School of War - Ep 27: Fred Kagan on Ukraine II

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Ep 27: Fred Kagan on Ukraine II Fred Kagan, Senior Fellow and Director of Critical Threats Project at AEI, joins the show to discuss where the war in Ukraine stands, how initial Russian designs failed, and where the conflict is headed. Times  02:14 Introduction 03:22 Accurate Predictions 06:45 The Baffling Russian Attack on Kyiv  08:36 A River Runs Through…The Russian Plan  10:22 Operational Design 101 13:22 Back To Basics - Reading Terrain Still Matters 16:33 Russian Objectives In The East 21:51 Russian Command And Control  26:29 Ukrainian Strikes On Senior Russian Officers 28:38 Russian Objectives In The South 33:06 Putin Still Seeking Total Victory? 36:42 Russian Game-plan For The South Coast 39:18 Transnistria 42:27 False Flags - Putin’s Comfort Zone 44:01 Moldovan Capabilities  47:46 Force Is A Kind Of Failure 50:47 Putin’s Options  54:48 Deterrence And Nuclear Taboos Ukraine Maps 05/02/2022 per ISW

Today, we're welcoming back Fred Kagan, who's going to give a whirlwind battlefield tour of the state of play in Ukraine here at the start of May, about two and a half months into the war. In the course of this conversation, we'll cover themes like campaign design, the relationship between political objectives and military strategy, along with nuclear deterrence and escalation. If possible, it would be useful to listen to this episode with a map of Ukraine in front of you. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. 17, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who not see buildings.

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. Before we get to today's interview, I'd like to share a word from our sponsor, The Spectator. As the longest-running magazine in the world, the spectator eschews identity politics in favor of intelligent conversation and thought. From the war in Ukraine to the ideological war in the classroom, from the rise of inflation to the rise of cancel culture, the spectator has been dedicated to stimulating reporting and analysis since 1828.

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for joining school of war i'm delighted to welcome back to the show today fred kagan he's senior fellow and director of the critical threats project at the american enterprise institute fred thanks so much for joining great to be back with you around so a couple of months ago you came on to discuss the russian invasion of ukraine and at the time the war was relatively new and the Russians were approaching and fighting on the outskirts of Kiev. And we spent a good portion of that recording with you kind of doing an after action on your own analysis of the pre-war period in which you were very reflective about things you'd gotten right, but also things you'd gotten wrong.

Incidentally, I got a fair amount of feedback from different quarters about how refreshing that was in unusual in certain respects. But now, as we record today, you are in the position of having, you were quite optimistic at the time about Ukrainian prospects in the defense of Kiev. And I think you have every right to kind of take a different tack. And so I thought the first question I would ask you is, what led you to be so optimistic about the risks that Russia faced and the advantages that Ukraine had in that first phase of the war? What actually happened there and how did you get it right? Well, I think there were a couple of things that there were a couple of assessments that were

very important that not everybody held. One was the question of whether the Ukrainians would fight or not, and Putin obviously thought that they wouldn't. That was the first indication in certain sense that he really was living in Cloud Cuckoo Land because it was almost impossible to have been talking to Ukrainians in the lead up to this war and think they were not going to fight. So I don't feel like I deserve much credit for making that call, but it was an important assessment that the adversaries didn't share. I didn't know that the Ukrainians would be able to fight as skillfully as they actually did. And I was initially worried that they might not and that they might fall into any of several obvious tracks, which they avoided. And so in addition

of fighting very hard, which I was confident they would, they also fought very skillfully. And that had become apparent a few, you know, by a week into the war. So it was apparent that they knew what they were doing and being very intelligent. And so that gave me a lot of optimism. On the Russian side, you know, we just had the opportunity to dispel this out. Mason Clark and I in the Foreign Affairs piece came out last week. The Russians designed their campaign for this invasion about as incompetently as its possible to design a campaign. And it was evident going into this attack that they were going to

do some stupid things. And my mind continues to boggle about this, Aaron, because, I mean, as a student of Soviet military and Soviet military theory and Soviet operational art, Soviet doctrine, I mean, there are Soviet generals and theorists spinning in their graves and line pits at the incompetence of the Russian campaign design, which, and the gist of the incompetence is they tried to do everything all at once. They didn't phase anything. They didn't prioritize anything. And they didn't maintain any kind of reserve in case things went wrong.

And then there were a whole bunch of subordinate mistakes that they made. in the campaign as well. But those are just, those are the kinds of things that would get you flunked in any command and general staff course on campaign design. And it's just breathtaking how badly they did this. And then beyond that, what we had seen leading up to the invasion that had led us to think erroneously that Putin wasn't serious about this was the way that they had structured their forces and the kinds of forces.

and the kinds of forces they had prepared to attack along various axes. So they basically took their weakest and least prepared forces and put them on the decisive axis on the west bank of the Nipro, the Take-Giv, which was a thing to do. And again, that's one of the things that had led us to conclude that they weren't really serious about this because it was unnecessary. Why was it baffling? Well, as you looked at the terrain and the requirements of taking Keeve, as we've all now seen, Kiev is fundamentally on the west bank of the Nipro River. It has suburbs on the East Bank, but the parts that matter are, for the standpoint of the war, are on the west bank of the river. The river is wide and it's hard to cross. And so if you were seriously,

about taking the city rapidly, the decisive axis is on the west bank of the river. And the Russians arrayed a lot of force on the west bank of the river in Belarus. And then they came down on that side. But that's a hard task because it requires driving a relatively long way pretty fast. And then either doing an encirclement of a large city, which requires a lot of force and is complicated or else just storming into a large city, which requires even more force and it's more complicated. And so one would have expected that you put the best troops that you have onto the hardest and most decisive task in the war. And instead, they put the worst troops that they were mobilizing onto that task. And they had no reserves for them. So you can ask me why they did that

and I can offer you no explanations. But it was baffling. And as we watched, them lining up like that and we were saying to ourselves there's there's no way that they are serious about doing this on the west bank or the river there you also are reducing the options you've got in terms of shifting forces in terms of providing support or receiving support from forces that are on the east side of the river perhaps persecuting or prosecuting rather other portions of the plan you know what you're doing on the left i'm phrasing this as a statement but it's really a question what you're doing on the west bank either sort of succeeds or it fails it's it's it's it's going to be in its own world a bit from well not necessarily it i mean it's it's complicated and

you know this is the other thing so they also of course had forces coming down on the on the east bank and quite a lot of them you have to make a decision as a planner how you want to command and control that activity they did one thing that's obvious in some respects which is they appear to have two headquarters, one commanding on the left bank and one commanding on the right bank. But that approach gives you problems as your forces actually converge on the city because then you don't have a single coherent commander overseeing the entire effort around the city. And there are bridges in the city and near the city. And there is reason to think that you would, if you succeed in various ways, that you would be able to have forces on one side help the other forces, if nothing else,

artillery ranges worked in the Russian favor. So they, And they did try to do this to set up artillery positions on the East Bank that would have been able to range to the West Bank. So there are a lot of opportunities to have forces interact with one another. But if you create, if you let the river be the seam between two commands, you make it much harder to have that kind of interaction going on. Now, this gets into a whole other conversation about what the Russian command and control structure apparently was here and how messed up. that seems to have been. But they designed this operation in a way that made it maximally difficult to have good coordination between forces on both banks of the city, whereas you rightly point out it would have been hard in any case. They made it harder.

You know, before we had this war in Europe, an ostensible purpose of this podcast was to take more of a historical and educational approach to military strategy. So maybe we could just take a moment, and as we used to say in Quantico, I presume they still say it, turn the map around and talk about campaign design in principle and put yourself on the Russian side of the map. What would have better design? What are the sort of formal requirements of design that you're trying to meet? What is it? And then what would you have done differently?

Yeah. So look, as I'm sure you learned at Quantico and as is taught throughout the American military and most militaries, there are basic principles in any designing any operation, like pick the decisive objective, pick the set of main objective and make it the main effort and allocate sufficient force to a main effort to ensure that you will be able to take it. And then principle of economy of force, right? Assign minimum necessary combat power to secondary objectives. And the point here is, you know, not all objectives are equal.

Some objectives have a chance to be decisive in the outcome of the operational war. Others are supporting efforts. And you should not put any more forces on supporting efforts and is absolutely necessary for them to succeed in their limited objective so that you have decisive force going after the decisive objective. In this case, the decisive effort should have been taking key. Putin obviously was coming in for the purpose of. replacing the Ukrainian government. And he intended to take Keev. That was going to be the hardest task.

And it was also likely to be the decisive task. Because if he had taken Keev, the fighting would not have stopped. We definitely would have had fighting continue in other parts of the theater in an organized fashion for as long as possible on the Ukrainian side. And then it would have gone to a partisan warfare and then insurgency. But the seizure of Keeve, especially. if he'd done it quickly in the war, would likely have changed the character of the war dramatically and rapidly and as much in his favor as it was possible to do.

So he should have designed a campaign that prioritized taking Keeve and that then assess the requirements for doing that and looked at what are the hard parts of that. And again, going back to saying, well, the hardest task is going to be what will necessarily be a rapid mechanized drive down the west bank of the Nipro River, which is actually quite tricky because the terrain coming from Yoluluus is complicated in a few ways. And so you have to do this kind of terrain analysis, right, as I taught you. So what, you know, what's wrong with the terrain? Well, to start with, there's the Pripipat marshes, which are marshes.

And sometimes they freeze in winter, sometimes they don't. that's I'm not interested in that part, but the key characteristic of them is there are virtually no roads through them because they're like marshes. So the road infrastructure right along the west bank of the Nipnoa is terrible as a general rule. And then of course, there's the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which didn't exclude stupid Russians, but which nevertheless is also poor in what we call ground lines of communications, right, because the point of an exclusion zone is you don't drive through it, so don't invest in that infrastructure. And so the initial plans that had been leaked in the fall about what the Russians were thinking about doing made more sense than what

they actually did. And they involved a much wider envelopment with forces, Russian forces attacking from much further west in Belarus and coming through Western Ukraine on a broader envelopment of the capital, which would have allowed them to do a few things. First of all, it would have allowed them to avoid the marshes. It also would have allowed them to avoid the turnover exclusion zone or send fewer forces through those areas. And it would have allowed them to use a denser road network that would have supported a broader and presumably more rapid advance. But it was a much longer drive. And so that was always going to be a complexity. So, you know, I I think it would be interesting to speculate a bit about why the Russians made the bad decisions

that they made. I mean, a really striking thing that you said in that foreign affairs piece. I'll just read it. In fact, Russia's design choice was so poor that the invasion would have likely failed, even if the supply arrangements had been sound, which is a really, really striking assertion to make. But let's leave that for a moment. I think we can come back to speculating about Russian decision making as we continue

to chat and come up to the present day and move a bit to the east, which is a little bit to the east, which seems to be where the main action is. And I, you know, I read, as the Russians were transitioning their efforts over here somewhat obviously, I read some really absurd stuff in the press to the, I don't know who these reporters were talking to, not you and not, I think, anyone credible reports to the effect, and this is the New York Times. You know, unlike the, you know, the guerrilla-style warfare in the vicinity of Kiev, you know, the wide open terrain in the eastern part of the country will lend itself to conventional operations. I remember reading and thinking, gosh, the operations around Kiev seem pretty conventional to me. What do I know? In any event, there is a

sort of superficial way in which if you just look at the map, look at the map of the eastern third of the country, the Ukrainians do seem to be in a in a tight spot in the sense that they are surrounded on three sides. There is the sort of, again, just superficial appearance of the makings of what in World War II, I guess we would have called a cauldron battle or something like that. But I think it's superficial, lacks a variety of elements you would see in such a battle, you know, mobility of the guys on the three sides being one of them. But I'll just, what's going on there? What are the Russian objectives and how's it going for them and for the Ukrainians? Well, the Russian stated objectives, of course, are to get to the boundaries of Danyets and Nguyenzsk Oblasts, as well as to

secure Harrison and parts of Zagrebos. They seem to be true. trying to conduct a large encirclement of the Ukrainians driving down the road from Izum through Slaviansk. And then it would go to Buckmood and then sort of link up around DeBalsova with the Russian lines there, which would cut off a big part of the Ukrainian military. They are not making a whole lot of progress on that. One of the dynamics that we've observed is that, you know, the line, the Ukrainians have been fortifying the line, that had become the line of contact after 2014. They've been fortifying that line since 2014.

And the Russians have actually been extremely ineffective at penetrating those prepared positions. And so you're seeing a significant divergence in the performance of Russian forces trying to come north and west through that line versus forces coming down from Harkey over terrain that the Ukrainians hadn't prepared to defend. Nevertheless, the Ukrainians have managed to establish defensive positions around ISU that have pretty much stopped the Russian advance down the main highway to Slaviansk. The Russians have impaled themselves in the east as they did in the west on urban centers like Sjavre Danyetsk and Urbizhne, and they just have demonstrated that they have no ability to take built up areas rapidly, which shouldn't be a surprise and isn't a surprise to anyone other than them. But they keep trying. But they have now started to conduct some operations

that are a little bit more successful between Urubizhne and Izzyum pushing down. You know, it's hard to say how far that's going to go and whether they're going to be able to achieve some tactical encirclements or not. It's certainly a slow motion encirclement. They're just not able to roll fast and the Ukrainians are able to delay them. And it's not at all clear to me that the Russians actually are going to have the combat power they need even to complete the encirclement slowly. So, you know, it's it's always hard to call these kinds of things because combat power is made up of so many imponderables. But looking at what we've seen, my forecast would be that the Russians will not complete any large scale encirclements and the attack will, will bog down across the board having made limited gains at some point in the coming weeks.

But, you know, again, it's very hard to be confident in those kinds of forecasts. If you are the Ukrainian commander of this portion of the war, what are you thinking about in terms of your needs, whether it's material, whether it's men, whether it's, you know, political support of some fashion, in some fashion. And, you know, sitting here on May the 2nd, are you getting what you need? Well, I don't know. One of the characteristics of this part of the war or this phase of the war is that still, it's still the case that neither side has been able to establish air superiority over the other lines. And that means that artillery really is becoming incredibly important. And that's why the howitzers that the U.S. is sending are so very important because artillery, both tube and rocket artillery is becoming the only way that either side can really, reach out and touch the other one at distance. The Russians have remembered, the one thing they have remembered from the Soviet days is the artillery as the queen of the battlefield. And they have taken to, actually, you might enjoy this. It's a very sort of French World War II doctrine of a

methodical battle kind of approach here, where first they blast the bejesus out of the area in front of them with artillery, and then they try to crawl forward with their ground forces, which isn't actually it working terribly well. But the Ukrainians need a lot of artillery in order to be able to handle that and they need long range artillery as well, which is why some of the more advanced rounds that the West is sending them, the boosted rounds of longer range and so forth, they're very, very important. As much of that stuff as can be gotten to the east as fast as possible, that's how much the Ukrainians need. And I think that that's the, I think that that's probably really the top priority at this point.

Out there in the east, in Isium, there was this fascinating incident that made it into the press over the last couple days where, you know, it appears that the Russian equivalent of our chairman of the Joint Chiefs was doing something, you know, more or less on the front lines or close to the front lines. There were some breathless declarations that he must be down there taking control of the war, your own, your group's assessment or groups you're associated with assessment was a little bit more sober. But nevertheless, it is striking. He went out there and then things went a little bit pear-shaped. Maybe tell listeners your understanding of what happened and what it means.

So as best, so we don't, I mean, we don't know and no one is really saying with any degree of credibility what he was doing there. I never believed that he'd been sent down there to take command of that axis. That would have been very bizarre. I think that he was doing what we call about a field circumcision. I think that he, you know, senior commanders and actually commanders at all levels do this on a regular basis. And, you know, when Kim and I were privileged to be in Iraq and Afghanistan, General Petraeus, General Atlanta and stuff, they did battlefield circumvations all the time. And commanders go to forward headquarters to get an actual sort of fingertip feel of the situation,

which you can't get from reports in your own headquarters. And, you know, to look your subordinates in the eye and get a sense for their morale and get a sense for their capability and make some judgments that just are much more real when you're actually there with them than when you're, you know, staring at screens in your headquarters. And my hypothesis would be that Kadaosimov was there conducting his equivalent of a battlefield circulation. And I think there are some reasons why he might have felt it necessary to do that,

because I think that there are some decision points that the Russians are looking at. On the one hand, we've had this rumor that Putin was going to declare victory or something on May 9th, but the attack has gotten bogged down. And so Gada Asimov may well have been down there to try to figure out what was going to be actually impossible. So you can go back and tell Putin what they were going to be able to do and what they were going to be able to do. That suggests a degree of honesty in their communications that I'm not sure has been present, but it should be in principle. But then other decisions that he might have wanted to make is like the Russians really seem to be impaled on the isu-maxes, but they're moving a little bit more freely elsewhere. Does he want to continue trying to drive down the road? The Slaviansk or does he want to reallocate forces somewhere else?

So I suspect that that's what he was doing. Now, a couple of things are worth noting about this, if I may. One is, of course, it sounds like the Ukrainians almost got him because they conducted an MRS strike. the command post, I think that he was at, I think shortly after he left, the U.S. military official said after he left, I don't know what the time was. And they killed some senior Russian officers again, I assume they were shooting at him. It's almost reassuring that the Russians are not quite so incompetent that they can't keep their chief of the general staff alive.

But so they did. So that was a little bit of trauma. But it does tell us something about the Russian commanders and the Russian command structure. and the confidence they have in different commanders. Because if it is the case that Southern Military District Commander, Dvordinochoff, was put in charge of the entire operation, as has been reported, then GEDAWSOMF going to Izum is a bit undermining to Dvordaunikoff. Not necessarily a senior commander could go on a battlefield circulation.

I kind of would have expected Dvortenov to be there if Gadeosomov was going to be doing that. And I would have expected that Asimov to go from there to Dvoronikov's headquarters rather than going right back to Moscow. So I think we need to ask questions about how much confidence the leadership still has in Dornikov to do this. The guy who should be really feeling bad about this is General Jodov, who is the commander of the Western Military District. And he's the guy who had been in command of the Izumaxis, until we had this report that Dvorkov was put in charge of the war. Well, whatever's going on, Girardiof is apparently done as a commander of an axis, at least for now.

And the fact that Get Osamov was there, and he apparently wasn't, should be reinforcing his conviction that he maybe needs to look for a new career. These battlefield politics remind me a little bit of an uncomfortable incident I had in Afghanistan as a lieutenant in 2010 where I was informed that the battalion commander and the regimental commander were on their way down to the neighborhood of where I was. And I said something on the radio to the battalion to the effective. Well, when they come into Charlie Company's area and was immediately informed that this was not the terminology that I should be using, it's not in fact Charlie Company's area.

It is the battalion's area. It is the regiment's area. And I was somewhat overstepping my, overstepping my bounds. But pride matters a lot here. I grant you. And the Ukrainians do seem to be, well, again, this will be a, it will sound like a statement, but it's really a question. the Ukrainians seem to be very effective at bumping off relatively senior Russian leaders.

Does that speak to, well, does it speak more to the incompetence of Russian leaders and their placement on the battlefield or, on the other hand, to their relative courage and being forward or, you know, on yet a third hand, just superiority of Ukrainian targeting intelligence? What's actually going on with this? Because it does seem a little unusual. So as far as we can tell from the reports that we're hearing, there are two. phenomena that are driving this. One is that very senior Russian officers have been drawn far forward as the morale, competence, and willingness of the Russian military to fight has been degraded.

And so I definitely have the image that senior Russian officers are moving further and further forward to be putting their boots up the butts of various subordinates and actually get them to attack, which has become an arduous task in the Russian military, quite unlawful. understandably. That might or might not be a problem from the standpoint of their odds of collecting their pensions, but their communication systems have broken down to the point where they are regularly transmitting sometimes in clear, we hear, but if encrypted in ways that allow the Ukrainians to pinpoint the locations of headquarters. And so the Ukrainians have become adept at locating where the headquarters are. And I suspect

that the Ukrainians also have been able to pick up when certain kinds of senior officers are going to be in certain places and then rapidly lobbying appropriate greetings for them. So I think that those are the two dynamics that are driving that primarily. Let's continue. We're sort of going clockwise around the map here. Let's move around into the south. I invite you, I, you know, I'm curious to know, aside from the valor and fierceness of the resistance if what's going on in Maripole is significant in a strategic sense, but also curious just more broadly about Russian consolidation in the South. It seems like they're under a bit, as you go further west in the South, as it were. It seems like they're under some pressure from the Ukrainians. What are their

objectives there? Well, I do think we should talk about Mariupil for a minute because the truth is I think that generations of Ukrainian school children should be memorizing the names of those who have died in the last stages of the fight for Muri Uboldt because they absolutely have inflicted casualties on the Russians beyond any reasonable point that anyone other than real heroes would have continued to fight. And they have also, therefore, tied down Russian forces in trying to reduce Azalstahl for weeks when, again, no one could have blamed them if they had given up much sooner. Now, the Russians, I think, encouraged them to be heroes because I think it's been very clear that if they had surrendered, the Russians probably have tortured and killed most of

them anyway. But that doesn't in any way diminish their valor. And these are true heroes and their sacrifices as mattered, continues to matter. The Russian activities in the Herzan and Mikhailiev area and the Zabritsia area are very significant. Right now, some of the most significant things are doing aren't military. They are imposing the usage of rubles in those areas. And they have appointed Russian governors and mayors in those towns. And they have repeatedly tried to get referenda to declare people's republics and so forth. This is very important because people have been talking about the Russian objectives as being Danetskin, Lu Hans.

That is not the sum of the Russian objective. The actual Russian objective is to seize and hold permanently any, every bit of terrain that they possibly can in Ukraine. That's the first thing. There is no geographical bound to what Putin wants and any territory that he holds when the fighting stops. he will try to hold forever. But they are making concrete preparations in the South to incorporate that territory permanently into Russia. I don't know whether they will annex it or if they will sort of recognize it as this nonsensical,

you know, independent regimes as they did in Danyetsk and Levantz. But they clearly intend to make a permanent transfer of those territories from Ukraine to Russia and are preparing to do that. And so they've been trying to consolidate their control politically and militarily and also to fend off Ukrainian counterattacks, which have been making progress. Now, we're seeing Russian reinforcements going from Crimea north. The Ukrainians suggest that the Russians are preparing to launch new offenses toward Krividiak, on the one hand, the Wuzelnetskyi's hometown, or toward Mikhailiev on the other,

and from Mikhailov, presumably, toward Odessa. And I think that it's possible, especially when we get all the way to Transnistri, which I assume you'll want to talk about in a minute, that the Russians think that they're setting up for an attack on Odessa proper. I frankly think that they would have to be even more delusional than they have been thus far to imagine that they are going to fight their way through Mikhailiof, and then they're going to fight their way down to Odessa, and then they're going to take Odessa. I just don't see that happening. but they have been pretty delusional. But even if they aren't, they might well hope that by showing such an operation, they can divert Ukrainian forces from elsewhere to the defense of Odessa, and so make advances further east possible. That's sort of what they're setting up for now. But right now, we're still not seeing any significant Russian offensive operations in those areas,

and they're struggling to hold off Ukrainian counter-offensives that are pushing them back. So we'll see how that goes. So fair to sum up then, because I do indeed want to kind of keep going clockwise and get to Transnistria and Moldova in a second, but based on both the sort of political activity in areas they're occupying north of Crimea, and as you point out, what seem to be indications that they still have an interest in what remains of the Ukrainian Black Sea Coast. I mean, these are not the activities of a power that is looking for a settlement of the conflict on, you know, something to approach and mutually agree. These are the things you would do if you are still looking for something that is overwhelmingly a victory for you, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that Putin is probably getting to the point where, well, it's very

hard. Putin is so, I think I said this the last time with you, but I say it for you going to do. The Russians have a wonderful way of saying, have gone crazy, which is so much etchetti, if you walked away from your mind. And Putin has walked so far away from his mind that it's really very hard to judge what he's actually trying to do or thinking about. But one could imagine that he could keep this offensive up for a while, try to make some more progress in the East, and then try to find some ways possibly by using escalation or the real imminent threat of escalation, attack to nuclear weapons or something else, to compel the Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire along,

current lines, which would give him a tremendous victory. And it would put him in an enormously advantageous position to take Ukraine in the future in a subsequent renewed attack. So he certainly at a minimum seems to be setting up for that. But the fact that he continues to lean into these offensives in the East so far suggests that his ambitions have not been at all stated. and frustration seems to be driving him toward an extreme of violence in a way that, honestly, it reminds me a little bit of the phenomenon that happened in Germany in 1918. And I'm a little worried about this because as the war begins really to unravel, the Germans found it necessary to impose more and more sacrifices on their people.

And in order to justify those sacrifices, they actually had to eat. increase the war aims and what they promised that they would get for their people in turn. Putin hasn't yet gone there. But amidst these rumors of a larger Russian mobilization, which we've seen before, so I don't want to overstate, I'm concerned that Putin could get into a situation where he begins to expand, re-expand the war aims in order to justify demanding more sacrifices from his own people just to keep the war going. And that's a vicious circle that can be very hard to escape from.

Luckily in the summer of 1918, there were a couple of regiments of Marines on hand, northeast of Paris. I have it on good authority that that is what literally stopped the German war machine. Indeed. There's a good museum right off I-95, south of Washington, that tells that tells that story very, very persuasively. So, yeah, just to stick on sort of Odessa and the South Coast for a second, To your theme of campaign design or operational design, you know, the conditions that you would want to meet before launching anything so ambitious. Like, for example, one would assume some sort of amphibious element would be part of an operation like this. But you don't, as you've already mentioned, it's stunning, by the way.

There's no air superior, no Russian air superiority over Ukraine. The Ukrainians clearly have these long range fires that they used most recently to see. Sink, I get the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet. Not a great indicator. If this is the kind of, you know, if the control of the Southern Coast is next on your list of operational objectives or strategic objectives, you know, the things you just want to get done before you launch that, just they don't seem to even be in the neighborhood of completable right now.

No, it's even worse than that, Aaron. I mean, on the one hand, you need to find some Russian Navy skippers who, are actually willing to sail their ships into the laws of Ukrainian anti-shipping missiles and drones. And then you'd need to find someone dumb enough to think it's a good idea to do that with several thousand troops on those ships. Because what could possibly go wrong? But beyond that, they don't have the troops because the naval infantry that they would have used for that purpose, they actually allocated to the fight against Moriupil. And those guys, this is one of the things that the defenders of Muddyubal did.

They fought so hard and so long that the Russians ended up committing elements of the 810th naval infantry to that fight. And those guys got chewed up and lost some senior officers in that fight. So you don't have, it's not like the Russian naval infantry's been sitting around waiting for a chance to do this amphibious operation. They've been fighting and they've been taking bad casualties. So now you're going to tell these guys who are not fresh, who've been beaten up and demoralized, including losing a transport at Berdianz, even before they sank the Moscow. Now you're going to tell them we're going to load you guys up and you're going to do an amphibious invasion. But don't worry because there are going to be forces coming from the east. Really?

That's interesting because they haven't been able to take Nikolaev when they were at full strength. So then they tried to bypass it and they tried to go up to Southern Google River. They couldn't do that either. So now badly weakened. Look at the, look at the, look at the Goliath on Google Earth if you haven't done this. Because this is an absolute nightmare for an attacker from. the east. You have a whole city on a bit of a spit of land, and you have to fight your way through the entire city to get to the one bridge across the river, and then you have to imagine

that the Ukrainians have been stupid enough not to blow it before you get there. And if all of those things happen, then you get to use the bridge actually to cross the river. But you could fight your way through the whole city and then have the Ukrainians blow the bridge at the end, and then all you have is the ruins of a city that actually doesn't do anything for you, and you have no groundline of communication to Odessa. That's the likeliest outcome of any Russian drive that way. So it's very hard to see how they actually would open up a ground line of communication from Crimea. I'm happy to talk about the fantastic Russian troops that are in Transnistria

that are also supposedly going to be involved in this if you want. Let's all 1,500 of them or so? Yeah, there are two motorized rifle battalions and a command echelon, together with some thousands of no doubt awesome transnistrian militia. Just before we get into the weeds here, and I fear I've not been doing enough of this, this episode, but let's just step back once or twice. And what is Transnistria? So Transnistria is an eastern strip of Moldova that broke away from then Moldavia at the collapse of the Soviet Union. was a Russian force there already, and there was a civil war, and the Russian force stayed

ostensibly as peacekeepers. And so there's been Russian, and now for a long time, despite the wishes of the Moldovan government, that it leave. And so for decades now, we've had this tiny Russian force in Transnistria, which has been maintaining the autonomy of what I guess, is now called the Rinistrovian Moldavian Republic, the PMR, which is this breakaway region that is protected by the small Russian force and has its own militia. It's roughly analogous to the DNR or the LNR, except that it's of much older vintage. Right. And these two motorized rifle battalions have been sitting there not doing very much for decades and now are, have been sitting there watching the meat grinder that are, has been Ukraine.

and having people periodically talk to them about what a great idea would be for them to attack Odessa. There have been various rumors and indications that the Russians might be preparing them to do that. I've got to tell you, Aaron, if those battalions attacked Odessa and there wasn't some massive Russian force from somewhere else, it would just be an exotic form of suicide. That's just those guys are not taking Odessa. They're just not. But that's not what I'm actually worried about because there's a smarter play for Putin, which involves using those guys not to try to take Dessa, but instead to blow up Moldova. And that concerns me a lot because the false flag attacks and other things are the Russians

have been staging in Transnistria. It's all about threats of Ukraine. It's all about warnings to the Ukrainians are doing this and that and the other thing. but it's all pretext for various mobilization of the PMR militia and possibly of some Russian reinforcements. That area is not very far from Chishiniao. It's able to cause a lot of mayhem in Moldova. And I'm very worried that it may have occurred to Putin, that there's a kind of horizontal escalation here. If he can destabilize Moldova and bring the war to NATO's border in that way, it can do a lot of positive.

of things from his perspective at a relatively low cost to him. And that is something that worries me quite a lot. Yeah, the news that the false flag attack that you make, at least the principal one that I saw, which was this purported attack on, what was it, the Transnistrian security services or? There were three. There was an attack on the security services,

and then there were two attacks on television transmission towers. Got it. At least those are the ones that come ready to them on. It seemed a bit when the news on that was breaking like a return to form for Putin and to the kind of stuff that he has a record of being successful at these sort of, I mean, in retrospect now with the sort of obvious failure in Ukraine, maybe it was all luck. But, you know, as you looked at each of these cases individually, whether it was Crimea in 2014 or any number of other sort of limited, bold conflicts that had an armed element, but also had a robust intelligence and political element. You know, he has a real track record there and that clearly, you know, the record seems to show that his skill set and analytic abilities and leadership abilities and style somehow lend itself, lend themselves to success in plays like that and less so in superintending a kind of larger conventional conflict. So let's, well, let's think that through for a second. So I can imagine a scenario where the transnistrian authorities and their Russian, you know, partners identify.

across the border in Moldova, the malefactors who are, the bad people who are responsible for these attacks inside Transnistria, they conduct a limited, they seek technical solutions and a limited strike across the Moldovan border. What are Moldovan capabilities? You know, what actually happens in that scenario? I don't know. I think Moldovan capabilities militarily are much lower than, obviously lower than Ukrainian capabilities. And I mean, Moldova also suffers from the problem that there is the prominent figure who is Saddam, who was the president before the current pro-Western president, Asundu, and Dodon was a Russian puppet. And he remains a significant figure. And there are other pro-Russian elements in Moldova.

And Moldova hasn't gone through the experience that Ukraine has since 2014, which hardened Ukraine against most of its obviously pro-Russian. elements. Moldova hasn't had that. Sandu just recently defeated Dodon a couple of years ago, and there was a really big deal because Dodon had been very overtly pro-Russian. So I think Moldova is more vulnerable politically, potentially, although the thing is, Aaron, yes, Putin was great at this. This is the other reason why we got the invasion wrong. We were like, why would he do an invasion? He's doing so well with all of this hybrid warfare. He can do it with much less. less cost and risk. But he didn't. He's done the invasion. And the thing is, you know,

it's like I'm a Calvin Hobbs fan. I don't know if I don't know if that speaks to you, but, you know, there's the one where Calvin's parents ripped their masks off and they turn out to be alien names. And Putin's done that. I mean, the problem is that, you know, if you've been gaslighting somebody and then you slip and you let it be known that you were gaslighting them and then you just attack them and then you go back to trying to gaslight them it usually doesn't work that well it takes a particularly stupid victim to fall for that again when it's so obvious what has actually happened so so there is no plausible deniability here i don't know one is no one is really arguing about whether these are false flag attacks or not. So he's not going to have that.

But I'm concerned that even without that, he may be able to destabilize the political situation and maybe even the security situation in Moldova to the point where it becomes, first of all, another country victimized by Putin. And that's something, there's a whole bunch of interest mentality here, which is important, but I don't want to lose sight of the fact that Moldova is a sovereign independent state that deserves not to be dragged into this war, destabilized by Putin aggression. But beyond that, of course, it would then be a significant distraction for NATO and particularly for Romania that Putin would try to hope to take advantage of in some way.

Yeah. I mean, in some ways, it is the signal failure of Putin in Ukraine thus far goes back to 2014 and goes back to what precedes the 2014. operation or invasion and annexation, right, which is the failure of pro-Russian political actors in Ukraine. And then with 2014, the beginning of a longstanding souring of Ukrainian attitudes towards Russia, which wasn't even a complete process. He's now made it complete, of course, with this invasion, such that, you know, the military

option, sort of the main force option was really the only option he had left for achieving his goals, at least in any kind of, you know, relatively short. time horizon. So even even the resort to force is a kind of if you're playing at the most sophisticated level and you know you really do want to achieve these political objectives, the resort to force is a kind of failure to begin with. There's a kind of mirror to what's going on in in Taiwan where you know, any Chinese military action is downstream of what will be a generational political failure to encourage, you know, pro PRC political parties and actors in Taiwan, which seems at this point to be more or less if not dead, a substantially.

dying force in Taiwanese politics. And so in Moldova, I guess, because, you know, we haven't had, we haven't had this sort of opportunity to stir up the antibodies in Moldovan politics as we've had in Ukraine. He's just got a better shot at some sort of real political destabilization there. There are a lot of antibodies, but I think before the Ukraine invasion, they had been fewer and it had been more complex. Now, I don't, I don't want to speak to Moldovan politics at this point because the Ukrainian invasionist who created antibodies around the world. But look, you're right, Aaron. The fact that Putin decided that he needed to invade was an acceptance of a failure of a generational policy,

which results from the kind of mistake that you get in a single-person autocracy. And, you know, the historian me finds it interesting to compare the Soviet approach to problem with Putin's approach to problems. And one of the characteristics of the Soviet Union is that it was an actual oligarchy. You know, we talk about Russian oligarchs. There are no oligarchs in Russia. There is Assad. And the Tsar gives favors to people and takes them away at his whim.

They don't have independent power bases. But the Politburo was an oligarchy. They did have independent power bases. Oligarchies are more conservative. There's more of an opportunity. in an oligarchy to have people challenge ideas and avoid the full, you know, tinfoil hat world that an individual with sycophants could get into. And that's, I think, what's happened with Putin.

He has been drinking his own vodka-laced Kool-Aid for 20 years. And we need to remember how the drinking of the Kool-Aid, of which this is now a metaphor, actually ended. So, well, this leads us to the issue that we can't, we can't finish this recording without addressing. And we talked about it the last time. But the threat, the threat of escalation, escalation that, you know, implicates NATO in some way, potentially.

And even if it doesn't in a direct way, might require or suggest a NATO response. So, you know, as you well know, the range of possibilities here is disconcerting and rich. You have chemical weapons. You have the possibility of tactical nuclear. weapons, you have the sort of mobilization you've been talking about. You know, what would you, you were the last time we spoke, you were quite concerned both about mobilization and about the possibility of, you know, nuclear weapons used to escalate to deescalate. It doesn't seem like things are going better for Putin now than the last time we spoke. So, you know, any updates to your assessment?

Are you still very concerned about this if there were to be a battlefield use of nuclear weapons, just to take that as a possibility to focus in on, you know, how would you speculate, they might be used and what should what would what would what would NATO in the west want to do about it if it happened well I remain very concerned about it I do think I mean the Russians have continued to put out various false flags and other conditions setting to conduct WMD strikes in Ukraine of one sort or another up to an including tactical nuclear weapons I think that if he were to use attack nuclear in Ukraine it would probably be as more of a demonstration initially than I mean, I don't think he's going to put a tack-nook on Keeve.

He could. I mean, he's insane, but I don't, I think even for him, Keeve is the objective and nuking it is not desirable. So I'm more concerned that he would put it on a town. I'm not going to start naming towns, but there are various towns in the east that I think he might undertake to make a demonstration. And he could do the same with a chemical weapon strike.

I'm less persuaded about the biological war. thing, he'd have to be a real imbecile to do that because if he has any confidence in his own military to contain a biological agent that's been released into Ukraine, he's even crazier than I think he is. What should the West do about it? Listen, I mean, I think, frankly, this is the point where the West needs to draw a clear line. And I think that we need to make it very clear to him that we will enter the war if he uses weapons of mass destruction. What does that mean? It means we have no requirement as the West to use weapons of mass destruction. So fundamentally, the first message that I would want to send him would be, listen, if you do that, we will simply bring in conventional forces and we will destroy your military in Ukraine as a start, probably also in Syria for good measure.

And then we'll see what we do after that. But we don't need to use nuclear weapons. We can destroy your military conventionally and we will. So that's where this goes for you in the first instance. Now, then we obviously get into the risk of him escalating into a nuclear war with NATO. And look, I mean, there are some first principles here. And I think Steve Rosen did a great conversation with Bill Crystal about this a while back. Look, either we think that nuclear deterrence theory, the U.S. vis-à-vis Russia works,

in which case, this is a case where that is handleable because we would not need to escalate to the point where it would be a rational choice for Putin to initiate global Armageddon. or we think that it doesn't. And if we think that nuclear deterrence theory no longer works, then we need to be having an entirely different and very fundamental and disturbing conversation on our side. But what we can't do is what some people are doing, which is saying, well, listen, I mean, if U.S. troops and Russian troops

start shooting each other, it's World War III, the implication being, you know, nuclear war and hand wave and move on. We can't do that. Now, I personally think there's good reason to think that nuclear deterrence will still work. And I think the burden of proof is on those who want to argue that we need to forget about that, decide that it won't work, and then we need to have a whole other discussion of what we're going to do here. But that's the bifurcation in all of our discussions here. I want to be respectful of your time. So last question here, but can you just spell that out a bit for me? Why can't we just, as you say, you know, hand wave in the event of a tactical nuclear weapons use in Ukraine and say, well,

you know, gosh, that sucks and we may continue to do what we can to support the Ukrainians, but, you know, fundamentally there is no obligation to respond with our direct military involvement, so we're not going to. What is the downside of that? Well, there's no obligation to respond except our national interest, which is we have to ask ourselves if we want to establish the principle that it is acceptable for a nuclear armed power to use nuclear weapons in war and suffer no significant consequences militarily. Because the Chinese will be observing that as well. And Putin will also draw lessons from that. And by the way, every other state that has nuclear weapons or is thinking about acquiring

nuclear weapons, just to throw that out there, we'll also draw conclusions about whether it should imagine that nuclear weapons use in war is a reasonable undertaking, we made this mistake already. We made this mistake with chemical weapons in Syria. And the effect of our inaction in response and insufficient action when we did act has been de facto to renormalize the use of chemical weapons in warfare. Do we really want to do that with nuclear weapons? I personally think it's important to to not do that and to not allow Putin to renormalize use of nuclear weapons as well as chemical weapons. And that's why I think we've got to do more than tut-tut and issue day marshes and a few more sanctions if he does this. And we need to be very clear with him explicitly that we would.

Fred Kagan, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Fascinating conversation. Thank you so much. Great to be with Aaron. Thanks. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.