The Meaning of Creeping Ukrainian Losses in the East
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You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the CEO and founder of War on the Rocks. And I'm sitting here with Mike Kaufman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And of course, we're going to be talking about the war in Ukraine. Thanks so much for sitting down with me, Mike. Happy to be back, Dr. Ryan. So let's do an update on the state of the front.

Let's start in the Donbass, where I know Ukraine has actually lost some valuable territory and what that means. Sure. So I think last couple of months we've probably been using and abusing the word dynamic to describe the situation at the front. Happy to look for synonyms like fluid, but suffice it to say that it's been a changing situation week by week.

So if we start in Donetsk, the Russian military has been pushing Ukrainian forces, steadily pressing them out of positions from Vugudar to Prokofsk. A couple weeks ago, they started focusing much more on the area south of Prokofsk. This is around Kurohovo and Vugudar. I think that town, Vugudar, is likely to fall fairly soon. And they've created a number of pockets or cauldrons, if you like,

And they're steadily pressing Ukrainian forces out of this area. They've settled in outside of Prokhorovsk. Prokhorovsk is now well within artillery range and artillery is hitting the eastern half of the city. And that has been a significant transit hub, although that value is now very degraded. That's right. I think its military value will steadily decrease. But I think we are going to see a siege of Prokhorovsk as we have seen play out for a

And I think more than likely, Prokofiev will end up being destroyed in that siege, given the way Russia is likely to prosecute it. At this point, Russian forces are trying to flank south of Prokofiev. That's how the last several weeks have unfolded. So they've been pushing to towns like Ukrains and Syriza.

the city of Lvov and basically trying to go around the city to the south. But I'm sure at a certain point, we're going to see them down both a direct assault and a partial involvement. They've also made gains steadily in Taratsk. This is the small city northeast of Prokhorovsk, sort of on your way up to Chalsevyar. If you look at the map, they're sort of inching their way towards Kostantinovka and have been

have made some progress just northwest of Chesivyar crossing the canal, although not pushing very hard there. And then maybe the last area Russian forces are advancing is far northeast by the Oskil River. This is essentially this buffer area or beachhead that Ukrainian forces hold east of the river between Kharkiv and Luhansk Oblast. And Russian forces have been steadily pushing through the river and have effectively bisected the territory that Ukrainian military controls.

What does that mean? What it means in practice is that they're slowly trying to get to Kupyansk. Kupyansk is a city right on the river, and they're essentially trying to, at least from my point of view, press Ukrainian forces out of all the positions east of the river, perhaps have the river be a natural boundary, then eventually try to get back to Izum, Liman, these areas they were pushed out of during the Kharkov 22 offensive.

So if Pokrovsk is taken eventually by Russia, and if they're able to push Ukrainian forces over the river in that little pocket that you discussed, how much of the Donbass will Russia control? If they take Pokrovsk, it effectively gives them all or most of Luhansk, I mean, up in the northeast. And then as far as Donetsk goes, it gives them a large part of Donetsk. But in order to really control Donetsk, they still need to take Kramatorsk, Slavyansk, and that could take them quite a few months. I mean, they are advancing fairly slowly.

And beyond Pokrovsk, a lot depends on whether the Russian military is exhausted at that point or not, because they could push further west now from the Donbass, further west into Dnipro region, potentially, or they could head north from Pokrovsk as well. It all depends on kind of what's left in the Russian military. And what's happening around Kharkiv? Around Kharkiv, actually, Ukrainian forces have made some gains, steadily pushing back Russian units in the town of Ovchansk.

Part of the reason for that is the Russian military had to pull some units out of those areas, that small buffer that they tried to capture back in May-June, in order to reinforce the salient around Kursk, right? The areas they primarily pulled, one was Kharkov, another one was Zaporizhia-Kursan, while keeping the bulk of their forces still trying to advance in Pokrovsk, Turetsk, and Chosovyar area.

Kursk actually has become a fairly fluid situation as well over the last couple of weeks. Russian forces mounted a counterattack. It wasn't particularly a large one, but... How many forces would you say Ukraine roughly still has in Kursk, which is in Russian territory, of course? This is just a kind of back-of-the-envelope calculation, but I would guess somewhere between 30 to 40 battalions, if you include supporting elements, things like artillery battalions, drone units, what have you. And...

And you're still looking at parts of a whole bunch of different brigades as an organized task grouping. The Russian military force is at least comparable to that, probably a bit larger, if you count all that's involved. And most recently, they had attacked a couple weeks ago, took back some of the salient that Ukraine forces controlled in the northwestern part of that area by doing what Russian military has been doing for a while now, which is

trying to find brigades that are weaker, for example, territorial defense units or brigades that they know are depleted and exhausted, and basically focusing the attack on them and trying to take advantage whenever Ukrainian units rotate or if they see any weakness on the lines or seams between areas of control, between battalions and brigades, right? They made a dent there, and then Ukrainian forces attacked from across the border towards the Glushkovo region, and they're contesting a part of that as well. So basically, the Kursk area is...

seem to have solidified, become static for a while. But in the last two weeks, things have been changing there. And I think it's going to go fitfully like this in terms of the coming months. Russia is definitely counterattacked, as you noted, but it is not a major commitment.

It seems like Russia is at least content for Ukraine to hold large parts of what they've taken in Kursk. Yeah, they're not prioritizing it. So it hasn't really succeeded as a major draw on Russian resources from other places in the front. Because, you know, you mentioned the number of battalions. These are probably understrength battalions. So on each side, we're probably talking more about like

maybe 20 to 30,000 people fighting over this part of the front. Does that sound fair to you? Yeah, that's probably pretty fair. Maybe a bit more on the Russian side, but on the whole, I think that's a reasonable order of numbers. So a fair number of people in the context of this war, but just for people that don't follow the war as closely at home,

What is the sort of rough total sizes of the Russian Armed Forces and Ukrainian Armed Forces right now? So I think the estimates range several hundred thousand on both sides along the front and then more in support. I think Ukrainians typically count maybe even upwards of 500,000, although I think this is an overestimate because you're counting even the Russian border areas and a lot of supporting units. But probably on the Russian side, you have a couple hundred thousand troops involved and much the same on the Ukrainian side. I

I suspect the Ukrainian military hoped to divert a much larger number of Russian troops than they ultimately did. And I think everyone now recognizes, including Ukrainian leadership, that that hasn't happened. So Kursk could be interpreted so far as a tactical success in terms of how the operation went. And operationally, I don't think it was all that successful in achieving for them what they wanted, at least not yet. From a political point of view, it's quite debatable. In fact, we're recording this on Thursday,

And one of those questions will be answered probably by the end of the day, which is, can Ukraine convert what happened in Kursk or some kind of political gains in getting certain things that they would like in policy changes? Namely, long-range strikes with U.S. weapons into Russian territory. That's right. Which I'm sure is on the agenda as it'll probably be in the news by these episode drops when Zelensky meets with Biden. Right.

That's right. They also want a host of other capabilities. They want to discuss material support, future supplemental, what have you. So I think one of their questions is,

To what extent has Kursk changed perceptions of how the war's been going? And the perception has been quite negative over the past year. And what could they convert that into fairly late in this administration's term? Let's talk about the South before we go on to some larger thematic issues. If you look across the South, I think that there hasn't been that much activity in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, at least not too much. That's interesting. Some fighting on the river along the islands. More recently, Russia had struck a grain

grain ship coming out of a Ukrainian port. So first time that's happened in a little while. Yes. First time that's happened in quite a while. They seem to have struck it with a Kh-22 anti-ship missile. And it's not clear why, why they specifically struck that ship and whether the tacit agreement or understanding between Russia and Ukraine allowing commercial export shipping in the Black Sea that is not attacking it, is that going to break down?

Why did the strike happen specifically? It's very hard to judge these things because it could be some kind of signal from Russia that could just be them fucking with them or maybe they thought something was on that ship besides grain. It's very hard for us to know. Yeah, and it's always hard to tell from a single isolated incident exactly what you're looking at. Is that going to be a pattern of a new type of behavior or not? Beyond that, I mean, you've seen...

Also, the expanded strike campaigns by both sides. Russia had stockpiled missiles and drones over the summer in order to conduct larger attacks on Ukrainian critical infrastructure, and they become a lot more sophisticated. They are primarily focused on fragmenting the Ukrainian grid that is affecting Ukraine's ability to distribute power across it because they know that now much of Ukraine's power, what's left is going to be nuclear generated, right? That's come from nuclear power plants.

Russia's not going to strike nuclear power plants. So far. So far, that's my impression of it. But they are going to strike transformers and substations and all sorts of other things that allow Ukraine to actually transport this power. And so I think that's probably one of the biggest challenges going into the winter is what will be the impact on the Ukraine economy, on the Ukrainian population, to what extent Ukraine will be able to supply power to major cities and the front line, and then what happens to all the folks in between.

That's, you know, yet an untold story. And also Ukraine's expanded strike in Russia, primarily with drones, but also certain types of ground launch cruise missiles. Going after weapons depots, energy infrastructure. That's right. And those weapons depots could have some effects. They actually could at least slow down Russian forces for a while in terms of ammunition availability, force them to reorganize. It could buy Ukraine time. But those strikes have gotten larger because Ukrainian production of drones, I've been talking about this, I think the better part of the year is increasing and increasing and increasing. And

And so Ukraine... Yeah, beyond these FPV drones, more longer and mid-range. That's right. Longer range, more sophisticated in terms of guidance system, better payload. And even though Russian air defense does tend to shoot down quite a few of these, depending on the target, right? People always see sort of five, six drones get through. They forget that's probably a small percentage of what was ultimately launched. Nonetheless, those strikes can be quite effective. And if Ukraine can expand them, it could over time inflict pretty significant costs on Russia.

Yeah, and there's been a lot of innovation, some of which are being reported, about drones that can navigate without GPS, without direct communication. There was a story in this last week. It's hard to know how much... It's a Y Combinator company. It's hard to know how much it's real yet, but there's a lot of interesting things that would prevent Russia from jamming these. That'll cut both ways eventually. There was a good story. I think it was on the war zone. I think it's quite accurate. Some weeks back on...

why the Russian military puts tires on top of its 295 strategic bombers, which looks incredibly odd and silly, from satellite into any observer, and the answer is straightforward. Because while that may look very silly, it's clearly meant to affect an AI-aided, machine-learning-based system.

guidance system that is object and scene matching. Yeah, computer vision. That's right. When you mentioned non-GPS-based guidance, if you look at some of the things Russians are doing, at least they seem pretty rudimentary and primitive, but they're clearly trying to address something, and it's definitely not GPS-based guidance if you look at the counters they're deploying. So it gives you a bit of a suggestion that maybe some of these long-range strike drones

are actually employing various forms of scene matching, terrain matching, and most importantly, object matching visually using an algorithm. And the reason you would do that is because algorithms can be fooled if they see something that they don't expect fairly easily, unlike humans. Mike, just to take a break from our conversation, you had Mick Ryan, retired Australian general, one of my favorite military writers on the Russia contingency. I'd like to play a quick clip from that show.

Somehow, I am skeptical. I am skeptical. No matter how many times I hear the slogan from certain Western countries, there are no restrictions on our weapons. Oh, yeah. Well, how come I've not seen any of your weapons then used to strike anywhere in Russia, if that's the case? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's no such thing as there's no rules. There's rules. There's always rules in war. Well, at least for us, as there should be. If we do allow them to do this, which we should, this

This isn't an escalation. This is just catching up with what Russia's been doing for 32 years. So, you know, for the escalation fetishes out there, yes, we should consider this, but this is not in any way an escalation, just as giving them tanks or air defence or towed artillery was not an escalation. This is playing catch up for what Russia's been doing.

Really great episode, Mike, and I really recommend it to everyone. You can listen to this episode and more from the War on the Rocks membership by joining War on the Rocks Platinum at warontherocks.com slash membership. So let's get back to our conversation. It seems to me that the most important thing going on on the front, at least, are these losses in Donbass, this sort of steady loss of territory to Russian forces. And I

I'd like to hear from you on what this says about Ukraine's mobilization efforts. Sure. So on the one hand, Ukraine has been significantly increasing the quantity of personnel. But there's substantial lag time between when they get these people and they can actually train them and do something with them. I think there are issues in quality because there's been a lot of public reporting coming out that ultimately a lot of these folks are older, they're not as motivated.

So you're maybe replacing quantity but not quality, and that affects the force. Russian military has had the same problem since 2022. Ukraine has absorption issues, right? They're working on reforming the actual training system.

basic training specialization tends to be done ukraine collective training tends to be done more in the west west is also looking to work with them to see if they could expand and help them address that problem trying to work out a lot of training pipeline issues yeah that's right but the truth is that both us and ukraine right now are doing things that we really should have started doing in 2022 and addressing the structural issues in terms of manpower the training pipeline what have you i

I think that Ukraine's naturally trying to split personnel between replacing losses at the front and new brigades that they're trying to generate as well so they can rotate units. But

But the core problem at the front line right now is manpower first, both a deficit of infantry, personnel being relatively exhausted and tired, sustained Russian pressure. Yes, Russian military is taking very large losses over the course of the last year's advances, but you can see that Ukrainian lines are creaking, right? These are undermanned, tired units. Yes, these are buckling lines, and the Russian military is steadily pressing. No, they've not had an operationally significant breakthrough. And no, I don't think if they take Prokofiev in

In and of itself, that's going to be a major strategic event, although Pokrovsk is fairly significant, both in terms of what the city is and because of the implications. What I found interesting is that a lot of folks, I think, here in Western Observers,

are not nearly as concerned with us politically as many Ukrainians are. Because for Ukraine, a trade of taking 900 square kilometers in Kursk in exchange for losing a lot of these cities and parts of Donetsk is not a good trade, right? Big reason for that, and people may not appreciate this, Ukraine has been defending this land for the last 10 years. Yeah. So what the strategic event is, it's not the loss of this one town or another. The strategic event would be Ukraine getting pushed out of the Donbass eventually. Right.

That's right. And this war started with both the Russian seizure of Crimea, but concurrent, right, the fact of invasion of Ukraine's Donbass region. And when you look at it from that point of view, and you have to appreciate that folks I know in Ukraine who are in the military, who are senior commanders,

The war started for them in 2014 or maybe 2015, but it didn't really start in 2024. And so for them being pushed out of the area they've been defending where they've had defenses, fortifications for all these years, that is a significant event in terms of the impact on the military and the political optics. And just to return to the manpower situation.

It really, you know, I know why we've harped on this on lots of episodes, but, you know, Zelensky's decision not to politically prioritize mobilization much earlier, as we've been talking about for quite a while, is really coming home to roost right now. It is. And, you know, the land supplemental is a big factor too, but let's be frank, it was the Ukrainian choice to take a long time to address mobilization issues.

and also to build fortifications. One of the things you do see in Donbass is there are still pretty big problems with how fortifications are built, where they're situated, the fact that units aren't using them, which is a good indicator of the fact that they don't think

that these fortifications are correctly located. And, you know, there's just a lot of also issues in coordination. When the military is pressed, you start to lose cohesion in the groupings of units because you have battalions and lots of units, Segunda too, so you're now operating within cohesive force. There's always issues with any brigades rotating or changing positions. And,

And there's also a lot of coordination issues that other folks have highlighted and I don't want to get into because, you know, we talk about them quite a bit. Like every military has these problems. The Russian military has these problems in spades too, but they have an advantage. They have quite a few more men. Their replacement rate is also problematic, but they had been doing on the whole better over the last two years. They have a lot more material and they have a fire's advantage. Typically on average five to one, although in some areas it's been reduced over the last couple of months, but nonetheless, they do have a firepower advantage. And

And so at this point, the more important question is not who controls Pokrovsk or who gets to, let's say, Kramatorsk, right? You do need them to control Donetsk and Prokhorovsk to say they've taken a Donbass. But as I've said before on this podcast, the sport isn't about who controls the next 20, 30 kilometers of the Donbass and won't be decided by who controls Kramatorsk either, right? I think...

On the front line, the main issue in question right now, what is being decided over the next six to eight months, is which military will be exhausted first. Is the Ukrainian military going to exhaust the Russian armed forces at the peak of their material advantage?

And is it going to essentially break this offensive, right? And then, yes, Russia can keep fighting the war, but given equipment constraints, manpower constraints, it's going to be increasingly difficult for them to actually get anything out of it, right? And Ukraine will be able to stabilize the line. Or is this battle over Pokrovsk and the town south of Pokrovsk down to Vologdar, is this going to potentially fracture the Ukrainian military? I hate saying it, but could it lead to a collapse of the line or...

or a real at least breaking of some kind of spirit. I think the latter is unlikely. That's not kind of the Ukrainian military I know. But following Kursk, you've had the cone of uncertainty actually expand quite a bit on which way this is going to go in the coming months. In general, Ukrainian military has done better and the worst case scenarios haven't come to fruition from my point of view. But the next couple of months are going to be very difficult. And this whole summer has been quite difficult. Russia is willing to take pretty large losses.

in terms of its TTPs and concepts of operations. How much of that do you think reflects a confidence in how many forces they can actually stand to lose while still mobilizing more versus a false confidence?

I think they are running into an issue where they're not going to be able to sustain the space of operations. Their loss rate relative to their replacement rate, the loss rate is quite high. They've metered operations over the course of July and August so that they lost less equipment, but now they've returned to larger mechanized attacks.

If you look at the overall fight for the past year, you could see Russia being able to sustain this into 2025, but starting to run into major challenges, both in manpower and equipment in 2025, probably maybe at least halfway through the year. There's just a guesstimate looking at now. A lot of folks have been asking about mobilization. Well, there's not much evidence that Russia is preparing to conduct another partial mobilization and given the shortage they have of labor and the disruption this would inflict on the economy.

Pretty unlikely they're going to go through it. But you can clearly see they are paying out several times more this year than they were last year, which means they're struggling to attract recruits. They've also gone through a lot of convicts that they've been using in expendable force informations. So yes, they can keep pushing. They can sustain it. But I think they're going to run into major headwinds next year. The challenge is just looking at, I guess, for lack of a better word, the political body language on the

the Ukrainian leadership side is they are trying to find a way to achieve war termination on favorable terms soon, right? And that naturally raises questions. You think that Kiev wants to do that even if Harris wins the presidential election here?

the u.s yes i do and in fact part of the reason i'm saying that is because just hearing some of the reflections of what's been said around town over the course of today you know one of the arguments that ukrainians have made is that if they are given long-range strike ability for example then they can make this a shorter war we'll see if they mean that but yeah but there is a lot of pressure and you know it's not that ukraine doesn't want to end the war there's a lot of political pressure to end the war too there's a lot of wariness setting in but but i think just

To step back and look at the situation objectively, assuming Ukraine gets this winter without major economic damage and assuming they stabilize the front manpower-wise, let's say come end of December, January. These are big ifs, but I'm just putting them out there. Looking at the financial material assistance and what we've promised Ukraine going into next year, right now, it is very difficult to see how Ukraine will be able to restore significant offensive potential with that, right?

other than expanding a strike campaign to try to compel Russia, right, into holding the war, increasing the cost on Russia, unless there's going to be a major change in Western support, and unless Ukraine has enough breathing space to recapitalize and reconstitute its armed forces, I think the reality looking into 2025, in best case scenario, doesn't look that great. And actually,

Actually, you can, to an extent, say that about the Russian side too. Russia has pretty serious issues in sustaining this war from a macroeconomic perspective. In the near term, they can manage it, but in the medium term, they have problems too. Politically, the Putin regime is more inured from that kind of pressure in some ways, unless there's some kind of collapse. And I know we've talked about this before, but one of these exogenous factors that we haven't in the West put a lock on, particularly in Europe, is Russia is still able to get

Everything from luxury to dual use industrial equipment from the West, from European countries. You know, you look and the exports dropped, of course, after Russia invaded Ukraine, but they spiked in places like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, which are clear third party markets for Russians to get this gear. And so we are helping to fuel in the West the Russian war machine. And of course, then on top of that, China's industrial and technological support arms from Iran, which are increasing in their advance in terms of their level of sophistication,

as well as the rounds they can get, artillery rounds, especially from North Korea, Russia has reasons to believe that its supply lines are fairly stable. Yeah, at least for now. I think Russia's main problem is a macroeconomic one, which is they

They have a shortage of skilled labor and fairly low productivity in the country. They're spending lots of money shifting people into the war and into the defense industrial complex. If you look at the defense spending, I think officially it's going to be just 6.2% next year, but it's probably going to be over 8% of GDP overall. They have a huge inflation problem. The economy is overheating. They keep raising the base interest rate, and they have no way of slowing it down. Well, at least they're not doing a great job of slowing it down as long as the war is

continuing as long as they're spending on the war. And since they've been cut off from significant borrowing by the West, they are spending down their available liquid reserves. And a lot of this is tied to the price of oil. And the price of oil is decreasing. Yeah, and the Saudis just exhibited some willingness to let it drop even more, which is going to be bad for Russia.

All this to say, my own point of view is not Russia's going to run out of money next year, but in the medium term, Russia's on a path that could be sustained, but also could be unsustainable. I don't like overly torqued arguments in either direction, like, oh, Russia can't sustain us, they're going to run out of money, because they could make some adjustments to potentially sustain the war. But also, I don't like the argument of,

Russia can keep this going and Russia has no incentives to negotiate or enter a ceasefire. But also the sort of the absolute truth of it is one thing. And you're right. What I'm trying, you know, what everyone's trying to dig into is what do people on each side believe politically and how is that driving them? And it's this sort of old impossible game of getting inside Putin's head, for example. Yeah, sure. And to what extent do they understand their constraints and what they're working with, right?

that's very fair. They may be operating under the assumption that, at least in Moscow, that they can keep this going for quite a while, even if the wheels to some extent are slowly coming off. But like I said, I do think that come next year, Russia's position in this war is going to increasingly look far less advantageous because their relative advantage is likely to be quite small in the battlefield. The

The costs relative to gains are going to be very high. And overall, the cost of sustaining the war and the potential risk, right, the growing risk for them is going to increase. That's not to say that anything's going to be great or rosy for Ukraine. It's just to say that, you know, that Russia's hand isn't that strong either, if you look at it.

And it's a great place to end the episode. Thanks so much, Mike, for joining us. Thank you for listening to the War on the Rocks podcast. Don't forget to check out our membership program where you can listen to shows like the Russia Contingency, which Mike hosts, which are for members only. I think we're up to 10, close to 10 members only podcasts for War on the Rocks membership. It's a pretty fantastic deal that you won't find anywhere else. So check it out at warontherocks.com slash membership. Stay safe and stay healthy.