Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/10/23 Daniel Davis on the Russian Offensive and Other Developments in Ukraine

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

Scott interviews former Lt. Col. Daniel Davis about the war in Ukraine. Davis has been closely watching the daily developments on the ground in Ukraine. He gives an update on where things stand on all the fronts, shares his interpretation of the current Russian offensive and draws on his experience in Iraq War I to illustrate the futility of the recent NATO battle tank transfer.  Discussed on the show: Davis’s author page on 1945 Eleventh Hour in 2020 America by Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis Daniel Davis did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during his time in the army. He is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities and is the author of the reports “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” and “Go Big or Go Deep: An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan.” Find him on Twitter @DanielLDavis1. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got the great daniel l davis former lieutenant colonel in the u.s army and he is the author of i had it right in front of me a second ago the eleventh hour in 2020 america which is really good. And he's been writing up a storm over at 1945.com.

And, well, you know, part of his background, I think a lot of y'all know this, Danny Davis, H.R. McMaster, and Douglas McGregor were all together in the big tank battle of 73 Easting in Iraq War I. And which was sort of, you know,

all these guys' dream come true that they got to fight a, land tank battle with somebody finally. And McGregor was in charge, but he's a naysayer, so he stayed a colonel. And McMaster is a politician. And so he became a general, a national security visor. And Lieutenant Colonel Davis was not just in Iraq War I, but he also went to Iraq War II and Afghanistan, where I hope you all know. And if you don't know this, you really should look into it. he was the heroic whistleblower of 2012 at the end of the surge came forward and said Petraeus is a liar the war is lost and we'll go down in world history for his heroics there but so the reason I have you on the show though is your expertise as a tank battler but also just overall in all of your great opinions and takes that you have on the war going on in Ukraine right now so I Welcome back to the show, Danny. How are you, sir?

I'm doing really good, Scott. Always a pleasure to be here with you. Cool, man. Happy to have here. So the big news is that this long planned and predicted by you and others, Russian escalation has begun. If I have it right, sir, when in mid-September, the Ukrainian forces did that faint and took, I guess, all of Harkiv and a bit of northern. in La Hansk there, that then Putin reacted to that by calling up 300,000 reservists.

And then I guess that meant transferring the regular army from their other positions around the country to the front for the reservists to take their spot. And I'm sure some of the reservists going to the front too. And then the idea was they were going to build up and build up and build up and then it's going to come the hammer blow. And you've been writing about, well, they might go this way, they might go that way. etc. like that. But I believe, you know, the first reports coming in now from the Kagan's over the, at the Institute for having wars and over at Reuters, they're saying that the invasion has

begun, the re-invasion, the doubling down by Russian forces has begun in LaHansk and Donets. Is that your understanding as well, sir? I mean, certainly that's what it appears to be, though I don't think yet this is the big hammer. I think that this is basically the stage setter because I still think that there's a larger hit to come. But it is unquestionable that the Russian forces have moved to the offensive in the Donbos, really almost all along the line of contact, which covers large forces of over 1,000 kilometers of front. And they've gone on the offensive all over the place. my guess is that what they're doing right now is doing a lot of reconnaissance by force where

they're finding out where the lines are strong and where the lines are weak because it's impossible to have a continual line of defense over a thousand kilometers. It's equally strong everywhere. So I think that once they find one, possibly two weak points in the line, then you may see the diversion of large strike forces trying to punch a hole in either one of those to get into the Ukrainian rear. That's what I would do. And that certainly seems what they're set up to do. But it remains to be seen because it's also at least a possibility that they're just going to go to some of the old Soviet doctrine of just slugging away, going right into the teeth of defense and just, you know, chewing everything up. That's a possibility. But I get the feeling that

they're going to try to do some maneuver warfare along the flanks or in the weak points of the Ukraine. that's that's where ukraine would be the most vulnerable and just go without saying that if he wants to go through belarus and kind of try to swing around kiev that he'll be able to do that or it that's certainly possible they do have reportedly quite a number of troops up in there but because uh ukraine has recognized that risk now they've been spending months uh building elaborate and and echelon defenses up at the border and all the way back into the country and certainly multiple points around Kiev. From what I've seen publicly discussed by the Ukrainian authorities,

they appear to have a pretty solid defense system in system in depth set up to defend Kiev. So I think that they're pretty good there, at least for the moment. But that comes at a price because if you have that much force structure and that many troops that are guarding your capital, which is reasonable, that means you're going to have less down in the areas along the front toward the you know the heart of where Russian forces are going to be coming from and that's a tradeoff I think they have to make because look the bottom line is regardless of what we've given or promised to give Ukraine they have limited forces

and they just can't do everything everywhere and they have to take choice make choices and make take risk and I think that Russia is ready to exploit that risk so I wouldn't expect them to launch first into the into the areas coming from Belarus because that's kind of what Ukraine is expecting. And so they have strong defenses there. I think they'll rather posture there and then come in south to the weaker spots and then see what happens. Because if Ukraine then moves forces to reinforce the penetrations, you know, because they want to try to stop the Russians from going too deep into the rear, they may pull forces off there. And then if they weaken that to some certain degree, and certainly the Russian

and intelligence services would be watching very, very closely. And if that gets to a certain level, then they may launch forth from there against a weakened defense. So it's just going to be a real difficult time for the Ukraine side right now, to be frank. Yeah, it sounds like it. So how outmanned are they? Because it is Ukrainian soil, after all. They are the home team, so they have an advantage in terms of manpower there. Obviously, Russia's a bigger country.

But is this $300,000 makes the difference completely or what? You know, the problem is that, and it's not been reported much in the Western press, unfortunately, so people don't have a complete picture, but the Ukrainian side are on what's reported to be their fourth round of mobilization in the war here, whereas Russia's basically on their second, if you want to look at what they did earlier in the war. but the problem is you know you had somewhere between nine and ten million people leave the country and those certainly weren't all women and children and you are now left with a lot smaller pool from which to draw people and of course you start with the ones that have any kind of experience and those are the ones that have gone in the first three rounds now that you're just taking anybody who can walk and those are reportedly some really young kids as ladies as young as 16 and 17 and old

in the 50s because they're just getting everybody and they're literally grabbing them off the streets because they just can't get enough. They tried to mobilize $200,000 in this current mobilization here because of the extraordinary numbers of casualties they've lost in the Donetsk region, especially in the Silidar and the Bokhmut fights, which have just been, you know, everybody's understanding they're the meat grinder fight battles. And even though most in the West want to talk about the Russian. casualties, and certainly they have been substantial. My estimate is based on all the reports

I get from both sides and just the understanding of how the firepower imbound still favors substantially the Russian side, at least two to one and sometimes five to one, depending on where on the front you're looking. The casualties that the Ukraine side are suffering have been enormous, and that leaves a lot fewer of their train forces, which they have reportedly kept in reserve for the this coming offensive. So they do have some punch, but the question is how much and who has more? Right now, even the ISW, which as you pointed out, is not exactly the most balanced organization I've seen out there, even they're conceding that the Ukrainian side is now under manned, which was not the case up through, I think into September even. Ukraine actually

through the summer had a manpower advantage over the Russian side. And certainly with a lot of the gear and the ammunition they'd gotten from the West. They actually had an advantage, not just on the home tariff, not just the fact that they had spent eight years building defenses, but they also had a manpower advantage. That's been knocked down considerably because they've lost so many. They have a lot fewer to bring on, and the Russians, as you pointed out, have literally millions more military age males from which to draw. So right now, that shift is back in the direction of Russia. They now have an increasing firepower advantage because they, in September, also mobilized their industry. And now then those things are starting to really crank out and put out the product.

And those numbers are only going to go up. You're going to get more ammunition. You're going to get more drones, more tanks. I mean, literally every kind of war material you can imagine is starting to just roll off the assembly lines right now in Russia. And that's having the ironic process of helping keep their economy from being damaged by all the sanctions that we put on it because they've added so many jobs in the defense industry ironically uh so that's perversely you know working against our interest as well i mean right now everything is starting to trend in the russian side and it's just going to be almost impossible for me to see how this works out good for the ukrainean now i mean i'm not watching every telegram channel and trying to keep up on every

you know move of the different forces around the different towns in the east and all this stuff so you know I'm getting it much more secondary kind of hand information from you and from Reuters and these kinds of things, which, you know, that's just the British, you know, government anyway, isn't it? But the thing of it is, you know, it's hard to make sense of, for example, the way that they claim the casualty numbers on the Russian side. You know, I read a thing about that catastrophe, which was, I think, last May for the Russian troops when they were trying to cross that river and they were all bunched up on the. bank and the Americans help the Ukrainians just obliterate them, right? And it was high hundreds of casualties, like 800 or 600 or something were killed right then and there. But then when I read the press, they talk as though the Russians face a disaster like that approximately every single day, right? Like I read a tweet last night that said, oh, the Russians are pouring in their forces. We killed

950 of them. And I thought, well, yeah, I mean, I guess that's possible, right? If they got some really good hits on some Russian forces bunched up somewhere. But that sounds like a hell of a thing for them to just do every day. But usually it's just the grind of the war rather than one really big, lucky strike on a barracks or on a big meeting or a bunch of guys all bunched up trying to cross a river together or something like that. So I know that they're exaggerating, but I just wonder, you know, how badly are they exaggerating? I know that it's a hell of a war, this artillery war, it's not like a bunch of guys, you know, patrol and poshtuns in Pactica, you know, where they got a couple of homemade landmines and then run and hide.

This is a serious ass fight over there between, you know, artillery pieces, mostly, right? Right. Yeah, yeah. And certainly the tanks are in there, too. And, I mean, it's a complete combined arms operation. I mean, everything is in play. And, and I, my honest assessment, now I'm not on the ground there. I certainly can't say with any absolute authority, but all the evidence to me suggest that these claims are just nonsense. And here's the reason I say that, because

I mean, all the way, you can go all the way back to beginning in December and all the way through, you know, these tweets you're citing yesterday, is that I keep seeing these claims that you know, Ukraine general staff reports that a thousand Russians were killed just in the last 24 hours

or 3,000 in the last three days or 700 and, you know, et cetera. And I'm like, where are all of these troops coming from? I mean, they would be losing literally, you know, 20, 30,000 a month. And I don't see any evidence of that. And then you have to ask the question, if even by the Western analysis, analysts admit that, you know, Russia is having anywhere from a 20,000 to 7,000 to 8,000 advantage in artillery per day. And if the Russians are allegedly losing this many troops, then you would have to say just mathematically, that the Ukraine side would have to be losing, you know, 2,000 per day, 3,000 per day,

if the same, you know, artillery is causing the same kind of casualties is when it's triple the number, quadruple the number on the other side. And that doesn't sound right either, right? No, no, absolutely not. For sure it's not. But the thing that you also see methodically, since that Karkew operation in September that you referenced, they pushed Russia all the way back to this place called the Svatovokrimanina line in the northeast.

And that's pretty much where they stopped in October. And that's where the line has stayed since then. Russia stabilized the line since that time. And then they started going on the offensive again, maybe in the middle of December, in tactical locations, especially in the Solidar Bakwuts-Zvarsk area. And now that you see that even, in the Kramina area,

the Spadivoreau area, in addition to they now, they took Celadar, they have Bachmout, like 75% surrounded.

They're making significant gains and subversed. Now then they're taking more operations and moving the line further to the west down in the Advivka area

and even making some lower, some small skirmishes in the Zapparisia area. And literally everywhere you look, Russia's on the offensive. And you have to ask yourself the question. If Russia's losing 500 to 1,000 every day, how in the world are they maintaining this operational push relentlessly? And look,

there are no reverses here. There hadn't been any reverses since October. I mean, if Ukraine's had any success on small-scale counterattacks, they've gone back to their original places. But all the rest of them have been backwards. So it just doesn't add up that Russia is losing this massive amount of Ukraine's not. Otherwise, Otherwise, you don't, it doesn't make any sense that the lines keep moving west. Yeah. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them.

World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them. You need to put some at least into precious metals. Well, Roberts and Roberts can set you up with the best deals on silver,

platinum and palladium, and they've been doing this since 1977. Hey, if you just need some sound advice about sound money, they're there for you, too. Call Tim Fry and the guys at 800-874-9760. That's 800-874-9760, or check them out at r-rbi.co. That's r-rbi.com. You'll be glad you did. All right, now, so I don't want to spend too much time on Iraq War I, but I am interested in this big tank battle of 73 Easting, and I believe

you've written before and the consensus is, is this correct, that if it had not been for the brilliance of then what, Lieutenant Colonel McGregor, things might have gone the other way, that it's not just that the Americans' tanks were so much better than the Soviet tanks of the Iraqis, it's that you guys had superior training and leadership. But if the Iraqi side had had superior training and leadership, they would have whooped you, even with possibly inferior equipment. That's what it really comes down to is how prepared you are for a fight like this. And then, so talk about that, but then also translate that to the situation in Ukraine. They say, I mean, Ukraine has thousands of tanks sitting in a shed somewhere anyway, right? But we're

going to pour in a few dozens of these are those German and American tanks, and these are going to make the difference somehow. So first talk about Iraq War I. Did I get that right? And then on to the east here. Yeah. What I've actually written just recently was that if you, if you, at the last minute, just reversed the sides and said, okay, all the Iraqis come out, you can take the American tanks and all the Americans, you can go and take the Iraqi tanks, and then we'll continue the fight. Then even then we still would have won. That's what I was trying to paraphrase, but I screwed it all up. But thank you. Yeah, it is close. But the issue is, I mean, let's first of all just look at the technology without question. An M1 at that time, A1 is much,

much better than a T-72. Just, you know, if you're just looking at the capacities and the defensibility and the firepower, et cetera, M1A1 is a better tank, period. But it absolutely matters who's behind the controls. For example, in that fight, there were quite a lot of reports, not just in our unit, but across the theater of Bradley fighting vehicles, our infantry fighting vehicles, taking out T-55 and T-72 tanks sometimes with their firepower, and that's how we were able to inflict so high casualties. And look, that should never have happened. Those, even the T-55 tanks, any T-55 tank can take out any Bradley is, no matter how modern it is, because it's an infantry fighting vehicle. And the armor is not powerful enough to resist a

105 or a 120 millimeter tank round it'll go right through it and blow up and hardly any of that happened because the Iraqis were terribly trained I mean they were terrible gunners they couldn't hit the broadside of a barn they fired a bunch of rounds at our units and just missed I mean one of my good friends who was a platoon leader in a Bradley unit they a tank fired at him and just missed

and gave him time to raise his toe launcher missile and take the tank out because it takes at least 10 seconds to cycle the next round, he had time to raise his toe launcher and fire. If it was just a decent gunner, my friend would not have survived that day. He certainly wouldn't have done the same in return. That translates into what's happening here because the issue is all of these great tanks were sent in. Too many people, Scott, conflate the presence of NATO military gear with the presence of NATO military capacity, meaning, hey, since the M-1s in Desert Storm, you know, burn through the T-72s, put them in Iraq and in Ukraine, and they're going to burn

through the Russian T-72s or the challengers and the, what was it, the Laipart 2s, etc., or the AMX-10 from France, you know, all these vehicles, you're like, these are NATO stuff, man, they'll just burn through all those. And if you just have like a duel between them, that's entirely possible. But the problem is that you are asking people who have never even seen these vehicles to try and get trained on them in a matter of weeks and then used them the same way that it takes a military, a NATO or a U.S. in particular armored unit, I mean, like years to prepare for. It's not just that, you know, you learn how to pull the trigger and learn how to drive the thing and bam, go into combat. It's not like that. You have to do a whole lot more than that.

And like, for example, when we went to Desert Storm, okay, we had been training for well over a year to defend the east-west border in eastern-west Germany at the time and we were physically at one of these training events when Saddam invaded Kuwait and then we shifted everything from that moment forward that was August 1990

we trained like crazy before we were deployed in December of that year and then even more intensely once we got on the ground from December to February before we crossed. So you're talking almost six months of intense training before we crossed the line of departure with all of our stuff, all the six,

systems we have in place, all the logistics, all the maintenance, all the medical support. I mean, everything you can imagine of a whole system, everything together, working towards common purpose. Now, you are now asking the Ukraine side to say, okay, you're not going to have a common military state. It's not just tanks and bradley's. It's Abrams, Bradley's, martyrs, AMX-10s, challengers, leopards, leopards one, leopards twos, and the stuff that they already have. this incredible mix match of equipment that there are no systems for with any of the Western stuff. And so you've got to try and figure out how to operate these things and then make them work together in a combined arms operation for an offensive that you've never done.

I mean, the closest you can come is that Kharkiv move. And that was more of a race than it was an offense because Russians reportedly only had a few thousand people up there. That's why they got routed so easily, but they, anywhere that Ukraine has fought Russia where they resisted and they have fought tough, Ukraine has not won a single battle in a year. That's telling and that to never get talked about in the West. So to expect that to radically turn around now with no chance to train, and I'm talking like a maximum minimum of six months, and preferably a year, I just don't see how they can be successful with this gear no matter how good it is. yeah man so i mean to zoom out a little bit to the politics of this thing um you know and i know

that's not your job colonel but kind of it seems like and as we talked about then when milly was saying hey hey hey you took curse on city back we should talk right now that was at the beginning of november he was essentially saying let's quit while you're only this far behind and not further behind. And then they said, no, forget that. We want to keep fighting. But, well, and certainly, you know, I don't know how equivalent this is to like, oh, you know, Karzai and Gandhi want to keep fighting. Like, you know, I don't know. I know that there are certainly factions in Ukraine who support the president's policy there of keeping the war going. I don't know how dominant they are or what, but certainly the state wants to keep fighting there. And,

And certainly the state there is sort of a Karzai puppet-style Potemkin regime. It's not exactly the same as in Afghanistan, but there's strong degrees of that anyway, post-2014 coup there and with all the U.S. government support for them. So, I just, I mean, it sounds like what you're saying is this whole thing is just maybe it's a matter of tempo, but the thing is just sliding downhill for Ukraine. they're just going to lose more, more men and more and more territory and, you know, lose at least two, probably all four of those oblasts at the end of the day anyway, right? Right.

That's my concern is that just fundamentally, it's just almost impossible. I mean, nothing's fully impossible. You know, the impossible does periodically happen in human affairs because people are involved. But it's just, I just can't tell you how high the hurdle would be for Ukraine to reverse this stuff. And it would have to be reversed, not just stopped. And I think it was really telling because Millie in December outright said, I see no path, or maybe it was even early January. So it wasn't long ago. I see no military path for Ukraine to drive Russia out of its country in the entire year of 2023.

And now he tried to caveat that right after, say, but, you know, hey, maybe they're going to fight or whatever. But, you know, if people are thinking they're going to win, I just don't see it. Now, the fact that he said that in light of what the entire rest of the government of the U.S. is saying, that should be really telling that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Staff, who you know, I have a lot of questions about some of his decisions and other things he's done in the past. I'm right with him on this one and impressed that he was willing to say that and take the risk on that publicly. Is it fair to say that he's speaking for the rest of the chiefs too when he says that? You should be.

Yeah. And that's the way it's supposed to be. But I cannot imagine any general officer who knows the reality would think anything different. So this goes back to the question of the casualties, right? Because there's this whole mythology here that the Russians are just completely getting their asses kicked. Everything is going as planned. If John McCain was here, he'd be whooping every day. This is going great.

And there's an analogy to Afghanistan right there. What do you mean the government and the army that we built can't. stand for one day without our support you know like but but you guys made all these promises but it's only the people who believe them uh but so it sounds like there may be a very rude awakening coming soon where you know the um where the possibly the ukrainian military will simply be broken i mean i don't know well i mean that again i'm not on the ground i haven't been able to see any of stuff firsthand but just for my assessment and knowledge of military affairs and understanding of how combat power is built, it just does not seem like

it's a rational position at all to suggest that Ukraine is going to be able to reverse this. And the higher likelihood is that they're going to end up broken and continue to get driven back in this offensive. I mean, after all, though, go back one year ago, the plan was always for Ukraine to lose. Nobody thought that they were going to do this well at all. The fact that their military is still a military and not. a you know Mujahideen insurgent force based out of the far west or based out of Poland that's the unique invention here the plan always was that we're going to do like Rambo

and back an insurgency after Russia destroys the military so in other words from their point of you hey we're a year ahead of schedule we've been doing far more damage to the Russians than the insurgency could have done this whole year and if the military breaks now well great we'll just go right back to plan A you know the ironic part was, though, if they had done that, I mean, that, you know, that would have been, you know, I guess what do they call it, death by 1,000 cuts to Russia because, you know, an insurgency is going to cause sabotage and, you know, a hit and run tax. It's like the Taliban did, et cetera. But the casualties for the Ukrainian side would have been astronomically smaller than what it has turned out. Because they didn't do what you call plan A there, they've gone with the conventional military path. And there, I mean, I think the most, you know, moderate casually count for the Ukraine side that the U.S. has ever admitted to has been around 100,000. I think absolutely minimum. It's triple that killed and wounded. I can't imagine it being any less. And that's what grieves me and drives me in all of this so much is that I see

so many thousands of people paying with their lives and so many cities just getting raised to the ground unnecessarily because I just don't think that the end is going to be changed by all this sacrifice, and we could have at least, you know, cut this off a long time ago and minimized the damage and at least allowed more people to live and begin to start to rebuild their country. And instead, the destruction is still not over. Yeah, it's terrible. All right, now, I'm sorry, just to clarify one last thing here. The whole point of the winter escalation is that the ground is frozen all the way solid. So yes, snow and ice is a pain, but mud is worse. And now the mud is completely frozen for the first, you know, few inches of the top soil or whatever,

which makes it easier for them to drive their trucks and tanks around off road and not have to stick to, you know, driving through every small town up and down every roadway in the country and that kind of thing, like in a Rock War II, where they just went around the towns, just drove through the desert and hooked around to Baghdad. So that's the difference. But then if that's correct and then if that's right then why'd they wait until the the beginning of February here isn't that pretty late to start it's going to start thawing out in another month yeah it may but there's two reasons why number one they needed time to get their troops trained up to an adequate level doesn't do any good to to throw them into the

fight you know as soon as the ground freezes if they're not fully trained because then their chances of success are lower and and even waiting later with some disadvantage on the ground, it's improved if your training level is higher. That's one thing. But the second thing is that it's actually been a very mild and unusually mild winter so far in Ukraine. And only within the last two weeks has the ground really frozen to where it's sustained on a frozen because it was kind of frozen, then it would melt, frozen, melt, et cetera.

So it remained really muddy. But now then it's for the most part frozen now. And then that gave them, you know, maybe a full month additional training for the, for the Russian side and an additional opportunity to stock up on all the ammunition that they're going to need and other tools of war. So now that they're in a lot stronger position and, but, yeah, I mean, the spring is coming and it's apparently not going to be, you know, as much of a frozen period of time as it normally is. And that does limit your opportunities. Yeah. All right. Well, just to wrap up here, and I'm sorry we're a little over time, but I mean, there are reports.

that i don't know if this is true or not or i don't know i i still i forgot to get around to read the washington post version of this only read the little newsweek version it was kind of thin but supposedly the cia director offered you know 20 percent supposedly which i don't know if that means all four provinces or just two there in the east or what it was but apparently ukraine and in russia both turned that down but at least that's some indication oh there's another thing that came out today where a Biden official said that they'd be willing to entertain the president of Brazil, Lula, to intervene as a negotiator. And we're staking out this hard position, but we will allow for Lula to get in here. So there's some indications of a possible

diplomatic solution when, I mean, it doesn't look like, well, I mean, again, even if they, if the Russians smash the Ukrainian military, they'll still have a tough insurgency on their So it would benefit both sides and all sides. Neither side really seems like they want to quit right now, but it's really in both sides' interest to quit right now if they can. You know what I mean? It seems like before the Russians, you know, lose more men trying to bite all this off. And before the Ukrainians lose even more.

I mean, they continue along this path. They might end up losing Odessa. Right, right. Yeah, and that's exactly what I've been arguing for a long time is that, you know, people who say, oh, the Russians, they don't have any. incentive to make a negotiation. They won't live by it. No, they do. They have motivation to get this cut off, maybe almost as much as the Ukraine side does, as evidenced by the fact that the Russians were willing to make a deal. Last April, actually March 29, to be specific in

Istanbul meetings, and only when we sabotage that, allegedly, or reporting, according to many reports, did that go away? And then the Russia, okay, fine, we'll win on the battlefield, what we can't get in negotiation since you won't even talk. And now then the prices for negotiations are going to be higher because Russia has gained more since that time. And depending on what happens in this current round here, they may have even more. So the longer that the Ukraine side waits to negotiate, the less they're going to end up with, which is what I've been saying since last March. And we're lining up to be just that way. Yeah.

All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show and all your great expertise, Danny. Always my pleasure, Scott. Thank you guys. That's the great Daniel L. Davis. retired lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Army, and you can find his writing at 1945. It's the number of 19 and then spelled out 45, but, you know, if you just Google it, it'll come right up. And the book is the 11th hour in 2020 America, which is really great. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.

APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute. Institute.org.