these moments. You know, we had a couple of them in the Middle East. Tamas's attack itself on October the 7th.

The Israeli campaign against Hezbollah, the sort of spectacular centerpiece of which was the beeper attacks. These moments where, you know, fighting forces, good guys or bad guys, sort of as an issue to decide, use very very. very old-fashioned, I'll call them strategums, you know, techniques of deception. They leverage their intelligence picture of the other side, and they find ways to achieve major effects. In Hamas's case, ultimately, you know, knock on wood, suicidal effects, TBD, certainly damaging effects to the Iranian axis, but operationally enormously successful in the short run. In the Israeli case, in the north, I mean, they defeated Hezbollah.

I mean, it was really striking contributed to the Paul Assad. In the Ukrainian case, we'll see now, we'll see what the effect of, this is a smaller scale thing, I think, but we'll see what the effect of this strike ultimately was. But I'm just, you know, that is, that is, I keep trying to tell many of my friends who are, you know, sort of believe that we are back in World War I with drones, which we kind of are, that doesn't actually mean that breakthroughs aren't possible. And actually, the things that you need for these breakthroughs are as old as warfare. itself. And the way you're going to do them is going to keep changing. But that, I mean, we just proved again on Sunday. This is my pet theory. Thank you for, thank you for indulging me. But we just proved again on Sunday that this kind of thing can be done. Well, I'm in favor of your pet theory. I think you're right. First of all, I'm going to start by observing, and we talk about this more if you want

to. People forget that World War I ended as a war of maneuver. Right. So maneuver was restored to the battlefield in World War I. We didn't have to wait for World War II to happen for that to occur, and that's why the war ended. So that's one thing. The second thing is, I know I don't have to tell Aaron McLean that the doctrinal definition of surprise is to attack the enemy in a time, place, or manner for which he is unprepared. And when you find yourself in a situation where you can't sneak up on the enemy, so you can't really achieve surprise by place, and you can't really necessarily achieve surprise even by time in the phase of pervasive surveillance, you can still attack in a manner for which the enemy is unprepared. And both sides have been working on that. That's exactly what the

Ukrainians just did. The time and place, I mean, you know, obviously the Russians didn't see this coming. But the biggest issue was it never occurred to the Russians of the Ukrainians who try to attack them in this way. The Russians have been making gains most recently, very limited gains, nothing particularly significant. But they've been making gains on a lot of the battlefield, particularly in the Baklowski area, by finding different ways in which to attack. They're not really using mass attritional attacks anymore. Now they're back to a kind of World War I infiltration tactics on motorcycles and buggies in various other effects. Is it effective? Well, they're taking very high casualties. They're not getting a lot of ground, but they're taking

fewer casualties than they had been before and they're still able to take some ground. Ukrainians are struggling to come up with fully effective defenses against this approach. They will. Then the Russians will find another way to attack. You're right. War continues to evolve. Otherwise, we would have gotten ourselves into a cul-de-sac a long time ago and never escaped from it. The fact that people keep, we keep getting into these cul-de-sacs and then getting out of them, that's a pattern that's not going to change.

Talk about the consequences of this attack for the war in Ukraine specifically. you know, a lot of the criticism of the attack here in Washington was that this was going to somehow poison the diplomatic process that is underway now in Turkey. I'd like to get your reaction to that. Another thing we should address in whatever order you please is, you know, these aircraft were being used for cruise missile strikes into Ukraine, which is particularly potent form of attack, expensive but potent. You know, is this going to have at the margins or even,

substantially, you know, a helpful defensive effect for, you know, the ongoing two-directional strategic air campaign being waged. So, I mean, to deal with the second question first, look, it depends on exactly how many bombers the Ukrainians took out of commission, but I'm sure that it will have an effect, and I'm sure that we will have, or I would expect that we will see a reduction, at least in the short term in the rate of Russian cruise missile attacks, which is important because those tend to require the use of defensive assets that are scarce for Ukraine, either their F-16s chasing down cruise missiles

or their ground-based air defense systems that could otherwise be engaging drones or other targets. So reducing the, and some of those cruise missiles have got increasingly effective and hard to shoot down. So reducing those, that attack will be helpful to Ukraine. How, you know, we'll have to see exactly what the long term battle of damage assessments are here before we have a real sense of how significant that will be. In terms of the negotiations, few things. First of all, this Ukrainian operation has overshadowed

the fact that the Russians launched the largest single air attack of the entire war last night the day before the negotiations were set to begin. And that was not, as far as I can tell, retaliation for this strike. That was a planned activity. I'm sorry. The one doesn't cast more of a shadow than the other. If the Ukrainians hadn't done this, we'd be talking about how the Russians were doing that. I would actually argue that this was an important thing for the Ukrainians to do from the standpoint of getting the Russians to change the way that they are approaching these so-called peace negotiations, because the Russians have not been negotiating for a ceasefire. The Russians have absolutely rejected the idea of the ceasefire that President Trump and President Zelensky have both

offered. The Russians are instead insisting on a negotiation of the pretty end of the conflict, and they've laid out their terms very clearly, Aaron, and the terms are Ukraine surrenders. That's the term. It's not for oblasts. It's recognition of the oblasts. It's a change in the Ukrainian government, the installation of a government that suits Russia, its negotiations continuing along a line of demands that had begun shortly after the invasion, and that would have imposed a Versailles-like set of restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, rendering Ukraine permanently helpless in the face of Russia. It involves Ukraine declaring permanent neutrality, changing its constitution to declare permanent neutrality, abandon any NATO aspirations ever, abandon EU aspirations as well,

in fact, and so on. In other words, to reestablish itself as a Russian puppet state with a new government, those are the Russian demands. And the only thing that's changed as we've gone through this so-called negotiation process is the Russians have increased their demands. So it's not like there was a real chance at peace here other than a capitulatory peace in which Ukraine surrenders, which the Ukrainians are rightly not going to do. So to talk about how this Ukrainian strike upends a peace negotiation is to misunderstand what that negotiation actually has been for the Russians. Now, I think on the flip side of this, you could say, why have the Russians been behaving this way? And the Russians have been behaving this way because Putin is convinced that he's winning the war,

as President Trump has said, and that he will win the war, and that the Ukrainians can't really do anything to hurt him significantly, and that they're not going to be able to survive. Well, if you actually want to see a peace negotiation happen, and I would love to see this war come to an end. I would love to see just an acceptable peace that is in the interest of Ukraine and the United States and Europe, which can't be on anything like the terms the Russians are currently demanding.

If you want that to happen, the Russian calculus has to change. It's Putin who's the problem here. It's not Zelenskyy. It's not Ukraine. The only thing the Ukrainians are being stubborn about is they're stubbornly refusing to surrender. So somebody's got to change Putin's calculations. calculation. Well, the best way to do that would be for the United States and Europeans to

lean into giving Ukraine the war material that it needs in order to start inflicting battlefield setbacks on the Russians and force Putin to reckon with those and realize that he's actually not going to be able to win on the ground the way that he thinks he is. But this is another way of establishing leverage. This is a way of demonstrating the Russians. No, actually, we Ukrainians can inflict a lot of damage. They're, you know, they're showing him. We can destroy multibunders multi-billion-dollar bombers, we can inflict billions of dollars of damage on you. And we can, we can hit you many thousands of miles away. That's, that's the message the Ukrainians just said. I think that that's a positive contribution to any long-term resolution of this war that can be

in anyone's interests other than Putin's. So in that sense, I think it's very short-sighted to be talking about this is in any way undermining the peaceful resolution of this conflict. Another argument I encountered yesterday in my sort of pathetic Twitter debating about all this. I say pathetic because definitionally all Twitter debating is pathetic. So I don't think I was unique with pathetic. I'm just sort of ashamed to have been doing it at all, or ex-debating, I should say now. But one argument I encountered was that, you know, this attack was inherently escalatory and it's sort of based on a flawed concept that the Russians can be compelled, quote unquote, on the battlefield, be more serious at the negotiating. I was just sort of asserted without evidence, even though admittedly it's a heavy lift.

So instead, it's really economic pressure. You need to put economic pressure on the records to make them get serious at the negotiating table, to which my response is, you know, one, I don't detect enormous appetite in Washington for that at the moment. Two, for it, I'm for it. It would be good in combination with other things. But three, if it was serious economic pressure, which is, you know, how wars like this do tend to be one, in fairness.

Well, that's going to put things that Putin really cares about at risk. And, well, that's escalatory now. You know, serious economic pressure would be escalatory. Or put it this way, it would run the same risks of escalation as an attack like this did. Anytime you're really putting pressure on and putting someone in a box, there's an escalation risk there. That's just how this works. That's just how life works. So I don't know if you have a response or how you think this.

of economic pressure sanctions debate is going. But that is another argument that's out there. Well, look, in the first place, I would love to see more economic pressure on the Russians. I think that it's very important because the Russian economy is vulnerable. And the Russians are struggling to supply their military and Putin. Putin needs it. So I'm in favor of that. We'll see what kind of appetite there is. I know various senators are talking about bringing forward bills with bone crushing sanctions. We'd love to see those advance. to President Trump's appetite is for having that happen. You're a student of military history as I am, Aaron.

Can you think of a war in which major combatants were engaged for high stakes and had taken high losses that was ended because one side imposed economic pressure on the other? I mean, people have tried that repeatedly. We had, you know, Napoleon's continental system that failed. Allied blockade of Germany in World War I certainly contributed, but it wasn't until the fronts collapsed that Ludendorff went to the Kaiser and said,

we need to call it a day. He was prepared to sacrifice the German population and economy. We tried hitting the German economy and Japanese economy in World War II. Didn't happen. I mean, we hit them, but it didn't, you know, didn't lead to an end of the war. I think on balance, you'd be challenged to find a case in which economic pressure that wasn't combined with effective military success actually led to the termination of a war, especially when the aggressor and the one who's driving the continuation of a conflict thinks he's winning on the battlefield.

And it's just absolutely not the case that it's unrealistic to think that the Ukrainians could begin to inflict significant battlefield setbacks on the Russians. They could if they were properly equipped. They could if they were properly supplied. There are changes that they need to make as well. They know what those are. We know what they are. But they could. This Russian military that's on the ground in Ukraine is vulnerable.

And the Ukrainians heard it periodically. they could hurt it more. They don't need to chase every last Russian out of Ukraine. And I think this is part of the problem that when people are talking about, well, the Ukrainians can't really do anything to the Russians. So, well, what do you mean by anything? Can they regain some territory that is significant in some way? Sure.

Again, are they going to chase every last Russian out of Ukraine militarily? No, they're not. But if they could create a situation with the proper support from the West, and their Asian allies as well, in which the Russians were unable to advance, in which they really were able to just stop the Russian advances, and in which the Ukrainians were able to begin pushing the Russians back in selected sectors, and the Russians were not going to be able to stop them from doing that in a straightforward way. Putin would, let's say that would be an opportunity for Putin to recalculate.

And that's what's required, because as long as Putin thinks that he's going to win, he's going to try to win. You know, there's a lot of bad faith, I think, in some of these arguments that you're seeing being offered in a kind of catchy coming and going style where when things are going badly for the Ukrainians, well, this is an unfolding tragedy. We kind of have to put them out of their misery, rather, and cut them off and bring this to an end. But if it's going well for them, well, that's escalatory and dangerous. So we've got to stop them. We got to cut them off. You know, either way, the policy outcome is the saying. And, you know, I think it's worth saying.

I'm curious your view on this. I mean, there's certainly people around this administration or influential in this administration in a way that was not true in the first Trump term. And I'll set aside Trump himself because I think he's got his own unique strategic concept that I think is actually separate from what I'm about to describe. And we can talk about that too. But there are there are people who are just genuinely hostile to the Ukrainian cause. It's not that they, you know, in the way that in the way that a lot of anti-Vietnam war protesters

in the 60s didn't so much want peace. They just wanted the other guys to win. And I think there are people in Washington who want the Russians to win. And I've tried to explain this on any number of occasions, is oftentimes to European interlocutors who are sort of aghast at this. And they literally don't understand how that could be, how an American is sort of serious American could want Russia to win. And I try to explain, well, you know, if you believe that global liberalism is the

threat, the great threat. There is a kind of idea of a MAGA international in which Russia is comparatively one of the good guys because they are also, Putin is also, you know, in this theory, opposed to the liberals. And Ukraine is a kind of extension of liberal imperium. And so we, we advance the broader political goals of the international through seeking their defeat. And you could get to the point logically where it's actually important that they lose. And then this sort of intersects. This is a coalition and it's complicated, but it intersects with these more classically, quote unquote, realist arguments that, you know, NATO expansion was a mistake, that that America is over-extended

in Eurasia, and we need to go to, you know, spheres of influence, and that's a sort of healthier way of maintaining world order and world peace. That's not quite the same thing as the desire for the MAGA International, but it's related, and you find, you find, you know, both ideas operating in the same people. Sometimes there was just a piece, I don't know, you saw Fred, I think it was from our friends at the Quincy Institute, calling for a quote-unquote, double reverse Kissinger, which I actually appreciated because I actually do the logical conclusion of a lot of this conversation. So it's the reverse Kissinger, which we've discussed on the show before, is, of course, we're going to flip Russia to help us in our competition with China. And I

had a good conversation with Richard Fontaine about that if people are interested. But the double reverse Kissinger would be that actually we now have good relations. The end state is good relations with both Russia and China. And there's a kind of, again, quote unquote, you know, conservative concert of powers that establishes world order. And that is the natural way for it for the United States. How it is that Eurasia dominated by a Russian Chinese condominium, you know, improves the American prospects for freedom and prosperity is yet to be explained to my satisfaction.

But that is, that is, I think, the concept. So one of the frustrating things to me, Fred, about the debate in D.C. right now is that people don't feel like they can put their cards on the table. And so there's just a bit of, and there's a bit of dishonesty in what we're talking about and what we're shadow boxing about. Well, happily for me, my, I get to focus on the external enemy

and those who are who are fighting it abroad. I think there was an extremely articulate and thoughtful presentation of a phenomenon that observe, but I'm not really, I don't, I don't really know that I'm going to offer you my own perspective on. other than to say that I thought that was a very perceptive and thoughtful presentation. How do you see things going in Ukraine in the next, let's say, you know, quarter to a year?

What are the major scenarios or options that are on your mind, how things likely could play in? Look, we're going to see continued and redoubled Russian offensive operations. Putin is going to continue trying to hammer Ukraine into the ground. we are seeing already the increasing Russian pressure in northern Ukraine and Tsummi Oblast and in Kharkiv. That's going to continue. The Russians are going to try to push into Tsumi. I think they probably at some point may, if they could get far enough into it, they'd probably stick a claim to it and also the Kharkiv. This, by the way, you know, watching this phenomenon reveals what nonsense it is to talk about how limited the Russian

names are because the Russians actually continue to articulate a series of different aims up to and including all of the Ukraine. Then President Trump made that observation a few days ago. I thought it was right. He said, I think Putin wants it all. Yeah, he does. That's what this is about. So the Russians are going to try to get it.

The Ukrainians are under a huge amount of pressure. If they make a mistake on the ground, the Russians probably can take advantage of it and have things go pretty badly. If the Ukrainians can avoid making significant mistakes, though, I think that the odds are that the, you know, the fighting continues about the way that it's been, with the Russians making, you know, slow grinding advances at a rate that will take them years, even to complete the seizure of the four oblasts that they've already claimed, always assuming that they can, because Russians have actually shown no ability to take a large fortified city. such as they're now facing in Danyat, also as they would be facing in Sumi since 2022.

So the odds are that this continues. We have agency in that. We have agency in that. If the U.S. cut off Ukraine entirely at this point, you would see a significant increase in the effectiveness of Russian air and missile attacks. Unfortunately, what the Ukraine just did doesn't affect the Russians' ability to use Shihads. ballistic missiles. The only system the Ukrainians have that can shoot down ballistic missiles is the Patriot. That's a very important system. If the U.S. stops supplying Ukraine with Patriots, Patriot Interceptors, it would be very bad. We saw during the period in which intelligence sharing

was cut off, that also puts Ukrainian civilians at risk. Since Ukrainies rely on that intelligence sharing for early warning of attacks, and it hinders Ukrainian defensive operations, could be pretty serious. I think the Europeans are working hard to offset those capabilities insofar as they can. No one has a replacement for Patriot right now. So the U.S. cutting off aid could make things worse. I don't think it would be likely to collapse the front or collapse the situation, but it would make things worse.

On the other hand, if President Trump did what he has sometimes said he would do on concluding that Putin is unsurious about the peace and lean in and actually start arming Ukrainians, the Ukrainians could, I'm confident the Ukrainians could stop the Russian advances, and I think that they would be able to start preparing over time for potential counterattacks and counteroffensive operations. That would be on a more limited scale than what they did in 2023, and that hopefully would be more successful we would have to find out.

So, you know, on the one hand, the forecast cone is pretty narrow. You know, weathermen like to say, you know, when you're in drought, predict drought. You know, when you're in positional warfare, predict more positional warfare. But we do need to remember that, again, as I said, when one ended as a war maneuver, and it is possible that one side or the other will find a way to restore maneuver to this battlefield. I would submit, with all due respect to those who don't want to see Ukraine succeed or survive, that it's in America's interest for it to be Ukraine to be the side that restores maneuver.

Among other things, our military would benefit from that. I'd like to know how to restore a maneuver to a battlefield like this, just in case a battlefield like this might be coming to us one day. So I'd like to see the Ukrainians do that for a lot of reasons. We could help them with that, and I think we should. Fred Kagan, whenever I want to understand what's going on in the war on Ukraine, I call you. You've been kind enough to be a friend of this show back when no one listened to it.

So thank you for coming on now that a few people do. I'm always delighted to talk with you, Aaron, and I really appreciate the conversations that I have with you in your air edition and your thoughtfulness. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.